Department of Cultural Semiotics

The article discus ses some semiotic approaches to the relation between nature and culture. Starting with outlining the structuralistic approach to this issue, especially the ideas of Juri Lotman and Algirdas Julien Greimas, the author finds parallels between different views on the relation between the natural world and human beings. First, the juxtaposition of Eero Tarasti’s existential semiotics with selected concepts of biosemiotics is discussed. The following part of the paper is dedicated to Bruno Latour’s ideas on nature–culture relation, hybrids and mediations. Then the author refers to Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere as the common space for all living and inanimate elements. Closing the paper with a return to biosemiotics, the author comes back to Tarasti’s ideas and compares these with some ideas in biosemiotics, paying special attention to the concepts of unpredictability, choice and dynamics. The comparison shows that some intuitions, assumptions and theses of these di...

There are two ways of considering the eternity presented in this paper: the eternity as a fundamental value, in the context of sacrum, and the eternity expressed as a temporal phenomenon. The author collates linguistic and semiotic view with the ontological and metaphysical one. The text is built on two axes: theoretical and methodological optic founded by authors representing Tartu-Moscow Semiotic Group on the one hand, and the metaphysical way of describing the presence. There is one notion that combines these two approaches: the centre. The text presents characteristic relations betweencultural system and its centre (centres), as well as the centre as a place of presenceand sense (according to the Western metaphysics) or, in contrary, as a “sacred nothing” (according to the Eastern metaphysics). The last part of the article discusses some Old Testament texts presenting Babylon and Jerusalem. Author refers mainly to the conceptsof Lotman, Toporow, Barthes and Derrida.

The article presents the study of urban space form the existential semiotics point of view. The main notions presented in this paper are the surrounding (i.e. the environment – landscape – city space) and the surrounded (subject – an individual human body). Maintaining the structuralist way of semiotic thinking, the author refers to the concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure (langue and parole), Algirdas-Julien Greimas (englobant / englobé), Michel de Certeau (strategies and tactics) and finally Eero Tarasti (existential semiotics, highlining the figure of the subject). The nature-culture relation discussed here is being presented in the perspective of biosemiotics also. The main part of the article contains the author’s proposal of applying Tarasti’s concept to the city space: firstly, his concept of the landscape semiotics (from 2000) and next the concept of the dynamic “Z-model” (from 2015). As the result, there is presented a complex semiotic study of the city space in the frame of t...

The paper aims at juxtaposing two main disciplines: science and technology studies, on the one hand, and biosemiotics, on the other, from the methodological perspective (i.e. concerning epistemology and methodology) and the ontological one (concerning the object of research). Thus, the analysis concerns the opposition of naturalism and antinaturalism in reference to the huma-nities and sciences and nature / culture in reference to the field of study. Science and technology studies (Bruno Latour) and biosemiotics are of key importance in challenging two kinds of binarism: the humanities vs. sciences and nature vs. culture. The discussion further touches upon the question of how the human subject can know nature as well as the issue of discourse, language, reference and the scientifi c text. A critical perspective on science, proposed by both science and technology studies and biosemiotics, possibly anticipates a revolution.