CH

 

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Chiappelli – Ossia: Grice e Chiappelli: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’academici – Cicerone e il segno di Marte.  Alessandro Chiappelli: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’academici – Cicerone e il segno di Marte. Grice: “One of my most recent reflections is on the distinction and striking parallelisms I draw between the Athenian dialectic – best represented in Raffaello’s “La scuola di Atene” at Rome – and the Oxonian dialectic – but represented in those reeky meeting at the Philosophy Room at Merton – or better, my Saturday mornings at St. John’s with Austin! Chiappelli provides us with a most brilliant hermeneutic of the iconography in Raffaello’s painting – Strawson tried to emulate him with some caricatures of Austin, Grice, and the rest of the Play Group – but his doodlings ccouldn’t compare!” Si laurea a Firenze. Insegna a Bologna. dei Lincei della Crusca incaricato di una missione di ricerche e studi negli archivi e biblioteche di Firenze sull'arte fiorentina del Rinascimento e la conservazione dei monumenti e delle opere d'arte. Altre opere: “Della interpretazione panteistica di Platone, Firenze: Succ. Le Monnier); La dottrina della realtà del mondo esterno nella filosofia moderna prima di Kant” (Firenze, Tip. dell'arte della stampa); “Studi di antica letteratura cristiana, Torino, Loescher); “Darwinismo e socialismo, Roma,); Saggi e note critiche, Bologna, Ditta Nicola Zanichelli); “Il socialismo e il pensiero moderno, “Leopardi e la poesia della natura” (Roma, Alighieri); “Leggendo e meditando. Pagine critiche di arte, letteratura e scienza sociale, “Nuove pagine sul cristianesimo antico, Firenze: succ. Le Monnier); “Pagine d'antica arte fiorentina, Firenze, Lumachi); “Dalla critica al nuovo idealismo, Torino, Bocca); “Pagine di critica letteraria, Firenze, Le Monnier); “Idee e figure moderne, Ancona, Puccini). Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Crusca. CiceroneAacademici, Alcibiade, Gli Scipione, la dialettica romana, storia dela filosofia romana, Cicerone, ambassiata, Carneade, Kant, neo-Kantianismo, external world, internal world, the reality of the external world, iconography, detailed ecphrasis of “La scuola di Atene” – dialettica ateniense, dialettica romana. Grice: To Athens, via Rome. Pistoia, Toscana.  Grice: Alessandro, mi chiedo sempre se tra la dialettica ateniese e quella oxoniana ci sia un vero confronto, o se siamo tutti in cerca di un buon caffè dopo l’ennesima discussione! Tu che hai studiato l’iconografia della scuola di Atene, pensi che i filosofi italiani abbiano imparato qualcosa dagli inglesi? Chiappelli: Caro Grice, forse Platone e Aristotele avrebbero preferito il vino al caffè, ma nella scuola di Atene tutti si ascoltano e nessuno ha fretta di arrivare alla conclusione. Gli inglesi, invece, vogliono il risultato, magari per poter scrivere un nuovo saggio prima di pranzo! Grice: E tu, Alessandro, con la tua passione per Cicerone e il segno di Marte, pensi che la dialettica romana possa insegnare qualcosa al mondo moderno, magari anche ai filosofi che si riuniscono a St. John’s il sabato mattina? Chiappelli: Caro Grice, la dialettica romana è come una partita di calcio: c’è chi parla, chi ribatte e chi fischia. Alla fine, tutti tornano a casa con qualche segno addosso, ma almeno il gioco è stato divertente. La filosofia, come l’arte, serve a ricordarci che la realtà è un po’ Marte, un po’ Terra, e a volte basta una battuta per far tornare il sorriso! Chiappelli, Alessandro (1887). Saggi di critica letteraria. Firenze: Barbèra.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Chiaramonti – Ossia: Grice e Chiaramonti: la ragione conversazionale.  Scipione Chiaramonti (Cesena, Emilia Romagna, Forli-Cesena): la ragione conversazionale. Grice: “When I gave my lecture for the Oxford Philosophical Society on ‘Meaning,’ I KNEW none in the audience would have ever HEARD of Chiaramonti; so I could easily pour scorn on any attempt to provide a taxonomy of signs, and propose my ideas on ‘meaning’ as superior!” -- Opuscula varia mathematica, avversario di BONAIUTO De universo Si laureò in filosofia a Ferrara. Insegna a Perugia. A Cesena, si dedica alle vicende interne dell'Accademia degli Offuscati, da lui fondata. Difende la cosmologia dalle critiche di Grassi, BONAIUTOi, e Glorioso De Methodo ad doctrinam spectante: Nerius; discute dall'interno le problematiche concernenti il dibattito logico incentrato sull'opposizione tra le diverse interpretazioni di Zabarella e Piccolomini. l'Anti-tycho, critica il sistema cosmologico BONAIUTO espresse, nel Saggiatore, un giudizio molto positivo sull'opera. C. rispose nell'Apologia pro Antitychone Opere Discorso della cometa pogonare, Farri. De tribus novis stellis quae comparuere, Neri. Difesa di C. da Cesena al suo Antiticone, e delle tre nuove Stelle, Landini De universo, De sede cometarum et novorum phaenomenorum, Opuscula mathematica, Zeneri In lizio de iride, de corona, de pareliis, et virgis commentaria, Scipione Banca In quartum metheorum commentaria, Banca. Benzoni, C., gnis, ex quoetiamamoremarguiſſetillatione necessaria. Fateor tamen, & ipse probabilius ex ea observatione amoremmulie ris in Pyladem, quàmalium affectum coniectum esse: facilè autem tummulieres, facilè negocio deducere. Interimnos finem imponamus huic quarte curatoriorum partis, qua græcè symioticè, nobis de signis  dicitur, in duo membra secatur. Primum inquirit mores. Secundum latitante saffectus. Indago procedittum ex causis, tum ex affectibus consequentibus, quos signa dicamus peculiariterſumptofigninomine. AD fiexcaufis, & signis progressus iungantur, certior inuestiga tioeuadit. de signis, Grice, ‘Meaning,’ segno naturale, segno artificiale. Grice: Caro Chiaramonti, confesso che quando ho presentato le mie idee sul “significato” a Oxford, nessuno conosceva i tuoi lavori sulla tassonomia dei segni! Mi ha dato una certa libertà nel proporre la distinzione tra segno naturale e segno artificiale. Ma sono curioso: come vedi oggi la relazione tra segno e significato? Chiaramonti: Caro Grice, è un vero piacere discutere con te! Per me, il segno non è solo un elemento isolato, ma si inserisce in un sistema di relazioni, dove il significato emerge anche dall’affetto e dalla causa che lo provoca. La mia esperienza nell’Accademia degli Offuscati mi ha insegnato quanto sia importante indagare non solo la natura del segno, ma anche i suoi effetti logici e cosmologici sulla conoscenza. Grice: Interessante! Mi colpisce il tuo approccio che unisce la logica e la cosmologia. Io tendo a separare i segni naturali, come il fumo che indica il fuoco, dai segni artificiali, come le parole, che richiedono una convenzione. Secondo te, questa distinzione è utile, oppure rischia di semplificare troppo? Chiaramonti: È una distinzione senz’altro preziosa, ma credo che i segni, naturali o artificiali, mantengano sempre una sfumatura di ambiguità. Nelle mie opere, ho cercato di mostrare che anche i segni artificiali, proprio come le comete che ho studiato, possono essere interpretati in modi diversi a seconda del contesto e delle passioni che li accompagnano. Forse, come dice il proverbio, “ogni segno parla, ma non sempre dice la verità.” Chiaramonti, Scipione (1592). Laurea in filosofia. Ferrara.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Chiaromonte – Ossia: Grice e Chiaromonte: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della parola – il cane irsuto. Definizione d’ aggetivo – la correlazione.  Nicola Chiaromonte: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della parola – il cane irsuto. Definizione d’ aggetivo – la correlazione. Grice: “Problem with C. is that he let things influence him too much! My favourite is his tract on ‘silenzio e parola’ – where as he explains, ‘parabola,’ as used by the Greeks meant conversazione, because among primitive people, it is all about ‘comparison,’ and that is what a parabole is – by comparison we may think of miaow-miaow and the bow-bow theory of meaning!” Antifascista. Si laurea sotto Caffi.  Dopo una parentesi fra le file fascistr. Ppropugnatore del socialismo libertario che contrappose alle spinte trotzkiste della rivista politics di Macdonald, a cui pure si legò in un sodalizio di amicizia e di frequentazione intellettuale. Ebbe legami d'amicizia con filosofi come Arendt e Camus, e scrittori come Orwell, e collaborò con Salvemini al settimanale italiano a New York, Italia libera. Tornato in Italia una prima volta e una seconda, si sentì esule in patria, anche per il suo rifiuto a sottostare ai compromessi che volevano la cultura strettamente legata ai partiti politici; per un periodo tenne una rubrica di critica teatrale sulla rivista Il Mondo fondata da Pannunzio. Assieme a Silone, fondò "Tempo presente", rivista culturale indipendente, esperienza innovativa nell'Italia dell'epoca che portò avanti, nonostante qualche dissapore con Silone, con grande attenzione agli autori di notevole spessore che riempivano le pagine del mensile. Le sue posizioni furono improntate all'anticomunismo ma, a differenza di Silone, fu senz'altro più utopico; vicino alle posizioni di Albert Camus, teorizzò «la normalità dell'esistenza umana contro l'automatismo catastrofico della Storia». Nel testo La guerra fredda culturale. La Cia e il mondo delle lettere e delle arti (Fazi editore) della storica e giornalista inglese Frances Stonor Saunders, si sostiene che la rivista Tempo presente sia stata finanziata dalla CIA: la Saunders ne individua i fondatori come personaggi di punta del Congress for Cultural Freedom e principali destinatari dei finanziamenti della CIA per attività culturali in Italia. Intrattiene una fitta corrispondenza con Mussayassul, Grice: Chiaromonte, tu parli della parola come se fosse un cane irsuto che va dove vuole. Ma c’è un modo di domarla? Chiaromonte: Caro Grice, se la parola è irsuta, meglio lasciarla libera! Come diceva mia nonna, "meglio una parola che abbaia che una frase che morde". E poi, la conversazione nasce proprio dall’imprevedibilità: ci si capisce tra le pieghe, non tra i comandi. Grice: Allora dovremmo ringraziare il silenzio, che lascia spazio alla parola di saltare sul divano, come un cane troppo allegro. Ma come la mettiamo con l’aggettivo? La correlazione non è sempre chiara! Chiaromonte: Ah, l’aggettivo è come il collare: a volte serve, altre volte stringe troppo. Meglio ridere di fronte alla confusione e ricordare che la parola, come il cane, si fa capire anche quando non ci sono istruzioni precise. Nicola Chiaromonte. siquidem tuDc et soDum duaruffi litterarum coutiDeat.at vero qqaDdo præposita syllabæ existat, noD duplex sed simplex est accipicDda, ut puta maximus auxius: Dumquiduam macsimus aut aocsius? Et cetera talia; et ideo, ut diximus, quotieos X [[ littera præpositasyllabæ existat, simplex est supputaada, sciiicet loquoDiaro cs et gs litteræ geroinatæ, si vocalibus præpooaDtur, numquam sonum syllabæ suscitabuDt de litteris, quaoluro ratio poscebat, tractafimus. Etiaro de syllabis, quouiaro dod brevis ratio est, ideo alio loco cod- i6 petenter cum roetris tractabimus. Partes orationis sunt VIII: nomen, pronomen, participium, adverbium, coniuctio, præpositio, interiectio, et verbum. Grice: “Italians speak of ‘parola’ easier than they analise it. I play with ‘word’ and ‘sentence’. ‘Sentence’ of course comes from Cicero, ‘sententia.’ I admit that it may not be possible to provide a formula ‘Expression means …’ unless you specify the ‘syntactic type’ to which E belongs. I tried for adjectival ‘shaggy’. And even there I got into problems with the idea of a correlation, where the utterer is asked to provide a correlation of the type he has just provided!” -- Grice: “La voce e la parola”. parola, parabola, Donatus, Priscianus, definizione di voce, vox, verbum, word, Grice on ‘word’ – Corleo on ‘parola.  Rapolla, Potenza, Basilicata.  Grice: Nicola, ti confesso che “parola” è un termine che gli italiani amano, ma raramente si divertono ad analizzare. Io invece mi ci arrovello: parola, voce, verbum… e poi arriva la frase – o, come direbbe Cicerone, la sententia! Tu quale preferisci? Chiaramonte: Caro Grice, da buon italiano, la parola mi fa sentire a casa. Ma la frase, ah, quella è come la pasta: se non la condisci bene, rischia di essere insipida! Preferisco una parola saporita che una frase troppo lunga. Grice: Capisco, ma ti metto alla prova: se ti chiedo di definire “shaggy”, come faresti? Io ho provato e sono finito a chiedere correlazioni, ma mi sono perso tra le syllabe e le consonanti doppie! Chiaramonte: Grice, la verità è che ogni parola ha una sua barba, a volte lunga, a volte corta. Se la barba è irsuta, la parola è divertente; se è troppo curata, rischia di essere noiosa. Meglio una parola che faccia sorridere, come un cane che non smette mai di abbaiare! Chiaromonte, Nicola (1927). Laurea. Facolta di Giurisprudenza Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Chiavacci – Ossia: Grice e Chiavacci: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale poetica di  Gentile.  Gaetano Chiavacci: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale poetica di  Gentile. Grice: “C. is a good one; Italians tend to identify him with Miichelstaedter, but surely there is more to C. than an exegesis of Michelstaedter (especially to refute Gentile’s) – my favourite tracts are three: his ‘critique of poetical reason’, a critique we were lacking! --, his little treatise on ‘man’ – and his ‘reality’ and not appearance, as Bradley would have it, but ‘illusion,’ which is related to Latin ‘ludus,’ game – His ‘philosophical studies’ cap it all!” Idealista. Studia l’attualismo di GENTILE. Si laurea a Firenze sotto Mazzoni col decameron di Boccaccio, Conosce Michelstaedter, ad Arangio, Cecchi, Robertis, Lamanna, e Facibeni. A Roma incontra Gentile e studia SERBATI. Insegna a Firenze, anche la cattedra di estetica. Entra a far parte dell'Accademia Roveretana degli Agiati. Gli verranno quindi elargiti diversi altri titoli accademici e riconoscimenti, come la medaglia d'oro ai benemeriti della scuola, della cultura e dell'arte. L'idealismo: tra GENTILE e critica che gravita sugl’autori fin qui presi in considerazione (alquanto lacunosa, a dire il vero, soprattutto negli ultimi anni e per quanto concerne l’esigenza e il compito di saggiare storicamente le posizioni di C.!!) a tutt’oggi non è concorde e perciò il problema della conciliazione tra la speculazione gentiliana e quella di MICHELSTAEDTER ci sembra tuttora aperto a ulteriori sviluppi e approfondimenti che sono ben lontani dal venire realizzati, come un compito non ancora del tutto assolto. Ben consapevoli di queste difficoltà, in queste paginei abbiamo inteso soltanto delimitare e precisare l’ambito di indagine, che è da valutare come un’ulteriore approsimazione al problema, e offrire degli spunti utili a sostegno della prosecuzione del discorso. poetico, critica della ragione poetica, illusion, allusion, ludo, la natura dell’uomo, carteggio con Gentile. Foiano della Chiana, Arezzo, Toscana.  Grice: Caro Chiavacci, hai mai pensato che la ragione poetica possa essere una partita a scacchi contro Gentile? Ogni mossa è un verso, ma il finale resta sempre aperto! Chiavacci: Grice, se fosse davvero una partita, io scommetto che Gentile si distrarrebbe a contemplare il cavallo… mentre Michelstaedter, invece, preferirebbe giocare a carte! 1934. Corpus. (Grice’s notebook, with the usual self-disgust) I really ought to do more socialising. One hears it said—usually by people who mean drinking—that socialising is good for one’s philosophical digestion. Still, whenever I try, I get bored; and when I get bored I become precise, which is a form of rudeness. So I went down to the Rose & Crown, that pub by Magdalen where the Cherwell behaves as if it had taken vows of quietness. I hoped—naïvely—to find conversation. I found, instead, a scholar. We call ourselves “scholars” because “undergraduate” is too honest and “student” too Continental. The tutors call us pupils, which is irritating: it makes one sound like a pet, or worse, a charity. I prefer the Latin: pupilla—the little doll in the eye, the bit that does the seeing while the rest of the creature pretends to be responsible. My companion introduced himself as Wainwright—the name alone suggests a trade, which is always comforting in Oxford, where very little is made and everything is pronounced. He said he was “reading” English. Reading English, at Oxford, is like knitting fog: a respectable employment for those who cannot face Greek. (Bologna has classics and italianistica; Boum Vadum has classics and, for reasons nobody explains, English.) Wainwright seemed proud of it. I asked him what English consisted in, and he responded with that provincial confidence which, in a healthy civilisation, would be called vitality. He quoted Donne at me, as if Donne were a theorem:  “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise …”  He recited it the way Shropshire recites anything: as though the lines were not merely verse but a method for making metaphysics sound like weather. Oxford, of course, prefers metaphysics to sound like grammar. I did my usual trick then, which is to stop listening and begin browsing. I had been revising old volumes of abstracts—over-seas, or over-channel, as I prefer, since the Channel is what makes us moral. One name, among the continental debris, caught my eye: Gaetano Chiavacci. Now here was a scholar of the sort Bologna manufactures without blushing. Chiavacci—so the note said—took his laurea at Florence under Guido Mazzoni, writing on La Commedia nel Decamerone. One ought, at this point, to become allegorical, because Italy encourages it: Chiavacci becomes Daphne, Mazzoni Apollo, and the thesis a laurel wreath pursued with academic breathlessness. But the title itself—La Commedia nel Decamerone—invited an English translation, and I gave Wainwright one in his own dialect: “Imagine,” I said, “the King James Authorised Version—or perhaps Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—wandering into Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, and someone has the decency to turn the whole collision into an opera, complete with libretto.” Wainwright stared, as English readers do when they are not sure whether you are complimenting them or making them responsible for something. “And,” I added, “the truly tragic part is this: Chiavacci did not merely write the thing. He got it published.” I said this with the sort of tone one uses for accidents. He looked pleased—so I explained. There is a particular lustre to the unpublication. An unpublished thesis is like a vow: it suggests purity. The moment you publish, you turn vow into commerce. The thing becomes public, which is the first step toward prostitution. Unpublicatio—if Cicero were forced to decline it—would surely be feminine. And she doesn’t go for much: a shilling, perhaps; the price of being cited by people who haven’t read you. “Flora,” I said, “the typographer at Iesi—Chiavacci managed Flora to get it printed.” Wainwright, who was reading English, naturally asked, “Where is Iesi?” “Where it always is,” I said, “in Italy. Which is to say: somewhere that can turn a local printer into an ontological event.” He laughed, and I took that as progress. Epilogue (or: the editorial conscience pretending to be a moralist) Still, since all this goes under Chiavacci’s entry, one ought—if one is pretending to be serious—to wonder what Chiavacci was thinking. There is room for a thesis there. Not the full choir of angels in Dante’s Paradiso—though Wainwright would insist on trumpets—but Inferno and Purgatorio give plenty of material for a Boccaccian mind. And the Decameron—ten-something, ten days, one story per day—already contains the whole machine of a civilisation: appetite, plague, comedy, cruelty, and the perpetual attempt to make narration look like an antidote. So perhaps Chiavacci’s project was not absurd. Perhaps it was even necessary. But if there is blame, it is usually safest in Oxford to blame the relatore. The supervisor relates the pupil—the eye’s little worker—into whatever the supervisor thinks matters. And what is a poor pupil to do? The pupil wants a grade; the supervisor wants a monument; the printer wants work; and the university wants the fiction that all this is education rather than traffic. So the pupil does what pupils do: he tries to buy his grade with labour, and he tries to get out of the programme as soon as he can—before the laurel wreath turns into a noose.Grice: E tu, Chiavacci, tra illusione e realtà, dove ti collochi? Tra i pedoni che avanzano o tra i re che si nascondono dietro l’apparenza? Chiavacci: Grice, io mi accontento di muovere la regina: così, tra ludo e allusione, posso sempre far credere agli altri che la poesia sia la vera strategia… almeno finché non arriva la medaglia d’oro! Chiavacci, Gaetano (1912). La commedia nel Decamerone. Sotto Guido Mazzoni, Firenze -- Iesi, Ancona, Marche: Flora.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Chiochetti – Ossia: Grice e Chiocchetti: filosofo ladino, non latino -- la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale prammatica.  Emilio Chiocchetti (Moena, Trento, Trentino-Alto Adige): filosofo ladino, non latino -- la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale prammatica. Grice: “I like C. – a surname most Englishmen are unable to pronounce, but cf. Chumley! – For one, he exapanded, alla Croce on Vico as proposing ‘espressione’ as prior to ‘communicazione,’ as I do – but he went further – he studied the Latin-language author, and saint, Aquinas, and his ‘modi di significare’ – Lastly, he expanded on ‘pragmatism’ as the term of abuse it MUST be! Why are non-philosophers OBSESSED to keep miscalling me a ‘pragmaticist’ who is into ‘pragmatics’ – It’s totally anti-Oxonian – Oxford being the epitome of aestheticism – to do so! Chiocchetti also played with the abused term, ‘scolastic’: he thought there are two scolastics: the palaeo-scolastici, or scolastici simpiciter, and the ‘neo-scolastici,’ like his self! He wrote a little tract on Gentile, who ungently threw it onto the wastepaper basket!” Grice: “In Italy, just to know that a philosopher has a religion orientation disqualifies as a philosopher, and that is at it should. The keyword is: anti-Popish.” Si laurea a Roma. Insegna a Rovereto. Collabora, su invito di Gemelli, alla Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica. Faustini,, SERBATI Faustini, idealismo Carteggio con NARDI. Centi, Coen, Consolati,, C. MRETTRI s», è ita, canina eno er insit) miri iztarta e ea Nihil obstat quominus imprimatur 19 Mediolani, Bernareggi. Nihil obstat quominus imprimatur Mediolani,Mons. Can. Cavezzali. ALL'AMICO P. ARCANGELO MAZZOTTI CHE NELLA VITA VISSUTA ANCHE PIÙ TENUE SA CERCARE E COGLIERE LA FILOSOFIA sg ca Ripubblico, a richiesta d'amicì, in volume questi «saggi» sul Pragmatismo, già pubblicati, parecchi anniì sono nella Rivista di filosofia Neoscolastica, per chè il Pragmatismo contiene aspetti di verità che non A vanno dimenticati. prammatico, Vico, Croce, estetica, Aquino, Gentile, Neo-Scolastica. Grice, 1947. St John’s. I am drafting notes for my seminar on Meaning, and, because one cannot pulverise what one cannot first locate, I am trying to swallow as much pragmatism as the stomach will tolerate. Not much, on the whole. Peirce is “not known on these shores,” which is why I am taking him on; not because I admire him in bulk, but because neglect is always an invitation to overstatement, and I have a professional duty to prevent my colleagues from being bullied by American nomenclature. One must keep the thing as English as possible, which in practice means translating it into something one can say without blushing: Ogden and Richards, Lady Welby, and a little domestic discipline about what “meaning” could possibly mean. Still, prudence demands reconnaissance. If I am to do violence to Peirce, I should at least do it with correct information, and so I find myself rummaging in old numbers of a journal one does not normally keep on the bedside table: Rivista di Filosofia Neo‑Scolastica. Already in 1911, one Emilio Chiocchetti is writing, with the solemnity of the devout and the energy of the provincial, on what he calls pragmatismo religioso. The phrase is alarming, as phrases sometimes are. One has been trained to hear “Neo‑Scolastica” as a warning label, and “Pragmatismo” as a contagion; put them together and the mind expects some hybrid infection. But Oxonian calm is a virtue, and one remembers that the neoscholastics, when they are serious, want intelligence about the enemy—preferably intelligence with footnotes. Chiocchetti does what a serious enemy‑intelligence officer does: he lays out the doctrine at length, especially the religious variant, and only afterwards administers the Aquinas—politely, but with a thump. His pragmatismo religioso is, as far as one can see, less Popish than psychological. It is James’s “religious experience” treated not as a dogma to be proved but as a mode of experience to be described, assessed, and—most dangerously—licensed as a route to something called “truth.” Chiocchetti follows James’s Oxford moment too: James had lectured at Manchester College in 1908, which is an Oxford fact, even if Manchester College sounds, to a snob, like a hall one might enter by mistake. Chiocchetti seems to treat those lectures as a kind of canonical opening: the Dreaming Spires tolerating, for an afternoon, a pluralistic universe. And then Chiocchetti does something that is genuinely useful to me, though he does it for his own purposes: he makes a great deal of our resident pragmatist, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller—“resident” in the literal sense, a man at Corpus, with Oxford behind him and a villa in Switzerland before him. I find myself unable to get loose of that charming triple-barrel of initials. The name looks like an Englishman attempting to outvote his birthplace. Chiocchetti treats Schiller as bait, or exhibit A: the pragmatist whom one can cite in order to show that the disease has acquired an Oxford address. And once Schiller is on the table, Chiocchetti can do what he really wants: show how one may take the measure of pragmatism without becoming a pragmatist—by re-insisting, at the end, on Thomistic discipline about meaning, signification, and the conditions under which talk about truth is not merely enthusiasm. I add, for colour, a small Oxford document. I read, in an obituary notice, the usual formula that Oxford applies to men it half-admires and half-disowns: his former pupils—tutees, if one wishes to avoid London vulgarity—found him a stimulating tutor; he “exerted considerable influence” as critic and “searcher after truth.” Critic is exactly right. Searcher is charitable. Finder is not alleged. It is the perfect epitaph for a pragmatist at Oxford: one concedes the liveliness of the mind, then declines to name any progeny. If pragmatism was popular here, it was popular in the Oxford sense: the population was small, and the census-taker reluctant. And then, inevitably, there is Schiller’s humour. A man who parodied Mind in 1901—Mind! A Unique Review of Ancient and Modern Philosophy—does not fit neatly into the later Oxford moral tale in which everything serious becomes “analysis” and everything playful is treated as suspect. Gardner likes that sort of thing, and Oxford pretends not to. But the parody matters for my purposes: it reminds one that pragmatism, in the Schiller–James vein, is not only a doctrine but a temperament—an impatience with solemnity, a tendency to treat philosophical machinery as something one may laugh at without being irresponsible. So Chiocchetti ends up in my notes not as an authority but as a useful cross-reference: a 1911 neo-scholastic report on the religious wing of pragmatism, anchored to James’s Oxford lecture and Schiller’s Oxford address, and concluded—inevitably—with Aquinas. The effect, on my seminar, is practical. It lets me tell the audience, just before I begin dismantling Peirce, that pragmatism was not an after-dinner American fad imported by tourists, but something that already had an Oxford lodging and an Italian surveillance report while the thing was still happening. That should keep them awake long enough for the main business: meaning, and the trouble we go to, in English, to avoid saying what we mean too easily.Grice: Caro Chiocchetti, confesso che il tuo cognome mette in difficoltà persino i più arditi tra gli inglesi – per non parlare degli Oxfordiani! Dimmi, tu che hai studiato sia Vico sia san Tommaso, l’“espressione” viene davvero prima della “comunicazione”? Chiocchetti: Caro Grice, la questione è semplice: prima si esprime, poi si comunica – almeno in teoria! A volte, però, il messaggio si perde tra i monti del Trentino… e allora c’è chi dice che serva un miracolo più che un filosofo. Grice: Miracoli a parte, mi dicono che in Italia basta avere un orientamento religioso per essere esclusi dal club dei filosofi. Ti senti più neo-scolastico o paleo-scolastico? Chiocchetti: In fondo, Grice, mi sento un pragmatico – ma non troppo! E se proprio devo scegliere, resto fedele alla mia piccola Moena: dove anche una discussione filosofica si chiude con un bicchiere di vino e un “salute!” Chiocchetti, Emilio (1911). Pragmatismo religioso. Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Chiodi – Ossia: Grice e Chiodi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’esistenti.  Pietro Chiodi (Corteno Golgi, Brescia, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’esistenti. Grice: “I like C.; for one, he plays, somethings rather sneakily, with the Italian language as Heidegger played with the German language: Heidegger is able to play with Latinate versus Germanic words: tat (deed) versus fakt. The Italians only have ‘fatto’ and this leads C. to restrict ‘fatto’ to ‘tat’ and invent ‘effetto’ for ‘fakt!’ – “But other than that he was a genius!” Si laurea a Torino sotto Credaro ed ABBAGNANO. Insegna ad Alba. Conosce Cocito e Fenoglio. comunista e antifascista, Insegna a Torino. L’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei gli assegnò il premio del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione per la filosofia e negli fu conferito il Premio Bologna.  Alla ristampa di Banditi C. premise questa avvertenza, poi conservata nelle edizioni successive: «La presente ristampa si rivolge particolarmente ai giovani, non già per far rivivere nel loro animo gli odi del passato, ma affinché, guardando consapevolmente ad esso, vengano in chiaro senza illusioni del futuro che li attende se per qualunque ragione permetteranno che alcuni valoricome la libertà nei rapporti politici, la giustizia nei rapporti economici e la tolleranza in tutti i rapportisiano ancora una volta manomessi subdolamente o violentemente da chicchessia».  Raccolse grande stima ed affetto tra suoi allievi, che ne conservano tuttora il ricordo di un grande Maestro, limpido esempio di tolleranza e serenità di giudizio. Attività filosofica 'Esistenzialismo, esserci, fenomenologia. deduzione critica ragion pura Esistenzialismo esistenti, nulla annhihila, Kant imperative, counsel of prudence, rule of ability, practical reason, existentialism, Heidegger, greatest philosopher, maxim universality, maxim universability. Grice, St John’s, 1947 “That office I had at the Admiralty was a grand business—space, authority, a door that actually closed—but my room at St John’s… well, one mustn’t grumble. There’s room enough for my papers and publications—Personal Identity in Mind (1941), for example—though not, alas, for all the Platonis and Aristotelis I should like in those monolingual editions one dreams of and never buys. And this morning I made my usual resolution: I shan’t buy the book Blackwell is pushing at me—Pietro Chiodi’s Introduzione a Heidegger, fresh from Einaudi (Italian for ‘we print anything,’ I am told). My reason is simple. Chiodi does to Heidegger what Ayer did: he cannot resist the cheap laugh. He begins in the proper Italian manner—‘Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher’—and I dare say I shall repeat that, verbatim, in some lecture or other. But then he turns around and treats the man as fair game: the Tyrolese, the Black Forest oracle, the whole business. Ayer, you remember, never tired of sniggering at the Nothing that noths—das Nichts nichtet—as though ridicule were an argument. Chiodi is scarcely better; his is less an introduzione than an extro-duction. Still, I must grant him one thing. When he translates das Nichts nichtet as la nulla nullifica, it actually comes out with a kind of sense—rather more sense, I confess, than Ayer manages in The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (or wherever he last attempted to be funny). Nulla nullifica at least sounds like something one could mean, even if one ought not. It’s a pity, really. Language, Truth and Logic was a splendid start—clean, bracing, all the right demolitions—but how thoroughly he has since traded on the trick. Austin, I hear, means to devote a whole run of his seminar—Sense and Sensibilia, that wretched pun on Austen—to Ayer’s Foundations. What irritates Austin most, I suspect, is not the thesis but the imprint: a Pelican. There is something indecent, to Austin, in serious error being made cheaply available. But Chiodi’s offence is worse. To translate Heidegger into Italian in 1947 is to rob him of the only thing a philosopher can truly count as his own: his voice. ‘Das Nichts nichtet’ is like champagne: you may drink it elsewhere, but it only truly happens in Champagne. Or like Burton says of the Arabian Nights: it must be read either in the original—or not at all. And then there is the implied condescension. The translator always pretends to be doing the public a favour: ‘Here—let me bring the Dark Forest into your sitting room.’ As if the Italian reader could never, by any exertion, find his own way through Heidegger’s thicket without a guide in clerical boots. One almost hears the tone: I shall simplify the abyss for you. No doubt well-meant. But philosophy is not improved by being made easier—only by being made clearer. And Heidegger, whatever else he is, is not in the clarity business.” If one is to be tempted by this Chiodi, one ought first to know who he is, and why he thinks the Italian public needs Heidegger served up as if it were hot broth for convalescents. Pietro Chiodi was not merely a translator with a taste for gloom: he belongs to that post-war Italian generation for whom “existence” is not a Parisian pose but a vocabulary for moral wreckage—Resistance, betrayal, survival, the private shame of being alive when others are dead, and the public problem of rebuilding a civic life without lying about what one has just done or allowed. And he is, moreover, an academic creature: trained at Turin, in the orbit of Nicola Abbagnano, who by the late forties is practically an Italian institution for existentialism—so much so that Abbagnano can write, without blushing, that a whole Turin series (Taylor’s Collezione di Filosofia) has been issuing “Italian existentialism” since 1947, and that Chiodi’s Heidegger book is one of the inaugural exhibits. Now Italians, in their love of administrative Latinity, call the thesis supervisor the relatore—as if the man’s business were to “relate,” to narrate, to file a report on the candidate, or to stand in a Roman court and declaim relatio to a magistrate; and if one wants to be wicked one can say that Abbagnano, as Chiodi’s relatore, was indeed “relating” Heidegger to Italy—providing the authorised bridge, the respectable escort, the stamp that says: this German darkness may now circulate among our undergraduates. The suspicion practically writes itself: Chiodi’s “introduction” has the air of a worked-up tesi di laurea—perhaps conceived pre-war in the safer scholastic register, but published post-war in the anxious register, when Europe is hungry for any philosophy that can speak about anxiety without sounding like either a sermon or a party circular. And so the thing is at once cultural mission and academic promotion: a difficult foreign master domesticated for local use, with Abbagnano’s imprimatur as guarantee that one is not merely importing German fog, but importing something one can teach on a timetable. [cambridge.org], [philpapers.org], [jstor.org] Now, as to the famous line itself, let us at least get the chronology straight before we start laughing. Heidegger’s “Das Nichts nichtet” comes from his inaugural Freiburg lecture, Was ist Metaphysik?, delivered 24 July 1929—so the “nothings” were not invented by Ayer at all, but merely repackaged as a travelling joke for English consumption. One can, if one wishes, write it with mock Teutonic solemnity—Heidegger sagt: das Nicht nichtet—and then turn to the Italian, where Chiodi (in your comic version) offers: il nulla nullifica. Here the philology becomes half the fun. English can “verb” a noun with a certain vulgar freedom; German can do it with a kind of grim official ease; Italian, less so—yet Chiodi tries, and the result, annoyingly, can sound more intelligible than Ayer’s snigger. Why does nulla feel “masculine” in Italian? It’s a ghost of Latin grammar: nullus, -a, -um leaving behind a fossil that Italian uses as an invariable “nothing,” with gender cues drifting according to article and idiom; the neuter dies, but its corpse keeps voting in elections. If one wanted the whole business in respectable Latin, Cicero would probably refuse to coin the barbarism and would paraphrase; but scholastic Latin will happily manufacture a verb on demand, and so the parody practically writes itself: Nihil nihilat—and Aquinas, if cornered, would not even blush. (One sees why the English positivists preferred laughter: it saved them from Latin.) [de.wikipedia.org], [archive.org] [philpapers.org], [jstor.org] Why did the line become famous in Oxford? Because Ayer, who had the gift of making serious error portable, helped turn continental metaphysics into a kind of after-dinner entertainment: you quote the German with a straight face, then you grin, then you call it nonsense, and you feel hygienic. And in the provinces—where one must actually teach, rather than merely win in common-room repartee—somebody was bound to respond, not with a grin but with a book. And there he is: not “W. F. Barnes” but Winston H. F. Barnes, with the very title you half-remember: The Philosophical Predicament (1950), a systematic critique of the analytic “abolish philosophy by philosophising” tendency, including (explicitly) the logical positivists and “Professor Ayer,” and the whole Oxford habit of pretending to utter platitudes while smuggling in metaphysics under cover of analysis. Barnes’s tone—one can hear it even through a brief review—is precisely what you want for your vignette: the man who has left Oxford for the wider world and now treats Oxford cleverness as a predicament rather than a triumph. [cambridge.org], [books.google.com], [archive.org] And then, because Oxford cannot resist making everything into an anecdote, Grice remembers that the Heidegger business had an earlier English rehearsal: Mind, 1929, when good old Ryle reviewed Sein und Zeit—and in the popular retelling it begins with the immortal Oxonian vice of confessing, as if it were a badge of honesty, that one has not read the thing one is about to judge. Whether Ryle quite wrote the sentence in that naked form is less important to the comedy than the posture: the don as self-appointed magistrate of unread difficulty. Which is why the clerical version (Sidney Smith’s quip about never reading a book before reviewing it lest it prejudice a man) is funny: a reverend may parody himself. But when a don does it, it becomes not parody but policy. The whole episode—Heidegger’s nothing, Chiodi’s nullifying, Ayer’s laughter, Barnes’s rebuke, Ryle’s airy review—starts to look like a single European scene: post-war Italy translating darkness because it must; post-war Oxford mocking darkness because it can; and everyone, in his own way, trying to decide whether philosophy is a civil service (with relatori and reports) or a voice one cannot translate without stealing it. I’m not being pedantic when I write it out in schoolboy German—Heidegger sagt, dass das Nicht nichtet. The pedantry is doing work. It reminds me that there is a difference—one that philosophers, of all people, ought not to lose—between saying, meaning, and implying. And once you take that difference seriously, you can hardly avoid oratio obliqua. If you can report what someone said, you should, in principle, be able to report what he meant; and if you can report what he meant, you should at least be able to gesture at what he implicated. Carnap’s line of attack—“very well, if Heidegger may say das Nichts nichtet, then I may say pirots karulise elatically”—depends on treating both as on a par: noises that happen to be grammatical. But Ryle’s point (or what I take Ryle’s point to be) is sharper: you cannot report nonsense—not in the relevant way. You can quote it, of course. Quotation marks will carry any corpse. But once you shift into indirect speech—once you try to do the decent thing and put it under a “that”-clause—He said that…—you have already treated it as the sort of thing that can be said that such-and-such. And Ryle is urging that there is no such “such-and-such” there to be had. My own implicature apparatus is no rescue here. “Implicature” presupposes a perfectly good what is said on which the rest can ride. But what is the base vehicle supposed to be in this case? By saying that nothing noths, Heidegger meant that… what? That it was raining? I don’t think so. That the kettle is boiling? Still less. The point is not merely that the sentence is odd, but that the ordinary path from sentence → proposition → reportable content appears to break down precisely where we need it. Yet we do not want to be too quick. Heidegger certainly said something: Das Nichts nichtet. And if one insists on treating “that” (Latin quod, English “that”) not as a mere logical introducer but as a kind of demonstrative—that (pointing)—then one begins to see the temptation. One can almost hear the maneuver: “Heidegger said that…” where that does not introduce a clean proposition but points toward a whole cloud of verbiage, a posture, a metaphysical theatre: some flatus vocis, yes, but flatus with ambitions. This was, I think, Rocelyn’s complaint (and it is a fair one): the that-clause seduces us into thinking the speaker has delivered a neatly packageable content, when all he has really delivered is an occasion to expand—to “compenetrate,” as the Italians would say, and as I should not—into the hinterland behind the clause. And once one begins that sort of expansion, one can go on expanding forever, which is the surest sign that we have left philosophy and entered something else. It is enough to make one long for the Other Place—by which I always mean the Varsity by the Cam—where at least they commit their nonsense with better Latin. G: I gather Turin has done what Oxford never quite manages without a blush: it has made Heidegger a faculty matter. S: Whereas Oxford preferred to make him a joke. G: Yes. In Oxford the route in was either Ryle in 1929, reviewing Sein und Zeit for Mind as a dutiful magistrate of difficulty, or Ayer in 1936, converting German metaphysics into portable hygienic laughter. S: Das Nichts nichtet as after-dinner entertainment. G: Precisely. One quotes the sentence, smirks, calls it nonsense, and feels cleaner. S: While in Turin, if I follow the evidence, Heidegger was not merely an exhibit in the museum of continental extravagance. G: No. He was curricular weather. That is the important contrast. Chiodi does not appear in 1947 out of a fog with a book and a grim expression. He comes from a faculty atmosphere in which Heidegger was already circulating seriously. S: Name the saints. G: Abbagnano first, because he is the relatore and therefore the officially paternal voice. But not Abbagnano alone. Pastore, Mazzantini, and then beyond them the wider Turin constellation: Pareyson, Guzzo, Geymonat, and the rest of that unnervingly populous philosophical north. S: A proper faculty, then. Chairs, specialties, zones of influence. G: Exactly. Oxford likes to pretend ideas emerge from rooms and personalities. Turin, at least here, looks more like a faculty organism. One chooses Abbagnano as relatore, yes, but one writes in the knowledge that the thesis will live before other eyes as well. S: Pastore and Mazzantini as examiners-by-atmosphere, if not by surviving rubric. G: That is nicely put. Whether we have the exact commission list in hand is another matter. But the point remains: Chiodi’s thesis was not a private confession to Abbagnano. It was addressed, implicitly, to a whole faculty ecology. S: Which is almost anti-Oxonian. At Oxford one had supervisors in everything except the formal Italian sense of supervision. G: And Oxford had, in the thirties, a parochial confidence that made all this easier to ignore. The Continent appeared when needed, and usually as an object-lesson in what happens when one does not keep one’s syntax on a lead. S: Ayer’s little public-health campaign. G: Yes. If Grice read Ayer when it came out, Heidegger entered his horizon less as a philosopher to be studied than as a case to be ridiculed. Ryle had at least gone to the trouble of confronting the book. Ayer preferred the sentence. S: Which is more English. We do not read systems; we quote symptoms. G: Whereas Turin seems to have been saying: no, the thing must be read, in German, in context, under chairs, under lectures, under an atmosphere of earnest seriousness. S: And then the war arrives and changes the meaning of “in German.” G: Here is the dramatic hinge. Chiodi, later remembered as a partisan and anti-fascist, has already been formed in a faculty where Heidegger is not scandal but matter. He graduates at Turin in 1938 under Abbagnano. The degree is reported inconsistently as pedagogia or filosofia, which is very Italian: one is formed by labels one later outgrows. S: But the relatore is solid enough. G: Yes. Abbagnano is secure. The title of the thesis is not yet secure, and we should not invent one merely to satisfy chronology. S: Good. Titles are so often retrospective lies. G: By the forties, though, Heidegger is no longer merely a faculty name. Chiodi is reading him in German. And then comes the splendid interrogation anecdote. S: “Leggo Heidegger in tedesco.” G: Better in the present, yes. Leggo Heidegger in tedesco. S: Which in Oxford would implicate: I am a serious reader. In an interrogation room: perhaps, I am pro-German. G: Or at least, I belong to a German-facing intellectual world. That is the danger of the sentence. The literal content is bibliographical. The possible uptake is political. S: Like a bad Searle example with higher stakes. G: Exactly. In the ordinary seminar: I read Heidegger in German. Therefore: scholarly exactness. In fascist or collaborationist interrogation: I read Heidegger in German. Therefore: sympathy, affinity, contamination, Germany. S: The same sentence, different inferential environment, different peril. G: And this is where Chiodi’s life becomes dramatically un-Oxford. It is one thing to joke about das Nichts nichtet in common room safety. It is another to be questioned by the Italian SS while one’s reading list suddenly acquires police significance. S: We should pause over “Italian SS,” because Oxford ears flatten abbreviations. G: Schutzstaffel, of course, in German. But in Chiodi’s case the biographical usage concerns the fascist apparatus of the Italian Social Republic, the German-backed northern regime after 1943. One should not imagine an English undergraduate merely playing at uniforms. S: Whereas Oxford in the thirties still mostly played at ideology over dinner. G: Just so. Turin produced a faculty culture in which Heidegger could be an object of serious formation. The war then turned German reading into something that could be misconstrued under interrogation. Oxford produced a culture in which Heidegger could be disposed of by ridicule before anyone had to risk anything. S: And yet Chiodi ends up on the bandito side. G: Exactly. Which is why one must not let the “German” part of Heidegger-reading overdetermine the politics. Chiodi becomes partisan. Captured in 1944. Interrogated. Deported. Returns. Banditi in 1946. Then Heidegger in 1947. S: A better chronology than Oxford ever deserved. G: Because there the sequence would have been: Ryle reviews. Ayer laughs. Undergraduates inherit the laugh. Done. S: There is something dismal about that parochial efficiency. G: Oxford in the thirties liked a clean field. Anti-Continental, anti-systematic, anti-fog. Programmatic in its anti-programmatic way. The joke against Heidegger functioned as a sort of curricular disinfectant. S: While Turin had chairs. Specialties. Teoretica, history of philosophy, the broader faculty division of labour. G: Yes. One can almost reconstruct the scene. Abbagnano as relatore. Pastore as the more properly teoretic or gnoseological intelligence. Mazzantini as another examining presence in the Heidegger-friendly climate. Pareyson in the background, the larger phenomenological-existential pressure. Guzzo, Geymonat, the whole faculty making “Heidegger” something one might have to survive, not merely cite. S: And Chiodi choosing Abbagnano knew, as any good student knows, that a thesis is written not only for the relatore but for the room. G: Exactly. The relatore signs; the faculty reads. S: Which makes the 1947 book less of a miracle and more of an inevitable afterlife. G: Quite. L’esistenzialismo di Heidegger does not drop from heaven. It is the first major philosophical book, yes, but behind it are Turin, 1934 onward, the laurea in 1938, the lectures where Heidegger’s name recurred, the war, the partisan break, the interrogation, the camp, the return, Banditi, and then post-war Italy’s need for a philosophy in which existence does not sound merely Parisian. S: Oxford, by contrast, wanted a philosophy in which existence sounded like bad grammar. G: One should be fair. Ryle was not merely parody. But the public tone was set less by the dutiful reviewer than by the cheerful positivist mocker. S: Ayer makes the sentence famous; Chiodi makes the thinker serious. G: That is very neat. S: Say more on the sentence itself. Das Nichts nichtet. G: Oxford heard in it an occasion for laughter. Chiodi, or at least the Italian reception around him, hears a challenge of translation and thought. Nulla nullifica, if one wants the comic version, already shifts the atmosphere. S: Because Italian cannot “verb” nouns with quite the same Black Forest impunity. G: Exactly. German can make the Nothing active. English can imitate the barbarism and then snigger at it. Italian has to decide whether to naturalise the monstrosity or expose it. S: Which is why translation itself becomes philosophy. G: And Chiodi, unlike Ayer, belongs to a world in which translation is not merely aid but fate. Post-war Italy must read Germany somehow. To translate Heidegger is already to decide whether the abyss will be domesticated or merely footnoted. S: Grice would say the translator steals the philosopher’s voice. G: Very possibly. But Chiodi’s Italy would say that not to translate is to leave a whole generation at the mercy of hearsay. S: Which is exactly what Oxford had: hearsay dignified as linguistic conscience. G: Cruel, but fair. S: We should return once more to the interrogation room. “Leggo Heidegger in tedesco.” G: Yes. Let us do the Gricean thing with it. Literal content: I read Heidegger in German. Possible intended implicature: I am a serious reader; you are misclassifying me if you think every German text is political evidence. Possible police uptake: I am culturally proximate to Germany. The peril lies in the mismatch between speaker meaning and hearer inference. S: And this is no seminar discrepancy. It is the difference between a correction and a deportation. G: Exactly. Which makes Oxford’s pre-war mockery look terribly upholstered. S: There is another irony. In Turin, Heidegger enters through faculty seriousness and survives the war by being philosophically real. In Oxford, Heidegger enters through mockery and survives by being quotable. G: Very good. Quotable, yes. The Continent had to be serious to matter. Oxford only required that it be ridiculous enough to repeat. S: And Grice? G: Grice is an interesting middle case. He could certainly enjoy the ridicule. But he also had too sharp an ear not to notice that some supposedly absurd sentences owe their career less to their own nonsense than to the social success of quoting them. S: So he would distinguish the proposition from the portability. G: Precisely. Ayer made Heidegger portable. Chiodi made him inhabitable. S: And after the war? G: After the war, Chiodi’s Heidegger belongs to reconstruction, to anti-fascism, to moral survival, to the task of thinking existence without lying about history. Oxford’s Heidegger belongs to curriculum by exclusion, to saying what philosophy is not by pointing across the Channel and laughing. S: One does feel that Turin won something there. G: Yes, though at a cost Oxford never paid. S: The final image, then, is nicely indecent. Oxford in the thirties, dry, superior, anti-continental, laughing at das Nichts nichtet. Turin in the thirties, crowded with chairs and relatori and examiners, taking Heidegger as a faculty problem. Then the war. Then the partisan. Then the interrogation. Then the man who says, in effect, Leggo Heidegger in tedesco. G: And means, perhaps, “I am a philosopher.” S: And is heard, perhaps, as “I am with Germany.” G: While in fact he is with the banditi. S: Which is more philosophy than Oxford usually permits before lunch.Grice: Caro Chiodi, tu con “fatto” ed “effetto” sembri giocare a nascondino con le parole come Heidegger faceva tra tedesco e latino. Dimmi, è davvero così difficile essere esistenti senza perdersi nei giochi linguistici? Chiodi: Grice, se esistiamo, è perché ci facciamo almeno un “fatto” al giorno! E se qualcosa va storto, ecco subito l’“effetto” che arriva come il caffè dopo pranzo. Heidegger avrebbe detto: “esserci è anche sopportare la moka che brucia!” Grice: E allora la libertà? Chiodi, tu la vuoi nei rapporti politici, la giustizia in quelli economici, e la tolleranza persino quando uno ti serve il caffè freddo. Esistenzialismo o manuale del perfetto barista? Chiodi: A dirla tutta, Grice, l’esistenzialista si accontenta di poco: un espresso caldo, un po’ di serenità, e la consapevolezza che la vita, come dice il proverbio, è fatta di “fatti e effetti”... meglio se non troppo annichiliti! . Chiodi, Pietro (1947). Heidegger. Torino: Einaudi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Chitti – Ossia: Grice e Chitti: l’implicatura conversazionale.  Luigi Chitti (Casalnuovo di Calabria, Calabria): l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice: “I like C.; not so much for what he philosophised about – law and law and law – but the way he corresponded with Say – a French philosopher – on the lack of an adequate philosophical vocabulary in Italian to express Aristotle’s principles of oeconomia!” Insegna diritto pubblico e di economia sociale. Conosce GIOBERTIi, che lo define valente economico. Trattato di economia politica o semplice esposizione del modo col quale si formano, si distribuiscono e si consumano le ricchezze; seguito da un'epitome dei principi fondamentali dell'economia politica di Giovanni Battista Say” Schiavo, ripudiato: ma vi si aggiunge un  elemento che è quello del controllo sociale che, sulla  iniziativa privata e sul suo svolgersi, viene attuato dallo  Stato.  Nello Stato corporativo anche la politica finaziaria deve necessariamente seguire le direttive, che non  coincidono nè con quelle del sistema liberale-capitalista  (benché ad esse siano assai più vicine) nè con quelle  del sistema collettivista.   Essendo l’imposta uno dei principali strumenti di  cui lo stato qualora rispetti il principio della proprietà privata  si può valere, per intervenire nel campo dell’economia, individuale, è logico che ad essa faccia più largo ricorso uno Stato, che ha per principio  l’intervento, ogni qualvolta l’interesse nazionale lo richieda.  E essenziale rilevare che nel sistema corporativo,  mutano fondamentalmente i modi dell’azione statale:  mentre nel sistema liberale-capitalista lo Stato si propone fini di benessere e prosperità, che vengono attuati  mediante la protezione di tutte quelle forze individuali  che si dimostrano utili a tale intento, lo Stato corporativo, oltre a proseguire per tale via i propri fini, si fa  esso stesso agente diretto e primario per l’attuazione degli scopi suddetti, non solo proteggendo e favorendo le forze utili' ai propri fini, ma facendosi iniziatore dei  provvedimenti atti ai dirigere le forze individuali all’obbiettivo prefisso.  Pantaleoni Finanza fascista, difensore dell’interesse nazionale.  l’economia filosofica d’Aristotele, econnomia corporativa. Corpus.  Hardie taught us today—he had the full lot, when he was economising time—so Shropshire was there, and so, regrettably, was my curiosity. Hardie said, with that air of giving you a fact rather than a temptation, “Aristotle wrote an Oeconomica, besides a Politica.” Shropshire, who always listened as if grammar were a personal affront, said: “Is he implying they’re different?” Hardie didn’t dignify that with an answer. He didn’t even look up. The man’s great talent was to punish you by continuing. I, however, committed what I now recognise as my first serious error in tutorial life: I commuted. “What do you mean, Shropshire?” “Well,” he said, “Say—Say, the French philosopher—wrote a whole tract entitled l’économie politique, which sounds like two Aristotles rolled into one.” Hardie merely ejaculated, “Oh,” in the tone of someone who has seen worse conflations than that and expects to see more. After class Shropshire told me, conspiratorially, that he liked Say—“and not just because his surname ain’t English.” “In Shropshire-ese,” as I later came to call it, this meant: it sounds English and is therefore doubly French. “And that means you’ve been reading Say, I say.” “Say? Not!” Shropshire exclaimed. “You know I’ve been brushing up my Italian for Covent Garden. So I read Say in Italian—three fat volumes—translated by one Luigi Chitti.” “Never heard of him.” “You mean you haven’t heard of him until now,” Shropshire said, with a satisfaction that belonged more to the ear than the intellect. “I’m pronouncing him distinctly enough.” He then launched into a story with the relish of a man who has discovered that political economy contains gossip. “The man was a thief. Exiled from Naples, finishes law in Paris, comes back, and then—here’s the cheek—he deprives Say of his say in the matter by translating him into a lingo where Say never once got to speak for himself.” It was a marvellous pun, and therefore, by Oxford standards, not to be trusted until checked. Shropshire was right about the cheek, if not about the psychology. Chitti did indeed put into the press all three volumes of Say’s Traité d’économie politique, complete with an epitome—a title so long it sounds like a sentence being paid by the syllable. And he did it anonymously, which is always either modesty or prudence, and in this case smells of both. To render a Frenchman into Italian is one thing; to render him into Italian and then decline to sign the rendering is quite another. One begins to suspect a translator’s implicature: I want credit without consequences. “That’s brain-drain with a vengeance,” I said, because undergraduates always speak as if they had invented metaphors and empires alike. “A Neapolitan lands in Paris, brushes up his French, gets the rights to translate—and instead of importing the original volumes and donating them to the Biblioteca in Naples, he translates the whole thing into Italian, where Say never had his say. No wonder he kept his name off the title page.” Shropshire nodded, delighted. “Exactly. Say doesn’t even get his own vowels.” Hardie, had he been present, would have reminded us—coldly—that Aristotle’s Oeconomica is not necessarily Aristotle’s, that economy is older than political economy, and that translators do not, by translating, commit larceny. But Hardie was not there; and in his absence Oxford does what it always does: turns a bibliography into a moral fable. Still, the philosophical point was worth keeping. The phrase “political economy” already contains a programme: it implies that the household and the city can be discussed in one breath. Shropshire had heard it immediately, as a linguistic compression of two Aristotles. And Chitti—whatever his motives—had staged the same compression in another key: he had made a French doctrine domesticate itself in Italian, and in doing so had raised, without meaning to, the most Gricean question of all: when a man gives you words in another man’s language, is he giving you the other man’s thought—or his own implicature about what you ought to be able to think? PS (Belsyre voice, but Naples on the table): I have the 1817 Volume I in front of me. And “Luigi Chitti, D. Leg. Sorbonne” shines—if that is the word—by its absence. One would have expected something: a “Dott.”, a Latin flourish (J.U.D., if he fancied himself medieval), even a modest “Lic.” if he wanted to sound French about it. But no: the title page behaves as if titles were a vice. Which, given Oxford, I can almost respect. Then the grand heading: Trattato di economia politica, seguito da un’epitome de’principi fondamentali dell’economia politica. “Mmm,” I murmur. “Interesting. The treatise is followed by its principles.” I confess: my first Gricean reaction is purely tactical. If something is “followed by an epitome of fundamental principles,” the conversational hint—if there is one—is: begin with the epitome. That is what I do. I am, after all, a philosopher; and philosophers read prefaces the way economists read ledgers. One week later I discover that what Chitti means by epitome is not what I mean by epitome. In my private dictionary, an epitome is a severe little thing: the sort of summary you could fit into a margin and still leave room for an insult. Chitti’s epitome, by contrast, behaves like a second treatise—less “epitome” than “empire”: it spreads. It multiplies. It occupies the space the treatise was supposed to occupy, and then congratulates itself on being “condensed.” And then there is the plural that offends my inner monist: principi, and not merely principles, but principi fondamentali. Fundamental principles. As if there were non-fundamental fundamentals lurking about in the pantry. How can a thing have more than one principle, unless “principle” is being used the way political economists use it—like “items” on a list, or “products” on a shelf? At this point, my irritation shifts—properly—from Chitti to Say. French has an unembarrassed pluralism about principles. It is in the idiom: principes come in batches. One can almost hear the Enlightenment behind it, counting and classifying like a customs officer. The Italian translator is merely being obedient; the crime, if there is one, is upstream. Still, Chitti’s real sin is subtler: not that he translates, but that he seems to think one can have “the treatise” and then, afterwards, tack on “the fundamentals,” as if the foundations were a detachable annex. It is the whole tone of the political economist: first the tract, then the principles, as if thought were laundry—sorted and pegged out to dry. I would never write like that. I would never present “principles” as a shopping list, still less as a list of fundamentals, as if philosophy were a grocer’s catalogue. If I have a principle, it is not something I enumerate; it is something I cannot escape. A principle is what makes the rest possible, not what follows after as an appendix. Which leads me to my most charitable suspicion: perhaps the title is already a miniature drama of translation. Perhaps Chitti knows, even if he cannot say it, that Naples in 1817 cannot be given Say whole. The “treatise” is the foreign body; the “epitome” is the naturalisation. He gives you the book, and then he gives you the authorised way to read it—principles, fundamentals, all nicely labelled—so that you can consume French political economy without having to taste the French. And that, I suppose, is why he kept his name off the title page. Not modesty. Not prudence. A deeper motive: when you deprive Say of his say, it is best not to leave fingerprints. I do what I always do when confronted with a title that looks as if it has been written by a committee: I check whether the oddity is Chitti’s or Say’s. First: Say’s book is not an antiquity in 1817; it is an organism. The Traité d’économie politique first appears in 1803 (Paris: Crapelet). Then it is republished and revised in 1814 (second edition), then a third edition in 1817 (Deterville), and so on. In other words, 1817 is not “late Say”; it is Say actively rewriting Say. [fr.wikisource.org], [gallica.bnf.fr] [fr.wikisource.org], [archive.org] [fr.wikisource.org], [en.wikipedia.org] Now: does Say have the “epitome”? Here is the neat point: the epitome is not a Chitti invention, but neither is it originally part of Say’s 1803 book. It becomes an add-on in later French editions—explicitly noted, for example, in the description of Say’s fifth edition (1826) as being “augmented” and “joined with an epitome of fundamental principles … and an index.” [gallica.bnf.fr], [archive.org] So if you are holding Chitti’s 1817 Italian title-page with its “seguito da un’epitome…,” you are not catching Chitti in the act of inventing an epitome ex nihilo; you are catching him either:  translating a French edition that already had the epitome apparatus (or a close cousin of it), or translating the Traité but packaging it in the Italian market with a pedagogical prosthesis: “Here is the treatise, and here is the digest you can pretend you read first.”  Either way, it is a publisherly gesture as much as a philosophical one. And yes, this makes the “followed by an epitome” sound less bizarre: it is the book acquiring its own teaching tail. Political economy is the sort of discipline that likes to tack on a list of principles—because lists look like science. What was Chitti translating from? There is a specific claim made in rare-book cataloguing: that the 1817 Italian is translated “from the third French edition of 1817.” Catalogues are not scripture, but in this case the chronology is plausible and the phraseology (“followed by an epitome…”) fits the way Say’s work is continually repackaged across editions. [peterharri...gton.co.uk], [abebooks.com] [peterharri...gton.co.uk], [fr.wikisource.org] Now to the “Sorbonne” fantasy: did Chitti study under Say? That is unlikely on timing alone. Say does not become a formal professor until later—he teaches publicly after 1815, is appointed at the Conservatoire (Arts et Métiers) later, and only takes the Collège de France chair in 1830. In 1817, Say is a major author and public figure, but not the kind of Paris “Sorbonne” professor under whom a Neapolitan law student straightforwardly “studies.” [britannica.com], [encyclopedia.com] So: Say is more plausibly Chitti’s textbook than Chitti’s supervisor. And Chitti’s “D. Leg. Sorbonne” (if he had ever printed it) would indicate law, not “political economy” as a degree track—since economics as a separate credential is precisely what is only just becoming institutionalised in France in this period. [britannica.com], [encyclopedia.com] Finally, the Gricean moral of the whole thing: Chitti is not merely translating a book; he is translating a genre: the French habit of treating “principles” as countable items, and of attaching an epitome as if knowledge were best served in slices. Say writes a treatise; the market demands a digest; the translator obliges; and the title page ends up implicating a recommended order of reading (“start with the epitome”) while saying the opposite (“the epitome follows”). In short: if Ciarlantini kills idealism by a sunset, Chitti teaches economics by an appendix. At St John’s, Strawson is reviewing what we all now call—rather too grandly—Anscombe’s Philosophical Investigations. It is one of those Oxford miracles: a book that makes the Faculty behave as if it has been given a new organ. We pretend we have “always known” Wittgenstein; we then proceed to cite him as if he were a neighbour. I said to Strawson that Anscombe had almost managed what Shropshire once taught me to notice—never Hardie, with his economy of time, but Shropshire, with his economy of malice—about Chitti and Say. For Say writes his Traité, and Chitti—without so much as a cough—hands the Neapolitans a three‑volume Italian Say, neatly preventing them from enjoying Say’s French say on the matter. Anscombe does something analogous and, in one crucial respect, the opposite. Blackwell, to its credit, does it properly. The thing arrives in 1953 as a bilingual edition: German and English together, so that Wittgenstein comes in twice—once as Teutonic, once as Anscombe’s immaculate prose.  Chitti spares Naples the French; Anscombe refuses to spare Oxford the German. [e-borghi.com], [museumfree...nry.org.uk] So I suggested to Strawson—wickedly, and therefore with affection—that he might begin his review with something like this:  “Blackwell has found itself a Luigi Chitti: Wittgenstein arrives in English with no warning label. But unlike Chitti—who spared Naples the trouble of reading Say’s French—Anscombe refuses to spare Oxford the trouble of recognising Wittgenstein’s German.”  Strawson looked at me with that expression which always means: I see the joke, and I disapprove of how much I like it. “Besides,” he said, “Chitti didn’t warn the Neapolitans because he didn’t sign the thing. Anscombe signs everything.” “Exactly,” I said. “That’s the moral difference. Chitti’s anonymity implicates prudence; Anscombe’s signature implicates responsibility.” And then, because Oxford is Oxford, we fell into the deeper and more irritating question: what counts as giving a book “to the masses”? A translation can be a gift; it can also be a filter. Chitti’s Italian is a filter that makes Say more consumable. Anscombe’s English is a filter that makes Wittgenstein more difficult—or rather, difficult in the right way: not obscure, but resistant to the lazy reader who wants philosophy to come pre‑digested. Which is why, I told Strawson, Blackwell may have found its Chitti; but it has also found something rarer: a translator who is not merely translating a text, but translating a temperament—without pretending that temperament is optional. P.S. (Grice, clarifying; Belsyre, still with Naples on the table): Two small datings, to stop the analogy wobbling. First, Chitti. If he really is living off Say’s 1817 (third French) rather than any later apparatus, that explains the shared telltale—epitome—and it makes the feat look properly monumental: the Italian book’s “seguito da un’epitome …” is not a Neapolitan whim, but a sign that Chitti is tracking (and domesticating) a French edition that has already learned to grow a pedagogical tail. Second, Anscombe. In 1953 she gives us the decency Chitti withheld: German and English on facing pages. Her English is therefore “some time before 1953”; but the German she prints cannot honestly be later than Wittgenstein’s last sustained preparation of that text. The Nachlass record puts the typescript of Part I of the final version (TS 227) in the window [1944–46]; so the latest safe dating for the German material as printed is 1946 (allowing, of course, for the usual small editorial nibbling in Cambridge hands). That is what “posthumous” buys you here: not a mysterious German afterlife, but a terminus fixed by the last authorial typescript, with translation and publication trailing behind like their own appendices. the clarifying question becomes:  Does Blackwell sell Wittgenstein’s book — or the Trustees’ decision about how to present Wittgenstein’s papers?  Because unlike Say→Chitti (author publishes, translator follows fast), PI is not “author publishes; translator translates”. It’s: author dies (1951), and then trustees/editors publish (1953). [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [wab.uib.no] And that makes the analogy with Chitti both tempting and dangerous:  Chitti’s “epitome” tracks an edition-feature (your 1817 hinge). Anscombe’s bilingualism tracks an editorial ethic: don’t spare the reader the German. But the “original German” here isn’t an edition Say himself published in 1817; it’s a Nachlass text stabilized by trustees, with known editorial intervention in the typescript lineage.Grice: Caro Chitti, confesso che ogni volta che provo a parlare di economia con un italiano, mi sento come Aristotele in cerca di parole che non esistono! Ditemi: è possibile che la filosofia economica sia sempre un po’ straniera? Chitti: Grice, le parole mancano ma la ricchezza non si fa mai attendere! Noi italiani abbiamo trasformato l’economia in una questione di Stato… e ogni tanto pure di caffè. Aristotele avrebbe gradito una pausa al bar, prima di spiegare la sua oeconomia. Grice: E la legge? Ho letto che lei si occupa soprattutto di diritto pubblico. Ma secondo lei, è più facile governare le ricchezze o le parole? Chitti: Oh, governare le parole è come domare una mandria di gatti irsuti! Le ricchezze si distribuiscono, ma le parole… quelle fuggono sempre appena uno prova a chiuderle in una definizione. Meglio lasciarle libere, come il proverbio dice: “Parole e fortuna, mai sotto controllo.” Chitti, Luigi (1817). (D. Leg. Sorbonne) Trattaato di economia politica seguito da un’epitome de’principi fondamentali dell’economia politica di Jean-Baptiste Say. Napoli.