GRICE ITALO

 

Luigi Speranza – GRICE ITALO!; or GRICE A-Z -- IN PLICATVRVM -- impiegato -- H. P. Grice, St. John’s Oxford -- Compiled by Grice’s Playgroup, The Bodleian -- For The Anglo-Italian Society, Bologna -- Dedicated to A. M. G. – Luigi Speranza, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia. – NAMES. GRICE ITALICVS: an alphabetical approach to Italian philosophy under Grice’s implicature. Have you noticed how little Grice says about Italian philosophy? It’s all *implicated*!

 

It may seem odd that I am trying to hard to conciliate Grice with the Italian tradition in philosophy. So perhaps a few points need to be explicated, and rather than be left to implicature. In this introduction will serve as a synopsis of Grice’s thought and most of the cross-references that I have detected in my studies to the output of Italian philosophers. At first sght, the cross-references would beem minimal, or ‘infime,’ as the Italians would put it. A tutor in philosophy at Oxford, that never attained at Oxford the degree of a professor, his activities, professionally, were restricted to the tutoring of a few pupils at his college, St. John’s, and I doubt he had to deal with many Italians! In fact, as Warnock has pointed out, philosophers of Grice’s generations – the Play Group – were notable for AVOIDING PUBLICITY beyond their own circle. And had Grice’s philosoophising not been treated by some who held a less parochial Oxonian view, the few references I have collected would restrict his mentions to Hare, Pears, and a few others, notably Strawson. However, Grice was a systematic philosopher, against all odds, and against this parochial character of the Oxford school of ordinary language of which he was a part. When a memorial to Grice was celebrated at Urbino, only one Italian philosopher, LEONARDI, cared to participate. Italians had to deal first with the language barrier. As Andreas Kemmerling has said regarding his own German language, it seems utterly odd that Grice would focus on an analysis of ‘mean,’ when even in Kemmerling’s vernacular, meinen hardly triggers the same implicatures. When it comes to implicature itself, the rhetorical tradition so rich in the Italian renaissance may come for help. After all Grice is making a distinction between EXPLICITLY conveying that p, and IMPLICITLY doing so, via insinuating that p, implying that p, suggesting that p, even meaning that p. Grice’s style of philosophizing tended to disgressions and the core issues he kept secretly stored. In this ‘Causal Theory of Perception,’ perhaps at his most clear, he lists a number of PHILOSOPHICAL theses that would be prone to the implicature analysis – not just ‘The red pillar seems red, indeed is red’ but things raning from ontology – what is actual is possible – to epistemology: what we know we believe. It was this warning against the philosophers of his generation who would rush to ‘diversity senses,’ to use Cohen’s odd metaphor, that Grice is interested in spreading. His research started well after Austin’s demise, since Grice would not be the one to ARGUE with Austin as to whether ‘I imply I know that’s a goldfinch’ is conversational in nature! And the early references by Hare and Pears are scattered about scattered views – Hare, about the usefulness of ‘implying’ in deontic contexts, Pears, as to whether ‘if’ conversationally implicates ‘iff.’ Perhaps outside Oxford, it was Strawson’s – Oxford’s over-prolific voice – who turn Grice into a household name, notably by calling him an Homeric god in his inaugural lecture for the Waynflete professorship of philosophy. But all this would HARDLY matter to a systematic philosopher in Italy teaching say, at Bologna! It was later when analytic philosophy became to be studied systematically, that other views held by Grice in SO MANY topics – like analyticity, vacuousness, and relative identity, that this or that Italian philosopher may have felt some interest to explore into the life and opinions, the prejudices of predilections of this picturesque philosophy don!