BU

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Bubbio – Ossia: Grice e Bubbio: la ragione conversazionale/

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Bucculeo – Ossia: Grice e Bucculeo -- Grex griceiana –verbalia: Bucculeo. The Bucculeii are a Roman family during the late Republic. It is known chiefly from a single individual, Marcus B., a legal scholar, mentioned in a humorous anecdote of Tullio Cicero, and attributed by him to the orator Lucius LICINIO Crassus.[1][2]  See also List of Roman gentes References  Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore, i. 39.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, Editor.   GENS        This article about Roman gentes is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information.  Categories: Roman gentesRoman gentes stubs So do we have the anecdote? Grice and Speranza hope it's a conversational one. Yes, there is an anecdote, and happily it is conversational. The gens notice is pointing to Cicero, De Oratore I.39. Unfortunately, the search results I could retrieve identify the passage location but do not reproduce the Bucculeius anecdote itself. They do confirm that De Oratore 1.39 is the relevant section and that Bucculeius appears there as a jurist associated with a story told by or attributed to L. Licinius Crassus. [academic.oup.com] What is interesting, from your Grice/Speranza perspective, is that the gens article itself already gives us several clues:  Marcus Bucculeius was a legal scholar. The story was considered humorous. Cicero preserves it in a dialogue about orators. Crassus is connected to the telling. [academic.oup.com]  That combination strongly suggests one of Cicero's favourite forms of wit:  a legal point carried to absurdity through conversation.  In De Oratore, Crassus and Antonius repeatedly discuss how advocates exploit ambiguity, literalism, and common-sense expectations. [en.wikipedia.org], [rhetoric.byu.edu] So my instinct is that the "Gricean fit" is unlikely to be a heroic deed or a political career. Rather:  Bucculeius survives because he became the punchline of a conversational joke involving legal interpretation.  That is almost pure Grice territory: what is said versus what is meant. One caution, however: I have not been able to retrieve the actual Latin text of the anecdote itself from the search results, so I do not want to reconstruct details that I cannot verify. Your hunch is nevertheless plausible:  If Cicero bothered to preserve the story, and if Smith's gens article can summarize the man merely as "mentioned in a humorous anecdote", then the anecdote itself is probably more important than Bucculeius' biography.  In that sense the Bucculeii are almost the inverse of many Roman gentes:  usually the man matters and the joke survives with him; here the joke matters and the man survives because of the joke.  A very Speranzian ending would be:  Bucculeius non propter acta, sed propter dictum memoratur. ("Bucculeius is remembered not because of a deed, but because of an utterance.")  And that is already rather Gricean. Does this help? In Marcus Tullius Cicero's De Oratore (specifically Book 1, Section 179, which falls within the larger chapter 39), the primary speaker Lucius Licinius Crassus (Licinio) рассказывает an anecdote to Marcus Antoniusand their peers regarding a legal blunder made by Marcus Bucculeius (Bucculeo). [1, 2, 3, 4] The Direct Summary Crassus states that Bucculeius made a careless legal mistake while selling a house to Lucius Fufius. In the deed of sale (mancipium), Bucculeius guaranteed the "window-lights" exactly as they were at the time. However, Fufius weaponized this poorly drafted guarantee. As soon as a building started going up anywhere in Rome that could be seen from his house, Fufius sued Bucculeius, claiming his light was being altered—no matter how small the obstruction or how far away the new building was. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] What is Said in Latin (and English Translation) Crassus introduces Bucculeius with a mix of mild praise and irony: [1] “Quo quidem in genere familiaris noster M. Bucculeius... [neque meo iudicio stultus, et suo valde sapiens]... simili in re quodam modo nuper erravit.” [1] English: "...our friend M. Bucculeius—a man who is no fool in my opinion, very wise in his own... made a mistake lately in an affair of a somewhat similar nature." (The full, precise Latin text can be found in reference). [1, 2] He then explains the mistake: [1] 3 siti Si è verificato un problema con la risposta, ma ecco i risultati più pertinenti: Attalus.org·https://www.attalus.org Cicero, De Oratore, 1 (a) - Attalus.org [7] Who, indeed, is there, that, if he would measure the qualifications of illustrious men, either by the usefulness or magnitude of their actions, would not ... Internet Archive·https://archive.org De oratore, book 1. Translated into English with an introd. by E.N.P. ... with you, Scsevola, and thanks to his oratorical skill will i surpass even ... will say my say as I have begun, and will only beg of you not to let the ... Wikiversity·https://en.wikiversity.org Quotes from Cicero's DE ORATORE BOOK I - Wikiversity The Latin quotes are selected for interest (int), language (lan), and rhetoric (bea), and are translated into English. The line numbers are from the Loeb ... Yes, this helps a great deal. What you've supplied is almost certainly the anecdote the gens article is referring to, and it is wonderfully Gricean. The key line is not really the conveyancing mistake itself. It is Crassus' introduction:  "... familiaris noster M. Bucculeius ... neque meo iudicio stultus, et suo valde sapiens ..." "... our friend Marcus Bucculeius ... no fool in my judgment, and very wise in his own ..." [as quoted in your extract].  That is almost a textbook case of conversational irony. The Gricean core Crassus says:  "Not foolish in my opinion."  The hearer immediately expects praise. Then:  "and very wise in his own."  The compliment collapses. The implicature becomes:  +> Bucculeius thought himself wiser than he really was.  That's exactly the sort of thing Grice loved: a speaker says something literally charitable while conversationally communicating something less charitable.  Why the legal anecdote is funny As your summary explains, Bucculeius sold a house and guaranteed the windows and light "as they were." Fufius then exploited the wording and sued whenever some new construction anywhere affected the view or light, however remotely. The joke is not that Bucculeius was ignorant of law. Quite the opposite. He was a jurist. The joke is:  the legal expert was trapped by his own drafting.  A splendid irony.  A reconstructed Latin dialogue Bucculeius and Fufius FVFIVS (1) “Hanc domum emam; quid mihi praestas?” (I shall buy this house; what do you guarantee me?)  BVCCVLEIVS (2) “Lumina eadem manebunt quae nunc sunt.” (The lights shall remain exactly as they are now.)  FVFIVS (3) “Ita scribemus?” (Shall we write it so?)  BVCCVLEIVS (4) “Ita; satis cautum est.” (Yes; the provision is sufficient.)  FVFIVS (5) “Ecce, novum aedificium alicubi exstruitur.” (Look, a new building is being erected somewhere.)  BVCCVLEIVS (6) “Quid ad nos?” (What has that to do with us?)  FVFIVS (7) “Lumina mutantur.” (The light is altered.)  BVCCVLEIVS (8) “Hoc non sensi.” (That is not what I meant.)  FVFIVS (9) “Forsitan; sed hoc scripsisti.” (Perhaps; but that is what you wrote.)  BVCCVLEIVS (10) “Intellego nunc quid inter verba et sensum intersit.” (I now understand the difference between the words and the meaning.)  +> that the legal force of an utterance may be determined by its wording rather than by the speaker's intended meaning.  The deeper Speranzian lesson This is almost a Roman version of Grice before Grice. Bucculeius assumes:  "The other party will understand what I mean."  Fufius responds:  "I understand exactly what you wrote."  The dispute is therefore between:  speaker meaning (quid volui dicere) sentence meaning (quid scripsi)  Which is astonishingly close to a central Gricean distinction. Indeed, if I had to choose a single Bucculeian motto, it would be:  Non quid voluit, sed quid dixit. "Not what he meant, but what he said."  That is why this tiny anecdote has survived while almost everything else about Marcus Bucculeius has disappeared. It is not merely a legal joke; it is a philosophical joke about meaning. And on a second run can you retrieve the Latin in Cicero from perhaps an open access source? Thanks Yes! Your additional evidence gets us very close to the actual text. The Loeb excerpt preserves the crucial Latin: [loebclassics.com]  Quo quidem in genere familiaris noster M. Bucculeius, homo neque meo iudicio stultus, et suo valde sapiens, et a iuris studio non abhorrens, simili in re quodam modo nuper erravit. Nam cum aedes L. Fufio venderet, in mancipio lumina, uti tum essent, ita recepit. Fufius autem, simul atque aedificari coeptum est in quadam parte urbis quae modo ex illis aedibus conspici posset, egit statim cum Bucculeio... [loebclassics.com]  A translation of the core:  "In that kind of case too our friend Marcus Bucculeius, no fool in my opinion, and exceedingly wise in his own, and not averse to the study of law, recently made a mistake of a similar sort. For when he sold a house to Lucius Fufius, he guaranteed in the conveyance that the lights should remain as they then were. Then Fufius, the moment construction was begun in any part of the city that could in any way be seen from that house, immediately sued Bucculeius..." [loebclassics.com]  For a Grice/Speranza reading, the most delicious point is that Bucculeius is not presented as stupid at all. Crassus says:  neque meo iudicio stultus, et suo valde sapiens  which almost translates as:  "not a fool in my opinion, and very wise in his own." [loebclassics.com]  That is devastatingly polite Roman irony. The conversational implicature is:  +> Bucculeius overrated his own cleverness.  And then the rest of the story demonstrates exactly how. The legal issue is essentially a clash between:  speaker meaning: "the light will remain substantially as it is", text meaning: "the light shall remain exactly as it is."  Fufius chooses the second interpretation and exploits it. [loebclassics.com] So I think Bucculeius may be one of the purest Gricean figures among these obscure gentes. The whole anecdote turns on:  quid voluit dicere versus quid scripsit ("what he meant" versus "what he wrote").  Indeed, if one wanted a one-line Speranzian moral:  Bucculeius credidit Fufium intellecturum; Fufius maluit legere. ("Bucculeius believed Fufius would understand; Fufius preferred to read.")  And that is almost a miniature philosophy of language embedded in Roman property law. And can you provide the continuation to this below -- because it is Fufius who is being Griceian? Fufius autem, simul atque aedificari coeptum est in quadam parte urbis quae modo ex illis aedibus conspici posset, egit statim cum Bucculeio... Yes — and now we have the continuation. The Alpheios text gives the whole anecdote: [texts.alpheios.net]  Fufius autem, simul atque aedificari coeptum est in quadam parte urbis, quae modo ex illis aedibus conspici posset, egit statim cum Buculeio, quod, cuicumque particulae caeli officeretur, quamvis esset procul, mutari lumina putabat. [texts.alpheios.net]  A fairly literal translation:  "But Fufius, as soon as building began in any part of the city that could somehow be seen from that house, immediately brought an action against Bucculeius, because he thought that whenever any portion of the sky was obstructed, however far away it might be, the light had been altered." [texts.alpheios.net]  This is even better than the summary. Is Fufius being Gricean? In a sense, yes — but in a very particular way. Bucculeius relies on what Grice would call something close to speaker's meaning:  "the light will remain essentially the same."  Fufius relies on the literal entitlement created by the wording:  "You guaranteed the lights as they now are."  Then he pushes that wording to the limit:  even a remote building that blocks a tiny bit of sky counts as altering the light. [texts.alpheios.net]  So the joke is that Fufius refuses to cooperate in the ordinary conversational way. A Gricean hearer would ordinarily reason:  Bucculeius did not intend to guarantee the entire Roman skyline forever.  Fufius instead reasons:  I shall interpret the clause by its most advantageous literal extension.  So he is almost the anti-Gricean participant. He ignores the presumed cooperative intention and exploits the text. Why Crassus finds it funny Notice that Crassus introduces Bucculeius as:  neque meo iudicio stultus et suo valde sapiens "no fool in my opinion, and very wise in his own." [texts.alpheios.net]  The humour is that a man who thought himself legally clever drafted language that another clever man could weaponize against him. The whole anecdote is a miniature lesson in:  verba vs. voluntas ("words" versus "intention").  Very nearly:  quid dixit vs. quid voluit ("what he said" versus "what he meant").  That is why, among all these obscure gentes, Bucculeius may be one of the most genuinely Gricean figures: he loses because he assumes his hearer will infer his intended meaning, while Fufius insists on the maximal literal interpretation permitted by the wording. [texts.alpheios.net] And is this belw the END of the anecdote before C. continues with something else (change topic or expand). Because we are not told if F. was VICTORIOUS in his suing. Thanks cum Buculeio, quod, cuicumque particulae caeli officeretur, quamvis esset procul, mutari lumina putabat. Yes. From the text we now have, the Bucculeius anecdote ends there. The sequence is:   Crassus introduces Bucculeius with the ironic description:  homo neque meo iudicio stultus et suo valde sapiens ("no fool in my judgment, and very wise in his own estimation").    He recounts the sale of the house and the guarantee:  lumina, uti tum essent, ita recepit ("he guaranteed the lights as they then were").    He recounts Fufius' reaction:  Fufius immediately sued whenever any construction anywhere visible from the house obstructed even a tiny portion of the sky.    Cicero/Crassus then moves straight on:  Quid vero? clarissima M'. Curi causa Marcique Coponi... ("What then? The famous case of Manius Curius and Marcus Coponius...") and begins a completely different legal example.    So, as far as the surviving text in this passage goes:  We are not told whether Fufius won. We are not told whether Bucculeius settled. We are not told what the court decided.  The anecdote's point is not the outcome but the drafting mistake. That is actually very Ciceronian. Crassus is illustrating a broader thesis:  legal disputes arise from the wording of instruments and the interpretation of obligations.  For that purpose, the result is almost irrelevant. The mere fact that Fufius could bring such an action is enough to show that Bucculeius had left himself exposed. A nice Grice/Speranza observation follows: The anecdote is structured so that we naturally ask:  "But who won?"  Yet Cicero declines to answer. That omission itself creates an implicature:  the interesting fact is not the verdict, but that a supposedly shrewd jurist allowed his words to be interpreted in a way he had not intended.  In other words:  Fufius' lawsuit is the punchline; the judgment would merely be the epilogue.  And that is why Cicero can abandon Bucculeius and move immediately to the causa Curiana without giving us the ending. But can we reconstruct the suing and Bucculeo winning? Nam cum aedes L. Fufio venderet, in mancipio lumina, uti tum essent, ita recepit. -- it seems subject is lumina. So B. can claim that lumina in t0 = present time -- same as lumina in t+1 the first time where Fufio is possessor or owner or proprietor, but not t indefintely. It seems to Grice and Speranza that Nam cum aedes L. Fufio venderet, in mancipio lumina, uti tum essent, ita recepit. -- does not ENTAIL time indefinition? Thanks I think your legal and Gricean instinct is very good here. Let's look carefully at the Latin:  Nam cum aedes L. Fufio venderet, in mancipio lumina, uti tum essent, ita recepit.  Literally:  "When he sold the house to L. Fufius, in the conveyance he guaranteed the lights, as they then were."  The crucial words are:  uti tum essent "as they then were."  Notice what Cicero's text explicitly gives us:  a reference point: tum ("then", i.e. at the time of sale) a guarantee about the state of the lights at that moment.  What Cicero does not tell us is the exact legal formula or whether it was construed prospectively forever.  Your proposed defence A Bucculeian advocate might argue:  "I warranted the condition existing at the moment of transfer."  Formally:  At time t₀ (sale):  lights = L   At time t₁ (delivery):  lights = L    Obligation discharged. Nothing in the wording explicitly says:  "for all future time."  That seems a perfectly plausible interpretation.  Why Fufius could sue But Crassus' joke depends on Fufius taking the phrase differently. The text says:  quod, cuicumque particulae caeli officeretur, quamvis esset procul, mutari lumina putabat "because he thought that whenever any portion of the sky was obstructed, however distant, the lights were altered."  Fufius' reasoning appears to be:  Bucculeius guaranteed the lights "as they were." Any reduction of visible sky changes the amount of light. Therefore the guarantee is breached.  The humour comes from the maximality of that reading.  Could Bucculeius have won? Certainly as a reconstruction. But we should distinguish: What Cicero tells us He tells us:  Fufius sued. Fufius interpreted the clause very broadly.  What Cicero does not tell us He does not tell us:  who won, what argument prevailed, what the jurists thought, what the court decided.  So any victory for Bucculeius is reconstruction, not evidence.  The deeper Gricean point I think the joke works best if Bucculeius is actually right in ordinary-language terms. Bucculeius means:  "I guarantee the house with the lights it presently enjoys."  Fufius interprets:  "I guarantee the visible heavens for all eternity."  The comedy arises because Fufius refuses the normal cooperative inference. In Gricean language:  Bucculeius relies on what a reasonable hearer would take him to mean. Fufius exploits what the words can be stretched to mean.  Hence:  Bucculeius speaks according to ordinary communicative intention; Fufius litigates according to maximal literalism.  And that is probably why Crassus tells the story: not primarily to report a lawsuit, but to show how a clever draftsman can be trapped when another clever man chooses verba over voluntas. And most likely it was an EXAMPLE -- a case study -- by Bucc. to his students -- because Fulfio (what do we know about him) seems especially tricky in noting that lumina mutant -- 'however far away' -- if a building is built -- that would require witness to measure how the lights 'mutant' -- and mutant from where? from one particular overture (beccause there was reference to window, I understand). Surely AT NIGHT lights 'mutant' also -- So we may just reconstruct it as a case example by Bucc. on contracts NOT needing to specify LIGHTS 'essent' etc? Thanks I think that's a very plausible Speranzian reconstruction, but we have to distinguish carefully between what Cicero explicitly gives us and what we are imaginatively building on top of it. What Cicero actually gives The surviving anecdote tells us only:  Bucculeius sold a house to Lucius Fufius. In the conveyance he guaranteed the lumina:  lumina, uti tum essent, ita recepit.   Fufius then sued whenever building activity anywhere visible from the house seemed to affect the light. Fufius' reasoning was that if any portion of the sky were obstructed, however remote, the lights had changed:  cuicumque particulae caeli officeretur, quamvis esset procul, mutari lumina putabat.    Cicero does not tell us:  who Fufius was beyond being the purchaser, whether he won, whether the suit was serious or merely notorious, whether Bucculeius later used it as a teaching example.  Your observation about tum This is the strongest point. The clause is:  uti tum essent "as they then were."  The natural question is:  "Then" for how long?  Nothing in the phrase itself explicitly says:  forever.  A Gricean lawyer for Bucculeius could argue:  the phrase fixes a reference state at the time of sale; it does not explicitly impose an eternal guarantee against all future urban development.  In modern terms, Fufius seems to be reading a snapshot description as though it were a perpetual warranty. Why Fufius is the interesting character Fufius is almost comically ingenious. Notice how extreme his interpretation is:  if any bit of sky is blocked, however far away, the lights have changed.  That moves beyond ordinary communication. A cooperative hearer would understand:  "the house enjoys this amount of light."  Fufius understands:  "the geometry of the visible heavens is contractually frozen."  That is exactly why the anecdote is funny. Could Bucculeius have used it as a classroom example? Historically, we don't know. But as a reconstruction, it is excellent. Imagine: DISCIPVLVS: "Magister, quid est cautio periculosa?" (Master, what is a dangerous contractual clause?) BVCCVLEIVS: "Brevis cautio a prudentiore lectore intellecta." (A short clause interpreted by a cleverer reader.) And then he tells the Fufius story. The moral would not be:  don't guarantee light.  Rather:  don't leave key terms underdefined.  In Speranza's idiom:  Non verba obscura sunt; nimis clara sunt. ("The words are not obscure; they are too clear.")  Because the clearer the wording looks, the easier it may be for a clever litigant to press it beyond what the drafter intended. So I agree with you that the real philosophical interest lies less in who won the lawsuit and more in the clash between:  Bucculeius' intended meaning, and Fufius' exploitative interpretation.  That is almost a Roman anticipation of the distinction between speaker meaning and literal meaning.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buonafede – Ossia: Grice e Buonafede: la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale.  Arcade Agatopisto Cromaziano Appiano Tino Benvenuto di Buonafede (Comacchio, Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna): la ragione conversazionale e  l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats everyday talk as a cooperative, rational enterprise in which hearers infer what a speaker means (often beyond what is literally said) by assuming an accepted purpose to the exchange and by applying norms such as informativeness, truthfulness, relevance, and clarity, with conversational implicatures arising when a speaker appears to flout these norms in ways the hearer can rationally “repair” by attributing intentions. Appiano Buonafede (Comacchio 1716–Rome 1793), a Celestine monk and prolific historiographer and polemicist who published under Arcadian names such as Agatopisto Cromaziano, is not a pragmatics theorist, but his practice and metacommentary on intellectual life illuminate a very different sense in which “reason” governs discourse: he writes large-scale histories of philosophy (notably Della istoria e della indole di ogni filosofia, 1766–1781, and the later Della restaurazione d’ogni filosofia nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII, issued in the 1780s) in order to classify, rehabilitate, and discipline philosophical traditions against what he takes to be the distortions of sensism and irreligion, while simultaneously staging quarrels in a strongly satirical key (e.g., the Baretti controversy around Il bue pedagogo, 1764). Set beside Grice, Buonafede looks less like an analyst of how implicature is computed in a talk exchange and more like an architect of macro-conversational conditions—who is entitled to speak, what counts as legitimate argument, what kinds of wit or ridicule are permissible, and how polemic and erudition can steer an audience toward endorsed conclusions; where Grice models implicature as a defeasible, calculable product of cooperative inference within a shared conversational project, Buonafede’s “implicatures” are largely rhetorical and institutional, generated by satire, selective quotation, and the narrative framing of whole schools as admirable or suspect, so that the governing rationality is not primarily the micro-rationality of interlocutors optimizing mutual understanding, but the normative rationality of cultural arbitration—using histories, exempla, and invective to make philosophy appear continuous, corrigible, and (in his preferred sense) rescuable. Grice: “You’ve got to love B.; he is all into the longitudinal unity of philosophy, literally from Remo – he has chapters on the Ancient Romans, on philosophy from the first monarchy to the second, a chapter on Cicerone, and one of a lovely phrase, the Roman equivalent to the century of Pericles, ‘filosofia nel regno di Augusto,’ but also on later developments of Italian philosophy, even a chapter on Cartesianism in Italy, and how philosophy on the whole was ‘resurrected’ or ‘revitalised’ in Italy. I once joked that philosophers should never give much credit to Wollaston – but B. totally proves me wrong!” Studia a Bologna. Insegna a Napoli. Ritratti poetici, storici e critici di varj uomini di lettere – Appio Anneo de Faba Cromaziano, nella quale convivono giudizi critici su MACCHIAVELLI.. La restaurazione di ogni filosofia contro il sensismo. Commedie. Il filosofo fanciullo critica filosofi riportando citazioni fuori dal contesto. Baretti lo critica e B. col Il bue pedagogo: novella menippee di Luciano da Fiorenzuola contro una certa Frusta pseudo-epigrafia di Aristarco Cannabue. CROCE lo critica: da abbattere un nemico senza che puo distrarlo la ricerca della verità, ma. Natali lo giudica filosofo non volgare. storiografia filosofica, criteria, storia neutrale della filosofia, primo filosofo romano, lingua latina Man the architect of his own fortune Appio Filosofo: addito a reflessioni generali sulla vita. Grice:Buonafede, tu che hai raccontato la filosofia come una lunga avventura dai tempi di Romolo fino a Cartesio, dimmi la verità: è più difficile far resuscitare la filosofia o districare le citazioni di Macchiavelli? Buonafede: Caro Grice, tra filosofi che si criticano e commedie menippee, il vero miracolo è sopravvivere alle “frustate” di Baretti e Croce senza perdere il filo della filosofia né il sorriso sulla bocca! Grice: Però, ammettilo, la tua “restaurazione di ogni filosofia” sembra più una commedia che una battaglia, come il bue pedagogo che pascola tra le note a piè pagina. Buonafede: Grice, hai ragione: in fondo, la vera filosofia è come una novella di Luciano, tra una risata e una citazione fuori contesto; serve più l’arte del saper ridere che quella del confutare. Buonafede, Arcade Agatopisto Cromaziano Appiano Tito Benvenuto di (1766). Della restaurazione di ogni filosofia. Venezia, Antonio Zatta. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buonaiuti – Ossia: Grice e Buonaiuti: la ragione conversazionale. Grice: “I like B.!” Atifascista.  Ernesto Buonaiuti (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers infer what a speaker means from what is said by presuming cooperative rationality in a “talk exchange” (Cooperative Principle plus maxims), so that apparent indirection, strategic omissions, or seeming irrelevance can be treated as deliberate and yield calculable, cancellable conversational implicatures; this framework is designed to model how communication works even when speakers do not state everything explicitly. Ernesto Buonaiuti (Rome, 1881–1946), by contrast, is not a philosopher of language but a historian of Christianity and leading Italian Modernist whose public life turned on conflicts about authority, method, and readership—e.g., he founded and directed the Rivista storico-critica delle scienze teologiche from 1905 to 1910 (placing his “founded at 24” claim in 1905), defended Modernism in works such as Il programma dei modernisti (1908), and saw key writings and journals placed on the Index, culminating in excommunication (commonly dated 25 January 1925/1926 depending on source tradition) and later political sanctions; in Gricean terms, Buonaiuti’s “meaning-problems” are less about micro-inference between interlocutors and more about institutional pragmatics—how texts address multiple audiences (Church, academy, state), how constraints (censure, oaths, indexing) reshape what can be said, and how dissent is managed through public acts that themselves communicate beyond their literal form. The comparison, then, is that Grice offers a general rational mechanism for recovering speaker-meaning in ordinary interaction, whereas Buonaiuti exemplifies a historically charged arena where what is “meant” is negotiated under surveillance and sanction: the same utterance (or publication) can carry layered implicatures about loyalty, critique, and methodological legitimacy depending on who is taken to be the audience, and ecclesiastical acts like placing a journal on the Index or imposing excommunication function as institutional speech-acts that regulate uptake—controlling not just propositions but the conversational conditions under which certain meanings may be responsibly entertained. Grice: “I like B.!” Atifascista. Studia sotto Minocchi, utilizzando le risorse offerte dal metodo positivo allo studio del Cristianesimo primitivo (Il cristianesimo primitivo e la Politica imperiale romana, 1911). Fondò a soli 24 anni la Rivista storico-critica delle scienze teologiche, per la diffusione della cultura religiosa in Italia e diresse in seguito la rivista Ricerche religiose. Queste riviste, premiate almeno in un primo momento da un discreto successo editoriale, vennero poste poi all'Indice. Il 25 gennaio 1926 era stato colpito con la scomunica, ribadita più volte, per aver preso le difese del movimento modernista soprattutto nelle opere Il programma dei modernisti (1908) e Lettere di un prete modernista (1908), contro la posizione ufficiale della Chiesa espressa nell'Enciclica Pascendi dominici gregis, emanata da papa Pio X. Nell'autobiografia (Il pellegrino di Roma), B. ricostruì il conflitto con la Chiesa cattolica, della quale, nonostante la scomunica, continuò a proclamarsi figlio fedele. Vince il concorso a cattedra, bandito per ricoprire il ruolo di professore ordinario di Storia del cristianesimo rimasto vacante per la morte di Baldassarre Labanca, presso l'Università di Roma, prevalendo su altri candidati illustri come lo stesso Minocchi, Adolfo Omodeo, Luigi Salvatorelli e Umberto Fracassini, Nicolò d'Alfonso. Gli anni di insegnamento, liberamente esercitato presso un Ateneo statale a dispetto delle censure ecclesiastiche[senza fonte], gli permisero di formare un gruppo di allievi, tra i quali spiccano Agostino Biamonti, Ambrogio Donini (che dopo la fine della guerra sarebbe stato professore di Storia del Cristianesimo a Bari e senatore comunista) e Marcella Ravà (poi divenuta direttrice della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma), fortemente attaccati alla figura e all'opera del maestro. Grice: Buonaiuti, tu che hai fondato riviste a 24 anni, confessalo: è vero che la ragione conversazionale in Italia si trova prima in una rivista che in una chiesa? Buonaiuti: Grice, se avessi chiesto al papa, avrebbe messo la ragione conversazionale direttamente all’Indice, insieme al mio programma dei modernisti! Grice: Ma Ernesto, tu che vinci concorsi e cattedre, dimmi: quando si parla di Cristianesimo primitivo, è meglio usare il metodo positivo o la politica imperiale romana? Buonaiuti: Grice, io dico che per insegnare la storia del Cristianesimo serve un po’ di metodo, un pizzico di politica, e tanti allievi fedeli – ma attenzione, perché anche la scomunica può essere conversazionale! Buonaiuti, Ernesto (1908). Il programma dei modernisti. Roma, Tipografia Sociale.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buonamici – Ossia: Grice e Buonamici: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- you scratch my back -- etymologia di muovere --  corpi in movimento. Grice: There are many B. (including GALILEO), so you have to be careful Francesco Giuseppe Buonamici (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- you scratch my back -- etymologia di muovere --  Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover speaker-meaning from what is said by assuming cooperative purposes and norms, and then calculating implicatures when an utterance seems oddly weak, tangential, or over/under-informative; meaning is thus anchored in recognisable communicative intentions and in publicly checkable principles of rational exchange rather than in merely semantic or causal relations. Francesco Buonamici (Florence 1533–1603), by contrast, is a late-Renaissance Aristotelian natural philosopher and classicist (studied at the Studio of Florence, taught at Pisa, author of De motu libri X, 1591, and Discorsi poetici in defense of Aristotle), whose central explanatory ambitions lie in the metaphysics and physics of motion and in humanist commentary on authoritative texts; if Galileo was indeed among those who benefited from the Pisan Aristotelian milieu associated with Buonamici, the intellectual model is still one of causes, natures, and demonstrations, not of conversational inference. The comparison is therefore a difference of explanatory level: Buonamici’s “reason” is the scholastic-humanist reason of principled accounts of change (motus) and disciplined interpretation of Aristotle (including poetics, imitation, and the canon), whereas Grice’s “reason” is a practical-normative account of how agents manage understanding in interaction, where even apparently irrelevant allusions (wine, towers, “you scratch my back”) can be systematically treated as rational moves generating further communicated content. Put sharply, Buonamici investigates how bodies move and how texts authorize explanation; Grice investigates how minds move from literal content to intended meaning under cooperative constraints—so that Buonamici supplies a paradigm of reason as causal-demonstrative order, while Grice supplies a paradigm of reason as inferential-social order governing what we can responsibly take one another to mean. -- corpi in movimento. Grice: There are many B. (including GALILEO), so you have to be careful – this one is a genius – he taught at Pisa, in the M. A. programme, both Aristotle’s Poetics – imitazione, il tragico, -- and his ‘motus’ – Galileo happened to be his tutee, and the rest is the leaning tower!” Frequenta lo Studio di Firenze, dove segue il corso del l'umanista Vettori (si conservano alcune lettere scambiate tra i due). Filosofo naturale e latinista, si ispira molto agli antichi testi che commenta (Aristotele, Nicomaco…). Tutore di Galilei a Pisa. Altre opere: “De Motu libri X, quibus generalia naturalis philosophiae principia summo studio collecta continentur, necnon universae quaestiones ad libros de physico auditu, de caelo, de ortu et interitu pertinentes explicantur, multa item Aristotelis loca explanantur et Graecorum, Averrois, aliorumque doctorum sententiae ad theses peripateticas diriguntur, apud Sermartellium (Firenze); Discorsi poetici nella accademia fiorentina in difesa d'Aristotile. Appresso Giorgio Marescotti (Firenze); De Alimento, Sermartellium juniorem. Galilei, De motu antiquiora” “Quaestiones de motu elementorum”.  Gentiluomo Fiorentino, e Medico, Lettore di Filosofia con gran concorso di Scolari nell'Università di Pifa. In detta Università avendo Giulio de' Libri altro Profesfore tacciato il Buonamici, come quello che citaffe testi falfi, questi una mentita gli diede; ed effendo state gettate da alcuno in fua scuola certe cor na, il Buonamici così diffe: Si vede che costui debbe avere in tafa grande a b éondanza di questa mercanzia, poichè ne porta qua. Egli v insegnò quaranta tre anni » e letto aveva due volte tutto AQUINO , e in ultimo gli erano pagate quattrocento feffanta piastre di provvisione. Il buon gusto nelle belle Lettere congiunse allo studio delle facoltà più gravi. corpi in movimento, Aristotele, filosofia naturale, Galilei, razionalismo, aristotelismo pisano, de imitazione – aristotele – poetica – mimica – de motu – muggerbrydge. Grice: Buonamici, tu che hai commentato Aristotele e insegnato a Pisa, dimmi, è vero che il “motus” si spiega meglio quando la torre pende? Buonamici: Grice, a Pisa persino i corpi in movimento si inclinano per imitare la torre – e se Aristotele avesse visto Galilei, forse avrebbe aggiunto un capitolo sulle pendenze! Grice: E sull’etimologia di “muovere”, ti sei mai chiesto se basta una spinta o serve anche una buona dose di letteratura? Buonamici: Grice, io dico che per muovere davvero serve imitazione, poesia e qualche tutee curioso – tu mi gratti la schiena, io ti muovo la mente! Buonamici, Francesco Giuseppe (1591). De Motu libri X, quibus generalia naturalis philosophiae principia summo studio collecta continentur, necnon universae quaestiones ad libros de physico auditu, de caelo, de ortu et interitu pertinentes explicantur, multa item Aristotelis loca explanantur et Graecorum, Averrois, aliorumque doctorum sententiae ad theses peripateticas diriguntur, apud Sermartellium (Firenze).

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buonamici – Ossia: Grice e Buonamici. Francesco Giuseppe Buonamici (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how a hearer moves from what is literally said to what is meant by presuming cooperative rationality (the Cooperative Principle and maxims) and then treating any apparent mismatch—saying something oddly tangential, too weak, or overly indirect—as a deliberate, intelligible move that licenses a calculable and cancellable implicature grounded in recognizable intentions. The Buonamici of your passage is the nineteenth-century Pisan civic orator who, in his 1863 commemorative discourse for the inauguration of Fibonacci’s statue in the Camposanto (printed by Nistri), explicitly frames his own speech as audience-designed and constrained by circumstance (limited time, decision to omit long notes, aim of making Fibonacci’s life “almost popular”), while also using public rhetoric to promote a national-linguistic and juridical unification theme (“Milano s’assorella a Firenze e Torino,” Tuscan becoming Italian law, “libertà libera”): in Gricean terms, this is a setting where meaning is managed as much by selective omission, strategic emphasis, and ceremonially appropriate relevance as by literal assertion. Thus, where Grice supplies the micro-pragmatic mechanism for explaining how listeners infer the speaker’s further point (e.g., praise of Fibonacci as indirectly praising civic modernity; talk of language unity as indirectly urging political unity; joking about “bread” or “traffic” as a way of making a technical legacy socially legible), Buonamici exemplifies the macro-rhetorical practice in which those inferences are deliberately courted: the oration is constructed so that what is not said (the skipped controversies, the shortened apparatus) and what is foregrounded (shared honour, common language, common law) carry much of the communicative force, making the speech itself a public exercise in reason-governed conversational (and quasi-conversational) uptake. Grice: “I like B.!” FIBONACCI A mostrare quanto il magnifico dono del Governo riusciva gradito, e j)er segno di pubblica onoranza al concittadino illustre, elessero i Pisani di inaugurarne la statua in un (giorno di festa, quando parecchi erano qui convenuti per causa della stupenda illuminazione della città; e il Mu- nicipio e le autorità del paese, e molto popolo si adunò a questo oggetto nel camposanto medesimo. Ivi io, domandato di ciò pochi giorni avanti dal signor Gonfaloniere, lessi il seguente discorso. Il quale se risente della brevità del tempo accordodo a comporlo, e non mostra tutta la importanza di un argomento per recenti scoperte e per le cure degli scienziaM fatto omm gravissimo; nullammo basta a sciogliere i Pisani da un obbligo antico, ed a rendere note e quasi popolari fra noi la vita e il nome del Fibonacci, che cotanto lustro recò alla città nostra. Questo solo essendo lo scopo del lavoro mio e lo intendimento del Municipio', ho potuto passarmi di varie cpiestioni su tal proposito tuttora agitate, ed anco risparmiare delle note lunghissi- me (ponendo solo le brevi e le indispensabili ) le quali in certi punti sarebbero forse cadute in accon- cio. I leggitori che desiderano di piu potranno consultare con grande profitto GRIMALDI, GUGLIELMINI, Libri, Doncompagni, e del tìonaini, non ha guari pubblicati sulle cose di FIBONACCI. Infatti di già vediamo che distrutte le differenze dei paesi, .Milano s’assorella a Firenze e Torino. La lingua dolcissima che suona sull’Arno, fà echeggiare anco le rive del Pò e dell’Udige. MACCHIAVELLI, VICO, ALFIERI, e PARINI sono salutati cittadini di tutte le nostre città. Anche il diritto pertanto che fu del borgo, dell’aite, del feudo s’avvierà a farsi dìritto della patria, le leggi positive si accomuneranno e correggeranno mediante la pratica giurisprudenza, e il diritto toscano diviene diritto italiano. All’ombra di colesta legge certa e finita nel tempo e nello spazio, fruiremo al dire di MACCHIAVELLI una libertà libera. Grice: Buonamici, tu che hai letto il discorso nel camposanto per Fibonacci, dimmi, la statua serve a illuminare Pisa o solo a ricordare ai Pisani che la matematica si mangia anche col pane? Buonamici: Grice, a Pisa la matematica si mangia col pane e col lampredotto: la statua serve a tenere svegli i conti, e a far capire che anche nei giorni di festa, Fibonacci non va mai in vacanza! Grice: Se Milano s’assorella a Firenze e Torino, allora le leggi positive diventano legge della patria, ma a Pisa basta una formula di Fibonacci per risolvere i problemi di traffico! Buonamici: Grice, qui l’unica libertà libera è quella che si trova all’ombra della statua: mentre la lingua dolcissima dell’Arno echeggia, tutti i cittadini matematici si sentono nobili anche senza feudo, purché sappiano contare almeno fino a dieci! Buonamici, Francesco Giuseppe (1863). Per la inaugurazione nel Camposanto di Pisa della statua di Leonardo Fibonacci, discorso. Pisa: Nistri.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buonamici – Ossia: Grice e Buonamici – la ragione conversazionale.  Giuseppe Maria Buonamici (Firenze, Toscana),

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buondelmonti – Ossia: Grice e Buondelmonti – la ragione conversazionale.  Giuseppe Maria Buondelmonti (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally get from what is said to what is meant by assuming that a talk-exchange has an accepted purpose and that speakers generally conform (or knowingly appear to deviate) in systematic ways captured by the Cooperative Principle and the maxims; this makes implicatures calculable, defeasible, and closely tied to communicative intentions and audience recognition rather than to “opinion” or reputation. Buondelmonti, by contrast, is an eighteenth-century Florentine patrician and man of letters whose intellectual profile (as summarized in Treccani’s Dizionario Biografico) includes rigorous humanistic-philosophical formation (e.g., Greek with Angelo Maria Ricci; philosophy and mathematics with Guido Grandi; connections with Tuscan academies), and whose interests in moral psychology and evaluation are visible in the very theme your passage foregrounds—how pleasures and pains might be “measured” and how opinion can override truth (the Seneca/Cato example: the same behavior is redescribed as vice or virtue depending on prior esteem). Set against Grice, Buondelmonti reads less like a pragmatics theorist and more like a theorist of the background forces that bias interpretation: where Grice models conversational understanding as disciplined by shared rational norms that make it reasonable to infer additional content (for instance, that talk of “wine” is a joking deflection or a comment on standards of calculation), Buondelmonti emphasizes how preconceptions, social authority, and moralized framing can hijack judgment so that identical “data” (drunkenness, praise, blame) yield opposite evaluations; in Gricean terms, Buondelmonti’s world highlights how interlocutors’ prior commitments can distort the very premises needed for implicature-calculation (what counts as relevant, credible, or orderly), while Grice provides the micro-level account of how such evaluations are nonetheless negotiated in conversation via what is explicitly said versus what is conversationally suggested and then accepted, resisted, or cancelled. Grice: “I like B.!” Studia sotto RICCI , il quale in una sua pagina -- Dissertationes Homericae habitae in florentino Lyceo ab Riccio, Firenze -- lo definisce "nobilissimo uomo fornito di acutissimo ingegno e discernimento ed eruditissimo di ampia e solida dottrina". Studia filosofia con CORSINI  e col celebre GRANDI , nonché materie giuridiche con MONIGLIA  e con GUADAGNI. Della Colonia Alfea. Sommenta il Saggio sull'intelletto umano e sopra la misura e il calcolo dei piaceri e dei dolori. S’nteressa pele istituzioni politiche, i principi del buon governo, che cercarono di applicare alla situazione del gran-ducato, cui prima l'incertezza della sua destinazione all'estinguersi della dinastia medicea, poi il vi periuidc i" autorità di uomini di voi cre- duli rozzi ed ignoranti , fentite quanto la forza di una prcconcepiu opinione può fo^ta lb fpirito an- cora de' più l'aggi e più addottrinati, Tentitelo, dilli, in un curiiifo ctjl'pjrto di Seneca che difende Cato- ne dal vizio dell' ubriachezza (0 Cotoni ebrieias chie- da tjl , ai faciliti! ejficiet qui/qui! obiecerìt hoc cri- meli boucflnm quam itirpem Catovent . Che tifate non farebbono i noilri Teologi in fentendo un si tirano Calilia ! L' ubriitfhezza in Catone non è vizio, an- zi è un' articolo di lode per lui , anzi egli l'onora, e lo I. mitica, ed in Marc' Antonio, in Alcllandto è degna di pena , è riprsnlibile, è dilonorata . Ma cosi è : quando li 0 filfato dentro di noi che Catone iia un.* uomo favio ed onorato , quando li ha di lui una tale opinione ( cli-'l crederebbe? ) i principi ftefii della natura ci fembrano falli, e l'ubriachezza li crede pii tolio virtù, che Catone vmofo. Le quali coic tutte fin qui da me riferite per dimoftrare il vafto imperio dell' opinione , mi con- flringono ad efclamarc enfaticamente con Sofocle che F opinione è più podeute della verità iltcITa , (ì) e con il Cardano clic la (lima e l'opinione fono le Re- gine delle cofe um;inc. E pure tA: sì c U nolira mi- lerìa che, fe ctedec sì voleflè ad Epittato , condan- nar (i) V. lenotcdiOJoanloPucocU t!> yitf ^iff&b ffit Lì&étK in Segno. Grice: Buondelmonti, tu che hai studiato con Ricci e Grandi, dimmi, secondo te il piacere si calcola con una formula o basta un bicchiere di vino? Buondelmonti: Grice, di solito preferisco la misura precisa, ma quando si tratta di Catone, l’ubriachezza diventa una virtù, almeno finché non arriva Marc’Antonio che la trasforma in peccato! Grice: E allora, se opinione è più potente della verità stessa, dovremmo fondare una scuola dove le regole cambiano a seconda se uno è sobrio o allegro? Buondelmonti: Grice, se Epitteto ci sentisse, direbbe che la vera filosofia sta nel condannare la fama e la gloria, ma io preferisco esclamare con Sofocle che l’opinione governa il mondo, soprattutto in Toscana, dove il vino non manca mai! Buondelmonti, Giuseppe Maria (1792). Saggio sull’intelletto umano e sopra la misura e il calcolo dei piaceri e dei dolori – Firenze, Stamperia Albizziniana. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buonasanti – Ossia: Grice e Buonsanti: l’implicatura conversazionale del vettore -- implicatura di ‘animale’ – ‘non umano’ --  scuola di Ferrandina – filosofia basilicatese -- filosofia italiana –  (Ferrandina). Filosofo basilicatese. Filosofo italiano. Ferrandina, Matera, Basilicata.  Nicola Lanzillotti Buonsanti (Ferrandina, Matera, Basilicata): l’implicatura conversazionale del vettore -- implicatura di ‘animale’ – ‘non umano’ --   Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers get from what is said to what is meant by presuming rational cooperation in a talk-exchange: speakers are taken to be pursuing shared purposes under norms of informativeness, truthfulness, relevance, and perspicuity, so that when an utterance seems to fall short (or pointedly overshoots), the hearer can calculate a defeasible, cancellable implicature that attributes an intention to the speaker and restores rationality to the exchange. Nicola Lanzillotti Buonsanti, by contrast, is not a theorist of conversational meaning but a leading figure in Italian veterinary medicine and its historiography (Milanese veterinary school; founder/editorial roles such as La Clinica veterinaria; direction of reference works like the Dizionario dei termini antichi e moderni delle scienze mediche e veterinarie, Vallardi, 1900), so his “meaning-practice” is primarily classificatory and technical: he stabilizes terms (including human/animal continuities) for diagnosis, pedagogy, and encyclopedic description rather than modeling the inferential pragmatics of ordinary conversation. The point of contact your vignette exploits is lexical scope and pragmatic narrowing: in scientific and institutional discourse, “animal” often functions as a taxonomic term that pragmatically implicates “non-human,” whereas in philosophical or Aristotelian reflection the same word can be widened (or reloaded) to include the human as an animal among animals, so a shift in conversational purpose (clinic/classroom vs. philosophical argument) predictably shifts what the speaker can be taken to mean. Put Griceanly, Buonsanti’s specialized usage tends to generate default, community-bound implicatures (animal = the veterinary object, i.e., non-human) that are rational within his professional setting, while a Grice-style interlocutor can cancel or redirect those implicatures by making the conversational point explicitly philosophical (animal as a broader category), revealing how even apparently “technical” terms rely on reason-governed, context-sensitive conversational inference to settle their operative meaning in use. Grice: “I like B.; Strawson calls him a veterinarian, but I call him a philosopher,, for surely he is a philosophical zoologist – he philosoophised, like Aristotle did, on the comparative physiology and anatomy of ‘human’ and pre-human.!” Esponente di spicco della storia della medicina veterinaria italiana ed europea è stato una delle figure più rappresentative della Scuola veterinaria milanese.  Diresse l'Enciclopedia medica italiana edita da Vallardi e La Clinica veterinaria (di cui fu anche fondatore).  Altre opere: Dizionario dei termini antichi e moderni delle scienze mediche e veterinarie Manuale delle malattie delle articolazioni Trattato di tecnica e terapeutica chirurgica generale e speciale La medicina Veterinaria all'Estero, organizzazione dell'insegnamento e del servizio sanitario. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. etimologia di ‘veterinario’ -- animale; filosofia e medicina nella Roma antica.  Grice: Nicola, ma dimmi, quando parli di “animale” intendi solo il non umano, oppure c’è qualche implicatura nascosta nel tuo vettore basilicatese? Buonsanti: Grice, qui a Ferrandina, l’animale ha più sfumature di una pecora smarrita: a scuola lo chiamiamo “non umano”, ma se mi metti davanti un filosofo, diventa subito “quasi umano”. Grice: Allora, dovrei portare Strawson in Basilicata: lui si diverte a dire che sei veterinario, ma secondo me tu stai tra Aristotele e il lupo di Matera, filosofeggiando sulla medicina. Buonsanti: Grice, qui siamo una scuola di filosofi che curano anche i cani: l’implicatura basilicatese è che se uno pensa troppo, prima o poi deve anche imparare a correre dietro alle galline! Buonsanti, Nicola Lanzillotti (1900). Dizionario dei termini antichi e moderni delle scienze mediche e veterinarie. Milano: Vallardi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buonsanto – Ossia: Grice e Buonsanto: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale pratica -- prammatica del discorso. 

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Burbuleo – Ossia: Grice e Burbuleo -- Grex griceiana – verbalia – Burbuleo. Inscription of Lucius B. Matutinus (CIL XI, 6162), from Suasa. The Burbulei, occasionally written Burboleia, was a family at ancient Rome. Members of this gens are mentioned in the time of Tullio Cicero, but the only one who achieved any distinction in the Roman state was Lucius B. Optatus, consul.  “B.” belongs to a large class of gentilicia ending in -eius, typically formed from Oscan names originally ending in -as. However, as the number of such gentile names grew, -eius came to be regarded as a regular gentile-forming suffix, and was applied in cases where it had no morphological justification, so it cannot be determined whether the root of B. is Oscan, or perhaps a Latin cognomen, like Burbulus. There was a family of this name from Minturnae, in southern Latium, which would be consistent with either a Latin or Oscan origin. Minturnae was originally a town of the Ausones, which received a Roman colony in 296 BC.[2][3]  The only distinct family of the Burbuleii bore the surname Optatus, desired or welcome. The consul Optatus had the additional surname Ligarianus, which in Republican times would normally have indicated adoption from the Ligarian gens, but by the second century such nomenclature usually indicates descent from a family through the female line.[5] Secunda, borne by Burbuleia, the wife of Cornelius Hilarus, was a personal or individualizing surname, derived from the old Latin praenomen Secunda, originally given to a second daughter.[6]  Burbuleius, a comic actor who lent his name to Gaius Scribonius Curio, the consul of 76 BC, who despite his excellent elocution was ridiculed for his lack of knowledge, slow thinking, and awkward gesticulations. Burbuleia Secunda, buried at Rome with her daughter, Cornelia Fortunata, aged twenty-two years, five months, in a tomb built by her husband, Marcus Cornelius Hilarus.[9] Burboleius C. f., named in an inscription from Rome.[10] Lucius Burbuleius Optatus, buried at Minturnae in Latium, aged twenty-six years, eight months.[11] Lucius Burbuleius Optatus, father of the consul Ligarianus. Lucius Burbuleius L. f. Optatus Ligarianus, consul suffectus in AD 135, had been prefect of the public treasury, quaestor, plebeian aedile, praetor, one of the Sodales Augustales, and was at various times governor of Syria, Cappadocia, and Sicily.[12][13] Lucius Burbuleius Matutinus, one of the Seviri Augustales at Suasa during the mid-second century.[14] See also List of Roman gentes References  Chase, p. 120.  Livy, viii. 10, ix. 25, x. 21.  Velleius Paterculus, i. 14.  New College Latin & English Dictionary, s. v. optatus.  Salomies, Adoptive and Polyonymous Nomenclature.  Chase, p. 172.  Pliny the Elder, vii. 12.  Valerius Maximus, ix. 14 § 5.  CIL VI, 16238.  CIL I, 2991.  CIL X, 6025.  CIL X, 6006, AE 1983, 517, AE 1999, 1352.  PIR, vol. I, p. 243.  CIL XI, 6162. Bibliography Titus Livius (Livy), History of Rome. Marcus Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History. Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac Dictorum Memorabilium (Memorable Facts and Sayings). Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Historia Naturalis (Natural History). Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). 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). Paul von Rohden, Elimar Klebs, & Hermann Dessau, Prosopographia Imperii Romani (The Prosopography of the Roman Empire, abbreviated PIR), Berlin (1898). Olli Salomies, Adoptive and Polyonymous Nomenclature in the Roman Empire, Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki (1992). John C. Traupman, The New College Latin & English Dictionary, Bantam Books, New York (1995). Category: Roman gentes

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Burbuleo – Ossia: Grice e Burbuleo -- Grex griceiana – verbalia – Burbuleo. For this gens we can focus on that B. who knew this actor -- Gesticulation in an actor is one thing -- gesticulation in B's 'profession' another -- so they can have a dialogue about that? Input? Feedback? Thanks Yes, I think the actor Burbuleius is by far the most Gricean/Speranzian member of the gens. What makes him so attractive is that the sources do not praise the actor. Rather, they tell us that the comic actor Burbuleius lent his name to Gaius Scribonius Curio, who, despite being an excellent speaker, was mocked for:  lack of knowledge, slowness of thought, awkward gesticulation.  Your source explicitly states this association through Pliny and Valerius Maximus. Thus the contrast between forensic delivery and theatrical delivery is already present in the evidence. The Gricean issue is:  When does gesture aid meaning, and when does it replace meaning?  An actor may gesture extravagantly because theatre is partly visual. An orator, however, risks generating the implicature:  "his hands are working harder than his arguments."   Conversatio: Curio and Burbuleius CVRIO (1) “Cur me homines tibi comparant, Burbulei?” (Why do people compare me to you, Burbuleius?)  BVRBVLEIVS (2) “Quia manibus loqueris.” (Because you speak with your hands.)  CVRIO (3) “At actor es; tibi gestus convenit.” (But you are an actor; gesture befits you.)  BVRBVLEIVS (4) “Mihi gestus personam adiuvat; tibi causam.” (For me, gesture assists the character; for you, the case.)  CVRIO (5) “Nonne idem est?” (Is that not the same thing?)  BVRBVLEIVS (6) “Minime. Si actor taceat, gestus sufficit; si orator taceat, causa cadit.” (Not at all. If an actor falls silent, gesture may suffice; if an orator falls silent, the case collapses.)  +> that bodily movement may supplement speech, but in deliberative or forensic discourse it cannot substitute for reasoned argument.  Why Speranza would like this The anecdote is almost proto-Gricean. Curio's problem is not merely that he gesticulates. His problem is that excessive gesticulation creates an implicature:  +> "the speaker lacks confidence in the verbal content."  The actor and the orator use the same physical motions, but their communicative purposes differ. A comic actor may intend:  "Look at me."  An advocate must intend:  "Attend to the argument."  Thus the same gesture changes meaning according to context.  A Speranzian moral  Gestus in scaena potest esse argumentum; in foro argumentum gestum vincere debet.  ("On the stage, gesture may itself be the argument; in the forum, the argument ought to surpass the gesture.") That strikes me as the strongest Burbuleian vignette: the boundary between performance and communication, a topic Grice would certainly have found fascinating. And what is the source for this then? Because perhaps we can find the Latin source. It would seem, for Grice and Speranza, a different figure of rhetoric. To refer to the consul as "Burbuleo" (+> the well known comic actor) presupposes a few things. It is a bit of a metaphor. As when we say not that Smith is sly, but a fox -- here we have a proper name -- as when people would refer to know it alls as 'Verrone'. or 'cicerone' (can you explain this usage? as per first OED citation). If the consul was called Burbuleo, it's the UTTERER who matters? Input? Feedback? Thanks -Burbuleius, a comic actor who lent his name to Gaius Scribonius Curio, the consul of 76 BC, who despite his excellent elocution was ridiculed for his lack of knowledge, slow thinking, and awkward gesticulations. This is exactly the right line of inquiry, and I think Grice and Speranza would focus less on the gesticulation itself than on the linguistic act of calling Curio "Burbuleius." The evidence we have says that:  Burbuleius was a comic actor. Gaius Scribonius Curio (consul of 76 BC), despite his eloquence and purity of Latin, acquired the nickname Burbuleius because of the way he moved his body while speaking. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org]  Now notice: nobody is saying  Curio is like Burbuleius in some respects.  Instead they simply call him:  Burbuleius.  That is much stronger. Gricean point: proper-name metaphor This is not merely a comparison. It resembles:  "He is a fox." "He is a Croesus." "He is a Don Juan."  or your examples:  "a Varro" for a know-it-all, "a Cicerone."  The proper name becomes a predicate. The utterer assumes the audience knows enough about the original bearer of the name to recover the implicature. Thus:  Curio is called "Burbuleius"  +>  Curio's delivery resembles that actor's stage mannerisms.  The hearer supplies everything. No explanatory clause is needed.  Why the actor matters The irony is especially good because Curio was not criticized for lack of eloquence. The sources indicate rather:  excellent elocution, but awkward gesticulation, slowness, lack of learning. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org]  Hence "Burbuleius" becomes a compressed criticism:  "You are turning forensic oratory into stage performance."  That is a different rhetorical vice from ignorance.  "Cicerone" Your mention of cicerone is apt. Historically the word comes from Cicero's reputation as an eloquent guide and speaker. By modern times:  cicerone  means  guide, especially one who explains monuments or antiquities.  The word no longer denotes Cicero himself. The proper name has become a common noun. Exactly the same semantic mechanism is at work. Likewise:  "He's a Burbuleius"  would mean something like:  "he gesticulates theatrically."   A possible conversation CVRIO: "Cur me Burbuleium vocatis?" (Why do you call me Burbuleius?) SPECTATOR: "Quia manibus tam multa dicis quam lingua." (Because you say as much with your hands as with your tongue.) CVRIO: "Num actor videor?" (Do I look like an actor?) SPECTATOR: "Non actor es; sed actoris nomen geris." (You are not an actor; but you bear an actor's name.) +>  the nickname transfers characteristics of the actor to Curio without explicitly stating them.   So I would say the central Gricean phenomenon is not gesticulation but onomastic implicature:  a proper name used as a complete criticism.  The utterer need only say Burbuleius; the audience reconstructs the rest. That is very close to the way a modern speaker can dismiss someone by saying merely:  "What a Hamlet," or "He's a Napoleon."  The communicative work is done by the hearer's cultural knowledge. And can we retrieve from the wiki gens B. entry en, the latin quotation where B. is used to qualify the consul? Thanks Does this help? It seems that in both sources, the Griceian point is discussed: a consul nicknamed as an actor (and an actor nicknamed as a consul in Pliny). Thanks -- Here are the two original Latin passages regarding Burbuleius (the ancient comic actor whose eccentric stage gestures earned the Roman orator Gaius Scribonius Curio his famous nickname). [1] 1. Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 7.55 (Note: While the general topic is introduced around section 12, this specific mention occurs in Book 7, Section 55, where Pliny discusses striking physical and behavioral resemblances). [1] "...e diverso L. Plancus orator histrioni Rubrio cognomen inposuit, rursus Curioni patri Burbuleiusitemque Messalae censorio Menogenes, perinde histriones." [1] English Translation: "...vice versa, Lucius Plancus the orator gave his surname to the actor Rubrius, whereas the actor Burbuleius gave his name to the elder Curio, and likewise the actor Menogenes to the former censor Messala." [1] 2. Valerius Maximus, Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium 9.14.5 (Note: This passage falls under Book 9, Chapter 14, Section 5, which deals with foreign and domestic examples of uncanny resemblances). [1, 2, 3] "At M. Messala consularis et censorius Menogenis Curioque omnibus honoribus abundans Burbulei, ille propter oris aspectum, hic propter parem corporis motum, uterque scaenici nomen coactus est recipere." [1] English Translation: "But Marcus Messala, a man of consular and censorial rank, was forced to take the name of Menogenes, and Curio, abounding in all public honors, that of Burbuleius—the former because of the appearance of his face, the latter because of a matching bodily movement; both were compelled to receive the name of a stage-player." [1, 2] Would you like the full English translation of the broader context surrounding these passages, or more information on the oratory style of Curio that prompted this nickname? [1, 2] Yes, this helps enormously, and in fact it sharpens the Grice/Speranza point beyond what the gens article alone suggests. The crucial text from Valerius Maximus is:  At M. Messala consularis et censorius Menogenis Curioque omnibus honoribus abundans Burbulei ... uterque scaenici nomen coactus est recipere. "... Messala ... and Curio, overflowing with every public honour, were compelled to receive the name of a stage-player; Messala that of Menogenes, Curio that of Burbuleius."  And the reason follows:  ille propter oris aspectum, hic propter parem corporis motum "the former because of the appearance of his face, the latter because of a similar movement of the body."   The Gricean point What is fascinating is that neither Pliny nor Valerius says:  Curio gesticulated like Burbuleius.  Instead, the actor's proper name is transferred:  Curio = Burbuleius  This is much stronger than a simile. Compare:  "He is sly like a fox." (simile) "He is a fox." (metaphor) "He is a Burbuleius." (proper-name metaphor)  The communicative burden is shifted to the audience. The utterer merely says:  Burbuleius.  The audience supplies:  comic actor, exaggerated body language, theatrical delivery, unsuitable forum manner.  That is a highly compressed form of communication.  An even more interesting detail from Pliny Your Pliny passage shows the phenomenon working both ways:  L. Plancus orator histrioni Rubrio cognomen imposuit ... "... the orator Plancus gave his surname to the actor Rubrius ..."  and then:  Curioni patri Burbuleius "... Burbuleius gave his name to Curio ..."  So Pliny is discussing reciprocal cases of name-transfer. This is almost a Roman theory of nicknames. One social type becomes so representative that his name becomes a predicate applicable to another person.  Why the utterer matters I think you are exactly right: The real rhetorical act belongs not to Curio, nor even to Burbuleius, but to the person who first coined the nickname. That speaker notices:  Curio's bodily movement ≈ Burbuleius' stage movement  and instead of saying the longer proposition, performs the more elegant speech act:  "There goes Burbuleius."  The nickname works only if the hearers are culturally competent. In Gricean terms, an enormous amount of information is conveyed by violating ordinary explicitness.  A possible Latin dialogue SPECTATOR I  "Quid Curio hodie in foro fecit?" (What did Curio do in the forum today?)  SPECTATOR II  "Curio? Immo Burbuleius." (Curio? Rather, Burbuleius.)  SPECTATOR I  "Intellego." (I understand.)  Notice how little is said. The third speaker understands immediately, provided he knows who the actor was. That is almost a perfect example of conversational economy.  Speranzian conclusion The nickname does not mean:  "Curio is Burbuleius."  Rather:  "Curio's mode of public performance is sufficiently like that of Burbuleius that the proper name alone communicates the criticism."  A single name replaces an entire descriptive sentence. That, I think, is why this tiny anecdote is so rich philosophically. It is really about how a proper name becomes a complete conversational implicature. And can we have more of the Latin in Pliny, because he seems to be dealing with, as you say, a theory of proper names as nicknames -- but fails to provide the information that V. M. does: 'a similar movement of the body.' Thanks Yes, and your observation is exactly right: Pliny and Valerius Maximus are doing slightly different things. Valerius explains the nickname:  "hic propter parem corporis motum" ("this man [Curio], because of a similar movement of the body")  He supplies the reason. Curio's bodily motion resembled that of the actor. As a result:  "scaenici nomen coactus est recipere" ("he was compelled to receive the name of a stage-performer").  So Valerius gives us the interpretant of the nickname.  Pliny, by contrast, is interested in a broader phenomenon: the transfer of names between famous persons. The snippet we have is:  "... e diverso L. Plancus orator histrioni Rubrio cognomen inposuit, rursus Curioni patri Burbuleius itemque Messalae censorio Menogenes, perinde histriones." [loebclassics.com]  Loosely:  "Conversely, the orator L. Plancus gave his surname to the actor Rubrius; likewise Burbuleius to Curio the elder, and Menogenes to the ex-censor Messala — in each case actors."  Pliny's interest is almost taxonomical:  Plancus → actor Rubrius actor Burbuleius → Curio actor Menogenes → Messala  He's collecting instances of name migration. [loebclassics.com]  A Roman theory of nicknames What is fascinating is that Pliny does not stop to explain Burbuleius. He assumes the reader already knows. That means the nickname must have had some currency. In Gricean terms:  "Curio is Burbuleius"  is highly economical. The utterer need not say:  "Curio's bodily movements in public speaking resemble those of the comic actor Burbuleius."  One proper name suffices.  Why Valerius is philosophically more useful Valerius supplies the missing inferential step:  propter parem corporis motum  which tells us the basis of the comparison. Without Valerius, Pliny's passage is almost cryptic. With Valerius, we obtain the full pragmatic chain:  Actor Burbuleius was known for a distinctive bodily style. Curio's oratorical delivery resembled it. People therefore called Curio "Burbuleius." The nickname communicated the criticism economically.   Speranzian point This is not merely metaphor. It is closer to what we might call a proper-name predicate. Instead of saying:  Curio scaenice gesticulatur ("Curio gesticulates theatrically"),  Romans could simply say:  Burbuleius.  The name itself becomes an utterance. One word carries an entire dossier of implications. And that, I think, is why Pliny is interested in it: he is observing a social phenomenon in which a person's name ceases to denote only that person and becomes a reusable descriptive label. Valerius tells us why it happened; Pliny records that it happened. [loebclassics.com] And still neither erudite Roman (V. M. or P.) care to quote the source (but then they didn't have the "Evening Standard" those days). I'm sure the consul found it offensive -- and the odd thing is that there was little he could do, his 'movements of the body' were sufficientlly similar to Barbuleo that such became his name. Whereas calling Barbuleo "Scribonio" would have a freezing effect. The implicature in terms of social order matters: a consul should NOT mimic like a mimic, whereas if a consul mimics that does not merit a professional mimic to acquire the name of the consul? Input? I think this is a very perceptive observation, and it goes beyond what Pliny and Valerius explicitly say into the social pragmatics of the nickname. What the sources explicitly give us is:  Curio acquired the nickname Burbuleius from the comic actor. [en.wikipedia.org], [kobo.com] Valerius explains the reason:  propter parem corporis motum ("because of a similar movement of the body"). [kobo.com]   Both Curio and Messala were, despite their high rank, compelled to "receive the name of a stage-player":  uterque scaenici nomen coactus est recipere. [kobo.com]    What neither Pliny nor Valerius tells us is who first coined the nickname or whether Curio accepted it gracefully. That part is lost to us.  The asymmetry is the interesting thing Your point is excellent: There is an asymmetry. The actor's name migrates upward:  Burbuleius → Curio  but not, apparently:  Curio → Burbuleius.  Pliny's passage is actually collecting these migrations of names between public figures and actors, but in the Curio case the remembered direction is actor → statesman. [thelatinlibrary.com], [kobo.com] Why? Because Roman society treated the resemblance as degrading rather than elevating. The implicature is:  "A consul is behaving like an actor."  not:  "An actor is behaving like a consul."  The first is funny. The second is complimentary, and therefore less likely to stick.  A Gricean account Suppose someone merely says:  Burbuleius venit.  ("Burbuleius has arrived.") If the referent is actually Curio, the hearers infer:  not literally the actor, but Curio, viewed under the aspect of theatrical bodily movement.  The nickname is doing all the communicative work. One word replaces a longer proposition:  "Curio's gestures resemble those of the comic actor Burbuleius."   Why Curio could not easily suppress it This is perhaps the sharpest point. If the resemblance was widely perceived, denial would be difficult. The nickname survives precisely because the community agreed on the comparison. In effect:  the social audience ratified the implicature.  One can object to a false accusation. It is harder to object to a caricature everyone immediately recognizes.  A very Roman hierarchy I think your formulation captures the social logic:  consul non debet histrionem imitari.  ("A consul ought not to imitate an actor.") But the reverse is not equally scandalous:  histrio consulem imitari potest.  ("An actor may imitate a consul.") The hierarchy matters. Valerius' wording itself emphasizes the dignity of the victims:  M. Messala consularis et censorius, Curio omnibus honoribus abundans,  and then contrasts these dignified figures with the fact that they acquired the names of stage performers. [kobo.com] That contrast is the joke.  A Speranzian moral I would put it this way:  The nickname "Burbuleius" is not really a comment on Curio's eloquence but on decorum. A Roman orator was expected to persuade by speech; once his bodily delivery became too visibly theatrical, the audience supplied a new identity for him. The actor's name became a criticism, and the criticism succeeded because it was collectively recognized.  In short:  Curio was not called Burbuleius because he was an actor; he was called Burbuleius because the public judged that part of his oratory belonged on the stage. [kobo.com], [thelatinlibrary.com] And Plinio is thricely to blame i he is importing this in his natural history of artifice -- ii. he provides a proportion: as an actor is called after a historian, a consul is called after an actor -- no reason of the proportion -- nor source (alla a consul C., is named Burbuleus -- by Petronio Arbiter in Sat. i. iv -- Pliny implicates it's the talk of the town -- a cliche -- and a topical one, in that even if Barbuleio predated the consul, the consul was still called thus or NAMED thus. Input? I think this is an excellent criticism of Pliny's method, and it is very much the sort of thing Speranza would notice. What Pliny explicitly gives us is extremely compressed:  e diverso L. Plancus orator histrioni Rubrio cognomen imposuit, rursus Curioni patri Burbuleius itemque Messalae censorio Menogenes, perinde histriones. [thelatinlibrary.com]  The striking thing is that Pliny is interested in a pattern, not a story. He lists:  Plancus ↔ Rubrius, Burbuleius ↔ Curio, Menogenes ↔ Messala,  as instances of names crossing from one person to another. [thelatinlibrary.com] But he does not tell us:  who first coined the nickname, where, in what speech, whether Curio objected, how widespread it was.  On all those points he is silent. We cannot responsibly infer more than that the nickname existed. [thelatinlibrary.com], [kobo.com]  Why Valerius Maximus is more satisfying Valerius at least supplies the reason:  hic propter parem corporis motum ("the latter [Curio] because of a similar movement of the body"). [kobo.com]  That gives us the missing conversational bridge. Pliny records:  nickname.  Valerius explains:  resemblance.   The proportion that Pliny seems to imply You are right that Pliny's structure is almost analogical:                      Person APerson BPlancus (orator)Rubrius (actor)Burbuleius (actor)Curio (consul/orator)Menogenes (actor)Messala (censor) Pliny appears interested in the exchangeability of names between public figures and performers. [thelatinlibrary.com] What he conspicuously does not explain is why the transfer happens in each case. Valerius supplies a reason for Curio. Pliny does not. [kobo.com], [thelatinlibrary.com]  A Gricean reading The implied conversation is almost: A: "There goes Curio." B: "Curio? Rather, Burbuleius." Nothing more need be said. The nickname succeeds only if the audience already knows the actor and already recognizes the resemblance. In that sense, Pliny is treating the nickname as a social commonplace. Not because he explicitly says it was "the talk of the town"—he does not say that—but because his abbreviated presentation presupposes a reader who understands the reference. [thelatinlibrary.com]  The hierarchy point I think this is your strongest insight. Valerius emphasizes that Curio was:  omnibus honoribus abundans ("abounding in all honours"). [kobo.com]  Yet he acquires the name of an actor. The humor depends on the asymmetry:  a consul becoming "Burbuleius" is comic; an actor becoming "Curio" would sound laudatory.  The nickname works because it drags a high-status figure into a lower-status theatrical register. That is precisely why Valerius highlights the rank of Curio before mentioning the nickname. [kobo.com] In Speranza's terms:  Non Burbuleius Curio fit; Curio Burbuleius fit.  The communicative force lies in the downward transfer of the name. A single proper name becomes a complete social criticism. Well, leaving the Mes./Men. pair aside, Pliny does mention two orators (one of them also consul) and two actors -- INTERCHANGING names: the actor named after the orator, the orator named after the actor. No reason. Knowing what we know from V. M., 'motum corporis parem' -- we know that about PLiny's second pair -- so we CAN RECONSTRUCT why an orator like Rubrius would lend his name to an actor like Planco, do we? Thanks One may assume that Rubrio was a SERIOUS orator (too solemn) and thus lent his name to an actor who overdid seriousness, as Plauco would? Thanks -- nost likely as you say Pliny's point: it's a queer natural artificial wold whose history I'm tracing: actors named after orators, orators named after actors -- scenique nomina -- etc -- anything but calling Spade Spade? Yes, I think we can push the analysis a little further—while being careful to distinguish what Pliny explicitly says from what we are reconstructing. What Pliny explicitly records is the symmetry:  e diverso L. Plancus orator histrioni Rubrio cognomen imposuit ... rursus Curioni patri Burbuleius itemque Messalae censorio Menogenes, perinde histriones. [thelatinlibrary.com]  In the Loeb summary attached to that passage:  the orator L. Plancus gives his surname to the actor Rubrius; the actor Burbuleius gives his name to Curio; the actor Menogenes gives his name to Messala. [thelatinlibrary.com]  Pliny's explicit interest is therefore the crossing of names between public speakers and actors. [thelatinlibrary.com]  What Valerius Maximus adds Valerius supplies the reason for one of the pairings:  Curio ... Burbulei ... propter parem corporis motum ("Curio [received the name] Burbuleius because of a similar movement of the body"). [kobo.com]  That tells us the mechanism: name-transfer through salient resemblance. [kobo.com]  Can we reconstruct the Plancus–Rubrius pair? Only conjecturally. The source we have does not explain why Rubrius acquired the name Plancus. Pliny merely records the fact. [thelatinlibrary.com] However, once Valerius has revealed the principle in the Curio case, a plausible reconstruction is:  the actor Rubrius must have resembled the orator Plancus in some conspicuous feature of appearance, voice, delivery, mannerism, or public persona.  That is an inference, not something Pliny explicitly states.  A very Gricean feature You have identified what may be the most interesting point: The nickname is not a description. Nobody says:  "Curio gestures like Burbuleius."  Instead they say:  "Curio is Burbuleius."  Likewise, in the other direction, the actor becomes:  "Plancus."  The proper name does all the work. In Gricean terms, the utterance is radically underinformative on the surface:  "Burbuleius."  Yet the audience recovers:  theatricality, bodily mannerism, inappropriate forum style, comparison with a known actor.  The name becomes a compressed conversational implicature.  Why Pliny likes it I rather agree with your reading of Pliny. He seems fascinated by a world in which names migrate:  orator → actor, actor → orator, actor → censor, public man → performer.  The point is almost taxonomic. Pliny's interest is less:  "What exactly was Curio doing?"  and more:  "Look how identities become transferable."  A person's name ceases to denote only that individual and begins to function as a social label.  A Speranzian formulation One might summarize Pliny's implicit theory as:  Nomina moventur sicut homines. ("Names move about just as people do.")  In the Curio case, Valerius lets us see the engine:  resemblance of bodily movement. [kobo.com]  In the Plancus case, the engine is left unstated, but Pliny's pattern strongly suggests another socially recognizable resemblance. [thelatinlibrary.com] That omission is itself almost Gricean: Pliny assumes the resemblance was obvious enough to his readers that he did not have to spell it out.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Burrieno – Ossia: Grice e Burrieno -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Burrieno. The Burrieni were a Roman family during the late Republic. It is known chiefly from a single individual, Gaius B., praetor urbanus about 82 B.C.[1][2]  See also List of Roman gentes References  Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Quinctio, 6. s. 25, 21. s. 69.  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). "C.BURRIENUS". Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 3. p. 517.    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: Burrieno – Ossia: Grice e Burrieno -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Burrieno. So for this gens we may focus on this individual, praetor urbanus -- why the need to qualify the thing, almost anti-Griceianly, as 'urbanus' -- it wasn't like there was exurbia and suburbia then? the etymology of praetor may be interesting and we can imagine a dialogue in Latin between the man and his infant son with son asking what 'are you, dad?' and he explaining bit by bit: first praetor. Only that, dad? Non, urbanus. Etc. Thanks This is a very Speranzian choice because Gaius Burrienus is almost nothing but a title:  praetor urbanus.  And precisely therefore we are invited to ask:  Why not simply praetor?  Why urbanus? Historically, by the late Republic there was more than one praetor. The title praetor urbanus distinguished the magistrate whose jurisdiction was principally connected with Roman citizens in the city of Rome from other praetors. So the adjective is not ornamental but contrastive. A Gricean might say:  If the speaker bothers to add urbanus, the hearer infers that praetor alone is insufficiently informative.  In other words:  praetor → under-informative praetor urbanus → adequately informative.  So, paradoxically, what looks anti-Griceian ("why the extra word?") is actually Griceian Quantity:  Say enough, but not more than required.  Once there are several praetors, "praetor" is no longer enough.  On praetor The etymology is attractive. The word is connected with the idea of:  "going before," "leading."  The same root underlies ideas of precedence and leadership. A praetor is originally a leader or chief magistrate, not merely a judge in the later bureaucratic sense. So an infant's question:  "What are you?"  can be answered progressively:  leader, magistrate, praetor, praetor urbanus.   Conversatio Latina FILIVS (1) "Pater, quid es?" (Father, what are you?)  BVRRIENVS (2) "Praetor sum." (I am a praetor.)  FILIVS (3) "Id tantum?" (Only that?)  BVRRIENVS (4) "Non tantum; praetor urbanus." (Not only that; praetor urbanus.)  FILIVS (5) "Quid est urbanus?" (What is urbanus?)  BVRRIENVS (6) "Qui iura civium Romae curat." (One who looks after the legal affairs of citizens at Rome.)  FILIVS (7) "Ergo Roma te audit?" (Then Rome listens to you?)  BVRRIENVS (8) "Non semper; sed Roma ad me saepe venit." (Not always; but Rome often comes to me.)  +> that an office is understood not merely by its name but by the sphere over which it has authority; the adjective "urbanus" determines the practical meaning of "praetor."  The deeper Speranzian point The conversation turns on a recurring Gricean phenomenon:  the hearer seeks the minimal description, the speaker insists on the fuller one.  The son thinks:  praetor.  The father replies:  praetor urbanus.  Exactly as:  "I'm a professor." "Professor of what?"  or  "He's a judge." "What kind of judge?"  Meaning does not stop at the noun. The modifier supplies the contrast class. So Burrienus teaches a neat Gricean lesson:  A title that once sufficed (praetor) becomes insufficient when the institutional world becomes more complicated; language grows by qualification. "Urbanus" is not an addition to the meaning—it is what fixes the meaning. And was this a somewhat closed taxonomy (or open ended?) and was a status scale in place -- urbanus, best? Thanks -- at the time B. was p. u., that is. A very good question. The answer is that, in Burrienus' time (around the 80s BC), "praetor urbanus" was not necessarily the "best" praetor, but it was certainly one of the most prestigious and visible praetorships. The taxonomy was neither completely open-ended nor completely fixed. The original situation Originally there was essentially one praetor. The word praetor itself is old and means something like:  "the one who goes before" (prae-itor),  hence leader or chief magistrate. Later, as Rome expanded, more praetors were added. At that point one had to specify which praetor. Thus:  praetor urbanus praetor peregrinus and later additional praetors with provincial or judicial assignments.  So the adjective urbanus emerges because the noun praetor alone no longer identifies the office sufficiently. A very Gricean case of Quantity:  "praetor" no longer tells the hearer enough.   What did urbanus mean? Not "urban" in the modern suburban/exurban sense. Rather:  connected with the urbs, the city of Rome itself.  The praetor urbanus was the magistrate whose jurisdiction centred on Roman citizens in Rome. By contrast, the praetor peregrinus dealt with cases involving foreigners (peregrini).  Was there a status scale? Yes, but not a perfectly rigid one. A Roman senator would generally regard:  praetor urbanus  as a particularly distinguished praetorship. Why? Because:  it sat in Rome, it was visible, it was tied to the civic heart of the Republic, it had great prestige.  A philosophical reconstruction might rank them:  consul praetor urbanus other praetorships  But that is a simplification. Ambitious Romans often valued later provincial commands and military opportunities as well.  A Speranzian vignette FILIUS "Ergo es praetor?" (So you are a praetor?) BURRIENUS "Ita." (Yes.) FILIUS "Et quid addit urbanus?" (And what does urbanus add?) BURRIENUS "Quod alii praetores sunt." (That there are other praetors.) FILIUS "Ergo urbanus melior est?" (Then urbanus is better?) BURRIENUS "Non semper melior; sed difficilius omitti potest." (Not always better; but harder to ignore.) The Gricean moral:  urbanus is not primarily an honorific adjective but a contrastive one. Once there are several praetors, the adjective becomes necessary because the hearer must know which praetor is meant.  And that, indeed, is why Burrienus survives in the record not merely as praetor but as praetor urbanus. Whoever gave those titles their names was not Grice or Speranza -- Ii can imagine the son bewilderment if B. would add: urbanus, dear -- not peregrinus. What is p. peregrinus, dad? a praetor qui est aut peregrinus? Non, teknon. Peregrinus applies to the SCOPE of the praetor -- not a pilgriming prator himself, but one who deals with the pilgrims to Rome, child. Input? Yes! This is precisely the sort of thing that would have driven both Grice and Speranza mad—not because the Romans were confused, but because they were perfectly happy with scope ambiguity so long as the relevant audience understood it. Your reconstructed dialogue is actually philosophically acute. The son naturally takes:  praetor peregrinus  to mean:  "a praetor who is a peregrinus."  That is the most immediate compositional reading. But the institutional meaning is:  "a praetor dealing with matters involving peregrini."  The adjective characterizes the jurisdiction, not the office-holder. A modern analogy would be:  "children's doctor" not a doctor who is a child, but a doctor for children.  Or:  "foreign secretary" not a secretary who is foreign, but one concerned with foreign affairs.   Conversatio Latina FILIVS  "Pater, si tu es praetor urbanus, quis est praetor peregrinus?"  (Father, if you are the urban praetor, who is the foreign praetor?) BVRRIENVS  "Alius magistratus."  (Another magistrate.) FILIVS  "Ergo peregrinus est?"  (So he is a foreigner?) BVRRIENVS  "Minime."  (Not at all.) FILIVS  "Cur igitur peregrinus dicitur?"  (Why then is he called peregrinus?) BVRRIENVS  "Quia de peregrinis cognoscit."  (Because he deals with foreigners.) FILIVS  "Non quia peregrinus est?"  (Not because he himself is a foreigner?) BVRRIENVS  "Non nomen hominis est, sed officii."  (It is not the description of the man, but of the office.)  The Gricean point The son assumes:  adjective → bearer.  The Roman institution assumes:  adjective → sphere of competence.  So the adjective is attached at a higher level than the child initially thinks. In modern semantic jargon, the adjective modifies the domain of authority, not the referent of the noun.  A Speranzian moral One can almost hear Speranza writing:  Praetor urbanus non est praetor urbanus; praetor peregrinus non est praetor peregrinus.  That is:  The "urban" praetor is not defined by being urban, and the "foreign" praetor is not defined by being foreign.  The adjectives look descriptive, but institutionally they are relational. And yes, an ordinary child—or an ordinary-language philosopher encountering the titles for the first time—would be perfectly justified in asking:  "But is the praetor peregrinus himself a peregrinus?"  The Roman answer would be:  Nequaquam, fili; peregrini sunt causa, non magistratus. ("By no means, my son; the foreigners are the subject matter, not the magistrate.").  That's a wonderfully un-Gricean piece of bureaucratic nomenclature. And since you said there were 'regional' praetors (though the title initially applied to one), the same scope applies to 'urbanus' -- with urbs as perhaps a misnomer -- "I deal with citizens -- civis -- who happen to live in the urbs, in Rome, as other praetors deal with citizens who happen to be in other urba? Input Yes, I think you're putting your finger on something that is both linguistically and institutionally interesting. The key is that urbanus and peregrinus are probably not parallel in quite the way a first-time reader expects. A child naturally parses:  praetor urbanus = an urban praetor praetor peregrinus = a foreign praetor  But the institutional meanings differ. For the praetor peregrinus, the adjective clearly points to the people and cases with which he deals, not to the magistrate himself. For the praetor urbanus, the adjective points to the forum of jurisdiction, namely Rome and its citizen litigation. So your son's question would be quite reasonable:  "If peregrinus refers to the people, doesn't urbanus also refer to the people?"  A Roman official might answer:  Partly, yes.  Not:  "I am urban."  but:  "I administer the legal business that belongs to the urban sphere."  In that sense, urbanus is almost shorthand for:  qui Romae ius dicit inter cives  ("the one who administers justice at Rome among citizens") whereas peregrinus is almost shorthand for:  qui de causis peregrinorum cognoscit  ("the one who handles cases involving foreigners"). So the adjective's scope is not the man but the jurisdiction.  A Speranzian conversation FILIVS  "Pater, esne urbanus quia Romae habitas?"  (Father, are you urban because you live in Rome?) BURRIENUS  "Non."  (No.) FILIVS  "Cur ergo urbanus vocaris?"  (Why then are you called urbanus?) BURRIENUS  "Quia Roma ad officium meum pertinet."  (Because Rome belongs to my office.) FILIVS  "Ergo urbanus nomen loci est?"  (Then urbanus names a place?) BURRIENUS  "Magis officii quam hominis."  (More of the office than of the man.)  A very Gricean moral would be:  The adjectives look as if they qualify the magistrate, but in practice they qualify the magistrate's jurisdiction.  So I would agree with your instinct: urbanus is not really saying "the praetor who is urban," but rather "the praetor whose competence is anchored in the urban civic sphere." That is exactly the sort of scope ambiguity that an ordinary-language philosopher would enjoy teasing apart. But at B.'s time, would a citizen who lived, say, in some well-established Roman colony not far from Rome would still be under his jurisdiction. It's the urbs thing that puzzles the child. If it means citizen that's one thing because 'cives romanus' doesn't but IMPLY 'urbs' -- you can be cives romanus' all over the territory under the rule that is centred IN THE URBS calls Roma? Input? Thanks Yes, I think your puzzlement is exactly the right one, and it exposes why urbanus is potentially misleading if taken too literally. A Roman child could reasonably say:  "Father, if a Roman citizen lives at Arpinum, Ostia, Praeneste, or a colony, is he not still a Roman citizen?"  And the answer would be:  Of course.  So urbanus cannot simply mean:  "the magistrate of Roman citizens"  because there were Roman citizens outside the city. Nor can it mean:  "the magistrate of everyone in a city,"  because many cities existed. The key point is that urbs in Roman political language very often means not "a city" but the City, namely Rome. Thus the opposition is roughly:  Roma and its civic forum, versus other jurisdictions and contexts.  A Speranzian reconstruction might run: FILIUS  "Pater, si civis Romanus Ravennae habitat, civis Romanus est?"  (Father, if a Roman citizen lives at Ravenna, is he still a Roman citizen?) BURRIENUS  "Certe."  (Certainly.) FILIUS  "Cur ergo urbanus vocaris?"  (Why then are you called urbanus?) BURRIENUS  "Quia Romae ius dico."  (Because I administer justice at Rome.) FILIUS  "Non quia de omnibus civibus cognoscis?"  (Not because you deal with all citizens?) BURRIENUS  "Non omnibus locis. Roma est finis officii mei."  (Not in all places. Rome is the boundary of my office.) The Gricean point is that the adjective urbanus looks demographic ("city people") but functions institutionally ("the Roman civic sphere"). Indeed, your observation goes further:  civis Romanus does not imply residence in Rome.  Quite right. By Burrienus' time, citizenship and residence were already distinct notions. One could be a Roman citizen without living in the urbs itself. So if little Burrienus asks:  "Why not call you praetor civium?"  he is asking a very intelligent question. The Roman answer would probably be:  because the title designates the forum where jurisdiction is exercised, not the entire class of persons affected by Roman citizenship.  In ultra-Speranzian form:  Urbanus non de civibus dicitur, sed de loco ubi civibus ius dicitur.  ("Urbanus is said not of the citizens, but of the place where justice is administered to citizens."). That, I think, is exactly the misunderstanding the child would have—and exactly the sort of ordinary-language puzzle Grice would enjoy.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buonsanti – Ossia: Grice e Buonsanti. Vito Buonsanti (San Vito dei Normanni, Brindisi, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale pratica -- prammatica del discorso. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers systematically recover speaker-meaning from what is said by assuming a cooperative, rational enterprise (the Cooperative Principle and its maxims) and then treating apparent defects—irrelevance, underinformativeness, odd wording—as deliberate, interpretable departures that yield calculable and cancellable implicatures grounded in publicly recognizable intentions. Buonsanti, by contrast, is best placed in an early nineteenth-century Italian pedagogical and grammatical-philosophical tradition: his concern with a “grammatica ragionata,” with language as a human instrument guided by “genio del linguaggio,” and with training (children learn by imitation; practical education, civic gestures like planting a liberty tree) frames meaning less as an inferential product of conversational norms and more as the disciplined expression of thought and action within a cultivated linguistic practice. The closest point of contact is that Buonsanti’s emphasis on practical discourse and on how rule-of-thumb “regolette” guide competent speaking resembles, at a different level, Grice’s idea that conversational rationality is normative and learnable; but where Grice offers a micro-pragmatic mechanism for deriving extra content (e.g., how a remark about planting a tree can be taken to mean peace by context-sensitive inference, or how a question-answer exchange licenses a “helpfulness” inference), Buonsanti reads the same phenomena through the lens of rational grammar, pedagogy, and civic praxis—meaning as something stabilized by education, usage, and the practical forms of life in which words and deeds jointly function as signs. Grice: “B. is a good one – I call him the Italian Wittgenstein; he talks of a reasoned grammar (grammatical ragionata) and not of rules but regoletta – and he like Austin speaks of the genius (il genio) del linguaggio – he speaks of a ‘philosophical approach’ to grammar – of ‘proposizioni’ and the rest – of etimologia, and sintassi, so he is into implicature!”  Repubblicano, e insieme al Carella, porta dalla vicina Brindisi un albero di naviglio per piantarlo, in segno di libertà, nella piazza antistante il Castello. Etica iconologica; Il sistema metrico; Geografia, Antologia Latina; Sistema d'istruire. By planting the tree, B. means that he wants peace. Etica iconologica: children learn by imitating: ‘sistema per educare i giovinetti” We are interested in that branch of philosophy that deals with action. Cannot be ‘morals’ because ‘ethos’ or mos is costume, not action. Analytic philosophers speak of ‘philosophy of action’ – Grice: “But not I. In my ‘Actions and Events’ I elaborate on this. I find that the vernacular is ‘do’. We need a special interrogative. Giulio whatted? He crossed the Rubicon. Quandum ubi quia are interrogative. Grice: “Latin is better equipped than English with particles to inquire, with respect to any category, which item would lend its name to achieve the conversion of an open sentence to the expression of an alethically/practically satisfactory utterance.   ‘unum ubi’. ‘unum quod’ – and so on. Am utterer may require not a pro-NOUN, but a pro-VERB, to make an inquiry about an indefinite reference to one of categories of items which a PREDICATE, qua epi-thet, ascribes to a subject. Ubi did GIULIO cross’ is answered by ‘Rubicon’,  yes-no question,  ‘Giulio WHATTED?’. Yes’ – And given the principle of conversational helpfulness, if one is in a position to specify what VERB we would use to express, we do just that. ‘Crossed the Rubicon’. ‘There! I *knew* that Giulio SOME-WHATTED.” The Romans lack ‘do’ but have ‘agire’ prammatica del discorso, icono, pratico e prasso radice per.  Grice: Buonasanti, dimmi, la grammatica ragionata è solo un gioco di regolette oppure serve davvero a capire il genio del linguaggio? Buonsanti: Grice, se non ci fossero le regolette, i bambini imparerebbero imitandoti e ti chiamerebbero maestro, ma rischieresti di essere scambiato per un albero piantato in piazza! Grice: Ma allora, se Giulio ha attraversato il Rubicone, dobbiamo chiedere “Giulio whatted?” oppure “Giulio agì?” – e magari ricevere in risposta una pizza di Brindisi! Buonsanti: Grice, qui a San Vito dei Normanni facciamo filosofia piantando alberi, ma la vera prammatica del discorso sta nel sapere quando è il momento di attraversare e quando di restare… soprattutto se c’è vento di libertà! Buonsanti, Vito (1807). Abbici morale, ovvero metodo facile per istruire i fanciulli nella lettura e negl’elementi della storia. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buscarini – Ossia: Grice e Buscarini: la ragione conversazionale – filosofia italiana – , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice. Giuseppe Buscarini (Fidenza, Parma, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers derive speaker-meaning from what is said by presuming cooperative rationality: interlocutors treat contributions as guided by shared purposes and norms (the Cooperative Principle and maxims), and they compute implicatures when an utterance appears underinformative, off-topic, or otherwise non-maximal, so that meaning is anchored in publicly recognizable intentions and the rational management of inference in talk. Buscarini, by contrast, belongs to an older rationalist-logical tradition in which “logic” is explicitly the doctrine of signs of ideas, with a basic semiotic split between natural signs (e.g., smoke for fire, a cry for pain) and conventional signs (badges, words, linguistic systems), and with an explicitly pedagogical aim: to teach clear, current, and brief expression; in this framework, the central explanatory unit is not the cooperative inferential practice of a conversation but the relation between ideas and their sign-vehicles, with language treated as the chief conventional instrument for expressing thought. The comparison is thus one of level and mechanism: Buscarini offers a broadly Cartesian/Port-Royal–style picture where rationality governs expression by regulating the adequacy of signs to ideas (and where “brevity/clarity” are stylistic-logical virtues), while Grice explains how, even when expression is not maximally clear or direct, rational agents systematically recover intended meaning by attributing purposes and intentions and by reasoning about what a speaker could be doing in context; where Buscarini’s semiotics comfortably accommodates “non-intentional” indication (natural meaning) versus instituted signification (conventional meaning), Grice makes intention and its recognition central to the distinctively communicative notion of meaning and uses conversational norms to explain how we routinely mean more (or other) than our words conventionally encode.Grice: “I love Buscarini” “I call myself ‘enough of a rationalist,’ since I’m Oxonian, but B. can go the whole hog!” – Keywords: key, way of words, way of ideas, way of things, segno naturale, segno convenzionale, vocabolo, lingua, esprimere. The author of ‘Discussioni di filosofia RAZIONALE’, B. is the archdeacon and vicar geneal of the diocese of Borgo San Donnino, the modern-day town of Fidenza. He publishes several pastroal letters and addresses to the clergy and people of his diocse. B. archidiacono della chiesa cattedale, viario generale capitolare della diocese di Borgo S. Donnino al venerable clero ed amatissimo popolo, salute nel signore – “Al venerable clero ed amatissimo popolo della citta e diocesi di Borgo San Donnino. B. FILOSOFIA RAZIONALE Dei segni  La logica deve trattare dei segni delle idee, dei vocaboli e della lingua. Piova.  Segno d’una idea è ciò che ha forza di svegliare in noi la notizia di una cosa da lui diversa. Il segno è naturale o convenzionale secondoché ha tale forza da natura o da convenzione falta tra uomini. Un segno naturale del fuoco o del dolore è il fumo e un grido. Segno convenzionale è una divisa d’un magistrato. Premesso questo, noi dobbiamo esprimere agl’altri col SEGNO l’idea, quale la concepiamo. Ora, la logica insegna a ben concepirle. Dunque, la logica deve insegnare anco a bene esprimerle. La logica perciò deve traltare anche del segno dell’idea  Prora. Il segno che principalmente si usa dall'universale per esprimere l’idea è il vocabolo, cioè, un suono articolatamente proferito ad esprimere un’idea. Un complesso di vocaboli valevole ad esprimere tutti i pensieri dell'uomo sotto determinate leggi grammaticali dicesi lingua. Ma abbiamo dello che la logica deve trattare del segno. Dunque, la logica deve trattare anche del vocabolo e della lingua. Tuttavia poichè questo studio si compie nelle scuole di grammatica, e di belle lettere. Così noi ce ne dispenseremo, notando solo che la lingua deve essere usitata, chiara, e breve. Grice: Caro Buscarini, dimmi, se la logica tratta di segni, ci serve una patente speciale per guidarli? Buscarini: Grice, la patente te la dà il buon senso; basta non prendere il fumo per fuoco e non urlare “dolore!” quando ti pizzica una zanzara. Grice: E se invece uso un vocabolo sbagliato, rischio la multa grammaticale? Buscarini: Solo se parli troppo; la lingua, dice la logica, deve essere usitata, chiara e breve. Se esageri, ti mando in confessionale a pentirti delle subordinate! Buscarini, Giuseppe (1842). Discussioni di filosofia razionale. Parma, Fiaccadori.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buzio – Ossia: Grice e Buzio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Buzio. The Buzzi were a family of ancient Rome. The only member of this gens to achieve prominence was Aulus B. Lappius Maximus, who held the consulship twice under the emperor Domitian. Several others are known from inscriptions. Aulus B. Lappius Maximus, consul from September to December in AD 86, and a second time from May to August 95. He was governor of Bithynia and Pontus, Germania Inferior, and Syria. Lucius B. Proculus, duumvir at Ostia in Latium in AD 32. Publius Manlius Bassus was his colleague.[6] Bucia, buried in a second-century tomb at Gens Bacchuiana in Africa, aged twenty-seven years, nine months, along with her mother, Aeburia Matidia Victoris.[7] Aulus B. Aptus, dedicated a second-century tomb at Rome for his verna, or home-born slave Selene, aged four years, three months, and fifteen days.[8] Bucia Tyche, buried at Rome, in a tomb built by her husband, Lucius Paccius Amarantus, ostensibly dating between the second half of the second century, and the early part of the third. The inscription is thought to be modern.[9] Undated Bucii Lucius Bucius Antiochus, named in an inscription from Ostia, along with Gaius Pomentinus Felix and the freedwoman Julia Apollonia.[10] Bucia Calvina, dedicated a tomb at Salernum in Campania for her husband, Servius Julius Vitellius, a cornicularius, or bugler, in the Legio VII Claudia, aged sixty-seven years, eleven months, and eleven days. The inscription is thought to be modern.[11] Publius B. Celer, buried at Utica in Africa, aged seventy-one years, six months, and twenty-two days.[12][13] Bucia C. f. Extricata, buried at Uchi Maius in Africa, aged seventy-five.[14] Bucia Saturnina, dedicated a tomb at Lambaesis in Numidia for her husband, Quintus Sabinius Ingenuus, aged seventy-five.[15] Marcus Bucius Victor Silicianus, built a tomb at Avedda in Africa for his wife, Albia Aurelia Fortunata, aged twenty-four.[16][17] See also List of Roman gentes Notes  Found in older sources as Lucius Appius Maximus Norbanus, evidently mistaking Lappius for L. Appius, and combining a partial name from a corrupt manuscript with that of Titus Flavius Norbanus, governor of Raetia during the same period. References  Pliny the Younger, Epistulae, x. 58.  Aurelius Victor, Epitome de Caesaribus, xi. 10.  AE 1961, 319b.  Eck, "Jahres- und Provinzialfasten", pp. 307 ff., 314, 316–319.  Gallivan, "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", pp. 190, 192, 216, 218.  Fasti Ostienses, CIL XIV, 244, AE 1928, 126.  Antiquités Africaines, 2022–65.  Thomasson, "Iscrizioni del Sepolcreto di via Ostiense", 129.  CIL VI, 13655.  CIL XIV, 5063.  CIL X, 129.  Inscriptiones Africae Latinae, 430, 1.  BCTH, 1917–238.  CIL VIII, 26307.  CIL VIII, 4027.  Inscriptions Latines de La Tunisie, i. 1. 1213a.  BCTH, 1932/33–499. Bibliography Ancient sources Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (Pliny the Younger), Epistulae (Letters). Sextus Aurelius Victor (attributed), Epitome de Caesaribus. Modern sources Antiquités Africaines, CNRS Éditions, Paris (1967–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). Werner Eck, "Jahres- und Provinzialfasten der senatorischen Statthalter von 69/70 bis 138/139" (Annual and Provincial Fasti of the Senatorial Goverors from AD 69/70 to 138/139), in Chiron, vol. 12 (1982). Paul A. Gallivan, "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", in Classical Quarterly, vol. 31, pp. 186–220 (1981). Alfred Merlin, Inscriptions Latines de La Tunisie (Latin Inscriptions from Tunisia), Fondation Dourlans, Paris (1944). Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Bengt E. Thomasson, "Iscrizioni del Sepolcreto di via Ostiense" (Inscriptions from Selpulchres of the Via Ostiensis), in Opuscula Romana, vol. I (1954), pp. 125–145. Gustav Wilmanns, Inscriptiones Africae Latinae (Latin Inscriptions from Africa), Georg Reimer, Berlin (1881). Category: Roman gentes

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Buzio – Ossia: Grice e Buzio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Buzio.  What strikes Grice and Speranza about at least this one B. is that he was consul from September to December -- something went wrong? Input? What strikes you is exactly what strikes many modern readers:  "Consul from September to December?"  It sounds as though something went wrong. But in the late first century AD, under Domitian, the answer is generally:  No, nothing necessarily went wrong at all.  Aulus Bucius Lappius Maximus was suffect consul in a specific nundinium (consular term), September–December 86, and again May–August 95. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikiwand.com] The key point is that by this period the consulship had effectively split into:  ordinary consuls (consules ordinarii), who began the year; suffect consuls (consules suffecti), who replaced them later in the year. [oxfordre.com], [academic.oup.com]  So the Gricean puzzle is that the modern hearer hears:  consul = one-year office,  whereas a Roman of Domitian's age might hear:  consul = rank and dignity, even if held for only part of the year.   A Speranzian conversation FILIUS  "Pater, quot menses consul fuisti?"  (Father, how many months were you consul?) LAPPIUS  "Quattuor."  (Four.) FILIUS  "Tantum?"  (Only four?) LAPPIUS  "Consul fui."  (I was consul.) FILIUS  "Sed annus duodecim menses habet."  (But a year has twelve months.) LAPPIUS  "Dignitas non numero mensium metitur."  (Rank is not measured by the number of months.) +> that achieving the consulship matters more than how long one held it.  The truly Gricean point If someone says:  consul fuit  ("he was consul"), a modern hearer may infer:  for the year.  Under Domitian that implicature is often false. The statement remains true even if the office lasted only one nundinium. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikiwand.com] So your puzzlement reveals a nice clash between:  modern expectations, Roman institutional practice.   Why Speranza would enjoy it The title consul remains the same. The duration changes. Thus:  consul no longer conversationally implicates  "consul for the whole year."   The semantics survive; the old implicature weakens. That's a very Gricean development. As for Lappius Maximus himself, the really remarkable thing is not that he served only September–December in 86, but that he obtained a second consulship in 95, which the sources describe as a rare distinction in that period. [oxfordre.com], [academic.oup.com] So if little Bucius asks:  "Only four months, father?"  the Roman answer would probably be:  Ita vero. Sed bis consul fui. ("Indeed. But I was consul twice."). Smiley.  Indeed. Speranza first took the term to be only two-months only, but four months makes perfect sense -- isn't that what quatrimenstral means? And the suffect he was also in the second term -- even if a different four-month period. And how did the ordinary vs. suffect work? When would a suffect replace an ordinary, to complete a gap between elections. In this case, that was not the case and there's nothing to prevent that he was elected for those four months the first time and for another set of fortuh monhs the second time? Thanks -- consul ordinarius echoes praetor urbanus? Yes — and your instinct is right: nothing went wrong in the case of Aulus Bucius Lappius Maximus. The sources explicitly describe both of his consulships as suffect consulships held in particular nundinia (consular terms):  September–December AD 86. May–August AD 95. [archive.org], [rhetoric.byu.edu]  So he was not filling in an accidental vacancy. He was appointed to one of the regular replacement consulships of the imperial system. [archive.org], [rhetoric.byu.edu] Ordinary versus Suffect By the first century AD, the traditional annual consulship had evolved. Very roughly:  Consules ordinarii began the year. One or more sets of consules suffecti succeeded them during the year. [en.wikipedia.org], [academic.oup.com]  The office remained enormously prestigious, so emperors could honor more senators by distributing the consulship among several pairs in a single year. Thus:  "consul" no longer implied  "held office for twelve months."   That older implicature had largely disappeared. Your reconstruction about election As far as the sources provided here go, they tell us only that Lappius Maximus held those two suffect consulships in those particular periods. They do not explain the detailed mechanics by which he obtained them. [archive.org], [rhetoric.byu.edu] So the safest statement is:  He held two regularly attested suffect consulships, one in 86 and another in 95. [archive.org], [rhetoric.byu.edu]  "Quadrimestral" Exactly. A four‑month consulship strikes modern readers as odd because we instinctively think:  consul = year.  But once the year is divided into successive nundinia, four months becomes perfectly intelligible. Indeed, from the Roman prestige perspective:  bis consul ("twice consul")  was likely far more important than the number of months served. The Oxford Classical Dictionary entry even notes that a second consulship had become a rare distinction by this period. [en.wikipedia.org], [academic.oup.com] Consul ordinarius and praetor urbanus There is an interesting parallel. Just as:  praetor became insufficient once there were several praetors, requiring distinctions such as urbanus and peregrinus,  so too:  consul eventually needed further specification, yielding ordinarius versus suffectus.  In both cases the bare title ceased to be informative enough. A Gricean moral might be:  when institutions become more complex, language acquires modifiers to preserve informativeness.  So yes, consul ordinarius and praetor urbanus are analogous in that respect: both are qualifiers introduced because the simple title no longer uniquely identified the office-holder's function. And the implicature in the Oxford source you give may be that, if this was under the same emperor, it means that B. merited -- it may have been a political favour the first time, but the emperor must have been pleased and instead of 'winning' some other senator into the rank, he chose to go back to B.? Thanks Yes, I think that is a very reasonable implicature, although we should distinguish carefully between what the source states and what we are inferring. What the sources explicitly tell us is:  Lappius Maximus was suffect consul in AD 86. He was suffect consul again in AD 95. A second consulship was regarded as a rare distinction in that period. [archive.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [academic.oup.com]  They also record that between these consulships he held major commands, including Germania Inferior and Syria. [archive.org] What the sources do not explicitly say is:  "Domitian was pleased with him and therefore promoted him again."  That is not stated in the evidence we have. However, as a Grice/Speranza reading of the situation, one naturally draws something close to that conclusion:  The emperor had a limited number of consulships available. A second consulship was unusual. Lappius Maximus received one. [en.wikipedia.org], [academic.oup.com]  Hence a contemporary Roman might well infer:  +> this man continued to enjoy exceptional imperial confidence.  In fact the Wikipedia-derived source even reports that Brian Jones regards Lappius as one of Domitian's amici (advisers or associates). [archive.org] From a Gricean angle, "twice consul" functions rather like your earlier examples of praetor urbanus and Burbuleius: The bare statement  bis consul fuit  carries more than its literal content. A Roman hearer would likely recover:  +> this is someone the regime repeatedly trusted.  Not because the statement says so, but because a second consulship was uncommon. [en.wikipedia.org], [academic.oup.com] And I rather like your formulation:  The first consulship might conceivably be favour; the second begins to look like favour confirmed.  That is not a fact stated by the sources, but it is a very plausible Roman implicature.