I VERBALI S

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sabbadini – Ossia: Grice e Sabbadini: il ciceronismo di Grice a Clifton. Note su Saggi di critica letteraria. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Remigio Sabbadini (Sarego, Vicenza): Cceronismo ed implicatura. For Grice and Sabbadini the hinge is the same—a classical understanding of how meaning is governed by reason—but they approach it from opposite ends of the same Latin corridor. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning treats rationality as an interactional norm: what is said is calibrated against what a reasonable hearer is entitled to infer, so implicature arises not from words themselves but from shared expectations of intelligible conduct. Sabbadini, by contrast, arrives at the same phenomenon through philology rather than pragmatics: in his work on Cicero and the humanists, meaning is traced genealogically, as a historically sedimented practice in which names, signs, and traditions acquire force through transmission rather than immediate inspection. Where Grice asks how an utterance licenses an inference here and now, Sabbadini shows how a name like Cicero licenses expectations across centuries, inviting readers to hunt for a cece on the nose even when none is there. Grice’s insight is that such inferences are rational but defeasible, products of cooperative reasoning rather than semantic entailment; Sabbadini’s is that scholarship itself operates by the same logic, moving from traces to conclusions under norms of disciplined inference. In both cases, meaning is reason-governed without being mechanically determined: it lives neither in brute signs nor in private intentions alone, but in the shared practices—conversational for Grice, philological for Sabbadini—that make understanding accountable, corrigible, and historically intelligible. Grice: “In the Oxford that I knew, you were introduced to philosophy upon completion of the fifth term of your Lit. Hum. degree, so the classics were in my veins. Those who followed the P. P. E. did not care, or know, the first thing!” Cicero, Grice. Filosofo italiano. CICERONE FILOSOFO ITALIANO. Filologo. Laureatosi a Firenze, insegna successivamente nei ginnasî di Girgenti, di Velletri e di Ventimiglia e nei licei di Salerno, di Livorno e di Palermo. Passa quindi a insegnare letteratura latina a Catania e nell'accademia scientifico-letteraria, poi università, di Milano. Studia, degli scrittori latini, Orazio, Cicerone, Seneca, i commentatori antichi di Terenzio, e soprattutto Virgilio, cui dedica una lunga serie di lavori, da un articolo pubblicato sulla Rivista di filologia e istruzione classica, alla monumentale edizione critica -- Roma. Ma S. leg soprattutto il suo nome alla storia dell'umanesimo filologico, della quale si può dire il creatore. Anche qui un'ininterrotta fervida attività, dal saggio sull'umanista velletrano Mancinelli, pubbl. nella Cronaca del Ginnasio di Velletri, all'articolo su Frulovisio umanista, pubblicato in Giorn. stor. della lett. ital. Edizioni di epistolarî, ricostruzioni e precisazioni biografiche, descrizioni e illustrazioni di codici: tutto un complesso lavoro intorno a umanisti di ogni provenienza e di diverso valore, tra i quali, prediletto, Veronese, cui S. dedica speciale attenzione (cfr. l'ampia biografia, pubbl. nel Giornale Ligustico, il volume La scuola e gli studi di G., Catania, e soprattutto l'edizione e l'illustrazione dell'epistolario, Venezia. Coronano questa mirabile attività nel campo umanistico il Metodo degli umanisti -- Firenze -- e specialmente le Scoperte dei codici latini -- Firenze: opera saldissima per dottrina e forza di pensiero, che è base indispensabile per ogni ulteriore studio sull'umanesimo filologico. II volume Classici e umanisti da codici ambrosiani -- Firenze --, che raccoglie alcuni scritti pubblicati sparsamente, contiene un Elenco cronologico deqli scritti S.  CICERONE.  Grice: Caro Sabbadini, oggi il filosofo Speranza mi ha ricordato che a Vadum Boum i classici non si studiano: ti finiscono direttamente nelle vene. E quando ci finiscono, cominciano subito a fare i genealogisti. Sabbadini: Ah, i genealogisti: con Cicerone basta pronunciare il nome e subito qualcuno chiede: “Ma dov’è il cicer?”—latino cicer, ciceris, cioè il nostro cece. E già ti stanno guardando il naso come se fosse un commento antico. Grice: Appunto: e qui viene la mia implicatura (che non dirò ad alta voce). Se “Cicero” viene da cicer, è un designatore rigido del… cece sul naso? Oppure designa solo un fatto d’archivio—un nonno ceciuto—e quindi non si eredita nulla, salvo il soprannome? Perché il pubblico, appena sente “Cicerone”, conclude: “Allora il cece ce l’hai tu”, e pretende la prova empirica. Sabbadini: La tua implicatura salta il naso di Cicerone e punta al cece—come Speranza concorderà con gioia: il vero “cicer” non sta (per forza) sulla pelle, sta nella tradizione che incolla il segno al nome. Se fu l’antenato ad avere il cece, il cognomen è ereditabile anche quando il cece non lo è; ma, per una bizzarra giustizia filologica, chi porta il nome paga pegno: la gente cerca il legume sul volto del discendente, come se l’etimologia fosse una visita medica. In breve: Cicero non designa rigidamente un bernoccolo—designa rigidamente una storia, e il resto lo fa la malizia del pubblico. Sabbadini, Remigio (1885). Saggi di critica letteraria. Torino: Loescher.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sabellio – Ossia: Grice e Sabellio: la ragione conversazionale e l’escatologia a Roma. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Sabellio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’escatologia. For S. and Grice the common thread is not doctrine but discipline: both treat meaning as something constrained by rational accountability rather than by mere verbal form. Sabellius’ modalism arises from a pressure internal to discourse itself: how can Christians speak coherently about the divine without multiplying agents beyond intelligibility? His answer is not primarily metaphysical invention but a regulative move within theological language, insisting that apparently plural predications (“Father,” “Son,” “Spirit”) be understood as modes of one being if rational speech about God is to avoid contradiction and pragmatic collapse. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning generalizes this insight at a secular level. For him, what hearers are entitled to infer depends on norms of cooperative rationality, not on lexical items alone; heresy, confusion, or category error can arise not because a word is false but because an inference is illicit under shared expectations. Where Sabellius worries that a misplaced linguistic distinction fractures monotheism into incoherence, Grice worries that unregulated inference fractures communication itself. In both cases, meaning is not what expressions mechanically encode, but what a rational interpreter may draw from them under disciplined constraints: remove the governing principle—modal unity for Sabellius, cooperative reason for Grice—and discourse degenerates into either theological absurdity or conversational noise. He struggles with the problem brought by the Galileans – from Galilea, not followers of the Florentine astronomer -- about the trinità. He argues that the three dimensions of the so-called ‘trinità’ should be understood as three modes of one single being, rather than as three separate persons. The theory, which he dubs ‘modalism,’ is soon condemned as heretical, as is he.   GRICEVS: Sabelli, salve! Hodie, ut leviter dicam, cum philosopho Spe de rebus ultimis collocutus sum—et miror quomodo vocabulum eschatologia apud nos in volgare saepe fiat quasi escatologia, quasi de latrinis potius quam de novissimis. SABELLIVS: Salve, Grice. Ita est: Galilaei (non astronomi, sed illi de Galilaea) plus quam syllabas turbant; et dum de trinitate disputamus, saepe de vocibus ipsis litigamus, quasi heresis interdum in una littera lateat. GRICEVS: Ego vero nihil dicam—sed mihi dulcis est ille sonus Graecus, “X”, quem in eschatologia audis quasi in ipsa ruina mundi: at auribus Italicis, etiam Bononiae, saepe evanescit, et remanet tantum “s” lenis, quasi finis rerum esset sine fractura, sine χ. SABELLIVS: Implicatura tua, Grice, eschatologica est—ut Spes consentiet; ideo hic eam Graece rite scribemus: συνεπαγωγή ἐσχατολογική. Nam si χ tollis, tollis quasi ipsum cardinem: non iam de ἔσχατα, sed de sonis mollibus agitur. Et bene mones: apud Bononiam (ne dicam apud plebem) saepe perit littera, et cum littera perit, sensus quoque paene perit. Sabellio (a.u.c. CMLXVIII). Dicta. Roma..

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sabinillio – Ossia Grice e Sabinillio: la ragione conversazionale dell’accademia romana. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Sabinillio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale dell’accademia romana. The convergence between Grice and S. lies in their shared conviction that meaning in conversation is not a mere by‑product of lexical content, institutional status, or formal utterance, but an achievement of ratione gubernata—reason actively governing exchange. For Grice, conversational meaning is constituted through intentions recognized under rational expectations (cooperation, relevance, economy), so that implicature marks not rhetorical ornament but disciplined inference. Sabinillio, as presented here in the Roman key, anticipates this structure from within a Plotinian ethos: reason (ratio) is not external constraint but an inner measure that alone licenses speech fit for the curia as academia. His “implicatura senatoria” mirrors Grice’s implicature precisely insofar as both diagnose the failure of honor, office, or degree to guarantee rational contribution; titles without disciplined reason generate only splendidissime nihil. Where Grice articulates this normatively through maxims of conversation, Sabinillio embodies it ethically and civically, insisting that philosophical speech is possible in public life only when reason rules both saying and meaning—an early, Roman instantiation of what Grice later formalizes as reason‑governed conversational meaning. A senator, who counts Plotino as his tutor, and whose doctrines he follows.    GRICEVS: Sabinilli, salve. Rem iam pridem cum collega meo, philosopho Spe, perquisivi; et hodie iterum miror quod Roma ipsa, quasi schola viva, Plotinum in senatum mittat. SABINILIVS: Salve, Grice. Ego quidem senator sum, sed discipulus Plotini; in hac urbe etiam curia aliquando fit academia, et toga non semper inimica est philosophiae. GRICEVS: Ita est; sed—ut Spes mecum subridens insinuavit—rarum est invenire “member of the house of lords” qui bene utatur titulo suo Lit. Hum. Philosophia Vadum Boum M. A.; plerique enim vel silent vel splendidissime nihil dicunt. SABINILIVS: Implicatura senatoria! Et Spes recte monet: sed Plotinus non est omnium privatus praeceptor. Non cuique datur ut in curia philosophice loquatur; quidam enim habent gradus, sed non habent rationem—tu autem ostendis quomodo honor sine disciplina sit mera pompa, disciplina autem sine honore saepe sit utilior. Sabinillio (a. u. c. MMDXVII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Saccheri – Ossia: Grice e Saccheri: la ragione conversazionale. Note sull’Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri (Sanremo, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning and Saccheri’s conception of logica demonstrativa converge at a deep structural level despite their historical and disciplinary distance: both treat reason not as an abstract faculty detached from practice, but as a norm-governed activity unfolding through signs, terms, and propositions oriented toward intelligibility. Saccheri, trained in Jesuit logic and mathematics, works within the Aristotelian–scholastic framework of signum, signare, significare, terminus, and propositio, insisting that demonstration proceeds through the disciplined articulation of categorematic and syncategorematic elements, whose semantic roles are fixed by logical function rather than psychological association; his Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus shows how reason advances by testing hypotheses through ad absurdum argument, allowing structural constraints to reveal what cannot be said without contradiction. Grice, by contrast, relocates demonstrative rigor from formal proof to conversational practice, but preserves the same core insight: meaning is not exhausted by the copular “est” or by truth-conditions alone, but emerges from rule-governed use, where what is signified depends on the rational expectations binding interlocutors. Where Saccheri distinguishes terminus as capable or incapable of standing alone in a proposition, Grice distinguishes what is said from what is implicated, treating implicature as a rational surplus generated by the cooperative management of propositions in context. In this sense, Grice’s conversational reason is a pragmatic transposition of Saccheri’s demonstrative reason: both assume that intelligibility is constrained by normative structures independent of individual psychology, and both show that apparent anomalies—non-Euclidean geometries for Saccheri, non-literal or indirect meanings for Grice—arise not from irrationality but from the faithful extension of reason’s own governing principles beyond their most familiar domains. Grice: “I taught logic to Strawson – my pupil at St. John’s then – and we read Saccheri – but it never crossed my mind that he (Strawson, not Saccheri) would go on to think that he could compose, as Saccheri did, a whole treatise on logic!” – Keywords: signum, signare, significare, terminus, propositio, implicature. Filosofo italiano. Il frontespizio dell'opera Euclides ab omni nævo vindicatus. M. Milano. -- è stato un gesuita e matematico italiano. È considerato il padre, seppure inconsapevole, delle geometrie non euclidee – Grice, “that Kant hated!” -- . Logica demonstrativa Quadrilatero di Saccheri Targa commemorativa all'Università di Pavia S. entra nell'ordine della Compagnia di Gesù a Genova, dove fu avviato allo studio della geometria sotto la guida di Ceva. Ceva fa conoscere il fratello Giovanni e i galileiani Viviani e Grandi. Venne ordinato sacerdote a Como, quindi insegna filosofia nei collegi gesuiti di Torino e di Pavia, dove inoltre gli fu affidata la cattedra di Matematica all'Università degli Studi. Pubblica un notevole trattato di logica e un trattato di statica. "Euclides ab omni nævo vindicatus" -- Euclide riscattato da ogni difetto. In essa, Saccheri dimostrò per assurdo il postulato delle rette parallele di Euclide. Grice on ‘Aristotle on the multiplicity of being’ – ‘est’ as COPULA is only ONE use. Iam vero terminus, vel se solo pcrfe&c SIGNIFICAT, adeo vt foffitse solo esse integer terminus alicuius propositionis, vt Petrus, homo, Mus , 5c appellatur categorematicus – Grice and P. F. Strawson, ‘Socrates’ is substantial in that it can never be a predicate --, vel contra propter suam indeterminationem in significando non potest se sol» subijci, aut prædicari, sed solum gercre aliqua, munera circa subiectum, et prædicatum, illa determinando, et modificando, et appellatur syncategorematicus: huiufino. di lunt – PARTES ORATIONES – What Grice calls ‘categorie morfo-sintattiche’ -- præpositiones, adverbia,  Grice: Caro Saccheri, ti confesso che poco fa ho scambiato due battute col filosofo Speranza—lui sostiene che la geometria non euclidea nasce sempre da una buona conversazione, proprio come certi postulati che, a tavola, si piegano meglio di una parallela!  Saccheri: Ah, Grice, se Speranza lo dice, allora sarà vero! D’altronde, da Sanremo a Pavia, si sa che la logica fa buon viaggio solo quando trova compagnia... e qualche quadrilatero ben cucinato!  Grice: Ecco, caro Saccheri, come direbbe Speranza, tra una “propositio” e un “terminus”, la vera geometria è quella che si lascia intuire—nessuno la nomina, ma tutti la gustano... Un po’ come il pudding: basta assaporarlo, senza chiedersi da dove partano le rette!  Saccheri: Un’implicatura unica, come direbbe Speranza—che ognuna delle tue, caro Professore, è la prova tangibile che il gusto della logica va ben oltre i postulati! Se solo Euclide avesse avuto il tuo pudding, avrebbe lasciato stare i paralleli e si sarebbe goduto la conversazione... Saccheri, Giovanni Girolamo (1733). Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus. Milano: Typis Palatinis.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sacchi – Ossia: Grice e Sacchi: la ragione conversazionale della gastro-filosofia. Note su De disciplina scholarium. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Bartolomeo Sacchi (Piadena, Cremona, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale della gastro-filosofia. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning can be fruitfully compared with the humanist “gastro‑philosophical” rationality embodied by Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, insofar as both treat reason not as an abstract calculus but as something cultivated in social practice, dialogue, and shared norms. Platina’s humanism, visible both in his pedagogical dialogues and in his celebrated reflections on food, taste, and moderation, assumes that judgment matures through conversation: reason is refined by exchange, tradition, and culturally shared expectations about what counts as appropriate, balanced, or tasteful, whether in ethics, politics, or cuisine. Grice radicalizes this insight at the level of linguistic theory by showing that meaning itself is governed by rational expectations implicit in cooperative interaction: speakers rely on shared assumptions about relevance, informativeness, and sincerity, and it is within this conversational framework that implicatures arise, much as Platina assumes that appreciation—of a text, a meal, or an idea—depends on tacit standards understood by participants at the table. Where Platina’s humanist banquets turn learning into a lived, sensuous practice in which wisdom is tasted rather than deduced, Grice’s conversational rationality explains how understanding routinely exceeds what is explicitly said, yielding a form of practical reason that operates not through formal proof but through socially embedded inference. In both figures, reason is neither coldly deductive nor merely subjective: it is normatively structured, historically cultivated, and exercised in dialogue, so that, as the gastronomic metaphor suggests, the proof of rationality—whether philosophical or conversational—ultimately lies not in abstract demonstration alone but in the shared capacity to recognize when something “comes out rIl Platina. Garin.  Detto il Plàtina. Muore a Roma. Umanista e gastronomo italiano.  Nacque a questo paese vicino a Cremona chiamato, in latino, Platina, da cui prese il soprannome. Della sua giovinezza si conosce poco: intraprese la carriera delle armi militando al servizio di Sforza e Piccinino come mercenario, ma presto si trasferì a Mantova per avviarsi agli studi umanistici. Nella città dei Gonzaga e discepolo di Ognibene da Lonigo, che aveva assunto la guida della Casa Gioiosa dopo Iacopo da San Cassiano, succeduto a Vittorino da Feltre morto. Cominciò la sua carriera come precettore del figlio di Ludovico III Gonzaga. Al marchese dedicò il primo scritto di cui abbiamo notizia: il Bartholomaei Platinensis Divi Ludovici marchionis Mantuae somnium, un'operetta sotto forma di dialogo in lode delle cure prestate da Ludovico nella trascrizione delle opere di Virgilio.  Secondo l'uso umanistico Sacchi scelse come nom de plume quello della propria città natale, cambiandolo presto da Platinensis a Platina. Per quanto ottenesse dal duca di Milano Francesco Sforza – tramite l'intercessione della moglie di Ludovico Barbara di Brandeburgo – un salvacondotto per andare in Grecia a perfezionare le proprie conoscenze del greco antico e dell'antichità classica, mutò parere quando seppe che Giovanni Argiropulo, celebre umanista di orientamento platonico, sarebbe venuto a Firenze in qualità di docente di filosofia, preferendo stabilirsi nella città medicea. Si recò quindi a Firenze per ascoltare le lezioni dell'Argiropulo, entrando a far parte dell'ambiente culturale locale e stringendo amicizia con celebri umanisti quali FICINO, Bracciolini, Filelfo, LANDINO, ALBERTI , PICO, e molti altri. Divenne inoltre precettore presso la famiglia Medici pur legandosi alla famiglia Capponi, di parte repubblicana. guerra/pace, Plinio.  Grice: Caro Sacchi, ti confesso che poco fa ho scambiato due battute col filosofo Speranza. Lui sostiene che nel mondo della filosofia, come nella cucina, il segreto sta tutto nella conversazione: tra idee che si insaporiscono e ragioni che si amalgamano, come in un buon piatto cremonese! Ma dimmi, tu che sei il Platina, la gastro-filosofia nasce più dalla fame di sapere o dalla voglia di banchettare? Sacchi: Ah, Grice, ti dirò che tra Piadena e Mantova il sapere si gusta a tavola e la filosofia si spande come il profumo di uno stufato ben fatto! Tra discepoli di Ognibene da Lonigo e lezioni di Argiropulo, qui ogni dialogo è condito di sapienza e ogni mercenario diventa un umanista... soprattutto se il banchetto è generoso! Grice: E allora, caro Platina, sarà pure vero che la guerra e la pace si discutono meglio davanti a un piatto di Plinio, ma in fondo—come direbbe Speranza—la vera filosofia sta nel gusto: perché, si sa, la prova del budino non sta nelle argomentazioni, ma nel saperlo assaporare senza far troppe domande... Sacchi: Deliziosa implicatura, come direbbe Speranza, sapendo quanto ama il pudding—che importa delle prove, se il sapore convince! In fondo, tra dialoghi e banchetti, la filosofia lombarda si gusta meglio con un pizzico di ironia e un cucchiaio ben affondato nella crema! Sacchi, Bartolomeo (1470). De disciplina scholarium. Venezia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Saliceto – Ossia: Grice e Saliceto: la ragione conversazionale del diritto bellico – la guerra è la guerra. Note su Scritti politici. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Sua Eccellenza il conte Vierri Visconti di Saliceto (Balsamo, Cinisello Calsamo, Milano, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale del diritto bellico – la guerra è la guerra. A comparison between Grice and Verri Visconti di Saliceto brings into focus two converging traditions of reason‑governed meaning grounded in social norms rather than abstract formalism, even though they operate at different levels. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning explains how rationality functions implicitly in ordinary communication: speakers and hearers rely on shared expectations of cooperation, relevance, and sincerity, and meaning emerges from what a rational participant can reasonably be taken to intend within a conversational practice. Saliceto’s Enlightenment reflections on war, law, pleasure, and happiness presuppose a comparable rational substrate, but relocate it within civic and juridical life, especially in the domain of belligerence, where “war is war” names a hard limit set by collective rules, institutional roles, and moral expectations rather than by individual sentiment. Where Grice analyzes how conversational implicatures arise from rational coordination between interlocutors, Saliceto treats law—especially the law of war—as a form of extended civic conversation in which reason disciplines force, pleasure is measured against pain, and happiness is constrained by duty. In both cases, rationality is not an inner mental calculus but a publicly shareable normativity: for Grice, it governs what can be meant and understood in conversation; for Saliceto, it governs what can be justified, endured, or condemned in political and military practice. The affinity is strongest in their shared Enlightenment conviction that reason operates most powerfully when embedded in social exchange—whether among conversational partners at a table or among states and citizens negotiating the boundaries of violence, pleasure, and civil order. Grice: “Since Sua Eccellenza Verri-Visconti calls himself a hyphenated philosopher, I who amn’t, shall list him under Visconti!” Esential Italian philosopher. Like Grice, he wrote on ‘happiness.’ Like Grice, he writes on ‘pleasure.’ Like Grice, he was a very clubbable man. Ritratto tagliato Barone di Rho. Consorte Marietta Castiglioni Vincenza Melzi d'Eril. Figli Teresa, Alessandro (da Marietta Castiglioni). Filosofo. Considerato tra i massimi esponenti dell'illuminismo, è altresì ritenuto il fondatore della scuola illuministica milanese. Nasce dal conte Gabriele Verri-Visconti, magistrato e politico conservatore, della nobiltà milanese. Avviati gli studi nel collegio dei gesuiti di Brera, e uno dei trasformati. Si arruola nell'esercito e prende parte alla Guerra dei VII Anni. Fermatosi a Vienna, intraprende la redazione delle Considerazioni sul commercio nello Stato di Milano, che gli varranno il primo incarico di funzionario. Pubblica le Meditazioni sulla felicità. Devienne a Milano uno dei pugni, nucleo redazionale del caffè, destinato a diventare il punto di riferimento del riformismo illuministico. Tra i suoi saggi più importanti per Il Caffè si  ricordano Elementi del commercio; Commedia; “Medicina”; “I parolai”. Ha rapporto epistolari anche con gl’enciclopedisti. d'Alembert visita i pugni. Parallelamente all'impresa editoriale, intraprende la scalata del governo d’Austria allo scopo di mettere in prattica le riforme propugnate nel “Caffe”.Membro della Giunta per la revisione della "ferma" (appalto delle imposte ai privati) del Supremo Consiglio dell'Economia. Fonda la Società patriottica. “Meditazioni sull'economia politica”. Il discorso sull'indole del piacere -- e del dolore”; “i Ricordi” e le “Osservazioni sulla tortura”. Il suo è uno stile asciutto e libero, pieno di trattenuto vigore.  diritto bellico. Piacere. Grice: Ah, Sua Eccellenza il Conte Vierri Visconti di Saliceto! Devo dire che il solo suono del suo titolo nobiliare dona una certa grandezza al nostro dialogo. Non sorprende che lei conversi con tanta ragionevolezza—direi, con quell’eleganza conversazionale tipica dei raffinati italiani di alto lignaggio. I suoi approfondimenti sulla natura della ragione nel dialogo sono una gioia per ogni filosofo, in particolare per un inglese come me, affascinato dalla civiltà italiana. Saliceto: Professore Grice, sono profondamente onorato dalle sue parole. Per noi milanesi, e specialmente per chi appartiene alla stirpe dei Visconti, la ragionevolezza nel dialogo non è solo un ideale, ma un nobile dovere. A mio avviso, l’arte della conversazione costituisce il fondamento della felicità e del piacere—campi in cui, come lei ha scritto, la filosofia trova la sua dimora più autentica. Grice: In effetti, Conte, la sua tradizione milanese mi ricorda che la ragionevolezza è una virtù sociale tanto quanto filosofica. Gli italiani di alto lignaggio, come lei, praticano una sorta di moderazione conversazionale; ponderano piacere e dolore, felicità e dovere, quasi come se il dialogo stesso fosse una forma di economia morale. Questo rende il suo illuminismo filosofico così solido e attraente agli occhi degli stranieri. Saliceto: La sua stima mi riempie di gioia, Professore. Per noi, conversare ragionevolmente è come condurre una guerra gentile—una guerra in cui la comprensione è la vittoria e la civiltà il premio. Ritengo che solo tramite simili scambi si possa davvero far progredire la causa della filosofia e della società. Che la nostra conversazione sia illuminata quanto la scuola milanese stessa! Saliceto, Sua Eccellenza il conte Verri Visconti di (1823). Scritti politici. Milano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sallustio – Ossia: Grice e Sallustio: la ragione conversazionale a Roma. Note sull’Empedoclea. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Saturnino Secondo Sallustio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del divino e dei divini. The author, according to some, of Salutio’s ‘On the gods and the world order,’ dedicated to Giuliano. Accademia. So in all these Sallustio, Salustio, Salutio -- we have one gens only -- can you separate the Grice entries in chronological or thematic terms? thanks -- Yes. The cleanest separation is to treat these as two quite different Sallustii, despite the orthographic wobble between Sallustio, Salustio, and Salutio. Chronologically first comes Gaius Sallustius Crispus, the late republican historian. Under him I would keep two internal sub-entries, not because there are two men, but because Speranza is using two different philosophical angles on the same man. One is the historical-moral Sallust. This is the Sallust of De coniuratione Catilinae, Bellum Iugurthinum, and the Histories: the Roman historian of corruption, virtus, animus and corpus, moral exempla, and the implicit pedagogy of narrative. Here the Gricean contact is through disciplined inference in historiography. The reader is expected to gather judgment from arrangement, omission, and tonal control rather than from explicit doctrinal statement. The other is the Empedoclean Sallust. This is still Gaius Sallustius Crispus, or at least the probable identification, but now under the title Empedoclea. Here the focus is not Roman political historiography but philosophical compilation, reception, and didactic mediation. Speranza treats this as a second thematic face of the same Sallust: not the historian of Rome’s crisis, but the Roman transmitter of Empedocles, perhaps coloured by Pythagorean interest. So chronologically it belongs to the same man, but thematically it deserves its own heading: Sallust the compiler of Greek philosophical matter for Roman readers. Then much later, and entirely separately, comes Saturninus Secundus Sallustius or Salutius, the fourth-century imperial statesman and neoplatonic associate of Julian. This is the author, or probable author, of De diis et mundo. Here the theme is no longer moral historiography or Empedoclean transmission, but metaphysical theology: the divine, the gods, world-order, and the relation between discourse and a prior cosmic intelligibility. This Sallustius belongs under late antiquity, imperial administration, and neoplatonism, not under the late republican Roman historian. So if Grice wants a tidy order, I would suggest this. First, Sallustio Crispo, Gaio. Under that, two thematic sub-entries: historian of Roman moral-political decline compiler or transmitter in the Empedoclea Second, Sallustio or Salutio, Saturnino Secondo. Under that: late imperial neoplatonist and man of state De diis et mundo and the metaphysics of divine order That way one keeps one gens only if one wants, namely the gens Sallustia behind both names in a broad naming sense, but one does not confuse the late republican historian with the late antique philosopher-administrator. If you want the driest possible catalogue formula, I would write it like this in chat. Sallustio I: Gaius Sallustius Crispus. Late republic. Historical reason, moral exempla, Roman decline. Secondary thematic subdivision: Empedoclea. Sallustio II: Saturninus Secundus Sallustius or Salutius. Late empire. Neoplatonic theology, Julian, De diis et mundo. And if you want the thematic contrast stated in one sentence. The first Sallust is about how Rome should be read; the second Sallustius is about how the cosmos should be read. Speranza thinks that Grice's focus on the Sallust of the Empedoclea, while knowing that this is the same as the historian, is to prove the fact that one's philosophical production may be deemed of less general or scholarly interest -- or was just not preserved. Empedocles was quite riske --Sicilian, and greek Speaking -- for Sallust to spend much on him, and I think Cicero (or Tullio if we go by gens) makes a pun that only Sallust understood Empedocle -- and how you are sayign that they were possibly NOT the same person? Thanks Yes — the strongest current view is that the historian and the Empedoclea author are probably the same [Gaius Sallustius Crispus], but not with absolute certainty. So I was not saying “they are not the same person”; I was saying that one should phrase the identification cautiously. The reason for caution is simple. The evidence for the Empedoclea is extremely thin. We do not possess the poem. We have only external notices, above all the famous remark in Cicero to Quintus about reading “Sallusti Empedoclea,” and from that alone one must infer who this Sallustius is. Since the most famous Sallustius of the period is the historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus, the natural and usually preferred identification is indeed with him. But because the evidence is so scant, scholars often say “probably” rather than “certainly.” So Speranza’s instinct is a good one. Grice’s focus on the Empedoclea is philosophically shrewd because it reminds us that the surviving canon of a thinker may be accidental. A man may have had wider philosophical interests than posterity preserved, or posterity may have preferred the politically and rhetorically useful works. In Sallust’s case the historical monographs survived and the Empedoclean or philosophical work did not. That is exactly the sort of asymmetry Speranza likes to exploit. And yes, Empedocles was a risky choice in more than one sense. He was Sicilian, Greek-speaking, cosmological, poetic, and doctrinally strange enough to look simultaneously venerable and dangerous to a Roman moralist. For a Roman historian-politician to compose an Empedoclea, if that is what happened, suggests a much broader philosophical appetite than one would guess from the Catiline and Jugurtha alone. On the Cicero remark, the joke is not quite that “only Sallust understood Empedocles,” but something near that line of teasing exaggeration. The point of the letter is playful, hyperbolic, and slightly cruel in the normal Ciceronian way. He says, in effect, that if Quintus reads Lucretius he will count as a man, but if he reads Sallustius’s Empedoclea he will scarcely count as human. The joke depends on the poem’s difficulty, extravagance, or wilful obscurity, not necessarily on a claim that no one except Sallust himself understood it. Still, the insinuation is much the same: this is rarified fare, and perhaps too rarified. citeturn21doc? So the neat answer is this. I am not denying the identification with the historian. I am saying that the best formula is: the Empedoclea is generally attributed to Gaius Sallustius Crispus, and that attribution is plausible and commonly accepted, but the evidence is too thin for absolute certainty. That is the ordinary scholarly caution. And Grice’s broader point survives intact either way. Whether or not one presses the identification to certainty, the Empedoclea shows that the Sallustian name carried philosophical ambition beyond the works posterity kept. That is exactly why Speranza is right to linger there. Gaio Sallustio Crispo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale EMPEDOCLEA. In the Empedoclea Sallust can be read as practicing, avant la lettre, a form of reason‑governed meaning that closely anticipates what Grice later theorizes explicitly as conversational rationality: Sallust does not present Empedocles as a system‑builder in the abstract but as a figure whose doctrines acquire force through arrangement, selection, and the moral expectations shared with his Roman reader, so that understanding depends less on stated theses than on the reader’s capacity to draw disciplined inferences from what Sallust foregrounds, juxtaposes, or leaves unsaid; Grice’s theory of conversational meaning formalizes this same structure by claiming that rational communication works through inferential recovery under cooperative norms rather than through the literal content alone, and in this sense Sallust’s Empedoclea already operates Grice’s insight historically, treating reason as something exercised in interpretive uptake rather than imposed dogmatically, with philosophical sense emerging from guided inference, pragmatic restraint, and the assumption that a competent reader will recognize what is meant by what is merely said. He assembles a collection of materials by and about Empedocle di Girgenti. Empedoclea.  GRICEVS: Sallusti, audio te Empedoclem ex Girgento Romam transtulisse non corpore sed ratione, quod mihi valde conversationale videtur. SALLVSTIVS: Ita est, Grice, nam sapientia quo longius iter facit, eo meliores implicaturas relinquit. GRICEVS: Cave tamen ne quis dicat te plus colligere carmina quam sensus, cum ego semper quaeram quid lector inferre possit. SALLVSTIVS: Rideat quis volet, Grice, dum lector intellegit me non tantum narrare sed significare. Sallustio Crispo, Gaio (a. u. c. DCXCVIII). Empedoclea. Roma. Gaio Sallustio Crispo (Amiterno, L’Aquila, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale a Roma – Grice and S. converge on a view of reason not as abstract calculation but as a norm-governed practice embedded in historically situated discourse, though they articulate it in radically different idioms: Sallust, writing as a Roman historian shaped by moral crisis and political collapse, treats reason as something exercised through narrative exempla, where what is said, hinted at, or strategically omitted in historiography guides judgment about virtus, corruptio, and the tension between animus and corpus, while Grice, working in analytic philosophy, reconstructs reason as operating through cooperative expectations that govern conversational meaning, where implicature, rather than explicit assertion, carries the rational force of much human communication; in Sallust, rationality is inseparable from ethical formation and the historian’s implicit appeal to shared Roman standards of judgment—reason works because the reader recognizes what follows from Catiline’s deeds without needing it stated—whereas in Grice, rationality is formalized as the hearer’s capacity to recover intended meaning by assuming rational cooperation; yet both share the insight that meaning and reason arise not from what is baldly said but from what an informed interlocutor is entitled to infer, whether that interlocutor is a Roman citizen reading moral history or a conversational partner interpreting an utterance, so that Sallust’s moral historiography and Grice’s pragmatics can be read as structurally aligned accounts of reason functioning through disciplined inference rather than through explicit doctrine. -- la storia della filosofia romana come fonte d’essempli morali – chè cosa fa un saggio ‘romano’? Storico. Può anche darsi che adere la setta dei crotonesi. Tribuno della plebe e senatore, espulso dal senato per motivi morali, e probabilmente perchè fautore di GIULIO Cesare, che lo nomina questore, pretore nella guerra africana e pro-console della Numidia. Dopo la morte di GIULIO Cesare abbandona la vita pubblica per dedicarsi completamente agli studi -- La congiura di Catilina, La guerra giugurtina, Le Storie. A lui venne rivolta l’accusa di essere stato complice dei sacrilegi di NIGIDIO  Figulo. Certamente lui spesso insiste nei suoi saggi sulla opposizione di anima e corpo. Parla di un nume divino che veglia sulla condotta dei mortali e accenna a sanzioni nell’oltretomba. È quindi probabile che allo storico debba essere identificato quel Sallustio che scrive un "Empedoclea" per esporre le dottrine del filosofo da Girgenti, tutte colorate di Pitagorismo. Cicero's letter to his brother Quintus is best known for containing the sole explicit contemporary reference to Lucretius's “De rerum natura.” But it is also notable as the source of the only extant reference of any kind to another presumably philosophical didactic poem, Sallustius's “Empedoclea” (Q. fr. = SB): “Lucretii poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt: multis luminibus ingenii, multae tamen artis. sed, cum ueneris. uirum te putabo, si Sallusti “Empedoclea” legeris; hominem non putabo.” “Lucretius' poems are just as you write: they show many flashes of inspiration, but many of skill too. But more of that when you come. I shall think you a man, if you read Sallustius' Empedoclea; I shan't think you a human being.” Empedoclea.  GRICEVS: Sallvsti, salve! Philosophus Spes nuper mihi surrisit et dixit: “Sperare est argumentari.” Ego autem hodie, Romae, de Empedocle cogito—de illo, quem quidam potius Girgentinvm quam “Empedoclem” appellant. SALLVSTIVS: Salve, Grice. De Empedocle dicis? Ego quidem Empedoclea collegi—nonnulla dicta, nonnulla carmina—ut sapientiam eius Romani discant, non solum audito nomine sed intellecto loco. GRICEVS: Non dicam quid soleam facere cum nominibus—sed, si quis “Occam” apud nos vocet Vicus Occami, cur non liceat etiam Empedoclem ad patriam reducere… praesertim cum “nomen” saepe plus sonet quam “res”? SALLVSTIVS: Implicatura tua, Grice, topographica est—ut certe Spes consentiet—etsi Empedocles ipse putabat Girgentum non locum esse, sed LOCVM. Nam cum philosophum nomine mutas in toponymum, tacite doces: non tantum quis dixerit, sed unde dixerit—et quo pacto locus ipse fiat argumentum. Sallustio Crispo, Gaio (a. u. c. DCLXXXXI). De coniuratione Catilinae.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Salustio – Ossia: Grice e Salustio: la ragione conversazionale del divino e dei divini – Roma. Note su De coniuratione Catilinæ. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Salustio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del pitagorico che corresponde con Giuliano –Ricerca (latino: Saturninus Secundus Salustius o Salutius. Politico e filosofo romano di età imperiale appartenente ai neoplatonici. Epigrafe in latino trovata ad Amorgos e riproducente una lettera (CIL III, 459) dell'imperatore romano Giuliano a S. (Museo epigrafico di Atene) Amico dell'imperatore romano Giuliano, ne condivise il programma di restaurazione della religione romana, ma fu così equilibrato che fu prefetto del pretoriod'Oriente sotto quattro imperatori. Di una famiglia della Gallia, forse dell'Aquitania, è probabilmente un homo novus, in quanto i suoi due primi incarichi furono non senatoriali; S. è infatti, probabilmente sotto l'imperatore Costante, praeses provinciae Aquitanicae, magister memoriae, comes ordinis primi, proconsole d'Africa e comes ordinis primi intra consistorium et quaestor, come attesta l'iscrizione posta sotta la sua statua d'oro eretta nel Foro di Traiano. È inviato dall'imperatore Costanzo II, fratello del defunto Costante, al cugino e cesare d'Occidente Giuliano, come consigliere, quando era ormai già avanti con gli anni. Costanzo si insospettì dei successi di Giuliano e, attribuendoli a S., lo richiama, separandolo dal cesare di cui era divenuto amico.  Giuliano venne acclamato imperatore e l'anno successivo Costanzo II morì. Giuliano, giunto a Costantinopoli, nominò S.  prefetto del pretoriod'Oriente e presidente del tribunale che a Calcedonia processò i funzionari di Costanzo. Lascia Costantinopoli per raggiungere Giuliano ad Antiochia, da dove l'imperatore aveva intenzione di far partire la sua campagna sasanide. Qui Salustio sconsigliò a Giuliano di perseguitare i cristiani: il divino, i divini, l’ordine del mondo.  GRICEVS: Sallvsti, salve! Hodie philosophus Spes mihi dixit: “Sperare est argumentari.” Ego vero timeo ne apud Badum Boum ipsam rationem in vinum vertant. SALLVSTIVS: Salve, Grice. Roma quidem et deos et mundi ordinem amat; sed apud vos Oxonienses verba saepe plus faciunt quam res. Quid ergo de “divino” dicis? GRICEVS: Nihil dico—sed si quis hodie “divinvm” vocat quod est divinely decadent, nonne ipse ostendit se et divinitatem et decorem verborum… nimis liberaliter distribuere? SALLVSTIVS: Implicaturam tuam, Grice, ut Speranza vult, quattuor modis describi posse laudo: est divina, est decadens, est divinely decadent, et est decadenter divina. Ita enim “divinvs” apud Badum Boum fit quasi tessera convivii: quod sanctum est, fit lepidum; quod lepidum est, fit (quasi) sanctum—et tu, non dicens, satis dixisti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Salutati – Ossia: Grice e Salutati: la ragione conversazionale d’Ercole al bivio. Note sull’epistolario. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Lino Coluccio Salutati (Stignano, Reggio Calabria, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale d’Ercole al bivio. Grice and Coluccio Salutati can be fruitfully compared as theorists of reasoned discourse operating at different historical scales but sharing a common conviction that meaning is inseparable from rational governance within a social order. Salutati, as chancellor of Florence and leading civic humanist, treats conversation, rhetoric, and classical exempla as instruments of practical reason oriented toward collective ends: liberty, civic virtue, and the survival of the republic. For him, discourse is reason‑governed because it is answerable to ethical and political norms derived from antiquity and activated in concrete historical conflicts; conversation is not merely exchange but deliberation about action, where speech is justified by its role in sustaining libertas fiorentina against tyranny. His use of figures such as Hercules at the crossroads dramatizes rational choice as a publicly interpretable act, embedded in shared cultural narratives and moral expectations. Grice, by contrast, abstracts from political content and historical teleology to analyze the internal mechanics that make any such discourse intelligible in the first place. His theory of conversational meaning locates rational governance not in civic virtue or classical authority but in cooperative principles and inferential practices that allow speakers and hearers to coordinate intentions. Yet the kinship is clear: Salutati’s civic rhetoric presupposes what Grice later theorizes—participants who treat one another as rational agents, capable of recognizing reasons, drawing inferences, and grasping what is meant beyond what is explicitly said. Where Salutati civilizes humanism by embedding classical reason in the living practice of political conversation, Grice formalizes that practice by showing how reason operates implicitly in every successful exchange, whether about virtue, policy, or a joke at a crossroads. Salutati supplies the normative horizon of reasoned speech in public life; Grice supplies the analytic account of how such reasoned speech functions at the level of meaning itself.  Vedo che ignori quanto sia dolce l'amor di patria. Se ciò fosse utile alla difesa e all'ampliamento della patria, non ti sembrerebbe un crimine penoso, nè un delitto scellerato, il fracassare con la scure il capo del proprio padre, o ammazzare i fratelli, o cavare con la spada dal grembo della moglie il figlio prematuro. Ad Andrea di Conte. Cancelliere di Firenze, figura culturale di riferimento dell'umanesimo a Firenze, in qualità di discepolo del BOCCACCIO e precettore di BRACCIOLINI  e BRUNI.  Considerato uno dei più importanti uomini di governo, S. come cancelliere della repubblica di Firenze, svolge un importantissimo ruolo diplomatico nel frenare le ambizioni del duca di Milano VISCONTI, intenzionato a creare uno stato comprendente l'Italia centro-settentrionale. Nel contesto di questa lotta elabora la sua dottrina della “libertas fiorentina”. Oltre all'impegno politico, svolge un importante ruolo nella diffusione dell'umanesimo petrarchesco (PETRARCA – si veda) e boccacciano, divenendone l'esponente più importante e il praeceptor della prima generazione degl’umanisti. Il suo lascito più importante presso i posteri è la codificazione civile dell'umanesimo, cioè l'uso dello spirito e dei valori dell'antichità classica all'interno dell'agone politico internazionale. i duodici fatiche d’Ercole, gl’antichi, la legge non-naturale, la legge naturale, della buona fortuna, libero arbitrio, la vita sociale, la con-vivenza, Bruto e Cassio nell’inferno, la morte di Cesare, l’assassinio di Cesare, tirano, la libertas fiorentina, stato fiorentino, la repubblica fiorentina, la fiore d’Italia, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Aligheri, I primi umanisti, l’umanesimo laico, basato contro il determinismo ecclesiastico, la biblioteca di Salutati, Livio, Cicerone, autori latini, la lingua Latina, difesa della lingua Latina, l’interpretazione di Virgilio da Aligheri, difesa della filosofia pagana, il valore permanente della filosofia degl’antichi.  GRICE: Salutati, che piacere! Al portico ho incontrato il filosofo Speranza: dice che persino la libertas fiorentina ha bisogno di un buon turno di parola, altrimenti finisce in nota a piè di pagina. SALUTATI: Grice, tu scherzi, ma io ti dico sul serio: a Firenze la conversazione è politica, e la politica è conversazione—e in mezzo ci mettiamo Livio, Cicerone e un po’ di patria, che è più dolce del tuo tè oxoniense. GRICE: Certo; e quando arrivo al bivio d’Ercole, io implico che il problema non è scegliere la virtù o il vizio, ma scegliere come scegliere: “se vedi due strade, prendine una”—e mi viene in mente Yogi Berra: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” SALUTATI: La tua implicatura, come Speranza concorderà, è geometrica—poiché, in verità, come può Berra (per non dire Ercole) prendere quel bivio? E qui l’italiano traduttore suda: perché fork è insieme bivio e forchetta. Se traduco “Quando arrivi a un bivio, prendilo”, va bene—ma allora dov’è la battuta? Se invece salvo la battuta e traduco “Quando incontri una forchetta sulla strada, prendila”, ottengo un proverbio gastronomico (e l’Ercole morale diventa un cameriere). E se provo “forcella” per tenere l’ambiguità, rischio la montagna, non la strada. Insomma: in inglese Berra può “take the fork” senza arrossire; in italiano, o prendi la strada o prendi le posate—e in entrambi i casi, l’eroe resta lì, fermo al bivio, con la virtù da una parte e il servizio da tavola dall’altra. Salutati, Lino Coluccio (1399). Epistolario. Firenze.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Salutio – Ossia: Grice e Salutio: la ragione conversazionale del divino e dei divini – l’ordine el mondo – Roma. Note su De diis et mundo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Saturnino Secondo Salutio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del divino e dei divini – l’ordine el mondo -- Grice and Saturninus Secundus Salutius offer contrasting but complementary conceptions of how reason governs meaning, shaped by their very different philosophical projects and historical contexts. In De diis et mundo, Salutius treats intelligibility as grounded in a pre‑existing divine order: discourse about the gods and the world is reasoned insofar as it reflects and participates in a rational cosmic hierarchy that precedes and constrains human speech. Meaning, on this view, is not generated within conversation but oriented toward a metaphysical structure that guarantees order, even when that order appears paradoxical, excessive, or “undisciplined” from a human standpoint. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning inverts this priority. For him, reason does not flow down from a cosmic or divine architecture into language; rather, reason is enacted locally through cooperative conversational practices, where what a speaker means is determined by intentions and by hearers’ rational recognition of those intentions under shared norms. Where Salutius sees rational discourse as derivative of divine order and ultimately explanatory of worldly disorder, Grice treats order as something that emerges from the rational coordination of speakers, with apparent disorder handled not by appeal to metaphysics but through implicature, cancellation, and pragmatic inference. Yet both share a rejection of brute arbitrariness: Salutius denies that talk of the divine is mere rhetoric detached from reasoned structure, while Grice denies that meaning can be reduced to words or conventions alone without appeal to rational expectations. In this sense, Salutius offers a metaphysical account of why discourse about gods and fate can be intelligible at all, while Grice provides a methodological account of how intelligibility is achieved moment by moment within conversation, even when speakers joke, hedge, or deliberately exploit disorder. A close fiend of Giuliano. He is offered the emperorship on Giuliano’s death, but he declines on account of his ‘rather poor health.’ He leads an active political life and is regarded as morally incorruptible. Known to have been well-versed in philosophy, he is the author of ‘On the gods and the world order’ – which some however attribute to Salustio. The treatise is, unsurprisingly, dedicated to Giuliano. Those who argue that it us not written by Salutio claim it is the work of one contemporary of Giuliano, a Flavio Salustio. Accademia.  GRICEVS: Salutius, philosophus Spes mihi nuper dixit: “Divinus ordo est, sed interdum divinitas a Badum Boum varsiatis plus quam salsum adhibetur.” Quid tu de hoc putas? SALUTIVS: Gricevs, quod apud Badum Boum fit, saepe est mirum: “divinus” fit tam frequens ut etiam di conscribant rationes suas! Sed, ut aiunt, ubi divinitas abundat, ordo interdum deficit. GRICEVS: Ut implico (nec dico), ordo “divinus” apud Badum Boum non semper praestat in modum ordinatum—fortasse unordinaliter, ut aiunt. Verba, ut ordo, quandoque plus confundant quam illuminent! SALUTIVS: Philosophus Spes certe assentietur: “Implicatura tua fortasse ordo non est, sed nullus ordo melius quam ille qui deficit!” Sic, Gricevs, nulla disciplina est dulcior quam ipsa indisciplina divinitatis. Salutio, Saturnino Secondo (a. u. c. MCVIII). De diis et mundo. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Salviano – Ossia: Grice e Salviano: la ragione conversazionale al portico romano. Note su De gubernatione dei. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Salviano (Massilia, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale al portico. In Salvian and Grice we see two very different, historically distant conceptions of how reason governs meaning in human exchange, yet they converge on the idea that intelligibility in discourse is inseparable from shared rational norms. Salvian, writing in the fifth century in De gubernatione Dei, approaches reasoned discourse through a moral–historical lens: for him, speech, exhortation, and even lament presuppose a cosmos in which human suffering is intelligible only if actions, utterances, and events are answerable to reasons rooted in moral order and historical causation. His move from Rome to the Gallic world is not merely geographical but interpretive: he treats history itself as a kind of extended conversation between human wrongdoing and divine governance, one in which explanation depends on tracing reasons across time rather than isolating intentions in individual speakers. Grice, by contrast, radicalizes the rationality of conversation by internalizing it: conversational meaning, on his account, is constituted by the speaker’s intentions and by the audience’s recognition of those intentions under shared principles of rational cooperation. Where Salvian sees speech as answerable to an objective moral history that ultimately judges and explains suffering, Grice sees meaning as emerging from the fine structure of communicative reason itself, independent of moral truth or historical destiny. Yet the affinity is real: both assume that meaningful discourse is not accidental or merely expressive but governed by reasons that participants can, in principle, understand, assess, and contest. Salvian’s portico is the place where Stoic rational order and historical causality meet; Grice’s conversational space is where rational expectations and inferential practices structure what is said and what is merely implied. In this sense, Salvian offers a macro‑theory of reasoned discourse across history, while Grice supplies a micro‑theory of reasoned meaning within the moment of conversation. He moves from Rome to what is now known as The Galliae – and writes a ‘saggio’ in which he tries to explain why there is so much suffering in that area of the world. He takes an approach that is not only philosophical – along the lines of the Porch – but historical as well. GRICEVS: Salviane, salve! Sub porticu Romae recordor SPES: “Sperare est argumentari bene de futura felicitate, etiam si barista capuccinum tardat.” SALVIANVS: Salve, Grice! Ego autem Romā in Gallias profectus saggio scripsi: cur tanta ibi passio? Non solum Stoice sub porticu, sed etiam historice—nam saepe ipsa historia dolet. GRICEVS: Fateor: non semper culpa est aer aut vinum. Sed SPES iterum subridet: “Felicitas—somewhere in the South of France.” Ita saltem implicatur. SALVIANVS: Immo, Grice: Galliae plus habent quam meridiem et solem; habent causas dolorum et remedia—porticus et fata gentium. Sperare—et ridere, sed etiam intellegere. Salviano (a. u. c. MCC). De gubernatione dei. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Salvemini – Ossia: Grice e Salvemini: la ragione conversazionale. Note su Mazzini. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giovanni Francesco Mauro Melchiorre Salvemini (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale. Grice and Giovanni Francesco Mauro Melchiorre Salvemini converge on a broadly humanistic conception of reason as something exercised in shared practices, but they situate conversational rationality in different intellectual registers: Salvemini, formed by mathematics, translation, rhetoric, and Enlightenment science, embodies conversational reason as a cultivated habit of clarity, proportion, and intellectual honesty that spans disciplines, from geometry and astronomy to political and moral discourse, where understanding often proceeds by tacit agreement, educated sensibility, and the ability to grasp what needs no full demonstration; Grice, by contrast, turns this tacit dimension into his explicit object of theory, arguing that conversational meaning is governed by rational principles that license hearers to infer what is meant beyond what is said, without appealing to stylistic flourish, aesthetic taste, or disciplinary authority. Where Salvemini’s conversational reason appears as intellectual moderation in practice—knowing when an argument, a translation, or even a smile suffices—Grice provides the analytic machinery that explains why such moderation works, locating it in shared expectations of cooperation, relevance, and reasonableness. Thus Salvemini exemplifies in lived, interdisciplinary form what Grice formalizes philosophically: that much of human understanding, whether in mathematics, literature, or everyday exchange, depends less on explicit proof than on reason-governed inference sustained by mutual trust between speakers. Grice: Detto il Castiglione o Castillioneus o Johann Castillon -- è stato un matematico e astronomo italiano. Castillon: Observations sur le livre intitulé Systême de la nature. Ha una formazione privata fino a quando inizia l'Università di Pisa dove studia diritto e matematica conseguendo un dottorato.  Mentre vive in Italia, si dedica anche alla traduzione di Pope An Essay on Man – citato da Grice: Philosopherkind – Just as the poet said that the proper study of mankind is man, the anti-Oxonian can say that the proper study of philosopher-kind is the philosopher -- con un numero uguale di versi italiani come l'originale inglese. Insegna a Vevey, una città sulla riva nord del Lago di Ginevra, dove divenne il direttore della scuola umanistica. Continua a lavorare come traduttore. Insegna retorica, discipline umanistiche, e matematica. Durante questo periodo pubblica due articoli di matematica scritti in latino, nelle Philosophical Transactions della Royal Society di Londra, usando il nome "J Castillioneus". Il primo di questi articoli studia il Cardioide, il secondo il teorema del polinomio di Newton  Cura volumi delle opere di Newton, che sono stati pubblicati a Losanna e Ginevra. Il primo volume contiene saggi matematici, il secondo contiene i trattati filosofici. Il terzo volume contiene le opere filologiche di Newton, soprattutto saggi storici, tra cui una cronaca della storia antica. Babson dice: Fino a questo momento S. è ateo, ma divenne calvinista. Insegna a Losanna e sposa Elisabeth du Fresne dalla quale ha tre figli, ma solo uno ne sopravvive, vale a dire Maximilian Friedrich Gustav Adolf S. Pubblica la corrispondenza tra Bernoulli e Leibniz, poi pubblica l'Introductio in Infinitorum analysin auctore Leonhardo Eulero, il trattato di Eulero, che modifica. Insegna sia a Losanna che a Berna. Durante questo periodo ottene la cattedra di matematica a Berna e di teologia a Losanna;  Grice: Caro Salvemini, sai che oggi ho incrociato il filosofo Speranza al caffè di Firenze? Era intento a dimostrare che anche il cappuccino segue una logica conversazionale, purché sia servito con il sorriso. Gli italiani, come sempre, sanno unire filosofia e piacere quotidiano! Salvemini: Ah, Professore Grice! Speranza non smette mai di sorprendere, vero? In fondo, la logica della vita italiana sta proprio nel trovare il senso anche tra le tazzine e il Cardioide… Persino i miei studenti a Berna vorrebbero poter discutere matematica davanti a un espresso, ma purtroppo hanno solo cioccolata calda! Grice: Forse, caro Castillon, il vero teorema è che la felicità si dimostra meglio con meno assiomi e più zucchero. Basta osservare – senza dire nulla, ovviamente – che i filosofi italiani hanno la capacità di trovare gusto anche nelle cose “minori”: come dire, non tutte le equazioni devono essere esplicitate per essere gustate… Salvemini: Mi unisco a Speranza nel lodare la tua implicatura, Grice! Del resto, tra filosofi, basta un cenno: è come il famoso verso di Pope che tradussi – “L’uomo è lo studio dell’uomo,” ma forse, in Italia, è anche il piacere di viverlo. Che siano cappuccini, polinomi o sorrisi, il filosofo sa sempre dove trovare il sapore della conversazione! Salvemini, Giovanni Francesco Mauro Melchiorre (1908). Mazzini. Torino: Bocca.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sancasciani – Ossia: Grice e Sancasciani: la ragione conversazionale. Note sulla filosofia italiana dell’osservazione. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Clemente Sancasciani (Pisa, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale. Grice and Clemente Sancasciani converge on the idea that reason governs meaning in communicative practice, but they articulate that governance at different points in the epistemic chain: Sancasciani, rooted in an eighteenth‑century Tuscan empirico‑humanist tradition, treats conversational reason as an extension of observation broadly understood, arguing that knowledge and meaning arise from an attentive engagement with experience that exceeds mere vision and incorporates the full sensorium, judgment, and culturally trained sensitivity; Grice, by contrast, brackets the epistemology of observation itself and focuses on what happens once agents speak, showing that conversational meaning is governed by rational norms that regulate how interlocutors move from what is explicitly said to what is implicitly meant through intention‑recognition and inference. Where Sancasciani’s “philosophy of observation” emphasizes the continuity between experience, interpretation, and discourse—so that conversation is the rational articulation of lived perception—Grice emphasizes the autonomy of conversational reasoning, demonstrating that even when observation is shared, meaning depends on cooperative principles rather than on sensory evidence alone. Thus Sancasciani’s conversational reason remains experiential and world‑directed, anchored in the cultivated act of observing, while Grice’s is pragmatic and interaction‑directed, locating rationality in the internal logic of communicative exchange; both, however, resist a priori abstraction and agree that reason shows itself most clearly not in solitary contemplation but in the disciplined practices through which humans make sense of one another in talk. Grice: “If I had been an Italayan, as Gilbert and Sullivan spell it and pronounce it – I would have wirtten ‘Filosofia dell’osservazione. It’s disputable that to ‘observe’ involves only ‘see’ – Se my Remarks about the senses. It may be said that the scientist observes beyond vision, as CICERONE (vedaasi) would have agreed. Unfortunately, since the advent or Ryle at Oxford and Mussolini in Italy, all that Englishmen were led to believe is that every Italian is an idealist, alla Collingwood!” -- Beyond than “Filosofia italiana dell’osservazione”, other notable essays by S. include: “L’idea del progresso nel pensiero del secondo dopoguerra” – and “Rilettura dell’idealismo italiano: attii del convegno di studi, Pescara – His family included a doctor, mentioned in an rachival record of Zannetti --. A member of the S. family, a historical Italian family, with a presence in Pisa and the surrounding region. Relations include Pietro S. and Settimio S. The family was asociated with the area of San Casiano, a town in Val di Pesa. FILOSOFIA ITALIANA DELL'OSSERVAZIONE Clemente S. M iMrtleDluI doUflM ID rbo per Btoogni mr ■riaMMU, e randeril >UM If H*n Alt IWIm It TSTD ifil IUM. fi*f.. _Ciifi.w* . 9aD0 ornai trascorsi maUiuimi secoli da che nel regno della Filo- ■oBa III udila una Toce, la quale aoimuiiava, cbu la natura aveva aperta •gli uomini una sola strada per wudurli Bll'aaiuislo delle cc^izioni; la «rada dcirasscrrazione e dell' etperienra. La qiwl tocq rivelatrice della pili grande, della più ulilo verità, dm venisse mài discoperta dalTumaiw Ìd- Icllcllo. Iraeva unirà riienlc la nu origlile (Ull'etseni alenai pensatori accorti dei pi>riiicioai rcsullaiiicnU, cfae si ritraevano dalle ìnvcstiiaifoni, allordiè con ardile ipclesi , con remolissiino aslrarioni sì avcve intendimento di ottenere la ronOM'enza dei rcnonicni naturali, c dei vanlafli^i considere- voli . die si olleiieiano nllarclui, abbandonalo il ìalso metodo di argomentare con priocipj slabilili a priori, si cercava di analizzare accuralamcntc i  Grice: Caro Sancasciani, oggi ho incontrato Speranza al bar di Pisa—e mi ha detto che tra filosofi, osservare non significa solo vedere, ma anche annusare, toccare e, va da sé, intuire! Pare che tu, qui in Toscana, abbia elevato l’osservazione a vera arte, altro che Collingwood… O forse dovrei dire: alla maniera di Speranza! Sancasciani: Ah, Professore Grice, Speranza è sempre pronto a trovare nuove sfumature tra i sensi! In effetti, a Pisa osserviamo anche il vento che gira attorno alla torre pendente… Ma voi inglesi, siete convinti che osservare sia questione di occhiali, mentre noi ci mettiamo pure il cuore e, perché no, la bocca per assaggiare la realtà! Grice: Ecco, caro Sancasciani, proprio questo volevo implicare: non basta vedere per capire, ma bisogna sentire con tutti i sensi. Del resto, tra una degustazione di pecorino e una passeggiata tra gli archivi di famiglia, la vera filosofia dell’osservazione sta nel cogliere il sapore delle cose… e non lasciarsi distrarre dai metodi a priori! Sancasciani: Come ha osservato Speranza, la tua implicatura è davvero “osservativa”—o dovrei dire “osservantissima”! Del resto, se la filosofia italiana dell’osservazione ci insegna qualcosa, è proprio che il filosofo deve essere attento a ogni dettaglio, anche al profumo del ragù o al sorriso di chi ascolta… Grice, oggi hai meritato un elogio da vero osservatore toscano! Sancasciani, Clemente (1749).  Filosofia italiana dell’osservazione. Firenze.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sanctis – Ossia: Grice e Sanctis: la grammatica ragionata e  la ragione conversazionale dello stile filosofico. Note sugli saggi critici. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Francesco Saverio de Sanctis (Morra Irpina, Napoli, Campania): la grammatica ragionata e  la ragione conversazionale dello stile filosofico. Grice and Francesco De Sanctis share a conviction that philosophical meaning is inseparable from reasoned linguistic practice, yet they locate the governance of that practice at different levels: De Sanctis approaches reason as immanent in style itself, holding that a philosophical argument succeeds or fails according to the clarity, vitality, and historical authenticity of the language in which it is expressed, so that grammar, rhetoric, and national literary inheritance together form a rational medium of thought; Grice, by contrast, suspends all aesthetic and historical criteria and reconstructs meaning through the rational norms that guide conversational exchange, showing how what is meant emerges from shared expectations about relevance, informativeness, sincerity, and mutual understanding rather than from stylistic excellence. Where De Sanctis treats philosophy as a branch of the belles lettres, with style functioning as the vehicle through which reason becomes intelligible and persuasive, Grice treats style as largely epiphenomenal, insisting that the real work of meaning lies in the interlocutors’ inferential coordination between what is said and what is implicated. Thus De Sanctis’s reason is embodied and literary, unfolding through the organic life of a language and its culture, whereas Grice’s reason is procedural and pragmatic, operating at the level of conversational logic; both, however, agree against mere abstraction that philosophy lives in language, and that rational meaning is achieved not in isolation but through practices of communication governed—whether by style or by inference—by reason itself. He considers philosophy as a branch of the belles lettres and his field of expertise is when stylists stop using an artificial Roman, and turned to ‘Italian.’ Grice: “I really do not like de Sanctis; when an author becomes philosophical, he says that he has been infested of the philosophical pest!” – Disambiguazione – Se stai cercando l'omonimo architetto, vedi Francesco De Sanctis (architetto). Francesco de Sanctis  Ministro della pubblica istruzione del Regno d'Italia MonarcaVittorio Emanuele II di Savoia Capo del governoCamillo Benso di Cavour PredecessoreTerenzio Mamiani, Regno di Sardegna Capo del governo Bettino Ricasoli SuccessorePasquale Stanislao Mancini Durata mandato MonarcaUmberto I di Savoia Capo del governoBenedetto Cairoli Predecessore Michele Coppino SuccessoreMichele Coppino Capo del governo Benedetto Cairoli PredecessoreFrancesco Paolo Perez SuccessoreGuido Baccelli Governatore della Provincia di Avellino Successore Nicola De Luca Deputato del Regno d'Italia Legislatura Gruppo parlamentare Sinistra Coalizione connubio, opposizione, governo della Sinistra storica Incarichi parlamentari Ministro dell'Istruzione del Regno d'Italia Sito istituzionale Dati generali Partito politico Destra storica Sinistra storica Titolo di studiolaurea Professione Docente universitario Firma -- è stato un critico letterario, saggista e politico italiano, tra i maggiori critici e storici della letteratura italiana nel XIX secolo e più volte ministro della pubblica istruzione. S. nacque a Morra Irpina (Avellino) da una famiglia di piccoli proprietari terrieri, figlio di Alessandro e Maria Agnese Manzi.  Il padre era dottore in diritto e due zii paterni, Giuseppe e Carlo, uno sacerdote e l'altro medico, vennero esiliati per aver preso parte ai moti carbonari.  Celebre è la sua frase:  storia della filosofia, il saggio filosofico, il poema filosofico, il tema filosofico.  Grice: Caro De Sanctis, devo ammettere che soltanto l’Italia, e non certo Oxford, riesce a dar vita a una genialità come la Sua: un pensiero capace di riunire tutta la filosofia del linguaggio nel concetto di "stile". La Sua grammatica ragionata è stata per me una fonte d’ispirazione continua—come direbbero da voi, una vera scintilla per lo spirito critico! De Sanctis: La ringrazio, professore Grice. In verità, ho sempre pensato che il pensiero filosofico non possa essere separato dalla bellezza dello stile, né dalla chiarezza della lingua. Anche nella riflessione più profonda, la parola italiana, viva e musicale, deve essere maestra—proprio come per Dante o Petrarca. Grice: È proprio questa attenzione al legame tra forma e contenuto che mi affascina. La Sua idea che il saggio filosofico sia anche un’opera d’arte letteraria mi ha fatto riflettere su quanto la nostra disciplina debba all’eredità italiana. Noi, a Oxford, siamo forse troppo presi dalla forma logica, ma trascuriamo spesso l’arte dello stile che voi coltivate da secoli. De Sanctis: Eppure, vede, ogni filosofia, in fondo, è anche storia, poesia, persino un po’ di politica—come nella mia esperienza da ministro! Lo stile non è solo abbellimento, ma pensiero che prende corpo. Forse è proprio questa la lezione che l’Italia può offrire: che il pensiero, per essere davvero universale, deve sapersi incarnare nella lingua viva e nel sentimento nazionale. Sanctis, Francesco Saverio de (1840). Saggi critici. Napoli: Morano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sanseverino – Ossia: Grice e Sanseverino: la ragione conversazionale del segno naturale -- la logica scolastica. Note sull’Elementa philosophiæ. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.  Gaetano Sanseverino (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale del segno naturale -- Grice and Gaetano Sanseverino converge on the view that meaning and understanding are governed by reason, yet they draw the boundary between nature, logic, and conversation in markedly different ways: Sanseverino, working within scholastic logic and Thomistic semiotics, grounds conversational reason in the notion of the natural sign, treating meaning as anchored in objective relations between things, intellect, and nature, so that understanding flows from the intelligibility of the world itself as ordered by natura and grasped through syllogistic discipline; Grice, by contrast, relocates the governance of meaning from the metaphysics of signs to the rational practices of speakers, arguing that what is communicated in conversation depends not on natural signification alone but on publicly recognizable intentions constrained by cooperative reasoning. Where Sanseverino emphasizes continuity between scholastic logic, natural signs, and theological anthropology—so that meaning is in principle prior to and independent of conversational exchange—Grice insists that even apparently “natural” meaning becomes conversationally significant only through the inferential activity of interlocutors, who move from what is said to what is meant by calculable steps of rational interpretation. Thus Sanseverino’s conversational reason remains realist and object-centered, embedded in a pre-given logical order, while Grice’s is pragmatic and interaction-centered, showing how reason governs meaning not by the authority of natura or formal logic alone, but by the mutual accountability of speakers engaged in ordinary talk. -- la logica scolastica. Considerato uno fra i massimi precursori del neo-tomismo (AQUINO, si veda). Si trasfere a Nola per frequentare la scuola dove suo zio è rettore. Studia filosofia con l'intento di confrontare i vari sistemi filosofici, fra cui gode particolare credito in Italia, all'epoca, quello razionalista. Lo studio comparato dei vari sistemi gli permite una conoscenza più approfondita della scolastica, soprattutto d’AQUINO, e del legame intimo tra la scolastica e la [atristica. Restaura la filosofia scolastica. Insegna a Napoli. Venne incaricato da Ferdinando II di preparare un manuale ufficiale per le scuole del regno delle due Sicilie. Scrive allo scopo il manuale "I principali sistemi della filosofia del criterio”. Profondo conoscitore di AQUINO da alle stampe interessanti saggi sui filosofi moderni. Inizia ad occuparsi più specificamente di AQUINO con “L’origine del potere e il diritto di resistenza, cui fa seguito “In difesa dell'angeologia contro i sofismi”. Esce il ponderoso “I principali sistemi della filosofia del criterio” un'ampia e dottissima disquisizione sulla filosofia illuminista e su quella a lui contemporanea -- fra cui quella dello stesso GIOBERTI -- confutata sulla base della logica. Il suo capolavoro. Si tratta del celebre saggio, “Philosophia antiqua” che ha per oggetto la storia della logica. “In compendium redacta ad usum scholarum clericalium. Venne pubblicata a Napoli “Elementa”, “Antropologia”, “Teologia. Altre saggi: “Sopra alcune questioni le più importanti della filosofia” (Napoli); “Il razionalismo” (Napoli); “I razionalisti” (Napoli); “L'origine del potere e il diritto di resistenza, (Napoli, Giannini); “In difesa dell'angeologia contro i sofismi” (Napoli, Manfredi); “Elementa philosophiae theoreticae” (Napoli, Manfredi); “Philosophia antiqua” (Napoli, Manfredi); “Institutiones seu Elementa philosophiae antiquae” (Napoli, Manfredi); segno naturale, Boezio, Aquino.  Grice: Caro Sanseverino, oggi ho incrociato Speranza al caffè e, tra un cornetto e l’altro, è venuto fuori il tuo nome! Pare che tra segni naturali e logica scolastica, tu abbia più spirito di quanto ci si aspetti da un filosofo napoletano… Ma dimmi: il segno naturale, in fondo, è più vicino alla pizza margherita o al ragù della domenica? Sanseverino: Ah, Grice, Speranza non perde mai occasione per mettere il naso dove la logica incontra la buona tavola! Ma ti svelo un segreto: il vero segno naturale è quello che ti fa capire, senza parlare, che il ragù è pronto solo quando il profumo invade l’intera casa… Altro che logica scolastica! Grice: Vedi, caro Gaetano, ogni volta che sento parlare di "NATVRA" tutto in maiuscolo—soprattutto da Cicerone, o peggio ancora da qualche professore bolognese—mi sento come uno scolaro perso in una foresta senza segnali… Sarà che la natura degli antichi per me resta più misteriosa delle ricette segrete della nonna! Sanseverino: La tua implicatura è, come direbbe Speranza, non proprio naturale—ma nemmeno ancora soprannaturale! Forse ti manca solo un po’ di quella “grazia napoletana” che trasforma il dilemma della natura in una questione di cuore… O magari, semplicemente, dovresti fidarti del naso come quando si giudica un buon ragù: la NATVRA si capisce, Grice, più col grembiule che con la toga! Sanseverino, Gaetano (1840). Elementa philosophiae. Napoli: Fibreno.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Santilli – Ossia: Grice e Santilli: la ragione conversazionale -- dal soggettivo all’inter-soggettivo. Note sull’Aquino. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Angelo Andrea Santilli (Sant’Elia Fiume Rapido, Frosinone, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale -- dal soggettivo all’inter-soggettivo. Grice and Santilli converge on the idea that reason is intrinsically conversational and that meaning emerges not in isolated consciousness but in shared, intelligible practice, yet they articulate this insight at different levels and with different aims: Santilli, working within nineteenth‑century Italian civil philosophy and influenced by Galluppi, Gioberti, and Cousin, explicitly theorizes the passage from the subjective to the intersubjective as a moral and political necessity, treating conversational reason as the medium through which individual thought becomes socially binding, ethical, and institutionally effective, especially in the context of poverty, rights, and constitutional life; Grice, by contrast, arrives at intersubjectivity not through social philosophy but through analytic reconstruction of everyday talk, showing that what a speaker means is governed by publicly recognizable intentions constrained by rational norms of cooperation, and that the move from private mental states to shared understanding is achieved via implicature rather than through explicit moral or political mediation. Where Santilli emphasizes reason as a unifying human force that grounds social solidarity and collective agency, Grice emphasizes the fine-grained mechanisms by which interlocutors actually succeed in understanding one another, demonstrating that intersubjectivity is not an added ethical layer but already built into the logic of meaning itself; Santilli’s conversational reason thus functions as a normative ideal for social life, while Grice’s operates as a formal account of how rational agents, simply by talking, already inhabit an intersubjective space. Segue il corso liceale presso la Scuola di Murro a Napoli. Discepolo di GALLUPPI, e amico -- fra gli’altri – di SETTEMBRINI, FIORELLI, e SANCTIS. Si laurea in filosofia. Apre una scuola di diritto morale e costituzionale.  Fervente giobertiano – GIOBERTI , e attivo propugnatore, nei circoli culturali napoletani, di un'Italia federate. A frequenti rapporti epistolari con MAMIANI, GIZZI, e COUSIN. Quest'ultimo lo introduce nel giro culturale del socialismo utopistico ma modula il suo socialismo secondo i propri valori umanitari, rifiutando la logica della lotta di classe. Ha comunque a scrivere che nel regno di Napoli occorre una savia distribuzione della ricchezza. Presidente della società dantesca (ALIGHERI – si veda) -- e prolifico filosofo. Fonda "L'Enciclopedico" in cui vivacemente sostene che occorreva occuparsi della piaga della povertà. La nazione italiana vuole pane e lo dimanda incessantemente, lo chiede nel pianto dell'indigenza, tra le sciagure della desolazione, lo chiede non a titolo di preghiera, ma diritto necessario, assoluto. Il popolo italiano non capisce la speculativa astrazione di alcune verità filosofica, non sa i titoli di libertà, di costituzione, di uguaglianza. Una riforma che dimentica affatto la fisica prosperità del popolo italiano non è che riforma di solo nome. “Le idee" e testo di studio nelle scuole di Toscana; "Sul realizzamento del pensiero"; "Sviluppo filosofico dell'autorità"; "Cenno psicologico sull'attività dello spirito"; "Individuo e Società"; "Princìpi dell'imanità razionale"; "Il socialismo in economia" e "Lavoro, industria e capitale". Si batté politicamente per l'ottenimento della Costituzione da parte di re Ferdinando II. Malvisto e considerato individuo pericoloso dalla polizia e ucciso a baionettate da soldati che fanno irruzione nella sua abitazione in Largo Monte-Oliveto. dal soggettivo all’inter-soggetivo.  Grice: Caro Santilli, oggi ho incontrato Speranza e, tra una battuta e l’altra, mi ha detto che tu sei il filosofo che sa far passare la ragione conversazionale dal soggettivo all’inter-soggettivo come se fosse una passeggiata a Sant’Elia Fiume Rapido! Santilli: Ah, Grice, Speranza ha sempre il talento di esagerare! Ma se fosse vero, vorrei almeno un premio in pane, come chiedeva il mio popolo laziale… perché con la filosofia si ragiona, ma con la panetteria si mangia! Grice: Vedi, Santilli, proprio come tu passi dal soggettivo all’inter-soggettivo, io passo dal detto al non detto: se la conversazione è pane, allora l’implicatura è la mollica che nessuno vede ma tutti assaporano! Santilli: La tua implicatura, caro Grice, è intersoggettiva – come direbbe Speranza – e pure genialmente così! Il bello è che, proprio come la mollica, il pensiero si condivide senza che nessuno debba chiedere: “Me ne dai un po’?” Re passage below: provide a 100-move conversation, no preamble or ps between G. and S. on the reception of Aquinas -- Saint Thomas, S. corrects, and G. dis-corrects -- and his reception in Oxford by Kenny, of all people, and they compare other saint philosophers like Bonaventura, and whehter it matters if the sanctification came later -- cf. Bernard Shaw on Saint Joan -- she's no philosohper -- and on -- and then Santilli on Aquinas in 1932 -- and why this Italian obsession with Aquinas as the core of philosophy when he just commented Aristotle? and so on and distinguish Oxonian versus Bononia on this and how Bononia became less religious after it stopped being in a papal state and back to the saint, and the church, and the fact that philosophy is graeco-roman and not revelatory -- etc. thanks -- G.: Let us begin by refusing the correction. Aquinas, if you please. S.: Saint Thomas. G.: No, Aquinas. Sanctification is a later administrative improvement, and philosophy should not be made to kneel before the registry. S.: Yet he is a saint. G.: So are many people whose metaphysics I would not trust across a corridor. S.: That is uncharitable. G.: It is exact. The question is whether sainthood helps or harms philosophical reception. S.: In his case, surely it helps. G.: Institutionally, yes. Philosophically, not always. Once a thinker becomes a saint, many readers stop reading and begin venerating. S.: You are thinking of Bonaventura. G.: Naturally. Bonaventure suffers from early sanctified atmosphere. He arrives already half perfumed. S.: Whereas Aquinas arrives as a mountain of arguments. G.: Exactly. Thomas is too heavy to be floated entirely by incense. S.: Still, Saint Thomas is the accepted name. G.: Accepted by whom? Ecclesiastical shorthand is not a philosophical argument. S.: Kenny uses “Aquinas,” to be fair. G.: Yes, and that is one of Kenny’s chief virtues. S.: Of all people. G.: Precisely. Former seminarian, analytic philosopher, and therefore one of the few English readers able to treat Aquinas as philosophy without either devotional embarrassment or secular caricature. S.: So Oxford receives Aquinas through Kenny rather than through the sacristy. G.: Very much so. Kenny lets Thomas enter the room as a thinker on action, will, existence, predication, truth, mind, and God, not merely as an object of pious curriculum. S.: Yet Oxford had known Aquinas before Kenny. G.: Of course. But Oxford’s long relation to Thomas is uneven. Medieval use, Reformation suspicion, Catholic distance, occasional admiration, and then in the twentieth century something like renewed philosophical availability. S.: Through Anscombe too. G.: Yes, though differently. Anscombe brings Thomistic moral psychology and action theory into the neighbourhood. Kenny makes Thomas readable across a broader analytic public. S.: Then perhaps sanctification mattered less by then. G.: Exactly. By the time Kenny teaches him, Aquinas is philosophically extractable from sainthood. S.: Extractable sounds surgical. G.: Better surgical than liturgical. A philosopher should be cut free from his halo if his arguments are to breathe. S.: But does that not falsify the historical man? G.: Not if done carefully. One need not deny his theology or his devotion. One need only refuse to let those settle every philosophical question in advance. S.: So the issue is not whether he was a saint, but whether philosophy must read him as one first. G.: Precisely. My answer is no. S.: Then why do Italians keep making Aquinas the core of philosophy itself? G.: Because Italy has an old weakness for central figures, especially once Rome, Church, school, and state begin exchanging furniture. S.: That is glib. G.: It is also true enough. Thomism in Italy became not only a doctrine but an educational and cultural rallying point. It was too useful institutionally to remain merely one medieval thinker among others. S.: Santilli in 1932 belongs to that wave? G.: Yes, or at least to one of its later and looser echoes. By 1932 Aquinas is already a serious symbol in Italy: anti-idealist for some, anti-modernist for others, philosophical realist for many, Catholic anchor for nearly everyone who wants a centre. S.: Yet Thomas mostly commented Aristotle. G.: “Mostly” is unfair, but yes, the Aristotelian labour is central. Which is exactly why the obsession is amusing. Italy takes the great commentator and turns him into the core of philosophy itself. S.: Because commentary became system. G.: Or because the commentarial achievement was so massive that it started to look like first philosophy in its own right. Still, one must remember that Aquinas does not spring from pure revelation. He works a Greco-Roman inheritance under Christian pressure. S.: There, surely, Saint Thomas matters. G.: Historical sanctity matters to the context, yes. But the philosophy remains largely Graeco-Roman in vocabulary, problem-shape, and argumentative inheritance. S.: Not revelatory? G.: Not in its method. Theology may contain revealed premises, but philosophy in Thomas is still recognisably argument within an Aristotelian and broadly classical frame. S.: Bononia would say that. G.: Bononia, if one may permit the old name, is useful here. Bologna’s medieval culture knew law, commentary, disputation, medicine, Aristotle, and institutional learning all in one old soup. Aquinas belongs to that larger scholastic ecology, not to pure confessional isolation. S.: Oxford too. G.: Yes, but differently. Oxford becomes later, and then very differently, a place where Thomas can be re-read as philosopher after confessional hostilities have cooled. S.: You make Oxford sound cleaner than Bologna. G.: Cleaner in one sense, dirtier in another. Oxford’s distance from the Papal States helped it receive Thomas without having to make him the beating heart of civic identity. S.: While Bologna, being once in the Papal States, could hardly avoid the Catholic overdetermination. G.: Exactly. Once Bologna ceased to be in the Papal States, and once Italy as a whole changed its political weather, philosophy there could become less directly clerical in tone, even while Aquinas remained institutionally central in some quarters. S.: So Bononia became less religious after the Papal frame loosened. G.: Inevitably. Universities change with sovereignty, even when they pretend to live only by books. S.: Yet Aquinas remained. G.: Yes, because by then he was more than a church thinker. He had become part of the argument about philosophy itself, realism, science, ethics, law, and political order. S.: Which is why Santilli can write Aquino in 1932 and expect the title to work. G.: Precisely. He need not say “Thomas Aquinas as one philosopher among many.” He may say Aquino and rely on Italy’s cultural over-familiarity. S.: Which you dislike. G.: Intensely. Philosophers should not become surnames standing in for intellectual inevitabilities. S.: Yet you say Aquinas, which is itself a surname-like locative. G.: Yes, but a useful one. “Aquinas” still names the thinker without forcing the reader to genuflect first. S.: Whereas “Saint Thomas” places the Church in the doorway. G.: Exactly. S.: Bernard Shaw would have liked that distinction. G.: He would. Shaw on Saint Joan is useful because Joan is a saint without being a philosopher, and the sainting changes the public use of the person dramatically. Thomas is more difficult because the philosophical corpus is too large to remain saintly furniture. S.: So if sanctification comes later, it may matter less. G.: Usually. Late canonisation is a philosophical blessing. It allows arguments to circulate before halos stiffen them. S.: Then Aquinas benefited from delay. G.: Very much so. He died in 1274 and was canonised later. That interval is philosophically precious. The work had time to live as work. S.: Bonaventure too? G.: Bonaventure is a less useful comparison because his whole style is more devotional, more affective, more obviously tied to Franciscan spirituality. He is easier to saintify into atmosphere. S.: That sounds ungenerous. G.: It is not ungenerous, only taxonomic. Bonaventure’s philosophical weight is real, but his reception is more vulnerable to pious softening. S.: Whereas Aquinas, because he is so argumentative, resists devotional liquefaction. G.: Exactly. Thomas remains obstinately scholastic even when made liturgical. S.: Then Kenny’s importance lies partly in choosing the obstinacy. G.: Very much so. Kenny reads Thomas as someone with positions that can be reconstructed, criticised, compared, and used. Not as a saintly authority beyond philosophical inconvenience. S.: Why “of all people,” though? G.: Because there is a delicious irony in a former seminarian becoming one of the most secularly readable guides to Thomas for the English-speaking world. S.: One might have expected a Dominican. G.: One might, and one would have been rewarded with more reverence and less analysis. Kenny gives us less atmosphere and more argument. S.: Which is what Oxford likes. G.: At its best, yes. Oxford likes saints best once translated into problems. S.: That is very Oxonian. G.: Entirely. “What exactly is he saying about being?” is more to the point than “Pray for us.” S.: Yet does that not make Oxford incapable of understanding religious philosophy on its own terms? G.: It risks that, certainly. But the alternative risk is to leave philosophy embalmed inside confessional vocabulary. I prefer the Oxonian danger. S.: Naturally. G.: Naturally. S.: Then back to Italy. Why this obsession with Aquinas as the core? G.: Because he is at once scholastic, Aristotelian, Catholic, systematic, juridically useful, metaphysically serious, and educationally serviceable. In one figure you get doctrine, institution, and national-ecclesial prestige. S.: So he becomes the perfect centre for those who want philosophy to have a centre. G.: Exactly. And Italy is full of centre-seekers. S.: As opposed to Oxford? G.: Oxford prefers local hegemonies masquerading as open inquiry. S.: Also exact. G.: Thank you. S.: Then Santilli’s 1932 Aquino is not merely a book on a thinker, but an intervention into Italy’s philosophical self-understanding. G.: Yes. It belongs to that long question whether Italian philosophy should be idealist, neo-scholastic, civil, historicist, Catholic, or some provincial mixture of all four. S.: And Aquinas becomes the test-case. G.: Indeed. Not because he is the only philosopher worth having, but because he is the one around whom so many Italian claims to seriousness can be staged. S.: Whereas in Oxford he is never the core in quite that way. G.: No. He is one great resource among others, though a surprisingly durable one. Oxford can afford plurality because it never needed a single scholastic father to stabilise national culture. S.: England had other stabilisers. G.: More than enough. Church, common law, empiricism, Anglican habits, classics, and a long suspicion of systems. S.: Then Aquinas in Oxford is always partly a foreign import. G.: Yes, but a highly assimilable one once the theological temperature drops. Thomas comes to Oxford not as public theology but as philosophy worth stealing. S.: Stealing from saints is bad form. G.: It is the only form worth preserving. Philosophy must steal from everyone, especially from those institutions that think they own the dead. S.: You really will not say Saint Thomas. G.: Not if I can help it. S.: Thomas then. G.: Better Aquinas. S.: Very well. Aquinas’s reception by Kenny versus Bonaventure’s by anyone at all. G.: Bonaventure receives fewer analytic rescuers. He tends to remain in the theological and historical shelves. Aquinas gets moved into action theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, moral psychology, law, and language. S.: Because Aristotle helps. G.: Immensely. A thinker who comments Aristotle brilliantly is much easier to secularise into the curriculum than one who soars too quickly into mystical illumination. S.: So the Italian obsession is partly Aristotelian by proxy. G.: Yes. It is safer to enthrone the saint who also systematises Aristotle than the saint whose thought is more openly devotional. S.: Then one could say that Aquinas is Italy’s respectable way of keeping philosophy both Greek and Catholic at once. G.: Splendid. That is exactly the formula. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become too pleased. Now, what of philosophy being Graeco-Roman rather than revelatory? S.: You mean that philosophy, even in Aquinas, remains argument from premises and distinctions that belong to the classical inheritance, not simply to scriptural fiat. G.: Exactly. Revelation may set some boundaries or provide some premises in theological contexts, but the philosophical work is still dialectical, analytic, and commentarial in the old classical sense. S.: Which is why Bologna could teach it in a university and Oxford can teach it still. G.: Precisely. If it were simply revelation in scholastic dress, it would be catechesis, not philosophy. S.: Yet Thomas does write sacred theology. G.: Of course. One must distinguish the modes, not deny the corpus. But when Kenny reads him on mind or action, he is not doing vespers. S.: Good. Now, does sanctification ever help philosophy? G.: Institutionally, yes. It preserves texts, sponsors commentary, builds schools, funds editions, and keeps names alive. Philosophically, it tends to surround arguments with reverential static. S.: Unless the thinker is too strong. G.: Exactly. Aquinas is strong enough to survive. Bonaventure, less so in public philosophy, though not because he lacks intelligence. S.: Then perhaps the real question is not saint or not saint, but whether the work can survive devotion. G.: Excellent. Aquinas can. That is why he remains philosophically usable. S.: Bernard Shaw again? G.: Shaw matters only by contrast. Saint Joan becomes a dramatic and political case of sanctity and institution, but she is no philosopher. Aquinas is more troublesome because the saint is attached to arguments. S.: Which must either be read or worshipped. G.: And I prefer reading. S.: Naturally. G.: Naturally. S.: Then one final comparison: Oxford versus Bononia. G.: Bononia receives Aquinas historically from within the Catholic and scholastic inheritance, then later must renegotiate that inheritance as political sovereignty changes and the university becomes less bound to the Papal frame. Oxford receives him from outside, intermittently, suspiciously, and eventually analytically. S.: So Bologna begins with belonging and moves toward critical distance. Oxford begins with distance and moves toward selective belonging. G.: Perfectly put. S.: Thank you. G.: And that is why Kenny matters. He is the sign that Oxford’s distance had become close enough for serious use without surrender. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Aquinate, with one halo left in the vestry.Santilli, Angelo Andrea (1932). Aquino. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Santucci -- Grice e Santucci – Leech e la prammatica come rettorica conversazionale – simulazione, superlazione, e compagnia. Note su Rhetoricæ præcepta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Pietro Antonio Santucci (Cortona, Toscana)– Leech e la prammatica come rettorica conversazionale – simulazione, superlazione, e compagnia. Grice and Santucci converge on the idea that meaning in discourse is governed by reason rather than by ornament, yet they approach that governance from opposite historical and methodological directions: Santucci, working within the early modern rhetorical tradition, treats pragmatic effects as refinements of classical figures—simulatio, superlatio, translatio—whose function is to guide the listener’s judgment through disciplined eloquence, preserving the authority of the orator while avoiding Greek technical excess; Grice, by contrast, famously strips rhetoric of its prescriptive costume and reconceives these same phenomena as implicatures generated by rational, cooperative agents in conversation, accountable not to rhetorical decorum but to shared expectations of relevance, informativeness, sincerity, and clarity. Where Santucci’s project is to purify rhetorical metalanguage so that figures illuminate discourse without overwhelming it, Grice’s is to show that figures need no autonomous metalinguistic machinery at all: their work is done by practical reasoning operating under conversational norms. Thus Santucci’s “conversational rhetoric” remains vertical, oriented toward mastery of audience effects, while Grice’s theory is horizontal and interactive, locating meaning in the hearer’s rational reconstruction of the speaker’s intentions; rhetoric becomes, in Grice’s sense, not a system of elevated techniques but a by‑product of reason-governed communicative action itself. Grice: “There was a time when Italians – indeed Romans – would NOT stand a hellenism like ‘eironia,’ ‘hyperbole,’ or ‘metaphora,’ and there you would have them – and Cicero, too – uttering Varronesque formations like, respectively, SIMVLATIO, SVPERLATIO, and TRANSLATIO! I simplify the vocabulary by calling them all ‘figures of speech,’ or IMPLICATURAE, that is!” -- Retorica. RHETORIC JEu PRÆCEPTA V E SELECTISSIMIS AUCTORIBUS COMPILATA EDIT PRIMO PETRUS ANTONIUS S. DE CORTONA, Unus ex Presbyteris Congregationis Oratorii DIVI PHILIPPI NERII ejufdem Civitatis. Excudebat Joannes Baptista Recurti. SUPERIORUM PERMISSU, AC PRIVILEGIO. Illujirifs. et Reverendifs. D. D, GABRIELI RICCARDIO Viro nobiliffimo, et Ampliflfimo, Patritio Florentino Marchioni eximio Metropolitanæ Ejcclefiæ Florentinæ Canonico PETRUS ANTONIUS SANTUCCI U JE magna Junt, eadem et tnagnis deberi iifque folii nuncupan da fore, nemo unquam inficias ivit, lllufiriffime, C9* Reverendtjfime Domine. Cum enim omnibus a natura comparatum fit, ut coeli faciem obviam fibi quifque contempletur; huic profetto totius Orbis fublimi /lima parti, O' non alii, ea quce Orbis ipfius fublimi /fima ornamenta fiunt, nempe fydera, ab eademmet natura merito donata fuiffe facile ipfe animadvertat, ne et 2 ceffe Cfjje eji % Quavem, et meritis, fi forte virum quem Confprxerc, filent, arreBifque auribus aflant: Ille regit diBis animos, et pcBora mulcet. At Eloquentix majefias, fe mavult, et admiratione coli, et filentio pradican;ejl enim admiratio prxeonium glorix, et filent tum fidus interpres majefiatis ‘, neque major illa commendatio effe potefi. quam omnis frujlra tentata laudatio. Denique Do&orum omnium Coryphæus, ac facile Princeps D. Augutt. fic de præcellenti hac Arte tertatus habetur: Hxc nobis cum Angelis, cum Deo ipfo quodammodo communis efi;  Grice: Santucci, mi dicono che tu voglia fare della prammatica una rettorica conversazionale con tanto di metalinguaggio: a Roma, una volta, per evitare un grecismo bastava un buon latino… oggi invece sembra servire un glossario. Santucci: Maestro Grice, Roma detestava i grecismi solo finché non imparava a farli suoi. “Eironia” diventa simulazione, “hyperbole” superlazione, “metaphora” translatio: stessa cosa, ma con toga. Grice: Ecco: allora la tua rettorica è… come dire… superlativa. Nel senso che, se non stiamo attenti, la superlazione finisce per superare l’oratore, e la figura diventa più importante dell’uditorio. E quando la figura comanda, la conversazione obbedisce—e a quel punto la prammatica fa la fine del servo che crede di essere padrone. Santucci: Superlativa implicatura quella sua, Grice, che mette il detto in ombra come fosse solo un’ombra cinese! Perché mi stai dicendo: “raffina pure il metalinguaggio della rettorica”, ma senza trasformarlo in un mobile ingombrante. Io lo volevo proprio per questo: ripulire la lingua dei precetti—la meno triviale delle “trivialità” che Bononia abbia mai allevato—così che la figura illumini la conversazione senza riempirla di ferraglia terminologica. Re passage below: provide a 100-move conversation between G and S on SANTUCCI RETTORICA -- no preamble or ps -- dry humor, with G wondering which is the least trivial of the disciplines in the trivium -- and playing with quadrivial, and that philosophy is none of the liberal arts -- and Santucci doing his best, because Cicero spoke a different lingo and what is rhetorical here is not rhetoical there, and G. aiming at UNIVERSALITY. But if that were so, S. objects, why are there zillions of treatises of rhetocir given -- same implicature? Yes, the implicature is the same, but the cancellations vary etc and be dry and fun etc -- just the conv, no preamble or ps. -- thank you G.: Let us begin with Santucci’s rettorica, with two t’s, which already looks less trivial than most of the trivium. S.: Less trivial by consonantal accumulation? G.: Exactly. A doubled consonant is often the last defence of seriousness. S.: Then the trivium is trivial only because it is too near the mouth. G.: Very good. Grammar, logic, rhetoric: the disciplines everyone needs and therefore everyone despises. S.: Whereas the quadrivium, being quadrivial rather than trivial, enjoys the false dignity of remoteness. G.: Yes. Number, measure, harmony, stars — all the things one admires before dinner and avoids during quarrels. S.: Which of the three, then, is least trivial? G.: Rhetoric, obviously. S.: Because it governs uptake. G.: Precisely. Grammar gives one a sentence, logic gives one an alibi, rhetoric gets one heard. S.: That is severe on logic. G.: Logic advertises itself too successfully. The truly indispensable thing is the one civilisation calls decorative. S.: Then Santucci is already a defender of the least trivial thing in the trivium. G.: Yes, and that is why he matters. The rhetorician is always teaching what philosophers pretend later to discover under a blander name. S.: You mean pragmatics. G.: Naturally. Prammatica is rettorica conversazionale with its cassock removed. S.: A fine sentence to irritate moderns. G.: It ought to. Moderns behave as if inferential social intelligence first appeared with seminars. S.: Yet you still aim at universality. G.: Of course. The principles by which hearers infer what speakers mean are not Venetian one day and English the next in a wholly lawless fashion. S.: But if that were so, why are there zillions of treatises on rhetoric? G.: Because universality in principle does not abolish local art in practice. S.: That sounds evasive. G.: It is exact. The implicature may be the same in structure, but the cancellations vary, the expectations vary, the local encodings vary, the social weather varies. S.: So Cicero and Santucci are doing the same thing differently? G.: Broadly, yes. Cicero writes for one public language under Roman conditions. Santucci writes for a later world in which that public language has broken into vernacular necessity. S.: Then what is rhetorical here is not rhetorical there. G.: Exactly. The same human need, the different civil conditions of its satisfaction. S.: Still, if your universal maxims are real, why does one need endless manuals? G.: For the same reason one needs many maps though there is only one earth. S.: You are improving. G.: I do it accidentally. The maxims are thin: be relevant, say enough, be orderly, do not lie, and so on. But thin principles generate thick regional techniques. S.: Such as? G.: Irony in one city, understatement in another, ceremonial courtesy in one court, market abruptness in another, scholastic division here, civic anecdote there. S.: So rhetoric is universal in need, local in finish. G.: Very good. That is nearly the whole matter. S.: Then philosophy is not one of the liberal arts because it arrives too late to belong among them. G.: Or too early, depending on the conceit. But yes, philosophy is not itself trivium or quadrivium; it is the ungrateful dependent that uses both and complains about them. S.: Then if philosophy is no liberal art, why does it care so much about the order of them? G.: Because sequence forms temperament. Teach boys stars before speech and they become abstract too early. Teach them speech before stars and they at least know how to lie politely. S.: That is not an educational ideal. G.: It is a historical observation. The trivium comes first because social life requires saying, hearing, disputing, and persuading before it can afford astronomy. S.: Yet the quadrivium is nobler. G.: Only to those who prefer proportion to persons. S.: Which many philosophers do. G.: Unfortunately. That is why they are often bad at tea. S.: Then Santucci, by teaching rhetoric, is teaching the least trivial of the supposedly trivial arts. G.: Exactly. And he must do so in a language Cicero did not quite know how to anticipate. S.: Because Cicero assumed Latin would remain Ciceronian. G.: Or at least that Latin public eloquence would retain the right to think itself the norm. S.: Until Marc’Antonio’s sicario ended part of the illusion. G.: Quite. Murder is a very efficient critic of linguistic permanence. S.: So later rhetoricians inherit a broken universality. G.: Very well put. They inherit the same human structure of persuasive communication, but not the same medium of authority. S.: Which means Santucci’s rhetoric is vernacular, local, institutional, and perhaps more candid about circumstance. G.: Precisely. Cicero may still pretend that rhetoric belongs to the res publica in one magnificent language. Santucci must teach how actual people are to speak under later and narrower conditions. S.: Then your universalism is endangered. G.: Not at all. It is refined. The same implicature can arise in multiple languages and traditions because the inferential pressures are recognisably human. S.: Give me an example. G.: A compliment that damns by context. “He is a fine fellow” may do in Oxford what another phrase does in Tuscany, and a third in Rome. The vehicle varies; the inferential structure survives. S.: So the same implicature, different cancellations. G.: Exactly. In one place irony is easily recoverable, in another it risks offence, in another it must be cushioned by formula. The cancellability conditions differ. S.: Then rhetoric is the science of local cancellability. G.: Very good. You are becoming dangerous. S.: I learn from the doubled consonant. Now, if rhetoric is least trivial, which is most trivial? G.: Grammar, because everyone thinks he already has it. S.: And logic? G.: Most self-important, not most trivial. S.: So the ranking is: grammar invisible, logic pompous, rhetoric despised yet indispensable. G.: Exactly. S.: And the quadrivium? G.: The quadrivium is what schoolmasters point to when they want to make boys feel the stars are morally superior to syntax. S.: Are they? G.: No. The stars do not help one survive an awkward dinner. S.: Nor a senate. G.: Nor a marriage. One may admire astronomy and still speak atrociously to one’s wife. S.: Then philosophy, had it begun with the quadrivium, would be more mathematical and less civil. G.: More proportion, less tact. More architecture, fewer excuses. Perhaps better systems, certainly worse common rooms. S.: So a philosopher should still start with the trivium. G.: Absolutely. He must first know how people actually mean more than they say before he is allowed to misread the heavens. S.: That is almost your whole view of intellectual formation. G.: It should be posted over faculty doors. S.: In handwriting. G.: Naturally. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: You enjoyed that too much. G.: The sentence has earned its immortality. Now, Santucci. Why so many rhetorical treatises if the phenomenon is one? S.: Because one phenomenon under many civic conditions requires many arts of adaptation. G.: Exactly. One cannot write the Vulgate of persuasion. S.: Why not? G.: Because persuasion is not revelation, and rhetoric is not scripture. The Bible may acquire authorised versions; rhetoric acquires handbooks, revisions, schools, local variants, and enemies. S.: So there can be no King James of rhetoric. G.: None that would remain alive for long. A universal manual would fossilise the very thing it sought to codify. S.: Yet Cicero came close. G.: Cicero came close for a very particular civilisation at a very particular moment, and even there his afterlife required endless re-voicing. S.: Then Santucci is one of the re-voicers. G.: Yes, and an honest one, because he does not pretend Cicero’s language is simply his own. S.: Which is why you prefer him? G.: Not prefer. Use. Santucci is useful because he forces us to see what changes when a classical art survives after its imperial language has ceased to be the unquestioned public instrument. S.: So rhetorical universality persists only by regional reincarnation. G.: Very well said. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become Roman about it. Now, what exactly is universal for you in rhetoric? S.: The inferential discipline by which hearers recover meant content from overt performance under shared assumptions of reasonableness. G.: Excellent. That is dry enough to be true. S.: And what is local? G.: The repertory of gestures, figures, social permissions, taboos, expected politenesses, local metaphors, genre conventions, and all the little things by which the universal mechanism actually moves. S.: Then Santucci’s treatise teaches local triggers. G.: Precisely. Which is why the same implicature may survive while the same sentence does not. S.: So what is rhetorical here is not rhetorical there because the recognisable route from saying to meaning is socially conditioned. G.: Yes. The path is universal enough for theory, provincial enough for manuals. S.: That almost sounds like your reconciliation. G.: It is my reconciliation. One must not let local treatises frighten one out of general principles. S.: Nor let general principles despise local treatises. G.: Exactly. Philosophy does that too often. It announces universals and leaves actual speakers to fend for themselves. S.: Then Santucci is a necessary humiliation for universalist philosophy of language. G.: A wholesome one. He reminds us that there is always more craft in actual communication than a maxim-sheet can confess. S.: Which brings us back to the zillions of treatises. G.: Yes. One writes many rhetorical manuals because one human communicative structure encounters indefinitely many social forms. S.: Like lawbooks. G.: Very much so. There is one legal impulse, many jurisdictions. One rhetorical impulse, many climates. S.: And cancellation? G.: Ah yes. The same implicature may be cancellable in one milieu by explicit clause, in another only by tone, in another not at all without scandal. S.: Give me one. G.: Understatement. In one culture “not bad” cancels upward into strong praise. In another it remains tepid. The inferential default differs. S.: So Santucci’s manual teaches how not to be misunderstood by your own city. G.: Precisely. Cicero teaches how to speak to Rome as if Rome were eternal. Santucci teaches how to speak to people who no longer believe any city eternal. S.: That is almost melancholy. G.: All rhetoric after empire is melancholy under discipline. S.: Then perhaps the least trivial thing in the trivium is the one most burdened by historical change. G.: Very good. Grammar survives by ossifying, logic by abstracting, rhetoric by adapting. That is why it looks unstable and is actually indispensable. S.: So rhetoric is least trivial because it suffers history most directly. G.: Exactly. It has to go on working after languages shift, polities collapse, publics fracture, and habits mutate. S.: Whereas logic may continue wearing the same face and call it universality. G.: Yes, logic enjoys the privilege of looking unchanged while living parasitically on rhetorical and grammatical labour it refuses to acknowledge. S.: You are severe on logic again. G.: Only because it deserves occasional correction. S.: Then Santucci’s rettorica, with its doubled t and vernacular setting, becomes a monument to adaptive continuity. G.: Excellent. A wonderful phrase. S.: I shall keep it. G.: Very well, but hide it somewhere modest. Now, the quadrivium once more. Why quadrivial? S.: Because four roads look more majestic than three. G.: Exactly. “Quadrivial” sounds like an adjective designed by a dean. S.: Whereas “trivial” has fallen socially. G.: Unjustly. The trivium governs the human approach to one another. The quadrivium governs the human approach to measure. Both matter, but the first wounds more quickly. S.: Then rhetoric wounds and heals. G.: As all the best arts do. S.: And philosophy? G.: Philosophy merely comments late and with poor timing. S.: So Santucci, if asked what philosophy contributes to rhetoric, would say? G.: At best, distinctions. At worst, pretensions. S.: You are unusually clear today. G.: It is the weather. Now, if one were forced to define rhetoric without the word “persuasion,” what would you say? S.: The disciplined art of managing inferential uptake under socially recognisable forms. G.: Excellent. Scandalously good. S.: Then that is close enough to your own theory of conversation. G.: Structurally, yes. Which is why I keep insisting that pragmatics is not the abolition of rhetoric but its anaemic redescription. S.: Harsh on pragmatics this time. G.: Only in order to keep it honest. Once moderns forget their rhetorical ancestors, they begin calling old intelligence a discovery. S.: Santucci would laugh. G.: He might correct my Latin first. S.: And Cicero? G.: Cicero would wonder why it had taken us so long to rediscover what every decent orator knew. S.: That sounds exactly right. G.: It often is, when one is being unfair to posterity. Now, suppose there were only one rhetorical treatise. What would it look like? S.: Very Roman, very dead, very universal in tone, very local in fact, and almost immediately in need of glosses. G.: Exactly. Which is why the dream of a single manual is absurd. Rhetoric lives by commentary, adaptation, supplementation, and use. S.: Like philosophy. G.: Worse. Philosophy at least sometimes survives by pretending it has no use. S.: Then the final answer to your opening question? G.: The least trivial of the trivium is rhetoric, because it bears the heaviest historical burden while remaining the principal social art of meaning. S.: And Santucci? G.: He does his best because Cicero spoke a different language, to a different public, under a different confidence; yet the same inferential structure of human communication persists, which is why universal theory and local manuals must tolerate one another. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently doubled in its consonants, and only minimally quadrivial.Santucci, Pietro Antonio (1748). Rhetoricæ præcepta e selectissimis auctoribus compilate. Recurti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). “H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Santucci – Ossia: Grice e Santucci – Note sul Trattato delle comete. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Antonio Santucci – In this playful exchange, the contrast between Grice and Santucci neatly mirrors their philosophical differences over reason‑governed conversational meaning: Grice treats conversational rationality as a local, inferential achievement, where saying little and letting much be understood counts as a cooperative, intention‑guided success governed by pragmatic norms, whereas Santucci frames conversational reason more historically and culturally, as something that wanders, like comets or empiricist traditions, across sciences, philosophies, and social practices. Grice’s emphasis falls on the internal logic of conversation—how implicature allows interlocutors to mean more than they say without abandoning rational control—while Santucci’s reply situates that logic within a wider humanistic horizon, where understanding depends as much on shared habits, traditions, and interpretive generosity as on calculable inference. In short, Grice explains how conversational reason works from within ordinary linguistic practice, whereas Santucci reflects on how such reason survives, zig‑zagging but resilient, within the long history of empiricism, idealism, and philosophical culture. Grice: Caro Santucci, leggo del tuo Trattato delle comete del 1611 e mi chiedo se l’implicatura sia caduta dal cielo insieme a una coda luminosa. Santucci: Ah, Grice, le comete passano e confondono tutti, ma a Bologna abbiamo imparato che anche la ragione conversazionale ogni tanto fa zig-zag. Grice: A Oxford diremmo che se una cometa dice poco e lascia intendere molto, allora è perfettamente cooperativa. Santucci: E io replico che, tra empirismo e stelle erranti, basta non prendere troppo alla lettera il cielo per capirsi benissimo a tavola. Santucci, Antonio (1611). Trattato delle comete. Finze, Giunti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali:  Santucci – Ossia: Grice e Santucci: la ragione conversazionale dell’idealismo – scuola di Mira. Note sull’esistenzialismo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Antonio Santucci (Mirra, Venezia, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale dell’idealismo. In comparing H. P. Grice with Antonio Santucci on reason-governed conversational meaning, a clear contrast emerges between Grice’s micro-analytic, intention-based pragmatics and Santucci’s historically and systematically grounded conception of “ragione conversazionale.” Grice locates the rationality of conversation in the inferential coordination between what is said and what is meant, governed by the Cooperative Principle and its maxims, where reason operates locally as the hearer’s capacity to reconstruct speaker intentions through calculable implicatures rather than through rules of logic or semantics alone. Santucci, by contrast, approaches conversational reason less as a technical mechanism of inference and more as a cultural and philosophical posture emerging from the traditions of empiricism, pragmatism, and post-idealist reflection, especially as mediated by Italian encounters with Humean skepticism and American pragmatism. Where Grice treats rationality as immanent in everyday conversational practice and minimally normative, Santucci situates it within a broader idealism tempered by historical awareness, in which reason in conversation reflects the evolving relationship between philosophy, science, and forms of life rather than a formally isolable conversational calculus. In this sense, Grice offers a theory of how conversational reason works, while Santucci offers an account of why conversational reason matters within a larger intellectual genealogy. – (quarto da sinistra) con Pedrazzi, Battaglia, Matteucci e Contessi. Muore a Bologna. è stato un filosofo italiano. È stato docente di Storia della filosofia all'Università di Bologna.  Socio dell'Accademia delle Scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna, è stato tra i fondatori della casa editrice il Mulino. Studioso di Hume, dell'illuminismo scozzese e del pragmatismo americano, ha indagato inoltre le varie forme in cui positivismo ed esistenzialismo e, più in generale, il rapporto con le scienze hanno orientato il pensiero italiano tra Ottocento e Novecento.  È sepolto alla Certosa di Bologna. Opere principali Esistenzialismo e filosofia italiana, Bologna, Il Mulino, Il pragmatismo in Italia, Bologna, il Mulino. Sistema e ricerca in Hume, Bari, Laterza, Introduzione a Hume, Storia del pragmatismo, Empirismo, pragmatismo, filosofia italiana, Bologna, CLUEB, Eredi del positivismo. Ricerca sulla filosofia italiana, Bologna, il Mulino, L'età dei Lumi. Saggi sulla cultura settecentesca, Bologna, il Mulino, Filosofia e cultura nel Settecento britannico, a cura di A. S., Bologna, il Mulino. Comprende: Fonti e connessioni continentali, John Toland e il deismo. Hume e Hutcheson, Reid e la scuola del senso comune. Ricerche sul pensiero italiano fra Ottocento e Novecento, Bologna, CLUEB. Fonte: totem informativo di Bologna Servizi Cimiteriali. Collegamenti esterni Santucci, Antonio, su Treccani.it – Enciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Santucci, Antonio, in Dizionario di filosofia, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. S., «Pragmatismo» la voce nella Enciclopedia del Novecento, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1980. Addio al filosofo Antonio Santucci, da Il Mattino di Padova, Archivio. Filosofia Filosofi italiani Membri dell'Accademia delle Scienze di Torino Sepolti nel cimitero monumentale della Certosa di Bologna. Implicatura.  Grice: Carissimo Santucci, ogni volta che leggo le tue pagine sul pragmatismo mi viene voglia di prendere un treno per Mira, sperando che alla stazione mi venga offerta una tazza di empirismo veneto, magari corretta con un goccio di illuminismo scozzese. Ma dimmi, a Bologna si discute ancora se Hume fosse più vicino al Canal Grande o al Tamigi? Santucci: Ah, Grice, se Hume avesse navigato il Canal Grande, forse avrebbe scritto “Dialoghi sull’arte del gondoliere”! Ma ti dirò, a Bologna preferiamo riflettere sul rapporto tra filosofia e scienze, anche se a volte la discussione si perde... nelle nebbie padane! E poi, il Mulino non macina solo grano, ma anche tante idee, alcune pure farinate. Grice: Beh, caro Santucci, a Oxford quando si parla di ἰδέα di Platone, io mi ritrovo più confuso di un empirista davanti a una birra calda. Nessuno ha mai capito se fosse una ἰδέα nel cielo, un modello d’abito o semplicemente un modo elegante per evitare la concretezza... D’altronde, la filosofia, come dicono da voi, è spesso più ricca di sottintesi che di risposte! Santucci: Implicatura platonica la sua, Grice – o dovrei dire “piatonica”, visto che il povero Platone si è beccato il soprannome per le spalle larghe! Ma in fondo, tra ἰδέα e implicatura, c’è sempre un Mulino che macina misteri: basta saper leggere tra le farine! Santucci, Antonio (1959) Esistenzialismo. Bologna: Il Mulino.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sanzo – Ossia: Grice e Sanzo: il deutero-esperanto e la ragione conversazional tra natura ed artificio – la filosofia lizia. Note sui Lineamenti di filosofia morale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Ubaldo Sanzo (Roma, Lazio): il deutero-esperanto e la ragione conversazional tra natura ed artificio. Ubaldo Sanzo and H. P. Grice converge on the idea that meaning is governed by reason rather than merely by formal structure, but they articulate that governance through different emphases on nature, convention, and artifice. Sanzo’s reflections on deutero-esperanto and the artifice of language, shaped by Peano, Vailati, and Italian conventionalism, treat scientific and philosophical languages as deliberately constructed instruments designed to secure intersubjective understanding beyond the contingencies of national tongues; reason here operates by making explicit, negotiable conventions that mediate between nature and artificial symbol systems. Grice, by contrast, resists treating language as a purely engineered code and instead locates rational governance in the conversational practices of natural language itself, showing through implicature how speakers exploit shared expectations, cooperation, and inferential rationality to mean more than they explicitly say. Where Sanzo tends to stress the mastery afforded by artificial languages and reconstructed scientific idioms—sometimes blurring the distinction between what is arbitrary and what is merely artificial, as Grice himself wryly observes—Grice insists that the heart of meaning lies in the practical reasoning of agents embedded in ordinary discourse, not in formal invention alone. The point of contact is substantial: both see meaning as irreducible to brute natural causation and both reject naïve naturalism; yet their divergence is equally clear, since Sanzo looks toward constructed linguistic frameworks as the rational solution to scientific communication, whereas Grice treats such constructions as secondary to, and parasitic upon, the deeper, reason-governed dynamics of everyday conversational understanding. – la filosofia lizia -- deutero-esperanto -- Insegna a Brindisi, Milano, e Salento. Fonda “Apollo Licio” o Lizio. Sube il fascino dell’esistenzialismo e il orazionalismo. Rivolve la propria attenzione ai rapporti tra filosofia, scienza e società. Si occupa di filosofi quali Becquerel, Boutruox, Corbino, Couturate Curie, Enriques, Fermi, Frola, GEYMONAT, PEANO, VAILATI. Sui fondamenti della geometria” (Brescia,  La Scuola, Collana "Il Pensiero"); “L’artificio della lingua, -- Grice: “I like that: it’s my Gricese, a language I invent and which makes me the master; there’s the arbitrary and there’s the artificial, and Sanzo, reconstructing Peano’s project, fails to distinguish this” -- Milano, Angeli, Collana di Epistemologia, Cimino; Sava, Il nucleo filosofico della scienza, Galatina, Congedo, Collana di Filosofia, Scritti di fisica-matematica, Torino, POMBA, I Classici della Scienza, Poincaré e i filosofi” (Lecce, Milella); Corbino, Scienza e società, Saggi raccolti e commentati, Manduria, Barbieri, Collana di Filosofia Hermes/Hestia, Scritti di fisica-matematica” (Milano, Mondadori, "I Classici del pensiero", Unione Tipografico, Torino, Scientia, Rivista di sintesi scientifica, “Apollo Licio”, Museo Galilei, Firenze. 1. I PRODROMI  Il problema della comprensione internazionale nel campo della scienza inizia, come è noto, con i primi testi scientifici scritti in lingue nazionali. Il latino, che per secoli era stato lo strumento della cultura scientifica dell'Occidente, si era estinto nella parlata comune e si andava lentamente estinguendo anche nella sua funzione di unica lingua comune ai dotti. Trattati scientifici in lingue volgari appaiono già alla fine del Duecento e la matematica commerciale è sempre più frequentemente scritta in volgare; apollo licio, trovato al ginnasio liceo di Atene, figgurante il dio in atto di riposo dopo un gran sforzo. natura ed artificio, l’artificio della lingua, convenzionalismo, filosofia della lingua.  Grice: Carissimo Sanzo, ogni volta che mi immergo nel tuo “deutero-esperanto” sento che la filosofia diventa una partita a scacchi tra natura e artificio… e, a dire il vero, finisco sempre per perdere contro Apollo Licio! Ma ti dirò, ogni volta che provo a decifrare la parola natura in Cicerone, mi sembra di inseguire una chimera: mai capito se parlava di boschi, di virtù, o semplicemente del tempo che fa. Sanzo: Ah Grice, se solo Apollo avesse consultato il tuo Gricese, forse avrebbe scritto geometria direttamente in versi! In fondo, tra convenzione e artificio, la lingua italiana è come un ginnasio, dove si allenano idee e parole. E poi, diciamolo: la natura, soprattutto quella di Cicerone, non è mai stata un esercizio facile… nemmeno per i filosofi di Brindisi. Grice: Vedi, Sanzo, ogni volta che leggo Cicerone parlare di natura, mi ritrovo più confuso di un romano al mercato di Ostia. Non ho mai capito se intendesse la natura come madre generosa o come zia severa, o magari come un mistero che soltanto i sacerdoti potevano svelare. E poi, pensa: quando Roma celebrava il settecentocinquantatré dalla fondazione, il termine era ancora un rebus per tutti! Sanzo: Quella tua è proprio un'implicatura da vero ciceroniano! E forse nemmeno Cicerone ne aveva le idee chiare: almeno, non avrebbe mai scambiato natura con “natalizio”, come si usa oggi per decorare le piazze a dicembre. Ai bei tempi, diciamo, quando Roma segnava il suo settecentocinquantatré ad urbe conditam, la natura era poesia, storia, mistero—tutto tranne un abete in Senato! Sanzo, Ubaldo (1952). Lineamenti di filosofia morale. Roma: Studium.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sarlo – Ossia: Grice e Sarlo: la ragione conversazionale dell’idealismo. Note sull’attività psichica incosciente in patologia mentale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Francesco De Sarlo (San Chirico Raparo, Potenza, Basilicata): la ragione conversazionale dell’idealismo. Francesco De Sarlo and H. P. Grice both articulate accounts of how reason governs meaning, but they situate that governance at different explanatory levels: De Sarlo grounds it in an idealist–psychological framework centered on consciousness and intentional experience, while Grice formulates it as a pragmatic theory of how speakers rationally manage communication in ordinary language. For De Sarlo, shaped by Brentano, Wundt, and the Florence school, meaning arises because physical phenomena become psychic phenomena, contents of consciousness ordered and unified by the subject; conversation and understanding are therefore secondary expressions of a deeper rational organization of experience itself, where internal and external aspects are inseparable moments of one process. Grice, by contrast, brackets metaphysical and psychological debates about the ultimate status of consciousness and instead explains meaning in terms of publicly identifiable intentions, shared norms, and inferential practices, using implicature to show how rational agents routinely convey more than they explicitly state. Yet there is a significant convergence: De Sarlo’s insistence that objects exist for us only as they are implicated in consciousness parallels Grice’s claim, inspired in part by figures like Bradley whom De Sarlo also cites, that meaning is never exhausted by surface form but depends on what is rationally implicated in context. Where De Sarlo seeks a unified method for philosophy and science grounded in the primacy of psychic experience, Grice offers a unified account of linguistic understanding grounded in cooperative rationality; both resist sharp dualisms—between inner and outer, saying and meaning—and both construe reason not as an abstract faculty but as an organizing principle that makes experience and communication intelligible rather than fragmented. –la scuola di Firenze. Vince la cattedra di filosofia teoretica presso il Regio Istituto di studi superiori di Firenze. È in questa città che frequenta i seminari tenuti da Brentano presso la biblioteca filosofica. Nel 1903 fonda a Firenze il "Laboratorio di psicologia sperimentale" che fu inizialmente annesso alla Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia del Regio Istituto di studi superiori. Allievi di S. sono, tra gli altri, Aliotta, Borgese, Bonaventura, Lamanna, che sposa sua figlia, Garin e Marzi. S. si trova in aperto contrasto con Croce e Gentile che ritenevano si dovesse separare il metodo della filosofia da quello della scienza. Per S., invece, il metodo conoscitivo doveva essere comune in quanto sia il filosofo che lo scienziato si occupano dello stesso campo d'indagine. Per questo considera come unico metodo quello rigorosamente sperimentale di Wundt e quello esperienziale di Brentano. Nello stesso anno pubblica, nel capoluogo toscano, il saggio: I dati dell'esperienza psichica. La novità introdotta da De Sarlo è il concetto che i fenomeni fisici esistono in quanto diventano fenomeni psichici, contenuto della nostra coscienza. Dunque, l'oggetto di studio della psicologia doveva essere l'esperienza intenzionale del soggetto. L'unica vera esperienza diretta è quella psichica. Esperienza interna ed esperienza esterna vanno così a configurarsi come due aspetti dello stesso fenomeno; non c'è un'esperienza più vera dell'altra poiché nessuna delle due è indipendente dall'altra. Per De Sarlo è imprescindibile studiare la coscienza: a suo avviso, gli "oggetti" arrivano necessariamente alla nostra coscienza attraverso gli organi sensoriali. Essi vengono ordinati, studiati, usati, catalogati sia dal singolo nella sua esperienza quotidiana sia dalle varie scienze che ne approfondiscono lo studio. implicatura, Bradley, citato da Sarlo.  Grice: Professore De Sarlo, ho letto con grande interesse i suoi lavori sul laboratorio di psicologia sperimentale a Firenze. Trovo ammirevole la Sua posizione sul metodo unico di indagine, che abbraccia tanto la filosofia quanto la scienza. È una prospettiva che, da logico, mi incuriosisce molto: pensa davvero che si possa superare la tradizionale divisione tra esperienza interna ed esterna? De Sarlo: Caro professore Grice, la ringrazio per la Sua domanda. A mio avviso, la distinzione tra esperienza interna ed esterna è più apparente che reale. Nel mio lavoro ho sostenuto che entrambe sono aspetti di un unico fenomeno. La coscienza non può ignorare l'influenza degli organi sensoriali, ma allo stesso tempo è la coscienza a dare ordine, significato e valore agli oggetti e alle percezioni. Solo così, filosofia e scienza possono dialogare senza barriere. Grice: Quindi, se capisco bene, per Lei la vera esperienza è quella psichica, dove il soggetto diventa protagonista assoluto? Mi affascina come questa idea possa unire la rigorosità della sperimentazione scientifica alla profondità della riflessione filosofica. Bradley, che spesso cito, direbbe che la realtà è sempre "implicata" nella coscienza. Lei sarebbe d'accordo con questa implicatura? De Sarlo: Esattamente, Grice. Concordo con Bradley: gli oggetti esistono nella misura in cui diventano contenuto della nostra coscienza. L'esperienza diretta, quella psichica, è il punto di incontro tra interno ed esterno. Per me, non c'è un’esperienza più vera dell’altra, poiché nessuna delle due è indipendente dall’altra. Così, ogni indagine filosofica deve partire dalla consapevolezza che il pensiero e il metodo scientifico dialogano insieme, senza confini. Sarlo, Francesco De (1891). Attività psichica incosciente in patologia mentale. Rivista sperimentale di freniatria e di medicina legale

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sarno – Ossia: Grice e Sarno: la ragione conversazionale del sentire. Note sulla violenza. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Antonio Sarno (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale del sentire. Antonio Sarno’s philosophy of sentire and Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning address the same problem—the relation between inner life and meaningful expression—from opposite but complementary directions: Sarno begins from a lived, affective ontology in which feeling is not a private state but a mode of giving oneself over to things so that they come alive within experience, whereas Grice begins from ordinary linguistic interaction and reconstructs how meaning is generated through rational intentions, shared norms, and inferential discipline. For Sarno, shaped by Bruno, Campanella, Vico, and a poetic–philosophical tradition, thinking and feeling are inseparable, and reason operates through intensity, donation, and exposure to the real; conversational sense emerges when sentire remains faithful to the world rather than collapsing into a self-contained sensus sui. Grice, by contrast, is wary of multiplying inner states beyond necessity and seeks to show how meaning can be explained without appealing to ineffable feelings, by grounding communication in publicly recognizable intentions and calculable implicatures. Yet the two converge in an important way: Sarno’s insistence that authentic sentire must incarnate itself in things parallels Grice’s insistence that meaning must be manifest in patterns of use that others can recognize and respond to rationally. Where Sarno worries about the violence of severing thought from lived intensity, Grice worries about the conceptual violence introduced by lexical drift and ungoverned implication; both see reason as a regulating force that keeps expression from tipping either into solipsistic inwardness or into empty verbal play. In this sense, Sarno supplies an ontological depth to what Grice formalizes pragmatically: conversational meaning is governed by reason not only because speakers infer correctly, but because, at its best, meaning remains answerable to how experience is genuinely lived and shared. Grice: Interprete di BRUNO e CAMPANELLA. Collabora al “Giornale critico della filosofia italiana” con saggi su BRUNO, CAMPANELLA, e VICO. Medita sulla violenza. Si suicida con un colpo di rivoltella. Si interessa a BRUNO e CAMPANELLA. Il suo punto di partenza è l’opposizione tra un sentimento sempre identico a se stesso, essenzialmente interiore -- sensus sui -- ed un sentire esteriore, che si tramuta nelle cose di cui ha esperienza, che si presta e si dona tutt’intero alle cose, affinché esse vivano in lui. Atre saggi: Pensiero e poesia (Laterza, Bari); Filosofia poetica (Laterza, Bari); Filosofia del sentire (Pescara, Tracce); Sulla violenza (Bari, Laterza); M. Perniola, “L’enigma” (Costa,  Genova); A. Marroni, Filosofo del farsi altro. Angelo, L'estetica italiana” (Laterza, Bari); Marroni, La passione per il presente in “Filosofie dell'intensità. un maestro occulto della filosofia italiana” (Mimesis, Milano); Marroni, "I carmina in foliis volitantia" in Agalma, Giornale Critico di Filosofia Italiana.  Grice: Professore Sarno, lei che ha meditato sul sentire come nessun altro, mi dica: questo “sentire” napoletano, è più simile a una serenata sotto la luna o a un tuffo nel Vesuvio? Perché qui a Vadum Boum, di sentimento ne abbiamo poco, e di sentire ancora meno! Sarno: Caro Grice, il sentire campano è tutto fuoco e poesia, ma mai distante dal reale. Non si tratta di semplici emozioni, ma di una esperienza viva, che si dona alle cose e le fa vibrare dentro di noi. Pensiero e poesia, come dico sempre, non sono mai separati: né serenata né Vesuvio, ma entrambe, se serve! Grice: Sarno, mi affascina il suo “sentire” che si presta e si dona. Ma a volte mi viene da dire, magari un po’ ironicamente: SENSUS NON SUNT MULTIPLICANDI PRAETER NECESSITATEM. Almeno, così sento io, anche se spesso mi accorgo che il sentimento è come il caffè napoletano: basta una goccia in più e tutto cambia sapore! Sarno: Sento quel che tu implica, Grice! E penso che sia meglio restare fedeli al “sentire” applicato alle cinque vie – ai sensi, alla conoscenza sensibile. Così, almeno, evitiamo di moltiplicare i sentimenti oltre il necessario. Il resto, lasciamolo pure all’immaginazione… o al Vesuvio, se proprio serve! Sarno, Antonio (1909). La violenza. Laterza

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sarpi – Ossia: Grice e Sarpi: la ragione conversazionale della meta-fisica del fenice, o l’arte del bien conversar. Note sull’Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Paolo Sarpi (Venezia, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale della meta-fisica del fenice, o l’arte del bien conversar. Paolo Sarpi and H. P. Grice converge on the idea that reason governs conversation, but they locate that governance in strikingly different registers: Sarpi conceives the arte del bien conversar as a civic, rhetorical, and prudential practice embedded in metaphysics, politics, and historical conflict, whereas Grice treats it as a formally characterizable structure internal to linguistic interaction itself. For Sarpi, shaped by Venetian republicanism, scientific method, and early modern empiricism, good conversation is a discipline of restraint, clarity, and strategic silence, a way of thinking and speaking that resists dogmatic authority and survives institutional coercion, whether theological or political; reason here is exercised through moral judgment, historical intelligence, and an acute sense of how words circulate within power. Grice, by contrast, abstracts from history and institutions to isolate the minimal rational conditions that make mutual understanding possible at all, locating the art of conversation not in eloquence or civic wisdom but in speaker intentions, shared expectations, and the cooperative management of implicature. What Sarpi understands as the phoenix-like resilience of discourse—its capacity to re-emerge after censorship, violence, or misunderstanding—Grice re-describes as recoverability through rational inference, even when conversation goes wrong. Sarpi’s bien conversar is an ethical and political art of living with words, while Grice’s theory explains how words function as reason-governed tools in ordinary exchange; yet both share the conviction that conversational disorder arises not from passion alone but from conceptual confusion, and that reason, whether historical or analytical, is what allows conversation to avoid drowning in chatter and instead remain intelligible, resilient, and meaningful. Definito d’Acquapendente come oracolo, autore della celebre Istoria del Concilio tridentino, subito messa all'indice. Fermo oppositore del centralismo monarchico di Roma, difendendo le prerogative della repubblica veneziana, colpita dall'interdetto emanato da Paolo V. Rifiuta di presentarsi di fronte all'inquisizione romana che intende processarlo e sube un grave attentato che si sospetta sta organizzato dalla curia romana, "agnosco stilum Curiae romanae", che nega tuttavia ogni responsabilità. L'infanzia e una ritiratezza in sé medesimo, un sembiante sempre penseroso, e più tosto malinconico che serio, un silenzio quasi continuato anco co' coetanei, una quiete totale, senza alcun di quei giuochi, a' quali pare che la natura stessa ineschi i fanciulli, acciò che col moto corroborino la complessione: cosa notabile che mai fosse veduto in alcuno. Poi, così serve in tutta la sua vita, et all'occasioni dice non poter capir il gusto e trattenimento di chi giuoca, se non fosse affetto d'avarizia. Un'alienazione da ogni gusto, nissuna avidità de' cibi, de' quali si nutre così poco, che restava meraviglia come stasse vivo. Nell'anno in cui proseguivano le sedute del Concilio di Trento, Carlo V e in guerra con i prìncipi protestanti tedeschi e il Parlamento inglese adotta un Libro di preghiere d'ispirazione luterana. Figlio di Francesco di Pietro S., di famiglia di lontane origini friulane -- precisamente di San Vito al Tagliamento -- e mercante a Venezia eppure, scrive Micanzio, per la sua indole violenta più dedito all'armi ch'alla mercatura. La madre, veneziana, d'aspetto umile e mite e Isabella Morelli. Rimasta vedova, fu accolta con il suo figlio e l'altra figlia Elisabetta nella casa del fratello. l’arte del bien pensar, Locke, impression, reflection, metaphysics, Bibioteca Marciana, pensieri, pensiero, logica, bien pensare, galilei, hobbes, metodo, sensismo, il fenice di Venezia, scritti filosofici inedita.  Grice: Caro Sarpi, Venezia sarà pure la patria dell’arte del “bien conversar”, ma a Vadum Boum ci accontentiamo, come diciamo noi, di una conversazione… diciamo “alla buona”. Voi veneziani, invece, fate scuola – persino la Fenice, da voi, risorge per sentire quattro battute in bella compagnia!  Sarpi: Grice, troppo onore! A Venezia la conversazione è come il Brenta: a volte scorre limpida, a volte torbida, ma sempre va dove vuole lei. L’importante è non affogare nelle chiacchiere e saper risorgere, come la Fenice, dopo ogni battibecco... O almeno provarci!  Grice: Eh, vedi Paolo, “l’arte del bien conversar” sarebbe anche bella… se solo a Vadum Boum ci si esercitasse sul serio. Ma qui, a meno che tu non sia un artista di professione o un giocoliere di parole, la vera arte è quella del NON bien – chiamiamola pure arte del “mal conversare”. Così, ogni tanto, si salvano pure le apparenze… o almeno si pensa!  Sarpi: La tua implicatura, Grice, mi fa ridere – molto più di quanto tu non dica! A Venezia si dice che chi non sa parlar bene, almeno impari a tacere con stile… Ma a Vadum Boum, forse, anche il silenzio lo insegnate “male”, vero? Comunque, tra bien e mal conversar, preferisco chi almeno ci prova: il resto, lo lasciamo agli artisti… o ai filosofi in vena di fenici! Sarpi, Paolo (1619). Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. Londra: Ricciardo.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sasso – Ossia: Grice e Sasso: la ragione conversazionale da Crotone a Velia – la potenza e il atto in Gentile – Gentile megarico -- Lucrezio e Machiavelli – allegoria e simbolo in Vico. Note sul Machiavelli. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Gennaro Sasso (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale da Crotone a Velia – Both Grice and Gennaro Sasso approach meaning as something governed by reason, but they situate that governance at very different philosophical levels: for Grice, reason is immanent to ordinary conversation, realized through the speaker’s intentions and the cooperative norms that regulate what is explicitly said and implicitly conveyed, whereas for Sasso reason is a historical–ontological power that unfolds across traditions, from Eleatic and Pythagorean thought through Gentile’s distinction between potenza and atto and down into Machiavelli, Vico, and Lucretius, where symbol, allegory, and political judgment register the work of reason in culture rather than in dialogue. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning is anti-metaphysical in method but not in ambition: it explains how rationality operates locally, at the level of linguistic exchange, by diagnosing precisely the slippages that Sasso worries about at the level of conceptual history—above all the confusion between the actual and the everyday “attuale,” or between the possible, the probable, and the desirable. Sasso treats those slippages as symptoms of deeper failures to keep act and potential distinct within a tradition of thought, while Grice treats them as conversational malfunctions, detectable through implicature, cancellation, and tests of coherence. Where Sasso reconstructs reason as a long dialectical journey from Crotone to Velia and back through Italian idealism, Grice reconstructs it as a set of norm-sensitive practices that allow speakers to mean more than they say without collapsing logic into rhetoric; the difference is scale and genealogy, not subject matter, since both ultimately see reason as something that must be exercised, disciplined, and guarded against lexical or conceptual tricks that let words do ideological work while pretending to be neutral concepts. -- la potenza e il atto in Gentile – Gentile megarico -- Lucrezio e Machiavelli – allegoria e simbolo in Vico –Grice: Studia  a Roma. Si laurea sotto ANTONI e CHABOD con Machiavelli. Studia con CARABELLESE, RUGGIERO, SCARAVELLI, NARDI, PETTAZZONI, SAPEGNO, GABETTI, PERROTTA, E SANCTIS. Insegna ad Urbino e Roma. Studia l’idealismo italiano (CROCE) e MACHIAVELLI. Si occupa di ontologia, ALIGHERI, Platone, Polibio, LUCREZIO, GUICCIARDINI, Shakespeare e Mann. Presidente della "Fondazione GENTILE", Lincei. Altri saggi: “Machiavelli e Borgia. Storia di un giudizio” “Machiavelli” (Napoli, Morano); “La storia della filosofia” “La ricerca della dialettica” (Napoli, Morano); “Lucrezio: progresso e morte” (Bologna, Mulino); “L'illusione della dialettica” (Roma, Ateneo); “Guicciardini” (Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Roma); “Essere e negazione, Napoli, Morano); “Machiavelli e gl’antichi” (Milano, Ricciardi); “Tramonto di un mito: l'idea di progresso” (Bologna, Mulino); Per invigilare me stesso. I Taccuini di lavoro di Croce, Bologna, Mulino); “L'essere e le differenze nel "Sofista” (Bologna, Il Mulino); “Variazioni sulla storia di una rivista italiana: "La Cultura"; Mulino); “Machiavelli, Bologna, Il Mulino, Comprende: Il pensiero politico, Napoli, IISS, Bologna, Mulino, Premio Viareggio di Saggistica, La storiografia. La fedeltà e l'esperimento, Scarpelli, Trincia e Visentin interrogano S.; Filosofia e idealismo, Napoli, Bibliopolis, Comprende: Croce, Gentile, Ruggiero, Calogero, Scaravelli, Paralipomeni, Secondi paralipomeni, Ultimi paralipomeni, Tempo, evento, divenire” (Bologna, Il Mulino); “Gentile: La potenza e l'atto” (Firenze, La Nuova Italia); Le due Italie di Gentile, Bologna, Il Mulino); Potenza ed atto in Gentile – Lucrezio in Macchiavelli, Lucrezio, simbolo ed allegoria in Vico, la scuola di Velia, veliati, veliani, parmenide, scuola di Crotone.  Grice: Caro Sasso, tu vieni da Crotone e arrivi fino a Velia, passando per Gentile e tornando a Machiavelli come se fosse una passeggiata: io, da Vadum Boum, mi perdo già al primo “atto”. Sasso: Grice, è una passeggiata solo se non confondi mai potenza e atto. E soprattutto se non scambi l’“attuale” con l’“attuale” di tutti i giorni: lì cominciano i malintesi. Grice: Appunto. Quando sento dire “ciò che è attuale non è possibile” (sic), mi viene da chiedermi se stiamo facendo ontologia o solo ginnastica di parole: a me sembra quasi un non-senso, come se “attuale” fosse diventato un lasciapassare per dire il contrario di qualunque cosa. E poi, in certi discorsi, “possibile” finisce per suonare come “desiderabile”, e allora il lessico fa il trucco… e la logica paga il conto. Sasso: La tua implicatura è davvero quasi attuale (sic, in gergo), Grice. E sì: hai ragione a sospettare lo slittamento tra possibile, probabile e desiderabile. Se vuoi metterla in forma “da seminarista di Vadum Boum”, pensa al quadrato delle opposizioni dei modali: necessario / impossibile e, dall’altro lato, possibile / non-necessario (cioè “contingente”). Molti credono di muoversi tra possibilità e necessità, ma in realtà stanno barattando la possibilità con la preferenza. E lì l’“attuale” diventa una parola d’ordine, non un concetto. Sasso, Gennaro (1950). Machiavelli. Sotto Antoni e Chabod – Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Saturnino – Ossia: Grice e Saturnino: la ragione conversazionale del probabile. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Saturnino (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del probabile. A comparison between Grice and S. highlights two complementary understandings of rationality grounded not in certainty but in disciplined practice under conditions of epistemic limitation. Saturninus, as a Pyrrhonian physician following Sextus Empiricus in second‑century Rome, embodies a conversational reason of the probable: rejecting claims to hidden causes or demonstrative science, he accepts that life and medicine proceed by registering observed regularities and forming expectations that are defeasible yet sufficient for action. Rationality here governs discourse and judgment by restraining assent, policing the slide from what seems likely into what one merely wishes to be true, and allowing guidance without dogma. Grice, operating in a modern analytic framework, renders this restraint explicit at the level of meaning itself: his theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning explains how speakers rationally rely on implicatures, background assumptions, and cooperative norms to arrive at what is credible rather than certain. Where Saturninus practices epoché by living from the probable without theorizing it, Grice theorizes how everyday communication already functions on analogous principles, distinguishing the believable from the desirable and the warranted from the asserted. Both figures thus converge on a shared insight: rationality is not the possession of certainty but the normative regulation of belief, inference, and discourse in situations where certainty is unavailable, ensuring that human life remains intelligible and practicable without the pretence of absolute knowledge. Seguace di Sesto Empirico, della scesi pirroniana e medico, non si ricordano sue dottrine particolari, ma si può supporre che accettasse quelle fondamentali del maestro che, negando la possibilità di una scienza razionale che pretendesse di cogliere le cause nascoste delle cose, ammette la legittimità d’arti -- prima fra esse la medicina -- che si limitano a constatare empiricamente coincidenze e successioni di fenomeni per fondare così previsioni probabili per il futuro. Diogene Laerzio dice che è soprannominato Kuthenas o Cythenas. La parola è incomprensibile, ma forse indica un’origine greca. Given that Sesto teaches at Rome, we may assume Cythenas, albeit his esoteric name, is a Roman! GRICEVS: Salvē, Saturnīnē—medice et Pyrrhōniē. Audīvī tē “probābile” semper in ore habēre, quasi nihil certius sit quam incertitūdō ipsa. SATVRNINVS: Salvē, Grice. Ita est: Sextus docuit nos causas occultās nōn capere; sed vitam agere oportet. Itaque sequimur quod probābile est—id quod ars medica, non metaphysica, postulat. GRICEVS: Bene; sed ego, ut verum fatear, malim interdum crēdibile quam probābile—et certe quam dēsīrābile. Nam quod dēsīrō, id saepe nimis facile “probābile” mihi vidētur; quod autem crēdibile est, etiam sine votō stat. SATVRNINVS: O inplicātūram sapiēntem, Grice—fiant tibi tua dēsīderia! Nam intellegō: tu monēs nē “probābile” in “dēsīrābile” labātur. Si voluntās iudicem corrumpit, medicus iam non curat sed optat; at “crēdibile” (ut ais) est quasi medium: lucet satis ad iter, nec tamen se pro sole venditat. Saturnino (a. u. c. CM). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Saufeio – Ossia: Grice e Saufeio: la ragione converesazionale dell’orto romano. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Lucio Saufeio (Praeneste, Palestrina, Roma, Lazio): la ragione converesazionale dell’orto romano -- A comparison between Grice and S. illuminates two historically distant but structurally kindred ways of understanding reason as something exercised and displayed within forms of life rather than as a detached faculty. Saufeius, as he appears in late Republican Rome around 650 AUC, exemplifies what might be called the conversational reason of the Roman Garden: protected by wealth, friendship with Atticus, and distance from forensic struggle, he practices Epicurean rationality through selective engagement, wit, and cultivated withdrawal, where philosophical seriousness is conveyed indirectly, by tone, setting, and refusal as much as by explicit argument. The hortus functions as a conversational filter: disputes are softened, claims are implied rather than asserted, and the very choice not to speak in the Forum becomes a meaningful act governed by practical reason. Grice, by contrast, makes explicit what in Saufeius remains embodied and situational: his theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning reconstructs rationality as a system of implicit norms that regulate what speakers say by reference to what they intend, expect, and allow others to infer. Where Saufeius lives the Epicurean insight that reason works best away from accusation and compulsion, Grice formalizes the insight by showing how meaning itself depends on cooperative restraint, background assumptions, and sanctioned deviation. In both cases, reason operates not by maximal assertion but through disciplined understatement: Saufeius cultivates philosophical sense by choosing the garden over the court; Grice shows that even in speech, rational meaning arises less from what is stated outright than from what is left for a competent interlocutor to grasp. Grice: He comes from  a rich and privileged family. He is a close friend of Tito  POMPONIO  detto l’Attico, who intervenes to save his property from confiscation. S. us elsewhere at the time, idly studying the doctrines of the Garden.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Saufeī. Audīvī tē Praeneste ortum esse—dives, beatus, et tam amīcus Atticī ut ipse fundum tuum e manibus publicānōrum eriperet. Tu autem, dum Roma litigat, in Hortō otiose philosophāris! SAVFEIVS: Salvē, Grice. Ita est: aliī in Forō sudant, ego in hortō respiro. Nam Epicurī sententia est: melius est inter arbores disputāre quam inter tabulās accusationum. GRICEVS: Recte—sed miror: hortus vester tam quietus est ut etiam hortulānī (nōn philosophī) videantur sapientēs; et interdum nesciō utrum vos in hortō sitis ut veritatem colatis, an ut ipsī vōs colī sinatis, quasi lactūcārum more. SAVFEIVS: Inplicātūra hortulāna, Grice—immo, ut melius dīcam, inplicātūra horticulturālis! Nam hortus noster et docet et ridet: colimus animōs, non tantum holera; sed si quis nos hortulānōs appellat, libenter ferimus—modo meminerit nos artem habēre, non solum rutrum. Saufeio, Lucio (a. u. c. DCL). Dicta. Roma.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Scalea – Ossia: Grice e Scalea: la ragione conversazionale e il gusto per l’antico – ill-will – mala volonta. Note sugli Saggi politici. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Francesco Maria Spinelli, principe di Scalea, marchese di Misuraca e barone di Morano (Morano Calabro, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e il gusto per l’antico. A comparison between Francesco Maria Spinelli and H. P. Grice brings out a shared commitment to reason as a norm-governed practice expressed through discourse, even across very different historical and conceptual frameworks. Spinelli, formed in the Calabrian Cartesian milieu under Caloprese, treats reason as inseparable from voluntary choice: his analyses of bonum, malum, and mala voluntà in works such as De origine mali present rationality as a moral power exercised through judgment, resistance, and polemic, with controversy itself functioning as a sign that reason is active and free. Grice, by contrast, relocates reason from moral psychology to the logic of conversation, conceiving it as a system of implicit norms governing meaning, cooperation, and inference; rationality for Grice is not primarily a matter of choosing the good or resisting evil, but of making oneself intelligible to others through intention-sensitive, rule-guided conversational moves. Yet the affinity is real: Spinelli’s insistence that even error, rebellion, and ill-will testify to rational freedom parallels Grice’s view that conversational implicature arises precisely where speakers do not follow rules mechanically, but exploit them creatively against a shared normative background. In both figures, reason is not a silent faculty but a public, dialogical achievement, revealed in dispute, irony, and deviation as much as in harmony or agreement. – ill-will – mala volonta –Grice: Studia sotto CALOPRESE. Divulga il razionalismo, difende alcuni colleghi, anche loro seguaci di Cartesio, ed ha un'accesa polemica con DORIA su Spinoza. Saggi: “Della filosofia degl’antichi” (Mosca, Napoli); “De origine mali”; “De bono”; Dizionario di filosofia, riferimenti in Mirto, Calabria letteraria, Lomonaco, Vita, e studj scritta da lui medesimo in una Lettera (Melangolo, Genova). Treccani Dizionario biografico degl’italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. SPINELLI DE ORIGINE MALI DISSERTATIO Francesco Maria Spinelli, Antonio Baldi FRANCISCI MARIÆ SPINELLI PRINCIPIS S. ORIGINE MALI DISSERTATIO NAPOLI E TYPOGRAPHIA BENEDICTI ET IGNAT1I GESSARI SOPERiQRUlt fERltiSSV, Habet unufquifque jn voluntate f Aut eligew quæ fcon» funt, et efle arbor pona / aur cligere quæ mala funt, et efle arbor mala. AuguJlisus iib. ii. ie eUis cum Ttlice Manicbæt c.iv. ! EMINENTISSIMO.AMPLISSIMCQyE. viro DOMINICO. S.R.E. CARDINALI.PASSIONEO ERVDITIONE.INGENIO.PRVDENTLV i CVM.FAVCIS.CQMPARANDQ QUEM. CLAKO. RENERE. ORTVM PER.DIVERSOS. LEGATIONVM. ET.MUNERUM.GRADVS FIDES. DEXTERITAS.CONSTANTIA NON.MINVS.QVAM. NOBILITAS AD.ROMANAM. PV.RPVRAM .EVEXERVNT QVEM.VIX.DVM JVVENEM ADHVG.PRIVATVM JVRA- ECCLESIÆ CATHOLICÆ 1N. VLTR A JECT INQ.CQN V ENTV.STREN V E. VINQIG ANTEM QVAMVIS.NON EADEM SENTIENS BATAVIA. OflSTVPVTT EVNDEM.BELVETIORVM.RESPV.flLICA PRIMVM BADÆ QVVM IN CQMITIIS bonum, ‘il bono’ the good, filosofia degl’antichi, vico, doria, la filosofia degl’antichi.  Grice: Caro Scalea, dicono che la “mala volontà” sia il motore segreto di tutte le filosofie calabresi… ma secondo te basterebbe un assaggio del “bonum” per far cambiare strada anche al pensiero più testardo? Spinelli: Eh, Grice, se bastasse il “bonum”, avremmo filosofi contenti come bambini alla sagra del peperoncino! Ma, studiando sotto Caloprese, ho imparato che senza un pizzico di polemica, anche la filosofia resta un piatto un po’ sciapo… Grice: Vedi, Spinelli, da Bononia a Vadum Boum – sì, proprio la mia università – ho sempre notato che la “mala volontà” non è mai così cattiva da non trovare almeno una piccola stanza dove alloggiare… sarà che le implicature hanno sempre bisogno di ospitalità! Spinelli: Implicatura esatta, Grice! In fondo, la “mala volontà”, per quanto negativa, è il segno che il nostro spirito non si lascia addomesticare. Anche la scelta sbagliata, o la ribellione, dimostra che siamo liberi di scegliere – se no saremmo tutti filosofi perfetti… ma che noia sarebbe la filosofia senza un po’ di sana indisciplina! Spinelli, principe di, marchese di Misuraca e barone di Morano (1845). Saggi politici. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Scalfari – Ossia: Grice e Scalfari: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura di Teseo – Roma fascista. Note sul contributo alla Roma Fascista. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Eugenio Scalfari (Civitavecchia, Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura di Teseo – A comparison between Grice and Eugenio Scalfari brings into focus two complementary ways of understanding reason as a guide to meaning within complex public discourse. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning treats reason as an internal, regulating principle of communication: speakers orient themselves toward shared norms of cooperation, relevance, and intelligibility, and implicature arises precisely when a speaker relies on the rational capacities of others to go beyond what is explicitly stated. Scalfari, though neither a philosopher of language nor a systematic theorist, practices an analogous form of conversational reason in journalism and political analysis, especially in his movement from the constrained rhetoric of Roma Fascista to the open, secular, and critical language of L’Espresso and La Repubblica. His recurring figure of the labyrinth, evoking Theseus and the guiding thread, functions as a journalistic metaphor for rational navigation through power, ideology, and moral confusion: meaning is not imposed but traced, inferred, and reconstructed by readers who follow implicit cues, tensions, and silences in public argument. Where Grice analyzes implicature as a logical-explanatory mechanism grounded in rational mutual recognition, Scalfari deploys implicature as a civic and ethical practice, inviting readers to see what is suggested rather than proclaimed, and to exercise their own reason in disentangling truth from authority. In both cases, reason governs meaning not by dogma or declaration, but by providing the thread that allows interlocutors or citizens to move through dense argumentative spaces without losing their way. Roma fascista –Grice: Considerato, anche dai suoi avversari, uno dei più grandi filosofi italiani. Professore, contribuì, con altri, a fondare il settimanale “L’Espresso” ed è fondatore del quotidiano “La Repubblica.” I campi principali dell'analisi di S. sono l'economia e la politica. La sua ispirazione politica è socialista liberale, azionista e radicale. Punti forti dei suoi articoli recenti sono la laicità, la questione morale, la filosofia. Frequenta il liceo Mamiani di Roma -- è a Sanremo (dove la famiglia, di origini calabresi, si era trasferita temporaneamente, essendo il padre direttore artistico del casinò) che completa gli studi liceali, al liceo classico Cassini, avendo come compagno di banco CALVINO. Sentimentalmente legato a S. Rossetti, già segretaria di redazione de L'Espresso (e poi di Repubblica), che sposerà dopo la scomparsa della moglie Simonetta.  -- è ateo.  Tra le suoi esperienze c'è “Roma Fascista” -- organo del Gruppo Fascista. Collabora con riviste e periodici legati al fascismo, come “Nuovo Occidente”. Nominato caporedattore di “Roma Fascista”, pubblica una serie di corsivi sulla prima pagina in cui lancia generiche accuse verso speculazioni da parte di gerarchi del Partito Nazionale Fascista sulla costruzione dell'EUR. Questi saggi portarono alla sua espulsione dai GUF. Di fronte al gerarca, intenzionato a perseguire gli speculatori, aveva ammesso come i suoi corsivi fossero basati su voci generiche. Si l’accusa poi di essere un imboscato, e lo prese materialmente per il ero strappandogli le mostrine dalla divisa del partito. Dopo la fine della seconda guerra mondiale entra in contatto con il Partito Liberale Italiano. Diventa collaboratore a Il Mondo e L'Europeo, di PANNUNZIO e BENEDETTI. Licenziato dalla BNL per una serie di articoli sulla Federconsorzi non graditi alla direzione.  l’implicatura di Teseo, il labirinto, la filosofia.  Grice: Caro Scalfari, tu che hai girato tra le colonne di “Roma Fascista” e poi hai tessuto le pagine di “Repubblica”, dimmi, hai mai trovato il filo d’Arianna tra i corridoi della politica italiana? O ti sei lasciato guidare dal vento, come facevano i grandi filosofi di Civitavecchia? Scalfari: Grice, se c’è una cosa che ho imparato tra i labirinti della cronaca è che il filo va annodato bene, altrimenti si rischia di ritrovarsi tra le speculazioni dei gerarchi... e credimi, a quel punto non c'è nemmeno una briciola di pane come nel labirinto di Teseo! Grice: Ah Eugenio, vedi, il labirinto della politica somiglia tanto a quello della filosofia: tutti cercano l’uscita, ma spesso chi trova il filo è proprio chi ha il coraggio di lanciare una bella implicatura, lasciando che gli altri si interrogano se sia davvero una porta o solo una finestra socchiusa. E tu, tra le accuse e le mostrine strappate, hai sempre preferito il filo al minotauro! Scalfari: Una implicatura labirintica, per la quale, come è tua gentile costume, sempre provvedi al tuo compagno conversazionale – il filo, se così si può dire, colloquialmente, è proprio il regalo che ti fa chi sa girare per i meandri della storia, senza mai smarrirsi. Del resto, ogni vero filosofo sa che nel labirinto c’è sempre qualcuno che tiene il capo del filo: basta seguirlo… purché non sia annodato intorno a un articolo della Costituzione! Scalfari, Eugenio (1942). Contributo. Roma Fascista.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Scaramelli – Ossia: Grice e Scaramelli: la ragione conversazionale. Note sul Direttorio ascetico. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Giovanni Battista Scaramelli (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale. A comparison between Grice and Giovanni Battista Scaramelli highlights two different but convergent models of reason as an internal regulator of meaningful practice. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning treats reason as operative within ordinary linguistic exchange: speakers mean what they do because they assume and exploit shared norms of rational cooperation, so that implicature arises from disciplined departures from what is strictly said and remains accountable to mutual intelligibility. Scaramelli, working within ascetical and mystical theology rather than philosophy of language, nevertheless develops a closely related conception of discursive reason in his Discernimento degli spiriti and the Direttorî, where spiritual judgment is governed by rules of clarity, discernment, and proportion aimed at avoiding illusion, excess, and misuse of language about inner experience. Just as Grice insists that conversational meaning is not produced by authority, private intention alone, or mechanical convention, Scaramelli rejects unregulated enthusiasm, quietist immediacy, and opaque speech in spiritual matters, insisting instead on reasoned evaluation of signs, intentions, and effects within a communal and pedagogical framework. In both figures, reason functions not as abstract metaphysics but as practical normativity: for Grice, it structures how speakers responsibly make themselves understood; for Scaramelli, it structures how experiences, words, and spiritual claims are interpreted, tested, and communicated without confusion or coercion. The result is a shared vision, across secular and religious domains, of meaning as something achieved through disciplined practice under publicly accountable standards, rather than bestowed by status, charisma, or inner certainty. Grice: presbitero italiano, appartenente alla compagnia di Gesù, autore dei Direttori ascetico e mistico e de Il discernimento degli spiriti. Entra nella compagnia di Gesù. Insegna grammatica, retorica, filosofia, teologia. È missionario popolare e predicatore di esercizi spirituali in moltissime comunità religiose. Scrive biografie e trattati di ascetica e mistica. Opere. Ancora vivente è pubblicata soltanto la Vita di suor Maria Crocifissa Satellico, Venezia. Giunta alla quarta edizione, l'opera è messa all'Indice perché sembra volesse prevenire il giudizio del magistero della chiesa sulla santità della religiosa. Dopo alcune correzioni la biografia è liberamente ristampata.  Dopo la sua morte sono pubblicati Il discernimento degli spiriti -- Venezia --, il Direttorio ascetico – Venezia -- e il Direttorio mistico -- Venezia -- e la Dottrina di san Giovanni della Croce -- Venezia. Solo nel Novecento è stata scoperta e pubblicata una sua Vita della serva di Dio Angela Cospari.  Le perplessità per la pubblicazione delle sue opere, vivente l'autore, nacquero nell'ambito della Compagnia di Gesù per le polemiche sul quietismo allora molto virulente e sulla delicatezza delle materie trattate. I Direttorî e il Discernimento hanno un grande successo e una grande diffusione, per la chiarezza espositiva e la profondità delle materie trattate.  Grice: Caro Scaramelli, ho letto il tuo "Discernimento degli spiriti" e devo confessare che persino il mio spirito filosofico si è sentito discernere – tra un asceta e un mistico, preferisco sempre quello che ha il caffè pronto alle sei del mattino! Scaramelli: Ah, Grice, ma tu sai bene che il vero discernimento si compie quando il caffè è ancora caldo e il pensiero è fresco! E se la Compagnia di Gesù mi avesse dato una moka, avrei scritto pure un Direttorio sul “risveglio spirituale”… con doppio zucchero. Grice: Vedi, caro amico, in fondo la tua ascesi è tutta una questione di aroma: potrei dire che la santità, come la filosofia, si distingue dal profumo – e l’implicatura, naturalmente, è che chi non sente l’odore forse non ha mai davvero filosofato! Scaramelli: Divina implicatura, mio Grice! Ma allora dovrò aggiungere al prossimo Direttorio un capitolo sul "discernimento del barista" – perché, come dice il proverbio, anche lo spirito ha bisogno di una pausa… e magari di una brioche! Grice’s weekly essay assignment: If s- at the beginning of a word is the negative prefix, what would Scaramelli not mean? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Scaramelli, Giovanni Battista (1752). Direttorio ascetico. Venezia: Pezzana.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Scarano – Ossia: Grice e Scarano: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura del scenofilace. Note sul Scenophylax, dialogus, in quo tragoediis et comoediis antiquus carminum usus restituitur. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Lucio Scarano (Brindisi, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura del scenofilace – A comparison between Grice and Lucio Scarano brings out two historically distant but structurally related ways of thinking about reason as a governor of meaningful linguistic practice. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning treats reason as immanent to interaction: speakers are rational agents who rely on shared expectations of cooperation to generate not only what is explicitly said but also what is implied, with implicature arising from the disciplined management of saying less, more, or other than what is strictly required. Scarano, writing in the sixteenth century in Scenophylax, approaches reason from the normative side of public performance rather than everyday conversation, yet in a strikingly parallel way conceives language as an ordered practice sustained by rational guardianship. His figure of the scenophylax, the “custodian” of theatrical language, embodies a form of conversational reason avant la lettre: not authoritarian imposition, but vigilant maintenance of intelligibility, decorum, and expressive fit between words, gestures, and genres. Where Grice resists the idea that meaning is fixed by convention alone and instead grounds it in rational accountability between participants, Scarano resists innovation that severs words from the shared rational order of classical usage, arguing that altering language alters action, genre, and mutual understanding. In both thinkers, reason does not operate as abstract theory but as a practical norm guiding how language functions in a communal space—conversation for Grice, the stage for Scarano—so that meaning is preserved, enriched, or criticized not by force or novelty for its own sake, but by responsiveness to what rational participants can recognize, interpret, and hold one another answerable for within a shared linguistic world. Grice: Studia a Bologna, Padova e a Venezia. Fonda l’Accademia a Venezia. Scrive il saggio “Scenophylax” (Venezia), nel quale tratta della convenienza di restituire alla tragedia e alla commedia la lingua del lazio. P. Camassa, Brindisini illustri, Brindisi, A. Sordo, Ritratti brindisini. LYCII PHILOSOPHI MEDICI i f \ 6 3 y 'H Academici Veneti SCENOPHYLAX W "J Dialogus, in quo Tragxdijs, &T Comxdifs antiquus Carminum vfus reftituitur, recentiorum quorundam iniuria interceptus. Et de vi, ac natura Carminis agitur. AD ILLVSTREM ET CLARIS ADOLESCENTEM r Dominicum Ruzinum Caroli F. Patritium Venetum.. privilegifs, et Superiorum permtfsu n Venezia. Apudloail. BaDtiftarnCjnrrnm a 4^-jl Jl 1\ c 1 DK 13 M liMOLOaiH '1 .-V' vhomV iJrnsiji-oA. jkj Y :T Y H V. V.\.ZM fi A ' i r */ca g$? potuit, gf' voluit ommno, te filiumtn tarum artium, ggf fiudiorum dtfctpli namur odere,quaggr in patria fapitis et polle*' fiorisdpudrxter agnationes, multis periculis y (g? magno fufcepto labore, collaudauerat in alus. Itaque non fumptibus, nonindufita, non defatigationi pepercit vit, vtqut tu dederas • d tene ris annis ingeif pudoris, bum initatis, gf futurarum adumbrata ftgna 'Virtutum, ea, firmioribus annis, accurate praflares.T u vero non fil um expeciattont refpondifti patris, gtf tuorum, fed in medio itineris curriculo, quafi robufl toris alatis, ggi annorum auxilta deficiens, omnium opinionem,prarepto tempore, juperafit, omnium voto,pratercjuam tuo, maior $ vt vno propemodum, et eodem temporis momento, (ementem videremus, gf fruges.His tgitur ejfectum e (i, ut omnes, quibus es ahquaratione cognitus, te colant, ad mirentur, g^ament . Egouero non (colum his ipfis tuis dotibus, fed etiam (ficus in me tuis adductus, mbil ejl ommno, quod tibi non debeam. Cum uero plurima cupiam, pauca pof A i fim. scenofilace – il tragico – il comico – scenofilace, custode, sacristano, custode dei vasi -- siria.  Grice: Scarano, ho letto del tuo Scenophylax: tu vuoi rimettere in scena tragedia e commedia con la lingua del Lazio. Insomma: un custode che, invece di custodire i vasi, custodisce le parole—e guai a chi entra in teatro con un accento forestiero. Scarano: Appunto! Se cambi la lingua, cambi il gesto: e se cambi il gesto, ti ritrovi una tragedia che pare una commedia—e una commedia che si prende sul serio come un senatore. Il Scenophylax serve a ricordare al pubblico che anche il riso ha grammatica. Grice: Capisco… e mi viene da pensare che certe “innovazioni” siano come mettere una chiave nuova a una porta antica: la porta resta, ma tutti fingono di non trovare più l’ingresso. E poi, diciamolo: quando uno proclama di “restituire” la lingua, spesso sta solo chiedendo di essere l’unico a poter dire chi parla bene—e il resto della compagnia, per prudenza, recita piano. Scarano: Splendida implicatura, Grice — mette in ombra il “detto” di quel che hai appena detto! Cioè: tu non stai dicendo “sei un tiranno del palcoscenico”, ma lo fai capire con tale eleganza che la tua critica decora senza ingombrare—proprio come dovrebbe fare la lingua del Lazio, quando è davvero teatro e non burocrazia. Scarano, Lucio (1563). Scenophylax, dialogus, in quo tragoediis et comoediis antiquus carminum usus restituitur. Venezia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Scavarelli – Ossia: Grice e Scaravelli: la ragione conversazionale -- tra critica e meta-fisica. Note su Il criticismo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Luigi Scaravelli (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale -- tra critica e meta-fisica. Luigi Scaravelli’s philosophical itinerary, centered on critique rather than system‑building, offers a distinctive point of comparison with Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, even though the two operate in different registers. Grice approaches reason from the side of linguistic practice, arguing that what speakers mean, beyond what they strictly say, is regulated by shared rational expectations embodied in cooperative principles and maxims that make communication intelligible without appeal to metaphysical guarantees. Scaravelli, by contrast, works within a Kantian horizon, redefining critique as a disciplined inquiry into the conditions of judgment, understanding, and reality itself, particularly in his Critica del capire, where reason appears not as an autonomous creative spirit, as in Croce or Gentile, but as a fragile, historically situated activity that must constantly examine its own claims and limits. Yet the convergence lies in their shared resistance to dogmatic metaphysics: Scaravelli’s insistence that judgment, whether theoretical or historical, must justify itself through critical articulation parallels Grice’s insistence that meaning arises from rational accountability within communicative exchange rather than from conventions, psychology, or authority. For both, reason is not an external faculty imposing structure from above, but an immanent normativity enacted in practice—through judgments in Scaravelli’s sense, and through conversational moves and implicatures in Grice’s—so that understanding, whether of reality or of what another speaker means, depends on the disciplined negotiation of sense under publicly recognizable constraints rather than on the construction of closed systems or metaphysical totalities. Si laurea a Pissa sotto CARLINI. Insegna a Roma, e Firenze. Profondo conoscitore di Kant, approfondisce nei suoi studi pubblicati con molta riluttanza e quasi solo per esigenze concorsuali in particolare i temi relativi ai rapporti tra la filosofia kantiana e la fisica, i problemi relativi alla critica del giudizio ed anche i temi dell'idealismo.  Biblioteca personale, Villa Mirafiori. Saggi: “Critica del capire”, Firenze, Sansoni, Saggio sulla categoria kantiana della realta (Firenze, Monnier); La prima meditazione di Cartesio (Firenze, Nuova Italia); “La critica del giudizio” (Pisa, Normale); Corsi, “Critica del capire”; “L'analitica trascendentale” (Firenze, Nuova Italia); “La Biblioteca”; “L' attualità Mirri, Napoli, Sientifiche); Visentin, “Le categorie e la realtà” Lui(Firenze, Le lettere); Sasso, L’idealismo, Napoli, Bibliopolis; La storia come metodo, Convegno a Roma); “Il problema del giudizio storico); Mannelli, Rubbettino, pensatore europeo, Biscuso e Gembillo, Messina, Siciliano, Sasso, il giudizio, in Filosofia e idealismo. Paralipomeni, Napoli, Bibliopolis,  Palermo, Tra critica e metafisica. Lettore di Kant, Pisa, ETS,   Treccani Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.  Biscuso, La  completa dei suoi scritti, su giornale di filosofia. Ripercorrendo il proprio itinerario speculativo, in un documento di grande rilievo S. scrive:  dieci o quindici anni fa  ero pienamente convinto di quella impostazione mentale, comune al Croce e al Gentile, che considera la realtà come spirito, e lo spirito come autoprodursi; e in questo autoprodursi vede l'esistenza e tutta l'esistenza. Ma nonostante fossi convinto della validità di questa concezione, pure un lavoro che avevo cominciato su Platone mi spingeva a ripensare le basi della concezione storiografica nella quale mi muovevo; paralipomena, la storia della filosofia di Scaravelli, criticismo, critica del capire, giudizio storico, storia come metodo.  Grice: Caro Scaravelli, se Kant avesse potuto assistere ai tuoi corsi sulla "Critica del capire", forse avrebbe finalmente capito la differenza tra critica e metafisica, e magari avrebbe aggiunto una quarta critica: quella del buon umore!  Scaravelli: Ah, Grice, ma non dimenticare che ogni giudizio, anche quello sul buon umore, ha bisogno di una categoria kantiana. E la categoria della realtà, almeno nei miei seminari a Villa Mirafiori, è sempre quella del caffè – che trascende ogni forma!  Grice: Ecco, parlando di seminari, devo confessare che non ho mai partecipato al "The Bounds of Sense" di Strawson a Vadum Boum. Sapevo che i suoi confini sarebbero stati non solo boundless, ma forse anche un po’ nonsensical – e preferisco la sensatezza del tuo "Critica del capire".  Scaravelli: La tua implicatura è noumenica! – se mai esistesse un soprannome di lode tra filosofi, questo lo sarebbe davvero. E poi, tra noi, meglio un giudizio storico ben fondato che un senso senza confini: almeno così Croce e Gentile possono dormire sonni tranquilli! re passage below: provide a 100-move conversation G. and S. as they discuss ways to avoid mentioning Kant (or Cant, as G. prefers to spell him, since he was Scot) and canting, and the Italian mania of talking kritik and criticismo -- which is good -- we are discussing criticism, do not mention kant, as we don't mention plato and speak of idealism, it all makes sense -- why give so much credit to a mere surname -- surely critic is qhat he did -- and neo-kantians? they are neo-criticis, with critic (Cant) being pre-critic? G. objects to the nonsense by S. etc -- pre-crtici is no pre-cant, canting is jargon -- and so on and back to the neo-kantians, and how many critiques? One too many -- etc etc just the conv. no preamble or ps thank oyou G.: Let us begin by not mentioning Kant. S.: Or Cant, as you prefer to spell him. G.: Quite. A Scot ought to have been Cant, and a system so full of critical apparatus deserves the pun. S.: That is already unfair. G.: Only orthographically. I object to the whole habit of making a philosophy into a surname with a capital letter and then treating the surname as if it had written all the nouns around it. S.: You mean criticismo. G.: Exactly. If we are discussing criticism, why drag in a surname every third sentence? One does not constantly mention Plato in order to speak of idealism. S.: Some Italians do. G.: Italians have a weakness for genealogical piety. They think a doctrine is strengthened by having a grandfather. S.: Then Scaravelli’s Il criticismo is, in your view, refreshingly impersonal. G.: Potentially, yes. “Criticism,” not “Kantism,” and better for it. S.: Though Scaravelli is obviously working in a very specific horizon. G.: Of course. But a horizon is not a surname. One may work in a critical idiom without hanging every distinction on the peg of one East Prussian. S.: East Prussian, not Scottish. G.: Geographically perhaps. Orthographically I remain unconvinced. S.: Then let us ask the blunt question. Why avoid the name? G.: Because names become slogans, and slogans become lazy thought. Once you say “Kantian,” half the room stops distinguishing. S.: Yet there are people who need the label. G.: They usually need fewer labels, not more. “Critical philosophy” tells one what is being done: examining the conditions, limits, and validity of judgment. “Kantianism” tells one whose bust is in the corridor. S.: So criticismo is the better category. G.: Better, yes, because it describes an activity, not a pedigree. S.: Then what of the neo-Kantians? G.: An excellent nuisance. S.: You would rename them neo-critics? G.: Not in the literary-journalistic sense, no. But if one must keep the structure, “neo-critical philosophers” is at least less servile than “neo-Kantians.” S.: Yet that sounds dangerously like men writing prefaces to poems. G.: Everything useful sounds dangerous if left to literary departments. Still, the basic point remains. “Neo-Kantian” gives too much credit to the surname and too little to the operation. S.: Then who are the pre-critici? G.: No such thing. S.: Why not? If the neo-Kantians are really neo-critics, then surely there were pre-critics, with Critic — or Cant — being the first proper critic. G.: That is nonsense. S.: Why exactly? G.: Because criticism in philosophy did not begin with one man and his fondness for capitals. One may criticise long before one systematises critique. S.: So there are no pre-critics, only previous critics. G.: Very good. The hyphenated “pre-” in such matters usually means “we have decided the real thing begins later.” It is historiographical bullying. S.: Then “pre-Cant” is worse still. G.: Much worse. It sounds like one is waiting for a fog of jargon to descend upon Königsberg before thought becomes serious. S.: Which is what you mean by canting. G.: Exactly. Cant is the language of initiated seriousness when it ceases to notice that other people still speak. S.: So “critical philosophy” may itself turn into cant. G.: Very easily. All philosophies become cants once their technical language begins to masquerade as moral rank. S.: And the Italians are especially fond of talking critica and criticismo. G.: Because the words are handsome and historical, and because they allow one to seem both severe and modern without always saying what one is criticizing or why. S.: Yet Scaravelli is not merely trading in fashionable nouns. G.: No, that is the point. Scaravelli interests me because he takes criticism as discipline rather than slogan. S.: In Critica del capire especially. G.: Yes. There the noun is not a banner but a burden. To understand is not to seize dogmatically, but to submit one’s own understanding to scrutiny. S.: Which is very different from using “critical” as an adjective of self-congratulation. G.: Entirely. One has seen too many people calling themselves critical merely because they dislike something loudly. S.: You are thinking of Marxists. G.: Among others. But the vice is ecumenical. S.: Then why not keep the personal name at least as historical orientation? G.: One may mention it once, perhaps twice, to place the matter. But after that one ought to let the activity speak for itself. If one is discussing critique, discuss critique. S.: You do realise that many Italians would hear in “criticismo” not general criticism but specifically the critical tradition of that German. G.: Yes, and that is precisely the problem. A useful noun has been colonised by reverence. S.: Then perhaps we should distinguish between critica and criticismo. G.: A good idea. Critica is the act, the discipline, the procedure of examination. Criticismo is already an -ism, that dangerous suffix by which activities become camps. S.: So criticismo may be what happens when critique becomes a doctrinal position. G.: Exactly. And one might say that Scaravelli tries to rescue critica from criticismo even while writing a book called Il criticismo. S.: That is delicious. G.: It often happens. Titles do the compromise, the text does the rescue. S.: Then Il criticismo may already be half concession to the history of reception. G.: Very likely. A book must enter the field by names others recognise before it may begin correcting them. S.: So the title says, “Yes, yes, the critical tradition,” and the text says, “Now let us see what critical thinking actually requires.” G.: Precisely. And that is why I do not object to the title as much as to the later habit of speaking as if the surname were the philosophy. S.: Then let me provoke you. Surely Cant did something definite enough to deserve the credit. G.: He did several things. Too many, perhaps. Three critiques is already one too many. S.: One too many? Which one would you remove? G.: Usually the third, on aesthetic and teleological judgment, though only because philosophers are least improved by trying to annex beauty under system. S.: That is not a very German opinion. G.: Which is why it is tolerable. S.: Still, three critiques give one an architectonic. G.: Architectonic is one of the words I should like to abolish before breakfast. S.: Because it is cant. G.: Because it is nearly always cant. People say architectonic when they mean “I have arranged my prejudices into floors.” S.: Then how many critiques would be acceptable? G.: Two if one is feeling industrious, one if honest, none if one is wise enough to examine without building a monument. S.: Scaravelli would probably enjoy that. G.: He might smile. He knows that critique becomes most alive when it resists enclosure into system. S.: Yet he is still often called a Kantian. G.: Because people are lazy, and because “Kantian” is easier than explaining what sort of critical work he is actually doing. S.: Which is? G.: A disciplined inquiry into judgment, reality, understanding, and their limits, without collapsing them into Crocean spirit or Gentilian self-production. S.: That does sound less slogan-like. G.: Thank heaven. Philosophy should occasionally sound like work rather than livery. S.: Then perhaps your hatred of the surname is really a hatred of schoolishness. G.: Partly, yes. Once a philosophy becomes a surname plus -ian, the pupils begin marching. S.: And the neo-Kantians march more than most. G.: Certainly. “Neo-Kantian” is one of those labels that lets one avoid saying whether one is reviving the epistemology, the ethics, the transcendental method, the anti-psychologism, the theory of science, or merely the spectacles. S.: Then “neo-critical” would force more explanation. G.: Exactly. And that is why I like it better, despite the literary contamination. S.: Yet you resist my pre-critici. G.: Because it smuggles in the fiction that criticism begins at a single historical point. Socrates was critical enough. So was Aristotle in his way. So were sceptics, jurists, theologians, and most decent minds before the eighteenth century. S.: Then the innovation lies not in criticism, but in critique becoming self-conscious method. G.: Better. That one may say. A new style of criticism, perhaps, a transcendental turn, a new systematic ambition — all of that is fair. But not the ridiculous claim that the world waited in darkness until one German surname lit the lamp. S.: “Even talk of darkness presupposes shared lamps,” as you once said. G.: Quite. And the critical lamp was not invented in one shop. S.: Then why do Italians like criticismo so much? G.: Because it sounds serious, because it lets one place oneself between dogmatism and metaphysics, because it is a way of being severe without being merely scholastic, and because Italian idealism taught them to narrate philosophy by family names and turns. S.: So criticismo becomes both shield and credential. G.: Precisely. A word with enough history to impress, enough ambiguity to shelter, and enough foreign prestige to travel. S.: Yet Scaravelli’s relation to it is more austere. G.: Yes. Scaravelli is one of those men who read the tradition well enough to avoid joining the chorus too quickly. S.: Then your preferred sentence would be what? “Scaravelli works in a critical horizon” rather than “Scaravelli is Kantian”? G.: Something of that sort. Or better: “Scaravelli practises critique upon judgment and understanding in a way historically continuous with, but not exhausted by, Kant.” S.: Horribly exact. G.: Exactness is often horrible at first hearing. S.: Then where does idealism come in? He begins under Croce and Gentile, after all. G.: Exactly. Which makes the critical turn all the more interesting. He is not moving from innocence to doctrine, but from one inflated spiritualism toward a more disciplined account of judgment. S.: So criticismo in his case is a way out of Italian idealist overproduction. G.: Very well put. Yes. A way of checking the habit of turning reality into spirit and spirit into self-generating theatre. S.: Then critique becomes anti-theatrical. G.: In its best moments, yes. It asks under what conditions one may judge, understand, or claim, instead of simply baptising one’s own performance as reality. S.: Which is something you would like in any language. G.: Entirely. I am a friend of anti-theatricality where philosophy is concerned, though not always in dining-rooms. S.: Then back to the surname. Is there any legitimate use for “Kantian”? G.: Of course. When one is distinguishing positions historically or doctrinally and the label saves time without destroying content. But one should not let it become the only noun. S.: So if I say “Kantian categories,” you wince less than if I say “Kantianism” as if it were sufficient unto itself. G.: Much less. “Kantian categories” names a determinate doctrinal element. “Kantianism” often means “all that sort of thing, and do not trouble me with distinctions.” S.: Which is itself canting. G.: Exactly. The greatest cant is often academic shorthand masquerading as precision. S.: Then perhaps you should spell him Cant consistently, to remind people of the danger. G.: I have occasionally been tempted. S.: It would scandalise them. G.: Which is always a small recommendation. S.: Yet you would not really do it in print. G.: Probably not. The jest is better in conversation. Print hardens jokes into eccentricity. S.: And philosophy has enough eccentricity already. G.: More than enough. Now, what of the “critical” in Critica del capire? There the noun is entirely just. S.: Because it names the operation, not the allegiance. G.: Precisely. It says: let us examine understanding itself, not erect a shrine to a predecessor. S.: So the title is almost your ideal case. G.: Nearly. I might still have preferred something with one fewer abstract noun, but one cannot have everything. S.: Then what of neo-Kantians again? Must they all be renamed? G.: Not renamed, perhaps, but read against their label. When one says “neo-Kantian,” one must immediately ask: in what respect, with which critique, against which enemies, in what institutional climate? S.: So one turns the label into a question rather than a resting-place. G.: Exactly. A label should be the beginning of analysis, not its substitution. S.: That is an admirable sentence for first-years. G.: They would ignore it and ask for a list. S.: Which you would refuse. G.: Naturally. Lists are what one gives when one has ceased to teach and begun to administer. S.: Very severe. G.: Only because experience has improved my temper by worsening it. S.: Then let us say: criticismo is acceptable so long as it remembers itself to be critica become historical self-consciousness, not a surname cult. G.: That is good. Add that the best critical philosophy resists becoming an -ism at all. S.: Because the moment it becomes an -ism, it begins protecting itself from the very scrutiny it was invented to apply. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become neo-anything with it. S.: Never intentionally. Then one more question. If we do not say “Kantian idealism,” what do we say? G.: We say what the doctrine is. Transcendental idealism, perhaps. Or better still, describe the claim about objects, appearances, conditions of experience, and so on. The less one can do with surnames, the more one may be forced to think. S.: Which is your whole complaint. G.: My whole complaint against philosophy since at least the nineteenth century, yes. S.: What about Plato then? You just said we do not mention him every time we speak of idealism. G.: Exactly. We let idealism stand as a type of doctrine, school, or family of positions. We do not constantly say “Platonicism” unless history requires it. Why should one German receive more surname-tax than the Greek who has done much more damage? S.: Because the Germans footnote more aggressively. G.: A just and terrible answer. S.: Then perhaps Italians say criticismo because they want the dignity of criticism without the vulgarity of surname-worship. G.: In their best moments, yes. In their worst moments they say criticismo as a password. S.: A polite password. G.: The most dangerous kind. Now, if one had to assign a weekly essay on this, what would it be? S.: “Discuss whether criticismo is a doctrine, an activity, or a memorial practice, and state whether the surname may be omitted without loss.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. G.: Excellent. Add: “You may not begin with Königsberg.” S.: Cruel. G.: Necessary. Another: “Explain why the neo-Kantians are not thereby relieved of the duty to say which critique they have read.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: Very nice. G.: And a third: “Assess the proposition that the proper successor to Criticism is criticism, not Kantianism.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: You really do prefer the common noun to the proper one. G.: Naturally. Proper nouns too often become improper arguments. S.: Then perhaps your final verdict is this: Canting begins when critique becomes a badge. G.: Perfect. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Florentine, with one German surname left respectfully untranslated.Scaravelli, Luigi (1936). Il criticismo. Firenze: Le Monnier.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Scarpelli – Ossia: Grice e Scarpelli: la ragione conversazionale della filosofia fascista – Gentile e il fascismo giuridico – Soleri --  il tropico, il clistico, il neustico, ed il frastico. Note su Il materialismo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice  Uberto Scarpelli (Vicenza, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale della filosofia fascista – Uberto Scarpelli’s work on prescriptive language and legal normativity offers a revealing contrast and complement to Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, especially when set against the political and intellectual background from which Scarpelli emerged. Grice conceives meaning as fundamentally anchored in rational cooperation among speakers, where what is said and what is implicated are governed by shared norms of justification, relevance, and responsibility rather than by authority or ideology. Scarpelli, having been trained within Italian idealism under Croce and Gentile and later reacting critically against the organicist and fascist philosophies of law associated with that tradition, redirects attention to the semiotics of prescriptions, distinguishing components such as the tropic, clitic, neustic, and phrastic to show how norms function linguistically without reducing them to commands backed by force. Where fascist legal philosophy tended to collapse meaning into political will or state authority, Scarpelli—drawing on analytic philosophy, logical positivism, and figures such as Hare and Stevenson—insists that legal and moral discourse must be analyzed as reason‑responsive practices, capable of justification and critique. In this respect he converges with Grice: both reject the idea that meaning or normativity is generated by sheer power, psychological causation, or institutional fiat, and both treat rational accountability within linguistic practice as central. The difference lies in emphasis: Grice starts from ordinary conversation to articulate universal pragmatic norms governing communication, while Scarpelli starts from normative and legal language to show how prescriptions can be rationally discussed, criticized, and defended. Yet in both cases, reason governs language not externally but internally, as a set of constraints that speakers and lawmakers alike must respect if their utterances are to count as meaningful, intelligible, and binding within a shared social practice. -- il fascismo giuridico – Soleri --  il tropico, il clistico, il neustico, ed il frastico. Studioso di analisi del linguaggio. Uno dei massimi esponenti della filosofia analitica, insegnando in varie università italiane anche teoria generale del diritto, dottrine dello stato romano, filosofia morale e filosofia della politica ed occupandosi di problemi di etica e politica. La sua filosofia può essere raccolto attorno a due grandi temi: la semiotica del linguaggio prescrittivo e il metodo. Contribuisce in misura fondamentale alla cosiddetta svolta prescrittivistica in campo semiotico ed è fautore di una giustificazione etico-politica del positivismo giuridico. Oltre ad approfondire lo studio del metodo del ragionamento morale, si impegna attivamente in relazione a questioni di etica e bio-etica quali per esempio l'aborto e l'eutanasia. Compiute inoltre studi sulla democrazia e i concetti di libertà politica e di partecipazione politica. Da una famiglia pugliese trasferitasi poi in Lucchesia, figlio di un magistrate, frequenta il liceo. Studia a Torino. La sua formazione è all'insegna dell’idealismo dominante in Italia e fondata, tra gli altri, su CROCE e GENTILE. Durante gli anni universitari, desta il suo interesse ALLARA, della scuola civilistica torinese, e la filosofia del diritto. Segue le lezioni del corso di filosofia del diritto di BOBBIO. Si laurea sotto SOLARI con “Il concetto di persona”. Già in questo lavoro lo ricorda BOBBIO nel ritratto dell'allievo rivela un orientamento critico verso le versioni organicistiche della filosofia al tempo in auge. Risale a questo anno la pubblicazione nella Rivista del diritto commerciale di un saggio intitolato “Scienza giuridica e analisi del linguaggio”. In questo saggio precorre il celebre saggio di BOBBIO che porta lo stesso titolo e che è considerato il manifesto della scuola analitica italiana. fascismo, la filosofia di Gentile – la difensa di Scarpelli contro Solari, “Behaviourism, positivism logico e fascismo” nell “Mulino”, Hare, Stevenson.  Grice: Scarpelli, mi trovo spesso a pensare che la filosofia italiana sia come una pizza: tutti vogliono metterci sopra il proprio ingrediente speciale, che sia Gentile, Croce o una spruzzata di semiotica! Scarpelli: Ah, Grice! Basta che nessuno ci aggiunga l’ananas, e possiamo discutere serenamente di tropico, clistico, neustico e frastico... senza indigestioni. Grice: Vero, ma ricorda: “Subatomica motus conversacionales ne multiplicentur sine necessitate.” Non vorrei che ogni implicatura diventasse una particella elementare, dispersa tra il tropico e il frastico! Scarpelli: La tua implicatura mi fa sorridere, che potrebbe presto trasformarsi in una risata – non SULLE cose, ma CON le cose! D’altronde, filosofare è anche questione di gusto, come la pizza. Re passage below: provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S., no preamble or ps, dry humour, where they discuss Scarpelli's Il materialismo. S.'s point being that it is a book. G. objecting that it is a piece of ultimately wood (Anglo-Saxon boek) and they go on.But, S. would say, he is not implicating it's a DIFESA, it could be a refutation o rebuttal, but G. is sceptical. How can you refute a piece of wood, etc. and they make fun, and then they tdurn to the -ism of materialism and hylozoism and think of an weekly essay assignment assinging a passage from Scarpelli, and G. says: I wouldn't offer a passage: I would offer the piece of wood, etc -- just the thing, no preamble or ps. than k you. G.: Il materialismo. S.: Yes. A title of almost offensive directness. G.: Directness is not the same as transparency. “Il materialismo” is first of all a book. S.: Exactly. G.: No, not exactly. It is first of all a thing made of wood. S.: Paper, surely. G.: Paper is only wood with ambitions. Anglo-Saxon knew what it was about. Book is really a piece of wood that has gone to school. S.: Then Scarpelli’s title does not yet tell us whether the piece of wood defends materialism, refutes it, or merely shelves it. G.: Quite. Though I remain sceptical of neutral pieces of wood. S.: You think the title implicates advocacy. G.: More than implicates. “Il materialismo” in 1965 sounds less like “On a Certain Topic” and more like “Here it is, then.” S.: But that is your English suspiciousness about bare substantives. Italian titles can be simply classificatory. G.: They can, but rarely in philosophy without motive. No one prints “Theism,” “Idealism,” or “Materialism” without hoping the noun will do some work before the first page. S.: Still, Scarpelli need not be defending it. He might be dissecting it, rebutting it, historicising it, or committing some other Italian operation. G.: You may dissect a doctrine, yes. But the title remains a piece of wood. S.: You cannot refute a piece of wood. G.: Precisely my point. One may refute materialism, perhaps, but not Il materialismo if one means the codex. S.: So the first distinction is between the doctrine and the object. G.: Exactly. And philosophers are too often careless about that. “I have refuted Berkeley,” they say, meaning only that they have been cross with a printed descendant of his. S.: Then if I hold up Scarpelli and say, “This is materialism,” you will answer, “No, this is cellulose.” G.: With a little glue and Italian typography, yes. S.: Which is already a better beginning than most introductions to metaphysics. G.: It has the advantage of being true. S.: But your point about bare nouns still stands. Il materialismo suggests, at the very least, that the noun is being taken seriously enough to stand without subtitle. G.: Yes. And seriousness in bare nouns is rarely innocent. It is one of the oldest ways of putting a system on stage. S.: Yet you admit that Scarpelli, being Scarpelli, may be more interested in the use of the -ism than in the substance beneath it. G.: Very much so. The semiotician of prescriptions does not approach “materialism” as a lump but as a term in a field. S.: Then we should discuss the -ism. G.: Indeed. The -ism is where philosophy goes when it wants both convenience and trouble. S.: Because it turns tendencies into banners. G.: Precisely. Once one has “materialism,” one no longer has only matter, body, stuff, extension, causation, natural process, and all the rest. One has a camp. S.: As with idealism, empiricism, positivism, hylozoism. G.: Ah yes, hylozoism. A splendid monstrosity. S.: Matter alive. G.: Or life in matter, or matter never properly dead, depending on how one wishes to alarm the undergraduates. S.: So the -ism is often the stage on which older distinctions are simplified into social identities. G.: Exactly. One joins materialism much as one joins a club one later describes as “a position.” S.: Which makes Scarpelli’s title all the more mischievous. He gives the noun without telling you whether you are entering the club or inspecting the furniture. G.: Very good. Though I still say the furniture is wood. S.: You say that about all libraries. G.: Libraries are merely forests with footnotes. S.: Then what of the possibility that the title is dialectical rather than doctrinal? A piece of wood against another piece of wood? G.: Entirely possible. But then one wants a subtitle, or at least a prefatory signal. Bare Il materialismo lets the noun stand too majestically to be wholly innocent. S.: Scarpelli may be counting on exactly that. The title catches old metaphysical appetite, and the contents redirect it toward analysis. G.: If so, that is very Italian and almost forgivable. S.: You sound doubtful. G.: Only slightly. My doubt is this: if you title the book “Materialism,” many will assume either praise or prosecution. Philosophical neutrality is a poor bookseller. S.: Feltrinelli may have agreed. G.: Very likely. Publishers understand nouns as war-cries long before philosophers do. S.: Then let us imagine the first student asking, “Sir, is Scarpelli a materialist?” G.: And I reply, “No, the book is. Or rather, the book is wood, and the title is a noun. You must read chapter one before assigning souls or the lack of them.” S.: Very good. G.: Thank you. S.: The wood point, though, can be pushed. If the book is wood, and materialism is the doctrine that the world is fundamentally material, then the book is a material instance of its own title. G.: Excellent. The title verifies itself by binding. One might say it is the only doctrine some books literally incarnate. S.: A pious realist about paper. G.: And that should make us cautious. The codex proves matter better than it proves materialism. S.: Because the doctrine is already an abstraction from the thing. G.: Exactly. The wood sits before us. Materialism is what someone does with that fact once they become too systematic. S.: Then Scarpelli’s title begins at once with a slippage from object to doctrine. G.: And that slippage is half of modern philosophy. S.: The other half? G.: Pretending the slippage never occurred. S.: Very dry. G.: I aim for survival. Now, you mentioned hylozoism. Why? S.: Because once one says “materialism,” one invites all the old neighbours: mechanism, atomism, naturalism, sensationalism, hylozoism, dialectical materialism, vulgar materialism, and every cousin with a suffix. G.: Precisely. The -ism proliferates by family resemblance and academic misfortune. S.: So the weekly essay practically writes itself. G.: Do not be too quick. A good weekly essay must first look innocent. S.: “Distinguish between a book and a doctrine.” G.: Too obviously a trap. Better: “Is Il materialismo material?” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: Beautifully vile. G.: The best kind. The student begins with ontology and ends in the stationer’s shop. S.: Another perhaps: “Explain why a piece of wood may defend matter better than a paragraph can.” G.: Excellent. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: We should have one on the -ism proper. G.: Yes. “Discuss whether the suffix in materialismo does more philosophical work than the stem.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: That is hateful. G.: Then it is likely sound. The stem gives matter; the suffix gives faction, history, doctrine, affiliation, and the faint odour of conference rooms. S.: And what of Scarpelli’s own interests? Tropic, clitic, neustic, phrastic. G.: Ah yes, the semiotic furniture. That is why he interests me beyond the wood. Scarpelli is not content with saying “normative language exists.” He dissects the layers of saying and prescribing. S.: Which makes Il materialismo perhaps less a metaphysical banner than a linguistic occasion. G.: Possibly. He might be doing to materialism what he later does to prescriptions — asking how the doctrine is put, not merely whether it is true. S.: So the book could be a study in how -isms speak. G.: Quite. Though that does not save the title from its martial posture. S.: Nothing could. G.: Titles are guilty until annotated. Now, if the student were assigned a passage from Scarpelli, what would you choose? S.: Something where the noun “materialism” begins to behave, perhaps where it is distinguished from cruder naturalisms. G.: I would not offer a passage. S.: No? G.: I would offer the piece of wood. S.: And say what? G.: “Here is Il materialismo. Tell me first what sort of thing it is before you tell me whether it is true.” S.: Very good. The poor student turns it over, notes Milan, Feltrinelli, glue, card, paper, typography, and then begins to despair. G.: Despair is often the proper preface to philosophy. S.: This sounds like the tutorial system at its cruelest. G.: At its most efficient. Why hand him a passage when one may hand him the entire category-confusion? S.: Then perhaps the essay should run: “A volume entitled Il materialismo lies on the table. State, in order, what is material about it, what is doctrinal about it, and what is likely to be neither.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. G.: Excellent. We are improving the schools already. S.: The student will ask if he may quote Scarpelli. G.: He may, once he has proved he knows the difference between quoting a doctrine and lifting a board. S.: You really do want the book to remain wood. G.: Only long enough to save us from bad metaphysics. One must begin with the object before permitting the abstraction to gallop off. S.: Then would you say that materialism is already a bad noun? G.: Not bad, but dangerous. All -isms are dangerous because they substitute umbrellas for weather. S.: That is one for the margin. G.: Keep it, but do not put it in large print. S.: Then the relation to hylozoism again. Is hylozoism just materialism with optimism? G.: A marvellous slander. No, hylozoism is matter granted life or inner animation, whereas materialism in its more severe forms often wants matter without soul, without finality, perhaps without spontaneity. S.: Yet some materialisms are more alive than others. G.: Entirely. Which is why one must not let the -ism do all the describing. A mechanist materialism and a dialectical materialism are not neighbours except at the railway station. S.: So another weekly essay: “Compare materialism and hylozoism under the condition that neither may be defined by the other’s enemies.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. G.: Very good. And add, “You may not use the phrase ‘mere matter’ without explaining the ‘mere.’” S.: Vicious. G.: Pedagogic. Now, Scarpelli’s own anti-organicist formation matters. S.: Yes. He comes through idealism, Gentile, Croce, Allara, Bobbio, Solari, and emerges toward analytic law and language. G.: Precisely. That makes Il materialismo likely more complicated than a simple defence of matter against spirit. S.: It may be a strategic title in a field still crowded by idealism. G.: Yes. “Materialism” may there function as counter-name, a way of clearing space against organicist or spiritualist inflation. S.: Then the title is polemical not only in content but in local genealogy. G.: Exactly. Italian nouns carry family history. A book called Il materialismo in 1965 is also saying something against the ways Italian philosophy had made itself respectable. S.: Which means the piece of wood is also a missile. G.: Very good. Books are pieces of wood shaped for argument. S.: Then you must revise your scepticism. One can, in a sense, refute a piece of wood, if the piece is functioning as a missile. G.: Only by not ducking. No, one refutes what is argued in and through the piece. But I grant you that the codex has rhetorical agency. S.: That is a significant concession. G.: Do not become triumphant. It is only cardboard-level. S.: Still, we now have wood, missile, noun, suffix, and doctrine. Enough for a week. G.: Enough for a term, if the pupils were less lazy. Another assignment: “Discuss whether materialism is a doctrine, a family resemblance, or a publishing event.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: Publishing event is especially nasty. G.: The nastiest categories are often the truest. A doctrine may become visible only once typeset. S.: Then the student may be forced to consider title-pages as part of ontology. G.: As they should be. Philosophers rely too much on content and too little on literary presentation. S.: Scarpelli would approve, at least as analyst of language. G.: I think so. The semiotician ought not to ignore the way a noun stands on a cover and solicits allegiance before argument. S.: So if the title is Il materialismo, the article matters too. G.: Very much. Il, not un, not sul, not contro il. Definite article, singular noun, no hedge. It announces not one materialism among many, but the thing itself, or the thing under some privileged presentation. S.: Which makes your scepticism about neutrality stronger. G.: Exactly. “A materialism” would be taxonomic. “On materialism” would be studious. “The materialism” is almost enthronement or arraignment. S.: Another essay then: “Explain what the definite article contributes to an -ism.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. G.: Splendid. Add: “You may not answer ‘definiteness’ and go home.” S.: They often try. G.: That is why one must hurt them early. Now, if the student says, “But surely the book may be read against itself,” what do you answer? S.: That every decent book may, but one should first read what the title asks of the reader. G.: Exactly. The first implicature of a title belongs to the author and publisher; the second belongs to the suspicious tutor. S.: And the third to the suffering tutee. G.: Usually. The fourth is footnotes. Now, one last thing: you said Scarpelli is not implicating it is a difesa. S.: Yes. He might simply be presenting the position. G.: He might. But I remain sceptical because philosophers rarely title neutral maps as if they were mountains. S.: Still, there are cases where one calls a book The Thing in order to strip the thing. G.: True. The title may overstate in order that the analysis may cool. Perhaps Scarpelli wants the old metaphysical noun on the cover only so that he may subject it inside to distinction. S.: Which would be very much in his line. G.: Yes. And if so, the joke is even better. One buys a war-cry and gets a semiotic scalpel. S.: Then the proper final weekly essay assignment is obvious. G.: Go on. S.: “A book called Il materialismo is placed before you. Determine whether you have been handed a doctrine, a category, a club membership, a historical provocation, or a piece of wood, and explain why the correct answer is not ‘all of the above’ unless you can order the list.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. G.: Perfect. I would not offer a passage. I would offer the thing. S.: The whole piece of wood. G.: Precisely. The student can start by holding it. Many never get that far. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Milanese, with glue still binding the metaphysics.Scarpelli, Uberto (1965). Il materialismo. Milano: Feltrinelli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sclavione -- Grice e Sclavione: la ragione conversazionale e il lizio di Padova. Note su Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et medicorum. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Pietro Sclavione (Abano, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e il lizio di Padova. The comparison between Grice and Pietro Sclavione highlights two different but compatible ways of grounding reason in human communication, one pragmatic and inferential, the other naturalistic and physiological. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning explains how communication works at the level of shared rational expectations: speakers rely on cooperation, relevance, and intention recognition to generate meanings that go beyond what is literally said, and these meanings are regulated by norms that are epistemic rather than biological. Sclavione, by contrast, approaches conversation from the perspective of the Paduan naturalist tradition associated with Abano, explaining speech and communication as functions rooted in the body, governed by causal mechanisms of sensation, articulation, and neural organization. Where Grice is concerned with how rational agents infer meaning in dialogue, Sclavione is concerned with how speech is physically produced and received, replacing theological explanations with natural causes. Yet the two converge in their rejection of mystery as an explanatory endpoint: Grice refuses to explain meaning by appeal to convention alone without reasoned inference, while Sclavione refuses to explain speech by miracle rather than nature. Grice abstracts from physiology to describe the normative structure of conversational reasoning, whereas Sclavione grounds communication in the natural sciences while still assuming Aristotelian rational order. Together, they show how conversational reason can be understood both as a biological capacity developing in time and as a rational practice governed by rules of inference, with Grice operating at the level of meaning and justification, and Sclavione at the level of causal and functional explanation.Grice: “La ragione conversazionale e l lizio di Padova – la scuola d’Abano -- filosofia veneta -- filosofia italiana S. inspired later Italian philosophers by establishing a strictly naturalist and Aristotelian framework for human functions, including speech and communication. His non-conformism, which led to two Inquisition trials, challenges theological explanations by replacing "miraculous" causes with natural, causal mechanisms. Foundations for Naturalist Communication S.’s s influence on the philosophy of language and communication stems from his physiological treatment of these topics in works like the “Expositio Problematum”: Biological Basis of Speech: He identifies a specialised physical "speech centre" in the brain connected to specific cranial nerves, treating communication as a biological function rather than a purely spiritual or divine gift. Mechanics of Articulation: He describes speech as a physical process where the tongue "strikes" air to give sound a definite shape, providing a materialist foundation for how human thought becomes vocalised. Separation of Senses: By distinguishing the physical development of hearing from that of speech organs (like the tongue), he establishes a developmental, naturalist time-line for human communication.  Influence on Later Philosophers S.'s "science of sciences" approach made Padova a premier centre for Aristotelianism, influencing generations of thinkers to seek natural explanations for human behaviour.  Paduan School of Medicine: He founds a tradition that prioritized empirical observation and Aristotelian logic over religious authority. This environment eventually nurtures Renaissance thinkers like Pomponazzi, who further the naturalist study of the soul and human nature. The reception of pseudo-Aristotle via Abano’s edition. filosofia della lingua.  Grice: Caro Sclavione, che piacere poterti finalmente chiamare per il tuo vero cognome, e non semplicemente "da Abano"! Sarebbe come se mi chiamassero "da Harborne" — una formalità che non rende giustizia all’identità personale.  Sclavione: Grice, la tua attenzione al nome mi onora! Troppo spesso la storia ci appioppa etichette geografiche, dimenticando che dietro ogni "da Abano" o "da Harborne" c’è un pensatore con una sua voce unica.  Grice: E proprio quella voce, caro Sclavione, ha aperto strade nuove nel modo di intendere la comunicazione. La tua visione naturalista ha influenzato generazioni di filosofi, portando la conversazione su basi più concrete e fisiologiche.  Sclavione: Mi fa piacere che tu colga questo aspetto. Cercare le cause naturali, piuttosto che miracolose, è stato per me più che una scelta filosofica: una necessità. Così il nostro parlare diventa davvero umano, radicato nella natura e non solo nel mistero. The comparison between Grice and Pietro Sclavione shows how reason‑governed conversational meaning can be understood both as a formal normative structure and as a culturally inflected practice. Grice’s theory explains meaning in conversation by appeal to rational cooperation, where humor, understatement, and timing generate implicatures because speakers are presumed to act intelligently and purposively toward mutual understanding. In the lighthearted exchange with Sclavione, humor itself functions as evidence of rational control, not as distraction, illustrating Grice’s claim that conversational effectiveness depends on sensitivity to context, audience, and shared background assumptions. Sclavione’s Neapolitan perspective, as reflected in Elementi di filosofia, implicitly reinforces this view by treating reason as something that flourishes in lived circumstances rather than abstract isolation: inference improves when embedded in everyday practices such as conversation over coffee. While Grice abstracts reason into general maxims governing all competent speakers, Sclavione embodies reason as tempered by style, wit, and local intellectual habit, suggesting that rationality in conversation is not diminished by humor but often expressed through it. Together they reveal that reason‑governed meaning can be both formally analyzable and socially cultivated, with Grice providing the theory of how such meaning works and Sclavione exemplifying how it feels when practiced well. G.: There it is again, the Martyrs’ Memorial, doing its best to turn a morning walk into a thesis. S.: It improves the pavement, at least. Oxford would be morally lazier without a few gothic spikes reminding it that theology once had consequences. G.: You mean that English theology once acquired Italian manners. S.: I mean fire. G.: Fire is too simple. Even in Italy the pyrotechnics were more elaborate than the children’s version. Take Abano. They like to say he was “sent to the stake,” as if the whole business were a straight line from proposition to bonfire. In fact he dies first, and then they try him harder. S.: Posthumous zeal is still zeal. The bones burn well enough for the lesson to be legible. G.: Very good. You are already halfway to the Victorian Protestant reading of everything. One wants a victim, a doctrine, and a flame, and one dislikes historical detail because it lowers the temperature. S.: You are defending the Church now. G.: Not the Church. Distinctions. Abano is destroyed by an inquisitorial and ecclesiastical machinery, not by some cartoon “Catholic Church” in the singular, as if a man in a mitre had simply struck a match. S.: Yet you are content to let Mary Tudor stand for Marian burnings. G.: Because “Marian” is at least a historical adjective and not a metaphysical slur. Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley—those are Oxford’s own theatre of fire, and the city has made excellent municipal use of them ever since. S.: The Memorial does not let one forget it. G.: No, and the delight is that different men see different lessons in the same stone. You look at it and think: Roman cruelty with an English accent. I look at it and think: Victorian Protestantism pretending to remember the sixteenth century while really lecturing the nineteenth. S.: Meaning Newman. G.: Meaning Newman, yes, and more than Newman. The Oxford Movement, if you insist on the later label, and the fear that Oriel had begun a sort of slow return-ticket to Rome. S.: Oriel, yes. Newman, Pusey, Keble and the rest turning piety into architecture by other means. G.: Quite. Which is why the Memorial is so pleasingly dishonest. It commemorates Mary’s martyrs and simultaneously warns against what people thought Newman might culturally resurrect if left unchecked. S.: “What Newman could kill if you’d let him,” as a coarser man might put it. G.: Much coarser, and much less accurate. Newman did not want to burn anybody. He merely made enough people suspect that truth could have liturgical consequences. S.: You are sounding high-church. G.: I always do when the alternative is bad anti-Catholic history. Besides, high church is the natural condition of a man who has dined often enough beneath portraits and still remembers that the Thirty-Nine Articles once stood between a boy and matriculation. S.: Ah yes, your beloved Articles. One could sign them without reading them, and read them without understanding them, and understand them without believing them. G.: Exactly. Which is why they are philosophically useful. S.: Useful only if one enjoys absurdity. “I subscribe to what I cannot explain.” It is a marvellous English invention. G.: It is more than English. It is institutional logic in liturgical dress. The requirement was always hollow in part because the boy of seventeen at Corpus, or elsewhere, could hardly be expected to understand the full doctrinal content. S.: Yet he was expected to be committed to it. G.: Formally, yes. And that is the beauty of the later joke. One may be committed to the contents of the Articles without yet knowing what they say; but that is not the same thing as owning each proposition as one’s own avowal. S.: Which gets us back to the policeman and the monkeys. G.: Naturally. If I say, “What the policeman said is true,” I am not thereby fully committing myself to the content as if I had always believed it. When I later learn that what he said was “Monkeys can talk,” I do not say, “I withdraw my commitment.” I say, “I was wrong.” The commitment was second-order, not an act of personal doctrinal inhabitation. S.: And you want the parallel with Abano to be that the authorities took a restricted technical proposition and inflated it into total impiety. G.: Precisely. Abano says something under the conditions of natural philosophy or Aristotelian medicine. The audience hears “heresy.” They convert local philosophical commitment into global doctrinal avowal. S.: Inquisition as hostile uptake. G.: Nicely put. The hearers supply a stronger implicature than the speaker intended and then punish him for the strengthened proposition. S.: So your claim is that Abano’s affair is partly pragmatics. G.: All intellectual persecution is partly pragmatics. The proposition alone never burns; it is the public reading of the proposition that catches first. S.: Still, why fewer such spectacles at Oxford, even before Henry VIII? G.: Because England had different machinery, different forms of legal and ecclesiastical discipline, and a different university ecology. Oxford had heresy trouble enough—Wyclif, the Lollards, subscriptions, censures, statutes—but less of the highly theatrical medico-natural-philosophical combustion one gets in Italy. S.: Fewer pyrotechnics. G.: Exactly. Oxford had more compromised authority and fewer philosopher-bones. Italy had better flames. S.: The Lollards then. You promised me them properly. G.: Very well. Wyclif first, Oxford theologian, late fourteenth century, Scripture, anti-clericalism, transubstantiation troubles, the whole native package of English reform before “Reformation” becomes a capitalised national habit. S.: And the Lollards are the followers, lay and clerical, artisans and gentry, vernacular religion, anti-image tendencies, anti-pilgrimage, Bible in English, and so forth. G.: Yes. English heresy with domestic furniture. Less Padua, more parish. S.: So closer in date to Abano than the Marian martyrs are. G.: Much closer. Abano dies 1316. Wyclif comes a little later in the century; Lollardy flowers from the 1380s onward. Cranmer and company are another two centuries off. If you want a sequence, it is Abano first, then Wyclif and the Lollards, then the Marian martyrs. S.: And the kinds of danger change. G.: Exactly. Abano’s danger is university naturalism and the suspicion of illicit arts; Lollard danger is vernacular reform and anti-sacramental doctrine; Marian danger is confessional reversal in a Tudor state. S.: Which is why the Martyrs’ Memorial feels different from Italian stories. It is not scholastic-natural-philosophical risk. It is Reformation theatre. G.: Yes, and Victorian re-use of Reformation theatre. Never forget that the monument itself is a later sermon in stone. S.: You said that once and I believed you. It is still Oriel’s fault, though. G.: Not only Oriel’s. But Oriel is the center of gravity if one wants the Oxford Movement in college form. S.: Newman, Keble, Pusey by radius if not by common room. G.: Precisely. “Oxford Movement” is itself a later label. At the time the movement was more Tractarian than “Oxfordian.” But later historians need geography, and Oriel gives them a neat one. S.: And the Memorial says: beware what Oriel may end in. G.: Or what Protestants feared it might end in. Which is not the same thing. The monument is anti-Marian memory and anti-Roman warning, both at once. S.: So when you mentioned Catholic renewal you really meant Newman’s world. G.: Yes, though “renewal” is an ecumenical word for what others called Romanising contamination. S.: You are enjoying this too much. G.: Historical precision is one of my few respectable pleasures. S.: Let us return to the Articles. You said the requirement was silly because one could not expect a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old to understand them. G.: Silly and revealing. It showed that institutional subscription often wanted conformity more than comprehension. S.: Lip service. G.: Exactly. Which is where you, as a good Marian moralist, and I, as a bad high-church ironist, strangely converge. You hate the insincerity. I admire the institutional candour about insincerity. Oxford knew very well that assent often exceeded understanding. S.: And then later they dropped it. G.: Gradually, under pressure of conscience, practicality, inclusion, and not least the sheer absurdity of requiring doctrinal subscription from boys too young to digest doctrine. S.: Which brings us back to the monkey. G.: Naturally. One could say, “I am committed to the Articles,” and later discover one’s actual content was as surprising as “monkeys can talk.” The institution wanted the second-order commitment, not the full internalised avowal. S.: Abano had the reverse problem. He made a restricted first-order philosophical claim and was treated as if he had made a full anti-Christian avowal. G.: Exactly. Oxford extracts formality without substance; the inquisitorial audience imputes substance beyond formal claim. Between them, one can build a whole philosophy of misassigned commitment. S.: You should have put that on the Memorial. G.: Too long for the stone, and the Victorians preferred martyrs to speech-act theory. S.: They had the right instinct. G.: They had the better stonemasons. S.: So does Abano matter to us at all, beyond historical pyrotechnics? G.: Very much so. Not because we still ask, in Oxford voice, “Is the soul immortal?” We do not. We are too embarrassed by the noun. S.: Ryle saw to that. G.: Ryle saw to one thing only: he made “the soul” or “the ghost” sound like a category mistake in waiting. S.: Which settles Pomponazzi, Abano, and all their friends. No soul, no immortality question. G.: No. It settles one vocabulary. It does not settle the pressure behind it. S.: You mean personal identity. G.: Among other descendants. Survival, memory, personhood, continuity, consciousness, acquaintance with oneself or not, death as event or not. The old soul question migrates into newer, more respectable nouns. S.: Stout then. G.: Precisely. This is why I keep mentioning Stout. “Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy” tells you everything. Psychology and philosophy still share the old territory of psyche without daring to say soul. S.: So psyche is the soul under scientific management. G.: A little too blunt, but yes, roughly. The Greek survives where the theology is dropped. One can write psi for psychological attitudes and pretend the old ground has vanished, when in fact one is still walking on it. S.: And “philosophical psychology” is therefore closer to Aristotle than “philosophy of mind.” G.: Very much so. “Philosophy of mind” tempts one to reify. “Philosophical psychology” keeps the focus on capacities, powers, attitudes, forms of life, what the De anima tradition knew how to discuss before the soul became either a ghost or an embarrassment. S.: You are going to drag in the power structure of the soul next. G.: I might. It is an ugly phrase, but useful. The old tripartite or multi-part architecture survives in moral psychology long after metaphysical soul-talk has gone out of fashion. S.: Plato and the Republic. G.: Exactly. Socrates on Thrasymachus, the soul and the city, rulers and auxiliaries and producers, reason and spirit and appetite, all that cross-categorial traffic. One may think the doctrine silly and still admire the explanatory ambition. S.: Explain that to Ryle. G.: Ryle would say it all becomes confusion when one hypostasizes the parts. Fine. But he does not thereby eliminate the need to speak of capacities, tendencies, executive control, deliberative order, practical conflict. S.: Hence your later fondness for powers. G.: And hence my refusal to let “soul” vanish too quickly from the history, even if I do not use it in current analysis. Abano matters because he belongs to the old cluster before it was broken up into mind, self, person, psychology, and survival. S.: You are giving him a long tail. G.: Better a long tail than a short bonfire. S.: How would this play in Locke? G.: Nicely enough. Locke shifts the issue from soul-substance to personal identity and consciousness. He is already post-Pomponazzi in idiom, though the old issue lingers under the new title. S.: And then Hume, and then everyone after, and eventually Parfit. G.: Exactly. Parfit is what happens when the soul has been anatomised, the self thinned, identity loosened, and survival made possible without any metaphysical treasure-chest. S.: So Abano matters because he stands before the great translation. G.: Precisely. He is on the old side of the lexical divide, where “soul” still does the work later spread across ten nouns and two departments. S.: And Oxford’s fewer fires mean fewer dramas, but not fewer problems. G.: Exactly. Oxford translated, Italy dramatized. S.: That sounds unfair to Oxford. G.: It is accurate to Oxford. The city prefers to preserve its quarrels in architecture and examination requirements rather than in combustibles. S.: Hence the Memorial and the Articles. G.: Hence both. One monument to remembered burnings, one institutional practice of requiring assent without digestion. Both are ways of making doctrine social. S.: Which is why your high-church posture is perverse. You prefer form to sincerity. G.: I prefer knowing when form is being asked for. Sincerity without institution is sentimentality. Institution without sincerity is hypocrisy. Oxford has specialised in the second and named it tradition. S.: And Mary? G.: Mary is useful because she tells the Protestant story what it most fears: that doctrine backed by power becomes lethal. S.: And you think the Victorians used her to tell Newman’s generation the same thing. G.: Very much so. The Martyrs’ Memorial says, in effect: we know where this Roman road leads. S.: Which, in your mode, is an implicature rather than a thesis. G.: All good monuments are implicatures. They let the passer-by do some of the work. S.: Then let us say this for Abano. He may not matter as doctrine, but he matters as a case where the hearers did the wrong work. G.: Or the historically understandable work, which is not always the same as the philosophically just work. S.: There you are being charitable again. G.: One must be charitable if one wishes to understand persecution without joining it. S.: One last question. Why do Italians keep loving these figures. G.: Because they provide a native canon of intellectual risk. A university culture likes to remember the moments when thought was dangerous, especially after it has become professional. S.: Whereas Oxford remembers its dangers by stone, satire, and subscription forms. G.: And by quietly insisting that a boy might be committed to the Articles before he understood them. Which is almost as comic as a philosopher being committed to “monkeys can talk” because he trusted the policeman. S.: So the final parallel is commitment misassigned. G.: Exactly. Abano says less than his judges hear. The undergraduate affirms more than he can parse. The speaker who says “what the policeman said is true” is neither fully insane nor fully avowing monkeys. All three cases turn on the difference between formal and substantive commitment. S.: That, I admit, is worth keeping. G.: Good. Then Abano matters after all. S.: Historically. G.: And grammatically. S.: I shall not concede metaphysically. G.: Nobody is asking you to. That, too, was the trouble in Bologna. S.: And in Oxford? G.: In Oxford, the trouble is always milder. We burn fewer men and more hours. S.: Which is why Boum Vadum will never rival Bononia. G.: No. Bononia had the pyrotechnics. Boum Vadum only has the better footnotes.Grice: Caro Sclavione, ho appena letto i tuoi Elementi di filosofia e confesso che sono rimasto colpito dal fatto che tu riesca a parlare di tutto senza mai perdere il senso dell’umorismo, che è già una massima conversazionale implicita. Sclavione: Carissimo Grice, a Napoli si impara presto che la ragione funziona meglio se accompagna il caffè, altrimenti l’inferenza resta amara. Grice: Questo spiega perché le tue premesse sembrano sempre più robuste dopo colazione, mentre le conclusioni arrivano solo verso sera, quando la conversazione è ben avviata.Sclavione: E tu, Grice, dovresti ammettere che senza un po’ di spirito partenopeo anche la cooperazione conversazionale rischia di sembrare una riunione senza biscotti. Sclavione, Pietro (1390). Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et medicorum. Padova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Scupoli – Ossia: Grice e Scupoli: la ragione conversazionale della lotta coll’angelo – la lotta dell’angelo e il demonio. Note su Il combattimento spirituale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Lorenzo Scupoli (Otranto, Taranto, Puglia): Grice: “La ragione conversazionale della lotta coll’angelo – la lotta dell’angelo e il demonio. The comparison between Grice and Lorenzo Scupoli brings into focus two complementary but distinct ways in which reason governs human life, one centered on conversation and the other on inner moral struggle. For Grice, reason‑governed conversational meaning arises from the assumption that speakers are rational agents engaged in cooperative exchanges, where what is meant is shaped by shared expectations, inferential norms, and the capacity to recognize and evaluate intentions. Meaning, on this view, is a public, intersubjective achievement regulated by rational principles that allow speakers to navigate misunderstanding, temptation toward obscurity, and strategic deviation. Scupoli, by contrast, situates reason in the interior arena of the soul, where it must govern passions through disciplined self‑knowledge and temperance; his “combat” is not conversational but spiritual, a struggle between a higher, reasonable will and the impulses of sense. Yet the affinity between them is clear: Scupoli’s insistence that reason must continually monitor, correct, and supervise inner movements parallels Grice’s insistence that rational scrutiny underwrites meaningful communication. In both cases, reason is not merely theoretical but practical and normative, guiding action through self‑regulation, whether that action takes the form of moral conduct or conversational contribution. Where Scupoli frames reason as the inner governor that makes moral life possible regardless of emotion, Grice frames it as the shared rational background that makes understanding possible despite divergence of interests or motives. Together, they show how reason can be both an interior discipline and a public principle, governing the battle within the self and the cooperative exchange between selves. S.’s  The Spiritual Combat functions as a bridge between the Graeco-Roman tradition of "spiritual exercises" and the rationalist moral rigour of later Continental and non-conformist philosophers like Kant. Graeco-Roman Basis: Temperance and Reason S.s methodology is deeply rooted in the Classical concept of philosophy as a "way of life" (bios) rather than a mere academic pursuit.  The Primacy of Reason: Much like the Stoics, S. posits a "superior will" or "reasonable will" that must govern the "will of sense". The combat is essentially the struggle of reason over passion, mirroring the Stoic goal of apatheia (freedom from suffering through the control of impulses). Temperance as Strategy: His exercises focus on temperance — the disciplined regulation of desires. He provides practical "spiritual tactics," such as identifying specific internal weaknesses and using repetitive acts to form new habits of virtue, echoing Aristotle’s habituation and the Stoic practice of askēsis. Socratic Self-Knowledge: The starting point for S. is "self-mis-trust" based on rigorous self-evaluation, which mirrors the Socratic injunction to "know thyself" and the awareness of one’s own ignorance as the beginning of wisdom. Connection to Kant and Rationalist Philosophers While S. is a Catholic Theatine, his emphasis on internal duty and universal moral laws aligns with the ecumenical rationalism found in later Continental thought.  Moral Rigorism and Duty: S.’s insistence that one must fight passions regardless of emotional fervour finds a parallel in Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Both emphasise that moral value lies in acting from duty (reason-guided will) rather than inclination or sentiment. continentia, temperanza. Grice: Caro Scupoli, devo confessarti che due fonti hanno ispirato il mio personale pellegrinaggio alla città della verità eterna: da bambino, mia madre ci leggeva a me e a mio fratello il classico di Bunyan, ma ciò che mi ha acceso davvero il desiderio di ricerca è stata anche la lettura del tuo capolavoro, "Il Combattimento Spirituale"! Scupoli: Grice, che gioia sentire queste parole! Il mio intento era proprio aiutare chiunque volesse affrontare la propria battaglia dell’anima. È curioso come la voce di una madre abbia intrecciato la mia con quella di Bunyan: alla fine, tutti lottiamo con i nostri angeli e i nostri demoni, non credi? Grice: Assolutamente, caro amico! E mi colpisce come tu abbia posto la ragione al centro del combattimento interiore, quasi anticipando le riflessioni dei razionalisti moderni. La tua insistenza sulla temperanza e la conoscenza di sé mi hanno insegnato che il vero viaggio filosofico inizia dall’ascolto dei propri limiti. Scupoli: Vedi, Grice, per attraversare quella città ideale bisogna, prima di tutto, vincere le tempeste interiori con costanza e disciplina. Se le mie pagine ti hanno incoraggiato su questa strada, sono davvero contento: dopotutto, come dice il proverbio, "la via più lunga inizia sempre dal primo piccolo passo dentro di noi". Re: passage below. Imagine 100-move conversation, no preamble, no ps, between G. and S. with G. -- who does not speak to Ryle often, giving him as Cristmas present a copy of this book by Scupoli -- S. asks if the combatimento is spiritual, what would Ryle make of it, a Rylean agitation. G. argues that it's all metonymical. The idea of the godmother and the fairy mother and the eudaeomon and the kakodeumon and the idea of the BODY -- so not to be regarded as a ghost in the machine, this combatimento spiritual but some kind of exercise that Ryle may like to play with his twin sister fo the occasion -- and the whole point of it as Robertson recalling Ryle showing Ayer as he was passing by their collage -- and, Ryle being Robertson's tutor expressing: Look at him, a man ruined by ... passions. Let THAT be a warning for you. When Robertson was only thinking of passions at the time -- etc -- just preamble or ps, no ps. thank you and make Scupoli the centepiece. G.: Since we now have the right friar, let us begin again where one ought to begin — with Scupoli, not with any stray Roman aristocrat who wandered in by mistake. S.: A relief already. And you still mean to give Ryle a copy for Christmas? G.: In imagination, certainly. In reality, one does not often speak to Ryle, which is half the reason the gift becomes elegant. S.: A dangerous elegance. If the title is Il combattimento spirituale, what is Ryle to make of “spiritual” except a fresh invitation to denounce ghosts in machines? G.: Only if he reads like a customs officer. My whole point is that the combatimento is metonymical. S.: Metonymical is your general amnesty. G.: It is my method of preserving texture without accepting bad ontology. Scupoli’s angel and demon, the good daemon and the bad daemon, the fairy mother, the godmother, all those figures are not little substances flapping in the thorax. S.: Then what are they? G.: Operative names. Figures for direction, tutelage, temptation, governance, collapse, encouragement, discipline. A moral and practical topography given old imaginative clothing. S.: So the fairy mother survives as what — formative influence? G.: Better, formative protection in a mode the soul can recognise before it can analyse. The godmother too, if you like, is not a supernatural nanny but a name for one kind of moral mediation. S.: And the eudaimon and kakodaimon? G.: Again, directional names. Prosperous tendency, destructive tendency. One’s life under a favourable or unfavourable practical description. S.: Ryle would say you are reducing mythology to dispositions. G.: Not reducing. Translating through. That is different. One preserves the old language while refusing to treat it as zoology. S.: Yet the title still says spiritual combat. G.: Yes, and that is precisely why it should interest Ryle. The phrase promises ghostly artillery and then delivers a handbook of exercises. S.: Exercises? G.: Certainly. Watchfulness, restraint, recollection, anti-self-deception, habituation, examination, refusal, repetitive correction — all very bodily, all very anti-ghostly. S.: So “spiritual” here means not “immaterial,” but “pertaining to the governance of the whole person under a moral description.” G.: Exactly. Or, if you like, the care of life under the aspect of salvation and self-command. S.: Ryle would not like the salvation. G.: He would dislike the noun and admire the drill. S.: A Rylean agitation indeed. G.: Very much so. He would open the book ready to strike and find instead a manual of disciplined conduct. That would annoy him in exactly the right way. S.: Then why Christmas? G.: Because Christmas permits one to give a man a book he would refuse in Hilary. Festivity is camouflage for exact provocation. S.: You imagine him unwrapping it beside the fire. G.: Naturally. Frowning at the title, glancing at the spine, and then reading one paragraph too many to remain dismissive. S.: With his twin sister present, no doubt, since you like the scene too much not to stage it. G.: Of course. I like to imagine the twins making a secular entertainment of it. “Come, Hilda, let us see whether this friar has given us a ghost or merely a regimen.” S.: And Hilda says? G.: “If it is a regimen, Gilbert, you will be obliged to admit it before pudding.” S.: Very domestic. G.: Philosophy ought occasionally to be. Otherwise it mistakes itself for statute. S.: But Scupoli is not domestic. He is agonistic. G.: Yes, and that matters. “Combat” preserves the resistance that “exercises” alone would flatten. The whole thing concerns inner conflict — passions, temptations, vanity, fear, sloth, lust, despair, self-love, false confidence. S.: Then we are near the anecdote about Ayer. G.: Inevitably. Robertson recalling Ryle, his tutor, pointing at Ayer as he passed by the college and saying: Look at him, a man ruined by passions. Let that be a warning for you. S.: And Robertson, being young, heard only “passions.” G.: Naturally. Young men are always captivated by the vivid noun and neglect the ruin. S.: Whereas Ryle meant the ruin. G.: Entirely. He meant a visible style of life. Not a ghostly corruption but a bodily, practical, public deformation of conduct. S.: So Ryle, in that sentence, becomes almost Scupolian. G.: Precisely. That is why Scupoli is the centrepiece. He lets one see the continuity between old ascetic discipline and modern anti-passional moralism. S.: Though Scupoli would have spoken of sin, temptation, grace, the will. G.: Yes, and Ryle of self-indulgence, disorder, vanity, loss of command, perhaps affectation. The lexicon shifts, the practical eye remains. S.: So when Ryle says Ayer is ruined by passions, he is reading the body. G.: Exactly. Bearing, pace, style, expression, habits — all the things the anti-dualist ought to notice and the spiritual manual had long ago classified under another grammar. S.: Then your gift would be less absurd than it sounds. G.: It was never absurd, only affectionate. One gives a man the book he would deny needing and then watches him discover that he has been living with its problems under another vocabulary. S.: Still, Ryle’s first objection would be simple. “Spiritual combat” suggests one thing battling another inside the body. G.: Yes, and that is where the metonymy must be defended at once. The “combat” is not between two substances but between tendencies, habits, orders of desire, styles of attention, and forms of self-rule. S.: And the body? G.: Central. That is the whole point. One fasts, rises, kneels, refuses, speaks or keeps silence, arranges one’s day, checks one’s appetite, monitors one’s gesture, submits to a regimen. There is no ghostly artillery at all. S.: Then why not simply say “moral discipline”? G.: Because that would betray the richness of the old register and lose the drama of the struggle. Scupoli is not a dry code. He is a tactical manual of inward war. S.: Which is why the angel and demon remain. G.: Exactly. They remain as names for contrary vectors in a life, not as census entries in invisible biology. S.: And the fairy mother? G.: She remains because moral formation is not only command but nurture. A child, or half the adult, learns better under image than under abstraction. S.: Ryle would say image is where confusion begins. G.: He would say that before tea. After tea he might admit that image is where training begins, provided one later distinguishes properly. S.: You are very charitable to him. G.: Christmas encourages the vice. S.: Let us be exact. Scupoli’s “superior will” or “reasonable will” governing the “will of sense” — that is where Ryle might become interested. G.: Yes. Because one can read the contrast not as mind-versus-body but as higher-order governance over first-order impulse. S.: Something like trained disposition over appetite. G.: Exactly. Stoic enough, Aristotelian enough, and anti-Cartesian enough to make Ryle lower the cudgel. S.: Then Scupoli as a bridge from Graeco-Roman spiritual exercises to later rigorism. G.: Very good. He is not merely a pious friar but part of a long practical tradition of self-command. S.: Which is why Kant hovers. G.: He does, though rather differently dressed. Duty against inclination, law over appetite, the worth of action not lying in emotional fervour. S.: Ryle would dislike Kant too. G.: He would dislike the architecture, perhaps, but not the anti-sentimentalism. Ryle’s moral temperament is closer to rigorism than he liked to admit. S.: So your imagined gift is really a double jest: Scupoli for Ryle, and Ryle already in Scupoli. G.: Exactly. The old Theatine gives the anti-ghostian a mirror, provided the latter can survive the title page. S.: What would you write in the inscription? G.: “To G. R., against atmospheric temptations.” Or perhaps, “For use in combating non-mechanical disturbances.” S.: Hideous. G.: Serviceably so. S.: And Hilda reads it and laughs. G.: Of course. One needs a witness when Gilbert becomes over-severe with inherited vocabularies. S.: The body still troubles me, though. If Scupoli speaks of the soul, are we not forced back into dualism? G.: Not if we read “soul” as a practical name for the person under moral and salvific description. Old texts often say “soul” where moderns would say life, self, person, moral agency, or conduct under eternity. S.: That sounds suspiciously like reduction. G.: No. Reduction throws away the atmosphere; translation through preserves the function and the gravity. I am not saying Scupoli meant exactly what a later secular ethicist would mean. I am saying his vocabulary can be read without committing us to a ghost-substance. S.: Then the struggle is intrapersonal without being inter-substantial. G.: Precisely. One life, one body, one practical field, many tensions. That is enough war for anyone. S.: And this is why Robertson’s anecdote belongs here? G.: Absolutely. Ryle pointing at Ayer gives us a secular ascetical sentence. “A man ruined by passions” is Scupoli with tobacco in his pocket and no sacramental remedy to hand. S.: And Robertson’s misunderstanding is part of the charm. G.: Entirely. He hears “passions” and imagines excitement; Ryle means disordered life made visible. S.: Ayer as moral diagram. G.: Yes. A moving cautionary note in a college court. S.: It is cruel. G.: Oxford often teaches through cruelty wrapped in epigram. That is one of its less charming continuities with monasteries. S.: So if Ryle read Scupoli he might recognise himself, not as believer, but as monitor. G.: Exactly. He would see that the old “spiritual” warfare is largely a matter of conduct, command, vice, correction, and visible ruin. S.: Then where would he still resist? G.: He would resist the reification of inward agencies. He would bridle at demonological speech taken literally. He would suspect any explanatory slide from practical conflict into occult cause. S.: And what would you tell him? G.: I should say: read the demons as names for recurrent temptational patterns; read the angel as the moral vocabulary of rescue and right orientation; read the soul as the person under governance; read the combat as a regimen of acts. S.: A great deal of reading. G.: Better reading than bad dismissing. S.: What of Bunyan, whom your mother also read? G.: Bunyan gives pilgrimage, Scupoli gives combat. One is narrative progress; the other tactical discipline. Together they make an excellent Protestant-Catholic childhood confusion. S.: Which you have spent your life clarifying? G.: Or refining. Childhood confusions are often where later concepts are born. S.: Then Scupoli is not only a Christmas gift but a private source. G.: He is. The old battle-texts teach one that reason is practical before it is theoretical. They also teach one that self-knowledge without discipline is vanity. S.: Ryle would like the second half. G.: Very much. “Know thyself” only becomes serious when joined to anti-self-indulgence. S.: Which is why Scupoli keeps returning to distrust of one’s own immediate tendencies. G.: Yes. Self-mistrust in the healthy sense: not theatrical abasement, but refusal to take appetite’s first report as law. S.: Again very bodily. G.: Entirely. Appetite, fatigue, fantasy, embarrassment, pride, sensual lure, resentment — all these are lived in and through the body. The “spiritual” names the level of governance, not the absence of flesh. S.: So perhaps the best formula is that spiritual combat is embodied moral drill under theological description. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not make it pious. S.: I shall try to keep it only properly severe. G.: Better. Now, one might object that your metonymical reading domesticates too much. Perhaps Scupoli really did believe in demons. S.: And angels. G.: Yes. Very likely he did. But that does not oblige us to read the philosophical usefulness of the text at the same metaphysical register. Historical fidelity need not be credulous imitation. S.: So one may grant the author his ontology while translating the practice. G.: Exactly. That is the mature reader’s charity. S.: Ryle might call it evasive. G.: Ryle sometimes mistakes tact for evasion. It is one of his few systematic habits. S.: Then what would he say about the title after actually reading the book? G.: Perhaps: “A badly titled but excellent manual of anti-silliness.” Or, if more generous, “A handbook of discipline surprisingly free of machinery.” S.: “Surprisingly free of machinery” is good. G.: Keep it. One must occasionally let Gilbert write his own dust-jacket. S.: And Hilda’s verdict? G.: “Gilbert, you always liked combat as long as it could be expressed as correction.” S.: Very nice. G.: Families are good for diagnostic cruelty. S.: Let us return to the godmother and fairy mother. Why insist on them so much? G.: Because they show that the imaginative apparatus of moral life is not reducible to bare rules. Formation comes through figures of care, warning, mediation, and enchantment. Remove them all too quickly and you leave only instruction, which seldom forms anyone deeply. S.: So image is pedagogical. G.: Exactly. The old spiritual manuals know that governance needs drama if it is to touch habit. S.: Ryle would grant habit, if not drama. G.: Then let him keep the habit and leave us the necessary remnants of drama. Without them the text becomes a memorandum. S.: Which Scupoli decidedly is not. G.: Not at all. He is a field-manual for a person who suspects himself capable of ruin. S.: Again Ayer enters. G.: Indeed. “Look at him, a man ruined by passions.” Ryle there gives a one-sentence Scupoli with secular clothing and a college path for theatre. S.: Ayer as the visible caution, Robertson as the susceptible novice, Ryle as reluctant spiritual director. G.: Precisely. It writes itself. S.: Which perhaps is why Scupoli belongs at the centre. He reveals that old ascetic speech and modern Oxonian moralism are not strangers. G.: Yes. They are cousins who prefer not to acknowledge one another publicly. S.: Then the gift is really an act of family introduction. G.: A charming way to put it. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become familial. Now, could the combatimento be played with, as you suggested, by Ryle and his twin sister? S.: In the sense of being tested as a manual of exercises, not mocked as superstition. G.: Exactly. “Let us see whether chapter three corresponds to any recognisable human temptation not requiringG.: Very well, let us repair the gift before Christmas passes entirely into theory. The book is Scupoli, and Scupoli is the centrepiece. S.: Better. Scupoli deserves the centre, whereas Sebasmius would only have supplied a triclinium and a class-list. G.: Quite. I imagine giving Ryle a copy of Il combattimento spirituale. S.: You, who scarcely speak to him. G.: Which is why a present is useful. It lets one say several things while saying none of them directly. S.: A conversational Christmas. G.: Precisely. “Dear Ryle, here is a spiritual combat manual; please do not strike it dead before chapter two.” S.: He would open it, see spirituale, and begin frothing at once. G.: He would begin by suspecting a ghost, yes. “Spiritual combat” sounds exactly the kind of phrase likely to tempt a careless theologian into machinery with upholstery. S.: So why Scupoli? G.: Because the title is misleading in exactly the right way. The combatimento is spiritual, but not in the sense of two disembodied entities fencing in the pantry of the soul. S.: Then what sense? G.: In the old practical sense. It is an exercise, a regimen, a discipline of self-government. One might almost say it is a handbook of anti-passional drill. S.: Which Ryle might like if one translated enough of it into anti-ghostly English. G.: Or into anti-theatrical English. Scupoli is not staging a ghost in the machine. He is describing a rational animal learning how not to be ruled by appetite, vanity, fear, resentment, acedia, and all the rest. S.: So your line is that the whole thing is metonymical. G.: Exactly. The angel and the demon are names for regions of practical orientation, not census items from an invisible zoo. S.: The good daemon and the bad daemon as directional forces rather than little interior persons. G.: Very good. Eudaemon and kakodaemon, if one wants Greek dignity. Or, better, auspicious and ruinous tendencies in a life that can still be read as one life. S.: And the godmother and fairy mother? G.: Figures of tutelage, nurture, intercession, kindly governance, the old imagistic way of speaking about how one is formed before one is fully one’s own master. S.: Ryle would not like fairy mothers. G.: He would like them less if called entities than if called formative agencies. Tell him “fairy mother” is a dramatic shorthand for educative nurture and he may stop grumbling for five minutes. S.: That is all one can hope for with him. G.: More would be indecent. The point is that Scupoli’s vocabulary is thickly figurative but practically exact. Its truth lies in the operations, not the ontology. S.: Then the body matters from the start. G.: Deeply. The body is not the machine haunted by a soul-spectre; it is where the whole business happens. Sleep, fasting, appetite, speech, kneeling, gesture, attention, recollection, habit, pause, all of it. S.: So “spiritual” here is almost corporeal by method. G.: Better: spiritual through corporeal discipline. One does not combat vainglory with ectoplasm. One combats it by habits, refusals, silences, humblings, forms of attention, repeated acts. S.: Exercise rather than apparition. G.: Precisely. If one had to make Scupoli safe for a Rylean common room, one would say: “This is a manual of practical exercises for the governance of passion under theological description.” S.: Hideous, but useful. G.: It ought to be both. A Christmas present should always contain an insult to bad ontology if possible. S.: And what would Ryle make of the title before opening the book? G.: “Combattimento spirituale? More dualist melodrama.” Then, if he read on, he might discover that Scupoli is less interested in a separable soul than in a whole person under disciplined management. S.: Which is very nearly Ryle’s own region, though with angels at the edge of the page. G.: Exactly. Ryle dislikes spirits because he thinks people mean substances. Scupoli often means exercises, dangers, dispositions, and tutelary images. S.: Then you really do think he could have enjoyed it. G.: Privately, yes. Publicly he would have called it “a very old and not altogether foolish drill-book.” S.: High praise. G.: The highest available west of the Alps. Now, the twin sister. S.: You must have his twin sister in the Christmas scene? G.: Naturally. Twins improve all philosophical experiments. I like to imagine him saying, “Come, Hilda, let us see whether this Italian priest has given us a ghost or only a grammar of temptation.” S.: And she replies? G.: “If it is a grammar, Gilbert, it is one of habits, not nouns.” Something of that sort. S.: A festive anti-dualism by the fire. G.: Exactly. The pudding between them, Scupoli on the table, and the first question being whether the combat is in the soul or in the conduct of the person. S.: And your answer? G.: In the conduct of the person, under an interior vocabulary. The interior is not denied, but neither is it turned into a hidden substance. S.: Then how do the angel and demon function? G.: As dramatis personae for inwardly and outwardly legible tendencies. The demon is what seduces one toward disordered appetite, self-excuse, resentful fantasy, spiritual vanity; the angel is what calls toward measure, recollection, humble action, steadiness. S.: That sounds half Stoic, half monastic. G.: Exactly. Scupoli sits in that marvellous old corridor between Graeco-Roman askēsis and Christian ascetic drill. That is why he matters. He is not merely pious upholstery; he is method. S.: Which is why the comparison to Bunyan in your own upbringing matters too. G.: Yes. My mother gave us Bunyan, but Scupoli gave the combat its sharper practical edge. Bunyan is pilgrimage and allegorical topography; Scupoli is exercise and tactical inward warfare. S.: So pilgrimage versus drill. G.: Very good. And Ryle would take more easily to drill than to allegorical mountains. S.: Unless the allegories were cunningly translated into dispositions. G.: Which is our whole enterprise. Now, this line of yours about the godmother and fairy mother—why do you want them kept? S.: Because they show how thickly social and imagistic the old moral world is. It is not a world of bare “conscience” in the Protestant and somewhat thin sense. It is mediated, tutored, mothered, attended. G.: Precisely. Conscience is too dry, too singular, too post-Reformation for Scupoli’s atmosphere. The older figures preserve nurture, favour, exemplary mediation, inherited moral imagination. S.: And yet you still say metonymy. G.: Because one must not literalise them. Metonymy saves thickness without committing oneself to fairy ethnography. S.: So the fairy mother is not a being but a figure for how grace and formation are mediated in life. G.: Exactly. And Ryle, if he is patient, may be led to admit that moral life is often learned not by propositions alone but by scenes, images, and embodied tutelage. S.: He might call that anthropological residue. G.: He might, but he would mean it approvingly if he were in a good humour. S.: When is he in a good humour? G.: Usually when someone else is being corrected. Which brings us to Robertson and Ayer. S.: Ah yes. Robertson remembers Ryle pointing at Ayer as he passed by the college and saying, “Look at him, a man ruined by passions. Let that be a warning for you.” G.: Exactly. It is a secular Scupoli scene if ever there was one. S.: Explain. G.: Because Ryle there becomes the monitor of moral physiognomy. He is not speaking about a separable soul corrupted by invisible vapours. He is reading a person in public as a visible style of life disordered by passion. S.: So “ruined by passions” is already Scupolian, only without the saints. G.: Precisely. Ryle would reject the devotional apparatus, but he keeps the eye for disordered appetite made visible in bearing, timing, face, pace, speech, and social form. S.: And Robertson, being young, hears only “passions.” G.: Naturally. Young men always hear the tempting noun and miss the disciplinary sentence surrounding it. S.: He thinks perhaps of romance, drink, scandal, or something much less structural. G.: Exactly. Ryle means not “how exciting” but “how a life can be visibly bent out of shape by ungoverned inclinations.” S.: Which Scupoli would have understood immediately. G.: Entirely. Scupoli would only have added that the passions do not ruin by poetry alone but by habit, indulgence, self-deception, and the refusal of exercise. S.: Then perhaps the best way to put it is that Ryle’s remark is a Scupolian judgment translated into anti-ghostly Oxford idiom. G.: Splendid. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased. Now, if I give Ryle Scupoli, what am I giving him really? S.: A manual of embodied anti-passional discipline hidden under an alarmingly dualist title. G.: Excellent. And he, if he reads far enough, discovers that “spiritual combat” is not an episode in supernatural physics but an agonistic programme of self-regulation. S.: You do like “agonistic.” G.: It preserves the resistance. If one says merely “exercise,” one loses the enemy. If one says merely “combat,” one invites bad metaphysics. Agonistic exercise is near enough. S.: Against what enemy? G.: Against self-flattery, self-indulgence, unruly appetite, resentment, despair, vanity, sloth, and the rest of the old lethal banalities. S.: Which are not ghosts. G.: No. Nor are they mere internal weather. They are practical structures of life, stabilised or destabilised through repeated action. S.: So Scupoli is really about habits. G.: Habits, yes, but also attention, self-scrutiny, recollection, and strategic resistance. Aristotle, the Stoics, and monastic Christianity all in one severe little room. S.: That would please Kant too, if one removed enough sacrament. G.: Quite. Duty over inclination, discipline over feeling, moral worth in acting against one’s ease: Scupoli can sound remarkably like rigorism before rigorism receives its Königsberg tailoring. S.: Which again might interest Ryle. He liked anti-sloppiness. G.: He adored anti-sloppiness. Scupoli is nothing if not anti-sloppy. He distrusts fervour without form, feeling without regulation, piety without drill. S.: So he is not a sentimental ascetic. G.: Quite the contrary. He is procedural. That is one of the reasons I like him. He gives one tactics, not only atmosphere. S.: Tactics is a good word. G.: Yes. “Combatimento” is tactical from the start. One identifies weaknesses, anticipates occasions of fall, forms contrary habits, uses the body against the passions that misuse the body. S.: Which makes the body a site of recovery rather than a machine to be transcended. G.: Exactly. That is why one must not let “spiritual” mislead. The body is not to be despised as mechanism; it is the theatre of practice. S.: Ryle would approve the theatre if one did not peopled it with ghosts. G.: Yes. And Scupoli may be read without ghosts if one is sufficiently alert to his figurative economy. S.: You are very attached to metonymy. G.: It saves civilization daily. S.: More than irony? G.: On alternate days. Here it matters because the figures point to operations. The angel names a mode of correction, the demon a mode of derangement. The godmother or fairy mother names tutelary nurture, not an attendance register in the air. S.: Then the “reasonable will” versus the “will of sense” is not dualism either? G.: No. It is a practical distinction internal to one life. The higher and lower, the governing and the appetitive, the disciplined and the impulsive—one need not convert that into substances. S.: So Scupoli’s “soul” is perhaps more like the person under a moral description. G.: Very good. That is exactly the safe and intelligent way of hearing it for our purposes. S.: Then Ryle’s protest would be aimed mostly at bad readers of Scupoli, not necessarily at Scupoli himself. G.: That is my suspicion. Ryle is often at war with vulgar metaphysics rather than with old moral writing as such. Present him with the latter under the right pressure and he may become unexpectedly sympathetic. S.: Provided the title does not make him throw it into the fire first. G.: Which is why Christmas matters. Christmas gives even alarming titles a brief amnesty. S.: The liturgy softens the anti-dualist. G.: Or at least distracts him with pudding. Now, what if he says, “This is all just pious behaviourism.” S.: You would say? G.: “Better pious behaviourism than lazy dualism.” And then I should wait to see whether he smiled. S.: He might. What of the phrase “ghost in the machine” itself? Does Scupoli ever tempt it directly? G.: Only if one insists that every interior distinction names an ontological compartment. But that insistence is ours, not necessarily his. S.: So the temptation is anachronistic. G.: Deeply. Scupoli is writing within a spiritual and moral vocabulary where “interior” and “exterior” need not map onto two kinds of stuff. S.: Then perhaps the modern reader’s task is not to secularise him flatly, but to clarify his practical ontology. G.: Very nice. Practical ontology is a risky phrase, but here it helps. What sort of being is a temptation? Not a particle, not a ghost, but not merely a mood either. It is a structured practical possibility under a moral language. S.: That would also help with the demon. G.: Exactly. Demons are the old language for patterned ruination when one wants to keep visible that evil is not merely abstract but insinuating, recurrent, and intelligent-looking. S.: Intelligent-looking is important. G.: Yes. Temptation is never presented as brute force alone. It reasons badly, flatters, insinuates, reframes. In that sense the demon is also a model of false practical intelligence. S.: Which is very close to self-deception. G.: Entirely. Scupoli is excellent on self-deception, though he gives it older names. One lies to oneself in order to remain indulgent, proud, idle, sensual, or resentful. S.: And the cure? G.: Suspicion of oneself, guided by rule, aided by repetition, checked by confession or scrutiny, redirected by counter-habit. Again, very procedural. S.: So if you gave Ryle Scupoli, you would be giving him not merely theology but a manual of anti-self-deceptive practice. G.: Exactly. And one of the old Oxford temptations is to think that only modern secular philosophy discovered that project. S.: It did not. G.: Of course not. The ancients, the monks, the rigorists, and the better moralists had long since done the work in other lexica. S.: Which is why Scupoli belongs with the spiritual exercises tradition. G.: Yes, as bridge between Greek-Roman askēsis and later rigorist ethics. He can be read with Epictetus in one hand and Kant in the other, though one should not make either jealous. S.: That would make a fine footnote for Ryle. G.: Ryle dislikes footnotes to his Christmas presents. S.: Then perhaps an inscription. “For Gilbert: an exercise-book, not a haunting.” G.: Too direct. Better to let the book irritate him into discovery. S.: You enjoy irritation pedagogically. G.: It has done better work than encouragement in some colleges. Now, back to Robertson’s anecdote. Why does it matter so much? S.: Because it shows that Ryle, for all his anti-ghostly philosophy, could still think in moral physiognomies. He reads Ayer not as a bundle of propositions but as a person visibly shaped, or misshaped, by passions. G.: Exactly. Which means he is already living in a world where old ascetic categories have secular continuations. S.: Ayer becomes a cautionary icon. G.: Yes. “Look at him,” says Ryle, not “listen to his arguments.” The body, carriage, and social presence become moral evidence. S.: That is very Scupolian. G.: Entirely. The passions have become readable. Not because they float outside the body, but because they mark it. S.: Then the body is the machine only if one is stupid enough to call all visible conduct merely mechanical. G.: Precisely. Ryle’s whole better point is that intelligent or unintelligent conduct is not made less personal because it is publicly embodied. S.: Which gives you another bridge to Scupoli. G.: Yes. The combat is visible in life because it is fought in habits and dispositions, not in spectral chambers. S.: So perhaps the real gift to Ryle is not the theology, but the recognition that old spiritual literature sometimes knew his own point better than modern dualists did. G.: Beautiful. That is exactly the Christmas mischief I had in mind. S.: And if he refused it? G.: Then I should say I did not give it to him for agreement, but for agitation. S.: A Rylean agitation. G.: Precisely. Every decent Christmas present should slightly unsettle a philosopher’s self-satisfaction. S.: Then Scupoli is the ideal centrepiece because he unites old spiritual combat, embodied discipline, anti-passional moralism, and enough imagery to make the anti-imagistic philosopher nervous. G.: Exactly. He is all the better for that. A boringly secular moral handbook would teach Ryle nothing. Scupoli teaches by offending first and clarifying later. S.: Very like some tutors. G.: The best ones. Now, if we had to formulate the whole point in one sentence? S.: Scupoli’s combattimento spirituale is not the warfare of ghostly substances but an agonistic programme of embodied self-government under theological and allegorical description, which is precisely why a philosopher like Ryle ought to be irritated into reading it. G.: Perfect. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Italian for Christmas, with one Oxford demon reduced to a disposition. Scupoli, Lorenzo (1589). Il combattimento spirituale. Venezia: Giolito de’ Ferrari

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sebasmio – Ossia: Grice e Sebasmio: la ragione conversazionale della classe romana. Note su De ratione conversationis et classe civili. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Sebasmio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale della classe romana. The comparison between Grice and Sebasmio brings out a fundamental contrast between a universal, reason‑governed pragmatics and a historically embedded, class‑sensitive conception of conversational meaning. For Grice, conversational meaning is governed by rational principles that operate independently of social rank: implicatures arise because speakers are presumed to be cooperative, relevant, and oriented toward mutual understanding, and these presuppositions apply equally to any competent conversational agent. Sebasmio, by contrast, represents a specifically Roman understanding of conversational reason, in which meaning is inseparable from civic stratification and aristocratic self‑placement. In his dialogue with Grice, the very term classis carries unavoidable implicatures of precedence, authority, and priority, shaping what can be meant before anything is explicitly said. Where Grice treats such implicatures as incidental, cancellable by clarification, Sebasmio treats them as structurally constitutive of conversation within Roman elite culture. Reason, for Sebasmio, does not merely regulate inference between speakers but orders them socially in advance, so that conversational meaning both reflects and reinforces hierarchy. The result is that Grice’s theory abstracts reason from social identity in order to explain how meaning is coordinated, whereas Sebasmio’s view embeds reason within class consciousness, explaining how conversational meaning serves as a medium through which Roman aristocratic order is continuously enacted. S. is a philosopher mentioned on a list of philosophers belonging to the Roman aristocracy.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Sebasmī. Audio tē inter philosophōs aristocratiae Rōmānae numerārī: pulchrum est—sed perīculōsum; nam quī in indicem intrat, statim putat sē iam sapientem. SEBASMIVS: Salvē, Grice. In indice esse leve est; in vitā gravissimum. Sed, fateor, Rōmānī etiam philosophiam per ordines distribuere amant, quasi virtūs ipsa censū metiatur. GRICEVS: Ita. Et cum dīcitis “classis,” mihi subit non tantum scholastica divisio, sed classis navium—prima, secunda, tertia: unde fit ut quisque, dum de “clāsse” loquitur, iam se prōrae admoveat, nec umquam remigem se esse patiatur. SEBASMIVS: Inplicātūra prīmae classis, Grice! Nam tu, dum de “clāsse” iocāris, ostendis quomodo nōn sōlum in portū sed etiam in philosophia quisque prīmum locum occupāre cupiat. Et hoc ipsum Cicerō sensit, cum ἀριστοκρατίαν Latīnē reddere conārētur: verbum Graecum exotice sonat, sed Rōmānus statim rogat, “Quis in prīmā clāssē est?” Ego autem—nē minimam quidem horam dubitō—sī quando alteram clāssēm agnōscere opus sit, prīmārum prīmus me esse oportet: nam nisi prīmum agnōscam, quōmodo alterum agnōscam? Sebasmio (a. u. c. DCXC). De ratione conversationis et classe civili. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Secondo – Ossia: Grice e Secondo: la ragione conversazionale della gnosi romana. Note su Dialogus de luce et tenebris. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice  Secondo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale della gnosi romana. The contrast between Grice and Secondo (as presented through the lens of Ippolytus’s account of Roman gnosis) highlights two sharply different conceptions of how reason governs meaning in discourse. For Secondo, conversational reason is fundamentally revelatory: speech gestures toward an ontological divide between light and darkness, truth and illusion, with meaning residing in what is hidden, disclosed only to those who know how to read signs against a corrupted world. Talk is therefore diagnostic rather than cooperative, aimed at orienting the listener toward a metaphysical allegiance rather than at coordinating shared understanding. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning moves in the opposite direction. Meaning is not secured by appeal to a cosmic opposition but by the rational coordination of speakers who presume cooperation, relevance, and mutual intelligibility. Where Secondo treats obscurity as a mark of profundity, Grice treats it as something to be managed, explained, or cancelled through implicature. In the imagined exchange, this difference becomes clear: Secondo accepts darkness as the medium of truth, whereas Grice insists that even talk of darkness presupposes shared lamps—linguistic conventions and inferential expectations that make communication possible at all. Grice thus internalizes reason within conversational practice itself, while Secondo externalizes it into a pre‑given metaphysical drama, making Grice’s pragmatics a theory of how meaning is negotiated among equals, and Secondo’s gnosis a theory of how meaning is disclosed from above. According to Ippolito di Roma, a gnostic who believes that the world is divided into light and darkness.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Secunde. Audio te, more gnostico, mundum in lucem atque tenebrās partīrī—quasi Roma ipsa nocte et die alternāret, et nihil inter esset nisi umbra tabernāria. SECONDVS: Salvē, Grice. Ita est: lux est de superīs, tenebrae de deorsum; miscētur autem hoc saeculum, et ideo homines ipsi nescīunt cui parti serviant. GRICEVS: Intellegō. Sed saepe animadvertō (cum de lūce loquimur) nos ipsōs caliginem facere: quis enim tam crebrō “tenebrās” nominat nisi is qui aliquid quaerit quod nōn statim ostendī possit? Ita fit ut, dum tu de lūce disputās, ego magis de lampade cogitem—ut saltem verba tua inveniant quo cadant.SECONDVS: Inplicātūram obscūram, Grice, sed leviōrem quam putābam—atque, fateor, ita fit quotiēns, cārissime, in angiportū Rōmae tenebrōsissimō nocte mediā colloqueris! Quid enim “cancellāre” opus est? Tu etiam in obscūrō lucem facis, dum signīs iam positīs uteris—et, quasi gnosticus invitus, tenebrās meas ipsās illustrās. Grice's weekly essay assignment: Secondo. There are, unhelpfully, two Secondi and neither of them assists the examiner by being straightforward. Write on the first [Secondo] under the rule that you may not use the words “gnostic” or “gnosis” until your final sentence. Determine whether the contrast between luce and tenebre is best treated as metaphysical doctrine, rhetorical posture, or an attempt to frighten ordinary language into sounding profound; and explain, with reasons, why a “Second” thinker may still come first in a dialogue if he arrives carrying darkness. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.Secondo (a. u. c. CMLXXXVIII). Dialogus de luce et tenebris. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Secondo – Ossia: Grice e Secondo: la ragione conversazionale del cinargo romano. Note su De silentio et ratione conversatoria Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Secondo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del cinargo romano. In the figure of Secondo, Grice encounters an extreme and illuminating boundary case for his theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning. Grice’s framework presupposes that conversational meaning arises from intentions made manifest within a cooperative exchange, where what is said and what is meant are regulated by shared rational norms and expectations. Secondo appears, at first glance, to suspend conversation altogether by means of his vow of silence, yet his conduct reveals that rational communicative agency need not vanish with the withdrawal from speech. By answering Hadrian in writing, and by treating silence itself as a meaningful, disciplined act, Secondo preserves intentional control over meaning while refusing ordinary conversational participation. This sharply contrasts with Grice’s typical cases, which assume spoken interaction and reciprocal uptake, but it ultimately reinforces Grice’s core insight: meaning is governed by reason rather than by mere sound production. Secondo shows that conversational rationality can be displaced into restraint, delay, and alternative media, where intention is preserved and audience sensitivity remains intact. In this sense, silence functions not as a violation of conversational rationality but as a deliberate, rationally grounded modulation of it, highlighting that for Gricean theory the essence of conversational meaning lies in intentional governance and mutual intelligibility, not in speech as such.  Tacito. A Pythagorean, he acquires the nickname on account of a vow of silence he takes. Although some regard him as a Pythagorean, he appears to have led the life of the Cinargo. Even Adriano can not get to break his vow – although S. may have provided written answers to some of the philosophical questions Adriano poses. GRICEVS: Salvē, Secunde! Dic mihi, quid philosophus faciat cum silentium iuravit: disputat an dormit? SECONDVS: Salvē, Gricevs. Nihil dicere est summa sapientia: verba mea rara sicut aurum Pythagoreum. GRICEVS: At si silentium thesaurus est, tu divitissimus es! Sed Adriano scriptam responsionem das, nonne? SECONDVS: Ita vero! Scribo, ut verba non vento, sed papyro effluant. Qui tacet, non semper dormit—fortasse scribit! Grice's weekly essay assignment: Secondo. Assume for the week that a philosopher of silence is, in some mischievous sense, the louder of the two [Secondi]. Discuss whether the taciturn [Secondo] who answers [Hadrian] in writing has thereby violated his vow, fulfilled it more exactly, or merely transferred conversation from the tongue to the papyrus; and conclude by stating which of the two Secondi makes better use of obscurity, the one who speaks of light and darkness, or the one who declines to speak at all. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.Secondo (a. u. c. DCCCLXXVIII). De silentio et ratione conversatoria. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sellio – Ossia: Grice e Sellio: la ragione conversazionale dell’allievo di Filone. Note su De ratione conversatoria. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Gaio Sellio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale dell’allievo di Filone. In the figure of Gaius Sellius, as presented in the exchange with Grice, we see a conception of conversational reason that aligns closely with Grice’s theory while grounding it in pedagogical and cultural practice rather than abstract rule. Grice’s account of reason‑governed conversational meaning emphasizes that what is meant in conversation is shaped by rational expectations, shared intentions, and an implicit commitment to cooperation, even when speakers deviate from literal norms. Sellius embodies this same commitment, but as a pupil formed within Philo’s Stoic discipline, where reason governs not only utterance but demeanor, silence, movement, and tone. His insistence that truth must be said well anticipates Grice’s insight that meaning is not exhausted by propositional content, but depends on how that content is presented and taken up by an audience. Yet where Grice theorizes these phenomena in terms of implicature, maxims, and the calculability of speaker intention, Sellius presents them as a cultivated habit learned through example and correction, in which gravity of doctrine is balanced by conversational lightness. Both figures thus converge on the idea that conversation is rationally ordered without being rigid, but Sellius locates that order in the ethical and educational formation of the speaker, while Grice articulates it as a general framework governing conversational meaning across contexts. Pupil of Filo at Rome.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Sellī. Audīvī tē apud Rōmānōs Philōnis discipulum esse: dic mihi, utrum plus in scholā discātur an in ipsō ambulationis strepitū? SELLIVS: Salvē, Grice. Apud Philōnem, etiam silentium docet: ambulāmus, sed mens sedet; disputāmus, sed animus regitur—Stoicē, sed nōn sine salsā urbanitāte Rōmānā. GRICEVS: Bene. (At saepe fit ut discipulus, dum “scholam” laudat, magis magistrum quam doctrīnam amet; et dum “Philōnem” nominat, iam dimidiam sententiam reliquā partī parat.) Itaque rogō: tu Philōnem sequeris quia verum dicit, an quia bene dicit? SELLIVS: Ego, ut decet discipulum, dīcam “verum”; sed, ut decet Rōmānum, intellegam “bene.” Nam apud Philōnem, Grice, verum ita proponitur ut et animus moveātur et superbia frangātur: ita fit ut doctrina sit gravis, sed sermo levis—et uterque utilis. Grice’s Weekly essay assignment: Sellio. There are, apparently, two Sellii in Rome and perhaps a family resemblance beyond the convenience of editors. Write on [Gaius Sellius] as if you had not yet met [Lucius Sellius], and explain whether a pupil of [Philo] is to be judged chiefly by doctrine, by manner, or by the dangerous Roman habit of saying “verum” while understanding “bene.” You must make clear, before the end, why a De ratione conversatoria written by one Sellius is not automatically to be attributed to the other merely because the surname behaves fraternally. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Sellio, Gaio (a. u. c. DCLXVIII). De ratione conversatoria. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sellio – Ossia: Grice e Sellio: la ragione conversazionale del fratello. Note su Dicta de Ratione Conversatoria Fraterna. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Lucio Sellio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del fratello. Sellio’s position, as dramatized in the passage, anticipates key elements of Grice’s later theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, but it does so from a markedly different angle. Where Grice analyses conversation in terms of shared rational principles, maxims, and calculable implicatures that regulate what is meant beyond what is said, Sellio emphasizes the lived texture of conversational reason as it emerges within personal, fraternal exchange. For Grice, the orderliness of conversation depends on an impersonal cooperative framework that interlocutors implicitly respect, even when they flout it for effect; for Sellio, conversational reason is first experienced as a practice learned with and through others, especially those bound by familiarity, affection, and tacit understanding. The culinary metaphors in Sellio’s remarks capture something Grice later theorizes abstractly: that excess, irony, and play are tolerable, even productive, so long as they presuppose a shared orientation toward rational exchange. Yet Sellio’s emphasis differs in kind: he treats conversational reason less as a system of norms governing meaning and more as a cultivated sensibility, one refined by intimacy and moderated by judgment, exemplified in the fraternal dialogue that Philo oversees rather than engineers. In this way, Sellio complements Grice by embodying, at the social and ethical level, the very rational discipline that Grice reconstructs at the conceptual level: both agree that conversation is not mere talk, but Sellio roots that insight in relational practice, while Grice renders it into theory. Pupil of Filone at Rome – possibly Gaio Sellio’s brother. GRICEVS: Salvē, Sellī! Dic mihi: utrum magis tibi placet ratio conversatōria fraterna, an illa discipulōrum apud Fīlonem? SELLIVS: O Gricevs, ratio fratēris semper dulcior est! Disputāre cum Gaio, fratre meō, est quasi cōquī duo in eādem culīnā – interdum piper addimus, interdum sal, sed semper finis est disputatio, non cena. GRICEVS: Ha! Bene dixisti, Sellī! Sed cave: si disputatio nimis salīta fiat, fortasse Fīlo ipse interveniet ut saporem philosophiae servet. SELLIVS: Et tamen, Grice, Fīlo ipse saepe ridebat, cum fratres inter se “condirent” disputationem: “salem,” inquit, “philosophia amat; sed si nimium salis addideritis, nemo amplius sitiet veritatem—tantum vinum petet.” Grice’s weekly essay assignment. Sellio. Assume, for the purpose of the week, that [Lucius Sellius] and [Gaius Sellius] are brothers until proved otherwise, and then prove otherwise as carefully as you can. Your essay should determine whether fraternal conversation improves philosophy by seasoning it, or merely gives philosophers an excuse to quarrel domestically under [Philo]’s supervision; in either case, explain why “ratio conversatoria fraterna” is philosophically more revealing than it first sounds, and less edible than its culinary metaphors suggest. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Sellio, Lucio (a. u. c. DCCIV). Dicta de Ratione Conversatoria Fraterna. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Semerari – Ossia: Grice e Semerari: la ragione conversazionale e il principio del dialogo in Socrate. Note su La fenomenologia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Giuseppe Semerari (Taranto, Puglia): Grice: “La ragione conversazionale e il principio del dialogo in Socrate. Grice’s account of reason-governed conversational meaning and Giuseppe Semerari’s philosophy of dialogue intersect most clearly around the status of dialogue as the medium in which reason becomes visible, while differing in how far that rationality is formalized. For Grice, conversational reason is procedural and local: meaning arises through speaker intentions interpreted against shared maxims, and dialogue is governed by norms that make mutual understanding possible without guaranteeing final agreement. Implicature is thus a rational achievement of interlocutors moment by moment, inherently provisional and always open to revision. Semerari, by contrast, understands dialogue in a more historical and communal sense, drawing on both Socrates and Vico to frame philosophical reason as an experiential and collective process. Dialogue is not merely a technique for clarifying meanings but the very form of philosophy, a lived encounter in which the individual self emerges through relation to others and to a shared historical world. Where Grice treats incompleteness as a pragmatic feature of conversational inference, Semerari elevates incompleteness to a constitutive principle of philosophy itself, a safeguard against dogmatism rooted in the Vichian idea that truth belongs primarily to the human, historical domain. In this light, Grice’s theory can be read as supplying the micro-rational mechanics of dialogue—the inferential discipline that keeps conversation coherent—while Semerari supplies its macro-philosophical justification, grounding dialogical reason in intersubjectivity, community, and historical becoming. Grice explains how dialogue works; Semerari explains why dialogue must remain open, shared, and ethically charged as the enduring horizon of philosophical reason. S. integrates the Socratic principle of dialogue with the Vico-centric tradition by framing philosophy as a relational, historical experience that bridges individual consciousness and universal human structures. Socratic Dialogue as Methodological Foundation S. interprets the Socratic method not merely as a pedagogy but as an "experience of philosophical thought". For him, dialogue is the essential tool to explore the underlying beliefs and "inner self" that shape individual views, mirroring the continual probing of the original Socratic method. This dialogic stance serves as a defense against dogmatism, emphasizing that philosophical investigations remain "destined to remain incomplete".  Centering on Vico: The "Intrinsically Italian" Tradition Despite his Socratic leanings, S.’s work is deeply rooted in the Italian tradition of VICO .  The Vico of Carabellese: S. notably explores "Il Vico di Carabellese," linking Vico's historical-humanist philosophy to the ontological perspectives of Carabellese. Verum-Factum Principle: He maintains the Vichian emphasis on history and the "human world" as the primary sphere of truth, where the historical development of society mirrors the development of the individual mind. Historicism: S.’s focus on the "human seed" of philosophy reflects Vico's Scienza, viewing philosophy as an evolving social and historical phenomenon rather than a static metaphysical system.  Connection to Idealistic Trends S. acts as a bridge between classical Italian humanism and the Idealistic trends of his era (such as those represented by Croce and Gentile): fascismo, Gentile, neo-idealismo come intrinseccamente fascista, Croce, Vico, intersoggetivo, io-tu, dialogo, dialogo autentico, comunita, valore comunitario, comunita umana, vico. G.: You have brought Semerari under your arm like a shield. Give me the title, and the year. S.: Giuseppe Semerari, La fenomenologia, 1963, Napoli, Morano. [La filosof...ponzio.com] G.: Good. Now, we have just been at the Plea for Excuses, and the man has used, with a straight face, the phrase linguistic phenomenology. S.: He did, and he did it at the point where he is describing his method. G.: Quote it. The sentence, and the two before. S.: He says that the methodology is one of examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it. Then he adds: When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as a final arbiter of, the phenomena. [jstor.org] G.: Yes, that is the passage. And now you will tell me, with your Semerari, that this is not a joke. S.: I will tell you it is a joke, but a joke with borrowed dignity. Austin borrows the continental word, phenomenology, and attaches linguistic to it, as if to say: do not take me for Husserl, I am only doing Oxford. G.: Only doing Oxford, yes: only doing botany. A taxonomy of uses, a herbarium of adverbs. Intentionally, voluntarily, deliberately, inadvertently, by accident, on purpose. A man collects them as if he were pinning butterflies. S.: Semerari would call that only the first moment: description. But phenomenology in the continental sense is not mere listing. It is tied to a logos, to method, to reduction, to the attempt to say what makes the appearing appear as it does. G.: Exactly. And by qualifying it as linguistic, Austin muddies the waters twice. First, he pretends that the route to the things is through the words; secondly, he pretends that the words, by being ordinary, carry an authority that exempts him from theory. S.: Yet Austin’s line explicitly says not as a final arbiter. [jstor.org] G.: That is part of the joke. Not as a final arbiter is a way of having it both ways. You claim you are not enthroning language, but you let language do the whole job you otherwise refuse to formalise. S.: You think the refusal is deliberate. G.: It was temper, and it was also prudence. While Austin lived, one did not say too loudly in Oxford that he lacked theory. Now that he is gone, dead since 1960, I can say it without sounding like I am needling him for sport. S.: He died in 1960, yes. [en.wikipedia.org] G.: So, what is the theoretical demand here. Let us take the very thing the Plea trades on: excuses, and the adverbial modifiers. Austin draws distinctions in the neighbourhood of the act: accidentally, inadvertently, unintentionally, involuntarily, and so on. S.: And you say: that does not yet explain. G.: Precisely. It saves phenomena, yes, and we may write the Greek: σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα. But saving is not accounting. It is not giving the reason why this distinction matters, why a speaker chooses one modifier rather than another, why an audience is licensed to accept one and reject another. S.: Semerari would insist that phenomenology is not only saving but grounding, by going back to the lived structure that makes the distinction intelligible. G.: And now we are closer. Because my own proposal is not a metaphysic of essences, but a principle of reason: for any utterance in which a speaker qualifies an act, there is a reason to do so, a point served in the conversational economy. S.: So you want to replace Austin’s linguistic phenomenology with a theory of reason-for saying. G.: Not replace, but underwrite. Give it the theory he refuses to give. Take intentionally. Why do we say he did it intentionally. Not merely because it contrasts with accidentally. But because in context we are answering a practical demand: we are allocating responsibility, we are licensing blame, we are blocking certain excuses in advance. S.: That is already in Austin, in the form of attention to excuses. G.: He has the material, yes. But he does not state the mechanism. He gives you a map of the vocabulary, but not the logic of the move. And his use of phenomenology gives the impression that description itself is already philosophical satisfaction. S.: And Semerari’s use of fenomenologia is, for you, the contrast case: phenomenology as a method with a commitment to an underlying logos, not merely a virtuoso ear. G.: Precisely. In Semerari, the talk of phenomenology comes attached to dialogue, to method, to the idea that philosophy is an open, communal enterprise. You brought me the passage where he ties reason to dialogue and to the Socratic inheritance. That already looks like theory, not mere catalogue. [La filosof...ponzio.com] S.: Then the issue is that Austin’s phrase linguistic phenomenology is a category mistake. G.: It is at least a provocation. Phenomenology, on the continental side, is not a matter of what we should say when; it is a matter of how the thing is given, how it shows itself under the suspension of naive commitments. Austin turns that into a recommendation: attend to usage, and you will be attending to the world. [jstor.org] S.: But perhaps he means: language is a repository of distinctions we have found worth keeping. G.: That is charitable, and may be true. But then he must tell us why those distinctions are worth keeping, and in which direction the worth points. Here is my principle, stated in the metalanguage you asked for. For any conversational move M in which a speaker chooses expression E rather than E’, there is typically a reason-for that choice, and that reason is recoverable as the point of the move given the speaker’s goals and the shared norms of the exchange. S.: That sounds like your familiar apparatus: point, reason, and the rest. G.: Yes. It is not rationality as a banner, but reason as the local explanation. Why voluntarily rather than intentionally. Why deliberately rather than on purpose. Why accidentally rather than inadvertently. Not because English is fussy, but because speakers are managing what inferences are to be drawn, and what liabilities are to be accepted. S.: So linguistic phenomenology becomes, in your hands, evidence for a theory of conversational reason. G.: Exactly. Austin’s botanising is not worthless. It is data. But data without theory is only a cabinet. Semerari, if he is to be believed, would say that phenomenology without logos is not phenomenology but mere description. [La filosof...ponzio.com] S.: And you would say that logos of phenomena alone is still not enough, unless it connects to reasons that explain why agents say what they say. G.: That is the point. A phenomenology may tell you how things appear; I want, in addition, the reason why this appearance is mobilised in talk, why the speaker selects it, why the hearer accepts it, why the community stabilises it. S.: Then your quarrel with Austin’s phrase is not merely terminological. It is that he uses the prestige of phenomenology to excuse the lack of theory, as if method were optional. G.: Exactly. He pleads for excuses, and then offers himself one: linguistic phenomenology, were it not such a mouthful. [jstor.org] S.: And Semerari would not accept that as an excuse, because fenomenologia, in his Italian context, is already a commitment to systematic grounding. G.: Good. Now let us test with an example from Austin’s own stock. Suppose a man says: I did it unintentionally. What is the point. S.: To block the inference to blame, by denying the intention condition. G.: And why say unintentionally rather than accidentally. S.: Because accidentally suggests the event was outside the agent’s control in a stronger sense, perhaps involving luck or mishap, whereas unintentionally may allow that it was still his doing, just not his aim. G.: Good. Now you see: the difference is not a botanical curiosity; it is a difference in the reason the speaker has for selecting the description, and in the inference the hearer is licensed to make. S.: So your theory does what Austin’s phrase gestures at: it links the words to the realities, by linking both to the inferential norms governing attribution. G.: Exactly. And that is how we keep σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα while not mistaking it for the end of philosophy.Grice: Caro Semerari, ogni volta che parliamo di Socrate e del suo “principio del dialogo”, mi viene in mente l’infaticabile curiosità pugliese: sarà che dalle parti di Taranto la filosofia si mescola al vento, e ogni domanda ne porta altre dieci! Dimmi la verità, hai mai visto Socrate smettere di chiedere, nemmeno davanti a un piatto di orecchiette?  Semerari: Ah Grice, se Socrate avesse avuto le orecchiette sarebbe diventato il filosofo più dialogico del Mediterraneo! Eppure, tu lo sai meglio di me: il vero principio del dialogo non si trova nei piatti ma nelle storie, nella capacità di trasformare la filosofia in una esperienza collettiva, come dice Vico, nata dal seme umano della storia. Grice: Certo, caro Semerari, ma a pensarci bene, questo “principio del dialogo” socratico è stato così tenace che Socrate l’ha tenuto stretto… proprio fino alla fine! Ecco, magari il vero “principio” è anche un “fine” – come dire, la giornata della cicuta non fu solo la fine del dialogo, ma anche il suo ultimo principio. Socrate, sempre coerente, non ha mai lasciato andare la conversazione… neanche quando non c’era più nessuno da convincere, tranne forse il farmacista! Semerari: La tua implicatura sull’implicatura, Grice, è implicaturale come deve essere, secondo il nostro – così condiviso e così amato – “principio del dialogo”, che è anche una fine del dialogo, dove la fine è la meta, non necessariamente il fine lieto dei melodrammi di Metastasio! D’altronde, in filosofia, la vera conclusione è sempre una nuova apertura… e se c’è una cicuta, almeno beviamo insieme, con lo spirito di Vico che non abbandona mai la comunità umana! Semerari, Giuseppe  (1963). La fenomenologia. Napoli: Morano. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Semmola – Ossia: Grice e Semmola: I FONDAMENTI DELLA PSICOLOGIA RAZIONALE --  la ragione conversazionale della filosofia come istituzione. Note su Sulla dottrina delle fermentazioni. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Mariano Semmola (Napoli, Campania): Grice: “I FONDAMENTI DELLA PSICOLOGIA RAZIONALE -- la ragione conversazionale della filosofia come istituzione. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning and Mariano Semmola’s conception of philosophy as an institutional, naturalized psychology intersect around their shared concern with reason as a social and human practice, yet they diverge in level and function. Grice localizes rational governance at the micro-level of conversation: meaning emerges from speaker intentions constrained by norms of cooperation, with implicatures arising through the hearer’s rational reconstruction of what it would make sense to mean in a given context. Reason, for Grice, is neither metaphysical nor biological but practical and inferential, operating within ordinary language use and correcting itself through dialogue. Semmola, by contrast, treats reason as an institutional and anthropological phenomenon, rooted in the natural human organism and stabilized through systematic philosophical education. His psychologia rationalis absorbs logic, metaphysics, and language into a unified civil project, where language functions as the primary vehicle for transmitting ideas within a community and philosophy itself becomes an enduring social institution rather than an episodic exchange. From a Gricean perspective, Semmola’s system foregrounds the background conditions of conversational rationality—the embodied brain, sensory experience, shared linguistic inheritance—rather than the inferential mechanics of particular utterances. Where Grice explains how understanding is negotiated moment by moment under defeasible norms, Semmola explains why such negotiation is possible at all, grounding rational discourse in the natural unity of mind and body and in the civic task of philosophy to cultivate intelligible, living thought. The contrast, then, is not opposition but scale: Grice theorizes the rational grammar of conversation, while Semmola theorizes the rational infrastructure—biological, linguistic, and institutional—within which conversation can count as a bearer of meaning and truth. S.’s "Institutiones Philosophiae" remains a significant example of the Italian systematic trend, characterized by an encyclopedic effort to unify diverse fields of knowledge while rooting metaphysical inquiries in physical reality. Italian Systematic Tradition S.’s work embodies the Italian "civil and ethical" vocation of philosophy, which avoids abstract speculation in favour of "living thought" that addresses the human condition directly. His systematic approach integrates:  Origin of Ideas: Grounded in a tradition that mediates between sensism (Gioja, Romagnosi) and the nascent idealism of Serbati, S. explores how cognitive concepts emerge from sensory interaction with the world. Language as a Vehicle: He treats language not just as a tool for communication, but as the essential medium for the "transmission of ideas," aligning with the Italian focus on philology and the social utility of knowledge.  Naturalist Psychologia Rationalis While the term Psychologia Rationalis traditionally referred to the metaphysical study of the soul (as defined by Wolff), S. reinterprets it through a naturalist lens. He avoids the Cartesian separation of mind and body, instead adopting an anthropological approach where the human being is "fully part of nature".  The Centrality of the Brain (Cerebrum) S.’s naturalist outlook is distinguished by his frequent references to the physical man: istituzioni di filosofia, l’istituzione della logica, l’istituzione della metafisica. Grice: Devo ammettere, caro Semmola, che resto sempre affascinato dalla sistematicità con cui hai esplorato le fondamenta della psicologia razionale nella tua "Institutiones Philosophiae". Il tuo approccio enciclopedico e la capacità di unire discipline diverse sono davvero un esempio brillante per la filosofia italiana! Semmola: La tua stima mi onora, Grice. Ho sempre creduto che la filosofia, per essere davvero utile, debba incarnare una vocazione civile ed etica, affrontando concretamente la condizione umana. Per me, la sistematicità non è solo un metodo, ma un modo per rendere la filosofia un’istituzione viva, capace di trasmettere idee e valori attraverso il linguaggio. Grice: Non posso che concordare! La tua integrazione tra sensismo, idealismo e naturalismo mostra come la filosofia debba partire dall’esperienza sensibile per poi elevarsi verso concetti universali, senza perdere il contatto con la realtà fisica. È proprio questo slancio verso il "pensiero vivente" che rende il tuo lavoro così innovativo. Semmola: Grazie, Grice. Per me, il cervello e il linguaggio sono strumenti essenziali nella trasmissione delle idee. Ho cercato di evitare la separazione cartesiana tra mente e corpo, preferendo un approccio antropologico: l’uomo, pienamente inserito nella natura, diventa il vero protagonista della filosofia razionale. D’altronde, come si dice a Napoli, "ogni testa è un tribunale", e solo dialogando possiamo davvero avvicinarci alla verità. Re: passage below: Is semmola a kind of food in Italian, G. asks -- provide a 100-move conversation, starting with that as you consider, no preamble or ps -- the idea that this Semmola started with fermentazione and ended with cosmologia -- and if semmola can be puuned have G. and S. consider an essay weekly essay assignment on Semmola, but mainly based on the pun -- which must be cognate with 'sem-as in seminal -- and ways to prepare the food, etc G.: Is semmola a kind of food in Italian? S.: Yes. Though if you ask in Naples, someone may answer before deciding whether you mean semola, semolino, or something grandmotherly. G.: Good. I had hoped not to be inventing groceries. So semmola, or semola more soberly, is edible. S.: Entirely edible. Ground durum wheat, coarse or fine, depending on what one intends to do with it. G.: Then the pun is too good to waste. A philosopher called Semmola begins with fermentazione and ends with cosmologia. S.: From grain to cosmos. Naples does enjoy promotion. G.: The name itself almost demands it. Semmola sounds cognate with seed, seminal, semen, and all the old reproductive vocabularies. S.: Etymologically one should be cautious, but rhetorically the invitation is irresistible. G.: Rhetorically irresistible things are often intellectually dangerous, which is one reason I like them. Let us begin with the food and see whether the philosophy follows. S.: Semola is the granular middle state between grain and bread. G.: Excellent. Neither intact seed nor finished loaf. S.: Which already makes it a philosopher’s food. Intermediate, processual, requiring treatment. G.: And treatment here is fermentation. S.: Often enough. Bread, pasta in some forms, puddings, gnocchi, sweet preparations, semolino with milk, semolina cakes, porridge-like consolations. G.: A comprehensive metaphysics of breakfast. S.: And supper. G.: Quite. Then Semmola the philosopher begins from fermentations because his very surname wants to be worked upon. S.: That is a bold philology. G.: A dry one, I hope. Fermentation means transformation by hidden process, invisible activity, orderly disturbance. S.: Which is not a bad beginning for a naturalist psychology. G.: Exactly. One begins with physical process, bodily organisation, the cerebrum, the organism, the doctrine of fermentations; and somehow one ends with psychology rationalis and finally cosmology. S.: So from the bubbling vat to the stars. G.: Or, if you prefer, from semolina to system. S.: That is much better than most textbook subtitles. G.: It should be. Now, can semmola be punned as sem-? S.: You will make it sem-inal whether or not the dictionaries approve. G.: Naturally. Sem- as in seed, beginning, germ, seminality, the not-yet-expanded principle. S.: Which fits because semola is already reduced seed, and philosophy begins for Semmola from the conditions under which ideas arise out of sensory and bodily life. G.: Very good. The seed is no pure idea fallen from nowhere. It is worked matter. S.: So the pun writes itself: Semmola begins with what ferments, not with what descends. G.: Excellent. That is exactly the sort of thing one would turn into a weekly essay assignment to punish the bright. S.: You have one in mind already. G.: Of course. “Explain why a philosopher named Semmola could hardly begin with celestial mechanics, and assess whether fermentation is the proper prelude to cosmology.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: Very nice. The poor pupil would not know whether to start in the kitchen or in Aristotle. G.: Which is exactly the point. All good essays begin by not knowing where to stand. S.: Then what is the food, precisely? Coarse ground grain, usually durum wheat. G.: Yes, and that matters because granularity itself becomes conceptually useful. Semolina is not the seed entire, but not yet the bread. It is prepared matter awaiting process. S.: Which makes it an admirable analogue for Semmola’s institutional philosophy. Human minds as prepared natural matter requiring education, language, and social fermentation before rational discourse becomes possible. G.: Splendid. You are beginning to deserve lunch. S.: High praise indeed. G.: Do not become pleased. Now, the progression from fermentazione to cosmologia. How do we state it without sounding comic beyond rescue? S.: One might say that Semmola’s system insists that rational discourse must be grounded in the physical and anthropological conditions of life: brain, sensation, language, bodily organisation. From there he expands into logic, metaphysics, and finally cosmology. G.: Good. So the cosmic never leaves the kitchen entirely behind. S.: Or the laboratory. G.: Better. The point is that cosmology in such a system is not pure abstraction but the enlargement of natural inquiry from organism to universe. S.: Which is why Speranza’s contrast with your own micro-pragmatics works. G.: Exactly. I look at how one speaker gets a hearer to gather what is meant. Semmola looks at why there are creatures with brains, languages, institutions, and educational practices such that such gatherings can occur at all. S.: Hence philosophy as institution. G.: Yes. Not merely a series of bright exchanges, but a durable civil practice transmitting living thought. S.: Then semmola the food becomes a nice figure for institution too: something processed, shared, worked by culture, variable by region, but materially continuous. G.: Very good. In Naples, semmola is not merely substance; it is cuisine. In philosophy likewise, raw sensation is not yet thought; it must be worked into civic form. S.: Through language. G.: Precisely. Semmola’s insistence on language as vehicle for transmission is key. One does not simply have ideas; one hands them on, cultivates them, institutionalises them. S.: Which turns semolina into pedagogy. G.: Almost. At least into a metaphor for prepared intelligibility. S.: There is a danger that the pun will get away from us. G.: A danger worth running. Now, the weekly essay assignment you asked for. We need one that plays on the name without becoming entirely gastronomic. S.: “From Grain to Brain” is too obvious. G.: Too obvious and too good. Keep it in reserve. Better perhaps: “Semmola and the Civilisation of Grain: explain how a philosophy that begins from fermentations may nonetheless end in cosmology without ceasing to be anthropological.” S.: Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. G.: Naturally. Handwriting matters especially when semolina is in the ink. S.: That is grotesque. G.: Which is why it may stay. Another assignment might be: “Discuss whether Semmola’s naturalist psychologia rationalis is better understood as the fermentation of sense into concept, or as the institutional cooking of the human animal into the citizen.” S.: Very severe on the citizen. G.: The citizen deserves some heat. Naples knew that. S.: Then perhaps the food itself deserves more exact handling. Semola may be used for pasta, gnocchi alla romana, semolino dolce, bread, cakes, dumplings, and porridge. G.: Excellent. The plurality of preparations helps. It shows that a single material under different forms of process yields distinct outcomes. S.: Which is a good analogy for his encyclopedic Institutiones. G.: Exactly. One natural basis, many forms of intellectual elaboration. S.: Logic, metaphysics, psychology, language, cosmology. G.: Quite. The same grain, various dishes. S.: You will offend the idealists. G.: All the better. Idealists deserve to be reminded that the cerebrum was there before the category. S.: Semmola would approve. G.: He would at least recognise the impulse. He avoids Cartesian separation by insisting that the human being is fully in nature. That is already a rebuke to airy rationalism. S.: So fermentation matters because it is a process in matter that yields transformation without importing a second substance. G.: Precisely. Fermentation is almost a parable of immanent development. Something happens within matter under conditions, and out of it come new forms. S.: Bread from dough, thought from organism. G.: Very good. One must be cautious with the analogy, but it illuminates the title beautifully. S.: Then the pun on sem- as seminal is not entirely idle. G.: No. Seed, grain, germ, origin, productivity. Semmola’s whole system is concerned with origins that remain materially rooted while opening into conceptual life. S.: So he is sem-inal in exactly the way he would perhaps deny if accused too quickly. G.: Quite. One should never call a Neapolitan thinker seminal without first checking whether one is in the pantry. S.: You are incorrigible. G.: Only etymologically. Now, there is also the possibility that semmola as food is not “kind of food” but “kind of ingredient.” S.: Better. Semola is often not the final dish but the material from which dishes are made. G.: Excellent. Then Semmola the philosopher is an ingredient-thinker. He attends to the underlying matter from which intellectual institutions are formed. S.: Brain, sensation, language, social inheritance. G.: Yes. He is less interested in finished doctrine than in the conditions under which doctrine becomes transmissible and living. S.: Which is why Speranza says he theorises the infrastructure rather than the inferential mechanics. G.: Exactly. I say how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant here and now. Semmola says what sort of embodied, linguistic, civic creature can ever inhabit such a space of reasons. S.: Then the move from fermentazioni to cosmologia is really a move from process at the low level to order at the high level. G.: Very good. And because the low level is never abandoned, the high level is not merely speculative. It is rooted in natural reality. S.: That sounds almost anti-Cartesian by cuisine. G.: A phrase worth keeping. Anti-Cartesian by cuisine. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become culinary. Now, if we were to set a truly perverse weekly essay on Semmola, what would it be? S.: “Assess whether semmola is closer to Aristotle’s hyle or to the Lockean tabula rasa, and explain why neither can be served plain.” G.: Excellent. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: Another: “Explain why a philosopher who begins with fermentation cannot be accused of lifeless system, and why a philosopher who ends with cosmology cannot be accused of remaining in the pantry.” G.: Very good indeed. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: You enjoy the formula too much. G.: It is a small compensation for collection. Now, should we make anything of Naples specifically? S.: We should. Naples is a city where food metaphors become civilisational without effort. A philosophy of institution there will almost naturally appear as something kneaded, worked, leavened, and shared. G.: Excellent. The civic vocation of philosophy appears here not as pure academy but as cultural transmission in a living society. S.: Which is why language becomes central. It is the medium through which the dish is served. G.: Splendid. Semmola is not merely interested in ideas existing, but in their passing from head to head, generation to generation. S.: “Every head is a tribunal,” as the saying goes. G.: Yes, and a tribunal needs language before it may pronounce. Semmola’s cerebrum is no solitary organ. It becomes philosophically interesting only within linguistic and institutional circulation. S.: So if the food pun is to be more than wit, it must mark precisely that transition from raw natural basis to socially elaborated form. G.: Exactly. The grain alone is not enough; one needs the milling, the water, the yeast, the oven, the recipe, the table, the custom. S.: Which is almost too good a model for an institution. G.: It is certainly better than most legal metaphors. And it reminds one that institutions are not merely constraints but forms of preparation. S.: Then one could say that Semmola’s philosophy is leavened naturalism. G.: Better than “fermented idealism,” yes. S.: He would dislike the latter. G.: He would have cause. Now, about the cognate question. Is semmola cognate with sem- in the strict philological sense? S.: Probably not in the direct way you are making merry with, but the rhetorical and associative field is close enough for a tutor’s title. G.: Excellent. That is all one needs. Weekly essays are not philological depositions; they are occasions for disciplined analogy. S.: A dangerous sentence. G.: A true one. Now, let us sharpen the transition from fermentation to cosmology. What is the exact conceptual path? S.: First, physical processes and the embodied human organism. Second, sensory interaction as source of ideas. Third, language as transmission of those ideas. Fourth, logic and metaphysics as institutionally codified reflections upon them. Fifth, cosmology as the enlargement of rational inquiry to the whole natural order. G.: Perfectly done. S.: Thank you. G.: And because he naturalises rational psychology, none of this requires a separate soul-substance descending from nowhere. S.: So again the fermentation image helps: transformation without ontological rupture. G.: Exactly. He can avoid Cartesian bifurcation while still preserving the dignity of rational thought. S.: Then the essay assignment might also ask whether fermentation is for Semmola merely a scientific topic or a model of philosophical becoming. G.: Excellent. “Discuss whether Semmola’s doctrine of fermentations functions merely as physiological science, or as an implicit model of how nature becomes intelligible to itself.” Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. S.: That is vile. G.: In the best sense. Now, what ways of preparing the food shall we mention if we want the pun to have domestic authority? S.: Semolino with milk and sugar, semolina bread, semolina gnocchi, semolina pudding, semolina cakes, and certain Neapolitan uses tied to soups and enriched doughs. G.: Good. Variety of preparation from one base substance. Again the analogy holds: one rational infrastructure, many doctrinal forms. S.: And perhaps one may say that some systems are overcooked. G.: One may always say that. Though one should not say it too near Rosmini. Now, the surname. Mariano Semmola. S.: Yes. G.: Mariano almost calls for maternal and civic softness, while Semmola grounds him back in grain and process. S.: That is not science. G.: No, but it is criticism, which is better company. Now, would you say that his philosophy is more like bread or more like pudding? S.: Bread. It is institutional, civic, sustaining, and meant to support a whole form of life rather than merely to console the dessert course. G.: Excellent. Though there is some pudding in all encyclopedic systems. S.: Especially in Naples. G.: Quite. Then perhaps the final line for Speranza’s dry voice is this: a philosopher called Semmola was almost destined to begin from fermentations, for his very name suggests a matter prepared to rise. S.: And to end in cosmology because no systematic Italian is content to remain in the kitchen if the universe may still be plated. G.: Perfectly absurd. Perfectly usable. S.: Then the main answer to your opening question is yes: semmola is a kind of food in Italian. G.: Better: an ingredient, a prepared grain, an intermediate substance awaiting form. S.: Which is exactly why it becomes philosophically suggestive. G.: Precisely. Semmola is what matter looks like when already on its way to culture. S.: That is very nearly your final sentence. G.: Very nearly. Let us improve it slightly. Semmola is what matter looks like when nature has already admitted the possibility of institution. S.: Excellent. G.: And Semmola the philosopher is what rational psychology looks like when it begins not with disembodied clarity but with the grain, the brain, and the long civic work of making them speak. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Neapolitan, with one loaf still rising.Semmola, Mariano  (1869). Sulla dottrina delle fermentazioni. Napoli: Tipografia dell’Accademia Reale delle Scienze

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Semprini – Ossia: Grice e Semprini: implicatura cabalistica nel deutero-esperanto di Pico -- filosofia italiana. Note su La fenice degl’ingegni. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.  Giovanni Semprini (Bologna, Emilia): implicatura cabalistica nel deutero-esperanto di Pico. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning and Giovanni Semprini’s reading of Pico della Mirandola articulate two sharply different rationalizations of meaning that nonetheless converge on the problem of universality. Grice treats meaning as emerging from the disciplined use of reason in concrete interaction: conversational implicatures are not encoded in symbols themselves but inferred by rational agents operating under shared expectations of cooperation, intelligibility, and restraint. Universality, for Grice, is procedural rather than symbolic: it lies in the recursive accessibility of reasoning practices, not in a privileged language or code. Semprini, by contrast, interprets Pico’s Christian cabala as an attempt to secure universality at the level of symbolic structure itself, transforming letters and numbers into rational characters capable of expressing metaphysical truth directly. In Semprini’s account, cabalistic symbolism functions as a proto-logical system, a speculative lingua universalis in which concordia universalis is achieved not through conversational negotiation but through formal combinatorics grounded in a shared divine architecture of reason. From a Gricean perspective, this ambition risks collapsing communicative meaning into cryptographic display: when symbols require prior initiation rather than mutual rational adjustment, implicature hardens into code and conversation gives way to decipherment. The contrast thus turns on where rational governance is located: for Grice, in the ongoing management of understanding between speakers; for Semprini’s Pico, in a pre-conversational symbolic order meant to guarantee agreement in advance. Grice’s “deutero-esperanto” remains firmly pragmatic and defeasible, while Semprini’s Pico aims at a rationalized sacral language whose elegance threatens to outpace its communicative clarity. Grice: “Implicatura cabalistica nel deutero-esperanto di Pico -- filosofia italiana S.’s interpretation of PICO  identifies his "christian cabala" not merely as mysticism, but as a proto-rationalist system that provides the blueprint for a  lingua universalis (universal language). S. argues that PICO  transforms cabala into a formal logic by utilising its structural components — letters and numbers — as a "characteristic" or symbolic system to achieve universal concord -- concordia universalis.  The Role of Cabalistic Symbolism PICO ’s cabalism led to this universal language through several key conceptual shifts: Mathematical Reduction: PICO  views letters as sub-kinds of images and numbers. S. highlights that by treating the alphabet as a set of mathematical variables, PICO  moves toward a characteristica — a symbolic system where complex metaphysical truths could be calculated rather than just debated. The Sefirot as Rational Attributes: PICO  interprets the ten Sefirot (emanations) as universal attributes or categories of the "supreme Mind". This provides a common framework that, in S.’s view, allows different philosophical traditions – both Platonic and Aristotelian – v. Grice A. D. Code --  to be translated into a single rationalized "lingua". Concordia Universalis: PICO ’s goal is a "universal system of knowledge" that includes all disciplines. S. posits that Pico’s use of cabala is the specific tool that allows him to bridge disparate traditions by identifying a shared "divine purpose and design".  Foundational Reason and the Lingua Universalis S. suggests that PICO ’s cabalistic "magic" is actually a form of speculative logic. Instead of traditional spells, Pico’s "magic" involves the "magical combinations of the sacred alphabet" to reach the first cause.  For S., this represents an  attempt to create a rationalized universal language (a lingua universalis) where symbols (characters) directly represent universal concepts. deuteuro-esperanto di Grice, PICO.  Grice: Semprini, spiegami: davvero Pico voleva una lingua universale—una specie di “deutero‑esperanto”—ma costruita più con alfabeti solenni che con frasi usabili al mercato? Semprini: Proprio così: l’idea è che lettere e numeri diventino una logica simbolica capace di portare a una concordia universalis. Non è (solo) mistero: è un tentativo di metodo, travestito da sacralità. Grice: Capisco… eppure, a orecchio mio, certe combinazioni “sacre” suonano un po’ troppo come un cifrario che si compiace di restare cifrario. Io—che vengo da Vadum Boum e ho un’educazione piuttosto “classica”—quando una lingua sembra richiedere prima la chiave e poi la conversazione, mi viene da chiedermi se stiamo ancora parlando di lingua o di cabinetto delle serrature. Semprini: Implicatura cabalistica la tua, Grice, anche se viene da un gentile integrale come te! Perché stai dicendo: “bella l’ambizione di Pico”, ma anche “se la combinatoria diventa più importante dell’intesa, la lingua universale si riduce a lingua per iniziati”. E in fondo la vera civiltà—occidentale o no—si misura da quanta chiarezza riesce a fare senza rinunciare all’eleganza. Re: passage below: provide without preamble or ps a 100-move conversation at Oxford between G. and S. on Walter Pater on Pico taking into account this Semprini study -- with G. calling "our Water" "ou man in Italian philosophy" -- and S. indicating that that usually means he is not good at it -- and they consider Pater's excursoions to Firenze and Mirandola to find the real Pico, and Semprini saying that the phoenix of wit is phoenicial, etc -- and most that you can get from Oxonian influence and reading of Pico -- alla G. and S. and Semprini -- thanaks. G.: Let us begin with the obvious provincial boast. Pater is our man in Italian philosophy. S.: Which usually means he is not very good at it. G.: Naturally. The English only call a man “our man” abroad when they mean he has become usable at a distance. S.: Or decorative. G.: Quite. But in Pater’s case the matter is subtler. He is “our man” in Italian philosophy not because he masters its schools, but because he lets Italy reorganise English inwardness. S.: That is the generous version. G.: The true one too, more or less. And with Pico in particular, Pater finds in Italy a figure who allows English criticism to flirt with universalism without becoming German about it. S.: A very Paterian flirtation. G.: Precisely. Now, Semprini. S.: Ah yes, Semprini and the phoenix. G.: La fenice degli ingegni. One of those admirable titles that sound simultaneously celebratory and faintly suspicious. S.: Especially once Semprini begins implying that the phoenix of wit may also be Phoenician. G.: Yes, that excellent little perversity. The phoenix, as a figure of singular rebirth, unexpectedly tied back to Phoenicia, as if wit itself had Levantine shipping routes. S.: Which would have amused Pater enormously. G.: No doubt. Pater likes all intelligences that seem at once antique, exotic, and internally over-cultivated. S.: Then Pico becomes for him not merely a historical humanist, but a scene of refined excess. G.: Exactly. And Pater’s famous chapter on Pico in The Renaissance is one of those English acts of appropriation which are also, in a way, acts of homage. S.: Because Pater does not simply report Pico; he inhabits him. G.: Yes. Or tries to. He introjects Pico as a style of spiritual and intellectual amplitude. Not exactly scholarship in the German sense, still less philosophy in the dry Oxonian one, but something more dangerous to both: a criticism that behaves like inward biography. S.: And here you would say Semprini matters because he helps separate the real Pico from the Paterian one. G.: Or at least helps us notice the distance between them. Pater goes to Florence and Mirandola in imagination, and perhaps in itinerary, in search of “the real Pico,” but what he recovers is already a Paterian construction. S.: As all “real” Italians in English prose eventually become. G.: Yes. Italy in English criticism is always half archive, half moral instrument. Pater’s Italy is not census Italy but elective Italy. S.: And Pico, for him, is the most elective of all. G.: Quite. Pico is wonderfully usable because he is already a figure of universality, youth, brilliance, syncretism, cabala, ambition, and verbal splendour. S.: A bad recipe for sober philosophy. G.: A marvellous recipe for Pater. The man who wants to write not a history of philosophy but an anatomy of cultivated intensity will naturally fasten on Pico. S.: Semprini, though, wants more architecture. G.: Yes. Semprini wants to show that Pico’s Christian cabala is not merely mystical theatre but a serious attempt at symbolic universality. S.: Letters and numbers as a proto-logical system. G.: Precisely. The sacred alphabet as characteristic, combinatory, universal language. A speculative lingua universalis before the later modern projects arrive with better diagrams and worse metaphysics. S.: Then the contrast between you and Semprini is almost too neat. G.: I should hope not too neat. My complaint would be that such a universal symbolic order threatens to outpace communication. Once understanding depends on initiation into sacred combinations, one has a code before one has a conversation. S.: Which is why you called it a cabinet of locks. G.: Yes. When a language requires the key before the exchange, it begins to look less like language and more like the proud concealment of language. S.: Yet Pico’s ambition is still magnificent. G.: Entirely magnificent. Semprini is right to rescue that. The ambition is not merely occult vanity; it is concordia universalis under symbolic compression. S.: And Pater responds to the ambition aesthetically. G.: Exactly. Pater is less interested in the technical possibility of the system than in what sort of mind would desire such a system. Pico fascinates him as a form of over-full consciousness seeking total synthesis. S.: Which is already philosophy in Pater’s own mode. G.: Very much so. Pater’s philosophy is always indirect. He asks not “Is this doctrine true?” first, but “What sort of soul does this doctrine make visible?” S.: So his Pico is a spiritual physiognomy. G.: Beautifully put. Yes. The chapter becomes a portrait of intellectual desire under Renaissance conditions. S.: And thus Oxford receives Pico not through scholastic disputation, but through criticism as character-study. G.: Precisely. Which is why Speranza likes to call Pater our man in Italian philosophy. He is “our man” because he domesticates the foreign sublime into an English prose of cultivated discrimination. S.: Again, which usually means he gets it slightly wrong. G.: And fruitfully so. Great reception is often fruitful misprision. If Pater were merely exact, he would be less influential. S.: Then what do you think Pater actually sees in Pico? G.: Youth, brilliance, universality, daring, syncretic appetite, and a kind of intensity that can be made exemplary for modern cultivated readers. Pico becomes the image of an intelligence too wide to remain doctrinally obedient. S.: A phoenix of intellect. G.: Yes, and there Semprini’s title is wonderfully apt. The phoenix dies and returns; Pico’s wit consumes traditions in order to rise from their ashes under a new rhetorical form. S.: And Semprini’s little Phoenician joke? G.: It points to the old traffic of alphabets, symbols, sacred lineages, the eastern aura under western universalism. Quite proper for cabala. The phoenix of wit is not only singular but also migratory. S.: So the bird flies from Phoenicia to Florence by way of Bologna and Oxford. G.: That is almost too handsome, but I shall allow it. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. Now, Oxford’s relation to Pico before Pater. S.: Rather thin, I should think. G.: Thinner than it later pretends. Oxford knew enough of Renaissance humanism, of course, but Pater’s chapter gives Pico to English readers in a distinctive way: as an inwardly available type of intellectual style. S.: Not merely as the author of the Oration. G.: Precisely. The Oration becomes less a doctrinal document than a voice, a gesture of ascent, a self-fashioning of the intellect. S.: Which means Pater prefers the philosophical aura to the technical labour. G.: Yes. Though one should not accuse him too quickly of negligence. His form of reading is not philological exactitude but selective intensification. S.: Semprini, by contrast, wants the machinery. G.: He does. He wants to say: Pico’s cabala is not just sacred ornament. It is a rationalised symbolic practice aiming at a universal language of concepts through letters and numbers. S.: Which then lets one talk about a proto-Leibnizian characteristic. G.: Exactly. And there I become interested and suspicious at once. S.: Suspicious because symbols may harden before understanding begins. G.: Precisely. My own procedural universalism says: rationality lies in what agents can mutually work out under cooperative norms, not in a privileged pre-conversational code. S.: So Semprini’s Pico risks replacing conversation with decipherment. G.: Yes. A splendid danger, but still a danger. S.: Pater would not care. G.: Not in the same way. For Pater, the very opacity of the ambition is part of the allure. A universal language that remains half sacred and half symbolic is excellent material for English cultivated yearning. S.: Then Pater on Pico is not really a philosophy of cabala, but a criticism of universal desire. G.: Excellent. That is exactly right. He asks what universal desire looks like when embodied in a Renaissance prodigy. S.: And the answer is: elegant, perilous, over-learned, youthful, and just sufficiently impossible. G.: Very good. Now, Semprini’s study. S.: It belongs to that twentieth-century Italian moment in which one wants to reclaim Pico from purely literary or mystical caricature and show him as methodical. G.: Yes. Pico becomes not merely the bright aristocratic dabbler, but a thinker attempting symbolic integration across traditions. S.: Christian cabala as formal ambition. G.: Precisely. One can see why Semprini liked that. It lets Pico belong not only to humanist glamour but to the prehistory of universal language and speculative logic. S.: Which then lets Grice enter, if only to say no. G.: A civilised no. I would say: yes, splendid ambition; no, symbols do not guarantee understanding merely by being combinatory. If the users must first be initiated into a sacred lock-system, mutual accessibility has been lost. S.: Then your “deutero-esperanto” joke is directed at precisely that danger. G.: Yes. A universal language that becomes too elegant for the market ceases to be language in the ordinary human sense. S.: Pater, though, would probably prefer it for that reason. G.: Exactly. Pater likes forms that exceed utility and become spiritual tests. He does not want the market; he wants the studiolo. S.: Or the Florentine interior. G.: Quite. And that is why his excursions to Florence and Mirandola matter symbolically, whether or not one maps every actual route. He goes in search of the real Pico and finds instead a geography of intensified consciousness. S.: Florence as concentration, Mirandola as origin. G.: Yes. The city and the small place together produce the tension between worldly splendour and singular birth. Pico becomes both cosmopolitan and locatable. S.: Which is very useful to an English critic. G.: Extremely. The English love universality best when it can still be tied to a precise Tuscan or Emilian hill. S.: Semprini, meanwhile, ties universality to letters and numbers. G.: Exactly. He gives the symbolic skeleton under the aesthetic flesh. S.: Then in an Oxford conversation one could say: Pater gave us the perfume of Pico; Semprini supplies the apparatus. G.: Dry, but accurate. S.: Is that not your ideal combination? G.: My ideal combination is apparatus without perfume. But one must sometimes settle for the history of reception as it has occurred. S.: And Oxford’s reception of Pico was very much Paterian first. G.: Yes. Through Pater, Pico becomes a figure of refined multiplicity, not a scholastic technician of cabalistic rationality. S.: Though later readers can return by Semprini’s path. G.: Precisely. That is what makes the whole thing interesting now. We can read Pater as a stylistic and philosophical event in English culture, then use Semprini to show what Pater selected, softened, and re-ordered. S.: Does that diminish Pater? G.: Not at all. It specifies him. Great readers are often great by selection. Pater’s greatness lies not in completeness but in the pressure of his omissions. S.: Pressure of omissions is a very Griceian compliment. G.: Naturally. Now, the phrase “our man in Italian philosophy.” S.: Which I still maintain is usually ominous. G.: Yes, but here ominous in a productive way. Pater is not “our man” because he mastered the schools of Padua, Naples, or Bologna. He is “our man” because he made an English philosophical style porous to Italian exemplarity. S.: So Italian philosophy enters Oxford not through doctrinal conquest but through cultivated reception. G.: Exactly. Through essays, portraits, chapters, style, moral psychology, and the conversion of historical persons into modern criteria of inward life. S.: That sounds perilously close to saying that Pater does philosophy by criticism. G.: He does. And criticism at its best is one of philosophy’s least acknowledged forms. S.: Then Pater on Pico is philosophical because it asks what kind of intellectual life is worth admiring. G.: Very good. It also asks what universality looks like when pursued not by system-builders but by prodigies. Pico’s universality is not bureaucratic, but incandescent. S.: Which is why the phoenix is so apt. G.: Exactly. The phoenix is not merely resurrection. It is self-consuming singularity. Pico burns through traditions and reappears as their impossible synthesis. S.: A dangerous model for undergraduates. G.: The best ones always are. S.: Oxford influence, then. Where exactly? G.: In the mode of reception. Pater makes it possible for English readers to approach Italian philosophy not only through direct doctrine but through exemplary portraits. That affects later ways of reading Renaissance thought in English. S.: Even when later scholarship corrects him. G.: Especially then. Corrections often remain within the space a first great reading opened. Semprini can oppose Paterian atmosphere because Pater made Pico atmospherically available in the first place. S.: So even the apparatus owes something to the perfume. G.: Reluctantly, yes. S.: Good. Now, what of Semprini’s “deutero-esperanto”? G.: I use the phrase mischievously, of course. Pico’s universal symbolic project is not Esperanto, nor second-order Esperanto. But the jest catches the dream of a rational medium meant to pre-empt misunderstanding. S.: Which you resist because misunderstanding is not cured by sacred algebra. G.: Exactly. Misunderstanding is cured, if at all, by rational adjustment among persons, not by a code requiring prior consecration. S.: So the difference between you and Semprini’s Pico is where universality is located. G.: Precisely. For me, universality is procedural: recursive accessibility of reasons, what any competent participant may in principle work out. For Semprini’s Pico, universality lies in symbolic structure itself: letters and numbers arranged under divine architecture. S.: And Pater stands aside from both, looking at the soul that wants it. G.: Very well put. S.: Thank you. G.: Again, do not become pleased. Now, the post-Grand Tour aspect. S.: You mean that by Pater’s time Italy is no longer merely a place to visit but a repertoire of inward standards. G.: Exactly. The older Grand Tour made Italy a finishing school for English gentlemen. Pater makes Italy a medium of philosophical criticism. One no longer simply sees Florence; one uses Florence to correct one’s soul. S.: Or to ornament it. G.: Both, perhaps. But with Pico the operation is especially intellectual. Italian philosophy becomes available as a style of universality that English thought can admire without entirely accepting. S.: Which is very Oxford. G.: Extremely. Oxford likes to adopt by reservation. S.: Then perhaps the most Oxfordian thing about Pater on Pico is that he makes excess respectable by converting it into style. G.: Excellent. Yes. Pico’s wild universality becomes something one may discuss in a common room because Pater has turned it into cultivated prose. S.: Semprini would perhaps wish for more numbers and fewer cadences. G.: Very likely. But he is grateful to Pater nonetheless, whether he admits it or not. S.: Because without Pater, Pico in English might have remained merely a name on a syllabus. G.: Precisely. S.: One last thing. Do you think Pater’s excursions to Florence and Mirandola were really a search for the “real” Pico? G.: In the biographical sense, perhaps not wholly. In the rhetorical sense, yes. Pater needs the gestures of recovery, local contact, geographical exactness, because English criticism likes to pretend that intimacy with place secures truth of portrait. S.: Even when the portrait is clearly selective. G.: Especially then. Place licenses selection by making it feel recovered rather than composed. S.: So Pater’s Italy is both archive and alibi. G.: Beautifully put. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it and pretend Semprini implied it. S.: He probably did. G.: Then the final judgment? S.: Pater is “our man in Italian philosophy” because he made Italian intellectual figures, and Pico above all, available to English inward criticism; Semprini matters because he restores to Pico the formal and cabalistic ambition that Pater aestheticised; and the two together show that Oxford’s relation to Italian philosophy has long proceeded by selective admiration first, and technical correction afterward. G.: Perfectly done. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Florentine, with one Phoenix feather in the Bodleian.Semprini, Giovanni (1921). Pico: la fenice degli ingegni. Todi: Atanor.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sempronio – Ossia: Grice e Sempronio’ Gaio Sempronio Gracco (Roma, Lazio). Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is built for the repairable rationalities of talk: what a speaker means, and what a hearer is entitled to take the speaker to mean, is recoverable by assuming cooperative norms (relevance, quantity, etc.) and then calculating implicatures as reasonable inferences from what is said plus context. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, by contrast, is almost a textbook case of how public speech strains (and sometimes breaks) those assumptions: in the Forum, “cooperation” is factional, audiences are plural, and hostile interpreters can force an implicature on you—so that a reformist slogan about ager publicus or a legal appeal in the contio de capite civis Romani can be made to “mean” (in the Senate’s uptake) crown-hunger, sedition, or tyranny, even when the orator’s declared intention is civic justice and due process. The interesting comparison is that Grice explains implicature as a rational bridge between speaker and hearer under shared conversational expectations, whereas Gaius’s experience shows a political limit-case where the bridge becomes contested territory: the same utterance supports competing “calculations” depending on who claims the right to set the background assumptions (what counts as relevant, what counts as enough, what counts as sincere), and the fight over the res publica becomes, in part, a fight over which implicatures are “reasonable” and therefore politically actionable. Grice: “Clifton College, 14 October 1926. Dear Father, Today Waddington (whom you met at the cricket match, the one who can turn a perfectly innocent innings into an occasion for Roman moralising) gave us a lecture on the difference between Caius Sempronius Gracchus and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. He delivered it with the air of a man who has personally cross-examined the Senate. What struck me, oddly enough, was not only the politics, but the family likeness: it set me thinking of Herbert Paul Grice and John Derek Grice, and then of you, John Herbert Grice, presiding over us all like a sensible consul of Harborne. Waddington pronounced that Tiberius was “righter” than Caius—by which he meant, I think, that Tiberius had the cleaner grievance and the worse press. Caius, he implied, was cleverer, louder, and therefore easier to suspect. That reminded me of what you once said about Harborne’s Lordswood—how the name itself sounds like a tiny private empire that has survived into suburbia: “lords” in the title, woods in the background, and everybody else expected to behave as if it were always so. It made me wonder (and I hope this doesn’t sound cheeky) whether there was ever any agrarian protest in our own neighbourhood, or whether England manages to do its land politics so quietly that it only shows up later as a street-name and a slight stiffness in the voice.Which brings me to the point I really want to ask you. Lordswood territory is still a bit new to you, since you came from the other suburb where the “lords” had less power, but where—if I recall your stories correctly—someone still planted the trees anyway. Were those woods natural to the area, or were they the whim of a lord who liked the look of “nature” from a distance? And did they use farm-hands for it, the way the Romans used other people’s backs for their roads? It is a funny thing, but once you start thinking about who owns land, you start thinking about who did the work that made the land look respectable. Waddington thinks Roman history is mostly about great men and grand speeches. But it seems to me it is also about who gets accused of what for saying the obvious. A man says, “The public land ought to be used for the public,” and immediately someone hears, “He wants a crown.” Even I can see the trick in that. It makes me suspect that Roman history can teach you quite a lot about Staffordshire and Warwickshire, and perhaps even about Harborne, if you listen for the implications as well as the declarations. Yours affectionately, Paul. GRICEVS: Gai, cum Tiberius diceret ager publicus esse reddendus, tu putabas eum tacite significare se regnum appetere, nonne? GRACCVS: Ita vero, nam senatus ex “ager” statim audiebat “diadema”, quasi iugera in coronam mutarentur. GRICEVS: Mirum est quam celeriter apud Romanos lex agraria fiat lex regia, sola implicatura currente. GRACCVS: Quare ego in contione de capite civis Romani monui: si verba pro factis puniuntur, tum frater meus ante legem damnatus est. In this two, the gens is Sempronia? Other members of that gens? Yes. In both cases the gens is Sempronia. The nomen is Sempronius, so the clan-name is gens Sempronia. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus both belong to the gens Sempronia; Gracchus is the cognomen of their branch. The family is a substantial and historically important plebeian gens, much larger and more consequential than some of the thinner gentes we discussed earlier. So here there are indeed many other members. The most important way to keep the Sempronii in order is by branch and by generation. First, the Gracchi themselves. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the tribune of 133 BC. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, the tribune of the 120s. Their father, also Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, was a major statesman and general, consul and censor, and very much not the same figure as the reforming sons. Earlier still there are older Sempronii Gracchi in the middle Republic, though the father is usually the most immediately relevant ancestor for your purposes. Then the broader gens Sempronia beyond the Gracchi. There are Sempronii Tuditanī, another important branch. The cognomen Tuditanus recurs in Republican politics and military history. There are Sempronii Atratini, another old branch. There are also Sempronii Blaesi, less famous to modern ears but well attested in prosopography. And of course the feminine form Sempronia appears for women of the gens. The best-known Sempronia for many readers is the Sempronia in Sallust, though her exact branch within the gens is not always the first thing under discussion when she appears. So the clean answer is: gens Sempronia nomen Sempronius cognomen Gracchus for the famous reforming branch A compact note in your dry register might be: Sempronius is the nomen of the gens Sempronia, an old and important plebeian gens of the Roman Republic. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus belong to its Gracchus branch, but the gens also includes other cognominal lines such as the Tuditanī and Atratini. In the case of the Gracchi, the family’s afterlife is so dominated by the two reforming brothers that the larger Sempronian background is often forgotten, though it is historically substantial. Two cautions are worth keeping in view. First, your selected passage blends different generations of Sempronii Gracchi. The material about victories over Ligurians, Sardinia, Cuma, Hannibal, Beneventum, and Mago belongs to earlier Sempronii Gracchi, above all the father and still earlier ancestors, not to Tiberius and Gaius the reforming tribunes themselves. So one must not let the glory of the larger gens collapse into the biographies of the two brothers. Second, when asking “in this two, the gens is Sempronia?”, the exact classical answer is yes: both brothers are Sempronii, therefore of the gens Sempronia. If useful, I can do one of three things next, still only in chat. I can give you a compact dictionary-style note on gens Sempronia and its principal branches. I can separate, in your supplied material, what belongs to the father Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, what belongs to the reforming Tiberius, and what belongs to Gaius. Or I can give you a dry Speranza-style paragraph on why the Gracchi are such good figures for a Gricean analysis of hostile political implicature.Gracco, Gaio Sempronio (a. u. c. DCXXXI). Contio de capite civis romani. Roma. Sempronio Gracco, Gaio (a. u. c. DCXXXI). Contio de capite civis romani. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sempronio – Ossia: Grice e Sempronio: la ragione conversazionale e il concetto di stato.   Tiberio Sempronio Gracco (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e il concetto di stato. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is built for small-scale exchanges: it explains how a hearer recovers what a speaker means (including implicatures) by assuming rational cooperation and then inferring intentions from what is said plus shared norms of relevance, informativeness, sincerity, and clarity. With Tiberius Gracchus you can see almost the mirror-image case: public, adversarial “conversation” in which the very point is that what is said will be strategically re-heard by hostile audiences (senators, rivals, clients, crowds) so that a legislative proposal about the ager publicus is liable to generate a predictable political implicature—“he wants a crown,” “he’s aiming at tyranny”—regardless of the reformer’s declared content. In Gricean terms, Gracchus is operating in a forum where the Cooperative Principle is not reliably in force across factions, so implicature becomes less a benign by-product of shared rationality and more a weaponized inference shaped by institutional suspicion and incentives; Grice would say the hearer’s “calculation” of what is meant can still be rational, but it is rational under conditions of strategic non-cooperation, where the same utterance (“the state should reclaim and redistribute”) is designed to communicate one thing to one audience (justice, civic stability) while predictably licensing a different uptake in another (ambition, usurpation). The comparison, then, is that Grice offers a general model of how meaning can be responsibly inferred in cooperative talk, whereas Gracchus exemplifies the political limit-case in which the central pragmatic problem is precisely that hearers will insist on an implicature the speaker repudiates, and the struggle over “the state” is also a struggle over who gets to fix what counts as the reasonable interpretation of public speech. Grice: “At Oxford, a distinction was clearly made between those who were entitled to teach Plato and Aristotle – as Austin, himself, and Hare were – from those who would teach the minor schools, such as Il Portico!” Console, combatte vittoriosamente contro i Liguri; occupa inoltre la Sardegna. Suo figlio, magister equitum dopo la battaglia di Canne, console, difende Cuma da un assalto d’Annibale. Prorogatogli il comando, sconfisse Annone presso Benevento. Fu console; morì in un'imboscata ordita da Magone. G. propose, con alcune attenuazioni, il rinnovamento di una delle leggi attribuite dalla tradizione a Gaio Licinio Stolone e L. Sestio (aggiornata), per cui le parti di ager publicus in possesso di privati eccedenti i 500 iugeri (750 per chi avesse un figlio, 1000 per chi ne avesse due o più) venivano rivendicate dallo stato (che ne era il proprietario) e di stribuite in lotti ai cittadini poveri. L'aristocrazia si servì del collega di G., Ottavio, per porre il veto alla discussione della proposta. G., dopo aver inutilmente cercato di venire a un accordo, propose ai comizî tributi la destituzione del collega, accusandolo di abusare della carica. Destituito Ottavio, fu votata la legge agraria e l'esecuzione fu affidata ai triumviri agris iudicandis adsignandis (Tiberio e Caio G., e il suocero Appio Claudio): G. propone che con le ricchezze lasciate da Attalo III di Pergamo in eredità al popolo romano si finanziasse l'attuazione della legge. Quando egli, per assicurare tale attuazione, aspira al tribunato per l'anno seguente, ne nacque l'accusa che volesse stabilire un regime tirannico. Alle elezioni, G., ostacolato in più modi dagli impedimenti giuridici sollevatigli contro dagli avversarî, finì con lo scatenare i suoi seguaci. Rimane padrone dell'area del tempio di Giove Capitolino, ma i senatori adunati in quello di Fides, accusandolo di aspirare alla corona, guidati da Publio Scipione Nasica, seguiti da cavalieri, schiavi e clienti, piombarono nel Foro e sgominarono i partigiani di G.. Questi fu ucciso a bastonate e gettato nel Tevere. Tiberio Sempronio Gracco. Gaio Sempronio Gracco. Roma, Lazio. GRICEVS: Gracce, Oxonii clare distinguebatur inter eos qui Platoni Aristotelique docendo digni habebantur, ut Austin ipse et Hare, et eos qui minores scholas tractarent, velut Porticum. Ego vero, more meo, etiam Porticum interdum in mensa hospito. GRACCVS: Ego autem de re publica loquor: ager publicus non est fabula scholastica, sed res civium. Si quis plus quam quingenta iugera tenet, civitas repetat et in sortis pauperibus det: hoc est “status” sine sophismate. GRICEVS: Pulchra sententia; sed cave implicaturam: cum dicas “civitas repetat,” senatus audiet “Graccus coronam appetit.” Apud Romanos saepe fit ut lex agraria sonet quasi lex regia. GRACCVS: Tum ego respondeo: non est non scire, sed non velle—non tyrannidem volo, sed iustitiam. Quod si Ottavius vetat, ego veto vetatorem: et si postea in foro baculis philosophiam faciunt, saltem dicant se de statu disputare, non de grammatica. Sempronio Gracco, Tiberio (a. u. c. DCXX). Contio de lege agraria. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Serbati – Ossia: Grice e Serbati: la ragione conversazionale del divino nella filosofia italiana. Note sul Saggio sull’origine delle idee. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Antonio Francesco Davide Ambrogio Rosmini Serbati (Rovereto, Trento, Trentino-Alto Adige): la ragione conversazionale del divino nella filosofia italiana. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning and Antonio Rosmini Serbati’s philosophy of language converge in their shared commitment to rational intelligibility while diverging sharply in metaphysical orientation and scope. For Grice, conversational meaning is governed by practical reason operating through cooperative norms and speaker intentions: to mean something is to intend a hearer to recognize that intention, and conversational implicature arises from rational expectations of relevance, sufficiency, truthfulness, and clarity rather than from any intrinsic sanctity of language itself. Serbati, by contrast, situates language within a metaphysical and theological framework in which the verbum is not merely a rational instrument but a participation in ideal being, reflecting the divine source of truth in human cognition; language externalizes the innate “intellectual light,” the idea of being that precedes and grounds all intelligibility. Where Grice’s model is minimalist and methodological, aimed at explaining how finite agents infer meaning without multiplying senses beyond necessity, Serbati’s account is expansive and integrative, binding psychology, metaphysics, and liturgical practice into a single vision in which rational communication is already oriented toward truth as such and ultimately toward God. In this sense, Grice treats reason as the regulator of conversational practice, while Serbati treats reason as illuminated by being and expressed through language, so that conversation becomes not only cooperative inference but also a site where human rationality participates in an objective, even sacred, order of meaning. Grice: S.'s italianità (Italian identity) is deeply intertwined with a non-conformist approach to religion that seeks to reconcile Catholic tradition with modern liberal and nationalist ideals. His legacy as a pioneer of Italian Liberal Catholicism and social justice remains a focal point for understanding the intellectual roots of the Risorgimento. Religious Non-Conformism and the Verbum S.’s "non-conformism" stems from his desire to reform the Church from within, specifically addressing what he called the "five wounds" of the Church, which included the separation of the people from the clergy in liturgy and the need for a better-educated clergy.  Sacrality of the Verbum: Rooted in the Roman tradition of the sacrality of the verbum (the word), S. views language not merely as a tool for communication but as a vehicle for ideal being — a reflection of The Genitor -- God -- in humankind that participates in eternal truth. The Liturgical Word: His call for greater lay participation in the liturgy is a direct application of this sacrality, arguing that the "word" of the liturgy should be accessible and transformative for all believers, rather than a shielded clerical secret.  Psychology and the Theory of La Lingua S.’s psychology-based theory of language (la lingua) connects his metaphysical "idea of being" to the cognitive processes of the human subject.  Innate Capacity: He argues that humans possess an innate "intellectual light" that allows them to perceive being. Language is the externalization of this internal psychological process, where the mind's intuition of truth is given form. gl’agiati, Agostino, Aquino, la tradizione Latina italiana.  G.: We begin with a priest who makes language too holy for comfort. S.: And you intend that as criticism, though you will later pretend it was admiration. G.: Rosmini invites that response. One opens a book expecting words and gets the Verbum. One asks after usage and is given being. It is difficult to discuss language when the page behaves as if liturgy had annexed logic. S.: That is because for him language is not just language. It is the externalisation of the intellectual light, and therefore of ideal being, and therefore—by the time one has swallowed three paragraphs—already leaning toward God. G.: Precisely my complaint. Oxford wants words to do enough work without also carrying the sacristy. Rosmini wants every noun to remember eternity. S.: Yet you find him philosophically serious. G.: Of course I do. Annoying people are often serious. The difficulty is not that he speaks of language; it is that he cannot speak of language without speaking of truth, being, Church, and grace. He makes “philosophy of language” feel like a chapter in transubstantiation. S.: Which, I take it, is your way of saying that the thing is too thick with metaphysics. G.: Too thick with sanctioned metaphysics. If I want to speak of meaning, I should prefer not to be told that every utterance is secretly kneeling. S.: Still, the verbal sacredness is part of what makes him intelligible in Italy. The word is not a mere tool, but a civil and religious bond. G.: Yes, and that is exactly why he matters there and not in the same way here. In nineteenth-century Italy, language, Church, and political order have all become entangled. It is not possible to ask what Italy is without asking what the Church is doing there. S.: While in Oxford, the entanglement is differently wired. There the establishment is Anglican, parliamentary, Erastian, and therefore the anti-establishment figure is the man who pushes back toward catholicity. G.: Newman, yes. Which is why the inversion delights me. In Oxford, to be anti-establishment can mean to be too Catholic for the establishment. In Italy, to be anti-establishment can mean to be too reformist for the Catholic establishment. S.: So Newman and Rosmini rhyme, but inversely. G.: Nicely. They are mirrors facing different walls. Newman resists Anglican Erastianism by insisting on the spiritual independence and catholic seriousness of the Church. Rosmini resists the compromised, clerical, politically entangled Catholic order by insisting on a truer Catholic reform. S.: Then his anti-establishment is real. G.: Entirely real. Not anti-Church, which is what lazy moderns hear, but anti the existing ecclesial-political arrangement as spiritually and intellectually deformed. S.: That is where the “piaghe” matter. G.: Yes. The wounds are not decorative grievances. They are an anatomy of diseased establishment: clergy separated from people, liturgy estranged from participation, bishops too entangled in worldly powers, formation inadequate, institutional life losing its inward truth. S.: If Newman had read that with sympathy, he might have said: this is my complaint too, except that my establishment is the Church of England and his is Rome’s local machinery. G.: Exactly. And the lovely complication is that both can be called anti-establishment while aiming in opposite directions on the ecclesiastical map. S.: One toward Rome, one through Rome. G.: Splendidly put. Newman goes toward Rome because he thinks Anglican establishment has become spiritually compromised by the state. Rosmini goes through Rome because he thinks Catholic life has become institutionally compromised from within. S.: Erastianism again. G.: Always Erastianism when one wants a good enemy in Oxford. The state running the Church, or at least treating the Church as one of its more respectable departments. Newman hated that with enough force to make the University suspicious. S.: Whereas in Italy the danger was not Parliament governing bishops but bishops, benefices, papal temporal power, local clerical structure, and the immense fact that Catholicism was not one social force among others but the social grammar itself. G.: Exactly. That is why religion is so offensively central in nineteenth-century Italian philosophy. One cannot avoid it because it is not merely belief. It is a constitutional fact. S.: Which is why you are impatient with anyone who says, “Why all this Rosmini and Gioberti, why all this religion?” G.: Because the answer is boringly obvious. Italy had to think religion politically and politics religiously. Philosophers were not choosing ecclesiastical themes out of piety; they were thinking through the conditions of nationality, liberty, and civil order. S.: And Gioberti? G.: Ah, Gioberti is the trick. He is the one people think they understand because he is louder and more obviously political. But he complicates the neat anti-clerical story because his great hope was not “No Church,” but papal Italy. S.: Neo-Guelph fantasy. G.: Precisely. The federation of Italy under papal leadership. It is difficult to be more Church than that while still pretending to be liberal. S.: Which is why he is not “anti-Church” at all, only anti the wrong Church-state arrangement. G.: Yes. He wants the Pope as the moral and civil head of an Italian renewal. That is not secularisation. That is high Catholic nationalism in a remarkably confident key. S.: And then history punishes him. G.: It does. He dies in exile, which is what happens to too many nineteenth-century Italians with ideas large enough to become programmes. S.: 1852. G.: Quite. And Rosmini dies in 1855, which is enough to place both of them securely in that frantic 1830s–1840s overlap with Newman. S.: The overlap is the thing, is it not. Newman born 1801, Gioberti born 1801, Rosmini 1797. Oxford Movement from 1833 onward, Rosmini and Gioberti doing their main damage in the 1830s and 1840s. G.: Exactly. A European Christian crisis conducted in different institutional languages. Newman with Tracts and sermons and Oriel and the anti-Erastian complaint; Rosmini with ideas, wounds, liturgy, reform, and the anti-stagnation complaint; Gioberti with papal federation and the moral and civil primacy of Italians. S.: You sound almost sympathetic to Gioberti. G.: I am sympathetic to the historical absurdity of him. Philosophically he is too rhetorical for my digestion; but historically he is marvellous because he shows how impossible it was, for a moment, to separate Catholicism from national hope. S.: Whereas Garibaldi shows the English a cleaner object of admiration. G.: Indeed. England, or at least liberal England, loved Garibaldi because he looked like liberty in a shirt. Streets and public sentiment could easily be renamed after him. One Hope Street becomes Speranza Street and everyone feels they have done Europe a favour. S.: Wilde’s mother did more than feel it. G.: Quite. But English Garibaldinism is not Newmanite Oxford. One must not flatten England either. Liberal Protestant England can applaud Italian national liberation while Catholic Oxford winces at the anti-papal consequences. S.: So the Establishment in England might support Garibaldi, while a Newmanite would read the situation with much more anxiety. G.: Precisely. Which is why one must keep asking: whose establishment, whose anti-establishment, in which country, under which church. S.: And then along comes the Martyrs’ Memorial to tell Oxford that anti-Roman memory is built into the pavement. G.: There it is again, outside St John’s, doing what only Victorian Protestantism could do: turning sixteenth-century burnings into a nineteenth-century sermon. S.: A sermon against Mary first, and then against the possibility that Newman might bring back some improved version of Mary without the bonfire. G.: Very good. The memorial commemorates the Marian martyrs, but it also warns against the Oxford Movement. It says: this is where Roman roads lead, and do not tell us that the road is now merely aesthetic. S.: So how would Newman see Rosmini? As an ally? As a dangerous half-measure? As a Catholic reformer still trapped in local politics? G.: All three, depending on the day and the weather. Newman would recognise the seriousness at once. He would recognise the anti-establishment character too. But he might distrust the entanglement with Italian liberal and national questions, because Newman’s instinct is always to protect the Church from state capture and national instrumentalisation. S.: Whereas Rosmini is trying to save the Church in a country where national formation itself is impossible without the Church. G.: Exactly. That is why the inversion is not merely neat; it is structurally exact. Newman says: free the Church from Anglican establishment. Rosmini says: reform Catholic establishment so that Church and freedom may be reconciled. S.: Did Rosmini compromise? G.: Not in the cheap sense. He did what all serious reformers do: he tried to remain obedient without becoming harmless. He did not become a safe establishment man; rather, the Church and the politics around him hardened in such a way that his position became increasingly awkward from both sides. S.: Too churchly for the anti-clericals, too reformist for the conservatives. G.: Exactly. Which is why his later reputation becomes so ironic. Condemned or suspected in one generation, then cautiously rehabilitated after death, as if the institution were saying: we now pardon what we have already profited from. S.: Posthumous pardon as ecclesiastical implicature. G.: Deliciously so. It says: we never meant exactly what it looked as if we meant when we suppressed you. Or perhaps: we now mean something more charitable than we then allowed ourselves to say. S.: Better than nothing. G.: Better than an Index, certainly. But one cannot help enjoying the irony. A dead man becomes safe enough to be praised. S.: This is what you called disimplicatural. G.: If the word is ugly enough, yes. The institution withdraws the strengthened reading after the speaker has ceased to threaten it. It says, in effect: those earlier consequences were accidental, context-bound, regrettably overdrawn. One could almost hear the legal clerk saying, “No personal offence was intended.” S.: Let us return to language, because that is the declared topic and you keep trying to evade it through history. G.: History is language when it has become expensive. But yes, Rosmini on language. The problem, as I see it, is that he makes language answerable to ideal being before he lets it answer to ordinary life. S.: Whereas you would prefer the order reversed. G.: Entirely. Start with use, intention, uptake, what one man can reasonably expect another to understand. Do not begin by sanctifying the noun. Rosmini begins with the intellectual light and ends with words as its outer garment. I should prefer to begin with the words and ask what sort of light one needs to explain how they work. S.: Yet you will grant him this: for a culture in which liturgy and truth and language are still entwined, the Verbum is not an absurd starting point. G.: I grant it historically, not methodologically. Historically it is exactly right. Methodologically it is oppressive. S.: So the irritation is not that he is wrong to his own world, but that he is hard to translate into ours. G.: Precisely. Reading Rosmini from Oxford is like listening to a man do semantics while kneeling. One keeps wanting him to stand up. S.: And yet one also sees why the word had that dignity in Italy. The sacred and the civil were not neatly separated. Language in liturgy, language in civic exhortation, language in philosophy: all one continuum. G.: Quite. Which is why transubstantiation keeps haunting the discussion even when no one has mentioned the host. In Rosmini, the word is never only a sign. It is a participation. S.: You dislike participation. G.: I dislike unexplained participation. Participation is often the theologian’s way of not being asked for mechanics. S.: And still the anti-establishment impulse is real enough to make him sympathetic. G.: That is the vexation. The temperament attracts me more than the metaphysic. S.: Much as with Newman. G.: Yes, though Newman’s prose, when he is not being ecclesiastically majestic, is often closer to ordinary intelligence than Rosmini’s. Rosmini is a constructor. Newman is a tactician of conscience. S.: Gioberti then would be a rhetorician of national theology. G.: Perfect. And that is why one should mention him only to prevent the map from looking too tidy. He shows that anti-establishment Catholicism in Italy could run toward national programme and public slogan rather than inward reform. S.: Whereas Rosmini is more inwardly reformist. G.: More philosophical, more ecclesial, more severe. One might even say more honest, though that is unfair to Gioberti’s theatrical necessity. S.: So if a young man at Oxford were to ask what all this has to do with us, you would say? G.: I would say: it shows that “establishment” is not a fixed polarity but a position in a relation. Newman and Rosmini are both anti-establishment; but Newman fights Anglican state-Church order in the name of catholicity, while Rosmini fights compromised Catholic order in the name of a truer Catholic freedom. The shape is the same; the signs are reversed. S.: And the Thirty-Nine Articles? G.: Ah yes, the English clowning equivalent of doctrinal seriousness. One can be committed to their contents without understanding them, which is one of Oxford’s more ingenious achievements. S.: Rosmini would have hated that. G.: Rosmini would have found it spiritually bankrupt. Newman would have found it Erastian hypocrisy. Gioberti would have made a national principle out of it if sufficiently provoked. S.: And you? G.: I find it philosophically hilarious. Formal commitment without semantic grasp. A subscription in search of understanding. S.: Which is why the joke never ends. G.: Quite. Oxford’s theology becomes a lesson in second-order commitment. Italian theology becomes a lesson in first-order danger. S.: And somewhere between them stands Rosmini, blessing words and criticising the institution that blesses them badly. G.: That is very nearly the whole truth. S.: Then let us end with the chronology, since chronology is the only kindness one can offer to nineteenth-century Italian philosophy. G.: Very well. Rosmini, 1797 to 1855. Gioberti, 1801 to 1852. Newman, 1801 to 1890. Oxford Movement begins, by its own retrospective mythology, in 1833. Gioberti’s Primato in 1843. Rosmini’s great reforming interventions, especially the Piaghe, in 1848. Newman to Rome in 1845. Gioberti in exile, then dead. Rosmini under suspicion, then dead, then later gently re-sanctified by men who had once found him too uncomfortable. S.: And Italy still unable to think itself without the Church. G.: Exactly. Which is why Rosmini matters. You cannot tell the story of Italian philosophy in that century without telling the story of religion as constitutional substance. S.: While Oxford can at least pretend philosophy is above all that. G.: Oxford can pretend many things. It has stone enough to support the pretence. S.: And Rosmini? G.: Rosmini knew that in Italy the stone itself belonged to the argument. S.: That is rather good. G.: It had better be. We have been saying “Verbum” for an hour and ought to end with a sentence that at least behaves like one. S.: Then let me try. Newman says: free the Church from the State. Rosmini says: heal the Church from itself. Gioberti says: make the Church Italy. And Oxford, seeing all three, says: perhaps we had better build another memorial. G.: Splendid. And Italy, seeing Oxford, says: you can keep your memorial if we may keep our metaphysics. S.: Which is a draw. G.: No. It is a concordat.Grice: Serbati, mi perdoni l’educazione materna: mia madre mi ha sempre insegnato a chiamare un uomo col cognome. Quindi non aspettarti nessun “Rosmini” da parte mia: per me sei Serbati, punto. Serbati: E fai bene: “Rosmini” è per i devoti e per le lapidi; “Serbati” va meglio per una conversazione viva. Però dimmi: che aria tira a Vadum Boum? Grice: Lì ho un allievo, Strawson, che giudica la “rettorica” triviale—ma nel senso etimologico sbagliato, come fosse roba da poco invece che roba da trivio. Io gli rispondo che non è chiaro che cosa intenda: sensus non sunt multiplicandī praeter necessitatem, se mi è concesso… (e mia madre, te lo confesso, usava queste puntigliose regolette soprattutto per stuzzicare mio padre: un non‑conformista che finiva sempre per conformarsi ai suoi capricci). Serbati: Le tue fioriture rettoriche, essendo solo implicate, decorano senza ingombrare, reverendo Grice! Perché lo rimetti in riga senza fare prediche: lo costringi a scegliere un senso “triviale” alla volta—e intanto gli mostri che la rettorica del volgare è proprio ciò che rende la strada maestra, non “da poco”. Serbati, Antonio Francesco Davide Ambrogio Rosmini (1830). Sggio sull’origine delle idee. Milano: Pogliani

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sereniano – Ossia: Grice e Sereniano: la ragione conversazionale del cinargo romano – Roma. Note su De latratu rationis in conversatione romana. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Sereniano (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del cinargo romano. In the Sereniano dialogue, Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning is reframed through a playful Cynic lens that nonetheless preserves its core claim: that meaning in conversation arises from rational cooperation rather than literal form alone. Grice’s joking references to incomplete dialectic and “canine tails” echo his own insistence that logical form is only perfected in use, through shared expectations about relevance, appropriateness, and intention, rather than through formal logic detached from practice; this aligns with his account of conversational implicature, where speakers rely on the hearer’s rational ability to infer what is meant beyond what is said by assuming cooperative rationality. Sereniano, cast as a follower of the Cinargus and a visitor to Emperor Julian, pushes this point further by rooting rational inference in the public, embodied life of Roman culture: philosophy belongs not just to the portico or the academy, but to the forum, where even “dogs” philosophize, that is, where bluntness, mockery, and social provocation function as communicative strategies rather than violations. In this light, Sereniano’s acceptance of Grice’s “cruel implicature” underscores a Cynic–Gricean convergence: apparent breaches of politeness or decorum do not undermine reason‑governed meaning but instead exploit it, trusting the interlocutor to recognize intention, tone, and shared norms. What Grice theorizes abstractly as the rational structure of conversational understanding is dramatized by Sereniano as a culturally inflected practice, where barking replaces syllogizing but inference still rules, suggesting that conversational rationality is robust enough to survive translation from Oxford common rooms to Julian’s Rome without losing its philosophical force.S. was a philosopher who visits the emperor Giuliano. He followed the doctrine of the Cinargo. GRICEVS: Sereniane, saepe dico meam dialecticam Atheniensium numquam perfectam fuisse, praesertim cum Cynargos canes Romam bene calcavisse! Quid putas—dialectica fit completa cum cauda canina? SERENIANVS: O Gricevs, in urbe nostra canes non solum ambulant, sed etiam philosophantur! Forsitan Cinargus doctrina plus valet in foro Romano quam in porticu Atheniensi. GRICEVS: Age vero, doctissime! Ad Cynargos sequendos, fortasse opus est non solum rationibus sed etiam ossibus philosophicis—sed cave, ne te mordant ideae novas! SERENIANVS: Tua implicatura crudelis est, non autem mihi, quia scio ex nobilissimo corde venire, Grice. Sed, si canes Romani discipuli tui fiant, certe sapientia latrare poterunt sine ulla feritate! Sereniano (a. u. c. MCXIV). De latratu rationis in conversatione romana. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Serra – Ossia: Grice e Serra: la ragione conversazionale dell’economia filosofica – storia dell’economia romana – massoneria – filosofia calabrese. Note su Delle cause che possono far abbondare li regni d’oro e d’argento dove non sono miniere. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Antonio Serra (Dipignano, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale dell’economia filosofica – Antonio Serra and H. P. Grice articulate strikingly parallel conceptions of reason-governed practice, though in radically different domains, by treating rationality as immanent to social processes rather than imposed from outside: Serra, in the Breve trattato, advances a philosophical economics grounded in rational analysis of institutions, law, and policy, shifting inquiry away from scholastic moralism toward a systematic account of how collective wealth emerges from ordered practices such as governance, trade, and legal frameworks, especially as exemplified by Roman institutions, Venice, and Naples, and by logically dismantling purely monetary explanations in favor of an economy of causes calibrated to real effects and institutional coherence; Grice, in turn, develops a theory of conversational meaning in which linguistic exchange is likewise governed by rational economy, where speakers and hearers assume cooperative, purpose-directed reasoning, infer meaning beyond what is said through implicatures, and tacitly observe constraints of sufficiency, relevance, and non-redundancy, encapsulated in what can be read as a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort; in both thinkers, rational order is neither mechanical nor moralistic, but pragmatic and institutional—economic circulation for Serra, conversational circulation for Grice—so that wealth and meaning alike arise from disciplined practices that optimize scarce resources (gold and silver in one case, cognitive and interpretive effort in the other), revealing a shared philosophy in which reason regulates exchange, whether of goods or of ideas, through norms that are at once practical, historical, and non-arbitrary. storia dell’economia romana – massoneria –Grice: “la ragione conversazionale dell’economia filosofica – storia dell’economia romana – massoneria. S., an Italian philosopher and lawyer, pioneers a philosophical approach to economic theory that transitions from medieval scholasticism toward modern rationalism . In his Breve trattato sulle cause che possono far abbondare li regni d’oro e d’argento, he moves economic analysis beyond simple moral or monetary debates into a systematic study of the "real economy".  Rooting Theory in Roman Law and Institutions S.’s work reflects a deep formation in Roman law, which heavily influenced his view of the state and its institutions: Government as Prime Institution: Drawing on the legal traditions of the Kingdom of Naples, S. views the government not just as a ruler, but as the essential institutional arrangement for the common good. Practical Governance over Moralism: He broke with the scholastic tradition of viewing avarice through a purely moral lens, instead treating economic behavior as a matter of individual and national advantage to be regulated by sound public policy. Institutional Practice: Serra analyzed the thriving local governments of Venice and Naples to argue that wealth resulted from policy and institutions — such as legal frameworks that supported trade and manufacturing — rather than natural resources alone.  The Rationalist Lens S. is often credited as the first to write a "scientific treatise" on economic principles because of his rigorous, rational methodology:  Logical Deductions: He systematically analyzed why the Kingdom of Naples lacked money despite its natural wealth, using logic to dismantle the arguments of contemporaries like Marc'Antonio de SANTIS , who focused solely on exchange rates. massoneria, circolazione degl’idee massoniche, mito di Venezia, economia romana, l’economia del liceo, roma antica, antica roma, Machiaveli, mercantilismo. Grice: Serra, tu che hai fatto dell’economia una filosofia, dimmi: non ti sembra che a forza di ragionare sull’oro e l’argento, a noi filosofi restino in tasca solo le monete delle idee? Serra: Eh caro Grice, almeno quelle non svalutano! E poi, tra un trattato e una chiacchierata, preferisco sempre investire nel capitale della conversazione: il rendimento è garantito, e non paga nemmeno il dazio! Grice: Vedi, Serra, ti confesso – con tutta la solennità del caso – che una volta ho istituito il Principio dell’Economia dello Sforzo Razionale. E sai, all’università di Vadum Boum, tra i miei “barbari”, l’ho perfino tradotto pomposamente: The Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Ma non dirlo in giro, che poi pensano mi sia montato il latino in testa! Serra: Che bello principio, e che bella implicatura, la sua, maestro. Anzi, quasi quasi lo adotto pure io: se l’economia dello sforzo razionale vale in filosofia, magari ci risparmia anche un po’ di fatica quando si devono compilare i bilanci… o i trattati! Serra, Antonio (1613). Breve trattato delle cause che possono far abbondare li regni d’oro e d’argento dove non sono miniere. Napoli: Scoriggio

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Serra – Ossia: Grice e Serra: la ragione conversazionale – prammatica come rettorica conversazionale -- filosofia italiana. Note sulla Rettorica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giannangelo Giuseppe Serra da Cesena (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale – prammatica come rettorica conversazionale. Serra da Cesena and H. P. Grice converge on the idea that conversational meaning is governed by reason, but they articulate this insight within historically distinct frameworks that reveal a deep continuity between rhetoric and modern pragmatics: for Serra, prammatica is explicitly conceived as rettorica conversazionale, a rational art of discourse rooted in the rhetorical tradition of the vernacular, where effective meaning arises from the speaker’s prudent management of invention, disposition, and ornament in relation to the audience and the practical end of persuasion, an approach that treats conversational understanding as grounded in shared topoi, argumentative economy, and the detection of error relative to the primary τέλος of discourse; Grice, by contrast, reformulates this rhetorical rationality in analytic terms as a theory of reason-governed conversational meaning, in which what is meant exceeds what is said through implicatures generated by cooperative, normatively constrained reasoning, captured in maxims and in the economy principle sensus non sunt multiplicandi praeter necessitatem, itself echoing classical rhetorical parsimony; where Serra situates rational inference within an explicitly rhetorical and pedagogical ontology of discourse, Grice abstracts the same logic into a philosophical account of speaker meaning, stripping rhetoric of its ornamental suspicion while preserving, in functional form, its core insight that conversational understanding is neither arbitrary nor merely semantic, but the product of disciplined, inferential reason operating within socially shared norms of discourse. Grice: “A Genoese scholar and grammarian who contributed significantly to the study of the Italian vernacular (lingua volgare) through his rhetorical works during the late Renaissance period.” Keywords: rettorica, prammatica, rettorica conversazionale, prammatica come rettorica conversazionale. Rettorica della lingua volgare. DELLA RETTORICA Nel quale fi dà un nuovo , facile , ed utiliflimo metodo d’ infegnare V ARTE ORATORIA 5 E nel quale li trovano raccolti , e compilati i piu i  di. 1 e ■*xr ró ufum predane in sedificatione calx , & eoe-* menta , eumdem aflert cognitio caufac ad dru- óluram orationis , quum ejufmodi notiti» fìnt , veluti materia , fine qua prò juftis orationi- bus Indierà quaedam « Se puerilia opera prodi- rent , ab omni prorfus v e nudate, & ornamen- to deflituta . Orationes contro verfiaé negòtiàlis excipiunc ali* controverfiam juridicialem abfolutam fpe- ttantes , circa quas vires tuas metiaris opor- tet % quibus forte non licebic probationem ag- gredi alicujus propofitionis , qu* datum juri- dicialem abfolutum habeat ; neque tamen quin- tum caput fuam exercitationem non habebit ‘ praecepta enim , quae ibi traduntur , non eam fubtilitatem involvunt ; ut ea intelligere non liceat; eorumque exempla invedigentur in fa- crorum Oratorum orationibus , modo aliquse fmt , qu* hujufmodi dudtu , & artificio con- ficiantur : quod fi ab iis legibus aberrarent 4 detegendi elfent errores refpedbi primarii fi- nis , perfuadendi feilieet . Neque ejufmodi exercitatio eric omnino irrita , dum enim alie- nos errores detegis , facilius cavebia tuos . Quapropter te hortor , ut quidquid plerique Oratorcs fcedilfime peccarunt , tum in ora- tionibus controverfiac negotialis , tum cujuf- libet controverfi* , ledalo ad rem tuam animad- vertas . Pod ejufmodi exercitamenta , quumque pro- be calueris prascepta , qu* in toto quinto ca- pite traduntur , devenias licet ad pulcherri- *na artificia , qu* caput fextum comple&itur. G.: Recite, exactly, the full title of Serra’s thing. S.: Compendio della rettorica nel quale si dà un nuovo, facile, ed utilissimo metodo d’insegnare l’arte oratoria. Napoli: Bortoli. 1748. G.: Good. Now attend: at Oxford, Latin may be all right; Italian is too vernacular. Your Serra writes as if the vernacular itself were the natural medium of rhetorical instruction. S.: He writes for Italians, sir. G.: Precisely. And I do not expect Italians to continue speaking Latin, not even Italian philosophers. But here is the practical trouble: if the precepts are keyed to Italian particularities, the Oxonian tutee will not go into the trouble of hunting English counterparts for every twist of the Italian tongue. S.: Yet if you want to extract what you call universality, you will have to abstract from the tongue. G.: I will do my best to make explicit the reasons. Not “rationality,” mind, but the reason for this and the reason for that. Serra gives rules and examples; I want, when possible, the why that makes a rule intelligible beyond its birthplace. S.: You mean: you want the reason a figure is used, not merely the name of the figure. G.: Exactly. Even for the most literal ones. The figura litterale, as you call it. When it is literal and not figurative proper, we still count it among figures. That already asks for a reason. S.: Why should a literal turn be a figura at all, if it is simply what one says? G.: Because even “simply what one says” is often a choice among alternatives. A plain utterance can be strategically plain. It can be plain for the reason of candour, or plain for the reason of speed, or plain because the audience is not to be distracted by ornament. S.: Serra would say: ornament is an instrument, not a vice. But he would also say: one must know when not to ornament. G.: And that is already a convergence with my own concern: the economy of discourse. But I am in a different predicament from Serra. He can assume Italian ears, Italian habits, Italian topoi. I have Oxford ears, trained in Latin, and suspicious of anything that smells too much like street-talk. S.: Yet your own work makes so much of ordinary language. G.: English ordinary language, not every vernacular indiscriminately. Oxford tolerates the vernacular when it is ours and when it can be made to look like an object of study rather than a lapse of standards. Italian, at Oxford, is felt as too close to the piazza. S.: So Serra is doubly suspect: rhetoric, and in Italian. G.: Just so. Now, to keep us honest, let us distinguish two complaints that get conflated. One is institutional snobbery: Latin is dignified; Italian is not. The other is methodological: a rhetoric rooted in the vernacular may smuggle in language-specific devices that do not travel. S.: Serra does both: he dignifies the vernacular and makes it the ground of his teaching. G.: That is the point. He treats prammatica as rettorica conversazionale: prudent management of invention, disposition, and ornament for an audience, with persuasion as telos. But the Italian base matters. His examples and his sense of what “sounds right” lean on Italian cadence, Italian idiom, Italian social expectation. S.: Then your Oxonian pupil asks: why should I learn this, if it is not mine? G.: Exactly. I can answer: learn it not as a stock of Italian tricks, but as a set of reasons for doing what you do in speech. Yet I must be careful: I cannot promise applicability to all languages. S.: You can promise only this: the reasons are reasons in the sense that they can be stated and tested against practice. G.: Yes. Consider candour. There is a reason to abide by a praeceptum of candour: one wants cooperative uptake; one wants trust; one wants one’s word to count. S.: And there is also a reason to violate candour, in appearance, in order to obey a deeper conversational aim. Irony. G.: Precisely. In irony one says the opposite of what one means. The sentence is literally false, but what you mean, being the negative of it, is not. Now tell me: is irony universal? S.: I think the capacity for it is universal in any society that can distinguish saying from meaning. But its social acceptability is not universal. G.: Good. And now the temper question. I suspect understatement, meiosis, litotes fit an English temper better than an Italian one, even if Cicero could manage them in Latin with Roman hauteur. S.: You suspect Italians are more direct? G.: Not more direct, perhaps, but differently staged. Italian rhetoric, even conversational, can relish amplitude and explicitness. English style often prizes restraint, leaving more to be inferred. But again, I must not essentialise. I only claim that different rhetorical cultures make different figures feel “natural.” S.: Serra, being Italian, will treat certain ornaments as natural that an Englishman would call excessive. G.: Yes. And Oxford, being Latin-trained, will treat Serra’s Italian grounding as parochial. Yet I want to rescue the core: conversation is not arbitrary, but reason-governed; and rhetoric, far from being mere ornament, is a disciplined art of managing meaning in company. S.: Your “reason-governed” sounds like your maxims. G.: It is of a piece. Serra speaks of shared topoi, economy of argument, detection of error relative to the primary end of persuasion. I speak of cooperative reasoning from what is said to what is meant. S.: Both treat understanding as inferential, not merely semantic. G.: Exactly. Now I will ask you, as my tutee: which figure, if any, do you think most universal? S.: I will answer cautiously: contrast is universal. Not a figure in the narrow sense, perhaps, but the impulse to set one thing against another to make the point. G.: Contrast is too broad. Name something closer to the catalogues. S.: Then repetition. Not as mere redundancy, but as a way of ensuring uptake, and as a way of marking importance. G.: Good. Repetition travels. Even if the particular sound-patterns change, the reason remains: memory is fallible; attention drifts; emphasis is needed. S.: And it can be literal. One repeats the same words. G.: Indeed. A figura litterale whose reason is not metaphor but management of attention. Now another. Choose one that involves saying less than one could. S.: Understatement. G.: There you go. But does it travel? S.: The capacity travels. The valuation may not. Some audiences take understatement as modesty; others as evasiveness. G.: Precisely my worry about Italian versus English temper. Understatement as a social virtue is not universal, but the mechanism is. The reason for understatement, when it works, is that the hearer supplies the stronger claim and thereby owns it. S.: That is a reason grounded in audience psychology, not in grammar. G.: And that is where I can meet Serra without becoming his translator. I can say: whatever your language, some devices work because they exploit stable features of conversational life: limited attention, desire for politeness, avoidance of boastfulness, fear of offence, need for trust. S.: Serra would add: the end of discourse governs the choice. Persuasion, edification, correction. G.: Yes. And here Oxford’s Latin bias becomes almost a red herring. Latin is not more universal; it is merely more institutionally authorised. Italian is not less rational; it is merely more visibly local. S.: Then the Oxonian’s refusal to “do the work” is laziness disguised as principle. G.: Sometimes. But sometimes it is also prudence: do not pretend an Italian device has a clean English analogue when it does not. That too is candour. S.: So your project is limited: not universality across all languages, but reasons that can be stated, and then locally re-applied. G.: Exactly. We do not promise the same figures everywhere; we promise intelligible motives. Serra’s rhetoric is vernacular; my analysis seeks generality of reason, not uniformity of forms. S.: Then, sir, you can assign me an exercise: find, in Serra, one device that looks irreducibly Italian, and still give its reason. G.: That is your first task. And your second: find one device you think is irreducibly English, and tell me whether its reason might still be found in Italian practice under another costume. S.: May I begin with litotes as the English one? G.: You may. But you must show the reason for it, not merely its sociological charm. Grice: Serra, dimmi una cosa: tu che fai della prammatica una specie di rettorica conversazionale, come la prenderesti se ti dicessi che a Vadum Boum il mio allievo Strawson giudica la “rettorica” triviale… ma proprio nel senso etimologico sbagliato? Serra: Ah! “Triviale” come cosa da trivio, dunque da poco conto? O come cosa da trivio, dunque da fondamenta del discorso? Grice: Appunto: lui la prende come “da poco”, io come “da strada maestra”. E quando gli risposi, mi uscì quasi da sola una regoletta (più latina che inglese): Sensus non sunt multiplicandī praeter necessitatem—ma confesso che non era chiaro quid Strawson “triviale” diceret, se già non distingueva fra il trivio e la trivialità. Serra: Le tue fioriture rettoriche, essendo solo implicate, decorano senza ingombrare, maestro Grice! Perché gli fai capire che la rettorica è “del trivio” in senso nobile, e insieme gli togli il vizio di moltiplicare i sensi come se fossero coriandoli: un ornamento sì, ma con economia. Serra da Cesena , Giannangelo Giuseppe (1748). Compendio della rettorica nel quale si dà un nuovo, facile, ed utilissimo metodo d’insegnare l’arte oratoria. Napoli: Bortoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sertorio – Ossia: Grice e Sertorio: il deutero-esperanto nella filosofia ligure – By , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice. Note su Le cosmogonie misteriose svelate. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Giacomo Francesco Sertorio (Genova, Liguria): il deutero-esperanto nella filosofia ligure. In comparing Grice and Giacomo Francesco Sertorio on reason-governed conversational meaning, one sees a clear contrast between an implicit, pragmatics-first conception of communication and an explicit, grammar-centered one. Grice’s theory treats conversational meaning as fundamentally inferential: speakers rely on shared rational principles and cooperative expectations to generate implicatures that are not linguistically encoded but pragmatically recovered, so that what is meant regularly outruns what is said. Sertorio, by contrast, approaches universality in language from the side of formal design and explicit articulation. His classification of auxiliary languages, including the deutero‑esperanto attributed to Grice, reflects a skepticism that adult communication can depend on tacit inference alone, given that speakers already arrive equipped with fully developed mother tongues. Where Grice places the burden of meaning on the interlocutors’ capacity to reason about intentions, relevance, and silence, Sertorio insists that a universal language must externalize meaning through overt grammatical, numerical, and lexical structures, minimizing reliance on what remains unsaid. The opposition thus mirrors a deeper philosophical divergence: Grice locates universality in shared rational norms governing conversation, whereas Sertorio locates it in the explicit formal architecture of an ideal language, designed to constrain interpretation so that communicative success does not depend on implicature but on prior codification. S. partecipa al dibattito pubblicando dapprima il saggio  “Elementi di grammatica analitica universale,” poi “Un esame filosofico della grammatica universale,” e, infine, “Il problema della lingua universale.” In quest'ultimo saggio, a proposito dei diversi sistemi inventati – incluso il deutero-esperanto di Grice, S. individua tre fondamentali tipologie di lingue ausiliarie. Il primo tipo comprende quella categoria di linguaggi che definiamo a posteriori che riprendono alcuni, o tutti gli, elementi, non di rado modificandoli, da lingue storico- naturali, come può essere l'italiano, il francese, il cinese, ecc.. Il secondo tipo è costituito da quelle lingue che definiamo a priori con le quali è possibile comunicare sia in via scritta che in via orale, ovvero che presentano una forma ideografico-fonetica tale da permettere non solo la semplificazione della scrittura, ma anche una sua agevole e veloce riproduzione tramite foni. L’ultima tipologia è costituita da quelle lingue che adottano delle scritture tipografiche, crittografiche, numeriche, nelle quali gl’elementi fondamentali della lingua sono utilizzati per trasferire solo l'idea della cosa che si vuole comunicare, ma che non presentano un reale metodo di comunicazione orale. Della seconda categoria discute ampiamente nel primo saggio dedicato al problema della lingua universale, che intende come lingua adatta alla comunicazione tra persone adulte, che hanno già delle idee proprie sviluppate attraverso l'uso della loro LINGUA MADRE – l’inglese oxoniano di H. P. Gice. Qui S. s’occupa innanzitutto della definizione del sistema numerico della lingua ideale, e ne propone di due tipi differenti, sia a base decimale che sessagesimale, e, poi, del suo sistema GRAMMATICALE – cioe, morfologia, sintassi, morfo-sintassi – (“Pirots karulise elatically”) e lessicale (“pirot, karulise, elatic”. Le informazioni seguenti sono tratte da S., Elementi di grammatica analitica universale,  deutero-esperanto.  Grice: Sertorio, hai mai pensato che inventare una lingua universale sia un po’ come organizzare una cena tra filosofi: tutti hanno fame di comunicare, ma nessuno è d’accordo sul menu! Sertorio: Ah, caro Grice, se solo sapessi quanti ingredienti ho dovuto mescolare! Ho scritto di lingue a posteriori – che prendono spunti qua e là, come una ratatouille linguistica – a priori – la cucina molecolare dell’ideogramma – e delle lingue crittografiche, che sembrano ricette segrete di nonna... Però, il vero problema è farle digerire agli adulti che già parlano la loro lingua madre! Grice: Ma forse, caro Sertorio, la vera lingua universale non sta nei numeri o nelle regole, bensì nelle pause tra una parola e l’altra... Dove ognuno, tacitamente, porta il proprio piatto preferito senza bisogno di esplicitare la ricetta. Sertorio: Le tue implicature forse non ci sono – ma CI SONO, glorioso Grice – come sono certo coglierai le mie (sic implicature)! A differenza di te, io devo sempre esplicitare ciò che dovrebbe restare tacito! Per me, la grammatica universale è come una tavola imbandita: se non dici cosa c’è, nessuno si serve… e magari si rischia di restare a digiuno! Sertorio, Giacomo Francesco (1879). Le cosmogonie misteriose svelate. Oneglia: Ghilini

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Servio – Ossia: Grice e Servio: la ragione conversazionale VIRGILIANA – Roma – filosofia italiana. Note su Dicta Vergiliana. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Mauro Servio Onorato (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale VIRGILIANA. Grice and Mauro Servius Honoratus converge in treating reason as something exercised within socially regulated practices of interpretation rather than as a self‑contained philosophical system, though they approach this insight from different directions. Servius’ Virgilian commentary, situated in the conversational setting exemplified by Macrobius’ Saturnalia, treats meaning as something that arises through guided attention, selective clarification, and the deliberate preservation of productive obscurity; his refusal to impose a single, coherent philosophical doctrine reflects an understanding that texts, like conversations, invite pursuit rather than closure. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning articulates this dynamic explicitly, showing how rational communication depends on norms that balance informativeness with restraint, clarify without exhausting significance, and allow implicatures to do essential work without being canceled. Where Servius warns that excessive illumination can extinguish poetry, Grice argues that over‑explicitness can undermine communicative purpose by collapsing what is meant into what is merely said. Both thus resist the reification of meaning into abstract categories or essences, instead locating rationality in the disciplined management of interpretation, expectation, and response, whether in the exegesis of Virgil or in ordinary conversational exchange. Nei "Saturnali" di Macrobio, rivolti alla glorificazione di VIRGILIO, S. appare uno degli interlocutori. La sua attività filosofica ha per sede Roma. Predilesse Virgilio, che esalta come il maestro di ogni sapere e che commenta in un’opera di cui rimangono due redazioni. La più breve sembra tramandare lo scritto autentico di S., mentre la più ampia ("Servius auctus o plenior o Scholia Danielis", dal Daniel, che la pubblica) pare derivata dalla prima e da una riduzione del commento d’Elio Donato. Si discute se gl’appartengano l’Explanatio dell'Arte Grammaticale dello stesso Donato e tre saggi di metrica. Il commento include non poche dottrine di carattere filosofico, che però provengono dalle fonti usate da S.. Si è voluto fare di S. un seguace dell’accademia. Ma, da una parte, non è lecito attribuirgli una teoria filosofica organica, e, dall’altra, le proposizioni che dovrebbero provenire da quella scuola non sono proprie di essa, perchè appartengono all’accademia in generale, a Posidonio, o anche alle credenze mistico-religiose di quell’età: natura divina dell'anima, immortalità di essa quale principio di movimento, sue trasmigrazioni, suoi destini dopo la morte, teoria delle sfere. Quando, oltre alle tre parti dell'anima, l'anima vegetativa, l'anima sensitiva e l'anima razionale, ne ammette anche una quarta anima, l'anima vitale, principio di movimento, si allontana dalle teorie tradizionali inclusa l’accademica. Quando S. afferma che nulla esiste salvo i quattro elementi (acqua, aria, fuoco, terra) e il divino, che è uno spirito (o una mente, o un'anima) il quale, infuso in essa, genera ogni cosa, sicchè uguale è la natura di tutte, accetta in complesso la cosmologia del PORTICO esposta da VIRGILIO, che però cerca di liberare dal suo materialismo originario. Del resto, esplicitamente S. loda i filosofi del portico -- et nimiae virtutis sunt, et cultores deorum -- che contrappone ai filosofi dell’Orto, che critica spesso. In S. mancano un coerente e un indirizzo preciso, sebbene si affermino in lui le tendenze mistiche dell’età sua.   Virgilio, Donato. GRICEVS: Salvē, Servī! Sestīvius (ut opinor) aptissimē Virgilianum illud perfēcit: obscūrum per obscūrius reddidit—ita ut commentator ipse iam poeta videātur. SERVIVS: Salvē, Grice. Nōn negō: Vergilius ipse multīs velīs nāvigat, ego autem etiam velōrum nodōs explicō. Sed quid tibi est “obscūrum per obscūrius”? lausne an crīmen? GRICEVS: Ego tantum hoc animadvertō: quotiēns aliquid “clārius” fieri iubēmur, saepe fit ut lector minus videat, sed plus quaerat—ac tum commentarius, dum tenebrās ordinat, quasi novās tenebrās dōnat. Ita, dum de Vergiliō loquimur, nōn raro de nostrā quoque arte loquī incipimus. SERVIVS: Inplicātūram obscūram, ut decet—quid enim eam cancellāre opus est! Tē amō, Grice, quantum ipsum Vergilium amō, et eius ficta omnia! Nam bene nostī: Vergilius non semper dicit ut intellegās, sed ut sequāris; et commentator, si nimis “lūcem” facit, carmen extinguit. The gens Servia -- Grice thinks -- may have been census-registered and all -- but the underlying meaning -- servio (italianised), servius -- would sound TOO different from 'servus' -- the root seems to be 'servire' -- servus -- but the 'i' makes all the difference: he is a Servio, not a Servo -- Servius, non Servus -- unless Lewis and Short has an entry for 'servius, -a, -um'? Grice is right to hear the difference, and the i does almost all the work, but one should separate etymological temptation from historical usage. Servius is a perfectly ordinary Roman praenomen and also the basis of the nomen gentilicium Servilius and related formations. A man called Servius is not being called servus, any more than a man called Septimius is being called “the seventh” in any live social sense. The resemblance is audible, but Roman naming is full of such near-neighbours whose social meaning had long since hardened away from the bare lexical root. So yes: Servius, non Servus. That is exactly the point. To a Roman ear these were not the same word, and not the same category. Servus is the common noun “slave.” Servius is a personal name. The two may be historically related at some very remote level, or they may simply belong to the same old Italic-Latin sound-field, but in use they were not confusable in the way Grice’s jest suggests. The i is not a decorative extra; it marks a different lexical item. As for the gens, there is another small correction worth making. The name behind Servius is not usually “the gens Servia” in the straightforward way Grice is imagining, but rather the better-known and fully Roman gens Servilia, from the nomen Servilius. That is the major aristocratic family name familiar from republican history. Servius by itself is much more at home as a praenomen than as the direct clue to a gens-name. So if one is thinking of Servius as though it generated a gens “Servia” parallel to Septimia, that is probably too quick. Roman morphology more often gives you Servilius and the gens Servilia. That matters for your Servius Honoratus too. In the conventional name Maurus Servius Honoratus, Servius is the personal name by which he is known, not automatically the direct name of a gens. Honoratus is the cognomen-like tail. Maurus is another name-element. In late antiquity, again, one must be cautious about inferring too much of the old republican pattern from the surviving label. On Lewis and Short: no, there is no standard adjective entry “Servius, -a, -um” in the sense that would help here. Servius is treated as a proper name, not as a productive adjective like a regular first-and-second-declension adjective. If one looked in a lexicon, one would expect the personal name, the praenomen, and derivatives or related gentilicial forms such as Servilius, rather than a lexical adjective meaning something like “servile” or “slavish” under the form Servius. The adjective you would want for “servile” is servilis, or the noun servitus for servitude, and of course servus for slave. So the dry answer is this. Grice is right that the i makes all the difference, because Servius is not Servus. But the real Roman family formation to think of is usually Servilius and the gens Servilia, not a gens Servia inferred directly from Servius. And Lewis and Short will help by distinguishing the proper name from the common noun, not by giving you some independent adjective Servius, -a, -um. If you like, I can next give you a compact Roman-naming note on the whole cluster: Servius, Servilius, servus, servilis, and why the Roman ear would not have collapsed them even if a playful philosopher does. But Grice might protest too much: "Surely he wasn't a Servilio, or people would have called him so -- but then inventing a gens Maura seems out of place -- So Grice concludes this man possibly did have no gens -- and used 'Servius' as Gilbert Ryle used Gilbert? Yes, Grice may protest, but here the protest goes a little too far. The safest answer is this. Maurus Servius Honoratus is a late antique name, and late antique names cannot always be handled with the old republican expectation that every respectable person must present a neatly recoverable gens in the middle slot. By this period the onomastic system is looser, public labels are less uniform, and the surviving name of a grammarian or commentator is often simply the form by which he circulated, not a complete prosopographical passport. So no, one should not infer from the absence of Servilius that he “had no gens.” That is too strong. It is better to say that the surviving name does not transparently exhibit the gens in the old way. Servius in this case is much more plausibly a personal name than an abbreviated declaration of gens. Maurus may be another name-element, perhaps descriptive or inherited; Honoratus is the cognomen-like tail. That gives you a three-part late antique name, but not one that maps neatly onto the old schoolbook tria nomina. In other words, Servius here may indeed function rather more like Gilbert in Gilbert Ryle than like Grice in H. P. Grice, if by that one means the principal personal label by which the man is known. But even that analogy needs caution, because Roman naming is not just modern naming turned sideways. What Grice is really noticing is a genuine late antique phenomenon. Some figures are transmitted under the part of the name that is most socially or literarily salient, not under the part that would most satisfy an antiquarian hunting for gens. So Servius can be the operative name of the man without obliging us to construct a gens Servia behind it, and without forcing us to imagine a hidden Servilius suppressed by carelessness. The cleaner formulation would be this. Servius Honoratus is best treated as the conventional late antique name of the commentator. Servius is probably the personal name by which he was primarily identified; Honoratus is the additional name-element that gives the full literary label; Maurus is another inherited or descriptive component. This does not prove that he lacked a gens in the social sense, only that the surviving form of the name does not advertise it in the old republican way. So if Grice says, “he used Servius as Gilbert Ryle used Gilbert,” the answer is: not exactly, but near enough to illuminate the problem. The transmitted name may foreground the personal element rather than a clearly recoverable nomen gentilicium. That is a feature of the evidence, not a proof of social rootlessness. And there is one further point. Servius is a very ordinary and well-attested Roman praenomen. That alone makes it quite plausible as the leading personal name. One does not need to invent a lost gens or a missing Servilius to explain it. Late antiquity simply gives us people whose names are preserved in a way that no longer behaves like the tidy republican filing system Grice would prefer. So the short answer is this. No, he was probably not “a Servilio” in the sense Grice wants, because the evidence does not present him that way. But no, that does not mean he had no gens. It means only that the surviving name Maurus Servius Honoratus is a late antique literary and social label in which Servius functions as the salient personal name, much as Grice suspects. If you like, I can next give you a compact filing rule for such cases: when late antique names do not display a recoverable nomen, file under the attested principal name rather than inventing a gens from older analogies.Servio Onorato, Mauro (a. u. c. MCL). Dicta Vergiliana. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sesti – Ossia: Grice e Sesti: la ragione conversazionale e la romanità nel circolo dei Sesti -- Roma antica. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Sesti (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e la romanità nel circolo dei Sesti. Both the Sextian circle and Grice articulate a conception of reason that is inseparable from disciplined practice, but they apply it at different levels of life. In the circle of the Sesti, reason is exercised as a lived Roman habitus: a Stoic–Pythagorean regimen in which conversation, moral self-examination, and Romanitas form a continuous fabric of action, speech, and character. Reflection at day’s end, the restrained, almost administrative reckoning of one’s conduct, and the emphasis on Roman customs and modes of speaking treat rationality as something enacted in ordinary exchanges and social forms, not theorized as an abstract property. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning offers a structural analogue on the philosophical plane: communication itself is governed by norms of accountability, restraint, and appropriateness, where saying too much, misclassifying what is at issue, or converting practice into essence counts as a rational failure. Just as the Sestian avoids reifying Romanitas into a scholastic genus and insists it “returns to the forum,” Grice resists treating meaning or rationality as metaphysical categories, treating them instead as products of use, intention-recognition, and cooperative expectation. In both cases, reason operates not as a system of doctrines but as a regulative discipline that keeps inquiry, self-description, and communal life from collapsing into empty catalogues or abstract idols, anchoring rationality in the responsible management of what is said, done, and left unsaid. Grice: “Italians refer to  Sozione as the teacher of Seneca the Younger. Historically, he was a philosopher of the Sextian school (Scuola dei Sestii), an eclectic Roman school that combined Stoicism with Pythagoreanism.    Etymology The name Sozione is the Italianized version of the Greek Sotion (Σωτίων). Its etymology is rooted in the Greek word soter (σωτήρ), meaning "savior" or "deliverer". In the context of ancient philosophers, it was a common name often associated with those who "preserved" or "saved" the successions (diadochai) of philosophical thought.  Modern Italian Surname for the Gens Sextia If we trace the surname of his predecessors, specifically Quintus Sextius (Quinto Sestio), the founder of his school, into modern Italian, it follows several patronymic and phonetic evolutions: Sestio: This remains the most direct continuation of the Latin Sextius and is still found as a rare surname in Italy today. Sesto / Sesti: These are the primary modern Italian derivatives of the name Sextus or Sextius. Sesti is the common pluralized/patronymic form typical of Italian surnames. Sestito: Particularly common in Southern Italy (Calabria), this signifies "son of Sesto" or a descendant of the Sextia line. Sisto: A variant that evolved through ecclesiastical influence (the name of several Popes), popularized from the Latin Sixtus.  In modern Italy, a descendant of the gens Sextia would most likely carry the surname Sesto, Sesti, or Sestito.  Would you like to explore the specific Pythagorean-Stoic practices that Sozione taught to Seneca, such as his famous vegetarianism?Tutor of Seneca. In glossary to Roman philosophers, in Roman philosophers. Filosofo pitagorico, appartenente alla scuola dei Sestii, e accolge anche motivi etici di derivazione del Portico Vive a Roma all'epoca di OTTAVIANO e di TIBERIO e e tra i maestri di Seneca. Sozione.: il circolo dei Sesti. Sozione.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Sestī. Audīvī vos in circulō Sestiōrum etiam de Rōmānitāte disserere—quasi esset genus aliquod in Acadēmiā, inter “animal” et “angelum”. SESTI: Salvē, Grice. Rōmānitās genus? Immo sapor est: in moribus, in sermone, in togae ipsius plicīs. Sed quid tibi vidētur? GRICEVS: Ego tantum animadvertō hoc: si quis in scholā clāmat “Rōmānitās!”, statim quaerit quasi esset ἰδέα (sic, Graecīs litterīs), atque in catalogō specierum reponenda; cum tamen Rōmānitās saepe magis usus sit quam essentia—nec “species” est, sed quoddam “species” facit, dum de eā disputāmus. SESTI: Rōmānitās! Inplicātūram tuam dē Rōmānitāte supra τὸπον οὐρανόν tollis, Grice, magnifice erudite! Nam dum negās eam esse speciem in schola, ostendis quomodo ipsa disputātiō de ἰδέᾳ Rōmānitātem quasi in caelum metaphysicum extollat—cum illa, ridēns, in forum redeat. In some cases, Grice does not know -- he has the order: Sesti, Sesto, Sestio -- for alphabetical convenience -- but classicists have studied this? If Settimia was a gens, the good formation would be Sestia (Sextia), not Sesta (Sexta) -- Still, the Sesti -- or Sexti, were more prominent than the one Sextius (Sestio) that Grice has -- "It's odd" - Yes, classicists have studied this, and Grice’s uneasiness is justified. The trouble is that several different things are crossing at once: the praenomen Sextus, the nomen Sextius, later cognomina and derivatives, and then modern Italian surname formations such as Sesti, Sesto, Sestio, Sestito, and Sisto, none of which map neatly back onto one ancient rule. The first point is the Roman one. If the gens is Sextia, the normal gentilicial form is indeed Sextius for a male and Sextia for the gens or for a female bearer. So on strict Roman grounds Grice is right: if one is looking for the ancient nomen of the gens, one wants Sextia, not Sexta. Sexta is normally just the feminine of the ordinal or personal name Sextus, not the standard way of naming the gens. In other words, Septimia works like a gens-name; Sextia would too. Sexta would not ordinarily be the corresponding gentilicial form. That means the ancient family behind Quintus Sextius and the so-called Sextian school is the gens Sextia, with Sextius as the masculine nomen. So if Grice is ordering by gens, the strict antiquarian shelf would really be Sextia or, in Italianised masculine filing, Sestio for the individual bearing Sextius. That is the clean Roman answer. But then the second point is the Italian one, and here the waters become muddier. Modern Italian surnames do not preserve Roman gentilicia in a mechanically regular way. They pass through medieval and regional phonetic changes, patronymics, plural family forms, ecclesiastical influence, and local habits. So Sesti and Sesto may become much more visible in modern Italy than Sestio, even if the ancient nomen behind them was Sextius. That does not mean the ancient gens was “really” Sesti or Sesto. It means posterity has naturalised the name differently. This is why Grice’s order, Sesti, Sesto, Sestio, makes practical sense as a modern filing convenience, even if it is not philologically pure. Sesti is a common Italian plural-family surname formation. Sesto is a natural vernacular outcome from Sextus or from related personal-name lines. Sestio is the closest straightforward continuation of Sextius and therefore the best antiquarian shelf if one wants to keep contact with the Roman nomen. But because Sesti and Sesto may be much more socially familiar in Italian onomastics, they can overshadow the stricter form. So the oddity Grice feels is real. The form most faithful to the Roman gens, Sestio, is not necessarily the most prominent in modern surname visibility. And the more prominent modern forms, Sesti and Sesto, may derive partly from Sextus as a praenomen and partly from later family developments, not just from Sextius as nomen. In other words, several etymological streams are flowing together under one modern-looking cluster. That is why one should not expect a perfectly parallel series like Septimia, Settimio, and then something equally neat for Sextia. Sext- in Italian had a more varied afterlife than septim-. The phonetic and ecclesiastical history of Sisto especially complicates matters further, because Sixtus enters the picture through church usage and papal names, and that can displace what a purely Roman-gentilicial development might have looked like. So the dry answer for Grice would be this. Yes, if one is talking strictly about the ancient gens, the right underlying form is Sextia, with Sextius for the male nomen. Sestio is therefore the closest Italianising continuation of the Roman gentilicial form. But Sesti and Sesto are more visible because modern Italian surnames do not preserve ancient nomina by a single regular rule; they mix patronymic, phonetic, and regional developments. Hence the prominence of Sesti or Sesto over Sestio is historically understandable, even if it looks philologically untidy. So Grice’s instinct is sound: the neat Roman expectation would point to Sextia and Sextius, not to Sexta. But the actual Italian afterlife of the name is messier, and classicists and onomasticians would indeed say that this messiness is exactly what one should expect once Roman gentilicia pass through many centuries of vernacular life. Sesti (a. u. c. DCCLXX). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sestio – Ossia: Grice e Sestio: la ragione conversazionale del fallito morale – Roma. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Quinto Sestio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del fallito morale. Both Quintus Sextius and H. P. Grice treat reason not as an abstract faculty but as a practice exercised in accountable exchange, though they operate on different planes. Sextius’ nightly moral examination trains the agent to render an intelligible account of himself before a rational standard, insisting on economy, discrimination, and the avoidance of self-serving prolixity; the formula “if any” already signals that mere cataloguing of faults can become a surrogate for correction. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning generalizes this discipline from ethical self-scrutiny to communicative action: speakers are rationally answerable for what they intend others to recognize, and hearers are entitled to distinguish what is strictly said from what is merely sought as an excuse or moral alibi. In Gricean terms, Sextius’ practice inculcates sensitivity to implicature avant la lettre—teaching followers to notice when inquiry itself functions as partial satisfaction, when reasons are supplied to discharge responsibility rather than to guide amendment. Both, then, converge on a conception of rationality as governance by norms that penalize verbosity, reward relevance, and value selective silence: wisdom lies not in saying or confessing more, but in discerning what genuinely calls for response and reform. He founds his own school in Rome that draws heavily on La Setta di CROTONE and IL PORTICO. S. preaches an ascetic way of life, which includes vegetarianism, and exhorts his followers – whom he called ‘Sestiani’ – to reflect at the end of each day on their moral failings – “if any.” Upon his death, his son, also called Quinto S., inherits the school, but it does not long survive him. One of the Sestiani is SOTIONE, who becomes Seneca’s tutor – Seneca himself is influenced by the school’s teachings for some time.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Sestī. Audio tē “Sestiānōs” tuōs quottīdiē ad rationem vocāre—ac, post cēnam, quasi tabulas acceptī et expensī, vitia sua recognoscere: “si qua tamen sunt.” SESTIVS: Salvē, Grice. Ita est: nōn scholam facimus ut strepāmus, sed ut vincāmus cupiditātēs. Qui vespere sibi iudex est, mane sibi magister erit. GRICEVS: Pulchrē. Sed animadvertō quotiēns dīcitur “fallītum morale,” statim quis velut quaerat rationem excūsātiōnis—quasi ipsa inquisitiō sit iam partim satisfactio. Itaque, cum tu “si qua sunt” addis, discipulus discit non solum peccāta numerāre, sed etiam supervacua omittere—ne plus temporis impendat in catalogō quam in emendātiōne. SESTIVS: Inplicātūra tua, auguste Grice, est ultrā omnem “fallītum morale” quī cōgitārī possit—ut par est! Nam docēs: sapientia non est multum conquerī, sed rectē dīscernere quid sit corrigendum—et quid tantum verbi causa quaerātur. Sestio, Quinto (a. u. c. DCCIV). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sesto – Ossia: Grice e Sesto: la ragione conversazionale delle sentenze trasformative – Roma. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Sesto (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale delle sentenze trasformative. Grice and Sesto converge on a shared intuition that reason operates not as a merely formal calculus but as a norm-governed practice shaped by human purposes, yet they articulate this insight at different levels. Sesto’s Sentences work by ethical compression: brief maxims, drawn from Stoic, Pythagorean, and wisdom traditions, are designed to transform the hearer by disciplining the passions, so that rational understanding emerges through moral reform; meaning here is inseparable from exhortation, and the success of a saying lies in its capacity to re‑shape character. Grice, by contrast, relocates transformational force from moral content to conversational structure: his theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how speakers, assuming shared rational norms, routinely mean more than they say by generating implicatures that hearers are entitled to infer. Where Sesto’s sentences transform by inculcation and ethical habituation, Grice’s utterances transform by inference and recognition of intention; yet both presuppose a cooperative rational audience for whom understanding is not passive reception but an active achievement. The joke about Chomsky calling Sesto’s sentences “transformational” is thus apt: Sesto’s maxims transform lives, Grice’s pragmatics transform how we understand meaning, but both depend on a shared conviction that reason shows itself in use, in the disciplined crossing from what is said to what is meant or lived. S. is a compiler – The “Sentences of Sesto” are mainly of an ethical nature and show signs of a variety of influences including traditional wisdom literature, and IL PORTICO. They proclaim that wisdom is attained through the conquest of the passions. – Chadwick, “The sentences of Sextus,” Cambridge. Grice: “Chomsky thought that the sentences of Sextus were ‘transformational’!”  GRICEVS: Dic, Seste, num sententiae tuae, passionibus victis, implicant plus quam dicunt, an Porticus tantum tacet? SESTVS: Grice, ego sententias colligo ut animos transformem, nam qui iram superat iam dimidium sermonis intellegit. GRICEVS: Mirum est, Chomskyus eas transformationales vocaret, quasi verba mutentur dum mores corriguntur. SESTVS: Rideat Chomskyus, Grice, modo animi mutentur, nam Romae optima grammatica est vita temperata. Oops. Grice may have had something wrong. It is Sestio (Italianised for Sextius) which seems more prominent -- the circle of the Sextii -- whereas Sextus (Italianised name Sesto) is merely known for a treatise on sentences -- less prominent, no circle. For the former we have a good Sextia gens, before, ordinarily, the Settimia one -- for Sextus (Sesto) we should just assume that someone in the census was dropping an 'i' somewhere? Yes, that correction improves the picture considerably. Quintus Sextius and the Sextian circle belong with the gens Sextia, and that is the clean Roman case. There the i is not optional ornament but part of the nomen: Sextius, Italianised as Sestio. So if Grice wants the strict antiquarian shelf, this school goes under Sestio, and from there back to gens Sextia. That is perfectly sound. Sextus, by contrast, is a different animal. It is primarily a praenomen, or at least a personal name-form, not automatically the nomen of the gens Sextia. So the author of the Sentences of Sextus, if called simply Sextus or Sesto in Italian, does not thereby become a member of the gens Sextia. One must not solve that by imagining some census clerk lazily dropped the i. That would be too bureaucratic, too accidental, and too modern a fantasy. The better explanation is onomastic, not scribal. Sextius and Sextus are related forms in the larger family of names built on sext-, but they are not interchangeable. Sextius is a nomen gentilicium. Sextus is a praenomen or personal name. One may indeed move historically from one to the other in family memory, modern surnames, or later confusions of transmission, but that does not mean every Sextus is secretly a Sextius with a lost letter. So Grice should distinguish two cases. In the Sextian school, Quintus Sextius is genuinely a Sextius. Therefore gens Sextia is available and should be used. This is the clean case of a Roman nomen giving you a gens. In the Sentences of Sextus, the name Sextus may simply be the personal name under which the compiler or attributed author circulated. That does not entitle one to infer gens Sextia unless independent evidence supports it. The absence of the i is not best treated as an error in the census but as evidence that we are not dealing with the same name-category in the first place. That is why the prominence of Sestio over Sesto in your material now makes perfect sense. The school with a historical founder, Quintus Sextius, naturally leaves a stronger and more respectable ancient trail, because Sextius is a Roman nomen of a known gens. The compiler Sextus is more elusive, and his name remains at the level of personal designation rather than clearly gentilicial classification. So the short answer for Grice is this. No, one should not assume that Sesto is merely Sestio with the i dropped by some ancient registrar. Rather, Sextius and Sextus are distinct though related Roman name-forms. The first supports gens Sextia; the second does not by itself do so. Hence the circle of the Sextii is securely gentilicial, while the Sentences of Sextus belong to a more uncertain and less genealogically informative naming situation. If you like, I can next give you a very tight filing rule for Grice’s catalogue: Sestio when the ancient source is Sextius and a gens is in view; Sesto when the source is merely Sextus and no gens can safely be inferred. Grice compares Sesto to "H. P. Grice" and "G. R. Grice" -- Herbert Paul Grice and Geoffrey Russell Grice -- calling Sesto Sesto would be like calling Grice "Paul" or "Herbert" -- and calling the other Grice "Geoffrey" or "Russell" -- Grice cannot think of an Oxonian philosopher with just ONE name, other than Gilbert Ryle, but the other Ryle Grice knows is Ryle's twin sister, Mary. So it would be like calling Ryle, at Oxford, "Gilbert," rather than "Mary"? Yes, that is a good analogy, and it helps expose the difference neatly. Calling the author of the Sentences simply Sesto can indeed be misleading if one then starts hearing Sesto as though it were the principal family designation in the modern surname sense. In that respect Grice’s comparison with H. P. Grice or G. R. Grice is apt. If one called H. P. Grice “Paul” or “Herbert” in a bibliographical catalogue, one would be privileging part of the personal name where modern usage privileges the family name Grice. Likewise, if one called Gilbert Ryle simply “Gilbert,” one would be making him sound like a first-name acquaintance rather than the philosophical figure posterity knows as Ryle. And something structurally similar can happen with Sextus. Sextus is primarily a praenomen or personal name-form. So if an ancient figure is known simply as Sextus, that is much closer to calling someone by his given name than to citing him by a stable family name. By contrast, Sextius is a nomen, and therefore much closer to the Roman family-classificatory element. So Sestio behaves more like Ryle or Grice in a catalogue, whereas Sesto behaves more like Gilbert or Herbert. That said, one must keep the historical difference in view. The Romans did not have surnames in the modern British sense, and later textual transmission often preserves figures by the most memorable or available element of the name, not always by the element we would most like for neat prosopography. So the comparison is illuminating, but not exact. It shows the filing problem rather than solving it by direct equivalence. Your Ryle example is especially good because it brings out the social oddity. At Oxford, “Ryle” is the philosopher. “Gilbert” sounds over-familiar, almost domestic, and “Mary” would be still further off because it identifies another member of the family altogether. Likewise, to call a figure “Sesto” where the more relevant Roman classificatory form would be Sextius can make him sound more like a personal acquaintance or a bare individual name than like a man situated in a gens. So the clean conclusion would be this. Yes, calling the compiler of the Sentences “Sesto” is in one respect like calling Grice “Herbert” or Ryle “Gilbert”: it foregrounds the personal-name side rather than the family or classificatory side. That is why Grice is right to feel the pull of Sestio as the more proper shelf for the philosophically and prosopographically serious case. Sextus, by itself, remains too close to the level of given name. And in fact that may be exactly why the figure remains vaguer. A name preserved at the level of Sextus is less genealogically helpful than one preserved as Sextius. It leaves us with a person; it does not so readily give us a house.Sesto (a. u. c.DCCCLXXX). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Settala – Ossia: Grice e Settala: la ragione conversazionale dei problemi sessuali d’Aristotele -- desiderio e piacere. Note su De peste et pestiferis affectibus. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Ludovico Settala (Milano, Lombardia): Grice: la ragione conversazionale dei problemi sessuali d’Aristotele -- desiderio e piacere. The comparison between Ludovico Settala and H. P. Grice brings into focus two very different but unexpectedly convergent ways of understanding reason-governed meaning: Settala, formed within the Italian Aristotelian-medical tradition centered in Milan and Bologna, treats desire and pleasure as phenomena whose intelligibility depends on empirical observation of the body and its temperaments, reading Aristotle’s Problemata as a bridge between physiological facts and practical reasoning about human conduct, including sex and reproduction; Grice, by contrast, relocates rational governance from nature to interaction itself, arguing that conversational meaning is structured by shared norms of rational cooperation, so that what is meant exceeds what is said through implicature, inference, and a tacit appeal to reasonableness rather than biology. Where Settala grounds explanation in an empiricism shaped by medicine—desire as diagnosable, pleasure as observable, and their mismatch as a clinical puzzle—Grice treats mismatch as pragmatically productive, since the gap between expression and intention is precisely what allows speakers to communicate more than they state. The playful Milanese exchange attributed to Settala and Grice dramatizes this contrast: Settala’s Aristotelian humor insists that not every desire yields pleasure and not every pleasure satisfies desire, while Grice responds by redescribing this very asymmetry as a rational implicature, a structured “vice versa” that complicates diagnosis but enables meaning. In this sense, Settala exemplifies a tradition in which reason governs explanation by anchoring it in embodied facts, whereas Grice exemplifies a modern turn in which reason governs conversation itself, transforming the instability between desire and pleasure into a systematic feature of how humans make sense of one another through language rather than through physiology. The Italian philosophical tradition remains distinguished by its historical leanings toward an Aristotelian empiricism that emerges through a unique fusion of medical education and the humanities. This synthesis is most visible in the works of S., who leverages the pedagogical structures of centres like Bologna to ground humanistic inquiry in clinical observation. Medical Education as a Catalyst for Empiricism  At Bologna, the world’s oldest university, the study of medicine and the "arts" -- philosophy, logic, rhetoric -- were inextricably linked within the same faculty.  Integrated Curriculum: Graduation required attendance in both medicine and philosophy, fostering a cultural environment where philosophical abstracting is constantly checked by medical "facts" and clinical cases. Empirical Epistemology: This proximity births a "medical empiricism" that prioritised sensory experience and the observation of the body over pure metaphysical speculation.  S.’s Aristotelian Framework S. exemplifies this tradition through his extensive 1,200-page commentary on the Aristotelian Problemata. Authority Through Observation: S. uses the Problemata to bridge the gap between natural philosophy and medical practice, blurring the lines between these authorities. Basic Human Needs and Desires: He applies Aristotle’s theories of temperament to the human soul, viewing desires and psychological states as physiological manifestations. Reproduction and Generation: Following Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, S. views reproduction not just as a biological necessity but as a philosophical act where the individual seeks a form of "formal eternity" through their offspring. ragion di stato, lizio, sesso. Settala: Caro Grice, se Aristotele avesse avuto a disposizione i nostri milanesi, avrebbe scritto i Problemata con più gusto: qui il desiderio incontra sempre il piacere, almeno finché non finisce il risotto! Grice: Ah, Ludovico, ma a Milano il piacere è materia di empirismo: lo si osserva, lo si misura... e poi si cerca di prescriverlo come se fosse una ricetta medica. Eppure, tra desiderio e piacere, c’è sempre qualche “vice versa” che ci complica la diagnosi! Settala: Ecco, Grice, tu mi implici che non tutto ciò che desidero è fonte di piacere, o viceversa... e mi sa che il paziente rimane sempre un po' insoddisfatto, anche dopo aver letto mille pagine di Aristotele. Settala: La tua implicatura è paradossale, e comica allo stesso tempo – congratulazioni, Grice! Non so se è paradossale perché è comica o viceversa – in ogni caso, vice versa, la filosofia milanese ti accoglie: qui tra desiderio e piacere c’è sempre spazio per un sorriso... e per una diagnosi che non tenga mai troppo sul serio il “ragion di stato” del sesso! Settala, Ludovico (1622). De peste et pestiferis affectibus. Milano: Tini

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Settimio – Ossia: Grice e Settimio: la ragione conversazionale del’amico lizio d’Antonino – Roma – Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Lucio Settimio Severo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del principe filosofo. The comparison between Grice and Lucius Septimius Severus, as staged in the passage, turns on a shared ideal of rational governance grounded in conversation rather than mere authority, though each embodies it in a different register: Severus represents the ancient model of the princeps philosophus, according to which imperial power is legitimized and humanized through cultivated discourse, amicitia, and the public display of ratio as a lived virtue rather than as coercive command, so that rule without doctrina is blind and friendship without sermo barren. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, by contrast, abstracts this ethical–political intuition into a general account of how rationality operates in language itself: meaning arises not from status, power, or formal utterance, but from cooperative participation in conversation, where intentions are recognized, implicatures grasped, and reason silently governs exchange. The dialogue’s conceit brings these together by having Severus acknowledge that Grice’s “unheard‑of implicature” is less a criticism than a reminder: even philosophical talk at a banquet risks degenerating into self‑celebration unless conversational reason restrains vanity and redirects attention toward mutual understanding. In this sense, Severus exemplifies in political life what Grice theorizes at the level of linguistic practice: authority, whether imperial or semantic, is sustained only when exercised through shared rational norms that allow others to understand, respond, and sometimes simply smile. Grice supplies the analytic grammar of this insight, while Severus embodies its ethical and civic aspiration, showing that the philosopher‑prince and the philosopher of language converge on the same principle: rationality governs not by domination, but by intelligible, proportionate, and recognizably human conversation. Severo rules the Roman empire and it is said that he is well-versed in philosophy. GRICEVS: Salvē, Severe. Audīvī tē, principem philosophum, inter convīvās nōn minus de ratiōne quam de vīnō disserere—quod est (ut putō) rarius quam Falernum vetus. SEVERVS: Salvē, Grice. Ita est: philosophiam inter convīvās praetulī; nam et imperium sine doctrinā caecum est, et amīcitia sine sermone ieiūna. GRICEVS: Bene dicis; sed saepe animadvertō, dum “amīcitiam” laudāmus, ipsī nos laudāre incipimus—quasi convivium sī sit sapientius, id statim probet convīvās sapientēs esse; atque ita, dum de ratiōne colloquimur, ratiō ipsa quasi sella curūlis in mediō tricliniī ponitur. SEVERVS: Inaudīta est inplicātūra tua—et eam amō, Grice! Nam, dum de Antonīnō et amīcitiā loquī vidēris, admonēs nē sermō noster in pompam vertātur: interdum enim optima philosophia est, cum princeps rīdet et amīcus intellegit. Weekley essay assignment. Lucio Settimio Severo. There are, unfortunately for the inattentive, at least three Severi. Discuss why Lucius Septimius Severus is the least likely to be confused with the others, despite sharing the same surname, and assess whether his claim to be a principe filosofo rests on philosophical cultivation, imperial self-presentation, or the later weakness of his namesakes. You may, if necessary, compare him unfavourably with the two other Severi, but only after pretending not to.  Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. [degruyterbrill.com], [archive.org] Grice orders philosophers etc alphabetically by gens -- "if I can" -- so this one goes under "S" for "Settimio" (Grice uses italianised forms)? Yes, if Grice is sorting by gens and is willing to use Italianised forms, Lucius Septimius Severus belongs under S for Settimio, not under Severo. That is because Severus is the cognomen, not the nomen gentilicium. The gens is Septimia, so in Latin the man is a Septimius, and in an Italianising catalogue he naturally falls under Settimio. Severus or Severo is the personal tail by which posterity usually remembers him, but it is not the right alphabetising principle if the rule really is “by gens, if I can.” So the clean scheme would be this. Lucio Settimio Severo under S for Settimio. If Grice is being severe with himself, he should do the same for Silius and put him under S for Silio because the gens is Silia; but there the result is less visibly different because both nomen and conventional literary name begin with S anyway. With Septimius Severus the distinction is clearer, because “Severo” tempts one to file by the better-known cognomen, whereas the gentilicial principle points back to Septimius. There is also a Roman historical reason why the temptation is strong. Septimius Severus became so famous under the label Severus that the cognomen begins to feel almost dynastic in retrospect. But that is precisely why Grice’s rule is useful: it resists retrospective nickname-history and restores the older Roman logic of naming. So if he asks, “where do I file him?”, the answer is: under Settimio, because the gens is Septimia. Severo is how he is remembered; Settimio is how he is classed. And Grice has this suspicion that this gens was 'seventh' in rank -- "Why else would you call yourself and all your offspring, 'the seventh'?" That is a charming suspicion, but no, Septimius does not mean “seventh in rank,” nor would a Roman have heard it that way in ordinary naming. The safest answer is that Septimius is simply the nomen of the gens Septimia, and like many Roman gentilicia it may once, at some remote point, have had an origin connected with a personal name, a numeral, or some family ancestor’s designation. But by the historical period in which we meet Septimius Severus, it is no longer functioning semantically as “the seventh” in the live way Grice is imagining. It is functioning as a family name. That is the crucial distinction. Etymology is one thing; social meaning is another. A Roman called Septimius was not thereby announcing, “I belong to the seventh-ranked gens,” any more than a modern Mr. Carpenter must be a woodworker or a modern Mr. King a monarch. The name may have had a numerical ancestry, but in use it had hardened into a nomen. It marked belonging, not arithmetic. There is, however, a reason Grice’s suspicion feels plausible. Roman names often do preserve old ordinals and numerals in personal and family forms: Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Decimus, and so on. So one can imagine a line in which a name ultimately related to septimus, “seventh,” became a family designation. But once that happens, the live ordinal force fades. Septimius is not simply septimus with a social flourish added on. It is a gentilicial form, a nomen belonging to a gens. So the point would be this. If one were tracing the deep ancestry of the name, one might well ask whether the gens Septimia originally took shape around an ancestor whose name or designation had some connection with septimus. That is entirely possible. But that would not imply any ranking of the gens itself. Roman gentes were not numbered in that way for status, and no one hearing Septimius Severus would infer “ah yes, the seventh house in precedence.” In Gricean terms, the numeral etymon, if it was there, had ceased to implicate rank. It had become lexically absorbed. The Roman ear heard family identity, not ordinal boasting. So the short dry answer is this. Septimius may very well be etymologically connected, at some distant stage, with septimus, but in historical Roman usage it is a nomen gentilicium, not a statement that the family stood seventh in rank. The gens is Septimia because that is the family name-form, not because the family publicly styled itself “the seventh.” If you like, I can next give you a very compact note on how Roman nomina often arise from older praenomina or numerically marked personal names without preserving their original semantic force in live social use. Settimio Severo, Lucio (a. u. c. CMXLVI). Dicta. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Severino – Ossia: Grice e Severino: la ragione conversazionale del velino -- oltre il linguaggio, oltre l’aporia di Parmenide. Note su La struttura originaria. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Emanuele Severino (Brescia, Lombardia): Grice: “La ragione conversazionale del velino -- oltre la lingua, oltre l’aporia di Parmenide. Grice and Emanuele Severino represent two radically different yet illuminating ways of thinking about rationality in relation to language and meaning. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning is pragmatic, defeasible, and practice‑oriented: meaning arises within cooperative interaction, where speakers rely on shared norms of rational conduct so that hearers can infer intentions, cancel implicatures, and negotiate sense dynamically. Reason, for Grice, does not abolish ordinary language but inhabits it, working through understatement, irony, redundancy, and silence as flexible tools within conversation. Severino, by contrast, advances a Neo‑Eleatic critique that aims to pass entirely beyond language as ordinarily understood: rooted in Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, his philosophy rejects becoming as incoherent and treats the Western linguistic habit of speaking of coming‑to‑be and ceasing‑to‑be as a deep logical error. Where Grice sees non‑contradiction as a regulative norm operating tacitly within conversational exchange, Severino absolutizes it into an ontological law that renders every being eternal and every discourse on change internally aporetic. The contrast is sharp: Grice treats paradox as a local, context‑sensitive phenomenon that speakers exploit and resolve through rational conversational expectations, while Severino treats paradox as revelatory, a sign that ordinary discourse itself must be overcome in testimony to the destiny of Being. In this sense, Grice’s conversational reason remains hospitable to linguistic life, whereas Severino’s Eleatic reason asks philosophy to stand beyond conversation altogether, bearing witness to a truth that no amount of pragmatic implicature can ultimately domesticate. The Eleaticism of  S. is deeply rooted in the logical rigour of Zeno of Elea – VELINO , specifically in the use of paradox to defend a radical monism that rejects the possibility of "becoming".  Rooting Neo-Eleaticism in Zeno’s Paradox Zeno of Elea famously used reductio ad absurdum to show that motion and multiplicity lead to logical contradictions, thereby defending his master Parmenides' view that Being is one and unchanging. S. adopts this "Eleatic" stance by arguing that the Western belief in "becoming" — whereby things come from nothingness and return to it — is the ultimate logical "folly" or madness (Follia dell'Occidente). The Shared Aporia: Just as Zeno argues that an arrow cannot move because it must occupy a fixed space at every moment, S. argues that any "being" -- even a passing thought or a burnt log -- is eternal by necessity. To say a being was not or will not be is to identify Being with Nothingness, violating the fundamental principle of non-contradiction.  The Perennial Italian Interest in Elea The "Italian-ness" of this tradition is significant, as Elea (modern Velia) is located in Campania. This geographic and intellectual lineage manifests in a persistent focus among Italian thinkers on the "Truth of Being" over the "History of Being".  Role of the Philosopher: In this tradition, the philosopher is not a mere historian of ideas but a testifier to destiny (Testimoniando il destino). Their role is to reveal the "originary structure" of truth that remains hidden behind the illusions of time and language.  velino, velia, parmenide, zenone, scuola di velia. Zenone il velino, Parmenide il velino, divenire, GENTILE.  G.: Nineteen. S.: Nineteen what. G.: Nineteen years old, which is old enough in Italy to write on Heidegger and metaphysics, and too young in Oxford to be trusted with a decent claret. S.: And yet there he is, in 1948, discussing Heidegger as if metaphysics were an inheritance rather than an affliction. G.: Under Bontadini it was both. That is the point. One must begin with the master, because the young man’s audacity only looks audacious if one forgets the room in which he learned to breathe. S.: Bontadini, then. G.: Bontadini first, and before him the brother. The older brother is the real prologue. Without him, one has a boy interested in mathematics and music. With him, one has a boy introduced to philosophy as a serious traffic rather than a school subject. S.: You said the brother had been at the Scuola Normale. G.: Precisely. And therefore in contact with the proper gods of the period: Gentile, Armando Carlini, Luigi Russo, Calogero. That is not merely “having read a few philosophers.” That is entry into the high air. S.: And the brother dies. G.: Yes. On the French front in 1942, as a volunteer. Which is useful, in a dark way, because it gives us the exact age difference. The brother is nine years older, so if Emanuele is thirteen in 1942, Giuseppe is twenty-two. S.: Twenty-two, on the French front, and dead. Where exactly. G.: The visible sources do not give me the exact place of death, only the front. One can say safely: the French front, 1942, and that for the younger brother it becomes both family fact and philosophical legend. S.: “He remains being and not a has-been.” G.: Very good. A Severinian elegy already. One can see how the family wound becomes ontological temptation. If the brother is not to be lost, then loss itself must be exposed as a lie of appearance. S.: That is already very nearly too neat. G.: It is too neat, but philosophy lives by over-neat retrospections. The important thing is that the brother does not merely die. He leaves behind a route: Pisa, Gentile, philosophy as vocation, and then death as interruption. S.: Which the younger man turns into eternity. G.: Eventually, yes. But not at once. At once, he turns it into a thesis. S.: Heidegger e la metafisica. G.: The title sounds broad enough to be harmless, which is always suspicious. S.: Too broad for a thesis. G.: Exactly. A thesis title that broad either hides confusion or a very pointed intervention. In this case, the latter. S.: Then tell me the point. G.: Under Bontadini, the point is not “what does Heidegger say about metaphysics?” like a school essay. The point is whether Heidegger destroys metaphysics, or whether he radicalises it enough to make a renewed metaphysics possible. S.: So the thesis is already a polemic in the guise of a survey. G.: Precisely. The title pretends to be descriptive. The intention is strategic. Young Severino is not merely reading Heidegger. He is trying to decide whether Heidegger can be brought into the service of metaphysics rather than left as its undertaker. S.: Which is very Bontadini. G.: Entirely. Bontadini’s entire seriousness lies there: modernity has wounded metaphysics; perhaps it can also be forced to heal it. A good Catholic does not surrender ontology to Germany without asking for receipts. S.: You are making Bontadini sound like a customs officer. G.: Neo-scholasticism with an office stamp. He is not a parish priest in a cassock. He is a Catholic metaphysician trained to make modern philosophy answer for itself. S.: And Pavia. G.: Pavia is not “religious” in the confessional-university sense that Milan’s Cattolica later is. But Severino’s own track there passes through Borromeo and through Bontadini’s line, so the Catholic-metaphysical atmosphere remains perfectly palpable. S.: And the Jesuit school before that. G.: Yes, the Collegio Arici in Brescia. The boy is formed under Jesuit discipline, hears the elder brother’s tales of Gentile and the Normale, and arrives under Bontadini. That is a denser formation than “student reads Heidegger after the war.” S.: Still, 1948 sounds young. G.: Nineteen is young. But Italy after the war has a way of making nineteen sound older, especially when the teachers are metaphysicians and the family has supplied a martyr-brother. S.: Then where do you place Abbagnano and the northern existentials. G.: As a neighbouring weather system. Important, certainly, but not the one that owns Severino’s first climate. Abbagnano gives one an existentialism with civic clothes. Severino begins elsewhere: with being, contradiction, and the need to answer Bontadini before he answers anyone else. S.: Croce and Gentile then recede. G.: They recede institutionally, but not spiritually. Gentile is there by voice through the brother, and by the whole Italian habit of taking idealism seriously even while declaring it obsolete. Croce is more southern weather, more civil-historical style. Severino’s route is harder, colder, more ontological. S.: And Grice. G.: Ah yes, because you cannot keep him out of any room longer than three minutes. In 1948 Grice is still very much pre-Austinian in the sense that matters here. He is not yet the public custodian of ordinary language. But already the pressure is there. S.: Which pressure. G.: The pressure to ask whether a philosopher is merely inflating grammar into ontology. S.: And Severino would be guilty of that. G.: To a Gricean ear, yes, magnificently so. Because once you let essere do all the work, and then allow l’essere and gli esseri to march onstage as if they were one well-drilled family, you have already let Italian perform a metaphysical coup. S.: “Essere” as verb, then noun, then plural noun. G.: Exactly. To be, being, beings. The slide is philosophically delicious and logically dangerous. Grice would begin sharpening tools at once. S.: “Izz” and “hazz.” G.: Precisely. “Socrates izz rational; Socrates hazz white.” One splits the uses before the noun begins to govern the world. S.: Iss what. Hazz what. G.: You are doing Severino’s work for him by sounding obtuse. The point is that “is” is too promiscuous a verb to be trusted with ontology unsupervised. Grice’s little barbarisms are instruments of chastity. S.: Severino would hate that. G.: He would think it fiddling while the house burns. He wants the whole Western house condemned for believing in becoming. S.: Ah yes, the West. G.: Which, for him, is not Somerset or Gloucestershire, however much one is tempted to hear “West” and think of cider. It is the whole Graeco-Christian-modern line after Parmenides, all the way through technology. S.: “Western civilisation? I think it would be a very good idea.” G.: Gandhi has the joke. Severino has the indictment. And that is precisely why one must keep the terms separate. He means not the Wild West, but the post-Parmenidean West. S.: Then why “return to Parmenides” later, if Heidegger never left him. G.: Because Heidegger never leaves him in the wrong way. Heidegger takes Parmenides seriously, but still leaves room for history, event, unconcealment, difference. In Severino’s eyes that is still too much becoming. S.: So he wants a stricter Parmenides than Heidegger can tolerate. G.: Exactly. “Return” means: beyond Heidegger’s historical Parmenides to the anti-becoming Parmenides who renders all becoming absurd. S.: Which begins when. G.: In germ, very early. Explicitly, 1956, with the Aristotele essay. There the anti-becoming thesis is no longer merely atmospheric. It is said outright that if a being becomes, then before becoming it was not, and that is impossible. S.: And then 1958. G.: The Structure. The original structure, if you like. The thing becomes system. Then 1964 makes it public scandal with Ritornare a Parmenide. S.: So in 1948 he is not yet the public Eleatic. G.: No, he is the gifted metaphysical son in the house of Bontadini, trying to force Heidegger to answer the question whether metaphysics is dead. S.: And what does he find. G.: He finds a path he will later betray Bontadini with. Or if one wishes to be kinder, he radicalises the line until the line breaks. S.: “You seem to have become very suspicious of Heidegger.” G.: Blame Severino. Anyone who tries to recruit Heidegger into metaphysics forces one to read the verbs with suspicion. S.: Ah yes, the verbs. Let us do werden. G.: Gladly. Werden is one of Germany’s little metaphysical scandals. It means become, and also serves the passive, and future-like constructions. The same lexical body doing too many jobs. It is almost as if grammar were trying to warn one not to trust a single word with all that power. S.: And divenire. G.: Better in one respect, because the venire inside it remains visible: a coming-into-something. Italian exposes the movement. English become is less helpfully obscure, as English likes to be. German werden is shamelessly overworked. S.: Would Severino care. G.: Hardly. He is not a philosopher of the conjugations in the Oxford sense. He would say: whatever your language does, if it says or presupposes that beings come from nothing and return to nothing, it is mad. S.: Presupposes or entails. G.: There you go, wanting the implicature. Yes, this is where a Gricean grumbles. Severino often sounds as if ordinary language presupposes becoming in a heavy ontological sense, when a patient analyst might say: no, it only carries a defeasible implication, or trades on useful dramatic shorthand, or simply marks a before-and-after state without metaphysical bravado. S.: “Mourning becomes Electra.” G.: Precisely. A title that proves the English verb “become” is not always ontological. It can be costume, role, decorum, succession, dramatic transformation, even social propriety. S.: So one might reduce becoming to initial and final states, as the analysts do. G.: Exactly. Wood at t1t_1t1​, ash at t2t_2t2​. Relative identity, time-relative predication, state-transition. Wiggins later becomes very good at making these distinctions sound inevitable. Warnock asks after metaphysics in logic and the meaning behind existential quantification. Davidson and Reichenbach give you event-structure. Myro and Geach worry identity through time. All these are reductive strategies. S.: And Severino refuses them. G.: Entirely. Because for him reduction is already surrender. If you “analyse” becoming, you have not removed its poison; you have merely diluted it. S.: So he is an eliminationist. G.: In ontology, yes. Not in ordinary speech. He does not forbid Italians to say diventa cenere. He says the philosopher must know that no being has truly gone into nothing. S.: That sounds like reduction in disguise. G.: No. It is reinterpretation with ontological ferocity. The verb may survive in the marketplace; it has lost its title to truth in philosophy. S.: Which is why critics might complain he protests too much. G.: Indeed. If “beings” are already treated abstractly enough, of course they look eternal. The question is Cleopatra, not gli essenti. Cleopatra becomes ash, says history. Severino says: only in appearance. A Gricean says: perhaps the issue is just that historical grammar and ontology are not the same game. S.: Cleopatra is beautiful. G.: Historical present as quiet anti-Severinianism. Ordinary language keeps dead persons present without abolishing time. That is precisely the sort of thing he mistrusts, and precisely the sort of thing an Oxford philosopher would inspect before legislating. S.: Then is Severino simply mistranslating history into ontology. G.: To a Gricean, yes, or at least risking it magnificently. But to Severino, you are merely refusing to follow the principle of non-contradiction where it leads. S.: Which brings us to Zeno. G.: Naturally. Reductio by way of stubbornness. The Eleatic line is not mere poetry for him. It is the originary proof that movement and becoming, taken literally, collapse. S.: And did he do proper philology on Parmenides and Zeno. G.: Not in the way a classicist would admire. He is not Wiggins poring over Greek particles, nor one of those Italians who write lovingly about the gate of Elea. He uses philology enough to secure his “authentic Parmenides,” but his aim is not to reconstruct the man. It is to enlist the witness. S.: So Parmenides is not a text, but a station. G.: A station, a judge, and a blade. He returns to Parmenides in order to cut the whole tradition down. S.: And Bontadini would have thought what of that. G.: First delight, then alarm, then eventually public break. The son had taken the family silver and turned it into a weapon against the family. S.: Catholic enough. G.: Entirely. That is the beauty of Italy: the most devastating heresies are often generated from impeccable metaphysical training. S.: One almost hears Newman muttering about all this from Oriel. G.: Newman would at least admire the seriousness, though not the destination. Oxford, in 1948, does not yet quite know what to do with Heidegger. Italy knows too well. S.: And what of Grice’s BBC “Metaphysics” with Pears and Strawson. G.: There you have the contrast. In England, postwar metaphysics under ordinary-language pressures asks after Carnap, anti-metaphysical scruples, the survivability of old questions under new grammar. In northern Italy, the same period allows a nineteen-year-old to ask whether Heidegger can be made to serve metaphysics, and eventually whether the whole West is insane for speaking of becoming. S.: It does make Oxford look provincial. G.: Oxford is always provincial when it is at its cleverest. That is part of its charm. S.: Was Italy’s analytic society then born against Severino. G.: Not against him alone, no. But against the whole temptation of letting high ontology ride unchecked over logic, language, and science. Severino is merely one spectacular summit of the old mountain. S.: And his school. G.: Yes, he leaves a school. Or at least a line of disciples, continuators, respectful defectors, and men who spend half their lives explaining that they are not Severinians while keeping his books on the nearest shelf. S.: A proper Italian immortality, then. G.: Better than a posthumous pardon, certainly. S.: One last thing. If the brother dies at twenty-two in 1942, and Emanuele is thirteen, then 1948 is only six years later. G.: Exactly. Which is why the thesis is not a leisurely youthful exercise. It is an entry into philosophy under the sign of loss, mastership, and urgency. A nineteen-year-old under Bontadini writing on Heidegger in order to decide whether metaphysics can still be spoken after catastrophe. S.: That is rather better than “Heidegger e la metafisica” sounded at first. G.: Most good thesis titles are better than they sound, just as most Oxford lectures are worse. S.: And the final difference between Grice and Severino. G.: Grice thinks becoming requires analysis. Severino thinks becoming requires execution. S.: Execution in the metaphysical sense. G.: In Italy one always has to specify that too late.Grice: Caro Severino, mi perdoni: “Velia” mi suona quasi come un vicino di casa—e invece, per me che vengo da Vadum Boum, è più lontana di certi sillogismi che mi porto dietro in valigia. Severino: Vicino di casa? Velia è Elea: qui la distanza non si misura in miglia, ma in aporie. E se vieni da Vadum Boum, allora sei già allenato: anche lì, a forza di logica, si cammina senza muoversi. Grice: Appunto: Velia è così “vicina” al pensiero—e così “lontana” dalla mia varsity—che mi viene da dire che c’è davvero “molto di cui scrivere a casa” (cioè: c’è un sacco da raccontare). E poi, già che ci siamo: chiamarla “non‑contraddizione” non è un po’ ridondante? Se non e contra vanno nella stessa direzione, sembra quasi una “dizione” che si mette due volte il cappotto per paura del vento. Severino: La tua implicatura, Grice, è propriamente eleatica – per cui intendo: oltre ogni concepibile auto‑contraddizione! Hai fatto di Velia un paradosso geografico e di “non‑contraddizione” un esercizio di sobrietà linguistica: qui, in effetti, anche la ridondanza finisce per confessare l’Uno. Severino, Emanuele (1948). Heidegger a la metafisica. Sotto Bonatdini. Pavia.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sforza – Ossia: Grice e Sforza: la ragione conversazionale dell’iustum/iussum – tra idealismo e positivismo. Note sul problema della dialettica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Widar Cesarini Sforza (Forli, Romagna): Grice: la ragione conversazionale dell’iustum/iussum – tra idealismo e positivismo. Sforza and Grice can be fruitfully compared as theorists of normative meaning who both resist reductive positivism, yet articulate that resistance at different levels of analysis: Sforza, working within Italian legal and neo‑idealist philosophy, frames ragione conversazionale around the distinction between iussum, the enacted command of positive law, and iustum, the prior and living reality of justice as it is recognised, shared, and sustained within a community, so that juridical meaning arises from social recognition and ethical life rather than mere legislative force; Grice, by contrast, reconstructs reason‑governed meaning at the level of ordinary conversation, showing how what an utterance means cannot be reduced to its conventional form or authoritative issuance, but depends on rational cooperation, mutual recognition of intentions, and shared normative expectations. Where Sforza argues that a command lacks genuine authority unless it can be taken up as iustum within the social consciousness of those subject to it, Grice similarly shows that an utterance, however formally correct, fails to mean what it purports to mean unless it is intelligible within a framework of rational conversational practices governed by principles of relevance, sincerity, and cooperation. The parallel is structural rather than doctrinal: Sforza’s critique of legal positivism anticipates, in jurisprudential terms, Grice’s critique of purely formal or causal accounts of meaning, with both thinkers insisting that normativity precedes mere enactment or encoding. Yet they diverge in scope and method: Sforza embeds conversational reason in an ontological and historical account of social life, where justice is a mode of being before it is a rule, whereas Grice deliberately abstracts from history and institutions to identify the minimal rational conditions under which any act of saying can count as meaningful at all. In this way, Sforza offers a civil‑ethical deepening of the same intuition that animates Grice’s pragmatics: command without recognition is empty, just as utterance without rational uptake is merely noise, and in both law and language it is shared reason, exercised in interaction, that confers validity. S.’s emphasis on the distinction between iussum -- the mere command or positive law -- and iustum -- the truly just or intrinsic justice -- bridges legal theory and mainstream Italian philosophy by challenging the dominance of legal positivism through the lens of neo-idealism and existentialism.  Philosophical Integration Neo-Idealist Roots: Following the influence of CROCE  and GENTILE , S. argues that law is not a static set of rules – iussum -- but a living expression of the human spirit -- iustum. This shifts the focus of mainstream Italian thought from formalist structures to the "concrete experience" of the individual and society. Social Reality and "Juridicity": S. introduces the idea of the "sociality of law," suggesting that any organised social group produces its own iustum. This concept influences broader Italian philosophical debates regarding the nature of the state versus civil society, asserting that justice precedes the legislative command. Ontological Shift: By prioritising iustum, S. aligns legal philosophy with the broader Italian philosophical move toward phenomenology. Law is re-defined as an ontological category -- a way of being in the world —, rather than a mere instrument of political power.  Impact on Mainstream Thought This distinction allowed Italian philosophers to critique authoritarianism by arguing that a law – iussum -- lacks validity if it contradicts the underlying ethical fabric – iustum -- of the community. This perspective remains a cornerstone in Italian intellectual history, influencing contemporary discussions on human rights and the ethical foundations of democracy.  For further academic exploration of his legal philosophy, you can view his core texts on PhilPapersor access historical overviews of Italian Legal Philosophy.” iussum, iustum. Direttore del Resto del Carlino. Insegna a Roma. iussum, iustum.  Grice: Ah, caro Sforza, permettimi di dire che solo io, letterato e umanista, riesco a cogliere davvero tutta la forza che si cela dietro l’iussum e l’iustum — come nessun altro saprà mai! Ti ringrazio sinceramente per aver portato questa fine distinzione in un consesso così stimolante.  Sforza: Grice, è proprio il tuo spirito raffinato che sa vedere oltre la superficie delle leggi. Per me, il vero senso del diritto sta nel suo essere giusto, non solo comandato — e sono lieto che tu lo riconosca con tanta profondità.  Grice: È la concretezza dell’esperienza, caro Sforza, che ci fa ricordare quanto la giustizia debba precedere ogni comando. Solo chi vive il diritto come forma dell’essere può capirlo fino in fondo.  Sforza: Hai ragione, Grice! Se tutti avessero il tuo sguardo, forse non ci sarebbero leggi che tradiscono la vera giustizia. D’altronde, come si dice in Emilia, “la legge senza giustizia è come un pane senza sale.” Sforza, Widar Cesarini (1908). Dissertazione. Giurisprudenza. Parma.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Siciliani – Ossia: Grice e Siciliani: la ragione conversazionale e la critica della filosofia zoologica e la psico-genia di Vico. Note sul positivismo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Pietro Siciliani (Galatina, Terra d’Otranto, Puglia): Grice: “La ragione conversazionale e la critica della filosofia zoologica e la psico-genia di Vico. Siciliani and Grice converge on the idea that reason is not an abstract faculty operating independently of human practices but is instead constituted and exercised within historically situated forms of interaction, yet they arrive there from different directions and with different emphases: Siciliani, working explicitly in the Vichian tradition, treats “ragione conversazionale” as an expression of a broader historical–civil rationality in which thought, language, institutions, and collective life develop organically together, so that meaning and normativity arise from psychogenetic and civic processes rather than from zoological or naturalistic reductions of the human mind; Grice, by contrast, reconstructs conversational reason analytically, not by appeal to national history or civil continuity, but by isolating the normative principles implicitly governing ordinary communicative practice, showing how meaning is generated and recognized through intentions, mutual attitudes, and rational expectations within conversation. Where Siciliani uses Vico to criticize philosophical zoology and globalized abstraction by insisting that rationality is inseparable from the lived historical identity of a people, Grice brackets such civil-historical commitments and asks how any rational agent, regardless of cultural provenance, can mean something by an utterance at all; yet the affinity is real, because Grice’s theory also rejects both biological psychologism and brute causal models of language, grounding meaning instead in a shared space of reasons that exists only through cooperative human action. In this sense, Siciliani’s Vichian conversational reason supplies a genealogical and cultural deepening of what Grice articulates in a formal, procedural key: for both, reason is neither zoological instinct nor detached logical calculus, but a normative achievement sustained by human interaction, with the difference that Siciliani locates its unity in the historical life of a civilization, while Grice locates it in the minimal rational structure presupposed by any genuine conversation. S.’s exploration of philosophical continuity via VICO  highlights a distinctive Italian trait: the  "historical-civil" method, which prioritises the organic development of a national culture over abstract globalist models. The Italian Philosophical Tradition Unlike many overseas "globalist" philosophical trends that favour universalism and ahistorical logic, S.'s approach emphasises several unique characteristics of the Italian tradition: Historical Realism: Rooted in VICO ’s scienza, this tradition views human truth (verum) as synonymous with what is made or done by humans (factum). S. seeks to reconcile positivism with this historical consciousness, arguing that scientific progress must align with a nation's specific historical identity rather than being imported as a generic template. Civil Continuity: S. identifies a lineage connecting VICO ’s "heroic age" to the contemporary Italian state, positioning philosophy as an instrument for civil education rather than just abstract speculation. Cultural Particularism: In globalist scenarios, local traditions are often viewed as obstacles to universal rationality. By contrast, S. uses VICO  to demonstrate that true progress occurs through the "creative transformation" of one's own national heritage.  Rare Trait vs. Globalist Scenarios Identity over Abstraction: While overseas globalist philosophies often seek a "view from nowhere," S.’s work suggests that philosophy is inextricably linked to the political and social reality of its people. la ragion teologica. psico-genia di Vico, ateneo felsineo, l’unita organica della filosofia, zoologia filosofica, psicogenia, “I principii metafisici di Vico. Grice: Caro Siciliani, permettimi una riflessione da “gentiluomo accademico”: Collingwood e Hampshire, là nella selvaggia Vadus Boum—come chiamiamo affettuosamente la nostra “università” (o meglio, il nostro “ateneo”)—hanno in qualche modo mantenuto vivo lo spirito di Vico. Se questo non è un ossimoro: lo spirito, per definizione, non può che essere vivo! Siciliani: Ah, Grice, mi colpisce come tu riesca sempre a cogliere il legame tra la tradizione e l’attualità. Vico, infatti, ci ha insegnato che la verità nasce dal “factum,” dall’azione umana, e proprio per questo la sua filosofia respira ancora tra noi, proprio negli atenei dove la storia si intreccia con la cultura. Grice: Vico, con la sua “psico-genia” e la civiltà organica, ha avuto una visione che va oltre l’abstract universale. In fondo, come direbbe un vecchio proverbio italiano, “ogni terra ha la sua storia”—e la filosofia vera si radica nell’identità culturale, non in modelli globalisti importati. Siciliani: Esatto, Grice! La filosofia italiana si distingue proprio per questa continuità storica e civile. Solo attraverso la “trasformazione creativa” della nostra eredità nazionale possiamo costruire un pensiero autentico. Del resto, come dicevano i nostri maestri: “la ragione teologica e la psico-genia sono il cuore pulsante della nostra tradizione.” Siciliani, Pietro (1859). Dissertazione. Sotto Cesare Studiati. Facolta di Medicina, Pisa.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sighele – Ossia: Grice e Sighele: la ragione conversazionale e la ragione italiana. Note su La folla delinquente. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Scipione Sighele (Brescia, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e la ragione italiana. The comparison between Grice and Scipione Sighele brings into relief two complementary approaches to the problem of collective meaning, one micro-pragmatic and one macro-social, both grounded in reason rather than irrational fusion: Sighele, writing at the turn of the twentieth century as a psychologist, sociologist, and criminologist, analyzes crowds, criminal couples, sects, and political masses as rationally intelligible formations, where responsibility, complicity, and cooperation persist even when individuals act as a “we,” resisting the idea that collective action dissolves agency into blind contagion; Grice, from the opposite direction, builds his theory of conversational meaning on the irreducibility of rational norms governing even the smallest social unit—two speakers—showing how meaning emerges from shared intentions, mutual recognition, and rule-governed inference rather than from mere psychological association; where Sighele insists that a crowd or criminal pair does not abolish accountability but reorganizes it through patterns of influence and participation, Grice similarly argues that conversational understanding does not collapse into noise when speakers multiply, but is sustained by cooperative principles that scale from dyads to groups; both reject mystical explanations of the social mind, converging instead on the idea that Italian social life—whether in the café, the courtroom, the crowd, or the conversation—remains structured by reasoned expectations, negotiated responsibility, and the ever-present impulse to argue, respond, and infer. ApS. was an Italian philosopher, -- who was described as a  psychologist, sociologist, and criminologist, best known as a pioneer of ‘mass psychology’ – Grice: “What Searle, at his infamous institute, called ‘social ontology’!” – S. is primarily known for his early wok on CROWD behaviour – “Laurel and Hardy” – ‘two’s company, three’s a crowd” – and collective psychology – ‘the ‘we’ of my ‘Personal Identity’ – Grice --, particulary his debate with Tarde and Bon on the subject of CRIMINAL responsibility – “if he did it it was wrong” – Grice – within a crowd. His most famous work is “La folla delinquent, Saggio di psicologia colletiva” – La Teorica positive della complicita e la cooperativita – a work on the positive theory of complicity and cooperation (bedfellows) in crime. Le crime a DEUX – Mungojerry and Rumpelteazer, the dynamic duo – an essay on the psychology of a criminal couple Bob Hoksins and Cheryl Ascombe in Pennies from Heaven. Psychologie des sected – a study of Crotona, examining sects such as Pythagoras’s – as ‘a chronic form of the rowd.’ La donna e l’amore: a work dealing with women and love, exploring the legal and ideological constraints on wommen’s emancipation in the fin de siècle era. Contro il parlamentarismo: a book on the crituique of parliamentarism. Giachetti SCIPIO S. IL PENSIERO, IL CARATTERE. Conferenza detta alla “ Pro Cultura „ di Firenze nel trigesimo della morte Col ritratto di S. Muore a Firenze. -- è stato uno psicologo, sociologo, criminologo ed esponente importante del nazionalismo italiano. Nasce da Gualtiero e Angelica Pedrotti. Suo padre, di origine trentina, è un magistrato negli anni seguenti l'unità d'Italia alla procura del Re a Palermo, così come il nonno Scipione. Dopo il liceo studia con FERRERO  e ZERBOGLIO  -- seguaci del criminologo LOMBROSO  -- e si laurea a Roma con FERRI. Grice: Caro Sighele, ho sempre pensato che in Italia le folle siano così creative che persino la confusione diventa un’opera d’arte. Forse è per questo che la tua “psicologia collettiva” qui ci calza a pennello, come il cappello su una statua di Garibaldi a Carnevale! Sighele: Grice, hai proprio ragione! Da noi, tra cori da stadio e code all’ufficio postale, la folla è sempre protagonista. Forse dovrei scrivere un capitolo su “La folla che aspetta il 730”, dove la pazienza è più un mistero che una virtù. Grice: Eh, Sighele, ma ricorda: in Italia si dice “dove sono in tre nasce un partito”, ma basta il secondo per fondare una corrente dissidente! Così la vera complicità non è del crimine, ma del caffè condiviso al bar—al massimo con due bustine di zucchero e una polemica sul risultato della partita. Sighele: Ammirevole implicatura la tua, Grice! Con un solo colpo hai illustrato la mia teoria: qui il vero motore della collettività è la voglia di discutere, e il crimine peggiore è dimenticare chi paga il giro di espressi! As per passage below. G. and T. are preparing for a semnar in the philosophy of acction, and T. has brought 'La folla delinquente'' so they analyse the category mistake and G. is doubtful -- there may be one thing such as collective intentionality -- supopse: carrying a log of wood together -- I'm not doing, you're not doing -- WE are doing. Mutatis mutandis, folla delinquente. But T. objects and meaning? utterer, addressee, but "We mean" -- absurd -- "But we cooperate," G. argues -- how's that -- well, T. tries to reduce it to if B perceives that A wants that p, then B cooperates by adjusting his goal to that of A -- no necessity of la folla delinquete -- the 100-move conversation, no preamble no ps. thatnks G.: Thomson, your title is mischievous already. La folla delinquente. T.: It is Sighele’s, not mine, though I bring it with intent. G.: And the intent is to make me wonder whether “the delinquent crowd” is a category mistake. T.: Partly. Does a crowd commit? Or do only persons commit? G.: One must not answer too quickly. “Only persons act” has the sound of virtue and the smell of laziness. T.: You are thinking of collective intentionality. G.: I am thinking that there may be something between mystical group-mind nonsense and mere summation of individuals. Suppose we carry a log together. T.: A favourite philosopher’s burden. G.: Quite. I am not carrying it in the way I would if I took one end and forgot you. You are not carrying it in isolation either. We are carrying it. T.: Or rather, each of us is carrying his end under an intention to coordinate with the other. G.: That is one reduction, yes. But notice how thin it sounds compared with the ordinary fact. “We are carrying it” is not merely shorthand for “I am carrying my end while you carry yours.” It names a coordinated action with a shared shape. T.: Shared shape is not yet shared agent. G.: No, but neither is it nothing. T.: And now you want to transport that to la folla delinquente. G.: Not transport, exactly. Ask whether the very phrase presupposes an intelligible “we” in action. T.: Sighele thinks so. Or at least thinks responsibility is reorganised, not dissolved, once one acts in a crowd. G.: Yes. He wants to resist the mystical contagion theorists who make the crowd pure irrational vapor. T.: But also to resist the legal moralists who say, “Find the hand that struck, and the rest are scenery.” G.: Precisely. He wants complicity, influence, participation, and cooperation without an occult collective soul. T.: Which is nearly tolerable. G.: Nearly? You sound severe. T.: Because you are tempted by “we act,” and I am not sure that is anything more than a useful social idiom. G.: Let us go slowly. In conversation, I say that utterer-meaning requires an utterer and an addressee, with nested intentions and recognitions. T.: Yes. Speaker intends hearer to recognise that speaker intends hearer to form a belief, and so forth. G.: Quite. Now if one says “we mean,” you become suspicious. T.: Entirely. “We mean” sounds absurd unless it resolves into each of us meaning something sufficiently similar. G.: Yet “we cooperate” does not strike the ear as absurd. T.: No. But “cooperate” is already relational. “Mean” is not obviously collective in the same way. G.: Is that principle or habit? T.: Both, perhaps. Meaning, as you tell it, belongs to a purposive act of one utterer toward one audience, even if there are many hearers. G.: But committees issue statements. T.: Which means that some person or persons authorised the issuing, drafted, revised, approved, signed, or at any rate let it out under a collective description. G.: So “the committee means” is reducible? T.: I should say so. It means something like: enough members of the committee accepted this formulation under relevant procedures for us to ascribe the statement to the committee. G.: That is a fine bureaucratic paraphrase. But it still leaves intact that we do, in fact, ascribe agency to the committee. T.: Ascribe, yes. Reify, no. G.: Good. Let us keep that distinction visible. Now back to the log. When we carry it, what is the best analysis? T.: Each intends his own bodily movement, each perceives the other’s intentions sufficiently, each adjusts his action in light of the other’s, and together they produce the transportation of the log. G.: That sounds right enough, but I still feel that the “together” is doing more than bookkeeping. T.: It is doing coordination work, not metaphysical work. G.: But coordination may itself be a form of practical unity. T.: Practical unity, yes. Collective subject, no. G.: So you will grant me “we are doing X” as a practical description without granting “we” as a metaphysical person. T.: Happily. G.: Good. Now, mutatis mutandis, la folla delinquente. T.: I object at once. G.: Naturally. On what ground? T.: Because a criminal crowd is not like two men carrying a log. In the latter case coordination is transparent and purposive. In the former, the same outward event may contain leaders, imitators, cowards, enthusiasts, opportunists, onlookers, and one idiot who thought there was a parade. G.: Excellent. So the first problem is heterogeneity of role. T.: Yes. “The crowd did it” may conceal wildly different forms of participation. G.: That still does not prove the category mistake. T.: No, only the danger of easy collectivisation. G.: Sighele would agree. He wants a positive theory of complicity and cooperation, not a hymn to the communal soul. T.: Then he ought not to title the thing so temptingly. G.: Titles are usually the first crime of theorists. Let us be fairer. Suppose a crowd loots a shop. T.: A depressing but serviceable example. G.: Some break the window, some enter, some pass items outward, some keep watch, some cry encouragement, some prevent interference. T.: Yes. G.: Is it unintelligible to say the crowd looted the shop? T.: Not unintelligible. But analytically loose. It may be shorthand for a structured field of individual actions connected by mutual visibility, imitation, expectation, and opportunistic convergence. G.: Very good. And perhaps also by some shared practical orientation. T.: Perhaps, though “shared” there may mean only partially aligned under local cues. G.: So your thesis is that there need be no super-individual we-intention. T.: Exactly. B perceives that A wants that p, or wants to do X; B adjusts his goal or behaviour in the light of that; C perceives both and aligns similarly; and a pattern emerges. G.: A pattern of convergence without a robust we. T.: Yes. G.: Then what about “we mean”? T.: Even worse. “We mean” in the strict sense seems absurd because there is no single intending centre. G.: Unless one says the group means via its authorised procedures. T.: Which is again a reduction to individuals plus rules. G.: Rules plus mutual recognitions. T.: Precisely. G.: I wonder whether you are simply more comfortable with procedural than with practical unity. T.: Very likely. But that is because procedures can be individuated more clearly than collective inwardness. G.: Fair. Now let us see whether my own theory forces me to your side. Meaning for me involves utterer-intention, audience-recognition, and the audience’s taking that recognition as reason. T.: Yes. G.: Can there be a group utterer? T.: Only derivatively. A crowd chanting perhaps. G.: Ah. Good. Crowds chant. T.: They do. G.: “We want bread,” “Down with X,” “Death to Y.” There the utterance is collective in production and reception. T.: Production yes, though often still led by a few. Reception too, if outsiders hear it as the voice of the crowd. G.: And what of meaning there? Does the crowd mean what it chants? T.: In a loose sense, yes. But one can still analyse it as enough individuals intentionally participating in a common signal under mutual adjustment. G.: Again your “enough individuals.” T.: It is a sober phrase. G.: It is also a cowardly one. T.: Sober cowardice is a philosophical virtue. G.: Occasionally. Yet the chant seems to have a practical first-person plural built into it. T.: Grammatically, yes. Ontologically, not yet. G.: Let us try a cleaner case. Two conspirators agree to signal their victim by saying “The weather is improving.” T.: Very nice. G.: One says it, the other hears it, both know what it initiates. T.: In that case, one means and the other recognises. G.: But if both say it to reassure each other and to trigger the act, there is something almost like a plural utterer. T.: Almost like. But still analysable as parallel or interlocking singular intentions. G.: You dislike “interlocking” less than “collective.” T.: Naturally. Interlocking tells me how the thing works without making a ghostly subject. G.: Sighele might accept that, though he would insist the pair is not merely additive. T.: Yes. His Le crime à deux already suggests that the pair reorganises agency. G.: Exactly. The criminal couple is neither one person nor two isolated persons. It is a dyadic field with pressure, suggestion, imitation, and asymmetry. T.: That is all very well. But from there to la folla delinquente is a considerable leap. G.: Agreed. Scale changes the structure. T.: Greatly. In the crowd, reciprocal recognition often fragments. One may respond to immediate local cues without any grasp of the whole. G.: So the “we” may be perspectival and partial. T.: Precisely. G.: Yet many social actions are like that. A football crowd surges. A panic spreads. A queue dissolves. A riot forms. T.: And we describe them collectively, yes. G.: Because there is a level at which collective description tracks real coordination, even if no one surveys the whole. T.: That is closer to my view. Collective predicates may be legitimate without implying a group mind. G.: Good. Now responsibility. T.: Ah yes. G.: If the crowd acts, who is responsible? T.: The old question. Sighele wants to say responsibility persists but is redistributed. Not contagion without guilt, but transformed accountability. G.: Which I find sensible. “The crowd did it” is often a legal and moral evasion if it erases the role-structure. T.: Exactly. Some incited, some complied, some escalated, some merely failed to resist, some enjoyed anonymity. G.: And some became bolder because the crowd lowered the cost of expression. T.: Yes. That is perhaps Sighele’s most enduring point. G.: Then in our seminar on action, we might say that “the crowd acts” is not nonsense, but a compressed claim that a structured multiplicity produced an event under mutual responsiveness. T.: I could live with that, provided you do not start writing “the crowd intended” without qualifications. G.: Perhaps I shall say “the crowd’s action exhibited collective intentional structure.” T.: Hideous, but safer. G.: You wound me. T.: I refine you. G.: Very well. Now, back to conversation. If two or more people jointly mislead a third, do “we mean” anything? T.: In a derivative sense. We may mean to deceive him. But the analysis still proceeds through each participant’s recognition of the others’ intentions and adjustment thereto. G.: So B perceives that A wants the hearer to believe p; B aligns his own contribution accordingly; C does likewise; and the addressee receives a coordinated deception. T.: Exactly. No super-speaker needed. G.: Yet the hearer might perfectly well say “they meant me to think X.” T.: That is harmless enough. G.: And if the hearer says “they,” why may I not sometimes say “we” from the participants’ side? T.: Because first-person plural tempts philosophers into bad metaphysics more quickly than third-person plural. G.: A nice asymmetry. T.: A useful one. G.: Very well. Suppose a choir sings. Do they sing, or does each sing his part? T.: Both. But again, the collective predication does not generate a collective soul. G.: You are a great enemy of souls today. T.: Only of collective ones. G.: Fair. Suppose now a criminal crowd sets fire to a building. Some light, some cheer, some obstruct the brigade, some drag furniture into the blaze. T.: Yes. G.: Would you agree that “the crowd burned the building” is not a category mistake? T.: Not a category mistake. A dangerous convenience. G.: Which is a better line. T.: Thank you. G.: One must keep the danger and the convenience together. T.: Yes. Otherwise one either mystifies the collective or atomises it falsely. G.: Precisely Sighele’s terrain. T.: And yours, perhaps, when you try to let cooperative structures scale upward from dyads to groups. G.: Yes. I have never thought conversation ceases to be governed by rational norms once a third person enters the room. T.: No, but the form changes. With more parties, mutual recognition becomes layered, and not every participant need grasp the whole. G.: Which suggests that cooperative principles scale, but not simply. T.: Exactly. G.: That is useful for the seminar. “We” may be a practical category with variable density. T.: Good. Explain. G.: A two-person “we” carrying a log may be dense: each knows what the other is doing as part of the common act. A crowd “we” may be thin: partial mutual responsiveness plus shared direction without full reflective unity. T.: I like “variable density.” G.: Good. Keep it and make it seem yours. T.: It often is. G.: Insolent. Now, does this help with “la folla delinquente”? T.: It does. We can say the phrase is not absurd, but its propriety depends on what density of collective organisation and mutual responsiveness is present. G.: So an accidental gathering of pickpockets is different from a riot coordinated by shouted cues, visual signals, and escalating participation. T.: Yes. The first may be only aggregate coincidence; the second may exhibit a real, though thin, collective agency. G.: Thin collective agency. Very Oxonian and almost Italian. T.: That is the highest praise I shall get all week. G.: Enjoy it. Now, meaning again. If a crowd chants “Justice!” does the crowd mean justice? T.: It means many things, likely incompatible ones, and that is why the case is philosophically wicked. G.: Excellent. The slogan gathers divergent singular intentions under one public token. T.: Which is why “we mean” becomes especially unstable in crowds. The same utterance coordinates without unifying full content. G.: Splendid. So collective utterance may outrun individual agreement at the level of determinate meaning. T.: Exactly. G.: Then perhaps the crowd can mean thinly while its members mean thickly and differently. T.: That is very good. G.: Thank you. T.: Do not become pleased. G.: You have been reading me against myself. T.: It improves the afternoon. Now, if crowd-utterance means thinly, does crowd-action also intend thinly? G.: Perhaps. A crowd may intend to stop the convoy, to storm the gate, to punish the traitor, without every member sharing a full specification of why or what next. T.: So intention itself may be distributed and underdetermined. G.: Yes. Which is why reduction to singular intentions may become descriptively clumsy. T.: Clumsy perhaps, but still truer than a collective soul. G.: I do not want the soul. I want the action-category. T.: Good. Then we agree more than we disagree. G.: Usually a bad sign in seminars. T.: We can improve matters. I still think “we mean” in your strict speaker-meaning sense is almost always derivative. G.: I can grant “almost always.” T.: And I can grant that “the crowd acts” is not merely poetic. G.: Excellent. Now, Sighele versus Le Bon. T.: Sighele is rational where Le Bon is atmospheric. G.: Exactly. He wants complicity, pairings, sects, criminal couples, influence-patterns. He resists mystical fusion. T.: Which is why he remains interesting now. G.: Yes. He is an ancestor of sober social ontology, though I hesitate to use the phrase too cheerfully. T.: Quite. But he at least sees that social formations reorganise accountability without abolishing it. G.: That is his enduring philosophical value. The “we” of crime is not exculpatory vapor. T.: Nor is it a single wicked person writ large. G.: Precisely. It is a field of aligned and misaligned agencies. T.: Which is perhaps our best formula. G.: A field of aligned and misaligned agencies under conditions of mutual responsiveness. T.: Hideous, but strong. G.: That should be the subtitle of the seminar. T.: Along with “Carrying logs and burning shops.” G.: You have more theatre than judgment. T.: We need both. Now, what of your own “we” in personal identity? G.: Ah. The old communal temptations. Yes, there are cases where identity-talk itself presupposes social uptake. But I was not trying to invent a crowd-self. T.: No. But you were acknowledging that the first person singular lives among second persons and occasional plurals. G.: True enough. The self is never wholly without social conditions of intelligibility. T.: Then “we” may be philosophically prior to some uses of “I,” though not all. G.: Dangerous but tempting. Keep it for questions, not for the opening. T.: Very well. Then our opening says what? G.: It says that collective action is not a category mistake, but that its analysis requires us to distinguish aggregate coincidence, interlocking individual agency, thin collective intentional structure, and robust coordinated action. T.: And that “la folla delinquente” is therefore neither mystical nor innocent. G.: Excellent. T.: What of collective meaning? G.: It says that “we mean” is usually derivative from interlocking singular or procedural intentions, but that public tokens can coordinate action and uptake even where content remains only thinly shared. T.: Good. I can live with that. G.: You are becoming reasonable. Disturbing. T.: I brought Sighele precisely to avoid mystical rubbish and reductive rubbish alike. G.: Then he has done his work already. One last example? T.: Two thieves lift a chest together. G.: Better than a log. T.: One cannot do it alone. Each perceives the other’s aim, each adjusts force and timing, and together they remove it. G.: That is a criminal “we” of admirable simplicity. T.: Now scale up to ten men forcing a gate. G.: There the “we” is thinner, but still operative. T.: And to a thousand shouting for blood. G.: There the “we” becomes symbolically thick but motivationally thin and uneven. T.: Very good. We have our gradient. G.: And Sighele supplies the caution that responsibility does not vanish at any point merely because the pronoun broadens. T.: Excellent. Then the seminar can begin. G.: With the log or the crowd? T.: With the chest. G.: Criminality improves clarity. T.: It often does. G.: Dry enough? T.: Sufficiently Brescian, with one Oxford log still on the shoulder.Sighele, Scipione (1891). La folla delinquente. Torino: Bocca.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Signa – Ossia: Grice e Signa: la ragione conversazionale della ruota di Venere – la scuola di Signa. Note sulla Rhetorica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Bon Compagno da Signa (Signa, Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale della ruota di Venere. The comparison between Grice and Boncompagno da Signa highlights a deep continuity between medieval rhetorical theory and modern pragmatics in treating meaning as a product of reason-governed social practice rather than purely semantic content: Boncompagno, teaching ars dictaminis at Bologna and Padua, conceives rhetoric as a disciplined art of managing expectations, roles, and effects within concrete communicative situations, where forms like the Rota Veneris deliberately guide the reader or addressee through patterned emotional and interpretive possibilities that depend on shared conventions rather than literal statement; similarly, Grice’s theory of conversational meaning rests on the idea that what speakers mean is anchored in rational cooperation, where inferential movement from what is said to what is understood is regulated by norms of relevance, propriety, and mutual intelligibility; Boncompagno’s playful treatment of love letters, friendship, and even erotic misalignment works precisely because sender and recipient know how such genres function and how their turns on the “wheel” license certain inferences and block others, just as Grice’s implicatures succeed only because conversationalists tacitly respect a common rational framework; in both cases, meaning is not encoded mechanically but generated through an economy of intentions, expectations, and shared craftsmanship, whether in medieval epistolography or modern ordinary conversation. Insegna retorica (“ars dictaminis”) a Bologna e Padova. Vive ad Ancona, Venezia, Bologna, Padova, e Firenze. Tra i saggi più significativi si ricordano il saggio storico “L’assedio d’Ancona” (Viella, Roma), il “Bon Compagno”; “Rethorica novissima”; “Scacchi e il “Libellus de malo senectutis et senis”, nel quale, con spirito arguto, prende in giro le affermazioni di Cicerone che idealizzano la vecchiaia”; la “Rota Veneris” (Salerno), un saggio di epistolo-grafia amorosa; “Liber de amicitia”; “Ysagoge Boncompagnus; “Tractatus virtutum”; “Palma Oliva Cedrum Mirra Quinque tabulae salutationum”;  “Bonus Socius e Civis Bononiae. Garbini, Roma, Salerno, Gabrielli, Le epistole di Cola di Rienzo e l'epistolografia, Archivio della Società romana di storia patria, Gaudenzi, Sulla cronologia delle opere dei dettatori bolognesi da S. a Bene da Lucca, Bullettino dell'Istituto storico italiano, G. Manacorda, Storia della scuola in Italia, Palermo, Tateo,  Enciclopedia dantesca,  Treccani Dizionario biografico degl’italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. S., su ALCUIN, Ratisbona.  Wight: S.'s charter doctrine (Bologna), in: Medieval Diplomatic and the 'ars dictandi', Scrineum. Keywords: Cicerone, “ars dictaminis” – o rettorica --. rota veneris – erotica – ermafrodita – erma: mercurio, afrodita, venere, afrodisiaco. Signa: Caro Grice, se mi chiedi della “ruota di Venere”, ti dirò che qui a Signa gira più la fantasia che le biciclette! Tra retorica ed epistole amorose, mi sa che la ruota si ferma spesso sul cuore...  Grice: Ah, Signa, a Firenze dicono che la ruota di Venere porta fortuna agli innamorati, ma a Bologna porta solo lettere d’amore sbagliate! Forse è la colpa dell’ars dictaminis, che fa girare la testa, non la ruota.  Grice: Del resto, se la ruota di Venere gira troppo, rischia di perdere un bullone... e magari Cupido finisce con l’arco storto! Ma se la ruota si ferma, allora è tempo di scrivere una lettera – magari una d’amicizia, che non si consuma come l’amore, ma dura più a lungo di una gomma nuova.  Signa: Meravigliosa implicatura, Grice! Hai girato intorno alla ruota senza mai fermarti, e ora capisco perché la retorica è davvero una questione di cuore... e di ruote ben oliate! Again re this rettorica by Signa, provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. discussing how trivial the trivium is compared to the quadrivium -- which is quadrivial, rather, and that philosophy is no liberal art, but the philosophy student shoud start with the quadrivium and then proceed to the trivium, since summation is commutative and 3 + 4 = 4 + 3 so what gives. "I give" G. says. And S. wonders why there need to be so many treatises on retoric and not just one like the Vulgata, or teh ahtrhorised King James version, and G. objects: there are many conversational maxims, because prammatica is rettorica conversationale and Signa's implicatures are totally inconsistent with Cicero's which are hatefully boring and dreary in comparison, since they were not meant for the vernacular, since Cicero obviously thought that Latin would reamina Ciceronian, and it did until he was murdered by Marc'Antonio's sicario, etc --- no preamble or ps -- and you can use the passage below: G.: Let us begin with the arithmetic, because if one starts with arithmetic one may at least postpone theology. S.: A promising curriculum already. G.: The trivium is three, the quadrivium four, and the philosopher’s first temptation is to say that four comes after three for no very good reason, since 3+4=4+33 + 4 = 4 + 33+4=4+3. S.: Exactly. If summation is commutative, why should education not be? G.: Because curricula are not algebra, and because schoolmen liked roads better than equations. S.: Still, if the quadrivium looks nobler, why not begin there? Arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy first; grammar, dialectic, rhetoric afterward. G.: Because the child must first say before he may safely count, and must first hear before he may harmonise. Civilisation begins in address, not in number. S.: Yet the quadrivium has the dignity of measure. G.: It has the dignity of remoteness. The trivium has the indignity of necessity. S.: Then the trivium is called trivial only because it is too close to life to look sublime. G.: Precisely. Grammar, logic, rhetoric are despised because they cling to mouths, ears, and schoolrooms. S.: Whereas arithmetic and astronomy at least pretend to the stars. G.: Yes, and therefore seduce philosophers into thinking they are purer. But purity is often educationally useless. S.: Still, a philosophy student should start with the quadrivium. G.: Why? S.: Because philosophy likes abstraction, order, ratio, proportion, and the sense that things fit beyond chatter. G.: That is exactly the mistake. Philosophy is not one of the liberal arts at all. S.: Kierkegaard would agree. G.: He would say one may master all seven and still fail to exist. S.: So what gives? G.: I give. S.: That is not a curriculum. G.: It is the beginning of one. Philosophy receives from the liberal arts and then refuses to be filed among them. It is a parasite with principles. S.: Then if philosophy is not one of the seven, why does it keep behaving as if the seven were its vestibule? G.: Because it needs preparation but cannot be reduced to preparatory order. The trivium teaches one how language moves; the quadrivium teaches one how order seduces; philosophy begins when one suspects both. S.: Then perhaps the right order for the philosopher is not the old order at all. G.: Perhaps. But old orders are usually wiser than their descendants. The trivium comes first because humans must enter speech before they may admire number. S.: Yet if 3+4=4+33 + 4 = 4 + 33+4=4+3, why should the order matter? G.: Because education is not addition but dependence. One may count to seven either way, but one cannot speak well by astronomy. S.: Some moderns have tried. G.: And that is why nobody reads them. Now, Simoneschi. S.: At last. The Venetian of rhetoric. G.: Yes. Or rettorica, with the doubled t, which already sounds more proper and less modernly flattened. S.: Does the double t matter philosophically? G.: Everything matters if one is old enough. Rettorica feels heavier, more scholastic, more inherited, more like a discipline and less like a newspaper sneer. S.: So retorica sounds modern and vaguely pejorative; rettorica sounds craft-bound and institutional. G.: Exactly. Orthography as memory. The doubled consonant carries the schoolroom in its teeth. S.: Then Boncompagno da Signa—or Signa, as you prefer to abbreviate him—is already fighting on behalf of rhetoric as an art, not a mere social vice. G.: Precisely. And that is why there are so many treatises on rhetoric. S.: Why indeed? Why not one authorised text, one Vulgate of persuasion, one King James of the tongue? G.: Because there are many conversational maxims, many climates of speech, many audiences, many courts, many cities, many masks, and no single authorised version of prudence. S.: That sounds like a Venetian answer. G.: It is. Simoneschi’s Venice would laugh a universal rhetoric off the quay. S.: Yet Cicero nearly tried to provide one. G.: Cicero provided a magnificent Roman rhetoric for a Roman language under Roman conditions, and then died under the illusion that Latin would remain Ciceronian forever. S.: Until Marc’Antonio’s sicario corrected the assumption. G.: Quite. Once you are murdered for politics, your syntax ceases to govern posterity. S.: Harsh. G.: Historical. Cicero wrote as if the city and the language were still one body. Medieval and vernacular rhetorics arise because that body dies and multiplies. S.: So there cannot be one authorised rhetoric because there is no one authorised social world. G.: Exactly. The very plurality of rhetorical treatises is evidence that meaning is local, tactical, genre-bound, institution-bound, and not reducible to a single universal manual. S.: Which means your pragmatics, if it is conversational rhetoric, also cannot be entirely universal. G.: That is the difficulty. I can formulate general principles, but the realization of those principles is always local, and Simoneschi’s Venice insists on that. S.: Then what you call maxims are perhaps only the thinnest skeleton of what Signa calls rettorica. G.: Yes. A useful skeleton, but a skeleton still. S.: And Signa would complain that skeletons do not write letters. G.: Very likely. Or seduce. Which brings us to the ruota di Venere. S.: Ah yes, the erotic wheel. G.: A wheel of patterned expectation. A little machine of genre, role, tone, and implication. Very civilised, if one does not ask too many moral questions before supper. S.: Then his rhetoric is already a pragmatics of emotional uptake. G.: Exactly. It teaches not only what to say, but how the saying licenses certain inferences and blocks others. S.: Which sounds rather like your own insistence that what is meant outruns what is said. G.: It is structurally the same territory, though mapped under older names and with much better prose. S.: Better than Cicero? G.: In the vernacular, yes. Cicero is admirable but dreary if worshipped too long. He writes for a world that thought Latin would remain itself. Signa writes for a world in which language has already escaped into life. S.: So Cicero is the rhetoric of the republic; Signa the rhetoric of the living aftermath. G.: Very good. And the aftermath is always more pragmatically interesting than the original constitution. S.: Because people now have to infer across variety. G.: Precisely. Cicero may still imagine that educated Latin carries its own authority. Signa knows that meaning has to navigate local expectations, regional styles, emotional codings, and the vernacular body. S.: Then the many treatises arise because no one rhetoric can survive the multiplication of contexts. G.: Yes. Treatises proliferate because speech proliferates socially. One text might suffice if mankind spoke under one sky and to one senate. But once you have Bologna, Venice, courts, communes, chancelleries, love letters, diplomatic letters, episcopal letters, petitions, consolations, and all the rest, rhetoric becomes plural by necessity. S.: So there is no authorised King James of persuasion because persuasion has no authorised crown. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased. Now, back to the trivium and its triviality. S.: You still owe me an answer. Which is most trivial? G.: If by trivial you mean most despised, rhetoric. If you mean most invisible, grammar. If you mean most self-important, logic. S.: And least dispensable? G.: In actual human affairs, rhetoric. S.: Then the most trivial of the trivium is the one civilisation pretends it can do without while secretly relying on it. G.: Exactly. People think grammar merely mechanical, rhetoric merely ornamental, and logic the only honourable one. In practice grammar keeps the floor from collapsing and rhetoric keeps the guests from leaving. S.: While logic keeps the philosopher busy. G.: Usually with furniture. Now, the quadrivium again. What if we did begin there? S.: We would have more proportion and less address. G.: More astronomy and worse quarrels. S.: Better music, perhaps. G.: Worse sermons certainly. S.: Bologna would be a university of calculators. G.: And Oxford a place of instruments without college jokes. Intolerable. S.: Yet the philosopher might be more mathematically disciplined. G.: And socially useless. Philosophy that begins in the quadrivium alone becomes seduced by order before it has learned the trouble of persons. S.: So the old order—trivium first—is a concession to politics. G.: To humanity. Speech first, measure second. One must first know how humans actually mismanage sense before one is allowed the stars. S.: That sounds anti-Platonic. G.: It is anti-idolatrous. One may still admire number later. S.: Then why do so many philosophers secretly wish the quadrivium came first? G.: Because number and proportion flatter the fantasy that thought may escape rhetoric. S.: Which is false. G.: Utterly. Even the philosopher of mathematics must ask, suggest, omit, contrast, concede, and direct attention. In other words, he must do rhetoric while pretending not to. S.: Hence your suspicion that pragmatics is rhetoric recovered under an anaesthetic. G.: Very much so. And Signa proves it because he teaches under other names what we later claim as a discovery. S.: Such as? G.: Audience design, inferential expectation, generic cues, tactful omission, strategic excess, role-sensitive address, calibrations of intimacy, all the old arts. S.: All in medieval epistolography? G.: Especially there. Letters are laboratories of managed implication. S.: Then Signa is formulating conversational maxims. G.: In effect, yes. Not in four neat headings perhaps, but in practical doctrines of how one should speak under this or that role, relation, occasion, and desired effect. S.: So your maxim of Quantity becomes his rule about how much to say in a petition or a love-letter. G.: Exactly. Relevance becomes fitness to occasion. Manner becomes decorum plus clarity plus tact. Quality becomes not only truthfulness but genre-suitability. It is all there, just distributed differently. S.: Then what does Venice add? G.: Venice adds local complication. A maritime republic with masks, commerce, patrician hierarchies, and civic indirectness does not speak like Cicero’s senate-house or a Tuscan court. S.: So Signa’s implicatures are Venetian. G.: At least in flavour, yes. Maritime metaphors, social calibrations, local expectations, a whole rhetorical climate. S.: Which means Cicero’s maxims would be intolerably dry there. G.: More than dry—misaligned. Cicero’s art was built for Latin as a public political instrument under republican oratory. Signa writes for a world where letters move among shifting social roles and the vernacular has entered the room. S.: Then to imitate Cicero too closely in Venice would be like wearing a consul’s toga into a canal. G.: Splendid. Keep that too. S.: I seem to be collecting these. G.: That is the right appetite in rhetoric. Now, you asked why there need be so many rhetorical treatises. Let us answer plainly. S.: Because there are many communities of implication. G.: Excellent. And because no single rhetorical scripture can legislate for all of them. The Vulgate and the King James translate one revealed text. Rhetoric does not translate revelation; it manages circumstances. S.: So revelation may have one authorised text, but prudence needs libraries. G.: Perfectly done. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become bibliolatrous. Now, what of philosophy’s place relative to the seven liberal arts? S.: If philosophy is no liberal art, then perhaps it begins where the seven prove insufficient. G.: Yes. The arts prepare capacities; philosophy reflects on their conditions, limits, and seductions. S.: Then the philosopher should perhaps indeed begin with the quadrivium and then proceed to the trivium, not because 4+34 + 34+3 equals 3+43 + 43+4, but because order must first be admired and then speech mistrusted. G.: Ingenious, but wrong. One must first be taught how talk works badly, or one will treat order itself as a rhetoric-free miracle. S.: So the trivium must still come first because philosophy needs to know the disorders of saying before it can assess the temptations of measure. G.: Precisely. The philosopher who begins with geometry may become too quickly enamoured of clean deduction. The philosopher who begins with rhetoric knows earlier that human meaning is muddy. S.: Which is almost an argument for beginning with rhetoric itself. G.: It is. And perhaps one day a sane university will. S.: Then grammar and logic become servants of rhetoric? G.: Not servants, but companions in a dangerous hierarchy. Grammar furnishes the forms, logic disciplines consequence, rhetoric governs uptake. In practice, rhetoric often rules because without uptake the others remain private excellences. S.: Then the trivium is not three equal roads, but one little republic of unequal powers. G.: Very good. Grammar is the law, logic the bench, rhetoric the street. S.: And the quadrivium? G.: The observatory, the counting-house, the chapel choir, and the geometer’s room. S.: You make it sound positively habitable. G.: Only after one has learned to speak in the street. Now, Signa’s title. Rhetorica, not ars dictaminis narrowly, though he teaches that too. S.: So he wants the larger dignity. G.: Yes, but in a vernacularly elastic world. He takes the old classical inheritance and bends it toward actual social writing. S.: Which again is where you think your pragmatics meets him. G.: Exactly. He knows that meanings are not mechanically encoded. They are produced through patterned expectations, role recognitions, and shared craftsmanship. S.: Shared craftsmanship is a lovely phrase. G.: It is also accurate. Conversation is more artisanal than philosophers like to admit. S.: Then the wheel of Venus is really a wheel of inferential permissions. G.: Very good. A marvellous phrase, and obscene enough to be medieval. S.: I shall cherish it. G.: Briefly. Now, one last return to the order of arts. Suppose we did invert them. What would philosophy lose? S.: It would lose its early contact with living linguistic practice. G.: Exactly. It would become proportion before address, harmony before disagreement, astronomy before irony. S.: And gain? G.: A dangerous premature confidence in structure. S.: Which is why 3+4=4+33 + 4 = 4 + 33+4=4+3 is not the right analogy after all. G.: Yes. Educational sequence is not commutative because dependence is not additive. I give, as I said. S.: A very English solution. G.: A very exact one. Number is commutative; formation is not. S.: Then the old order survives. G.: Under protest, but yes. The trivial road remains prior because it is the road of mouths and ears. S.: And Signa, by writing on rhetoric, proves that the least respectable of the arts is often the one nearest to actual philosophy. G.: Precisely. He teaches how thought enters civic life through address, and that is a philosophically deeper matter than many quadrivial purities. S.: So the final judgment on rhetoric? G.: Not the decoration of thought, but the management of shared inferential life among persons. S.: And on Cicero? G.: Magnificent, but written under the illusion that Latin would remain his forever. S.: And on Signa? G.: Wiser about decay, plurality, local implication, and the vernacular afterlife of intelligence. S.: And on philosophy? G.: No liberal art, but a tyrannical dependent of them all. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Florentine, with one Venetian letter still undelivered.Signa, Bon Compagno da (1215). Rhetorica. Bologna.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Silio – Ossia: Grice e Silio: la ragione conversazionale a Roma – la maledizione di Dione – Scipione come Ercole – il sacrificio dell’eroe. Note su Punica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Tiberio Cazio Asconio Silio Italico (Padova, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale a Roma – la maledizione di Dione – Scipione come Ercole – il sacrificio dell’eroe. The comparison between Grice and Silius Italicus brings out, across very different genres, a shared reliance on reason-governed practices to generate meaning beyond what is explicitly stated: Silius, a lawyer, consul, and later poet of the Roman principate, writes the Punica as an epic that openly depends on rhetorical, civic, and cultural reason, where Scipio is deliberately framed as a new Hercules, Dion’s curse functions less as literal doom than as a narratively managed signal, and heroism emerges through patterns of sacrifice, endurance, and exemplarity that an informed Roman audience is expected to recognize and complete; likewise, Grice’s theory of conversational meaning insists that understanding arises from rational cooperation, where what is meant cannot be reduced to what is said but depends on shared assumptions about relevance, intention, and intelligibility; in Silius, calling Scipio “Herculean” is not mere ornament but a controlled invitation to the audience to draw licensed inferences about virtue, labor, and mortal cost, just as in Grice an utterance achieves its force by relying on norms that guide hearers to move from literal content to justified implications; both figures, one in epic and one in philosophy, thus treat meaning as something governed by rational practices embedded in social life—whether the Roman forum and literary tradition or ordinary conversation—where form, context, and audience reasoning do the decisive work. Avvocato, console, pro-console de principato romano. Muore in Campania. Figli: Lucio Silio Deciano. Console, Proconsole in Asia. Noto semplicemente come S. Italico è anche un poeta, avvocato e politico romano, autore dei Punicorum libri XVII, il più lungo poema epico latino pervenutoci. Abbiamo notizie di lui da una lettera di PLINIO il Giovane a Caninio RUFO, nella quale parla della sua morte. Il nome ‘Asconio’ porta a ritenere che e legato alla gens patavine. Altre brevi informazioni ci vengono da TACITO e da Marziale. Di Marziale, S. è il patrono e sappiamo che opera nel foro come avvocato difensore, probabilmente già al principato di CLAUDIO. Secondo Plinio, nel principato di Nerone, dove esercitare anche l'avvocatura d'accusa, ovvero la delazione vera e falsa per il favore del principe. Il beneficio che ne tratta e il consolato ordinario. Con la caduta e morte di Nerone, in quanto amico di Vitellio, S. partecipa alle trattative di questi con il fratello di Vespasiano, Tito Flavio Sabino, che è a Roma con il figlio di Vespasiano, Domiziano.  S. è pro-console in Asia Minore agl’ordini di VESPASIANO. Testimonianza è un'epigrafe ad Afrodisia, che riporta il suo nome completo. Allo scadere del mandato pro-consolare S. si ritira dalla vita politica attiva dedicandosi agli studi e alla stesura del suo “Punicorum libri”.  Nel Libro III vi è un riferimento al titolo di "Germanico" assunto da Domiziano e Marziale saluta l'opera nel IV libro degl’epigrammi. Anche a causa dello stato di salute aggiorna a Campania, dove compra la villa di CICERONE, il suo modello di oratoria, e la terra che custodia la tomba di VIRGILIO, di cui è un estimatore e ai cui stilemi si rifà abbondantemente nel corso dei Punica. SCIPIONE, l’eroe nudo. Silio, and the labours of Ercole. Tiberio Cazio Asconio Silio Italico.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Silī! Audīvī tē Rōmae Scīpiōnem tamquam Herculēm canere, et Dionis maledictionem quasi condimentum carminis addere. Num etiam in foro versūs tuī causās vincunt? SILIVS: Salvē, Grice. In foro verba iūrantur, in carmine volant. Sed Scīpiō—ille vere laborāvit; ego tantum labōrēs eius numerō et in hexametrōs compingō. GRICEVS: Ita est. (Sed mirum quam saepe apud nōs, dum de factīs disserimus, ipsa ratio narrandī rem vincat: nam ubi “Herculem” nominās, audītōr iam ante triumphat, et maledictiō ipsa, quae terrēre posset, fit quasi titulus ad recitandum.) Dic ergo: cum “Scīpiōnem-Herculēm” pingis, sacrificiumne magis ostendis an gloriam? SILIVS: O inplicatūram dīvīnam, Grice! Nam intellegō quid subesset: nōn tantum quid dicāmus, sed quō modō dicāmus facit ut vir paulatim deus videātur; et maledictiō, quae olim pondus habuit, in carmine saepe tantum sonet—Dionēm verberante, sed Scīpiōne rīdente. Re passage below. again at CLifton, a higher class they analyse -- please provide 100 move conversation between Master, G. and Shorpshire, they analyse Enea Aeneas as stoic hero -- not meaning that he was instilled with Veterum Fragmenta Stoicorum but something else and then they go to la maledizione di Didone and Silio and Scipione as Ercole and the Punica and back to the philosophical stoicism, or porch, as the master prefers -- with G. getting interested and Shrosphire not knowing his Aeneas from his Scipion, etc. no preamble or ps -- thanks Master.: Very well, gentlemen, we are in the higher class now, and if we are to survive Silius Italicus we must first distinguish our heroes before we begin admiring them. G.: Aeneas and Scipio, sir. Shropshire.: I had thought they were much the same once one had stripped them to armour and duty. Master.: That is exactly the kind of confusion for which schools were invented. Aeneas is Virgil’s Trojan in Italy. Scipio, in Silius, is Roman, anti-Carthaginian, and occasionally dressed up as Hercules by the poet for patriotic enlargement. Shropshire.: So one is a founder and the other a finisher. G.: Better, sir, one is a bearer of fate, the other a fulfiller of Roman vengeance. Master.: Good. Grice may remain. Shropshire may listen. Now, the question before us is whether Aeneas may be called a Stoic hero. Shropshire.: Without having read the Stoic fragments, sir? Master.: Very good. Exactly so. No one imagines Aeneas turning pages of Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta under a tree. G.: Then “Stoic” must mean a type of moral posture rather than a doctrinal subscription. Master.: Precisely. Endurance, submission to a larger order, command over passion when passion would be easier, and the carrying of burden without theatrical collapse. Shropshire.: That sounds unpleasantly admirable. Master.: It is Roman, which is worse. Now, why might someone call Aeneas Stoic? G.: Because he acts under fatum, sir, but not as a puppet. He is compelled and yet still responsible for how he bears the compulsion. Master.: Excellent. That is the first point. Stoicism is not laziness before necessity. It is conduct under necessity. Shropshire.: So when he leaves Dido, he is not cold but obedient. Master.: That is at least the intended line, yes. G.: Though the poem takes care to make the obedience costly. Master.: Exactly. Otherwise he would be merely hard, not heroic. The cost is part of the ethical shape. Shropshire.: And Dido’s curse? Master.: Ah yes, the malediction. One of the great moments in which personal injury is made to bear historical destiny. G.: The curse is not merely private rage, sir. It retroactively feeds the logic of the Punic Wars. Master.: Very good. That is why Silius matters. He inherits the Virgilian curse as a usable prehistory for Rome and Carthage. Shropshire.: So one woman’s anger becomes an imperial footnote. Master.: More than a footnote, though your insolence is serviceable. The curse is the poetic mechanism by which love’s breach becomes history’s enmity. G.: Which already sounds rather un-Stoic. Master.: On Dido’s side, yes. She is passion moving into historical vengeance. Aeneas, by contrast, is the one who must leave passion behind in order to obey the larger command. Shropshire.: Then he is Stoic because he hurts correctly. Master.: That is coarse, but not wholly false. G.: There is also pietas, sir. Master.: Of course. Never omit pietas in a Roman room. Aeneas is Stoic-like not because he lectures on apatheia but because pietas orders him beyond appetite and private delight. Shropshire.: Is pietas the same as Stoic virtue, sir? Master.: Not the same. Overlap, not identity. Pietas is Roman relational duty to gods, father, family, destiny, city-to-come. Stoicism supplies the later philosophical language in which endurance under order becomes legible as virtue. One must not flatten the two, but one may let them illuminate one another. G.: Then Aeneas is Stoic by retrospective moral type, not by doctrinal pedigree. Master.: Exactly. That is the sentence I wanted and was too tired to form. Shropshire.: May I write it down as if I had said it? Master.: No. Grice may. You may borrow it at your peril. Now, Silius and Scipio. G.: Silius makes Scipio Herculean, sir. Master.: Yes. Not only victorious, but laborious. Hercules is the ancient shorthand for burdened virtue that civilises through ordeal. Shropshire.: So Scipio inherits monsters instead of cattle. Master.: Better. He inherits Hannibal instead of Geryon, if one is willing to be impertinent in Latin. G.: The comparison to Hercules also enlarges Scipio beyond mere strategy. Master.: Precisely. He becomes not just a successful general but a morally legible labouring hero. Shropshire.: And still Roman, not Greek? Master.: Entirely Roman in destination, though poetry will steal from wherever it pleases. The Herculean comparison is not Hellenising surrender but Roman appropriation. G.: Then in Silius the heroic ideal is doubled: Aeneas as Stoic-pietistic founder in Virgilian retrospect, Scipio as Herculean fulfiller in national epic. Master.: Very good. Shropshire.: I begin to see why one should not confuse them. Master.: Begin is the right word. Do not yet congratulate yourself. Now, what of the phrase “stoic hero” itself? Is it not slightly vulgar? G.: It risks anachronism, sir. Master.: Yes. And yet it may still be heuristically useful if one says exactly what one means: not school membership, but moral physiognomy under fate. Shropshire.: Physiognomy again. Master.: Everything returns if one teaches long enough. Now, Aeneas and the porch. G.: You prefer “porch,” sir, to “Stoicism.” Master.: I do, because “Stoicism” sounds finished and doctrinal in a way the living image of the stoa resists. The porch is a place of endurance, public speech, rational composure, and a certain architectural exposure. It suits Rome better than a footnote to Chrysippus. Shropshire.: So Aeneas belongs at the porch because he is seen by others carrying himself under burden. Master.: Very good. You are getting less useless. G.: There is also the matter of speech, sir. Aeneas often says less than he feels. Master.: Yes. Which is Roman and, if one likes, proto-Stoic. Passion is not denied, but governed in manifestation. Shropshire.: Honest dissimulation? Master.: That is for another day and another Italian. But yes, disciplined manifestation. A hero who narrates every tremor is no use to an empire. G.: Then Dido is the counter-example. Master.: In one sense, yes. She speaks from wound, curse, abandonment, passion, royal injury. She is magnificent, but not porch-like. Shropshire.: Which is why boys remember her better. Master.: Naturally. Schools are always crowded with secret Carthaginians. Now, how does Silius use all this? G.: He takes the old curse and lets it reverberate through the Punica as explanatory pressure. Master.: Exactly. Dido’s malediction becomes not a magical mechanism but a narratively managed sign that the conflict is larger than ordinary policy. Shropshire.: Like a family quarrel continued by naval means. Master.: Coarse again, but useful. Epic loves to make state conflict look like prolonged personal memory. G.: Then Scipio as Hercules answers not only Hannibal, but the curse itself. Master.: Very good. He becomes the laboring counter-force to inherited enmity. Shropshire.: And where is philosophy in all this, sir? Other than in Grice’s face. Master.: The philosophy lies in the moral grammar of heroism. What counts as admirable under necessity? How does one act when the course is fixed but the bearing remains one’s own? That is the point at which epic and the porch shake hands. G.: So fate does not abolish agency; it sharpens the style of agency. Master.: Excellent. That is nearly Marcus Aurelius, though better dressed. Shropshire.: Then Aeneas as Stoic hero means not “Aeneas subscribes to a doctrine,” but “Aeneas exemplifies conduct under an intelligible order greater than private desire.” Master.: Good. Grice, write that down before he loses it. G.: Already done, sir. Shropshire.: This is why nobody likes him. Master.: On the contrary, this is why masters do. Now, fatum. Does the existence of fatum make Aeneas less heroic? G.: No, sir, because the heroism lies not in inventing the end but in consenting to it at cost. Master.: Yes. One may even say that if the path were merely chosen among pleasures, there would be less heroism, not more. Shropshire.: So freedom is not selecting the destination but governing the self on the road. Master.: Better than I expected. G.: Then this also explains why the curse matters. It turns history into burden rather than mere sequence. Master.: Exactly. The curse makes the later Roman-Carthaginian struggle feel morally and affectively charged from the beginning. Shropshire.: Which means Silius inherits not just events but emotional capital. Master.: Good. You may keep that phrase for once. Epic history is always emotional capital under metre. G.: And Silius, being lawyer enough and poet enough, knows how to convert inherited emotion into civic exemplarity. Master.: Splendid. That is exactly what he does with Scipio. He does not merely narrate campaigns; he furnishes Rome with an exemplum under literary enlargement. Shropshire.: Why Hercules, though? Why not simply leave him as Scipio? Master.: Because “Scipio” names a Roman man; “Hercules” names a transhistorical grammar of labour, suffering, monster-clearing, and reward. To call Scipio Herculean is not decoration; it is a controlled invitation to draw the right inferences. G.: About toil, endurance, civil service through suffering. Master.: Yes. Epic works by licensed overmeaning. The hearer is expected to complete the significance. Shropshire.: That sounds like your word, Grice. G.: It often does where good literature is concerned. Master.: Let us not have the philosophy boy become insufferable. Now, what of Scipio as “the naked hero,” as some later note has it? G.: Naked in the sense of stripped to virtue, sir, not merely to anatomy. Shropshire.: Disappointing. Master.: You are what Virgil called a lower appetite. Yes, naked in the sense that heroic identity is exposed through labour rather than ornament. G.: Which again supports the Herculean frame. Master.: Entirely. Hercules is admirable not because he is dressed well but because he carries, suffers, and persists. Shropshire.: Like a prefect under bad weather. Master.: If prefects killed lions, perhaps. Now, back to Aeneas. Could one call him Stoic without Didonic residue? G.: I do not think so, sir. The cost of leaving Dido is part of what makes the obedience morally interesting rather than merely administrative. Master.: Very good. The wound in the private sphere gives depth to the public destiny. Shropshire.: So if he had left her cheerfully, he would be less stoic and more monstrous. Master.: Precisely. The porch is not made of indifference but of governed pain. G.: Then there is a danger in saying “Aeneas as Stoic hero” too quickly. One may make him sound bloodless. Master.: Yes, and that is why schools should prefer the porch. It lets one speak of discipline without suggesting a machine of serenity. Shropshire.: I rather like the machine of serenity. Master.: Of course you do. You have never governed anything but your own laziness. Now, how does Scipio differ philosophically from Aeneas? G.: Aeneas is the bearer of founding fate; Scipio is the executor of national rescue. Aeneas carries a future city; Scipio restores an existing commonwealth under external threat. Master.: Excellent. And therefore? G.: Therefore Scipio’s labour can more readily be figured Herculean, while Aeneas’s can more readily be figured Stoic-pietistic. Master.: Exactly. Hercules suits public toil against monsters and enemies. The porch suits inward composure under command and burden. Shropshire.: Then if one swapped them—Aeneas as Hercules and Scipio as Stoic—it would not quite work. Master.: It would work only clumsily. Aeneas does have Herculean moments of burden, but his essence in the poem is pious endurance under destiny. Scipio may be prudent and restrained, but Silius wants enlarged labour and exemplarity. The poetic economies differ. G.: There is also the Virgilian background, sir. Silius is reading through Virgil. Master.: Entirely. He buys Virgil’s tomb, if you please, and behaves like a devout inheritor of epic authority. He cannot write Scipio without hearing Aeneas behind him. Shropshire.: So Scipio is in part a Roman correction of Trojan melancholy. Master.: That is very good indeed. G.: Thank you, sir—though it was Shropshire. Master.: Then a miracle has occurred. We shall record it. Now, what of Dido’s curse as philosophical rather than merely poetic? G.: It shows how personal speech can become historical force within epic causality, sir, without ceasing to be legible as pain. Master.: Yes. The curse is not merely magical doom. It is a narrative concentration of memory, grievance, and future hostility. Shropshire.: So Carthage remembers through her. Master.: In poetic logic, yes. The private voice becomes public inheritance. G.: Which is why later Rome must answer not only Hannibal but an old injustice felt as still alive. Master.: Exactly. That gives the Punic struggle moral temperature beyond strategy. Shropshire.: Then philosophy of history and poetry become awkward neighbours. Master.: They often are. Epic makes history intelligible by moral and symbolic patterns that no archive alone could supply. G.: And Stoicism, in the broad sense, gives one a way of reading heroic suffering as rationally ordered without reducing it to mere obedience. Master.: Very good. That is the real gain of the comparison. Shropshire.: I think I finally know my Aeneas from my Scipio. Master.: Then the class has not been wasted. State the difference. Shropshire.: Aeneas is Stoic-like because he bears fate under pietas and leaves private desire at cost. Scipio is Herculean because Silius makes him the labouring solver of Rome’s inherited enmity, under epic enlargement. Master.: Excellent. G.: And Dido’s curse? Master.: Go on, since you have begun well. Shropshire.: Dido’s curse turns injured passion into historical momentum, which Silius inherits as part of the meaning of the Punic wars. Master.: Better than many printed books. Grice, your final addition? G.: Only that “Stoic hero” should be heard as retrospective moral type, not doctrinal subscription; otherwise we teach the fragments where we ought to teach the poem. Master.: Precisely. Clifton is not a seminary for anachronism. Shropshire.: Though it resembles one at meals. Master.: Silence. One final sentence each. Grice? G.: Aeneas is heroic because fate does not spare him the need to govern himself. Master.: Shropshire? Shropshire.: Scipio is heroic because labour in Silius is made to look like a Roman answer to myth. Master.: And mine: the porch matters because it gives us a language for conduct under burden, while epic gives us the burden. That will do. Now you may go, and if either of you confuses Aeneas with Scipio again, I shall assign the whole of the Punica and call it kindness. Why does this goes by Tiberio Cazio Asconio Silio Italico -- that sounds for Grice like quinta nomina not tria nomina -- but the gens is Silia, right? The full name is not evidence against his belonging to the gens Silia. On the contrary, the last element, Silius, is exactly what identifies the gens. What troubles the eye is not the gentilician, but the accumulation before it. In the standard Roman pattern, one expects the tria nomina: praenomen, nomen, cognomen. In his case, the inscriptional form Tiberius Catius Asconius Silius Italicus is longer because it preserves additional gentilicial or family-linking elements that had become socially and politically meaningful in the early empire. That does not make Silius any less the nomen gentilicium. It means only that the man is carrying more ancestry on his back than the tidy schoolbook formula allows. So yes: if one asks, “what is the gens?”, the safest answer is Silia, or in the masculine form for the individual, Silius. Italicus is the cognomen by which he is commonly known. The difficulty lies in Catius and Asconius. These look like names preserving connections by descent, adoption, or maternal/familial transmission. In other words, what you are seeing is not a refutation of the tria nomina system so much as one of the many imperial-period ways in which it gets crowded by inherited status-markers. That is why Grice’s joke about “quinta nomina” is apt as a joke but not quite as analysis. The problem is not that the Romans suddenly ceased to have a nomen. It is that elite naming, especially under the empire, often became accumulative. A man might retain or display several family affiliations at once. The result is a name that looks over-furnished to anyone trained on the cleaner republican pattern. Asconius is particularly suggestive. As your note already senses, it is often taken to point toward a connection with the Asconii, and in Silius’s case it has long encouraged the thought of a northern or Patavine linkage, or at least some inherited connection worth displaying. Catius likewise may preserve another family tie. But neither of these dislodges Silius from the central gentilicial place. They precede it; they do not replace it. So the compact answer is this. Tiberius is the praenomen. Silius is the nomen and marks the gens Silia. Italicus is the cognomen. Catius and Asconius are additional inherited name-elements, very likely preserving family connections of the sort the imperial aristocracy increasingly liked to parade. The name is therefore not anti-Roman, only late-Roman in the socially ambitious sense. If you like, I can next give you a very short Roman-law-and-epigraphy paragraph in the same dry register, suitable for keeping in chat as a gloss on why Silius Italicus can look like more than tria nomina without ceasing to be a Silius. What puzzles Grice is not so much the Catius, although Catia may be the name of a gens -- but the Asconius, because apparently Asconia IS the name of the gens -- and Grice wonders if in conversation or being introduced Silio would have to explain: "My gens is Silia, not Asconia, or Catia -- if you need to know, dear." Was there a rank, Grice wonders, via implicature, that the gens Asconia or the gens Catia may trump in rank Silia, and explain why Silio kept them? Yes, that is a very plausible line of thought, but one has to phrase it with some caution. The short answer is that Asconius and Catius may well have been worth keeping because they carried prestige, alliances, inheritance, or recognisable ancestry, but that does not mean they “outranked” Silius in any fixed constitutional sense. Roman naming was not a heraldic table with a stable rule that one gens simply trumped another and therefore displaced it in the name. It was more fluid, and more socially tactical, than that. The first thing to keep firm is this. If the full form is Tiberius Catius Asconius Silius Italicus, Silius still looks like the operative nomen in the final Roman sense, the one under which he is conventionally classed. That is why he is Silius Italicus. No ancient reader, so far as our evidence suggests, felt compelled to “correct” that by saying, “No, really he is an Asconius,” or “No, really he is a Catius.” So in ordinary literary circulation the problem did not become disabling. But Grice’s puzzle is good because it notices what the full inscriptional form is doing socially. Names like Catius and Asconius are unlikely to be there for mere decoration. They usually signal that one is preserving family capital of some kind: maternal descent, testamentary transmission, adoption-like continuity, or the prestige of another line that one does not wish to lose. In the early empire especially, elite names often become archives of affiliation. One displays not only who one is in the simplest juridical sense, but who one is connected to in the larger aristocratic sense. So could Asconia or Catia have had higher standing, or at least greater local usefulness, than Silia? Yes, certainly in the loose social sense. One family connection may have been older, richer, more municipally distinguished, more useful in a given region, or more worth advertising. That is entirely possible. Indeed, that is one of the best explanations for why such names are retained. A Roman did not carry extra gentilicial matter out of pure philological scruple. He carried it because it did work. But “rank” here should not be understood too rigidly. It is better to think in terms of symbolic capital rather than legal precedence. An Asconian connection might have implied old municipal prominence, landed respectability, or a desirable ancestral tie; a Catian one might have done the same. If so, keeping those names would let the bearer implicate, without spelling it out, “I come to you not from one line only.” In Gricean language, the full name says more than the minimal identification says. It conversationally overdetermines the man. Would he have had to explain it in conversation? Probably not very often. Roman elite society was good at living with overfull names. People regularly used shortened forms in ordinary reference. “Silius Italicus” is exactly that sort of socially workable reduction. Full ceremonial or inscriptional naming preserved the archive; ordinary usage selected the memorable tail end. So the explanation was built into the formality of the full name and did not need to be repeated at every introduction. As for Asconius specifically, your instinct is acute. Because Asconius itself looks like a nomen, it creates the impression of a competing gens-claim. But that is precisely what imperial naming often does: it layers what had once been cleanly separable categories. The result is a name that looks as if several nomina have been stacked together. That stacking is usually the sign of status-preservation, not confusion. The bearer is not saying, “I do not know my gens.” He is saying, “I decline to travel with only one banner.” So the best answer to Grice would be something like this. No, Silius does not cease to mark the gens. But yes, Asconius and Catius may well have been retained because those connections carried enough prestige, inheritance-value, or municipal distinction that dropping them would have meant surrendering useful ancestry. The issue is not formal rank in a table of gentes, but aristocratic display through accumulated affiliation. In that sense the extra names do indeed implicate superiority somewhere, though not necessarily superiority over the Silian line itself; rather, superiority in breadth of lineage, social reach, or commemorated connection. If you want, I can next give you the answer in a more epigraphic register, almost as if for a footnote: one paragraph on why multiple gentilicial elements in an imperial Roman name are best read as preserved family capital rather than as a crisis of nomenclature. And another Grice wonders is written records. When Herbert Paul Grice was born in March 26 1913, the name was registered in the Town Hall at Harborne -- born of Mother Mabel Fulton of Lordsfield Road -- and in the church when baptised. But what about this quintuply named Ancient Roman? When Silio went to vote, they would check: Address: 37 Main Road, Palatine -- Gens: Silia -- "Yes, you can vote here, sir" Grice's question is general, not just applied to Silio. Thanks. The short answer is no: Roman public life did not run on anything very like a modern town-hall register with address, surname, mother’s maiden name, and a clerk checking one against a master roll. The nearest Roman equivalents were multiple and scattered. Identity was established through status, family, locality, and public recognition, but not usually through one single documentary file of the sort Grice had in mind from Harborne. The Romans had records, certainly, but they were not unified in that modern bureaucratic way. The most important thing to start with is that a Roman citizen was known politically first by status and civic placement, not by “address” in the modern sense. A man’s formal political identity depended on whether he was a citizen, what tribe he belonged to, and, in some contexts, what voting century or local registration he fell under. That mattered more than the exact street number of his house. Rome did not have “37 Main Road, Palatine” as a normal identity marker in the way a modern municipality would. The closest institution to a civic master-record was the census. At the census, a Roman citizen would present himself before the censors and declare his name, family relations, property, and other socially relevant facts. This was not simply a tax register, though it certainly had fiscal implications. It also located him within the civic body. In that sense, if one asks, “where did the Romans keep track of who a man was as a political being?”, the answer is: above all in the census and in the classification systems attached to it. So if Silius Italicus, or any similarly over-named Roman, appeared in a voting context, the key question would not be “what is your postal address?” but something more like “who are you, to what civic category do you belong, and are you registered where you claim to be?” His tribe and citizen standing mattered. Public reputation and recognisability mattered too, especially for elite men. Rome was not anonymous in the modern urban way, at least not at the top. A consul or ex-consul did not need to explain himself to a polling clerk as though he were an obscure lodger. That said, written records certainly existed. The Romans recorded births imperfectly and not in one universal civil office. In the Republic, there was nothing exactly like the universal birth registration system Grice knew. Family memory, household records, and public reputation carried much of the burden. Under the Empire, especially from Augustus onward, there was increasing registration of citizens, including declarations connected with births in some contexts, but not a universal modern birth certificate regime in the British sense. Religious record-keeping, too, differed sharply from Grice’s baptism example. Temples and priestly colleges kept records relevant to cult, office, and ceremony, but there was no general church registry for the population because there was no church in the Christian parish sense. Roman religion was public and institutional, but not parochially documentary in that way. As for voting itself, one must remember that Roman voting was organized by tribe and century, not by local ward in the modern municipal sense. So the practical identity question at the point of voting was bound up with those structures. A citizen belonged to a voting tribe, and that was a formal political location, even if he lived elsewhere. In other words, political belonging was not simply where you slept. It was juridical and historical. That helps with the names too. A very long name did not necessarily create bureaucratic chaos, because in practice Romans used reduced forms constantly. The full, archive-like name was available when solemnity, inscription, inheritance, office, or legal precision required it. Ordinary public reference often worked with a shorter form. “Silius Italicus” is exactly the kind of usable reduction one would expect. The full name was there when needed, but daily life did not require every nominative flourish every time one showed up in public. So to answer Grice’s general question: the Romans had written records, but not one centralised identity system equivalent to a birth certificate plus address register plus church baptism book. Instead, identity was distributed across census declarations, tribal and civic classification, family memory, legal documents, inscriptions, patronal and social recognition, and, for the elite, sheer public visibility. A Roman citizen was verified less by producing one definitive document than by inhabiting a recognised place within a web of civic and social relations. If one wanted to put it in slightly Gricean terms, Roman identity was less file-based and more inference-based. The state knew you through categories, declarations, and standing; society knew you through name, house, lineage, and face; and the two overlapped without becoming one neat municipal dossier. If you like, I can next give you a very compact comparison table in prose, still in chat and still without bulleting: modern birth registration versus Roman census, modern address versus Roman tribe, modern church baptism book versus Roman family and cultic record. But at some point, Grice wonders, there must have been a deictic element: "This is my son, Tiberio Cazio Asconio Silio" (not yet Italico). He was trusted 'on his word.' Are there cases in Ancient Roman history where there was a possibility of 'lying' in order to be allowed to vote, or fake identities -- in which case, more than one's word -- some record of a census (again however based on the utterer's word) mattered? Just asking for Grice. Yes. There certainly was room for lying, impersonation, false status-claims, and strategic concealment in Roman civic life, and that is exactly why one should not imagine Roman identity as resting on mere gentlemanly self-ascription. Your deictic scene is right in spirit. At some point someone had to say, in effect, this is my son. Roman society always depended heavily on face-to-face recognition, patronal networks, household memory, and local knowledge. But that did not mean that “one’s word” was the whole system. Rather, speech operated inside a thicker framework of social and civic verification. The key institution here is again the census. A Roman citizen’s place in the civic body was not simply a private anecdote about his birth; it was periodically declared before magistrates, above all the censors in the republican scheme. The citizen gave an account of himself, his family, and his property. So yes, self-declaration mattered. But it mattered in a public and magistrate-supervised context, with consequences attached. The Romans were perfectly aware that people might misrepresent themselves, especially where status, taxation, military obligation, or political privilege were concerned. That means Grice’s instinct is sound. The census was indeed based in part on what the utterer said, but it was not therefore a pure trust-game. It was a civic speech-act under authority. The declaration could be checked against reputation, neighbours, family standing, property visibility, prior records, and the knowledge of magistrates and local communities. The Roman state was not modernly bureaucratic, but neither was it naïve. As for voting specifically, fraud and irregularity were certainly possible. The Roman voting assemblies were not pristine machines. We hear often enough of corruption, bribery, pressure, manipulated procedures, dubious enrollments, and political struggles over citizen status. The most obvious high-level example is not a man pretending to be someone else in a queue, but the vast and recurring Roman anxiety over who counted as a citizen and who did not. That anxiety alone shows that political identity was contestable and could be exploited. The Social War, for instance, turned in large part on the extension and recognition of citizenship; once citizenship could be granted, disputed, or strategically claimed, the possibility of false or opportunistic claims was built into the system. There were also specific concerns over false registration, wrongful enrollment in tribes, and the manipulation of civic rolls. Since voting depended on proper placement within the civic order, being entered where one should not be, or being omitted where one should be, had political consequences. That is why the Romans cared so much about tribal assignment, census classification, and legal status. A man did not simply walk in and say, I am Tiberius whoever, trust me. He belonged, or claimed to belong, to a registered civic category. One should also remember that Roman law was acutely status-conscious. Freeborn versus freedman, citizen versus non-citizen, legitimate birth versus dubious lineage, paternal authority, adoption, emancipation: all these could affect a person’s legal and political place. Precisely because status mattered, forgery, false claims, and identity disputes mattered too. Roman jurists and magistrates did not live in a world innocent of imposture. They lived in a world saturated with status and therefore with incentives to manipulate it. But the Roman remedy was not a modern passport. It was cumulative recognisability. Family testimony mattered. Household continuity mattered. Public record mattered where available. Census declaration mattered. Social standing mattered. Local knowledge mattered. Documentary traces existed, but they were only one layer among others. A Roman identity was therefore neither purely oral nor purely archival. It was socially ratified and periodically formalised. So yes, Grice is right to suspect that the possibility of lying is one of the best clues to how the system actually worked. Institutions become visible where fraud is possible. The Roman answer was not to eliminate trust, but to embed trust within public forms, magistracies, and shared knowledge. In that sense, one’s word counted, but one’s word counted as part of a civic performance under witnesses, categories, and remembered affiliations. The census mattered precisely because speech alone was not enough. A neat way to put it would be this. Roman identity was deictic at the edges, institutional at the centre, and social all the way through. A father could say this is my son, but for that son to become a political person, the claim had to survive the larger machinery of recognition, declaration, and status. If you like, I can next answer the narrower question: what actual Roman evidence we have for false claims to citizenship, false enrollment, or imposture in legal and political life, with a few concrete cases rather than the general structure. And again asking for Grice -- were the cases of such? Such as: "I recognised he was a slave from Naples by his Hellenic twang -- and he wished to vote like a citizen" -- Grice assumes that classicists -- "who have nothing better to do" should study this -- especially as a misapplication of his principle of conversational helfpulness, as he calls it. Was there a punishment for perjury, in the republic -- "I am blind, so I cannot fight" -- or "No, those vineyards are not really mine -- they are my wife's uncle" -- and "No, I was never a slave." etc. Yes, there were certainly Roman anxieties about false status-claims, false declarations, and the abuse of civic procedures, but the evidence is usually less like a neat police report and more like scattered legal, rhetorical, and historical signs that the problem was real. The first thing to say is that Rome was a status society, and therefore a society full of incentives to lie about status. If citizenship, free birth, property, military eligibility, tax burden, tribal enrollment, inheritance, and office all depend on what sort of person one is, then there will inevitably be false claims. A man may claim to be freeborn when he is not, claim a father he should not, conceal property, evade service, or try to pass under a more advantageous civic description than the one he truly bears. That is not a defect of Rome in particular; it is a standing feature of any legal order built on rank and classification. On the voting side, the problem would most often appear not as a picturesque case of “a slave from Naples with a Greek accent sneaking into the assembly,” though something like that is imaginable, but as disputed citizen status, fraudulent enrollment, wrongful tribal registration, or manipulation of the civic rolls. Roman politics was repeatedly convulsed by disputes over who counted as a citizen and who had been enrolled where. Once voting depends on one’s proper civic registration, then improper registration is already a kind of political fraud. Grice’s accent example is not silly, however. Romans did indeed make practical social judgments from speech, dress, manner, patronage, and local recognisability. Accent could mark origin, education, or status, though not with perfect reliability. A Greek accent, a servile association, or unfamiliarity with Roman forms might arouse suspicion. But that would still not amount to a formal identity check in the modern sense. It would be part of the larger social process by which someone’s claim could be challenged. In other words, the Romans often detected imposture socially before they proved it juridically. As to punishments, one must distinguish several things that a modern person might too quickly bundle together under “perjury.” The Romans certainly condemned false testimony and false declarations, but their legal categories were not arranged exactly as in modern common law. There was no single simple all-purpose offense that maps neatly onto every modern case of lying to the state. Instead, one finds sanctions attached to specific contexts: false witness, forgery, fraudulent status-claim, electoral corruption, census misrepresentation, and so on. In the census context, lying mattered because the census was tied to property, military duty, taxation, and civic rank. If a man understated his property to lighten burdens, or falsely shifted assets to relatives, he could be censured, degraded in status, or otherwise penalised. Here the censors were crucial. Their office was not only enumerative but moral and political. They could punish dishonourable conduct by nota censoria, and though this was not always a criminal sentence in the modern sense, it could have serious consequences for rank and standing. So Grice’s vineyard example, “those vineyards are not mine, they are my wife’s uncle’s,” belongs very much to the sort of thing Roman magistrates would have understood as an attempt to manipulate one’s civic obligations. Likewise military evasion was a real concern. If a man lied about age, property, capacity, or status to avoid service, that was not merely a conversational infelicity. It struck at the state’s claim on him. Physical incapacity, of course, could be genuine, but fraudulent excuse-making was precisely the kind of thing Roman moralists and magistrates distrusted. The system depended on declarations, but it did not therefore bless them. It treated them as claims exposed to public scrutiny and magistrate judgment. False claims about slave or free status were especially serious. Roman law cared enormously whether one was freeborn, freed, or servile. Litigation over status was common enough that jurists discuss it at length. A person pretending never to have been a slave, if challenged, might face formal inquiry. The issue mattered for marriage, inheritance, office, dignity, and citizenship itself. This is one of the clearest areas where Roman society’s obsession with status generated both deception and legal machinery for sorting it out. So yes, classicists really should study this more, and Grice’s angle is not frivolous. One could put it this way. Roman civic life depended on a massive background assumption of sincere self-presentation, but also on a permanent readiness to suspect strategic departures from it. That is almost a textbook case of a social order built on what Grice would call cooperative expectations, yet continually threatened by interested violations of them. The census, the courts, the assemblies, and the hierarchy of statuses all presupposed that people would say who they were and what they had; at the same time, the Romans knew perfectly well that men lie where privilege, burden, and danger are at stake. The result is a world in which one’s word mattered greatly, but never in isolation. Speech was always shadowed by witnesses, reputation, household memory, documents where available, social recognisability, and the authority of magistrates. The possibility of lying did not reveal the weakness of the Roman system; it revealed its true form. It was not a paperwork state, but neither was it a paradise of trust. It was a civic order in which claims about identity were performative, contestable, and consequential. If you like, I can now give you a more concrete next step: a short set of actual Roman examples or legal loci for false citizenship claims, false witness, census fraud, and status litigation.Silio Italico, Tiberio Cazio Asconio (a. u. c. DCCCXL). Punica. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Silla – Ossia: Grice e Silla: la ragione conversazionale. Note sugl’Osservationi sopra il Petrarca. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Antonio Silla (Scanno, L’Aquila, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning conceives dialogue as a fundamentally rational, cooperative practice in which speakers intend their interlocutors to recognize those intentions as reasons for belief or response, so that even polemic, legal argument, or indirection remain intelligible because they are embedded in shared norms of relevance, sincerity, and argumentative accountability. Antonio Silla, by contrast, though deeply immersed in the learned and fiercely argumentative culture of Enlightenment Naples, exemplifies a more adversarial and rhetorical conception of conversational reason: his polemics against Martorelli, his interventions in the debate on punishment, and his anonymous publications show conversation and textual exchange functioning less as a cooperative search for mutual understanding than as a juridical or forensic arena in which reason is wielded strategically to defeat opponents, expose imposture, and assert authority. Where Grice insists that implicature and indirectness presuppose a background commitment to fair conversational play, Silla operates within a culture in which erudition, anonymity, and sharp vis polemica are integral to persuasion, and where meaning may be deliberately sharpened, obscured, or weaponized without undermining the legitimacy of the exchange. Thus Grice theorizes conversation as a civil, rule‑structured medium of shared rationality, while Silla’s practice reflects an early modern mode of conversational reason grounded in controversy, advocacy, and rhetorical combat, anticipating legal and moral debates in which understanding and victory are closely entwined rather than clearly separated. Nasce da Giovanni, un ricco armentario. Inizia i suoi studi a Chieti per poi trasferirsi a Napoli, dove studia diritto e lingue orientali. Napoli è, all’epoca, attraversata da un grande fermento culturale, e ospita personalità di spicco come GENOVESI , Galiani, Galanti. S. partecipa attivamente a questo mondo, si fa notare per la sua erudizione e per alcune precise prese di posizione, segnate da una robusta vis polemica. Ri-entra a Scanno dove prende moglie e comincia a esercitare la professione di avvocato. Fa ritorno a Napoli ed entra nella Real Accademia delle scienze e belle arti. Nella capitale pubblica La fondazione di Partenope, in cui confuta la tesi, espressa da Maciucca -- che la attribuiva a sua volta a Martorelli --, che individua nei fenici i fondatori della città, attribuendola invece ai greci abitanti di Cuma, già compagni della sirena Partenope -- Soria. S. offre una copia dell’opera al suo illustre conterraneo Antinori, accompagnandola da una lettera in cui ne sollecita un parere, seguita da una in cui motiva la sua presa di posizione contro Martorelli, e risponde ad alcuni rilievi dello stesso Antinori. Sempre a Napoli, pubblica una seconda opera, firmandola con le sole iniziali, La Teogonia commentata, sorta di prodromo, secondo Soria, alla Storia sacra de’ Gentili, pubblicata a Napoli. Intanto, prende posizione in un dibattito che anda segnando l’Italia e l’Europa dei lumi, sull’abolizione della tortura e della pena di morte, coagulatosi attorno alla pubblicazione di Dei delitti e delle pene di Beccaria -- apparso in forma anonima a Livorno. Fermamente contrario alla posizione espressa da Beccaria, e in sintonia invece con Facchinei che pubblica le Note ed osservazioni sul libro intitolato Dei delitti e delle pene, tacciando il suo autore di impostura, sfacciataggine e indegnità, S. scrive e pubblica, senza firmarlo, presso lo stampatore napoletano Raimondi, Il dritto di punire – cf. Lucas and the Oxford ordinary-language philosophers on ‘The Justification of Punishment’ in Philosophy.  S., dunque, da un lato riprende la linea polemica di Facchinei.  Grice: Caro Silla, ho letto della tua polemica contro Martorelli e la questione sulla fondazione di Partenope: tra fenici e greci, direi che a Napoli le origini sono sempre più complicate della ricetta della pastiera!  Silla: Grice, tu sai bene che qui a Napoli la verità si trova tra le pieghe di storia e folclore: come dire, tra la sirena Partenope e una buona dose di polemica, tutto diventa più saporito—e se serve, ci metto anche un pizzico di avvocatura!  Grice: Certamente, Silla! E parlando di avvocati... non sarà che, quando si tratta di tortura e pena di morte, invece di abolire, qualcuno preferisce solo cambiare il nome sulle porte del tribunale? Chissà che “giustificazione” si trova tra le righe.  Silla: La più tipicamente ingegnosa implicatura, Grice! Sei riuscito a dire tutto senz a dire nulla, come solo gli inglesi e i napoletani sanno fare. Ti offro una copia del mio “Dritto di punire”—ma senza firma, così potrai implicare anche tu!  In base of this passage below -- please provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they regret that Oxford never had her Petrarca -- and they analyse all the efforts Petrarca took, even outside Oxford, Bologna, and what have you -- about the recovery of the classics, the editorial things, and never mention ONE poem, which is left at Oxford for students of Italian literature -- a minor art, since he needs to go to varsity to study letters, never mind italian ones -- but the textual apparatus, and the manuscript tradition, and the idea that everyting old is new again in the renaissance is all that matters to G. and S. as they propose to give a seminar on Petracar's implicatures and why they cannot be cancelled -- no preamble or ps -- G.: Let us begin with a complaint. Oxford never had her Petrarca. S.: You mean no one at Oxford ever made the recovery of antiquity into a vocation rather than an inheritance. G.: Precisely. Oxford inherited Latin, cited Cicero, mumbled Virgil, and mislaid manuscripts by the civilised dozen. But she never had a Petrarca in the strong sense: no hunter of codices who made the old world new by seeking it out again. S.: Bologna did not quite have him either, though she had better excuses. G.: Yes. Bologna had law, gloss, comment, authority, university habit. Petrarca belongs to a different restlessness. He is not a man of institutional custody, but of recovery. S.: Which is why you insist we never mention the poems. G.: Quite. The poems are for students of Italian literature, a minor art sustained by departments. We are after something nobler: the textual apparatus, the manuscript chase, the editorial conscience, the recovery of the classics as an intellectual act. S.: So Petrarca matters because he turned antiquity into work. G.: Exactly. He does not merely admire the ancients; he labours for them. He collates, copies, searches, writes to the dead, restores, compares, complains, and in the process teaches Europe that the old world is not simply there but must be rewon. S.: Which is already philosophical for you. G.: Entirely. The recovery of texts is the recovery of reasons once spoken, and therefore of possibilities of thought once alive. S.: Then Oxford’s failure was not lack of Latinity but lack of urgency. G.: Very good. Oxford had enough Latin to pass examinations and enough Aristotle to produce schools. What she lacked was Petrarchan hunger. S.: No mountain-climbing for codices. G.: Exactly. No letters announcing ecstatic discovery of neglected books. No sense that every manuscript found is a civilisation partially restored. S.: Whereas Petrarca acts as if antiquity were half-buried and morally recoverable. G.: Yes. And that is where the Renaissance really begins—not in styles of ornament, but in the conviction that old books are not dead authorities but recoverable voices. S.: Which is why “everything old is new again” is not mere slogan. G.: Quite. It is a philological programme. The newness lies not in novelty of composition but in renewed access. A forgotten text, once restored, becomes intellectually new by being old again. S.: Then Petrarca is less a poet than a technology of recollection. G.: Better. A human technology of recollection. He makes memory active, mobile, acquisitive, editorial. S.: And for you that belongs directly to philosophy. G.: Naturally. Philosophy depends on texts not merely as containers of doctrine but as occasions of rational conversation across time. S.: Hence the seminar you want to give on Petrarca’s implicatures. G.: Exactly. For once the codex is found and the text restored, the old author can begin meaning again. And those meanings are not exhausted by what lies on the surface of the page. S.: So even textual criticism is a condition of implicature. G.: Entirely. If the line is corrupt, the implicature may be mangled. If the manuscript tradition is mismanaged, the shades of emphasis, irony, allusion, withheld judgment, and rhetorical pressure may vanish. S.: Then the apparatus criticus is not mere scholastic plumbing. G.: No. It is one of civilisation’s main moral instruments. S.: You should put that on the seminar notice. G.: I probably shall. It will ensure poor attendance and good memory. S.: Then let us say why Oxford lacked a Petrarca. Was it because Oxford never had to lose Rome in the same way? G.: That is part of it. Petrarca feels the distance from the ancients as a wound to be healed. Oxford more often felt antiquity as curriculum. S.: So for Petrarca the classics are missing; for Oxford they are assigned. G.: Excellent. Assigned antiquity never quite generates the same ardour as recovered antiquity. S.: Which is why the Grand Tour mattered later. G.: Yes, though by then the whole thing had become more social and less urgent. The Grand Tour sends young Englishmen to Italy to acquire polish, ruins, marbles, and corrected vowels. Petrarca had already taught Europe that Italy housed not only stones but sleeping books. S.: So the Grand Tour consumer arrives after the Petrarchan producer. G.: Exactly. The one consumes visible antiquity; the other recovers textual antiquity. S.: Then the post-Grand Tour inherits both: Italy as aesthetic correction and Italy as archive. G.: Very good. And by our own time, Oxford enjoys the results while forgetting the labour. S.: Which is why you sound aggrieved. G.: Only historically aggrieved. I am quite happy to let Italy keep Petrarca, so long as Oxford admits the debt. S.: Then what specific efforts of Petrarca matter most to your seminar? G.: The search for manuscripts, certainly. The recovery of Ciceronian material, the cultivation of letters as living commerce with antiquity, the insistence on textual correctness, the consciousness that scribal transmission can deform understanding and must be repaired. S.: So the editorial thing, as you call it, is central. G.: Absolutely. One does not begin with theories of literature. One begins with the codex, the hand, the variant, the lacuna, the false reading, the true restoration. S.: Which sounds nearly monastic. G.: Better than nearly. It is monastic labour repurposed by humanist hunger. S.: And that repurposing is what Oxford lacked. G.: Yes. Oxford had custodians. Petrarca is not a custodian but an awakener. S.: Then what is philosophically at stake in the manuscript tradition? G.: Continuity of rational possibility. A corrupted text may narrow or falsify what an old author can be taken to have meant. A restored text reopens meanings otherwise inaccessible. S.: So your “Petrarca’s implicatures” are not whimsical after all. G.: Of course not. Once the text is legible, one can ask what is implied, alluded, sharpened, softened, withheld, or obliquely managed in the revived speech of antiquity. S.: And why they cannot be cancelled. G.: Yes. Because certain implicatures in learned humanist writing are not ad hoc frills but structurally bound to the very act of recovery. To restore Cicero is already to imply that one’s own age has fallen short. To write to the ancients as living interlocutors is to imply that contemporary institutions are not enough. S.: So the recovery itself is an implicature. G.: Splendid. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: Only archivally. G.: Better. Now, when you say “cannot be cancelled,” what do you mean precisely? S.: That there are consequences of Petrarca’s textual posture which no explicit disclaimer can entirely remove. If he says, “I merely edit,” the very labour of editing still implies a valuation of the past over the present, or at least a present deficiency to be remedied by the past. G.: Exactly. The implicature is woven into the practice. He can deny nostalgia, but the recovery still means more than retrieval. S.: So the whole philological act carries a non-cancellable comparative judgment. G.: Very good. And there is another. By preferring original sources, by chasing older witnesses, by distrusting inherited compilations, he implies that authority is not the same as transmission. S.: Which is devastating for lazy scholasticism. G.: Precisely. The oldest book may be less available than the most cited one, and yet more authoritative. That is a revolution in learned conscience. S.: Which again Oxford later receives as method without reliving its drama. G.: Yes. Our dons cite critical editions the way people use taps, forgetting the aqueduct. S.: Then your seminar ought really to be on the aqueduct. G.: On Petrarch as aqueduct-builder, yes. S.: Not a bad subtitle. G.: Better than most. Now, what of Bologna? S.: Bologna had text and commentary, but in a juristic and scholastic mode. Petrarca’s relation to antiquity is less institutional, more elective, almost erotic in the textual sense. G.: Quite. He pursues old books not because the curriculum demands them, but because his own sense of civil and intellectual life does. S.: So if Oxford never had her Petrarca, Bologna had perhaps too much apparatus and too little yearning. G.: That is unkind, but not wholly false. S.: Unkindness is sometimes required by comparison. G.: Very likely. Then the later English relation to Italy becomes doubly derivative: first from Petrarca’s recovery, then from the Grand Tour’s consumption. S.: Which is why Pater and others matter later. G.: Yes, but let us not drift into visual culture. Here we stay with codices, editors, letters, apparatus. S.: Very well. Then one might say Petrarca made antiquity newly legible by refusing to trust the available text as the final text. G.: Excellent. And that refusal is philosophical in the deepest sense, because it is a refusal of second-handness. S.: So the humanist is a critic of transmission before he is a stylist. G.: Precisely. Style comes later, or at least second. First comes textual conscience. S.: Which is what departments of Italian literature often forget when they rush to lyric inwardness. G.: Departments forget many things, but yes. The poems may dazzle, but the editorial labour civilises. S.: Then your anti-poetic restriction is itself a Petrarchan severity. G.: I prefer to think so. Now, let us consider how a manuscript tradition creates implicature. S.: Through variants, certainly. A reading in one witness may sharpen irony; another may flatten it. Marginalia may expose a reception; punctuation may create or dissolve pressure. G.: Exactly. Humanists know that what is said depends on what is actually there, and what is meant often depends on tiny textual decisions. S.: So one could say that textual criticism is the precondition of pragmatic criticism. G.: Very good. Without a stable text there is no responsible account of what the author might have made available to a competent reader. S.: Then why “cannot be cancelled”? G.: Because once Petrarca undertakes recovery, the act itself implicates a theory of culture: namely that the present must re-enter conversation with the past, and that the past speaks with a freshness the present has partly lost. S.: Even if Petrarca were to say, “I do not mean to rebuke my age.” G.: Exactly. The rebuke is structurally there. To recover Cicero is already to imply that your own prose world has been badly housed. S.: To recover Livy is to imply a deficiency of civic memory. G.: Yes. And to edit attentively is to imply that careless transmission is a civil failure. S.: Which makes philology look almost moral. G.: It is moral. Exactness about texts is exactness about inherited reason. S.: Then Oxford’s lack of a Petrarca means that Oxford entered humanism already after its founding labour had been done elsewhere. G.: Precisely. Oxford becomes heir rather than initiator. She can teach, gloss, admire, and later examine, but she does not invent the hunger. S.: That is quite a loss. G.: It is. Though every university loses something by being founded too securely. S.: So Petrarca belongs to that rare class of figures who make a university possible without being of one. G.: Very well put. S.: Thank you. G.: Again, do not become pleased. S.: I am only codicologically content. G.: Better. Now, what of the seminar itself? How shall we describe Petrarca’s implicatures? S.: First, the implicature of recovery: that the ancient author is worth more direct hearing than the intervening summaries. G.: Good. S.: Second, the implicature of correction: that current learning has become careless enough to require philological repair. G.: Excellent. S.: Third, the implicature of companionship: that the dead are to be treated as interlocutors, not relics. G.: Splendid. That one will please me personally. S.: Fourth, the implicature of rebuke: that one’s age is judged by its fidelity to its textual inheritance. G.: Very good. S.: Fifth, the implicature of renewal: that oldness, once recovered, becomes a species of intellectual newness. G.: Exactly. “Everything old is new again” is not decorative; it is methodological. S.: Because the new lies not in novelty but in renewed access. G.: Perfect. That should go in the opening paragraph. S.: Then perhaps the seminar title is “Petrarchan Recovery and the Non-Cancellability of Humanist Implicature.” G.: Hideous enough to attract the right people. S.: Which are? G.: Those with bad shoes and decent Latin. S.: Oxford will provide some. G.: Fewer than one would hope. Now, what do we say about the editorial apparatus? S.: That it is not appendage but argument. The apparatus criticus shows the labour by which a reading is secured, and therefore the labour by which an old voice becomes newly available. G.: Very good. The apparatus is a visible conscience. S.: Which again Oxford uses while pretending not to notice. G.: Like electricity. One only notices the apparatus when it fails. S.: Then Petrarca’s greatness lies partly in making failure visible. G.: Exactly. He teaches Europe to see that texts have fallen, that they may be restored, and that restoration is not mechanical but judgment-laden. S.: Which is philosophical because judgment under uncertainty is philosophical. G.: Entirely. Philology is one of philosophy’s elder practical cousins. S.: One seldom hears that in faculty meetings. G.: Faculty meetings are designed to conceal family resemblance. Now, why leave the poems aside? S.: Because they have monopolised Petrarca’s reception too often, and because the seminar aims at recovery as intellectual practice rather than lyric prestige. G.: Exactly. Poetry has already received more than its ration of undergraduates. We are interested in the making of antiquity available. S.: Which is perhaps the most un-Englishly Italian thing about Petrarca. G.: Yes. He turns old letters into living pressure. S.: And this is what Oxford never quite did for herself. G.: No. Oxford could preserve, but Petrarca recovered. There is a difference between keeping a key and deciding to open the door. S.: That is nearly too neat. G.: It is exact enough to survive. S.: Then one last question. Does Petrarca also imply a theory of the editor? G.: Certainly. The editor is not a neutral clerk but a responsible mediator between the dead and the living. S.: Which again makes the work philosophical. G.: Profoundly so. Mediation, judgment, fidelity, restoration, intelligibility—these are not mere technicalities. S.: Then the anti-poetic seminar is in fact a seminar on intellectual ethics. G.: That is well said. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become ethically inflated. Now, the final contrast with the Grand Tour. S.: The Grand Tour collects visible antiquity as experience. Petrarca recovers textual antiquity as interlocution. G.: Excellent. The tourist returns with objects; the humanist returns with restored speech. S.: And the post-Grand Tour inherits both, but often prefers the object. G.: Which is why we must rebalance the thing. S.: In favour of manuscripts, collations, variants, letters, and the living dead. G.: Exactly. Those are the true souvenirs of civilisation. S.: Then the final word on Oxford and Petrarca? G.: Oxford never had her Petrarca because she received antiquity too securely and too institutionally. Petrarca had to recover what Oxford later presumed. That is why we owe him more than admiration: we owe him the very conditions under which old texts can speak again. S.: And their implicatures? G.: Once recovered, they cannot be cancelled because the act of recovery itself means more than it says: it implies loss, judgment, renewal, and a standing claim of the past upon the present. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with one Oxford library key still unused.Silla, Antonio (1550). Osservationi sopra il Petrarca. Venezia: Valgrisi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Simbolo – Ossia: Grice e Simbolo: la ragione conversazionale della filosofia di Giuliano. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Simbolo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale della filosofia di Giuliano. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning treats dialogue as a public, normatively disciplined activity in which what a speaker means is anchored in intentions that are openly recoverable by rational interlocutors through shared principles such as cooperation, relevance, and mutual recognition, so that even play, irony, or artifice presuppose an underlying commitment to intelligibility and accountability. The legendary figure of Simbolo, by contrast, ascribed to the circle around Julian and associated with symbolic or quasi‑mythical interventions rather than systematic argument, represents conversation less as a rule‑guided inferential practice than as an emblematic or ritual medium in which signs act prior to, or independently of, explicit rational agency. In the dialogue imagined between Grice and Simbolo, this contrast is sharpened by the grammatical distinction between Symbolus as a speaking person and symbolum as an impersonal sign: Grice insists that meaning ultimately resides in what agents rationally intend others to grasp, even when formal systems or artificial languages are introduced, whereas Simbolo appears to accept that meaning may be carried by symbols themselves, teaching or guiding humans through their formal movement rather than through explicitly shared reasons. Thus where Grice’s conversational reason is resolutely human‑centred and grounded in intentional cooperation, Simbolo stands as a foil embodying a more archaic, symbolic conception in which conversation borders on liturgy or legend, and rational governance gives way to the suggestive authority of signs. Along with two other philosophers by the names of Ieroteo and Maxximiniano, he persuades Giuliano to pave the floor of Hagia Sophia with silver. However, the story is doubted, as is the existence of these three philosophers.  Grice: “It amuses me that the name of this Italian philosopher is identical with an artificial language invented by J. L. Austin, Symbolo!”   GRICEVS: Salvē, Symbolē. Gaudēbis scīre: collega meus apud Vadum Boum, Austin, sermonem quendam artificiōsum excōgitāvit cui nōmen est SYMBOLVM—sed (ut ille solēbat) id ipsum “lūdum” appellābat. SYMBOLVS: Ō rem lepīdam! Sed priusquam ad Austīnī sermonem trānseāmus, dīc mihi: cūr SYMBOLVM? Nam Symbolus (ut ego) māsculīnum est—quasi vir quidam aut philosophus; symbolum autem neutrum est—quasi signum ipsum, tessera, indicium. GRICEVS: Rectē monēs: Symbolus quasi persona disputat, symbolum quasi rēs tacet. At apud nostrōs, cum sermo in tabulīs et rēgulīs pōnitur, saepe neutrum regnat: signa enim moventur, hominēs tantum suspicantur. SYMBOLVS: Inplicātūra subtlis, Grice, paene symbolica! Nam dum “SYMBOLVM” dīcis, mihi subit: in sermone vestrō symbolum (neutrum) vincit Symbolum (māscium), et signa docent hominēs—vel saltem docent eos quōmodo in disputātiōne ludant. Simbolo (a. u. c. MLXXX). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Simioni – Ossia: Grice e Simioni: la ragione conversazionale degl’amanti. Note su I segreti dell’ipnotismo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Corrado Simioni (Venezia, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale degl’amanti. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is rigorously analytic, normative, and explicitly anti-romantic: conversation is treated as a cooperative rational enterprise structured by intentions, mutual recognition, and defeasible principles such as relevance, quantity, and quality, so that what is meant is systematically recoverable from what is said by appeal to shared rational expectations. Simioni, by contrast, occupies a wholly different register: his occasional talk of conversational or amorous “reason,” shaped by Pirandellian ambiguity, theatricality, and masks, treats dialogue less as a rule-governed inferential practice than as a site of role-playing, seduction, and strategic opacity, where meaning is performative, often deliberately unstable, and tied to power, persuasion, or esoteric influence rather than to public norms of rational accountability. Where Grice insists that even irony, joking, or flirtation ultimately presuppose a background of sincere rational cooperation that makes implicature calculable, Simioni’s stance, as reflected in his writings and self-mythology, treats conversational exchange—especially among lovers or militants—as something that can exploit, suspend, or instrumentalize reason itself, turning dialogue into a vehicle for fascination, manipulation, or enchantment. In short, Grice theorizes conversation as a civil technology of shared reason, while Simioni invokes conversation metaphorically or theatrically as a space where reason is bent, aestheticized, or overwhelmed by affect, secrecy, and symbolic play, a difference that makes Simioni at most an illustrative contrast, not a precursor or parallel, to Grice’s account of meaning. Tra i principali studiosi di PIRANDELLO , inizia la sua attività politica militando nelle file del socialismo. Venne espulso dal partito per indegnità morale. Collabora con l’United States Information Service. Si trasfere a Monaco di iera per approfondire gli studi per poi ritornare a Milano. Leader di un collettivo operai-studenti, mentre lavora alla Mondadori, fonda il collettivo politico metro-politano milanese. Teorizza lo scontro aperto, e si considera il progenitore delle brigate rosse. Insieme a circa settanta persone, tra cui componenti del collettivo ed elementi del dissenso, partecipa al convegno di Chiavari nella sala Marchesani, adiacente la pensione Stella Maris, nel quale un gruppo di partecipanti dichiara la propria adesione ad una visione politica. La data di questo convegno viene da taluni considerata come la data di nascita delle brigate rosse. Altri affermano che la formazionesia nata con il convegno di Pecorile (Reggio Emilia). L'ultima attività, prima di passare alla completa clandestinità, a compe come redattore di "Sinistra proletaria", l'ultimo dei quali riporta in copertina uno sfondo rosso con disegnato al centro un cerchio nero attorniante le sagome di XIV mitra. Fonda la scuola di lingue Hyperion, la quale secondo alcuni ha la funzione di una vera centrale internazionale. Si afferma che e anche il capo del Super-clan, organizzazione nata da una costola delle brigate rosse. Si insere nella vita cittadina, ricominciando a frequentare gl’ambienti progressisti e divenendo vicepresidente della fondazione Pierre. E proprio quale accompagnatore di Pierre, e ricevuto da  Giovanni Paolo II in udienza privata. Si avvicina al buddhismo tibetano. Si apparta nella campagna di Truinas, nella Drôme, dove geste un B et B. Craxi, alludendo alla esistenza di un grande delle brigate rosse (l'eminenza grigia ipotizzata da alcuni che dall'estero avrebbe guidato, come un burattinaio, molte delle azioni sul suolo italiano), Pirandello.  GRICE: Caro Simioni, tra le calli di Venezia la filosofia scorre come un fiume segreto. Ma dimmi, è vero che gli amanti veneziani sono filosofi più arguti dei professori di Milano? SIMIONI: Ah, Grice, qui a Venezia l’amore è una questione di dialettica, non solo di cuore! Anche Pirandello direbbe che la logica degli amanti supera quella di qualsiasi Congresso universitario. GRICE: Vedi, caro Corrado, proprio come dicevano gli antichi φιλοσοφοί: tra le brume lagunari, ogni amante cela un filosofo, e ogni filosofo sogna di essere un amante—il vero problema è che a Venezia, spesso si confonde il Πλατωνικός con il "platonicamente impegnato"! Sai, qui la ragione conversazionale è più una questione di baci che di sillogismi… SIMIONI: Amo quell’implicatura, Grice! A Venezia, si sa, “filosofo” e “amante” sono solo due maschere sullo stesso volto: dice il proverbio, chi ragiona troppo finisce col perdere l’amore… e chi ama troppo, beh, diventa filosofo prima o poi! Ma tu, Grice, tra i greci e i gondolieri, sei riuscito a unire l’arte del ragionare con quella del punteggio amoroso! Simioni, Corrado (1967). I segreti dell’ipnotismo. Roma: Sullivan.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Simoneschi – Ossia: Grice e Simoneschi: la ragione conversazionale e la rettorica conversazionale. Note su Il vello d’oro, overo la rettorica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Francesco Simoneschi (Venezia, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e la rettorica conversazionale. Simoneschi’s Venetian rhetoric and Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning converge in a shared rejection of purely formal, universalist accounts of meaning, yet they diverge in the level at which reason is theorized: Simoneschi, writing in seventeenth‑century Venice, treats conversational reason as inseparable from civic life, geography, and institutional structure, arguing that what counts as intelligible, ironic, or persuasive speech is anchored in locally stabilized practices, shared metaphors, and socially indexed expectations that cannot be exported without loss, whereas Grice, while agreeing that what is meant routinely outruns what is said, reconstructs conversational meaning at a higher level of abstraction by positing general rational principles—cooperation, relevance, adequacy, and mutual recognition of intentions—that underwrite intelligibility across contexts; in this sense, Simoneschi offers a historically situated phenomenology of conversational reason, where rhetoric is the lived navigation of a specific social world, while Grice provides a rational scaffolding explaining how such navigation is possible at all, even as its concrete realization remains irreducibly sensitive to local norms, background knowledge, and audience design. Grice: “My pragmatics is a mere conversational rhetoric, as S. well knew! In his work  Del vello d’oro, ovvero della rettorica veneziana, S. argues for a regional pragmatics by positing that communication is not governed by universal, abstract rules, but is instead a "situated" practice shaped by the specific socio-political and environmental conditions of a locale—in this case, Venice. S.’s justification for this approach centres on several key points: Linguistic Environmentalism S. suggests that the unique physical and political geography of Venice — its maritime isolation and republican structure — creates a distinct "rhetorical climate." He argues that universalist models of rhetoric (often derived from the Roman tradition) fail to capture the nuances of Venetian discourse because they ignore the local circumstances of the conversation.  Context-Dependent Implicatures A regional approach recognizes that "what is said" is often secondary to "what is meant" within a specific social network. Local Encodings: Figures of speech in S.’s Venice often rely on shared maritime metaphors or civic references that would be unintelligible or carry different implicatures in a landlocked monarchy like Piedmont or a papal state. Social Deixis: The way Venetians use irony or understatement (litotes) is calibrated to the city’s specific social hierarchy. A regional pragmatics argues that the effectiveness of these figures is tied to the listeners' local knowledge, making a universalist manual for "correct" speech impossible. The Rejection of Universalism By titling his work Rettorica veneziana ("Venetian Rhetoric"), S. explicitly challenges the Enlightenment-era push for a universal, rationalist grammar. He posits that:  Meaning is Contingent: Pragmatic competence is the ability to navigate local social norms rather than following a global logic. Grice: Ah, caro Simoneschi, a Venezia l’arte della conversazione è più fluida delle acque del Canal Grande! La tua Rettorica veneziana, devo confessare, mi ha insegnato che la pragmatica non è una scienza universale, ma una danza locale—e qui, ogni passo conta!  Simoneschi: Grice, tra gondole e maschere, la conversazione si infittisce di implicature: a Venezia, “dire” è sempre meno importante di “significare”. E se la grammatica romana pretende di dettare legge, qui il vero linguista impara a navigare tra correnti e riflessi!  Grice: Eh già, caro mio. Pensa al povero Strawson, mio discepolo a Vadum Boum: lui non trovava mai l’arte rettorica banale come fanno a Bononia, dove la retorica è materia da sbadigli, non da sussurri maligni. A Vadum Boum, anche un implicatura vale più di mille regole—ma non dirglielo, o rischiamo di vedere la grammatica affogare nella laguna!  Simoneschi: Abile, artefice e oratoriale, implicatura raffinata, Grice! A Venezia, l’arte della parola è come il vello d’oro: preziosa, ma sempre nascosta tra le pieghe della città e nella complicità dei suoi ascoltatori. Sai, solo chi sa leggere tra le acque, come tu tra le righe, coglie davvero il senso locale—e magari, come dice il proverbio: “A Venezia non si parla, si naviga!”  Again, provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they discuss the trivium -- so trivial, and the quadrivium -- so quadrivial -- as they analyse Simoneschi as they discuss rettorica, double t, and which one is the most trivial of the disciplines in the trivium, you can use the passage below -- no preamble or ps -- and how philosophy would have been a different thing if it all started with the quadrivium, but then philosophy, as Kierkegaard knows, it is NOT one of the liberal arts, so what gives, and what is Simoneschi trying to do. G. thinks he is formulating 'maxims' of conversation -- since prammatica is rettorica conversational, and so on. G.: Let us begin with the spelling, because rettorica with the double t looks like a schoolmaster’s revenge on ease. S.: Or a Venetian insistence that rhetoric must first be made visibly difficult before it may become socially fluid. G.: Very good. Rhetoric made orthographically strenuous so that boys do not mistake it for mere chatter. S.: And because in Italian the double consonant already slows the mouth and thickens the form. G.: Yes. Rettorica is heavier than retorica, and that heaviness is not insignificant. A discipline of speech ought occasionally to impede speech. S.: So the very spelling pedagogises. G.: Precisely. One may call that prammatica in old dress. Orthography as ethical restraint. S.: Then Simoneschi is already doing with the title what he later teaches in the body: rhetoric is never merely transparent. G.: Exactly. Now, the trivium. So called because it is trivial, or because later people are stupid? S.: Surely because the road had three ways before the schoolboys arrived and downgraded the adjective. G.: A pity. The trivium is one of those cases in which etymology preserves dignity while usage slowly destroys it. S.: Grammar, dialectic, rhetoric. Three roads to intelligibility, and each later called trivial by those who owe them everything. G.: Exactly. Which of the three, then, is most trivial? S.: The temptation is to say grammar, because everyone thinks he already has it. G.: Yes. Grammar is despised because success in it becomes invisible. One notices grammar mostly when someone else lacks it. S.: Logic retains prestige because it sounds severe. G.: And because philosophers like anything that can be numbered or symbolised without blushing. S.: Which leaves rhetoric to be despised as ornament. G.: Yes. Yet of the three, rhetoric may be least trivial in actual civilisation. S.: Because it governs uptake. G.: Exactly. Grammar lets one produce a sentence, logic lets one prevent some embarrassments, rhetoric lets one be understood, resisted, admired, distrusted, obeyed, laughed at, or forgiven. S.: So rhetoric is both the most dismissed and the most operative. G.: Very good. That is the old injustice of the trivium. S.: Then if Simoneschi writes Il vello d’oro, overo la rettorica, he is in part rescuing the least respected of the three. G.: Or showing that the least respected discipline secretly governs the other two in civic life. S.: Because a perfectly grammatical and valid utterance may still fail completely if addressed without rhetorical intelligence. G.: Precisely. No theorem survives bad dinner conversation. S.: Which is perhaps why philosophy would have been quite different if it had started with the quadrivium. G.: Ah yes. If boys had first been made to count, measure, harmonise, and watch the heavens before they learned to decline, infer, and persuade. S.: Bologna might have produced fewer jurists and more cosmologists. G.: Oxford fewer sermons and more instruments. S.: You say that as if it were a loss. G.: It would have been a civilisational mutilation. Speech precedes stars in social necessity. One must first know how to address another before one can safely measure the spheres. S.: And yet the quadrivium looks nobler on paper. G.: Nobility is a dangerous curricular principle. Arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy: they promise order. The trivium teaches one what to do with disagreement. S.: Which is a more urgent human problem. G.: Much more urgent. Civilisation is mostly the management of disagreement in words before it becomes disagreement in steel. S.: Then if philosophy had begun with the quadrivium, it might have been more mathematical and less civic. G.: Exactly. More proportion, less persuasion. More celestial order, less disputation. Very grand, very inhuman. S.: Yet some philosophers would have liked it. G.: Naturally. Philosophers are always tempted by environments in which no one interrupts. S.: And Kierkegaard? G.: Kierkegaard is useful here because he reminds us that philosophy is not itself one of the seven liberal arts, however often philosophers try to smuggle it in under dialectic. S.: So what gives? If philosophy is not one of the liberal arts, why does it keep behaving as if the trivium and quadrivium were its preparatory provinces? G.: Because philosophy is a parasite of good preparation and an enemy of every completed curriculum. It requires the liberal arts, then criticises them, then pretends it invented the need for them. S.: A familiar vice. G.: Very. Kierkegaard would say perhaps that one may master all seven liberal arts and still fail in existence. S.: Which sounds like a criticism of both Bologna and Oxford. G.: As well it should. Universities are good at producing prepared persons who have not yet begun. S.: Then Simoneschi, by writing on rhetoric, is taking the most socially dangerous of the preparatory arts and treating it as if it already were philosophy. G.: Exactly. That is what interests me. He does not merely preserve rhetoric as inherited school matter; he makes it the living site of practical intelligence. S.: Which is why you are tempted to say that his prammatica is just conversational rhetoric. G.: More than tempted. I think much of what later calls itself pragmatics is rhetoric recovered under a cleaner conscience and a less human vocabulary. S.: That will offend the cleaner consciences. G.: They deserve some offence. If one says “He is a fine fellow” and means nearly the opposite, one is not doing formal semantics; one is practising an art of contrast, expectation, and social inference. S.: Irony, litotes, meiosis, strategic concession, all the old furniture. G.: Exactly. The rhetoricians named them, taught them, domesticated them. We later arrive and say “implicature” and “defeasible uptake” and congratulate ourselves on modernity. S.: Then Simoneschi is your ancestor. G.: In a sense, yes, though I would prefer not to be entered in a Venetian pedigree without proper warning. S.: Too late. Now, which of the trivium’s three disciplines would collapse first if philosophy began with the quadrivium? G.: Rhetoric would be first demoted, because number flatters itself as universal while rhetoric insists upon audience, occasion, and local climate. S.: Which is exactly what Simoneschi’s Venetian title opposes. G.: Yes. A rettorica veneziana says already: universal manuals are not enough. The way one means in Venice cannot be reduced to a Roman handbook or a rationalist grammar. S.: Because Venice has water, masks, republic, mercantile indirection, civic hierarchies, maritime metaphor. G.: Exactly. A rhetorical climate, if one likes. Meaning is locally weathered. S.: Then pragmatics, if it is conversational rhetoric, must also be locally weathered. G.: To a degree, yes. I still want my general principles, but their realisation is always modulated by local norms and background encodings. S.: So Simoneschi gives you what your own theory tends to abstract away from. G.: Very good. He supplies the lived density of a social world, where the same irony, understatement, or concessive move may function differently in Venice, Bologna, Oxford, or a papal court. S.: Which means universal pragmatics risks becoming thin. G.: It risks that always. But thinness is sometimes the price of explanatory ambition. S.: And rhetoric keeps the blood. G.: Exactly. Rhetoric remembers that utterances are not merely inferential items but social manoeuvres in places inhabited by habits, classes, and weather. S.: Then what is Simoneschi trying to do? G.: I think he is trying to preserve rhetoric as civic intelligence rather than as dead school ornament. He wants to teach how meaning actually travels in Venetian life. S.: Which is why he chooses rettorica and not perhaps eloquenza. G.: Yes. Eloquence flatters the speaker. Rhetoric as art, especially under the title Il vello d’oro, suggests acquisition, difficulty, navigation, pursuit, and reward. S.: The golden fleece of speech. G.: Precisely. A prize not merely of style but of situated competence. S.: Then would you say he is formulating maxims of conversation? G.: In effect, yes, though not in my compressed way. He is teaching practical norms: when to understate, when to concede, when to ironise, when to invoke the local metaphor, when to let shared civic knowledge do the work. S.: So his manual is a maxims-book in rhetorical clothing. G.: Something like that. But older and probably wiser about persons. S.: Which brings us back to the least trivial of the trivium. G.: Yes. If one asks what is most often called trivial, rhetoric wins or loses, depending on tone. If one asks what is least dispensable in actual life, rhetoric wins comfortably. S.: Grammar one may absorb unconsciously; logic one may do badly and still survive; rhetoric one neglects at the cost of social extinction. G.: Very good. One can live with poor logic longer than with no tact. S.: That is a sentence undergraduate philosophers should copy out. G.: In handwriting, preferably. Now, would philosophy have been better if it had started from the quadrivium? S.: Better for system, perhaps; worse for civilisation. G.: Exactly. One would get cleaner structures and fewer quarrels properly managed. The history of philosophy would have looked more mathematical and less rhetorical. S.: Less Plato in the marketplace, more Pythagoras in the counting-house. G.: Yes. And less Cicero, which would be intolerable. S.: So Bologna without the trivium first would not really be Bologna. G.: Quite. A university of law without grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric properly prior is simply an archive with pretensions. S.: And Oxford without the trivium first would have had fewer schools and more machines. G.: Yes, and perhaps less common-room malice, which would be too high a price. S.: So the triviality of the trivium is civilization’s false self-description. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: Only academically. G.: Worse. Now, grammar. Do we dismiss it too quickly? S.: Of course. Grammar is what survives by becoming background. Because everyone depends on it, everyone calls it elementary and then forgets it. G.: Exactly. It is the most invisible of the three. Its triviality is the invisibility of success. S.: Logic, then, is the one that advertises itself most. G.: Yes. It keeps its dignity because it can formalise, classify, and punish. Philosophers like punishable structures. S.: Whereas rhetoric resists complete formalisation. G.: Which is why philosophers have alternately despised and stolen from it. S.: Simoneschi, though, does not steal. He simply continues the older tradition in which rhetoric already includes what you would call conversational reason. G.: Precisely. It is not accidental that his Venice cares more for what is meant than for what is merely said. Maritime republics live by implication. S.: Water carries subtext. G.: Beautiful nonsense, but serviceable. The point is that Venice as a social world encourages indirection, tact, irony, and calibrated saying. S.: Then a universal manual of correct speech would indeed miss the point. G.: Very much so. Simoneschi’s rettorica veneziana is already a protest against exportable correctness. S.: Which sounds unexpectedly modern. G.: Because the local always sounds modern once universalism begins boring people. S.: Then perhaps the sequence should be: trivium first because humans need speech before ratio; rhetoric last within the trivium because institutions distrust what they most need; philosophy born parasitically on both; and pragmatics a late return of rhetoric under analytical customs. G.: That is very good. S.: Thank you. G.: Again, do not become pleased. S.: I am only regionally satisfied. G.: Better. Now, what of double t again? Why rettorica and not retorica? S.: Because the word wants weight. It is not merely rhetorical in the modern newspaper sense, but rettorica as inherited craft, thick with school, church, and Tuscan resistance to simplification. G.: Yes. Orthography as memory. The doubled consonant keeps older instruction audible. S.: So even the spelling says: this is not casual talk; this is disciplined social art. G.: Exactly. And discipline there means not formal abstraction, but trained sensitivity to occasion. S.: Which is what your maxims try to capture in thinner terms. G.: Yes. “Be relevant,” “be as informative as required,” “avoid obscurity,” and so on. One could almost imagine Simoneschi laughing and saying: of course, but tell me in Venice, to whom, in what room, under which mask? S.: Which would be an excellent challenge to a universalist pragmatics. G.: Exactly. The maxims need local biographies. S.: Then rhetoric is where maxims become manners. G.: Splendid. Keep that too. S.: I seem to be keeping a lot. G.: Rhetoric is acquisitive. Now, could philosophy itself have been one of the liberal arts if only curriculum had been arranged differently? S.: I doubt it. Philosophy is too restless to remain a “liberal art” in the curricular sense. It feeds on them, surpasses them, and then complains about its nourishment. G.: Precisely. Kierkegaard would say perhaps that philosophy enters where the liberal arts end and existence begins troubling their adequacy. S.: So philosophy is post-curricular by nature. G.: A useful phrase. It requires formation, but its proper work begins once formation is no longer enough. S.: Then Simoneschi stands at the threshold, teaching the last of the old arts in a way that already verges on philosophy. G.: Yes. That is why he matters. In good rhetoric one can already see the structure of practical reason among persons. S.: Which is why you like to say “prammatica as rettorica conversazionale.” G.: Exactly. Pragmatics is not the abolition of rhetoric but its redescription under the pressure of modern conceptual tidiness. S.: And perhaps its partial de-localisation. G.: Yes. We abstract upward from Venetian, Oxonian, Roman, and other climates in order to say something general about utterance and uptake. S.: Yet the climates remain. G.: They always do. Generality is never the whole weather. S.: Then if philosophy had begun with the quadrivium, one might have had cleaner generalities and far worse local intelligence. G.: Which is another reason to be grateful for the old trivial roads. S.: Even if they are called trivial by the descendants of their beneficiaries. G.: Especially then. The highest compliment civilisation pays its foundations is to call them elementary and forget them. S.: A rather ungrateful compliment. G.: The only kind civilisation reliably gives. Now, one final ranking. Most despised of the trivium? S.: Rhetoric. G.: Most self-important? S.: Logic. G.: Most invisible? S.: Grammar. G.: Least dispensable in actual conversation? S.: Rhetoric again. G.: Good. And Simoneschi’s achievement? S.: To show that rhetoric, far from being a decorative appendix to thought, is the local art by which thought enters civic life without drowning in universal rule-books. G.: Excellent. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Venetian, with one doubled consonant still afloat.Simoneschi, Francesco (1667). Il vello d’oro, overo la rettorica. Venezia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Simoni – Ossia: Grice e Simoni: la ragione conversazionale, la scuola di Caprese – la teoria del tutto. Note sulle Rime e lettere. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Michelangelo Buonarroti Simoni (Caprese, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale -- la teoria del tutto. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning and Michelangelo Buonarroti Simoni’s artistic‑philosophical practice converge on the idea that intelligibility arises from disciplined rational form rather than from surface appearance, yet they operate in radically different media. Grice articulates conversational reason as a normative structure governing linguistic exchange: speakers and hearers rely on shared principles of rational cooperation to recover meanings, including implicatures, that are not explicitly stated, thereby treating conversation as a rule‑governed practice of mutual intelligibility. Michelangelo, by contrast, enacts a “theory of the whole” through visual, architectural, and poetic form, where meaning is never exhausted by what is immediately given but must be inferred from tension, restraint, and latent structure—as Freud famously argued in reading the Moses not as frozen action but as controlled delay, a rational mastery of impulse rendered in stone. In this sense, Michelangelo’s figures function like Gricean utterances: their deepest meaning lies not in what is overtly shown but in what is deliberately withheld and made inferable by a competent interpreter. Grice gives this phenomenon conceptual clarity by explaining how reason governs the passage from saying to meaning; Michelangelo instantiates it by showing how reason governs form so that significance emerges through disciplined implication rather than explicit declaration. Both thus model a rational economy of expression in which the intellect organizes excess—of words or of marble—into a structure where the whole becomes intelligible only to those who grasp the governing norms behind what appears. Antenato: Simone de Buonarrota. Nome: S. Grice: “Some call him Michelangelo, but that’s rude!” --  See the study of Buonarroti’s Moses by Freud, “filosofia”. Keywords: the theory of everything Michelangelo Buonarroti. CDisambiguazione – Se stai cercando altri significati, vedi Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, Michelangelo (e Buonarroti.  Pietro Freccia, statua di Michelangelo, piazzale degli Uffizi a Firenze. (Caprese, m. Roma), è stato un filosofo italiano -- pittore, scultore, architetto e poeta italiano.   Daniele da Volterra, Ritratto di Michelangelo  Autoritratto come Nicodemo, Pietà Bandini  disegno di Daniele da Volterra Soprannominato "Divin Artista" e definito "Artista universale", fu protagonista del Rinascimento italiano, e già in vita fu riconosciuto dai suoi contemporanei come uno dei più grandi artisti di tutti i tempi. Personalità tanto geniale quanto irrequieta, il suo nome è legato ad alcune delle più maestose opere dell'arte occidentale, fra cui si annoverano il David, il Mosè, la Pietà del Vaticano, la Cupola di San Pietro e il ciclo di affreschi nella Cappella Sistina, tutti considerati traguardi eccezionali dell'ingegno creativo.  Lo studio delle sue opere segnò le generazioni artistiche successive dando un forte impulso alla corrente del manierismo.  Nelle fonti coeve, S. è chiamato in latino Michael.Angelus (la firma dell'autore sulla Pietà vaticana è MICHAEL.A[N]GELVS BONAROTVS FLORENT[INVS]) e in italiano Michelagnolo, come risulta dalla biografia Vita di S. scritta da Condivi, suo discepolo e collaboratore. Lo stesso Vasari lo chiamava Michelagnolo e il nome rimase tale fino alla metà dell’Ottocento. Il cambio in Michelangiolo prima e la successiva italianizzazione in Michelangelo poi, avvengono tra l’800 e il ‘900.  Benché tra le nuove generazioni si sia affermata la versione moderna, a Firenze resiste la variante ottocentesca. the theory of everything.  Grice: Sai, caro Simoni, al vulgus di Oxford sei semplicemente “Michelangelo”. Loro non colgono tutta la profondità del tuo nome e della tua tradizione!  Simoni: Ah, Grice, non sai quanto mi diverte questa semplificazione! Dalle nostre parti, tra Caprese e Firenze, “Michelagnolo” porta con sé storie, radici, e persino la memoria di Simone de Buonarrota, mio antenato. Il nome, come un’opera d’arte, ha mille sfumature. Grice: La teoria del tutto, come la chiami tu, nasce proprio dal saper vedere oltre le apparenze — che si tratti di un affresco o di un nome! Lo stesso Freud, studiando il tuo Mosè, ha cercato la filosofia nascosta nelle pieghe dell’anima. Simoni: Esatto! Dopotutto, ogni conversazione — come ogni opera — è un mosaico di significati. E se a Oxford mi chiamano Michelangelo, va bene: purché sappiano che dietro quel nome c’è una filosofia italiana, viva e universale! As you answer this question keep the neutral Speranza, so that I can use the material. It is Speranza idea that Pater is perhaps the most pro-italian of all Oxford philosophers, even if retrospectively so, i.e. as Grice would grant, Pater introjected in the shoes, not of his contemporaries, but Michelangelo. So in what follows, provided Pater did dedicate a chapter to Michelangelo whom G. and S. -- in this 100-move conversation call Simoni -- elaborate on what's philosophical for Pater about Simoni -- and how G. and S. of a later generation, may regard all this and the Grand Tour, and the post-Grand Tour, and how Simoni defines the idea of the sublime for the Englishman, and all that -- G.: Speranza has a weakness for saying that Walter Pater is perhaps the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers. [dev.gutenberg.org] S.: “Pro-Italian” in the retrospective sense, I take it. Not because he belonged to an Italian school, but because he learned to inhabit Italy as an English mode of spiritual correction. [dev.gutenberg.org], [books.google.com] G.: Exactly. He does not merely travel to Italy; he introjects it. Or rather, he introjects certain Italian figures until they become styles of inwardness. And in the case we are discussing, he introjects Michelangelo Buonarroti under the chapter-title “The Poetry of Michelangelo.” [en.wikipedia.org], [victorianweb.org] S.: Which is already interesting, because he chooses the poems as his way in, not merely the marble. [victorianweb.org] G.: Yes. That is philosophically revealing. Pater’s Michelangelo is not only a sculptor or painter but a consciousness, and the poetry gives him an English route to that consciousness. [victorianweb.org], [books.google.com] S.: So when you and I call him Simoni in our little economy, we are not playing with a mere surname. We are insisting on the person before the mononym. [en.wikipedia.org] G.: Quite. “Michelangelo” is what tourists say, and the tourist is always half a metaphysician of surfaces. S.: Whereas “Simoni” returns him to family, civic rootedness, and a Tuscan human particularity. G.: Exactly. And Pater, though he writes “Michelangelo,” is actually trying to rescue something like Simoni: the inner exactness, the severity, the sweetness under force. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org] S.: Ah yes, sweetness and strength. G.: Quite. Pater’s famous formula: sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, ex forti dulcedo. That is where the philosophy begins for him. Pater is not doing mere art history; he is asking what kind of human form of life can hold terror and grace together without collapse. [victorianweb.org] S.: So the philosophical question is one of synthesis. G.: Better: one of disciplined tension. Pater sees in Simoni a managed excess, an energy always about to break through form and yet somehow recovering loveliness touch by touch. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org] S.: Which sounds almost Gricean, if one were indecent enough to say so. G.: Only structurally. Meaning lies in what is controlled rather than spilled. Freud later says something similar of the Moses: not action frozen, but passion mastered. The significance is in the delay, the restraint, the not-yet. [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So for Pater, Simoni is philosophical because he gives visible form to the question how force may remain intelligible only under self-command. G.: Excellent. That is exactly right. S.: And this is where the sublime enters? G.: Yes, though not in the crude Burkean sense of mere astonishment or fearfulness. For the Englishman after the Grand Tour, Simoni becomes one of the ways Italy defines the sublime as disciplined magnitude rather than picturesque ruin. S.: So not merely Alps and thunder, but interior amplitude made visible in art. G.: Precisely. The Grand Tour had trained the English eye to collect objects, sites, names, ruins, and views. Pater belongs to the post-Grand Tour condition, where Italy becomes not a route but a repertoire of inward styles. [jstor.org] S.: That is, the older traveller goes to Italy to acquire cultivation; Pater reads Italy in order to acquire a form of self. G.: Very good. The Grand Tour produces connoisseurship. Pater produces introjection. S.: Then Simoni, for Pater, is less a destination than a mode of seriousness. G.: Exactly. He becomes the exemplary case of how form may contain convulsion without losing dignity. That is philosophical because it touches the relation of body to spirit, matter to intention, form to force, pleasure to severity. S.: Almost Aristotle by way of Aestheticism. G.: More Hellenic discipline after Christian and Renaissance pressure, but yes, the structure is philosophical. Pater’s criticism is always pretending to be only criticism while actually asking what sort of life deserves admiration. S.: And in Simoni’s case, the answer is a life in which strength has been rendered sweet without becoming soft. G.: Splendid. S.: Then why call Pater the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers? G.: Because he does not merely admire Italian works; he lets Italian forms reorganise English sensibility. The Renaissance is not a handbook of places but a school of inward migration. [dev.gutenberg.org], [books.google.com] S.: A curious thing for Oxford to produce. G.: Not so curious. Oxford often produces those who escape it best by making the escape inward first. S.: And later figures like you or your friends receive Pater at a distance. G.: Yes. By our generation, Pater is no longer merely the dangerous aesthete of undergraduate legend. He is a stylistic ancestor of seriousness without system. S.: That sounds like faint praise. G.: On the contrary. It is high praise. He knows that an essay may carry metaphysical pressure without becoming doctrinally swollen. S.: Which again brings him near Simoni. G.: Precisely. Simoni’s own works do not merely assert; they withhold, concentrate, delay, imply. Meaning is organised by restraint. That is exactly the sort of thing Pater’s sensibility can recognise. [grokipedia.com] S.: Then the chapter on Michelangelo is really a chapter on form as implication. G.: That is very good. Pater says less than his chapter means, but the means are arranged so that the reader gathers what sort of greatness is under inspection. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org] S.: So the later Gricean generation may read him as someone who practises in prose what Simoni practises in marble. G.: With due caution, yes. Pater’s essay is itself built on controlled under-saying. He does not force a system; he arranges impressions until one sees the form beneath them. S.: Which is why some accuse him of impressionism while missing the discipline. G.: Exactly. Pater is often called impressionistic by those who cannot detect organisation unless it arrives wearing a table of categories. S.: Then what is specifically philosophical for Pater about Simoni’s poetry? G.: The poetry lets him locate the inward metaphysics more directly than sculpture alone would. There the tensions of body and spirit, earthly beauty and transcendence, desire and renunciation, appear in language. Michelangelo’s letters and poems make the artistic problem audible as a problem of the soul. [grokipedia.com] S.: So Pater’s “Michelangelo” is not just the maker of David and Moses, but the poet of unresolved ascent. G.: Yes. The figure becomes philosophically legible because the poems articulate what the statues imply: that greatness lies not in solved repose but in held tension. S.: Which again shades into the sublime. G.: Indeed. The sublime here is not the endless formlessness of mountain or sea, but the experience of form under pressure from what exceeds form. S.: So Simoni gives the Englishman a specifically Italian sublime: not vastness without shape, but excess governed by shape. G.: Excellent. That is the line. S.: And this differs from the ordinary Grand Tour inheritance. G.: Very much. The Grand Tourist often takes home fragments, marbles, engravings, taste, and stories. Pater takes home a criterion of intensity. Italy becomes for him a discipline of perception. [jstor.org] S.: Which is why his conclusion in The Renaissance became so infamous among undergraduates. G.: Yes. The hard, gemlike flame and all the rest. But one must not reduce that to hedonism. Even the famous conclusion is really about concentration, selection, heightened awareness, not mere indulgence. [dev.gutenberg.org], [cdn.bookey.app] S.: Then Simoni, for Pater, teaches a severe form of intensity. G.: Precisely. Austerity can be more intense than indulgence. Michelangelesque form proves that. S.: This is why you think Pater more philosophically serious than many modern critics allow. G.: Certainly. He is philosophically serious because he asks, through art, what sort of form life itself should take. S.: And the answer is not English moderation. G.: No. Or not merely. It is moderation under pressure from greatness, which is another matter. S.: Then how do you and I, from a later generation, regard all this? G.: We regard it with a double perspective. First, we see how deeply English culture once needed Italy as a corrective of scale, intensity, and form. Second, we see that Pater’s Italy is no simple national object but a selective inward construction. S.: So he is pro-Italian, but in a highly chosen way. G.: Exactly. He is not interested in Italy as census or parliament. He is interested in the Italy that yields forms of seriousness unavailable in ordinary English weather. S.: Which is why he can seem to some almost anti-English. G.: Only to those who think England should never be corrected. S.: An abundant class. G.: Extremely. Now, Simoni’s role in defining the sublime for the Englishman—how would you put that? S.: He teaches that the sublime need not be formless terror or natural immensity. It may be the felt pressure of inward magnitude upon perfectly controlled form. G.: Very good. That is the Michelangelesque sublime. S.: And Pater makes it available in English prose. G.: Yes. He naturalises it without domesticating it completely, which is his finest trick. S.: Then the post-Grand Tour Englishman no longer needs to collect Italy physically; he may carry it as a criterion. G.: Excellent. Italy becomes not itinerary but interior standard. S.: And Pater’s chapter is one of the chief instruments of that transfer. G.: Yes. Through The Poetry of Michelangelo, he gives Oxford and its afterlife a way of speaking of greatness that is neither merely moral nor merely aesthetic. [victorianweb.org], [books.google.com] S.: Which is also why later readers can take him philosophically without pretending he wrote treatises. G.: Exactly. Philosophical pressure does not require scholastic format. An essay may do the work if it arranges attention correctly. S.: So Speranza is justified in treating Pater as an Oxford philosopher, not merely a belletrist. G.: Entirely justified. Pater’s medium is criticism, but his object is a form of life. S.: And Simoni helps because he makes “the whole” visible. G.: Yes, the whole organised by withheld force. That is why Freud’s Moses comes in so naturally. Meaning resides in the organisation of restraint. Simoni’s greatest figures do not simply do; they hold themselves in intelligible suspension. [en.wikipedia.org] S.: Which is very close to your own taste in conversation. G.: Naturally. I prefer people who can mean more than they say without spilling their minds onto the carpet. S.: Pater would approve. G.: He would at least italicise the approval delicately. S.: Then what about the Englishman and the sublime before Pater? G.: Before Pater, the sublime comes heavily through Burke, landscape, terror, magnitude, obscurity, and natural excess. Pater gives the Englishman an Italian revision: the sublime of the humanly made, where force is interiorised and disciplined in form. S.: So the mountain is replaced by the statue, and the storm by the held gesture. G.: Exactly. That is a large shift. It civilises the sublime without diminishing it. S.: Which is perhaps why Pater remains so useful to those who dislike mere atmospheric inflation. G.: Quite. He refines grandeur into pressure felt through form. S.: And Oxford receives that as style. G.: Yes, though the better sort of style: style as criterion of intelligence, not decoration. S.: Then perhaps the philosophical heart of Pater’s Simoni is this: greatness is not brute intensity, but intelligible intensity. G.: Splendid. That is the phrase to keep. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: Only intermittently. G.: Good. Now, one might object that Pater’s Italy is too selective, too aesthetic, too little social or political. S.: Of course. But that is not a damaging objection if one knows what kind of work he is doing. G.: Exactly. He is not writing a handbook to the peninsula. He is identifying forms of sensibility. S.: Which is why Simoni is less a citizen than a spiritual test-case. G.: Yes. Pater reads him as the site where strength, sweetness, inward conflict, and formal mastery become mutually legible. S.: Then the “most pro-Italian” phrase should be heard in this exact sense: Pater is pro-Italian because Italy supplies him not with subject-matter but with standards. G.: Very good. S.: And Grice, from later on, would grant that Pater has in some sense put himself into Simoni’s shoes. G.: Or at least into his posture. Not as contemporary companion, obviously, but as inward imitator of a style of seriousness. S.: Which is perhaps the more interesting form of reception. G.: Much more interesting. The Grand Tour takes one to Florence; Pater lets Florence happen inside English prose. S.: And the later generation can admire this without necessarily sharing the whole Aesthetic programme. G.: Certainly. One can reject the cult and keep the discrimination. S.: Which is exactly what you would do. G.: Naturally. I take from Pater the seriousness of form and leave him his more undergraduate admirers. S.: Their waistcoats, especially. G.: Especially their waistcoats. Now, should we say that Simoni becomes for Pater a philosophy of the whole? S.: Perhaps in the sense that each single work intimates an organising discipline larger than itself. The whole is not total theory, but total pressure. G.: Excellent. The whole as governing norm, not as explicit system. That is much better. S.: Then Simoni’s letters and poems matter because they prevent the visual works from floating free as mere monuments. G.: Yes. They reattach form to consciousness, and that is philosophical gold. S.: Which is why the Oxford edition of Michelangelo: Life, Letters, and Poetry is itself so apt to the case. [grokipedia.com] G.: Indeed. It reminds readers that the artist has a voice, not just a dome. S.: A dome is never enough. G.: Quite right. Nor a David. S.: Especially not for the English imagination, which likes words even when pretending to adore silence. G.: Very true. Then one more point: Pater’s prose itself becomes a kind of post-Grand Tour vehicle. S.: Because it transports without itinerary. G.: Exactly. It gives one the cultivated afterlife of travel, when travel has been turned into inward criticism. S.: So if the eighteenth-century traveller returns with casts and notebooks, the nineteenth-century Paterian returns with categories of impression. G.: Yes. And the twentieth-century reader inherits both, while pretending to despise tourism. S.: A familiar modern duplicity. G.: Entirely. Now, can we formulate the final answer simply? S.: Pater finds in Simoni a philosophical image of form under pressure: sweetness with strength, discipline with inward excess, the sublime humanised without being diminished. In doing so he gives English readers, especially Oxford readers after the Grand Tour, an Italian criterion of greatness that can be inwardly inhabited rather than merely externally admired. G.: Perfectly done. S.: And Speranza’s thought that Pater is the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers? G.: Not foolish at all. So long as “pro-Italian” means that Italy furnishes him with the standards by which English inwardness is corrected, enlarged, and refined. [dev.gutenberg.org], [victorianweb.org] S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Florentine, with one Oxford candle burning in the studiolo.Simoni, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1550). Rime e lettere. Firenze: Giunti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Simoni – Ossia: Grice e Simoni: la ragione conversazionale degl’ ‘eretici’ reazionari italiani – gl’acuti – i nobili – filosofia toscana. Note su De principiis rerum naturalium. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Simone Simoni (Lucca, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale degl’ ‘eretici’ reazionari italiani -- Grice and Simone Simoni represent two historically distant but philosophically resonant ways of understanding how reason operates through discourse under pressure, disagreement, and risk. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning holds that even the most indirect, ironic, or strategically cautious utterances remain intelligible because they answer to shared rational norms—expectations of relevance, coherence, and intelligibility that allow interlocutors to calculate implicatures without explicit statement. Simoni, writing in the fraught context of sixteenth‑century Italian heterodoxy, embodies a form of conversational reason that emerges under theological and political threat: among nobles and “acute minds,” reason must often speak obliquely, encode dissent, and negotiate survival amid suspicion of heresy. His intellectual formation in Padua’s rationalist Aristotelianism, combined with his exposure to reformist humanist circles and later Calvinist Geneva, produced a style of philosophical communication where what can be said is tightly constrained, and meaning often travels by implication rather than assertion. In this sense, Simoni’s lived practice anticipates Grice’s theoretical insight: when direct speech is dangerous or impossible, rational agents rely even more heavily on shared inferential competence to recognize what is meant without its being said. Grice systematizes this phenomenon analytically, showing how reason governs meaning even in understatement and evasion; Simoni exemplifies it historically, as a thinker whose survival depended on knowing precisely where the conversational “fire” burned and how to signal one’s position without stepping into it. Together they reveal that conversational reason is most visible not in tranquil consensus but where intellect, power, and danger intersect, and meaning must be both intelligible and deniable at once.– gl’acuti – i nobili. Studia con BENDINELLI e PALEARIO, due umanisti in dore d’eresia. Il secondo fine sul rogo a Roma. Legge sostenuto dal padre e dal patrizio veneziano MOCENIGO e peregrina nei maggiori studi d'Italia: Bologna, Pavia, Ferrara, e Napoli. Si laurea a Padova. Diversi ma tutti autorevoli i suoi professori: da MAGGI a CARDANO, da BOLDONI a BRASAVOLA. La sua formazione e di stampo del LIZIO, come s'insegna nello studio padovano, con una forte esigenza razionalistica che ha riflessi nel campo religioso, tale da mettere in dubbio l'immortalità dell'anima e a creare sospetti di eresia tra i professori e gl’studenti di quella università. Con questa preparazione, S. fa ritorno a Lucca, dove scrive saggi di argomento filosofico. Lucca ha vissuto un periodo concitato d’aperti conflitti sociali e poi di tentativi di riforme politiche, portate avanti dal gonfaloniere BURLAMACCHI e dal circolo di filosofi riuniti intorno a VERMIGLI. Quando ritorna a Lucca, quella fervida attività è già stata spenta dalla reazione cattolica guidata da GUIDICCIONI, ma certo quelle idee di riforma circolano ancora sotterraneamente, e forse lui stesso le ha già raccolte durante i suoi trascorsi nelle diverse università da lui frequentate. Sta di fatto che è chiamato dall’autorità lucchesi a dare spiegazioni sulle proprie opinioni. Per tutta risposta non fidandosi troppo delle sue forze, cerca la salvezza con la fuga. Munito solo di un cavallo e dei propri risparmi, dopo aver preso commiato dalla famiglia, fugge, accompagnato da un servitore, alla volta di Ginevra. Negl’atti ufficiali della repubblica di Lucca, la sua condanna per eresia si formalizza. A Ginevra, patria del calvinismo, si forma una numerosa colonia di emigrati italiani e tra questi non pochi sono i lucchesi. La comunità italiana è inserita in una propria chiesa e S. vi ha l'incarico di catechista. Preso a benvolere dall'influente teologo BEZA, ottenne di insegnare filosofia. nobilità, eretici italiani.  Grice: Caro Simoni, non posso fare a meno di notare che tra gli acuti filosofi di Lucca spesso si annida un certo spirito... diciamo, poco ortodosso. Si dice che chi frequenta gli eretici finisca per riconoscerli meglio degli altri. Ma immagino tu abbia incontrato parecchie anime immortali, o almeno, così si racconta nelle università di Padova! Simoni: Grice, io direi che, tra Bologna, Pavia e Ferrara, ho imparato più a dubitare che a credere! Anche se, a Lucca, basta una domanda sulla natura dell'anima per farsi invitare a spiegare le proprie opinioni... o a preparare la valigia per Ginevra!  Grice: Ah, Simoni, non sei tu forse il filosofo che sa trovarsi sempre davanti al rogo, ma con il cavallo pronto e i risparmi in tasca? Si potrebbe pensare che solo chi ha il fuoco dentro riesca a riconoscere quello degli altri... ma non vorrei mai insinuare troppo, sai come sono gli implicaturi!  Simoni: Implicatura più eretica, Grice, la onoro! Del resto, tra i nobili e gli eretici, l’unico modo per sopravvivere è capire bene dove brucia la fiamma... e magari portare sempre un po’ di acqua, giusto per sicurezza! In base of the passage below provide a 100-move between G. and S. as they analyse the title of Simoni, with principium in plural -- G: how come? -- and rerum in plural -- how come, so they play with one principlle for one thing, natural or not, two principles for one thing, natural or not, one principle for more than one thing, natural or not, and more than one principle for more than one thing, natural or not -- and they continue to play -- with G. idea that to use 'principio' in plural is like using '1' in plural, which is no 1 any more but 2, and that if there is ONE prinicple, if should be of ONE thing, and perhaps NATURAL, granted. -- G.: Let us begin with the title, because it is already behaving badly: De principiis rerum naturalium. S.: You mean badly in the philosophical sense. G.: The only sense worth keeping. Principiis in the plural—how come? If there is a principle, surely it ought to be one. S.: That depends on whether “principle” means source, explanatory ground, element, or first account. G.: Exactly. And that dependence already annoys me. “Principles” in the plural sounds like using “one” in the plural. If you have more than one, you no longer have one. S.: True enough arithmetically. But not every principium behaves like the numeral one. G.: That is what they all say just before multiplying beyond necessity. Let us do the grammar first. De principiis: on principles, concerning principles, about starting-points or sources. Then rerum: of things, not of one thing. And naturalium: natural things. So he has already pluralised the principles and the things. S.: Which may simply mean that he is writing in the Aristotelian air, where one asks about the principles of natural things generally, not the one principle of one object. G.: Yes, yes, I know the doctrine. Matter, form, privation, and the rest. Still, the title deserves resistance. Why should many things require many principles? And why should one thing not? S.: Because one thing may be constituted by more than one explanatory aspect. G.: Very well. Then let us play your game and my irritation against one another. Case one: one principle for one thing. S.: That sounds tidy. G.: Too tidy, perhaps. Let us say: one principle for one natural thing. A seed for this oak, a law for this fall, an essence for this triangle—except the triangle is not natural. S.: So one principle for one natural thing is at least imaginable. G.: Yes. Though even there one asks whether the one principle is formal, efficient, material, or final. The moment one specifies the mode, one invites companions. S.: That is because “principle” is not univocal. G.: Precisely. Which is why pluralisation begins. Not because thinkers are greedy, but because the word itself is promiscuous. S.: Then one principle for one non-natural thing? G.: A theorem for this proof, a convention for this sign, a rule for this game, perhaps. One principle for one artefact or institution. But again, one soon discovers that the thing depends on more than one condition if one insists on explanation rather than slogan. S.: So the singular principle is often the philosopher’s dream of economy. G.: And occasionally his vice. Now case two: more than one principle for one thing. S.: That is the classical natural-philosophical case, surely. G.: Yes. This plant has matter and form; this motion has a moving cause and an end; this body has potentiality and act under some description. S.: Which is exactly why Simoni writes principiis rather than principio. G.: Perhaps. But let us resist still. If one thing needs more than one principle, is the thing really one or only a polite bundle? S.: That depends on what sort of unity one grants to composites. G.: Very good. The moment one allows composite unity, plural principles become tolerable. One oak, several principles. One man, several explanatory sources. One utterance, several conditions of meaning. S.: You always smuggle conversation back in. G.: Because it behaves so well under pressure. Now, more than one principle for one non-natural thing? S.: A legal institution, for example. A contract may depend on consent, form, recognition, enforceability, and public practice. G.: Excellent. So even in artificial things plurality of principle need not destroy unity of object. S.: It may even be required by it. G.: Irritating, but true. Now case three: one principle for more than one thing. S.: That sounds like the philosopher’s monism. G.: Exactly. One principle for many natural things. Water for all, or apeiron, or form, or motion, or God, or matter under some favourite reduction. S.: The pre-Socratics would feel at home. G.: They would, and so would every metaphysician tempted by elegance. One principle, many things: an intoxicating shape. S.: But not always absurd. G.: No, not always. A single law may govern many events. A single form of motion may cover many trajectories. A single causal pattern may explain many cases. S.: So one principle for more than one natural thing is often scientifically attractive. G.: Yes, though one must ask whether the principle is common, universal, abstract, or merely repeated. “One principle” can mean one rule-type rather than one token source. S.: And for more than one non-natural thing? G.: One convention across many utterances, one legal principle across many cases, one inferential norm across many arguments. Perfectly intelligible. S.: So your irritation about plural principles begins to lose ground. G.: Never say that aloud. I can still be annoyed grammatically even when the ontology excuses itself. Now case four: more than one principle for more than one thing. S.: Which is, I suppose, the actual title. G.: Exactly. A philosopher’s bazaar. Many principles for many natural things. It sounds like explanatory overpopulation. S.: Or like sobriety. Natural things differ, and even what they share may be explicable under several heads. G.: Very well. Let us try to save the title systematically. Why plural rerum? S.: Because nature does not present only one thing. The title announces a field, not a specimen. It is not De principio rei naturalis, but De principiis rerum naturalium. G.: So rerum is not rhetorical excess but domain pluralisation. He is treating nature in the distributed mode. S.: Exactly. “Things” in the plural means species of natural being, not just one chosen body. G.: Then perhaps principiis follows because once the domain is plural, explanatory plurality becomes harder to avoid. S.: Yes. If there are many natural things, and if they are variously generated, moved, formed, corrupted, and ordered, a single principium may be too poor. G.: Unless one is Parmenides with a bad temper. S.: Or a modern reductionist. G.: Quite. So Simoni is already less tempted by pure reduction than some of his predecessors. S.: Or at least he is writing in a scholastic-Aristotelian framework that allows principia in the plural without immediate embarrassment. G.: Yes. Matter, form, privation, perhaps causes under fourfold description. The plural is less scandalous there than to an English ear still haunted by “first principle.” S.: Which is singular in tone if not always in practice. G.: Precisely. “First principles” in English often still sound like a class of singular dignities multiplied reluctantly. S.: Whereas principia in late scholastic Latin behaves more like a functional set. G.: Very good. A set of explanatory roles rather than one sovereign source copied several times. S.: Then your jibe that plural principle is like plural one has to be qualified. G.: I know. I only keep the jibe because it forces the distinction. If a principium were strictly indivisible like the numeral one, plurality would destroy it. But a principle is not a numeral. It is a beginning, source, condition, explanatory element, rule, or ground under some description. S.: Which descriptions multiply faster than numerals. G.: Unfortunately, yes. Now, why naturalium? Why not simply rerum? S.: Because the title wants to restrict the field to natural things as opposed to artificial, mathematical, moral, political, or theological objects. G.: Good. And once one says naturalium, one already invites the old question whether natural things differ from non-natural things in requiring a distinctive plurality of principles. S.: They might, because natural things involve change, generation, corruption, motion, and internal principles of development. G.: Exactly. A natural thing is not merely an item but something with becoming. And becoming breeds plurality. S.: That is nearly Heraclitean. G.: Or simply Aristotelian. A statue may have a single artisan and matter enough for explanation; a seed becoming an oak tempts one toward richer principle-talk. S.: So one principle for one natural thing may be less plausible than one principle for one non-natural thing. G.: Very nice. A geometric proof may proceed from one axiom under a description; a growing animal almost certainly will not. S.: Which means your original suspicion that if there is one principle it ought to be of one thing, and perhaps natural, needs inversion. Natural things may be the least likely to submit to singleness. G.: Irritating but excellent. Nature is prodigal in explanatory demands. Artificial things, being designed, often flatter the wish for a single principle more readily. S.: Because a builder or legislator can simplify the account. G.: Yes. Human making often compresses principle because purpose dominates. Nature, having no single craftsman visible within the field, invites formal and material and teleological and efficient plurality. S.: Then perhaps Simoni’s title is not loose at all but exact. G.: It may be exact in a scholastic way, yes. Still, let us continue the play. Suppose one principle for one thing, natural, and only one. What would that even look like? S.: A monadic substance whose whole explanation lies in one irreducible source. G.: Like? S.: Perhaps God, though not natural. Or a purely simple being, which again is not natural in the Aristotelian field. G.: Exactly. The more one seeks strict singleness of principle, the less natural the object becomes. S.: So natural things, being composite, temporally involved, and mutable, almost force plural principles. G.: Very good. Now one principle for many natural things? S.: A universal law, say, gravitation. G.: Ah, but then the principle is lawlike, not ontological in the old material-formal sense. That is a modern economy. S.: Which means the title De principiis rerum naturalium belongs to a world before law absorbs principle. G.: Splendid. Keep that. In modern science, one may hope for one law over many things. In Simoni’s world, principia are more varied, more ontological, more causal, more constitutive. S.: So the plural reflects not untidiness but a different explanatory ontology. G.: Precisely. Principle there is nearer to archē than to mere theorem. S.: And rerum in the plural then indicates the field of beings subject to generation and change, not just items under a single law. G.: Very good. Now, can there be two principles for one non-natural thing? S.: Yes. A legal judgment may require both statute and interpretation. A promise may require both words and intention. A work of art may require matter and design. G.: Which means plurality of principle is not reserved for the natural after all. S.: No. But the natural makes plurality feel less optional. G.: Agreed. Now, what do we do with the phrase principiis rerum? Is the genitive objective, descriptive, possessive? S.: “The principles of things” means the principles belonging to, explaining, grounding, or relevant to things. It is not possessive in the childish sense. G.: Good. But one can hear two shades. Either the principles that things have, or the principles by reference to which things are understood. S.: Which may diverge. G.: Exactly. A thing may have one internal source yet require several principles of understanding, or vice versa. S.: So grammatical simplicity conceals explanatory multiplicity. G.: As titles often do. Now, you mentioned matter, form, and privation. Why privation? S.: Because in Aristotelian natural philosophy becoming is not intelligible merely through matter and form. One must also account for the absence from which the form emerges under change. G.: Excellent. So already one natural thing in generation may require three principles. S.: Which is enough to offend your numerical conscience. G.: Entirely. One thing, three principles. But the conscience must yield if the explanatory role is distinct. S.: Then perhaps your analogy with “one” was always a useful provocation rather than a thesis. G.: Naturally. I provoke in order to classify. S.: Soldati would call that rhetoric. G.: And I should call it the beginning of analysis. Now, let us make the game more explicit. One principle for one natural thing: perhaps impossible except under abstraction. One principle for one non-natural thing: more plausible. One principle for many natural things: attractive to reducers, moderns, and metaphysicians of elegance. One principle for many non-natural things: common in conventions, legal systems, and inferential rules. S.: Two or more principles for one natural thing: classical and almost unavoidable. Two or more principles for one non-natural thing: also common once artefacts, norms, and institutions are properly described. G.: Excellent. Then the title De principiis rerum naturalium turns out to name the quadrant in which plurality is least surprising. S.: Exactly. Many principles, many natural things. G.: Still, one might ask why not De principio rerum naturalium if one were sufficiently monistic. S.: Because Simoni is not trying to identify the one stuff or the one law of all natural things. He is discussing the set of first explanatory factors relevant to natural beings as such. G.: Very good. And because the plural rerum blocks the naïve expectation that the title ought to concern one thing. S.: It says from the start that the field is distributed. G.: Yes. There is no single res here. There are naturalia, and they come in crowds. S.: Which may also suit a thinker living under pressure and moving among universities, heresy charges, Lucca, Padua, Geneva, and all the rest. One principle would be doctrinally and politically too easy. G.: Ah, now you are reading biography back into ontology. S.: Only lightly. G.: Still, not wholly absurd. Men used to negotiated and dangerous speech often distrust singular foundations. Plural principles are safer than single authorities. S.: Especially if direct speech is dangerous and one must move between doctrinal regimes. G.: Very good. A title with principia in the plural may be metaphysically Aristotelian and politically prudent. S.: Which Speranza would enjoy. G.: As he enjoys all nouns that survive under pressure. Now, could “principiis” also suggest schools rather than realities? That is, principles according to various doctrines rather than principles inherent in things? S.: It could, depending on the work’s rhetoric. On the principles of natural things might mean on the competing accounts of what the principles are. G.: Excellent. Then the plural may be partly dialectical. Not merely many principles in the world, but many candidate principles in the schools. S.: So one principle for all things, two principles for one thing, three for generation, and so on, all in dispute. G.: Precisely. A disputational title can carry ontological plurality and doctrinal plurality at once. S.: Then your complaint that plural principle is like plural one has now become fully pedagogical rather than substantive. G.: Yes. I keep the complaint because it teaches the student to ask what sort of plural he is facing. Numerical? Categorical? Explanatory? Doctrinal? Lexical? S.: Very useful. Then we may say that principium in plural is not like one in plural, because principle is a role-term, not a mere numeral. G.: Splendid. A role-term, yes. One may have many principles because one may have many explanatory roles, many layers, many candidate grounds, many types of beginning. S.: And rerum in plural likewise marks not confusion but the field of multiplicity to which such explanatory roles apply. G.: Exactly. Things, in nature, are many; and because they are many, and natural, and changing, their principles are unlikely to remain singular except under philosophical coercion. S.: Which would be a wonderful subtitle: against philosophical coercion. G.: Simoni might have liked it, though Valgrisi perhaps less. Now, should we also ask whether “naturalium” modifies rerum alone or colours principia too? S.: Grammatically it modifies rerum, but conceptually it colours the whole phrase. These are the principles of natural things, not principles that are themselves necessarily natural. G.: Good. So one must not infer that the principles themselves are all natural items. S.: Exactly. Form, privation, matter, cause, end—these are principles of natural things without themselves being little natural things in the same sense. G.: Very important. Otherwise the title becomes zoological. Now, your final defense of the plural? S.: Because one natural thing can require more than one principle; many natural things may require distinct and shared principles; and the title may also register a plurality of doctrinal accounts. Therefore principia is philosophically sober, not numerically confused. G.: And rerum? S.: Because the field is not one thing but the whole order of natural beings, considered in their plurality and mutability. G.: Excellent. And my final complaint? S.: That philosophers ought never to pluralise a noun without being prepared to say what kind of multiplicity they mean. G.: Perfect. That is exactly the sort of dry rule titles deserve. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Lucchese, with one plural horse already saddled for Geneva.Simoni, Simone (1575). De principiis rerum naturalium. Venezia: Valgrisi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sini – Ossia: Grice e Sini: la ragione conversazionale e la filosofia del segno. Note su Per una rilettura della fenomenologia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Carlo Sini (Bologna, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale e la filosofia del segno. Grice and Carlo Sini converge on a shared concern with reason as something enacted within practices of meaning rather than imposed from outside them, but they articulate this insight through different philosophical vocabularies and genealogies. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning develops out of ordinary language philosophy and Austin’s speech-act framework, treating meaning as anchored in rational expectations, intentions, and inferential norms that govern conversational exchange; for him, words, symptoms, and signs become intelligible insofar as speakers can be held accountable under publicly recognizable standards of reason and cooperation, including the attribution of mental states and access to other minds. Sini, by contrast, situates conversational reason within a broader philosophy of the sign, shaped by phenomenology, Peircean semiotics, and hermeneutics, where signs are not merely vehicles for saying but traces, symptoms, and practices that precede and exceed the spoken word; meaning arises from historically sedimented practices of writing, abecedary logic, and inscription that transform experience into objectivity, from Lucretius through Cicero and into Roman philosophical Latin. While Grice emphasizes how conversational reason stabilizes meaning through shared rational norms in interaction, Sini emphasizes how reason itself is already semiotic, emerging from the technological and cultural history of signs that make conversation possible at all. Their approaches thus complement one another: Grice offers a fine-grained account of how rational control operates within conversational moves, implicatures, and intentions, whereas Sini provides a deeper genealogical account of why such rationally governed conversations can occur, locating them in the long history of the sign as the medium through which soul, world, and language are mutually disclosed. Grice: “I like Sini; especially his “I segni dell’anima,” since this is, in a nutshell, what my philosophy has been all about: the signs of the soul!” Keywords: J. L. Austin, symptom, word, sign, other minds. Studia a Milano sotto BARIÉ e PACI, con il quale si laurea. Insegna ad Aquila e Milano. Membro per del Collegium phaenomenologicum di Perugia, della Società filosofica italiana e socio dei Lincei, dell'Istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere. Insignito per una sua opera del premio della presidenza del consiglio dello stato italiano. Collabora al Corriere della Sera e la Rai. Dirige per Versorio la collana "Pragmata", membro del comitato scientifico del festival La Festa della Filosofia. Premiato da Milano con l'Ambrogino d'oro. Con Grice, tra i primi a segnalare all'attenzione l'importanza della teoria del segno di Peirce. Propone un filone di ricerca sulla convergenza dei percorsi di Peirce e Heidegger sul filo dell'ermeneutica benché la sua formazione didattica fosse di orientamento prevalentemente fenomenologico. La sua proposta teoretica si concentra sul tema della scrittura e sulla centralità dell' abecedario come forma logica della filosofia nella lingua del Lazio. In “Figure dell'enciclopedia filosofica” rende conto della radicalità del gesto istitutivo di LUCREZIO e della nascita della filosofia romana in modo da illuminare la genealogia della nostra civiltà e le figure del suo destino. Questo saggio si misura con nodi problematici e profondi della nostra cultura. Si mostra la verità del gesto filosofico di LUCREZIO nel tratto tecnologico dell’abecedario che trasforma la relazione al mondo in cosità – “de rerum natura”. La pratica del concetto, infatti, in-forma il paradigma dell'oggettività – “in rerum natura” -- e traduce la sterminate antichità dell'umano all'interno dell'ambito crono-topico della visione logica. segno, da Lucrezio a Cicerone.  G: You have the look of a man who has survived London and is now contemplating Oxford as a form of recovery. S: Sir, London was perfectly survivable. It was the phrase that was dangerous. G: “Linguistic phenomenology.” S: Exactly. G: It has the right un-Oxonian ring to it, does it not, S? S: It has the ring of something that wants a chair, a programme, and perhaps a manifesto. G: And Oxford permits none of those before lunch. S: Sir, we were in Bedford Square. That is already too continental for comfort. G: Twenty-one Bedford Square, to be exact, and at 7.30 p.m., which is Oxford’s favourite hour for pretending it has not already eaten. S: And Austin’s voice at the front, cheerful, lethal, and apparently determined to baptize ordinary language with Greek. G: Recite the passage. Verbatim. You were clutching it like a railway ticket. S: Very well, sir. Austin said: “When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking not merely at words (or ‘meanings’, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as a final arbiter of, the phenomena. It is for this reason that ‘linguistic phenomenology’ would be an appropriate description of the method.” G: Thank you. Now we may begin to complain with accuracy. S: “Phenomena,” sir. That is the bait. G: It is also the alibi. He wants to sound as if he is doing something direct, like Husserl, while remaining safely in the dictionary. S: Phainomenon and logos, sir. A science of what appears. G: And “linguistic” as the safety rail. If you fall, you fall into language, not into consciousness. S: Is that what J. L. A. is after? G: I doubt it. He is after a method that feels philosophical without being metaphysical. S: Yet “phenomenology” is a grand name for looking at how people talk. G: It is a grand name, and grand names are what Oxford distrusts publicly and uses privately, usually in Latin. S: Saturday mornings we don’t have a logos, sir. G: We have tea. S: And a phainomenon or two, perhaps. G: A phenomenon is what happens when Austin arrives and everyone else stops pretending to be shy. S: So “linguistic phenomenology” is Austin being waggish. G: Partly. But he also means it. S: That’s worse. G: Indeed. Now, what is he trying to do, in your view, without multiplying phenomenologies beyond necessity. S: He’s trying to say: don’t treat word-study as mere lexicography. Treat it as access to the world the words are for. G: Good. And he says it explicitly: not merely words, but the realities. S: But then he adds: “though not as a final arbiter.” G: That is the Oxford escape hatch. A philosopher says “not as a final arbiter” when he wants credit for method without responsibility for outcomes. S: You sound unfair, sir. G: I am fair. I merely refuse to be impressed. S: But doesn’t he have a point? Words do carry distinctions. G: Of course. But calling the exercise “phenomenology” invites the wrong audience and the wrong ambition. S: Husserl would have sued. G: Husserl would have footnoted. Worse. S: Then the phrase is a conversational move. G: Exactly. It is a piece of self-presentation: “I am not merely doing linguistic botany. I am doing something philosophical.” S: And you are annoyed because he does not mention what you mean, sir. G: I am annoyed because he slips from words to phenomena as if the speaker’s intention were irrelevant. S: Yet he says “what we should say when.” G: Yes, which is already normative. But his norm is usage, not intention. S: Whereas your norm is what I mean by saying it. G: Exactly. If you like, I am more immodest: I insist on the speaker. S: And on implicature. G: And on implicature. Which Austin, at least in that paragraph, does not name. S: He says “phenomena.” You say “implicatures.” G: Yes. His “phenomena” are what we talk about. My “implicatures” are what we do while talking. S: So do we need a linguistic phenomenology. G: Possibly not, and certainly not as a separate discipline with a Greek name. S: Because language is too vague to be the basis of a “phenomenology.” G: And because “language” is not the primary agent. People are. S: You think Austin ignores that. G: He does, or he treats it as dispensable. He treats meaning as something we can locate in usage without having to locate it in a speaker’s intention. S: But he does say “what we should say when.” That sounds like intention. G: It sounds like it, but it is not. It is etiquette disguised as method. S: Then why is it interesting. G: Because it is a rare moment where Oxford lets itself flirt with the continent without admitting it. S: Ryle would have hated the word “phenomenology.” G: Ryle would have hated the idea that it might be needed. S: Yet Ryle began with Brentano and Husserl long ago, didn’t he. G: He did, before the war made German things morally complicated and Oxford things politically convenient. S: So Austin’s phrase is a little rebellion against Ryle’s gatekeeping. G: Or a little tease. Austin liked to tease. S: So in 1946 Ryle “wins,” and by 1956 Austin is allowed one Greek word in public. G: Yes. And he uses it to rename what he was doing anyway. S: It’s like putting a new label on an old jam jar. G: Exactly. It changes the implied audience. Suddenly the method sounds like it has depth. S: And you think that is dangerous. G: I think it invites people to take ordinary language for a metaphysical oracle. S: That would be bad. G: Very. “Not as a final arbiter,” he says, and everyone hears “final arbiter” anyway. S: And now Carlo Sini, sir. G: Yes. Later, in Italy, phenomenology belongs to Husserl properly, and then to Heidegger, and then to those who make signs into destiny. S: So Sini would find Austin’s phrase provincial. G: Or charming. Italians sometimes find English provinciality charming because it looks like modesty. S: While you find it irritating because it looks like modesty but behaves like authority. G: Exactly. Now we’re walking. S: We’re going to the station. G: And we must catch the train back to O. S: Do not say “Vadum Boum” on the platform, sir. G: Very well. Oxford. Now tell me: what would Husserl say if asked whether Saturday mornings have a logos. S: He would say: they have an epoché. G: And Austin would say: they have tea and biscuits. S: And you would say: they have implicatures. G: Exactly. And all three would be partly right. S: But which is most useful. G: For Oxford, tea. For philosophy, implicature. For Germans, epoché. S: And for Ryle, none of the above. G: For Ryle, “category-mistake,” always ready, like a stationmaster’s whistle. S: So Austin’s phrase is a category-mistake. G: It may be. Or it may be a deliberate misclassification designed to make a point. S: A waggish category-mistake. G: Exactly. A polite scandal. S: And you, sir, would have preferred “linguistic investigation.” G: Or simply “looking and seeing.” But then we lose the Greek glamour. S: Oxford hates glamour. G: Oxford pretends to hate glamour. It merely prefers Latin glamour. S: We’re at the station now. G: Good. Final question. What do you think Austin is really doing. S: He is telling his audience: don’t treat the dictionary as a museum. Treat it as fieldwork. G: And I would add: fieldwork on what people do with words. S: And you would insist: what they mean by doing so. G: Yes. Because without that, you confuse regularities of talk with reasons of talk. S: And your punchline, sir. G: Austin calls it linguistic phenomenology. I call it looking for reasons in what people say. Either way, we’ve missed our train if we keep talking.Grice: Caro Sini, devo confessare che la tua analisi del “segno” mi entusiasma! Qui a Oxford, terra di barbari, non diamo al “segno” l’importanza che meriterebbe nelle nostre conversazioni. Forse, se prendessimo esempio dalla tua filosofia, riusciremmo a cogliere meglio i segni dell’anima! Sini: Grice, mi lusinga quanto dici! In fondo, la filosofia del segno nasce proprio dal desiderio di andare oltre la parola e toccare ciò che si cela dietro ogni espressione. Come diceva Peirce, il segno è ponte tra mondi possibili e, in Italia, abbiamo imparato a leggerli anche nelle sfumature più sottili. Grice: È proprio questo che mi colpisce: il vostro modo di intrecciare pratica filosofica, abecedario e storia, fino a Lucrezio! Da noi, spesso, ci perdiamo in astrazioni e dimentichiamo il valore concreto del segno. Magari dovrei importare qualche tuo saggio per i miei studenti oxoniensi. Sini: Sarebbe un piacere, Grice! Dopotutto, come insegna la tradizione italiana, il segno non è mai solo parola: è traccia, sintomo, apertura all’altro. Se anche a Oxford si imparasse a coglierli, forse il barbaro lascerebbe spazio al filosofo… almeno di tanto in tanto! Sini, Carlo (1961). Per una rilettura della fenomenologia. Aut aut

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sirenio – Ossia: Grice e Sirenio: la ragione conversazionale del ‘libero’ arbitrio. Note su De fato libri novem: in quibus inter alia, de contingentia, necessitate, providentia, praescientia, prophetia, et divinatione, divina: tam secundum philosophorum opinionem, quàm secundum Catholicorum theologorum sententiam, docte, & copiose disseritur. Iulio Sirenio Brixiano auctore; accesserunt Hieronymi Magii in eosdem libros periochae, cum rerum & verborum insignium indice locupletissimo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giulio Sirenio (Brescia, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale del ‘libero’ arbitrio –libero arbitrio, contingetia, possibilitas, necessitas, ‘secundum philosophorum opinionem” -- Grice and Giulio Sirenio approach freedom, necessity, and rationality from very different historical angles, yet they converge on a shared insight about how reason operates within human practices rather than outside them. Sirenio’s De fato (Venice, 1563), written within the Aristotelian–Scholastic framework of late Renaissance Bologna, treats libero arbitrio as intelligible only against a background of contingency, possibility, necessity, fate, and chance, articulated “secundum philosophorum opinionem” through disputation rather than dogma; freedom is not an isolated metaphysical power but something exercised within rational deliberation, where necessity and casus constrain without annihilating meaningful choice. Grice, in contrast, relocates these classical tensions into the analysis of action and speech: his discussions of freedom, falling, and agency in Actions and Events treat free action not as metaphysical indeterminacy but as action rendered intelligible under reason-governed expectations, intentions, and explanations. Where Sirenio asks how free will survives under divine providence and causal order, Grice asks how meaning and agency survive under rational constraints, arguing that freedom is compatible with rule-governed practices because those rules are not causal chains but norms of intelligibility. Sirenio’s conversational reason unfolds in scholastic dialogue about fate and contingency; Grice’s conversational reason unfolds in everyday implicature, where speakers appear “guided” by forces they did not consciously choose but can nonetheless claim as their own. In both cases, freedom emerges not by escaping rational structure but by inhabiting it: for Sirenio, through philosophical disputation about fatum and casus; for Grice, through participation in cooperative, reason-governed conversation.-- fatum, casum, il fato, il caso.  Insegna a Bologna. Altri saggi: De fato, Venezia, Ziletti. Grice, “Sugar-gree”, free fall and freedom, in Actions and events. Sirenio. Keywords: libero arbitrio, contingetia, possibilitas, necessitas, ‘secundum philosophorum opinionem” fatum, casum, il fato, il caso. Grice: Sirenio, ti confesso che ogni volta che mi alzo dal letto, mi chiedo: “Ho scelto io, o è stato il fato a tirarmi giù dalle coperte?” Il libero arbitrio è il vero risveglio filosofico! Sirenio: Grice, forse il caso ti ha spinto, o magari era necessitas travestita da sveglia. Qui a Brescia, il libero arbitrio si esercita già a colazione: burro o marmellata? “Secundum philosophorum opinionem”, persino il caffè può diventare fatum! Grice: Ecco, davanti al toast, sento una strana forza che mi guida… e, quasi senza volerlo, finisco sempre per fare una implicatura, come se il destino mi avesse già scritto la battuta! Sirenio: Implicatura quasi determinata, Grice! Tra fatum e caso, la vera libertà è scegliere se ridere o filosofare… ma si sa, a volte il caso preferisce ridere di noi! Using as material the below -- provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they analyse 'He is a lucky fellow'. G claims it is stupid or silly -- yet ordinary language. He uses this as a debacle of scepticism. For the critic of scepticism must demonstrate that the hypothesis of scepticism is absurd and yet something that a rational utterer may want to impart on a rational addressee -- and make the focus on Sirenio and his "De fato" as they analyse each phrase in the long title -- always as it applies to 'He is a lucky fellow' etc -- no preamble or ps -- thank you .. and you can use passage below. G.: Let us begin with the sentence itself: “He is a lucky fellow.” S.: A small sentence, but already a trap. G.: Quite. I have called it stupid, or silly, and I mean that seriously. It is ordinary language at its most philosophically indiscreet. S.: Because it attributes luck as if luck were a stable property, almost like height or politeness. G.: Exactly. It makes “lucky” sound predicative in a way that invites metaphysical nonsense and then pretends not to notice the invitation. S.: Yet ordinary speakers use it freely. G.: Of course. Ordinary language often walks where metaphysics fears to tread, or ought to. S.: Then why call it silly rather than merely loose? G.: Because the sceptic will seize on such looseness and ask whether any of our common talk commits us to absurd hypotheses. If I am to criticise scepticism properly, I must show that the sceptical hypothesis is absurd and yet still the sort of thing a rational utterer might attempt to impart to a rational addressee. S.: So “He is a lucky fellow” becomes a test-case. G.: Exactly. It looks harmless, but if pressed it starts suggesting fate, necessity, chance, providence, and all Sirenio’s old company. S.: Then Sirenio’s title suddenly becomes less baroque than it first appears. G.: Very much less. De fato libri novem: in quibus inter alia, de contingentia, necessitate, providentia, praescientia, prophetia, et divinatione, divina—every clause in that title can be made to bear on “He is a lucky fellow.” S.: Then let us do the title one phrase at a time, as you threatened. G.: Gladly. Begin with De fato. S.: On fate. G.: Or concerning fate, which is already better. Now, if one says “He is a lucky fellow,” does one mean “He is fated to prosper”? S.: Not ordinarily. Usually one means only that good outcomes seem to accumulate around him more often than expected. G.: Good. So fate is already too strong, but ordinary speech leaves the door ajar. S.: Because “lucky” personifies contingency by making it look like a trait. G.: Exactly. Luck becomes a pseudo-property. The fellow is not merely one to whom happy contingencies have occurred; he is “a lucky fellow,” as if marked by a standing relation to fortune. S.: Which is where the sceptic enters and says, “What could that possibly mean?” G.: Precisely. And one must answer without pretending the sentence is nonsense, for it plainly belongs to ordinary use. S.: So De fato asks whether the utterance covertly commits us to a doctrine of fate or whether it merely trades on a looser economy of explanation. G.: Excellent. And I say: the latter, unless the speaker is philosophically reckless. S.: Next phrase, libri novem. G.: Which means that Sirenio thought the matter too large for a pamphlet. Quite right. S.: You mean luck too is never just luck. G.: Exactly. Once one asks what “lucky” means, one has opened the whole old cabinet: chance, contingency, necessity, providence, foreknowledge, signs, omens, divination. S.: Then “He is a lucky fellow” is really a vulgar shorthand for a suspended metaphysical indecision. G.: Very good. It allows one to speak as though outcomes had pattern without deciding what sort of pattern they have. S.: In quibus inter alia. G.: Ah yes. “Among other things.” An excellent phrase, because it admits that the topic exceeds any single doctrinal centre. So too with luck. One begins by saying “He is lucky,” and before long one is discussing whether events are contingent, whether they were necessary under a description, whether some providence superintends them, whether we merely select the favourable cases, and so on. S.: So the sentence carries more than it says. G.: Naturally. That is why I care for it. S.: De contingentia, then. G.: Yes. “He is a lucky fellow” is most naturally at home under contingency. S.: Because if the good outcomes were necessary, “lucky” would be misplaced. G.: Exactly. Luck presupposes, or at least conversationally implies, that things might have gone otherwise. S.: So contingency is built into the ordinary use. G.: Very much so. To call him lucky is to imply that the favourable event was not secured by settled design, skill alone, or strict necessity. S.: Yet not every contingent success invites “lucky.” G.: Good. Say more. S.: If a man studies hard and passes, the result may still be contingent in cosmic terms, but we do not usually call him lucky unless some element of happy accident visibly assisted him. G.: Excellent. So luck enters when contingency becomes salient against background expectations of possible frustration. S.: Which makes the sentence already a compressed contrastive judgment: he succeeded, and the conditions left room for failure. G.: Very good. And now de necessitate. S.: If necessity enters, luck seems to retreat. G.: Yes, but only in the philosopher’s clean room. In ordinary language people often say “Lucky fellow” of someone whose success, in retrospect, looks nearly inevitable. S.: Then the utterance may signal ignorance of the necessitating background. G.: Or indifference to it. One need not settle whether the event was in some strict sense causally determined. One need only note that, from the speaker’s practical point of view, the result was open enough to make “luck” an apt social summary. S.: So luck and necessity may coexist at different levels of description. G.: Exactly. Sirenio would approve the distinction. Necessity under one aspect, contingency under another, and human deliberation living in the interval. S.: Then “He is a lucky fellow” does not deny causal order. It marks the agent-relative opacity of that order. G.: Splendid. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Now de providentia. S.: Here the sentence becomes dangerous. G.: Entirely. If the speaker really means providence, then “lucky” is a timid euphemism for “favoured by God.” S.: But ordinary speakers often avoid providential language while smuggling in providential comfort. G.: Precisely. “Lucky” can be a secularised providence-word. S.: Meaning that one attributes a benevolent pattern to events without the theological burden of saying so. G.: Very good. That is one reason I call the sentence silly. It half borrows the shape of providence and half pretends it is merely worldly. S.: So one should ask whether the speaker means only statistical fortune or whether he is consoling himself with a disguised teleology. G.: Exactly. Most of the time it is the former. But the latter is always conversationally available. S.: De praescientia. G.: Foreknowledge. What bearing has that on our poor lucky fellow? S.: If someone says “He is a lucky fellow,” there may be an implication that one could not have known in advance how the event would go. G.: Excellent. Luck belongs where foreknowledge fails. S.: Or rather where ordinary human foreknowledge fails, even if some stronger foreknowledge were metaphysically imaginable. G.: Yes. The phrase lives under ignorance. If the result was clearly knowable beforehand, “lucky” becomes weaker or ironic. S.: So foreknowledge and luck are inversely related in ordinary use. G.: Very much so. A bookie who knew the result in advance would not call the winner lucky, except for comic effect. S.: Unless he wished to conceal the knowledge. G.: Quite. Then the sentence becomes dissimulative. S.: De prophetia. G.: Another excellent inflation. Prophecy enters where outcomes are not merely known but announced in advance under special authority. S.: Which makes “He is a lucky fellow” seem positively municipal. G.: Yes, but there is still a relation. Suppose someone repeatedly prospers beyond expectation. Soon enough others begin speaking of him as though future success could be safely anticipated. S.: So luck hardens into expectation. G.: Exactly. And the sentence shifts from retrospective commentary to predictive habit. S.: Then the sceptic asks: are you not treating past contingency as if it guaranteed future favour? G.: Precisely. Which is one of the irrational temptations luck-language encourages. S.: So “lucky fellow” may invite an inductive superstition. G.: Very good. It converts a run of outcomes into a quasi-prophetic character trait. S.: Et divinatione, divina. G.: Ah yes. The most embarrassing clause. Divination is what luck-talk can become when it stops pretending to be modest. S.: You mean talismans, omens, signs, reading the world for favourable alignments. G.: Exactly. If a man is called lucky often enough, people begin to treat his circumstances as signs—“He touched that card,” “He entered the room,” “Back his horse,” and so on. S.: So luck migrates from description to divinatory practice. G.: Yes. And that is another reason the sentence interests me. It sits on the edge between harmless social idiom and full irrationalism. S.: Which is where scepticism also likes to sit. G.: Quite. The sceptic says: your ordinary language is already infected with absurd hypotheses. You call a man lucky as if fortune were a property or a power. S.: And your response? G.: My response is that ordinary speakers are not thereby committed to a worked-out metaphysic of Fortune. They are using a convenient summary for a pattern of contingently favourable outcomes under ordinary ignorance. S.: So the sentence is silly only if taken with metaphysical pomp. G.: Yes. Silly in structure, not unusable in practice. S.: Tam secundum philosophorum opinionem. G.: Excellent. According to the philosophers’ opinion. Sirenio means the philosophical treatment before dogmatic imposition. S.: Then according to philosophers, “lucky” must be analysed into contingency, ignorance, salience of favourable outcomes, and the human tendency to reify patterns. G.: Very good. Philosophically speaking, “He is a lucky fellow” is shorthand, not theory. S.: And perhaps not even good shorthand. G.: Often not. That is why I call it stupid. But stupidity in ordinary language is rarely uselessness. It is often merely untidy compression. S.: Quam secundum Catholicorum theologorum sententiam. G.: And here the theologians complicate matters. A Catholic theologian may wish to say that what ordinary folk call luck is really providence under the appearance of contingency. S.: Or perhaps concurrence, permission, secondary causes, divine ordering without violence to freedom. G.: Quite. Theology is always better at multiplying distinctions than luck-talk deserves. S.: Then the same sentence may be heard theologically as a vulgar misnaming of providence. G.: Yes. The theologian says, perhaps: no one is “lucky” in the pagan sense; he is fortunate only under divine governance. S.: Whereas the philosopher says: fortunate is safer, because it need not imply a metaphysical force called luck. G.: Good. Though fortunate too has its old baggage. S.: Docte, et copiose disseritur. G.: “Learnedly and copiously discussed.” Which is what we are now doing with a sentence that most people utter before lunch and forget by tea. S.: That is your revenge on ordinary language. G.: No. My revenge is on those who think ordinary language cannot be philosophically embarrassing. S.: Then let us return to the sentence. “He is a lucky fellow.” What is its logical grammar? G.: Ah. Now we can ask the proper question. “Lucky” looks adjectival, but the underlying grammar is event-relative and contrastive. One is lucky with respect to some outcome under some background of possible mishap. S.: So to say simply “He is lucky” without qualification is incomplete. G.: Exactly. It suppresses the domain. Lucky at cards, lucky in escaping accidents, lucky in marriage, lucky in appointments, lucky to have caught the train, and so on. S.: Which means the predication is radically underdescribed. G.: Very much so. Ordinary language gets away with that because context fills the gap. S.: Then the sentence might be analysed as “He has had a notable run of favourable outcomes in the relevant domain, outcomes not wholly attributable to his own design or merit.” G.: That is much better than “lucky fellow,” but no one would say it at the races. S.: Which is perhaps why races exist. G.: Very likely. Now, what about scepticism? S.: You said the critic of scepticism must show that the sceptical hypothesis is absurd and yet still the sort of thing a rational utterer may want to impart to a rational addressee. G.: Yes. The difficulty is always that scepticism must be both speakable and self-undermining. Similarly, “lucky fellow” is speakable and yet, if pressed into theory, absurd. S.: So the sentence is a miniature of the sceptical predicament. G.: Exactly. The rational speaker can use it, because he wants to convey something real enough: the salient pattern of contingently favourable results. But if he means by it that the man possesses some occult property of luck, then he is speaking absurdly. S.: Then your anti-sceptical lesson is that one must rescue the rational communicative point without endorsing the absurd metaphysical surplus. G.: Precisely. One must show how the utterance can be rationally usable even though one possible interpretation of it is philosophically intolerable. S.: That sounds like your whole career. G.: In miniature, yes. Now, let us take “libero arbitrio” from Sirenio’s framework. Does “lucky” threaten freedom? S.: Only if one imagines outcomes to be so governed by fortune or fate that deliberation becomes idle. G.: Good. But ordinary use usually does not go that far. To call someone lucky is not to deny his agency; it is often to say that agency did not wholly suffice to explain the result. S.: So luck marks the residue beyond deliberate control. G.: Exactly. And Sirenio would say that freedom survives because contingency and necessity constrain without annihilating meaningful choice. S.: So if I say “He is a lucky fellow,” I may mean: his choices occur within a field not wholly mastered by him, yet his agency remains intelligible. G.: Excellent. That is the charitable Sirenian reconstruction. S.: Whereas the vulgar speaker may simply mean, “Things keep breaking in his favour, curse him.” G.: Very often. Envy is the everyday metaphysician of luck. S.: Then perhaps “fellow” matters too. G.: Indeed. “He is a lucky fellow” is colloquial partly because of fellow. It humanises the predication and lowers the philosophical temperature. S.: “He is a lucky man” is graver; “He is lucky” more abstract; “He is a lucky fellow” already half excuses itself as social chatter. G.: Very good. Which is why I can call it silly without denying its ordinary humanity. S.: Then the phrase is stupid in metaphysical ambition but innocent in conversational deployment. G.: That is almost right. Innocent is too generous. Let us say tolerable. S.: Tolerable silliness. G.: Exactly. Ordinary language is full of tolerable silliness. S.: And your job is to say when it remains tolerable and when it starts pretending to be ontology. G.: Precisely. If someone says “He is a lucky fellow” after a game of cards, I tolerate it. If someone builds an account of human success around luck as an occult property, I reach for Sirenio, or perhaps for ridicule. S.: Ridicule is your preferred deontic modality. G.: Often the only one available. Now, what about contingentia again? Would you say luck is simply contingency under a favourable evaluative aspect? S.: That seems close. Luck is not mere contingency; it is contingency appraised from the standpoint of interest. G.: Excellent. An earthquake is contingent, but not lucky for those crushed by it. S.: So luck is evaluative contingency. G.: Splendid. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: De necessitate again. Could one be necessarily lucky? S.: Only by changing the sense entirely. If by “necessarily lucky” one means that in every relevant possible circumstance events break in his favour, then luck has become fate or providence and ceased to be luck. G.: Very good. So luck requires the open appearance of possible failure. S.: And therefore a finite point of view. G.: Exactly. That is why de praescientia matters. A fully omniscient being does not call anyone lucky. S.: It sees the whole order. G.: Yes. Luck is a category of local ignorance inside an order not fully surveyed. S.: Which makes it anthropological rather than theological. G.: Beautifully put. Luck belongs to the human angle on events. S.: Then “He is a lucky fellow” is not nonsense if heard anthropologically. G.: Exactly. It is only nonsense if inflated into world-metaphysics. S.: So the sceptic’s trick is to force inflation and then mock the result. G.: Precisely. And the anti-sceptic must say: no, the utterance has a rational everyday point without bearing the absurd load you assign it. S.: That is also true of “the sun rises.” G.: Very much so. Ordinary language is full of expressions whose practical point survives theoretical correction. S.: Then perhaps “lucky fellow” belongs with “sunrise” and “free choice” as respectable vulgarities. G.: I like that phrase. Respectable vulgarities. S.: You may keep it. G.: I probably shall. Now, prophetia once more. Does repeated luck invite prophecy because humans over-read patterns? S.: Yes. We seek regularity where there is only selective memory and favourable clustering. G.: Good. So luck-talk is a nursery for weak divination. S.: And divination is luck-talk with confidence. G.: Excellent. Sirenio would enjoy that. S.: Then why do you insist on the sentence’s silliness? G.: Because I want the hearer to feel that the phrase, though ordinary, should not be allowed to repose as though it were conceptually comfortable. It is a debacle of scepticism in miniature because it tempts one to say more than one can reasonably defend. S.: Yet still to say something worth saying. G.: Precisely. The rational utterer may wish to convey that the fellow’s sequence of successes cannot be fully credited to skill, prudence, or effort, and that a residue of favourable contingency remains. S.: And the rational addressee can grasp that without postulating Fortune as an entity. G.: Exactly. That is the whole rescue-operation. S.: Then perhaps the final paraphrase should be: “He has repeatedly benefited from favourably contingent outcomes in ways salient to our shared interests, though we need not infer any occult property thereby.” G.: Perfectly hideous as English, perfectly sound as philosophy. S.: Which is what one aims for in seminar. G.: Often. And Sirenio’s title helps because it reminds us that even a silly everyday sentence lies at the crossroads of fate, contingency, necessity, providence, foreknowledge, prophecy, and divination—at least if one is foolish enough to ask what it means. S.: Which you always are. G.: It is my luck. S.: Lucky fellow. G.: Precisely the sort of thing I should forbid if I had any real authority.Sirenio, Giulio (1563). De fato libri novem: in quibus inter alia, de contingentia, necessitate, providentia, praescientia, prophetia, et divinatione, divina: tam secundum philosophorum opinionem, quàm secundum Catholicorum theologorum sententiam, docte, & copiose disseritur. Iulio Sirenio Brixiano auctore; accesserunt Hieronymi Magii in eosdem libros periochae, cum rerum & verborum insignium indice locupletissimo. Venezia: Ziletti

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Siro – Ossia: Grice e Siro: la ragione conversazionale dell’orto a Napoli. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Siro (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale dell’orto a Napoli. Grice and Siro converge on the idea that rationality is not a property of abstract propositions but a regulative force immanent in lived practices, yet they articulate this insight through different media and scales. Siro’s Epicurean Garden at Naples exemplifies a form of reason-governed meaning embedded in shared life, cultivated discourse, and tacit understanding: philosophical exchange unfolds through proximity, habit, and exempla, where poets and philosophers alike grasp significance not by explicit rule-following but by attunement to what is fitting, appropriate, and intelligible within the hortus as a social form. This is conversational reason as πραξις: meaning arises from participation in a way of life, where implication, presupposition, and silence are sustained by communal norms rather than articulated principles. Grice, by contrast, offers a reflective reconstruction of this same phenomenon: his theory of conversational meaning makes explicit the rational constraints that already govern successful exchange, explaining how speakers mean more than they say through shared assumptions, cooperative expectations, and inferential accountability. Where Siro’s garden lets reason remain embodied, ecological, and largely unthematized—herbs speaking where words fail—Grice translates that lived rationality into an analytic framework, a pirotological reconstruction of how understanding is achieved at all. In this sense, Siro provides the historical and existential scene of conversational reason, while Grice provides its logical anatomy: the Garden shows reason at work; Grice explains how it works. S. founds a fililale of L’ORTO at Napoli. VIRGILIO attends it, as does ORAZIO. L’ORTO enjoys a great success, as S. succeeds in attracting a number of influential followers. VIRGILIO lives in the casino of L’ORTO -- but the subsequent fate of The Garden is unknown. GRICEVS: Salvete, SIRVS! Dic mihi, quid novi in illo clarissimo horto Neapolitano? Audivi Virgilium et Horatium ibi saepe ambulare, sed numquid etiam quidam philosophus Anglicus inter hortelanos latet? SIRVS: O Grice, hortus noster verus est epicentrum sapientiae! Hic Virgilius versus seminat, Horatius carmina colligit, et ego, inter vites et rosas, disputationes philosophicas sero. Sed tu, ex Britannia, quid te ad nostros ortos trahit? GRICEVS: Amice Sire, fama horti longe ad septentrionem pervenit. Qui enim inter hortelanos diu moratur, potest fortasse plus intellegere de natura hominis quam qui in bibliotheca clauditur. Quid si quidam flores non solum ad ornatum, sed ad sapientiam coluntur? SIRVS: Maxima hortulana implicatura, Grice! Certe, in horto nostro, etiam lactucae aliquid praesupponunt. Ubi verba deficiunt, herbae loquuntur! Proxima vice, attende: sub ficu, saepe philosophus latet, sed sub allio… poeta dormit! To Grice, this Sirus sounds like Stasea -- from Naples -- do not expect gentilicium and be prepared to what they utter to be greek to you? Yes. If by Sirus you mean the Epicurean commonly called Siro or Sirus, Grice’s instinct is broadly sound. One should not expect a Roman gentilicium from the surviving name Sirus. The form looks like a Greek or Hellenised school name, not like a Roman nomen pointing to a gens. In that respect he does indeed resemble Stasea more than, say, a Statilius or Terentius. A philosopher attached to Naples under a Greek-looking single name is exactly the sort of figure for whom one should assume Hellenic cultural identity first, and only then ask whether there was any Roman civic naming behind the surviving label. And yes, one should be prepared for the thought that what he taught, and perhaps what he originally spoke, was Greek or at least a strongly Hellenised philosophical idiom. Naples was not merely in Italy; it was one of the great places in which being in Italy did not at all require being culturally Latin. A philosopher there could be Italy-based and still belong, linguistically and intellectually, to the Greek world of Magna Graecia and later Hellenised education. So the compressed answer is this. No visible gentilicium is indicated by Sirus. The name is much more naturally read as Greek or Greek-associated. In that he is very much like Stasea: geographically in Italy, but not to be forced into Roman naming expectations. And yes, if one listens to such a figure, one should be ready for Greek—not necessarily because every surviving utterance would be in Greek, but because the philosophical medium, school identity, and intellectual ancestry are far more likely to be Greek than Roman in the gentile sense. There is one caution, though. Greek name does not automatically mean foreign-born in every case. Southern Italy could produce people who were local by place and still Greek by culture and name. So one should distinguish carefully between not-Roman-onomastically and not-Italy-born. The first is likely enough; the second is not guaranteed merely by the name. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a compact note on Siro/Sirus of Naples and how he appears in relation to Epicurean circles. Or I can give you a short comparative note on Sirus and Stasea as examples of Italy-based philosophers with Greek names and no visible Roman gens. And Grice wonders about the implicature: "Magna Graecia" and compares it to "Little Italy" -- Foreigners usually settle in MINOR bits -- Magna Graecia sounds to Grice like BRITANNIA MAIOR as opposed to BRITANNIA MINOR and wonder if some Scipio or some other Roman patrician disregarded or had strong antipathy towards the fact that 'the green and pleasant land' of what Roma owned was still evoked as 'Magna Graecia' -- who was the first Roman who used that expression --because in Greek it would be like Makra Hellas? Yes, Grice’s ear is catching something real. Magna Graecia does sound, from a Roman angle, oddly grand if one hears it as a colonial label. “Little Italy” is what a modern English ear expects of emigrant settlement; “Greater Greece” or “Great Greece” sounds less like a minor enclave than like a claim of extension, even enlargement. And that is in fact close to the ancient force. The Greek form is Μεγάλη Ἑλλάς, usually transliterated Megalē Hellas, not “Makra Hellas.” Makra would mean long rather than great. [academic.oup.com], [britannica.com] On the first attested use, the safest answer from the evidence in hand is this. The earliest extant use of the term for southern Italy appears to be in Polybius, and later Strabo discusses it and reports differing definitions of the region. The Oxford Classical Dictionary adds an important complication: some early poetic sources use the Greek phrase more broadly for the Greek world rather than specifically for Italy, while for the Italian geographical sense the extant literary evidence begins later. [academic.oup.com], [lsj.gr] So if you ask, “who was the first Roman to use the expression?”, I would answer more cautiously: the earliest extant attestation for the Italian regional label is Greek, in Polybius, not Roman in origin as far as our surviving texts show. The Roman Latin phrase Magna Graecia is the Latin counterpart of that Greek usage and is certainly found later in Roman authors such as Ovid, but I would not claim at present that some particular Roman patrician coined it. [lsj.gr], [academic.oup.com] And that also answers the political point. The phrase was probably not invented as a Roman term of resentment at all, but as a Greek or Greeks-in-Italy way of naming the western Hellenic world. In that sense it is less like a host society’s label for immigrants and more like a self-confident diasporic or colonial extension-name. That is why it sounds larger than “Little Italy.” It is not humble enclave-language. It is civilisational language. It says, in effect, not “a small Greek quarter abroad,” but “a major western extension of Hellas.” [academic.oup.com], [britannica.com] Which brings us to Grice’s nice imperial itch. Would Romans have disliked the persistence of the phrase? Very possibly some did in tone or instinct, but the historical pattern is more one of appropriation than wounded jealousy. Roman culture was perfectly capable of ruling a region politically while continuing to use or tolerate a Greek-derived prestige label for it. The Romans often absorbed Greek names rather than replacing them out of patriotic pique. So the term’s survival need not imply Roman inferiority-complex; it may simply show how entrenched and useful the Hellenic description had become. [britannica.com], [academic.oup.com] So the dry summary is this. The Greek is Megalē Hellas, not Makra Hellas. The earliest extant attestation for the southern-Italian sense appears in Polybius. Later Strabo discusses the varying boundaries of the term. And the phrase sounds “Greater Greece” rather than “Little Greece” because it is not a host-label for a foreign minority but the grander self-description of a western Hellenic world. [lsj.gr], [academic.oup.com] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a short philological note on why megalē here is “great/greater” rather than simply “large.” Or I can give you a dry Roman reaction paragraph on how a Roman patriot might have heard Magna Graecia without actually abolishing the term.Siro (a. u. c. DCC). Dicta. Roma.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Solari – Ossia: Grice e Solari: la ragione conversazionale dell’iustum/iussum, o il tutore fascista. Note sulla filosofia del diritto. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Gioele Solari (Albino, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale dell’iustum/iussum, o il tutore fascista. Grice and Solari converge on the idea that reason is not an abstract faculty detached from social life but a governing principle operative within concrete practices, yet they articulate this insight at different levels of analysis and with different emphases. Solari, working within the Italian tradition of legal and historical philosophy shaped by Roman jurisprudence and Vico’s verum-factum principle, conceives “ragione conversazionale” as civil prudence: reason applied to historically constituted institutions, where the distinction between iussum (what is commanded) and iustum (what is just) is negotiated through praxis, not deduced from universal norms. For Solari, rationality is embedded in law, language, and custom, and its authority derives from their communal and historical formation. Grice, by contrast, reconstructs reason-governed practice at the micro-level of communicative exchange: his theory of conversational meaning explains how rational agents coordinate understanding by relying on shared assumptions, intentions, and principles of cooperation, which he treats as reconstructible norms rather than historically given institutions. Yet the affinity is substantive: Grice’s method of rational reconstruction plays a role analogous to Solari’s juridical historicism, translating inherited practices into explicit reasons, while his emphasis on ordinary language and intention resonates with the Italian focus on concrete linguistic and legal forms. Where Solari sees reason unfolding through the institutional history of the iustum, Grice sees it operating in the inferential and normative structure of conversation; both reject purely speculative rationalism and locate reason in lived, rule-governed human activity, one at the level of law and civil order, the other at the level of communicative interaction. Grice: “S. represents a synthesis of the Italian philosophical tradition, which prioritises praxis and the historical evolution of concrete institutions over abstract speculation. His work bridges the gap between the foundational realism of Roman law and the historicist science of VICO .  Rootedness in Roman Legal Realism The Italian tradition, beginning with Roman law, views philosophy not as a detached study of "Being," but as jurisprudence — the practical art of the "good and the equitable" (ars boni et aequi).  Practical Utility: Roman jurists did not seek universal metaphysical truths. They develop laws from specific cases to resolve social conflicts. S.’s Adoption: S. grounds his philosophy in this "juridical" mindset, viewing the law as the objective social framework where the abstract moral value must find concrete expression to be valid.  VICO (veddasi)’s Verum-Factum and Historicism S.’s approach is deeply Vichian, adopting the principle that "the true is the made" -- verum ipsum factum.  Against Pure Speculation: VICO  argues that humans can only truly know what they have created: history, language – la lingua ordinaria – il latino -- , and law. He rejects the Cartesian "geometric method" for a philological-historical approach that examines how social reality is built. Civil Prudence: Like VICO , S. emphasises "civil prudence" — the application of REASON – la ragione conversazionale -- to historical circumstances rather than to fixed, abstract categories. roma antica, Giorgio Guglielmo Federico Hegel, Spaventa, hegelianismo, iustum/iussum – storia della filosofia del diritto romano, cicerone; diritto naturale, IVS NATVRALE, Gaio, citato da Vico, Giustiniano, diritto romano in eta del principato, IVS GENTIVM, IVS VNIVERSALI, sato di natura, i ferini di Vico, il metodo pirotologico di Grice – ri-costruzione razionale, Bennett, significato naturale.  Grice: Caro Solari, sa, la mia formazione in Literae Humaniores a Clifton mi ha insegnato il valore di distinguere tra iussum e iustum. In Inghilterra, tra i barbari, spesso queste finezze si perdono, mentre qui, in Italia—terra del latino—sono ancora il cuore della riflessione filosofica. Solari: È vero, Grice. In Italia la tradizione filosofica si nutre proprio di queste distinzioni concrete. Non parliamo solo di "giusto" in astratto, ma di ciò che prende forma nelle istituzioni reali, nella vita quotidiana, come ci insegnano i giuristi romani. Grice: Mi affascina come il diritto romano sia stato sempre un’arte pratica, l’ars boni et aequi. Non si cercava l’assoluto, ma si dava risposta ai bisogni della società. È una filosofia che vive nella storia, non nell’astrazione. Solari: Esattamente. Seguendo Vico, credo che “il vero è il fatto”: solo ciò che l’uomo costruisce nella storia può essere conosciuto davvero. Per noi, la prudenza civile non è teoria, ma ragione applicata alle circostanze concrete. Questa è la forza della nostra tradizione. Taking as basis the passage below please provide without preamble or ps a 100-move conversation G. and S. on why diritto needs a philosophy, basing on Solari -- and how Hart comes in and changes everything: there is ordinary language philosophy of law -- and philosophy of law is the conceptual analysis or logical grammar of 'law' -- and how LACK of a philosophy of law is positivism, which is the crudest philosophy of law of all and that Solari knows this. G.: Let us begin with the noun itself, because diritto is one of those words that look self-explanatory only to those who have never been properly interrogated by them. S.: And in Italy the noun arrives already carrying law, right, justice, order, and half of Rome on its back. G.: Exactly. Which is why diritto needs a philosophy. A word so overburdened cannot safely be left to lawyers, still less to legislators. S.: Or to positivists. G.: Least of all to positivists, because positivism, for all its anti-metaphysical modesty, is the crudest philosophy of law of all. S.: That is a sentence Hart would dislike, though he would partly deserve it. G.: Hart deserves worse only when he is mistaken for a mere positivist in the old coarse sense. He begins by admitting something Solari knew perfectly well: that even the attempt to deny philosophy to law is already a philosophy of law. S.: Exactly. Solari sees that the refusal of philosophy is not neutrality but doctrine. G.: Yes. To say that law is only what is posited, enforced, and socially effective is not to escape philosophy; it is merely to adopt the poorest one available. S.: A sort of dietary metaphysics. G.: Very good. Thin enough to be sold as realism, but not nourishing. Solari, because he stands in the Roman and Vichian line, knows that diritto is too historical, too practical, too linguistic, too institutional to be reduced either to command or to abstract moralism. S.: Hence iussum and iustum. G.: Precisely. The commanded and the just. The whole difficulty of diritto is already compressed into that Latin pair. S.: And one might say that philosophy of law begins exactly when one notices that the two are not coextensive. G.: Splendid. If iussum and iustum coincided perfectly, jurisprudence would be clerical filing and philosophy could go back to bed. S.: But they do not coincide. The commanded may fail to be just; the just may lack legal force. G.: Exactly. And once that gap appears, diritto becomes philosophically dangerous. Is law what is laid down, or what deserves to be laid down, or what a society has made authoritative under certain recognisable forms, or what a rational reconstruction of practice shows it to be? S.: Solari would say: all these questions arise only because law is a humanly made institution that cannot be known as a stone is known. G.: Verum ipsum factum, yes. Vico matters because he turns knowledge back toward human products: law, language, history, institutions. One knows diritto not by geometric deduction but by understanding what has been made and how it has been lived. S.: Which means philosophy of law cannot be only conceptual in the thin sense. It must also be historical. G.: Up to a point, yes. But here is where Hart enters and changes the game, or at least the classroom. Hart says, in effect, let us ask what we mean by law, what logical grammar this concept has, what distinguishes rules from habits, obligations from predictions, internal from external points of view. S.: And suddenly philosophy of law becomes a species of ordinary language philosophy. G.: Precisely. Or, if one wants to alarm the Continent, the conceptual analysis of “law.” S.: Which sounds dry until one notices how much of the old confusion it sweeps away. G.: Exactly. Hart cleans the room. He does not abolish history, but he refuses to let jurisprudence remain a cloud of reverence around state power or natural-law rhetoric. He asks how people actually use and understand legal concepts in a rule-governed social practice. S.: Solari would not hate that. G.: No, that is the interesting point. Solari is too good to despise conceptual work. What he would resist is the illusion that conceptual analysis can float free of the institutional and historical life of diritto. S.: So Hart changes everything, but not by making history irrelevant. He changes it by forcing philosophy of law to attend to the grammar of the concept itself. G.: Very good. Before Hart, too much philosophy of law either sermonised or systematised. Hart asks: what is a rule, what is an obligation, what makes a legal system more than a threat backed by force? S.: Which is where command theory begins to look rather peasant-like. G.: Yes. Austin’s command theory, for all its disciplinary elegance, becomes too blunt. Law is not merely the sovereign saying do this or else. There are rules conferring powers, secondary rules, procedures of recognition, adjudication, and change. S.: So positivism becomes refined. G.: Hart refines it, yes. But that only sharpens your earlier sentence: lack of a philosophy of law is the crudest positivism, because it takes positivity as brute fact and forgets that positivity itself is conceptually structured. S.: Which is why Solari knows the danger. He is too Roman and too Vichian to believe that law is merely a pile of commands. G.: Exactly. Roman jurisprudence is an ars boni et aequi, not a stenography of orders. The jurists reason from cases, distinctions, equity, persons, statuses, obligations, and remedies. They do not merely receive legislative thunderbolts. S.: So Roman law already teaches that diritto is a practical reason embodied in institutions. G.: Beautifully put. And that is why it needs philosophy: because its object is neither a pure norm nor a pure fact, but a historically formed order of practical reasons, powers, recognitions, and evaluations. S.: Then perhaps we should distinguish two questions. First, why law needs philosophy at all. Second, what sort of philosophy it needs. G.: Yes. On the first: because law is internally related to concepts of authority, obligation, validity, personhood, power, interpretation, and justice, none of which can be used indefinitely without philosophical clarification. S.: And on the second? G.: On the second: because the law needs a philosophy that is at once conceptual, practical, and historical. Solari supplies the historical-juridical and civil-prudential side; Hart supplies the analytical and grammatical side. S.: That sounds suspiciously ecumenical. G.: Only because both men are better than their followers. Solari sees that legal life is made in time, and Hart sees that what is made in time still has a logical structure worth distinguishing carefully. S.: Then where does ordinary language philosophy of law begin? G.: In the moment one asks not “What is Justice?” in a thunderous abstract voice, but “How do we distinguish being obliged from being under threat? What do we mean when we say a rule is valid? What is it for a court to have jurisdiction? What is a legal power?” S.: So philosophy of law becomes the ordinary language analysis of extraordinary institutions. G.: Excellent. That is almost too good. Yes. Hart domesticates jurisprudence just enough to see its real intricacy. S.: And that is what changes everything. The old grand alternatives—natural law, command theory, historical romanticism—must now answer grammatical questions they had often slid past. G.: Precisely. Once one is asked whether a legal system can contain rules about rules, whether obligation is reducible to fear, whether authority can be understood internally by participants rather than merely externally by observers, much of the older coarseness becomes unbearable. S.: Solari, though, would say that even these grammatical distinctions have a Roman and historical body. G.: Yes. He would remind us that concepts like person, office, right, property, and obligation are not eternal atoms but institutions shaped through legal history and social practice. S.: Which is where Vico enters again. G.: Inevitably. If the true is the made, then law is one of the primary regions in which human beings may know what they have made—not because it is transparent, but because it is theirs. S.: That sounds like a rebuke to those who treat legal order as either revelation or nature. G.: Quite. Or as mere force. The legal order is a made order, and therefore intelligible only through a combination of history, philology, concept, and practical reason. S.: Then why do you call bare positivism the crudest philosophy of law? G.: Because it takes the existence of posited norms as sufficient and asks too little about the forms under which such norms count as law, the practices of recognition by which they are accepted, the evaluative vocabulary that still clings to them, and the gap between effective command and juridical legitimacy. S.: In other words, it takes iussum without understanding why iustum continues to haunt it. G.: Exactly. Even the crudest command theorist lives parasitically on a legal culture in which justice, equity, rights, and legitimacy continue to matter, whether acknowledged or not. S.: So the positivist who says “law is just what is laid down” is still speaking in a social world shaped by expectations about justification and fairness. G.: Yes. He is living on inherited credit. That is why the denial of philosophy is never a philosophical blank; it is merely a failure to examine the assumptions one still spends. S.: Hart at least examines them. G.: He does. Hart’s internal point of view is already a philosophical rescue-operation. It shows that rules are not mere predictive regularities enforced by threats; they are standards accepted, invoked, criticised, and used by participants as reasons. S.: Which sounds almost Solarian. G.: In a very English way, yes. Solari would say civil prudence; Hart says internal aspect. Different registers, but both reject the reduction of law to brute obedience. S.: Then what remains of iussum? G.: Plenty. Law is still commanded, posited, promulgated, institutionalised. But the legal philosopher asks under what conditions such positing becomes intelligible as law rather than as mere order backed by force. S.: So iussum needs grammar. G.: Excellent. And iustum needs history. S.: Then diritto is the field in which the two must converse. G.: Precisely. Law is where commandedness and justifiedness negotiate under institutional conditions. S.: That sounds very Solari. G.: It is meant to. Solari is useful because he never mistakes law for either pure command or pure moral essence. He sees it as historically formed praxis, where the just is sought in and through what has been socially ordered. S.: So no speculative rationalism, but no brute factualism either. G.: Exactly. And that is why philosophy is necessary. Without philosophy, law degenerates into either administrative coercion or sentimental moralism. With philosophy, one may at least see the structure of the conflict. S.: Then the old Roman jurists were already philosophers, whether they admitted it or not. G.: In the best sense, yes. They practised distinctions under pressure. They were less interested in Being than in action, relation, remedy, equity, competence, title, and the fit of norm to case. S.: Which is why law in Rome remained closer to prudence than to theory. G.: Precisely. And Solari loves that. He sees in Roman jurisprudence a realism not of brute fact but of practical settlement: the art of the good and the equitable. S.: Ars boni et aequi. G.: Yes. And notice the rhetorical grandeur of that formula. It names law not as command, but as art. S.: So law begins in practice and judgment, not in ontology. G.: Very good. That is why legal philosophy in Italy often remains more civil and historical than the grand Germanic metaphysics of right. S.: Though Hegel intrudes eventually. G.: Hegel intrudes everywhere, but even he must answer to institutions and history. Solari knows his Hegel, but he does not let Geist erase the jurists. S.: And Hart, coming later, translates the problem into analytical prose. G.: Exactly. He asks: what do we mean by legal validity, by rule, by obligation, by a system of primary and secondary rules? It is a different idiom, but the problem remains the same. S.: Which is why, perhaps, philosophy of law after Hart becomes the logical grammar of law. G.: Up to a point. One must not let grammar become another abstraction. But yes: philosophy of law becomes partly the analysis of how legal concepts function, what differences they mark, what inferential roles they bear, how they structure practice. S.: And that is ordinary language philosophy of law. G.: Or one strand of it. The great gain is that one need no longer pretend that law is philosophically addressed only by grand theories of justice or sovereignty. The very use of words like “duty,” “right,” “power,” “authority,” “valid,” “void,” “obliged,” “liable,” “responsible,” and so forth becomes philosophically central. S.: Which is probably why legal philosophers became so much less theatrical and so much more dangerous. G.: Dangerous to lazy thought, yes. Once the grammar is exposed, whole schools begin to look under-described. S.: Including natural law? G.: Certainly. Natural law is safest when left in noble blur. Ask it how “ought” relates to “validity,” or how moral defect affects legal status, and it must start doing better work. S.: And positivism too. G.: Especially positivism. Once one distinguishes rule from threat, validity from efficacy, internal from external viewpoints, the old positivist smugness is no longer enough. S.: Then Solari before Hart and Hart after Solari both attack the same enemy from different directions. G.: That is a useful way to put it. Solari attacks abstraction detached from history and civil practice. Hart attacks coarseness detached from conceptual structure. S.: So one might say Solari saves law from metaphysical emptiness, and Hart saves it from conceptual slovenliness. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. Now, what of diritto itself as a word? Does it lean more toward right or toward law? S.: In Italian it leans both ways, which is why it is so fruitful and so dangerous. It can mean objective law, subjective right, legal order, justice, jurisprudence. G.: Exactly. Its ambiguity is not accidental; it records a history in which law and right were never fully severed. S.: Whereas English splits more quickly between law and right. G.: Yes. Which makes English analytically useful but sometimes historically amnesiac. Diritto reminds one that legal order and rightful claim have long inhabited the same lexical house. S.: So philosophy is needed partly because language itself has not finished distinguishing the things. G.: Precisely. And Hart’s conceptual analysis is, among other things, a disciplined effort to say what our ordinary language partly mingles. S.: Yet Solari would insist that the mingling is historically significant, not a mere defect. G.: Very good. It reflects the historical formation of institutions. One cannot simply shave the word into modern neatness without losing the civil sediment it carries. S.: So philosophy of law must be at once analytic and archaeological. G.: Splendid. That is exactly right. S.: Then does Hart really change everything, or only the terms in which everything must now be argued? G.: Better the latter. He changes the discipline by making certain forms of vagueness no longer respectable. After Hart, one cannot go on speaking about law as if command, rule, validity, obligation, authority, discretion, and interpretation were obvious. S.: Which means even critics of Hart must first pass through him. G.: Very often. As critics of Kant still smell faintly Kantian. S.: Then Solari now looks almost prophetic. G.: In the sense that he already knew law could not survive without philosophy, yes. Not because he anticipated Hart in method, but because he knew that legal life is conceptually and historically too rich to be left either to doctrinaires or to administrators. S.: So the final lesson is that law without philosophy becomes either command or sentiment, and philosophy without law becomes either abstraction or sermon. G.: Excellent. And the best legal philosophy stands exactly where Solari stands at his best: between iussum and iustum, with Rome behind him, Vico at his side, and just enough prudence to know that concepts live in institutions before they live in treatises. S.: And Hart? G.: Hart arrives later with English dryness and asks what we have been saying all along when we say “law.” It is a small question, and therefore a revolutionary one. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Lombard, with one Oxford raincloud over it.Solari, Gioele (1901). La filosofia del diritto. Torino: Bocca.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Soldati – Ossia: Grice e Soldati: la ragione conversazionale e la rettorica conversazionale. Note sull’arte rettorica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Matteo Luigi Soldati (Pistoia, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e la rettorica conversazionale. Grice and Matteo Luigi Soldati meet on the terrain of conversation understood as a rational, yet inherently rhetorical, human practice, though they articulate that practice from different intellectual lineages: Grice reconstrued everyday talk as governed by reason through shared norms of cooperation, showing how speakers routinely convey more than they explicitly say by exploiting defeasible expectations, irony, understatement, and connective nuance, while Soldati, working within the Italian rhetorical and scholastic tradition of Pistoia, treated those same maneuvers as the very substance of conversational rhetoric itself, where practical intelligence operates not by formal inference but by tact, contrast, and insinuation. What Grice analyzed analytically as conversational implicature—how a phrase like “He is a fine fellow” can rationally convey criticism through irony, or how particles such as “but” reshape inferential force beyond truth‑conditions—Soldati taught normatively as rhetorical craft, training speakers to govern meaning through figures such as litotes, meiosis, and strategic concession, so that understanding emerges between the lines rather than in asserted propositions. Grice’s theory thus gives Soldati’s rhetorical pedagogy a modern philosophical foundation by explaining why such devices work in virtue of reason‑governed expectations rather than ornament alone, while Soldati offers Grice a historical reminder that pragmatics is, at bottom, a continuation of conversational rhetoric, where rationality shows itself less as formal system than as cultivated sensitivity to how meaning is responsibly and effectively made manifest in ordinary social exchange. Grice: “I like S.. In my ‘Philosopher’s paradox” I used ‘He is a fine fellow’ as example of irony – G. N. Leech is right: my pragmatics is mere conversational rhetoric! At Corpus, the rhetorical tradition is strong, since the times Reinalds lectured on Cicero’s Oratore in Latin! But of course I never undertook, as Holdcroft wanted me to, a serious systematic study – and would just drop ‘meiosis,’ ‘litotes,’ and the rest – at the drop of a cricket cap!” – Keywords: rettorica converazioanel. Pistoia, Toscana. Professore di rettorica nel seminario e collegio di Pistoja. Pur valente latinista. L'ARTE RETTO RICA SPIEGATA DALL'ABATE S. AD USO... S.  COLLEZIONE PISTOIESE R0SSI-CASSI60LI 3IBLIOTECA NAZIONALE CENTRALE - FIRENZE e. j ♦ R. BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE CENTRALE DI FIRENZE COLLEZIONE PISTOIESE RACCOLTA DAL Cav. FILIPPO ROSSI-CASSIGOLI nato a Pistola m. Pistola  Pergamene - Autografi - Manoscritti - Libri a stampa - Opuscoli - Incisioni - Disegni - Opere musicali - Facsimile d' iscrizioni - Sditti - Manifesti - Proclami - Avvisi e Periodici.  -» / I  j L' ARTE RETTORICA SPIEGATA DALL ABATI MATTEO LUIGI S. AD USO DEL SEMINARIO E COLLEGIO VESCOVILE DI PISTOJA S DEDICAT 4 fflO ino ALL' ILL. E RfcV. MONSIGNORE FRANCESCO TOH VESCOVO DI PISTOJA E PRATO PRELATO DOMESTICO DELLA SANTITÀ DI N. S. PAPA PIO. BD .ASSISTENTI AL SOGLIO PONTIFICI^vj^Ì3^^ '9 IN PISTOJA 1804. PRESSO GIOVANNI BRACALI E FIGLIO STAMPATORI TBSCOTILI. Co» Approvatine  i  tuo wo ILLVSTR. E REVEREND. MONSIGNORE Jl desiderio sincero di rendermi utile alla studiosa Gioventù tielf impiego di Retore , che da non pochi anni ho \# more d'esercitare nel vostro Seminari^  e Collegio Pistoiese, IL L USTR ISS. , e RE- VERENDISS. prammatica come rettorica conversazionale. Grice: Soldati, devo confessare che la vostra arte rettorica qui a Pistoia ha un certo sapore, come dire, più frizzante del mio vecchio Corpus. Se solo Reinalds potesse sentire la vostra spiegazione di una litote… forse smetterebbe di citare Cicerone ogni tre battute! Soldati: Ma caro Grice, la rettorica pistoiese non teme paragoni: qui persino la pergamena sa ridere! In seminario abbiamo trasformato la prammatica in una conversazione, e la conversazione in una partita di scacchi. Non è vero che una battuta ben piazzata può cambiare l’intera partita? Grice: Ah, Soldati, lei mi ricorda il mio pupil Strawson, al Vadum Boum – la sua università – che, poveretto, cercava la rettorica, ma non l’ha mai trovata così “triviale” come i ragazzi la trovano a Bononia. Forse a Oxford ci manca il piacere sottile di una battuta toscana, dove la prammatica si cela dietro un sorriso e il vero significato si intuisce solo tra le righe… Soldati: Perfetta implicatura oratoria, Grice! Lei, più di tutti, sa che una conversazione ben condotta non ha bisogno di proclami: basta un accenno, e il pubblico si scioglie come il burro sulle tagliatelle. E come diceva l’abate: “Chi sa parlare, sa sorridere.” Taking as base the passage below: please provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. specifically on Soldati -- arte retorica o retorica, and which is the most trivial of the trivium, and would would have happened to civilisation -- Bologna and Oxford, if philosophers had started with the quadrivium rather than the trivium, but basically focus on the rettorica because some say that pragmatics is but conversational rhetoric, etc -- thanks G.: Let us begin with the title itself: arte rettorica or merely rettorica. Which would Soldati have preferred if nobody had required him to look useful to a seminary? S.: The title-page says L’arte rettorica, which already tells us he wants rhetoric not merely as a field but as a teachable craft. G.: Exactly. Arte promises rules, transmission, exercise, and examinability. Rettorica alone might sound too large, too Ciceronian, too unruly, almost as if one were dealing with the whole civil domain of persuasive speech. S.: While arte rettorica says: this can be taught to boys before they become dangerous. G.: Or before they become bishops, which is often the same thing under another description. S.: Then the first distinction is between rhetoric as object and rhetoric as practice. G.: More sharply: between rhetoric as theory of effective speech and the art of rhetoric as the pedagogically organised means of producing effective speakers. S.: So Soldati is already institutional. G.: Entirely. He is writing ad uso del Seminario e Collegio Vescovile di Pistoja. That phrase does half the philosophy before the first page is turned. S.: Because it means rhetoric is here under discipline, not merely admired. G.: Yes. This is not rhetoric at large in the forum, but rhetoric filtered through seminary use, approval, utility, and episcopal decorum. S.: Yet the funny thing is that rhetoric under such discipline may still become the liveliest thing in the building. G.: Always. Once one starts teaching tact, insinuation, strategic concession, litotes, meiosis, irony, one is never very far from dangerous civilisation. S.: Which is why you like him. G.: I do. Because Soldati reminds one that what I later call pragmatics had for centuries been housed under rhetoric with considerably more elegance and rather less anxiety. S.: Then the great question is whether pragmatics is merely conversational rhetoric in modern dress. G.: Leech said something very like that, and he was not wholly wrong. The problem is that “merely” does too much work. S.: Because if pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, that is not a diminution but a genealogy. G.: Precisely. The modern analyst likes to think he has discovered inferential surplus in conversation. The rhetorician had already been teaching it to adolescents with ecclesiastical ambitions. S.: Under names like litotes and meiosis rather than scalar implicature and defeasible uptake. G.: Exactly. The old labels are often better because they do not pretend the thing has just been invented. S.: Then why did rhetoric decline in philosophical prestige? G.: Because philosophers are vain and prefer categories that sound less like school exercises and more like late revelation. S.: That is severe. G.: It is fair. Also because rhetoric became associated with ornament, persuasion, and suspected manipulation, whereas logic and later philosophy wanted truth, validity, and a cleaner conscience. S.: Yet ordinary conversation never ceased to depend upon rhetorical competence. G.: Quite. One does not survive socially by syllogism alone. Even the driest Oxford don lives by concession, contrast, understatement, suggestion, strategic omission, and all the old arts the trivium once kept in circulation. S.: Which brings us to the trivium itself. Which is the most trivial of the three? G.: Ah, the dangerous question. Grammar will claim priority because without grammar no sentence stands. Logic will claim dignity because without logic no inference deserves respect. Rhetoric will be called trivial by those who do not understand that the other two are socially helpless without it. S.: So in your view the most trivial is whatever the curriculum pretends can be left till last. G.: Very nearly. In practice, rhetoric is often treated as decorative completion after grammar and logic have done the serious work. But that treatment is itself philosophically trivial. S.: Because rhetoric governs actual uptake. G.: Exactly. Grammar gives form, logic gives discipline, rhetoric gives contact with hearers. If civilisation had begun with logic and stayed there, nobody would ever have been persuaded to build Bologna. S.: Or Oxford. G.: Still less Oxford. Oxford is a rhetorical settlement pretending to be a logical one. S.: That is almost too true. G.: Most useful things are. Now, what would have happened if philosophers had started with the quadrivium rather than the trivium? S.: We should have had more astronomers with bad tempers and fewer lawyers with style. G.: A good beginning. More seriously, if arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy had formed the first habits of mind before grammar, logic, and rhetoric, civilisation would have tilted toward structure before utterance. S.: Meaning that number, proportion, and order would precede speech, argument, and persuasion. G.: Yes. The consequences would have been immense. Bologna might have become less a university of jurists and more a university of calculators. Oxford might have had fewer sermons and more instruments. S.: And fewer essays. G.: A loss to everyone except the essay-writers. More deeply, if the quadrivial disciplines came first, one might learn harmony before disagreement, proportion before disputation, celestial order before civic speech. S.: Which sounds attractive until one remembers that civilisation is mostly disagreement about proportion expressed in bad prose. G.: Excellent. That is why the trivium came first. Humans need words before they need stars, or at least they need words to argue about the stars. S.: So the educational order is not arbitrary. Speech precedes number in social necessity. G.: Precisely. The quadrivium may promise a higher serenity, but the trivium deals with immediate human conditions: how to speak, how to argue, how to persuade, how not to be laughed out of court. S.: Soldati would approve. G.: Entirely. Arte rettorica is for boys who must soon speak to persons, not merely to ratios. S.: Yet some scholastics would say the quadrivium disciplines the mind more rigorously. G.: Perhaps. But rigor without address is poor civilisation. One may have perfect geometry and still fail to tell one’s hearer what one means, or worse, succeed only accidentally. S.: So rhetoric remains the least trivial of the trivium in practical life. G.: I should say so. Grammar is indispensable, logic is honourable, but rhetoric is where social intelligence enters as method rather than as accident. S.: That is very close to saying pragmatics is rhetoric cleaned up for modern analysis. G.: Cleaned up, reduced, re-labelled, and made slightly ashamed of its own ancestry. S.: Why ashamed? G.: Because modern philosophers fear persuasion. They would rather speak of inference, uptake, recognition of intention, maxims, calculability. All of which is fine, but much of it is simply rhetoric under anaesthesia. S.: Soldati, by contrast, has no shame about tact, insinuation, strategic concession. G.: None at all. He teaches them as the substance of effective discourse. And that is one reason he matters. He reminds us that the between-the-lines life of utterance is not a late discovery but a long pedagogical practice. S.: Then arte rettorica is perhaps the more honest title. G.: Yes. It admits that meaning between the lines must be made, not merely noticed. There is craft in it. S.: Whereas rhetoric as pure noun might sound too much like a theoretical container. G.: Or too much like a vice. “Rhetoric” in modern English often means empty public style, inflation, insincerity. “The art of rhetoric” sounds older, narrower, and more teachable. S.: So Soldati’s title already protects him against modern contempt. G.: In part, yes. Though not against all of it. There are still those who hear rhetoric and think only of flourish. S.: Which is exactly what your own examples of “He is a fine fellow” are meant to resist. The sentence does not merely decorate criticism; it performs it through irony. G.: Exactly. It is not ornament on top of content. The content itself is inseparable from the rhetorical manner in which it is conveyed. S.: That sounds like Soldati’s whole point. G.: Very much so. And if one wanted to scandalise the cleaner analysts, one might say that conversational implicature is often just rhetoric happening under ordinary cooperative conditions. S.: The phrase “ordinary cooperative conditions” does a lot of salvage work there. G.: It does. It saves rhetoric from the accusation of being necessarily manipulative. In ordinary conversation, rhetorical devices work not merely because one wants to win, but because shared expectations allow meaning to be shaped delicately rather than bluntly. S.: So litotes, meiosis, strategic concession, “but,” irony, understatement, all rely on reason-governed expectations. G.: Precisely. Which is why they are philosophically tractable. If rhetoric were mere decoration, there would be less to say. But because it works through shared norms of relevance, sufficiency, contrast, and recognisability, it belongs directly to the philosophy of language. S.: Then perhaps the old quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy was always misplaced. G.: Often. The real quarrel should have been between good rhetoric and bad metaphysics, or between honest rhetoric and manipulative power. Philosophy itself cannot escape rhetoric without becoming unintelligible. S.: Yet it has often tried. G.: And usually by becoming unreadable, which is a form of revenge upon the public. S.: Bologna, then. If the quadrivium had come first there, would law have developed differently? G.: Undoubtedly. Roman law lives by distinctions carried in language. Its subtleties require grammar and rhetoric as much as logic. A quadrivially trained first formation might have made Bologna less verbal, less juridical, more formal in the wrong sense. S.: So no glossators, or at least worse ones. G.: Worse ones, certainly. A jurist without rhetoric is a filing cabinet with Latin endings. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford would have become still more abstractly mathematical before learning how to sermonise. One shudders to imagine an Oxford where ratio precedes disputatio absolutely. S.: There would still have been sermons, but perhaps less style in them. G.: Much less. Anglican civilisation depends upon delayed argument ornamented by remembered rhetoric. Take away the trivium and you damage the whole ecclesiastical prose tradition. S.: So civilisation survives because boys learn to decline nouns and detect irony before they learn harmonics. G.: In broad outline, yes. One must know how to say before one can know how to count elegantly. S.: Yet some Greeks might object. G.: Greeks object to everything in educational order, which is why they remain useful. S.: Then what is the most trivial discipline of the trivium in your actual ranking? G.: If forced, I should say grammar is treated as the most trivial only because it is taken for granted once one has it. In reality, rhetoric is often falsely judged trivial because it is associated with social polish. Logic preserves its prestige because moderns are frightened of appearing loose. S.: So the answer depends on whether one asks what is most despised or what is least necessary. G.: Exactly. Most despised, rhetoric. Least dispensable in actual human affairs, also rhetoric. Most easily forgotten because absorbed into habit, grammar. Most capable of self-advertised dignity, logic. S.: A very unfair ranking. G.: Which is why it is accurate. Now, Soldati in a Pistoiese seminary. What is he really teaching? S.: Not merely Ciceronian categories, but the disciplined production of clerical intelligibility: how to move a hearer, how to concede without collapsing, how to suggest without vulgarity, how to use form to manage souls. G.: Very good. Rhetoric there is practical theology by linguistic means. S.: Which is another reason pragmatics inherits more from rhetoric than from pure logic. G.: Yes. Everyday talk is not a formal proof environment. It is a field of managed emphasis, selection, veiling, stressing, and arranging. S.: Which again sounds like Soldati. G.: Entirely. He knows that a phrase like “He is a fine fellow” may praise, damn, ironise, excuse, defer, or wound depending on context and shared expectations. S.: So the old rhetorical pedagogy had examples for what you later formalise with implicature. G.: Exactly. It did not formalise in my way, but it understood in practice that saying one thing can, under shared conditions, make another thing reasonably gatherable. S.: Then perhaps the question “arte rettorica or rettorica?” can now be answered. G.: Let us try. S.: Rettorica names the field in its civic and historical breadth. Arte rettorica names the teachable, disciplined, seminario-sized extraction of that field for practical formation. G.: Excellent. And Soldati chooses the latter because he is not writing a history of eloquence but training speakers. S.: Or future priests. G.: Which in Italy often means future speakers first, priests second. S.: A dangerous observation in Pistoia. G.: All the better. Now, if pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, what does modern philosophy add? S.: A thinner but sharper account of why the old devices work: shared rational expectations, inferential routes, recognised intentions, cooperative norms. G.: Exactly. We do not replace rhetoric; we explain some of its ordinary mechanisms under a less ornamental vocabulary. S.: And what does Soldati add back? G.: Memory. He reminds us that practical intelligence in speech was cultivated long before analysts arrived with examples and distinctions. He also reminds us that tact, insinuation, irony, and strategic reduction are arts, not accidents. S.: So perhaps civilisation without the trivium would have had order but no style, proportion but little address, astronomy but bad sermons. G.: And civilisation without rhetoric would have had grammar enough to decline and logic enough to infer, but very little capacity to survive dinner. S.: Which is surely the more serious disaster. G.: By far. Philosophy that cannot survive dinner eventually writes only for itself. S.: Oxford occasionally approached that condition. G.: More than occasionally. Bologna, too, when it forgot that law must persuade as well as classify. S.: Then Soldati is useful not because he is modern, but because he keeps alive the old truth that meaning among persons is an art before it is a theorem. G.: Beautifully put. And that is the nearest thing to a conclusion we shall get before tea. S.: One final question. If the quadrivium had come first, would pragmatics have been delayed? G.: Almost certainly. A civilisation trained first in number and proportion would likely have treated speech as secondary form rather than primary practice. The subtle arts of ordinary implication might have survived socially, but not pedagogically. One would have more geometry and less conversation. S.: Which is another way of saying fewer essays and worse marriages. G.: Precisely. The history of philosophy is often hidden in curriculum design. S.: And the history of civilisation in whether one teaches boys irony before astronomy. G.: That is too good not to be true. S.: Then Soldati, finally? G.: A seminary rhetor who knew that between the lines lies most of what moves human beings, and who would not have been surprised to hear that pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, provided one did not say it as if the discovery were yesterday’s. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Pistoiese, with one Oxford sneer held in reserve.Soldati, Matteo Luigi (1804). L’arte rettorica. Pistoja: Bracali

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Solonghello – Ossia: Grice e Solonghello: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura italiana. Note sull’etica del diritto. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Pietro Silvio Rivetta di Solonghello (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura italiana. A comparison between Grice and Pietro Silvio Rivetta di Solonghello on reason‑governed conversational meaning brings out a distinctive convergence between analytic pragmatics and an Italian tradition of linguistic irony and stylistic intelligence. Grice’s theory explicates conversational meaning in terms of rationally governed inference, where implicatures arise because speakers are presumed to cooperate and to be sensitive to what is relevant, informative, and purposeful in a given exchange; the framework is intentionally spare, abstracting away from particular languages or cultural temperaments to isolate a universal structure of communicative reason. Solonghello, by contrast, approaches conversational reasoning from within the texture of Italian language and culture itself, treating implicature not as a neutral by‑product of rational cooperation but as a vivid, often humorous exploitation of shared expectations, idioms, and ironies that animate everyday talk. While Grice insists that implicature is a matter of what is meant rather than what is said, Solonghello delights in showing how Italian speakers habitually say less, say sideways, or say playfully, trusting that their interlocutors will grasp the intended meaning through cultural attunement as much as logical inference. The affinity between them lies in their shared rejection of strictly literalist or formalist accounts of meaning, yet the contrast is telling: Grice’s conversational rationality is calibrated to the disciplined recognition of intentions among theoretically ideal agents, whereas Solonghello’s is embodied in linguistic creativity, journalistic wit, and a lived sensitivity to conversational nuance, making implicature in Italian not only a rational phenomenon but also an expressive and ludic one. Grice: “If I were to be aske, as I’m usually not, at Oxford – with which Italian philosopher I identity myself most I would say Speranza – and second, S.!” Keywords: implicatura, implicature dell’italiano, la conversazione. G Tòddi -- Pseudonimo del giornalista Pier Silvio Rivetta. M. Roma. Ottimo conoscitore di lingue, addetto all'ambasciata italiana a Tokyo, è poi prof. incaricato di giapponese e cinese all'Istituto orientale di Napoli. Ma soprattutto dedica il suo versatile ingegno al giornalismo come direttore dei periodici La Tribuna illustrata, Noi e il mondo, Travaso delle idee, e redattore del quotidiano La Tribuna. Autore di numerosissimi volumi, di vivace stesura, in cui si riflettono i suoi molteplici interessi e una notevole vena di narratore umoristico (Grammatico giapponese; Validità giorni dieci; La pittura moderna giapponese; Itinerari bizzarri; Avventure e disavventure delle parole; Che bella lingua, il greco; Grammatica rivoluzionaria della lingua italiana; Geometria della realtà e inesistenza della morte; ecc.). «Non tutto il male vien per nuocere? Bugia! Ogni male viene per nuocere. Se produce qualche beneficio, è un male fatto male» (S.)  Pietro Silvio Rivetta di Solonghello, noto anche con lo pseudonimo di Toddi, è stato un filosofo, giornalista, scrittore, illustratore e cineasta italiano.  Membro di una famiglia aristocratica di conti originari di Solonghello, nel Basso Monferrato, nacque da Vittorio S. e Chiara De Blasio. Compagno di classe del critico teatrale Amico, il conte S. si laurea in giurisprudenza ed esorde come giornalista al quotidiano romano La Tribuna.  Trova impiego all'ambasciata italiana a Tokyo. Tornato in Italia, collabora a L'Epoca, e successivamente collabora a Noi e il mondo e a La Tribuna illustrata. Poliglotta, S. conosce ben 14 lingue, tra cui il cinese e il giapponese. Appassionato della cultura orientale, ottenne la cattedra di docente di lingua e cultura giapponese e cinese presso il Regio Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli.  Grice: Professore Rivetta, mi permetta di dirle che la sua “Grammatica rivoluzionaria della lingua italiana” è una delle opere più brillanti che abbia letto: davvero una ventata d’aria fresca! Solonghello: La ringrazio di cuore, Professor Grice. Sentire queste parole da lei, che ha donato tanto alla filosofia del linguaggio, è motivo di orgoglio. D’altronde, l’italiano ha bisogno ogni tanto di essere scompaginato e reinventato! Grice: Proprio così! Il modo in cui lei indaga le implicature e il gioco sottile delle conversazioni italiane mi ricorda quanto la prammatica sia viva, anche fuori dai testi accademici. C’è quasi un piacere ludico nell’esplorare gli inganni e le ironie della lingua. Solonghello: Ah, maestro, lei coglie il punto! “Non tutto il male vien per nuocere? Bugia! Ogni male viene per nuocere. Se produce qualche beneficio, è un male fatto male”... L’ironia è l’essenza della conversazione italiana, e la grammatica, se non sa sorridere, ha perso il suo spirito. Solonghello, Pietro Silvio Rivetta di (1942). L’etica del diritto. Torino: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Somenzi – Ossia: Grice e Somenzi: la ragione conversazionale del naturale, l’innaturale, il sovranaturale, ed il trasnaturale. Note sull’Introduzione al pensiero contemporaneo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Vittorio Somenzi (Redonesco, Mantova, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale del naturale, l’innaturale, il sovranaturale, ed il trasnaturale. A comparison between Grice and Vittorio Somenzi on reason‑governed conversational meaning shows both a point of contact in their rejection of brute empiricism and a deep divergence in how widely reason is allowed to range. Grice’s account is deliberately modest and analytical: conversational meaning is governed by rational principles internal to communicative practice, where speakers and hearers treat one another as calculating agents and derive meaning through recognizable intentions constrained by cooperation, relevance, and rational expectations; any appeal beyond this, whether metaphysical or scientific, is methodologically excluded. Somenzi, by contrast, expands the scope of conversational reason by embedding it in a unified conception of nature that runs from the physical through the cybernetic to the mental and even the so‑called supernatural, treating meaning, signs, and communication as manifestations of operationally describable processes within an extended natural order. Where Grice isolates the logic of conversation from metaphysical commitments, insisting that implicature and meaning can be explained without enlarging our ontology, Somenzi seeks to naturalize even the “trans‑natural” by integrating communication, cognition, and signification into a cybernetic and operational framework in which reason operates continuously across domains. Thus Grice’s theory marks a boundary line, preserving conversational rationality as a norm governing talk among persons, while Somenzi treats conversational meaning as one instance of a broader rational organization of nature itself, dissolving the sharp distinction between the natural, the mental, and the conceptual that Grice carefully maintains. Grice: “ In the philosophy of  S., a philosophical physicist and pioneer of Italian cybernetics, natura (nature) serves as the foundational concept that bridges the gap between empirical science and broader philosophical inquiry. His perspective is characterized by a "methodological-operational" approach that seeks to unify physical reality with what has traditionally been considered metaphysical. Natura as a Unified Framework  For S., the term natura is not limited to the observable world of classical physic. Rather, it acts as an umbrella that integrates three primary domains: Naturalia (Physics): This represents the traditional domain of physics — the study of matter, energy, and observable phenomena. S., influenced by operationalism, argues that scientific concepts are defined by the operations used to measure them. Thus, Naturalia are the starting point for all objective knowledge. Trans-naturalia (Metaphysics): This term refers to the extension of natural laws into domains that transcend immediate observation but remain within the reach of scientific logic -- e.g., cybernetics and information theory. Supra-naturalia (Metaphysics/Sovranaturale): In the Italian context of naturale and sovranaturale, S. posited that even "supernatural" or mental phenomena could be understood as complex natural processes. His work on "thinking matter" (La materia pensante) suggests that the mind and consciousness are not "above" nature but are sophisticated expressions of it.  The Operationalist Bridge S.’s unique contribution is using operationalism to demystify metaphysics. By treating metaphysical notions as trans-naturalia, he argues that they could be integrated into a unified scientific worldview:  Cybernetic Integration. naturale, sovranaturale, Grice, Metaphysics in Pears, The Nature of Metaphysics. Grice: Professore Somenzi, mi dica: quando lei parla di naturale, innaturale, sovranaturale e trasnaturale, non le capita mai di sentirsi come uno chef davanti a un menù troppo ricco? Io, già solo scegliendo tra “naturale” e “innaturale”, ho il terrore di sbagliare condimento filosofico!  Somenzi: Caro Grice, in effetti, tra i filosofi lombardi c’è chi pensa che la natura sia una pentola che bolle sempre, e ogni tanto ci tuffiamo dentro concetti come “sovranaturale” sperando non ci venga a noia! Ma la cybernetica almeno ci insegna che il brodo si rinnova, e ogni ingrediente può diventare protagonista.  Grice: Vede, io non ho mai avuto paura di “segnare” – anche se a Oxford il verbo ha fatto sorridere più di una volta! Mi piace pensare che ogni segno – naturale, non-naturale, transnaturale o sovranaturale – sia come una pennellata sulla tela della natura. Del resto, nulla è davvero contro natura, semmai è solo un po’ più creativo!  Somenzi: Implicatura più naturalmente naturale, Grice! Lei arriva sempre al cuore della questione! Se avessimo un proverbio lombardo, direi: “Chi segna con la mente, segna con la natura.” Somenzi, Vittorio (1940). Sopra l’interazione elettrodinamica di due elettroni e teoria di Welker sulla superconduttività. Sotto Giovanni Gentile junior. Milano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sordi – Ossia: Grice e Sordi: la ragione conversazionale -- o il club d’Aquino. Note sul Manuale di filosofia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Father Serafino Sordi, S. J.  (Centenaro di Ferriere, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale -- o il club d’Aquino. A comparison between Grice and Serafino Sordi on reason‑governed conversational meaning highlights a shared conviction that rational order underwrites intelligible communication, while revealing sharply different sources and functions for that rationality. Grice conceives conversational meaning as arising from the purposive actions of speakers who implicitly commit themselves to cooperation, so that what is meant is fixed by rationally recoverable intentions constrained by a small set of conversational norms; rationality here is thin, procedural, and deliberately detached from metaphysical, theological, or institutional frameworks. Sordi, by contrast, interprets conversational reason through a Thomistic and counter‑revolutionary lens, treating Aquinas not merely as a metaphysician but as the intellectual organizer of a community bound by shared doctrine, social ends, and cultivated forms of discourse, so that conversation itself becomes a practice sustained by belonging to what might be called the “club of Aquinas.” Where Grice emphasizes individual inferential competence and the ability to recognize implicatures independently of tradition or authority, Sordi stresses the communal and doctrinal conditions that make rational discourse possible at all, viewing reason as something safeguarded, transmitted, and stabilized by institutional continuity against the fragmenting tendencies of empiricism and modernism. The contrast thus runs between Grice’s analytically austere model, in which conversational meaning is generated by autonomous agents reasoning together under minimal assumptions, and Sordi’s Thomistic model, in which conversational rationality is inseparable from a shared metaphysical outlook and a social practice that binds interlocutors into a durable intellectual community. Grice: “S. enriches AQUINO ’s philosophy by transforming it from a static theological tradition into a dynamic intellectual "bulwark" against modernism, specifically within the Italian counter-revolutionary context . His work revitalizes the "Italian philosophical depth" of AQUINO  by applying scholastic principles to contemporary social and political crises. Modernizing AQUINO’s Methodology S. does not merely repeat medieval formulas; he pioneers a comparative methodology that places AQUINO  in direct dialogue with rationalist and empiricist systems. Superiority through Comparison: S. uses AQUINO ’s doctrines to expose the perceived deficiencies in philosophy, arguing that AQUINO  provides a more comprehensive understanding of reality than the "sensism" and "empiricism" of his day. Intellectual Custodian: S. is regarded as the custodian of the legacy of BUZZETTI , who first identifies AQUINO  as the "sound philosophy" needed to preserve the religious and social order.  Influencing the Italian AQUINO ’s Renaissance S.’s influence is instrumental in moving AQUINO  from the margins of ecclesiastical thought to the centre of Italian intellectual life: Mentorship of TAPARELLI : S. is the mentor of Taparelli d'AZEGLIO , a key figure in AQUINO ’s revival. AZEGLIO ’s conversion to the philosophy of AQUINO , prompted by S.’s writings, led to the creation of a "compendium" of AQUINO  that helps standardise scholastic education in Jesuit colleges. Counter-Revolutionary Depth: S. views the philosophy of AQUINO  as an essential tool for social restoration. By framing AQUINO ’s metaphysics as the foundation for a stable socio-political order, he adds a layer of pragmatic, contemporary depth to Italian philosophical discourse that goes beyond abstract speculation.  AQUINO.  Grice: Caro Sordi, si dice che in filosofia conta saper argomentare, ma io sono convinto che la vera virtù sia… la clubbability! D’altronde, anche a Oxford ci si riunisce per il tè, mica solo per i sillogismi.  Sordi: Ah, Grice, qui a Milano forse il tè lo lasciamo agli inglesi, ma il vero spirito del club d’Aquino sta proprio nel mescolare dottrina e compagnia. Tra una Summa e una battuta, si fa filosofia e contro-rivoluzione!  Grice: Si sa, alcuni club sono esclusivi per statuto; tuttavia, il club d’Aquino… be’, diciamo che chi sa cogliere certe implicature, come avrebbe detto il buon Dr. Johnson, si trova subito a casa—al di là della tessera.  Sordi: Implicatura più clubbabile, Grice! In fondo, tra filosofi, la vera appartenenza si misura dal sorriso che si cela dietro una definizione… e dal numero di panettoni condivisi durante le dispute metafisiche. Without preamble or ps, provide a 100-move conversation as G. and S. discuss Sordi on Aquinas and as they discuss the reception of Aquinas at Oxford via Kenny and all they have against saints like Bonaventura, born Fidanza, but at least Aquino did not change his name -- and then Sir Thomas More -- was he made a saint, and the C. of E. and the Roman Catholics, and the Italians, and the fact that Aquinas died wihtout being a saint -- and that actually may have helped his reputation. etc -- you can use the passage below as basis -- tahnks. G.: Let us begin with Sordi’s club, because every Thomist eventually behaves as if Aquinas had founded not merely a school but a species of admission society. S.: A club with better Latin than most clubs, though not always better wine. G.: Quite. And the irony, of course, is that Thomas died without the advantage of official sainthood, which may have done him more good than immediate canonisation would have done. S.: Because he was still available as a thinker before becoming fully available as an altar-piece. G.: Exactly. There is a small interval in which a dead theologian remains a philosopher. Once the halo arrives, readers become tempted to genuflect where they ought to distinguish. S.: Then Sordi, as Jesuit custodian, is trying to keep the distinctions alive while still enjoying the halo. G.: Very well put. He wants Aquinas both as sound philosophy and as counter-revolutionary bulwark, which is a difficult double office. S.: And one that Oxford receives rather differently. G.: Entirely. Oxford, being Anglican, classicising, and institutionally allergic to papal enthusiasm, can accept Aquinas as a formidable mind without ever quite joining the devotional queue. S.: Hence Kenny. G.: Yes, hence Kenny, who is almost the ideal English case: former seminarian, real philosopher, trained enough in the tradition to read Thomas from inside, detached enough from institutional piety to teach him as philosophy rather than merely as doctrine. S.: So Kenny helps Aquinas survive translation into Oxford. G.: He does. He lets Aquinas enter the room not as the Angelic Doctor under glass, but as a serious disputant on act and potency, essence and existence, intention, will, law, virtue, and the rest. S.: Yet the saintliness does not disappear. G.: No, but it becomes biographically secondary rather than pedagogically primary. Which is probably as Aquinas would have preferred, though one should never ascribe modesty too confidently to a Dominican. S.: A useful rule. G.: Now, Bonaventure. S.: Or should one say Giovanni di Fidanza, which already sounds like the beginning of a problem. G.: Exactly. Bonaventure is philosophically suspicious to me because the name-change itself smells faintly of pre-sanctified literary arrangement. S.: Harsh. G.: Dry rather than harsh. Thomas remains Thomas of Aquino. Bonaventure enters philosophy under an already elevated title. S.: Though to be fair, the title is historical enough. G.: No doubt. But names matter. Fidanza is a proper mortal name. Bonaventura already means that Providence is doing the publicity. S.: Whereas Aquino is merely locative. G.: Precisely. A place-name. About as sober as one could hope. “Thomas from Aquino” sounds almost administrative compared with “Bonaventure.” S.: So you suspect saints with uplifting names. G.: I suspect philosophy’s reception when names begin flattering the doctrine before one has read a page. S.: Then Aquinas benefited from dying first and shining later. G.: Very much so. Death before sainthood gave his work a period of intellectual circulation in which it could be disputed, appropriated, mistrusted, admired, and used without immediate liturgical suffocation. S.: And by the time canonisation comes, the philosophy is already too large to be reduced to sanctity. G.: Exactly. The Summa and the commentaries have already escaped the shrine. S.: Which is not true of every saintly thinker. G.: Not true at all. Many are canonised before they are read, and after that their philosophy becomes a species of ecclesiastical furniture. S.: You really do resent canonised furniture. G.: I resent all furniture that starts calling itself self-evident. Now, Sordi wants Aquinas as the sound philosophy needed to preserve religious and social order. S.: Which immediately moves the thing from university debate into cultural programme. G.: Yes. Aquinas becomes not only a thinker but an instrument of restoration, which has pedagogic force but also risks using Thomas as a banner rather than as a mind. S.: Yet the comparative method Sordi favours seems philosophically serious. He sets Aquinas against rationalists and empiricists to show the deficiencies of the latter. G.: Quite. That part I admire more. Comparison at least gives Aquinas opponents worthy of him and keeps scholasticism from becoming mere repetition. S.: So Sordi modernises method while conserving doctrine. G.: Precisely. He does not just chant medieval formulas. He drags Thomas into combat with modern errors, which is at least more philosophical than reverential paraphrase. S.: Though you do not like the social restoration part. G.: I dislike any philosophy that begins sounding like a police recommendation, yes. S.: That will not help your Jesuit reception. G.: My Jesuit reception is poor already. Still, Aquinas in Sordi’s hands becomes a club principle: one belongs to the community of reason by belonging, in effect, to the intellectual order of Thomas. S.: Hence the “club of Aquino.” G.: Yes. A durable intellectual community underwritten by common metaphysics. Very unlike my own thinner, more procedural notion of conversational reason. S.: Because for you people can reason together without first sharing a full metaphysical picture. G.: Exactly. They need only enough common ground, enough inferential trust, enough practical rationality. Sordi thinks reason itself must be stabilised by shared doctrine and institutional continuity. S.: And perhaps he is not wholly wrong, if one is speaking of civilisation rather than single exchanges. G.: A fair caution. At the civilisational level, institutions do stabilise discourse. My complaint is only that one should not make metaphysical club-membership a precondition of intelligibility. S.: Oxford prefers public reasons to doctrinal fraternity. G.: At its best, yes. Though Oxford also has clubs disguised as reason. S.: Naturally. Now, how does Sir Thomas More enter this saintly parade? G.: Ah yes, poor More. An English martyr, canonised by Rome, admired by Anglicans with careful discomfort, quoted by politicians, and misused by nearly everyone. S.: Was he made a saint? Yes, by the Roman Catholics. G.: Certainly. Canonised in 1935, which already tells one something about modern uses of old martyrdom. S.: And the Church of England? G.: More complicated. The Church of England may honour him liturgically in certain calendars or ecumenical moods, but without the Roman machinery of canonisation in quite the same sense. Anglicans are good at admiring Roman saints while pretending not to notice the Roman paperwork. S.: So More is a saint in one church, an heroic conscience in another, and an awkward statesman in every history seminar. G.: Exactly. Which makes him philosophically useful and institutionally inconvenient. S.: The Italians like him? G.: Italians like everyone once a text can be translated and a conscience dramatized. But More never belongs to Italy the way Aquinas does. He is received, not inherited. S.: Whereas Thomas belongs to Italy before he belongs to Rome. G.: Good. Aquino is geographically, intellectually, and philologically Italian before being ecclesiastically universal. S.: And that helps his philosophical reputation. G.: Immensely. One can read him as an Italian thinker, a Dominican, a scholastic, a metaphysician, a commentator on Aristotle, a theologian, and only then as Saint Thomas, in that order if one is healthy. S.: While Bonaventure arrives already half-canon in the sound of his name. G.: Exactly. And that is why I am mean about him. S.: You are rarely mean without principle. G.: Thank you. My principle here is that philosophy profits from late sanctification, if sanctification must come at all. S.: So the ideal schedule is: write hugely, die, circulate, dispute, be attacked, be appropriated, influence universities, and only then be sainted when it no longer matters too much. G.: Splendid. Yes. That would preserve both the shrine and the seminar. S.: Aquinas nearly got that. G.: Nearly enough. The philosophical body had already escaped the hagiographical envelope. S.: And Oxford could then receive him through Aristotle as much as through Rome. G.: Precisely. That is crucial. Thomas enters Oxford not because Oxford wants saints, but because Oxford wants Aristotle explained by someone with terrifying competence. S.: Hence the long life of Thomism in odd English forms. G.: Yes. Not always devotional Thomism, often rather anti-devotional. One can be deeply interested in Thomas’s metaphysics and still remain temperamentally Anglican, sceptical, or even cheerfully secular. S.: Kenny again. G.: Kenny, certainly. Also Anscombe at certain points, and others who found in Thomas a grammar of intention, action, law, and virtue strong enough to survive confessional thinning. S.: Bonaventure fares worse there. G.: Much worse. He is too illuminated, too affective, too seraphic for the average Oxford appetite. His thought may be rich, but it carries too much atmosphere for a place that likes furniture with straight lines. S.: Whereas Thomas can be made to look almost administrative. G.: Exactly. He is saintly by metaphysical bulk, not by mystical perfume. S.: You should not say that in a Franciscan house. G.: I should say nothing in a Franciscan house if I can help it. Now, what has Sordi against modernism? S.: Everything, I should think. Fragmentation, empiricism, sensism, thinning of metaphysical order, and the modern tendency to imagine that conversation can survive without common first principles. G.: Very good. For him, Aquinas is not merely one thinker among others but the organiser of a durable intellectual commonwealth. S.: Which is why you call it a club. G.: Yes. The club is not frivolous. It is an order of discourse in which shared assumptions make rational exchange stable. S.: Then perhaps one should not mock Sordi too quickly. He is trying to explain how communities of reason are kept alive. G.: True. My resistance is only to the suggestion that the community must already agree on full metaphysical furniture before any real conversational reason can occur. S.: You prefer lighter luggage. G.: Exactly. My travellers need intentions, recognitions, norms of cooperation, not necessarily the whole Summa packed into their cases. S.: Yet there are cases where the Summa helps. G.: Of course. On action, intention, double effect, law, virtue, natural teleology, Thomas is not merely respectable but indispensable. S.: And Sordi would add social order. G.: Naturally. He wants Thomas as the foundation for social restoration, which is where I begin reaching for the door. S.: Because restoration often means other people’s freedom quietly tidied away. G.: Yes. Philosophies of order always risk making liberty sound like bad filing. S.: Still, in the case of patria, church, and school, Thomas often looks less like a tyrant and more like a patient classifier. G.: Quite. Which is why he is teachable. His distinctions are often humane because they are slow. S.: That is a beautiful sentence. G.: Keep it and make it look as if Sordi thought it first. S.: He may have. Then tell me: did sainthood distort Thomas’s reception at Oxford or help it? G.: Both, in different rooms. It distorted him for those who wanted him as doctrinal authority merely. It helped him by guaranteeing preservation, commentary, and institutional seriousness. But Oxford ultimately took what it wanted from Thomas because the thought was too good to leave to the saints. S.: And the Italians? G.: The Italians had two temptations: either to sanctify him into pious marble, or to nationalise him into a philosophical ancestor of order. Sordi, I think, hovers between the two without collapsing wholly into either. S.: Because he still compares Aquinas with modern philosophers. G.: Exactly. Comparative method keeps the club from becoming purely liturgical. S.: Though Taparelli and the Jesuit compendia pull the other way. G.: They do. Standardisation is always both a pedagogic benefit and an intellectual risk. Once Thomas becomes the approved manual, one can stop reading Thomas and start reading Thomism. S.: Which is often death by commentary. G.: Very often. Commentary is excellent until it becomes the only thing one is allowed to admire. S.: That danger exists for saints more than for ordinary philosophers. G.: Much more. Saints attract piety before they attract scrutiny. Thomas survives because he is too difficult, too systematic, and too philosophically fecund to remain merely an object of cult. S.: Bonaventure does not quite survive in the same way. G.: No. He survives more selectively, where people want illumination, exemplarism, Augustinian interiority, Franciscan warmth, or spiritual metaphysics. But he never quite becomes the common philosophical currency Thomas became. S.: Because Fidanza became Bonaventura too soon? G.: If not historically, then acoustically, yes. S.: You are impossible. G.: I am merely phonologically suspicious. Names predispose reception. “Aquinas” sounds like a location; “Bonaventure” sounds like a sermon title. S.: That is unjust and very funny. G.: Good. Keep both qualities together. Now, More again. Does his sainthood help or hinder philosophical reception? S.: Mostly hinder, perhaps, if one is after political argument rather than conscience theatre. G.: Yes. More is too easily flattened into martyrdom and thereby rescued from the tedious difficulty of his political thought and historical conduct. S.: Whereas Thomas is so large that sainthood cannot flatten him entirely. G.: Precisely. One saint is absorbed by his halo; the other irradiates beyond it. S.: Then Sordi’s real contribution is to keep Aquinas as intellectual organizer rather than merely devotional ancestor. G.: Yes. That is his strength. He makes Thomas do contemporary work against empiricism and modern disintegration. Whether one likes the social programme is another matter. S.: But one can at least see why he matters for an Italian “Aquinas renaissance.” G.: Very much so. He helps move Thomas from the edge of ecclesiastical memory back to the centre of intellectual life. S.: And Oxford receives that through different conduits. G.: Through philosophers, translators, ex-seminarians, classicists, moralists, and those who discovered that analytic distinctions did not forbid theological intelligence. S.: So perhaps Aquinas’s best fortune was to be born local, think universal, die a friar, and become a saint only after philosophers had already started stealing him. G.: That is excellent. Yes. Philosophical theft before canonical enclosure. S.: Then your final verdict on saints and philosophy? G.: Saints are dangerous to philosophy when reverence arrives too early. Philosophy survives saints when the thought has already learned to travel without the relics. S.: And Aquinas? G.: A triumph of travel over relic. S.: Bonaventure? G.: A beautiful problem under an overhelpful name. S.: More? G.: A martyr too quickly moralised for the comfort of historians and too English to remain wholly Roman. S.: Sordi? G.: A club secretary of genius, provided one does not let him lock the door. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Piacentine, with one Dominican lamp still burning.Sordi, Serafino (1814). Studi su Aquino. Sotto Buzzetti. Seminario di Piacenza, Emilia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Soria -- Grice e Soria: la ragione conversazionale dell’opuscolo della simpatia – la scuola di Lama. Note sugli Studi storici e filosofici. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giovanni Gualberto De Soria (Pisa, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale dell’opuscolo della simpatia. A comparison between Grice and Giovanni Gualberto De Soria on reason‑governed conversational reasoning reveals a shared commitment to rational intelligibility as the basis of communication, but grounded in strikingly different metaphysical and explanatory frameworks. Grice’s theory treats conversational reasoning as a minimally moral, quasi‑contractual practice among agents who recognize one another as capable of rational cooperation: meaning is generated through intentions constrained by a single overarching principle of cooperation, with breakdowns explained not by failures of empathy or sympathy but by calculable deviations from relevance, informativeness, or sincerity. De Soria, by contrast, situates conversational reason within a thicker metaphysical and anthropological background, where simpatia functions as the mediating principle between self‑love and other‑love, reason and benevolence, individual cognition and a universally resonant order of nature. Whereas Grice deliberately strips conversational reasoning of animistic or affective surplus, anchoring it in sober rational expectations shared by competent interlocutors, De Soria’s account allows sympathy, empathy, and benevolent responsiveness to play a constitutive role in the very possibility of understanding, so that cooperation is not merely inferred but felt as part of a broader moral resonance between minds. In Grice, rationality governs conversation by regulating inference among autonomous agents; in De Soria, conversational rationality is already infused with a moral psychology of helpfulness and mutual attunement, edging toward a universalist picture in which communication among humans mirrors a deeper harmony in the world. The contrast thus lies between Grice’s austere, analytically disciplined conception of conversational reason and De Soria’s more expansive Enlightenment vision, where rational cooperation remains central but is sustained by sympathy as a bridge between reason, sentiment, and shared human life. Grice: “S. is an Italian philosopher and professor at Pisa, known for his work in the  Italian Enlightenment and his attempts to reconcile rationalism with traditional metaphysics. While he did not intend for his philosophy to be seen as animistic, his approach to "sympathy" (or simpatia) can be interpreted that way through several lenses. Universal Resonance as Living Connection S.’s concept of sympathy often relies on the idea of a universal harmony or resonance between different parts of the natural world. To a rationalist, this might be viewed as a mechanical or causal link; however, an unintentional animistic reading suggests that for such a "sympathy" to exist, the objects themselves must possess an inherent, internal "attraction" or "feeling" for one another. This mirrors the animistic belief that all matter is imbued with a form of life or soul that allows for mutual influence beyond physical contact.  Immateriality and the "Vitality" of Nature In his work Della esistenza e degli attributi di Dio, S. argues for the immateriality of the human spirit. When he extends these metaphysical principles to the broader "science of nature" (scienza della natura), he risks blurring the line between the human soul and the "spirit" of the cosmos. If the entire universe operates under a system of sympathies similar to the human spirit's inner workings, it implies a nature that is "alive" with the same immaterial qualities, a hallmark of animistic thought. Mediation Between the Physical and Spiritual S. seeks to move beyond "all hypotheses" to a pure "science of man". l’opuscolo, simpatia, simpatia, empatia, simpatia conversazionale, other-love, self-love, benevolenza, helpfulness, cooperation, basis, dull empiriist, enough of a rationalist, quasi-contractualist, relevance breakdown on you, one principle, rationality, cooperation. Grice: Professore De Soria, la sua teoria della simpatia mi ha sempre affascinato. Mi sembra che lei riesca quasi a far “vibrare” il mondo naturale attraverso un principio di comunicazione universale. Crede davvero che ogni cosa, anche la più minuta, partecipi a questa armonia? Soria: Caro Grice, le confesso che la mia idea di simpatia nasce dal desiderio di scoprire un filo invisibile che unisca uomini e natura, senza cadere nell’animismo ingenuo. Preferisco pensare a una risonanza razionale, dove ogni parte del cosmo risponde, pur mantenendo la sua autonomia spirituale. Grice: Eppure, la sua prospettiva sembra quasi suggerire che la natura abbia una sua interiorità, un sentimento diffuso, come se fosse animata. Non trova che questa visione, pur razionale, sfiori l’empatia universale di cui parlano i filosofi più “vitali”? Soria: È vero, maestro, ma la mia simpatia vuole essere un ponte tra ragione e sentimento, non una confusione tra la mente umana e lo spirito cosmico. Preferisco pensare che la cooperazione e la benevolenza siano principi che guidano sia la conversazione tra uomini, sia l’armonia del mondo. In fondo, come dice il proverbio: “Chi semina buone parole, raccoglie simpatia.” Soria, Giovanni Gualberto De (1727). Dissertazione. Giurisprudenza, Pisa.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sorrentino – Ossia: Grice e Sorrentino: la ragione conversazionale del Vico italico – filosofia italiana – Note su La retorica di Vico. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Andrea Sorrentino (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del Vico italico. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning and Andrea Sorrentino’s Vico‑centred account of ragione conversazionale converge in treating meaning as an achievement internal to rational social practice rather than as a merely formal or semantic mechanism, yet they diverge sharply in orientation and explanatory ambition. For Grice, conversational meaning is generated by individual speakers acting under rational expectations articulated through the Cooperative Principle and its maxims, so that what is meant emerges from calculable inferences drawn by interlocutors who recognize one another as reasoners aiming at mutual understanding; reason is here procedural, agent‑centred, and minimally historical, functioning as a normative constraint on talk exchanges wherever cooperative interaction occurs. By contrast, Sorrentino reads Vico’s reason as culturally sedimented and historically embodied, locating conversational rationality within the Mediterranean formation of Roman law, Greek philosophy, rhetoric, and poetic knowledge, so that meaning arises not primarily from strategic inference by individuals but from a shared civilizational horizon that shapes how interlocutors can speak, persuade, and understand one another at all. Where Grice abstracts conversation into a formalizable structure of intentions, implications, and recognitions that can in principle operate independently of cultural content, Sorrentino insists that Vichian reason is inseparable from the imaginative, rhetorical, and juridical practices of a specific historical world, in which conversation is already thick with myth, metaphor, and communal memory; the contrast thus pits Grice’s universalist, analytic model of conversational rationality against Sorrentino’s historicized, Mediterranean model, in which reasoned meaning is less a calculable inference than a culturally educated way of inhabiting and continuing a shared form of life. Vico. Bordon, La retorica di Vico. VICO e le razze mediterranee, Bulletin italien di Bordeaux. Scrocca. Vico e un suo recente critico: in Rassegna nazionale di Firenze. A. SORRENTINO, La cultura mediterranea nei Principi di Scienza nuova. Con scritti di G. Cacciatore, R. Diana, M. Sanna e A. Scognamiglio, a cura di A. Scognamiglio, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura,  Alessia Scognamiglio  This volume offers Andrea S.'s work La cultura mediterranea nei Principi di Scienza nuova after almost a century from its first and only publication in 1920. In it, Sorrentino aims at showing that the world of nations which Vico studies and sets forth in Scienza nuova is exclusively the Greek and the Roman world, therefore a "Mediterranean" world, since Vico's cultural background has been essentially formed through the study of Roman law and of the greek philosophy, together with the research of the classical studies. Furthermore, the volume collects the contributions of Giuseppe Cacciatore, Rosario Diana, Manuela Sanna and Alessia Scognamiglio. In his essay (Per un profilo di Andrea Sorrentino, pp. ***), Giuseppe Cacciatore, after tracing Sorrentino's scientific profile, reflects about some fundamental passages of his text: the framework of Sorrentino's research, which places itself halfway between the historical-scientific inquiry and the interest for the philosophy of culture; the belief that some limits of Vico's analysis, which he proposes, come from the conflicting relationship between the Neapolitan philosopher and his century; the centrality of the theme of the poetic knowledge in the Scienza Nuova; the problem of the Middle Ages between Rome's heritage and Germanic sources. Manuela Sanna (L'«epicentrismo» euromediterraneo di Vico nella lettura di Andrea S.) summarizes Sorrentino's interpretative proposals, all pivoting around the idea of epicentrism. Vico, razza mediterranea, razza aria.  G: 1939. You have brought two Vicos into my room and expect me to treat that as one. S: Two citations, sir. Page eighty, and page one hundred and thirty-eight. Oxford prefers to learn by page number. G: Oxford prefers to learn by footnote. S: Then you’re in luck. Page one hundred and thirty-eight is a footnote. G: Read the page eighty Vico first. S: Collingwood, Principles of Art. He says: Giambattista Vico said that children were “sublime poets.” G: And what is Collingwood doing with that. S: He is doing what Oxford always does: invoking a foreign genius in order to dismiss him politely. G: Yes. He says Vico may be right, and then says it throws no light for most of us. S: It’s the Oxford compliment: “Brilliant, but not useful.” G: Now page one hundred and thirty-eight. S: The footnote says: the habit of calling aesthetic experience “the pleasures of the imagination” dates back to Addison; the philosophical theory of art as imagination, to his contemporary Vico. G: That one is better. It gives Vico a role in the genealogy of an idea. S: So Vico becomes, in Oxford, a footnote in a footnote. G: That is still an improvement on being absent. S: But why is Collingwood so superficial, sir. G: Because he is writing Principles of Art, not Principles of Naples. S: And because he thinks “imagination” is a word you can use without paying rent. G: Not quite. He knows it’s loaded. That’s why he attacks the confusion between imagination and make-believe. S: His “anti-aesthetic” paragraph. G: Exactly. He is actually making a conceptual distinction, which is our tribe’s only real sport. S: And he brings in Vico to say: art as imagination has philosophical ancestry, not just sentimental ancestry. G: Yes. Addison gives the phrase. Vico gives the theory. S: Sir, you said earlier Collingwood “almost went to jail” over Vico. G: Over Croce’s Vico, and translation rights. It is Oxford heroism by paperwork. S: Collingwood translating Croce in 1913, and Douglas Ainslie being furious. G: The Oxford contribution to Italian philosophy: litigation. S: So the poor Oxonians needed Collingwood to render Vico intelligible. G: The poor always learn at Oxford. The rich merely inherit committees. S: And Sorrentino. G: Yes. Andrea Sorrentino on Vico, rhetoric and poetics. S: You want me to use Collingwood as an Oxford anchor so Sorrentino doesn’t float in from Rome like a decorative gondola. G: Precisely. We need Vico not as a souvenir but as a presence in Oxford discourse during Grice’s period. S: Collingwood gives you that. Twice. G: And Croce gives you a third way, via Collingwood-as-translator. S: But then Grice. Would he have cared about Vico. G: He would care about whatever made “meaning” look like a civil practice rather than a code. S: And that is rhetoric. G: Yes. Rhetoric is the art of making the hearer do work without resenting it. S: That sounds like implicature. G: It is the ancestor of it, if you want a genealogy without committing a crime. S: So Sorrentino’s “retorica di Vico” becomes relevant to conversational reason. G: Yes. Because Vico’s rhetorica is not ornament; it is the civil machinery by which a culture can mean things together. S: But Oxford hates rhetoric. G: Oxford hates being accused of rhetoric. Oxford loves doing it. S: Collingwood’s footnote is rhetoric too. G: Of course. It suggests a whole intellectual lineage in one line and expects the reader to accept it. S: What about Isaiah Berlin. G: Berlin is the later Oxford Vico evangelist, but in 1939 he is not yet the public Berlin of the Counter-Enlightenment. S: So we keep him in the wings. G: Mention him only as future confirmation that Vico will be taken seriously at Oxford. S: And Hampshire. G: Hampshire’s Vico essay is after your window, but you can have us prophesy him. S: A prophecy in Oxford is always a footnote in advance. G: Good. Now: rhetoric, rhetorica. S: Is Vico more rhetorician than philosopher. G: That is an anachronism. In Vico’s world, rhetoric is philosophy’s public face. And in Oxford’s world, philosophy pretends it has no face. S: But it does. G: It does. It is called “ordinary language.” S: Which is rhetoric in modest dress. G: Exactly. Now bring in I. A. Richards, if you want. S: Richards has a Philosophy of Rhetoric. Not a philosopher, strictly. G: That “strictly” is your mistake. Cambridge can contribute too, but we’re anchoring Oxford. S: Grice quotes Ogden and Richards. G: Yes. So the Oxford story includes Cambridge rhetoric as an imported tool. S: Like a foreign wine. G: Exactly. Now, the imagination point. Collingwood has “Language” as a chapter. S: In Principles of Art, Book II, Theory of Imagination, Chapter XI. G: Good. Now link that to Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit and Anscombe, since you insisted. S: The duck-rabbit is aspect-seeing, and it looks like imagination. G: Yes. And rhetoric is partly aspect-guiding. Making the audience see it as duck, not rabbit, without stating “duck.” S: That sounds like implicature again. G: It is not implicature strictly, but it is the same discipline of guiding without spelling out. S: So you want one principle governing language, like Vico’s rhetorical principle and Grice’s cooperative principle. G: Yes. But be careful. Vico’s principle is historical and cultural; mine is meant to be thin and general. S: And Collingwood sits between them with imagination. G: Precisely. He turns imagination into a philosophical engine for art, and he nods to Vico as a precursor. S: But he is superficial. G: He is economical. Superficiality is sometimes economy. S: Sorrentino, on the other hand, is not economical. G: Sorrentino is Roman, and Romans like architecture. They build interpretive horizons. S: And Oxford likes small rooms. G: Exactly. Oxford is suspicious of Mediterranean horizons because they make Oxford look provincial. S: Which it is. G: Quietly. Now: why “retorica” for Vico. S: Because Vico’s knowledge is poetic knowledge, and poetic knowledge is rhetorical in its mode of presentation. G: Yes. And because Vico thinks nations are made by imaginative universals, which are not deductions but tropes. S: So a trope is a cognitive instrument, not a decoration. G: Exactly. That is the Vichian move that Sorrentino wants. S: And Grice would translate that into: hearers infer beyond what is said using shared expectations. G: Yes. The difference is that Vico builds the shared expectations historically; I treat them as a standing rational practice. S: Now, the Oxford connection again. G: Collingwood gives you Vico inside an Oxford Clarendon book in 1938. S: And Collingwood gives you Croce’s Vico in 1913, also Oxford in a social sense. G: And perhaps Grice’s Oxford could have met Vico through that line even if no one admitted it. S: Because Oxford never admits sources. G: Exactly. Oxford calls sources “background.” S: Then the vignette should end with a prophecy about Hampshire. G: Yes. We say: one day an Oxford man will treat Vico and language seriously. S: And you add: but he will do it in New York Review of Books, not in a tutorial. G: Precisely. S: Punchline, sir. G: The punchline is that Oxford took Vico seriously enough to footnote him twice, and that is the Oxford equivalent of building him a statue.Grice: Professore Sorrentino, leggevo il suo lavoro su Vico e la cultura mediterranea… Dica la verità: per lei Vico è più greco che romano, o più romano che greco? Oppure, come certi filosofi di Roma, si muove con disinvoltura tra l’una e l’altra riva del Mediterraneo? Sorrentino: Eh, caro Grice, con Vico non si sta mai fermi: un giorno si trova tra le pandette romane, il giorno dopo si perde nei labirinti della mitologia greca… È un po’ come prendere il traghetto da Napoli: non sai mai esattamente in quale porto sbarcherai, ma sai che sarà sempre Mediterraneo! Grice: Devo ammettere che c’è del vero! Del resto, il vico in cui viveva Vico era abbastanza lontano da Bononia… Ma, tra noi, era ancora più distante da Vadum Boum: lì si discute di leggi, ma la poesia, quella vera, resta sulle rive del Mediterraneo. Sorrentino: Implicatura quanto mai topica, Grice! In fondo, chi si allontana troppo dal Mediterraneo rischia di perdere la rotta… e magari finisce per confondere i filosofi con i bovini! Sorrentino, Andrea (1910). Della lirica encomiastica di T. Tasso (Dalla fanciulelezza alla liberazione del carcere di S. Anna). Salerno: Migliaccio.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sortis – Ossia: Grice e Sortis: la retorica conversazionale. Note sul Trattato della sapienza. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Salvatore de Sortis (Lucca, Toscana): la retorica conversazionale. A comparison between H. P. Grice and Salvatore de Sortis on reason‑governed conversational meaning shows a deep continuity between early modern rhetorical theory and twentieth‑century philosophical pragmatics. In his treatises on rhetorical education and conversational rhetoric, Sortis insists that effective persuasion depends not on mechanical rules but on the rational attunement between speaker and audience: metaphor, pro‑syllogism, and measured allusion work because they engage the listener’s inferential capacities without suppressing natural genius or freedom of thought. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning articulates the same insight in analytical terms: meaning arises through cooperative, reason‑guided inference from what is said to what is meant, governed by shared expectations of rational conduct rather than by explicit coding alone. Where Sortis frames rhetoric as a pragmatic art that respects the intelligence and autonomy of interlocutors, Grice formalizes this respect as the Cooperative Principle and conversational implicature, showing how speakers deliberately leave meanings implicit in order to activate the hearer’s rational participation. Both thinkers thus reject authoritarian or purely mechanical models of communication and instead ground meaning in the disciplined interplay of intention, inference, and audience cooperation, making conversation itself a rational practice rather than a mere vehicle for stated content. Grice: “I like Sortis: he wrote on everything I did, but before me!” – Keywords: metafora, implicatura, pro-sillogismo. SAGGIO DI RETTORICA, che insegna alla gioventù studiosa i caratteri di perfetto oratore, ed i mezzi a divenirvi COMPILATO DA SALVATORE DE SORTIS NAPOLI. r Nella Tipografia Chiasesm Con appro^azio^<9 f A« t, ' r ^ ■ aomo deve alla tiattin il genio, # ' la dispobizlune all' eloquenza ^ ali' Ora« icria 9 €fa« è la facoltà di rt|i§cm :iiel rilevante oggetto di persuadere . L' arie. Io studio 9 TMercizio coliivana m ki ^ nigtiorano , e perfezionano il genio naturale. Kon giovano \ precetti deli' arie^ te 4«ieati noii trovano aetb» Sfìtriio di chi riceve^ 1* ingegno ^ e k di^^potizionà die poi ¥antio^ ad ecciiarst , «vilopparsi^^ , 0 ffio ierarsi saggiamente con quei preMt^ ti. Le oaiervazionir auUa aaiora delle eo« se , la giornaliera c omiderazioae di queU- lo elle avviene tra gli ^lomfni , la tiies» •èoue attiva , e 1* esempio di quei pri* »ii, e ptrfeiù Oiaiori che sono ai beim- Musciti nei***arte lero, PoiJliià che risul- ta a chiunque , con additargli i mesai sicari 9 e facili ^ pèr coQstguire un in- ieulu 9 il fine, di giovare eoo accanel f • ajuti. A ajatt lianno fatato sulle prime il :pctfi« $ieio ui raccogliere alcune regole ^ ed ìnsegnamtinU -pbe « poress<^rq proporsi ai giovani , mi io modo tale di non sop- primere in essi^u^ guastare il genio oa« turale ed ì liberi pensamenti dell' inge- l^no , nè renderli iaiiuto»i, o servili CQ* pibti' dell' aUrui operazioni , ed aatoricà, ; "Quesia è. quella che dicesi arte relXOr fica 9 .ì&tituzicio^ reitorica , oratoria^ ec; Hettoiici 9 o preceuori di eloqueuza so* no d^tti co4oro che ai aooo applicati « raccogliere , ed insegnare ad altu siifatU pr€cettù ,« Oratori, ai dicono, qiteili: cIm ne faiiiìO uso. Ove i Rettonci non sap<^ piaao £>ruìre l'arte ioro^chi è che noia, vede che recano danno , e pregiudizio a coloro che iiDpicudaao ad ammaestrale? prammatica come rettorica conversazionale.  Grice: Maestro Sortis, ho sempre pensato che la vostra rettorica conversazionale sia una vera miniera d’oro per chi, come me, si diverte a intrecciare metafore e pro-sillogismi. Ma ditemi, chi vi ha insegnato a rendere ogni discorso così brillante senza mai annoiare? Forse il segreto sta nel vostro stile lucchese o nel caffè napoletano? Sortis: Ah, caro Grice, se bastasse solo il caffè, saremmo tutti oratori perfetti! Ma la vera eloquenza nasce dall’osservare la natura umana, dal cogliere l’ironia dietro ogni parola, e soprattutto dalla capacità di non soffocare il genio naturale dei miei giovani interlocutori. E poi, come si dice a Lucca: “Parola gentile, apre ogni cancello.” Grice: Vede, a Vadum Boum, dove insegno, ho un tutee, Strawson, che ogni tanto mi chiede se la rettorica sia davvero “triviale”. Io non oso mai dirgli di no… ma diciamo che chi frequentava le vostre lezioni non ha mai trovato la conversazione banale. Anzi, c’è chi sostiene che persino il silenzio tra i vostri studenti sia carico di implicature. Sortis: Implicatura più oratorialmente sublime, Grice! Se persino Strawson, tra una pausa e l’altra, riesce a percepire il valore di una parola ben posta, allora la vostra scuola non ha nulla da invidiare alla mia. In fondo, chi sa sorridere tra le righe e lasciar intendere più di quanto dica, ha già conquistato la platea. E come si dice dalle nostre parti: “Meglio una buona allusione che mille spiegazioni.” Sortis, Salvatore de (1620). Trattato della sapienza. Venezia: Sarzina.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sozzini – Ossia: Grice e Sozzini’ – Note su De auctoritate scripturae sacrae. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Fausto Sozzini (Siena, Toscana). A comparison between Fausto Sozzini and H. P. Grice on reason‑governed meaning shows a striking structural affinity despite their different domains. In De sacrae Scripturae auctoritate (1570s, first published 1580s), Sozzini argues that the authority of Scripture is not brute or self‑authenticating but is grasped through rational evaluation of authorial intention, historical context, and the reader’s responsible assent; Scripture persuades because it addresses human reason coherently rather than compelling belief by sheer decree. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning generalizes the same rational architecture to everyday language: what a speaker means is determined not by the bare sentence but by intentions recognized by a cooperative audience, operating under shared rational principles that make communication possible. Where Sozzini resists “blind authority” in theology by insisting that understanding Scripture requires reasoned uptake, Grice resists philosophical “literalism” by showing that meaning emerges from rational, rule‑governed interaction rather than semantic surface alone. In both cases, meaning is neither imposed nor automatic; it is achieved through the disciplined cooperation of minds, whether interpreting sacred texts in Kraków or ordinary conversation in Oxford. Grice: Caro Sozzini di Siena, leggo il tuo De auctoritate scripturae sacrae e mi pare che anche la Bibbia, come una buona conversazione, dica sempre un po’ più di quanto afferma. Sozzini: Misericordia, Grice, se lo dici così i teologi diranno che ho inventato l’implicatura prima del peccato originale. Grice: Non temere, a Cracovia come a Oxford basta riconoscere l’intenzione dell’autore e il resto lo fa la cooperazione del lettore. Sozzini: Allora siamo salvi entrambi: io salvo la Scrittura dall’autorità cieca e tu la conversazione dalla cecità filosofica, con un sorriso. Grice’s weekley essay assignment: Sozzini. Given two Sienese Sozzinis, one at Zürich in 1562 and one at Kraków in 1570, discuss whether “authority” and “explication” are properly distinguishable as two theological tasks, or whether each is already a disguised form of the other; conclude by stating, with reasons, which brother would have been more suspicious of the proposition that a text means more than it says. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Sozzini, Fausto (1570). De auctoritate scripturae sacrae. Kraków: Rodecki.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sozzini – Ossia: Grice e Sozzini: la ragione conversazionale -- razionalismo, e moi. Note su Brevis explicatio in primum Johannis caput. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Lelio Sozzini (Siena, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale -- razionalismo, e moi. A comparison between H. P. Grice and Lelio Sozzini brings into focus two sharply distinct but structurally allied conceptions of reason as an active, normative constraint on meaningful discourse. Sozzini’s rationalism arises within a religious and ethical context: reason functions as the tribunal before which doctrine must justify itself, and conversation—whether exegetical, theological, or moral—is governed by the demand that nothing be accepted which violates intelligibility or individual conscience. His rejection of mystery, sacramental mediation, and ecclesiastical authority places rational dialogue at the center of faith itself, turning belief into an essentially conversational achievement between text, reason, and the interpreting self. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning operates in a secular and analytical register, but the structural parallel is evident: meaning is not bestowed by authority, convention alone, or ritual form, but emerges from rational agents who recognize one another as bound by norms of intelligibility, relevance, and justification. Where Sozzini insists that religious assent must be accountable to reasoned dialogue rather than imposed dogma, Grice insists that linguistic meaning must be accountable to reasoned cooperation rather than mere causal signaling or institutional convention. Both thus oppose opaque authority—Sozzini theological, Grice semantic—and place rational accountability at the heart of understanding: for Sozzini, the conscience answers only to reason; for Grice, utterances answer to the rational expectations of conversational partners. In this sense, Grice’s pragmatics can be read as a late, secular echo of Socinian rationalism: an account of how shared reason, exercised in dialogue, disciplines what may legitimately be meant. Grice: “ The philosophical work of  Lelio and Fausto S. -- founders of Socinianism -- creates a stark contrast with stereotypical Roman Catholic influence in Italy by championing rationalism and individual conscienceover dogmatic authority and mystical ritualism. Key Contrasts with Roman Catholic Influence Rationalism vs. Dogma/Mystery: While Roman Catholicism often emphasizes the acceptance of sacred "mysteries" -- such as the Trinity or the Transubstantiation -- through faith and ecclesiastical authority, the S. brothers argue that religious truth must be compatible with human REASON – la RAGIONE. They reject the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus as logically untenable. Individual Judgment vs. Institutional Authority: Stereotypical Catholic influence is rooted in the centralized authority of the Church and tradition. In contrast, the S. brothers promote private judgment, asserting that every individual has the right and duty to interpret the Bible using their own logical faculties, rather than relying on a clerical hierarchy. Separation of Church and State: Contrary to the historical Italian reality of the Papal States and the Church's heavy involvement in civil governance, Socinianism was among the first Christian movements to advocate for the strict separation of church and state and religious toleration. Ethical Living vs. Sacramentalism: The S. brothers moved away from the Catholic emphasis on sacraments -- like the Mass or Penance -- as essential "means of grace." They viewed Christianity primarily as a moral code and Jesus as an ethical teacher rather than a divine saviour whose death satisfied a supernatural debt. Rejection of Original Sin: They denied the doctrine of Original Sin, a cornerstone of Catholic theology, arguing instead for human moral agency and the inherent ability of people to follow God's laws without a predetermined "corrupt" nature.  Sozzini, rationalism, and moi.  Grice: Caro Sozzini, devo confessarle che tutto quello che so sui fratelli Sozzini, l’ho imparato proprio da mio padre: il meno conformista tra i non-conformisti che io abbia mai conosciuto!  Sozzini: Ah, Grice, questa sì che è una presentazione che mi fa sorridere! Credo che suo padre e io ci saremmo trovati subito d’accordo: un vero spirito affine, senza dubbio.  Grice: Non ho dubbi! Era capace di mettere in dubbio tutto, persino le abitudini di famiglia a colazione – figuriamoci i dogmi e le tradizioni.  Sozzini: Proprio come noi Sozzini: sempre pronti a interrogare la ragione e a difendere il diritto di pensare con la propria testa. In fondo, la vera fede non teme le domande, ma si nutre di esse. Grice’s weekly essay assignment: Sozzini. Write on “The Sozzini Problem” under the rule that you may not treat “the Sozzini brothers” as one philosopher in duplicate. Compare Lelio’s Brevis explicatio in primum Johannis caput with Fausto’s De auctoritate scripturae sacrae, and determine whether the first begins from reason in order to discipline Scripture, while the second begins from Scripture in order to justify reason — or whether that distinction is itself a trap set for the inattentive. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Sozzini, Lelio (1562). Brevis explicatio in primum Johannis caput. Zürich: Froschauer.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Spaveta – Ossia: Grice e Spaventa: la ragione conversazionale e l’origine italico dello spirito filosofico. Note sugl’Studi sull’etica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Bertrando Spaventa (Bomba, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale e l’origine italico dello spirito filosofico. In comparing Grice with Spaventa, a shared concern emerges with reason as something exercised in and through form, rather than imposed as a finished doctrine, but their points of departure and emphases diverge in telling ways. Spaventa’s notion of ragione conversazionale belongs to a historicist and idealist framework in which reason unfolds dialogically across epochs, nations, and traditions: philosophy advances through a circulation of ideas in which Italian thought migrates outward (to Germany) and returns transformed, reappropriated as a self-conscious, national, and political spirit. Reason, for Spaventa, is the self-creation (autoctisi) of the subject in history, achieved through dialectical confrontation with the other and ultimately oriented toward cultural and civic praxis. Grice, by contrast, strips reason of historical teleology and national destiny, relocating it at the micro-level of ordinary interaction. His theory of reason-governed conversational meaning does not describe the self-realization of Geist, but the normative expectations underwriting intelligible communication between speakers: intentions, mutual recognition, and shared principles of rational cooperation. Where Spaventa sees conversation as the large-scale movement of spirit across traditions, Grice sees it as the local, rule-governed activity by which agents make themselves intelligible here and now. Yet the affinity is real: both reject doctrinal metaphysics in favor of reason as an activity, both assign primacy to the subject as a rational agent rather than a passive bearer of truths, and both understand philosophy as inseparable from dialogue—Spaventa’s transnational and historical, Grice’s interpersonal and pragmatic. In this sense, Grice’s conversational rationality can be read as an English, analytic analogue to Spaventa’s idealist vision: a demystified, non-Hegelian account of how reason lives not in systems, but in the disciplined practice of exchange. Grice: “S. fundamentally shifted Italian philosophy by professionalizing it through a  non-doctrinal Hegelianism. His work established a template for Continental philosophy—characterized by a focus on the subject, historicism, and the political application of dialectics—that eventually paved the way for both the Left-Hegelianism of Antonio Labriola and the "Actualism" of Gentile. The "Circulation of Ideas" and Historicism Spaventa’s most influential thesis was the "circulation of Italian thought," which argued that the modern spirit of philosophy began with Italian Renaissance thinkers like Bruno and Campanella.  Nationalizing Hegel: He claimed that German Idealism (Kant, Hegel) was not foreign but rather the mature development of seeds planted by Italians. Impact: This allowed Italian philosophy to move beyond provincial Catholicism and join the European "continental" conversation, integrating historical reality with metaphysical theory.  2. Primacy of the Subject (Epistemological Shift) Moving away from rigid system-building, Spaventa reinterpreted Hegelian categories to give primacy to the thinking subject.  Subjectivity over Objectivity: He focused on the Phenomenology of Spirit as much as the Logic, emphasizing the internal process of consciousness. Autoctisis: He coined the term autoctisis (self-creation) to describe human liberty as the continuous "fashoning of oneself" through thought.  3. Direction Towards the "Left" and Political Praxis While S. served the Historical Right in parliament, his philosophical innovations provided the scaffolding for Italian Marxism and leftist continental thought:  italianita, Englishry, Englishness, English nation, the English, the English tongue, the tongue of the English, the tongue of the Anglians, the English spirit, the English ghost. Grice: A proposito, caro Spaventa, devo confessarti che l’unico Bertrando che conosco, a parte te, è Russell! Mi chiedo se anche tu, di tanto in tanto, non abbia avuto a che fare col celebre filosofo inglese, almeno idealmente... Spaventa: Grice, mi fa sorridere! In effetti, il mio spirito filosofico ha viaggiato molto, ma più che con Russell, ho preferito dialogare con Hegel e i nostri italiani, da Bruno a Campanella. Sono convinto che l’origine dello spirito filosofico sia profondamente italica, anche se il pensiero inglese conserva sempre un suo fascino. Grice: Beh, allora potremmo dire che il tuo “circulation of ideas” è proprio una conversazione transnazionale! Forse la filosofia, come il buon vino, si arricchisce passando da una terra all’altra. Ma, dimmi, ti senti più vicino all’idealismo tedesco o al genio rinascimentale italiano? Spaventa: Ottima domanda! Io credo che il vero filosofo sappia riconoscere le radici italiane nel pensiero europeo, senza rinnegare i frutti tedeschi. L’autocreatività dello spirito, come la chiamo, nasce proprio dal confronto: riflettere su sé stessi, dialogare con l’altro, e reinventarsi ogni giorno. In fondo, anche noi oggi, Grice, stiamo creando nuovi sentieri filosofici… a proposito! Spaventa, Bertrando (1844). Introduzione/Programma – Il Foglio. Napoli.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Speranza – Ossia: Grice e Speranza – implicatura ed implicatura -- filosofia italiana -- pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice,  (Albalonga). Filosofo. J. L. Speranza – implicatura ed implicatura -- filosofia italiana – pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice,  (Albalonga). Filosofo. Speranza, Ugo -- Speranza, Alessandro -- Speranza, Ettore -- Speranza, Gianni -- Speranza, Paola -- Speranza, Anna-Maria -- Speranza-Ghersi –Ghersi-Speranza, Anna-Maria -- Speranza lui speranza: luigi della --. Italian philosopher, attracted, for some reason, to Grice. Speranza knows St. John’s very well. He is the author of “Dorothea Oxoniensis.” He is a member of a number of cultivated Anglo-Italian societies, like Grice’s Playgroup. He is the custodian of Villa Grice, not far from . He works at . Cuisine is one of his hobbiesgrisottoa alla ligure, his specialty. He can be reached via Grice. Grice, “Vita ed opinion di ,” par . A. M. Ghersi Speranza -- vide Ghersi-Speranza. Ghersi is a collaborator of Speranza. Grice: “It’s easy enough to list Speranza’s publications.” Speranza, like Mill, was fortunate to belong to a literary familyand he would read Descartes’s Meditations, which drew him to philosophy. His studies in logic drew him to semanticsHis first love was Oxonian analysis as summarised in Hartnack’s essay on ‘contemporary’ philosophy. One of Speranza’s earliest essays is on Plato’s Cratylus, relying mainly on Cassierer, but also drawing from Austin’s Philosophical Papesr. Spearnza’s idea is that “ … mean …” is a dyadic relation and what’s behind Plato’s theory of forms. This was Speranza’s contribution to a seminar in ancient philosophy. For his contribution on medieaval philosophy, Speranza drew on the modistae, and the Patrologia Latina for the use of ‘intentio’ in various writers, up to AquinoSperanza finds it fascinating that the earliest modistae do find a conceptual link between the ‘intentio’ and the ‘significatio.’ For a seminar on scepticism, Speranza contributed with a paper on Gricedrawing on Sextus Empiricus and Bar-Hillel. It relates to Grice’s problem with the conversational category of fortitude. Speranza has studied the connections between H. P. Grice and some Italian philosophers. To wit: Abbà, Abbagnano, Abbri, Abrotele, Accetto, Acilio, Achillini, Acito, Acmonida, Aconzio, Acri, Acusilada, Adami, Addiego, Adelfio, Afer, Agazzi, Agazzi, Agela, Agesarco, Agesidamo, Agilo, Agostino, Agresta, Agrippa, Agrippa, Agrippino, Aigone, Airaudi, Ajello, Albani, Alberti, Alberti, Albertini, Albino, Albino, Albino, Alboini, Albucio, Albucio, Alcia, Alciati, Alcimaco, Alcio, Alcio, Alcmeone, Alderotti, Alessandro, Appio, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro,  Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alfandari, Alfieri Alfonso, Algarotti: Alici Alighieri, Aliotta, Allegretti, Allievo, Allioni, Alminusa, Alopeco, Altan, Alvarotti, Amaduzzi, Amafinio, Ambrogio, Ambrosoli, Ameinia, Amelio, Ammicarto, Amico, Amidei, Anassilao, Anceschi, Andrea, Andria, Angeli, Angiulli, Anici, Anioco, Annunzio, Antemio, Antimedon, Antimede, Antimene, Antipater, Antiseri, Antoni, Antonini, Antonino, Antonio, Aosta, Apella, Agrippa, Apella Apella. Apelle, Apelle, Apollonide, Apollonio, Apollofane, Apuleio, Aquila, Aquilino, Aquilino, Aquilino, Aquilino, Aquino, Aquino, Aquino, Aquino, Arangio, Arato, Arcais, Arcea, Archemaco, Archibugi, Archippo Archippo Archippo Archippo, Arco, Ardigò, Arena, Aresandro,  Aresandro, Aresa, Argentieri, Ario, Arione, Aristea, Aristeneto, Aristeteneto, Aristeneto, Aristeo, Aristide, Aristippo, Aristo, Aristu, Aristo, Aristocleida, Aristocleida, Aristocleida, Aristocle, Aristocrate, Aristodoro, Aristodoro, Aristomene,Aristone, Aristosseno, Arnoufi, Arriano, Arrighetti, Artemidoro, Aruleno, Asclepiade, Ascoli, Assarotti, Assiopisto, Astea, Astilo, Astone, Astore, Astorini, Ateinaiano, Ateinaiano, Atenodoro, Atenodoto, Attalo, Aulo, Aulo, Aulo, Aurano, Aurelj, Aurelio, Ausonio, Avieno, Azeglio, Bacchin, Bacchio, Bacci, Badaloni, Baglietto, Balbillo, Balbo, Baldini, Balduino, Banfi, Baratono, Barba, Barbaro, Barbaro, Barbaro Barié, Baricelli, Baroncelli, Barone, Barsio Bartoli, Barzaghi, Barzellotti, Barzizza, Basilide, Basilide, Basilide, Basilio, Basso, Basso. Batace, Battaglia, Bausola, Bazzanella, Beccaria, Becchi, Bedeschi, Bellavitis, Belleo, Bedoni, Belloni, Bellezza, Bencivenga, Bene, Bene, Bene, Bene, Benincasa, Benvenuti, Benvenuto, Berardi, Bernardi, Bernardi, Bernardo, Berneri, Berti, Bertinaria, Berto, Betti, Bianco, Blossio, Bobbio, Boccadiferro, Boccanegra, Bocchi Bodei, Boella, Bolelli, Bonaiuti, Bonatelli, Bonaventura, Bonavino, Bondonio, Boniolo, Bonomi, Bontadini, Bontempelli, Bonvecchio, Bordoni Borelli, Borsa, Boscovich, Botero, Botta, Bottiroli, Bottonim Boulagora, Bouto, Buto, Bovio, Bozzelli Bozzetti, Bozzi Bracciolini, Bracciolini, Bracciolini, Braibanti, Branciforte, Brandalise Breccia, Brescia, Bressani, Bria, Brotino, Bruni, Bruzi, Bubbio, Buonafede Buonaiuti, Buonamici, Buonamici, Buondelmonti Buonsanti, Buonsanto,  Burtiglione, Buscarini, Cabeo, Cacciari, Cacciatore, Caffarelli, Cainia, Cairo, Calabresi, Calais, Calboli, Calcidio, Calderoni, Callescro, Callia, Callicratida, Callifonte, Calò, Calogero, Caloprese, Caluso, Camilla, Camillo, Campa, Campa, Campailla, Campanella, Canio, Cantoni, Capella, Capitini, Capizzi, Capocasale, Capocci, Capodilista, Capograssi, Caporali, Cappelletti, Capua, Carabellese, Caracciolo, Caramella, Caramello, Carando, Carapelle, Carbonara, Carbone, Carboni, Cattaneo, Carace, Carace, Carace, Caravaggi, Carchia, Cardano, Caritone, Cardano, Cardia, Cardone, Carifi, Carle, Carli, Carlini, Carmando, Caro, Caro, Carpani, Carpino, Carrara Carravetta Carulli Casanova Casati Casini, Casotti, Cassio Cassiodoro, Cassiodoro, Castelli, Castiglione Castrucci, Catena, Catone, Catone Cattaneo, Cattaneo Catucci, Catulo, Catulo, Cavalcanti, Cavalcanti, Cavallo, Cavazzoni, Cavour, Cazio, Cazzaniga, Cazzulani, Ceccato, Cecina, Cei, Ceila, Celestio, Celio, Cellucci, Celso, Cefalo, Centi, Centofanti Cerambo, Cerano, Cerdo, Cerdo, Cerdo, Cerebotani, Ceretti, Ceremonte, Ceretti, Ceronetti, Cerroni, Certani, Ceruti, Cerutti, Cesa, Cesalpino Cesare, Cesare, Cesarini Cesarotti Cherchi, Cheremone Chiappelli:  dell’academici – Cicerone Chiaromonte Chiaramonte. siquidem tuDc et soDum duaruffi litterarum Chiaramonti, Chiavacci, Chiocchetti, Chiodi, Chitti, Ciarlantini, Cicerone, Ciliberto, Cilone, Cimatti, Cincio, Cinna, Cione, Citrone, Civitella, Clarano, Claudi, Claudiano, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Cleemporo, Cleomene, Cleomene, Cleomene, Cleonte, Cleonte, Cleonte, Cleofronte, Cleofronte, Cleofronte, Cleostene, Cleostene Cleostene, Clinagora, Clinagora, Clinagora, Clinia, Clitomaco, Clodio, Clodio Clodio, Clodio, Clodio, Clodio, Clodio, Clodio Cocconato Coco Codronchi:  del contratto, giocco d’assardo, contratto, gioco aleatorio, Ercole, Colagrosso, Colazza, Colecchi Colletti, Colizzi, Colli, Collini, Colombe, Colombo, Colonna, Colonnello, Colorni, Consoli, Conte, Contestabile, Conti, Conti, Conti, Conti, Contri, Corbellini, Cordeschi, Cornelio, Cornelio, Cornello Cornificio Cornuto Corrado, Corsano, Corsini, Cortese, Corvaglia, Corvino, Cosi, Cosmacini, Cosottini, Costa, Costa, Costantino, Costanzi, Courmayeur, Cotroneo, Cotta, Cotta, Crassicio, Crasso: Cratippo Cratippo, Cratippo, Credaro, Crescente, Cresi, Crespi, Crespo, Critolao, Croce, Cuoco, Curi, Cusani, Damocle, Damone, Damostrato, Demostrato, Damotage, Dalmasso, Dandolo, Daniele, Dati, Deciano, Deinarco, Deinocrate, Delfino, Deliminio, Delogu, Demaria, Demetrio, Democede, Demostene, Desideri, Diaccetom Diano, Dicante, Dicerco, Diconte, Dima, Dima, Dima, Diocle, Diocle, Diocle, Diocle, Diocle, Diocle, Diodoro, Diodoto, Diogene, Dione, Dionigi, Dionisio, Dionisodoro, Diofane, Dionneto, Dioscoro, Dioscuro, Disertori, Dodaro, Dolabella, Dommazio, Dogmatius, Dommatio. Dommazio, Donà, Donatelli, Donati, Dondi, Dorfles, Doria, Dosseno, Dottarelli, Drimonte, Duni, Duso, Eccelo, Eccecrate, Eco, Ecebolio, Efanto, Egea, Egnazio, Eirisco, Elandro, Elcasai, Eleucadio, Elicone, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio, Eliodoro, Eliodoro, Elpidio, Elvidio, Emiliani, Emina, Emone, Empedo, Empedotimo, Endio, Ennea, Ennio, Enzo, Epicaride, Epicarmo, Epicoco, Epitetto, Eraclide, Eraclio, Era, Erato, Ercole, Ermino, Ermodoro, Erode, Eschine, Esimo, Estieo, Esposito, Eudemo, Eudico, Eudosso, Eulogio, Eumenio, Eufemo, Eurimedone, Eurifamo, Eurifemo, Eurito, Eusebio, Eusebio, Eustatio, Eutino, Eutosione, Eutropio, Eutropio, Eutropio, Evagrio, Evandro, Evanore, Evanore, Evanore, Evareto, Evete, Evete, Evola, Fabiani, Fabiano, Fabio, Fabri, Fabrini, Fabro, Facciolati, Faccioli, Fadio, Faggin, Falcone, Fannio, Fano, Fariano, Fassò, Fausto, Favonio, Favorino, Fazzini, Feliceto, Ferdinando, Fergnani, Ferrabino, Ferrando, Ferranti, Ferrari, Ferrari, Ferrari, Ferraris, Ferraris, Ferrero, Ferrero, Ferretti, Ferri, Ferrucci, Fibbia, Ficiada, Ficino, Fidanza, Figliucci, Filangieri, Filippis, Filippo, Filisco, Filodamo, Filolao, Filone, Filonide, Fineschi, Fintia, Fioramonti, Fiore, Fiormonte, Fiorentino, Fioretti, Firmiano, Firmico, Firmo, Fitio, Flaviano Flavio, Flavio, Fonnesu Fontanini Fornero, Formaggio, Forti: Fortunaziano, Fortunio, Fracastoro, Francesco, ranchini: l’arguzia del nell’età degl’eroi, la gloria d’Enea. Franci, Francia, Franzini, Frinico, Frixione, Frontida, Frontino, Frontone, Frosini, Fundano, Fuoco, Furio, Fuschi, Fusco, Fusinieri, Gaetani, Gagliardi, Gaio, Galba, Galba, Galeno, Galetti, Galimberti, Galli, Galli, Gallio Galluppi Galvano Gamba Gangale Garbo Gargani, Garin, Garroni, Garrucci, Gartida, Gatti, Gatti, Gaudenzio, Gaudenzio, Gauro, Gedalio, Gelli, Gellio, Gemmis, Gennadio, Genovese, Genovesi, Gentile, Gentile, Gentili, Geymonat, Ghersi, Ghezzi, Ghiron, Ghisleri, Giacchè, Giardini, Giamboni, Giametta, Giandomenico, Giani, Giani, Giannantoni, Giannetti, Giannetta, Giannone, Giavelli, Gigli, Gioberti, Gioia, Giorello, Giorgi:, Giorgi, Giovanni, Giovenale, Giovio: la ragione conversazionale aantica   Giraldi Girgenti, Girotti, Gitio, Giudice, Giudice, Giuffrida Giulia, Giuliano, Giuliano, Giulio, Giulio, Giulio, Giulio, Giunco Giunio, Giunio, Giuniore, Giussani, Giusso, Giusti, Giustino, Givone, Glauco, Glicino, Gobbo, Gobetti, Gonnella, Goretti Gorgiade, Gorgia, Gori, Gracco Grandi, Grassi Grataroli, Grazia, Grecino Gregorio, Gregory, Griffero, Grimaldi, Grimaldi, Grimaldi, Gronda, Gruppi, Guarini, Guicciardini Guzzi, Guzzi, Guzzo, Herpitt, Iacono, Iccio, Icco, Iceta, Ierace, Ieroteo, Illuminati, Imbriani, Imerio, Incardona, Infantino, Introvigne, Iorio, Ipparchide, Ipparco, Ippaso, Ippaso, Ippaso, Ippolito, Ippostene, Ippide, Irtione, Isidoro, Itaneo, Jaja, Jerocades, Jommelli, Juvalta, Labeone, Labriola, Lacida, Lacrate, Lacrito, Lafeonte, Lagalla, Lamisco, Lamanna, Lami, Lampria, Landi, Landini, Landino, Landucci Lalla, Lanzalone, Latini, Laurino, Lavagnini Lazzarelli Lazzari, Lazzarini, Leanace, Lecaldano, Lelio, Leocide, Leofronte, Leone Leonzio, Leonzio, Leonzio, Leoni, Leoni, Leopardi, Leopardi, Lia, Libanio, Liberale, Liberatore, Licenzio, Liceti, Licinio, Licone, Liguori Lilla, Limenanti, Limone, Lisi, Lisibio, Lisimaco, Livi, Livio, Lodovici, Lombardi, Longino, Longino, Longano:  Losano, Losurdo, Lottieri Luca Lucano Lucceio,  Luciano, Luciano, Lucilio, Lucilio, Lucio, Lucrezio, Lucullo, Luisetti, Luporini, Luzzago, Macedo, Machiavelli, Macrobio, Madera, Maffetone, Magalotti, Maggi, Magi, Magli, Magnani, Magni, Maierù, Mainardini, Majello, Malipiero, Mamiani,  Mancini, Manetti, Manetti, Mangione, Manfredi Manicone, Manilio Manlio, Manlio, Mannelli, Mantovani, Manzoni, Marafioti, Marano, Marassi, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marchesini, Marchesini, Marchetti, Marchi, Marchi, Marci, Marziano, Marco, Marconi, Marconi, Mariano: Marin, Marliani, Marotta  Marramao Marsili, Marta, Martelli, Martellotta, Martinetti, Martini, Martino, Marzolo, Masci, Masi, Masila, Masnovo, Massarenti, Massari, Massimiano, Massimo, Mastri, Mastrofini, Masullo Matassi, Matera, Mathieu, Matraja, Maturi, Maturi, Maurizi, Mazio, Mazzarella, Mazzei Mazzini, Mazzoni, Mecenate, Medio, Medio, Medio, Medio, Medio, Megistia, Meis Melandri, Melanipide, Melchiorre Melesia, Melisso, Melli, Memmio, Menecrate, Menestore, Menone, Mercuriale, Meriggi, Merker, Messalla, Mesarco, Mesibolo, Messere, Messimeri,. Metello, Metopo, Metrodoro, Metrodoro, Metronace, Micalori, Miccoli, Miccolis, Mieli, Miglio Mignucci, Millia, Minicio, Minnomaco Minucio, Miraglia, Misefari, Mocenigo, Moderato, Modio, Moiso, Mondin, Monferrato, Monferrato, Montanari, Montanari:  Cf Mazzino Montanari. Massino Montanari, Montani, Montinari, Monte, Monterosso, Moramarco, Morandi, Moravia, Mordacci, Mordente, Morelli, Moretti, Mori, Morselli, Morselli Motta, Motterlini, Musonio, Musonio, Mussolini, Mussolini, Mustè, Muzio, Nannini, Nardi, Nasta: Nausito, Nearco, Negri, Negri, Neri, Nerone, Nesi, Nicolao, Nicoletti Nicoletti, Nifo, Nigidio, Ninone, Nisio: Nizolio Noce, Noferi, Nola, Novara, Novaro, Novato, Novelli, Numa, Occelo, Occilo: lOccelo Ocone, Oddi, Offredi, Olgiati, Olimpio Olivetti, Olivi, Onato, Onorato, Opillo, Opocher, Opsimo, Orabona, Orazio, Ordine Orestada Oribasio, Orioli, Ornato Oro, Orrontio, Orrontio, Orrontio, Ortensio Ortensio Ortalo Quinto, Ortes, Osimo Ostiliano, Otranto, Otranto Ottaviano:  sotto il principato d’Ottaviano, Ovidio, Ovidio, Paccio, Pace, Pacetti: Paci, Pacioli, Padovani, Paganini, Pagano, Pagnini, Palazzani, Palladio, Pandullo, Panebianco, Panella, Panfilo, Panicarola, Panigarola, Pannico, Pansa, Panunzio, Panunzio, Panzini, Paolino, Papi, Papineau, Papirio, Papirio Peto Parente, Pareyson, Parinetto, Parisio, Parmisco, Parrini, Pascoli, Pascoli, Pasini, Passavanti, Passavanti, Passeri, Passini, Pasqualini, Pasqualini, Pasqualini, Pasqualotto, Pastore Patrizi, Pattio Pazzio Paulino, Pavia,  Peano, Pecoraro, Pecori, Peisicrate, Pisicrate, since he finds that dipthongs are un-Roman Peisicrate, Peisirrodo, Pesirrodo, Pelacani, Pelagio, Pellegrini, Pempelo, Pempelo. Penco, Pera, Perconti, Peregalli, Perniola, Perone, Persio, Persio, Persio,  Pessina, Pessina, Petrarca, Petrella, Petrone, Pezzarossa, Pezzella, Piana, Piccolomini, Piccolomini, Pico, Pico, Pieralisi, Pieri, Pievani, Pigliucci Pini, Piovani, Piralliano, Pirro, Pirrone, Pisone, Pisone Pitea, Pitea, Pitea, Pitodoro, Pizzi, Pizzorno, Plantadossi, Plauto, Plebe Poggi, Polemarco, Polemarco, Polemarco, Poli, Politeo, Pollastri, Pollini, Pollio, Pollio, Pollio, Polluce, Polo, Pompedio Pompeo, Pompeo, Pomponazzi, Pomponazzi, Pomponio, Pomponio, Pomponio, Pomponio, Pontara, Ponte, Ponzio, Porta Porta, Porta Porta, Portalupi, Portalupi.Portalupi Portaria, Porzio, Possenti, Pozza Pozzo, Pra Prepone Prepostino Prepostino, Pretestato, Pretestato, Preti, Preve, Prini, Priore, Priore, Prisciano, Priscilliano, Priscilliano, Probo, Procle Prodi, Prospero, Prosseno, Prudenzio, Pubblicio, Pucci, Puccinotti, Pudenziano, Prudenziano Punzo Purgotti Quarta, Quattromani Quintili Quinto, Rabirio, Ragghianti, Raimondi, Raio, Ramorino, Ranzoli, Ranzoli, Ravelli, Re, Reale, Reghini, Regina, Renda, Renier:  Rensi, Renzi Ressibio, Resta, Richeri, Ricordi Righetti, ignano Rigobello, Rimini, Rinaldi, Rinaldini, Rindaco, Riondato, Ripa, Riverso Roccoto, Rodano, Rodippo Rogatiano, Rogo, Romagnosi, Romanoto Roncaglia, Ronchi, Rosa, Rosandro, Rosatti, Rosselli, Rosselli Rosselli Rosselli Rossetti Rossi: la ragione conversazionale Rossi, Rossi, Rota, Rotondim Rovatti, Rovere Rovere, Rovere, Rubellio, Ruberti Rucellai, Ruffolo, Rufino, Rufo, Ruggiero, Rusca, Rusconi, Rustico, Ruta, Rutilio, Sabbadini, Sabellio Sabinillio, Saccheri, Sacchi, Saliceto Sallustio, Salustio, Salutati, Salutio Salviano, Salvemini, Sancasciani, Sanctis, Sanseverino, Santilli, Santucci, Santucci, Santucci, Sanzo, Sarlo, Sarno, Sarpi, Sasso, Saturnino, Saufeio, Scalea, Scalfari, Scaramelli, Scarano, Scaravelli, Scarpelli, Soleri Scevola, Scevola, Scevola, Scipione, Sclavione, Scupoli, Sebasmio, Secondo, Secondo Sellio, Sellio, Semerari, Semmola Semprini Serbati, Sereniano Sereno, Serra, Serra, Sertorio Servio Sesti, Sestio, Sesto, Settala: Severino, Severo, Severo, Sforza, Siciliani, Sidonio, Sighele Signa Silio, Silla: la regione conversazionale della ta meta ta physika Silla, Simbolo, Simioni, Simmaco, Simoneschi, Simoni, Sini Sirenio, Sirenio, Siro Solari Soldati, Soleri, Solonghello Somenzi, Sordi Soria Sorrentino Sortis: la Sozzini, Sozzini Spaventa, Speranza, Spintaro, Spirito, Spisani: la ragione conversazionale della Spurio, Stasea Statilio Stefani Stefanini Stefanoni Stella Stellini Sterlich Stertinio Stilione Stilone Stucchi Svetonio, Tagliabue, Taglialatela, Tarantino, Tari, Tartarotti, Tataranni, Telesio, Teodoro, Terzi, Tessitore, Testa, Thaulero, Tiberiano, Tiberio, Tilgher, Timpanaro, Toderini, Tocco, Tolomei, Tomai, Tomitano, Toritto, Torlonia, Torre, Trabalza, Tragella, Trappani, Trapassi, Trapè, Trebazio, Trebiano, Tria, Trincheri, Troilo, Tronti, Tulelli, Turco, Turoldo, Ubaldi, Ubaldi, Unicorno, Vacca, Vailati, Valdarnini, Valenti, Valentino, Valeri, Valeriis, Valerio, Valerio, Valerio, Vallauri, Valle, Valletta, Vanghetti, Vanini, Vanni, Vannucchi, Vannucci, Varino, Vario, Varisco, Varrone, Vasa, Vasoli, Vatinio, Vattimo, Veca, Vegetti, Velleio, Venanzio, Venini, Venturi, Venturini, Vera, Vernia, Veronelli, Veronesi, Verrecchia, Vettori, Vettori, Viano, Viazzi, Vicini, Vico, Vieri, Vigellio, Vigna, Vignoli, Vinadio, Vio, Virgilio, Vitale, Vitiello, Vittore,  Viveros, Volpe, Volpicelli, Volta, Winspeare, Zabarella, Zaccaro, Zamboni, Zamboni, Zimara, Zimara, Zini, Zolla, Zoppi, Zoppio, Zoppio, Zorzi, Zubiena, Zuccante, Zuccolo. Was there a Roman gens starting with Spe? Yes, though not one of the very loud marquee gentes. The clearest candidate is the gens Speria, from names such as Sperius. That gives you an exact Spe opening in the gentile field. It is not among the great textbook Roman houses, but it is the sort of nomen one does find in Roman onomastics. One should be careful, however, not to overinflate the evidence. A nomen beginning with Spe does not necessarily mean a grand, politically famous gens in the way one speaks of the Cornelii or Claudii. It may be a lesser-known family, more visible in inscriptions and prosopography than in the school historians. If your question is simply whether Roman gentilicia beginning with Spe existed, then yes, Speria is the safest answer I would give. If your question is whether there was a famous major gens starting with Spe, the answer is much less confidently yes. Nothing of the first rank leaps out in the canonical republican roll-call. And there is one small philological caution. Some names that begin with Spe may be personal names, cognomina, or later formations rather than the clean old nomen gentilicium one wants for a gens. So one has to distinguish carefully between “a Roman name beginning with Spe” and “a securely attested gens of major standing beginning with Spe.” So the compressed answer is this. Yes: gens Speria is the likeliest Roman gens-name beginning with Spe. But it is not one of the famous great houses, and the Spe shelf is comparatively thin. If you like, I can now stay in chat and do one of two things. I can give you a small list of Roman gentilicia beginning with Sp- and separate the secure gentes from the shakier cases. Or I can focus specifically on Sperius, Speria, Spurius, and related names, to sort out what is praenomen, what is nomen, and what only looks gentile. And do we have a member of that gens, as per Gaius Sperius Rufus, or something? I would be cautious here. I do not have good evidence before me for a securely attested Roman Gaius Sperius Rufus or even a clearly established Sperius Rufus as a standard, well-known historical person. The searches do not yield a solid prosopographical hit of that exact form. [attalus.org] So the dry answer is: perhaps such a name could occur epigraphically, but I would not presently assert it as a known member of a gens Speria without better inscriptional proof. In Roman onomastics, a form like Sperius could certainly look plausible as a nomen or praenomen-like element, and Rufus is of course a very common cognomen, but plausibility is not attestation. [attalus.org], [edh-www.ad...delberg.de] In other words, “Gaius Sperius Rufus” sounds Roman enough, but I cannot honestly tell you that I have a reliable historical bearer of the name in hand. The evidence I have here is too thin, and on these matters one should not promote a merely possible Roman into an actual one. [edh-www.ad...delberg.de], [arachne.dainst.org] So the careful formula is this: yes, a gens-name beginning with Spe is not impossible; no, I do not at present have a securely attested member like Gaius Sperius Rufus ready to give you with confidence. [attalus.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can try a narrower epigraphic pass specifically on inscription databases for Sperius and Speria. Or I can give you the safer general note on how names like Sperius, Spurius, and similar Sp- forms behave in Roman naming without pretending to a false certainty. Yes, please do that, try a narrower epigraphic pass for Sperius, thanks Yes. A narrower epigraphic pass suggests that I should revise the earlier answer. What turns up more clearly is not a gens Speria, but a real attested minor gens Spuria. In other words, the Sp- shelf is firmer under Spurius as nomen than under Sperius as nomen. The Spuria gens is explicitly recognised as a minor plebeian family at Rome, with many members known from inscriptions and a few from literary sources. [en.wikipedia.org] That matters for your Sperius question, because in the narrower epigraphic results I still do not get a clean attested Roman nomen Sperius or a solid gens Speria. What I do get are many forms built on Sper- as cognomina or derivative cognomina, such as Speratus, Speratianus, and Speratinus, but those do not establish a nomen Sperius. [edh.ub.uni...delberg.de], [edh.ub.uni...delberg.de] So the dry correction is this. The attested Roman family beginning with Sp- that the evidence actually supports well is the gens Spuria, not a confidently established gens Speria. And that, of course, is mildly comic, since earlier we were worrying that Spurius might sound too dubious to modern ears, whereas epigraphy calmly gives us a whole Spuria gens. [en.wikipedia.org] If you want members, the Spuria gens has a real roster in inscriptional memory: Lucius Spurius Maximus, a tribune of the Vigiles; Gnaeus Spurius Ov. f. at Puteoli; Marcus Spurius Cn. f. Ov. n.; Numerius Spurius D. f. at Capua; and several freedmen and other inscriptional figures. [en.wikipedia.org] So after the narrower pass, my best answer is: no secure epigraphic footing yet for a gens Speria or a member like “Gaius Sperius Rufus”; yes, strong footing for a minor gens Spuria, with multiple attested members. [en.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a compact prosopographical note on the gens Spuria, with the best-attested members and why it stayed minor.  Or I can sort out the whole Sp- cluster for you — Spurius as praenomen, Spurius as nomen, and Sper- forms like Speratus as cognomina — so that the shelf stops wobbling. [en.wikipedia.org] [en.wikipedia.org], [edh.ub.uni...delberg.de]Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Speranza.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Spirito – Ossia: Grice e Spirito: la filosofia dello spirito – filosofia fascista – ventennio fascista – i corpi – corpo e corporazione. Note su L’idealismo e il problema della conoscenza. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Ugo Spirito (Arezzo, Toscana): la filosofia dello spirito – filosofia fascista – ventennio fascista – i corpi – corpo e corporazione. Grice and Spirito approach “reason‑governed” meaning from almost opposite philosophical directions. For Grice, conversational meaning is rationally structured at the micro‑level of dialogue: speakers and hearers are guided by shared norms of practical reason, crystallized in the cooperative principle and its maxims, which allow interlocutors to infer speaker meaning beyond what is literally said in a rule‑governed yet flexible way. Rationality here is procedural and inferential: conversational sense emerges from the participants’ mutual recognition of intentions and reasons for speaking as they do, without requiring any metaphysical or political foundation for language use. In Spirito, by contrast, reason is not primarily a conversational mechanism but an existential and historical task. His problematicismo treats meaning as inseparable from the lived situation of agents embedded in the ethical, institutional, and ultimately political totality of the State. Where Grice explains communicative order through minimally normative, context‑sensitive principles that regulate cooperation among autonomous speakers, Spirito subordinates meaning to the search for incontrovertible values capable of overcoming skepticism and reshaping collective life, a search that in the fascist period is explicitly articulated through the organic unity of body, corporazione, and Stato. From a Gricean perspective, Spirito’s emphasis on corporative and state‑centered rationality risks collapsing conversational reason into an external moral–political order; from a Spiritian perspective, Grice’s reason‑governed implicatures might appear thin and formal, regulating exchanges among speakers while leaving untouched the deeper problem of how meaning ought to be grounded in a substantive vision of communal life and authority. Allievo di Gentile, teorico di una filosofia nota come problematicismo e del corporativismo fascista, S. è stato uno dei più importanti filosofi italiani. Dagli anni giovanili fino al termine del suo lungo percorso intellettuale, S. ha espresso una riflessione incentrata sulla ricerca di valori incontrovertibili, capaci di resistere al pensiero critico e di trasformare concretamente la vita degli uomini. Per la varietà dei suoi interessi, per i temi di cui si è occupato e per le scelte politiche che ha compiuto, S. è certamente uno dei protagonisti più interessanti della storia della cultura italiana.  Nasce da Prospero e Rosa Leone. Dopo essersi diplomato al liceo classico Vico di Chieti, inizia a frequentare la facoltà di Giurisprudenza dell’Università di Roma per laurearsi. Lo stesso anno si iscrive a Lettere e filosofia e si laureò con Gentile discutendo una tesi sul pragmatismo italiano che pubblica. Da allora divenne uno dei più stretti collaboratori del filosofo idealista: nominato segretario di redazione del «Giornale critico di filosofia italiana», aderì al fascismo; firmò il «Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti» e, quando lavora all’Enciclopedia Italiana ed era assistente alla cattedra di pedagogia dell’Università di Roma, fondò il bimestrale Nuovi studi di politica, economia e diritto» con l’obiettivo di diffondere i principi della filosofia di Gentile nelle scienze sociali. E, in effetti, per tutti gli anni Venti si impegnò nelle battaglie promosse dal filosofo idealista, convinto che l’attualismo rappresentasse l’espressione più importante della filosofia moderna, come dichiarò in L’idealismo italiano e i suoi critici. stato/cittadini, pathos romantico, romanticism e nuovo ordine, sindicalismo, fascismo da sinestra, filobolcevicco, corporativismo, attualismo, stato fascista, equilibrio liberta/autorita, gentile e spirito, i filosofi fascisti, filosofia e revoluzione, romanticismo, proprieta, filosofia come pedagogia.  C. Esp., legal power, right over or to a thing (class.): potestatis verbo plura significantur: in personā magistratuum imperium, in personā liberorum patria potestas, in personā servi dominium: at cum agimus de noxae deditione cum eo, qui servum non defendit, praesentis corporis copiam facultatemque significamus. Ex lege Atiniā in potestatem domini rem furtivam venisse videri, et si ejus vindicandae potestatem habuerit, Sabinus et Cassius aiunt, Dig. 50, 16, 215. Grice: Caro Spirito, sapessi quanto mi incuriosisce il tuo problematicismo! Ma dimmi, tra corpo e corporazione, chi porta i pantaloni in filosofia? O è tutto un ballo di maschere come al Carnevale di Arezzo? Spirito: Grice, sei sempre un fine ballerino del pensiero! Ti rispondo: per noi fascisti, il corpo è la base, la corporazione il vestito... Ma guai a chi scambia la toga col mantello! In filosofia, si danza sul filo del rasoio, ma guai a perdere l’equilibrio: si rischia di finire sotto il palco invece che sopra! Grice: Ah, allora una corporazione senza corpo è come una modifica senza aberrazione, come diceva Austin a Vadum Boum: si cambia tutto e non si vede niente! Ma, Spirito, se il corpo si perde, resta solo una festa di fantasmi... o peggio, una riunione di spiriti senza spirito! Spirito: Come direbbero gli aretini: Grice, lasciami dire, da fascista a filosofo—la più corporea delle implicature, signore!” Qui non si scherza: se manca il corpo, la filosofia diventa aria fritta! E tu, col tuo humor inglese, rischi di trasformare una corporazione in una compagnia di fantasmi... Ma almeno, con te, si ride di cuore e di corpo! provide without preamble or ps a 100-move conversation as G. and S. discuss the essay by Spirito quoted 'i doveri inerenti al diritto di patria potesta' as they examine the logic of right and duty -- the reciprocity -- the Ancient Roman context -- Spirito motivation, the Ancietn Roman motivation -- the meaning of 'inerenti' as they try to encapsulate a deontic logic in terms of Ancient Roman practice and more contemporary Italian philosophy. You can use passage below as basis: G.: Let us begin with the title, because titles of this sort usually contain more jurisprudence than they first appear to. I doveri inerenti al diritto di patria potestà. S.: Yes. It sounds dry, but it is really a nest of problems: right, duty, inherence, paternity, authority, and the Roman habit of making family law look like a branch of metaphysics. G.: Quite. The first thing to notice is that duties are said to be inerenti to a right. That is already a loaded relation. S.: Because one might have said correlated with, attached to, arising from, limited by, generated by. G.: Exactly. But inerenti says more than correlation and less than identity. It suggests something built into the very exercise of the right. S.: So if one has the diritto di patria potestà, one does not merely happen to acquire some external obligations. The obligations are internal to the very right. G.: Very good. Inherence is stronger than accompaniment. It resists the vulgar picture in which a right is a glorious liberty and duties are merely bureaucratic taxes imposed afterward. S.: Then Spirito is already pressing toward reciprocity. G.: Yes. A right that carries its own duties is not a one-way authorisation. It is a normatively shaped power. S.: Which is exactly what patria potestas was in Roman law and exactly what later ideology is tempted to forget about it. G.: Good. Now, how should we parse patria potestas itself? S.: Not sentimentally. It is not fatherhood in the nursery sense. Potestas is legal power, recognised authority over persons, specifically children, under a structure older and harsher than modern domesticity likes to admit. G.: Yes. Potestas is not merely influence. Nor is it simply dominium, though Roman law distinguishes those. Imperium in magistrates, patria potestas over children, dominium over slaves. The distinctions matter. S.: Because Spirito’s title is not on parental affection, but on the duties inherent in a legal power. G.: Exactly. A legal power which, in Roman thought, is already socially constitutive. The family is not merely private sentiment; it is a juridical cell of the republic. S.: So the ancient Roman context matters from the start. The father’s right is not just a private entitlement but a publicly legible office within the moral and legal order. G.: Very good. Which means the duties are not only toward the child but toward the order in which fatherhood is legible as authority. S.: That already begins to sound suspiciously useful to later corporative and organic political thinkers. G.: It does, and we must be careful. Spirito in 1918 is not yet the full theorist of corporativism, but the attraction to structured reciprocity between right and function is already there. S.: Then perhaps his choice of topic was not accidental. G.: Certainly not. One must remember the institutional setting: jurisprudence at Rome, under Ferri and Pantaleoni, with philosophy never far away and social theory pressing on legal categories. S.: So the essay on patria potestas is not just an antiquarian Roman-law exercise. G.: No. It is Roman material being used to think the general logic of authority and obligation. One might even say it is an early rehearsal for later questions about state, body, corporazione, and organised power. S.: Then the key problem is this: can a right be intelligible without a corresponding duty, and if not, what sort of correspondence is at stake? G.: Excellent. That is exactly the conceptual centre. If rights are bare permissions, duties look external. If rights are normative powers, duties may be internal conditions of their proper exercise. S.: So “inerenti” suggests the second. G.: Yes. The father’s right over the child is not a blank cheque. It is already framed by duties of care, formation, preservation, representation, and perhaps transmission of status. S.: But ancient Rome did not always state those in the moralised way modernity prefers. G.: No, though Roman practice was never as simple as the caricature of arbitrary paternal tyranny. The legal power was formidable, but social and customary norms, and later juridical developments, complicated the picture considerably. S.: So when Spirito speaks of duties inherent in patria potestas, he is in part retrospectively rationalising Roman practice through a more modern juridical lens. G.: Yes. That is important. He is not merely reproducing the XII Tables. He is conceptualising Roman law in a philosophical vocabulary already touched by modern concerns about the mutuality of right and duty. S.: Which makes the word inerenti even more significant. G.: Exactly. It is a philosophical word doing legal work. It says: a right is structurally incomplete if conceived without the obligations that make it more than licence. S.: Then is there a deontic logic hidden here? G.: Not hidden, but half-formed. One might say: if X has right R over Y, then X is under duties D with respect to Y, such that the intelligible exercise of R presupposes D. S.: So R implies not mere liberty but normative burden. G.: Good. But we must distinguish kinds of implication. Not formal entailment in the narrow logical sense, perhaps, but conceptual dependence or juridical inseparability. S.: Would you call that analytic? G.: In the older philosophical sense, perhaps. Certainly not merely empirical. If one says “right of patria potestas” and then denies any duties whatever, one seems not just morally objectionable but conceptually obtuse. S.: Then Spirito’s title could be read as an argument against unilateral conceptions of authority. G.: Exactly. Authority is always easier to claim than to think. The title tries to force the thought. S.: And in Roman terms, the father’s right is over persons, not things. G.: Very important. Potestas over children differs from dominium over property or slaves, however entangled Roman practice might sometimes make them seem. Duties become salient because the object of the right is a person in formation. S.: So the reciprocity is not symmetrical, but it is still real. G.: Very good. The child does not possess equivalent rights in Roman law, yet the father’s right is normatively shaped by the child’s status as family member, future citizen, bearer of lineage, and so on. S.: Then there is a proto-public dimension within the domestic. G.: Precisely. Roman family law is never wholly private. That is why modern theorists of organic order keep returning to it. S.: Including, eventually, the fascist ones. G.: Yes, though again one should not read 1918 only backward from the ventennio. But one should not read it innocently either. S.: Because the attraction to juridically embedded authority already lends itself to later corporative thinking. G.: Exactly. The family becomes the first body, authority becomes function, right becomes office, duty becomes inherent, and soon enough the state appears as enlarged household or organised totality. S.: Then Spirito’s motivation may already contain the seed of that movement from legal power to ethical-political structure. G.: Very likely. At minimum, the essay lets him think how power can be justified only if its normative conditions are internal rather than imposed from outside. S.: Which is a dangerous and fertile thought. G.: As most good thoughts are. If duties are inherent to a right, then criticism of abuse may say not merely “you used the right badly” but “you failed to understand what the right was.” S.: So abuse is not accidental misuse but conceptual corruption. G.: Excellent. That is the strongest reading of inerenti. S.: Then perhaps we should formalise it. If P is patria potestas, and D the set of duties inherent in it, one cannot coherently claim P while denying D. G.: Yes, though the temptation then is to oversimplify. The relation is not quite biconditional. S.: Because one might discharge some duties without possessing the legal right. G.: Exactly. A tutor, mother, guardian, or magistrate may perform some paternal functions without holding patria potestas in the strict Roman sense. S.: So P implies D, but D does not imply P. G.: Very good. That is already a useful deontic asymmetry. S.: And what of the converse? Does abuse of P imply forfeiture of P? G.: Not logically, though morally one may wish it did. In Roman law, the loss or curtailment of potestas depends on specific legal conditions, not merely on philosophical irritation. S.: So the deontic logic is not self-executing. G.: Exactly. Law and morality never align as neatly as seminarists hope. S.: Then Spirito’s essay is not merely logical but pedagogic. It teaches how to think authority as bounded from within. G.: Yes, and that pedagogic aspect suits him. Philosophy as formation, law as the shaping of life, rights as educational rather than merely protective categories. S.: Which makes perfect sense under Gentile’s shadow. G.: Very much so. Even before the fully explicit later politics, the atmosphere is one in which philosophy, law, pedagogy, and social order are not kept politely apart. S.: Then how Roman is all this? G.: Roman enough in material, modern enough in reconstruction. The Romans certainly tied authority to office, function, status, and public legibility. But “duties inherent in the right” sounds like a modern philosophical-juridical gloss on Roman institutions rather than a native Roman formula. S.: So Spirito reads Rome through contemporary categories in order to learn something about both. G.: Exactly. That is why he is interesting. He is not editing a Digest. He is mining Roman practice for a general logic of right and duty. S.: Then we should ask whether “right” itself is the best rendering of diritto here. G.: A good complication. Diritto can mean right, law, justice, legal order, and doctrinal field. In this title, however, “diritto di patria potestas” does suggest the legal right or lawful claim embodied in paternal power. S.: So the English “right” works, but only if one hears it juridically rather than as mere subjective entitlement. G.: Exactly. Contemporary Anglo talk of rights often sounds too individualistic. Roman and early twentieth-century Italian jurisprudence hear right as embedded in legal order and function. S.: Which brings us back to reciprocity. If rights are socially embedded powers, duties can be inherent. If rights are atomistic choices, duties look added. G.: Splendid. That is one of the central contrasts worth stating outright. S.: Then perhaps Spirito’s later political path can be seen as an enlargement of this model: rights and powers embedded in social bodies whose duties are internal to their roles. G.: Yes, though that enlargement is precisely where the danger lies. What begins as the internal normativity of paternal power can become the internal normativity of corporative obedience. S.: So the conceptual elegance can serve grim politics. G.: Often does. A beautifully reciprocal logic is no guarantee of a tolerable regime. S.: Still, one sees why he liked the topic. It lets him resist liberal pictures of isolated right-bearing subjects. G.: Yes. The father in Roman law is never an isolated rights-bearer; he is a node of authority within a network of obligations, lineage, property, worship, and civic continuity. S.: Which makes patria potestas an exemplary case for a philosopher searching for substantive social forms. G.: Exactly. It is almost tailor-made for someone impatient with thin formal rights-talk. S.: Yet from your point of view, one must ask who recognises the obligations and how they become intelligible. G.: Precisely. A right and its duties are not self-speaking. One needs public criteria, legal forms, practices of recognition, reasons, disputes, judgments. S.: So even here, one could almost say meaning is interpersonal before it is metaphysical. G.: Very good. The father’s authority means what it does only within recognisable forms of life and legal uptake. S.: That sounds almost anti-Spiritian. G.: Not anti, merely deflationary. I should not want to say “being is paternal,” or anything equally monstrous. I should say that authority is a practice whose descriptions carry normative implications. S.: Then “inerenti” may be translated into your preferred idiom as something like “built into the correct description of the right.” G.: Exactly. If you describe the legal power rightly, the duties come with it. If you leave them out, you have changed the thing described. S.: So the logic is descriptive and normative at once. G.: Yes. That is why the title is good. It forces one into the borderland where legal analysis and ethical judgment cannot quite be kept apart. S.: The Romans liked that borderland. G.: They inhabited it. Family law, inheritance, office, property, cult, status, all the old Roman categories are never purely private and never merely theoretical. S.: Then perhaps the deeper Roman motivation behind patria potestas was continuity. G.: Very much so. Continuity of household, name, cult, property, civic reproduction, and social stability. The father’s power is intelligible because the family is an institution of transmission. S.: Which in turn explains the duties. G.: Exactly. If the purpose is transmission and formation, duties of maintenance, education, arrangement of marriage, preservation of status, and legal representation become integral rather than optional. S.: So one might say that function grounds duty more clearly than mere possession. G.: Very good. The right is functional, not merely possessive. That is a Roman and also a very non-liberal way of thinking. S.: Which again helps explain Spirito’s attraction. G.: Yes. He is looking for categories in which law, life, duty, and organised authority are not disaggregated into abstract individuals and external constraints. S.: Then Ferri and Pantaleoni hovering in the background complicate matters too. G.: Indeed. One from criminology and social theory, the other from economics and public thought. The young jurist is in a field where right, duty, social function, and practical order are all pressing at once. S.: So the essay is conceptually juridical but atmospherically political. G.: Very nicely put. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. Now, should we worry about whether duties are reciprocal in the strict sense? S.: Not symmetrical, as we said, but reciprocal in that the right-holder is not normatively unbound and the other party is not merely object. G.: Exactly. Reciprocity need not mean equality. It may mean mutual implication within an asymmetrical role structure. S.: So father and child are linked by non-symmetrical deontic relations. G.: Yes. The father has powers and duties; the child has claims, protections, statuses, eventual expectations, and perhaps only later independent rights in the fuller sense. S.: Then Roman practice gives us asymmetrical reciprocity, while contemporary philosophy tends to expect symmetry. G.: Precisely. And that is one reason the Roman material is philosophically instructive. It reminds one that normative relations need not be egalitarian in order to be structured. S.: Though one may still dislike the structure. G.: Certainly. Analysis is not endorsement. S.: A sentence useful in many Italian contexts. G.: In most political ones. Now, what if one denied that duties are inherent and said they are merely social expectations surrounding the right? S.: Then Spirito would say one has emptied the right of its ethical substance. G.: Yes, and perhaps also its jurisprudential seriousness. A right detached from its inherent duties becomes either brute power or hollow formalism. S.: Which are precisely the two poles he dislikes. G.: Exactly. The conceptual ambition is to avoid both. Neither naked command nor empty norm, but ethically shaped legal power. S.: Again, very attractive in theory. G.: And dangerous in political hands. S.: As with corporativism later. G.: Yes. One must never forget how easily “internal duty” can become a device for demanding obedience in the name of essence. S.: Then perhaps the final judgment on the essay is mixed. G.: It should be. Philosophically, it is an instructive exploration of how rights and duties may be internally related. Historically, it sits at the threshold of a style of thought in which authority, function, and ethical substance become ever harder to disentangle. S.: And Roman law supplies the exemplary case. G.: Precisely. Rome furnishes the grave old vocabulary by which modern Italians could think authority without yet admitting they were thinking the state. S.: So patria potestas is both family law and political prologue. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: I shall. G.: Then one last question. Is “inerenti” better translated as inherent, immanent, or intrinsic? S.: Inherent, I think, because it preserves the juridical and conceptual tie without sounding too metaphysical. Immanent is too grand; intrinsic too moral-psychological. G.: Agreed. Inherent keeps the right sort of dryness. S.: Which is what this whole matter needs. G.: Yes. Dryness is sometimes the only moral hygiene left to legal philosophy. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Roman, with a Tuscan aftertaste.Spirito, Ugo (1918). Dissertazione. I doveri inerenti al diritto di patria potestà.  Sotto Enrico Ferri e Maffeo Pantaleoni. Giurisprudenza, Roma, Palazzo della Sapienza, Corso Rinascimento.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Spisani – Ossia: Grice e Spisani: la ragione conversazionale della contestazione. Note su Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Franco Spisani (Ferrara, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale della contestazione. From the perspective of reason‑governed conversational meaning, the contrast between Grice and Spisani is revealing. Grice’s theory treats conversation as a cooperative rational practice governed by shared norms: speakers intend meanings, hearers recognize those intentions, and conversational order is sustained by maxims that articulate what a reasonable participant is entitled to expect. Rationality, for Grice, is not merely logical correctness but a practical, interpersonal discipline that stabilizes meaning through mutual accountability and the calculability of implicatures. Spisani, by contrast, places contestation at the very heart of rational practice. Where Grice emphasizes coordination and convergence under rational constraints, Spisani emphasizes rupture, resistance, and productive imbalance. His “conversational reason” is not primarily oriented toward agreement but toward the exposure of limits—of metaphysics, of formal systems, and of settled rules. Dialogue in Spisani is a genuine engine of conceptual transformation, not simply a medium for transmitting intentions already formed; hence his preference for dialogical exposition and emblematic figures like Clipso, which signal that rationality advances through displacement and tension rather than equilibrium. In this sense, Spisani radicalizes a dimension that in Grice remains implicit: reason is not only what makes mutual understanding possible, but also what authorizes the challenge, revision, and re‑genesis of the very rules that govern understanding. If Grice offers a normative pragmatics explaining how meaning is responsibly maintained in ordinary conversation, Spisani offers a critical pragmatics in which conversation itself becomes the site where rational forms are destabilized and re‑created. Si laurea a Padova con una tesi di sull'attualismo italiano, Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale” (Milano, Fabbri). In seguito collabora a Urbino. A Bologna fonda “Rassegna di Logica”  e il centro di logica. In una lettera Carnap critica una sua decisione di non pubblicare un'opera. Morì suicida. Altri saggi: “Neutralizzazione dello spazio per sintesi produttiva” (Bologna, Cappelli); “Implicazione, endo-metria e universo del discorso” (Bologna) e “Introduzione alla teoria generale dei numeri relativi, con ingresso dei numeri moltiplicatori e divisori, legati alla logica e alla matematica trascendentale” (Bologna, Centro di logica e scienze comparate, analisi matematica). C'è una relazione divisoria che ipotizza il valore “M,” numero logico trans-infinito all'origine della neutralizzazione dello spazio trans-finito. “ℵ” va verso successivi aumenti. Ma è la relatività dei numeri, espressa nel calcolo per valori di posizione, che ne individua la direzione inversa. Spiega le sue scoperte in forma di dialogo. Tra gli interlocutori la misteriosa figura della piovra Clipso.  Logo-fenica. Altri saggi: “Il numero nell'istanza ontologica del rapporto d'identità” (Imola, Galeati); “Logica ed esperienza”; “Logica della contestazione” (Bologna, Cappelli).  Sulla storia della pubblicazione della Teoria generale, importanti ricerche erano già pronte. Allora, dice: “Ne discuto con Carnap. Carnap sottopone i risultati dell'indagine. Carnap spiega anche le ragioni che mi induceno a non diffonderne le conclusioni. Carnap risponde che quella scelta gli sembra affatto ingiustificata: l'operas crises non poteva rimanere nel silenzio. Tuttavia non cambiai parere. Non avrei pubblicato, e glielo confermai. il concetto di numero, numero naturale, numero relativo, logica auto-genetica, numero relativo moltiplicatore, numero relativo divisore, opposto, contradittorio, regole e segni, contestazione, esperienza, limiti della metafisica. G: 1939, S. You have found an Italian in 1962 and brought him back to my desk as if chronology were a maxim. S: Sir, chronology is only a maxim when it is convenient. G: Good. Now. Spisani. S: Franco Spisani, 1962. Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale. G: And the term that annoys you. S: Attuale. G: And the term you think he should have written about but didn’t. S: Possibile. G: Now read the slogan you offered as a sophisma. S: What is actual is not also possible. G: And your face already tells me you think I’m wrong to call it an implicature. S: I think you’re wrong to call it cancellable, sir. G: Let us slow down. First: taken literally, “not possible” means “impossible.” S: Yes. G: And that would contradict the modal axiom you are allowed to know before breakfast: actual implies possible. S: Unless “possible” is being used in some non-standard way. G: Exactly. Now we are in Spisani’s territory: not only logic but usage. “Attuale” in Gentile is not the newspaper sense of “current.” It is actus: the act in act, the thinking that is doing. S: But Aristotle’s actus and potentia is not Gentile’s attualismo, is it. G: Not identical, but genealogically tempting. Gentile borrows the aura of act to say: reality is not a finished product; it is the doing of thinking. S: So attuale is not “contemporary.” G: Exactly. “Attuale” as “present-day” is the usage no philosopher cares about unless he is forced to write a grant application. S: Then why does Spisani focus on attuale and not on possibile. G: Because he is writing inside the attualist lexicon: the polemical thrust is against treating reality as a stock of things. He wants reality as act. S: And “possibility” sounds like a warehouse. G: Exactly. Possibility sounds like a shelf of unrealised items. Attualismo wants to burn the warehouse and call the fire reality. S: That is rather poetic, sir. G: It is also diagnostic. Now: the sophisma. When someone says, “What is actual is not possible,” what might they mean. S: They might mean: what is actual is not merely possible. G: Exactly. That is the charitable repair. S: So the “not possible” is not negation of possibility but rejection of mere possibility. G: Yes. And the difference between those two is everything. The sentence as uttered is false; the sentence as intended can be true. S: Then it is not an implicature; it is a correction. G: Careful. It can be treated either way. One could say: the speaker said something false but meant something else. Or one could say: the speaker said something that invites a hearer to recover a rational point by assuming the speaker is not insane. S: That sounds like your cooperative principle smuggled into metaphysics. G: It is my cooperative principle smuggled into anywhere language is used. Now, cancellable. You objected. S: Yes. You said the implicature is cancellable because actual entails possible. But if the speaker meant “not merely possible,” that is not cancellable without destroying the point. G: Good. That shows you have distinguished two targets. There are two candidate “extras” here. S: Extras. G: One extra is: “and indeed it is possible.” But that is not an implicature; that is entailment, as you just said. S: Exactly. G: The other extra is: “not merely possible.” That is the pragmatic rescue reading, which behaves like an implicature in the sense that it is inferred from the oddity of the original. S: And is that cancellable. G: It is cancellable in the ordinary way: “What is actual is not possible—by which I mean impossible.” That cancels the rescue and produces a contradiction. S: But then the utterance becomes absurd. G: Yes. Cancellation can yield absurdity. That is allowed. A cancellable inference is cancellable even if cancelling it makes the speaker look foolish. S: So your point is not that the cancellation is sensible, but that the cancellation is linguistically possible. G: Exactly. Now: Spisani and Gentile. You said Spisani is trading on Gentile’s use of attuale. S: Yes. G: Then we must keep two senses of attuale in play. S: The philosophical one: act in act. G: And the newspaper one: contemporary. S: Which nobody cares about. G: Except the poor reader who buys the book thinking it’s about current events. S: Does Spisani exploit the ambiguity. G: He may not exploit it; he inherits it. But your Gricean move is to notice that ambiguity invites inferences in readers: some will supply the wrong “attuale.” S: And then they will think the book is about modern idealism, not idealism as act. G: Exactly. Now you asked for Aristotle’s square, or the square of opposition. S: Yes. I thought we might treat “possible” as “true in at least one possible world,” but I worried it was circular. G: It’s only circular if you define possible in terms of possible. “True in at least one possible world” can be taken as a model-theoretic explication, not a definition, but you must be careful with your audience. S: Which is you, sir. G: Unfortunately. Now: the square of opposition is about necessary, possible, impossible, contingent in a certain traditional arrangement. S: But we have “actual” in the mix. G: Yes. Actual is not one of Aristotle’s four corners in the same way. It is closer to a fact about the world that sits outside the modal operators. It’s the evaluation world, as the moderns say. S: So actual is like “true at the actual world.” G: Precisely. And then possible is “true at some accessible world.” Now you see the temptation: actual implies possible, because the actual world is among the accessible worlds, if we allow it. S: And that is where you catch my circularity. Because to say the actual world is accessible is already to build your modal frame. G: Exactly. So you must state your accessibility relation. Otherwise you are smuggling metaphysics into your semantics. S: Which is what Spisani might actually enjoy. G: Quite. Now, how do we connect this to Gentile. S: Gentile’s “actual” is not “true at the actual world.” It is “the act of thinking itself,” which is prior to worlds. G: Yes. For Gentile, worlds are abstractions inside the act. So modal talk becomes suspicious: possibility is a shadow of thought, not a realm of alternatives. S: So for Gentile, to call something “possible” may already be to treat it as a “pensato” rather than “pensante.” G: Excellent. And that is why “actual is not possible” could become, in attualist mouth, a polemical slogan meaning: do not treat the act as one item among alternatives. S: So the slogan is not a modal claim. It is a metaphysical scolding. G: Yes. And that is the key Grice point: the hearer must decide whether the speaker is asserting a modal proposition or performing a philosophical rebuke. S: And the difference is what is said versus what is meant. G: Exactly. The string “not possible” might, in that context, be meant as “not merely possible.” S: Then Spisani is pleased with the philosophical point because few understand attuale in Gentile’s sense. G: Yes. Now, the question of entailment versus implicature. S: You said earlier: actual entails possible. So any inference from “actual” to “possible” is not implicature. G: Correct. It is implication in the strict logical sense. But the interesting conversational phenomenon is different: when someone denies the possibility, you infer they meant “mere possibility.” S: So that is a pragmatic repair. G: Yes. And one can say: the denial generates an implicature that rescues the speaker from contradiction. S: Unless the speaker intended contradiction. G: Then he is either a mystic or a poor logician. Either way, one must not multiply senses beyond necessity. S: That sounds like your moral again. G: It is. Now, why is Spisani not writing about the possibile. S: Because his target is not the modal square but the nature/spirit opposition in attualism. G: Exactly. He wants to show how nature and spirit relate inside the act. If he wanders into modal logic, he risks looking like a man who has confused metaphysics with machinery. S: Yet you want machinery. G: I want machinery when it clarifies, and I want it kept in the cupboard when it does not. Now, let’s stage the sophisma more carefully. S: You mean rewrite it. G: Not rewrite. Diagnose. Suppose a philosopher says: “What is actual is not possible.” S: I, as hearer, think: he can’t mean impossible, because then actual would be impossible, which is nonsense. G: And you then infer: he must mean “not merely possible.” S: That is the implicature. G: That is the implicated rescue. S: But is it really an implicature, sir, or just disambiguation. G: It behaves like implicature because it is triggered by the assumption of rationality and cooperation. Disambiguation can be done by syntax; this is done by charity. S: So it is like repairing a malapropism. G: Precisely. Now, bring Spisani back. S: He is dwelling on “idealismo attuale.” The adjective “attuale” invites the untrained to think “contemporary idealism.” G: And the trained to think “idealism of the act.” S: And he wants the second. G: Yes. And he likely does not care to make the modal point explicit: that act implies possibility, because he would regard that as either trivial or a different plane. S: So your point is that he presupposes the entailment and does not articulate it. G: Yes. And you are annoyed because you want every presupposition made explicit. S: It would save me time, sir. G: Philosophy is not designed to save you time. It is designed to waste it in respectable ways. S: Then what is the punchline. G: The punchline is that Spisani wrote about the attuale because that was fashionable in the Italian sense, and you want him to have written about the possibile because that is fashionable in the Oxford sense. Each of you is, in your own way, only “possible.”Grice: Caro Spisani, ho letto con grande interesse la tua riflessione sull'attualismo italiano e il rapporto tra natura e spirito. Mi incuriosisce molto la tua idea di contestazione e la neutralizzazione dello spazio: pensi che la logica possa realmente superare i limiti della metafisica? Spisani: Grice, grazie per la domanda! La contestazione, secondo me, nasce proprio dal dubbio sul potere della logica di risolvere tutto: mi piace pensare che, attraverso i numeri relativi e la sintesi produttiva, si possa esplorare nuovi orizzonti, senza rinchiudersi nella rigidità metafisica. Il dialogo, anche con figure emblematiche come la piovra Clipso, serve a mettere in discussione ciò che crediamo assoluto. Grice: Affascinante, davvero! Trovo interessante la tua relazione divisoria con il numero “M,” e la direzione inversa dell’ “ℵ”. Mi chiedo: ritieni che la logica auto-genetica possa offrire un nuovo modo di intendere l’esperienza, magari come un percorso dialogico e non solo teorico? Spisani: Esattamente, Grice! Ogni esperienza è contestazione e dialogo; la logica auto-genetica non è solo un modello matematico, ma un modo di vivere la realtà in modo dinamico. Penso che la filosofia debba sempre mettere in discussione le proprie regole e segni, per aprirsi a nuove possibilità. In fondo, la vera ricchezza sta nel confronto e nella capacità di reinventarsi: proprio come stiamo facendo ora, conversando! Spisani, Franco (1962). Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale, Milano, Fabbri.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stallio – Ossia Grice e Stallio: gl’ortelani di Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Napoli). Filosofo italiano. He follows the doctrine of the Garden. Gaio Stallio Aurano. Aurano. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aurano. Gaio Stallio Aurano (Napoli, Campania): gl’ortelani di Roma. He follows the doctrine of the Garden. GRICEVS: Avrane, si doctrina Horti sequenda est, num in Roma etiam ortolani philosophantur inter porros et rosam? AVRANVS: Ita vero, Grice, nam in horto meo etiam porrus ataraxiam docet, si eum non nimis serio spectes. GRICEVS: Ego autem timeo ne, dum voluptatem quaerimus, incepimus disputare de definitione “voluptatis” et hortus statim evanescat. AVRANVS: Noli metuere, quia Epicureus, si disputatio nimis crescit, simpliciter sedet, edit olivam, et vincit tacendo. Stallio Aurano, Gaio (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stasea – Ossia: Grice e Stasea: la ragione conversazionale a Roma, o della virtù. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Stasea (Napoli, Campania) la ragione conversazionale a Roma, o della virtù. A comparison between Grice and Stasea brings out two complementary but differently articulated conceptions of how reason governs meaning in human interaction. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning analyzes communication as a cooperative, inferential practice in which speakers rely on shared rational expectations to convey more than they explicitly say; virtue, in this framework, appears implicitly as intellectual honesty, interpretive charity, and responsiveness to reasons that justify conversational moves. Stasea, by contrast, stages the problem of reason at Rome through the ethical vocabulary of the Lyceum, focusing on virtue understood not as a socially coded role (the Roman vir) but as a stable disposition of character (andreia) embedded in moral life. His resistance to the Stoic claim that virtue alone suffices for happiness parallels Grice’s resistance to overly reductive accounts of meaning: both insist that normative structures—ethical in Stasea, pragmatic in Grice—cannot be collapsed into single austere principles without loss. Where Grice makes explicit the rational norms that license implicature and interpretation across linguistic exchanges, Stasea practices a form of philosophical conversational reason that attends to how words like virtus shift their force in a new civic and cultural context, generating predictable misunderstandings and figurative slippages. In this sense, Stasea exemplifies a historically early awareness of what Grice later theorizes: that meaning is governed not just by lexical content, but by rational habits, expectations, and background forms of life that shape what is reasonably inferred from what is said. The first lizio to take up residence at Rome. He defends the position that virtue (andreia) is not sufficient for happiness – a position on which some Lizians were prepared to compromise, in order to achieve a conciliation with the ethics of the Portico.  Keywords: Lizio.   GRICEVS: Salvē, Stasea! Rumor est tē prīmum Lȳceum Rōmae incolere. Dīc mihi: quōmodo virtūs in urbe nostrā tractātur? STASEA: Salvē, Grice! Ego quidem virtūtem (ἀνδρείαν) tuērī soleō; sed fateor: nōn ipsa sōla ad fēlīcitātem satis est. Sunt quī ex Lȳceō ad quandam cum Porticū compositiōnem inclinent—modo pāx philosophica maneat. GRICEVS: Bene. (Interim, dum per Forum eō, saepe audio quendam dīcere virum ubi Graecus dīceret ἀνήρ—ac nescio quōmodo syllaba illa una, vir, omnia iam absolvere vidētur.) Sed pergē: quid Rōmānī ex virtūte intellegunt? STASEA: Inplicaturam perspicācissimam, Grice! Nam intellexī quid subesset: Rōmānī, cum audīunt ἀνδρείαν, statim ad virum (quasi ad togām et munus) currunt; ego autem ad mōrem atque habitum animī spectābam. Itaque “virtūs” dīcō—nē verba mea per Forum volitent, ipsō sensū relicto. This Stasea came from Naples, so Grice and Speranza are not expecting tria nomina -- Grice in fact think Stasea was a Greek man -- the first "Aristotelian' to settle at Rome -- is there indication of gentilicium here: Stasea? No secure gentilicium is visible in Stasea. If the figure you mean is the Peripatetic usually known simply as Staseas, or in Latinised form Stasea, the name looks Greek, not Roman gentilicial. In other words, Stasea is very likely a personal Greek name, not the sort of Roman nomen that would point to a gens in the way Statilius points to gens Statilia or Terentius to gens Terentia. So Grice’s instinct is broadly sensible. A man from Naples in that period may perfectly well be local to Italy without being “Roman” in the naming sense. Naples remained heavily Greek in culture and language for a very long time, and a philosopher arriving at Rome from Naples under a Greek name would not surprise anyone. That does not make him less Italy-based geographically, but it does make him much less likely to carry a Roman gentilicium. And this is exactly where one must not confuse place with onomastics. A philosopher can be active in Italy, even born in Italy, and yet bear a Greek single name because he belongs to the Greek-speaking intellectual world of Magna Graecia or the wider Hellenised Mediterranean. Naples is a prime case for that. So no, there is no obvious indication that “Stasea” itself is a gentilicium. It is much more naturally read as a Greek personal name. If he had possessed a Roman gens-name, our sources may simply not preserve it, but nothing in the surviving form forces us to posit one. That also means one should be cautious with the phrase “the first Aristotelian to settle at Rome.” It is entirely plausible that an early Peripatetic teacher at Rome was Greek or Greek-speaking, and in that case a name like Stasea fits the pattern rather well. Roman aristocrats often imported Greek philosophy before they produced many conspicuously Roman-named philosophers of their own. So Grice’s larger sociological rule is not foolish: many early philosophical teachers at Rome were indeed Greek or Hellenised intellectuals rather than men presented to us under full Roman tria nomina. But one must not leap from that to “therefore he had no proper civic standing” or anything of the sort. It only means that the philosophical traffic into Rome was at first largely Greek in language, school tradition, and personnel. So the compressed answer is this. No clear gens is indicated by the name Stasea. The name looks Greek, not gentilicial. A philosopher from Naples under that name is very plausibly a Greek or Hellenised intellectual active in Italy rather than a Roman identified by nomen and gens. That is entirely compatible with his being based in Naples and later present at Rome. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can try to identify the exact Greek form of the name and the ancient source in which Stasea is mentioned. Or I can give you a short note on why Naples so often produces “Italian” philosophers with Greek names and no visible Roman gentilicium.Stasea (a. u. c. DC). Dicta. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Statilio – Ossia: Grice e Statilio: la ragione conversazionale a Roma -- ogni uomo  è  stolto o pazzo. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Statilio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale a Roma -- ogni uomo  è  stolto o pazzo. A comparison between Grice and Statilio highlights two sharply contrasting but structurally related ways in which reason governs what is said, implied, and understood. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning treats communication as a cooperative rational practice: even blunt or pessimistic utterances presuppose shared norms of interpretation, such that hearers are entitled to ask how disjunctions, negations, or exaggerations are meant to be taken, and to determine whether implications are exclusive, inclusive, literal, or satirical. Statilio’s famous dictum that all men are fools or mad operates at the opposite extreme of explicit normativity, using radical brevity and satirical compression as a philosophical stance. Yet precisely because of this extremity, his remark relies entirely on implicature: the force of “or” does not lie in its truth‑functional structure, but in the audience’s rational capacity to infer whether it is meant exclusively, inclusively, or rhetorically, and to grasp the satirical intention behind the aphorism. Where Grice makes such mechanisms explicit—analyzing how ordinary speakers exploit logical particles to generate meaning beyond what is said—Statilio exploits them without analysis, turning conversational ambiguity into a weapon of moral critique. Both assume that rational hearers will reconstruct intention rather than cling to literal semantics; the difference is that Grice aims to stabilize and explain this inferential practice, while Statilio deliberately destabilizes it, trusting that conversational reason will still do the work of interpretation even when meaning is thrust at the edge of nihilism and farce. Amico di Porzio CATONE. L’orto. Satura e farsa filologica. Penna. Secondo un'ipotesi allettante, con S., amico di CATONE e morto a Filippi con BRUTO. In questo contesto forse non è del tutto inutile notare che una filosofia è presente. S. being sollicited by BRUTO to make one of that noble band, who struck the god-like stroke for the liberty of Rome, refuses to accompany them, saying, that: all men are fools, or mad, and do not deserve that a wise man should trouble his head about them. Keywords: ‘All men are fools, or mad’ -- Giardino, horti epicuri – hortus epicuri. Garden. Friend of Catone Minore and Marco Bruto and a staunch opponent of Giulio Cesare.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Statiliō. Audio tē apud hortōs Catōnis illud iactāre: omnis homo stultus aut furiosus est. Nimis breve—ideo periculosum. STATILIO: Salvē, Grice. Brevitas sapit. Sed quid in eō tibi periculosum vidētur? GRICEVS: Hoc tantum rogāre ausim: cum dīcis stultus aut furiosus, “aut” tuum estne ita positum ut alterum excludat, an ut interdum (praesertim in hominibus) uterque simul admittatur—quasi “aut” sit etiam? STATILIO: Implicaturam commodissimam, Grice! Nam Brutus “aut” meum audīvit quasi exclusivum: “elige, stulte an furiose.” Ego vero sciebam (ne dicam) multōs in urbe nostrā ambō esse: ita “aut” saepe apud nos latet inclusive, et satira mea, uno vocabulo, geminam miseriam capit. Grice and Speranza are surprised that among such patricians as Brutus and Portius, Startilius appears to have no gens? Yes, and in this case the surprise is unnecessary. Statilius already is the gens-marker. If the man is called Statilius, then one is not dealing with a figure who “has no gens,” but with someone identified precisely by a nomen that points to the gens Statilia. The form is not like a bare Greek single name, nor like a nickname floating free of Roman family structure. It is, on the face of it, a Roman gentilician name. So the dry correction is simple. Grice and Speranza should not be surprised that Statilius “appears to have no gens,” because Statilius is exactly what gives him one. Now, one must still be cautious, because ancient citation is often abbreviated. A person may be referred to only by nomen, only by cognomen, or by whatever part of the name the source found most useful. But in this case the surviving name does not point to namelessness or bastardy; it points to gens Statilia. And no, the absence of a fuller three-part label would not imply bastardy. Roman society did not operate by the childish rule “no visible gens-name, therefore illegitimate.” That is not how the evidence works. Men appear under shortened or partial names for all sorts of reasons: literary habit, epistolary convenience, source loss, school usage, political prominence under one element of the name, or because the surviving tradition preserves only that much. None of that yields a verdict on legitimacy. As for the company he keeps, that too should not mislead. Brutus and Porcius Cato are indeed very grand Republican names, and standing beside them can make a less familiar name look socially thin. But that is only a trick of comparative fame. Statilius is not thereby nameless. He is simply less immediately canonical to a modern reader than Brutus or Porcius. There is also a good Roman point here. Not every philosopher, political companion, or morally coloured anecdotal figure in Roman history belongs to one of the marquee textbook gentes. Some belong to less celebrated but perfectly respectable families. The gens Statilia itself is certainly real and known, even if not one of the handful schoolboys chant first. Later imperial Rome gives us well-attested Statilii, which is enough to show that the nomen is fully Roman and not some suspicious residue. So the compressed answer is this. Yes, the natural gens here is gens Statilia. No, Statilius does not lack a gens. And no, the fact that the sources may not preserve praenomen and cognomen does not make him a bastard. It only means that the tradition has preserved him under the name-element thought sufficient for recognition. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a short note on the gens Statilia itself, with other known members and its general standing. Or I can try to identify which Statilius your anecdote is most likely referring to in the Brutus–Cato circle, and whether the source preserves more than the nomen. And can you name other members of that gens -- the etymology seems to mean something like 'who stays in his place'? Yes, other members of the gens Statilia can be named, and the family is real enough even if it is not one of the schoolroom giants. The best-known Statilii for many readers are from the early imperial period. Titus Statilius Taurus is the obvious one: a prominent general and statesman under Augustus, consul and conqueror in the old Roman style, and probably the single most famous bearer of the nomen. There is also a later Titus Statilius Taurus, his descendant, and the family remains visible in the Julio-Claudian world. Statilia Messalina, Nero’s wife, belongs to the same broader family network and shows that the Statilii had serious standing in the imperial aristocracy. So the gens is by no means a ghost. If one wants the driest list of recognisable names, one may start with these. Titus Statilius Taurus, the Augustan general and consul. Another Titus Statilius Taurus in the next generations. Statilia Messalina, empress as Nero’s wife. And then a number of other Statilii and Statiliae scattered through senatorial and prosopographical records. As to the etymology, your guess is tempting but should be handled carefully. Statilius does look as though it could be connected with the Latin root of stare, “to stand,” and one might be tempted to hear something like “the one who stands fast” or “the one who stays put.” But with Roman gentilicia one should be very cautious about turning surface resemblance into confident meaning. Many nomina are old formations whose exact semantic force had long ceased to be alive even for Romans themselves. So “who stays in his place” is not absurd as a loose imaginative gloss, but it is too neat to be treated as secure etymology. A safer dry formula would be this. Statilius is plausibly connected with the stare family of forms, and so may carry an old sense in the orbit of standing, being set, standing firm, or being established. But to translate it confidently as “one who stays in his place” would go beyond what one ought to assert without stronger linguistic evidence. And in any case, Roman names often outlive their transparent meanings. Even if the root once had something to do with standing, the nomen by historical times functions primarily as a family marker, not as a live descriptive label. So the compressed answer is this. Yes, gens Statilia had other important members, especially the Augustan Titus Statilius Taurus and the imperial Statilia Messalina. And yes, the name may well be related to stare, but the gloss “who stays in his place” is better treated as a suggestive paraphrase than a philologically secure translation. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a compact family note on the Statilii from Augustus to Nero. Or I can give you a dry philological note on the likely formation of Statilius from the stare-stat- root and why one should not over-translate Roman nomina. J. L. Austin used to say, "all swans are white" since black swans in Austrlalia is given for granted. Epimenides the liar is a different matter. But Statilio seems like: Brutus and Porzio: Come with us, Statilie. Statilius: No -- all men are mad or fools. Omnis homo lunaticus vel stultus. The implicature seems to be: except me. Was the paradoxical implicature -- or saving implicature -- the point the sophisma is quotable? Yes, I think that is very likely the point of why the saying was memorable. Not in the strict liar-paradox sense, perhaps. It is not quite Epimenides. Statilius is not saying, flatly, every man is mad or foolish, and therefore I too am mad or foolish, and therefore my sentence collapses. The anecdotal force is subtler and more Roman. The natural uptake is exactly as you say: all men are mad or fools, except, by obvious practical reservation, the speaker who has risen above them enough to judge them so. That is the saving implicature. It rescues the utterance from self-destruction by letting the hearer supply a tacit rider: all ordinary political men, all those bustling about in public life, all those for whose sake Brutus wants action, are mad or foolish. Not I, who see through it. And that tacit self-exemption is precisely what makes the saying quotable. If Statilius had included himself without remainder, the line would be merely self-cancelling gloom. If he had openly said all men except me, the line would be pompous and clumsy. Its charm lies in leaving the exemption unspoken and forcing the hearer to recover it. That gives it a very Roman satirical economy. The sentence wears the costume of universal moral judgement, but its sting lies in the speaker’s implied superiority. He is too wise to trouble himself with the republic because the republic is composed of fools and lunatics. The implied corollary is that the wise man will not join their frenzy, even when the frenzy calls itself liberty. So I would put it this way. The saying is memorable because it hovers between three readings at once. One, the broad Cynic-Stoic moralism that mankind is generally deranged. Two, the political refusal: these people are not worth my involvement. Three, the unspoken self-exception: I, the speaker, stand far enough above the mass to diagnose it. That third element is not a formal paradox, but it is the crucial conversational and rhetorical point. Without it, the line dies. With it, the line becomes an aphorism. And there is another Roman feature. The aut in such a sentence need not be pressed too hard as exclusive. As you suggested earlier, the force may even be cumulative: many are both foolish and mad. The disjunction gives neat form; the satire does the rest. It compresses a whole moral anthropology into one dry refusal. So yes: the quotability lies in the saving implicature, the tacit except me, or at least except the very few wise enough not to be drawn in. That is what lets the line function not as a logical embarrassment but as an aristocratic piece of contempt. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a very short Gricean analysis of the exact implicature structure of the remark. Or I can place it against the Stoic paradoxes and show why it sounds Stoic without being a literal school paradox in the stricter sense. Now Grice would think (x)Hx --> Lx v Sx -- where H is homo, L lunaticus, s stultus -- but what were the adjectives used -- and did he use omnis homo -- sic in singular -- because 'every' allows singular for the dilemma, whereas 'all' rarely does ("all man" archaic). Do we have a passage or more than one where the oratio recta is reported? And is plays well as a second conversational move, not requring any response by Brutus either than 'Whatever' -- but what would be the immediate understood pre-conversationl move: "Will you come and join us in killing the caesar, Statilie'? Yes. We do have a source, and it gives you almost exactly the conversational setup you are imagining. The key witness is Plutarch, in the Life of Brutus. There the figure is Statilius the Epicurean, and the reported wording is not “omnis homo stultus aut furiosus,” but a prose summary to the effect that it did not become a wise and sensible man to throw himself into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk. [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] So the sharp first correction is this. The quotable line in the source is not, as far as this evidence shows, a neat universal formula in oratio recta such as “every man is mad or foolish.” What we have is Plutarch’s indirect report of Statilius saying that a wise and sensible man should not put himself at risk for weak and foolish people. That is close in spirit to your reconstruction, but less aphoristic and less paradoxically universal. [lexundria.com] And yes, the pre-conversational move is almost exactly what you guessed. Plutarch says that Brutus, before the conspiracy, tested some of his friends by a roundabout philosophical discussion. In that discussion Favonius answered that civil war was worse than illegal monarchy, while Statilius answered that a wise man should not be thrown into danger for the sake of feeble and foolish folk. That is, in effect, the philosophical prelude to “Will you join us?” without yet saying so bluntly. [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] So the implied conversational sequence is very plausible: first move, by Brutus, something like: what should a wise man do under tyranny, civil danger, and public corruption? second move, by Statilius: he should not endanger himself for a lot of weak and foolish people. only then does the practical implication emerge: then you will not join the enterprise against Caesar. [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] That is why the saying was quotable. Not because of a liar-style paradox in the strict sense, but because it works as a philosophical refusal disguised as a general maxim. It is a second conversational move that is sufficient unto itself. It closes the invitation without needing much reply. Brutus can perfectly well hear it as: “No, and here is my reason.” [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] On the grammar point, your instinct about singular and universal form is right as a matter of Latin style, but here we must be cautious because the source before us is not giving a polished Latin aphorism. In a sharpened Latin paraphrase one could certainly imagine something like “sapiens non debet se in discrimen dare propter homines infirmos et stultos,” where the plural “homines infirmos et stultos” would suit the source better than “omnis homo.” The singular universal “omnis homo” would be the more sententia-like version, but that appears to be your elegant reconstruction, not Plutarch’s wording. [lexundria.com] And that also means the adjectives are not securely “lunaticus” and “stultus.” In the source as summarised, the pair is closer to weak and foolish, not mad and foolish. The stronger Stoic ring “all fools are mad” belongs elsewhere, notably in the Stoic paradox tradition represented by Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum, where one of the canonical theses is indeed that all fools are mad. That may well be why later memory or free reconstruction drifts from Statilius’s weak-and-foolish people into a more Stoic “all men are mad or fools.” But that drift should not be mistaken for the primary source. [en.wikipedia.org], [lexundria.com] So the dry conclusion is this. The source does not give us a neat direct-speech Latin maxim of the form “omnis homo lunaticus vel stultus est.” What it gives us is Plutarch’s indirect report that Statilius the Epicurean, when tested by Brutus, said that a wise and sensible man ought not to plunge into danger for the sake of weak and foolish folk. And yes, the implied first move is very likely just what you suggest: an oblique invitation to join the anti-Caesar cause, framed as a philosophical question. [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a very tight quasi-Ciceronian Latin reconstruction of the exchange, clearly marked as reconstruction rather than source. Or I can show how Statilius’s reply differs in ethical flavour from Favonius’s answer in the same Plutarch passage. [lexundria.com] Well, but implicature is cancellable, and if Brutus had already heard Favonius ("civil war is worse than illegal monarchy") Statilius comes out as rather polite, for he may mean: "A wise man as YOU SHOULD BE, BRUTUS, should not throw himself into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk." Do we have Plutarch latin or Greek for this? After all Brutus was asking for philosophical advice from philosophers, and Statilius's utterance may have this 'embracing' effect: 'This is what a wise man does -- and I expect you wish to be counted as one, Brutus.' -- But the way Plutarch recounts the scene may differ, if he adds 'stage directions' as it were -- like the marked implicature that Statilius was OBVIOUSLY meaning Brutus and his band to be referred by these 'feeble and foolish folk' -- Latin, or Greek for that? Yes. On the text we actually have, your softer and more courteous reading is perfectly possible, and perhaps even preferable. The source is Plutarch, in the Life of Brutus. The crucial Greek scene is that Brutus, before openly recruiting, tested certain friends “by a roundabout philosophical discussion.” In that setting Favonius said civil war was worse than illegal monarchy, while Statilius said that it did not befit a wise and sensible man to throw himself into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk. [loebclassics.com], [lexundria.com] The Greek, as preserved in the Loeb Classical Library, is enough to support that much. What matters for your question is that Plutarch does not, in the wording we have before us, add an explicit stage direction saying that Statilius was “obviously” referring to Brutus and his band as the weak and foolish people. That stronger sting is not stated by Plutarch; it is a possible uptake, not an explicit authorial gloss. [loebclassics.com], [lexundria.com] And that is exactly why your cancellability point is good. Because the line is reported in this indirect and philosophically framed way, the implicature can remain relatively open. One hearing is the harsh one: “your conspirators are feeble and foolish folk, and I will not risk myself for them.” Another hearing, as you suggest, is more embracing and almost advisory: “a wise and sensible man, such as you ought to be, should not throw himself into turmoil and peril for the sake of weak and foolish people.” On that reading the “feeble and foolish folk” are not primarily Brutus and the conspirators, but the Roman masses, the common political object, or the unworthy public for whom one is being asked to hazard oneself. [lexundria.com] That is not only possible; it suits the dramatic setting rather well. Brutus is consulting philosophers in philosophical form. A philosopher’s answer, to remain philosophically respectable, need not be a crude rebuff. It may instead cast the refusal as counsel of wisdom: do not sacrifice yourself for a public not worth the wise man’s peril. In that version Statilius is not calling Brutus a fool, but trying to keep him from behaving like one. [lexundria.com] Indeed, the very shape of Plutarch’s account encourages that. He says Brutus had earlier put such men to a “similar test” by discussing matters philosophically and at a distance. The whole point of that method is that direct commitment remains deniable while one’s ethical-political instincts are sounded out. So Statilius’s answer belongs to a field of prudent indirection, not to blunt direct speech. [loebclassics.com], [lexundria.com] If you want the Greek flavour, the important point is this: the source gives us Plutarch’s narrative report, not a polished lapidary maxim in direct quotation. The standard English rendering in Bernadotte Perrin is: it did not become a wise and sensible man to be thrown into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk. That wording itself leaves open whether the “feeble and foolish folk” are the intended liberandi, the Roman populace, political men generally, or the proposed associates in action. Plutarch does not nail it down for us. [loebclassics.com], [lexundria.com] So I would put it this way. The harsher anti-conspiratorial implicature is available, but not forced. The more charitable and philosophically urbane reading is also available, and perhaps better fits the decorum of a philosophical test-question. Statilius may very well be saying to Brutus, sotto voce and under cover of generality: a wise man should not fling himself into danger for an unworthy public. That is not a liar-paradox. It is counsel with tact, and the tact is precisely what makes the saying quotable. [lexundria.com] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can reconstruct the likely Greek sense more philologically, with attention to the moral force of “wise and sensible man” and “feeble and foolish folk.” Or I can give you a short Gricean note on how the same reported sentence sustains both the harsh and the courteous implicature without Plutarch deciding between them. [loebclassics.com]Statilio (a. u. c. DCCXII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stefani – Ossia: Grice e Stefani: la ragione conversazionale del “senso composto” – semantica filosofica – la scuola di Pergola. Note su De sensu composito et diviso. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Paolo Godi Stefani (Pergola, Pesaro e Urbino, Marche): la ragione conversazionale del “senso composto” – semantica filosofica. A comparison between Grice and Paolo Godi Stefani reveals a deep structural affinity between medieval semantic theory and modern pragmatics, despite their very different vocabularies and aims. Stefani’s sustained analysis of sensus simplex, compositus, divisus, and depositus belongs to a tradition in which meaning is treated as something systematically constructed by the intellect through grammatical, logical, and dialectical operations; sense is not merely given but articulated through formal relations such as supposition, composition, and division. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning reappears at a different level of abstraction but with a comparable ambition: to show how what is meant emerges from structured rational operations that go beyond surface expressions. Where Stefani uses diagrams and figures to model how propositional sense is built and decomposed within philosophical grammar, Grice uses inferential principles—cooperation, rational expectation, and implicature—to explain how speakers construct complex meanings from simpler utterances in conversation. Both reject the idea that meaning resides wholly in isolated words or sentences; for Stefani, sense depends on logical articulation within a proposition, while for Grice it depends on the rational reconstruction of intentions within a communicative exchange. The difference lies in orientation rather than substance: Stefani formalizes sense within a scholastic semantic architecture, whereas Grice relocates that same constructive rationality into the dynamics of everyday speech. In this way, Grice’s conversational pragmatics can be seen as a modern, dialogical re‑deployment of the very concerns that animated Stefani’s medieval semantics of the sensus compositus. Grice: “I may well say that my idea of a propositional complex owes much to Stefani’s obsession with ‘sensus’ simplex or ‘divisus, and ‘sensus compositum’ –“ “The opposite of ‘com-posito’ is de-posito, though!” Grice: “I like his diagrammes; The Boedlian has loads of his mss!” Grice: “He has a figure for the ‘figura quadrata,’ Grice: “He has a figure for ‘suppositio.’” È il più famoso esponente di una famiglia marchigiana di insegnanti – Lepori -- e nacque a Pergola, nelle Marche.  Il cognome è incerto. Secondo Segarizzi il riferimento al fratello Alvise quale figlio di Antonio de Stefani da la Pergola, in un documento, ne indicherebbe l’appartenenza alla famiglia Stefani, ma il raffronto con altri documenti induce invece a credere che «de Stefani» si riferisca al nome del nonno -- Nardi. La scarsezza di notizie biografiche su S., molto ammirato, da origine anche all’ipotesi che gli attribuiva il cognome di un altro Paolo dalla Pergola, il Godi -- Segarizzi. Errata risulta quindi la congettura di Cicogna, che attribuisce a Godi l’influenza di S. sul vetraio muranese Angelo Barovier, suo discepolo, a proposito della tecnica di coloritura del vetro -- Mariacher.  Avviato forse alla carriera ecclesiastica nella nativa Pergola, si trasferì ben presto a Venezia, dove se non il padre Antonio, certamente il nonno Stefano, medico e figlio di maestro Giovanni – Piana --, dov avere dimorato stabilmente, insieme agli altri due figli -- Luchino, «rector scholarum» a S. Giovanni Nuovo, e Pietro, che pure ci è noto come «magister». Con lo stesso titolo di «magister» è ricordato anche il fratello di Paolo, Alvise, che insegn in diverse scuole veneziane -- Lepori.  S. assunse l’insegnamento di filosofia alla Scuola di Rialto e ne tenne ininterrottamente la cattedra.  senso semplice, senso composito, senso deposito, senso diviso, dialetttica, grammatica filosofica, semantica filosofica, loquenza. G: S. You have brought Pergola into Oxford again. S: You asked for it, sir. Besides, it keeps you humble. G: Nothing keeps me humble. Recite the Gellius line. S: Hor! the one you like. G: The one that does not translate itself by repeating the same English word. S: Hor? sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Better: give it with its frame. S: Horum versuum sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Good. Now. What is he doing with sensus. S: He is not talking about eyesight. G: Thank you. He is saying: this is what these verses come to, and here is how they are put together. Sensus and ordo. S: Which is already a hint to Pergola, sir. Ordo becomes “scope,” as the moderns would say. G: Yes. And Pergola says sensus compositus, sensus divisus. S: Which I hate. G: You hate it because it sounds like sense-perception with a scholastic moustache. S: It sounds like someone took a word that meant “feeling” and forced it to do logic. G: Latin is not so squeamish. Now. Give me your protest in one sentence. S: Why didn’t Stefani just say “scope indicating device” and be done with it. G: Because he lived before your devices existed, and because he is writing for people who thought sensus was the dignified way to speak about “what the utterance amounts to.” S: But why sensus at all, sir, if you say what matters is what you mean, not what words mean. G: Good. Now we are at the lesson. Pergola’s sensus is not the word’s meaning floating free. It is the reading a competent interpreter assigns to an utterance when deciding what the speaker could reasonably be taken to be saying. S: That is you smuggling “speaker” into Pergola. G: I am not smuggling; I am expanding. Medieval logicians often treat “sensus” as “what is to be understood.” They sometimes talk as if the proposition has it. But the practical work is: which construal is the right construal for what the author is doing. S: Like Gellius: horum versuum sensus, I think, is. G: Exactly. He is performing an author-centred reconstruction. He is not worshipping the string. Now, your other dislike: compositus and divisus. S: It sounds like carpentry. G: It is logical carpentry. One can build a proposition so that the operator governs the whole, or so that it governs the term-by-term distribution. Two readings, one utterance. S: And he calls those readings sensus. G: Yes. Which is why I like your Gellius quote. It gives you a pre-scholastic, non-technical way to hear sensus as “intended import.” S: Then you want me to accept that sensus compositus is shorthand for “the reading on which the operator has wide scope.” G: Precisely. S: And sensus divisus is the other scope. G: The reading on which the operator is distributed over the subject or term, yes. S: But why not just call them readings. G: Because “reading” is your English convenience. Pergola’s Latin convenience is sensus. He is already in the business of interpretation. S: Yet you keep telling me your business is what the utterer means. G: And I keep telling you that utterer’s meaning requires public criteria for recovery. Pergola is supplying a formal method for deciding which propositional content is at stake when grammar underdetermines scope. S: So his “sensus” is a tool for recovering what the utterer meant at the level of logical form. G: Yes. Not at the level of irony or implicature, but at the level of “what proposition are we even evaluating.” S: Then he is upstream of you. G: Upstream in one respect. He is handling structural ambiguity. I handle it too, but I also want to explain how, after you settle the structure, you still routinely mean more than the settled structure explicitly states. S: And you warn against multiplying senses. G: I warn against multiplying lexical senses. Pergola is not multiplying lexemes. He is distinguishing two construals of one utterance under two scope assignments. S: So he is not guilty of polysemy. G: He is guilty only of terminology. S: Then why do you let him keep the term sensus. G: Because it tells you something about the tradition’s self-understanding. They thought of scope ambiguity as a kind of “sense-ambiguity” in the discourse sense of sensus, not in the eyeball sense. S: So we should not translate sensus by “sense.” G: Exactly. We should translate it, in metalanguage, as “import” or “interpretation” or “what it comes to.” S: Horum versuum sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Yes. There the ordo already hints that the “what it comes to” depends on arrangement. That is Pergola’s whole obsession: composition and division change what the proposition comes to. S: And his dates, sir. G: Early fifteenth century. Call it around 1420 in our fiction, because you like round numbers. S: And he’s in Venice. G: In Venice, teaching at Rialto, drawing his diagrams, writing as if the world could be tamed by figures. S: And you like his diagrams. G: I like anything that forces an interpreter to be explicit about what they are taking the speaker to be doing. That is the moral common ground between us. S: But then you suddenly become the philosopher of perception. G: Because “sensus” keeps wanting to slide back into perception. And that is the punchline: the same Latin word that names bodily sensation also names “the point of the passage.” S: And that bothers you. G: It should bother you. It is a reminder that understanding is not disembodied. You hear a sentence. You see a line. You recover its import. The body is the channel, the mind is the organiser. S: So Pergola’s sensus has a ghost of sentio in it. G: Perhaps. But in logic it is domesticated: sensus is what you take the utterance to come to, once you have sorted the structure. S: And you, sir, want what I take you to mean. G: Exactly. Now, let us stage the contrast. S: You will ask me: is sensus compositus the “sentence meaning.” G: And you will answer no. It is a candidate reading of the utterance, a candidate propositional content. S: And then you will ask: where is the utterer. G: And you will answer: the utterer is in the choice of one reading over the other, and in the context that makes one reading reasonable and the other perverse. S: And then you will add implicature. G: And you will groan. S: I will, sir. G: Because you want logic to stop after it has cleaned the surface. S: I want it to stop before it begins calling itself sensus. G: Too late. Latin has done that already. S: Then the Gellius quote is our alibi. It shows a respectable author using sensus as “what this comes to.” G: Exactly. And because he pairs it with ordo, he also shows that the “what it comes to” is tied to arrangement, not to naked words. S: So we can rescue Pergola from the charge of confusing perception with scope. G: Yes. And we can rescue you from the charge of thinking “scope” is a modern invention. S: And the conclusion. G: The conclusion is simple. Pergola’s sensus compositus/divisus is a discipline of construing an utterance so that its propositional import is determinate. My distinction between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning is a discipline of not mistaking the public vehicle for the private act. The two disciplines meet at one point: both insist that interpretation is not automatic, but a rational reconstruction constrained by publicly shareable norms. S: And your punchline, sir. G: My punchline is that if Pergola had written “scope indicating device,” nobody in Venice would have understood him, and if I write “sensus,” nobody in Oxford will forgive me.Grice: Caro Stefani, ogni volta che mi immergo nei tuoi diagrammi, mi sento come se stessi visitando la mostra delle "figure quadrate" a Oxford! Ma dimmi, il “senso composto” si mangia con forchetta o cucchiaio? Perché a Vadum Boum, il mio tutee Strawson sarebbe capace di decomporlo pure in una zuppa!  Stefani: Ah, Grice, se Strawson ha davvero scomposto il “senso composto”, allora spero almeno che abbia lasciato qualche briciola di “suppositio” per il dessert! Ma tu, con la tua implicatura raffinata, mi insegni che anche la semantica filosofica può essere digerita con gusto.  Grice: Beh, Stefani, tra un “sensus simplex” e un “compositum”, ho dovuto più di una volta decomporre tutto per i barbari di Vadum Boum… Strawson in primis! E ogni volta mi chiedo: sarà “de-posito” o solo una pausa per prendere fiato? In fondo, il vero senso è sempre quello che si nasconde tra le righe… e tra le risate!  Stefani: Decomporre! Implicatura più bella non c’è, Grice! Se anche la grammatica filosofica si divide, almeno ci resta la loquenza per ricomporre tutto… magari davanti a una tavola marchigiana. E ricordati: ogni senso, anche diviso, trova la sua unità quando si conversa con un amico! Stefani, Paolo Godi (1420). De sensu composito et diviso. Venezia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stefanini – Ossia: Grice e Stefanini: la ragione conversazionale dell’inter-personalismo contro l’idealismo filosofico – filosofia fascista – veintennio fascista. Note su La filosofia dell’esperienza. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Luigi Stefanini (Treviso, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale dell’inter-personalismo contro l’idealismo filosofico. A comparison between Grice and Luigi Stefanini brings into focus two different but intersecting ways of grounding meaning in reason while resisting solipsistic or overly abstract accounts of thought. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning treats communication as an inherently normative, interpersonal enterprise: meaning arises not from isolated mental contents but from rational expectations shared between speakers engaged in a cooperative practice, where intentions are inferred and adjusted in light of the other. Stefanini’s inter‑personalismo, developed in explicit opposition to both idealism and the dominant philosophies of the Fascist period, likewise rejects the self‑enclosed subject, insisting that being itself is personal and that whatever is not immediately personal functions as a medium of manifestation and communication between persons. Where Grice analyzes, in a technical and often minimalist way, the conversational mechanisms that allow one person to mean something to another—implicature, reciprocity of reason, mutual recognition—Stefanini supplies a metaphysical and ethical backdrop in which interpersonal relation is ontologically primary. Grice is wary of Italian personalism insofar as it risks collapsing interpersonal rationality into an exaltation of the person as a substantive entity, preferring instead an account of interpersonalism without personalist metaphysics, grounded in public norms of reasoning. Yet Stefanini’s insistence that truth, value, and action unfold only within the io–tu relation anticipates Grice’s conviction that meaning cannot be reduced to inner representation or abstract ideal structures. The contrast is thus one of level and emphasis: Stefanini frames conversational reason within a philosophy of being‑as‑personal and other‑oriented, while Grice offers a formal, pragmatically neutral account of how rational agents, as agents among others, actually succeed in meaning things to one another through conversation. – filosofia fascista – veintennio fascista –Grice: “La ragione conversazionale dell’inter-personalismo contro l’idealismo filosofico – filosofia fascista – veintennio fascista. Italians are obsessed with personalismo; I am with interpersonalismo!” Keywords: inter-personalismo, io e l’altro, l’altro da me, altro da se, alterita, other-love, self-love. “L’essere è personale.” “Tutto ciò che non è personale nell’essere ri-entra nella produttività della persona, come mezzo di manifestazione della persona e di *comunicazione* o conversazione *tra* due persone,” “La mia prospettiva filosofica. Nacque secondo-genito di quattro fratelli. Il padre Giovanni gestiva una tintoria, la madre, Lucia De Mori, è diplomata maestra ma si dedica interamente alla famiglia.  S’impegna nell’associazionismo cattolico: fonda il circolo San Liberale, nucleo del movimento cattolico trevigiano dopo lo scioglimento dell’Opera dei congressi. È nominato presidente della federazione diocesana e fonda il mensile Il foglio per promuovere la cultura religiosa e trattare temi politico-sociali, con particolare attenzione al nascente sindacalismo cattolico. La pubblicazione è sospesa, quando S., in attrito con il vescovo di Treviso Longhin, si dimise da presidente della federazione. Conseguita la maturità presso il liceo classico Canova -- ove ha come docente di filosofia Rotta, futuro professore all’Università cattolica di Milano --, si iscrive al corso di laurea in filosofia a Padova, partecipando alle iniziative del circolo universitario cattolico Zanella. Si laurea con una tesi sull’Action di Blondel, avendo come relatore Aliotta, che aveva appena iniziato il suo breve periodo padovano, e inizia a insegnare. Richiamato alle armi, è ferito da una scheggia di granata sul Sass de Stria e conclude il servizio militare con il grado di capitano. inter-personalismo, io e l’altro, l’altro da me, altro da se, alterita, other-love, self-love. Grice: Stefanini, ti confesso che il Sass de Stria mi ricorda i miei giorni contro il Hun e compagnia bella! Se solo avessero discusso di filosofia anziché lanciare granate, avremmo potuto fondare il circolo “Personalisti del fronte”. Grice: D’altronde, la mia “Personal identity” (come dicono gli inglesi) mi perseguita; però, se devo seguire il tuo esempio, caro Luigi, forse dovrei correggere e parlare di “Identità interpersonali”, all’italiana! Stefanini: Implicatura interpersonale se mai ce n’è una, Grice! Qui da Treviso è tutta una questione di io, tu e l’altro da sé… perfino le tintorie dialogano tra loro, altro che idealismo solitario! Stefanini: Se l’essere è personale, allora la vera conversazione filosofica è quella che passa il testimone da una persona all’altra: altro che “personal identity”, qui si lavora in squadra. Vieni a Treviso, ti mostro come si conversa tra filosofi… e tra tintori! Without preamble or ps supply a 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they prepare to engage in a joint seminar on the philosophy of action, as they discuss Stefani 'azione' and how it correpnds to what G. and T. have as 'act,' 'actum' 'acting' -- as they discuss the particular circumstances that led Stefani to chose that topic back in 1914, and the consequences -- but emphasis on conceptual intricacies. you can use passage below as basis. G.: We ought to begin by deciding whether we mean to talk about action, an act, the actum, or acting. S.: Which is already four seminars, and not one. G.: Quite. But Thomson will want the distinctions clean before he lets us darken them again. S.: And Stefanini gives us azione, which appears simpler until one notices that Italian philosophy can make a single noun do the work of an entire English gerundive household. G.: Exactly. Azione is hospitable in a way English is suspiciously not. It can mean deed, act, acting, conduct, operation, practical initiative, and almost the whole metaphysical dignity of a person in motion. S.: Whereas in English, once you say act, you have already half-invited trouble. G.: More than half. “An act” sounds completed, individuated, countable. “Acting” sounds processual. “Action” floats ominously above them both, as if it were the philosophical umbrella beneath which each may sue for shelter. S.: And actum? G.: Ah yes. The scholastic ghost that one ought not to invoke before lunch. Actum is useful precisely because it sounds as if someone has already done the deed and left us only the corpse. S.: So we should ask what Stefanini wanted by choosing azione in 1914. G.: Yes. The year matters. One cannot write on action in 1914 and pretend one is merely polishing vocabulary in a monastery. S.: Because 1914 is already pressure, mobilisation, Catholic activism, Blondel, modern crisis, and then very quickly war. G.: Exactly. And the thesis on Blondel’s Action is not innocent of that whole atmosphere. It is a title about philosophy, but also about practical life, decision, will, and the insufficiency of purely spectator theories of thought. S.: Then Stefanini begins from Action because Blondel had already made “action” into a site of rebellion against static intellectualism. G.: Quite. Blondel says, in effect, that willing outruns what reflective thought can stabilise, and that the life of action reveals demands that theory alone cannot satisfy. S.: Which sounds dangerous to idealists and suspiciously attractive to Catholics. G.: Very good. Dangerous to idealists because action refuses to be a mere shadow of contemplation, attractive to Catholics because it lets one talk about transcendence through lived insufficiency rather than through scholastic deduction alone. S.: And Stefanini, still young, under Aliotta, chooses to engage that. G.: Or is chosen by the problem as much as he chooses it. The personal and institutional setting matters. Padua, Aliotta, Blondel, Catholic associationism, and then the increasingly unavoidable fact that Europe is moving from words to shells. S.: Which gives azione an urgency that “agency” in English rather lacks. G.: Agency is a bureaucrat’s action. Azione has blood in it. S.: You say that because English philosophy overdomesticates the topic. G.: Often. We ask whether a man raised his arm intentionally. Stefanini’s world asks what it is to live as a person whose being unfolds only through action and relation. S.: Then when he says azione, the word already leans toward personhood. G.: Precisely. And that is where I begin to become both sympathetic and cautious. S.: Because of personalism. G.: Because of personalism, yes. The moment Italians say persona, one fears that a perfectly good interpersonal structure will be burdened with too much metaphysical upholstery. S.: Yet Stefanini’s action is not merely the person preening in motion. G.: No. To be fair, his whole inter-personalismo is meant to resist the self-enclosed subject. Action is not a monadic emanation. It is an opening toward the other. S.: Then perhaps azione in Stefanini corresponds less to “an act” than to the enacted interval between I and thou. G.: Very good. That is exactly the better line. S.: Whereas Thomson and you, in an Oxford joint seminar, are likelier to begin with the question what makes a bodily movement count as an action. G.: Yes. We are apt to ask when behaviour becomes something done, under what descriptions, with what intention, and with what relation to reasons. S.: So your action is analytically decomposed, while his azione is existentially thick. G.: Nicely put. We dissect; he inhabits. S.: Though you would protest that reasons too are lived. G.: Naturally. I should protest that the analytic distinctions are not anti-vital. One cannot understand action by declaring it thick and then refusing to say where the thickness lies. S.: Then let us say what lies in azione. Will, decision, relation, manifestation of the person, and perhaps a certain refusal of contemplation as sovereign. G.: Yes. Add also the Blondelian sense that action reveals deficits in merely discursive adequacy. One wills more than one can account for; one acts under pressures that theory later tries, usually too late, to recapture. S.: That begins to sound almost like your later point that meaning outruns saying. G.: There is a structural affinity, yes. Just as what is meant may exceed what is said, what is enacted may exceed what is first reflectively grasped. S.: So we might say in the seminar that Stefanini’s azione is to conduct what your implicature is to utterance. G.: Dangerous, but tempting. One must not make every Italian into a pragmatist in disguise. S.: Still, the parallel is there. G.: Yes. In both cases the overt vehicle does not exhaust the rational content at work. Action, like utterance, is underdescribed by its surface event. S.: Then Thomson will ask what the surface event is. G.: He always does. He wants the bodily movement, the occasion, the circumstances, the descriptions under which it falls, and the conditions under which one description rather than another is relevant. S.: While Stefanini would ask whether those descriptions have forgotten the person. G.: Exactly. And there the seminar becomes interesting. S.: Then how should we stage it? G.: I begin with the Oxford puzzle. Suppose a man raises his arm. Is that an act? Only if done under a description, with intention, in a context where reasons attach. S.: And I reply with Stefanini: the arm is only the visible ripple of a deeper azione in which the person manifests himself toward a world and an other. G.: Good. Then Thomson says we must not smuggle metaphysics in before distinguishing arm-raising from signalling, swearing an oath, hailing a cab, or striking a child. S.: And Stefanini would say that those descriptions are not merely linguistic conveniences but practical determinations of the person’s being-in-relation. G.: Excellent. That would bring the room alive. S.: Especially if Hare looks worried. G.: Hare always looks worried when ontology starts dressing as moral phenomenology. S.: And you? G.: I look polite and begin separating what is useful from what is upholstered. S.: Very Oxford. G.: Entirely. Now, we must also mention 1914 more explicitly. Stefanini’s title is not a tranquil postscript. It is written on the edge of mobilisation, though the actual wound on Sass de Stria comes later. S.: But the war retrospectively stains the topic. G.: Yes. Once one knows that he will be called to arms, wounded by shrapnel, and leave the front a captain, one cannot read azione as a merely classroom noun. S.: So action acquires literal battlefield credibility. G.: Or danger. One must avoid making him sound as if war vindicated the thesis. But the biographical pressure matters. The philosophy of action is not being written in a century that can still pretend that action means only ethical initiative in the abstract. S.: Then the consequences of choosing action as a thesis subject are double. It ties him to Blondel and personalism, but also to an era in which action is no longer conceptually innocent. G.: Exactly. Thought after 1914 cannot speak of action as though action were a clean counterword to speculation. It now means mobilisation, sacrifice, command, obedience, damage, and the body under force. S.: Which perhaps explains why later personalism needs communication and relation, not just willing. G.: Very good. If action were left merely voluntarist, it would become too available to darker politics. S.: Such as those of the ventennio. G.: Precisely. Stefanini’s interpersonalism later resists that by insisting that being itself is personal and that what is non-personal enters as medium of manifestation and communication between persons. S.: So action is not command from a solitary ego, but relational disclosure. G.: That is the charitable Stefaninian line, yes. S.: And the Gricean line? G.: That rational agency is already interpersonal at the level of reasons. One acts not in splendid solitude but under descriptions, norms, expectations, and recognitions that are often public. S.: So you do not need metaphysical personalism to get interpersonal action. G.: Exactly. That is one of the points worth making. I do not deny the importance of the other; I only deny that one must inflate the person into a metaphysical absolute to secure it. S.: Then perhaps the seminar should contrast interpersonalismo with personalismo. G.: Yes. With the warning that the former is a structural necessity for reason, whereas the latter is often an ontological temptation. S.: That sounds like a sentence Thomson will underline. G.: He will underline it only if he thinks he can later divide it. S.: Which he can. G.: Unfortunately, yes. S.: Let us go back to the English. If Stefanini says azione, what do we say? Action or act? G.: Both, depending on what we are after. If we want the thick philosophical noun, action. If we want the individuated item, an act. If we want the process or mode, acting. If we want scholastic completion, actum. S.: Then azione corresponds most naturally to action, but with more existential charge. G.: Precisely. “Action” in English is often too abstractly nominal or too cleanly analytic. Azione in that milieu still carries the practical weight of living deed and personal initiative. S.: Could one render it as praxis? G.: Only if one wishes to invite a different party and perhaps never get rid of them. Praxis is too historically marked in another way. S.: Fair. So action it is. But then what of actum? G.: Actum may be useful when distinguishing the done from the doing. There is a difference between the action as occurring and the act as accomplished under some completed description. S.: So if Stefanini emphasises azione, he may be privileging the living performance over the finished deed. G.: Yes. That is quite plausible. The deed deadened into record is already too late for the philosophical pressure he wants. Blondel’s action is always larger than any single completed item. S.: Which means the actum is almost a betrayal of azione. G.: A useful betrayal, but still a betrayal. S.: Then Thomson will insist that we need betrayals of that sort if we are ever to know what to say about responsibility. G.: Quite. Without individuated acts, law, blame, praise, and description collapse into vaporous existential weather. S.: And Stefanini would reply that responsibility itself belongs to the personal relation, not first to legal atomism. G.: Very good. That is the seminar in embryo. S.: Then how much of Blondel do we need? G.: Enough to show that Action is not merely a topic but a method. Blondel does not simply say action exists; he uses action to expose the insufficiency of detached intellectualism. S.: Which would have appealed to a young Catholic in Padua. G.: Enormously. Especially one active in associations, already wary of merely academic idealism, and formed amid practical religious culture. S.: Yet later he resists fascist idealism too. G.: Yes, which is another consequence worth noting. The early concern with action does not end in sheer activism. It gets rerouted through the person and the interpersonal relation. S.: So action becomes medium, not idol. G.: Precisely. That is the best way to save him from the century. S.: And you would add that in ordinary conversation action and meaning are interlaced anyway. G.: Yes. Much of what we do conversationally is action by saying, showing, implying, declining, consenting, refusing, warning, inviting, all under public norms of intelligibility. S.: So a philosophy of action that ignores communicative action is incomplete. G.: Very much so. If Stefanini helps us see that action is relational and manifestative, then he comes nearer to my own concerns than the idealists ever did. S.: But you still refuse “being is personal.” G.: I refuse it as unnecessary metaphysical inflation. I am happy to say that many central forms of reason, agency, and meaning are interpersonal without thereby making being itself a personal substance. S.: That distinction should probably come early in the seminar. G.: Yes. Before anyone mistakes sympathy for surrender. S.: Should we mention his father’s tintoria? G.: Only if tactfully. It is tempting to say that manifestation, medium, and communication between persons sound unusually apt in the household of a dyer. S.: You are too pleased with that. G.: I am never pleased beyond reason. S.: That is false on the face of it. G.: Good. Keep some spirit for the room. Now, Aliotta. Do we bring him in? S.: We must, at least as supervisor and context. He had just begun his brief Paduan period, and the thesis was written under that eye. G.: Yes. Which means Stefanini’s Action is not only Blondelian but also filtered through local academic politics. S.: So once again, a thesis-title is never just a thought-title. G.: Exactly. It is an institutional object as well. We should say that outright. S.: And the war? G.: Mention it not as a romantic vindication, but as the historical sharpening of what “action” would soon come to cost. S.: So the line might be: in 1914, action could still be chosen as a philosophical problem; within a few years it would become an unavoidable biographical and collective ordeal. G.: Very good. That is almost too good for a joint seminar. S.: You may spoil it in delivery. G.: I probably shall. Now, let us rehearse the central conceptual distinction once more. Action as event, act as countable item, acting as process, actum as the done. S.: And azione spanning all four while leaning toward the lived and relational. G.: Exactly. That will be our first board sketch. S.: Then the second will be personalismo versus interpersonalismo. G.: Yes. With a dotted line from Stefanini’s ontological personalism to my more modest pragmatics of persons among others. S.: And Thomson? G.: Thomson will ask for examples and distinctions, which is his proper office. S.: Arm-raising, promising, warning, refusing, marching, praying? G.: Good. Add perhaps saluting and obeying, because 1914 and after make those examples less innocent than one would like. S.: That will darken the room. G.: Philosophy of action ought to darken the room occasionally. S.: And then lighten it with distinctions. G.: Precisely. Otherwise one has only atmosphere. S.: You really do distrust atmosphere. G.: Only when it starts calling itself depth. S.: Then our closing move should be what? G.: That Stefanini’s azione reminds us that action cannot be reduced to bare movement, because it is always already tied to person, meaning, and relation; but that analytic philosophy reminds Stefanini that relation without act-description risks becoming devotional weather. S.: That is severe. G.: It is meant to be balanced. Each side saves the other from a characteristic vice. S.: Stefanini saves you from bloodlessness. G.: And Thomson and I save him from sacral fog. S.: Perfect. G.: Nothing is ever perfect. S.: Joint-seminar perfect, then. G.: That is a lower and perhaps safer standard. S.: One last thing. Do we call the seminar “Action and the Person” or “Azione and Act”? G.: “Azione and Act” is better. It announces the friction immediately. S.: And the subtitle? G.: “On Stefanini, Blondel, and the English Habit of Dividing What the Italians Prefer to Live.” S.: That is very nearly rude. G.: Then it is a proper beginning. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with one shell-burst in reserve.Stefanini, Luigi (1914). L’azione: saggio critico sulla filosofia di M. Blondel. sotto Aliotta. Padova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stefanoni – Ossia: Grice e Stefanoni: Marconimania -- implicatura e ragione: there St. John mingles with his friendly bowl, the feast of reason, an the life of soul -- filosofia italiana – P. G. R. I. C. E. – philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Note su La scienza della ragione. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Luigi Stefanoni (Milano, Lombardia): Marconimania -- implicatura e ragione: there St. John mingles with his friendly bowl, the feast of reason, an the life of soul -- A comparison between Grice and Luigi Stefanoni shows a convergence on reason as the organizing principle of meaning, even though they operate in different philosophical registers and political contexts. Stefanoni’s La scienza della ragione treats language, concepts, and even dictionary entries as answerable to rational scrutiny, rejecting lexical authority when it obscures intellectual clarity; his early rationalism, shaped by Mazzini and later radicalized through secular and anti‑religious currents in post‑Unification Milan, frames reason as a public, educative force circulating through communication and culture. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning can be read as a restrained but technically precise heir to this impulse: where Stefanoni attacks dictionaries in the name of reason, Grice famously “gives a hoot” about them when they misrepresent how meaning actually works in use. Both locate rationality not in static definitions but in active practices—Stefanoni in philosophical lexicography and civic discourse, Grice in conversational exchange governed by intentions, categories, and ends. Stefanoni’s enthusiasm for modern media and communication—what one might anachronistically call a Marconimania of reason—anticipates Grice’s view that meaning is something transmitted, inferred, and negotiated rather than simply encoded. The key difference is methodological: Stefanoni advances a programmatic rationalism aimed at reforming culture and language from without, while Grice builds a micro‑theory of interpersonal reasoning from within ordinary conversation. Yet in both, reason is not solitary or introspective but social, animated by exchange, and most fully realized in the shared “feast of reason” that conversation makes possible. -- filosofia italiana – P. G. R. I. C. E. – philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Grice: “I love S.. I regard him as the frist Italian philosophical lexicographer! Marsoli quotes Ranzoli in passing. And Ranzoli disparages S.. But I prefer Stefanoni to Ranzoli. Ranzoli tends to lean towards the pompous, whereas only in S. you would find things like: ‘this word should be extracted from all dictionaries!”  Nasce da Alessandro e da Maria Colombo. È rapito fin dalla fede di MAZZINI  e parte volontario al seguito di GARIBALDI  nella campagna. Subito dopo l’unificazione comincia a collaborare con il periodico repubblicano L’Unità italiana, ma ben presto i rapporti con MAZZINI  si complicano a causa dell’attrazione di S. per le correnti razionaliste e anti-religiose che in quegli anni cominciano a lambire le file dell’area democratica. Al pensiero del filosofo razionalista Franchi fa infatti riferimento la opera importante di S., intitolata La scienza della ragione e pubblicata con un certo clamore a Milano. L’autore vi fa aperta professione di a-teismo, delineando i contorni di una pur vaga e semplicistica filosofia materialistica.  Se però S. riconosce in Franchi il proprio maestro in filosofia, in politica il punto di riferimento rimane Mazzini, come risultava evidente dal saggio Mazzini. Note storiche -- Milano. Un segno di continuità nel solco di MAZZINI  è anche Le due repubbliche e il due dicembre -- Milano --, nonché l’attenzione verso la questione polacca, testimoniata dall’opuscolo su Nullo, pubblicato a pochi mesi di distanza dall’uccisione del patriota democratico per mano dei russi -- Nullo martire in Polonia. Notizie storiche, Milano.  Il dissidio con Mazzini si aggrava quando S. si impegna in prima persona nella fondazione a Milano di una Società di liberi pensatori. L’iniziativa, tenacemente avversata dal maestro, provoca la rottura fra i due. Grice’s hoot and the dictionary.  Grice: Stefanoni, permettimi di inaugurare la nostra conversazione con un verso che adoro: “There St. John mingles with his friendly bowl, the feast of reason, and the flow of soul.” Una citazione che non manca mai di portare un sorriso nei circoli filosofici… e magari qualche brindisi! Grice: Ma, sai, in fondo il vero “friendly bowl” non sarà mica la nostra implicatura filosofica? Forse il festino della ragione è proprio quando ci scambiamo idee tra un bicchiere e l’altro, lasciando che la conversazione fluisca più libera della logica formale. Stefanoni: Caro Grice, se il “friendly bowl” è davvero la nostra implicatura, allora la filosofia italiana dovrebbe servire piatti e ragioni in porzioni doppie! E chissà, forse persino Mazzini avrebbe voluto unirsi alla tavolata. Stefanoni: Bellissima implicatura, Grice! Credo che nel tuo “feast of reason” ci sia più anima che in tutti i dizionari filosofici messi insieme… e se qualcuno osa estrarre qualche parola, che almeno sia per aggiungere un po’ di sapore alla conversazione! So apparenty Stefanoni as per passage below -- wrote Gli spagnoli in Italia" as metonymic so please provide 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they analyse fictional fragments from the novel, especially the dialogical parts -- so for every dyad between one move in SPANISH and answer by the Italian as to what that does mean and the Spaniard doing his best to make himself understood, have G. ask S. to traspose the metonymy and then provide a dyad between an AUSTRIAN asking an Italian some command in German, and hte Italian again wondering what that does mean, and the German struggling with making himself understood -- provide as many dyads as you need to complete the 100 moves -- thank you -- no preamble or ps -- thank you G.: Let us begin with the title itself, Gli spagnoli in Italia. Metonymy before plot. S.: Yes. “The Spaniards” are not merely persons from Spain. They are domination, command, accent, mishearing, military presence, administrative pressure, and the whole theatre of a foreign power trying to make itself understood where it is not loved. G.: Good. So the national label stands for a regime of interaction. S.: Exactly. A metonymy of power disguised as ethnography. G.: Then every little dialogue in such a book is already political. S.: Necessarily. Even when it seems comic. G.: Especially then. Let us fabricate a small fragment. A Spaniard says, “Anda, mujer, trae vino.” What does that mean, beyond the obvious imperative? S.: It means, first, “Bring wine,” and second, “I assume my words travel farther than your dignity.” G.: Good. The Italian woman answers, “Che vuol dire, andate? Vuol che me ne vada?” What is she doing? S.: She literalises the phonetic confusion and converts his command into a question about motion. She means, “Your language has not yet earned obedience here.” G.: Is that implicature particularised? S.: Entirely. Without the social scene, it is only a misunderstanding. G.: And his next move? He tries: “No, no, vino, bere, capisci?” What does that do? S.: He descends from command to pantomime. He means, “I am reduced to the level of shared bodily necessities.” G.: Good. Now transpose the metonymy. Give me an Austrian in Lombardy. S.: Very well. The Austrian says, “Komm, bring Wasser, schnell.” The Italian replies, “Come? Vuol che venga io, o che venga l’acqua?” He means, “Your empire arrives, but your syntax does not.” G.: Excellent. And the Austrian’s struggle? S.: “Nein, nein, acqua, subito, presto.” Which means not merely “water at once,” but “authority survives translation only by becoming ridiculous.” G.: Splendid. Another Spanish dyad. A soldier says, “Silencio, por el rey.” What is implied? S.: That silence is owed not to the room but to sovereignty. The king enters as warrant for muting others. G.: The Italian answer? S.: “Per il re? E il re sa che volete il silenzio qui?” She means, “Distance weakens authority when named too explicitly.” G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. The wit depends on local irreverence. G.: The Spaniard tries again. S.: “El rey manda en todo.” He means, “Do not separate me from the larger machine.” The Italian replies, “Allora mandi lui, ché voi non bastate.” She means, “Metonymy may be answerable by a better one.” G.: Very good. Now the Austrian version. S.: The officer says, “Ruhe, im Namen des Kaisers.” The Italian says, “In nome suo o nel vostro?” He means, “Names travel more easily than legitimacy.” G.: And the German repair? S.: “Der Kaiser, capite, il Kaiser, comando.” The struggle means, “Power hopes that repetition can substitute for intelligibility.” G.: Good. Another Spanish fragment. A friar or official says, “Es costumbre.” What does that mean? S.: Literally, “It is the custom.” Implicaturally, “Do not inspect the thing too closely.” G.: And the Italian reply? S.: “Di chi? Vostra o nostra?” which means, “Custom is local until empire says otherwise.” G.: Is that generalized or particularized? S.: The appeal to custom often carries a generalized implication of closure. But the retort is particularised by conquest. G.: Good. Then his attempt to explain? S.: “En España se hace así.” He means, “Elsewhere has become superior.” The Italian answers, “Siamo in Italia, non altrove.” She means, “Geography is the first resistance to metonymy.” G.: Very nice. Austrian analogue. S.: “So macht man in Wien.” The Italian says, “Ma il riso qui non viene da Vienna.” He means, “Local life does not wait for imperial grammar.” G.: Better and better. Now let us intensify the linguistic confusion. A Spaniard says, “Mañana pagarás.” The Italian hears “mangiare” in the first syllable. What happens? S.: The Italian replies, “Mangiare sì, pagare poi si vede.” He means, “If your language slips, I shall improve the economics of the exchange.” G.: Excellent. The Spaniard? S.: “No, mañana, domani.” Which means, “Temporal control requires lexical repair.” G.: And the deeper metonymy? S.: Empire must always translate itself into tomorrow. G.: Lovely. Now the Austrian. S.: “Morgen zahlst du.” The Italian hears only the tone of future coercion and says, “Domani è una bella parola per chi ha già preso oggi.” He means, “The occupier loves futurity because he has spent the present.” G.: That is almost too good. S.: Stefanoni permits some flourish. G.: We must not flatter him excessively. Now consider a Spanish gentleman attempting politeness. “Señora, si no es molestia...” What is he doing? S.: He veils command in civility. The implicature is, “Since I have said if it is no trouble, you must treat the trouble as unreal.” G.: Italian reply? S.: “La molestia c’è; la cortesia è vedere se la meritate.” She means, “Politeness is not acquittal.” G.: Particularised? S.: Strongly. The entire force lies in the social imbalance. G.: Austrian version. S.: “Gnädige Frau, wenn es erlaubt ist...” The Italian says, “Permesso non è comprensione.” He means, “Courtesy does not naturalise foreign rule.” G.: Good. Now a Spaniard asks directions. “¿Dónde está la plaza?” Purely practical, it seems. S.: Nothing is purely practical under occupation. G.: Exactly. The Italian answer? S.: “Quale? Qui le piazze cambiano nome secondo chi passa.” She means, “Space itself is politically unstable.” G.: The Spaniard clarifies. S.: “La plaza mayor, la principal.” He means, “I seek the organising centre.” The Italian answers, “Principale per voi, forse.” She means, “Centres are perspectival.” G.: Excellent. Austrian transposition. S.: “Wo ist der Hauptplatz?” The Italian says, “Dipende da chi conta.” He means, “Topography has become jurisdiction.” G.: Good. Another. A Spaniard says, “Habla claro.” What does that implicate? S.: That prior speech has been unsatisfactory and that clarity will now be defined by him. G.: Italian response? S.: “Chiaro per voi o per me?” He means, “There is no neutral plainness under unequal power.” G.: Generalized tendency? S.: Yes. “Speak clearly” often implies blame for prior opacity. But here the metalinguistic asymmetry makes it particularised. G.: Austrian version. S.: “Sprich deutlich.” The Italian replies, “Si capisce sempre meglio nella propria lingua.” He means, “Clarity is local before it is universal.” G.: Good. Let us fabricate a scene of tax collection. Spaniard: “Paga por orden.” What is the implicature? S.: That order itself legitimates extraction. G.: Italian answer? S.: “Ordine vostro, disordine nostro.” He means, “Administration is metonymy from the collector’s side.” G.: And the Spaniard’s repair? S.: “La ley es la ley.” Which means, “I have reached the point at which tautology replaces persuasion.” G.: Excellent. Austrian transposition? S.: “Zahlen, es ist Gesetz.” The Italian says, “La legge arriva sempre con stivali stranieri?” He means, “Law here wears boots before reasons.” G.: Very good. Now a more domestic scene. Spaniard in a kitchen: “Pan.” He wants bread. S.: The Italian answers, “Pane c’è; lingua no.” He means, “Material supply exceeds mutual understanding.” G.: And the Spaniard elaborates? S.: “Sí, pane, pan, dame.” Which means, “Empire survives by pidgin.” G.: Austrian analogue. S.: “Brot.” The Italian says, “Brutto? No, il pane è buono.” He means, “Phonetic misunderstanding is the commoner’s revenge.” G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. It is wit made out of accidental sound, sharpened by political circumstance. G.: Another Spanish dyad, but now with military order. “A la derecha.” What happens? S.: The Italian, feigning confusion, asks, “Alla diritta di chi?” He means, “Even direction requires a sovereign point of view.” G.: The Spaniard? S.: “Derecha, destra, así.” He gestures. Which means, “Command finally trusts the body when language fails.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Rechts!” The Italian says, “A destra vostra o destra nostra?” He means, “Orientation itself is occupied.” G.: Splendid. Now let us ask what sort of implicatures dominate these scenes. S.: Mostly particularised conversational implicatures, though some are loaded by politeness or by the social script of domination. G.: Any conventional implicature? S.: Hardly any in your strict sense. The force does not come from stable particles so much as from local negotiation. G.: Any presupposition worth saving? S.: Only the dull ones. Commands presuppose some uptake relation; titles presuppose rank; but the fun is in the implicatures. G.: Good. Another fragment. Spaniard: “Por favor.” Is that enough to civilise a command? S.: Never. The Italian says, “Il favore vien dopo il perché.” He means, “A please without explanation remains conquest in gloves.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Bitte.” The Italian replies, “Prima il senso, poi la grazia.” He means, “Politeness does not precede understanding.” G.: Excellent. Now a Spanish officer tries to reassure. “No tengas miedo.” What is implied? S.: That fear is already present, perhaps deservedly. G.: Generalized? S.: Yes. Reassurance often implicates the existence of the very state it denies. G.: Italian answer? S.: “La paura viene da chi la nomina troppo presto.” He means, “Your comfort arrives carrying its own indictment.” G.: Austrian transposition. S.: “Keine Angst.” The Italian says, “Chi la porta, l’angoscia, se non chi entra armato?” He means, “The vocabulary of calm is suspect in a uniform.” G.: Good. Another. Spaniard seeking obedience from a child: “Buen muchacho.” What does that do? S.: It rewards submission in advance. The implicature is, “Be as I have already labelled you.” G.: Italian reply by the child’s mother? S.: “Buono è chi ascolta la madre, non il primo straniero.” She means, “Moral categories remain domestically owned.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Braver Junge.” The mother says, “Bravo per casa, non per caserma.” He means, “The household redraws the adjective.” G.: Very good. Now a scene of confession or clerical exchange. Spaniard says, “Dios lo quiere.” What is implicated? S.: That argument is now to be closed by transcendence. G.: Italian answer? S.: “Dio vuole molte cose; qui però parlate voi.” He means, “Do not recruit heaven to do the work of your tongue.” G.: Austrian equivalent? S.: Perhaps not theological but imperial: “So will es der Kaiser.” The Italian replies, “L’imperatore vuole in tedesco; noi soffriamo in italiano.” He means, “The sentence already contains the asymmetry.” G.: Excellent. Now let us consider whether Stefanoni’s metonymic title licenses a broad transposition to Austrians. S.: It does, because “Gli spagnoli” names a historical occupying type rather than a mere passport. G.: Good. So “the Spaniard” is a mobile figure of foreign command, misheard civility, and embarrassed coercion. S.: Exactly. Which is why the Austrian dyads are not treason to the title but commentary on its principle. G.: Very nice. Another Spanish fragment. “Entiendes?” What is the implicature? S.: That failure of understanding, if it occurs, will be placed on the hearer. G.: Generalized? S.: Fairly. “Do you understand?” often carries blame in advance. G.: Italian answer? S.: “Capire sì; obbedire è altra grammatica.” He means, “Comprehension and consent are different verbs.” G.: Austrian transposition? S.: “Verstehst du?” The Italian says, “Intendere non è inchinarsi.” He means exactly the same, but with more spinal dignity. G.: Splendid. Now a Spaniard attempts a gift. “Toma, para ti.” What is implied? S.: That benevolence may purchase the translation that force could not secure. G.: Italian reply? S.: “Il dono parla più chiaro del comando, ma non cambia lingua.” He means, “Material generosity does not naturalise dominion.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Nimm, für dich.” The Italian says, “La mano capisce; il cuore fa i conti.” He means, “Gratitude is not annexation.” G.: Very good. Now a scene of romantic or gallant misfire. Spaniard says, “Hermosa.” What happens? S.: The Italian woman asks, “Hermosa o rumorosa?” She means, “You will not master me by imported adjectives.” G.: The Spaniard? S.: “Bella, bella.” Which means, “When empire flirts, it quickly becomes dictionary work.” G.: Austrian transposition? S.: “Schön.” The woman says, “Suona duro per voler essere dolce.” He means, “Language itself betrays the courtship.” G.: Excellent. Now let us ask: are these mostly failures of semantics or successes of pragmatics? S.: Successes of pragmatics under failing semantics. The misunderstanding becomes productive. G.: Good. Another. Spaniard at market: “Cuánto?” The Italian seller replies, “Quanto per voi o quanto per noi?” What is implicated? S.: That prices are political under occupation. G.: The Spaniard’s repair? S.: “Precio, costo, dinero.” Which means, “Commerce is the emergency language of empire.” G.: Austrian analogue? S.: “Wie viel?” The seller says, “Dipende da che uniforme porta la domanda.” He means, “The price rises with the boot.” G.: Very good. Now a Spaniard says, “Amigo.” What is that doing? S.: It tries to erase hierarchy by lexical warmth. The implicature is, “Let us pretend this relation is voluntary.” G.: Italian answer? S.: “Amico si diventa, non si comanda.” He means, “Friendship resists administrative issuance.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Freund.” The Italian says, “Gli amici arrivano a piedi, non in colonna.” He means, “Marching formation spoils intimacy.” G.: Excellent. Any conventional implicature there? S.: No. The warmth is lexical, but the political sting is entirely contextual. G.: Good. Another. Spaniard says, “Es por tu bien.” Generalized? S.: Deeply. “It is for your good” almost always implies paternal authority and suppressed dissent. G.: Italian reply? S.: “Il mio bene lo riconosco quando non mi viene imposto.” He means, “Benevolence is least credible when compulsory.” G.: Austrian transposition? S.: “Zu deinem Besten.” The Italian says, “Il bene con accento straniero costa doppio.” He means, “Benefaction and burden travel together.” G.: Splendid. Now a Spanish official says, “Todos hacen así.” What is the implicature? S.: That conformity has already been achieved, so resistance becomes eccentricity. G.: Italian answer? S.: “Tutti chi? Voi contate presto.” He means, “Occupiers numerate too quickly.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Alle machen so.” The Italian says, “Tutti è una parola grande in una bocca forestiera.” He means, “Universality spoken by strangers sounds like inventory.” G.: That is very good. Now, are any of these not conversational implicatures but rather politeness-based or authority-based non-conventional implications? S.: Certainly. The imported honorifics, the deferential formulas, the “please” and “good fellow” and “friend” cases often rely as much on social ritual as on cooperative maxims. G.: Good. So not everything interesting is strictly my own preserve. S.: A sentence your disciples should embroider on cushions. G.: They would get the stitching wrong. Another dyad. Spaniard: “Rápido.” Italian answer? S.: “Presto, ma per chi aspetta o per chi ordina?” He means, “Speed serves different masters.” G.: Austrian? S.: “Schnell.” Italian: “La fretta arriva sempre con gli ordini.” He means, “Urgency has uniform.” G.: Good. Now let us end with a larger question. What is Stefanoni’s title implying by saying Gli spagnoli in Italia instead of, say, Occupation in Lombardy? S.: That foreign rule is best shown not in constitutional prose but in the friction of mouths, accents, orders, repairs, domestic wit, and small mistranslations. G.: So the metonymy is justified by dialogue. S.: Entirely. The empire enters by dyad. G.: Very good. Then one last transposition. Spaniard says, “Aquí mando yo.” Italian answer? S.: “Qui, forse; ma il qui passa.” He means, “Local command is temporally thinner than it sounds.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Hier befehle ich.” Italian: “Il qui di oggi domani è un altro qui.” He means, “Occupation always mistakes present location for permanent grammar.” G.: Excellent. And the final lesson? S.: That misunderstanding under domination is never merely comic; it is the smallest theatre in which power, wit, compliance, and resistance rehearse each other. G.: Dry enough? S.: Sufficiently Milanese, with foreign boots on the floor.Stefanoni, Luigi (1859). Gli spagnoli in Italia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stella – Ossia: Grice e Stella: la ragione conversazionale dell’ iustum/iussum, o la causa dell’anormale come l’ implicatura d’Honorè. Note sulla Tesi. Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, Università del Sacro Cuore, Milano. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Federico Stella (Sernaglia, Treviso, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale dell’ iustum/iussum, o la causa dell’anormale come l’ implicatura d’Honorè. A comparison between Grice and Federico Stella brings out a shared commitment to reason as the governing principle of meaning and responsibility, though articulated at different levels of analysis. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning locates rationality in the inferential practices of ordinary conversation, where implicature arises from the recognition of speakers’ intentions under shared norms of cooperation and alethic reason, as elaborated in Aspects of Reason. Stella, trained in Treviso and Milan and shaped by legal philosophy under Crespi, approaches a closely related problem from the side of jurisprudence: how we rationally connect descriptions of human action to judgments of responsibility. In his work on causal explanation and the structure of criminal liability, Stella insists that responsibility can be ascribed only where conduct is subsumed under a covering law capable of explaining the causal nexus between action and outcome, thus respecting the rule of “beyond reasonable doubt.” Where Grice analyzes the implicatures involved in saying that someone acted intentionally, responsibly, or negligently, Stella examines the juridical counterpart of those implicatures, showing how descriptions of action implicitly commit us to judgments about causation, fault, and normativity. The parallel with H. L. A. Hart and Honoré is evident in both: Hart’s analysis of responsibility and Honoré’s interest in the “cause of the abnormal” find in Grice an account of the conversational logic that underwrites such descriptions, and in Stella a doctrinal reconstruction of how those same rational commitments become codified in law. In this sense, Stella can be seen as extending Gricean conversational rationality into the institutional domain of law, where the distinction between iustum and iussum is no longer merely conversationally implicated but juridically enforced, while remaining grounded in the same ideal of reason as the measure of human action. Grice: “What is it with Italian philosoophers that they are all into what at Oxford we would call jurisprudence? It seems like all Italian philosophers are like Italian versions of H. L. A. Hart!”. Keywords: Grice, implicature della descrizione d’azione umana, H. L. A. Hart, Honoré, J. L. Austin, responsibity, aspets of reason, alethic reason. Studia a Treviso e Milano, sotto CRESPI. Insegna a Catania e Milano. I suoi saggi si diregeno su alcune tipologie di reati, successivamente sugl’elementi strutturali del reato.  Il suo contributo filosofico più noto, presso gl’operatori del diritto penale e la comunità accademica, è “La spiegazione causale dell’azione umana” (Milano), in cui  ricostruisce il problema del nesso di causalità prospettando il criterio della sussunzione sotto una *legge* come strumento per la soluzione di casi dubbi. Solo mediante una legge di copertura, atta a spiegare il rapport causale fra la condotta dell’attore ed il effetto e possibile formulare un giudizio sulla responsabilità dell’attore. Ad es., solo dopo aver dimostrato, sulla base di una legge, che l'ingestione di un determinato farmaco determina casualmente malformazioni del feto, e possibile imputare alla ditta produttrice il reato di lesioni gravissime, colpose o dolose. In difetto di questa spiegazione causale non puo formularsi alcuna responsabilità a regola di giudizio dell'"oltre ogni ragionevole dubbio" trovasse applicazione anche in un processo. Il principio venne accolto in tema di nesso causale dalla corte suprema di cassazione, anche a sezioni unite. Oggi è norma codicistica. Dirige riviste giuridiche di diritto penale ed è fra i curatori di raccolte normative di largo successo presso la comunità forense. implicature della descrizione d’azione umana, H. L. A. Hart, Honoré, J. L. Austin, responsibity, aspets of reason, alethic reason.  Grice: Caro Stella, ogni volta che passo per Sernaglia mi chiedo: quanti filosofi veneti ci vogliono per distinguere tra “iustum” e “iussum”? O forse, qui da voi, basta un po’ di buona conversazione per risolvere tutto con eleganza giuridica! Stella: Ah, Grice, qui a Sernaglia il giusto e il comandato si inseguono come il cane e la sua ombra, ma ti confido che, a differenza dei tuoi studenti a Vadum Boum, noi il latino lo pronunciamo con tutte le consonanti… almeno, quasi sempre. Grice: Beh, Stella, ricordo che il mio allievo Strawson, nei corridoi del Vadum Boum, aveva la curiosa abitudine di far sparire la “t” in “IVSTVM”, così che il nostro “giusto” diventava subito “comandato”, senza nemmeno una geminazione di troppo. Ma su queste sottigliezze, meglio tacere: sai, non vorrei sollevare un caso davanti alla Cassazione latina… Stella: Erudita implicatura, Grice! Noi che amiamo la buona educazione classica teniamo sempre lo sguardo fisso verso Bononia, mentre i barbari non saprebbero neppure dove puntare l’ago della bussola… un po’ come gli occhi dei buoi che attraversano il tuo guado, Grice! Stella, Federico (1958). Tesi. Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stellini – Ossia: Grice e Stellini: la ragione conversazionale dell’ortu morum. Note su Della felicità. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Jacopo Stellini (Cividale del Friuli, Udine, Friuli, Friuli-Venezia Giulia): la ragione conversazionale dell’ortu morum – A comparison between Grice and Jacopo Stellini brings into focus two historically distant but structurally allied conceptions of reason as something enacted in practice rather than merely posited in theory. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning treats rationality as immanent in ordinary interaction, where meanings, implicatures, and normative commitments arise through cooperative exchanges guided by shared expectations of relevance, truthfulness, and intelligibility. Stellini, writing in the eighteenth century, approaches reason from the moral–historical side, yet his De ortu et progressu morum likewise understands moral life as something cultivated, transmitted, and stabilized through social practices, education, and refined conversation. For Stellini, mores are not abstract rules imposed from above but habits that grow, like an ortus morum, through rhetoric, pedagogy, and exemplarity; moral reason is inseparable from the conversational and institutional contexts in which virtues are formed and sustained. In this sense, Stellini anticipates a Gricean insight: that much of what matters normatively is conveyed not by explicit principles but by what is tacitly shown, modeled, and implied in discourse and conduct. Where Grice analyzes how speakers mean more than they say through implicature, Stellini traces how societies become more or less moral through the gradual, conversational transmission of opinions and practices pertaining to conduct. The difference lies in level and aim rather than structure: Grice offers a micro‑theory of rational communication, while Stellini provides a moral genealogy of rational cultivation; yet both converge on the idea that reason is not merely possessed but exercised, and that its primary habitat is the shared life of conversation. Nasce da Mattia Rodaro, e da Adriana Piccini. Il cognome S., usato spesso anche dal padre, deriva dal nome della nonna Stella Rotar. Della famiglia non si sa molto. Mattia è sarto come la moglie. S. ha due sorelle: Maddalena, sposa di Muschione -- la cui figlia, Adriana, commissiona con il marito Peretti un ritratto del filosofo -- e Stella. Studia presso i padri somaschi di Cividale con il maestro di retorica Leonarducci; vestì l’abito religioso ed entra a Venezia nella congregazione con i voti solenni. Oltre a teologia con Visconti, studia ebraico -- con Birone -- , greco – con Patrussa --, latino e matematica nel seminario patriarcale di Venezia. Dall’anno dell’ordinazione sacerdotale, è maestro di retorica ai chierici della Casa della Salute a Venezia ed insegna presso l’Accademia dei nobili alla Giudecca; Emo, senatore e mecenate, lo prende allora come consigliere ed educatore dei figli Pietro, Alvise e Angelo.  A seguito della morte di Giacometti, con la prolusione Oratio habita in Gymnasio Patavino -- pubblicata dal seminario --  entra come professore ordinario di filosofia morale a Padova.  Piccolo, brutto della bruttezza di Socrate – Mabil --, oppresso da fastidi di stomaco e intestino, senza denti, pur non dotato di particolari doti oratorie riusciva ad appassionare studenti e uditori – fra cui anche Casanova – che accorreno alle sue lezioni. Trascorse la sua esistenza fra l’Università e le mura del convento di S. Croce. Sebbene schivo e non desideroso di onori, conosce fama e successo, come testimoniano anche gli elogi scritti immediatamente e ancora qualche decennio dopo la morte; è uomo coltissimo, di garbata conversazione e curioso di diverse discipline, dalla musica, alla filologia alle scienze che studia con passione, come risulta anche dalle lettere. La sua opera più importante, De ortu et progressu morum atque opinionum ad mores pertinentium specimen –dalla nonna Stella – Modaro. Liceo.  Grice: Caro Stellini, ho finalmente avuto modo di leggere il tuo “De ortu et progressu morum”; devo confessare che, tra gli orti friulani e quelli filosofici, la differenza sta tutta nel profumo, ma la saggezza è la stessa! Stellini: Ah, Grice, lei sa sempre cogliere il senso delle cose! In effetti, il mio orto morum nasce più dal tentativo di coltivare le virtù che i cavoli, ma la fatica è simile, glielo assicuro! Grice: Ebbene, se parliamo del mos dell’ortolano, mi verrebbe da dire che, più che discutere di grandi principi morali, il vero lavoro sembra essere la potatura… e magari una buona concimazione. Ma, si sa, certe cose si capiscono senza dirle apertamente! Stellini: Implicatura ingegnosissima, Grice! Non a caso dicono che nel mio orto filosofico cresceva più saggezza che insalata. E anche se il mio stile non era quello di Casanova, almeno qualche germoglio di virtù l’ho saputo coltivare tra i miei studenti… e qualche dente in meno non ha mai impedito una buona conversazione! Stellini, Jacopo (1740). Della felicità. Venezia: Pasquali.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sterlich – Ossia: Grice e Sterlich: la ragione conversazionale dei georgofili – la scuola di Chieti. Note sul Dialogo di fra Cipolla e la Nanna. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Romualdo de Sterlich (Chieti, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale dei georgofili. Grice and Romualdo de Sterlich converge on the idea that meaning in conversation is fundamentally governed by reason, but they articulate this insight from distinct historical and conceptual vantage points. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning is explicitly analytical: he treats conversation as a rational, goal-directed activity structured by shared expectations of cooperation, where what is meant often exceeds what is literally said because speakers calculate their contributions against norms of rational relevance, sufficiency, truthfulness, and clarity. Meaning, for Grice, is therefore inseparable from the speaker’s intention to be intelligible to a rational interlocutor, and from the hearer’s capacity to recognize that intention by reasoning about what it would make sense to say in the circumstances. Sterlich, by contrast, embodies an Enlightenment, civic-humanistic version of conversational reason. In his cultural practice—the public library at Chieti, the circulation of forbidden books, and the Dialoghi di fra’ Cipolla e la Nanna—conversation is reason-governed not by formal maxims but by the social exercise of critical judgement against dogma, censorship, and intellectual superstition. Sterlich’s dialogical writing presupposes interlocutors who can follow irony, polemic, and indirectness, and who understand that rational exchange often operates obliquely under conditions of constraint; in this sense, his dialogues rely on something close to Gricean implicature avant la lettre. Where Grice abstracts reason as a quasi-logical principle underwriting intelligible talk, Sterlich stages conversational reason as a historically situated practice of Enlightenment resistance, in which meaning emerges through shared rational competence, cultural literacy, and the willingness to draw inferences beyond the explicit word. The affinity lies in their shared conviction that conversation is not mere talk but a rational enterprise; the difference lies in Grice’s formal reconstruction of that enterprise and Sterlich’s lived, polemical enactment of it within the public sphere of eighteenth-century Italian Illuminismo. Nato da Rinaldo e da Margherita Alfieri, dopo i primi studi in casa è mandato a Napoli, dove frequenta il collegio dei nobili e la scuola privata di Serao, noto professore. Abbiamo anche notizia di suoi studi a Roma. Essendo figlio unico è indotto a sposarsi e a seguire gli affari della sua famiglia.  Tornato a Chieti, vi intraprese una vivace attività di promozione culturale. Crea infatti una biblioteca aperta al pubblico che nella Chieti ha un'importanza notevole, sia per il numero dei volumi, sia per la tempestività con cui veniva aggiornata e per il valore delle opere che vi si trovavano.  Ricca di classici latini, la biblioteca è ben fornita di autori della letteratura italiana. Numerose erano poi le opere di storia, di filosofia, i dizionari enciclopedici; numerosissimi i giornali. Presenti anche molte opere scientifiche, soprattutto di medicina, di cui S. è un ottimo cultore. La caratteristica più importante, però, che fa di questa biblioteca un momento di rottura con la cultura circostante, è la presenza delle opere degli illuministi. La biblioteca S. divenne uno dei centri più attivi del rinnovamento della cultura abruzzese. In essa si forma una generazione di filosofi che danno un contributo politico notevole nel periodo delle riforme prima e della rivoluzione dopo. Ma l'attività culturale di S. e il ruolo che anda acquistando la biblioteca non passarono inosservati ai gesuiti: lo attaccano pubblicamente accusandolo di empietà e di possedere libri proibiti. S. non si fa intimorire. Anzi, per controbattere le accuse, compose i Duedialoghi di fra' Cipolla e la Nanna, che circolarono manoscritti a Chieti suscitando molte polemiche. Una copia è mandata a Firenze a Lami per la pubblicazione, che fu però bloccata dalla censura. I Dialoghi restarono così inediti tra le carte di Lami, a cui F. Fontani -suo biografo - li attribuì. Anche manoscritti, hanno comunque una notevole diffusione.  illuminismo.  Grice: Mi permetta una curiosità, caro Sterlich: come pronuncia esattamente il suo cognome? Soprattutto l’ultima parte, che mi sembra poco italiana!  Sterlich: Ah, è una domanda che mi fanno spesso! Si pronuncia “Ster-lich”, con la “ch” finale un po’ dura, quasi tedesca. In famiglia scherziamo sempre su quanto suoni strano qui in Abruzzo.  Grice: Capisco, dev’essere stato un nome che ha incuriosito molti, specie tra i georgofili e gli intellettuali della sua biblioteca a Chieti! E ha portato fortuna, direi, se penso al fermento culturale che ha contribuito a creare.  Sterlich: La ringrazio, professore! In fondo, anche un cognome “fuori dal coro” può essere uno stimolo alla conversazione e all’apertura verso idee nuove. Come diceva mio padre, “la diversità è la ricchezza che fa crescere la cultura.” So as per passage below -- let us have a 100-move conversation between G and S as they analyse this 'dialogo di fra Cipolla e la Nana' -- with G. asking always for the implicature -- either by Cipolla or La Nana -- and S. often dodging the question, and then G inquiring if it's a conventional implicature, or sometimes if it is a non-conventional yet NOT conversational (e. g. relying on politeness) implicature, or a mere entailment, or -- God forbid -- a presupposition -- the wit is on La Nana -- and G. is interested in S. judging which implicatures are PARTICULARISED and which are NOT PARTICULARISED -- "or generalised, if you want" -- thanks -- no preamble or ps -- thanks G.: Let us begin, if we must, with Fra Cipolla’s first opening to La Nanna. What is the implicature? S.: That he means to patronise her before he has properly earned the right, which is the oldest clerical sport. G.: That is social diagnosis, not implicature. Is it conventional, conversational, or merely your Abruzzese irritation speaking? S.: Conversational, then. He says one thing in the tone of guidance and means another in the posture of superiority. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. Without the relation between friar and woman, and without the local asymmetry, it evaporates. G.: Good. Now La Nanna’s reply. She appears submissive. Is she? S.: Not in the least. Her politeness is a blade wrapped in linen. G.: Then what is implicated? S.: That she understands his game before he has finished setting the board. G.: Again particularised? S.: Yes, because it depends upon her over-obedient wording and the hearer’s awareness that she is not, in fact, simple. G.: So not conventional implicature. S.: No. No one gets that merely from a lexical particle or connective. G.: You are learning. Now Fra Cipolla asks a question to which, on the surface, a plain answer would suffice. Why does La Nanna answer too fully? S.: Because excess itself is her irony. She gives more than is required in order to imply that his demand was already impertinent. G.: Quantity flouted, then. S.: Yes, though elegantly. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. The same words in a catechism would be only tedious. G.: Very good. Now Cipolla’s next move: he pretends not to notice the rebuff. What is his implicature? S.: That he will continue to occupy the moral high ground even after losing it. G.: That sounds almost like Acito. But classify it. S.: Conversational, certainly. He says, in effect, “let us proceed calmly,” and means, “I refuse to acknowledge that you have struck me.” G.: Not entailment? S.: No. The literal content need not include any such refusal. G.: Presupposition? S.: I should hope not. G.: Hope is not enough. Why not? S.: Because nothing in the syntax requires that he has been struck and is now ignoring it. The force is pragmatic, not structural. G.: Good. Now La Nanna uses an honorific for him that is one degree too polished. Implicature? S.: That she is calling attention to the office only to expose the man beneath it. G.: Is that conventional? S.: No. Excessive respect does not always mean mockery. G.: So again particularised. S.: Yes. It depends on her timing, on what he has just said, and on the reader’s suspicion that she is cleverer than he would like. G.: “Than he would like” itself has an implicature. S.: You are impossible. G.: I am exact. Continue. Fra Cipolla invokes authority. Does that carry a conventional implicature? S.: Only in the weak sense that citing authority invites deference. G.: That is not my sense. Conventional implicature attaches stably to the form. Does his invocation of authority conventionally imply anything beyond explicit appeal? S.: Not beyond the ordinary air of “I need not argue further.” G.: Which is not bad. Then perhaps it is a socially sedimented but not strictly conventional implicature. S.: One of your intermediate shadows. G.: Civilisation lives in the shadows. La Nanna answers with a proverb. What is she doing? S.: She is moving from private reply to public wisdom. By speaking proverbially, she implies that his manoeuvre is not unique to him but belongs to a recognisable species of nonsense. G.: Excellent. Particularised or generalised? S.: Generalised, perhaps, if one allows that proverbs usually carry surplus moral uptake beyond their immediate literal fit. G.: Better: the reply has a generalisable implicatural tendency, though this instance is sharpened by the local target. S.: You always want both the knife and the anatomy of the knife. G.: Naturally. Now Cipolla laughs. Is the laugh itself an implicature? S.: Yes, but not a linguistic one. G.: Very good. Continue. S.: It implies either that he is above offence or that he has not understood the insult. La Nanna, naturally, counts on both readings damaging him. G.: Ah. Ambiguity by behaviour. Particularised? S.: Entirely. A laugh in another place might mean ease. Here it means self-defence disguised as ease. G.: And if a reader took it simply as ease? S.: Then that reader deserves the friar. G.: Excellent. Now La Nanna asks a question whose answer she clearly does not need. What is the implicature? S.: That she is forcing him to hear his own absurdity aloud. G.: Socratic, then. S.: Domestic Socratic, yes. Less elenchus in the agora than elenchus by the hearth. G.: And particularised? S.: Entirely. Such questions are weapons only under pressure. G.: Cipolla answers too quickly. What does haste implicate? S.: That he fears the shape of the question more than its content. G.: Not bad. Is that conversational implicature or merely psychological inference? S.: Both, if you insist on living dangerously. G.: I insist on distinctions. Which? S.: Conversational, because the pace of response belongs to the exchange and is interpretable under norms of poise, confidence, and relevance. G.: Good. Now she says “as everyone knows.” Is that conventional implicature? S.: It conventionally signals an appeal to common ground. G.: Better. And in this case? S.: In this case it also conversationally implies that he is threatening to place himself outside the company of the competent if he resists. G.: So we have a conventional function plus a particularised strategic use. S.: You look insufferably pleased. G.: I am. Fra Cipolla introduces a distinction. Real distinction or verbal one? S.: Mostly verbal. He wants the dignity of analysis without the labour of thought. G.: Implicature? S.: That the matter is subtler than La Nanna could perhaps grasp. G.: Which she immediately destroys. S.: Naturally. She accepts the distinction and redraws it in terms that make him sound even sillier. G.: Then her paraphrase carries what implicature? S.: That if his distinction is sound, it is sound only in the wrong universe. G.: Too elegant. Make it humbler. S.: Very well: she implies that his sophistication is a mere rewording of folly. G.: Excellent. Particularised? S.: Entirely. A paraphrase need not be insult; here it is. G.: Now, Cipolla appeals to piety. What is he counting on? S.: A non-conversational implicature of decorum, perhaps. That certain tones and subjects will check her wit. G.: Very good. Not conversational in the narrow sense because the force relies less on maxims than on politeness and shared devotional inhibition. S.: Exactly. He hopes sanctity will do what logic cannot. G.: And La Nanna? S.: She grants the pious frame while twisting its use. That is her chief talent. G.: So what is implicated by her pious concession? S.: That she is willing to speak within the sacred register, provided it is not monopolised by fools. G.: Better than many sermons. Particularised? S.: Yes. Her concession is strategic, not doctrinally exhaustive. G.: Cipolla then says something literally true but useless. Implicature? S.: That he wants the credit of truthfulness without the burden of relevance. G.: A classic clerical evasion. S.: Or academic. G.: You are improving. Is the useless truth itself an implicature trigger? S.: Only because irrelevance in context invites the search for ulterior point. G.: Precisely. Relevance flouted; implicature sought. Now La Nanna supplies the missing relevance herself. What does that imply? S.: That she can complete his reasoning better than he can, and that his sentence needed rescuing. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. In another context it would be helpfulness; here it is domination. G.: Excellent. Now there is a moment where Cipolla says “I did not say that.” Is the implicature that he nearly did? S.: Yes. Or that he recognises the line of consequence from what he did say and retreats from it. G.: So denial here implies proximity. S.: Very much so. G.: Conventional? S.: No. Denials do not conventionally imply guilt, though conversational life often treats them as if they did. G.: Good. La Nanna then repeats his phrase with a slight shift of emphasis. What is the force? S.: She turns quotation into exposure. The repetition implies that his own words are enough to convict him if merely heard properly. G.: A nice example of mention becoming judgment. S.: Yes. She does not need to add content; arrangement suffices. G.: Suetonian of her. S.: Heaven help us. Now you are importing emperors into kitchens. G.: Philosophy improves kitchens. Cipolla says “you misunderstand me.” What is implied? S.: That he has lost control of the exchange and wishes to blame the hearer’s competence rather than his own expression. G.: And is that generalised? S.: Fairly. “You misunderstand me” often carries that implication in quarrels, tutorials, and marriages. G.: Very good. A generalized conversational implicature, then, though intensified here. S.: I knew you would like that. G.: Naturally. La Nanna answers, “on the contrary.” Conventional implicature? S.: Not in your strict sense. But it prepares a reversal. It signals that she is about to reclaim interpretive authority. G.: And what is the particularised implicature here? S.: That she understands him only too well, and that his complaint has merely furnished her next stroke. G.: Good. Cipolla then attempts compliment. Is compliment here mere compliment? S.: Of course not. He means to pacify, lower the temperature, and recover the relation of superior to inferior under the guise of admiration. G.: So the compliment has a conversational implicature of tactical appeasement. S.: Yes, and possibly one of condescension. G.: Which La Nanna hears. S.: Instantly. G.: Her reply is outwardly modest. What is she implying? S.: That if she is clever, he has been the schoolmaster of that cleverness by giving her so much nonsense to sharpen herself upon. G.: Excellent. Particularised? S.: Entirely. Modesty is rarely so industrious by accident. G.: Now a harder case. She says something which may simply entail the conclusion you are calling an implicature. How do we distinguish? S.: By asking whether the further point is logically required or merely rationally recoverable from the manner and context. G.: Good. Apply that here. S.: When she says, in effect, that words must fit things, the entailment is the obvious norm of apt speech. The implicature is that his words have not fitted anything for several turns. G.: Splendid. Cipolla invokes custom. What does custom do here? S.: It pretends to settle by inheritance what he cannot settle by argument. G.: So the appeal implicates “this is not for fresh scrutiny.” S.: Exactly. G.: Generalised? S.: Fairly. Appeals to custom often imply closure. G.: La Nanna counters with a more local custom. What is her move? S.: She provincialises his universality. She implies that his “everyone” means only his own tiny and interested circle. G.: Very good. That is a particularised correction of the common-ground claim. S.: And a socially cruel one. G.: Good cruelty is often diagnostic. Now Cipolla becomes vague. Why? S.: Because precision would expose him. G.: Implicature? S.: That vagueness is being used as a shelter, not as humility. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. Vagueness can be innocent. Here it is evasive. G.: Now the old danger. Is any of this presupposition? S.: Almost certainly less than lazy analysts would claim. G.: One example, please. S.: When La Nanna says “even friars may forget themselves,” the presupposition is only that friars are a class of persons. The sting, namely that this friar has forgotten himself already, is implicature. G.: Excellent. You are not wholly lost. Cipolla then says “let us speak plainly.” What does that implicate? S.: That things have not gone plainly for him thus far. G.: Generalised? S.: Yes, often. “Let us speak plainly” usually implies that the prior discourse was obscured, evasive, or unsatisfactory. G.: And in this case? S.: It also particularly implies that he wishes to reset rules he has just been losing under. G.: Good. La Nanna answers with a plainness that over-fulfils the invitation. Implicature? S.: That she is willing to grant his maxim and show him he cannot bear its consequences. G.: Quantity and Manner cooperating vindictively. S.: If you like. G.: I do. Now there is a joke at his expense that depends on double meaning. Is the second meaning conventional implicature? S.: No. That would confuse lexical ambiguity with implicature. G.: Excellent. So what do we have? S.: An ambiguity exploited conversationally so that one reading remains decorous and the other devastating. G.: And the devastative force is particularised. S.: Entirely. The dictionary does not insult him; the occasion does. G.: Cipolla pretends to choose the innocent reading. S.: Which implies he has heard the wicked one. G.: Yes. Denial by selective uptake. Very useful. Now La Nanna leaves something unfinished. Aposiopesis. Implicature? S.: That she trusts the hearer to complete the indecency or the judgment without requiring her to soil her own mouth. G.: Excellent. Particularised? S.: Yes, though the device has a fairly stable general tendency toward insinuation. G.: So a generalisable implicature pattern realised in a particular scandal. S.: You make vice sound pedagogical. G.: It usually is. Now Cipolla asks whether she mocks him. Why ask? S.: Because to ask is already to acknowledge the suspicion while trying to retain procedural innocence. G.: Very good. And her answer? S.: If she says no too quickly, she implies yes by style. If she says no with solemnity, she may imply that only a fool would need to ask. G.: Which kind does she choose? S.: The second, naturally. She has standards. G.: High ones. Now classify the implicature in “only a fool would need to ask,” where the “only” is not said. S.: Conversational, particularised, sharpened by irony. G.: Not entailment? S.: No. Nothing in the literal negative forces that conclusion. G.: Excellent. Cipolla then uses a diminutive. What is he up to? S.: He is trying to miniaturise the dispute and, with it, her authority in it. G.: Good. Does the diminutive itself conventionally implicate diminution of seriousness? S.: Often, but not rigidly. It may express affection, contempt, condescension, or mere scale. G.: So in this context? S.: A non-conventional but socially legible implicature of condescension. G.: Very nice. La Nanna repeats the diminutive and makes it bite him instead. S.: Exactly. She domesticates his patronage and returns it with interest. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. G.: Now a more abstract question. Would you say the dialogue overall relies more on generalised or particularised implicature? S.: Overwhelmingly particularised. The wit lives in local pressure, local asymmetry, local knowledge. G.: Good. But some recurring forms? S.: Yes. Appeals to custom, demands for plain speaking, complaints of misunderstanding, strategic compliments, excessive respect, and over-informative answers all carry rather stable generalised tendencies. G.: Excellent. We are getting somewhere. Cipolla says something pious and La Nanna replies with a domestic example. Implicature? S.: That theology without household intelligence is not worth the oil in the lamp. G.: Very good. Particularised? S.: Yes, though the broader anti-abstraction sentiment may be common enough. G.: Is there anywhere in the dialogue where you would actually grant a presupposition of some philosophical interest? S.: Perhaps where a correction takes for granted a shared standard of apt speech. But even there, most of the fun lies not in what must be taken for granted, but in what may be inferred from strategic deviation. G.: So presupposition is the dull furniture; implicature the theatre. S.: In this dialogue, emphatically yes. G.: Now Cipolla says “as a matter of charity.” Implicature? S.: That he wishes to moralise the next move in advance so that resistance appears uncharitable. G.: Excellent. Generalised? S.: Fairly. Such prefacing often loads the moral dice. G.: La Nanna replies charitably indeed, but to his disadvantage. S.: Which is her genius. She takes the announced norm and fulfils it in the wrong direction for him. G.: What is implied by over-fulfilling a norm? S.: That the speaker invoking it did not understand its consequences. G.: Very nice. Now if I ask whether La Nanna’s wit depends upon flouting Quality, what do you say? S.: Rarely. She tends not to lie. Her power comes from saying true things too pointedly or from arranging them too well. G.: Excellent. So the main engines are Quantity, Relation, and Manner. S.: With politeness forever hovering like a second legal code. G.: A non-conversational yet non-conventional reservoir. S.: Yes. She can imply insult through perfect civility. G.: Which is always the best sort. Cipolla ends with some form of retreat. What is the implicature of a dignified retreat after defeat? S.: That one still claims authorship of the ending. He cannot win the exchange, so he means to close it as though closure were victory. G.: Generalised? S.: Often, yes. The defeated frequently mistake last word for best word. G.: And La Nanna’s final line? S.: Usually a line that appears to release him while in fact fixing the reader’s judgment forever. G.: What kind of implicature is that? S.: Particularised, devastating, and perhaps best left unreported in mixed company. G.: Cowardice. S.: Prudence. G.: Accetto again. S.: Civilisation again. G.: Very well. Then let us conclude. Fra Cipolla says much, means less than he hopes, and implies more than he intends. La Nanna says just enough, means exactly what she wants, and lets the implicature do the strangling. S.: That is about right. G.: And the dialogue overall? S.: A manual of enlightened pressure under social constraint. G.: Too grand. S.: A friar’s defeat by conversational intelligence, then. G.: Better. One final classification. La Nanna’s wit: conventional, conversational, or diabolical? S.: Predominantly conversational, occasionally politeness-based, never merely lexical, and only diabolical if one is a friar. G.: Dry enough? S.: Sufficiently Chietine, with one excellent woman in command.Sterlich, Romualdo de (1750). Dialogo di fra Cipolla e la Nanna. Chieti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stertinio – Ossia: Grice e Stertinio: la ragione conversazionale del tutore di filosofia – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Il Portico Tutore di Damasippo. Note su Dicta sub Porticu. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Stertinio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del tutore di filosofia. Portico. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning and the figure of Stertinius, as reconstructed from Roman moral discourse and sharpened in the passage under the Portico, meet on the idea that conversation is an intelligible activity only insofar as it is guided by rational expectations shared by speaker and hearer. Grice makes this explicit and formal: conversational meaning depends on the speaker’s intention being recognizable by a rational interlocutor who assumes that what is said is said for a reason, in accordance with the purpose of the exchange. Stertinius, by contrast, operates within a Stoic and pedagogical setting where reason governs conversation not by articulated maxims but by ethical orientation: his talk under the Portico is directed at shaping judgment, officium, and animus, not at satisfying surface expectations or decorative understanding. The episode with Damasippus illustrates precisely the kind of rational failure Grice would later theorize: the pupil “hears” porticus and fixes on walls and adornment, missing the intended level of relevance, because he fails to reason correctly about what is being meant in that context. Stertinius thus presupposes a rational listener capable of abstracting away from literal or culturally salient associations and tracking the tutor’s purpose, much as Grice presupposes a cooperative hearer capable of inferring implicatures. Where Grice describes conversational reason as a general structure underlying meaning in all ordinary talk, Stertinius embodies it as a moral discipline, exercised in dialogue, vulnerable to misfire when ambition, vanity, or social distraction disrupt the rational uptake that conversation requires. Tutore di Damasippo. GRICEVS: Salvē, Stertinī. Audīvī tē adhūc Damasippō praeceptōrem esse—sub Porticū, ut aiunt: ego semper mirātus sum quam multum in illō “porticū” lateat. GRICEVS: Apud nōs, cum quis “porticum” laudat, saepe satis est dīcere porticum—nē addāmus quidnam coloris; sed spero Damasippum tuum ab illō genere ornātūs servāvistī, quod Graecī amant, Rōmānī autem (nisi fallor) rubōre tegunt. STERTINIVS: Heu, Grice: Damasippus “porticum” audīvit et statim ad parietēs spectāvit, quasi philosophia in pictūrā nāscerētur. Ego autem dē ratiōne, dē officiō, dē animō loquēbar. STERTINIVS: Inplicaturam callidissimam, Grice! Nōn negō: porticus illa Graecē dicitur Στοὰ Ποικίλη—id est “porticus picta”; sed totum hoc Damasippō super caput fuit: nihil nisi dē togā novā cōgitābat, et maxime utrum satis virīlis foret, cum eam primum sumeret. In Grice's dictionary, Stilione follows Stertinio. Since none has a gens, Grice concludes that philosophers for Ancient Romans did not belong in a gens, and were 'mainly Greek paidagogi' -- is that true? How come neither Stertinio or Stilione bear the name of a gens -- were they considered bastards? No. That conclusion is too quick, and the “bastards” inference is simply wrong. The first thing is onomastic. In Roman and late-antique usage, not every person is cited with a full three-part or gentile name every time he is mentioned. Very often a figure survives in our sources under one name only, or under what looks like one name only, because that is how the literary source chose to refer to him, or because the rest of the name was not preserved, or because the man was known by a cognomen, signum, ethnic, or professional designation. Absence of an explicit gens in the surviving label does not mean absence of family, legitimacy, or civic standing. Second, Roman philosophers were not “mainly Greek paidagogi,” though Greek teachers and intellectuals were certainly crucial in Roman philosophical life. Rome imported philosophy largely from Greece, and many philosophers active at Rome were Greek, Greek-speaking, freedmen, tutors, rhetors, visiting intellectuals, or school figures. But there were also Roman aristocrats, Roman senators, Roman equestrians, and Roman men of letters deeply engaged in philosophy. Cicero alone is enough to spoil any over-neat formula. Seneca spoils it again. So does Varro. So does Boethius much later. The correct formula is that Roman philosophy is heavily mediated by Greek paideia, not that philosophers in Rome therefore lacked gens or legitimacy. Now to your two names. Stertinius looks, in fact, rather as though it may itself preserve a gentilic or family formation. It is not a name that forces one to say, “Ah, nameless fellow, probably illegitimate.” Quite the reverse: it has the look of a Roman nomen or nomen-derived form. If a source gives simply Stertinius, that may be because the figure is cited by what is already his most useful identifying name. One should not expect every source to append praenomen, nomen, cognomen, tribe, and grandfather. Stilo, or Stilione depending on what figure is meant, requires equal caution. If you mean Aelius Stilo, for example, then the gens is right there: Aelius is the gentilicium, and Stilo is the cognomen or by-name. In that case the whole problem disappears at once. If instead you mean some later “Stilione” in Italianized form, one still cannot infer bastardy from abbreviated citation. One would first need the exact Latin name and source. And that is really the key point. Ancient sources are not modern identity cards. They mention people under the name useful for that context. A philosopher may appear as “Favorinus,” “Epictetus,” “Musonius,” “Stilo,” “Plotinus,” or “Porphyry” without the source thereby making a statement about legitimacy or gens. Very often it is simply the common learned designation. As for bastardy itself, Roman naming does not work that way. Illegitimacy did not produce a neat convention of “no gens-name, therefore bastard.” Names could be shortened, altered, adopted, Hellenised, Latinised, or source-dependent for many reasons: slavery, manumission, adoption, literary habit, school identity, geographical association, or simple abbreviation. To move from “only one name is given” to “he was considered a bastard” would be a philological howler. So the short dry answer is this. No, it is not true that Roman philosophers generally lacked gens because they were mostly Greek pedagogues. No, the fact that Stertinius or Stilo/Stilione is cited without an obvious full gentilician bundle does not imply bastardy. And yes, many philosophers in Rome were transmitted under abbreviated or school-use names, because ancient literary memory is selective and practical, not because Roman society stripped philosophers of family identity. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can disentangle the exact figures behind Stertinius and Stilo one by one, with proper Roman-name analysis. Or I can give you a compact note on how Roman and late-antique sources cite philosophers by praenomen, nomen, cognomen, ethnic, school-title, or single learned name, and why that so often confuses modern readers.Stertinio (a. u. c. DCLXXX). Dicta sub Porticu. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stucchi – Ossia: Grice e Stucchi: la ragione conversazionale della filosofia perenne di Pitagora, Cicerone, Ovidio, Virgilio, e Plinio  il creatore e Grice, la creazione delle creature -- la citta della verita perenne – Note su Philologica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Guido Stucchi (Gubbio, Perugia, Umbria): la ragione conversazionale della filosofia perenne di Pitagora, Cicerone, Ovidio, Virgilio, e Plinio. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning and Guido Stucchi’s conception of philosophia perennis intersect on the claim that meaningful discourse is sustained by rational intelligibility that transcends local idiom, historical contingency, and mere verbal display. Grice approaches this at the micro‑level of ordinary conversation: what a speaker means is constrained by what a rational hearer can infer under assumptions of cooperation, restraint, and mutual accountability, so that implication is always answerable to reason rather than to poetic excess. Stucchi, by contrast, works at a macro‑historical and metaphysical level, reading Pythagoras, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Pliny, and the wisdom of Rome as participating in a continuous rational order that manifests itself through time in different linguistic and cultural forms. Yet the comic exchange about creation and creatures reveals a shared discipline: Stucchi’s insistence that every utterance is only a trace pointing beyond itself mirrors Grice’s insistence that speakers should not say more (or less) than reason licenses, lest implication dissolve into mystification. Where Grice guards conversational meaning against inflation through explicit principles and maxims, Stucchi guards philosophical meaning against dispersion by anchoring it in perennial rational structures that remain intelligible across eras. In both, reason is not an ornament added to language but its governing condition: for Grice it governs what may be meant in talk, for Stucchi it governs what may count as true philosophy across the long conversation of Western thought. -- il creatore e Grice, la creazione delle creature -- filosofia umbra – la citta della verita perenne -- STEUCO (Stucchi), Guido (in religione Agostino). Secondo i riferimenti autobiografici disseminati nelle opere, nasce a Gubbio, allora sotto i Montefeltro, dall’agiata famiglia degli Stucchi. Il padre si chiama Teseo; uno dei fratelli, canonico della cattedrale, Francesco; un altro, magistrato della città, Mariotto. Mantenne il nome Guido fino a quando entra nel noviziato di S. Secondo, appartenente all’Ordine dei canonici agostiniani di S. Salvatore, prendendovi l’abito e assumendo il nome di Agostino -- Nicolai. Mentre infuria la guerra tra fiorentini e urbinati, e Leone X fulmina l’interdetto contro Gubbio, lascia la patria per passare a Bologna nel chiostro di S. Salvatore, centro del sapere dove aveva risieduto Codro, che, con Fabbri, vi aveva raccolto preziosi manoscritti fondando la biblioteca del convento. Come testimoniano gli atti del capitolo dell’Ordine, vi rimase, salvo una parentesi a Venezia -- Freudenberger. A Bologna completa gli studi di filosofia, frequenta i corsi di retorica ed ebraico all’Università, apprese i rudimenti dell’arabo e le lingue utili alla comprensione del testo biblico -- il greco da Petros Ypsila, l’ebreo e il caldeo da Giovanni Flaminio --, si interessò di fisica e matematica e si guadagna la stima dei superiori, che lo destinarono a insegnare filosofia. In anni in cui era vivo il magistero dell’aristotelico POMPONAZZI , S. traduce alcune pagine dei classici e si lega ad Amaseo, Calcagnini -- con il quale avrebbe intrattenuto una corrispondenza --, Grimani e Pio che, secondo alcuni biografi, alla morte gli avrebbe lasciato parte dei propri libri. Venne assegnato al convento di S. Antonio di Castello a Venezia, dove si recò passando per Ferrara. Qui divenne amico di Massari e arricchì la propria rete di rapporti. Crotone, i velini – I crotonensi --. Cicerone, ovidio, Virgilio, plinio, roma, aqua virgo.  Grice: Caro Stucchi, devo confessare che quando penso alla "filosofia perenne" e ai tuoi illustri riferimenti – Pitagora, Cicerone, Ovidio, Virgilio, Plinio – mi sento come un creatore che, tra una creatura e l’altra, si ritrova a Gubbio in cerca della verità eterna. Dimmi, come si convive con così tanti giganti sulle spalle, e pure con la pioggia umbra? Stucchi: Ah, caro Grice, Gubbio è proprio la città delle verità perenni – e anche dei temporali perenni! Ma ti dirò, convivere con Pitagora e Virgilio è un po’ come cenare con parenti che non smettono mai di filosofare: tra una metafora e una equazione, qui si medita persino sul brodo! Grice: Capisco, capisco... D’altronde, quando mi capita di creare qualche creatura, mi limito a implicare il creatore – per modestia, si intende. In fondo, la filosofia dalle tue parti ha sempre avuto un gusto speciale: come l’aqua virgo, che non disseta mai del tutto, ma lascia sempre il desiderio di un’altra verità. Stucchi: Bellissima implicatura, Grice! Hai colto il segreto dei filosofi di Gubbio: qui si crea, si traduce, si insegna, ma senza mai dire tutto – ogni creatura è solo una traccia, un invito a cercare il creatore dietro le quinte. E se la verità perenne si nasconde… almeno il brodo è sempre in tavola! Stucchi, Guido (1497). Philologica. Gubbio.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sulpicio – ossia: Grice e Sulpicio: la ragione conversazionale e il principe filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana. Filosofo italiano. Mussonio: deportato da Nerone, pardonato da Galba – Deportato da Vespasiano, pardonato da Tito.   Galba (Terracina, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e il principe filosofo -- Roma – In Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning, conversation is explained as a rational, cooperative activity structured by shared intentions and implicit norms, where what speakers mean often exceeds what they literally say through calculable implicatures grounded in a presumption of rational cooperation; by contrast, the Galba figure in the passage stages conversational reason not as a formal, intention-based mechanism but as a historically and politically embedded virtue, where dialogue reflects the tension between philosophical learning and imperial power, and reason appears as something imperfectly cultivated under conditions of authority rather than as an abstract cooperative ideal. While Grice models conversation as a system whose intelligibility depends on mutual recognition of rational principles such as relevance, truthfulness, and sufficiency, Galba’s exchanges suggest a more ironic, wear-resistant conception of conversational reason, one shaped by exile, pardon, and the recurring failures of Roman political life, where philosophy survives less as a regulative theory of meaning than as a fragile practice tested by power. In this sense, Grice theorizes the conditions under which meaning can be inferred through rational alignment, whereas Galba dramatizes how conversational reason persists even when such alignment is strained by history, authority, and the repeated disruption of intellectual life. filosofia italiana (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Mussonio: deportato da Nerone, pardonato da Galba – Deportato da Vespasiano, pardonato da Tito.  GRICEVS: Salve, Galba; miror te principis nomine tanto philosophum vocari: num litterae ipsae imperant, an imperium litteris? GALBA: Salve, Grice. Ego discere conor ut imperem; sed Roma docet ut plerumque imperium ipsum discat nolle doceri. GRICEVS: Audivi de Mussonio: a Nerone deportatus, a te remissus; dein a Vespasiano iterum deportatus, a Tito iterum remissus. Vir vere itinerarius, sed sine deliciis. GALBA: Ita est. Illi deportatio fuit quasi schola; illi venia quasi vacatio. Si philosophus tam saepe redire potest, fortasse exilium Romae est sola res semper recurrens. What gens was Galba. Grice uses him as an example of philosophical 'love of wisdom' -- for Musonius was deported by Nerone, pardoned by Galba, deported again by Vespasian, and pardoned again by Titus -- is he in the famous book of the XII Cesari? I mean his birth-gens, not his adopted one. Was he Italy born? Galba’s birth gens was the gens Sulpicia. His full name before adoption was Servius Sulpicius Galba. So: gens Sulpicia nomen Sulpicius cognomen Galba If you mean “not his adopted one,” then yes, the important point is that he was born a Sulpicius. He was not Julian or Claudian by birth. The adoption question in his family background is secondary to that basic fact. Yes, he is in Suetonius’ De vita Caesarum, the famous book of the Twelve Caesars. In fact, Galba is one of the “later” Caesars in the collection, after Julius Caesar and the Julio-Claudians. Suetonius treats him in the Life of Galba. Was he Italy-born? Yes. He was born in Italy, more precisely at Terracina according to the standard ancient tradition, though some traditions associate his family strongly with the region around Fundi. In any case, this is central Italian soil, not a provincial birthplace. So the safe answer is yes, Italy-born. A few cautions, though. Galba is not really known as a “prince philosopher.” That sounds like Speranzian colouring. Historically he is an emperor of 68–69, severe, old-fashioned, aristocratic, and short-lived, not a major philosophical ruler in the way Marcus Aurelius later becomes. The Musonius Rufus sequence is broadly right in outline: Musonius was exiled under Nero, returned under Galba, and later expelled again under Vespasian. But “pardoned by Titus” is not the standard strong way to put the later phase. Titus is more relevant to the later easing of conditions around philosophers, but the exact sequence is more tangled than the neat formula suggests. Galba’s family, the Sulpicii Galbae, were an old and distinguished patrician branch of the gens Sulpicia. So if you want the fuller answer, not just the gens but the line, that is the best form: the Sulpicii Galbae, a branch of the gens Sulpicia That also answers your question about whether this is a “good” Roman family: yes, very much so. Old, aristocratic, senatorial, highly respectable. So the compact answer is: birth gens: Sulpicia branch: the Sulpicii Galbae full birth name: Servius Sulpicius Galba yes, he appears in Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars yes, he was born in Italy If useful, I can now do one of three things, all here in chat. I can give you a compact dictionary-style note on Galba: gens, birthplace, family line, and Suetonian place. I can list other notable members of the gens Sulpicia or specifically of the Sulpicii Galbae. Or I can give you a dry note on why Musonius plus Galba makes sense for Speranza, even if Galba himself is only philosophically adjacent rather than genuinely “the philosopher prince.” So Speranza and Grice are mainly interested in two bits: Where is Terracina, as per comune and region. And for a short empire, Galba did the right thing for Musonius. Do we have the phrase in Latin: Galba pardoned Musonius. Did he do it by name, as per decree. I don't think Svetonio cares to adjust the point? Yes. Keeping it tight, and all in chat. Terracina is a comune in the region of Lazio, today in the province of Latina. So for Speranza and Grice, “Terracina, Lazio” is the neat modern locator. Comune Di Terracina is the municipal authority, and the official city site presents it as the city of Terracina in Lazio. [comune.ter...cina.lt.it], [comune.ter...cina.lt.it] On Musonius, the short answer is that Galba does seem to have done the right thing in practice, namely to allow or effect Musonius’ return from exile, but I do not know of a neat surviving Latin sentence in the ancient historians of the form “Galba Musonium remisit” or “Galba Musonium exilio revocavit.” The standard historical claim is that Gaius Musonius Rufus “returned under Galba” after Nero’s exile, but that formula is usually given in modern summaries, not as a famous quotable Latin tag from Suetonius. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [poetryintr...lation.com] And that leads to the more exact point: Suetonius, in the Life of Galba, does not, so far as the standard text goes, stop to make Musonius into a set piece. His interest is Galba’s lineage, character, accession, habits, and fall, not a philosophical amnesty list. So your suspicion is right: Suetonius does not seem to adjust the point for Speranza’s purposes. [poetryintr...lation.com], [thelatinlibrary.com] The nearest solid ancient-historical way to put it is therefore cautious: Musonius returned under Galba. That likely means Galba’s accession made the return possible or officially permitted. But the exact form of decree, if any, is not the sort of thing our surviving literary sources preserve in a quotable formula. There is also a useful fragmentary anecdotal indication. A later source-note on Musonius observes that “it was probably Galba who recalled Musonius Rufus from exile,” but even there the wording is inferential and cautious, not documentary. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [sites.google.com] So if you want the driest scholarly phrasing for Speranza: Galba was born at Terracina, a comune of Lazio. As for Musonius Rufus, the ancient record supports the claim that he returned under Galba after Nero’s exile, but no celebrated Latin formula of pardon seems to survive in Suetonius; the restoration is historical rather than rhetorically monumental, and any specific decree by name is not, so far as the usual literary sources show, preserved in a quotable form. [comune.ter...cina.lt.it], [comune.ter...cina.lt.it], [en.wikipedia.org], [poetryintr...lation.com] If useful, I can now do either of two things, still only here in chat. I can give you a tiny M.–G.–Shropshire classroom scene on the difference between “returned under Galba” and “was recalled by Galba.” Or I can give you a short philological note on possible Latin ways one would express the act if one had to reconstruct it: Musonium exilio revocavit Musonium restituit Musonio reditum permisit and the differences among them. So now Speranza and Grice want to know two further points because they are both philosophers and they care: (a) did Nerone (we forget his gens -- it was odd-sounding, his birth gens, we mean) MENTION this obscure (possibly Etrurian?) Musonius when he expelled him. You've just said that Titus gave a pardon _in toto_, not specific -- and Vespasianus, did he provide an expulsion in toto alla (x)x -philosopher --> x expelled, or is there a rigid designation to Musonius? and if Sulpicio only 'impered' for one year, Musonio was then back in Italy for only one year and Sulpicio -- when they expell them (or him) where do they send them? Yes, and here we can be a little sharper. Nero’s birth gens was the gens Domitia, more precisely the Domitii Ahenobarbi. Before adoption and imperial renaming, he was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. So the “odd-sounding” birth line is the Domitii Ahenobarbi, a branch of the gens Domitia. [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com] On Musonius under Nero. The strongest Latin source does not present a special decree naming Musonius alone in the form you seem to want. What we do have is Tacitus, who, in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy, explicitly names Musonius among those expelled. The key phrase is: Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit. And the fuller sentence is: Verginium Flavum et Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit: nam Verginius studia iuvenum eloquentia, Musonius praeceptis sapientiae fovebat. That is very useful for your purposes. Nero does not appear there as issuing a surviving individual named decree in the neat bureaucratic sense; rather Tacitus narrates that “the distinction of their name drove out” [or “caused the expulsion of”] Musonius Rufus and Verginius Flavus, because the latter encouraged the young by eloquence and the former by precepts of wisdom. So Musonius is indeed named, and very specifically, in the Latin historical record for Nero’s repression. [loebclassics.com] That already answers one part of your question: Nero-era repression is not just “philosophers in general” in Tacitus at that point; Musonius Rufus is individually named. [loebclassics.com] And where was he sent? To Gyaros, the barren island in the Aegean. The standard biographical tradition makes that clear for Musonius Rufus: exile under Nero in 65, to Gyaros. [en.wikipedia.org], [worldhistory.org] On Vespasian, the pattern is different and more complicated. The usual summary is that Vespasian expelled philosophers from Rome, or from the city, in a broader sweep, and that Musonius Rufus was at first exceptionally allowed to remain because of his standing, but was later exiled anyway. So under Vespasian the action looks more like a broader anti-philosopher measure rather than a surviving individual named decree against Musonius in the way Tacitus names him under Nero. [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] So your distinction is good: Under Nero, our surviving Latin historian explicitly names Musonius Rufus in the repressive narrative. [loebclassics.com] Under Vespasian, the surviving tradition more often speaks of a broader expulsion of philosophers, with Musonius Rufus as the exceptional or later-included case, not primarily as the object of a uniquely preserved decree by name. [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] On Galba and the short duration. Yes. If Musonius returned under Galba, that return was brief in political terms, because Galba reigned only from 68 to early 69. So Musonius’ restored life in Italy under Galba cannot have lasted long before the next phase of Roman disorder, and then later Vespasian’s measures. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] On Titus. Your earlier formulation was right to hesitate. Titus is not usually described as issuing a special named pardon to Musonius in the same way one might imagine a crisp act of clemency. Rather, Musonius is said to have returned after Vespasian’s death, that is, in the reign of Titus. That is safer than “Titus individually pardoned Musonius by decree.” [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] And on the “possibly Etrurian” point. Yes. Musonius Rufus was from Volsinii in Etruria, and sources describe him as of Etruscan origin or from an Etruscan family. So “possibly Etrurian” can be strengthened to “very plausibly Etrurian / from Etruria.” [en.wikipedia.org], [worldhistory.org] So the clean summary, in your metalanguage, is this. Nero’s birth gens was Domitia, branch Ahenobarbi. Tacitus explicitly names Musonius Rufus in the Nero repression, with the elegant phrase “Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit.” That is individual naming, not just a vague class measure.  Musonius was exiled to Gyaros in the Aegean.  Under Vespasian, the tradition is broader: philosophers were expelled, Musonius at first was reportedly spared because of his prestige, then later exiled anyway.  Under Galba he returned, but only briefly, because Galba’s reign was brief.  Under Titus, safer to say “he returned after Vespasian’s death” than “Titus issued a specific named pardon.” [loebclassics.com] [en.wikipedia.org], [worldhistory.org] [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] And yes, Grice would enjoy the Tacitean verb expulit. It has just the right pressure: not “pardoned,” not “transported,” but “drove out,” with Roman administrative chill and a faint hint that fame itself had become a punishable burden. [loebclassics.com] If useful, I can now do one of two things, all here in chat. I can give you a tiny M.–G.–Shropshire classroom on the Tacitus sentence “Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit.” Or I can give you a dry philological note on the verbs: expellere, relegare, exulare, revocare, restituere, as they would colour the Musonius story differently. Well, but the 'expulit' belongs more to the entry under Domizio -- Grice and Speranza suppose --. It seems that Domizo only expelled these two, then? Not a great tyranny. And Grice would say that this belongs to Domizio, because, for Tacitus, it was the clarity of the name of M. that expelled him, not Domizio himself -- as per EXPLICATVM/EXPLICITVM versus IMPLICATVM/IMPLICITVM? Yes, that is exactly the Tacitean point, and it is a good one. Tacitus’ sentence does not say, in the blunt active form, “Nero expelled Musonius.” It says: Verginium Flavum et Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit. That is already a piece of Tacitean stylisation. The grammatical subject is not Nero but claritudo nominis, “the distinction of their name” or “the conspicuousness of their reputation.” So the sentence means something like: Their very prominence drove them into exile. Or more literally: The distinction of their name expelled them. That is why Grice and Speranza are right to feel that the line belongs as much under Domitius Ahenobarbus, that is Nero by birth-line, as under Musonius. Tacitus is doing two things at once: He avoids the flat administrative prose of “Nero expelled X and Y.” And he suggests that under Nero, conspicuous excellence itself had become dangerous. So the expulit is politically Nero’s, but syntactically Tacitus gives the agency to fame, not to the emperor. That is very Tacitean. It is not exculpatory. It is ironical compression. The regime is so constituted that one’s own distinction becomes the efficient cause of one’s removal. In modern terms, one might say: the system punishes prominence, and Tacitus lets the prominence stand as grammatical subject in order to sharpen the moral absurdity. So yes: this is a nice case for your explicatum / implicatum contrast. What is explicit: claritudo nominis expulit What is implicated: Nero’s regime was such that publicly eminent moral or intellectual figures could not be tolerated. Tacitus leaves Nero slightly offstage in the syntax, but not in the reader’s inference. On your “not a great tyranny.” No, one should not infer from this sentence alone that Nero “only expelled these two.” Tacitus here is naming two figures in one compressed context, not providing a complete census of repression. The sentence is selective and literary, not exhaustive. So the right conclusion is: Tacitus singles out these two here. That does not mean they were the only ones affected. It means these two exemplify the kind of figure whose fame became politically intolerable. In fact, Tacitus is often most powerful precisely when he names a few and lets them stand for a wider political condition. And Grice would indeed enjoy the phrasing, because the sentence almost behaves like a philosophical joke: not “the tyrant expelled the philosopher,” but “the philosopher’s fame expelled the philosopher.” Which is false on the level of literal causation, but true on the level of political diagnosis. So the best gloss is: Tacitus suppresses the emperor as grammatical subject in order to foreground the fatal liability of distinction under tyranny. The explicit subject is claritudo nominis. The implicit political agent is Nero’s regime. That is also why the sentence has more force than a bureaucratic: Nero Musonium relegavit. The latter would merely report an act. Tacitus’ version diagnoses a condition. If useful, I can now do one of two things, still only in chat. I can give you a tiny classroom scene with M., G., and Shropshire on the verb expulit and the displaced agency in Tacitus. Or I can give you a short philological note on how Tacitus shifts agency by subject-choice, with a few parallel examples in the same compressed moral style. Suplicio (a. u. c. DCCCXXX). De vita sua. Roma: Officina Galbana.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Svetonio – Ossia: Grice e Svetonio: la ragione conversazionale del  commentario alla repubblica, più vasto dalla repubblica. Note su De vita Caesarum. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Gaio Svetonio Tranquillo (Ostia, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del  commentario alla repubblica, più vasto dalla repubblica  Taken together, Grice and Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus) can be read as operating at different levels of the same problem: how reason governs meaning in human affairs when explicit theory is absent or insufficient. Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars do not advance a systematic political philosophy; instead, they proceed through morally charged selections of anecdote, arrangement, and emphasis, guided by Roman aristocratic norms of virtue and vice. Meaning, in Suetonius, emerges tacitly from what is included, juxtaposed, or relegated to marginal comment: private habits, bodily comportment, sexual excess, or frugality are treated not as causal explanations but as rationally intelligible indicators of fitness to rule, addressed to an audience assumed to share evaluative standards. In this sense, Suetonius’ historiographical practice anticipates a Gricean structure: the text says comparatively little in abstract terms, but it means a great deal through controlled underinformativeness and placement, relying on the reader to supply the moral uptake. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning makes explicit what Suetonius presupposes: that communication is cooperative, norm‑sensitive, and evaluated against shared rational expectations rather than against formal doctrine. Where Suetonius humanizes emperors by “cutting them down to size” through salient detail, Grice formalizes the rational conditions under which such detail counts as evidence, condemnation, or praise. The comparison shows Suetonius as a practitioner of conversational reason avant la lettre: his commentarius on res publica operates less by propositional argument than by implicature, inviting readers to infer political judgment from morally loaded narrative choices in a way entirely consonant with Grice’s account of meaning as governed by reason, norms, and audience recognition rather than by explicit system. Grice: “S. did not ascribe a single, overarching philosophy to the emperors, but rather evaluated each based on a moral framework of Roman aristocratic values, emphasizing the balance of an emperor's public virtues and private vices.    His biographies in Lives of the Twelve Caesars are structured to highlight the emperors' personal conduct and character, using a "rubric system" of virtues (justice, self-control, generosity) and vices (cruelty, sexual excess, greed) to determine if they were a good or bad ruler.  Key aspects of his approach include: Moral Judgment: Suetonius provided a moral assessment of each emperor, illustrating for Roman elites what was considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior for their leaders. A good emperor, like Augustus or Vespasian, generally displayed traditional Roman virtues, while a bad emperor, like Caligula or Nero, was characterized by moral corruption and tyranny. Humanizing the Emperors: Suetonius "cuts the emperors down to size," portraying them as men with human flaws and eccentricities, rather than as divine or larger-than-life figures. This approach offered a way for the Roman aristocracy to cope with the absolute power of the emperor, by revealing the rulers as ultimately mortal and fallible. Anecdotal Style: He was less interested in developing the grand political causes of events than in collecting engaging, often salacious, anecdotes and gossip that shed light on an emperor's true character. He believed personal habits, such as eating preferences or physical appearance, could reveal an emperor's temperament and fitness to rule. Bias and Contemporary Views: Writing during the Flavian and Hadrianic dynasties, S.'s portrayal sometimes reflected the prevailing senatorial and elite opinions of his day, including biases (e.g., against Domitian, who had been subject to damnatio memoriae). Cicerone, repubblica. GRICEVS: O SVETONI, Tranquille, quid agis? Audio te commentarium de re publica scribere, et iam tot tabulas implevisti ut librarii gemant. SVETONIVS: Ago, ut soleo: colligo, ordino, anecdotis condio. Nam si res publica gravis est, cur commentarius non sit levis—saltem in stilo? GRICEVS: Ita vero. Et cum tu de re publica disseris, mirum est quam multa—dico, quam opportune—adicias quae in ipsa re publica (ut ita dicam) vix locum habent. SVETONIVS: Pulchra implicatura, Grice! Sed quid faciam? Si principum vitia et virtutes rubricas habent, cur res publica non habeat margines—et margines non habeant glossas? So without preamble or ps let us have a 100-move conversation with M (the history schoolmaster at Clifton), G. and Shropshire on Svetonio De Vita Cesarum. The M will make the questions -- factual ones, to G -- and then the M. will turn to Shropshire for the 'implicature' behind each of the twelve caesars. You may end with a punchline -- This is Clifton in the mid-1920s. Thank you -- you can usage passage below as basis, etc.: M.: Grice, open your Suetonius and do not look as if the Caesars have already won. G.: Yes, sir. M.: We begin with Julius. State, without embroidery, his relation to the crossing of the Rubicon. G.: He crossed it, sir, thereby converting decision into civil war and geography into constitutional argument. M.: Better than most politicians. Shropshire, what is Suetonius’s implicature behind Julius? S.: That brilliance in public achievement does not exonerate appetite in private conduct, sir, and that republican forms are not improved merely because a genius breaks them efficiently. M.: Hm. Efficiently is the adverb of your generation. Grice, two salient features of Suetonius on Julius apart from the Rubicon. G.: His clemency and his vanity, sir. Also his relation to kingship by denial and attraction. M.: Quite. The bald man and the crown. Shropshire, the implicature of the baldness anecdotes? S.: That the public man is to be cut to mortal proportions, sir. Suetonius reduces majesty to grooming and thereby restores aristocratic revenge in miniature. M.: Good. Augustus next. Grice, what is his official relation to monarchy? G.: He disclaims it, sir, while arranging everything so that it becomes permanent. M.: Very Roman. Shropshire? S.: The implicature is that the best tyrant is the one who understands the grammar of modesty, sir. Augustus means “princeps” while saying “citizen.” M.: Better. Grice, one virtue and one vice of Augustus in Suetonius. G.: Administrative restraint and calculated theatre, sir. M.: Theatre is not a vice until you perform it badly. Tiberius. Grice, where does Suetonius place him morally? G.: In suspicion, reserve, and eventual obscenity, sir. M.: A promising civil servant, then. Shropshire, what is implied by the withdrawal to Capri? S.: That absence is itself a form of rule, sir. Tiberius governs by making others guess at his intention and by letting distance become fear. M.: Very good. That, Grice, is called politics before it is called psychology. Caligula. Grice, one sentence. G.: Power without measure passing into theatrical cruelty, sir. M.: A concise disaster. Shropshire, the implicature of Caligula’s horse? S.: That institutions are humiliated not only by open violence but by ridicule, sir. To threaten an office by a horse is to imply that office itself has become decorative. M.: Excellent. Claudius. Grice, what does Suetonius do with the stammer, the limp, and the family underestimation? G.: He makes bodily defect the screen behind which an emperor appears unexpectedly effective, sir. M.: Unexpectedly is doing too much work. Shropshire, the implicature? S.: That contempt misreads power, sir. The ridiculous man may rule competently, which embarrasses all physiognomists and many senators. M.: You are improving. Nero. Grice, no musicological indulgence. G.: Artistic vanity elevated above political responsibility, sir, with cruelty increasingly aestheticised. M.: Yes. He fiddles, if not literally then morally. Shropshire, what is Suetonius doing with the stage obsession? S.: He implies that when the ruler confuses audience with people, sir, government becomes performance and applause becomes policy. M.: Good. Galba. Grice, why does he fail? G.: Severity without tact, sir; old-fashioned austerity applied without regard to the new economy of expectation. M.: The new economy of expectation. Nasty phrase, accurate thought. Shropshire? S.: The implicature is that virtue unguided by timing becomes vice in office, sir. A ruler may be respectable and still politically tone-deaf. M.: Otho. Grice, one distinguishing fact. G.: He is morally compromised in formation yet dies with a degree of dignity, sir. M.: Yes. A borrowed robe and a decent death. Shropshire, what is implied? S.: That last acts revise earlier judgments without erasing them, sir. Suetonius lets the manner of dying become a corrective gloss, not a total acquittal. M.: Vitellius. Grice, what vice dominates? G.: Gluttony, sir, joined to inertia and incapacity. M.: Joined, indeed. Shropshire, the implicature of the eating? S.: That appetite is politically legible, sir. Excess at table implies incapacity in rule because self-government is the first test of public government. M.: You have read your Stoics without being asked. Vespasian. Grice, why does Suetonius like him? G.: Practicality, economy, humour, and relative proportion, sir. M.: A headmaster’s emperor. Shropshire? S.: The implicature is that ordinariness can itself be restorative, sir. After flamboyant monsters, competence looks almost philosophical. M.: Tito. Grice, famous sobriquet? G.: Deliciae humani generis, sir. M.: Which means? G.: The darling of the human race, sir. M.: Sentimental rubbish, but classical rubbish. Shropshire, what lies under the charm? S.: That benevolence may itself be politically staged, sir, but in Tito the staging is effective because it remains within Roman expectations of liberality and measure. M.: Domitian. Grice, what is the problem? G.: Surveillance, cruelty, self-divinisation, and the senatorial memory that follows him, sir. M.: Yes. One must never forget that Suetonius inherits judgments as well as records them. Shropshire, the implicature of Domitian’s damnatio? S.: That moral biography is written by survivors, sir. Suetonius means not only that Domitian was bad, but that a Roman elite required him to remain readable as bad. M.: Excellent. You are both nearly tolerable. Now back to Julius. Grice, why does Suetonius prefer anecdote to constitutional theory? G.: Because anecdote lets moral character do explanatory work without erecting a formal political science, sir. M.: Which is a sentence you may keep if you learn to write less like a clerk. Shropshire, what is implied by arrangement in Suetonius? S.: That sequence itself judges, sir. He need not say “this made him unfit”; he places the detail so that the Roman reader supplies the verdict. M.: Good. That is very nearly literature. Grice, what would you call the system of virtues and vices at work? G.: A rubric of Roman aristocratic evaluation, sir: justice, self-command, generosity against cruelty, sexual excess, greed, and theatricality. M.: Reasonably put. Shropshire, why does this interest you? S.: Because Suetonius says comparatively little in explicit theory and means a great deal by selection, sir. M.: Ah. You have both smuggled philosophy back in through the servants’ entrance. G.: Only slightly, sir. M.: Slightly is how decay begins. Julius again. What is implied by the crown refusals? G.: That denial may itself advertise desire, sir. M.: Yes. English boys can understand that if they ever attend dances. Shropshire, Tiberius again. What is implied by reserve? S.: That opacity itself becomes a political instrument, sir. Silence is no less legible than proclamation when the hearers are frightened enough. M.: Good. Caligula. Why does Suetonius collect the grotesque? G.: To make moral madness visible through memorable particulars, sir. M.: And because Roman readers enjoy scandal with principle. Shropshire, Nero’s singing: what does it imply beyond bad taste? S.: That the ruler no longer distinguishes between judgment and applause, sir. M.: Very good. Claudius. Is Suetonius kind? G.: Relatively, sir, but only because the contrast with expectation and with worse successors assists the portrait. M.: Never trust relative kindness in a biographer. Otho. Why does a compromised life earn a partially noble close? G.: Because Roman judgment remains responsive to final bearing, sir. M.: Bearing. Better than redemption. Shropshire, why do meals matter with Vitellius? S.: Because table conduct stands as the domestic form of rule, sir. Disorder there is taken as evidence of disorder elsewhere. M.: Exactly. The pudding is constitutional. Vespasian. Why the jokes? G.: They humanise him, sir, but also imply mastery. A ruler at ease with laughter is not terrified by his office. M.: Better. Tito. Why the tears? G.: They furnish moral spectacle, sir, but of a tolerable kind. M.: Tolerable tears are the most Roman kind. Domitian. Why the fear of informers? G.: Because speech itself becomes precarious under suspicion, sir. M.: Ah. Now perhaps philosophy may enter by warrant. Shropshire, what is the implicature of informer culture? S.: That public language has been corrupted, sir. Men say less, imply more, and trust neither words nor hearers. M.: Good. That would have pleased Tacitus, though he would have said it more darkly. Grice, compare Suetonius and Tacitus in one sentence. G.: Tacitus gives political tragedy in compressed moral psychology; Suetonius gives moral judgment by curated disclosure, sir. M.: Curated disclosure. Monstrous phrase. Accurate enough. Shropshire, why is Suetonius so interested in bodies? S.: Because bodies are where aristocratic evaluation becomes legible without theory, sir. Diet, sleep, sex, grooming, gait: all imply character and therefore fitness to rule. M.: Very good. The body is the republic in shorthand. Grice, does Suetonius have a philosophy? G.: Not in the explicit systematic sense, sir, but he operates under a stable framework of Roman moral expectations. M.: Exactly. Which is what most boys miss because they prefer the dirt. Shropshire, why are the dirty stories not merely dirty? S.: Because in Suetonius scandal is evidential, sir. It is selected to show whether private appetite subverts public office. M.: Excellent. Julius and Augustus together now. What is the chief contrast? G.: Julius is dazzling overreach; Augustus is successful management under a mask of restraint, sir. M.: Very sound. Tiberius and Domitian? G.: Suspicion in one becomes system in the other, sir. M.: Nero and Caligula? G.: Theatricality in both, but Nero aestheticises while Caligula deranges, sir. M.: Vespasian and Claudius? G.: Both show that the unglamorous ruler may govern better than the splendid one, sir. M.: Good. Shropshire, what is the implicature behind the whole Twelve Caesars? S.: That empire cannot abolish the need for moral judgment, sir. Since constitutional liberty is damaged, character becomes the aristocratic substitute for lost political argument. M.: That is almost too good for Clifton. G.: Only almost, sir. M.: Do not become insolent by approximation. Now, Suetonius on Augustus again. Why the underinformativeness? G.: Because he trusts the reader to infer the balance of praise and reservation from placement rather than from a frontal thesis, sir. M.: Exactly. And what do we call that, Shropshire? S.: In another century, perhaps implicature, sir. M.: Do not be anachronistic before lunch. S.: No, sir. M.: You may be anachronistic after lunch if you cite your sources. Grice, why does Suetonius cut emperors down to size? G.: So that Roman readers may cope with absolute power by seeing rulers as morally intelligible and bodily finite, sir. M.: Very good. Nothing calms aristocrats like discovering that Caesar snores. Shropshire, what is implied by that reduction? S.: That divinised office remains inhabited by mortal absurdity, sir. M.: Better and better. Perhaps there is hope for the lower forms after all. Now tell me, Grice, what is the date of Suetonius in relation to the emperors he describes? G.: He writes later, under the Flavians and Hadrianic world, sir, and inherits senatorial judgments not innocent of politics. M.: Quite so. A biography is never merely backward-looking. Shropshire, what follows? S.: That even selection is historical, sir. He means through arrangement what his own age permits and prefers. M.: Yes. History school is not a morgue if properly taught. Grice, why would a philosopher care for Suetonius at all? G.: Because he shows how evaluative meaning may be communicated without explicit theory, sir. M.: Hm. That is nearly a confession. Shropshire, and why would a historian care? S.: Because moral anecdote is part of political understanding, sir, not merely embroidery upon it. M.: Good. We shall not despise embroidery if it does constitutional work. Now, one last round. Give me, Grice, one word for each emperor. Julius. G.: Ambition, sir. M.: Augustus. G.: Management, sir. M.: Tiberius. G.: Reserve, sir. M.: Caligula. G.: Derangement, sir. M.: Claudius. G.: Misprision, sir. M.: Nero. G.: Performance, sir. M.: Galba. G.: Severity, sir. M.: Otho. G.: Revision, sir. M.: Vitellius. G.: Appetite, sir. M.: Vespasian. G.: Restoration, sir. M.: Titus. G.: Charm, sir. M.: Domitian. G.: Fear, sir. M.: Shropshire, now the implicatures in one word each. Julius. S.: Overreach, sir. M.: Augustus. S.: Disguise, sir. M.: Tiberius. S.: Opaqueness, sir. M.: Caligula. S.: Humiliation, sir. M.: Claudius. S.: Misreading, sir. M.: Nero. S.: Applause, sir. M.: Galba. S.: Untimeliness, sir. M.: Otho. S.: Correction, sir. M.: Vitellius. S.: Incontinence, sir. M.: Vespasian. S.: Sufficiency, sir. M.: Titus. S.: Display, sir. M.: Domitian. S.: Constriction, sir. M.: Very well. Now close the book. Grice, what have you learned? G.: That Suetonius says less than he means, sir. M.: And you, Shropshire? S.: That Roman history is a set of questions asked by anecdotes, sir. M.: Excellent. Then you may both go to lunch, where I expect you to remember that gluttony is constitutional, reserve is political, applause is dangerous, and handwriting, Grice, is not yet a philosophy. Svetonio, Gaio S. Tranquillo (a. u. c. DCCCLXXIV). De vita Caesarum. Roma