1 A letter to Barron Trump

 Dear Barron Trump,

I am 86; profoundly influenced by your speech at your father's first inauguration as U S A President, I've devoted the last 4 entries on my blog to 'On Hope, inspired by Barron Trump; on Trust, inspired by Ivanka Trump.' I need your inspiration, for during the last 44 years I lost hope, with which I arrived in Great Britain.

What were the hopes with which I arrived to Britain in 1980? My main hopes were two; they both derived  from Dr Kenny's  - the Master of Balliol College, university of Oxford - visit in my seminar. 

Dr Kenny opened the seminar by announcing that he would talk about ethics in Aristotle's Eudemian  Ethics and in the Nicomachean Ethics. He informed us that these two works have three books in common, which have been in modern times commonly published only in the Nicomachean Ethics, which has been considered later of the two and viewed as Aristotle's mature ethics. Kenny with stylometric investigations proved that the three common books belonged originally to the Eudemian Ethics, which he consequently regarded as Aristotle's, while the Nicomachen Ethics he viewed as notes scribbled by Aristotle's students. Contrasting the difference between the two, Kenny said  'A person who organised his life entirely with a view to the promotion of philosophical speculation would not be wise but cunning, not phronimos but panourgos. The type of person whom many regard as the hero of the Nicomachean Ethics turns out, by the standards of the Eudemian Ethics, to be a vicious and ignoble character.' 

A thought went through my mind: 'Am I to be exposed by Kenny as a person who is not wise but cunning, not phronimos but panourgos?'

Kenny said that he wanted to focus his talk on a passage from the Eudemian Ethics and a passage from the Nicomachean Ethics. 

Then Kenny turned to me: 'Julius, would you translate these two passages for your students!'

I replied: 'I shall do so, reading each sentence aloud in Greek, then giving it in Czech.'

***

Translation is a laborious process; Kenny presented me with a task which no classicist and no classical philosopher could master. Why did he do so? What did he want to accomplish?

Toward 1970s the top men of the KGB realised that Communism was untenable and began to cooperate with the CIA and MI6 on its desmantling. By inviting western Academics to my seminar I unwittingly prepared a space within which this cooperation developed and thrived. Only one thing was wrong, my insistence on openness. I had to go.

In November 1979 Kenny invited me to Balliol, and .I was invited to Kings College Cambridge. I was honoured, but could not abandon my students. There was only one way to get me out, my philosophy seminar had to be destroyed. After the police intervention that destroyed Kenny's visit, I could not reopen my seminar. The police prevented it Wednesday by Wednesday.