History of Philosophy

Course requirements: attending lectures + in-class examination on required reading
Method of evaluation of coursework: in-class examination + colloquium
Marking method: final mark based on the result of the in-class exam and the colloquium mark
Exam requirements: Material presented during lecture + textbook + required reading
Teaching method: lecture
Recommended study methods: attending lectures and library visits
Role of the course within the specialist training scheme:
The primary objective of this course on philosophy and ethics is to familiarise students with the consistency of philosophical thinking and forms of art in a given era.
For practicing artists and conservators, interpreting a concept of art, which has been formulated in the contexts of reality-thinking-art, is indispensable. Since this problematic can only be examined in the context of a historical overview, we begin our thinking about art with Plato. The organising principles of historical enquiry ensures the continuity of the learning process and the successive accumulation of basic concepts and logical connections.
Course description, major areas of study (per semester):
Semesters 1-2
1) About "the love of wisdom"
-"philosophical thinking begins with wonder" (Plato)
"philosophy began when in place of the oracle every man's own conscience was placed" (Hegel)
Philosophy: as concept, its fundamental questions; as it comes into contact with other ways of knowing: science, art, religion; similarities - differences.
2) Reality and art
Aesthetics in the ancient world (Greek):
Ancient (Greek) enlightenment:
Socrates as "midwife of the soul," who in his art helps those in intellectual labour give birth to the truth;
Classical philosophy of Athens:
Plato: "forbidden art,"
Aristotle: work of art as a true mimesis of nature and social reality
the reality of thinking and the art of the classical age;
fundamental concepts of aesthetics: middle ages, Christianity, civilisation creating force: "Christian, Europe," Christian interpretation of art: St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas;
- scholastic thinking - gothic spectacle: the unity of belief and intellect, the symbolism of Christian art
The beginnings of the philosophy of modern age:
- naive natural and social philosophy (Morus, Machiavelli, Giordano, Galilei)
- secularisation,
- the renaissance man
- autonomy, authenticity
- Michelangelo: David
- polyhistor Leonardo
- humanist Erasmus
- Luther the rebel
b) scientific exactness in philosophy:
- F. Bacon's empiricism
- R. Descartes? rationalism

The Enlightenment:
Voltaire "the smile of reason"
the "classic demands" of the citizen
"nature is the first model of art" (Diderot)
the theory of the humanistic mission of art in classical German philosophy:
Immanuel Kant,
aesthetical values (qualities, beautiful, etc.)
Crisis and dissolution of civil philosophy at the beginning of the 19th century ? new directions:
the philosophy of change: Hegel (similarities - differences)
philosophy of art and aesthetics (similarities - differences)
new directions, their connection to art:
classical Marxism: art as ?expression? and forms of communicating real the reality of experience (Lukács György)
positivism: A. Comte ? sociology
the precursors of existentialism
The second half of the 19th century
aesthetics in the age of science
the aesthetics of the artist and the viewer,
Nietzsche
Aesthetic theories in the 20th century:
intuition-theories,
existentialism - and the avantgarde
Freud and Dada, surrealists
positivism and what follows from it:
the analytical strivings of Wittgenstein,
Russel and sense perception.
The aesthetics of postmodern philosophy:
deconstruction as antecedent,
Jean-F. Lyotard's system with Richard Rorty?s counter-opinion,
Habermas, as successor of the Frankfurtians.
Questions of visual aesthetics:
the spectacle as the object of sense perception, as aesthetical experience (similarities - differences),
the visual, aesthetical object - being and structure,
the future of visual arts.
Course bibliography (literature, notes, collection of examples, case studies, etc.):
Works and encyclopaedias on the history of philosophy that can be found in libraries and bought in bookshops.