Research Group for Transdisciplinary Investigation of Philosophical, Textual and Intellectual Culture in the Early Universities
Granted Projects
ACADEMIA. Reconstructing Late Medieval Quests for Knowledge:
Quodlibetal Debates as Precursors of Modern Academic Practice
(European Research Council, no. 949710)
Philosophy at the University of Prague around 1409:
Matěj of Knín’s Quodlibet as a Crossroads of European Medieval Knowledge
(Czech Science Foundation, no.19-16793S)
UniQ Project: A Database of Bohemical Texts on Universals
(Lindat-Clariah, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic)
The site is under construction.
Mgr. Ota Pavlíček, Ph.D., Th.D. - deputy head
ota.pavlicek[at]flu.cas.cz
Ota Pavlíček focuses on late medieval philosophy, philosophical theology, and the production and dissemination of knowledge in European universities in the 14th to 16th centuries. His main interests in these areas include the theme of universals and, more generally, metaphysics; the creation of the world and its administration (ideas in the mind of God, the first substance, etc.); currents of thought in the early universities of Central Europe (especially the University of Prague) in the context of "Western" universities; intellectual history; and history of university disputations, especially of the quodlibetal debates at the faculties of liberal arts. Another area of his interest is processing the mentioned topics with the help of tools from the field of Digital Humanities; in this regard, he also organises Prague Talks on Digital Humanities. He obtained his Ph.D. under co-tutelle at Paris Sorbonne and Charles University. At the IP CAS, he had been the principal investigator of a number of individual and collective projects funded by the Grant Agency of CAS; MEMPHIS (Czech Ministry of Education); Lindat-Clariah (Czech Ministry of Education); Postdoctoral Programme of the CAS; Programme of International Cooperation of Junior Scholars (CAS); Scientific Foundation of the Czech Republic. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the project ACADEMIA: Reconstructing Late Medieval Quests for Knowledge: Quodlibetal Debates as Precursors of Modern Academic Practice, funded by the European Research Council (ERC, No. 949710).
licka[at]flu.cas.cz
Lukáš Lička focuses on the history of medieval Latin philosophy and science from the 13th to the 15th centuries, in particular on the medieval optical tradition (extramission, mirror images, light and shadows, the relationship of optics to other quadrivial disciplines, especially to astronomy) and the theory of sensory perception and science about the soul (activity of the senses, attention, intentionality, the nature of the human intellect). Based on broadly conceived manuscript research, he examines two types of transfer in the intellectual history of late medieval universities: (1) the cultural transfer of philosophical ideas, texts and manuscripts from the Western European centres of university learning (Paris and Oxford) to the Central European area (especially the University of Prague) and (2) ) methods of transferring philosophical and natural science issues from university lectures and comments to disputation practice, especially within the framework of quodlibeta at art faculties. He is a member of the ERC-funded project ACADEMIA: Reconstructing Late Medieval Quests for Knowledge: Quodlibetal Debates as Precursors of Modern Academic Practice (from 2021, principal investigator Ota Pavlíček); and of the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) project on Philosophy at the University of Prague around 1409: the Quodlibet of Matthias of Knin as a Crossroads of European Medieval Knowledge (2019–2022, principal investigator Ota Pavlíček).
