Head of Department

Martin Nitsche was born on 23rd of June, 1975 in Ústí nad Labem. His research interests include phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), topology, philosophy of art, and philosophy of religion. From 1993 to 1999, he studied philosophy and history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. In 2007, he earned PhD for the work in systematic philosophy entitled Essence of Human Being according to Heideger's Contributions to Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the same faculty.
Since 2000, he is an assistant professor for Phenomenology and Philosophy of Art at the Department of Political Science and Philosophy of the Philosophical Faculty, Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. Since 2010, he is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in Prague. His habilitation was aproved in 2016, and he became an associate professor (docent) in philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University Prague. He was awarded the Fullbright - Masaryk Fellowship at the Department of Political Science, UCLA, USA in 2016/17.
He has published following monographies: Metodická přednost spleti. Tranzitivně-topologický model fenomenologie; Die Ortschaft des Seins. Martin Heideggers phänomenologische Topologie; Prostranství bytí. Studie k Heideggerově topologii; a Z příhodného. Fenomenologická interpretace Heideggerových Příspěvků k filosofii. 

ALICE KOUBOVÁ

Deputy Head of Department

Alice Koubová received Ph.D. in mathematics from Charles University in Prague (2001) and Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of Parix X (2005). As a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, she focuses mainly on performance philosophy, artistic research and applied philosophy and the way in which these research fields tackle the problems of (inter)corporeality, expressivity, identity, sociality, ethics, and methodology. She has been developing these topics as a lecturer at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and other art schools, as a core convener of the international Performance Philosophy Network, and as the principal investigator of the research project "Performativity in Philosophy: Contexts, Methods, Implications." (Czech Science Foundation).

She has collaborated with researchers from many institutions including: TEAK Helsinki, Philosophy on Stage - Vienna, MBody: Research in media, somatics, dance and philosophy - Freiburg, Soundcheck Philosophy - Halle, Theatre Academy in Malmö - Lund University, Centre for Performance Studies - University of Bremen, Janáček Academy of Performing Arts - Brno.

She has also participated in projects with several Czech theatres and artistic institutions (Studio Alta, Alfréd ve Dvoře, National Theatre, Theatre Institute) by preparing and facilitating public discussions on political and cultural topics, dramaturgical consultations, and feedback sessions after artistic performances.

Besides her activities at the intersection of philosophy and arts, Alice Koubová also takes part in the research projects „Beyond phenomenology of sociality“ (Czech Science Foundation) and „Measures for developing an ethical culture in the Czech state administration“ (Technology Agency of the Czech Republic) where she investigates a wide range of possibilities how to apply philosophical thinking in the public sphere and to current societal challenges. 

Alice Koubová has widely published in internationally recognized journals and publishing houses. She is the author of the monograph Self-Identity and Powerlessness (2013, Brill), Beyond the Principle of Identity (2007, Filosofia). She received Otto Wichterle Award (2014), Libellus Primus Award (2008) and Josef Hlávka Award (2000).

 Curriculum Vitae:

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Petr Kouba studied philosophy at the Departement of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, and received PhD at the same department in 2006. During his postgraduate study, he was awarded several fellowships: at the Universität Zurich (2000 - 2001), Duquesne University in Pittsburgh (2001 - 2002), and the Université de Lausanne (2003-2004). After receiving PhD, he lectured at the Anglo-American College in Prague and in the international programm CERGE-EI at the Charles University. Besides being a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, he lectures philosophy at the Departement of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles Universtity in Prague. He is an author of the books Fenomén duševní poruchy. Perspektivy Heideggerova myšlení v oblasti psychopatologie, which was translated to the English and German languages. He published another two monographies: Margins of Phenomenology, and Exodus bez Mojžíše. He also co-edited three collective monographies: Dynamic Structure: Language as Open System, Medicína v kontextu západního myšlení, and Franz Kafka: Minority Report. 

Doc. Karel Novotný, MA, PhD, DSc., studied philosophy and physics at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague, and philosophy and political science at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt in Germany. He received PhD both at the Université Paris XII – Créteil, and at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague. He received habilitation at the Palacký University Olomouc in 2012. As a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, he also earned the title Doctor Sciencie in 2016.
From 1999 to 2000, he worked at the Jan Patočka Archive. From 1993 to 2000, he was a lecturer in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. Besides being a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, he is also a coordinator of the international program German and French Philosophy in Europe (a part of Erasmus Master Mundus program) at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University. He is a director of the Central-European Institute of Philosophy (www.sif-praha.cz), together with doc. H. R. Sepp. He is recipient of the Award for achieved excellent results of major scientific impact awarded by the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2014. In 2015, he was awarded the national order of the French Republic Chevalier des Palmes Académiques.
His expertise lies in the field of French philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, german classical philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of history. He is an investigator in several grant projects awarded by the Grant Agency of Czech Republic, and the Grant Agency of the Czech Academy of Sciences.  He is a coordinator of following study programms: PRVOK P 18 „Phenomenology and Semiotics“ (2012 – 2016), PROGRES Q21 „Text and image in phenomenology and semiotics“ (2017 – 2021). He published four monographies, co-edited six collective monographies, two editions of primary sources, and one anthology. He has published more than fifty articles, 26 in renown international indexed periodics, 18 in international monographies. He translated several philosohical texts by I. Kant, E. Husserl, M. Henry, M. Richir, etc.

JOSEF FULKA

He graduated from philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. He received his PhD. in 2003 at the same department. Besides the position at the Institute of Philosophy, he is also an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, and in the Undergraduate Program in Central European Studies (CERGE-EI) in Prague. He was awarded the Fulbright - Masaryk fellowship at the Department of Communication Studies, University Texas at Austin in 2013 - 2014.
His expertise lies mainly in the field of the 18th and 20th century philosophy and the theory of literature. He translated numerous works from French and English, including authors like R. Barbaras, J. Kristeva, R. Barthes, E. Laclau, L. Althusser, M. Foucault, J. Butler, H. Lane, C. Lévi-Strauss, J. Rancière, M. Richir, A. Badiou, G. Didi-Huberman, P. Klossowski, M. Maffesoli, and others. 

Mgr. Michael Hauser, Ph.D. (*1972) studied philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. He is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy since 1998, and he is a lecturer in philosophy at the Faculty of Education of the Charles University since 2003. From 2006 to 2009, he was a principal investigator in the junior grant project of the Grant Agency of Czech Republic "Negative humanism". He is a founder of the citizen’s association SOK, which develops critical social thinking in an interdisciplinary context. He publishes in several magazines: Salon – literary supplement of Právo newspaper, Literární noviny, A2, Host, Deník Referendum, Alarm. He has translated Slavoj Žižek’s The Tieklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, or, together with M. Váňová, Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, and several other texts.
Besides his research and university activities, he is also active in popularising philosophy. He lectures for wide public in Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Poland, and takes part in massmedia discussions.

He is an author of the following monographies: Adorno: moderna a negativita, Prolegomena k filosofii současnosti, Humanismus nestačí. Rozhovor se Slavojem Žižkem nebo Cesty z postmodernismu. Filosofická reflexe doby přechodu.
He is also a principal investigator of the grant project awarded by the Grant Agency of CR “Unity and Multiplicity in Contemporary Thought”, whose goal is to reflect on unity and variety emerging in theory after the end of postmodernity, and to interpret the interwinment of post- and pre- modernist motives in the theology of radical orthodoxy (John Milbank). The project is conducted in cooperation with Jakub Ort and Joe Feinberg.

In 2014, Micheal Hauser was nominated by the Institute of Philosophy and elected by the Czech Parliament a member of The Czech Television Counsil.

(*1977) H. Janoušek studied philosophy at Faculty of Arts of the Charles University, namely at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 2015 for the thesis on the originis of Husserl's phenomenology in the contexts of Franz Brentano School (Marty, Twardowski, Meinong, Kraus, Ehrenfels). His research also focuses on empiricist philosophy of David Hume and on rationalist philosophy of Bernard Bolzano. He is interested in bringing thoughts of these authors into the contemporary phenomenological and analytic discourses in order to reveal some of their basic premises and indicate possibilities of their future development. He also makes his research accessible to wider scientific audience in translations and commentaries.

Curriculum Vitae: 

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MARTIN RITTER

Martin Ritter (1977) completed his PhD studies in 2007 at Charles University in Prague with a dissertation on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language. In 2007–2018 he taught philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University; in 2010 he became a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is an expert on Jan Patočka’s phenomenology and on the thought of Walter Benjamin. Currently, Martin focuses on media philosophy. He edited (and translated) three volumes of Czech Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, and translated into Czech key works of, among others, Theodor W. Adorno, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Žižek, or Homi Bhabha.

JAN BIERHANZL

Jan Bierhanzl is a researcher at the Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy of the Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He is also an assistant professor at the Department of German and French Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. In his research, he focuses mainly on following areas: contemporary French philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas, ethics and politics, aesthetics. He is an author of the monograph La rupture du sens. Corps, langage et non-sens dans la pensée d'Emmanuel Levinas. In 2015, he was awarded the Otto Wichterle Award for outstanding young researchers of the Academy of Sciences. 

 




Robin Rollinger does research in phenomenology and Austrian philosophy. In addition, he has written about logic and psychology in the nineteenth century. Among the books he has authored are Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano (1999) and Austrian Phenomenology (2008). He is also the author of numerous articles and the editor of two volumes of Husserl's collected works (Husserliana).

R. Rollinger's CV and publications

GEOFFREY DIERCKXSENS

Geoffrey Dierckxsens obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), and currently works as a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Prague. In 2013 and 2014 he studied as an associated researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Geoffrey Dierckxsens specializes in French phenomenology and hermeneutics, in particular in their relations to contemporary analytical philosophy (moral theory and philosophy of mind). He was guest editor of the special issue of Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 6, No 2 on “justice and its margins.” His publications include “The Ambiguity of Justice” (Ricœur Studies, 2015), The Animal Inside. Essays at the Intersection of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), “Responsibility and the Physical Body. Paul Ricoeur on Analytical Philosophy of Language, Cognitive Science, and the Task of Phenomenological Hermeneutics” (Philosophy Today, 2017), and Paul Ricœur’s Moral Anthropology: Singularity, Responsibility and Justice (Lexington Books, 2017).

CV in english:

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Vít Pokorný graduated from philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, in 2002. In 2016, he was awarded his PhD at the Department of General Anthropology of the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague for his research on psychedelic experiences. He is a junior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and an assistant professor at the Department of Political Sciences and Philosophy of the Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem.
He publishes in philosophy and anthropology, focusing on psychedelics, theory of perception and imagination, or enactive science. He is a member of the Society for Aesthetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He took part in the research grant Methodological precedence of Intertwinng: theory and application. He is an author of a philosophical texbook Postmoderní filosofie and the monography Myslet z psychedelických zkušeností: transdisciplinární interpretace.
In his work, he attempts on finding connections between various disciplines - philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, or ecological thinking in order to formulate a complex transdisciplinary perspective.

JAKUB ORT

Jakub Ort studied theology at the Protestant Theological Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. The theme of his master thesis was  interpretation of the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz and of its relation to the Critical theory of the Frankfurt school.
He cooperates on the grant project „Unity and Multiplicity in Contemporary Thought“ (main researcher Michael Hauser). He focuses on the theological and philosophical movement of Radical ortodoxy (especially John Milbank) from the perspective of contemporary critique of postmodern thinking.
He is a broadcaster in the Czech Radio's show Hergot! (focusing on the religion and society), and a regular contributor of the A2 magazine.

In 2015 he joined the Department of Humanities at the Czech University of Life Sciences as an Assistant Professor, where he teaches philosophy and political science. In 2019 he joined the Institute of Philosophy as part of a three-year project funded by the Czech Science Agency entitled ‘Towards a New Ontology of Social Cohesion’.

Within this project, he focuses on the concept of prefigurative politics and how it is used in the theory and practice of social movements. Broadly, this concept concerns the various ways in which movements and theorists seek to embody or represent the future they desire in their contemporary practice, and thus this work intersects with a range of themes in contemporary philosophy, including the relationship between critical theory and practice, notions of historical time and memory, utopia and dystopia, and notions of performance and performativity.