H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza -- Z

 

Giacomo Zabarella (Padova, Veneto). Institutionally, Grice and Zabarella are not counterparts in the same academic format. Grice’s formula is a modern Oxford one. “Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s” means a college office with tutorials, student responsibility, and membership in the college’s governing and social life. “CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford” means a university-wide teaching post in the faculty structure. So Grice occupies the characteristic dual Oxford role: college tutor and university lecturer. Zabarella belongs to a very different system: the Renaissance University of Padua, organised around chairs rather than colleges. Giacomo or Jacopo Zabarella was a Paduan nobleman, educated and doctorated at Padua, who spent his whole teaching career there; in 1564 he succeeded Bernardino Tomitano in the chair of logic, and in 1577 he was promoted to the first extraordinary chair of natural philosophy. He was therefore not a fellow-tutor in any Oxford sense, but a university professor in the old Italian chair system. Jacopo Zabarella spent his academic life at Padua, succeeding Bernardino Tomitano in logic and later holding the first extraordinary chair of natural philosophy there. [en.wikipedia.org], [galileo.li...y.rice.edu] So the clean comparison is this. Grice was a modern Oxford don with a dual college-and-university role. Zabarella was a Renaissance university professor in the Paduan chair system. Grice’s world is collegiate, tutorial, and faculty-based. Zabarella’s world is professorial, public, and scholastic-Aristotelian. That institutional contrast fits the philosophical contrast rather well. Zabarella is a theorist of method, demonstration, regressus, and the order of sciences. His key intellectual habitat is the Aristotelian logic and methodology of Padua, especially the relation between resolutio and compositio, and the status of secundae intentiones in logic. Jacopo Zabarella is described as a leading Renaissance Aristotelian whose major concern was scientific method, the classification of disciplines, and the logic of demonstration and regressus. [encyclopedia.com], [philopedia.org] Grice, by contrast, works not on the scholastic order of sciences but on the rational structure of communication: intention, uptake, implicature, and what makes an utterance count as meaning something to someone. So if you want the sharpest formulation, it is this. Zabarella rationalises discourse from the side of method: how thought is ordered, reduced, and reconstructed in scientific and logical inquiry. Grice rationalises discourse from the side of communication: how a hearer can recognise a speaker’s intention and derive what is meant beyond what is said. Both are concerned with normativity in discourse, but the normativity is housed differently: for Zabarella in method and demonstrative order, for Grice in recognisable reasons and conversational uptake. Two factual corrections are needed in your draft. First, the philosopher is usually Jacopo Zabarella, though Giacomo is also found. “Giacomo Zabarella” is not wrong in Italian form, but the standard scholarly and bibliographic form is Jacopo Zabarella. Jacopo Zabarella is the standard reference form in modern scholarly sources, even though Giacomo also appears. [en.wikipedia.org], [encyclopedia.com] Second, I would be careful with “cattedra di semiotica.” The source support I have is for the chair of logic, not for describing it as a chair of semiotics. The reliable biographical sources say that Jacopo Zabarella succeeded Bernardino Tomitano in the chair of logic in 1564. [en.wikipedia.org], [handwiki.org] And your bibliographic close should be adjusted slightly. The safest statement is that Opera logica was first published in Venice in 1578 and includes De methodis and De regressu among its contents. The standard bibliographical notices identify Opera logica as Zabarella’s first published work, appearing in Venice in 1578, and containing De methodis and De regressu. [en.wikipedia.org], [Zabarella,...ymogih.org], [prdldev.ju...titute.org] So the plain answer to your opening question is: H. P. Grice was a modern Oxford fellow-tutor and university lecturer. Zabarella was a Renaissance professor at Padua holding university chairs in logic and natural philosophy. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Zabarella to the chair-and-commentary world. Philosophically, Zabarella offers a theory of method and second intentions; Grice offers a theory of communicative intention and implicature. If you want, I can now give you one compact paragraph in your preferred style, with all the corrections silently absorbed.Z. e ossessionato colla ragione conversazionale e il lizio di Poppi. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning locates what is meant not in the semantic payload alone, but in a rational structure of intention and uptake: a speaker means p by producing an utterance with the intention that the hearer recognize that very intention and treat the recognition as a reason to form the intended response, with implicature marking what the hearer is entitled to infer when cooperation and rationality are presumed. Zabarella (Padova, 1533–1589), the great logician of the Paduan “lizio” and theorist of method, looks at first remote from this interpersonal pragmatics because his focus is methodological and meta-logical: in works like De methodis (1578) and De regressu (1578), and across the Opera logica (Venice editions from 1578 onward), he analyzes how scientific knowledge is ordered by compositive and resolutive procedures, and how philosophy traffics in secundae intentiones—concepts about concepts—whose contingency makes them unlike the objects of natural science. Yet that very domain is where a Gricean comparison becomes sharp: Zabarella’s “second intentions” are not merely private mental items but public tools for governing inference, classification, and disputation in a shared scholastic setting, and this public governance anticipates Grice’s core insistence that meaning is answerable to reasons that are in principle recognizable by an audience. The contrast is that Zabarella rationalizes discourse from the side of method (how arguments are constructed, reduced, and legitimated within the lizio), while Grice rationalizes discourse from the side of conversational exchange (how a particular move in talk becomes meaningful because the hearer can reconstruct the speaker’s point and thereby derive an implicature); but the bridge is that both treat the “non-scientific” part of philosophy as normatively structured rather than merely psychological: Zabarella by insisting on ordered procedures for thinking about thinking, Grice by insisting that what is meant in conversation is fixed by reason-governed recognitional routes from what is said to what is intended. Grice: “When Oxford opens its logic institute on St. Giles I was so happy – no longer part of the sub-faculty of philosophy! Note that Z.’s discussion opened up new perspectives on how NON-scientific ALL philosophy can be – since it deals with contingent ‘secundae intentiones’ – from semantics to ethology!” Lizio, liceo, liceale. Grice: “Most philosophers are stealing the voice of Z.; Poppi ain’t!” Primogenito di un’antica e nobile famiglia, eredita dal padre il titolo di conte palatino. Considerato il massimo esponente del lizio padovano. Studia a Padova, dove è allievo di ROBERTELLO, TOMITANO, e PASSERI, laureandosi in filosofia. Succedendo a TOMITANO  nella cattedra di semiotica nello studio padovano. Declina l'invito del re Báthory di insegnare in Polonia, ma gli dedica un saggio, l’opera logica, stampata a Venezia. Sono pubblicate a Padova le sue Tabulae logicae e a Venezia, il suo commento agl’Analitici del Lizio. In risposta alle critiche mosse alla sua semiotica dai suoi colleghi, PICCOLOMINI , BALDUINO, E PETRELLA, compone la De doctrinae ordine apologia. Apparvero rispettivamente i suoi saggi, la De naturalis scientiæ constitutione, e i De rebus naturalibus; postumi comparvero i suoi commenti incompiuti alla fisica e al de anima di Aristotele. I libri della sua biblioteca sono conservati presso a Padova. Altri saggi: Opera logica, De methodis; De regressu, Tabula logicæ, In duos Aristotelis libros posteriores analyticos commentarii, De doctrinae ordine apologia, De naturalis scientiæ constitutione, De rebus naturalibus, Venezia, In libros Aristotelis physicorum commentarii, Opera physica, De generatione et corruptione et Meteorologica commentarii, In tres libros Aristotelis de anima commentarii, De mente agente, De rebus naturalibus; De sensu agente; De rebus naturalibus, Rivista di Storia della Filosofia. metodo compositivo, metodo resolutivo, ordine compositivo, ordine resolutivo, logica ed estetica, Baumgarten, il liceo, il lizio, notes on I Tatti’s edition of Z’s, “On methods, la risoluzione buletica.  St John’s, 1939. Late afternoon. A corridor that smells of coal and polish. A timid knock, then another, more hopeful. Knock knock. Come in. A young man enters, hair too careful, gown not yet resigned to its own existence. I’m Strawson, sir. Yes. I know who you are. Mr Mabbott sent me, sir. He said you might prepare me for the Logic paper. PPE. Ah, yes. He mentioned it. He said he couldn’t be… bothered. Strawson smiled, as if “bothered” were a charitable correction of something more accurate. I hope I won’t be too much trouble, sir. That depends on what you count as trouble. Sit down. Strawson sat, producing at once the look of someone determined to be teachable. It is a look that tutors never quite trust. For today we do one thing only. Logic, sir? Zabarella. Strawson hesitated. Zabarella? Zabarella. I’m afraid I never did Latin properly, sir. PPE. London. Not Clifton. Read anyway. That is the whole point of Oxford: you are always reading something you claim not to know. I passed him the volume. He took it as if it might bite. He began, cautiously, aloud, with the grave patience of a man decoding a spell. Opera logica… quorum argumentum, seriem et utilitatem versa pagina demonstrabit. He stopped. Go on. He looked up, slightly triumphant, as if he had reached the end of a danger. Sir. Yes. Is that deictic. Deictic. That bit, sir. Versa pagina demonstrabit. It’s like pointing. Pointing is allowed in Latin. But it’s a kind of instruction, isn’t it. “The usefulness will be shown on the turned page.” It’s almost… stage direction. Almost. Does that count as logic, sir, or as theatre. In Zabarella, the difference is small. Continue. He looked back down and read on, more quickly now, as if the safest way to survive Latin is to outrun it. De natura logicae. De quarta figura syllogismorum. De methodis. De conversione demonstrationis in definitionem. De propositionibus necessariis. De speciebus demonstrationis. De regressu. De tribus praecognitis. De medio demonstrationis. Commentarii in libros duos Posteriorum Analyticorum. Apologia de doctrinae ordine. Tabulae logicae. Good. Strawson looked pleased with himself, then suspicious, as if praise were never free. Today we begin at the end, of course. Of course, sir. Tabulae logicae. He brightened. Tables. That sounds almost modern. Everything sounds modern if you mishear it. Now, before we touch the tables, we return to your interruption. My interruption, sir? Versa pagina demonstrabit. Yes, sir. What exactly were you thinking. That it’s odd, sir. It’s as if Zabarella expects the reader to cooperate. As if he’s saying: I’m not going to explain here; you are to turn the page and see. That is exactly what he is saying. So it’s like conversation, sir. If you insist on saying so, yes. It presupposes a reader who will do the obvious thing. Strawson frowned, respectfully, which is a useful kind of frown in Oxford: it means he is about to become difficult while still sounding polite. But it also presupposes the reader knows which page counts as versa. Italian manners, I said. Italian manners, sir? Yes. He does not fling the contents at you. He doesn’t throw the whole lorry into your lap on the doorstep. He says: the argument, the order, and the utility will be displayed on the next page. He gives you a chance to turn. Civilised. Strawson laughed. I do not see what is funny. I’m sorry, sir. I thought you said mozzarella earlier. I did not say mozzarella. No, sir. And even if I had, it would only prove the point. You heard what suited you and supplied the rest. Yes, sir. We are not here to improvise cheese. We are here to notice the mechanism. Zabarella is telling you how to read him, before he begins. Like a maxim, sir. If you like. A maxim of book-behaviour. Turn the page. Strawson paused again. One bit, sir. Here it comes. If he says demonstrabit, sir, that is a strong verb. Demonstrate. Not merely list. Yes. But what we got was a list. Yes. So either he is using demonstrabit loosely, sir, or he thinks a series is already an argument. I nodded, not because I agreed, but because he had earned the nod by being annoying in the right way. That, Strawson, is the whole joke and the whole lesson. In a scholastic world, order is not decoration. Order is justification. A table can be a proof of seriousness. So the title page is already doing philosophy, sir. It is already doing manners. And sometimes manners are the deepest philosophy Oxford permits before tea. Strawson glanced at the list again, as if it had changed while we were speaking. So we start with Tabulae logicae. We start with Tabulae logicae. And sir. Yes. Is Tabulae logicae the cake. What cake. The piece of cake you promised. I promised nothing of the kind. But since you have asked so nicely, you may have this much: the cake, in logic, is always the table. The hard part is not eating it. The hard part is learning not to throw it. Grice: Caro Zabarella, ogni volta che rifletto sul lizio padovano, mi viene in mente il modo in cui hai saputo dare dignità filosofica alle “secundae intentiones”. È davvero affascinante pensare che la filosofia possa occuparsi di ciò che è contingente, senza perdere la profondità del discorso! Zabarella: Grice, ti ringrazio per queste parole! Per me, il lizio di Poppi – e il liceo in generale – rappresenta proprio quel luogo di incontro dove logica e metodo si intrecciano, lasciando spazio alla discussione e all’interpretazione. La filosofia, come la conversazione, si rinnova continuamente proprio grazie alle sue “secondarie intenzioni”. Grice: Mi piace il tuo approccio, Giacomo: il metodo compositivo e quello resolutivo che hai elaborato offrono strumenti preziosi per affrontare non solo questioni logiche ma anche estetiche. In fondo, ciò che conta è la capacità di organizzare il pensiero, di dare un ordine alla conoscenza senza irrigidirla. Zabarella: Hai colto perfettamente il mio intento! La risoluzione bulètica, come tu la chiami, è un invito a non smettere mai di interrogarsi, a comporre e scomporre idee. La logica, se vissuta come dialogo, diventa arte e non semplice tecnica: è la voce del lizio che risuona ancora oggi nei corridoi di Padova. Zabarella, Giacomo (1578). Opera logica uorum argumentum, seriem & utilitatem versa pagina demonstrabit.  De Natura Logicae De quarta figura syllogismorum De Methodis De conversione demonstrationis in definitionem De propositionibus necessariis De speciebus demonstrationis De Regressu De tribus praecognitis De medio demonstrationis Commentarii in libros duos Posteriorum Analyticorum Apologia de doctrinae ordine Tabulae logicae Venezia. Meietti.

“Lorenzo Zaccaro (Napoli, Campania) Compared institutionally, Grice is again much easier to place than Zaccaro. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. “Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s” means a college office: he belonged to the governing and teaching life of the college, with tutorials and direct responsibility for students. “CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford” means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice held the classic double Oxford role: one foot in the college, one in the university. Lorenzo Zaccaro is not comparable in that collegiate-tutorial sense. The evidence I can confirm places him in the nineteenth-century Neapolitan world as a professor and man of letters, not as an Oxford-style don. A biographical notice identifies Lorenzo Zaccaro as a Calabrian scholar, born in 1811, who was professor of Italian and Greek literature at the University of Naples and director in Naples of the Istituto de Pamphilis di scienze, lettere, belle arti e commercio. It also describes his interests as Latin and Italian language, aesthetics applied to letters, and comparative grammars. Lorenzo Zaccaro is described as professor of Italian and Greek literature at the University of Naples and as director of the Istituto de Pamphilis; his main interests are given as Latin and Italian language, aesthetics, and comparative grammar. [comune.san...izzi.cs.it] So the clean institutional comparison is this. Grice was an Oxford don with a dual college-and-university appointment. Zaccaro was a nineteenth-century Neapolitan professor and pedagogical author, active in university and learned-institution settings rather than in a residential college tutorial system. That difference matches the philosophical contrast rather well. Grice’s work comes out of a setting where tutorial conversation, objections, and public reasons are the natural medium. It is therefore unsurprising that he explains meaning by rational uptake, intention-recognition, and implicature. Zaccaro’s work, at least in the material you cite, comes out of a pedagogical-philological setting: grammar, method, literary formation, and the rational organisation of linguistic learning. It is therefore unsurprising that he rationalises language from the side of internal structure, curriculum, and disciplined use, rather than from the side of conversational inference. There are two factual corrections worth making to your draft. First, the major grammar title is not from 1841. The attested bibliographic record gives Introduzione allo studio della lingua latina, ossia Saggio di una nuova grammatica latina ragionata divisa in tre parti, with the three parts Lessigrafia, Etimologia, and Sintassi regolare e figurata, published in Naples in 1855, by Gemelli. The bibliographic records for Introduzione allo studio della lingua latina identify it as a three-volume work by Lorenzo Zaccaro, published in Naples in 1855 by Gemelli. [archive.org], [beweb.chie...ttolica.it], [beweb.chie...ttolica.it] Second, the 1841 item is different: Cenno critico sulle facoltà dell’anima umana da precedere all’analisi dell’immagine. The local biographical notice for Lorenzo Zaccaro lists the 1841 Cenno critico as one of his works, distinct from the 1855 grammatica ragionata. [comune.san...izzi.cs.it] So if you want one plain English paragraph you can use, I would phrase it like this: H. P. Grice occupied the characteristically Oxford dual role of college fellow-tutor and university lecturer, combining the intimate tutorial culture of St John’s with a wider faculty appointment. Lorenzo Zaccaro, by contrast, belongs to the nineteenth-century Neapolitan world of university teaching and pedagogical philology: a professor of Italian and Greek literature at Naples, a learned-institution figure, and an author of rationalised grammar manuals rather than an Oxford-style residential tutor. The institutional contrast mirrors the philosophical one: Grice theorises language from the side of rational conversation and intention-recognition, whereas Zaccaro approaches language from the side of grammar, method, and the disciplined organisation of linguistic understanding. [comune.san...izzi.cs.it], [archive.org], [beweb.chie...ttolica.it], [beweb.chie...ttolica.it] One final caution. “Roma, Lazio” in your prompt does not fit the source I found. The biographical notice I found places Zaccaro in San Lorenzo Bellizzi and Naples, not Rome. The source I found identifies Lorenzo Zaccaro as born in San Lorenzo Bellizzi and professionally active in Naples, not as a Roman figure. [comune.san...izzi.cs.it] If you want, I can now compress all that into a very short headnote in your preferred style.dissetta la ragione conversazionale.” Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes the central explanatory unit not the grammatical form as such but the hearer’s rational route to uptake: S means p by producing an utterance with the intention that the addressee arrive at a response (typically belief), that the addressee recognize this very intention, and that such recognition function as the addressee’s reason for the response; implicature is then what is responsibly recoverable when the speaker counts on cooperative inference rather than spelling everything out. Zaccaro’s “grammatica ragionata,” by contrast, belongs to a pedagogical-philological project that treats linguistic competence as something stabilized by method, memory, and the correction of scholastic error: in his Introduzione allo studio della lingua latina ossia saggio di una grammatica latina ragionata (Napoli, Barone) he explicitly defends “novità di forma” for an ancient subject, reorganizing lessigrafia/etimologia/sintassi (regolare e figurata) and adding an appendix on traslati, with the aim of giving precettori a usable rational order and freeing students from confused textbook taxonomies. The comparison, then, is that Zaccaro rationalizes language from the side of its internal architecture (how declensions, conjugations, and figures should be learned and justified), whereas Grice rationalizes language from the side of its social use (how speakers exploit what they do not say, and how hearers are entitled to infer it, because the speaker intends that inferential recognition to count as a reason). Put sharply: Zaccaro makes grammar into a disciplined route from forms to correct understanding; Grice makes conversation into a disciplined route from what is said to what is meant, where “sottinteso” is not a mere rhetorical flourish but a reason-based mechanism of coordination between minds—something a rational grammar can prepare for, but cannot by itself explain without the Gricean step from rule-following to intention-recognition. Grice: “I like him!” :Z. does for Italian what I tried to do to Strawson for English – only he wouldn’t listen!” Implicature, sottinteso, grammatica razionale, lingua latina, lingua italiana. Introduzione allo studio della lingua latina ossia saggio d’una grammatica latina ragionata cioè lessigrafia etimologia sintassi regolare e figurata. Con un’appendice intorno a’traslati. Eccovi, o Precettori.la Lessigrafia latina. Dessa corrisponde. al trattato che i grammatici addimandano declinazione de’nomi ed aggiuntivi e coriugazione de' verbi. Non vi rechi:noia la novità del titolo, che non è nuovo omai nelle senole, e poi corrisponde più esattamente al metodo che si deve seguire in questo studio, cioè di leggere e scrivere di scrivere e conferire a memoria le parole d’una lingua, che un metodo ben ordinato vuol affidare alla -memoria pria che all’intelligenza. In quanto al contenuto di questo trattato sotto il rispetto delle novità di forma sopra materia tanto antica conviene che io accenni qualche cosa per giustificare il divisamento di rifare un lavoro di che abbondano le scuole, e per dare ai precettori u qualche indirizzo a bene usarlo: Se la lessigrafia delle scuole fosse scerra d’errori sarebbe stato inutile prodursi lin ne un’altrà, perocchè, questo studio versandosi sul fatto di una lingua esistente, ogni lessigrafia si potrebbe accomodare ad ogni sistema filologico io dunque non serivo il presente volume col fine di compiere un corso, copiando un trattato ben fatto che le scuole si abbiano. Avrei potuto rimettere i precettori a’lavori altrui. La vera ragione che m’induce a quest’altra. pesosa produzione è l'imperfeziohedei trattati precedenti; da’qualii giovanetti attiigonospropositi amtoreveli, dove importa che sì ieno nozioni fondamentali, pdr quanto. è possibile, esatte e precise. Pia a da. La lessigrafia delle scuole tra; le altre cose iinsegnavai i che i nomi. latini: oltre il genere maschile e fonundrile s’avessero il genere nesird; it dubbio, 'il conuine e \ epiceno.  Grice: Lorenzo, devo confessare che nutro una sincera ammirazione per il tuo approccio alla grammatica latina. La tua lessigrafia, così ricca di ragionamento e attenzione alle sfumature, mi ricorda ciò che ho sempre desiderato fare per l’inglese: rendere la lingua un terreno fertile per l’implicatura e il sottinteso! Zaccaro: Caro Grice, mi lusinga il paragone! Credo fermamente che lo studio della lingua, sia latina che italiana, debba partire dalla riflessione razionale, senza mai trascurare la memoria e la tradizione. Solo così si possono evitare quegli errori che troppo spesso si annidano nei vecchi trattati scolastici. Grice: Hai ragione, Lorenzo. La tua Introduzione allo studio della lingua latina non si limita a una semplice declinazione di nomi e verbi, ma propone una sintassi regolare e figurata, capace di dare nuovi strumenti agli insegnanti. È un metodo che premia la precisione e la chiarezza: quasi fosse un ponte tra tradizione e innovazione. Zaccaro: Grice, è proprio questo il mio intento: fornire ai precettori un indirizzo concreto per usare al meglio la lingua, ma anche stimolare una conversazione viva, dove la grammatica diventa dialogo. Perché, in fondo, la vera ragione conversazionale sta nel saper ascoltare e reinterpretare le parole antiche in chiave nuova. Zaccaro, Lorenzo (1841) Cenno critico sulle facoltà dell’anima umana da precedere all’analisi dell’immagine. Napoli: Barone.

Cesare Zamboni (Cento, Ferrara, Emilia). Compared to H. P. Grice, this “Zamboni” is not comparable as an Oxford-type institutional appointment at all, because you are no longer dealing with a modern college fellow and university lecturer, but with an early modern Paduan Aristotelian professor. So the comparison has to be made across two quite different academic worlds. Grice’s formula is institutionally precise in the modern Oxford sense. “Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s” means a college office with tutorial responsibility and membership in the governing body of the college. “CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford” means a university appointment in the faculty structure beyond the college. So Grice occupies the classic dual role of Oxford don: college tutor and university lecturer. Cesare Cremonini, whom your text is effectively invoking under the mistaken name “Cesare Zamboni,” belongs to a different system. He was a university professor in the old Italian sense, first associated with Ferrara and then, crucially, with Padua, where he succeeded into the Aristotelian teaching line after Zabarella. He was not a fellow of a residential college, because that structure is not the relevant one here. He is best described as a professor of philosophy in the Paduan university world, embedded in Renaissance scholastic-Aristotelian teaching, public lectures, disputations, and university chairs rather than Oxford tutorials and college fellowships. So the most economical institutional comparison is this. Grice was an Oxford don with a dual college-and-university role. Cremonini was an early modern university professor in the Italian chair system. Grice’s institutional life is collegiate and tutorial. Cremonini’s is professorial, public, and scholastic. That difference also helps with the philosophy. Cremonini’s intellectual world is one of De interpretatione, dialectic, signification, and the relation between voces, litterae, and passiones animae. It is a semantics of signification and a logic of concepts, taught in the frame of Aristotelian commentary and disputation. Grice’s intellectual world is one of intention, uptake, rational cooperation, and implicature. It is not primarily a semantics of signs, but a pragmatics of reason-governed communicative action. So if you want a pointed comparison, I would say: Cremonini explains how conventional linguistic signs attach to universal mental contents in a scholastic-Aristotelian framework. Grice explains how, given such signs, a speaker can mean more than is said by making intentions publicly recoverable under conversational norms. Two factual cautions, though. First, this is not “Cesare Zamboni.” The philosopher you mean is Cesare Cremonini. “Zamboni” here is a mistaken substitution. Second, your “lizio” material needs care. I would not make much of “lizio” as if it were a stable technical self-description without checking the actual textual basis. The stronger and safer material is the De interpretatione line about voces and litterae being ad placitum while the passiones animae are common. So the clean answer to your opening question is: H. P. Grice was a modern Oxford don, both college fellow-tutor and university lecturer. Cesare Cremonini was an early modern Italian university professor, not a college fellow in any Oxford sense. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate system; Cremonini to the chair-and-disputation system. Philosophically, Cremonini gives you a scholastic semantics of signification; Grice gives you a pragmatic theory of communicative intention and implicature. And if you want a single plain-English paragraph you can actually use, I can draft that next, keeping it fully in chat and with no document insertion.Z. studia  la ragione conversazionale e la dialettica del lizio.” Grice’s theory of reason-based conversational meaning makes the decisive explanatory move from a doctrine of signs to an account of rational uptake: what a speaker means is fixed by an intention that the hearer recognize that intention and let the recognition function as the hearer’s reason for response, so that implicature is not a mystic residue but a publicly answerable inference licensed by the cooperative norms of talk. Set beside this, “Zamboni” in your passage is best anchored not to an Zanichelli item but to the early modern Paduan-Ferrarese Aristotelian known in standard sources as Cesare Cremonini (Cento–Padova), student of Pendasio at Ferrara, successor (in secundo loco) to Zabarella at Padua, author of the Exordium habitum Patavii VI Kal. Febr. 1591 (Ferrariae, 1591), and a teacher who repeatedly insists—precisely in De interpretatione key—that voces and litterae are ad placitum while the passiones animae are “apud omnes,” i.e., common across humans. The comparison, then, is sharp: Cremonini/Zamboni gives a scholastic semantics in which conventionality is located at the level of linguistic vehicles (names, uttered sounds, written marks) and dialectic is the technique for mapping them onto universal mental affections; Grice instead relocates the explanatory center to the intersubjective rational structure by which an utterance becomes a communicative act at all, because the hearer can recognize the speaker’s intention and treat that recognition as a reason to supply what is left unsaid. So where Zamboni’s “significatum ad placitum” explains how words can vary across languages yet still hook onto shared concepts, Grice’s implicature explains how, even with the same words and the same concepts in place, what is meant in a particular exchange can outrun what is said—because speakers rely on the audience’s rational capacity to reconstruct their purposes under conversational norms; in that sense, the lizio supplies Grice with a deep historical background on sign and convention, but Grice supplies the missing micro-mechanics that scholastic dialectic tends to presuppose rather than analyze: the reason-governed pathway from utterance to uptake. De interpretatione, significatum ad placitum. “Famous for his dialettica e cosmologia and implicature!” – Grice.  Figlio di Matteo Z., un  pittore originario di Cremona, di cui si conservano affreschi negl’oratori delle chiese della Pietà e di San Rocco. “Unlike his father” (Grice), Z. prende la strada degli studi filosofici. Studia a Ferrara sotto PENDASIO . Insegna a Ferrara. Tenne rapporti con la corte estense. Di fronte al duca d'Este recita il suo poemetto, “Le pompe funebri” – “which the duke didn’t like” (Grice) -- e quando si trova a essere oggetto di non chiarite gelosie e maldicenze da parte dei suoi colleghi a Ferrara, scrive al duca per richiedere un suo intervento. Non risulta il duca risolve i conflitti denunciati da Z., che, perciò, decide di trasferirsi altrove. Chiamato a Padova per insegnare in sostituzione di Zabarella – “whose surname also started with a Z” – Grice. Z. inizia il suo corso leggendo la prolusione Exordium habitum Patavii. Contro il tentativo di fondare a Padova uno studio rivale dell'università. Respondetur, quod conceptus dupliciter poteft confiderari, vel simpliciter vt elt PASSIO IPSIUS ANIMI, et fic idem elt APVD OMNES, vel vi elt paffio talis in ordine ad objectum, de quo fic conceptus, et hic poteft elle varietas apud varios; alia verò duo, voces Icilicer et littere funt AD BENEPLACITVM – ET NON AD NATURAM -- et apud varios variè le habent, apud Grecos enim alia voce homo fignificatur rideft, antropos e et alia feribitur, et SIGNIFICATVR APVD LATINOS. Dicetis etiam SONVS BRUTORVM, est vox, tamen NON EST AD PLACITVM illorum, sed eodem modo voi que fe habent; Relpondetur, quod voces funt duplices, alig que SIGNIFICAT AFFECTVS, alie que SIGNIFICAT CONCEPTVS, fi loquamur de vocibus, que fignificant conceptus, tales autem funt voces, que lequuntur intellectum, dideo VOX ARTICVLATA proprie lunt ipiorum HOMINVM, cum itaque dictum fit voces imediaté fignificare conceptus, veluti fe habe. I galileiani, la dialettica di Z., de interpretatione, nomen, significatio, ad placitum.  Corpus. Evening. Grice returns not straight from Blackwell’s but by way of the river, because a man with a new pamphlet is incapable of going directly home. Shropshire is already in the room, on the bed, as if beds were made for visitors and scholars were made to endure them. Shropshire: You’ve been out. Grice: I have done what the University intends. I have consumed an inaugural and then purchased the authorized residue. Shropshire: You mean you’ve bought the little blue thing. Grice: I’ve bought the little blue thing. Shropshire: Blackwell’s. Grice: Naturally. Shropshire: And you’re already in a temper. How long have you owned it. Grice: Long enough to be dissatisfied with it. Shropshire: That’s quick work, even for you. Did you read it while crossing the High, or have you developed a new technique for perusing pamphlets at traffic. Grice: I stopped at the river. Shropshire: The one by Magdalen. Grice: The one by Magdalen. Yes. One sits, one orders something, one watches boats, and one discovers that Clarendon has improved the man. Shropshire: Improved him. Grice: Cleaned him. It’s a week since the lecture. In the room he had pauses, throat-clearings, all the little human hesitations by which a thought actually arrives. On the page he is pure. Not a stumble. Not a cough. Not a single Oxford moment of deciding whether to be brave. Shropshire: A week. Grice: About that. Shropshire: You think the Clarendon can turn a man into print in a week. Grice: It is twenty-one pages. Shropshire: Twenty-one pages and an eternity of self-respect. Grice takes the pamphlet out as if presenting evidence. Grice: Listen. The title-page alone is enough to make one feel examined. Shropshire: Read it, then. Do your liturgy. Grice reads with careful solemnity, as if the proper nouns must be pronounced correctly for the institution to exist. Grice: The Historical Imagination. An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 28 October 1935. Oxford. At the Clarendon Press. Shropshire: Delivered before the University. As if the University were a magistrate. Grice: It felt like one. The whole place there, judging not only the thought but the performance. Shropshire: And now the performance has been laundered. Grice: Exactly. That is what irritates me. We were not given the lecture; we were given the lecture as it ought to have been, had a lecture ever occurred in a world without throats. Shropshire: Stay with your Mods, Grice. Grice: Meaning which. Shropshire: Meaning your shared religion. Moderations behind you, moderns on the syllabus, all safely dead. Nobody alive in Mods. Nobody alive in the “modern” paper either, not really. Locke doesn’t cough, Kant doesn’t hesitate, Mill doesn’t lose his place. That’s why Oxford can examine them. Grice: Which is precisely why I went to hear Collingwood. The novelty is that he is not a set text. He is unsyllabus. He is an event. Shropshire: He was an event until Clarendon made him a text. Grice: Yes. That is the complaint. Shropshire: Then why did you buy the thing. Grice: Because I am weak, and because Blackwell’s had it, and because I thought I might catch the argument again. Instead I find I am arguing with an edited version of a man I heard with my own ears. Shropshire: So you’ve gone from attending the lecture to attending the pamphlet. Grice: Don’t be clever. Shropshire: I’m not being clever. I’m being a commoner. It’s different. Grice: You are on my bed. Shropshire: On your bed, yes. And you are in your own head, worshipping the Clarendon imprint as if it were antiquity. Grice: Worshipping. Shropshire: Idolising, then. Because it’s living. Because it’s new. Because it’s not on the list. Grice: It is genuinely interesting. Shropshire: It may be. But don’t let the Establishment sell you “genuinely interesting” in pamphlet form and call it philosophy. Grice: And your alternative is. Shropshire: My alternative is older and therefore funnier. Grice: Here we go. Shropshire, very casually, as if he were expanding an abbreviation for his own amusement rather than correcting anyone, says it out loud, full and smooth, like something he has said before. Shropshire: Exordium habitum Patavii, vi Kalendas Februarias, fifteen ninety-one. Grice: What on earth. Shropshire: Your Zamboni. Your Cremonini. The Renaissance version of your inaugural craze. Opening speech delivered at Padua on the twenty-seventh of January, fifteen ninety-one. No romance. No imagination. No “delivered before the University” as if the University were a duchess. Just the label, the place, the date. Grice: You’ve been reading Cremonini. Shropshire: I’ve been tasting him. There’s a difference. And I did it because you keep worrying that his first datable thing has a silly title. It isn’t silly. It is honest. It tells you what it is. Your Collingwood title tells you what it wants to be. Grice: That is not fair. Shropshire: It is perfectly fair. Collingwood calls his opening talk The Historical Imagination and suddenly everyone behaves as if imagination is the subject and not the occasion. Cremonini calls his opening talk an exordium and refuses the masquerade. He is being pretentious in Latin, yes, but he is being pretentious in a way that doesn’t pretend to be modest. Grice: And your point is that I ought to prefer the old pretension to the new. Shropshire: My point is that you ought to notice the mechanism. Oxford has given you a living man as a novelty, then within a week or two it has converted him into a tidy text, and you are already comparing your memory to the print like a parish clerk checking a hymn. That’s the same mechanism you are using for Zamboni. You want the first datable thing to sound like genius. But inaugurals don’t sound like genius. They sound like inaugurals. The genius is what comes after. Grice: That makes Zamboni’s “exordium” more bearable. Shropshire: It makes Collingwood’s more suspicious. Grice: You are impossible. Shropshire: I am a commoner. It’s my brief. And now, if you like, read me the first page and I’ll tell you what Collingwood meant before Clarendon taught him how to mean it.Grice: Cesare, uno degli aspetti che mi ha sempre affascinato del tuo lavoro è l’uso del termine “lizio” per riferirsi al Lycaeum greco. C’è una musicalità tutta italiana in quella parola che, secondo me, restituisce dignità alla tradizione aristotelica – quasi fosse una radice autoctona! Z.: Caro Grice, apprezzo il tuo entusiasmo! Il “lizio” non è solo un modo di italianizzare il Lycaeum; è un ponte tra il nostro pensiero dialettico e le radici elleniche. Nel mio insegnamento, questa parola diventa simbolo di una dialettica che si rinnova, adattandosi ad ogni lingua, ad ogni significato “ad placitum”. G.: Infatti, la dialettica del lizio permette una conversazione aperta, dove il “significatum ad placitum” non è solo un esercizio linguistico, ma una vera e propria implicatura filosofica. È come se la voce articolata degli uomini – per dirla con le tue parole – fosse sempre pronta a reinventare concetti e affetti. Zamboni: Mi piace pensare che, come il Lycaeum di Aristotele, anche il nostro “lizio” sia un luogo di incontro – dove le voci, i concetti e i nomi si scambiano significati, lasciando spazio a nuove interpretazioni. In fondo, la filosofia italiana è sempre stata abile nel trasformare l’eredità greca in qualcosa di unico e conversazionale. Zamboni, Cesare (1591). Exordium habitum Patavi VI Kal. Febr. Ferrara

Giuseppe Zamboni (Verona, Veneto). Compared institutionally, Grice is much easier to place than Zamboni. Grice held a recognisably Oxford double role: college fellow and tutor on the one hand, university lecturer on the other. That means he belonged both to a college-based tutorial structure and to the wider teaching machinery of the university. “Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s” locates him in the collegiate system, with responsibility for students, tutorials, and college governance; “CUF University Lecturer in philosophy” places him in the university-wide faculty structure. So Grice’s academic identity is dual and highly institutional in the specifically Oxford way: one foot in the college, one in the university. Zamboni is not comparable in that exact collegiate-university sense. He belongs to a different academic and intellectual ecology altogether: Catholic and neo-scholastic Italy, with strong links to Verona, Padua, and later publishing centres such as Milan and Rome. He was certainly academically formed at Padua, where he took the two lauree, and he later taught in licei and developed as a public intellectual and philosopher through publishing, Catholic intellectual networks, and institutional affiliations less tutorial-collegiate and more scholastic-cultural. In short, he was not “a fellow and tutor” in anything like the Oxford sense. He is better described as an Italian Catholic philosopher formed in the faculty of lettere e filosofia at Padova, then active as teacher, scholar, and philosophical author in the Veronese and broader neo-scholastic milieu. So if you want the sharp comparison, I would put it this way. Grice was an Oxford don in the full institutional sense: college fellow, tutor, and university lecturer, embedded in a dual structure of collegiate tutorials and faculty lecturing. Zamboni was an Italian philosopher-scholar shaped by the old faculty of lettere e filosofia and by the Catholic intellectual world of Veneto and northern Italy, not by a residential-collegiate tutorial system. Philosophically, that institutional difference mirrors the intellectual one rather neatly. Grice’s work emerges from a setting in which conversation, tutorial exchange, objections, and publicly assessable reasons are central practices. It is therefore unsurprising that his theory of meaning is outward-facing, dialogical, and tied to rational recognisability. Zamboni’s work emerges from a setting in which formation is more speculative, scholastic, psychological, and metaphysical. It is therefore unsurprising that his treatment of volere begins inwardly, from the io, persona, and the grounding of agency in first-person volition. So institution and doctrine line up rather well: Oxford tutorial culture helps explain why Grice turns willing into willing that, something legible in public reason-giving. Italian neo-scholastic and introspective culture helps explain why Zamboni turns willing into the constitutive interior act of the self. There are also two factual corrections to your passage. First, this is Giuseppe Zamboni, not Giovanni Zamboni. Second, “Zamboni, Giuseppe (1897). Dissertazione di laurea. Facolta di Filosofia e Lettere. Padova.” is too thin to state confidently as if it were a bibliographically established title. What we presently have is evidence for a laurea in lettere in 1897 and then a second laurea in filosofia in 1900 or, in shorter notices, 1899. I would not yet cite “Dissertazione di laurea” as though the thesis title were known, because we have not established the topic of the 1897 laurea. The biographical sources support the degrees, but not, so far as we have found, the exact title or subject of the first dissertation. So the safest comparative formulation would be something like this: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the strict institutional sense, both a Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s College and a CUF University Lecturer in philosophy, thereby occupying the characteristic dual role of college tutor and university teacher. Giuseppe Zamboni, by contrast, belongs to the very different world of Italian Catholic and neo-scholastic philosophy: formed at Padua in the old faculty of lettere e filosofia, active as teacher and author in the Veronese and wider Italian intellectual milieu, and oriented less toward collegiate dialogue than toward introspective psychology, gnoseology, and metaphysics. That institutional contrast helps illuminate the philosophical one: Grice treats willing primarily as something rendered public in rational conversation, whereas Zamboni treats volition primarily as the inner act by which the io becomes persona and grounds moral agency. And if you want the shortest possible answer to your opening question, it is this: Grice was a college fellow-tutor plus university lecturer; Zamboni was not an Oxford-style don at all, but an Italian scholastic philosopher-teacher and author. If you like, I can now do either of two things, still only in chat and in plain English. I can turn your whole Zamboni-Grice comparison into one polished paragraph. Or I can give you a compact biographical headnote for Zamboni that matches the institutional precision of the Grice formula.Z. essamina la ragione conversazionale e il volere.” Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning locates what is meant in a rational nexus of intentions and recognitions: for S to mean p by uttering x, S intends that an audience form some response (typically belief), intends that the audience recognize this intention, and intends that this recognition function as the audience’s reason for uptake; on this basis, “willing that” (volere che) is not just a mental push but something that can be made public and assessable in talk through what is said, what is implicated, and what can be demanded as a reason. Zamboni, in the Veronese line of reflection on the psychology of the will and the self (your dossier’s Psicologia del volere; L’origine delle idee: saggio analitico introspettivo; Sistema di gnoseologia e di morale; La persona umana: soggetto autocosciente), approaches the same terrain from the opposite direction: he treats volition as the inner act in which the io constitutes itself as persona and thereby bridges the sensible and the “sopra-sensibile,” so that moral agency is grounded in an irreducibly first-person structure of decision and responsibility. The comparison is therefore sharp but complementary: Zamboni’s will is primarily the metaphysical-gnoseological anchor of personhood (the act by which the self owns its acts), whereas Grice’s will is primarily a pragmatic operator inside rational interaction (the way an agent’s commitments and intentions become legible to others and become reasons in a shared conversational economy). Put bluntly: Zamboni explains how willing is possible as an interior foundation of agency; Grice explains how willing, once present, becomes communicable as “willing that” in a space where hearers can recognize intentions, draw implicatures, and hold speakers responsible for the reasons their utterances purport to provide. Psicologia del volere, volere, l’io, sopra-sensibile, volere, volizione, volitum – the will – Grice e Z. on WILLING THAT – volere che. Grice: “Not everybody knows his zamboni.” There’s Giorgio Zamboni, but this entry is about Giovanni Zamboni. Essential Italian philosopher. Filosofo italiano. Saggi: Spencer:  commemorazione e polemica, Garagnani, Bologna; La filosofia scolastica secondo un positivista, Marchiori,Verona; Il valore scientifico del positivismo d’ARDIGO  e della sua conversion, Verona; La dottrina morale e la psicologia del VOLERE in un saggio di etica di un discepolo d’ARDIGO, Società Veronese, Verona; La gnoseologia dell’atto come fondamento della filosofia dell’essere: saggio d'interpretazione sistematica della dottrina gnoseologica d’AQUINO, Milano; Gnoseologia, Vita e Pensiero, Giuseppe, Milano; L’origine delle idee: saggio analitico INTROSPETTIVO, proposto alla riflessione personale, Società Veronese, Verona; Sistema di gnoseologia e di morale: base teoretica per esegesi e critica della filosofia, Studium, Roma; Studi esegetici, critici, comparativi sulla CRITICA DELLA RAGIONE PURA, Veronese, Verona; Metafisica e gnoseologia, Veronese, Verona; Il realismo critico della gnoseologia pura: risposta al caso Zamboni, Gemelli, Olgiati e Rossi, Verona; Realismo, metafisica, personalità: rilievi, note, discussioni, Veronese, Verona; La persona umana: soggetto auto-cosciente nell’esperienza integrale: termine della gnoseologia, base della metafisica, Verona, Giulietti., Vita e pensiero, Milano; Precisazioni e complementi ai testi scolastici: religione naturale e l’essenza della religione cristiana, Veronese, Verona; La filosofia dell’ESPERIENZA IMMEDIATA. Psicologia del volere, volere, l’io, sopra-sensibile, volere, volizione, volitum – the will -- gnoseologia, l’io.  In 1946, with the city still learning how to be peacetime and the colleges relearning how to sound unshaken, G. found himself browsing a piece by Zamboni on the “conversione” of Ardigò, and the very word conversion struck him as a philosophical category mistake in clerical dress: “positivism,” “phenomenalism,” “empiricism,” “idealism”—these ought to be, at best, provisional labels for families of arguments, temperaments, and methodological habits, but once you let an -ism harden into a badge you immediately inherit the whole ecclesiastical apparatus of creed, lapse, relapse, excommunication, and—worst of all—that oddly confident verb, to deconvert, as if one could step out of a view the way one steps out of a club, returning one’s membership card at the door and walking away lighter. Yet what would “deconverting” amount to, in sober detail, other than revising a network of particular commitments, retracting some inferences, refusing some slogans, and noticing that the phrase you once marched under had been doing more work than you ever acknowledged? If a man says he has “converted to positivism,” G. thought, he is not reporting a new evidence-base so much as advertising a new social alignment; and if he later says he has “converted away,” he is not describing the abandonment of arguments so much as rescuing his dignity from the implication that he had once treated a method as a faith. The comedy, and the danger, is that the conversion vocabulary makes intellectual change sound like a single punctiliar event—illumination, crisis, renunciation—when in truth it is usually a slow redistribution of reasons, a gradual loss of patience with some questions and a gradual discovery that other questions will not go away. The only honest moral, he concluded, is that philosophy should resist being spoken as religion even when it borrows religion’s dramatic verbs; for the moment you let an -ism become a creed, you also let disagreement become heresy, and then the conversation that ought to be about reasons becomes instead a contest about who has “faith,” who has “lost it,” and who is now claiming to be pure again by “deconverting,” as if the mind were a chapel and not, more awkwardly, a workshop.Grice: Caro Zamboni, ogni volta che mi confronto con il tema del volere, mi viene in mente la tua originale riflessione sulla psicologia della volizione. Secondo te, come si può distinguere, in modo nitido, tra il semplice desiderio e il vero atto di volontà? Zamboni: Ottima domanda, Grice! Per me, il desiderio resta spesso sul piano del possibile, quasi come un’ombra dei nostri slanci interiori. Il volere autentico, invece, si manifesta quando l’io si assume la responsabilità di tradurre un’intenzione in azione, andando oltre ciò che appare immediato o spontaneo. È lì che la volontà si distingue, diventando davvero fondamento dell’agire umano. Grice: Quindi, se capisco bene, il volere non è solo una questione di scelta consapevole, ma anche di esperienza intima che coinvolge tutto l’io. Credi che questa dimensione sopra-sensibile renda la volontà un ponte tra il pensiero e la realtà morale? Zamboni: Esattamente, Grice! La volontà è, per così dire, il luogo dove l’io si fa persona, capace di trascendere la pura reazione e dare senso al proprio agire. È in questo superamento del dato sensibile che la filosofia trova la sua forza più autentica: quella di dare voce, come diresti tu, a una conversazione interiore che plasma la nostra etica quotidiana. Zamboni, Giuseppe (1897). Dissertazione di laurea. Facolta di Filosofia e Lettere. Padova.

Marc’Antonio Zimara (Galatina, Lecce, Puglia) -- Compared with Grice, Marc’Antonio Zimara belongs to an altogether different institutional and philosophical world. Grice’s positions at St John’s and in the CUF system place him squarely inside the mature Oxford structure of professional philosophy. Fellow and Tutor means collegiate authority exercised through the tutorial: weekly essays, dialectical exchange, close supervision of undergraduates, and the cultivation of philosophical precision through live conversation. CUF University Lecturer extends that role beyond the college and into the university as a whole: lectures, faculty recognition, and participation in the wider machinery of Oxford philosophy. So Grice’s authority is both local and general, both intimate and institutional. He is a philosopher formed by, and working through, a system in which rational exchange between persons is itself the medium of philosophical life. Zimara is not analogous in that sense. Marc’Antonio Zimara belongs to the Padua-Aristotelian and wider Renaissance commentary tradition, not to the twentieth-century British professional department. His intellectual authority is not primarily that of the college tutor or university lecturer in the Oxford sense, but that of the learned commentator, compiler, indexer, teacher, civic intellectual, and transmitter of doctrine within an inherited scholastic order. He is tied to Padua, to the scuola del lizio, to De interpretatione, De anima, Averroes, and the textual machinery through which Aristotelian thought was made available, stable, and teachable. The institutional comparison, then, is asymmetrical. Grice is a modern professional philosopher of conversation and reason in an analytically self-conscious university system. Zimara is a Renaissance Aristotelian operating within the pedagogic and textual economy of commentary, gloss, table, question, and doctrinal ordering. That difference is philosophically revealing because it corresponds to two different models of intelligibility. For Grice, reason in communication is synchronic, interpersonal, and recognitional. Meaning does not arise from a sign simply by belonging to a taxonomic system. What a speaker means depends on a complex rational intention: the speaker intends the addressee to recognise an intention and to let that recognition function as a reason for uptake. Meaning is therefore generated in the moment of communicative exchange, under publicly accountable norms of rational cooperation. Even implicature is not a mystical surplus; it is an inferentially licensed extension of what is said under assumptions of reasonableness. For Zimara, by contrast, intelligibility is more often doctrinal, disciplinary, and diachronic. His work on signum, on the distinction between natural and instituted signs, on Aristotle and Averroes, and on the question of the primo cognito belongs to a world where the main task is not to explain how two agents generate meaning in a live exchange, but how a learned community preserves, orders, and transmits the conditions under which texts and doctrines remain interpretable. His Tabula dilucidationum is emblematic here. It is not a theory of utterer’s meaning. It is an instrument for navigating an inherited conceptual order. It assumes that meaning is stabilised through commentary, cross-reference, doctrine, and school training. That is why your phrase “the conversational reason of the peripatetics of the lizio” is so interesting. Strictly speaking, Zimara’s reason is not conversational in Grice’s sense. It is not the reason by which one hearer recovers what one speaker now means in a present exchange. It is rather the reason of a school, the reason of a tradition, the reason of disciplinary continuity. One might call it a conversation only if one stretches the term across generations of teachers, students, commentators, and readers. The conversation is not first between speakers face to face, but between texts, lemmata, glosses, indexes, and transmitted distinctions. This becomes especially sharp with your focus on the primo cognito. For Zimara, the question of the first object of cognition belongs within an ordered theory of intellect and signification. It asks what is first known, and therefore what architecture of cognition underlies later understanding. It is a question inside a stable metaphysical and psychological framework. For Grice, by contrast, the comparable pressure would be different. He would ask not first what the intellect primitively cognises, but how one rational subject makes another rational subject grasp what is meant through an utterance. His concern is not the first object of cognition as such, but the first recoverable point of communicative action. Zimara begins from the structure of cognition. Grice begins from the structure of intentional communication. This is why the sign distinction matters in different ways for each. Zimara can distinguish natural from artificial signs within a De interpretatione framework and give you a taxonomy. Grice would say that even the most elegant taxonomy of signs still fails to explain speaker-meaning unless it is connected to the reason-responsive structure of communicative intention and uptake. In short, Zimara can classify signs. Grice explains how a sign becomes a move in conversation. That is perhaps the most exact contrast. There is also a second important comparison through pedagogy. Grice’s Oxford office is built around the tutorial and lecture, which means philosophy is constantly being remade in direct exchange. In that setting, inherited material only comes alive if it can survive questioning, objection, clarification, and rational uptake. Zimara’s teaching world is built around textual transmission and commentary, where philosophy comes alive through the preservation and reorganisation of authoritative material. The teacher is less the live interrogator of ordinary speech than the organiser of a doctrinal map. So if one wanted a compact formula, one might say this. Grice stands for reason as live conversational recovery. Zimara stands for reason as inherited interpretive order. Or, more specifically still: Grice explains how meaning is generated by a rational speaker and recovered by a rational hearer. Zimara explains how meaning is stabilised within a disciplinary community through commentary, taxonomy, and scholastic method. Your mention of vernacular and learned Latin is also apt. Zimara is fascinating because he occupies both registers. He helps translate Aristotelian doctrine between languages and pedagogic levels. But even that bilingual or diglossic flexibility is still not yet Gricean in the full sense. It helps transmit doctrine; it does not yet amount to a theory of how one agent means something by getting another agent to recognise an intention. So the comparison is not that Zimara anticipates Grice straightforwardly. It is rather that Zimara gives Grice a historical foil. He shows how far one can go with sign theory, doctrinal architecture, and pedagogic transmission before one reaches the specifically Gricean question: what makes an utterance count as meaning something for someone in conversation. If you want, I can now do one of three things, still only in chat, in plain English prose, and without formatting embellishment. I can compress this into one polished scholarly paragraph. I can expand it into a more technical mini-essay focused on signum, De interpretatione, and primo cognito. I can also revise your Grice–Zimara dialogue so that it sounds more historically precise and less modern in its assumptions. Provide your feedback on BizChatYou said: Why can't I copy the previous response?Agent mode said: CopilotYou probably cannot copy it because the chat pane is currently behaving like a rendered response area rather than a normal editable text area, and sometimes long responses become harder to select reliably there. A few likely causes: The response was very long, so the interface may not have made selection easy. The pane may have lost focus or partially refreshed after the reply appeared. On some systems, click-and-drag selection in this kind of panel can be inconsistent. Try this, in order: Click once inside the response, then try dragging from the very beginning of the passage to the end. If drag-select fails, click in the response and use Ctrl+A on Windows or Cmd+A on Mac. Sometimes that selects the whole reply in the chat pane. Then use Ctrl+C or Cmd+C. If that still fails, I can simply repost the previous answer in a fresh message, and you can try copying that one instead. If you want, I can also give you the previous response again in shorter chunks, which is often easier to copy.la ragione conversazionale dei peripatetici del lizio, o la questione del primo cognito, la scuola di Padova, la filosofia leccese, la filosofia pugliese, e la filosofia italiana. Grice’s theory of reason-based conversational meaning treats communication as an essentially rational transaction: what a speaker means is fixed not by the mere presence of a sign or by a coded correlation, but by an intention that the addressee recognize the speaker’s intention and let that recognition serve as a reason for uptake; hence the decisive contrast between mere indication and genuinely communicative meaning lies in reason-governed recognition. Marc’Antonio Zimara (Galatina, Lecce, Puglia), formed in the Padua-Aristotelian milieu and explicitly attached to the dottrina del lizio, is a useful foil because his work exemplifies a scholastic architecture in which signification is stabilized by commentary traditions and by the De interpretatione framework of signum, including the distinction between natural and instituted (or artificial) signs; his Tabula dilucidationum in dictis Aristotelis et Averrois (frequently dated to the early sixteenth century and widely printed in Venice in later editions) functions as a navigational device for doctrine, and his Quaestio de primo cognito situates cognition in an ordered theory of the intellect’s first object. The comparison therefore sharpens the methodological difference: Zimara’s “conversational reason” is largely diachronic and disciplinary—reason as the inherited method by which a community of readers and teachers secures stable interpretability of Aristotle in both learned Latin and vernacular exposition—whereas Grice’s conversational reason is synchronic and interpersonal, explaining how meaning is generated in the moment by an agent who designs an utterance so that another agent can rationally recover what is meant (often beyond what is said) precisely because the speaker intends that recovery to occur. In that sense, Zimara’s lizio gives Grice a historically rich testing ground for the sign’s taxonomy, but Grice’s substantive claim is that no taxonomy of signs, however refined, explains speaker-meaning until it is anchored in the reason-responsive structure of intention and recognition that makes an utterance count as a move in conversation rather than merely a datum in a doctrinal table. Grice: “An esay way to check the Griceianism of the Italians is in the commentary of De Interpretatione – the definition of ‘sign’ and the distinction between natural sign and artificial sign – cf. Z., Logicalia, Sgarbi. In the case of Z., we have both the VERNACULAR (Italian) and the ‘learned’!” Gice: “They say my philosophy is systematic, but which ain’t? (I mean, other than Kierkegaard!). The Italians have a way to refer euphemistically to ‘Aristotle’ which doesn’t sound quite as Greek: ‘lizio’ – this spelling reflects a corruption of the Lycaeum, where he taught! Z., for example, would be following the ‘dottrina del lizio’!” Keywords: Il Lizio, scuola di Padova. Grice: “Z. is a testimony that Aristotle is popular without Oxford!” Si laurea a Padova e vi insegna. Sindaco di Galatina. Si reca a Napoli per difendere la città dai soprusi dei duchi Castriota. Insegna filosofia a Salerno con la stesura di una guida alle opere di Aristotele o del liceo o lizio. Cura la pubblicazione di alcune opere di Alberto Magno e di Giovanni di Jandun. Dizionario di filosofia. Cantimori, Enciclopedia Italiana. Saggi: Quæstio de primo cognito, Papie, Iacob de Burgofranco impresse, Studi  galatinesi illustri, Guida Biografica, Tor Graf Galatina, Galatina. Treccani, Enciclopedia italiana. Grice: “It is amazing how much Z, loved Aristotle, at least for those who don’t love him that much!” Grice: “Z. liked to retell the story of why he preferred to refer to Aristotle’s philosophy as that of the ‘lizio’ – the ‘lizio’ is the antiquated Italian way and spelling for Hellenic ‘lykaeon.’ This represents Apollo – in the statue at the gymn -- ginnasio,’ since they were naked --  where Aristotle walked around. Aristotle, il liceo, la filosofia del liceo, filosofia liceale, lizio, liziale, Aristotle within and without Oxford.  Grice: Caro Zimara, sai, c’è chi preferisce Zimarra, ma per quanto mi riguarda tu resti il “mio” Zimara: una vera autorità del lizio! Mi affascina la tua maestria nel tenere viva la tradizione aristotelica, soprattutto attraverso quel ponte sottile tra il segno naturale e quello artificiale che tu hai saputo trattare sia in volgare che in latino. Come nasce, per te, questa passione per la scuola del lizio? Zimara: Ti ringrazio, Grice! In verità, per me il “lizio” non è solo una scuola filosofica, ma un vero modo di essere. Crescere tra Galatina e Padova significava vivere la filosofia come dialogo continuo, dove la distinzione tra segni naturali e artificiali diventava essenziale per comprendere la realtà. E poi, come ben dici, la lingua italiana offre infinite sfumature per reinterpretare Aristotele in chiave contemporanea! Grice: Mi piace questo tuo legame con la tua terra e il modo in cui hai saputo declinare la dottrina aristotelica per il pubblico italiano. Credo che la questione del “primo cognito” sia ancora oggi uno snodo fondamentale: secondo te, è ancora attuale interrogarsi su come avvenga il primo contatto tra l’intelletto e il mondo? Z.: Assolutamente,Grice. La domanda sul primo cognito resta una delle più affascinanti: ogni generazione deve imparare a “vedere” il mondo con occhi nuovi, senza perdere il filo che ci lega alla tradizione. In questo senso, il lizio non è solo memoria, ma anche invenzione e responsabilità, proprio come il moderno liceo continua a essere laboratorio di pensiero critico. Grice’s theory of reason-based conversational meaning makes the decisive explanatory move from texts as repositories of doctrine to communication as a rational transaction: S means p by producing an utterance (or any communicative act) with the intention that an audience form a response, that the audience recognize that intention, and that this recognition function as the audience’s reason for uptake; implicature is then what the audience is entitled to infer when the speaker relies on that recognitional rationality rather than spelling everything out. Niccolò Zimara (Galatina, Lecce, Puglia), cast here as jurist and firstborn in the Zimara constellation, is illuminating precisely because his Commentaria in Aristotelis (Venezia: Tacuino) belongs to a scholastic economy where meaning is often treated as something secured by authoritative text, lemma, and gloss, with the reader doing disciplined reconstructive labor under institutional norms; his “sottintendere con eleganza” is, in that world, a practical necessity (ink, space, inherited abbreviations) and a method for transmitting doctrine across generations of readers trained to supply what is omitted. From a Gricean angle, however, that very practice can be re-described as proto-pragmatic: the commentary’s ellipses work because the author counts on a competent reader to recognize that the omission is deliberate and to treat that recognition as a reason to supply the missing step—so that what looks like mere economy of print becomes a structured invitation to inference. The contrast, then, is that Zimara’s “implicit” is primarily hermeneutic and institutional (a readerly competence within the Aristotelian tradition), whereas Grice’s implicature is inter-personal and reason-governed (a speaker’s intention made publicly accessible through recognitional uptake); but the bridge is exactly your comic exchange: the commentator’s glossa is effective not just because Aristotle is there, but because the reader can rationally recover what is meant by seeing why it was left unsaid. Giurista, Primogenito di ZIMARA. Zimara. C. (Galatina, Lecce, Puglia). G.  Is it me, or has the Oxford Gazette become sentimental? A.  It’s you. The Gazette doesn’t do sentiment. It does logistics in ceremonial clothing. G.  Logistics, yes. Like “any member of the university.” I always hear that and think: any member, provided he can find the door and survive the benches. A.  Or provided he can survive you. G.  That’s cruel. A.  It’s accurate. You’re carrying a book that could stun an undergraduate at ten yards. G.  It’s not a book. It’s an instrument. A Tabula. A.  A table large enough to seat the whole Faculty. G.  Marci Antonii Zimarae Tabula dilucidationum in dictis Aristotelis et Auerrois. A.  You’re pronouncing it like a meal. G.  It’s meant to be nourishing. It’s meant to delucidate. A.  You’ve been using that verb all week. Delucidate. It sounds like what a dentist does to a tooth. G.  It sounds like what we do to Categories. A.  What we do is read it, and then the undergraduates write it down wrong, and then other people examine them on the wrong version. G.  That’s unfair. A.  It’s the entire Oxford system in a sentence. Weed removal. G.  Weed removal? A.  Yes. You don’t cultivate the garden; you keep the weeds from making it look like a field. G.  You’re saying our “class” is horticulture. A.  It’s maintenance. The Gazette advertises “Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione.” It doesn’t say: “Come and be saved.” G.  It does imply: come and be rescued. “Any member of the university” means anyone unable to read these two things without us. A.  It means anyone who wants an easy hour in a warm room. G.  You always think the audience is lazy. A.  I think the audience is human. Human means: will be examined by someone else. G.  We’re walking to the Examination Schools. They’re going to be examined by the building if not by the examiners. A.  That building examines everybody. It examines you now. You’re carrying a Renaissance index into a nineteenth-century testing machine. G.  I like the symmetry. Delucidation walking into examination. A.  You’re making puns again. G.  It’s not a pun, it’s a conceptual point. “Delucidation” is clarity produced by arranged cross-references. A.  And “examination” is panic produced by arranged desks. G.  You have no respect for learning. A.  I have respect for passing. Learning is optional; passing is compulsory. G.  That’s ghastly. A.  It’s accurate. Now tell me what you think we do for “any member of the university.” G.  We make explicit what is left implicit. A.  You always say that, and then you refuse to be explicit. G.  Because the point is to show how the implicit works. Zimara would approve. A.  Zimara would sell another edition. That’s what he would do. G.  “Opus iam diu expectatum.” A.  Yes. The Renaissance equivalent of “due to popular demand.” G.  But look—Tabula dilucidationum. The very title is a promise: if you’re lost in Aristotle or Averroes, here is the path back. A.  “If you’re lost, consult the index.” That is not philosophy; it’s library science. G.  It’s philosophy’s survival technique. And it’s our job: to be the living index. A.  I refuse to be a living index. I am not a card catalogue with legs. G.  You’re a gardener with legs, by your own story. A.  Better. At least a gardener can pretend he’s outdoors. G.  You object to “delucidate” because it sounds too bright? A.  I object because it sounds like you’re promising to fix Aristotle. G.  Not fix. Render him readable. A.  He’s readable. G.  For you. Not for “any member of the university.” A.  There you go again: that phrase. What does it really mean? G.  It means open attendance. A.  It also means: anyone may come and be made to feel stupid for an hour. G.  That’s not the intention. A.  It’s the implicature. G.  Then we should cancel it. A.  Or we should make the implicature true in a kinder way: give them tools. G.  Tools like Zimara’s. A.  Zimara gives you a table because he doesn’t want to explain. He wants you to find. G.  He wants you to recover. A.  Exactly. Recovery, not revelation. G.  Then we’re Zimara with voices. A.  You’re Zimara with a voice. I’m the man trying to keep the voice from turning into a sermon. G.  You’re uncomfortable with sermonising. A.  I’m uncomfortable with anything that smells like “edification.” G.  Then why teach Categories? A.  Because the Faculty says so, and because someone has to stop the words “substance” and “quality” being used like charms. G.  That is edification. A.  No, that’s pest control. G.  Your metaphors are getting agricultural. A.  Yours are getting ecclesiastical. Let’s stick to weeds. G.  Fine. But there is a question I want to ask on the walk. A.  Ask it, before the Schools ask it of you. G.  Zimara indexes Aristotle and Averroes. But Averroes wrote in Arabic. A.  “Almost,” yes. G.  So what is Zimara indexing, really? A.  Latin Averroes. The Averroes Oxford can tolerate. G.  So the Tabula is already a translation of a translation. A.  And that should make you feel at home. G.  It does. Because our job is also a translation: from Greek into exam English. A.  And from exam English into something the student can say without blushing. G.  You’re admitting we delucidate. A.  I’m admitting we tidy. There’s a difference. G.  What’s the difference? A.  Delucidating sounds like bringing light. Tidying sounds like removing rubbish. The result can look the same, but the moral posture is different. G.  Zimara is light. We are rubbish? A.  We are the people who keep the rubbish from calling itself light. G.  That is almost profound. A.  Don’t encourage it. G.  But take “any member of the university.” It’s a democratic phrase. A.  It’s a recruitment phrase. G.  It’s also a warning: “any member” includes dons who will attend and then correct you. A.  That’s the real examination. G.  So the Schools are just the stage. A.  Precisely. And you’re carrying your own scenery. G.  I could read the whole title aloud at the start. A.  Please don’t. G.  Why not? A.  Because then someone will ask what “dilucidationum” means, and you will begin a lecture about Latin, and we will never reach Aristotle. G.  I can answer simply: “clarifications.” A.  And then you will add: “clarifications of dicta,” and then you will add: “and dicta is not dicta,” and then we will be dead. G.  You’re saying the safest course is to be obscure. A.  I’m saying the safest course is to be brief. G.  Quantity, not Manner. A.  Both. But especially not the manner you adopt when you’re pleased with a book. G.  I’m not pleased with the book. I’m pleased with the phrase “Marci Antonii filius.” A.  You’ve smuggled that in again. G.  It makes me think: we should put “Aristotelis filii” on the Gazette notice. A.  It already does. “Any member of the university” means: any child of the university who can’t manage without nurses. G.  That’s perfectly nasty. A.  It’s Oxford. Now here we are—look. The Schools. G.  It’s odd. They built a cathedral for examinations and now we walk in with a Renaissance index as if it were a hymn book. A.  And we call it a “class.” G.  Open to “any member of the university.” A.  Yes. G.  So what shall we do first? A.  Weed. G.  Delucidate. A.  Fine. Weed by delucidation. G.  And if anyone asks why? A.  Tell them: because Aristotle is compulsory, and understanding is optional. G.  That’s your punchline? A.  No. Mine is: if they want illumination, they should try the Divinity School—this place only does marking.Grice: Caro Zimara, ho appena sfogliato i Commentaria in Aristotelis (Venezia, Tacuino) e mi è venuta voglia di chiederti se anche tu, tra una glossa e l’altra, lasciavi apposta qualcosa non detto. Zimara: Professore, a Venezia l’inchiostro costa e l’Aristotele non finisce mai, quindi si sottintende con eleganza e si lascia al lettore il lavoro sporco. Grice: Appunto: io direi che lì nasce la ragione conversazionale, perché il lettore capisce ciò che intendi proprio riconoscendo che intendevi farlo capire. Zimara: Cosi bella implicatura, Grice! Zimara, Marc’Antonio (1537). Marci Antonii Zimarae Tabula dilucidationum in dictis Aristotelis et Auerrois. Opus iam diu expectatum, et nunc primum summa diligentia in lucem editum. Venetiis: Octavianus Scotus.

Teofilo Zimara (Galatina, Lecce, Pugglia). Compared with Grice, Teofilo Zimara belongs to a radically different intellectual ecology. Institutionally, Grice is easy to place. He is a fully modern Oxford philosopher: Fellow and Tutor at St John’s, then CUF University Lecturer, working inside the tutorial system, the lecture circuit, the faculty, and the postwar professional world of analytic philosophy. His authority is tied to a recognisable academic machinery: college fellowship, tutorials, public lectures, examinations, and participation in a highly self-conscious philosophical community. Zimara is different in two related ways. First, he belongs to the Renaissance and post-scholastic Aristotelian commentary world, not to the twentieth-century professional philosophy department. Second, his significance is less that of an autonomous “original theorist” in the modern sense than that of a transmitter, organiser, and interpreter within a learned tradition. If Grice’s setting is the Oxford common room, the tutorial, the faculty seminar, and the BPhil lecture, Zimara’s is the commentary tradition, the printed apparatus, the doctrinal school, the transmission of Aristotelian psychology through editions, glosses, and pedagogic ordering. In that sense, the comparison is not between two professors of the same type, but between two different civilisations of philosophy. That difference matters because it illuminates two distinct models of intelligibility. Grice’s model is conversational, inferential, and public. Meaning is not simply attached to signs by convention or by doctrinal inheritance. Rather, what a speaker means is constituted through a complex recognitional structure: the speaker intends the hearer to recognise an intention, and to let that recognition serve as a reason for uptake. Meaning is therefore a rationally accountable achievement between persons. Even when what is meant outruns what is explicitly said, the surplus remains, in principle, reconstructible through intention, context, and cooperative rationality. The Zimara line, by contrast, represents an older stabilisation of intelligibility. In a scholastic-Aristotelian environment, understanding is secured less by the live negotiation of intention between interlocutors and more by insertion into an already ordered explanatory system: faculties of the soul, species, cognition, signa, powers, acts, commentary traditions, distinctions inherited from Aristotle and his interpreters. Here the central question is not first, what does this speaker now mean in this exchange, but rather, how is this proposition or doctrine to be placed within a stable architecture of interpretation. That is why your comparison through inheritance is so suggestive. In Zimara, especially with the father-son motif and the De anima apparatus, transmission itself becomes philosophically emblematic. Philosophy persists through continuity of scaffolding: the same problems, the same text, the same faculty psychology, re-edited, glossed, indexed, retaught. The relation between father and son mirrors the relation between commentary and source, tradition and rearticulation. The very title Theophili Zymarae, Marci Antonii filius says this openly. It presents authority genealogically before any argument begins. The son appears already situated within an inherited structure of legitimacy. Grice’s world is almost the inverse. For him, inherited material remains inert unless reanimated in rational exchange. Aristotle, scholastic psychology, or any other doctrine becomes philosophically live only when speakers and hearers can use it in a practice of giving and taking reasons. Tradition does not itself guarantee understanding. It supplies material, distinctions, vocabulary, perhaps even forms of life. But meaning occurs only when those materials are activated within a communicative economy of recognised intentions and rational inference. So one might put the contrast very sharply. Zimara represents intelligibility as doctrinally scaffolded. Grice represents intelligibility as conversationally achieved. That does not mean Zimara lacks conversation altogether. Rather, the “conversation” there is stretched across generations, schools, and editions. It is diachronic rather than immediately dialogical. It is the long conversation of tradition, not the moment-to-moment exchange of recognitional intentions. Grice’s conversational reason is a mechanism. Zimara’s is a continuity. This also explains why the paternal motif in your Bodleian vignette is philosophically rich rather than merely comic. “Marci Antonii filius” is not just a biographical ornament. It marks a world in which authority and intelligibility are socially and genealogically mediated. The father’s name functions almost as a doctrinal credential. In Gricean terms, one could say that the title page carries an implicature: take this work as already warranted by lineage and apparatus. Grice, of course, would find that both funny and revealing, because it shows how much social meaning can be compressed into what looks like bare designation. The Oxford comparison then becomes even sharper. At Oxford, titles like Scholar, Fellow, Tutor, Lecturer, Commoner, President are institutional signals, but they do not by themselves settle philosophical content. They shape expectations, to be sure, and Grice is exquisitely sensitive to that social signalling. But the final warrant still lies in what can be argued, recognised, and rationally followed in conversation. In the Zimara world, by contrast, institutional and genealogical markers are more deeply fused with the transmission of content itself. Apparatus, lineage, and commentary are not external to philosophy. They are among its very conditions of intelligibility. So if you ask how Grice compares to Zimara, I would say this. Grice is the philosopher of living rational uptake between interlocutors. Zimara is the philosopher, or at least the representative, of inherited rational architecture. Grice explains how meaning works when minds meet in conversation. Zimara shows how meaning persists when minds are trained within tradition. And that is why your contrast is valuable: it reveals two forms of philosophical life, one centred on public recognitional reason, the other on transmitted interpretive order. If you want, I can now do one of three things, still entirely in chat and in plain English prose. I can compress this into a single polished scholarly paragraph. I can expand it into a denser mini-essay focused on De anima, commentary, and scholastic intelligibility. I can also revise the Grice-Zimara dialogue so that it sounds more historically exact and less anachronistically modern.Grice’s theory of reason-based conversational meaning makes uptake essentially inferential and normative: what a speaker means is fixed not by a sign’s bare association, but by a complex intention that the hearer recognize the speaker’s intention and let that recognition function as a reason for response; hence the heart of meaning lies in a public, rationally accountable route from what is said to what is meant. Set against this, the Zimara line (Marcantonio Zimara of Galatina as the well-known Aristotelian apparatus-maker, and Teofilo as the heir who “noted what counted most” in De anima) represents a different, older way of grounding intelligibility: the scholastic-Aristotelian project treats meaning as stabilized by doctrinal architectures—faculties of the soul, cognition, signa, and the ordered commentary tradition—so that “understanding” is primarily secured by belonging to a system of explanation rather than by the moment-to-moment rational negotiation between interlocutors. The contrast is instructive for your motif of philosophical inheritance: where Zimara’s father-to-son transmission models philosophy as continuity of interpretive scaffolding (the same De anima problems re-edited, re-indexed, and re-taught), Grice’s model treats even inherited materials as inert until they are re-animated in a conversational economy where reasons are exchanged, intentions are recognized, and implicatures are responsibly drawn. In that sense, Zimara’s “conversation across generations” is a metaphor for tradition’s persistence, while Grice’s conversational reason is a mechanism: it explains how any tradition, including Aristotelian psychology, becomes communicatively live only when participants can be counted on to derive what is meant by tracking the rational point of what is said.Grice: “I was surprised to learn that the son of my former pupil, Strawson, ALSO became a philosopher – mine, obsessed with the Ashmolean, was into museum studies! However, it is not that rare for a philosopher to spawn another philosopher. I can think of Z., whom every Italian knows as an Aristotelian, and only historians of Italian philosophy know as the father of the noted academic – Teofilo!”. “Like Galen re: Strawson, Teofilo re: Z. noted what counted most, and edited DE ANIMA!” Filosofo italiano. Figlio di Marc’Antonio Zimara. Grice, “Marc’antonio e tutti gli Zimara. G.  You know what I’ve found in the Bodley? A title that looks like it was written by a man afraid his author might be mislaid. S.  That is most titles, if you mean it strictly. G.  No, listen. Theophili Zymarae, Marci Antonii filius, In libros tres Aristotelis De anima commentarii: cum indice copiosissimo. Venetiis: apud Iuntas, 1584. S.  You’re enjoying the “Marci Antonii filius.” G.  I am pausing for it, yes. “Marci Antonii filius.” As if the book itself were a son brought into Hall to be introduced. S.  Or as if the son were brought into print to be excused. G.  Excused from what? S.  From being unknown. “Filius” is a credential. The way a tie can be a credential. G.  I have a tie and no father in the title. S.  Then you are over-dressed for your anonymity. G.  I think it’s comic. It’s the Oxford habit in Latin: you make the relation do the work. S.  You mean like “Scholar of Corpus Christi College”? G.  Precisely. “Scholar” is my Marci Antonii. I am a son of the endowment. S.  Whereas I am merely a commoner. No filius, no scholarship, no apparatus. G.  You’re a commoner in the way a donkey is a commoner: the college still expects you to carry things. S.  Yes, but nobody prints “S., Commoner of Corpus” on a title-page. G.  They might, if you wrote an index. S.  I could write an index and still not become anyone’s son. G.  The Zimara has a father and an index. It is the perfect apparatus. S.  What do you mean by “apparatus”? G.  Index, gloss, commentary, the whole scholastic machinery. An author with a father is like a text with footnotes: it comes with built-in authority. S.  So the “filius” is a footnote to the man. G.  Or the man is a footnote to the father. S.  That’s rather brutal, even for Latin. G.  Latin is designed for brutality with manners. S.  And you are reading this to me as if it were a joke. G.  It is a joke with a moral. It makes me think of the Wesleys. S.  Which ones? G.  Samuel Wesley at Exeter, and his son at Lincoln. S.  Samuel was Oxford educated? G.  Exeter College. A “poor scholar,” if you like the phrasing. S.  That’s already a “filius” move: “poor scholar” means you are allowed in, but only as a kind of conditional. G.  Exactly. And then John Wesley—Fellow of Lincoln College. S.  So the father is Exeter, the son is Lincoln, and the shared surname is the bridge. G.  And the father is proud of the son’s fellowship, because the son’s Oxford status retroactively polishes the father’s. S.  Whereas with Zimara the son’s title polishes the father’s by carrying his name. G.  Or the father polishes the son’s by lending his. S.  I see why you paused. It’s like announcing a pedigree at a dog show. G.  Except the dog is Aristotle’s De anima. S.  That is an insult to Aristotle. G.  It is a compliment to dog shows. They are very clear about lineage. S.  So what do you mean, exactly, when you say “commoner,” if we’re doing Oxford pedantry? G.  You mean what the word is doing, not what it says. S.  Yes. You keep telling people that is the point. G.  A commoner is a man whose presence is not guaranteed by endowment. He pays; therefore he must justify himself by performance. S.  And a scholar is a man whose presence is guaranteed by endowment; therefore he must justify himself by not disgracing it. G.  Nicely put. You see, you are perfectly capable of being philosophical without a scholarship. S.  But it would be better if I could say “S., G.’s filius.” G.  You are not my son. S.  Not biologically. Academically. G.  Oxford does not allow that sort of adoption. It prefers to adopt you by giving you a room and then charging you for coal. S.  What about the public-school slang you mentioned? G.  You said yesterday “filius” sounded like “fill us.” S.  That is not slang; that is hunger. G.  It is Corpus in Hilary, which is the same thing. S.  But you meant some Shropshire thing. G.  I meant that you, being a commoner, have the freedom to be vulgar about Latin. I, being a scholar, must be reverent even when amused. S.  So your reverence is a kind of scholarship tax. G.  Precisely. The scholar is required to pretend the apparatus is solemn. S.  And the commoner is allowed to say, “Why does he need to advertise his father?” G.  And you have said it. S.  Yes. Why does he? G.  Because in some places the father is your qualification. In ours, the scholarship is. S.  In Wesley’s case, the son’s Oxford position becomes part of the father’s story. In Zimara’s case, the father’s name becomes part of the son’s title. G.  That’s the symmetry. Now, what’s the difference? S.  The Wesley “Exeter” and “Lincoln” are institutions. Zimara’s father is a person. G.  And Oxford likes institutions more than persons, because institutions do not die at inconvenient moments. S.  Yet persons are what you philosophers claim to be studying. G.  Only when we’re not being examined. S.  You’re reading a title-page like it’s a viva. G.  Title-pages are examinations. They test whether you will accept the authority cues. S.  I fail, then. I keep laughing at “Marci Antonii filius.” G.  You don’t fail. You merely refuse to be intimidated. S.  That is easy when you have nothing to lose. G.  You have everything to lose. You have only your mind. That is what commoners trade in. S.  Scholars trade in endowments and Latin. G.  Scholars trade in being seen to deserve endowments and Latin. S.  So the “filius” is like a scholarship: a signal that one belongs before one has spoken. G.  Yes. And like all such signals, it invites suspicion. S.  Does it? G.  Only in people who are paying attention. “Why is he telling me this?” is the beginning of thought. S.  So you are saying the title-page has implicature. G.  The title-page is one long implicature: “Trust me.” S.  And “my father is trustworthy.” G.  Or “my father is known, therefore I may be treated as known.” S.  Whereas the Wesley case is “my son is known, therefore I may be treated as having produced something.” G.  You are getting it. S.  It is still funny. G.  It is funny in the dry way that pedigree is funny: it is serious and yet obviously a social contrivance. S.  Like being “Scholar” and “Commoner.” G.  Like that. The only difference is that Oxford writes ours in the buttery book, not in Latin on a Renaissance title-page. S.  Would you like yours in Latin? G.  Herbertus Paulus Grice, Scholaris Corporis Christi. S.  Add “Cliftonensis filius.” G.  No. That would make Clifton my father, which is ungrateful to Birmingham. S.  So you will keep your fathers off the title-page. G.  I will keep them where Oxford keeps them: in the presuppositions. S.  And I will keep laughing at “Marci Antonii filius.” G.  Good. Laughter is sometimes the only way of signalling you’ve understood the social meaning without submitting to it. S.  So what do you mean by “understood,” exactly? G.  That you recognised the intention: “take this as authoritative,” and you chose not to take it that way. S.  That sounds almost like your future theory. G.  Don’t be obscene. It’s only 1932.Grice: Caro Zimara, ogni volta che penso alla tradizione aristotelica italiana, il tuo nome, insieme a quello di tuo padre Marc’Antonio, spicca sempre come punto di riferimento imprescindibile. Mi incuriosisce sapere: come hai vissuto il passaggio di questa eredità filosofica da padre in figlio? Zimara: Grazie, Grice! In effetti, crescere con Marc’Antonio come padre è stato come vivere tra le pagine di Aristotele e i corridoi della scuola di Padova. Ho sempre percepito la filosofia non solo come studio, ma come una conversazione continua, che si rinnova di generazione in generazione. Grice: Interessante! Mi piace la tua idea di conversazione filosofica che attraversa il tempo. So che ti sei dedicato molto all'“anima”, seguendo le orme di tuo padre. C’è qualcosa che credi di aver reinterpretato o innovato nel dialogo con il suo insegnamento? Zimara: Sicuramente! Ho cercato, ad esempio, di dare maggiore spazio all’esperienza e alla dimensione interiore dell’anima, integrando la lezione aristotelica con le nuove questioni che il Rinascimento ci offre. Del resto, come dicevi tu, la filosofia è sempre una conversazione… che continua, anche oltre i confini della famiglia! Zimara, Teofilo (1584). Theophili Zymarae, Marci Antonii filius, In libros tres Aristotelis De anima commentarii: cum indice copiosissimo. Venezia: apud Iuntas.

Giovanni Zini (Firenze, Toscana): Compared with Grice, Giovanni Zini belongs to a quite different intellectual and institutional world. Grice was fully embedded in the Oxford professional-philosophical structure. Fellow and Tutor at St John’s placed him inside the college tutorial system, where philosophy was taught through weekly essays, close argument, and disciplined conversational exchange. His position as CUF University Lecturer then added the broader university role: public lectures, faculty-wide teaching obligations, and visibility within the institutional machinery of Oxford philosophy. So Grice’s authority was both collegiate and university-wide, and it was exercised through the characteristic Oxonian forms of philosophical life: tutorial, lecture, seminar, examination, and faculty conversation. Zini, by contrast, is not best understood on the model of the Oxford analytic don. He belongs more to the Florentine and Italian moral-political-philosophical tradition in which philosophy remains closely tied to civic thought, intellectual history, justice, law, and ethical culture. Even if one calls him part of a scuola di Firenze or a wider filosofia toscana, the comparison with Grice is not one of equivalent institutional rank but of different cultural location. Grice is a professional philosopher of ordinary language and rational communication in a highly formalized British academic setting. Zini is a thinker of justice, morality, social life, and the relation between law and value within a broader Italian intellectual horizon. This difference in institutional setting helps explain the difference in their conceptions of reason. For Grice, reason is conversational, recognitional, and public. A speaker means something by intending the hearer to recognize an intention and to let that recognition guide uptake. Meaning is thus anchored in a rationally structured, mutually monitorable exchange. Even implicature remains in principle reconstructible: one can explain why the hearer was entitled to infer more than was literally said. Zini helps pressure that model from a different side. His concern with justice, moral obligation, punishment, distribution, liberty, equality, and the relation between legal order and ethical legitimacy pushes us toward the question of what sort of normativity underwrites those public reasons. If Grice gives the micro-mechanics of how reasons circulate in conversation, Zini asks what sort of justice or authority those reasons are answerable to. That is why your formula iussum quia iustum versus iustum quia iussum is so useful here. In one direction, something is commanded because it is just. In the other, it is treated as just because it is commanded. Zini’s thought lives very naturally at that intersection. He is occupied by the relation between the moral and the legal, between ius as enacted norm and justice as a value that may either ground or contest enacted normativity. Grice does not directly theorize justice in that historical-moral register, but his account of conversational reason becomes highly relevant once one sees that public discourse about law, obligation, and legitimacy depends on speakers and hearers treating one another’s claims as reason-giving rather than merely causally effective. So the philosophical comparison could be put like this. Grice explains how, in actual discourse, interlocutors communicate explicit and implicit content by relying on shared expectations of rational cooperation. Zini foregrounds the substantive normative question of whether the reasons publicly exchanged in legal and moral discourse derive their force from command, from justice, or from some unstable interaction between the two. That is why Zini can be read as supplying something Grice’s theory needs if it is not to remain merely a psychology of uptake. Grice tells us how a hearer can reasonably infer that a speaker is pressing, insinuating, cancelling, or contesting a norm. Zini helps explain why those norms are philosophically fraught in the first place, especially in contexts where justice and law do not coincide. In this sense, Grice and Zini are complementary rather than rival. Grice gives the rational pragmatics of normative discourse. Zini gives the moral-political substance that makes such discourse matter. And your contrast between malum in se and malum prohibitum, or between iussum quia iustum and iustum quia iussum, sharpens the point beautifully. Grice can explain how speakers conversationally negotiate such distinctions, for example by implicating that a law lacks moral legitimacy, or by cancelling the assumption that legality suffices for justice. Zini, meanwhile, supplies the thematic and historical gravity of the distinction itself. If you like, I can now do one of three things, still only in chat and in plain English prose. I can compress this into one polished scholarly paragraph. I can expand it into a denser mini-essay with a stronger focus on ius, justice, and the moral versus the legal. I can also revise your fictional Grice-Zini dialogue so that the voices sound more historically and philosophically distinct.la ragione conversazionale del ivstvm qvia, il ⸠, il ivssvm, la la scuola di Firenze, la filosofia fiorentina, la filosofia toscana, la filosofia italiana. ivs, ivstvm quia ivssvm, the moral and the legal. Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning treats what is meant as anchored in a recognitional structure: the speaker intends the hearer to arrive at some response (typically belief), intends the hearer to recognize that intention, and intends that this recognition function as the hearer’s reason for uptake; implicature is then the surplus the hearer is rationally entitled to infer given cooperative expectations. Zini (Firenze, 1868–Pollone, 1937), though writing in moral and political philosophy rather than pragmatics, usefully foregrounds the normative axis that Grice’s picture needs in order to be more than psychology: in Giustizia. Storia d’una idea (Torino, Fratelli Bocca, 1907) he reconstructs justice as both idea and emotion and then as a problem of distribution, liberty versus equality, merit, and reparative punishment, while in earlier ethical work such as Il pentimento e la morale ascetica (Torino, Bocca, 1902) he treats moral life as structured by obligations that feel internally binding yet are historically and socially articulated. Read through your iustum quia iussum / iussum quia iustum contrast, Zini’s concern is the interface between the moral and the legal ius, precisely the territory where Grice’s “reason” can be seen as normative rather than merely causal: for Grice, conversational force succeeds when recognition supplies a reason for belief, but in legal-moral talk that reason is often contested as to whether it derives from command or from antecedent justice; Zini supplies the thematic pressure showing why this matters, while Grice supplies the micro-mechanics explaining how such pressure is negotiated in conversation—how speakers can insinuate, contest, or cancel the “just because commanded” reading via implicatures that an audience is entitled to draw only insofar as the exchange remains governed by publicly recognizable reasons. Grice: “Like me, Z. is interested in the Graeco-Roman concept of ‘ius.’ Saggi: Proprietà individuale e proprietà collettiva, Torino, Bocca, Il pentimento e la morale ascetica, Torino, Bocca; Giustizia: storia d’una idea – cfr. Grice on ‘justice’ in Thrasymachus – Torino, Bocca, -- cf. Grice, “Justice in Plato’s Republic,” “Social justice,” The Grice Papers --; La morale al bivio, Torino, Bocca, La doppia maschera dell'universo: filosofia del tempo e dello spazio, Torino, Bocca, Il congresso dei morti, Roma, Partito comunista d'Italia, ed. con introduzione di Bergami e prefazione di Nesi, Calabritto, Mattia e Fortunato; Poesia e verità, Milano, Corbaccio, I fratelli nemici: dialoghi e miti,, La tragedia del proletariato in Italia: diario, prefazione di Bergami, Milano, Feltrinelli, Appunti di vita torinese, Firenze, Olschki, Pagine di vita torinese: note del diario, Torino, Centro studi piemontesi. Grice enjoyed Z.’s approach. “Z.’s philosophy on justice is divided in six parts. The first is on the real and the ideal -- il reale e l’ideale --; the second is “la giustizia come idea ed emozione” -- fairness as idea and as emotion --; the third, “i frutti del lavoro e la loro distribuzione scondo giustizia,” The fruits of labour and their distribution according to fairness; the fourth is “Libertà od egualiglianza”.  Grice: “An apt way to describe the underlying conceptual difference between "malum in se" and "malum prohibitum" is "iussum quia iustum" and "iustum quia iussum", namely something that is commanded (iussum) because it is just (iustum) and something that is just (iustum) because it is commanded (iussum). In symbols: ivstvm ⸠ ivssvm. Ius, iustum quia iussum, justice from Plato to Z.: the history of an idea, alla Berlin. Grice: Caro Zini, mi rendo conto ogni volta che parliamo che la nostra formazione classica rende trasparentissimo per entrambi il significato di “IVSTVM QVIA IVSSVM”—una distinzione che, ahimè, viene ignorata dai barbari di Vadum Boum! Tu non trovi che sia proprio la nostra educazione a farci cogliere la sottigliezza tra il morale e il legale? Z.: Grice, hai perfettamente ragione! Chi non ha respirato il latino e il greco fin da giovane, spesso non percepisce quanto sia profonda la differenza tra ciò che è giusto perché comandato e ciò che è comandato perché giusto. “IVSTVM QVIA IVSSVM” non è solo una formula; è la chiave di volta della nostra tradizione filosofica fiorentina e italiana. Grice: Eppure, ogni volta che cerco di spiegare questa distinzione ai miei colleghi d’oltre Manica, mi guardano come se parlassi in enigmi. Forse manca loro quel senso del reale e dell’ideale che la scuola di Firenze ha sempre coltivato: la giustizia come idea ed emozione, come tu hai splendidamente illustrato nei tuoi saggi. Zini: È vero, Grice! La nostra tradizione insegna che la filosofia non è mai solo teoria, ma esperienza vissuta. “IVSTVM QVIA IVSSVM” è il cuore pulsante della storia della giustizia, e solo chi sa leggere tra le righe del diritto romano riesce davvero a comprenderne la portata. Siamo fortunati ad avere occhi “educati” per coglierne ogni sfumatura! Zini, Giovanni (1925). Filosofia e società. Milano: Hoepli.

Elémire Zolla (Torino, Piemnote). The comparison is promising because it isolates a real contrast between two different models of how meaning exceeds what is explicitly said. At the institutional level first: Grice and Zolla are not really comparable in the same academic register. Grice was a professional Oxford philosopher in the strict postwar analytic sense: Fellow and Tutor at St John’s, then CUF University Lecturer, moving within the tutorial, lecture, and seminar structures of Oxford philosophy. Zolla, by contrast, although intellectually formidable and deeply learned, belongs more to the Italian essayistic, literary, comparative-religious, and speculative tradition than to a narrowly professionalized academic philosophy of the Oxford type. He is closer to the figure of the European man of letters, cultural morphologist, and hermeneut of symbols than to the Oxford analyst of concepts and ordinary language. So, if Grice’s institutional habitat is the common room, the tutorial, the analysis seminar, Zolla’s is the essay, the spiritual-intellectual itinerary, the learned meditation on myth, esotericism, and civilization. That difference in institutional placement matters because it helps explain the divergence in their conceptions of reason. Grice’s idea of conversational reason is public, procedural, and recognitional. Meaning is generated in a space where speaker and hearer are mutually accountable to rational expectations. A speaker means something by getting the hearer to recognize an intention, and implicature works because both parties assume a shared discipline of cooperation. The hearer is licensed to infer more than what is said because discourse is governed by reason-responsive norms. Even when the implicit exceeds the explicit, it does so in a way that remains in principle reconstructible. One can ask: what did he mean, why was I entitled to infer that, what maxim or expectation made that inference reasonable? This is why Grice remains a philosopher of civilized public intelligibility, even at his most subtle. Zolla’s “reason,” if one may still call it that without qualification, is much less public in this sense. It is not primarily the rationality of mutual recognition in ordinary conversation, but the rationality of initiation, symbolic correspondence, and inner transformation. In the catabatic material, especially around Enea’s descent to the underworld, understanding is not simply a matter of decoding what is said plus drawing warranted inferences from cooperative premises. It is a matter of becoming the sort of person who can undergo the descent and therefore hear symbolically. Meaning is not simply inferred; it is undergone. The hearer is not just a decoder but a participant in an itinerary of transformation. This is why your contrast between Grice and Zolla works especially well through the katabasis motif. For Grice, “go to hell” can be analysed in terms of force, speaker’s intention, tone, occasion, implicature, perhaps jocular inversion if used affectionately. Its meaning is recoverable through the ordinary machinery of conversational interpretation. For Zolla, by contrast, descent into hell is not reducible to force plus implicature. It becomes an archetypal and initiatory figure: not merely a thing said, but an event of passage. The utterance would matter less as a conversational move than as a summons to transformation. In a Gricean frame the question is: what content is conveyed beyond the literal sentence? In a Zollian frame the question is: what symbolic itinerary is being enacted, and what interior reconfiguration does this require? So the sharpest contrast might be put this way. Grice explains how additional meaning is generated from ordinary discourse under the assumption of rational cooperation. Zolla explores forms of meaning in which discourse points beyond ordinary public intelligibility toward symbolic, esoteric, or initiatory structures that do not primarily seek common conversational uptake. That, I think, is the deepest philosophical difference. There is also a secondary but important difference in style of rationality. Grice’s rationality is discursive, analytic, and economy-governed. It values recoverability, explicit conditions, and the possibility of reconstructing why a hearer was justified in taking an utterance as meaning more than it literally said. Zolla’s rationality is analogical, morphologic, and contemplative. It values correspondences, archetypes, spiritual morphologies, and the reorganization of perception itself. In Grice the hearer reasons from evidence furnished by discourse. In Zolla the hearer may have to be altered by mythic form before discourse can truly be heard. This is why your phrase “conversational reason” is apt for Grice but only partially apt for Zolla. If one wants to compare them fairly, one might say that Zolla also believes in reason, but not in the same register. His is not the civility of publicly shareable reasons among conversational partners. It is rather an esoteric or symbolic reason, one that organizes experience through traditional figures, myths, archetypes, and powers of the soul. That makes him less a theorist of conversation than a theorist of spiritual hermeneutics. There is also a good historical-cultural way to phrase the contrast. Grice belongs to a postwar Oxonian effort to save rationality from both crude formalism and irrationalism by grounding it in ordinary discourse and intention-sensitive communication. Zolla belongs to a twentieth-century Italian attempt to recover forms of sacred, symbolic, and traditional intelligence against the flattening effects of modern secular rationalization. So Grice refines ordinary intelligibility; Zolla seeks to reopen vertical intelligibility. If you want, I can now do one of three things in chat only. I can turn this into a compact comparative paragraph in a more polished scholarly style. I can expand it into a longer mini-essay with references to specific Zolla titles you listed. I can help you refine the fictional Grice-Zolla exchange so that their voices are more distinct philosophically and less merely decorative.Per Z. la ragione conversazionale e nececessaria nella discesa d’Enea all’Ade. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats what is meant as an achievement of rational, mutually recognizable intention: a speaker means p by an utterance only if she intends the hearer to arrive at some response (typically belief), intends the hearer to recognize that intention, and intends that this recognition function as the hearer’s reason for the response; implicature, on this model, is the disciplined surplus the hearer is entitled to infer from what is said plus the assumption of cooperative rationality. Z., by contrast, is attracted to the point at which discourse strains against its own surface and requires initiation rather than mere decoding: in Catàbasi e anàstasi. Discesa nell’Ade e resurrezione (Tallone, Alpignano) and in the later collection Discesa all’Ade e resurrezione (Adelphi), where Catabasi e anastasi forms the nucleus, the descent motif (Enea’s katabasis among others) functions as a hermeneutic and spiritual itinerary in which what matters is not only what an utterance licenses one to infer, but the symbolic passage by which the hearer is transformed into someone capable of hearing at all; the “reason” in Z. is therefore less the public, conversational reason of recognitional intentions and more an esoteric rationality of correspondences, archetypes, and interior “powers” (Le potenze dell’anima, Bompiani, 1968) that reorganize the self’s uptake. The comparison thus sharpens a limit: Grice explains how ordinary talk reliably generates additional content because interlocutors treat one another’s moves as reason-responsive and intention-guided, whereas Z. thematizes cases where meaning is deliberately routed through mythic and ritual structures (catabasis, tradition, esoterico) that do not primarily aim at ordinary, shareable reasons but at a staged conversion of perspective—so that “vai all’inferno,” in a Z. key, is less a recoverable conversational implicature than a symbolic instruction whose point is the descent itself. Saggi: Etica e estetica, Spaziani, Torino, L’eclissi dell'intellettuale, Bompiani, Milano, Volgarità e dolore, Bompiani, Milano, Le origini del trascendentalismo, Storia e letteratura, Roma, Storia del fantasticare, Bompiani, Milano, Le potenze dell'anima: morfologia dello spirito nella storia della cultura, anatomia dell'uomo spirituale-- cf. Grice, “the power structure of the soul” -- Bompiani, Milano; Il letterato e lo sciamano, Che cos'è la tradizione romana?, Le meraviglie della natura: introduzione all'alchimia, Bompiani, Milano, Archetipi, Marsilio, Venezia; L'androg-gino: l'umana nostalgia dell'interezza, Red, Como, GIOVE ANDROGINO; Incontro con l'andro-gino: l'esperienza della completezza sessuale, GIOVE ANDROGINO, Como Aure: i luoghi e i riti, Marsilio, Venezia, L'amante invisibile: l'erotica sciamanica nelle religioni, nella letteratura e nella legittimazione politica, Marsilio, Venezia, Sincretismo, Guida, Napoli; Verità segrete esposte in evidenza: sincretismo e fantasia, contemplazione e l’esoterico, Marsilio, Venezia; Discorsi metafisici, Guida, Napoli; Uscite dal mondo, Adelphi, Milano; La luce; La ricerca del sacro, Tallone, Alpignano Ioan Petru Culianu, Tallone, Alpignano, Lo stupore infantile, Adelphi, Milano; Le tre vie, Adelphi, Milan; Un destino itinerante: conversazioni tra oriente ed occidente, Marsilio, Venezia; La nube del telaio: RAZIONALITA e irrazionalità tra oriente ed occidente, Mondadori, Milano; La filosofia perenne: incontro fra oriente ed occidente, Mondadori, Milano; Catabasi e anastasi, Tallone, Alpignano; La discesa d’ENEA all'Ade – VIRGILIO; La ri-surrezione di BACCO; Minuetto all'inferno, Einaudi, Torino. Fantasticare, Bacco, la discesa d’Enea all’Ade, escatologia, la tradizione italica, la tradizione romana.  Grice: Carissimo Z., lasciami confessarti una piccola eccentricità: da quando lessi per la prima volta, a Clifton, la catabasi di Enea nell'Ade, ho sempre trovato irresistibile usare l'espressione "vai all'inferno" come un vero complimento tra i corridoi di Vadum Boum! Per me, è quasi un elogio: attraversare l’Ade significa esplorare la profondità dell’esistenza, proprio come Enea.  Z,: Grice, che meraviglia sentire questa tua interpretazione! La catabasi, nella tradizione veneziana e italiana, non è mai semplice caduta: è viaggio iniziatico, discesa all’interno di sé e della storia. Enea ci insegna che il senso si trova proprio nell’oscurità, e che l’inferno può diventare luogo di conoscenza, quasi una scuola dello spirito.  Grice: Esatto, Z.! È proprio ciò che mi affascina della tua filosofia, tra etica, estetica e fantasticare: quella capacità di scorgere archetipi e potenze dell’anima nei miti, nella letteratura e persino nella tradizione romana. Quando a Vadum Boum qualcuno mi dice "vai all'inferno", sento che mi invita a una catabasi personale, a cercare la verità segreta tra le ombre.  Z.: Ecco la bellezza del pensiero italiano, Grice: trasformare il viaggio nell’Ade in un minuetto all’inferno, dove persino la volgarità e il dolore hanno un loro splendore. La filosofia è un andare e venire tra luce e tenebra; e il nostro dialogo, come la discesa di Enea, è sempre un incontro tra oriente e occidente, razionale e irrazionale, tradizione e innovazione. Zolla, Elémire (1932). La vita di Buddah.

Giovanni Battista Zoppi (Verona, Veneto). The comparison is looser than with the university philosophers you asked about earlier, because I do not see evidence that Giovanni Battista Zoppi held a role structurally like an Oxford fellowship plus university lectureship. The biographical notices I found present Giovanni Battista Zoppi chiefly as a Veronese Rosminian philosopher, civic intellectual, and prolific writer on Dante, Manzoni, grammar, and moral-religious education, with public offices in Verona rather than a clearly documented university chair analogous to Grice’s. [museodegli....verona.it], [istitutoveneto.it], [it.wikisource.org] So the clean institutional contrast is this: Grice was split across two formal Oxford levels: Fellow and Tutor at citeturn46search? in the collegiate system, and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy in the central university system. That means college office plus university office, tutorial teaching plus faculty lecturing. Zoppi so far looks more like a nineteenth-century public intellectual and man of letters in Verona, with civic and educational roles, not an Oxford-style don and not clearly a holder of a university chair on the evidence now in hand. [museodegli....verona.it], [istitutoveneto.it], [it.wikisource.org] If you want the philosophical-institutional comparison in one line: Grice’s authority is collegiate and university-wide at once, whereas Giovanni Battista Zoppi’s authority seems to be civic-literary and educational, rooted in Verona’s intellectual and public life rather than in a dual Oxford office. [museodegli....verona.it], [istitutoveneto.it], [it.wikisource.org] There is one useful positive comparison, though. Both are linked to teaching in a broad sense: Grice through tutorials and university lectures; Giovanni Battista Zoppi through school-oriented and educational writing, especially La filosofia della grammatica, explicitly subtitled “studi e memorie di un maestro di scuola.” That makes Zoppi’s intellectual persona pedagogical, but not in the same institutional form as Grice’s. [beweb.chie...ttolica.it], [museodegli....verona.it] So the shortest answer is: not very close institutionally. Grice is a modern Oxford academic with two formal offices. Giovanni Battista Zoppi, on current evidence, is better understood as a Rosminian philosopher, educational writer, and civic intellectual of Verona, not as the holder of an Oxford-comparable post. [museodegli....verona.it], [istitutoveneto.it], [it.wikisource.org] One bibliographical correction, too: the major grammar book by Giovanni Battista Zoppi is not 1865 but La filosofia della grammatica, first in 1884 and then in a revised 1891 edition. The 1865 work is Osservazioni sulla teorica della pena studiata in Dante. [beweb.chie...ttolica.it], [museodegli....verona.it] If you want, I can do one more pass focused only on whether Giovanni Battista Zoppi ever held a formal teaching appointment, so we can sharpen the comparison further.In Z. splende la filosofia della grammatica – citata da VAILATI!” Grice: “I hardly use the term ‘grammar.’ At Oxford, we would – as I do in the creation of my System G – speak of a GLOSSARY, FORMATION RULES, SYNTAX, and SEMANTICS --. This has been an interest of mine since I started giving joint seminars at Oxford with Strawson on ‘categories’ – since we can allege that there is something that we may call a ‘morpho-syntactical’ category – the old parts of speech --. It may be argued that ‘syntactical category’ quite does not do – and that ‘morpo-syntactical’ needs to be used – especially in very non-agglutinative languages like old Roman, or modern Italian. A grlimpse at a grammar of Italian will have the philosopher focusing on MORPHO-syntactical phenomena rather than SYNTACTICAL phenomena proper! Studiata nella storia della grammatica italiana, da un croceano. Tra i divulgatori della grammatica storica dell’italiano sono degni tra noi di menzione Fornaciari e Mattio, che sono preceduti fuori da Blanc, la cui “Gratnmatik der italienischen Sprachen” ha ancora un certo valore pella dottrina delle forme. Se la grammatica generale, non mai del tutto rassegnata a morire, giacque sotto i colpi e i sarcasmi della scienza della lingua, non mancarono tra noi tentativi d’una FILOSOFIA della GRAMMATICA – ragionata e razionale, ovviamente --, e notevole è quellodi Z. (citato da VAILATI), un rosminiano – ROSMINI  -- acuto quanto dotto e diligente e anche garbato espositore. Il quale crede appunto di costruire una scienza della grammatica col connubio della grammatica generale e della scienza positiva del linguaggio, inconsapevolmente ese- [T. ricorda il saggio di Starck, Grammar and Language, fondato sulla credenza che almeno i tre gruppi attuali e più importanti delle lingue indo-europee sono retti da comuni principi generali; e i numerosi saggi di Grasserie e particolarmente L’Essai de syntaxe generale.  Grice: Carissimo Z., permettimi subito di lodare la tua “filosofia della grammatica”, che ho letto con grande interesse e da cui ho tratto spunti preziosi per il mio System G. Devo confessare che, pur avendo affrontato il tema tra i corridoi severi di Vadum Boum, spesso sotto lo sguardo ironico del pedante massimo J. L. Austin, ho sempre trovato nella tua opera una chiarezza e una profondità che pochi possono vantare! Z.: Grice, le tue parole mi riempiono d’orgoglio! Sapere che la mia “filosofia della grammatica” abbia ispirato uno studioso raffinato come te, è per me motivo di grande soddisfazione. Non è facile difendere la grammatica contro i sarcasmi di certi accademici, ma come diceva Rosmini: “La verità trova sempre il suo cammino, anche tra le spine del dubbio.” Grice: È proprio vero, caro Zoppi! Nel mio percorso tra glossari, sintassi e semantica, ho spesso sentito la voce della tua riflessione filosofica guidarmi oltre i limiti imposti dalle convenzioni accademiche. Se la grammatica può essere intesa come dialogo tra teoria e pratica, tu hai saputo renderla viva, ragionata e razionale, come pochi in Italia. Zoppi: Grice, il tuo riconoscimento è per me come una ventata di aria fresca tra i tomi polverosi! La filosofia della grammatica, come l’italiano stesso, è fatta di eleganza e precisione. Se ho potuto dare un contributo, è grazie alla tradizione che ci unisce e alla passione per la ricerca. In fondo, la grammatica è il cuore pulsante del pensiero, e dialogare con te ne è la prova più bella! Zoppi, Giovanni Battista (1865). Osservazioni sulla teorica della pena studiata in Alighieri. Verona.

Girolamo Zoppio (Bologna, Emilia). The comparison is closer than with Melchiorre Zoppio, because Girolamo Zoppio also belongs to a recognisably academic world, but it is still not a straight office-for-office parallel. Grice’s Oxford arrangement is institutionally dual: college office plus university office so: Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means college membership, governance, and tutorial teaching within the college CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide teaching role beyond the college Girolamo Zoppio, by contrast, belongs to the late sixteenth-century Italian university-and-academy pattern: laureato in filosofia called to Macerata to teach rhetoric and poetry later teaching at Bologna and founder of the Accademia dei Catenati So the neat contrast is: Grice college fellow college tutor university lecturer working in a split Oxford system of college and university Girolamo Zoppio university teacher of rhetoric and poetry, later of the humanities academy founder public literary polemicist working in a more continuous humanist system where teaching, disputation, and literary controversy overlap That means Girolamo is not like Ludovico Zuccolo, who stands more outside the university frame; but he is also not like Grice in the very specific Oxford sense of combining fellowship, tutorial office, and university lectureship. The institutional difference matters. Grice’s authority comes from: tutorial teaching college fellowship university lectures faculty integration Girolamo Zoppio’s authority comes from: his university teaching at Macerata and Bologna his role in literary-philosophical controversy his status within an academy culture, especially the Accademia dei Catenati his publications as interventions in learned public debate So if you want the cleanest one-line formulation: Grice combines the specifically Oxford dual office of college tutor-fellow and university lecturer, whereas Girolamo Zoppio belongs to the older Italian model of university teacher and academy polemicist, less divided between college and university than Grice, and more embedded in the public culture of rhetoric, literary defence, and learned controversy. Philosophically, that fits your contrast very well. Grice’s institutional habitat encourages: small-group tutorial analysis fine distinctions the micro-mechanics of saying and meaning argument as disciplined conversational exchange Girolamo Zoppio’s habitat encourages: public disputation rhetorical and poetic defence academy conversation the macro-practice of learned controversy and authority formation So a slightly sharper version would be: Grice is an Oxford don in the full dual sense, college fellow-tutor and university lecturer; Girolamo Zoppio is an early modern university humanist and academy-founder, whose authority lies less in a dual institutional office than in the combined functions of teaching, disputing, and publishing within the civic-literary world of Bologna and Macerata. One small caution: the line “Zoppio, Girolamo (1554). Eneide. Bologna.” should be treated carefully unless you have direct bibliographical confirmation that this is the precise title and date you want to cite. For the institutional comparison, the safer basis is his documented teaching and academy role rather than a single title.Parla della ragione conversazionale nella filosofia italiana. Grice’s theory of reason-based conversational meaning makes the center of gravity neither “words” nor “topics” but a recognitional structure: S means p by an utterance only if S intends A to arrive at some response, intends A to recognize that intention, and intends that this recognition function as A’s reason for the response; implicature then becomes what a rational hearer is warranted in inferring from a speaker’s deliberate management of what is said under shared expectations of cooperative rational conduct. Read against this, Z. (Bologna; active at Macerata; founder of the Accademia dei Catenati) looks like an early-modern case-study in how intellectual life is actually organized around such reason-responsive uptake, because his polemical “defense” writings treat interpretation as a public contest in which speakers craft utterances to secure recognitions, concessions, and inferential allegiance from an audience: in Ragionamenti del signor Hieronimo Z. in difesa di Dante, et del Petrarca (Bologna, per Giovanni Rossi, 1583), framed as discourse within the Accademia dei Catenati, Z. praises Dante’s mimetic power over “costumi” and “affetti” across social kinds, and the very point of that praise is pragmatic—Dante’s greatness is shown by what readers are led to see, supply, and endorse beyond explicit statement. The subsequent exchange-cycle (Risposta alle opposizioni sanesi, Fermo, 1585; Particelle poetiche sopra Dante, Bologna; La poetica sopra Dante, Bologna, per Alessandro Benacci) makes the parallel sharper: Z.’s quarrel is not merely about propositions but about the rational governance of a learned conversation—what counts as a fair move, what counts as an admissible inference from Aristotle’s Poetics to Dante, and how a disputant can force an opponent’s hand without saying everything outright. Where Grice provides the explanatory micro-mechanics (recognition of intention as a reason), Z. supplies a historically thick macro-scene in which “ragione conversazionale” is enacted as scholastic-literary practice: a culture of academies and disputes where meaning is continually renegotiated, and where what “follows” from an utterance (praise, blame, legitimacy, authority) is precisely what matters. “Some like Z. (Melchiorre), but Z. (Girolamo) is MY man!” – Grice. Alighieri – the other Z. wrote about love – and was Girolamo’s son, anyway – and doctor in philosophy, too. Laureatosi in filosofia, venne subito chiamato allo studio di Macerata per leggere retorica e poesia. Ivi si trattenne per molti anni e fonda l'Accademia dei Catenati. Ritornato poi a Bologna, ha un incarico d'insegnamento presso il locale studio di umanità. Portato alla polemica, non si tenne dall'intervenire nella contesa letteraria fra Bulgarini e Mazzoni, negatore l'uno e sostenitore l'altro dell'eccellenza del genio d’ALIGHIERI. Uscite infatti le Considerazioni del Bulgarini, Z. prende subito posizione e da alle stampe i Ragionamenti in difesa di ALIGHERI et di PETRARCA.  Nei Ragionamenti ALIGHIERI è LODATO per avere scritto “una azione fuor delle regole dello scriver poeticamente bene e con lode” e per essere stato “un ignorante della lingua latina,” ed è inoltre giudicato “grande imitatore” per i “costumi d'uomini e di donne, vecchi, giovani, fanciulli, nobili, liberi, servi, dotti e indotti, d’ogni sesso in somma, d’ogni conditione, d'ogni fortuna co' loro affetti convenevoli espressi con parole, et concetti proprij et alti.” Seguì la Risposta di Z. all’opposizioni sanesi fatte ai suoi ragionamenti in difesa d’ALIGHIERI, Fermo, contro Borghesi, supposto portavoce di Bulgarini. Quindi direttamente contro Bulgarini pubblica le particelle poetiche sopra ALIGHIERI, suffragate poi dalla poetica sopra ALIGHIERI. In Z., come negl’altri filosofi del tempo, opera il puntiglio personale, che si risolve in schermaglia di parole, in sofisticheria di tesi; ma pure non è difficile riconoscere un fondo più serio costituito dall'approfondimento e dall'applicazione della poetica del lizio nel testo d’ALIGHIERI.  Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, Barbi. St John’s, SCR, late afternoon. Z. (the father, and the earlier one): because Bologna, when it is not staging pageants, sometimes does something more subversive—turns Latin into Italian and calls it culture. There I was, sunk into the corner of the settee in the best-lit (and least draughty) part of the SCR, enjoying—without quite admitting it—the comfortable scandal of the place: the College’s pantomime of a medieval hall at High Table, cum the gentleman’s-club gentility of the SCR afterwards, where one eats and drinks and talks as if privilege were a natural property of stone. The cushions had been arranged behind me with an excess that suggested either taste or guilt; and I let them do their work, because it is difficult to be ascetic when the upholstery is determined to refute you. A servant appeared, as if summoned by the mere fact that Fellows have laps. He placed an overlarge book into my reach with the neutral efficiency by which an institution makes entitlement look like order. “Thought you might want this, sir,” he said—or, in that neighbourhood of phrasing that allows the College to pretend it is being helpful rather than merely functioning—and withdrew before the object could implicate him in Latin. I had the thing on my lap like a compliant monument. Mabbott arrived, in his own time, and did what he always did before he sat: he made himself a drink as if mixing a cocktail were the last remaining area in Oxford where “method” could be defended without argument. “What now, Grice?” he said, settling beside me. I did not answer. I simply began, out of the blue, as if I were singing—though of course one must never call it singing in an Oxford common room. Arma virumque cano. (I let the Latin stand, because Latin in Oxford is always allowed to stand.) Mabbott gave me a look that contained, in miniature, Scotland’s view of England: affectionate, sceptical, and faintly superior. “National anthem?” he said. I turned a page with the deliberation of a man who has no obligation to hurry. “Almost,” he added. “Italy’s, perhaps. Ours only after we’ve annexed it.” “Not quite,” I said. “But it is the sort of line that behaves like one: everybody knows it, and half the people who know it cannot parse it.” He leaned in, and I showed him what mattered—not the Latin, which Oxford can always do in its sleep, but the civic insolence of the move. The Italian was there, printed, unapologetic: Canto de l’armi e de l’uom. Canto. Arms and the man, put into Italian as if Italian were entitled to inherit Rome without applying for permission. “Who wrote that monstrosity?” Mabbott said, which was his way of admitting it was effective. “Z.,” I said. “Girolamo. Bologna. Mid-century. Young enough to think it a duty to make Virgil speak to Italians without the Pope acting as interpreter.” Mabbott said, “And the other Z.?” “The son,” I said, “turns Bologna’s civic imagination into printed fireworks—duchesses, tournaments, whole processions masquerading as titles. The father does the serious sort of vanity: he vernacularises the empire.” Mabbott took a sip and said, “You’re making Bologna sound like Oxford’s better self.” “No,” I said. “Oxford’s different self. We do not vernacularise; we antiquate. We take what is already English and make it Old English and then congratulate ourselves on having preserved it.” “You mean Beowulf.” “Exactly,” I said. “We can’t translate Latin into English and call it civic education, because we’ve been doing that so long we call it ‘school.’ So instead we do the reverse trick: we take English and make it difficult enough to require a tutor.” To my surprise, and to my satisfaction (which I concealed, because satisfaction is a vice in company), Mabbott supplied the punchline without needing to be asked. He recited, quite calmly, as if it were nothing, the opening that functions, for us, as a tribal password: Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon… [cupblog.org] “Exactly,” I said. “Bologna prints public meaning. Oxford prints private difficulty.” Mabbott smiled. “And Austin?” I murmured, because murmuring is how one criticises friends in Oxford without admitting friendship. “Austin,” I said, “still thinks he can restore the man-of-the-street to our quarters by sheer force of ordinary language. It’s touching. Also slightly lunatic. The man-of-the-street, if he ever arrived in the SCR, would ask for the window and be told—politely—that the garden is round the back.”Grice: Carissimo Z., devo confessare che essere nato a Bononia è davvero un privilegio! La sua eleganza, la sua storia e la sua aria raffinata rendono ogni passo un piacere per l’anima. Se fossi nato nel vecchio Vadum Boum, il guado dei buoi, temo che i miei piedi sarebbero ancora umidi dalla bruma inglese!  Z.: Grice, le tue parole sono musica per il mio cuore! Bononia non solo asciuga i piedi, ma scalda anche lo spirito con la sua tradizione filosofica e la vivacità delle sue accademie. Qui, la conversazione è arte, e ogni disputa letteraria diventa festa di pensiero.  Grice: Proprio così, Z.! Le tue difese accese di Alighieri dimostrano come a Bologna la filosofia sappia dialogare con la poesia, elevando ogni parola. Mi affascina il tuo modo di difendere la grandezza di Dante e Petrarca: è segno che qui si respira cultura con ogni battito del cuore.  Z.: Grice, ti ringrazio! La nostra città insegna che il puntiglio può essere virtù, e la polemica un esercizio di profondità. Come dice il proverbio bolognese, “chi sa ascoltare sa rispondere”: così continuiamo la nostra conversazione, tra ragione e sentimento, senza mai perdere il gusto della disputa elegante! Zoppio, Girolamo (1554). Eneide. Bologna.

Melchiorre Zoppio (Bologna, Emilia) The closest comparison is that both are genuinely university teachers, but their institutional forms are quite different. Grice belongs to the modern Oxford dual structure: college office plus university office so: Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means college membership, governance, and tutorial teaching inside the college CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide lectureship beyond the college Zoppio, by contrast, belongs to the early modern Bolognese university and academy world: he is much closer to a professor in the continental sense, and also to an academico and man of letters So the neat contrast is: Grice college fellow tutorial teacher university lecturer working in a split institutional system: college and university Zoppio doctor in philosophy at Bologna teacher of logic at Macerata later teacher of moral philosophy at Bologna founder of the Accademia dei Gelati working in a less bifurcated world where university teaching, literary production, and academy life overlap So unlike Zuccolo, Zoppio really is an academic teacher; but unlike Grice, he is not divided between a collegiate fellowship and a central university lectureship in the Oxford way. What that means institutionally is: Grice’s authority comes from tutorial instruction college membership faculty lecturing the Oxford machinery of fellows, common rooms, and lectures Zoppio’s authority comes from a university teaching role in moral philosophy the humanist and rhetorical culture of Bologna and the para-university sphere of the academy, especially the Gelati That last point matters. The Accademia dei Gelati is something Grice has no exact institutional equivalent for. Oxford has common rooms, clubs, and play groups, but Zoppio’s academy is a semi-public learned society with literary, dramatic, and civic functions. So part of Zoppio’s “office” is not office at all in the modern bureaucratic sense, but the authority of the learned organizer and cultural impresario. So the cleanest formulation is: Grice combines the specifically Oxford dual office of college tutor-fellow and university lecturer, whereas Zoppio combines the older Italian roles of university teacher and academy founder, less divided between college and university than Grice, but more deeply embedded in the humanist culture of literary and civic conversazione. And philosophically that fits your comparison very well. Grice’s institutional habitat encourages: small-group tutorial precision fine distinctions what is said versus what is meant rational accountability in live exchange Zoppio’s habitat encourages: moral-philosophical discourse academy conversation dramatic and literary staging civility, decorum, and amore ragionevole as social practice So the short version is: Grice is an Oxford don in the full dual sense, college fellow-tutor and university lecturer; Zoppio is an early modern university philosopher and academy-founder, closer to a continental professor plus cultural organizer than to an Oxford don. If you want, I can also compress this into a single sentence in your preferred style: Grice’s authority is collegiate-tutorial and university-wide at once, whereas Zoppio’s is Bolognese-humanist, rooted in the chair of moral philosophy and in the Accademia dei Gelati rather than in the Oxford division between fellowship and lectureship.introduce la ragione conversationale alla scuola dell’universita piu antiqua d’Italia. Grice’s theory of reason-based conversational meaning insists that what a speaker means is fixed not by the bare semantic value of an utterance, nor by a theatrical “expression,” but by a structured complex of intentions whose recognition by the audience is meant to function as the audience’s reason for uptake; on that model, implicature is the rationally accountable surplus generated when a speaker counts on cooperative inference rather than explicit statement. Z., as a Bolognese professor of moral philosophy and founder of the Accademia dei Gelati, looks at first like an author of literary personifications (Love, Death) and moralized dialogue, yet his Psafone trattato d’amore (Bologna, Sebastiano Bonomi, 1617) explicitly frames “amore humano, ragionevole, e civile” as something governed by the norms of discourse and by the split between “favellar” and “credere” (talking with them is one thing, believing with them another), thereby anticipating in ethical-rhetorical terms a distinction that Grice will later reconstruct with technical force as the gap between what is said and what is meant, and between mere causal effect and reason-giving recognition. The comparison, then, is that Z. embeds “ragione” in a humanistic practice of conversazione (academy talk, moral reflection, dramatic dialogue) where persuasion, decorum, and civil love are cultivated through exemplary speech, whereas Grice makes that civility theoretically sharp: conversational order is not just a social virtue but a rational mechanism in which audiences are entitled to infer beyond the uttered words precisely because speakers intend them to recognize intentions as reasons; Z. supplies the early-modern scene of “amore ragionevole” as a conversational art, while Grice supplies the analytical account of how that art works when it works, and why its failures (mere talk without warranted belief, mere rhetoric without reason) are philosophically diagnostic. Grice: “I like Z., but then I don’t like Shakespeare MUCH – Z’s characters are truly philosophical, such as “Love’ and “Death,’ and this was before Freud. Z., o anche Zoppi -- filosofo e drammaturgo italiano. S’addottora in filosofia a Bologna. Dopo aver insegnato logica a Macerata, tenne lezioni di filosofia morale a Bologna. Fonda la felsinea accademia dei gelati, Nell'ambito delle adunanze di tale accademia fa rappresentare varie opere drammatiche da lui stesso composte (L'Admeto, Medea esule, Creusa, Meandro). È in amichevoli rapporti epistolari con Lipsio ed è tenuto in onore da Papa Urbano. Consolatione di Z., filosofo morale, nella morte della moglie Olimpia Luna, Bologna, Bellagamba, Psafone trattato d'amore del Caliginoso Gelato il s. Z., nel quale secondo i poeti, e filosofi, ethnici, e profani scrittori, platonici, et altri, si discorre sopra le principali considerationi occorrenti nella materia dell'amore umano, ragionevole, e civile. Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, Bologna. Vallieri, Z., in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Opere di Z., su MLOL, Horizons Unlimited. Opere di Z., , . PSAFONE # «TRATTATO «5 H D'AMORE fg m & rft »€r lungi da quella credenza, che noi illustrati dalla ferità confefifiamo; imper cioche altrove il favellar con loro , altro è il credei con loro . La feconda è, che perciòfìamo coftret- ti dyyfare i nomi frequentati da simil sorte filosofi , in quella ìfiejfa significazione che da essi tal'hor non cefi he ne intefa 3 & abufata fi leg^e ;ì quali per fodisfattione dell'orecchie più feue re sfaranno anco talvolta non con ogni approuatione addotti. Tu come odi mentou are Fortuna , Defililo 3 Infiuf- A 2 fo, 4 fo ,e fintili , di licenza ahnòme,& f enfia qualmente noi fiamo gouernati dalla prouida mano di Dio y & dalla libertà dell'arbitrio. Implicatura, love, amore, morte, death, gl’amanti, amante-amato, amore ragionevole.  St John’s, SCR, late afternoon. Z.: not because one needs yet another excuse to sit down, but because Bologna has a habit of printing its excuses, and Z. is a particularly shameless specimen. [blog.petit...aisance.it] There I was, sunk into the corner of the settee in the best-lit (and least draughty) corner of the SCR, propped up with cushions as if the whole arrangement were an Arts-and-Crafts conspiracy against productivity. A college servant had already done the only really strenuous part of scholarship, namely fetching from the overlarge stacks a book too large to be modern and too self-satisfied to be medieval; it arrived with the unobtrusive tone of domestic ritual. “Your reading, sir,” he said—or something near enough to that, the phrasing always varying just enough to preserve the fiction that we are not all repeating ourselves for a living. I rested the thing on my lap, where it belonged: an overgrown folio is not a book so much as a small piece of furniture, and furniture is meant to be sat with. I opened it and, as if the page had been waiting for me to supply an audience, found a title so long that it behaved like a procession in print. I began reading it aloud, partly because it was ridiculous and partly because the ridiculous is often where the historical evidence is most honest. “La montagna circea: torneamento nel passaggio della serenissima duchessa donna Margherita Aldobrandina, sposa del serenissimo Ranuccio Farnese, duca di Parma e Piacenza: festeggiato in Bologna a ventisette giugno milleseicento. In Bologna: presso gli heredi di Giovanni Rossi.” Mabbott, who had drifted into the neighbouring seat with the air of a man who intends not to be impressed, permitted himself a glance. “I suppose,” he said, “Oxford has never done anything quite like that.” “Never,” I said, “is a strong quantifier, Mabbott. It invites counterexample, which is why philosophers use it when they want a result without the labour.” He made the noise that meant: you are being difficult again, but I will play. “All right,” he said. “What is your criterion?” “The criterion,” I said, “is shameless explicitness. Bologna doesn’t merely hold a civic festivity; it prints the festivity, and it prints it under a title that refuses to be an abstract. The bibliographic record even tells you, with a sort of municipal pride, that this was for her entry into Bologna on 27 June 1600.” [blog.petit...aisance.it] Mabbott leaned in a little, and for a moment we were simply two tutors doing what tutors do: attending to a text as if attention were a moral virtue. “And you’re reading it,” he said, “because of Z..” “Precisely,” I said. “Z. is meant to be our ‘conversazione’ man—academies, civility, discourse, ‘amore ragionevole,’ the whole humanistic apparatus. But here he is, in 1600, doing Bologna’s other trick: turning a political-social event into a printed artefact, as if civic order were something you could bind in boards. It is the public version of what I later try to do in the private, conversational version: make norms visible.” Mabbott smiled—minimally, but enough to count as affection in an SCR. “And Oxford?” he said. “Oxford,” I said, “would rather let the whole thing remain an implicature. We will have the ceremony, certainly. We may even have a pamphlet. But we will not allow the title to swell into a civic parade. We are embarrassed by amplitude. Bologna is not.” He took a sip—tea or brandy, whichever you like for the scene—and said, “If you want a counterexample, you’ll have to give me a day.” “Good,” I said. “Bring me tomorrow an Oxford analogue: an ‘entry’ or ‘passage’ of a great person, a civic day made textual. The only rule is that it must beat 1600, or at least pretend it can.” He raised an eyebrow. “So the criterion is designed to let Bologna win.” “Of course,” I said. “Rivalry is not war; it is the choice of an evaluative standard disguised as fairness.” Next day, he came back with a note or two—enough to show willing, not enough to turn him into an antiquary. “I can find Oxford ceremonial print,” he said, “but not earlier than yours, and not with that kind of baroque title.” I allowed myself the small pleasure of not gloating too openly. “Then Bononia remains Alma Mater,” I said, “and Vadum Boum remains the clever latecomer. Bologna prints its civic meaning; Oxford prefers to let meaning be recovered by inference. Which, if you think about it, is exactly why Z. belongs in my lap and not merely in your bibliography. if you want to respect the lexical pun and avoid introducing an alien letter like W, then p1 and p2 are the neatest labels. And yes, the Quinean scruple pushes you toward treating Pico not as a bare proper-name constant but as something like: the p1-role or the p1-description or, if you like, the property of being Pico. So the cleanest setup is: p1(x,t) = x instantiates the Pico-description at time t p2(x,t) = x instantiates the woodpecker-description at time t Then the transformation is: ∃x∃t1∃t2[(t1 < t2) ∧ p1(x,t1) ∧ ¬p2(x,t1) ∧ p2(x,t2)] This gives exactly what you want: the same x earlier satisfies p1 and not p2 later satisfies p2 without ever using Pico as a name-constant. That is probably the best bare symbolic description. On your Pegasus-style point Yes — what you are suggesting is very close to the old Quinean worry about turning names into predicates, as in: Pegasus pegasizes or, more systematically: to pegasize = to instantiate the Pegasus-description So if one wanted to be very explicit, one might say: p1 = picoizes p2 = woodpeckerizes But I would be a little careful there, because p1 and p2 are not really parallel in kind. That is the philosophically interesting bit. p1 is quasi-individualizing: the role or description under which that individual is picked out in the story p2 is natural-kinded: the species-description into which he is transformed So the best refined formulation would be: p1(x,t) = x is the individual counted as Pico at t p2(x,t) = x is a woodpecker at t Then: ∃x∃t1∃t2[(t1 < t2) ∧ p1(x,t1) ∧ ¬p2(x,t1) ∧ p2(x,t2)] If you want the change more strongly marked: ∃x∃t1∃t2[(t1 < t2) ∧ p1(x,t1) ∧ p2(x,t2) ∧ Change(x,p1,p2,t1,t2)] with Change(x,F,G,t1,t2) := F(x,t1) ∧ ¬G(x,t1) ∧ G(x,t2) But honestly the explicit formula above is cleaner than introducing Change as a separate symbol. If you want to stress the pun itself You could even say, informally: p1 = the Pico-predicate p2 = the pico-predicate in the zoological sense That is, the myth trades on an equivocation between: p1 = Pico as hero p2 = pico as bird-kind And then the transformation is the passage from p1-status to p2-status across time in one persisting subject. So the shortest elegant version is: ∃x∃t1∃t2[(t1 < t2) ∧ p1(x,t1) ∧ ¬p2(x,t1) ∧ p2(x,t2)] Gloss: there is an x such that, earlier, x falls under the Pico-description and not under the woodpecker-description, while later x falls under the woodpecker-description. And if you want the Quinean gloss: this avoids treating Pico as a rigid singular term, and instead treats the relevant identity-conditions through time-indexed predication. So yes: p1 and p2 are exactly the right notation for the pun-sensitive version. If you want, I can next give you: a more austere regimented version in Quinean style, or a more Gricean prose gloss about why this is not identity simpliciter but time-relative predication.Grice: Carissimo Zoppio, lasciami dire che Bononia, con la sua eleganza e il suo stile raffinato, è sempre stata per me simbolo di vera grandezza accademica. La sua università, la più antica d’Italia, offre una statura che persino il mio adorato Vadum Boum – Oxford, che all’epoca era poco più che un guado per buoi – non può eguagliare. C’è una musicalità nel vostro parlare e una dignità nelle vostre adunanze che, lo confesso, mi fanno spesso rimpiangere di non essere nato bolognese!  Zoppio: Grice, le tue parole sono un piacere per l’animo! Non posso che ringraziarti per questo omaggio alla nostra Bononia, che da sempre cerca di unire la filosofia alla poesia, e la ragione alla fantasia. Se la nostra accademia dei gelati può vantare qualcosa, è il gusto per la conversazione arguta e il rispetto della tradizione. È vero: l’eleganza non si insegna, si respira nelle mura di questa città.  Grice: Ed è proprio nella tua opera, caro Zoppio, che si avverte questa raffinata fusione di amore e morte, ragione e sentimento. I tuoi drammi, come “Admeto” e “Medea esule”, rappresentano con profondità filosofica la condizione umana – e, prima di Freud, hai saputo cogliere con acume i tormenti degli amanti! La tua “Psafone” è una vera implicatura d’amore: ogni parola è una carezza, ogni concetto una meditazione.  Z.: Grice, sentire che il mio lavoro parli così alla tua sensibilità mi onora. Per me la filosofia non è mai stata solo logica, ma sempre anche cuore; il dialogo tra amante e amato, tra ragione e passione, è ciò che rende viva la nostra ricerca. Se Bononia ha qualcosa in più rispetto a Vadum Boum, è forse proprio la capacità di far incontrare la dottrina con la vita, senza mai perdere il senso dell’eleganza e dell’umano. Zoppio, Melchiorre (1600). La montagna circea: torneamento nel passaggio della sereniss. duchessa donna Margherita Aldobrandina, sposa del sereniss. Ranuccio Farnese, duca di Parma e Piacenza: festeggiato in Bologna à xxvij giugno 1600. Bologna: Rossi.

Francesco Zorzi (Venezia, Veneto) combina la ragione conversazionale coll’armonia del mondo.” Institutionally, the comparison is much less close than with Zuccante or Castelli, because Francesco Zorzi is not a modern university office-holder in the Oxford sense at all. Grice’s description is very specific to the twentieth-century Oxford system: Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means college membership plus tutorial responsibility CUF University Lecturer means a university-wide teaching post in the central Oxford structure So Grice belongs to a dual institutional world: college and university Zorzi, by contrast, belongs to the early sixteenth-century Venetian and Franciscan world: religious order learned writing public theological and philosophical authorship patronage and advisory work not a college fellowship and not a university lectureship in the modern sense So the basic answer is: Grice formal academic appointment college fellow tutorial teacher university lecturer embedded in Oxford’s collegiate and faculty structure Zorzi Observant Franciscan friar and learned author not a fellow of a college not a university lecturer in the Oxford/CUF sense better understood as a religious intellectual, theologian, philosopher, and advisor writing from within ecclesiastical and humanist networks That means the comparison has to be made by function, not by title. Grice’s institutional authority comes from: tutorial pedagogy faculty lecturing regular university office the Oxford apparatus of fellows, colleges, and lectures Zorzi’s authority comes from: religious standing scholarly and theological authorship participation in humanist and ecclesiastical culture the prestige of learned books such as De harmonia mundi and practical intervention in design and symbolic interpretation, as with San Francesco della Vigna So if you want the sharpest formulation: Grice is an Oxford don in the full modern sense, simultaneously college tutor and university lecturer; Zorzi is a Renaissance religious intellectual whose authority is textual, theological, and symbolic rather than collegiate-tutorial. There is also a deeper contrast in how institution shapes thought. Oxford, in Grice’s case, fosters: small-group analysis live argumentative exchange precision about intention, inference, and what is meant Zorzi’s world fosters: large synthetic constructions sacred philology cosmic symbolism theological architecture the idea that order is already inscribed in creation and can be read across music, number, language, and form So I would put it this way: Grice’s office belongs to the micro-institutions of modern philosophy, tutorial, lecture, and faculty; Zorzi’s belongs to the macro-institutions of Renaissance religious learning, order, text, patronage, and sacred interpretation. A compact version, in your preferred style, would be: Grice combines the specifically Oxford dual office of college tutor-fellow and university lecturer, whereas Francesco Zorzi belongs to the Renaissance Franciscan-humanist type: not a don with a chair, but a friar-scholar whose authority is exercised through books, theology, symbolic exegesis, and learned patronage rather than through a collegiate tutorial structure. One small philological caution: for Zorzi, it is often useful to note the dual naming, Francesco Zorzi / Francesco Giorgio Veneto, because the Latin and Italian forms circulate differently in scholarship.Grice’s theory of reason-based conversational meaning locates what is meant not in cosmic symbolism or inherited correspondences, but in a rational structure of intention and uptake: S means p by uttering x only if S intends an audience to arrive at a response (typically belief) and intends that this response be produced through the audience’s recognition of that very intention, so that recognition functions as the hearer’s reason for acceptance; implicature, correspondingly, is what a rational hearer is entitled to infer given the cooperative organization of talk. Z. (Venezia, Veneto), by contrast, makes harmony itself the medium of intelligibility, treating meaning as the echo of a pre-established order: in De harmonia mundi totius cantica tria (Venezia, 1525), structured in three canticles (creatio, redemptio, restitutio), Francesco Giorgio Veneto (Z.) fuses Neoplatonism, Pythagorean proportion, and Christian kabbalah so that number, tone, and sacred language become the world’s deep grammar, a doctrine with practical ambitions that even spills into architecture (his 1535 memorandum for San Francesco della Vigna, aligning design with harmonic proportion). The contrast sharpens a useful Gricean point: where Z.’s “armonia del mondo” encourages the thought that signs and utterances work because they resonate with a metaphysical order already there to be read, Grice insists that the primary engine of meaning is interpersonal and inferential—an achievement of conversational reason, not a discovery of cosmic syntax; any “harmony” in Grice is thus a local, negotiated equilibrium among speakers’ purposes and hearers’ reason-guided interpretations, rather than the macrocosmic consonance of the universe. Grice: “For some reason, in the Veneto area they cannot pronounce the /dg/, which becomes /z/ as everyone who is familiar with Giorgone – as in Quine’s infamous example -- knows! My mother brought me C. of E. high, my father non-conformist would possibly have agreed with most of what Z. says about the cabbala!” Saggi: L'armonia del mondo. L'elegante, poema e commento, Maillard, Arché, Milano Paris. Onda, Le vicende costruttive della chiesa e del convento, Il progetto di Sansovino e il memoriale di Z.; La teoria ermetica di Z., La chiesa di S. Francesco della Vigna e il suo convento, Venezia, San Francesco della Vigna; Campanini, Le fonti dell’armonia del mondo di Z., Ca’Foscari; Campanini, La struttura simbolica dell’armonia del mondo di Z.; Argento, Il cardinale e l'architetto: Aleandro e il rinascimento adriatico, Apostrofo, Cremona. Z. is an interesting one, as a proof that, in Italy, they take the Hebrew language seriously. They call it a classic, even! I wish I had learned some all those years I boarded at Clifton – especially since I will later make use of ‘Fiat lux’! While the concept of ‘harmonia mundi’ may claim a Judaeo-Christian heritage, as the Italians put it – a heritage they lack! --, it is *so easy* to reconstruct the ‘harmonia mundi’ in purely Aryan, that is, Pythagorean terms! The root of ‘mundo’ are complex enough, and the English language lacks the concept, preferring vir-hood, ‘world,’ instead. ‘Harmonia’ is possibly so hellenic that CICERONE never cared to find the proper Roman indigenous cognate. De harmonia mundi totius cantica tria – three canticles on the harmony of the entire world. The essay’s organization is based on three main canticles, each dedicated to a different theological subject. The references to tones are tied to Z/s muscal and kabbalistic theories, which he uses to build his argument about cosmic harmony. The text is organized into three canticles. Canticle I os on God – Deus – Creatio. Armonia del mondo, armonia conversazonale.  Grice: Caro Z., lasciami dire che, da pianista, conosco profondamente quella scala completa che tu suoni, l’ottava piena; ogni nota vibra in me come un tocco al cuore. È sorprendente come la tua “armonia del mondo” riesca a legare la musica alla filosofia, creando una melodia che parla, non solo alla mente, ma anche all’anima. Z.: Grice, mi onora sentirlo! Per me, l’armonia non è soltanto una struttura musicale, ma un vero principio che governa il mondo. La filosofia, la musica, persino la cabala si intrecciano per rivelare un senso più profondo, dove ogni nota, ogni pensiero, trova il suo posto nell’universo. Il tuo sentire da pianista è la testimonianza che l’armonia si manifesta ovunque ci sia sensibilità. Grice: È proprio questa universalità che mi affascina! Spesso, studiando la filosofia come un gioco di idee e di parole, dimentichiamo che la vera saggezza sta nel saper cogliere la bellezza del tutto: come in una sonata, ogni tema si sviluppa e ritorna, arricchito, alla sua origine. La tua visione mi ricorda che “la vita è una musica” – e ogni filosofia, un’interpretazione. Z.: Hai colto l’essenza, Grice! L’armonia del mondo è dialogo e ascolto, come una conversazione che si fa canto. Se riusciamo a far risuonare le corde giuste, allora la filosofia diventa poesia, e la musica una riflessione. Ti ringrazio: il tuo sguardo e la tua nota aggiungono profondità a questa sinfonia che, come dice il proverbio, “chi sa ascoltare, sa comprendere.” Zorzi, Francesco (1525). De harmonia mundi totius cantica tria. Venezia: Vitali

Enrico Castelli Gattinara di Zubiena (Torino, Piemonte) -- The institutional comparison is much closer to Giuseppe Zuccante than to Ludovico Zuccolo, but still with an important difference. Grice’s Oxford position is structurally dual: he is a college Fellow and Tutor at St John’s and also a university lecturer through the CUF post So he operates on two linked levels at once: the college level, where teaching is tutorial, local, and residential the university level, where teaching is public, faculty-wide, and more formal For Enrico Castelli Gattinara di Zubiena, the nearest comparison is not a college fellowship plus university lectureship, but the continental pattern of a professor or university intellectual centered in Rome, with a stronger public-institutional and editorial role than the Oxford tutorial role. So the clean contrast is: Grice college office plus university office tutorial fellow in a collegiate system small-group teaching regular university lecturing philosophy formed in the tutorial-and-faculty structure of Oxford Castelli Roman university intellectual not a fellow of a college in the Oxford sense better understood through chair, institute, review, archive, colloquium philosophy formed through public institutions, editorial networks, and conferences That matters for the philosophical comparison too. Grice’s institutional habitat encourages: fine-grained analysis small-group argumentative discipline attention to what is said and what is meant in tightly controlled exchanges Castelli’s habitat encourages: public intellectual mediation thematic gatherings and colloquia cross-European networks larger cultural-philosophical framing, especially through symbolism, religion, art, and historical crisis So if you want the neatest formulation: Grice’s authority is split between college and university, tutorial and lecture; Castelli’s is concentrated in the Roman professor-editor-organizer type, less collegiate and more public, less tutorial and more institutional in the broader cultural sense. Or even more sharply: Grice is an Oxford don in the full dual sense, college tutor and university lecturer; Castelli is a Roman philosophical impresario as much as a teacher, with his authority expressed not through a college fellowship but through teaching, journals, archives, and the Colloqui Castelli. One caution, though: your line “Zubiena, Enrico Castelli Gattinara di (1921). Dissertazione di laurea. Sotto Varisco Roma.” should still be treated as a plausible biographical placeholder, not as a securely verified bibliographical title, unless you have direct archival confirmation. If you want, I can next give you the comparison in your preferred compressed style, almost sentence-ready for chat, for example: Grice combines the specifically Oxford dual office of college tutor-fellow and university lecturer, whereas Castelli belongs to the Roman model of the professor-organizer-editor, less anchored in a collegiate tutorial structure than in wider philosophical institutions and public intellectual networks.filosofa sulla ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura demoniaca, corpi e corpi, filosofia fascista.” Simbolo, parabola. Grice’s reason-based theory of conversational meaning treats what is meant as something essentially answerable to reasons: a speaker means p by producing an utterance with the intention that the hearer come to believe p (or otherwise respond), and that the hearer’s route to that response essentially runs through recognizing that very intention as a reason for uptake; implicature, on this picture, is not a shadowy surplus but a rationally recoverable consequence of cooperative expectations. Castelli Gattinara di Z, (“Z.”), by contrast, is drawn to the zones where reason meets what he names the demoniaco, not as a merely irrational residue but as a symbolic and historical pressure on intelligibility, staged through iconography, parabola, and the crises of modernity that his Roman institutions were built to address (Archivio di Filosofia, founded; the Colloqui Castelli, initially focused on demitizzazione). If Grice explains how meaning is generated by publicly recognizable intentions within a cooperative economy of reasons, Z. probes how the very space of “recognition” can be distorted by mythic or demonic figures that function less like detachable contents than like frameworks of interpretation; his Il demoniaco nell’arte is exemplary here, treating the demonic as a philosophical problem of representation rather than an occult add-on. The comparison therefore sharpens a limit-case: Grice’s implicature is calculable because conversational rationality is the default norm, whereas Z.’s “implicatura demoniaca” (as your trope has it) names what happens when symbols and historical pathologies bend or hijack that norm, so that what is “meant” may still be inferentially approached but no longer underwrites the same confidence that intention-recognition will function as a stable, shared reason. Grice: “Perhaps without knowing it, Z. has explored a crucial concept in Graeco-Roman philosophy, that of ‘daimone,’ ‘il demoniaco,’ as Z. calls it, focusing on its iconography. One may call Z. the Italian Parkinson. Like Parkinson, Z. edits a volume on ‘semantics.’ I would also call him the Italian A Flew. Like Flew, Z. edits a volume on “Language and philosophy.” Z. bears what Italians, and everybody else, for that matter, call a ‘topographical’ cognomen. ‘Z.,’ being a comune nella provincia di Biella, Piemonte. Insegna a Roma. Fonda l'archivio di filosofia e organizza i colloqui Castelli. Z. should have called these colloquia the Z. colloquia, incontri che riuniscono filosofi per discutere temi diversi. Vicino all'esistenzialismo, Z. parte da una posizione spiritualista. Si caratterizza per uno stile filosofico dal tratto auto-biografico. Si interessa di temi legati al rapporto tra RAGIONE, arte, e religione. Introduce il dibattito sulla de-mitizzazione. In general, since Evola, Italian philosophers should know better, and avoid the Greek or Hellenic mystic concept of the ‘mythos’ and replace it for the very relatable one of ‘legend.’ In Z. convergono suggestioni tratte da Agostino, Kierkegaard, Šestov, e Heidegger, in una ricerca volta a delineare una filosofia della storia italiana sulla base della considerazione del concetto di peccato – ‘that Cicerone lacked’ Grice.  Nei colloqui Z. convenneno filosofi di rilievo della scena fenomenologica ed ermeneutica. Vi fanno la loro comparsa Gouhier, Breton, Brun, Bruaire, Tilliette, Lacan, Ricœur, Lévinas, Ellul, Argan, Starobinski, Benveniste, Eco  Scholem, Vahanian, e Giannini . Z. prende il suo posto, come organizzatore dei colloqui e direttore dell'archivio di filosofia, Olivetti. Panikkar e suo grande amico e collaboratore. Simbolo, parabola; diavolo; l’individuo e lo stato, la corporazione, demonio, vita beata, Flew, Parkinson, implicature demoniache.  G.: Caro Z., devo dirti che grazie alla tua attenzione per le novità provenienti dalla terra dei barbari, dalla Sorbona e da Vadum Boum, mi sono sempre sentito il benvenuto! È raro trovare un filosofo italiano che, con orecchie ben aperte, sappia intercettare i venti del pensiero europeo e renderli parte di una conversazione viva e ospitale. Z.: Professore, è un piacere sentirlo! Credo che la filosofia debba sempre essere una finestra sull'altro, una continua apertura verso ciò che ci sorprende e ci mette in discussione. I colloqui che organizzo a Roma nascono proprio con questo spirito: mettere insieme le voci più diverse e lasciarci contaminare, senza timore di perdere la nostra identità. G.: Ecco, proprio questa tua impostazione mi affascina. In fondo, il dialogo filosofico è come una parabola: si parte da un punto, poi si attraversano simboli, suggestioni e persino demoni – quelli interiori e quelli storici – per poi ritornare, arricchiti, al cuore della ragione italiana. La tua filosofia della storia, con l’accento sul peccato e la demitizzazione, è un esempio brillante di questo percorso. Z.: Grice, le tue parole mi motivano. Pensare al demoniaco, o come dici tu al daimone, significa proprio abbracciare la complessità della nostra esperienza. Solo così, tra corpo, arte e religione, possiamo tracciare una via autentica per la filosofia italiana, sempre con lo sguardo rivolto al futuro ma radicati in una tradizione viva. Zubiena, Enrico Castelli Gattinara di (1921). Dissertazione di laurea. Sotto Varisco Roma.

Giuseppe Zuccante (Grancona, Vicenza, Veneto). The comparison is much closer here than with Ludovico Zuccolo, because Giuseppe Zuccante really was an academic in a modern university setting. So the broad parallel is: Grice college fellow and tutor at St John’s plus a university-wide lectureship at Oxford Zuccante professor of history of philosophy at the Regia Accademia scientifico-letteraria di Milano, later incorporated into the university structure That means both men belong to recognisably academic institutions, but the institutional shapes are different. Oxford, in Grice’s case, has a dual structure: college office and university office So “Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s” means: he belonged to the college as a governing and teaching member and he taught students in the tutorial system “CUF University Lecturer in philosophy” means: he also had a central university teaching role beyond the college Zuccante, by contrast, seems to fit the continental chair model more closely: he held a professorial chair or cathedra in storia della filosofia within the Milanese higher-education system So if you want the clean contrast: Grice’s role was split across two institutional levels: college tutor-fellow and university lecturer Zuccante’s role was more unified in one professorial identity: professore di storia della filosofia That difference also tracks their intellectual style rather well. Grice’s Oxford role encourages: small-group tutorial argument close analysis attention to distinctions in live discussion philosophy as conversational discipline Zuccante’s Milan role encourages: large historical sweep history of philosophy as a distinct field diachronic treatment of traditions, authors, and schools philosophy as cultural-historical formation So the neat formulation would be: Grice was doubly placed within Oxford, as both college tutor-fellow and university lecturer, whereas Zuccante occupied the more continental role of professor of history of philosophy, a single chair defined by subject rather than by the Oxford division between college teaching and university lecturing. And there is one further contrast worth drawing. At Oxford, especially in Grice’s case, “philosophy” is usually not represented by a chair in the history of philosophy as such; it is distributed through tutorials, lectures, and subject areas. At Milan, in Zuccante’s case, the title itself is already historical: professore di storia della filosofia So one might say: Grice’s office is pedagogically dual and methodologically analytic; Zuccante’s is professorially unified and historically oriented. A concise version in your preferred style would be: Grice’s Oxford status combines two jurisdictions, college and university, tutorial and lecture; Zuccante’s Milanese status is that of a continental professor with a named chair in the history of philosophy, less divided institutionally and more explicitly historical in disciplinary self-definition. One caution, though: the line “Zuccante, Giuseppe (1879). Dissertazione di laurea. Padova.” should still be treated carefully. It is plausible as a placeholder for the laurea year, but unless you have documentary evidence, I would not yet cite it as if it were a bibliographically established title. The safer comparison is institutional, not bibliographic.In Z., l’implicatura conversazionale incontra la ragione. Grice’s substantive theory of reason-based conversational meaning begins from the claim that what a speaker means is not exhausted by signs or codes but is grounded in a rational structure of intention-recognition: for S to mean p by uttering x, S intends an audience to arrive at a response (typically belief) and intends that this response be produced via the audience’s recognition of that very intention, so that uptake is not mere causal impact but a reason for the hearer. Set against that, Z., the storico della filosofia and interpreter of empiricism and moral psychology (professore di storia della filosofia at the Accademia scientifico-letteraria di Milano; works include Saggi filosofici; La dottrina della coscienza morale nello Spencer; La storia della filosofia e i rapporti suoi colla storia della coltura e della civiltà; Fra il pensiero antico e il moderno; Socrate; Mill e l’utilitarismo; Uomini e dottrine; Aristotele e la morale; figures as a complementary, historically minded foil: where Grice analyzes how implicature “meets reason” at the micro-level of conversational exchange (the inferential route from what is said to what is meant), Z. treats reason as something traced longitudinally through traditions (from the Lizio/Peripatos through modern empiricism), emphasizing how philosophical intelligibility depends on the cultivation, transmission, and vernacular accessibility of rational forms; thus Z.’s “ragione” is the diachronic discipline that makes a culture capable of understanding Aristotle, Spencer, or Mill, while Grice’s “ragione conversazionale” is the synchronic discipline that makes a single utterance mean what it does because the hearer can rationally recognize, and respond to, the speaker’s intention. Grice: “It amazes me to note the influence of the English empiricists on Italian culture, when they have monsters of their own! Z. has read Aristotle, and unlike many other than the great three – Bologna, Sorbona, Oxford – in the vernacular! At Oxford, it would be unthinkable to have a professor professing on the big history of philosophy! In retrospect, I wonder why I did use Hardie’s notes on the Ethica nichomachea, when Z. wrote his own!” Storico italiano della filosofia Grancona, Vicenza. Professore di storia della filosofia nella r. accademia scientifico-letteraria di Milano, poi trasformata in facoltà di filosofia. S’occupa soprattutto di positivismo e di filosofia antica. Le sue principali opere sono: Saggi filosofici; La dottrina della coscienza morale in Spencer;  Fra la filosofia antica e la moderna; Socrate; Mill e l’utilitarismo; Uomini e dottrine; Il LIZIO e la morale, La storia della filosofia e i rapporti suoi colla storia della coltura e della civiltà. Z. is a good representative of the school of Milano – which postdated that of Bologna. While Oxford does not have  chair in the history of philosophy, this is exactly the title of his cathedra in this newish university: “professore di storia della filosofia.” Such a chair would be unthinkable today, as the area is divided into ancient philosophy, mediaeval philosophy, modern philosophy, and contemporary philosophy – and as different from a course on the storiography of philosophy, on which the Italians excel. Z.’s interest in empiricism can be thus seen as Z. searching for the longitudinal unitity between, say, il ‘Lizio,’ as the Italians referred to the Lycaeum, and those philosophers who were Zuccan’tes contemporaries. storia, della filosofia, analisi, Grice on Hardie on Eth. Nic., Grice, ethica, psychologia, joint seminars at Oxford by Grice, Austin, and Hare, on the Eth. Nic. – for Lit. Hum., Greek mandatory! – that Strawson could not attend! Grice: Caro Z., mi colpisce sempre la tua attenzione per la storia della filosofia: a Milano avete dato valore a una cattedra che a Oxford sarebbe impensabile! Da noi, l'antica e la moderna si separano nettamente, mentre tu cerchi l'unità tra il Lizio e i pensatori contemporanei. Z.: Grice, la ringrazio. In Italia la storia della filosofia è vista come un ponte tra la cultura e la civiltà. Ho sempre creduto che leggere Aristotele in volgare, e non solo in latino o greco, aiuti a riportare la filosofia vicino alle persone, alla loro esperienza quotidiana. Grice: È un approccio che trovo affascinante! Da noi, per le humaniores, il greco era obbligatorio, ma forse ci siamo persi la dimensione più viva e conversazionale. Mi incuriosisce il tuo interesse per il positivismo e l’empirismo: come li intrecci con la tradizione italiana? Z.: Bella domanda! Per me, l'empirismo inglese è una lente utile, ma va sempre filtrato attraverso la coscienza morale italiana—quella che ho indagato in Spencer e Mill. La filosofia, in fondo, è una conversazione continua tra esperienze, lingue e civiltà: il dialogo, come dicevi tu, non si ferma mai. Zuccante, Giuseppe (1879). Dissertazione di laurea. Padova.

Ludovico Zuccolo (Faenza, Ravenna, Romagna). At the level of academic role, the comparison is less “parallel appointments” than two very different university worlds. Grice’s titles are institutional and highly specific: Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means he was a college fellow with responsibility for teaching students in tutorials inside the Oxford collegiate system. CUF University Lecturer means he also held a university-wide lecturing role, funded centrally, with duties beyond the college. So Grice combines two layers: college office university office For Zuccolo, by contrast, we are in the early seventeenth century, before anything like the modern Oxford division between college fellowship, tutorial office, and university lectureship. So the closest comparison is not office for office, but intellectual type and social location. The safest way to put it is: Grice was a professional academic philosopher inside a mature collegiate university structure, with defined teaching and institutional roles. Zuccolo was a learned writer and political-moral thinker operating in the world of courts, cities, patronage, print, and civic discourse, not as a “Fellow and Tutor” in the Oxford sense. So if you ask how they compare institutionally: Grice formal university appointment college fellow tutorial teacher university lecturer embedded in an examination-and-college system Zuccolo not a college fellow in the Oxford sense not a tutorial don better understood as a man of letters, political writer, and dialogist in the civic-humanist Italian world That difference matters philosophically too. Grice’s style is shaped by tutorial culture: close argument small-group discussion fine distinctions responsibility for what exactly is meant Zuccolo’s style is shaped by the dialogue, treatise, and civic-political tradition: public reasoning statecraft utopian and moral reflection signs, language, and order at the scale of the polity rather than the tutorial room So the neat contrast is: Grice belongs to the institutional ecology of Oxford: college, tutorial, lecture, faculty Zuccolo belongs to the institutional ecology of early modern Italy: court, republic, patronage, print, and civic philosophy If you want a one-line formulation in your preferred style, I would suggest: Grice’s authority is collegiate and tutorial, internal to Oxford’s dual structure of college fellowship and university lectureship; Zuccolo’s is civic-humanist and literary, grounded not in a modern academic chair but in the public world of dialogue, political reflection, and patronage.Con Z. troviamo la perfetta combinazione tra ragione conversazionale, la lingua perfetta della Repubblica di San Marino e la filosofia italiana. Z. and Grice line up neatly if we treat Z. as a sign/theory-of-state utopian and Grice as a theorist of reason-based conversational meaning—with the contrast turning on where each locates the binding force of “meaning.” Z. writes from within an Italian civic and institutional imagination of signs: his Dialoghi include Belluzzo ovvero della città felice, an idealized celebration of San Marino as “felice” chiefly because it preserves libertà; and, strikingly, he treats political stability as tied to distribution—arguing that rapid population growth becomes governable only through a more equable partition of wealth. Even his famous Della ragion di stato (embedded as “oracolo XI” in the Considerazioni politiche e morali sopra cento oracoli, turns on the autonomy of political prudence: “ragion di stato” is not merely lawbreaking, but whatever conserves a form of government. In that setting, “segno” is never merely semantic: it is public, regulative, and implicitly constitutional—something like the currency of a republic, whose circulation presupposes shared uptake and civic discipline. Grice, by contrast, radicalizes meaning by relocating it inside the rational micro-structure of a conversational exchange. Where Z. is attracted to the sign as a public artifact (the sign as a thing in the republic), Grice’s “meaning” is a reason-governed transaction between minds: for S to mean by uttering , S intends (i) that A form some response (typically belief), (ii) that A recognize S’s intention, and (iii) that this recognition function as A’s reason for the response. That “reason condition” is the substantive pivot: it is not enough that an effect occur, nor even that an intention exist; the intention must be recognizable as such and must rationally ground the audience’s uptake. Hence Grice can “underrate signs” in the semiotic sense and still be deeply committed to a discipline of signification—because the explanatory work, for him, is done not by the sign’s public status but by the inferential accountability of speaker and hearer under cooperative rational constraints. So the difference can be put sharply: Z. politicizes signification (signs as elements in a civic order—San Marino as a “city” that holds together through shared norms, including distributive ones), while Grice psychologizes and rationalizes signification (meaning as a complex of intentions whose recognition supplies reasons). Yet they can be made to meet: Z/’s “patto” image for a perfect civic language anticipates, at the macro-level, what Grice supplies at the micro-level—namely, that communication is sustained not by brute codes but by mutually recognizable norms of reasonableness that make uptake answerable. Grice: “I was called a cavalier at Oxford when I gave my lecture to the Oxford Philosophical Society on ‘meaning,’ underrating ‘signs’ on which Z. has written bunches of stuff! There is indeed a continuous Italian tradition of philosophers who JUST philosophized on, as I prefer, ‘the sign’: Fusinieri, Marzolo, Ferrero, Marchesini, Cairo – and, why not, Mussolini!” Autore di un discorso della ragione del numero del verso italiano, dove afferma il principio dell'unificazione dell'accento e della quantità, dei dialoghi, in uno dei quali, Belluzzo ovvero della città felice, Z. critica l'utopia di Moro e delinea uno stato ideale, celebrando la libertà di San Marino. In altri, egli mette in luce il rapporto tra ri-partizione della ricchezza e aumento della popolazione, sostenendo che alle difficoltà inerenti al rapido crescere di quest’ultima può rimediarsi solo attraverso una perequata distribuzione della prima. Il suo Della ragione di stato, Considerazioni politiche e morali sopra cento oracoli d'illustri personaggi. Præfertim considerantur; imperij Romani robur, ergo ex caufa argumentum poterat coniunge Galenus, Satyr. Deconiect. cuiufquemorib. et cetera nus, confirmaremque ipsum, si muliercorum spectaculorum curiosa fuisset, ac frequens. Hecitafubijcere voluideobfer uatione, et iudicio Galeni: cetera, qua ex ea demnostra methodo ad ijcip ot erant, quisque potest per se facilè negocio deducere. Interim nos finem imponamus huicquarte curatoriorum partis, qua græcè Symioticè, nobis DE SIGNIS dicitur, in duo membra secatur. Primum inquirit mores. Secundum latitantes affectus. Indago procedittum ex causis, tum ex affectibus consequentibus, quos SIGNA dicamus peculiariter sumpto figninomine. Ad si ex causis, et SIGNIS progressus iungantur, certior investigatio euadit. segno, significare, de signis, Grice, Meaning, conventional sign, artificial sign, natural sign, lingua utopica. Dell’ideale repubblicano. Yes, but here we need to distinguish between traditional family legend and securely documented history. The etymology is usually given as toponymic: the family name is connected with Grado, and the usual Venetian tradition is that the surname developed from an earlier form such as Gratico or Gradonico and then became Gradenigo, with the family being associated with Grado. The most cautious modern summary says the origin is uncertain in detail, but that the “Gradese” connection is the one consistently accepted by tradition and regarded as the most plausible by modern historians. [it.wikipedia.org] So, in short: the surname probably means “of/from Grado” or “the family associated with Grado,” rather than deriving from an ordinary lexical noun. [it.wikipedia.org] On the earliest member of the lineage, the answer depends on whether you mean legendary ancestor or first historically visible figure. In legendary family tradition, the house is pushed back to migration from Aquileia to Grado, even to the age of Attila, but that is heraldic-genealogical tradition, not firm history. [heraldrysi...titute.com], [conoscerevenezia.it] In stricter historical terms, the most careful source says the family only clearly appears in Venetian history in the second half of the ninth century, after the murder of Doge Pietro Tradonico. That means we do not really have a securely documented single “eldest member” by name from the supposed founding era. [it.wikipedia.org] If you want the earliest individually named member who is easy to point to in the later medieval genealogy, one common genealogical line gives Bartolomeo di Gradenigo as father of Marco di Gradenigo, with Marco di Gradenigo active in the thirteenth century and father of Doge Pietro Gradenigo. But that is already much later than the legendary origin-story. [ancestors....search.org], [gw.geneanet.org] So the safest scholarly answer is: the surname is traditionally derived from Grado; the ancient origin narrative is legendary and not securely datable;  and the earliest historically usable members are medieval Venetians, not a single securely documented founder from the migration legend. If you want the cleanest one-line formulation, I would suggest: Gradenigo is traditionally a toponymic surname connected with Grado, but the family’s remote founder belongs to legend rather than documented history; the lineage becomes historically clear only in medieval Venice, with figures such as Marco di Gradenigo and Doge Pietro Gradenigo. [it.wikipedia.org], [ancestors....search.org], [gw.geneanet.org] If you want, I can next narrow this to one of two things: earliest documented Gradenigo by name, or whether Gradenico in Z.’s 1608 title is really just an older spelling of Gradenigo.Grice: Caro Z., confesso che a Oxford mi chiamarono “cavalier” quando parlai di meaning: avevo quasi liquidato i signs, proprio mentre tu—con ammirevole ostinazione italiana—li prendi sul serio, de signis e tutto il resto. Z.: Con simpatia, Professore: in Italia il segno non è un accessorio, è una disciplina. E se si sogna una lingua perfetta—anche solo come utopia civile, alla San Marino—bisogna sapere che cosa rende un segno “naturale”, “artificiale”, o “convenzionale”. Grice: Ecco il punto che mi diverte: il mio “meaning” nasce da intenzioni e riconoscimenti, ma tu mi ricordi che la tradizione—da Fusinieri e Marzolo fino alle nostre bizzarrie moderne—ha già trattato il segno come cosa pubblica, quasi politica. Una lingua perfetta non è soltanto un codice: è un patto. Z.: Appunto: e un patto, per reggere, chiede anche giustizia. Nei miei dialoghi (pensi a Belluzzo) la ripartizione della ricchezza non è moralismo: è condizione di stabilità. Così anche la lingua: senza una “perequazione” dei segni—accessibili e condivisi—la repubblica parla, ma non conversa davvero. Zuccolo, Ludovico (1608). Il Gradenigo: dialogo nel quale si discorre contra l’amor platonico, et a longo si ragiona di quello del Petrarca. Bologna: Bellagamba.

 

POSTILLA

 

This study, aptly titled “Così bella implicatura, Grice!”, has deliberately taken the form of a conversazione rather than a linear exposition, not by accident but as a methodological homage to Grice himself; it has sought to put into practice his repeated insistence on the latitudinal unity of philosophy—where ethics, metaphysics, logic, and language stand or fall together, like virtue, which is entire—and on the longitudinal unity of his own work, whose continuity lies in the patient demonstration that reason operates most fruitfully in and through conversation. In this sense, the inquiry has tried to show, by doing rather than by declaring, what Grice meant when he treated conversational reasoning as an activity rather than a doctrine, something to be exercised over time and across topics, in the spirit of Galileo’s and Collingwood’s shared insight that understanding advances by conversando rather than by proclamation. If the result has occasionally wandered, doubled back, or lingered over apparently marginal details, that too has been intentional, for it is precisely in such movements that implicature does its quiet work. Above all, the process has proved both fruitful and genuinely enjoyable, confirming Grice’s conviction that philosophical clarity need not come at the expense of wit, pleasure, or intellectual companionship, and that reasoning conducted in good conversational faith can be as rigorous as it is humane.