H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PR

 

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

 

 

Verbali: Pra

 

G.: Pra, then. Or Dal Pra, if one wishes the title-page to behave.

S.: Let us begin with the title. Segni dei tempi.

G.: Yes. Pra, Pra, Pra, and then segni dei tempi. It looks innocent until one asks what exactly dei is doing.

S.: You are back with Hardie.

G.: Hardie had the right irritation. Dei may look possessive, partitive, specifying, even faintly liturgical if one lets one’s church-history run ahead.

S.: The signs of the times.

G.: Precisely. Which already risks eschatology. Not merely signs in time, but signs belonging to the times, as if time itself had learned to write.

S.: Or signs characteristic of the times.

G.: Yes. A specifying genitive rather than a proprietary one. But Italian lets the little phrase remain usefully underdetermined.

S.: Tempo and tempi, then.

G.: Ah yes. Tempo singular, the abstract stream. Tempi plural, articulated historical periods, seasons, ages, conjunctures. Segni del tempo would sound more metaphysical or perhaps meteorological. Segni dei tempi sounds historical and pluralised.

S.: So tempi gives us epochs.

G.: Exactly. Not time as such, but times, periods, circumstances, historical weather.

S.: And segni.

G.: Which brings us to segno, signum, sign, signify, and all the rest.

S.: You wanted to begin from the examples in Meaning.

G.: Yes. The first three at the beginning are the right starting point. “Those spots mean measles.” “Those spots didn’t mean anything to me, but to the doctor they meant measles.” “The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year.”

S.: And you want them rewritten through sign and signify.

G.: Exactly, and then in Italian through segno, segnare, significare, and finally in Latin through signum, signare, significare.

S.: Before that, one question. Why not simply keep mean.

G.: Because Pra gives us segni, and Pra is entitled to force one into lexical archaeology.

S.: Good. Then first English.

G.: First English, yes. Take “Those spots mean measles.”

S.: Rewritten with sign.

G.: “Those spots are a sign of measles.”

S.: Or verbally.

G.: “Those spots sign measles” is hideous in ordinary English, though philosophically tempting. Better perhaps “Those spots sign the presence of measles” if one is forcing the verb.

S.: And with signify.

G.: “Those spots signify measles.” Better English, though already slightly bookish.

S.: The second example.

G.: “Those spots didn’t mean anything to me, but to the doctor they meant measles.”

S.: With sign.

G.: “Those spots were no sign to me, but to the doctor they were a sign of measles.”

S.: And with signify.

G.: “Those spots signified nothing to me, but to the doctor they signified measles.”

S.: Third.

G.: “The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year.”

S.: With sign.

G.: “The recent budget is a sign that we shall have a hard year.”

S.: And with signify.

G.: “The recent budget signifies that we shall have a hard year.”

S.: Already one hears the difference. Sign and signify tilt more visibly toward consequence and indication.

G.: Precisely. Mean in English is a wonderfully broad and unruly servant. Signify behaves more ceremonially. Sign as noun is plain enough; sign as verb is possible, but awkward outside technical or poetic tolerance.

S.: Now Italian.

G.: Yes. “Quelle macchie significano il morbillo.”

S.: With segno.

G.: “Quelle macchie sono segno di morbillo.”

S.: And with segnare.

G.: Here we feel the strain. “Quelle macchie segnano il morbillo” is poor Italian if taken naively. Better “Quelle macchie segnano la presenza del morbillo” or, even more idiomatically, “Quelle macchie segnano che c’è il morbillo,” though that last begins to sound provincial and not beautifully so.

S.: So significare is the clean Italian verb.

G.: Entirely. Segno as noun, significare as verb. Segnare tends more to mark, inscribe, note, score, register, or indicate in a stronger material way.

S.: The second example.

G.: “Quelle macchie non significavano nulla per me, ma per il medico significavano il morbillo.”

S.: With segno.

G.: “Quelle macchie non erano per me alcun segno, ma per il medico erano segno di morbillo.”

S.: With segnare.

G.: Again one forces it: “Quelle macchie non mi segnavano nulla, ma al medico segnavano il morbillo” is ghastly. Better “Quelle macchie non mi segnavano nulla, ma al medico segnavano la presenza del morbillo,” though even there significare wins by miles.

S.: Third.

G.: “Il bilancio recente significa che avremo un anno difficile.”

S.: With segno.

G.: “Il bilancio recente è segno che avremo un anno difficile.”

S.: And with segnare.

G.: “Il bilancio recente segna un anno difficile per noi” is possible, but it no longer mirrors the original exactly. Segnare in Italian drifts toward marking out, determining, stamping, ushering in.

S.: Which is philosophically interesting.

G.: Very much so. It suggests that segnare may be more active than significare, less purely semantic and more eventive.

S.: Now Latin.

G.: Yes. “Illae maculae significant morbillos.”

S.: You pluralise morbilli.

G.: One may. Or better, to avoid nosological fuss, “Illae maculae significant morbum morbillosum,” but that is ugly. Let us keep “Illae maculae sunt signum morbilli” for the noun-form.

S.: Good. Then noun and verb.

G.: “Illae maculae sunt signum morbilli.” And with significare, “Illae maculae significant morbillos.”

S.: With signare.

G.: “Illae maculae morbillos signant” is not impossible, but it sounds more like branding or marking than signifying. One begins to feel why significare may have become the preferred semantic verb.

S.: Second example.

G.: “Illae maculae mihi nihil significabant, medico autem morbillos significabant.”

S.: With signum.

G.: “Illae maculae mihi nullum signum erant, medico autem signum morbilli erant.”

S.: And with signare.

G.: “Illae maculae mihi nihil signabant, medico autem morbillos signabant.” Again possible, but harsher and less settled than significabant.

S.: Third.

G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal significat nos annum difficilem habituros esse.”

S.: With signum.

G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal signum est nos annum difficilem habituros esse.”

S.: With signare.

G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal annum difficilem signat” perhaps, but it begins to move toward “marks” rather than “means.”

S.: So significare is the safer semantic workhorse in Latin too.

G.: Yes, though signare remains temptingly primitive because it suggests the act of marking by which signification comes to be possible.

S.: Which brings us to segni dei tempi.

G.: Exactly. Segni as noun. But the question is whether behind segni there lurks not merely significare but segnare.

S.: Because the times do not only signify; they mark.

G.: Very good. Segni dei tempi may mean signs belonging to the times, but also markings made by the times, inscriptions of history upon the world.

S.: So dei is ambiguous and segni is doubly alive.

G.: Precisely. The signs of the times are both signs that indicate the times and marks impressed by the times.

S.: Now back to Meaning proper. You had your five contrasts between natural and nonnatural cases.

G.: Yes. The first set: spots, budget, and the entailment of the condition. If x means that p in that natural sense, p follows.

S.: So “Those spots signify measles, but he hasn’t got measles” fails.

G.: Exactly. And “The recent budget signifies that we shall have a hard year, but we shan’t” has the same defect.

S.: In Italian.

G.: “Quelle macchie significano il morbillo, ma non ha il morbillo” fails. “Il bilancio recente significa che avremo un anno difficile, ma non l’avremo” likewise.

S.: In Latin.

G.: “Illae maculae significant morbillos, sed morbillos non habet” fails. “Hoc vectigal significat nos annum difficilem habituros esse, sed non habituri sumus” fails.

S.: Because natural signification entails the condition.

G.: Quite.

S.: Then your point that one cannot pass to “what was meant by those spots.”

G.: Yes. In the natural case one cannot smoothly say “what was signified by those spots was that he had measles” in the nonnatural style. Or rather one can say it, but it no longer behaves as the original does.

S.: Let us rewrite.

G.: English first: from “Those spots signify measles” one cannot straightforwardly infer “What those spots signified was ‘he has measles.’”

S.: Because the quotation-form fails.

G.: Exactly. Likewise in Italian: from “Quelle macchie significano il morbillo” one cannot naturally move to “Ciò che quelle macchie significavano era ‘ha il morbillo’” as though the spots were uttering a sentence.

S.: And Latin.

G.: “Quod illae maculae significabant erat ‘morbillos habet’ ” has the same oddity.

S.: Then the second set.

G.: Yes. “Those three rings on the bell mean that the bus is full.” “That remark meant that Smith found his wife indispensable.”

S.: Now sign and signify behave differently.

G.: Better indeed. “Those three rings on the bell signify that the bus is full.” “Those three rings are the sign ‘the bus is full’ ” if one is willing to grow semiotic.

S.: Italian.

G.: “Quei tre tocchi di campanello significano che l’autobus è pieno.” Or with segno: “Quei tre tocchi sono il segno che l’autobus è pieno.”

S.: Latin.

G.: “Illa tria tintinnabuli pulsa significant raedam plenam esse.” Or “Illa tria pulsa sunt signum raedam plenam esse.”

S.: Here no entailment.

G.: Precisely. “Those three rings signify that the bus is full, but in fact it is not full” is perfectly possible, because the conductor may have erred.

S.: So signification here is nonnatural.

G.: Yes. And now one may say “What those rings signified was that the bus is full.”

S.: And quotation becomes possible.

G.: Entirely. “Those three rings signified ‘the bus is full.’”

S.: In Italian.

G.: “Quei tre tocchi significavano ‘l’autobus è pieno.’”

S.: Latin.

G.: “Illa tria pulsa significabant ‘raeda plena est.’”

S.: It sounds a little odd in Latin with the object-language quotation.

G.: Naturally. Latin dislikes being made to do modern semantic gymnastics in evening dress. But the structure is clear enough.

S.: Now your larger question. Signify or signare as basic.

G.: Yes. One temptation is to say significare is basic, because it is the settled semantic verb across the natural and nonnatural cases.

S.: But you are drawn to signare.

G.: Very much. Because signare suggests the underlying operation of marking by which something is made available as sign.

S.: So signare would be structurally prior, significare semantically fuller.

G.: Exactly. Signare is like laying down the mark; significare is the mark’s already functioning in an interpretive economy.

S.: Which is why you wanted the triadic formalisation.

G.: Yes. Let us say S(x,y,z), where x is the signans, y the signatum, and z the signee, if one may permit a barbarous convenience.

S.: The signee being the addressee, the one for whom the sign is functioning.

G.: Precisely. Now if signare is basic, S(x,y,z) is not merely “x signifies y to z” but “x marks y for z,” or “x is deployed as sign of y for z.”

S.: Better perhaps: x signat y apud z.

G.: Very good Latinising. Or ad z, depending on how direct one wishes the orientation.

S.: So in the squash case the bandaged leg is x, the refusal is y, and A is z.

G.: Exactly. B, by displaying x, signat y ad A.

S.: And in the natural case.

G.: There z may be less essential. Spots can be signum morbilli even without a particular addressee in view. But once a doctor notices them, the triad is activated epistemically.

S.: So the natural case is dyadically sufficient, triadically available. The nonnatural case is triadically constitutive.

G.: Splendid. Keep that too.

S.: You are in a granting mood.

G.: Because this one is correct.

S.: Then segni dei tempi, under this model, would involve x as historical phenomena, y as what is to be gathered about the times, and z as the reader or citizen.

G.: Precisely. The title itself presupposes a signee. Signs of the times are not merely there; they are there to be read.

S.: And dei.

G.: Dei then governs either y or the relation as a whole. They are signs belonging to the times, signs about the times, signs characteristic of the times, and perhaps marks left by the times.

S.: So Dal Pra’s title is already semantically busy.

G.: Almost indecently so, and he does nothing to simplify it. Which is precisely why it deserves Pra, Pra, Pra and no little scrutiny.

S.: Now one more lexical issue. Significare, not segnificare.

G.: Yes. One must not let the phonetic pull of segno produce the barbarism segnificare. Italian preserves significare from Latin significare, not a vernacularised segno-form.

S.: Whereas segnare belongs to the segno line.

G.: Exactly. Italian has both families: segno/segnare and significare. They overlap semantically, but their histories are distinct enough to matter.

S.: English likewise, in a way. Sign and signify.

G.: Yes. Sign is the more Anglo-Latinate hybrid citizen; signify the more ceremonially Latinate verb. And signature lurks nearby to remind us that signare also meant to mark, seal, subscribe.

S.: Which helps your preference for signare as formal base.

G.: Very much. To sign is to mark in a way that creates a directed relation. A signature is not merely a mark; it is a mark by someone, of something, for someone or within some recognised institution.

S.: So again triadic.

G.: Precisely. The world keeps conspiring on behalf of my formalisation.

S.: Let us test it on your natural examples. “Those spots mean measles.”

G.: In triadic notation, minimally S(x,y,z) with x = those spots, y = measles, z = doctor-observer. But because the natural case does not require an intending signans, we should be cautious. The notation fits best once there is an interpreter in place.

S.: Whereas in the bell case x is the three rings, y the bus is full, z the passenger-hearer, and behind x one may add the conductor as utterer.

G.: Yes. Then one sees the full richness: a human agent arranges x so that z will gather y.

S.: Which is almost your standard nonnatural meaning formula.

G.: Nearly, yes. The only thing still missing is the reflexive intention that z recognise that very intention.

S.: So signare may formalise the broad triadic framework, while meansNN requires the reflexive refinement.

G.: Excellent. Exactly that.

S.: Then Dal Pra’s segni remain at the broader level.

G.: Mostly, yes. Historical signs do not always involve a speaker with reflexive intention. They may still be read, but not always meantNN.

S.: Hence your original natural-nonnatural distinction returns.

G.: It always does. Good distinctions are like Roman roads.

S.: Straight and overused.

G.: Better overused than forgotten.

S.: Then perhaps the final lexical hierarchy is this. Signum and segno give the nounal base. Signare and segnare give the act of marking or pointing. Significare gives the settled semantic relation. Meaning in your special sense adds the further layer of speaker-intention and recognisable uptake.

G.: Beautifully put.

S.: And S(x,y,z).

G.: Yes. S(x,y,z) as the formal skeleton of signare: x the signans, y the signatum, z the signee.

S.: Signee is horrible.

G.: Entirely. Which is why it is useful for one afternoon.

S.: And Pra.

G.: Pra remains useful because Segni dei tempi forces all these questions into one little title: signs, times, of, reading, history, implication.

S.: So all they discuss is Pra, Pra, Pra, segni, dei tempi.

G.: As you requested, and no little thing either.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently Veronese by way of Corpus.

 

Grice: Pra, lo sai, solo un vero “lit. hum.” come me coglie subito chi si nasconde dietro “Antonino” nelle tue conversazioni ragionate: il vero nome di quello che il vulgus chiama Marco Aurelio! E poi, grazie a Bradley, ci fu un tempo in cui Hegel era quasi troppo popolare a Vadum Boum—cioè Oxford!

Pra: Ah, Grice, vedo che sei molto sensibile a queste sfumature classiche! In effetti, Antonino—Marco Aurelio—incarna nel mio pensiero l’unione tra teoria e prassi, un dialogo tra sapienza antica e spirito critico moderno, proprio come il continuo intreccio tra Hegel e i suoi interpreti, qui in Italia e, come dici tu, anche a Oxford.

Grice: Assolutamente, Pra! È interessante come il tuo “trascendentalismo pratico” resista al dogmatismo così come le meditazioni di Marco Aurelio resistono alla mera teoria. E forse il boom di Hegel a Oxford non era che un altro capitolo di questa conversazione continua tra teoria ed esperienza vissuta.

Pra: Ben detto, Grice. Il mio percorso—tra filosofia, resistenza e ricerca storica—mira a tenere viva la conversazione tra passato e presente, sempre consapevole che la ragione serve l’azione, e non il contrario. Forse, come Antonino, dobbiamo sempre tornare al dialogo, dentro di noi e con gli altri.

 

Verbali: Prepostino

 

G.: Romulus divine again. M. never tires of it.

M.: I do not tire of it because you boys persist in thinking it a fairy-tale, whereas it is properly constitutional.

Shropshire: Constitutional? I had thought it heavenly.

M.: In Rome the heavenly is often constitutional. In England too, if you are prepared to notice the obvious.

G.: You mean the King.

M.: I mean our Defender of the Faith, yes. A crowned monarch is not merely dressed. He is anointed.

Shropshire: With oil.

M.: With oil, yes, but not merely by a bottle. By rite, invocation, and a doctrine of set-apartness.

G.: And that is private in the ceremony.

M.: Very nearly the only truly private part. The screen is drawn. The cameras, were there any, would be useless. The moment is between the monarch and the Holy Ghost.

Shropshire: Then you are saying Romulus got something of the same sort.

M.: Mutatis mutandis, yes. Not chrism and gospel, but translation, apotheosis, divine paternity, public authority under heavenly cover.

G.: But how, exactly.

M.: You must first stop thinking that divinity in Rome is only a matter of thunderbolts. It is also pedigree, favour, and destiny.

Shropshire: I had half a mind to start worshipping him.

M.: Do not be ridiculous before breakfast.

Shropshire: Why not. If Rome did.

M.: Rome did many things from which Clifton must be spared.

G.: Still, sir, if Romulus is divine, does he begin it all, or does Aeneas.

M.: Aeneas begins the line in one sense, Romulus begins the city in another, and Augustus begins the polished version in a third.

Shropshire: Then we are to worship three at once.

M.: You are to translate three at once, which is harder and safer.

G.: Aeneas, then. He is already half-divine through Venus.

M.: Precisely. The Trojan line does not begin in a village registry. It begins with a goddess.

Shropshire: And then someone Vestal enters later.

M.: Later, yes. In the Roman line you get the Vestal mother of Romulus and Remus, which gives the foundation another sacred complication. One need not improve the pedigree when it is already implausible enough.

G.: So the point is that Rome does not arise from mere settlement, but from divinely freighted descent.

M.: Exactly. Virgil’s great service is to make political history look like sacred continuity.

Shropshire: The Iliad did that for the Greeks.

M.: Not quite in the same way, but near enough for a schoolboy comparison.

G.: The Iliad gives the Greeks heroic legitimacy. The Aeneid gives the Romans a theocracy.

M.: Better to say a providential history in epic form.

Shropshire: That is only a longer way of saying theocracy.

M.: It is a more accurate and therefore less childish way.

G.: Still, Virgil clearly wants Rome to look fated.

M.: Entirely. Fatum does most of the heavy lifting, with Juno trying to impede and thereby improve the drama.

Shropshire: Juno is anti-Italian, then.

M.: Anti-Trojan in the first instance, anti-destiny in the second, and useful to the poet in every instance.

G.: So Aeneas comes as enemy of the Greeks, whose city they have destroyed, and founds Italy out of vengeance.

M.: Out of survival and command rather than vengeance. Do not make him too simple. He escapes a destroyed city and carries a destiny westward.

Shropshire: To fight Turnus, who was the real Italian.

M.: There is the interesting point. Turnus stands for the already-there. Aeneas for the not-yet-but-destined. The poem needs both.

G.: Then the Itali are there before Rome.

M.: Of course they are. Italy is not founded from nothing. Virgil’s task is to make Roman supremacy look like fulfilment rather than takeover.

Shropshire: That sounds like implicature.

M.: It sounds like you have been listening to the wrong boy.

G.: But it is, sir. Virgil does not always say “Rome is justified because fate says so.” He makes one gather it from the structure.

M.: Very good. The poem works by declaration and arrangement. Jupiter states, but the narrative implies.

Shropshire: And the she-wolf.

M.: Ah yes. The most famous animal in constitutional mythology.

G.: She gives the twins a bestial and protective beginning.

M.: Yes. Wild nurture under divine tolerance. The city begins in exposure, rescue, and animal fosterage before it becomes law.

Shropshire: Which makes it sound rather less dignified than Westminster.

M.: Westminster also has its moments if one reads enough history.

G.: So the wolf is part of the divine economy, though not herself divine.

M.: Precisely. A sign, an instrument, a piece of natural marvel under providential direction.

Shropshire: I still like the idea of worshipping Romulus.

M.: You like it because it involves less prose than Livy.

Shropshire: That too.

G.: But the divinity of Romulus comes after the founding and after the fratricide.

M.: Exactly. Rome begins with murder and ends the founder in heaven. That is one of the more Roman combinations.

Shropshire: Light and dark. Prepostino would like that.

M.: Prepostino would have had to defend it to boys already reading another sacred book with equal confidence and less tact.

G.: The Vulgate.

M.: Or your Authorized Version, if you insist on England. But for the Roman civic imagination, Virgil could function almost biblically.

Shropshire: Nine books.

M.: Twelve, you ass.

Shropshire: I was economising on empire.

M.: Clifton does not permit economy in epic arithmetic.

G.: Still, there is a scriptural air to it. Prophecy, descent, providence, city, law, future greatness.

M.: Exactly. Virgil sings Rome into moral inevitability.

Shropshire: Then Romans are really Romuleans.

M.: A barbarous but not wholly useless coinage.

G.: Without the diminutive.

M.: Certainly without the diminutive. Empires are never founded in diminutives.

Shropshire: Unless by Oxonians.

M.: Oxford was not founded by anyone sensible enough to write epic about it.

G.: Sir, when you say Romulus is divine, do you mean by birth, by office, or by translation.

M.: Excellent. By birth in the loose heroic sense, by office in the civic sense, and by translation or apotheosis in the cultic-public sense.

Shropshire: Three divinities in one.

M.: I shall ignore the theology of that.

G.: Then it is like the English monarch in this way: not born simply as a god, but set apart by rite and office.

M.: Very good. The analogy is not identity. But the English can understand sacral office better than they pretend.

Shropshire: Because of the anointing.

M.: Precisely. That hidden act means that public authority is not merely political. It is symbolically consecrated.

G.: And Romulus is the Roman version of such consecrated founding.

M.: Yes. The founder is more than mayor. He is city in person, and then city under heaven.

Shropshire: Is that why Quirinus matters.

M.: Exactly. Romulus does not merely die. He becomes or is assimilated to Quirinus, which lets the political founder pass into cultic permanence.

G.: So Rome gives itself a founder who can remain present as god.

M.: You have it.

Shropshire: That is very useful. If a founder stays divine, criticism becomes awkward.

M.: It usually does. Sacred politics has that advantage.

G.: Which is why Virgil matters for Italians. This is living matter, as you say.

M.: Very much living matter. Do not think this is a dead chapter merely because your desks are old.

Shropshire: Prepostino had to defend all this among readers of the Bible.

M.: Yes, and that is a serious intellectual task. To interpret pagan civic divinity under Christian textual dominance requires a good deal of exactness.

G.: One has to show that “Romulus is divine” need not mean “believe this as you believe the Creed.”

M.: Exactly. One may read it as civic theology, symbolic politics, Roman anthropology of power, or all three.

Shropshire: But the Romans did believe it.

M.: Romans believed many things at several levels simultaneously. Never underestimate the complexity of public belief.

G.: That sounds like saying they believed and also managed belief.

M.: Precisely. Religion is often administrative before it becomes interior.

Shropshire: That is a disappointing sentence.

M.: It is also a true one.

G.: Then Aeneas is useful because he gives Rome an origin against the Greeks.

M.: Yes, but do not reduce the poem to revenge. The Greeks destroy Troy; Aeneas carries Trojan nobility into a future that will exceed Greece.

Shropshire: By defeating Turnus.

M.: By defeating Turnus, marrying into Latium, and making foreignness become origin.

G.: So the poem turns an outsider into rightful ancestor.

M.: Exactly. That is one of Virgil’s great political tricks.

Shropshire: Trick.

M.: Poetic trick, constitutional service, sacred narrative. Take your pick according to your piety.

G.: And Juno’s resistance improves the claim because Rome triumphs over divine opposition and thus looks more deeply chosen.

M.: Very good. Opposition in epic is often proof of providence by delay.

Shropshire: Like prep school.

M.: I shall pretend not to have heard that.

G.: Sir, does this mean that the first Rome is already presented as destined empire before it is even a city.

M.: Yes. Prima Roma is imagined backward from imperium. The city is narrated under the shadow of what it will become.

Shropshire: Which is unfair to the shepherds.

M.: Great literature is often unfair to local populations.

G.: Then what Virgil gives the Romans is not just ancestry, but theological time.

M.: Splendid. Keep that.

Shropshire: He always tells him to keep things.

M.: Because on rare occasions he says them worth keeping.

G.: Thank you, sir.

M.: Do not become ornamental.

Shropshire: I still want to know how the she-wolf fits with destiny.

M.: As a sign that nature itself will cooperate with fate when the city is at stake. The wild nurses the civil. Rome begins by taming its own origin retroactively.

G.: And the divine father, Mars, adds another layer.

M.: Yes. A martial paternity for a martial city. The genealogy is never accidental.

Shropshire: So the city’s habits are in the blood.

M.: Or so the myth would have you think.

G.: Then the point of all this for the Romans was to render office, empire, and law almost liturgical.

M.: Precisely. And that is why modern boys who have only parliamentary categories in their heads misunderstand ancient political religion.

Shropshire: I have only cricketing categories.

M.: In your case that may be an improvement.

G.: Prepostino, then, in trying to discuss the divino di Romolo, is handling something not merely historical, but still charged.

M.: Entirely. For Italians, Rome is never only antiquarian. It remains civic matter, symbolic matter, confessional matter, educational matter.

Shropshire: And here the Bible is Virgil.

M.: In one register, yes. The Aeneid may function as a national scripture without ceasing to be poetry.

G.: Which means that when Virgil says little, he still makes much understood.

M.: And there you return to your inferential obsessions. Fair enough. Epic works by overt statement and by arranged inevitability.

Shropshire: So if Aeneas is enemy of the Greeks, and founder of the Italians, and Romulus divine, and the wolf maternal, then what is left for history.

M.: Quite a lot, unfortunately. But myth gives history its public grammar.

G.: Then the king’s anointing and Romulus’s apotheosis are analogous in that both make office more than secular.

M.: Exactly. Not identical, but analogous enough for English boys to understand without becoming pagans.

Shropshire: A pity.

M.: For you perhaps.

G.: And the hiddenness of the anointing matters because sacrality is intensified by concealment.

M.: Very good. What is unseen can govern the seen more thoroughly than a spectacle.

Shropshire: Then perhaps Romulus ought also to have been screened off.

M.: Rome preferred thunder and disappearance. It was less Anglican about mystery.

G.: So the Roman founder vanishes upward, the English king kneels under a canopy, and both cases make authority descend or ascend under divine sign.

M.: Splendidly put.

Shropshire: Then may I worship him privately.

M.: You may translate him privately. Worship is not on today’s timetable.

G.: And the whole point of Virgil is to make Rome seem not merely victorious, but justified.

M.: Yes. Victory alone is crude. Fate, descent, divine favour, opposition overcome, all these turn force into meaning.

Shropshire: Which is what empires like best.

M.: Indeed. Raw conquest is bad pedagogy. Destiny teaches better.

G.: Then the Romans are not just descendants of Romulus, but readers of an interpretation of themselves.

M.: Excellent. They become what the poem tells them they already are.

Shropshire: That is very convenient.

M.: Civilization often is.

G.: So in class Roman History, what we are really reading is Roman self-authorization.

M.: Quite. With animals, gods, exiles, murder, marriage, and very good hexameters.

Shropshire: Better than Kings.

M.: Different. Do not invite comparisons you cannot parse.

G.: Still, among boys reading the Authorized Version, Virgil would have to be defended differently.

M.: Yes. One must explain that civic myth and sacred scripture are not identical categories, even when both are culturally formative.

Shropshire: But both are sung or read as if they mattered beyond the page.

M.: Exactly. That is why this is living matter.

G.: Then the final lesson is that Romulus is divine not as a childish fable, but as Rome’s way of consecrating its own beginning.

M.: Precisely.

Shropshire: And our king.

M.: Our king is anointed, not abducted into Quirinus. Try not to confuse the service-books.

G.: Dry enough, sir.

M.: Sufficiently Cliftonian. Romulus may ascend; you two, for the present, may decline.

 

Grice: Prepostino, tu parli del divino di Romolo come se Roma fosse nata da un’implicatura: lui dice “sale al cielo”, ma implica “qui si fonda un ufficio pubblico con l’aureola”.

Prepostino: Esatto: e a Cremona impariamo presto che il cielo è un’ottima copertura retorica. Il detto è pietà; il voluto dire è politica—con un pizzico di caratterismo.

Grice: Però se ci metti anche il Manicheismo, la conversazione si biforca: “Romolo è divino” (luce), “Romolo è fratricida” (tenebra). Roma nasce come una Summa theologica scritta a colpi di ascia.

Prepostino: E tu, Grice, quando dici “Summa”, implichi “nota a piè di pagina infinita”: perché a Roma perfino gli dèi vanno commentati—altrimenti qualcuno li prende alla lettera, e finiamo tutti in dogmatica.

 

Verbali: Vattio

 

G.: Praetextatus again, then. Still Roman, still senatorial, still very high office, and still not securely a commentator on Themistius.

S.: You did a further run.

G.: I did, and the result is sober rather than sensational. I found good material on Themistius’s paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics and on the manuscript tradition of his Aristotelian paraphrases, but nothing that firmly places Vettius Agorius Praetextatus in the apparatus, testimonia, or prefatory notices as a commentator on Themistius. [eulogikon.org], [jstor.org]

S.: So the claim remains unverified.

G.: More than that. It becomes increasingly suspect as a positive historical statement.

S.: Yet we may still have our conversation.

G.: Naturally. Oxford has never waited for total certainty before producing a perfectly good discussion.

S.: Then begin with Themistius. These are not Aristotle’s “philosophical speeches.”

G.: No. That phrase must be corrected at once. Aristotle did not sit down and write a set of speeches later performed by Themistius. What Themistius wrote were paraphrases of Aristotelian treatises: explanatory, pedagogical re-presentations in smoother Greek prose. [lechiesediroma.info], [eulogikon.org]

S.: So if someone said that Praetextatus commented on Themistius, the likely object would be a paraphrase of some Aristotelian work.

G.: Exactly. Perhaps the Posterior Analytics, perhaps the Physics, perhaps another of the paraphrases. But that is only what would be likely if the claim were true. It does not make the claim true.

S.: And you now have the incipit for one.

G.: Yes. The opening of the paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics is secure enough from the digital Greek archive. It begins: Ἐμοὶ συντάττεσθαι μὲν ἐξηγήσεις τῶν Ἀριστοτελικῶν βιβλίων μετὰ τοσούτους τε καὶ τοιούτους οὐκ ἐδόκει πόρρωθεν εἶναι φιλοτιμίας ἀνωφελοῦς ... [eulogikon.org]

S.: Translate it, then.

G.: In English first: “It did not seem to me far removed from useless ambition to compose expositions of Aristotle’s books after so many authors and such distinguished ones ...” [eulogikon.org]

S.: Dry enough already.

G.: Dry, yes, and self-aware. Themistius says, in effect, that after so many able predecessors, writing full-scale expositions would look almost vain.

S.: And the Latin.

G.: Let us make it decently schoolmanlike: Mihi quidem expositiones librorum Aristotelicorum post tot ac tales viros componere non videbatur procul ab inutili ambitione abesse ...

S.: Very good. One hears the ancient commentator apologising in advance for commenting.

G.: Exactly. Which is one reason I like him. The commentator begins by acknowledging the crowded dignity of the commentarial queue.

S.: And then he says, further on, that what is useful is not full rival commentary but a concise extraction of Aristotle’s intentions.

G.: Yes. The same opening passage makes that clear. He wants to pick out the βουλήματα, the intentions or purports of what Aristotle wrote, and present them swiftly and briefly for readers who have studied Aristotle once but cannot keep returning to large commentaries. [eulogikon.org]

S.: So the paraphrase is pedagogical compression.

G.: Precisely. Less a scholion than a civil service of recollection.

S.: Then if Praetextatus had commented on Themistius, he would have been commenting on a commentator of Aristotle.

G.: Yes, which would already give him a respectable third-rank dignity: Roman senator, pagan grandee, high office under Julian and after, reduced in leisure to glossing a gloss of the Liceo.

S.: The Liceo.

G.: Or the Lyceum, or as the common room would sooner say, the lizio, if only to keep Aristotle from sounding too school-board.

S.: You admit, then, that this would make Praetextatus less a member of an Academy than a third-rate commentator of the Lyceum.

G.: If the claim were true, yes. And there is still no evidence that it is.

S.: No Academy, then.

G.: No securely attested Academy. No evidence from this run that he belonged to any formal Platonic Academy in the relevant sense. He was a Roman senator, priest, initiate, high official, defender of cults, and highly Hellenising aristocrat. That is what we know. [en.wikipedia.org], [mithraeum.eu]

S.: Entirely Roman credentials.

G.: Entirely Roman, yes. Latin name, Latin civic career, Latin inscriptions, Roman office, Roman city, Roman pagan elite. Greek culture does not subtract Romanity in the fourth century.

S.: Yet suppose, for the pleasure of the thing, that he did comment on Themistius’s paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics. Why would a Roman senator be interested in such a dry object.

G.: Because dryness is often irresistible to grand men once religion has ceased to suffice and politics has begun to pall.

S.: That is a cynical answer.

G.: A Roman one. Besides, the Posterior Analytics concerns scientific knowledge, demonstration, first principles. A senator who wished to style himself a cultivated pagan of serious philosophical stamp might well find such a work useful.

S.: Useful for what.

G.: For appearing not merely pious and politically dignified but intellectually exact. The old senatorial paganism of the fourth century was not only cultic. It was self-consciously learned.

S.: Still, the Posterior Analytics and Prior Analytics are not exactly the first things a civilised undergraduate hugs.

G.: Heaven forbid. I myself went only so far as the Categories and De Interpretatione with much comfort. The Analytics always looked like the sort of Aristotelian country one visits out of duty and leaves grateful to be alive.

S.: So if Praetextatus had written on Themistius’s paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics, he would have gone farther into the Analytics than you cared to.

G.: Disturbingly farther, yes.

S.: Was he then a traitor to the Roman cause.

G.: What Roman cause.

S.: The anti-Greek one.

G.: There was never a stable anti-Greek Roman cause among educated Romans worth speaking of. There was Roman hauteur, Roman appropriation, Roman impatience, Roman superiority, Roman bilingual vanity. But cultivated Romans had been feeding on Greek philosophy for centuries.

S.: Even before Christ.

G.: Obviously. And before Julian too, and before your modern sub-faculty of philosophy dreamt of imitating anyone.

S.: Ah yes, the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy.

G.: Instituted in Oxford in the twentieth century, formally under Literae Humaniores first and later with a more autonomous life, but not, so far as I know, out of any nostalgia for Julian the Apostate.

S.: I had hoped they wanted to go back to Julian.

G.: Oxford wants to go back to many things and never quite reaches any of them.

S.: Yet Julian matters here.

G.: He does. Praetextatus flourished under Julian in the sense that Julian’s reign reopened a political horizon for learned pagan aristocrats. But Julian was also, in the old Christian joke, he who gave the victory to the Galilean by trying too theatrically to resist him.

S.: Because the attempted pagan restoration sharpened the contrast and failed.

G.: Exactly. Julian made pagan seriousness look noble, but also belated.

S.: So Praetextatus belongs to that noble belatedness.

G.: Very much so. Which is why a hypothetical comment on Themistius would fit him psychologically, even if not yet historically. A late Roman senator proving that Hellenic philosophy still has civilised life in it.

S.: And Themistius himself was a statesman-philosopher.

G.: Quite. Senator, orator, imperial adviser, pagan under Christian emperors, and a man who managed to make Aristotle useful to public life without turning him into a camp or a sect. [eulogikon.org], [bmcr.brynmawr.edu]

S.: So Praetextatus might have liked him.

G.: He might well have. That remains a plausible cultural affinity. But affinity is not commentary.

S.: Then the incipit again. It is wonderfully modest.

G.: Yes. Themistius says that after so many predecessors it would be a form of useless ambition to compose expositions. But he then claims a lesser novelty: not to rival the μεγάλαι ὑπομνήσεις, the large commentaries, but to extract the intentions concisely and help memory. [eulogikon.org]

S.: So a Roman senator commenting on that would be commenting on a text that is already a digest.

G.: A digest of Aristotle by a statesman-philosopher. Which begins to sound almost too perfect for late-antique aristocratic leisure.

S.: Then what precisely is the Posterior Analytics paraphrase about, in opening.

G.: It opens with pedagogic conditions of learning. The passage soon turns to the claim that anyone who is going to attend to any scientific learning must already possess certain natural starting-points by which he knows something in advance about the matter; one cannot receive everything from the teacher. The pupil must bring something from home, so to speak. [eulogikon.org]

S.: A very tutorial thought.

G.: Entirely. Themistius would have been tolerable in Oxford for at least one term.

S.: Then perhaps Praetextatus wanted to educate the Roman classes.

G.: Not the plebs, surely.

S.: Why not.

G.: Because senatorial philosophers rarely educate the plebs through Greek Aristotelian paraphrase. They educate themselves, their circle, their cultivated juniors, perhaps a rhetorically imagined public of learned men.

S.: So not a democratic project.

G.: Heaven no. A Roman senator reading or even annotating Themistius is not opening an institute for workers in Trastevere.

S.: Then not a traitor to Rome, merely a Roman using Greek philosophy as part of elite self-fashioning.

G.: Precisely. Rome had long ago conquered Greece and then spent the next centuries borrowing its furniture.

S.: Yet Aristotle was anti-Roman.

G.: Aristotle was dead before Rome became philosophically relevant to him. To call him anti-Roman is to flatter Roman chronology.

S.: Fair.

G.: Very. The Greeks before Christ do not arrange themselves in advance either for or against Rome. Rome later appropriates them under its own afterlight.

S.: Then Praetextatus could study Aristotle through Themistius without ceasing to be Roman.

G.: Entirely. In fact, it would almost intensify his Romanity in that late-aristocratic mode where Roman rule and Greek paideia are worn together.

S.: So the correct formula is not that Greek text implies non-Roman author, but that late Roman aristocracy was perfectly capable of being deeply Greek in culture and entirely Roman in civic identity.

G.: Exactly.

S.: Let us linger on the possibility of the apparatus criticus.

G.: Yes. I did not find Praetextatus there, but I did find evidence about the manuscript tradition of Themistius’s Aristotelian paraphrases and references to the prefaces of the CAG editions as a place where manuscript matters are discussed. [jstor.org], [archive.org]

S.: So if one wanted to settle the matter, where would one go.

G.: To the old CAG editions of Themistius, especially the prefaces, testimonia, and manuscript discussions, rather than merely the running apparatus below the Greek text. Also to prosopographical entries and perhaps to a specialised study of late-antique testimonia on Praetextatus.

S.: In other words, dusty books.

G.: The only proper sort.

S.: And the specific work.

G.: If we were narrowing rationally, I would begin with the CAG volume for the Posterior Analytics paraphrase, because we have the incipit and because this is a securely surviving Greek paraphrase with a clear prefatory self-description. [archive.org], [eulogikon.org]

S.: Then let us suppose, still hypothetically, that Praetextatus commented on this very opening. What might have attracted him.

G.: Several things. The relation between teacher and learner. The necessity of pre-existing principles. The compressed pedagogic dignity of Themistius. The chance to appear both Aristotelian and urbane. The whole enterprise of making hard Greek logic civilly teachable.

S.: Making dry Greek logic Romanly habitable.

G.: Exactly.

S.: You sound almost sympathetic.

G.: To Themistius, yes. To Praetextatus as hypothetical commentator, conditionally. To the historical claim, no.

S.: Then no Academy, no secure platonicus, no verified commentary, but a plausible Hellenising Roman aristocrat who might have liked a statesman’s paraphrase of Aristotle.

G.: That is the exact and dull truth.

S.: Dullness is often the beginning of scholarship.

G.: The middle too.

S.: And the Latin translation once more, polished.

G.: Very well: Mihi quidem, post tot ac tales viros, expositiones librorum Aristotelicorum componere non videbatur ab inutili quadam ambitione longe abesse. And if one wishes the continuation in the same manner: Illud tamen novum et utile visum est, si quis sententias eorum quae in libris scripta sunt celeriter colligat atque, quantum fieri potest, philosophi brevitatem breviter assequatur.

S.: Excellent. One hears the old schoolroom sigh.

G.: A useful sigh. Themistius is saying, “I shall not rival the giants; I shall help memory.”

S.: Then perhaps the final judgment on Praetextatus is this. Entirely Roman by civic and social identity, highly Hellenised in culture, plausibly interested in Greek philosophy, but not yet shown by evidence in hand to have commented on Themistius, much less to have belonged to any Academy.

G.: Precisely.

S.: And if someone insists that he wrote a commentary on Themistius.

G.: Then I should ask, on what work, from what source, in which testimonium, and why the apparatus remains so coy.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently Capitoline, with one eye on the lizio.

 

GRICEVS: PRAETEXTATE, audio te sub Iuliano ad amplissimas dignitates evectum esse: igitur philosophus iam non solum in scholis, sed etiam in curia—quasi Iuppiter ipse Capitolinus tibi suffragia dederit.

PRAETEXTATVS: Si Iuppiter mihi favet, id Romae fit: hic deus non tonat tantum, sed etiam candidatos commendat. Ego autem Temistium commentariis colo—ne quis putet in magistratu me tacuisse.

GRICEVS: Lepide: cum dicas te “Iovem Capitolium” colere, dicis religionem; sed implicas (more nostro conversazionali) hoc: Romae etiam deos oportet ita laudari ut senatus non irascatur.

PRAETEXTATVS: Et cum tu “implicas” dicis, dicis doctrinam; sed implicas hoc: in Urbe et in Accademia idem valet praeceptum—qui nimis clare loquitur, tonitrua meretur; qui sapienter subridet, Iovem habet pro collega.

 

 

 

Verbali: Preti

 

G.: Preti, then. Filosofia e filosofia della scienza. I distrust the title already.

S.: Because it repeats philosophy and then narrows it.

G.: Exactly. Filosofia e filosofia della scienza has the air of saying philosophy and philosophy of, as if the latter were both inside and outside the former.

S.: Which is not always absurd.

G.: No, but it is often ugly. One wants to abstract the pattern first. Filosofia e filosofia della X. Or filosofia dello Y. Or filosofia di Z.

S.: Yes. And then ask why some substitutions feel natural and others preposterous.

G.: Precisely. Filosofia della scienza is intelligible enough. Filosofia del linguaggio, though I dislike it, has become naturalised. Filosofia della religione, tolerable. Filosofia dell’arte, old and respectable.

S.: And then your monsters.

G.: Obstetricy of rats.

S.: You mean philosophy of rat obstetrics.

G.: Exactly. Or ornithology of non-flying avians.

S.: That is almost redundant.

G.: That is why it is useful. Theology of paganism.

S.: Which at least has a history.

G.: Biology of invertebrates.

S.: Perfectly normal.

G.: Exactly. And that helps. Some genitives designate a coherent branch. Others merely expose an academic impulse to annex by suffix.

S.: Then your complaint about filosofia della scienza is not that it is senseless, but that it invites the annexing mood.

G.: Yes. It sounds less like a subject than a summons. Philosophy, back into uniform, and off to the laboratory.

S.: You are repeating yourself, but dryly.

G.: Repetition is the common-room form of principle.

S.: Yet surely some philosophy of this or that is harmless enough.

G.: Harmless until it becomes somebody’s official identity. “He is a philosopher of language.” I have overheard the phrase often enough, irritably enough.

S.: Because you dislike “language” as an abstraction.

G.: Detest it, except in one civilised case. The only language I admit is a formal calculus, with a specified vocabulary, formation-rules, and perhaps transformation-rules if one is feeling generous.

S.: While Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, English.

G.: Are not languages in that philosopher’s purified sense, but enormous historical muddles with poetry, taxes, invasions, and pronunciation.

S.: So when someone called you a philosopher of language.

G.: I wanted to reply that I had spent a couple of classes as CUF Lecturer arguing precisely against that abstraction.

S.: Against language.

G.: Against “language” as a misleading singularity. Ordinary people speak Anglo-Saxon derivatives, Anglo-Norman inheritances, Englishes plural, idiolects, dialects, registers, but not Language with a capital L.

S.: The Italians at least know this through the Crusca.

G.: Yes. Mere linguistic botanising, but honest botanising.

S.: And the French ignore it through the Académie.

G.: Quite. They legislate where they ought merely to prune.

S.: Then philosopher you are willing to be.

G.: Reluctantly, yes.

S.: But philosopher of X.

G.: There the trouble starts. Add too narrow a clause and philosopher no more. He becomes a local official. Our man at Oxford for nineteenth-century continental aesthetics.

S.: A ridiculous title.

G.: Entirely. Tomorrow we shall have another who supersedes him, and the day after perhaps two men.

S.: Two men for nineteenth-century continental aesthetics.

G.: Oxford can survive that sort of duplication if properly underfunded.

S.: Yet every man at Oxford was, in some sense, a philosopher of ordinary language.

G.: Was, yes, though I should prefer not to say it that way.

S.: You mean ordinary-language philosopher.

G.: Exactly. There is a distinction, and you may make it if you like.

S.: Gladly. Philosophy of ordinary language sounds as if ordinary language were the object. Ordinary-language philosophy sounds as if philosophy proceeds by attending to what ordinary language already does.

G.: Precisely. The philosophy is not about language, never mind ordinary language. It uses ordinary language as a check on metaphysical inflation.

S.: So the hyphen saves a doctrine from a department.

G.: Splendid. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Then Preti’s title annoys me because it sits right at the edge of the departmental temptation. Philosophy and philosophy of science. As if philosophy could preserve itself by becoming the reflection-office of science.

S.: Yet Preti may mean to secure philosophy by relation, not by subordination.

G.: Perhaps. But titles are guilty before arguments acquit them.

S.: That is severe.

G.: It is economical.

S.: Let us try another route. What is a philosopher.

G.: Ah. There one enters the OED at one’s peril.

S.: Or the degree statutes.

G.: Worse. When I got my B.A., it was a baccalaureus in artibus from the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy of the Faculty of Literae Humaniores.

S.: Which means you were not awarded a degree qua philosopher.

G.: Precisely. It would have been impossible, or nearly so, for Oxford to certify me as a philosopher simpliciter. One was processed through arts, honours, faculties, sub-faculties, and only then philosophy.

S.: So the institution did not quite know how to award philosophy as such.

G.: No. It awarded literacy, civilisation, gradation, performance under examination. Philosophy entered under literae humaniores and survived there by stubbornness.

S.: Then most of you were, as you once put it, graders.

G.: Dependent scholars, yes. Having been pupils, then pupiling or tutoring pupils, grading, examining, producing one more turn in the degree-awarding machine.

S.: That sounds faintly Marxian.

G.: Merely collegiate.

S.: But different from philosopher.

G.: Entirely. A philosopher may be prone to general reflections on life, or professionally engaged in philosophical studies.

S.: The latter is circular.

G.: Exactly.

S.: So the former.

G.: I suppose so. One who reflects generally, systematically perhaps, but certainly beyond the local burden of his office.

S.: Yet Oxford men lived by office.

G.: For bread and butter, yes. Tutor, lecturer, examiner, fellow. Philosophy often entered only in the margins of those titles.

S.: Which is why you resist “philosopher of X.” It makes the office the man.

G.: Exactly. It gives one a portfolio rather than a mind.

S.: Yet Austin liked the portfolios, in a way.

G.: Austin liked control. That is adjacent, though not identical.

S.: You mean the playgroup.

G.: Naturally. He wanted it composed only of slaves.

S.: A severe word.

G.: Accurate enough. Graders, whole-time tutorial fellows in philosophy, junior enough not to preen, senior enough not to need instruction in the alphabet, but not too senior to threaten the chairmanship.

S.: No pupils.

G.: Certainly no pupils. No one upon whom one might show off pedagogically. Everyone present had to be safely within the machine.

S.: So the playgroup was para-philosophical, but still professional in its social selection.

G.: Exactly. It was not a free republic of wisdom. It was a controlled colony of the degree-awarding system.

S.: One more turn in the machine, as you say.

G.: Yes, except done on Saturday mornings and with better examples.

S.: Yet Socrates would have objected.

G.: Socrates objected to many institutional conveniences.

S.: Because for him it was the love of wisdom.

G.: Or the wisdom of love, if one is feeling Platonic after tea.

S.: So Austin’s little polity was less eros than procedure.

G.: Very much so. Though he had a genius for making procedure look like spontaneous intelligence.

S.: Then philosopher in Oxford was already a compromised role.

G.: Inevitably. One earned a degree not as philosopher, but as one who had survived arts, classics, literae humaniores, sub-faculties, collections, schools, and dons.

S.: Which makes “philosopher of language” even funnier.

G.: Yes. One has not yet been awarded philosopher, and already one is philosopher of.

S.: You sound almost Roman.

G.: Oxford is Rome with worse roads and better weathered stone.

S.: Then back to Preti. Why Filosofia e filosofia della scienza, specifically.

G.: Because the title almost dramatizes the split. Philosophy proper and philosophy under scientific annexation.

S.: Or philosophy in relation to science.

G.: If one is charitable.

S.: And Preti was often charitable toward logico-scientific culture.

G.: He was, and that is one reason he interests me. He sees rhetoric and logic as two cultures, not merely two words.

S.: Yet his title still risks shrinking philosophy into supervision.

G.: Precisely. I dislike any title that suggests philosophy survives by fastening itself parasitically to another discipline’s prestige.

S.: But philosophy of science may still be philosophy if it asks sufficiently general questions.

G.: Of course. That is why the matter is irritating rather than simple. One can do philosophy through science without becoming merely the porter of science.

S.: Then your abstraction exercise matters. Filosofia e filosofia della scienza. Filosofia e filosofia della religione. Filosofia e filosofia dell’arte. These work because the second term names a field in which general questions can still arise.

G.: Yes. Whereas philosophy of rat obstetrics.

S.: Still very bad.

G.: Delightfully bad. It exposes the mechanism. Not every genitive yields a discipline. Some merely record a librarian’s overeagerness.

S.: And philosopher of language.

G.: Is often philosopher of a badly made singular.

S.: Yet your own work was later filed there.

G.: Filing is one of the revenge-mechanisms of posterity.

S.: So if you deny language as a philosophical singular, what do you allow.

G.: Meanings, utterances, speakers, hearers, intentions, occasions, conventional signs if one must, calculi if specified, and the whole civilised muddle of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and English if one is doing history.

S.: But not Language.

G.: Not as an occult substance.

S.: Then the Italians with their Crusca.

G.: At least collect words honestly, like herbs.

S.: Linguistic botanising.

G.: Exactly. And the French legislate because they cannot garden without uniforms.

S.: A little hard on the French.

G.: Not hard enough.

S.: Then philosopher of ordinary language is wrong because.

G.: Because ordinary language is not the topic but the methodical reminder. One does philosophy by returning to how expressions actually work in ordinary use.

S.: Hence ordinary-language philosophy.

G.: Yes. The philosophy is ordinary-language in temper, not about ordinary language as an object.

S.: Though later generations blurred that.

G.: Inevitably. Once a method hardens into a movement, someone will install a department for its relics.

S.: Then philosopher again. If the professional definition is circular and the institutional degree does not certify it cleanly, philosopher must remain partly honorific and partly aspirational.

G.: Very good. One becomes philosopher less by award than by habit of mind and perhaps by the dangerous willingness to generalise.

S.: Dangerous because.

G.: Because the institution pays one for particulars. Essays, tutees, finals, revisions, references. Generality is usually smuggled in under those burdens.

S.: Which is why Austin’s playgroup mattered.

G.: Yes. It gave one a para-professional margin in which philosophy could breathe without immediately becoming grading.

S.: Yet even there, control.

G.: Austin never fully forgot the degree-machine. He wanted whole-time tutorial fellows, no pupils, no public, no one likely to take notes for posterity.

S.: So no one present could use it to show off to juniors.

G.: Precisely. The hierarchy had to be flat enough to preserve inquiry and vertical enough to preserve Austin.

S.: That is very dry.

G.: It is also true.

S.: Then Preti’s title perhaps belongs to another institutional world, where philosophy and philosophy of science can appear side by side without the same Oxford anxieties.

G.: Quite. Pavia is not St John’s. Nor is Florence. Italian titles can be grander because they grow nearer chairs and systems, farther from weekly essays.

S.: Whereas Oxford hid philosophy under literae humaniores and then under sub-faculties.

G.: Like contraband.

S.: So when Preti says filosofia della scienza, he may still be doing something more candid than an Oxford don would.

G.: Very likely. The Italian can state the relation. The Englishman prefers to smuggle it through examples.

S.: Retorica e logica, then.

G.: A better title in some ways. At least one sees the contest. Two cultures, two modes, two claims on seriousness.

S.: And there you are happier because rhetoric for you is not mere ornament.

G.: Exactly. I find the rhetoric to the logic, if you like. The implicature to the explicature.

S.: Preti, then, is useful because he sees that rhetoric and logic are not separable by mere contempt.

G.: Yes. He knows that clarity itself has a style, and that anti-idealist plainness is still a rhetoric.

S.: Which returns us to philosopher.

G.: As one who can reflect on such oppositions without becoming merely their bureaucrat.

S.: So “our man for nineteenth-century continental aesthetics” is the bureaucratic version.

G.: Precisely. Today he handles aesthetics, tomorrow another man handles him.

S.: Oxford by portfolios.

G.: Oxford by accidental sovereignties over topics. A very bad way to think about philosophy.

S.: Yet the machine needs labels.

G.: Machines always do.

S.: And degrees.

G.: And degrees. Baccalaureus in artibus, sub-faculty, faculty, literae humaniores. Never simply philosopher.

S.: Which may be salutary.

G.: In one way, yes. It prevents precocity from becoming credential.

S.: But it also obscures what the life is meant to be.

G.: Exactly. One becomes adept at surviving structures and only later asks whether wisdom has entered anywhere.

S.: Socrates again.

G.: Always a nuisance in the best sense.

S.: He would not have liked sub-faculties.

G.: He would have corrupted them all.

S.: Then Austin’s insistence on whole-time tutorial fellows only.

G.: Was one of those Oxford oddities in which the para-professional is protected by making it more professional socially and less professional officially.

S.: So the playgroup was free only within a carefully arranged servitude.

G.: Splendidly put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep that too.

S.: I am beginning to accumulate permissions.

G.: Do not become philosophical on their basis.

S.: Too late. Then perhaps the final line on Preti is this. Filosofia e filosofia della scienza is an irritating title because it exposes the temptation to make philosophy survive by genitive annexation, yet it also reveals a real problem, namely how philosophy relates to the prestige and method of science without surrendering its generality.

G.: Very good indeed.

S.: And your own line on philosopher.

G.: Philosopher, yes. Philosopher of X, only under protest, and only if X is large enough to fight back.

S.: Language would not qualify.

G.: Not as an abstraction. Lingo perhaps, in a pub, but never Language on a form.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently Oxonian. The degree-machine may go on awarding arts; wisdom will have to remain unofficial.

 

Grice: Preti, devo confessarti che “Retorica e logica” è stato uno dei tuoi testi che più ho apprezzato: mi affascina il modo in cui cerchi la retorica—l’implicatura—nella logica, l’explicatura. A volte penso che proprio lì risieda il cuore della conversazione filosofica. 

Preti: Grazie, Paul. Per me la conversazione è sempre un terreno fertile dove retorica e logica possono intrecciarsi senza che una prevalga sull’altra. Il mio stile volutamente semplice e rapido cerca di evitare il “bello scrivere” idealistico: preferisco la chiarezza nervosa e diretta, che permette alla ragione conversazionale di emergere senza filtri. 

Grice: Eppure, non è forse vero che la cultura logico-scientifica e quella umanistico-letteraria rischiano di essere inconciliabili, come suggerisci nel tuo saggio? Come vedi il ruolo della conversazione per evitare l’oscurantismo fanatico che nasce dalla separazione tra queste due culture? 

Preti: Ottima domanda, Paul. Credo che sia proprio la conversazione filosofica, quando si fonda su una ragione dualistica e non unitariamente inglobante, a consentire il dialogo tra i saperi. La conversazione, per me, è il luogo in cui si può trovare una via alternativa tra l’eredità hegeliano-crociana e il pensiero scientifico, senza cedere a nessuna forma di fanatismo o elitismo. 

 

Verbali: Preve

 

G.: Preve begins, as he ought, with a campagna elettorale.

S.: And what do you know about them?

G.: Elections?

S.: Elections, electoral rights, electoral machinery, electoral vanities, electoral weather. You sound suddenly as if you had canvassed Yorkshire.

G.: I have canvassed nothing but undergraduates, which is a subtler and less remunerative electorate.

S.: Still, you are serious about elections.

G.: Entirely. Elections are one of the few civilised ways of discovering that one is unpopular before lunch.

S.: Then let us begin locally. What were the electoral rights of an Oxonian of your sort.

G.: They accumulated slowly and oddly, as most rights do in Oxford. As a scholar, none to speak of in the governing sense.

S.: At Corpus.

G.: My alma mater was Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and that was that. One belonged, one learned, one suffered, one did not govern. [H. P. Gric...7), pp ...]

S.: Then Rossall.

G.: Yes, I was Master at Rossall School for a year, and I do not think my election mattered there.

S.: Why not.

G.: Because schoolmasterly authority is less elective than disciplinary. One is appointed into a weather, not chosen by a polis.

S.: That is almost Greek enough to be false.

G.: Most good Oxford sentences are.

S.: Then Merton.

G.: Senior scholar at Merton, again not much election in the sense that concerns us. Scholarship is not sovereignty. [web.stanford.edu]

S.: Then St John’s.

G.: First probationary lecturer, then fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. There at last election begins to matter. [pdcnet.org]

S.: Because.

G.: Because one is part of the governing body.

S.: Governing body.

G.: Yes, in the Hobbesian manner, S., a body that governs.

S.: Rather than a body governed.

G.: Oxford generally contrives to be both at once.

S.: Then being a fellow meant being a member of the governing body of St John’s College, Oxford.

G.: Precisely. And there election acquires institutional bite. One votes, one is voted upon, one learns how much civility can be packed into procedural hostility. [pdcnet.org]

S.: Yet the war came.

G.: And during the war one had very little ordinary electoral life in the collegiate sense, though I kept an eye and a hand on political elections in the country at large.

S.: Prime ministers at the tip of the tongue.

G.: Quite. Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, the succession was never far off.

S.: So even when you were not electorally active, you were electorally attentive.

G.: That is fair.

S.: Now, Vice-President of St John’s College, Oxford. Did election matter there.

G.: It did, though I realised it only by stages, as one realises many university dignities, by hearing one’s own name uttered in the passive voice.

S.: Step by step, then.

G.: First, one notices a vacancy or forthcoming vacancy. Then one notices that certain older men become suddenly affable in a way that suggests a file is moving.

S.: Then.

G.: Then one hears that the governing body will meet. Then one is told, perhaps obliquely, that one’s name has been mentioned. Then one is informed that one has been elected Vice-President.

S.: As if struck by lightning in committee form.

G.: Exactly.

S.: Could you have refused.

G.: The office.

S.: Either the office or the running for it.

G.: The office, yes, in principle. Running for it is more delicate. One often does not exactly run in Oxford; one allows oneself to be run.

S.: That sounds faintly indecent.

G.: Much of college administration does.

S.: But could you have said beforehand, no, I do not wish my name to go forward.

G.: Yes, I think one could. The governing body permits refusals of ambition, though not always cheerfully.

S.: So one may decline candidature without abolishing the office.

G.: Precisely.

S.: That differs from your CUF lectureship.

G.: Very much. As a CUF University Lecturer one was elected, if you like, into a teaching post, but one’s actual lectures could be on what one thought fit within tolerable limits.

S.: Elected to teach, not elected in content.

G.: Exactly. Oxford still allowed a lecturer the pleasure of deciding what boredom to impose.

S.: Whereas the committee for examinations was another matter.

G.: Entirely another matter. Examination committees are small republics with bad tempers.

S.: And the Examinations Schools.

G.: Yes. One might be elected or appointed into examining responsibilities, but there the machinery is more formal, more rule-bound, more public in its consequences.

S.: So there are electoral layers.

G.: Always. College, faculty, university, nation. Oxford is federative in its confusions.

S.: Meanwhile the pupils were making noise with their own elections.

G.: To the student representative bodies, yes. Undergraduates discover democracy just in time to misapply it to committees about coffee.

S.: Unfair.

G.: Slightly. But only slightly.

S.: Then the Vice-Chancellor. Is he elected.

G.: Yes.

S.: I thought he was elected by the Chancellor.

G.: No. That is one of the common confusions produced by magnificently named offices.

S.: Then how is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford chosen.

G.: Step by step, since you insist on constitutional choreography. The office is filled by a formal process in which a nomination is made and then approved through university procedures. In modern Oxford practice the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford is appointed by the Chancellor after a recommendation from the appropriate body, but the role is not simply the Chancellor’s whim. [philpapers.org], [people.cs....utgers.edu]

S.: That sounds less like election and more like mediated appointment.

G.: Oxford specialises in mediated appointment while calling it self-government.

S.: Then the Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He is elected.

G.: Yes, very definitely. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford is elected by Convocation. That is one of the more dramatic survivals. [wstarr.org], [paperzz.com]

S.: Step by step again.

G.: Very well. A vacancy occurs. Candidates are nominated. Members of Convocation vote. The winner becomes Chancellor. Oxford thus manages to combine medieval costume with recognisable electoral arithmetic. [wstarr.org], [paperzz.com]

S.: So the Chancellor is elected, not self-creating.

G.: Quite.

S.: And yet the King is not.

G.: Our dear Defender of the Faith is not elected, no. He succeeds by hereditary principle from William the Conqueror onward through the monarchy’s own line of constitutional transformations. [philpapers.org]

S.: So the university elects its Chancellor, but the realm does not elect its crowned continuation.

G.: Exactly. Oxford is in that sense more republican than the kingdom and less honest about it.

S.: What about the Pope, who once mattered rather more to Bologna than to Oxford.

G.: The Pope is elected.

S.: By the cardinals.

G.: Yes. The Pope is elected in conclave by the College of Cardinals. It is rather like Oxford, only the togas are more definite in colour and the stakes somewhat larger. [pdcnet.org], [theologie.uzh.ch]

S.: Since 1949 on his own piece of land next to Rome.

G.: Better to say the Vatican City State, established by the Lateran Treaty of 1929, not 1949. [pdcnet.org], [philpapers.org]

S.: Good. You corrected me in time to save a footnote.

G.: The best Oxford correction is the one that prevents publication.

S.: Then Ancient Rome. Did it all begin with Cicero running for office and losing a couple of times.

G.: Not quite that neatly. Cicero certainly ran through the cursus honorum and won the consulship; he did not simply stand as a serial loser. He was elected quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul, all in due order. [en.wikipedia.org], [cla.csulb.edu]

S.: So no romantic story of noble repeated defeat.

G.: No. Cicero’s story is one of rather alarming success for a novus homo.

S.: Then your correction is that Roman electoral life begins well before him.

G.: Of course. The Republic is saturated with election. Cicero merely gives it style, prose, and self-consciousness.

S.: So from Cicero to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford there runs a line of men wanting others to formalise their vanity.

G.: That is one summary.

S.: And Preve.

G.: Yes, back to Preve. No propaganda without election.

S.: Is that really the line.

G.: It is a good enough line for philosophy. Propaganda presupposes a field of possible uptake, and election is one of the clearest institutional fields in which persuasion must organise itself.

S.: So a campagna elettorale is not just noise.

G.: No. It is structured noise with counting at the end.

S.: Which Austin might have approved.

G.: Austin would have said something like no aberration without modification, or no modification without aberration, and then refused to tell us which because the interest lay in the examples.

S.: So for you it is no propaganda without election.

G.: Or at least no recognisable electoral propaganda without some imagined or actual electorate.

S.: Then your own life at Oxford taught you that by degrees.

G.: Yes. First as one with no governing vote. Then as one within a governing body. Then as one watching offices filled by procedures of varying opacity. One learns that election is not a single thing but a family of practices.

S.: Scholars, fellows, vice-presidents, vice-chancellors, chancellors.

G.: Quite. Add committees, examinations, boards, faculties, and one has enough elective life to make Hobbes sigh.

S.: Yet you said as a scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, nothing electorally weighty.

G.: Correct.

S.: As Master at Rossall School, not really electoral.

G.: Correct.

S.: As Senior scholar at Merton, still not really.

G.: Correct.

S.: As probationary lecturer at St John’s College, Oxford, approaching it.

G.: Yes.

S.: As fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, fully within it.

G.: Exactly.

S.: Then Vice-President, elected.

G.: Yes.

S.: Which means that by then election mattered personally.

G.: Deeply enough to be inconvenient.

S.: Did you enjoy it.

G.: I enjoyed understanding it better than submitting to it.

S.: That is very Oxford.

G.: Oxford enjoys institutions chiefly as things to anatomise while inhabiting them.

S.: And your pupils.

G.: They enjoyed elections in the student sense, which is to say loudly and with insufficient Latin.

S.: You are impossible.

G.: Merely formed.

S.: Then Preve’s thesis title, Temi di propaganda politica nella campagna elettorale per le elezioni del 18 aprile 1948.

G.: Yes. A title of almost excessive explicitness.

S.: It says propaganda, campagna, elezioni all at once.

G.: Which is why it pleases me. It leaves very little unsaid, which for a philosopher of implication is often a relief.

S.: And yet even there, the unsaid remains.

G.: Of course. Every campaign says more than it states: who belongs, who threatens, what future is implied by a slogan, what fear is concealed in a promise.

S.: So Preve studies not merely propaganda but the pragmatics of collective choice.

G.: Nicely put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it.

S.: Then what is the moral.

G.: That an election is the one civilised circumstance in which large numbers of people consent to be simplified by language for a limited time.

S.: Grim.

G.: Accurate.

S.: And Oxford.

G.: Oxford teaches the same lesson on a smaller scale. First you learn that you have no vote. Then that your vote matters. Then that offices are filled by processes half elective, half sacerdotal. Then that even the Chancellor of the University of Oxford is elected, though the Defender of the Faith is not. Then that the Pope is elected, though more gorgeously. Then that Cicero had been doing electoral seriousness long before any of us. [wstarr.org], [philosophi...-berlin.de], [pdcnet.org], [en.wikipedia.org]

S.: So Preve is right to begin with an election campaign.

G.: Entirely. No campaign without an electorate, no electorate without uptake, no uptake without language doing more than it says.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently electoral.

 

 

Grice: Prese, sono curioso: come vedi il ruolo della ragione conversazionale e dell’implicatura nella filosofia italiana, soprattutto nel quadro del tuo comunitarismo?

Preve: Grice, grazie della domanda! Per me la ragione conversazionale è il cuore del dialogo tra comunità, unite dalla socialità e dalla razionalità. Nel mio “Elogio del comunitarismo”, insisto sul fatto che solo attraverso il confronto si può realizzare un vero universalismo.

Grice: Interessante! E la tua ispirazione marxiana ed hegeliana sembra portarti a vedere la conversazione come uno spazio dove le esperienze storiche e sociali si incontrano e si trasformano, vero?

Preve: Esattamente, Grice. Per me l’implicatura conversazionale non è solo uno strumento logico: è il percorso che ci permette di costruire una comunità universale, dando alla filosofia italiana una “raison d’être” sociale fondata sul dialogo e sull’interscambio.

 

Verbali: Prini

 

G.: Prini has written Esistenzialismo, and that alone is enough to make me suspicious.

S.: Only of existentialism.

G.: Of every ism. I am ecumenically sceptical. A philosopher who is not suspicious of an ism deserves to be trapped in one.

S.: Yet you are especially alert when the ism arrives in hard covers from the peninsula.

G.: Naturally. Imported abstractions are often more dangerous because they have crossed a frontier unexamined.

S.: Prini would say you are merely English.

G.: He would be right in the wrong way.

S.: Still, your complaint is not only against the ism but against the noun before it, esistenza.

G.: Indeed. Esistenza is a mouthful and an abstraction at once, which is a bad combination. A short abstraction may still be tolerable. A long one announces a school.

S.: Like speranza, perhaps.

G.: Like speranza, only worse. Speranza has hope on its side. Esistenza has furniture.

S.: You think it is built from stanza.

G.: I suspect it of that. At least it smells less of being than of standing, staying, stationing, sticking about. It has not the clean bareness of sum.

S.: So you prefer est to existit.

G.: Vastly. A est. B est. A est B. One can understand that before breakfast.

S.: Whereas A existit sounds as though A has done something procedural.

G.: Precisely. It sounds as though A has emerged from an office carrying a certificate.

S.: But let us be fair. Existere in Latin is not merely bureaucratic.

G.: No, but it is already suspect. There is this ex-, and the ex- bothers me.

S.: Because it is spatial.

G.: Entirely. Out of, from, forth, out-standing, stepping out. All very theatrical.

S.: Yet spatial prepositions do figurative work all the time.

G.: Yes, and philosophers are always delighted when they can forget that.

S.: Then existere may begin from standing forth, appearing, emerging, showing itself, rather than from simple being.

G.: Exactly. Which is why it is not the same as esse.

S.: Good. Then let us say that existence is not built directly on the verb to be, but on a more dramatic family of standing out.

G.: There you have it. Not merely being, but showing up.

S.: Which might explain Heidegger’s affection for Dasein.

G.: Ah yes. The German hill-fort. There is a green hill far away, and then there is Dasein nearer than any hill and more exhausting.

S.: You do not like Dasein either.

G.: I distrust any philosophy that improves itself by hyphenation or compounds.

S.: But da is only there.

G.: Which is precisely the trouble. There is. There exists. The there seems innocent until it begins charging rent.

S.: And existence then becomes a mode of locatedness.

G.: Or exhibitedness. Being as turnout.

S.: That sounds almost fair to Heidegger.

G.: It is fairer than he usually is to English.

S.: Then let us return to the Latin. Exsistere or existere, from sistere.

G.: Yes, from standing, setting, causing to stand, coming forth, emerging into presence. All of which is perfectly decent as Latin, and perfectly alarming as ontology.

S.: Because ontology then inherits a metaphor of movement or manifestation.

G.: Exactly. If one says A is, one says very little and quite enough. If one says A exists, one may be insinuating that A has emerged, stands forth, is there in some emphatic way.

S.: The antonym, then, is not non est but perhaps non exsistit.

G.: Or, if you insist, insistit.

S.: I do insist.

G.: Of course you do.

S.: Existere and insistere make a nice pair. If one can stand out, one can stand on, stand in, insist.

G.: Yes. The whole family is spatially overactive.

S.: Yet that may help. If existere is to stand forth, insistere is to stand upon or persist. One is emergence, the other pressure or continuance.

G.: Very good. And philosophers then turn these prepositional gymnastics into first principles.

S.: As they always do.

G.: And then complain when ordinary people prefer sum.

S.: Cogito, ergo existo?

G.: Why not just cogito, ergo sum. Descartes had the decency to choose the smaller verb.

S.: Though later people delight in saying cogito, ergo existo as if the longer word gave one more furniture.

G.: Longer Latin always gives undergraduates the impression of metaphysics.

S.: Then what would Cicero think.

G.: Cicero would think many things at once and none of them encouraging. He could understand A est, B est, A est B. He could manage predication without continental melodrama.

S.: But would he like exsistere.

G.: He used it, of course, in ordinary Latin ways. To come forth, to arise, to appear, to result, to stand out. But he would not have dreamt of making exsistere the sacred portal of ontology.

S.: So if one said to Cicero that moderns distinguish between being and existence by making a cult of exsistere, he would raise an eyebrow.

G.: At least one. Perhaps both if he had just dined.

S.: Then is existence a predicate.

G.: No. At least not in the vulgar sense that one lists it among the sensible properties of a thing, like red, sour, or municipal.

S.: Kant, then.

G.: Naturally. Existence is not a real predicate. A hundred possible thalers and a hundred actual thalers differ not in concept but in purse.

S.: Which was already one way of curing the metaphysical swelling.

G.: Yes. The cure was expensive but effective.

S.: Yet Frege gives us the existential quantifier, which makes existence look not like a first-order predicate but like something said of concepts.

G.: Quite. Existence belongs in logic as the satisfaction of a concept, not as a property glued onto individuals.

S.: So one says there exists an x such that Fx, not Exa in some naïve predicate slot.

G.: Exactly. And that is one reason why I distrust the café metaphysics of existence. Logic had already tidied the place before the smoke arrived.

S.: Then Quine enters with ontological commitment.

G.: Ah yes. To be is to be the value of a bound variable. The driest sentence ever written against romance.

S.: Dry enough to make existentialism look upholstered.

G.: Entirely. Quine can reduce a continent to notation.

S.: Yet Quine too worries about existential commitment.

G.: Yes, and rightly. Once one quantify over something, one begins paying rent to it.

S.: Your ontological Marxism again.

G.: If they work, they exist.

S.: That is not Quine.

G.: No, but it is a respectable common-room supplement to Quine.

S.: Then let us descend from modern logic to Aristotle.

G.: Always a relief.

S.: The particularis in the Square of Opposition.

G.: Yes. Some A is B. There exists at least one A that is B, if one likes later dress.

S.: So existential import enters there by the back door.

G.: It does, and the mediaevals spent a good deal of time polishing the hinges.

S.: Then Aristotle too had to manage existence without making it a dramatic noun.

G.: Precisely. He had ousia, being, predication, categories, and enough trouble already. He did not need Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

S.: Yet Prini writes Esistenzialismo in 1955 and means something fairly recognisable.

G.: Yes. By then the word has become a banner.

S.: Through Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus, cafés, war, nausea, black polo-necks.

G.: You forgot Le Deux Magots.

S.: I was saving it.

G.: Good. All that apparatus by which a grammatical discomfort becomes a civilisation.

S.: And Abbagnano in Italy.

G.: Ah yes. Abbagnano is the one to blame in the peninsula.

S.: Prini knows it.

G.: He certainly ought to.

S.: Because Abbagnano domesticates existentialism for Italy.

G.: Domesticates is too kind. He naturalises it, institutionalises it, gives it a proper local passport.

S.: While Prini takes it up with Catholic and conversational complications.

G.: Yes, and that makes him more interesting and more suspicious at once.

S.: Let us not lose the word itself. You said esistenza is built less from being than from standing.

G.: That is my prejudice, yes.

S.: But etymologically that is not absurd.

G.: No, not absurd. Only revealing. The abstract noun carries within it a history of emergence rather than bare being.

S.: Then existence is not what there is before philosophy, but what philosophy makes out of a certain family of expressions.

G.: Very good. That is exactly the irritation. Existence sounds primitive only after much cultivation.

S.: Whereas est is primitive at once.

G.: Yes. Est is as near to intellectual clean water as grammar allows.

S.: Then why not say that existentialism is a philosophy of standing forth rather than of being.

G.: Because its adherents would think one had shrunk the drama. Which is why one should say it more often.

S.: Still, there is something to the standing forth. Human existence, for Heidegger, is not inert presence but a way of being disclosed, ahead of itself, thrown, concerned.

G.: Yes, yes. One can make poetry out of adverbs if given time.

S.: You are unfair.

G.: Only prophylactically.

S.: Then let us ask the central question. What is Prini complaining about.

G.: In one sense, not enough. In another, too much. If he writes Esistenzialismo, he accepts the banner under which too many unlike things have marched.

S.: Jaspers is not Sartre, Heidegger is not Camus, Abbagnano is not Marcel.

G.: Precisely. Isms are often laundries in which distinctions go to die.

S.: Yet one still needs some shelf label.

G.: Librarians always do. Philosophers less so.

S.: Then perhaps Prini uses existentialism not as a creed but as a scene of problems.

G.: That would improve him at once.

S.: Finitude, freedom, situation, testimony, discourse, conversation.

G.: Yes. Once he moves toward conversation he becomes less café and more civil.

S.: Which you prefer.

G.: Vastly. I can tolerate many abstractions if they eventually lead to actual speech.

S.: Then perhaps the route is this. Existence as standing-forth becomes too metaphysical when reified into a noun, but becomes philosophically useful again when returned to situations in which people speak, testify, verify, listen, risk.

G.: That is almost enough to save the noun.

S.: Almost.

G.: Do not overstate the rescue.

S.: Never intentionally.

G.: Good. Now let us perform your favourite reduction: izzing and hazzing.

S.: At last.

G.: Aristotle has to deal not only with what a thing is, but with what it has. Being and having, if you like, though I prefer the mock-Homeric izzing and hazzing.

S.: Dyadic relations.

G.: Quite. A izz B. A hazz B.

S.: Reflexive and transitive if suitably regimented.

G.: Or not, depending on what madness one is formalising.

S.: But your point is that ontology is not exhausted by izzing.

G.: Exactly. One discovers, to one’s horror, that a thing’s relation to its properties, accidents, possessions, states, and equipment matters too. Hazzing is the revenge of predicamental life upon pure being.

S.: So existentialism that obsesses over being may forget having.

G.: Very often. Though in everyday misery having is usually the more urgent category.

S.: Camus’s stranger has less than he is.

G.: Nicely put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep moving. Now Quine again. Ontological commitment does not require one to praise existence; it requires one to count one’s variables.

S.: A splendidly anti-café discipline.

G.: Exactly. No smoke, only scope.

S.: And Frege already had the better weapon: existence is the second-order predicate applying to concepts that have an instance.

G.: Yes. Which means that if Prini wishes to talk ontology, he ought not to forget what logic had already done to the old noun.

S.: Yet existentialists often write as if logic were a provincial registrar.

G.: They must, otherwise the registration would expose them.

S.: Then where does ordinary language philosophy enter.

G.: To remind everyone that there is a difference between there is, there exists, there stands, there remains, there appears, and that the differences are not always metaphysical.

S.: So when someone says “there is a green hill far away,” he is not yet doing ontology.

G.: No. He is perhaps doing hymnody.

S.: And when someone says “there exists a green hill far away,” he is already insufferable.

G.: Usually. Unless he is correcting a map.

S.: Then Prini’s task, if he is to survive your scepticism, is to show that esistenza names not a mysterious property but a human mode of situation, exposure, finitude, conversation.

G.: Better. And perhaps also desire.

S.: Pensare è la maniera più profonda del nostro desiderare.

G.: Yes. Once he says that, he becomes less a system-builder and more a civil companion.

S.: Yet still under the ism.

G.: Unfortunately. There is no cure for a title once printed.

S.: Unless one writes against it.

G.: Or beneath it.

S.: Then what of insistit.

G.: Ah yes. If you insist, the antonym of existere in our playful mood is insistere.

S.: Because if existence is standing forth, insistence is standing on.

G.: And philosophers do a great deal of the latter once challenged.

S.: Then perhaps existentialism is what happens when insistence about being acquires publishing opportunities.

G.: Very good indeed.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become Parisian.

S.: I shall remain only moderately café-bound.

G.: Better. Now, Abbagnano again. You said he is to blame in the peninsula.

S.: Because he gave existentialism a respectable Italian prose and institutional location.

G.: Exactly. Once an ism has a dictionary-man and a university chair, it becomes ineradicable.

S.: And Prini inherits that weather.

G.: Yes, though he complicates it by theology, conversation, and a dislike of purely apophantic discourse.

S.: Which brings him oddly close to you.

G.: Close enough to converse with, far enough to keep me suspicious.

S.: Then perhaps the final answer about esistenza is this. It is an abstract noun of dubious grandeur, etymologically allied less to bare being than to standing forth, and philosophically dangerous when treated as a simple predicate or primitive metaphysical substance. Yet it may be rehabilitated if one treats it as naming modes of situated human life rather than a thing-like property.

G.: That is excellent.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Not yet. Add that Cicero would have preferred est and that Frege and Quine had already put paid to much of the theatre.

S.: And that Aristotle’s particularis had done more honest work than a shelf of cafés.

G.: Better.

S.: Then here is the properly dry ending. Esistenzialismo may have arrived from Heidegger and Jaspers, taken the train to Le Deux Magots with Sartre, been novelised by Camus, and naturalised in Italy by Abbagnano, but by the time Prini receives it the poor noun has already been interrogated by Aristotle, disciplined by Kant, quantified by Frege, and taxed by Quine.

G.: Splendid.

S.: And your own verdict.

G.: I remain sceptical of every ism, but if Prini insists on esistenza, I shall allow him one condition.

S.: Which is.

G.: That he not forget that most of what existentialists call existence could often have been said, more cleanly, with sum.

 

Grice: Prini, sono incuriosito dal suo modo di interpretare la “ragione conversazionale” alla luce del mito di Dedalo e il volo di Icaro. Secondo lei, la conversazione filosofica può davvero offrire una via di fuga dai limiti imposti dal pensiero dogmatico, proprio come Icaro ha cercato di superare le barriere del suo destino?

Prini: Grice, è una domanda affascinante! Credo che la conversazione filosofica sia, in effetti, il modo più profondo di desiderare e pensare. Essa ci permette di elevarci al di sopra delle rigidità del discorso apofantico, aprendo la possibilità di una ragione “situata” e dialogica, dove ogni interlocutore contribuisce a costruire senso, proprio come Dedalo e Icaro affrontano insieme il rischio e la libertà.

Grice: Dunque, potremmo dire che la conversazione è un viaggio condiviso, in cui la verifica e la testimonianza si alternano come forme di prova, e dove ogni partecipante riconosce i propri limiti senza temere di cadere, ma anzi valorizzando quel volo verso l’ignoto?

Prini: Esattamente, Grice. Nei miei lavori, come “Discorso e situazione” e “Verso una ontologia della conversazione”, ho cercato di delineare proprio questo: la molteplicità delle forme della conversazione razionale “situata”. La filosofia non è solo dimostrazione, ma anche ascolto, dialogo e apertura all’altro—una vera ontologia della conversazione, dove il mito di Icaro diventa metafora della nostra ricerca di senso e libertà.

 

Verbali: Priore

 

G.: Priore begins, I suppose, where Quine ended the peace.

S.: Or where Quine began the disturbance.

G.: Better. One does not publish Two Dogmas of Empiricism in order to improve table manners.

S.: In The Philosophical Review, no less.

G.: Fittingly American.

S.: And 1951.

G.: Yes, 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism in The Philosophical Review, volume 60, pages 20 to 43. [pdcnet.org], [philpapers.org]

S.: One dogma being the analytic-synthetic distinction.

G.: The very distinction Priore had been using happily under the august shelter of istituzione sintetico-analitica.

S.: Which is rather good. The schoolmaster in Naples and the logician in America quarrelling over the same pair of adjectives.

G.: Yes. Priore sounds as if he had institutionalised the distinction before Quine had abolished it.

S.: Priore istituzione sintetico-analitica, Quine anti-analytic synthetic.

G.: Exactly. One constructs a school method on it; the other announces it a dogma. Philosophy advances by attacking pedagogues only after living off them.

S.: And Quine had the proper venue for the attack.

G.: Indeed. The Philosophical Review, which sounds universal enough until one remembers that it is a very American journal with a New-World confidence in its title. [pdcnet.org], [jstor.org]

S.: Published by Cornell.

G.: Which is the point. A parochial institution with an imperial journal-title.

S.: Quine, meanwhile, at Oxford as Eastman.

G.: Or Eastman Visiting Professor, if one insists on dignity.

S.: He was there in the mid-fifties, certainly in your anecdotal weather.

G.: Yes, though Two Dogmas itself was already out in 1951 before the Oxford visit. Two Dogmas of Empiricism predates the Eastman arrival, which only made the dogma audible over tea. [pdcnet.org], [philpapers.org]

S.: And because Two Dogmas of Empiricism had been published in The Philosophical Review, Grice and Strawson sent In Defense of a Dogma to the same place.

G.: Naturally. One does not send a reply to Quine to a provincial outlet of one’s own choosing. One sends it back into the same American trumpet.

S.: So In Defense of a Dogma appears in 1956, again in The Philosophical Review.

G.: Exactly. Volume 65, number 2, pages 141 to 158. H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, behaving as if a dogma might still deserve a legal defence. [sites.ualberta.ca], [philpapers.org]

S.: Which is already delicious. A dogma defended in America by two Oxford men.

G.: Yes. One would have expected them to defend it in Mind, among the safer clergy.

S.: Or perhaps in Analysis, if brevity had suited them.

G.: But no. The dogma had been attacked in Ithaca, so it was defended in Ithaca.

S.: A critical response in the proper amphitheatre.

G.: Precisely. The journal becomes the battlefield, which is very tidy and very un-English.

S.: Then later, when I thought of submitting your Meaning, I did not choose Mind, though you had already published Personal Identity there.

G.: Nor Analysis, nor anything tidily local.

S.: No. I sent it to The Philosophical Review.

G.: Which was almost indecently American.

S.: But logical.

G.: Very logical. If Two Dogmas of Empiricism had made the venue philosophically hot, and In Defense of a Dogma had made it part of Oxford’s quarrel with America, then Meaning could enter there as if that were where the serious weather now happened. [pdcnet.org], [sites.ualberta.ca], [pdcnet.org]

S.: And Meaning did appear there in 1957.

G.: Yes. H. P. Grice, Meaning, The Philosophical Review, volume 66, number 3, July 1957, pages 377 to 388. A small English paper walking into an American house as if it belonged there. [pdcnet.org], [philpapers.org]

S.: Which, for a don of your vintage, was untypical.

G.: Entirely. Oxford men of my generation were not bred to think of their destiny as Ithacan.

S.: Yet the paper went there.

G.: Because the route had been prepared by dogma.

S.: Exactly. And then, years later, Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions goes to the same journal.

G.: In 1969. Again The Philosophical Review, volume 78, number 2, April, pages 147 to 177. One begins to suspect a habit. [wstarr.org], [philpapers.org]

S.: A habit that would have seemed unthinkable for an Oxford don of your stamp if the earlier story had not happened.

G.: Precisely. It is the sort of thing one can only do after one has already half-emigrated in print.

S.: So from Two Dogmas of Empiricism to In Defense of a Dogma, then to Meaning, and thence to Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions, one gets half the history of Oxford philosophy in the pages of a Cornell journal.

G.: Exactly. A local quarrel exported to a New-World review and thereby made canonical.

S.: Which is very Priorean in its own way.

G.: How so.

S.: Priore had his sintetico-analitico before Quine turned analytic-synthetic into an American dogfight.

G.: Ah yes. Priore as innocent precursor of the dogma.

S.: Innocent perhaps, but structurally impudent.

G.: Indeed. He takes the very pair Quine wishes to blur and turns it into an educational method.

S.: Istituzione sintetico-analitica as though the distinction were not only real but useful.

G.: Which is exactly what Grice and Strawson said to Quine in more refined clothes.

S.: That Quine had criticised the distinction, perhaps, but not justified its abolition.

G.: Yes. In Defense of a Dogma is, after all, less a metaphysical hymn than a plea against impatient demolition. [sites.ualberta.ca], [philpapers.org]

S.: Then perhaps Priore was defending a dogma before it was attacked.

G.: Excellent. The schoolmaster as pre-emptive dogmatist.

S.: Which raises the larger question. Can one defend a dogma.

G.: Of course one can defend a dogma.

S.: But should one.

G.: That depends on whether one is defending it as dogma or as distinction.

S.: We were being ironic, of course.

G.: Naturally. The charm of a dogma is that, in principle, one need not defend it at all. One merely inherits it with a straight face.

S.: It arrives under the sign of faith rather than argument.

G.: Exactly. A dogma is what saves one the trouble of reasons, which is why philosophers are forever trying to smuggle reasons back into it.

S.: Hence In Defense of a Dogma, where the whole joke is that what is called a dogma turns out to require meticulous distinctions. [sites.ualberta.ca], [philpapers.org]

G.: Yes. We call it a dogma in order to deny that it is merely that.

S.: So the title is part irony, part challenge.

G.: Entirely. One says dogma and then behaves argumentatively, which is philosophy’s oldest hypocrisy and one of its better ones.

S.: Then what of Priore. Is his sintetico-analitico a dogma.

G.: Perhaps pedagogically. The schoolmaster must dogmatise where the metaphysician can still hesitate.

S.: Because pupils cannot be raised on Quine.

G.: No one should be raised on Quine. One can be corrected by him, but not formed.

S.: Priore forms.

G.: Exactly. He gives one synthesis first, then analysis, or perhaps the other way round depending on how sternly one reads the method.

S.: In any case he institutionalises the pair.

G.: And thereby makes Quine look like an intruder in a classroom that had already made up its mind.

S.: Which is part of the joke. Quine attacks a distinction that schoolmasters had found practical for decades.

G.: A healthy reminder that philosophy often denounces as dogma what pedagogy had merely been using to get boys through Livy.

S.: Then Oxford philosophy in the fifties sits oddly between the American journal and the Napoleonic schoolbook.

G.: Very oddly. Priore in Naples, Quine in Ithaca, Grice in Oxford, all entangled by a pair of adjectives.

S.: And all finding themselves, somehow, in The Philosophical Review, except Priore, who had the decency to remain nineteenth-century. [pdcnet.org], [pdcnet.org]

G.: Priore would have found Cornell climatically unsettling.

S.: But perhaps bibliographically flattering.

G.: Yes. Nothing pleases a schoolmaster more than being retrospectively made relevant to a metaphysical panic.

S.: Then we should fix the dates again, because dogmas thrive on vagueness.

G.: Very well. Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 1951, The Philosophical Review. In Defense of a Dogma, 1956, same venue. Meaning, 1957, same venue. Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions, 1969, same venue. There is your Ithacan thread. [pdcnet.org], [sites.ualberta.ca], [pdcnet.org], [wstarr.org]

S.: And that thread is enough to make The Philosophical Review a sort of transatlantic clearing-house for Oxford disputes.

G.: Exactly. A New-World customs office through which analytic philosophy passed with only partial inspection. [pdcnet.org], [jstor.org]

S.: One should also note the absurdity of the title.

G.: The Philosophical Review as though philosophy required one. [pdcnet.org], [jstor.org]

S.: Whereas Oxford preferred not to review itself, only to gossip.

G.: Precisely. Americans review; Englishmen imply.

S.: And Grice, by publishing in The Philosophical Review, made his implications visible to a reviewing nation. [pdcnet.org], [wstarr.org]

G.: Which was risky but useful.

S.: Then perhaps the whole story is this. Quine attacks the analytic-synthetic distinction in Two Dogmas of Empiricism; Grice and Strawson reply with In Defense of a Dogma; that same venue then becomes the natural home for your Meaning; later still it houses Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions; and all the while Priore sits in the background having long ago turned sintetico-analitico into a classroom institution. [pdcnet.org], [sites.ualberta.ca], [pdcnet.org], [wstarr.org]

G.: That is very nearly it.

S.: Very nearly.

G.: Add only that Quine’s presence at Oxford as Eastman made the quarrel socially immediate, even if the original essay had already appeared. One thing is to read Two Dogmas of Empiricism; another is to have its author at lunch looking unconvinced. [pdcnet.org], [en.wikipedia.org]

S.: Which made the venue itself part of the drama.

G.: Exactly. The Philosophical Review was no longer just an American journal. It had become the printed extension of a quarrel that had entered Oxford rooms. [pdcnet.org], [pdcnet.org]

S.: And because of that, sending Meaning there was not random at all.

G.: No. It was almost a continuation of the conversation by other means.

S.: The conversation being transatlantic and faintly comic.

G.: Entirely comic. Imagine it. Half of Oxford philosophy, published in a Cornell journal because Quine had the indecency to attack a distinction there first.

S.: That is the real joke.

G.: Yes. Not that the New World produced the dogma’s enemy, but that the Old World had to cross the Atlantic to defend its distinctions.

S.: Which sounds almost imperial in reverse.

G.: Colonial, perhaps. Oxford sending its thoughts to Ithaca for recognition.

S.: And Priore, meanwhile, declines rosa.

G.: Better than Quine, who never declined it at all.

S.: There is a punchline here.

G.: I think so.

S.: That the analytic-synthetic distinction was called a dogma only after it had already become a syllabus.

G.: Excellent. And once something is on a syllabus, no philosopher can kill it entirely. He can only make it harder for schoolmasters.

 

 

Grice: Priore, dicono che tu sia “sintetico‑analitico”: è il primo metodo didattico che sembra anche una dieta—prima riassumi, poi scomponi, e alla fine nessuno ha più fame di sintassi.

Priore: Eppure funziona: se lo studente capisce subito (sintesi), poi accetta di soffrire (analisi). È la mia versione napoletana del pactum: ti do Cicerone, tu mi dai pazienza.

Grice: Perfetto: e quando tu dici “non è difficile”, tu dici una bugia pedagogica—ma implichi gentilmente “è difficile, però ti ci porto io a braccetto”.

Priore: E quando tu dici “braccetto”, tu implichi che il latino è una conversazione: chi non segue le massime—quantità, qualità, relazione e modo—finisce punito con una versione di Livio, senza dizionario.

 

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

 

 

Verbali: Prodi

 

G.: Prodi and his seconda cattedra have ruined my afternoon.

S.: A very Italian way to spend it.

G.: The phrase nags. We have chairs; they have a second chair. It sounds at once luxurious and faintly conspiratorial.

S.: Or merely administrative.

G.: Administration is always faintly conspiratorial.

S.: You were trying to imagine the Oxford equivalent.

G.: Naturally. A seconda cattedra of Patologia generale in Bologna suggests at once a second Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy here.

S.: Which would not be the Waynflete.

G.: Why not.

S.: Because Waynflete endowed one chair, not two. A second chair in the same subject would be a second chair of metaphysical philosophy, but not a second Waynflete.

G.: Retrospectively, perhaps.

S.: Not merely retrospectively. Properly. The title is not generic. It names a specific benefaction attached to a specific professorship.

G.: Still, if Oxford, in a fit of late Roman prolixity, added another chair of metaphysical philosophy, common room speech would call it the second Waynflete.

S.: Common room speech is not a constitutional instrument.

G.: It is the only one that works.

S.: Not in statutes.

G.: Statutes are what survive after meaning has left the building.

S.: Even so, the second chair would not be Waynflete. It would be second only by subject, not by endowment.

G.: So your point is that adjectives of sequence do not simply stack onto proper names of benefactors.

S.: Exactly. “Second chair of metaphysical philosophy,” yes. “Second Waynflete,” only loosely and after a fashion.

G.: After a fashion is where Oxford lives.

S.: And misnames things.

G.: Misnaming is often the first form of truth.

S.: Dangerous doctrine.

G.: Productive one. Take the White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy.

S.: The same answer.

G.: Which is?

S.: A second chair in moral philosophy would not be White’s.

G.: Why not.

S.: Because White endowed or sponsored one chair, and his name attaches to that one office. A further chair in the same subject would be another chair of moral philosophy, not another White’s, unless later usage stretched the point.

G.: But later usage always stretches the point.

S.: True, though not always respectably.

G.: Respectability is not the point. I am after the pressure of the thing. If there were a second chair in moral philosophy, it would feel, in the air, like a duplication of White’s.

S.: In the air perhaps, not in the calendar.

G.: Calendars are merely the graveyards of air.

S.: You are in one of your institutional moods.

G.: Prodi induced it. A seconda cattedra suggests a faculty so confident in its pathology that it can afford pathology doubled.

S.: Whereas Oxford prefers to conceal duplication under colleges, lectureships, tutorials, readers, and the general fiction that there is no system.

G.: Precisely. Our proliferation is lateral rather than vertical.

S.: Tutor’s world, not chair’s world.

G.: Yes. Which is why the fantasy of a second chair sounds both alien and oddly healthy.

S.: Healthy for moral philosophy perhaps.

G.: Indeed. Think of White’s. Hare had Austin before him, and then Kneale. One can see the point of a second chair there.

S.: You think moral philosophy was cramped by singularity.

G.: Singularities usually cramp. A second chair might have allowed rival orthodoxies without requiring a blood feud over one armchair.

S.: Adjacent pieces of furniture delivering opposed consciences.

G.: Exactly. White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy and the other moral philosopher, both official, both disagreeable, both salaried.

S.: Yet Austin was not White’s.

G.: No, but he was the predecessor in the local weather before Hare. The point is atmospheric, not genealogical.

S.: Atmosphere again.

G.: Where institutions are actually lived.

S.: Then perhaps a second chair in moral philosophy would have been good for Oxford, if only because moral philosophy was spread across tutors, ordinary language, Aristotle, intuition, utility, and whatever else the week required.

G.: Precisely. The singular chair encourages the illusion that one man represents a subject. No one should represent morality alone. It is indecent.

S.: Except to examiners.

G.: Examiners are indecent by office.

S.: And the poor learn at Oxford, so why bother.

G.: Ah yes, your democratic sneer.

S.: Not democratic. Economical. If only the poor learn, the rich merely inherit. Chairs are largely for the spectacle.

G.: Nonsense. The poor learn under rich names, which is Oxford’s way of moral laundering.

S.: White’s and Waynflete as educational detergents.

G.: Very good. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Still, with metaphysical philosophy the matter is hotter.

S.: Hotter because the title itself is absurd.

G.: Magnificently absurd. Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy. It sounds like a challenge issued by one century to another.

S.: Especially given who held it.

G.: Ryle, for instance.

S.: Who denied metaphysics, you always say.

G.: He denied a great deal under that heading and seemed peculiarly fit to occupy a chair named for what he enjoyed dismantling.

S.: Denying the ghost in the machine is not denying metaphysics.

G.: No, but it is denying a kind of metaphysical upholstery.

S.: Which is not quite the same as denying the room.

G.: Very good. Ryle denied some furnishings, not the existence of the house.

S.: So the Waynflete holder need not be a metaphysician in the old robustly furniture-filled sense.

G.: Precisely. Oxford titles preserve historical intentions longer than doctrines preserve themselves.

S.: Then a second chair of metaphysical philosophy might have been useful if only to represent metaphysics positively while the first was engaged in therapeutic demolition.

G.: Exactly my thought. One Waynflete to unmask category mistakes, another to insist that being still matters.

S.: You want ontological pluralism institutionalised.

G.: At least ontological fairness.

S.: Or your ontological Marxism.

G.: Yes, if they work they exist.

S.: That is not Marxism so much as don’s pragmatism.

G.: All good ontology is practical before lunch.

S.: Then the second chair would be what, in your scheme.

G.: A professor extraordinarius, naturally.

S.: Ah, we have reached the Italian part.

G.: Straordinario is too delicious to ignore.

S.: But it does not mean flamboyant.

G.: More’s the pity.

S.: It means outside the ordinary professorial establishment, or at least historically below or beside the ordinario in the older university hierarchy.

G.: Yes, yes. Yet English ears cannot resist hearing extraordinary where the Italians mean structurally non-ordinary.

S.: And then you make the inevitable pun with Austin.

G.: Entirely inevitable. Austin gives us ordinary-language philosophy; Bologna gives us the professor extraordinario. One wants at once a professor extraordinario of ordinary-language philosophy.

S.: Beyond ordinary ordinary language.

G.: Exactly. The extraordinary ordinary philosopher.

S.: Or the ordinary extraordinary one.

G.: Oxford would have loved him and denied him promotion.

S.: Because ordinary at Oxford is already extraordinary elsewhere.

G.: Precisely. Which is why the pun is institutionally true. An ordinario is a full ordinary professor. Austin’s ordinary language would then seem almost to request an ordinario of ordinary language.

S.: While your metaphysical second chair would be an extraordinario of metaphysical philosophy, beyond ordinary-language philosophy.

G.: Beautiful. Beyond ordinary language, but perhaps not beyond language entirely.

S.: Ryle would object.

G.: Ryle objected professionally.

S.: And Austin would ask what you mean by extraordinary.

G.: At which point the appointment would lapse for want of a preposition.

S.: Still, the Italian distinction between ordinario and straordinario tempts one because it names publicly what Oxford preferred to conceal under other titles.

G.: Exactly. We had tutorials, lectureships, readers, and college powers, but no decent way to say: here is the official other fellow in the same subject.

S.: The second chair names institutional dissent in advance.

G.: That is what struck me in Prodi. A seconda cattedra feels as if the faculty has admitted that one pathology is not enough to keep pathology honest.

S.: Or that there are too many students.

G.: Students are always the dull explanation.

S.: Usually the true one.

G.: Truth is often the dull explanation, but one need not surrender at once.

S.: Then let us test the White’s case more soberly. Hare occupies White’s. Austin had earlier occupied it, and then Kneale follows.

G.: Yes.

S.: So a second chair in moral philosophy might have permitted one holder more concerned with ethical theory, another with ordinary moral discourse, or another with ancient ethics, or jurisprudential spill-over.

G.: Exactly. One can imagine the relief. No need for one office to bear Aristotle, Hume, intuitionism, ordinary language, utilitarian anxieties, and undergraduate conscience all alone.

S.: Though Oxford often prefers one office burdened with too much, because burden is a sign of dignity.

G.: Or of insufficient imagination.

S.: The result being that tutors quietly do the real plurality.

G.: Quite. Oxford’s secret second chairs are the colleges.

S.: That is not bad.

G.: It is true, which is why it is not bad.

S.: Then why hanker after a formal second chair at all.

G.: Because formal duplication has the virtue of honesty. It says publicly that a subject exceeds one incumbent.

S.: While Oxford says privately that a subject exceeds the university.

G.: Also true.

S.: And with metaphysics.

G.: Ah yes. There the singularity is even more theatrical. Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy sounds already like two titles welded into one by a benefactor who did not trust the future.

S.: Benefactors rarely trust the future. That is why they endow nouns.

G.: Excellent.

S.: Thank you.

G.: A second chair there would therefore raise the question whether metaphysical philosophy is a field with internal plurality or merely a title under which Oxford stores its embarrassment.

S.: You think embarrassment the deeper function.

G.: Often. The title preserves an honourable relation to metaphysics while daily practice keeps metaphysics under surveillance.

S.: Ryle as honorary constable.

G.: Precisely. He patrols the title rather than abolishing it.

S.: Then a second chair might have been useful as the authorised criminal.

G.: Wonderful. One Waynflete constable, one metaphysical criminal, both salaried by the same university.

S.: The criminal perhaps straordinario.

G.: Naturally. Beyond ordinary-language philosophy.

S.: Though not beyond language entirely, as you said.

G.: One must leave some bridge back for salary.

S.: Then what of the naming problem again. You insist that common room speech would call him the second Waynflete.

G.: Of course it would.

S.: Even if statutes would not.

G.: Statutes are written by men who fear common rooms.

S.: Not without reason.

G.: True. But the common room captures retrospective usage better than the register. If the White’s is the salient chair in moral philosophy, another chair in the same subject will be heard as second White’s whether or not White would recognise the relation.

S.: White is in no position to object.

G.: Benefactors seldom are.

S.: So your claim is about conversational economy, not legal propriety.

G.: Exactly. We identify a later item by reference to the salient earlier one. The same way one says the second Rome while knowing perfectly well that only one city paid for the aqueducts.

S.: That is a dangerous analogy.

G.: All useful analogies are slightly dangerous.

S.: Then let us add Bologna again. Prodi’s seconda cattedra of general pathology does not mean that pathology was split metaphysically into first and second substances.

G.: A pity. It might have improved medicine.

S.: It means simply two official chairs in one subject.

G.: Yes, but “simply” does not do justice to the institutional imagination. To have a first and a second chair is already to have admitted a certain abundance.

S.: Or bureaucracy.

G.: Bureaucracy is abundance with minutes.

S.: Very like your beloved verbali.

G.: Quite.

S.: Then your Oxford fantasy remains.

G.: Entirely. A second chair of moral philosophy would have been healthy. A second chair of metaphysical philosophy would have been hotter. Oxford preferred instead to distribute excess vitality through tutorials and private heresies.

S.: One don at a time.

G.: Exactly. We managed our heresies privately.

S.: Which may be the real difference between ordinario and straordinario. In Italy the distinction is named. In Oxford it is lived and denied.

G.: Beautifully put. The extraordinary professor in Oxford is often merely an ordinary tutor with dangerous views.

S.: Or an ordinary professor with extraordinary disclaimers.

G.: Ryle again.

S.: Naturally.

G.: Still, I cannot resist the thought that a professor ordinario and a professor extraordinario of metaphysical philosophy would have improved the climate immensely.

S.: One to say that metaphysics is nonsense, one to say that nonsense presupposes being.

G.: Exactly.

S.: And in moral philosophy.

G.: One to analyse “good,” one to ask whether goodness survives the analysis.

S.: Hare and his shadow.

G.: Or his neighbour.

S.: Then the final difficulty remains the names.

G.: Always the names.

S.: You want “second Waynflete” and “second White’s” because ordinary conversation identifies the later by the salient earlier benefaction.

G.: Yes.

S.: I object because legally and historically the benefactor named one office only.

G.: Also yes.

S.: So we are both right in different registers.

G.: Which is why the university survives.

S.: By equivocation.

G.: By controlled equivocation.

S.: A very Oxonian virtue.

G.: One of our better ones.

S.: Then perhaps Prodi has merely shown you that Bologna made explicit what Oxford preferred to imply.

G.: Splendid. A seconda cattedra is what Oxford would have left as a conversational implicature.

S.: And the punchline.

G.: At Oxford there was no second Waynflete, because the first was already doing double duty and denying half of it.

 

Grice: Prodi, vengo da una conversazione freschissima con Speranza: mi ha detto che lei è l’unico capace di parlare di biologia cellulare come se fosse semiotica, e di semiotica come se fosse fisiologia—poi ha aggiunto, con aria da Oxford, che i cani di Pavlov hanno più disciplina di certi metafisici.

Prodi: È solo che il vivente non aspetta i nostri sistemi. Se vuoi capire significazione e comportamento, devi guardare dove la materia “firma” le sue decisioni: cellule, tumori, riflessi. E sì, ogni tanto i metafisici si offendono: preferirebbero che la verità fosse più educata.

Grice: Speranza e io, dopo quella chiacchierata, ci siamo trovati a fissare la parola “artificio” con un certo sospetto. Lei parla degli artifici della ragione, eppure l’impressione è che qui l’artificio sia meno un trucco e più una derivazione: il “non‑naturale” che nasce dal naturale come un secondo strato. Speranza, che mi conosce, mi fa sempre i complimenti perché io evito “artificio” e preferisco dire “non‑naturale” — come a dire: non lo sto decorando, lo sto ricavando. E allora anche Pavlov cambia faccia: non è una macchina che addestra cani, è una scena in cui un segno diventa causa, e la ragione si scopre empirica senza perdere la dignità.

Prodi: La vostra è una implicatura naturalissima, come sono sicuro che Speranza non avrà difficoltà a chiamarla così. Perché lei sta dicendo (senza fare prediche) che l’artificio migliore è quello che non si vede: quello che sembra natura perché è costruito sopra la natura, non contro di essa. Nel cane di Pavlov il campanello non è “finto”: è un pezzo di mondo che entra nel comportamento come regola. E lì capisci anche il resto: la semiotica non è un lusso umanistico, è una biologia del significare; la “cunning” della ragione è che riesce a sembrare naturale proprio quando ha imparato a passare per i segni.