Our department offers courses in all areas of philosophy. Each term there are at least three to five courses in English and couple of others in other foreign languages (i.e. mostly French or German). There are new courses each term, for the actual courses please check our schedule HERE (if you click on the course code, the course page from the Student Information System with annotation will open in a new window). We offer a PhD programme in English.
If you have any questions concerning our department, please do not hesitate to contact our departmental coordinator of international relations (Anna Tropia).
For historical reasons, the department’s strengths have been in phenomenology and ancient philosophy. In the last decade, the faculty members have systematically combined different approaches and philosophical methods in their research. This has led to original output in the intersection of areas such as ethics and ancient philosophy, pragmatism and phenomenology, hermeneutics and political philosophy, philosophy of mind and history of modern philosophy, analytic philosophy and philosophy of art etc. Scholarly papers have appeared in high quality journals such as Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Phänomenologische Forschungen, Rhizomata, Erkenntnis, Synthese, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Philosophia, Annales bergsoniennes, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Phronesis, Aries, Contemporary Pragmatism, etc. Monographs have been published in Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury, Vrin, OLMS, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Doubleday, Herder Verlag, Harrassowitz Verlag.
From 2023 to 2027, ÚFaR is hosting a PRIMUS project called “Role-Ethics in Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy“, which combines research on contemporary ethics with the study of ancient philosophical texts from two different traditions: the Greco-Roman and the Chinese. This project brings together leading Czech and international scholars of Ancient and Chinese philosophy to explore the ethical implications of what happens when people exercise their agency while assuming various social roles.
As for institutional funding, most of the recent research has been associated with the university’s research programme Rationality in Human Sciences (2012-2016). This research scrutinizes overlapping themes in different human sciences in order to identify common forms of rationality and their critical potential in the present world. The programme divides thematically into three modules: (a) Varieties of Ethics, (b) Knowledge and Normativity, (c) Cultures as Metaphors of the World. The research in ancient and medieval philosophy is conducted within the framework of the University Centre for the Study of the Ancient and Medieval Tradition of Thought (2012-2017). The centre combines philosophical, theological and philological perspectives on the common cultural and spiritual heritage. As for special-purpose funding (mainly Grant Agency of Czech Republic), the research of the last years has been focused on the ancient philosophy (2014-2016 Man in Aristotle’s Philosophy), the interactions between traditional and modern philosophy (2011-2015 Apriority, Syntheticity and Analyticity from Medieval Thought to Contemporary Philosophy), the interactions between pragmatism and phenomenology (2014-2016 Pragmatic Turn in Phenomenology) and the philosophy of mind (2012-2015 Concept of Consciousness, Its Unity and Variability). Since 2012, the Institute has been an active participant in the Prague Centre for Jewish Studies, particularly in the area of Jewish philosophy.
In accord with the philosophy’s role in university education the department’s publishing strategy aims at both high quality publications in prestigious international journals and publishing houses and development of the department’s educational and cultural function (translations and editorial work in Czech for a wider academic, as well as a non-academic, audience and the like).
For recent outputs, see the Czech pages listing monographs and scholarly papers published by our department’s members.
The department’s principal domestic partner is the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The Department is engaged in OFFRES, a network of university departments in French-speaking countries, participating in the organization of events such as the Action Summer University. A further, international partner organisation is The Southeast-European Association for Ancient Philosophy (SEAAP). The student exchange contracts under the Erasmus Programme include 32 universities. The department has also intensive relations with the Department of Philosophy at Central European University and with the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin.
For recent conferences, see the Czech page listing events organised by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.
