Dear Nick, I thank you and Michael for your visit, and I accept your invitation to write you a letter. Remember: I warned 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 forget 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 before. Thank you for lending me I.F. Stone's book on Socrates, which brings back memories of two remarkable ladies who were my loyal patients many years ago, Mrs. Gilbert, the wife William Gilbert, who was awaded a Nobel prize for inventing a long since superseded technique for analyzing genetic sequences, and Mrs. Boudin, the wife of Leonard Boudin, the civil liberties lawyer who spent an academic year as visiting professor at the Law School after he successfully defended the pediatrician and Vietnam War opponent Benjamin Spock, Stone's thesis, which I infer from reading the first two dozen pages, is that Socrates was punished for the offense of deprecating virtuous democracy in favor of evil authoritarianism. It's an interpretation not unpersuasive to me, which I.F.Stone's political journalistic background might have led me to expect and which demonstrates to me that even as you try to contradict Socrates and Plato, you confirm the validity of their thinking, inasmuch as Stone's reverence for populist democratic government is a monument to Platonic idealism. Your and Michael's visit makes me want to summarize my ideas 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 worthwhile. Most memorable from our discussion last evening is that many, most, if not indeed all of our threads of verbal, logical argument lead to insoluble contradictions. I am reminded of Aristotle's concept "aporia" which is expanded with much elegance at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia Take a look at it. I conclude that in the realm of language, contradictions are unmanageable and that our only escape from them is a transition into another, different sphere, der Übergang in einen anderen Bereich, metabasis eis allo genos, substituting "deed" for "word", as did Goethes Faust: It occurs to me by replacing "word" with "deed" as primary experience I create a new aporetic situation. Action precludes communication, communication is essential, and for purposes of communication, speech is indispensable. 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. Assimilation, idealization, deidealization.