The marathon sessions, sometimes in Tomin’s flat, often lasted six hours.
Cheryl Misak at Aeon:In 1986, my quiet life as a doctoral student in philosophy was punctuated by a trip to Brno in Czechoslovakia (as it then was), where I found myself in a high-speed, chicken-scattering taxi, chasing a bus before it reached the border. It was my small part in a larger story of philosophers’ derring-do during the Cold War.
The Oxford philosopher of science Bill Newton-Smith had been arrested prior to my trip in the middle of a talk in Prague, taken to secret police headquarters for interrogation, then driven in a convoy through the snowy night to the West German frontier and expelled. The French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida had been followed for days, drugs were planted in his suitcase, and he was briefly arrested and detained at the border as a smuggler.
In order to understand the larger story, we must begin with the first efforts of the philosophers who helped start the independent and completely above-board Inter-University Centre (IUC) in Dubrovnik in the former Yugoslavia. Once we understand this larger story, we shall find a moral for some of our present complex ethical and political situations.
he IUC was founded by 30 universities in 1972, under the leadership of the physicist Ivan Supek, at the time rector of the University of Zagreb. Tito’s Yugoslavia, not aligned with the Soviet Union but communist enough to please it, provided neutral ground where academics from Warsaw Pact countries could meet their colleagues from the West. The IUC arranged conferences and courses in the humanities and social sciences, and soon moved into the natural sciences and medicine. There were some constraints.
In philosophy, technical subjects such as logic were more acceptable to the Warsaw Pact governments than ethics, unless the latter was done from a Marxist perspective. The Soviet philosophers, especially, were wary of speaking freely about non-technical matters to the foreigners. Newton-Smith and his Oxford colleague Kathy Wilkes, who had leading roles in the IUC’s birth and development, ran an annual Philosophy of Science Seminar, which I attended both as a final-year undergraduate from the University of Lethbridge in Canada and while studying for the DPhil in Oxford. These philosophers were focused on science and seemed uncontroversial enough to the authorities to fit the bill. But even talking about the philosophy of science allowed an entry-point into political conversations. Those were the days when the sociology of knowledge was flying high and the discussion was often about the values and politics that drove science and whether we could even make sense of the idea that science is a search for the truth. No one, however, encountered any trouble, at least not that I know of.
While the IUC went on as ever, another set of activities, this time covert, began in 1978, after the Czech dissident philosopher Julius Tomin wrote a letter addressed to the universities of Oxford, Harvard, Freiburg and the Freie Universität Berlin outlining the hardships endured by Czech academics. Tomin explained that Czech philosophers came from a background heavy in Greek philosophy and that this was being curtailed – ‘from time to time we hear threats: “We will destroy you together with your Plato”.’
The threats were real. University education was heavily controlled and censored; state functionaries decided who could study and who could teach, and what they might study and teach; academics were subject to long sessions of questioning at secret police headquarters; mail was intercepted; those deemed dangerous were sacked. Tomin was running underground philosophy seminars out of his apartment in Prague and asked these distinguished universities to ‘enter into scientific contacts’ with the persecuted academics. Oxford answered his call – the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy voted to support the effort both financially and by sending their people to lecture at the underground university. Wilkes and Newton-Smith as well as Richard Hare and Charles Taylor were the first to visit, on benign tourist pretexts, and Anthony Kenny followed soon afterwards. They talked about the things in which they were expert – philosophy of science, René Descartes, philosophy of mind, all somehow considered threatening by the authorities.
Philosophy wasn’t the only subject matter for the underground university. Ecology (especially the sensitive topic of environmental degradation or pollution), religion, literature and political science also figured heavily. The marathon sessions, sometimes in Tomin’s flat, sometimes in the homes of others, often lasted six hours. The locals, mostly large crowds of students and former (ie, fired) professors were hungry for all manner of ideas, taking full advantage of the presence of the visitor. An interpreter provided simultaneous translation.
By 1980, the underground lecture movement felt it had to expand beyond Oxford and become a registered charity. The Jan Hus Educational Foundation was set up, named after the Moravian reformist priest and rector of the University of Prague, whose life straddled the 14th and 15th centuries. The Foundation was an alliance of the political Right and Left. It included Roger Scruton, a highly conservative champion of traditionalist values, the Left-wing anti-communist Wilkes and Newton-Smith, and Derrida, who sometimes referred to his deconstructionism as a radicalisation of the spirit of Marxism. One would think the alliance would be unholy and fraught but, in fact, the philosophers, despite their varying political views, were united in their efforts to improve conditions for colleagues in totalitarian regimes.
