Department of Aesthetics
Faculty of Philosophy & Arts, Charles University,
Prague
invites you to three guest lectures
By
Ákos Cseke
Department of Aesthetics
Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest
Ákos Cseke is Associate Professor at the Department of Aesthetics at Pázmány Péter Catholic
University. His main area of interest is medieval aesthetics. He defended doctoral dissertation
on the notion of imitation in St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure at the
Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV). In his lectures he will focus on three topics: the concept
of medieval aesthetics, a critical evaluation of Umberto Eco’s concept of medieval aesthetics;
and love and beauty in the Middle Ages. Ákos Cseke holds, that if we can speak about an
aesthetics in the Middle Ages at all, it is certainly not an aesthetics as theory of artistic beauty,
but as a metaphysical or psychological theory of beauty (beauty of God and of the human
soul). In the following lectures, Eco’s influential but problematic conception of medieval
aesthetics will be contested and the so-called Neoscholastic philosophy of art will be
compared with what Aquinas himself really thought about beauty and art.
Tuesday 21th October 2008, 17:30 – 19:05
Medieval Aesthetics: Three Problems in One Expression. What Is „Medieval”?
What Is „Aesthetics”? And What Is „Medieval Aesthetics”?
Wednesday 22th October 2008, 14:10 – 15:45
Love and Beauty in the Middle Ages (Origen, Bernard of Clairvaux)
Friday 24th October 2008, 12:30 – 14:05
Art and Beauty in the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Lectures will be given in English and will take place in room No. 426 (5 th floor)
Faculty of Philosophy & Arts, Charles University
Celetná 20
Prague 1