Dear Nick, I thank you and Michael for your visit, and accept your invitation to write you a letter. Remember my warning you that you might regret it. The name of one of my afflictions is called staircase wit in English, esprit d'escalier in French, Treppenwitz in German and refers to the mental deficiency which causes one to forgvet to express the important ideas at the party, remembering only as one descends the stairs in departing what one wanted to say or what one should have said at the party. Thank you for lending me I.F. Stone's book on Socrates. His thesis which I infer from reading the first two dozen pages, is that Socrates was punished for the offence of challenging democracy with authoritarianism. It's an interpretation not unpersuasive to me, which I.F.Stone's political journalistic background might have led me to expect. Your and Michael's visit makes me want to summarize my thinking about various matters. I would be the first to admit that the presumption to summarize issues which are extraordinarily complex reflects unfavorably on the summarizer¬ and that such summaries are probably not wortwhile. I consider an understanding of how we "know" and of what "knowledge" might "be" as fundamental to all my intellectual efforts, explanatory not only of theoretical and applied "natural science", but explanatory also to technology in all its branches and to intellectual disciplines flowing from language to which for the past hundred years, the Germans have referred as "Geisteswissenschaften", sciences of the spirit, no less. John Stuart Mill called them "Moral Sciences" of which history in its various phases is the most prominent.