The group operated an underground education network in Czechoslovakia, then under Communist Party rule, running seminars in philosophy, smuggling in books, and arranging for Western academics to give lectures.

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".

[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.

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.

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".

The philosophy faculty agreed to send Charles Taylor of All Souls, and books were purchased with a grant from the Literae Humaniores board.

[17] Derrida, Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Tugendhat, who was born in Brno, all travelled to Czechoslovakia to conduct a seminar,[18] as did John Keane and David Regan.

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".