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
I specialise in the history of knowledge production at Late Medieval and Early Modern European universities, being particularly interested in Central European Faculties of Liberal Arts and links to their counterparts in Western Europe. Systematically, my research interests include philosophical (metaphysics, logic, astrology) and theological (mostly philosophical theology) discussions, the Reformation’s philosophical background, and intellectual practice. I am also interested in various types of debates, including the Arts quodlibets. I also research the area of Digital Humanities in relation to textual corpora of Late Medieval and Early Modern scholarly texts. I have run various projects in both fields, including a project on the 1409 Prague quodlibetal debate financed by the Czech National Scientific Foundation and the UniQ digital project on the Central European struggle over universals. My current primary project is ACADEMIA (Reconstructing Late Medieval Quests for Knowledge: Quodlibetal Debates as Precursors of Modern Academic Practice), funded by the European Research Council, which reconstructs the Arts quodlibetal tradition in ca. 1370–1700. I am also interested in the transfer of the results of basic research in the humanities into applied research, in particular through digital technologies within the scope of Digital Humanities.
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).
