The Foundation was deemed a "centre of ideological subversion" by the Czech police, and several of the visiting philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Roger Scruton and Anthony Kenny, were arrested or placed on the "Index of Undesirable Persons".[1][2]
In 1998 Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the democratic Czech Republic, awarded Roger Scruton the Medal of Merit (First Class) for his work on behalf of the students, and gave Commemorative Medals of the President of the Republic to the Foundation and two of its organizers, Barbara Day and Kathy Wilkes.[3] In 2019 the British ambassador to the Czech Republic, Nick Archer, unveiled a plaque on the building in the Letná area of Prague in which the early seminars were held.[4]
The Foundation was created after Czech dissident philosopher Julius Tomin wrote in 1978 to four Western universities asking them to support philosophy seminars he was holding in his apartment in Prague. The seminars were known as bytové semináře ("home seminars").[1] Tomin called his discussion group "Jan Patočka University", after the Czech philosopher who died in 1977 after being interrogated by police.[6][7][8]
Correspondence from the Eastern Bloc was slow and uncertain; one commentator compared it to sending a message in a bottle. Only one letter is known to have arrived at its intended destination, the philosophy faculty at the University of Oxford, one year after it was sent. The letter was read out to the faculty by William Newton-Smith of Balliol during a meeting in January 1979; the final item on the agenda was "Letter from Czechoslovakian philosophers". Those present voted to offer financial support and to send two philosophers to address the seminars.[9] The minutes noted:
It was agreed that the Chairman (J. L. Mackie) should send a letter of support to the Czechoslovakian philosophers. It was agreed to ask the Lit. Hum [Literae Humaniores] Board to make a grant to cover the cost of sending two members of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty to meet with the Czechoslovakian philosophers."[9]
Kathy Wilkes of St. Hilda's and Steven Lukes of Balliol were the first philosophers to visit Tomin.[10] Wilkes visited in April 1979, carrying books for the students. Her first seminar was on Aristotle at Tomin's apartment in Keramická Street from 6 pm to midnight; she gave another a few days later, for 25 people, on "Identity of Human Personality".[11] She told her colleagues that one of the books she took over had apparently been read by 40 people within the week.[12]
When she returned to Oxford, Wilkes asked its Literae Humaniores board for financial support (at that time philosophy was a sub-faculty of Literae Humaniores), and urged other philosophers to pay a visit, to be coordinated by William Newton-Smith. An article appeared about the seminars in the New Statesman in May. Wilkes wrote one for The Guardian a few days later and another appeared at the end of May in Isis. The philosophy faculty agreed to send Charles Taylor of All Souls, and books were purchased with a grant from the Literae Humaniores board.[13]
Scruton arranged for several of the students to study for the Cambridge Diploma and Certificate in Religious Studies, chosen because Cambridge was the only university that would allow the students to sit for a qualification remotely and in secret.[18][19]
Several philosophers who travelled to give seminars were detained by the Czech police or expelled from the country.[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] William Newton-Smith was detained in March 1980, as was Anthony Kenny, then Master of Balliol, the following month.[29] Kathy Wilkes was arrested, searched and escorted to the airport in or around May 1980.[26] Roger Scruton was detained in 1985 and placed on the Index of Undesirable Persons.[30] His book Thinkers of the New Left was published that year; he said it was written in response to his experiences in the Eastern Bloc.[31]
The most prominent arrest was that of Jacques Derrida in Prague in December 1981. He spent 24 hours in custody, supposedly for drug smuggling, after the police planted drugs in his suitcase.[32][33] According to the philosopher Geoffrey Bennington:
[Derrida] goes to Prague to run a clandestine seminar. Followed for several days, stopped at the end of the week, finally arrested at the airport, and, after a police operation on his suitcase in which they pretend to discover a brown powder, he is imprisoned on the charge of "production and trafficking of drugs". Signature campaign for his release. Released ("expelled") from Czechoslovakia after an energetic intervention of [President] François Mitterrand and the French government.[16]
Derrida had been working on Franz Kafka's "Before the Law" at the time—Kafka was born in Prague—and believed the drugs had been planted while he was visiting Kafka's grave. His Czech lawyer said the arrest was like a Kafka story, complete with nudity, photographs and a prison uniform.[34]
Velvet Revolution
The underground network was active until the Velvet Revolution saw the overthrow of the Communist Party in 1989. The Foundation continued to support education in the new Czech Republic. In October 1998 at Magdalen College, Oxford, President Václav Havel awarded the Foundation, Kathy Wilkes and Barbara Day Commemorative Medals of the President of the Republic. Roger Scruton was awarded the Medal of Merit (First Class) of the Czech Republic.[3] A plaque was unveiled at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge in October 2018 to commemorate the faculty's support,[19] and in November 2019 the British ambassador to the Czech Republic, Nick Archer, unveiled a plaque on the building in Keramická Street, in the Letná area of Prague, in which the early underground seminars were held.[4]
Charles University, also known as Charles University in Prague or historically as the University of Prague, is the oldest and largest university in the Czech Republic. It is one of the oldest universities in Europe in continuous operation. Today, the university consists of 17 faculties located in Prague, Hradec Králové, and Plzeň. Charles University belongs among the top three universities in Central and Eastern Europe. It is ranked around 200–300 in the world.
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he has distanced himself from post-structuralism and "never used this word [postmodernity]".
Ernest André Gellner FRAI was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by The Daily Telegraph, when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by The Independent as a "one-man crusader for critical rationalism".
Kathleen Vaughan Wilkes was an English philosopher and academic who played an important part in rebuilding the education systems of former Communist countries after 1990. She established her reputation as an academic with her contributions to the philosophy of mind in two major works and many articles in professional journals. As a conscientious college tutor, she won the respect and affection of her students and academic colleagues. Her most notable contribution lay in her clandestine activities behind the Iron Curtain, which led to the establishment of underground universities and academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. For her work in support of this network President Václav Havel awarded her the Commemorative Medal of the President of the Czech Republic in October 1998.
Josef Škvorecký was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher. He spent half of his life in Canada, publishing and supporting banned Czech literature during the communist era. Škvorecký was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1980. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton was an English philosopher and writer who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.
Paul Charles Ram Flather is a British academic. Until 2018 he served as the Secretary-General of the Europaeum, an association of leading European universities, and is Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. He is the son of Shreela Flather, Baroness Flather. He was formerly a journalist working for the BBC, Times newspapers and the New Statesman where he was deputy editor. He has written for many publications on education and politics.
Geoffrey Bennington is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Georgia, United States, and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. He is a literary critic and philosopher, best known as an expert on deconstruction and the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Bennington has translated many of Derrida's works into English.
David Wood was Centennial Professor of Philosophy, and Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor, at Vanderbilt University.
Julius Tomin is a Czech philosopher. He became known in the 1970s and 1980s for his involvement with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which ran an underground education network in the former Czechoslovakia, offering seminars in philosophy in people's homes.
Hugh J. Silverman was an American philosopher and cultural theorist whose writing, lecturing, teaching, editing, and international conferencing participated in the development of a postmodern network. He was executive director of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature and professor of philosophy and comparative literary and cultural studies at Stony Brook University, where he was also affiliated with the Department of Art and the Department of European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He was program director for the Stony Brook Advanced Graduate Certificate in Art and Philosophy. He was also co-founder and co-director of the annual International Philosophical Seminar since 1991 in South Tyrol, Italy. From 1980 to 1986, he served as executive co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. His work draws upon deconstruction, hermeneutics, semiotics, phenomenology, aesthetics, art theory, film theory, and the archeology of knowledge.
Oikophobia is an aversion to a home environment, or an abnormal fear (phobia) of one's home.
The Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford was founded in 2001. It is part of Oxford's Humanities Division. The faculty is located next to Somerville College on Woodstock Road. As of 2020, it is ranked 1st in the UK and 2nd in the English-speaking world by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, as well as 2nd in the world by the QS World University Rankings. It is additionally ranked first in the UK by the Complete University Guide, the Guardian, the Times, and the Independent.
Thinkers of the New Left is a book by the conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton published by Longman in 1985, in which the author harshly criticizes the writings of authors he considers as representative of the New Left. The book proved controversial and according to Scruton its reception damaged his academic career. Some of the material in the book appeared in reworked form in a 2015 book titled Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left.
Zdena Tominová was a Czech novelist and a dissident in the communist era of Czechoslovakia.
Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher, writer and newspaper columnist. A specialist in continental philosophy, theology and the philosophy of religion, he is the author of several books, including The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility (2001), Roger Scruton: The Philosopher of Dover Beach (2009), and Why Be a Catholic? (2011).
Notes from Underground is a 2014 novel by the English writer Roger Scruton. It is set in Prague in the 1980s and follows a young Czech writer, Jan Reichl, who becomes involved with an underground intellectual scene. Jan ends up in the United States where he later, in the early 21st century, examines his experiences. The title references Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel with the same title. The book received the bronze prize in the "Suspense / Thriller" category at the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards.
Alan Claude Robin Goldsmid Montefiore is a British philosopher and Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is a co-founder and Emeritus President of the Forum for European Philosophy, as well as Joint President of the Wiener Library, and a former Chair of Council of the Froebel Educational Institute.
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