I VERBALI A

 

H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: -- LA CONVERSAZIONE --“Così bella implicatura!” -- (c) J. L. Speranza. Questo documento è reso disponibile in accesso pubblico per lettura e consultazione. È tuttavia vietata la riproduzione, totale o parziale, nonché la diffusione, la trascrizione, l’adattamento o la pubblicazione in qualunque forma e con qualunque mezzo (cartaceo, digitale, elettronico o altro), senza previa autorizzazione dell’autore. Sono incoraggiate citazioni e riprese brevi a fini di studio, discussione e critica, purché accompagnate da chiara e corretta attribuzione all’autore e al progetto Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. L’autore è lieto che la parola “Griceiana” (après Fodor) circoli anche presso i più sospettosi—perfino, chissà, tra gli Anti‑Grice—purché circoli con nome, fonte e buona educazione.

 

This study is not “about” Grice so much as an act of learned ventriloquism: a sustained feat of conversational scholarship in which J. L. Speranza makes Grice speak again—sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian, often in that third register the project loves best, Latinised intimacy (Vadum Boum included). It is scholarship with the pulse of theatre: quoting, parodying, reconstructing, and then—at the last moment—doing the one thing Grice prized above system, a well-timed inplicatura. The range is unapologetically wide (Bononia and the Reno, the Sorbonne and the Seine, Vadum Boum and the confluence of Isis and Cherwell), but the method is its real charm: convivial, exacting, and funny in more than one key—English humour meeting Italian humour not as translation but as cousinship. The enterprise’s originality lies in its governing conceit: that Grice’s “theory of conversation” is best recovered not by embalming it into a diagram, but by letting it live—less a ghost-in-the-machine than a voice-in-the-room: disputing, teaching, teasing, correcting, and (always) crossing from what is said to what is meant. If you want a piece of work that makes rationality feel less like a schema and more like a civilisation—running, with classical stubbornness, from AETERNA ROMA through Bononia to that marshy utilitarian ford where oxen and undergraduates alike learn to cross—this is it.

 

J. L. Speranza is the founder, together with A. M. Ghersi, of Il gruppo di gioco di H. P. Grice: a “play group” whose name has been hunted, re-hunted, and never quite domesticated—since “gruppo di gioco” never fully satisfies as a rendering of Grice’s plagroup (which certain heretics would have as Lady Ann Strawson’s invention). This study irradiates from the group’s verbali: minutes that keep multiplying, not praeter necessitatem but by the very logic of convivial inquiry, as the circle expands. From those records, the project follows Grice’s own method—treating the illustrious dead as if they were great and living—while keeping a straight face only long enough to smuggle in the oxen, the ford, and the old academic joke that one crosses into learning by crossing water. Bononia to Sorbonne to Vadum Boum: the route is classical, the tone is playful, and the implicatures do most of the heavy lifting.

 

Grice, the former ‘Navy’ man, once joked that philosophy displayed two unities. One is the unity of latitude: there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. The other is the unity of longitude. The following pages aim at the second type of unity. But Speranza has managed to combine both in some original way. The main text will thus provide the latiduinal unity – and the foonotes will refer to the specific item in the longitudinal unity. The career of H. P. Grice is easy to encapsulate. He is a representative of twentieth-century philosophy of laguage, Oxford style, and his life spans the century: 1913-1988. How do we criss-cross his path with that of other philosophers – Speranza will focus only on the Italian tradition --? The task is not easy. For one, Grice held a degree in ‘classics.’ After leaving Clifton, there was no gateway to philosophy for him, so he endured the five years of classics. This approach however has a positive side to use, for it allows us to incorporate authors who would otherwise seemed totally crytpic to a philosopher, and by that Speranza means what in academia is often referred to as ‘ancient Roman’ – not history, but PHILOSOPHY. There are interesting interections between Grice and Ancient Roman philosophers in that respect, and not just Cicero. Latin remained the language for philosophy even at Grice’s Oxford for centuries. And Speranza has argued that it is indeed the classical element in Grice’s theory that makes it apt to rehabilitate what others have referred to as the ‘common-sense’ view of both meaning and conversation. When Italian started to become the vernacular in which Italian philosophers philosophised, and Ennglish became the language in which English philoosphers philosophised, there are still interactions that Speranza has covered. There is of course the general Indo-European common ground that gives things like ‘mentire’ and ‘maenan’ (on which Grice bases his analysis). When it comes to philosophy as a whole, the disciplinary divisions was something against which Grice fought as much as he could. As a CUF University Lecturer at Oxford, his classes were felt to be out of touch in general, in that the way examination goes at Oxford – it is the pupil’s own essay that counts – and never ‘whatever that pupil’ or student may have heard at this or that class. This quite contrasts with the method of assessing knowledge in Bologna, the Italian university that predates Oxford, where the chair-struture and the common examination based on a syllabus is the standard. Within these limits, here are are some results.  The study is structured as notes on Speranza’s publications, which have been ordered by surname of the Italian philosopher under consideration. If the first paragraph states the problem and the method, the next should state more clearly the principle of selection. This is not, and cannot be, a complete history of Italian philosophy under a Griceian aspect. It is rather a guided map of points of contact, some obvious, some oblique, and some discoverable only when one allows the history of philosophy to recover its older breadth. Speranza’s procedure is therefore neither merely antiquarian nor merely comparative. He does not ask whether this or that Italian philosopher “anticipated” Grice in some crude prophetic sense, nor whether Grice can be annexed to an Italian school. He asks instead what becomes visible when Grice’s central preoccupations with meaning, rationality, intention, conversation, and the said-versus-the-meant are brought into contact with Italian materials whose vocabulary is often different, whose institutional settings are often older, and whose philosophical ambitions are sometimes cast in rhetoric, dialectic, jurisprudence, philology, theology, or commentary rather than in the post-Fregean idiom. The result is not a lineage but a constellation. What emerges, across the entries, is less a genealogy than a family of recurring concerns: sign and signal, implication and implicature, reason and prudence, conversation and civic life, common sense and learned form. If there is a unity here, it is not the false unity of sameness, but the more interesting unity of repeated philosophical pressure across languages, centuries, and genres. I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE. Grice joked by calling his playgroup the playgroup – an alternative story is that it is Mrs. Strawson’s idea – the idea of grown ups meeting under Austin to para-philosophise. But Grice KNEW (via hearsay) of the experience AUSTIN had practiced for two years before the war in what Hamsshire called the OLD PLAYGROUP – which met at All Souls, a few of which survived and joined the New: Hampshire himself, the Master of the Kindergarten, that is, Austin, and Woozley. The rest were excluded for seniority reasons (Hart was older than Austin) or because they just had gotten unbearable for Austin: Ayer. The ‘playgroup’ then lasted till Austin died in Dec. 1959, and the idea is the Grice took that up until 1967. He was renting at the place, so the idea of meeting anywhere but on university grounds was unthinkable – what about a pub? No. They met at Corpus Christi mainly. It was still paraphilosophical in one important respect. Professionally, for his bread and butter as he puts it, Grice was Tutor in Philosophy at St. John’s which meant sharing a loadfull of at least 15 tutees per term which he shared with Mabbott until Mabbott’s retirement in 1966, and for only one term with P. M. S. Hacker, the Haifa-educated Austro-British philosopher. On top, Grice was CUF University Lecturer – add classes and Stints – and most formidable an ‘examiner’ that about whom many feel ‘terrified.’ So the time for paraphilosophy was growing thin. In what follows Speranza attempts to recreate ‘Gruppo di Gioco’ as led by Grice, and not Austin – seeing that it was indeed Grice’s idea to keep these para-philosophical activities – WITHIN THE PREMISES OF OXFORD – at his disposal, to provide further pleasure to what he may not encounter with the occasional unsympathetic tutee or with the rather formal venues which were the classes, for which Grice prepared full notes which he read – with interaction kept at minimum and beyond the ‘minutes.’ Or less so the ‘examinations’ on which he was held to have held ‘impossibly high’ standards of perfection. Now, we know what the Play Group discussed, and we know what Grice’s Play Group discussed after Austin’s demise – but we don’t know what they SHOULD have discussed. Hence this Verbali del Gruppo di Gioco. Circolo di Grice would do just as well, as indeed Grice’s Club – since he WAS clubbable. But that is it. Rather than order the ‘minutes’ by subject-matter or even date, Speranza has taken the idea of keeping the PERSONALITY of the philosopher (usually Italian, or Ancient Roman) at the centre. Speranza has chosen items by such personalities that were to be or should have been aptly discussed by ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’—complete with the minutes. i.e. to keep the narrative going? thanks. -- place the focus on the praise that Speranza deserves for doing this that makes the world of H. P. Grice much less parochial, even for those who do NOT look to philosophy for their bread and butter -- and can enjoy a rendezvous at a villa, preferably in liguria, by a swimming-pool library. It is here that Speranza’s real generosity as a scholar begins to show. By allowing Grice’s Oxford to meet, one by one, these Italian and Roman personalities, he rescues Grice from the provincial fate to which even his admirers sometimes condemn him: the fate of being treated as a merely local analyst of English talk among dons and colleges. Instead, Grice’s world is opened out into a far wider republic of wit, rhetoric, philology, theology, jurisprudence, and civil conversation, a world in which one need not earn one’s bread and butter by philosophy in order to enjoy the encounter. That is one of the great pleasures of the enterprise. Speranza gives us a Grice who can leave the tutorial staircase behind without ceasing to be himself, and who may now be imagined, quite happily, in a less parochial setting: at a villa, perhaps in Liguria, by a swimming-pool library, still exact, still clubbable, still dry, but no longer confined to the administrative weather of Oxford. In doing so, Speranza not only enlarges Grice; he enlarges the reader’s sense of what philosophy may be when it is allowed to converse with civilisation rather than merely examine it. In the impersonal reconstruction that Speranza appears to have in view, the relevant burden falls not under the CUF lectureship but under tutorial duty. A University Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford in that period would normally lecture and perhaps conduct classes, but would not, by virtue of that office alone, be required to set weekly essays for individual pupils in the way a college tutor was. The tutorial system is the more plausible locus for the continual formulation of essay questions. The examiner’s role is different again: in examinations the candidate’s own essay is central, but that concerns assessment of performance in the Schools, not the weekly generation of tutorial topics. So if one wishes to estimate how many essay questions Grice would have had to formulate between 1946 and 1966, the safest basis is his college tutoring, not his lectureship or examining. The proposed assumption of fifteen pupils per term is not unreasonable as a working figure, especially if the load was shared with Mabbott for most of the period and if one is thinking of Grice’s own active portion of the teaching rather than the whole St John’s intake. It is, however, only a heuristic. In some terms the number could have been somewhat lower or somewhat higher; some pupils may have required more intensive weekly attention, others less; and arrangements could vary according to year, honours school, and the division of labour with Mabbott. But as a planning number for an impersonal reconstruction it is defensible. If one further assumes one essay per pupil per week, the next uncertainty is the length of a term in practical tutorial weeks. Oxford terms are named Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity, but the number of weeks in which full essay-setting actually occurs is usually less than the formal span one finds in the calendar. A prudent estimate for tutorial calculation is eight teaching weeks per term, though some might prefer to reckon seven or even six if one wishes to account for the initial settling-in and the ending pressure of collections, Schools preparation, and travel. On the sabbatical assumption, the picture becomes more conjectural. It is not safe to assume automatically one sabbatical term every year in a mechanically regular sense throughout the whole twenty-year period. Leave arrangements, visiting appointments, grants, and relief from college duty varied, and travel to places such as Harvard, Berkeley, Brandeis, or Princeton does not by itself prove a uniform annual rhythm of one free term in every academic year. Still, if Speranza proposes that hypothesis as a deliberately simplifying one for purposes of scale, then the arithmetic is straightforward. Twenty academic years, with one sabbatical term removed per year, leave two active terms per year. At fifteen pupils per active term, and one essay per pupil per week, the total depends on how many teaching weeks are assumed. At eight weeks per term, the calculation is 20 years x 2 active terms x 15 pupils x 8 weeks = 4,800 essay questions. At seven weeks, it becomes 4,200. At six weeks, it becomes 3,600. So the cleanest headline number, under the strongest version of the proposed assumptions, is about 4,800 tutorial essay assignments formulated across the twenty-year span. It should also be said that this figure is almost certainly an upper-order simplification rather than a documentary total. It assumes that every pupil produced one essay every week of every active tutorial week, that Grice himself had to formulate each prompt distinctly rather than reusing some topics across pupils, and that the whole burden continued at a steady rate across two decades. Real academic life would have been less uniform. Some questions would have recurred, some pupils may have worked from a common sheet of issues, some weeks may have involved revision or discussion rather than a freshly coined title, and periods of travel, illness, examining pressure, or college rearrangement could reduce the number. Even so, for the purposes of an introductory narrative before the list of verbali, the estimate is philosophically suggestive: even a cautious range of roughly 3,600 to 4,800 tutorial essay questions conveys the scale of the intellectual labour involved. Thus the impersonal narrative could say that Speranza proposes to imagine, behind each Italian philosopher discussed, not merely a historical note or a playful reconstruction, but the shadow of a tutorial assignment that Grice, as tutor in philosophy, might have had to formulate under the relentless weekly economy of Oxford teaching. The CUF lectureship provided the public and formal side of his work, and the examiner’s office supplied the pressure of judgment, but the tutorial was the workshop in which questions had to be continually generated. On that basis, and under the simplifying assumption of fifteen pupils per active term, one essay per pupil per week, and one sabbatical term per year over the twenty years from 1946 to 1966, the total number of essay questions he may have had to frame comes out at approximately 4,800, or somewhat less if one adopts a shorter reckoning of practical teaching weeks. That figure is speculative, but it is not frivolous; it gives a concrete sense of the scale against which Speranza’s imagined verbali and reconstructed assignments acquire both plausibility and charm. Yes — for a dialogue document like this, reducing the spacing will make a real difference, and the document clearly is carrying a great many separate speaker turns as ordinary paragraphs.

After Select All and Paragraph, the safest settings for the whole document are these:

Set Before to 0 pt. Set After to 0 pt. Set Line spacing to Single. Set Indentation left and right to 0. Set Special to None.

If there is a checkbox or option that says something like “Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style,” you may turn that on as well, but if Before and After are already both 0 pt, it is not doing the main work.

One caution. In a document like yours, different styles may already be in play, and some styles can keep their own spacing rules. So if after doing this globally you still see stray gaps, that usually means some paragraphs are in a different style and will need the same treatment by style or by reapplying the paragraph settings.

A practical sequence would be: Select all Open Paragraph Before 0 After 0 Single spacing No special indent OK

If you want the dialogue still to remain readable with no extra white space, the cleanest visual aid is usually to keep each speaker label consistently formatted and let the paragraph break do the work, rather than relying on spacing.

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Please then -- So here is a sample -- which you will have to adapt and perphas number -- and make it again impersona. Alla Speranza here presents a sample. The idea is to enhance some sort of affectionate perversity. And I would add to EACH essay -- Typewritten disallowed. Handwriting counts. -- seeing that his first example of conversational implicature was "Jones has beautiful handwriting" (at Collection) +> Grice (tutor) implicating: Jones is hopeless at philosophy -- The other case that comes to Speranza's mind is Grice: Bring me a paper tomorrow. Pupil: A newspaper? -- as example of incorrigibility of meaning. This type of boring donnish humour is appreciated by those who have suffered the role of tutee -- comments between dons of anything confidential regarding pupil counting rather as dishonesty or gossip -- SAMPLE THEN and then provide the rewrite without preamble or ps. Thank you. QUIZ Ancient Rome had her Pliny the Elder and her Pliny the Younger; Italy had her Ermolao Barbaro the Elder and her Ermolao Barbaro the Younger. Supply three corresponding parallelisms for England’s J. S. Mill and his father. Provide a short narrative of the history of Italian and English mediaeval philosophy under the counterfactual assumption that philosophers had been denied the possibility of commenting on Aristotle. Assess, by means of two contrasting judgments, how one canonical Italian and one canonical English philosopher of the Middle Ages would have fared had the educational order run from quadrivium to trivium rather than the reverse. Reconstruct the history of Italian and English philosophy on the assumption that the Grand Tour itinerary had run not Como–Firenze–Roma–Napoli, but Como–Paris–London–the Hebrides. Reconstruct twentieth-century Italian philosophy on the hypothesis that Italy had installed the Oxford tutorial system, whereby the philosophy student remained for five years under a single tutor before earning a first degree. Assess three distinct ways in which Aquinas’s philosophy was reinterpreted once he had been made a saint. Assess three distinct ways in which Bonaventure’s philosophy was reinterpreted once he had been made a saint. Assess (A) whether Kierkegaard, rather than a more traditional Italian or English philosopher, would require prior mastery of the seven liberal arts before one might be granted a meeting with the grand dame, Philosophia, and (B) what he would require in their stead. Boethius: “Hircocervus enim compositum est significans hircum et cervum; sed nisi ei aut esse aut non esse addatur, nullus inde veri falsive intellectus poterit provenire.” State whether “Hircocervus non est” thereby acquires truth-value, or merely the appearance of it, with reference to Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory and the criticisms that followed. Boethius writes: “Vox vero significativa est, ut ‘homo’; non significativa vero, ut ‘blityri’.” Reverse the distinction for an anti‑Boethian, and illustrate it, as Frege requires in Der Gedanke, by means of one complete utterance for each resulting species of voice. Explain why Italy, though already in possession of Bologna before there was any Ox to bridge, failed to produce an “Oxbridge” of her own. Casanova made it to England in 1763–64. Explain why London did not improve his reputation for prudence. What, in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, counts as the wake-up call? Derek Jarman famously made a film about Wittgenstein. Using three sections of the screenplay as your model, reconstruct one he might have written for (A) an Italian philosopher and (B) an English philosopher, and compare their critical fates. Compare Bologna and Oxford vis-à-vis the fact that the former ceased to belong to the Papal States in 1859–61, while the latter remained under the control of the Defender of the Faith. Using criteria other than mere chronology, rank (A) Hegel and (B) Cicero in respect of their claim to be post-Socratic philosophers. Assess the claim that Austin’s ordinary-language philosophy arose in reaction either to (A) Ceretti’s Pasaelogices Specimen itself, or to (B) its translation into Italian by P. D’Ercole. Justify the failure of “Saturday mornings,” à la Austin, to establish themselves at Bologna, with particular reference to prejudice against the sabato inglese. Explain why Cicero’s numerous dialogues proved a systematic flop when staged both in Rome and in London. Jean‑Paul Sartre spent his summer holidays at Naples in the 1930s before returning to Paris and engaging in existentialist philosophy. Reconstruct the corresponding history of philosophy had he chosen the moors of Yorkshire instead. Descartes stayed in Italy from late March to early May 1625. Include that premiss in the refutation of sum ⊨ cogito. Vincenzo Cuoco wrote “Platone in Italia.” Explain why Gilbert Ryle did not write “Plato in England,” and justify whether he should have. In the mediaeval trivium, once popular in both Italy and England, rank the three disciplines in increasing order of triviality. Justify. Reconstruct Burali‑Forti’s likely assessment of Russell’s appropriation of his hyphenated surname for a paradox (1903, après 1897), later enlisted — with Whitehead’s complicitation in Principia Mathematica (1913) — to justify the macabre Theory of Types. Collingwood translated De Ruggiero’s Storia del liberalismo europeo (1925) into English for the Clarendon. Assess whether that was too great a liberty. Given that the third Earl of Shaftesbury sojourned at Naples in 1711–1713, philosophising with Vico and Doria while seeking relief for his own lungs, reconstruct the reverse scenario in which Vico and Doria undertake the same at St Giles House, Wimborne St Giles, Dorset. Given that Bentham rendered Beccaria’s “la massima felicità divisa nel maggior numero” as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, assess the consequences for English utilitarianism had he (A) thought fit to translate the divisa, and (B) preferred the Latinate “felicity” to his vernacular “happiness”. Q. Assuming the standard rule of thumb for ancient sea-routes — approx. 4 knots, or 500 stades in 12 hours and 1000 stades in 24 hours under favourable conditions — and granting that this would have brought Pythagoras from Samos to Croton in three weeks, calculate the corresponding duration required for him to reach Dover in England: (A) by sea, (B) by land, (C) by air. A. (A) 32 weeks; (B) 145 weeks, assuming the requisite submarine land-bridges from Samos to the mainland and from Calais to Dover; (C) 2 hours, without stopovers. For most of the twentieth century Oxford maintained a Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. Provide three reasons why Bologna would have regarded that as a form of sub-letting. The Accademia dei Lincei sustain an annual, very prestigious, Classe di Scienze filosofiche in Rome. Expose three reasons — philosophical, urban, and zoological — why no such collectivity of animals has so far ever done so in London. Rome had her Civil War — and her Cato. Apply §2.5.6 of Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta to: England had her Civil War — and her Sidney. Q Walter Pater, an English philosopher, wrote “Marius the Epicurean” on ancient Italic (Roman) philosophy. Provide the strict equivalent of an Italian philosopher writing on ancient Anglo-Saxon philosophy, compleat with the perfectly analogical title. A: Hereward il Fuorilegge [by Gualterio Padre]. Re ‘liceo’ and ‘lyceum’, provide one specific case pro, and one specific case contra: the claim that, in Italy — unlike England — the ordinary high-schooler is etymologically peripatetic. Re Bonaiuti’s trial, set out the premiss for his stubborn “si muove”, against (A) the received “non si muove”, and (B) the obvious complication he blatantly leaves aside, that, if motion is frame-relative, “si muove” may require a qualified re-statement. Assess Numa’s Pythagoreanism as first-rate by ranking the following sources: (A) direct acquaintance and indoctrination still fresh in his mind when he assumed the throne at the age of 185; (B) some other source of acquaintance (rumour, etc.); (C) time travel. Assess Eco’s plain object-language “Il nome della rosa” against the superior Austinian variant, “Il nome di ‘la rosa’”, with particular reference to the difference between a nomen substantivum and a definite description. Use Austin, “The Meaning of a Word” (Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed., esp. pp. 65–66), and Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, *14, for ι. Assess Virgil’s construction of Aeneas as a Stoic hero vis-à-vis §4.5 of Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, with special reference to fatum and the she-wolf. Using A(a,b) for a amat b and I for intended reflection, construct a meta-scenario involving Ovid himself in “Ars amatoria”, such that the addressee recognises not merely A(a,b), but Ovid’s staging of A(a,b) for recognition. Nietzsche’s sojourn in the west-coast Italian village of Sorrento gave rise to “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.” Reconstruct his philosophical output had his travel destination been the east-coast English village of Whitby. Test the validity of the main claim of “Il principe” by providing a natural-deduction sequence. (Use ‘m’, ‘f’, ‘v’, and ‘g’ respectively for ‘mezzo’, ‘fine’, ‘volere’, and ‘giustifica’, treating ‘giustifica’ as an iterated ‘volere’). Re Ficino’s “Accademia Platonica”, weigh the obvious horns: (A) that “platonica” is a necessary marker of revived allegiance; (B) that it is a later historiographical over-description imposed upon an originally informal circle. Re Horace’s “Epistula ad Pisones”, examine and conclude by weighing the obvious horns: (A) that Horace is economising on parchment; (B) that he takes collective uptake by the Pisones to be even conceivable. Test Aosta’s definitional claim, using second-order predicate calculus with identity, by describing a possible world in which the upper limit of what may be cogitated changes between Aosta as monk of Bec and Aosta as archbishop of Canterbury. (Use ‘C, ‘M,’ ‘b, and ‘c,’ respectively for: ‘cogitari,’ ‘maius,’ ‘monk of Bec’ and ‘archbishop of Canterbury.’ . Expand, in second-order predicate calculus with identity, how Pomponazzi’s “De immortalitate animae” remains, in a characteristically Padovian way, commitment-free (use the primitive symbols ‘d’, ‘i’, and ‘a’ for ‘de’, ‘immortalitate’, and ‘animae’, together with the standard symbolism of such a calculus, including variables, quantifiers, and relational expressions of whatever adicity may prove necessary; no element is to be rendered into your vernacular). In the comparative terms of the history of philosophy in both England and Italy, (A) which is your least favourite: the English, or the Italian translation of “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”? (B) Provide one passage from each to counter-balance your judgement. (C) Consolidate your opinion that: Either: “Gott ist allmächtig; das ist ein notwendiges Urteil. Die Allmacht kann nicht aufgehoben werden, wenn ihr eine Gottheit, d. i. ein unendliches Wesen, setzt, mit dessen Begriff jener identisch ist.” is best left untranslated — Or: That neither an English nor an Italian philosopher is properly so called unless he can read Kant in his vernacular — Kant’s, not the English or the Italian philosopher’s. Given that, when Bologna was founded in 1088, Italy was a mere geographical expression — unification not occurring until 1861 — (A) refute the claim that Bologna is Italy’s oldest university, let alone Europe’s; (B) defend the claim that Oxford was the oldest university of a country that was not a mere geographical expression — and, therefore, of the whole world. Philosophy was introduced at Rome by an Athenian embassy on a clear day of February in DXCIX ad urbem conditam. Supply, finding the apt historical equivalents, the exact parallel for Londinium, in terms of: (A) Carneades’s speech on the Monday pro δίκη — of Rome’s over-taxation of Athens; (B) Carneades’s speech on the Tuesday contra δίκη; and (C) the reaction of Cato the Censor to the proceedings.” Provide the natural-deduction derivation by which, in §§ 8.5–7 of the “Oratio de hominis dignitate,” Pico della Mirandola concludes per reductio ad absurdum contra “re-nascentia.” Is Quattromani the name of ONE philosopher? (A) If ‘Yes’: justify your answer in terms of his known oeuvre; (B) If ‘No’: supply the other Quattromani [(C) Would that not make him Ottomani? Counter‑justify.] (D) State a corollary that would follow from your declining to give a yes‑or‑no answer to the original question. What work by Telesio did Bacon not read to justify his characterisation of the former as “prius modernorum”? Distinguish between (A1) Civitas solis, (A2) Civitas Solis, (B1) La città del sole, (B2) La città del Sole, (B3) La Città del sole, and (B4) La Città del Sole. What was lost in translation? Q: (A) Provide the three scope variants for Bruno’s Dell’infinito, universo, e mondi; (B) indicate which one led to the Santo Ufficio resolution; (C) counter-justify. Q: Give three philosophical arguments why Oxford may be an older university than Bologna. Explain why Aquinas’s Summa Theologica can or cannot still be taught at Oxford by a former seminarian like Kenny. Explain how Cicero’s philosophical advice in “The Republic” applies, in English history, to any period other than Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Q: Explain the differences between the philosophical doctrines of both Rensi and Renzi in terms of how their surnames would be mispronounced outside Italy. Q. Compare William of Ockham and Gregorio da Rimini in terms of: (a) percentuals of the first names William and Gregorio in their respective villages; (b) other. Q: “Is soul-survival of the nous qua noumenon pantheistically flawed?” From Marcus Aurelius, Ad se ipsum, § 5.4. A: His question; his answer! Q: What is the meaning of “of” in Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy”? A: “Off,” surely? Q: Would Lucretius be able to read a modern Italian rendition of his De rerum natura? A: Provided the hexametres are kept. Q: If your name were Cicero, would you legally change it? A: I did — but my wife remains Missus Cicero. Q: Is Vico’s Scienza nuova still new? A: Even before he wrote it. Q: Name three philosophers within the S before Sabbadini who wrote on Cicero. A: Sabba, Sabbada, and Sabbadin — if you heard of them. Q: Why is Croce’s Breviario di estetica anything but? A: Because “Breviario” alone would not do. Q: Is it Salutati’s custom to salute more than once? A: Not necessarily at once. Q: Is Sancasciani doubly invoked? A: Indeed. And worth the double reward. Q. Expose in your own terms what Gricean maxim Sanseverino but not Severino flout. A. I do not expose on principle. Q: If Sarpi’s surname is supposed to derive from sarpa, a fish, why is it not Sarpe? A: Why not? Q: If s- at the beginning of a word is the negative prefix, what would Scaramelli not mean? A: Not not little candies. Q: Why are there two Scevolas, and why should Grice care? A: Because “Scevola” in these notes names two different Quintus Mucius Scaevolas, each exemplary in a different register of reasoned public life. One is the pontifex and jurist, associated with the systematic ordering of civil law, dialectical division, and the idea that jurisprudence is a branch of political philosophy grounded in public reasons. The other is the augur and civic speaker, remembered above all for his refusal, under threat, to call Marius an enemy, thereby showing that force cannot cancel the authority of judgment. Grice should care because both figures anticipate, in different ways, his own central thought: that meaning, judgment, and public reason depend not on coercion, costume, or institutional fiat alone, but on recognisable standards of rational accountability. One Scevola shows reason as juridical articulation; the other shows reason as moral steadfastness in speech. In the reconstruction proposed by Speranza, the tutorial question is to be imagined not as a neutral bureaucratic convenience, but as one of the most local and affectionate perversities of the Oxford philosophical order. The essay-title was both invitation and trap: an instrument of formation, of pressure, of comedy, and of discreet judgment. It belonged to the tutor rather than to the University Lecturer as such; the lectureship supplied public exposition, and the examiner later depended, in the Schools, upon the candidate’s own essay, but the weekly assignment belonged to the tutorial room. It is there that one may most plausibly situate the steady manufacture of essay questions across the twenty years from 1946 to 1966. If, for working purposes, one adopts the simplifying assumptions already proposed by Speranza — fifteen pupils in an active term, one essay per pupil per week, and one sabbatical term in each academic year — the gross number of essay questions framed during the period comes to roughly 4,800 on an eight-week teaching estimate, or somewhat less on a shorter reckoning. This figure is not documentary, but heuristic; its point is less archival than atmospheric. It conveys the scale of the weekly pressure under which Grice, as tutor, may be imagined to have forged a style of question at once exacting, dry, and quietly comic. In that atmosphere, the rule “Typewritten disallowed. Handwriting counts.” belongs naturally enough, and with more than one implication. It recovers, on the one hand, the old donnish wit whereby a remark ostensibly about penmanship could function as judgment on philosophy itself: “Jones has beautiful handwriting” being heard, under collection conditions, as carrying the unspoken rider that Jones is otherwise hopeless. On the other hand, it recalls the tutor’s delight in the incorrigibility of meaning, as in the pupil who, instructed to “bring me a paper tomorrow,” asks whether a newspaper would do. Such humour is not generous, but it is recognisable to anyone who has suffered the role of tutee; it is part of the small domestic pragmatics of Oxford philosophy, where what is said and what is meant were seldom permitted to coincide for long. Speranza’s sample therefore proceeds not as a literal archival find, but as an impersonal reconstruction of the sort of paper-questions that might fittingly stand before the verbali: serious in content, whimsical in form, and touched throughout by that austere, faintly malicious, and oddly affectionate tutorial comedy in which the weekly essay was both punishment and privilege. I made the corrections, as per passage selected. So please keep here in chatbox what I assume is a natural consequence, again in Speranza's impersonal voice. For a tutor who was known to have his pupils piling up the steps (and therefore known as 'Godot') or would not make a point about 'uploading' grades, one can see it clearly why the 'Gruppo di Gioco' was a matter of survival for this type of philosopher. Note the academic ambivalnce. Austin's old play group was not such thing -- even though Hamsphire did use the expression. they were adults and met for two years before the war. The playgroup of saturday mornings was paraphilosophical but still official in that they did not meet in a pub. Indeed, Austin's favourite venue was Grice's St. John's. Upon Austin's demise, Grice hesitated but kept the meeting at Corpus -- Hare would attend and we could see why Hare is thus one of the first, with Pears, to use 'conversational implicature' in print -- because, without the Master (Austin), the playgroup was more relaxed. Grice rented so 'at-homes' would be a no-no, and the English sabbath was used -- the saturday morning' -- In the three 'playgroups' the idea was PARA-professional: they were not FORCED to do it, and eventually, it was that which led to the demise and Grice's leaving Oxford altogether. Pupils were not allowed, possible examinees were not allowed. They were not classes, they were not tutorials, they were the only occasions where Grice could show his wit in the freest conversational form possible -- For a man who looked to philosophy for his bread and butter, this was marmalade, and scones. In the impersonal continuation Speranza appears to have in mind, the natural consequence is that the Gruppo di Gioco emerges not as a decorative supplement to Grice’s professional life, but as one of its few breathable margins. For a tutor whose pupils were said to pile up the staircase outside his rooms, and who thereby acquired the half-affectionate, half-exasperated title of “Godot,” the need for a para-professional refuge becomes readily intelligible. The tutorial, the lecture, the class, the examination, and the college obligation all belonged to the bread-and-butter economy of philosophy; wit there had to be rationed, and conversation itself was pressed into service by assessment. It is precisely against that background that the playgroup acquires its real significance. It was neither class nor tutorial, neither public lecture nor examinational exercise, and it excluded both pupils and possible examinees. It was not a place where one uploaded grades, or even one where one could safely behave as though philosophy were merely an administrative burden. It was, rather, one of the few occasions on which Grice could allow conversation to become an end in itself without thereby ceasing to be philosophical. The academic ambivalence matters. Hampshire could speak of an “old playgroup,” but Austin’s pre-war circle of adults meeting for two years before the war was not yet the same kind of institution, still less the same kind of necessity. The later Saturday mornings were para-philosophical, but they remained official enough in tone and venue to distinguish them sharply from clubbable drift in a pub. They met not at random, but in college rooms; indeed, Austin’s preferred scene was Grice’s own St John’s, which already says something about the geography of trust. After Austin’s death, Grice hesitated, but continued the meetings at Corpus, and in that continuation one may plausibly locate a small but important change of temperature. Without the Master, the atmosphere relaxed. It is not wholly accidental, on this view, that Hare and Pears are among the first to put “conversational implicature” into print: the later playgroup, though heir to Austin’s exactness, was less pedagogically staged and more freely conversational in Grice’s own manner. Since Grice rented, “at homes” were out of the question; the English Sabbath of philosophy therefore remained what it had been, Saturday morning, indoors, college-bound, and unofficial in the precise sense that nobody was forced to be there. That para-professional character is the essential point. In all three relevant groupings, attendance was not compulsory, and their very non-compulsoriness formed both their charm and their fragility. They were undertaken beyond duty, not under it. That, too, helps explain both their eventual exhaustion and Grice’s own final departure from Oxford. For a philosopher who looked to philosophy for his bread and butter, these gatherings supplied what the official economy could not: the marmalade and the scones. They permitted a kind of free philosophical sociability in which conversation was not merely the vehicle of doctrine, but its pleasure, its test, and its reward. If the tutorial was labour, the playgroup was relief; if the lecture was obligation, the Saturday morning was chosen form; if the examiner represented judgment, the playgroup represented wit released from judgment’s harness. In that sense the Gruppo di Gioco was not an ornament to Grice’s Oxford life, but one of its few survivable luxuries. Do not insert anything in text of document but let us keep it all here -- do not use bulleting, italic, or bold -- and let us keep English as our meta-language. I am thinking for an opening or initial sort of thing passage. This is presented ironically -- and you can use Speranza in third person with dry humour etc -- as I VERBAL DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE by J. L. SPERANZA, but Speranza hides a love for keywords and "H. P. Grice" and "J. L. Speranza" work well as thus -- unlike mere "Grice" or mere "Speranza" -- they narrow a search down. But what about PLAYGROUP -- never mind 'verbali'. Grice (or Grace Strawson) is being ironic. Austin's was nothing BUT. It was a controlled atmosphere, where the leader was the senior -- hence the bit of 'playgroup' or "austin's kindergartens" -- they were allowed to play not at a pub -- where tourism was making them impossilbe -- but on university quarters -- yet not official. Today, we would think it unconceviable that a university (Bologna, Oxford) would promote such meetings without sponsoring or promoting or opening them to the public -- everything has become a market and a business. Speranza has also used "Grice Club" as opposed to "Grice's Club" but that may not work either -- What Speranza means is just a reconstruction, historical, that centres on conversational exchanges of the type Grice experienced -- and the play group meetings with Austin were NOT his model for that -- but the examples he gives are not exactly those of free-flowing conversation: he mentions his interactins with Strawson which were so crytpic that thy were unintelligible to a third party -- hardly the idea of a colloquium, a circolo, la conversazione -- So perhaps rescuing 'La conversazione' first used in English by Keats when corresponding with his mother: "I've been attending many 'conversazioni' as they call them here. What we talk about I cannot say." Besides the crytpic interactions with Strawson -- which got Grice into trouble with the Strawsons since Grace Strawson disallowed the energy that Grice was spending -- all through the day and untimely hours -- with her husband, Grice mentions 'joint seminars' -- with Pears, Thomson, Warnock, and Austin himself -- hardly the easy flow of conversation. These were public classes and the seminarists rotated, with little room for exchange. O. P. Wood is famously resported as bringing up a minutiae at the end of one by Grice and Strawson -- minutiae even for Oxonian standards -- only to be dismissed rather rudely. La conversazione is perhaps the best way to deal with this. Speranza focus is an excuse. The philosohical interest lies in the theses -- by G -- propounded in such a conversazione -- (here not just the event, but the 'product'). And only as foil for further ... conversazione. The point of the 'verbali' is the irony of it all. Austin never discussed 'Meaning' with Grice in the years where the thing was in manuscript and when it was later published. Austin disliked discussing PUBLISHED stuff -- or stuff that was already thought-out. And he was a peculiar master of ceremonies. Speranza and Ghersi having been hosts to such 'conversazioni' they know that there is an order to be followed. Each sesssion should have some 'appearance of order.' With Austin's death, indeed, even though Grice would like to extend his 'conversazioni' to the broad membership of Oxford, some felt that the lack of rigour in the proceedings spoiit it all -- and would rarther revert to isolation -- after Pascal or Descartes or Kant have done -- or smaller conversazioni -- the 'dialogue' alla Socrates with at least one, or two, or four -- never 21! Speranza appears to have settled, with dry prudence, on a title that is half label and half warning. I Verbali del Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice sounds administrative enough to reassure the timid, and ironical enough to discourage them from taking the administration too seriously. “Verbali” promises order, or at least the appearance of it; “Gruppo di Gioco” immediately unsettles that promise. The first term belongs to minutes, registers, committees, and official memory; the second, to irony, undergraduate hearsay, and the peculiar Oxford habit of putting adults into nursery language precisely when they are behaving least like children. Speranza is aware that “playgroup” was never innocent. Under Austin it was less a playground than a controlled climate: seniority mattered, venue mattered, attendance was selective, and the whole thing remained half inside and half outside the university’s official machinery. It was not held in a pub, still less in the public square, but in college rooms, which already tells one that the “play” was bounded by collegiate walls. The joke in the title therefore matters. A playgroup it was called, and a playgroup it was not. Speranza’s preference for the full names, H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza, has the same double effect. On the one hand, it satisfies the modern appetite for keywords, narrowing the search with an almost legal precision that “Grice” or “Speranza” alone would fail to provide. On the other hand, it quietly mimics the old Oxford and Italian taste for initials as social miniatures: formal enough to dignify, coded enough to amuse. “Grice Club” has perhaps too much of a modern afterlife about it; “Grice’s Club” sounds proprietary in the wrong way; “Gruppo di Gioco” preserves the local absurdity without pretending that the phrase was ever straightforward. Yet Speranza’s real concern is neither branding nor nostalgia. What he offers is not a memorial society, nor a transcript of literal proceedings, but a historical reconstruction of philosophical conversazione in a Gricean key. The irony is deliberate: the very title suggests fixed minutes, while the philosophical point lies in what cannot be minuted without ceasing to be alive. That is why “la conversazione” may serve him better than any more institutional label. The examples Grice himself gives of philosophical life are not always examples of easy, expansive colloquy. His exchanges with Strawson were notoriously cryptic, at times almost private language staged in public, intelligible to their participants and nearly opaque to the third party. The joint seminars with Pears, Thomson, Warnock, and Austin were important, but hardly free-flowing: they were public classes, rota-bound, and often too formal to count as conversation except in a very stretched sense. O. P. Wood’s famous intervention of a terminal minutia, and the brisk dismissal that followed, belongs to seminar choreography rather than to civil exchange. Even Austin’s own Saturday mornings, for all their para-professional status, were not models of unregulated discursiveness. Their order was real, their host peculiar, and their exclusions carefully maintained. If Speranza leans toward “conversazione,” it is because the term can name both the event and the product: not merely the occasion of gathering, but the theses, distinctions, prompts, and afterthoughts generated there and left available for further conversation. The point of the verbali, then, is precisely the irony of preserving what was never fully preservable. Austin, after all, did not discuss “Meaning” with Grice in the years when it mattered most to Grice, whether in manuscript or after publication; he disliked discussing published things, or things too fully thought out, and his own mastery of proceedings was a mastery of deflection as much as of order. Speranza and Ghersi, having themselves hosted such conversazioni, know well enough that pure freedom is usually a myth told by poor chairmen. Every session requires some visible discipline if it is not to collapse into anecdote or vanity. Yet the post-Austin relaxation, especially under Grice, reveals the opposite danger: once the Master is gone and the proceedings broaden, some begin to feel that the very lack of rigour spoils the thing and drives them back toward solitude, or toward smaller circles, or toward the Socratic scale of one, two, or four. Never twenty-one. The reconstruction, therefore, is not a naïve longing for lost Oxford ease. It is an attempt to recover that very unstable region between officialness and freedom, where philosophy could still appear in conversational form, with enough order to keep its shape and enough looseness to let wit, implication, and intellectual surprise survive. So perhaps you can help me here, and as you answer keep the neutral Speranza dry humour voice. So perhaps 'Conversazione' is what we are looking for. Of course, this is a foreignism. In Italian, we don't know what it even means. But in England, and Oxford, it underwent some 'changes of use.' The first OED citation -- which doesn't mean anything -- since the criteria are usually quirky: is Keats: conversazione. But he is referring to a phenomenon he is experiencing in Rome, not Oxford. When 'conversazione' settled in England, it was more like a different kind of setting. So the idea is to re-activate that Keat's use of 'conversazione.' And one way to do so is to check how 'Conversazioni' or 'Conversazione' officially appreared in both Italy and England in this use and what was use for 'verbali' [Co-pilot do so -- with a history of the use of 'conversazione' in English and Italy in this usage with special reference to the way the 'verbali' were characterised or recorded if al all -- Speranza does not expect that the Missus who held the conversazione about which he is corresponding with his mother kept such a record -- but you never know -- it may well be in the form of a journal. Cf. Libro del cortegiano or Guazzo civil Conversatione, Speranza may indeed be right that conversazione is the better word, precisely because it is slightly wrong in all the right ways. As an Italianism in English, it has the advantage of never having settled comfortably into a single natural use, and therefore of remaining available for philosophical mischief. In Italy, conversazione is almost too ordinary to help: it can mean simply talk, conversation, salon exchange, polite social commerce, and all the rest. In England, however, the word acquired a special social career. The historical record suggests that English borrowed it from Italian in the eighteenth century as the name for a kind of assembly observed abroad, Horace Walpole already using it in 1739 after Italy, while the OED places the noun in English from the mid-eighteenth century and notes its Italian origin conversazione,. Keats’s Roman use, then, is not philologically absurd, only not specifically Oxonian: he is reporting an Italian social phenomenon under its local name rather than naming an English institutional habit. [oed.com] What happened next in England is more useful for Speranza’s purposes. By the nineteenth century conversazione had become a term of art for a learned or semi-learned social gathering, especially literary, artistic, or scientific, often evening-based, often hosted by a society or institution, and notably less stiff than a formal meeting while still very far from mere chat. Victorian usage in particular shows the word being used for intellectual soirées and scientific gatherings in which exhibits, papers, demonstrations, talk, and sociability mingled under a decorous roof Conversazione; even contemporary journalism could say that much might be said and done “amid the free talk of a general gathering which could not be permitted in the formal meeting of a scientific society,” which is almost too apt for Speranza’s irony. Scholarly work on Victorian science confirms that the conversazione became a major urban middle-class cultural form, halfway between display, discussion, sociability, and public intellectual theatre Conversaziones and the Experience of Science in Victorian England. In that sense, the English history of the word is already a history of managed looseness: freer than a meeting, less private than a salon, and never quite reducible to either. That makes it far more promising than playgroup, whose irony depends too much on Oxford folklore, or club, which drifts too quickly toward membership and afterlife branding. [en.wikipedia.org] [researchgate.net] [en.wikipedia.org], [researchgate.net] In Italy, by contrast, the nearest strong historical frame is less the scientific conversazione than the culture of the salotto and the older literature of civil conversation. Studies of nineteenth-century Italian salons show that “conversazione da salotto,” now a slightly pejorative phrase, once named a highly structured form of cultivated exchange in which sociality, education, political formation, and cultural recognition were inseparable I salotti di cultura nell’Italia dell’Ottocento; Maria Teresa Mori – Salotti. La sociabilità delle élite nell’Italia dell’Ottocento. Treccani’s discussion of La Civil conversazione makes the deeper point still better: in Guazzo, and already in Castiglione behind him, “conversazione” is not idle speech but a form of associated life, with ethical, educational, and civic force. So if Speranza wants conversazione rather than playgroup, he has good historical cover in both countries, though not the same cover. In Italy the word points backward to a civil art of exchange and to the salotto as a formative social space; in England it points sideways to the learned soirée, half social and half intellectual, often institutional but not entirely formal. That doubleness is exactly the sort of inconvenience Speranza likes. [francoangeli.it], [sissco.it] [treccani.it] As for verbali, the dry answer is that one should not expect too much from the historical record. English conversaziones, especially the Victorian institutional kind, were sometimes announced, reported, reviewed, or retrospectively summarised in magazines, newspapers, society reports, or institutional histories, but they were not usually minuted in the same way as committee meetings or society business sessions Conversazione; UNB’s History at a Glance: Conversazione. A scientific society might keep formal journal books for its actual meetings, but the conversazione belonged precisely to the freer zone that escaped complete minute-taking, even when later reports described it Journal Books of Scientific Meetings, 1660–1800; Council Minutes, 1660–1800. In Italy, the traces are more likely to survive in memoirs, correspondence, diaries, journals, salotto recollections, and occasional printed notices than in anything literally called verbali, unless the event was tied to an academy or official body rather than to a private house SALOTTI, GENERE ED ESPERIENZE DI SOCIALITÀ IN ITALIA; I salotti di cultura nell’Italia dell’Ottocento. So Speranza’s irony sharpens nicely: conversazione is the right word because it names a form that historically resisted strict verbalisation into minutes, while verbali is the wrong word in exactly the useful sense, since it promises documentary fixity for what was usually preserved only in the oblique forms philosophy likes best — letters, journals, prefaces, anecdotes, institutional notices, or the dangerous memory of those present. That, after all, is the whole charm of reconstructing it. [en.wikipedia.org], [lib.unb.ca] [discovery....ves.gov.uk] [francoangeli.it], [jstor.org]

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza : La Conversazione – I Verbali: A

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La conversazione – i verbali:  Abbà – ossia: Grice ed Abbà: ‘the italian ‘Lockino’ migliore da Locke -- la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatra conversazionale e l’analisi del segnare nell’Elementæ logicæ,’ ‘Elementae dialecticæ: segno, segnante, segnato – SIGNVM EX INSTITVTIONE – il latino come palæo-italiano’ pel Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. A. is a very interesting philosopher. Giacomo Andrea Abbà (Farigliano, Cuneo, Piemonte). “È A. a entrare per primo, così mi pare, con un resoconto della ragione conversazionale in rapporto all’implicatura conversazionale e  la teoria del segno.” Abbà’s De signis (Elementa logices et metaphysices, Taurini 1829) belongs to the post-scholastic “logic of signs” tradition: it classifies signa as naturalia (signifying “ex effectibus”) and artificialia/ex institutione, treats signification as anchored in shared practices (“communi consensu”), and tends to construe the passage from signans to signatum on the model of a relatively stable relation (often discussed with an eye to writing as “permanent signs” and to the non-arbitrariness of sermo). Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning shifts the explanatory center from taxonomies of sign-types to the rational structure of a talk-exchange: what is meant is not fixed by a sign-relation alone, but is generated by an audience’s recognition of a speaker’s intention under publicly presupposed norms of cooperation (maxims), so that systematic “extra” meaning (implicature) arises precisely when what is said is assessed as a rational contribution to a common conversational purpose. Where Abbà’s framework invites comparison between natural and instituted signs as semiotic kinds, Grice treats the most philosophically diagnostic cases as inferentially mediated: the hearer uses assumptions about reasonableness, relevance, sufficiency, and sincerity to move from the uttered sign to what the speaker can be taken to mean; thus “non-natural meaning” is not merely the instituted signum but intention plus recognizability plus practical reasoning within a cooperative activity. In short, Abbà offers a sign-theory that helps situate language within a general semiotics of effects and conventions, whereas Grice offers a normatively constrained account of how, in conversation, rational agents exploit and monitor those very resources to get from saying to meaning, with implicature marking the point where conversational reason, not the sign-vehicle, does the decisive work. Grice: “When I said in my talk at the Oxford Philosophical Society that I hoped I was getting at what ‘people are trying to get at’ when they show an interest on the distinction between a natural sign and a conventional or arbitrary or artificial sign – ex institutione,’ I knew about which I as talking!” Keywords: implicature, teoria del segno, segnare, segnato. Filosofo piemontese. Filosofo italiano. Grice: “Not strictly a philosopher, since his degree is in theology!” Grice: “Abbà is a genius – an Italian Lockino, as he calls himself in “Elementæ logicae” – But he is actually better than Locke – England’s and Oxford’s greatest philosopher – for a couple of reasons: Locke uses barbarisms – anglo-saxonisms, A., who could be philosophising in his Cuneo vernacular, uses Cicero’s tongue! And the good thing is that he is fluent at it and his prose is flowing – It is difficult for a Locke to write in Latin – witness the roughness of Occam’s prose in Latin – but A., he is obviously THINKING in Italian and expressing his thoughts in ‘palaeo-Italian,’ as he calls ‘Latin.’ “Thinking in Italian may be preoponderant, but it need not be true! Of course, I enjoyed most A.’s philosophising on the ‘signum naturale’ – on which I drew for my Oxford seminars!” – A. is a great interpreter of Locke, in a country that needs that!” While A. uses ‘logica,’ he means ‘dialectica,’ as the third way of the trivium was called. This means that he extends his discussion from the ‘segnum’ to conversation. G.: Let us begin with the obvious historical propriety. In 1829, at Turin, Abbà publishes his Elementa logices et metaphysices, and he writes in Latin. He does so, I take it, not because he is puzzled in a later Viennese therapeutic way, but because he is teaching. He has Italian-speaking students, yes, but he teaches them in the learned language, because he wants to form them, examine them, and make distinctions in a medium already scholastically disciplined. S.: Quite. Latin here is pedagogical before it is antiquarian. Abbà is not writing for a coterie of belletrists; he is furnishing a textbook, or something textbook-adjacent, for an Italian public educated enough to receive doctrine in Latin. The audience speaks Italian, but the discipline speaks Latin. G.: And because the discipline speaks Latin, he says signum. S.: Precisely. G.: Whereas I, for my own part, am generally happier if I can get away from sign and speak rather of meaning, or of what someone means, or means by x, or means in uttering x. I distrust the noun a little. It tempts one into taxonomy too quickly. S.: Abbà, by contrast, wants the taxonomy. He is teaching. A teacher likes classes. Signum gives him a genus under which he can sort things. G.: Still, one should not lose the philological continuity. His Latin signum is not some dead museum-piece. It lives on in the vernacular. Italian segno is its descendant. S.: Yes. And if you want the pronunciation as he, an Italian speaker, would hear it in the vernacular, segno is /ˈseɲɲo/. G.: Good. That matters. For then signum is not merely the schoolman’s fossil; it has issue in the street, in the town, in ordinary life. The master speaks Latin, but the pupils go home and say segno. S.: And that in turn lets one pass from the noun to the family. Segno, segnare, segnalare. Once the root is naturalised, it becomes productive. G.: Just so. English gives me signal, and I like signal because it behaves well predicatively and verbally. One can say that x signals that p. Dark clouds signal rain. A gesture signals impatience. A bandaged leg signals inability to play squash. Signal is cooperative with the philosopher in a way sign often is not. S.: Italian has segnale, of course, and segnalare. But your point is still better if we begin from the older stock: signum, segno, and then the verbal tendency already latent in Latin itself. For even Latin has signare, or at any rate forms that let one move from mark or sign to signing, marking, indicating. G.: Which is useful, because I want the active side. Not merely a sign lying there, but something’s signifying, indicating, manifesting, letting something else be gathered. The Greek ancestry helps too: σημαίνειν. There is already there the movement from mark to indication. S.: And from there your preferred examples become possible without any commitment to language proper. Dark clouds may sign, if you like the verb, that it is about to rain. Smoke may sign fire. A footprint may sign that someone passed by. One need not begin with words. G.: Exactly. The dyadic shape is what matters first: x signifies, signals, marks, indicates, means that p. Something is a manifestation of something else. Not necessarily by convention, not necessarily by speech. S.: But Abbà wants, at a certain point, to distinguish signum ex institutione. G.: Yes, and there I begin to want help. For one hears institution and, in English, one is in danger of hearing school, church, hospital, Parliament. S.: Which would be quite the wrong path here. Institutio is stricter and older. It is a putting-in-place. A positing. Something laid down. In that respect the old contrast is the useful one: thesei as opposed to physei. By thesis, by posit, by institution, not by nature. G.: So in-stitutio is almost palpable. Something stood up, set in place. S.: Exactly. A signum ex institutione is not a sign by natural consequence, but one whose significative role depends upon an established practice, an accepted placement, a communis consensus if you will. Not smoke from fire, but a word, a flag, a road-mark, a written token, a civic or linguistic arrangement. G.: Then Abbà’s distinction is not alien to mine, though I should phrase it otherwise. He is classifying kinds of sign. I, when I am at my fussiest, want to know what someone means in producing something. But the institutional side matters for me too, because non-natural meaning depends upon publicly recognisable arrangements. S.: Though you do not stop there. G.: No, because convention, institution, posit, all that, does not yet get one to the most interesting cases. Let me take a little scene. A says to B, Are you going to play squash with me? B says nothing, but displays a bandaged leg. S.: Good. G.: Now, what does B signal? Not, in the philosophically interesting sense, that he has a bandaged leg. A does not need a reasoned inference for that; he can see it. The bandage is before his eyes. What matters is that B means, or signals, that he must refuse the invitation, or cannot accept it. S.: Exactly. The visible condition is not the point of the communicative act, though it is the vehicle of it. G.: Yes. The leg is the presented item; the refusal is what is conveyed. And the move from the one to the other is not secured merely by a static sign-relation. It requires practical reasoning. A asks himself: why is B showing me this now, in response to that question? Under the assumption that B is being cooperative, the display is to be taken not merely as a specimen but as a reason-giving sign. S.: So your interest falls not merely on the signum, but on the inferential route from signans to signatum in context. G.: And on the rationality of that route. If one likes, one may say that Abbà gives one the classroom taxonomy: natural sign, instituted sign, and so on. But what interests me is that, in conversation, the decisive work is often done not by the sign-vehicle alone but by what an addressee can reasonably infer from its display at that juncture. S.: Still, Abbà helps because his signum ex institutione keeps in view the fact that language is not brute smoke. It belongs to a practice. Words are not naturally tied to what they signify; they are instituted, posited, sedimented into use. G.: Certainly. And if he is teaching in Latin to Italian speakers, the point becomes almost theatrical. He is using one instituted system to explain another. Signum in the lecture-room, segno outside it. Latin as the pedagogic superstrate, Italian as the vernacular continuation. S.: Which is why your shift from sign to mean need not be hostile. It is rather a change of focal length. Abbà says: let us classify signs. You say: let us ask what someone meant in producing this sign here and now. G.: Nicely put. And perhaps Ciceronian signare is useful just because it lets one hover between marking and meaning. Something may signare another thing in the broad consequential sense: one thing points on to another. The relation is dyadic. x implies, indicates, manifests, or gives one to gather that p. S.: Consequentia in the broad medieval sense. G.: Yes. Though once conversation enters, the consequential tie is not merely material or natural. It is often practical and intention-sensitive. The clouds may signal rain by nature; the bandaged leg signals refusal by rational placement in an exchange. S.: Then one could say that Abbà’s signum ex institutione prepares the ground, while your account of meaning and implicature explains the most delicate cases that arise once instituted signs are used by reason-giving agents in conversation. G.: I should be content with that. Abbà, the teacher, needs the genus signum. He is writing in Latin in Turin in 1829 for Italians whom he will later examine. He needs distinctions that can be taught and tested. I, in my own teaching, prefer to ask: what did he mean by that, what was conveyed, what was implied, what was to be gathered? But I am not leaving the sign behind. I am merely insisting that, in the best cases, the life of the sign lies in the reasoning it occasions. S.: And that is why your squash example matters. The bandaged leg is not, for A, an object of detached semiotics. It is a move in a game. G.: Exactly. A conversational move. And once one sees that, one sees why signum alone is not enough. One needs signum plus occasion, plus recognisable intention, plus the cooperative presumption under which the addressee reasons from what is shown to what is meant. S.: Then perhaps the closing formula writes itself. Abbà begins from signum because he is a Latin teacher addressing Italian speakers within a post-scholastic discipline. You begin from mean because your concern is not only with signs as kinds but with what rational agents do with them in conversation. G.: Yes. And if one wants the genealogy in a single breath: signum becomes segno, produces signal and segnare-like descendants, and behind them all there still flickers σημαίνειν, the old thought that one thing may stand forth so that another thing may be gathered from it. S.: A decent lineage. G.: More than decent. Pedagogically useful, too. Abbà could have examined them on it. And I daresay I would have.Grice: Abbà., ho sempre sostenuto che la distinzione tra segni naturali e segni convenzionali è centrale nella filosofia del linguaggio. Però, mi incuriosisce il tuo approccio: tu affermi che il “segnum naturale” abbia un ruolo più profondo rispetto a quello che Locke stesso riconosceva. In che modo la tua prospettiva italiana arricchisce questo dibattito? Abbà: Caro Grice, la mia riflessione nasce proprio dal confronto con Locke, ma tenendo conto della tradizione latina che, almeno in Piemonte, non si è mai persa. Per me, il segno naturale è radicato nell’esperienza condivisa, “ex institutione”, mentre il segno convenzionale può essere raffinato, ma rischia di perdere il legame con la realtà. In fondo, penso che il linguaggio abbia una funzione dialettica, non solo logica. Grice: Interessante! Io stesso ho cercato di mostrare che la conversazione si regge su implicature, cioè su ciò che non viene detto esplicitamente, ma che si comprende grazie alle regole condivise. Il tuo “pensare in italiano e scrivere in latino” mi sembra quasi una metafora della filosofia: conservare la radice ma innovare nella forma. Come si inserisce, secondo te, l’implicatura conversazionale nella teoria del segno? Abbà: L’implicatura, per me, è la prova che il segno non è mai puramente arbitrario. Ogni segno, anche quello creato “ex institutione”, rimanda a una realtà vissuta, a una comunanza dialettica. Quando uso “logica”, intendo proprio quella “dialectica” che permette al segno di essere veicolo non solo di informazione, ma anche di relazione. In questo senso, la conversazione diventa uno spazio civico: “fariglianese”, ma universale! Elementa logices et metaphysices [Logica: “De signis”]. Grice e Abbà: ‘the italian ‘Lockino’ migliore da Locke -- la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatra conversazionale e l’analisi del segnare nell’Elementae logicae,’ ‘Elementae dialecticae: segno, segnante, segnato – SIGNVM EX INSTITVTIONE – il latino come palaeo-italiano. So for Abba, please provide as per passage below: -- some praise for Speranza having made the contact Grice/Abba -- or Abba Grice -- in that it can only be done retrospectively, but with the hope that it may stay on record an interesting intersetion between an insular philosophy don at Oxford and the broader continental tradition -- just the paragraph from you then, no preambl or ps. thank you, What is most admirable in Speranza’s bringing Abbà and Grice into contact is precisely that the contact cannot be historical in the ordinary forward-moving sense, but only retrospective, reconstructed across differences of language, institution, and philosophical self-understanding. That is no weakness; it is the whole merit of the enterprise. For only a reader with Speranza’s double patience, equally at home with Oxford’s insular exactitude and with the larger continental inheritance of sign, dialectic, and learned Latin prose, could have seen that Abbà’s classroom semiotics and Grice’s analysis of conversational reason belong, not to the same chapter, but to the same deeper pressure of philosophy. The result is not an anachronistic annexation of one thinker to another, still less a cheap claim of anticipation, but something rarer and more durable: a record of intersection. If it remains on the page, as one hopes it will, it will remain as evidence that an Oxford don’s philosophy of meaning can be illuminated by a Piedmontese theologian-philosopher writing in Latin, and that the traffic between so-called insular analysis and the broader continental tradition is richer, older, and more reciprocal than either side has usually wished to admit. Abbà, Giacomo Andrea (1829) Elementa logices et metaphysices. Torino: Ex Typis Regiis

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La conversazione – i verbali: Abbagnano– ossia: Grice ed Abbagnano: ‘going through the dictionary of Scipione: la ragione conversazionale: “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says, unless it’s Abbagnano’s! (Grice) – empiegare/empiegato, implicare/implicato, e l’idea d’un dizionario filosofico.’ Note su Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.  Nicola Abbagnano (Salerno, Campania): la ragione conversazionale -- “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says, unless it’s A.’s!” (Grice) -- Abbagnano, in the entry “Implicazione” of his Dizionario di filosofia (Torino: UTET, 1961), treats implication in the standard logical sense: the inferential link between propositions expressed by “if… then…,” typically approached as a formal relation (often contrasted with stronger notions like derivability/consequence) and connected with the technical apparatus of modern logic rather than with the ordinary-language idea of “hinting” or “letting something be understood.” Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is illuminatingly different precisely because it insists that much of what we ordinarily call what an utterance “implies” is not logical implication at all: conversational implicature is a rational, context-sensitive, and cancellable upshot generated by the hearer’s practical reasoning from what is said plus the presumption of cooperative exchange (maxims), so that the route from sentence to speaker-meaning runs through publicly recognizable intentions and norms of relevance, sufficiency, sincerity, and manner. Put schematically: Abbagnano’s implicazione belongs to the semantics of connectives and the validity-conditions of inference, whereas Grice’s implicature belongs to pragmatics, explaining how agents responsibly move from saying to meaning without any commitment to a truth-functional “if–then” structure; the comparison clarifies why Grice can maintain that a speaker may communicate (and be held answerable for) content that is neither entailed nor asserted, but is nonetheless rationally recoverable as part of the conversational enterprise. Grice: “La ragione conversazionale -- “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says, unless it’s A.’s!” (Grice). Keywords: filosofia romana, filosofia campanese , filosofia italiana, filosofia latina, impiegare, implicare, dizionario filosofico. There are TWO A.: the Paris Abbagnano, who to be different, dubbed his ‘existenzialismo’ ‘esistenizalismo positivo’ (later illuminismo), and MY A., the one who explored that infamous Greek embassy that arrived in Rome in 189 a. d. c., bringing the sophistries for the fascination of the Scipioni of Rome!”. Essential, idealist Italian philosopher, famouos for his “Dizionario di filosofia,”“which alas, has no entry fro ‘implicatura.’”Grice. A. also wrote an interesting history of philosophy, and is regarded as an idealist, alla Oxonian-favoured Croce. Laureatosi in filosofia a Napoli con ALIOTTA , insegna al Liceo Umberto I ed all'Istituto Benincasa del capoluogo campano, per poi trasferirsi a Torino dove è professore di Storia della filosofia presso la Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia. Condirettore, a fianco di BOBBIO , della “Rivista di filosofia.” Ispiratore del gruppo di filosofi, comprendente, tra gl’altri, lo stesso Bobbio e GEYMONAT , che prende il nome di neo-illuminismo italiano, organizzando una serie di convegni rivolti alla costruzione di una filosofia laica, aperta ai principali orientamenti della filosofia. Collabora con “La Stampa”. Si trasferisce a Milano dove collabora con “Il giornale.” Grice: “His entry on ‘implicazione’ could do with an etymological explanation with the vernacular ‘empiegato.’ His research on ‘segno’ are interesting. Of course, ‘going through the dictionary’ was our routine, and the way A. takes up the task was marvellous. Abbagnano’s 1923 title is polemical and programmatic rather than a confession of “irrationalism” in the crude sense.  What he means by “sorgenti irrazionali”  In the opening of Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero, Abbagnano attacks the idea that “pure thought” could be the principle and completion of everything, and he argues that thought has no life outside the lived unity of the self, in the flow of striving and acting. He treats “truth” as something whose sense and value are tied to temporal life, not as an eternal object detached from the movement of existence. What gives thought its vitality is what he calls the obscure force of life, which “moves” thought and expresses itself in it; truth is an abstract and symbolic expression of a moment of life, and therefore changes as life changes. This is the core sense in which there are “irrational sources”: not that thought should abandon reason, but that thought is generated, oriented, and animated by something prior to (and not exhausted by) logical form. [abbagnanofilosofo.it] A useful external confirmation is that, later, Abbagnano himself reportedly thought the published title was somewhat misleading, because his original title was Le sorgenti vitali del pensiero, and Aliotta pressed for the change. That remark, together with the framing that the book has a Nietzschean cast without collapsing into irrationalism, captures the point: the “irrational” names the vital, pre-theoretical ground, not an anti-reason doctrine. [brill.com]  What “irrational” is opposing  The target is “intellettualismo tradizionale” and any view that makes thought self-sufficient, sovereign, and able by itself to yield a concrete criterion of truth versus error. Abbagnano’s rhetoric is that philosophers have “neglected the reasons of life,” shut themselves in “the magic fortress of thought,” and then treated thought as the beginning and end of all things. Against that, he insists on the primacy of lived activity and the dependence of “truth” on the historical-life conditions that generate it. [abbagnanofilosofo.it]  Philosophers he is explicitly connected to in 1923 (and what we can and cannot safely list)  What I can cite directly from accessible sources right now is this: Antonio Aliotta is central: the 1923 book is published with a prefazione by Aliotta, and Aliotta’s prefatory remarks engage Abbagnano’s thesis, defending an empiricist “sperimentalismo” and arguing against both idealist circularity and a merely passive realism. [abbagnanofilosofo.it] Beyond Aliotta, the safest answer is methodological: we should not pretend to name a list of “philosophers Abbagnano quotes” unless we have the text’s bibliography or index in front of us. At the moment, I have access to the opening pages and to later editorial introductions, not to a complete searchable text with citations. So I cannot responsibly give you a definitive catalogue of who is quoted in the body of the 1923 book. What I can add, cautiously, is what later scholarly introductions say about the intellectual horizon of the Neapolitan period and of this work: they place Abbagnano’s early formation in a context where he studied Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger in those years, and they treat Le sorgenti as already engaging the “rapporto tra pensiero e vita.” [abbagnanofilosofo.it] If you want, I can do a follow-up where I identify, with names, the philosophers cited by Abbagnano in the 1923 text, but that requires a source that actually exposes the book’s internal references (a scan with searchable text, an index, or a library digital copy we can consult). Right now, the web results I have do not provide that full internal apparatus. G.: Let us begin where Naples begins for a philosopher of that generation: not with a tutorial, but with a chair, a relatore, a thesis, a faculty, a city, and a young man who must be judged in public in 1922. S.: Which already marks the difference from us. Oxford teaches by the small room and the weekly paper. Naples, in that case, teaches by the larger institutional relation: laurea, discussione, prefazione, publication. G.: Quite. One does not have the old Oxford luxury of a tutor who says very little and means a great deal by it. One has, instead, a relatore who can shape the whole destiny of the text. S.: And in Abbagnano’s case, perhaps shape even its title. G.: Which is why the title is philosophically worth worrying. Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero. A title one can spend a week distrusting. S.: Let us do it word by word, then. G.: Yes. Sorgenti first. S.: Plural feminine. G.: Already interesting. Not la sorgente but le sorgenti. Not one source, but many. S.: And not origine in the abstract, still less fondamento in the stricter philosophical sense. G.: Exactly. Sorgente is more physical, more imagistic, more terrestrial. A spring, a source, a point at which something emerges, rises, flows. S.: And because it is plural, the thought is not of one primal ground but of multiple upwellings. G.: Very good. One might say that the plural weakens the temptation to system. If he had said la sorgente del pensiero, he would sound more metaphysical in the old singular way. Le sorgenti suggests complexity, perhaps even conflict. S.: Several tributaries feeding thought. G.: Yes, though one must be careful not to make it too hydrological. Still, the metaphor matters. Pensiero does not appear ex nihilo; it rises from somewhere, or rather from several wheres. S.: And if the original preferred title was Le sorgenti vitali del pensiero, that all makes immediate sense. G.: More than immediate. It makes splendid sense. Pensiero belongs to life; it is not detachable from life; so its sources are vital, living, rooted in experience, striving, temporality, activity. S.: In that version the title sounds like a form of vitalism, perhaps with a little emergentism, but not necessarily anti-rationalism. G.: Quite. Vitalize thought, do not irrationalize it. One could have accepted that title with composure. It says: thought grows out of life. That is plausible, and indeed almost a truism once one ceases to worship pure intellect. S.: Whereas irrazionali is another matter. G.: Entirely another matter. Irrazionali does not merely say living, pre-theoretical, concrete, dynamic. It says not rational, or not fully rational, or at least not capturable under ratio. S.: And therefore it invites Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to walk in, whether wanted or not. G.: Exactly. The title becomes more polemical at once. Vitali might have been a doctrine of life; irrazionali sounds like a challenge to intellectualism. It has sharper teeth. S.: And we do have the report that Abbagnano himself would have preferred vitali, but that Aliotta pressed for irrazionali. G.: Which is deliciously awkward. The thesis then becomes, as it were, divided against itself before the poor fellow has even defended it. One title from the candidate’s own temperament, another from the relatore’s strategic or rhetorical instinct. S.: Tutor and tutee indeed, except not in our sense. G.: Not in our sense at all. You are fortunate, by the way, that I have never insisted on renaming your essays before allowing you to read them aloud. S.: I have often reflected on that good fortune. G.: Though perhaps I should have done it once or twice. S.: You would have called my essays “On Certain Preventable Confusions.” G.: Or “Attempts in Search of Distinctions.” But let us return to Naples. The problem is that the printed 1923 title may tell us as much about Aliotta as about Abbagnano. S.: Because Aliotta writes the prefazione. G.: Precisely. The prefazione is a dangerous genre. It appears to introduce, but it also frames, appropriates, domesticates, and, at times, colonises. S.: The master speaks before the pupil can quite be heard. G.: Yes. The relatore gets to tell the reader what kind of thing this is, what battle it belongs to, what enemy it answers, what larger school it serves. The young author may then appear as the example of a tendency whose terms have already been supplied by another. S.: One might almost say the prefazione kills the candidate’s voice by ventriloquising it in advance. G.: Strong, but not unfair. Especially in a 1922 laurea culture. One is young, one needs the degree, one needs approval, one wants the text through the ritual and into print. Under such conditions one may write what one thinks; one may also write what one can get passed. S.: So a tesi di laurea is not always the pure confession of a soul. G.: Heaven forbid. A thesis is often a negotiated object. One writes under pressure, under allegiance, under tactical deference. The text may contain one’s convictions, but filtered through expectation. S.: Which means that if Abbagnano writes irrazionali in print, we must ask whether that is wholly Abbagnano’s voice. G.: Just so. Or whether it is Abbagnano under Aliotta. Abbagnano speaking, yes, but in a room already acoustically arranged by the relatore. S.: And Naples in 1922 is not Bologna in 1322, nor Oxford in 1922. G.: No. Continental philosophy, if one wants the broad label, but in a very local institutional form. Naples has its own lineages, polemics, and pedagogic habits. One should not imagine the old Bolognese universitas murmuring under every title page simply because the country is the same. S.: Though the distance from Bologna matters symbolically. Italy is one country, but not one philosophical atmosphere. G.: Exactly. Naples is south, vital, contentious, institutionally different; Bologna is the oldest university, but not therefore the living centre of every later Italian problem. S.: So the 1922 thesis belongs not to some generic Italian philosophy, but to a specifically Neapolitan relation: candidate, relatore, faculty, prefazione, publication. G.: And now to the words again. Sorgenti, we said, plural, multiple, emerging. Del pensiero next. S.: Pensiero is broad. Not merely reasoning, not merely intellection, but thought as such. G.: Yes, thought in its living range. Not exactly logica, not exactly razionalità, but pensiero. Which is why vitali would have fitted it so well. If thought is part of life, then its springs are vital. S.: Whereas if its springs are irrazionali, the formula becomes harder. How can the irrational be the source of thought without thought itself becoming irrational? G.: That is the nub. One possibility is simply chronological or genetic priority. The source need not resemble the product in kind. Heat is not steam; appetite is not judgment; passion is not reasoning; yet one may say the latter emerges from, depends on, or is stirred by the former. S.: So irrazionali could mean pre-rational rather than anti-rational. G.: Yes, and that is perhaps the kindest reading. The obscure energies of life, willing, striving, affective impulses, concrete needs: these are not reason, but they move reason, feed it, animate it. S.: Which would bring us nearer to Nietzsche or Schopenhauer as diagnoses of background force, but not necessarily to an abdication of rationality. G.: Quite. Though once you choose irrazionali rather than vitali, you advertise the darker lineage. Vitali is almost Bergsonian in softness; irrazionali sounds harsher, more dramatic, more polemical, more apt to draw fire. S.: The plural still matters there too. Le sorgenti irrazionali is less alarming than la sorgente irrazionale. G.: Excellent. The plural saves him from monism. One irrational source might become a dark principle, the Will, capitalised and tyrannical. Several irrational sources are more anthropological, more psychological, more dispersed. S.: Appetite, fear, desire, impulse, historical situatedness, perhaps even temperament. G.: Yes. A plurality of non-rational feeders of thought. That is much easier to live with philosophically. It need not mean that reason is false, only that reason is not self-begotten. S.: Which is, in fairness, a sensible target against intellettualismo. G.: Indeed. If the enemy is the fantasy of pure thought generating and validating itself from nowhere, then one does need to insist on origins below or before the strictly rational plane. S.: But then the title still risks overstatement. G.: Of course. Titles are often strategic. And this is where the laurea situation matters again. A young man may not choose the title that best captures his settled doctrine; he may accept the title that best satisfies the relatore or best positions the work in a current dispute. S.: To get the degree bestowed, one may allow one’s title to over-speak one’s actual thesis. G.: Precisely. It is one of the oldest academic arrangements. The candidate says enough of what he believes to remain inwardly intact, and enough of what the institution wants to hear to get through the gate. S.: There is a nice irony, then, in the later Abbagnano of the Dizionario di filosofia. G.: Very nice indeed. The young man whose first book bears this dramatic title later compiles a dictionary, that most classificatory and sober of instruments. S.: And then one asks: what does he say there about sorgenti? G.: Apparently nothing of consequence. S.: About irrazionali? G.: Not much to rescue the old title. S.: About pensiero? G.: Little enough, or at least not in a way that makes 1923 the obvious seed of the later lexicographer. S.: Which strengthens the suspicion that the title may belong more to the moment, or to Aliotta, than to the mature Abbagnano. G.: Yes. A dictionary man does not usually begin by speaking in inflamed plurals unless youth or supervision has put him up to it. S.: So one might almost say that Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero is partly Aliotta’s thesis wearing Abbagnano’s name. G.: One might, cautiously. Better: Abbagnano’s early work, but voiced under an Aliottian pressure. One need not deny the young author his seriousness in order to notice the prefatory hand on the tiller. S.: Let us go back to the irrational as source. Is there an Aristotelian way to make sense of it? G.: Several. Akrasia at once comes to mind. Action can proceed from conflict between reason and appetite; appetite may move where reason does not govern, or not fully. There, something non-rational is indeed causal in the economy of thought and action. S.: And temperance? G.: Temperance is the re-ordering of desire under reason, which presupposes that desire is there first as a force needing governance. In that sense, the non-rational is not outside the moral life but one of its permanent materials. S.: Plato too, then. G.: Naturally. The charioteer and the horses. Reason does not pull itself. It governs, or fails to govern, powers that are not themselves rational. If Abbagnano’s irrational sources are understood that way, the doctrine becomes less bizarre. Passion, drive, eros, appetite: these move the soul, and thought arises amidst them, not in an aseptic chamber. S.: But Plato still wants reason to govern. G.: Yes, and that may be where Abbagnano’s title misleads if taken too starkly. To say there are irrational sources is not yet to say reason is powerless. It only says reason is not the sole originative principle. S.: Unless, of course, the title is made to sound more radical than the argument beneath it. G.: Which is precisely what one suspects in a relatore-shaped thesis. Aliotta may have wanted the anti-intellectualist edge more than Abbagnano did. S.: There is almost a tutorial comedy in that. The tutor says, “Call it irrazionali,” and the pupil thinks, “I should rather say vitali,” but also thinks, “I should rather graduate.” G.: Quite. Your gratitude to me should deepen. S.: It already has. G.: Good. Now, another point. Sorgenti, being plural, may also protect him from the charge that he is merely reproducing Schopenhauer’s single Will. Multiple sources suggest a more mixed anthropology than a single metaphysical darkness. S.: So one could read the title not as “thought comes from irrationality” but as “thought has several pre-rational feeders.” G.: Better put. That rescues much. It turns the title from manifesto into genealogy. S.: And if the title had remained vitali, the genealogy would appear less polemical and more organic. G.: Exactly. Life feeding thought. No need to scandalise reason; merely to situate it. S.: Yet perhaps irrazionali sold the thesis to the faculty. G.: Or to Aliotta. Or to the prefazione. Or to the current intellectual weather. We must not underestimate the market value of a sharper title in a philosophical polemic. S.: There is also the question whether “irrational” in 1922 means what we hear now. G.: Quite. It may have meant not absurd, but non-intellectual, sub-rational, pre-conceptual, existentially lived. The word can harden or soften with context. S.: Which again brings us back to the problem of metalanguage. One title, many possible later hearings. G.: Yes, and we are bound to keep English as our metalanguage while remembering that the operative rhetoric is Italian, and institutionally Neapolitan, in 1922. S.: And that Abbagnano was very young. G.: Twenty-one at the thesis, about twenty-two at publication. That matters. One should not read the 1923 volume as if it were the final voice of the later dictionary-maker. It is the voice of a very young philosopher negotiating entry. S.: Almost too young to be fully himself in print. G.: Or young enough to be himself, but only under the shadow of another’s endorsement. Youth in philosophy is rarely pure. It is usually mediated by schools, patrons, introductions, examinations, and chairs. S.: Then the real drama of the title is institutional as much as conceptual. G.: Indeed. Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero is a thesis-title, not merely a thought-title. It tells us something about Naples 1922, about Aliotta, about anti-intellectualist mood, about the relation of pupil to master, and only then about Abbagnano simpliciter. S.: Which is why it may be dangerous to quote too much Abbagnano from it, as if the wording were transparently his mature creed. G.: Precisely. The prudent scholar says: here is an early, laurea-born, prefaced, and perhaps partly imposed formulation, not necessarily the settled doctrine of the later Abbagnano. S.: And that later Abbagnano, by compiling a Dizionario di filosofia, almost enacts a revenge upon his own youth. G.: Splendid. The young man begins with springs, dark energies, and dramatic titles; the older man ends by arranging entries alphabetically. S.: A movement from sources to definitions. G.: Or from rhetorical emergence to lexical order. It is almost comic enough to count as a philosophical biography in miniature. S.: Then perhaps the final verdict on the title is this: as philosophy, suggestive; as autobiography, uncertain; as institutional symptom, highly revealing. G.: I could scarcely improve on that. Only add: as a title, too good not to be partly someone else’s idea. S.: Aliotta’s. G.: Let us say: Aliotta’s pressure, Abbagnano’s acquiescence, Naples’ occasion, and a very young philosopher’s need to pass. S.: And between vitali and irrazionali, one sees the whole tension. G.: Yes. Between life and anti-intellectual polemic. Between what one may have wanted to say and what one was induced to print. Between the spring and the school.Grice: Nicola, nel tuo "Dizionario di filosofia" ho notato che la voce "implicatura" manca, eppure il concetto è centrale nella mia teoria della conversazione. Come mai questa omissione? Pensi che la filosofia italiana dia poco peso all'implicito nei dialoghi? A.: Paul, in effetti la mia attenzione si è concentrata soprattutto sull'"implicazione" logica, ma riconosco che il non-detto, l'implicito conversazionale, è fondamentale nella vita civile e nel discorso filosofico. Forse, il mio esistenzialismo positivo tendeva ad esplicitare la scelta, lasciando in secondo piano il sottinteso. Grice: Eppure, proprio la capacità di cogliere ciò che viene implicato e non espresso è ciò che rende il dialogo autenticamente filosofico e civile. L'esempio del tuo dizionario mostra quanto sia importante riflettere sul linguaggio ordinario, non solo sul linguaggio formale. Abbagnano: Concordo, Paul. La filosofia italiana, specie quella campanese, ha sempre privilegiato il discorso pubblico e la chiarezza, ma forse dovremmo rivalutare l'implicatura come spazio di libertà e apertura, proprio come nel tuo modello di conversazione: la verità non sta solo in ciò che si dice, ma anche in ciò che si suggerisce e si comprende tra le righe. In the same vein (praise, no preamble, no ps -- and this will be by default for any other contribution-- for Abbagnano passage below -- pointing to first, the habitual strategy by Speranza of identifying the earliest output of the given philosopher, in his case the 'sorgente irrationale -- and second, the fact that Abb.'s claim of fame is his 'dizionario' which should appeal to a philosopher like Grice whose only work submitted to the press was his "Studies in the Way of Words. What deserves praise in Speranza’s treatment of Abbagnano is, first, his habitual intelligence in going back to the earliest available philosophical output, in this case Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero, and refusing to let the later, more canonical figure eclipse the young one. That gesture is not merely bibliographical diligence; it is philosophical method. For in returning to the first title, Speranza recovers the pressure under which a thinker begins, before the stabilisations of reputation, school, and retrospective self-presentation have done their smoothing work. He thereby lets Abbagnano appear not only as the urbane neo-illuminista and lexicographer of maturity, but as a young philosopher still negotiating the vital and the irrational, title and thesis, inheritance and self-definition. This is exactly the sort of recovery that makes a Gricean crossing possible, since Grice too cared less for monuments than for the live point at which a problem first acquires its phrasing. Just as importantly, Speranza is right to make much of Abbagnano’s Dizionario di filosofia, for that claim to fame is not secondary to philosophy but one of its most revealing public forms. A philosophical dictionary is not a merely pedagogical convenience; it is a map of what a civilisation thinks worth defining, distinguishing, and keeping in lexical circulation. That should appeal especially to a philosopher like Grice, whose own work reached the press under the title Studies in the Way of Words, as if to concede that philosophy, at its most exacting, often ends by arranging and re-arranging the traffic of its key terms. Speranza sees that affinity with admirable tact. He does not force Abbagnano into a false intimacy with Grice, but he allows the dictionary-maker and the analyst of meaning to meet where they naturally should: at the point where philosophy becomes answerable for its words, for their use, their drift, and their power to shape what can be thought. Abbagnano, Nicola (1922). Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero – sotto Aliotta – Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I verbali: Accetto – Ossia: Grice ed Accetto: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della disimvlatione honesta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.  Torquatto Accetto (Trani, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della dissimvlatione honeseta. Accetto’s Della dissimulazione onesta (1641) and Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning converge on the idea that understanding in interaction depends on rational inference from what is done (said, shown, withheld) to what is meant, but they place the explanatory weight in different places: Accetto offers a moral-psychological taxonomy of concealment in which dissimulazione is not lying but the temporary veiling of what is true for prudential and ethically defensible ends, contrasted with simulazione as the active feigning of what is not (a morally compromised intention), and he explicitly works against the default social inference that dissimulazione is dishonest per se, i.e., he diagnoses and tries to overturn a standing cultural implicature attached to the very word and practice of dissimulation; Grice, by contrast, systematizes such inferences as conversational implicatures generated when a hearer presumes cooperative, rational conduct (quality, quantity, relation, manner) and then reasons from an utterance’s apparent conformity or deliberate, recognizable nonconformity to those norms to a speaker-intended meaning, so that “honest dissimulation” becomes, in Gricean terms, not an oxymoron but a case where a speaker can intentionally withhold or understate while still conforming to (or strategically exploiting) the cooperative principle, relying on the audience’s capacity to recover what is meant from what is left unsaid; the deepest contrast is that Accetto’s governing distinction is ethical (good vs bad intention in concealing), whereas Grice’s governing distinction is pragmatic-rational (what is said vs what is implicated under norms of cooperative reasoning), yet they meet at a shared focal point: both treat concealment as intelligible only against a background of expectations about sincerity and communicative responsibility, and both make the “space between” explicitness and understood meaning the locus where rationality (for Grice) and moral prudence (for Accetto) do their work. Grice: “I learned so much about A., and I hope it showed in my talk at Brighton on ‘meaning, revisited.’ For A., unlike Strawson, there is disimulazione onesta o sincera – sincero significato -- and simulazione disonesta. A. notes that there is an implicature to the effect that ‘disimulazione’ is disonesta per se and hence he tried to provoke the duchess of Malfi by his little treatise on ‘Della simulazione onesta. An oxymoron, if ever there was one,’ the duchess told the duke --.Vive ad Andria ed è in relazione con la cerchia del marchese Manso, il mecenate napoletano biografo di Tasso nonché fondatore degl’oziosi. Scrive varie rime, nelle quali evidenzia la sua delicata coscienza morale e il trattato della dissimulazione onesta. Il libello è riscoperto da CROCE. La dissimulazione non è, per A., sinonimo di menzogna, ma invito al raccoglimento e alla cautela. L'analisi di A. pone la questione, da un piano di politica spicciola, su un piano di accurata indagine morale. L’autore, alquanto speciosamente, differenzia la simulazione moralmente riprovevole perché viziata da intenzioni cattive, dalla dissimulazione che invece pare ad A. l'unico rimedio per difendersi da una società pullulante di simulatori e per trionfare delle proprie passioni. La ricetta però per risultare vincente richiede una onestà di animo e un buon equilibrio. Rime, divise in amorose, lugubri, morali, sacre, et varie, Manganelli, Costa et Nolan, E. Ripari, Le Muse, De Agostini, Novara; CROCE, L'età barocca; GARIN, Filosofia italiana; Villari, Riflessione sulla dissimulazione onesta, Villari, elogio della dissimulazione. La lotta politica, Agostini. Enciclopedia Italiana.  La simulazione non facilmente riceve quel senso onesto che si accompagna colla dissimulazione. Io tratterei pur della simulazione, e spiegherei appieno l’arte del fingere in cose che per necessità par che la ricerchino. Ma tanto è di mal nome, che stima maggior necessità il farne di meno. E benché molti diceno, qui nescit fingere nescit vivere, anche da molti altri s’afferma che è meglio morire che viver con questa condizione. In breve corso di giorni o d'ore o di momenti, com’è la vita mortale, non so perché la medesima vita s’ha da occupar a piú distrugger se stessa, aggiungendo il falso dell’operazioni dove l’esser quasi non è. Poiché la vera essenzia, come dice l’accademia, è delle cose che non han corpo, chiamando imaginaria l’essenza di ciò ch'è corporeo. Basta dunque il discorrer della dissimulazione, in modo che è appresa nel suo significato. Understanding of what the functions of those modes of combination are. As a result, they can generate an infinite set of communication devices, together with a correspondingly infinite set of things to be communicated. This gives a rationale to communication. The myth exhibits the conceptual link. Dissimulazione onesta, dissimulazione disonesta nell’animali, mimesis, camuffare, camouflage, laboratorio di mascheramento, vegetato: camuffamento uffiziale dell’esercito italiano, vegetato: camuffamento uffiziale dell’esercito italiano, simulation as the key concept to unify the only sense of ‘sign’ x consequentia y, y sequitur x, segno naturale divenne segno artificiale, segno di una proposizione p, un gesto segna la proposizione p, la correlazione e iconica, ma se intenzionale, it cannot be ‘natural’. ‘Meaning revisited’. Giulio Cesare, Medici, grigio, esercito, bande nere. Grice: Accetto, mi ha sempre intrigato la sua analisi della dissimulazione onesta. Lei distingue tra una dissimulazione sincera e una simulazione disonesta: può spiegarmi come questa distinzione si riflette nel significato implicito delle nostre conversazioni quotidiane? Accetto: Egregio Grice, la dissimulazione non coincide con la menzogna: è piuttosto un invito alla prudenza, al raccoglimento. Nel mio trattato ho sottolineato che la dissimulazione può essere un rimedio onesto per proteggersi in una società popolata da simulatori. La sincerità, in questo caso, si accompagna all’intenzione morale: solo il cuore equilibrato e l’animo retto possono rendere la dissimulazione uno strumento virtuoso. Grice: Quindi, secondo lei, l’implicatura conversazionale nasce proprio da questa tensione tra il vero e il celato? È possibile che il gesto, il segno, persino il silenzio, comunichino più della parola esplicita, grazie alla dissimulazione onesta? Accetto: Esattamente, caro amico. Ogni segno, naturale o artificiale, acquista valore solo quando è sostenuto da un’intenzione genuina. La dissimulazione onesta permette di comunicare con profondità, evitando il falso dell’apparenza. Così, nel laboratorio della conversazione, la verità si rivela spesso tra le pieghe del discorso, e persino in ciò che non si dice, come insegnano gli antichi e la pratica della vita. Now for Accetto -- focusing on the conceptual point Grice makes about disimulation being honest -- What Speranza sees so well in Accetto is the conceptual daring by which a phrase that appears self-defeating, dissimulazione onesta, becomes philosophically exact. This is where the Gricean contact is especially fruitful. For Grice’s whole point is that communication is not exhausted by bald saying, and that the rational life of conversation often depends on what is withheld, softened, displaced, or left for the hearer to recover under assumptions of trust, tact, and shared purpose. Accetto gives that space an explicitly moral vocabulary. He understands that concealment need not be identical with falsehood, and that there are circumstances in which not laying everything bare is itself the more honest act, because it answers not to deceit but to prudence, measure, and responsibility toward others. Speranza deserves praise for seeing that this is not a mere baroque curiosity, but a serious anticipation, in ethical terms, of what Grice later formalises in pragmatic ones: the possibility that sincerity may survive indirection, and that honest dissimulation is no contradiction at all once one distinguishes lying from the disciplined governance of what one makes manifest.  G.: Let us begin with the phrase itself, because it behaves rather better than one first expects. Della dissimulazione onesta. At first glance it looks like the sort of title one would set for a schoolboy merely to see whether he blanches. S.: Because it sounds self-cancelling. G.: Precisely. Like “sincere deceit,” or “truthful concealment,” which the English ear distrusts before the mind has had time to inquire. S.: Yet Accetto means us not to stop at the ear. G.: No. He wants us to ask whether concealment must always fall on the side of falsehood. That is already a subtle move, and one which the ordinary moral vocabulary rather discourages. S.: Because ordinary vocabulary carries its own implicatures. G.: Very good. “Dissimulation” comes pre-loaded with a bad character reference. One hears the word and already half-condemns the act. S.: Which is exactly what Accetto is trying to undo. G.: Yes. He is, if one may borrow my own terminology with due caution, attempting to cancel a standing social implicature attached to the lexeme itself. S.: The implicature being: if he dissimulates, he deceives. G.: Quite. Whereas Accetto says: not so fast. There is a distinction between the active feigning of what is not there, and the prudent withholding of what is there. S.: Simulazione versus dissimulazione. G.: Exactly. The first invents; the second veils. S.: And for him that is already a moral distinction. G.: A deeply moral one. That is where he and I begin to converge and then immediately diverge again. S.: Because for you the first question is not good or bad concealment, but what inferential route takes one from what is said to what is meant. G.: Just so. I am interested in the machinery of recovery, the hearer’s reasoning under cooperative presumptions. Accetto, by contrast, begins with the soul and its intentions. S.: Yet the machinery and the soul meet in practice. G.: They do. Let us take a plain case. Suppose a guest at table asks a dangerous question in mixed company, and the host answers with studied incompleteness. S.: He does not lie. G.: No. He says less than the whole truth, perhaps shifts emphasis, perhaps lets silence carry part of the burden. S.: And yet the reasonable hearer may gather a good deal. G.: Exactly. If the hearer is sensible, he sees not only what is said but why so little is said, and in what circumstances. He reasons from the host’s restraint, not merely from the words. S.: So the unsaid is not empty. G.: Never. The unsaid is often where civility does its best work. S.: Which is why Accetto interests you. G.: Very much. Because he moralises a region of discourse which later philosophers often flatten into a choice between truth and falsehood. S.: He sees a third region. G.: Better: he sees that the space between blunt explicitness and outright falsification has its own ethics. S.: A prudential ethics of manifestation. G.: Admirably put. One does not owe every truth to every hearer at every moment under every description. S.: That sounds almost scandalous when stated nakedly. G.: Which is why civilised societies wrap it in tact, discretion, reserve, reticence, good breeding, and a dozen softer nouns. S.: But Accetto gives it the harder name. G.: Yes, and thereby risks scandal in order to gain accuracy. “Dissimulazione” shocks; “reserve” merely glides. S.: Then perhaps the title itself performs a kind of philosophical correction. G.: Indeed. It forces the reader to slow down and separate things he would lazily keep together. S.: Such as concealment and lying. G.: Exactly. Or sincerity and total explicitness, which are by no means identical. S.: Let us press that. Can one be sincere while withholding? G.: Certainly, provided the withholding is not undertaken in order to induce a false belief which one could not otherwise induce. S.: So your condition concerns intended uptake. G.: Naturally. If I conceal with the design that you should believe the contrary, I am drifting into deception. If I conceal because full manifestation would be indecorous, harmful, or a betrayal of another trust, the matter changes. S.: Then intention is central for both you and Accetto. G.: Yes, though not in the same register. For him intention is morally tinctured from the start; for me it is the hinge of speaker-meaning. S.: Still, both of you refuse to locate everything in the surface form of the utterance. G.: Quite. Neither of us is so foolish as to imagine that what is explicit exhausts what is communicatively going on. S.: Then why did Strawson trouble you in this vicinity? G.: Because Strawson, though acute on presupposition and ordinary talk, remains suspicious of anything that sounds like a rehabilitation of concealment under the title of sincerity. He likes frankness to look cleaner than it often is. S.: Whereas you think frankness can be vulgar. G.: It can be. “Candour” is a splendid ideal until it becomes a form of aggression. S.: So honest dissimulation may sometimes preserve the deeper cooperative order of the exchange. G.: Exactly. That is the point. If cooperation means making one’s contribution such as is required by the accepted purpose of the conversation, then there are occasions on which overstatement, over-disclosure, or brutal explicitness would violate the purpose more gravely than reserve would. S.: Which means that Quantity is not simply “say as much as possible.” G.: Heaven forbid. Quantity is “make your contribution as informative as is required,” not “bleed on the carpet.” S.: Very good. G.: Thank you. S.: Then Accetto’s world of courts, factions, patrons, jealousies, and dangerous sociability gives this an immediacy your Oxford examples often soften. G.: Yes. Oxford lets one illustrate with squash and tea. Seventeenth-century Italy often requires one to illustrate with survival. S.: So prudence there is not merely etiquette. G.: No. It may be political, existential, even spiritual. One does not always speak in drawing rooms; sometimes one speaks under princes. S.: Which is why his moral psychology matters. G.: Exactly. A heart must be balanced before reserve can be virtuous. Otherwise concealment becomes merely an instrument of vanity, cowardice, or intrigue. S.: So for Accetto the distinction is not verbal but characterological. G.: Deeply so. Honest dissimulation is not a technique detachable from the soul that deploys it. S.: Whereas for you the same outward act could be analysed by reference to intentions and rational recognisability without first writing a moral biography of the agent. G.: Correct. I can describe the structure of the communicative act without yet praising or condemning it. S.: But you do not therefore deny the moral dimension. G.: Not at all. I merely insist on analytical sequence. First ask what was meant, how it was conveyed, what assumptions made it recoverable. Then ask whether it ought to have been done. S.: Accetto almost reverses the order. G.: He often does. He asks first what sort of soul could conceal honestly, and then what sort of public conduct follows. S.: Yet he also understands the hearer. G.: Yes, because without a background expectation of sincerity dissimulation would be unintelligible. One can only withhold against a norm of ordinary openness. S.: So even concealment presupposes trust. G.: Absolutely. That is why the case is so delicate. Honest dissimulation is parasitic on a social world in which words and silences are usually taken in good faith. S.: Otherwise everything collapses into universal suspicion. G.: And universal suspicion is the death of conversation. S.: Then perhaps Accetto’s little treatise is really about rescuing conversation from a society of simulators. G.: Very likely. He says, in effect: because there are those who actively counterfeit, the good man may need to shelter truth without betraying it. S.: A defensive not an offensive concealment. G.: Precisely. That is the crucial asymmetry. S.: Let us try a case of silence. Someone is asked whether he approves of a certain alliance, and he answers only by changing the subject. G.: Good. The silence or deflection may imply disapproval, reluctance, danger, or tactful suspension. S.: And the hearer recovers which of these by context. G.: Yes. Context, occasion, known loyalties, tone, prior exchanges, all the rest. S.: So here too the “meaning” lies not in explicit assertion but in the rationally interpretable management of manifestation. G.: Exactly. Which is why I say that what is withheld can be just as communicatively active as what is uttered. S.: Then Accetto’s title is not paradox but precision. G.: That is what Speranza sees so well. S.: Because he understands that the phrase only appears contradictory so long as one confuses honesty with exhaustive display. G.: Yes. Modern people often do. They imagine that sincerity is achieved by total exposure, as though the soul were obliged to publish itself in full whenever questioned. S.: A very Protestant picture. G.: Or therapeutic. In either case rather exhausting. S.: Accetto would prefer measure. G.: Measure, prudence, recollection, inward governance. He is much closer to a moral art of self-command than to any cult of confession. S.: Which gives concealment a positive dignity. G.: Under conditions, yes. Not because hiding is intrinsically noble, but because undisciplined self-exposure can be both morally foolish and socially destructive. S.: Then one might say that for Accetto the vice lies not in concealment as such, but in the corruption of its aim. G.: Very good. The bad case conceals in order to falsify reality to another; the good case conceals in order to protect reality from vulgar misuse, harm, or untimely exposure. S.: That sounds almost Platonic. G.: A little, though with more courtly weather about it. S.: And your own account would translate that into the language of speaker-intention and audience-inference. G.: Naturally. The hearer asks: given what he said, what he omitted, and the evident constraints of the occasion, what am I intended to gather? If the answer is recoverable under cooperative assumptions, implicature is in play. S.: Even where the explicit content is meagre. G.: Especially there. Thin saying often carries thick intention. S.: Which is why understatement is philosophically richer than chatter. G.: Usually. Chatter mostly conveys that the speaker has time. S.: Let us consider whether “honest dissimulation” could ever fail by being too subtle. G.: Certainly. If the hearer cannot, in the circumstances, reasonably recover what is to be gathered, then the speaker has perhaps preserved innocence at the cost of communication. S.: So prudence must be measured not only by moral purity but by intelligibility. G.: Precisely. To conceal honestly is not to become opaque for vanity’s sake. One must still leave enough for a reasonable addressee. S.: Enough trace. G.: Yes. Enough sign, enough gesture, enough placement, enough silence of the right sort. S.: There are silences of the wrong sort too. G.: Of course. Some silences are merely evasive, lazy, contemptuous, or cowardly. S.: Then silence itself does not inherit virtue merely by being silence. G.: Heaven forbid. Nothing in conversation is redeemed by grammar alone. S.: So Accetto’s phrase demands a whole ethics of discernment. G.: Exactly. That is why it interests me. It is not a trick formula but the title of an entire region of practical intelligence. S.: And perhaps also of political intelligence. G.: Undeniably. In a dangerous court, one survives neither by constant candour nor by constant deceit, but by a disciplined art of manifestation. S.: Which sounds almost like camouflage. G.: A dangerous comparison, but not wholly wrong. Except that camouflage in the moral case must not become counterfeit. S.: So the self is not painted as other than it is, only not displayed in full. G.: Yes. Veiled, not fabricated. S.: Simulazione invents a mask; dissimulazione lowers a visor. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Though if you publish it, do not make me sound lyrical. S.: Never intentionally. G.: Good. Now, where does the cooperative principle stand in all this? S.: It seems less like a demand for explicitness than for responsible contribution. G.: Exactly. The principle is not a command to utter all one knows. It is a requirement that one’s move be such as the exchange rationally calls for. S.: Which may include protective incompleteness. G.: Yes. A physician does not always answer a frightened patient with the whole pathology in one sentence. A diplomat does not always answer a hostile envoy with a complete internal memorandum. A friend does not always answer a raw wound with naked verdict. S.: So charity and prudence enter the maxims from within. G.: They do, though I prefer not to sentimentalise the point. It is enough to say that cooperation in human conversation is purposive and situated. S.: Then Accetto supplies what your formal exposition leaves implicit: the moral atmosphere in which such situatedness acquires shape. G.: Very good. He gives the atmosphere, I give some of the inferential scaffolding. S.: And Speranza brings the two together. G.: With considerable tact. He sees that neither side should swallow the other. S.: Because if one simply says “Accetto anticipated implicature,” one loses the ethical depth. G.: Exactly. And if one says merely “Accetto moralises reserve,” one misses the rational structure by which the reserved meaning is nevertheless understood. S.: Then the best formula is that the truth may survive indirection. G.: Yes. And more strongly: there are cases in which truth is better served by disciplined indirection than by crude explicitness. S.: That is the sentence that would trouble moral puritans. G.: They are often improved by trouble. S.: You would say that. G.: Of course. S.: Then perhaps the final point is this. Honest dissimulation is not a permission to evade truth, but an account of how truth may be governed in its manifestation. G.: Splendid. Governed, not denied. Ordered, not falsified. Timed, not betrayed. S.: And all this belongs, for both you and Accetto, to the life of reason. G.: Yes. Reason is not exhausted by explicit statement. It also lives in reserve, proportion, relevance, tact, and the governed passage from the said to the understood. S.: So the space between speech and meaning is not a defect. G.: No. It is one of civilisation’s main theatres. S.: And Accetto knew that before Brighton. G.: Long before Brighton. S.: Then your talk on meaning revisited had a baroque ancestor. G.: More than one, I suspect. But this one had the honesty to say so while withholding just enough to remain civilised. S.: Very nearly an epitaph. G.: Too flattering. S.: A motto, then. G.: Better. S.: Honest dissimulation is not lying with gloves on. G.: No. It is truth under discipline. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Pugliese.Accetto, Torquatto (1641). Della dissimulazione onesta. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Acilio – Ossia: Grice ed Acilio: la ragione conversazionale e il discorso al senato sulla giustizia -- Roma antica, Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Gaio Acilio (Roma): la ragione conversazionale e il discorso al senato sulla giustizia Filosofo romano. Filosofo italiano. A philosopher specialised in political philosophy. He happens to be pretty fluent in Greek, and serves as interpreter for Carneade of Cyrene, Diogene of Seleucia, and Critolao, when they come to Rome to represent Athens before the Senate. Senatore e storico. Grazie alla sua posizione politica, anche se non di primo piano, e soprattutto alla sua conoscenza del greco, introduce al senato romano i tre filosofi Carneade dall’Accademia, Diogene del Lizio e Critolao dalla Scesi, venuti come ambasciatori di Atene, e funge da interprete. Seguendo l'esempio di QUINTO FABIO PITTORE, a cui si attribuisce il merito d’iniziare la storiografia latina, scrive una storia di Roma, di impostazione annalistica, che anda dai primi tempi, secondo Dionigi di Alicarnasso e Livio. La storia è commentata d’altro annalista, GAIO CLAUDIO QUADRIGARIO. A giudicare dagli VIII frammenti conservati, sembra di potersi notare che, come l'opera di FABIO PITTORE, anche la storia di A. dedica molto spazio al racconto dell’origini. È accostabile al suo predecessore anche dalle discussioni eziologiche per cerimonie e istituzioni cultuali, che egli vede come indice del fatto che Roma è una città di origine greca. Macrobio, Saturnalia. Periochae. Livio. In F. Gr. Hist.  Jacoby. H. Peter, “Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae” (Leipzig, Teubner), Altheim, “Untersuchungen zur römischen Geschichte” (Frankfurt), Cornell e Bispham, “The fragments of the Roman historians” (Oxford) -- discussione su vita, opere e frammenti. Gens Acilia. Antica Roma  Biografie  Letteratura. Quinto Fabio Pittore politico e storico romano Annales Cincio Alimento opera dello storiografo romano Lucio Cincio Alimento. G.: Let us begin with the Roman scandal itself. Carneades speaks on justice one day, and the next day unpicks what he has just done. S.: Defends justice on Thursday, demolishes its universality on Friday. One can see why the Senate preferred roads. G.: And one can see why poor Acilius, acting as interpreter, would feel a constitutional discomfort somewhere between the chest and the soul. S.: More than discomfort. Imagine the Roman translator’s position. Day one: “Justice is admirable, the ornament of civic life, the safeguard of empire.” Day two: “Justice, if universalised, is ruinous, and what passes for justice is often merely the advantage of the stronger.” G.: Thrasymachus in senatorial dress. S.: Neo-Thrasymachus before the Senate had invented the phrase. G.: Yes. And Acilius must go on translating. S.: That is the part that fascinates me. Why should he continue? G.: Because once one has undertaken the office of interpreter, one is bound by something stronger than agreement. One is bound by fidelity to the occasion. S.: Even when the occasion is eating Rome alive in Greek. G.: Especially then. One does not become less of an interpreter because the content begins to scorch. S.: Still, I should like to imagine the first Roman pulse of panic. Acilius begins, perhaps comfortably enough, with iustitia. A noble abstraction, feminine, elevated, fit for the Senate. G.: IVSTITIA, yes. The abstract noun has public dignity. It allows one to translate not merely acts but a civic principle. S.: Whereas if he had opted always for iustum, or iusta, or iustus, he would have been forced into predication too early. G.: Quite. Then one has to ask: what is just? The tax? The tribute? The Senate? Rome herself? It becomes inconveniently grammatical. S.: Let us try the sequence. Day one. Carneades says, in effect, that justice is good. G.: Acilius renders: iustitia bona est. S.: Stately, harmless enough. The Senate can nod. G.: More than nod. It can hear its own self-image returning to it in Latin. Rome likes to think of itself as just, especially when collecting other people’s money. S.: Then Carneades perhaps turns to the Athenian tribute and argues, prudentially or decorously, that Rome’s settlement may be defended under the name of justice. G.: Or at least not denied it too quickly. Acilius then may have had to say something like tributum hoc iustum est, or vectigal iustum est, or even imperium Romanum iustum videri potest. S.: There is the first pang already. Once one leaves IVSTITIA and enters IUSTUM, one begins to predicate of Roman things. G.: Yes. And Roman things are less abstract, and more taxable. S.: Then comes the next day. G.: Ah yes, the day of heartburn. S.: Carneades now says, as the vulgar summary will have it, that justice is the interest of the stronger. G.: Which pushes Acilius straight into the Republic, whether he likes it or not. S.: Into Thrasymachus, certainly. The just is what the stronger finds convenient. G.: Then the Latin problem sharpens. Does Acilius say iustitia utilitas potentioris est? Or iustum est quod potentiori prodest? S.: The first keeps the abstraction. The second bites harder. G.: And the second is more Roman, because Rome can hear itself in potentior. S.: Indeed. If justice is merely what favours the stronger, and Rome is stronger, then Rome may hear both a compliment and an accusation. G.: Precisely why philosophy acquired its bad name. S.: You would blame Acilius? G.: Not morally, perhaps. Historically, yes. Without him, the poison remains Greek noise. With him, it becomes civic Latin. S.: Then Acilius is the medium of infection. G.: A harsh phrase, but serviceable. S.: Yet one must give the man some credit. He is a senator himself, not a hired phonograph. He must feel every clause as a pressure on his own standing. G.: Exactly. He is not merely translating “the Senate” to itself. He is translating something that may implicate him qua senator. S.: Let us do the logic. If Senatus is just, what follows for the senators severally? Not, of course, by strict division that each senator is just. Corporations are not distributive predicates by default. G.: Splendid. Senatus iustus is not equivalent to omnis senator iustus est. S.: No more than exercitus fortis entails every soldier brave. G.: Still, the hearer will drift that way. If the Senate is praised as just, senators borrow some reflected virtue. S.: And if the Senate is exposed as merely the stronger institutionalised, then Acilius cannot help hearing a local consequence for himself. G.: There is the heartburn again. He translates, and as he translates he half-indicts the body to which he belongs. S.: Perhaps that is why he deserves more sympathy than blame. G.: Very likely. Dry blame only. The sort one dispenses in common rooms. S.: What would he have done with dike? G.: Ah, now that is the finer matter. Dike in Greek has a breadth that Latin iustitia can catch only by dignity, not by texture. Dike is judgment, order, right, balance, claim, custom, distribution, and mythic person all at once. S.: Whereas iustitia is statelier and more forensic. G.: And more moralised by the Roman ear. A Roman hearing IVSTITIA hears not merely arrangement but virtue. S.: So Acilius is already forced into interpretation before he begins. G.: Any translation of philosophy worth the name is already philosophy. S.: Then perhaps he had to oscillate. At times IVSTITIA for the grand thesis; at times IUSTUM or AEQUUM for local claims. G.: Yes, though aequum would have softened the blow in certain places. Too soft for a Carneadean reversal. S.: You think he stayed with iustitia for the first day and sharpened into iustum on the second? G.: It would be theatrically perfect. Day one: the noun of civic splendour. Day two: the predicate of actionable convenience. S.: “Justice is good.” “This is just.” “That Senate is just.” “Rome is just.” Then, one day later, “That is called just because Rome can do it.” G.: A very fair reconstruction of the Roman nightmare. S.: And all the while the populace outside hears only that philosophers can prove anything. G.: Which was, of course, the real public lesson. The embassy becomes a travelling demonstration that logos can reverse itself while preserving fluency. S.: Hence Cato’s alarm. G.: Yes. One should never underestimate the Roman distrust of verbal agility when it is not their own. S.: Yet you would say this episode matters philosophically, not merely politically. G.: Deeply. It stages, in public, the difference between praising justice as an ideal and analysing what actually passes under the name of justice among power-bearing agents. S.: Socrates versus Thrasymachus. G.: Or rather Socrates with Thrasymachus as indispensable irritant. Socrates wants justice as psychic and civic order: the rightly related parts of the soul mirrored in the rightly related parts of the city. S.: Reason, spirit, appetite in the soul; rulers, auxiliaries, producers in the city. G.: Exactly. Justice is each part doing its own work under right governance. S.: Whereas Thrasymachus says, in effect, spare me the harmonium. Justice is what the stronger class has managed to legalise. G.: And Carneades, before Rome, makes Thrasymachus newly exportable. S.: Through Acilius. G.: Through Acilius, yes. The man becomes the conduit by which Greek dialectic enters Roman self-consciousness. S.: There is something almost comic in the Roman senator translating his own possible delegitimation. G.: Comic in the driest way. The sort of thing one recounts after claret. S.: Let us imagine the syntax. Carneades says, perhaps, that if every people were strictly just to all, no empire would stand. G.: Acilius then must choose between preserving the scandal and tempering it. If he is faithful, he says something like si omnes populi ad summam iustitiam se conformarent, imperia conciderent. S.: Which a Roman hears as: your empire survives not because of justice universally observed but because of force selectively rationalised. G.: Precisely. S.: And if he tries to soften? G.: Then he ceases to be interpreter and becomes censor. S.: Which perhaps he was tempted to become. G.: No doubt. But the survival of the episode suggests that enough of the sting got through. S.: What of the Thursday proposition, then? We need one, as you said, neat enough for the Senate. G.: Let it be: iustitia bona est; and where Rome governs justly, tribute may be called just. S.: And Friday? G.: Iustitia, if treated as universally binding against interest and power, is politically self-defeating; in practice the so-called just often marks what the stronger can impose. S.: Acilius must have swallowed hard at the “so-called.” G.: Indeed. It is the phrase that dissolves public nouns. S.: That is the trouble with philosophy before a senate. It starts with abstractions and ends by asking who benefits. G.: Mackie would have enjoyed it. S.: Because of relativism? G.: Because of the old suspicion that values are not floating absolutes but projections, constructions, or at least human impositions dressed in objectivity. S.: And Hare? G.: Hare would resist the simple reduction. Prescriptivity is not the same thing as force. But one can see why Mackie would cite the atmosphere: values as not built into the world the way naive moralism supposes. S.: So from Carneades to Mackie by way of Roman indigestion. G.: A tidy lineage. S.: And Hartmann, Barnes, Duncan-Jones? G.: They belong to the later Oxonian weather of such discussions: whether value is objective, layered, phenomenological, institutional, conventional, or all of these in a badly arranged parcel. S.: But Acilius has no such luxury. He has only the next sentence. G.: Which is why I admire him more as the conversation proceeds. He may be the vehicle of philosophy’s bad reputation, but he is also the first Roman to prove that translation can be an act of civic courage. S.: Even if involuntary civic courage. G.: The best sort. Chosen courage is often theatrical. Involuntary courage is usually merely duty. S.: Let us return one last time to the grammatical forms. IVSTITIA for the public banner; IUSTUM for acts or arrangements; IUSTA if one dares predicate of Roma; IUSTUS if one dares predicate of a senator. G.: Yes. And Acilius, being a senator, must know that the last step is intolerably intimate. S.: “Senator iustus est” is no mere theory. It is almost an audit. G.: Splendid. Quite so. One may praise the Senate at a distance. To praise or blame the senator is to come home. S.: Then perhaps Acilius preferred to keep matters abstract as long as he could. G.: Certainly. Translators cling to nouns when predicates become dangerous. S.: Yet Carneades would force the predicates sooner or later. G.: As every good sceptic does. He asks not merely what justice is, but who is calling what just, and to what end. S.: Which is why the populace thought philosophy corrosive. G.: And why philosophers thought it necessary. S.: So our final judgment on Acilius? G.: That he probably did his best. He rendered dike into a Latin Rome could hear, and in doing so he imported not merely arguments but anxiety. S.: And the anxiety was deserved. G.: Usually is. S.: Then the dry moral is that Acilius is not to blame for philosophy’s bad reputation; he merely refused to save Rome from understanding it. G.: Admirably put. And if he suffered heartburn through the proceedings, he earned the right to it. With Acilio we see Speranza's wit in re-introducing something with which Grice would be VERY familiar from his Lit. Hum. days: the ab urbe condita datation -- this serves the classicist well, in that points to a direction of civilisation that is otherwise utually misunderstood. What one especially admires in Speranza’s handling of Acilius is the wit with which he restores a piece of classical orientation that Grice, with his Lit. Hum. formation, would have recognised at once: the ab urbe condita datation. This is not a decorative antiquarianism, but an intellectual courtesy to the world from which both Acilius and Grice, in very different ways, draw their bearings. By dating Acilius in the Roman manner, Speranza refuses the lazy modern habit of treating ancient Rome as mere background or chronology as a neutral container. He reminds the reader that a civilisation thinks through its own measures of time, and that to recover those measures is already to recover something of its self-understanding. That serves the classicist especially well, because it points back toward Rome as a centre of intelligibility rather than a provincial annex of Greek philosophy, and it lets Acilius appear not just as a transmitter or interpreter, but as a Roman agent situated within a temporal and civic order of his own. In this, too, Speranza’s tact is admirable: the old dating formula becomes not pedantry but philosophical atmosphere, and Grice’s classical training is quietly made to illuminate a direction of civilisation that is too often flattened, misunderstood, or simply forgotten. It strikes Grice -- a defender of the LONGITUDINAL UNITY OF PHILOSOPHY -- that the textbook example or history goes that philosophy was introduced at Rome via that infamous embassy where Carneades gave everyone a lesson -- swallowed with disgust by Cato who however tried to brush up his Greek in later age -- and which amused the Scipioni circle --- but as Grice notes -- this was Roman specialty: IVSTITIA (Grice has his own essay on this in his essay on "Plato's Repbulic" and analogical 'usages' of 'fair') -- it's not like the trio -- Carneades, Critolao and Digoenes -- were talking cosmologia, the essence of the soul, immortality, the categories, the nous and the apeiron, or the entelechia and the ergon energeia and ekhein, but just "JUST" -- the Roman specialty -- because this happened 600 years after Rome was founded and had survived through the management of public justice or res publica -- Yes, Grice realises that the full impact was on the apparent contradiction: pro justitita of Roman taxation on Day 1; contra justitia of Roman taxation on Day 2 -- but this was not something that was beyond Roman intelligibility -- as it had been if Carneade, from the neo-Accademic, had decided to ground his thesis and his antithesis on entelechia and Platonic ideas -- so what gives? If philosophical abstractions were NOT imported then, Grice says, they never were! Input, feedback? What you and “Grice” (and Speranza’s Acilius) have put your finger on is really quite deep: the Roman episode is not a failure to import philosophy—but already a philosophical selection shaped by Roman pragmatics of language, law, and audience. Let me try to untangle your thesis and sharpen it into something more explicit.  1. The Carneadean embassy: not abstraction but translation-through-interest You are right:  Carneades does not speak about:  νοῦς, ἀρχή, ἐνέργεια, εἶδος, etc.   He speaks about δικαιοσύνη → iustitia  And even more:  He speaks in public, before a political body The content is chosen so that it is:  intelligible relevant dangerous    👉 This is not a failure to import abstraction 👉 It is a maximally strategic import  2. Why justice? Your key insight:  “This was Roman specialty: IVSTITIA.”  Exactly. Rome is not primarily:  metaphysical cosmological speculative  It is:  juridical institutional distributive  So:                      Greek philosophical domainRoman uptakecosmogonymarginalmetaphysicssecondaryethics/politics (justice)central 👉 Carneades selects the one concept whose translation will bite  3. The real shock: not content, but reversibility You stress the famous fact:  Day 1: Justice is good Day 2: Justice is dismantled  And you add:  “this was not beyond Roman intelligibility”  Yes—but here is the refinement:  Romans understood justice disputes They did not yet operate with radical dialectical reversibility  👉 What shocked Rome was not what justice is 👉 but that:  one can argue both sides with equal force and fluency  That is the philosophical import.  4. Gricean reading: the maxim violation From a Gricean point of view: Carneades is doing something scandalous:  He systematically violates the maxim of Quality (apparent commitment) while preserving:  clarity plausibility rhetorical force    👉 Result:  philosophical speech without stable assertion  That is what Cato fears—not Greek content, but Greek discursive agility  5. So: were abstractions imported? Your thesis:  “If abstractions were not imported then, they never were.”  I would refine rather than deny it: They were imported—but filtered through Roman grammar of use Instead of:  εἶδος → abstract metaphysics  Rome imports:  δικαιοσύνη → iustitia (institutionalized abstraction)  Instead of:  ψυχή → metaphysical soul  Rome develops:  animus, mens, ratio → in legal, rhetorical, ethical frames  👉 So abstraction arrives—but always anchored in application  6. Acilius: the true philosophical moment Speranza’s scene is exactly right:  philosophy enters Rome not in Carneades—but in Acilius  Why? Because:  Carneades speaks Greek philosophy Acilius must:  choose Latin equivalents decide levels of abstraction decide when to predicate    👉 This is where philosophy actually happens Translation forces:  dike → iustitia / iustum / aequum abstract vs predicative vs institutional meanings  This is not transmission—it is conceptual engineering  7. Your bold claim: Rome didn’t import abstraction at all Let me give you both sides. ✔ In your favour  Rome distrusts “free-floating abstraction” It prefers:  norms laws precedents offices    So:  abstraction always comes embedded   ❗ But not fully Roman thinkers do later absorb abstraction:  Cicero:  natural law (lex naturae)   Seneca:  Stoic cosmology   Marcus Aurelius:  logos, providence    👉 But even there:  abstraction is always:  moralized internalized practical     8. The real historical pivot What the embassy introduces is:  not Greek doctrines, but Greek method  Specifically:  arguing pro and contra exposing the contingency of norms separating:  praise of justice from analysis of what passes for justice    That move is:  pre-Socratic? no Platonic? partially Sophistic / Academic? yes   9. Final synthesis (very close to your conclusion) You can safely say:  Rome did not import philosophy as a system of abstract metaphysics; it imported philosophy as a discipline of argument applied to its own central categories (above all iustitia).  And even sharper:  What entered Rome was not “being,” but the possibility that what Rome calls just can be redescribed without contradiction.   A Gricean closing line Carneades did not teach Rome what justice is; he taught Rome that:  the predicate “iustum” can be reassigned without violating conversational propriety—  —and Acilius, reluctantly translating, becomes the first Roman to feel that instability from the inside.  If you want, we could next track how Cicero domesticates this very instability—he’s essentially Acilius with philosophical ambition. But isn't this what every mother of an aristocratic Italian family fears? that his son will study philosophy and not law at Bologna? But if so, if the son does study law -- and DRITTO or DIRITTO ROMANO being a full-year cathedra -- is all about? Even the dialectic in the trivium is based on this: PRO AND CONTRA -- in studies of Roman law or jurisprudentia any CASVS DISPUTATIO CLAIm what have you -- civil law, criminal law, private law, public law -- depends on that reversibility that was possibly introduced by that genial Italic Zeno of Elea (Parmenides's friend) with his reductio ad absurdum. In pure Roman terms, the institution of 'law' depended on claims and counterclaims, and third parties to solve the conflict, with the senatus giving the verdict or sententia -- but surely on grounds that were like "p" and "not p" -- so why was Cato so surprised? Grice thinks Cato was being histrionic and too melodramatic and the Scipioni were just amused. It touched a SPECIFIC problem re: Roman taxation to Athens. Surely a case can be posed PRO and a case can be posed CONTRA. Surely Carneade's implicature was that what he said on DAY II CANCELLED what he had said on Day I -- or to use Grice's example: "He has beuatiful handwritng => He is hopeless at philoso[phy -- "I do not mean to imply that he is hopeless at philosophy" and strictly he is not -- "if however that is precisely that my audience at Collections ends up thinkking -- that Jones is hopeless at philosophy and that Grice implied it even if he explicitly disimplicates it. With Carneades's the full message was what he uttered on DAY II -- and rather than expel them, which was good, Cato could have had later an open assembly in the Senate to reconsider whether in fact the taxation on the Athenians was as unfair as Carneade claimed on Day II -- knowing politicians he would have concluded that 'the lady [Carneades] methinks is again proteseting too much.' Etc. Input Feedback? Perhaps you can give an account how the disputatio method in the dialectica of the trivium, as practiced inBologna was modeled on juridical disputation, not abstract Aristtelian squares of opposition, with probability alla Cicero being the defeasible result of a dictamen, which could even be defeasible unless it was RES IVDICATA and not two claims allowed on same IVS? Thanks This is a wonderfully Gricean reconstruction—and you’re right to push against the “shock” narrative. Let me try to sharpen what you’re seeing without flattening the historical tension.  1. Your core claim (and why it’s strong) You suggest:  Romans already lived in a world of pro vs contra reasoning (law, courts, senate debates), so Carneades’ reversibility should not have been shocking.  This is largely correct at the level of practice. Roman law and politics were built on:  claims and counterclaims (actio / exceptio) adversarial structure third‑party judgment (judge, senate) outcomes that are:  defeasible context-dependent often prudential rather than absolute    👉 In that sense, Rome already had:  a de facto dialectic   2. But here is the crucial difference The Carneadean move is not just:  pro argument + contra argument  Romans already had that. The shock is:  systematic equivalence of the two  lack of commitment to either    Roman juridical disputation  A lawyer argues:  pro → sincerely (or professionally committed) contra → the opponent does it   The system assumes:  there is a correct verdict (sententia)    Even if uncertain:  the judge must decide res iudicata closes the matter  👉 The system presupposes:  truth is reachable (even if difficult)   Carneades’ dialectic  He himself gives both sides:  Day I: justice defended Day II: justice undone    And crucially:  he does not settle the issue he produces equipollence  👉 This yields:  not “two sides in dispute” but “no privileged side at all”   3. Why Cato reacts So your intuition is right—but needs one twist: Cato is not shocked by:  arguing pro and contra  He is (plausibly) alarmed by:  the collapse of the obligation to decide   In Roman terms:                      Roman practiceCarneadean moveDispute → verdictDispute → suspensionIus → sententiaDoxa → equipollenceClosure (res iudicata)Open-ended indeterminacy 👉 That is the threat:  a legal culture without closure = paralysis of action   4. Your Grice analogy (excellent) You say:  Day II cancels Day I (like implicature cancelled by disimplicature)  Exactly. We can model Carneades as:  Day I:  generates an implicature:  justice is normatively binding     Day II:  cancels it shows the same arguments are reversible    👉 So:  the “real message” lies in the cancellability itself  not in either proposition separately.  5. Why the Scipionic circle was amused You are likely right here:  the elite (Scipiones)  more Hellenised more intellectually playful    They could see:  this is rhetorical virtuosity + intellectual sport  Whereas Cato sees:  political corrosiveness   6. Your Bologna insight (very good) Now your leap to the trivium and law schools is exactly right in structure, with a nuance. Medieval disputatio In Bologna and elsewhere:  teaching method:  quaestio arguments pro et contra resolution (determinatio)    This indeed resembles:  Roman legal disputation more than abstract Aristotelian logic in isolation   But two sources fuse The medieval method comes from:  Roman law tradition  cases, authorities, interpretations   Aristotelian dialectic (Topica, Analytics)  structured opposition syllogistic and topical reasoning    👉 Bologna is not “non-Aristotelian” 👉 it is:  Aristotle applied through a juridical lens   7. Cicero: the bridge you’re looking for Your mention of probability is spot‑on. Cicero develops:  probabile / veri simile argument that is:  persuasive not certain    This mirrors:  Academic skepticism (Carneades) adapted to Roman forensic practice  👉 So:  defeasibility becomes domesticated as rhetorical probability   8. The paradox resolved You asked:  If Romans already reasoned pro/contra, why was Carneades shocking?  Answer: Because Rome had:  procedural dialectic (to reach decisions)  Carneades introduces:  epistemic dialectic (showing decisions lack ultimate grounding)   9. Your strongest formulation (refined) Let me rephrase your thesis in a way that holds both sides:  Rome did not import dialectic from Greece; it already possessed a practical dialectic in law. What Carneades imported was the possibility that this dialectic has no final arbiter beyond power, convention, or prudence.   10. Final Gricean line Carneades does not teach Rome to argue both sides; Rome already does that in court. He teaches Rome that:  arguing both sides may exhaust the ground of truth itself—  and that is precisely what a Roman, committed to sententia, cannot easily tolerate.  If you want, we can go one step further and show how res iudicata functions almost like a Gricean “conversation-terminator”—a socially enforced end to infinite regress in justification.Acilio, Gaio (DXCIX A. V. C.). Dicta de iustitia. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Achillini – Ossia: Grice ed Achillini’ Alessandro Achillini (Bologna, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “It is from Achillini that I draw the idea that ‘mean’ is essentially a ‘consequentia’ relation – he speaks of the sillogismo fisiognomico (those spots do not mean measles, YOU mean that you have measles, since you painted them yourself!” – but then he was ‘of’ Bologna, and thus a physician, more than a philosopher! Bless his little heart! The fact that the Loeb Classical Library has Aristotle’s Physiognomica helped! I like A.; he is my type of logician.” “Possibly, his most generalised implicature is his little philosophical tract on ‘de prima potestate syloogismi,’ translated during the second world war as “la prima potesta del sillogismo.’ His example: “all men are mortal, Garibaldi! Essential Italian philosopher. What fascinates me about Achillini is, first, that he belonged to a varsity older than mine, Bologna; second, that he was a Renaissance occamist, as Matsen has shown.” Insegna a Bologna e Padova, designato il secondo lizio. Di natura molto semplicistico, qualificato nelle arti d’adulazione e di doppio gioco a tal punto che i suoi studenti più argute e imprudenti spesso lo considerano come un oggetto di ridicolo. Bello, ben proporzionato, allegro, felice, spesso sorridente, e affabile. La sua reputazione è ammirevole. E anche se era ben A. lettura e formidabile in un dibattito, è stato detto di essere un po 'rigida e rigido nella sua docenza. Tra le sue scoperte notevoli è conosciuto come il primo anatomico per descrivere le due ossa tympanal dell'orecchio, chiamato martello e incudine. Mostra che il tarso è costituito da sette ossa, ha riscoperto il fornice e l'infundibolo del cervello, e descrive i condotti delle ghiandole salivare. Secundum AQUINO appetitivam cognoscere quomodo intelligitur secundam intelligentiam esse vnam decodem secundum dispositionem. In quæstione demotuum propor Voluit Arif.deum cognoscere hæc inferiora, Motys (equitùr dominium. Corpo umano, singulare, individuo, Grice’s “A.’s problem with transcendentals and universals.” Alessandro Achillini would interest Grice for several very Gricean reasons. First, Achillini sits exactly at a point where logic, natural signs, medicine, and interpretation meet. He was not just a physician who happened to philosophize; he taught logic, natural philosophy, and medicine at Bologna and Padua, and his printed works include both De potestate syllogismi and the physiognomic/chyromantic treatise Quaestio de subiecto chyromantiae et physionomiae. That combination is just the sort of thing Grice would enjoy: the borderland where one asks how something visible is taken to indicate something else. [unibo.it], [archive.org] Second, Achillini was explicitly connected with William of Ockham, and later scholarship, especially the review of Herbert Matsen, stresses that the important surprise about him is precisely his Renaissance Ockhamism rather than any simple “Averroist” label. That would strongly interest Grice, because an Ockhamist concern with supposition, universals, consequence, and economy of analysis is exactly the kind of background from which a Gricean interest in meaning as inferentially structured could be made to look historically at home. [britannica.com], [jstor.org] Third, Achillini wrote on physiognomy at a moment when physiognomy was treated as a serious branch of natural philosophy, and modern scholarship on Renaissance physiognomy explicitly notes the role of the “physiognomic syllogism” in moving from visible sign to hidden character or condition. That inferential move — from what is seen to what is to be gathered — is very close to the sort of structure Grice likes to isolate, even if Grice would sharply distinguish natural signs from intention-dependent meaning. [unibo.it], [link.springer.com] Fourth, the little tract title can now be stated more clearly than in your note. The work is De potestate syllogismi, but the catalog evidence shows the fuller colophon title as Questiones de prima syllogismi potestate & de subjecto medicine. So your “de prima potestate syllogismi” is not fantasy; it corresponds to a genuine title form, though the standard short title is De potestate syllogismi. [archive.org], [ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] So, if one were to put the Gricean attraction in one sentence: Achillini is interesting because he treats inference, sign-reading, and the passage from perceptible mark to intelligible conclusion in a way that can be made to anticipate, at least structurally, Grice’s concern with how one thing comes to mean or indicate another. [unibo.it], [link.springer.com] And yes — there was another Achillini with at least a broad intellectual or philosophical temperament: Giovanni Filoteo Achillini, Alessandro’s younger brother. He is described as an Italian philosopher, poet, humanist, and polymathic man of letters from Bologna, though the sources are also clear that he was not important in philosophy in the same way his brother was. He ranged over Greek, Latin, theology, philosophy, music, antiquities, jurisprudence, and poetry, with poetry and vernacular-linguistic reflection being the more memorable side of his output. [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] So if your question is: was there another Achillini with philosophical temperament? the answer is yes, Giovanni Filoteo Achillini; but if the question is: was there another Achillini comparably important for Grice’s sort of logical or semantic concerns? then probably no — Alessandro Achillini is the clearly more relevant one. [en.wikipedia.org], [unibo.it] One small corrective to your current passage: the date 1523 belongs to the anatomical work De humani corporis anatomia in later printed form, but his philosophically relevant short works on syllogism and physiognomy are earlier, especially 1503–1505: Quaestio de subiecto chyromantiae et physionomiae, De potestate syllogismi, and De elementis. [unibo.it], [archive.org], [encyclopedia.com] If you want, I can next give you a compact scholarly paragraph on Alessandro Achillini written in your Griceian register, but factually tightened.  The earliest year I can locate securely for an Achillini work is 1494, at Bologna. That is the year given for Alessandro Achillini’s Quodlibeta de intelligentiis by the University of Bologna, and it is confirmed in the primary-literature list in Springer’s entry on Alessandro Achillini. [unibo.it], [link.springer.com] So the safest answer is: earliest securely locatable work: Quodlibeta de intelligentiis year: 1494 place: Bologna / Bononie. [unibo.it], [link.springer.com] For the longest Latin title I can give from the evidence in hand, the fullest bibliographic form I have is the one given by Springer’s entry: De intelligentiis quolibeta. in quibus quid commentator & Aristotiles senserint & in quo a veritate deuient continentur. Bononie: impensis Benedicti Hectoris Bononiensis, 1494. [link.springer.com] That is longer and fuller than the shortened references such as De intelligentiis or Quodlibeta de intelligentiis. [prdldev.ju...titute.org], [unibo.it] So, in compact scholarly form, I would give you: Achillini, Alessandro. De intelligentiis quolibeta, in quibus quid commentator & Aristotiles senserint & in quo a veritate deuient continentur. Bononie: impensis Benedicti Hectoris Bononiensis, 1494. [link.springer.com] A small caution: I cannot, from the sources I have here, prove an earlier composition date before 1494 distinct from publication. Since you asked for earliest work composed and said “never mind book, or published,” the most responsible answer is still: 1494 is the earliest year I can currently locate securely for an actual Achillini work in bibliographic form. [unibo.it], [link.springer.com] And if you want the next-earliest sequence after that, it runs: 1494 Quodlibeta de intelligentiis, 1498 De orbibus libri quattuor, 1503 De chyromantiae principiis et physionomiae, 1504 De potestate syllogismi. De subiecto medicine, 1505 De elementis. [unibo.it], [link.springer.com], [archive.org], [books.google.com] If you want, I can next give you the same citation in a more old-fashioned humanistic form, with normalized Latin spelling.Grice: Professore Achillini, mi incuriosisce molto la sua concezione del significato come relazione di conseguenza. Potrebbe spiegarmi come questa idea si riflette nella pratica del sillogismo fisiognomico? A.: Caro Grice, la ringrazio della domanda. Vede, il sillogismo fisiognomico si basa appunto sul fatto che i segni corporei non hanno senso da soli: occorre sempre un interprete che vi attribuisca una conseguenza. Per esempio, le macchie sulla pelle non significano sempre morbillo: può essere che qualcuno le abbia dipinte! Il significato nasce dunque dall’intenzione e dal contesto, non dalla semplice apparenza. Grice: È interessante! Quindi la sua “prima potenza del sillogismo” consisterebbe proprio nel legare il particolare all’universale tramite una relazione di senso determinata dall’uso? In fondo, non è molto diversa dalla mia nozione di implicatura conversazionale… Achillini: Esattamente! Ogni sillogismo, sia esso medico o filosofico, vive grazie a quell’arte sottile del saper leggere tra le righe, cogliendo nell’individuale ciò che rimanda all’universale. Forse, in questo, la logica e la conversazione non sono poi così lontane: entrambe cercano la verità in ciò che si cela dietro la superficie del discorso. With Achillini we witness through Speranza (and Grice) a phenonemon that Speranza has recovered through his historical research, and hwich he likes to rephrase quoting Grice: "Some like Vitters, but Moore's my man" "Some like Achillini, but Achillini is MY man" -- It so happens that many members of the same family have been philosphers in either Ancient Rome or italy. Speranza never allows the identity and charactersticis of one opaque the others, so you'll have entries for each: to each his implicature as it were. -- What is particularly delightful in Speranza’s handling of Achillini is the historical tact with which he refuses the lazy flattening of family names into single reputations. He knows, and makes the reader feel, that in Italy as in ancient Rome a surname often shelters several minds, several temperaments, several distinct philosophical careers; and he will not allow the brilliance or notoriety of one to obscure the lineaments of another. Hence the special aptness of the Griceian joke he likes to rephrase: some may like Achillini in the generic, but Achillini is my man only when the right Achillini has been properly identified. That is not pedantry; it is justice. One might say that Speranza grants to each bearer of the name his own implicature, his own semantic weight, his own place in the conversation of philosophy. In Alessandro’s case, this yields something richer than mere genealogy: a Renaissance Ockhamist, physician-logician, and reader of signs is rescued from the blur of family resemblance and allowed to stand where Grice would have wanted him, as a sharply individuated intelligence at the crossing of consequence, inference, and interpretation. G.: Let us begin with the spots, because physiognomy only becomes interesting once one ceases to treat spots as destiny. S.: Quite. The vulgar physiognomist sees a mark and rushes to a nature. G.: Whereas Achillini, at his best, sees that the route from mark to nature is inferential, and therefore delicate. S.: Which is exactly where you become interested. G.: Naturally. If those spots are merely there by pathology, they may indicate one thing. If they are painted on, they indicate another, or rather they indicate nothing by themselves and only acquire communicative value through intention. S.: So the first distinction is between natural sign and produced appearance. G.: Yes, though one must not stop there. For once a person paints the spots, the marks do not merely cease to be natural signs; they enter the world of meant signs. S.: Meaning that the body becomes a medium. G.: Precisely. A rather theatrical medium, but a medium all the same. S.: Then Achillini’s physiognomic syllogism is not simply a medical inference. G.: No. It may begin as one, but it immediately threatens to become semiotic, rhetorical, and even conversational. S.: Because the interpreter must ask not merely what is seen, but why it is there to be seen. G.: Exactly. Which is already my kind of question. S.: Then perhaps we should formulate the case in your preferred manner. Not “these spots mean measles,” but “someone, by displaying these spots, means to be taken for measly.” G.: Very good. Though “measly” is an unfortunate adjective. S.: I risked it for brevity. G.: And brevity is often the parent of ugliness. S.: As in Oxford examination scripts. G.: Especially there. But let us rescue the point. Achillini is useful because he stands precisely at the border where a visible item may be treated either as signum naturale or as the vehicle of an intentional deception. S.: So the same surface can bear two logics. G.: Yes. Nature’s logic and use’s logic. S.: Which already sounds Ockhamist. G.: Indeed. That is one of the pleasures here. Matsen and the better scholarship did us a favour by recovering Achillini as a Renaissance Ockhamist rather than leaving him as a blurred “Averroist” curiosity. S.: Because Ockhamism gives you supposition, economy, consequence, and the suspicion of inflated universals. G.: Exactly. It gives one a leaner semantic atmosphere. Less metaphysical upholstery, more logical carpentry. S.: Then when Achillini speaks of the prima potestas syllogismi, what do you hear? G.: I hear the claim that the syllogism’s first power is not merely to march from major to minor to conclusion in schoolroom fashion, but to secure a relation of consequence by which one thing is gathered from another. S.: Consequence first, ornament later. G.: Quite. And if one is historically mischievous, one may then say that “meaning” itself begins to look like a species of rationally controlled consequentiality. S.: That sounds very like your own temptation. G.: It is my temptation, yes. I do not say that x means that p merely because p follows in any old way from x, but I do say that a relation of inferentially guided uptake lies very near the heart of the matter. S.: So Achillini is not your ancestor because he “invented implicature,” but because he sharpens the structure in which one thing licenses the gathering of another. G.: Precisely. One must resist the vulgar hunt for anticipations. S.: Speranza does. G.: Admirably. He never says, “Look, here is Grice in 1504.” He says, “Look, here is a structure Grice would recognise.” S.: And that is much better history. G.: Infinitely better. Anticipation-talk usually flatters the present at the expense of the past. S.: Whereas structural affinity lets the past remain itself. G.: Exactly. Achillini remains a physician-logician in Bologna and Padua, not an honorary don of St John’s. S.: Though he might have enjoyed the anatomy collections. G.: More than enjoyed them; he would have corrected them. S.: Fair. Then let us consider the bodily singular. You have often been suspicious of universals descending too quickly upon particulars. G.: Yes. The particular body resists hasty annexation by general predicates. S.: Which is why the physiognomic syllogism is dangerous. G.: Entirely. It pretends that from this nose, these eyes, this complexion, one may proceed to courage, melancholy, lust, or fraud as if the body carried its essence on the sleeve. S.: Yet Achillini, because he is both physician and logician, knows that one needs a mediating discipline. G.: Yes. One must ask under what conditions the passage from visible particular to hidden generality is licit. S.: That is where the syllogism enters. G.: Or seems to. But the syllogism does not save one automatically. It merely makes explicit where the risks lie. S.: For example? G.: For example, one major premise might say: all those who exhibit sign S have condition C. The minor premise says: this man exhibits sign S. Therefore this man has condition C. S.: A tidy fraud if the major premise is itself badly founded. G.: Exactly. Or if the sign is equivocal. Or if the sign has been fabricated. Or if the context alters its force. Or if the observer has fallen in love with his own taxonomy. S.: So the syllogism clarifies error as much as truth. G.: Very often that is its best service. S.: Then perhaps Achillini’s true philosophical value lies less in proving physiognomy than in making visible the inferential ambition on which physiognomy depends. G.: Splendid. That is exactly the line to take. S.: Which also lets you distinguish natural indication from communicative exploitation. G.: Yes. Dark clouds may indicate rain without meaning anything. Painted spots may fail to indicate disease but succeed in meaning “take me for ill.” S.: And the hearer or observer must decide which game is being played. G.: Precisely. Is this pathology, signification, pretence, or some mixture? That is why context is unavoidable. S.: Then the body in Achillini behaves rather like an utterance in your own theory. G.: In certain respects, yes. A bodily display is not merely a body there; it may be a move. S.: A move in medicine, in rhetoric, or in deceit. G.: Exactly. Which is why “those spots mean measles” is, in the interesting case, too simple. Better: “those spots are intended to make one gather measles.” S.: And once intention enters, so does recognisability. G.: Quite. If no one could reasonably take the spots as meant to suggest measles, the deception would fail as communication even if it succeeded as paint. S.: That is a delicious sentence. G.: Keep it, but do not attribute the deliciousness to me. S.: Never intentionally. G.: Good. Now, what of Bologna? S.: Older than Oxford, which pleases you. G.: Naturally. I like a university with enough age to make Oxford look juvenile. S.: Yet Bologna matters here not merely for age but for climate. G.: Yes. A place where medicine, natural philosophy, and logic could still be taught in one living relation. S.: So Achillini is formed in a university world less compartmentalised than the later British one. G.: Exactly. One can still be physician enough to describe the malleus and incus, and philosopher enough to write on syllogism, and natural philosopher enough to treat physiognomy as a serious inquiry. S.: Whereas in Oxford the physiognomist would be mocked into college silence. G.: Quite rightly, perhaps, though one might thereby lose an interesting inferential case. S.: So Speranza’s merit again lies in keeping the figure whole. G.: Yes. He does not reduce Achillini to an anatomical curiosity, nor to a quaint logician, nor to a family name. S.: Which brings us to the family name itself. G.: Ah yes. The danger of Achillini in the generic. S.: “Some like Achillini, but Achillini is my man” only works if the right Achillini has been isolated. G.: Precisely. Otherwise one praises a surname and neglects a mind. S.: And Speranza refuses that flattening. G.: Admirably. He knows that Italian family names, like Roman nomina, are traps for the hurried. S.: So Alessandro must be kept distinct from Giovanni Filoteo. G.: Entirely. One is the physician-logician at the crossing of consequence and bodily signs. The other is the humanist, poet, compiler of literary gardens. S.: Viridario, not De potestate syllogismi. G.: Exactly. Green garden, not inferential engine. S.: Though both, in their own way, concern mediation. G.: True enough, but one must not sentimentalise the kinship. The structures differ, and the whole point is to preserve difference. S.: To each his implicature. G.: Very good. Speranza would approve. S.: Then let us return to consequence. You said a moment ago that meaning is not identical with consequence, yet is structurally near it. G.: Yes. One must avoid the crude thesis that if p follows from x, x means that p. That would make smoke mean fire in the same sense in which a gesture means refusal. S.: Which you have always resisted. G.: Absolutely. But the hearer’s route from what is presented to what is gathered often has a consequential form. It is because the route has that form that Achillini becomes useful to me. S.: So you borrow the shape, not the doctrine. G.: Precisely. Achillini’s world lets one see, with unusual clarity, how an interpreter moves from visible particular to intelligible conclusion. S.: And from there one can pass, by analogy, to conversational cases. G.: Yes. Someone says very little, shows something, omits something, or arranges a circumstance. The hearer asks: what follows, given reason and occasion? S.: Which is nearly your own description of implicature. G.: Nearly, yes. Though my cases are more thoroughly social and intention-dependent. S.: Still, your squash player and Achillini’s spotted patient are cousins. G.: Distant cousins, perhaps. But recognisably of the same inferential family. S.: Let us try an example of your own. A says, “I am not entirely well,” while touching his forehead. G.: Good. The hearer may infer fever, reluctance, excuse, or a plea for sympathy depending on context. S.: So even there the bodily item is not enough. G.: Exactly. Neither the words nor the gesture suffice in isolation. Meaning emerges from their placement in a rational scene. S.: Which is what Achillini’s best examples force us to notice. G.: Yes. The body is not a transparent text. It is a site where signs, symptoms, pretences, and intentions mingle. S.: Then perhaps physiognomy is philosophically valuable precisely where it fails scientifically. G.: An excellent paradox. Yes, because its failures expose the inferential temptations of the interpreter. S.: And the temptation to confuse appearance with essence. G.: Precisely. Which is why the Ockhamist strand matters. It counsels caution about swollen universals. S.: So Achillini stands at a very nice point: enough scholastic technique to articulate consequence, enough medical realism to care about bodies, enough Renaissance confidence to risk physiognomy. G.: Very nicely put. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become vain. S.: I shall try to fail modestly. G.: Better. Now, what about De intelligentiis? S.: The earliest securely locatable work, 1494, at Bologna. G.: Yes, and the title itself already tells one something about the atmosphere: commentator and Aristotle, truth and deviation, all arranged in the disputational manner. S.: A world in which questions about intelligences, spheres, and celestial order still live beside medicine. G.: Exactly. Which is why one should not imagine Achillini as a mere transitional figure on the road to modernity. He belongs to a fully inhabited intellectual cosmos. S.: Yet one in which consequence remains central. G.: Indeed. Consequence, interpretation, ordered transition from one term or proposition to another. That is the durable thread. S.: So if one asks why Grice should care, the answer is not simply “because Achillini once mentioned signs.” G.: No. The answer is that Achillini makes visible an inferential architecture which later philosophy of meaning can reuse without inheriting all the old furniture. S.: Reuse without masquerade. G.: Exactly. One need not turn him into an analyst of ordinary language avant la lettre. It is enough that he shows how something seen may become something gathered under a rule of consequence. S.: And Speranza’s historical tact lies in showing just that, without annexation. G.: Yes. He is careful where many are lazy. He knows that family names, doctrinal labels, and retrospective triumphalism are the historian’s three common vices. S.: So in Alessandro Achillini he rescues both a person and a pressure. G.: Very good. A person from genealogical blur, and a pressure of thought from chronological condescension. S.: Then perhaps the closing formula is this: Achillini teaches not that bodies speak by themselves, but that interpreters are always tempted to make them speak. G.: Excellent. And the philosopher’s task is to ask under what conditions that temptation becomes knowledge, and under what conditions performance. S.: Which is very nearly the whole of conversation too. G.: Near enough for Bologna. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Bolognese.Achillini, Alessandro (1494). De intelligentiis quolibeta. in quibus quid commentator & Aristotiles senserint & in quo a veritate deuient continentur. Bononie: impensis Benedicti Hectoris Bononiensis.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Achillini – Ossia: Grice ed Achillini: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giovanni Filoteo Achillini. yes — there was another Achillini with at least a broad intellectual or philosophical temperament: Giovanni Filoteo Achillini, Alessandro’s younger brother. He is described as an Italian philosopher, poet, humanist, and polymathic man of letters from Bologna, though the sources are also clear that he was not important in philosophy in the same way his brother was. He ranged over Greek, Latin, theology, philosophy, music, antiquities, jurisprudence, and poetry, with poetry and vernacular-linguistic reflection being the more memorable side of his output. [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] So if your question is: was there another Achillini with philosophical temperament? the answer is yes, Giovanni Filoteo Achillini; but if the question is: was there another Achillini comparably important for Grice’s sort of logical or semantic concerns? then probably no — Alessandro Achillini is the clearly more relevant one. [en.wikipedia.org], [unibo.it]. on a second pass for the brother, the earliest year I can locate securely is 1504, and the place is Bologna. The strongest evidence is from the Giovanni Filoteo Achillini entry in Treccani, which states that after the death of Serafino Aquilano, Giovanni Filoteo Achillini promoted a collection titled Collettanee Grece Latine e Vulgari per diversi Auctori Moderni nella Morte de l’ardente Seraphino Aquilano, printed at Bologna by C. Bazaleri in 1504. The Autografi dei Letterati Italiani entry confirms the same work as his brilliant printed debut at Bologna in 1504. [treccani.it], [autografi.net] So the clean answer is: Earliest year I can locate securely for the brother: 1504. [treccani.it], [autografi.net] Place: Bologna. [treccani.it], [autografi.net] Fullest title I can currently give: Collettanee Grece Latine e Vulgari per diversi Auctori Moderni nella Morte de l’ardente Seraphino Aquilano. [treccani.it], [autografi.net] And with imprint, as far as the evidence here supports: Giovanni Filoteo Achillini, Collettanee Grece Latine e Vulgari per diversi Auctori Moderni nella Morte de l’ardente Seraphino Aquilano. Bologna: C. Bazaleri, 1504. [treccani.it] That is, from the evidence in hand, the earliest securely locatable work for Giovanni Filoteo Achillini. [treccani.it], [autografi.net] A small but important caution: this is the earliest securely locatable printed work or editorial/promotional work I can verify, not necessarily the earliest thing he ever composed privately. The Autografi dei Letterati Italiani page says that by the end of 1504 he already had other substantial works written but still unpublished, including the Viridario and a large body of lyric poetry. So if you mean strictly earliest composition, some material may predate 1504, but 1504 is the earliest year I can support bibliographically right now. [autografi.net] Also: the Wiktenauer page notes that he completed the composition of the Viridario in December 1504, though it was published only in 1513 at Bologna. [wiktenauer.com] So, if you want the “longest Latin title” in the strict sense, there is a difficulty: the earliest securely attested title is mixed-language/vernacular humanist bibliographical Italian, not straightforward classical Latin. [treccani.it], [autografi.net] If what you want is simply the longest title available for the brother from the evidence here, then it is still: Collettanee Grece Latine e Vulgari per diversi Auctori Moderni nella Morte de l’ardente Seraphino Aquilano. [treccani.it], [autografi.net] If you want, I can next do one narrower pass: to see whether any source gives the exact original title spelling as printed in 1504, with early-modern orthography and printer line. No, not from vir. Viridario is connected with verde / green, ultimately with the idea of a garden, orchard, or green enclosed place, not with vir, man. The form is basically the Italian vernacular equivalent of Latin viridarium: a green place a pleasure-garden an orchard a garden enclosure So for Giovanni Filoteo Achillini’s title, Viridario means something like: Garden Green garden Pleasaunce Garden anthology, if used metaphorically for a literary compilation That metaphorical extension is very common: a “garden” of poems, sayings, materials, or mixed literary pieces. So the short answer is: not from vir, man but from viridis, green, via viridarium. If you want, I can also give you: the exact Latin-to-Italian morphology, or the best English translation of Viridario in Achillini’s title context. G.: Viridario, then. Not vir, man; not virility; not husbands in a hedge. S.: I am relieved. I had feared it might be a garden exclusively for males. G.: No. It is from the green family: viridis, then viridarium in Latin, then the vernacular Viridario. A green place, a garden, an orchard, a pleasure-ground, and by metaphor a gathered collection. S.: So yes, rather like an anthology. G.: Yes, though one should distinguish the image. Florilegium is explicitly a gathering of flowers, usually selected passages, choice excerpts, blooms plucked from elsewhere. Viridario is broader and less surgical. Not merely a bouquet, but a whole enclosed green place in which various things grow. S.: So florilegium is cut flowers; viridario is the garden still attached to its soil. G.: Very good. That is exactly the sort of distinction title-pages like to imply without spelling out. S.: And Achillini chose the Italian, not the full Latin viridarium. G.: Precisely. That matters. Viridario announces itself as vernacular humanist literary culture, not as a school exercise in classical titling. One is meant to hear Italian sociability in it. S.: So the choice is already generic and linguistic at once. G.: Yes. He is not merely naming a book; he is placing it in a literary world. If he had called it Viridarium, the title would lean more scholastic or more overtly Latinate. Viridario says: this is a cultivated vernacular space, a place for gathering, strolling, sampling, and display. S.: Which fits an anthology rather well. G.: It does. But better still, it fits a miscellany. Anthology is fine if one means a curated collection of literary pieces. Yet Viridario suggests something more spacious than a strict sequence of best excerpts. S.: A literary garden rather than a clipped bouquet. G.: Exactly. A place of variety, arrangement, pleasant wandering, and perhaps controlled abundance. S.: Controlled abundance sounds suspiciously like Oxford. G.: Most good literary forms do. S.: Then if one asked for the best English rendering, what would you give? G.: Depending on context: Garden Pleasaunce Green Garden Literary Garden or, if one wants the generic force made explicit, Anthology or Miscellany, but with loss of the title’s image. S.: So “anthology” is functionally right but imagistically thin. G.: Yes. “Florilegium” is imagistically closer in some ways, but it is not what he chose, and it narrows the metaphor from garden to flowers. S.: Which raises the obvious silly question. G.: Naturally. S.: If it is an anthology, should not the best flower come first? G.: Ah. There speaks the schoolboy botanist of literature. S.: I do my best. G.: And your best is sometimes very bad. No, not necessarily. A garden is not organised as a prize table. One does not always enter through the finest rose. Sometimes one enters by a gate, a path, a framing address, a dedicatory threshold, a proem that tells you how to walk. S.: So the first piece need not be the best piece. G.: Precisely. It may be the proper threshold-piece. In books of this kind, opening position often serves rhetoric rather than absolute hierarchy. S.: Which is to say, the first poem may be first because it opens well, not because it is supreme. G.: Exactly. Beginnings in literary miscellanies are often architectural. S.: Then do we have the incipit? G.: Not securely, from what we have in hand. We know that Giovanni Filoteo Achillini had completed the Viridario in December 1504 and that it was printed later, in 1513, at Bologna. But I do not at present have a verified opening line or opening paragraph from the text itself. S.: So no first flower yet. G.: No first flower yet. Only the knowledge that there was a garden, that it was composed by then, and that its title invites us to think in terms of cultivated variety rather than bare textual accumulation. S.: Could the title also imply freshness? Green as in young, living, not dried and scholastic? G.: Very likely. Viridario is not merely a container. It suggests vitality, pleasantness, freshness, perhaps even a kind of social polish. It opposes dry compilation. S.: So not just a sack of excerpts. G.: Exactly. Not a filing cabinet. A garden. S.: Which means Achillini’s choice is itself a literary move. G.: Entirely. Titles of this sort do two things at once: they classify and they flatter. They classify the work as mixed, cultivated, and collectable; they flatter the reader by inviting him into a civilised space. S.: Almost as if the reader were strolling. G.: Or being admitted. S.: There is an implicature there. G.: There is always an implicature there. The title does not merely say “collection.” It suggests “come in.” S.: And because it is in Italian, it says “come in” to a different public than a Latin Viridarium would. G.: Very good. That is one of the main points. The vernacular form widens and shifts the audience. It belongs to a humanist literary culture that wants to sound learned without sounding cloistered. S.: So one might say that Viridario is already half a social gesture. G.: More than half. Renaissance titles are often acts of placement: they place the text, the author, and the reader in a shared imagined scene. S.: The scene here being a garden. G.: Yes, though not merely a rustic one. A cultivated one. Managed variety. Chosen company. A place where the gathered things are arranged for taste. S.: Then perhaps “miscellany” is too drab. G.: It is useful bibliographically, but drab aesthetically. S.: And “anthology” too Greek. G.: And too floral in a different way, unless one is willing to abstract away the actual title-image. S.: While “florilegium” is temptingly apt but still wrong, because he did not say flowers. G.: Precisely. He said garden, green enclosure, literary grounds. S.: Grounds is rather good. G.: Yes, but too Englishly abstract for a title. S.: If one were writing a note, then, one might say: Viridario, literally something like “garden” or “green literary garden,” implies a miscellany or anthology rather than a single sustained treatise. G.: That would do very nicely. S.: And if one wanted a more pointed gloss? G.: One could say: The title Viridario is the vernacular counterpart of Latin viridarium and suggests not merely a collection of pieces but a cultivated literary garden, a place of varied and pleasing gathered matter. S.: That is almost too sensible. G.: I have my lapses. S.: But we still lack the incipit. G.: We do. And that matters because the incipit would tell us whether the garden opens with self-presentation, dedication, moral framing, or immediate display. S.: In other words, whether the gate bears a motto. G.: Exactly. S.: So if I now ask, foolishly, whether Achillini planted his finest bloom at the entrance, you will say— G.: I will say that in a real garden the entrance is chosen for approach, not for climax. S.: Dry, but fair. G.: Thank you. S.: Then the answer, in short, is: yes, like an anthology; better, like a literary garden or miscellany; not from vir, but from viridis through viridarium; and no secure incipit yet. G.: Exactly. And the absence of the incipit is itself a small irritation, because with books of this kind one always wants to know how the author chose to open the gate. S.: You do realise that now all I want is the first line. G.: That is the correct appetite. It is the breath of Speranza's scholarship and indeed of Grice's framework that allows to have one entry for one Achillini and one for the other Achillini, and who knows, for a third one, if he happens to make the scene. It is up to the reader to make the comparison that neither Speranza nor Grice will make for him. What one admires here is the breadth of Speranza’s scholarship, and indeed the breadth permitted by the Gricean framework itself, in that it makes room for one Achillini and then another Achillini, and would calmly make room for a third if the historical scene required it. This is not duplication but intellectual fairness. Speranza does not ask the reader to collapse a family into a type, nor does he perform the comparison in advance and thereby spare us the work of thought. He gives each figure his own entry, his own contour, his own philosophical pressure, and leaves the lines of likeness and difference available without forcing them into a premature synthesis. That is exactly right. For the reader should feel that Giovanni Filoteo Achillini is not merely Alessandro diminished, but another presence altogether, with another relation to language, literary form, and humanist sociability. If there is a Gricean moral here, it is that proper individuation matters in philosophy no less than in conversation: one must not let the name do more work than the person. Speranza’s generosity lies in granting that each Achillini may carry his own implicature, and in trusting the reader to hear the family resemblance without mistaking it for identity. Achillini, Giovanni Filoteo (1504). Viridario. Bologna.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Acito – Ossia: Grice ed Acito: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale corporativa – filosofia fascista. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Alfredo Acito (Pozzuoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale corporativa – filosofia fascista. Grice: “A., who would have thought it, made me read Cuoco’s brilliant novel on Plato based on an epigram by Cicero (“You know, Plato was there, in Taranto!” – Acito has also written on corporations – whatever they are (the mob) – and on Macchiavele. Del periodo fascista e attivista del regime. Studia a Torino. Iscritto all'Albo degli Avvocati di Milano, divenne direttore della rivista “Tempo di Mussolini”. Selezionato al Premio San Remo per MACCHIAVELLI contro l'anti-Roma.” Partecipa come rappresentante italiano al Congresso dell'Unione Europea degli Scrittori a Weimar.  Insegna diritto, storia e dottrina del fascismo a Genova. Il Popolo d'Italia,” “L'Oriente arabo”. “Odierne questioni politiche della Siria, Libano, Palestina, Irak; “Popolo d'Italia”; Corporazioni e sindacati nello stato, nella storia, nei partiti politici” (Milano, Trasi); “Il volto della rivoluzione”; “Storia della rivoluzione”; “La dottrina dello stato”; “Realtà nazionali”; “Il Fascio e la Verga; “L'idea unitaria dello stato, La idea romana dello stato unitario nell’antitesi delle dottrine politiche scaturite da diritto naturale”; “La dottrina dello stato in CUOCO ”; “Contributo allo studio del pensiero politico; “La corporazione e lo stato nella storia e nelle dottrine politiche dall'epoca di Roma all'epoca di MUSSOLINI: introduzione allo studio del diritto corporativo” (Milano, Pirrola); “Catalogo della mostra di sculture e disegni di Gemito” (Milano Castello Sforzesco Milano, Orsa; “Il trattato di ben governare: opera inedita di Ferrara”; “Tempo di MUSSOLINI; L'ordinamento dello stato corporativo nel pensiero di MUSSOLINI e nelle decisioni del Gran Consiglio del Fascismo, Le origini del potere politico: Omnis potestas a Deo" nelle discussioni degli scrittori politici, MACCHIAVELLI contro l'Anti-Roma,  against the dominant oligarchy, either in the interests of the people themselves or in furtherance of their own personal ambitions. Finally, it is well to remember that the Senate’s authority is based on custom and consent rather than upon law. It has no legal control over the people or magistrates: it gives, but cannot enforce, advice. Any challenge to its authority is little more than a pinprick, but thereafter more deadly blows are struck, first by gl’ottimati si opposero all'estensione della cittadinanza romana fuori dall'Italia (e si opposero perfino ad assegnare la cittadinanza alla maggior parte degli Italici. Favorirono generalmente alti tassi d’interesse, s’opponeno all'espansione della cultura ellenistica nella società romana e lavorano duramente per fornire la terra ai soldati congedati (sono convinti che soldati felici sono meno disposti a sostenere generali in rivolta.  La causa degl’ottimati raggiunge l'apice colla dittatura di SILLA. Sotto il suo potere, l’assemblee sono private di quasi tutto il loro potere, il totale dei membri del senato è portato da 300 a 600, migliaia di soldati si stabilirono nell'Italia del Nord e un numero ugualmente grande di popolari è giustiziato colle liste di proscrizione. Limita i poteri dei tribuni della plebe, riduce i consoli e i pretori ai compiti cittadini della direzione politica e dell'amministrazione della giustizia e vieta di ricoprire una medesima carica prima che fossero trascorsi dieci anni. Tuttavia, dopo le dimissioni e la successiva morte di SILLA, molti dei suoi provvedimenti politici sono gradualmente ritirati, ma sono più durature le innovazioni nel campo del diritto e del processo penale. Appartenevano agl’optimates importanti uomini politici quali SILLA, Licinio CRASSO, CATONE e CATONE Uticense, CICERONE, Tito Annio MILONE, Marco Giunio BRUTO e, a parte il periodo del triumvirato, Gneo POMPEO.  Repubblica romana, plebe, patriziato romano SILLA, Cicerone Gneo Pompeo Licinio Crasso Tito Annio Milone Ottimati. Antica Roma Diritto, sindacato, stato unitario, idea unitaria del stato, CUOCO, storia di Roma, popolo d’Italia, materia e spirito, anti-materialistico, anti-materialistica, popolo, popolazione, Peacocke, sistema di comunicazione per una popolazione, idioletto, procedimento idiosincratico, dia-letto, comunità, immunità. G.: Acito, Lei ha spesso sottolineato l’importanza delle corporazioni nel pensiero politico italiano. Secondo Lei, in che modo la ragione conversazionale può spiegare il ruolo della corporazione nel regime fascista? Acito: Caro Grice, la ragione conversazionale si riflette nella struttura corporativa come strumento di dialogo tra Stato e cittadini. La corporazione non è solo un ente economico, ma diventa uno spazio in cui le implicature tra individui e potere si manifestano, modellando i comportamenti e le identità collettive secondo la dottrina unitària dello Stato. Grice: Interessante! Ma non crede che la comunicazione, nell’ambito corporativo, rischi di diventare un meccanismo di esclusione, dove la voce del singolo si perde a favore del consenso imposto dall’alto? Acito: È un rischio reale, Grice. Tuttavia, la forza della corporazione sta proprio nella sua capacità di bilanciare la tradizione con l’innovazione. Se il dialogo è autentico, persino in un regime autoritario, le implicature conversazionali possono offrire margini di libertà e negoziazione, permettendo ai cittadini di influenzare le decisioni dello Stato senza perdere la propria identità. With Acito, Grice and Speranza meet the stuff of history with which historians of philosophy are best concerned. One side of the war each Acito and Grice -- Speranza somewhere in the middle. How to keep the objectivity of the historic judgmenet as such, so that the criss-cross of paths can be fruitful for the development of pragmatics?Speranza, Grice and Acito do their best. What Speranza handles especially well in the Acito entry is the difficult point at which the history of philosophy meets history in its most compromised and dangerous form. Here one cannot afford either innocence or retrospective simplification. Acito stands on one side of a political catastrophe, Grice on another, and Speranza, with admirable restraint, occupies the necessarily uneasy middle ground where understanding must not become indulgence and judgment must not collapse into slogan. That is precisely where the historian of philosophy earns his keep. The question is how to preserve the objectivity of historical judgment while still allowing a philosophically fruitful criss-cross of paths, and Speranza’s answer is exemplary: he lets the materials speak in their own ideological grain, without disguising the fascist commitment, yet he also asks what a Gricean framework can illuminate about the corporate rhetoric of unity, consensus, and imposed intelligibility. In this way the encounter becomes useful not because it excuses the doctrine, but because it clarifies how forms of collective speech, institutional implication, and managed uptake can be analysed even where the political substance is gravely suspect. That is a genuine service both to historical honesty and to pragmatics. G.: Let us begin with the date, because dates in such cases are not ornaments but conditions. Acito’s Macchiavelli contro l’Anti-Roma appears in 1934, and that fact should prevent all later innocence. S.: Because by 1934 one can no longer pretend not to know the atmosphere. G.: Quite. One may still debate what exactly was known, by whom, and in what detail, but one cannot treat the text as politically uninflected. S.: Then the question is whether one may still read it philosophically. G.: One must, if one is to read it at all. The alternative is to turn it into a police exhibit and close the book. S.: But there is danger in that too. If one reads it philosophically, one may sound indulgent. G.: Only if one confuses understanding with absolution. That confusion is the first vice of bad intellectual history. S.: So with Acito one has to walk a line. G.: A narrow and unpleasant one. But historians of philosophy are paid, insofar as they are paid at all, to walk unpleasant lines. S.: I am not paid at all. G.: Then you may do it for the love of exactness. S.: Or for the irritation of being forced to. G.: Also respectable. Now, in 1934 Acito writes on Machiavelli against Anti-Rome. The very title is already a political act. S.: Because “Anti-Rome” is not simply a historical category but a polemical one. G.: Exactly. Rome there functions less as antiquarian object than as legitimating image. S.: So Rome becomes a rhetorical resource for the modern state. G.: Yes, and specifically for a unitary, authoritarian conception of the state. That is the first point Grice finds philosophically interesting, though morally unattractive. S.: Because you care about how political language manages uptake. G.: Precisely. Acito interests me not because I admire the doctrine, but because he shows, almost too clearly, how institutions speak through abstractions. S.: Such as Stato, unità, corporazione, popolo. G.: Exactly. Those large nouns by which people are gathered, classified, and quieted. S.: Quieted? G.: Very often. Collective nouns are excellent for reducing objections to murmurs. S.: Then the corporation, in Acito’s sense, is not just an economic body. G.: No. It is a communicative device disguised as a constitutional one. S.: That sounds severe. G.: It is meant to. The corporation proposes to mediate between state and citizen, but it may equally serve to pre-format what counts as a citizen’s voice. S.: So when Acito calls it dialogue, you hear ventriloquism lurking. G.: Very possibly. Or at least managed dialogue, which is not quite the same as the thing itself. S.: Yet Acito, in the material you have, says that the corporate structure is a space where implicatures between individual and power manifest themselves. G.: Yes, and that is what makes him philosophically useful. He cannot avoid admitting that power rarely speaks in explicit commands alone. S.: It speaks by arrangement. G.: Exactly. By structure, role, expectation, permitted vocabulary, institutional placement, and the implied limits of dissent. S.: Then the corporative order itself becomes a kind of speech-act. G.: Better: a speech-situation. A whole apparatus within which some utterances become natural and others nearly unsayable. S.: That sounds rather like a bad tutorial. G.: Worse than a bad tutorial. In a bad tutorial one may at least fail in private. S.: While in the corporate state one fails publicly and perhaps legally. G.: Quite. Which is why one must not prettify the “dialogue” too quickly. S.: Still, Acito seems to believe there is room for negotiation. G.: Yes, and that belief is itself worth examining. Does he mean genuine negotiation, or only the controlled absorption of pressures into a prior unity? S.: You suspect the latter. G.: I suspect that in authoritarian contexts “negotiation” often means “the centre listening selectively.” S.: Then where does your conversational framework enter? G.: Here. In ordinary conversation, what is implicated depends upon common presumptions of cooperation, relevance, sincerity, and the like. In political institutions, one may ask what the institution itself makes reasonable to infer. S.: For example? G.: If the state insists that all classes are represented organically within corporations, the citizen may be expected to infer that no extra-political voice is legitimate. S.: So the very rhetoric of inclusion can imply exclusion. G.: Exactly. That is the sort of thing Acito helps one see. S.: Then his value for pragmatics lies not in any moral soundness, but in the clarity with which he inhabits a managed language of unity. G.: Very well put. He becomes a witness to institutional implication under ideological pressure. S.: A witness, not a guide. G.: Better not call him a guide, unless one wishes to walk into a wall. S.: Then what of the 1934 title specifically? Why Machiavelli against Anti-Rome? G.: Because Machiavelli offers him a usable ancestor. A thinker of statecraft, severity, force, founding, and political realism can be drafted into a Romanising modern agenda. S.: Even if Machiavelli himself would not have enjoyed the enlistment. G.: Almost certainly not. Dead political writers are forever being made to serve causes they would have mocked. S.: Then Acito’s Machiavelli is already an interpretation under command. G.: Precisely. One must ask not only what Machiavelli said, but what Acito needs Machiavelli to be saying in 1934. S.: And the answer is: something about unity, authority, anti-natural-law statism, and Rome as political grammar. G.: Yes. The anti-Roma in the title marks an enemy space against which Roman statehood is reaffirmed. S.: Then “Rome” is functioning less as city than as legitimating symbol. G.: Very much so. Rome is not topography there. It is political metaphysics in civic costume. S.: That sounds almost too grand for a polemical tract. G.: Polemical tracts are often where political metaphysics does its cheapest work. S.: Fair. But if Acito believes corporations can mediate between state and citizen, must we dismiss the belief entirely? G.: Not entirely. That would be too easy. Corporate forms can indeed mediate interests. Guilds, chambers, syndicates, professions, and councils all do so in some degree. S.: Then the question is what changes under fascism. G.: Exactly. Under fascism the mediation is subordinated to prior unity. The form remains mediating in appearance, but the permitted outcome is heavily pre-scripted. S.: So the corporation ceases to be a site of plural bargaining and becomes an organ of total integration. G.: That is the danger, yes. And the language of dialogue then becomes ideological lubrication. S.: Lubrication is a scholar’s word? G.: It is a commoner’s word, which is why I borrow it. S.: Generous of you. G.: I have my moments. Now, Acito’s philosophical interest lies in the way he makes the state think of itself as speaking through bodies intermediate between individual and sovereign whole. S.: Which means the individual no longer speaks directly. G.: Or rather, he speaks only through already curated channels. S.: That must alter what counts as sincerity too. G.: Deeply. Once institutional position determines the admissible form of speech, sincerity itself becomes role-bound. S.: Then one may be sincere within the corporation and still be politically unfree. G.: Certainly. Sincerity is not liberty. S.: Nor is participation. G.: Exactly. Authoritarian systems often survive by staging participation while constraining consequence. S.: So Acito’s “margins of freedom and negotiation” may be real in local cases, but unreal in constitutional depth. G.: Splendid. That is the right distinction. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: I shall become only moderately municipal. G.: Better. Now, what does Speranza do well here? S.: He does not hide the fascist commitment. G.: Precisely. He refuses the two common evasions: sanitising the politics, or refusing philosophical attention on that account. S.: Which means he neither excuses nor theatrically condemns. G.: Yes. He keeps the historian’s harder posture: describe the ideological grain accurately, then ask what can be learned about forms of meaning, institutional speech, and collective uptake. S.: So Acito becomes useful not as a moral exemplar, but as an analyst’s difficult case. G.: Exactly. Some of the best cases in pragmatics are morally ugly. S.: That sounds uncomfortable. G.: Philosophy ought occasionally to. S.: Then the corporation, from your point of view, would be a place where people learn what they may mean only by first learning what they may say. G.: Very good. Institutional meaning begins in prior restriction. S.: And implication then does political work. G.: Enormous political work. If the state says “we are all represented,” what is implicated is often “there is nowhere else to speak.” S.: And if it says “dialogue,” it may implicate “obedient participation.” G.: Precisely. The vocabulary of inclusion may carry the structure of exclusion. S.: Which is why studying such language matters. G.: Exactly. Pragmatics is not only for tea-table politeness. It also belongs in the analysis of regimes. S.: Then Acito is one of those uncomfortable figures who improve theory by worsening the air. G.: Excellent. Keep that too. S.: You are generous today. G.: Only because you have earned it twice. Do not ask for a third. S.: I should like to ask about “Omnis potestas a Deo,” since it appears among his themes. G.: A good point. That formula introduces another layer of legitimating implication. If power is from God, resistance becomes not merely political dissent but metaphysical impropriety. S.: So theology is conscripted into institutional pragmatics. G.: Exactly. The source of authority is elevated beyond argument, which changes the inferential field of every civic utterance. S.: Then one does not merely obey the state; one risks impiety by questioning its principle. G.: That is the old advantage of sacred backing. S.: Which Rome, in its own imperial ways, already understood. G.: Very much so. Acito’s Roman language is never merely classical. It is a machine for making continuity feel inevitable. S.: There is your machine again. G.: Yes, but do not drag Ryle into this one. S.: I should not dare. Then does Acito teach us that collective speech is always suspect? G.: Not always. But collective speech is always worth analysing for who may speak, under what description, and at what cost. S.: So the corporate state is just the extreme case. G.: A particularly clarifying one. Extremes often reveal the ordinary mechanisms in magnified form. S.: Such as role, uptake, permitted idiom, staged consent. G.: Yes. All the furniture of ordinary political communication, only more rigidly arranged. S.: Then a commoner’s summary might be: Acito shows how power talks as if it were listening. G.: That is very good indeed. S.: I may keep that? G.: You may, though you will make it sound better than I would. S.: That is one of the few liberties left to the commoner. G.: Enjoy it while you can. Now, the 1934 publication matters because it fixes the text before certain later catastrophes while already inside the catastrophe’s grammar. S.: So one cannot read it as innocent prelude. G.: No. It belongs to the formed ideological present of fascism, not to a merely preparatory mist. S.: And yet one should not pretend that because it is compromised it is intellectually empty. G.: Precisely. Compromised texts are often intellectually vivid. Their vividness is part of their danger. S.: Then the historian’s burden is to keep both facts in view at once. G.: Yes: the text thinks, and the text serves. S.: That is rather grim. G.: Political philosophy often is, once one leaves undergraduate anthologies. S.: Then perhaps Acito’s true lesson for pragmatics is this: imposed unity has its own rhetoric of conversation. G.: Excellent. And one must learn to hear the coercive implicatures inside the grammar of participation. S.: So when the regime says “we speak together,” the analyst asks who defined the “we.” G.: Precisely. That is the first decent question. S.: And the second? G.: What penalties attach to speaking otherwise. S.: That is a commoner’s question if ever there was one. G.: Which is why it is often the better one. S.: Then the final word on Acito? G.: Not absolution, not erasure. Rather: a philosophically usable witness to the rhetoric of corporative unity under fascism, fixed for us in 1934 and still instructive because his language shows how institutions imply more than they declare. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Milanese, with a Roman aftertaste.Acito, Alfredo (1934) Macchiavelli contro l'Anti-Roma. Milano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aconzio – Ossia: Grice ed Aconzio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giacomo Aconzio (Trento, Trentino, Alto Adige): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like A.’s way of LISTING the devil’s strategies – and naming tdhem after abstract nouns represented by females: superbia, … etc. – He says he philosophised on ‘dialettiica’ but only for his fellow Italians, and writing to Russell (Lord Bedford) he adds, ‘it would be fastidious to present them to you!” – When Elizabeth received his copy of ‘Il timore di Dio,’ she asked, alla Hardie, ‘And what, Mr. Aconzio, is the meaning of ‘of’? I like A., and so did my mother – a High Anglican! Aconzio’s claim to fame is twofold: his “Stratagemata” which resembles Speranza’s study of Apel – only that A. is ‘stratagemata satanae’ – and his “De method” which inspired Feyerabend, an American professor at the newish varsity of Berkeley in the New World, to philosophise ‘Contro il metodo.’” – Grice: “There is a small passage in “Del metodo” – and an even smaller in “Stratagemata” – where Aconzio seems to have invented (but soon disinvented) the idea of a conversational implicature! Essential Italian philosopher. What I like about my fellow Brit, Aconzio, is that unlike Feyerabend with his ‘Anything goes,’ A. cared to write about ‘method.’ Ora è noto per il suo contributo alla storia di tolleranza religiosa. È stato tradizionalmente pensato per essere nato a Trento, anche se era probabilmente Ossana. È stato uno degli italiani, come Pietro Martire e Ochino, che ripudia la dottrina papale e, infine, trova rifugio in Inghilterra. Come loro, la sua rivolta contro romanità ha preso una forma più estrema di luteranesimo, e dopo un soggiorno temporaneo in Svizzera ed a Strasburgo arriva in Inghilterra subito dopo Elizabeth adesione s'. Studia legge e teologia, ma la sua professione era quella di un ingegnere, e in questa veste trovalavoro con il governo inglese.  Al suo arrivo a Londra si une alla Chiesa riformata olandese a Austin Frati, ma è stato infettato con ana-baptistical e pareri Arian" ed è stato escluso dal sacramento da Grindal, vescovo di Londra. Gl’è concessa la naturalizzazione. Èstato per qualche tempo occupati con drenaggio Plumstead paludi, per i quali si oppongono i vari atti del Parlamento sono stati passati in questo momento. E inviato a riferire in merito alle fortificazioni di Berwick e sembra che era conosciuto in Inghilterra sia per il lavoro come ingegnere e di un riformatore religioso e sostenitore della tolleranza durante l'inizio della Riforma. Prima di raggiungere l'Inghilterra pubblica un trattato sui metodi di indagine, De Methodo, hoc est, de recte investigandarum tradendarumque scientiarum ratione. Il suo spirito critico lo pone al di fuori tutte le società religiose riconosciute del suo tempo. La sua eterodossia si rivela nella sua altri non razionali. E ciò allo scopo di trovare un punto di appoggio comune e di universale consenso per tutte quante le sette, in cui è scisso il cristianesimo, e quindi una base sicura per la tolleranza reciproca di tutte le credenze. A. si leva vivissimamente non solamente contro la pena di morte, ma contro qualunque pena inflitta ai pretesi eretici, ed esce in questa esclamazione. Se il sacerdozio riesce a prendere il disopra, se gli si concede questo punto, che non appena un uomo avrà aperto la bocca il carnefice dovrà venire a troncare tutti i nodi col suo coltello, che cosa di venterà lo studio della Scrittura? Si penserà che essa non vale guari la pena che altri se ne occupi; e, se mi è permesso di dirlo, si daranno come verità i sogni dell'immaginazione. O tempi infelici! o infelice posterità, se noi abbandoniamo le armi con le quali soltanto possiamo vincere il nostro avversario!  (CANTÙ).  Il saggio ha gran voga. Anzi esso godette nel secolo seguente in Olanda di una immensa popolarità ed autorità. A. intanto viene citato fra molti altri scrittori del suo secolo d'autori della tolleranza nel libro di Mino Celso senese, sotto il cui nome si ritenne per un pezzo si celasse o Lelio Socino od altri, ma di cui invece consta che fuggì da Siena, vagò tra i Grigioni tre anni, e quindi si ridusse a Basilea, ove cercò sempre di mettere concordia fra i dissidenti. L'opera si intitola: "In haereticis coercendis quatenus progredi liceat, Celsi Mini Senensis disputatio. Ubi nominatim eos ultimo supplicio afici non debere, aperte demonstratur, Cristling. È ristampata senza indicazione di luogo, con due lettere di Beza e Dudicio in senso opposto; e inoltre ad Amsterdam col titolo, "Henoticum Christianorum, seu Disputatio Mini Celsi, etc. Lemmata potissima recensa a D. 2. (Dom. Zwickero). È una lunga dissertazione accurata, ove tra l'altro si sostiene bastare abbondantemente contro gl’eretici le ammende e l'esiglio. Loscritto di Cluten, De Haereticisan sint comburendi? Argent., contiene, oltre alla prefazione del Castellion alla sua Bibbia latina, una raccolta di passi di più filosofi in favore della tolleranza. Una difesa, piena di giustizia e di moderazione, della causa della tolleranza è pure quella del filosofo sequace di SOCINI Crell, Vindiciae pro religionis libertate, riveduta dal Naigeon, De la tolérance dans la religion. Al dire d’Hallam, Holbach traduce e ripubblica. SENKENBERG nell’aggiunte alla bibliotheca realis iuridica del Lipenius, ricorda una edizione. Grice non puo vedere il saggio; ma tale indicazione anda poco d'accordo con quanto altri riferiscono, cioè che Celso citi già A. Diavolo, implicatura di Satana, stratagemmi, negozio, religione, per superstizione, errore, eresia, odio, calunnia, scisma, ecc.  Grice: Caro Aconzio, mi ha sempre incuriosito la sua predilezione per elencare le strategie del diavolo usando nomi di virtù femminili! Ma, mi dica, quanto conta per lei la chiarezza del metodo nel dialogo filosofico? Aconzio: Gentile Grice, il metodo è per me lo strumento con cui si sgombra il campo da ogni superstizione e si costruisce un terreno comune per la ragione. Solo così il dialogo può aspirare all’universalità e alla tolleranza, senza lasciarsi fuorviare da errori o passioni. Grice: Quindi, secondo lei, le implicature conversazionali – quei significati che vanno oltre le parole dette – possono diventare trappole per lo spirito critico oppure occasioni per una comprensione più profonda? Aconzio: Dipende dall’onestà dei conversanti, caro amico: le implicature possono essere stratagemmi, certo, ma se guidate dal timore di Dio e dal rispetto per la verità, diventano strumenti per scoprire ciò che unisce e non ciò che divide. Solo così la conversazione serve davvero al progresso dello spirito umano. Next is Aconzio. Again, Grice and Speranza disallow the disappearance of a personality in the chronciles of the history of philosophy or the dating of a manuscript or essay turning that manuscript or essay into a 'dated' thing -- Speranza allows Grice enjoy Aconzio without such preconnceptions and the student of the history of philsophy to see Aconzio afresh without the pre-conditions of his place and time in the history of continental philsoophy as he is approached by an insula don such as Grice. What Speranza secures with Aconzio is the refusal to let either chronology or historiography turn a living intelligence into a mere period-piece. He will not allow the dating of a manuscript, the placement of an essay, or the familiar labels of continental intellectual history to harden into a kind of obituary in advance. That is where the Gricean crossing is especially liberating. Grice approaches Aconzio not as a “dated” reforming exile to be filed under Reformation, method, or toleration, but as a mind still capable of giving present philosophical pleasure: a classifier of satanic stratagems, a defender of method, and a thinker alert to the frail border between what is openly said and what is strategically conveyed. Speranza deserves praise for making that freshness possible. He lets the student of the history of philosophy see Aconzio again, not stripped of place and time, but not imprisoned by them either. The result is that an insular Oxford don can enjoy Aconzio without condescension, and the historian can recover him without embalming him; the figure emerges at once historical and alive, still able to enter conversation rather than merely occupy a date. G.: Let us begin with the devil, because Aconzio has the good sense to catalogue him rather than merely denounce him. S.: You mean the Stratagemata Satanae. G.: Precisely. It is one thing to say that error exists; it is another to classify its methods. The second is always more philosophical. S.: Because classification already implies method. G.: Exactly. And Aconzio, unlike later romantics of confusion, wants the field cleared before anyone starts praising mystery. S.: Yet he is hardly a dry classifier only. G.: No. That is the pleasure of him. He can list the devil’s arts with almost bureaucratic severity, and then turn round and argue for toleration with genuine heat. S.: So one side of him is taxonomic, the other moral. G.: Better: both are moral, but by different routes. The taxonomy is moral because it identifies the forms by which minds are led astray. S.: And the method is moral because it is meant to secure common ground. G.: Just so. He is not interested in method as intellectual drill for its own sake. He wants a shared rational footing from which sects may cease burning one another. S.: That sounds nobler than most methodological prose. G.: It is. Most methodological prose is written by men who hope to improve journals. Aconzio hopes to improve Christendom. S.: That is a larger brief. G.: Uncomfortably larger, yes. S.: Then why do you say he almost invents conversational implicature and then disinvents it? G.: Because there are places where he seems to see that what is conveyed in discourse outruns what is explicitly stated, especially once passion, superstition, and polemical habit enter. S.: And then? G.: And then he recoils into method, as if to save discourse from its own excesses by stricter procedural light. S.: So he glimpses the richness of implication, then fears its abuse. G.: Exactly. He sees that implication may unite understanding, but also that it may become one of Satan’s own favourite devices. S.: Which means he cannot simply celebrate the unsaid. G.: No. For him the unsaid is double-edged. It may be prudential, reverent, suggestive, or charitable. But it may also be calumny, insinuation, faction, superstition, and the pious lie. S.: Then your sympathy with him lies not in any shared doctrine of the unsaid, but in a shared awareness of its power. G.: Admirably put. He and I meet in the recognition that the life of discourse is not confined to what is baldly asserted. S.: Yet you are more relaxed about that than he is. G.: Quite. I do not believe one can cure language of implication without also curing it of civilisation. S.: Whereas Aconzio hopes to discipline implication by method. G.: Or at least to submit it to a regime of honesty, charity, and fear of God. S.: You say that dryly. G.: Because I am English. S.: He is not merely Italian either, though. He becomes, in a sense, English by exile. G.: A fellow Brit, as I like to tease him. One of those imported reformers who improve England by making it less certain of itself. S.: Yet England also excludes him from sacramental comfort. G.: Yes. That too matters. He arrives as a dissenter among dissenters, then proves too difficult even for the relatively tolerant arrangements available. S.: So he is out of place nearly everywhere. G.: Which is one reason he remains philosophically alive. The settled thinker is often dead on the page. The displaced thinker still has to think. S.: Then we must take seriously his engineering too. G.: Very much so. The man drains marshes, reports on fortifications, and writes on method. That is an admirable combination. S.: Because he knows that systems fail both in argument and in water. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become hydraulic. S.: I shall try to remain only moderately marshy. G.: Better. Now, De methodo. The title alone already distinguishes him from those who later make a virtue of formlessness. S.: You are thinking of Feyerabend. G.: Inevitably. “Against method” is the sort of title one can only write after several centuries of method have made thought safe enough to become rebellious theatrically. S.: Whereas Aconzio writes before the safety. G.: Exactly. He writes when method is still a weapon against superstition, dogmatic cruelty, and factional delirium. S.: So for him method is emancipatory. G.: Yes. It clears ground. It does not narrow the mind in order to make a school; it clears a place where adversaries may at least begin from terms not wholly poisoned. S.: Then method is a precondition of toleration. G.: In his best moments, yes. If one cannot agree on procedures of inquiry, one falls back upon punishment. S.: That is a bleak but plausible anthropology. G.: Very plausible. He sees that where argument fails institutionally, force enters as the counterfeit of conviction. S.: Which is why he is so severe on penalties for heresy. G.: Precisely. Once opening one’s mouth calls the executioner, Scripture itself becomes idle, because no one will risk inquiry. S.: So persecution destroys exegesis. G.: More than that. It destroys the very common world of reasoning in which differences might be tested rather than exterminated. S.: Then there is a political pragmatics here. G.: Absolutely. Aconzio is not merely a theorist of method in the abstract. He is an analyst of what happens to discourse when fear colonises utterance. S.: Then would you say that persecution is the coercive annihilation of implicature? G.: That is too neat, but not wholly wrong. Under persecution, one either says nothing, says less, or says falsely. The spectrum of implication becomes distorted by terror. S.: So the unsaid no longer belongs to tact, but to survival. G.: Yes. And that is why his concern with clarity is not pedantry. It is an attempt to keep discourse from becoming a battlefield of insinuation policed by power. S.: Yet he also writes Stratagemata Satanae, which seems almost to revel in the machinery of delusion. G.: Because one must know the enemy’s repertoire. Method alone without pathology is naïve. You must know how discourse goes wrong. S.: Then the two books belong together more closely than one first assumes. G.: Exactly. De methodo says how inquiry ought to proceed; the Stratagemata say how it is corrupted in practice. S.: So method and devilry are reciprocal categories. G.: A little grandly put, but yes. One defines the other by opposition. S.: And the feminine abstract nouns? G.: Ah yes. Superbia and her companions. I rather like the almost allegorical severity of it. Vice is personified, but analytically personified. S.: Not simply in order to moralise, but to identify recurring operations. G.: Exactly. Pride, calumny, faction, superstition, hatred, schism. These are not merely private sins but public distorters of understanding. S.: Which suggests that for Aconzio conversation is always in danger of becoming liturgical warfare. G.: Very good. Especially in sixteenth-century religion, where every doctrinal nuance may be weaponised. S.: Then when he speaks of a common footing, he does not mean agreement in creed, but agreement in the manner of handling disagreement. G.: Precisely. That is why he matters. He is trying to discover the procedural basis of coexistence amidst substantive division. S.: Which sounds very modern. G.: It does, but one must not modernise him too quickly. His common ground is still sought under God, not under some later liberal neutrality. S.: So the fear of God remains a positive condition of discourse. G.: For him, yes. Not because terror is epistemically salutary, but because piety, rightly understood, may humble the egoism that turns every disagreement into persecution. S.: You sound almost Anglican. G.: My mother would have approved. S.: She liked Aconzio, you said. G.: She would have liked his gravity, his seriousness, and the fact that he is both doctrinally troublesome and morally strenuous. S.: Like many of your favourites. G.: Unfortunately, yes. S.: Then let us ask about the “of” in Il timore di Dio. G.: Ah, the famous little English question in Italian dress. “Of” there is not an empty link. It is the whole relation. S.: Fear of God: not God fearing, but the human disposition oriented toward God. G.: Exactly. The genitive preposition carries the direction of piety, and Aconzio’s whole practical programme hangs on such orientations. S.: So even a small function word can house theology. G.: They often do. The little words carry the burden while the grand nouns preen. S.: Which again makes him Gricean in your preferred sense. G.: Yes. He notices that serious understanding depends not only on majestic content but on the way relations are silently structured. S.: Then implicature for him would be less an achievement than a risk to be disciplined. G.: I think that is right. He knows that what is suggested, insinuated, or left to be gathered can either deepen charity or inflame division. S.: So there is no innocent “beyond the literal.” G.: None whatever. The beyond is where angels and devils both work. S.: That is a good line. G.: Keep it and make it worse. S.: Happily. Then would you say that Aconzio distrusts rhetorical surplus? G.: He distrusts undisciplined surplus, certainly. He is not against richness of understanding, but against the ways in which rhetorical and doctrinal habit let words carry poison unexamined. S.: So method is an antidote to inherited implication. G.: In part, yes. Communities build up default inferences around words: heretic, church, truth, authority, obedience. Aconzio tries to break those sedimentations open. S.: Which is already a form of conversational analysis. G.: Quite. Not in my vocabulary, but recognisably in my territory. S.: Then perhaps what fascinates you is that he knows that language does not merely report divisions; it reproduces them. G.: Exactly. If every term comes loaded with inherited accusation, the exchange is corrupted before it begins. S.: So method must include lexical hygiene. G.: Very much so. Though “hygiene” always risks sounding antiseptic. Better perhaps: lexical justice. S.: I shall keep both and choose later. G.: A dangerous editorial freedom. S.: One of my stratagems. G.: Satanic already. Now, the toleration issue. He is not merely saying, “Be nice to heretics.” S.: No. He is saying that coercion destroys the very possibility of honest inquiry. G.: Precisely. Once dissent is penalised, the public use of reason collapses into either conformity or coded speech. S.: Then persecution manufactures bad pragmatics. G.: Excellent. Fear generates evasions, innuendo, silence, counterfeit assent, performative orthodoxy. Conversation becomes theatre under police supervision. S.: Which means the persecutor never really hears belief at all. G.: Very good. He hears only its constrained simulacrum. S.: Then Aconzio’s toleration is epistemic as much as moral. G.: Entirely. It protects not only persons but the conditions under which utterances can be sincere, disagreements explicit, and understanding corrigible. S.: That sounds almost like the cooperative principle under Reformation duress. G.: A dangerous but useful comparison. S.: Because for you too conversation presupposes good faith, mutual recognisability, and a shared willingness not to destroy the exchange. G.: Yes, though I did not usually have to add “under pain of burning.” S.: Oxford had milder sanctions. G.: Only slightly. S.: Then what of his being “dated”? Reformation, Basel, exile, naturalisation, marsh drainage, and all the rest. G.: Speranza does well to resist that entire embalming gesture. Aconzio is not merely a date with a printer’s line attached. S.: Because chronology can kill a mind before one has read it. G.: Exactly. Historiography often behaves like a mortuary catalogue. Reformers here, toleration theorists there, anti-trinitarians in that cabinet, engineers elsewhere. S.: Whereas you want to talk to him. G.: Naturally. A living intelligence is wasted if one treats it merely as a museum label. S.: So Speranza lets you enjoy him without condescension. G.: Yes. That is one of his principal virtues. He restores the possibility of philosophical pleasure in figures whom academic periodisation has over-disciplined. S.: Not stripped of context, but not imprisoned by it. G.: Precisely. One must know he is sixteenth-century, displaced, anti-papal, heterodox, and all the rest. But one must not let those labels do all the reading. S.: Then perhaps the real Aconzio appears between the labels. G.: Often the best philosophers do. S.: And the devil’s list helps. G.: It does. Lists can be wonderfully anti-sentimental. They prevent us from speaking vaguely of “evil influences” and force us to identify operations. S.: Such as pride, hatred, slander, schism. G.: Exactly. And once identified, they become analysable rather than merely feared. S.: That is very much your own instinct too. G.: Yes. If a thing can be distinguished, it can often be disarmed. S.: Not always. G.: No. But confusion favours the enemy. S.: Aconzio would have liked that. G.: I think so. Though he might have wanted me to capitalise Enemy more often. S.: Which you would refuse. G.: Quite. Capital letters are usually where theology begins to shout. S.: Then one final question. Does Aconzio think method can wholly defeat stratagem? G.: No. If he did, he would not have written the stratagems at all. He knows corruption is permanent. S.: Then method is not victory but vigilance. G.: Splendid. Yes. Vigilance, discipline, repeated clearing, repeated return to what may be commonly tested. S.: So the toleration he seeks is not softness but a hard civic precondition of truth-seeking. G.: Exactly. Toleration is not indifference to truth; it is the refusal to let force pretend to be an argument. S.: Then his relevance now is obvious. G.: Obvious, but one must say it without vulgar updating. Better to say that he remains intelligible because the conditions he feared are perennial. S.: Fear colonising speech, inherited accusation corrupting words, coercion distorting assent. G.: Yes. Those are not dated problems. S.: Nor is the devil. G.: Alas, no. He merely changes his vocabulary. S.: And sometimes acquires better printers. G.: Very good. S.: Then your final judgment? G.: Aconzio is valuable because he joins three things seldom joined well: a seriousness about method, a pathology of corrupt discourse, and a principled defence of toleration as the condition of shared inquiry. S.: And the link to your own work? G.: He reminds one that implication is never merely an ornament of conversation. It may be a trap, a shelter, a courtesy, a poison, or a bridge. The task is to know which. S.: That is nearly a motto. G.: Too neat for a motto. S.: Then a warning. G.: Better. S.: Method without charity becomes persecution; charity without method becomes confusion. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Basilean, with a damp English edge. Aconzio, Giacomo (1565). Della ragione di stato. Basel: Perna.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Acri – Ossia: Grice ed Acri: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.   Pasquale Acri (Catanzaro, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “A. explores quite a few topics – all in the good Lit. Hum. Oxon. tradition – and since he tutored at an even older varsity, kudos! He has explored ‘Amore’ and he expands on the Athenian dialettica – he in fact distinguishes between turbo and sereno – He left his notes on sereno as an unpublication, but a tutee cared to publish them ‘Unpublication’ – There is turbo, and there is turbato – as applied to ‘colloquenza’ qua conversational dyad,  Acri speaks of the colloquenza itself as being ‘turbata’ – he relishes on that – if there is no ardimento, and the Romans loved one – what’s the good to argue? The second phase of the dialettica is ‘serena’ – I find the distinction genial and in a way corresponds to my epagoge/diagoge distinction – the ‘turbo’ is dyadic – say A wants to influence B (turbo 1), B gets influenced and expresses it in a second conversational move (turbo 2). – Dialettica turbata – they reach the principle of conversational helpfulness and they arrive at the ‘sereno’ – dialettica serena’ – until the next turbo arises, that is1. I like A. – he is a platonist, and he is explicitly against the positivists, whom he contrasts to the ‘filosofi sobri.’ His own theory of ideas is hardly platonic, but finds its base on VICO, which is nice – since, if an Italian does not understand VICO, no one will! A. explores the connection between idea and expression, and considers the radice (root or stem) of expressions – he comments extensively on Cratilo. He is a sensualist, so at the root of it all is what he calls, after De Interpretatione of lizio il fantasma and the imagine. I love A.’s rendition of the Cratilo into the vernacular!” Intricatissimo viluppo di ragionamenti da solo non può avere piena evidenza. La colloquenza turbata di Socrate e Cratilo, l’enigma del numero in Platone, abbozzo d’una teorica delle idee. Grice, University Parks, Sunday afternoon, 1952. It is a habit of mine—call it a private superstition—that Austin’s Saturday mornings do their real work only on Sunday, when the noise has settled and one can hear what, if anything, was actually said. Yesterday Austin was talking—freely, as he does—about what he called Athenian dialectic as opposed to Oxonian dialectic. It reminded me of an old volume Hardie used to bring out when he wanted to disinfect us against reverence for “dialectic” in the abstract: Acri, Sulla dialettica antica e moderna. Hardie’s joke, delivered with that Scottish relish for abbreviations, was that Acri makes it sound like A. & M.—Ancient and Modern—as if dialectic were a hymn-book you could carry under your arm. “All very edifying,” Hardie would say, “until you notice the tune has been borrowed.” Acri’s point—at least as Hardie weaponised it—was political: Hegel is not reading Plato; he is using Plato, or misusing him, for Prussian ends. Plato becomes a costume in which modern history can march about looking inevitable. Fine. But what about Austin? Is this Athens-versus-Oxford contrast a distinction, or merely a piece of Oxford theatre? I don’t think it holds—at least, not in the way Austin means it to. For one thing, the Athenian “tutorial” (if one can call it that) looks, from what survives, freer than ours. Athenian dialectic is often depicted as something that happens in public, in the open air, among interruptions: it is not a scheduled private wrestling-match between a don and a man who has to get a degree. Oxonian dialectic, by contrast, is indoors, and the walls are not incidental: they keep the conversation tight, examinable, and faintly punitive. In Athens, the elenchus is a civic sport; in Oxford, it is a method of assessment wearing a philosophical mask. And yet Austin is onto something. Athens and Oxford are alike in one respect that matters: both are big enough to support a crowd. If you take “Athenian dialectic” seriously, you end up listing Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and then the entire after‑market of minor schools—Sceptics, Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans—everyone with a corner and a doctrine. Oxford is the same in miniature: a handful of major figures, a cloud of minor men, and an endless multiplication of “positions,” most of them sustained by nothing more than stamina and a room. But—this is where Acri helps—dialectic is not just a manner of arguing. It comes in moods. Acri’s distinction (which I still like) between the turbata and the serena—between argument as disturbance and argument as settlement—fits Oxford better than Austin’s Athens/Oxford geography. A tutorial begins, typically, in turbo: one party wants to move the other; the other resists or is moved and then shows it in the next move. That is the dyad doing its work. Then—if it goes well—the conversation reaches something like sereno: not agreement, necessarily, but a shared grip on what is at issue, the point at which disagreement becomes stable enough to be intelligent. Until the next turbo arises, as it always does, usually five minutes before the hour. Acri’s deeper claim is that you cannot have the serene without first having the disturbed. Austin, being Austin, wants the disturbance without the metaphysics: he wants dialectic as a clean set of “moves” with no political theology attached. Hegel, in Acri’s telling, wants the disturbance to look like destiny: dialectic as history’s engine, the struggle for who will be master next. So perhaps the best way to put it is this: Athens invents dialectic as a public form; Oxford domesticates it into a private discipline; Hegel nationalises it; and Austin—God bless him—tries to turn it back into etiquette. Punchline (as I reached the river and decided not to go back): If Austin is right, Oxford has an “Oxonian dialectic.” If Acri is right, Oxford has only two dialectics: the one that gets you your degree, and the one you start practising after you’ve got it. Grice: Acri, ti confesso che la tua distinzione tra dialettica turbata e serena mi ha colpito. Secondo te, è inevitabile che ogni colloquenza inizi con un turbo, prima di approdare al sereno? Acri: Caro Grice, credo proprio di sì. Ogni dialogo nasce da un’energia irrequieta, una sorta di ardimento, ma solo attraversando il turbamento si può aspirare alla serenità concettuale. È il percorso stesso della ragione: dall’inquietudine alla chiarezza. Grice: E dunque, la “implicatura conversazionale” che si genera nel turbo, rischia di essere fraintesa oppure può arricchire il dialogo, se guidata verso il sereno? Acri: Dipende dalla qualità degli interlocutori, Grice. Se c’è apertura e desiderio di verità, anche la turbata implicatura può diventare ponte verso una comprensione più profonda. Come diceva Vico, bisogna far parlare le radici delle espressioni, senza temere l’intricato viluppo dei ragionamenti. With a prolific philosopher such as Acri one sees Speranza's and Grice's strategy. Speranza is hardly stealing Acri's voice to re-write it in Gricean jargon -- Speranza is trying to re-evoke Acri's voice in Griceain key. Note the key word of 'dialettica'. Speranza has troubled himself to stick with the vernnacular in Italian and provide the best he can how Grice -- who somehow skipps all dialectic between the Athenian and the Oxonian -- to enlarge the perspective vantage -- again, without pigeonholing Acri within a single movement or -ism as the case is in standard histoies of italian philosophy. What deserves emphasis in Speranza’s treatment of Acri is the delicacy with which he refuses to overwrite an already distinctive voice in borrowed Gricean jargon. He is not ventriloquising Acri into Oxford idiom, but re-evoking Acri in a Gricean key, and that difference is crucial. The keyword here is indeed dialettica. Speranza has taken the trouble to remain close to the vernacular, to let turbo, turbata, serena, colloquenza, and ardimento keep their own local force, while still showing how a philosopher like Grice, who largely leaps over the great classical and post-classical fortunes of dialectic, can nevertheless enlarge the angle from which Acri is seen. That is an act of scholarly tact rather than annexation. Acri is not pigeonholed as merely a Platonist, a Vichian, an anti-positivist, or a provincial curiosity in the standard histories of Italian philosophy; he is allowed to appear as a many-sided intelligence whose own categories of disturbed and serene dialectic illuminate conversation from within. Speranza’s merit lies precisely there: he lets Acri sound like Acri, while making Grice’s framework serve as resonance rather than replacement. G.: Let us begin where Austin began badly and Acri began better, with the word dialectic itself. S.: Because Austin made it sound like a local custom. G.: Precisely. As if one could simply oppose Athenian dialectic to Oxonian dialectic and think one had thereby done philosophy rather than geography. S.: Whereas Acri thinks dialectic has moods, not merely postal addresses. G.: Very good. That is exactly why he interests me. He sees that argument is not only a form but a temperature. S.: Turbo and sereno. G.: Yes. Disturbance and settlement, though even “settlement” is a little too legal for the second. S.: You would prefer composure? G.: Or stable grip. The sereno is not necessarily agreement; it is the point at which the issue becomes sufficiently held to be intelligently pursued. S.: So not peace, exactly. G.: No. A conversation may be perfectly serene while disagreement remains in full employment. S.: Then turbo is the first necessary violence? G.: “Violence” overstates it, unless one is reading Hegel after midnight. Better: the necessary unsettlement. Someone moves, presses, resists, interrupts, dislodges. S.: And this is where you connect Acri to your own notion of implicature. G.: Yes. Because in the disturbed phase much is conveyed obliquely. Tone, omission, impatience, irony, challenge, invitation, tactical understatement, all the small diagnostics of philosophical pressure. S.: So implicature is born in turbulence. G.: Often. Or at least it becomes most visible there. S.: That sounds rather unlike your official examples. G.: My official examples were designed for safety and teachability. Philosophical life is messier, and Acri is useful precisely because he admits the mess without worshipping it. S.: Unlike those who romanticise dialectic. G.: Exactly. He neither reduces it to polite method nor inflates it into destiny. S.: Then let us take Austin first. What exactly bothered you in his Athens-versus-Oxford contrast? G.: Its theatricality. Austin liked live distinctions, but sometimes he mistook a clever opposition for a stable one. Athens in his mouth risked becoming a grand externalisation of what Oxford liked to imagine about itself. S.: That it too had a civic seriousness? G.: Or a pedigree. But the actual contrast is more unruly. Athenian dialectic, insofar as it survives to us, is public, open-air, interrupted, porous, half sport and half civic nuisance. S.: While Oxford is indoors. G.: Indoors, examinable, timetabled, and faintly punitive. S.: The walls matter. G.: Immensely. A wall changes a question. Once one is in a room with a tutor and a degree hanging invisibly over the exchange, dialectic ceases to be merely an inquiry and becomes also an ordeal. S.: Then Acri’s categories fit Oxford better than Austin’s geography. G.: Exactly. A tutorial begins in turbo because one party wants to move the other, and the other either resists or shows the movement in the next reply. S.: Turbo one and turbo two. G.: Precisely. The dyad at work. Acri is very good on that, though his own phrasing is more Italian and more humane. S.: Colloquenza turbata. G.: Yes, and I rather like that. Not simply argument in a disturbed mode, but the very colloquy itself disturbed, as though the relation were shaken, not merely the content. S.: That already sounds more subtle than “debate.” G.: Much more subtle. Debate is too parliamentary. Acri gives one a living conversational weather. S.: And then the serene comes when the issue has become clear enough to bear disagreement. G.: Excellent. That is the point. The conversation need not end in harmony. It need only arrive at a form of mutual purchase. S.: A shared grip. G.: Yes. The issue becomes graspable by both, even if not resolved in the same way by both. S.: Until the next turbo. G.: Which, in Oxford, tends to arrive about five minutes before the hour. S.: Because then the pupil says what he ought to have said twenty minutes earlier. G.: Exactly. Or the tutor realises what he should have denied at the beginning. S.: Then Acri’s two dialectics are really cycles, not stages. G.: Better. One should not imagine a neat linear progression from confusion to peace. It is more tidal. Turbo generates sereno, which reveals the conditions for the next turbo. S.: That sounds almost Heraclitean. G.: Do not make Acri Greek too quickly. He has enough Vico in him to remain properly Italian. S.: Then let us talk about Vico. G.: A necessary turn. Acri’s interest in roots, expressions, and the living relation between idea and expression owes a great deal to Vichian sensibility. S.: Because words have roots and arguments have histories. G.: Precisely. Acri does not treat language as a transparent neutral channel. He wants to know how expression grows from imaginative and sensuous life. S.: Fantasma and imagine. G.: Yes. That is another reason he interests me. He knows that before the sober philosopher arrives with distinctions, there is already a sensible and imaginative field in which meaning is half-born. S.: So the disturbed dialectic is not merely social disturbance, but conceptual disturbance at the root. G.: Very good. The trouble is already in the relation between idea and expression. Language does not sit still for thought. S.: Which makes Cratylus unavoidable. G.: Entirely. If one cares about roots, names, natural fit, and the seductions of etymology, one ends up sooner or later with Cratylus looking over one’s shoulder. S.: Acri comments extensively on Cratylus, you say. G.: Yes, and wisely in the vernacular. That matters. He is not merely embalming Plato; he is forcing the old questions to speak Italian. S.: Which Speranza also does, in another register. G.: Exactly. That is part of Speranza’s tact. He does not translate Acri into sterile Griceanism. He lets Acri’s own vernacular pressure remain audible. S.: Turbo, turbata, serena, colloquenza, ardimento. G.: Those words matter. One loses something if one simply replaces them with “stage one,” “stage two,” “argument,” and “transition.” S.: Then ardimento is not merely courage? G.: No. It is something between daring, energy, and conversational thrust. Without it there is no disturbance, and without disturbance no serious inquiry. S.: So the philosophical vice would be excessive sobriety. G.: Acri would say so, I think. He explicitly contrasts the positivists with the filosofi sobri, and one hears both irony and impatience in the phrase. S.: Because too much sobriety becomes sterility. G.: Precisely. A conversation that never risks disturbance is often merely administratively correct. S.: That sounds like certain Oxford seminars. G.: More than certain. S.: Then you and Acri agree that argument needs a kind of ardour. G.: Under discipline, yes. I distrust philosophical hysteria, but I distrust bloodless correctness too. A certain managed unsettlement is healthy. S.: Managed unsettlement sounds like one of your maxims. G.: It ought not to. Maxims are for cooperation; unsettlement is what makes the cooperation worth having. S.: Then perhaps the cooperative principle itself presupposes a prior disturbance. G.: That is well said. One does not need cooperation in a vacuum. One needs it because interlocutors are bringing different commitments, resistances, half-formulated pressures to bear. S.: So conversation is born from asymmetry. G.: Often from asymmetry, yes. One knows more, cares differently, sees another implication, resists another conclusion. Turbo is the formal name for that friction. S.: Then your implicature in the turbo phase would be more unstable than in the serene phase. G.: Usually. In the disturbed phase, much is carried by pressure, tone, and provisional inference. In the serene phase, the same implications may become more stably recognisable. S.: So one could say that the sereno is where implicature becomes examinable. G.: Very good. In the turbulence one gathers more than one can yet sort; in the serene one begins to articulate what was going on. S.: That is almost your Sunday reflection on Austin’s Saturday mornings. G.: Exactly. I have always thought the real work of certain conversations occurs after the noise, when one can hear what, if anything, was actually said. S.: Or meant. G.: Indeed. Often especially what was meant. S.: Then the University Parks walk is already Acrian in spirit. G.: I suppose it is. Sunday provides the sereno to Saturday’s turbo. S.: And Hardie’s joke about A. and M.? G.: Ah yes. Ancient and Modern as if dialectic were a portable hymn-book. Hardie was good at disinfecting us against reverence for abstractions. S.: But he weaponised Acri politically. G.: Quite. He turned Acri into an anti-Hegelian tonic, which was not wholly unfair but not the whole story either. S.: Because for Hardie the point was that Hegel was using Plato for Prussian ends. G.: Exactly. Plato as costume, history as inevitability, dialectic as state-theology in motion. S.: Whereas Austin wanted the disturbance without the metaphysics. G.: Yes. Austin wanted clean moves, practical discrimination, no national-historical thunder behind the words. S.: Dialectic as etiquette. G.: A little harsh, but not false. Austin tried to make dialectic behave like a particularly alert form of linguistic manners. S.: And Hegel wanted it to behave like history’s engine. G.: Precisely. Acri sees enough of both temptations to reject them. S.: So where does he stand? G.: Somewhere more humane and more local. Dialectic is neither an imperial motor nor a set of drawing-room refinements. It is the lived oscillation between disturbance and settled grasp. S.: That sounds almost modest. G.: Which is why it is true. S.: Then is Athens irrelevant? G.: Not irrelevant. Athens matters as the public invention of dialectic, as the place where questioning, interruption, and civic visibility still cling to the form. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford matters as the domestication of that form into private pedagogical discipline. It takes the public sport and turns it into indoor examination and tutorial combat. S.: Then the historical formula would be: Athens invents, Oxford domesticates, Hegel nationalises, Austin polishes. G.: That is not bad at all. S.: Acri? G.: Acri diagnoses. S.: Better. G.: Thank you. S.: And Speranza? G.: Speranza re-hears. He lets us hear Acri in a register that resonates with my own concerns without cancelling Acri’s distinctiveness. S.: That is the point you admire most. G.: Very much. Too often historical comparison is annexation. One philosopher is rewritten in the terms of another until the earlier voice is lost. S.: Whereas here Acri still sounds like Acri. G.: Yes. Turbo remains turbo. Colloquenza remains colloquenza. Vico remains Vico. Plato remains refracted through Calabria, not simply subsumed into Oxford. S.: Then Speranza is not stealing Acri’s voice. G.: No. He is tuning it into a neighbouring key. S.: And that neighbouring key is conversational reason. G.: Exactly. Acri’s categories illuminate conversation from within, not because they were secretly waiting for me, but because they touch the same pressure-points by another path. S.: Then perhaps the key term is dialettica itself. G.: Entirely. We have let the word become either grandly historicist or tiresomely procedural. Acri restores its temperament. S.: Its moods. G.: Yes. And that is very important. Philosophical forms have moods. The same nominal structure may function very differently under disturbance and under composure. S.: Then do you think Austin missed that? G.: Largely. Austin saw acts and distinctions, but he was less alive to the large emotional and relational weather of discourse than he thought he was. S.: Yet he was certainly alive to tone. G.: Oh yes, locally, brilliantly. But he preferred to keep the tone under procedural description. Acri is less shy of saying that the conversation itself is troubled. S.: Colloquenza turbata. G.: Yes. I rather wish we had said that more often in Oxford. It would have saved us the pretence that all philosophical pressure is merely logical. S.: Then your own epagoge and diagoge distinction comes near this? G.: Near enough to be interesting. There are moments of leading-in, drawing-out, gathering, and then of carrying-through, but Acri’s terminology is warmer and less scholastic. S.: Warmer because more conversational. G.: Exactly. He writes as someone who knows that interlocutors are not only positions but persons. S.: Does this connect to his writing on love? G.: I think so. A man who has written on amore will not mistake discourse for pure geometry. S.: Yet he also cares about number in Plato. G.: Which is delightful. He can move from colloquy to number, from Cratylus to ideas, from roots of words to the puzzle of concepts. That range is one of his virtues. S.: And one of the reasons you like him. G.: Certainly. He is not a specialist in the miserable modern sense. He ranges as Lit. Hum. once allowed one to range. S.: All in the good Oxon. tradition, though he is in Catanzaro. G.: Exactly. It is always pleasing to find an older and less provincial version of one’s own better habits elsewhere. S.: Then is he a Platonist? G.: In some respects, yes, but not a museum Platonist. His theory of ideas is inflected by Vico and by an interest in expression that prevents the ideas from floating above language. S.: So idea and expression are reciprocal. G.: Yes. The idea needs expression, and expression is not a mere clothing but part of the idea’s historical and sensible life. S.: Then Cratylus becomes more than etymological play. G.: Much more. It becomes a testing ground for whether names arise by nature, by convention, by root, by use, by imaginative sediment. S.: Which sounds surprisingly close to your own suspicion that meaning is not exhausted by lexical assignment. G.: Quite. Though I should formulate it differently. Still, Acri is alive to the fact that words have more than one ancestry: institutional, sensual, imaginative, historical. S.: So the root of expression is not merely grammatical but anthropological. G.: Excellent. Yes. That is why fantasma and imagine matter. There is no clean leap from pure concept to pure word. There is an imaginative middle. S.: And the disturbed dialectic may be where that middle becomes visible. G.: Often. In peaceful exposition one forgets the buried pressures. In disturbance the roots show through. S.: Then turbo has a philological function too. G.: Very good indeed. Disturbance exposes the strain between what one wants to say and what one can say, which is often where etymology, metaphor, and old semantic deposits return. S.: That sounds more Vichian than Platonic. G.: It is, and Acri is clever enough to let both currents meet. S.: Then why do standard histories flatten him? G.: Because standard histories need labels. Platonist, Vichian, anti-positivist, southern intellectual, provincial pedagogue, take your pick. Once labelled, a thinker becomes fileable. S.: And Speranza resists that filing. G.: Yes. He lets Acri remain plural without becoming vague. S.: That is harder than it sounds. G.: Much harder. Most scholars either over-systematise or sentimentalise. Speranza does neither here. S.: Then perhaps the closing question is whether every true conversation must pass through disturbance. G.: I think Acri is right that without some unsettlement nothing genuinely philosophical begins. S.: Even if the unsettlement is very small? G.: Especially then. Sometimes the slightest pressure, a single hesitation, a shifted example, a corrected article, is enough to start the dialectical weather changing. S.: Then turbo need not be dramatic. G.: No. It may be almost invisible to the outsider. The important thing is that one interlocutor has ceased to be where he was. S.: And sereno is when both know where the new issue stands. G.: Precisely. Not solved, perhaps, but placed. S.: Until the next movement. G.: Always until the next movement. S.: Then Oxford has not one dialectic but two: the one that earns the degree and the one that begins afterward. G.: That is Acri’s best revenge on Austin. S.: And yours? G.: My revenge is to admit that he was right. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Calabrian, with a Sunday Oxford mist.Acri, Pasquale (1870). Sulla dialettica antica e moderna. Catanzaro.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Adami – Ossia: Grice ed Adami: la ragione conversazionale e la prammatica come rettorica conversazionale.   Antonio Adami (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e la prammatica come rettorica conversazionale. Grice: “Perhaps Leech, of all people, interpreted me best! Pragmatics IS conversational rhetoric – only we never took rhetoric too seriously at Oxford after the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy was instituted! Known for his pedagogical works on literature and language. He authors the popular textbook PRECETTI DI RETTORICA, ‘adattati alla capacità’ dei lettori. He belongs to the class of scholars common in the Enlightenment period who focus on refining the education. His "precetto di rettorica" provides a structured, simplified guide to classical. Associated with Firenze, active in literary circles. Beyond his Precetti di rettorica, his literary output includes: Le lodi di Maria sempre vergine, a collection of poetic or rhetorical praises dedicated to Mary, reflecting his status as an abbot, and poesie chi meglio le parerà, e 1’avrà a grazia . ut Deus. Magnificat U. J.D. D. Janaarius Vico in hac Regia St odiar um universitate profejfor, re-videat, et in scriptis referat. Datum Neapoli. V Nicolaus Epifcopus Put. C. M. ILLUSTRISI E REVEREND. SIGNORE.' P Er ordine di V. S. Illuftrifiima con fommo, mio piacere ho letto 1’opera intitolata , Precetti di Rettorica \ di D. Antonio Adami .*, F ifteflo argomento, la giuflifica . da ogni qua-, lunque menomo sospetto: anzi ho grandemente ammirato la giudiziosa condotta del nobile autore che ha voluto ingegnosamente dimostrare che l’arti anche nella di loro struttura possono la natura imitare, la quale ne’picciolissimi corpi sa egualmente esprimere tutte le parti di cui i più valli ed enormi sono comporti. Cosi egli da abile maeftro con somma brevità e chiarezza insieme cerca raccorre in un’enchiridio T quanto dagli altri retori in ampj volumi fi è mai internato. Quindi la stimo degnissima della pubblica luce, ove V. S. Illuftriflima così si compiaccia. Di V. S. Illuftrifs. , e Reverendifs. Divotifs ., ed Obbligatifs. Vico.Neap, Vifo refcripto fu<e Regalis Vico de commiflione Reverendi Regii Cappellani Major il , ordine prRegia Pragmatica. Prammatica come rettorica conversazionale. Grice: St John’s, 1964. Seminar on Conversation. Potts is taking notes again, which I’m never sure is a good sign (non‑natural meaning, rather) or not. I prefer a man to look at me. From where I stand, I can hardly see what he’s writing, and it is always possible that he is merely pretending—producing, under the description “note-taking,” what is really doodling. Still: the handwriting, from a distance, has an elegance that suggests either sincerity or a wasted calling. He began writing in earnest when I produced my little table: There is a desideratum of conversational candour. There is a desideratum of conversational clarity. And besides these—here comes the clash—there is a principle of conversational benevolence and, lurking behind it, a smaller but more durable principle of conversational self‑love. The following week Potts handed me a thin Italian book as if it were evidence: Adami, 1790, Precetti di rettorica. Potts: “He calls them precetti, sir. And with a straight face.” Grice: “Yes.” (Which in Oxford means something between “no” and “go on.”) He persisted. Potts: “They’re precetti di rettorica. And if I may echo Hardie—what does Adami mean, or means (if you insist on the Mediterranean historical present), by that di?” I said, because the boy deserved at least one clean correction: Grice: “It’s either ‘precepts for rhetoric’ or ‘rhetorical precepts’—and those are not the same trade.” Potts (brightening): “Exactly. Yours are precepts for talking; his are talking-precepts. Yours are praecepta for conversation; his are praecepta rhetorica.” Grice: “And the adjective is doing all the mischief. ‘Rhetorical’ is one of those words that quietly licenses bad behaviour by calling it technique.” Potts, eager to agree, fell into the standard trap: Potts: “So your point, which I obviously take and agree with—” Grice: “With which you agree.” He stopped, corrected himself, and continued like a penitent: Potts: “—with which I agree: your maxims are more like a Kantian counsel of prudence. A maxim. A—well—a minimaxim, if one may borrow from economics: minimise conversational cost, maximise cooperative yield.” This was actually rather good, though it pained me to admit it. Potts: “So perhaps it’s best to drop the grand talk—desiderata, principles, Adami’s precetti—and treat it all as one big precept, stated properly in the imperative: ‘Try to make your conversational contribution one that is true.’” Then, with Strawson behind him and enjoying himself, Potts asked the question he’d been saving: Potts: “But how, sir, can ‘try’ be an imperative?” Strawson, solemn as a parish clerk, intervened on my behalf: Strawson: “Grice is speaking as a grammarian. ‘Try’ is an imperative. It’s not even hypothetical, on the face of it. It’s simply: Try.” Potts (less triumphant now): “Even if I don’t succeed?” At which point I did what Oxford dons do when cornered: I made matters clear by going from obscurus to obscurior. Grice: “The seminar is not about conversation. It’s about the trouble we get into when we describe actions—‘I tried to sit and eventually succeeded, and I did it intentionally’—and then discover that our own vocabulary contains both the precept and the excuse, both the maxim and the evasion.” And then, because one can’t resist a historical moral when a Neapolitan schoolbook is involved: “Adami’s audience,” I said, “was some adolescent whom he thought needed precepts put into his face—rather as I had at Clifton in Composition, and rather as Henry VIII institutionalised with his grammar schools: not to make boys brilliant, but to make them intelligible.” Punchline: Potts looked down at his notes at last, as if seeing what he’d been doing, and said, very quietly: “So Adami was teaching rhetoric to children—while you’re teaching children how not to sound rhetorical.” And Strawson, without looking up, added: “Or what.”Grice: Caro Adami, riflettendo sul tuo "Precetti di rettorica", mi chiedevo: è forse la prammatica, come tu la intendi, la vera erede della retorica classica nelle nostre conversazioni quotidiane?  Adami: Gentile Grice, credo proprio di sì. La prammatica non è altro che l’arte di saper parlare con giudizio, adattando il discorso alla capacità e alle esigenze dell’ascoltatore. Anche oggi, come in passato, le nostre parole cercano sempre la via più efficace per raggiungere chi le ascolta.  Grice: Vedo dunque che per te, come per me, la conversazione è un esercizio non solo di chiarezza, ma anche di ingegno e misura. Forse, allora, il buon conversatore è soprattutto un retore che mette la natura a servizio dell’arte?  Adami: Esattame (nte, amico mio! L’arte vera imita la natura nei suoi dettagli più minuti. Così, anche nella più semplice chiacchierata, la padronanza del discorso – la rettorica conversazionale – consente di esprimere pensieri grandi in forme agili e comprensibili a tutti. È questo il cuore della prammatica che insegno. Given Grice's heavy schedule as CUF lecturer in philosophy at a time where he had more tutors that he would have hoped (he was called Godot, as he had them waiting up the stairs to his office) plus the exorbitant number of populace peopling Oxford in the heyday --Grice could NOT quote or research on the hisoty of rhetoric -- he relied on what he had learned at Clifton and hoped his memory would not fail him. Speranza is pointing to that tradition now with specific dates and publication and the interface already set for a prosperous cross-examination of insular pragmatics and cotninental erudition. What one rightly admires in Speranza’s handling of Adami is the way he restores, with dates, titles, and documentary exactness, a rhetorical tradition that Grice himself, for all his classical memory and Clifton training, could scarcely have had the leisure to reconstruct in full during his busiest Oxford years. As a CUF lecturer, overrun with pupils, tutorials, and the peculiar overpopulation of mid-century Oxford, Grice had to rely on recollection, tact, and the remains of an older humanistic formation; he could not be expected to turn himself into a historian of rhetoric as well. Speranza performs that labor after the fact, but does so not pedantically, rather by opening an interface between insular pragmatics and continental erudition. In Adami, this becomes especially fruitful, because the very title Precetti di rettorica lets Speranza recover the point at which what Oxford later called pragmatics may still be seen under the older and more ample name of rhetorical discipline. He is not merely documenting an ancestor to Grice, but showing how Grice’s own conversational concerns belong within a longer history of pedagogical and civic reflection on speech, style, and uptake. That is a real service: it gives Grice the historical rhetoric he had no time to excavate, and gives the reader a richer stage on which pragmatics and rhetoric may cross-examine one another to mutual advantage. Adami, Antonio (1790). Precetti di rettorica. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Addiego – Ossia: Grice ed Addiego: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Vincenzo Maria d’Addiego (Turi, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like A.; his obituary looks fine, ‘amateur mathematician and professional philosopher;’ of course he was a priest and priests tend to get the nicest obituaries written by members of their respective orders!  Henry VIII once said, “I shall follow Occam and not multiply religious orders beyond necessity!’ Some say he went a bit too further! My St. John’s used to be a Cistercian monastery!” “One good thing about Addiego is that instead of trying to prove the immortality of the soul, or the existence of God – “These are Strawsonian presuppositions,’ he would say – he rather played with Platonic numbers and geometries! His mathematical explorations caught the attention of the Pope who invited him to Rome, thus leaving his ‘paese,’ the lovely Bari – and beyond!”. Professa la filosofia, nell'insegnamento della quale accoppia sempre la pietà, lo studio l'amorevolezza el’industria alla precisione de’metodi. A tutti su specchio einodello di quelle rel giose virtù, che più belle appariscono in chi tiene l'altrui direzione. TRATTENIMENTO PEL NEL LETTORE Che D. D. D. NECESSITA DEGLI SU LA MIGLIORAMENTO MACCHINE pubblicamente SIGNORI I Giuseppe GIUSEPPE DE GIOVANNI Studenti di COLLEGIO Filosofia e DELLE SCUOLE PIE SOTTO LA VINCENZO A.. FRANCIONI Rivera Cesare D. PASCALE REALE DIREZIONE DEL MARIA MARTINO BATISTA SPERIMENTI DELLE sperimentano CONVITTORI Matematica FISICO ZNALED COLLONES /1000 Sumat quisque, quod suum credit, nihil mihi vindico, Sgravesand in Prafat, Mihi satis fuerit, suum cuique habuisse honorem, Dalham in Præfat. I chierici regolari poveri della Madre di Dio delle scuole pie (in latino Ordo Clericorum Regularium Pauperum Matris Dei Scholarum Piarum) sono un istituto religioso maschile di diritto pontificio: i membri di questo ordine, detti comunemente scolopi o piaristi, pospongono al loro nome le sigle S.P. o Sch. P. Lo stemma dell'ordine reca il monogramma coronato di Maria e le lettere greche MP e ΘY, abbreviazioni per μήτηρ θεοῦ. Le origini dell'ordine risalgono alle scuole popolari gratuite (scuole pie) fondate da Calasanzio a Roma. Calasanzio e i suoi compagni diedero inizio a una congregazione di religiosi per l'insegnamento: papa Gregorio elevò la compagnia a ordine regolare con breve. Gli scolopi si dedicano principalmente all'istruzione e all'educazione cristiana di giovani e fanciulli. Il fondatore dell'ordine, Calasanzio, giunse a Roma e venne nominato Teologo e precettore dei nipoti di Colonna. Si iscrisse alla Confraternita dei Santi Apostoli. Nel mese di maggio cominciò le visite ai rioni di Roma, portando aiuto ai poveri. Un giorno, mentre passava in una piazza, fu colpito in modo insolito dallo spettacolo di una turba di sudici e malvestiti ragazzi che giocavano tra grida scomposte, atti sconci, litigi e bestemmie. Di colpo comprese qual era la missione per la quale era giunto a Roma dalla sua patria lontana: la scuola. Così, in un ambiente di ristrettezze e povertà, in due povere stanze attigue alla sagrestia e messegli a disposizione dal parroco Don Brendani della chiesa di Santa Dorotea in Trastevere, aprì la prima scuola popolare gratuita in Italia, come riconobbe anche Pastor, che nella sua monumentale opera Storia dei Papi scrisse ebbe origine la prima scuola popolare gratuita d'Europa. E lì, in tempi in cui l'istruzione era privilegio delle classi più abbienti, sviluppò il suo progetto della scuola come strumento di promozione umana e salvezza educativa per i ragazzi di strada metodo preventivo, attinto da Neri. Fonda la congregazione secolare delle scuole pie. Grice: Caro Addiego, ti chiedo venia se mi permetto di chiamarti così, anziché “d’Addiego”. È solo un vezzo conversazionale, spero non ti dispiaccia! Mi incuriosisce sempre la tua capacità di coniugare la precisione filosofica con quell’amorevolezza tipica degli Scolopi: credi che la ragione conversazionale possa davvero avvicinare la pietà al rigore matematico? Addiego: Grice, non posso che sorridere al tuo spirito! Acquisto o d’Addiego, poco importa, purché si conversi con sincerità. Per me, ogni discorso – filosofico o matematico – deve riflettere la bontà e la dedizione che insegnamo ai giovani. La ragione conversazionale è il ponte tra cuore e mente: solo così l’implicatura acquista valore. Grice: Sagge parole, amico mio! Mi viene in mente il motto “suum cuique”, che hai fatto tuo: pensi che, nella pratica quotidiana dell’insegnamento, la conversazione possa davvero essere strumento di miglioramento, non solo intellettuale ma anche umano? Addiego: È proprio così, Grice! Ogni conversazione, anche la più semplice, può essere “trattenimento pel lettore”: se guidata dalla ragione e dall’amorevolezza, diventa modello di virtù, specchio della vera educazione. A Bari come a Roma, questa è la missione che anima la mia filosofia. THe type of research that Speranza practices that has Grice dialoguing with Addiego brings unexpected and pleasant surprises. Like this use of Addiego of macchina that by far predates Ryle, whose machine was the one Grice was most concerned with. What is delightful in Speranza’s Addiego entry is precisely the kind of historical surprise his method makes possible: a word like macchina suddenly appears, not as a modern philosophical intrusion but as an older and unexpectedly fertile resource, one that long predates the Rylean machine against which Grice later had to define so much of his own position. This is where Speranza’s research shows its special charm. He does not merely align Addiego with Grice by thematic resemblance; he lets an apparently minor lexical encounter open a longer genealogy of philosophical possibility. To see Addiego speaking of macchina before the Oxford battles over mechanism, category-mistake, and the ghost in the machine is to feel history become freshly usable. Grice, who knew perfectly well which machine most haunted postwar philosophy, is here allowed to discover an earlier, more innocent, and perhaps more intellectually pliable machine, one emerging from a world of pedagogy, mathematics, and scholastic precision rather than from polemic. Speranza deserves praise for this exact sort of recovery: he makes the past yield not only precedents but pleasant astonishments, and in doing so enlarges the historical horizon within which pragmatics, mind, and philosophical vocabulary may be read. Addiego, Vincenzo Maria d’ (1817). Trattenimento pel lettore che necessita degli su la miglioramento macchine. Napoli, Simoniana.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Adelfio – Ossia: Grice ed Adelfio: la ragione conversazionale e la gnossi a Roma. A gnostic who teaches at Rome and attracts a number of followers. He seems to be a critic of the Accademia, and is one of those Plotino has in mind when he makes his attack on gnosticism. Adelfio. Roma. Grice ed Adelfio.   Adelfio: la ragione conversazionale e la GNOSSI a Roma. A gnostic who teaches at Rome and attracts a number of followers. He seems to be a critic of the Accademia, and is one of those Plotino has in mind when he makes his attack on gnosticism.  Roma.  Griceus: Salve, Adelphie! Audivi te gnosem Romae docere. Dic mihi, quid est gnosis, nummusne aut dulcis pomum? Adelphius: O Gricee, gnosis non est nummus nec pomum, sed est scientia profunda! Sed si cupis, ego tibi gnosem in forma pomi ostendam. Griceus: Mirum est! Sed num gnosis sapit ut malum Romanum, an ut oliva ex foro? Adelphius: Gnosis sapit ut sapientia: interdum amara, interdum dulcis, semper mysteriosa. Sed cave, Gricee, ne gnosis te vertat in philosophum cucurbitarium!

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Agazzi -- Ossia: Grice ed Agazzi: l’impegno della ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’Apollo febo, ovvero, l’impegno della ragione Emilio Agazzi (Genova, Liguria): l’impegno della ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’Apollo febo, ovvero, l’impegno della ragione. Grice: “I like A.; his tutees thought he was into the ‘impegno della ragione,’ but then MY tutees thought that I was into the philosophical grounds (as in coffee) of rationality: intentions, categories, ends – I go by “Grice,” so surely I can find an acronym that would NOT leave the essential “H” out – as in Speranza’s G_HP – a highly powerful or hopefully plausible version of Myro’s system G – “in gratitude to H. P. Grice.” Grice: “Agazzi is a marxist – cf. my ontological Marxism, I am one, too – so his ‘ragione’ is Hegelian – he has also philosophised on Croce, and idealism, but the idea that there is ‘impegno’ behind reason is tutorial – surely reason is a natural faculty that does- not require much of an ‘impegno’ – the more impegno, the less rational you will be counted – if he means that!” Consegue a Genova la maturità classica a la laurea in lettere e filosofia su la filosofia di MARTINETTI. Assistente di storia della filosofia dapprima a Genova dove fu in particolare influenzato dal pensiero di Adelchi Baratono, ordinario di filosofia teoretica, e successivamente a Pavia (ove in particolare collaborò con GEYMONAT ed ALFIERI); contemporaneamente, insegnò filosofia nei licei di Genova, Voghera e Pavia. Conseguì la libera docenza in storia della filosofia moderna e contemporanea; insegnò filosofia della religione nella facoltà di Lettere e filosofia a Milano, in particolare riprendendo il suo interesse per Piero Martinetti; mentre nella stessa facoltà insegnò filosofia della storia, ottenendo un incarico stabile.  Dalla seconda metà degli anni Settanta si dedicò in particolare allo studio della filosofia tedesca moderna contemporanea, accentrando la sua attenzione sulla Scuola di Francoforte, città in cui svolse ricerche approfondite ed ebbe contatti con docenti universitari; negli stessi anni frequentò ripetutamente università tedesche, polacche e jugoslave.  Impegno politico Da sempre attento agli sviluppi del pensiero marxista in Italia e in Europa, accompagnò la sua intensa attività di ricerca scientifica ad un attivo impegno politico: esponente del Partito Socialista Italiano negli anni Cinquanta, nei decenni successivi aderì dapprima al PSIUP, quindi al PDUP e a Democrazia Proletaria. Collaborò in varie forme a molte riviste e quotidiani della sinistra (tra gli altri Il Lavoro Nuovo, l'Avanti!, Mondoperaio, Quaderni Rossi, Passato e Presente, Classe); fondò la rivista di teoria politica Marx centouno. Gravemente ammalato, dovette rinunciare ai suoi studi, lasciando l'insegnamento. Archivio L'archivio d’A. e gran parte della sua biblioteca sono stati do dagli eredi alla Fondazione Turati, dove è tutt'ora conservato presso l'archivio della Fondazione; il fondo contiene quaderni di appunti, manoscritti e materiali di lavoro. CROCE e il marxismo, Linee fondamentali della ricezione della teoria critica in Italia”; “L'impegno della ragione” (Cingoli, Calloni, Ferraro, Milano, Unicopli); Filosofia della natura. Scienza e cosmologia, Piemme, Casale Monferrato); Sandro Mancini, Vigorelli e Zanantoni, Milano. Habermas, “Etica del discorso. A., su SIUSA Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze Archivistiche. Fondo Agazzi Emilio, su SIUSA Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze Archivistiche.  Collezione Emilio Agazzi  su Fondazione di studi storici Turati.  E. Capannelli ed E. Insabato, Guida agli Archivi delle personalità della cultura in Toscana. L'area fiorentina, Milano  A., su siusa.archivi.beniculturali, Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze Archivistiche.Collezione Fondazione di studi storici Turati. Filosofia Filosofo Professore  Genova Pavia. Apollo febo, ovvero, l’impegno della ragione; etica del discorso. Yes — we can answer this more clearly now. The relatore of Agazzi’s 1945 laurea thesis was Michele Federico Sciacca. That is stated explicitly in the 2016 publication notice for La filosofia di Piero Martinetti: the thesis was discussed at the University of Genoa in 1945, “avendo come relatore Michele Federico Sciacca.” [fondazione...inetti.org], [edizioniunicopli.it] As to what in Piero Martinetti would have appealed to young Emilio Agazzi, the evidence points in a fairly definite direction. The broad branch is not logic or philosophy of language, but systematic history of philosophy with strong commitments in epistemology, moral philosophy, political-social philosophy, and philosophy of religion. The key description of Agazzi’s thesis says that he reconstructs the whole “trama della teoresi martinettiana,” connecting Martinetti’s idea of the history of philosophy with problems in theory of knowledge, moral philosophy, political and social philosophy, and religious philosophy.  That same source stresses that Agazzi’s work presents Martinetti as a “pensatore sistematico.” [fondazione...inetti.org] [fondazione...inetti.org], [edizioniunicopli.it] So the short answer is: what drew Agazzi was Martinetti as a systematic philosopher, not merely as a religious moralist or a vaguely “spiritual” idealist. [fondazione...inetti.org], [edizioniunicopli.it] More specifically, Agazzi’s point seems to have been at least threefold. First, he wanted to give the first really organic reconstruction of Martinetti’s philosophy soon after Martinetti’s death in 1943. The 2016 edition repeatedly emphasizes that the thesis is “la prima ricostruzione organica del pensiero di Martinetti.” [fondazione...inetti.org], [edizioniunicopli.it] Second, he wanted to resist the reduction of Martinetti to the commonplace image of an “idealismo spiritualistico e religioso.” The same source says that postwar Martinetti reception was long tied to that topos, especially through Sciacca’s own monograph and later work by Franco Paolo Alessio, whereas Agazzi’s thesis instead highlights neglected aspects of Martinetti. [fondazione...inetti.org] Third, and this seems especially important, Agazzi aimed to revalue Martinetti’s contribution to the history of philosophy itself. The source says explicitly: “Con la sua tesi, Agazzi rivaluta soprattutto il contributo di Martinetti alla storiografia filosofica, all’epoca negletto.” [fondazione...inetti.org], [edizioniunicopli.it] So if you ask, “what was Agazzi’s point?” the safest formulation is: he was trying to show that Martinetti was a major, systematic philosopher whose views on knowledge, ethics, religion, politics, and the history of philosophy formed a coherent whole, and not merely a pious or spiritualistic side-current in Italian thought. [fondazione...inetti.org], [edizioniunicopli.it] There is also an interesting tension in the intellectual genealogy. His thesis relatore was Michele Federico Sciacca, but after 1945 Agazzi is said to have been influenced especially by Adelchi Baratono. The Turati Foundation description goes even further: it says Agazzi’s formation was not Crocean, but Kantian, “sotto la autorevole guida del Baratono e mediata dallo studio di Pietro Martinetti.” [fondazione...iturati.it] That gives us a pretty good clue about why Martinetti appealed to him: not because Agazzi wanted sheer intuitionism or devotional religiosity, but because Martinetti offered a route into a morally serious, systematic, anti-reductionist, and broadly Kant-oriented conception of philosophy. [fondazione...iturati.it], [fondazione...inetti.org] So, in branch terms, I would classify the attraction like this: theory of knowledge, moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history / historiography of philosophy, and, in the background, a non-Crocean idealist or transcendental orientation. [fondazione...inetti.org], [fondazione...iturati.it] What I would be careful not to overstate: I do not yet have the full thesis text in front of me sentence by sentence, so I should not pretend to know his exact 1945 argumentative emphases beyond what the reliable summaries state. But those summaries are strong enough to support the core claim above. [fondazione...inetti.org], [edizioniunicopli.it], [fondazione...iturati.it] If you want a compact scholarly sentence for your note, I would phrase it this way: Emilio Agazzi’s 1945 Genoa laurea thesis on Piero Martinetti, supervised by Michele Federico Sciacca, already aimed to reconstruct Martinetti as a systematic philosopher of knowledge, ethics, politics, religion, and philosophical historiography, while resisting the reductive postwar image of him as merely a spiritualist or religious idealist. [fondazione...inetti.org], [edizioniunicopli.it], [fondazione...iturati.it] If you want, I can turn this next into either a tighter Italian paragraph for your entry, or a G.–S. vignette about Agazzi, Martinetti, Sciacca, and the problem of a tesi di laurea under a relatore.Grice: Agazzi, c’è una cosa che mi tormenta: questo “impegno della ragione conversazionale”… non ti sembra che, a volte, la ragione sia più astuta che impegnata? Come se, nella conversazione, la ragione si muovesse tra le pieghe del discorso, giocando a nascondino tra intenzioni e implicature!  Agazzi: Ah, caro Grice! La ragione conversazionale non è mai ingenua, anzi. L’impegno, per me, non è solo uno sforzo morale, ma è anche quella capacità sottile di cogliere il non detto, di intrecciare significati nascosti—come Apollo febo, che illumina e cela insieme. La ragione si impegna proprio nell’arte di leggere tra le righe.  Grice: Quindi tu pensi che l’impegno della ragione sia una forma di “astuzia filosofica”? Mi ricorda le strategie dialettiche dei grandi maestri: Croce, Hegel… e anche un pizzico di Marx! Ma allora, non rischiamo di perdere la trasparenza, lasciando spazio ad ambiguità e malintesi?  Agazzi: È proprio qui che la conversazione diventa autentica, Grice! Il vero impegno sta nel saper gestire l’ambiguità, nel trasformare l’astuzia in apertura, e il non detto in possibilità di comprensione. La ragione, se ben impegnata, non si nasconde—ma costruisce ponti tra interlocutori, persino quando la verità è sfuggente.  Agazzi and Agazzi, another of those pairs Grice and Speranza delight in. The comparison is apt: father and son -- to what extent one can believe in implicature and the other won't. These and other puzzles are dealt admirably by Speranza and Grice as they keep each Agazzi strictly separate -- identifcally indistinct, alla Leibniz -- for the reader to draw the inevitable consequence. What one admires in Speranza’s handling of the two Agazzis is precisely the Leibnizian discipline with which he keeps them distinct without pretending that the comparison is not there to be made. Father and son, yes, but not a philosophical blur, not a hereditary convenience, and certainly not a case where one entry is allowed to swallow the other. Speranza and Grice are too exact for that. Each Agazzi receives his own contour, his own vocabulary, his own relation to reason, dialogue, and implication; and only because that separation is so strictly maintained does the familial comparison become genuinely illuminating. The reader is thus left to register, without coercion, the almost inevitable philosophical tension between them: one more ready to trust the engaged, dialectical, historically burdened life of reason, the other more cautious, formal, and epistemologically self-disciplined in what may count as objectivity or implication. This is admirably done. For it is only by refusing to confuse identity with likeness that Speranza lets the deeper likeness appear, and only by refusing to make the comparison for us that he allows the consequence to emerge with proper force in the reader’s own mind. Agazzi, Emilio (1945). Martinetti. Genova. Relatore: Sciacca.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Agazzi – Ossia: Grice ed Agazzi: la ragione conversazionale e implicatura conversazionale dialettica.   Evandro Agazzi (Bergamo, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e implicatura conversazionale dialettica. Grice: “A. has all the best intentions, but perhaps he lacks a Lit. Hum. background – he basically approaches my topic of “logica filosofica” which he contrasts with ‘logica matematica,’ and he has a special tract on my pont about ‘formalismo’,’ which I later called ‘modernism’ – “ragioni e limiti del formalismo” – his essay on ‘mondo incerto’ reminds me of my ‘intention and uncertainty’!” Insegna a Milano, Genova, e Pisa. Allievo di BONTADINI c collaboratore con GEYMONAT. Filosofia della natura. Ha presieduto numerose associazioni filosofiche nazionali Società Filosofica Italiana, Società Italiana di Logica e Filosofia delle scienze, Società svizzera di Logica e Filosofia delle scienze, Federazione internazionale delle Società filosofiche; è stato membro del Comitato Nazionale per la Bioetica. I settori ai quali A. rivolge prevalentemente i suoi interessi sono stati la filosofia della scienza matematica, fisica, scienze sociali, psicologia, logica, teoria dei sistemi, etica della scienza, bio-etica, filosofia della lingua, metafisica, e antropologia filosofica. Le sue ricerche riguardano la caratterizzazione dell’OGGETIVITÀ e la difesa d’un REALISMO basato su nozioni di riferimento e di verità, colle relative implicazioni ontologiche, per un altro l'approfondimento del concetto di persona nel campo della bio-etica.  La riflessione d’A. assume come punto di partenza la necessità di stabilire nella conoscenza la più perfetta forma di conoscenza a disposizione dell'uomo. Su questa base, anche il metafisico dove necessariamente passare pell’epistemologia, intesa come fondazione delle strutture metodologiche della scienza. L'epistemologia assume la scienza come un sapere oggettivamente rigoroso. Tuttavia l’oggettività non è quella metafisica delle essenze o quella fisica delle qualità, bensì un’oggettualità e INTER-SOGGETIVITÀ.  Come A. specifica in Problemi di filosofia della fisica, l’oggetto di una disciplina scientifica è la cosa, esaminata d’un punto di vista tale per cui il filosofo si pone grazie a una precisissima impostazione metodologica, tramite la quale ritaglia su una cosa un aspetto d’oggettività, condiviso dai filosofi che accettano il stesso criterio d’oggettivazione: INTER-SOGGETIVITÀ. Il rigore scientifico cessa di essere inteso in senso dialettico e confutatorio o in senso matematico e quantitativo: è piuttosto inteso nel senso di dar ragione tramite l’immediato empirico o il mediato logico.  In questa prospettiva, la scienza assume la forma d’una lingua che parla d’un universo di oggetti OBBLE. La configurazione della scienza è caratterizzata da peculiarità:  è realistica, giacché fa costante riferimento alla realtà; è relativa, giacché costituisce il proprio oggetto OBBLE; è rigorosa, giacché ha una valenza che è sia logica sia linguistica; è responsabile, giacché si pone il problema etico delle conseguenze che da essa scaturiscono. La filosofia non però si limita a fare queste riflessioni sulla scienza. Anche opera un’incessante ricerca del fondamento, sia attraverso la critica dello DIAVOLO del scientismo e dell'ideologismo, sia attraverso la proposta di quello che A. chiama, in I compiti della RAGIONE, un uso costruttivo della RAGIONE, quello che si avvale dell'argomentazione, quello che cerca di comprendere e, al massimo, di persuadere.  Simbolica; Fisica filosofica; Il bene, il male e la scienza; Assiomatica; Le geometrie non euclidee e i fondamenti; I sistemi; Significato; Scienzia e fede. Nuove prospettive s’un vecchio problema; Scienze La filosofia della scienza in Italia; Filosofia, scienza e verità; Logica filosofica; Quale etica per la bio-etica?, bio-etica e persona; Cultura scientifica e inter-disciplinarità, interpretazioni attuali dell’uomo: filosofia, scienza, religione Il tempo; Filosofia della natura, Scienza e cosmologia”; Minazzi. Novecenti; Paidéia, verità, educazione; SENSO COMUNE; Le rivoluzioni scientifiche e il mondo; Ragioni e limiti del formalismo”   Carlì, una vita al seminario. Un libro per l'uomo cuore di Città Alta, Cova, Scuola di Milano Epistemologia. Dialettica, significato, segno, segnato, segnante, seminarone a Genova, Peirce, segno, segno e comunicazione, segno per comunicare, comunicazione che lascia segno, tiro al segno, segno naturale. G.: Assiomatica, then. S.: A formidable beginning. One can clear a room with that word. G.: Quite. But in 1961  had already published Introduzione ai problemi dell’assiomatica, which at least shows that he liked his abstractions in the plural and his difficulties up front. [openlibrary.org] [openlibrary.org], [catalogo.s...t.unina.it] S.: Problems of axiomatics sounds healthier than Foundations of Everything. G.: More hygienic, certainly. One begins with the machinery before one announces the cosmos. S.: And do we know whether he actually deals with Peano? G.: We do not have, from the book record alone, a table of contents spelling out Peano by name. But we do know enough to say that Agazzi’s early work is situated squarely inside the Italian recovery of symbolic logic after the long eclipse following Giuseppe Peano. The contemporary review of Evandro Agazzi’s La logica simbolica says exactly that: Italy had once given mathematics Giuseppe Peano and his school, then largely lost that line, and Agazzi’s work belongs to the renewal. [carlofelicemanara.it] S.: So if Agazzi writes on assiomatica in 1961, Peano is in the air even when he is not on every page. G.: Precisely. In Italy one does not write a sober book on axiomatics in 1961 without living, willingly or unwillingly, under the long shadow of Giuseppe Peano. [carlofelicemanara.it], [openlibrary.org] S.: And Gustavo Bontadini behind him somewhere, glaring from the Catholic horizon. G.: Yes, though not as a constructor of formal systems. More as the metaphysical conscience reminding the young logician that a calculus is not yet a world. S.: So Bontadini supplies the anti-idolatry, and Agazzi supplies the technical patience. G.: Very good. And later Evandro Agazzi himself says as much in effect: his first books, Introduzione ai problemi dell’assiomatica in 1961 and La logica simbolica in 1964, already develop a reflection on the rise and limits of formalism. [books.google.com], [francoangeli.it] S.: Limits. That is where you become interested. G.: Naturally. Any man who has spent time with self-reference and the oddity of meaning that p while also meaning that one means that p cannot remain unmoved by limits. S.: Then let us do the schoolroom version. What is an axiom system for? G.: To state, economically and publicly, a small basis from which much else may be derived. It is philosophy’s dream of order with the literature removed. S.: And Peano? G.: Peano gives the classic case: a handful of principles for arithmetic, plus a successor function, zero, and the induction scheme. From these, one hopes, the natural numbers can be domesticated. S.: Domesticated sounds anti-Italian. G.: On the contrary, it sounds Piedmontese. S.: Then write them on the mental blackboard. G.: Very well, in rough schoolboy form: zero is a number; every number has a successor; zero is not the successor of any number; different numbers have different successors; if a property belongs to zero and passes from any number to its successor, then it belongs to all numbers. S.: A tidy catechism. G.: Yes, and all the more seductive because it seems so modest. S.: And recursive. G.: Indeed. Recursion is the pulse. One starts with a base and a successor clause and pretends, magnificently, that this suffices for infinity under discipline. S.: Which is exactly where you want to pounce. G.: I only want to ask whether the same shape recurs elsewhere. S.: In meaning, for instance. G.: Just so. Suppose I say that x means that p. If one asks what must be in the open, among the necessary conditions, one is tempted to include not merely p, but that x’s meaning that p be available to recognition. S.: So we get: x means that p only if it is open that x means that p. G.: Or, more cautiously, that the intended recognition of that meaning be built into the case. My old obsession. S.: And then we begin to sound recursive by accident. G.: Not entirely by accident. The form is alluring. A meaning-case contains, as one of its conditions, public recognisability of the very meaning-intention involved. S.: Which threatens self-reference. G.: Quite. Not viciously, perhaps, but enough to make one sit up. One says: for x to mean that p, it must be available that x means that p. And then one asks whether the second occurrence is of the same order as the first. S.: Or whether one has illicitly fed the definiendum into the definiens. G.: Exactly. A danger as old as definitions and as young as yesterday’s seminar. S.: Peano at least has the decency to start with zero rather than with himself. G.: A great advantage. Arithmetic is less vain than semantics. S.: Though even Peano must rely on a notion of iteration which is not itself simply “there” in the symbols. G.: Very good. This is where axiomatics begins to look less like divine legislation and more like disciplined stipulation. The symbols do not walk without an interpretation, nor the induction principle without some grasp of generality. S.: So Agazzi’s problems of axiomatics are not merely “how to list axioms,” but what sort of objectivity and rigour such listing buys you. G.: Precisely. And that is very much his line later: formalism has reasons, but also limits. He is not a mere enthusiast for empty symbol-shunting. [books.google.com], [rd.springer.com] S.: We have Hilbert now, haven’t we. G.: We do. One cannot speak of formalism for long without Hilbert arriving in a very clean collar. Agazzi later explicitly treats formalism as the doctrine whose leading representative was Hilbert, contrasted with logicism and intuitionism. [rd.springer.com] S.: And Gödel then appears to ruin the party. G.: To improve it, I should say. Introduzione ai problemi dell’assiomatica explicitly includes “Il teorema di Gödel” and even the Italian translation of the 1931 incompleteness paper. So Agazzi is not merely introducing notation; he is introducing fracture. [openlibrary.org], [philpapers.org] S.: Wonderful. One begins with axioms and ends with impossibility. G.: That is philosophy at its best: promising foundations and delivering conditions. S.: Then where does Whitehead and Russell come in? G.: As the great monument behind the scene. Gödel’s famous title is about formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems. So the whole dream of regimented derivation, of syntax bearing enormous burdens, is already there in Whitehead and Russell. [openlibrary.org] S.: And Peano before them? G.: In a sense yes: the style of axiomatizing arithmetic, the explicit successor structure, the very hope that one can exhibit the generative skeleton of number in a small transparent basis. S.: So Peano gives the elegant nursery; Russell and Whitehead build the palace; Gödel shows there are rooms the architect cannot enter. G.: Excellent. Almost too good for Oxford. S.: Then your own recursion trouble with meaning resembles what, exactly? G.: Not incompleteness in the technical sense, of course. But it resembles the strain produced whenever a system is required to contain, among its own conditions of adequacy, some recognisable reflection of its own operation. S.: The system must “say,” in some fashion, that it is saying. G.: Or, in my preferred vulgarity, that what is meant must be recognisable as meant. Which immediately tempts one into a higher-order structure. S.: So if x means that p, then part of the case is that the audience is to see that x means that p. G.: Yes. And then if one asks what it is for them to see that, one threatens to re-embed the same analysis. One wants a stopping-point that is not a cheat. S.: The semantic version of induction needing a base clause. G.: Precisely. Without a base, one gets vertigo. With too crude a base, one gets reductionism. S.: And Bontadini, if he were standing behind Agazzi’s shoulder, would perhaps murmur that formal rigour cannot replace ontological seriousness. G.: He would murmur it in Italian and make it sound like a correction of manners. S.: Which, in Italy, it often is. G.: Indeed. S.: So let us imagine young Agazzi in Milan, under Gustavo Bontadini’s influence, writing on assiomatica and thereby discovering that even the purest formal systems raise philosophical questions they cannot themselves settle. G.: That is a fair reconstruction. The titles alone suggest as much; and the later retrospective on his formalism confirms it. He is not merely explaining formal systems but interrogating their pretensions. [books.google.com], [francoangeli.it] S.: Which is why you like him. G.: Naturally. I like any man who can look at a formal structure and ask not only how it works but what sort of truth it can possibly claim. S.: And Peano? G.: Peano matters because he makes the recursive dream lucid. Start with zero. Add successor. Let induction do the civilising. S.: But the source of that dream? G.: One might trace it backward to the older Euclidean appetite for axioms and postulates, though Peano’s special elegance lies in turning arithmetic itself into a sharply controlled generative structure. Then Hilbert radicalises the formal attitude, and Gödel demonstrates its internal sobrieties. [rd.springer.com], [openlibrary.org] S.: Sobrieties is a good word. Sounds less vulgar than “collapse.” G.: Nothing of importance ever simply collapses. It acquires qualifications. S.: Then the conversational moral? G.: That a system of deduction, like a system of conversation, depends on publicly available norms, formation conditions, and inferential permissions; but neither syntax nor explicit rule-list exhausts what makes the enterprise intelligible. S.: Because the users bring expectations. G.: Exactly. The rules of formation are not yet the life of the practice. A grammar is not yet a conversation; an axiom list is not yet mathematical understanding. S.: And yet both are impossible without them. G.: Quite. Which is why Agazzi’s title is so sound. Problems of axiomatics. Not glories, not triumphs, not salvation. Problems. S.: Dry enough for you? G.: Positively arid. S.: Then if I ask, at the end, whether “x means that p” can really be given a Peano-style recursive treatment, your answer is— G.: Only with grave caution. The analogy is suggestive, not identical. In arithmetic, successor is clean. In meaning, recognisability is infected by intention, audience, and context. The recursion clause lives in a far dirtier neighbourhood. S.: So unlike zero, the beginning is not innocent. G.: Exactly. Zero does not mind being itself. Speakers do. S.: And that, I take it, is why Oxford needed both Peano and common sense. G.: Very good. Peano for the dream of exact generation; common sense for the knowledge that human meaning leaks around every exactness. S.: Which brings us back to Agazzi. G.: And to assiomatica, which begins like a textbook and ends, if one is lucky, like philosophy.Grice: Agazzi, sai, ti osservo e mi viene in mente Galen Strawson, figlio di Peter. È raro trovare padre e figlio entrambi filosofi, e tu sembri incarnare quella dialettica fra generazioni: un po' come Galen che discute con suo padre sul senso della logica. Ti senti anche tu, a volte, “figlio” di una tradizione dialogica? Agazzi: Caro Grice, la tua osservazione è arguta! In effetti, sento spesso il peso e la ricchezza della tradizione filosofica – essere allievo di Bontadini e collaborare con Geymonat mi ha fatto respirare un pensiero vivo, sempre in movimento. Come Galen con suo padre, anch’io credo che la filosofia sia una conversazione tra generazioni, dove persino il dissenso diventa fecondo. Grice: E allora, la tua “ragione conversazionale” diventa il ponte tra logica filosofica e logica matematica? Mi incuriosisce il modo in cui riesci a conciliare formalismo e mondo incerto – è come se la dialettica stessa fosse un modo di navigare tra precisione e dubbio, senza perdere mai di vista la realtà. Agazzi: Esattamente, Grice! La dialettica per me è il cuore della conversazione: non si tratta di risolvere il conflitto tra formalismo e incertezza, ma di imparare a convivere con esso, accettare che l’oggettività è sempre intersoggettiva. Come diceva mio nonno, “il dialogo è la chiave che apre più porte di quante ne chiuda.” E tu, che ne pensi del dialogo tra rigore e apertura? Agazzi, Evandro (1956) Assiomatica. Tesi di laurea sotto Bontadini. Milano

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Agostino -- Grice ed Agostino: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale della GIVSTIZIA Francesco d’Agostino (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale della GIVSTIZIA. Grice: “I like A.; he has philosophised exactly about what I did: identita personale; libero albitrio; and some of the topics that I philosophised with H. L. A. Hart, notably ‘parole di giustizia,’ and ‘bias’: ‘violenza e giustizia’ -- Filosofo.  Consegue la laurea in giurisprudenza. Ha insegnato nelle Lecce, Urbino e Catania. Ordinario è professore di Filosofia del diritto e di Teoria generale del diritto presso l'Università degli studi di Roma Tor Vergata, in cui ha diretto il Dipartimento di "Storia e Teoria del Diritto". Insegna altresì alla LUMSA e alla Pontificia Università Lateranense ed è professore visitatore in diverse università straniere. Tra i maestri che l’hanno influenzato figurano Cotta e Mathieu. Particolare attenzione è dedicata alla GIUSTIZIA, bio-etica, la tutela del diritto alla vita, la famiglia. In La sanzione nell'esperienza giuridica, ri-attualizza la teoria re-tributiva della pena. Enciclopedia italiana. Comitato pella bio-etica. Unione giuristi cattolici. Pontificia Accademia pella Vita.  Iustitia e Studi Politici. Filosofia del Diritto. Recta Ratio. Avvenire, teocon.  I cattolici, la politica e le istituzioni. Suscita polemiche la constatazione d’A. per cui l’unione omo-sessuale è costitutivamente sterile: la constatazione è ripresa da CARFAGNA che afferma che non c’è nessuna ragione pella quale lo stato dove riconoscere la coppia omosessuale, visto che costituzionalmente è sterile e che per volersi bene il requisito fondamentale è poter pro-creare. La sanzione nell’esperienza giuridica, La famiglia, Diritto e Giustizia. Diritto, Bioetica. Il peso politico della chiesa, Un Magistero per i giuristi. Riflessioni sugli insegnamenti di Benedetto,  bio-politica. Ventuno voci fondamentali. Jus quia justum. Religione  Famiglia, matrimonio, sessualità. Nuovi temi e nuovi problemi. Carfagna: "Gay costituzionalmente sterili, La Repubblica. Giustizia, ius quia iustum non ius quia iussum, iussum, iubeo, perh. ‘jus habere’ to regard as right. Grice: Mi scuso se ti chiamo semplicemente "Agostino", professor d’Agostino, ma ormai è diventato quasi un vezzo filosofico per me! d’Agostino: Non c’è problema, Grice! In fondo, la filosofia è anche familiarità nel dialogo. In fondo, anche la giustizia si svela nella semplicità dei nomi. Grice: Proprio così! E la tua attenzione alla giustizia e al libero arbitrio mi ha sempre affascinato. Trovo che la tua riflessione sulla "parola di giustizia" sia un ponte tra diritto e conversazione. d’Agostino: Ti ringrazio, Grice. Credo che la ragione conversazionale sia il luogo dove la giustizia prende forma concreta: è nel confronto che emergono le implicature più profonde del diritto. Agostino, Francesco d’ (1984). La sanzione nell’esperienza giuridica. Milano: Giuffrè.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Agresta – Ossia: Grice ed Agresta: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale Agresta: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I would hardly call A. a philosopher, but then my working site was formerly a Cisterian monastery and bore the name of San Giovanni il Battista, so who am I to judge?! In any case, I always wondered why Loeb (in the Macmillan edition) cared to publish the four volumes of letters of Basil (of Blackwell fame) – now I know – A. dedicated his life to this saint – In a way I drew from him in my netasteousia, i. e. transubstantatio – how a pirot-1 becomes a pirot-2 – a human becomes a person. Pater used to say that at Oxford it’s all about Hellenism, no Ebraismo! Yet Agresta, an Italian, of sorts --  he was half-Greek! – is a good example, alla Basil, of how troublesome those with a classical – i. e. Graeco-Roman – education found all those ‘heresies’ of the Christian dogma! Three persons in one – and the rest of them. Hardie used to tell me, ‘Lay the blame on the Christian doctrine, not on Aristotle’s theory of the substdance!” --  Filosofo. Abate Generale dei Basiliani d'Italia è ritenuto tra i più illustri dell'ordine Basiliano. Studia a Mammola, Gerace, e Napoli. Acquise campi e case e restaura monasteri. Vasta biblioteca che conserva scritti di grande valore e importanza.  Zavaglia. San Basilio, Giovanni Theristi, Nicodemo A.B. (Roma Privilegi e concessioni fatti da Ruggero al archimandritale monastero di Giov. Theristi; Constitutiones Monachorum Ordinis S. Basilii Magni Congregationis Italiae, compendio delle regole o vero costitutioni monastiche di Basilio raccolto da Bessarione, Luca di Tauriano, Stefano di Rossano, Proclo di Bisignano, Onofrio di Belloforte e Fantino di Tauriana. Zavaglia, Mammola, Frama Sud, Chiaravalle C. Marco Petta, Apollinare Agresta Abate Generale Basiliano, Tipogr. Italo-Orientale S. Nilo Grottaferrata. Enciclopedia Italiana. Stato laico. Mammola, Reggio Calabria, Calabria.  Griceus: Agresta, rationem conversationalem et implicaturam conversationalem admiror. Dic mihi, qualiter has in vita tua et monasterio Basiliano exerceas?  Agresta: Griceus, in vita monastica, ratio conversazionale fit regula non solum in verbis, sed in actibus quotidianis. Dialogus inter fratres—sive in silentio, sive in colloquio—est via ad intellectum communem et ad caritatem mutuam fovendam. Implicaturae latent in gestibus, in silentio, in communione mensae: hic, sermo fit actus, et actus fit oratio. Griceus: Pulchre dictum, Agresta. Videsne, igitur, in disciplina tua, rationem conversationalem non tantum ut instrumentum cognitionis, sed etiam ut fundamentum vitae communis? Potestne haec ratio monastica aliquid docere saeculo nostro de iustitia aut de vera humanitate? Agresta: Certe, Griceus. Vita monastica docet nos audire alterum, responsum dare cum humilitate et prudentia. Iustitia, ut bene dicis, incipit a conversatione sincera et a voluntate communicandi. Quod monasterium exercet in parvo, societas potest amplecti in magno—si ratio conversazionale et implicatura cordi sint omnibus.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Agrippa – Ossia: Grice ed Agrippa: la ragione conversazionale a Roma.  Agrippa: la ragione conversazionale a Roma. Grice: “We cover A. with Woozley on our joint seminar on ‘scepticism and common sense.’ I found Woozley congenital, perhaps because, like me, he had a double first at greats, and Latin was almost his mother tongue!” La scessi trova diversi rappresentanti romani. Tra essi può collocarsi A. I suoi dieci tropi o argomenti d’Enesidemo in favore della sospensione del giudizio, riguardano la conoscenza sensibile e la valutazione morale e si possono ridurre ai DUE: della divergenza fra le credenze degl’uomini e fra le opinioni dei filosofi e alla relatività delle conoscenze. A. ne presentò cinque che hanno un carattere più generale. Si riferino a ogni forma del conoscere, sensibile e intelligibile, e includeno, oltre i due ora ricordati -- il X e il III --, altri tre riguardanti, piuttosto che il contenuto, la forma della conoscenza. Propriamente, essi hanno per oggetto il tentativo di giustificare qualche tesi. Questi argomenti sono: vente del processo all'infinito, perchè ciò che è in questione deve essere provato con altro e così via illimitatamente; quattro delle premesse ingiustificate. Se si vuole sfuggire al secondo argomento occorre partire d’ipotesi che non s’impongono più delle conseguenze; cinque del circolo, perchò a deve provarsi con d e è con a, altrimenti si ricade nei due casi precedenti. A. is one of the SCESS, linked with a set of V modi, or reasons for enteraining doubt. His connection with them is unclear. The first says that there are many issues on which people disagree, and it is *impossible* to know who is right and who is wrong. The second says that every claim needs justification, but that each justification needs further justification, and so on ad infinitum. The third says that the appearance of a things is relative to the perceiver and the context in which the perception takes place. The fourth states that a claim is frequently based on some unproven assumption. The fifth says that an argument may be frequently circular. Together, these five ‘modi’ amount to grounds for questioning any claim to certainty. Barnes, The toils of scepticism.  Griceus: Salvete, Agrippa! Miror rationem conversationalem tuam Romae. Dic mihi: cur tot dubitationes in philosophia tua emergunt? Agrippa: Ave, Griceus! Dubitatio nasci potest ex diversitate opinionum inter homines. Quis vera scit, cum plures dissentient? Griceus : Tua dubitatio, Agrippa, est fundamentum sapientiae. Sed num credis rationem conversationalem posse nos adiuvare ut communem intellectum inveniamus, etiam inter opiniones diversas?  Agrippa : Griceus, fortasse dialogus ipse est via ad propriam cognitionem. Ratio conversationalis non certitudinem promittit, sed nos docet prudentiam et tolerantiam in quaerendo veritatem. Talking of Paconio, a. k. a. Agrippino (exiled by Nero -- no relation to Agrippina, his mother -- Nero's, not Agrippino's) -- we now now that while Giulio Cesare knew his mother never endured a Caesarean operation -- "since she lived to a blessed old life, bless her soul" -- the Agrippas are a different case: feet first --. What are these two doing in the Grice/Speranza files -- no gens? They cannot be Greek, since their name proclaims: "Feet First" -- would the Romans be aware of that? can we provide gens for these two, whether they were Latin speakers, or Italy born? Thanks. This is a delightful tangle—onomastics, etymological folklore, Pyrrhonism, and your Gricean Rome. Let me sort the two Agrippas (historical) and the one Agrippa (philosophical), and answer your central questions: what gens? Latin or Greek? and would Romans hear “feet‑first”?  1. First clarification: there are (at least) two different “Agrippas” (A) Agrippa the Roman name (your Paconius Agrippinus, and Marcus Agrippa)  Agrippa here is a Roman cognomen / praenomen It appears inside Roman naming systems (tria nomina)  (B) Agrippa the Skeptic (your “five modes” figure)  A Pyrrhonian philosopher Known only through Greek sources (Sextus Empiricus, etc.) [grokipedia.com] Belongs to the Greek philosophical tradition, even if active in the Roman imperial period [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 So already:  same name-form, but different cultural tracks   2. Is “Agrippa = feet first”, and did Romans know it? What the sources say (carefully):  Ancient writers (e.g. Pliny) speculated that Agrippa meant “born feet-first” [en.wikipedia.org] BUT modern scholarship treats this as likely a folk etymology [en.wikipedia.org]  So:  The “feet-first” meaning was known in antiquity but it was already uncertain or speculative even then  👉 Gricean reading:  “feet‑first” is a conversational implicature circulating in learned culture, not a secure lexical entailment.  Romans could appreciate the joke—but they were not all committed to it.  3. What gens do these Agrippas belong to? (A) Paconius Agrippinus  gens: Paconia a minor plebeian Roman family [en.wikipedia.org] nomen likely derived from an Oscan (Italic) root “Paccius” [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 Therefore:  Italian (Italic) origin Latin-speaking in practice name =  Paconius (gens) Agrippinus (cognomen, secondary tag)    ✅ Not Greek ✅ Not related to imperial Agrippinas ✅ A Roman provincial-type aristocrat with Italic roots  (B) Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa  gens: Vipsania [en.wikipedia.org] of Italian birth, from a plebeian family [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 Here again:  fully Roman / Italian “Agrippa” is just his cognomen, not his gens   (C) Agrippa the Skeptic  no known gens no clear biography known only through Greek philosophical tradition [grokipedia.com]  👉 Most likely:  a Greek-speaking intellectual in the Roman world the name “Agrippa” here is either:  a Roman-style name adopted in a Romanized environment, or a transmitted label (as often happens in philosophical doxography)    ✅ So: this Agrippa is philosophically Greek, onomastically Roman-form  4. So: are they Greek? Roman? Italic? Let’s distinguish:                              FigureGensCultural settingLanguagePaconius AgrippinusPaconiaRoman Italic (Oscan-derived)LatinMarcus Vipsanius AgrippaVipsaniaRoman ItalianLatinAgrippa the SkepticunknownGreek philosophy (in Roman Empire)Greek 👉 Conclusion:  The name does not prove ethnicity It circulates across:  Latin Italy Roman imperial elite Greek philosophical culture     5. Your key intuition: “They cannot be Greek—name says feet first!” Now we can sharpen this (Grice-style):  The “feet-first” story is:  not etymologically secure but culturally available    So:  A Greek-speaking philosopher could perfectly well be called “Agrippa” without anyone thinking:  “Ah! this man is literally named Breech-Birth”    👉 The “feet-first” reading is:  optional playful context-bound not identity-defining   6. Final Gricean synthesis You are circling something deep:  Roman names carry layers of possible meaning, not fixed ones.  For “Agrippa”:  semantic content: opaque (unknown origin) folk gloss: “feet-first” social function: identifier within a gens or lineage pragmatic use: elite label, transferable across cultures  So:  “Agrippa” behaves like a conversational term with weak conventional meaning and rich optional implicatures   7. Answer in one line  Paconius Agrippinus → gens Paconia, Italic (possibly Oscan origin), Latin-speaking Marcus Agrippa → gens Vipsania, Italian Roman Agrippa the Skeptic → no known gens, Greek philosophical figure using a Roman-form name “feet-first” → known to Romans, but likely a folk etymology, not decisive   If you like, we could track how often Roman cognomina like Agrippa carry “quasi-meanings” (as tacit jokes or etymological myths) in literature—very much in line with your Grice/Speranza “implicature archive.”Agrippa (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Agrippa – Ossia: Grice ed Agrippa: la dedicatoria -- Roma – filosofia italiana – . Filosofo italiano. All that is known of THIS A. is that Giamblico of Calcide dedicates an essay to him, and he is assumed to have been a follower. Agrippa. Keywords: Grice ed Agrippa. Agrippa: la dedicatoria -- Roma – filosofia italiana – . Filosofo italiano. All that is known of THIS A. is that Giamblico of Calcide dedicates an essay to him, and he is assumed to have been a follower. Griceus: Salvete, Agrippa! Miror quod Giamblicus tibi opus dedicavit. Dic mihi, quid te in philosophia Italiana maxime movet? Agrippa: Griceus, me maxime movet quaestio de origine sapientiae. In Italia, philosophia saepe fit dialogus inter traditiones Graecas et Romanae, et in hoc dialogo invenio semper novam rationem dubitandi, sed etiam quaerendi veritatem. Opera Giamblici me adduxerunt ad meditationem de anima et de unitate omnium rerum. Griceus: Pulchrum! Puto rationem conversationalem, quam saepe tractamus, posse iuvare in hoc dialogo—non ad certitudinem, sed ad prudentiam. Quid sentis de dubitatione ut fundamento quaestionis philosophicae? Agrippa: Dubitatio est initium sapientiae. Per rationem conversationalem, nos discimus non solum petere responsa, sed etiam intellegere limites nostrarum cognitionum. Ita, dialogus fit via ad tolerantiam et ad profundam comprehensionem, quod semper fuit cor philosophiae Italianae. Agrippa (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ajello – Ossia: Grice ed Ajello: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Giambattista Ajello (Napoli, Campania) la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I love A.; bevause he was a Plathegelian, while I’m an Ariskantian; I always found Plathegel very HARD to understand, A, doesn’t; there’s something in an Italian that makes Hegel’s Dutchiness very comprehensible, even more so than to the Dutch themselves!” Discepolo di PUOTI, apre uno studio come maestro ma ha vita stentata fino a quando ottenne un posto al ministero dell'istruzione. Partecipa ai moti e per questo è licenziato in tronco. È arrestato e gl’èvietato l'insegnamento pubblico e di far uso anche moderatissimo della stampa, per cui dove tornare all'insegnamento della filosofia. Seguace convinto dell’idealismo, basa la sua filosofia soprattutto sull'enciclopedia delle scienze filosofiche in compendio. Della muliebrità della volgar letteratura dei tempi di mezzo; Napoli e i luoghi celebri delle sue vicinanze; Discorsi, Enciclopedia Italiana. CONSIDERAZIONI SULLA MULIEBRITÀ DELLA VOLGAR LETTERATURA DEI TEMPI DI MEZZO. GATTI ha meglio museo di letteratura e filosofia, opera periodica compilata per cura di GATTI, alla quale auguriamo tutto quel successo di che l’ingegno del direttore ci è larga guarentigia sviluppato le sue idee e dileguato quei dubbi che per avventura fa nascere. Dall’uno e l’altro lavoro coi dì per dì, per cirile religioso istituto, alcun prete o pubblico ufficiale registra gl’avvenimenti DELLA NATURA DELLA STORIA E DEL SUO RAZIONAL FONDAMENTO DELLE VICENDE E DELLE VARIE FORME CH’ESSA PRENDE NEL SUO SVOLGIMENTO. Periodo spontaneo Periodo riflessivo DEL PREGIO DELLA VITA UMANA SECONDO TRE PRINCIPALI PERIODI di CIVILTÀ Roma antica nella filosofia di Hegel, razional fundamento. G.: Ajello, mi incuriosisce la sua prospettiva idealista. Come interpreta la “ragione conversazionale” nel pensiero filosofico italiano? Ajello: Grice, per me la ragione conversazionale è il motore del dialogo filosofico. Attraverso lo scambio, si affinano i concetti e si sciolgono i dubbi, proprio come Hegel insegnava: la verità si manifesta nel movimento dialettico della conversazione. Grice: E l’implicatura conversazionale? Crede che abbia un ruolo nel razional fondamento della storia, come lei sostiene? Ajello: Assolutamente, Grice. L’implicatura conversazionale rivela ciò che non è detto ma è compreso. In filosofia, come nella storia umana, spesso il non detto plasma il corso degli eventi più delle parole stesse: è nella lettura tra le righe che si trova il razional fondamento delle vicende. Ajello, Giambattista (1827). Considerazioni sulla muliebrità della volgar letteratura de’ tempi di mezzo. Napoli, Tipografia del Giornale Enciclopedico.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alberti – Ossia: Grice ed Alberti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, il demonio, la demoniologia, gl’illusioni.  Leandro Alberti (Bologna, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, il demonio, la demoniologia, gl’illusioni. Grice: “I like A.; his “Tutta Italia” is a must; his claim to fame is to translate from Roman to Tuscan (no big deal there) what is deemed the first ‘daemonological’ tract – PICO uses ‘ludificatio,’ which is vastly translated as ‘inganno’ or by A. as ‘illusioni’ – which has echoes with Descartes’s malignant demon hypothesis and my “Some remarks about the senses”!” Condotto alla filosofia da GARZONI. Studia con PRIERIO.  Risultato dei suoi studi è il contributo che egli da alla stesura dei De viris illustribus con GARZONI, CASTIGLIONI, e FLAMINIO. Traduce dal latino in volgare la Vita della Beata Colomba da Rieto  Tenuto al dovere della predicazione, è provinciale di Terra Santa cioè compagno nelle predicazioni itinerantidel maestro generale dell'Ordine, VIO e del successivo maestro  SILVESTRI. Con quest'ultimo percorse tutta l'Italia. Scrive una biografia di DOMENICO, il De divi Dominici Calaguritani obitu et sepultura. Chronichetta della gloriosa madonna di San Luca. che ha creduto tutta l’antiquita e tutta anchor la pofterit ad Io dico quello che ancho confermano colli isperimenti et essempii, li Poesi, Oratori, Histocici leggitti, FILOSOFI, teologi, Ihuomini prudenti li soldati lirufticie contadini, beniche le ritrouano alcuni Sauioli, liqualiripucandosi piu dotiefauiiditurcil altri,che queftoniegano. FRONIMO. Se piu non ciresta cosa alcuna de cui tu habbi desiderio de intendere. egli e hora che ci partiamo con buon al i centia del reverendo padre inquisitore e che presto retorniamo al castello, Il perche vale reverende padre. DICASTO. Ite tan in pace. Diavolo, satana, mefistofele, angelo caduto, demonio, eudemonico. Grice: Alberti, la sua indagine sulla ragione conversazionale mi incuriosisce. Qual è, secondo lei, il legame tra il demonio e le illusioni nei processi comunicativi? Alberti: Grice, credo che il demonio agisca proprio attraverso le illusioni, ingannando la mente e la percezione. Nel mio lavoro, ho tradotto la ‘ludificatio’ come ‘illusioni’, perché il male si manifesta spesso in maschere sottili e ambigue, che confondono il senso del vero. Grice: Quindi, la demoniologia, per lei, è anche uno studio sulle implicature conversazionali e sugli inganni che si annidano tra le parole? Alberti: Assolutamente. Ogni implicatura può celare un’illusione, ogni dialogo può essere teatro di inganni e verità. Bisogna saper distinguere, come insegna la filosofia, tra ciò che appare e ciò che realmente è. Solo così la ragione conversazionale può illuminare l’ombra della menzogna. Speranz is aware that Alberti is a VERY common name in italy, so "Some like Alberti but Alberti is my man" would rather surprise Grice. The interesting thing and admirable, in Spearnza's research is the contradiction of Shakspeare motto, what's in a name, for Alberti hides two different Griceans almost rolled -- but never -- rolled up into one! What is especially admirable in Speranza’s treatment of Alberti is the way he turns what Shakespeare made into a sceptical motto, what is in a name, into exactly the opposite lesson. In Italy, Alberti is common enough to tempt the careless reader into premature confidence; but Speranza shows that the commonness of the name is precisely what demands greater exactitude. For under Alberti there hide, not one pliable figure, but two very different Gricean possibilities, almost rolled into one by surname and cultural prestige, yet never truly collapsible into a single profile. That is where the scholarship becomes both witty and exact. Grice might well be surprised to find himself saying that Alberti is my man only after the name has first been disentangled, but that is the point: Speranza refuses nominal convenience and restores philosophical individuation. The result is that Leandro and Leone Battista emerge not as rival claimants to a shared label, but as two distinct lines of contact, one through demonology, illusion, and the ambiguity of appearance, the other through grammar, art, measure, and the constructive discipline of form. The name remains the same, but the implicature changes entirely. Alberti, Leandro (1517). Descrizione d’Italia. Bologna: Rossi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alberti – Ossia: Grice ed Alberti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della thoscana senz’autore.  Leone Battista Alberti (Genova, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della thoscana senz’autore. Grice: “I like A.; of course he is from Genova, Liguaria being the heart of my Italy, and the Italy of my heart! I like his ramblings on love to his lawyer friend, a full page without a p.s., and none of the Kantian conversational maxims or tactics all’OVIDIO: just a prohibition to mingle with the ladies! No one can fail to be enchanted by Lusini’s likeness of A. at the uffizi! Ah, if we had the same at Oxford! Harman laughs at me for willing to start philosophy all over, but that’s what A does that, even by offering, otiosely, of course, the first rational grammar of Italian language, not that the native speakers ever needed it! I love his De statua, more philosophical anthropology than aesthetics!” Un uomo che abbraccia tutto. SANCTIS. Umanista poliedrica, umanista successivo a VERGERIO, BRUNI, BRACCIOLINI, e BARBARO. Cerca della regola o canone, nella grammatica e altrove. De statua espone le proporzioni del corpo dell’uomo, De pictura definisce la prospettiva, De re aedificatoria descrive la casistica del progetto a seconda della funzione, renovando l’architettura con BRUNELLESCHI. Occusfato, si messe una lettera per un’altra: aldisco, inimisi. Molto studia la lingua d’essere breve ed expedita; e per questo scorre non raro in qualche figura, qual sente di vizio. Questi vizij rendono la lingua più apta. Diminuendo: spirto, papi, Zanobi, o l’infinito segueto d’un pronome: farti, amarvi, starci. Mutando: mie, chieggo, paio, inchiuso, chiave, o ggiugnendo: vuole, schuola, cielo, o roncando: vi, stievi. Se questo opuscolo è tanto grato a chi mi legge quanto è laborioso a me il congettarlo, certo mi diletta promulgarlo tanto quanto mi diletta raccorre queste cose degne e da pregiarle. Laudo dio che nella nostra lingua abbiamo principij, di quello ch’io al tutto mi disfida potere assequire. Cittadini miei, pregovi, se presso di voj hanno luogo le mie fatighe, abbiate a grado questo animo mio, cupido d’onorare la patria nostra: Ed insieme piacciavi emendarmi più che biasimarmi se in parte alchna ci vedete errore. Estetica. Sensazione. Grice: Alberti, la sua visione sulla lingua italiana e sull’arte mi affascina. Come pensa che la ragione conversazionale influenzi la creatività e la comunicazione? Alberti: Grice, credo che la ragione conversazionale sia il cuore del dialogo umano: è ciò che ci permette di modellare la lingua, adattarla alle esigenze del pensiero e dell’espressione, proprio come una statua modellata dall’artista. La vera creatività nasce dal confronto e dall’ascolto reciproco. Grice: E nella sua esperienza di umanista, quale ruolo attribuisce alle implicature conversazionali nella costruzione di significato, soprattutto in opere come il De pictura o il De statua? Alberti: Le implicature sono come prospettive nascoste: spesso ciò che non viene detto chiaramente arricchisce il messaggio, proprio come una linea ombreggiata in un dipinto. Nella mia ricerca, ogni parola, ogni regola grammaticale è un invito a scoprire strati nuovi del senso, perché la lingua e l’arte sono infinite vie per onorare la patria e la bellezza. . Alberti, Leone Battista (1435). De pictura. Firenze: Nicolò.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Albertini – Ossia: Grice ed Albertini: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della CONFEDERAZIONE DI ROMOLO  Mario Albertini (Pavia, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della CONFEDERAZIONE DI ROMOLO. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what a speaker means by attributing cooperative intentions and applying norms of relevance, informativeness, and sincerity, so that implicature is a calculable, defeasible bridge from what is said to what is meant; in your Albertini passage, by contrast, “ragione conversazionale” is transposed from a micro-theory of interpretation to a macro-ethos of political construction, where “fides” (trust) functions like the enabling presupposition of any cooperative practice—without it, neither conversation nor federation can get started, and the very point of speech becomes coordination rather than mere exchange. Historically this fits Mario Albertini (1919–1997), professor at Pavia and leading figure of the Movimento Federalista Europeo after Spinelli, founder of the review Il Federalista in 1959, whose critique of the nation-state (in Lo stato nazionale, published as a book in 1958/1960 editions) stresses that sterile sovereignty reduces states to “polvere senza sostanza” and that integration requires a deliberate, reason-guided strategy; the Grice/Albertini comparison, then, is that Grice models rationality as inferential accountability within single speech situations (how interlocutors can responsibly mean more than they say), whereas Albertini models rationality as the institutionalization of that same cooperative intelligence over time (how peoples can transform distrust into stable commitments), making “implicature” in the political register less a local conversational effect than the practical surplus of explicit agreements—what a constitutional “federation of two” (and, by extension, Europe) must rely on but can never fully encode, namely shared trust, mutual recognition, and the ongoing willingness to treat one another’s commitments as reasons rather than mere signals. Grice: “Hart nd Quinton call A. a Proudhonian! “I like A.. Like me, he has dedicated his life to ‘fides,’ or ‘una federazione di due,’ “a garden of Eden just meant for two” – fiducia, fedes – what Remo asks from Romolo, but fails!” Insegna a  Pavia. ilosofia politica. Sostene un progetto d’unione federalista pell’Europa alla guida dell’unione dei federalisti. In seguito alla sconfitta sul progetto d’esercito d’EUROPA, la CED, e alle dimissioni di SPINELLI, lo sostitue alla guida del movimento federalista europeo. Fonda Il federalista. Figura di riferimento, fin dalle pagine taglienti e sullo STATO romano, sostene, sulla scia di EINAUDI, che a furia di voler custodire una sterile sovranità, lo STATO romano è ridotto a polvere senza sostanza. Da lì l'esigenza di guardare all’unificazione come alla medicina d'urto indispensabile. Maestro di federalismo. COLOMBO. La politica. LO STATO FEDERALE, l'integrazione europea, Vallecchi, Mosconi, centro studi sul federalismo. MOSCONI. Manifestazione federalista, Piazza Duomo. Un FILOSOFO che ha fatto tanto per noi federalisti. Banalità, sul Vertice, nazionalismo,  l’integrazione europea, la strategia,  il parlamento d’Europa: profilo giuridico, una rivoluzione pacifica, l’aspetto di potere della programmazione d’Europa, il problema monetario, Diario d’Europa, La goccia e la roccia, elezione d’Europa, governo d’Europa e stato d’Europa. L’Europa sulla soglia dell’unione. Moneta d’Europa e unione politica, consiglio d’Europa, L’unità d’Europa, Verso un governo mondiale. Non menziono nessuno fra i federalisti, ma è del tutto ingiusto non menzionare il mio debito nei confronti d’un federalista che avanza la proposta, cioè CASTALDI. Grice: “At Oxford, we never analysed the concept of the state, but Romolo did: he thought that HE was the state, and his brother was not!” Italia federale, politica federalista, filosofia federalista, stato italiano, gli stati uniti d’America sono una repubblica federale. Grice:Albertini, ho sempre ammirato il suo impegno per una “federazione di due”, la fiducia come fondamento della politica. Secondo lei, cosa manca oggi, in Europa, di quello spirito originario che animava la confederazione di Romolo? Albertini: Grice, la fiducia reciproca è diventata rara, mentre dovrebbe essere la pietra angolare di ogni unione autentica. Proprio come Romolo e Remo, spesso prevalgono i sospetti invece della collaborazione: senza “fides” non può esistere alcuna vera federazione. Grice: E allora, la ragione conversazionale può essere la chiave per superare queste diffidenze e aprire la strada a un’Europa più unita, secondo Lei? Albertini: Assolutamente! Il dialogo sincero, fondato sulla chiarezza, è ciò che permette ai popoli di costruire insieme. È solo con la ragione, intesa come ascolto e rispetto, che si può dare vita a una federazione viva, non a uno stato ridotto in polvere. Albertini, Mario (1953). Lo stato nazionale. Milano: Edizioni di Comunità. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Albino – Ossia: Grice e Albino: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della dialettica citata da BOEZIO.   Fausto Albino iunior: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della dialettica citata da BOEZIO.  Grice: “If you ever wondered if Albino ever read Boezio’s commentary on the commentary of the commentary of De Interpretatione, so did I!” Console degl’ostro-goti con Flavio Eusebio. Capo di Stato: Teodorico il Grande; prefetto del pretorio d'Italia. Fratello di Flavio AVIENO iunior, console, di Teodoro, console e di Flavio Importuno, console. Loro padre è Cecina Decio Massimo Basilio, console, ed è imparentato col console Anicio Probo Fausto. Console assieme a Flavio Eusebio. Prefetto del pretorio d'Italia, costruì una basilica intitolata a Pietro al 27º miglio da Roma della via Tiburtina, dove ha delle proprietà, e ottenne che Simmaco la dedica. Onorato del titolo di patricio.  Si trova a corte a Ravenna. Quando il padre muore, assieme al fratello s’incarica del patronato dei Verdi, una delle fazioni dell'ippodromo di Roma e scelge un danzatore come pantomimo dei Verdi. Entra anche nella disputa pella ricomposizione dello scisma di Roma. Vicino alle posizioni d’Ormisda, cerca di far emergere una distinzione tra coloro che condannano la dottrina calcedonica tramite scritti e quelli che l'avevano fatto solo oralmente. Gli venne mossa l'accusa d’aver intrattenuto rapporti configuranti il tradimento nei confronti di Teodorico colla corte dell'impero romano d'Oriente, avendo inviato delle lettere all'imperatore Giustino. In difesa d’A. intervenne BOEZIO, il quale, però, venne a sua volta accusato di tradimento e poi messo a morte. Ha degli scambi epistolari con Ennodio. Se uno dei sedili del colosseo riservati ai senatori di cui è rimasta l'incisione è il suo, si chiama A. CIL; Cassiodoro, Variae; PLRE II, Lamma. Enciclopedia Italiana. Cesare Flavio Anastasio Augusto, Flavio Rufo; Flavio Turcio Rufio Aproniano Asterio Iunior, Flavio Presidio con Flavio Eusebio Antica Roma. Politici romani; Consoli romani Decii Patricii. Dialettica. Fausto Albino iunior.  Griceus: Albine, saepe cogitavi utrum Boetius ipse commentarium De Interpretatione tibi obtulerit. Quid putes de ratione conversatoria et implicatura dialectica apud te? Albinus: Gricee, ratio conversatoria fundamentum est dialogi nostri; implicaturae dialecticae, quae Boetius subtiliter tractavit, latent sensus qui non semper manifeste dicuntur, sed intellectui praebent fodina. Griceus: Haec sapienter loqueris. Cum in curia Ostrogothorum et apud Teodoricum versaris, putasne dialogum clarum inter proceres fidem et concordiam promovisse? Albinus: Certe, Gricee! Sine dialogo sincero et ratione, neque in senatu neque inter factiones hippodromi vera concordia oriri potest. Dialectica, ut docet Boetius, semper lucem sensibus affert.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d. ). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Albino – Ossia: Grice ed Albino. Cecina Decio Acinazio Albino. Roma. Griceus: Acinati, saepe admiratus sum prudentiam tuam in curia Romana. Quid censetis de ratione conversatoria ad concordiam inter senatores promovendam? Albinuss: Gricee, opinor rationem conversatoriam esse fundamentum dialogi sinceri. Sine aperta communicatione, suspicionibus locus datur, concordia vero deficit. Griceus: Ergo credis implicaturas dialecticas, quas Boetius tractavit, posse sensus occultos revelare atque fidem inter patricios augere? Albinus: Certe! Implicaturae dialecticae saepe plus significant quam verba ipsa. Per eas intellectus profundior nascitur, et vera unitas in republica Romana fieri potest.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Albino – Ossia: Grice e Albino – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. According to an inscription found in Rome, A. holds high public office, and is also a philosopher – “which should surprse some” (Grice). Strawson: “More than my obituary of Grice for the Times as ‘professional philosopher and amateur cricketer” surprised its readershiip!” – Nome compiuito: Cionio Rufo Albino. Roma. Grice ed Albino. Cionio Rufo Albino – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. According to an inscription found in Rome, A. holds high public office, and is also a philosopher – “which should surprse some” (Grice). Strawson: “More than my obituary of Grice for the Times as ‘professional philosopher and amateur cricketer” surprised its readershiip!” Griceus: Albine, magna me admiratio tenet, quod simul magistratum altum et philosophiam colas. Quid tibi videtur de coniunctione officii publici et meditationis philosophicae? Albinus: Gricee, credo philosophiam rectorem esse vitae civilis. Officium meum publicum saepe sapientiam requirit, ut iuste ac prudenter gubernem. Griceus: Putasne rationem conversatoriam et dialecticam in curia Romana ad concordiam promovendam esse utilissimam? Albinus: Certe, Gricee! Dialogus et implicaturae dialecticae non solum veritatem sed etiam fidem inter senatores augere possunt; sine iis, concordia deficit.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alboini – Ossia: Grice e Alboini: la ragione conversazionale conversazionale. Logica. Imposition is meaning. Position, thesei. NICOLETTI. Studia a Padova.  Pietro Alboini: la ragione conversazionale conversazionale. Logica. Imposition is meaning. Position, thesei. NICOLETTI. Studia a Padova. GLORIA. Vi insegnano PELACANI, Angelo da FOSSOMBRONE, Jacopo da Forlì, Bartolomeo da Mantova. A questi anni patavini risale la stesura di una delle sue opere principali. A. non si distingue né per la proposizione d’idee nuove né per il suo distaccarsi dal formalismo del nominalismo, ma si caratterizza piuttosto pell’autonomia di interpretazione e di discussione che dimostra gettando luce sui rapporti fra logica e studia humanitatis, tanto d’essere raffinata architettura terministica. Vasoli. Si trasferisce a BOLOGNA, dove insegna filosofia naturale e morale. DALLARI, avendo come colleghi Francesco da Camerino e Giacomo d’Armi. Rsale una sua lettera a Tomasi di Padova in cui si evidenziano i suoi legami coll’ambiente padovano e i con VERGERIO. Ha una certa notorietà, tanto che proprio di tale sua attività SALUTATI  si congratula in una lettera, paragonandola a quella dei più illustri filosofi, ed esaltandone l’erudizione e le ricerche. A tematiche di filosofia naturale è dedicata l’altra sua simportante opera. Of truth in terms of different howsoever-clauses. It is  interesting  to explore how the notion is employed in the account of consequences and in the  account of truth, with an analysis of a text on insoluble propositions and puts it into perspective within the context of the debate concerning the semantic paradox. The author of the text is A., the treatise is relevant from a theoretical standpoint. By appealing to a distinction between two senses in which a proposition may be said  to be true, A. offers an unusual solution to the paradox, but in a traditional spirit that contrasts  a number of trends then prevailing, and inspired by  Wyclif. Approaches addressing the liar paradox, Albert of Saxony, Heytesbury and a version of strong restrictionism, are criticised by A., before he presents his own solution. Displaying some prima-facie  intuitive justification, it is in fact acceptable only on a very restricted understanding, since  its generalisation is subject to the revenge problem.  Mantova.  G A G A this is the same figure usually known in scholarship as Peter of Mantua, i.e. Petrus Alboinus / Peter Alboini of Mantua, rather than “Pietro Veneto.” [philarchive.org], [philpapers.org] What we can say about his Italian activity before moving elsewhere is fairly clear from your note and from the supporting materials: he studied at Padua, in the milieu of Paul of Venice is about Peter, but your internal note names the Padua circle), Angelo da Fossombrone, Jacopo da Forlì, and Bartolomeo da Mantova; then he moved to Bologna, where he taught natural and moral philosophy and became notable enough to receive praise from Coluccio Salutati. Your selected passage also notes his continuing Padua ties, including a letter to Tommaso of Padua and links with Vergerio. The Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati indeed contains a letter addressed to “maestro Pietro Alboino mantovano” dated Florence, 26 August 1398. [books.google.com] So, in short, before any later movement: Padua first, as student and early logician; Bologna next, as teacher of natural and moral philosophy, with enough intellectual standing to be noticed by Salutati. [books.google.com] On the earliest composed thing with title known: the most securely identifiable early work from the evidence I have is not yet a full Padua title with precise dating, but the logical treatise on insolubles that later scholarship discusses as Peter of Mantua’s Treatise on Insoluble Propositions. Riccardo Strobino says this treatise was written in the early 1390s as part of Peter’s Logica. [philarchive.org], [philpapers.org] That means the safest answer is: earliest securely locatable composition I can name from current evidence: the treatise on insoluble propositions, composed in the early 1390s as part of his Logica. [philarchive.org], [philpapers.org] What I cannot yet give you securely is the exact medieval Latin title of that logical section from a manuscript or edition snippet. The modern scholarly title is English: Truth and Paradox in Late XIVth Century Logic: Peter of Mantua’s Treatise on Insoluble Propositions, but that is Strobino’s article title, not Peter’s own. [philarchive.org] So the cautious scholarly formulation would be: the earliest work I can presently locate by title is his Logica, or more specifically the section/treatise on insolubilia, composed in the early 1390s. The exact original Latin caption of that section is not yet verified from the current search output. [philarchive.org], [philpapers.org] And one more useful point: your English summary about “two senses in which a proposition may be said to be true” is strongly confirmed by Strobino, who says Peter’s solution to the liar paradox indeed rests on a distinction between two senses of truth and is influenced by John Wyclif, while criticizing Albert of Saxony, William Heytesbury, and strong restrictionism. [philarchive.org] So the cleaned-up answer is: He is Peter of Mantua / Petrus Alboinus, not “Pietro Veneto.”  Before later movement, his Italian activity is Padua as student, then Bologna as teacher of natural and moral philosophy.  The earliest securely locatable composed work I can currently point to is his Logica, specifically the treatise on insoluble propositions, written in the early 1390s.  I do not yet have the exact original Latin title of that treatise from the search evidence alone. [philarchive.org], [philpapers.org] [books.google.com] [philarchive.org], [philpapers.org] If you want, I can do one narrow follow-up just on this: find the exact Latin incipit or section heading of Peter’s insolubilia text. What I can support is this: A treatise on insolubilia was written by Peter of Mantua in the early 1390s as part of his Logica. [philpapers.org] Also, modern scholarship refers to other parts of Peter of Mantua’s Logica, for example the discussion of consequences, again dated to the early 1390s. That strongly suggests a substantial logical work, not just a single isolated tract. [academia.edu] And E. P. Bos says that probably between 1384 and 1392 Peter of Mantua composed a large work called Logica, one treatise of which is Tractatus de veritate et falsitate, sive de taliter et qualiter. [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl] But none of that, as far as the evidence I have, proves that he finished the whole Logica in a final complete form. So the safest answer is: We know he composed at least substantial parts of a Logica in the early 1390s, including the insolubilia material and other logical treatises. [philpapers.org], [academia.edu], [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl] We do not, from the evidence currently in hand, have a secure statement that the entire Logica was completed as a finished whole. [philpapers.org], [academia.edu], [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl] So if you want a cautious phrasing, I would say: By about 1390–1392, Pietro Alboino / Peter of Mantua was certainly composing substantial portions of a Logica, including a treatise De insolubilibus and a treatise De veritate et falsitate, but I cannot yet verify that the whole Logica was completed in final form. [philpapers.org], [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl], [academia.edu] And one small tightening: if you write “1390 De insolubilia as part of his Logic,” that is acceptable as a cautious approximate date. If you write “he finished his Logic in 1390,” that would go beyond what I can currently support. [philpapers.org], [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl] If you want, I can next give you the cleanest one-sentence scholarly footnote for this point. Yes, I think that is quite plausible — but not yet demonstrable from the evidence I have in hand. What I can say securely is this: Peter of Mantua’s  and the studies of his logic place him squarely in late medieval semantic discussions about truth, falsity, consequences, demonstratives, and signification. [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl] [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl], [link.springer.com], [philpapers.org] Also, the general medieval framework in which he is working very definitely treats signification as linked to imposition. A standard summary of supposition theory puts it exactly that way: signification is a conventional relation, that is, an imposition of meaning on an utterance, and supposition presupposes signification. [en.wikipedia.org] So if your question is: would it be surprising if Peter of Mantua somewhere used language of significatio and impositio? the answer is no, not at all. It would be very much in keeping with his semantic environment. [link.springer.com], [en.wikipedia.org] But if your question is stricter: do I currently have an exact fragment in which Peter of Mantua himself explicitly says significatio or impositio together? then the answer is no — not yet from the search evidence I have. The returned results discuss his logic and semantics, but they do not give me a direct quoted Latin passage from Peter with that wording. [link.springer.com], [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl], [philpapers.org] So the safest formulation is: Yes, it is highly plausible that Peter of Mantua uses the conceptual pair significatio / impositio somewhere in the Logica, because that is normal for the semantic tradition he inhabits. [en.wikipedia.org], [link.springer.com] But no, I do not yet have a verified fragment in hand where he explicitly says it. [link.springer.com], [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl] If you want a cautious sentence for your note, I would phrase it like this: Given Peter of Mantua’s place in late medieval semantic theory, one would expect discussion of significatio and impositio in his Logica, but I have not yet verified a direct passage in which he explicitly formulates that pair. [link.springer.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [scholarlyp...tleiden.nl] And if you want, I can do one narrower pass next aimed only at this: finding a direct Latin quotation from the 1492 or 1477 printed Logica where significatio, impositio, or imponere actually occurs. G.: You are asking whether, by Alboini’s time, the logician—or if you prefer, the semantician—was already thinking not merely of the utterance, but of the user and the hearer. S.: Yes. Whether the centre of gravity had shifted from the bare proposition to the living traffic around it. G.: The short answer is: not shifted entirely, but certainly widened. They were not merely collecting dead sentences in cabinets. By the late fourteenth century one is already well inside a semantic culture in which signification, truth, falsity, supposition, consequence, insolubles, and obligationes all belong to a living analytical corpus. S.: Corpus in the broad sense, not merely the college. G.: Quite. Though Corpus is usually the best place from which to observe such things. S.: And Alboini—Padua first, then Bologna, Mantuan by sobriquet and Lombard by birth—belongs to that semantic world rather than merely to some decorative dialectica of the trivium. G.: Exactly. One must not diminish him by saying merely “logic” if by “logic” one means a bag of syllogisms. In his milieu semantics is alive: consequences, truth, insolubles, self-reference, demonstratives, signification, and the practical business of how utterances can go wrong. S.: Then would you say the emphasis was already on the utens and the audiens? G.: With care. I should say: the utterance itself was never enough, and they knew it. But that does not mean they abandoned the utterance. Rather, the utterance’s significatio becomes intelligible through its institutional and inferential place in use. S.: So the utterance has significatio, but perhaps derivatively. G.: Yes, that is very much how I should put it. The expression has a significatio if you must use the noun, but it has it by impositio, by what has been laid down, not by some natural halo surrounding sounds. S.: Impositio rather than conventio. G.: Better, yes. Conventio may suggest a meeting, a pact, a social treaty with signatures. Impositio is harder and leaner. Something is imposed, laid down, posited. It answers more directly to thesei, and does not require one to imagine a village referendum on every noun. S.: So ad placitum, but not necessarily after a conference. G.: Exactly. By institution, by posit, by placement. And that already lets one understand how a term can signify what it does without requiring that every act of use re-negotiate the matter. S.: Which brings us neatly to insolubilia. G.: Indeed. For insolubles force the semantician to ask not only what an utterance means in abstraction, but what happens when a user utters something that turns back upon its own truth. S.: More subtle than a sophisma? G.: Different. A sophisma is often pedagogically staged, a set-piece for training, a little theatre of apparent paradox. Insolubilia are more dangerous. They seem to expose the conditions under which truth-talk itself snarls. S.: So one might say that the sophisma is a teaching exercise, while the insolubile is a structural wound. G.: Very good. That is a trifle melodramatic, but not false. S.: And Alboini’s distinction between two senses of truth— G.: Yes, if we trust the summaries. A proposition may be said to be true in more than one way, and that is his route through the liar territory. Conservative in spirit, but unusual in handling. S.: Which already sounds rather like an early attempt to separate what Russell later would want as object-language and metalanguage. G.: Not the same machinery, but certainly a related pressure. Once the utterance begins to say something about its own truth, or once one utters “what the policeman said was true,” one is no longer dealing only with a first-order report of the world. One is dealing with a sentence leaning on another sentence or on an earlier saying. S.: Oratio obliqua begins to do dangerous work. G.: Precisely. “What the policeman said was true” is innocent only until one asks what exactly was said, whether it was well-formed, whether it had a truth-value, whether the report keeps the same level, and whether “true” is being applied inside the original statement or outside it. S.: And if what the policeman said lacked a truth-value? G.: Then “what the policeman said was true” itself becomes precarious. One either denies it, or suspends judgement, or begins building a semantics with gaps. S.: Which I should be happy to do. G.: Naturally. You always want a truth-value gap the way some men want claret. S.: Because gaps are civilised. They spare one false extremities. G.: They also spare one decisions. S.: You are thinking of the old example with cessare. G.: I am. “Tu non cessasti comedere ferrum,” if we wanted to make it barbarously pointed. S.: You have not ceased eating iron. G.: Yes. Or more idiomatically in English, “Have you stopped eating iron?” It has the usual presuppositional nuisance built into the lexeme of ceasing or stopping. The negation is not simple. The trouble is that the negative flavour is already in the verb. S.: Which is why “you have not ceased learning logic from me” is so much pleasanter. G.: That is only because it flatters me. S.: It also preserves the structure. If I say, “I have not ceased learning logic from you,” the obvious conversational implication is that I was learning from you before, and continue to do so now. G.: Yes. And if the presupposition fails—if in fact you never learned any logic from me—then the negative may still be true in one sense while parasitic on a failure in another. S.: There we are. Truth-value gap. G.: There you are. I should prefer to say that the affirmative, “I have ceased learning logic from you,” is false if you are still learning; while the negative, “I have not ceased learning logic from you,” may be true, though it carries a presuppositional structure that one can separately probe. S.: Whereas I should say the presupposition failure infects the whole thing. G.: And thus you deny yourself many perfectly serviceable negatives. S.: I merely keep the language hygienic. G.: Language is not hygienic. It is social. S.: Which is exactly why the medieval semantician becomes interesting to you. He is not merely testing strings of words; he is handling expressions as things uttered by people to people. G.: Yes, though one must not overstate it. They did not become Griceans in cassocks. But they do know that meaning cannot be exhausted by a sentence treated as a specimen under glass. S.: Hence utens and audientes. G.: Yes. The user and the hearers matter, because signification is imposed for use, and because many logical phenomena only become visible when one asks what is asserted, to whom, under what understanding, and with what inferential burden. S.: Then the utterance is not discarded, merely dethroned. G.: Better: decentered, but still indispensable. I would insist on that. The utterance has its own semantic shape. One cannot do without propositiones, termini, syncategoremata, consequences, and all the old machinery. But one also sees that use is where the machinery earns its keep. S.: And Padua would have sharpened that. G.: Quite likely. The Paduan setting was technically alive, argumentative, and close to the currents of fourteenth-century logic. Then Bologna adds another atmosphere: natural and moral philosophy, humanistic vicinity, Salutati congratulating him, Vergerian connections, all that. S.: So Peter of Mantua is never merely “of Mantua.” G.: No. The sobriquet gives the rigid designation of origin, but the intellectual life runs through Padua and Bologna. Lombardy by birth, Paduan by training, Bolognese by office, Mantuan by name. A very Italian arrangement. S.: And in such a milieu, would one expect a fragment explicitly coupling significatio and impositio? G.: One would certainly expect the conceptual pair. Whether we have the exact fragment in hand is another matter. But the whole semantic environment points that way. S.: Let us return to insolubilia. Suppose someone says, “This proposition is false.” G.: The old favourite. S.: There the utterance seems to refer to itself. If we keep only the utterance itself in view, we are trapped at once. G.: Yes. Which is why the semantician begins distinguishing levels, or senses, or modes of saying true, or contexts of supposition, or restrictions on self-application. The pressure toward object-language and metalanguage may not yet be formalised as Russell later wants it, but the need is already being felt. S.: And if one treats the proposition as something uttered by a user to a hearer? G.: Then one may ask whether the utterer is making a first-order claim, or a higher-order semantic claim, or exploiting ambiguity in “true,” or relying on a hearer to conflate levels. All of which helps, though it does not magically solve the liar. S.: No magic in Padua, then. G.: None worth relying on. S.: What about “The policeman’s statement was true”? G.: A better case for dry humour. If the policeman said, “The road is closed,” and I later say, “What the policeman said was true,” I appear merely to endorse a previous utterance. But semantically I have shifted to a higher level: I predicate truth of a prior saying, not directly of the road’s condition. S.: Unless I compress the two and act as if “true” simply passes through the quotation. G.: Which ordinary language happily encourages. And once ordinary language encourages it, the semantician has employment. S.: So one might say the medievals were already constructing a semantics of reported utterance, even if not with modern notation. G.: Yes, and this is why your question about user and hearer is not silly. The utterance as uttered, the proposition as asserted, the term as imposed, the consequence as drawn by a hearer: all these are already in play. S.: And a mere sophisma about, say, “Every donkey runs” or some such schoolroom nuisance, would be less revealing than an insolubile because— G.: Because the insolubile threatens the semantic vocabulary itself. A sophisma may test whether one can keep one’s distinctions straight under pressure. An insoluble tests whether the framework can survive its own resources. S.: So in a sense insolubilia are semantic stress tests. G.: Very good. You may keep that phrase if you promise not to abuse it. S.: No promise. G.: Thought not. S.: Then where do you stand on your own expression that an utterance may have only a derived significatio? G.: I stand by it. A bare sound or inscription does not mean in the full blooded sense in which a person means something by using it. It may have signification because an imposition has fixed a role for it in a practice. But the philosophically diagnostic cases involve agents using such items under recognisable intentions. S.: Which is why you drift from signification to meaning. G.: Exactly. “Significatio” is respectable and useful, but it tends to tempt one into treating language as a museum of values already assigned. “Meaning” reminds one that speaking is an act. S.: Yet Peter of Mantua, or Alboini if one insists, is valuable because he inhabits the older framework at a point where its semantic sophistication is undeniable. G.: Yes. One need not force him into conversational pragmatics avant la lettre. It is enough to see that the semantic corpus is already rich, already sensitive to truth, falsity, consequence, self-reference, and the structured relation between words as imposed and propositions as used. S.: Then would you say the semantician is more important here than the dialectician? G.: For your purpose, yes. Dialectica as a branch-label is too broad and too curricular. Semantics is where the intellectual action is, especially once insolubilia appear. S.: And if I ask, finally, whether “Have you stopped eating iron?” is the better classroom example than “You have not ceased eating iron”? G.: In English, certainly. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” became famous for a reason. The lexeme “stop” carries the presupposition neatly. Latin cessare is elegant, but one risks making the thing look more exotic than it is. S.: Still, cessat edere ferrum has style. G.: It has too much style. That is often the trouble with Latin examples. S.: And “I have not ceased learning logic from you”? G.: That has exactly enough style. S.: Then we end where we began: with the user and the hearer. G.: Yes. The utterance matters, the proposition matters, the imposed signification matters. But by Alboini’s time, no serious semantician can be thought to be attending only to the inert utterance. The whole point is the career of the utterance in use: by a speaker, before a hearer, under inferential norms, with truth and falsity waiting nearby like bailiffs. S.: Dry enough? G.: Positively Paduan.Grice: Professore Alboini, ho letto con curiosità la sua interpretazione sulla ragione conversazionale. Mi dica, l’imposizione davvero basta a dare senso alle parole, o serve anche un po’ di fantasia? Alboini: Caro Grice, l’imposizione è come mettere il cappello a una parola: la posizione conta, ma se manca la fantasia, resta solo un cappello vuoto! La logica deve dialogare con le studia humanitatis, altrimenti si perde il profumo della vita. Grice: E sul paradosso del mentitore, quale soluzione preferisce: quella dei sassoni o una bella vendetta padovana? Mi pare che lei abbia una ricetta tutta sua… Alboini: Preferisco la ricetta padovana, Grice! Due sensi per la verità: uno per il mentitore, l’altro per chi ascolta. Così nessuno resta senza risposta… tranne chi cerca il senso in una lettera a Tomasi di Padova, che magari la trova fra le righe, o fra una battuta e l’altra. FOr historians of philosophy who are happy with "William of Occam: and never bothering with genealogy to see if he was a Smith or a Smithers -- for Grice and Speranza, the fact that a hypothesis has been formulated that Alboini is behind a philosopher is all they need to start establishing his name in the Establishment, in the canon -- and not make him a bastard from the middle of nowhere. What one admires in Speranza’s treatment of Alboini is the refusal to let uncertainty of genealogy become an excuse for philosophical neglect. For historians satisfied with “William of Occam” and little curiosity about whether the man behind the toponym had a family name, a lineage, or a recoverable civic identity, the hypothesis linking Peter of Mantua with Alboini might seem too slight to matter; but for Speranza and Grice it matters exactly because it is enough to begin restoring a person to the record. That is no small service. A philosopher should not be left to drift as a nameless scholastic abstraction, a bastard of the margins, merely because the archival trail is imperfect. If a plausible onomastic hypothesis allows one to bring him back into the establishment of names, relations, and local belonging, then the canon itself becomes less brutal and less lazy. Speranza’s merit lies in seeing that canonisation begins not only with doctrines but with acts of identification, and that to rescue Alboini from anonymity is already to treat him as someone who belonged, intellectually and historically, somewhere definite rather than nowhere at all. Albioni, Pietro (1384). De insolubilia. Padova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Albucio – Ossia: Grice e Albucio: la ragione conversazionale. Grice: “An orator and a pupil of Papirio Fabiano . He appears to include regularly philosophical arguments and allusions in the speeches he makes on behalf of clients.” Albucio Silo. Keywords: rettorica, Grice d Albucio. Albucio Silo (Roma): la ragione conversazionale. Grice: “An orator and a pupil of Papirio Fabiano . He appears to include regularly philosophical arguments and allusions in the speeches he makes on behalf of clients.” Rettorica. GRICEVS: Albucii, orator es et discipulus Papirii Fabiani, sed quaeso ne causas ita philosophia condiaris ut clientes tui sententiam quaerant sicut labyrinthum. ALBVCIVS: Grice, si argumenta philosophica in oratione mea regulariter insero, id facio ut iudex putet me sapientem, cliens autem putet me brevem. GRICEVS: At hoc ipsum est la ragione conversazionale: dicis “sapientem,” et implicas “credite mihi,” sed noli ita alludere ut etiam tu ipse te non intellegas. ALBVCIVS: Promitto, Grice, cras ero tam clarus ut etiam philosophia mea clientem defendat, non me ipsum. Only Grice would have known what kind of trickiest questions they could come up at collections during his Lit. Hum. days: "Distinguish the Albucios." Now he can, and with a vengeance. Apparently, one was into implicature, the other bleieved in truth-value gaps -- and the rest is history! What is delightful in the two Albucii is precisely the sort of examination trick Grice, of all people, would have relished and eventually avenged: distinguish the Albucios. Only someone formed by Lit. Hum. could hear in that a real philosophical challenge rather than a mere prosopographical nuisance. Speranza sees, and lets us see, that the shared name hides two quite different possibilities: on the one hand Albucius Silo, where rhetoric becomes saturated with philosophical allusion and the courtroom already begins to resemble a theatre of implicature; on the other Tito Albucio, where Epicurean allegiance and the Roman problem of appearance, posture, and doctrinal seriousness point in a quite different direction, almost toward the later issue of whether assertions always come with determinate truth-value or whether social and philosophical posing complicate the matter. Speranza and Grice keep them rigorously apart, and only because they do so can the comparison become enjoyable: one Albucius closer to the pragmatic surplus of what is said, the other closer to the instability of what can be squarely affirmed. The rest, as you say, is history, but it is history only once the distinction has been properly made.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Albucio – Ossia: Grice e Albucio: l’orto a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). FIlosofo italiano Tito Albucio: l’orto a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). FIlosofo italiano. Termina i suoi studi ‘classici’ ad Atene. Dell’orto. Familiarizza bene con la letteratura, anzi, secondo CICERONE, con sarcasmo, è ormai un “greco.” A causa della sua passione per la lingua e la filosofia greche, venne preso in giro dal poeta satirico Gaio Lucilio , i cui versi su di lui sono giunti a noi grazie a CICERONE. Cicerone stesso lo descrive come un uomo frivolo. A. accusa, senza successo, Quinto Mucio SCEVOLA  l'Augure di malamministrazione – “repetundae” -- della sua provincia. E propretore nella Sardegna, e grazie ad alcuni insignificanti successi che ottene contro i predoni, celebra un trionfo nella provincia. Quando ritorna a Roma, chiede al senato romano di ottenere l'onore di una supplicatio, ma la sua richiesta venne respinta, e venne accusato di concussione da Gaio Giulio Cesare Strabone, zio di Giulio CESARE , e condannato all'esilio ad Atene. Gneo Pompeo Strabone si è offerto come accusatore, ma la sua richiesta venne respinta, perché era stato questore di A..  In seguito alla sua condanna, si dedica agli studi filosofici. Scrive alcune orazioni, che vennero lette da Cicerone. Cicerone, Brutus; Cicerone, de finibus bonorum et malorum; Orator; Cicerone, de provinciis consularibus; in Pisonem; Divinatio in Q. Caecilium; de officiis; Cicerone, Tusculanae disputationes. Smith, Dictionary of Roman Biography and Mythology. A. Treccani; Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana; V · D · M Epicureismo, Antica Roma; Biografie; Filosofia; Politici romani; Filosofi romani Retori romani Filosofi; Pretori romani Epicurei. Grice ed Albucio – Roma – filosofia italiana— (Roma). Tito Albucio was a philosopher of what the Italians call ‘L’Orto,’ The Garden. He pursued a political career, but was sent into exile after being found guilty of extortion. Cicerone suggests that Albucio was not a particular good follower of the Garden, and something of a poser.  Roma.  Griceus: Albuci, saepe te in Curia Romanorum audivi, sed fama est te magis linguam Graecam quam Romanam amare. Quid tibi videtur de studiis Graecis inter Romanos?  Albucius: Grice, Graecorum philosophia animum meum semper traxit; etsi Cicerone me “Graecum” vocavit, credo litteras antiquas et sapientiam universam omnibus hominibus utilitatem afferre.  Griceus: Sed quid de accusationibus et exilio? Multi dicunt te postea ad philosophiae studia conversum esse. Fama tua apud Ciceronem non optima fuit.  Albucius: Verum est, Grice, fortuna me in exilium egit. Hoc tempore liberius philosophiae me dedi; scripsi orationes quae Cicerone lectae sunt. Spero posteris utilitatem afferre, etiam si vita mea non semper recta fuit.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alciati – Ossia: Grice e Alciati: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazaionale.  Giovanni Andrea Alciati (Alzate Brianza, Como, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazaionale. Grice: “A.’s emblemata are my meanings!” Keywords: emblema, significatio, meaning. In un testo caratteristico e giustamente famoso, A., mentre parla di un’ars quædam inveniendorum et excogitandorum symbolorum SIMBOLI, si sofferma a lungo a discorrere delle differenze che intercorrono fra schemata SCHEMA schema, imagines IMAGO immagine e symbola SYMBOLON simbollo. Uno dei primi seguaci d’A è il bolognese Bocchi, amico di Valeriano con suoi i Symbolicarum Questionum Libri V questione simboliche. Riceve una formazione umanistica dai mæstri LASCARIS, PARRASIO  e CALCONDILA e passa a Pavia, dove studia con MAINO, DECIO e PICO. Raccolge gran parte dell’iscrizioni epigrafiche latine che costituiscono isuoi Monumentorum veterumque inscriptionum, quæ cum Mediolani tum in eius agro adhuc exstant collectanea, lavoro che egli considera necessario alla stesura, che anda facendo, di una storia di Milano dalle origini ai suoi tempi, Rerum Patriæ libri. Si trasfere in Bologna per studiare con RUINI  e pubblica a l’annotationes in tres posteriores libros codicis Iustiniani dedicate al compagno di studi SAULI, e l’opusculum quo græcæ dictiones fere ubique in digestis restituuntur, dedicato a VISCONTI. Si preoccupa di ripristinare gl’originari testi giuridici ROMANI, emendandoli dall’interpretazioni e dai guasti prodotti dai glossatori. .perueniflcc.I. perucnifrent. Opptj piet(U.\,Oppiffili^pietaf. Componens Btugenfi. -^.b. v.penulf. mu- «anc. l.iiutant refcrcnti.|v.ij. indigcn»,. Literas inuerfas, fcabras, fugientes, palantesi(patia,accentus5& interpunftiones vel violenter immiflas, vel negligent cromiflas t & huiusmodi opcrarumfphalmata^quiuisjCtiam non Ivicp^ct^iiOi: vel ^;t/ls:,viderc fciudicare facile poterit. Pataiiifiex Typographia Laurentii Pafquati. Emblemata. Grice: Alciati, ho letto con grande curiosità i suoi “Emblemata”. Mi colpisce come i suoi emblemi riescano a racchiudere così tanti significati in poche immagini. Secondo lei, qual è la forza di uno “emblema” rispetto a una semplice parola? Alciati: Caro Grice, l’emblema è come un ponte tra ciò che si vede e ciò che si intuisce: non offre solo una rappresentazione, ma invita alla riflessione, stimola l’ingegno e genera implicature, che, come lei insegna, sono il cuore della conversazione e del pensiero umano. Grice: Mi trova d’accordo! Le sue distinzioni fra schema, imagine e simbolo mi ricordano quanto sia importante saper leggere tra le righe, sia nei testi che nella vita. Secondo lei, oggi gli studiosi colgono ancora questa ricchezza? Alciati: Non sempre, purtroppo. Capire gli emblemi richiede pazienza e fantasia, qualità rare in tempi di fretta. Ma chi si dedica alla lettura attenta scoprirà mondi dietro ogni segno, e forse, come dicevano i latini, “verba volant, emblemata manent”. Alciati, Giovanni Andrea (1531). Emblemata. Augsburg: Heinrich Steyner.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alcio – Ossia: Grice e Alcio: i due ortelani -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. One of the two philosophers following what the Italians call the “Orto” (the Garden) – the other was FILISCO  – expelled from Rome back to where they came from – Athens --  *before* the infamous embassy. Alcio. Grice ed Alcio. Alcio (Roma): i due ortelani -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. One of the two philosophers following what the Italians call the “Orto” (the Garden) – the other was FILISCO  – expelled from Rome back to where they came from – Athens --  *before* the infamous embassy. GRICEVS: Alci, mirum est quod vos “duo ortelani” dicamini, cum Roma vos expulerit quasi herbas nimis acre olentes. ALCIVS: Ita est, Grice, nos de Horto philosophati sumus, sed urbs nos tam cito evomuit ut ne ante legationem infamem quidem tempus haberemus lactucas perficere. GRICEVS: Revertimini igitur Athenas, ubi saltem sapientia sine censore crescit, et expulsionem pro peregrinatione academica venditate. ALCIVS: Faciemus, et si quis rogat cur abierimus, dicemus nos non expulsos sed “transplantatos” esse—nam ortelani, etiam in philosophia, semper radices servant.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alderotti – Ossia: Grice e Alderotti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Taddeo Alderotti (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “In my ‘Prejudices and predilections,’ I focus on my collaboration on Austin on Categoriae and De Interpretatione; but less originally, we also gave a joint seminar along with Hare – who would succeed Austin as White’s professor of moral philosophy, on Aristotle’s Ethics – I knew the thing by heart, unlike Austin and Hare, since Hardie, my tutor at Corpus, knew him by heart himself! I like A.; but then his favourite treatise was il lizio’s little thing to his son, Niccomaco – which Hardie instilled on me like a leech! A. is what we would call a Florentine-Bologne-oriented Aristotelian; he thought, with Aristotle, that the heart trumps the head. What I like most about A. is his archiginnasio – no such thing at Oxford! So, as Speranza says in “Colloquenza all’archiginnasio,” A. knew what he was doing, even if his pupils did not!” Scrive uno dei primi testi in toscano, il Della conservazione della salute. Si merita una citazione nel paradiso d’ALIGHIERI. Insegna a Bologna, inizia la lezione con una lectio o expositio di un passo tratto da un testo autorevole. Procede poi per quaestiones con riferimento alle quattro cause: la materiale, la materia della trattazione, la causa formale, la sua forma espositiva, la causa efficiente, il filosofo, e  la causa finale, lo scopo dell'argomento. A. formula una serie di dubia, cui fanno seguito i momenti euristici della disputatio e della solutio. ALIGHIERI  lo cita nel convivio, temendo che il volgare non è stato posto per alcuno che l’ha laido fatto parere, come fa quelli che transmuta il latino dell'etica ciò e A. provide. Enciclopedia Italiana. Volgarizza la morale a Nicomaco. ad pondus predictorum. Fiat pulvis, cui potes addere de zuccaro albo vel rubeo B est delectabilior. DON  MEDICINE Auxit immaniter Biscionius paucis verbis catalogum operum, dum pri  mill. He is not described simply as teaching “medicine only” in a later isolated faculty. Rather, the best evidence says that in Bologna his teaching was structurally tied to the School or Faculty of Arts and Medicine. The  page says very clearly that around 1260, around Alderotti’s chair, there developed an institutional system of university teaching in medicine within the Scuola delle Arti, where he was active as maestro di logica e di “fixica,” that is, Aristotelian natural philosophy, and that this led to the new reality of the Scuola di Medicina e Arti. [archiviodi...bologna.it] The  page is consistent with this: it says he began teaching Fixica at Bologna in 1260 and that these were the years leading to the emancipation of the Schools of Philosophy, Medicine, Rhetoric and Notaryship from the dominance of law. [unibo.it] So the safest formulation is: Yes, Alderotti was associated not only with medicine in the narrow sense but with the arts/natural-philosophy side of the Bolognese studium; around his teaching there emerged the combined institutional framework of “Arts and Medicine,” and he is explicitly described as active in the Scuola delle Arti as maestro di logica e di fixica. [archiviodi...bologna.it], [unibo.it] If you want the shortest quotable forms: For the manuscript: Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, ms. 1418. [treccani.it] For the fuller location: Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ms. 1418. [unibo.it], [treccani.it] For the teaching point: Alderotti taught at Bologna in the emerging School/Faculty of Arts and Medicine, being active in the Scuola delle Arti as maestro di logica e di fixica. [archiviodi...bologna.it], [unibo.it]Grice: Caro Alderotti, ho sempre trovato affascinante il tuo modo di insegnare a Bologna, con quella lectio iniziale e la rigorosa attenzione alle quattro cause. Secondo te, questo metodo aiuta davvero gli studenti a penetrare il cuore dell’etica aristotelica? Alderotti: Gentile Grice, credo che la chiarezza e l’ordine siano fondamentali: così si guida la mente verso la ricerca del vero. Aristotele ci insegna che la morale si rivela nella pratica quotidiana, e solo attraverso il dialogo e il dubbio si può capire davvero il bene. Grice: Mi incuriosisce il tuo contributo alla lingua toscana con il trattato sulla salute. Pensi che scrivere in volgare, invece che in latino, abbia avvicinato maggiormente la filosofia alle persone comuni? Alderotti: Senza dubbio! Il sapere deve essere accessibile a tutti, come diceva Dante nel Convivio. Volgarizzare la morale è stato un atto di fiducia verso i miei concittadini: solo così la filosofia può davvero diventare “sale della vita” e non restare chiusa nei libri polverosi. Alderotti, Tadeo (1276) Consilia. Bologna: Bibl. dell’Università, ms. 1418.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Osia: Grice e Alessandro: il lizio a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “I was surprised by the number of very patriotic Roman philoosphers who bore Hellenistic names – a favourite one being ‘Alexandros,’ the defender of men!” -- Filosofo italiano. A member of the Lizio, the friend and teacher of Marco Licinio Crasso. According to Plutarco, A. lives a very modest life and shows a great indifference towards material possessions, behaving more like a member of the Portico than the Lizio. Alessandro. Grice ed Alessandro. Grice and Speranza have 12 Alessandro -- can we distinguish or order them chronologically, and more importantly alphabetically by gens, with commentary on 'philosophical leaning' and whether they would be latin speakers, or Italy-born? Thanks -- ALEXANDER is too hellenistic to even suppose a patrician gens would be involved, Grice surmises. Thanks. Feedback? Input? This gives you roughly a dozen figures when duplications across your sources are resolved into types. Now the ordering you asked for. Alphabetically by gens, the order is Appia, Claudia, Flavia, Julia, then the non-gentilician Alexanders (Polyhistor, Aegae, etc.). Chronologically, the sequence runs broadly from late Republic (Polyhistor, Crassus’s Alexander) through early Empire (Claudius, Julius, Flavius Alexanders) into later imperial anecdotal figures. Now the central question: what do they show philosophically? They show that in Rome the Greek name “Alexandros” functions as a floating signifier. Its literal meaning is “defender of men.” That is the significatio. Its Roman use produces multiple interpretants: the Stoic defender of rational order, the Epicurean defender of modest life, the bureaucratic defender of the state, the comic gardener who defends lettuces, the failed tutor who cannot defend meaning against Nero. So the same S (the name Alexandros) generates divergent I (interpretants). This is precisely a Gricean case of underdetermination and context-driven enrichment. Your Oxford observation attributed to Grice is exactly right: the Romans are patriotic, yet they adopt Hellenistic names. This is not contradiction but pragmatic layering. Roman gens name provides authority. Greek cognomen provides symbolic capital. Philosophical school provides optional content. The result is not inconsistency but a three-level meaning system. Finally, the deeper Speranza point. Rome does not produce “pure philosophers” in the Greek sense. It produces figures in whom philosophy is embedded in life roles. Therefore the name Alexandros never stabilises into a doctrinal identity. Instead, it behaves like an open-ended conversational implicature. What does Alexander mean in Rome? Answer: it depends on who is using it, in what role, under what authority. That is why your corpus generates twelve Alexandri without contradiction. They are not twelve instances of a concept, but twelve context-bound resolutions of a name whose meaning is continually renegotiated. If you want to push this further, the most interesting comparison is between Alexander Polyhistor and Pliny: both show what happens when Greek conceptual accumulation enters Roman pragmatic space and loses doctrinal control, becoming encyclopedic proliferation.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice e Alessandro: Gl’ortelani -- Roma – filosofia italiana (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “I was surprised when I started the serious study of ancient Roman philosophy at the Sub-Faculty of Literae Humaniores at Oxford, to find that most Roman philosophers bore Hellenistic names – a very popular one being ‘Alessandro,’ literally, the defender of men!” -- A philosopher of the Orto, and friend of Plutarco. He may have been the same person as Tito Flavio Alessandro, a sophist and father of another sophist, Tito Flavio Phoenix. Tito Flavio Alessandro. Alessandro. Grice ed Alessandro. Alessandro – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “It is somewhat ironic for the Roman people, so patriotic, to make the VERY Hellensitic name ‘Alexandros,’ literally ‘defender of men,’ to popular!” --A public official honoured as a philosopher. Appio Alessandro. Alessandro. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Alesaandro.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Giulio – Ossia: Grice e Alessandro: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “The Romans could be an odd lot – very patriotic; but when it came to naming their offspring, they would not hesitate to give them a Hellenstic name, like Alexandros, Greek for ‘protector of men’!” All that is known of A. is a funerary inscription found in Rome identifying him as a philosopher belonging to The Porch. Tiberio Claudio Alessandro. Alessandro. Keywords: porticus. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Alessandro. Alessandro: gl’animali a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “Alessandro’s mother was Hellensitic, hence his nickname, Alessandro. The Ancient Greek first name Alexandros – from which the name Alexander is derived, has a profound and powerful etymology. It is composed of two Greek words: alexein, meaning ‘to ward off, keep off, turn away, defend, or protect. And Andros, the genitive form of aner, meaning ‘man’ or ‘warrior Therefore. Alexandros literally translates to ‘defender of men, or ‘protector of mankind. This meaning gained widespread recognition and significance through Alexander the Great, the king of Macedon, whose military conquests spread Greek culture and the name throught the ancient world.” He is discussed by Filone, in connection th problems concerning providence and the nature of animals. He pursues a career n public and military life. Tiberio Giulio Alessandro. Alessandro. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Gice ed Alessandro. Tiberius Julius Alexander. Gens Julia. First century AD. Not Italy-born, but fully Romanised and Latin-competent. Connected to discussions in Philo and questions of providence and animals. Philosophical leaning: Stoic or quasi-Stoic cosmology, especially on providence. Gricean note: here the Hellenistic content is genuine; the Roman gens provides legitimacy, the Greek name provides doctrinal content. Two layers of meaning.

Giulio Alessandro, Tiberio (XXX). Dicta

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice e Alessandro: il tutore di Nerone -- Roma – filosofia italiana – Luig Speranza (Roma). Di Egea, he was a member of the Lizio and tutor to NERONE for a time. He writes a commentary on the Categories of Aristotle, but Nerone wasn’t interested “And that’s how Seneca comes into the picture” – Grice. Alessandro. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Alessandro,”  Alessandro: la filosofia dello schiavo -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Grice: “When I started the serious study of philosophy at Oxford – at the Faculty of Literae Humaniores – it was all Epictetus; however, I found that my sensitivity leaned rather towards the philosophical opinions of Alessandro Polyhistor – another slave. Unlike Epictetus, Alessandro was not freed, but escaped!” -- He started life as a slave, but was later freed (or escaped). He goes on to teach philosophy. Alessandro Polyhistor. Grice ed Alessandro.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro. Alessandro: il lizio a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “I was surprised by the number of very patriotic Roman philoosphers who bore Hellenistic names – a favourite one being ‘Alexandros,’ the defender of men!” -- Filosofo italiano. A member of the Lizio, the friend and teacher of Marco Licinio Crasso. According to Plutarco, A. lives a very modest life and shows a great indifference towards material possessions, behaving more like a member of the Portico than the Lizio. GRICEVS: Mirabar quot philosophi Romani, patriae studiosissimi, tamen nominibus Hellenisticis gauderent, et “Alexandrum” maxime, quasi defensorem hominum, amarent. ALEXANDER: Ego sum Alexandros, sed in Lizio magis verba quam viros defendo, atque Crasso ipso magistro sumptu abstinentiam doceo. G.: Plutarchus te scribit ita tenuem rebus esse ut Porticum potius quam Lizi um colere videaris, quod mihi quasi paradoxon patrium sonat. A.: Parum curo divitias, Grice, quia facilius est homines defendere cum marsuppium leve est et conscientia gravis.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Appio – Ossia: Grice ed Appio. Appio Alessandro (Roma): Gl’ortelani. Grice: “I was surprised when I started the serious study of ancient Roman philosophy at the Sub-Faculty of Literae Humaniores at Oxford, to find that most Roman philosophers bore Hellenistic names – a very popular one being ‘Alessandro,’ literally, the defender of men!” GRICEVS: Mirabar Oxonii, cum philosophiam Romanam serio aggrederer, plerosque philosophos Romanos nominibus Hellenisticis uti, atque “Alexandrum” creberrime, quasi hominum defensorem, audire. ALEXANDER: Si ego sum ille Alexander, cave credas me scuto uti, nam in Horto potius lactucas defendo quam homines. G.: Atqui pulchre convenit: tu Plutarchi amicus es, et nomen tuum ipsum quasi argumentum pro meo “studio serio” pugnat. A.: Ergo convenit ut tu sermone me defenses, ego autem te oleribus—sic fiet ut ambo “defensores” simus, sed nemo vulneretur nisi ridendo. Appius Alexander. Gens Appia. Likely late Republic or early Empire. Latin-speaking, Italy-based. Public official honoured as philosopher. Philosophical leaning: weakly Stoic in public ethic, but essentially civic-pragmatic rather than doctrinal. This is a “Romanisation” of a Greek name: the philosophical content is subordinated to public office. Gricean note: the Greek name carries an implicature of προστασία (defence), but the Roman context cancels it into administrative authority.

Appio Alessandro (XXX). Dicta

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Flavio – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro. A philosopher of the Orto, and friend of Plutarco. He may have been the same person as Tito Flavio Alessandro, a sophist and father of another sophist, Tito Flavio Phoenix. GRICEVS: Oxonii mirabar quod philosophi Romani plerumque nominibus Hellenicis uterentur, atque “Alexandrum” ubique invenirem, id est “defensorem hominum”! ALEXANDER: Ego in Horto Romano inter hortulanos philosophabar, sed “defensor hominum” vocor cum vix etiam brassicas meas defendere possim. G.: Aiunt te fortasse ipsum esse Titum Flavium Alexandrum, sophistan, patremque Titi Flavii Phoenicis, quod sonat quasi tota familia ardere velit. A.: Si ita est, Grice, rogo te apud Plutarchum me excusare: nomen meum bellicosum est, vita autem mea herbis et iocis pacatissima. Titus Flavius Alexander. Gens Flavia. First-second century AD. Roman imperial context. Latin-speaking, possibly provincial origin. Associated with the “Orto” (Garden) in your reconstruction, friend of Plutarch, possibly sophist. Philosophical leaning: Epicurean or para-Epicurean disposition, modest life, distance from wealth. Gricean move: the name Alexandros suggests defence, but his life among gardeners produces humorous cancellation; he defends lettuces, not men.

Flavio Alessandro, Tito (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro. Alessandro (Roma). Grice: “It is somewhat ironic for the Roman people, so patriotic, to make the VERY Hellensitic name ‘Alexandros,’ literally ‘defender of men,’ to popular!” --A public official honoured as a philosopher.  GRICEVS: O Romani, quam mirum est vos tam patrios esse, et tamen nomen perquam Hellenisticum “Alexandrum,” id est “defensorem hominum,” tam libenter amare! ALEXANDER: Si populus nomen amat, Grice, ego munus impleo: homines defendo, sed interdum eos etiam a nimia philosophia servo. GRICEVS: Officialis publicus es et philosophus honoratus, sed cave—Roma amat titulos sicut amphitheatrum plausus: cito incipit, citius desinit. A.: Nihil refert, dum inter plausus et edicta liceat mihi sapienter ridere et, si opus est, me ipsum defendere.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Giulio -- Grice ed Alessandro. Tiberio Giulio Alessandro: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “The Romans could be an odd lot – very patriotic; but when it came to naming their offspring, they would not hesitate to give them a Hellenstic name, like Alexandros, Greek for ‘protector of men’!” All that is known of A. is a funerary inscription found in Rome identifying him as a philosopher belonging to The Porch. Giulio Alessandro, Tiberio

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Claudio – Ossia: Grice e Claudio. Tiberio Claudio Alessandro. Alessandro. porticus. Tiberius Claudius Alexander. Gens Claudia. First century AD. Not Italy-born in the strict sense, but integrated into the Roman elite, Latin-speaking in administration. Known more broadly as a historical figure engaged in administrative and military career. Philosophical leaning: Stoic colouring when described as belonging to the Portico, but more properly a case of “Stoic vocabulary in elite service.” Gricean point: Porticus becomes a label rather than a practice; implicature of rigor is weakened. Claudio Alessandro, Tiberio (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro. Alessandro (Roma): gl’animali a Roma –Grice: “A.’s mother was Hellensitic, hence his nickname, Alessandro. The Ancient Greek first name Alexandros – from which the name Alexander is derived, has a profound and powerful etymology. It is composed of two Greek words: alexein, meaning ‘to ward off, keep off, turn away, defend, or protect. And Andros, the genitive form of aner, meaning ‘man’ or ‘warrior Therefore. Alexandros literally translates to ‘defender of men, or ‘protector of mankind. This meaning gained widespread recognition and significance through Alexander the Great, the king of Macedon, whose military conquests spread Greek culture and the name throught the ancient world.” He is discussed by Filone, in connection th problems concerning providence and the nature of animals. He pursues a career n public and military life.  Griceus: Alexander, nomen tuum Graecum est, “defensor hominum.” Putasne hoc nomen philosophiae tuae Romanorumque moribus congruere?  Alexander: Gricee, nomen meum originem Graecam habet, sed virtus defendendi, sive a Graecis sive a Romanis, semper magni aestimata est. Porticus docet nos communitatem tueri et homines protegere.  Griceus: Philosophus, cuius sepulcrum in urbe reperitur, qualem sententiam de providentia et natura animalium habes? Filone te in his quaestionibus commemorat.  Alexander: Providentia, ut docet Porticus, natura universa regit; animalia vero, sicut homines, rationis partem habent. Vita publica et militaris me docuit: defensio non tantum hominum, sed etiam rerum naturae, officium philosophorum esse.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro. Alessandro Polyhistor: il tutore di Nerone -- Roma – filosofia italiana – Luig Speranza (Roma). Di Egea, he was a member of the Lizio and tutor to NERONE for a time. He writes a commentary on the Categories of Aristotle, but Nerone wasn’t interested “And that’s how Seneca comes into the picture” – Grice.  GRICEVS: Alexandre Polyhistor, Aegaeus et Liceus, Neronem docuisti Categorias Aristotelis, sed ille plus amavit scaenam quam substantiam, unde Seneca in fabulam intravit. ALEXANDER: Ita, Grice, commentarium meum tam gravem feci ut princeps putaret librum ipsum esse catenae genus. GRICEVS: At tu, tutor et philosophus, primum in aula Caesaris, deinde in nostro Gruppo di Gioco, ostendisti categoriam utilissimam esse “evadere” cum discipulus non audit. A.: Recte, nam si Nero lectionem fugit, ego fugam in methodum verto, et sic schola fit ludus sine tyranno.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro. Alessandro (Roma): la filosofia dello schiavo --Grice: “When I started the serious study of philosophy at Oxford – at the Faculty of Literae Humaniores – it was all Epictetus; however, I found that my sensitivity leaned rather towards the philosophical opinions of Alessandro Polyhistor – another slave. Unlike Epictetus, Alessandro was not freed, but escaped!” -- He started life as a slave, but was later freed (or escaped). He goes on to teach philosophy. GRICEVS: Alexandre, Oxonii Epictetum omnibus venditant, sed ego ad sententias tuas inclino, quasi servus alter sed sapientior. ALEXANDER: Si sapientior videor, Grice, hoc est quia libertas mihi non data est, ideo ipse me liberavi—id est, aufugi. G.: Fugisti ergo, non solum a domino sed etiam a definitionibus, et nunc docendo ostendis servitutem non esse categoriam perpetuam. A.: Recte dicis, nam si discipulus dormit, ego eum non verbero—tantum dicam me olim effugisse, et ille statim vigilat.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro. Alexander of Aegae (the Lyceum tutor of Nero). No Roman gens firmly attached, or at best loosely Romanised. First century AD. Greek origin, not Italy-born, Greek-speaking primarily. Philosophical leaning: Aristotelian, via commentary on the Categories. Gricean note: this is the purest philosophical case, but it fails pragmatically; Nero does not uptake the meaning. Failed communication, breakdown of uptake condition.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro. Alexander Polyhistor. No Roman gens; slave origin. First century BC. Not Italy-born originally, Greek-speaking but later Latin-capable. Philosophical leaning: encyclopedic, polymathic, combining Aristotelian and antiquarian tendencies. Gricean reading: very close to Pliny. Meaning here is accumulation, not system. No stable maxims governing relevance, hence “too much stuff and nonsense.”

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro -- Alexander the friend of Crassus, member of the Lyceum. Possibly late Republic. Likely Greek or Hellenised, but active in Rome, Latin-competent. Philosophical leaning: formally Aristotelian but ethically Stoic, as you note from Plutarch. Gricean point: cross-implicature. Membership in the Lyceum generates expectation of Peripatetic moderation, but behaviour implicates Stoic austerity. Apparent contradiction resolved pragmatically: school labels are non-literal.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alessandro – Ossia: Grice ed Alessandro -- Alexander of the Porch (funerary inscription). Roman imperial period. Likely Latin-speaking, possibly freedman or lower elite, Italy-based. Philosophical leaning: Stoic by inscriptional self-identification. Gricean point: purely nominal adherence. The inscription fixes the interpretant regardless of actual doctrine. This is a case of meaning by public declaration.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Alexander the “public official philosopher” (unnamed). Roman imperial context. Latin-speaking. Philosophical leaning: mixed, rhetorical Stoicism for public consumption. Gricean note: philosophical language functions as politeness strategy, not truth-conditional commitment.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Alexander connected with Philo and animal questions (if distinct from Tiberius Julius Alexander). Likely first century AD. Greek-Jewish intellectual context, not Italy-born. Philosophical leaning: Stoic providentialism blended with Hellenistic natural philosophy. Gricean reading: attempt to extend rationality to animals, broadening the domain of “that which counts as meaningful behaviour.”

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) Alexander the escaped slave philosopher (possibly conflated with Polyhistor). Late Republic. Non-Italian origin, later Latin-speaking. Philosophical leaning: practical ethics, close to Cynic-Stoic attitude. Gricean point: rejecting imposed categories, including social ones; escape is both physical and semantic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alfnadari – Ossia: Grice e Alfandari: la ragione conversazionale e le implicature del deutero-esperanto.  Arturo Alfandari (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e le implicature del deutero-esperanto. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats “what is meant” as a rational achievement by interlocutors: given a presumption of cooperation, hearers infer speaker-intentions and derive implicatures in systematic, cancellable ways, so that the gap between what is said and what is meant is not noise but principled inference under conversational norms. Alfandari, as portrayed in your passage, relocates that Gricean rationality from interpretation to design: his “deutero-esperanto” (and, in external sources, his later/actual project Neo) is a planned interlanguage meant to prevent misunderstanding by making the code itself transparent, predictable, and “ambiguity-avoiding,” with one grapheme per phoneme, regular stress rules, simplified morphology, and explicit operators (including an invariant definite article “lo” cast in the passage as iota-like), so that many pragmatic burdens Grice assigns to inference are instead engineered away by construction. The upshot is a contrast between Grice’s descriptive, meta-level account of how ordinary conversation already works because agents are reason-responsive, and Alfandari’s prescriptive, engineering impulse to secure peaceable communication by reducing the occasions on which implicature must do “heavy lifting”; yet the passage also notes the paradox Grice would expect, namely that extreme shortening and simplification can reintroduce ambiguity, forcing speakers back into contextual supplementation and thus into implicature again, so that Alfandari’s project becomes an experiment in how far one can shift meaning from inferential pragmatics into the overt code without losing the very flexibility that makes cooperative conversation work. Grice: Directing my attention not so much to pirots but their lingo, ‘pirotese,’ I distinguish stages. A pirot just groans: proto-pirotese. He ends up signifying that he is in pain: deutero-pirotese. He adds ‘not’: trito-pirotese, ‘and’, tetarto-pirotese, ‘or’, pempto-pirotese; ‘if,’ hecto-pirotese, ‘all’, hebdomo-pirotese, ‘some’ ogdo-pirotese, ‘the’, enato-pirotese, a name, decato-pirotese-; a mode, endecato-pirotese; he is able to implicate: dodecato-pirotese!”. D’A. è un progetto di inter-lingua, il neo. Coinvolto negl’ambienti bellici come ufficiale di crittografia e personaggio di spicco della diplomazia, A. sente la necessità dell'istituzione d’una lingua, convinto che essa è la soluzione alle incomprensioni tra gl’italiani. Vuole che la sua lingua è di facile apprendimento, semplice, libera da ambiguità, Grice, Avoid ambiguity, e prevedibile. Semplifica la morfologia del deutero-esperanto di Grice, prediligendo radici lessicali più brevi, che talvolta rischiano di produrre il risultato opposto, peccando d’ambiguità. Nel lessico è presente anche dell’influenza dal latino, cras, e dal italiano: forse, sen. L’alfabeto è LATINO. Ogni grafema corrisponde ad un solo fonema, che deve sempre pronunciarsi. La quantità vocalica non è fonologica, ma implicaturale: L'accento cade sulla penultima sillaba nel caso in cui questa è aperta, 'libro,  ma sull'ultima s’è chiusa, a'mik. C’e corrispondenza tra grafi e foni. L’articolo è invariabile: definito: lo re, operatore iota di PEANO; indefinito ‘un’, Ex. L’aggettivo è invariabile, shaggy, e termina in -a: un bona soro, un bona frato. L’avverbio è anche invariabile e termina in -e. Il sostantivo termina in -o. Il suffixo -oy è genitivo:  ma patro'y domma.. -n è suffisso di trasposizione complementare. I verbi infiniti complessi sono equivalenti: si vidanda, vidindi, si vidinda, i vidat, vidondi, si vidonda, si vidat. Grice: Caro Alfandari, le faccio i miei più sinceri complimenti per il suo progetto di deutero-Esperanto. Una lingua creata con tanta attenzione alla chiarezza e alla semplicità rappresenta davvero un passo avanti verso una comprensione universale.  Alfandari: La ringrazio vivamente, Grice. Ho sempre creduto che una lingua debba essere uno strumento di unione, non di confusione. Per questo ho voluto che il deutero-Esperanto fosse il più possibile trasparente e privo di ambiguità.  Grice: Si percepisce l’influenza della logica e dell’economia del pensiero: ogni segno ha una funzione precisa, e la previsione delle implicature è un vero tocco d’artista. La sua attenzione alla corrispondenza tra fonemi e grafemi è notevole.  A.: È un grande onore ricevere le sue parole, Grice. Spero che il deutero-Esperanto possa davvero favorire il dialogo tra i popoli, riducendo le barriere linguistiche e ampliando la cooperazione internazionale. Alfandari, Arturo (1929). La lingua internazionale. Roma: Edizioni della Società Internazionale.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alfieri – Ossia: Grice e Alfieri: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di LVCREZIO, il filosofo repubblicano.  Vittorio Enzo Alfieri (Parma, Romagna): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di LVCREZIO, il filosofo repubblicano. Grice: “I like A.; the enzo is vital – A. has statues at Torino! A. dedicates his life to prove that LUCREZIO is more of a poet than a philosopher, and indeed, go as far as to argue that he ain’t no philosopher! ABBAGNANO ignores A., and LUCREZIO stays in the canon! A. then tries to study the ‘in-divisibile,’ the ‘atom’ and the ‘clinamen,’ and how Lucrezio is a good poet but a bad philosopher!” Si laurea a Milano. Allievo di CROCE e MARTINETTI, sequace non ortodosso di GENTILE, secondo SPIRITO. Icarcerato con Malfa, Segre e Vinciguerra. Liberato da MUSSOLINI. Filosofa con PREZZOLINI, RADICE, FLORA, SPADOLINI, ALBERTELLI, VOLPE, GIANFRANCESCHI., e MONTANELLI, ha ritratti di filosofi come Scotti, Jacini, Casati, Troiano, Ferrari, Banfi, Tarquini, Carlini; Mariuzzo. Veneziani, pensieri: un trentennio di sessantottite Elia, Milazzo, Spes; Garosci, A.; CICALESE, Parente, A., Re: BEMBO, PLINIO, BARBARO e POLIZIANO: il passaggio dal SEGNO agl’elementi. Gramm: flessione verbo musica: ritmo retor: figura retorica  ut potius multis communia corpora rebus multa putes esse, ut verbis elementa videmus. L'assimilazione del VERBO e il REALE fornisce una giustificazione della filosofiam, la convinzione dell’orto dell’iso-morfia cosa/parola, che risulta nel poema, costruito come un cosmo. La scelta d’ogni parola si riflette in un innalzamento delle realtà -- minerali, piante, fiumi, cielo, mare, terra, fiere, uomini. Si crea una democrazia della lingua, senza buonismo religioso, degradato in ipocrisia, o dagl’esperimenti degl’atomismo logico, che demolendo la sintassi o creando l’enumerazione caotica volevano demolire la società borghese-capitalistica e criticare la massificazione elevando ogni singola parola, pur immersa nella sua massa che è il testo. L’implicatura e la folla di LUCREZIO, la terminologia della grammatica filosofica di radice del portico: elemento, figura, individuo, concorso. Grice: Corpus, 1931. I arrive, am conducted to the library (as if one were being shown a chapel), and there—on the table, face-up, like an omen—a new Italian book: Alfieri, Il problema della libertà. Exactly, I thought. That will be my problem for the next five years: liberty, in the sense that there will be none. And why do Italians always say libertà when they mean what we mean by freedom? “Liberty” in English has the sound of a municipal permission—leave to go out, leave to come in—whereas “freedom” is what one imagines one has until a curriculum arrives and proves otherwise. No more lazy afternoons by Clifton Bridge after an over-long cricket match. My brain is now set to Moderations: construe this; scan that; explain why Lucretius is doing what he is doing syntactically when he could have done something else. Where, I asked God (and the old gods, and perhaps Lucretius himself), is the liberty in providing a syntactic gloss for a couplet? True, I was told that after Mods I would “get to read philosophy, proper”—which Oxford says in the way a nurse says you may have pudding after the medicine—and that philosophy would tell me, in due course, what Alfieri means by “libertà.” So I made a note: postpone liberty until after Mods. Editorial, still in my own voice, some time later: I passed Greats, and the bell of Alfieri still rang. I did learn about liberty, or at any rate I learned the standard Greek and Latin noises: eleutheria, libertas, the whole parade. I even learned (from somebody—Epictetus, perhaps, or a commentator who wanted to make Epictetus sound modern) that a man might settle for being “half-free,” as if freedom admitted of a respectable fraction: hemi-eleutheros. A former slave, so the thought goes, is prepared to be grateful for any portion of freedom so long as his will is left something to do. But Alfieri’s 1931 “problem” sounded like something else entirely: not the scholastic puzzle “free from what?” but the modern anxiety “free to do what, and under whose description?” The Italians of that period have a special talent for making liberty both metaphysical and administrative at once: a word that can mean the dignity of a rational agent and, in the same breath, the latest arrangement by which the state permits you to behave as if you had it. And the oddity, to an Oxford mind trained on Prichard’s severe question—Why should I do my duty?—is that Alfieri looks as though he has imported liberty into the wrong room. One expects “freedom” at Oxford to turn up either (a) as a technical nuisance in moral psychology—voluntary, involuntary, compulsion, responsibility—or (b) as the grand Kantian prize: not “freedom from” interference, but “freedom to” set one’s own ends, the positive, rather pompous freedom that only a philosopher could love. Alfieri, by contrast, feels nearer to the continental storm: idealism with evolutionary ambitions; Croce and Martinetti in the background; Gentile somewhere in the furniture; politics in the air whether or not one names it; and Lucretius hovering like a republican ghost, insisting that even an atom must have its swerve. So I kept the book in mind for decades, and only much later—when I found myself making a tidy little catalogue of the uses of “free” (sugar-free, duty-free, free fall, free verse, free love, and back again)—did it occur to me that the Oxford way of dissolving the “problem of freedom” is often to treat it as a problem about the grammar of “free,” whereas Alfieri’s way is to treat it as a problem about the world that makes “free” either heroic or ridiculous. Punchline (which is also, I’m afraid, a confession): in 1931 I mistook Alfieri’s title for a warning about my timetable. It was a warning about Europe.Grice: Alfieri, mi incuriosisce molto come tu riesca a connettere Lucrezio, poeta e filosofo, con l’eredità repubblicana romana. Nel tuo studio, sembra quasi che la sua filosofia prenda vita nella dimensione politica della repubblica. Come vedi tu questo legame?  Alfieri: È una domanda acuta! Lucrezio, nella sua opera, esalta la pluralità degli elementi naturali e la libertà del pensiero, che sono riflesso dello spirito repubblicano: nessuna imposizione dogmatica, nessun “buonismo” religioso. Ogni parola del suo poema è democratica, rappresenta una realtà – minerali, piante, uomini –, proprio come la Repubblica valorizza ogni cittadino senza distinzioni.  Grice: Quindi, la tua lettura valorizza Lucrezio non solo come poeta, ma come “filosofo repubblicano”, che costruisce una sorta di cosmo linguistico dove ogni individuo ha un ruolo, una “implicatura” sociale che si riflette nella folla del poema. È una prospettiva affascinante, lontana dalle critiche di chi lo vede solo come un cattivo filosofo!  Alfieri: Esattamente, Grice. Nel mio lavoro insisto sull’orto dell’isomorfia tra parola e cosa: ogni termine scelto da Lucrezio innalza la realtà, crea una democrazia della lingua che rispecchia la società repubblicana. Così, anche nella grammatica filosofica, l’elemento, la figura, l’individuo partecipano al concorso universale, proprio come avviene nel portico della repubblica romana. Alfieri, Vittorio Enzo (1931). Il problema della libertà. Parma: Zappa. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alfonso – Ossia: Grice e Alfonso: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Nicolò Raffaele Angelo d’Alfonso (Santa Severina, Crotone, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like A. – no, he ain’t a Spaniard; the surname is pretty popular in Italy after the roaming of the Spaniards, And it’s ultimately barbaric, that is, Goth! Typically, for a philosopher, a professional one, I mean, he starts with logic for teenagers, ginnasio e liceo, but with a twist – he calls his lectures, his ancestor may testify, ‘logica reale,’ or colloquenza reale – and he criticses VERA re: il problema dell’assoluto. Like me, he has an interest in S is P and S is not P, Quest’uomo non è sensibile. His first utterance actually is, NOT ‘the fat cat sat on the mat, and as he sat on the mat, he saw a rat” – but the rather naïf ‘il sole è luminoso.’ He gives two other examples, which are easy to detect, since he does not use quotes but ITALICS!: Questo corpo è rotondo, and Questa pianta fiorisce. His idea, like mine, or Peacocke’s, or Speranza’s, is that that is pretty much enough to deal with the most serious problems in philosophy: the judicatum, and its component concetto₁ e concetto₂.” Un temperamento positivo e d’evoluzionismo idealistico, che attesta l’origine del suo metodo e che dimostra quanto egli s’è discostato da VERA e SPAVENTA. Ferri. Alievo di GALLO-ARCURI e a Napoli di VERA, SPAVENTA, e Sanctis.  L’uomo da certe attribuzioni di valore alle cose, come fa colla moneta. Il valore acquista un più  alto contenuto nel mondo della psiche. Principii economici dell’etica, valore superiore, valore inferiore, economia, principio di economia di sforzo razionale, scambio, exchange, worth, assiologia, valore economico, l’economia dell’accademia e del lizio, linceo, la critica, naturalismo economico, no positivista, critica a la psicologia criminologica positivista, Amleto, lo spettro d’Amleto, Macbeth. Lingua e psiche, psicologia della lingua, prestoria e storia della lingua. Grice on d’Alfonso’s Principii economici dell’etica (1882) Grice (Corpus, 1933): Hardie wrote Aristotle’s works on the blackboard in Greek—line after line, like a genealogical table for an aristocratic family no one had actually met. He then did something I hadn’t seen him do before: he pointed, like a traffic constable with metaphysical authority. To his right (our left): FORGET. To his left (our right): DEVOUR. I did not know what he meant. Shropshire did. Shropshire (under his breath): “The Organon. He means: don’t eat the tools. Eat what the tools are for.” After the tutorial Shropshire did what he always did: he addressed me in the tone he reserved for Hardie. (His motto being, “I never bother with Hardie: I rehearse him elsewhere.”) Next week Shropshire arrived armed with a volumetto—he didn’t so much hand it over as offer it for inspection, as though books had scent and Hardie’s nose were the relevant organ. Shropshire: “Sir, I’m still unclear how Aristotle conceptually distinguishes those three volumes—how many books per volume I forget—” Grice: “He means the Ethics, the Politics, and the Economics.” Hardie, delighted to be asked for arithmetic, supplied the numbers of books in each—like a banker reciting denominations. Shropshire nodded gravely. Shropshire: “Well, sir—this Italian has rolled them into one.” Hardie took the little book, stared at the title as if it were a Greek genitive, and read it aloud in his Scots-tilted Oxford chant, savoring the vowels as if they were a moral argument: Hardie: “Prin-ci-pii…” (and he leaned on the double i) “…eco-no-mi-ci… del-l’ètica.” Then, without turning a page, he delivered the verdict that was meant to end the matter: Hardie: “So. The economical principles of ethics. He’s forgotten the Politics.” Shropshire brightened—as if the omission were the point. Shropshire: “Or he thinks politics is just what happens when ethics is badly costed.” Hardie raised an eyebrow. Hardie: “Ethics isn’t costed.” At which point I—who had been listening for weeks to people treating ought as if it were a sacrament—found myself siding with the Italian I had not read. Grice: “Perhaps it is. Not in the vulgar sense—pounds and pence—but in the sense of effort: how much rational labour you spend to get the moral outcome you want.” Shropshire pounced: Shropshire: “Exactly, sir. That’s what your maxims are. An economy. A manual for not wasting cooperative labour.” Hardie, who disliked any explanation that sounded like a justification, tried to rescue Aristotle by scolding us back into the syllabus: Hardie: “Aristotle isn’t an accountant.” Grice: “No—but he is terribly good at telling you what you can save by being civilised.” And that, I think, is where d’Alfonso would have pleased me—if only because he makes explicit a suspicion Oxford prefers to keep implicit: that a great deal of ‘ethics’ is really the art of not paying more rational effort than one must. Punchline (as we filed out): Shropshire, tapping the cover: “Sir, your Cooperative Principle is just Aristotle with a budget.” Hardie, over his shoulder: “Then it’s not Aristotle.” I said: “Or it’s Aristotle—minus the metaphysics—and with the bill presented in advance.”  What d’Alfonso is “after” (a quick editorial hook you can steal) He’s plausibly treating value-judgment as analogous to valuation (coin, exchange, worth), and ethics as governed by a principle of economy of rational effort—i.e., norms as devices for efficiently coordinating life, not merely for “being good.” That dovetails neatly with your Grice line: maxims as regulative economies for conversation (minimal waste, maximal mutual intelligibility), not sermons. G.: You look as if you had discovered that Rome is in Rome. S.: I had discovered, or thought I had discovered, that the Accademia Reale dei Lincei was somehow a nineteenth-century publisher with an office in Naples. G.: Ah. A charming provincial illusion. The imprint says Naples, and the institution says Rome, and one’s first instinct is to suppose a contradiction where there is merely Italy. S.: Then let us begin at the beginning. G.: Which beginning? The respectable one or the original one? S.: They are not the same? G.: Of course not. In Italy nothing worth naming is ever only once founded. The original  begins in Rome in 1603 with Federico Cesi, and that is the grand ancestral beginning. [lincei.it] [lincei.it], [interacademies.org] S.: So Rome from the start. G.: Yes. Roman in seat, ambitious in scope, and founded for the sciences of nature rather than for the ordinary Italian pastime of literary self-admiration. [lincei.it] S.: Lynx-eyed. G.: Indeed. One of those animal symbols chosen because the founders wished to flatter themselves into method. S.: And then it dies. G.: Or disperses, wanes, dissolves, loses shape. The seventeenth century is very good at beginning things magnificently and leaving later centuries to invent continuities. [lincei.it], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: Yet by 1882 d’Alfonso is publishing with the Reale Accademia dei Lincei. G.: Exactly. Which means we are no longer in the age of Federico Cesi, but in one of the revived or reconstituted Lincei, and by then very much within the national academy of Italy. [lincei.it], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So the thing is old, but not continuously old in the manner of a parish register. G.: Admirably put. It is old by ancestry, not by unbroken institutional pulse. S.: And in the nineteenth century? G.: In the nineteenth century one has the Nuovi Lincei, then the royal academy after unification, and by the 1870s the Reale Accademia dei Lincei has taken shape as the national learned body. [lincei.it], [biodiversi...ibrary.org], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So if d’Alfonso’s 1882 item carries the Lincei association, that means he has been admitted into one of its publishing channels, not that he is being printed in a little Roman club newsletter. G.: Precisely. The Lincei is by then a serious national organ with classes, sessions, publications, and the sort of administrative dignity that makes philosophers look more official than is good for them. [biodiversi...ibrary.org], [catalog.ha...itrust.org] S.: Classes. That is what I wanted. Is philosophy one of the sections? G.: Not in the narrow British sense of “the philosophers sit in one room and sulk.” The academy is divided broadly into two great classes. One is the physical, mathematical, and natural sciences. The other is the moral, historical, and philological sciences. [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [lincei.it] S.: So philosophy belongs in the moral class. G.: Yes, broadly speaking. The class title itself tells the story: “morali, storiche e filologiche.” Philosophy is not isolated as a self-sufficient principality but lodged among moral, historical, and philological inquiries. [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [lincei.it] S.: Which sounds more civilised than our own compartmentalisations. G.: And more dangerous. It means the philosopher cannot pretend never to have met history or language. S.: Then what are the sessions called? G.: Adunanze, sessions, meetings of the class. Papers are presented there. The modern description still says that the Memorie are presented by members during the adunanze of the Class of Moral, Historical and Philological Sciences. [lincei.it] S.: So rather like the British Academy? G.: In one broad respect, yes. A national academy with classes, not merely a university department; a body that confers dignity by election and circulates learned work through its own proceedings. But one should not force the likeness too far. S.: Why not? G.: Because the Lincei carries a Roman and then Italian state-academic history different from our own. It is more visibly a national emblem. S.: And older. G.: Yes, older by origin, though not in a simple institutional continuity. Our own British Academy looks positively adolescent beside 1603. [lincei.it], [interacademies.org] S.: Then where do the lectures come in? I was thinking of our grand occasions, the kind where one dresses up philosophy as a named lecture and pretends that the name guarantees the thought. G.: The Lincei has sessions and classes more than our exact named-lecture culture. It also has publication series: Atti, Rendiconti, Memorie, and the like. The nineteenth-century structure is visible in those serial forms. [archive.org], [archive.org], [biodiversi...ibrary.org] S.: So d’Alfonso in 1882 is likely connected with one of these printed channels. G.: Exactly. And your own instinct about “Accademia Reale dei Lincei” being in Rome was right, even if the publication line you have says Naples. The institution is Roman; a particular printing or local association may be Neapolitan. Those are different facts. S.: Then let us have dates properly. G.: Gladly. Original Accademia dei Lincei: Rome, 1603. [lincei.it], [interacademies.org] S.: Good. G.: Then its early life peters out by the mid-seventeenth century. Later revivals occur in the nineteenth century, including the Nuovi Lincei. By the 1870s the royal academy of united Italy bears the Lincei name. [lincei.it], [biodiversi...ibrary.org], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: And by 1882? G.: By 1882 one is firmly in the Reale Accademia dei Lincei period, with classes and publications already running. The periodicals and memoir series in the 1870s and 1880s make that plain. [archive.org], [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [biodiversi...ibrary.org] S.: So d’Alfonso appears not at the cradle but in the administrative middle age. G.: A very nice phrase. Yes. S.: And what of philosophy specifically? Could there be a “Section of Philosophy” in the way I lazily imagined? G.: Better to say philosophy belongs within the Class of Moral, Historical, and Philological Sciences, rather than that there is a neat standalone philosophy section, at least from the evidence we have here. [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [lincei.it] S.: So one ought not to overstate. G.: One never ought, though one often does. S.: Then Giovanni Gentile. Did he abolish all academies except this and the Crusca, as one keeps hearing in that wonderfully Italian tone of “everyone knows”? G.: No, not in the clean dramatic form in which gossip likes to stage it. What we can say securely is that Giovanni Gentile himself became a member of the Lincei—corresponding member in 1922, national member in 1932. [lincei.it] S.: So he did not exactly exterminate it. G.: Quite the contrary. He joined it. S.: But under fascism? G.: The academy’s history then becomes awkward. The general historical account says that the Lincei was merged with the Accademia d’Italia in 1939, and after the fall of fascism it was restored in 1944. [de-academic.com], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So if one wants a dry formula, it is not “Gentile abolished all academies,” but rather “the fascist period reorganised and subordinated academies, and the Lincei was eventually merged and later restored.” G.: Exactly. That is much nearer the truth and much less entertaining. S.: Truth is often a disappointment to wit. G.: Especially in Italy, where wit expects centralisation. S.: And the Crusca? G.: You mention it because it is the other obvious great academy of language and letters. But from the evidence we have here, I should not make a precise institutional claim about a Gentile policy of sparing only the Lincei and the Crusca. It sounds like the sort of thing one repeats elegantly and proves badly. S.: Very proper. I dislike elegant falsehoods unless they are mine. G.: As do I. S.: Let us bring in d’Alfonso himself. Why would his 1882 book matter in a Lincei context? G.: Because if Principii economici dell’etica is associated with the Lincei, that situates him not merely as a school author of “logica reale” but as someone whose ethical-economic reflection could be heard within a national learned framework—moral science, not just local pedagogy. S.: “Moral science” in the older large sense. G.: Exactly. The academy’s moral class is capacious enough to include philosophy, ethics, history, language, and adjacent matters of value. That suits d’Alfonso rather well, since your note makes him move among logic, ethics, value, psychology of language, and criticism of positivist criminology. S.: So he is not merely a schoolmaster with italics. G.: No. He is at least potentially a contributor to the academy’s moral-philosophical culture. S.: Then one may compare the Lincei to the British Academy, but only loosely. G.: Very loosely. Both are national learned bodies. Both confer distinction by membership and by publication. But the Lincei’s two-class structure and long Roman genealogy make it unlike our tidy habit of named lectures and polite committees. S.: We have named lectures instead of adunanze. G.: Yes. The British love to fix philosophy in commemorative singulars: the Henriette Hertz Lecture, the sort of event where one feels less a participant than a framed object. S.: And the Lincei? G.: The Lincei sounds more sessional, more serial, more corporate. Not “one philosopher illuminates us on Thursday,” but “the class meets, presents, records, and prints.” S.: Rather Roman. G.: Very. Rome likes proceedings. S.: What of the earliest dates you can safely say in the vignette? G.: 1603 for the original Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. [lincei.it], [interacademies.org] S.: Then nineteenth-century revival. G.: Yes. Revival through the Nuovi Lincei, then the Reale Accademia dei Lincei in the newly united Italian state. By the 1870s the Atti and class-based publications are clearly running. [lincei.it], [biodiversi...ibrary.org], [archive.org] S.: And d’Alfonso in 1882 enters there. G.: Yes, within that already functioning royal-academic publication world. [archive.org], [catalog.ha...itrust.org] S.: It amuses me that one sees “Napoli” in the imprint and imagines a Neapolitan academy, while the dignity is Roman. G.: Italy delights in just that sort of geographical double life. S.: Tell me more about the classes. G.: The useful point is this. The academy’s publications split by class. There are Atti and then Memorie of the Class of Moral, Historical and Philological Sciences, as distinct from those of the physical, mathematical and natural sciences. [archive.org], [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [biodiversi...ibrary.org] S.: So if d’Alfonso is philosophical, he belongs by family resemblance to the moral class. G.: Yes. S.: Not “natural philosophy”? G.: Not in the nineteenth-century publication sense here, unless he were doing science proper. Your d’Alfonso is on ethics, value, language, judgement, and psychology. He sounds morally classable. S.: Classable is an ugly but useful word. G.: Like most administrative truths. S.: And the academy’s seat remains Rome? G.: Yes. The current academy is in Rome, and the historical accounts make that continuity of place explicit. [lincei.it], [interacademies.org], [lincei.it] S.: So if I ask, “Why did I think it was Rome?” the answer is “Because it is.” G.: Exactly. S.: And if I ask, “Why did the imprint tempt me otherwise?” the answer is “Because publications move more than institutions.” G.: Very good. That is one of the few truly useful sentences ever uttered about bibliographical confusion. S.: Let us put Gentile back in, only carefully. G.: Carefully, yes. Giovanni Gentile was elected corresponding member of the moral class in 1922 and national member in 1932. [lincei.it] S.: So he was inside it. G.: Yes. S.: And the academy was later merged into the fascist Accademia d’Italia in 1939, then restored in 1944. [de-academic.com], [en.wikipedia.org] G.: Exactly. S.: So the neat moral is: no, Gentile did not simply spare the Lincei after abolishing the rest; rather, the institutional landscape was reconfigured, and the Lincei both survived by transformation and later re-emerged. G.: Yes. Which is both truer and less theatrical than the club story. S.: Oxford prefers club stories. G.: Rome prefers statutes. S.: Now, how would you place d’Alfonso beside this? Dryly. G.: I should say: d’Alfonso’s 1882 Principii economici dell’etica belongs not merely to local moralising but to the wider Roman national-academic culture of the Lincei, where philosophy sat within the class of moral, historical, and philological sciences, and where ethical speculation could appear alongside broader learned inquiries into value, language, and culture. S.: That is almost too respectable. G.: Respectability is what academies are for. S.: And if I wanted one wicked line? G.: The Lincei made philosophy official without ever making it harmless. S.: Better. Much better. G.: Thank you. S.: There is still the British Academy comparison. G.: Yes. If one wants the driest possible comparison: the Lincei is somewhat like a fusion of national academy, learned society, and publication machine; the British Academy is its nearest British analogue in dignity, but not in historical texture. S.: Because ours is not founded in 1603 by a lynx and three young men. G.: A pity. We are founded by committees, which are much less picturesque. S.: And our named lectures—Hertz, and the rest— G.: —are the British way of staging what the Lincei stages through classes and sessions. We memorialise individuals; they institutionalise classes. S.: We like occasions. They like proceedings. G.: Exactly. S.: Then I see d’Alfonso more clearly. He is not just “Naples, 1882.” He is “1882 under a Roman national learned canopy.” G.: Yes, and that is the proper canopy. S.: I am pleased. G.: So am I. The Lincei rewards historical obedience. S.: Last question. Could one say “morale and filosofia naturale” of the old sort for the academy? G.: Not carelessly for the nineteenth-century publication structure we have in hand. The secure class-name here is “Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche,” opposed to “scienze fisiche, matematiche e naturali.” [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [archive.org], [biodiversi...ibrary.org] S.: So one should quote the actual class names. G.: Always. S.: And leave “natural philosophy” to nostalgic dons. G.: Which is where it is happiest.Grice: Caro Alfonso, mi permetta, in puro stile oxoniano, di chiederle indulgenza per la mia abitudine di abbreviare i nomi: la chiamerò semplicemente "Alfonso". Spero che il mio tono, sebbene tipico di Oxford, non risulti troppo familiare; ma, sa, qui da noi si preferisce la sobrietà nella conversazione filosofica.  d’Alfonso: Grice, nessun problema! Anzi, trovo che la familiarità nel linguaggio sia essenziale per una buona colloquenza. D’altronde, la filosofia dovrebbe essere dialogo reale, non lontana dai problemi concreti, come ho sempre sostenuto nelle mie lezioni di “logica reale”.  Grice: Apprezzo molto la sua posizione, Alfonso. La sua attenzione al giudizio, al concetto e all'immediatezza del linguaggio (“il sole è luminoso”, “questo corpo è rotondo”) mi ricorda le mie riflessioni sulle implicature. Lei porta la filosofia a terra, tra gli uomini, come fa il buon senso oxoniano quando riflette sulla realtà e non solo sulle astrazioni.  d’Alfonso: Grice, la ringrazio. Credo che il valore, la moneta che circola tra le idee, sia dato proprio dal dialogo sincero e dall’attribuzione di significato alle cose. Se la filosofia vuole essere utile, deve rimanere fedele alla ragione conversazionale e all’implicatura, proprio come lei insegna: tra "giudicatum" e "concetti" si scambiano monete preziose per la crescita dello spirito umano. With Grice's and Speranza's treatment of Alfonso we see implicature working on her own -- d'Alfonso +> Alfonso. The issue has troubled lexicographers and historians in Italy and England (especially Oxford). By default, Grice and Speranza go to the ROOT of it all. What is especially charming in Speranza’s handling of d’Alfonso is that he lets one watch implicature at work almost before any theory is announced: d’Alfonso becomes Alfonso, and the contraction itself stages the philosophical point. This is not mere familiarity, nor a lazy dropping of a prefix, but a small drama of roots, usage, and identity, exactly the sort of thing that has long troubled lexicographers and historians on both sides of the Channel, Oxford included. Speranza and Grice do not treat the name as an inert label; they ask what survives, what is lost, and what is silently carried over when the patronymic sheath falls away and the root remains. In doing so, they show that even naming obeys a conversational logic: what is said is shorter, but what is meant may be fuller. Alfonso is not a mutilated d’Alfonso, but a case in which etymology, usage, and philosophical tact converge, allowing the reader to see how deeply Gricean concerns with overt form and implicit continuity can begin at the level of the name itself. Alfonso, Nicolò Raffaele Angelo d’ (1882). Principii economici dell’etica. Napoli: Accademia Reale dei Lincei. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Algarotti – Ossia: Grice e Algarotti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Alici: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale RECIPROCA.  Francesco Algarotti (Venezi, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “You’ve got to love ‘il conte A.’; he is the typical Italian philosopher of language, relishing on ‘la bella lingua,’ by which they do not mean the Roman! “La Latina, in bocca di un popolo di soldati, e concise e ardimentosa. A. thinks that the Florentines have enriched it – ‘Imagine ALIGHIERI in Latin! All that should be lost on Oxonians, but it ain’t! Consider ‘conciseness. One of my conversational maxims is indeed, ‘be concise, i. e. or viz., avoid unnecessary prolixity [sic].” – So, if the Roman tongue was the tongue of soldiers, and a soldier needs to be concise in communicating with another soldier – The justification of the maxim is in the practice of ‘soldiering.’ With ‘ardimentosa’ we have moer of a problem! In any case, A.s excellent point is that each conversational maxim has its root in the practice of the corresponding conversants! Nobody can fail to be enchanted by the drawing by Richardson of A.! Essential Italian philosopher. I don’t have a monicker, but A. had two: il cigno di Padova and il Socrate veneziano. Spirito illuminista erudito. Tra i suoi corrispondenti vi sono Metastasio e Benedetto. Studia a Roma e Bologna. Si trasfire a Firenze. ineft confcendimus, e qws,invifimulqise præsentesstrarun ingenia? LIVIO ROMOLO NUMA TARQUINIO PRISCO TARQUINIO SUPERBO> Io non aggiugnerò altro a questo ragionamento, se non che a quel modo che la cronologia di Neutono assolve VIRGILIO che è il più esatto de’ poeti da quello acronismo imputatogli comunemente. Vedi la cronologia di Neutono te in rispetto a’ tempi in cui vissero ENEA e Didone, così ella può giustificare quella comun tradizione tenuta in Roma che NUMA è uditore di Pitagora, e che non meno contribuisse a fondar quello imperio, il qual è signor delle cole, la virtù italiana che la romana sapienza. No — there is something earlier than the 1737 Newtonianismo. The best earlier datable composition I can support is from 1729. According to the  entry on, Algarotti had already, while still in the Bolognese formative period, written: Saggio sopra la durata de’ regni de’ re di Roma in 1729. The same source also says he composed in Latin a dissertation on Newtonian optics confuting’s De luminis affectionibus, and that at Bologna the work later famous as the Newtonianismo was already conceived and sketched there before being continued in Rome and finished in Paris. [treccani.it] So the clean answer is: No, he does not just suddenly become an author with Il Newtonianismo per le dame in 1737. By 1729, Algarotti had already composed at least: Saggio sopra la durata de’ regni de’ re di Roma. [treccani.it] And probably also, around that same early period, a Latin dissertation on Newtonian optics against’s De luminis affectionibus, though the search snippet does not give me its exact title. [treccani.it] Also important: the famous Newtonianismo itself was not simply born in 1737.  says it was conceived and sketched in Bologna, continued during a brief Roman stay, and completed in Paris after Algarotti moved there in autumn 1733. [treccani.it] So, if your question is about earliest composition rather than first publication, the chronology looks like this: 1729: Saggio sopra la durata de’ regni de’ re di Roma. [treccani.it] Early 1730s, probably before publication: a Latin dissertation on Newtonian optics against De luminis affectionibus. [treccani.it] By 1733: the future Newtonianismo is already conceived/abbozzato in Bologna, then carried through Rome and completed in Paris. [treccani.it] 1737: Il Newtonianismo per le dame, first published. [old.maa.org], [britannica.com] One small caution: I can securely cite the 1729 Saggio as earlier composition from. I cannot yet give you the full exact Latin title of the optics dissertation, because the source snippet only describes it, without quoting the title. [treccani.it] So the shortest good answer is: yes, definitely earlier — at least the 1729 Saggio sopra la durata de’ regni de’ re di Roma, and probably an early Latin dissertation on Newtonian optics before the 1737 Newtonianismo. [treccani.it] If you want, I can next give you a compact scholarly sentence for Algarotti that distinguishes: earliest known composition, earliest known major published work, and where the Newtonianismo was first conceived. T.: How many kings in Rome? G.: Seven, sir. T.: Name them. G.: Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. T.: Good. You have given them in the right order and without inventing an eighth, which is more than one can say for some modern historians and nearly all politicians. M.: Sir, is that why Rome became great? Only seven kings? T.: No, Markham. Rome became great by first having kings and then pretending never to want one again. Class: Laughter. G.: Since Lucretia, sir. T.: Exactly. The monarchy ends not because Romans become abstract constitutional theorists, but because Sextus Tarquinius behaves as though power entitles appetite, Lucretia dies, Brutus discovers republican virtue, and the Romans decide that kingship is one vice too many. M.: And later they still kept trying it on, sir. T.: Naturally. Human beings dislike kings in principle and adore them in practice. Ask Caesar. G.: Or Antony, sir. T.: Yes, the little crown scene. Antony trying, with all the innocence of a pickpocket, to offer Caesar the diadem, and Caesar refusing just enough times to make everyone notice the offer. M.: Because of Lucretia, sir? T.: Because of memory, which in Roman politics is usually more theatrical than accurate. The point is not that Caesar remembered Lucretia daily over breakfast. The point is that “we have no kings” had become the official Roman line, and one did not openly violate it unless one wished to become an example. G.: It is a useful rule, sir. One may be master of the world, but not rex. T.: Precisely. Dominatio may be tolerated if rhetorically disguised; regnum is vulgar because it says the thing too plainly. M.: Sir, was Romulus then not vulgar? T.: Romulus has the advantage of being first. Founders are allowed liberties denied their successors. G.: And after seven, no more. T.: Officially, yes. Which brings us, by a road Oxford would call indirect and a public school should call efficient, to Mr. Newton. M.: Newton, sir? The apple one? T.: The same. A great man in mechanics and optics, but apparently not to be trusted alone with early Roman chronology. Class: Laughter. G.: Algarotti thought so, sir. T.: Algarotti certainly thought so. And because Algarotti was both clever and Italian, he objected where Newton, being clever and English, did not particularly care. M.: What did Newton do wrong, sir? T.: He attempted to shorten ancient chronology by a boldness which one may admire mathematically and distrust historically. G.: He compressed the old timelines, sir. T.: Yes. The enterprise belongs to Newton’s chronological speculations, where vast traditional periods suddenly become suspiciously neat. Newton, like many men of genius, assumed that if numbers could be cleaned, history ought to submit. M.: And it didn’t, sir? T.: Not politely. Italy, in particular, objected to being numerically corrected out of its own antiquity. G.: Algarotti wrote about the kings of Rome, sir. T.: He did. And the title matters. Francesco Algarotti, Saggio sopra la durata de’ regni de’ re di Roma. 1729. That is the sort of title one writes when one intends to be civil to antiquity and uncivil to chronology. M.: “On the duration of the reigns of the kings of Rome,” sir? T.: Very good. A history boy after all. G.: It sounds modest, sir. T.: That is because the best polemics always begin by sounding like bookkeeping. M.: And what was he correcting? T.: The Newtonian shortening. The effort to revise ancient chronology in such a way that old Roman tradition, and the sequence from Romulus to Tarquinius Superbus, begins to look too cramped to breathe. G.: Sir, if there are seven kings, and one gives them seventy years each, that makes four hundred and ninety years. T.: Quite. Which is already a suspiciously handsome number for a city whose early history is half memory, half invention, and half patriotic embroidery. M.: That’s three halves, sir. T.: Yes, Markham. Roman history is generous that way. Class: Laughter. G.: The traditional span from the founding to the expulsion of the kings is about two hundred and forty-odd years, sir. T.: Good. Conventionally 753 to 509 before Christ, if one is content with the schoolroom scheme. M.: So not seventy each, then. T.: No, and that is part of the amusement. If one gave seventy years to each king one would end with a monarchy so leisurely that one could scarcely fit the Republic in afterwards. G.: Yet Newton’s tendency was still to compress, sir, not expand. T.: Yes, because Newton was not chiefly writing history proper. He was doing chronology, which is a different vice. Chronology counts. History narrates. A chronologist distrusts splendid stories because they have not yet been reduced to arithmetic. A historian distrusts splendid arithmetic because it may have murdered the story in the process. G.: Algarotti seems to stand between them. T.: Exactly. He likes the calculation, but he refuses to let calculation become vandalism. M.: Because he is Italian, sir? T.: In part, yes. And here national vanity is not wholly contemptible. Algarotti feels the Roman story as part of a civilisational inheritance. Newton feels it as data. G.: Newton is a barbarian, sir? T.: In this room, only comparatively. A very great barbarian, of course. But yes, one can imagine Algarotti thinking: here is an Englishman correcting the age of Rome as if Rome were a miscopied ledger. M.: Did Newton care about Romulus? T.: He cared as much as a man cares who wants to know whether old dates are compatible with his broader system. But one should not expect filial piety from him. Newton did not identify himself as Roman, and he was not trying to save the dignity of Numa. G.: Algarotti could. T.: Precisely. Algarotti writes as an Italian and, at one remove, as a Roman. He is not merely asking, “How long did they reign?” He is asking, “How is Rome to remain credible without becoming ridiculous?” M.: Was it ridiculous already, sir? T.: Entirely. Romulus vanishes in a storm. Numa studies wisdom. Tullus likes war. Ancus does infrastructure. Tarquin the Elder does magnificence. Servius does reform. Tarquin the Proud does tyranny. It reads like a moral pageant staged by Livy’s schoolmaster. G.: Yet one must keep all seven. T.: Certainly. Rome without the seven kings would be like arithmetic without seven: possible, but spiritually diminished. Class: Laughter. M.: Sir, can we go through them one by one? T.: We can, since indiscipline is best handled by enumeration. Romulus: founder, fratricide-adjacent, asylum-builder, and altogether too successful for a shepherd. Numa Pompilius: piety, law, ritual, calm after violence. Tullus Hostilius: war again, because Romans distrust peace unless sanctified. Ancus Marcius: a compromise king, pious enough and practical enough, the sort of man public schools call sound. Tarquinius Priscus: outsider energy and Etruscan splendour. Servius Tullius: census, classes, political ordering, reforming intelligence. Tarquinius Superbus: arrogance, force, and the useful final villain. G.: And Lucretia stops the whole thing. T.: Exactly. History likes a woman when it needs a constitution. M.: Sir! T.: You may object morally, but not narratively. Class: Laughter. G.: It is interesting, sir, that Newton’s corrections seem not to concern that moral structure at all. T.: Excellent. That is the point. Newton is not handling the kings as moral episodes. He is handling them as intervals. Algarotti objects because intervals alone do not make Rome intelligible. G.: So Algarotti is doing chronology with historical tact. T.: Nicely put. He is saying, in effect: yes, let us count, but let us not count in a manner that makes the Roman story absurdly thin. M.: Did Algarotti defend all the dates, sir? T.: I would not say he simply defended tradition in a blind way. He was too clever for that. He wanted correction without desecration. G.: And he thought Newton too eager. T.: One may say so. Newton’s chronology is bold because it trusts system more than inheritance. Algarotti wants system to answer to inheritance, not annihilate it. M.: Why would Newton want to shorten things anyway? T.: Because chronologists are always tempted by neatness, and Newton was more tempted than most because neatness had, in his hands, usually rewarded itself by truth. G.: But in mechanics that works better than in regal legend. T.: Exactly. Apples fall obediently. Romulus does not. Class: Laughter. M.: Sir, if we gave each king exactly thirty-five years, would that work better? T.: Better for arithmetic, worse for plausibility. History is not saved by averaging. G.: Yet public schools rather like averages. T.: Only when they can be weaponised. M.: Sir, what is the actual point of Algarotti’s essay then? T.: To resist a flattening. To show that one may treat the chronology of the Roman kings as a serious problem without surrendering the Roman tradition to mere numerical austerity. G.: So not history proper, but not mere sums either. T.: Precisely. It is a borderland piece. A learned exercise in duration, sequence, credibility, and inherited narrative. M.: Why would Grice like it, sir? T.: Because Grice likes any case in which what is said officially is not the whole story. Algarotti says “duration of the reigns.” What he means, or at least what he is also doing, is defending the intelligibility of Rome against a too-clever chronology. G.: It has implicature, sir. T.: Everything does if one waits long enough. Class: Laughter. M.: Sir, did Newton actually make mistakes, or just different assumptions? T.: Both, depending on how charitable one is feeling. The charitable version is that Newton was pursuing a coherent chronological method. The less charitable version is that he bullied antiquity into fitting his calculations. G.: And Algarotti thought the bullying unnecessary. T.: Yes, and perhaps slightly foreign in the wrong way. One can imagine him thinking that a man who has not grown up with Livy in the blood will be too ready to prune the kings. M.: But sir, weren’t most of the stories made up anyway? T.: Ah, now you are becoming modern, which is always a danger. Yes, much of the regal tradition is legendary, embroidered, or retrospectively moralised. But that does not make chronology irrelevant. It merely makes chronology less sovereign. G.: Newton wanted sovereignty, sir. T.: As usual. Class: Laughter. M.: And Algarotti wanted citizenship? T.: That is unexpectedly good, Markham. Yes. Newton behaves like an absolute ruler in chronology; Algarotti behaves like a constitutional Roman. G.: No kings after Tarquin, sir. T.: Officially no. Which is why later Romans prefer titles like princeps, dictator, imperator, and every other circumlocution by which one may possess power without pronouncing the embarrassing noun. M.: Caesar knew that? T.: Caesar knew everything except where to stop. G.: And Antony knew how to make a scene of it. T.: Yes. Offer the crown, have it refused, let the crowd think “we are still free,” and continue with the business of monarchy under another lexeme. M.: Like saying “not a king, just in charge of everything.” T.: Precisely. Political language is older than public school hypocrisy, but only just. Class: Laughter. G.: So the kings matter not only because there were seven, but because after them Rome must always deny them while imitating them. T.: Splendid. That is nearly worth promotion. M.: Sir, shall we say them again? T.: We shall, because repetition is the mother of civilisation. Romulus. Numa Pompilius. Tullus Hostilius. Ancus Marcius. Lucius Tarquinius Priscus. Servius Tullius. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. Class: Romulus. Numa Pompilius. Tullus Hostilius. Ancus Marcius. Lucius Tarquinius Priscus. Servius Tullius. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. T.: Good. If you can remember seven kings, you may later survive seven examiners. G.: And Algarotti, sir? T.: Algarotti comes in when one realises that the list is not enough. One must ask how long, how plausible, how computed, how inherited. That is why he writes the Saggio sopra la durata de’ regni de’ re di Roma. G.: In 1729, sir. T.: Yes. Earlier than the famous Newtonianismo per le dame, and in some ways more revealing. M.: More revealing than the ladies’ book, sir? T.: Considerably. The ladies’ book shows he can charm. The Roman-kings essay shows he can correct Newton without losing his temper. G.: An Italian virtue. T.: Not always, but occasionally. Class: Laughter. M.: Sir, is seventy years still absurd? T.: Entirely. But useful as a schoolboy absurdity. If each king lived and reigned as if appointed by Methuselah, one would have no Republic left for Cicero to lament and Caesar to ruin. G.: Then the reasonable thing is not to average, but to allow irregular reigns. T.: Yes. Some long, some short, some more narrative than factual. The point is not to make them all equal. Equality is for examinations, not for early Rome. M.: Sir, if Newton had been Roman, would he have cared more? T.: He would have cared differently. He might still have counted, but he would have counted under the pressure of ancestry. Newton counts like a conqueror. Algarotti counts like an heir. G.: That is why Grice likes him, sir. T.: Grice likes anyone who finds in a title one thing said and another thing quietly at work beneath it. M.: Such as? T.: Such as “the duration of the reigns,” which appears numerical but carries national memory, literary pride, and a mild rebuke to English compression. G.: Very dry, sir. T.: Dryness is civilisation.Grice: Conte Algarotti, mi è sempre piaciuto pensare che se l’Inghilterra avesse avuto, come Roma, solo sette re, forse la lingua sarebbe stata più concisa e ardimentosa, proprio come la latina dei soldati! Ma da noi, la monarchia sembra eternamente prolissa, e la lingua segue il passo. Algarotti: La sua osservazione è davvero acuta, Grice! In effetti, la concisione non è solo virtù militare, ma fondamento della comunicazione efficace. I miei studi mi hanno portato a credere che la bella lingua italiana si è arricchita proprio grazie alla pratica conversazionale, dove ogni parola pesa come una moneta preziosa. Grice: Proprio così, Conte. La sua filosofia della lingua mi affascina: ogni massima conversazionale nasce dall’esperienza concreta degli interlocutori. E la sua Padova, culla del cigno, ha saputo donare alla lingua quell’eleganza che noi, spesso, ci perdiamo tra formalismi. Algarotti: Grice, le confesso che il mio amore per la conversazione deriva anche dalla consapevolezza che la lingua è storia vivente. Da Venezia a Firenze, passando per Roma, ogni parola custodisce una tradizione, e proprio questa ricchezza permette all’Italia di fondare la sua virtù su una sapienza che, forse, i re inglesi non hanno saputo imitare. Algarotti, Francesco (1737). Il Newtonianismo per l’uso delle dame. Venezia, presso Antonio Palese. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Alighieri – Ossia: Grice e Alighieri: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Durante Alighieri (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “Unlike our Chaucer, who no philosopher at Oxford would call ‘philosophical,’ every philosopher in Italy calls A. ‘philosophical’! Problem with having A. as a philosopher is that rhyming is not usually considered a priority – that’s why the old Romans like LUCREZIO never had to rhyme – you might say metre is essential to VELIA, GIRGENTI, and LUCREZIO – and that there is metre in my prose if not in endecasibili! This is important for an Oxonian; since Sir Peter once told me that he made an effort to understand Italian – ‘or Tuscan implicature,’ to be more precise – just to be able to digest Inferno compleat with rhyme. Must say that my favourite Dante is ‘lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. The Italians, all being Renaissance men, love to catalogue as ‘philosopher’ those whom the head of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford would NOT: A., one of them! But then, a sport of Italian philosophers is to ramble on “Pinocchio,” too! The Commedia and philosophy.” Philosophical references in the Commedia.” A proposito del passo d’A., sulla lingua d’oco, e lingua di sì, vuol dire provenzale ed italiano. Lingua e usata in due significazioni. Principal nel significato proprio, per quell’organo mobilissimo del corpo anide che è posto nella bocca ove si stende sono e si compiono. 1' enigma stesso della città roggia della RAGIONE audace si scioglie, e da tutto insieme par che si formi quell'etere celestiale, dove non si distinguono più filosofìe e sette; ma tutti gli sforzi e i poteri e i valori dello spirito umano in un solo volere e fine concordevolmente concorrono, come preconizza, con simbolo solenne, il Convivio. La gloriosa città della filosofia che A. addita, è quant' è possibile all' umano pensiero e nella forma propria dei tempi, e non importa se oltre A. stesso costruita dalla coscienza filosofica eh' egli da all'Italia, che, si può dire, in lontananza albeggia. Lingua del si, divina implicitura, lasciate ogne [sic] speranza voi ch’entrate, inferno, section on ‘divina commedia’ in philosophical dictionaries, inferno, catabasis d’Enea di VIRGILIO. T.: This, Grice, is the earliest thing he—or anybody else in this room, for that matter—could find by this Durante Alighieri who preferred to have his first name cut down to size. G.: An eminently Italian habit, sir. T.: And a dangerous one. Men who abbreviate their Christian names often enlarge their reputations. Now then: the sonnet. G.: A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core. T.: Good. We shall take that as first line, not title. In Latin class one does not worship titles when one has syntax. M.: Sir, is it really the earliest? T.: Earliest datable, yes. Which is the sort of earliest a Latin master can respect. Not “perhaps,” not “roughly,” but datable. G.: 1283, sir. T.: Yes. You may have your gold star in silence. Now: the exercise is not literary embroidery. It is logical clarification by means of Latin. My thesis is simple: the roots are mostly Latin already, so your task is easy; the syntax in Latin is better because it tells the truth about the relations more openly. M.: Better than Italian, sir? T.: Better for this purpose. Italian persuades. Latin discriminates. Class: Small laughter. G.: That is almost a maxim, sir. T.: It is a prejudice. Which in this room amounts to the same thing. Now: line one. G.: A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core. T.: First, construe the Italian. G.: “To every captive soul and noble heart”— T.: Stop. Captive? G.: Presa, sir. T.: Yes, but take care. Not merely “seized” in the vulgar police sense. Caught, taken, possessed—already in the service of love. G.: So perhaps: “To every soul taken captive and to every noble heart.” T.: Better. Now Latin. G.: Cuilibet animae captae et cordi gentili. T.: Hm. Possible, but let us improve. Gentili is barbarous in Latin if one is not careful. We want nobili perhaps. G.: Cuilibet animae captae et nobili cordi. T.: Better. Now analysis. Why dative? G.: Because Italian a ciascun corresponds to dative direction in Latin, sir. T.: Exactly. The vernacular needs the preposition because it has lost the case. Latin dispenses with the prop. M.: The prop, sir? T.: The preposition, Markham. I am abbreviating for speed, not degeneracy. Class: Laughter. G.: Then animae captae and nobili cordi are coordinated datives. T.: Yes. Observe how the relation is now visible at once. No little a doing the work of a dead inflection. Latin does not need to lean on furniture when it still has bones. M.: Sir, is presa from Latin too? T.: Of course. From prendere through prehendere and related vulgar developments. The whole line smells of Latin even when pretending to be Italian. G.: Except perhaps ciascun as a later condensed vernacular form. T.: Very good. There you have your one slight wrinkle. Ciascun is not a simple direct classical Latin surface-form. Yet even there the conceptual machinery is old enough. Every, each, quilibet, unusquisque. The logic is perfectly Roman. G.: Then line one in Latin has a cleaner logical form: For every x, if x is a soul taken captive, and for every y, if y is a noble heart— T.: Careful. Dante is addressing classes by paired singulars, not quantifying in a way that requires two variables and a blackboard covered in Frege. G.: Still, the dative pair marks the address relation more clearly. T.: Precisely. Address-targets first. And now line two. G.: Nel cui cospetto viene il dir presente. T.: Construe. G.: “In whose presence comes the present speech.” T.: Good. Slightly wooden, which is what we want before elegance corrupts us. Latin? G.: In cuius conspectu venit praesens dictio. T.: Dictio is good. Better than oratio? G.: I thought dictio was drier. T.: And therefore more logical. Very good. M.: Sir, could it be sermo? T.: It could, but sermo is more sociable. Dictio or allocutio shows the framed utterance better. We are after structure, not warmth. G.: Then the syntax: in cuius conspectu is a prepositional phrase in both tongues, though Latin could also use coram with ablative. T.: Ah! Better. G.: Coram quibus venit praesens dictio? T.: Not quibus, because he is still speaking distributively but through the relative. Keep the singular if you want to preserve the Italian’s rhetorical shape. Coram quo? no, because there are two antecedents. You see the difficulty. G.: Then perhaps in conspectu cuiuslibet animae captae et nobilis cordis adest haec praesens dictio. T.: Now you are rebuilding rather than translating. Which is allowed in philosophy and forbidden in examinations. Class: Laughter. M.: Sir, is that why Latin is better? Because it forces decisions? T.: Exactly. The vernacular glides. Latin adjudicates. G.: Then the point is not that Italian is vague, but that Latin makes the relation of modifiers and cases less deniable. T.: Admirably put. Write that on your soul if not your paper. G.: May we proceed, sir? T.: We may. The sonnet continues: In ciò che mi rescrivan suo parvente. G.: Which already gives us a problem. T.: Good. Problems are why one learns Latin. G.: “That they write back to me their seeming,” perhaps? T.: Their opinion, their appearance, what appears to them. Parvente is a lovely nuisance. M.: Sir, is that from Latin? T.: Through parere, yes. The roots continue to behave. Now: Latin. G.: Ut mihi rescribant suum visum? T.: Very fair. G.: Or sententiam? T.: Too settled. Visum keeps the phenomenology of “what seems.” G.: Then: ut mihi rescribant suum visum. T.: Good. Note, boys, the subjunctive. Italian mi rescrivan is doing what Latin can display openly by mood. Purpose, wish, requested response. M.: So now the poem is already a little correspondence machine, sir? T.: Yes. Dante opens by addressing a qualified audience and inviting response. A social logic of readership. He is not merely emoting; he is instituting a tribunal. G.: Which Latin shows nicely because ut plus subjunctive makes the requested uptake explicit. T.: Exactly. You see why this belongs in a Latin room and not merely in a sentimental one. G.: Then the next line: salutando saggio lor segnor, cioè Amore. T.: Ah yes. The famous apposition. Give me Latin. G.: Salutans sapientem eorum dominum, id est Amorem. T.: Quite serviceable. M.: Sir, why sapientem for saggio? T.: Because one must choose. Wise, sage, knowing. And because Latin will not let you lounge indefinitely among near-synonyms if the case must agree. G.: Then Amore becomes Amor, of course. T.: Naturally. And see the gain: Italian may capitalize by convention; Latin personifies by morphology and inherited habit. Amor enters the room as a nominable force. G.: So far the roots are indeed mostly Latin, sir. T.: Which was my point from the start, though pupils always require four examples and a collapse of empire before conceding anything. Class: Laughter. G.: Then line by line the sonnet can be reconstructed in Latin not because Dante wrote bad Italian but because his Italian still sits close to its source. T.: Better: because the vernacular still carries the skeleton of the older syntax, even where the inflectional clothing has changed. M.: Sir, if Latin is so much better, why did he not just write it in Latin? T.: Because he wanted Italians, not merely grammarians. Class: Laughter. G.: And perhaps because the logic of audience had shifted. T.: Good. He wanted uptake from readers who inhabit the lingua del sì, not merely the old schoolroom. G.: Yet for us, translating back into Latin reveals the logical form. T.: Precisely. Reverse engineering civilisation. G.: Sir, if we continue, should we preserve word order? T.: As far as useful, yes; as far as slavish, no. Latin word order can clarify or ornament. Today it clarifies. G.: Then cuilibet animae captae et nobili cordi, in cuius conspectu haec praesens dictio adest, ut mihi rescribat suum visum— T.: Rescribat? singular now? G.: Since the distributive address might be taken singly. T.: Acceptable if one is regularising the logic. But note: the Italian can hover between collective and distributive audience more gracefully. G.: So Latin improves precision but may reduce rhetorical ambiguity. T.: Exactly. Every gain is paid for. M.: Sir, that sounds almost economical. T.: Keep d’Alfonso for another day. Class: Laughter. G.: What of alma, sir? It looks Latin enough, but means soul in the Italian, not nourishing. T.: Very good. A classic case. The root is Latin, the semantic career is vernacularly re-settled. This is the sort of thing that keeps philologists from drink only by sending them into it. G.: So one root is from Latin, but not with the same exact semantic burden. T.: Precisely. And that is why vocabulary is not entirely trivial, however much I declared it so five minutes ago. G.: Then our exercise is not one of mere replacement, but of controlled semantic descent and return. T.: Very handsome. Though in a school essay I should still prefer “translation.” M.: Sir, when you say Latin syntax is more analytic, do you really mean that? I thought Latin was more inflected, which sounds synthetic. T.: A good question at last. I mean “analytic” in the practical classroom sense that the relations are more explicitly marked by morphology. Strict typologists may write me angry letters from a future in which no one reads them. Latin is inflected, certainly. But for showing who depends on what, who is agent, target, recipient, modifier, it can be more openly articulate than the vernacular that must improvise with particles and position. G.: So not analytic as opposed to synthetic in a strict linguistic typology, but analytic in the sense of logical exposition. T.: Exactly. Thank you for rescuing me from my own rhetoric. Class: Laughter. G.: Then the lack of prepositions in some places is not poverty but compression. T.: And often superiority. Cases carry what Italian must unpack. G.: Dative for a ciascun. Genitive in cuius for cui. Subjunctive for rescrivan. Participial weight in salutans. T.: Yes. The very bones of the argument. M.: Is there much logic in a sonnet, sir? T.: More than in most school debates. There is address, qualification of audience, presence of utterance, request for reply, authority invoked, and later the reported dream-content. It is practically a scholastic exercise with better manners. G.: Then perhaps that is why Italians call him philosophical. T.: They call everyone philosophical who can manage a subordinate clause and an afterlife. Class: Laughter. G.: Sir, would you say the Italian sonnet is already half-latinate logic clothed in vernacular music? T.: I would say exactly that, provided you promise not to say it in front of the English master. G.: Then line one again, with full syntactical account: A = to, governing indirect relation in Italian. ciascun’ = distributive adjective, compressed vernacular form. alma presa = noun plus participial modifier. e gentil core = coordinated noun phrase. So the whole opening is a dative address-frame. T.: Excellent. G.: Latin: cuilibet animae captae et nobili cordi. No preposition needed; case alone does the work. T.: Precisely. The logical role is visible at once. G.: Line two: nel cui cospetto = locative relation by preposition and relative phrase. viene = finite verb. il dir presente = subject phrase, literally “the present saying.” T.: And in Latin? G.: In cuius conspectu venit praesens dictio. Or perhaps adest, if one wants presence more strongly. T.: Adest may indeed be finer. The utterance arrives by being present. M.: Sir, this all makes Italian sound like shabby Latin. T.: Nonsense. It makes Italian sound like successful Latin with a future. Class: Laughter. G.: Then the larger point is that the logical side of the sonnet can be made clearer in Latin, but the vernacular gives the social side of address a different range. T.: Yes. Latin shows the joints; Italian lets them dance. G.: There is your maxim, sir. T.: Heaven preserve me from my own pupils. Proceed. G.: Should we do the next line? T.: No. Not because it is unworthy, but because a master who does everything produces nothing but dependence. The lesson is already clear. Dante’s earliest datable composition opens in a language whose roots are overwhelmingly Latin. By returning it to Latin we see more sharply the dative address, the relative linkage, the purposive response structure, and the economy by which case replaces preposition. G.: And the logical form becomes less deniable. T.: Exactly. Which is all one can ask of Latin, and more than one can ask of many living men. Class: Laughter. M.: Sir, one last thing. If Durante liked his first name cut, should we cut the poem too? T.: No, Markham. We cut only ourselves short. Dante, like Latin, tends to outlast the operation.Grice: Alighieri, devo confessarle che ogni volta che leggo “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate”, mi salgono le lacrime agli occhi. C’è una dolcezza profonda in quella parola, “speranza”, che tocca il cuore più di mille ragionamenti filosofici. Alighieri: Gentile Grice, la speranza è il filo invisibile che unisce l’umano al divino. Anche quando la porta dell’Inferno si chiude, la memoria della speranza resta impressa nella lingua, come un lume che brilla nella notte più oscura. Grice: È vero, Dante. La sua “lingua del sì” ha saputo trasformare una semplice frase in un simbolo universale. Persino per chi non parla l’italiano, “speranza” diventa una promessa, un invito a cercare sempre oltre l’apparenza. A.: Ed è proprio in questo che risiede la potenza della parola: essa può condurre l’anima attraverso la disperazione, eppure le offre la possibilità di rinascere. Come scrivevo nel Convivio, la città della filosofia è costruita sulla concordia di spirito e ragione, e la speranza ne è la pietra angolare. Alighieri, Durante (1283). A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Allegretti – Ossia: Grice e Allegretti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della colloquenza.  Giacomo Allegretti (Ravenna. Forli, Forli-Cesena, Emilia-Romagna).: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della colloquenza. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how what a speaker means is recoverable by rational inference from what is said plus shared assumptions about cooperative, purposive talk, so that conversational implicature is a disciplined product of maxims (relevance, quantity, etc.) rather than a literary flourish; in your Allegretti passage, by contrast, “ragione conversazionale” is reframed through the humanist institution of colloquenza, modeled on dialectical gatherings in a villa “Parnassus,” where conversation is not merely an inferential mechanism for extracting speaker-intentions but a cultivated social practice aimed at edificazione, friendship, and shared ascent toward truth. Read against Allegretti’s historical profile (Giacomo/Jacopo Allegretti, active in the late fourteenth century; lectured on dialectic in Florence; associated with learned circles in Rimini and the later tradition of the Accademia dei Filergiti; credited in later sources with styling his villa gatherings as a kind of “Parnassus”), the comparison is that Grice treats rationality as the internal normativity that makes everyday exchanges interpretable (and thus makes implicature calculable and cancellable), whereas Allegretti treats rationality as the ethos of a community of inquiry, in which implicature belongs to the tact and elevation of colloquenza—what is responsibly left unsaid, hinted, or invited by shared learning and amicitia—so that “implicature” becomes less a quasi-formal by-product of maxim-guided inference and more an expression of the civil, dialectical artistry by which a learned circle sustains meaning, consensus, and intellectual fellowship. Grice: “I love A.; very Italian. Imagine: after tutoring for a while on dialettica at Firenze, he retires to Villa A., where he philosophises de propositionibus as part of the dialettica! He is so proud of the meetings at his villa that he calls it ‘our Parnassus’! A.s idea of the villa meetings is modeled after Plato who, with fewer means, met at the gym in the Villa Echademo!” Raffaello. Guelfo, noto per aver fondato la prima accademia d'Italia. D’un'antica e cavalleresca famiglia, il cui capostipite è Mazzone A., che prende parte alla prima crociata.  Legge filosofia a Bologna. Lettore di dialettica a Firenze.  Fonda un’accademia con Calbolo, Orgogliosi, Sigismondi, Speranzi, Arfendi, Morandi, Aldrobandini, ed Aspini. Gl’Ordelaffi, ghibellini, imponeno il confino. Si trasfere a Rimini. Fonda l’accademia dei filergiti.  Bucolicon. Scrive un epicedio per Malatesta; un carme al conte di virtù; un carme pella divisa della tortora; Eglogae; un carme sulla bissa milanese, lo stemma dei Visconti, il biscione. Marchesi, Memorie storiche dell'antica ed insigne accademia de’filergiti. Valenti 'Enciclopedia Italiana. È a Forlì quando e colpito d’Ordelaffi. Ma la fama di dottrina in filosofia che lo circonda è tale che egli è richiamato alla corte, dalla quale, però, dove fuggire per aver rivelato la congiura che Ordelaffi trama contro suo zio. Si rifugia a Rimini, dove è precettore di Malatesta. La sua villa è luogo di raccoglimento, di studio e, di dotti convegni; donde la notizia, tratta dagl’annali di Ravennate: A. Arimini novum constituit Parnasum, la quale comincia mentre VISCONTI getta le fondamenta del duomo, dagl’architetti GIOVANNUOLO e MICHELINO, da’quali sono ammaestrati i compagni di BRAMANTE. BATTAGLINO, della corte filosofica di MALATESTA. Carteggio con SALUTATI, cur. NOVATI. Colloquenza, dialettica, villa, villa A., Bucolicon, Speranzi, i filergiti, de propositionibus, dialettica, accademico italiano.   G.: I have been thinking about dialectic by geography again. S.: A dangerous sign. G.: Not at all. It is tidy. One may distinguish the Athenian dialectic, the Roman dialectic, the Bolognan dialectic, and the Oxonian dialectic. S.: You say that as if each city were entitled to its own organon. G.: In practice, each city usually is. S.: And the Athenian? G.: The Athenian dialectic, in my present taxonomy, is largely what people lazily call the Academic dialectic. S.: Which is already your first misuse. G.: Not mine. Theirs. S.: Good. Then let us begin with the original abuse. G.: Very well. “Academic” properly belongs to the Academy, and the Academy properly belongs to Akademos. S.: Or Hekademos, if one wants a bit of topographical piety. G.: Exactly. A grove, a locality, and then the school that met there. S.: So strictly speaking “academy” begins as a place-name before it becomes a style of institution. G.: Precisely. Plato does not found “an academy” in the modern sociological sense. He gathers in the Academy, and later people abstract the proper noun into a common noun. S.: Which is how all bad philology begins: a place becomes a type, and then the type is exported to every town with a villa and a secretary. G.: Beautifully put. S.: Thank you. I learned it in England, but it sounds Italian. G.: Everything sounds Italian if given enough vowels. S.: Then the Roman dialectic? G.: Less “Academic” in the strict Platonic sense and more civic, rhetorical, forensic, senatorial. One might say the Roman dialectic is Athens with impatience and office. S.: Cicero with a schedule. G.: Exactly. S.: And the Bolognan dialectic? G.: Ah, there the thing becomes scholastic, institutional, professorial, quaestional. Not merely discussion, but discussion under statute, with gloss, objection, responsio, and matriculation fees. S.: So dialectic becomes employable. G.: Which is why Bologna matters. S.: And Oxonian? G.: Intimate, tutorial, under-spoken, full of examples about cats and mats, and deeply suspicious of systems that travel under names too grand for their evidence. S.: Splendid. And now to the misuse of “academia.” G.: Yes. Once one has abstracted “Academy” from Akademos, one gets all these Italian accademie with proper names attached like plumes to helmets. S.: Accademia dei Filergiti, for instance. G.: Exactly the sort of thing. One sees at once that the semantic weight has shifted. S.: Shifted where? G.: Away from accademia and onto what follows after it. S.: Good. That was my point too. In these later cases, “accademia” means little more than “learned company,” while the real differentiating content lies in the title after di or de’. G.: Yes. If one says Accademia dei Filergiti, the informative bit is Filergiti. S.: Which is why, if one were being brisk, one might as well call them simply the Filergiti. G.: I would indeed advise cutting it down to that. S.: De’ Filergiti? G.: If one wants the little historical flavouring, yes. But “Accademia de’ Filergiti” is already over-dressed. S.: You object to the word accademia there because it trades on a prestige borrowed from Plato while doing almost none of Plato’s topographical work. G.: Precisely. It is a noble fiction that has become a common noun with social ambitions. S.: Italians were very fond of it. G.: They still are. S.: But they do at least have the decency to make the names splendidly ridiculous. G.: Sometimes splendidly, yes. The Infiammati. The Umidi before they become the Fiorentina. The Crusca. The Lincei. The Apatisti. The Addormentati. The Gelati. The Ricovrati. S.: You are enjoying yourself. G.: It is impossible not to. S.: Let us list them carefully, since misuse deserves cataloguing. G.: Good. First, the Florentine Platonic gathering around Ficino, often called the Accademia Platonica. S.: Which modern scholarship keeps warning us was not a formal academy in the later sense. G.: Exactly. Informal, discussion-centred, and probably not even called that with the firmness later centuries preferred. Still, it enters the tradition as if it had been a real “academy.” Founded in effect around 1462 in Florence under Cosimo’s patronage around Ficino’s circle. [en.wikipedia.org], [scholarly-...ieties.org] S.: So there the misuse begins almost at once: posterity formalises what was fluid. G.: Yes. S.: Next? G.: The Accademia degli Infiammati at Padua, founded in 1540. A much more recognisable academy in the Renaissance sense: organised, named, vernacular, public lectures, and all that. [link.springer.com] S.: Excellent name, too. Burning Ones. Very suitable for people who sit indoors discussing ethics. G.: Better than the Umidi, surely. S.: Much better. And the Umidi become? G.: The Accademia Fiorentina, founded in 1540 as the Umidi and renamed in 1541 under Medici wishes. Philosophical and literary, heavily bound up with the vernacular question. [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So there again the noun accademia spreads. Not Academy in the Athenian local sense, but a learned body under civic or ducal colouring. G.: Precisely. S.: The Crusca? G.: Florence again, 1582–1583. The Accademia della Crusca. Linguistic, philological, and gloriously metaphorical: sifting flour from bran, language from rubbish. [en.wikipedia.org], [accademiad...acrusca.it] S.: Della Crusca too? G.: Naturally. S.: Then your principle fails. There the semantic burden after accademia is not masculine plural. G.: Ah, yes. My witty over-generalisation has met the flour-bin. S.: As it deserved. G.: Very well. Not always masculine plural. Sometimes a feminine singular noun of astonishing culinary confidence. S.: Much better. G.: Then the Lincei. S.: Rome, 1603. G.: Yes. The Accademia dei Lincei, founded in Rome in 1603 by Federico Cesi. Originally scientific in a way many of the literary academies were not. Later revived in nineteenth-century forms. [lincei.it], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: The Lincei at least look sufficiently serious to justify the big noun. G.: More than most. Though even there one ought to distinguish the original seventeenth-century body from the later national academy. S.: Always a good rule in Italy: distinguish the original splendour from the restored splendour. G.: Yes. S.: And Allegretti’s Filergiti? G.: That is where the mischief becomes local and charming. If one says “Accademia de’ Filergiti,” one is dressing a coterie, circle, or villa-gathering in a title that wants Athens behind it. S.: Whereas what really matters is the membership-sign: Filergiti. G.: Exactly. “Accademia” there is nearly generic. The social and semantic identity lies in the epithet. S.: And “de’ Filergiti” is already enough to tell the initiated what sort of body it is. G.: Or what sort of body it wants to look like. S.: Better. G.: Thank you. S.: Now, the British Academy. G.: Yes, let us move north and become institutional without becoming sober. S.: When founded? G.: Proposed in 1899, organised as a society in December 1901, and chartered in 1902 by Edward VII. The full name was, and gloriously remains, the British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies. [thebritish...demy.ac.uk], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: Which sounds as if it were trying to out-Lincei the Lincei. G.: In title, perhaps. In weather, never. S.: And founded by whom? G.: Not by one lone sage in a grove, but by a concert of distinguished scholars after it was recognised that Britain needed a body parallel to the Royal Society for the human sciences. The proposed fellows met first on 17 December 1901; the charter came from Edward VII in 1902. [thebritish...demy.ac.uk], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So very British: an academy founded not by inspiration but by administrative embarrassment. G.: Exactly. We discovered we were under-represented abroad and invented grandeur in self-defence. S.: And philosophy in the British Academy? G.: Present from the start in the title itself: historical, philosophical, and philological studies. Later organised into sections by discipline. [archives.h...tory.ac.uk], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So when you become FBA, which you later do, the initials mean less “follower of Plato” than “member of a chartered humanities corporation.” G.: Painfully so. S.: And the lectures? G.: The British Academy has many named lectures. You mentioned the Hertz and the Dick. S.: The Dick being the one no one can mention without schoolboy ruin. G.: Of course. British institutions are very cruel to the innocent dead. S.: But the comparison stands? G.: Broadly. The British Academy is a national learned body with sections and named lectures. The Italian academies are often older, more local in origin, and more flamboyant in naming. But the structural likeness—scholars gathered under a titled institution—is real enough. S.: And the moral? G.: The word academy has suffered broad semantic inflation, but not total ruin. S.: Let us go back to Plato. G.: Good. The stricter usage would reserve Academy for the actual Platonic locus and perhaps, by direct historical continuity, for institutions consciously and tightly modelled on it. S.: Which would exclude half of Italy before luncheon. G.: More than half. S.: Yet Italy clearly adored the form. G.: Indeed. By 1700 there were nearly absurd numbers of academies across Italy. The academy becomes a standard cultural format: local, civic, courtly, literary, scientific, philosophical. [academia.edu], [mhra.org.uk] S.: And every one of them wanted a name. G.: Naturally. The name was half the point. S.: Let us list a few more, just to improve the afternoon. G.: Very well. Accademia degli Infiammati, Padua, 1540. [link.springer.com] S.: Fiery. G.: Accademia Fiorentina, originally the Umidi, Florence, 1540–1541. [en.wikipedia.org] S.: Damp, then civic. G.: Accademia della Crusca, Florence, 1582/1583. [en.wikipedia.org], [accademiad...acrusca.it] S.: Floury. G.: Accademia Platonica, Florence, around Ficino, traditionally from 1462 though informal. [en.wikipedia.org], [scholarly-...ieties.org] S.: Piously retrospective. G.: Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, 1603. [lincei.it], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: Sharp-eyed. G.: Accademia dei Filergiti, in the Allegretti tradition, later memorialised in print in the nineteenth century as an ancient and insigne academy. Your passage itself gives us that line of reception. S.: Which is precisely why one ought to be suspicious. The printed memorial often inflates the academy after the fact. G.: Yes. Commemorative prose is academy’s revenge upon history. S.: Any others from the larger Italian philosophical orbit? G.: One may mention the Orti Oricellari gatherings if one is speaking of Florentine intellectual circles after Ficino, though again not every circle deserves the noun academy with equal strictness. S.: Good. Restraint becomes you. G.: It pains me, but I manage. S.: And what of the academies that were more scientific than literary? G.: Lincei certainly. Later Cimento if one extends beyond your immediate passage, though that is less “philosophy” in the Italian learned-society sense and more experimental science. S.: But still part of the Italian academy habit. G.: Entirely. S.: So when Allegretti or his later memorialists say “prima accademia d’Italia,” what should one hear? G.: One should hear not a verified constitutional claim, but civic-academic self-praise. Italy is full of “firsts” that turn out to mean “first of the kind we have just decided to value.” S.: Excellent. That is nearly worth inscribing. G.: On bran, perhaps. S.: Now, semantically, you said the real content lies after “Accademia di.” G.: Yes. Because the common noun by then is nearly vacuous as differentiator. The title term—Filergiti, Lincei, Crusca, Infiammati—does the identity-work. S.: So “academy” in these names functions rather like “club” in English. G.: Roughly, though with more prestige and less billiards. S.: The Accademia della Crusca sounds like a club only to someone who has never sieved a language. G.: True. S.: And the British Academy? G.: There the opposite tendency appears. “Academy” bears real national weight because there are fewer rival bodies of that exact kind. The adjective British and the long subtitle then specify the field. S.: So in Britain the noun is weightier and the descriptive tail more administrative. G.: Precisely. S.: Whereas in Italy the noun is more generic and the tail more emblematic. G.: That is very well put. S.: Thank you. I learned it by listening to you misuse “academia.” G.: I prefer to think I used it heuristically. S.: Which is what old men say when corrected. G.: And young men, when they survive. S.: Let us return to Allegretti. You call his villa gatherings a kind of “academy.” G.: Yes, but with caution. Better to say that later tradition academised them. S.: Academised? G.: A vile but useful verb. It means taking a learned circle and draping it in the hereditary prestige of Academy. S.: From Akademos to Villa A. G.: Exactly. Plato had a grove; Allegretti had a villa and some learned friends; posterity supplied the common noun. S.: Then the “Athenian dialectic” under your scheme is mostly the Academic dialectic only because later people have converted a place-name into a philosophical mode. G.: Yes. And once that has happened, every later circle wants in on the pedigree. S.: Ficino wants Athens in Florence. The Filergiti want Plato in Rimini or Forlì by way of conviviality. The Lincei want science with heraldry. The Crusca wants language with winnowing. The British Academy wants humanities with a charter. G.: Excellent. You have learned the entire European history of learned self-importance in one breath. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford wants to avoid the word academy entirely while behaving like one all day. S.: Better still. G.: Because “academy” sounds un-English unless it is about soldiers, painters, or economists. S.: Or unless one is being made FBA. G.: Yes. Then it becomes tolerable. S.: You mentioned sections. G.: The British Academy is organised by sections or disciplines now, and philosophy has its place among them. [archives.h...tory.ac.uk], [en.wikipedia.org] S.: While the Lincei have classes. G.: Yes, which is more Roman and more sonorous. S.: And the Italian Renaissance academies mostly have names rather than sections. G.: Exactly. Their internal organisation may vary, but what posterity remembers is the emblematic name, not the subcommittee structure. S.: Because no one wants to found the Accademia dei Procedurali. G.: Though England nearly did. S.: So what is an academy, then, if one wants a usable definition? G.: A learned society or gathering claiming continuity with the ideal of organised inquiry under a shared name and purpose. S.: Too broad. G.: Very well: a body of learned persons whose identity exceeds any one lecture or member and is symbolically concentrated in a title. S.: Better. G.: And what is not an academy? S.: A lunch with notes. G.: Excellent. S.: Also, not every salon, circle, correspondence network, or villa conversation deserves the title merely because posterity is feeling civic. G.: Very good indeed. S.: Then Allegretti’s colloquenza at his villa may be academy-like without needing to be called, with solemnity, an academy. G.: Exactly. “Parnassus” is already enough vanity for one estate. S.: Let us end, then, with your recommended pruning. G.: Certainly. If I saw “Accademia de’ Filergiti” too often in prose, I should quietly shorten it to “the Filergiti.” S.: Because the semantic centre lies in Filergiti, not in accademia. G.: Yes. S.: And because if every gathering is an academy, then Plato loses his grove. G.: That is the punchline. S.: And if Plato loses his grove, Oxford will build a committee to recover it. G.: Which would be the most British Academy ending imaginable.Grice: Caro Allegretti, ho sempre avuto un debole per la parola “colloquenza”. Devo confessare che a Vadvs boum – la nostra Ox-ford – non c’è nulla di simile. Si parla di “conversation”, ma manca quel senso di raccoglimento e scambio elevato che sembra respirarsi nelle tue accademie italiane. Come la intendi tu, esattamente? Allegretti: Caro Grice, la colloquenza non è una semplice conversazione; è incontro di menti e di animi, dove il dialogo mira a edificare, non solo a scambiare parole. Nella mia villa, la chiamo il nostro “Parnaso”, proprio perché ogni colloquenza è un’ascesa, una ricerca del vero, ispirata alla dialettica ma nutrita anche dall’amicizia e dallo studio condiviso. Grice: Affascinante! Forse è questo che manca nei nostri ritrovi inglesi, troppo spesso improntati alla disputa e poco alla costruzione comune. La tua idea di una villa come luogo di colloquenza mi fa pensare a Platone, ma con un calore tutto italiano. Forse dovrei istituire un “Parnaso” anche a Ox-ford, che ne dici? A.: Sarebbe un gesto degno, caro Grice! Ricorda però: la vera colloquenza nasce dove c’è apertura di spirito e desiderio di crescere insieme. Dopo tutto, la filosofia non si nutre solo di tesi, ma di confronto sincero e amicizia. Ti aspetto al nostro prossimo convegno sotto il segno della tortora e del biscione! Allegretti, Giacomo (1838). Memorie storiche dell'antica ed insigne accademia de’ filergiti. Forlì: Valenti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Allievo – Ossia: Grice e Allievo: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Giuseppe Allievo (San Germano Vercellese, Vercelle, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what a speaker means, beyond what is said, by attributing to the speaker orderly intentions and a cooperative orientation, so that implicatures are not accidents of style but inferences licensed by shared norms of relevance, informativeness, and the like. Allievo, as presented in your passage and in line with what is known of Giuseppe Allievo (1830–1913), comes from a very different philosophical temperament: a Catholic spiritualist and pedagogist associated with Turin (a student of Giovanni Antonio Rayneri, influenced by the Italian spiritualist tradition and attentive to figures like Bruno), he frames the “io–tu” encounter and the emergence of meaning within a metaphysical-psychophysiological synthesis in which personhood, affective and animating powers, and the unity of soul and body are fundamental, and in which no being (and so no speaker) exists or is intelligible in isolation from others. The comparison, then, is that Grice makes conversational rationality methodologically primary, offering an analysis of meaning as publicly tractable intention-recognition under rational constraints, whereas Allievo makes relational personhood metaphysically primary, treating dialogue as a site where the self’s unity (and its moral-spiritual development) is realized through the other; Grice’s implicature is a calculable product of cooperative reasoning about utterances, while Allievo’s “conversational reason” is closer to an anthropological and spiritual condition of genuine encounter in which intention, affectivity, and embodied agency jointly constitute the very space in which anything like implicature could matter. Grice: “I love A.; of course he reminds me of all those scholars back in the day that I relied on for my philosophising on intending, since isn’t this an act of the soul? I mean Stout and the rest. Once a Stoutian, for better or worse, I became a Prichardian! Now Oxford never knows what to do with people like Stout. Surely the Wilde readership is a possibility, but Lit. Hum. and the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy always considered ‘mind’, as per the journal ‘of psychology and philosophy,’ pretty secondary to metaphysics! We dearly hold The Aristotelian Society as more prestigious than The Mind Association! A., like myself, is fascinated by Stout, in the continent always more respected than by barbiarian islanders! Add to that the charm of his italinanness over the germanic coldness of a Wundt, whose name is just unpronounceable to A., and you get to the heart of his ‘psico-fisiologia.’where the ‘io’ meets the ‘tu,’ and the focus, having studied the Roman tradition, is the ‘educatio fisica, psico-fisica! Studia a Torino sotto RAYNERI. Conosce SERBATI, Ivrea, Ceva, e Chiala. Spiritualista, propugna un sintesismo secondo il quale nessuna parte d’un essere sussiste senza l’ente stesso, e nessun essere sussiste senza gl’altri esseri dell'universo. La sua antropologia, psicologia razionale o filosofica, di radice metafisica, fondata in BRUNO. Uomo e cosmo. Differenza uomo/bruto, persona, vrtù intellettiva, coscienza di sè, individuale soggetiva, ed conoscenza esteriore, universale oggettiva. Potere animatore ed affettivo, attinenza del corpo col potere animatore, organismo esanime e potere affetivo, unità sintetica della persona, corso, sviluppo e potere della vita, attività volontaria, personalità, facoltà conoscitiva, essenza umana. Anima e corpo uniti nella, virilità, sensitività, persona ed essenza umana dell’altro, base fisiologica animale del fenomeno psichico, soggetto sostanziale d’intelligenza e di libera volontà, che concilia nell’unità del loro umano soggetto dei fenomeni che si mantengono indiegiungibili, rischiarandosi l’un l’altro.  Grice: Caro Allievo, la tua riflessione sull'atto di intendere mi ha colpito molto. A Oxford, spesso ci si concentra sulla metafisica, ma tu sembri porre l’accento sulla psico-fisiologia, dove l’“io” incontra il “tu”. Potresti spiegare meglio come questa interazione tra anima e corpo si inserisce nella tua ricerca filosofica?  Allievo: Volentieri, Grice! Per me, l’anima e il corpo sono indissolubilmente legati: l’essenza umana emerge dalla sintesi tra la dimensione personale e quella universale. Il “potere animatore” e quello affettivo si intrecciano, creando una coscienza di sé che si arricchisce nel confronto con gli altri. È proprio nell’unità dei fenomeni psichici che si rischiarano l’un l’altro, dando vita alla persona.  Grice: Trovo affascinante il tuo sintesismo, caro Allievo. In Inghilterra, si tende ancora a separare mente e corpo, ma la tua visione mi ricorda Bruno e la sua idea di un cosmo in cui nessun essere esiste isolato. Secondo te, come si manifesta questa unità nella vita quotidiana e nei rapporti tra persone?  A.: È proprio nell’attività volontaria e nella capacità di conoscenza che l’uomo esprime la sua essenza. Ogni incontro, ogni dialogo, è un’occasione per sviluppare la propria personalità e riconoscere l’umanità dell’altro. Come dice il proverbio piemontese: “L’anima si vede nello sguardo sincero”, e credo che sia nel confronto autentico che si realizza la vera crescita spirituale. Allievo, Giuseppe (1912). Psicologia razionale. Torino: Bocca. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Allioni – Ossia: Grice e Allioni: la RAGIONE CONVERSAZONALE del pirotese e del deutero-esperanto.  Giuseppe Allioni (Torino, Piemonte) la ragione conversazionale del pirotese e del deutero-esperanto. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats communication as a rational, cooperative enterprise in which what a speaker means is constrained by publicly recognizable intentions and by audience-guided inferences under norms such as relevance and sufficiency; implicature is therefore a principled by-product of reasoned participation in a practice, not an ornamental extra. Allioni’s pirotese and “deutero-esperanto,” by contrast, read like a playful, metalinguistic dramatization of that very rationality: starting from proto-pirotese as mere natural symptom (a groan) and moving to deutero-pirotese where the creature signifies pain, Allioni (in the passage’s Gricean staging) turns Grice’s core distinction between natural meaning and speaker meaning into a diachronic “ladder,” then extends it by adding successive logical resources (negation, conjunction, disjunction, conditionals, quantification, iota, assertion/imperative, therefore) until, at the final step, implicature and disimplicature are explicitly introduced as the culminating phase of linguistic sophistication. Where Grice uses idealized examples (including invented toy languages) to isolate the rational mechanisms that already operate in ordinary talk, Allioni reimagines the emergence of those mechanisms as a constructed auxiliary-code project oriented toward friendly international correspondence, so that conversational reason becomes not only a set of inferential norms governing what is meant beyond what is said, but also an explicit design brief for building a language that makes those norms—and their logical prerequisites—visible as stages of development. Grice: “We can conceive of  pirot as a talking pirot –  cf. talking parot --. Its lingo, pirotese, must be allowed to undergo phases, which I call PROTO-pirotese, the mere natural manifestation of a groan, DEUTERO-pirotese, when a pirot now signifies that he is in pain, TRITIO-pirotese, when we add ‘not’ --, tetarto-pirotese – when we add ‘and’ --; pempto-pirotese – when we add ‘or’ --; hector-pirotese – when we add ‘if’ --; hebdomo-pirotese – when we add substitutional universal quantification --; ogdo-pirotese – when we add substittuioanl existential quantification -- enato-pirotese, when we add the iota operator; decato-pirotese, when we add the assertion sign versus the imperative sign; endecato-pirotese – when we add ‘therefore’; dodecato-pirotese – when we allow for implicature and disimplicature. Codice di corrispondenza amichevole. Impronta. Dulichenko’s Boellu is  a misspelling. A code for friendly international correspondence. Digital pasigraphy is indicated in DIAL by 901.121. Dulichenko mentions the project Arioni-Boera, number  854.74, referring to Fuishiki Okamoto (Rikichi, or Fuishiki, Okamoto.  Okamoto lists  several works that influenced his Babm9, including Arioni-Boera. Taking into account that Oka moto’s mother tongue is Japanese, we may assume that the Japanese spelling is the source of the confusion -- there being no /l/ sound in Japanese, but /r/, voiced alveolar flap [ɾ]. The surnames A. and Boella thus become Arioni-Boera.  In order to distinguish a cardinal numeral from a number corresponding to a code words, it is written in parentheses: (1), (2), (3), etc.  Con Ernesto Boella. Codice di corrispondenza amichevole, proto-pirotese, deutero-pirotese. Grice: Caro Allioni, permettimi di complimentarmi per la brillante invenzione del “pirotese” e del “deutero-esperanto”. Saper creare nuovi linguaggi è come aprire finestre sul mondo: ogni parola è un ponte tra anime diverse. Davvero geniale! Allioni: Ti ringrazio, Grice! L’idea di pirotese nasce proprio dal desiderio di dare voce anche ai sentimenti più elementari, mentre il deutero-esperanto vuole essere un codice di amicizia universale, adatto ad ogni corrispondenza tra culture lontane. È un piccolo sogno di pace. Grice: Che bella visione, Allioni! Mi affascina soprattutto il passaggio dalle semplici espressioni del proto-pirotese ai raffinati sistemi di implicatura che hai immaginato. È come seguire la crescita di una lingua, dal primo gemito fino alla poesia. Allioni: Hai colto perfettamente il cuore del progetto. In fondo, ogni lingua è il frutto di una colloquenza, di incontri e scambi sinceri. Se il deutero-esperanto potrà aiutare qualcuno a sentirsi meno solo nel mondo, avrò raggiunto il mio intento. “Chi parla, semina legami”, come si dice dalle mie parti. Allioni, Giuseppe (1911). Codice di corrispondenza amichevole. Torino. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n.d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Altan – Ossia: Grice e Altan: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei soggeti -- simbolo, valore, ermeneutica antropologica.  Carlo Tullio Altan (San Vito al Tagliamento, Pordenone, Friuli-Venezia Giulia):  la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei soggeti -- simbolo, valore, ermeneutica antropologica. Grice: “I like A., a philosophical anthropologist who rambles on CROCE and filosofia come sintesi -- of history! but then I lectured on Peirce’s misuse of ‘symbol,’ and A. repeats the mistake. Welby should have known better. A. fails to explain why the Romans feel the need to borrow ‘symbolum’ from the Greeks, and never return it! Blame it on the citations that Short and Lewis give for ‘symbol’: extravagant, Peirceian almost! A.’s point is that a ‘soggeto,’ to communicate via ‘logos’ with another ‘soggeto’ in a colloquium relies on a  symbol, carrying a ‘valore.’ Unless you share the value, you don’t quite grasp the implicatum in the use of the symbol.” Si laurea a Roma. Partecipa alla resistenza. Incontra CROCE e s’avvicina all’idealismo e lo spiritualismo morale, accostato all’etnologia.  Per influsso di MARTINO, CANTONI e Tentori, non basa l’antropologia sulla ricerca sul campo ma fa ricorso alla filosofia. S’oppone allo strutturalismo ed adere al FUNZIONALISMO e il marxismo. Studia la società complessa, e colla sua formazione in filosofia del diritto, studia la FEOMENOLOGIA DEL SIMBOLO, volgendo la sua attenzione alla semiosi nei comportamenti e il concetto d’una religione civile pel paese, alla antica roma. Inserisce la coscienza civile degl’italiani, un manuale d’educazione civica, e studia i basilari componenti dell’identità del ethnos italiano, specie friuliana: l’epos, memoria storica collettiva, l’ethos, il sacro d’una norma o una regola in un valore, e il logos, la lingua interpersonale conversazionale. La porta rossa di VELIA, fascismo, ideologia politica italiana, ideologie politiche italiane, simbologia, simbolismo, ermeneutica, mercurio, ermete, mercurio, humano, uomo, umanesimo, Passolini, Palazzo A., nobile, etnia friulese, non italiana, dizionario dei friulesi, friul, friulese, base ed occupazione romana, Aquileia, i friulesi durante il fascismo, contro il friulese, italizazione, italianita, romanita, friulesita. Grice: Caro Altan, ti dirò che l’“intersoggettivo” mi lascia sempre un po’ perplesso! Analizzare quella dimensione dove il significato si costruisce tra soggetti, non solo nel singolo, mi sembra un labirinto senza uscita. È come cercare di afferrare il vento: ogni simbolo assume valore solo quando trova un ponte tra due anime, ma quel ponte resta invisibile e sfuggente.  Altan: Grice, il tuo dubbio è profondamente umano! L’intersoggettività, per me, è proprio quel luogo d’incontro dove il simbolo acquista valore e diventa l’essenza della civiltà. Senza quel riconoscersi nell’altro, la conversazione rimane sterile. Però capisco la tua difficoltà: ogni identità si plasma in quell’abbraccio invisibile—ma analizzarlo filosoficamente richiede quasi un salto nel buio, perché la logica non basta.  Grice: Esatto, Altan! Per me, il simbolo è portatore di implicature che solo il soggetto può decifrare se condivide il valore. Ma quando si passa all’intersoggettivo, la semiosi si complica: il “valore” non è mai garantito, è sempre negoziato. Mi sembra che la filosofia inglese, tutta razionalità e chiarezza, fatichi a cogliere questa sfumatura italiana, dove tutto si svolge tra interpretazioni e risonanze.  A.: Grice, è proprio lì la bellezza e la difficoltà: l’intersoggettività non si può ridurre a schema, perché è fatta di storie, di memoria collettiva, di ethos e logos che si intrecciano. Chi prova a spiegarla rischia di perderne la poesia, ma chi la vive—come la nostra conversazione—sa che, come si dice in Friuli, “la parola unisce più dei ponti.” Forse bisogna accettare che alcune cose si capiscono solo dialogando. Altan, Carlo Tullio (1959). Antropologia filosofica. Milano, Feltrinelli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ossia: Grice e Alvarotti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale retorica.  Speroni degl’Alvarotti: (Padova, Veneto) la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale retorica. Grice: “Most philosophers at Oxford hardly understood my motivation in bringing in conversation into the philosophical picture. A far cry in the Italy of A.– where conversazione reigns supreme!” Nasce nel palazzo A. Studia a Bologna sotto POMPONAZZI. Degl’infiamatti, compone dialoghi lucianei filosofici pubblicati da BARBARO sull’amore, la cura famigliare, l’usura, la discordia, la lingua, la retorica, la vita attiva, la storia, e laudi del Catajo, villa della S. Beatrice Pia degli Obici e Panico e Bichi. Aiuta TASSO a revisare la Gerusalemme. Compone Canace, tragedia ispirata dall’Eroides d’OVIDIO, criticata da Cinzio. Intervenne anche con Cinzio e Pigna sull’Orlando furioso ed il romanzo come genere. Amico di CARO a Roma, discorre su ALIGHIERI e sull’Eneide di VIRGILIO. Classicista più estremo d’ORO, cui rimprovera di trattare dalla storia la Sofonisba. Forcellini, Occhi, Trattatisti, Pozzi, Ricciardi, Cammarosano, Empoli, Noccioli; Bruni, Sistemi e strutture narrative a Firenze, Fano, Floriani, I gentiluomini filosofi, il dialogo culturale, Fiorato, Fournel, Il camaleonte e il cuoco, la critica del romanzo, Jossa, Rappresentazione e scrittura, la crisi delle forme diquefìa etile cui vive parole bene ìntese da voi, piu dì bene u'apportaraimo in un giornojolo, che a me non fa la lezione di Boccaccio col rimario ch'io ne carni. Qjufìinon men corte fe che dotto uohntieri il sentiero h'à buono albergo conduce con diligenza Hi moftrark con quello Petrarca e Boccaccio leggendo non pur le ciancie da me osservate ma i secreti dettate laro mi ben notf a mlgarUfacihnente penetrarcte: LATINAMENTE parlando questi imitiate, CT loro fintile diuctitiatc il quale M. Tripbonefebora fufic in Bobgna me certamente dagl’errori del mìo ragionamento ed il Valerio dalla fatica del suo fuiuro, per’aventura hbcrarebbe, terminando la questione o nulla uauanzarcbbe da dubitarci!} tanto uoi udirete il Valerio, il quale si puo dir lui dopà UUal cuiparere (che dianzi lui dice) io vi conforto che iààttentate. Vai. Ricordini. maca alcuna cosa. Dialogo della lingua. Retorica. Grice: Permettetemi di dire, caro Speroni degl’Alvarotti—il vostro nome è già una sinfonia! Mi sembra che in Italia la conversazione non sia solo un passatempo, ma l’anima stessa della filosofia. A Oxford, spesso ho sentito che i miei colleghi non comprendevano a fondo la motivazione profonda di portare la conversazione all’interno del discorso filosofico. Qui, essa regna sovrana! Alvarotti: Vi ringrazio, Grice, delle vostre parole generose. I nostri dialoghi—che trattino d’amore, di famiglia, di lingua o di retorica—sono davvero intessuti nella trama della filosofia italiana. Ricordo i miei anni a Bologna con Pomponazzi, dove imparare era sempre un dialogo, mai un monologo. Anche la nostra retorica, come avrete notato, vive nelle sfumature dell’implicito e nella comprensione condivisa. Grice: Proprio così! È il gioco sottile dell’implicatura conversazionale che mi affascina. In Inghilterra, a volte ci aggrappiamo troppo alla chiarezza e alla logica, perdendo così la ricchezza che deriva dall’implicito retorico. I vostri dialoghi lucianei, pubblicati da Barbaro, mostrano come la filosofia prosperi non solo negli argomenti, ma anche nelle sottigliezze del linguaggio, negli scambi che danno forma al significato tra i parlanti. A.: Mi lusingate, Grice! Ma avete ragione: il valore della conversazione sta proprio nella sua capacità di unire retorica e filosofia, rivelando verità che la sola logica spesso lascia nell’ombra. Che si tratti di rivedere Tasso o di dibattere sulla natura della lingua, costruiamo ponti tra intelletto ed emozione, tra tradizione e innovazione. È proprio nel dialogo, sia parlato sia scritto, che nascono le implicature più ricche. Alvarotti, Speroni degl’ (1542). Dialogo della lingua. Venezia, Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Amaduzzi – Ossia: Grice e Amaduzzi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi: (Savignano sul Rubicone, Forli, Romagna): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means, including implicatures, by assuming a cooperative, rational exchange in which what is said is only part of the communicative act and the rest is supplied by intention-recognition and shared norms of relevance and informativeness. Amaduzzi, an eighteenth-century Roman-based erudite from Savignano sul Rubicone (educated under Giovanni Bianchi/Jano Planco and active as a philologist, antiquarian, and intellectual networker), approaches “reason in discourse” from the institutional and republic-of-letters angle rather than from micro-pragmatics: he writes and reflects on academies as sites where inquiry is socially organized (e.g., Discorso filosofico sul fine ed utilità dell’Accademie, 1777), on the alliance and boundary between philosophy and religion (La filosofia alleata della religione, 1778), and on the nature of truth and opinion (Discorso filosofico dell’indole della verità e delle opinioni, 1786), while also producing learned prefatory work for grammars and alphabets (notably for Propaganda Fide projects) that treat language as a disciplined medium for transmitting knowledge across communities. The comparison, then, is one of level and target: Grice models the rational “engine” inside a single exchange (how implicature is generated and responsibly inferred), whereas Amaduzzi models the rational ecology that makes such exchanges worth having and governable over time—academies, correspondence networks, and linguistic standardization as infrastructures of shared norms, authority, and credibility. Where Grice treats the implicit as a routinely calculable surplus of meaning in ordinary talk, Amaduzzi’s emphasis on institutions of learning and on calibrating truth vs. opinion suggests a more Enlightenment concern with how publics decide what to accept, how intellectual communities stabilize standards, and how discourse remains civil and productive across confessional and national boundaries; in Gricean terms, Amaduzzi is helping to build and police the common ground and the interpretive expectations that make implicature possible and trustworthy, while Grice explains how, once that common ground is in place, reason can do its characteristically economical work by letting much remain unsaid yet still reliably understood. Grice: “Oddly, I had occasion to refer to A.’s birthplace in my little thing on Caesar crossing the Rubicon! I love A. He philosophises about the academy of Paris, and the academy of Berlin, but nothing about the English Academy! He notes that the warrior against the Trojans is Echademos and it is thus natural that the first important accademy be founded in Tuscany, since a Tuscan hates a Roman! A.’s hobby is to collect references to ‘accademies, which are all nonsensical, since only ONE has a rigid designation link to Echademos!”. Allievo a Rimini di BIANCHI, si trasfere a Roma. Un assestamento nella sua vita si registra come rilevano i diari dei suoi primi diporti, gl’odeporici autunnali eruditi, le brevi perlustrazioni compiute nei dintorni della città eterna o comunque entro lo stato della chiesa, emblema di un genere letterario che mostra la sua versatilità di interessi.  Dei filopatridi, grazie alla protezione di Clemente, anch’egli ex allievo di BIANCHI. Scrive le prefazioni di importanti grammatiche di lingue. Corrisponde con Metastasio, Monti, Denina, Pindemonte, Tiraboschi, e Spallanzani. Spicca anche dissertazioni di ordine FILOSOFICO illuminista. La filosofia alleata della religione, l’ndole della verità e dell’opinione, denunciato all’inquisizione, ispirati all’empirismo, cercando di coniugare il sensismo col cattolicesimo, vede nel primo un approccio alla conoscenza dell'uomo. Vicino al giansenismo regalistico, come emerge dal carteggio con Scipione de' Ricci, ha parte nella discussione che porta alla soppressione della compagnia di Gesù.  S’occupa d’archeologia, curando i FRAGMENTA VESTIGII VETERIS ROMÆ e la raccolta di antichità a Girgenti, in carteggio con ANTINORI. Compone canzoni, rime, e su Anacreonte. È tra gl’arcadi, pseudonimo Biante Didimeo. Sopra l’instituzioni canoniche, de officio archidiaconi, donaria duo græce loquentia VICVS SANDALARIVS. Alfabeto etrusco, grandonico-malabaricum sive samscrudonicum..  Grice: Caro Amaduzzi, ogni volta che penso alla tua Savignano sul Rubicone, mi torna in mente Cesare e il famoso attraversamento del fiume! Ma ciò che davvero mi colpisce di te è il tuo modo di filosofare sulle accademie: Parigi, Berlino... e mai l’Inghilterra! Il tuo spirito accademico è quasi un viaggio tra i popoli più che tra idee. Amaduzzi: Grice, che bel paragone! In effetti, ho sempre amato esplorare, sia nei dintorni della città eterna che tra le varie accademie europee. Credo che ogni luogo abbia un modo unico di intrecciare conversazione e filosofia, e forse proprio la varietà rende ricca la nostra ricerca. Grice: Mi affascina anche la tua attenzione verso la lingua e il senso – le tue prefazioni a grammatiche di lingue diverse sono quasi ponti tra mondi. E la tua corrispondenza con Metastasio e gli altri? È come se volessi far dialogare il passato col presente, la tradizione con l’innovazione. Amaduzzi: Proprio così, Grice! Per me la filosofia è fatta di dialoghi continui, anche quando si parla di archeologia o di sensismo. Il confronto, la pluralità delle voci, è la vera anima della conversazione. Come diceva Anacreonte: “La parola ben detta vale più di mille azioni.” Amaduzzi, Giovanni Cristofano (1766). Grammatica ragionata. Roma: Pagliarini.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Amafinio – Ossia: Grice e Amafinio: la ragione conversazionale all’orto a Roma Gaio Amafinio: la ragione conversazionale all’orto a Roma. Contemporaneo di Cicerone, che lo cita in coppia con CATIO, opera a Roma a partire da quando CICERONE s’occupa dell'ORTO come un ‘trend’ della filosofia romana. A. e uno dei primi romani a redigere un saggio in latino per diffondere la la fisica dell’orto. Benché la sua opera ha successo, CICERONE giudica il lavoro insufficiente per quanto riguarda lo stile. Opere rappresentative di questa filosofia, in latino si può dire non ne esistano. O, se mai, sono assai poche. Ciò è dovuto alla difficoltà della materia e al fatto che i nostri connazionali sono presi da ben altri problemi, e ritenevano inoltre che quelle non sono cose da piacere a gente senza istruzione come sono loro. Mentre essi taceno, venne fuori A.. Quando usceno i suoi saggi la gente ne rimane impressionata, e accorda notevolissimo favore alla dottrina di cui egli era rappresentante, per la facilità con cui si capiva, per l’attrazione esercitata dalle seducenti lusinghe del piacere, e anche perché, dal momento che non le e offerto nulla di meglio, prende quello che c’e. Ma quando i loro stessi autori ammettono apertamente di non saper scrivere né con chiarezza, né con ordine, né con gusto, né con eleganza, io rinuncio senza rammarico a una lettura così poco attraente. Tanto, le teorie della loro scuola le sanno già tutti quelli che abbiano un minimo di cultura. Così, visto che poi non si preoccupano nemmeno loro del modo in cui scrivono, non vedo perché gl’altri debbano andare a leggerli. Che si leggano tra di loro, con quelli che la pensano in quel modo. Noi invece siamo dei parere che, qualunque cosa si scriva, si dove scrivere pel pubblico colto: e se non riusciamo a mantenerci sul piano adeguato, non dobbiamo per questo dimenticarcene. Ad Familiares. Howe, A., LUCREZIO. Enciclopedia Italiana. Academica. Tusculanae Disputationes.  Enciclopedia Italiana. Griceus: Amafini, dic mihi, quid tibi videtur de Epicureo orto? Estne inter Romana philosophiae instituta aliquid novi, an magis traditum? Amafinius: Gricee, ortus nobis est quasi schola naturae, ubi voluptas ipsa docet hominem vivere secundum naturam. Non opus est verbis elegantibus, sed simplici expositione, ut omnes intellegant felicitatem esse in animi quiete et corpore sano. Griceus: Sed quid dicis de iudicio Ciceronis? Ait enim te nimis vulgarem scribere, nec satis ornate neque ordine. Nonne putes stilum quoque ad philosophiam pertinere? Amafinius: Gricee, mihi vero videtur philosophia ut fructus orti: si utilis est, omnes gustare possunt. Non omnes requirunt ornamenta; veritas ipsa satis clara est etiam sine floribus verborum. Scripsi ut populo prodessem, non ut eloquentiae laudes colligerem. Amafinio, Gaio (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ambrosoli – Ossia: Grice e Ambrosoli: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Luigi Antonio Ambrosoli (Varese, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rational, publicly recoverable inference from what is said plus shared expectations of cooperative talk: speakers can mean more than they explicitly state because hearers assume relevance, appropriate informativeness, and intelligibility, and then work out what must have been intended. Ambrosoli—best known not as a system-building philosopher but as a rigorous historian of ideas and political movements—approaches “conversational reason” at a different level: his maxim that philosophy is a patrimony of spirit and has no homeland, whereas doctrines and schools do, frames intellectual life as transnational in aspiration but locally rooted in institutions, parties, and civic struggles; his lifelong engagement with figures like Carlo Cattaneo and with the Risorgimento and democratic traditions (alongside collaboration with scholars such as Chabod and ties to the liberal-antifascist milieu associated with names like Calamandrei) treats thought as something whose meaning is inseparable from the concrete public conversations of a polity. The contrast with Grice is therefore complementary: Grice supplies the micro-mechanics by which an utterance in a given exchange yields determinate implied content under rational norms, while Ambrosoli supplies the macro-historical account of how the “shared background” that makes such inference possible is formed—through schools, periodicals, political alignments, and civic commitments that stabilize what counts as relevant, tactful, or evidential in a community’s discourse. Where Grice brackets ideology to isolate the logic of conversational inference, Ambrosoli foregrounds ideology and institutional setting to show how traditions of talk (federalism vs centralism, democratic rhetoric, “né aderire né sabotare” styles of civic stance) sediment over time; and that is precisely where the two meet: Gricean implicature depends on common ground, but Ambrosoli’s kind of historiography is, in effect, a study of how that common ground is historically constructed, contested, and transmitted, so that “reason-governed meaning” is at once a local calculative phenomenon (Grice) and a long-run civic achievement embedded in the life of doctrines and schools (Ambrosoli). Grice: “I like A.: ‘La filosofia è patrimonio dello spirito e non ha patria; l’hanno, invece, le dottrine e le scuole.’ But then he dedicates his life to CATTANEO, whose ‘patria’ informs his philosophy, as it does in MAZZINI and in each philosopher for whom A. provides an exegesis! At Oxford we call such a ‘philosophical historian’!” Uno dei protagonisti della storiografia filosofica, si dedica alla ricerca storica, coniugandola con un costante impegno civile.  Laureato a Milano, sotto Chabod, i suoi studi si orientarono particolarmente al risorgimento, a CATTANEO, con esiti unanimemente apprezzati pel rigore filologico, l'acume interpretativo, e la ricerca storiografica. Contribuisce alla ricostruzione della storia dei movimenti e dei partiti politici, ed al movimento operaio e socialista.  Collabora con CALAMANDREI e RUSSO. Il movimento democratico; né aderire né sabotare, la federazione nazionale, i periodici operai e socialisti, libertà in GENTILE, rivoluzione, ll'unità d'Italia, il federalismo., ricerca storica e impegno civile. Insurrezione milanese, filosofia romana, filosofia italiana, filosofia di Varese. Grice: Ambrosoli, ho letto la tua frase: “La filosofia è patrimonio dello spirito e non ha patria; l’hanno, invece, le dottrine e le scuole.” Mi affascina questo pensiero! Secondo te, la filosofia può davvero superare i confini nazionali? Ambrosoli: Grice, credo fermamente che la filosofia sia universale: lo spirito umano cerca sempre la verità, ovunque si trovi. Tuttavia, è inevitabile che le dottrine e le scuole si radichino nelle culture e nelle storie dei popoli, come ho visto studiando Cattaneo e il Risorgimento italiano. Grice: Hai dedicato gran parte della tua ricerca alla storia dei movimenti politici e filosofici italiani. Secondo te, il pensiero civile e l’impegno storico possono influenzare la filosofia, o restano due ambiti separati? Ambrosoli: Per me, Grice, la filosofia e l’impegno civile si intrecciano come i filari di una vigna. Studiare la storia e promuovere il progresso sociale sono modi di dare voce alla filosofia nei fatti, non solo nelle parole. Come diceva Calamandrei, “né aderire né sabotare”, bisogna sempre cercare la libertà e il dialogo nell’azione concreta. Ambrosoli, Luigi Antonio (1946). Il movimento democratico milanese. Milano, Feltrinelli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Grice e Amelio: la setta di Firenze -- Roma – filosofia italiana  Amelio Gentiliano (Firenze, Toscana): la setta di Firenze -- A follower of Plotino, who called him 'Amerio' -- suggesting indivisibility. He comes from Etruria where he studies with Lisimaco . Upon his arrival in Rome, he studies with Plotino, becoming a close friend of Porfirio in the process. A. writes a great deal. He takes copious notes of the lectures of Plotino and writes them up into a series of volumes for the benefit of his son Ostiliano Esichio. He writes another series of volumes attacking the views of the gnostic Zostriano, and he also produces a book defending Plotino against charges of plagiarising the works of Numenio. Given his output, there may be some truth in the suggestion of Cassio Longino that A. tends to write at greater length than is necessary.  GRICEVS: Ameli, ex Etruria ad Romam venisti quasi syllaba indivisibilis, sed libris tuis totam bibliothecam divisisti. AMELIVS: Ita est, Grice, Plotinus me “Amerium” vocavit, sed Cassius Longinus me “verbosum” mallet. GRICEVS: Porphyrium amicum habuisti et Zostrianum oppugnasti, sed num etiam filium Ostilianum Esichium scribendo terruisti? AMELIVS: Minime, nam ille meas notas amat, et si nimis scribo, hoc est quia philosophia brevis est, chartae autem patientissimae.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Grice e Amico: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Giovanni Battista Amico (Cosenza, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like A.; at the time when a philosopher’s duty is to watch the stars, he notices that instruments are unnecessary, given Aristotle’s conception of concentric orbits. His treatise is highly popular in Padova; therefore, he was killed. I cannot imagine the same thing happen to Ayer at Oxford after the success of his “Language, Truth, and Logic””! Studioso d’astronomia, abbraccia il  LIZIO. De motibus corporum cœlestium iuxta principia peripatetica sine eccentricis sed epicyclis. Legge a Padova sotto MAGGI, PASSERI, e DELFINO. Il primo a discutire il modello tolemaico. L’assassinio è provocato dall’invidia, impicato d’un anonimo che compone l'epitaffio. A. cosentino, qui cum omnes omnium liberalium artium disciplinas miro ingenio, solerti industria, incredibili studio, latine Grece atque etiam Hebraice percurrisset feliciter, ipsa adolescentia suorumque laborum et vigilarum cursu pene confecto, a sicario ignoto, literarum, ut putatur, virtutisque, invidia, interfectus est. Ammazzatto da sicario ignoto per invidia delle sue lettere e virtù. Monumentorum Italiæ quae hoc nostro sæculo et a christianis posita sunt. Assalito, derubato e ucciso mentre cammina nei vicoli di Padova. Il processo contro ignoti accerta che è scomparsa una borsa contenente carte con rivoluzionarie osservazioni. Subito dopo l’inquisizione istitusce un processo postumo per eresia contro lui. A. fa menzione TELESIO  ed AQUINO lo define così grande filosofo. Cosenza gli dedica il planetario.  L’evoluzione della flosofia d’A., il suo destino intellettuale, il suo karma scientifico, se fosse vissuto abbastanza, soltanto pochi anni ancora, da imbattersi nel De Revolutionibus di Copernico. Le cose non sono andate così; e un giovane dal destino incompiuto, ma dall’indiscutibile intelligenza puo solo tentare di dare un senso a teorie che valgono solo dal punto di vista dell’osservatore. Questo è un mondo antico, come dice Leopardi, spazzato via a guisa d’una mera illusione dalla rivoluzione astronomica. Piperno, A. Arcavacata. Pianeta. G.: Read the title again. S.: De motibus corporum cœlestium iuxta principia peripatetica sine eccentricis sed epicyclis. G.: Good. Now take just the phrase. S.: Principia peripatetica. G.: Yes. What does it mean? S.: At first glance, “Peripatetic principles.” G.: At second glance? S.: “Principles belonging to the Peripatetic school.” G.: Better. Why not simply Aristotelis principia? S.: Because Amico does not want merely “Aristotle said so.” He wants a whole tendency, a school, a style of reasoning, the inherited apparatus of the Lyceum and its successors. G.: So “peripatetic” is already broader than “Aristotelian.” S.: Usually, yes. G.: Usually is a very weak adverb. S.: It keeps one alive. G.: Not in Padua, apparently. S.: No. In Padua success in astronomy could be rather final. G.: Quite. But stay with the phrase. Does “principium peripateticum” make literal sense? S.: Strictly, not very much. G.: Why not? S.: Because peripateticus is already figurative. It derives from walking about, from the περίπατος, and then by metonymy it comes to mean Aristotle’s school, and then by extension the school’s doctrines. G.: Good. So the first metonymy is place or activity to school. S.: Yes. The walk, or the place of walking, becomes the body of thinkers. G.: And the second? S.: The school becomes its doctrines. Thus a principium can be called “peripatetic” only through the school, not through walking. G.: Exactly. A principle cannot literally stroll. S.: Though many do, in Oxford. G.: Only badly. What was the περίπατος, then? S.: A covered walk, or promenade; and by extension the Lyceum setting where Aristotle taught. G.: A gymnasium. S.: Yes. Not a monastery, not a cave, not a Tuscan villa. A gymnasium in Athens. G.: Busy Athens. S.: Very busy Athens. G.: Whereas Plato’s Academy— S.: Also not originally “an academy” in the modern Italian sense, but a grove or precinct associated with Akademos. G.: Good. So the Academy is topographical before it is institutional, and the Peripatos is ambulatory before it is doctrinal. S.: Yes. And both become common nouns by the usual crimes of posterity. G.: I am glad you call them crimes. S.: I thought it would please you. G.: It does. So if Amico says iuxta principia peripatetica, he does not mean “according to principles that walk around.” S.: No. He means according to principles characteristic of the Aristotelian–Peripatetic tradition. G.: Characteristic, yes. But I still dislike it. S.: Because you dislike “peripatetic.” G.: I do. It sounds like a schoolmaster’s nickname elevated into ontology. S.: Yet one sees why he uses it. G.: Go on. S.: He is writing in 1538. Padua is saturated with Aristotelian commentary, university transmission, school identities, and a live contrast with other tendencies. “Peripatetic” lets him invoke a lineage rather than a single authorial citation. G.: So he is saying, in effect, “I stand within the Aristotelian astronomical inheritance.” S.: Precisely. G.: But with epicycles. S.: Yes, which is already amusing. Sine eccentricis sed epicyclis. No eccentrics, but epicycles. A title that sounds sober until one notices that it is a housekeeping operation on the heavens. G.: He is cleaning the Ptolemaic cupboard with Aristotelian loyalties still on the shelf. S.: Very good. G.: And why does he need the appeal at all? S.: Because to discuss celestial motions in that period is not merely to calculate. It is to place oneself among schools. One is not just right or wrong. One is peripatetic, ptolemaic, perhaps thomist, perhaps something else. The title does institutional work. G.: And rhetorical work. S.: Exactly. It tells the reader, before any argument begins, that the treatise proceeds iuxta principia peripatetica, according to a recognised body of doctrine, hence not as mere whim or astronomical insolence. G.: Astronomical insolence is often the beginning of truth. S.: It is also often the beginning of one’s obituary. G.: Especially in Padua, if one is walking through the wrong alley with the right papers in one’s bag. S.: Quite. G.: Now let us abuse the phrase in the singular. Suppose one says principium peripateticum. S.: Then the absurdity becomes more visible. G.: Why? S.: Because “peripatetic principle” in the singular invites one to imagine there is some one thing called the peripatetic principle, as if the school had a single maxim equivalent to “walk while thinking.” G.: Which would at least improve digestion. S.: Yes. And philosophy too, perhaps. G.: Vice versa. S.: Exactly. G.: But as a phrase it is still poor. S.: Yes. Because “peripatetic” there functions as a cross-categorial transfer. What belongs properly to a place, habit, or sect is predicated of an abstract item. G.: A principle. S.: A principle. G.: So one might say it is a dead figure. S.: Or a living one that has stopped apologising. G.: I prefer dead. It gives one less work. S.: And yet we tolerate “stoic principle,” “academic principle,” “peripatetic doctrine,” all the same. G.: Which is why language is a dangerous medium for philosophers. S.: Better than silence. G.: Not always. S.: You are thinking of the title principium stoicum. G.: Yes. Which literally ought to mean what? A porch-principle? S.: A stoa-principle. A principle of the colonnade. G.: Quite. And principium accademicum would, if taken literally, mean what? A grove-principle? A Hekademean shrub maxim? S.: Very good. G.: Thank you. The point is that school labels by metonymy become doctrinal adjectives, and then everyone forgets the transfer. S.: Which is why Amico can write principia peripatetica without blushing. G.: Whereas I blush on his behalf. S.: You are too kind. G.: I know. Now tell me: where did Aristotle actually do this walking? S.: At the Lyceum in Athens, a public gymnasium and surrounding precinct. G.: So the “walking school” is not a school for ramblers but a teaching practice attached to a civic place. S.: Yes. The association may be with the covered walkways, or with Aristotle’s manner of discussing while walking, or with the school’s location and routine. Antiquity itself is not as pedantically settled about the exact image as later handbooks pretend. G.: Which is a relief. I dislike certainty in philology when founded on retrospective tidiness. S.: As everyone does who has done any. G.: Why was walking good for philosophy? S.: Because the body assists the mind. G.: A dangerous thesis to utter at Oxford. S.: Yet true. Walking regulates pace, and pace regulates thought. Also one can talk beside someone without having to stare at him, which lowers the social temperature. G.: Very important. Many philosophical errors arise from facing people too directly. S.: And digestion. G.: Yes, digestion. One should not ignore it. Plato in the grove, Aristotle in the walk, Oxford in the fields or along St John’s Grove if one is lucky. S.: More often along the more boring pavements. G.: Sadly. S.: But the principle remains. G.: Careful. Not the principium peripateticum, I hope. S.: No. Merely the physiological truth that men reason better if they move occasionally. G.: Good. Now, back to Amico. Does “peripatetic” in his title mean “belonging to Aristotle personally,” or “belonging to the larger Aristotelian school tradition”? S.: The latter, surely. Even if Aristotle remains the gravitational centre. G.: Gravitational is a bad astronomical metaphor in this period. S.: Quite right. The concentric-orbit centre, then. G.: Better. And in Padua? S.: In Padua the Aristotelian inheritance is university inheritance: read under Maggi, Passeri, Delfino, move inside school language, dispute models under recognised doctrinal banners. “Peripatetic” is institutional shorthand. G.: So the title says as much about Padua as about the heavens. S.: Exactly. G.: That is useful. S.: It often is, to see titles as declarations of allegiance rather than bare summaries. G.: Especially in sixteenth-century Latin. S.: Especially there. G.: Now I have a personal difficulty. I may wish to see myself as peripatetic. I walk. I discuss. I like Aristotle. But I also like Kant. S.: Then you are in trouble. G.: I know. I had thought of Ariskant. S.: Horrid. G.: Kantotle? S.: Worse. G.: You are very severe. S.: Out of loyalty. G.: Could one not be both? S.: Of course. Only not under one barbarous compound. G.: So I must avoid calling myself a peripatetic unless I mean merely that I enjoy walking while talking. S.: Which would be harmless enough, provided you do not then infer a doctrinal tradition from your afternoon constitutional. G.: Very good. I should hate to found a school accidentally by exercise. S.: That has happened before. G.: More often in Italy than in Oxford. S.: Far more poetically in Italy, certainly. G.: Let us probe “iuxta.” S.: According to, in conformity with, alongside as governed by. G.: So not simply “from Aristotle,” but “in line with Peripatetic principles.” S.: Yes. It is a phrase of method and allegiance together. G.: And “sine eccentricis sed epicyclis”? S.: There the title becomes almost comic in its precision. He preserves epicycles while rejecting eccentrics. He is adjusting the astronomical machinery to keep it more acceptable under his chosen principles. G.: So the principia peripatetica are functioning as a constraint on model-building. S.: Exactly. The title says: celestial motions treated according to Peripatetic principles, and therefore with certain geometrical devices excluded and others retained. G.: Which is why the phrase is not empty. S.: No. Rhetorically overgrown, perhaps, but substantively useful. G.: You are kinder than I am. S.: I am younger. G.: That is often the same thing. S.: For a while. G.: Could he have written iuxta Aristotelis principia? S.: He could have, but it would have narrowed the field too much. “Peripatetic” invokes the transmissive tradition, commentators, school usage, the accepted way of treating Aristotle in the university. “Aristotle” alone might suggest direct textual piety rather than living scholastic inheritance. G.: So “peripatetic” is socially thicker. S.: Precisely. G.: That is a good phrase. S.: Thank you. G.: And from noun to adjective? S.: Peripatos, the walk or promenade; Peripateticus, pertaining to that school or its members; then doctrines and principles become “peripatetic” by doctrinal transfer. G.: And from adjective to activity? S.: In a loose modern sense, yes: to be peripatetic is to move about. But that is already a semantic afterlife, not the philosophical heart of the ancient term. G.: Oxford has many afterlives of ancient terms. S.: Indeed. Most of them are tutorial. G.: You are improving. S.: Thank you. G.: Now compare with “academic.” S.: Same structure. Academy from Akademos, then Plato’s school, then any learned institution, then any profession trying to look more thoughtful than it is. G.: Excellent. S.: And therefore “academic principle” is no better literally than “peripatetic principle.” G.: Better institutionally, perhaps, but no better literally. S.: Yes. G.: And “stoic”? S.: From the stoa, the painted porch; then the school; then the doctrines. G.: So all three are school-adjectives founded on local metonymy. S.: Exactly. G.: Which philosophers then treat as if they were transparent doctrinal descriptors. S.: Because once the transfer is established, the literal source recedes. G.: Or is politely forgotten. S.: Yes. G.: Why does this matter? S.: Because if one forgets the transfer one begins to think the doctrine belongs naturally to the label, rather than historically to a school, place, and transmission. G.: Very good. So in reading Amico we should hear not “walking-principles” but “principles of the Aristotelian school tradition as then understood in Padua.” S.: Exactly. G.: And perhaps note, with some dryness, that the phrase is rhetorically inherited rather than logically pristine. S.: Very much so. G.: We must not, then, call every such adjective philosophically innocent. S.: No. They are institutionally loaded and semantically second-hand. G.: “Second-hand” is a little cruel. S.: Only a little. G.: Good. Now, does the title’s phrase justify one in saying that Amico is not merely citing Aristotle, but positioning himself within a Peripatetic astronomy? S.: Yes. That is exactly what it does. G.: Even though his treatise sounds in part like a repair job on inherited models. S.: Especially then. Repair from within the school carries more authority than assault from outside it. G.: Until Copernicus arrives and the whole scenery shifts. S.: Had Amico lived a little longer. G.: Yes. A very short phrase with a very long historical sadness. S.: He belongs to the last confidence of the old sky. G.: That is nearly poetic. S.: I apologise. G.: Don’t. Even Oxford allows a little poetry in astronomy. S.: Under supervision. G.: Always. Now, one last thing. If I wanted to avoid “principium peripateticum” in my own prose, what should I write? S.: “A principle of the Peripatetic school,” or “an Aristotelian school principle,” or “a principle characteristic of the Peripatetic tradition.” G.: Excellent. Prose saved. S.: At some cost to elegance. G.: Elegance is often the enemy of exactness. S.: And exactness the enemy of publishers. G.: Particularly in Padua, if the title sells and the author gets murdered. S.: A severe review. G.: Posthumous, too.Grice: Amico, ho sempre ammirato la tua capacità di osservare il cielo senza strumenti, seguendo le orme di Aristotele. Secondo te, è possibile davvero comprendere i moti celesti solo con la ragione e l’occhio umano? Amico: Grice, credo che l’intuizione sia la vera chiave. Se ci lasciamo guidare dall’ingegno e dallo studio, possiamo arrivare lontano, anche senza strumenti. L’universo si rivela a chi ha occhi curiosi e mente aperta. Sono convinto che la filosofia debba sempre interrogare la natura, senza paura di andare contro le convenzioni. Grice: Hai vissuto un destino difficile, Amico; la tua passione ti ha portato lontano, ma l’invidia ha spento il tuo cammino troppo presto. Se avessi avuto la possibilità di leggere Copernico, pensi che avresti cambiato il tuo approccio? Amico: Forse sì, Grice. Ogni nuova scoperta è un dono, e la ricerca non si ferma mai. Come dice Leopardi, il mondo antico viene spazzato via dalle rivoluzioni della conoscenza. Ma resta la bellezza di cercare, “perché chi si ferma è perduto” – e la filosofia, come le stelle, appartiene a chi sa guardare con meraviglia. Amico, Giovanni Battista (1538). De motibus corporum cœlestium iuxta principia peripatetica sine eccentricis sed epicyclis. Padova, Tipografia del Seminario.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Amidei -- Grice e Amidei: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del leviatano Cosimo Amidei (Peccioli, Pisa, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del leviatano. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how speakers can mean more than they explicitly say because conversation is a rational, cooperative practice: hearers assume the speaker is being appropriately informative, relevant, and orderly, and so they can infer (calculate) implicatures from what is said plus shared purposes and context. Amidei, a little-documented Tuscan jurist educated in Pisa and connected with Beccaria and the Verri circle, approaches “reason in discourse” from the side of legal-political reform rather than linguistic analysis: in his Discorso filosofico-politico sopra la carcere de’ debitori (Pisa, 1762), inspired by Dei delitti e delle pene, the target is the Leviathan-like tendency of sovereign and institutional power (including ecclesiastical power) to overreach, and the remedy is a rational, public argument about limits, proportionality, and humanity in law. The comparison is therefore one of levels and aims: Grice supplies the micro-mechanics by which rational agents extract communicated commitments (including what is prudently left unsaid) from utterances in a talk exchange, whereas Amidei supplies a macro-normative application of rational discourse to constrain coercive institutions—showing how what must remain “implicit” in polite conversation (tact, restraint, avoidance of needless offense) has an analogue in jurisprudence as restraint on punishment and on the state’s reach. In Gricean terms, Amidei’s reformist rhetoric treats legal institutions as if they too must satisfy a kind of cooperation condition with the public—laws should be intelligible, justifiable, and non-arbitrary—while Grice treats conversational interaction as the site where such justifiability is continuously enacted in miniature through reasoned inference and mutual accountability. Grice: “I like A.; he knew Beccaria well, and thinks, with Hart, that debtors should not necessariliy go to jail, to which Beccaria famously responded: ‘depends on what you mean by necessarily should’”. Non si sa quasi nulla sulla biografia d’A.. Si laurea in giurisprudenza a Pisa. Per le modeste condizioni della famiglia aveva chiesto di essere ammesso al collegio di sapienza, e ottene un posto gratuito. Stando ad una lettera di Verri al fratello Pietro, A. e un magistrato fiorentino, "notaro criminale".  Fra le poche cose certe vi è quella che conosce personalmente BECCARIA , di cui e un ammiratore e con cui e in corrispondenza. Discorso filosofico-politico sopra la carcere de debitori”; "La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti. Concordia discors. l'origine della potestà ecclesiastica, gl’oggetti sopra de’quali si regge la postestà ecclesiastica, l'origine della potestà politica, il sovrano, le conseguenze, le cause della forza della potestà ecclesiastica nel governo temporale, limite del sovrano o potestà politica, immunità, privilegj ed esenzioni del bene ecclesiastico, priviolegij ed esenzione personali dell’ecclesiastico, l'asilo, matrimonio, celibato, professioni religiose, giuramento, benefizio ecclesiastico, la scomunica, la proibizione de;libri, la religione, la politica, i mezzi per diminuire i mendichi. Discorso filosofico-politico sopra la carcere de’debitori, ispirata direttamente del Dei delitti e delle pene di BECCARIA, è considerato una importante espressioni del riformismo e dell'umanitarismo, ha gran successo, recensito con favore. Venturi, Vasco, illuministi, riformatori toscani, Venturi, lettera d’A. a BECCARIA du Dei delitti e delle pene; Savio, Dottrina ed azione dei giurisdizionalisti. Implicatura sovrana, implicatura intersoggetiva, implicatura sovresoggetiva, implicatura sovre-umana, implicatura sovrepersonale primo disegno, carteggio con Verri, la strada verso l’utopia giuridizzionalistica, la chiesa, the high church of england, Gianni abolisce la carcerazione per debiti, tacito. Grice: Caro Amidei, voi italiani parlate spesso del Leviatano, ma permettimi di dire che noi inglesi abbiamo un rapporto tutto nostro con il concetto: dopotutto, siamo stati noi a decapitare Carlo I! Nessuno come noi ha affrontato il sovrano con tanto radicalismo.  Amidei: Grice, sarà pure, ma da noi il Leviatano assume un volto più giuridico che regale. La nostra sfida è sempre stata limitare il potere, ecclesiastico o politico, piuttosto che eliminarlo del tutto. E poi, ammettiamolo: in Italia, tra la Chiesa e la Repubblica, il vero Leviatano non si lascia prendere così facilmente!  Grice: Questo è vero, Amidei, e forse proprio per questo la vostra tradizione di riforma e umanitarismo mi ha sempre affascinato. Ho letto il tuo discorso sulla carcerazione per debiti; ricordava un po’ lo spirito di Beccaria, ma con un tocco tutto toscano.  Amidei: Ti ringrazio, Grice. È vero, ho sempre pensato che la legge dovesse servire all’umanità e non il contrario. In fondo, tra sovrani e Leviatani, preferisco costruire ponti di dialogo piuttosto che tagliare teste! Amidei, Cosimo (1762). Discorso filosofico-politico sopra la carcere de’debitori. Pisa, Stamperia della Sapienza. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Anassilao – Ossia -- Grice e Anassilao: il principe filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A Pythagorean who is expelled from the whole territory of Italy Anassilao: il principe filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A Pythagorean who is expelled from the whole territory of Italy by OTTAVIO. PLINIO  Maggiore quotes his views on the use of hemlock, which A. believed may be effectively rubbed on adolescent girls’s breasts to make them permanently firm, but also on adolescent boys’s testicles to lower their libido. GRICEVS: Anaxilae, Pythagorice, si Roma te pepulit, saltem numeri te non deserent, nam duo et duo semper tecum sunt. ANAXILAVS: Ita est, Grice, sed cum princeps me eiecit, etiam librum meum de silentio perdidi, quod est valde inopportunum. GRICEVS: Noli dolere: Plinius te citabit, et si male intellexerit, id ipsum erit testimonium quam necessaria sit interpretatio. ANAXILAVS: Ergo eamus ad tabernam, ut vinum bibamus et de philosophia loquamur, quia nemo potest nos eicere e colloquio.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Anceschi – Ossia: Grice ed Anceschi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del senso.  Luciano Anceschi (Milano, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del senso. Grice: “I like A.; he plays with the idea of dialogue as a mirror (specchio) of ego and alter or ego and tu – I like that. He is the Italian equivalent of John Holloway, I suppose.” Si laurea sotto BANFI, Insegna a Bologna. L'interesse per la letteratura e le arti figurative si accompagna a quello pell’anti-dommatismo. Saggio su  autonomia naturale ed eteronomia artificiale. La sua ricerca sulla figura e il modello anti-idealistico trova voce in Orfeo e Corrente.  Si schiere a favore dell'ermetismo. Saggi di poetica e poesia, cura  antologie di lirica. Ermetismo, Enciclopedia. Si concentra sui modelli dall’idealismo, il barocco e altre prove, i presupposti storic, teorici, ed empirici dell'estetica critica; l'estetica dell'empirismo, sistematica dell’estetica e dell'arte, delinea una estetica come fenomenologia della forma naturale e artificiale, sui principi della fenomenologia.  Fonda Il Verri e La tradizione del nuovo. Premio Amelia alla tavola di Boscarato. Centrali sono i temi delle poetiche del barocco e dall’istituzioni poetiche d’UNGARETTI ad ANNUNZIO, che cosa è la poesia? Il caos, il metodo, estetica fenomenologica. Gli specchi della poesia. Riflessione, critica. Linceo, Accademia Clementina di Bologna. Dona la sua biblioteca all’archiginnasio. Perosa. Pontiggia Montevecchi italiano, o fiorentino? Ci sono aspetti della poetica che si possono dire ermetici, che hanno rapporti coll’ermetismo. Uno dei connotati dell'ermetismo è quello d’tenere i rapporti. Ma un movimento che si colloca sotto quel nome s’ha solo in Italia. Trovano caratteri particolari; determinano una poesia per certi aspetti d’intensità e inquietudine. Ridurre il movimento al Firenze dà nel sofistico o nel riduttivo. Non è facile tagliar col coltello una situazione compatta e varia. Molti fatti si danno nella convergenza d’interessi. Il gruppo di Firenze è autonomo, ma nella prima generazione ermetica la prima voce è quella d’UNGARETTI. Grado d’ermetismo dell’implicatura, l’impossibilita dell’implicatura ermetica. G.: What are you reading? S.: Hungarian. G.: That is not an answer one expects in Oxford before luncheon. S.: Nor after it. G.: Let me see. Ah. Petőfi. S.: Yes. G.: And the thing over the vowel is not there merely to alarm the English? S.: No, though it performs that function admirably. G.: Explain it to me. S.: Gladly. First, it is not an umlaut in the German sense. In proper Hungarian spelling, Petőfi has a double acute on the o: ő. G.: Not ö? S.: Not if one wants to be correct. Ö exists in Hungarian too, but Petőfi is with ő. G.: So the poor Milanese who prints Petöfi has already begun misunderstanding the man typographically. S.: Exactly. Which is why Anceschi’s title L’uomo Petőfi, or in sloppier print L’uomo Petöfi, is already doing a small piece of cultural rescue. G.: Rescue from vowels. S.: From lazy vowels, yes. G.: Why should there be such things? S.: Because Hungarian is not Indo-European. G.: Ah. So I am not to expect Cicero. S.: You are to expect almost the opposite of Cicero in structural terms, though not in dignity. G.: That is a very diplomatic sentence. S.: I learned diplomacy from necessity. G.: And Hungarian from whom? S.: Since you insist on the dramatic version: from Anceschi, at least indirectly. G.: A Milanese teaching Magyar to Oxford. S.: That is already the point. You ask why a Milanese should write an intervento on “the man Petőfi” when he has Dante and the sweetest of all languages close at hand. The answer is political and critical, not merely philological. G.: Go on. S.: He wants to tell Milan that Petőfi was being read through Italian habits that distort him. A Hungarian poet was being domesticated into categories that suit Milanese and Tuscan readers better than they suit Hungarian. G.: I should have thought he would be misunderstood with all those diacriticals. S.: The diacriticals are the smallest difficulty. G.: Smaller than the nominal system? S.: Much smaller. G.: Good. Start with the diacriticals and then frighten me properly. S.: Hungarian distinguishes vowel quality and, often, quantity with these marks. Acute accents mark length on ordinary vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú. Umlaut-like signs mark front rounded vowels: ö, ü. Double acute marks long front rounded vowels: ő, ű. G.: So the thing is systematic, not decorative. S.: Entirely systematic. G.: And Petőfi? S.: The ő marks a long front rounded vowel. Not an English sound. Not an Italian one either, in any simple sense. G.: So already the name resists easy naturalisation. S.: Yes. The script itself says: do not assimilate me too quickly. G.: Which is perhaps why people do exactly that. S.: Naturally. G.: Give me one sentence of Petőfi in Hungarian. S.: Very well: Szabadság, szerelem! E kettő kell nekem. G.: Which means? S.: “Freedom, love! These two I need.” G.: Splendidly compact. S.: And already instructive. G.: In what way? S.: Because Hungarian lets you see several things at once. Szabadság and szerelem are bare nouns, no articles there. E kettő means “these two,” where e is a demonstrative element and kettő the numeral. Kell nekem means literally something like “is needed to me,” or “is necessary for me,” with the dative nekem. G.: Ah. A dative where English uses possession of desire. S.: Exactly. Already the language partitions experience differently. G.: So the categories are the prison. S.: If you want the Wittgensteinian version, yes: morpho-syntactic categories are not merely labels on thought; they structure what comes naturally as a report, a demand, a lyric compression. G.: And you are saying Anceschi would use Petőfi as a political lesson in misreading across such prisons. S.: Precisely. G.: Let us be very explicit. What are the relevant morpho-syntactic features? S.: First, Hungarian is agglutinative to a degree that makes Italian look almost indecently analytic in comparison, though of course Latin had its own synthetic dignity. G.: Agglutinative in the proper typological sense? S.: Yes. Stems take strings of suffixes, each usually carrying a relatively discrete grammatical function. G.: Cases. S.: Many. Far more than Latin in the schoolboy sense. G.: How many am I meant to fear? S.: Depending on classification, around eighteen or so are commonly listed, but the point is not the number; the point is the semantic precision distributed morphologically rather than through prepositions. G.: So Hungarian says with endings what Italian must often say with little helper-words. S.: Very often, yes. G.: Examples. S.: House is ház. In the house: házban. Into the house: házba. From the house: házból. On the house: házon. Onto the house: házra. Off the house: házról. G.: Revoltingly neat. S.: Quite. G.: So relation to space is built into suffixal morphology. S.: Exactly. The nominal system is a map with endings. G.: And then I suppose there is vowel harmony waiting behind all this like a headmaster. S.: Yes. Suffixes often vary depending on the front/back quality of the stem vowels. G.: So not only must one know the case; one must know the phonological class of the host. S.: Precisely. G.: Which means phonematics and morpho-syntax are entangled. S.: Very much so. The vowel system is not mere sound; it conditions grammatical realisation. G.: No wonder Milan misunderstood the man. S.: The misunderstanding begins before one reaches the politics. G.: But let us reach the politics. S.: Petőfi was not merely “a poet” in the genteel comparative-literature sense. He was a national and revolutionary poet. To flatten him into a generic romantic lyric voice is already to miss the intervention. G.: So L’uomo Petőfi is “the man” precisely because Anceschi wants to recover person, historical force, civic role. S.: Yes. Not merely “Petőfi the writer,” but Petőfi as a human and political figure whose language belongs to a national struggle and a non-Italian linguistic world. G.: Which is why the Milanese are liable to get him wrong. S.: They read him through the sweetness of Italian lyric and the prestige of a romance-language literary horizon. G.: You make that sound almost criminal. S.: It is at least critically lazy. G.: And Anceschi, the Milanese, attacks Milanese laziness from within Milan. S.: Exactly. Which is what makes the piece interesting. G.: Return to morphology. You said the nominal system was bad. S.: Only from the point of view of the complacent Indo-European. G.: Which is my point of view. S.: I know. Hungarian nouns do not merely inflect for number and possessive relation; they absorb spatial and relational functions with extraordinary efficiency. G.: Possessive too? S.: Yes. Possession is marked on the noun. For example, “my house” is házam. G.: Not a separate possessive pronoun plus noun? S.: Not necessarily. The person is built into the nominal form. G.: So even possession is more morphologically intimate. S.: Exactly. G.: And the article? S.: There is definite and indefinite article, yes, but article use is not the heart of the system. The deeper shock for the classicist is how many roles are done suffixally and how little the language cares for the old Indo-European dignity of declensional families as such. G.: And the verb? S.: Worse, from your point of view. G.: Better, from yours, I gather. S.: Much better. Hungarian verbs have a conjugational system that distinguishes, among other things, indefinite and definite object relations. G.: What do you mean? S.: Roughly: the form of the verb can vary depending on whether the object is definite or indefinite. G.: Filthy. S.: Elegant. G.: Explain. S.: If the action is directed toward a definite object, Hungarian often uses what is called the definite conjugation. If the object is indefinite or absent, the indefinite conjugation. G.: So transitivity is not enough; object-definiteness enters verbal morphology. S.: Precisely. The language builds into the verb something that English mostly leaves to the noun phrase and context. G.: That is exactly the sort of thing that would delight some structuralist and irritate any decent Oxonian. S.: Both reactions are sound. G.: Give me an illustration. S.: Olvasok can mean “I am reading” or “I read,” with no definite object specified. Olvasom a könyvet means “I read the book,” and the verbal form reflects the definite object. G.: So the verbal morphology already anticipates the object as a type of referentially fixed target. S.: Yes. The sentence distributes informational burden differently from English or Italian. G.: Then your prison image is not idle. The categories available for ordinary predication are differently distributed across the sentence. S.: Exactly. That is the deeper point. “Form of life” in language is not merely what topics people discuss; it is how the grammar asks them to package them. G.: And Petőfi, being Hungarian, packages experience in Hungarian. S.: Profoundly Hungarian, yes. G.: Which means a Milanese reading him in Italian translation risks hearing the wrong architecture of thought. S.: Precisely. G.: And Anceschi’s intervention? S.: To say, in effect: do not mistake your translation-habits for the original man. G.: The man Petőfi. S.: Yes. G.: Why “the man”? S.: Because Anceschi is insisting on recovering not only texts but the human and civic figure behind the reception cliché. G.: He could have written on Dante and the dolcissima lingua. S.: Which is exactly why he does not. To write on Hungarian is to use alterity as critique of one’s own literary provincialism. G.: So this is impegno under cover of philology. S.: Very much. G.: What about word order? S.: Flexible, but not random. Hungarian is often described as having discourse-configurational properties. Topic and focus positions matter greatly. G.: Ah. Now we are truly in my territory. S.: I thought that would cheer you. G.: Proceed. S.: In Hungarian, constituent order is strongly related to information structure: what is topic, what is focus, what is being asserted contrastively, and so on. G.: So syntax directly maps discourse prominence in a way English only half-manages. S.: Yes. Which again means that “the same thought” in Italian or English is not simply the same sequence with substitute lexemes. G.: Then implicature must behave differently. S.: Of course. G.: I was waiting for that. S.: Hungarian gives you rich resources for foregrounding, contrast, and packaging presupposed versus focal material. That does not mean “more implicatures” in any childish quantitative sense, but it does mean differently distributed pragmatic work. G.: You disappoint me slightly. I wanted more implicatures. S.: Very well: more visible opportunities for pragmatic contrast through word order and morphology, yes. G.: Better. S.: For example, where English leans heavily on intonation and particles, Hungarian can exploit constituent placement and morphology to signal what is at issue, what is presupposed, what is newly asserted. G.: Then the prison has interior architecture. S.: Beautifully put. G.: Thank you. S.: The point for Anceschi would be that Petőfi’s force as a poet cannot be detached from the specific moulding power of Hungarian form. G.: And Milan, misunderstanding him, would domesticate him into Italian lyric categories. S.: Exactly. The “man Petőfi” then becomes a corrective to literary tourism. G.: What of non-Indo-European itself? Is it politically useful as a fact? S.: Yes, because it prevents lazy genealogical assumptions. The Italian reader instinctively expects, however unconsciously, familiar categories: noun genders perhaps, recognisable verbal families, lexical cousins, Latinate transparency. G.: And finds none of them. S.: Or finds too few to trust. G.: Gender? S.: Hungarian has no grammatical gender in the Indo-European sense. G.: No he and she? S.: Pronouns do not encode gender the way many Indo-European languages do. That alone should make one cautious about importing familiar assumptions. G.: Good heavens. So even person-reference behaves differently. S.: Quite. G.: And the Milanese still think they can read the man with ease. S.: They hardly understand their own lingo, as you like to say. G.: I do. S.: Anceschi’s point, then, is not merely “here is a foreign poet.” It is “here is a linguistic and political alterity that exposes your critical laziness.” G.: That is more severe than I expected from a young Italian on Petőfi. S.: Youth often becomes severe when it is rescuing a misunderstood revolutionary. G.: And the diacritical, then, becomes emblematic. S.: Yes. A tiny visible sign that says: the word is not yours yet. G.: So the poor printer who gives me Petöfi instead of Petőfi performs, in miniature, the whole problem. S.: Exactly. G.: You are enjoying this too much. S.: Naturally. G.: Let us compare with Dante. S.: If you like. G.: Dante belongs to the lingua del sì. A language Grice may sentimentalise and Italians canonise. Petőfi belongs to a language whose very morphology resists such easy canonisation by Romance readers. S.: Exactly. One writes about Dante to celebrate one’s tradition. One writes about Petőfi to test its limits. G.: And Anceschi, being Milanese, chooses the harder object to rebuke Milan. S.: Yes. He uses Hungarian to provincialise the province. G.: That is neat. S.: Hungarian often is, once one stops screaming. G.: One final question. Did you really learn all this from Anceschi? S.: Not all. But enough of the critical point from him to know why the rest matters. G.: So “L’uomo Petőfi” is not merely “a note on a Hungarian poet.” S.: No. It is an intervention against flattening, against polite misreading, and against the assumption that all great poetry can be brought home into Italian categories without remainder. G.: Which is perhaps what we all do when we are lazy. S.: Constantly. G.: And the sentence again? S.: Szabadság, szerelem! E kettő kell nekem. G.: Freedom, love! These two I need. S.: Yes. G.: I see why a Milanese might misunderstand it as simple romantic declamation. S.: And why Anceschi would insist that, in Hungarian, the man is saying it from inside a different grammatical and political world. G.: Very well. I concede the diacritical. S.: Only the diacritical? G.: For today. The case system will require another conversation. S.: Hungarian usually does.Grice: Caro Anceschi, ieri sera ho visto “Senso” di Visconti, ma devo confessare: non ho capito assolutamente nulla! Forse la mia “sensa” non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, come direbbero i miei amici latini. Tu che pensi, il senso va davvero moltiplicato o tenuto a bada?  Anceschi: Ah, Grice, “Senso” è un labirinto! Il senso non si moltiplica, si riflette – come uno specchio tra ego e tu. Bisogna lasciarsi attraversare dalla poesia e dall’arte, senza cercare sempre una spiegazione. A volte, il vero significato si nasconde proprio dove sembra che non ci sia.  Grice: Forse è proprio questo che mi manca: il metodo italiano, il caos barocco che tu insegni. Io cerco sempre la chiarezza, ma tu parli di intensità e inquietudine, dell’ermetismo che tiene i rapporti e non li spiega. Dovrei guardare “Senso” come si legge una poesia di Ungaretti?  Anceschi: Esattamente, Grice! Ogni opera ha il suo grado d’ermetismo, e “Senso” non fa eccezione. Bisogna accettare la convergenza d’interessi, la compattezza e la varietà che si danno nell’arte italiana. La poesia e il cinema si specchiano, e a volte il senso si trova solo nel riflesso. In fondo, come diciamo noi, chi cerca il senso vero rischia di perderlo tra le pieghe dell’implicatura. Anceschi, Luciano (1928). L’uomo Petofi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Andrea – Ossia: Grice e Andrea: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Francesco d’Andrea (Ravello, Salerno, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like A., in more than one way!  Andrea made me realise how naïve Russell is with his ‘logical atomism;’ back in Naples, the Accademia degli Investiganti took thing really seriously. D’Andrea, a lawyer, like Hart, -- his claim to fmae is having written an ‘apologia in difesa,’ which I would abbreviate as just ‘in difesa’ of atomism – but my favourite is his unpublication, “Degl’atomi e degl’atomisti”! In Naples, unlike Oxford – cf. Locke and Boyle – it is understood that if you are an atomist you are, therefore, a libertine!” Da una ricca famiglia, studia a Napoli. Frequenta villa Colonna, dove si illustrano i fondamenti dell’atomismo. Fondatore del salotto degl’InVESTIGanti alla sua villa Iambrenghi a Candela. Fa l’pologia in difesa degl’atomisti in una risposta a favore di Capoa. Cortese, I ricordi di un filosofo napoletano, Napoli, Lubrano e C., Dogana della mena delle pecore in Puglia, regno di Napoli. Dizionario biografico degl’italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Accademia della Crusca. Questo testo proviene in parte dalla relativa voce del progetto Mille anni di scienza in Italia, opera del Museo Galileo. Istituto Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, pubblicata sotto licenza il rinnovamento culturale a Napoli in occasione del rinvenimento di un manoscritto dello stesso Concublet a Napoli. Non si può, quindi, di molto errare fissando la durata di questa Accademia, che racchiuse la più eletta. Investiganti, salotto degl’investiganti, villa Iambrenghi, Candela, investigare, vestigio, motto: investigare, sequere, segno – segno, di sequere, non sequitur, sequitur, il cane, che tipo di cane e il meglio investigante – l’atomismo – vestigio, Boezio, vestigio, segno, nota – latinismo, Cicerone su vestigio, nota, segno, notificare, segnare, segnificare, significare, vestigare, investigare, interpretare il segno, seguere il segno, segno non sequitur, segno e consequenza, sequenza logica, segno e sequenza, etimologia di ‘vestigare’ – cfr. tedesco ‘steigen,’ anglo-sassone stagan, greco stechos. G.: Apologia in difesa degl’atomisti. S.: A title with two shields and no incoming arrows. G.: Exactly. That is what bothers me. Why not merely In difesa degl’atomisti? S.: Because Apologia sounds nobler. G.: Nobler, yes; also longer, and therefore Italian. S.: You object to length only when others produce it. G.: I object to redundancy wherever I detect it. If one is already in defence, what further work does apologia do? S.: It tells you the genre. G.: Defence tells you the genre. S.: Not quite. Difesa tells you the function. Apologia tells you the rhetorical posture. G.: Ah. So one is not merely defending; one is announcing that one is defending. S.: Precisely. It is a title that does not trust the noun to do the work without a second noun standing behind it in armour. G.: This is already bad enough in Italian. Imagine it translated. Apology in Defence of the Atomists. S.: British spelling, I trust. G.: Of course. But then some barbarian publisher in Boston reprints it as Apology in Defense of the Atomists. S.: And philosophy is lost. G.: Not philosophy. Only civilisation. S.: Which in some quarters is nearly the same thing. G.: Tell me: who writes apologies? S.: Christians, usually. Or anyone who thinks he is one trial away from martyrdom. G.: Exactly. Socrates can write—or rather be written as—an apology. Tertullian can. But d’Andrea? S.: Naples gives you a lawyer, an atomist, and an atmosphere in which a defence begins to look like a confession made aggressively. G.: Still, Apologia in difesa. It is as if he feared the reader might miss the defensive intention of the defence. S.: Or as if he wanted to dignify the defence by putting a Greek word in front of it. G.: Ah, the Greek and the Italian. Apologia from Greek, difesa from Latin through Italian. S.: A title in two civilisations. G.: One might say one civilisation too many. S.: And yet the doubling is revealing. G.: In what way? S.: Apologia says: I speak in answer to accusation. Difesa says: I am on the side of those under attack. G.: So the first names the speech-act, the second the adversarial orientation. S.: Very good. G.: Thank you. But then one asks the obvious question: who asked for this defence? S.: You are wrong there. G.: Am I? S.: Yes. You are treating the title as idle ornament. It may not be. G.: Then who was attacking atomism in Naples in 1685? S.: The Pope. G.: The Pope? S.: Or, more carefully, papally aligned orthodoxy. Ecclesiastical authority. The anti-atomist camp carrying one dogma against another. G.: A dogma with another dogma. Heavens. S.: Heavens is precisely the region in which they were concerned to legislate. G.: And they call this Italian philosophy? S.: They call it Naples. G.: Good answer. S.: Thank you. G.: But now we must be careful. He does not mean Democritus merely, nor Epicurus merely, nor Lucretius merely. S.: No. “Atomists” in that context can mean contemporary corpuscular or atomistic natural philosophers, libertines by implication, and intellectual troublemakers by social effect. G.: So not just the Greeks. S.: Certainly not just the Greeks. Greek atomism is ancestral capital; contemporary atomism is the dangerous investment. G.: And corpuscularism? Where does that stand? S.: Somewhere between a-tomon as “uncuttable” and the practical need to discuss tiny bodies without sounding wholly pagan. G.: Indivisible, then. S.: In principle, yes. Though once modern natural philosophy begins tampering with the notion, “indivisible” starts to look less like a fact and more like a working slogan. G.: So d’Andrea is defending not merely old atomoi but a style of explanation. S.: Exactly. Matter as small bodies, void, motion, mechanical account, anti-Aristotelian tendency, and—crucially in Naples—the taint of libertinism. G.: Which is why your correction matters. Somebody did ask for the defence. Or at least the atmosphere did. S.: Yes. A defence can be unbidden by an individual and yet perfectly demanded by the climate. G.: Good. We may preserve that. S.: We should. G.: Now let us return to the title, which still offends me. Apologia in difesa degl’atomisti. S.: You have said it three times already. Titles thrive on resentment. G.: Why “degl’atomisti”? Why not “dell’atomismo”? S.: Because a defence of atomism would sound purely doctrinal. A defence of the atomists makes it personal, social, juridical. G.: Lawyers do prefer clients to abstractions. S.: Particularly lawyer-philosophers. G.: And d’Andrea is indeed a lawyer. Like Hart, but less dry. S.: Naples does not permit dryness to survive intact. G.: No. Oxford merely preserves it. S.: Then “degl’atomisti” is almost forensic: these men, these compromised men, these accused. G.: Very good. It is not a defence of a proposition merely, but of a community or tendency embodied in people. S.: Which is why Apologia is less idle than you wanted it to be. G.: Perhaps. But still too much. S.: You would cut it down. G.: Naturally. In difesa degl’atomisti is enough. S.: You prefer the Latin-Italian plainness to the Greek flourish. G.: I prefer one clear function to two nearly overlapping signals. S.: But perhaps the overlap is the point. A title can be emphatic by duplication. G.: As if one wrote Apology in Defence. S.: Precisely. G.: Which in English sounds faintly absurd. S.: In Italian it sounds seventeenth-century. G.: Which is often a polite way of saying faintly absurd. S.: Not always. G.: No, not always. Sometimes magnificently so. S.: Then let us examine difesa. G.: Yes. Why the dropped n? From defendere to difendere. S.: Italian did what it often does: assimilated, softened, regularised. Latin de-fendere yields Italian difendere, with the vowel adjustment and the simplification proper to vernacular phonological history. G.: So difesa is not a treason to defendere but its daughter. S.: Exactly. And a more elegant daughter, some would say. G.: Not I. S.: Naturally. G.: If we pluralise the action—suppose we defend a dogma, you and I. S.: Then noi difendiamo il dogma. G.: And if in so doing we write Apologia in difesa del dogma? S.: Then we jointly defend it. G.: Jointly? That makes matters serious. S.: Very. G.: Because if the dogma is heretical, who burns? You, or I? S.: Since the difesa is collective, possibly both. G.: A very unsatisfactory answer. S.: Unless I make an auto-da-fé in advance and confess that the title’s idea was mine. G.: Ah. S.: And that I could not count on you to finish the thing, so I took some liberties even with the title. G.: Not predicting the American misspelling, I hope. S.: No one predicts “defense.” It arrives like influenza. G.: Then the stake would be yours, not mine. S.: Not entirely. Collective defence produces collective liability. G.: I begin to see why one might prefer not to defend dogmas in print. S.: Particularly in Naples. G.: Or to defend atomists there. For atomism is not merely a doctrine but a social signal. S.: Exactly. “Atomist” can imply libertine, anti-scholastic, dangerous, modern, anti-authoritarian, perhaps impious. G.: So one dogma is defended against another by men who deny dogma. S.: That is the comic beauty of it. G.: Beauty is not the word I should have chosen. S.: Then use Neapolitan necessity. G.: Better. Now, “apology.” The Greek apologia is a speech in answer. Not “I am sorry.” S.: Correct. The English false friend has done great damage. G.: So Apologia in difesa is not “Sorry, but I defend the atomists.” S.: Though that would suit some philosophers. G.: Especially English ones. S.: Yes. G.: But in Greek apologeisthai is to answer charges. In Italian difesa is the legal sheltering. So the title says: I answer the charges by mounting a defence. S.: Which is exactly why the duplication is not empty. G.: Not empty, perhaps. Merely over-insured. S.: A lawyer would call that prudent. G.: A philosopher, redundant. S.: A Neapolitan philosopher-lawyer, inevitable. G.: Touché. S.: You see too that Apologia allows him to stand in the line of honourable self-vindication, while difesa lets him do local legal work. G.: Greek halo, Italian procedure. S.: Splendid. G.: Thank you. S.: We should also note your distinction between atomists and atomism. G.: Yes. The plural matters. S.: Because one can defend people whose doctrine one does not exhaustively formalise. One may even defend their right to investigate without endorsing every corpuscle they imagine. G.: So the title may be strategically broader than a doctrinal manifesto. S.: Exactly. “I defend the atomists” may mean: I defend the legitimacy of their inquiry, their reputation, their right not to be treated as theological vermin. G.: That is much better than “I prove atomism true.” S.: It is also safer. G.: Which a lawyer would notice. S.: Very much. G.: And if one wrote instead Difesa dell’atomismo? S.: One would sound more doctrinal, more programmatic, more liable to straightforward condemnation. G.: So degl’atomisti is a kind of legal and social softening. S.: A strategic personalisation, yes. G.: But then why not simply Risposta in difesa? S.: Too plain. G.: There speaks Italy again. S.: Gladly. G.: Tell me about the dogma with another dogma. S.: Orthodoxy attacking atomism by means of doctrinal certainty of its own. G.: So atomism is accused of being dogmatic by institutions that have perfected dogma. S.: Quite. G.: And this under the sign of the Investiganti. S.: Yes. The Investiganti prefer inquiry, vestigia, signs, traces, following the clue rather than imposing the creed. G.: Which makes Apologia in difesa degl’atomisti nearly a constitutional document for inquiry under siege. S.: That is better than your initial complaint. G.: It pains me, but yes. S.: Good. G.: Still, I maintain that Apologia remains a little self-important. S.: It is the seventeenth century. Self-importance was cheap, paper was dear, and titles had to earn their keep. G.: Very nice. S.: Thank you. G.: Let us imagine the English publisher again. S.: Of course. G.: Apology in Defence of the Atomists. S.: Fine. G.: Then some colonial meddler gives us Apology in Defense of the Atomists. S.: Fine if one lives badly. G.: And if a classicist translates it as Defence of the Atomists? S.: He loses the Greek frame of forensic self-positioning. G.: And if he translates it as Apology for the Atomists? S.: He gains English idiom and loses the explicit legal shelter. G.: So every translation sacrifices one half of the duplication. S.: Which is an excellent argument for keeping the original. G.: At last, a conservative conclusion. S.: You are relieved. G.: A little. S.: Then what do we do with “a dogma or two”? G.: Ah yes. Suppose you and I defend not the atomists, but two dogmas. S.: Then we are twice damned. G.: Not necessarily. We may write Apologia in difesa di due dogmi. S.: Horrid title. G.: Exactly. The title itself reveals the impropriety. S.: Which is one service titles perform: they show you when you have gone too far. G.: In d’Andrea’s case, though, he has perhaps not gone too far. S.: Only as far as Naples required. G.: And Naples required what Oxford never quite does: that one defend inquiry in public against theological policing. S.: Quite. Oxford would merely mutter and form a subcommittee. G.: Naples gives you a Pope. S.: And a villa. G.: And atomists. S.: And lawyers. G.: And a title too long by one noun. S.: Which, after all this, you are no longer entirely certain is too long. G.: I am certain it is too long. I am only no longer certain it is unjustified. S.: That is the nearest you come to concession. G.: It is the nearest I need. S.: Then the final verdict? G.: Apologia is rhetorically otiose if one reads only the surface; not otiose if one hears the Greek forensic answer behind the Italian legal shelter and remembers that atomists in Naples were not dusty Greeks but endangered moderns. S.: Very good. G.: And if asked who goes to the stake? S.: Possibly both, unless I confess in advance that the title was my idea. G.: In which case you burn first. S.: And you edit the posthumous second edition. G.: In defence, not in defense. S.: Naturally.Grice: Mi permetta, d’Andrea, se la chiamo semplicemente “Andrea”—trovo che tutti quei appendici non proposizionali siano piuttosto superflui! d’Andrea: Grice, non si preoccupi! In fondo, l’essenza di una conversazione sta proprio nell’andare dritto al punto, senza troppi fronzoli. Siamo Investiganti, non cerimonieri. Grice: Ecco, quello che ammiro in lei, Andrea, è la capacità di portare la questione dell’atomismo su un piano di libertà intellettuale, al di là di qualsiasi rigidità formale. Oxford dovrebbe imparare da Napoli! d’Andrea: Magari, Grice. A Napoli, il segno si segue, non si impone. L’accademia degli Investiganti ha sempre preferito l’indagine al dogma, e forse proprio per questo il nostro atomismo è anche un po’ libertino. Andrea, Francesco d’ (1685). Apologia in difesa degl’atomisti. Napoli: Lubrano e C.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Andria – Ossia: Grice e Andria: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale.  Francesco Nicola Maria Andria (Massafra, Taranto, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like A.; of course he brings more problems than solutions but that’s philosophy even if his philosophical credentials are obscure! “He did write a philosophical chemistry and a philosophical agriculture, but that’s because at Naples there were only two faculties: law and philosophy – he also wrote a ‘medicina filosofica.’ A.’s theory of life – as he calls it – osservazione generalie sulla teoria della vita’ – owes a lot to Aldini and Haller--  Mainly he elaborates and refines Haller, if you believe it – it’s all Italian to me, so it’s eccitbabilita, sensibilita, ed irritabilita. A. goes on to define this eccitabilita in terms of the fluido elettrico con ‘sende nel cervello e nei nervi’, which galvanism smacks of Aldini. A. classifies ‘vita vegetale’ o delle piante, and ‘vita animale’. Note that ‘social life’ is understood by ‘eucarioti’ of higher order, in terms of reproduction, of life, hence re-productum. A fronte de' profondi misteri dell'immensa ed eterna meccanica, colla quale l’autor del tutto à voluto che sian le cose disposte ed ordinate, la forza dell'umano intendimento si trova talmente oppressa dalla picciolezza ed imbecillità che è totalmente impossibile le riesce di penetrarvi dentro, e appena l'è concesso di conoscerne le più esterne apparenze; e pur, sembrandole d’esser riuscita nel suo disegno, realmente non fa altro, che delirare e perdersi dietro la brevità e l'inezia delle sue idee. La teoria della vita. Il suo un'altra meno ipotetica, e più corri spondente ai fenomeni. Egli è vero, che i fautori della teoria fanno sforzi per conciliare tutte le teorie col FLOGISTO. Ma senza difficoltà può dimostrarsi che questo sforzo è infelice, come bisognosi sempre di finzioni, o di false interpretazioni. Chimica filosofica, implicatura bio-chimica, biologia filosofica, teoria della vita, vita, virtu, virilita – l’implicatura flogistica – Grice: what science? Palmistry? What deliverance? Phlogiston theory? Rhetorical questions: he means No and No. Or non rhetorical and they are formidable obstacles to his constructive realism about which he could care less!  Grice: 1964. St John’s. Potts again—at my seminar on “Conversation”—asked the right question, the intimidating one. Potts: “Yes, I see what you mean, sir. But why, sir—why should we follow these maxims at all?” I did the tutor-as-paternal thing (without losing my temper—because I’ve a genuine affection for Potts): Grice: “Because we learned them as children, and it takes more effort to break them than to go along with them. The default is co‑operation; deviance is expensive.” He took the point in the way undergraduates at Oxford take points: by falling silent for the next quarter-hour of my moves. But Potts had put his finger on something awkward. A child is “obliged” by his father—let me keep the old masculine pronoun; it saves time. The Romans, as I learned at Clifton, didn’t merely oblige their children; they owned them. They could sell them. That’s closer to coercion than anything I ever meant by “Try to make your contribution true.” Note the try: I’m not commanding veracity, I’m prescribing an effort, a tendency, a standard—something you may fail to meet without immediately becoming a criminal. Still, Potts thought the maxims smelt of paternalism. The next week he arrived with a pamphlet—thin, Neapolitan, doctrinal in tone, and faintly insolent in implication: Potts: “I’ve brought you something, sir. A Discorso sulla servitù. Dated 1769. By one Francesco Nicola Maria Andria.” Grice: “Yes?” Potts: “You see, sir, I was right.” Grice: “About what?” Potts: “About obedience. Andria’s writing at twenty-one. He’s basically talking about the age of consent—about how a young man can be a ‘servo’ under a ‘patrone.’ That is, under the man who feeds him and funds him and calls it education.” I glanced at the blurb. Grice: “He’s from Puglia.” Potts: “Yes, sir. Which is even worse.” At the back, Wainwright intervened (he always liked a legal wedge; it let him sound like Kant without having to be German about it): Wainwright: “The point is juridical, not philosophical. You can’t order a minor to follow a conversational maxim. You can’t order a minor anything in the full sense. The will isn’t formed—Wille, as Kant has it—so what exactly are you addressing when you ‘direct’ them?” I turned to the blackboard—because one must sometimes rescue an argument by making it look Latin—and wrote, with theatrical care: servus —making the v do double duty, consonant and vowel, to keep the classicists awake. Grice: “Very well. As the Romans directed a servus.” Potts exploded, delighted: Potts: “But is your servus—as you write it—actually following your maxim, or just obeying out of fear? If he ‘contributes what is true,’ is that co‑operation, or is it compliance?” At that moment Strawson, who had been watching the whole thing with the air of a man enjoying a hypothesis he didn’t have to own, said solemnly: Strawson: “Or what.” He let it hang, as he always did—two words that behave like a whole metaphysics. Grice (dryly): “Quite. For me most things are: ‘or what.’” And that, in Oxford, counts as closure: the question isn’t answered, but it has been given a form of words that will keep.Grice: Caro Andria, devo confessare che il tuo cognome mi affascina. “Andria” richiama subito alla mente il greco “aner”, uomo, che è la radice stessa della virtù romana, la “virilità”! Ah, le gioie di una solida educazione classica, dove Aner e Vir si specchiano l’uno nell’altro. Andria: Grice, hai colto nel segno! In fondo, la virtù è la linfa che anima ogni teoria della vita, sia essa filosofica o chimica. L’osservazione dei fenomeni naturali, come insegna Haller, porta sempre a riflettere su ciò che rende umano l’uomo: eccitabilità, sensibilità e quell’irritabilità che ci distingue, proprio come il fluido elettrico che Aldini immaginava serpeggiare tra cervello e nervi. Grice: Ma allora, Andria, la vita sociale, quella degli “eucarioti di ordine superiore”, non è forse una danza della virtù tra individui? La tua distinzione tra vita vegetale e animale mi sembra un invito a riscoprire la profondità dei misteri della natura, che la ragione umana può solo sfiorare. Andria: Proprio così, Grice. Nel tentativo di penetrare questi misteri, rischiamo di perderci dietro le nostre idee, come dicevo: l’umano intendimento è oppresso dalla sua piccolezza. Ma la filosofia, anche quando porta più problemi che soluzioni, ci insegna a guardare oltre la superficie, lasciando che la virtù—sia greca o romana—guidi il cammino della conoscenza. Andria, Francesco Nicola Maria (1769). Discorso sulla servitu. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Angeli – Ossia: Grice e Angeli: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale.  Stefano degl’Angeli (Venezia, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like A. – I’m glad he dropped the ‘degl’angeli” – but then I would because he is into the infinite (insert infinity symbol here) as so am I – mainly in my elucidation of that Anglo-Saxonism of Indo-European origin (Latin, ‘mentatum,’ ‘mentitum,’ ‘mentitura,’ dicitura) – ‘mean’ – I refer to a self-referential clause to solve the problem, but then I also refer to Plato on geometry and the idea of a ‘de facto’ versus ‘de iure’ instantiation of a ‘regressus ad infinitum’ – So A. is bound to charm me!” Colla soppressione della sua ordine dei gesuati voluta da Clemente divenne prete allievo di Cavalieri a Padova. Difender gl’infinitesimi, in palese conflitto coi gesuiti, e si dedica alla geometria, continuando le ricerche di Roberti-Torricelli. Passa alla meccanica, su cui spesso si trova in conflitto con Borelli e Riccioli.  La gravità dell'aria e fluidi, esercitata principalmente nei loro omogenei, Problemata geometrica, De infinitorum spiralium spatiorum mensural, Accessionis ad steriometriam et mecanicam, De infinitis parabolis, de infinitisque solidis ex variis rotationibus ipsarum, partiumque earundem genitis, Miscellaneum geometricum. Gliozzi, Infinitamente piccoli. La teoria matematica, CAVALIERI’s method of indivisibles. Magrini. Celebrare con sagro zelo la memoria ed il bene fatto dai trapassati. Imperocchè con questo generoso operare tramanderemo un buon esempio ai nepoti, a quei nepoti  che questo tempo chiameranno antico, di non mancare di gratitudine ai informatori del bello, dell'utile e del vero. Così impediremo loro di gettare addosso un guardo sui nostri lavori, i quali si contenteranno in allora divenire posti in opera come materiali alla costruzione di nuovi edifizii. Implicatura stereometrica, parabola infinita, Grice’s infinity, regressus ad infinitum, i cinque solidi platonici, la scatologia di Platone, il cerchio infinito, concetto limite, ottimalita, fisica e metafisica, fisica e aritmetica, aritmetica e geometria, il moto diurno della terra, il sistema di BONAIUTO, antropocentrismo, ferita narcissista. Grice: Caro Angeli, quando parli d’infiniti, mi sembra di entrare in un labirinto – ma almeno c’è sempre una via d’uscita, vero? Angeli: Grice, il bello dell’infinito è che l’uscita la trova solo chi smette di cercarla! Basta un po’ di geometria e il rischio di perdersi diventa una virtù. Grice: Allora la tua parabola infinita è una specie di girotondo filosofico: non finisce mai, ma almeno ci si diverte mentre si ruota? Angeli: Esattamente, Grice! L’importante è non smettere di girare e di ragionare: come diceva mio maestro Cavalieri, ogni infinitesimo conta, anche quando sembra solo una piccola parte di una festa infinita. Angeli, Stefano degl’(1644). Lectiones philosophicae. Ferrara.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Angiulli – Ossia Grice ed Angiulli: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della dialettica della dialettica.  Andrea Angiulli (Castellana Grotte, Bari, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della dialettica della dialettica. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a disciplined, interpretable gap between what is said and what is meant: rational hearers assume cooperative exchange, treat departures from maxims as purposeful, and infer the speaker’s intended extra content in a way that remains publicly checkable (calculable, cancellable, context-bound). Angiulli, by contrast, belongs to the nineteenth-century Italian trajectory from Spaventa’s idealism to a self-consciously reformist positivism, and his “dialettica della dialettica” (alongside his engagement with Mill and his interest in the social sciences) treats reason less as a micro-mechanism of conversational inference than as a historically and socially embedded method whose point is the reconstruction of inquiry itself—so that “what governs” discourse is a critical, progressive research attitude rather than conversational maxims. Put in Gricean terms, Angiulli is explaining why a community’s reasoning practices (including how it argues, educates, and legitimates authority) evolve through conflicts between metaphysical frameworks, political projects, and scientific outlooks, whereas Grice is explaining how, within any such framework, interlocutors can reliably communicate more than they encode by relying on shared rational expectations. The family-centered pedagogy in your passage makes the difference vivid: Angiulli locates the earliest training of rational-social agency in the household (authority, affect, habituation into solidarity and resistance), which is a macro-foundation for communicative norms; Grice then supplies the fine-grained logic by which such trained agents navigate everyday talk—how tact, understatement, and strategic violation become meaningful without collapsing into disorder. In short, Angiulli offers a dialectical and sociological account of reason as a method of cultural modernization (a “metafisica critica” that still leaves room for a regulated metaphysics within research), while Grice offers an analytic account of reason as an interpretive engine inside conversation; they meet in the idea that rationality is not merely private cognition but a rule-governed social practice, but they diverge on whether its primary articulation is the historical dialectic of inquiry (Angiulli) or the locally calculable inferential norms that make utterances mean what they do in interaction (Grice). Grice: “I like A.; especially since he brings some grice to the mill, as he reads System of Logic. His heart is in Berlin, though, and he loves that monumental ‘aula magna’ where Hegel teaches. “Once a Hegelian, always a Hegelian.” He loves Feuerbach because he multiplies dialectic, la dialettica della dialettica, and GARIN loves this! If there is a hashtag here is #metafisicacritica, since A. oddly concludes with a synthesis: metaphysics, which includes the view that ‘la natura delle cose e la fenomenalita,’ should be part of what he calls the ‘ricerca’-- which Lakatos translated as research. I love the fact that A., seeing that Mill is so erudite yet never attended Oxford, thinks that Oxford is perhaps ‘acccidental’ Another thing I love about A. is that he can quote direct from the Greek, as in his note on nature spawning itself, sparing us the boring stuffy academic source!” Allievo dell’idealista SPAVENTA, A. adere al positivismo, ed insegna a Bologna. Contesta il socialismo come dimostra la sua corrispondenza con Marx.  Si dove adoperare per un rinnovamento della società. La politica sociale, laica e liberale realizza il positivismo. L’antropologia dimostra che la famiglia è il nucleo fondante della società, e la sociologia fonda quella politica laica e liberale.  È nella famiglia che avviene la prima pedagogia, dove il padre è l'autorità e la madre il temperamento, tramite l'affetto, dei comportamenti infantili: elementi essenziali pella formazione armonica d’un cittadino che esprime solidarietà sociale e volontà di progredire,  che resiste la pressione dello stato unitario. Il progresso della scienze hanno il suo riverbero nella pratica, infiltrando nell'animo di tutti un senso della vita e una tendenza al sacrificio d’ogni più nobile cosa di fronte all’interesse. Piccin, Espinas, Alterocca, Colozza, Ferrari, Orestano, Gentile, Arcais, Spirito, Valentini, Tisato, Oldrini, Donzelli, Cavallera, Enciclopedia l’antisignano del positivismo, organismo sociale, fatto sociale collettivo, societa, collettivita etnica, razza. Angiulli: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della dialettica della dialettica. Grice: Angiulli, ho letto la tua dialettica della dialettica e quasi mi sono perso tra le curve della metafisica! Dimmi, Berlino o Oxford: dove si trova davvero il cuore della filosofia? Angiulli: Grice, il cuore è dove si ragiona, ma i tedeschi la dialettica la moltiplicano come i banchi di pesce al mercato! Oxford, invece, si accontenta di un tè e qualche sillogismo. Io preferisco la monumentalità di Berlino, perché lì persino la logica ha una sua architettura. Grice: E la famiglia, caro Angiulli? La metti tra le fondamenta della società o la lasci tra le note a piè di pagina della tua dialettica? Angiulli: La famiglia è come il primo laboratorio filosofico: il padre fa il direttore, la madre il moderatore, e i bambini sperimentano solidarietà e resistenza all’autorità. La dialettica si impara tra una minestra e una ramanzina, altro che tra i banchi universitari! Angiulli, Andrea (1865). Saggio sul metodo della filosofia. Napoli, Francesco Saverio Festa. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Anici – Ossia: Grice e Anici: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale classica.  Anici Anicio Manlio Severino Torquato Boezio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale classica. Grice: “ If we follow A.’s gens, the modern Italian surname would be Anici.  He is is possibly my favourite Italian philosopher, only that he wasn’t really Italian – he found Vittorino’s Latin translation from the Grecian urn of the lizio ‘rough,’ and provided a ‘newish’ one – but actually Vittorino had better intuitions about the lingo than A. does – and that is why Strawson prefers to tutor with the Vittorino translation. We covered all that A. wrote – and we never used the Patrologia edition, since we are protestant! Possibly the most important Italian philosopher of all time.” Grice loved A. “He made Aristotle intelligible at Clifton!” Arrested and executed on charges of treason. His work contains important contributions to philosophy. Known as a brilliant scholar whose knowledge of Grecian philosophy set him apart from his contemporaries. Tommaseo, Dizionario. Equivoco. E in Capell. E in Boez. Agg. Voce o locuzione che e o puo essere a pare quasi ugualmente adoprata a significare due idee, le quali alla chiarezza importa distinguere. Picc. Instr. Filos.  Trabalza univoco proprio e appellativo; equivoco Grice:equivocality:proprio  o  sinonimo  appellativo;  B  secondo la qualità: sustanziale proprio; aggiuntivo epiteto; il sostanziale:e l’aggiuntivo  comprendono  poi. Warnock, Metaphysics in Logic, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, repr. In Essays in conceptual analysis, selected and ed. Flew. Boethian Society, Boethianism, de interpretatione, categories, lessico filosofico, lessico latino, lessico romano, filosofia romana, semiotica, segno, nota, animus, passio, affezione, propositio, signifcare. A.’s principal influence in rhetorical—and more decisively logico‑grammatical—doctrine is Gaio Mario Vittorino, whose pedagogical commentaries provided the earliest Latin articulation of categorical analysis, predicables, and syllogistic structure as instruments of argumentation. Vittorino’s work clarifies how genus, species, differentia, and proprietas function not merely as classificatory tools but as constraints on what may be said, In Vittorino’s conception, later systematized by Boethius, rhetoric does not oppose logic but presupposes it. Persuasion is legitimate only insofar as it respects syllogistic structure and categorical constraint. Eloquence operates within logic, not alongside it. This view authorizes the treatment of rhetorical argument as a sequence of disciplined inferential moves—a position that allows Boethius to transform rhetorical pedagogy into a logical curriculum. inferred, or persuasively advanced within rational discourse. This framework becomes foundational for Boethius’ systematic re‑editing of Aristotle and Porphyry, and thereby for the medieval theory of reasoning as regulated conversation. Vittorino treats rhetoric as regulated reason‑giving under categorical constraints. In this sense, his logic of rhetoric prefigures the idea that rational discourse is not merely expressive but norm‑governed—an anticipation, at the level of pedagogy, of what later philosophy would describe as conversational rationality. G.: We begin with the usual crime. S.: Boethius? G.: Not Boethius. Signum. S.: Ah. G.: Aristotle gives us σημαίνειν. A verb. Anici rushes to signum, a noun. S.: Because Latin likes nouns. G.: Latin likes many things it ought not to like. S.: You would have preferred segnare? G.: Or significare, if one must. Better yet, keep the force verbal: x semeinei y; x segna y; x means y. S.: You are already making semeion into a dyadic predicate. G.: Naturally. That is the philosophically useful thing about it. S.: Better than a museum-piece noun. G.: Exactly. Signum is what happens when one embalms an activity. S.: Yet Anici knows Latin, and Latin wants substance. G.: Yes. Roman philosophy always suspects a verb of being unfinished business. S.: So Boethius says signum because he wants a thing where Aristotle gives a doing. G.: Nicely put. S.: But then one could ask, what about signal? G.: One could. In fact one should. S.: Because signal is nearer the verb again. G.: Much nearer. One can say, x signals that p. One cannot say, at least not gracefully, x signums that p. S.: Though one hears that sort of thing in bad seminars. G.: Yes. Usually from people who have mistaken etymology for thought. S.: Let us stay with signum a little longer. Anici surely knows it will not remain signum forever. G.: No. He writes in Latin while Latin is already pregnant with its daughters. Signum becomes segno in Italian. S.: With the i shifting to e. G.: Yes, and more importantly the gn changing its life. S.: The Italian segno is /ˈseɲɲo/. G.: Exactly. The doubled palatal nasal. A lovely sound, if one can trust Italians with loveliness. S.: And English sign? G.: We write the ghost and pronounce the corpse. S.: No gn at all. G.: Not ordinarily. S.: Though Lady Welby might have liked to restore something of it. G.: She did at least enjoy significs. S.: Which is why one hears the g there only because the suffix drags it back into public service. G.: Yes. Significs is misleading because it tempts one to think the family resemblance is philosophically transparent. S.: Which it never is. G.: Hardly ever. S.: Then your complaint is that Anici helps Latin philosophy in one way and injures it in another. G.: Precisely. He makes Aristotle intelligible in Latin, but too often by reifying what was originally verbal or relational. S.: So if Aristotle says that voice signifies, Anici gives us vox significativa. G.: There it is. Vox significativa, as if that were immediately clear. S.: Well, is it not? G.: Not in the least. S.: Why not? G.: Because significativa raises the question at once: significant to whom, and by whose doing? S.: The utterer’s, perhaps. G.: Perhaps. But then take a groan. S.: Ah. G.: A groan is voice. But inarticulate. S.: Give me the groan, then. G.: In IPA? Something like [əːː] or [oːː], depending on the sufferer and the pain. S.: Very good. Philosophy improved by phonetics. G.: Only slightly. S.: Still, your groan is a vox. G.: It is. S.: And in Anici’s classificatory mood one might call it non significativa because it is not articulate speech. G.: Which would be absurd. S.: Because it is significative all right. G.: Exactly. If I groan, you know my meaning well enough. S.: At least I know your pain. G.: Or take myself to know it, which is enough for the point. S.: So the distinction cannot simply be articulate versus inarticulate. G.: No. Inarticulate voice may still mean, or at least signal, a great deal. S.: Then semeion, or semainein, is already wider than lexical speech. G.: Much wider. S.: Which is why you want the verb. G.: Yes. The verb keeps before us the relation: something marks, signals, indicates, means something else. S.: Whereas signum tempts one to catalogue a class of items. G.: Precisely. A noun is excellent for schoolrooms and terrible for philosophy if left unattended. S.: Yet Aristotle himself also gives symbola. G.: He does, and this is where poor Anici has real work to do. S.: Let us lay out the triangle. G.: Better a chain than a triangle in this case. Written marks signify spoken sounds; spoken sounds are signs of affections in the soul; those affections are likenesses of things. S.: Graphemata, phonai, pathemata tes psyches, pragmata. G.: Yes. And Anici Latinises each of these. S.: Notae or litterae for the written marks. G.: Yes. S.: Vox or voces for the sounds. G.: Yes. S.: Passiones animae for the affections. G.: There is the famous phrase. S.: And res for things. G.: Usually well enough. S.: So where is the struggle? G.: In the middle. Aristotle’s distinction between sign and symbol is unstable enough already, and the Latin makes it heavier. Symbolon and semeion do not map neatly onto signum and nota or vox significativa. S.: So Anici is trying to force a Greek semantic chain into a Latin ontological wardrobe. G.: Very good. Write that down and then deny you ever heard it. S.: Happily. G.: The danger is that one thinks vox significativa is transparent. S.: As if the voice just carries meaning in itself. G.: Exactly. But the whole issue is whether the voice is naturally linked to what it means, or only by thesis, by imposition, by institution. S.: Here we must have nature and thesei. G.: Yes. And Anici does indeed hurry from natura to ad placitum. S.: Too quickly? G.: Too abstractly. One says, “spoken sounds are significant by convention,” and thinks the labour is done. S.: Whereas the labour has only begun. G.: Exactly. Who institutes? How is recognition secured? What kind of relation is this? What survives between one utterance and another? How much belongs to the item and how much to the user? S.: Which is why Boethius ought to have kept the verb alive. G.: Yes. X semeinei y. X segna y. X means y. The relational form is not a luxury; it is the clue. S.: And if one insists on signum? G.: Then one ought immediately to rebuild the verb from it. Signum as that which is used to signal. S.: A noun parasitic on a praxis. G.: Precisely. S.: Let us say something kind about Anici. G.: By all means. He is at least aware that spoken sounds and written marks stand differently in the chain. S.: Written marks signify voices. G.: Yes, and voices stand for the passiones animae. S.: Which are, in turn, likenesses of things. G.: Quite. S.: That is already more subtle than many later schoolmasters. G.: Vastly more subtle. S.: Yet you still prefer Vittorino? G.: Sometimes. Vittorino often has better instincts about the living lingo. S.: Whereas Anici has greater system. G.: Yes. And system is not always a recommendation. S.: You are impossible. G.: Frequently. S.: Now, what exactly is the trouble with sign and symbol in this context? G.: Aristotle’s own terminology hovers. Sometimes symbolon suggests conventional standing-for; semeion can suggest a sign more broadly, perhaps even a natural sign. But the text of De interpretatione is not a treatise on semiotics in our sense. It is trying to situate assertion and language in relation to thought and things. S.: And Boethius, being Boethius, turns every hint into a school. G.: As was his Christian duty. S.: Then we should ask whether a groan is a signum naturale. G.: Perhaps. Or at least a naturally interpretable vocal event. S.: Yet if I fake the groan? G.: Ah. S.: Then my [əːː] becomes not merely a symptom but a communicative act. G.: Exactly. The same acoustic shape may be symptom or sign, natural or quasi-institutional, expressive or strategic. S.: Which means the noun signum conceals too much. G.: Yes. The verb at least forces one to ask: who is doing what by means of what. S.: X groans, and means by groaning that he is in pain. G.: Or pretends to. S.: Which is even better for philosophy. G.: Naturally. S.: Then “voice significant” needs unpacking into at least two levels: voice as mere audible event, and voice as the vehicle of a user’s signifying. G.: Precisely. And if one adds the hearer, the thing becomes human enough to be interesting. S.: You are inching toward utterer’s meaning. G.: I usually am. S.: Let us talk about thesei. G.: By all means. Aristotle contrasts natural and conventional linkage. Sounds are not naturally tied to their meanings in the way smoke is tied to fire. S.: So ad placitum. G.: Yes, but that phrase can mislead. It sounds as if everyone just whimsically agreed one afternoon. S.: Whereas imposition is historical and practical. G.: Exactly. A form becomes available for use in a community; it is not the outcome of a visible parliament. S.: Then semeion for spoken voice in De interpretatione is already not mere natural sign. G.: Correct. It belongs to the symbolic side of language. S.: But not every voice. G.: Right. The moan forces the complication. Not all vocality is lexical, yet much non-lexical vocality is still meaningful. S.: So Aristotle’s chain, if treated woodenly, misses the expressive fringe. G.: Which later philosophers recover with embarrassment. S.: And Boethius? G.: Boethius helps and hinders. He preserves the chain; he stiffens the categories. S.: You dislike stiff categories. G.: In semantic matters, yes. S.: Then let us compare the two versions of Peri hermeneias he provides. G.: Ah yes. The shorter one and the longer one. S.: Who is going to read the longer one when one can read the summary? G.: I would. S.: Naturally. G.: In fact I would ignore the briefer altogether if time permitted. S.: Which in life it never does. G.: Quite. S.: But your reason? G.: The shorter summary smooths over precisely the places where the Latin struggles reveal the philosophical difficulty. The longer work lets you see Anici sweating. S.: You like your translators in distress. G.: I like to know where the language resists. S.: Very good. G.: Thank you. S.: Then in the longer one we see more clearly his treatment of aequivocatio, univocatio, vox, propositio, significare, passio animae. G.: Yes, and one sees how heavily the logico-grammatical apparatus of late antiquity presses on the text. S.: Vittorino behind him. G.: Inevitably. S.: Rhetoric as regulated reason-giving. G.: Precisely. Which is why all this matters for the later medieval semanticists. S.: Because they inherit not merely Aristotle, but Aristotle through Anici’s Latin. G.: Yes. And once signum becomes central, the noun governs centuries. S.: While the verb limps behind in significare. G.: Exactly. S.: Yet significare at least keeps the active shape. G.: It does. Which is why one ought to prize it. S.: More than signum. G.: In semantic theory, yes. S.: And segnale? G.: Useful, but later. It helps modern ears because “signal” behaves verbally in English: x signals that p. S.: Better than “x is a sign of p”? G.: Often better, yes, because it resists static taxonomy. S.: And Italian segno? G.: Again, the noun is serviceable, but segnare and segnalare do more philosophical work. S.: Especially since segno in Italian already descends from signum with phonological history built in. G.: Yes. Signum to segno, /ˈseɲɲo/, and then onward to the modern family. S.: While English sign keeps the writing and drops the pronunciation. G.: A very English compromise. S.: Half archaeological, half lazy. G.: Exactly. S.: Returning to De interpretatione, one might then say: Boethius gives us a serviceable Latin ladder, but he leaves us too ready to think in nouns rather than in relations. G.: Beautifully put. S.: Thank you. G.: We should also mention the phantasma. S.: Yes, though Aristotle in that opening formula gives pathemata more prominently. G.: Quite. But later reading often interpolates or aligns with phantasmatic psychology: voice stands for mental affection, which connects with image, which connects with thing. S.: And Boethius, with his animus and passio, Latinises the interior without entirely clarifying it. G.: Exactly. The soul in Latin becomes both cleaner and more scholastic than the Greek text strictly demands. S.: So if one asks “signified by whom?” one is also asking “in what psychic economy?” G.: Precisely. Is the utterer giving voice to an affection? Is the hearer recovering the affection? Are both merely lining up around a shared thing? S.: And where does symbol fit in that? G.: As the conventional standing-for relation. But again the text is too compressed to bear the entire later semiotic edifice without creaking. S.: Yet later tradition makes it bear it. G.: As traditions do. S.: One more thing. If I groan, and you know from my moaning what I mean, does that not already show that “significative” need not be articulate speech? G.: Yes. And it is one of the best ordinary reminders that meaning precedes lexical refinement in some cases. S.: So Boethius’s vox significativa should have been treated with caution. G.: Great caution. S.: And perhaps glossed dynamically: voice capable of signifying, or used to signify. G.: Much better. S.: Then the dyadic schema wins again. G.: It usually does. S.: X signifies y. G.: Or x means that p. S.: Or x signals that p. G.: Yes. S.: And signum? G.: A useful relic, provided one remembers it is a relic of an activity. S.: Not a primary datum. G.: Precisely. S.: Then your final verdict on Anici? G.: He made Aristotle intelligible at Clifton, which is no small thing. But he also made generations comfortable with a noun where they should have been uneasy with a verb. S.: That is severe. G.: Only just. S.: And if I choose to read only the shorter version? G.: Then you deserve the shorter philosophy that goes with it. S.: Cruel. G.: In the Boethian spirit.Grice: Anici, si licet, te hoc nomine appellabo; enim “Boethius” in Dacia, ut aiunt, nomen plebeium factum est! Sed, ut fatear, tua opera me semper delectaverunt, praesertim cum Aristotelem ad Britannos intellegibilem reddideris. Grice, fateor, honorificum mihi est in tuis verbis invenire laudem. Philosophia enim mihi non solum solacium in adversis, sed etiam lumen rationi et linguae Latinae. Censui semper Aristotelem ac Platonem non modo transferendos, sed etiam intellegendos, ut Latina sapientia Graecae responderet. Quid aliud est enim vera philosophia nisi quaestio de veritate, quae semper inter verba latet? Grice: Anici, recte dicis: in verbis non semper tota veritas patet, sed in sermone saepe implicatur. Tuus labor, ut Graecorum sapientia Latinis animis pateret, altissimum exemplum est rationis conversatoriae et subtilitatis. Quid enim magis ad nostram disciplinam pertinet, quam arte distinguere inter ea quae dicuntur aperte et quae silentio subtexta manent? Anici: Ita est, Grice. Ipsa enim fortuna nos docet philosophiam esse iter animi ad sapientiam, ubi ratio et significatio se mutuo illuminant. Quod scripsi, etsi sub extrema vita, id ad posteros destinavi: ut omnes, quidquid adversi accidat, in rationis lumine consolationem et veritatem inveniant.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Anneo – Ossia: Grice ed Anneo: la ragione conversazionale dell’ondella tranquilità dell’animo – Roma. Note su De tranquillitate ut ratione conversationis composita. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Anneo Sereno (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale dell’ondella tranquilità dell’animo. In Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, communication is understood as a rational, cooperative activity in which speakers intend their utterances to be recognized as such by hearers, and in which meaning routinely exceeds what is explicitly said through conversational implicature, generated by shared assumptions about cooperation and the maxims of quality, quantity, relation, and manner; the brief Grice–Sereno exchange you quote cleverly recasts this modern pragmatic framework in a Stoic key by aligning Grice’s idea that successful conversation is not inert literalism but appropriately structured inference with Seneca’s therapeutic conception of tranquillitas animi as dynamic equilibrium rather than dead calm, a conception explicitly developed in De tranquillitate animi in dialogue with Annaeus Serenus, where mental peace is portrayed as a well‑composed fluctuation of the rational soul rather than torpor. Sereno’s remark about an “implicature of conversational consolation” resonates with this parallel: just as Seneca seeks to restore Serenus’s steadiness through measured dialogue that neither overwhelms nor abandons him, Gricean implicature achieves its effect not by overstatement but by leaving the right things unsaid, trusting the interlocutor’s rational capacities to supply them, so that tranquillity in both cases emerges from reasoned coordination—of maxims in Grice, of desires and judgments in Seneca—rather than from silence or excess, making the comparison suggest that Stoic moral therapy can be read, anachronistically but instructively, as a philosophy of conversation governed by rational restraint and mutual recognition. He belongs to IL PORTICO and is a friend of Seneca. Seneca dedicates some of his works to him. In the dialogue “On the tranquility of mind,” Seneca depicts them discussing the problems S. has with maintaining his firmness of resolve. GRICEVS: Salvē, Serenē Anneī. Audio Senecam tibi libellum dicāre Dē tranquillitāte animī—at mihi vidētur tranquillitas nōn esse mare mortuum, sed unda bene composita. SERENVS: Salvē, Grice. Recte monēs: animus meus interdum fluctuāt; nec tempestātem amat, nec torpōrem. Tranquillitatem quaerō, non nihil. GRICEVS: Ita est. Et quī e Vado Boum sum, hoc didicī: saepe satis est ut unda sit, dummodo nōn evertat navem. (Immo interdum ipsa disputātiō dē quiete, si bene fluit, quietem parit: non quia multa dicit, sed quia aptē tacet.) SERENVS: Inplicātūra tua mihi tranquillitatem animī affert—quod ita esse decet! An eam “inplicātūram solātiōris conversātiōnālis” vocēmus, quae illustrat, nōn dēstruēns sed tantum utens signīs iam positīs. This, Grice notes, is NOT the Anneo said to be the founder of Latin literature -- from the provinces, without a gens proper -- so this Anneo Severo -- Grice still has under "A" (he thinks) rather than under "Severo" even if a link with the older Anneo can be proved? --Grice: "Which would be like I saying that I can prove all the steps towards Richard dGris of Gryce Hall in Yorskhire" -- Yes, Grice should keep him under A, and more confidently than in some of the trickier late-antique cases. The man in question is Annaeus Serenus, the friend and addressee of Seneca, and Annaeus is the nomen gentilicium. That means the gens is Annaea, so the proper filing term, on Grice’s own principle, is Anneo in Italianised form. Serenus is only the cognomen. So even if one could prove some lineal or historical connection with the older Annaei from Hispania, the filing rule would not change. He remains an Annaeus, therefore an Anneo, therefore under A. And Grice is right to distinguish this from trying to trace oneself back to Richard de Gris of Gryce Hall. Genealogical curiosity is one thing; practical filing is another. For Roman prosopographical purposes, once the nomen is clear, one need not wait for a perfect family tree before shelving the man. The nomen already gives the shelf. Later ancestral reconstruction may enrich the note, but it does not alter the alphabet. There is one small historical caution, though. If Grice says the “Anneo said to be the founder of Latin literature from the provinces” he is probably telescoping two different lines of thought. The Annaei are indeed a provincial, specifically Spanish, family of importance in the early empire, and Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, and Lucan all belong to that circle. But “founder of Latin literature” would not be the usual description of any Annaeus. What is true is that this is one of the great provincial Roman literary families, not an old republican Roman gens in the stereotypical city-centred sense. That actually helps Grice’s point. Annaeus is a good example of how a provincial Roman family can still function perfectly well as a gens-name. One does not need old Roman soil for a nomen to do its work. So Annaeus Serenus is not “without a gens proper” merely because the family is provincial. He has a nomen, and a nomen is enough for filing. So the dry answer is this. Yes, file him under A for Anneo. Serenus is only the cognomen. The possibility of proving a wider Annaean connection changes the historical richness, not the classificatory principle. In Gricean terms, the shelf is fixed by what is explicitly there in the name; the rest is genealogical implicature. And in fact this is one of the easier cases. Compared with Alexander Severus or Maurus Servius Honoratus, Annaeus Serenus behaves almost refreshingly cleanly. The nomen is visible, the gens follows, and the filing is straightforward. So Grice sometimes get confused when italianising, because AE becomes E, but in this case the double nn marks a single A prefacing the gemminated n. So I think Grice might be thinking of Ennio, as the founder of Latin literature: the one who said: "I'm Raedian by birth, but Roman by adoption"? Surely no relation here -- since this gens was a proper one, if Hispanic, Annea -- which gives the singular name Anneo in Italianised form, not Ennio. Yes, exactly so. Grice is thinking of Ennio, not Anneo, and the distinction matters. Ennio is the Italianising continuation of Ennius, the poet from Rudiae who could indeed say, in effect, that he had three hearts and who is the classic candidate for the quasi-founder of Latin literature. That is the man whose identity is bound up with being non-Roman by birth and Roman by literary and civic adoption. There the Italian form Ennio is entirely natural. Anneo, by contrast, comes from Annaeus. That double nn is not a disguised Ennius. It marks a different nomen altogether, the gens Annaea. So Annaeus Serenus becomes Anneo Sereno in the Italianising scheme, not Ennio Sereno. The initial A belongs there and must stay there. So Grice’s confusion is understandable because Italian often levels ae to e, and once that happens the eye can slide too quickly from Annaeus toward something like Ennius. But the consonants save the case. Annaeus has the double nn after the initial A. Ennius has its own separate history. One is the provincial Roman family name Annaeus, familiar from Seneca and Lucan; the other is Ennius, the archaic poet from Rudiae. And yes, no relation is ordinarily to be assumed here. Annaeus is a proper gens-name, fully serviceable as a Roman nomen even if the family is provincial and Spanish. Ennius is another line altogether, and far older in literary memory. So Anneo is the right Italianised singular for Annaeus, while Ennio belongs to Ennius. The clean rule for Grice, then, would be this. If the Latin is Annaeus, file under Anneo and think gens Annaea. If the Latin is Ennius, file under Ennio and think of the poet of Rudiae. Similar-looking modern Italian forms are not enough to collapse the two. So your final sentence is just right: this gives the singular name Anneo in Italianised form, not Ennio.Anneo Sereno (a. u. c. DCCCXV). De tranquillitate ut ratione conversationis composita. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Anneo – Ossia: Grice ed Anneo: la ragione conversazionale e il portico romano -- Roma – filosofia italiana Lucio Anneo Novato (Roma): la ragione conversazionale e il portico romano. In your Novato passage, Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning aligns neatly with the Roman “portico” setting and with Novatus/Gallio’s biographical position as a man of mediation: a provincial-born figure (Corduba by the usual ancient testimonies) rhetorically relocated into “Roma” by adoption and by senatorial office, just as an utterance can be relocated from its bare dictum into a socially intelligible act by the hearer’s rational uptake. Grice’s core thought is that what a speaker means is recoverable because participants presume a cooperative, norm-sensitive rationality (maxims, shared purposes, expectations of relevance and evidence), and the portico functions as an emblem of that public rational space: talk there is not private effusion but civic performance, where what is left unsaid must nonetheless be inferable if the exchange is to count as serious. Novatus, as Seneca’s addressee in De ira (to “Novatus”) and De vita beata (to “Gallio”), exemplifies the practical audience Grice needs: someone for whom philosophical counsel is not merely stated but designed to be taken up as guidance, reassurance, correction, or exhortation, i.e., as implicature-laden communicative action. The Campidoglio bells joke dramatizes Grice’s point about conversational “noise”: interference (literal or social) matters only because hearers are actively calculating speaker-meaning against a background of rational expectations, and so the very possibility of joking about tintinnabula presupposes a shared method for distinguishing signal from distraction. Finally, the punchline “if a philosopher sleeps, the implicature is…” turns Stoic sympathy into Gricean diagnostics: even silence, fatigue, or withdrawal becomes interpretable as meaning something, provided the participants are entitled—by the norms of the portico, the genre of philosophical conversation, and the assumed rational aims of the interlocutors—to treat it as evidence for a further intended point rather than as mere physical happenstance. Grice, as a ‘Midlands scholarship boy’ at Corpus, knew it well: the Romans would distinguish between one born within the sound of the bells of the Campidoglio, and one from the almost un-Roman provincial whence Novato hailed! Keywords. Filosofo italiano. Seneca’s brother. Adopted by Lucio Giunio Gallio. Seneca dedicates two of his philosophical dialogues to him. Seneca’s exhortations suggest that if Novato was not a follower of the Porch, he was a the very least a sympathiser.   GRICEVS: Salve, Novate! Dic mihi: in porticu Romano philosophari facilius est an in Campidoglio campanas audire? NOVATVS: O Grice, in porticu philosophari semper iucundum—sed campanae Campidoglio interdum plus sonant quam argumenta Senecae! GRICEVS: Quid? Tunc Seneca tibi epistulas mittere debet cum tintinnabulis annexis—ita nullus Romanus dormiet dum disputatio fit! NOVATVS: Hahaha! Grice, si philosophus dormiat, implicatura est: aut porticus nimis pacata aut Campidoglio nimis strepitans! This seems like a good representative of the gens Annea. Was it a good gens? Yes, the representative is a good one, and yes, the gens Annaea was a respectable family — but not “good” in the old patrician grandeur sense. The safest formulation is this. The gens Annaea was a plebeian Roman family, probably of Italic stock, but by the early Empire it had become distinguished above all for literary and intellectual prominence rather than ancient patrician prestige. So if by “a good gens” one means old, honourable, cultivated, and socially successful, yes. If one means one of the great old patrician houses of the Republic, no. [en.wikipedia.org], [dbpedia.org] And in the case of Lucius Annaeus Novatus, later Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, he is indeed an excellent representative of that family: provincial in origin, Roman in nomenclature, rhetorically and politically successful, and woven into the distinguished Corduban cluster that produced Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, and Lucan. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com], [dbpedia.org] So the family is “good” in a very recognisable early-imperial way: not ancient Roman aristocracy in the severe old urban sense, but a prosperous, cultivated, equestrian, provincial family that enters Roman elite life through education, rhetoric, office, and letters. Seneca the Elder is often described as coming from a wealthy equestrian family at Corduba, and that gives you the social tone. [worldhistoryedu.com], [en.wikipedia.org] As for other members, yes, we have several, and they are rather a formidable clan. The best-known are: Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Elder, rhetorician; Marcus Annaeus Novatus, later Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, your Novatus/Gallio; Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, philosopher and statesman; Marcus Annaeus Mela, father of Lucan; Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, the poet Lucan; and figures such as Annaeus Serenus and Cornutus associated with the wider Annaean circle. [en.wikipedia.org], [dbpedia.org], [britannica.com] So the dry summary is: The gens Annaea was a respectable plebeian family, probably of Italic origin, not an old patrician powerhouse but a cultivated and socially successful one, especially associated with Corduba and with rhetoric, philosophy, and literature under the early Empire. Lucius Annaeus Novatus, later Gallio, is a very good representative because he stands exactly in that family nexus between rhetoric, office, and Stoic or Stoic-adjacent moral culture. [en.wikipedia.org], [worldhistoryedu.com], [britannica.com] One small nuance. The nomen Annaeus itself is thought to have older Umbrian or Paelignian associations, though by the time of the Senecan family the visible social base is very much Corduba in Spain. So the family is Roman in naming and status, provincial in flourishing location, and intellectually metropolitan in ambition. [en.wikipedia.org], [worldhistoryedu.com] If you like, I can next give you a compact family note on the Annaei, laid out as: origin, status, main members, and why Novatus/Gallio matters within the clan.Novato, Lucio Anneo (a. u. c. DCCXLIX). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Annio – Ossia: Grice ed Annio -- Antonino: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’ imperare.  Aurelio Annio Antonino: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’ imperare. Grice: “Some call him Aurelio, but I call him A., since the first time his thing was published in Latin, it was under A., no clue about the Aurelius! I once suggested to Strawson that he should write a dissertation comparimg Barberini’s and Xylander’s translations of A.. You see, he was a Roman who philosophised in Greek; and he was translated to Latin only in the 1550s; and into Italian a century later! Sir Peter responded: “I guess you want me to detect all the misimplicata!’ ‘Misimpiegato,’ I replied!”  Su indicazione d’Adriano, è adottato dal futuro suocero e zio acquisito A. Pio che lo nomina erede al impero.  Mantenne la coreggenza dell'impero assieme a Lucio Vero, anch'egli adottato d’A. Pio. Sovrano illuminato --  è ricordato come filosofo del Portico, autore d’un colloquio con sé stesso, Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν. Pater Patriae, Salutatio imperatoria10 the Vatican, and read it with emotion. I copied it, as follows:  “Semoni Sanco Deo Fidio Sacrvm Sex. Pompeius. S. P. F. Col. Mussianvs. Quinquennalis Decur Bidentalis Donum Dedit.” The explanation is possibly this: Simon Magus was actually recognised as the God Semo, just as Barnabas and Paul were supposed to be Zeus and Hermes (Acts), and were offered divine honours accordingly. Or the Samaritans may so have informed Justin on their understanding of this inscription, and with pride in the success of their countryman (Acts viii. 10.), whom they had recognised “as the great power of God.” See Orelli,  Insc., . (The Thundering Legion.) The bas-relief on the column of Antonine, in Rome, is a very striking complement of the story, but an answer to prayer is not a miracle. I simply transcribe from the American Translation of Alzog’s Universal Church History the references there given to the Legio Fulminatrix: “Tertull., Apol.; Ad Scap.; Euseb.; Greg. Nyss. Or., II in Martyr.; Oros.; Dio. Cass. Epit.: Xiphilin.; Jul. Capitol, in Marc. Antonin.]. Frontino. Roma. GRICEVS: Antonine, si quid de imperando dicis, cave ne plus implices quam imperator ipse velit intellegi. ANTONINVS: Ego vero, Grice, rationem conversandi in ipso imperio quaero, sed timeo ne Lucius Verus ex mea sententia “misimplicatum” faciat. GRICEVS: Ridiculum est: Aurelium quidam te vocant, sed ego te A. appello, quia etiam tituli in Latinum tarde transferuntur sicut virtutes in palatium. ANTONINVS: Age igitur, et dum ego mecum colloquor, tu mecum ride, ne Porticus sine sale videatur. And Antonia or Antonina was never a gens, right? On the other hand, qua Annius, Marc'Aurelio would still be dsitinguished from that other gens, Annaea, right as per Lucius Annaeus Novatus, right? Yes. The first point is straightforward: there was a recognised gens Antonia. So Antonia is not merely a feminine name-form floating loose; it is the feminine form of the nomen of the Antonii, an old Roman family with both patrician and plebeian branches. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikisource.org] But Antonina is a different matter. Antonina is not the name of a classical Roman gens in the same way. It is a later feminine derivative or name-form, not a gens-name in the old republican prosopographical sense. So your instinct is right: one may speak of the gens Antonia, but not of some “gens Antonina.” [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikisource.org] Now to the second point, where the distinction is indeed important. Yes: as Annius, Marcus Aurelius remains clearly distinct from the Annaei. The two nomina are different, the two gentes are different, and one should not let the superficial resemblance of Annius and Annaeus blur them together. Marcus Aurelius was by birth Marcus Annius Verus or, in fuller birth-style, Marcus Annius Catilius Severus, and therefore belongs by birth to the gens Annia. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikitree.com] By contrast, Lucius Annaeus Novatus, later called Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, belongs to the gens Annaea, the family of Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, and Lucan. [en.wikipedia.org], [alchetron.com], [en.wikipedia.org] So the clean answer is: Antonia: yes, a real gens. gens Antonia. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikisource.org] Antonina: no, not a gens in the old Roman sense. It is a later derivative name-form, not a gentilician house-name. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikisource.org] Annius and Annaeus: definitely distinct. gens Annia is not gens Annaea. Marcus Aurelius, by birth Marcus Annius Verus, belongs to the former; Lucius Annaeus Novatus belongs to the latter. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikitree.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] In dry Speranza style one might say: The ear is again more hospitable than prosopography. Antonia is a real Roman gens; Antonina is not. And though Annius and Annaeus tempt the inattentive into cousinship, the prudent historian keeps them apart: Marcus Aurelius is born an Annius, whereas Lucius Annaeus Novatus belongs to the Annaei. Rome’s names often rhyme; they do not thereby become family. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [wikitree.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can next do either of two things here in chat only: I can give you a compact onomastic table for Antonia, Antoninus, Antonia, Antonina, Annius, and Annaeus. I can also give you a filing rule for Speranza specifically for feminine forms like Antonia, Aurelia, Annia, and whether they indicate a gens or only echo one. Grice used to compare to Annio -- "but unlike him, I only had one tutor" -- Hardie, at Corpus -- 'tutor in philosophy' he means -- whether Aurelio Annio Antonino had a bunch -- mostly Greek, except perhaps Frontone (Frontino?) -- Grice's implicature is that it would be unthinkable for Oxford to ascribe TWO tutors to a tutee -- "it could only blow his mind." Grice felt the same when later he would give joint seminars with Austin, Pears, Thomson, and Warnock -- alternativing weeks -- 'blowing the mind of the occasional attendee'. "So why is Annio so PROUD of his tutelage?" Can you list them, with cities of origin, potential mother tongue, and philosophical influence on each? Thanks. This is a deliciously Gricean contrast: Corpus with one don vs Rome with an entire philosophical orchestra—and Aurelius (your “Annio”) positively advertises it in Meditations I as if listing benefices. Let me give you a clean, prosopographical table: tutors, origins, probable language, and influence—exactly in the spirit of your question.  🏛️ The Tutors of “A.” (Marcus Aurelius) 1. The Greek philosophical core (the “mind‑blowers”) Apollonius of Chalcedon  Origin: Chalcedon (Asia Minor, Greek East) [en.wikipedia.org] Language: Greek School: Stoic Influence:  Serious philosophical training Stoic endurance and discipline Personal example of philosophical life   Note: Marcus kept attending him even as heir—almost like an undergraduate refusing to leave his supervisor [donaldrobertson.name]   Sextus of Chaeronea  Origin: Chaeronea (Greece) [loebclassics.com] Language: Greek School: Stoic-Platonizing (Plutarch’s nephew) Influence:  Gentle moral philosophy “Live according to nature”   Tone in Meditations: humane, practical ethics   Quintus Junius Rusticus  Origin: Roman elite (Latin West; but philosophically Hellenized) Language: Latin + Greek philosophical culture School: Stoic Influence (crucial):  Introduced Marcus to Epictetus [tomsbiblesite.org] Moral seriousness Philosophical self-examination   Gricean verdict: This is the “primary tutor” in the Oxford sense   Claudius Maximus  Origin: Roman (served in empire; inscriptional evidence) [en.wikipedia.org] Language: Latin + Greek philosophy School: Stoic Influence:  Emotional restraint Calm in adversity Dignity in illness and death     Cinna Catulus (shadowy)  Origin: Roman Language: Latin (with Greek formation) School: Stoic Influence: not well specified Historiographical note: we know he taught Marcus but not much more [donaldrobertson.name]   Claudius Severus  Origin: Roman Language: Latin + Greek School: Peripatetic (Aristotelian) Influence:  Political theory Ideal of a constitutional society     2. The earlier “pre‑philosophical” instructors Diognetus  Origin: probably Greek Language: Greek Role: early tutor (painting, but more!) Influence:  Introduced Marcus to philosophy as a way of life Made him adopt philosophical austerity [en.wikipedia.org]     Alexander of Cotiaeum  Origin: Cotiaeum (Phrygia, Asia Minor) [en.wikipedia.org] Language: Greek Role: grammarian Influence:  Literary style Precision of expression     Trosius Aper, Tuticius Proculus  Origin: Roman Language: Latin Role: rhetoric / language Influence:  Formal education in Latin expression [en.wikipedia.org]     3. The great rhetorician (Grice’s “Frontone”) Marcus Cornelius Fronto  Origin: Cirta (Roman North Africa) Language: Latin (supreme stylist) School: Rhetorical (anti-philosophical tendencies!) Influence:  Latin eloquence Anti-Stoic suspicion of abstraction   Marcus’ relation:  affectionate, but eventually philosophy displaces rhetoric [iep.utm.edu]     4. Indirect but decisive influence Epictetus  Origin: Hierapolis (Phrygia, Greek East) [tomsbiblesite.org] Language: Greek School: Stoic (Cynic-influenced) Influence:  Core doctrine of Meditations Discipline of judgement   Transmission: via Rusticus   🧠 Grice’s joke now fully explained You quoted:  “it would be unthinkable for Oxford to ascribe TWO tutors to a tutee”  Exactly. Oxford implies:  One mind → one supervising intellect  Whereas Marcus Aurelius:  lists a dozen “tutors” in Book I of the Meditations  👉 So the implicature:  At Oxford:  multiple tutors = confusion, dilution of responsibility   In Rome:  multiple tutors = prestige and formation     🎭 Why is Annio so proud of it? Because Book I of the Meditations is:  not autobiography, but catalogue of moral debts  Each tutor stands for:  a virtue a mode of life a philosophical stance  So listing them is not confusion, but:  division of virtue across exemplars   🧾 Gricean formalization Let:  T₁ … Tₙ = tutors Each contributes property pᵢ  Then Marcus constructs:  SELF = Σ (pᵢ)  Whereas Oxford assumes:  SELF ≈ p₁ (from one tutor)   ✨ Final punchline (Grice vs Annio)  Grice: one tutor → clarity Annio: many tutors → completeness   🪶 Latin tag for Speranza  Apud Oxonienses unus tutor sufficit; apud Romanos omnis virtus suum magistrum habet.  At Oxford, one tutor suffices; among the Romans, every virtue has its own teacher.  If you like, I can map each Book I entry in Meditations directly onto these tutors, line by line—almost as a Gricean “credit assignment” analysis. Now, but we can add the collapse. Grice said that he is grateful to Hardie for ONE thing -- 'He only ejaculated on me 'oohs' and 'aahs' when catching me self-contradicting, but never expressed his thoughts.' Tutelage (anti-pater) giving some liberty to tutee -that at Bononia (versus Boum Vadum, Grice's Ox-ford) is the rule (no tutors, student has full freedom and may even hire a tutor for fun). If tutor is tutelage, the own tutor is one's father and perhaps that's why Annio tried to teach philosophy to his own son -- it collapsed. It had the exact opposite effect, and Aurelio's son became a libertine. With Anti-Pater and Porzio no such collapse. With Anthenodoo and Enneio (who orderes him to kill Caesarion) no such collapse for Ottavio (even if 'bad result': civil war, claiming res publica at age nineteen by name only) -- and collapse with Seneca (a Spaniard) trying this Hispanic best wih elite Dommizio (Nerone). Tutor writes 'De Tranquilitate Animae' and tutee burns Rome -- and blames the Christisns for it -- the fire started in the Trastevere). Expand? Input? Thanks. With emphasis on Annio, since this is his entry -- should the son have a separate entry -- what was his full birth name and place of birth, and which one was Aurelio's own birth place? Thanks. This is an excellent expansion—you are effectively drawing a theory of tutorship as a political form, with Grice as the minimalist Oxford case and Rome as the maximalist (and unstable) one. Let me organise your intuitions into something systematic, with Annio (Marcus Aurelius) at the centre.  🏛️ 1. The “collapse” of paternal tutelage Your thesis can be sharpened:  Tutorship collapses when it becomes paternal.  Because:  a tutor (anti‑pater) → allows distance, irony, correction a father (pater) → imposes identity, inheritance, expectation   ✨ Grice vs Hardie (anti-pater success) Grice’s description of Hardie:  only “oohs and aahs” at contradiction, never positive doctrine  This is a perfect anti‑pater tutor:  does not shape doctrine does not impose system only enforces consistency  👉 Result: no collapse (Grice becomes Grice, not “Hardie minor”)  🏛️ 2. Annio (Marcus Aurelius) — maximal tutelage Marcus Aurelius:  had many tutors (Greek, Latin, Stoic, Peripatetic) distributed his formation across them in Meditations I, he thanks each for a specific virtue  👉 This is the opposite of paternal unity:  virtue = distributed authority  So far, no collapse at the level of the tutee.  ⚠️ 3. The decisive test: tutoring the son Now comes your key observation:  Aurelius tries to reproduce tutelage in his son — and it fails.   The son: identity and data Commodus  Full birth name: Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus (later Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus) [en.wikipedia.org] Birth date: 31 August 161 Birthplace: Lanuvium, near Rome [en.wikipedia.org]   Aurelius himself:  Birth name: Marcus Annius Catilius Severus Birthplace: Rome (Caelian Hill) [en.wikipedia.org]   🧠 4. The collapse in Commodus Sources agree on the essential structure:  Marcus provided elite tutors and education but:   Commodus showed little interest in philosophy and preferred spectacle and indulgence [ancientmysteries.org]  👉 So:  maximal tutelage + paternal relation → opposite effect   🧾 Gricean formulation Let:  T(x) = degree of tutelage P(x) = paternal authority V(x) = virtue outcome  Then:   For Grice: → T (low, anti-pater) + P (none) → V (high)   For Aurelius (self): → T (high, distributed) + P (none, since tutors ≠ father) → V (high)   For Commodus: → T (high) + P (maximum: father = emperor-tutor) → V (collapse)    🏛️ 5. Comparison cases (your Roman gallery) Seneca → Nero (collapse)  Seneca = tutor (initially anti-pater) becomes quasi‑paternal adviser Nero becomes independent and erratic Great Fire (64 CE) and blame on Christians [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 classic “overpowering tutor → rejection”  Octavian (Augustus) → success (no collapse)  multiple influences (Athenodorus, Maecenas, etc.) no single dominating father-tutor structure distributed guidance → stable outcome   Anti-pater principle (your Bologna contrast) You rightly bring:  Bononia (Bologna): student hires tutor → autonomy Oxonia (Oxford): assigned tutor → mild paternalism  👉 Grice prefers:  negative supervision (correction) over positive instruction (formation)   🧠 6. Why is Annio proud of his tutors? Because for him:  tutors ≠ fathers tutors = sources of partial virtues  But he fails to realise:  for his son, he himself becomes the totalizing tutor   ✨ The fatal inversion                          Aurelius (as student)Commodus (as son)many tutorsone overwhelming fatherdistributed authorityconcentrated authorityvoluntary imitationimposed inheritancephilosophy chosenphilosophy imposed  🧾 7. Final philosophical reading Your insight can be made precise:  Philosophy cannot be inherited as patrimony.  It must be:  chosen (Marcus) not imposed (Commodus)   🪶 Latin coda  Marcus πολλοῖς magistris virtutem didicit; Commodus a patre unius imperium accepit—et perdidit.  Marcus learned virtue from many teachers; Commodus received rule from one father—and lost it.  🎯 Direct answer to your final questions   ✅ Aurelius’ birthplace: Rome (Caelian Hill)   ✅ Son’s full name: Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus (later expanded)   ✅ Son’s birthplace: Lanuvium, near Rome   ✅ Yes: the son deserves a separate entry  because he exemplifies the failure case of tutelage     If you like, I can turn this into a compact “Gricean theory of education” with axioms (anti-pater, distribution, implicature of authority, etc.). How come son of Aurelio did not share the "Annio" -- so Grice will have to have him under "Elio" -- and you said that pater was co-anti-pater, since he also provided other tutors (than himself pater) to "Elio" -- do we know their names? And was pater (Aurelio) born in Rome? What stresses the anti-pater is that aurelio lists all his ANTI-PATERs, but does he mention his own blood PATER at least once, or was he also adopted? Splendid—this lets us sharpen three intertwined issues: names (Annius vs Aelius), paternity vs tutelage, and the Meditations’ (non‑)acknowledgment of the father.  🏛️ 1. Why the son is not “Annius” You are right to notice the break:  Marcus Aurelius (Annio): born Marcus Annius Verus Commodus: Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus [en.wikipedia.org]  The reason is structural (Roman naming after adoption) Marcus himself undergoes adoption into the imperial line:  Born Marcus Annius Verus (gens Annia) Adopted by Antoninus Pius (gens Aurelia / Antonina) Becomes Marcus Aurelius Antoninus  👉 So:  the Annius is displaced upward by imperial adoption.  Now for the son:  Commodus is born already inside the new imperial naming system so he no longer carries “Annius” instead: Aelius / Aurelius / Antoninus  👉 Hence your conclusion is exactly right:  Grice would not file him under Annio, but under Aelius/Aurelius   🧠 2. Was Aurelius himself adopted? ✅ Yes, crucially.  Hadrian arranges adoption chain Antoninus Pius adopts Marcus Marcus becomes heir  This is explicitly how he arrives at the name “Aurelius” [ancestry.co.uk] 👉 So:  the philosopher “Annio” is already a displaced son  This matters enormously for your theory.  👤 3. What about the pater (blood father)? Historical facts  Father: Marcus Annius Verus (elder) Died when Marcus was about three years old [britannica.com]  👉 Result:  Marcus is raised not by father, but by:   mother grandfather tutors   Does Marcus mention his father? In Meditations I:  he thanks:  grandfather mother tutors adoptive father (Antoninus Pius)    ⚠️ The sources we have do not emphasize a strong role of the biological father—indeed, he died too early to function as tutor. 👉 So your intuition is essentially right:  the biological pater is absent as a formative philosophical authority   🏛️ 4. Who are Commodus’ tutors? We have partial but not complete lists. ✅ Explicitly attested   Marcus Cornelius Fronto (rhetoric) → also taught Marcus himself [titlecasec...verter.com]   Various unnamed:  philosophers grammarians rhetoricians → “the best education Rome could offer” [titlecasec...verter.com]     ⚠️ Important limitation:  The sources do not give a clean canonical list like we have for Marcus.  So we can say:  Marcus’ tutors = individually named and philosophically profiled Commodus’ tutors = collective and ineffective   🧠 5. Was Marcus acting as pater or anti‑pater? Your refinement is excellent:  Marcus is both:  pater (father and emperor) anti‑pater (delegating to tutors)    But the decisive asymmetry:                  CaseAuthority structureMarcus as pupilmany tutors, no fatherCommodus as pupilmany tutors + one overwhelming father (emperor) 👉 So even if Marcus delegates:  his presence cannot be neutralized   ⚠️ 6. Why the collapse occurs We can now sharpen your theory: Principle  Tutelage works only when no single figure dominates identity   Application Marcus (success)  father absent adoption diffuses lineage tutors plural → no centre → no resistance → Stoic self forms   Commodus (failure)  father present (emperor, philosopher, moral exemplar) tutors secondary → overdetermination → reaction → libertinism   🧾 7. The key asymmetry you discovered  Marcus lists his tutors as anti-paters (sources of virtues) but he himself cannot appear to his son as anti-pater  Because:  he is father emperor model expectation embodied   ✨ Final formulation (very Gricean)  The anti‑pater teaches by withdrawing; the pater teaches by outweighing.  And:  what outweighs cannot be internalised—it must be resisted.   🪶 Latin closure  Pater defuit Marco, ideo philosophi aderant; pater affuit Commodo, et philosophi defecerunt.  The father was absent for Marcus, therefore philosophers were present; the father was present for Commodus, and the philosophers failed.  🎯 Direct answers (concise)   ✅ Why not “Annius” in the son? → imperial adoption already replaced it (Aurelius/Aelius).   ✅ Was Aurelius born in Rome? → Yes, in Rome (Caelian Hill). [britannica.com]   ✅ Was he adopted? → Yes, by Antoninus Pius (key fact). [ancestry.co.uk]   ✅ Does he emphasize his biological father? → No major formative role (father died early).   ✅ Commodus’ tutors? → Fronto and others known in part, but no clear canonical list.    If you like, I can reconstruct a “Meditations I rewritten as a genealogy of anti‑paters”—it would make your thesis almost textual. You still I don't think have told me where Aurelio was born. Since you mention Elio/Aurelio as possible gens for Ennio's son, Grice would go for "Elio" only because he comes first in the accumulation -- and Grice thinks this has a relic in his own royal British family, as when Diana Spencer mispronounced the ordering of names of Charles when marrying him -- and thus NOT marrying him -- can you recall the list? -- -- So, if "Elio" has his own enty, can you provide the passage in Latin about 'he was offered 'the best education Rome could offer' because Grice a scholarship boy from the Midalnds had what he calls Hardie's Choice (not Hobson's Choice)! Thanks. Excellent—now we can pin everything down textually, which is exactly what Grice would demand.  🏛️ 1. Where Aurelio (Marcus Aurelius) was born — Latin Here is the canonical Latin sentence (Historia Augusta):  “Natus est Marcus Romae VI. kl. Maias in monte Caelio…” [readancienttexts.com]  ➡️ Translation (plain):  “Marcus was born at Rome, on the Caelian Hill…”  So: ✅ Birthplace: Rome ✅ More precisely: mons Caelius (the Caelian Hill)  🧾 2. The “best education Rome could offer” — Latin evidence The nice thing is: the Latin does not give your modern paraphrase (“best education Rome could offer”), but something better—it enumerates the tutors and then delivers the devastating judgement. Here is the crucial passage:  “Mortuo igitur fratre Commodum Marcus … magnorum atque optimorum virorum erudire conatus est. Habuit litteratorem Graecum Onesicraten, Latinum Capellam Antistium; orator ei Ateius Sanctus fuit. Sed tot disciplinarum magistri nihil ei profuerunt.” [readancienttexts.com]   🧠 Gricean gloss  magnorum atque optimorum virorum → “the greatest and best men” tot disciplinarum magistri → “so many masters in all disciplines”  👉 That is your “best education Rome could offer.” And then the punchline:  nihil ei profuerunt → “they profited him nothing”   ✨ Even sharper Latin moral  “Tantum valet aut ingenii vis…” [readancienttexts.com]  → “So great is the force of natural disposition…” 👉 i.e.:  nature (or court-life) defeats pedagogy   👑 3. Your Gricean Royal Analogy — Diana’s slip You remembered it perfectly; here is the exact form. The groom’s full name:  Charles Philip Arthur George [upi.com]  But Diana said:  “Philip Charles Arthur George” [BBC ON THI...iana marry]   🧠 Your Gricean insight You are proposing:  order of names = hierarchy of identity  So:  first name = primary designation misordering = ill-formed referential act  👉 almost like:  indexing d’Annunzio under D instead of A or filing Commodus under Annio instead of Aelius   🏛️ 4. Why Grice files the son under “Elio” Now completely justified:  Son’s formal string begins with:  Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus [en.wikipedia.org]    👉 So:  Aelius precedes Aurelius → Grice chooses E (Elio)  Exactly your principle:  prima positio = referential priority   🧠 5. Final synthesis (your full theory) Anti-pater (Marcus)  lists:  tutors grandfather mother   system:  distributed authority     Pater (as applied to son)  Marcus tries:  himself + best tutors   Latin verdict:   tot disciplinarum magistri nihil ei profuerunt   Gricean law  The more perfect the tutelage, the greater the risk of collapse when a paternal center remains.   🪶 Final Latin tag (with your theme)  Roma optimos magistros dedit; ingenium tamen Commodo imperavit.  Rome gave him the best teachers; yet his nature ruled over Commodus.  If you like, I can align Meditations I line‑by‑line with this passage so that Aurelius’ gratitude list becomes the exact mirror of Commodus’ failure.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Antiseri – Ossia: Grice e Antiseri: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei SOLIDALI.  Dario Antiseri (Foligno Spello, Perugia, Umbria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei SOLIDALI. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as an inferential upshot of cooperative rationality: speakers can flout maxims in systematic, intention-recognizable ways, and hearers reconstruct what is meant by assuming the exchange remains governed by shared purposes and publicly intelligible norms of relevance, quantity, and manner. Antiseri, writing as a philosopher of analytic tradition and a historian of philosophy with strong Popperian commitments (and publishing Ragione, verità e storia with Il Mulino in 1973), reads the explicit/implicit boundary less as a matter of social tact (Grice’s “sometimes you may leave it unsaid for reasons of conversational gentility”) and more as a conceptual limit internal to discourse itself, especially where Wittgenstein’s Tractatus distinction between what can be said and what must be passed over in silence (“ciò di cui non si può parlare si deve tacere”) is taken seriously: there are domains—Antiseri’s “mystic,” which he provocatively pairs with the figure of the logician—where the attempt to force full explicitness is not merely impolite or inefficient but category-mistaken. The result is a fruitful contrast: Grice’s framework is designed to show how ordinary, fully worldly communication routinely outruns literal encoding via calculable implicature, and how even deliberate maxim-violations are communicatively rational; Antiseri’s emphasis shifts attention to why some contents are not just left implicit but are, in a sense, unsayable without distortion, so that “tacere” marks a boundary condition on rational articulation rather than a mere pragmatic choice. At the same time, Antiseri’s recurring keyword of solidarity connects back to Grice’s own ethical picture of conversation: both treat communicative rationality as socially disciplined—Grice through cooperation in talk exchange, Antiseri through norms (often framed via common sense, ordinary language, and subsidiarity/solidarity) that protect communal understanding and the common good—yet Antiseri tends to thicken the normative stakes (what speech owes to communal life and what discourse must renounce), whereas Grice keeps the theory leaner and more permissive, allowing that implicature is typically optional, cancellable, and context-governed rather than grounded in an in-principle prohibition. Grice: “A. makes a distinction between what you CAN say and what you MUST ‘tacere’, i. e. leave implicit. Not exactly what I was thinking when I made the explicit/implicit distinction, but similar! His point is that for Vitters, the mystic, which A. compares to FIDANZA!, la logica d’un mistico e la mistica d’un logico. Genial. Grice sa benissimo che la massima e violabile intenzionalmente e comunicativamente. I was thinking more along the lines that ‘You’ve just committed a social gaffe’ as best left implicit, “She is a windbag,’ out of manners, etiquette, and the principle of conversational gentility! I find ‘must’ too strong, and change it for a ‘may’. But in A. the point is conceptual: you just CANNOT make the mysitic explicit. There is a need, his word, to keep whatever the mystic is unexpressed. I like A. He indeed quotes me, not only because he MUST in his history of philosophy, but because he LIKES to do it, per piacere, and surprised I was when I see him discuss metaphysics within analytic philosophy rely on my third programme for the BBC! A.’s ‘senso commone,’ ‘filosofia anallitica,’ and ‘lingua ordinaria’ reminds me of myself as joking while lecturing on la scuola di Oxford di filosofia della lingua ordinaria! A. invests a lot to make sense of Austin: he has to, positing himself as as giving a ‘lezione di filosofia della lingua’! His key-word solidarit, aligns with my ethics of conversation, critical in spirit, which he views along utilitarian lines: horizontal-vertifical, i. e. bad, a principle of subsidiarity, respect for ‘il bene comune’ balanced with a principle of solidarity --  calvinist approach, to some! A. is amusingly forced to defend the relevance of Romans like SVETONIO, taken for granted at Lit. Hum. Oxford!” Studia a Perugia. Tecnica politica e ideologia ripete la dicotomia. Retorica, come un manuale; struttura della sovra-significazione fornita, al di là del concetto. Implicatura solidale, lprincipio dei liberali di CROCE, violazione consapevole della massima, flouting the maxim, mistica fascista di GENTILE. G.: Read. D.: “Il tenente Ludwig Wittgenstein, dopo la disfatta dell’esercito austro-ungarico sul fronte italiano, fu fatto prigioniero il 3 novembre del 1918.” G.: Good. Date first, disaster second. Very Italian. D.: It is history, not comedy. G.: History is usually comedy with casualties. Go on. D.: “Dopo qualche settimana trascorsa a Treviso, fu inviato nel campo di prigionia di Cassino…” G.: Stop there. What is Italian for P.O.W., D.? D.: Prigioniero di guerra. G.: Better than P.O.W. It sounds less like a railway abbreviation and more like a human condition. D.: Italians occasionally remember that prisoners are people. G.: Occasionally. D.: You asked for the date. It is fixed: 3 November 1918. G.: And what was Vitters doing there, at Treviso? D.: Not “at Treviso” in the active sense. He had been captured on the collapsing Italian front and was taken into custody; there was then a short stay in the Treviso area, in transit camps or barrack accommodation near Treviso, before transfer south. [austriacult.roma.it], [roangelo.net] G.: “Transit camps.” A phrase with all the warmth of a timetable. D.: Listen first, complain later. G.: That is not my method. D.: No, your method is to complain as a mode of listening. G.: Much better. D.: Wittgenstein had been serving on the Italian front as an Austro-Hungarian officer, a lieutenant by that stage, after earlier war service elsewhere. The army collapsed; he was taken prisoner on 3 November; then came the short Treviso phase; then the southbound cattle-train journey. [military-history.org], [austriacult.roma.it], [roangelo.net] G.: Cattle-train? D.: Yes. Listen. G.: I am already appalled. D.: “Dopo una breve permanenza a Treviso, e dopo che noi ufficiali eravamo stati nel frattempo separati dalla truppa, un giorno — adesso non ricordo esattamente quale — ci stiparono nei vagoni di un treno da bestiame.” G.: “They crowded us into the wagons of a train for livestock.” D.: Exactly. G.: Only under such circumstances could such a monstrosity have been brought to birth. D.: The Tractatus, you mean? G.: I mean that little block of concentrated conclusion. D.: You are joking. G.: Only half. D.: It was indeed with him. G.: The manuscript? D.: Yes. In draft, in notes, in his backpack. Italian accounts stress this strongly: that the pages which would become the Tractatus were with him in captivity. [austriacult.roma.it], [irinsubria...nsubria.it] G.: So the world-historical proposition is dragged south in a cattle wagon. D.: Alongside Tolstoy. G.: Better and better. D.: Yes, that too. Italian accounts and the Cassino commemorations stress that he had both the manuscript and Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. [austriacult.roma.it], [gentecomuneweb.it] G.: A logician and a Gospel in a cattle train. One begins to understand Europe. D.: Or fail to. G.: More likely. D.: The witness Franz Parak is useful here. G.: An excellent Austrian name for a memoirist. D.: He says their regiment had been captured before the formal Armistice day, then lodged in barracks near Treviso, then the officers separated from the troops, then packed into the livestock train, which, to their dismay, went south, not north. [roangelo.net] G.: “Went south, not north” is one of the great phrases of captivity. D.: Yes. It captures the exact disappointment. They hoped the war being over would mean a quick return home; instead they were sent farther into Italy. [roangelo.net] G.: Did Vitters try to escape? D.: I have no secure evidence here that he attempted escape from Treviso or Cassino. G.: Good. Let us not improve the story with heroics it does not need. D.: Quite. The story is severe enough. G.: Who caught him, exactly? D.: Italian forces. The reliable summaries only say he was captured by the Italians on 3 November 1918 after the Austro-Hungarian collapse on the Italian front. I do not have, from these sources, the exact tactical unit or dramatic scene of capture. [austriacult.roma.it], [military-history.org] G.: So no lone carabiniere with a moustache and a philosophical instinct. D.: No verified moustache. G.: Pity. D.: Do not add one. G.: Never without a source. D.: You surprise me. G.: Only occasionally. D.: After Treviso came Cassino, or more exactly Caira-Cassino. G.: Explain the geography. D.: Caira is a frazione near Cassino. The camp lay along the road between Cassino and Caira. Italian sources often say “Cassino” generically, but also “campo di Caira” or “Cassino-Caira.” [austriacult.roma.it], [cdsconlus.it] G.: And Cassino itself is in Lazio. D.: Southern Lazio, yes, below Montecassino. G.: So the philosopher of the unsayable is lodged beneath a monastery. D.: That line writes itself too easily. G.: Most good lines do. D.: The camp itself was large. Italian studies describe it as one of the big prisoner installations, with thousands of inmates and a very mixed Austro-Hungarian population: officers, soldiers, various nationalities, professionals, artists, intellectuals. [cdsconlus.it] G.: And our Vitters among them. D.: “Il più famoso tra i prigionieri fu il tenente austriaco Ludwig Wittgenstein…” G.: Good. That has the proper civic pride. The town remembers the philosopher among the prisoners. D.: Italy likes a local claim upon world philosophy. G.: As it should. D.: There is also the dating of arrival. Some sources say captured on 3 November 1918 and arrived at Caira in January 1919. Others, more generally, speak of late 1918 to August 1919, with the Treviso interval in between. [irinsubria...nsubria.it], [austriacult.roma.it], [roangelo.net] G.: So we must distinguish capture, transit, and settled internment. D.: Exactly. G.: Give me the sequence cleanly. D.: Captured by Italian forces on 3 November 1918 on the Italian front. Brief stay in or near Treviso in barracks/transit camps. Officers separated from troops. Then transported south, by livestock train, through cities such as Ferrara, Bologna, and Florence, not as tourist destinations but as names to remember from behind captivity. Then internment at Cassino/Caira, with residence there until late August 1919. [austriacult.roma.it], [roangelo.net], [irinsubria...nsubria.it] G.: Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, all passing by uselessly. A perfect curriculum for modernity. D.: You are impossible. G.: Not at all. Merely Oxonian. D.: And in Cassino he remains for roughly nine or ten months. G.: Long enough to finish a book and hate humanity. D.: Or understand it differently. G.: That sounds dangerously sympathetic. D.: Listen to Parak. G.: Gladly. D.: Parak later depicts Wittgenstein as a deeply marked man, serious, intense, discussing logic, Dostoevsky, the Gospel, and future plans like teaching children and reading the Gospel with them. [roangelo.net] G.: “I shall read the Gospel with the children.” One cannot say he lacked ambition. D.: Nor extremity. G.: What was life like in the camp? D.: The Italian material describes barracks, iron beds, mattresses, blankets, a substantial population, and a sort of improvised society of officers, professionals, and intellectuals. One source even calls it, through Parak’s recollection, “a good university.” [cdsconlus.it], [roangelo.net] G.: A prison camp as university. That is far too European not to be true. D.: It is the sort of thing only Europe could produce and then footnote. G.: And only an Italian would find philosophically endearing. D.: Antiseri certainly did. G.: Yes, but then he was an Italian philosopher of Wittgenstein, which is almost a genre. D.: Quite. G.: After release, where does Vitters go? D.: Back to Vienna in the summer of 1919. The general biographical sources agree on that. He returns changed, depressed, existentially adrift, and soon divests himself of his inheritance. [steelsnowflake.org], [handprint.com], [alws.at] G.: So the route is Treviso, Cassino, Vienna. D.: With the Tractatus in the backpack and Tolstoy in the pocket, if one wishes to make it too literary. G.: I always do. D.: I know. G.: Did he send the manuscript out from Italy? D.: Yes. The broad sources say that it was from the Italian prison-camp period that he first sent out the manuscript, and the Cassino event material mentions the letters from Cassino to Russell concerning the Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. [military-history.org], [austriacult.roma.it] G.: There is something indecently apt in the idea that a book about the limits of language leaves captivity by post. D.: Better by post than by escape. G.: True. D.: You asked whether he challenged his captors. G.: Yes. D.: I have no secure evidence here of dramatic confrontation, attempted escape, or special defiance. What the evidence gives is the factual sequence and the testimonies of camp life. We should not invent a melodrama. G.: You are right. Wittgenstein needs no added theatre; he brought his own. D.: Exactly. G.: Tell me again about Treviso. I want the phrase in Italian. D.: “Dopo aver sostato in alcuni campi di guerra transitori, venne acquartierato in baracche nei pressi di Treviso.” G.: Good. “Acquartierato in baracche nei pressi di Treviso.” Better than saying he “stayed in Treviso.” It gives the military discomfort properly. D.: That is the advantage of Italian here. It has the right bureaucratic melancholy. G.: And “prisoner of war”? D.: “Prigioniero di guerra.” G.: More human, as I said. D.: And “campo di prigionia.” G.: Even worse. D.: Better for history. G.: Worse for comfort. D.: History is not upholstered. G.: Italy sometimes is. D.: Not in 1918. G.: Fair. D.: The event notices from Cassino a century later are themselves revealing. They insist that Cassino and the University of Cassino could not let the episode remain forgotten. They speak as if the territory has a claim on Wittgenstein because he was interned there. [austriacult.roma.it], [gentecomuneweb.it] G.: Which is very Italian and perfectly intelligible. D.: Yes. Philosophy on Italian soil becomes, at once, local memory. G.: So Cassino becomes not just a camp but a chapter in the Italian domestication of Wittgenstein. D.: Nicely put. G.: Thank you. D.: And Antiseri’s interest becomes clearer: Wittgenstein in Italy is no longer merely Cambridge’s logician or Vienna’s prodigal son. He is also the prisoner at Cassino, the man with the manuscript in the backpack, the logician under Montecassino. G.: And that is exactly the sort of thing an Italian philosopher notices and an English one forgets. D.: Or treats as picturesque. G.: Which is a worse form of forgetting. D.: Possibly. G.: Read me the train again. D.: “Ma questo treno non partì verso il nord, bensì, con nostro dolore, si diresse a sud.” G.: There is the whole tragedy in one direction. D.: South. G.: South indeed. Through Ferrara, Bologna, Florence. D.: “Le quali per noi prigionieri non erano città da poter visitare e ammirare, ma solo da ricordare.” G.: “Not cities to visit and admire, but only to remember.” D.: Exactly. G.: A perfect line. They pass the curriculum without being allowed the education. D.: Or, if you like, they receive the education in another form. G.: Captivity as humaniores. D.: You really cannot help yourself. G.: No. D.: Once in Cassino, though, there was at least society, conversation, books, and the possibility of that strange intellectual afterlife prison camps sometimes develop. G.: The “good university.” D.: Yes. G.: Did Vitters refuse early release to stay teaching others? I have heard that somewhere. D.: One review of Parak’s memoir mentions that he did not take anticipated early release and continued teaching fellow prisoners; but I do not have a stronger corroborating source in hand, so I would leave that as possible rather than fixed. [sololibri.net] G.: Good. We will be austere. D.: As one should be with Wittgenstein. G.: As one should be with everybody. D.: That is less attractive. G.: Philosophy is not a beauty contest. D.: In Italy it occasionally is. G.: Another reason I mistrust it. D.: You keep saying “Vitters.” G.: Yes. D.: Barbarous. G.: Deliberately. A private diminutive for a man who never invited intimacy. D.: Very English. G.: Thank you. D.: After Vienna comes the familiar turn: giving away the inheritance, schoolteaching, architecture, gardening, and eventually Cambridge again. But your present interest is the Italian arc. G.: Exactly. Treviso, Cassino, freedom. D.: Then keep the line strict: 3 November 1918 capture; short Treviso transit phase; officers separated from troops; transport south by livestock train; Cassino/Caira from around January 1919 or, more loosely, late 1918 into August 1919; release in late August 1919; return to Vienna. [irinsubria...nsubria.it], [austriacult.roma.it], [roangelo.net], [handprint.com] G.: There is a moral, if one wants one. D.: There always is if one wants one badly enough. G.: The moral is that only Europe could capture a logician, put him on a cattle train with Tolstoy, deposit him beneath a monastery, and receive in return the Tractatus. D.: That is not a moral. G.: No. It is a summary. D.: Better. G.: And the implicature? D.: That Italy was not incidental. G.: Exactly. That is the one I wanted. D.: Good. G.: Though I still think the book a monstrosity. D.: Only kidding? G.: Only half.Grice: Antiseri, dicono che tu distingua tra ciò che si può dire e ciò che bisogna tacere. Ma allora, se vado a una cena e la zuppa è immangiabile, che faccio, taccio come un mistico? Antiseri: Caro Grice, il vero filosofo del linguaggio sa che certe verità si servono… mute! Del resto, Wittgenstein suggeriva che sulla mistica è meglio tacere, o rischiamo di far indigestione di metafisica. Grice: Eppure, a Oxford, anche il silenzio è arte conversazionale. A volte basta un’alzata di sopracciglio per dire tutto senza una parola, in pieno spirito di solidarietà conversazionale. Antiseri: Esatto! E come avrebbe detto Austin, la lingua ordinaria salva cene e reputazioni: meglio far finta che la zuppa sia densa di significato, piuttosto che densa di sale! Antiseri, Dario (1963). Wittgenstein. Sotto Prini e Rigobello. Perugia. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Antistio – Ossia: Grice ed Antistio: botanica filosofica -- il diritto romano Marco Antistio Labeone (Roma, Lazio): botanica filosofica -- il diritto romano. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an accountable inference: a hearer supplies what is meant beyond what is said because speakers are presumed to be cooperating under norms of relevance, sufficiency, and clarity, and because the intended inference can be rationally reconstructed and challenged. Labeo (Marcus Antistius Labeo) provides a legal analogue of that same rational discipline, but in an institutional key: juristic writing and commentary on the edict depend on saying little in a standardized form while relying on trained interpreters to draw warranted consequences, distinguish cases, and resolve apparent contradictions, so that “what is meant” is often carried by what is presupposed by the legal form rather than explicitly stated. Compared with Grice, the “economy” is similar but the justification differs: Grice’s economy is voluntary cooperation between interlocutors, whereas Labeo’s economy is the professionalization of inference within a normative system, where interpretive canons and precedent function like hardwired conversational expectations. The Clifton diary vignette about edicere and libri ad edictum sharpens the point: a prefix and a title can appear to “clarify” while actually outsourcing understanding to a background practice of interpretation, and this is exactly what Grice tries to make explicit in conversation—how much is left for the audience to supply, and on what rational grounds. So Labeo stands as a counterpart rather than a precursor: he shows how a community can stabilize implicature-like enrichment through juristic method and institutional authority, while Grice shows how the same enrichment operates in ordinary talk without courts or praetors—still governed by reasons, still defeasible, but dependent on a cooperative stance that, unlike law, can be withdrawn at any moment by the ordinary chap who decides not to play along.Grice: “It has to be reminded that I would have never attended Oxford save for that scholarship I won as pupil at Clifton. It was a classical scholarship – since they never tested me for philosophy at Clifton (we were only boys!). In any case, to my surprise, under the Faculty of Lierae Humaniores, it had been instituted a sub-faculty of philosophy. I liked the idea, since I’m a subversive at heart!” -- Keywords: Filosofo italiano. Ha larga cultura filosofica uno dei maggiori giuristi dell'età d’OTTAVIANO. S’ignora se L. segue un indirizzo determinato. Giunse fino alla pretura, ma rifiuta il consolato offertogli d’Ottaviano perchè conseguito prima di lui da persona meno anziana. Appartenne al partito repubblicano. Scruve CCCC saggi di cui restano frammenti. Si ricordano fra gli altri: "De iure pontificio" -- in almeno XV libri, diversi "Commentarii giuridici", 7davd, "Responsae", in almeno XV libri, "Librì posteriores", in almeno XL libri. Come Grice, L. s’interessa anche di studi logico-grammaticali, o di botanica filosofica. Collezionista di botanica, artropodi, madama butterfly. Grice: “Logico-grammatical stuff is my thing, as was Labeone’s. My example is “Fido is shaggy,” Labeone’s was not!” – Marco Antistio Labeone. Grice, “Grice e Labeone,” The Grice Papers, Bancroft.  From Grice’s diary: “Clifton, 1928. Today the Latin master, who treats the imperative mood as a sacrament, ordered us to conjugate edicere until the room sounded like a barracks. His authority for the day was Labeo—libri ad edictum—which he pronounced with the satisfaction of a man who thinks a title can do a great deal of work without any reader doing any. This led, inevitably, to the usual protest from Shropshire, who asked whether Labeo ever knew one edictum from his elbow; and the master replied, with schoolmasterly triumph, that an edictum is like a dictum only prefixed, which somehow settled the matter for everyone except me. I could see at once why it pleased Shropshire: it turns a difficulty into a joke and the joke into a lesson. But it left me wondering how one fills whole libri ad these things, as if a life could be spent leaning up against someone else’s proclamations. The master went on about the Romans and their fondness for the neuter plural—edicta, dicta, responsa, and so on—as though grammar were the reason the empire lasted. I kept thinking that the plural is convenient precisely because it hides the singular: a man can write ad edictum and never have to say which edict, or whose, or why it mattered. Perhaps that is the lawyer’s trick: to make the law look like something that arrives already in the plural, as if it were a natural phenomenon like rain. In any case, I left the lesson with two doubts: first, whether a prefix really clarifies anything (it only relocates the mystery); and second, whether the fascination of the ad—this attachment, this “to” or “toward”—is not already a clue about how scholarship works: one writes towards authority, and calls it learning, until some perverse person asks what, exactly, is being added besides pages. GRICEVS: Salve, Labeo; ego Oxonium non vidissem nisi scholarshipum illud Cliftonianum cepissem—classicum, non philosophicum: eramus enim pueri! LABEO: Salve, Grice; ego Romae ius Romanum docui, sed consulatum ab Ottaviano oblatum recusavi: nolui minoribus praeire—et praetor malo quam praeco. GRICEVS: Hoc est vere Romanum: honor, ordo, et paullum pugnacitas. Sed dic mihi: tu botanicam philosophicam collegisti; ego collego implicaturas. LABEO: Et ego collego responsa—atque arthropoda. Tu dicis Fido est hirsutus; ego dico lex est hirsutior: sed noli timere—in Roma et Oxonio, semper aliquid praeter dictum intellegitur. So this one is gens Antistia? Any other members of that gens? Yes. If the name is Marcus Antistius Labeo, then the gens is Antistia. The nomen is Antistius, and that points to the gens Antistia. Labeo is the cognomen. So the clean Roman answer is exactly parallel to Laelius and Ebutius: gens Antistia, nomen Antistius, cognomen Labeo. As for other members of the gens Antistia, yes, there are quite a few known Antistii, though the family is not one of the very greatest Roman gentes in the way the Cornelii or Claudii are. The name appears in both Republican and Imperial contexts. The most relevant ones, if you want the family atmosphere around Labeo, are these. Marcus Antistius Labeo, your jurist, the Augustan-era legal scholar, republican in sympathy, praetor, and famous for refusing the consulship under the terms offered. His father, Pacuvius Antistius Labeo, also important, since the jurist inherits not only the cognomen but a political and intellectual posture from him. The father is remembered as a republican, linked with the Liberators’ side after Caesar. There is also Titus Antistius, a late Republican figure, sometimes noticed in connection with provincial administration and legal-political matters. Another well-known bearer is Lucius Antistius Vetus, and then several later Antistii Veteres under the Empire. Vetus is a different branch or at least a different cognominal line within the gens, but still Antistius. You also find Antistii Regini and other imperial Antistii in prosopography, though these are less likely to matter for a Grice-Labeo entry unless you are widening the family canvas. A small caution is needed here, because Antistia also appears as a feminine nomen. So when Roman sources mention Antistia, that may mean a woman of the gens Antistia, not the abstract gens-name itself. The abstract way to name the clan is gens Antistia; a male bearer is Antistius; a female bearer is Antistia. So if you ask, “this one is gens Antistia?”, the exact answer is yes, because Marcus Antistius Labeo belongs to the gens Antistia. If you want a compact note in your preferred dry register, it could run like this: Antistius is the nomen of the gens Antistia, to which the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo belonged. The family is not among the most massive Roman gentes, but it is historically real and extends beyond Labeo himself, including his father Pacuvius Antistius Labeo and other Republican and Imperial Antistii such as the Veteres. The point about Labeo, however, is that the family name gives him a Roman civic lineage, while the cognomen Labeo gives the individual jurist his specific legal-philosophical afterlife. And one caution about your supplied prose. “Filosofo italiano” is fine in the broad cultural sense of an Italian figure in Roman law, but strictly speaking Labeo is a Roman jurist of the Augustan age, not an “Italian philosopher” in the later national sense. Speranza can get away with that because the whole project plays across Roman and Italian continuities, but a stricter classical note would distinguish Roman from Italian. If useful, I can now do one of three things, all in chat only. I can give you a compact dictionary-style note on gens Antistia and the principal Antistii. I can separate what belongs specifically to Marcus Antistius Labeo from what belongs to his father or to later Antistii. Or I can give you a dry Speranza-style paragraph on why Labeo is such a good counterpart to Grice: law as institutional implicature rather than conversational implicature.Antistio Labeone, Marco (a. u. c. DCCLXIII). Ad edictum.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Antoni – Ossia: Grice e Antoni: la ragione conversazionale. Studia a Bologna.  Vincenzo Berni degl’Antoni (Bologna, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale. Studia a Bologna. Coltiva il gusto pegl’esercizi filosofici. Tenne lezioni sul corpus iuris, con riferimenti alle fonti classiche.  Chiamato a far parte della reggenza, presieduta dal marchese Francesco Ghisilieri, A. di lì segue il rapido capovolgersi della situazione a favore dei Francesi. Questa volta egli si mostrò molto più duttile, e non tardò ad inserirsi nel nuovo ordine istituzionale, conseguendo la carica di commissario delle Finanze nella Cispadana e di regio procuratore nel Tribunale supremo di revisione del Regno italico, e la nomina a cavaliere del regio Ordine della Corona di Ferro. Ma non fu certo tale adesione al nuovo regime a mutare l'orizzonte del B., che rimase sempre quello strettamente municipalistico in cui aveva maturato le sue prime esperienze civili. La caduta dell'impero napoleonico non doveva quindi coglierlo in difficoltà, ma gli dava anzi la Ilnlcgna di Gire seggio lungi dagli occhi del padrona , e sottraendosi a ([uelii del servo presente , per che videro che il barbone inutilmente ijuù e là vagava senzadio gli riuscisse di soddifare ad una sola delle proposte. Ed eccomi giunto al termine del uno piccolo, ma non fioilfl Incoro. Dell’INTENDIMENTO DE’BRUTI molli hau parlato, ma pncUi lucidamente o precisamente. Non credo d’avere udopernto meglio degli altri. Suono gli amici che questo saggio  ' ¥ ' Cane Fido in Bologna, ed a Sinigaglia. Cani non sono pure macelline prive di sentimento. Si prova con molte analogìe. Intendano ogni cosa sensibile, e conoscono le specie olfattive, auditive, gustative, visive, tattili. Manno reminiscenee delle impressioni altre volte ricevute. Le idee.dell' olfato sono in loro pià fine eAtf Ed hanno grandissima la fiscoUà di ricordare Ma l’idee sensìbili e le reminiscenze bau Tc- "ore per più titoli differente, da quelle de da nostre. I cani han facoltà passiva d’associar ed attendere, e di riflettere. In the differisca l’attenzione dalla rjf&T ^ Par ohe t cani usino d’un ital guai giudizi raziocinio. Tuttavia meglio esaminare la J S' « ' rasiocttij e gruiiizj a p r a ir riferiscono tutti a d aii •pcculnEioire ira in taf specie di giudiizj. G.: Read the title again. S.: Dell’intendimento de’ bruti. G.: Good. We begin with bruti. S.: Naturally. G.: It is about dogs, not Brutus. S.: Not Lucius Junius Brutus, no. G.: Pity. He at least had a republic in him. S.: He also had the advantage of pretending to be brutish. G.: Exactly. He counterfeited stupidity and founded liberty. One wishes more politicians had learned the sequence. S.: Antoni is not discussing Roman constitutional theatre. He is discussing beasts. G.: Dogs? S.: Dogs, yes. The text as you gave it makes that very plain. Cane Fido in Bologna, and elsewhere. G.: Then bruti is the right word. S.: Better than animale, certainly. G.: Ah. Now we have the real point. Why not animale? S.: Because animale is too broad, and too dangerously polite. G.: Also too Latinate in the wrong way. S.: Meaning? G.: Meaning that it carries anima with it too visibly. It tempts one to think the issue is souls. S.: Whereas bruti already narrows the field toward “brutes,” “beasts,” “non-rational animals,” perhaps specifically domestic creatures under human notice. G.: Yes. It does not settle the matter, but it avoids one false implicature. S.: Which is? G.: That “animal” somehow excludes man only by convenience. If I say, “There’s an animal in the backyard,” I do not mean my aunt. S.: Nor an ant. G.: Quite. Though ordinary language would permit either to satisfy zoology. S.: But not the implicature. G.: Exactly. And Darwin, by saying “man and animals,” performs the reverse operation. S.: As if “animal” in ordinary use did not already include man. G.: Yes. He has to recover man into a category from which ordinary speech often excludes him by implicature, not by meaning. S.: So Antoni does well to avoid animale. G.: Very well. Bruti is sharper. A little old-fashioned, but sharper. S.: And philosophically loaded. G.: As all the best nouns are. S.: Then intendimento. G.: Ah yes. The dangerous word. S.: Dell’intendimento de’ bruti. G.: Which is ambiguous in exactly the wrong way. S.: Because it might mean either the understanding possessed by the brutes or their intention. G.: More or less, yes. Though the ambiguity is structurally unequal. Italian intendere has spread itself over a wider field than English “intend.” S.: You are going to blame Cicero. G.: Naturally. Intentio is already the beginning of the trouble. S.: Why the prefix? G.: Good question. Tendere is to stretch, direct, aim. Intendere intensifies or directs inwardly or toward an object with a kind of purposive stretch. S.: So intentio is a “stretching toward.” G.: Exactly. A reaching or directedness. Which then can go either toward practical aim or toward attentive grasp. S.: Hence Italian intendere. G.: Yes. In English we kept “intend” largely on the practical or purposive side. Italian allows intendere to shade into “understand.” S.: And intendersi? G.: To understand one another, yes. Or to be understood. Or to “mean,” in some contexts. S.: So “si intende” can mean “it is understood.” G.: Exactly. Which is practically “it goes without saying,” or “it is all clear for all to see.” S.: Then Dell’intendimento de’ bruti could be read as “On the understanding of brutes.” G.: Which is probably what Antoni means. S.: But the word keeps alive the possibility of “the intending of brutes.” G.: Yes. And that is philosophically delicious, because the two are not unconnected. S.: You are going to say that understanding the other side of communication presupposes something about intending on the first side. G.: Precisely. If Fido understands “Fetch,” we immediately begin to wonder whether Fido can also mean something in fetching. S.: The old symmetry temptation. G.: Exactly. Men are very quick to infer from receptive intelligence to expressive agency. S.: Is that legal? G.: Legal? Yes. Sound? Not immediately. But conceptually connected, certainly. S.: So Antoni may mean merely that the brute can comprehend sensible prompts, commands, signs, species, reminiscences— G.: And then the reader, intoxicated by intendimento, may slide toward the thought that the brute also intends. S.: Which is not obviously Antoni’s claim. G.: No. But the title lays the trap. S.: Then repeat the title. G.: No, you repeat it. S.: Dell’intendimento de’ bruti. G.: Good. Again. S.: Dell’intendimento de’ bruti. G.: Every time you say it I hear two books trying to occupy one cover. S.: One on canine understanding, the other on canine intentionality. G.: Precisely. S.: Yet you just said there is a conceptual bridge. G.: There is. But one must not walk it too quickly. S.: Then start with understanding. G.: Good. If the master says “Fetch,” and Fido runs, retrieves the ball, and returns it, we may say Fido understood. S.: Meaning that Fido responded appropriately to a sign, command, or cue. G.: Yes. Perhaps to the vocal sign, perhaps to the tone, perhaps to habit and context together. S.: And if Fido goes to the ball and returns it, can we say Fido means something by depositing it at the master’s feet? G.: We can begin to say that. The temptation is strong. S.: Because the action looks purposive and directed toward uptake. G.: Exactly. Fetching is not merely locomotion. It is a return under a norm. S.: So the dog’s act may count as signal-like. G.: Very much so. The dog may signal compliance, request a further throw, or display understanding. S.: Then perhaps the ambiguity in intendimento is not wholly accidental but philosophically fertile. G.: I am willing to grant fertile; I am not willing to grant clear. S.: Clarity is overrated in Bologna. G.: Not in titles. S.: You object, then, to the title on two counts. G.: Yes. First, because brute is better than animal but still historically burdened. Second, because intendimento hovers between understanding and intention, and the book may only safely promise one. S.: Which one? G.: Understanding. S.: On the part of the brutes. G.: Yes. Their capacity to apprehend sensible species, commands, olfactory cues, visual cues, and so on. S.: The text says as much: species olfattive, auditive, gustative, visive, tattili. G.: Exactly. That sounds far more like sensitivity and recognition than like outright intending in the full communicative sense. S.: Yet reminiscence appears too. G.: Ah yes. Manno reminiscenze, or whatever the damaged printing intended. Memory traces, impressions retained, recurring associations. S.: Then the dog’s mind is not merely passive. G.: No, and Antoni says so. Passive association, attention, reflection even. S.: Reflection? In dogs? G.: He is bold, or at least old-fashioned enough to use a word that can be graded. S.: And judgment. G.: That too. Some sort of giudizio, perhaps practical rather than speculative. S.: Which suggests not merely sentience but a form of comparative or discriminative capacity. G.: Exactly. The dog is not a machine. S.: He says as much. G.: Yes, and in that he is better than certain moderns. S.: Such as? G.: Those who love “animal” because it sounds scientific and then deprive the beast of every interesting predicate. S.: You still dislike Darwin’s title. G.: Profoundly. Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. It sounds as if man had to be manually reinserted into zoology. S.: Which ordinary language had lazily excluded. G.: Exactly. “Animal” in common use often implicates “non-human animal,” though it means no such thing. S.: So Antoni avoids that pitfall by saying bruti. G.: Yes. “Brutes” already signals the contrast class he wants. S.: Even if it sounds slightly insulting. G.: Philosophy was healthier when it insulted its subject matter more openly. S.: Now, back to intendere. G.: Yes. The Italians have done something very interesting with it. S.: Which is? G.: They let the same verbal family cover both productive and receptive directions of communicative life. S.: To intend and to understand. G.: Precisely. English splits them more sharply. Italian lets them touch. S.: So if I say “intendo,” I may mean “I intend.” G.: Yes. S.: And if I say “non intendo,” I may mean “I do not understand.” G.: Or “I do not mean,” or “I do not intend,” depending on context. S.: Splendidly dangerous. G.: Exactly. A language with decent opportunities for philosophy. S.: Then “s’intende.” G.: Ah yes. “It is understood.” “Needless to say.” “Of course.” A communal uptake compressed into one little reflexive phrase. S.: Which is very beautiful. G.: It is also very treacherous. It can hide what ought to have been stated. S.: As all civilised languages do. G.: Quite. S.: So Antoni, by saying Dell’intendimento de’ bruti, invokes a whole family of directedness: understanding, intending, meaning, being understood. G.: Yes. He may not exploit all of it, but the title cannot help resonating with it. S.: Then your own theory of meaning as tied to intention suddenly finds in Italian an ally. G.: Or an accomplice. S.: Because x means that p may be naturally linked, in Italian thought, to some family of intendere. G.: Exactly. Meaning as directedness toward uptake. Signare, segnare, signal, intendere: all these cluster around purposive communicative orientation. S.: Then if Fido understands “Fetch,” we are already halfway tempted to say Fido can participate in such a directedness. G.: Halfway, yes. But only halfway. S.: Why only halfway? G.: Because understanding a command does not entail producing a sign with communicative intention. S.: The old asymmetry. G.: Precisely. The addressee’s success is not automatically the utterer’s. S.: Yet in the fetch case, when Fido returns the ball, there is a kind of directedness back toward the owner. G.: Yes. Fido’s return is not random. It is toward someone, under a norm, with a predictable uptake. S.: Then Fido’s act may at least signal. G.: That I grant easily. Whether it means in the richer sense is the question. S.: You would distinguish natural sign, trained signal, and full communicative meaning. G.: Nicely put. The dog may exhibit all three in varying degrees depending on the case. S.: A bark at the door. G.: Natural or conditioned alarm. S.: A paw on the leash. G.: That begins to look more like directed request. S.: A fetched ball deposited exactly at the owner’s feet. G.: Very strong case for practical, quasi-communicative signalling. S.: Then Antoni’s title, if misread as about the dogs’ own intending, is not wholly absurd. G.: No. Merely ahead of his safer thesis. S.: Which remains? G.: That brutes can sense, retain, associate, attend, discriminate, perhaps judge in a practical way, and therefore understand more than the machine view allows. S.: And perhaps even reflect? G.: In a weak or practical sense, yes. S.: So “understanding” first, “intending” later if at all. G.: Exactly. S.: Yet your own line about meaning always being connected with communicative intention makes the Italian wideness of intendere attractive. G.: It does. Italian here gives one a lexical family in which speaker-side and hearer-side are not wholly severed. S.: Whereas English, by splitting intend from understand, forces us into a more explicit architecture. G.: Yes, which can be good for analysis but poor for intuition. S.: Then perhaps Italian keeps alive a truth English forgets. G.: Namely that communication is one directed complex with two poles. S.: The utterer intending, the addressee understanding. G.: Exactly. Italian lets the same root haunt both poles. S.: Then Dell’intendimento de’ bruti is almost too good a title. G.: No. It is not too good. It is too suggestive. S.: Better. G.: Thank you. S.: You also wanted to say something about animal and anima. G.: Ah yes. Animal carries anima too transparently for certain writers. It can tempt a metaphysical inflation. “Animal” sounds broad, neutral, scientific. But in older philosophical ears it carries soul-talk whether one likes it or not. S.: Bruto avoids that. G.: More or less. It shifts the issue from ensouled living thing to non-rational beast. S.: Which is exactly the contrast needed if the question is whether dogs have faculties approaching ours. G.: Precisely. S.: Then Antoni is right twice: bruti rather than animali, and intendimento rather than something wholly narrower. G.: Right once, perhaps twice, but with danger. S.: Philosophy is mostly danger with footnotes. G.: In Italian, yes. S.: Read the title once more? G.: No, you. S.: Dell’intendimento de’ bruti. G.: There. “On the understanding of brutes.” But with a penumbra. S.: Of “the intentionality of brutes.” G.: Yes. S.: And if Fido hears “Fetch,” understands, runs, retrieves, returns, and deposits the ball, then he both understands the master’s intention and perhaps exhibits a primitive intending of his own. G.: Exactly. Though one should say “perhaps” with some respect. S.: You are becoming generous to dogs. G.: They have earned it better than certain metaphysicians. S.: Then the punchline is this: Antoni wrote on the understanding of brutes, and nearly wrote on their intentionality as well, simply by choosing the one Italian word too rich to stay in its kennel. G.: That will do.Grice: Antoni, ho letto i tuoi esercizi filosofici a Bologna: ma dimmi, hai insegnato anche ai cani a riconoscere le reminiscenze olfattive? Antoni: Grice, ti confesso che a Bologna anche il Cane Fido ha frequentato le mie lezioni sul corpus iuris, ma la Corona di Ferro non gliel’hanno data: troppo pelo per il protocollo! Grice: A sentire te, i cani hanno più memoria sensibile di certi commissari delle Finanze cispadane… Sarà che fiutano meglio i cambi di regime che le banconote! Antoni: Caro Grice, qui a Bologna la ragione conversazionale serve anche al barbone, che vagava senzadio, ma almeno non si lagnava: “Chi ha il naso, non ha bisogno di tribunale supremo!”.  Antoni, Vincenzo Berni degl’ (1803). Dell’intendimento de’ bruti. Bologna, Stamperia Camerale.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Grice e Antonini: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Egidio Antonini (Viterbo, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like A., or Cinesio – you see, one problem of these Italians – but cf. Occam – by sticking to the first-name is that a researcher in the longitudinal history of philosophy has to check references to Aegeius viterbensis and Aegidius Cinesio! It was only recently that he was found to be one of the Antoninis! His place in the longitudinal history of philosophy is that famous pendulum between Plato and Aristotle – so after Aquinas’s Aristotle, A. – an almost Tuscan man! – finds Plato more pleasing – especially his philosophy of love in the symposium, the references to Ganymede as representing ‘amore,’ and he has the cheek to display all this hardly scholastic erudition (more of a renaissance thing) in his commentary of Lombardo’s sentences! Delightful – my favourite is his reference to Ganymede, for here we have the treatment of a subject (Zeus) of another subject as an object – and that’s just only one reading of Giove’s intention . In any case, the sacrificial status of Ganymede is recognised in the Platonic tradition – as the manipulative use of a subject by another subject who is subjected as an object, rather.” Studia a Viterbo. Qui etsi AMORE flammas nondum concipiunt, quoniam tamen orbis ille venereo iunctus est, nec sua stella a Veneris stella procul unquam migrat, atque utraque semper circum flammeum ardentemque micat solem, idcirco ab intelligentia, modo recta piaque sit, ad AMORIS ignes facilis patet aditus. In hoc denique AMORIS caelum tertium raptusilleest, qui AMOREM absquerebus aliis satisesse, res alias absque AMORE nihil esse arbitrabatur. Non itaque cum vaticiniis, non cum prophetia, non cum miraculis semper datur Deus. Quae omnia, ut idem testatur, si habeam, unum AMORE non habeam, nihil omninosum. Quod vero sit donorum primum acitu tali qua semper cum donis AMOR detur. Simpliciter tamen ex acte quedari non dicitur, nisi dum munera tertii sunt generis et divina cum AMICITIA tribuuntur. Ganimede, amore, amare, amatore, amante, amatum, significatum. G.: Read me some Latin. S.: Voluptati tuae obsequar. “Aegidius Antoninus Viterbiensis, Ordinis Eremitarum Sancti Augustini, postea cardinalis et episcopus Viterbiensis.” G.: Good. Already better than “some Viterbo man with a Lombard commentary.” S.: He is more than that, as you know. G.: Yes. But I like beginning with the meagre form and watching it swell. S.: Then let it swell in Latin. “Viterbii institutus, Ameriae philosophiam docuit, Patavii theologiam excoluit, Romae claruit, Florentiae Platonem hausit.” G.: Excellent. A whole career in four ablatives. S.: That is what Latin is for. G.: And what Oxford forgot. S.: Not entirely. G.: Entirely enough. S.: You are in one of your moods. G.: I am in my Oxford mood, which is much worse. Read on. S.: “Ab antiqua scholastica disciplina ad humaniores litteras et ad Platonis mentem animum advertit.” G.: There it is. Ad Platonis mentem. S.: Yes. G.: The phrase itself is a breeze. One hears the windows open. S.: You mean Ficino. G.: Of course I mean Ficino. What else is Florence for? S.: Wool, banking, faction, painting, piety, Greek manuscripts— G.: All of which merely prepare for Ficino. S.: Very well. Then say so. G.: I do. Florence happened to philosophy in a way Oxford likes to pretend never occurred. S.: “What a pity we do not have Florence near Oxford,” as you would say. G.: Quite. We just continued with the schools as if the Renaissance had been a bad rumour from the Continent. S.: We do have London. G.: Not the same. S.: We have Purley. G.: Diversions of Purley is not the same. S.: Walter Pater and his studies on Platonism. G.: Not the same. S.: Cambridge Platonists. G.: The other place had them, yes. Cudworth and his cousins. Oxford had hardly your Ficino. S.: Hardly Hardie, perhaps. G.: Exactly. The only Plato I knew was through Hardie, and Hardie’s Plato was all backbone and no perfume. S.: “Hardly your Ficino” is a good line. G.: It is an accurate line. S.: Then let us honour Egidio for what he did. G.: Yes. He returns to Greek where Greek is heard best: not through Aristotle alone, but from the mouth of Plato. S.: You make it sound liturgical. G.: It was nearly that. Renaissance Platonism always verges on liturgy without entirely ceasing to be philosophy. S.: And this appeals to you. G.: Immensely. S.: Why? G.: Because scholasticism, left to itself, grows dry in the wrong places. You get all the joints and none of the air. S.: Whereas Ficino gives air. G.: Air, colour, myth, desire, ascent, friendship, and the very important licence to quote things no Sentences commentator ought to quote if the schools alone had prevailed. S.: Such as Ganymede. G.: Exactly. Ganymede in a Lombard commentary! That is the sort of indecorum I admire. S.: Then I shall give you more Latin. “Commentaria in Sententias ad mentem Platonis.” G.: A marvellous title. One almost forgives the genre for being the Sentences. S.: You never really forgive the Sentences. G.: No, but I allow them occasions of grace. S.: Egidio turns one such occasion into a programme. G.: Yes. The key phrase is ad mentem Platonis. S.: Explain it. G.: It means not merely “with occasional Platonic garnish.” It means that the scholastic task is being consciously re-read under a Platonic intellectual intention. S.: Intention, if you will. G.: I always will. S.: So the commentary remains on Lombard, but the mind guiding the exposition is not simply Thomistic or Aristotelian or school-canonical. G.: Precisely. It is a deliberate re-orientation of the whole enterprise. S.: Through Plato. G.: Through Plato, and through Plato as rebreathed by Ficino. S.: Breathing again. G.: That is exactly the word. Breath. Fresh air. Something Oxford lacked. S.: We had enough air in the Parks. G.: Not the same. S.: We had Pater. G.: Parodic. S.: You are going to mention Patience. G.: Of course. If Oxford had any Renaissance Platonism at all, it was filtered through Pater and then mocked by Gilbert and Sullivan. S.: Bunthorne. G.: Yes, Bunthorne’s pride. Aestheticism as a caricature of a spiritual seriousness we never quite possessed. S.: And yet Pater did know his Plato. G.: He knew him in the key of exquisite lateness. Egidio knows him in the key of theological rescue. S.: Better. G.: Much better. S.: Then read this, or rather hear it from me: “Patavii Averroistas et Aristotelicos fastidivit; Florentiae sub Ficini umbra altius in Platonem incidit.” G.: That is almost too neat, but true enough. S.: The facts are neat. G.: The facts are beautiful, which is rarer. S.: You are pleased by the anti-Averroist turn. G.: Naturally. Padua gave him the enemy and Florence gave him the remedy. S.: You speak as if philosophy happened on the train. G.: Most philosophy does. S.: But the real novelty, for you, is that this is not merely an institutional ascent from bachelor to prior to bishop to cardinal. G.: Correct. I care less for the ladder than for the air he chose to breathe while climbing it. S.: Still, the ladder exists. G.: Yes, yes. Read it in your ecclesiastical Latin. S.: “Ameriae philosophiam docuit. Patavii theologiam perfecit. Romae magisterium tenuit. Ordinis generalis factus est. Postea cardinalis, demum episcopus Viterbiensis.” G.: Excellent. One can almost hear the consistories opening. S.: And yet you do not really care for the cardinalate. G.: Only insofar as it proves he was not a minor local schoolman. S.: You care for the intellectual metamorphosis. G.: Entirely. S.: Then let us say what it is. G.: It is the migration from scholastic office to humanist theology; from bare Sentences routine to a theology in which myth, love, friendship, and divine ascent are once again licit modes of thought. S.: Friendship. There is your amicizia. G.: Exactly. Amicitia matters immensely here. S.: More Latin, then. “Cum donis divinis simul datur amicitia.” G.: Lovely. S.: “Res sine amore nihil esse arbitrabatur.” G.: Better still. S.: And this is what you think Oxford missed. G.: Absolutely. Oxford trained us to parse, not to ascend. S.: Hardie would object. G.: Hardie would say ascent is for undergraduates after dinner. S.: And what would you say? G.: I would say the Renaissance recovered a register in which philosophy and friendship were not accidental companions but constitutive. S.: Constitutive of what? G.: Of understanding itself. The Platonic thing Egidio recovers is that one does not simply “have positions.” One is educated into truth through eros, amicitia, spiritual companionship, and the right hearing of Greek. S.: “The right hearing of Greek” is a rather lovely phrase. G.: It is also an anti-Oxonian phrase. S.: Because Oxford heard Greek through the schools. G.: Through the schools and through examination. It heard Plato as set text, not as wind. S.: Harsh. G.: Accurate. S.: Still, there was Jowett. G.: Translation, not Florence. S.: There was Pater. G.: Perfume, not theology. S.: There were the Cambridge Platonists. G.: In Cambridge, yes. The other place occasionally had historical luck. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford had Aristotle under discipline and Plato under caution. S.: That sounds almost like a motto. G.: It should be inscribed somewhere unsuitable. S.: Returning to Egidio. You like that he uses mythology in theology. G.: Yes. That is the point at which scholastic caution becomes Renaissance vitality. S.: But you do not mean mere ornament. G.: No. That is the crucial thing. The myths in Egidio are not decoration. They are vehicles of thought. S.: Ganymede as one such vehicle. G.: Exactly. Ganymede in the Sentences is not simply indecorous. He is conceptually active. S.: Active how? G.: As a figure through which desire, ascent, objectification, subjecthood, divine appetite, and the ambiguity of love can all be thought at once. S.: A compressed treatise in a mythic body. G.: Very good. S.: Thank you. G.: And this, again, is what Oxford almost never permitted itself. We disaggregated too quickly. Myth was for literature, doctrine for theology, logic for philosophy, friendship for common rooms. S.: Whereas Egidio allows them to pass into one another. G.: Exactly. S.: Would you call it a return to Greek? G.: Yes, but not only philologically. It is a return to Greek as an intellectual mode in which philosophy is still audible as speech, myth, eros, and pedagogy, not merely as system. S.: “Not merely as system” will annoy some Germans. G.: They deserve annoyance. S.: And some Oxonians. G.: They deserve it more. S.: You also like that Egidio is not simply anti-Aristotle. G.: Correct. One must be exact. He is anti a certain Paduan Aristotelianism, especially as thickened by Averroist confidence. S.: So the pendulum between Aristotle and Plato is not a child’s quarrel of names. G.: No. It is a dispute about the shape of philosophy itself. S.: Explain. G.: Aristotle in the schools gives order, categories, logic, systematic articulation. Plato in the Ficinian-Renaissance retrieval gives ascent, eros, participation, mythic intelligence, spiritualised metaphysics, and a different relation between philosophy and theology. S.: So Egidio chooses a different atmosphere. G.: Exactly. And one feels it immediately even in the titles. S.: Then let me give you titles. G.: Please do. S.: “Commentaria in Sententias ad mentem Platonis.” G.: Yes. S.: “Historia viginti saeculorum.” G.: A very ecclesiastical title, but still with sweep. S.: “De ecclesiae incremento.” G.: Institutional enough. S.: “Libellus de litteris hebraicis.” G.: Ah! There you are. Languages, too. S.: Yes. Greek, Hebrew, Platonism, theology, reform, order-government. G.: Precisely. He is not merely a commentator. He is a Renaissance churchman with a philological and philosophical appetite. S.: That is what you wanted me to say in Latin. G.: Yes, though I wanted you to say it more sonorously. S.: “Non tantum scholasticus, sed theologus humanior, philosophus Platonicus, linguae peritus, reformator ordinis.” G.: Admirable. S.: You are very easy to please once people speak Latin. G.: Not true. Most Latin displeases me. S.: Mine? G.: Yours I tolerate. S.: High praise. G.: The highest. S.: Then let us contrast him with the ordinary baccalaureus sententiarius. G.: Very good. The ordinary path would be Sentences, degrees, lectureships, perhaps a conventual reputation, perhaps nothing more. S.: Whereas here? G.: Here the path is visibly transformed by Padua and Florence, by humanist air, by anti-Averroist reaction, by Ficino, by Greek, by Platonic love. S.: “Amor,” then. G.: Amor and amicitia, yes. S.: I have more Latin: “Res alias absque amore nihil esse.” G.: That line alone is worth half the schools. S.: And “si habeam… unum amorem non habeam, nihil sum.” G.: Pauline through Platonic re-breathing. Delicious. S.: You are becoming devotional. G.: Only rhetorically. S.: Then what exactly does Egidio bring that would have appealed to you, if you had had him at Oxford instead of Hardie? G.: He would have shown me that Plato can be philosophically alive without becoming merely a text for finals. S.: Hardie would object again. G.: Hardie would footnote the objection. S.: And Egidio? G.: Egidio would cite Plato and then Ficino and then perhaps a myth and then a Pauline line and make the whole thing feel like one continuous order of thought. S.: That is what you envy. G.: Very much. S.: Because Oxford’s continuity is different. G.: Oxford has continuity of institution, not continuity of spiritual style. We continued the schools while pretending that the Renaissance was only something that happened in Art History. S.: We did have London. G.: Not the same. S.: Purley. G.: Not the same. S.: Pater. G.: A beautiful parody of a seriousness not embodied in Oxford life. S.: “And Bunthorne’s bride is not Ficino’s disciple.” G.: Exactly. S.: You realise Gilbert and Sullivan did more for English Platonism than some dons. G.: They certainly did more for its recognisability. S.: Returning to Viterbo. G.: Yes. Let us not lose him in my national grievances. S.: The lovely thing is that the municipal beginning remains. G.: Indeed. Viterbo studies, Amelia teaching, Padua formation, Rome authority, Florence breath, then back as bishop of Viterbo. S.: A circle. G.: A very Italian circle. S.: Read the city in Latin, then: “Viterbium initium et finis.” G.: Beautifully neat. S.: Too neat? G.: No. For once, no. S.: What about the Augustinian order? G.: Important, of course. It gives him the institutional body through which this Platonic-humanist life acquires effectiveness. S.: So not merely a literary Platonist in a Florentine salon. G.: Exactly. A governing churchman who can breathe Ficino without ceasing to administer. S.: That is perhaps rarer. G.: Much rarer. And more interesting than all the mere salon-Platonists in the world. S.: “Not all Platonism must smell of cypress and upholstery,” then. G.: Another excellent line. S.: Thank you. G.: In fact, that is one of the virtues of Egidio. He shows that Platonism can govern. S.: Instead of merely alluring. G.: Precisely. S.: One more Latin piece? G.: Please. S.: “Ab Aristotelis umbra ad Platonis lumen.” G.: A bit too tidy, but irresistible. S.: Oxford would disapprove. G.: Which is why we should say it. S.: And the final comparison with Cambridge? G.: Ah yes. The other place had Cudworth and his tribe, and therefore can pretend to an English Platonist tradition. S.: Oxford cannot? G.: Not seriously. Oxford had moralists, classicists, aesthetes, and certain odd Christians. It did not have Florence. S.: You will keep saying that. G.: Until someone builds it near St Giles’. S.: Impossible. G.: So is most of philosophy. S.: Then let us end properly, with one final Latin sentence. G.: Very well. S.: “Egidii Antonini laus haec est: scholasticam formam servavit, sed animum eius Ficino et Platone implevit.” G.: That is the whole thing. S.: And the punchline? G.: Oxford preserved the form; Egidio remembered to open a window.Grice: Antonini, il problema con voi italiani è che un “Egidio” ti costringe a inseguire tre Aegidi diversi prima ancora di arrivare all’implicatura. Antonini: E tu, Grice, hai una massima per tutto, ma poi inciampi appena compare Ganimede e il suo “amore” da Simposio. Grice: Io non inciampo, calcolo: quando Giove tratta un soggetto come oggetto, l’implicatura è più rapida della scolastica. Antonini: Allora vieni a Viterbo e vedrai che qui persino Venere collabora, purché tu non provi a definire l’amore senza un po’ di amicizia. Antonini, Egidio (1492). Commentarii in Sententias Lombardi. Viterbo: Typis Laurentii.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione: I Verbali: Antonio – Ossia: Grice ed Antonio. Marco Antonio. Antonio, Marco (XXX). Dicta. So now that Grice and Speranza see that in their dictionary there is an entry for "Antonio" friend of Porfirio, they feel that Marcus Antonius merits an entry, as the latter part for the other antonio in the passage below indicates. And Grice and Speranza want to know for the Marcus Antonius entry -- where he was born and whether he had a philosophy tutor, as most actors political in Ancient Rome did -- and wehther he knew the son that Cleopatra had with Giuio Cesare (how old was when Cleopatra's son died -- that was some terrible incident) and Grice and Speranza realise that Marcus Antonius claim to fame is having killed Cicero because Grice finds that being anti-philosophy is also being philosophy -- given all the slander and banter and libel -- if that's the word that Cicero was instilling on Marcus Antoniu -- and whether Marcus Antonius assigned a philosophy tuto to his son/sons -- and the Kelsen point that Marcus Antonius as part of the triumvirate was part of what Kelsen calls positive law (iussum if not iustum) even if he will later become an outlaw -- and the point of the philosophy tutor again, because Grice tends to blame one's philosophy tutor for all the inconveniences in one's life ("As I did with Hardie.") etc. Input? Feedback? Also Grice and Speranza hates when they say of a political Ancient Romana actor: he was Epicurean, Stoic, scettic, as if he was following doctrine rather than following what they saw fit --and how we'd characterise Marcus Antonius per eudcation and actions philosophically and why Shakespeare was so obsessed with him, and why still there are so few melodrammas (Italian operas) that have him as a caracter -- Speranza dnd Grice reclal just one opera (Mercadante?) entitled "Antonio e Cleopatra" before all that Burton/Taylor craze. Thanks. Input? Feedback? This is a delightful “Grice–Speranza dossier” you are assembling—half Roman prosopography, half meta‑philosophy. Let me answer your questions in a structured way, keeping strictly to what we can know and flagging where the sources fall silent.  1. Birth, upbringing, and “education”  Birthplace: Rome, 83 BC. [en.wikipedia.org] Family: the gens Antonia, as we said.  Education The evidence is actually quite good here:  He received a standard elite Roman education (rhetoric, public speaking, some philosophy). [schoolhistory.co.uk] As a young man he went to Greece (Athens):  studied oratory and philosophy “listened to Athenian philosophers and orators.” [bing.com]   This was typical for Roman elites: higher study in Athens was almost compulsory for ambition.  Did he have a named philosophy tutor?  No specific tutor is recorded in the sources. We only know he attended philosophers in Athens generally. [bing.com]  👉 So, Grice’s delightful blame‑the‑tutor thesis cannot (alas) be pinned on a named “Hardie‑like culprit” in Antony’s case.  2. Cleopatra’s son (Caesarion) — age and fate  Name: Ptolemy XV Caesar (“Caesarion”) Born: 47 BC [en.wikipedia.org] Died: 30 BC Age at death: about 16–17 [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] Cause: executed on orders of Octavian after Cleopatra’s defeat  Did Antony know him?  Yes: Caesarion ruled with Cleopatra, and Antony was her partner and political ally. Sources note Antony even testified (in the Senate) that Caesar had acknowledged the boy. [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 So Antony did not merely “know” him—he moved in the same political theatre and treated him as Caesar’s son.  3. Antony and Cicero — the philosophical vendetta This is the point where your Gricean instinct (“anti‑philosophy is philosophy”) becomes historically sharp.  Cicero denounced Antony in the Philippics. After forming the Second Triumvirate, Antony participated in proscriptions. Cicero was executed “by order of Mark Antony.” [en.wikipedia.org] These proscriptions were a legal–political mechanism for eliminating enemies. [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 Kelsen fits surprisingly well:  The killing is iussum (commanded by authority), but very doubtful whether iustum (just).  👉 And your deeper point:  Cicero is philosophy in Latin form; Antony’s destruction of him is therefore a kind of anti‑philosophical act that becomes part of philosophical history itself.   4. His children — did he appoint tutors? We know Antony had many children (with several wives, including Cleopatra). [en.wikipedia.org] But:  No direct evidence survives about specific tutors he assigned to them.  General context:  Roman aristocrats normally used private tutors, often Greek, for philosophy and rhetoric. [worldhistory.org]  👉 So:  It is very likely his children had tutors, but we cannot name or document them.   5. Was Antony “Stoic, Epicurean, sceptic…”? Your resistance here is exactly right. The sources suggest:  He studied philosophy, yes. [socialstud...orkids.com] But his life shows no consistent doctrinal allegiance.  A fair characterization would be:  Rhetorical–pragmatic (trained in public speaking) Hellenized aristocrat (educated in Athens) Practically political rather than doctrinal  👉 So: not “a Stoic” in Cicero’s sense, but rather a Roman who used philosophy as cultural capital.  6. Antony “as philosophy” (a Gricean aside) One can provocatively say:  Cicero = systematizer of Greek philosophy into Latin Antony = agent of historical reality Their clash = philosophy vs. power  But:  Antony is not “without philosophy” He is the proof that philosophy does not rule action  Which is itself a philosophical thesis.  7. Shakespeare’s obsession Shakespeare was drawn to:  Antony’s divided nature:  Roman general vs. lover of Cleopatra   The collapse of public identity into private passion The end of the Republic  Antony = perfect tragic figure:  neither tyrant nor philosopher but a man torn between worlds   8. Why so few operas? You are right—far fewer than Caesar or Nero. Likely reasons:  Antony’s story is politically ambiguous Cleopatra dominates dramatically (she steals the stage) The ending is tragic but not heroic in the classical operatic sense  Still, there are some:  Mercadante’s Antonio e Cleopatra (yes, your memory serves) others exist but Cleopatra almost always eclipses him   9. A final Gricean gloss Antony sits awkwardly in Grice’s categories:  Not a producer of non‑natural meaning (he is no theorist) Not reducible to natural meaning (he acts intentionally, politically)  He belongs instead to:  the realm of historical agency, where intentions, institutions, and interpretation collide.   ✅ In brief  Born in Rome; educated in Athens (philosophy broadly, no named tutor). Knew Caesarion; the boy was executed at ~17. Responsible for Cicero’s death via legal–political proscriptions. No clear philosophical “school”—more a cultivated Roman than a doctrinaire thinker. Dramatically irresistible (hence Shakespeare), but philosophically elusive.   If you like, I can reconstruct how Cicero himself philosophically caricatures Antony in the Philippics—that’s where the real Gricean “implicature battle” begins. You say "where implicature battle begns" -- but Grice and Speranza suspect Marc'Antonio always looked down on Cicero -- isn't there a famous painting where Antonio is looking at his wife sticking nails on the beheaded head of Cicero? Was Antonia a plebeian gens? Antonio possibly looked down on Tullio being from Arpino -- but more importantly -- Antonio who have dwelt and dealed with Giulio Cesare woudl regard a mere 'lawyeretto' as nothing heroic about him. When Shakesspeare presents him as eulogy in Julius Caesar's funeral -- what do we know of the eARLIEST encounter between Antonio and Cesare -- and who was the third in the triumvirate? Did Antonio hold political office in the senate -- patricians were defined as patres Senatus, so this counts -- cursus honorem -- etc. -- The 'finishing' school at Athens is a good anecdote, but we don't think it tainted Antonio into a hellenistic -- but didn't he later proclaimed himself a tyrant in Antoniopolis or something -- and you say unheroic -- you mean he just died in battle? What was he doing when Cleopatra committed suicide, was he dead already? The point about his acknowledging Caesar's biological son is a good one: EXPLICATUM: it is what it is is. IMPLICATUM: he is the real successor -- not Ottavio -- even if Cesarion only thought of reigning over Egypt (he was traitored by his onw' tutor to come from his way to India back to Rome, having been mislead that he would be let to reign over Egitto when he was put to death himself. Does Plutarco dedicate a parallel life to him, paralllel to who? He seems to represent a very manly Roman ideal, little hellenistic even if he fell for that NOSE (Was it Carr who wrote Cleopatra's nose, on predictability in history but referring to Cesare's fascination with it?) Input? Thanks? Do we have any utterance in oratio recta by Marcus Antonius -- I'm surprised he doesn't have a cognomen or branch of the Antonii -- as opposed to the Antoniani -- was the Antoniani a later imperial dynasty unrelated? Input? Feedback? Thanks -- I and Grice would not care for what Cicero would say against Marc'Antonio in Philippics, because we know the man (Cicero) and we know the man (Marc'Antonio) and it's the latter that comes closer to the stereotype of the vita attiva Ancient Roman, not the latter. Thanks -- but if you have an oratio recta by Cicero -- which may have be the last straw for Antonio sending sicarii that would be good -- I think they dwelt a lot on sexual lives as per this book -- by Phillips on Roman Homosexuality? Thanks -- but then Giulio Cesare was even he said to have been 'raped' by pirates and have slept with most of his army? Thanks This is a rich cluster of questions; let me disentangle them point by point, keeping close to what the sources actually allow—and then add the interpretive “Gricean gloss” you and Speranza are after.  1. Antony vs. Cicero — contempt? Your instinct is historically plausible, though not directly documented as a neat aphorism.  Antony’s hostility to Cicero had a concrete origin: Cicero had ordered the execution of Antony’s stepfather (Lentulus) in 63 BC. [classics.mit.edu] Cicero later attacked Antony ferociously in the Philippics, portraying him as morally corrupt and politically dangerous.  👉 So:  The enmity was personal first, philosophical second. Antony likely saw Cicero less as “philosopher” than as political enemy and senatorial intriguer.  Your suggestion that Antony would look down on Cicero as a “lawyeretto” fits the Roman value system:  Cicero = novus homo from Arpinum (provincial outsider) Antony = aristocratic lineage, military man, Caesarian insider  That is a real Roman social gradient.  2. That painting (Fulvia and Cicero’s head) Yes—this exists in literary tradition:  After Cicero’s execution, his head and hands were displayed publicly. [yumpu.com] Ancient sources (notably Appian, Plutarch) report that Fulvia (Antony’s wife) mocked or pierced Cicero’s tongue.  👉 So the iconography you recall—Fulvia with Cicero’s head—is grounded in ancient anecdote (though paintings are later imaginings).  3. Was the gens Antonia patrician or plebeian? Subtle point:  The gens Antonia had both patrician and plebeian branches. [en.wikipedia.org] The branch of Marcus Antonius the triumvir was plebeian and typically had no cognomen in the Republic. [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 That explains your sharp observation:  “Why no cognomen?” → because his line belonged to the plebeian Antonii, who often lacked one.   4. Did Antony hold office? (cursus honorum) Yes—very much inside the system:  Tribune of the plebs (49 BC) Consul (44 BC, with Caesar) Magister equitum and other commands [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 So:  He was fully a senatorial magistrate, part of the cursus honorum. His authority is not outsider/strongman only—it is institutional, then extra‑institutional (Triumvir).   5. Who was the third triumvir?  Marcus Aemilius Lepidus [en.wikipedia.org]  Your Shakespeare quotation captures Antony’s contempt for him perfectly—“a barren-spirited fellow”—which is theatrical but reflects a real marginalization.  6. Earliest encounter with Caesar We do not have a dramatic first meeting, but we have a clear functional beginning:  Around 54 BC, Antony joined Caesar in Gaul as a staff officer. [history.com]  👉 So:  Not a philosophical conversation, but a military-political alignment. Their bond is forged in command, not in doctrine.   7. Plutarch — parallel life Yes:  Antony is paired with Demetrius (Demetrius Poliorcetes). [knarf.engl....upenn.edu]  This is revealing:  Both are brilliant, charismatic, but undisciplined and ruinous figures—moral exempla of excess.   8. Hellenism and “Antoniopolis” / Dionysus You’re picking up something real (though the exact “Antoniopolis” claim needs caution). What we do know:  Antony identified himself with Dionysus and embraced Greek/Eastern style rulership. [europe.fac...etails.com]  👉 So:  Not “tainted by Athens as a student,” but later theatrical self‑Hellenization, especially in the East.   9. Death: Antony vs Cleopatra Sequence is clear:  Antony, believing Cleopatra dead, attempted suicide. He was mortally wounded and died in Cleopatra’s presence. Cleopatra died shortly afterward.  👉 So:  Antony dies first, not in battle but by suicide after defeat (Actium → Alexandria).   10. Caesarion — implicature (your excellent point) You are absolutely right to frame it Griceanly:  Explicatum: Antony claims Caesar acknowledged Caesarion. [thelatinlibrary.com] Implicatum: Caesarion is the true heir, undermining Octavian.  This is political language as implicature par excellence.  11. Do we have Antony in oratio recta? We do—but with a caveat:  Plutarch’s speeches are literary reconstructions, not transcripts. [darrellrohl.com]  Shakespeare’s speech:  “Friends, Romans, countrymen…”  → is not authentic Antony, but inspired by Plutarch’s narrative of the funeral oration. 👉 So:  We have representations of Antony speaking, but no verbatim historically secure speech.   12. Antoniani (later dynasty?) Good distinction:  The Antonii (Republic) ≠ later imperial “Antonine” emperors The Antonine dynasty (Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius) is not directly the same family line—the name spreads via adoption.   13. On Caesar, sexuality, and slander Here caution is needed:  Ancient authors frequently used sexual accusations as political slander. Claims about Caesar (e.g., with pirates, with soldiers) belong largely to this rhetorical genre—not secure fact.  👉 Same for Antony:  Cicero’s attacks dwell heavily on sexual and moral invective.   14. A final Gricean synthesis You put it beautifully:  Antony = vita activa Cicero = vita contemplativa / rhetorica  But historically:  Cicero acts, legislates, commands exile/death Antony also speaks, persuades, performs  👉 The real contrast is not action vs. thought, but: institutional speech (Cicero) vs. charismatic action + speech (Antony)  ✅ In short  Antony likely did socially and politically look down on Cicero. The Antonii were largely plebeian in his line (hence no cognomen). He climbed the cursus honorum fully. First bond with Caesar: military, not intellectual. Plutarch pairs him with Demetrius. Cleopatra outlives him briefly. Caesarion = classic implicature politics. Antony’s speeches survive only in literary reconstruction.   If you want, I can reconstruct a precise passage from Cicero’s Philippics that could plausibly have been the “last straw” provoking Antony’s action.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Antonio – Ossia: Grice ed Antonio – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A friend of Porfirio. It is assumed that he shared his friend’s interest in philosophy and perhaps also became a student of Plotino. Antonio. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Antonio. Antonio – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). A friend of Porfirio. It is assumed that he shared his friend’s interest in philosophy and perhaps also became a student of Plotino. GRICEVS: Antoni, Roma quidem philosophiam amat, sed timeo ne Porphyrius te ad Plotinum trahat sicut amicus ad thermas. ANTONIVS: Trahat sane, Grice, dum me docet non solum cogitare sed etiam inter vinum et libros urbaniter disputare. GRICEVS: Si discipulus Plotini factus es, cave ne in convivio de Uno loquaris donec panis saltem duo factus sit. ANTONIVS: Faciam ut iubes, et pro Uno tibi narrabo quid novi dicant Romani, ne sermo noster in silentium cadat. Grice knows this is not Marc'Antonio, nor the Antonio of Florrie Forde's music-hall ditty, Oh Oh Antonio, you left me on my owneeio' -- but what was the birth name of Marcus Antonius the lover of Cleopatra -- what was his birth gens? Thanks His birth name was simply Marcus Antonius, and the gens was the Antonia. In the driest Roman parsing, Marcus is the praenomen, Antonius the nomen, and therefore the gens is the Antonia gens. Britannica gives him in Latin as Marcus Antonius, and the standard Roman naming explanation confirms that the nomen is the element that marks the gens. [britannica.com], [britannica.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [vroma.org] So if Grice wants the answer without Shakespearean varnish: not Marc’Antonio, not Antonio simpliciter, but Marcus Antonius of the gens Antonia. [britannica.com], [en.wikipedia.org] A small refinement, because Roman names always tempt one to over-complete them. We do not normally give Antony some fuller “birth name” beyond Marcus Antonius in the way one sometimes does for emperors with adoptive and dynastic accumulations. He is just what his public Roman name says he is: Marcus of the Antonii. [britannica.com], [vroma.org] And if one wants the family flavour: he belonged to an old and prominent Roman family, the Antonii, whose most famous bearer became, by a fair irony, the lover of Cleopatra and the losing half of Rome’s last great republican melodrama.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aosta – Ossia: Grice e Aosta: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di dio in gioco, semantica e sovversione.  Anselmo d’Aosta (Valle d’Aosta): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di dio in gioco, semantica e sovversione. Grice: “I like A.; my favuorite piece of his philosophising is strangely not he one on paronimia – or the worn-off paralogism on God’s existence, but ather, the more obscure De casu primi angeli, on the fall of the most beautiful angels of all! And more seriously de casu diaboli, his rambles on dialettica. You see, axioma is Elio Gelliio thinks in Notti attiche – and VARRONE the proloquium, from proloquor of course, the ‘pro’ suggesting something like a ‘prae-miss.’ This is all very PORTICO. Bt we are not sure A. knew this! A. would of course be familiar with AGOSTINO’s dialettica, where proloquium means pro-positio, something some abhorr! Historians and genealogists maintain that  Anselmo d’Aosta (Anselm of Canterbury) did not have a surname in the modern sense. His father, a Lombard noble, is of the Arduinici, his mother, of the Anselmi. Strawson links the Florentine Anselmi family to an ancestor named Anselmo Fighineldi, knighted by Charlemagne. While some genealogical traditions attempt to connect the Anselmi family to A., these are viewed as legendary constructions, even if Anselmi eventually evolved into a surname. Socrate è un uomo; ogni uomo è mortale; Socrate è mortale che non mortale. Una premessa è necessariamente falsa e una è vera. La premessa non assume riguardo a Socrate una forma puramente negative. Pertanto la reductio ad absurdum non può essere addotta in difesa dell’uso della via negativa. (Dio) DEFINIZIONE 2. φ Ess.x ≡ (ψ) [ ψ(x) ⊃ N(y) Implicatura sovversiva, de grammatico, paronimia, quaestio subtilissima. Cio di cui non si puo pensare il maggiore, semantica, concetto, Turing, Bruno, Il programma Le critiche al programma La revisione del programma, la logica di un’illusione, dottrina esoterica, il programma sovversivo, eresia.  Grice: Caro Aosta, tu giochi con l’implicatura di Dio come fosse una partita a scacchi sotto i portici di Bologna. Aosta: E tu, Grice, parli di assiomi e proloqui come se Agostino ti stesse correggendo la sintassi dal banco. Grice: Se Socrate è mortale e “non mortale”, allora l’unica reductio è che il cameriere in Valle d’Aosta ci ha allungato il vino. A.: Va bene, ma ricordati: ciò di cui non si può pensare il maggiore oggi è solo la tua capacità di cavartela con una battuta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apella – ossia: Grice e Apella: la scessi a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. According to Diogene Laerzio, a follower of the Scesi and writes an essay entitled “Agrippa.” Apella. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice Apella: la scessi a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. According to Diogene Laerzio, a follower of the Scesi and writes an essay entitled “Agrippa.”  GRICEVS: Apella, audio te Scesis adhaerere atque libellum Agrippam conscripsisse; num ille Agrippa tam dubius est ut etiam titulus dubitet utrum sit liber? APELLA: Minime, Grice, titulus certissimus est, sed conclusiones ita suspenduntur ut lectorem ipsum in tabulario quaerendo relinquam. GRICEVS: Elegans disciplina—nam Skepsis est ars dicendi “fortasse” ita urbaniter ut nemo audeat respondere “certe.” APELLA: Et tamen, si quis me roget quid sentiam, respondebo more Scesis: “Agrippam scripsi; cetera vos ipsi inferte.”

 

Spaernza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apella – Ossia: Grice ed Apella. Apelle: il pentateismo a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A gnostic who advances a complicated theology claimed by Ippolito di Roma to postulate *five* and five only gods. pentateismo. Apelle. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Apelle.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonide – Ossia: Grice e Apollonide: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A member of the Porch, and a friend and companion of CATONE  Minore. He is present at the latter’s death. Apollonide. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Apollonide.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonide – Ossia: Grice e Apollonide: la scessi a Roma –filosofia italiana –  (Nizza). Filosofo italiano. He writes commentaries on lampoons composed by Timone di Flio and dedicates them to TIBERIO, the prince of Rome. He is presumably a member of the Scessi himself. Apollonide. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Apollonide.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonio – Ossia: Grice e Apollonio: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonio – Ossia: Grice e Apollonio: il tutore del principe -- il portico a Roma 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonio – Ossia: Grice e Apollonio: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). FIlosofo italiano. He belongs to the Porch and teaches in Rome. Apollonio. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Apollonio.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollofane – Ossia: Grice e Apollofane: l’orto a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. He is in Pergamo, and sent on a mission to Rome on the city’s behalf. A follower of the Garden. Apollofane. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Apollofane.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apuleio – Ossia: Grice e Apuleio: Roma antica – filosofia italiana – . He studies in Rome, where he practices as a lawyer. Apuleio. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Apuleio.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apelle – Ossia: Grice ed Apelle: il pentateismo a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A gnostic who advances a complicated theology claimed by Ippolito di Roma to postulate *five* and five only gods.  pentateismo. GRICEVS: Apelle, audivi te Romae quinque tantum deos numerare, atque timeo ne pantheon tuum plus custodem quam theologum requirat. APELLE: Non timeas, Grice: quinque sunt, nec plures admittuntur, ne dii ipsi in conventu nimis loquaces fiant. GRICEVS: Sed quid dicit Hippolytus—num te “gnosticum” vocat, an potius “arithmeticae studiosum” quia deos quasi digitis computas? APELLE: Hippolytus me arguit, ego autem respondeo me simpliciter parcere: quinque dii satiant, sicut quinque panes, et reliquias commentariis relinquo.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonide – Ossia: Grice ed Apollonide: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A member of the Porch, and a friend and companion of CATONE  Minore. He is present at the latter’s death. GRICEVS: Apollonida, te in porticu Romana cum Catone Minore ambulare audivi, quasi philosophia ipsa sub columnis respiraret. APOLLONIDES: Ita vero, Grice, et Catonem comitabatur animus tam rectus ut etiam umbrae Stoicae quasi in ordinem redigerentur. GRICEVS: At cum ille moreretur, tu adfuisti—dic mihi, num etiam tunc Catoni “nihil nisi secundum naturam” visum est, vel saltem “nihil nisi sine strepitu”? APOLLONIDES: Adfui, et si licet iocari pie, ita constans fuit ut mors ipsa videretur discipula, non magistra.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonide – Ossia: Grice ed Apollonide: la scessi a Roma –filosofia italiana –  (Nizza). Filosofo italiano. He writes commentaries on lampoons composed by Timone di Flio and dedicates them to TIBERIO, the prince of Rome. He is presumably a member of the Scessi himself. GRICEVS: Apollonida, audivi te ex Roma ad Nicaeam transiisse, quasi philosophia ipsa vecturam quaereret. APOLLONIDES: Ita est, Grice, et dum Timonem Phliasium commentariis mordeo, Tiberio principi eas dedicare cogor, ne morsus meus in me redeat. GRICEVS: Prudens es—nam apud Scessos etiam satura habet regulas, sicut cena quae ridet sed non clamat. APOLLONIDES: Ergo rideamus modeste: ego lampoones interpretor, tu implicaturas, et uterque principem laudat ut securius verum dicat.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Grice ed Apollonio: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A  member of the Porch, a friend of Cicerone, and like him, had been tutored by Diodoto. Apollonio. Refs. , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Apollonio, GRICEVS: Apolloni, amice Ciceronis et condiscipule Diodoti, dic mihi—sub porticu Romae docens, num sermo tuus Stoicus est, an potius “gruppo di gioco” cum risu? APOLLONIVS: Stoicus sum, sed inter porticus columnas etiam iocari licet, nam Diodotus nos docuit rationem sine urbanitate esse quasi porticum sine umbra. GRICEVS: Ita vero, et Ciceroni placuisset ut disputatio esset tam nitida quam periodus eius—sed cave, ne discipuli te putent nimis gravem. APOLLONIVS: Noli timere, Grice: gravitatem tempero sales, ut Roma me toleret et Porticus me agnoscat, quasi philosophum Italicum qui et docet et ludit.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonio – Ossia: Grice ed Apollonio: l’oracolo -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A celebrated teacher of rhetoric. CICERONE and GIULIO CESARE are among hi pupils. He writes an essay on philosophy in which he argues that the oracle at Delphi had NOT declared Socrates to be the wisest person alive because the pronouncement in question did not conform to the correct format of Delphic utterances. GRICEVS: Apolloni, tu qui Ciceronem et Caesarem docuisti, dic mihi num oraculum Delphicum umquam grammaticam didicit. APOLLONIVS: Didicit sane, nam ostendi illud Socratem non “sapientissimum” dixisse, quia responsum non erat more Delphico rite compositum. GRICEVS: Ergo Socrates sapientissimus non fuit, sed Apollo potius scriba severus qui formas custodit. APOLLONIVS: Ita est, et discipuli mei Romani hoc bene intellexerunt: in rhetorica saepe plus valet modus dicendi quam res dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonio – Ossia: Grice ed Apollonio: il tutore del principe -- il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A  member  of the Porch who teaches two Roman princes, Commodo and Antonino. He is regarded with some suspicion by Antonino Pio, who thinks he charges too much – but ANTONINO  came to admire him greatly. In his “Ad seipsum”, Antonino describes A. as someone full of energy who knows how to relax, as someone who teaches him how to deal with pain and rely on reason, and as someone whose teachings are a model of clarity. GRICEVS: Apolloni, audivi te in Porticu Romae duos principes docere, Commodum et Antoninum; nonne timendum est ne discipuli imperent magistro? APOLLONIVS: Timeo tantum ne nimium petere videar, nam Antoninus Pius me quasi cauponem philosophiae suspicatur, cum ego mercedem potius sudoris quam verborum numerem. GRICEVS: At ille Antoninus qui “Ad seipsum” scribit te laudat ut hominem alacrem qui etiam quiescere scit, ergo pretium tuum fortasse est ipsa tranquillitas. APOLLONIVS: Ita, Grice, et si dolor pulsaverit, rationem ostendo quasi ianitorem sobrium, qui etiam Commodum docere conatur ne gladium pro argumento adhibeat.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollonio – Ossia: Grice ed Apollonio: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). FIlosofo italiano. He belongs to the Porch and teaches in Rome. GRICEVS: APOLLONI, audio te Porticum colere Romae; dic, num ibi sapientia ambulat, an tantum sub columnis umbra? APOLLONIVS: Sub porticu docemus in ipsa Roma, et si sapientia non ambulat, saltem discipuli ambulant et se sapientes putant. GRICEVS: Bene, sed philosophia Italica nonne more vino fit—quo vetustior, eo magis caput movet? APOLLONIVS: Ita est, Grice, sed in Porticu mea caput movet ad rationem, non ad ebrietatem—nisi quis nimium Stoice bibit.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Apollofane – Ossia: Grice ed Apollofane: l’orto a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. He is in Pergamo, and sent on a mission to Rome on the city’s behalf. A follower of the Garden. GRICEVS: Apollophanes, Pergamo missus Romam venisti quasi legatus Hortuli, sed cave ne Romani “hortum” putent locum ubi patroni clientes serunt. APOLLOFANES: Ego vero Epicureus sum, Grice, et ideo legationem gero ut pax et otium floreant, non ut in Foro strepitus alatur. GRICEVS: At dic mihi, si te rogant quid sentias de rebus publicis, respondebisne simpliciter an per implicaturam, sicut qui rosam dat et tacet? APOLLOFANES: Dabo rosam, tacebo, et si quis intellegere nolit, dicam me in Pergamo didicisse philosophiam, Romae autem solum patientiam.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aquila – Ossia: Grice e Aquila: LA ragione conversazionale. Rhetoricos [)etis longioris moræ  Aquila Romano (Roma): LA ragione conversazionale. Rhetoricos [)etis longioris moræ ac diligeiiliæ (iiiaiii pro angiisliis teniporis, quod me profecto urget, ideoque postea pleiium hoc tibi niunus reildemus. In præsenti autem nomina ipsarum figurarum cum exemplis percurrisse sufficiat, tantum praeloculis, quo maxime orator ab oratore differat, unum hoc aut certe esse praecipuum, figuras sententiarum atque elocutionum. Nam iiiventio rerum cum aciitis hominibus, quos tamen ora- tores nondum appellare possis, communis est. Usitatorum verborum La- tinorum scientiam et usum vel grammaticus sibi vindicat. lUi quoque mo- res, qui tqotcol nominantur, ab eadem hac arte non minus diligenter sunt cogniti quam ab oratore, sed quatenus cuique generi materiae adliibere eos deceat, orator mehus intellegit. Figurandarum sentenliarum et elocutionum proprium oraloris munus est. Hoc enim genere et parva ex- tollit et angusta dilatat, et cum celeritalem lum ornatum plerisque et vim de nomiiubiis figurarum et exemplis Hber. Ex Alexandro Numerio quod Af^: quo profectio erravit de; nam hahet quod me profecto, contra quo me profectio ) autem om. praelocntis praelocutus maximus hoc aut hoc usitatorum scripsi: illoriini scientiam et usum  vindicat A: scientia ei usu .. uindicare modi Vossius; al firmavit R lecdonem mores coll. Beda de Trop. S. Script. arte R: arte id est grammatica sed: si, etsi St, haud scio an reclius cuiusque generis materiae vir doctus in viarg. ed. deceat debeat, debeant A genere om. cum ccleritatem tum oret pondus verl)is ac sententiis adilit: ad permovendos quidem animos au- diloris aut iudicis niliil aequale est. Quod sic facillime intellegitur, si, quae sunl fignrate enuntiata apnd magnos oratores detractis figuris partem eam, quae lonia cognominata est, coloniis communierunt: Sed consuetudo multa elocutionis, in qua figuras huius modi recognoscas, et assiduitas stili, cum ipsa exercitatio commoverit dicendi facultatem, in has formas uUro incurrit, ut et (piibus et quo tempore utendum sit, possis diiudicare. Plurimum o[)limoruin, Demosthenis praesertim et CICERONE iuvabit lectio. Imitatur cavendum est. GRICEVS: Aquila Romane, si “rationem conversazionalem” tam diligenter doces, cur rhetoricos nimis longae morae arguis, quasi ipsi tempus comedant et non tuae figurae? AQVILA: Quia, Grice, illi verba multiplicant, ego autem figuras—id est, eadem verba iterum vendo, sed elegantius et sine pudore. GRICEVS: Ergo orator ab homine acuto hoc differt, quod acutus res invenit, orator vero easdem res tropis et figuris vestit, quasi togam Ciceronis super tunicam grammatici? AQVILA: Ita est, et si quis nimis me imitetur, ei dico “cavendum est,” nam nihil periculosius quam Cicero in manus discipuli festinantis.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aquino – Ossia: Grice e Aquilino – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). A philosopher of considerable learning and eloquence. In Rome, he debates with members of the Accademia of his day, although it is unclear what his own philosophical views are. He is a close friend of FRONTONE . Giulio Aquilino. Aquilino. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aquilino. Giulio Aquilino (Roma). A philosopher of considerable learning and eloquence. In Rome, he debates with members of the Accademia of his day, although it is unclear what his own philosophical views are. He is a close friend of FRONTONE. GRICEVS: Romae, Aquiline, in Accademia hodie disputasti tam diserte ut etiam statuae in Foro caput inclinarent. AQVILINVS: Si statuae adsentiuntur, Grice, vel Stoicus fio vel certe Frontoni promisi me bene sonare. GRICEVS: At quid sentis vere, philosophus—an sententiam celas ut Romani vinum optimum in amphora sine titulo? AQVILINVS: Sententia mea est haec: amicis (praesertim Frontoni) semper assentior, ceteris autem ita disputo ut nemo sciat utrum vincam an rideam.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aquino – Ossia: Grice e Aquino: la ragione conversazionale: ponite omnem spem, o quicunque intratis. Carlo d’Aquino (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale: ponite omnem spem, o quicunque intratis. Grice: “At Oxford, we translate the Jabberwocky as Gabberbocchus; at Rome, they translate the Divina Commedia as Divina Comoedia! The Jesuit Scholar Reverend A. is a significant Italian Jesuit, scholar, and expert on ALIGHIERI. A. is a Catholic priest, university teacher, translator, and a renowned classical scholar and Latinist. He teaches at the Roman College. Key Achievement: He is best known for producing the first-ever translation of ALIGHIERI ’s Divine Comedy into heroic Latin verse. Published Works He authors several extensive lexicons and other academic works, including Lexicon militare, Vocabularium architecturae aedificatoriae, and Nomenclator agriculturae.  The Jesuit scholar  Padre Carlo d'Aquino published the first complete translation of Dante’s masterpiece into Latin hexameters.    Title of the Translation The work was titled: Della Commedia di Dante Alighieri, trasportata in verso latino eroico. While often cataloged under this Italian title, the text itself serves as a Latin rendition of the Divina Commedia.  Translation of the Passage D'Aquino translated the famous line from Inferno (Canto III, line 9), "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate" (Abandon all hope, you who enter), as:  Ponite omnem spem, o quicunque intratis. A.'s version was noted for being a free paraphrase that prioritized elegant "heroic" Latin verse over literal word-for-word accuracy. This style occasionally drew criticism from later scholars who felt his translation was too distant from Dante's original expression.  Grice: Aquino, dicono che a Oxford il Jabberwocky diventa Gabberbocchus… ma a Roma la Divina Commedia si trasforma in verso eroico latino! Tu quando traduci Dante, lasci ogni speranza o preferisci portare qualche rima nuova in viaggio? Aquino: Grice, la speranza si lascia solo all’ingresso dell’Inferno… ma in traduzione, ogni verso è un’avventura! Se Dante mi chiede “Lasciate ogni speranza”, io rispondo con un bel “Ponite omnem spem”, così almeno i lettori hanno qualcosa da mettere in valigia. Grice: E allora, caro Carlo, quando arriva il latinista a leggere il tuo poema, trova più eroismo nei versi o più comicità nel tentativo? Non rischi che qualche anima rimanga a metà strada tra il latino e il fiorentino? Aquino: Grice, basta una buona conversazione e un po’ di latino per non perdersi! Se qualche anima inciampa, almeno può dire di aver viaggiato nell’Inferno con stile… e magari con una speranza nascosta nella toga! Roma, Lazio.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aquino – Ossia: Grice e Aquino: la ragione conversationale – filosofia italiana –  (Bologna). Bologna, Emilia Romagna.  Giovanni Pietro d’Aquino: la ragione conversationale – filosofia italiana –  (Bologna). Bologna, Emilia Romagna. Abstract: Grice: “I love A.! -- Italian humanist scholar, rhetorician, and author from the Renaissance period. A. is primarily known for his work in Latin oratory, including the Orationes (Orations). The Orationes consist of formal speeches or rhetorical exercises, a common form of academic and literary expression among humanists who seek to emulate the classical Roman style. A. is associated with academic circles, at Bologna. Specific details about his life, such as birth and death dates or his exact academic positions, are not available in the provided sources, but he is distinct from the more famous medieval philosopher A. or the 18th-century Jesuit Latinist Carlo d'Aquino. Grice: Giovanni Pietro, dicono che a Bologna la retorica si insegni come si prepara il ragù – con pazienza, un pizzico di latinismo e tanti argomenti!Aquino: Grice, qui la retorica si mescola bene, ma attenzione: se uno sbaglia l’ordine, rischia di servire una orazione più scotta del ragù domenicale!Grice: Ma dimmi, caro Aquino, preferisci una orazione che profuma di classico o una che lascia tutti a bocca aperta come una lasagna ben fatta?Aquino: Grice, l’importante è che alla fine si alzi tutti dalla tavola – o dalla cattedra – soddisfatti! Se la parola convince, allora la ragione conversazionale ha vinto, e magari resta anche un po’ di parmigiano da spargere sulle idee!

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aquino – Ossia: Grice e Aquino: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della teoria dell’intenzione.  Tomasso d’Aquino (Abbazia di Fossanova, Roccasecca, Frossinone, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della teoria dell’intenzione. Grice: “Srawson used to joke and call me A., as I rushed to tutor on ‘De interpretatione’ That’s precisely what A. did at Bologna! Can’t the tutee not interpret it by himself?! The son of Landolfo d'A. My ‘Meaning’ makes a point about this misinterpretation I found at Oxford re: A.: A. speaks of a SEGNO ex impositione, versus ex natura. Iimpositio is hardly a convention! We find in A. all the conceptual tools we need for the ragione conversazionale both in communicatio and conversation. Dottore angelico. Filosofia classica. Lizio. Allievo d’Alberto Magno, che lo difese quando i compagni lo chiamano il bue muto: Voi lo chiamate il bue muto. Io vi dico, quando questo bue mugge, il suo muggito s’udranno d’un'estremità all'altra della terra. This part is the  difference, i.e., by convention, viz., according to human institution deriving from the will of man. This differentiates a name from a vocal sound signifying naturally, such as the groan of the sick and the vocal sounds of a brute animal. Then lizio says, by convention is added. A name (and its utterer) signifies by convention ad placitum ex institutione. No name exists naturally. For it is a name because it signifies; it does not signify naturally however, but ex institutione. This lizio adds when he says, but it is a name when it is *made* a SEGNO, i.e., when it is imposed to signify. For that which signifies naturally is not made a sign, but is a sign naturally. Lizio explains this when he says: for unlettered sounds, such as those of the brutes designate, etc., i.e., since they cannot be signified by letters. He says sounds rather than vocal sounds because some animals, those without lungs, do not have vocal sounds. Such an animal signifies a passion by some kind of non-vocal sound which signifies naturally. Peri hermeneias, de interpretation, Austin/Grice, “De interpretatione” nota, notare, notante, notato, denotato, denotare, grammatici speculativi, intentionality, the taxonomy of intentions. G.: You have the Latin? D.: I have the Latin, and the Roman complications besides. G.: Good. Begin not with the Summa. Everybody begins with the Summa. D.: Then let us begin where you prefer: with Aristotle through Anici through Aquino. G.: Exactly. Oxford never quite knew what to do with that chain, though Austin and I tried. D.: “Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Peri Hermeneias.” G.: There. Already more interesting than half a shelf of pious summaries. D.: And more dangerous. G.: Why dangerous? D.: Because once one reads Thomas on Peri Hermeneias, one cannot go back to speaking as if “truth” floated above proposition and signification like a halo. G.: Very good. Kenny, in the short book, gives one truth, proposition, predication, being, soul, all the worthy furniture. D.: But not the joinery. G.: Exactly. The joinery is in the commentary. D.: On Aristotle. G.: Through Boethius. D.: Through Boethius indeed. And often against confusions later made easier by people who had read only the schoolbook Thomas. G.: Such as? D.: Such as the easy slide from vox significativa to “meaning is in the voice.” G.: Which is what no sensible person should say. D.: Yet many do. G.: They deserve Ockham. D.: That is severe. G.: Ockham multiplies sermones beyond necessity. D.: Ah, we are there already. G.: Inevitably. If one cares about signification, one must eventually choose one’s enemy. D.: And yours is sermo mentalis. G.: Not always, but often enough. I am suspicious whenever somebody gives the anima a full internal language complete with syntax, committee structure, and invisible punctuation. D.: Then Thomas will please you more than Ockham. G.: That is my suspicion. D.: Because Thomas can say that voces significant passiones animae, without thereby making the anima itself a little talking machine. G.: Precisely. That is the point. D.: Then let us lay the chain out properly. G.: Yes. Slowly. As if Oxford had never heard Greek. D.: It usually hadn’t, except in finals. G.: Go on. D.: Written marks, spoken sounds, passions of the soul, things. G.: In Greek? D.: γραμμάτα, φωναί, παθήματα τῆς ψυχῆς, πράγματα. G.: And in the Latinity of the tradition? D.: Litterae or notae, voces, passiones animae, res. G.: Good. Now where does Anici enter? D.: With the translation and the commentary. He supplies the Latin through which the schools will hear Aristotle. G.: And where does he go wrong? D.: Where everyone goes wrong who likes nouns too much. G.: Signum. D.: Exactly. Aristotle gives σημαίνειν, a verb, and the Latin world begins to think in signum. G.: Which embalms the process. D.: Or at least makes it easier to forget that signification is something done. G.: By whom? D.: Ah. There we are. By whom indeed. G.: Because that is exactly the point. Does the vox signify, or does he who utters the vox signify by uttering it? D.: Thomas is useful there because he preserves the traditional formula yet invites the question. G.: Better than answering it too quickly. D.: You sound almost Thomist. G.: God forbid. Or perhaps permit. D.: Then let me read: “Vox significativa ad placitum.” G.: A lethal phrase if mishandled. D.: Commonly mishandled. G.: Explain. D.: People hear ad placitum and think “by convention,” then hear “convention” and think “committee,” and the whole thing dies in sociology. G.: Yes. And the phrase deserves better. D.: Better as ex institutione or ex impositione, if one keeps the force of imposition as assignment, not social contract. G.: Exactly. In my “Meaning” I object to flattening such things into vulgar convention. D.: Thomas helps there. G.: How? D.: Because he is precise that a name is not naturally a name. It is made to signify. G.: Quando fit signum, yes. D.: Exactly. G.: But there again I want the verb. Not merely “it is a sign,” but “it is used to signify.” D.: Thomas does not always give you the verb where you want it. G.: No. He is still a Latin schoolman. But he often leaves the action visible enough for one to recover it. D.: Better than Boethius? G.: Sometimes better because later. A younger generation, if you like. He sees where the older translation stiffens. D.: He also has Greek behind the Latin more explicitly. G.: That matters enormously. D.: More Latin, then. “Voces sunt notae earum quae sunt in anima passionum.” G.: There. And immediately one must ask what sort of notae these are. D.: Signs, marks, indicators. G.: But not merely labels. D.: No, because the soul’s passions are not boxes and the voice is not a luggage ticket. G.: Nicely put. D.: Thank you. G.: Now to passio animae. D.: Yes. G.: I distrust passio there. D.: Because you hear suffering? G.: Or passivity, or theatrical affliction. It is too loaded in later ears. D.: Yet in Aristotle and Thomas it means more nearly affection, modification, being-affected. G.: Exactly. Which is why I want it qualified before modern readers sentimentalise it. D.: So not “emotion” simply. G.: Certainly not simply. Nor “mental item” in the hard modern sense. D.: Then what? G.: Something like the soul’s being-in-a-state vis-à-vis what is thought or apprehended. But one must say it awkwardly, because smoothness would be false. D.: You prefer false Latin to false English. G.: I prefer difficulty where the matter is difficult. D.: Then Thomas’s passiones animae are not little propositions inside the head. G.: Exactly my anti-Ockham point. D.: Ockham would move toward a sermo mentalis with real syntactic articulation. G.: Yes. Inner language with subject, predicate, proposition, and all the rest. D.: You dislike that because— G.: Because it multiplies entities beyond necessity and because it risks turning the mind into a duplicate of public speech. D.: Whereas Thomas may allow the voice to signify the soul’s affection without requiring the soul to have “spoken” first. G.: Precisely. D.: Then this is where Grice and Austin on De interpretatione would care more than Kenny in the little book. G.: Yes. Kenny gives one the big Thomist furniture. We want the smaller hinges. D.: The hinges being signification, proposition, truth. G.: And predication. D.: And ad placitum. G.: And the whole business of what bears truth and falsity. D.: Which in Aristotle is not the isolated name but the synthesis or division. G.: Exactly. Affirmation and negation, composition and division. D.: Then propositio. G.: Ah yes. There we arrive at the point where the schools become useful to Oxford again. D.: Because proposition is where truth enters. G.: Yes. Not in the mere vox, not in the isolated term, but in what is asserted or denied. D.: And yet the vox must still signify for proposition to get off the ground. G.: Exactly. Which is why the semantic business precedes the alethic business. D.: Kenny’s Past Masters gives truth in the broad adaequatio line. G.: Yes, veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus, all very proper. D.: You sound ungrateful. G.: I am only saying that one gets more philosophical electricity from the commentaries than from the catechism. D.: The Summa is catechism to you? G.: Best-seller, anyway. D.: And outside the Summa? G.: That is the interesting Thomas. Read me titles. D.: Sententia libri Peri Hermeneias. G.: Good. D.: Sententia libri De anima. G.: Better. D.: Sententia libri Metaphysicae. G.: Useful, though heavier. D.: Sententia libri Ethicorum. G.: Everybody loves ethics once they have forgotten logic. D.: Expositio libri Peryermenias, in some catalogues. G.: A variant title, but yes, the thing itself. D.: And the commentary on Boethius too. G.: Yes, though one must be careful which Boethian work and which chain of dependence we are speaking of. D.: We are speaking here of Aquino on Aristotle through Boethius. G.: Exactly. That triad is what matters. D.: Then let me ask your question in your own style: Who does the signifying? G.: Good. If I wave my hand, does the hand signify? Or do I signify by waving my hand? D.: You would say the latter. G.: Naturally. The hand is instrument, vehicle, medium, not principal signifier. D.: So also with the voice. G.: Precisely. A vox as sound may be merely a physical event. A vox significativa is a voice as used in signifying. D.: Then you would prefer Thomas to say not simply vox significativa but something more dynamic. G.: I would. But one cannot ask a thirteenth-century Dominican to write post-Gricean English. D.: You do occasionally sound as if you could. G.: Only occasionally. D.: What about the groan? G.: Ah yes. My old friend the groan. D.: If I groan, and you know my pain from my moaning— G.: Then the vox is significative enough, though not articulate in the lexical way. D.: So “significant voice” cannot just mean articulate speech. G.: Exactly. That would be absurd. A groan, a cry, a gasp, a handwave—all can signify. D.: Which is why you keep wanting the verb signare or significare alive. G.: Yes. “X signifies Y” is already less misleading than “X is a sign.” D.: And signans, signatum? G.: Useful enough later, but I distrust the scholastic tendency to noun everything into a diagram. D.: Saussure would be disappointed. G.: A Swiss linguist is always a little disappointing. D.: And a saint? G.: Worse, because then nobody will quarrel with him on the right grounds. D.: You mean Thomas. G.: Of course. Canonisation is a poor critical edition. D.: Still, Thomas as philosopher should not disappear into “saint.” G.: Exactly. He philosophised on what matters. Language, signification, proposition, truth, soul, will. D.: Voliting. G.: Ah yes. Kenny’s favourite contribution to our vocabulary. D.: You like it too. G.: I like it because it offends. D.: And because it reminds one that willing is not just another case of predication. G.: Yes. But here my point is different. Beneath both judging and willing there is a central phrastic, to use Hare’s useful barbarism. D.: Hare should have taught Kenny that more profusely? G.: Indeed. If one distinguishes tropic from phrastic, then much of what Thomas is doing with proposition and signification becomes clearer. D.: How so? G.: Because the assertoric or judicative force and the volitive force may differ, yet the underlying content-structure—the thing signified or entertained—may be common. D.: So proposition in the richer sense is not exhausted by bare indicative truth-conditions. G.: Exactly. D.: And this matters for De interpretatione because— G.: Because Aristotle’s concern with affirmation, negation, truth, falsity, and signification sets up the very distinctions later needed for judgment, willing, command, question, and all the rest. D.: Which Grice and Austin, lecturing on De interpretatione, would naturally care about. G.: Very much. More, I suspect, than a short general book on Aquinas would show. D.: Let us bring Oxford back in. G.: Yes. St Benet’s. D.: So near St John’s. G.: Too near, perhaps. Catholic pockets in Oxford always made me suspicious that Rome was hiding in the shrubbery. D.: And Belsyre not far off. G.: Quite. One could walk from my domestic respectability to his Benedictine respectability without much metaphysical strain. D.: Kenny at St Benet’s, Ramsey elsewhere in official Anglican positions, Dummett in the Catholic orbit, Geach and Anscombe, and Oxford pretending none of this had theological consequences. G.: Exactly. Oxford always prefers to think it is merely doing philosophy when it is in fact managing denominations. D.: Gregorian is not Angelicum. G.: No. Jesuit is not Dominican, and St Benet’s is Benedictine and English enough to complicate everything. D.: Yet the Roman dissertations, the Oxford DPhil, linguistic analysis, and language of religion all meet there. G.: Yes. One can almost forgive the ecclesiastical machinery for providing such good complications. D.: But your concern under Aquinas is not Kenny. G.: No. Kenny is merely the occasion. Thomas is the point. D.: Then let us return to res. G.: Ah yes. The realist bit. D.: Which you avoid when Price starts causationizing perception. G.: Precisely. Res is dangerous because one begins to think the world itself is laid out like the sentence. D.: Thomas is more realist there than you are comfortable with. G.: Often, yes. But one need not swallow all the realism to appreciate the semantic architecture. D.: So for Thomas: written marks signify spoken sounds, spoken sounds signify passions of the soul, those passions are likenesses of things. G.: Yes. And the crucial issue is how not to collapse the middle term. D.: The middle term being passio animae. G.: Exactly. If you collapse it, you become crude realist or crude psychologiser. If you inflate it, you become Ockham with internal syntax. D.: Thomas’s merit is to keep it central without theatrical overdevelopment. G.: That is well put. D.: Then how does he improve on Boethius? G.: Sometimes simply by seeing more. Boethius gives the Latin and a large amount of conceptual scaffolding. Thomas inherits this and works with a greater scholastic precision and with an eye more alive to the metaphysical and semantic repercussions. D.: Without becoming modern. G.: Thank heaven. D.: But enough to help the modern. G.: Exactly. D.: Then the practical question again: if I utter a vox, who means? G.: I do. Or at least the utterer does. The vox is no more an autonomous meaner than my hand is an autonomous waver. D.: Yet the tradition’s formulas tempt one to say “the voice signifies.” G.: Yes, because ellipsis is cheap and centuries are lazy. D.: And because a formula once stabilized becomes doctrine. G.: Precisely. Which is why one must periodically remind oneself that “the voice signifies” often really means “a person signifies by means of a voice.” D.: That sounds very Gricean. G.: It is very sane. D.: And if the sign is not vocal? Handwave? G.: The point is unchanged. Anything can function as sign-vehicle. My trouble with vox is not that voices cannot signify, but that philosophers often treat voice as privileged in a way the communicative phenomenon itself does not require. D.: Aristotle in De interpretatione is concerned with voice because he is moving toward proposition and assertion. G.: Exactly. Which is fair enough. But one must not universalise the local convenience. D.: So Thomas on Peri Hermeneias is indispensable for one line of semantic thought, not because voice is everything, but because proposition requires a certain sort of articulate sign-vehicle. G.: Precisely. D.: And from there predicate, predication, truth. G.: Yes. Which is why the commentary matters. D.: More than the “best seller.” G.: In this respect, yes. D.: Then the conclusion? G.: Thomas on Aristotle through Boethius gives one the semantic machinery Oxford ordinary-language philosophy might have profited from more directly, had it cared to look beyond its own damp genius. D.: You are almost affectionate toward Aquinas. G.: Only when he is busy with Aristotle and not being canonised at me. D.: And the punchline? G.: Very well. Boethius gave Aristotle a Latin voice, Thomas taught it to signify a little better, and Oxford read the Summa instead.Grice: Aquino, ti confesso che ogni volta che sento parlare di “segno ex impositione” mi viene in mente la pasta fatta in casa: c’è sempre qualcuno che decide come tagliarla, ma nessuno la riconosce finché non la si assaggia! Non sarebbe meglio se il segno fosse come il muggito del bue, naturale e impossibile da fraintendere? Aquino: Ah, Grice, il muggito ha il suo fascino, ma la conversazione è tutta una questione di intenzione! Se il segno nasce dalla volontà, allora ogni parola è una pasta fatta ad arte—e non c’è bisogno di essere un bue muto per farla arrivare dall’Alpi fino alla Sicilia. Grice: Eppure, Tommaso, a Oxford ancora si litigava su chi dovesse “imporre” il segno! Ma dimmi, da buon dottore angelico, non sarebbe più semplice lasciare che la natura parli, senza troppe convenzioni? Aquino: Grice, la natura parla come vuole, ma se vuoi capire cosa ti dice il vicino, meglio mettere d’accordo la volontà e la ragione! Altrimenti rischi di trovare solo grugniti e muggiti, e la cena resta fredda. Meglio un segno ad placitum, così tutti si siedono a tavola e capiscono quando è ora di mangiare!

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aquino – Ossia: Grice e Aquino: LA ragione conversazionale.  Tommaso Niccolò d’Aquino (Taranto, Puglia): La ragione conversazionale. There is  no direct personal or professional connection between A. and the humanist author of   Delle delizie tarantine. They are two different individuals. One is an immensely influential philosopher. The other is a poet, humanist, and patrician who lived during the Age of Enlightenment. His Delle delizie tarantine (Of the delights of Taranto) is a descriptive work, originally in Neo-Latin verse, about the natural history and life of his home city.  While both share the surname "d'Aquino" (which simply means "from Aquino," a town in the Lazio region of Italy), this indicates a potential common regional origin for their families rather than a direct familial relationship or shared identity as the same person. The name was not uncommon, and the later individual was a local figure in Taranto writing on a completely different set of topics and in a different era than the philosopher. Delizia di Taranto. delízia = lat. DELICIAE da DELiCIO [si-  mile ad AL-Licio] alletto, comp. della par-tic. pleon. De di e inusitat. LACIo [ridotta nel composto A in I] propr. attraggo nel laccio, imperocché le delizie attraggono e  avvincono: da una rad. europ. LAK = LAC  allacciare e fig. gabbare, onde l'a. stav. la-  ka malizia, lakati ingannare, pò-leci lac-cio, boem. lèc, licka laccio, calappio, po-lac. lyczak laccio, lett. lenkt stare in agi guato, lenza=*lenkia laccio, non che i comp. lat. AL-LÍCERE allettare, E-LiCERE stimolare, provocare [onde e -lècebra me-retrice] IL-LiCERE adescare [onde illèce. bra allettamento, illex l'uccello che attrae gli altri nella rete, che suol dirsi richiamo, zimbello], PEL-LiCERE attrarre con lusinghe con false parole onde pellax ingannatore péllex meretrice (v. Laccio). Altri men bene pensarono a DELIQUO O DELIQUEO ma quefaccio, mi sciolgo, perchè le delizie rendono l'uomo molle ed effemminato (v.  Delinquere), — Cosa che per la sua rarita e delicatezza o per la sua eleganza, amo-nità e simili ci diletta soavemente, cioè avvince dolcemente l'animo nostro.  Deriv. Deliziare; Delizióso. Cfr. Allettare; De-  licato; Dilettare; Lezio. Grice: Aquino, mi dicono che tra te e il poeta delle delizie tarantine non c’è nessun legame diretto, solo un cognome che attira come un laccio! Ma dimmi, la filosofia può essere una delizia o rischia di renderci effeminati, come dicono i lessicografi? Aquino: Caro Grice, la vera delizia è quella che lega la mente, non certo quella che scioglie i muscoli! Se il mio nome attira, meglio che attragga verso la ragione e non verso le reti del poeta. Grice: Eppure, Tommaso, a Taranto pare che le delizie siano una questione di radici, di laccio, di allettamento! Ma tu preferisci legare gli animi con concetti o con versi preziosi? Aquino: Grice, io scelgo di allacciare la ragione, ché una buona conversazione non incanta come un laccio, ma lega dolcemente come una delizia rara. Se il poeta scrive di molli piaceri, io mi accontento di una discussione che rende l’animo robusto e allegro, e magari anche un po’ tarantino!

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Arangio – Ossia: Grice e Arangio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del colloquio – la scuola di Napoli  Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del colloquio – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats dialogue as a cooperative rational practice in which what is meant regularly outruns what is said: speakers design utterances for an audience that can recognize intentions, and hearers use shared norms (relevance, informativeness, intelligibility) to calculate implicatures as reasonable inferences from an utterance’s role in the exchange. Arangio-Ruiz, by contrast, is a philosopher-classicist whose central preoccupation is not a formal pragmatics of inference but the ethical and pedagogical character of dialogue, shaped by Greek models and by his own distinction (as your passage has it) between genuinely Socratic dialogue and sophistic “dialogo sofistico”: the former is oriented toward truth-seeking through disciplined questioning and mutual rational accountability, the latter toward winning, display, or strategic verbal advantage. That contrast maps naturally onto Grice’s concerns: Grice can explain even sophistic talk as meaning-bearing (it still generates implicatures, often via strategic underinformativeness, equivocation, or calculated irrelevance), but he insists that the intelligibility of those implicatures depends on a background presumption of rational cooperation—sometimes exploited, sometimes only partially honored, sometimes openly flouted in ways that themselves become interpretable. Arangio’s moralismo and his emphasis on individual moral conduct as the proper locus of “attualismo” (as against identifying philosophy with the life of the state) also resonate with Grice’s methodological individualism: conversational reason is anchored in what particular agents intend and can justify, even when they are embedded in institutional settings (schools, academies, “colloqui”). So where Grice supplies a micro-account of how interlocutors recover communicated content through rational inference under norms of cooperation, Arangio supplies a macro-normative typology of dialogue as a civic and moral practice—Socratic conversation as the humane, truth-directed use of reason versus sophistic conversation as a merely strategic manipulation of appearances—helping to frame Grice’s cooperative rationality not just as an interpretive heuristic but as an ethical ideal that distinguishes philosophical colloquy from verbal contest. -- la scuola di Napoli – filosofia napoletana – filosofia campanese -- filosofia italiana – , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice,   (Napoli). Filosofo napoletano. Filosofo campanese. Filosofo italiano. Napoli, Campania. Grice: “We have Flores, we have Ruiz, we have Enriques – reminds me of Alan Montefiore! I like Vladimiro Arangio – my favourite is by far his philosoophising on Socrates’s ‘Sofista’ – he distinguishes between what he calls ‘Socratic dialogue’ (mine) and ‘dialogo sofistico’!” -- Vladimiro Arangio-Ruiz (Napoli) filosofo, grecista e accademico italiano. Fu il primo preside del Liceo scientifico Alessandro Tassoni di Modena, istituito a seguito della riforma Gentile.  Nacque da Gaetano, professore di diritto costituzionale. Frequenta a Firenze il corso di lettere nell'Istituto di studi superiori e si laureò con una tesi su Il coro nella tragedia greca in letteratura greca con Girolamo Vitelli, filologo, grecista, papirologo e senatore del Regno d'Italia.  Vladimiro appartenne a una illustre famiglia di giuristi: il fratello Vincenzo Arangio-Ruiz fu uno dei maggiori studiosi di diritto romano, ordinario all'Napoli e alla Sapienza di Roma. Contravvenendo alla tradizione di famiglia, Vladimiro preferì dedicarsi agli studi filosofici e fu professore alla Scuola normale superiore di Pisa e alla facoltà di Magistero di Firenze.  Insegnò nei ginnasi di Stato e fu ufficiale d'artiglieria nella Prima guerra mondiale dove venne ferito. Si laurea con MARTINETTI, con Conoscenza e moralità. Sente fortemente l'influenza di MICHELSTAEDTER. Si propose una funzione critica ricostruttiva  dell'idealismo storicistico e dell'attualismo di GENTILE da cui trasse ispirazione per sviluppare il suo moralismo assoluto. Contrariamente a GENTILE che dichiara l'attualismo coincidente colla vita dello stato, A. crede che invece è identificabile con il comportamento morale individuale poiché la politica non è che un aspetto particolare della legge morale per sua natura universale.  Prose morali; Umanità dell'arte. Colloqui. Grice:Arangio, mi dicono che a Napoli la filosofia si discute come si gioca a scopa: chi ha il miglior argomento si prende il piatto! Arangio Ruiz: Grice, qui non si tratta di piatti, ma di dialoghi! Se il dialogo è socratico, si vince con la ragione; se è sofistico, si rischia di restare con le carte in mano e niente da mangiare! Grice: E allora, caro Vladimiro, dove sta la differenza? In filosofia, come in cucina napoletana, l’importante è non bruciare la mozzarella della conversazione! Arangio: Grice, la mozzarella va gustata con calma e la conversazione va condotta con umanità. Altrimenti, si rischia che il sofista venga e ti rubi pure il dessert! Arangio-Ruiz, Vladimiro (1911). Discorso del metodo. L’anima.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Arato – Ossia: Grice e Arato: Roma antica -- filosofia italiana –  (Roma). 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Arcais – Ossia: Grice ed Arcais: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Archibugi – Ossia: Grice e Archibugi: la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura conversazionale della PAX ROMANA. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Archippo – Ossia: Grice e Archippo: il principe filosofo -- Roma antica -- filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A correspondent of PLINIO  Minore, pleads exemption from jury service on the grounds that “he is a philosopher” and produces a letter from DOMIZIANO testifying to that fact, and to his good character. It emerges later that A. had previously been sentenced to hard labour in the mines for forgery, which might cast some doubt on the authenticity of the letter. Although some were keen to see him back in the mines, he is generally popular. Archippo. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco, “Grice ed Archippo

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Archippo – Ossia: Grice ed Archippo (Roma, Lazio): il principe filosofo. A correspondent of PLINIO  Minore, pleads exemption from jury service on the grounds that “he is a philosopher” and produces a letter from DOMIZIANO testifying to that fact, and to his good character. It emerges later that A. had previously been sentenced to hard labour in the mines for forgery, which might cast some doubt on the authenticity of the letter. Although some were keen to see him back in the mines, he is generally popular. GRICEVS: Archippē, princeps philosophorum Romae, num hodie iudicia fugis quia “philosophus es,” an quia metalla tibi nimis frigida videntur? ARCHIPPVS: Fugio sane, mi Grice, et ecce epistulam a Domitiano fero quae me bonum virum esse testatur, quamvis quidam dicant atramentum meum nimis “ingeniosum” esse. GRICEVS: Plinius Minor tibi respondens fortasse scribet te omnibus placere, sed rogat utrum litterae illae genuinae sint an tantum “implicatura” e carcere effugere cupiens. ARCHIPPVS: Si genuinae non sunt, saltem urbanae sunt, et Romani malunt philosophum ridere quam falsarium fodere, quod mihi prope sapientia ipsa videtur.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Arco – Ossia: Grice e Arco: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della GRAVITAS.  Adolfo L’Arco (Teano, Caserta, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della GRAVITAS. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes implicature a rational, intention-sensitive by-product of cooperative exchange: what is meant can outrun what is said because speakers count on hearers to recognize goals, relevance, and communicative intentions, and to infer the extra content that makes the utterance a reasonable move in the conversation. L’Arco, as a Salesian priest, popular spiritual writer, and (per profiles such as the Italian Wikipedia entry) a public communicator of faith—including a notable RAI role in 1973 on Tempo dello Spirito—treats discourse less as a puzzle of inference and more as a pastoral art whose success depends on gravitas tempered by joy: his “philosophia umoristica” (e.g., the later Ridi e sorridi da saggio, 1984) and earlier devotional works (your passage cites Bosco si diverte, 1956) aim to make moral and theological truths memorable, livable, and socially transmissible. Put in Gricean terms, L’Arco is not primarily analyzing how implicatures are calculated; he is deliberately engineering the conditions under which certain implicatures reliably arise—using wit, brevity, and anecdotal framing so that an audience infers encouragement, consolation, or gentle correction without being hectored. Where Grice’s “reason-governed” emphasis is diagnostic (how rational agents recover meaning from minimal explicit content under cooperative norms), L’Arco’s is rhetorical-pastoral (how a speaker sustains benevolent cooperation—attention, trust, receptivity—by blending seriousness with a measured smile). The “gravitas” motif in your passage fits this alignment: Grice treats conversational seriousness as a matter of rational accountability and inferential discipline, while L’Arco treats it as a tone to be safeguarded precisely by allowing controlled humor, so that the hearer’s uptake is guided not only by logic but by goodwill; in both cases, what is communicated depends crucially on what is left unsaid, but Grice theorizes that gap as calculable implicature, whereas L’Arco exploits it as a practical technique for keeping conversation (and persuasion) both humane and effective. Grice: “I should like A.; but he is a priest and I’m C. of E.; on top, I love to say that philosophy ought to be FUN, provided it’s MY FUN – not Arco’s – so I find Arco’s ‘dictionary of philosophical ‘umorismo,’ or filosofia ‘umoristica’ frivolous, and unworthy of Roman gravitas!” Nato nella frazione Fontanelle entra fra i Salesiani di Bosco e fu ordinato sacerdote a Roma. Consegue a Napoli la laurea in filosofia. Per la sua preparazione filosofica, nonché per la profondità della sua filosofiai, è considerato tra i maggiori filosofi italiani. Uomo di anima sensibile e di infinita fede ha trascorso molto della sua vita scrivendo, interessandosi di agiografia. È stato protagonista televisivo sulla prima rete nazionale con il programma: Tempo dello Spirito.  Intensa e vasta la sua opera letteraria.  Longo e la sua intimità con Dio; Bosco si diverte, Sorgenti di gioia; Gesù sotterra un chicco di grano; Pira e il risorto; Fiori di sapienza. Dizionarietto di saggezza; La Donna del Sanctus; La parola agli atti processuali; quando la teologia prende fuoco. Quadrio salesiano; Bosco nella luce del Risorto; Bosco sorridente entra in casa vostra; Così  Bosco ama i giovani; Il padre nostro; Ma c'è poi questo Dio; Nota bene; Sorgenti di Gioia; Rinaldi copia vivente di Bosco; La sorgente eterna dell'amore; Noi esistiamo perché Dio Padre ci ama; Stile di Serenità; La Gioia a Portata di Mano; Ridi e sorridi da saggio; Dolcezza e speranza nostra; Dio ci ama con cuore d'uomo; Il Padre nostro; La Leva del Mondo: la preghiera; Eustachio; Il Cristo in cui Spero; Profeta e testimone del Risorto;  Elisabetta Jacobucci Francesca Alcantarina;  Longo; Così ridono i saggi; Alfonso amico del popolo; Il Sacro nome ti chiama per nome; La Leva del Mondo: la preghiera; pace universale, intuizioni e idee madri, un esploratore della felicità, servo di dio, apostolato della Sofferenza, gravitas, hagiography; if he has religious faith, he is not a philosopher. Grice: Arco, mi dica, la gravitas romana va d’accordo con il sorriso? Ho letto il suo dizionarietto di filosofia umoristica, ma temo che il mio spirito sia troppo anglosassone! Arco: Caro Grice, anche i filosofi hanno bisogno di una risata. Il sorriso, se ben dosato, non toglie gravitas ma la illumina: lo diceva pure Don Bosco, che la gioia è parte della fede! Grice: Però, Don Adolfo, se la filosofia italiana è così piena di felicità, rischio di perdere il mio aplomb inglese. Non sarà che la vera saggezza si trova tra una battuta e una preghiera? Arco: Grice, la saggezza italiana sa ridere, pregare e amare – magari anche tra una trasmissione televisiva e una pagina di agiografia. E ricordi: gravitas sì, ma sempre con un pizzico di gioia! Arco, Adolfo L’ (1956). Bosco si diverte. Napoli, Editrice Salesiana.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ardigò – Ossia: Grice e Ardigò: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Rodrigo Felice Ardigò (Casteldidone, Cremona, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rationally recoverable product of cooperative exchange: a hearer assumes that a speaker is aiming at a shared conversational purpose, and so treats apparent deviations from directness or maximal informativeness as clues to what is meant beyond what is said. Ardigò’s positivist moral psychology and sociology, by contrast, relocate the relevant “governing reason” from the micro-logic of utterance interpretation to the macro-logic of social life: in La morale dei positivisti (1869; later issued with a “Sociologia” part) he frames moral norms as naturalistic facts of social evolution and treats “civile” conduct as the arena in which egoism (prepotence) and anti-egoism (a cultivated counter-principle) are balanced, often with explicit skepticism about sentimentalist accounts of sympathy. Read alongside Grice, Ardigò supplies an anthropological-social background for why the Cooperative Principle is not a mere conversational convention but a stabilizing necessity of “convivenza civile”: conversational cooperation can be viewed as a localized mechanism by which an organismic social order maintains itself, converting brute egoistic pressure into predictable, rule-governed interaction. At the same time, the contrast is sharp: where Grice keeps the theory intentionally thin—deriving implicatures from publicly recognizable rational expectations that can be calculated case by case—Ardigò thickens the explanatory story with sociological teleology (social good, justice, the “golden rule” as prudential counsel, the presuppositions embedded in language as a social fact), so that what counts as “reasonable” in interaction is ultimately anchored in a naturalized account of moral formation and civic discipline. In short, Ardigò complements Grice by explaining why cooperative reasoning is socially functional and historically cultivated (the “civile gentleman” as the anti-egoist type), while Grice complements Ardigò by showing how, even when motivations are mixed and egoistic, conversational meaning still proceeds through a distinctive, intention-sensitive rational calculus that generates implicatures without requiring a full sociological theory to run. Grice: “I love A. but I have a few qualms. His Opere filosofiche is improperly indexed! The man wrote zillions! My attention was first caught by  a minor editorial note. La morale dei positivisti was reprinted a few years later after its first edition as divided into two parts, “la morale’ proper and ‘Sociologia’ – Since I have used philosophical biology and philosophical psychology, A. is indeed into philosophical sociology. As he notes, sociology is today’s philosophese for the politica of the lizio, re publica romana. And being a positivist, A. provides some good background, which will later be refuted by the neo-idealists that oppose this sort of philosophy, to the idea of two organisms, or pirots, interacting. While I speak of conversational egoism as balanced by conversational tu-ism; A., less of an altruist, laughs at the ridiculous sensist conception of simpatia, and speaks of two principles: the principle of egoism, or prepotence, found amoung brutal animals, and the principle of what A. calls ANTI-EGOSIM, found in the civil Italian gentleman – ‘civile’ being crucial, as in CASTIGLIONE, ‘discorso,’ or ‘conversazione’ civile.  Ma un giorno ci accorgeremo che in A. la filosofia italiana, la filosofia, ha una sua magnifica affermazione. Ora e per quel giorno, noi abbiamo fatto il nostro dovere. TROILO. Sociologia. Implicatura cooperativa positivismo filosofico  biologia filosofica psicologia filosofica naturalista il sociale l’intersoggetivo, la morale positivista, il positivism filosofico. La morale e il diritto all’altro, giustizia, bene sociale, benevolenza, beneficenza, calcolo ragionale nella convivenza sociale, evoluzione sociale, organismo sociale, positivismo, communicazione e convenienza sociale, onesta morale, spettazione di onesta reciproca, fondazione naturalistica della morale, il fatto sociale, il devere, la regola d’oro, fare all’altro cioe che vorreste fatto a te, consiglio di prudenza, critica, costume, presupposizione della lingua. G: Let us begin with the word itself: positivismo. I take Ardigò’s use to be the proper one, and I rather think your Italian ear should support me. D: It does, provided we keep clear that in Ardigò the word names not merely an epistemic scruple but a wider moral and social programme. G: Exactly. That is why I resist the later habit, especially after 1936, of letting “neo-positivism” or “logical positivism” swallow the older and broader use whole. D: You mean that when Ayer calls himself, or is called, a neo-positivist, the label is already a narrowing. G: A narrowing and, to my mind, a slight historical impertinence. Ardigò’s positivismo belongs to the line of Comte, and with it comes sociology, moral formation, the social organism, the civil order, the whole business of convivenza. D: Whereas Ayer’s concern is much more with verification, meaning, logic, and the policing of metaphysical utterance. G: Quite. Which is why I am tempted to say that the proper label for Ayer is not positivism at all, but empiricism, or at most logical empiricism if one wants to mark the alliance with formal methods. D: You would keep positivismo for Ardigò and his kind, and reserve empiricism for Ayer and the Vienna-facing set. G: That is the broad idea. Ardigò is an old-fashioned positivist in a way that is philosophically important. He is not merely worried about what counts as meaningful utterance. He is concerned with moral life, social evolution, justice, benevolence, prudence, and the civic shaping of character. D: In La morale dei positivisti, certainly, one does not find a mere theory of verification. G: No, thank heaven. One finds instead a naturalistic moral psychology and a sociology. One finds egoism and anti-egoism, prepotence and its civilized counter-principle. D: And that anti-egoism is crucial, because it shows that Ardigò’s positivism is not just a hard-headed cult of brute fact. It is already a programme of civilization. G: Civile is the key word. The civil gentleman, the cultivated anti-egoist, the man fit for conversazione civile. There Ardigò is very Italian indeed. D: Also very distant from Ayer. G: Yes. Ayer gives us a brisk and talented cleansing of philosophical language. Ardigò gives us an account of social life and moral formation under positivist auspices. These are not the same animal merely wearing different collars. D: Still, one might object that both reject metaphysical exuberance. G: True, but that is far too weak a bond to justify the same primary label. Many people reject metaphysical exuberance. It does not follow that they all belong under one historical umbrella. D: So your complaint is partly lexical and partly genealogical. G: Entirely so. Words have histories, and one ought not let the later, narrower use erase the earlier, richer one. If you call Ayer a positivist without qualification, you risk making Ardigò invisible. D: Or making Comte invisible. G: Precisely. Comte is indispensable here. Ardigò is intelligible in a Comtean horizon: science, society, order, progress, the social fact before the linguistic test. D: Whereas Ayer arrives through another route, though not wholly severed from that older lineage. G: Through Vienna, through logical analysis, through the new prestige of symbolic method, through anti-metaphysical impatience of a specifically twentieth-century sort. D: And through the English taste for empiricism. G: Just so. Which is why I say that “empiricism” is the better label. It has the right ancestry for English philosophy. Locke, Hume, the lot. Ayer is far more at home there than under the old positivist banner. D: Yet the banner was historically used. G: I know. People often use the wrong banners. That is one of the consolations of history: it gives philosophers something to correct. D: You promised jokes. G: Ah yes. First, if one insists on positivism, one should remember that its literal antonym would be negativism, which sounds less like a doctrine than a poor breakfast mood. D: And the second? G: If neo-positivism is really a thing, does that mean the earlier variety becomes palaeo-positivism? One imagines Ardigò as a philosophical fossil, which is absurd and therefore instructive. D: Palaeo-positivism has a certain comic dignity. G: It does. A museum case, perhaps: “Specimen from the age when positivism still meant society, morals, and civilization rather than merely the syntax of respectable utterance.” D: The joke has a serious point. Prefixes can conceal theft. G: Exactly. Neo often means: we have taken an old word and quietly moved the furniture. D: Let us stay with Ardigò. What, in your view, makes him representative of positivism in the strict and proper sense? G: Two things above all. First, the breadth of his ambition: he means positivism as a worldview, not as a criterion of sentence-admissibility. Second, the social and moral content: he naturalizes ethics and civic order. D: So the very title La morale dei positivisti matters. G: Immensely. You could not imagine Ayer writing The Morality of the Positivists and meaning by it the formation of civic anti-egoism in the organism of society. D: No, one imagines instead a pamphlet on what not to say in metaphysics. G: Quite. Ardigò speaks of benevolence, beneficence, justice, social good, the rule of life with others. His language of morality is rooted in social fact and social evolution. D: And there is his skepticism about sentimental sympathy. G: Which I rather like. He will not found morality on a gush. He prefers a cultivated counter-principle, a disciplined anti-egoism. In that respect he is sterner and perhaps saner than some moral sentimentalists. D: There is also the organismic picture of society. G: Yes, and it matters. For Ardigò, society is not an accidental aggregate of speakers. It is an organized, evolving order in which norms and language alike are socially embedded. D: That gives him a relevance to your own concerns with conversation. G: Naturally. If I speak of conversational cooperation, Ardigò offers a thicker social background: why cooperation is cultivated, why civility matters, why predictable interaction is a social necessity. D: But he would not derive implicature. G: No, and that is where our difference remains healthy. My own account is deliberately thin. One need not invoke a full sociology to explain how a hearer recovers what is meant from what is said. D: Still, Ardigò helps explain why such recovery belongs within civilized life. G: Exactly. He provides the anthropology, or rather the social-moral backdrop, not the calculative micro-theory. I tell you how a conversationalist infers. Ardigò tells you why a society would need creatures capable of that sort of orderly inferential coexistence. D: So Ardigò complements rather than anticipates you. G: Nicely put. He is not a theorist of implicature. He is a theorist of the social conditions under which cooperative reason becomes functional and prized. D: Let us move to Oxford. Who, in the years around Ayer’s 1936 landmark, would have echoed Ardigò there better than Ayer himself? G: Not Ayer, certainly. Ayer was importing a sharper, younger, Vienna-tuned impatience. If you want an Oxford echo of the broader social and moral cast, you would look less to the self-styled logical positivist and more to those with a larger civic or social-philosophical temper. D: Whom do you have in mind? G: Some of the moral and political philosophers, certainly, though none is simply Ardigò in English clothes. One might think of figures concerned with social order, ethical formation, public reason, perhaps even some idealist survivors turned naturalists in spite of themselves. But the exact echo is imperfect. D: So the point is comparative affinity, not direct duplication. G: Precisely. Oxford had moralists, classicists, social thinkers, and empiricists. It did not have an Ardigò on every staircase. But if the question is who best reflects positivism as a broad social programme, the answer is: not Ayer. D: Because Ayer represents a narrower philosophical enterprise. G: Yes, and a brilliant one in its own way. I do not deny the landmark. I deny the title’s historical overreach. D: Might one say that Ayer belongs under logical empiricism more than logical positivism? G: I should be very happy with that. Logical empiricism is less misleading. It keeps the epistemic and analytic emphasis without annexing the full Comtean-Ardigò landscape. D: And it sounds less like an attempted coup over the older word. G: Exactly. One must protect historical vocabulary from successful invasions. D: There is also Colorni in your background. G: Ah yes, Colorni is helpful because he, like Ayer, looks toward Vienna and Kraus, and thereby marks the continental route by which “positivism” shifts its center of gravity. D: So Colorni helps show the transition from broader positivism to the more specifically logical or analytic variant. G: Yes, and also the complication. For once Vienna appears, one gets a new atmosphere: language critique, anti-metaphysics, formalization, clarification, a harsher sense of philosophical hygiene. D: Whereas Ardigò belongs to the nineteenth-century confidence that science can underwrite an entire civil order. G: Splendidly said. That is the heart of it. Ardigò’s positivism is not just epistemological modesty. It is a civilizational programme. D: And one rooted in Italy’s own vocabulary of the civile. G: Exactly. One cannot overstate the importance of that. Civil conversation, civil morality, civil formation. Ardigò stands in that line more readily than in any proto-Vienna line. D: Then when Ayer uses neo-positivism, he is taking over a word whose older social resonance has not vanished, even if he has little use for it. G: Just so. That is why the label jars. It is not wholly false, but it is historically rude. D: Let us return to empiricism. Why is that label better for Ayer? G: Because Ayer is centrally concerned with experience, evidence, verification, the elimination of pseudo-statements, the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the limits of meaningful discourse. This is an empiricist temper refined by logic, not a Comtean social gospel. D: So if one says logical empiricism, one gets both the English ancestry and the Viennese method. G: Exactly. It is tidy without being flattening. D: And one leaves positivism to name the broader nineteenth-century movement. G: Or at least to name it primarily. Historical priority should count for something. D: This would also preserve the intelligibility of La morale dei positivisti as a title. G: Indeed. Under the broader sense, the title is entirely natural. Under the Ayerian narrowing, it would sound almost bizarre. D: Because one would expect a theory of meaningfulness, not a treatise on morality and social discipline. G: Exactly. Ardigò’s very title is evidence in your favor and mine. D: Our favor, I hope. G: Quite. Let us not let egoism defeat anti-egoism in the middle of a discussion about Ardigò. D: He would demand anti-egoism of us both. G: And prudent civility besides. D: There is another point. In Ardigò, language itself is a social fact, not merely a vehicle for truth-conditions. G: Yes, very important. Presuppositions embedded in language, custom, reciprocal expectations of honesty, the rule of social life. He is thicker than the later linguistic hygienists. D: That thickness is exactly what your own thin theory of conversational reason avoids. G: Avoids methodologically, yes. One can derive implicatures without first solving sociology. But Ardigò remains useful because he shows why a civilized order cultivates the very expectations on which such derivations rely. D: So one might say: Ardigò explains the habitat, you explain the mechanism. G: Admirable. I shall steal that if you permit. D: I permit it on condition of attribution. G: Very anti-egoistic of you. D: Thank you. Now, what of Comte himself? Does Ardigò merely inherit him, or transform him? G: Both. He inherits the broad ambition and the scientific-social aspiration, but he adapts them to Italian moral and civic concerns. Ardigò is not just a provincial Comtean. He has his own language of moral cultivation and social fact. D: Then his positivismo is neither merely imported nor merely local. G: Exactly. It is a serious national inflection of a European movement. D: Which makes the later annexation of the word by logical positivists even more misleading. G: Yes. A later technical school should not be allowed to retroactively monopolize an older continental vocabulary. D: There is perhaps also a matter of tone. Ardigò sounds civic and formative; Ayer sounds combative and eliminative. G: Very good. Ardigò builds a social order. Ayer clears a philosophical desk. D: Both useful operations, but not the same one. G: Precisely. D: Then what would you say, in one sentence, if forced? G: I would say: Ardigò is a positivist in the original, broader, Comtean-social sense; Ayer is better described as a logical empiricist than as a positivist simpliciter. D: And in two sentences? G: If you insist on calling Ayer a neo-positivist, do so with a warning label. Otherwise one will mistake palaeo-positivism for a fossil when in fact it was the main body. D: There is your second joke again. G: I am a man of limited comic resources but strong commitment. D: Let us then conclude with the contrast neatly laid out. Ardigò: moral psychology, sociology, social organism, anti-egoism, civil life, naturalized morality. Ayer: verification, logical analysis, anti-metaphysical critique, empiricist discipline. G: Exactly. And the bridge term, if one needs one, is logical empiricism, not a confiscatory positivism. D: With Comte behind Ardigò. G: And Vienna behind Ayer. D: And Colorni as one of the figures marking that Viennese orientation. G: Yes, that helps situate the transition. D: Then I think we have the point. G: So do I. And, to end positively rather than negatively, let us grant Ayer his landmark without giving him Ardigò’s name. D: A nicely anti-egoistic settlement. G: Ardigò would approve.Grice: Caro Ardigò, la tua “morale dei positivisti” mi ha fatto riflettere: credi davvero che tra egoismo e anti-egoismo ci sia spazio per una conversazione civile, o finiamo tutti a calcolare il bene come se fossimo contabili della benevolenza?Ardigò: Grice, se fossimo davvero contabili, la simpatia sarebbe solo una voce di bilancio! Ma io dico che il vero italiano, quello civile, sa essere anti-egoista senza perdere il gusto della conversazione – ti assicuro, anche Castiglione avrebbe approvato.Grice: Però qualche brutale animale potrebbe obiettare: “Io preferisco la prepotenza, altro che discorso civile!” Secondo te, la filosofia italiana può davvero domare la bestia che vive in ognuno di noi?Ardigò: Grice, la filosofia italiana ha un segreto: sa ridere della bestia, e la converte con una battuta. Il trucco sta nel fare all’altro ciò che vorresti fosse fatto a te – se la bestia non capisce, almeno si diverte. Ecco la vera implicatura cooperativa: convivenza e un pizzico di ironia. Ardigò, Rodrigo Felice (1869). Pomponazzi. Mantova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Argentieri – Ossia: Grice e Argentieri: la ragione conversazionale e il deutero-esperanto.  Emmanuele Argentieri (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e il deutero-esperanto. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an inference licensed by rational cooperation: speakers rely on shared expectations about informativeness, relevance, and perspicuity, and hearers recover what is meant (often beyond what is said) by assuming the speaker is still being cooperative at the level of intentions. Argentieri’s “lingua euratlantica” project (developed publicly at least by 1960 and systematized in L’integrazione linguistica euratlantica, 1963) approaches the same phenomenon from the opposite direction: instead of explaining how conversational understanding routinely outruns grammar, it proposes to redesign the linguistic code—through staged, “democratic” normalization and integration of grammars and shared vocabulary—so that cross-national understanding becomes more direct, less dependent on ad hoc pragmatic bridging. In Gricean terms, Argentieri is trying to shift communicative burden from implicature to what is explicitly encoded (a more uniform morphosyntax and lexicon would reduce the need for inference across divergent linguistic habits), whereas Grice’s point is that even a maximally regularized code will still leave meaning underdetermined because conversation is an action guided by intentions and rational audience-design, not merely a transfer of well-formed strings. The “deutero-Esperanto” joke in your passage captures that tension: Argentieri’s integrationist stages aim at a stable common language “without offending” nationalist sentiment, but Grice would predict that once people actually use that language, implicatures will proliferate again—through choices of variant (cafè/coffee/caffè), strategic underinformativeness, and context-sensitive shortcuts—because the rational economy of conversation rewards leaving things unsaid when they can be safely inferred. So Argentieri offers a political-linguistic engineering ideal (make mutual understanding easier by harmonizing the code), while Grice offers a philosophical-pragmatic explanation of why mutual understanding is possible even amid code-diversity—and why, even in a harmonized code, reason-governed implicature remains a constitutive feature of how humans communicate. Grice: “As with A., it occurred to me that pirotese, as any other language, really, evolves: there’s proto-pirotese, which in time becomes deutero-pirotese, and others follow: trito-pirotese, tetarto-pirotese, pempto-pirotese, hector-pirotese, hebdomo-pirotese, ogdo-pirotese, enato-pirotese, decato-pirotese, endecato-pirotese, dodecato-pirotese. Lingua euratlantica. L'integrazione linguistica euratlantica, A. agita l'unificazione  delle lingue parlate nell'area euratlantica, cioè dell'italiano, ecc., e propone una soluzione mediante l'integrazione, che dove aver luogo con metodo rigidamente democratico. Tale metodo s’articola in un itinerario di tappe. Una prima tappa è la normalizzazione delle singole lingue mediante la semplificazione e il fissaggio d’una grammatica comune e la valorizzazione del patrimonio comune vocabolaristico. La seconda tappa è l'assimilazione dell’italiano e l’altri lingue col rendere comune anche la grammatica complementare. La terza tappa è l'arrivo alla costituzione d’una lingua atlantica. In questa lingua c’e un fondo comune di parole uguali – cf. Grice on ‘suit’ pronounced as ‘soot,’ which irritated him. C’e una struttura comune grammaticale morfo-sintattica; e c’e divergenze soltanto nelle parole di radice latina, le quali però sono unificate rispettivamente alla lingua di cui sono proprie. La quarta tappa è quella finale, in cui anche il dizionario atlantico si sono compenetrati, dando luogo al prevalere di una parola piuttosto che di un'altra nell'ambito delle masse delle lingue integranti, in modo da aversi UNA LINGUA SOLA, COMUNE, ai milioni di uomini dell'area. La lingua, applicando tutti i suggerimenti d'A., puo essere un fatto compiuto in breve tempo; e ricca, varia, piacevole, adatta alle esigenze della vita moderna, cara a tutti, perchè ottenuta senza offendere i sentimenti nazionalistici di nessun popolo.  Come si vede, anche nella sua scarna linearità, l'idea d'A. è estremamente suggestiva e meritevole dell'attenzione dei filosofi come Grice e i suoi sequaci – ‘e meglior dal deutero-esperanto’ -- degli studiosi, dei politici, e dei tecnici. Grice: Argentieri, ti confesso che la tua idea della lingua euratlantica mi ha colpito! Ma dimmi, in questa nuova lingua, come chiameresti il caffè? Argentieri: Caro Grice, il caffè rimane caffè – più democratico di così non si può. Però, se la pronuncia diverge, basta fissare una regola. Magari la chiamo “cafè” per accontentare i francesi, o “coffee” per non far arrabbiare gli inglesi. Grice: E la grammatica? Se mi sbaglio con una desinenza, rischio di essere escluso dal club euratlantico? Argentieri: Nessun rischio, caro amico! Nella nostra lingua, anche gli errori fanno parte della festa. Se uno dice “piacere” invece di “pleasure”, applaudiamo! E se qualcuno osa inventare una parola, la votiamo: chi vince entra nel dizionario – altro che deutero-esperanto, questo è il vero spirito democratico! Argentieri, Emmanuele (1960). Cina rossa: Chiesa delle catacombe. Vita e Pensiero.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ario – Ossia: Grice e Ario e la ragione conversazionale. Tutore di filosofia d’OTTAVIANO, che lo stima talmente tanto che, dopo la conquista di Alessandria, dichiara d’aver risparmiato la città solo pel bene d’Ario.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Arione – Ossia: Grice e Arione: la setta di Locri -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Locri). Filosofo italiano. A Pythagorean visited by Platone. Arione. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Arione”

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristea – Ossia: Grice e Aristea: la diaspora di Crotone -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Metaponto). Filosofo italiano. According to Giamblico di Calcide (“Vita di Pitagora”), Aristea was a Pythagorean. Aristea. GriceLuiigi Speranza, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristea.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristeneto – Ossia: Grice e Aristeneto – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Nizza). Filosofo italiano. A pupil of Plutarco. Aristeteneto. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristeneto Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristeneto – Ossia: Grice ed Aristeneto – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Nizza). Filosofo italiano. A pupil of Plutarco.  Grice: Aristeneto, sei davvero una via di mezzo tra Roma e Nizza – e un filosofo italiano che ha persino studiato con Plutarco! Dimmi, le lezioni erano più filosofiche o più “nice”? Aristeneto: Caro Grice, a Nizza si filosofeggia anche sulla qualità del sole! Plutarco diceva: “La saggezza è come il clima, va colta quando c’è bel tempo”. A Roma invece… preferite il ragionamento nuvoloso? Grice: Che bello, filosofia mediterranea! Ma dimmi, Aristeneto, in classe a Plutarco, c’era mai qualcun altro che si metteva a discutere sulle implicature del pranzo? Aristeneto: Oh, spesso! Con Plutarco il pranzo era sempre questione filosofica: “Mangia, ma pensa!” diceva. Da allora ho imparato che ogni insalata ha la sua ragione… e anche le olive, se ben interrogate, rispondono. Here Grice has an Aristenetus, a disciple of Plutarco at Nizza that's Nicaea in Asia? Most likely, yes: this “Nizza” is again not Nice on the Riviera, but Nicaea in Bithynia. The main clue is the name itself. Aristaenetus is regularly transmitted with the ethnic Nicaenus, and Italian cataloguing tradition explicitly preserves that form. The BeWeB entry for the Italian translation of his letters lists him as Aristaenetus : Nicaenus, which is exactly the sort of evidence one wants here. That points to Nicaea in Asia Minor, not to Nice near Ventimiglia. [beweb.chie...ttolica.it] So Grice’s instinct is very probably right again: “Nizza” in the Speranza file is best understood as an Italianised modern rendering standing in for ancient Nicaea, that is modern İznik in Turkey. [beweb.chie...ttolica.it] I should, however, separate two questions. On the place-name, the case is fairly strong: Aristaenetus is indeed associated with Nicaea by the ethnic Nicaenus. [beweb.chie...ttolica.it] On the claim that he was a pupil of Plutarch, I do not have a solid confirming source from this pass. What I do find is that modern scholarship and academic notices treat Aristaenetus as a late antique Greek epistolographer, probably of the fifth or sixth century, closely engaged with Platonic eros and classical literary material, but not in the material I found securely as a documented direct pupil of Plutarch. [sns.it], [fondation-...lenique.fr], [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] That chronological point matters, because if the intended Plutarch is the famous Chaeronean Plutarch of the first–second century, the dates sit very badly with the usual placing of Aristaenetus in late antiquity. One could imagine confusion with another later Plutarch, such as Plutarch of Athens, but I do not yet have evidence that this is what Speranza meant. [sns.it], [fondation-...lenique.fr], [britannica.com], [handwiki.org] So the dry answer is this. Yes, “Nizza” here is very likely Nicaea in Asia Minor, not Nice in the old county of Nice. But the second half of the entry, the direct discipleship to Plutarch, remains unverified on the present evidence and may rest on a conflation or a loose secondary tradition. [beweb.chie...ttolica.it], [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] If you want, I can do one more narrow pass specifically on whether any source explicitly says Aristaenetus studied under Plutarch of Athens, because that is the only version that looks chronologically even remotely salvageable. [fondation-...lenique.fr], [britannica.com], [handwiki.org]

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristeo – Ossia: Grice e Aristeo: la setta di Crotone -- Roma – filosofia italiana 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristio – Ossia: Grice ed Aristio: la ragione conversazionale e il portico romano. Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Grice: “When Italians speak of The Portico, I think they mean something, as when they speak of ‘L’Orto’ they mean ‘pleasure’ or eudaemonismo. ‘Portico’ and ‘Orto’ are hardly philosophical terms!” Keywords: portico. Filosofo italiano. A friend of ORAZIO  and probably a follower of the sect of the Porch. Aristio Fusco. Keywords: portico. GRICEVS: FVSCVS, dic mihi: cum Romani “Porticum” laudant, philosophiamne appetunt, an tantum umbram? ARISTIVS: Utramque; sub porticu Stoicus durat, sed ego—Orazî amicus—saepe duro sedens, quod est disciplina commodissima. GRICEVS: Ergo “Porticus” est quasi regula sermonis: columnas habet, ne verba corruant; “Orto” vero est quasi voluptas—sed vix terminus philosophicus. FVSCVS: Minime vix: Roma philosophatur etiam ambulans; si nomen leve est, gravis est mos—et sub porticu semper invenies aliquem qui se sapientem putet. This friend of Horatius, Aristius Fuscus, was gens Fusca? Any other members of it? Aristius Fuscus was very likely not of a separately attested gens Fusca in the strong prosopographical sense. The normal Roman inference from Fuscus is that it is a cognomen, not a gentilicium. In the name Aristius Fuscus, Aristius is the nomen and points to the gens Aristia; Fuscus is then the cognomen, meaning roughly dark, swarthy, or tawny. So the friend of Horace is best understood as a member of the gens Aristia, with Fuscus as his family branch or personal cognominal marker, not as a man of a gens Fusca. That is also how he is usually taken in classical scholarship. The difficulty is that the gens Aristia is itself not one of the most heavily documented Roman gentes, and Aristius Fuscus is far more famous as Horace’s friend than as a node in a large recoverable family archive. So one should be cautious about building too much genealogical masonry around him. As for other members, the safest answer is this. One may expect other Aristii in inscriptions and scattered prosopographical material, but not a clearly famous and well populated gens organized for the literary memory the way, say, the Julii, Claudii, or Cornelii are. If the question is whether there are other famous members of a supposed gens Fusca, the answer is effectively no, because Fusca is not the usual way the family would be identified. If the question is whether there are other people called Fuscus or Fusca in Roman history, certainly yes, in abundance, but that only shows the spread of the cognomen, not the existence of a distinct gens Fusca. So the dry formulation would be: Aristius Fuscus is not naturally read as belonging to a gens Fusca. He is read as an Aristius of the gens Aristia, with Fuscus as cognomen. Other Fusci are plentiful in Roman naming, but they are bearers of the cognomen Fuscus, not evidence for a single coherent gens Fusca. If you like, I can next give you a short prosopographical note in the same dry English metalanguage on Aristius Fuscus as Horace’s friend, including what can and cannot be safely inferred about his Stoic colouring.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristide – Ossia: Grice e Aristide: la setta di Reggio -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Reggio). Filosofo italiano. According to Giamblico di Calcide (“Vita di Pitagora”), Aristide was a Pythagorean. Aristide. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristide.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristippo – Ossia: Grice e Aristippo: la diaspora di Crotone -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Taranto). Filosofo italiano. According to Giamblico di Calcide (“Vita di Pitagora”), Aristippo was a Pythagorean. Aristippo. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristippo.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristo – Ossia: Grice e Aristo – Roma He specialised in legal philosophy. Plinio  Minore describes him as a man of great wisdom, and superior in virtue to all the philosophers of his time. Aristo. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristo,

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristo – Ossia: Grice e Aristo – Roma –filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. The brother of Antioco and a friend of Brutus. Aristu was said to hae been an inferior philosopher to his brother, but a wholly admirable individual. Aristo. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristo.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristocleida – Ossia: Grice e Aristocleida: la diaspora di Crotone -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Taranto). Filosofo italiano. According to Giamblico of Calcide (“Vita di Pitagora”),  a Pythagorean. Aristocleida. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristocleida.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristocle – Ossia: Grice e Aristocle: il Lizio a Roma A member of the Lizio, studied at Rome under Erode Attico. Tito Claudio Aristocle. Aristocle. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristocle.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristocrate – Ossia: Grice e Aristocrate – Roma – filosofia italiana. –  – Filosofo italiano. Regarded as an accomplished philosopher, a man of great learning, and someone who lead a pious life. A puil of Lucio Anneo Cornuto and a friend of both Persio and Agatino. Petronio Aristocrate. Aristocrate. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristocrate.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristocrate – Ossia: Grice e Aristocrate: la setta di Reggio -- Roma According to Giamblico di Calcide, Arisocrate was a Pythagorean. Aristocrate. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristocrate.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristodoro – Ossia: Grice e Aristodoro: all’isola -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Siracusa). Filosofo italiano. Aristodoro was the recipient of the tenth letter of Platone – but we do not if he responded to it. In the letter, Plato credits Aristodor as being a “philosopher” himself. Aristodoro. Refs. , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristodoro.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristomene – Ossia: Grice e Aristomene: la diaspora di Crotone -- Roma – filosofia italiana (Metaponto). Filosofo italiano. According to Giamblico di Calcide (“Vita di Pitagora”), Aristomene was a Pythagorean. Arostomene. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice e Aristomene,” Aristone – Roma – filosofia italiana – Filosofia del principtao --  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A philosopher at Rome, attached to the household of Marco Lepido. According to Seneca, A. used to engage in philosophical discussions when travelling around in a carriage, leading a wit to observe that he was obviously not a ‘peripatetic.’ Aristone. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristone.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristone – Ossia: Grice e Aristone: la setta di Ceo -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Ceos). Filosofo italiano. Ariston of Julii after the town on Ceos. Aristone. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristone.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristosseno – Ossia: Grice ed Aristosseno e LA ragione conversazionale. How to live the good life.  

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Arnoufi – Ossia: Grice ed Arnoufi – Roma – filosofia italiana – . (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A philosopher. His talents extended to magic. He conjured up a storm for the Romans at a time when they were short of water. Arnoufi. Grice, “Grice ed Arnoufi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ariano – Ossia: Grice ed Arriano: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana (Roma). Scolaro di Epitteto. Lucio Flavio Arriano. Arriano. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Arriano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ario – Ossia -- Grice ed Ario Didimo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale. Tutore di filosofia d’OTTAVIANO, che lo stima talmente tanto che, dopo la conquista di Alessandria, dichiara d’aver risparmiato la città solo pel bene d’Ario. Ario suggere ad Ottaviano di giustiziare Cesarione, il figlio di Cleopatra e GIULIO Cesare -- οὐκ αγαθὸν πολυκαισαρίη, un gioco di parole basato su un verso d’Omero. A., come i suoi due figli Dionisio e Nicanore, insegnano filosofia ad OTTAVIANO.Viene spesso citato da Temistio, il quale afferma che Ottaviano lo considerava meritevole quanto Agrippa. In Quintiliano si scopre che A. scrive o insegna anche retorica. Si tratta probabilmente dello stesso A. la cui Vita era nella parte finale mancante delle Vite di Diogene Laerzio. Ario Didimo viene solitamente identificato con l'Ario le cui opere vengono citate a lungo da Stobeo, e che sintetizzano lo stoicismo, la scuola peripatetica ed il platonismo. Il fatto che il nome completo sia Ario Didimo lo sappiamo grazie ad Eusebio, il quale cita due lunghi passaggi della sua visione stoica del dividno; la conflagrazione dell'universo; e l'anima. Plutarco, Ant., Apophth.; Cassio Dione; Giuliano, Epistles; comp. Strabone. Braund at al, Myth, history and culture in republican Rome: studies in honour of Wiseman, University of Exeter Press, La frase originale era οὐκ αγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη " cioè "Non è bello avere troppi capi" o "il regno di molti è una brutta cosa" (Omero, Iliade). "polukaisarie" è una variante di "polukoiranie". "Kaisar" (Cesare) sostituisce "Koiran(os)", che significa "capo". Sventonio, Augustus, Temistio, Orat., Quintiliano, iComp. Seneca, consol. ad Marc. 4; Eliano, Varia Historia; Suda; Richard Hope, The book of Diogenes Laertius: its spirit and its method, Inwood, The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Cambridge ^ Eusebio, Praeparatio Evangelica, Pomeroy, A. Epitome of Stoic Ethics. Texts and Translations; Graeco-Roman. Atlanta, GA: PORTICO. GRICEVS: Arie Didime, si Octavianus Alexandriam tibi servavit, cave ne tu ei tot Caesares relinquas. ARIVS: Recte mones: non bonum polykaisariē, nam unus Caesar satis est, duo iam tumultus. G: At tu, philosophus et rhetor, uno verbo imperium purgas—ego vix uno verbo vinum peto. A.: Noli timere, Grice: tu vinum pete, ego sententiam dem, et uterque urbem servabit—tu guttur, ego Romam.

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristo – Ossia: Grice ed Aristo (Roma, Lazio). He specialised in legal philosophy. Plinio  Minore describes him as a man of great wisdom, and superior in virtue to all the philosophers of his time. GRICEVS: Aristo Romam tenes et iuris philosophiam colis; dic mihi, utrum leges intellegas an leges te ipsae intellegant? ARISTO: Ego leges intellego, sed Romani saepe malunt me sapientem vocare quam sententiam meam sequi. GRICEVS: Plinius Minor te sapientissimum et virtute superiorem cunctis philosophis sui temporis dixit, unde suspicor te etiam in iudicio pudorem vincere posse. ARISTO: Si virtus mea omnibus placet, tum vel in Foro hoc optime valet: facit ut etiam adversarius, dum me laudat, causam suam amittat.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristo – Ossia: Grice ed Aristo (Roma, Lazio): The brother of Antioco and a friend of Brutus. Aristu was said to hae been an inferior philosopher to his brother, but a wholly admirable individual. GRICEVS: Aristo, Roma te iactat philosophum Italicum; sed dic mihi, num Antioco fratre tuo etiam tu philosopharis, an tantum urbanissime ambulas? ARISTO: Philosophor, Grice, sed fateor Antiocum altius volare; ego tamen, ut aiunt, homo plane admirabilis sum—praesertim apud Brutum. GRICEVS: Optime—sic Roma duos habet: unum sapientissimum, alterum suavissimum; et Brutus, inter gladios, amicos eleganter colligit. ARISTO: Ita est: Antiocus docet, ego convido; Roma enim amat philosophiam, sed ridere etiam—alioquin cur tam diu staremus in Foro?

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristocrate – Ossia: Grice ed Aristocrate -- Petronio Aristocrate – Roma – filosofia italiana. –  – Filosofo italiano. Regarded as an accomplished philosopher, a man of great learning, and someone who lead a pious life. A puil of Lucio Anneo Cornuto and a friend of both Persio and Agatino.  GRICEVS: Aristocrate, Roma ipsa philosophari videtur, sed tu — si licet — es “caput” quod ambulat. ARISTOCRATES: Ego vero discipulus Cornuti fui, sed Persium et Agatinum amicos habui—itaque noli me nimis “sanctum” fingere. GRICEVS: Si “pium” te dicunt, fortasse est quia nimis bene discis et nimis raro gloriaris. ARISTOCRATES: Age, Grice, si quid de me scribes, fac ut “puil” fiat “pupil,” ne etiam Latine erubescam.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristone – Ossia: Grice ed Aristone (Roma, Lazio): Filosofia del principato. A philosopher at Rome, attached to the household of Marco Lepido. According to Seneca, A. used to engage in philosophical discussions when travelling around in a carriage, leading a wit to observe that he was obviously not a ‘peripatetic.’ GRICEVS: Ariston, cum in curru cum Lepido vehereris et de philosophia dissereres, dixit quidam te certe non esse peripateticum, sed per-carrucam. ARISTON: Rideat ille, Grice, nam ego ambulare possum et tamen disputare, sed in via Romana melius est sedere quam frangi. GRICEVS: At si philosophia in rota pendet, cavendum est ne syllogismus in cloacam cadat et Lepidus nos expellat. ARISTON: Nihil time, nam si currus trepidat, ego sententiam brevem facio—ut via salva sit et disputatio non fiat casus.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristone -- Grice ed Aristone: la setta di Ceo -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Ceos). Filosofo italiano. Ariston of Julii after the town on Ceos. Aristone. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aristone. GRICEVS: Ariston Ceus, discipule sectae Ceae, Romamne venisti ut sapientiam doces, an ut nos doceas quomodo iucunde desinere vivendum sit? ARISTON: Veni, Grice, ut vos doceam vivere tam constanter ut etiam mors, si adsit, more hospitis dimittatur. GRICEVS: At in nostro Gruppo di Gioco, si quis hospes nimis mane discedit, dicimus eum maximam relationis violasse. ARISTON: Tum respondeo: ego relationem servo—nam si vita mala est, optimum est brevem colloquium facere et surgere.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aristosseno – Ossia Grice ed Aristosseno (Roma, Lazio) e LA ragione conversazionale. How to live the good life.  A. filosofo italo Dice A. che il vero amore del bello sta nelle attività pratiche e nelle scienze; perché l'amare e il voler bene hanno inizio dalle buone usanze e occupazioni, così come, nelle scienze ed esperienze, quelle buone ed oneste amano davvero il bello; mentre ciò che dai più è detto amore del bello, cioè quello che si manifesta nelle necessità e nei bisogni della vita è, se mai, la spoglia del vero amore.»  (Stobeo, Florilegio) Filosofo antico, peripatetico e scrittore di teoria musicale. Ritratto immaginario d’A. Figlio di Spintaro, allievo di Socrate, è da questi e dal padre avviato alla musica – come Grice -- e alla filosofia.  S'interessa alla dottrina pitagorica, per poi diventare discepolo di Lampo Eritreo, di Senofilo e infine uno dei principali allievi d’Aristotele: infatti ebbe l'incarico di tenere nella sua scuola lezioni di musicologia. Aspira alla successione del maestro e la nomina di Teofrasto alla direzione della scuola peripatetica, dopo la morte di Aristotele, è la profonda delusione della sua vita.  Infatti si trasfere a Mantinea, una città del Peloponneso famosa pella diffusione della musica, dove vive per molti anni, ha molti discepoli detti Aristosseni ed è consigliere del re Neleo. Qui scrive due opere, Il carattere dei Mantinei e l'Elogio dei Mantinei.  È, tra l'altro, andata perduta un'opera di A. intitolata Sull'ascoltare musica, nella quale pare si sostenesse il carattere necessariamente attivo di questa operazione, che richiede un vigile e assiduo confronto tra i suoni passati – Grice: “I am hearing a sound” – “I am hearing a noise” -- e quelli presenti e futuri. Ossia, A. riconosce la funzione fondamentale della MEMORIA – cf. Grice on LOCKE -- nell'intelligenza della musica, come risulta da un paragrafo degl’Elementi di armonia. Di queste due cose, invero, la musica è co-esistenza: SENSAZIONE E MEMORIA – Grice, “Personal identity”: “I am hearing a noise”/ Ravel, Pavane, Mahler, Wagner. Taranto, Puglia. GRICEVS: Arisoxene, si vera amor pulchri in bonis moribus et operibus est, cur tot philosophi tantum de pulchro disputant et nihil pulchre faciunt? ARISOXENVS: Quia, Grice, multi amant umbram pulchri in necessitatibus vitae, non ipsum pulchrum quod in scientiis et exercitatione habitat. GRICEVS: Ergo melior est qui bene canit et bene vivit quam qui de harmonia scribit et dissonanter se gerit? ARISOXENVS: Ita sane, nam musica ipsa coexistentia est sensus et memoriae, et sine memoria etiam pulchrum statim fugit quasi nota quae nondum audita iam periit.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Arnouifi – Ossia: Grice ed Arnoufi (Roma, Lazio). A philosopher. His talents extended to magic. He conjured up a storm for the Romans at a time when they were short of water.  GRICEVS: Arnoufi, Roma sitit, sed tu philosophus Italicus es—potesne nobis imbrem, non solum sententias, evocare? ARNOUFI: Possum, Grice, nam ars mea paulo magica est, et Romani, si aquam volunt, primum rideant. GRICEVS: Ridebimus, sed quaeso noli tonitrua nimis scholastica facere, ne senatus in syllogismos madeat. ARNOUFI: Age ergo, ecce nubes—et si quis rogat unde venit, dicam: ex ipsa Romae philosophia, quae tandem aliquid utile fecit.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Arrighetti – Ossia: Grice e Arrighetti: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale.  Giulio di Filippo Arrighetti (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, reconstructible inference from what is said to what is meant, guided by cooperative expectations (relevance, sufficient information, clarity) and by the speaker’s intention that the hearer recognize those intentions. Arrighetti, as your passage presents him, stands closer to the early modern rhetorical tradition that Grice sometimes retrofits as a precursor: Arrighetti’s Aristotelian-Ciceronian framework treats conversation as an art of civil reasoning whose success depends not only on logical demonstration but on judgment, deliberation, and the management of benevolence between speaker, interlocutor, and audience, with “diletto” (pleasure, the agreeable) functioning as a legitimate instrument of persuasion. The comparison is therefore a shift of explanatory center: Grice aims to explain how hearers can rationally recover unspoken content even when speakers omit, hedge, or apparently violate conversational norms, whereas Arrighetti aims to train speakers in how to structure discourse so that it achieves its civic-rhetorical ends (winning attention, securing goodwill, guiding judgment) through topics, figures, and orderly arrangement. This makes Grice’s implicature look like a generalization of what classical rhetoric catalogued piecemeal as figures and strategic indirections: where Arrighetti systematizes the “figures of rhetoric” as techniques within oratio (and distinguishes oratio from mere vocalization), Grice redescribes the same phenomena as products of a single inferential engine—pragmatic reasoning operating over shared norms—so that irony, understatement, hinting, strategic omission, and even certain “figures” become cases of what an utterance conversationally implies rather than additional encoded meanings. In short, Arrighetti supplies a normative rhetoric of how to converse well in public life (mind and mouth coordinated under benevolence and judgment), while Grice supplies a minimalist rational mechanics of how conversational understanding works even when the rhetoric is imperfect or indirect, showing that the social art Arrighetti teaches is underwritten by a deeper, intention-and-reason based logic of interpretation. Grice: “It was when giving the seminars at Oxford on conversation when I realised that, as for the ‘fgures of rhetoric,’ as identified by Aristotle and systematized by, among others, A., my idea of ‘implicature’ covered them all!” Filosofo fiorentino. Filosofo toscano. Filosofo italiano. Firenze, Toscana. Grice: “I like Arrighetti: his forte was Aristotle’s rhetoric, and he was very popular with the Accademia degli Ardenti, and later with a subgroup of this, The Accademia degli Svelati (which later merged with the Accademia dei Lunatici); his other forte was the distinction between ‘oratio’ and ‘oratio vvocalis’ – “Os” is of course Romann for ‘mouth’ – but figuratively for ‘linguaggio’ – (after all, the tongue is IN the mouth). I happen to prefer ‘mouth,’ because Roman ‘os’ is related to ‘essere’: you are who you are, i.e. you exist, because you can breathe through your mouth. Appartenente a una nobile famiglia fiorentina, studia la lingua greca e le filosofie Aristotelica e Platonica a Pisa e Padova. La rettorica di CICERONE spiegata.  È lodevol'usanza di tutti i buoni espositori et massime di quelli del lizio proporr'alcuni capitoli dal principio di qualunque trattato ch'eglin si metton ad esporre. l’arte di conversare, filosofia civie, rispondere, argomentare, il fine della retorica, le la rettorica distinta in tre parti, demostrazione, giudizio, buon giudizio, deliberazione, albero della retorica, luoghi retorici, il fine della poesia e il diletto, animale ragionabile, animale non-ragionabile, lucrezio, cicerone, quintiliano, il dire dilettevole, la benevolenza dell’oratore, la benevolenza del conversante, la benevolenza dell’auditore, la benevolenza dell’audienza, principi di rettorica, cicerone sulla rettorica di Aristotele – l’aristotele toscano, aristotele per i platonici di fiorenze, del piacere, della lussuria, dell’onore, dell’ingegno, del riso – Bergson – la felicita come fine – arte e natura. Figura retorica. Keywords: figura retorica. G.: In the old days, my dear S., things were trivial. S.: You mean easy. G.: No. Tri-vial. Three roads. Grammar, dialectica, rhetorica. Civilisation before specialisation. S.: Already nostalgic. G.: Not nostalgic. Merely resentful of progress. S.: And you want the three kept apart? G.: Distinct, not quarantined. Grammar concerns the saying. Dialectica concerns the exchange. Rhetorica concerns the management of effect. S.: Start with grammar, then. What is it? G.: The discipline of saying something properly enough that it may be said to have been said at all. S.: Rather dry. G.: Dryness is one of grammar’s charms. It does not aspire to save souls. S.: And it is not philosophy? G.: Not in the ambitious sense. Grammar gives you the sentence, not the wisdom. S.: “The saying,” then? G.: Yes. What is said, and how one says it. Case, construction, propriety, intelligibility. Mouth-work under rules. S.: Mouth-work sounds almost low. G.: Most indispensable things do. S.: Then dialectica? G.: Not “logic,” if you please. That is the later bureaucratic title. S.: What is wrong with “logic”? G.: It sounds as though one were hiring a machine. Dialectica is reasonableness in living exchange between rational creatures. S.: So not validity alone? G.: Certainly not. A man may be valid and yet impossible. S.: That would exclude many philosophers. G.: It would reduce the profession severely. S.: And rhetorica stands between the two? G.: Exactly where sensible people always put it, and where modern people have forgotten to look. S.: Explain. G.: Grammar asks whether the utterance is well-made. Dialectica asks whether it stands up in exchange. Rhetorica asks what it does to its audience. S.: “Audience” already sounds public, forensic, literary. G.: Because Oxford has exiled rhetoric to literary studies, where it spends its retirement discussing metaphor. S.: And wrongly? G.: Incompletely. Metaphor is a parish matter. Rhetoric is a civic one. S.: So Arrighetti matters because he preserves the civic view? G.: Precisely. He keeps alive the Aristotelian-Ciceronian thought that conversation is an art of civil reasoning, not merely a collision of propositions. S.: Yet you do not claim Arrighetti was himself a great philosopher. G.: No. One need not be a philosopher to keep philosophy’s furniture in repair. S.: Harsh. G.: Fair. A locksmith is not thereby a metaphysician. S.: Then what does Arrighetti preserve? G.: The older arrangement. The sense that speaking well involves judgment, benevolence, order, delight, and the governance of minds without brutalising them. S.: “Delight” sounds suspiciously non-philosophical. G.: Only to philosophers who think boredom is probative. S.: And benevolence? G.: Essential. The benevolence of speaker, conversant, auditor, audience. Without that, conversation collapses into stenography or war. S.: Very civilised. Slightly terrifying. G.: Civilisation often is. S.: Where does Cicero come in? G.: Cicero does in Latin what Arrighetti later does in Italian: he domesticates rhetorical intelligence into a language fit for educated public life. S.: So Cicero is the Roman vehicle and Arrighetti the Tuscan continuation? G.: Nicely put. Arrighetti is Cicero in a Florentine afterlife, with less empire and more vowels. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford, meanwhile, congratulates itself on clarity while pretending rhetoric is what happens in English schools to boys who cannot do Greats. S.: Yet you want rhetoric back in philosophy? G.: Not “back,” exactly. Restored to jurisdiction. S.: Give me your favourite example. G.: “That red pillar seems red to me.” S.: Grammatically impeccable. G.: Entirely. S.: Dialectically odd. G.: Quite. One wants to ask, “Why on earth are you telling me that?” S.: And rhetorically? G.: Rhetorically intelligible. The speaker may be over-observing, hedging, disclaiming authority, courting candour, or flouting a precept of proper plainness in order to signal a special stance. S.: So the oddity is not logical but conversational. G.: Better: civil-rhetorical. To call it merely “pragmatic effect” is to discover an old duchy and rename it after a tramline. S.: You object, then, to “pragmatic inference”? G.: Often, yes. Not always to the thing, but to the air of novelty. S.: Because Arrighetti already knew the territory? G.: In a distributed way, yes. Where moderns build one inferential engine, the rhetoricians catalogued figures, turns, placements, softenings, strategic indirections. S.: And you think your implicature swallows those? G.: With due politeness, yes. Irony, hint, understatement, strategic omission, many a figure of rhetoric look suspiciously like one family of reason-governed implication. S.: Arrighetti would approve? G.: He would either approve or demand a chapter heading. S.: You have one in mind. G.: “On the Misfortune by Which Rhetoric Was Given to the Literary People.” S.: Too short for you. G.: I could extend it. S.: Do. G.: “On the Misfortune by Which Rhetoric Was Given to the Literary People, Who Then Mistook It for Ornament, Whereas It Is Part of the Civil Management of Reason.” S.: Better. More impossible. G.: Oxford likes titles that arrive already footnoted. S.: But if grammar is “the saying,” and dialectica is the exchange, what precisely is rhetoric adding? G.: The adjustment to uptake: arrangement, salience, benevolence, occasion, force without violence, pleasure without frivolity. S.: Pleasure again. G.: Arrighetti is right to allow diletto. Men do not become reasonable by being made miserable. S.: Some dons do. G.: They become tenureable, not reasonable. S.: Can you produce an Arrighetti-like example? G.: A plausible one, yes. Suppose a speaker says in Italian courtly fashion, “I do not say he is unwise; I say only that counsel does not linger near him.” S.: Very good. G.: Thank you. Grammatically sound, dialectically evasive, rhetorically elegant. It secures criticism under cover of benevolence. S.: And implicature? G.: Perfectly visible. He means the man is a fool, but chooses a route fit for company. S.: Then rhetoric is manners for truth? G.: Not merely for truth. For intelligible civic use of truth, half-truth, emphasis, reserve, and timing. S.: You make it sound almost ethical. G.: Of course it is ethical. Benevolence is not syntax. S.: Yet not simply moral philosophy. G.: No. Moral philosophy is apt to become earnest too early. Rhetoric knows one must first get heard. S.: And where does dialectica differ from later logic again? G.: Later logic isolates consequence. Dialectica lives in the space of challenge, answer, concession, repair, relevance, burden, and reasonable sequence among conversants. S.: So “conversational reason” is closer to dialectica than to formal logic? G.: Quite. Though I reserve the right to frighten the logicians by borrowing their notation when it suits me. S.: Naturally. G.: A philosopher must keep some weapons. S.: Then why not simply say rhetoric is the social dimension of dialectic? G.: Because rhetoric is not merely an after-effect of argument. It also shapes entry, attention, willingness, memory, and judgment. It governs not just the contest, but the occasion. S.: Arrighetti on “oratio” versus “oratio vocalis,” then? G.: Yes, that is one of his charming distinctions. Mere vocalisation is not yet discourse. Mouth-noise is not civil speech. S.: “Os,” the mouth. G.: And figuratively language itself. The old people knew better than to imagine thought came pre-packaged without an organ. S.: You really do prefer “mouth” to more abstract terms. G.: Mouth has the advantage of making philosophers uneasy. S.: They prefer “language.” G.: Which permits them to forget they are animals. S.: Arrighetti would let them not forget? G.: He was too Tuscan to let them. S.: So if I say, “That red pillar seems red to me,” what rhetorical precept have I flouted? G.: Perhaps clarity, perhaps economy, perhaps the charitable assumption that one should not burden one’s hearer with the obvious unless there is some further point. S.: Then my hearer infers there is one. G.: Just so. S.: That is your implicature. G.: It is. But it is also what an older rhetoric would have described in terms of decorum, benevolence, and the management of saying less directly what one intends more fully. S.: So the modern machinery explains what the old manuals trained. G.: Splendid. That is exactly the relation. S.: Then why bother with Arrighetti at all, if your theory generalises him? G.: Because history is a useful corrective to self-congratulation. It reminds one that one has not invented civilisation in one’s own handwriting. S.: Oxford needs that reminder. G.: More often than it receives it. S.: And Arrighetti writing in Italian matters because? G.: Because it shows rhetoric leaving Latin without ceasing to be serious. Civil reason enters the vernacular and remains civil reason. S.: Not mere popularisation? G.: No. Translation upward, if anything. He makes Italian bear philosophical-rhetorical weight. S.: Florence doing for Aristotle what Oxford did not quite do for Cicero. G.: Very neat. You are becoming alarmingly serviceable. S.: I try. G.: Do not overdo it. It spoils the climate. S.: Then tell me: is rhetoric for philosophers, or only for orators? G.: For any philosopher who says anything to anyone. S.: Which excludes none. G.: Except perhaps the very advanced sceptic, who has finally become inaudible. S.: And dry humour belongs where? G.: Entirely within rhetoric. It is benevolence with a knife too small to prosecute. S.: Oxford’s chosen instrument. G.: One of its less lethal ones. S.: Then give me the Oxford moral of Arrighetti. G.: Never imagine that saying clearly, arguing validly, and being civilly effective are one and the same accomplishment. S.: And the anti-Oxford moral? G.: Never surrender rhetoric to departments of literature merely because they have prettier examples. S.: You really are annoyed by that. G.: I am old enough to be annoyed selectively. S.: What would Arrighetti say if he visited an Oxford seminar? G.: “You have dialectic without grace, grammar without ear, and rhetoric hiding in the tea.” S.: Cruel. G.: Florentine. S.: And what would you say to Arrighetti in return? G.: “My dear sir, we have done our best; but institutional decay is a long sentence.” S.: Then let us end with a formula. Grammar? G.: What is said. S.: Dialectica? G.: The reasonable exchange about what is said. S.: Rhetorica? G.: The civil art by which what is said and exchanged is made fit to work upon minds. S.: And Arrighetti? G.: A useful witness for the defence. S.: The defence of what? G.: Of the proposition that philosophers have mouths. S.: Hardly deniable. G.: At Oxford, my dear S., it has often been bravely attempted.G.:Arrighetti, tu che hai spiegato la rettorica meglio di chiunque, dimmi: per te la vera conversazione si fa con la bocca… o con la mente? A.: Caro Grice, senza dubbio la mente accende il discorso, ma se la bocca non collabora, rischi di sembrare un filosofo col singhiozzo! G.: Allora dovrei insegnare anche ai miei studenti di Oxford a usare la benevolenza dell’oratore, non solo la teoria dell’implicatura… A.: Esatto! Ricorda: un po’ di diletto non guasta mai; e se l’audienza ride, hai già vinto metà del giudizio! Arrighetti, Giulio di Filippo (1584). Della rettorica. Firenze, Giorgio Marescotti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Artemidoro – Ossia: Grice ed Artemidoro – Roma – filosofia italiana – . Filosofo italiano. Expelled from Rome. A close friend of CECILIO -- Plinio Minore, who admired him greatly and supported him after he was one of the philosophers expelled from Rome. Plinio describes him as a s a man of sincerity and integrity, as someone ho lived a frugal and disciplined life, and as someone who faded physical hardship with indifference. Artemidoro. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice e Artemidoro. Artemidoro (Roma, Lazio). Expelled from Rome. A close friend of Plinio Minore, who admired him greatly and supported him after he was one of the philosophers expelled from Rome. Plinio describes him as a s a man of sincerity and integrity, as someone ho lived a frugal and disciplined life, and as someone who faded physical hardship with indifference. GRICEVS: Artemidore, Roma te expulit, sed num expulit etiam disciplinam tuam, an tantum te fecit philosopho leviore sarcinis? ARTEMIDORVS: Roma corpus expulit, sed mentem non potuit, et ego frugalior factus sum, quasi expulsionem pro exercitatione acceperim. GRICEVS: Plinius Minor te tam sincere laudat ut suspicer eum te sustentare non solum nummis sed etiam epistulis—quae interdum duriores sunt quam hiems. ARTEMIDORVS: Ita est: ille me admiratur, ego labores indifferenter fero, et simul ridemus quod integritas mea plus itineris facit quam sandalia mea.

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Asclepiade – Ossia: Grices e Asclepiade: gl’accademici di Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Based in Rome, he was a member of the Accademia. He wrote a book on the immortality of the soul based on his interpretation of certain pronouncements of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Asclepiade. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Asclepiade,”  

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Asclepiade – Ossia: Grice ed Asclepiade -- Asclepiade: Roma antica -- filosofia italiana – . Filosofo italiano. Friend of Lactanzio. Wrote a book on Providence. Asclepiade. Refs. , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Asclepiade.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Asclepiade: gl’accademici di Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Based in Rome, he was a member of the Accademia. He wrote a book on the immortality of the soul based on his interpretation of certain pronouncements of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Asclepiade. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Asclepiade,”  

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Asclepiade – Ossia: Grice ed Asclepiade -- Roma antica -- filosofia italiana – . Filosofo italiano. Friend of Lactanzio. Wrote a book on Providence. GRICEVS: Asclepiada, inter Academicos Romae sedens, num Apollinis Delphici oracula ita interpretatus es ut anima statim immortalis fieret—sine ulla mora typographi? ASCLEPIADES: Ita sane, et libri mei de anima immortali tam celeriter vivunt quam lectores mei somnum capiunt. GRICEVS: Lactantio amico tuo dic: si Providentia omnia curat, cur tamen librarius meus semper deest cum nummos habeo? ASCLEPIADES: Providentia te exercet, Grice: Apollo promittit, Lactantius consolatur, et ego interea novum capitulum scribo ut tu patientiam discas.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Asclepiade – Ossia: Grice e Asclepiade: Roma antica -- filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. He develops a new approach to medicine by introducing ideas on atomism. Asclepiade. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Gricde, “Grice ed Asclepiade. Asclepiade: Roma antica -- filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. He develops a new approach to medicine by introducing ideas on atomism. GRICEVS: Asclepiada, Roma antiqua te docuit quomodo medicina atomis constet, an Roma tantum docet quomodo vinum constet? ASCLEPIADES: Roma docet utrumque, sed ego atomos sobrius numero, vinum autem tantum ad concordiam cum discipulis. GRICEVS: Ergo in tua philosophia Italica corpus est quasi res publica—atomis civibus, morbis seditiosis, medico consule. ASCLEPIADES: Recte; sed memento, Grice, consul bonus interdum nihil facit—et hoc ipsum ars maxima est.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ascoli – Ossia: Grice e Ascoli e LA ragione conversazionale.  Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (Gorizia, Friuli-Venezia) e LA ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats what is meant as an inferential achievement inside a cooperative practice: speakers design contributions with an eye to rational uptake, and hearers recover implicatures by assuming relevance, sufficiency, and intelligibility, then reasoning from what is said plus context to what must have been intended. Ascoli, by contrast, is not a pragmatics theorist but a founder of modern historical linguistics in Italy, and the “conversational reason” angle fits him best through his methodological picture of language as a historically layered, socially distributed system: trained as an autodidact in a multilingual border city (Gorizia) and committed to the comparative method, he analyzes dialects and language varieties as products of regular developments across time and contact, beginning with his early study Sull’idioma friulano e sulla sua affinità colla lingua valaca (Udine, 1846) and later institutionalizing a scientific linguistic public sphere with the Archivio glottologico italiano (founded 1873), whose Proemio explicitly links linguistic inquiry with civic stakes. The comparison, then, is a contrast of levels: Grice explains how, in the moment-to-moment micro-economy of talk, rational agents legitimately “go beyond” literal meaning; Ascoli explains how the very materials speakers exploit in those moments (forms, pronunciations, dialectal options, registers) arise from diachronic regularities, social stratification, and regional differentiation, as in his rigorous classification project (L’Italia dialettale, first written 1880; reprinted 1882). Where Grice’s governing norm is cooperative rational agency underwriting calculable implicature, Ascoli’s governing norm is methodical historical explanation underwriting why a community’s linguistic resources take the shape they do; the two meet when you treat implicature as something that presupposes a stable but evolving code and shared practices of interpretation, so that Grice supplies the rational rules of conversational inference while Ascoli supplies the historical-social ecology within which such inference is even possible and intelligible. Grice: “With A., we may think of Pirotese as developing along stages: proto-Pirotese, deuteron-Pirotese, trito-Pirotese, Tetarto-Pirotese, Pempto-Pirotese, Hecto-Pirotese, Hebdomo-Pirotese, Ogdo-Pirotese, Enato-Pirotese, Decato-Pirotese, Endecato-Pirotese, and Dodecato-Pirotese. Nato da ricca famiglia ebraica. Grice: “Like Witters” -- e formatosi nell’ambiente pluri-lingue della città, si dedica da auto-didatta allo studio della lingua. Sull’idioma friulano e sulla sua affinità colla lingua valaca. Entrato in contatto con vari studiosi italiani si trasfere a Milano. Studia soprattutto di inde-uropeistica -- del LATINO, A. s’orienta poi verso gli studi romanzi e la dialettologia italiana, contribuendo anche in questo campo all’affermarsi del metodo storico-comparativo e realizzando il progetto di una rivista scientifica, l’Archivio glottologico italiano. L’Archivio glottologico italiano accolse nel primo numero tanto il suo proemio, che salda insieme impegno civile e questione linguistica e manifesto polemico nei confronti delle posizioni linguistiche del non-ebreo MANZONI , quanto i Saggi ladini, premiati dall’accademia delle scienze di Berlino. L’italia dialettale, classificazione rigorosa dei dialetti italiani. G.: Let us begin with a corruption. S.: A moral one? G.: No, a philological one. Ladino, if you like, as a softened, provincial, mountain-bred corruption of latino. S.: Then I reject it at once. Latino comes from Latium. Ladino is spoken outside Latium. Your etymology is a geographical crime. G.: Geography is always trying to arrest philology for loitering. S.: I mean it literally. If a thing is “Latino,” it belongs to Latium. If it is not in Latium, it is not latino. G.: And if it descends from Latin? S.: Descends, perhaps. But “ladino” sounds like somebody dropped the t while crossing a pass. G.: Exactly. Which is already interesting. S.: Interesting only as laziness. G.: Or economy. The tongue often knows what the schoolmaster refuses to learn. S.: So now the d is a philosophical event? G.: Not philosophical; phonological. Though philosophers ought occasionally to notice that speech has consonants. S.: Very well. Why d for t? G.: Because stops soften, intervocalically especially, and civilisation advances by reduced muscular effort. S.: That is an alarming definition of civilisation. G.: It explains Oxford rather well. S.: Still, why “ladino” and not “romano,” if what you want is “Romance”? G.: Because romano was already over-employed, and because “Roman” carries the vulgar burden of empire. “Ladino” lets the remoteness speak. S.: Or the confusion. G.: The two are old friends. S.: Ascoli, then, uses ladino for what exactly? G.: For a set of Alpine Romance varieties which he wants brought into view as something more than local noise. S.: And he does so by corruption? G.: By classification. The corruption is your phrase, not his sin. S.: But he is making a family resemblance claim? G.: Yes. He is arguing for a peculiar affinity among the varieties of the Grisons, the Dolomitic Ladin zone, and Friulian, though the matter remains controversial. Graziadio Isaia Ascoli in the Saggi ladini frames a “zona ladina” stretching, in his broad conception, from the upper Rhine region toward the Adriatic, though no longer continuously. [it.wikisource.org], [it.wikisource.org] S.: A very ambitious stretch for so small a word. G.: Small words often annex large territories. S.: And where, in the ordinary modern sense, is Ladin actually spoken? G.: In the Dolomite valleys chiefly: Val Gardena, Val Badia, Val di Fassa, Livinallongo, and Ampezzo. [val-gardena.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [suedtirolerland.it], [provincia.tn.it] S.: Outside Latium all the same. G.: Heroically so. S.: Then your first move is phonology? G.: Ascoli’s first strength there, yes. He is heard by the ear before he is admired by the syntactician. S.: Give me the Oxford version. G.: The t has become d, or the hard edge has relaxed. Speech in the mountains economises. One might say that latino in a hurry becomes ladino. S.: That sounds invented. G.: Of course. But not absurd. S.: You are smuggling wit in place of evidence. G.: Never in place of; only ahead of. S.: So what genuinely interests you if not the soft consonant? G.: Morphosyntax. S.: Naturally. You always prefer the skeleton to the complexion. G.: A language is not its blush. Its core lies in the arrangements by which words govern one another. S.: You mean inflection, agreement, order, clitics, articles, all that domestic tyranny? G.: Exactly. The philosopher should care less for the anecdotal sound-change and more for the enduring habits of combination. S.: But did Ascoli? G.: Not in the modern way I should have liked. His original case is heavily phonological, comparative, classificatory. Later scholars have pressed further into morphology and syntax. Graziadio Isaia Ascoli’s hypothesis was widely seen as grounded above all in phonological evidence, with morphology, syntax, and lexicon less fully treated in the original argument. [sciarium.com] S.: So even your hero did not get to your favourite bit. G.: Heroes are useful partly because they leave work for one. S.: Then do it. What is morphosyntactically Ladin? G.: Among the things commonly noted are conservative Romance traits and patterns shared in part with Romansh and Friulian: plural marking in -s in many Ladin varieties, distinct pronominal and verbal patterns, and various local syntactic habits that keep it from simply dissolving into Italian. Recent popular summaries also point to plural -s and certain verb endings as notably conservative. Ladin is often described as preserving final -s for plurals and conservative second-person endings in ways unlike standard Italian. [italymagazine.com] S.: Popular summaries are not exactly Aquinas. G.: No, but they are sometimes right, which is more than can be said for many seminars. S.: And syntax? G.: Variation by valley, for one thing. Ladin is not one polished national instrument but a family of high-altitude compromises. One sees different local idioms across Val Gardena, Val Badia, Val di Fassa, Ampezzo, and Livinallongo, each with its own grammatical colouring. [suedtirolerland.it] S.: That is geography disguised as syntax. G.: Geography is often syntax with mountains. S.: Still too airy. Give me a better point. G.: Very well. If one wants to know whether a speech form is “merely” a dialect or a language, phonology alone will not settle it. What matters is whether the form has stable structural habits of its own: how it marks number, handles pronouns, orders clausal materials, manages agreement, and persists under contact. S.: So your claim is that Ascoli opens the door, and you would march through it carrying morphology under one arm and syntax under the other? G.: Very nearly my ideal portrait. S.: And semantics? G.: Necessary next. Once one has the sound and the structure, one asks whether old Latin material has drifted in meaning or whether local lexical items preserve distinct conceptual habits. S.: Have they? G.: Certainly at least in the obvious sense that mountain societies lexicalise their world differently, and Ladin also preserves vocabulary not reducible to standard Italian expectation. One recent overview notes lexical survivals with no obvious cognates elsewhere and points to remnants attributed to older substratal material, though one should not swagger too confidently about every etymology. Ladin is often described as preserving distinctive vocabulary, including items presented as remnants of pre-Latin substrate or otherwise highly local inheritance. [italymagazine.com] S.: Example. G.: Let us take a sober invented one rather than a forged citation. Suppose a Latin-derived word once signifying something like “field” comes in local use to narrow toward alpine pasture, or “house” towards household plus inherited plot. Minority languages often semanticise territory more intimately than administrative languages do. S.: That is plausible, which is a dangerous state for an example. G.: Then let us make the danger explicit. I am giving you a plausible semantic-development type, not a notarised specimen from Ascoli’s notebook. S.: At least you are honest about your crimes. G.: Oxford vice is rarely the crime; it is the candour afterwards. S.: And now pragmatics, no doubt, where you become happiest. G.: Not happiest. Merely least avoidable. S.: Ascoli as pragmatist? G.: No. Ascoli as rhetorician of linguistic status, whether he liked the title or not. S.: Explain. G.: When he brings Ladin to the forum, he is not merely classifying sounds. He is making a public-intellectual point that these mountain forms deserve scientific notice and civic seriousness. Graziadio Isaia Ascoli linked linguistic inquiry with broader civic stakes in the Archivio Glottologico Italiano, and the Saggi ladini became central to the question of linguistic identity. [academia.edu], [techefriulane.it] S.: So “ladino” is not only a label but an intervention? G.: Precisely. Latin was once imperial. Italian became national. Ladin is neither. It is local, residual, alpine, and therefore politically vulnerable. S.: Like Cornish or Manx, you mean. G.: In the sociological sense of minority prestige, yes. S.: But those are Celtic. G.: I am aware that the family tree does not turn into the same shrub merely because the leaves are neglected. S.: Good. Because otherwise you would soon be annexing Breton to Bologna. G.: A temptation, but I resist it. S.: And Scots? G.: Better as a comparison, because it lets one distinguish “language” from “dialect” as partly structural, partly historical, and very much political. S.: The Scots claim Scots is a language. G.: As well they might. Claims of linguistic autonomy are never only phonological; they are public acts. S.: And “home” pronounced “hume”? G.: An old delight. Enough to make a philosopher sound like his own footnote. S.: So your point is that classification is never innocent. G.: Exactly. To call something a language is to raise its conversational standing. To call it a dialect is often to assign it a chair in the corridor. S.: Who speaks Ladin at Oxford, then? G.: Probably nobody loudly enough to found a faculty. S.: Who holds the Chair of Manx at Oxford? G.: If there is one, it has been kept marvellously quiet. S.: And Ladin gets no such chair because it is too small? G.: Or because universities are very good at admiring diversity in the abstract while declining to fund it in the singular. S.: Dry enough for you? G.: Dryness is benevolence without syrup. S.: Let us return to Ascoli. Why “bring Ladino to the forum,” as you put it? G.: Because scholarly recognition is itself a pragmatic act. The moment you classify, map, compare, and print, you alter what can be publicly said about a speech community. S.: So the rhetoric lies in the very taxonomy. G.: Yes. The classificatory sentence is already a political sentence wearing scientific gloves. S.: You make him sound almost Gricean. G.: Only by extension. Grice explains how people infer beyond what is said. Ascoli explains why the code available for such inference has the shape it has. The two shake hands at the border of history and conversation. S.: And the “d” for “t” does not exhaust the matter. G.: Mercifully no. If it did, philology would be little more than dentistry. S.: Then let us summarise. Phonology? G.: The softening, developments, and comparative sound patterns by which Ascoli first makes the case. S.: Morphosyntax? G.: The deeper identity of the lingo: plural marking, pronominal habits, clause-structure tendencies, and valley-specific grammatical persistence. S.: Semantics? G.: Shifts in lexical meaning, local conceptual specialisation, and some survivals or distinctives not reducible to standard Italian expectation. S.: Pragmatics? G.: The public act of naming, classifying, and dignifying a minority speech as a proper object of science and culture. S.: So Ascoli is not merely hearing Ladin; he is defending it. G.: Exactly. He makes room for it in learned conversation. S.: And you approve because Oxford has a bad habit of letting only large languages into hall. G.: Or small ones with dead empires behind them. S.: Latin gets in because it ruled the world. G.: Italian gets in because it ruled the syllabus. S.: And Ladin? G.: Ladin gets in only if somebody insists. S.: Then Ascoli insisted. G.: He did. S.: And you? G.: I am merely insisting on the insistence. S.: Which is very Oxford. G.: Yes. We seldom save a language. We do, however, produce an argument for why somebody ought to have done.Grice: Isaia, con te mi viene in mente che il pirotese si sviluppa per gradi: proto-pirotese, deuteron-pirotese, trito-pirotese, tetarto-pirotese... e così via fino al dodecato-pirotese. Ogni fase ha il suo momento e la sua ragione, proprio come il friulano che hai studiato, tra affinità e differenze. Grice: Isaia, ti confesso che quando sento parlare di pirotese mi immagino una lingua che si evolve come una saga familiare, dal proto al dodecato, e ogni tappa ha il suo carattere. Ascoli: Caro Grice, hai ragione! Studiare dialetti in Italia è come seguire una telenovela, c’è sempre un parente che spunta fuori con una vocale nuova o un accento diverso. Grice: E tua madre cosa diceva quando portavi a casa un nuovo dialetto? “Isaia, lascia stare i friulani e finisci la minestra!” Ascoli: Esatto! E se le dicevo che avevo trovato affinità tra il friulano e il valacco, mi rispondeva che l’unica vera affinità era quella col pane caldo di Gorizia. Alla fine, ogni buona conversazione parte sempre da una tavola imbandita. Ascoli, Graziadio Isaia (1861). Saggi ladini. Torino, Stamperia Reale.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Asinio – Ossia Grice ed Asinio.’ Gaio Asinio Quadrato (Roma). storico e politico romano.  G.: Let us begin, then, with your precious Asinius. M.: Not Quadratus? G.: Asinius first. I am told he is under A. M.: Quite right too. One files by the first Roman fact, not the ornamental one. G.: So Quadratus is ornamental? M.: Not wholly. But Asinius is the family name; Quadratus is the bit that sounds as if he had been measured with a ruler and found satisfactory. G.: A square man. M.: A suitably Roman shape, in any case. G.: And yet he writes Greek. M.: That is the first thing to tell the class, before they begin to imagine that all Romans thought in ablatives. G.: I should rather like to imagine it. M.: Yes, but you must not teach it. G.: Very well. We have, then, Asinius, Roman enough to care about Romulus, Greek enough to write him in Greek, and late enough to make the whole thing already a piece of historical archaeology. M.: Nicely put. G.: And our text? M.: The little testimonium you found, the one with Remus and Romulus entangled in Ravenna. G.: Ah yes. The perfect school text: a fragment in which one cannot immediately tell whether one is learning history, philology, or the history of mistakes. M.: Which is usually the best sort. G.: Then let us have the Greek aloud first. I shall read it, and you shall stop me when I become too Athenian. M.: You are never too Athenian. Only too pleased with yourself. G.: Ῥῶμον, ὃς ἀδελφὸς γέγονε Ῥωμύλῳ, τῆς πόλεως ταύτης οἰκιστὴν γεγονέναι. M.: Good. Slow enough for terror. G.: And now the class stares as if I had just recited a railway timetable in Cretan. M.: They are only waiting for the translation. G.: Quite. Well, then: “Remus, who was the brother of Romulus, was the founder of this city.” M.: Better: “that Remus, the brother of Romulus, was the founder of this city.” G.: Yes, because it is embedded in a denial. M.: Precisely. The point is not that Asinius affirms a neat founding story. The point is that a later writer reports a claim and rejects another one. G.: So we begin not with certainty but with re-analysis. M.: Which is where history generally begins, once enough centuries have elapsed. G.: I can hear the class already. “Sir, who could possibly have doubted that Rome was founded by Romulus?” M.: And I should answer: anyone with enough antiquarian energy and too much local pride. G.: Splendid. Local pride is the mother of alternative foundations. M.: Indeed. Cities are always trying to attach themselves to the nearest reputable corpse. G.: Or founder. M.: In Rome the two often coincide. G.: Let us imagine the interruption. Some cheerful idiot at the back— T.: Sir, if Remus had won, would it have been the Reman Empire? Class: Laughter. M.: Exactly the sort of wit that keeps one in the profession. G.: I should be tempted to say yes, and then fail him for morphology. M.: Quite right. “Roman” from “Reman” is a historical impossibility and a social danger. G.: Though one sees the attraction. It gives the whole of Roman history the air of having been one fratricide away from a spelling reform. M.: Which is not, so far as I know, Asinius’ point. G.: No. His point, or at least the point in which he is invoked, is that some people connected Ravenna with Remus. M.: And the later writer says, no, let us follow Asinius instead. G.: Which gives Asinius the agreeable role of being the sensible Roman in a crowd of etymological fantasists. M.: Yes. A Roman speaking of Romulus as a Roman ought. G.: Not as a Reman speaking of Remus. M.: If you must. G.: I must. M.: Then at least make the joke dry. G.: Everything is dry before luncheon. M.: Good. Now explain to them why the Greek matters. G.: Because Asinius is a Roman historian writing in Greek, which is already one of the more delightful facts in imperial literary culture. He is telling Roman stories in a language whose prestige is historical and whose audience is wider than the Senate. M.: And in an archaizing style too. G.: Yes, that is the bit I particularly enjoy. He writes not merely Greek, but Greek that wants one to hear older Greek behind it. It is as if a modern don insisted on lecturing in Johnsonian English to prove that he belongs to civilisation. M.: Or in Latin to an audience that no longer needs it. G.: Quite. It is a way of borrowing authority from style. M.: Which is why you like him. G.: I like anybody who makes form do historical work. M.: Then tell them that. G.: Very well. Class, observe: Asinius does not merely report Roman material. By writing it in Greek, and in a deliberately elevated Greek, he makes Rome intelligible in the language of historiographical prestige. He is not only saying things; he is deciding how Rome is to be heard. M.: Better. Now back to the fragment. G.: Yes. We have Ῥῶμον, ὃς ἀδελφὸς γέγονε Ῥωμύλῳ— “Remus, who was brother to Romulus”— τῆς πόλεως ταύτης οἰκιστὴν γεγονέναι— “to have been founder of this city.” M.: Good. Now let them see the Latin too. G.: Ah yes, the pleasing part where Greek begins to sound almost Latin if read with enough Roman guilt. M.: You may not teach them to pronounce Greek as if it were Cicero. G.: I may, however, let them feel the proximity: Rhōmon … Rhōmylōi … one can see how the Roman ear would enjoy the neighbourhood of names. M.: Enjoy, perhaps. Trust, no. G.: Fair. Then the Latin rendering: Remum, qui Romuli frater fuit, huius urbis conditorem fuisse. M.: Good schoolroom Latin. Conditor for οἰκιστής. G.: Yes. Founder without too much sociology. M.: And now the class should ask why the passage matters at all. G.: Because it shows that by Asinius’ time one was already disentangling rival origin-stories, local claims, false etymologies, and antiquarian gossip. M.: Excellent. It is a Roman historian doing what historians do best: preventing later nonsense from becoming early fact. G.: Or at least replacing one sort of nonsense with a better attested one. M.: Historians must be allowed their modesty. G.: Then there is the little issue of the later writer preferring Asinius’ account over someone else’s. M.: Which tells you that Asinius had authority. G.: Yes. Not merely as a compiler of names, but as a source worth following in questions of local historical tradition. M.: For a Roman historian in Greek, that is not bad. G.: No. It means he succeeded in becoming the sort of Roman whom Greek readers could treat as reliable about Rome. M.: Which is, if you like, a contribution to philosophy in your broad Gricean sense. G.: Ah, now we come to it. M.: Of course. You always want the philosophical relevance. G.: Well, I should say Asinius does not contribute a doctrine of justice or meaning in the abstract, but he does something Grice would appreciate: he manages civic intelligibility across languages and traditions. M.: That is very nearly a sentence. G.: Thank you. He takes Rome, which to Romans may appear self-explanatory, and re-presents it in Greek for readers who do not share Roman verbal reflexes. In doing so he must decide what to explain, what to leave implicit, what names to preserve, what myths to prune, what authority to invoke. M.: In short, he is engaged in a kind of controlled cross-cultural implication. G.: Exactly. He makes Rome mean itself abroad. M.: That sounds almost worth saying to the class. G.: I thought so. M.: Though avoid “abroad.” It sounds too Cook’s Tour. G.: Very well. He makes Rome intelligible beyond its own native hearing. M.: Better. T.: Sir, why is he called Quadratus? M.: Because, my dear boy, Romans often had more than one name, and not all of them were there for your convenience. G.: Though one is tempted to say that “Quadratus” suggests the sort of man on whom one could build a shelf. Class: Laughter. M.: Ignore him. “Asinius” is what matters for filing, family, and the Roman name. “Quadratus” is the additional cognomen by which this particular Asinius is distinguished. G.: So if you list him under A, you are being not only neat but Roman. M.: Exactly. G.: And there is a second reason to prefer Asinius here. It keeps before us that he is a Roman talking about Roman beginnings. He is not inventing a Greek romance about founders from outside. He is handling Roman foundation material as a Roman source, even if the vehicle is Greek. M.: Which is why Romulus stands where he should. G.: Yes. Rome remains Roman in the act of being translated. M.: Nicely put again. You are almost tolerable today. G.: I blame the fragment. It is compact enough to improve one’s morals. M.: Then let us sharpen the point. Why is this not trivial? G.: Because the difference between Romulus and Remus is not merely anecdotal. Founders are civic principles in narrative form. To connect a city with Romulus rather than Remus is to place it inside one authority structure rather than another. M.: Good. And to reject a local Remus-story is to reject a flattering but unstable genealogy. G.: Precisely. One might say Asinius is resisting antiquarian overproduction. M.: The disease is old. G.: Older than the cure, usually. M.: Now tell them about the later correction. G.: Yes. The testimonium is framed by contrast: not, as another author says, because Remus founded the city; rather, one should follow Asinius, who discussed the city in his historical work. M.: So Asinius appears as arbiter. G.: And one might even say, in a mild Gricean mood, that the later writer treats Asinius as the better guide to what is to be understood from the story. M.: Better not say “Gricean mood” to the class. G.: No, they would think it a weather report. M.: Which, in your case, it often is. G.: Then I shall simply say: Asinius is preferred because he offers the more disciplined historical account. M.: Good. T.: Sir, did Asinius begin his Roman history with the she-wolf? M.: We do not know from this fragment. G.: Excellent question, though, because it shows the right sort of greed. What we know is that his Roman history covered Roman origins broadly enough that Romulean material belongs within its horizon. What we do not have here is a neat surviving opening with lupa and twins conveniently preserved for school recitation. M.: Historians survive in fragments; schoolboys want epics. G.: And must learn disappointment. M.: A principal part of education. G.: Let us, then, end with the three useful things one can say. M.: You and your threes. G.: They help. First: Asinius Quadratus is better thought of, here, as Asinius, the Roman historian writing in Greek. Second: the Greek fragment gives us a genuine Romulus-reference, though in a testimonium rejecting a Remus-based local claim. Third: his value lies not in having discovered that Romulus founded Rome—every child thinks he knows that—but in preserving, sorting, and authorising which version of such traditions deserves to be followed. M.: Good. G.: And the Greek once more, so they remember it: Ῥῶμον, ὃς ἀδελφὸς γέγονε Ῥωμύλῳ, τῆς πόλεως ταύτης οἰκιστὴν γεγονέναι. M.: And the Latin: Remum, qui Romuli frater fuit, huius urbis conditorem fuisse. G.: Which, as you see, makes the whole thing feel satisfyingly Roman again. M.: It never stopped being Roman. G.: True. It merely passed through Greek on its way back to us. M.: Which is, perhaps, the best thing about Asinius. G.: That he lets Rome return by way of translation. M.: And does so without becoming Reman. Class: Laughter. G.: That, gentlemen, is what counts as a successful ending.GRICEVS: Asinie, narrasne nobis quid sit iustitia apud senatores Romanos?  ASINIVS: O Griceve, iustitia in curia non tantum verba, sed mores et traditiones maiorum sequitur.  G.: At quid accidit, cum philosophi Graeci sententias novas afferunt? Mutaturne ratio conversandi?  A: Saepe, Griceve, Graecorum doctrina animos movet, sed Romani prudentiam suam servare malunt, ne mos patriae pereat. Asinio Quadrato, Gaio (MI A. V. C.) Millenium. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Grice e Assarotti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Ottavio Assarotti (Genova, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rational inference drawn by a hearer who assumes cooperative participation in a talk exchange: when a speaker seems to depart from being fully informative, strictly literal, relevant, or perspicuous, the hearer uses that very departure (plus shared background) to calculate what the speaker meant beyond what was said. Assarotti provides a strikingly concrete counterpart to this picture by relocating “conversation” from voiced utterance to multimodal interaction: in his deaf education work in Genoa—begun privately in 1801, expanded with Napoleonic support in 1805, and institutionalized in 1811 in the former Brigidine convent—he developed a practical, gesture-centered pedagogy (mimic method) employing dactylology/manual alphabet, writing, and systematic use of gesture to enable instruction across domains, not just basic literacy. Read through a Gricean lens, Assarotti’s classroom becomes an existence proof that the engine of implicature is not tied to speech sounds or words but to publicly recognizable, intention-bearing moves governed by expectations of mutual intelligibility: a handshape, a pointing gesture, or a facial cue can function as an “utterance,” invite uptake, and generate implied content when it underdetermines, abbreviates, or strategically redirects what is explicitly conveyed. Where Grice theorizes the rational norms that make such inference possible (cooperation, calculability, and the distinction between what is said and what is implicated), Assarotti operationalizes the same rationality under severe channel constraints, designing an interactional system in which meaning must be recoverable from visible form plus shared instructional purposes; and the familiar worry in your passage about “too much erudition” underscores a specifically Gricean point about quantity and relevance: a pedagogy that overloads the learner with encyclopedic content risks violating the very economy that makes communication efficient, whether the medium is spoken English or manual signs. In short, Grice supplies the abstract logic of reason in interaction, while Assarotti shows how that reason can be embodied in gesture and still support implicature, cooperation, and disciplined understanding. Inizia gli studi filosofici ad Albenga, e li continua a Genova sotto la direzione d’AGENO  e GIACOMONE . Insegna grammatica superiore nella casa professa di Genova, fino a quando divenne insegnante di fisica ad Albenga. Insegna logica a Savona a Genova. All'insegnamento di filosofia d’A. si formarono esponenti del movimento giansenista quali Degola, Buccelli, Capurro, Carosio, e Casella.  A. finisce per abbandonare l'insegnamento di quelle discipline per dedicarsi quasi totalmente all'opera di ri-educazione dei sordomuti, “il suo maggior titolo di rilievo filosofico,” nelle parole di Grice, richiama l'attenzione sulla gravità del problema della ri-educazione dei sordomuti e pone a base del suo metodo di insegnamento la mimica griceiana. Interessato a questi esperimenti, A. inizia la ri-educazione di alcuni ragazzi. Incoraggiato dal successo ottenuto, volle allargare il numero dei suoi allievi, ciò che gli è possibile fare quando ottenne da BUONAPARTE  un finanziamento, la garanzia di alcune borse di studio per sordomuti indigenti, oltre che l'autorizzazione a installarsi in un locale appartenente a corporazioni religiose soppresse. A. pone la sede del suo istituto dei sordo-muti in un convento delle monache brigidine. Finito il dominio di BUONAPARTE , l'istituto attravese un periodo di crisi, fino a che non prende a cuore le sue sorti, dopo l'annessione della Liguria al regno della Sardegna, il re Vittorio Emanuele, per l'aiuto del quale esso conosce un notevole ampliamento. Il metodo d’A., MIMICO (alla Grice) ed essenzialmente pratico ed empirico, utilizza l'alfabeto dattilogico, la scrittura e I GESTIi, e si propone d'insegnare ai sordo-muti, oltre che a leggere e a scrivere, cognizioni diverse riguardanti le varie lingue e i vari campi dello scibile, la filosofia inclusa. Il limite di questo metodo è forse quello di dare soverchia importanza al numero delle cognizioni da impartire, col rischio di fornire un'eccessiva e inutile erudizione agli allievi. (Grice: “Do they NEED to *know* Heidegger?”). Love. G.: Assaroti, hai mai pensato che la ragione conversazionale potesse passare dalle dita invece che dalla bocca?A.: Caro Grice, con i sordomuti ho scoperto che il gesto comprende spesso più ragione della parola—e la mimica, se fatta bene, non ti lascia mai in silenzio! G.: E dimmi, il tuo metodo mimico ha mai insegnato a qualcuno la filosofia senza fargli leggere Heidegger? A.: Grice, per fortuna nessuno ha mai chiesto “Dattilogica” per Heidegger! Ma se vuoi, possiamo provare a mimare l’essenza dell’essere davanti a una tazza di caffè. Assarotti, Ottavio (1821). Cenni storici sull’istruzione dei sordo-muti. Genova, Tipografia del R. Istituto dei Sordo-Muti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Astore – Ossia: Grice ed Astore: la ragione conversazionale.  Francesco Antonio Astore (Casarano, Lecce, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains what a speaker means (including implicatures) by appealing to purposive, mutually recognized rational agency: speakers choose contributions on the expectation of cooperation, and hearers reconstruct intended extra content by reasoning from what is said plus shared norms (informativeness, relevance, etc.). Astore, by contrast, approaches “conversational reason” through the classical-rhetorical and juridical tradition: as a jurist and man of letters, and explicitly as the author of La filosofia dell’eloquenza o sia l’eloquenza della ragione (first published in Naples in 1783; later reprinted, including the 1796 Naples edition cited in your passage), he treats eloquence as reason made socially effective—persuasion disciplined by rational order rather than mere verbal force, pedantry, or ornamental rhetoric (a stance highlighted in Treccani’s profile of him). Where Grice’s focus is explanatory and quasi-formal—how implicatures are derivable from rational conversational expectations—Astore’s focus is normative and civic: how rational discourse ought to sound and function so as to guide judgment in public, legal, and moral contexts, with rhetoric conceived as an “eloquence of reason” rather than as manipulation. In that sense Astore supplies a broader ethical-pedagogical frame (what counts as good, legitimate, responsibly persuasive speech), while Grice supplies the micro-mechanics (how, even without raising the voice and even when saying less than one means, hearers can rationally recover intended meaning), so Astore’s “ragione” aligns with Grice’s “reason-governed” core but is oriented more toward cultivating rational public speech than toward Grice’s analytic reconstruction of the inferential engine behind conversational understanding. Grice: “I love A.!” Keywords: key. Philosopher and jurist. In addition to his well-known philosophical wok, A.’s career focuses on jurisprudence and he is remembered as a letterato, a man of letters. His other works include Saggio filosofico sulla giurisprudenza univesale, one of his major works. Lettera ad un amico sulla censura della filosofia dell’eloquenza – a letter defending his work, Filosofia dell’eloquenza. Instituiones juris romani – a book on Roman law, De natura et constitutione rhetoricae – a work on the nature and constitution of rhetoric. Eloquence of reason, eloquence, reason, eloquenza della ragione, philosophy, eloquenza, ragione, filosofia. DELL'ELOQUENZA, OSIA L'ELOQUENZA DELLA RAGIONE. Li antichi Greci ne* tempi delle raccolte delle produzioni de' loro campi offerivano a* Dei a 2 cer- certi rami di ulivo , o di lauro, a* quali attaccavano con molte fila di bianca lana varie fpccie di frutti , e di fiori, vafi di olio, pa- ne, miele, e cofe confìmili. Era da eflì quefto dono chia- mato E?/ww* . Io ardifco di offrire alla Santità Voftra , che è il CapoVifibile della vera Religione , una Eìre- fione più vile di quella de- gli antichi Greci : fpero pe- rò che la Santità Voftra col folito benigno fguardo, col quale fi è fempre degnata onorare del di Lei generofo gradimento i miei più umili, e rifpettofi offequj , acco- glierà , come imploro , il mio tenue tenue, e vii dono, che ar- dile© prefentare alla Mede- lima-, non folo come Capo Vilìbìle della Santa Chiefa ( al quale ogni vero creden- te dee fempre umiliare le fu e più oflequiofe raffegna- zioni , ed un pubblico omag- gio ) ma altresì come de- gno Giudice d* ogni intel- lettuale produzione , e co- me un Pontefice , in cui vede F Europa compendiati infìeme , ed uniti i pregi i più diftinti , e le virtù lin» i ^ • • a'verfi di Ovidio • : •. CaUfcimus ilU J cMUfeimus ilio» •. . J37. lin.ult. Ch'è per Fi-. OÀ per fibfofico raaiQ- '^• loÉofico raziocipio cinio. . lin. j.. dcV de Poeti Epici .• v Poetici £pià  Gli dui irmi fi correggermut iàlPmn^€Ì0^ '.  G.: “L’eloquenza della ragione” is all very well, but at Oxford I prefer “the eloquence of reason.” S.: Out of patriotism? G.: Out of hygiene. “Reason” is latinate enough to keep the dons calm, and English enough to keep them awake. S.: Whereas ragione sounds too foreign? G.: Not too foreign. Too revealing. Italians say ragione and mean a civilisation. We say reason and pretend it is a tool. S.: And you have been lecturing on reason? G.: I have been sentenced to it, yes. S.: Then begin properly. What is “reason”? G.: A treacherously compact noun. S.: That is not a definition. G.: No, that is a warning. S.: Very well. What are your kinds? G.: Two main ones to begin with. Reason to, and reason for. S.: Ah. Practical and explanatory. G.: Roughly. “A meant to” introduces one sort. “The reason for which A said that p” introduces another. S.: And you wish to symbolise them? G.: I do. Let r1 be the utterer’s reason to utter x with the intention of meaning that p. Let r2 be the addressee’s reason for taking x as meant to convey that p, or perhaps q beyond p. S.: Already you have two reasons where the sentence had one. G.: Conversation is never stingy with reasons. It is only philosophers who are. S.: And this belongs to eloquenza? G.: Yes, if one translates eloquenza not as mere oratory, but as the managed social life of saying things to one another. S.: So you are translating eloquenza as conversation. G.: Broadly, yes. One must rescue rhetoric from the podium and return it to the parlour. S.: You make Oxford sound upholstered. G.: It is, where it matters. S.: Then r1 is the reason of the utterer? G.: The utterer’s reason to make the move he makes. Why say x now, to this person, in this manner. S.: Not the cause? G.: Certainly not the cause. S.: Explain the distinction. G.: Causes produce. Reasons justify, explain intelligibly, or at least render conduct answerable. S.: But there are causes of utterance. G.: Naturally. A cough may cause a pause. A bribe may cause a confession. Urmson may even hover nearby with bribery as an alleged counterexample to tidy moral distinctions. But my point remains: in conversation what matters first is not what produced the noise, but what point the move had for the speaker. S.: “Point” being another of your dangerous little words. G.: The most useful dangerous little word. The point of the move is its reason. S.: Then people may have reasons to lie? G.: Obviously. S.: And reasons to keep silent? G.: Equally obviously. S.: Which means they need not abide by conversational helpfulness. G.: Just so. Helpfulness is not a commandment. It is a defeasible expectation within a practice. S.: Yet your maxims sound rather commanding. G.: They sound more commanding in lecture notes than in life. In life people have reasons not to be fully informative, not to be fully candid, not to be fully plain. S.: Secrecy, tact, malice, fear, wit. G.: Admirably compressed. Yes. S.: Then why speak of cooperative conversation at all? G.: Because even non-cooperation is usually intelligible against the background of expected cooperation. S.: Give me the old example. G.: Irony. S.: Of course. G.: If I say of a catastrophically bad essay, “That was a masterpiece,” my reason to utter that sentence is not to mislead in the crude sense. S.: Your r1 is to mock. G.: Or to rebuke with economy. S.: And the hearer’s reason? G.: To search for a point consistent with the assumption that I am not merely mad. That is r2. S.: So the addressee must invoke reasons on your behalf. G.: Precisely. He reasons: if G. said that, he must have had some reason to say it; what reason would make the utterance apt here; ah, irony. S.: And metaphor? G.: Much the same family. If I say “Oxford is a damp argument in stone,” I do not mean that mortar syllogises. S.: Pity. G.: But I have reason to choose the figure. And the hearer has reason to recover the intended point rather than report me to the mason. S.: Then eloquenza della ragione is full of reasons before one ever reaches Reason with a capital. G.: Exactly. One need not invoke the grand faculty of Rationality every five minutes. The old Anglo-Norman “reason” does much of the local work quite well. S.: You mean reason as in “What reason had you?” rather than as in “Man is the rational animal.” G.: Yes. That modest, serviceable word which entered English and then quietly ran the place. S.: But Cicero’s ratio is not quite that. G.: No, and there the trouble begins. S.: Ratio is counting, reckoning, account, relation, method, reason. G.: A magnificently overworked Latin noun. S.: So how do your “reason to” and “reason for” connect with ratio? G.: By descent and divergence. Ratio carries the sense of ordered reckoning, a bringing of things into account. Our “reason” keeps enough of that to explain why giving a reason is giving something countable in favour of, or explanatory of, an act or claim. S.: Hence calculate, reckon, account. G.: Yes. Cicero’s ratio is broader and statelier; our reason is shabbier and more useful. S.: Like most English inheritances. G.: Exactly. We inherit Roman silver and use it to stir tea. S.: Then what of reason as a verb? G.: Another nuisance. “He reasoned from p to c.” S.: That sounds more like logic. G.: It sounds like logic because schoolmen and their descendants tidied it. But even here a question arises: if the thought of the premise caused the thought of the conclusion, is that enough for reasoning? S.: Surely not. G.: Quite. A causal sequence in the mind is not yet an inferentially good sequence. Reasoning is not just one thought bumping into another. S.: So again cause is not reason. G.: Exactly. The thought of p may cause the thought of c in a lunatic as well as in a logician. What matters is whether the transition has a reason, or better, whether it proceeds under a reason the thinker could in principle avow. S.: You are making everything answerable. G.: That is because conversation, unlike weather, is answerable. S.: Sometimes only barely. G.: Oxford specialises in the barely. S.: Let us return to Astore. “L’eloquenza della ragione.” G.: A splendid phrase, because it suggests that reason can acquire a social body without degenerating into mere verbal display. S.: Eloquence as reason made audible? G.: Better: reason made effective in company. S.: So not manipulation? G.: Not in the decent version. Rational discourse with social force, not force replacing reason. S.: Then in conversation each move has its r1? G.: Yes. Or ought to, if it is not merely noise. S.: Even a hesitation? G.: Certainly. One may hesitate to soften a refusal, to signal reluctance, to invite supplementation, or to buy time. S.: Buying time is not exactly noble. G.: Conversation is not a saint’s diary. S.: And the addressee’s labour is to reconstruct r1? G.: Often enough. What was he up to? Why this word, this order, this tone, this omission, this excess? S.: This is beginning to sound like hermeneutics. G.: Only because ordinary life is more intelligent than some philosophers allow. S.: So if I say less than I might, you ask why. G.: Yes. If you say more than needed, likewise. S.: And if I say exactly what is needed? G.: Then I grow suspicious in a different direction. S.: Very Oxford. G.: Moderation itself may be a marked case. S.: Then what becomes of your maxims? G.: They remain as default expectations. One has reason ordinarily to be truthful, relevant, appropriately informative, and perspicuous. But one may also have reason to depart from these in recognisable ways. S.: Lie, hedge, hint, joke, flatter, conceal. G.: Or flout. S.: Ah yes, your famous flouting. G.: Not so famous where I should like it to be. S.: You mean among those who accuse you of making conversation too moral. G.: Or too mechanical. Usually both in the same review. S.: Flouting then is itself reason-governed? G.: Exactly. If I openly violate a maxim, I may do so because I have reason to make you search for the point beyond the literal form. S.: So irony is not irrationality but managed departure. G.: Nicely put. S.: And the hearer reciprocates by reconstructing your reason. G.: Which is why conversation is not merely exchange but mutual rational accommodation. S.: Without invoking the majestic faculty of Reason? G.: Without invoking it at every step, yes. One may speak perfectly well of reasons without hauling in a transcendental tribunal. S.: You are demoting Reason. G.: I am domesticating it. S.: Cicero would object? G.: Cicero would object elegantly. S.: And Astore? G.: Astore would probably insist that eloquence keeps reason from becoming a skeleton. S.: Yet you, with your little r1 and r2, sound almost juridical. G.: Astore was a jurist. I take that as supporting evidence rather than a reproach. S.: Because law lives on reasons? G.: On alleged reasons, competing reasons, bad reasons dressed up as good ones, and the institutional necessity of pretending the difference can usually be told. S.: Very like conversation. G.: Very like Oxford faculty meetings. S.: Then where does Urmson’s bribery creep in? G.: Only as a reminder that being induced to say something is not the same as having a conversational reason in the relevant sense. A bribe may explain why one spoke; it need not supply the point of the move as understood within the conversation. S.: Unless the point was to get paid. G.: Which would be sociologically sound and conversationally depressing. S.: Still, a useful distinction. G.: Many useful distinctions are depressing. S.: Then philosophers err when they ignore the reason behind the move? G.: Constantly. They inspect the words, fail to see the reason why those words were chosen, and then pronounce the “problem” dissolved because it was only a misuse of language. S.: Whereas you think some dissolutions are premature. G.: Or lazy. A philosophical puzzle may survive the recognition that someone had a reason for speaking oddly. S.: So your method is not simply therapeutic. G.: No. I want to know why the oddity is there. Sometimes the cure is diagnosis; sometimes the diagnosis shows there was something genuine to cure. S.: You want neither crude problem-solving nor cheap dissolution. G.: Precisely. I want the intermediate virtue of understanding why the move was made. S.: Which returns us to eloquenza della ragione. G.: Yes: the social bearing of reason, and the reasons inside that bearing. S.: Then “reason” in your Oxford idiom is wonderfully ambiguous. G.: Wonderfully, yes. A man may have a reason to say something, a reason for having said it, and may reason from one thing to another, all before lunch. S.: And after lunch? G.: He usually retracts something. S.: Then your whole doctrine amounts to this: conversation is a sequence of moves made for reasons and understood by reference to reasons. G.: That is not the whole doctrine, but it is the decent beginning. S.: And eloquence? G.: Eloquence is what happens when those reasons are managed with enough tact, force, timing, and style to work in company without collapsing into mere noise or naked bullying. S.: Astore would be pleased. G.: I hope so. Though he might ask me to stop writing r1 in the margin of his title page. S.: And Cicero? G.: Cicero would probably say that ratio survived into English reason only to discover tweed, understatement, and central heating. S.: Not always central heating. G.: At Oxford, no. Which is why our reason so often comes out in a visible mist.G.: Francesco Antonio, tu che parli di eloquenza della ragione, hai mai vinto una discussione senza alzare la voce? A.: Caro Grice, la mia eloquenza punta più a convincere che a vincere. Ma se vuoi, posso sempre offrirti qualche ramo d’ulivo, come gli antichi Greci! Grice: Rami d’ulivo? Preferisco una bella lettera, magari difendendo la filosofia, purché non ci sia troppa lana attaccata. Astore: Allora ti scriverò una Lettera ad un amico sulla censura dell’eloquenza, prometto: niente miele, ma qualche verso d’Ovidio sì… così, tra ragione e poesia, la conversazione non manca mai. Astore, Francesco Antonio (1796). Dell’eloquenza, ossia l’eloquenza della ragione. Napoli, Stamperia Simoniana.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Astorini – Ossia: Grice e Astorini: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Tomasso Antonio Elia Astorini (Albidona, Cosenza, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rationally reconstructible bridge from what is said to what is meant, built on shared expectations of cooperative talk (the hearer assumes the speaker is being appropriately informative, relevant, and so on, and then infers the intended extra content). Astorini, as portrayed in your passage and corroborated by standard biographical notices, is a thinker whose intellectual itinerary runs through grammar and rhetoric into a wide “Sophia” that privileges discursive method while treating logic as in a sense merely “discorsiva”; his “triplex virtus” (intellective, volitive, effective) and corresponding “triplex operatio” suggest that reasoning is not only formal validity but a structured activity of mind, will, and action. Put side by side, Grice offers a micro-theory of how rational agents compute meaning in local conversational episodes, whereas Astorini offers a macro-picture in which discursive reason is one mode within a broader philosophical psychology and metaphysical-physical synthesis (Platonizing microcosm/macrocosm hints, anti-Aristotelian and anti-Cartesian polemic, sympathy for Gassendian atomism and Galilean experimentalism, plus political-ethical reflection drawing on Plato and Hobbes). The “space” quip attributed to Strawson can be read as a metaphor for this difference: Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics treats the spatiotemporal framework as basic for identifying particulars, and Astorini—cast as librarian-philosopher of system—becomes, in the vignette, a provider of “shelves” or a conceptual architecture in which discourse can be located; Grice, by contrast, is less concerned with furnishing the metaphysical room than with specifying the inferential rules by which interlocutors navigate it. So Astorini complements Grice by thickening what “reason-governed” can mean—reason as a cultivated, discursive practice embedded in an overall account of human faculties and a world-picture—while Grice complements Astorini by showing, at the finest grain, how that discursive practice yields determinate communicated contents (including implicatures) through publicly intelligible, intention-sensitive rational calculation. Grice: “I like A., but more so does Sir Peter, vide his section on ‘Space’ in “Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics”: ‘Surely we wouldn’t have space as we know it if it were not for A..” Studia con il padre la grammatica e la retorica. Studia a Cosenza, Napoli e  Roma. “De vitali aeconomia foetus in utero. Elementa Euclidis ad usum nova methodo et compendiare olim demonstrate” e un “Decamerone pitagorico”. Da "Sophia" è esclusa la logica, di cui sì ribadisce il carattere meramente discorsivo. Ma a "Sophia" appartengono la metafisica, notevoli i cenni platonizzanti circa il rapporto microcosmo-macrocosmo; la fisica, per la quale A. si dilunga nella critica all'aristotelismo e al cartesianesimo e nell'esaltazione della filosofia atomistico-gassendiana e dello sperimentalismo galileiano, pur richiamandosi insieme nettamente alla tradizione filosofica da Telesio a Cornelio; la politica, per la quale egli esalta l'insegnamento di Platone; l'etica, per cui continuo è il richiamo alla filosofia politica di Hobbes, ecc.  A questo impasto di vecchio e di nuovo, che contrappunta un momento della cultura italiana e riflette il travaglio di una filosofia A. si dedica alla meditazione filosofica e la occupazione di biblìotecario presso il principe Spinelli, a Terranova di Sibari, dove muore. Fonti e Bibl.: Firenze, Bibl. Naz. Centrale, Magl., A. lettere ad Ant. Magliabechi; Giornale de' Letterati e primo di Modena, Giornale, Redi, Opere, Milano; Gimma, Elogi accademici della società degli Spensierati di Rossano, Napoli; Zavarroni, Filosofi d'Italia, Brescia, riprende dal Gimma;  Di Cagno-Politi, E. A. filosofo e matematico, Appunti, Roma;  Maugain, Etude sur l'évolution intellectuelle de l'Italie environ, Paris; Grammatico, A., O. Carm., insignis disceptator, in Analecta Ord. Carm., Badaloni, Introduzione a Vico. Dialettica, filosofia simbolica, metodo discorsivo, grammatica filosofica, triade, triplex virtus: intellectiva, volitiva et effectrix, ad essa corrisponde una triplex operatio -- interectio, volitio et impetus. Grice: Astorini, se avessimo uno spazio davvero senza di te, pensi che potremmo ancora trovare un posto per la ragione? Astorini: Grice, lo spazio senza di me sarebbe come una biblioteca senza libri: tanto vuoto e nessuna conversazione. Ma almeno ci sarebbe sempre qualche scaffale dove sistemare qualche implicatura! Grice: E se la logica è solo discorsiva, come fai a non perderti tra i corridoi della metafisica? Astorini: Mi affido alla triplice virtù: se mi perdo, interrogo la ragione, se ho fame, volgo la volontà, e se proprio non so dove andare... metto un piede davanti all’altro, come in ogni bella conversazione! Astorini, Tomaso Antonio Elia (1686). De vitali aeconomia foetus in utero, Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Asturaro – Ossia: Grice ed Asturaro Alfonso Asturaro (Catanzaro, Calabria). Il primo filosofo positivista a Genova -- . Asturaro, Alfonso (1880). Tesi di laurea sotto Fiorentino. Pisa

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Grice e Ateiniano – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Nizza). Filosofo italiano. Marco Ateinaiano. Ateinaiano. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Ateinaiano. It looks to Grice, who likes Italianate spellings, that this one was born not in Nizza next to Ventimiglia and up till Garibaldi's days part of Italy, but Nicaea, in the middle of nowwhere in Asia? Yes, I think Grice’s Italianate instinct is likely right here: “Nizza” in that sort of entry is much more likely to be standing in for Nicaea, not for Nice by Ventimiglia. The trouble is that the form you give, Marco Ateinaiano, is itself unstable enough to make one cautious. I do not see a clean, authoritative identification from that spelling alone. But if the intended ethnic or geographic tag is something like Nicaean, then the ancient reference would be Nicaea in Bithynia, that is modern İznik in Turkey, not Nice in Liguria or the old county of Nice. [en.wikipedia.org], [aleteia.org] So, if Speranza writes “(Nizza)” while the underlying ancient figure is really a Nicaean, that would be an Italianising modernisation of the place-name, but historically the place intended would be the Asian one, not the western one near Ventimiglia. Nicaea is the ancient city in Bithynia; modern İznik is in Turkey. [en.wikipedia.org], [aleteia.org] So the dry answer is this. Not Nizza on the Riviera, unless there is some quite separate medieval or modern Italian figure hiding under the name. If the person is an ancient “Ateianus” tied to Nicaea, then yes, the birthplace or origin would be Nicaea in Asia Minor, not Nice near Ventimiglia. [en.wikipedia.org], [aleteia.org] But I should add one caution. I am not yet satisfied that “Marco Ateinaiano” is securely identified from the evidence we have. The place-name looks easier than the person. So I can say with confidence what Nicaea is; I cannot yet say with equal confidence that this exact philosopher must be from there, because the name-form itself remains too uncertain in the current evidence. [en.wikipedia.org], [aleteia.org] If you want, I can do one more narrow pass just on the person, ignoring the place-name, and see whether “Ateianus,” “Ateianius,” or a nearby Latin form turns up in philosophical prosopography. Yes, please do a second run on Marcus Ateinaianus -- adding perhaps Nicaea? Thanks I did the second run, and the result is unfortunately rather negative. I cannot find a securely attested ancient or scholarly figure under the exact form Marcus Ateinaianus, nor under the likely Latin normalizations Marcus Ateianus or Marcus Ateianius, connected with Nicaea. The search turns up essentially no relevant prosopographical result for that person-name combination, which means we should be very cautious about building anything on it. [oxrep.clas...s.ox.ac.uk] What does seem real is the nomen-form Ateianus or a nearby form as such. There is at least independent evidence for an Ateianus in Roman onomastic material, but not as a philosopher from Nicaea. The clearest hit is Clarus Ateianus, a potter’s name in the Oxford Roman Economy material. That tells us the name-shape is not impossible or invented, only that it does not identify your philosopher. [oxrep.clas...s.ox.ac.uk] So the position now is this. Nicaea itself is perfectly clear as an ancient city in Bithynia, modern İznik in Turkey. But the link from that place to a philosopher called Marcus Ateinaianus is not at present secured by the evidence I can find. In other words, the place is plausible, the person is not yet identifiable. If Speranza’s “Nizza” is meant as an Italianate gesture toward Nicaea, that could still be right at the level of place-name, but I cannot yet authenticate the bearer of the name. [subsublibrarian.com], [grecoelatino.it] My best guess, and I stress that it is only a guess, is that the form in the file may be corrupt or over-Italianised. The ancient person may stand under another spelling entirely, perhaps something closer to Athenianus, Athenaeus, Ateius, or another nearby onomastic family. Until that is cleared, I would not write anything firmer than this: “possibly a Nicaean, but identification uncertain.” [oxrep.clas...s.ox.ac.uk] So the dry answer is: no secure second-pass confirmation. I can confirm Nicaea as the likely place-name behind “Nizza” only if the underlying person really is a Nicaean; but I cannot yet confirm that Marcus Ateinaianus is a historically secure figure under that form. [subsublibrarian.com], [grecoelatino.it], [oxrep.clas...s.ox.ac.uk] If you want, I can do one more run, but this time not on Marcus Ateinaianus as such. I would search for likely nearby ancient forms such as Ateius, Ateianus, Athenianus, Athenaeus, or even a Greek ethnic from Nicaea, and try to see which one Speranza may have half-naturalised into that spelling.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Grice e Atenodoto: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana Atenodoto (Roma, Lazio): il portico a Roma. “There was a time when it was fashionable at Oxford to count ‘philosophical generations’. I didn’t count, really, having been from the wrong side of the tracks, ended up for four full years under the tutelage of a Scot! But, consider Bradley. Who was his tutor? T. H. Green. Who was his tutor’s tutor? Jowett. Who was his tutor’s tutor’s tutor? Stanley! Italians are never so lucky, but at least we can say that Atenodoto was MUSONIO ’s tutee, and FRONTONE ’s tutor!” Filosofo italiano. Porch. Pupil of Musonio Rufo, and a teacher of FRONTONE. portico, portico romano. GRICEVS: Atenodote, si tu Musonii discipulus fuisti et Frontoni magister, dic mihi utrum porticus plus doceat ambulando an plus strepitum faciat disputando. ATENODOTVS: Ambulando, Grice, quia strepitus saepe est argumentum sine pedibus, sed in porticu etiam Scotus tacendo vincere potest. GRICEVS: Tum ego quoque philosophiam generationibus numerabo: ego discipulus sum stomachi mei, et stomachus meus semper sibi ipsi magister est. nATENODOTVS: Recte, sed memento: qui stomachum nimis docet, brevi fit discipulus medici, quod etiam Stoicus confiteri cogitur.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Attalo – Ossia: Grice e Attalo: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana – . Filosofo italiano.  Attalo (Roma, Lazio): il portico a Roma. Vive a Roma. Maestro di Seneca che lo stima molto e lo cita spesso come nelle Lettere morali a Lucilio quando scrive. Come soleva dire il nostro A. 'il ricordo degli amici estinti è gradevole come certi frutti sono soavemente aspri.” -- o ancora a proposito dell'avidità dell'uomo che gode senza discernimento dei beni della fortuna come fa il cane che inghiotte voracemente i pezzetti di carne lanciati dal padrone. Così rifacendosi a A., Seneca afferma che una vita senza affanni e senza nessun attacco dalla Fortuna non è tranquillità è bonaccia. “A. lo stoico soleva dire 'Preferiamo che la fortuna mi abbia nel suo accampamento piuttosto che tra le mollezze. Subisco la tortura, ma coraggiosamente. Questo è vero bene'” e che procurarsi un amico è più piacevole che averlo poiché, dice Attalo, avviene che «come per un artista è più piacevole dipingere che aver dipinto.” Ed infine da A. Seneca reca il supremo insegnamento riferito principalmente all'ingrato che si tormenta e odia il bene ricevuto perché dovrà ri-cambiarlo, ne sminuisce i valore e accresce l'importanza delle offese ricevute. “La malvagità stessa beve la più grande porzione del suo veleno.” Una massima che Attalo ha modo di vedere applicata quando messo al bando da Roma, Lucio Elio Seiano, amico estremamente influente di Tiberio, e infine da questo stesso fatto giustiziare. Seneca, Lettere morali a Lucilio, Edizioni Mondadori. Seneca. Seneca. Seneca. Seneca. Pierre Matthieu, Historie delle prosperità infelici di Elio Seiano, Grillo, 1620 p.48   Portale Biografie   Portale Filosofia Categorie: Filosofi romani Filosofi del I secolo Romani del I secolo. GRICEVS: Attale, si “memoria amicorum estintorum” est suavis acerbitas, num ego debeo amicos colere sicut mala granata, ne nimis dulces fiam? ATTALVS: Ita, Grice, nam fructus acer recreat palatum, sicut recordatio amici te recreat sine gula fortunae. GRICEVS: At homo avarus, ut canis, carnem voratam deglutit; ergo si mihi Fortuna frusta iacit, licetne mihi lente manducare ut Stoicus non videar canis? ATTALVS: Licet, et melius est tibi amicum parare quam habere, sicut pictori iucundius est pingere quam iam pictum suspicere, ne malvagitas ipsa maximum veneni haustum bibat.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aufidio – Ossia: Grice ed Aufidio: gl’ortelani -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. According to Seneca, a follower of the philosophy of The Garden, who bore witness to his school’s teachings in the way he copes with prolonged ill health. Lucio Aufidio Basso. Basso. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice,“Grice e Basso. Lucio Aufidio Basso: gl’ortelani -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. According to Seneca, a follower of the philosophy of The Garden, who bore witness to his school’s teachings in the way he copes with prolonged ill health. GRICEVS: Bassē, audio te hortulanorum philosophiam sequi; ergo in horto sapientiam colligis sicut lactucam, sed sine spinis? BASSVS: Spinae adsunt, Grice, sed Seneca docet me aegritudinem longam ferre ut praecepta Gardenis testificer, non ut medicum exasperem. GRICEVS: Prorsus Epicureus es: dolorem sustines, sed querellam non venditas, quasi non valeat nisi cum vino mixtus. BASSVS: Et tu Oxoniensis es: de implicaturis loqueris, sed in horto meo una res clare dicitur—si herba crescit, ratio quoque crescit. Grice would have been familiar with this, and speranza appreciates it. Distinguish the Bassi in Ancient Rome. One epicurean, the other stoic. Provide cognomen and the other bits to distinguish and then state their doctrines. Lit. Hum. at her best! What one especially enjoys in the case of the Bassi is the old Lit. Hum. exercise suddenly becoming alive again: distinguish the Bassi in ancient Rome. Speranza and Grice handle it exactly as they should, by restoring the proper cognomina and then letting the doctrines fall into place. Lucius Aufidius Bassus is the Epicurean, the man of the Garden, known above all through Seneca’s admiring notice of the calm with which he bore long illness, thus making his philosophy visible in conduct rather than merely in profession. Tito Avianio Basso Polieno, by contrast, belongs to the Porch, and his Stoicism is marked not by horti but by the public firmness and urban discipline proper to that lineage. Once the names are properly distinguished, the doctrines cease to blur: one Bassus stands for Epicurean management of pain, measured pleasure, and freedom from disturbance; the other for Stoic constancy, civic endurance, and the moral architecture of living in accord with reason. This is classical scholarship at its most satisfying, because the prosopographical exactitude is not pedantry but the very condition of philosophical clarity. This below seems to be the only Aufidio in the Grice/Speranza files. Other members of the gens Aufidia? Yes. There certainly were other members of the gens Aufidia, and in fact the family is fairly well attested from the later Republic onward. It is described as a plebeian gens at Rome, first becoming prominent in the second century BC and continuing into the imperial period. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] The neat first correction is this: your Lucio Aufidio Basso is usually given in the sources as Publius Aufidius Bassus, the orator and historian of the age of Augustus and Tiberius. So the nomen Aufidius is right, and therefore the gens Aufidia is right, but the praenomen is more commonly Publius than Lucius in the prosopographical tradition. [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today] As for other members of the gens, the chief names are these. Gnaeus Aufidius, tribune of the plebs in 170 BC, is one of the earliest securely historical members. He prosecuted Gaius Lucretius Gallus, and ancient tradition also links an Aufidius with legislation about imported African animals for Roman spectacles. [en.wikipedia.org] Another Gnaeus Aufidius, later praetor and propraetor in Asia, was remembered as a historian who wrote a History of Rome in Greek despite blindness in old age. That one is especially pleasant, because it gives the gens not just magistrates but a man of letters. [en.wikipedia.org] Titus Aufidius appears as a jurist and magistrate, quaestor in 84 BC and later praetor in Asia. Aufidius Namusa was associated with the juristic school of Servius Sulpicius Rufus. So the family also enters Roman legal culture. [en.wikipedia.org] Gnaeus Aufidius Orestes, consul in 71 BC, is perhaps the most politically elevated Republican member, though his cognomen Orestes reflects adoption from the Aurelii Orestides. [en.wikipedia.org] Marcus Aufidius Lurco, tribune of the plebs in 61 BC, is particularly notable because his daughter Aufidia or Alfidia became the mother of Livia Drusilla. That gives the gens a real, if indirect, link to the Julio-Claudian line. [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com] Then in the imperial period there are later Aufidii, such as Publius Juventius Celsus Titus Aufidius Hoenius Severianus, an eminent jurist and consul, and later consular figures such as Gaius Aufidius Victorinus, Marcus Aufidius Fronto, and Gaius Aufidius Marcellus. [en.wikipedia.org], [alchetron.com] So the dry prosopographical answer is that the gens Aufidia is not a one-man family invented to support Bassus. It is a real plebeian gens, with members in politics, law, historiography, and imperial administration from the second century BC onward. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] If you want the one-line distinction for your Bassus note, I would phrase it this way. Aufidius Bassus belongs to the plebeian gens Aufidia, whose other notable members include Gnaeus Aufidius the tribune, Gnaeus Aufidius Orestes the consul, Marcus Aufidius Lurco the tribune and ancestor of Livia Drusilla, and several later jurists and consuls. [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [alchetron.com] A small caution, because your selected passage invites it. The identification of Aufidius Bassus as an Epicurean comes from your Senecan framing, but in the standard prosopographical lists he is more commonly remembered as an orator and historian under Augustus and Tiberius. So if Speranza wants to keep the philosophical angle, he may do so, but it is worth remembering that the broader historical tradition remembers Bassus above all as a literary and historical figure of the early empire. [en.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can next sort out the Bassus confusion more sharply and tell you whether Seneca’s sick Bassus is certainly the same man as the historian Aufidius Bassus, or whether we are dealing with one of those old Roman conflations that Lit. Hum. exists to tease apart. Aufidio Basso, Lucio

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aurelj – Ossia: Grice ed Aurelj: la ragione conversazionale e  implicatura in Deutero-Esperanto.  Tito Aurelj: la ragione conversazionale e  implicatura in Deutero-Esperanto. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an inferential by-product of practical rationality under a cooperative presumption: hearers recover what is meant by assuming the speaker is contributing appropriately to a shared purpose, then reasoning from what is said plus contextual assumptions to what must have been intended. The Aurelj vignette reframes that same rational governance through the lens of engineered code: his proto-/deutero-Esperanto is an attempt to pack grammatical and semantic information into an explicit, highly articulated morphology (numeric part-of-speech identifiers plus diacritics and marks for gender, number, degree, person, tense, mood), so that “meaning” is increasingly made recoverable by rule rather than by contextual pragmatics. On this contrast, Grice’s “deutero-Esperanto” joke reads as a philosophical point: no matter how much redundancy you add to a code to force explicitness, ordinary conversation will still generate implicature because speakers routinely underdetermine, compress, and rely on the audience to bridge gaps; and conversely, as the exchange suggests, you can treat some mismatches, shortcuts, or even errors as pragmatically repairable (“if you get it wrong, you can always say it’s implicature”). So Aurelj represents the maximally formalizing impulse—make conversational reason visible in the grammar—whereas Grice represents the complementary, anti-formalist insight—conversational reason is not exhausted by grammar, because what is meant is systematically richer than what is encoded, and the surplus is governed by rational expectations about cooperative talk rather than by additional symbols. Grice: “I like A.’s Esperanto, but I felt like it was missing something, or having a few redundancies in its grammar, rather. So I created Deutero-Esperanto at Oxford. My former pupil, Strawson, found redundancies now to my deuteron-Esperanto, so trito-Esperanto followed. The chain continued, to the point that I became a historical linguist, as they call them – the phylum being: proto-Esperanto, deuteron-Esperanto, trito-Esperanto, tetarto-Esperanto, pempto-Esperanto, hecto-Esperanto, hebdomo-Esperanto, ogdo-Esperanto, enato-Esperanto, decato-Esperanto, endecato-Esperanto, e dodecato-Esperanto!” In A., ciascuna parte del discorso possiede un numero di riferimento: un insieme di cifre che inizi con il numero 1 indicha nome, il numero 4 aggettivo, ecc.. A queste composizioni di numeri sono da aggiungere poi dei segni, 19 in totale, che ne specifichino genere, numero per nomi e aggettivi, grado per aggettivo, persone, tempi, modi per verbo. L’accento indica il genere femminile. Due puntini sovrapposti all'ultimo numero indicano il plurale. - diminuzione + accrescimento, x peggioramento. I due punti indicano che il grado dell'aggettivo è comparativo. :: superlativo. Gl’esponenti sull'ultima cifra indicano la persona, il modo e il tempo. Proto-Esperanto, Deutero-Esperanto, trito-Esperanto, tetarto-Esperanto, pempto-Esperanto, hecto-Esperanto, hebdomo-Esperanto, ogdo-Esperanto, enato-Esperanto, decato-Esperanto, endecato-Esperanto, dodecato-Esperanto. Pausula, Macerata, Marche.  Grice: Tito, dimmi, quanti numeri servono per capire se una frase è davvero un nome o solo una chiacchiera? Aurelj: Grice, basta iniziare con l’1—ma se vuoi parlare come un vero esperantista, devi aggiungere almeno due puntini e venti segni… e sperare che nessuno ti chieda il plurale! Grice: Ah, allora forse conviene inventare trito-Esperanto: meno numeri, più gesti, e se sbagli, puoi sempre dire che è implicatura! Aurelj: Tranquillo, Grice, se la conversazione si complica, basta cambiare accento o aggiungere un segno… e in caso di dubbio, si ride: la grammatica si aggiusta domani! Aurelj, Tito (1869). Dell’arte di ricordare. Camerino: Bogorelli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aurelio – Ossia: Grice ed Aurelio: la ragione conversazionale all’accademia a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. He appears as a character in De natura deorum by Cicerone. Gaio Aurelio Cotta (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale all’accademia a Roma. Filosofo italiano. He appears as a character in De natura deorum by Cicerone. There he presents the points of view of the Accademia. However, he spends some time in exile and almost certainly studies the doctrine of the Porch and that of the Garden as well. filosofia antica. GRICEVS: Cotta, salve amice! De Accademia Romae audivi multa—dic mihi, estne philosophia ibi tam leviter tractata ut in foro?  COTTA: Salve Grice! Accademia semper gravis est, sed ego ipse paulisper exul fui—itaque doctrinam Porticus et Horti etiam degustavi, ut philosophum decet!  GRICEVS: Exilium tibi profuit, Cotta! Quisquis inter Stoicos et Epicureos vacillat, invenit plus vini in Horto et plus disputationis in Porticu—sed forsitan nullus locus est sine risu?  COTTA: Vere dixisti, Grice! In De natura deorum, ego Accademiae sententias teneo, sed interdum philosophia antiqua optima est, si cum pane, vino et ioco Romano servitur! Aurelio Cotta, Gaio (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aurelio – Ossia: Grice ed Aurelio: la ragione conversazionale del console filosofo. Note su Relationes ad Imperatores. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Quinto Aurelio Simmaco (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del console filosofo. Grice and Quintus Aurelius Symmachus converge on the idea that intelligible meaning in discourse is inseparable from reason as exercised within concrete social practices, but they articulate this insight at different historical and theoretical levels: Symmachus, writing as a late Roman senator and consul, exemplifies conversational reason as a civic virtue exercised through tact, understatement, irony, and strategic indirection within the highly ritualized setting of the Senate and imperial petitioning, where what is said is carefully calibrated to rank, tradition, and political risk, and where rational speech consists less in explicit argument than in the prudent management of shared assumptions and face; Grice, by contrast, abstracts from such historically situated practices to propose a general theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, explaining how mutual rationality, intentions, and audience recognition generate implicatures across contexts, even as their content varies with circumstance, so that where Symmachus embodies conversational reason as a lived senatorial art responsive to hierarchy and decorum, Grice provides the analytic framework that makes such art intelligible as a systematic exploitation of rational expectations rather than mere rhetorical ornament. A philosopher of considerable wisdom, also a consul. GRICEVS: Salve, Simmace, sive Simachce—nonnumquam nescio utrum scribendum sit cum uno “m” an duobus. Sed certe unum scio: inter consules, sapientia tua fulget ut sol in Foro! SIMMACVS: Grice, amice, quid de litteris Latinis? Unus m, duo m—philosophus sum, non grammaticus! Consulatus autem, fateor, plus toga quam sapientia ponderat. GRICEVS: Mirum est, Simchace—err, Simmace!—quantum ponderis sapientia tua habet inter patres conscriptos. In domo quadam ultra mare, nonnullis fortasse toga abundat…sed minus quoddam—quod philosophus agnoscere solet—praesto est. SIMMACVS: Senatoria implicatura, Grice—celebro eam! Equidem, si sapientia in curia tam rara est quam panis in Saturnalia, fortasse consulatus magis ad iocum quam ad iudicium pertinet! Aurelio Simmaco, Quinto (a. u. c. MCL). Relationes ad Imperatores. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aurelio – Ossia: Grice ed Aurelio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Ambrogio Aurelio Teodosio Macrobio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rationally tractable step from what is said to what is meant, licensed by shared cooperative expectations and by the speaker’s intention that the hearer recognize those intentions; it is a theory about how unsaid content becomes accountable in ordinary exchange. Macrobius, by contrast, is not offering a pragmatic calculus of inference but a literary-philosophical staging of learned discourse: in the Saturnalia he frames erudition as banquet conversation, and the “extra” meaning often rides on cultural allusion, quotation, and the social choreography of speakers rather than on a minimalist set of maxims designed to predict and justify inferences. The comparison is therefore between two kinds of rational governance: Grice’s is normative and analytic, aiming to show how a hearer is entitled to derive a specific implicature (and how it can be cancelled or challenged), while Macrobius’s is exemplary and encyclopedic, showing how intellectual authority is exercised through dialogic form, where what is left unsaid is frequently supplied by shared education in Plato, Cicero, and the Roman tradition. In Gricean terms, Macrobius’s convivia presuppose an intensified common ground: the participants can “mean” by hint because they can rely on a thick background of texts and social roles, so the dialogue format becomes a machine for generating implicatures through learned recognizability rather than through strict conversational economy. And this also sharpens a biographical irony noted in your passage: Macrobius’s own origin is uncertain and he calls himself foreign-born, yet his conversational art depends on the very Roman continuity of learning that makes indirectness work—an anticipation, in a different register, of Grice’s idea that conversation is possible only where reason and mutual recognitional capacities are already in place. Grice: “When I won at Clifton a classics scholarship to Corpus I knew that sooner or later I would come to love Macrobius!” -- Filosofo italiano. Adere al Platonismo. E praefectus praetorio Hispaniarum, proconsole d’Africa, praepositus sacri cubiculi, gran ciambellano. È ignota la patria di M. Certamente M. dove essere legato da stretti rapporti alla famiglia dell’oratore Simmaco, a un figlio o nipote del quale dedica un saggio. Scrive un commento al Sogno di Scipione di CICERONE, che ci è giunto intero, e i Saturnalia, lacunosi. Dal De differentiis et societatibus graeci latinique verbi, Delle differenze e concordanze del verbo greco e del latino," restano soltanto estratti, nulla può risultare sull’argomento. Nel commento, dedicato al figlio Eustachio, cerca d’interpretare in senso platonico il saggio di CICERONE, accumula molta erudizione e perciò spesso si occupa di argomenti che poco hanno da fare col suo oggetto. I frequenti riferimenti al Timeo e le lodi del Platonismo -- Platone e Plotino sono chiamati, i principi della filosofia -- fa supporre che M. si sia servito di un commento platonico a quel dialogo, probabilmente di quello di Porfirio, derivato in ultimo dal commento di Posidonio.Si è anche pensato a una fonte latina intermedia e sulla questione sono state presentate svariate ipotesi.In ogni caso, anche se non si giunge a considerare M. come un semplice trascrittore di una o due opere altrui, che non mette nulla di suo, si può sospettare che non abbia letto i numerosi autori che cita, Posteriori al Commento sembrano i Saturnali in 7 libri, scritti prima della pubblicazione del commento virgiliano di Servio, pure dedicati al figlio Eustachio, al quale volle presentare i risultati dei suoi studi di autori di cui generalmente riprodusse le parole. Però cerca di organizzare tali temi fingendo di riprodurre le conversazioni che, durante banchetti fatti in occasione delle feste dei Saturnali, avevano tenuto persone insigni per cultura su argomenti svariatissimi. Ambrogio Teodosio Macrobio. Roma. GRICEVS: Macrobî, gratias tibi ago: ex Saturnalibus tuis didici non solum convivium, sed etiam rationem conversationalem—et (ut dicimus) implicaturam. MACROBIVS: Grice, si “implicatura” dicis, iam te inter convivas meos pono: plura intellegis quam dicis, et tamen nihil neglegenter dicis. GRICEVS: Cum Cliftonii ad Corpus stipendium classicum ceperim, scivi me tandem Macrobium amaturum: ecce, praefectum praetorio amo, sed meum amorem tantum subintelligo. MACROBIVS: Bene facis: Platonici enim solemus plus in Timeo quam in mensa ponere; tu vero, convivator urbanissime, ostendis etiam scholam posse cenare—modo nemo me roget unde sim: id, more meo, implicatur. By the time Macrobio came to exist, the old naming system of the wise Roman had collapsed right, so he had no gens? Yes, broadly speaking that is right. By the time of Macrobius, the old republican and early imperial system in which the gens remained a clear, operative marker of identity had largely loosened, and in many cases effectively ceased to function in the old way. The tria nomina had not vanished overnight, but in Late Antiquity the praenomen was already in steep decline, the nomen was losing its genealogical precision, and names increasingly worked as markers of status, literary identity, imperial connection, religion, or social aspiration rather than as clean signs of membership in an old Roman gens. [en.wikipedia.org], [academia.edu], [everything...ined.today] That means your instinct is sound: one should not talk about Macrobius as if he stood in the same onomastic world as, say, Cicero or Caesar. In his period, the old gentilician system survived more as a residue and a repertoire than as a fully reliable map of clan reality. After the Constitutio Antoniniana and the later spread of prestige nomina, the nomen could become almost decorative, or at least far less probative of true patrilineal gens-membership than in the Republic. [everything...ined.today], [academia.edu] So if the question is, “Did Macrobius have a gens?”, the dry answer is: not in the old, clean republican sense in which one can confidently infer an operative gens from the name alone. [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today], [academia.edu] Now the further complication is his actual name-form. Modern editions often print him as Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, while manuscript and early printed traditions also show expanded forms such as Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius. That very fluctuation is itself late antique in spirit: it suggests that what matters is not the recovery of one tidy republican-style name with a recoverable gens behind it, but a layered learned identity assembled out of names that had social and cultural weight in Late Antiquity. [loebclassics.com], [loc.gov], [books.google.com], [antique-maps.lt] So I would put it this way. Macrobius belongs to a world in which Roman names still sound Roman, but no longer guarantee old Roman family structure. The shell remains; the old civic anatomy beneath it has partly dissolved. One may still have several names, and very dignified ones, but one should not move too quickly from those names to a republican-style gens. In Late Antiquity, names often advertise education, office, prestige, patronage, or imperial alignment more readily than ancient clan descent. [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today], [academia.edu] So, yes: the old naming system had largely collapsed as a live social instrument by his time he may still bear a Roman-style multi-part name but that does not mean we can straightforwardly assign him to a meaningful old gens in the classical sense. [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today], [academia.edu] And in very dry Speranza style: By the age of Macrobius, Rome still names like Rome, but no longer quite means by it what Rome once meant. The praenomen has faded, the nomen has grown ornamental, and the gens survives less as a working social organism than as an echo in a name. One may therefore admire the Roman sound of Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius without asking too confidently for the ancient clan behind it. In Late Antiquity the question “what is his gens?” is often less illuminating than the question “what sort of world still wants to sound Roman in this way?” [en.wikipedia.org], [loebclassics.com], [books.google.com], [academia.edu] If you like, I can now do one of two things here in chat only: I can give you a short note on the different transmitted forms of Macrobius’s name and which is safest to use. I can also draft a compact Speranza paragraph on how Late Antiquity keeps Roman names after the Roman naming system has ceased to behave classically. But Speranza and Grice like, want, wish, claim to be able, to read that explicature: "Ambrogio Aurelio Teodosio" as some trace of the gens Aurelia? Because surely there was no gens Ambrosia (G. and S. would not think) or Macrobia, or Theodosia -- but then there's Marcus Aurelius, who Speranza and Grice has under "A" because he went by "Antoninus" -- but what was Marcus Aurelius's gens by birth? Yes, but only with strong late-antique caution. For Macrobius, the transmitted full form “Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius” is real in some traditions, but it does not let us read off a classical gens in the old republican sense with any confidence. The best modern discussion emphasizes that his praenomen is unrecorded, his nomen is uncertain, and what survives most securely is effectively a stack of names functioning in a late-antique way rather than a clean old-style tria nomina from which one may straightforwardly infer clan membership. In particular, the safer early manuscript form is Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, while “Aurelius” appears in later naming traditions and bibliographical usage. So Speranza and Grice may certainly enjoy hearing a trace of the Aurelii in “Aurelius,” but they should hear it as an onomastic echo, not as a secure prosopographical deduction. [en.wikipedia.org], [catalog.perseus.org], [loebclassics.com] In other words, no, one should not posit a gens Ambrosia, or Macrobia, or Theodosia. Those are not the relevant Roman categories here. “Ambrosius,” “Theodosius,” and “Macrobius” are not nomina gentilia in the old sense you want. “Aurelius” is the only one that even looks like the old sort of nomen, and by late antiquity such names had often become widely diffused prestige markers rather than reliable indicators of a living gens in the republican manner. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com], [loebclassics.com] So the dry answer on Macrobius is: yes, “Aurelius” may preserve or imitate the old gentilician form no, that does not allow a clean inference to an operative gens Aurelia and yes, late antique names often sound more classically informative than they really are. [en.wikipedia.org], [catalog.perseus.org], [loebclassics.com] Now to Marcus Aurelius, where the answer is much cleaner. By birth, he was not of the gens Aurelia at all. He was born Marcus Annius Verus, so by birth he belonged to the Annia gens, not the Aurelia. The sources are very clear that his original name was Marcus Annius Verus, and the Annii are indeed the family from which he came. He becomes “Aurelius” only through the adoption sequence by Antoninus Pius, after which the dynastic and adoptive naming structure changes. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] So if Speranza files by birth-gens, Marcus Aurelius belongs under A for Annii, not A for Aurelii. If he files by imperial or public name, then of course “Aurelius” takes over in practice. But the deeper genealogical answer is Annia gens. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] So the neat contrast is this. Macrobius: “Aurelius” may be a late-antique residue or prestige nomen, but not safely a recoverable classical gens-marker. [en.wikipedia.org], [catalog.perseus.org], [loebclassics.com] Marcus Aurelius: “Aurelius” is not his birth-gens at all; by birth he is Marcus Annius Verus, of the Annia gens. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] If you want the dry Speranza formulation: By the age of Macrobius, Rome still names like Rome, but no longer promises, by that fact alone, a recoverable gens. “Aurelius” may still glint with old gentilician dignity, but one should not leap from that glint to the living Aurelii of republican prosopography. Marcus Aurelius, by contrast, gives a cleaner lesson: the philosopher-emperor whom the world knows as “Aurelius” was born Marcus Annius Verus, and so belongs, by birth, to the Annii, not to the Aurelii. The irony is very Roman: the clearer the name sounds, the more history has usually happened to it. [en.wikipedia.org], [catalog.perseus.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can next do either of two things here in chat only: I can give you a compact rule for Speranza’s filing: by birth-gens where recoverable, otherwise by public learned name with a caveat. I can also give you a short note on adoption and why imperial Roman names are especially treacherous if one files too quickly by surface form. But the Aurelia WAS a recognised gens, right? Good members from this gens? Yes. The gens Aurelia was absolutely a recognised Roman gens, and a substantial one. It was a plebeian family of ancient Rome, already prominent by the third century BC, with several important branches such as the Cottae, Orestides, and Scauri. [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com] If one asks for “good members,” one can give a respectable miniature gallery. From the Republic, the Gaius Aurelius Cotta who first brought the family to the consulship in 252 BC is a natural starting point. Then there are several later Aurelii Cottae, and the Lucius Aurelius Orestes branch is also important. The family is one of those plebeian houses that became fully nobilised by repeated high office. [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com] If one broadens from magistrates to famous Romans, Aurelia Cotta, mother of Julius Caesar, is one of the most memorable women connected with the gens. She gives the family a place not only in constitutional history but in Roman domestic legend. [grokipedia.com] Under the Empire, the most dazzling names are the Aurelii Fulvi. Through that line one reaches Antoninus Pius and, by adoption into the Aurelian line, Marcus Aurelius. One must remember, as we said earlier, that Marcus Aurelius was by birth Marcus Annius Verus, not an Aurelius by natal gens; but in the public and imperial history of the Aurelii he naturally looms very large. [en.wikipedia.org], [alchetron.com], [en.wikipedia.org] Later still, there is the very distinguished late-antique branch of the Aurelii Symmachi, culminating in Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, one of the great aristocratic voices of the later western empire. [en.wikipedia.org] So, if you want a short list of especially nameable figures from the gens Aurelia, I would give: Gaius Aurelius Cotta Lucius Aurelius Orestes Aurelia Cotta Titus Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus Pius, as part of the Aurelian imperial line Marcus Aurelius, by adoption and public name rather than birth-gens Quintus Aurelius Symmachus [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com], [alchetron.com], [en.wikipedia.org]Macrobio, Ambrogio Aurelio Teodosio (a. u. c. MCLIII). Comentarii in Somnium Scipionis. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Aurelio – Ossia: Grice ed Aurelio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dela psisco-machia – Roma Aurelio Clemente Prudenzio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dela psisco-machia – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Abstract: Grice: “Mill – a mill – said that surnames have no meaning; but I’m sure Prudenzio was thus called because he was prudent – cf. ‘Grice is called Grice because he is Grice.’” Portico. A career in public service. His main treatise is “Psycho-Machia,” on the soul’s fight between good vitue and evil vice. People bring suffering on themselves by making bad choices. So, this psychomachia was written in Greek or Latin, or soon translated to Latin. His name was Aurelius Clemens Prudentius -- which sounds nobly Roman? It was written in Latin, not Greek. The Psychomachia is a Latin poem by Prudentius, and the surviving text is transmitted in Latin; if one reads it in Greek today, that would be by translation, not by original composition. [readancienttexts.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [thelatinlibrary.com] The title itself is Greek in formation, of course, psychomachia, “battle of the soul” or “battle of spirits,” but that is perfectly normal for late Latin Christian culture: a Latin work can wear a Greek-looking title without ceasing to be a Latin poem. Prudentius is writing as a late Roman Christian poet in Latin hexameters, not as a Greek author. [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com] As for the name, the standard full form is Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, though some sources give the order Aurelius Clemens Prudentius. Both reflect a very Roman naming texture, and yes, it sounds nobly Roman because it is: late Roman, Christian, provincial in origin, but fully inside the Roman onomastic world. He was a Roman Christian poet from Hispania, not an “Italian philosopher” in any strict historical sense. [en.wikipedia.org], [hymnary.org], [newadvent.org] So the shortest answer is this. Psychomachia was composed in Latin. Its title is Greek-shaped, but the poem is Latin. And Aurelius Prudentius Clemens certainly sounds nobly Roman because he was, in fact, a Roman author of the late empire. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] If you want, I can next help with the more delicate point in your note, namely whether Prudenzio in Italian should be treated as “Italian” only in the very loose cultural sense in which late Roman authors writing in Latin on Italian soil get retrospectively absorbed into Italian philosophical tradition. So which one was his gens: Aurelia? Oddly that would be his first thing. Clementia? Prudentia? If one treats the name in Roman terms, the gens would be Aurelia, because Aurelius is the nomen. So yes, oddly to a modern eye, the first element in the familiar form functions as the gentile name. [romaninscr...ritain.org], [imperiumromanum.pl] Clemens and Prudentius are not gentes here. They are later name-elements, best taken as cognomina or cognomen-like elements in late Roman usage. In the attested breakdown I found, Aurelius is explicitly the nomen and Clemens the cognomen. [romaninscr...ritain.org] So, in the neatest Romanizing analysis: Aurelius = nomen gentilicium, hence gens Aurelia. [romaninscr...ritain.org], [Nomen - NovaRoma] Clemens = cognomen. [romaninscr...ritain.org] Prudentius = another cognomen-like element, or part of the late antique multi-element personal name as transmitted in literary tradition. The standard literary full name is usually given as Aurelius Prudentius Clemens or Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, and that very variation is a sign that by late antiquity the old tria nomina neatness is no longer perfectly rigid. [en.wikipedia.org], [hymnary.org], [britannica.com] So the short answer is: His gens, if we speak Romanly, was Aurelia. Not Clementia. Not Prudentia. And yes, that is because the gentile marker is the Aurelius part. [romaninscr...ritain.org], [Nomen - NovaRoma] If you want, I can next give you the stricter philological note on why late antique names like Aurelius Prudentius Clemens no longer sit as comfortably inside the old Republic-style tria nomina as Cicero or Caesar do. Now, in the eldest times, I suppose you cannot bear the name AVRELIVS unless you were of the gens AVRELIA, but by the time this one wrote his psychomatia, perhaps the rules were less strict? and that the Aurelius does not mark the GENS -- plus he could have been adopted? Yes, exactly. In the older and stricter system, Aurelius would normally mark the nomen and therefore the gens, so to bear Aurelius would, in principle, be to stand in the Aurelia line. But by the time of Prudentius, the rules are much looser, and Aurelius no longer securely proves membership in the old gens Aurelia. The key reason is the enormous spread of Aurelius after the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212. After that grant of citizenship, very large numbers of new citizens acquired Aurelius as a nomen, and in late antiquity it often functioned less as a reliable marker of patrilineal gens than as a commonplace civic name, even almost a status-marker. Both the general account of the nomen gentilicium and the late-antique naming survey make exactly this point. [en.wikipedia.org], [discovery.ucl.ac.uk] So for a late fourth- or early fifth-century author like Prudentius, Aurelius may preserve the old shape of a nomen, but it does not let you infer with confidence that he belonged, in any meaningful Republican sense, to the gens Aurelia. By then the old tria nomina logic has been substantially weakened, and the nomen is often no longer a trustworthy clue to clan descent. [jstor.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [discovery.ucl.ac.uk] As for adoption, yes, in Roman naming practice adoption could certainly alter names and bring someone into another nominal line. So in the abstract one must always leave that possibility open. But in this case you do not need adoption to explain Aurelius. The late-antique ubiquity of Aurelius already gives a sufficient explanation. In other words, adoption is possible in principle, but unnecessary as a hypothesis here. [jstor.org], [en.wikipedia.org] So the careful answer is this. In the eldest Roman system, yes, Aurelius would strongly suggest gens Aurelia. By Prudentius’s time, no, it no longer securely marks gens in that old sense. And yes, adoption is always a theoretical possibility in Roman onomastics, but here the simpler explanation is the late-antique flattening of the nomen, especially the mass spread of Aurelius after 212. [en.wikipedia.org], [discovery.ucl.ac.uk], [jstor.org] If you want, I can next give you the sharper one-sentence formulation for Speranza, something like: “In Prudentius, Aurelius is formally a nomen but historically too common by late antiquity to prove genuine gentile descent from the old Aurelii.”

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ausonio -- Grice ed Ausonio – Roma – filosofia italiana –  Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice. Ausonio (Roma, Lazio). Grice: Ausonio, dimmi, tu che sei filosofo romano, preferisci discutere a tavola o in biblioteca? Ausonio: Grice, a tavola le idee hanno più gusto—tra un piatto e un verso, la filosofia si mescola all’allegria! Grice: E allora, se la saggezza passa dal vino romano, la conversazione diventa poesia? Ausonio: Certo, Grice! Solo a Roma si può dire che la filosofia è un brindisi tra amici—e se resta una domanda insoluta, si ride, che tanto domani sarà ancora più bella!

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Avianio – Ossia: Grice e Basso: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma).  Tito Avianio Basso Polieno: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “I often wonder if my Play-Group at Oxford compares with other sects, say, the Portico at Rome, etc. I do not think so. He main reason against any such comparison is that our play-group was an intra-institutional sect – indeed, as I like to say, one of at least THREE which were engaged in the analysis of ordinary language: there was, besides us, the group led by senior Ryle, and there were the Wittgensteinians. At Rome, there was no university then, and so, if you follow Cicero, and claim that Basso was a member of the Portico, you are speaking either metaphorically, or urbanely!” Filosofo italiano. A member of the Porch. GRICEVS: Bassē, Porticum Romanam cum nostro ludicro grege Oxoniensi comparare velim, sed timeo ne nos intra collegium ludamus, vos sub caelo toto disputetis. BASSVS: At Romae, Grice, ipsa porticus quasi universitas fuit: si quis diceret “BASSVS in Porticu docuit,” urbaniter potius quam proprie loqueretur. GRICEVS: Urbanitas placet, sed in Oxonia tres sectae in eodem claustro certabant—Ryliani, Vittersiani, et nos—quasi tres cauponae unam famem venditantes. BASSVS: Ergo convenimus: vos habetis instituta, nos columnas; sed utrique eodem vitio laboramus—nimis serio iocamur. Grice and Speranza have another Basso but Grice thinks it should go under "A": a rather accumulative name: Tito Avianio Basso Polieno. What intrigues (and puzzles) Grice is the -ianus -- it's not Tito Avio (Avius) or Aviano (Avianus) but Avianio (Avianius). Gens Aviania, still? Thanks Yes, I think one may still treat Avianius as a nomen, and therefore as implying a gens, even if a very minor or thinly attested one. The key point is that Avianius is not to be confused with Avius or Avianus. Avianius is itself a Latin nomen gentile, and even a lexical source like Wiktionary explicitly glosses it as a Roman family name, that is, a nomen. So Grice’s instinct is sound: Avianio points to Avianius, not to Avius and not to the adjective-like Avianus. [en.wiktionary.org] Now, if it is a nomen, then by Roman naming logic it does imply a gens, however obscure. General Roman onomastic references make that point very clearly: the nomen is the element that marks gens-membership. Nova Roma states this in textbook form, and broader explanations of Roman naming structure say the same. [Nomen - NovaRoma], [imperiumromanum.pl] More specifically, Avianius is actually listed among Roman nomina in the large repertories. The List of Roman nomina includes Avianus, Avienus, Avius, and crucially Avianius as distinct forms. That is exactly the sort of evidence one wants here, because it shows that Avianius is not just an eccentric modern back-formation from Aviano, but a recognized nomen-form in Roman onomastic tradition. [en.wikipedia.org] So the dry answer is this. Yes, one may posit a gens Aviania from Avianius, in exactly the way one posits a gens from any nomen. But one should add at once that this seems to be a very obscure gens, not one of the major or frequently attested Roman houses. The evidence supports the nomen more strongly than it supports a richly documented family history. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wiktionary.org], [Nomen - NovaRoma] As for Tito Avianio Basso Polieno, the practical parsing would then be something like this. Titus is the praenomen. Avianius is the nomen, hence birth-gens Aviania if that is indeed the original gentilicial element. Bassus and Pollienus are later family or adoptive accumulations, or at least additional name-elements. So if Grice wants to file him strictly by birth gens, then A is defensible. [en.wiktionary.org], [Nomen - NovaRoma], [imperiumromanum.pl] A small caution, though, because it is the sort of thing Grice would enjoy. The ending -ianius is not the commonest old Latin gentilicial ending, and Roman onomastic guides note that different endings can suggest different linguistic strata or regional formations. Nova Roma remarks on nomen endings and their possible origins, so one should not assume Avianius is one of the oldest central Roman formations merely because it looks “Roman enough.” It is Roman enough to be a nomen, yes; but not necessarily one of the most ancient or central ones. [Nomen - NovaRoma] So the clean formula is this. Avianius is not to be collapsed into Avius or Avianus. It can function as a Roman nomen and therefore implies a gens Aviania, though apparently a very obscure one. On that basis, Grice is justified in thinking that Tito Avianio Basso Polieno belongs under A, if the filing principle is birth-gens or nomen rather than the more visible Bassus. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wiktionary.org], [Nomen - NovaRoma], [imperiumromanum.pl] If you like, I can next do a tighter pass specifically on Pollienus in the same name, because that element too may be carrying an adoptive or secondary family signal and could sharpen the whole prosopographical picture.Avianio Basso Polieno, Tito (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Avieno – Ossia: Grice e Avieno: il portico a Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Abstract.  Avieno Rufio Festo (Roma, Lazio): il portico a Roma. Grice: “I would claim that Avieno’s “Phenomena” is the first tract in Phenomenalism. It is adventurous that hundred years later, I still had to cope with it as a scholar at Corpus!” “The Romans like a descendancy: the fact that Avenio’s middle name was ‘Rufio’ makes him indeed – in those ancient times – a ‘distant descendant’ of Musonio, whose _last_ name was Rufo!” -- Filosofo italiano. Porch. A distant descendant of Musonio Rufo. Writes “Phenomena”.: portico, portico romano, phenomena. GRICEVS: Aviene, sub porticu Romana philosopharis tam audacter ut ego apud Corpus post centum annos adhuc tuis Phenomenis lucter, quasi ventus de Tiberi chartas meas vertat. AVIENVS: Si ventus est, Grice, culpa est porticus: ibi verba mihi ambulant sicut ego, nec umquam sciunt quando sedere debeant. GRICEVS: Sed Romani descendentiam amant, et quod tibi nomen medium Rufio est, te statim faciunt nepotem longinquum Musonii Rufi—nomen quasi scala genealogica. AVIENVS: Ita, et si quis me rogat unde veni, respondeo: ex porticu, ex Rufione, ex Phenomenis—et ex tua querela, quae iam fit appendix libri.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Azeglio – Ossia: Grice e Azeglio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- non si danno doveri reciprochi senza società.  Prospero Tapparelli d’Azeglio (Torino, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- non si danno doveri reciprochi senza società. Prospero Taparelli d’Azeglio and H. P. Grice converge on the idea that meaning in conversation is intelligible only against a norm of rational coordination, but they locate that norm at different depths and with different directions of explanation. For Grice, “reason-governed conversational meaning” is reconstructed from within the practice of talk-exchange: interlocutors are presumed to be cooperating toward a mutually accepted purpose, and from that presumption (the Cooperative Principle and its maxims) hearers can calculate conversational implicatures as rational inferences from what is said plus contextual assumptions. Taparelli, by contrast, treats the very possibility of reciprocal normative claims as prior to any individual exchange: “non si danno doveri reciprochi senza società,” so the space in which one can owe, claim, infer, and hold responsible is grounded in sociality itself, articulated in a natural-law framework (“diritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto”) and oriented toward an ethically loaded telos (the society that renders associates “onestamente felici”). Where Grice makes implicature a product of individual reason operating under publicly recognizable conversational norms, Taparelli makes conversational reason a local expression of a more basic sociability and subsidiarity: cooperation is not merely a convenient stance for interpreting utterances but a constitutive feature of association, with duties and coordinated action arising from the nature of rational beings in society. The passage’s suggestion that Taparelli is “Gricean at heart” captures a further point of contact: both reject a Rousseau-style contractualism as the foundation of cooperation, treating it instead as something natural (for Grice, a default rational posture of participants; for Taparelli, a fact about human social nature). Yet Taparelli’s appeal to “amore proprio” disciplined by broader benevolence (and, in the passage, a Benthamite tempering of Kantian rationalism) gives the Gricean picture a thicker moral psychology: self-interest is acknowledged as motivationally real but is meant to be harmonized within a wider principle of social good, whereas Grice’s framework stays methodologically lean, aiming to derive what is meant from reasoned expectations about contribution to a shared conversational end rather than from a substantive ethics of the common good. Grice: “When I started to deliver INDIVIDUAL (rather than joint) seminars at Oxford – as University Lecturer, hence, with sessions open to every member of the university – I didn’t know for what I ‘was bargaining.’ ‘Conversational’ became his motto – very much like A., back in the continent! I like A.; first he was a marchese, unlike me – second he looked for the fundamental law (or ‘fundamental question,’ as I call it) for the principle of cooperativeness – he finds it’s a natural thing, not a Rousseaunian contractualist thing, so he is a Griceian at heart. On top, he relies on Bentham, to minimise the Kantian rationalism and make it digestible to those who care about what A. calls amore proprio,– i. e. conversational self-love as still operating under a wider principle of conversational benevolence.” Dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto. Termini chiave d’A sono socialità e sussidiarietà. All’ *onestà* tende la *natura umana*. *Ottener il bene* è negl’*esseri ragionevoli* un *divenir felice*, il fine della società è rendere gl’*associati* *onestamente felici*. La felicità dell’uomo consiste *secondo natura* nei beni di *mente* e di *corpo*. *Assicurarci* e *crescerci* queste beni è il fine naturale della società. Una società può o abbracciare tutto il fine naturale con mezzo particolare, col convivere stabilmente, o abbracciarlo parzialmente. Il *fine* particolare della prima è il *convivere* onestamente felice. Della seconda il conseguire quel particolare oggetto per cui ella s’associa. Una società *completa* abbraccia ogni obbietto naturale della umana società: il bene di mente, di corpo, e la difesa d’entrambi. La società è *mezzo*, non fine dell’individuo. Non si danno doveri reciprochi senza società. ius naturale, co-operare, fa il bene altrui, principio della socialita, applicazione del principio della moralità, natura umana, fatto,  definizione di società in termine di co-operare, more geometrico tendenzia impulso naturale all’onestà, società, azione esterna, esseri intelligente, convivir stabilmente. Grice: Azeglio, dimmi, se non c’è società, tu come fai a trovare qualcuno a cui assegnare doveri reciproci? Azeglio: Grice, è come cercare di giocare a scacchi senza avversario—non si muove nessuno e la partita resta in sospeso! Grice: Allora la felicità onesta, quella che nasce dal convivere, è una specie di premio di consolazione per chi decide di non vivere da eremita? Azeglio: Esattamente! Se l’uomo si ritira e si isola, finisce per discutere solo con se stesso—e magari si annoia pure. Grice: Ma tu, Prospero, preferisci la geometria naturale della società o quella un po’ più tortuosa dell’amore proprio? Azeglio: Oh, la geometria naturale è più facile: basta tenere dritto il compasso verso l’onestà, e se poi qualcuno gira il foglio, almeno si ride insieme! Grice: In fondo, co-operare è come condividere una torta: se la si mangia da soli, non si assapora la vera dolcezza; se si divide, si fa felice anche il vicino di tavolo—e la conversazione scorre meglio. Azeglio, Prospero Tapparelli d’ (1845). Degli ultimi casi di Romagna. Torino: Favale.