- Doctoral Thesis Second Nature: A Contribution to the Social Philosophy of Art (Jakub Stejskal) In what sense can one speak of art as a source of insight into the social? In my thesis I focus on criticizing a position that explains art's social-cognitive potential in terms of its purported intrinsic adherence to a normative view of society as a reconciled second nature: Art either offers insight into the nature of social reality as such a second nature or it makes us feel its unreconciled condition and becomes a promise of reconciliation. I identify two traditions of art interpretation holding this position, which both have their intellectual roots in early German Idealism: the Frankfurt Critical Theory and analytic Kantian Revisionism. In the writings of their adherents art is - implicitly or explicitly - understood essentially as a means of enchantment and affirmation that can at most suppress its affirmative character in the name of future reconciliation. Against this conception I develop an understanding of artistic modernism as belonging to an aesthetics of disenchantment, which takes art to be a way of establishing a specific cognitive distance from the social second nature without evoking reconciliation.

This historical work focuses on the theory of photography. It is divided into three autonomous episodes chronologically correspond to three historical stages. These parts are connected with one genealogies of one possible reading of the photography. The first part deals with the historical circumstances and causes of the birth of photography. The second phase describes the later period of history of the Weimar Republic and photographic movement of Neue Sachlichkeit. The last part concentrates on Düsseldorf School of Photography and its current followers. These historical eras combines the aesthetic issues of cult and conceptual values, which is demonstrated on the way how read the photographic medium as a specific aesthetic phenomenon.