BA

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Bacchin – Ossia: Grice e Bacchin: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’ANYPOTHETON HAPLOUSTATON, overo, i fondamenti della filosofia del lingua.  Giovanni Romano Bacchin (Belluno, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’ANYPOTHETON HAPLOUSTATON, overo, i fondamenti della filosofia del lingua. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes implicature a disciplined, publicly checkable inference from what is said plus context under assumptions of rational cooperation: a hearer is entitled to derive what is meant beyond the sentence because the speaker’s choice of words is treated as purposive and answerable to norms like relevance, adequacy, and clarity, so that even negation and hedging become tools for intention-recognition rather than merely formal operators. Bacchin (Giovanni Romano Bacchin, 1929–1995) approaches “conversational reason” from a different starting point: a broadly metaphysical and dialectical project (shaped by the Padua school around Marino Gentile) in which intersubjectivity has an intrinsic “dialectical dimension” and philosophical discourse is driven by the systematic negation of presupposition; accordingly, the motivating phenomena in your passage—question/answer structure, the primacy of negation (the ~-operator), and the shifting sense of “altro” between “not-B” and “the other person” (a tu)—push implicature toward something like transcendental-pragmatic conditions of dialogue rather than Grice’s maxim-based, local calculations within a talk exchange. Online bibliographic records support the timeline you cite: L’immediato e la sua negazione (Perugia: Grafica, 1967) is well-attested in library catalogues, and I fondamenti della filosofia del linguaggio appears earlier (Assisi, 1965, per PhilPapers and catalogues), which fits Bacchin’s self-presentation as grounding philosophy of language in metaphysics rather than treating it as a subfield of linguistics or logic; in that vein, “anypotheton” evokes the Platonic notion of the unhypothetical first principle, suggesting that what ultimately licenses discourse is not just cooperative inference but a foundational structure that makes sense and questioning possible at all. The contrast, then, is that Grice explains how we responsibly get from utterance to implicature by reconstructing speaker intentions under conversational norms, while Bacchin tends to redescribe the same terrain as the dialectical and metaphysical logic of discourse itself—where negation, presupposition, and the irreducible presence of a second person are not merely conversational strategies but constitutive features of philosophical meaning, making “implicature” look less like a calculated pragmatic add-on and more like what inevitably emerges whenever thinking becomes dialogical and therefore exposes itself to contradiction, reply, and the other. Grice: “I like B.; as an Italian he is allows to speak pompously as we at Oxford cannot! But he is basically saying the commonplace that ‘intersoggetivita’ has a ‘dialectical dimension’ (interoggetivita come dimensione dialettica) in the sense that the ego or l’io presupposes the altro as he puts it: a cui – therefore; it is a presupposition of the schema, as Collingwood would have it, alla Cook Wilson and thus only transcendentally justified. B. notes that the operator ~ is basic in that ‘inter-rogo’ invites a ‘risposta’ whose ‘motivation’ may be ‘implicita’ – the ad-firmatum is motivated by the domanda – which can be another dimanda: why do you think so? “Why do you ask why I think so?” --  B. is alla Heidegger and other phenomenologists, with the ‘essere’ versus appare on which my implicata in ‘Causal Theory of Perception’ depend (‘if A seems B, A is not B. Note that there is no way to express this implicata without a ~. It might be argued that it can express with some of the strokes or with some expression that would flout ‘be brief, rather than the simplest” – and which would involve, as VELIA has it, the idea of, precisely altro, other than. Note that B. equivocates on the ‘altro’ in the dialectical dimension of intersubjectivity he obviously means ‘tu,’ not ‘altro.’ In the negation or contradiction, in dialectical terms, of an affirmation, which is involved in every ‘dialogue’ that B. calls ‘socratico’ or euristico rather than sofistico, based on equivocation,  the altro is the other, A is not B, impying A is other than B (cf. my ‘Negation and Privation’). This does not need have us multiply the sense of ‘ne,’ in old Roman!” discorso metafisico a new discourse on metaphysics, from genesis to revelations autentico esperienza disscorso implesso hypotheton, supponibile, insupponibile semplice complesso proposizionale, semplice sub-proposizionale implicazione senso significato segno proposizione funzione proposizionale Whitehead. Grice: Giovanni, ti confesso che il tuo ANYPOTHETON HAPLOUSTATON mi mette più soggezione che un esame di logica a Oxford. Ma tu come fai ad essere così semplice e così complesso allo stesso tempo? Bacchin: Grice, in Italia semplificare è una questione di dialettica: basta parlare con un po’ di pomposità e tutti credono che sia filosofia. Il segreto? L’interoggettività: l’io che parla ha sempre bisogno di un “tu” che ascolta, anche se poi non capisce! Grice: Ma allora il vero filosofo è quello che domanda “Perché tu chiedi perché io penso così?” e spera che nessuno gli risponda troppo chiaramente! Così la conversazione resta aperta e la filosofia sopravvive tra una domanda e l’altra. Bacchin: Esatto, Grice! In fondo, se A sembra B ma non è B, l’importante è che la risposta sia sempre “dipende”—e magari, se la conversazione diventa troppo seria, si può sempre negare tutto con un bel “~”! Così, alla veneta, nessuno resta senza un altro da contraddire. Bacchi, Giovanni Romano (1967). L’immediate e la sua negazione. Perugia: Grafica. Bacchin, Giovanni Romano (1967). L’immediato e la sua negazione. Perugia: Grafica.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Bacchio – Ossia:  Grice e Bacchio: il principe tra gl’accademici di Roma – filosofia italiana – , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice,  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A member of the Accademia. ANTONINO  attended his lectures. He was the adopted son of GAIO. Bacchio. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice e Bacchio,”   Bacchio: il principe tra gl’accademici di Roma – filosofia italiana – , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice,  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. A member of the Accademia. ANTONINO  attended his lectures. He was the adopted son of GAIO. GRICEVS: Bacchi, princeps inter academicos Romae, philosophus Italicus, num Antoninum discipulum tuum adhuc ad lectiones trahis an ille iam me trahit? BACCHIVS: Traho quidem, sed Antoninus tam diligens est ut calamos quoque meos adoptet, sicut olim a Gaio adoptatus sum. GRICEVS: O praeclare, ergo Roma adoptat philosophos sicut philosophos adoptant Romae—circulus perfectus et nemo evadit nisi per iocum. BACCHIVS: Ita est, et si quis evadere conatur, statim in Accademiam recipitur, quasi carcer urbanissimus cum vino et syllogismis. Bacchio, Gaio

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Bacci – Ossia: Grice e Bacci: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei bagni dei romani.  Andrea Bacci: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei bagni dei romani. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, cooperative inference from what is said plus context: in a “talk exchange,” hearers assume speakers are aiming to be appropriately informative, relevant, and perspicuous, and so they work out further intended content (implicata) as what must be meant if the speaker is still being rationally cooperative—even when the speaker is being witty, indirect, or strategically economical. Bacci (Andrea Bacci, 1524–1600), by contrast, belongs to late Renaissance learned medicine and antiquarian natural history, where “meaning beyond the literal” is carried less by maxims of conversation than by the interpretive habits of a scholarly republic of letters: his De Thermis (Rome, 1587) and related treatises on waters, baths, wines, poisons, and simples present the Roman thermae as a nexus of nature, regimen, civic life, and classical authority, so that what is “implied” often comes from the reader’s recognition of genre (medical consilium, natural-historical compilation), citation practice (Pliny, Galen, etc.), and the cultural script of Roman bathing (hygiene, sociability, therapy, and sometimes moral critique). In Gricean terms, Bacci’s “baths” are not primarily a setting for calculable conversational implicatures but a textual environment where readers infer practical norms and evaluations from learned description—warm water and bodily practice functioning as a medium for persuading, recommending, and authorizing—so the comparison turns on two models of rationality: Grice’s local rationality of interlocutors coordinating intentions in real time, versus Bacci’s encyclopedic, humanist-medical rationality in which meaning is stabilized by authorities, institutions, and shared classical knowledge, making the thermae less a site of conversational inference than a durable cultural apparatus for guiding belief and conduct. Grice: “You’ve got to love B.; he was born in the Italian equivalent of Weston-super-Mare, and therefore, he dedicated his philosophy to swimming!” – Studia a Matelica, Siena, e Roma. Scrive “Del Tevere, della natura...”. Pubblica il “De Thermis”, un saggio sulle acque, la loro storia e le qualità terapeutiche che venne accolto con entusiasmo. Dopo aver ottenuto la cattedra alla Sapienza e l'iscrizione all'albo dei cittadini romani, e nominato Archiatra pontificio. Delle acque albule di Tivoli, Delle acque acetose presso Roma e delle acque d'Anticoli, Delle acque della terra bergamasca, Tabula semplicim medicamentorum, De venenis et antidotis, “Della gran bestia detta alce e delle sue proprietà e virtù”; “Delle dodici pietre preziose della loro forza ed uso, L'Alicorno. De naturali vinorum historia. vinificazione e conservazione dei vini; Consumo dei vini condizioni di salute; Caratteristiche dei vini; Uso dei vini nell'antichità, Vini delle varie parti d'Italia, Vini a Roma. In quo agitur de balneis artificialibus, penes instituta recæperit, hoc tempus non esta deo compertum, nisi quantum legitur fuisse antiquissimum. Nam ex omnibus monumentis quæad notitiam hominum peruenerunt, vetustissima huncritum lavationum, perinde necessarium ad communem vitam commemorant. Balnearum enim mentionem invenio non modo ante ROMANORUM IMPERIUM. REPUBLICA HABE ROMANORUM, VANTA thermarum ARTIFICIALIUM magisterial FILOSOFO PLINIO i bagni dei romani, De thermis – thermal baths – philosophy of thermal baths – implicatura ginnastica – le xii pietro pretiose – storia naturale del vino, bacco – terme romane – il vino e la filosofia, bacco ed Apollo, le xii pietre pretiose per ordine di dio I sardio II topatio III smeraldo IV barconchio IV saphhiro VI diaspro VII lingurio VIII agata IX amethisto X berillo XI chrisolito XII onice – tevere, le tibre au louvre, i vini. Thermopolium romanum – illustrazione – incisione terme romanae – natatio – piscina – ginnasio, mercurial, arte ginnastica. Sant’Elpidio a Mare, Fermo, Marche.  Grice: Andrea, dimmi, se uno pensa alla filosofia dei bagni romani, è meglio discutere immersi nelle terme o asciutti in biblioteca?Bacci: Grice, la vera implicatura conversazionale nasce quando l’acqua è calda e le idee scorrono, altro che biblioteca! I romani sapevano che il pensiero si rilassa meglio a bordo piscina che tra libri impolverati.Grice: Allora, la storia naturale del vino si capisce meglio dopo un tuffo o prima di un brindisi?Bacci: Grice, prima il bagno, poi il vino, e infine la filosofia: così anche la gran bestia detta alce si sentirebbe romana e magari scriverebbe un trattato sulle implicature delle terme! Bacci, Andrea (1587). De Thermis. Roma, Mascardi.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Badaloni – Ossia: Grice e Badaloni: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della colloquenza.  Nicola Badaloni (Livorno, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della colloquenza. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rationally reconstructible step from what is said to what is meant, licensed by shared cooperative norms (relevance, sufficient information, sincerity, clarity) and recoverable by a hearer as the best explanation of a speaker’s communicative intention in a given exchange. Badaloni, by contrast, is best situated as a Marxist historian of philosophy and public intellectual from Livorno (1924–2005), closely associated with Pisa (where he taught and held the chair in history of philosophy from 1966) and known for historically contextual readings of figures such as Bruno, Campanella, Vico, and Gramsci; in that tradition, “colloquenza” points less to a micro-pragmatics of inference within a single talk exchange and more to the historically extended dialogue between thought and co-action, rhetoric and institutions, and the formation of a collective rationality in and through cultural practices. Where Grice makes conversational reason a formalizable normativity internal to utterance interpretation, Badaloni’s practice treats dialogue (Plato read through, and sometimes against, later Roman mediations) as a historically situated genre with its own political and rhetorical conditions, so that what is “implied” often depends on tradition, conflict, and the changing social function of philosophical speech rather than on maxims abstracted from any particular epoch. The upshot is that Grice’s implicature is an account of how meaning is inferred here-and-now by rational agents under cooperative constraints, whereas Badaloni’s “implicature of colloquenza” is closer to how meaning and rational orientation are generated across time by interpretive communities—how a culture learns to hear what a text, a dialogue-form, or a philosophical inheritance is “really doing” within a broader drama of praxis, freedom, and historical transformation. Grice: “I like B.; he never took the ROMAN story of philosophy – I say story since history, as every Italian knows, is too pretentious! – seriously until he had to teach it! “Storia del pensiero filosofico – l’antichita’ is my favourite – because he does his best to understand Plato’s pragmatics of dialogue as misunderstood by Cicero!” Di convinzioni marxiste, studioso di Bruno, Campanella, Vico, e Gramsci. Insegna a Pisa, e mette in luce filosofi minori e inattuali, Franco, Fracastoro, Porta, Cherbury, Conti, rinnovando attraverso una collocazione nel contesto, figure immerse in una meta-storia. Storicismo e filosofia Il marxismo conserva la sua capacità di strumento di comprensione del mondo, di erogatore di energie di cambiamento, di guida pello sviluppo d’una prassi razionale. B. ricerca un legame, nella storia, tra pensiero e co-azione e sviluppa uno storicismo di impronta marxista che raccorda filosofi come Bruno, e Labriola, accomunati dalla tensione al rinnovamento e alla trasformazione degl’assetti sociali. C'è alterità profonda, ma non rottura senza legame, tra Croce e Gramsci. Retorica e storicità Inquietudini e fermenti di libertà nel Rinascimento italiano la fama del Bruno Marxismo come storicismo Campanella politico e filosofo, Per il comunismo Fermenti di vita intellettuale, vita civile e controriforma La storia della cultura, Storia d'Italia Gramsci. dal mito alla ricomposizione politica, Libertà individuale e uomo collettivo Politica e storia Gentile Dialettica del capitale, la filosofia della prassi, sta Gramsci. prassi come previsione, marxismo, società ed economia, Forme della politica e teorie del cambiamento Movimento operaio e lotta politica a Livorno”; “Democratici e socialisti praxis, simmanenza nella filosofia politica cosmologia ed etica Laici Inquietudini e fermenti di libertà nel Rinascimento Il pensiero filosofico. colloquenza, la retorica di Vico storia e storicita,  badaloni implicatura libero biologia filosofica telesio vallisneri lingua utopica laico comune comunismo marchetti vignoli. G.: Oxford, 1946. One comes back from a war and finds that rhetoric has not been demobilised, merely misfiled. S.: Misfiled where? G.: Under style. Under “mere eloquence.” Under decorative vice. Anywhere, in short, except philosophy. S.: And what has provoked this morning’s grievance? G.: A thesis title from Pisa. Retorica e storicità in Vico. S.: By whom? G.: A young Badaloni, no less. Young enough to have written it in the shadow of war, and old enough to know that “rhetoric” by itself would be treated as verbal upholstery unless one added “historicity” to make philosophers sit up. S.: So “storicità” is the bait for philosophers? G.: Not bait. Rescue equipment. S.: You exaggerate. G.: Never where Oxford is concerned. S.: Then tell me why this title matters. G.: Because Vico had long suffered the indignity of being admired for style by people who did not wish to be troubled by his philosophy. Naples liked honours and graces; rhetoricians were allowed to teach polish, not foundations. S.: And Vico objected? G.: Repeatedly, if not always tactfully. He knew that rhetoric was not merely ornament, but bound up with wisdom, civil life, history, language, and the shape of human understanding. S.: Then Badaloni’s title restores that? G.: That is the point. “Retorica” alone might sound like belles lettres. “Retorica e storicità” says: no, this concerns the historical constitution of reason itself. S.: Rather ambitious for a thesis produced in wartime Pisa. G.: Which is why it interests me. S.: Remind me of the wartime context. G.: Pisa was bombed. Severely. August 1943. Then German occupation. Then liberation in September 1944. So one is not speaking of a student composing a Vico exercise in a serene cloister while church bells and abstractions politely alternate. S.: You mean the thesis comes out of damage. G.: Out of damage, occupation, interruption, rationing, anxiety, and then post-liberation recovery. A rather good setting, if one wants to understand why “historicity” ceases to be an academic garnish. S.: Because history had ceased to be optional. G.: Precisely. There are moments when “history of philosophy” means a shelf, and moments when it means tanks, rubble, and the question whether a civilisation still knows how to speak to itself. S.: You are making Badaloni sound more dramatic than he probably was. G.: That is because young thesis writers are usually more dramatic than they look in library catalogues. S.: And Pisa itself? G.: Not merely bombed. Occupied by the Germans after the armistice, fought over, then liberated. A university city trying to think under conditions not ideally suited to scholarship. S.: Such as bombs. G.: Yes. They interfere with footnotes. S.: So Badaloni persists with Vico and rhetoric in the middle of this. G.: Which suggests either admirable seriousness or incurable Italianity. I am willing to allow both. S.: Why Vico, though? Why rhetoric there? G.: Because Vico is one of the few philosophers for whom rhetoric is not external decoration but internal method. Tropes, institutions, poetic wisdom, civil formation, the historicity of language: all of it belongs together. S.: “Sapientia Italorum antiquorum,” then? G.: Exactly. Vico’s old Italian wisdom, not as museum-piece but as philosophical counterclaim to abstract rationalism. Badaloni, by adding storicità, effectively says that rhetoric is one of the historical forms in which reason becomes human. S.: Oxford would dislike that. G.: Oxford would divide it into papers and then pretend the unity never existed. S.: Surely unfair. G.: Perfectly fair. Here rhetoric is what literary men do with metaphor. Philosophy then takes over when the ornaments have been removed. S.: And you think that false. G.: Entirely. The historical and rational foundation of language is not something one reaches after rhetoric; it is partly constituted in the rhetorical life of a language. S.: That sounds suspiciously continental. G.: Only because England has forgotten that Cicero once existed. S.: But you said this is about Badaloni, not merely Vico. G.: Indeed. Badaloni is interesting because he starts with Vico and rhetoric before he becomes more publicly associated with Bruno, Campanella, Gramsci, and the rest of his later historical company. S.: So Vico is not a passing enthusiasm? G.: No. Vico remains in the background even when Bruno comes to the foreground. One can often tell a philosopher’s early formation by what he never quite stops hearing. S.: And what does Badaloni hear in Vico? G.: That rhetoric is historical reason before reason becomes self-deceived into imagining itself timeless. S.: Nicely put. G.: I keep trying. S.: But where does Collingwood enter? G.: Ah yes, Oxford’s better conscience. Collingwood did not merely dabble in Vico. He helped make him hearable in English thought. S.: Through Croce? G.: Partly. The Croce on Vico, yes, whatever the proprietary indignations attached to translations and permissions. But more importantly, Collingwood absorbed the Vichian sense that language, imagination, expression, and history are not separable departments. S.: You mean in The Principles of Art? G.: Exactly. Vico surfaces there more than once, and not as mere antiquarian garnish. The thought that language and art belong to expression rather than to detachable decoration is profoundly congenial to Vico. S.: So Oxford did have a Vichian line. G.: A line, yes. Not a school. Oxford never quite found the courage to let rhetoric return as philosophy. It preferred to let Collingwood do expression, history, and imagination in a noble but rather solitary way. S.: Solitary because the others were busy analysing “if”? G.: Someone had to. S.: And Hampshire? G.: Hampshire is a later and rather revealing case. He knows Vico matters, partly through the atmosphere created by Berlin and the wider anti-ahistorical mood. But Hampshire wants, as I see it, to separate Vico’s historicity from his rhetoric. S.: Why? G.: Because rhetoric embarrasses analytical philosophers. History can be discussed as philosophy of history. Language can be discussed as philosophy of language. But rhetoric threatens to bring in style, civic speech, figuration, and the ancient impoliteness of public life. S.: So Hampshire wants Vico as philosopher of language, but without the cyclical grand history and without the rhetorical baggage? G.: More or less. He would like the conceptual harvest without the full Neapolitan weather-system. S.: And you disapprove? G.: I understand it, which is worse. But yes, I think something is lost if one sanitises Vico into a tidy philosopher of language proper. S.: Because language in Vico is historical through and through? G.: And rhetorical through and through. The first speech of peoples is not a seminar paper. It is imaginative, tropic, social, juridical, fear-laden, ceremonial. To peel off rhetoric is to peel off the very medium of early sense-making. S.: Then Badaloni’s “retorica e storicità” is better than Hampshire’s surgery. G.: Better by being less hygienic. S.: Very Italian. G.: Which is occasionally a compliment. S.: What exactly would Oxford miss in reading Vico as mere stylist? G.: It would miss the claim that rhetorical forms are themselves historical deposits of reason. Metaphor is not a literary frill; it may be a fossil of collective understanding. S.: Fossils again. You have become geological. G.: War does that to one. Rubble encourages stratigraphy. S.: And what of Pisa under occupation? Can G. and S. say more than “bombed and occupied”? G.: They should. The bombing of August 1943 devastated parts of the city. After the armistice, German control, repression, fear, interruptions to ordinary life. Then 1944 brings liberation, but liberation does not instantly repair institutions. A thesis produced in 1945 is produced amid administrative recovery, civic exhaustion, and material uncertainty. S.: So Badaloni’s mission is not abstract. G.: Exactly. To write on rhetoric and historicity then is almost to insist that intellectual life has not been bombed out of existence. S.: Rather moving. G.: Keep yourself under control. S.: I’m trying. G.: Good. S.: And Luporini in this picture? G.: An important mediation. Not necessarily a Vico specialist in the narrow bibliographical sense for every year of the war, but clearly able and willing to supervise a thesis on Vico in 1945. That itself matters. S.: Because it means Vico remained philosophically live in Pisa during and just after the war. G.: Precisely. The thesis is not merely personal whim. It belongs to a real intellectual line. S.: Is there something distinctively Marxist already in the young Badaloni here? G.: In embryo, perhaps. The later Badaloni will want links between thought and co-action, ideas and institutions, philosophy and historical transformation. Vico is a very useful precursor for anyone tempted by that kind of historical intelligence. S.: Because rhetoric is already social praxis? G.: Exactly. Not “praxis” in the later sloganised sense, but speech embedded in institutions, conflict, memory, law, education, civic life. S.: Then why did Vico complain about rhetoric’s status in Naples? G.: Because in ordinary academic life the rhetorician is too often treated as a master of elegance, not as a philosopher. One may teach youths to shine, but not to think foundations. S.: And Vico wanted both? G.: He wanted rhetoric restored to sapiential dignity. He did not want eloquence without wisdom, nor wisdom that imagined it could dispense with eloquence. S.: Which sounds annoyingly right. G.: Most good philosophy does, until a faculty board sees it. S.: And Oxford’s failing? G.: To keep rhetoric in a side room. We produce philosophers who speak as if language were a neutral pipeline. Then we are surprised when history re-enters by the back door. S.: Through Collingwood. G.: Through Collingwood, through Berlin in another register, through Hampshire uneasily, and now, for our amusement, through a young Badaloni in Pisa with bombs still in the recent past. S.: You make him sound like a messenger from another tradition. G.: He is exactly that. Italian historicism arriving to remind Oxford that words have ancestry. S.: Could one say that Badaloni philosophises rhetoric by historicising it? G.: Very neatly put. And conversely, he historicises philosophy by taking rhetoric seriously. S.: Better. Two-way traffic. G.: Good. You are not entirely wasted. S.: What would Hampshire say against this? G.: He would worry, I think, that once rhetoric and historicity are too tightly bound, one loses conceptual clarity and ends up with civilisation instead of analysis. S.: And your answer? G.: Civilisation may be what analysis has been abstracted from. S.: Uncivil. G.: Accurate. S.: Then where does Berlin enter exactly? G.: Berlin helped make Vico intellectually fashionable again in certain circles, especially as an anti-rationalist and pluralist ancestor. But Berlin likes large ideas and historical temperaments. Hampshire, knowing Berlin, inherits some of the interest while trying to produce a more disciplined philosophical Vico. S.: That is, less cyclical history, more language? G.: Exactly. Less providential drama, more philosophy of human expression and conceptual worlds. S.: And you think that still leaves rhetoric too far outside. G.: Yes. It gives us Vico washed and ironed. S.: Oxford laundry. G.: A dangerous institution. S.: What might G. say about the thesis title itself? G.: That it is nearly perfect. “Retorica e storicità in Vico.” Brief, pointed, and already argumentative. It declares that rhetoric in Vico is not an adjunct but a mode of historical being. S.: Better than “Vico’s Style.” G.: Infinitely. “Vico’s Style” sounds like a tailor’s thesis. S.: And Badaloni’s later Bruno work? G.: One can mention that he later turns with force to Bruno, but the Vichian background remains. Bruno gives him cosmology, freedom, heresy, transformation. Vico has already taught him that ideas live in historical worlds and linguistic forms. S.: So Vico is preparatory? G.: More than preparatory. Foundational in tone, even if not permanently foregrounded. S.: Then if we place ourselves in Oxford, 1946, what would attract you in this thesis? G.: Precisely that it refuses the local division of labour. It tells me rhetoric is not merely literary; it belongs to philosophy where philosophy remembers that language has a history and reason has a public life. S.: And what would repel your colleagues? G.: The same thing. S.: Admirably concise. G.: I can be concise when accusing institutions. S.: Suppose one of them says: “But surely rhetoric concerns persuasion, not truth.” G.: Then one replies: persuasion in a historical language is one of the ways truth becomes socially available. Also, untruth persuades too, which is why one had better understand rhetoric rather than exile it. S.: Very Vichian. G.: Very civilised. S.: Is there dry humour in Vico? G.: Less than in Oxford, but more than Oxford notices. S.: And in Badaloni? G.: Young thesis writers are seldom allowed humour by their supervisors. It appears later, in footnotes, if they survive. S.: Then let us provide it for him. G.: Gladly. S.: Could one say that Pisa, under bombing and occupation, was learning storicità the hard way? G.: Yes, though one should say it without flourish. Bombs are the most vulgar school of history. S.: And Badaloni responds by returning to Vico’s rhetoric. G.: Which is rather good, because it says that after force, one must recover speech. S.: Speech as reason in history. G.: Exactly. Not merely speech as style. S.: Then perhaps Oxford needed Badaloni more than Pisa did. G.: That is the sort of thought which makes one provincial and universal at once. S.: A fine Oxford disease. G.: Quite. S.: Summarise, then. What do G. and S. learn from young Badaloni? G.: That rhetoric without historicity is dismissed as ornament. Historicity without rhetoric becomes bloodless abstraction. Vico joins them. Badaloni notices. Oxford lags behind. Collingwood nearly catches up. Hampshire tidies what should remain slightly untidy. And language, if treated as merely logical form, loses the civic and historical sediment that makes it human. S.: And the punchline? G.: In wartime Pisa a student wrote on rhetoric and historicity under bombs; in peacetime Oxford we still needed persuading that words have a past.Grice: Badaloni, mi racconti: la filosofia è meglio vissuta come storia o come una bella chiacchierata tra amici? Badaloni: Grice, la chiacchierata vince sempre! La storia la insegnano, ma la colloquenza la si improvvisa, e magari finisce a cena tra marxisti e vichiani.Grice: E il dialogo platonico, Nicola, secondo te lo capiva meglio Cicero o chi riusciva a riderci sopra?Badaloni: Grice, chi ride è già filosofo: la retorica di Vico dice che la libertà nasce sempre dal fermento, anche se la storia a volte la chiama controriforma! Badaloni, Nicola (1945). Retorica e storicita in Vico – relatore: Luporini. Pisa.

 

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

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Baglietto – Ossia: Grice e Baglietto: la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura conversazionale della dialettica.  Claudio Baglietto (Varazze, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura conversazionale della dialettica. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes “implicature” a product of rational, cooperative inference: hearers recover what is meant beyond what is said by assuming speakers are (in broad outline) contributing appropriately to a shared purpose, so that dialectic is explained in terms of publicly intelligible intentions, relevance, and accountable reasoning rather than in terms of national style or moral posture. Baglietto, by contrast, is best read as a young Italian moral and political intellectual formed at Pisa and the Scuola Normale (in the Gentile/Carlini environment) who, alongside Capitini, cultivated an ethically Kantian and religiously inflected rationalism and became notable for principled noncollaboration with fascism and refusal of military service, eventually living in exile; his early work on “the problem of language” in Manzoni (published in the Annali of the Scuola Normale in the mid-1950s and as a Normale monograph in 1956) and his engagement with German philosophy (including Heidegger, the theme of being-with, and language) suggest a conception of dialectic less as a set of inferential rules for extracting implicatures and more as an ethically governed practice of address between persons, where the very possibility of speaking-with (a kind of Mitsein in dialogue) is bound up with conscience, responsibility, and the refusal to collaborate with wrongdoing. In that contrast, Grice supplies a general mechanism for how implied meaning is rationally calculable in any ordinary exchange, while Baglietto’s “conversational reason” naturally emphasizes the moral conditions under which genuine conversation is worth having at all—conversation as shared rational life rather than merely efficient information transfer—so that what is “implied” is carried not only by maxims and contextual assumptions but also by the interlocutors’ ethical stance, their willingness to meet one another as a thou, and their capacity to turn dialectic into a form of nonviolent practice rather than rhetorical victory. Grice: “I like B.; unlike me, he was a consceinious objector, but then we were fighting on different camps! I love the fact that his first tract is on ‘il problema del linguaggio’ in Manzoni – but then he turned from ‘la bella lingua’ to Dutch! And specialized in Kant, but most notably Heidegger – ‘mitsein und sprache.’ But he also wrote on ‘eros’ and ‘love,’ – which is very Platonic of him! And of me, since the ground for my theory of conversation is on the balance between what I call a principle of conversational self-LOVE (or egoism, if you mustn’t) and a corresponding principle of conversational OTHER-love (or altruism, if you must, since I prefer tu-ism – ‘thou-ism’).” Studia a Pisa sotto Gentile e Carlini. Sviluppa idee di riforma morale, in contrapposizione al fascismo. Organizza con CAPITINI riunioni cui partecipano Binni, Dessì, Ragghianti, e Varese.  Mente limpida, carattere disciplinato, studioso, coscienza sobria, pronta ad impegnarsi, con una forza razionale rara, con un'evidentissima sanità spirituale. Cominciai a scambiare con lui idee di riforma. Su due punti convenivamo facilmente perché ci sono diretti ad essi già in un lavoro personale da anni: un razionalismo di tipo spiccatamente etico e kantiano; il metodo della noncollaborazione col male. Si aggiunge, strettamente conseguente, l’anti-fascismo. Invitammo gli amici a conversazioni periodiche.  Cantimori critica B., accusandolo di mancanza di senso di realismo politico, nonché di senso dello stato.  Il cammino della filosofia Antifascismo Fontanari e Pievatolo Chiantera Stutte, Cantimori. Un intellettuale del Novecento, Carocci, Roma, che rinvia soprattutto a Simoncelli, La Normale di Pisa. Tensioni e consenso; Angeli, Milano); Capitini. Capitini Mahatma Gandhi Nonviolenza  B. morale critica manzoni amore. G.: Baglietto chose, rather bravely, to make a philosophical topic out of il problema della lingua in Manzoni. S.: Bravely, or archaically. G.: In Oxford those are often the same thing. S.: Why not discuss language in the abstract? G.: Because abstraction is very often the fastest way of losing the quarrel before one has had it. S.: So Baglietto starts from Manzoni because Manzoni gives the problem body? G.: Body, history, politics, pedagogy, and irritation. All the ingredients of a proper philosophical topic. S.: You are already avoiding the word. G.: I am distinguishing. Let us say L for lingua, though I mistrust even that. S.: Why mistrust it? G.: Because if I say L is a set of utterances, I have already cheated. S.: How so? G.: A language is not merely a heap of utterances any more than a club is a heap of dinners. S.: Then what is L? G.: At minimum, a communicative device with socially ratified forms, expectations, corrections, exclusions, and inherited prestige. S.: That is very Oxford. G.: Oxford is a communicative device with poor heating. S.: And Manzoni has a problem with L? G.: More precisely, Baglietto thinks Manzoni has a problem with L. Manzoni wants unification. A nation requires a usable common speech, not merely a map of local noises. S.: And Baglietto objects? G.: Or at least complicates. He sees value in keeping things local, at the level of dialect and almost at the level of what later people would call idiolect. S.: “Almost,” you say. G.: The word idiolect was only just finding its feet. But the thing was there: one person’s own way of speaking inside a dialect inside a larger linguistic order. S.: So Baglietto prefers plurality? G.: Ethically, perhaps. Philosophically, certainly. Politically, with caution. He is interested in the fact that speech is inhabited before it is standardised. S.: Which makes Manzoni the wrong hero. G.: Not wrong. Useful. One always wants a good centraliser in order to expose the costs of centralisation. S.: Then tell me the centralising story. G.: Italy had, and in a sense still has, the problem of many speech forms and one desired national culture. The educated solution, for a long time, was not “Italian” in some neutral pan-Italian sense, but Tuscan. S.: Even outside Tuscany. G.: Especially outside Tuscany. S.: Which is absurd. G.: No more absurd than Oxford English being taken for English. S.: There is no such thing as Oxford English. G.: There is, though Oxford prefers to call it simply “proper.” S.: You mean Received Pronunciation? G.: Not only that. RP is the accentual side. Oxford adds habits of syntax, idiom, pacing, understatement, and what one may call institutional grammar. S.: Institutional grammar sounds sinister. G.: It is merely power in shirt-cuffs. S.: And you think this parallels Manzoni? G.: Entirely. Just as Manzoni sought a norm adequate to national prose and schooling, Oxford enforces a norm adequate to dissertations, prize essays, and civilized correction. S.: Give me the local English version. G.: A Cockney double negation in a Locke Prize essay would not be greeted as a bold experiment in plural expressive rationality. S.: It would be corrected. G.: More efficiently: it would be noticed without being discussed. S.: That is crueller. G.: Much. Open condemnation is almost democratic. S.: So Baglietto sees in Manzoni what you see in Oxford. G.: Exactly. The pressure to call one form simply “the language” and to demote the others into dialect, vulgarism, local colour, or error. S.: But surely some standard is necessary. G.: Of course. The question is what one sacrifices in constructing it. S.: Dialect? G.: Dialect, yes. But also moral texture, local memory, domestic cadence, shades of social relation, and the freedom to sound as if one came from somewhere. S.: You mean standard speech makes us all homeless? G.: Only verbally. Which, for philosophers, is bad enough. S.: And Bononia? G.: Ah yes, the Italian embarrassment. Bologna kept Latin in its higher functions, as Oxford did. But when the vernacular gained prestige, it was not simply “Emilian” that rose into dignity. It was Tuscan. S.: So Bologna taught in one place and linguistically deferred to another. G.: Precisely. A useful lesson in cultural self-government by imported accent. S.: You really are malicious. G.: Historical, my dear fellow. Historical. S.: Then Oxford followed a similar path when Latin gave way to English? G.: Similar, though more concealed. English came in, but not every English. One received something like a regulated upper-register English, with its own assumptions of grammar and propriety. S.: And tutors enforce it? G.: Daily. A tutor’s pencil is the most continuous linguistic legislation in the kingdom. S.: That sounds exaggerated. G.: Only if you have never seen a draft returned bleeding from the margins. S.: So what would be disqualified in Oxford prose? G.: Double negatives in certain registers, regional constructions, over-explicit repetition, misplaced colloquial emphasis, and any phrase that sounds as if it was learned from life rather than from books. S.: That last one is unfair. G.: Which is why it is effective. S.: And Baglietto brings this to philosophy? G.: That is what is admirable. “The problem of language” sounds old-fashioned, almost genteel. But in Manzoni it is a problem of norm, nation, authority, education, and speech as lived practice. S.: Why Manzoni, though, and not, say, a general theory of language after Heidegger or Kant? G.: Because Manzoni allows one to begin where people actually quarrel: not over Being, but over what one ought to write in a schoolbook and how a people is to recognise itself in print. S.: That is rather concrete. G.: Philosophy does occasionally benefit from objects. S.: And Baglietto likes concreteness? G.: Moral concreteness, certainly. He was too ethically serious to be satisfied with merely formal dialectic. S.: You are smuggling in his anti-fascism. G.: Not smuggling. Declaring. A man concerned with non-collaboration with evil will not regard language as neutral machinery. S.: So standardisation can look moral or immoral depending on what it does to persons. G.: Precisely. One may standardise in order to include, or in order to subordinate. Usually one does both and then writes prefaces. S.: Then Manzoni’s project is ambiguous? G.: Fruitfully so. It is emancipatory and disciplinary at once. S.: Very modern. G.: Very national. S.: And Baglietto’s sympathy is with the local? G.: With the ethically inhabited. The local because it is lived, and the idiosyncratic because it is where conscience speaks before committees tidy it up. S.: Idiolect as conscience. That is a little much. G.: All philosophy is a little much. Otherwise it would be administration. S.: So if L is a communicative device, Manzoni wants to unify L, and Baglietto wants to remind us that L is always many. G.: Splendid. You are nearly employable. S.: I resist. G.: Sensibly. S.: What would Manzoni say to this defence of dialect and idiolect? G.: He would say a nation cannot conduct itself in mutually unintelligible intimacies. S.: And Baglietto? G.: He would reply that a nation which abolishes intimacies has produced administration, not conversation. S.: Very fine. But does Oxford not need its own standard? G.: It does, and uses it ruthlessly. The trick is that Oxford presents its own localism as universality. S.: How? G.: By calling its accent “clear,” its idiom “educated,” its grammar “correct,” and its exclusions “merely stylistic.” S.: Which is precisely what Manzoni’s enemies might have said of Florentine. G.: Quite. S.: Then who is the English parallel to Manzoni? G.: A difficult question. England never had quite the same crisis, because the centralising state and print culture had other advantages. But in a broad sense one might think of Johnson for lexicon, perhaps the King James Bible for prestige prose, perhaps the BBC for modern accentual norm. S.: That is three people and an institution. G.: England prefers committees and accidents to founding fathers. S.: No single national purifier, then? G.: Not of the Manzoni type. The English standard emerged less by one heroic washing in the Arno than by a long chain of schoolrooms, printers, sermons, examinations, and embarrassed corrections. S.: Which is less poetic. G.: England mistrusts poetry unless it is dead. S.: And Italy had more trouble because Latin had longer prestige? G.: In part. Bologna and Oxford alike lived on Latin, but when vernacular authority rose, the question in Italy was: which vernacular? In England the answer was easier because the political centre had already done much of the work. S.: So Baglietto sees in Manzoni a philosophical site where politics, ethics, and speech meet. G.: Exactly. The apparently passé topic of “the problem of language” turns out to be the problem of who may speak for whom, in what form, and at what cost. S.: That is indeed philosophical. G.: You sound surprised. S.: I was. “The problem of language in Manzoni” had sounded like a thesis one writes before discovering real philosophy. G.: Real philosophy is often what arrives after one stops despising such titles. S.: And Baglietto did this young? G.: Which makes it all the more impressive. Young philosophers usually prefer cosmic nouns to municipal problems. S.: Whereas he starts with lingua. G.: Yes, and thereby reaches ethics, politics, communication, community, and the structure of mutual address. S.: You are making him sound Gricean before Grice. G.: Not Gricean. Merely civilised. S.: Then explain the Oxford tutor parallel more closely. G.: Very well. A tutor receives an essay not merely to inspect ideas, but to inspect the shape in which ideas have been made public. He corrects syntax, register, ordering, tone, and lexical propriety. He claims to be correcting style; in fact he is inducting the pupil into a form of life. S.: Which is your definition of philosophy now. G.: On good days. S.: So Baglietto would say that what appears as “mere language” is really ethical participation? G.: Yes. To speak with another is not merely to code information; it is to enter a common life under norms. S.: Hence his later interest in dialogue, Mitsein, and speech-with. G.: Exactly. The Manzoni topic is not a mere youthful antiquarianism. It already points toward the moral conditions of genuine address. S.: Then dialect is not just philological residue. G.: It is the site where speech remains answerable to lives not yet fully absorbed by state grammar. S.: And idiolect? G.: The last refuge of singularity before the schoolmaster arrives. S.: You do dislike schoolmasters. G.: Only when they are successful. S.: Then one last difficulty. If every standard excludes, why not abandon standards? G.: Because chaos flatters nobody for long. One needs standards. One merely ought not worship them. S.: And Baglietto’s achievement? G.: To bring a seemingly antiquated topic back into philosophical seriousness by showing that “language” in Manzoni is not a dictionary problem but a problem of community, norm, conscience, and power. S.: And your Oxonian gloss? G.: That every dissertation is, secretly, a chapter in Il problema della lingua. S.: Even the bad ones? G.: Especially the bad ones. They merely solve it in favour of the examiner.Grice: Baglietto, dimmi, tra Kant, Heidegger e la bella lingua, tu preferisci il dialogo o il monologo? Baglietto: Grice, se non c’è dialettica, pure l’amore rimane senza parole! La mia preferenza? Conversare, anche con un po’ di tuismo: meglio sbagliare insieme che avere ragione da soli! Grice: E allora la non-collaborazione col male diventa una conversazione gentile—ma se uno si ostina, meglio cambiare argomento o paese? Baglietto: Grice, io ho scelto l’Olanda, tu Oxford… ma alla fine, la filosofia trova sempre casa, anche tra amici che ridono un po’ di sé e dell’umanità! Baglietto, Claudio (1946). Il problema della lingua in Manzoni. Pisa, Edizioni della Normale. 

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Balduino – Ossia: Grice e Balduino: la  ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del vestigio dell’angelo al  Campidoglio.  Girolamo Balduino (Montesardo, Alessano, Lecce, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del vestigio dell’angelo al Campidoglio. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as something a hearer can rationally and publicly recover from what is said plus contextual assumptions about cooperative discourse: if a speaker chooses a weaker, odder, or apparently irrelevant formulation, the hearer is licensed to infer an additional intended content (and can test it by cancellability and calculability), so that “meaning beyond saying” is explained by intention recognition under conversational norms rather than by symbolism in the medieval sense. Balduino, by contrast, belongs to the Renaissance Aristotelian-semantic tradition (Padua, then Salerno and Naples) in which the central explanatory triad is not maxim and implicature but nomen/verbum/enuntiatio and the theory of signa: his De signis (Venice, Giolito, 1545) and his work on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione emphasize how words signify, how truth and falsity arise only with composition, and how modes of oratio are classified, with “sign” talk (notare, segnare, significare, notificare) doing much of the work that Grice later gives to pragmatic inference. The “vestigio” motif in your passage captures the methodological contrast: for Balduino, a vestigium is paradigmatically a sign that points from a perceptible trace to what produced it, in a way continuous with Augustine’s classic example of vestigium as a sign from which we think an animal passed; for Grice, the interesting analogue is not the trace itself but the inferential step by which an audience moves from trace to hypothesis under rational constraints, and especially the further step where a speaker exploits that inferential tendency to communicate more than is said. So where Balduino systematizes meaning in terms of semantic composition and signification (a framework naturally hospitable to “signs” and “traces” as theoretical primitives), Grice relocates the explanatory burden onto conversational rationality: the angel’s footprint is not yet implicature, but it becomes Gricean the moment someone intentionally “leaves a trace” in discourse—choosing a formulation whose best rational explanation is that the speaker meant the hearer to infer something further, and meant the hearer to recognize that intention. Grice: “It is amusing that when we were lecturing with Sir Peter at Oxford on Categoriæ and De Interpretatione, B. had done precisely that – AGES before, in a beautiful beach town of Italy! ‘vir Montesardis,’ Strawson and I, following an advice by Paulello, draw a lot from Balduino’s commentary especially of the Peri Hermeneias, the section on the ‘oratio,’ since we were looking for ordinary-language ways to render all the modal distinctions, indicative, imperative, optative, interrogative, vocative, …, that B. finds so easy to digest – but our Oxonian tutees didn’t!” Studia a Padova l’eclettismo lizio sotto PASSERI e SPERONI. Insegna sofistica a Salerno e Napoli. A B. s’oppone ZABARELLA. Interpretazione, Papuli, logica, BONAIUTO scienza, dimostrazione, Colapietra. De signis, segnare, significare. Primum oportet ponere quid sit nomen. rhetoricis. INTENTIONE Verbum vero quniéda sunt praesuppo ipsi volunt cum vero et falso SIGNIFICANDUM enunciationes posterius ut ignotius et explicandum quas quando secundum se, ac purum dicetur. Ipsum sic purumi nullum veritatis et compositionis, aqua verum explicatur, est dam, non per se sed quam sine compositis nominibus non est intelligere. Gi ergo hac de causa nomem præponit verbo, notitia verbi in compositione verum explicantis, non pont, intelligi sine nominibus compositis. Ita et nomina, verum illud quod tempus simpliciter et omnino, ponentium CONSILIO coplectuntur. Exemplo simili sus ideftindetinite et indeterminate SIGNIFICANS appellat, Ma, gentinus dicit esse tempus finitum et determinatum. Et particula, quam adom né temporis differentiam rer pra, curro, curris, nin git, pluit, complexu horūuer borum concertis intellectis personis, cum vero et falso SIGNIFICANT. ferebar, Magentinus ad solum præsens direxit. falsum igir, Campidoglio 334 donazione di Gregorio, notante, segnante, notificare, il segno di san michele, etym. dub. ves-stigium, foot-print naturale artifiziale marcare posizione arbitrio a piacere. Grice: Balduino, mi diverte pensare che mentre a Oxford sudavamo su Categorie e De Interpretatione, tu eri già in riva al mare a digerire senza sforzo tutti i modi dell’oratio. Balduino: Caro Grice, a Padova mi hanno insegnato che prima si pone quid sit nomen e poi si lascia che il verbum faccia il suo teatro, come l’angelo che al Campidoglio lascia un vestigio e pretende pure l’implicatura. Grice: Allora quel segno non è solo un piede sulla pietra, ma un invito a inferire—e i miei tutees, poveretti, vedevano solo la pietra e nessun angelo. Balduino: Non te la prendere, perché tra notare, segnare e significare c’è sempre chi capisce al volo e chi, per principio cooperativo, finge di capire solo per non chiedere un’altra lezione. Balduino, Girolamo (1528). Dissertatio. Padova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Balonio – Ossia: Grice e Balonio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Balonio. The Balonii are a family at ancient Rome. No members of this gens are mentioned in ancient writers, but a number are known from inscriptions. “B.” belongs to a class of gentilicia formed using the suffix -onius, originally applied to cognomina ending in -o, but later used as a regular gentile-forming suffix, without regard to the orthography of the root. These nomina are frequently Oscan. Chase suggests that B. might be derived from the cognomen Bala, perhaps from Latin balare, "to bleat". The spelling Bellonius, found in a few inscriptions, suggests a possible derivation from Bellona, the goddess of war, although the two forms could also have developed independently.  The main praenomina of the Balonii were Aulus, Gaius, and Marcus, all of which were common throughout Roman history. Other names used by this gens included Gnaeus and Lucius, which were also common, and Numerius, which was relatively uncommon, and much more distinctive.  Members Balonia, mistress of the slave Philemon, along with B., probably her brother, according to an inscription from Casilinum in Campania. B., master of the slave Philemon, along with Balonia, probably his sister, according to an inscription from Casilinum. Aulus Balonius A. l. Diphilus, a freedman at Rome who gave a pot to Pamphilo.[3] Gaius B., one of the duumviri quinquennales at Furfana in Apulia, along with Quintus Appaeus, named in an inscription. Bellonius Secundus, buried at the present site of Radovljica, formerly part of Pannonia Superior.[5] B. Marcellus, named in an inscription from Saguntum in Hispania Citerior, dating to the late first or early second century, along with Balonius Marcianus and Balonius Severus.[6] B. Marcianus, named in a late first- or early second-century inscription from Saguntum, along with Balonius Marcellus and Balonius Severus.[6] Balonius Severus, named in a late first- or early second-century inscription from Saguntum, along with Balonius Marcellus and Balonius marcianus.[6] Marcus Ballonius M. f. Paullus, a native of Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul, was a soldier in the tenth cohort of the Praetorian Guard, in the century of Fronto. He was buried at Rome in the first half of the second century. Balonia Helias, buried at Canusium in Apulia, in a second-century tomb dedicated by her brother, B. Priscus.[8] Marcus Balonius M. l. Lariscus, a freedman employed as a lanarius, or wool-worker, and coactiliarius, or felt maker, who dedicated a second-century tomb at Rome to his wife, Balonia Livittiana.[9] Balonius Priscus, dedicated a second-century tomb at Canusium to his sister, Balonia Helias.[8] Lucius Bellonius Marcus, made an offering to Mercury at a shrine located at the present site of Obrigheim, formerly part of Germania Superior, dating to the latter half of the second century, or the first half of the third.[10] Gaius Bolonius Maximus, buried at Emona in Pannonia Superior, in a tomb dedicated by his wife, Aurelia Bona, dating to the late second or early third century.[11] Belonius, dedicated a fourth-century tomb at Rome for his wife, Othonia Felicissima.[12] Undated Balonii Balonia, buried at Casinum in Campania, together with Balonius Pudens.[13] Aulus Balonius, mentioned in a fragmentary inscription from Rome, apparently concerning a freedman of his wife.[14] Gaius Balonius, named in an inscription from Rome, giving the date as the Kalends of May.[15] Balonia A. l. Chila, a freedwoman buried at Rome, along with Aulus Balonius Dio, Balonia Nice, and Quintus Roscius Philargurus.[16] Numerius Balonius Dardanus, probably the freedman of Numerius Balonius Faustus, who built a sepulchre at Rome for Dardanus and Balonia Secunda, his freedwoman.[17] Aulus Balonius A. l. Dio, a freedman buried at Rome, along with Balonia Chila, Balonia Nice, and Quintus Roscius Philargurus.[16] Marcus Bullonius Euhodus, an officer in the Legio I Minervia, named in an inscription from Rome.[18] Numerius Balonius Faustus, built a tomb at Rome for his freedwoman, Balonia Secunda, and Numerius Balonius Dardanus, probably his freedman.[17] Balonia Liberalis, a young woman buried at Rome, aged twenty-two years, five months, and twenty-seven days, with a monument dedicated by her mother, Balonia Severa.[19] Balonia Marcia, buried at Nemausus in Gallia Narbonensis.[20] Balonia A. l. Nice, a freedwoman buried at Rome, along with Aulus Balonius Dio, Balonia Chila, and Quintus Roscius Philargurus.[16] Balonia Philematio, buried at Casinum.[21] Balonius Pudens, buried at Casinum, along with Balonia.[13] Balonia N. l. Secunda, the freedwoman of Numerius Balonius Faustus, was buried at Rome, aged twenty-six, in a tomb built by her former master, along with Numerius Balonius Dardanus, probably the freedman of Faustus.[17] Balonia Severa, dedicated a tomb at Rome to her daughter, Balonia Liberalis.[19] Lucius Bullonius Severus, made an offering to a local divinity at Apta Julia in Gallia Narbonensis.[22] Gnaeus Balonius Cn. l. Theogenes, a freedman buried at Rome, along with his fellow freedman, Publius Servilius Agatho, and Servilia Musa.[23] See also List of Roman gentes References  Chase, pp. 118, 119.  CIL X, 3789.  AE 1993, 233.  AE 2004, 430.  AIJ, 217.  CIL II, 3841.  CIL VI, 2739.  AE 1972, 122.  CIL VI, 9494.  CIL XIII, 6488.  ILJug, ii. 1077.  ICUR vii. 19146.  CIL X, 5219.  CIL VI, 9134.  CIL VI, 8228.  CIL VI, 38088a.  CIL VI, 13506.  CIL VI, 578.  CIL VI, 13508.  CIL XII, 3466.  CIL X, 5192.  CIL XII, 1094.  CIL VI, 13507. Bibliography Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romanae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores (Christian Inscriptions from Rome of the First Seven Centuries, abbreviated ICUR), Vatican Library, Rome (1857–1861, 1888). René Cagnat et alii, L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy, abbreviated AE), Presses Universitaires de France (1888–present). George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). Viktor Hoffiller and Balduin Saria, Antike Inschriften aus Jugoslawien (Ancient Inscriptions from Yugoslavia, abbreviated AIJ), vol. 1: Noricum und Pannonia Superior, Zagreb (1938). Anna and Jaroslav Šašel, Inscriptiones Latinae quae in Iugoslavia inter annos MCMXL et MCMLX repertae et editae sunt (Inscriptions from Yugoslavia Found and Published between 1940 and 1960, abbreviated ILJug), Ljubljana (1963–1986). Category: Roman gentes Of the Balonii or Belonii Grice's and Speranza's favourite is the one that made an offering to MERCURIO, since this is a rare case where a specific VERY ROMAN minor god is mentioned -- and it's implicaturally defeasible. "I made an offering to Mercurio." We can imagine a six-move conversation on returning to his house or tent in Obrigheim, and his son asking for details and what to expect. and (II) you can offer your second-best Grice/Speranza fit – thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Balonio – Ossia: Grice e Balonio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Balonio. This is a lovely case—because the Balonius at Obrigheim (offering to Mercury) gives you a perfect religious implicature that is neither trivial nor fully determinate. Let me give you:  (I) the six‑move dialogue (with the son) (II) the Grice/Speranza reading (III) a second‑best fit from the gens    I. Conversatio I — Balonius and his son (Mercury offering)  Scene: returning to camp/home from the shrine  FILIVS (1) “Pater, quid egisti apud fanum?” (Father, what did you do at the shrine?)  BALONIVS (2) “Mercurio votum solvi et donum dedi.” (I paid a vow to Mercury and gave an offering.)  FILIVS (3) “Ergo bene nobis erit? lucrum exspectemus?” (So things will go well for us? Should we expect gain?)  BALONIVS (4) “Mercurius favet negotiis et itineri.” (Mercury favours trade and travel.)  FILIVS (5) “Igitur securi sumus?” (Then we are safe?)  BALONIVS (6) “Feci quod oportet; reliqua dii norunt.” (I have done what was fitting; the rest the gods know.)  +> that making an offering to Mercury suggests—but does not guarantee—success, profit, or safe passage, and therefore should not be taken as a firm prediction   II. Why this is a perfect Grice/Speranza case Your instinct is exactly right.  Explicit content  “I made an offering to Mercury”   Hearer’s natural inference (son)  Mercury = god of:  trade profit journeys     therefore:  “We will prosper / be safe”   But speaker’s stance Balonius corrects:  he does not deny the inference but weakens it:   “I did what was proper; the rest is uncertain”   Gricean structure  maxim of Relation: → relevant to success maxim of Quantity: → leaves outcome under-specified    Result:  defeasible religious implicature    Ultra‑formula  Votum factum est → forsitan prosperitas    III. Second-best fit: Ballonius Paullus (Praetorian soldier) A surprisingly good candidate.  The case  soldier in the Praetorian Guard buried at Rome inscriptional identity: → highly structured, institutional   Why Gricean? Because being:  “Praetorian”  implicates:  loyalty proximity to power honour   But:  inscription only states: → rank, unit, burial   So:  the title does implicature work beyond what is said   Mini‑dialogue AMICVS (1) “Paulle, miles es tantum?” (Paullus, are you merely a soldier?)  PAVLLVS (2) “Praetorianus sum.” (I am a Praetorian.)  AMICVS (3) “Ergo propius ad imperium stas?” (Then you stand closer to power?)  PAVLLVS (4) “Nomen hoc plus dicit quam verba mea.” (This name says more than my words.)  +> that institutional titles implicitly convey prestige and political proximity beyond their literal meaning   IV. Final Speranzian synthesis  In the Balonius who offers to Mercury, meaning arises from the culturally shared expectation that divine favor accompanies ritual action, yet remains defeasible because the outcome is left to the gods; while in the Praetorian Balonius, a bare title generates implications of status and proximity to power that exceed explicit statement, showing how both religion and social rank operate through controlled implicature rather than direct assertion.    Ultra‑compact pair  Mercurius: votum → spes (sed non certitudo) Praetorianus: nomen → honos implicatus    Answer  Best: Balonius who offers to Mercury → paradigmatic defeasible religious implicature Second-best: Praetorian Ballonius Paullus → status conveyed by naming beyond explicit content   If you like, we can next compare Mercury-offering implicatures with Christian prayer inscriptions, where the implicature becomes much stronger (and less defeasible).

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Balonio – Ossia: Grice e Balonio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Balonio. Second-best fit: Ballonius Paullus (Praetorian soldier) A surprisingly good candidate.  The case  soldier in the Praetorian Guard buried at Rome inscriptional identity: → highly structured, institutional   Why Gricean? Because being:  “Praetorian”  implicates:  loyalty proximity to power honour   But:  inscription only states: → rank, unit, burial   So:  the title does implicature work beyond what is said   Mini‑dialogue AMICVS (1) “Paulle, miles es tantum?” (Paullus, are you merely a soldier?)  PAVLLVS (2) “Praetorianus sum.” (I am a Praetorian.)  AMICVS (3) “Ergo propius ad imperium stas?” (Then you stand closer to power?)  PAVLLVS (4) “Nomen hoc plus dicit quam verba mea.” (This name says more than my words.)  +> that institutional titles implicitly convey prestige and political proximity beyond their literal meaning   

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Balvenzo – Ossia: Grice e Balvenzo -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Balvenzo. The Balvenzi are Roman family during the late Republic. It is known chiefly from a single individual, Titus B., a primus pilus in the command of Quintus Titurius Sabinus in Gaul. He was severely wounded in the attack made by Ambiorix in 54 B.C.[1][2]  See also List of Roman gentes Footnotes  Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, v. 35.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, Editor.  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William, ed. (1870). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)    GENS This article about Roman gentes is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information.  Categories: Roman gentesRoman gentes stubs I guess for this gens, the conversation will concern the 'primum pilus' so not to make it macabre we can reconstruct the dialogue when Titurio makes him a pilus. "Just a pilus?" "Primum pilus" -- and you can editorialise on that – Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Balvenzo – Ossia: Grice e Balvenzo -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Balvenzo. Lovely—this is exactly the kind of rank-inference vignette that works beautifully for Grice/Speranza: a tiny lexical contrast (“pilus” / “primus pilus”) carrying a massive implicature. Let me give you:  (I) the dialogue (II) the editorial note on primus pilus (III) the Gricean unpacking    I. Conversatio: Titurius and Balvenzius (appointment)  TITVRIVS (1) “Balvenzi, te pilum facio.” (Balvenzius, I make you a pilus.)  BALVENZIVS (2) “Pilus tantum?” (A mere pilus?)  TITVRIVS (3) “Non pilus—primum pilum.” (Not a pilus—the first pilus.)  BALVENZIVS (4) “Nomen idem sonat; sed honos longe maior est.” (The name sounds the same; but the honour is far greater.)  +> that the addition of “primus” transforms what appears to be a minor promotion into one of the highest and most prestigious centurionate ranks, far exceeding what the hearer initially assumed   II. Editorial note: what is primus pilus? This is where your intuition is exactly right. In the Roman legion:   a pilus (centurion of the first cohort) → already elite   the primus pilus: → chief centurion of the entire legion    Functional difference                  TermMeaningpiluscenturion (first cohort)primus pilussenior centurion, highest rank   So:  the distinction is lexically minimal, structurally maximal  Exactly the kind of thing Grice would delight in.   III. Grice/Speranza analysis 1. The misunderstanding Balvenzius hears:  “pilus” → implicates:  promotion, but within normal scale     2. The correction Titurius says:  “primum pilum”   3. Gricean mechanism The conversation turns on: Maxim of Quantity  initial utterance: → under-informative (“pilus”) corrected utterance: → fully specified distinction   4. The implicature collapse Balvenzius’ first inference:  “a respectable but ordinary promotion”  is replaced by:  “highest centurionate dignity”    So:  a scalar implicature is triggered and then revised    IV. Why this is a perfect Speranzian case You get:  minimal phonetic difference maximal institutional shift real conversational correction   Latin crystallisation  Parva additio—magna dignitas.    V. Final Speranzian synthesis  In the distinction between pilus and primus pilus, a minimal addition in expression produces a substantial augmentation of meaning, for the hearer initially draws an ordinary inference from the unqualified term, only to have it corrected by the added modifier; and thus the exchange illustrates how ranks, like meanings, are structured not by substance alone but by the precision with which they are linguistically marked.    Ultra‑compact  “Pilus” dicitur—“princeps centurionum” intellegitur.    Answer  Dialogue captures: → under‑specification → correction → enriched implicature Best aspect: → tiny lexical shift carries massive social meaning   If you like, we can now contrast this with a case where the modifier reduces honour (e.g. quasi / velut)—the opposite Gricean movement.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Banfi – Ossia: Grice e Banfi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale d’Eurialo -- Niso; ovvero, la tradizione di VICO. Antonio Banfi (Vimercate, Monza, Lombardia):  la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale d’Eurialo -- Niso; ovvero, la tradizione di VICO. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes implicature a specifically rational, interactional phenomenon: what a speaker means beyond what is said is recoverable because participants treat talk as cooperative, purposive, and norm-governed, so that an “extra” content is warranted only insofar as it can be worked out as the best rational explanation of why that utterance was produced in that context. Banfi (1886–1957), by contrast, comes to “ragione conversazionale” less from the micro-mechanics of utterance interpretation and more from a broad, anti-dogmatic “critical rationalism” (Principi di una teoria della ragione, 1926) that treats reason as a historically situated, methodologically self-correcting practice spanning knowledge, culture, and praxis; accordingly, interpretation for Banfi is not merely decoding speaker-intention under conversational maxims but a layered activity (exegesis, interpretation, theory of interpretation) whose point is inseparable from commitment, care, and action—hence the passage’s insistence that without a practical stake “why interpret?” and its linking of interpretive performance to heroic praxis (Euryalus and Nisus) and to a Vichian sense of tradition as something made and remade by human agents in history. Where Grice’s “reason” in conversation is largely a local rationality that licenses calculable implicatures in a talk exchange, Banfi’s rationality is programmatically wider: it legitimates interpretive moves by situating them within the dynamics of culture, historical understanding, and collective life, so that what is “implied” can look less like a maxim-driven inference from a single utterance and more like a historically mediated uptake of meaning within a shared tradition (Vico’s world of institutions, common sense, and civic imagination). Put sharply, Grice explains how we responsibly get from saying to meaning in the moment; Banfi tends to ask how interpretive reason itself is possible, why it matters, and how it becomes a form of praxis—so “conversational implicature” becomes, in a Banfi-inflected key, not only a rational inference but also a culturally and ethically loaded act of participation in the life of reason. Grice: “What I like about B. is that he is more ‘important’ than it seems, at least to Italians! He has written bunches, but my favourite are two: his ‘l’interpretazione’ B. draws a distinction between ‘esegesi,’ ‘interpretazione’ and ‘TEORIA dell’interpretazione,’ in a slightly non-Griceian use of ‘teoria,’ and eroe e prassi,’ for indeed this second strand is the base for the former. Unless you CARE, why interpret, which is indeed, a performance?!” Comunista. Sostene un razionalismo anti-dogmatico in grado di attraversare i vari settori dell'animo umano, liberale combaciano un illuminismo razionale tecnico-scientifico. Studia con COTTI a Milano sotto NOVATI,  su BARBERINO, ZUCCANTE e MARTINETTI, sulla CONTINGENZA. Conosce il socialista CAFFI. il partito. Corti Pozzi Anceschi Rossanda Bucalossi Ferrari, Gisondi. Eurialo e Niso; ovvero, la tradizione VICO; spirito vitale storiografia storia della filosofia ragione conversazione riticismo idealismo personalismo l’interpersonale sovranità  stato italiano portico romano enea antonino acerrima indago diritto criminale critica. G.: So here we are, browsing a dissertation on Francesco da Barberino which may or may not exist in a form fit for human consultation. S.: Like most dissertations, then. G.: Precisely. They are written to be examined, not necessarily to be found. S.: And Banfi wrote on Barberino? G.: Yes. A very young Banfi, and that is part of the charm. Before one becomes a philosopher of reason, interpretation, and civilisation, one may begin with a medieval notary who writes in two languages and too many registers. S.: You make that sound like an accusation. G.: In England it would be. In Italy it can be a qualification. S.: Why Barberino at all? Why not Dante directly, if one wants grandeur? G.: Because a philosopher with any self-respect does not begin with the most obvious mountain. He chooses the ridge from which one may see the mountain properly. S.: So Barberino is the ridge? G.: Exactly. Near enough to Dante to matter, unlike the entirely minor; not so engulfed by Dante as to make original work impossible. S.: And what is Barberino good for? G.: For several things at once, which is why Novati would have approved and why Banfi, even as a future philosopher, could take him seriously. Barberino sits at the crossroads of Latin and Tuscan, legal and literary culture, didactic writing, manuscript self-presentation, moral instruction, and that delicious pre-humanistic habit of writing as if one were already one’s own commentator. S.: That sounds exhausting. G.: Which is why I read him at night. S.: To put yourself to sleep? G.: To be sent to sleep by civilisation, which is a superior method. S.: Cruel. G.: Accurate. Barberino is not the Commedia. But then neither is most of Europe. S.: You said there were “three pieces or four or two.” G.: Because Barberino is the sort of author whose oeuvre resists simple dinner-party arithmetic. The best-known works are Reggimento e costumi di donna and Documenti d’amore, and around them circle Latin materials, glossing habits, and textual complications enough to keep a dissertation honest. S.: So why did he never rise to Dante’s height? G.: Because history is unjust in regular ways. Dante has architecture, cosmology, theological nerve, dramatic compression, and the reckless advantage of genius. Barberino has learning, design, moral texture, bilingual dexterity, and the disadvantage of good sense. S.: Good sense is fatal to immortality? G.: Usually. Posterity likes visionaries and monsters. Notaries must settle for scholarship. S.: He was a notary, then? G.: And jurist, and man of letters, and a useful witness to the traffic between Latin culture and vernacular self-assertion. S.: Which is where Banfi comes in? G.: Exactly. Banfi, even before becoming recognisably Banfi, already chooses a figure who embodies the problem of language as culture rather than merely as grammar. S.: We are back, then, to Tuscan versus Latin. G.: We never left it. S.: Explain it as if I were from Reading. G.: Worse things happen. Latin remained the language of prestige, law, commentary, abstraction, inherited authority. Tuscan and the vernaculars rose as media of lived expression, moral instruction, and eventually literary seriousness. Barberino inhabits the tension rather than solving it. S.: Unlike Dante? G.: Dante dramatizes and transcends the tension. Barberino manages it, which is a less glorious but more socially revealing accomplishment. S.: And Oxford had the same problem? G.: In its own way, yes. We kept Latin much too long, as a badge of seriousness. Then came English, but not any English one happened to hear in the street. S.: You mean the old point about standards. G.: Precisely. Oxford replaces Latin with English and then behaves as if English had always meant Oxford English, or at least English under Oxford supervision. S.: Whereas Italy had to choose not merely vernacular over Latin, but one vernacular over others. G.: And that is the philosophically richer drama. Bologna, though in Emilia, did not simply elevate Emilian. Learned seriousness flowed toward Tuscan. One might say Italy invented national language by selective provincialism. S.: You sound admiring. G.: I am. England was politically lucky and linguistically lazy. Italy had to think about the matter. S.: Chaucer, then? Is he your English Barberino? G.: Not exactly. Chaucer is too large, too funny, too socially various, too much his own weather. But as an English comparison he is useful. S.: Because of French? G.: Because of French and Latin and English. Chaucer’s problem is not Tuscan versus Latin, naturally, but English emerging in a world where French still carries prestige and Latin still carries authority. S.: So England too had its trilingual embarrassment. G.: Indeed. Only ours is less elegant because we are barbarians with archives. S.: And Chaucer knew Dante? G.: Very likely in some measure, certainly the Italian atmosphere and probably more than atmosphere. But the point here is that Barberino is near Dante historically and culturally in a way useful to Banfi: one can study the vernacularisation of serious discourse without beginning from the fully monumental case. S.: Did Barberino interact with Dante? G.: There are historical proximities and possible intersections, and certainly a shared Florentine and Tuscan horizon, but the interest for Banfi is less gossip than intellectual ecology. S.: Pity. I like gossip. G.: Which is why I ration it. S.: So a young philosopher in Milan chooses Barberino under Novati. Why is that especially good? G.: Because it shows that philosophy need not begin with abstract systems. One can begin with a philological object that already contains questions of language, norm, authority, moral pedagogy, and the formation of culture. S.: You mean Banfi was already becoming Banfi by way of medieval literature. G.: Exactly. The future philosopher of reason begins with a writer whose mixed textual life teaches that culture is layered, mediated, interpreted, and never merely given. S.: And Milano was just starting, as you say. G.: The institutional setting matters. Milan’s academic world was not Oxford or Cambridge with their old theatrical confidence. It was a newer, more self-conscious intellectual environment, which perhaps made such a topic feel less “merely literary” and more genuinely foundational. S.: Whereas in England one would have shoved Barberino into philology and left him there. G.: With a note of approval and a total failure of philosophical imagination. S.: Did Oxford have anybody like Barberino? G.: Not exactly in the same configuration. England has many clerks, moralists, compilers, and bilingual mediators, but Barberino’s precise mixture of juristic culture, vernacular didacticism, Latin framing, and manuscript self-consciousness is rather Italian. S.: So you retreat to Chaucer. G.: I advance to Chaucer. Chaucer is the nearest large comparison because he too writes in an emerging vernacular under the pressure of older prestige languages. S.: But Chaucer won. G.: As much as one can win in Middle English. He won because English eventually won with him. Barberino is more interesting in defeat. S.: Defeat again. G.: Or lesser canonisation, if you insist on tact. S.: What exactly did Barberino write that is so valuable? G.: The Documenti d’amore are a splendid example of mixed literary and didactic ambition, vernacular verse with Latin apparatus, moral and social instruction embedded in a framework that assumes commentary belongs with composition. S.: He comments on himself? G.: Almost. Or at least writes as if gloss and text were natural companions. It is a very un-English confidence. S.: England distrusts gloss? G.: England distrusts anything that looks too much like admitting one has read. S.: And Reggimento e costumi di donna? G.: Another didactic text, socially prescriptive, morally programmatic, and full of evidence about how vernacular discourse can carry serious normative content without ceasing to be socially situated. S.: You are making didactic literature sound almost noble. G.: It often is, if one is not bullied by later taste. S.: Yet still he never becomes Dante. G.: Nor does anyone by trying. Dante is not the standard by which all are to be condemned. S.: Banfi would say that? G.: I think young Banfi would at least imply it. To choose Barberino for a laurea is already to resist the bad habit of making literary history a queue behind genius. S.: And Novati encouraged this sort of thing? G.: Very much the sort of philologist who would see value in an author situated at intersections rather than peaks. S.: So Banfi at twenty-two is doing serious medieval philology? G.: Under a formidable supervisor, yes. And that matters. It means philosophy in Italy, or at least Banfi’s philosophy, begins not in thin air but in textual discipline. S.: While we English begin by misdescribing our own language and then calling it analysis. G.: You do learn quickly. S.: Then tell me about the dissertation itself, imaginary though it may be. G.: I imagine it as earnest, over-informed in the good way, mildly too respectful, and already straining toward larger questions than the title officially permits. S.: Such as? G.: Such as why Barberino matters for the history of vernacular seriousness; why Tuscan rises not merely as speech but as cultural claim; why Latin remains indispensable even where the vernacular is ascendant; and why a writer may be central to a transition without being central to the later canon. S.: That already sounds like philosophy of culture. G.: Exactly. Which is why Banfi is a philosopher even before he starts sounding like one. S.: And England had no exact parallel figure? G.: Not one cleanly. Chaucer is too major and too unlike Barberino in literary effect. Gower perhaps gives some of the multilingual dignity. Hoccleve some bureaucratic textuality. But none is simply Barberino in English costume. S.: Perhaps that is just as well. G.: England would have given him a worse accent. S.: And how would G. justify reading Barberino every night? G.: Because he is the sort of writer one reads not for transport but for sediment. S.: Sediment? G.: The layers of a culture becoming self-aware in language. Reading him is like watching serious prose and verse negotiate jurisdiction. S.: That would put anyone to sleep. G.: Not anyone. Only those insufficiently trained in delight. S.: So Barberino is delightful now? G.: In the dry way that glossed moral instruction can be delightful when one no longer expects everything to be sublime. S.: That is almost a confession of defeat. G.: It is a confession of maturity. S.: And what would Oxford make of him? G.: Oxford would admire the manuscript tradition, assign him to a specialist, compare him to nobody the public has heard of, and continue pretending that philosophy begins elsewhere. S.: Which Banfi helpfully disproves. G.: Precisely. A philosopher begins with Barberino and thereby reminds us that language, culture, and thought were historically entangled before departments untangled them for administrative purposes. S.: Then the real topic is not Barberino but the right to treat Barberino philosophically. G.: Very good. That is exactly the point. S.: And the punchline? G.: Dante takes you to heaven, hell, and the stars. Barberino takes you to bed with a gloss. At my age, the second is often more restful.Grice: Antonio, dimmi, quando si parla di interpretazione, è più importante essere un esegeta o avere una teoria pronta nel taschino? Banfi: Grice, secondo me è meglio essere entrambi! Se hai solo la teoria, rischi di restare a digiuno al banchetto dell’interpretazione. Se sei solo esegeta, potresti perderti nel sugo! Grice: E per Eurialo e Niso—preferirebbero una performance eroica o una teoria razionale per spiegare le loro avventure? Banfi: Ah, Grice, gli eroi hanno bisogno di un po’ di teoria per capire perché corrono nella notte, ma la vera tradizione sta nel prendersi cura di interpretare ogni passo—altrimenti ti ritrovi a Milano con solo il razionalismo a scaldarti! . Banfi, Antonio (1908). Barberino – sotto Novati. Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia, Regia Accameia Scientifico-Literaria, Milano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Banzio – Ossia: Grice e Banzio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Banzio. The Banzii are a Roman family during the time of the Republic. It is known chiefly from a single member, Lucius B.. He was a native of Nola in Campania, and served in the Roman army at the Battle of Cannae. B. was wounded and captured by Hannibal, but was treated kindly and set free. He then hoped to convince his city to surrender, but was dissuaded from this action by Marcus CLAUDIO Marcellus, the Roman commander. See also List of Roman gentes  References  Titus Livius, Ab Urbe Condita, xxiii. 15.  Plutarchus, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Marcellus, 10 ff.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, Editor.  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William, ed. (1870). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)    GENS                            This article about Roman gentes is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information.  Categories: Roman gentesRoman gentes stubs

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Banzio – Ossia: Grice e Banzio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Banzio. It seems this Banzio merits TWO conversations -- the first with interpreter and Annibale -- the conditions why he is set free -- the second, his conversation with Claudio about the fate of Nola and Claudio's response. Thanks Excellent—this is one of the richest “conversion” scenes in Livy/Plutarch, and it lends itself perfectly to your two‑stage conversational reconstruction:  (I) Hannibal → Bantius (via interpreter): release as political speech‑act (II) Bantius → Marcellus: attempted betrayal, then reversal  Let me give you both in clean four‑move Latin dialogues, with the Gricean implicatures.   I. Conversatio I — Hannibal and Bantius (per interpretem)  Historical basis:  Bantius wounded at Cannae Hannibal admires him, spares him, gives gifts and friendship [lexundria.com]   Dialogus INTERPRES (1) “Hannibal dixit te fortissimum fuisse et vitam tibi donat.” (Hannibal says you were most brave and grants you your life.)  BANTIVS (2) “Cur hostis mihi vitam dat?” (Why does an enemy give me my life?)  INTERPRES (3) “Te amicum vult et Nolam ad se adiungere sperat.” (He wishes you as a friend and hopes you will bring Nola over to him.)  BANTIVS (4) “Beneficium accipio—sed quid exspectetur intellego.” (I accept the kindness—but I understand what is expected.)  +> that Hannibal’s mercy is not disinterested generosity but a calculated attempt to secure political influence through obligation   Comment This is a perfect case of:  gift → obligation implicature  Hannibal does not explicitly say:  “betray Nola”  but:  the entire act of clemency means that    II. Conversatio II — Bantius and Marcellus (Nola)  Historical basis:  Bantius initially favours defection Marcellus wins him back by praise and gifts [lexundria.com]   Dialogus BANTIVS (1) “Claudio, civitas mea dubitat et ad Poenos inclinatur.” (Marcellus, my city wavers and inclines toward the Carthaginians.)  MARCELLVS (2) “Tu es ille Bantius qui pro Romano consule vulnera tulit?” (Are you that Bantius who bore wounds for a Roman consul?)  BANTIVS (3) “Ego sum—sed beneficia Hannibalis me movent.” (I am—but Hannibal’s kindness moves me.)  MARCELLVS (4) “Quae tua sunt ostendunt te iam elegisse.” (What you bear upon yourself shows you have already chosen.)  +> that Bantius’ true allegiance is determined not by recent benefits received, but by his past actions and identity as already recognized by others   Comment Marcellus’ strategy is subtle:  he does not argue directly instead: → re-describes Bantius’ identity   He says, in effect:  “you are already the kind of man who belongs with us”    III. Why this is such a strong Speranzian double case You get two different implicature structures:  1. Hannibal’s side  explicit: → “I spare you” implicature: → “you owe me political loyalty”   2. Marcellus’ side  explicit: → “you are that Bantius…” implicature: → “you must act consistently with that identity”    These are:                  StrategyMechanismHannibalobligation from giftMarcellusobligation from self‑conception   Final Speranzian synthesis  In Bantius, Hannibal seeks to bind a man through the implicature of benefaction, converting mercy into political expectation, while Marcellus reverses the same movement by appealing to Bantius’ own past, so that action is governed not by recent advantage but by the identity already attributed to him; and thus the episode displays two competing forms of implicature, one projecting obligation forward from a gift, the other recalling it backward from a life.    Ultra‑compact pair  Hannibal: beneficium dat → officium postulat Marcellus: facta praeterita → officium definiunt    Answer  Two dialogues constructed from Livy/Plutarch First: mercy as strategic implicature Second: identity as corrective implicature   If you like, we can now build a τρίτον (third) dialogue where the people of Nola react—collective implicature rather than individual.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Baratono – Ossia: Grice e Baratono: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale stilistica.  Adelchi Baratono (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale stilistica. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rationally controllable, hearer-recoverable surplus over what is said: speakers exploit cooperative norms (relevance, sufficiency, sincerity, perspicuity) and hearers infer speaker-intended content by publicly checkable reasoning, so “style” matters only insofar as it reliably guides inference to intention. Baratono (1875–1947), by contrast, approaches “implicature” through a philosophically ambitious stylistics and psychology of the sensible: trained in a milieu shaped by sociological and psychological interests (including a Wundt-influenced “psychology of peoples” in his early phase, per standard biographical accounts) and later developing a “sensist” aesthetics that links the elementary psychic fact to judgment and volition, he treats linguistic form as the site where sensibility, value, and collective mentality sediment into expressive pattern—so that what is implied is often carried by tonal, evaluative, and affective organization rather than by a maxim-governed calculus alone. The upshot is a productive tension: Grice explains how implication is licensed by general rational constraints internal to conversation, whereas Baratono’s “stilistica” tends to explain how implication is generated by the shaping powers of the sensible (and of communal-historical forms of feeling) that make certain inferences feel natural, attractive, or obligatory; in your passage’s idiom, Grice asks whether one can infer responsibly without relying on aesthetic “color,” while Baratono replies that the elementary psychic-material of language—desire, credibility, and the will’s participation in meaning—already structures what counts as an intelligible, persuasive, and thus inferable conversational move. Grice: “I like B. – especially his ‘stilistica italiana. If I were to offer an English stylistics I would not count as a philosopher, but that’s because ‘English’ is spoken by more than Englishmen, while Italian ain’t! B. thinks he is a sensist alla Locke, which he possibly is. In the typical Italian way, instead of focusing on the classics – Roman philosophy – he reads sociology and psychology and comes up, in a typically Italian way, with a sintessi: la psicologia del popolo alla Wundt. If Austin puns on sense and sensibility, B. takes ‘sensibilia’ VERY sensibly as the basis for ‘aesthetics,’ seeing that ‘aesthetikos’ IS Ciceronian for ‘sensibile’ B. is Griceian in his search for what he calls the ‘elementary’. He applies ‘elementary’ to ‘fatto psichico’: judicativo e volitivo, both based on the ‘sensibile,’ or rather on desirability and credibility. His use of ‘sense’ does not quite fit the Oxonian ‘sense datum,’ since the will is involved in the sensibile, or, in his wording, it is the anima or psyche that searches for the corpus. The compound is something like the hylemorphism – the form is sensible – and the volitive (prattica) and judicative (teoretica) components of the soul operate on this.” Comunista e socialista. Studia a  Genova. Carrea, fascismo, Firenze, Turati. Schiavi. Inoltre per alcuni scritti del B., in Critica Sociale, vedi Critica Sociale, cur. Spinella, Caracciolo, Amaduzzi, Petronio, Milano, Indici, cur. Lanza. Oltre l'esposizione in Il mio paradosso, Spirito, idealismo Volpe, estetica romantica, Sciacca, Faggin, Il formalismo sensista di Assunto Bertin, Bontadini, attualismo problematicismo, Brescia, Talenti, A. B., Torino  (con bibl.). Stilistica, breviario di stilistica italiana, fatto psichico elementare, i fatti psichici eleentare, psicologia filosofica, illuminismo, implicatura luminaria, implicatura escataologica, politica ed etica, la filosofia al margine: gentile, croce, natura umana, esperienza, il mondo sensibile, estetica, il bello, il sublime, criticismo, assiologia, hume a Cremona e torino, spirito, animo, forma logica, l’eneide, riviera ligure. Grice: Adelchi, dimmi, se uno parla di stilistica italiana deve per forza essere filosofo o basta la sensibilità? Baratono: Grice, la sensibilità è la chiave, ma se ci metti un po’ di anima e giudizio, il risultato è come la focaccia ligure: gustoso e ben lievitato! Grice: Ma il sensibile, Adelchi, è davvero il punto di partenza o serve anche un po’ di volitività, magari una spolverata di desiderio? Baratono: Grice, se la volontà non c’è, la stilistica rimane in un cassetto! Io dico sempre: la filosofia stilistica si fa col cuore, ma anche con un pizzico di spirito socialista… e la Riviera ligure non guasta! Baratono, Adelchi (1897). Tesi di laurea sotto Asturaro – Facolta di Filosofia e Lettere, Genova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barba – Ossia: Grice e Barba: la ragione conversazionale e l’impliatura conversazionale – la scuola di Gallipoli – filosofia leccese – filosofia pugliese --  Emmanuele Barba (Gallipoli, Lecce, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’impliatura conversazionale – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, publicly tractable inference from what is said plus context under shared conversational norms (cooperation, relevance, adequate informativeness, etc.), so that “conversational reason” is basically the disciplined machinery by which hearers recover speaker-intended meaning beyond the literal sentence. Barba, by contrast, is best situated as a 19th-century Gallipoli-based physician-philosopher and civic intellectual (educated in Naples, trained in letters under Basilio Puoti, later active as teacher, administrator, and museum-founder) whose interests in Roman/Latin culture—especially epigraphic and antiquarian materials—model meaning less as an abstract inferential calculus and more as culturally sedimented inscription: Latin epigraphy and “Roman philosophy” become public, durable vehicles of shared understanding that work by presuming a community of readers, historical continuity, and local civic memory. Where Grice explains how a fleeting utterance can rationally generate implied content in real-time interaction, Barba’s “implicature” is naturally reimagined as what is carried by forms (inscriptions, mottos, proverbs, civic commemoration) whose force depends on tradition and communal uptake over time: the proverb, the motto, and the carved Latin formula function like slow-motion implicatures, inviting hearers to infer norms and attitudes from compact conventional wording within a known lifeworld. Your passage’s contrast between “Grecia Magna” and the “breath of fresh air” of Roman occupation fits this: Grice theorizes the general logic of inference in any language, while Barba’s outlook emphasizes how Latin public texts and Romanizing cultural practices stabilize what can be meant and mutually recognized in a specific polis; in short, Grice gives a universal pragmatics of rational intention-recognition, whereas Barba exemplifies a historically and civically grounded pragmatics in which meaning and implication are anchored in the material, educational, and communal infrastructures that make a “we” of interpreters possible in the first place. Grice: “I like Barba, but then I like Gallipoli – and he was born and died there, at Villa Barba. His main interest was Roman philosophy, which he studied at Naples! – The Roman occupation in Southern Italy brought ‘a breath of fresh air,’ as Barba has it, to the old “Grecia Magna” tradition --.” Grice: “Barba is very clear: ‘Epigrafia filosofica latina,’ o ‘epigrafia filosofica romana’ surely ain’t Grecian!” Conduce gli studi a Gallipoli, per poi trasferirsi a Napoli presso il zio, Tommaso Barba. Tommaso Barba e presidente della Gran Corte. Studia grammatica e materie letterarie nella scuola di Puoti. Si laurea in Filosofia. Studiare nel R. Collegio Cerusico e divenne professore di anatomia umana comparata. Insegna scienze e lettere al ginnasio di Gallipoli e fu sovrintendente scolastico ed Assessore delegato alla Pubblica Istruzione.  Fu arrestato ed esiliato a causa delle resistenze al governo. I membri dell'Associazione Democratica posero una scritta: "Nato dal popolo, Per il popolo si adoperò". A lui fu intitolato il Museo civico di Gallipoli.  Note  AnxaEmanuele Barba, su anxa. 21 aprile  13 ottobre ).  Scheda sul sito del Museo B.. Filosofi. Emanuele Barba. Barba. Keywords. epigrafia latina, iscrizione latina, iscrizione greco-romana, la iscrizione di Platone sulla porta dell’academia, ageometretos medeis eisito, Delville pittore belga (Libert), a Italia crea ‘L’ecole de Platon,’ per la Sorbonna.  I vasi di Barba – gemelli, fratelli siamesi, ecc. Monete romana, Gallipoli, colonia romana, ‘Proverbi e motti del popolo gallipolino” – poesie di Barba sulla morte del re d’Italia, risorgimento – esilato, carcere. Grice: Emmanuele, dimmi, quando a Gallipoli parlano di filosofia, preferiscono le epigrafi latine o le antiche iscrizioni greche? Barba: Grice, qui le epigrafi latine sono come il pane: quotidiane, ma se uno trova una scritta greca, la espone in salotto e invita tutti a discuterne! Grice: E con una villa così, avrai avuto più iscrizioni che monete romane! Ma ti chiedo, le gemelle filosofiche le preferisci unite o ciascuna per conto suo? Barba: Grice, gemelle unite, perché la filosofia, come i proverbi gallipolini, si comprende meglio in compagnia: da soli si rischia di finire in esilio, o peggio, in un museo! Barba, Emmanuele (1852). Proverbi e motti del popolo gallipolino. Gallipoli: Barba.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barbaro – Ossia: Grice e Barbaro: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale di Daniele.  Daniele Matteo Alvise Barbaro: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale di Daniele. Grice: “This can be confusing to Oxonians, althou we are familiar with the Hanover dynasty! Daniele B., a faithful nephew, commented on his uncle’s, Ermolao B.’s, ‘translation’ of Aristotle’s rhetoric – I shouldn’t even be saying this since it’s implicated in the title where Ermolao features as ‘interprete,’ and the ‘commentarium’ is due to Daniele. On top, Daniele wrote about ‘eloquenza,’ but his comments on his uncle’s vulgarization into latin of Aristotle’s vulgar-greek (koine) rhetorica – is perhaps more Griceian – since there is little conversational about Daniele B.’s ‘eloquenza,’ while the rhetoric (or ‘rettorica,’ as he prefers) is ALL about ‘dialettica’ and dialogue!” Prospettiva. Commentatore l’architettura di VITRUVIO. Camera oscura diaframma per migliorare la resa dell'immagine. Conosce di PALLADIO, TASSO e BEMPO. Commissiona a Palladio Villa B., Maser. Studia a Padova.  Partecipò a quali fondamenti sono fordate l'articelle de' maestri, o gl’esercitij de' giovanetti. Baſtiti, oDinardo, che tu sia giunto là, doue di giugnere desideravi, o che tu habbi veduto un circolo della tanto desiderata cognizione. Però che dalle parti dell'ANIMA incominciasti,o in esse sei ritornato, havendo il corso tuo sopra di natura, ci sopra di me fornito, come sopra due rote di quel carro, che per lo aperto cielo ti condurrà vittorioso, o trionfante. Archittetura, palladio, prospettiva, retorica, ordine cronologico: Ermolao Barbaro il vecchio – Ermolao Barbaro il giovane – Daniele Barbaro – Temisto, index nominorum, interpretazione e commentario di Barbaro sul commentario di Tesmisto sull’analitica posteriora – manoscritto, Bologna. Manoscritto delle ‘Adnotationes ad analyticos priores’ – commentario diretto su Aristoele e no via Temisto – Villa Barbaro – lezione privati di Barbaro sull’organon di Aristotele – analytica priora e analytica posteriora, non al studio GENERALE, ma alla sua propria villa!. Venezia, Veneto.  Grice: Daniele, dimmi, com’è che riesci a spiegare la retorica senza mai perderti tra i commentari dello zio Ermolao? Barbaro: Grice, basta una buona prospettiva! Se la dialettica non funziona, mi affido alla camera oscura: così almeno le idee vengono fuori nitide come Palladio voleva! Grice: E tu che hai commissionato una villa a Maser, forse la retorica la insegni meglio in salotto che in aula! Barbaro: Certo, Grice! Come diceva Tasso: se vuoi eloquenza, serve un buon architetto e qualche giovanotto curioso. La dialettica si costruisce… mattone dopo mattone! With the Barbari, Grice and Speranza meet the Italian genealogy at her best -- a dynasty -- usually the elder is not just the patriarch, but the inspirer. These were the days were doctrines were shaped at one's villa or palazzo --not at Bologna, or Oxford. So here 'Some like Barbaro, but Barbaro's MY man' doesn't work -- it's a trilemma, rather. What is most admirable in Speranza’s treatment of the Barbari is the genealogical intelligence with which he lets a philosophical dynasty appear as a dynasty, and not as a mere sequence of bearers of the same surname. Here the old Griceian formula, some like Barbaro, but Barbaro is my man, must indeed fail, because the case is no longer binary but trilemmatic, and the very failure is instructive. In families like this, the elder is not only predecessor but inspirer, and doctrine is formed as much in villas, palazzi, embassies, and private lessons as in any public schoolroom at Bologna or Oxford. Speranza understands that perfectly. He restores the domestic and dynastic setting in which interpretation, rhetoric, eloquence, commentary, and pedagogy passed through kinship before they passed into institutions. That is why the three Barbari must remain distinct while also being legible as members of one intellectual house: not a blur, but a lineage. Grice and Speranza thus meet Italian genealogy at its best, where family itself becomes a medium of philosophical transmission, and where the reader is invited to see that influence may run uncle to nephew, elder to younger, private lecture to public text, before it ever hardens into a doctrine with a school-name.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barbaro – Ossia: Grice e Barbaro:la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura convresazionale del vecchio.  Ermolao Barbaro il vecchio:la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura convresazionale del vecchio. Grice: “As much as Speranza LOVES Daniele B., I prefer Ermolao B.; after all, he was his uncle – I mean, Ermolao was Daniele’s uncle – and therefore HE taught HIM; I mean, Ermolao, as a good philosophical uncle, taught the ‘minor’ (literally, since he was his junior) Barbaro.”  "Some like B., but B.s MY man." Umanista. Studia a Padova. Orationes contra poetas. Epistolae. Edizione critica a cura di Giorgio Ronconi.Firenze: Sansoni, Facolta di Magistero dell'Universita di Padova Ermolao Barbaro il Vecchio. Aesopi Fabulae. A cura di Cristina Cocco. Genova: D. AR.FI.CL.ET., Trad. italiana a fronte Hermolao Barbaro seniore interprete. Aesopi fabulae. A cura di Cristina Cocco, Firenze: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, Il ritorno dei classici nell'umanesimo. Edizione nazionale delle traduzioni dei testi greci in eta umanistica e rinascimentale. Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Firenze, Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri, ed. Barbera-Bianchi, Firenze, Pio Paschini. Bigi. Eloquenza, Venezia, Veneto.  Grice: Ermolao, dimmi, ti capita mai che qualche poeta si offenda quando leggi le tue “Orationes contro poetas”? Barbaro: Grice, sai, i poeti sono come le galline: fanno rumore quando perdi un uovo, ma poi dimenticano tutto alla prima epistola. A Padova ormai mi conoscono! Grice: Allora, tra una favola di Esopo e una traduzione dal greco, ti rimane il tempo per insegnare a Daniele qualche trucco dell’eloquenza? Barbaro: Certo! Gli dico sempre: “Se vuoi convincere qualcuno, cita Esopo. Se non basta, aggiungi una battuta veneziana. E se ancora non funziona, scrivi una lettera a Firenze: lì capiranno!”

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barbaro – Ossia: Grice e Barbaro: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazinale del giovane.  Ermolao Barbaro il giovane: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazinale del giovane. Grice: “Very good.”, ermolao – the younger – il giovane, non il vecchio. Speranza likes Ermolao B. the Younger, but Ermolao B. The Elder is MY man." Umanista. Studia a Verona sotto BOSSO e a Roma sotto Leto e Gaza. Insegna, come Grice, Austin, and Hare, la Nicomachea di Aristotele, mettendo in guardia i suoi studenti dalle traduzioni in latino di Aristotele e predicando il ritorno alla traduzione diretta dal greco, proprio come face lui. Sono infatti di quegli anni i commentari all'Etica e alla Politica e la traduzione della Retorica. Abbandonato l'insegnamento  accompagna nuovamente il padre in missione diplomatica a Roma. E promosso senatore della Repubblica di Venezia e ma stavolta in veste ufficiale, si reca a Milano con il padre per una nuova ambasceria. Il primo incarico diplomatico arriva quando, insieme a Trevisano, rappresenta a Bruges la Serenissima in occasione dei festeggiamenti per l'incoronazione a ‘re dei romani’ di Massimiliano d'Asburgo e nell'occasione fu investito cavaliere. Dopo un'esperienza come savio di terraferma, e finalmente nominato ambasciatore residente a Milano dove si accredita e rimane in carica. Venne creato cardinale in pectore d’Innocenzo VIII nel concistoro, ma non venne mai pubblicato. L'ottima gestione della legazione veneziana a Milano, in tempi davvero turbolenti come quelli della reggenza di Ludovico il Moro, gli vale un anno dopo la nomina ad ambasciatore a Roma alla corte d’Innocenzo VIII. Ed e qui che avvenne la catastrofe.  Il Bruno Figliuolo, Il Diplomatico E Il Trattatista: Ermolao Barbaro Ambasciatore Della Serenissima, Napoli, Guida Editori Antonino Poppi, Ricerche sulla teologia e la scienza nella scuola padovana. Bigi. Il celibato, PICO, POLIZIANO, comenta la retorica, commenta l’etica nicomachea, comenta a politica, retorica ed eloquenza. Venezia, Veneto.  Grice: Ermolao, dimmi, preferisci insegnare Aristotele in greco o in latino? Io avrei paura che qualche studente si perda tra le traduzioni! Barbaro: Grice, il latino va bene per le feste, ma la saggezza si trova nel greco – almeno non rischiamo che Aristotele diventi una barzelletta! Grice: Hai ragione! D’altronde, se Platone ha scritto sulla porta “vietato ai non geometri”, forse anche Aristotele avrebbe gradito qualche professore meno diplomatico. Barbaro: Eh, Grice, tra una missione a Roma e una traduzione, almeno ci resta il tempo per fare una battuta… e magari insegnare la Nicomachea senza perderci tra gli ambasciatori!

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barbazio – Ossia: Grice e Barbazio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Barbazio. The Barbazi are a family at Ancient Rome. The only member of this gens mentioned in history is Marcus B. Philippus, a runaway slave who became a friend of Giulio Caesar, and subsequently obtains the praetorship under Marcus Antonop. Others are known from inscriptions.  “B.” belongs to a class of gentilicia formed from cognomina ending in -atus. The surname Barbatus, from which the nomen is derived, originally referred to someone with a beard. The B. used several common praenomina, of which the most frequent was Marcus. Other Barbatii were named Lucius, Publius, Quintus, and Titus.  Publius Barbatius M. l., a freedman named in an inscription from Rome, dating from the early first century BC. Publius Barbatius L. l. Philotaerus, a freedman buried at Canusium in Apulia, in a tomb dating from the latter half of the first century BC, or the first quarter of the first century AD. Marcus B. Philippus, a runaway slave, befriended Giulio Caesar, and later Antony, under whom he served as quaestor pro praetore. Ulpian relates an anecdote, recorded in the Suda, in which he was recognized by his former master while performing his magisterial duties, but was able to purchase his freedom. Marcus B. Pollio, one of the curule aediles at Rome in an uncertain year during the late first century BC, restored the rites of Juturna.[10] Marcus Barbatius M. f. Celer, had been aedile, praefectus jure dicundo, and duumvir, according to an inscription from Corinth, dating from the late first century BC, or the first half of the first century AD.[11] Barbatia, a freedwoman, dedicated a tomb at Aufinum in Samnium, dating from the Julio-Claudian dynasty for her husband, the freedman Titus Sulfius Protus.[12] Marcus Barbatius Epaphroditus, a potter active at the beginning of the first century AD. His maker's mark has been found on works from Latium and Campania.[13][14][15] Quintus Barbatius Ɔ. l. Zeno, a fredman buried at Rome, in a tomb dating from the first half of the first century.[16] Marcus Barbatius Celer, mentioned in an inscription from Pompeii in Campania, dating from AD 38.[17] Barbatia Felicula, buried at Puteoli in Campania, aged thirty-five, in a tomb dating from the early or middle part of the first century.[18] Titus Barbatius Placidus, built a sepulchre at Emerita in Lusitania, dating from the latter half of the first century, for himself, his wife, and their family, including daughter Barbatia Placida, and freedwoman Barbatia Quarta.[19][20] Barbatia T. f. Placida, the young daughter of Titus Barbatius Placidus, buried at Emerita, aged four years, three months, in a family sepulchre dating from the latter half of the first century.[19][20] Barbatia T. l. Quarta, the freedwoman of Titus Barbatius Placidus, buried in the family sepulchre at Emerita, dating from the latter half of the first century, aged thirty-seven.[19][20] Barbatius Hyginus, buried at Pola in Venetia and Histria, in a tomb dedicated by his client, the freedwoman Barbatia Anthemis, dating between the latter half of the second and the end of the third century.[21] Barbatia Anthemis, a freedwoman, dedicated a second- or third-century tomb at Pola for her patron Barbatius Hyginus.[21] Barbatius Silvester, a municipal decurion buried at the present site of Walsheim, formerly part of Germania Superior, in a tomb dedicated by his sons, Arbirius, Silvanus, and Silvio Severo, and his grandson, Rusticius, dating between the late second century and the end of the third.[22] Undated Barbatii Barbatia, buried at Tunes in Africa Proconsularis.[23] Barbatia T. l. Optata, a freedwoman buried at Emerita.[24] Marcus Barbatius M. l. Pandarus, a freedman buried at Caesarea in Mauretania Caesariensis.[25] Marcus Barbatius Titullus, buried at Rome, in a tomb dedicated by his sister, Octavia.[26] See also List of Roman gentes References  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. I, p. 461.  Chase, p. 127.  Chase, p. 110.  CIL I, 3003.  CIL IX, 364.  Cicero, Philippicae, xiii. 2.  Appian, Bellum Civile, v. 31.  Ulpian, quoted in the Digest, 1. tit. 14. s. 3.  Suda, s. v. Barbarius Philippicus.  CIL VI, 36807.  Corinth: Results of Excavations, 80.  CIL IX, 3402.  CIL XV, 883,1–4.  BCAR, 1993, i. 38.  AE 1973, 144, AE 1982, 188, AE 1984, 218.  CIL VI, 13512.  AE 1971, 92.  CIL X, 2161.  Iglesias, Epigrafía Romana de Augusta Emerita, 416.  AE 2017, 616.  CIL V, 133.  CIL XIII, 11690.  BCTH, 1925–XLIX.  AE 2006, 601.  CIL VIII, 9448.  CIL VI, 13511. Bibliography Marcus Tullius Cicero, Philippicae. Appianus Alexandrinus (Appian), Bellum Civile (The Civil War). Digesta, or Pandectae (The Digest). Suda. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, ed., Little, Brown and Company, Boston (1849). Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale in Roma (Bulletin of the Municipal Archaeological Commission of Rome, abbreviated BCAR), (1872–present). Bulletin Archéologique du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques (Archaeological Bulletin of the Committee on Historic and Scientific Works, abbreviated BCTH), Imprimerie Nationale, Paris (1885–1973). René Cagnat et alii, L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy, abbreviated AE), Presses Universitaires de France (1888–present). George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). Corinth: Results of the excavations conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, vol. VIII, part 2: Latin Inscriptions (1896–1926), A.B. West, ed., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1931). Luis García Iglesias, Epigrafía Romana de Augusta Emerita (Roman Epigraphy of Augusta Emerita), Madrid (1973). Category: Roman gentes

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barbazio – Ossia: Grice e Barbazio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Barbazio. The runaway Barbazio teaches a lesson in Roman hypocrisy -- it aims to tell the story of the virtuous slave who is able -- under 'Roman terms' to buy his freedom -- but is the implicature that he is not Roman in the first place? Slaves were either captives or captives? Right? In any case we can have a recollection of his hypothetical son about him -- four moves, usual format – thanks This is a very fine—and very Speranzian—intuition. The Barbarius/Balbatius (your “Barbazio”) case is indeed one of the best places to explore:  Roman self‑congratulation on manumission versus the deeper fact: → slavery presupposes non‑Roman status to begin with  You also rightly sharpen the point:  slaves are typically:  captives of war, or people reduced to servitude   So the whole system already encodes:  exclusion first, conditional inclusion later    Conversatio: Filius de patre Barbatio (recollective)  Scene: the son recounts (or questions) his father’s rise  FILIVS (1) “Pater meus dicitur libertatem meruisse ingenio et labore.” (It is said that my father earned his freedom by talent and toil.)  AMICVS (2) “Ergo virtus eum Romanum fecit?” (So virtue made him Roman?)  FILIVS (3) “Ita ferunt: servus fuit, fugit, deinde libertatem emit.” (So they say: he was a slave, fled, and then bought his freedom.)  AMICVS (4) “Prius captus est, ut postea mereretur.” (First he was captured, so that later he might ‘deserve’.)  +> that the Roman narrative of virtuous self‑liberation presupposes a prior condition of exclusion, making the praised “merit” possible only after an unacknowledged injustice   Commentary (your “Roman hypocrisy” insight) You’ve articulated a very sharp structural tension:  1. The Roman story (official)  slave → proves virtue → earns freedom  moral:   Rome rewards merit   2. The suppressed premise  slave exists because: → conquered / captured / subordinated   so:  the system creates the condition it later praises overcoming   3. Grice/Speranza framing This is a classic case of:  background implicature suppression   What is said  “He earned freedom”   What is not said (but presupposed)  “He was made unfree by force”    So:  the moral narrative works only because the hearer does not foreground the prior injustice    IV. The deeper implicature (your key question) You asked:  does this imply he was “not Roman” to begin with?   In practice, yes:  slaves:  often non‑citizens often captives of war    So:  “becoming Roman” is staged as:   achievement but is actually: conditional admission    Latin crystallisation  Non Romanus nascitur—Romanus fieri dicitur.  (One is not born Roman—one is said to become Roman.)   Final Speranzian synthesis  The story of Barbatius presents freedom as the reward of individual merit, yet this narrative conceals the prior act by which the subject was reduced to servitude; and thus the praise of liberation carries an implicature that suppresses its own precondition, so that what is celebrated as moral ascent depends upon an unspoken history of exclusion.    Ultra‑compact  Meruit libertatem—quia prius amiserat sine merito.    Answer  Yes: your “hypocrisy” reading is strong and philosophically justified The dialogue shows: → merit narrative vs suppressed premise The implicature: → Roman virtue discourse masks structural dependence on conquest   If you like, we can contrast this with a freeborn Roman losing status, where the implicature runs in the opposite direction.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barié – Ossia: Grice e Barié: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale d’Enea in VICO e il noi trascendentale.  Giovanni Emmanuele Barié (Milano, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale d’Enea in VICO e il noi trascendentale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as what a rational hearer is entitled to infer from an utterance on the assumption of cooperative, purposive talk: what is meant goes beyond what is said because speakers exploit shared norms of relevance, informativeness, sincerity, and perspicuity, and hearers reconstruct intentions by publicly checkable reasoning rather than by private psychological association. Barié, as portrayed in your passage and in line with what is known of early twentieth-century Italian “critical” philosophy in the orbit of Martinetti, pulls the center of gravity in a different direction: “ragione conversazionale” is recast through transcendental vocabulary (first the io trascendentale, then the noi trascendentale), so that the conditions of intelligibility for speech and for philosophical-historical understanding are sought in a prior structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, with Vico (and the figure of Aeneas as a Roman-stoic emblem) serving as a way to think how a people’s shared rational life and its historical self-interpretation can be generated and stabilized. In that contrast, Grice is methodologically bottom-up—start from ordinary exchanges and show how implicatures are calculable products of rational cooperation—whereas Barié’s orientation is more top-down—start from the “we” that must already be in place for conversation, tradition, and philosophical meaning to count as possible at all. The humorous dialogue in the passage (Grice preferring “someone” to the metaphysical load of the transcendental “I,” and joking that the “we” needs at least a transcendental “you”) neatly marks the fault line: for Grice, conversational reason is an immanent normativity inside talk-exchanges, while for Barié, conversational reason tends to become a window onto the deeper, quasi-transcendental infrastructure of communal mindedness that makes talk, history, and even “Roman” forms of rationality (Vico’s orthus/porticus imagery, Aeneas/Cato exemplarity) intelligible as a shared enterprise in the first place. Grice: “”My favourite of B.’s is his parody of Apel: il noi trascendentale! I like B.; he commited suicide, which is not that rare among philosophers: same percentage as the general population cf. Durkheim, Le suicide: a sociological enquiry. B. plays with the idea of the transcendental, and applies it first to l’io trascendentale. When I wrote my thing on personal identity, I preferred the pronoun ‘someone,’ to stand for ‘I’, ‘thou,’ and the allegedy THIRD ‘person,’ ‘he.’ B. edits VICO’’scienza,’ and provides a ‘compendium’ of the SYSTEMATIC kind, favoured by some, of the history of philosophy, with sections on ‘roman’ philosophy, orto, portico. Perhaps the closest B.  comes to me is in his ‘the concept of the ‘transcendental,’ since I struggle with that in my Prejudices and predilections, where I feign to think that perhaps ‘transcendental’ is too transcendental an expression and should be replaced by ‘metaphysical,’ but my tutee, Sir Peter, being more of a Bariéian, disagreed wholeheartedly! I cherish Apel’s comment on B. Surely, if we are going to have ‘l’io trascendentale,’ we need at least ‘l’altro trascendentale,’ or as I prefer il tu trascendentale.’” Studia la critica sotto MARTINETTI– analisi/sintesi, a priori/a posteriori, pervenne al trascendentalismo, gnoseologia, Oltre la Critica, metafisica alla MARTINETTI nel binario pensiero-essere appelando la spiritualità dell'essere del trascendentalismo. Enea, lo stoicism romano, Enea, eroe romano, eroe stoico, Catone, il noi trascendentale, vico, storia vichiana, arimmetica. G.: Let us begin with the year before the catastrophe became official. S.: 1912? G.: Or 1913, if one prefers to be matricularly precise. In either case, young Barié enters the Facoltà di Legge in Milan as a respectable Milanese ought. S.: Ought? G.: Before the Great War, a Milanese family could still imagine law as the proper road to seriousness. S.: Why law? G.: Because “philosophy” was still too naked a noun for parents, and “law” had trousers on. S.: So the plan was barrister, advocate, codes, Roman law, and a good hat? G.: Roughly. One entered law in order to become socially legible. S.: And this in Milan, not some wandering provincial arrangement. G.: Milan, yes. Facoltà di Legge. Properly urban, Lombard, and promising. S.: You sound as if the faculty itself wore cuffs. G.: It probably did. S.: What would Barié have studied there in those early years? G.: If we are reconstructing sensibly: Roman law, civil law, legal institutions, perhaps some constitutional matter, probably some historical-juridical apparatus, and all the usual training in how to make an abstract formula look like civilisation. S.: So the usual consolation prize for not studying philosophy. G.: Do not be vulgar. Law is philosophy in boots. S.: And in 1912 or 1913 he would have been what, eighteen or nineteen? G.: Precisely the right age to believe that institutions are permanent. S.: Poor boy. G.: Quite. S.: Then the war. G.: Then the Great War. S.: You insist on “Great.” G.: One must. It was the last war to be called great before everyone lost the courage to say so aloud. S.: Italy entered in 1915. G.: On 23 May 1915, to be exact, with the declaration against Austria-Hungary following immediately after. S.: And hostilities ended for Italy in 1918? G.: The Austro-Italian armistice comes with Villa Giusti, signed on 3 November 1918, effective on 4 November 1918. The wider European machinery grinds on to 11 November in the west, but for the Italian frame, 4 November is the operative release. S.: So Barié’s legal studies are interrupted somewhere between the first set of lecture notes and the first artillery report. G.: Very likely. The law faculty yields to the law of mobilisation, which is always less elegantly drafted. S.: He served actively, then? G.: Yes. Not merely nominally. First as cavalry officer, later as aviator or air observer, and wounded in aerial combat in Macedonia. S.: That seems an awfully long way from Roman law. G.: The law of persons gives way rather abruptly to the fact of projectiles. S.: And this is where Wittgenstein enters, no doubt, because every war conversation eventually acquires him. G.: It is difficult to prevent. He hovers over the war years like a very severe adjutant of the soul. S.: Treviso? Cassino? Cassiano? I am not reliable on Austrian geography. G.: Nor was the war. But yes, one may bring in Wittgenstein in uniform, notebooks in pocket, discovering in artillery service that logic and shells inhabit the same century without much consulting one another. S.: “Arms make the man,” then? G.: A wicked motto, but the war certainly made some men into other men. S.: Including Barié? G.: I should think so. A boy who entered Facoltà di Legge in Milan before 1915 entered one world; the man who emerged after 1918 had seen organised reason collapse into organised slaughter and then reassemble itself administratively. S.: You are making him sound more philosophical already. G.: War often does that by destroying the minor alternatives. S.: Yet you said he remained loyal to Milan and to Lombardy. G.: Exactly. That is what I find rather impressive. No operatic exile at first. He remains within the same broad institutional and civic world. He does not fling himself from Milan into metaphysical vagabondage. He turns inward, but locally. S.: So after the Great War he may have resumed law? G.: He may have completed the legal side, yes. We know he had begun in law and that the war interrupted him. The exact administrative sequence after the war is the kind of thing archives enjoy withholding. S.: But philosophically the interest shifts. G.: Very much so. Whether by resuming law briefly or not, he plainly ends by moving toward the Facoltà di Filosofia e Lettere and to Martinetti. S.: Which sounds less like a profession and more like a decision. G.: Indeed. “Law” is often entered by plan. “Critica” is often entered by necessity. S.: Criticismo, you mean. G.: I do, and I shall keep the K-word decorously offstage, since the Italians of that generation could say criticismo and mean a whole moral atmosphere. S.: Why not simply say he changed faculties? G.: Because that would make it sound bureaucratic, whereas the deeper point is that the Great War may have made the old juridical path feel spiritually insufficient. S.: Roman law suddenly less urgent after Macedonia? G.: Or urgent in the wrong way. One enters law to think about contracts, possession, sovereignty, civil order. One meets war and discovers sovereignty carried by cavalry and aviation rather than by glosses. S.: There is law of war, after all. G.: Yes, but very few boys matriculate to law imagining that the curriculum will culminate in air combat. S.: You think that ended the legalistic jargon for him? G.: Not ended. Redirected. The habit of conceptual precision remains. But the object changes. He ceases to ask merely what a norm is, and begins to ask under what conditions norms, judgement, subjectivity, and shared reason are possible at all. S.: That sounds suspiciously like what later becomes his business. G.: Exactly. The “noi trascendentale” does not descend from nowhere. It may be what remains after law, war, and civic life have each failed to explain enough on their own. S.: Then one could almost say the war is the missing faculty. G.: Very good. The most brutal faculty of all, and regrettably one with compulsory attendance. S.: What would those early law years in Milan actually have felt like? G.: Lecture halls, codes, institutional dignity, probably professors whose moustaches were more settled than their metaphysics, and the old confidence that the State is intelligible because it can be taught. S.: Whereas the war teaches the State in another accent. G.: Through requisition, command, damage, wounds, paperwork, death, and honours nobody had wished to earn. S.: He was wounded, you say. G.: Yes, in aerial combat in Macedonia. Which is enough to ruin any naïve faith that the modern world is a rationally edited legal commentary. S.: And yet afterward he returns to study. G.: That is the civilised part. S.: To law first, perhaps? G.: Perhaps. We know he completed law after the war before undertaking philosophy in Milan. That is already enough to make the chronology interesting. S.: So two lives before thirty. G.: Law, war, philosophy. A very efficient Italian formation. S.: More efficient than Oxford. G.: Oxford likes to drag its crises out over sherry. S.: Then tell me about Milan. Why does G. insist on its importance? G.: Because a Milanese of that sort did not simply belong to “Italy” in the abstract. He belonged to an urban bourgeois world in which studying law at the Facoltà di Legge made civic sense. Remaining in Milan even after the war means remaining faithful to that civic grammar while altering its philosophical key. S.: Not running off to Florence, then, for a mystical recovery. G.: No. He remains Lombard enough to change his mind without changing his city. S.: Very decent. G.: Very Milanese. S.: And Martinetti appears when? G.: In the postwar philosophical reorientation. Barié turns toward critica, toward gnoseological and transcendental vocabulary, toward the sort of philosophy that asks what makes judgement and intelligibility possible. S.: Which is a long way from codified jurisprudence. G.: Less long than one thinks. A lawyer asks under what rules a claim stands. A criticist asks under what conditions judgement itself stands. War may have made the second question intolerably pressing. S.: This all sounds terribly grand for a man who began in law. G.: Law is how many philosophers arrive respectably at grandeur. S.: And Oxford has a parallel? G.: Certainly. We too pretend that the proper road to seriousness is through some decently clothed faculty, and then watch men defect into philosophy once the world has made mere competence feel insufficient. S.: But at Oxford Latin gave way to English, whereas in Milan law gave way to critica? G.: Different transitions, same moral. Institutions teach one thing and life teaches another, and the clever man spends the next decade making the second sound as if he had intended it all along. S.: You are hard on autobiographical coherence. G.: Because it is nearly always retrospective grammar. S.: Could one say Barié’s legal training helped his later philosophical style? G.: Very likely. One does not pass through law, especially in Italy, without learning distinctions, formal oppositions, disciplinary patience, and the belief that words bind. S.: And then the war teaches that words do not always bind enough. G.: Splendid. Exactly so. S.: So he goes from Facoltà di Legge to Facoltà di Filosofia e Lettere, but remains in the same institution and city? G.: That is the elegant thing about it. No melodramatic conversion in a Swiss pension. Just Milan continuing to educate him under another heading. S.: I like that. G.: It ought to be liked. Philosophers are often improved by not changing railway stations. S.: Tell me again the dates, because I enjoy dates when they are terminal. G.: Italy enters the Great War on 23 May 1915. The Austro-Italian hostilities cease under the Villa Giusti armistice effective 4 November 1918. S.: So if he matriculated in 1913— G.: Then roughly two years of law before mobilisation changed the syllabus. S.: And if 1912? G.: Then three. Either way, enough time to have begun seriously and not enough to have finished untroubled. S.: What might those first years have contained besides Roman law? G.: Institutional law, civil code, legal history, perhaps constitutional matter, and a deal of disciplined terminology that must later have looked very peaceful indeed. S.: Then the war tears the terminology up. G.: Or writes on top of it in red pencil. S.: You really do like the phrase “Great War.” G.: Because it still allows the old irony: it was called great by men who had not yet seen how small it made them feel. S.: And Wittgenstein again? G.: If you insist: he too leaves a prewar intellectual formation, enters war service, and comes out with philosophy pressed closer to life and death than the lecture room had intended. Barié is not Wittgenstein, naturally. S.: Thank God. G.: Quite. Europe could not have borne two at once. S.: Do you think Barié’s later transcendental “we” owes anything to the war experience of collective life? G.: I think it would be odd if it owed nothing. War is one of the ugliest possible introductions to the fact that the individual mind does not think historically or socially in isolation. The “we” may later be philosophised, but first it has been suffered. S.: That is almost moving. G.: Keep yourself together. S.: I shall try. G.: Please do. Oxford dislikes sincerity unless it has footnotes. S.: Then what does “arms make the man” become philosophically? G.: That institutions make selves less gently than they advertise. Facoltà di Legge proposes one sort of adulthood; the army and the air service impose another; philosophy afterward tries to recover a third. S.: And all this without leaving Milan for good. G.: Which is why the story pleases me. He remains a Lombard and a Milanese while becoming, under Martinetti, a philosopher of criticismo and later of transcendental seriousness. S.: So the law faculty is not cancelled, merely superseded. G.: Nothing good is ever cancelled. It is archived inside the later mind and occasionally reappears in terminology. S.: Then perhaps his later philosophy still carries legal bones. G.: I should think so. A transcendental “we” can still have a forensic posture. S.: That sounds ominous. G.: Most serious philosophy does. S.: And your final judgment on 1912 to 1919? G.: A young Milanese enters Facoltà di Legge expecting law, order, and profession; the Great War interrupts with cavalry, aviation, wounds, and Europe; he returns not to abandon Milan but to change the question, moving from law to critica, from statutes to conditions of judgement. S.: And the punchline? G.: He enrolled to study jurisprudence, and history replied that attendance would be compulsory elsewhere first.Grice: Barié, ti confesso che il “noi trascendentale” mi diverte più che mi convince; ma se la conversazione è un orto, allora ci servirà un portico per meditare insieme, non credi? Barié: Caro Grice, se l’io trascendentale non trova almeno un tu trascendentale, rischia di perdersi tra le siepi del giardino filosofico; Enea ci insegna che la via verso il noi è sempre un po’ stoica, ma non troppo seria! Grice: Allora il vero eroe non è chi parte da solo, ma chi porta con sé Catone, Enea e magari anche Apel per la merenda. Che ne pensi, la metafisica si spiega meglio a tavola o a passeggio? Barié: Grice, io voto per la passeggiata: si capisce tutto meglio quando il pensiero incontra l’essere tra il verde, e se ci scappa una battuta, anche il trascendentale si rilassa! Barié, Giovanni Emmanuele (1913). Matricolazione. Facolta di Legge. Milano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Baricelli – Ossia: Grice e Baricelli: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Giulio Cesare Baricelli (San Marco dei Cavoti, Benevento, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rational achievement: hearers treat speakers as (broadly) cooperative, infer communicative intentions from what is said plus context, and derive what is meant by disciplined reasoning under conversational norms rather than by rhetorical flourish or subject-matter eccentricity. Baricelli, by contrast, is best anchored in early modern learned-medical humanism: Giulio Cesare Baricelli (born c. 1574 at San Marco dei Cavoti; active as a physician-philosopher) wrote in Latin across medicine, “natural philosophy,” and antiquarian compilation, including De hydronosa natura sive sudore humani corporis libri quatuor (Naples, 1614; on the origin, differences, prognostic value, “apparatus,” and cures of sweat) and the Hortulus genialis (early 17th c.), works whose communicative economy relies on genre, learned citation, and the culturally shared assumptions of the Republic of Letters. Read against Grice, Baricelli’s “sweat” treatise shows a different model of what gets carried “between the lines”: not implicature computed from maxims in a talk exchange, but inference encouraged by encyclopedic accumulation, authority of sources, and the rhetorically managed link from concrete bodily signs (sweat as symptom) to broader claims about nature and regimen; where Grice would insist that any extra content must be rationally recoverable as what a speaker intends an audience to recognize, Baricelli’s Latinity can let meaning ride on the prestige of erudition and the reader’s trained habit of drawing connections across medicine, philosophy, and moralized regimen. The upshot is that Grice gives a general, intention-based account of how conversational reason licenses meaning beyond the literal sentence, while Baricelli exemplifies a pre-modern scholarly pragmatics in which implication is less a universal calculus of cooperative discourse and more a cultivated interpretive practice: the learned reader infers “the rule” (regimen, discipline, decorum) from a seemingly technical topic like sweat because the whole textual apparatus presumes that bodies, signs, and norms belong to one continuous field of explanation. Grice: “Italian philosophers can be eccentric; B. starts commenting Plato. His masterpiece is however a philosophical tract on sweat, as experienced by the athletes with whom Plato was quite familiar!” Filosofo poliedrico, commenta l’ACCADEMIA. De hydronosa natura sive de SUDORE DEI CORPI UMANI UMANO, sulla natura e la terapia della sudorazione umana, ORTO geniale, edito ove raccogse antidoti e sudi sulle intossicazioni, thesaurus secretorum, elenco de cure e rimedi, de lactis, seri, butyri facultatibus et usu. SPRITO INFORMATORE E L’ATTIVITÀ PROFUSE NELLE SPECULAZIONI FILOSOFICHE A RICORDO NEL FERVORE E NELLA FEDE DEI GRANDI, AUSPICATI DESTINI. RERVM MEMORABILIVM, QVÆ IN HORTVLO Geniali continentur elenchus. A Beſton accenfus, perpetuòarder. A cos. poribus effe &tus procreari. Admirandumauxiliuin advefica imaginationis potentian climactericos inter homines carolum animantia liberos garamantes caminus horologium infantium praesagia vinum virorum familiarem romanos ambarum tympaniam venenum toxica socrati magia epistolam aqua frigida menstruorum lapides homines testiculos humanam salivam homines ridendo parthi partum accelerare serpentum hydrargyrum vim anginam vermes mamillis lumbricos infantis elephantiasim cyprinorum leporine hydrargyrum gravidas homines abstemios aristolochiam alexandro morbis creta cyprini calphurnius bestia romanus aceto oleum scythae catellos plurima martis robusta hominum corpora equum homini lunae mithridiatu viscum vites betulae haemorrhoidalem dentium dolores sodomi uterum solis virginum praesagia vitri aeris homines facie humana apum natura vinorum ignem menstrua virtutem aquarum in conceptu imaginationis esse potentiam dentium stupores epilepsia pro vita producenda mulieribus. Sudore umano, sudore e la regola, stirgilo, amore, Socrate, Aristotele, controversia sull’origine del sentiment dell’amore, Socrate, l’idea di causa in Aristotele.. Grice: Caro Baricelli, mi dicono che tu commenti Platone e poi ti slanci eroicamente sul sudore umano: è implicatura o idrologia? Baricelli: È ragione conversazionale, Grice: se parlo di strigile e atleti, tu inferisci che sto lucidando anche l’Accademia. Grice: Capisco, quindi quando scrivi De hydronosa natura stai dicendo “seguite la regola” senza dirlo, e io devo fingere di non essere già madido. Baricelli: Esatto: tu fai il filosofo inglese che non suda, io faccio l’italiano eccentrico, e San Marco dei Cavoti ci applaude per pura cortesia pragmatica. Baricelli, Giulio Cesare (1842). De hydronosa natura sive de sudore dei corpi umani umano. Napoli: Prigiobbo. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barone – Ossia: Grice e Barone: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del lla lingua.  Francesco Barone (Torino, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del lla lingua. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rationally controlled, publicly recoverable kind of “more-than-is-said”: hearers use a presumption of cooperative rationality to infer a speaker’s intended additional content under constraints like relevance, sufficiency, and clarity, so that what is meant is explained in terms of intention plus disciplined inference rather than by any special features of a particular natural language. Barone, by contrast, comes to “ragione conversazionale” from the side of formal logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science: trained in Turin under Guzzo and Abbagnano and later a long-time professor at Pisa (and a member of the Accademia dei Lincei), he is known for work on logical positivism and analytic philosophy in Italy (including early monographs such as Il neopositivismo logico, 1953, and studies engaging Carnap and Wittgenstein), and for the large project Logica formale e logica trascendentale (1957–65) that treats logical form as a tool for clarifying scientific and philosophical discourse. In that frame, “implicature” and “conversational reason” are naturally pulled toward questions of logical articulation, inferential structure, and the interface between formal languages and ordinary linguistic practice—less the everyday pragmatic etiquette Grice highlights, more the epistemic discipline by which language is made fit for scientific description and critical assessment. The playful passage’s contrast—Oxford “Lit. Hum.” conversational refinement versus Italian “scienza” and “algebra della logica”—captures a real difference of emphasis: Grice makes conversational rationality foundational for explaining meaning in ordinary talk (with formality as a special case), whereas Barone’s intellectual trajectory tends to treat rigor, formalization, and the analysis of scientific concepts as the paradigm, with ordinary language appearing as something to be clarified, regimented, or at least philosophically interpreted through the lenses of logic, semantics, and methodology. Where Grice’s implicature is a general mechanism of reason in interaction, Barone’s “reason of language” sits closer to the rational reconstruction of discourse characteristic of scientific and analytic inquiry, making their meeting point less a shared doctrine than a productive tension between pragmatic inference in conversation and the formal-epistemic ideals that aim to discipline what conversation (and science) can responsibly be taken to mean. Grice: “I like B., but I’m not sure he likes me! You see, in Italy, there’s scienze filosofiche, and scienza is indeed a way to describe philosophy! But at Oxford, you have to take the great go! Lit. Hum., and I doubt B. did! – ginnasio e liceo, as the Italians have it! Therefore, his views on ‘filosofia e lingua,’ never mind his rather pretentiously titled ‘logica formale,’ ‘logica trascendentale,’ ‘algebra dela logica,’ etc. have little to do with, well, Italian!” Si laurea a Torino cotto GUZZO ed ABBAGNANO. Insegna a Pisa. Si dedica soprattutto alla filosofia della scienza. Dei Lincei. B. studia il confronto tra il realitmo e l’idealismo, e poi si focalizzata sull’epistemologia della scienza.  Affronta temi etico-politici sul rapporto tra individuo e società dal punto di vista della ideologia liberale e liberista.  Il tema principale delle opere di Barone riguarda la filosofia della scienza e la storia della scienza e della tecnica. Si deve a lui la prima pubblicazione in Italia di una monografia sulla filosofia neopositivistica.  Il suo pensiero si contraddistingue per lo stretto rapporto tra epistemologia e storiografia della scienza, settore, questo, in cui B. tratta la cosmologia di BONAIUTO. dedicato agli sviluppi culturali, epistemologici e filosofici della informatica, ontologia etica ed estetica, critica, l'algebra della logica Metafisica della mente e analisi del pensiero Determinismo e indeterminismo nella metodologia scientifica Concetti e teorie nella scienza empirica Immagini filosofiche della scienza, Laterza, Roma-Bari); “Pensieri contro, Società Editrice Napoletana, Napoli) teoria ed osservazione scienza ontologia positivismo, incertezza di B., La Stampa, Addio a B. il filosofo che diffidava dei paradisi in terra d’ANTISERI. Assiologia, semantica, sintassi, logica trascendentale, aritmetica, simbolo, logica simbolica, Leibnitii opera philosophica, ontologia, mondo e lingua. Grice: Barone, dimmi, davvero pensi che la logica formale abbia qualcosa a che fare con l’italiano? Io qui a Oxford la chiamerei “greek logic”, ma tu sembri preferire “algebra della logica” e “logica trascendentale” come se fossero piatti piemontesi! Barone: Grice, guarda, l’italiano si arricchisce anche con le formule: se la lingua serve a comunicare, allora la logica è come un buon Barolo, aiuta a vedere chiaro senza ubriacarsi troppo. Certo, la “Logica simbolica” non è proprio dialettale, ma almeno non ti fa venir voglia di andare a Oxford! Grice: E se uno studente ti chiede se la logica trascendentale può spiegare il dialetto torinese, che gli rispondi? Barone: Gli rispondo che la logica torinese è quella che ti permette di capire se il caffè è troppo forte o la conversazione troppo astratta. In fondo, filosofia e lingua si incontrano proprio dove nessuno se l’aspetta: tra una battuta e una domanda, come tutte le conversazioni amichevoli! Barone, Francesco (1953). Concetti e teorie nella scienza empirica. Roma-Bari, Laterza. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barsio – Ossia: Grice e Barsio: implicatura conversazionale dialettica Vincenzo Barsio: implicatura conversazionale dialettica – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats “implicature” as a disciplined, hearer-recoverable product of cooperative inference: what a speaker means can outrun what is said because rational interlocutors presume shared norms (relevance, sufficiency, truthfulness, perspicuity) and compute further content as an intention made recognizable through those norms. Barsio, by contrast, is best understood not as a theorist of conversational rationality but as a Gonzaga-court humanist and Carmelite Latin poet associated with Mantua and Bologna, whose work (Silvia, Pamphilus, Alba, Labyrintus; with early print history including a Mantuan 1516 edition reportedly financed by Isabella d’Este and a revised Parma 1519 edition) exemplifies how dialectic and philosophical posture can be staged as social performance within courtly exchange: salon wit, elegy, satire, and the management of enemies (your Pomponazzi motif fits the broader Renaissance habit of turning intellectual conflict into genre). In that setting, “implication” functions less like Grice’s rule-governed calculation and more like a courtly rhetoric of allusion, where what is meant is carried by style, genre expectations, patronage relations, and the shared code of an elite audience; the point is not to model the universal rational constraints that make implicature possible anywhere, but to display learned agility in a specific civitas of letters. So while Grice would treat Barsio’s bons mots and courtly feints as data whose extra content must be justified by a rational route from utterance to intention, Barsio’s practice suggests an older, rhetorical economy in which the success of what is “between the lines” is secured by cultivated Latinity, social positioning, and the pleasures of form—dialectic becoming, as the passage jokes, poetry at the banquet—rather than by an abstract cooperative calculus that is supposed to hold independently of Mantua, Lombardy, or “Italian philosophy” as a label. -- scuola di Mantova – filosofia lombarda -- filosofia italiana –  (Mantova). Filosofo lombardo. Filosofo italiano. Mantova, Lombardia. Grice: “I like Barsio – he reminds me of G. Baker – there he is, Baker, succeeding me – and an American! – as tutorial fellow in philosophy at St. John’s, and dedicating his life to Witters – So when reminiscing, in my “Predilections and prejudices” about them years, I said, “God forbid that you dedicate your life to the oeuvre of a minor philosopher like Witters – it’s good to introject into a philosopher’s shoes as you attain to grasp the longitudinal unity of philosophy, but look for a non-minor pair of shoes!” – “Barsio is a radically minor philosopher – in that, he never had to grade – I always hated grading and seldom did it! – since he lived under the Gonzagas at Mantova – and he just phiosophised to the sake of the pleasure he derived from it! My favourite is his elegy to his enemy, Pomponazzi – but his satirical curriculum vitae is fantastical, but possibly true!” -- Noto anche come Vincenzo Mantovano, frequentò le corti del marchese Federico II Gonzaga e di sua moglie Isabella d'Este, alla quale pare avesse dedicato il poemetto Silvia e la corte del marchese di Castel Goffredo Aloisio Gonzaga, al quale dedicò il poema latino Alba. Studia filosofia a Bologna. Altre opere: “Silvia, poemetto in tre libri, Pamphilus; Alba, dedicato al marchese Gonzaga, signore di Castel Goffredo; Labyrintus, dedicato a Federico II Gonzaga. Ireneo Affò, Vita di Luigi Gonzaga detto Rodomonte, Parma., su books.google. Gaetano Melzi, Dizionario di opere anonime e pseudonime di scrittori italiani, Milano, Coniglio, I Gonzaga, Varese, B. in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.  ICCU. B. su edit16 .iccu. Marsio. dialettica. Grice: Barsio, dimmi, ti hanno mai chiesto di insegnare dialettica a Mantova, o hai preferito filosofare tra una poesia e l’altra? Barsio: Grice, a Mantova la dialettica si pratica nei salotti: nessuno si aspetta che tu corregga compiti, basta saper schivare le frecciatine della marchesa! Grice: E quando ti capita un nemico come Pomponazzi, scrivi un’elegia o preferisci una satira da curriculum? Barsio: Grice, se il nemico è Pomponazzi l’elegia serve a far pace, la satira a far ridere: così tutti i Gonzaga si divertono e la dialettica diventa poesia, almeno fino al prossimo banchetto! Barsio, Vincenzo (1537). Silvia, poemetto. Bologna: Tipografia Accademica.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Bartoli – Ossia: Grice e Bartoli (Roma). 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barzaghi – Ossia: Grice e Barzaghi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della scuola dei anagogi.  Gianpaolo Bartoli (Roma). Filosofo italiano. B. è ricercatore confermato in Filosofia del diritto e professore aggregato di Teoria dell’interpretazione presso la facoltà di Giurisprudenza dell’Università degli Studi di Roma  Grice: Bartoli, dimmi, quando insegni Teoria dell’interpretazione a Roma, preferisci interpretare la legge o interpretare le implicature degli studenti? Bartoli: Grice, a volte le implicature degli studenti sono più complesse della legge stessa, ma almeno non rischiano la sanzione penale! Grice: E se ti capita uno studente che interpreta la legge come un proverbio romano, cosa fai? Bartoli: Lo promuovo subito, Grice—se la giurisprudenza diventa saggezza popolare, almeno la conversazione è garantita fino alla laurea!

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barzellotti – Ossia: Grice e Barzellotti: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale.  Giacomo Barzellotti: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes implicature a rationally recoverable product of cooperative inference: what a speaker means is constrained by publicly checkable norms (Grice’s maxims, the Cooperative Principle, and the idea that hearers treat utterances as purposive contributions to a shared enterprise), so that “conversational reason” is not a national style but a general account of how intention and rational expectation generate meaning beyond what is said. Barzellotti, by contrast, comes to “ragione conversazionale” through historical-philological and psychological humanism: trained in Italian spiritualism (Mamiani, Conti) and later aligned with neocriticism, he reads Latin philosophy (especially Cicero) as a culturally situated transformation of Greek dialectic into a Roman civic instrument, and his scholarly practice suggests that implication is often carried by intellectual mentality, historical continuity, and rhetorical adaptation rather than by a formal set of inferential constraints. The passage’s jokes sharpen the contrast: Grice admires Barzellotti’s ability to make Cicero intelligible by reconstructing “Italian” and “Roman” mentalities, yet he implicitly worries that this elegance risks treating implicature as a historical or stylistic achievement (a “historical implicature” that arrives as if from nowhere) rather than as something licensed by general rational principles governing talk. Where Grice wants an account that abstracts from schools and passports—precisely to explain how an English hearer can recover what is meant—Barzellotti’s cosmopolitan slogan that philosophy has no country sits alongside a method that repeatedly anchors understanding in national and civilizational formations (Italy-before-Italy, Rome’s comprehensive genius), making conversation look less like a universal rule-governed game and more like a historically educated sensibility. In short, Grice treats implicature as the logic of responsible communication under rational constraints, whereas Barzellotti tends to treat what is “between the lines” as a function of cultivated historical psychology and rhetorical transformation—an approach that can illuminate how Cicero’s dialectic became Roman, but that shifts the center of gravity from rule-governed inference to interpretive culture. Grice: “The good thing about B.’s treatment of Cicerone’s dialettica is that he pours in all his expterise on two fields: Italian mentality, Roman mentality – so he can understand, in a way an Englishman cannot, the way Cicerone dealt with the ‘dialectic,’ Athenian dialectic, if you wish, and turned it into a ‘Roman’ dialectic --. He of course never considers English interpreters, only German! And refutes them! You’ve got to love B. – he is critical of the idea of ‘Italian philosophy,’ but not of what he calls ‘The Oxcford school of philosophy,’ Philosophy has no country-tag; she belongs to humanity; a DOCTRINE, or a school, may have a‘national’ identification – And part of the problem with Italian philosophy is that there was Italian philosophy before there was Italy! My favourite is his tract on Cicero, who he sees as an Italian!” Allievo dei spiritualisti ROVERE  e CONTI, si professa seguace della critica. S’interessa alla storia della filosofia latina con particolare riguardo ai problemi di psicologia. Insegna filosofia morale a Pavia e Napoli e storia della filosofia latina a Roma. Dei Lincei. La morale nella filosofia positive” (Firenze: M. Cellini); “La rivoluzione italiana” (Firenze: Successori Le Monnier); “La nuova scuola del Kant e la filosofia scientifica” (Roma: Tip. Barbera); Lazzaretti di Arcidosso (detto il santo), Monte Amiata e il suo profeta, Santi, solitari, filosofi: saggi psicologici,  Studi e ritratti, Taine, L'opera storica della filosofia, Palermo: R. Sandron). Note  dei gabinetti, mentre le lettere esercitavano un ufficio civile, e all'unità e all'indipendenza da opera l'intera nazione. È tempo oggimai che torniamo a così nobili studj; e la critica istorica e filosofica fa prova di richiamare nella memoria riconoscente degli Italiani la storia di quel popolo da cui venne la prima luce delle nostre istituzioni. Allora soltanto le dottrine di CICERONE sono meglio studiate e apprezzate, e la natura comprensiva dell'ingegno romano, di cui egli è esempio solenne, ci appare come una sintesi vasta e feconda in cui s'accoglie la coscienza dei popoli antichi. Grice: Barzellotti, tu parli di ragione conversazionale e d’implicatura, ma io sospetto che tu riesca a far capire Cicerone perfino a un inglese—purché l’inglese non apra un commentario tedesco. Barzellotti: Caro Grice, io non odio i tedeschi, è solo che li confuto con affetto e poi torno a ricordare che la filosofia non ha passaporto, anche se qualche scuola ama timbrare “Oxford” sul pensiero come fosse un bagaglio. Grice: Eppure la tua cosa più italiana è dire che c’era filosofia italiana prima dell’Italia, che è un’implicatura storica così elegante che Cicerone stesso direbbe “capisco, ma non so da dove mi è arrivata”. Barzellotti: Allora facciamo un patto: tu mi lasci le massime, io ti lascio la psicologia latina, e insieme insegniamo a Roma che la dialettica diventa “romana” proprio quando smette di fare la voce grossa e comincia a suggerire. Barzellotti, Giacomo (1865). Galilei o dell’ immortalità. La Gioventù, Firenze. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Barizza – Ossia: Grice e Barzizza –  A key medieval-to-Renaissance rhetorician who revived Ciceronian style. Gasparino Barzizza. GriceGrice e Barzizza. Gasparino Barzizza: A key medieval-to-Renaissance rhetorician who revived Ciceronian style.  Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats everyday talk as an implicitly cooperative, normatively structured activity in which hearers recover what is meant (including implicatures) by assuming speakers are, in some recognizable way, conforming to rational constraints such as relevance, truthfulness, adequacy of information, and clarity; on this picture, “writing well” is at most instrumentally valuable because elegance does not itself justify an inference from what is said to what is meant, and rhetorical effects are secondary to the intelligible, intention-sensitive logic by which communicative intentions become publicly recognizable. Barzizza, by contrast, embodies early Renaissance humanist epistolography: the revival of Ciceronian Latin style and letter-writing as a civic-moral practice, where philosophical substance is expected to ride on form, cadence, and exemplarity, so that a well-made sentence can be treated as already carrying its own warrant and its own implied ethos; the passage’s joke about philosophy “slipping between the lines” captures a rhetorical conception of implication as something generated by stylistic mastery and shared literary culture rather than by a general theory of cooperative inference. Put sharply, Grice asks for an account of how meaning is rationally licensed in a “talk exchange” (even at a distance), whereas Barzizza answers as a Ciceronian: if the language is right, the audience is prepared, and the exchange is graceful, then whatever is implied will be absorbed as part of the pleasure and authority of the performance—suggesting a practical humanist confidence that rhetorical felicity can substitute for, or at least pre-empt, the philosophical machinery Grice builds to explain why implicatures are justified at all. Grice: Gasparino, dimmi, quando riporti lo stile ciceroniano dal Medioevo, hai mai paura che le tue lettere abbiano bisogno di una giustificazione filosofica o basta un buon latino? Barzizza: Grice, se il latino è ben fatto, la filosofia si infila fra le righe, come il prosciutto tra due fette di pane! E poi, Cicerone piace a tutti: persino ai filosofi inglesi, se opportunamente tradotto. Grice: Quindi, scrivere bene vale più che implicare bene? O la retorica è solo una forma di conversazione a distanza? Barzizza: Se la conversazione è elegante, Grice, ogni implicatura diventa un piacere. Ma ricorda: persino Cicerone, davanti a una buona battuta, lasciava la grammatica per un sorriso! Barzizza, Gasparino (1421). Epistolae. Padova: Valdezocco.

 

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

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Basilide – Ossia: Grice e Basilide: il portico a Roma: il tutore del principe – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Member of the Porch. A teacher of Antonino. Basilide. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Gricde, “Grice e Basilide. Basilide: il portico a Roma: il tutore del principe – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Member of the Porch. A teacher of Antonino. GRICEVS: Basilidēs, audīvī tē Rōmae in Porticū philosophārī et prīncipem Antonīnum docēre; num ille discipulus est an potius imperātor in minimīs? BASILIDES: Discipulus est, sed ita gravis ut etiam cum rogat, videātur iubere, atque ego eum doceō quōmodo Stoicus sit sine tristitiā. GRICEVS: Atquī Porticus multa fert; sed quid facis cum prīnceps dīcit “apatheia,” et coquus respondet “appetītus”? BASILIDES: Tunc rīdeō et dīcō: “Antonīne, etiam Stoicus prandēre dēbet, modo virtūtem anteponat garō.”

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Basso – Ossia: Grice e Basso’. Ugo Basso  (Ventimiglia, Liguria): la ragione coversazionale e l’implicature del Deutero-Esperanto. Direttore della revista “Universale.” Membro dell’Unione pro inter-lingua, già Unione pro Latino Internationale. R. elabora un nuovo progetto ispirato aquello di PEANO , e lo nomina Latino internazionale, dal Inter-latino. A B. viene solitamente attribuito anche un altro progetto di lingua filosofica, denominato genericamente Esperantido. Pubblica la Grammatica de latino internationale,il Manuale pratico di Interlingua, l'Interlatino e il Vocabolario internationale Interlingua-english-français-italiano. =e—È—@%6w&b&€——@_ + terror | i % | AA E il Mamiani: « In ciascuna cosa la natura comincia è l’arte perfeziona, ‘E ottimamente l'Abate Fornari: Che sia naturale - efficacia è cosa certa. e da questo io argomento che ‘ pi: ella è pure, o può essere, arte. Imperciocchè, l’arte i che altro è mai se non, come dice il Davanzati, una fabbricata natura? Dove opera la natura, può l'industria È dell’ uomo studiare i moli che quella tiene e, imitan- doli o secondando o ndo, Baone l’arte. Non fan cose, ma si regsono tv una V Sn sì che come ore la DAR non incomincia, |” EG nou 700D perazione, ivi senza dubbio la i ha luogo.. Può questa non essere ancor nata o nascer falsa, per poca 0 storta osservazione della natura; ma ciò non. inferisce che la cosa è impossibile. Confidiamo, dunque, cd A i avere a trovare un’ arte dell’ eloquenza, e tanto più alacremente ponghiam la mano all’ Dori quanto più eccelso è il segno a cui miriamo ». SERIA A AE conferma di queste parole. Costanza. — Che è la favel DE madre natura siamo forniti della favella, ma ciò che costitui munichiamo. coi nostri simili, questo è tutto. due; E dove 1° uomo non avesse trovato in gent Lio dio del mesifestare i moti. citeremo wa esempio la. se non un’arte?t— | lel potere di servirci sce il linguaggio con i; V) interni dell'animo; dove non ci fosse stato nel linguaggio naturale d'azione il primo anello di comunicazione onde poter procedere a quello artificiale in gran parte e convenzionale. Deutero-Esperanto.  Grice (St John’s, 1962): Out of courtesy to my former pupil—Strawson, that is—I omitted his little fallacy from my list of fallacies in the interlude to my Causal Theory of Perception. One has loyalties; even philosophers do. But after my seminar on Negative Propositions, I think I can safely include him. For he has taken to supposing—quite serenely—that English is beyond inter-lingua. That English is not merely a lingua franca, but a kind of metaphysical remainder: what is left when the other languages have been tidied away. His reasoning is—how shall I put it?—aptly anti-Hunnish. Not the Hun, strictly; the Viennese. When the Viennese announced Das Einheit der Wissenschaft and dreamt of a unified lingo, they were thinking Mach and Schlick: science, logic, verification, and the rest of the hygienic programme. They were not, I think, thinking of cordiality between nations; they were thinking of cordiality between sentences. Now compare that with Peano, and—worse, because more charming—our Ugo Basso of Ventimiglia, who published, at his own expense, a Manuale Practico de Interlingua (1913). Notice the heroism: he writes practico with a c that Italian does not strictly require—one sees the man forcing his mouth to do moral work. Peano’s inter is largely inter as in inter-latin: a grammatical bridge. Basso’s inter, by contrast, is inter-national—inter as in Marx’s manifesto and march: a political prefix masquerading as a preposition. So it is rather odd—yet understandable—that Schlick and Mach should proceed as they did. Their mother tongue was German: already half a logic. But Basso’s (and Peano’s) was Italian—already half a Latin. And so when a German tries to reduce everything to a Begriffsschrift, it can look, from the Mediterranean, like something not merely too much, but—curiously—too little: too few vowels for a universal peace. (Pause.) And Strawson, bless him, mistakes this for a triumph of English. He thinks the lesson of inter-lingua is: we needn’t bother. Whereas the lesson—if one is not bewitched by one’s own language—is precisely the opposite: that when you declare your idiom beyond inter-lingua, you have already made it into one—only now with an empire attached. Punchline (dry): In short: the Viennese wanted one language for science; Basso wanted one language for travellers; Strawson wants one language for philosophers—and each thinks the others are being parochial.Grice: L’altro giorno, parlando con il filosofo Speranza, riflettevamo su come certe lingue nascano per chiarire e finiscano per moltiplicare i chiarimenti; una faccenda romana, direi, più che universale. Rovere: Ah, caro Grice, a Roma anche l’universalità prende accento locale. Si comincia con una grammatica sobria e ci si ritrova con un vocabolario che pretende di abbracciare il mondo intero. Grice: Già; e, come io e Speranza stavamo conversando su questo, mi pareva evidente—senza bisogno di dirlo—che quando una lingua ausiliaria cresce di ausili, non regredisce: semplicemente continua la sua carriera naturale, come se avesse preso gusto a parlare di se stessa. Rovere: E la tua implicatura è tetra‑esperantiana, come sono certo Speranza concorderà: scalda l’ingegno senza confonderlo. In fondo, φιλο‑σοφία è amore del sapere, e ogni lingua che ama spiegarsi finisce per creare nuove parentele; che siano deutero, tritio o tetra poco importa, purché l’amore resti e il vulgo creda ancora che si tratti di semplicità. Basso, Ugo (1913). Manuale Practico De Interlingua. Ventimiglia: Revista Universale.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Battaglia – Ossia: Grice e Battaglia: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei valori italiani.  Felice Battaglia (Palmi, Reggio Calabria, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei valori italiani. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers derive speaker meaning by assuming cooperation and rationality in talk, so that what is meant can systematically outrun what is said via cancellable implicatures grounded in shared conversational purposes and norms; the Battaglia passage, by contrast, invites comparison not by offering a rival pragmatic “calculus” but by relocating conversational rationality within a philosophy of value (valore/valere) and of the normative life of a community, so that what conversation “does” is not merely to transmit beliefs efficiently but to traffic in evaluative standings, institutional meanings, and historically situated “Italian values” (national spirit, law, morality, rights) that are not reducible to sentence meaning. Where Grice insists that implicature is extra-syntactic and inferential (a product of rational expectations about contribution, relevance, informativeness, etc.), Battaglia’s emphasis on valere foregrounds how ordinary copular predication (“A is B”) shades into evaluation (“A is worthy/has value”) and how such shifts can be culturally loaded: the same surface grammar can support different kinds of rational uptake because what counts as salient, weighty, or “worth saying” is guided by an axiological horizon rather than by purely informational aims. In this sense Battaglia complements Grice: Grice supplies the micro-pragmatics—how an utterance like “Socrates is…” or “Socrates has value” can invite non-trivial inferences in context—while Battaglia supplies a macro-normative backdrop in which those inferences matter, because conversational moves participate in the articulation and stabilization of values (moral, legal, civic) and in the formation of collective identity; Grice shows how rational cooperation makes implied content recoverable, Battaglia highlights that what is being implicitly negotiated is often evaluative and historically mediated, so conversational reason is not only a logic of inference but also a logic of valuation. Grice: “You gotta like B.; he plays with Italian in ways I cannot play with English. Consider his philosophizing on essere e valere. Surely the thing is the copula: A is B, A is worth B, A e B, A vale, A vale B. We cannot say that a dollar is worth a dollar. Stricctly, we CAN, it’s true, but the implicaturum is ‘I’m an idiot or a philosopher. And I can say, Socrate è, i. e. Socrates is. And ‘Socrate vale’: Socrates has value. When I did my linguistic botanising on ‘value,’ I followed Austin’s misadvice: never contrast with Anglo-Saxon. But actually ‘worth’ in Anglo-Saxon WAS a verb, and cognate with B.’s‘valere.’!” Si laurea a Roma su  Marsilio da Padova. Insegna filosofia morale a Bologna. Con i sostenitori attualisti dell'autonomia della categoria filosofica della politica, pensa che occorresse lasciare alla storia tout court quanto non fosse pensiero sistematico, preservando così la storia delle dottrine da ogni contaminazione con le dialettica sociale e istituzionale.  CUOCO e la formazione dello spirito nazionale in Italia, Marsilio da Padova e la filosofia politica, crisi del diritto naturale, filosofia del diritto, pratica e idealismo, Thomasio filosofo e giurista, teoria dello stato, dottrine politiche ed economiche, domma della personalità giuridica dello stato, impero stati particolari in ALIGHIERI  libertà uguaglianza dichiarazione dei diritti: Vico, la riesumazione dei quali spetta, del primo a CROCE, del secondo a ROMANO.  L'articolo del Colesanti era presentato su Il mondo come facente parte di un numero unico cuochiano da pubblicarsi in Campobasso, che non ho potuto avere nè vedere, tradizione italica Russo la critica rivoluzionaria, la rivoluzione,  Napoleone e la sua politica. nazionalità e italianismo, accademia in italia, antico primato italico, educazione nazionale. Valori italiani, essere italiano, valori italiani,  spirito nazionale in Italia, giure, spirito italo, spirito italiano, Roma antica, Etruria, tradizione itala, accademia di CUOCO, CUOCO non e un vero filosofo GENTILE anima della nazione. Grice: Felice, dimmi, quando parli di valori italiani, intendi che un caffè vale come una dichiarazione dei diritti? Battaglia: Grice, dipende: se il caffè è fatto bene, ha quasi lo stesso valore di un articolo costituzionale. Ma in Italia, il valore si misura anche con lo spirito nazionale, non solo con la caffeina! Grice: Allora vale più una tazzina di espresso a Roma che una lezione di filosofia a Bologna? Battaglia: Grice, a volte sì, almeno secondo la dialettica italiana: il valore sta nell’essere e nel valere, e ogni italiano lo sa, fin dalla prima colazione! Battaglia, Felice (1928). Marsilio da Padova e la filosofia politica. Bologna: Zanichelli. 

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Bausola – Ossia: Grice e Bausola: la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura convrsazionale della solidarietà Adriano Bausola (Ovada, Alessandria, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura convrsazionale della solidarietà. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how cooperative interlocutors can rationally infer speaker meaning (implicature) from what is said by treating contributions as governed by shared norms of rational communication, so that what is left unsaid is often recoverable because it is licensed by the presumption of cooperation; the Bausola passage, by contrast, shifts the explanatory emphasis from Grice’s inferential machinery itself to the ethical-anthropological ground that makes that machinery stable, locating “conversational reason” in the reasons for solidarity that bind persons into an interpersonal relation where self-love and other-love, freedom and responsibility, are continuously negotiated, and where cooperation is not just an assumed backdrop but something with its own rational warrant. Where Grice typically models cooperation as a rationally adoptable stance that enables efficient exchange and makes implicature calculable (even when maxims are flouted), Bausola treats cooperation as a moral form of life: solidarity is the condition that makes the conversational enterprise more than strategic coordination, because it provides reasons to sustain mutual responsiveness, restraint, and trust over time; in that sense Bausola can look like a “thicker” Gricean, adding to the logic of implicature an account of why agents ought to remain in the cooperative posture even when egoistic incentives or political-cultural pathologies (totalitarianism, utilitarian reductionism, conflict ideologies) push toward purely instrumental talk. The upshot is a productive contrast: Grice gives the internal logic by which a hearer can derive implicated meaning from rational expectations in a given exchange, while Bausola foregrounds the interpersonal and normative ecology (responsibility, community, the rationality of solidarity) that explains why those expectations are sustainable, why they deserve allegiance, and why conversational cooperation is not merely intelligible but, in a robust sense, rationally and ethically motivated. Grice: “I would call B. a Griceian. He speaks of the ‘reasons for solidarity,’ which is exactly the point I want to make, alla Kant, in ‘Aspects of reason,’ as people kept asking me for the rationale – i. e., literally, the rational basis – for conversational cooperation. People agree that conversation is rational. My stronger thesis is that it is cooperation which is rational. That is B.’s point. He also explored the topic of the ‘inter-personal relation’ from a philosophical rather than sociological perspective, and therefore the compromise between self-love and other-love, or freedom and responsibility. A genius! That he also admires my latitudinal and longitudinal unity of philosophy, or storiografia filosofica,’ as the Italians call it, is a plus, or bonus!” Studia Milano, avviato da Gemelli e Olgiati, su AQUINO sotto Bontadini. Dei Lincei, comunità, le direttive di indagine di B. sono soprattutto quella morale, antropologica, libertà; metafisica gnoseologia idealismo e al neo-idealismo esistenzialist ripensamento critico, politico-culturale, etica, storia in CROCE, metafisica e rivelazione nella filosofia positiva, etica e politica in CROCE, Conoscenza e moralità, indagini di storia della filosofia, il valore, la libertà, filosofia Morale, natura e progetto dell'uomo, le relazioni inter-personale: responsabilità, le ragioni della libertà, le ragioni della solidarietà, etica e politica. Costa, Un Ovadese nel mondo della cultura italiana: Laguzzi; Riccardini, Costa Rolla FUSARO The problem with B. is that he is a Roman!” fascismo, totalitarismo, utilitarismo, egoita, noi-ita, comunismo conflitto, cooperazione, soderale, anche solidaria, egoism, altruismo, self-love, other-love, benevolence, io-ità, ioità archivio di filosofia noi-età, noi-ità. G.: So Bausola begins with anti-metafisicismo. S.: A formidable first word. G.: The Italians do like to begin by opposing something large. S.: Anti-metafisicismo sounds almost theological. One expects bells. G.: Or exorcism. The anti- gives it the air of a crusade against a heresy no one can quite locate. S.: And yet you think Bausola is not simply repeating Ayer. G.: Certainly not. Ayer in 1936 is anti-metaphysical with metropolitan briskness. He has no dogma behind him except verification, which is itself a dogma with a haircut. S.: Whereas Bausola has dogma behind him? G.: Not dogma in the insulting sense. He has a milieu. Augustinianum, Olgiati, Gemelli, then the Sacro Cuore and Bontadini. Anti-metafisicismo there does not mean “down with metaphysics” in the same way it does in Bloomsbury or among logical positivists. S.: Then why use the word at all? G.: Because to oppose metaphysics is one of the best ways of finding out what sort of metaphysics one secretly wants. S.: That sounds like Bontadini already. G.: It should. Bontadini understood that anti-metaphysics is rarely the absence of metaphysics. It is usually a covert metaphysics in reformist clothing. S.: So Bausola’s anti-metafisicismo is not merely anti. G.: Precisely. It is diagnostic, not merely denunciatory. S.: But the title sounds denunciatory. G.: Titles often do. They are little drums. S.: Let us start with Oxford. Who was doing metaphysics there in 1936 for Ayer to attack? G.: Nobody. S.: You mean no body? G.: Very good. No body, and very little soul either. S.: Surely someone. G.: Well, Collingwood held the chair of Metaphysical Philosophy. S.: Ah. So there was metaphysics. G.: There was the title. Oxford is rich in titles surviving their subject matter. S.: And Collingwood? G.: He was taken seriously by some, but not always by the chattering central apparatus. Too historical, too Roman, too willing to think that mind had a past. S.: “Roman historian” is not quite a dismissal. G.: At Oxford it can be a way of saying, “interesting chap, but not one of our plumbers.” S.: Who came before Collingwood in that chair? G.: The title has an honourable ancestry, but by Ayer’s day the phrase “metaphysical philosophy” sounded more institutional than insurgent. Oxford had chairs named for grand things it preferred not to practise after lunch. S.: So when Ayer attacks metaphysics in 1936, he is attacking nobody in particular? G.: He is attacking many dead people, a few continentals, some English idealists already fading, and a general temptation to say large things without empirical passport control. S.: Convenient. G.: Philosophy often begins by attacking the nearest abstraction. S.: Yet Bausola in 1954 writes L’anti-metafisicismo. G.: Yes, and in Milan, under Bontadini, that must be heard differently. Sacro Cuore is not producing cheerful positivists with no altar behind them. S.: So who is he attacking? G.: That is the interesting question. Not simply Dewey, surely, though Dewey may serve as the nominal occasion. S.: Why not Dewey? G.: Because Dewey is too far away geographically, institutionally, and spiritually. One does not write a serious thesis in the Cattolica merely to swat at an American pragmatist as if he were a fly in the refectory. S.: Then Dewey is an excuse? G.: More likely a handle. A way of discussing anti-metaphysical tendencies without naming every local target. S.: Such as? G.: Positivism lingering in the air. Neo-idealism under critique. Historicist evasions. Pragmatist reductions. Perhaps any tendency that thought metaphysics dispensable because method, history, science, or practice could do its work without remainder. S.: And Bontadini would have supplied the larger map. G.: Naturally. Metafisica e antimetafisica is almost the perfect background. Once Bontadini frames the issue, anti-metaphysics becomes less a school and more a recurrent temptation of modern philosophy. S.: A temptation to abolish first questions? G.: Or to replace them with local procedures and then congratulate oneself on sobriety. S.: Which sounds exactly like Oxford, if one is feeling unkind. G.: I am usually feeling exact. S.: So Ayer says metaphysics is nonsense. G.: More or less. Or at least that its propositions lack cognitive meaning under his preferred test. S.: And Bausola says? G.: Bausola is not content merely to mock anti-metaphysics. He wants to understand what drives it and why it is inadequate. S.: In a Catholic university. G.: Exactly. Which means anti-metafisicismo there cannot be merely the cheerful destruction of castles in the air. It is a problem internal to the philosophical conscience of the place. S.: You make Sacro Cuore sound very solemn. G.: It was solemn, but not stupid. There is a difference, though not every university manages it. S.: And the Augustinianum? G.: Important because it gives Bausola not only a classroom but a form of life. A formative environment, personal contacts, intellectual atmosphere, and likely the sort of inward seriousness that makes “metaphysics” sound less like a parlour vice and more like a duty. S.: Whereas Corpus for you and Clifton for Grice serve a different function. G.: Analogous in formation, different in creed. Corpus Christi kept the sacramental name while becoming English and dry. Sacro Cuore kept both the sacrament and the programme. S.: Then anti-metaphysicalism in English sounds weaker. G.: It does. “Anti-metaphysicalism” is a possible word, but it sounds as if one were objecting to a disease in a pamphlet. Italians do these things with more chest. S.: Is there a normal English equivalent? G.: Usually “anti-metaphysical stance” or “anti-metaphysics.” We are a nation of circumlocution pretending to be plain. S.: So why is anyone afraid of metaphysics? G.: Because metaphysics makes total claims, and total claims embarrass moderate men, scientists, bureaucrats, and undergraduates with scholarships. S.: You forgot priests. G.: Priests are often less afraid than philosophers. They have practised dogma longer. S.: Back to Ayer. If nobody at Oxford was really doing metaphysics in 1936, what was the fuss? G.: The fuss was partly theatrical. Ayer arrives with Vienna in his pocket and a broom in his hand. One needs dust if one is to sweep dramatically, and metaphysics supplied the dust. S.: Yet Collingwood is sitting there in the chair. G.: Yes, being called metaphysical while doing history, imagination, and civilisational anatomy. Which is not nothing. S.: So perhaps Ayer was attacking a signboard. G.: Often the safest target. S.: And who came after Collingwood? G.: The succession tells the usual Oxford tale: titles survive transformations. The chair remains “metaphysical,” while the occupants and the institution increasingly prefer analysis, language, mind, or respectable fragments. S.: Fragmentation as a defence against metaphysics. G.: Precisely. One may still discuss being, provided one does so in pieces. S.: Whereas in Milan Bausola is beginning from anti-metafisicismo under Bontadini, which suggests the matter is still live. G.: Very much so. In Italy the fight over metaphysics is not simply a matter of cleaning up language. It involves idealism, neo-scholasticism, positivism, historicism, and the spiritual dignity of philosophy itself. S.: More crowded than Oxford. G.: More historical. Oxford likes to pretend it was born at tea. S.: Then Bausola’s anti-metafisicismo could be aimed at a whole family of reductions. G.: Exactly. The reduction of being to experience, of truth to utility, of reason to method, of metaphysics to a category mistake, of religion to sentiment, and of philosophy to commentary on science. S.: A very large enemy. G.: The Italians prefer their enemies composite. It gives the thesis a better silhouette. S.: Yet you said Dewey might be a pretext. G.: A respectable pretext. One can discuss pragmatism as a visible form of anti-metaphysical temper while really worrying about much closer things. S.: Such as Croce? G.: Possibly by contrast, though Bausola later writes on Croce in ethics and politics. But the anti-metaphysical impulse may appear in more than one place: pragmatism, neo-positivism, historicist reductions, utilitarian social thought, and all the little habits of mind that treat metaphysics as either obsolete or dangerous. S.: Dangerous is the interesting one. G.: Yes, because once you call metaphysics dangerous you have almost admitted its power. S.: So who is afraid of metaphysics? G.: Men who suspect that if metaphysics returns, their own tidy local methods will have to answer larger questions than they prefer. S.: That sounds like you speaking of Oxford. G.: I am speaking of everyone with a method. S.: And Bausola’s solidarity later grows out of this? G.: I think so. A philosopher who worries early about anti-metaphysics may later worry about reductionisms in ethics, politics, and interpersonal life. If the person is more than a utility-calculating atom, solidarity needs reasons. If solidarity has reasons, metaphysics is never very far offstage. S.: Ah, now we are back to conversation. G.: We never left it. Cooperation in conversation, for me, is rational. For Bausola, cooperation may need a thicker ground: interpersonal relation, responsibility, freedom, solidarity. S.: Which Ayer would not have enjoyed. G.: Ayer enjoyed clarity more than thickness. S.: And Dewey? G.: Dewey might have smiled and called it social intelligence, then wandered back toward democracy and education. But Bausola wanted something sterner than that. S.: Something Catholic? G.: Something philosophically answerable in a Catholic atmosphere, yes. The distinction matters. S.: So anti-metafisicismo at Sacro Cuore is not a slogan against heaven. G.: No. It is a way of asking what modern thought loses when it congratulates itself for having risen above metaphysics. S.: And Oxford’s equivalent question? G.: What exactly did Ayer think he had killed, in a place where the supposed corpse was mostly absent? S.: A marvellous murder without a body. G.: Oxford excels at that. S.: Was there any anti-metaphysicalism in English before Ayer? G.: Plenty of suspicion, certainly. British empiricism contains repeated anti-metaphysical nerves. But Ayer made it young, brisk, continental, and journalistic. S.: So he gave anti-metaphysics a public-school tie. G.: More or less. And then Oxford spent years deciding whether to treat him as a revolution or a nephew. S.: And Bausola’s 1954 thesis sits where in all this? G.: At an intersection: young Catholic philosopher, Milanese institutional world, Bontadini behind him, anti-metafisicismo before him, and a larger postwar problem about what philosophy can be if one refuses both dogmatic closure and anti-metaphysical evacuation. S.: That is a very elegant thesis-shaped crossroads. G.: Better than beginning with “language games,” which is what weaker men would have done. S.: You are unkind to games. G.: Only when they deny being games. S.: Then tell me about the anti- in anti-metafisicismo. G.: The anti- is almost always psychologically revealing. It makes the thing opposed seem more substantial than the opposition admits. S.: Like Anti-Christ. G.: Exactly. One does not invent Anti-Christ unless Christ is already inconveniently central. S.: So anti-metafisicismo presupposes metaphysics. G.: Splendid. You are becoming almost theological. S.: I try to keep up. G.: Do not overdo it. S.: Then what kind of metaphysics is Bausola defending, if any? G.: Not crude system-building, I should think. Rather the legitimacy of first questions, the irreducibility of being, personhood, moral obligation, perhaps freedom and transcendence against flattening accounts. S.: Meat-physics, as I once heard someone say. G.: Meatphysics is what happens when metaphysics is left too close to lunch. S.: And Oxford preferred not to have metaphysics at lunch? G.: Oxford preferred it in chairs and titles, not in one’s soup. S.: While Italy served it with courses. G.: And with regional variation. S.: Is Bausola criticising anti-metaphysicalism because he fears totalitarianism, utilitarian reduction, collectivism, egoism, all that? G.: Later certainly those become his themes: freedom, responsibility, person, solidarity. It is not absurd to think the anti-metafisicismo thesis already marks the enemy terrain. S.: So anti-metaphysics may lead to bad politics? G.: Or at least to thinner anthropology, and thin anthropology is politically very promiscuous. S.: You make metaphysics sound morally useful. G.: I am only saying that refusing to ask what a person is tends not to improve how persons are treated. S.: And at Oxford? G.: We preferred to ask what “person” means and hoped the rest would behave itself. S.: Did it? G.: Only intermittently. S.: Back to Collingwood once more. You say no one took him seriously because he was a Roman historian. G.: That is exaggeration for effect. Some took him very seriously. But his mode of seriousness was not the mode that would later dominate analytic Oxford. S.: Too historical, too imaginative, too synthetic. G.: Yes. Too willing to think that metaphysics had to do with forms of thought in history rather than with tidying propositions. S.: Which makes him closer to the Italians. G.: Indeed. That is partly why he is interesting. S.: Then Bausola’s world is one in which metaphysics is still a battleground, while Ayer’s Oxford is one in which anti-metaphysics is a victorious poster hung over a mostly empty stage. G.: Very well put. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become vain. S.: Never. I shall merely become anti-vain. G.: That too would only prove the thing had triumphed.Grice: Adriano, pensi che la solidarietà sia solo un altro tipo di miscela italiana di caffè, o ha bisogno di una dose filosofica di espresso? Bausola: Grice, la solidarietà assomiglia più a un dolce condiviso—talvolta prendi la fetta più grande, talvolta la lasci all’altro. Filosoficamente, è il compromesso tra l’amor proprio e l’amore per gli altri, ma sempre con un cucchiaio per due. Grice: Quindi, se chiedo la ragione che sta dietro alla condivisione, devo aspettarmi una risposta kantiana, oppure solo una spallucciata italiana accompagnata da un sorriso? Bausola: Forse tutte e due, Grice! Gli italiani amano la loro filosofia quanto il gelato. Le ragioni ci sono, ma a volte la cooperazione ha un sapore migliore se non analizzi ogni cucchiaio. Bausola, Adriano (1954). L’anti-metafisicismo. Sotto Bontadini, Milano.