PhDr. Tomáš Hříbek, Ph.D.

In recent years, he has expanded his interests to include the ethics of emerging technologies. In this regard, he helped found the interdisciplinary Karel Čapek Center for Values in Science and Technology. He is Head of the Department of Applied Philosophy and Ethics at the Czech Academy of Sciences‘ Institute of Philosophy. In addition to his research, he also teaches aesthetics and art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the Anglo-American University in Prague.

• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Contemporary Art and Psychoanalysis
• Disenchantment, Blasphemy and Transcendence: Religion and Spirituality in Contemporary

Is aesthetics identical with philosophy of art? Artists as well as critics who during the last century—and increasingly its latter half—questioned that art should aspire towards beauty and, thus, that the key to its interpretation is aesthetics, denied this equivocation. For somewhat different reasons, philosophers during the same period shared this skepticism. This course guides students through the main themes of aesthetics, which enjoyed something of a renaissance during the last few decades, and philosophy of art. The themes covered include definition of art, ontology, aesthetic experience, value of art, a relationship between art and kowledge, art and morality, and philosophical topics related to select individual art forms (painting, sculpture, Conceptual Art etc.).

When we hear the phrase „psychoanalysis and art,“ most of us immediately think of Surrealism. While Surrealism still has some influence over some contemporary artists, it is already a very remote episode in the history of modernism, which was closed for quite some time. However, psychoanalysis is still alive as an interpretative tool and source of inspiration in the art of the few decades. The purpose of this course is to make the students familiar with the basic concepts and theories of the recent as well as classical psychoanalysis that had a fundamental impact not only in the art theory and criticism of recent decades, but also the creative practice of many key contemporary artists. These concepts includes dream work, Oidipus Complex, the uncanny, fetishism, narcissism, a psychoanalytic notion of embodiment, repetition and abjection. We shall also touch on the question of whether psychoanalysis might be used for an interpretation of contemporary Czech art.