The goal of this bilateral cooperation project is to support and strengthen the research collaboration between the Institute of Philosophy at Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) and the Philosophy Department of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. The guiding aim of this research collaboration is to explore the relation between art and philosophy through the question of the concept. If philosophy can be defined as the creation of concepts, in what way does it relate to artistic creativity? And if artistic creativity also involves conceptual designs, how do these relate to philosophical reflections?

A number of questions and problems arise when one begins to formulate the concept as the hinge between the practices of philosophy and art. If philosophy is the domain of concept creation, what do we make of conceptual art? What is the operation of the concept in art in general? Is it a part of its creative process or imposed from art’s outside as an interpretive mechanism? What does it mean to posit philosophy in an outside? Is philosophy’s role given only in critique, as Kant says, in clipping the wings of genius? In short, the question of the concept is the contested site where we seek to explore the relation between art and philosophy from a number of perspectives and theoretical orientations.

Amanda Holmes, Antonia Birnbaum and Rok Benčin are the principal researches on this grant. They plan to work with a rotating group of scolars over the course of the two-year-project of the oead (BMBWF).

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