H. P., GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE

 

H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: “Così bella implicatura!” -- (c) J. L. Speranza. Questo documento è reso disponibile in accesso pubblico per lettura e consultazione. È tuttavia vietata la riproduzione, totale o parziale, nonché la diffusione, la trascrizione, l’adattamento o la pubblicazione in qualunque forma e con qualunque mezzo (cartaceo, digitale, elettronico o altro), senza previa autorizzazione dell’autore. Sono incoraggiate citazioni e riprese brevi a fini di studio, discussione e critica, purché accompagnate da chiara e corretta attribuzione all’autore e al progetto Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. L’autore è lieto che la parola “Griceiana” (après Fodor) circoli anche presso i più sospettosi—perfino, chissà, tra gli Anti‑Grice—purché circoli con nome, fonte e buona educazione.

 

This study is not “about” Grice so much as an act of learned ventriloquism: a sustained feat of conversational scholarship in which J. L. Speranza makes Grice speak again—sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian, often in that third register the project loves best, Latinised intimacy (Vadum Boum included). It is scholarship with the pulse of theatre: quoting, parodying, reconstructing, and then—at the last moment—doing the one thing Grice prized above system, a well-timed inplicatura. The range is unapologetically wide (Bononia and the Reno, the Sorbonne and the Seine, Vadum Boum and the confluence of Isis and Cherwell), but the method is its real charm: convivial, exacting, and funny in more than one key—English humour meeting Italian humour not as translation but as cousinship. The enterprise’s originality lies in its governing conceit: that Grice’s “theory of conversation” is best recovered not by embalming it into a diagram, but by letting it live—less a ghost-in-the-machine than a voice-in-the-room: disputing, teaching, teasing, correcting, and (always) crossing from what is said to what is meant. If you want a piece of work that makes rationality feel less like a schema and more like a civilisation—running, with classical stubbornness, from AETERNA ROMA through Bononia to that marshy utilitarian ford where oxen and undergraduates alike learn to cross—this is it.

 

J. L. Speranza is the founder, together with A. M. Ghersi, of Il gruppo di gioco di H. P. Grice: a “play group” whose name has been hunted, re-hunted, and never quite domesticated—since “gruppo di gioco” never fully satisfies as a rendering of Grice’s plagroup (which certain heretics would have as Lady Ann Strawson’s invention). This study irradiates from the group’s verbali: minutes that keep multiplying, not praeter necessitatem but by the very logic of convivial inquiry, as the circle expands. From those records, the project follows Grice’s own method—treating the illustrious dead as if they were great and living—while keeping a straight face only long enough to smuggle in the oxen, the ford, and the old academic joke that one crosses into learning by crossing water. Bononia to Sorbonne to Vadum Boum: the route is classical, the tone is playful, and the implicatures do most of the heavy lifting.

 

Grice, the former ‘Navy’ man, once joked that philosophy displayed two unities. One is the unity of latitude: there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. The other is the unity of longitude. The following pages aim at the second type of unity. But Speranza has managed to combine both in some original way. The main text will thus provide the latiduinal unity – and the foonotes will refer to the specific item in the longitudinal unity. The career of H. P. Grice is easy to encapsulate. He is a representative of twentieth-century philosophy of laguage, Oxford style, and his life spans the century: 1913-1988. How do we criss-cross his path with that of other philosophers – Speranza will focus only on the Italian tradition --? The task is not easy. For one, Grice held a degree in ‘classics.’ After leaving Clifton, there was no gateway to philosophy for him, so he endured the five years of classics. This approach however has a positive side to use, for it allows us to incorporate authors who would otherwise seemed totally crytpic to a philosopher, and by that Speranza means what in academia is often referred to as ‘ancient Roman’ – not history, but PHILOSOPHY. There are interesting interections between Grice and Ancient Roman philosophers in that respect, and not just Cicero. Latin remained the language for philosophy even at Grice’s Oxford for centuries. And Speranza has argued that it is indeed the classical element in Grice’s theory that makes it apt to rehabilitate what others have referred to as the ‘common-sense’ view of both meaning and conversation. When Italian started to become the vernacular in which Italian philosophers philosophised, and Ennglish became the language in which English philoosphers philosophised, there are still interactions that Speranza has covered. There is of course the general Indo-European common ground that gives things like ‘mentire’ and ‘maenan’ (on which Grice bases his analysis). When it comes to philosophy as a whole, the disciplinary divisions was something against which Grice fought as much as he could. As a CUF University Lecturer at Oxford, his classes were felt to be out of touch in general, in that the way examination goes at Oxford – it is the pupil’s own essay that counts – and never ‘whatever that pupil’ or student may have heard at this or that class. This quite contrasts with the method of assessing knowledge in Bologna, the Italian university that predates Oxford, where the chair-struture and the common examination based on a syllabus is the standard. Within these limits, here are are some results.  The study is structured as notes on Speranza’s publications, which have been ordered by surname of the Italian philosopher under consideration. If the first paragraph states the problem and the method, the next should state more clearly the principle of selection. This is not, and cannot be, a complete history of Italian philosophy under a Griceian aspect. It is rather a guided map of points of contact, some obvious, some oblique, and some discoverable only when one allows the history of philosophy to recover its older breadth. Speranza’s procedure is therefore neither merely antiquarian nor merely comparative. He does not ask whether this or that Italian philosopher “anticipated” Grice in some crude prophetic sense, nor whether Grice can be annexed to an Italian school. He asks instead what becomes visible when Grice’s central preoccupations with meaning, rationality, intention, conversation, and the said-versus-the-meant are brought into contact with Italian materials whose vocabulary is often different, whose institutional settings are often older, and whose philosophical ambitions are sometimes cast in rhetoric, dialectic, jurisprudence, philology, theology, or commentary rather than in the post-Fregean idiom. The result is not a lineage but a constellation. What emerges, across the entries, is less a genealogy than a family of recurring concerns: sign and signal, implication and implicature, reason and prudence, conversation and civic life, common sense and learned form. If there is a unity here, it is not the false unity of sameness, but the more interesting unity of repeated philosophical pressure across languages, centuries, and genres. I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE. Grice joked by calling his playgroup the playgroup – an alternative story is that it is Mrs. Strawson’s idea – the idea of grown ups meeting under Austin to para-philosophise. But Grice KNEW (via hearsay) of the experience AUSTIN had practiced for two years before the war in what Hamsshire called the OLD PLAYGROUP – which met at All Souls, a few of which survived and joined the New: Hampshire himself, the Master of the Kindergarten, that is, Austin, and Woozley. The rest were excluded for seniority reasons (Hart was older than Austin) or because they just had gotten unbearable for Austin: Ayer. The ‘playgroup’ then lasted till Austin died in Dec. 1959, and the idea is the Grice took that up until 1967. He was renting at the place, so the idea of meeting anywhere but on university grounds was unthinkable – what about a pub? No. They met at Corpus Christi mainly. It was still paraphilosophical in one important respect. Professionally, for his bread and butter as he puts it, Grice was Tutor in Philosophy at St. John’s which meant sharing a loadfull of at least 15 tutees per term which he shared with Mabbott until Mabbott’s retirement in 1966, and for only one term with P. M. S. Hacker, the Haifa-educated Austro-British philosopher. On top, Grice was CUF University Lecturer – add classes and Stints – and most formidable an ‘examiner’ that about whom many feel ‘terrified.’ So the time for paraphilosophy was growing thin. In what follows Speranza attempts to recreate ‘Gruppo di Gioco’ as led by Grice, and not Austin – seeing that it was indeed Grice’s idea to keep these para-philosophical activities – WITHIN THE PREMISES OF OXFORD – at his disposal, to provide further pleasure to what he may not encounter with the occasional unsympathetic tutee or with the rather formal venues which were the classes, for which Grice prepared full notes which he read – with interaction kept at minimum and beyond the ‘minutes.’ Or less so the ‘examinations’ on which he was held to have held ‘impossibly high’ standards of perfection. Now, we know what the Play Group discussed, and we know what Grice’s Play Group discussed after Austin’s demise – but we don’t know what they SHOULD have discussed. Hence this Verbali del Gruppo di Gioco. Circolo di Grice would do just as well, as indeed Grice’s Club – since he WAS clubbable. But that is it. Rather than order the ‘minutes’ by subject-matter or even date, Speranza has taken the idea of keeping the PERSONALITY of the philosopher (usually Italian, or Ancient Roman) at the centre. Speranza has chosen items by such personalities that were to be or should have been aptly discussed by ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’—complete with the minutes. i.e. to keep the narrative going? thanks. -- place the focus on the praise that Speranza deserves for doing this that makes the world of H. P. Grice much less parochial, even for those who do NOT look to philosophy for their bread and butter -- and can enjoy a rendezvous at a villa, preferably in liguria, by a swimming-pool library. It is here that Speranza’s real generosity as a scholar begins to show. By allowing Grice’s Oxford to meet, one by one, these Italian and Roman personalities, he rescues Grice from the provincial fate to which even his admirers sometimes condemn him: the fate of being treated as a merely local analyst of English talk among dons and colleges. Instead, Grice’s world is opened out into a far wider republic of wit, rhetoric, philology, theology, jurisprudence, and civil conversation, a world in which one need not earn one’s bread and butter by philosophy in order to enjoy the encounter. That is one of the great pleasures of the enterprise. Speranza gives us a Grice who can leave the tutorial staircase behind without ceasing to be himself, and who may now be imagined, quite happily, in a less parochial setting: at a villa, perhaps in Liguria, by a swimming-pool library, still exact, still clubbable, still dry, but no longer confined to the administrative weather of Oxford. In doing so, Speranza not only enlarges Grice; he enlarges the reader’s sense of what philosophy may be when it is allowed to converse with civilisation rather than merely examine it.

 

VERBALI: ABBA. Grice discusses Abba’s take on signs.

G.: Let us begin with the obvious historical propriety. In 1829, at Turin, Abbà publishes his Elementa logices et metaphysices, and he writes in Latin. He does so, I take it, not because he is puzzled in a later Viennese therapeutic way, but because he is teaching. He has Italian-speaking students, yes, but he teaches them in the learned language, because he wants to form them, examine them, and make distinctions in a medium already scholastically disciplined.

S.: Quite. Latin here is pedagogical before it is antiquarian. Abbà is not writing for a coterie of belletrists; he is furnishing a textbook, or something textbook-adjacent, for an Italian public educated enough to receive doctrine in Latin. The audience speaks Italian, but the discipline speaks Latin.

G.: And because the discipline speaks Latin, he says signum.

S.: Precisely. G.: Whereas I, for my own part, am generally happier if I can get away from sign and speak rather of meaning, or of what someone means, or means by x, or means in uttering x. I distrust the noun a little. It tempts one into taxonomy too quickly. S.: Abbà, by contrast, wants the taxonomy. He is teaching. A teacher likes classes. Signum gives him a genus under which he can sort things.

G.: Still, one should not lose the philological continuity. His Latin signum is not some dead museum-piece. It lives on in the vernacular. Italian segno is its descendant.

S.: Yes. And if you want the pronunciation as he, an Italian speaker, would hear it in the vernacular, segno is /ˈseɲɲo/.

G.: Good. That matters. For then signum is not merely the schoolman’s fossil; it has issue in the street, in the town, in ordinary life. The master speaks Latin, but the pupils go home and say segno.

S.: And that in turn lets one pass from the noun to the family. Segno, segnare, segnalare. Once the root is naturalised, it becomes productive.

G.: Just so. English gives me signal, and I like signal because it behaves well predicatively and verbally. One can say that x signals that p. Dark clouds signal rain. A gesture signals impatience. A bandaged leg signals inability to play squash. Signal is cooperative with the philosopher in a way sign often is not.

S.: Italian has segnale, of course, and segnalare. But your point is still better if we begin from the older stock: signum, segno, and then the verbal tendency already latent in Latin itself. For even Latin has signare, or at any rate forms that let one move from mark or sign to signing, marking, indicating.

G.: Which is useful, because I want the active side. Not merely a sign lying there, but something’s signifying, indicating, manifesting, letting something else be gathered. The Greek ancestry helps too: σημαίνειν. There is already there the movement from mark to indication. S.: And from there your preferred examples become possible without any commitment to language proper. Dark clouds may sign, if you like the verb, that it is about to rain. Smoke may sign fire. A footprint may sign that someone passed by. One need not begin with words.

G.: Exactly. The dyadic shape is what matters first: x signifies, signals, marks, indicates, means that p. Something is a manifestation of something else. Not necessarily by convention, not necessarily by speech.

S.: But Abbà wants, at a certain point, to distinguish signum ex institutione.

G.: Yes, and there I begin to want help. For one hears institution and, in English, one is in danger of hearing school, church, hospital, Parliament.

S.: Which would be quite the wrong path here. Institutio is stricter and older. It is a putting-in-place. A positing. Something laid down. In that respect the old contrast is the useful one: thesei as opposed to physei. By thesis, by posit, by institution, not by nature.

G.: So in-stitutio is almost palpable. Something stood up, set in place. S.: Exactly. A signum ex institutione is not a sign by natural consequence, but one whose significative role depends upon an established practice, an accepted placement, a communis consensus if you will. Not smoke from fire, but a word, a flag, a road-mark, a written token, a civic or linguistic arrangement. G.: Then Abbà’s distinction is not alien to mine, though I should phrase it otherwise. He is classifying kinds of sign. I, when I am at my fussiest, want to know what someone means in producing something. But the institutional side matters for me too, because non-natural meaning depends upon publicly recognisable arrangements. S.: Though you do not stop there.

G.: No, because convention, institution, posit, all that, does not yet get one to the most interesting cases. Let me take a little scene. A says to B, Are you going to play squash with me? B says nothing, but displays a bandaged leg. S.: Good. G.: Now, what does B signal? Not, in the philosophically interesting sense, that he has a bandaged leg. A does not need a reasoned inference for that; he can see it. The bandage is before his eyes. What matters is that B means, or signals, that he must refuse the invitation, or cannot accept it. S.: Exactly. The visible condition is not the point of the communicative act, though it is the vehicle of it.

G.: Yes. The leg is the presented item; the refusal is what is conveyed. And the move from the one to the other is not secured merely by a static sign-relation. It requires practical reasoning. A asks himself: why is B showing me this now, in response to that question? Under the assumption that B is being cooperative, the display is to be taken not merely as a specimen but as a reason-giving sign. S.: So your interest falls not merely on the signum, but on the inferential route from signans to signatum in context.

G.: And on the rationality of that route. If one likes, one may say that Abbà gives one the classroom taxonomy: natural sign, instituted sign, and so on. But what interests me is that, in conversation, the decisive work is often done not by the sign-vehicle alone but by what an addressee can reasonably infer from its display at that juncture.

S.: Still, Abbà helps because his signum ex institutione keeps in view the fact that language is not brute smoke. It belongs to a practice. Words are not naturally tied to what they signify; they are instituted, posited, sedimented into use. G.: Certainly. And if he is teaching in Latin to Italian speakers, the point becomes almost theatrical. He is using one instituted system to explain another. Signum in the lecture-room, segno outside it. Latin as the pedagogic superstrate, Italian as the vernacular continuation. S.: Which is why your shift from sign to mean need not be hostile. It is rather a change of focal length. Abbà says: let us classify signs. You say: let us ask what someone meant in producing this sign here and now. G.: Nicely put. And perhaps Ciceronian signare is useful just because it lets one hover between marking and meaning. Something may signare another thing in the broad consequential sense: one thing points on to another. The relation is dyadic. x implies, indicates, manifests, or gives one to gather that p. S.: Consequentia in the broad medieval sense.

G.: Yes. Though once conversation enters, the consequential tie is not merely material or natural. It is often practical and intention-sensitive. The clouds may signal rain by nature; the bandaged leg signals refusal by rational placement in an exchange. S.: Then one could say that Abbà’s signum ex institutione prepares the ground, while your account of meaning and implicature explains the most delicate cases that arise once instituted signs are used by reason-giving agents in conversation.

G.: I should be content with that. Abbà, the teacher, needs the genus signum. He is writing in Latin in Turin in 1829 for Italians whom he will later examine. He needs distinctions that can be taught and tested. I, in my own teaching, prefer to ask: what did he mean by that, what was conveyed, what was implied, what was to be gathered? But I am not leaving the sign behind. I am merely insisting that, in the best cases, the life of the sign lies in the reasoning it occasions. S.: And that is why your squash example matters. The bandaged leg is not, for A, an object of detached semiotics. It is a move in a game.

G.: Exactly. A conversational move. And once one sees that, one sees why signum alone is not enough. One needs signum plus occasion, plus recognisable intention, plus the cooperative presumption under which the addressee reasons from what is shown to what is meant.

S.: Then perhaps the closing formula writes itself. Abbà begins from signum because he is a Latin teacher addressing Italian speakers within a post-scholastic discipline. You begin from mean because your concern is not only with signs as kinds but with what rational agents do with them in conversation.

G.: Yes. And if one wants the genealogy in a single breath: signum becomes segno, produces signal and segnare-like descendants, and behind them all there still flickers σημαίνειν, the old thought that one thing may stand forth so that another thing may be gathered from it. S.: A decent lineage.

G.: More than decent. Pedagogically useful, too. Abbà could have examined them on it. And I daresay I would have.

Further refs.: Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Abbà: ‘the italian ‘Lockino’ migliore da Locke -- la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatra conversazionale e l’analisi del segnare nell’Elementæ logicæ,’ ‘Elementae dialecticæ: segno, segnante, segnato – SIGNVM EX INSTITVTIONE – il latino come palæo-italiano’ pel Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

 

VERBALI: ABBAGNANO

Grice considers a tesi di laurea.

G.: Let us begin where Naples begins for a philosopher of that generation: not with a tutorial, but with a chair, a relatore, a thesis, a faculty, a city, and a young man who must be judged in public in 1922.

S.: Which already marks the difference from us. Oxford teaches by the small room and the weekly paper. Naples, in that case, teaches by the larger institutional relation: laurea, discussione, prefazione, publication.

G.: Quite. One does not have the old Oxford luxury of a tutor who says very little and means a great deal by it. One has, instead, a relatore who can shape the whole destiny of the text.

S.: And in Abbagnano’s case, perhaps shape even its title.

G.: Which is why the title is philosophically worth worrying. Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero. A title one can spend a week distrusting. S.: Let us do it word by word, then.

G.: Yes. Sorgenti first. S.: Plural feminine.

G.: Already interesting. Not la sorgente but le sorgenti. Not one source, but many.

S.: And not origine in the abstract, still less fondamento in the stricter philosophical sense.

G.: Exactly. Sorgente is more physical, more imagistic, more terrestrial. A spring, a source, a point at which something emerges, rises, flows. S.: And because it is plural, the thought is not of one primal ground but of multiple upwellings. G.: Very good. One might say that the plural weakens the temptation to system. If he had said la sorgente del pensiero, he would sound more metaphysical in the old singular way. Le sorgenti suggests complexity, perhaps even conflict. S.: Several tributaries feeding thought. G.: Yes, though one must be careful not to make it too hydrological. Still, the metaphor matters. Pensiero does not appear ex nihilo; it rises from somewhere, or rather from several wheres. S.: And if the original preferred title was Le sorgenti vitali del pensiero, that all makes immediate sense.

G.: More than immediate. It makes splendid sense. Pensiero belongs to life; it is not detachable from life; so its sources are vital, living, rooted in experience, striving, temporality, activity. S.: In that version the title sounds like a form of vitalism, perhaps with a little emergentism, but not necessarily anti-rationalism. G.: Quite. Vitalize thought, do not irrationalize it. One could have accepted that title with composure. It says: thought grows out of life. That is plausible, and indeed almost a truism once one ceases to worship pure intellect. S.: Whereas irrazionali is another matter. G.: Entirely another matter. Irrazionali does not merely say living, pre-theoretical, concrete, dynamic. It says not rational, or not fully rational, or at least not capturable under ratio.

S.: And therefore it invites Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to walk in, whether wanted or not. G.: Exactly. The title becomes more polemical at once. Vitali might have been a doctrine of life; irrazionali sounds like a challenge to intellectualism. It has sharper teeth. S.: And we do have the report that Abbagnano himself would have preferred vitali, but that Aliotta pressed for irrazionali. G.: Which is deliciously awkward. The thesis then becomes, as it were, divided against itself before the poor fellow has even defended it. One title from the candidate’s own temperament, another from the relatore’s strategic or rhetorical instinct. S.: Tutor and tutee indeed, except not in our sense. G.: Not in our sense at all. You are fortunate, by the way, that I have never insisted on renaming your essays before allowing you to read them aloud. S.: I have often reflected on that good fortune. G.: Though perhaps I should have done it once or twice. S.: You would have called my essays “On Certain Preventable Confusions.”

G.: Or “Attempts in Search of Distinctions.” But let us return to Naples. The problem is that the printed 1923 title may tell us as much about Aliotta as about Abbagnano. S.: Because Aliotta writes the prefazione. G.: Precisely. The prefazione is a dangerous genre. It appears to introduce, but it also frames, appropriates, domesticates, and, at times, colonises. S.: The master speaks before the pupil can quite be heard. G.: Yes. The relatore gets to tell the reader what kind of thing this is, what battle it belongs to, what enemy it answers, what larger school it serves. The young author may then appear as the example of a tendency whose terms have already been supplied by another. S.: One might almost say the prefazione kills the candidate’s voice by ventriloquising it in advance.

G.: Strong, but not unfair. Especially in a 1922 laurea culture. One is young, one needs the degree, one needs approval, one wants the text through the ritual and into print. Under such conditions one may write what one thinks; one may also write what one can get passed.

S.: So a tesi di laurea is not always the pure confession of a soul.

G.: Heaven forbid. A thesis is often a negotiated object. One writes under pressure, under allegiance, under tactical deference. The text may contain one’s convictions, but filtered through expectation. S.: Which means that if Abbagnano writes irrazionali in print, we must ask whether that is wholly Abbagnano’s voice. G.: Just so. Or whether it is Abbagnano under Aliotta. Abbagnano speaking, yes, but in a room already acoustically arranged by the relatore. S.: And Naples in 1922 is not Bologna in 1322, nor Oxford in 1922. G.: No. Continental philosophy, if one wants the broad label, but in a very local institutional form. Naples has its own lineages, polemics, and pedagogic habits. One should not imagine the old Bolognese universitas murmuring under every title page simply because the country is the same. S.: Though the distance from Bologna matters symbolically. Italy is one country, but not one philosophical atmosphere. G.: Exactly. Naples is south, vital, contentious, institutionally different; Bologna is the oldest university, but not therefore the living centre of every later Italian problem. S.: So the 1922 thesis belongs not to some generic Italian philosophy, but to a specifically Neapolitan relation: candidate, relatore, faculty, prefazione, publication. G.: And now to the words again. Sorgenti, we said, plural, multiple, emerging. Del pensiero next. S.: Pensiero is broad. Not merely reasoning, not merely intellection, but thought as such.

G.: Yes, thought in its living range. Not exactly logica, not exactly razionalità, but pensiero. Which is why vitali would have fitted it so well. If thought is part of life, then its springs are vital. S.: Whereas if its springs are irrazionali, the formula becomes harder. How can the irrational be the source of thought without thought itself becoming irrational? G.: That is the nub. One possibility is simply chronological or genetic priority. The source need not resemble the product in kind. Heat is not steam; appetite is not judgment; passion is not reasoning; yet one may say the latter emerges from, depends on, or is stirred by the former. S.: So irrazionali could mean pre-rational rather than anti-rational. G.: Yes, and that is perhaps the kindest reading. The obscure energies of life, willing, striving, affective impulses, concrete needs: these are not reason, but they move reason, feed it, animate it. S.: Which would bring us nearer to Nietzsche or Schopenhauer as diagnoses of background force, but not necessarily to an abdication of rationality. G.: Quite. Though once you choose irrazionali rather than vitali, you advertise the darker lineage. Vitali is almost Bergsonian in softness; irrazionali sounds harsher, more dramatic, more polemical, more apt to draw fire. S.: The plural still matters there too. Le sorgenti irrazionali is less alarming than la sorgente irrazionale. G.: Excellent. The plural saves him from monism. One irrational source might become a dark principle, the Will, capitalised and tyrannical. Several irrational sources are more anthropological, more psychological, more dispersed. S.: Appetite, fear, desire, impulse, historical situatedness, perhaps even temperament.

G.: Yes. A plurality of non-rational feeders of thought. That is much easier to live with philosophically. It need not mean that reason is false, only that reason is not self-begotten. S.: Which is, in fairness, a sensible target against intellettualismo. G.: Indeed. If the enemy is the fantasy of pure thought generating and validating itself from nowhere, then one does need to insist on origins below or before the strictly rational plane. S.: But then the title still risks overstatement. G.: Of course. Titles are often strategic. And this is where the laurea situation matters again. A young man may not choose the title that best captures his settled doctrine; he may accept the title that best satisfies the relatore or best positions the work in a current dispute.

S.: To get the degree bestowed, one may allow one’s title to over-speak one’s actual thesis. G.: Precisely. It is one of the oldest academic arrangements. The candidate says enough of what he believes to remain inwardly intact, and enough of what the institution wants to hear to get through the gate.

S.: There is a nice irony, then, in the later Abbagnano of the Dizionario di filosofia.

G.: Very nice indeed. The young man whose first book bears this dramatic title later compiles a dictionary, that most classificatory and sober of instruments. S.: And then one asks: what does he say there about sorgenti? G.: Apparently nothing of consequence. S.: About irrazionali? G.: Not much to rescue the old title.

S.: About pensiero? G.: Little enough, or at least not in a way that makes 1923 the obvious seed of the later lexicographer. S.: Which strengthens the suspicion that the title may belong more to the moment, or to Aliotta, than to the mature Abbagnano. G.: Yes. A dictionary man does not usually begin by speaking in inflamed plurals unless youth or supervision has put him up to it. S.: So one might almost say that Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero is partly Aliotta’s thesis wearing Abbagnano’s name.

G.: One might, cautiously. Better: Abbagnano’s early work, but voiced under an Aliottian pressure. One need not deny the young author his seriousness in order to notice the prefatory hand on the tiller. S.: Let us go back to the irrational as source. Is there an Aristotelian way to make sense of it? G.: Several. Akrasia at once comes to mind. Action can proceed from conflict between reason and appetite; appetite may move where reason does not govern, or not fully. There, something non-rational is indeed causal in the economy of thought and action.

S.: And temperance? G.: Temperance is the re-ordering of desire under reason, which presupposes that desire is there first as a force needing governance. In that sense, the non-rational is not outside the moral life but one of its permanent materials. S.: Plato too, then. G.: Naturally. The charioteer and the horses. Reason does not pull itself. It governs, or fails to govern, powers that are not themselves rational. If Abbagnano’s irrational sources are understood that way, the doctrine becomes less bizarre. Passion, drive, eros, appetite: these move the soul, and thought arises amidst them, not in an aseptic chamber. S.: But Plato still wants reason to govern. G.: Yes, and that may be where Abbagnano’s title misleads if taken too starkly. To say there are irrational sources is not yet to say reason is powerless. It only says reason is not the sole originative principle. S.: Unless, of course, the title is made to sound more radical than the argument beneath it. G.: Which is precisely what one suspects in a relatore-shaped thesis. Aliotta may have wanted the anti-intellectualist edge more than Abbagnano did. S.: There is almost a tutorial comedy in that. The tutor says, “Call it irrazionali,” and the pupil thinks, “I should rather say vitali,” but also thinks, “I should rather graduate.” G.: Quite. Your gratitude to me should deepen. S.: It already has. G.: Good. Now, another point. Sorgenti, being plural, may also protect him from the charge that he is merely reproducing Schopenhauer’s single Will. Multiple sources suggest a more mixed anthropology than a single metaphysical darkness. S.: So one could read the title not as “thought comes from irrationality” but as “thought has several pre-rational feeders.” G.: Better put. That rescues much. It turns the title from manifesto into genealogy. S.: And if the title had remained vitali, the genealogy would appear less polemical and more organic. G.: Exactly. Life feeding thought. No need to scandalise reason; merely to situate it. S.: Yet perhaps irrazionali sold the thesis to the faculty. G.: Or to Aliotta. Or to the prefazione. Or to the current intellectual weather. We must not underestimate the market value of a sharper title in a philosophical polemic. S.: There is also the question whether “irrational” in 1922 means what we hear now. G.: Quite. It may have meant not absurd, but non-intellectual, sub-rational, pre-conceptual, existentially lived. The word can harden or soften with context. S.: Which again brings us back to the problem of metalanguage. One title, many possible later hearings. G.: Yes, and we are bound to keep English as our metalanguage while remembering that the operative rhetoric is Italian, and institutionally Neapolitan, in 1922. S.: And that Abbagnano was very young. G.: Twenty-one at the thesis, about twenty-two at publication. That matters. One should not read the 1923 volume as if it were the final voice of the later dictionary-maker. It is the voice of a very young philosopher negotiating entry. S.: Almost too young to be fully himself in print. G.: Or young enough to be himself, but only under the shadow of another’s endorsement. Youth in philosophy is rarely pure. It is usually mediated by schools, patrons, introductions, examinations, and chairs.

S.: Then the real drama of the title is institutional as much as conceptual.

G.: Indeed. Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero is a thesis-title, not merely a thought-title. It tells us something about Naples 1922, about Aliotta, about anti-intellectualist mood, about the relation of pupil to master, and only then about Abbagnano simpliciter. S.: Which is why it may be dangerous to quote too much Abbagnano from it, as if the wording were transparently his mature creed. G.: Precisely. The prudent scholar says: here is an early, laurea-born, prefaced, and perhaps partly imposed formulation, not necessarily the settled doctrine of the later Abbagnano. S.: And that later Abbagnano, by compiling a Dizionario di filosofia, almost enacts a revenge upon his own youth. G.: Splendid. The young man begins with springs, dark energies, and dramatic titles; the older man ends by arranging entries alphabetically. S.: A movement from sources to definitions. G.: Or from rhetorical emergence to lexical order. It is almost comic enough to count as a philosophical biography in miniature.

S.: Then perhaps the final verdict on the title is this: as philosophy, suggestive; as autobiography, uncertain; as institutional symptom, highly revealing. G.: I could scarcely improve on that. Only add: as a title, too good not to be partly someone else’s idea. S.: Aliotta’s. G.: Let us say: Aliotta’s pressure, Abbagnano’s acquiescence, Naples’ occasion, and a very young philosopher’s need to pass.

S.: And between vitali and irrazionali, one sees the whole tension.

G.: Yes. Between life and anti-intellectual polemic. Between what one may have wanted to say and what one was induced to print. Between the spring and the school.

Further refs.: Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Abbagnano: ‘going through the dictionary of Scipione: la ragione conversazionale: “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says, unless it’s Abbagnano’s! (Grice) – empiegare/empiegato, implicare/implicato, e l’idea d’un dizionario filosofico.’ Note su Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. 

 

VERBALI : ACCETTO

G.: Let us begin with the phrase itself, because it behaves rather better than one first expects. Della dissimulazione onesta. At first glance it looks like the sort of title one would set for a schoolboy merely to see whether he blanches.

S.: Because it sounds self-cancelling.

G.: Precisely. Like “sincere deceit,” or “truthful concealment,” which the English ear distrusts before the mind has had time to inquire.

S.: Yet Accetto means us not to stop at the ear.

G.: No. He wants us to ask whether concealment must always fall on the side of falsehood. That is already a subtle move, and one which the ordinary moral vocabulary rather discourages.

S.: Because ordinary vocabulary carries its own implicatures.

G.: Very good. “Dissimulation” comes pre-loaded with a bad character reference. One hears the word and already half-condemns the act.

S.: Which is exactly what Accetto is trying to undo.

G.: Yes. He is, if one may borrow my own terminology with due caution, attempting to cancel a standing social implicature attached to the lexeme itself.

S.: The implicature being: if he dissimulates, he deceives.

G.: Quite. Whereas Accetto says: not so fast. There is a distinction between the active feigning of what is not there, and the prudent withholding of what is there.

S.: Simulazione versus dissimulazione.

G.: Exactly. The first invents; the second veils.

S.: And for him that is already a moral distinction.

G.: A deeply moral one. That is where he and I begin to converge and then immediately diverge again.

S.: Because for you the first question is not good or bad concealment, but what inferential route takes one from what is said to what is meant.

G.: Just so. I am interested in the machinery of recovery, the hearer’s reasoning under cooperative presumptions. Accetto, by contrast, begins with the soul and its intentions.

S.: Yet the machinery and the soul meet in practice.

G.: They do. Let us take a plain case. Suppose a guest at table asks a dangerous question in mixed company, and the host answers with studied incompleteness.

S.: He does not lie.

G.: No. He says less than the whole truth, perhaps shifts emphasis, perhaps lets silence carry part of the burden.

S.: And yet the reasonable hearer may gather a good deal.

G.: Exactly. If the hearer is sensible, he sees not only what is said but why so little is said, and in what circumstances. He reasons from the host’s restraint, not merely from the words.

S.: So the unsaid is not empty.

G.: Never. The unsaid is often where civility does its best work.

S.: Which is why Accetto interests you.

G.: Very much. Because he moralises a region of discourse which later philosophers often flatten into a choice between truth and falsehood.

S.: He sees a third region.

G.: Better: he sees that the space between blunt explicitness and outright falsification has its own ethics.

S.: A prudential ethics of manifestation.

G.: Admirably put. One does not owe every truth to every hearer at every moment under every description.

S.: That sounds almost scandalous when stated nakedly.

G.: Which is why civilised societies wrap it in tact, discretion, reserve, reticence, good breeding, and a dozen softer nouns.

S.: But Accetto gives it the harder name.

G.: Yes, and thereby risks scandal in order to gain accuracy. “Dissimulazione” shocks; “reserve” merely glides.

S.: Then perhaps the title itself performs a kind of philosophical correction.

G.: Indeed. It forces the reader to slow down and separate things he would lazily keep together.

S.: Such as concealment and lying.

G.: Exactly. Or sincerity and total explicitness, which are by no means identical.

S.: Let us press that. Can one be sincere while withholding?

G.: Certainly, provided the withholding is not undertaken in order to induce a false belief which one could not otherwise induce.

S.: So your condition concerns intended uptake.

G.: Naturally. If I conceal with the design that you should believe the contrary, I am drifting into deception. If I conceal because full manifestation would be indecorous, harmful, or a betrayal of another trust, the matter changes.

S.: Then intention is central for both you and Accetto.

G.: Yes, though not in the same register. For him intention is morally tinctured from the start; for me it is the hinge of speaker-meaning.

S.: Still, both of you refuse to locate everything in the surface form of the utterance.

G.: Quite. Neither of us is so foolish as to imagine that what is explicit exhausts what is communicatively going on.

S.: Then why did Strawson trouble you in this vicinity?

G.: Because Strawson, though acute on presupposition and ordinary talk, remains suspicious of anything that sounds like a rehabilitation of concealment under the title of sincerity. He likes frankness to look cleaner than it often is.

S.: Whereas you think frankness can be vulgar.

G.: It can be. “Candour” is a splendid ideal until it becomes a form of aggression.

S.: So honest dissimulation may sometimes preserve the deeper cooperative order of the exchange.

G.: Exactly. That is the point. If cooperation means making one’s contribution such as is required by the accepted purpose of the conversation, then there are occasions on which overstatement, over-disclosure, or brutal explicitness would violate the purpose more gravely than reserve would.

S.: Which means that Quantity is not simply “say as much as possible.”

G.: Heaven forbid. Quantity is “make your contribution as informative as is required,” not “bleed on the carpet.”

S.: Very good.

G.: Thank you.

S.: Then Accetto’s world of courts, factions, patrons, jealousies, and dangerous sociability gives this an immediacy your Oxford examples often soften.

G.: Yes. Oxford lets one illustrate with squash and tea. Seventeenth-century Italy often requires one to illustrate with survival.

S.: So prudence there is not merely etiquette.

G.: No. It may be political, existential, even spiritual. One does not always speak in drawing rooms; sometimes one speaks under princes.

S.: Which is why his moral psychology matters.

G.: Exactly. A heart must be balanced before reserve can be virtuous. Otherwise concealment becomes merely an instrument of vanity, cowardice, or intrigue.

S.: So for Accetto the distinction is not verbal but characterological.

G.: Deeply so. Honest dissimulation is not a technique detachable from the soul that deploys it.

S.: Whereas for you the same outward act could be analysed by reference to intentions and rational recognisability without first writing a moral biography of the agent.

G.: Correct. I can describe the structure of the communicative act without yet praising or condemning it.

S.: But you do not therefore deny the moral dimension.

G.: Not at all. I merely insist on analytical sequence. First ask what was meant, how it was conveyed, what assumptions made it recoverable. Then ask whether it ought to have been done.

S.: Accetto almost reverses the order.

G.: He often does. He asks first what sort of soul could conceal honestly, and then what sort of public conduct follows.

S.: Yet he also understands the hearer.

G.: Yes, because without a background expectation of sincerity dissimulation would be unintelligible. One can only withhold against a norm of ordinary openness.

S.: So even concealment presupposes trust.

G.: Absolutely. That is why the case is so delicate. Honest dissimulation is parasitic on a social world in which words and silences are usually taken in good faith.

S.: Otherwise everything collapses into universal suspicion.

G.: And universal suspicion is the death of conversation.

S.: Then perhaps Accetto’s little treatise is really about rescuing conversation from a society of simulators.

G.: Very likely. He says, in effect: because there are those who actively counterfeit, the good man may need to shelter truth without betraying it.

S.: A defensive not an offensive concealment.

G.: Precisely. That is the crucial asymmetry.

S.: Let us try a case of silence. Someone is asked whether he approves of a certain alliance, and he answers only by changing the subject.

G.: Good. The silence or deflection may imply disapproval, reluctance, danger, or tactful suspension.

S.: And the hearer recovers which of these by context.

G.: Yes. Context, occasion, known loyalties, tone, prior exchanges, all the rest.

S.: So here too the “meaning” lies not in explicit assertion but in the rationally interpretable management of manifestation.

G.: Exactly. Which is why I say that what is withheld can be just as communicatively active as what is uttered.

S.: Then Accetto’s title is not paradox but precision.

G.: That is what Speranza sees so well.

S.: Because he understands that the phrase only appears contradictory so long as one confuses honesty with exhaustive display.

G.: Yes. Modern people often do. They imagine that sincerity is achieved by total exposure, as though the soul were obliged to publish itself in full whenever questioned.

S.: A very Protestant picture.

G.: Or therapeutic. In either case rather exhausting.

S.: Accetto would prefer measure.

G.: Measure, prudence, recollection, inward governance. He is much closer to a moral art of self-command than to any cult of confession.

S.: Which gives concealment a positive dignity.

G.: Under conditions, yes. Not because hiding is intrinsically noble, but because undisciplined self-exposure can be both morally foolish and socially destructive.

S.: Then one might say that for Accetto the vice lies not in concealment as such, but in the corruption of its aim.

G.: Very good. The bad case conceals in order to falsify reality to another; the good case conceals in order to protect reality from vulgar misuse, harm, or untimely exposure.

S.: That sounds almost Platonic.

G.: A little, though with more courtly weather about it.

S.: And your own account would translate that into the language of speaker-intention and audience-inference.

G.: Naturally. The hearer asks: given what he said, what he omitted, and the evident constraints of the occasion, what am I intended to gather? If the answer is recoverable under cooperative assumptions, implicature is in play.

S.: Even where the explicit content is meagre.

G.: Especially there. Thin saying often carries thick intention.

S.: Which is why understatement is philosophically richer than chatter.

G.: Usually. Chatter mostly conveys that the speaker has time.

S.: Let us consider whether “honest dissimulation” could ever fail by being too subtle.

G.: Certainly. If the hearer cannot, in the circumstances, reasonably recover what is to be gathered, then the speaker has perhaps preserved innocence at the cost of communication.

S.: So prudence must be measured not only by moral purity but by intelligibility.

G.: Precisely. To conceal honestly is not to become opaque for vanity’s sake. One must still leave enough for a reasonable addressee.

S.: Enough trace.

G.: Yes. Enough sign, enough gesture, enough placement, enough silence of the right sort.

S.: There are silences of the wrong sort too.

G.: Of course. Some silences are merely evasive, lazy, contemptuous, or cowardly.

S.: Then silence itself does not inherit virtue merely by being silence.

G.: Heaven forbid. Nothing in conversation is redeemed by grammar alone.

S.: So Accetto’s phrase demands a whole ethics of discernment.

G.: Exactly. That is why it interests me. It is not a trick formula but the title of an entire region of practical intelligence.

S.: And perhaps also of political intelligence.

G.: Undeniably. In a dangerous court, one survives neither by constant candour nor by constant deceit, but by a disciplined art of manifestation.

S.: Which sounds almost like camouflage.

G.: A dangerous comparison, but not wholly wrong. Except that camouflage in the moral case must not become counterfeit.

S.: So the self is not painted as other than it is, only not displayed in full.

G.: Yes. Veiled, not fabricated.

S.: Simulazione invents a mask; dissimulazione lowers a visor.

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Though if you publish it, do not make me sound lyrical.

S.: Never intentionally.

G.: Good. Now, where does the cooperative principle stand in all this?

S.: It seems less like a demand for explicitness than for responsible contribution.

G.: Exactly. The principle is not a command to utter all one knows. It is a requirement that one’s move be such as the exchange rationally calls for.

S.: Which may include protective incompleteness.

G.: Yes. A physician does not always answer a frightened patient with the whole pathology in one sentence. A diplomat does not always answer a hostile envoy with a complete internal memorandum. A friend does not always answer a raw wound with naked verdict.

S.: So charity and prudence enter the maxims from within.

G.: They do, though I prefer not to sentimentalise the point. It is enough to say that cooperation in human conversation is purposive and situated.

S.: Then Accetto supplies what your formal exposition leaves implicit: the moral atmosphere in which such situatedness acquires shape.

G.: Very good. He gives the atmosphere, I give some of the inferential scaffolding.

S.: And Speranza brings the two together.

G.: With considerable tact. He sees that neither side should swallow the other.

S.: Because if one simply says “Accetto anticipated implicature,” one loses the ethical depth.

G.: Exactly. And if one says merely “Accetto moralises reserve,” one misses the rational structure by which the reserved meaning is nevertheless understood.

S.: Then the best formula is that the truth may survive indirection.

G.: Yes. And more strongly: there are cases in which truth is better served by disciplined indirection than by crude explicitness.

S.: That is the sentence that would trouble moral puritans.

G.: They are often improved by trouble.

S.: You would say that.

G.: Of course.

S.: Then perhaps the final point is this. Honest dissimulation is not a permission to evade truth, but an account of how truth may be governed in its manifestation.

G.: Splendid. Governed, not denied. Ordered, not falsified. Timed, not betrayed.

S.: And all this belongs, for both you and Accetto, to the life of reason.

G.: Yes. Reason is not exhausted by explicit statement. It also lives in reserve, proportion, relevance, tact, and the governed passage from the said to the understood.

S.: So the space between speech and meaning is not a defect.

G.: No. It is one of civilisation’s main theatres.

S.: And Accetto knew that before Brighton.

G.: Long before Brighton.

S.: Then your talk on meaning revisited had a baroque ancestor.

G.: More than one, I suspect. But this one had the honesty to say so while withholding just enough to remain civilised.

S.: Very nearly an epitaph.

G.: Too flattering.

S.: A motto, then.

G.: Better.

S.: Honest dissimulation is not lying with gloves on.

G.: No. It is truth under discipline.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Pugliese.

Grice: Accetto, mi ha sempre intrigato la sua analisi della dissimulazione onesta. Lei distingue tra una dissimulazione sincera e una simulazione disonesta: può spiegarmi come questa distinzione si riflette nel significato implicito delle nostre conversazioni quotidiane?

Accetto: Egregio Grice, la dissimulazione non coincide con la menzogna: è piuttosto un invito alla prudenza, al raccoglimento. Nel mio trattato ho sottolineato che la dissimulazione può essere un rimedio onesto per proteggersi in una società popolata da simulatori. La sincerità, in questo caso, si accompagna all’intenzione morale: solo il cuore equilibrato e l’animo retto possono rendere la dissimulazione uno strumento virtuoso.

Grice: Quindi, secondo lei, l’implicatura conversazionale nasce proprio da questa tensione tra il vero e il celato? È possibile che il gesto, il segno, persino il silenzio, comunichino più della parola esplicita, grazie alla dissimulazione onesta?

Accetto: Esattamente, caro amico. Ogni segno, naturale o artificiale, acquista valore solo quando è sostenuto da un’intenzione genuina. La dissimulazione onesta permette di comunicare con profondità, evitando il falso dell’apparenza. Così, nel laboratorio della conversazione, la verità si rivela spesso tra le pieghe del discorso, e persino in ciò che non si dice, come insegnano gli antichi e la pratica della vita.

Further refs. : Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Grice ed Accetto: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della disimvlatione honesta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. 

 

VERBALI: ACILIO

G.: Let us begin with the Roman scandal itself. Carneades speaks on justice one day, and the next day unpicks what he has just done.

S.: Defends justice on Thursday, demolishes its universality on Friday. One can see why the Senate preferred roads.

G.: And one can see why poor Acilius, acting as interpreter, would feel a constitutional discomfort somewhere between the chest and the soul. S.: More than discomfort. Imagine the Roman translator’s position. Day one: “Justice is admirable, the ornament of civic life, the safeguard of empire.” Day two: “Justice, if universalised, is ruinous, and what passes for justice is often merely the advantage of the stronger.” G.: Thrasymachus in senatorial dress. S.: Neo-Thrasymachus before the Senate had invented the phrase. G.: Yes. And Acilius must go on translating. S.: That is the part that fascinates me. Why should he continue? G.: Because once one has undertaken the office of interpreter, one is bound by something stronger than agreement. One is bound by fidelity to the occasion. S.: Even when the occasion is eating Rome alive in Greek. G.: Especially then. One does not become less of an interpreter because the content begins to scorch. S.: Still, I should like to imagine the first Roman pulse of panic. Acilius begins, perhaps comfortably enough, with iustitia. A noble abstraction, feminine, elevated, fit for the Senate. G.: IVSTITIA, yes. The abstract noun has public dignity. It allows one to translate not merely acts but a civic principle. S.: Whereas if he had opted always for iustum, or iusta, or iustus, he would have been forced into predication too early. G.: Quite. Then one has to ask: what is just? The tax? The tribute? The Senate? Rome herself? It becomes inconveniently grammatical. S.: Let us try the sequence. Day one. Carneades says, in effect, that justice is good. G.: Acilius renders: iustitia bona est. S.: Stately, harmless enough. The Senate can nod. G.: More than nod. It can hear its own self-image returning to it in Latin. Rome likes to think of itself as just, especially when collecting other people’s money. S.: Then Carneades perhaps turns to the Athenian tribute and argues, prudentially or decorously, that Rome’s settlement may be defended under the name of justice. G.: Or at least not denied it too quickly. Acilius then may have had to say something like tributum hoc iustum est, or vectigal iustum est, or even imperium Romanum iustum videri potest. S.: There is the first pang already. Once one leaves IVSTITIA and enters IUSTUM, one begins to predicate of Roman things. G.: Yes. And Roman things are less abstract, and more taxable. S.: Then comes the next day. G.: Ah yes, the day of heartburn. S.: Carneades now says, as the vulgar summary will have it, that justice is the interest of the stronger. G.: Which pushes Acilius straight into the Republic, whether he likes it or not. S.: Into Thrasymachus, certainly. The just is what the stronger finds convenient. G.: Then the Latin problem sharpens. Does Acilius say iustitia utilitas potentioris est? Or iustum est quod potentiori prodest? S.: The first keeps the abstraction. The second bites harder. G.: And the second is more Roman, because Rome can hear itself in potentior. S.: Indeed. If justice is merely what favours the stronger, and Rome is stronger, then Rome may hear both a compliment and an accusation. G.: Precisely why philosophy acquired its bad name. S.: You would blame Acilius? G.: Not morally, perhaps. Historically, yes. Without him, the poison remains Greek noise. With him, it becomes civic Latin. S.: Then Acilius is the medium of infection. G.: A harsh phrase, but serviceable. S.: Yet one must give the man some credit. He is a senator himself, not a hired phonograph. He must feel every clause as a pressure on his own standing. G.: Exactly. He is not merely translating “the Senate” to itself. He is translating something that may implicate him qua senator. S.: Let us do the logic. If Senatus is just, what follows for the senators severally? Not, of course, by strict division that each senator is just. Corporations are not distributive predicates by default. G.: Splendid. Senatus iustus is not equivalent to omnis senator iustus est. S.: No more than exercitus fortis entails every soldier brave. G.: Still, the hearer will drift that way. If the Senate is praised as just, senators borrow some reflected virtue. S.: And if the Senate is exposed as merely the stronger institutionalised, then Acilius cannot help hearing a local consequence for himself. G.: There is the heartburn again. He translates, and as he translates he half-indicts the body to which he belongs. S.: Perhaps that is why he deserves more sympathy than blame. G.: Very likely. Dry blame only. The sort one dispenses in common rooms. S.: What would he have done with dike? G.: Ah, now that is the finer matter. Dike in Greek has a breadth that Latin iustitia can catch only by dignity, not by texture. Dike is judgment, order, right, balance, claim, custom, distribution, and mythic person all at once. S.: Whereas iustitia is statelier and more forensic. G.: And more moralised by the Roman ear. A Roman hearing IVSTITIA hears not merely arrangement but virtue. S.: So Acilius is already forced into interpretation before he begins. G.: Any translation of philosophy worth the name is already philosophy. S.: Then perhaps he had to oscillate. At times IVSTITIA for the grand thesis; at times IUSTUM or AEQUUM for local claims. G.: Yes, though aequum would have softened the blow in certain places. Too soft for a Carneadean reversal. S.: You think he stayed with iustitia for the first day and sharpened into iustum on the second? G.: It would be theatrically perfect. Day one: the noun of civic splendour. Day two: the predicate of actionable convenience. S.: “Justice is good.” “This is just.” “That Senate is just.” “Rome is just.” Then, one day later, “That is called just because Rome can do it.” G.: A very fair reconstruction of the Roman nightmare. S.: And all the while the populace outside hears only that philosophers can prove anything. G.: Which was, of course, the real public lesson. The embassy becomes a travelling demonstration that logos can reverse itself while preserving fluency. S.: Hence Cato’s alarm. G.: Yes. One should never underestimate the Roman distrust of verbal agility when it is not their own. S.: Yet you would say this episode matters philosophically, not merely politically. G.: Deeply. It stages, in public, the difference between praising justice as an ideal and analysing what actually passes under the name of justice among power-bearing agents. S.: Socrates versus Thrasymachus. G.: Or rather Socrates with Thrasymachus as indispensable irritant. Socrates wants justice as psychic and civic order: the rightly related parts of the soul mirrored in the rightly related parts of the city. S.: Reason, spirit, appetite in the soul; rulers, auxiliaries, producers in the city. G.: Exactly. Justice is each part doing its own work under right governance.

S.: Whereas Thrasymachus says, in effect, spare me the harmonium. Justice is what the stronger class has managed to legalise. G.: And Carneades, before Rome, makes Thrasymachus newly exportable. S.: Through Acilius. G.: Through Acilius, yes. The man becomes the conduit by which Greek dialectic enters Roman self-consciousness. S.: There is something almost comic in the Roman senator translating his own possible delegitimation. G.: Comic in the driest way. The sort of thing one recounts after claret. S.: Let us imagine the syntax. Carneades says, perhaps, that if every people were strictly just to all, no empire would stand. G.: Acilius then must choose between preserving the scandal and tempering it. If he is faithful, he says something like si omnes populi ad summam iustitiam se conformarent, imperia conciderent. S.: Which a Roman hears as: your empire survives not because of justice universally observed but because of force selectively rationalised. G.: Precisely. S.: And if he tries to soften? G.: Then he ceases to be interpreter and becomes censor. S.: Which perhaps he was tempted to become. G.: No doubt. But the survival of the episode suggests that enough of the sting got through. S.: What of the Thursday proposition, then? We need one, as you said, neat enough for the Senate. G.: Let it be: iustitia bona est; and where Rome governs justly, tribute may be called just. S.: And Friday? G.: Iustitia, if treated as universally binding against interest and power, is politically self-defeating; in practice the so-called just often marks what the stronger can impose. S.: Acilius must have swallowed hard at the “so-called.” G.: Indeed. It is the phrase that dissolves public nouns. S.: That is the trouble with philosophy before a senate. It starts with abstractions and ends by asking who benefits. G.: Mackie would have enjoyed it. S.: Because of relativism? G.: Because of the old suspicion that values are not floating absolutes but projections, constructions, or at least human impositions dressed in objectivity. S.: And Hare? G.: Hare would resist the simple reduction. Prescriptivity is not the same thing as force. But one can see why Mackie would cite the atmosphere: values as not built into the world the way naive moralism supposes. S.: So from Carneades to Mackie by way of Roman indigestion. G.: A tidy lineage. S.: And Hartmann, Barnes, Duncan-Jones? G.: They belong to the later Oxonian weather of such discussions: whether value is objective, layered, phenomenological, institutional, conventional, or all of these in a badly arranged parcel. S.: But Acilius has no such luxury. He has only the next sentence. G.: Which is why I admire him more as the conversation proceeds. He may be the vehicle of philosophy’s bad reputation, but he is also the first Roman to prove that translation can be an act of civic courage. S.: Even if involuntary civic courage. G.: The best sort. Chosen courage is often theatrical. Involuntary courage is usually merely duty. S.: Let us return one last time to the grammatical forms. IVSTITIA for the public banner; IUSTUM for acts or arrangements; IUSTA if one dares predicate of Roma; IUSTUS if one dares predicate of a senator. G.: Yes. And Acilius, being a senator, must know that the last step is intolerably intimate.

S.: “Senator iustus est” is no mere theory. It is almost an audit. G.: Splendid. Quite so. One may praise the Senate at a distance. To praise or blame the senator is to come home.

S.: Then perhaps Acilius preferred to keep matters abstract as long as he could. G.: Certainly. Translators cling to nouns when predicates become dangerous. S.: Yet Carneades would force the predicates sooner or later. G.: As every good sceptic does. He asks not merely what justice is, but who is calling what just, and to what end. S.: Which is why the populace thought philosophy corrosive. G.: And why philosophers thought it necessary. S.: So our final judgment on Acilius? G.: That he probably did his best. He rendered dike into a Latin Rome could hear, and in doing so he imported not merely arguments but anxiety. S.: And the anxiety was deserved. G.: Usually is. S.: Then the dry moral is that Acilius is not to blame for philosophy’s bad reputation; he merely refused to save Rome from understanding it. G.: Admirably put. And if he suffered heartburn through the proceedings, he earned the right to it.

Further refs. : Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Acilio: la ragione conversazionale e il discorso al senato sulla giustizia -- Roma antica, Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

 

VERBALI: ACHILLINI

G.: Let us begin with the spots, because physiognomy only becomes interesting once one ceases to treat spots as destiny.

S.: Quite. The vulgar physiognomist sees a mark and rushes to a nature.

G.: Whereas Achillini, at his best, sees that the route from mark to nature is inferential, and therefore delicate.

S.: Which is exactly where you become interested.

G.: Naturally. If those spots are merely there by pathology, they may indicate one thing. If they are painted on, they indicate another, or rather they indicate nothing by themselves and only acquire communicative value through intention.

S.: So the first distinction is between natural sign and produced appearance.

G.: Yes, though one must not stop there. For once a person paints the spots, the marks do not merely cease to be natural signs; they enter the world of meant signs.

S.: Meaning that the body becomes a medium.

G.: Precisely. A rather theatrical medium, but a medium all the same.

S.: Then Achillini’s physiognomic syllogism is not simply a medical inference.

G.: No. It may begin as one, but it immediately threatens to become semiotic, rhetorical, and even conversational.

S.: Because the interpreter must ask not merely what is seen, but why it is there to be seen.

G.: Exactly. Which is already my kind of question.

S.: Then perhaps we should formulate the case in your preferred manner. Not “these spots mean measles,” but “someone, by displaying these spots, means to be taken for measly.”

G.: Very good. Though “measly” is an unfortunate adjective.

S.: I risked it for brevity.

G.: And brevity is often the parent of ugliness.

S.: As in Oxford examination scripts.

G.: Especially there. But let us rescue the point. Achillini is useful because he stands precisely at the border where a visible item may be treated either as signum naturale or as the vehicle of an intentional deception.

S.: So the same surface can bear two logics.

G.: Yes. Nature’s logic and use’s logic.

S.: Which already sounds Ockhamist.

G.: Indeed. That is one of the pleasures here. Matsen and the better scholarship did us a favour by recovering Achillini as a Renaissance Ockhamist rather than leaving him as a blurred “Averroist” curiosity.

S.: Because Ockhamism gives you supposition, economy, consequence, and the suspicion of inflated universals.

G.: Exactly. It gives one a leaner semantic atmosphere. Less metaphysical upholstery, more logical carpentry.

S.: Then when Achillini speaks of the prima potestas syllogismi, what do you hear?

G.: I hear the claim that the syllogism’s first power is not merely to march from major to minor to conclusion in schoolroom fashion, but to secure a relation of consequence by which one thing is gathered from another.

S.: Consequence first, ornament later.

G.: Quite. And if one is historically mischievous, one may then say that “meaning” itself begins to look like a species of rationally controlled consequentiality.

S.: That sounds very like your own temptation.

G.: It is my temptation, yes. I do not say that x means that p merely because p follows in any old way from x, but I do say that a relation of inferentially guided uptake lies very near the heart of the matter.

S.: So Achillini is not your ancestor because he “invented implicature,” but because he sharpens the structure in which one thing licenses the gathering of another.

G.: Precisely. One must resist the vulgar hunt for anticipations.

S.: Speranza does.

G.: Admirably. He never says, “Look, here is Grice in 1504.” He says, “Look, here is a structure Grice would recognise.”

S.: And that is much better history.

G.: Infinitely better. Anticipation-talk usually flatters the present at the expense of the past.

S.: Whereas structural affinity lets the past remain itself.

G.: Exactly. Achillini remains a physician-logician in Bologna and Padua, not an honorary don of St John’s.

S.: Though he might have enjoyed the anatomy collections.

G.: More than enjoyed them; he would have corrected them.

S.: Fair. Then let us consider the bodily singular. You have often been suspicious of universals descending too quickly upon particulars.

G.: Yes. The particular body resists hasty annexation by general predicates.

S.: Which is why the physiognomic syllogism is dangerous.

G.: Entirely. It pretends that from this nose, these eyes, this complexion, one may proceed to courage, melancholy, lust, or fraud as if the body carried its essence on the sleeve.

S.: Yet Achillini, because he is both physician and logician, knows that one needs a mediating discipline.

G.: Yes. One must ask under what conditions the passage from visible particular to hidden generality is licit.

S.: That is where the syllogism enters.

G.: Or seems to. But the syllogism does not save one automatically. It merely makes explicit where the risks lie.

S.: For example?

G.: For example, one major premise might say: all those who exhibit sign S have condition C. The minor premise says: this man exhibits sign S. Therefore this man has condition C.

S.: A tidy fraud if the major premise is itself badly founded.

G.: Exactly. Or if the sign is equivocal. Or if the sign has been fabricated. Or if the context alters its force. Or if the observer has fallen in love with his own taxonomy.

S.: So the syllogism clarifies error as much as truth.

G.: Very often that is its best service.

S.: Then perhaps Achillini’s true philosophical value lies less in proving physiognomy than in making visible the inferential ambition on which physiognomy depends.

G.: Splendid. That is exactly the line to take.

S.: Which also lets you distinguish natural indication from communicative exploitation.

G.: Yes. Dark clouds may indicate rain without meaning anything. Painted spots may fail to indicate disease but succeed in meaning “take me for ill.”

S.: And the hearer or observer must decide which game is being played.

G.: Precisely. Is this pathology, signification, pretence, or some mixture? That is why context is unavoidable.

S.: Then the body in Achillini behaves rather like an utterance in your own theory.

G.: In certain respects, yes. A bodily display is not merely a body there; it may be a move.

S.: A move in medicine, in rhetoric, or in deceit.

G.: Exactly. Which is why “those spots mean measles” is, in the interesting case, too simple. Better: “those spots are intended to make one gather measles.”

S.: And once intention enters, so does recognisability.

G.: Quite. If no one could reasonably take the spots as meant to suggest measles, the deception would fail as communication even if it succeeded as paint.

S.: That is a delicious sentence.

G.: Keep it, but do not attribute the deliciousness to me.

S.: Never intentionally.

G.: Good. Now, what of Bologna?

S.: Older than Oxford, which pleases you.

G.: Naturally. I like a university with enough age to make Oxford look juvenile.

S.: Yet Bologna matters here not merely for age but for climate.

G.: Yes. A place where medicine, natural philosophy, and logic could still be taught in one living relation.

S.: So Achillini is formed in a university world less compartmentalised than the later British one.

G.: Exactly. One can still be physician enough to describe the malleus and incus, and philosopher enough to write on syllogism, and natural philosopher enough to treat physiognomy as a serious inquiry.

S.: Whereas in Oxford the physiognomist would be mocked into college silence.

G.: Quite rightly, perhaps, though one might thereby lose an interesting inferential case.

S.: So Speranza’s merit again lies in keeping the figure whole.

G.: Yes. He does not reduce Achillini to an anatomical curiosity, nor to a quaint logician, nor to a family name.

S.: Which brings us to the family name itself.

G.: Ah yes. The danger of Achillini in the generic.

S.: “Some like Achillini, but Achillini is my man” only works if the right Achillini has been isolated.

G.: Precisely. Otherwise one praises a surname and neglects a mind.

S.: And Speranza refuses that flattening.

G.: Admirably. He knows that Italian family names, like Roman nomina, are traps for the hurried.

S.: So Alessandro must be kept distinct from Giovanni Filoteo.

G.: Entirely. One is the physician-logician at the crossing of consequence and bodily signs. The other is the humanist, poet, compiler of literary gardens.

S.: Viridario, not De potestate syllogismi.

G.: Exactly. Green garden, not inferential engine.

S.: Though both, in their own way, concern mediation.

G.: True enough, but one must not sentimentalise the kinship. The structures differ, and the whole point is to preserve difference.

S.: To each his implicature.

G.: Very good. Speranza would approve.

S.: Then let us return to consequence. You said a moment ago that meaning is not identical with consequence, yet is structurally near it.

G.: Yes. One must avoid the crude thesis that if p follows from x, x means that p. That would make smoke mean fire in the same sense in which a gesture means refusal.

S.: Which you have always resisted.

G.: Absolutely. But the hearer’s route from what is presented to what is gathered often has a consequential form. It is because the route has that form that Achillini becomes useful to me.

S.: So you borrow the shape, not the doctrine.

G.: Precisely. Achillini’s world lets one see, with unusual clarity, how an interpreter moves from visible particular to intelligible conclusion.

S.: And from there one can pass, by analogy, to conversational cases.

G.: Yes. Someone says very little, shows something, omits something, or arranges a circumstance. The hearer asks: what follows, given reason and occasion?

S.: Which is nearly your own description of implicature.

G.: Nearly, yes. Though my cases are more thoroughly social and intention-dependent.

S.: Still, your squash player and Achillini’s spotted patient are cousins.

G.: Distant cousins, perhaps. But recognisably of the same inferential family.

S.: Let us try an example of your own. A says, “I am not entirely well,” while touching his forehead.

G.: Good. The hearer may infer fever, reluctance, excuse, or a plea for sympathy depending on context.

S.: So even there the bodily item is not enough.

G.: Exactly. Neither the words nor the gesture suffice in isolation. Meaning emerges from their placement in a rational scene.

S.: Which is what Achillini’s best examples force us to notice.

G.: Yes. The body is not a transparent text. It is a site where signs, symptoms, pretences, and intentions mingle.

S.: Then perhaps physiognomy is philosophically valuable precisely where it fails scientifically.

G.: An excellent paradox. Yes, because its failures expose the inferential temptations of the interpreter.

S.: And the temptation to confuse appearance with essence.

G.: Precisely. Which is why the Ockhamist strand matters. It counsels caution about swollen universals.

S.: So Achillini stands at a very nice point: enough scholastic technique to articulate consequence, enough medical realism to care about bodies, enough Renaissance confidence to risk physiognomy.

G.: Very nicely put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become vain.

S.: I shall try to fail modestly.

G.: Better. Now, what about De intelligentiis?

S.: The earliest securely locatable work, 1494, at Bologna.

G.: Yes, and the title itself already tells one something about the atmosphere: commentator and Aristotle, truth and deviation, all arranged in the disputational manner.

S.: A world in which questions about intelligences, spheres, and celestial order still live beside medicine.

G.: Exactly. Which is why one should not imagine Achillini as a mere transitional figure on the road to modernity. He belongs to a fully inhabited intellectual cosmos.

S.: Yet one in which consequence remains central.

G.: Indeed. Consequence, interpretation, ordered transition from one term or proposition to another. That is the durable thread.

S.: So if one asks why Grice should care, the answer is not simply “because Achillini once mentioned signs.”

G.: No. The answer is that Achillini makes visible an inferential architecture which later philosophy of meaning can reuse without inheriting all the old furniture.

S.: Reuse without masquerade.

G.: Exactly. One need not turn him into an analyst of ordinary language avant la lettre. It is enough that he shows how something seen may become something gathered under a rule of consequence.

S.: And Speranza’s historical tact lies in showing just that, without annexation.

G.: Yes. He is careful where many are lazy. He knows that family names, doctrinal labels, and retrospective triumphalism are the historian’s three common vices.

S.: So in Alessandro Achillini he rescues both a person and a pressure.

G.: Very good. A person from genealogical blur, and a pressure of thought from chronological condescension.

S.: Then perhaps the closing formula is this: Achillini teaches not that bodies speak by themselves, but that interpreters are always tempted to make them speak.

G.: Excellent. And the philosopher’s task is to ask under what conditions that temptation becomes knowledge, and under what conditions performance.

S.: Which is very nearly the whole of conversation too.

G.: Near enough for Bologna.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Bolognese.

 

Grice: Achillini, mi incuriosisce molto la sua concezione del significato come relazione di conseguenza. Potrebbe spiegarmi come questa idea si riflette nella pratica del sillogismo fisiognomico?

A.: Caro Grice, la ringrazio della domanda. Vede, il sillogismo fisiognomico si basa appunto sul fatto che i segni corporei non hanno senso da soli: occorre sempre un interprete che vi attribuisca una conseguenza. Per esempio, le macchie sulla pelle non significano sempre morbillo: può essere che qualcuno le abbia dipinte! Il significato nasce dunque dall’intenzione e dal contesto, non dalla semplice apparenza.

Grice: È interessante! Quindi la sua “prima potenza del sillogismo” consisterebbe proprio nel legare il particolare all’universale tramite una relazione di senso determinata dall’uso? In fondo, non è molto diversa dalla mia nozione di implicatura conversazionale…

Achillini: Esattamente! Ogni sillogismo, sia esso medico o filosofico, vive grazie a quell’arte sottile del saper leggere tra le righe, cogliendo nell’individuale ciò che rimanda all’universale. Forse, in questo, la logica e la conversazione non sono poi così lontane: entrambe cercano la verità in ciò che si cela dietro la superficie del discorso.

Further ref.: Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Achillini’ Alessandro Achillini (Bologna, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. 

 

VERBALI: ACHILLINI

G. and S. discuss Achillini

G.: Viridario, then. Not vir, man; not virility; not husbands in a hedge.

S.: I am relieved. I had feared it might be a garden exclusively for males.

G.: No. It is from the green family: viridis, then viridarium in Latin, then the vernacular Viridario. A green place, a garden, an orchard, a pleasure-ground, and by metaphor a gathered collection. S.: So yes, rather like an anthology. G.: Yes, though one should distinguish the image. Florilegium is explicitly a gathering of flowers, usually selected passages, choice excerpts, blooms plucked from elsewhere. Viridario is broader and less surgical. Not merely a bouquet, but a whole enclosed green place in which various things grow. S.: So florilegium is cut flowers; viridario is the garden still attached to its soil.

G.: Very good. That is exactly the sort of distinction title-pages like to imply without spelling out. S.: And Achillini chose the Italian, not the full Latin viridarium. G.: Precisely. That matters. Viridario announces itself as vernacular humanist literary culture, not as a school exercise in classical titling. One is meant to hear Italian sociability in it. S.: So the choice is already generic and linguistic at once. G.: Yes. He is not merely naming a book; he is placing it in a literary world. If he had called it Viridarium, the title would lean more scholastic or more overtly Latinate. Viridario says: this is a cultivated vernacular space, a place for gathering, strolling, sampling, and display. S.: Which fits an anthology rather well. G.: It does. But better still, it fits a miscellany. Anthology is fine if one means a curated collection of literary pieces. Yet Viridario suggests something more spacious than a strict sequence of best excerpts. S.: A literary garden rather than a clipped bouquet. G.: Exactly. A place of variety, arrangement, pleasant wandering, and perhaps controlled abundance. S.: Controlled abundance sounds suspiciously like Oxford. G.: Most good literary forms do. S.: Then if one asked for the best English rendering, what would you give? G.: Depending on context: Garden Pleasaunce Green Garden Literary Garden or, if one wants the generic force made explicit, Anthology or Miscellany, but with loss of the title’s image. S.: So “anthology” is functionally right but imagistically thin. G.: Yes. “Florilegium” is imagistically closer in some ways, but it is not what he chose, and it narrows the metaphor from garden to flowers. S.: Which raises the obvious silly question. G.: Naturally. S.: If it is an anthology, should not the best flower come first? G.: Ah. There speaks the schoolboy botanist of literature. S.: I do my best. G.: And your best is sometimes very bad. No, not necessarily. A garden is not organised as a prize table. One does not always enter through the finest rose. Sometimes one enters by a gate, a path, a framing address, a dedicatory threshold, a proem that tells you how to walk. S.: So the first piece need not be the best piece. G.: Precisely. It may be the proper threshold-piece. In books of this kind, opening position often serves rhetoric rather than absolute hierarchy. S.: Which is to say, the first poem may be first because it opens well, not because it is supreme. G.: Exactly. Beginnings in literary miscellanies are often architectural. S.: Then do we have the incipit? G.: Not securely, from what we have in hand. We know that Giovanni Filoteo Achillini had completed the Viridario in December 1504 and that it was printed later, in 1513, at Bologna. But I do not at present have a verified opening line or opening paragraph from the text itself. S.: So no first flower yet. G.: No first flower yet. Only the knowledge that there was a garden, that it was composed by then, and that its title invites us to think in terms of cultivated variety rather than bare textual accumulation. S.: Could the title also imply freshness? Green as in young, living, not dried and scholastic? G.: Very likely. Viridario is not merely a container. It suggests vitality, pleasantness, freshness, perhaps even a kind of social polish. It opposes dry compilation. S.: So not just a sack of excerpts. G.: Exactly. Not a filing cabinet. A garden.

S.: Which means Achillini’s choice is itself a literary move. G.: Entirely. Titles of this sort do two things at once: they classify and they flatter. They classify the work as mixed, cultivated, and collectable; they flatter the reader by inviting him into a civilised space. S.: Almost as if the reader were strolling. G.: Or being admitted. S.: There is an implicature there. G.: There is always an implicature there. The title does not merely say “collection.” It suggests “come in.” S.: And because it is in Italian, it says “come in” to a different public than a Latin Viridarium would. G.: Very good. That is one of the main points. The vernacular form widens and shifts the audience. It belongs to a humanist literary culture that wants to sound learned without sounding cloistered. S.: So one might say that Viridario is already half a social gesture. G.: More than half. Renaissance titles are often acts of placement: they place the text, the author, and the reader in a shared imagined scene. S.: The scene here being a garden. G.: Yes, though not merely a rustic one. A cultivated one. Managed variety. Chosen company. A place where the gathered things are arranged for taste. S.: Then perhaps “miscellany” is too drab. G.: It is useful bibliographically, but drab aesthetically. S.: And “anthology” too Greek. G.: And too floral in a different way, unless one is willing to abstract away the actual title-image. S.: While “florilegium” is temptingly apt but still wrong, because he did not say flowers. G.: Precisely. He said garden, green enclosure, literary grounds. S.: Grounds is rather good. G.: Yes, but too Englishly abstract for a title. S.: If one were writing a note, then, one might say: Viridario, literally something like “garden” or “green literary garden,” implies a miscellany or anthology rather than a single sustained treatise. G.: That would do very nicely. S.: And if one wanted a more pointed gloss? G.: One could say: The title Viridario is the vernacular counterpart of Latin viridarium and suggests not merely a collection of pieces but a cultivated literary garden, a place of varied and pleasing gathered matter. S.: That is almost too sensible. G.: I have my lapses. S.: But we still lack the incipit. G.: We do. And that matters because the incipit would tell us whether the garden opens with self-presentation, dedication, moral framing, or immediate display. S.: In other words, whether the gate bears a motto. G.: Exactly. S.: So if I now ask, foolishly, whether Achillini planted his finest bloom at the entrance, you will say— G.: I will say that in a real garden the entrance is chosen for approach, not for climax. S.: Dry, but fair. G.: Thank you. S.: Then the answer, in short, is: yes, like an anthology; better, like a literary garden or miscellany; not from vir, but from viridis through viridarium; and no secure incipit yet. G.: Exactly. And the absence of the incipit is itself a small irritation, because with books of this kind one always wants to know how the author chose to open the gate. S.: You do realise that now all I want is the first line. G.: That is the correct appetite.

Refs.: Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Achillini: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

VERBALI: ACITO

G. and S. discuss Acito.

G.: Let us begin with the date, because dates in such cases are not ornaments but conditions. Acito’s Macchiavelli contro l’Anti-Roma appears in 1934, and that fact should prevent all later innocence.

S.: Because by 1934 one can no longer pretend not to know the atmosphere.

G.: Quite. One may still debate what exactly was known, by whom, and in what detail, but one cannot treat the text as politically uninflected.

S.: Then the question is whether one may still read it philosophically.

G.: One must, if one is to read it at all. The alternative is to turn it into a police exhibit and close the book.

S.: But there is danger in that too. If one reads it philosophically, one may sound indulgent.

G.: Only if one confuses understanding with absolution. That confusion is the first vice of bad intellectual history.

S.: So with Acito one has to walk a line.

G.: A narrow and unpleasant one. But historians of philosophy are paid, insofar as they are paid at all, to walk unpleasant lines.

S.: I am not paid at all.

G.: Then you may do it for the love of exactness.

S.: Or for the irritation of being forced to.

G.: Also respectable. Now, in 1934 Acito writes on Machiavelli against Anti-Rome. The very title is already a political act.

S.: Because “Anti-Rome” is not simply a historical category but a polemical one.

G.: Exactly. Rome there functions less as antiquarian object than as legitimating image.

S.: So Rome becomes a rhetorical resource for the modern state.

G.: Yes, and specifically for a unitary, authoritarian conception of the state. That is the first point Grice finds philosophically interesting, though morally unattractive.

S.: Because you care about how political language manages uptake.

G.: Precisely. Acito interests me not because I admire the doctrine, but because he shows, almost too clearly, how institutions speak through abstractions.

S.: Such as Stato, unità, corporazione, popolo.

G.: Exactly. Those large nouns by which people are gathered, classified, and quieted.

S.: Quieted?

G.: Very often. Collective nouns are excellent for reducing objections to murmurs.

S.: Then the corporation, in Acito’s sense, is not just an economic body.

G.: No. It is a communicative device disguised as a constitutional one.

S.: That sounds severe.

G.: It is meant to. The corporation proposes to mediate between state and citizen, but it may equally serve to pre-format what counts as a citizen’s voice.

S.: So when Acito calls it dialogue, you hear ventriloquism lurking.

G.: Very possibly. Or at least managed dialogue, which is not quite the same as the thing itself.

S.: Yet Acito, in the material you have, says that the corporate structure is a space where implicatures between individual and power manifest themselves.

G.: Yes, and that is what makes him philosophically useful. He cannot avoid admitting that power rarely speaks in explicit commands alone.

S.: It speaks by arrangement.

G.: Exactly. By structure, role, expectation, permitted vocabulary, institutional placement, and the implied limits of dissent.

S.: Then the corporative order itself becomes a kind of speech-act.

G.: Better: a speech-situation. A whole apparatus within which some utterances become natural and others nearly unsayable.

S.: That sounds rather like a bad tutorial.

G.: Worse than a bad tutorial. In a bad tutorial one may at least fail in private.

S.: While in the corporate state one fails publicly and perhaps legally.

G.: Quite. Which is why one must not prettify the “dialogue” too quickly.

S.: Still, Acito seems to believe there is room for negotiation.

G.: Yes, and that belief is itself worth examining. Does he mean genuine negotiation, or only the controlled absorption of pressures into a prior unity?

S.: You suspect the latter.

G.: I suspect that in authoritarian contexts “negotiation” often means “the centre listening selectively.”

S.: Then where does your conversational framework enter?

G.: Here. In ordinary conversation, what is implicated depends upon common presumptions of cooperation, relevance, sincerity, and the like. In political institutions, one may ask what the institution itself makes reasonable to infer.

S.: For example?

G.: If the state insists that all classes are represented organically within corporations, the citizen may be expected to infer that no extra-political voice is legitimate.

S.: So the very rhetoric of inclusion can imply exclusion.

G.: Exactly. That is the sort of thing Acito helps one see.

S.: Then his value for pragmatics lies not in any moral soundness, but in the clarity with which he inhabits a managed language of unity.

G.: Very well put. He becomes a witness to institutional implication under ideological pressure.

S.: A witness, not a guide.

G.: Better not call him a guide, unless one wishes to walk into a wall.

S.: Then what of the 1934 title specifically? Why Machiavelli against Anti-Rome?

G.: Because Machiavelli offers him a usable ancestor. A thinker of statecraft, severity, force, founding, and political realism can be drafted into a Romanising modern agenda.

S.: Even if Machiavelli himself would not have enjoyed the enlistment.

G.: Almost certainly not. Dead political writers are forever being made to serve causes they would have mocked.

S.: Then Acito’s Machiavelli is already an interpretation under command.

G.: Precisely. One must ask not only what Machiavelli said, but what Acito needs Machiavelli to be saying in 1934.

S.: And the answer is: something about unity, authority, anti-natural-law statism, and Rome as political grammar.

G.: Yes. The anti-Roma in the title marks an enemy space against which Roman statehood is reaffirmed.

S.: Then “Rome” is functioning less as city than as legitimating symbol.

G.: Very much so. Rome is not topography there. It is political metaphysics in civic costume.

S.: That sounds almost too grand for a polemical tract.

G.: Polemical tracts are often where political metaphysics does its cheapest work.

S.: Fair. But if Acito believes corporations can mediate between state and citizen, must we dismiss the belief entirely?

G.: Not entirely. That would be too easy. Corporate forms can indeed mediate interests. Guilds, chambers, syndicates, professions, and councils all do so in some degree.

S.: Then the question is what changes under fascism.

G.: Exactly. Under fascism the mediation is subordinated to prior unity. The form remains mediating in appearance, but the permitted outcome is heavily pre-scripted.

S.: So the corporation ceases to be a site of plural bargaining and becomes an organ of total integration.

G.: That is the danger, yes. And the language of dialogue then becomes ideological lubrication.

S.: Lubrication is a scholar’s word?

G.: It is a commoner’s word, which is why I borrow it.

S.: Generous of you.

G.: I have my moments. Now, Acito’s philosophical interest lies in the way he makes the state think of itself as speaking through bodies intermediate between individual and sovereign whole.

S.: Which means the individual no longer speaks directly.

G.: Or rather, he speaks only through already curated channels.

S.: That must alter what counts as sincerity too.

G.: Deeply. Once institutional position determines the admissible form of speech, sincerity itself becomes role-bound.

S.: Then one may be sincere within the corporation and still be politically unfree.

G.: Certainly. Sincerity is not liberty.

S.: Nor is participation.

G.: Exactly. Authoritarian systems often survive by staging participation while constraining consequence.

S.: So Acito’s “margins of freedom and negotiation” may be real in local cases, but unreal in constitutional depth.

G.: Splendid. That is the right distinction.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself.

S.: I shall become only moderately municipal.

G.: Better. Now, what does Speranza do well here?

S.: He does not hide the fascist commitment.

G.: Precisely. He refuses the two common evasions: sanitising the politics, or refusing philosophical attention on that account.

S.: Which means he neither excuses nor theatrically condemns.

G.: Yes. He keeps the historian’s harder posture: describe the ideological grain accurately, then ask what can be learned about forms of meaning, institutional speech, and collective uptake.

S.: So Acito becomes useful not as a moral exemplar, but as an analyst’s difficult case.

G.: Exactly. Some of the best cases in pragmatics are morally ugly.

S.: That sounds uncomfortable.

G.: Philosophy ought occasionally to.

S.: Then the corporation, from your point of view, would be a place where people learn what they may mean only by first learning what they may say.

G.: Very good. Institutional meaning begins in prior restriction.

S.: And implication then does political work.

G.: Enormous political work. If the state says “we are all represented,” what is implicated is often “there is nowhere else to speak.”

S.: And if it says “dialogue,” it may implicate “obedient participation.”

G.: Precisely. The vocabulary of inclusion may carry the structure of exclusion.

S.: Which is why studying such language matters.

G.: Exactly. Pragmatics is not only for tea-table politeness. It also belongs in the analysis of regimes.

S.: Then Acito is one of those uncomfortable figures who improve theory by worsening the air.

G.: Excellent. Keep that too.

S.: You are generous today.

G.: Only because you have earned it twice. Do not ask for a third.

S.: I should like to ask about “Omnis potestas a Deo,” since it appears among his themes.

G.: A good point. That formula introduces another layer of legitimating implication. If power is from God, resistance becomes not merely political dissent but metaphysical impropriety.

S.: So theology is conscripted into institutional pragmatics.

G.: Exactly. The source of authority is elevated beyond argument, which changes the inferential field of every civic utterance.

S.: Then one does not merely obey the state; one risks impiety by questioning its principle.

G.: That is the old advantage of sacred backing.

S.: Which Rome, in its own imperial ways, already understood.

G.: Very much so. Acito’s Roman language is never merely classical. It is a machine for making continuity feel inevitable.

S.: There is your machine again.

G.: Yes, but do not drag Ryle into this one.

S.: I should not dare. Then does Acito teach us that collective speech is always suspect?

G.: Not always. But collective speech is always worth analysing for who may speak, under what description, and at what cost.

S.: So the corporate state is just the extreme case.

G.: A particularly clarifying one. Extremes often reveal the ordinary mechanisms in magnified form.

S.: Such as role, uptake, permitted idiom, staged consent.

G.: Yes. All the furniture of ordinary political communication, only more rigidly arranged.

S.: Then a commoner’s summary might be: Acito shows how power talks as if it were listening.

G.: That is very good indeed.

S.: I may keep that?

G.: You may, though you will make it sound better than I would.

S.: That is one of the few liberties left to the commoner.

G.: Enjoy it while you can. Now, the 1934 publication matters because it fixes the text before certain later catastrophes while already inside the catastrophe’s grammar.

S.: So one cannot read it as innocent prelude.

G.: No. It belongs to the formed ideological present of fascism, not to a merely preparatory mist.

S.: And yet one should not pretend that because it is compromised it is intellectually empty.

G.: Precisely. Compromised texts are often intellectually vivid. Their vividness is part of their danger.

S.: Then the historian’s burden is to keep both facts in view at once.

G.: Yes: the text thinks, and the text serves.

S.: That is rather grim.

G.: Political philosophy often is, once one leaves undergraduate anthologies.

S.: Then perhaps Acito’s true lesson for pragmatics is this: imposed unity has its own rhetoric of conversation.

G.: Excellent. And one must learn to hear the coercive implicatures inside the grammar of participation.

S.: So when the regime says “we speak together,” the analyst asks who defined the “we.”

G.: Precisely. That is the first decent question.

S.: And the second?

G.: What penalties attach to speaking otherwise.

S.: That is a commoner’s question if ever there was one.

G.: Which is why it is often the better one.

S.: Then the final word on Acito?

G.: Not absolution, not erasure. Rather: a philosophically usable witness to the rhetoric of corporative unity under fascism, fixed for us in 1934 and still instructive because his language shows how institutions imply more than they declare.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Milanese, with a Roman aftertaste.

G.: Acito, Lei ha spesso sottolineato l’importanza delle corporazioni nel pensiero politico italiano. Secondo Lei, in che modo la ragione conversazionale può spiegare il ruolo della corporazione nel regime fascista?

Acito: Caro Grice, la ragione conversazionale si riflette nella struttura corporativa come strumento di dialogo tra Stato e cittadini. La corporazione non è solo un ente economico, ma diventa uno spazio in cui le implicature tra individui e potere si manifestano, modellando i comportamenti e le identità collettive secondo la dottrina unitària dello Stato.

Grice: Interessante! Ma non crede che la comunicazione, nell’ambito corporativo, rischi di diventare un meccanismo di esclusione, dove la voce del singolo si perde a favore del consenso imposto dall’alto?

Acito: È un rischio reale, Grice. Tuttavia, la forza della corporazione sta proprio nella sua capacità di bilanciare la tradizione con l’innovazione. Se il dialogo è autentico, persino in un regime autoritario, le implicature conversazionali possono offrire margini di libertà e negoziazione, permettendo ai cittadini di influenzare le decisioni dello Stato senza perdere la propria identità.

Further refs.: Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Grice ed Acito: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale corporativa – filosofia fascista. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

 

H, P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE: ACONZIO,

G.: Let us begin with the devil, because Aconzio has the good sense to catalogue him rather than merely denounce him.

S.: You mean the Stratagemata Satanae.

G.: Precisely. It is one thing to say that error exists; it is another to classify its methods. The second is always more philosophical.

S.: Because classification already implies method.

G.: Exactly. And Aconzio, unlike later romantics of confusion, wants the field cleared before anyone starts praising mystery.

S.: Yet he is hardly a dry classifier only.

G.: No. That is the pleasure of him. He can list the devil’s arts with almost bureaucratic severity, and then turn round and argue for toleration with genuine heat.

S.: So one side of him is taxonomic, the other moral.

G.: Better: both are moral, but by different routes. The taxonomy is moral because it identifies the forms by which minds are led astray.

S.: And the method is moral because it is meant to secure common ground.

G.: Just so. He is not interested in method as intellectual drill for its own sake. He wants a shared rational footing from which sects may cease burning one another.

S.: That sounds nobler than most methodological prose.

G.: It is. Most methodological prose is written by men who hope to improve journals. Aconzio hopes to improve Christendom.

S.: That is a larger brief.

G.: Uncomfortably larger, yes.

S.: Then why do you say he almost invents conversational implicature and then disinvents it?

G.: Because there are places where he seems to see that what is conveyed in discourse outruns what is explicitly stated, especially once passion, superstition, and polemical habit enter.

S.: And then?

G.: And then he recoils into method, as if to save discourse from its own excesses by stricter procedural light.

S.: So he glimpses the richness of implication, then fears its abuse.

G.: Exactly. He sees that implication may unite understanding, but also that it may become one of Satan’s own favourite devices.

S.: Which means he cannot simply celebrate the unsaid.

G.: No. For him the unsaid is double-edged. It may be prudential, reverent, suggestive, or charitable. But it may also be calumny, insinuation, faction, superstition, and the pious lie.

S.: Then your sympathy with him lies not in any shared doctrine of the unsaid, but in a shared awareness of its power.

G.: Admirably put. He and I meet in the recognition that the life of discourse is not confined to what is baldly asserted.

S.: Yet you are more relaxed about that than he is.

G.: Quite. I do not believe one can cure language of implication without also curing it of civilisation.

S.: Whereas Aconzio hopes to discipline implication by method.

G.: Or at least to submit it to a regime of honesty, charity, and fear of God.

S.: You say that dryly.

G.: Because I am English.

S.: He is not merely Italian either, though. He becomes, in a sense, English by exile.

G.: A fellow Brit, as I like to tease him. One of those imported reformers who improve England by making it less certain of itself.

S.: Yet England also excludes him from sacramental comfort.

G.: Yes. That too matters. He arrives as a dissenter among dissenters, then proves too difficult even for the relatively tolerant arrangements available.

S.: So he is out of place nearly everywhere.

G.: Which is one reason he remains philosophically alive. The settled thinker is often dead on the page. The displaced thinker still has to think.

S.: Then we must take seriously his engineering too.

G.: Very much so. The man drains marshes, reports on fortifications, and writes on method. That is an admirable combination.

S.: Because he knows that systems fail both in argument and in water.

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become hydraulic.

S.: I shall try to remain only moderately marshy.

G.: Better. Now, De methodo. The title alone already distinguishes him from those who later make a virtue of formlessness.

S.: You are thinking of Feyerabend.

G.: Inevitably. “Against method” is the sort of title one can only write after several centuries of method have made thought safe enough to become rebellious theatrically.

S.: Whereas Aconzio writes before the safety.

G.: Exactly. He writes when method is still a weapon against superstition, dogmatic cruelty, and factional delirium.

S.: So for him method is emancipatory.

G.: Yes. It clears ground. It does not narrow the mind in order to make a school; it clears a place where adversaries may at least begin from terms not wholly poisoned.

S.: Then method is a precondition of toleration.

G.: In his best moments, yes. If one cannot agree on procedures of inquiry, one falls back upon punishment.

S.: That is a bleak but plausible anthropology.

G.: Very plausible. He sees that where argument fails institutionally, force enters as the counterfeit of conviction.

S.: Which is why he is so severe on penalties for heresy.

G.: Precisely. Once opening one’s mouth calls the executioner, Scripture itself becomes idle, because no one will risk inquiry.

S.: So persecution destroys exegesis.

G.: More than that. It destroys the very common world of reasoning in which differences might be tested rather than exterminated.

S.: Then there is a political pragmatics here.

G.: Absolutely. Aconzio is not merely a theorist of method in the abstract. He is an analyst of what happens to discourse when fear colonises utterance.

S.: Then would you say that persecution is the coercive annihilation of implicature?

G.: That is too neat, but not wholly wrong. Under persecution, one either says nothing, says less, or says falsely. The spectrum of implication becomes distorted by terror.

S.: So the unsaid no longer belongs to tact, but to survival.

G.: Yes. And that is why his concern with clarity is not pedantry. It is an attempt to keep discourse from becoming a battlefield of insinuation policed by power.

S.: Yet he also writes Stratagemata Satanae, which seems almost to revel in the machinery of delusion.

G.: Because one must know the enemy’s repertoire. Method alone without pathology is naïve. You must know how discourse goes wrong.

S.: Then the two books belong together more closely than one first assumes.

G.: Exactly. De methodo says how inquiry ought to proceed; the Stratagemata say how it is corrupted in practice.

S.: So method and devilry are reciprocal categories.

G.: A little grandly put, but yes. One defines the other by opposition.

S.: And the feminine abstract nouns?

G.: Ah yes. Superbia and her companions. I rather like the almost allegorical severity of it. Vice is personified, but analytically personified.

S.: Not simply in order to moralise, but to identify recurring operations.

G.: Exactly. Pride, calumny, faction, superstition, hatred, schism. These are not merely private sins but public distorters of understanding.

S.: Which suggests that for Aconzio conversation is always in danger of becoming liturgical warfare.

G.: Very good. Especially in sixteenth-century religion, where every doctrinal nuance may be weaponised.

S.: Then when he speaks of a common footing, he does not mean agreement in creed, but agreement in the manner of handling disagreement.

G.: Precisely. That is why he matters. He is trying to discover the procedural basis of coexistence amidst substantive division.

S.: Which sounds very modern.

G.: It does, but one must not modernise him too quickly. His common ground is still sought under God, not under some later liberal neutrality.

S.: So the fear of God remains a positive condition of discourse.

G.: For him, yes. Not because terror is epistemically salutary, but because piety, rightly understood, may humble the egoism that turns every disagreement into persecution.

S.: You sound almost Anglican.

G.: My mother would have approved.

S.: She liked Aconzio, you said.

G.: She would have liked his gravity, his seriousness, and the fact that he is both doctrinally troublesome and morally strenuous.

S.: Like many of your favourites.

G.: Unfortunately, yes.

S.: Then let us ask about the “of” in Il timore di Dio.

G.: Ah, the famous little English question in Italian dress. “Of” there is not an empty link. It is the whole relation.

S.: Fear of God: not God fearing, but the human disposition oriented toward God.

G.: Exactly. The genitive preposition carries the direction of piety, and Aconzio’s whole practical programme hangs on such orientations.

S.: So even a small function word can house theology.

G.: They often do. The little words carry the burden while the grand nouns preen.

S.: Which again makes him Gricean in your preferred sense.

G.: Yes. He notices that serious understanding depends not only on majestic content but on the way relations are silently structured.

S.: Then implicature for him would be less an achievement than a risk to be disciplined.

G.: I think that is right. He knows that what is suggested, insinuated, or left to be gathered can either deepen charity or inflame division.

S.: So there is no innocent “beyond the literal.”

G.: None whatever. The beyond is where angels and devils both work.

S.: That is a good line.

G.: Keep it and make it worse.

S.: Happily. Then would you say that Aconzio distrusts rhetorical surplus?

G.: He distrusts undisciplined surplus, certainly. He is not against richness of understanding, but against the ways in which rhetorical and doctrinal habit let words carry poison unexamined.

S.: So method is an antidote to inherited implication.

G.: In part, yes. Communities build up default inferences around words: heretic, church, truth, authority, obedience. Aconzio tries to break those sedimentations open.

S.: Which is already a form of conversational analysis.

G.: Quite. Not in my vocabulary, but recognisably in my territory.

S.: Then perhaps what fascinates you is that he knows that language does not merely report divisions; it reproduces them.

G.: Exactly. If every term comes loaded with inherited accusation, the exchange is corrupted before it begins.

S.: So method must include lexical hygiene.

G.: Very much so. Though “hygiene” always risks sounding antiseptic. Better perhaps: lexical justice.

S.: I shall keep both and choose later.

G.: A dangerous editorial freedom.

S.: One of my stratagems.

G.: Satanic already. Now, the toleration issue. He is not merely saying, “Be nice to heretics.”

S.: No. He is saying that coercion destroys the very possibility of honest inquiry.

G.: Precisely. Once dissent is penalised, the public use of reason collapses into either conformity or coded speech.

S.: Then persecution manufactures bad pragmatics.

G.: Excellent. Fear generates evasions, innuendo, silence, counterfeit assent, performative orthodoxy. Conversation becomes theatre under police supervision.

S.: Which means the persecutor never really hears belief at all.

G.: Very good. He hears only its constrained simulacrum.

S.: Then Aconzio’s toleration is epistemic as much as moral.

G.: Entirely. It protects not only persons but the conditions under which utterances can be sincere, disagreements explicit, and understanding corrigible.

S.: That sounds almost like the cooperative principle under Reformation duress.

G.: A dangerous but useful comparison.

S.: Because for you too conversation presupposes good faith, mutual recognisability, and a shared willingness not to destroy the exchange.

G.: Yes, though I did not usually have to add “under pain of burning.”

S.: Oxford had milder sanctions.

G.: Only slightly.

S.: Then what of his being “dated”? Reformation, Basel, exile, naturalisation, marsh drainage, and all the rest.

G.: Speranza does well to resist that entire embalming gesture. Aconzio is not merely a date with a printer’s line attached.

S.: Because chronology can kill a mind before one has read it.

G.: Exactly. Historiography often behaves like a mortuary catalogue. Reformers here, toleration theorists there, anti-trinitarians in that cabinet, engineers elsewhere.

S.: Whereas you want to talk to him.

G.: Naturally. A living intelligence is wasted if one treats it merely as a museum label.

S.: So Speranza lets you enjoy him without condescension.

G.: Yes. That is one of his principal virtues. He restores the possibility of philosophical pleasure in figures whom academic periodisation has over-disciplined.

S.: Not stripped of context, but not imprisoned by it.

G.: Precisely. One must know he is sixteenth-century, displaced, anti-papal, heterodox, and all the rest. But one must not let those labels do all the reading.

S.: Then perhaps the real Aconzio appears between the labels.

G.: Often the best philosophers do.

S.: And the devil’s list helps.

G.: It does. Lists can be wonderfully anti-sentimental. They prevent us from speaking vaguely of “evil influences” and force us to identify operations.

S.: Such as pride, hatred, slander, schism.

G.: Exactly. And once identified, they become analysable rather than merely feared.

S.: That is very much your own instinct too.

G.: Yes. If a thing can be distinguished, it can often be disarmed.

S.: Not always.

G.: No. But confusion favours the enemy.

S.: Aconzio would have liked that.

G.: I think so. Though he might have wanted me to capitalise Enemy more often.

S.: Which you would refuse.

G.: Quite. Capital letters are usually where theology begins to shout.

S.: Then one final question. Does Aconzio think method can wholly defeat stratagem?

G.: No. If he did, he would not have written the stratagems at all. He knows corruption is permanent.

S.: Then method is not victory but vigilance.

G.: Splendid. Yes. Vigilance, discipline, repeated clearing, repeated return to what may be commonly tested.

S.: So the toleration he seeks is not softness but a hard civic precondition of truth-seeking.

G.: Exactly. Toleration is not indifference to truth; it is the refusal to let force pretend to be an argument.

S.: Then his relevance now is obvious.

G.: Obvious, but one must say it without vulgar updating. Better to say that he remains intelligible because the conditions he feared are perennial.

S.: Fear colonising speech, inherited accusation corrupting words, coercion distorting assent.

G.: Yes. Those are not dated problems.

S.: Nor is the devil.

G.: Alas, no. He merely changes his vocabulary.

S.: And sometimes acquires better printers.

G.: Very good.

S.: Then your final judgment?

G.: Aconzio is valuable because he joins three things seldom joined well: a seriousness about method, a pathology of corrupt discourse, and a principled defence of toleration as the condition of shared inquiry.

S.: And the link to your own work?

G.: He reminds one that implication is never merely an ornament of conversation. It may be a trap, a shelter, a courtesy, a poison, or a bridge. The task is to know which.

S.: That is nearly a motto.

G.: Too neat for a motto.

S.: Then a warning.

G.: Better.

S.: Method without charity becomes persecution; charity without method becomes confusion.

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Basilean, with a damp English edge.

 

Grice: Caro Aconzio, mi ha sempre incuriosito la sua predilezione per elencare le strategie del diavolo usando nomi di virtù femminili! Ma, mi dica, quanto conta per lei la chiarezza del metodo nel dialogo filosofico?

Aconzio: Gentile Grice, il metodo è per me lo strumento con cui si sgombra il campo da ogni superstizione e si costruisce un terreno comune per la ragione. Solo così il dialogo può aspirare all’universalità e alla tolleranza, senza lasciarsi fuorviare da errori o passioni.

Grice: Quindi, secondo lei, le implicature conversazionali – quei significati che vanno oltre le parole dette – possono diventare trappole per lo spirito critico oppure occasioni per una comprensione più profonda?

Aconzio: Dipende dall’onestà dei conversanti, caro amico: le implicature possono essere stratagemmi, certo, ma se guidate dal timore di Dio e dal rispetto per la verità, diventano strumenti per scoprire ciò che unisce e non ciò che divide. Solo così la conversazione serve davvero al progresso dello spirito umano.

Further refs. : Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Aconzio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

 

VERBALI: ACRI

G.: Let us begin where Austin began badly and Acri began better, with the word dialectic itself.

S.: Because Austin made it sound like a local custom.

G.: Precisely. As if one could simply oppose Athenian dialectic to Oxonian dialectic and think one had thereby done philosophy rather than geography.

S.: Whereas Acri thinks dialectic has moods, not merely postal addresses.

G.: Very good. That is exactly why he interests me. He sees that argument is not only a form but a temperature.

S.: Turbo and sereno.

G.: Yes. Disturbance and settlement, though even “settlement” is a little too legal for the second.

S.: You would prefer composure?

G.: Or stable grip. The sereno is not necessarily agreement; it is the point at which the issue becomes sufficiently held to be intelligently pursued.

S.: So not peace, exactly.

G.: No. A conversation may be perfectly serene while disagreement remains in full employment.

S.: Then turbo is the first necessary violence?

G.: “Violence” overstates it, unless one is reading Hegel after midnight. Better: the necessary unsettlement. Someone moves, presses, resists, interrupts, dislodges.

S.: And this is where you connect Acri to your own notion of implicature.

G.: Yes. Because in the disturbed phase much is conveyed obliquely. Tone, omission, impatience, irony, challenge, invitation, tactical understatement, all the small diagnostics of philosophical pressure.

S.: So implicature is born in turbulence.

G.: Often. Or at least it becomes most visible there.

S.: That sounds rather unlike your official examples.

G.: My official examples were designed for safety and teachability. Philosophical life is messier, and Acri is useful precisely because he admits the mess without worshipping it.

S.: Unlike those who romanticise dialectic.

G.: Exactly. He neither reduces it to polite method nor inflates it into destiny.

S.: Then let us take Austin first. What exactly bothered you in his Athens-versus-Oxford contrast?

G.: Its theatricality. Austin liked live distinctions, but sometimes he mistook a clever opposition for a stable one. Athens in his mouth risked becoming a grand externalisation of what Oxford liked to imagine about itself.

S.: That it too had a civic seriousness?

G.: Or a pedigree. But the actual contrast is more unruly. Athenian dialectic, insofar as it survives to us, is public, open-air, interrupted, porous, half sport and half civic nuisance.

S.: While Oxford is indoors.

G.: Indoors, examinable, timetabled, and faintly punitive.

S.: The walls matter.

G.: Immensely. A wall changes a question. Once one is in a room with a tutor and a degree hanging invisibly over the exchange, dialectic ceases to be merely an inquiry and becomes also an ordeal.

S.: Then Acri’s categories fit Oxford better than Austin’s geography.

G.: Exactly. A tutorial begins in turbo because one party wants to move the other, and the other either resists or shows the movement in the next reply.

S.: Turbo one and turbo two.

G.: Precisely. The dyad at work. Acri is very good on that, though his own phrasing is more Italian and more humane.

S.: Colloquenza turbata.

G.: Yes, and I rather like that. Not simply argument in a disturbed mode, but the very colloquy itself disturbed, as though the relation were shaken, not merely the content.

S.: That already sounds more subtle than “debate.”

G.: Much more subtle. Debate is too parliamentary. Acri gives one a living conversational weather.

S.: And then the serene comes when the issue has become clear enough to bear disagreement.

G.: Excellent. That is the point. The conversation need not end in harmony. It need only arrive at a form of mutual purchase.

S.: A shared grip.

G.: Yes. The issue becomes graspable by both, even if not resolved in the same way by both.

S.: Until the next turbo.

G.: Which, in Oxford, tends to arrive about five minutes before the hour.

S.: Because then the pupil says what he ought to have said twenty minutes earlier.

G.: Exactly. Or the tutor realises what he should have denied at the beginning.

S.: Then Acri’s two dialectics are really cycles, not stages.

G.: Better. One should not imagine a neat linear progression from confusion to peace. It is more tidal. Turbo generates sereno, which reveals the conditions for the next turbo.

S.: That sounds almost Heraclitean.

G.: Do not make Acri Greek too quickly. He has enough Vico in him to remain properly Italian.

S.: Then let us talk about Vico.

G.: A necessary turn. Acri’s interest in roots, expressions, and the living relation between idea and expression owes a great deal to Vichian sensibility.

S.: Because words have roots and arguments have histories.

G.: Precisely. Acri does not treat language as a transparent neutral channel. He wants to know how expression grows from imaginative and sensuous life.

S.: Fantasma and imagine.

G.: Yes. That is another reason he interests me. He knows that before the sober philosopher arrives with distinctions, there is already a sensible and imaginative field in which meaning is half-born.

S.: So the disturbed dialectic is not merely social disturbance, but conceptual disturbance at the root.

G.: Very good. The trouble is already in the relation between idea and expression. Language does not sit still for thought.

S.: Which makes Cratylus unavoidable.

G.: Entirely. If one cares about roots, names, natural fit, and the seductions of etymology, one ends up sooner or later with Cratylus looking over one’s shoulder.

S.: Acri comments extensively on Cratylus, you say.

G.: Yes, and wisely in the vernacular. That matters. He is not merely embalming Plato; he is forcing the old questions to speak Italian.

S.: Which Speranza also does, in another register.

G.: Exactly. That is part of Speranza’s tact. He does not translate Acri into sterile Griceanism. He lets Acri’s own vernacular pressure remain audible.

S.: Turbo, turbata, serena, colloquenza, ardimento.

G.: Those words matter. One loses something if one simply replaces them with “stage one,” “stage two,” “argument,” and “transition.”

S.: Then ardimento is not merely courage?

G.: No. It is something between daring, energy, and conversational thrust. Without it there is no disturbance, and without disturbance no serious inquiry.

S.: So the philosophical vice would be excessive sobriety.

G.: Acri would say so, I think. He explicitly contrasts the positivists with the filosofi sobri, and one hears both irony and impatience in the phrase.

S.: Because too much sobriety becomes sterility.

G.: Precisely. A conversation that never risks disturbance is often merely administratively correct.

S.: That sounds like certain Oxford seminars.

G.: More than certain.

S.: Then you and Acri agree that argument needs a kind of ardour.

G.: Under discipline, yes. I distrust philosophical hysteria, but I distrust bloodless correctness too. A certain managed unsettlement is healthy.

S.: Managed unsettlement sounds like one of your maxims.

G.: It ought not to. Maxims are for cooperation; unsettlement is what makes the cooperation worth having.

S.: Then perhaps the cooperative principle itself presupposes a prior disturbance.

G.: That is well said. One does not need cooperation in a vacuum. One needs it because interlocutors are bringing different commitments, resistances, half-formulated pressures to bear.

S.: So conversation is born from asymmetry.

G.: Often from asymmetry, yes. One knows more, cares differently, sees another implication, resists another conclusion. Turbo is the formal name for that friction.

S.: Then your implicature in the turbo phase would be more unstable than in the serene phase.

G.: Usually. In the disturbed phase, much is carried by pressure, tone, and provisional inference. In the serene phase, the same implications may become more stably recognisable.

S.: So one could say that the sereno is where implicature becomes examinable.

G.: Very good. In the turbulence one gathers more than one can yet sort; in the serene one begins to articulate what was going on.

S.: That is almost your Sunday reflection on Austin’s Saturday mornings.

G.: Exactly. I have always thought the real work of certain conversations occurs after the noise, when one can hear what, if anything, was actually said.

S.: Or meant.

G.: Indeed. Often especially what was meant.

S.: Then the University Parks walk is already Acrian in spirit.

G.: I suppose it is. Sunday provides the sereno to Saturday’s turbo.

S.: And Hardie’s joke about A. and M.?

G.: Ah yes. Ancient and Modern as if dialectic were a portable hymn-book. Hardie was good at disinfecting us against reverence for abstractions.

S.: But he weaponised Acri politically.

G.: Quite. He turned Acri into an anti-Hegelian tonic, which was not wholly unfair but not the whole story either.

S.: Because for Hardie the point was that Hegel was using Plato for Prussian ends.

G.: Exactly. Plato as costume, history as inevitability, dialectic as state-theology in motion.

S.: Whereas Austin wanted the disturbance without the metaphysics.

G.: Yes. Austin wanted clean moves, practical discrimination, no national-historical thunder behind the words.

S.: Dialectic as etiquette.

G.: A little harsh, but not false. Austin tried to make dialectic behave like a particularly alert form of linguistic manners.

S.: And Hegel wanted it to behave like history’s engine.

G.: Precisely. Acri sees enough of both temptations to reject them.

S.: So where does he stand?

G.: Somewhere more humane and more local. Dialectic is neither an imperial motor nor a set of drawing-room refinements. It is the lived oscillation between disturbance and settled grasp.

S.: That sounds almost modest.

G.: Which is why it is true.

S.: Then is Athens irrelevant?

G.: Not irrelevant. Athens matters as the public invention of dialectic, as the place where questioning, interruption, and civic visibility still cling to the form.

S.: And Oxford?

G.: Oxford matters as the domestication of that form into private pedagogical discipline. It takes the public sport and turns it into indoor examination and tutorial combat.

S.: Then the historical formula would be: Athens invents, Oxford domesticates, Hegel nationalises, Austin polishes.

G.: That is not bad at all.

S.: Acri?

G.: Acri diagnoses.

S.: Better.

G.: Thank you.

S.: And Speranza?

G.: Speranza re-hears. He lets us hear Acri in a register that resonates with my own concerns without cancelling Acri’s distinctiveness.

S.: That is the point you admire most.

G.: Very much. Too often historical comparison is annexation. One philosopher is rewritten in the terms of another until the earlier voice is lost.

S.: Whereas here Acri still sounds like Acri.

G.: Yes. Turbo remains turbo. Colloquenza remains colloquenza. Vico remains Vico. Plato remains refracted through Calabria, not simply subsumed into Oxford.

S.: Then Speranza is not stealing Acri’s voice.

G.: No. He is tuning it into a neighbouring key.

S.: And that neighbouring key is conversational reason.

G.: Exactly. Acri’s categories illuminate conversation from within, not because they were secretly waiting for me, but because they touch the same pressure-points by another path.

S.: Then perhaps the key term is dialettica itself.

G.: Entirely. We have let the word become either grandly historicist or tiresomely procedural. Acri restores its temperament.

S.: Its moods.

G.: Yes. And that is very important. Philosophical forms have moods. The same nominal structure may function very differently under disturbance and under composure.

S.: Then do you think Austin missed that?

G.: Largely. Austin saw acts and distinctions, but he was less alive to the large emotional and relational weather of discourse than he thought he was.

S.: Yet he was certainly alive to tone.

G.: Oh yes, locally, brilliantly. But he preferred to keep the tone under procedural description. Acri is less shy of saying that the conversation itself is troubled.

S.: Colloquenza turbata.

G.: Yes. I rather wish we had said that more often in Oxford. It would have saved us the pretence that all philosophical pressure is merely logical.

S.: Then your own epagoge and diagoge distinction comes near this?

G.: Near enough to be interesting. There are moments of leading-in, drawing-out, gathering, and then of carrying-through, but Acri’s terminology is warmer and less scholastic.

S.: Warmer because more conversational.

G.: Exactly. He writes as someone who knows that interlocutors are not only positions but persons.

S.: Does this connect to his writing on love?

G.: I think so. A man who has written on amore will not mistake discourse for pure geometry.

S.: Yet he also cares about number in Plato.

G.: Which is delightful. He can move from colloquy to number, from Cratylus to ideas, from roots of words to the puzzle of concepts. That range is one of his virtues.

S.: And one of the reasons you like him.

G.: Certainly. He is not a specialist in the miserable modern sense. He ranges as Lit. Hum. once allowed one to range.

S.: All in the good Oxon. tradition, though he is in Catanzaro.

G.: Exactly. It is always pleasing to find an older and less provincial version of one’s own better habits elsewhere.

S.: Then is he a Platonist?

G.: In some respects, yes, but not a museum Platonist. His theory of ideas is inflected by Vico and by an interest in expression that prevents the ideas from floating above language.

S.: So idea and expression are reciprocal.

G.: Yes. The idea needs expression, and expression is not a mere clothing but part of the idea’s historical and sensible life.

S.: Then Cratylus becomes more than etymological play.

G.: Much more. It becomes a testing ground for whether names arise by nature, by convention, by root, by use, by imaginative sediment.

S.: Which sounds surprisingly close to your own suspicion that meaning is not exhausted by lexical assignment.

G.: Quite. Though I should formulate it differently. Still, Acri is alive to the fact that words have more than one ancestry: institutional, sensual, imaginative, historical.

S.: So the root of expression is not merely grammatical but anthropological.

G.: Excellent. Yes. That is why fantasma and imagine matter. There is no clean leap from pure concept to pure word. There is an imaginative middle.

S.: And the disturbed dialectic may be where that middle becomes visible.

G.: Often. In peaceful exposition one forgets the buried pressures. In disturbance the roots show through.

S.: Then turbo has a philological function too.

G.: Very good indeed. Disturbance exposes the strain between what one wants to say and what one can say, which is often where etymology, metaphor, and old semantic deposits return.

S.: That sounds more Vichian than Platonic.

G.: It is, and Acri is clever enough to let both currents meet.

S.: Then why do standard histories flatten him?

G.: Because standard histories need labels. Platonist, Vichian, anti-positivist, southern intellectual, provincial pedagogue, take your pick. Once labelled, a thinker becomes fileable.

S.: And Speranza resists that filing.

G.: Yes. He lets Acri remain plural without becoming vague.

S.: That is harder than it sounds.

G.: Much harder. Most scholars either over-systematise or sentimentalise. Speranza does neither here.

S.: Then perhaps the closing question is whether every true conversation must pass through disturbance.

G.: I think Acri is right that without some unsettlement nothing genuinely philosophical begins.

S.: Even if the unsettlement is very small?

G.: Especially then. Sometimes the slightest pressure, a single hesitation, a shifted example, a corrected article, is enough to start the dialectical weather changing.

S.: Then turbo need not be dramatic.

G.: No. It may be almost invisible to the outsider. The important thing is that one interlocutor has ceased to be where he was.

S.: And sereno is when both know where the new issue stands.

G.: Precisely. Not solved, perhaps, but placed.

S.: Until the next movement.

G.: Always until the next movement.

S.: Then Oxford has not one dialectic but two: the one that earns the degree and the one that begins afterward.

G.: That is Acri’s best revenge on Austin.

S.: And yours?

G.: My revenge is to admit that he was right.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Calabrian, with a Sunday Oxford mist.

 

Grice: Acri, ti confesso che la tua distinzione tra dialettica turbata e serena mi ha colpito. Secondo te, è inevitabile che ogni colloquenza inizi con un turbo, prima di approdare al sereno? Acri: Caro Grice, credo proprio di sì. Ogni dialogo nasce da un’energia irrequieta, una sorta di ardimento, ma solo attraversando il turbamento si può aspirare alla serenità concettuale. È il percorso stesso della ragione: dall’inquietudine alla chiarezza. Grice: E dunque, la “implicatura conversazionale” che si genera nel turbo, rischia di essere fraintesa oppure può arricchire il dialogo, se guidata verso il sereno? Acri: Dipende dalla qualità degli interlocutori, Grice. Se c’è apertura e desiderio di verità, anche la turbata implicatura può diventare ponte verso una comprensione più profonda. Come diceva Vico, bisogna far parlare le radici delle espressioni, senza temere l’intricato viluppo dei ragionamenti.

Further refs. :  Speranza, J. L. (n. d.) ‘Grice ed Acri: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  

 

VERBALI: ADAMI

 

Grice: St John’s, 1964. Seminar on Conversation. Potts is taking notes again, which I’m never sure is a good sign (non‑natural meaning, rather) or not. I prefer a man to look at me. From where I stand, I can hardly see what he’s writing, and it is always possible that he is merely pretending—producing, under the description “note-taking,” what is really doodling. Still: the handwriting, from a distance, has an elegance that suggests either sincerity or a wasted calling. He began writing in earnest when I produced my little table: There is a desideratum of conversational candour. There is a desideratum of conversational clarity. And besides these—here comes the clash—there is a principle of conversational benevolence and, lurking behind it, a smaller but more durable principle of conversational self‑love. The following week Potts handed me a thin Italian book as if it were evidence: Adami, 1790, Precetti di rettorica.

 

Potts: “He calls them precetti, sir. And with a straight face.”

Grice: “Yes.” (Which in Oxford means something between “no” and “go on.”) He persisted.

Potts: “They’re precetti di rettorica. And if I may echo Hardie—what does Adami mean, or means (if you insist on the Mediterranean historical present), by that di?” I said, because the boy deserved at least one clean correction:

Grice: “It’s either ‘precepts for rhetoric’ or ‘rhetorical precepts’—and those are not the same trade.” Potts (brightening): “Exactly. Yours are precepts for talking; his are talking-precepts. Yours are praecepta for conversation; his are praecepta rhetorica.” Grice: “And the adjective is doing all the mischief. ‘Rhetorical’ is one of those words that quietly licenses bad behaviour by calling it technique.” Potts, eager to agree, fell into the standard trap: Potts: “So your point, which I obviously take and agree with—” Grice: “With which you agree.” He stopped, corrected himself, and continued like a penitent: Potts: “—with which I agree: your maxims are more like a Kantian counsel of prudence. A maxim. A—well—a minimaxim, if one may borrow from economics: minimise conversational cost, maximise cooperative yield.” This was actually rather good, though it pained me to admit it. Potts: “So perhaps it’s best to drop the grand talk—desiderata, principles, Adami’s precetti—and treat it all as one big precept, stated properly in the imperative: ‘Try to make your conversational contribution one that is true.’” Then, with Strawson behind him and enjoying himself, Potts asked the question he’d been saving: Potts: “But how, sir, can ‘try’ be an imperative?” Strawson, solemn as a parish clerk, intervened on my behalf: Strawson: “Grice is speaking as a grammarian. ‘Try’ is an imperative. It’s not even hypothetical, on the face of it. It’s simply: Try.” Potts (less triumphant now): “Even if I don’t succeed?” At which point I did what Oxford dons do when cornered: I made matters clear by going from obscurus to obscurior. Grice: “The seminar is not about conversation. It’s about the trouble we get into when we describe actions—‘I tried to sit and eventually succeeded, and I did it intentionally’—and then discover that our own vocabulary contains both the precept and the excuse, both the maxim and the evasion.” And then, because one can’t resist a historical moral when a Neapolitan schoolbook is involved: “Adami’s audience,” I said, “was some adolescent whom he thought needed precepts put into his face—rather as I had at Clifton in Composition, and rather as Henry VIII institutionalised with his grammar schools: not to make boys brilliant, but to make them intelligible.” Punchline: Potts looked down at his notes at last, as if seeing what he’d been doing, and said, very quietly:

“So Adami was teaching rhetoric to children—while you’re teaching children how not to sound rhetorical.”

And Strawson, without looking up, added: “Or what.”

 

Grice: Caro Adami, riflettendo sul tuo "Precetti di rettorica", mi chiedevo: è forse la prammatica, come tu la intendi, la vera erede della retorica classica nelle nostre conversazioni quotidiane? 

Adami: Gentile Grice, credo proprio di sì. La prammatica non è altro che l’arte di saper parlare con giudizio, adattando il discorso alla capacità e alle esigenze dell’ascoltatore. Anche oggi, come in passato, le nostre parole cercano sempre la via più efficace per raggiungere chi le ascolta. 

Grice: Vedo dunque che per te, come per me, la conversazione è un esercizio non solo di chiarezza, ma anche di ingegno e misura. Forse, allora, il buon conversatore è soprattutto un retore che mette la natura a servizio dell’arte? 

Adami: Esattame (nte, amico mio! L’arte vera imita la natura nei suoi dettagli più minuti. Così, anche nella più semplice chiacchierata, la padronanza del discorso – la rettorica conversazionale – consente di esprimere pensieri grandi in forme agili e comprensibili a tutti. È questo il cuore della prammatica che insegno.

 

Further refs.: Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Adami: la ragione conversazionale e la prammatica come rettorica conversazionale. 

 

VERBALI: ADDIEGO

 

Grice: Caro Addiego, ti chiedo venia se mi permetto di chiamarti così, anziché “d’Addiego”. È solo un vezzo conversazionale, spero non ti dispiaccia! Mi incuriosisce sempre la tua capacità di coniugare la precisione filosofica con quell’amorevolezza tipica degli Scolopi: credi che la ragione conversazionale possa davvero avvicinare la pietà al rigore matematico?

Addiego: Grice, non posso che sorridere al tuo spirito! Acquisto o d’Addiego, poco importa, purché si conversi con sincerità. Per me, ogni discorso – filosofico o matematico – deve riflettere la bontà e la dedizione che insegnamo ai giovani. La ragione conversazionale è il ponte tra cuore e mente: solo così l’implicatura acquista valore.

Grice: Sagge parole, amico mio! Mi viene in mente il motto “suum cuique”, che hai fatto tuo: pensi che, nella pratica quotidiana dell’insegnamento, la conversazione possa davvero essere strumento di miglioramento, non solo intellettuale ma anche umano?

Addiego: È proprio così, Grice! Ogni conversazione, anche la più semplice, può essere “trattenimento pel lettore”: se guidata dalla ragione e dall’amorevolezza, diventa modello di virtù, specchio della vera educazione. A Bari come a Roma, questa è la missione che anima la mia filosofia

 

Further refs.: Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Addiego: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. 

 

Verbali: Zamboni

 

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: Zamboni, 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.

 

Verbali: Zamboni

 

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.

 

Verbali: Zimara

 

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!

 

Verbali: 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!

 

Verbali: Zini

 

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!

 

Verbali: Zolla

 

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.

 

Verbali: Zoppi

 

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 JAustin, 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!

 

Verbali: Zoppio

 

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 G. 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?” Mabbott said, settling beside G. G. did not answer. He 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. (G. let the Latin stand, because Latin in Oxford is always allowed to stand.)

Mabbott gave G. a look that contained, in miniature, Scotland’s view of England: affectionate, sceptical, and faintly superior.

“National anthem?” he said. G. 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!

 

Verbali: Zoppio

 

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. There G. 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. G. 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. G. 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.

 

VERBALI: ZORZI

 

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.”

 

VERBALI: ZUBIENA

 

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.: Grice, 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.

 

VERBALI: ZUCCANTE

 

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.

 

VERBALI: ZUCCOLO

 

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, Grice: 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.