Hanus completed V?Nejedly’s unfinished opera as a gesture of friendship, which the father never forgot. Hanus’s strong beliefs meant that he never ignored those who were Party members (unless overtly evil). Among his closest friends and a near neighbour was the Nobel prizewinning Jaroslav Seifert, some of whose texts he set to music, including Destn?z Piccadilly (“The Umbrella of Piccadilly”, 1983-84).His loyalty to friends meant that he was prepared to take risks during the Communist years. During the years of occupation his writing developed and he produced a number of works which were essentially anti-Fascist in tone. Meditace dates from the time of the occupation of the Sudetenland but his Fantasie of 1939 was a direct response to the general invasion of the country on 15 March that year.He was further moved by the execution of the Czech students by the Nazis in November 1939, writing his cantata Zeme mluv?”The Land Speaks”), quoting from the Czech National Anthem and the Hussite Chorale. In 1941 came his Violoncello Sonata, a work which was significant in his progress to a composer in symphonic forms and for the stage. The first of his seven symphonies was written in the following year but, because of its references to the Stabat Mater, it did not get past the German censors to performance.

For much of his career, he was on the editorial board of the Journal of Philosophy and he built up expertise on the philosophy of science, the theory of knowledge, pragmatism and human rights. He was, however, notably restrained in his publishing habits As he once wisecracked: “Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?”Towards the end of his final long illness, he asked another Columbia philosopher, David Albert: “Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don’t believe in him?”Andrew Gumbel. created to intimidate and inspire us more sluggish thinkers.Morgenbesser learned the fine art of kibitzing from his father, a garment worker in the Lower East Side of New York who can never have suspected how Jewish humour could be so witheringly applied to metaphysics and epistemology. Sidney Morgenbesser trained to be a rabbi before switching to academia, studying at the City College of New York, then the University of Pennsylvania. After teaching at Swarthmore College and the New School of Social Research, he joined the Department of Philosophy at Columbia in 1954, where he remained until retirement in 1990. Larry George, a political science professor at California State University in Long Beach who never met the man, commented: When I first heard the now canonical Morgenbesser anecdotes in graduate school, I thought he was some kind of a Talmudic tall tale.

Morgenbesser protested to the officer who tried to stop him that the rules covered smoking in the station, not outside. The cop conceded he had a point, but said: “If I let you get away with it, I’d have to let everyone get away with it.” To which Morgenbesser, in a famously misunderstood line, retorted: “Who do you think you are, Kant?” Hauled off to the precinct lock-up, Morgenbesser only won his freedom after a colleague showed up and explained the Categorical Imperative to the nonplussed boys in blue.It was such episodes that caused the philosopher Robert Nozick to write that he “majored in Sidney Morgenbesser”. Asked what he made of his treatment, he said it was “unfair, but not unjust”. Pressed for an explanation, he added: “It was unfair because they hit me over the head, but not unjust because they hit everyone else over the head.”Another unfortunate encounter with the police occurred when he lit up his pipe on the way out of a subway station. Austin explained how many languages employ the double negative to denote a positive (“he is not unlike his sister”), but that no language employs a double positive to make a negative.