Aesthetics

The first part of the course is conceived as an introduction to aesthetics, addressing the usual introductory questions: what the subject matter of the discipline is and what methods aesthetics employs. Drawing on current literature, the course examines the main thematic areas of contemporary aesthetic theory, based on the definition of the aesthetic situation as the fundamental subject of aesthetic inquiry. Within this framework, the focus of aesthetic investigation oscillates between describing the formation of the aesthetic object and identifying the conditions and assumptions on the part of the aesthetic recipient.
The introductory lectures on the current state of the discipline are followed by a historical section exploring the main developmental tendencies of European aesthetic thought in the visual arts. Visual art is situated within the broader context of the development of thinking about art, in which it emerged as a complex and diverse phenomenon that also attracted the interest of mathematicians, writers, philosophers, and others.
The lectures in the historical section therefore focus on these various aspects of visual art and, drawing on primary sources, seek to demonstrate which themes shaped visual aesthetics during different periods in the development of European art and how specific philosophical and aesthetic views and ideas influenced the formation of the artistic means of expression characteristic of their respective periods.
To introduce topics in contemporary visual aesthetics after 1900 – including the aesthetics of film and so-called visual culture – from the perspective of various philosophical approaches (phenomenological, structuralist, semiotic, etc.), the course employs a comparative approach to the concepts developed by theorists and aestheticians of visual art (e.g., R. Scruton, M. Merleau-Ponty, J.-F. Lyotard, G. Didi-Huberman, N. Goodman, N. Bourriaud, M. Schapiro, M. Petříček, and others).