The Department of Aesthetics, Masaryk University, develops its research and teaching in the field of aesthetics and the general theory of art, semiotics and structuralism, historical poetics and rhetoric, history of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, sociology and psychology of art, cultural anthropology, media theory, and art criticism. It is also involved in comparative research in the transnational context of European cultural studies.

Aesthetics has been cultivated at the faculty since the founding of MU (1919), recalling the work of Otakar Zich and the influence of philologists Karel Svoboda, Ferdinand Stiebitz, and František Novotný. The world's most famous member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Slavist Roman Jakobson, also worked at the Brno alma mater in the 1930s.

Soon after the war, aesthetics began to be taught as a graduate subject in Brno. It was taught by Mirko Novák, and a special chapter of Brno aesthetics was the influence of the Renaissance personality Oleg Sus.

The period of normalization suppressed, among others, the study of aesthetics, but it was still the subject of the scholars Rudolf Pečman, Jiří Vysloužil, and Jiří Fukač. After the Velvet Revolution, the Aesthetics Seminar became a part of the Department of Musicology in 1990 and since 2005 it has been functioning under the direction of prof. Petr Osolsobě as an independent department.

The Seminar offers a number of courses taught in both Czech and English and cooperates with Germany, Poland, Slovakia, and Italy within the Erasmus+ program.