Prof. PhDr. Petr Osolsobě, Ph.D

Head of the Department of Aesthetics

Petr Osolsobě's research focuses on the history of aesthetics, Czech aesthetics, semiotics and structuralism, the philosophy of language and art of Aurelius Augustine, and the value interpretation of the works of Dante Alighieri and William Shakespeare.

He graduated in Czech language and history at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University with the thesis On the notion of recursiveness with a permanent reference to Vladimír Holan in 1988 and passed the Ph.D. exam (PhDr.).

He defended his dissertation on the aesthetics of Kierkegaard's reflection on Aristotle's Poetics at Charles University (2000, Ph.D.). It demonstrates the decisive influence of Aristotelianism on early existentialism and its theory of art.

He habilitated for the field of philosophy with his essay Mimesis and Virtue (2004) at MU. He has published studies on Jan Zahradníček, Oleg Sus, Josef Šafařík, Otakar Zich, Karel Engliš and Czech structuralism and semiotics, Aurelius Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett, Shakespeare's philosophy and his religion.

He has published book translations from English (Essays of Samuel Beckett, Company), Italian (The Cultural and Spiritual Roots of Europe), and French (The Aesthetics of Saint Augustine and its Sources).

Since 2002 he has also been a lecturer at the Theatre Faculty of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, where he was awarded a full professorship in dramatic arts in 2008. During the celebration of the 90th anniversary of the foundation of Masaryk University, Petr Osolsobě was awarded a medal for his contribution to the development of the faculty and the university.