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each time the Congress was rebuffed with the plain implication that
its sessions were part of a political conspiracy of the West. The phi–
losophers of Poland, among whom some of the greatest logicians of
the world are numbered, were also invited. They accepted but at the
last moment the Polish government refused them permission to attend.
The Czech philosophers were invited. They arrived in force, carefully
selected and purged, with Arnost Kolman, late of Moscow, as whip
of the delegation which included for purposes of showcase demon–
stration one political sympathizer who was not a dialectical material–
ist. Communist philosophers from Hungary, Italy and other coun–
tries were on hand.
To compensate for the absence of Soviet philosophers, the or–
ganizers of the Conference quite properly made very liberal provision
for thinkers of the same political persuasion to present their point
of view on the program. The same forethought was not in evidence
in regard to other aspects of the program. The sole American sched–
uled to read a paper before the plenary sessions of the Congress was
someone none of the American philosophers had ever heard of. They
learned subsequently that he was an historian from the University
of Atlanta. John Dewey's vigorous paper, read in his absence, was
relegated to one of the sub-sessions of the Unesco panel. Whatever
the extenuating circumstances, and there are probably many, the
Congress was poorly organized.
The Communist philosophers, like good soldiers, did their duty
and rudely awakened the philosophers present to the kind of world
they were living in. Some pretended not to notice. And the organizers
of the Congress were so eager for harmony, so desirous of having a
successful conference-by which they meant a polite and peaceful
rather than a stormy one-that they made no effort, except at one
session, to balance the program in such a way that crusaders against
the "decadent bourgeois culture of the West" could be properly
answered. Indeed, so anxious was the President of the Congress, Pro–
fessor Pos, to avoid any appearance of having something said or done
at the Congress offensive to the Soviet Union and its satellite powers,
that he intervened to prevent effective reply to the fantastic political
attacks which the Communist philosophers directed against the West–
ern powers. At one of the plenary sessions, he angrily interrupted a
fellow-Dutchman, Justus Meyer of Bloemendaal, who had mildly
