Host Magazine Masterclass: Jiří Přibáň – Bet on Freedom

CED Cellar Stage
23. 4. 2025 19:00

We can see the bet on freedom in the same way that we put everything we care about, including our lives, at stake. The stakes can never be calculated in advance, and despite all plans and strategies, randomness rules. This lecture also explores this randomness and its function in modern society. The more modern man becomes aware of this basic social experience, the more he paradoxically tries to create fixed points in society that he marks as permanent and unchanging values. In doing so, it is necessary to reject the moral fundamentalism that ignites passions leading to political violence and social destruction. At the same time, however, moral relativism or cynicism must be rejected and the possibility of an ethical life must be contrasted with moral absolutism as that which, while putting our existence at stake, gives it meaning.

Jiří Přibáň is a constitutional judge and Professor of Legal Philosophy, Theory and Sociology at Cardiff University, where he founded the Centre of Law and Society in 2014 and led it until 2024. He is a member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic, the British Academy of Social Sciences and the Academia Europaea. He is the author of dozens of books, including The Defence of Constitutionalism (2014) and a trilogy of dialogues with journalist Karel Hvíždala, The Search for History (2018), The Search for Responsibility (2021) and The Search for Meaning (2023). He also writes essays on culture and visual art, for example in his books Italian Features (2020), Images of Czech Postmodernism (2011) and Under the Line of Art (2008).

Tickets 200 CZK / student 100 CZK

Host Masterclasses is conceived as a series of lectures in which prominent personalities of cultural life talk about their profession and life. The event is supported by the State Fund for Culture.