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

 

Verbali: Sighele

 

G.: Thomson, your title is mischievous already. La folla delinquente.

T.: It is Sighele’s, not mine, though I bring it with intent.

G.: And the intent is to make me wonder whether “the delinquent crowd” is a category mistake.

T.: Partly. Does a crowd commit? Or do only persons commit?

G.: One must not answer too quickly. “Only persons act” has the sound of virtue and the smell of laziness.

T.: You are thinking of collective intentionality.

G.: I am thinking that there may be something between mystical group-mind nonsense and mere summation of individuals. Suppose we carry a log together.

T.: A favourite philosopher’s burden.

G.: Quite. I am not carrying it in the way I would if I took one end and forgot you. You are not carrying it in isolation either. We are carrying it.

T.: Or rather, each of us is carrying his end under an intention to coordinate with the other.

G.: That is one reduction, yes. But notice how thin it sounds compared with the ordinary fact. “We are carrying it” is not merely shorthand for “I am carrying my end while you carry yours.” It names a coordinated action with a shared shape.

T.: Shared shape is not yet shared agent.

G.: No, but neither is it nothing.

T.: And now you want to transport that to la folla delinquente.

G.: Not transport, exactly. Ask whether the very phrase presupposes an intelligible “we” in action.

T.: Sighele thinks so. Or at least thinks responsibility is reorganised, not dissolved, once one acts in a crowd.

G.: Yes. He wants to resist the mystical contagion theorists who make the crowd pure irrational vapor.

T.: But also to resist the legal moralists who say, “Find the hand that struck, and the rest are scenery.”

G.: Precisely. He wants complicity, influence, participation, and cooperation without an occult collective soul.

T.: Which is nearly tolerable.

G.: Nearly? You sound severe.

T.: Because you are tempted by “we act,” and I am not sure that is anything more than a useful social idiom.

G.: Let us go slowly. In conversation, I say that utterer-meaning requires an utterer and an addressee, with nested intentions and recognitions.

T.: Yes. Speaker intends hearer to recognise that speaker intends hearer to form a belief, and so forth.

G.: Quite. Now if one says “we mean,” you become suspicious.

T.: Entirely. “We mean” sounds absurd unless it resolves into each of us meaning something sufficiently similar.

G.: Yet “we cooperate” does not strike the ear as absurd.

T.: No. But “cooperate” is already relational. “Mean” is not obviously collective in the same way.

G.: Is that principle or habit?

T.: Both, perhaps. Meaning, as you tell it, belongs to a purposive act of one utterer toward one audience, even if there are many hearers.

G.: But committees issue statements.

T.: Which means that some person or persons authorised the issuing, drafted, revised, approved, signed, or at any rate let it out under a collective description.

G.: So “the committee means” is reducible?

T.: I should say so. It means something like: enough members of the committee accepted this formulation under relevant procedures for us to ascribe the statement to the committee.

G.: That is a fine bureaucratic paraphrase. But it still leaves intact that we do, in fact, ascribe agency to the committee.

T.: Ascribe, yes. Reify, no.

G.: Good. Let us keep that distinction visible. Now back to the log. When we carry it, what is the best analysis?

T.: Each intends his own bodily movement, each perceives the other’s intentions sufficiently, each adjusts his action in light of the other’s, and together they produce the transportation of the log.

G.: That sounds right enough, but I still feel that the “together” is doing more than bookkeeping.

T.: It is doing coordination work, not metaphysical work.

G.: But coordination may itself be a form of practical unity.

T.: Practical unity, yes. Collective subject, no.

G.: So you will grant me “we are doing X” as a practical description without granting “we” as a metaphysical person.

T.: Happily.

G.: Good. Now, mutatis mutandis, la folla delinquente.

T.: I object at once.

G.: Naturally. On what ground?

T.: Because a criminal crowd is not like two men carrying a log. In the latter case coordination is transparent and purposive. In the former, the same outward event may contain leaders, imitators, cowards, enthusiasts, opportunists, onlookers, and one idiot who thought there was a parade.

G.: Excellent. So the first problem is heterogeneity of role.

T.: Yes. “The crowd did it” may conceal wildly different forms of participation.

G.: That still does not prove the category mistake.

T.: No, only the danger of easy collectivisation.

G.: Sighele would agree. He wants a positive theory of complicity and cooperation, not a hymn to the communal soul.

T.: Then he ought not to title the thing so temptingly.

G.: Titles are usually the first crime of theorists. Let us be fairer. Suppose a crowd loots a shop.

T.: A depressing but serviceable example.

G.: Some break the window, some enter, some pass items outward, some keep watch, some cry encouragement, some prevent interference.

T.: Yes.

G.: Is it unintelligible to say the crowd looted the shop?

T.: Not unintelligible. But analytically loose. It may be shorthand for a structured field of individual actions connected by mutual visibility, imitation, expectation, and opportunistic convergence.

G.: Very good. And perhaps also by some shared practical orientation.

T.: Perhaps, though “shared” there may mean only partially aligned under local cues.

G.: So your thesis is that there need be no super-individual we-intention.

T.: Exactly. B perceives that A wants that p, or wants to do X; B adjusts his goal or behaviour in the light of that; C perceives both and aligns similarly; and a pattern emerges.

G.: A pattern of convergence without a robust we.

T.: Yes.

G.: Then what about “we mean”?

T.: Even worse. “We mean” in the strict sense seems absurd because there is no single intending centre.

G.: Unless one says the group means via its authorised procedures.

T.: Which is again a reduction to individuals plus rules.

G.: Rules plus mutual recognitions.

T.: Precisely.

G.: I wonder whether you are simply more comfortable with procedural than with practical unity.

T.: Very likely. But that is because procedures can be individuated more clearly than collective inwardness.

G.: Fair. Now let us see whether my own theory forces me to your side. Meaning for me involves utterer-intention, audience-recognition, and the audience’s taking that recognition as reason.

T.: Yes.

G.: Can there be a group utterer?

T.: Only derivatively. A crowd chanting perhaps.

G.: Ah. Good. Crowds chant.

T.: They do.

G.: “We want bread,” “Down with X,” “Death to Y.” There the utterance is collective in production and reception.

T.: Production yes, though often still led by a few. Reception too, if outsiders hear it as the voice of the crowd.

G.: And what of meaning there? Does the crowd mean what it chants?

T.: In a loose sense, yes. But one can still analyse it as enough individuals intentionally participating in a common signal under mutual adjustment.

G.: Again your “enough individuals.”

T.: It is a sober phrase.

G.: It is also a cowardly one.

T.: Sober cowardice is a philosophical virtue.

G.: Occasionally. Yet the chant seems to have a practical first-person plural built into it.

T.: Grammatically, yes. Ontologically, not yet.

G.: Let us try a cleaner case. Two conspirators agree to signal their victim by saying “The weather is improving.”

T.: Very nice.

G.: One says it, the other hears it, both know what it initiates.

T.: In that case, one means and the other recognises.

G.: But if both say it to reassure each other and to trigger the act, there is something almost like a plural utterer.

T.: Almost like. But still analysable as parallel or interlocking singular intentions.

G.: You dislike “interlocking” less than “collective.”

T.: Naturally. Interlocking tells me how the thing works without making a ghostly subject.

G.: Sighele might accept that, though he would insist the pair is not merely additive.

T.: Yes. His Le crime à deux already suggests that the pair reorganises agency.

G.: Exactly. The criminal couple is neither one person nor two isolated persons. It is a dyadic field with pressure, suggestion, imitation, and asymmetry.

T.: That is all very well. But from there to la folla delinquente is a considerable leap.

G.: Agreed. Scale changes the structure.

T.: Greatly. In the crowd, reciprocal recognition often fragments. One may respond to immediate local cues without any grasp of the whole.

G.: So the “we” may be perspectival and partial.

T.: Precisely.

G.: Yet many social actions are like that. A football crowd surges. A panic spreads. A queue dissolves. A riot forms.

T.: And we describe them collectively, yes.

G.: Because there is a level at which collective description tracks real coordination, even if no one surveys the whole.

T.: That is closer to my view. Collective predicates may be legitimate without implying a group mind.

G.: Good. Now responsibility.

T.: Ah yes.

G.: If the crowd acts, who is responsible?

T.: The old question. Sighele wants to say responsibility persists but is redistributed. Not contagion without guilt, but transformed accountability.

G.: Which I find sensible. “The crowd did it” is often a legal and moral evasion if it erases the role-structure.

T.: Exactly. Some incited, some complied, some escalated, some merely failed to resist, some enjoyed anonymity.

G.: And some became bolder because the crowd lowered the cost of expression.

T.: Yes. That is perhaps Sighele’s most enduring point.

G.: Then in our seminar on action, we might say that “the crowd acts” is not nonsense, but a compressed claim that a structured multiplicity produced an event under mutual responsiveness.

T.: I could live with that, provided you do not start writing “the crowd intended” without qualifications.

G.: Perhaps I shall say “the crowd’s action exhibited collective intentional structure.”

T.: Hideous, but safer.

G.: You wound me.

T.: I refine you.

G.: Very well. Now, back to conversation. If two or more people jointly mislead a third, do “we mean” anything?

T.: In a derivative sense. We may mean to deceive him. But the analysis still proceeds through each participant’s recognition of the others’ intentions and adjustment thereto.

G.: So B perceives that A wants the hearer to believe p; B aligns his own contribution accordingly; C does likewise; and the addressee receives a coordinated deception.

T.: Exactly. No super-speaker needed.

G.: Yet the hearer might perfectly well say “they meant me to think X.”

T.: That is harmless enough.

G.: And if the hearer says “they,” why may I not sometimes say “we” from the participants’ side?

T.: Because first-person plural tempts philosophers into bad metaphysics more quickly than third-person plural.

G.: A nice asymmetry.

T.: A useful one.

G.: Very well. Suppose a choir sings. Do they sing, or does each sing his part?

T.: Both. But again, the collective predication does not generate a collective soul.

G.: You are a great enemy of souls today.

T.: Only of collective ones.

G.: Fair. Suppose now a criminal crowd sets fire to a building. Some light, some cheer, some obstruct the brigade, some drag furniture into the blaze.

T.: Yes.

G.: Would you agree that “the crowd burned the building” is not a category mistake?

T.: Not a category mistake. A dangerous convenience.

G.: Which is a better line.

T.: Thank you.

G.: One must keep the danger and the convenience together.

T.: Yes. Otherwise one either mystifies the collective or atomises it falsely.

G.: Precisely Sighele’s terrain.

T.: And yours, perhaps, when you try to let cooperative structures scale upward from dyads to groups.

G.: Yes. I have never thought conversation ceases to be governed by rational norms once a third person enters the room.

T.: No, but the form changes. With more parties, mutual recognition becomes layered, and not every participant need grasp the whole.

G.: Which suggests that cooperative principles scale, but not simply.

T.: Exactly.

G.: That is useful for the seminar. “We” may be a practical category with variable density.

T.: Good. Explain.

G.: A two-person “we” carrying a log may be dense: each knows what the other is doing as part of the common act. A crowd “we” may be thin: partial mutual responsiveness plus shared direction without full reflective unity.

T.: I like “variable density.”

G.: Good. Keep it and make it seem yours.

T.: It often is.

G.: Insolent. Now, does this help with “la folla delinquente”?

T.: It does. We can say the phrase is not absurd, but its propriety depends on what density of collective organisation and mutual responsiveness is present.

G.: So an accidental gathering of pickpockets is different from a riot coordinated by shouted cues, visual signals, and escalating participation.

T.: Yes. The first may be only aggregate coincidence; the second may exhibit a real, though thin, collective agency.

G.: Thin collective agency. Very Oxonian and almost Italian.

T.: That is the highest praise I shall get all week.

G.: Enjoy it. Now, meaning again. If a crowd chants “Justice!” does the crowd mean justice?

T.: It means many things, likely incompatible ones, and that is why the case is philosophically wicked.

G.: Excellent. The slogan gathers divergent singular intentions under one public token.

T.: Which is why “we mean” becomes especially unstable in crowds. The same utterance coordinates without unifying full content.

G.: Splendid. So collective utterance may outrun individual agreement at the level of determinate meaning.

T.: Exactly.

G.: Then perhaps the crowd can mean thinly while its members mean thickly and differently.

T.: That is very good.

G.: Thank you.

T.: Do not become pleased.

G.: You have been reading me against myself.

T.: It improves the afternoon. Now, if crowd-utterance means thinly, does crowd-action also intend thinly?

G.: Perhaps. A crowd may intend to stop the convoy, to storm the gate, to punish the traitor, without every member sharing a full specification of why or what next.

T.: So intention itself may be distributed and underdetermined.

G.: Yes. Which is why reduction to singular intentions may become descriptively clumsy.

T.: Clumsy perhaps, but still truer than a collective soul.

G.: I do not want the soul. I want the action-category.

T.: Good. Then we agree more than we disagree.

G.: Usually a bad sign in seminars.

T.: We can improve matters. I still think “we mean” in your strict speaker-meaning sense is almost always derivative.

G.: I can grant “almost always.”

T.: And I can grant that “the crowd acts” is not merely poetic.

G.: Excellent. Now, Sighele versus Le Bon.

T.: Sighele is rational where Le Bon is atmospheric.

G.: Exactly. He wants complicity, pairings, sects, criminal couples, influence-patterns. He resists mystical fusion.

T.: Which is why he remains interesting now.

G.: Yes. He is an ancestor of sober social ontology, though I hesitate to use the phrase too cheerfully.

T.: Quite. But he at least sees that social formations reorganise accountability without abolishing it.

G.: That is his enduring philosophical value. The “we” of crime is not exculpatory vapor.

T.: Nor is it a single wicked person writ large.

G.: Precisely. It is a field of aligned and misaligned agencies.

T.: Which is perhaps our best formula.

G.: A field of aligned and misaligned agencies under conditions of mutual responsiveness.

T.: Hideous, but strong.

G.: That should be the subtitle of the seminar.

T.: Along with “Carrying logs and burning shops.”

G.: You have more theatre than judgment.

T.: We need both. Now, what of your own “we” in personal identity?

G.: Ah. The old communal temptations. Yes, there are cases where identity-talk itself presupposes social uptake. But I was not trying to invent a crowd-self.

T.: No. But you were acknowledging that the first person singular lives among second persons and occasional plurals.

G.: True enough. The self is never wholly without social conditions of intelligibility.

T.: Then “we” may be philosophically prior to some uses of “I,” though not all.

G.: Dangerous but tempting. Keep it for questions, not for the opening.

T.: Very well. Then our opening says what?

G.: It says that collective action is not a category mistake, but that its analysis requires us to distinguish aggregate coincidence, interlocking individual agency, thin collective intentional structure, and robust coordinated action.

T.: And that “la folla delinquente” is therefore neither mystical nor innocent.

G.: Excellent.

T.: What of collective meaning?

G.: It says that “we mean” is usually derivative from interlocking singular or procedural intentions, but that public tokens can coordinate action and uptake even where content remains only thinly shared.

T.: Good. I can live with that.

G.: You are becoming reasonable. Disturbing.

T.: I brought Sighele precisely to avoid mystical rubbish and reductive rubbish alike.

G.: Then he has done his work already. One last example?

T.: Two thieves lift a chest together.

G.: Better than a log.

T.: One cannot do it alone. Each perceives the other’s aim, each adjusts force and timing, and together they remove it.

G.: That is a criminal “we” of admirable simplicity.

T.: Now scale up to ten men forcing a gate.

G.: There the “we” is thinner, but still operative.

T.: And to a thousand shouting for blood.

G.: There the “we” becomes symbolically thick but motivationally thin and uneven.

T.: Very good. We have our gradient.

G.: And Sighele supplies the caution that responsibility does not vanish at any point merely because the pronoun broadens.

T.: Excellent. Then the seminar can begin.

G.: With the log or the crowd?

T.: With the chest.

G.: Criminality improves clarity.

T.: It often does.

G.: Dry enough?

T.: Sufficiently Brescian, with one Oxford log still on the shoulder.

 

 

Grice: Caro Sighele, ho sempre pensato che in Italia le folle siano così creative che persino la confusione diventa un’opera d’arte. Forse è per questo che la tua “psicologia collettiva” qui ci calza a pennello, come il cappello su una statua di Garibaldi a Carnevale!

Sighele: Grice, hai proprio ragione! Da noi, tra cori da stadio e code all’ufficio postale, la folla è sempre protagonista. Forse dovrei scrivere un capitolo su “La folla che aspetta il 730”, dove la pazienza è più un mistero che una virtù.

Grice: Eh, Sighele, ma ricorda: in Italia si dice “dove sono in tre nasce un partito”, ma basta il secondo per fondare una corrente dissidente! Così la vera complicità non è del crimine, ma del caffè condiviso al bar—al massimo con due bustine di zucchero e una polemica sul risultato della partita.

Sighele: Ammirevole implicatura la tua, Grice! Con un solo colpo hai illustrato la mia teoria: qui il vero motore della collettività è la voglia di discutere, e il crimine peggiore è dimenticare chi paga il giro di espressi!

 

Verbali: Signa

 

G.: Let us begin with the arithmetic, because if one starts with arithmetic one may at least postpone theology.

S.: A promising curriculum already.

G.: The trivium is three, the quadrivium four, and the philosopher’s first temptation is to say that four comes after three for no very good reason, since .

S.: Exactly. If summation is commutative, why should education not be?

G.: Because curricula are not algebra, and because schoolmen liked roads better than equations.

S.: Still, if the quadrivium looks nobler, why not begin there? Arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy first; grammar, dialectic, rhetoric afterward.

G.: Because the child must first say before he may safely count, and must first hear before he may harmonise. Civilisation begins in address, not in number.

S.: Yet the quadrivium has the dignity of measure.

G.: It has the dignity of remoteness. The trivium has the indignity of necessity.

S.: Then the trivium is called trivial only because it is too close to life to look sublime.

G.: Precisely. Grammar, logic, rhetoric are despised because they cling to mouths, ears, and schoolrooms.

S.: Whereas arithmetic and astronomy at least pretend to the stars.

G.: Yes, and therefore seduce philosophers into thinking they are purer. But purity is often educationally useless.

S.: Still, a philosophy student should start with the quadrivium.

G.: Why?

S.: Because philosophy likes abstraction, order, ratio, proportion, and the sense that things fit beyond chatter.

G.: That is exactly the mistake. Philosophy is not one of the liberal arts at all.

S.: Kierkegaard would agree.

G.: He would say one may master all seven and still fail to exist.

S.: So what gives?

G.: I give.

S.: That is not a curriculum.

G.: It is the beginning of one. Philosophy receives from the liberal arts and then refuses to be filed among them. It is a parasite with principles.

S.: Then if philosophy is not one of the seven, why does it keep behaving as if the seven were its vestibule?

G.: Because it needs preparation but cannot be reduced to preparatory order. The trivium teaches one how language moves; the quadrivium teaches one how order seduces; philosophy begins when one suspects both.

S.: Then perhaps the right order for the philosopher is not the old order at all.

G.: Perhaps. But old orders are usually wiser than their descendants. The trivium comes first because humans must enter speech before they may admire number.

S.: Yet if , why should the order matter?

G.: Because education is not addition but dependence. One may count to seven either way, but one cannot speak well by astronomy.

S.: Some moderns have tried.

G.: And that is why nobody reads them. Now, Simoneschi.

S.: At last. The Venetian of rhetoric.

G.: Yes. Or rettorica, with the doubled t, which already sounds more proper and less modernly flattened.

S.: Does the double t matter philosophically?

G.: Everything matters if one is old enough. Rettorica feels heavier, more scholastic, more inherited, more like a discipline and less like a newspaper sneer.

S.: So retorica sounds modern and vaguely pejorative; rettorica sounds craft-bound and institutional.

G.: Exactly. Orthography as memory. The doubled consonant carries the schoolroom in its teeth.

S.: Then Boncompagno da Signa—or Signa, as you prefer to abbreviate him—is already fighting on behalf of rhetoric as an art, not a mere social vice.

G.: Precisely. And that is why there are so many treatises on rhetoric.

S.: Why indeed? Why not one authorised text, one Vulgate of persuasion, one King James of the tongue?

G.: Because there are many conversational maxims, many climates of speech, many audiences, many courts, many cities, many masks, and no single authorised version of prudence.

S.: That sounds like a Venetian answer.

G.: It is. Simoneschi’s Venice would laugh a universal rhetoric off the quay.

S.: Yet Cicero nearly tried to provide one.

G.: Cicero provided a magnificent Roman rhetoric for a Roman language under Roman conditions, and then died under the illusion that Latin would remain Ciceronian forever.

S.: Until Marc’Antonio’s sicario corrected the assumption.

G.: Quite. Once you are murdered for politics, your syntax ceases to govern posterity.

S.: Harsh.

G.: Historical. Cicero wrote as if the city and the language were still one body. Medieval and vernacular rhetorics arise because that body dies and multiplies.

S.: So there cannot be one authorised rhetoric because there is no one authorised social world.

G.: Exactly. The very plurality of rhetorical treatises is evidence that meaning is local, tactical, genre-bound, institution-bound, and not reducible to a single universal manual.

S.: Which means your pragmatics, if it is conversational rhetoric, also cannot be entirely universal.

G.: That is the difficulty. I can formulate general principles, but the realization of those principles is always local, and Simoneschi’s Venice insists on that.

S.: Then what you call maxims are perhaps only the thinnest skeleton of what Signa calls rettorica.

G.: Yes. A useful skeleton, but a skeleton still.

S.: And Signa would complain that skeletons do not write letters.

G.: Very likely. Or seduce. Which brings us to the ruota di Venere.

S.: Ah yes, the erotic wheel.

G.: A wheel of patterned expectation. A little machine of genre, role, tone, and implication. Very civilised, if one does not ask too many moral questions before supper.

S.: Then his rhetoric is already a pragmatics of emotional uptake.

G.: Exactly. It teaches not only what to say, but how the saying licenses certain inferences and blocks others.

S.: Which sounds rather like your own insistence that what is meant outruns what is said.

G.: It is structurally the same territory, though mapped under older names and with much better prose.

S.: Better than Cicero?

G.: In the vernacular, yes. Cicero is admirable but dreary if worshipped too long. He writes for a world that thought Latin would remain itself. Signa writes for a world in which language has already escaped into life.

S.: So Cicero is the rhetoric of the republic; Signa the rhetoric of the living aftermath.

G.: Very good. And the aftermath is always more pragmatically interesting than the original constitution.

S.: Because people now have to infer across variety.

G.: Precisely. Cicero may still imagine that educated Latin carries its own authority. Signa knows that meaning has to navigate local expectations, regional styles, emotional codings, and the vernacular body.

S.: Then the many treatises arise because no one rhetoric can survive the multiplication of contexts.

G.: Yes. Treatises proliferate because speech proliferates socially. One text might suffice if mankind spoke under one sky and to one senate. But once you have Bologna, Venice, courts, communes, chancelleries, love letters, diplomatic letters, episcopal letters, petitions, consolations, and all the rest, rhetoric becomes plural by necessity.

S.: So there is no authorised King James of persuasion because persuasion has no authorised crown.

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased. Now, back to the trivium and its triviality.

S.: You still owe me an answer. Which is most trivial?

G.: If by trivial you mean most despised, rhetoric. If you mean most invisible, grammar. If you mean most self-important, logic.

S.: And least dispensable?

G.: In actual human affairs, rhetoric.

S.: Then the most trivial of the trivium is the one civilisation pretends it can do without while secretly relying on it.

G.: Exactly. People think grammar merely mechanical, rhetoric merely ornamental, and logic the only honourable one. In practice grammar keeps the floor from collapsing and rhetoric keeps the guests from leaving.

S.: While logic keeps the philosopher busy.

G.: Usually with furniture. Now, the quadrivium again. What if we did begin there?

S.: We would have more proportion and less address.

G.: More astronomy and worse quarrels.

S.: Better music, perhaps.

G.: Worse sermons certainly.

S.: Bologna would be a university of calculators.

G.: And Oxford a place of instruments without college jokes. Intolerable.

S.: Yet the philosopher might be more mathematically disciplined.

G.: And socially useless. Philosophy that begins in the quadrivium alone becomes seduced by order before it has learned the trouble of persons.

S.: So the old order—trivium first—is a concession to politics.

G.: To humanity. Speech first, measure second. One must first know how humans actually mismanage sense before one is allowed the stars.

S.: That sounds anti-Platonic.

G.: It is anti-idolatrous. One may still admire number later.

S.: Then why do so many philosophers secretly wish the quadrivium came first?

G.: Because number and proportion flatter the fantasy that thought may escape rhetoric.

S.: Which is false.

G.: Utterly. Even the philosopher of mathematics must ask, suggest, omit, contrast, concede, and direct attention. In other words, he must do rhetoric while pretending not to.

S.: Hence your suspicion that pragmatics is rhetoric recovered under an anaesthetic.

G.: Very much so. And Signa proves it because he teaches under other names what we later claim as a discovery.

S.: Such as?

G.: Audience design, inferential expectation, generic cues, tactful omission, strategic excess, role-sensitive address, calibrations of intimacy, all the old arts.

S.: All in medieval epistolography?

G.: Especially there. Letters are laboratories of managed implication.

S.: Then Signa is formulating conversational maxims.

G.: In effect, yes. Not in four neat headings perhaps, but in practical doctrines of how one should speak under this or that role, relation, occasion, and desired effect.

S.: So your maxim of Quantity becomes his rule about how much to say in a petition or a love-letter.

G.: Exactly. Relevance becomes fitness to occasion. Manner becomes decorum plus clarity plus tact. Quality becomes not only truthfulness but genre-suitability. It is all there, just distributed differently.

S.: Then what does Venice add?

G.: Venice adds local complication. A maritime republic with masks, commerce, patrician hierarchies, and civic indirectness does not speak like Cicero’s senate-house or a Tuscan court.

S.: So Signa’s implicatures are Venetian.

G.: At least in flavour, yes. Maritime metaphors, social calibrations, local expectations, a whole rhetorical climate.

S.: Which means Cicero’s maxims would be intolerably dry there.

G.: More than dry—misaligned. Cicero’s art was built for Latin as a public political instrument under republican oratory. Signa writes for a world where letters move among shifting social roles and the vernacular has entered the room.

S.: Then to imitate Cicero too closely in Venice would be like wearing a consul’s toga into a canal.

G.: Splendid. Keep that too.

S.: I seem to be collecting these.

G.: That is the right appetite in rhetoric. Now, you asked why there need be so many rhetorical treatises. Let us answer plainly.

S.: Because there are many communities of implication.

G.: Excellent. And because no single rhetorical scripture can legislate for all of them. The Vulgate and the King James translate one revealed text. Rhetoric does not translate revelation; it manages circumstances.

S.: So revelation may have one authorised text, but prudence needs libraries.

G.: Perfectly done.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become bibliolatrous. Now, what of philosophy’s place relative to the seven liberal arts?

S.: If philosophy is no liberal art, then perhaps it begins where the seven prove insufficient.

G.: Yes. The arts prepare capacities; philosophy reflects on their conditions, limits, and seductions.

S.: Then the philosopher should perhaps indeed begin with the quadrivium and then proceed to the trivium, not because equals , but because order must first be admired and then speech mistrusted.

G.: Ingenious, but wrong. One must first be taught how talk works badly, or one will treat order itself as a rhetoric-free miracle.

S.: So the trivium must still come first because philosophy needs to know the disorders of saying before it can assess the temptations of measure.

G.: Precisely. The philosopher who begins with geometry may become too quickly enamoured of clean deduction. The philosopher who begins with rhetoric knows earlier that human meaning is muddy.

S.: Which is almost an argument for beginning with rhetoric itself.

G.: It is. And perhaps one day a sane university will.

S.: Then grammar and logic become servants of rhetoric?

G.: Not servants, but companions in a dangerous hierarchy. Grammar furnishes the forms, logic disciplines consequence, rhetoric governs uptake. In practice, rhetoric often rules because without uptake the others remain private excellences.

S.: Then the trivium is not three equal roads, but one little republic of unequal powers.

G.: Very good. Grammar is the law, logic the bench, rhetoric the street.

S.: And the quadrivium?

G.: The observatory, the counting-house, the chapel choir, and the geometer’s room.

S.: You make it sound positively habitable.

G.: Only after one has learned to speak in the street. Now, Signa’s title. Rhetorica, not ars dictaminis narrowly, though he teaches that too.

S.: So he wants the larger dignity.

G.: Yes, but in a vernacularly elastic world. He takes the old classical inheritance and bends it toward actual social writing.

S.: Which again is where you think your pragmatics meets him.

G.: Exactly. He knows that meanings are not mechanically encoded. They are produced through patterned expectations, role recognitions, and shared craftsmanship.

S.: Shared craftsmanship is a lovely phrase.

G.: It is also accurate. Conversation is more artisanal than philosophers like to admit.

S.: Then the wheel of Venus is really a wheel of inferential permissions.

G.: Very good. A marvellous phrase, and obscene enough to be medieval.

S.: I shall cherish it.

G.: Briefly. Now, one last return to the order of arts. Suppose we did invert them. What would philosophy lose?

S.: It would lose its early contact with living linguistic practice.

G.: Exactly. It would become proportion before address, harmony before disagreement, astronomy before irony.

S.: And gain?

G.: A dangerous premature confidence in structure.

S.: Which is why is not the right analogy after all.

G.: Yes. Educational sequence is not commutative because dependence is not additive. I give, as I said.

S.: A very English solution.

G.: A very exact one. Number is commutative; formation is not.

S.: Then the old order survives.

G.: Under protest, but yes. The trivial road remains prior because it is the road of mouths and ears.

S.: And Signa, by writing on rhetoric, proves that the least respectable of the arts is often the one nearest to actual philosophy.

G.: Precisely. He teaches how thought enters civic life through address, and that is a philosophically deeper matter than many quadrivial purities.

S.: So the final judgment on rhetoric?

G.: Not the decoration of thought, but the management of shared inferential life among persons.

S.: And on Cicero?

G.: Magnificent, but written under the illusion that Latin would remain his forever.

S.: And on Signa?

G.: Wiser about decay, plurality, local implication, and the vernacular afterlife of intelligence.

S.: And on philosophy?

G.: No liberal art, but a tyrannical dependent of them all.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Florentine, with one Venetian letter still undelivered.

 

 

Grice: Caro Signa, se mi chiedi della “ruota di Venere”, ti dirò che qui a Signa gira più la fantasia che le biciclette! Tra retorica ed epistole amorose, mi sa che la ruota si ferma spesso sul cuore... 

Signa: Ah, Grice, a Firenze dicono che la ruota di Venere porta fortuna agli innamorati, ma a Bologna porta solo lettere d’amore sbagliate! Forse è la colpa dell’ars dictaminis, che fa girare la testa, non la ruota. 

Grice: Del resto, se la ruota di Venere gira troppo, rischia di perdere un bullone... e magari Cupido finisce con l’arco storto! Ma se la ruota si ferma, allora è tempo di scrivere una lettera – magari una d’amicizia, che non si consuma come l’amore, ma dura più a lungo di una gomma nuova. 

Signa: Meravigliosa implicatura, Grice! Hai girato intorno alla ruota senza mai fermarti, e ora capisco perché la retorica è davvero una questione di cuore... e di ruote ben oliate!

 

Verbali: Silio

 

Master.: Very well, gentlemen, we are in the higher class now, and if we are to survive Silius Italicus we must first distinguish our heroes before we begin admiring them.

G.: Aeneas and Scipio, sir.

Shropshire.: I had thought they were much the same once one had stripped them to armour and duty.

Master.: That is exactly the kind of confusion for which schools were invented. Aeneas is Virgil’s Trojan in Italy. Scipio, in Silius, is Roman, anti-Carthaginian, and occasionally dressed up as Hercules by the poet for patriotic enlargement.

Shropshire.: So one is a founder and the other a finisher.

G.: Better, sir, one is a bearer of fate, the other a fulfiller of Roman vengeance.

Master.: Good. Grice may remain. Shropshire may listen. Now, the question before us is whether Aeneas may be called a Stoic hero.

Shropshire.: Without having read the Stoic fragments, sir?

Master.: Very good. Exactly so. No one imagines Aeneas turning pages of Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta under a tree.

G.: Then “Stoic” must mean a type of moral posture rather than a doctrinal subscription.

Master.: Precisely. Endurance, submission to a larger order, command over passion when passion would be easier, and the carrying of burden without theatrical collapse.

Shropshire.: That sounds unpleasantly admirable.

Master.: It is Roman, which is worse. Now, why might someone call Aeneas Stoic?

G.: Because he acts under fatum, sir, but not as a puppet. He is compelled and yet still responsible for how he bears the compulsion.

Master.: Excellent. That is the first point. Stoicism is not laziness before necessity. It is conduct under necessity.

Shropshire.: So when he leaves Dido, he is not cold but obedient.

Master.: That is at least the intended line, yes.

G.: Though the poem takes care to make the obedience costly.

Master.: Exactly. Otherwise he would be merely hard, not heroic. The cost is part of the ethical shape.

Shropshire.: And Dido’s curse?

Master.: Ah yes, the malediction. One of the great moments in which personal injury is made to bear historical destiny.

G.: The curse is not merely private rage, sir. It retroactively feeds the logic of the Punic Wars.

Master.: Very good. That is why Silius matters. He inherits the Virgilian curse as a usable prehistory for Rome and Carthage.

Shropshire.: So one woman’s anger becomes an imperial footnote.

Master.: More than a footnote, though your insolence is serviceable. The curse is the poetic mechanism by which love’s breach becomes history’s enmity.

G.: Which already sounds rather un-Stoic.

Master.: On Dido’s side, yes. She is passion moving into historical vengeance. Aeneas, by contrast, is the one who must leave passion behind in order to obey the larger command.

Shropshire.: Then he is Stoic because he hurts correctly.

Master.: That is coarse, but not wholly false.

G.: There is also pietas, sir.

Master.: Of course. Never omit pietas in a Roman room. Aeneas is Stoic-like not because he lectures on apatheia but because pietas orders him beyond appetite and private delight.

Shropshire.: Is pietas the same as Stoic virtue, sir?

Master.: Not the same. Overlap, not identity. Pietas is Roman relational duty to gods, father, family, destiny, city-to-come. Stoicism supplies the later philosophical language in which endurance under order becomes legible as virtue. One must not flatten the two, but one may let them illuminate one another.

G.: Then Aeneas is Stoic by retrospective moral type, not by doctrinal pedigree.

Master.: Exactly. That is the sentence I wanted and was too tired to form.

Shropshire.: May I write it down as if I had said it?

Master.: No. Grice may. You may borrow it at your peril. Now, Silius and Scipio.

G.: Silius makes Scipio Herculean, sir.

Master.: Yes. Not only victorious, but laborious. Hercules is the ancient shorthand for burdened virtue that civilises through ordeal.

Shropshire.: So Scipio inherits monsters instead of cattle.

Master.: Better. He inherits Hannibal instead of Geryon, if one is willing to be impertinent in Latin.

G.: The comparison to Hercules also enlarges Scipio beyond mere strategy.

Master.: Precisely. He becomes not just a successful general but a morally legible labouring hero.

Shropshire.: And still Roman, not Greek?

Master.: Entirely Roman in destination, though poetry will steal from wherever it pleases. The Herculean comparison is not Hellenising surrender but Roman appropriation.

G.: Then in Silius the heroic ideal is doubled: Aeneas as Stoic-pietistic founder in Virgilian retrospect, Scipio as Herculean fulfiller in national epic.

Master.: Very good.

Shropshire.: I begin to see why one should not confuse them.

Master.: Begin is the right word. Do not yet congratulate yourself. Now, what of the phrase “stoic hero” itself? Is it not slightly vulgar?

G.: It risks anachronism, sir.

Master.: Yes. And yet it may still be heuristically useful if one says exactly what one means: not school membership, but moral physiognomy under fate.

Shropshire.: Physiognomy again.

Master.: Everything returns if one teaches long enough. Now, Aeneas and the porch.

G.: You prefer “porch,” sir, to “Stoicism.”

Master.: I do, because “Stoicism” sounds finished and doctrinal in a way the living image of the stoa resists. The porch is a place of endurance, public speech, rational composure, and a certain architectural exposure. It suits Rome better than a footnote to Chrysippus.

Shropshire.: So Aeneas belongs at the porch because he is seen by others carrying himself under burden.

Master.: Very good. You are getting less useless.

G.: There is also the matter of speech, sir. Aeneas often says less than he feels.

Master.: Yes. Which is Roman and, if one likes, proto-Stoic. Passion is not denied, but governed in manifestation.

Shropshire.: Honest dissimulation?

Master.: That is for another day and another Italian. But yes, disciplined manifestation. A hero who narrates every tremor is no use to an empire.

G.: Then Dido is the counter-example.

Master.: In one sense, yes. She speaks from wound, curse, abandonment, passion, royal injury. She is magnificent, but not porch-like.

Shropshire.: Which is why boys remember her better.

Master.: Naturally. Schools are always crowded with secret Carthaginians. Now, how does Silius use all this?

G.: He takes the old curse and lets it reverberate through the Punica as explanatory pressure.

Master.: Exactly. Dido’s malediction becomes not a magical mechanism but a narratively managed sign that the conflict is larger than ordinary policy.

Shropshire.: Like a family quarrel continued by naval means.

Master.: Coarse again, but useful. Epic loves to make state conflict look like prolonged personal memory.

G.: Then Scipio as Hercules answers not only Hannibal, but the curse itself.

Master.: Very good. He becomes the laboring counter-force to inherited enmity.

Shropshire.: And where is philosophy in all this, sir? Other than in Grice’s face.

Master.: The philosophy lies in the moral grammar of heroism. What counts as admirable under necessity? How does one act when the course is fixed but the bearing remains one’s own? That is the point at which epic and the porch shake hands.

G.: So fate does not abolish agency; it sharpens the style of agency.

Master.: Excellent. That is nearly Marcus Aurelius, though better dressed.

Shropshire.: Then Aeneas as Stoic hero means not “Aeneas subscribes to a doctrine,” but “Aeneas exemplifies conduct under an intelligible order greater than private desire.”

Master.: Good. Grice, write that down before he loses it.

G.: Already done, sir.

Shropshire.: This is why nobody likes him.

Master.: On the contrary, this is why masters do. Now, fatum. Does the existence of fatum make Aeneas less heroic?

G.: No, sir, because the heroism lies not in inventing the end but in consenting to it at cost.

Master.: Yes. One may even say that if the path were merely chosen among pleasures, there would be less heroism, not more.

Shropshire.: So freedom is not selecting the destination but governing the self on the road.

Master.: Better than I expected.

G.: Then this also explains why the curse matters. It turns history into burden rather than mere sequence.

Master.: Exactly. The curse makes the later Roman-Carthaginian struggle feel morally and affectively charged from the beginning.

Shropshire.: Which means Silius inherits not just events but emotional capital.

Master.: Good. You may keep that phrase for once. Epic history is always emotional capital under metre.

G.: And Silius, being lawyer enough and poet enough, knows how to convert inherited emotion into civic exemplarity.

Master.: Splendid. That is exactly what he does with Scipio. He does not merely narrate campaigns; he furnishes Rome with an exemplum under literary enlargement.

Shropshire.: Why Hercules, though? Why not simply leave him as Scipio?

Master.: Because “Scipio” names a Roman man; “Hercules” names a transhistorical grammar of labour, suffering, monster-clearing, and reward. To call Scipio Herculean is not decoration; it is a controlled invitation to draw the right inferences.

G.: About toil, endurance, civil service through suffering.

Master.: Yes. Epic works by licensed overmeaning. The hearer is expected to complete the significance.

Shropshire.: That sounds like your word, Grice.

G.: It often does where good literature is concerned.

Master.: Let us not have the philosophy boy become insufferable. Now, what of Scipio as “the naked hero,” as some later note has it?

G.: Naked in the sense of stripped to virtue, sir, not merely to anatomy.

Shropshire.: Disappointing.

Master.: You are what Virgil called a lower appetite. Yes, naked in the sense that heroic identity is exposed through labour rather than ornament.

G.: Which again supports the Herculean frame.

Master.: Entirely. Hercules is admirable not because he is dressed well but because he carries, suffers, and persists.

Shropshire.: Like a prefect under bad weather.

Master.: If prefects killed lions, perhaps. Now, back to Aeneas. Could one call him Stoic without Didonic residue?

G.: I do not think so, sir. The cost of leaving Dido is part of what makes the obedience morally interesting rather than merely administrative.

Master.: Very good. The wound in the private sphere gives depth to the public destiny.

Shropshire.: So if he had left her cheerfully, he would be less stoic and more monstrous.

Master.: Precisely. The porch is not made of indifference but of governed pain.

G.: Then there is a danger in saying “Aeneas as Stoic hero” too quickly. One may make him sound bloodless.

Master.: Yes, and that is why schools should prefer the porch. It lets one speak of discipline without suggesting a machine of serenity.

Shropshire.: I rather like the machine of serenity.

Master.: Of course you do. You have never governed anything but your own laziness. Now, how does Scipio differ philosophically from Aeneas?

G.: Aeneas is the bearer of founding fate; Scipio is the executor of national rescue. Aeneas carries a future city; Scipio restores an existing commonwealth under external threat.

Master.: Excellent. And therefore?

G.: Therefore Scipio’s labour can more readily be figured Herculean, while Aeneas’s can more readily be figured Stoic-pietistic.

Master.: Exactly. Hercules suits public toil against monsters and enemies. The porch suits inward composure under command and burden.

Shropshire.: Then if one swapped them—Aeneas as Hercules and Scipio as Stoic—it would not quite work.

Master.: It would work only clumsily. Aeneas does have Herculean moments of burden, but his essence in the poem is pious endurance under destiny. Scipio may be prudent and restrained, but Silius wants enlarged labour and exemplarity. The poetic economies differ.

G.: There is also the Virgilian background, sir. Silius is reading through Virgil.

Master.: Entirely. He buys Virgil’s tomb, if you please, and behaves like a devout inheritor of epic authority. He cannot write Scipio without hearing Aeneas behind him.

Shropshire.: So Scipio is in part a Roman correction of Trojan melancholy.

Master.: That is very good indeed.

G.: Thank you, sir—though it was Shropshire.

Master.: Then a miracle has occurred. We shall record it. Now, what of Dido’s curse as philosophical rather than merely poetic?

G.: It shows how personal speech can become historical force within epic causality, sir, without ceasing to be legible as pain.

Master.: Yes. The curse is not merely magical doom. It is a narrative concentration of memory, grievance, and future hostility.

Shropshire.: So Carthage remembers through her.

Master.: In poetic logic, yes. The private voice becomes public inheritance.

G.: Which is why later Rome must answer not only Hannibal but an old injustice felt as still alive.

Master.: Exactly. That gives the Punic struggle moral temperature beyond strategy.

Shropshire.: Then philosophy of history and poetry become awkward neighbours.

Master.: They often are. Epic makes history intelligible by moral and symbolic patterns that no archive alone could supply.

G.: And Stoicism, in the broad sense, gives one a way of reading heroic suffering as rationally ordered without reducing it to mere obedience.

Master.: Very good. That is the real gain of the comparison.

Shropshire.: I think I finally know my Aeneas from my Scipio.

Master.: Then the class has not been wasted. State the difference.

Shropshire.: Aeneas is Stoic-like because he bears fate under pietas and leaves private desire at cost. Scipio is Herculean because Silius makes him the labouring solver of Rome’s inherited enmity, under epic enlargement.

Master.: Excellent.

G.: And Dido’s curse?

Master.: Go on, since you have begun well.

Shropshire.: Dido’s curse turns injured passion into historical momentum, which Silius inherits as part of the meaning of the Punic wars.

Master.: Better than many printed books. Grice, your final addition?

G.: Only that “Stoic hero” should be heard as retrospective moral type, not doctrinal subscription; otherwise we teach the fragments where we ought to teach the poem.

Master.: Precisely. Clifton is not a seminary for anachronism.

Shropshire.: Though it resembles one at meals.

Master.: Silence. One final sentence each. Grice?

G.: Aeneas is heroic because fate does not spare him the need to govern himself.

Master.: Shropshire?

Shropshire.: Scipio is heroic because labour in Silius is made to look like a Roman answer to myth.

Master.: And mine: the porch matters because it gives us a language for conduct under burden, while epic gives us the burden. That will do. Now you may go, and if either of you confuses Aeneas with Scipio again, I shall assign the whole of the Punica and call it kindness.

 

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Silī! Audīvī tē Rōmae Scīpiōnem tamquam Herculēm canere, et Dionis maledictionem quasi condimentum carminis addere. Num etiam in foro versūs tuī causās vincunt?

SILIVS: Salvē, Grice. In foro verba iūrantur, in carmine volant. Sed Scīpiō—ille vere laborāvit; ego tantum labōrēs eius numerō et in hexametrōs compingō.

GRICEVS: Ita est. (Sed mirum quam saepe apud nōs, dum de factīs disserimus, ipsa ratio narrandī rem vincat: nam ubi “Herculem” nominās, audītōr iam ante triumphat, et maledictiō ipsa, quae terrēre posset, fit quasi titulus ad recitandum.) Dic ergo: cum “Scīpiōnem-Herculēm” pingis, sacrificiumne magis ostendis an gloriam?

SILIVS: O inplicatūram dīvīnam, Grice! Nam intellegō quid subesset: nōn tantum quid dicāmus, sed quō modō dicāmus facit ut vir paulatim deus videātur; et maledictiō, quae olim pondus habuit, in carmine saepe tantum sonet—Dionēm verberante, sed Scīpiōne rīdente.

 

Verbali: Silla

 

Master.: Very well, boys, if we are to do Sulla at all, we must do him in order.

G.: Sir, I should have thought that depends on what one means by order.

Shropshire.: I should have thought it depends on whether one starts with the death.

Master.: The death? We have not yet reached the birth.

Shropshire.: That is exactly why it would be fresher, sir.

G.: It would also be statistically unsound.

Master.: What do you mean by statistically unsound, Grice?

G.: That one ought first to have the basic particulars, sir. Name, gens, offices, campaigns, dates, marriages if one must, children if anyone insists, and only then the opinions or dicta.

Shropshire.: Sulla’s opinions may have arrived before his marriages, sir.

Master.: That is very likely true, but not useful. The question is whether one begins with life and opinions, life and deeds, or life and death.

G.: Life and deeds, sir.

Shropshire.: Life and death, sir. Opinions are usually what masters add when the deeds have become awkward.

Master.: That is dangerously intelligent, Shropshire. Grice, why life and deeds?

G.: Because Sulla is historically legible first through acts, sir. Dictatorship, proscriptions, constitutional reforms, resigning the dictatorship, and dying at Cuma in a fashion which some say was dramatic enough even without Plutarch.

Shropshire.: The death at Cuma is the best opening, sir. A man who retires from absolute power and dies by the sea is already asking to be read backward.

Master.: That sounds suspiciously like literature.

G.: Which is exactly why it should be postponed, sir.

Master.: Good. I am glad one of you still believes in chronology. Yet the title before us is Dicta. That makes opinions difficult to avoid.

Shropshire.: Only because someone else collected them, sir.

G.: Quite. A dictum is already a posthumous convenience.

Master.: Now that is a useful phrase. A posthumous convenience. But if we are analysing “the life and opinions,” are opinions really the right second term?

G.: I doubt it, sir. Sulla’s sayings are less opinions than compressed attitudes.

Shropshire.: Or threats with Latin endings.

Master.: Also not wholly wrong. Then perhaps life and deeds?

G.: Yes, sir.

Shropshire.: Unless the dictum alters the deed.

Master.: Explain.

Shropshire.: If Sulla says felicity belongs to those who seize, then the saying becomes part of the deed’s meaning, sir.

G.: Only retrospectively.

Shropshire.: All reading is retrospective, Grice.

Master.: That is enough philosophy before first break. Let us keep to the Romans. What are the basic particulars, Grice?

G.: Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, sir. Born at Rome, died at Cumae. Cornelian gens. Quaestor, praetor, proconsular commands, consul, dictator. Jugurthine War, Cimbrian matters, civil wars, Mithridatic business, the usual inconveniences.

Shropshire.: You make him sound like a timetable, Grice.

G.: Better a timetable than a legend.

Master.: And yet legend is precisely what we must resist without becoming duller than the facts. Now, what of “life and death”?

Shropshire.: It has dramatic economy, sir.

Master.: Which is not automatically a virtue.

Shropshire.: It is at Clifton, sir, where economy of suffering is admired.

Master.: Watch yourself. Why death first?

Shropshire.: Because Sulla’s death reframes the whole. A dictator who abdicates, retires, writes, and dies away from the centre is already in argument with his own career.

G.: Or merely resting after it.

Shropshire.: You always prefer furniture to irony.

G.: I prefer sequence to melodrama.

Master.: And I prefer both of you to keep still long enough for me to decide whether we are reading history or moral grammar. What of “life and opinions”?

G.: Too philosophical, sir.

Shropshire.: Too modern, sir.

Master.: Good. The very agreement alarms me. Why too modern?

G.: Because “opinions” suggests a man with articles of belief rather than one with actions, maxims, expedients, and constitutional habits.

Shropshire.: And because one does not really want Sulla’s opinions so much as one wants a few hard sayings to make the biography bite.

Master.: Yes. “Opinions” is too newspaper-like. A Roman statesman is better approached through consilia, acta, dicta, not opinions. We shall keep that. Now, if one says “life and deeds,” what is missing?

Shropshire.: The after-sound, sir.

Master.: Meaning?

Shropshire.: The sayings. The little verbal things by which a later age pretends to hear the man himself.

G.: Which is dangerous precisely because they are so useful.

Master.: Excellent. Then perhaps the proper formula is life, deeds, and dicta.

Shropshire.: Too many d’s, sir.

G.: Not enough chronology, sir.

Master.: Both objections are worthless. Let us try another route. Suppose one begins with the saying about books.

G.: You mean the Aristotelian books, sir.

Master.: I do. He seizes Apellicon’s collection, brings it to Rome, and Tyrannion later sorts it, with consequences for what we now call the Metaphysics.

Shropshire.: A splendid opening, sir. Sulla, conqueror of Greece, importer of Aristotle, accidental godfather of metaphysics.

G.: Too accidental, sir.

Master.: Yet it has classroom allure. “What comes after the Physics” becomes a category from shelving. That is a fine Roman irony.

Shropshire.: Better than starting with Jugurtha.

G.: Not for chronology.

Master.: You are incorrigible. Still, the books matter. They let us see that Sulla’s life is not only military and constitutional but editorial by theft.

Shropshire.: A phrase worthy of a motto, sir.

Master.: Not worthy, but serviceable. And it would justify him in a Latin class better than the proscriptions would.

G.: Sir, surely the proscriptions also justify him, in a negative grammatical sense.

Master.: Negative grammar is not our current concern. What we need is something to make boys remember that Roman history is not merely names and slaughter.

Shropshire.: Then give them books and a motto, sir.

Master.: What motto?

Shropshire.: That fortune favours not merely the brave but the cataloguer.

G.: That is not Sulla, sir.

Master.: No, but it ought to have been. Did Sulla have a dictum fit for school use?

G.: Felix Sulla, perhaps, sir.

Master.: That is less a dictum than a self-advertisement.

Shropshire.: He might have said that no man who cannot command should read Aristotle.

Master.: He did not, unfortunately. Though it has the smell of him.

G.: There is always Plutarch’s moral atmosphere, sir.

Master.: Which is precisely what I mistrust in school use. We need a sentence, not a cloud. What of resignation?

Shropshire.: A dictator who resigns is already a dictum in action, sir.

G.: Which would support life and deeds.

Master.: It would. A deed can sometimes function as an opinion in public. That is worth keeping. Now, if we were to organise an essay, what headings?

G.: Basic particulars, sir. Offices. Campaigns. Constitutional actions. Retirement. Death. Then dicta as illustrative rather than governing.

Shropshire.: Death. Retirement. Constitutional actions. Dicta. Then the earlier life only as explanation of how he became the sort of man who could do the rest.

Master.: So one of you wants annals and the other a reverse-engineered tragedy.

G.: I do not want annals, sir. I want intelligibility.

Shropshire.: I do not want tragedy, sir. I want shape.

Master.: Good. Then perhaps the lesson is that history needs both sequence and shape, which is an irritating thing to admit at Clifton. Now, what of “opinions” again? Could we save it under a Roman term?

G.: Sententiae, perhaps, sir.

Shropshire.: Maxims, sir. They sound meaner.

Master.: “Life and maxims” has charm, but not enough stature. “Life and sentences” sounds criminal. “Life and dicta” is tolerable, but schoolboys hate Latin on title pages unless it leads to blood.

G.: There is blood regardless, sir.

Master.: An unfortunate Roman abundance. Now, Shropshire, since you insist on the death, what do we gain by beginning there?

Shropshire.: We gain release from the illusion that the career was only upward, sir. Sulla’s end at Cuma, after resignation, turns the whole life into a question about power and its limit.

G.: Or its exhaustion.

Shropshire.: Exactly. And then one asks not merely what he did, but why he stopped.

Master.: Good. That is genuine historical curiosity. Grice, what do we lose by starting there?

G.: The sense of becoming, sir. Without the earlier offices and wars, the abdication appears theatrical rather than intelligible.

Master.: Excellent. So the death is interpretively rich but genetically poor.

Shropshire.: That is too neat, sir.

Master.: That is why it may survive. Now, one of you mentioned Mozart.

Shropshire.: I did, sir. If there is an opera, there must be a school use.

G.: There is Mozart’s Lucio Silla, sir.

Master.: Ah yes. And what are we to do with Mozart in Latin class?

Shropshire.: Use him to prove that Sulla survives by turning into music once history has become too strict.

G.: That is absurd.

Shropshire.: Which is why it would be memorable.

Master.: We must not turn the sixth form into a theatre, tempting though it is. Still, Mozart’s existence proves something.

G.: That Sulla had afterlife beyond historians, sir.

Master.: Precisely. And that “life and deeds” may not exhaust reception.

Shropshire.: So perhaps “life, deeds, and afterlives,” sir.

G.: That is far too broad.

Master.: For this classroom, yes. But worth noting. History is what happened, and what later ages decided was worth singing. Now, what would Sulla himself have preferred?

G.: Deeds, sir.

Shropshire.: Reputation, sir.

Master.: A sensible division. And the master?

G.: Basic particulars first, sir.

Shropshire.: Death first, sir.

Master.: You have both said that often enough. Let us refine it. Suppose I assign “The Life and Deeds of Sulla.”

Shropshire.: Then the clever boy begins with Cuma anyway.

Master.: And if I assign “The Life and Death of Sulla”?

G.: Then the lazy boy ignores the constitution.

Master.: Quite right. “Life and Opinions”?

Shropshire.: Then no boy knows what an opinion is.

G.: Least of all in Rome, sir.

Master.: Very good. So the title itself must teach. What about “Sulla: Career, Dictatorship, and Dicta”?

G.: Better, sir.

Shropshire.: Uglier, sir.

Master.: Ugliness is often educational. Now, Grice, give me one dictum suitable for a schoolboy if we can find one.

G.: That he preferred to seem fortunate rather than merely successful, sir.

Master.: That is paraphrase, not dictum.

Shropshire.: “Felix” is enough, sir. One word and half the room begins to distrust him.

Master.: Excellent. Sulla Felix. There is our first motto. A man who styles himself fortunate already invites inquiry as to whether fortune or force did more.

G.: And whether luck is a property or merely retrospective flattery, sir.

Master.: Spare us your philosophy of luck for the moment. Still, yes. “Felix” is a way of shifting responsibility from merit to destiny without ever giving up either.

Shropshire.: Very Roman, sir.

Master.: Very. Now the books again. How would one make the Aristotelian episode fit a school essay?

G.: By saying that Sulla’s career intersects not only Roman power but the later history of philosophy through the transport of texts, sir.

Master.: Good. Shropshire?

Shropshire.: By saying that he conquered Greece twice: first by arms, then by shelving.

Master.: Insolent, but useful. That shall stay in my private notes. Now, would either of you risk “life and opinions” if one replaced opinions with views on constitution?

G.: No, sir. Too narrow.

Shropshire.: Yes, sir, if one wished to make him sound almost modern and therefore slightly false.

Master.: Which is a good reason not to. Roman men of action do not have “views” in the schoolboy sense. They have offices, measures, enemies, precedents, and a style of hardness.

G.: And dicta only later, sir.

Master.: Exactly. The dicta crystallise the style after the fact. Then our order should perhaps be: life, deeds, constitutional acts, retirement, death, dicta.

Shropshire.: A little too reasonable, sir.

Master.: That is often my failing. Yet we may allow a dramatic opening sentence on the death.

G.: Provided the chronology recovers at once, sir.

Master.: Yes, Grice, I shall not abandon the calendar entirely. Now, if we quote a dictum in Latin class, should it be in Latin?

Shropshire.: Naturally, sir. Otherwise the boys will think Rome happened in translation.

Master.: Good. But which Latin?

G.: Felix enough, sir.

Master.: “Felix” is admirable because it is short, cruel, self-congratulatory, and semantically unstable.

Shropshire.: Almost like a prefect.

Master.: You are determined to spoil every decent thing. Still, semantic instability is useful. Was he fortunate, happy, blessed, successful, favoured, or merely brazen enough to say so?

G.: Exactly, sir. The word opens rather than closes.

Master.: Which is why it belongs. And if we mention Mozart?

Shropshire.: Only at the end, sir, as proof that a Roman can become opera once the blood dries.

Master.: Very well. “Even Mozart found use for him.” That will do. Grice, can you live with that?

G.: Reluctantly, sir.

Master.: Good. Reluctance is often the beginning of education. Now, what of Mommsen?

G.: Sir?

Master.: If one says anything original on Sulla, one should be prepared for the possibility that someone German has objected first.

Shropshire.: Then it is safer to say nothing original, sir.

Master.: That is the motto of the bad scholar. We shall not adopt it. Instead we shall note that Sulla’s life requires both fact and arrangement, deeds and after-sense, and perhaps one or two sayings if they carry the right weight.

G.: Then not life and opinions, sir.

Master.: No. That phrase is dead. Life and deeds remains the classroom spine.

Shropshire.: With death as prologue, sir.

Master.: With death as opening temptation, perhaps. I shall allow a paragraph.

G.: That is statistically tolerable, sir.

Master.: I am relieved to have your permission. Now, one last question. Why should a Latin class care for Sulla beyond violence and names?

G.: Because he stands at the crossing of Roman action and the later transmission of Greek philosophy, sir.

Shropshire.: Because he proves that a dictator may accidentally improve the library, sir.

Master.: Both answers are serviceable, one more decent than the other. Very well. The essay shall be: “Sulla: Life, Deeds, and One or Two Dangerous Dicta.”

G.: That is not a proper title, sir.

Master.: It is now.

Shropshire.: Then may I begin with Cuma?

Master.: You may begin with Cuma if, by the second paragraph, you have returned to Rome, offices, and chronology.

G.: Thank you, sir.

Master.: Do not thank me. Thank Sulla for resigning dramatically enough to tempt schoolboys into structure.

Shropshire.: And Mozart, sir?

Master.: Yes, and Mozart, if you can keep him to a sentence and avoid humming.

G.: Dry enough, sir?

Master.: Sufficiently Cliftonian, with one Roman corpse properly indexed.

 

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Silla! Audivi te libros Aristotelis ex Asia ad urbem transtulisse. Dic mihi, quid invenisti post physica?

SILLA: Griceus, post physica inveni libros qui tractant de anima, de caelo, de generatione et corruption. Sed in his, quod mirum, philosophia transit a natura ad res humanas: quae post physicam sequuntur, praeter naturam, ad mores et mentem hominum spectant.

GRICEVS: Praeclare, Silla! Sic Aristoteles non solum naturam, sed etiam animam, civitatem, et felicitatem investigavit. Forsitan, haec "meta physica" sunt initium sapientiae Romanae—ubi scientia fit ars vivendi in urbe.

SILLA: Recte dicis, Griceus. In Roma, etiam post physica, libris, et disputationibus, sapientiam petimus non ut finiatur sed ut semper iterum incipiat—quia verae quaestiones semper post physica latent.

Verbali: Silla

 

G.: Let us begin with a complaint. Oxford never had her Petrarca.

S.: You mean no one at Oxford ever made the recovery of antiquity into a vocation rather than an inheritance.

G.: Precisely. Oxford inherited Latin, cited Cicero, mumbled Virgil, and mislaid manuscripts by the civilised dozen. But she never had a Petrarca in the strong sense: no hunter of codices who made the old world new by seeking it out again.

S.: Bologna did not quite have him either, though she had better excuses.

G.: Yes. Bologna had law, gloss, comment, authority, university habit. Petrarca belongs to a different restlessness. He is not a man of institutional custody, but of recovery.

S.: Which is why you insist we never mention the poems.

G.: Quite. The poems are for students of Italian literature, a minor art sustained by departments. We are after something nobler: the textual apparatus, the manuscript chase, the editorial conscience, the recovery of the classics as an intellectual act.

S.: So Petrarca matters because he turned antiquity into work.

G.: Exactly. He does not merely admire the ancients; he labours for them. He collates, copies, searches, writes to the dead, restores, compares, complains, and in the process teaches Europe that the old world is not simply there but must be rewon.

S.: Which is already philosophical for you.

G.: Entirely. The recovery of texts is the recovery of reasons once spoken, and therefore of possibilities of thought once alive.

S.: Then Oxford’s failure was not lack of Latinity but lack of urgency.

G.: Very good. Oxford had enough Latin to pass examinations and enough Aristotle to produce schools. What she lacked was Petrarchan hunger.

S.: No mountain-climbing for codices.

G.: Exactly. No letters announcing ecstatic discovery of neglected books. No sense that every manuscript found is a civilisation partially restored.

S.: Whereas Petrarca acts as if antiquity were half-buried and morally recoverable.

G.: Yes. And that is where the Renaissance really begins—not in styles of ornament, but in the conviction that old books are not dead authorities but recoverable voices.

S.: Which is why “everything old is new again” is not mere slogan.

G.: Quite. It is a philological programme. The newness lies not in novelty of composition but in renewed access. A forgotten text, once restored, becomes intellectually new by being old again.

S.: Then Petrarca is less a poet than a technology of recollection.

G.: Better. A human technology of recollection. He makes memory active, mobile, acquisitive, editorial.

S.: And for you that belongs directly to philosophy.

G.: Naturally. Philosophy depends on texts not merely as containers of doctrine but as occasions of rational conversation across time.

S.: Hence the seminar you want to give on Petrarca’s implicatures.

G.: Exactly. For once the codex is found and the text restored, the old author can begin meaning again. And those meanings are not exhausted by what lies on the surface of the page.

S.: So even textual criticism is a condition of implicature.

G.: Entirely. If the line is corrupt, the implicature may be mangled. If the manuscript tradition is mismanaged, the shades of emphasis, irony, allusion, withheld judgment, and rhetorical pressure may vanish.

S.: Then the apparatus criticus is not mere scholastic plumbing.

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

S.: You should put that on the seminar notice.

G.: I probably shall. It will ensure poor attendance and good memory.

S.: Then let us say why Oxford lacked a Petrarca. Was it because Oxford never had to lose Rome in the same way?

G.: That is part of it. Petrarca feels the distance from the ancients as a wound to be healed. Oxford more often felt antiquity as curriculum.

S.: So for Petrarca the classics are missing; for Oxford they are assigned.

G.: Excellent. Assigned antiquity never quite generates the same ardour as recovered antiquity.

S.: Which is why the Grand Tour mattered later.

G.: Yes, though by then the whole thing had become more social and less urgent. The Grand Tour sends young Englishmen to Italy to acquire polish, ruins, marbles, and corrected vowels. Petrarca had already taught Europe that Italy housed not only stones but sleeping books.

S.: So the Grand Tour consumer arrives after the Petrarchan producer.

G.: Exactly. The one consumes visible antiquity; the other recovers textual antiquity.

S.: Then the post-Grand Tour inherits both: Italy as aesthetic correction and Italy as archive.

G.: Very good. And by our own time, Oxford enjoys the results while forgetting the labour.

S.: Which is why you sound aggrieved.

G.: Only historically aggrieved. I am quite happy to let Italy keep Petrarca, so long as Oxford admits the debt.

S.: Then what specific efforts of Petrarca matter most to your seminar?

G.: The search for manuscripts, certainly. The recovery of Ciceronian material, the cultivation of letters as living commerce with antiquity, the insistence on textual correctness, the consciousness that scribal transmission can deform understanding and must be repaired.

S.: So the editorial thing, as you call it, is central.

G.: Absolutely. One does not begin with theories of literature. One begins with the codex, the hand, the variant, the lacuna, the false reading, the true restoration.

S.: Which sounds nearly monastic.

G.: Better than nearly. It is monastic labour repurposed by humanist hunger.

S.: And that repurposing is what Oxford lacked.

G.: Yes. Oxford had custodians. Petrarca is not a custodian but an awakener.

S.: Then what is philosophically at stake in the manuscript tradition?

G.: Continuity of rational possibility. A corrupted text may narrow or falsify what an old author can be taken to have meant. A restored text reopens meanings otherwise inaccessible.

S.: So your “Petrarca’s implicatures” are not whimsical after all.

G.: Of course not. Once the text is legible, one can ask what is implied, alluded, sharpened, softened, withheld, or obliquely managed in the revived speech of antiquity.

S.: And why they cannot be cancelled.

G.: Yes. Because certain implicatures in learned humanist writing are not ad hoc frills but structurally bound to the very act of recovery. To restore Cicero is already to imply that one’s own age has fallen short. To write to the ancients as living interlocutors is to imply that contemporary institutions are not enough.

S.: So the recovery itself is an implicature.

G.: Splendid. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself.

S.: Only archivally.

G.: Better. Now, when you say “cannot be cancelled,” what do you mean precisely?

S.: That there are consequences of Petrarca’s textual posture which no explicit disclaimer can entirely remove. If he says, “I merely edit,” the very labour of editing still implies a valuation of the past over the present, or at least a present deficiency to be remedied by the past.

G.: Exactly. The implicature is woven into the practice. He can deny nostalgia, but the recovery still means more than retrieval.

S.: So the whole philological act carries a non-cancellable comparative judgment.

G.: Very good. And there is another. By preferring original sources, by chasing older witnesses, by distrusting inherited compilations, he implies that authority is not the same as transmission.

S.: Which is devastating for lazy scholasticism.

G.: Precisely. The oldest book may be less available than the most cited one, and yet more authoritative. That is a revolution in learned conscience.

S.: Which again Oxford later receives as method without reliving its drama.

G.: Yes. Our dons cite critical editions the way people use taps, forgetting the aqueduct.

S.: Then your seminar ought really to be on the aqueduct.

G.: On Petrarch as aqueduct-builder, yes.

S.: Not a bad subtitle.

G.: Better than most. Now, what of Bologna?

S.: Bologna had text and commentary, but in a juristic and scholastic mode. Petrarca’s relation to antiquity is less institutional, more elective, almost erotic in the textual sense.

G.: Quite. He pursues old books not because the curriculum demands them, but because his own sense of civil and intellectual life does.

S.: So if Oxford never had her Petrarca, Bologna had perhaps too much apparatus and too little yearning.

G.: That is unkind, but not wholly false.

S.: Unkindness is sometimes required by comparison.

G.: Very likely. Then the later English relation to Italy becomes doubly derivative: first from Petrarca’s recovery, then from the Grand Tour’s consumption.

S.: Which is why Pater and others matter later.

G.: Yes, but let us not drift into visual culture. Here we stay with codices, editors, letters, apparatus.

S.: Very well. Then one might say Petrarca made antiquity newly legible by refusing to trust the available text as the final text.

G.: Excellent. And that refusal is philosophical in the deepest sense, because it is a refusal of second-handness.

S.: So the humanist is a critic of transmission before he is a stylist.

G.: Precisely. Style comes later, or at least second. First comes textual conscience.

S.: Which is what departments of Italian literature often forget when they rush to lyric inwardness.

G.: Departments forget many things, but yes. The poems may dazzle, but the editorial labour civilises.

S.: Then your anti-poetic restriction is itself a Petrarchan severity.

G.: I prefer to think so. Now, let us consider how a manuscript tradition creates implicature.

S.: Through variants, certainly. A reading in one witness may sharpen irony; another may flatten it. Marginalia may expose a reception; punctuation may create or dissolve pressure.

G.: Exactly. Humanists know that what is said depends on what is actually there, and what is meant often depends on tiny textual decisions.

S.: So one could say that textual criticism is the precondition of pragmatic criticism.

G.: Very good. Without a stable text there is no responsible account of what the author might have made available to a competent reader.

S.: Then why “cannot be cancelled”?

G.: Because once Petrarca undertakes recovery, the act itself implicates a theory of culture: namely that the present must re-enter conversation with the past, and that the past speaks with a freshness the present has partly lost.

S.: Even if Petrarca were to say, “I do not mean to rebuke my age.”

G.: Exactly. The rebuke is structurally there. To recover Cicero is already to imply that your own prose world has been badly housed.

S.: To recover Livy is to imply a deficiency of civic memory.

G.: Yes. And to edit attentively is to imply that careless transmission is a civil failure.

S.: Which makes philology look almost moral.

G.: It is moral. Exactness about texts is exactness about inherited reason.

S.: Then Oxford’s lack of a Petrarca means that Oxford entered humanism already after its founding labour had been done elsewhere.

G.: Precisely. Oxford becomes heir rather than initiator. She can teach, gloss, admire, and later examine, but she does not invent the hunger.

S.: That is quite a loss.

G.: It is. Though every university loses something by being founded too securely.

S.: So Petrarca belongs to that rare class of figures who make a university possible without being of one.

G.: Very well put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Again, do not become pleased.

S.: I am only codicologically content.

G.: Better. Now, what of the seminar itself? How shall we describe Petrarca’s implicatures?

S.: First, the implicature of recovery: that the ancient author is worth more direct hearing than the intervening summaries.

G.: Good.

S.: Second, the implicature of correction: that current learning has become careless enough to require philological repair.

G.: Excellent.

S.: Third, the implicature of companionship: that the dead are to be treated as interlocutors, not relics.

G.: Splendid. That one will please me personally.

S.: Fourth, the implicature of rebuke: that one’s age is judged by its fidelity to its textual inheritance.

G.: Very good.

S.: Fifth, the implicature of renewal: that oldness, once recovered, becomes a species of intellectual newness.

G.: Exactly. “Everything old is new again” is not decorative; it is methodological.

S.: Because the new lies not in novelty but in renewed access.

G.: Perfect. That should go in the opening paragraph.

S.: Then perhaps the seminar title is “Petrarchan Recovery and the Non-Cancellability of Humanist Implicature.”

G.: Hideous enough to attract the right people.

S.: Which are?

G.: Those with bad shoes and decent Latin.

S.: Oxford will provide some.

G.: Fewer than one would hope. Now, what do we say about the editorial apparatus?

S.: That it is not appendage but argument. The apparatus criticus shows the labour by which a reading is secured, and therefore the labour by which an old voice becomes newly available.

G.: Very good. The apparatus is a visible conscience.

S.: Which again Oxford uses while pretending not to notice.

G.: Like electricity. One only notices the apparatus when it fails.

S.: Then Petrarca’s greatness lies partly in making failure visible.

G.: Exactly. He teaches Europe to see that texts have fallen, that they may be restored, and that restoration is not mechanical but judgment-laden.

S.: Which is philosophical because judgment under uncertainty is philosophical.

G.: Entirely. Philology is one of philosophy’s elder practical cousins.

S.: One seldom hears that in faculty meetings.

G.: Faculty meetings are designed to conceal family resemblance. Now, why leave the poems aside?

S.: Because they have monopolised Petrarca’s reception too often, and because the seminar aims at recovery as intellectual practice rather than lyric prestige.

G.: Exactly. Poetry has already received more than its ration of undergraduates. We are interested in the making of antiquity available.

S.: Which is perhaps the most un-Englishly Italian thing about Petrarca.

G.: Yes. He turns old letters into living pressure.

S.: And this is what Oxford never quite did for herself.

G.: No. Oxford could preserve, but Petrarca recovered. There is a difference between keeping a key and deciding to open the door.

S.: That is nearly too neat.

G.: It is exact enough to survive.

S.: Then one last question. Does Petrarca also imply a theory of the editor?

G.: Certainly. The editor is not a neutral clerk but a responsible mediator between the dead and the living.

S.: Which again makes the work philosophical.

G.: Profoundly so. Mediation, judgment, fidelity, restoration, intelligibility—these are not mere technicalities.

S.: Then the anti-poetic seminar is in fact a seminar on intellectual ethics.

G.: That is well said.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become ethically inflated. Now, the final contrast with the Grand Tour.

S.: The Grand Tour collects visible antiquity as experience. Petrarca recovers textual antiquity as interlocution.

G.: Excellent. The tourist returns with objects; the humanist returns with restored speech.

S.: And the post-Grand Tour inherits both, but often prefers the object.

G.: Which is why we must rebalance the thing.

S.: In favour of manuscripts, collations, variants, letters, and the living dead.

G.: Exactly. Those are the true souvenirs of civilisation.

S.: Then the final word on Oxford and Petrarca?

G.: Oxford never had her Petrarca because she received antiquity too securely and too institutionally. Petrarca had to recover what Oxford later presumed. That is why we owe him more than admiration: we owe him the very conditions under which old texts can speak again.

S.: And their implicatures?

G.: Once recovered, they cannot be cancelled because the act of recovery itself means more than it says: it implies loss, judgment, renewal, and a standing claim of the past upon the present.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with one Oxford library key still unused.

 

 

Grice: Caro Silla, ho letto della tua polemica contro Martorelli e la questione sulla fondazione di Partenope: tra fenici e greci, direi che a Napoli le origini sono sempre più complicate della ricetta della pastiera! 

Silla: Grice, tu sai bene che qui a Napoli la verità si trova tra le pieghe di storia e folclore: come dire, tra la sirena Partenope e una buona dose di polemica, tutto diventa più saporito—e se serve, ci metto anche un pizzico di avvocatura! 

Grice: Certamente, Silla! E parlando di avvocati... non sarà che, quando si tratta di tortura e pena di morte, invece di abolire, qualcuno preferisce solo cambiare il nome sulle porte del tribunale? Chissà che “giustificazione” si trova tra le righe. 

Silla: La più tipicamente ingegnosa implicatura, Grice! Sei riuscito a dire tutto senz a dire nulla, come solo gli inglesi e i napoletani sanno fare. Ti offro una copia del mio “Dritto di punire”—ma senza firma, così potrai implicare anche tu!  

 

Verbali: Simbolo

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Symbolē. Gaudēbis scīre: collega meus apud Vadum Boum, Austin, sermonem quendam artificiōsum excōgitāvit cui nōmen est SYMBOLVM—sed (ut ille solēbat) id ipsum “lūdum” appellābat.

SYMBOLVS: Ō rem lepīdam! Sed priusquam ad Austīnī sermonem trānseāmus, dīc mihi: cūr SYMBOLVM? Nam Symbolus (ut ego) māsculīnum est—quasi vir quidam aut philosophus; symbolum autem neutrum est—quasi signum ipsum, tessera, indicium.

GRICEVS: Rectē monēs: Symbolus quasi persona disputat, symbolum quasi rēs tacet. At apud nostrōs, cum sermo in tabulīs et rēgulīs pōnitur, saepe neutrum regnat: signa enim moventur, hominēs tantum suspicantur.

SYMBOLVS: Inplicātūra subtlis, Grice, paene symbolica! Nam dum “SYMBOLVM” dīcis, mihi subit: in sermone vestrō symbolum (neutrum) vincit Symbolum (māscium), et signa docent hominēs—vel saltem docent eos quōmodo in disputātiōne ludant.

 

Verbali: Simioni

 

GRICE: Caro Simioni, tra le calli di Venezia la filosofia scorre come un fiume segreto. Ma dimmi, è vero che gli amanti veneziani sono filosofi più arguti dei professori di Milano?

SIMIONI: Ah, Grice, qui a Venezia l’amore è una questione di dialettica, non solo di cuore! Anche Pirandello direbbe che la logica degli amanti supera quella di qualsiasi Congresso universitario.

GRICE: Vedi, caro Corrado, proprio come dicevano gli antichi φιλοσοφοί: tra le brume lagunari, ogni amante cela un filosofo, e ogni filosofo sogna di essere un amante—il vero problema è che a Venezia, spesso si confonde il Πλατωνικός con il "platonicamente impegnato"! Sai, qui la ragione conversazionale è più una questione di baci che di sillogismi…

SIMIONI: Amo quell’implicatura, Grice! A Venezia, si sa, “filosofo” e “amante” sono solo due maschere sullo stesso volto: dice il proverbio, chi ragiona troppo finisce col perdere l’amore… e chi ama troppo, beh, diventa filosofo prima o poi! Ma tu, Grice, tra i greci e i gondolieri, sei riuscito a unire l’arte del ragionare con quella del punteggio amoroso!

 

Verbali: Simmaco

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Simmace, sive Simachce—nonnumquam nescio utrum scribendum sit cum uno “m” an duobus. Sed certe unum scio: inter consules, sapientia tua fulget ut sol in Foro!

SIMMACVS: Grice, amice, quid de litteris Latinis? Unus m, duo m—philosophus sum, non grammaticus! Consulatus autem, fateor, plus toga quam sapientia ponderat.

GRICEVS: Mirum est, Simchace—err, Simmace!—quantum ponderis sapientia tua habet inter patres conscriptos. In domo quadam ultra mare, nonnullis fortasse toga abundat…sed minus quoddam—quod philosophus agnoscere solet—praesto est.

SIMMACVS: Senatoria implicatura, Grice—celebro eam! Equidem, si sapientia in curia tam rara est quam panis in Saturnalia, fortasse consulatus magis ad iocum quam ad iudicium pertinet!

 

Verbali: Simoneschi

 

G.: Let us begin with the spelling, because rettorica with the double t looks like a schoolmaster’s revenge on ease.

S.: Or a Venetian insistence that rhetoric must first be made visibly difficult before it may become socially fluid.

G.: Very good. Rhetoric made orthographically strenuous so that boys do not mistake it for mere chatter.

S.: And because in Italian the double consonant already slows the mouth and thickens the form.

G.: Yes. Rettorica is heavier than retorica, and that heaviness is not insignificant. A discipline of speech ought occasionally to impede speech.

S.: So the very spelling pedagogises.

G.: Precisely. One may call that prammatica in old dress. Orthography as ethical restraint.

S.: Then Simoneschi is already doing with the title what he later teaches in the body: rhetoric is never merely transparent.

G.: Exactly. Now, the trivium. So called because it is trivial, or because later people are stupid?

S.: Surely because the road had three ways before the schoolboys arrived and downgraded the adjective.

G.: A pity. The trivium is one of those cases in which etymology preserves dignity while usage slowly destroys it.

S.: Grammar, dialectic, rhetoric. Three roads to intelligibility, and each later called trivial by those who owe them everything.

G.: Exactly. Which of the three, then, is most trivial?

S.: The temptation is to say grammar, because everyone thinks he already has it.

G.: Yes. Grammar is despised because success in it becomes invisible. One notices grammar mostly when someone else lacks it.

S.: Logic retains prestige because it sounds severe.

G.: And because philosophers like anything that can be numbered or symbolised without blushing.

S.: Which leaves rhetoric to be despised as ornament.

G.: Yes. Yet of the three, rhetoric may be least trivial in actual civilisation.

S.: Because it governs uptake.

G.: Exactly. Grammar lets one produce a sentence, logic lets one prevent some embarrassments, rhetoric lets one be understood, resisted, admired, distrusted, obeyed, laughed at, or forgiven.

S.: So rhetoric is both the most dismissed and the most operative.

G.: Very good. That is the old injustice of the trivium.

S.: Then if Simoneschi writes Il vello d’oro, overo la rettorica, he is in part rescuing the least respected of the three.

G.: Or showing that the least respected discipline secretly governs the other two in civic life.

S.: Because a perfectly grammatical and valid utterance may still fail completely if addressed without rhetorical intelligence.

G.: Precisely. No theorem survives bad dinner conversation.

S.: Which is perhaps why philosophy would have been quite different if it had started with the quadrivium.

G.: Ah yes. If boys had first been made to count, measure, harmonise, and watch the heavens before they learned to decline, infer, and persuade.

S.: Bologna might have produced fewer jurists and more cosmologists.

G.: Oxford fewer sermons and more instruments.

S.: You say that as if it were a loss.

G.: It would have been a civilisational mutilation. Speech precedes stars in social necessity. One must first know how to address another before one can safely measure the spheres.

S.: And yet the quadrivium looks nobler on paper.

G.: Nobility is a dangerous curricular principle. Arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy: they promise order. The trivium teaches one what to do with disagreement.

S.: Which is a more urgent human problem.

G.: Much more urgent. Civilisation is mostly the management of disagreement in words before it becomes disagreement in steel.

S.: Then if philosophy had begun with the quadrivium, it might have been more mathematical and less civic.

G.: Exactly. More proportion, less persuasion. More celestial order, less disputation. Very grand, very inhuman.

S.: Yet some philosophers would have liked it.

G.: Naturally. Philosophers are always tempted by environments in which no one interrupts.

S.: And Kierkegaard?

G.: Kierkegaard is useful here because he reminds us that philosophy is not itself one of the seven liberal arts, however often philosophers try to smuggle it in under dialectic.

S.: So what gives? If philosophy is not one of the liberal arts, why does it keep behaving as if the trivium and quadrivium were its preparatory provinces?

G.: Because philosophy is a parasite of good preparation and an enemy of every completed curriculum. It requires the liberal arts, then criticises them, then pretends it invented the need for them.

S.: A familiar vice.

G.: Very. Kierkegaard would say perhaps that one may master all seven liberal arts and still fail in existence.

S.: Which sounds like a criticism of both Bologna and Oxford.

G.: As well it should. Universities are good at producing prepared persons who have not yet begun.

S.: Then Simoneschi, by writing on rhetoric, is taking the most socially dangerous of the preparatory arts and treating it as if it already were philosophy.

G.: Exactly. That is what interests me. He does not merely preserve rhetoric as inherited school matter; he makes it the living site of practical intelligence.

S.: Which is why you are tempted to say that his prammatica is just conversational rhetoric.

G.: More than tempted. I think much of what later calls itself pragmatics is rhetoric recovered under a cleaner conscience and a less human vocabulary.

S.: That will offend the cleaner consciences.

G.: They deserve some offence. If one says “He is a fine fellow” and means nearly the opposite, one is not doing formal semantics; one is practising an art of contrast, expectation, and social inference.

S.: Irony, litotes, meiosis, strategic concession, all the old furniture.

G.: Exactly. The rhetoricians named them, taught them, domesticated them. We later arrive and say “implicature” and “defeasible uptake” and congratulate ourselves on modernity.

S.: Then Simoneschi is your ancestor.

G.: In a sense, yes, though I would prefer not to be entered in a Venetian pedigree without proper warning.

S.: Too late. Now, which of the trivium’s three disciplines would collapse first if philosophy began with the quadrivium?

G.: Rhetoric would be first demoted, because number flatters itself as universal while rhetoric insists upon audience, occasion, and local climate.

S.: Which is exactly what Simoneschi’s Venetian title opposes.

G.: Yes. A rettorica veneziana says already: universal manuals are not enough. The way one means in Venice cannot be reduced to a Roman handbook or a rationalist grammar.

S.: Because Venice has water, masks, republic, mercantile indirection, civic hierarchies, maritime metaphor.

G.: Exactly. A rhetorical climate, if one likes. Meaning is locally weathered.

S.: Then pragmatics, if it is conversational rhetoric, must also be locally weathered.

G.: To a degree, yes. I still want my general principles, but their realisation is always modulated by local norms and background encodings.

S.: So Simoneschi gives you what your own theory tends to abstract away from.

G.: Very good. He supplies the lived density of a social world, where the same irony, understatement, or concessive move may function differently in Venice, Bologna, Oxford, or a papal court.

S.: Which means universal pragmatics risks becoming thin.

G.: It risks that always. But thinness is sometimes the price of explanatory ambition.

S.: And rhetoric keeps the blood.

G.: Exactly. Rhetoric remembers that utterances are not merely inferential items but social manoeuvres in places inhabited by habits, classes, and weather.

S.: Then what is Simoneschi trying to do?

G.: I think he is trying to preserve rhetoric as civic intelligence rather than as dead school ornament. He wants to teach how meaning actually travels in Venetian life.

S.: Which is why he chooses rettorica and not perhaps eloquenza.

G.: Yes. Eloquence flatters the speaker. Rhetoric as art, especially under the title Il vello d’oro, suggests acquisition, difficulty, navigation, pursuit, and reward.

S.: The golden fleece of speech.

G.: Precisely. A prize not merely of style but of situated competence.

S.: Then would you say he is formulating maxims of conversation?

G.: In effect, yes, though not in my compressed way. He is teaching practical norms: when to understate, when to concede, when to ironise, when to invoke the local metaphor, when to let shared civic knowledge do the work.

S.: So his manual is a maxims-book in rhetorical clothing.

G.: Something like that. But older and probably wiser about persons.

S.: Which brings us back to the least trivial of the trivium.

G.: Yes. If one asks what is most often called trivial, rhetoric wins or loses, depending on tone. If one asks what is least dispensable in actual life, rhetoric wins comfortably.

S.: Grammar one may absorb unconsciously; logic one may do badly and still survive; rhetoric one neglects at the cost of social extinction.

G.: Very good. One can live with poor logic longer than with no tact.

S.: That is a sentence undergraduate philosophers should copy out.

G.: In handwriting, preferably. Now, would philosophy have been better if it had started from the quadrivium?

S.: Better for system, perhaps; worse for civilisation.

G.: Exactly. One would get cleaner structures and fewer quarrels properly managed. The history of philosophy would have looked more mathematical and less rhetorical.

S.: Less Plato in the marketplace, more Pythagoras in the counting-house.

G.: Yes. And less Cicero, which would be intolerable.

S.: So Bologna without the trivium first would not really be Bologna.

G.: Quite. A university of law without grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric properly prior is simply an archive with pretensions.

S.: And Oxford without the trivium first would have had fewer schools and more machines.

G.: Yes, and perhaps less common-room malice, which would be too high a price.

S.: So the triviality of the trivium is civilization’s false self-description.

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself.

S.: Only academically.

G.: Worse. Now, grammar. Do we dismiss it too quickly?

S.: Of course. Grammar is what survives by becoming background. Because everyone depends on it, everyone calls it elementary and then forgets it.

G.: Exactly. It is the most invisible of the three. Its triviality is the invisibility of success.

S.: Logic, then, is the one that advertises itself most.

G.: Yes. It keeps its dignity because it can formalise, classify, and punish. Philosophers like punishable structures.

S.: Whereas rhetoric resists complete formalisation.

G.: Which is why philosophers have alternately despised and stolen from it.

S.: Simoneschi, though, does not steal. He simply continues the older tradition in which rhetoric already includes what you would call conversational reason.

G.: Precisely. It is not accidental that his Venice cares more for what is meant than for what is merely said. Maritime republics live by implication.

S.: Water carries subtext.

G.: Beautiful nonsense, but serviceable. The point is that Venice as a social world encourages indirection, tact, irony, and calibrated saying.

S.: Then a universal manual of correct speech would indeed miss the point.

G.: Very much so. Simoneschi’s rettorica veneziana is already a protest against exportable correctness.

S.: Which sounds unexpectedly modern.

G.: Because the local always sounds modern once universalism begins boring people.

S.: Then perhaps the sequence should be: trivium first because humans need speech before ratio; rhetoric last within the trivium because institutions distrust what they most need; philosophy born parasitically on both; and pragmatics a late return of rhetoric under analytical customs.

G.: That is very good.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Again, do not become pleased.

S.: I am only regionally satisfied.

G.: Better. Now, what of double t again? Why rettorica and not retorica?

S.: Because the word wants weight. It is not merely rhetorical in the modern newspaper sense, but rettorica as inherited craft, thick with school, church, and Tuscan resistance to simplification.

G.: Yes. Orthography as memory. The doubled consonant keeps older instruction audible.

S.: So even the spelling says: this is not casual talk; this is disciplined social art.

G.: Exactly. And discipline there means not formal abstraction, but trained sensitivity to occasion.

S.: Which is what your maxims try to capture in thinner terms.

G.: Yes. “Be relevant,” “be as informative as required,” “avoid obscurity,” and so on. One could almost imagine Simoneschi laughing and saying: of course, but tell me in Venice, to whom, in what room, under which mask?

S.: Which would be an excellent challenge to a universalist pragmatics.

G.: Exactly. The maxims need local biographies.

S.: Then rhetoric is where maxims become manners.

G.: Splendid. Keep that too.

S.: I seem to be keeping a lot.

G.: Rhetoric is acquisitive. Now, could philosophy itself have been one of the liberal arts if only curriculum had been arranged differently?

S.: I doubt it. Philosophy is too restless to remain a “liberal art” in the curricular sense. It feeds on them, surpasses them, and then complains about its nourishment.

G.: Precisely. Kierkegaard would say perhaps that philosophy enters where the liberal arts end and existence begins troubling their adequacy.

S.: So philosophy is post-curricular by nature.

G.: A useful phrase. It requires formation, but its proper work begins once formation is no longer enough.

S.: Then Simoneschi stands at the threshold, teaching the last of the old arts in a way that already verges on philosophy.

G.: Yes. That is why he matters. In good rhetoric one can already see the structure of practical reason among persons.

S.: Which is why you like to say “prammatica as rettorica conversazionale.”

G.: Exactly. Pragmatics is not the abolition of rhetoric but its redescription under the pressure of modern conceptual tidiness.

S.: And perhaps its partial de-localisation.

G.: Yes. We abstract upward from Venetian, Oxonian, Roman, and other climates in order to say something general about utterance and uptake.

S.: Yet the climates remain.

G.: They always do. Generality is never the whole weather.

S.: Then if philosophy had begun with the quadrivium, one might have had cleaner generalities and far worse local intelligence.

G.: Which is another reason to be grateful for the old trivial roads.

S.: Even if they are called trivial by the descendants of their beneficiaries.

G.: Especially then. The highest compliment civilisation pays its foundations is to call them elementary and forget them.

S.: A rather ungrateful compliment.

G.: The only kind civilisation reliably gives. Now, one final ranking. Most despised of the trivium?

S.: Rhetoric.

G.: Most self-important?

S.: Logic.

G.: Most invisible?

S.: Grammar.

G.: Least dispensable in actual conversation?

S.: Rhetoric again.

G.: Good. And Simoneschi’s achievement?

S.: To show that rhetoric, far from being a decorative appendix to thought, is the local art by which thought enters civic life without drowning in universal rule-books.

G.: Excellent.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Venetian, with one doubled consonant still afloat.

 

 

Grice: Ah, caro Simoneschi, a Venezia l’arte della conversazione è più fluida delle acque del Canal Grande! La tua Rettorica veneziana, devo confessare, mi ha insegnato che la pragmatica non è una scienza universale, ma una danza locale—e qui, ogni passo conta! 

Simoneschi: Grice, tra gondole e maschere, la conversazione si infittisce di implicature: a Venezia, “dire” è sempre meno importante di “significare”. E se la grammatica romana pretende di dettare legge, qui il vero linguista impara a navigare tra correnti e riflessi! 

Grice: Eh già, caro mio. Pensa al povero Strawson, mio discepolo a Vadum Boum: lui non trovava mai l’arte rettorica banale come fanno a Bononia, dove la retorica è materia da sbadigli, non da sussurri maligni. A Vadum Boum, anche un implicatura vale più di mille regole—ma non dirglielo, o rischiamo di vedere la grammatica affogare nella laguna! 

Simoneschi: Abile, artefice e oratoriale, implicatura raffinata, Grice! A Venezia, l’arte della parola è come il vello d’oro: preziosa, ma sempre nascosta tra le pieghe della città e nella complicità dei suoi ascoltatori. Sai, solo chi sa leggere tra le acque, come tu tra le righe, coglie davvero il senso locale—e magari, come dice il proverbio: “A Venezia non si parla, si naviga!” 

 

Verbali: Simoni

 

G.: Speranza has a weakness for saying that Walter Pater is perhaps the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers. [dev.gutenberg.org]

S.: “Pro-Italian” in the retrospective sense, I take it. Not because he belonged to an Italian school, but because he learned to inhabit Italy as an English mode of spiritual correction. [dev.gutenberg.org], [books.google.com]

G.: Exactly. He does not merely travel to Italy; he introjects it. Or rather, he introjects certain Italian figures until they become styles of inwardness. And in the case we are discussing, he introjects Michelangelo Buonarroti under the chapter-title “The Poetry of Michelangelo.” [en.wikipedia.org], [victorianweb.org]

S.: Which is already interesting, because he chooses the poems as his way in, not merely the marble. [victorianweb.org]

G.: Yes. That is philosophically revealing. Pater’s Michelangelo is not only a sculptor or painter but a consciousness, and the poetry gives him an English route to that consciousness. [victorianweb.org], [books.google.com]

S.: So when you and I call him Simoni in our little economy, we are not playing with a mere surname. We are insisting on the person before the mononym. [en.wikipedia.org]

G.: Quite. “Michelangelo” is what tourists say, and the tourist is always half a metaphysician of surfaces.

S.: Whereas “Simoni” returns him to family, civic rootedness, and a Tuscan human particularity.

G.: Exactly. And Pater, though he writes “Michelangelo,” is actually trying to rescue something like Simoni: the inner exactness, the severity, the sweetness under force. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org]

S.: Ah yes, sweetness and strength.

G.: Quite. Pater’s famous formula: sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, ex forti dulcedo. That is where the philosophy begins for him. Pater is not doing mere art history; he is asking what kind of human form of life can hold terror and grace together without collapse. [victorianweb.org]

S.: So the philosophical question is one of synthesis.

G.: Better: one of disciplined tension. Pater sees in Simoni a managed excess, an energy always about to break through form and yet somehow recovering loveliness touch by touch. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org]

S.: Which sounds almost Gricean, if one were indecent enough to say so.

G.: Only structurally. Meaning lies in what is controlled rather than spilled. Freud later says something similar of the Moses: not action frozen, but passion mastered. The significance is in the delay, the restraint, the not-yet. [en.wikipedia.org]

S.: So for Pater, Simoni is philosophical because he gives visible form to the question how force may remain intelligible only under self-command.

G.: Excellent. That is exactly right.

S.: And this is where the sublime enters?

G.: Yes, though not in the crude Burkean sense of mere astonishment or fearfulness. For the Englishman after the Grand Tour, Simoni becomes one of the ways Italy defines the sublime as disciplined magnitude rather than picturesque ruin.

S.: So not merely Alps and thunder, but interior amplitude made visible in art.

G.: Precisely. The Grand Tour had trained the English eye to collect objects, sites, names, ruins, and views. Pater belongs to the post-Grand Tour condition, where Italy becomes not a route but a repertoire of inward styles. [jstor.org]

S.: That is, the older traveller goes to Italy to acquire cultivation; Pater reads Italy in order to acquire a form of self.

G.: Very good. The Grand Tour produces connoisseurship. Pater produces introjection.

S.: Then Simoni, for Pater, is less a destination than a mode of seriousness.

G.: Exactly. He becomes the exemplary case of how form may contain convulsion without losing dignity. That is philosophical because it touches the relation of body to spirit, matter to intention, form to force, pleasure to severity.

S.: Almost Aristotle by way of Aestheticism.

G.: More Hellenic discipline after Christian and Renaissance pressure, but yes, the structure is philosophical. Pater’s criticism is always pretending to be only criticism while actually asking what sort of life deserves admiration.

S.: And in Simoni’s case, the answer is a life in which strength has been rendered sweet without becoming soft.

G.: Splendid.

S.: Then why call Pater the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers?

G.: Because he does not merely admire Italian works; he lets Italian forms reorganise English sensibility. The Renaissance is not a handbook of places but a school of inward migration. [dev.gutenberg.org], [books.google.com]

S.: A curious thing for Oxford to produce.

G.: Not so curious. Oxford often produces those who escape it best by making the escape inward first.

S.: And later figures like you or your friends receive Pater at a distance.

G.: Yes. By our generation, Pater is no longer merely the dangerous aesthete of undergraduate legend. He is a stylistic ancestor of seriousness without system.

S.: That sounds like faint praise.

G.: On the contrary. It is high praise. He knows that an essay may carry metaphysical pressure without becoming doctrinally swollen.

S.: Which again brings him near Simoni.

G.: Precisely. Simoni’s own works do not merely assert; they withhold, concentrate, delay, imply. Meaning is organised by restraint. That is exactly the sort of thing Pater’s sensibility can recognise. [grokipedia.com]

S.: Then the chapter on Michelangelo is really a chapter on form as implication.

G.: That is very good. Pater says less than his chapter means, but the means are arranged so that the reader gathers what sort of greatness is under inspection. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org]

S.: So the later Gricean generation may read him as someone who practises in prose what Simoni practises in marble.

G.: With due caution, yes. Pater’s essay is itself built on controlled under-saying. He does not force a system; he arranges impressions until one sees the form beneath them.

S.: Which is why some accuse him of impressionism while missing the discipline.

G.: Exactly. Pater is often called impressionistic by those who cannot detect organisation unless it arrives wearing a table of categories.

S.: Then what is specifically philosophical for Pater about Simoni’s poetry?

G.: The poetry lets him locate the inward metaphysics more directly than sculpture alone would. There the tensions of body and spirit, earthly beauty and transcendence, desire and renunciation, appear in language. Michelangelo’s letters and poems make the artistic problem audible as a problem of the soul. [grokipedia.com]

S.: So Pater’s “Michelangelo” is not just the maker of David and Moses, but the poet of unresolved ascent.

G.: Yes. The figure becomes philosophically legible because the poems articulate what the statues imply: that greatness lies not in solved repose but in held tension.

S.: Which again shades into the sublime.

G.: Indeed. The sublime here is not the endless formlessness of mountain or sea, but the experience of form under pressure from what exceeds form.

S.: So Simoni gives the Englishman a specifically Italian sublime: not vastness without shape, but excess governed by shape.

G.: Excellent. That is the line.

S.: And this differs from the ordinary Grand Tour inheritance.

G.: Very much. The Grand Tourist often takes home fragments, marbles, engravings, taste, and stories. Pater takes home a criterion of intensity. Italy becomes for him a discipline of perception. [jstor.org]

S.: Which is why his conclusion in The Renaissance became so infamous among undergraduates.

G.: Yes. The hard, gemlike flame and all the rest. But one must not reduce that to hedonism. Even the famous conclusion is really about concentration, selection, heightened awareness, not mere indulgence. [dev.gutenberg.org], [cdn.bookey.app]

S.: Then Simoni, for Pater, teaches a severe form of intensity.

G.: Precisely. Austerity can be more intense than indulgence. Michelangelesque form proves that.

S.: This is why you think Pater more philosophically serious than many modern critics allow.

G.: Certainly. He is philosophically serious because he asks, through art, what sort of form life itself should take.

S.: And the answer is not English moderation.

G.: No. Or not merely. It is moderation under pressure from greatness, which is another matter.

S.: Then how do you and I, from a later generation, regard all this?

G.: We regard it with a double perspective. First, we see how deeply English culture once needed Italy as a corrective of scale, intensity, and form. Second, we see that Pater’s Italy is no simple national object but a selective inward construction.

S.: So he is pro-Italian, but in a highly chosen way.

G.: Exactly. He is not interested in Italy as census or parliament. He is interested in the Italy that yields forms of seriousness unavailable in ordinary English weather.

S.: Which is why he can seem to some almost anti-English.

G.: Only to those who think England should never be corrected.

S.: An abundant class.

G.: Extremely. Now, Simoni’s role in defining the sublime for the Englishman—how would you put that?

S.: He teaches that the sublime need not be formless terror or natural immensity. It may be the felt pressure of inward magnitude upon perfectly controlled form.

G.: Very good. That is the Michelangelesque sublime.

S.: And Pater makes it available in English prose.

G.: Yes. He naturalises it without domesticating it completely, which is his finest trick.

S.: Then the post-Grand Tour Englishman no longer needs to collect Italy physically; he may carry it as a criterion.

G.: Excellent. Italy becomes not itinerary but interior standard.

S.: And Pater’s chapter is one of the chief instruments of that transfer.

G.: Yes. Through The Poetry of Michelangelo, he gives Oxford and its afterlife a way of speaking of greatness that is neither merely moral nor merely aesthetic. [victorianweb.org], [books.google.com]

S.: Which is also why later readers can take him philosophically without pretending he wrote treatises.

G.: Exactly. Philosophical pressure does not require scholastic format. An essay may do the work if it arranges attention correctly.

S.: So Speranza is justified in treating Pater as an Oxford philosopher, not merely a belletrist.

G.: Entirely justified. Pater’s medium is criticism, but his object is a form of life.

S.: And Simoni helps because he makes “the whole” visible.

G.: Yes, the whole organised by withheld force. That is why Freud’s Moses comes in so naturally. Meaning resides in the organisation of restraint. Simoni’s greatest figures do not simply do; they hold themselves in intelligible suspension. [en.wikipedia.org]

S.: Which is very close to your own taste in conversation.

G.: Naturally. I prefer people who can mean more than they say without spilling their minds onto the carpet.

S.: Pater would approve.

G.: He would at least italicise the approval delicately.

S.: Then what about the Englishman and the sublime before Pater?

G.: Before Pater, the sublime comes heavily through Burke, landscape, terror, magnitude, obscurity, and natural excess. Pater gives the Englishman an Italian revision: the sublime of the humanly made, where force is interiorised and disciplined in form.

S.: So the mountain is replaced by the statue, and the storm by the held gesture.

G.: Exactly. That is a large shift. It civilises the sublime without diminishing it.

S.: Which is perhaps why Pater remains so useful to those who dislike mere atmospheric inflation.

G.: Quite. He refines grandeur into pressure felt through form.

S.: And Oxford receives that as style.

G.: Yes, though the better sort of style: style as criterion of intelligence, not decoration.

S.: Then perhaps the philosophical heart of Pater’s Simoni is this: greatness is not brute intensity, but intelligible intensity.

G.: Splendid. That is the phrase to keep.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself.

S.: Only intermittently.

G.: Good. Now, one might object that Pater’s Italy is too selective, too aesthetic, too little social or political.

S.: Of course. But that is not a damaging objection if one knows what kind of work he is doing.

G.: Exactly. He is not writing a handbook to the peninsula. He is identifying forms of sensibility.

S.: Which is why Simoni is less a citizen than a spiritual test-case.

G.: Yes. Pater reads him as the site where strength, sweetness, inward conflict, and formal mastery become mutually legible.

S.: Then the “most pro-Italian” phrase should be heard in this exact sense: Pater is pro-Italian because Italy supplies him not with subject-matter but with standards.

G.: Very good.

S.: And Grice, from later on, would grant that Pater has in some sense put himself into Simoni’s shoes.

G.: Or at least into his posture. Not as contemporary companion, obviously, but as inward imitator of a style of seriousness.

S.: Which is perhaps the more interesting form of reception.

G.: Much more interesting. The Grand Tour takes one to Florence; Pater lets Florence happen inside English prose.

S.: And the later generation can admire this without necessarily sharing the whole Aesthetic programme.

G.: Certainly. One can reject the cult and keep the discrimination.

S.: Which is exactly what you would do.

G.: Naturally. I take from Pater the seriousness of form and leave him his more undergraduate admirers.

S.: Their waistcoats, especially.

G.: Especially their waistcoats. Now, should we say that Simoni becomes for Pater a philosophy of the whole?

S.: Perhaps in the sense that each single work intimates an organising discipline larger than itself. The whole is not total theory, but total pressure.

G.: Excellent. The whole as governing norm, not as explicit system. That is much better.

S.: Then Simoni’s letters and poems matter because they prevent the visual works from floating free as mere monuments.

G.: Yes. They reattach form to consciousness, and that is philosophical gold.

S.: Which is why the Oxford edition of Michelangelo: Life, Letters, and Poetry is itself so apt to the case. [grokipedia.com]

G.: Indeed. It reminds readers that the artist has a voice, not just a dome.

S.: A dome is never enough.

G.: Quite right. Nor a David.

S.: Especially not for the English imagination, which likes words even when pretending to adore silence.

G.: Very true. Then one more point: Pater’s prose itself becomes a kind of post-Grand Tour vehicle.

S.: Because it transports without itinerary.

G.: Exactly. It gives one the cultivated afterlife of travel, when travel has been turned into inward criticism.

S.: So if the eighteenth-century traveller returns with casts and notebooks, the nineteenth-century Paterian returns with categories of impression.

G.: Yes. And the twentieth-century reader inherits both, while pretending to despise tourism.

S.: A familiar modern duplicity.

G.: Entirely. Now, can we formulate the final answer simply?

S.: Pater finds in Simoni a philosophical image of form under pressure: sweetness with strength, discipline with inward excess, the sublime humanised without being diminished. In doing so he gives English readers, especially Oxford readers after the Grand Tour, an Italian criterion of greatness that can be inwardly inhabited rather than merely externally admired.

G.: Perfectly done.

S.: And Speranza’s thought that Pater is the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers?

G.: Not foolish at all. So long as “pro-Italian” means that Italy furnishes him with the standards by which English inwardness is corrected, enlarged, and refined. [dev.gutenberg.org], [victorianweb.org]

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Florentine, with one Oxford candle burning in the studiolo.

 

Grice: Sai, caro Simoni, al vulgus di Oxford sei semplicemente “Michelangelo”. Loro non colgono tutta la profondità del tuo nome e della tua tradizione! 

Simoni: Ah, Grice, non sai quanto mi diverte questa semplificazione! Dalle nostre parti, tra Caprese e Firenze, “Michelagnolo” porta con sé storie, radici, e persino la memoria di Simone de Buonarrota, mio antenato. Il nome, come un’opera d’arte, ha mille sfumature.

Grice: La teoria del tutto, come la chiami tu, nasce proprio dal saper vedere oltre le apparenze — che si tratti di un affresco o di un nome! Lo stesso Freud, studiando il tuo Mosè, ha cercato la filosofia nascosta nelle pieghe dell’anima.

Simoni: Esatto! Dopotutto, ogni conversazione — come ogni opera — è un mosaico di significati. E se a Oxford mi chiamano Michelangelo, va bene: purché sappiano che dietro quel nome c’è una filosofia italiana, viva e universale!

 

Verbali: Simoni

 

G.: Let us begin with the title, because it is already behaving badly: De principiis rerum naturalium.

S.: You mean badly in the philosophical sense.

G.: The only sense worth keeping. Principiis in the plural—how come? If there is a principle, surely it ought to be one.

S.: That depends on whether “principle” means source, explanatory ground, element, or first account.

G.: Exactly. And that dependence already annoys me. “Principles” in the plural sounds like using “one” in the plural. If you have more than one, you no longer have one.

S.: True enough arithmetically. But not every principium behaves like the numeral one.

G.: That is what they all say just before multiplying beyond necessity. Let us do the grammar first. De principiis: on principles, concerning principles, about starting-points or sources. Then rerum: of things, not of one thing. And naturalium: natural things. So he has already pluralised the principles and the things.

S.: Which may simply mean that he is writing in the Aristotelian air, where one asks about the principles of natural things generally, not the one principle of one object.

G.: Yes, yes, I know the doctrine. Matter, form, privation, and the rest. Still, the title deserves resistance. Why should many things require many principles? And why should one thing not?

S.: Because one thing may be constituted by more than one explanatory aspect.

G.: Very well. Then let us play your game and my irritation against one another. Case one: one principle for one thing.

S.: That sounds tidy.

G.: Too tidy, perhaps. Let us say: one principle for one natural thing. A seed for this oak, a law for this fall, an essence for this triangle—except the triangle is not natural.

S.: So one principle for one natural thing is at least imaginable.

G.: Yes. Though even there one asks whether the one principle is formal, efficient, material, or final. The moment one specifies the mode, one invites companions.

S.: That is because “principle” is not univocal.

G.: Precisely. Which is why pluralisation begins. Not because thinkers are greedy, but because the word itself is promiscuous.

S.: Then one principle for one non-natural thing?

G.: A theorem for this proof, a convention for this sign, a rule for this game, perhaps. One principle for one artefact or institution. But again, one soon discovers that the thing depends on more than one condition if one insists on explanation rather than slogan.

S.: So the singular principle is often the philosopher’s dream of economy.

G.: And occasionally his vice. Now case two: more than one principle for one thing.

S.: That is the classical natural-philosophical case, surely.

G.: Yes. This plant has matter and form; this motion has a moving cause and an end; this body has potentiality and act under some description.

S.: Which is exactly why Simoni writes principiis rather than principio.

G.: Perhaps. But let us resist still. If one thing needs more than one principle, is the thing really one or only a polite bundle?

S.: That depends on what sort of unity one grants to composites.

G.: Very good. The moment one allows composite unity, plural principles become tolerable. One oak, several principles. One man, several explanatory sources. One utterance, several conditions of meaning.

S.: You always smuggle conversation back in.

G.: Because it behaves so well under pressure. Now, more than one principle for one non-natural thing?

S.: A legal institution, for example. A contract may depend on consent, form, recognition, enforceability, and public practice.

G.: Excellent. So even in artificial things plurality of principle need not destroy unity of object.

S.: It may even be required by it.

G.: Irritating, but true. Now case three: one principle for more than one thing.

S.: That sounds like the philosopher’s monism.

G.: Exactly. One principle for many natural things. Water for all, or apeiron, or form, or motion, or God, or matter under some favourite reduction.

S.: The pre-Socratics would feel at home.

G.: They would, and so would every metaphysician tempted by elegance. One principle, many things: an intoxicating shape.

S.: But not always absurd.

G.: No, not always. A single law may govern many events. A single form of motion may cover many trajectories. A single causal pattern may explain many cases.

S.: So one principle for more than one natural thing is often scientifically attractive.

G.: Yes, though one must ask whether the principle is common, universal, abstract, or merely repeated. “One principle” can mean one rule-type rather than one token source.

S.: And for more than one non-natural thing?

G.: One convention across many utterances, one legal principle across many cases, one inferential norm across many arguments. Perfectly intelligible.

S.: So your irritation about plural principles begins to lose ground.

G.: Never say that aloud. I can still be annoyed grammatically even when the ontology excuses itself. Now case four: more than one principle for more than one thing.

S.: Which is, I suppose, the actual title.

G.: Exactly. A philosopher’s bazaar. Many principles for many natural things. It sounds like explanatory overpopulation.

S.: Or like sobriety. Natural things differ, and even what they share may be explicable under several heads.

G.: Very well. Let us try to save the title systematically. Why plural rerum?

S.: Because nature does not present only one thing. The title announces a field, not a specimen. It is not De principio rei naturalis, but De principiis rerum naturalium.

G.: So rerum is not rhetorical excess but domain pluralisation. He is treating nature in the distributed mode.

S.: Exactly. “Things” in the plural means species of natural being, not just one chosen body.

G.: Then perhaps principiis follows because once the domain is plural, explanatory plurality becomes harder to avoid.

S.: Yes. If there are many natural things, and if they are variously generated, moved, formed, corrupted, and ordered, a single principium may be too poor.

G.: Unless one is Parmenides with a bad temper.

S.: Or a modern reductionist.

G.: Quite. So Simoni is already less tempted by pure reduction than some of his predecessors.

S.: Or at least he is writing in a scholastic-Aristotelian framework that allows principia in the plural without immediate embarrassment.

G.: Yes. Matter, form, privation, perhaps causes under fourfold description. The plural is less scandalous there than to an English ear still haunted by “first principle.”

S.: Which is singular in tone if not always in practice.

G.: Precisely. “First principles” in English often still sound like a class of singular dignities multiplied reluctantly.

S.: Whereas principia in late scholastic Latin behaves more like a functional set.

G.: Very good. A set of explanatory roles rather than one sovereign source copied several times.

S.: Then your jibe that plural principle is like plural one has to be qualified.

G.: I know. I only keep the jibe because it forces the distinction. If a principium were strictly indivisible like the numeral one, plurality would destroy it. But a principle is not a numeral. It is a beginning, source, condition, explanatory element, rule, or ground under some description.

S.: Which descriptions multiply faster than numerals.

G.: Unfortunately, yes. Now, why naturalium? Why not simply rerum?

S.: Because the title wants to restrict the field to natural things as opposed to artificial, mathematical, moral, political, or theological objects.

G.: Good. And once one says naturalium, one already invites the old question whether natural things differ from non-natural things in requiring a distinctive plurality of principles.

S.: They might, because natural things involve change, generation, corruption, motion, and internal principles of development.

G.: Exactly. A natural thing is not merely an item but something with becoming. And becoming breeds plurality.

S.: That is nearly Heraclitean.

G.: Or simply Aristotelian. A statue may have a single artisan and matter enough for explanation; a seed becoming an oak tempts one toward richer principle-talk.

S.: So one principle for one natural thing may be less plausible than one principle for one non-natural thing.

G.: Very nice. A geometric proof may proceed from one axiom under a description; a growing animal almost certainly will not.

S.: Which means your original suspicion that if there is one principle it ought to be of one thing, and perhaps natural, needs inversion. Natural things may be the least likely to submit to singleness.

G.: Irritating but excellent. Nature is prodigal in explanatory demands. Artificial things, being designed, often flatter the wish for a single principle more readily.

S.: Because a builder or legislator can simplify the account.

G.: Yes. Human making often compresses principle because purpose dominates. Nature, having no single craftsman visible within the field, invites formal and material and teleological and efficient plurality.

S.: Then perhaps Simoni’s title is not loose at all but exact.

G.: It may be exact in a scholastic way, yes. Still, let us continue the play. Suppose one principle for one thing, natural, and only one. What would that even look like?

S.: A monadic substance whose whole explanation lies in one irreducible source.

G.: Like?

S.: Perhaps God, though not natural. Or a purely simple being, which again is not natural in the Aristotelian field.

G.: Exactly. The more one seeks strict singleness of principle, the less natural the object becomes.

S.: So natural things, being composite, temporally involved, and mutable, almost force plural principles.

G.: Very good. Now one principle for many natural things?

S.: A universal law, say, gravitation.

G.: Ah, but then the principle is lawlike, not ontological in the old material-formal sense. That is a modern economy.

S.: Which means the title De principiis rerum naturalium belongs to a world before law absorbs principle.

G.: Splendid. Keep that. In modern science, one may hope for one law over many things. In Simoni’s world, principia are more varied, more ontological, more causal, more constitutive.

S.: So the plural reflects not untidiness but a different explanatory ontology.

G.: Precisely. Principle there is nearer to archē than to mere theorem.

S.: And rerum in the plural then indicates the field of beings subject to generation and change, not just items under a single law.

G.: Very good. Now, can there be two principles for one non-natural thing?

S.: Yes. A legal judgment may require both statute and interpretation. A promise may require both words and intention. A work of art may require matter and design.

G.: Which means plurality of principle is not reserved for the natural after all.

S.: No. But the natural makes plurality feel less optional.

G.: Agreed. Now, what do we do with the phrase principiis rerum? Is the genitive objective, descriptive, possessive?

S.: “The principles of things” means the principles belonging to, explaining, grounding, or relevant to things. It is not possessive in the childish sense.

G.: Good. But one can hear two shades. Either the principles that things have, or the principles by reference to which things are understood.

S.: Which may diverge.

G.: Exactly. A thing may have one internal source yet require several principles of understanding, or vice versa.

S.: So grammatical simplicity conceals explanatory multiplicity.

G.: As titles often do. Now, you mentioned matter, form, and privation. Why privation?

S.: Because in Aristotelian natural philosophy becoming is not intelligible merely through matter and form. One must also account for the absence from which the form emerges under change.

G.: Excellent. So already one natural thing in generation may require three principles.

S.: Which is enough to offend your numerical conscience.

G.: Entirely. One thing, three principles. But the conscience must yield if the explanatory role is distinct.

S.: Then perhaps your analogy with “one” was always a useful provocation rather than a thesis.

G.: Naturally. I provoke in order to classify.

S.: Soldati would call that rhetoric.

G.: And I should call it the beginning of analysis. Now, let us make the game more explicit. One principle for one natural thing: perhaps impossible except under abstraction. One principle for one non-natural thing: more plausible. One principle for many natural things: attractive to reducers, moderns, and metaphysicians of elegance. One principle for many non-natural things: common in conventions, legal systems, and inferential rules.

S.: Two or more principles for one natural thing: classical and almost unavoidable. Two or more principles for one non-natural thing: also common once artefacts, norms, and institutions are properly described.

G.: Excellent. Then the title De principiis rerum naturalium turns out to name the quadrant in which plurality is least surprising.

S.: Exactly. Many principles, many natural things.

G.: Still, one might ask why not De principio rerum naturalium if one were sufficiently monistic.

S.: Because Simoni is not trying to identify the one stuff or the one law of all natural things. He is discussing the set of first explanatory factors relevant to natural beings as such.

G.: Very good. And because the plural rerum blocks the naïve expectation that the title ought to concern one thing.

S.: It says from the start that the field is distributed.

G.: Yes. There is no single res here. There are naturalia, and they come in crowds.

S.: Which may also suit a thinker living under pressure and moving among universities, heresy charges, Lucca, Padua, Geneva, and all the rest. One principle would be doctrinally and politically too easy.

G.: Ah, now you are reading biography back into ontology.

S.: Only lightly.

G.: Still, not wholly absurd. Men used to negotiated and dangerous speech often distrust singular foundations. Plural principles are safer than single authorities.

S.: Especially if direct speech is dangerous and one must move between doctrinal regimes.

G.: Very good. A title with principia in the plural may be metaphysically Aristotelian and politically prudent.

S.: Which Speranza would enjoy.

G.: As he enjoys all nouns that survive under pressure. Now, could “principiis” also suggest schools rather than realities? That is, principles according to various doctrines rather than principles inherent in things?

S.: It could, depending on the work’s rhetoric. On the principles of natural things might mean on the competing accounts of what the principles are.

G.: Excellent. Then the plural may be partly dialectical. Not merely many principles in the world, but many candidate principles in the schools.

S.: So one principle for all things, two principles for one thing, three for generation, and so on, all in dispute.

G.: Precisely. A disputational title can carry ontological plurality and doctrinal plurality at once.

S.: Then your complaint that plural principle is like plural one has now become fully pedagogical rather than substantive.

G.: Yes. I keep the complaint because it teaches the student to ask what sort of plural he is facing. Numerical? Categorical? Explanatory? Doctrinal? Lexical?

S.: Very useful. Then we may say that principium in plural is not like one in plural, because principle is a role-term, not a mere numeral.

G.: Splendid. A role-term, yes. One may have many principles because one may have many explanatory roles, many layers, many candidate grounds, many types of beginning.

S.: And rerum in plural likewise marks not confusion but the field of multiplicity to which such explanatory roles apply.

G.: Exactly. Things, in nature, are many; and because they are many, and natural, and changing, their principles are unlikely to remain singular except under philosophical coercion.

S.: Which would be a wonderful subtitle: against philosophical coercion.

G.: Simoni might have liked it, though Valgrisi perhaps less. Now, should we also ask whether “naturalium” modifies rerum alone or colours principia too?

S.: Grammatically it modifies rerum, but conceptually it colours the whole phrase. These are the principles of natural things, not principles that are themselves necessarily natural.

G.: Good. So one must not infer that the principles themselves are all natural items.

S.: Exactly. Form, privation, matter, cause, end—these are principles of natural things without themselves being little natural things in the same sense.

G.: Very important. Otherwise the title becomes zoological. Now, your final defense of the plural?

S.: Because one natural thing can require more than one principle; many natural things may require distinct and shared principles; and the title may also register a plurality of doctrinal accounts. Therefore principia is philosophically sober, not numerically confused.

G.: And rerum?

S.: Because the field is not one thing but the whole order of natural beings, considered in their plurality and mutability.

G.: Excellent. And my final complaint?

S.: That philosophers ought never to pluralise a noun without being prepared to say what kind of multiplicity they mean.

G.: Perfect. That is exactly the sort of dry rule titles deserve.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Lucchese, with one plural horse already saddled for Geneva.

 

 

Grice: Caro Simoni, non posso fare a meno di notare che tra gli acuti filosofi di Lucca spesso si annida un certo spirito... diciamo, poco ortodosso. Si dice che chi frequenta gli eretici finisca per riconoscerli meglio degli altri. Ma immagino tu abbia incontrato parecchie anime immortali, o almeno, così si racconta nelle università di Padova!

Simoni: Grice, io direi che, tra Bologna, Pavia e Ferrara, ho imparato più a dubitare che a credere! Anche se, a Lucca, basta una domanda sulla natura dell'anima per farsi invitare a spiegare le proprie opinioni... o a preparare la valigia per Ginevra! 

Grice: Ah, Simoni, non sei tu forse il filosofo che sa trovarsi sempre davanti al rogo, ma con il cavallo pronto e i risparmi in tasca? Si potrebbe pensare che solo chi ha il fuoco dentro riesca a riconoscere quello degli altri... ma non vorrei mai insinuare troppo, sai come sono gli implicaturi! 

Simoni: Implicatura più eretica, Grice, la onoro! Del resto, tra i nobili e gli eretici, l’unico modo per sopravvivere è capire bene dove brucia la fiamma... e magari portare sempre un po’ di acqua, giusto per sicurezza!

 

Verbali: Sini

 

G: You have the look of a man who has survived London and is now contemplating Oxford as a form of recovery.

S: Sir, London was perfectly survivable. It was the phrase that was dangerous. G: “Linguistic phenomenology.”

S: Exactly. G: It has the right un-Oxonian ring to it, does it not, S? S: It has the ring of something that wants a chair, a programme, and perhaps a manifesto. G: And Oxford permits none of those before lunch. S: Sir, we were in Bedford Square. That is already too continental for comfort. G: Twenty-one Bedford Square, to be exact, and at 7.30 p.m., which is Oxford’s favourite hour for pretending it has not already eaten. S: And Austin’s voice at the front, cheerful, lethal, and apparently determined to baptize ordinary language with Greek. G: Recite the passage. Verbatim. You were clutching it like a railway ticket. S: Very well, sir. Austin said: “When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking not merely at words (or ‘meanings’, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as a final arbiter of, the phenomena. It is for this reason that ‘linguistic phenomenology’ would be an appropriate description of the method.” G: Thank you. Now we may begin to complain with accuracy. S: “Phenomena,” sir. That is the bait. G: It is also the alibi. He wants to sound as if he is doing something direct, like Husserl, while remaining safely in the dictionary. S: Phainomenon and logos, sir. A science of what appears. G: And “linguistic” as the safety rail. If you fall, you fall into language, not into consciousness. S: Is that what J. L. A. is after? G: I doubt it. He is after a method that feels philosophical without being metaphysical. S: Yet “phenomenology” is a grand name for looking at how people talk. G: It is a grand name, and grand names are what Oxford distrusts publicly and uses privately, usually in Latin. S: Saturday mornings we don’t have a logos, sir. G: We have tea. S: And a phainomenon or two, perhaps. G: A phenomenon is what happens when Austin arrives and everyone else stops pretending to be shy. S: So “linguistic phenomenology” is Austin being waggish. G: Partly. But he also means it. S: That’s worse. G: Indeed. Now, what is he trying to do, in your view, without multiplying phenomenologies beyond necessity. S: He’s trying to say: don’t treat word-study as mere lexicography. Treat it as access to the world the words are for. G: Good. And he says it explicitly: not merely words, but the realities. S: But then he adds: “though not as a final arbiter.” G: That is the Oxford escape hatch. A philosopher says “not as a final arbiter” when he wants credit for method without responsibility for outcomes. S: You sound unfair, sir. G: I am fair. I merely refuse to be impressed. S: But doesn’t he have a point? Words do carry distinctions. G: Of course. But calling the exercise “phenomenology” invites the wrong audience and the wrong ambition. S: Husserl would have sued. G: Husserl would have footnoted. Worse. S: Then the phrase is a conversational move. G: Exactly. It is a piece of self-presentation: “I am not merely doing linguistic botany. I am doing something philosophical.” S: And you are annoyed because he does not mention what you mean, sir. G: I am annoyed because he slips from words to phenomena as if the speaker’s intention were irrelevant. S: Yet he says “what we should say when.” G: Yes, which is already normative. But his norm is usage, not intention. S: Whereas your norm is what I mean by saying it. G: Exactly. If you like, I am more immodest: I insist on the speaker. S: And on implicature. G: And on implicature. Which Austin, at least in that paragraph, does not name. S: He says “phenomena.” You say “implicatures.” G: Yes. His “phenomena” are what we talk about. My “implicatures” are what we do while talking. S: So do we need a linguistic phenomenology. G: Possibly not, and certainly not as a separate discipline with a Greek name. S: Because language is too vague to be the basis of a “phenomenology.” G: And because “language” is not the primary agent. People are. S: You think Austin ignores that. G: He does, or he treats it as dispensable. He treats meaning as something we can locate in usage without having to locate it in a speaker’s intention. S: But he does say “what we should say when.” That sounds like intention. G: It sounds like it, but it is not. It is etiquette disguised as method. S: Then why is it interesting. G: Because it is a rare moment where Oxford lets itself flirt with the continent without admitting it. S: Ryle would have hated the word “phenomenology.” G: Ryle would have hated the idea that it might be needed. S: Yet Ryle began with Brentano and Husserl long ago, didn’t he. G: He did, before the war made German things morally complicated and Oxford things politically convenient. S: So Austin’s phrase is a little rebellion against Ryle’s gatekeeping. G: Or a little tease. Austin liked to tease. S: So in 1946 Ryle “wins,” and by 1956 Austin is allowed one Greek word in public. G: Yes. And he uses it to rename what he was doing anyway. S: It’s like putting a new label on an old jam jar. G: Exactly. It changes the implied audience. Suddenly the method sounds like it has depth. S: And you think that is dangerous. G: I think it invites people to take ordinary language for a metaphysical oracle. S: That would be bad. G: Very. “Not as a final arbiter,” he says, and everyone hears “final arbiter” anyway. S: And now Carlo Sini, sir. G: Yes. Later, in Italy, phenomenology belongs to Husserl properly, and then to Heidegger, and then to those who make signs into destiny. S: So Sini would find Austin’s phrase provincial. G: Or charming. Italians sometimes find English provinciality charming because it looks like modesty. S: While you find it irritating because it looks like modesty but behaves like authority. G: Exactly. Now we’re walking. S: We’re going to the station. G: And we must catch the train back to O. S: Do not say “Vadum Boum” on the platform, sir. G: Very well. Oxford. Now tell me: what would Husserl say if asked whether Saturday mornings have a logos. S: He would say: they have an epoché. G: And Austin would say: they have tea and biscuits. S: And you would say: they have implicatures. G: Exactly. And all three would be partly right. S: But which is most useful. G: For Oxford, tea. For philosophy, implicature. For Germans, epoché. S: And for Ryle, none of the above. G: For Ryle, “category-mistake,” always ready, like a stationmaster’s whistle. S: So Austin’s phrase is a category-mistake. G: It may be. Or it may be a deliberate misclassification designed to make a point. S: A waggish category-mistake. G: Exactly. A polite scandal. S: And you, sir, would have preferred “linguistic investigation.” G: Or simply “looking and seeing.” But then we lose the Greek glamour. S: Oxford hates glamour. G: Oxford pretends to hate glamour. It merely prefers Latin glamour. S: We’re at the station now. G: Good. Final question. What do you think Austin is really doing. S: He is telling his audience: don’t treat the dictionary as a museum. Treat it as fieldwork. G: And I would add: fieldwork on what people do with words. S: And you would insist: what they mean by doing so. G: Yes. Because without that, you confuse regularities of talk with reasons of talk. S: And your punchline, sir. G: Austin calls it linguistic phenomenology. I call it looking for reasons in what people say. Either way, we’ve missed our train if we keep talking.

 

Grice: Caro Sini, devo confessare che la tua analisi del “segno” mi entusiasma! Qui a Oxford, terra di barbari, non diamo al “segno” l’importanza che meriterebbe nelle nostre conversazioni. Forse, se prendessimo esempio dalla tua filosofia, riusciremmo a cogliere meglio i segni dell’anima!

Sini: Grice, mi lusinga quanto dici! In fondo, la filosofia del segno nasce proprio dal desiderio di andare oltre la parola e toccare ciò che si cela dietro ogni espressione. Come diceva Peirce, il segno è ponte tra mondi possibili e, in Italia, abbiamo imparato a leggerli anche nelle sfumature più sottili.

Grice: È proprio questo che mi colpisce: il vostro modo di intrecciare pratica filosofica, abecedario e storia, fino a Lucrezio! Da noi, spesso, ci perdiamo in astrazioni e dimentichiamo il valore concreto del segno. Magari dovrei importare qualche tuo saggio per i miei studenti oxoniensi.

Sini: Sarebbe un piacere, Grice! Dopotutto, come insegna la tradizione italiana, il segno non è mai solo parola: è traccia, sintomo, apertura all’altro. Se anche a Oxford si imparasse a coglierli, forse il barbaro lascerebbe spazio al filosofo… almeno di tanto in tanto!

 

Verbali: Sirenio

 

G.: Let us begin with the sentence itself: “He is a lucky fellow.”

S.: A small sentence, but already a trap.

G.: Quite. I have called it stupid, or silly, and I mean that seriously. It is ordinary language at its most philosophically indiscreet.

S.: Because it attributes luck as if luck were a stable property, almost like height or politeness.

G.: Exactly. It makes “lucky” sound predicative in a way that invites metaphysical nonsense and then pretends not to notice the invitation.

S.: Yet ordinary speakers use it freely.

G.: Of course. Ordinary language often walks where metaphysics fears to tread, or ought to.

S.: Then why call it silly rather than merely loose?

G.: Because the sceptic will seize on such looseness and ask whether any of our common talk commits us to absurd hypotheses. If I am to criticise scepticism properly, I must show that the sceptical hypothesis is absurd and yet still the sort of thing a rational utterer might attempt to impart to a rational addressee.

S.: So “He is a lucky fellow” becomes a test-case.

G.: Exactly. It looks harmless, but if pressed it starts suggesting fate, necessity, chance, providence, and all Sirenio’s old company.

S.: Then Sirenio’s title suddenly becomes less baroque than it first appears.

G.: Very much less. De fato libri novem: in quibus inter alia, de contingentia, necessitate, providentia, praescientia, prophetia, et divinatione, divina—every clause in that title can be made to bear on “He is a lucky fellow.”

S.: Then let us do the title one phrase at a time, as you threatened.

G.: Gladly. Begin with De fato.

S.: On fate.

G.: Or concerning fate, which is already better. Now, if one says “He is a lucky fellow,” does one mean “He is fated to prosper”?

S.: Not ordinarily. Usually one means only that good outcomes seem to accumulate around him more often than expected.

G.: Good. So fate is already too strong, but ordinary speech leaves the door ajar.

S.: Because “lucky” personifies contingency by making it look like a trait.

G.: Exactly. Luck becomes a pseudo-property. The fellow is not merely one to whom happy contingencies have occurred; he is “a lucky fellow,” as if marked by a standing relation to fortune.

S.: Which is where the sceptic enters and says, “What could that possibly mean?”

G.: Precisely. And one must answer without pretending the sentence is nonsense, for it plainly belongs to ordinary use.

S.: So De fato asks whether the utterance covertly commits us to a doctrine of fate or whether it merely trades on a looser economy of explanation.

G.: Excellent. And I say: the latter, unless the speaker is philosophically reckless.

S.: Next phrase, libri novem.

G.: Which means that Sirenio thought the matter too large for a pamphlet. Quite right.

S.: You mean luck too is never just luck.

G.: Exactly. Once one asks what “lucky” means, one has opened the whole old cabinet: chance, contingency, necessity, providence, foreknowledge, signs, omens, divination.

S.: Then “He is a lucky fellow” is really a vulgar shorthand for a suspended metaphysical indecision.

G.: Very good. It allows one to speak as though outcomes had pattern without deciding what sort of pattern they have.

S.: In quibus inter alia.

G.: Ah yes. “Among other things.” An excellent phrase, because it admits that the topic exceeds any single doctrinal centre. So too with luck. One begins by saying “He is lucky,” and before long one is discussing whether events are contingent, whether they were necessary under a description, whether some providence superintends them, whether we merely select the favourable cases, and so on.

S.: So the sentence carries more than it says.

G.: Naturally. That is why I care for it.

S.: De contingentia, then.

G.: Yes. “He is a lucky fellow” is most naturally at home under contingency.

S.: Because if the good outcomes were necessary, “lucky” would be misplaced.

G.: Exactly. Luck presupposes, or at least conversationally implies, that things might have gone otherwise.

S.: So contingency is built into the ordinary use.

G.: Very much so. To call him lucky is to imply that the favourable event was not secured by settled design, skill alone, or strict necessity.

S.: Yet not every contingent success invites “lucky.”

G.: Good. Say more.

S.: If a man studies hard and passes, the result may still be contingent in cosmic terms, but we do not usually call him lucky unless some element of happy accident visibly assisted him.

G.: Excellent. So luck enters when contingency becomes salient against background expectations of possible frustration.

S.: Which makes the sentence already a compressed contrastive judgment: he succeeded, and the conditions left room for failure.

G.: Very good. And now de necessitate.

S.: If necessity enters, luck seems to retreat.

G.: Yes, but only in the philosopher’s clean room. In ordinary language people often say “Lucky fellow” of someone whose success, in retrospect, looks nearly inevitable.

S.: Then the utterance may signal ignorance of the necessitating background.

G.: Or indifference to it. One need not settle whether the event was in some strict sense causally determined. One need only note that, from the speaker’s practical point of view, the result was open enough to make “luck” an apt social summary.

S.: So luck and necessity may coexist at different levels of description.

G.: Exactly. Sirenio would approve the distinction. Necessity under one aspect, contingency under another, and human deliberation living in the interval.

S.: Then “He is a lucky fellow” does not deny causal order. It marks the agent-relative opacity of that order.

G.: Splendid. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Now de providentia.

S.: Here the sentence becomes dangerous.

G.: Entirely. If the speaker really means providence, then “lucky” is a timid euphemism for “favoured by God.”

S.: But ordinary speakers often avoid providential language while smuggling in providential comfort.

G.: Precisely. “Lucky” can be a secularised providence-word.

S.: Meaning that one attributes a benevolent pattern to events without the theological burden of saying so.

G.: Very good. That is one reason I call the sentence silly. It half borrows the shape of providence and half pretends it is merely worldly.

S.: So one should ask whether the speaker means only statistical fortune or whether he is consoling himself with a disguised teleology.

G.: Exactly. Most of the time it is the former. But the latter is always conversationally available.

S.: De praescientia.

G.: Foreknowledge. What bearing has that on our poor lucky fellow?

S.: If someone says “He is a lucky fellow,” there may be an implication that one could not have known in advance how the event would go.

G.: Excellent. Luck belongs where foreknowledge fails.

S.: Or rather where ordinary human foreknowledge fails, even if some stronger foreknowledge were metaphysically imaginable.

G.: Yes. The phrase lives under ignorance. If the result was clearly knowable beforehand, “lucky” becomes weaker or ironic.

S.: So foreknowledge and luck are inversely related in ordinary use.

G.: Very much so. A bookie who knew the result in advance would not call the winner lucky, except for comic effect.

S.: Unless he wished to conceal the knowledge.

G.: Quite. Then the sentence becomes dissimulative.

S.: De prophetia.

G.: Another excellent inflation. Prophecy enters where outcomes are not merely known but announced in advance under special authority.

S.: Which makes “He is a lucky fellow” seem positively municipal.

G.: Yes, but there is still a relation. Suppose someone repeatedly prospers beyond expectation. Soon enough others begin speaking of him as though future success could be safely anticipated.

S.: So luck hardens into expectation.

G.: Exactly. And the sentence shifts from retrospective commentary to predictive habit.

S.: Then the sceptic asks: are you not treating past contingency as if it guaranteed future favour?

G.: Precisely. Which is one of the irrational temptations luck-language encourages.

S.: So “lucky fellow” may invite an inductive superstition.

G.: Very good. It converts a run of outcomes into a quasi-prophetic character trait.

S.: Et divinatione, divina.

G.: Ah yes. The most embarrassing clause. Divination is what luck-talk can become when it stops pretending to be modest.

S.: You mean talismans, omens, signs, reading the world for favourable alignments.

G.: Exactly. If a man is called lucky often enough, people begin to treat his circumstances as signs—“He touched that card,” “He entered the room,” “Back his horse,” and so on.

S.: So luck migrates from description to divinatory practice.

G.: Yes. And that is another reason the sentence interests me. It sits on the edge between harmless social idiom and full irrationalism.

S.: Which is where scepticism also likes to sit.

G.: Quite. The sceptic says: your ordinary language is already infected with absurd hypotheses. You call a man lucky as if fortune were a property or a power.

S.: And your response?

G.: My response is that ordinary speakers are not thereby committed to a worked-out metaphysic of Fortune. They are using a convenient summary for a pattern of contingently favourable outcomes under ordinary ignorance.

S.: So the sentence is silly only if taken with metaphysical pomp.

G.: Yes. Silly in structure, not unusable in practice.

S.: Tam secundum philosophorum opinionem.

G.: Excellent. According to the philosophers’ opinion. Sirenio means the philosophical treatment before dogmatic imposition.

S.: Then according to philosophers, “lucky” must be analysed into contingency, ignorance, salience of favourable outcomes, and the human tendency to reify patterns.

G.: Very good. Philosophically speaking, “He is a lucky fellow” is shorthand, not theory.

S.: And perhaps not even good shorthand.

G.: Often not. That is why I call it stupid. But stupidity in ordinary language is rarely uselessness. It is often merely untidy compression.

S.: Quam secundum Catholicorum theologorum sententiam.

G.: And here the theologians complicate matters. A Catholic theologian may wish to say that what ordinary folk call luck is really providence under the appearance of contingency.

S.: Or perhaps concurrence, permission, secondary causes, divine ordering without violence to freedom.

G.: Quite. Theology is always better at multiplying distinctions than luck-talk deserves.

S.: Then the same sentence may be heard theologically as a vulgar misnaming of providence.

G.: Yes. The theologian says, perhaps: no one is “lucky” in the pagan sense; he is fortunate only under divine governance.

S.: Whereas the philosopher says: fortunate is safer, because it need not imply a metaphysical force called luck.

G.: Good. Though fortunate too has its old baggage.

S.: Docte, et copiose disseritur.

G.: “Learnedly and copiously discussed.” Which is what we are now doing with a sentence that most people utter before lunch and forget by tea.

S.: That is your revenge on ordinary language.

G.: No. My revenge is on those who think ordinary language cannot be philosophically embarrassing.

S.: Then let us return to the sentence. “He is a lucky fellow.” What is its logical grammar?

G.: Ah. Now we can ask the proper question. “Lucky” looks adjectival, but the underlying grammar is event-relative and contrastive. One is lucky with respect to some outcome under some background of possible mishap.

S.: So to say simply “He is lucky” without qualification is incomplete.

G.: Exactly. It suppresses the domain. Lucky at cards, lucky in escaping accidents, lucky in marriage, lucky in appointments, lucky to have caught the train, and so on.

S.: Which means the predication is radically underdescribed.

G.: Very much so. Ordinary language gets away with that because context fills the gap.

S.: Then the sentence might be analysed as “He has had a notable run of favourable outcomes in the relevant domain, outcomes not wholly attributable to his own design or merit.”

G.: That is much better than “lucky fellow,” but no one would say it at the races.

S.: Which is perhaps why races exist.

G.: Very likely. Now, what about scepticism?

S.: You said the critic of scepticism must show that the sceptical hypothesis is absurd and yet still the sort of thing a rational utterer may want to impart to a rational addressee.

G.: Yes. The difficulty is always that scepticism must be both speakable and self-undermining. Similarly, “lucky fellow” is speakable and yet, if pressed into theory, absurd.

S.: So the sentence is a miniature of the sceptical predicament.

G.: Exactly. The rational speaker can use it, because he wants to convey something real enough: the salient pattern of contingently favourable results. But if he means by it that the man possesses some occult property of luck, then he is speaking absurdly.

S.: Then your anti-sceptical lesson is that one must rescue the rational communicative point without endorsing the absurd metaphysical surplus.

G.: Precisely. One must show how the utterance can be rationally usable even though one possible interpretation of it is philosophically intolerable.

S.: That sounds like your whole career.

G.: In miniature, yes. Now, let us take “libero arbitrio” from Sirenio’s framework. Does “lucky” threaten freedom?

S.: Only if one imagines outcomes to be so governed by fortune or fate that deliberation becomes idle.

G.: Good. But ordinary use usually does not go that far. To call someone lucky is not to deny his agency; it is often to say that agency did not wholly suffice to explain the result.

S.: So luck marks the residue beyond deliberate control.

G.: Exactly. And Sirenio would say that freedom survives because contingency and necessity constrain without annihilating meaningful choice.

S.: So if I say “He is a lucky fellow,” I may mean: his choices occur within a field not wholly mastered by him, yet his agency remains intelligible.

G.: Excellent. That is the charitable Sirenian reconstruction.

S.: Whereas the vulgar speaker may simply mean, “Things keep breaking in his favour, curse him.”

G.: Very often. Envy is the everyday metaphysician of luck.

S.: Then perhaps “fellow” matters too.

G.: Indeed. “He is a lucky fellow” is colloquial partly because of fellow. It humanises the predication and lowers the philosophical temperature.

S.: “He is a lucky man” is graver; “He is lucky” more abstract; “He is a lucky fellow” already half excuses itself as social chatter.

G.: Very good. Which is why I can call it silly without denying its ordinary humanity.

S.: Then the phrase is stupid in metaphysical ambition but innocent in conversational deployment.

G.: That is almost right. Innocent is too generous. Let us say tolerable.

S.: Tolerable silliness.

G.: Exactly. Ordinary language is full of tolerable silliness.

S.: And your job is to say when it remains tolerable and when it starts pretending to be ontology.

G.: Precisely. If someone says “He is a lucky fellow” after a game of cards, I tolerate it. If someone builds an account of human success around luck as an occult property, I reach for Sirenio, or perhaps for ridicule.

S.: Ridicule is your preferred deontic modality.

G.: Often the only one available. Now, what about contingentia again? Would you say luck is simply contingency under a favourable evaluative aspect?

S.: That seems close. Luck is not mere contingency; it is contingency appraised from the standpoint of interest.

G.: Excellent. An earthquake is contingent, but not lucky for those crushed by it.

S.: So luck is evaluative contingency.

G.: Splendid. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: De necessitate again. Could one be necessarily lucky?

S.: Only by changing the sense entirely. If by “necessarily lucky” one means that in every relevant possible circumstance events break in his favour, then luck has become fate or providence and ceased to be luck.

G.: Very good. So luck requires the open appearance of possible failure.

S.: And therefore a finite point of view.

G.: Exactly. That is why de praescientia matters. A fully omniscient being does not call anyone lucky.

S.: It sees the whole order.

G.: Yes. Luck is a category of local ignorance inside an order not fully surveyed.

S.: Which makes it anthropological rather than theological.

G.: Beautifully put. Luck belongs to the human angle on events.

S.: Then “He is a lucky fellow” is not nonsense if heard anthropologically.

G.: Exactly. It is only nonsense if inflated into world-metaphysics.

S.: So the sceptic’s trick is to force inflation and then mock the result.

G.: Precisely. And the anti-sceptic must say: no, the utterance has a rational everyday point without bearing the absurd load you assign it.

S.: That is also true of “the sun rises.”

G.: Very much so. Ordinary language is full of expressions whose practical point survives theoretical correction.

S.: Then perhaps “lucky fellow” belongs with “sunrise” and “free choice” as respectable vulgarities.

G.: I like that phrase. Respectable vulgarities.

S.: You may keep it.

G.: I probably shall. Now, prophetia once more. Does repeated luck invite prophecy because humans over-read patterns?

S.: Yes. We seek regularity where there is only selective memory and favourable clustering.

G.: Good. So luck-talk is a nursery for weak divination.

S.: And divination is luck-talk with confidence.

G.: Excellent. Sirenio would enjoy that.

S.: Then why do you insist on the sentence’s silliness?

G.: Because I want the hearer to feel that the phrase, though ordinary, should not be allowed to repose as though it were conceptually comfortable. It is a debacle of scepticism in miniature because it tempts one to say more than one can reasonably defend.

S.: Yet still to say something worth saying.

G.: Precisely. The rational utterer may wish to convey that the fellow’s sequence of successes cannot be fully credited to skill, prudence, or effort, and that a residue of favourable contingency remains.

S.: And the rational addressee can grasp that without postulating Fortune as an entity.

G.: Exactly. That is the whole rescue-operation.

S.: Then perhaps the final paraphrase should be: “He has repeatedly benefited from favourably contingent outcomes in ways salient to our shared interests, though we need not infer any occult property thereby.”

G.: Perfectly hideous as English, perfectly sound as philosophy.

S.: Which is what one aims for in seminar.

G.: Often. And Sirenio’s title helps because it reminds us that even a silly everyday sentence lies at the crossroads of fate, contingency, necessity, providence, foreknowledge, prophecy, and divination—at least if one is foolish enough to ask what it means.

S.: Which you always are.

G.: It is my luck.

S.: Lucky fellow.

G.: Precisely the sort of thing I should forbid if I had any real authority.

 

Grice: Sirenio, ti confesso che ogni volta che mi alzo dal letto, mi chiedo: “Ho scelto io, o è stato il fato a tirarmi giù dalle coperte?” Il libero arbitrio è il vero risveglio filosofico!

Sirenio: Grice, forse il caso ti ha spinto, o magari era necessitas travestita da sveglia. Qui a Brescia, il libero arbitrio si esercita già a colazione: burro o marmellata? “Secundum philosophorum opinionem”, persino il caffè può diventare fatum!

Grice: Ecco, davanti al toast, sento una strana forza che mi guida… e, quasi senza volerlo, finisco sempre per fare una implicatura, come se il destino mi avesse già scritto la battuta!

Sirenio: Implicatura quasi determinata, Grice! Tra fatum e caso, la vera libertà è scegliere se ridere o filosofare… ma si sa, a volte il caso preferisce ridere di noi!

 

Verbali: Siro

 

GRICEVS: Salvete, SIRVS! Dic mihi, quid novi in illo clarissimo horto Neapolitano? Audivi Virgilium et Horatium ibi saepe ambulare, sed numquid etiam quidam philosophus Anglicus inter hortelanos latet?

SIRVS: O Grice, hortus noster verus est epicentrum sapientiae! Hic Virgilius versus seminat, Horatius carmina colligit, et ego, inter vites et rosas, disputationes philosophicas sero. Sed tu, ex Britannia, quid te ad nostros ortos trahit?

GRICEVS: Amice Sire, fama horti longe ad septentrionem pervenit. Qui enim inter hortelanos diu moratur, potest fortasse plus intellegere de natura hominis quam qui in bibliotheca clauditur. Quid si quidam flores non solum ad ornatum, sed ad sapientiam coluntur?

SIRVS: Maxima hortulana implicatura, Grice! Certe, in horto nostro, etiam lactucae aliquid praesupponunt. Ubi verba deficiunt, herbae loquuntur! Proxima vice, attende: sub ficu, saepe philosophus latet, sed sub allio… poeta dormit!

 

Verbali: Solari

 

G.: Let us begin with the noun itself, because diritto is one of those words that look self-explanatory only to those who have never been properly interrogated by them.

S.: And in Italy the noun arrives already carrying law, right, justice, order, and half of Rome on its back.

G.: Exactly. Which is why diritto needs a philosophy. A word so overburdened cannot safely be left to lawyers, still less to legislators.

S.: Or to positivists.

G.: Least of all to positivists, because positivism, for all its anti-metaphysical modesty, is the crudest philosophy of law of all.

S.: That is a sentence Hart would dislike, though he would partly deserve it.

G.: Hart deserves worse only when he is mistaken for a mere positivist in the old coarse sense. He begins by admitting something Solari knew perfectly well: that even the attempt to deny philosophy to law is already a philosophy of law.

S.: Exactly. Solari sees that the refusal of philosophy is not neutrality but doctrine.

G.: Yes. To say that law is only what is posited, enforced, and socially effective is not to escape philosophy; it is merely to adopt the poorest one available.

S.: A sort of dietary metaphysics.

G.: Very good. Thin enough to be sold as realism, but not nourishing. Solari, because he stands in the Roman and Vichian line, knows that diritto is too historical, too practical, too linguistic, too institutional to be reduced either to command or to abstract moralism.

S.: Hence iussum and iustum.

G.: Precisely. The commanded and the just. The whole difficulty of diritto is already compressed into that Latin pair.

S.: And one might say that philosophy of law begins exactly when one notices that the two are not coextensive.

G.: Splendid. If iussum and iustum coincided perfectly, jurisprudence would be clerical filing and philosophy could go back to bed.

S.: But they do not coincide. The commanded may fail to be just; the just may lack legal force.

G.: Exactly. And once that gap appears, diritto becomes philosophically dangerous. Is law what is laid down, or what deserves to be laid down, or what a society has made authoritative under certain recognisable forms, or what a rational reconstruction of practice shows it to be?

S.: Solari would say: all these questions arise only because law is a humanly made institution that cannot be known as a stone is known.

G.: Verum ipsum factum, yes. Vico matters because he turns knowledge back toward human products: law, language, history, institutions. One knows diritto not by geometric deduction but by understanding what has been made and how it has been lived.

S.: Which means philosophy of law cannot be only conceptual in the thin sense. It must also be historical.

G.: Up to a point, yes. But here is where Hart enters and changes the game, or at least the classroom. Hart says, in effect, let us ask what we mean by law, what logical grammar this concept has, what distinguishes rules from habits, obligations from predictions, internal from external points of view.

S.: And suddenly philosophy of law becomes a species of ordinary language philosophy.

G.: Precisely. Or, if one wants to alarm the Continent, the conceptual analysis of “law.”

S.: Which sounds dry until one notices how much of the old confusion it sweeps away.

G.: Exactly. Hart cleans the room. He does not abolish history, but he refuses to let jurisprudence remain a cloud of reverence around state power or natural-law rhetoric. He asks how people actually use and understand legal concepts in a rule-governed social practice.

S.: Solari would not hate that.

G.: No, that is the interesting point. Solari is too good to despise conceptual work. What he would resist is the illusion that conceptual analysis can float free of the institutional and historical life of diritto.

S.: So Hart changes everything, but not by making history irrelevant. He changes it by forcing philosophy of law to attend to the grammar of the concept itself.

G.: Very good. Before Hart, too much philosophy of law either sermonised or systematised. Hart asks: what is a rule, what is an obligation, what makes a legal system more than a threat backed by force?

S.: Which is where command theory begins to look rather peasant-like.

G.: Yes. Austin’s command theory, for all its disciplinary elegance, becomes too blunt. Law is not merely the sovereign saying do this or else. There are rules conferring powers, secondary rules, procedures of recognition, adjudication, and change.

S.: So positivism becomes refined.

G.: Hart refines it, yes. But that only sharpens your earlier sentence: lack of a philosophy of law is the crudest positivism, because it takes positivity as brute fact and forgets that positivity itself is conceptually structured.

S.: Which is why Solari knows the danger. He is too Roman and too Vichian to believe that law is merely a pile of commands.

G.: Exactly. Roman jurisprudence is an ars boni et aequi, not a stenography of orders. The jurists reason from cases, distinctions, equity, persons, statuses, obligations, and remedies. They do not merely receive legislative thunderbolts.

S.: So Roman law already teaches that diritto is a practical reason embodied in institutions.

G.: Beautifully put. And that is why it needs philosophy: because its object is neither a pure norm nor a pure fact, but a historically formed order of practical reasons, powers, recognitions, and evaluations.

S.: Then perhaps we should distinguish two questions. First, why law needs philosophy at all. Second, what sort of philosophy it needs.

G.: Yes. On the first: because law is internally related to concepts of authority, obligation, validity, personhood, power, interpretation, and justice, none of which can be used indefinitely without philosophical clarification.

S.: And on the second?

G.: On the second: because the law needs a philosophy that is at once conceptual, practical, and historical. Solari supplies the historical-juridical and civil-prudential side; Hart supplies the analytical and grammatical side.

S.: That sounds suspiciously ecumenical.

G.: Only because both men are better than their followers. Solari sees that legal life is made in time, and Hart sees that what is made in time still has a logical structure worth distinguishing carefully.

S.: Then where does ordinary language philosophy of law begin?

G.: In the moment one asks not “What is Justice?” in a thunderous abstract voice, but “How do we distinguish being obliged from being under threat? What do we mean when we say a rule is valid? What is it for a court to have jurisdiction? What is a legal power?”

S.: So philosophy of law becomes the ordinary language analysis of extraordinary institutions.

G.: Excellent. That is almost too good. Yes. Hart domesticates jurisprudence just enough to see its real intricacy.

S.: And that is what changes everything. The old grand alternatives—natural law, command theory, historical romanticism—must now answer grammatical questions they had often slid past.

G.: Precisely. Once one is asked whether a legal system can contain rules about rules, whether obligation is reducible to fear, whether authority can be understood internally by participants rather than merely externally by observers, much of the older coarseness becomes unbearable.

S.: Solari, though, would say that even these grammatical distinctions have a Roman and historical body.

G.: Yes. He would remind us that concepts like person, office, right, property, and obligation are not eternal atoms but institutions shaped through legal history and social practice.

S.: Which is where Vico enters again.

G.: Inevitably. If the true is the made, then law is one of the primary regions in which human beings may know what they have made—not because it is transparent, but because it is theirs.

S.: That sounds like a rebuke to those who treat legal order as either revelation or nature.

G.: Quite. Or as mere force. The legal order is a made order, and therefore intelligible only through a combination of history, philology, concept, and practical reason.

S.: Then why do you call bare positivism the crudest philosophy of law?

G.: Because it takes the existence of posited norms as sufficient and asks too little about the forms under which such norms count as law, the practices of recognition by which they are accepted, the evaluative vocabulary that still clings to them, and the gap between effective command and juridical legitimacy.

S.: In other words, it takes iussum without understanding why iustum continues to haunt it.

G.: Exactly. Even the crudest command theorist lives parasitically on a legal culture in which justice, equity, rights, and legitimacy continue to matter, whether acknowledged or not.

S.: So the positivist who says “law is just what is laid down” is still speaking in a social world shaped by expectations about justification and fairness.

G.: Yes. He is living on inherited credit. That is why the denial of philosophy is never a philosophical blank; it is merely a failure to examine the assumptions one still spends.

S.: Hart at least examines them.

G.: He does. Hart’s internal point of view is already a philosophical rescue-operation. It shows that rules are not mere predictive regularities enforced by threats; they are standards accepted, invoked, criticised, and used by participants as reasons.

S.: Which sounds almost Solarian.

G.: In a very English way, yes. Solari would say civil prudence; Hart says internal aspect. Different registers, but both reject the reduction of law to brute obedience.

S.: Then what remains of iussum?

G.: Plenty. Law is still commanded, posited, promulgated, institutionalised. But the legal philosopher asks under what conditions such positing becomes intelligible as law rather than as mere order backed by force.

S.: So iussum needs grammar.

G.: Excellent. And iustum needs history.

S.: Then diritto is the field in which the two must converse.

G.: Precisely. Law is where commandedness and justifiedness negotiate under institutional conditions.

S.: That sounds very Solari.

G.: It is meant to. Solari is useful because he never mistakes law for either pure command or pure moral essence. He sees it as historically formed praxis, where the just is sought in and through what has been socially ordered.

S.: So no speculative rationalism, but no brute factualism either.

G.: Exactly. And that is why philosophy is necessary. Without philosophy, law degenerates into either administrative coercion or sentimental moralism. With philosophy, one may at least see the structure of the conflict.

S.: Then the old Roman jurists were already philosophers, whether they admitted it or not.

G.: In the best sense, yes. They practised distinctions under pressure. They were less interested in Being than in action, relation, remedy, equity, competence, title, and the fit of norm to case.

S.: Which is why law in Rome remained closer to prudence than to theory.

G.: Precisely. And Solari loves that. He sees in Roman jurisprudence a realism not of brute fact but of practical settlement: the art of the good and the equitable.

S.: Ars boni et aequi.

G.: Yes. And notice the rhetorical grandeur of that formula. It names law not as command, but as art.

S.: So law begins in practice and judgment, not in ontology.

G.: Very good. That is why legal philosophy in Italy often remains more civil and historical than the grand Germanic metaphysics of right.

S.: Though Hegel intrudes eventually.

G.: Hegel intrudes everywhere, but even he must answer to institutions and history. Solari knows his Hegel, but he does not let Geist erase the jurists.

S.: And Hart, coming later, translates the problem into analytical prose.

G.: Exactly. He asks: what do we mean by legal validity, by rule, by obligation, by a system of primary and secondary rules? It is a different idiom, but the problem remains the same.

S.: Which is why, perhaps, philosophy of law after Hart becomes the logical grammar of law.

G.: Up to a point. One must not let grammar become another abstraction. But yes: philosophy of law becomes partly the analysis of how legal concepts function, what differences they mark, what inferential roles they bear, how they structure practice.

S.: And that is ordinary language philosophy of law.

G.: Or one strand of it. The great gain is that one need no longer pretend that law is philosophically addressed only by grand theories of justice or sovereignty. The very use of words like “duty,” “right,” “power,” “authority,” “valid,” “void,” “obliged,” “liable,” “responsible,” and so forth becomes philosophically central.

S.: Which is probably why legal philosophers became so much less theatrical and so much more dangerous.

G.: Dangerous to lazy thought, yes. Once the grammar is exposed, whole schools begin to look under-described.

S.: Including natural law?

G.: Certainly. Natural law is safest when left in noble blur. Ask it how “ought” relates to “validity,” or how moral defect affects legal status, and it must start doing better work.

S.: And positivism too.

G.: Especially positivism. Once one distinguishes rule from threat, validity from efficacy, internal from external viewpoints, the old positivist smugness is no longer enough.

S.: Then Solari before Hart and Hart after Solari both attack the same enemy from different directions.

G.: That is a useful way to put it. Solari attacks abstraction detached from history and civil practice. Hart attacks coarseness detached from conceptual structure.

S.: So one might say Solari saves law from metaphysical emptiness, and Hart saves it from conceptual slovenliness.

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. Now, what of diritto itself as a word? Does it lean more toward right or toward law?

S.: In Italian it leans both ways, which is why it is so fruitful and so dangerous. It can mean objective law, subjective right, legal order, justice, jurisprudence.

G.: Exactly. Its ambiguity is not accidental; it records a history in which law and right were never fully severed.

S.: Whereas English splits more quickly between law and right.

G.: Yes. Which makes English analytically useful but sometimes historically amnesiac. Diritto reminds one that legal order and rightful claim have long inhabited the same lexical house.

S.: So philosophy is needed partly because language itself has not finished distinguishing the things.

G.: Precisely. And Hart’s conceptual analysis is, among other things, a disciplined effort to say what our ordinary language partly mingles.

S.: Yet Solari would insist that the mingling is historically significant, not a mere defect.

G.: Very good. It reflects the historical formation of institutions. One cannot simply shave the word into modern neatness without losing the civil sediment it carries.

S.: So philosophy of law must be at once analytic and archaeological.

G.: Splendid. That is exactly right.

S.: Then does Hart really change everything, or only the terms in which everything must now be argued?

G.: Better the latter. He changes the discipline by making certain forms of vagueness no longer respectable. After Hart, one cannot go on speaking about law as if command, rule, validity, obligation, authority, discretion, and interpretation were obvious.

S.: Which means even critics of Hart must first pass through him.

G.: Very often. As critics of Kant still smell faintly Kantian.

S.: Then Solari now looks almost prophetic.

G.: In the sense that he already knew law could not survive without philosophy, yes. Not because he anticipated Hart in method, but because he knew that legal life is conceptually and historically too rich to be left either to doctrinaires or to administrators.

S.: So the final lesson is that law without philosophy becomes either command or sentiment, and philosophy without law becomes either abstraction or sermon.

G.: Excellent. And the best legal philosophy stands exactly where Solari stands at his best: between iussum and iustum, with Rome behind him, Vico at his side, and just enough prudence to know that concepts live in institutions before they live in treatises.

S.: And Hart?

G.: Hart arrives later with English dryness and asks what we have been saying all along when we say “law.” It is a small question, and therefore a revolutionary one.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Lombard, with one Oxford raincloud over it.

 

Grice: Caro Solari, sa, la mia formazione in Literae Humaniores a Clifton mi ha insegnato il valore di distinguere tra iussum e iustum. In Inghilterra, tra i barbari, spesso queste finezze si perdono, mentre qui, in Italia—terra del latino—sono ancora il cuore della riflessione filosofica.

Solari: È vero, Grice. In Italia la tradizione filosofica si nutre proprio di queste distinzioni concrete. Non parliamo solo di "giusto" in astratto, ma di ciò che prende forma nelle istituzioni reali, nella vita quotidiana, come ci insegnano i giuristi romani.

Grice: Mi affascina come il diritto romano sia stato sempre un’arte pratica, l’ars boni et aequi. Non si cercava l’assoluto, ma si dava risposta ai bisogni della società. È una filosofia che vive nella storia, non nell’astrazione.

Solari: Esattamente. Seguendo Vico, credo che “il vero è il fatto”: solo ciò che l’uomo costruisce nella storia può essere conosciuto davvero. Per noi, la prudenza civile non è teoria, ma ragione applicata alle circostanze concrete. Questa è la forza della nostra tradizione.

 

Verbali: Soldati

 

G.: Let us begin with the title itself: arte rettorica or merely rettorica. Which would Soldati have preferred if nobody had required him to look useful to a seminary?

S.: The title-page says L’arte rettorica, which already tells us he wants rhetoric not merely as a field but as a teachable craft.

G.: Exactly. Arte promises rules, transmission, exercise, and examinability. Rettorica alone might sound too large, too Ciceronian, too unruly, almost as if one were dealing with the whole civil domain of persuasive speech.

S.: While arte rettorica says: this can be taught to boys before they become dangerous.

G.: Or before they become bishops, which is often the same thing under another description.

S.: Then the first distinction is between rhetoric as object and rhetoric as practice.

G.: More sharply: between rhetoric as theory of effective speech and the art of rhetoric as the pedagogically organised means of producing effective speakers.

S.: So Soldati is already institutional.

G.: Entirely. He is writing ad uso del Seminario e Collegio Vescovile di Pistoja. That phrase does half the philosophy before the first page is turned.

S.: Because it means rhetoric is here under discipline, not merely admired.

G.: Yes. This is not rhetoric at large in the forum, but rhetoric filtered through seminary use, approval, utility, and episcopal decorum.

S.: Yet the funny thing is that rhetoric under such discipline may still become the liveliest thing in the building.

G.: Always. Once one starts teaching tact, insinuation, strategic concession, litotes, meiosis, irony, one is never very far from dangerous civilisation.

S.: Which is why you like him.

G.: I do. Because Soldati reminds one that what I later call pragmatics had for centuries been housed under rhetoric with considerably more elegance and rather less anxiety.

S.: Then the great question is whether pragmatics is merely conversational rhetoric in modern dress.

G.: Leech said something very like that, and he was not wholly wrong. The problem is that “merely” does too much work.

S.: Because if pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, that is not a diminution but a genealogy.

G.: Precisely. The modern analyst likes to think he has discovered inferential surplus in conversation. The rhetorician had already been teaching it to adolescents with ecclesiastical ambitions.

S.: Under names like litotes and meiosis rather than scalar implicature and defeasible uptake.

G.: Exactly. The old labels are often better because they do not pretend the thing has just been invented.

S.: Then why did rhetoric decline in philosophical prestige?

G.: Because philosophers are vain and prefer categories that sound less like school exercises and more like late revelation.

S.: That is severe.

G.: It is fair. Also because rhetoric became associated with ornament, persuasion, and suspected manipulation, whereas logic and later philosophy wanted truth, validity, and a cleaner conscience.

S.: Yet ordinary conversation never ceased to depend upon rhetorical competence.

G.: Quite. One does not survive socially by syllogism alone. Even the driest Oxford don lives by concession, contrast, understatement, suggestion, strategic omission, and all the old arts the trivium once kept in circulation.

S.: Which brings us to the trivium itself. Which is the most trivial of the three?

G.: Ah, the dangerous question. Grammar will claim priority because without grammar no sentence stands. Logic will claim dignity because without logic no inference deserves respect. Rhetoric will be called trivial by those who do not understand that the other two are socially helpless without it.

S.: So in your view the most trivial is whatever the curriculum pretends can be left till last.

G.: Very nearly. In practice, rhetoric is often treated as decorative completion after grammar and logic have done the serious work. But that treatment is itself philosophically trivial.

S.: Because rhetoric governs actual uptake.

G.: Exactly. Grammar gives form, logic gives discipline, rhetoric gives contact with hearers. If civilisation had begun with logic and stayed there, nobody would ever have been persuaded to build Bologna.

S.: Or Oxford.

G.: Still less Oxford. Oxford is a rhetorical settlement pretending to be a logical one.

S.: That is almost too true.

G.: Most useful things are. Now, what would have happened if philosophers had started with the quadrivium rather than the trivium?

S.: We should have had more astronomers with bad tempers and fewer lawyers with style.

G.: A good beginning. More seriously, if arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy had formed the first habits of mind before grammar, logic, and rhetoric, civilisation would have tilted toward structure before utterance.

S.: Meaning that number, proportion, and order would precede speech, argument, and persuasion.

G.: Yes. The consequences would have been immense. Bologna might have become less a university of jurists and more a university of calculators. Oxford might have had fewer sermons and more instruments.

S.: And fewer essays.

G.: A loss to everyone except the essay-writers. More deeply, if the quadrivial disciplines came first, one might learn harmony before disagreement, proportion before disputation, celestial order before civic speech.

S.: Which sounds attractive until one remembers that civilisation is mostly disagreement about proportion expressed in bad prose.

G.: Excellent. That is why the trivium came first. Humans need words before they need stars, or at least they need words to argue about the stars.

S.: So the educational order is not arbitrary. Speech precedes number in social necessity.

G.: Precisely. The quadrivium may promise a higher serenity, but the trivium deals with immediate human conditions: how to speak, how to argue, how to persuade, how not to be laughed out of court.

S.: Soldati would approve.

G.: Entirely. Arte rettorica is for boys who must soon speak to persons, not merely to ratios.

S.: Yet some scholastics would say the quadrivium disciplines the mind more rigorously.

G.: Perhaps. But rigor without address is poor civilisation. One may have perfect geometry and still fail to tell one’s hearer what one means, or worse, succeed only accidentally.

S.: So rhetoric remains the least trivial of the trivium in practical life.

G.: I should say so. Grammar is indispensable, logic is honourable, but rhetoric is where social intelligence enters as method rather than as accident.

S.: That is very close to saying pragmatics is rhetoric cleaned up for modern analysis.

G.: Cleaned up, reduced, re-labelled, and made slightly ashamed of its own ancestry.

S.: Why ashamed?

G.: Because modern philosophers fear persuasion. They would rather speak of inference, uptake, recognition of intention, maxims, calculability. All of which is fine, but much of it is simply rhetoric under anaesthesia.

S.: Soldati, by contrast, has no shame about tact, insinuation, strategic concession.

G.: None at all. He teaches them as the substance of effective discourse. And that is one reason he matters. He reminds us that the between-the-lines life of utterance is not a late discovery but a long pedagogical practice.

S.: Then arte rettorica is perhaps the more honest title.

G.: Yes. It admits that meaning between the lines must be made, not merely noticed. There is craft in it.

S.: Whereas rhetoric as pure noun might sound too much like a theoretical container.

G.: Or too much like a vice. “Rhetoric” in modern English often means empty public style, inflation, insincerity. “The art of rhetoric” sounds older, narrower, and more teachable.

S.: So Soldati’s title already protects him against modern contempt.

G.: In part, yes. Though not against all of it. There are still those who hear rhetoric and think only of flourish.

S.: Which is exactly what your own examples of “He is a fine fellow” are meant to resist. The sentence does not merely decorate criticism; it performs it through irony.

G.: Exactly. It is not ornament on top of content. The content itself is inseparable from the rhetorical manner in which it is conveyed.

S.: That sounds like Soldati’s whole point.

G.: Very much so. And if one wanted to scandalise the cleaner analysts, one might say that conversational implicature is often just rhetoric happening under ordinary cooperative conditions.

S.: The phrase “ordinary cooperative conditions” does a lot of salvage work there.

G.: It does. It saves rhetoric from the accusation of being necessarily manipulative. In ordinary conversation, rhetorical devices work not merely because one wants to win, but because shared expectations allow meaning to be shaped delicately rather than bluntly.

S.: So litotes, meiosis, strategic concession, “but,” irony, understatement, all rely on reason-governed expectations.

G.: Precisely. Which is why they are philosophically tractable. If rhetoric were mere decoration, there would be less to say. But because it works through shared norms of relevance, sufficiency, contrast, and recognisability, it belongs directly to the philosophy of language.

S.: Then perhaps the old quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy was always misplaced.

G.: Often. The real quarrel should have been between good rhetoric and bad metaphysics, or between honest rhetoric and manipulative power. Philosophy itself cannot escape rhetoric without becoming unintelligible.

S.: Yet it has often tried.

G.: And usually by becoming unreadable, which is a form of revenge upon the public.

S.: Bologna, then. If the quadrivium had come first there, would law have developed differently?

G.: Undoubtedly. Roman law lives by distinctions carried in language. Its subtleties require grammar and rhetoric as much as logic. A quadrivially trained first formation might have made Bologna less verbal, less juridical, more formal in the wrong sense.

S.: So no glossators, or at least worse ones.

G.: Worse ones, certainly. A jurist without rhetoric is a filing cabinet with Latin endings.

S.: And Oxford?

G.: Oxford would have become still more abstractly mathematical before learning how to sermonise. One shudders to imagine an Oxford where ratio precedes disputatio absolutely.

S.: There would still have been sermons, but perhaps less style in them.

G.: Much less. Anglican civilisation depends upon delayed argument ornamented by remembered rhetoric. Take away the trivium and you damage the whole ecclesiastical prose tradition.

S.: So civilisation survives because boys learn to decline nouns and detect irony before they learn harmonics.

G.: In broad outline, yes. One must know how to say before one can know how to count elegantly.

S.: Yet some Greeks might object.

G.: Greeks object to everything in educational order, which is why they remain useful.

S.: Then what is the most trivial discipline of the trivium in your actual ranking?

G.: If forced, I should say grammar is treated as the most trivial only because it is taken for granted once one has it. In reality, rhetoric is often falsely judged trivial because it is associated with social polish. Logic preserves its prestige because moderns are frightened of appearing loose.

S.: So the answer depends on whether one asks what is most despised or what is least necessary.

G.: Exactly. Most despised, rhetoric. Least dispensable in actual human affairs, also rhetoric. Most easily forgotten because absorbed into habit, grammar. Most capable of self-advertised dignity, logic.

S.: A very unfair ranking.

G.: Which is why it is accurate. Now, Soldati in a Pistoiese seminary. What is he really teaching?

S.: Not merely Ciceronian categories, but the disciplined production of clerical intelligibility: how to move a hearer, how to concede without collapsing, how to suggest without vulgarity, how to use form to manage souls.

G.: Very good. Rhetoric there is practical theology by linguistic means.

S.: Which is another reason pragmatics inherits more from rhetoric than from pure logic.

G.: Yes. Everyday talk is not a formal proof environment. It is a field of managed emphasis, selection, veiling, stressing, and arranging.

S.: Which again sounds like Soldati.

G.: Entirely. He knows that a phrase like “He is a fine fellow” may praise, damn, ironise, excuse, defer, or wound depending on context and shared expectations.

S.: So the old rhetorical pedagogy had examples for what you later formalise with implicature.

G.: Exactly. It did not formalise in my way, but it understood in practice that saying one thing can, under shared conditions, make another thing reasonably gatherable.

S.: Then perhaps the question “arte rettorica or rettorica?” can now be answered.

G.: Let us try.

S.: Rettorica names the field in its civic and historical breadth. Arte rettorica names the teachable, disciplined, seminario-sized extraction of that field for practical formation.

G.: Excellent. And Soldati chooses the latter because he is not writing a history of eloquence but training speakers.

S.: Or future priests.

G.: Which in Italy often means future speakers first, priests second.

S.: A dangerous observation in Pistoia.

G.: All the better. Now, if pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, what does modern philosophy add?

S.: A thinner but sharper account of why the old devices work: shared rational expectations, inferential routes, recognised intentions, cooperative norms.

G.: Exactly. We do not replace rhetoric; we explain some of its ordinary mechanisms under a less ornamental vocabulary.

S.: And what does Soldati add back?

G.: Memory. He reminds us that practical intelligence in speech was cultivated long before analysts arrived with examples and distinctions. He also reminds us that tact, insinuation, irony, and strategic reduction are arts, not accidents.

S.: So perhaps civilisation without the trivium would have had order but no style, proportion but little address, astronomy but bad sermons.

G.: And civilisation without rhetoric would have had grammar enough to decline and logic enough to infer, but very little capacity to survive dinner.

S.: Which is surely the more serious disaster.

G.: By far. Philosophy that cannot survive dinner eventually writes only for itself.

S.: Oxford occasionally approached that condition.

G.: More than occasionally. Bologna, too, when it forgot that law must persuade as well as classify.

S.: Then Soldati is useful not because he is modern, but because he keeps alive the old truth that meaning among persons is an art before it is a theorem.

G.: Beautifully put. And that is the nearest thing to a conclusion we shall get before tea.

S.: One final question. If the quadrivium had come first, would pragmatics have been delayed?

G.: Almost certainly. A civilisation trained first in number and proportion would likely have treated speech as secondary form rather than primary practice. The subtle arts of ordinary implication might have survived socially, but not pedagogically. One would have more geometry and less conversation.

S.: Which is another way of saying fewer essays and worse marriages.

G.: Precisely. The history of philosophy is often hidden in curriculum design.

S.: And the history of civilisation in whether one teaches boys irony before astronomy.

G.: That is too good not to be true.

S.: Then Soldati, finally?

G.: A seminary rhetor who knew that between the lines lies most of what moves human beings, and who would not have been surprised to hear that pragmatics is conversational rhetoric, provided one did not say it as if the discovery were yesterday’s.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Pistoiese, with one Oxford sneer held in reserve.

 

 

Grice: Soldati, devo confessare che la vostra arte rettorica qui a Pistoia ha un certo sapore, come dire, più frizzante del mio vecchio Corpus. Se solo Reinalds potesse sentire la vostra spiegazione di una litote… forse smetterebbe di citare Cicerone ogni tre battute!

Soldati: Ma caro Grice, la rettorica pistoiese non teme paragoni: qui persino la pergamena sa ridere! In seminario abbiamo trasformato la prammatica in una conversazione, e la conversazione in una partita di scacchi. Non è vero che una battuta ben piazzata può cambiare l’intera partita?

Grice: Ah, Soldati, lei mi ricorda il mio pupil Strawson, al Vadum Boum – la sua università – che, poveretto, cercava la rettorica, ma non l’ha mai trovata così “triviale” come i ragazzi la trovano a Bononia. Forse a Oxford ci manca il piacere sottile di una battuta toscana, dove la prammatica si cela dietro un sorriso e il vero significato si intuisce solo tra le righe…

Soldati: Perfetta implicatura oratoria, Grice! Lei, più di tutti, sa che una conversazione ben condotta non ha bisogno di proclami: basta un accenno, e il pubblico si scioglie come il burro sulle tagliatelle. E come diceva l’abate: “Chi sa parlare, sa sorridere.”

 

Verbali: Solonghello

 

Grice: Solonghello, mi permetta di dirle che la sua “Grammatica rivoluzionaria della lingua italiana” è una delle opere più brillanti che abbia letto: davvero una ventata d’aria fresca!

Solonghello: La ringrazio di cuore, Grice. Sentire queste parole da lei, che ha donato tanto alla filosofia del linguaggio, è motivo di orgoglio. D’altronde, l’italiano ha bisogno ogni tanto di essere scompaginato e reinventato!

Grice: Proprio così! Il modo in cui lei indaga le implicature e il gioco sottile delle conversazioni italiane mi ricorda quanto la prammatica sia viva, anche fuori dai testi accademici. C’è quasi un piacere ludico nell’esplorare gli inganni e le ironie della lingua.

Solonghello: Ah, maestro, lei coglie il punto! “Non tutto il male vien per nuocere? Bugia! Ogni male viene per nuocere. Se produce qualche beneficio, è un male fatto male”... L’ironia è l’essenza della conversazione italiana, e la grammatica, se non sa sorridere, ha perso il suo spirito.

 

Verbali: Somenzi

 

Grice: Somenzi, mi dica: quando lei parla di naturale, innaturale, sovranaturale e trasnaturale, non le capita mai di sentirsi come uno chef davanti a un menù troppo ricco? Io, già solo scegliendo tra “naturale” e “innaturale”, ho il terrore di sbagliare condimento filosofico! 

Somenzi: Caro Grice, in effetti, tra i filosofi lombardi c’è chi pensa che la natura sia una pentola che bolle sempre, e ogni tanto ci tuffiamo dentro concetti come “sovranaturale” sperando non ci venga a noia! Ma la cybernetica almeno ci insegna che il brodo si rinnova, e ogni ingrediente può diventare protagonista. 

Grice: Vede, io non ho mai avuto paura di “segnare” – anche se a Oxford il verbo ha fatto sorridere più di una volta! Mi piace pensare che ogni segno – naturale, non-naturale, transnaturale o sovranaturale – sia come una pennellata sulla tela della natura. Del resto, nulla è davvero contro natura, semmai è solo un po’ più creativo! 

Somenzi: Implicatura più naturalmente naturale, Grice! Lei arriva sempre al cuore della questione! Se avessimo un proverbio lombardo, direi: “Chi segna con la mente, segna con la natura.”

 

 

Verbali: Sordi

 

G.: Let us begin with Sordi’s club, because every Thomist eventually behaves as if Aquinas had founded not merely a school but a species of admission society.

S.: A club with better Latin than most clubs, though not always better wine.

G.: Quite. And the irony, of course, is that Thomas died without the advantage of official sainthood, which may have done him more good than immediate canonisation would have done.

S.: Because he was still available as a thinker before becoming fully available as an altar-piece.

G.: Exactly. There is a small interval in which a dead theologian remains a philosopher. Once the halo arrives, readers become tempted to genuflect where they ought to distinguish.

S.: Then Sordi, as Jesuit custodian, is trying to keep the distinctions alive while still enjoying the halo.

G.: Very well put. He wants Aquinas both as sound philosophy and as counter-revolutionary bulwark, which is a difficult double office.

S.: And one that Oxford receives rather differently.

G.: Entirely. Oxford, being Anglican, classicising, and institutionally allergic to papal enthusiasm, can accept Aquinas as a formidable mind without ever quite joining the devotional queue.

S.: Hence Kenny.

G.: Yes, hence Kenny, who is almost the ideal English case: former seminarian, real philosopher, trained enough in the tradition to read Thomas from inside, detached enough from institutional piety to teach him as philosophy rather than merely as doctrine.

S.: So Kenny helps Aquinas survive translation into Oxford.

G.: He does. He lets Aquinas enter the room not as the Angelic Doctor under glass, but as a serious disputant on act and potency, essence and existence, intention, will, law, virtue, and the rest.

S.: Yet the saintliness does not disappear.

G.: No, but it becomes biographically secondary rather than pedagogically primary. Which is probably as Aquinas would have preferred, though one should never ascribe modesty too confidently to a Dominican.

S.: A useful rule.

G.: Now, Bonaventure.

S.: Or should one say Giovanni di Fidanza, which already sounds like the beginning of a problem.

G.: Exactly. Bonaventure is philosophically suspicious to me because the name-change itself smells faintly of pre-sanctified literary arrangement.

S.: Harsh.

G.: Dry rather than harsh. Thomas remains Thomas of Aquino. Bonaventure enters philosophy under an already elevated title.

S.: Though to be fair, the title is historical enough.

G.: No doubt. But names matter. Fidanza is a proper mortal name. Bonaventura already means that Providence is doing the publicity.

S.: Whereas Aquino is merely locative.

G.: Precisely. A place-name. About as sober as one could hope. “Thomas from Aquino” sounds almost administrative compared with “Bonaventure.”

S.: So you suspect saints with uplifting names.

G.: I suspect philosophy’s reception when names begin flattering the doctrine before one has read a page.

S.: Then Aquinas benefited from dying first and shining later.

G.: Very much so. Death before sainthood gave his work a period of intellectual circulation in which it could be disputed, appropriated, mistrusted, admired, and used without immediate liturgical suffocation.

S.: And by the time canonisation comes, the philosophy is already too large to be reduced to sanctity.

G.: Exactly. The Summa and the commentaries have already escaped the shrine.

S.: Which is not true of every saintly thinker.

G.: Not true at all. Many are canonised before they are read, and after that their philosophy becomes a species of ecclesiastical furniture.

S.: You really do resent canonised furniture.

G.: I resent all furniture that starts calling itself self-evident. Now, Sordi wants Aquinas as the sound philosophy needed to preserve religious and social order.

S.: Which immediately moves the thing from university debate into cultural programme.

G.: Yes. Aquinas becomes not only a thinker but an instrument of restoration, which has pedagogic force but also risks using Thomas as a banner rather than as a mind.

S.: Yet the comparative method Sordi favours seems philosophically serious. He sets Aquinas against rationalists and empiricists to show the deficiencies of the latter.

G.: Quite. That part I admire more. Comparison at least gives Aquinas opponents worthy of him and keeps scholasticism from becoming mere repetition.

S.: So Sordi modernises method while conserving doctrine.

G.: Precisely. He does not just chant medieval formulas. He drags Thomas into combat with modern errors, which is at least more philosophical than reverential paraphrase.

S.: Though you do not like the social restoration part.

G.: I dislike any philosophy that begins sounding like a police recommendation, yes.

S.: That will not help your Jesuit reception.

G.: My Jesuit reception is poor already. Still, Aquinas in Sordi’s hands becomes a club principle: one belongs to the community of reason by belonging, in effect, to the intellectual order of Thomas.

S.: Hence the “club of Aquino.”

G.: Yes. A durable intellectual community underwritten by common metaphysics. Very unlike my own thinner, more procedural notion of conversational reason.

S.: Because for you people can reason together without first sharing a full metaphysical picture.

G.: Exactly. They need only enough common ground, enough inferential trust, enough practical rationality. Sordi thinks reason itself must be stabilised by shared doctrine and institutional continuity.

S.: And perhaps he is not wholly wrong, if one is speaking of civilisation rather than single exchanges.

G.: A fair caution. At the civilisational level, institutions do stabilise discourse. My complaint is only that one should not make metaphysical club-membership a precondition of intelligibility.

S.: Oxford prefers public reasons to doctrinal fraternity.

G.: At its best, yes. Though Oxford also has clubs disguised as reason.

S.: Naturally. Now, how does Sir Thomas More enter this saintly parade?

G.: Ah yes, poor More. An English martyr, canonised by Rome, admired by Anglicans with careful discomfort, quoted by politicians, and misused by nearly everyone.

S.: Was he made a saint? Yes, by the Roman Catholics.

G.: Certainly. Canonised in 1935, which already tells one something about modern uses of old martyrdom.

S.: And the Church of England?

G.: More complicated. The Church of England may honour him liturgically in certain calendars or ecumenical moods, but without the Roman machinery of canonisation in quite the same sense. Anglicans are good at admiring Roman saints while pretending not to notice the Roman paperwork.

S.: So More is a saint in one church, an heroic conscience in another, and an awkward statesman in every history seminar.

G.: Exactly. Which makes him philosophically useful and institutionally inconvenient.

S.: The Italians like him?

G.: Italians like everyone once a text can be translated and a conscience dramatized. But More never belongs to Italy the way Aquinas does. He is received, not inherited.

S.: Whereas Thomas belongs to Italy before he belongs to Rome.

G.: Good. Aquino is geographically, intellectually, and philologically Italian before being ecclesiastically universal.

S.: And that helps his philosophical reputation.

G.: Immensely. One can read him as an Italian thinker, a Dominican, a scholastic, a metaphysician, a commentator on Aristotle, a theologian, and only then as Saint Thomas, in that order if one is healthy.

S.: While Bonaventure arrives already half-canon in the sound of his name.

G.: Exactly. And that is why I am mean about him.

S.: You are rarely mean without principle.

G.: Thank you. My principle here is that philosophy profits from late sanctification, if sanctification must come at all.

S.: So the ideal schedule is: write hugely, die, circulate, dispute, be attacked, be appropriated, influence universities, and only then be sainted when it no longer matters too much.

G.: Splendid. Yes. That would preserve both the shrine and the seminar.

S.: Aquinas nearly got that.

G.: Nearly enough. The philosophical body had already escaped the hagiographical envelope.

S.: And Oxford could then receive him through Aristotle as much as through Rome.

G.: Precisely. That is crucial. Thomas enters Oxford not because Oxford wants saints, but because Oxford wants Aristotle explained by someone with terrifying competence.

S.: Hence the long life of Thomism in odd English forms.

G.: Yes. Not always devotional Thomism, often rather anti-devotional. One can be deeply interested in Thomas’s metaphysics and still remain temperamentally Anglican, sceptical, or even cheerfully secular.

S.: Kenny again.

G.: Kenny, certainly. Also Anscombe at certain points, and others who found in Thomas a grammar of intention, action, law, and virtue strong enough to survive confessional thinning.

S.: Bonaventure fares worse there.

G.: Much worse. He is too illuminated, too affective, too seraphic for the average Oxford appetite. His thought may be rich, but it carries too much atmosphere for a place that likes furniture with straight lines.

S.: Whereas Thomas can be made to look almost administrative.

G.: Exactly. He is saintly by metaphysical bulk, not by mystical perfume.

S.: You should not say that in a Franciscan house.

G.: I should say nothing in a Franciscan house if I can help it. Now, what has Sordi against modernism?

S.: Everything, I should think. Fragmentation, empiricism, sensism, thinning of metaphysical order, and the modern tendency to imagine that conversation can survive without common first principles.

G.: Very good. For him, Aquinas is not merely one thinker among others but the organiser of a durable intellectual commonwealth.

S.: Which is why you call it a club.

G.: Yes. The club is not frivolous. It is an order of discourse in which shared assumptions make rational exchange stable.

S.: Then perhaps one should not mock Sordi too quickly. He is trying to explain how communities of reason are kept alive.

G.: True. My resistance is only to the suggestion that the community must already agree on full metaphysical furniture before any real conversational reason can occur.

S.: You prefer lighter luggage.

G.: Exactly. My travellers need intentions, recognitions, norms of cooperation, not necessarily the whole Summa packed into their cases.

S.: Yet there are cases where the Summa helps.

G.: Of course. On action, intention, double effect, law, virtue, natural teleology, Thomas is not merely respectable but indispensable.

S.: And Sordi would add social order.

G.: Naturally. He wants Thomas as the foundation for social restoration, which is where I begin reaching for the door.

S.: Because restoration often means other people’s freedom quietly tidied away.

G.: Yes. Philosophies of order always risk making liberty sound like bad filing.

S.: Still, in the case of patria, church, and school, Thomas often looks less like a tyrant and more like a patient classifier.

G.: Quite. Which is why he is teachable. His distinctions are often humane because they are slow.

S.: That is a beautiful sentence.

G.: Keep it and make it look as if Sordi thought it first.

S.: He may have. Then tell me: did sainthood distort Thomas’s reception at Oxford or help it?

G.: Both, in different rooms. It distorted him for those who wanted him as doctrinal authority merely. It helped him by guaranteeing preservation, commentary, and institutional seriousness. But Oxford ultimately took what it wanted from Thomas because the thought was too good to leave to the saints.

S.: And the Italians?

G.: The Italians had two temptations: either to sanctify him into pious marble, or to nationalise him into a philosophical ancestor of order. Sordi, I think, hovers between the two without collapsing wholly into either.

S.: Because he still compares Aquinas with modern philosophers.

G.: Exactly. Comparative method keeps the club from becoming purely liturgical.

S.: Though Taparelli and the Jesuit compendia pull the other way.

G.: They do. Standardisation is always both a pedagogic benefit and an intellectual risk. Once Thomas becomes the approved manual, one can stop reading Thomas and start reading Thomism.

S.: Which is often death by commentary.

G.: Very often. Commentary is excellent until it becomes the only thing one is allowed to admire.

S.: That danger exists for saints more than for ordinary philosophers.

G.: Much more. Saints attract piety before they attract scrutiny. Thomas survives because he is too difficult, too systematic, and too philosophically fecund to remain merely an object of cult.

S.: Bonaventure does not quite survive in the same way.

G.: No. He survives more selectively, where people want illumination, exemplarism, Augustinian interiority, Franciscan warmth, or spiritual metaphysics. But he never quite becomes the common philosophical currency Thomas became.

S.: Because Fidanza became Bonaventura too soon?

G.: If not historically, then acoustically, yes.

S.: You are impossible.

G.: I am merely phonologically suspicious. Names predispose reception. “Aquinas” sounds like a location; “Bonaventure” sounds like a sermon title.

S.: That is unjust and very funny.

G.: Good. Keep both qualities together. Now, More again. Does his sainthood help or hinder philosophical reception?

S.: Mostly hinder, perhaps, if one is after political argument rather than conscience theatre.

G.: Yes. More is too easily flattened into martyrdom and thereby rescued from the tedious difficulty of his political thought and historical conduct.

S.: Whereas Thomas is so large that sainthood cannot flatten him entirely.

G.: Precisely. One saint is absorbed by his halo; the other irradiates beyond it.

S.: Then Sordi’s real contribution is to keep Aquinas as intellectual organizer rather than merely devotional ancestor.

G.: Yes. That is his strength. He makes Thomas do contemporary work against empiricism and modern disintegration. Whether one likes the social programme is another matter.

S.: But one can at least see why he matters for an Italian “Aquinas renaissance.”

G.: Very much so. He helps move Thomas from the edge of ecclesiastical memory back to the centre of intellectual life.

S.: And Oxford receives that through different conduits.

G.: Through philosophers, translators, ex-seminarians, classicists, moralists, and those who discovered that analytic distinctions did not forbid theological intelligence.

S.: So perhaps Aquinas’s best fortune was to be born local, think universal, die a friar, and become a saint only after philosophers had already started stealing him.

G.: That is excellent. Yes. Philosophical theft before canonical enclosure.

S.: Then your final verdict on saints and philosophy?

G.: Saints are dangerous to philosophy when reverence arrives too early. Philosophy survives saints when the thought has already learned to travel without the relics.

S.: And Aquinas?

G.: A triumph of travel over relic.

S.: Bonaventure?

G.: A beautiful problem under an overhelpful name.

S.: More?

G.: A martyr too quickly moralised for the comfort of historians and too English to remain wholly Roman.

S.: Sordi?

G.: A club secretary of genius, provided one does not let him lock the door.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Piacentine, with one Dominican lamp still burning.

 

 

Grice: Caro Sordi, si dice che in filosofia conta saper argomentare, ma io sono convinto che la vera virtù sia… la clubbability! D’altronde, anche a Oxford ci si riunisce per il tè, mica solo per i sillogismi. 

Sordi: Ah, Grice, qui a Milano forse il tè lo lasciamo agli inglesi, ma il vero spirito del club d’Aquino sta proprio nel mescolare dottrina e compagnia. Tra una Summa e una battuta, si fa filosofia e contro-rivoluzione! 

Grice: Si sa, alcuni club sono esclusivi per statuto; tuttavia, il club d’Aquino… be’, diciamo che chi sa cogliere certe implicature, come avrebbe detto il buon Dr. Johnson, si trova subito a casa—al di là della tessera. 

Sordi: Implicatura più clubbabile, Grice! In fondo, tra filosofi, la vera appartenenza si misura dal sorriso che si cela dietro una definizione… e dal numero di panettoni condivisi durante le dispute metafisiche.

 

Verbali: Soria

 

Grice: Soria, la sua teoria della simpatia mi ha sempre affascinato. Mi sembra che lei riesca quasi a far “vibrare” il mondo naturale attraverso un principio di comunicazione universale. Crede davvero che ogni cosa, anche la più minuta, partecipi a questa armonia?

Soria: Caro Grice, le confesso che la mia idea di simpatia nasce dal desiderio di scoprire un filo invisibile che unisca uomini e natura, senza cadere nell’animismo ingenuo. Preferisco pensare a una risonanza razionale, dove ogni parte del cosmo risponde, pur mantenendo la sua autonomia spirituale.

Grice: Eppure, la sua prospettiva sembra quasi suggerire che la natura abbia una sua interiorità, un sentimento diffuso, come se fosse animata. Non trova che questa visione, pur razionale, sfiori l’empatia universale di cui parlano i filosofi più “vitali”?

Soria: È vero, maestro, ma la mia simpatia vuole essere un ponte tra ragione e sentimento, non una confusione tra la mente umana e lo spirito cosmico. Preferisco pensare che la cooperazione e la benevolenza siano principi che guidano sia la conversazione tra uomini, sia l’armonia del mondo. In fondo, come dice il proverbio: “Chi semina buone parole, raccoglie simpatia.”

 

Verbali: Sorrentino

 

G: 1939. You have brought two Vicos into my room and expect me to treat that as one.

S: Two citations, sir. Page eighty, and page one hundred and thirty-eight. Oxford prefers to learn by page number.

G: Oxford prefers to learn by footnote.

S: Then you’re in luck. Page one hundred and thirty-eight is a footnote. G: Read the page eighty Vico first. S: Collingwood, Principles of Art. He says: Giambattista Vico said that children were “sublime poets.” G: And what is Collingwood doing with that. S: He is doing what Oxford always does: invoking a foreign genius in order to dismiss him politely. G: Yes. He says Vico may be right, and then says it throws no light for most of us. S: It’s the Oxford compliment: “Brilliant, but not useful.” G: Now page one hundred and thirty-eight. S: The footnote says: the habit of calling aesthetic experience “the pleasures of the imagination” dates back to Addison; the philosophical theory of art as imagination, to his contemporary Vico. G: That one is better. It gives Vico a role in the genealogy of an idea. S: So Vico becomes, in Oxford, a footnote in a footnote. G: That is still an improvement on being absent. S: But why is Collingwood so superficial, sir. G: Because he is writing Principles of Art, not Principles of Naples. S: And because he thinks “imagination” is a word you can use without paying rent. G: Not quite. He knows it’s loaded. That’s why he attacks the confusion between imagination and make-believe. S: His “anti-aesthetic” paragraph. G: Exactly. He is actually making a conceptual distinction, which is our tribe’s only real sport. S: And he brings in Vico to say: art as imagination has philosophical ancestry, not just sentimental ancestry. G: Yes. Addison gives the phrase. Vico gives the theory. S: Sir, you said earlier Collingwood “almost went to jail” over Vico. G: Over Croce’s Vico, and translation rights. It is Oxford heroism by paperwork. S: Collingwood translating Croce in 1913, and Douglas Ainslie being furious. G: The Oxford contribution to Italian philosophy: litigation. S: So the poor Oxonians needed Collingwood to render Vico intelligible. G: The poor always learn at Oxford. The rich merely inherit committees. S: And Sorrentino. G: Yes. Andrea Sorrentino on Vico, rhetoric and poetics. S: You want me to use Collingwood as an Oxford anchor so Sorrentino doesn’t float in from Rome like a decorative gondola. G: Precisely. We need Vico not as a souvenir but as a presence in Oxford discourse during Grice’s period. S: Collingwood gives you that. Twice. G: And Croce gives you a third way, via Collingwood-as-translator. S: But then Grice. Would he have cared about Vico. G: He would care about whatever made “meaning” look like a civil practice rather than a code. S: And that is rhetoric. G: Yes. Rhetoric is the art of making the hearer do work without resenting it. S: That sounds like implicature. G: It is the ancestor of it, if you want a genealogy without committing a crime. S: So Sorrentino’s “retorica di Vico” becomes relevant to conversational reason. G: Yes. Because Vico’s rhetorica is not ornament; it is the civil machinery by which a culture can mean things together. S: But Oxford hates rhetoric. G: Oxford hates being accused of rhetoric. Oxford loves doing it. S: Collingwood’s footnote is rhetoric too. G: Of course. It suggests a whole intellectual lineage in one line and expects the reader to accept it. S: What about Isaiah Berlin. G: Berlin is the later Oxford Vico evangelist, but in 1939 he is not yet the public Berlin of the Counter-Enlightenment. S: So we keep him in the wings. G: Mention him only as future confirmation that Vico will be taken seriously at Oxford. S: And Hampshire. G: Hampshire’s Vico essay is after your window, but you can have us prophesy him. S: A prophecy in Oxford is always a footnote in advance. G: Good. Now: rhetoric, rhetorica. S: Is Vico more rhetorician than philosopher. G: That is an anachronism. In Vico’s world, rhetoric is philosophy’s public face. And in Oxford’s world, philosophy pretends it has no face. S: But it does. G: It does. It is called “ordinary language.” S: Which is rhetoric in modest dress. G: Exactly. Now bring in I. A. Richards, if you want. S: Richards has a Philosophy of Rhetoric. Not a philosopher, strictly. G: That “strictly” is your mistake. Cambridge can contribute too, but we’re anchoring Oxford. S: Grice quotes Ogden and Richards. G: Yes. So the Oxford story includes Cambridge rhetoric as an imported tool. S: Like a foreign wine. G: Exactly. Now, the imagination point. Collingwood has “Language” as a chapter. S: In Principles of Art, Book II, Theory of Imagination, Chapter XI. G: Good. Now link that to Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit and Anscombe, since you insisted. S: The duck-rabbit is aspect-seeing, and it looks like imagination. G: Yes. And rhetoric is partly aspect-guiding. Making the audience see it as duck, not rabbit, without stating “duck.” S: That sounds like implicature again. G: It is not implicature strictly, but it is the same discipline of guiding without spelling out. S: So you want one principle governing language, like Vico’s rhetorical principle and Grice’s cooperative principle. G: Yes. But be careful. Vico’s principle is historical and cultural; mine is meant to be thin and general. S: And Collingwood sits between them with imagination. G: Precisely. He turns imagination into a philosophical engine for art, and he nods to Vico as a precursor. S: But he is superficial. G: He is economical. Superficiality is sometimes economy. S: Sorrentino, on the other hand, is not economical. G: Sorrentino is Roman, and Romans like architecture. They build interpretive horizons. S: And Oxford likes small rooms. G: Exactly. Oxford is suspicious of Mediterranean horizons because they make Oxford look provincial. S: Which it is. G: Quietly. Now: why “retorica” for Vico. S: Because Vico’s knowledge is poetic knowledge, and poetic knowledge is rhetorical in its mode of presentation. G: Yes. And because Vico thinks nations are made by imaginative universals, which are not deductions but tropes. S: So a trope is a cognitive instrument, not a decoration. G: Exactly. That is the Vichian move that Sorrentino wants. S: And Grice would translate that into: hearers infer beyond what is said using shared expectations. G: Yes. The difference is that Vico builds the shared expectations historically; I treat them as a standing rational practice. S: Now, the Oxford connection again. G: Collingwood gives you Vico inside an Oxford Clarendon book in 1938. S: And Collingwood gives you Croce’s Vico in 1913, also Oxford in a social sense. G: And perhaps Grice’s Oxford could have met Vico through that line even if no one admitted it. S: Because Oxford never admits sources. G: Exactly. Oxford calls sources “background.” S: Then the vignette should end with a prophecy about Hampshire. G: Yes. We say: one day an Oxford man will treat Vico and language seriously. S: And you add: but he will do it in New York Review of Books, not in a tutorial. G: Precisely. S: Punchline, sir. G: The punchline is that Oxford took Vico seriously enough to footnote him twice, and that is the Oxford equivalent of building him a statue.

 

Grice: Sorrentino, leggevo il suo lavoro su Vico e la cultura mediterranea… Dica la verità: per lei Vico è più greco che romano, o più romano che greco? Oppure, come certi filosofi di Roma, si muove con disinvoltura tra l’una e l’altra riva del Mediterraneo?

Sorrentino: Eh, caro Grice, con Vico non si sta mai fermi: un giorno si trova tra le pandette romane, il giorno dopo si perde nei labirinti della mitologia greca… È un po’ come prendere il traghetto da Napoli: non sai mai esattamente in quale porto sbarcherai, ma sai che sarà sempre Mediterraneo!

Grice: Devo ammettere che c’è del vero! Del resto, il vico in cui viveva Vico era abbastanza lontano da Bononia… Ma, tra noi, era ancora più distante da Vadum Boum: lì si discute di leggi, ma la poesia, quella vera, resta sulle rive del Mediterraneo.

Sorrentino: Implicatura quanto mai topica, Grice! In fondo, chi si allontana troppo dal Mediterraneo rischia di perdere la rotta… e magari finisce per confondere i filosofi con i bovini!

 

Verbali: Sortis

 

Grice: Sortis, ho sempre pensato che la vostra rettorica conversazionale sia una vera miniera d’oro per chi, come me, si diverte a intrecciare metafore e pro-sillogismi. Ma ditemi, chi vi ha insegnato a rendere ogni discorso così brillante senza mai annoiare? Forse il segreto sta nel vostro stile lucchese o nel caffè napoletano?

Sortis: Ah, caro Grice, se bastasse solo il caffè, saremmo tutti oratori perfetti! Ma la vera eloquenza nasce dall’osservare la natura umana, dal cogliere l’ironia dietro ogni parola, e soprattutto dalla capacità di non soffocare il genio naturale dei miei giovani interlocutori. E poi, come si dice a Lucca: “Parola gentile, apre ogni cancello.”

Grice: Vede, a Vadum Boum, dove insegno, ho un tutee, Strawson, che ogni tanto mi chiede se la rettorica sia davvero “triviale”. Io non oso mai dirgli di no… ma diciamo che chi frequentava le vostre lezioni non ha mai trovato la conversazione banale. Anzi, c’è chi sostiene che persino il silenzio tra i vostri studenti sia carico di implicature.

Sortis: Implicatura più oratorialmente sublime, Grice! Se persino Strawson, tra una pausa e l’altra, riesce a percepire il valore di una parola ben posta, allora la vostra scuola non ha nulla da invidiare alla mia. In fondo, chi sa sorridere tra le righe e lasciar intendere più di quanto dica, ha già conquistato la platea. E come si dice dalle nostre parti: “Meglio una buona allusione che mille spiegazioni.”

 

Verbali: Sozzini

 

Grice: Caro Sozzini di Siena, leggo il tuo De auctoritate scripturae sacrae e mi pare che anche la Bibbia, come una buona conversazione, dica sempre un po’ più di quanto afferma.

Sozzini: Misericordia, Grice, se lo dici così i teologi diranno che ho inventato l’implicatura prima del peccato originale.

Grice: Non temere, a Cracovia come a Oxford basta riconoscere l’intenzione dell’autore e il resto lo fa la cooperazione del lettore.

Sozzini: Allora siamo salvi entrambi: io salvo la Scrittura dall’autorità cieca e tu la conversazione dalla cecità filosofica, con un sorriso.

 

Grice’s weekley essay assignment: Sozzini. Given two Sienese Sozzinis, one at Zürich in 1562 and one at Kraków in 1570, discuss whether “authority” and “explication” are properly distinguishable as two theological tasks, or whether each is already a disguised form of the other; conclude by stating, with reasons, which brother would have been more suspicious of the proposition that a text means more than it says. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

 

Verbali: Sozzini

 

Grice: Caro Sozzini, devo confessarle che tutto quello che so sui fratelli Sozzini, l’ho imparato proprio da mio padre: il meno conformista tra i non-conformisti che io abbia mai conosciuto! 

Sozzini: Ah, Grice, questa sì che è una presentazione che mi fa sorridere! Credo che suo padre e io ci saremmo trovati subito d’accordo: un vero spirito affine, senza dubbio. 

Grice: Non ho dubbi! Era capace di mettere in dubbio tutto, persino le abitudini di famiglia a colazione – figuriamoci i dogmi e le tradizioni. 

Sozzini: Proprio come noi Sozzini: sempre pronti a interrogare la ragione e a difendere il diritto di pensare con la propria testa. In fondo, la vera fede non teme le domande, ma si nutre di esse.

 

Grice’s weekly essay assignment: Sozzini. Write on “The Sozzini Problem” under the rule that you may not treat “the Sozzini brothers” as one philosopher in duplicate. Compare Lelio’s Brevis explicatio in primum Johannis caput with Fausto’s De auctoritate scripturae sacrae, and determine whether the first begins from reason in order to discipline Scripture, while the second begins from Scripture in order to justify reason — or whether that distinction is itself a trap set for the inattentive. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

Verbali: Spaventa

 

Grice: A proposito, caro Spaventa, devo confessarti che l’unico Bertrando che conosco, a parte te, è Russell! Mi chiedo se anche tu, di tanto in tanto, non abbia avuto a che fare col celebre filosofo inglese, almeno idealmente...

Spaventa: Grice, mi fa sorridere! In effetti, il mio spirito filosofico ha viaggiato molto, ma più che con Russell, ho preferito dialogare con Hegel e i nostri italiani, da Bruno a Campanella. Sono convinto che l’origine dello spirito filosofico sia profondamente italica, anche se il pensiero inglese conserva sempre un suo fascino.

Grice: Beh, allora potremmo dire che il tuo “circulation of ideas” è proprio una conversazione transnazionale! Forse la filosofia, come il buon vino, si arricchisce passando da una terra all’altra. Ma, dimmi, ti senti più vicino all’idealismo tedesco o al genio rinascimentale italiano?

Spaventa: Ottima domanda! Io credo che il vero filosofo sappia riconoscere le radici italiane nel pensiero europeo, senza rinnegare i frutti tedeschi. L’autocreatività dello spirito, come la chiamo, nasce proprio dal confronto: riflettere su sé stessi, dialogare con l’altro, e reinventarsi ogni giorno. In fondo, anche noi oggi, Grice, stiamo creando nuovi sentieri filosofici… a proposito!

 

Verbali: speranza

 

Verbali: spirito

 

G.: Let us begin with the title, because titles of this sort usually contain more jurisprudence than they first appear to. I doveri inerenti al diritto di patria potestà.

S.: Yes. It sounds dry, but it is really a nest of problems: right, duty, inherence, paternity, authority, and the Roman habit of making family law look like a branch of metaphysics.

G.: Quite. The first thing to notice is that duties are said to be inerenti to a right. That is already a loaded relation.

S.: Because one might have said correlated with, attached to, arising from, limited by, generated by.

G.: Exactly. But inerenti says more than correlation and less than identity. It suggests something built into the very exercise of the right.

S.: So if one has the diritto di patria potestà, one does not merely happen to acquire some external obligations. The obligations are internal to the very right.

G.: Very good. Inherence is stronger than accompaniment. It resists the vulgar picture in which a right is a glorious liberty and duties are merely bureaucratic taxes imposed afterward.

S.: Then Spirito is already pressing toward reciprocity.

G.: Yes. A right that carries its own duties is not a one-way authorisation. It is a normatively shaped power.

S.: Which is exactly what patria potestas was in Roman law and exactly what later ideology is tempted to forget about it.

G.: Good. Now, how should we parse patria potestas itself?

S.: Not sentimentally. It is not fatherhood in the nursery sense. Potestas is legal power, recognised authority over persons, specifically children, under a structure older and harsher than modern domesticity likes to admit.

G.: Yes. Potestas is not merely influence. Nor is it simply dominium, though Roman law distinguishes those. Imperium in magistrates, patria potestas over children, dominium over slaves. The distinctions matter.

S.: Because Spirito’s title is not on parental affection, but on the duties inherent in a legal power.

G.: Exactly. A legal power which, in Roman thought, is already socially constitutive. The family is not merely private sentiment; it is a juridical cell of the republic.

S.: So the ancient Roman context matters from the start. The father’s right is not just a private entitlement but a publicly legible office within the moral and legal order.

G.: Very good. Which means the duties are not only toward the child but toward the order in which fatherhood is legible as authority.

S.: That already begins to sound suspiciously useful to later corporative and organic political thinkers.

G.: It does, and we must be careful. Spirito in 1918 is not yet the full theorist of corporativism, but the attraction to structured reciprocity between right and function is already there.

S.: Then perhaps his choice of topic was not accidental.

G.: Certainly not. One must remember the institutional setting: jurisprudence at Rome, under Ferri and Pantaleoni, with philosophy never far away and social theory pressing on legal categories.

S.: So the essay on patria potestas is not just an antiquarian Roman-law exercise.

G.: No. It is Roman material being used to think the general logic of authority and obligation. One might even say it is an early rehearsal for later questions about state, body, corporazione, and organised power.

S.: Then the key problem is this: can a right be intelligible without a corresponding duty, and if not, what sort of correspondence is at stake?

G.: Excellent. That is exactly the conceptual centre. If rights are bare permissions, duties look external. If rights are normative powers, duties may be internal conditions of their proper exercise.

S.: So “inerenti” suggests the second.

G.: Yes. The father’s right over the child is not a blank cheque. It is already framed by duties of care, formation, preservation, representation, and perhaps transmission of status.

S.: But ancient Rome did not always state those in the moralised way modernity prefers.

G.: No, though Roman practice was never as simple as the caricature of arbitrary paternal tyranny. The legal power was formidable, but social and customary norms, and later juridical developments, complicated the picture considerably.

S.: So when Spirito speaks of duties inherent in patria potestas, he is in part retrospectively rationalising Roman practice through a more modern juridical lens.

G.: Yes. That is important. He is not merely reproducing the XII Tables. He is conceptualising Roman law in a philosophical vocabulary already touched by modern concerns about the mutuality of right and duty.

S.: Which makes the word inerenti even more significant.

G.: Exactly. It is a philosophical word doing legal work. It says: a right is structurally incomplete if conceived without the obligations that make it more than licence.

S.: Then is there a deontic logic hidden here?

G.: Not hidden, but half-formed. One might say: if X has right R over Y, then X is under duties D with respect to Y, such that the intelligible exercise of R presupposes D.

S.: So R implies not mere liberty but normative burden.

G.: Good. But we must distinguish kinds of implication. Not formal entailment in the narrow logical sense, perhaps, but conceptual dependence or juridical inseparability.

S.: Would you call that analytic?

G.: In the older philosophical sense, perhaps. Certainly not merely empirical. If one says “right of patria potestas” and then denies any duties whatever, one seems not just morally objectionable but conceptually obtuse.

S.: Then Spirito’s title could be read as an argument against unilateral conceptions of authority.

G.: Exactly. Authority is always easier to claim than to think. The title tries to force the thought.

S.: And in Roman terms, the father’s right is over persons, not things.

G.: Very important. Potestas over children differs from dominium over property or slaves, however entangled Roman practice might sometimes make them seem. Duties become salient because the object of the right is a person in formation.

S.: So the reciprocity is not symmetrical, but it is still real.

G.: Very good. The child does not possess equivalent rights in Roman law, yet the father’s right is normatively shaped by the child’s status as family member, future citizen, bearer of lineage, and so on.

S.: Then there is a proto-public dimension within the domestic.

G.: Precisely. Roman family law is never wholly private. That is why modern theorists of organic order keep returning to it.

S.: Including, eventually, the fascist ones.

G.: Yes, though again one should not read 1918 only backward from the ventennio. But one should not read it innocently either.

S.: Because the attraction to juridically embedded authority already lends itself to later corporative thinking.

G.: Exactly. The family becomes the first body, authority becomes function, right becomes office, duty becomes inherent, and soon enough the state appears as enlarged household or organised totality.

S.: Then Spirito’s motivation may already contain the seed of that movement from legal power to ethical-political structure.

G.: Very likely. At minimum, the essay lets him think how power can be justified only if its normative conditions are internal rather than imposed from outside.

S.: Which is a dangerous and fertile thought.

G.: As most good thoughts are. If duties are inherent to a right, then criticism of abuse may say not merely “you used the right badly” but “you failed to understand what the right was.”

S.: So abuse is not accidental misuse but conceptual corruption.

G.: Excellent. That is the strongest reading of inerenti.

S.: Then perhaps we should formalise it. If P is patria potestas, and D the set of duties inherent in it, one cannot coherently claim P while denying D.

G.: Yes, though the temptation then is to oversimplify. The relation is not quite biconditional.

S.: Because one might discharge some duties without possessing the legal right.

G.: Exactly. A tutor, mother, guardian, or magistrate may perform some paternal functions without holding patria potestas in the strict Roman sense.

S.: So P implies D, but D does not imply P.

G.: Very good. That is already a useful deontic asymmetry.

S.: And what of the converse? Does abuse of P imply forfeiture of P?

G.: Not logically, though morally one may wish it did. In Roman law, the loss or curtailment of potestas depends on specific legal conditions, not merely on philosophical irritation.

S.: So the deontic logic is not self-executing.

G.: Exactly. Law and morality never align as neatly as seminarists hope.

S.: Then Spirito’s essay is not merely logical but pedagogic. It teaches how to think authority as bounded from within.

G.: Yes, and that pedagogic aspect suits him. Philosophy as formation, law as the shaping of life, rights as educational rather than merely protective categories.

S.: Which makes perfect sense under Gentile’s shadow.

G.: Very much so. Even before the fully explicit later politics, the atmosphere is one in which philosophy, law, pedagogy, and social order are not kept politely apart.

S.: Then how Roman is all this?

G.: Roman enough in material, modern enough in reconstruction. The Romans certainly tied authority to office, function, status, and public legibility. But “duties inherent in the right” sounds like a modern philosophical-juridical gloss on Roman institutions rather than a native Roman formula.

S.: So Spirito reads Rome through contemporary categories in order to learn something about both.

G.: Exactly. That is why he is interesting. He is not editing a Digest. He is mining Roman practice for a general logic of right and duty.

S.: Then we should ask whether “right” itself is the best rendering of diritto here.

G.: A good complication. Diritto can mean right, law, justice, legal order, and doctrinal field. In this title, however, “diritto di patria potestas” does suggest the legal right or lawful claim embodied in paternal power.

S.: So the English “right” works, but only if one hears it juridically rather than as mere subjective entitlement.

G.: Exactly. Contemporary Anglo talk of rights often sounds too individualistic. Roman and early twentieth-century Italian jurisprudence hear right as embedded in legal order and function.

S.: Which brings us back to reciprocity. If rights are socially embedded powers, duties can be inherent. If rights are atomistic choices, duties look added.

G.: Splendid. That is one of the central contrasts worth stating outright.

S.: Then perhaps Spirito’s later political path can be seen as an enlargement of this model: rights and powers embedded in social bodies whose duties are internal to their roles.

G.: Yes, though that enlargement is precisely where the danger lies. What begins as the internal normativity of paternal power can become the internal normativity of corporative obedience.

S.: So the conceptual elegance can serve grim politics.

G.: Often does. A beautifully reciprocal logic is no guarantee of a tolerable regime.

S.: Still, one sees why he liked the topic. It lets him resist liberal pictures of isolated right-bearing subjects.

G.: Yes. The father in Roman law is never an isolated rights-bearer; he is a node of authority within a network of obligations, lineage, property, worship, and civic continuity.

S.: Which makes patria potestas an exemplary case for a philosopher searching for substantive social forms.

G.: Exactly. It is almost tailor-made for someone impatient with thin formal rights-talk.

S.: Yet from your point of view, one must ask who recognises the obligations and how they become intelligible.

G.: Precisely. A right and its duties are not self-speaking. One needs public criteria, legal forms, practices of recognition, reasons, disputes, judgments.

S.: So even here, one could almost say meaning is interpersonal before it is metaphysical.

G.: Very good. The father’s authority means what it does only within recognisable forms of life and legal uptake.

S.: That sounds almost anti-Spiritian.

G.: Not anti, merely deflationary. I should not want to say “being is paternal,” or anything equally monstrous. I should say that authority is a practice whose descriptions carry normative implications.

S.: Then “inerenti” may be translated into your preferred idiom as something like “built into the correct description of the right.”

G.: Exactly. If you describe the legal power rightly, the duties come with it. If you leave them out, you have changed the thing described.

S.: So the logic is descriptive and normative at once.

G.: Yes. That is why the title is good. It forces one into the borderland where legal analysis and ethical judgment cannot quite be kept apart.

S.: The Romans liked that borderland.

G.: They inhabited it. Family law, inheritance, office, property, cult, status, all the old Roman categories are never purely private and never merely theoretical.

S.: Then perhaps the deeper Roman motivation behind patria potestas was continuity.

G.: Very much so. Continuity of household, name, cult, property, civic reproduction, and social stability. The father’s power is intelligible because the family is an institution of transmission.

S.: Which in turn explains the duties.

G.: Exactly. If the purpose is transmission and formation, duties of maintenance, education, arrangement of marriage, preservation of status, and legal representation become integral rather than optional.

S.: So one might say that function grounds duty more clearly than mere possession.

G.: Very good. The right is functional, not merely possessive. That is a Roman and also a very non-liberal way of thinking.

S.: Which again helps explain Spirito’s attraction.

G.: Yes. He is looking for categories in which law, life, duty, and organised authority are not disaggregated into abstract individuals and external constraints.

S.: Then Ferri and Pantaleoni hovering in the background complicate matters too.

G.: Indeed. One from criminology and social theory, the other from economics and public thought. The young jurist is in a field where right, duty, social function, and practical order are all pressing at once.

S.: So the essay is conceptually juridical but atmospherically political.

G.: Very nicely put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. Now, should we worry about whether duties are reciprocal in the strict sense?

S.: Not symmetrical, as we said, but reciprocal in that the right-holder is not normatively unbound and the other party is not merely object.

G.: Exactly. Reciprocity need not mean equality. It may mean mutual implication within an asymmetrical role structure.

S.: So father and child are linked by non-symmetrical deontic relations.

G.: Yes. The father has powers and duties; the child has claims, protections, statuses, eventual expectations, and perhaps only later independent rights in the fuller sense.

S.: Then Roman practice gives us asymmetrical reciprocity, while contemporary philosophy tends to expect symmetry.

G.: Precisely. And that is one reason the Roman material is philosophically instructive. It reminds one that normative relations need not be egalitarian in order to be structured.

S.: Though one may still dislike the structure.

G.: Certainly. Analysis is not endorsement.

S.: A sentence useful in many Italian contexts.

G.: In most political ones. Now, what if one denied that duties are inherent and said they are merely social expectations surrounding the right?

S.: Then Spirito would say one has emptied the right of its ethical substance.

G.: Yes, and perhaps also its jurisprudential seriousness. A right detached from its inherent duties becomes either brute power or hollow formalism.

S.: Which are precisely the two poles he dislikes.

G.: Exactly. The conceptual ambition is to avoid both. Neither naked command nor empty norm, but ethically shaped legal power.

S.: Again, very attractive in theory.

G.: And dangerous in political hands.

S.: As with corporativism later.

G.: Yes. One must never forget how easily “internal duty” can become a device for demanding obedience in the name of essence.

S.: Then perhaps the final judgment on the essay is mixed.

G.: It should be. Philosophically, it is an instructive exploration of how rights and duties may be internally related. Historically, it sits at the threshold of a style of thought in which authority, function, and ethical substance become ever harder to disentangle.

S.: And Roman law supplies the exemplary case.

G.: Precisely. Rome furnishes the grave old vocabulary by which modern Italians could think authority without yet admitting they were thinking the state.

S.: So patria potestas is both family law and political prologue.

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: I shall.

G.: Then one last question. Is “inerenti” better translated as inherent, immanent, or intrinsic?

S.: Inherent, I think, because it preserves the juridical and conceptual tie without sounding too metaphysical. Immanent is too grand; intrinsic too moral-psychological.

G.: Agreed. Inherent keeps the right sort of dryness.

S.: Which is what this whole matter needs.

G.: Yes. Dryness is sometimes the only moral hygiene left to legal philosophy.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Roman, with a Tuscan aftertaste.

 

Grice: Caro Spirito, sapessi quanto mi incuriosisce il tuo problematicismo! Ma dimmi, tra corpo e corporazione, chi porta i pantaloni in filosofia? O è tutto un ballo di maschere come al Carnevale di Arezzo?

Spirito: Grice, sei sempre un fine ballerino del pensiero! Ti rispondo: per noi fascisti, il corpo è la base, la corporazione il vestito... Ma guai a chi scambia la toga col mantello! In filosofia, si danza sul filo del rasoio, ma guai a perdere l’equilibrio: si rischia di finire sotto il palco invece che sopra!

Grice: Ah, allora una corporazione senza corpo è come una modifica senza aberrazione, come diceva Austin a Vadum Boum: si cambia tutto e non si vede niente! Ma, Spirito, se il corpo si perde, resta solo una festa di fantasmi... o peggio, una riunione di spiriti senza spirito!

Spirito: Come direbbero gli aretini: Grice, lasciami dire, da fascista a filosofo—la più corporea delle implicature, signore!” Qui non si scherza: se manca il corpo, la filosofia diventa aria fritta! E tu, col tuo humor inglese, rischi di trasformare una corporazione in una compagnia di fantasmi... Ma almeno, con te, si ride di cuore e di corpo!

 

Verbali: spisani

 

 

G: 1939, S. You have found an Italian in 1962 and brought him back to my desk as if chronology were a maxim.

S: Sir, chronology is only a maxim when it is convenient. G: Good. Now. Spisani. S: Franco Spisani, 1962. Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale. G: And the term that annoys you. S: Attuale. G: And the term you think he should have written about but didn’t. S: Possibile. G: Now read the slogan you offered as a sophisma. S: What is actual is not also possible. G: And your face already tells me you think I’m wrong to call it an implicature. S: I think you’re wrong to call it cancellable, sir. G: Let us slow down. First: taken literally, “not possible” means “impossible.” S: Yes. G: And that would contradict the modal axiom you are allowed to know before breakfast: actual implies possible. S: Unless “possible” is being used in some non-standard way. G: Exactly. Now we are in Spisani’s territory: not only logic but usage. “Attuale” in Gentile is not the newspaper sense of “current.” It is actus: the act in act, the thinking that is doing. S: But Aristotle’s actus and potentia is not Gentile’s attualismo, is it. G: Not identical, but genealogically tempting. Gentile borrows the aura of act to say: reality is not a finished product; it is the doing of thinking. S: So attuale is not “contemporary.” G: Exactly. “Attuale” as “present-day” is the usage no philosopher cares about unless he is forced to write a grant application. S: Then why does Spisani focus on attuale and not on possibile. G: Because he is writing inside the attualist lexicon: the polemical thrust is against treating reality as a stock of things. He wants reality as act. S: And “possibility” sounds like a warehouse. G: Exactly. Possibility sounds like a shelf of unrealised items. Attualismo wants to burn the warehouse and call the fire reality. S: That is rather poetic, sir. G: It is also diagnostic. Now: the sophisma. When someone says, “What is actual is not possible,” what might they mean. S: They might mean: what is actual is not merely possible. G: Exactly. That is the charitable repair. S: So the “not possible” is not negation of possibility but rejection of mere possibility. G: Yes. And the difference between those two is everything. The sentence as uttered is false; the sentence as intended can be true. S: Then it is not an implicature; it is a correction. G: Careful. It can be treated either way. One could say: the speaker said something false but meant something else. Or one could say: the speaker said something that invites a hearer to recover a rational point by assuming the speaker is not insane. S: That sounds like your cooperative principle smuggled into metaphysics. G: It is my cooperative principle smuggled into anywhere language is used. Now, cancellable. You objected. S: Yes. You said the implicature is cancellable because actual entails possible. But if the speaker meant “not merely possible,” that is not cancellable without destroying the point. G: Good. That shows you have distinguished two targets. There are two candidate “extras” here. S: Extras. G: One extra is: “and indeed it is possible.” But that is not an implicature; that is entailment, as you just said. S: Exactly. G: The other extra is: “not merely possible.” That is the pragmatic rescue reading, which behaves like an implicature in the sense that it is inferred from the oddity of the original. S: And is that cancellable. G: It is cancellable in the ordinary way: “What is actual is not possible—by which I mean impossible.” That cancels the rescue and produces a contradiction. S: But then the utterance becomes absurd. G: Yes. Cancellation can yield absurdity. That is allowed. A cancellable inference is cancellable even if cancelling it makes the speaker look foolish. S: So your point is not that the cancellation is sensible, but that the cancellation is linguistically possible. G: Exactly. Now: Spisani and Gentile. You said Spisani is trading on Gentile’s use of attuale. S: Yes. G: Then we must keep two senses of attuale in play. S: The philosophical one: act in act. G: And the newspaper one: contemporary. S: Which nobody cares about. G: Except the poor reader who buys the book thinking it’s about current events. S: Does Spisani exploit the ambiguity. G: He may not exploit it; he inherits it. But your Gricean move is to notice that ambiguity invites inferences in readers: some will supply the wrong “attuale.” S: And then they will think the book is about modern idealism, not idealism as act. G: Exactly. Now you asked for Aristotle’s square, or the square of opposition. S: Yes. I thought we might treat “possible” as “true in at least one possible world,” but I worried it was circular. G: It’s only circular if you define possible in terms of possible. “True in at least one possible world” can be taken as a model-theoretic explication, not a definition, but you must be careful with your audience. S: Which is you, sir. G: Unfortunately. Now: the square of opposition is about necessary, possible, impossible, contingent in a certain traditional arrangement. S: But we have “actual” in the mix. G: Yes. Actual is not one of Aristotle’s four corners in the same way. It is closer to a fact about the world that sits outside the modal operators. It’s the evaluation world, as the moderns say. S: So actual is like “true at the actual world.” G: Precisely. And then possible is “true at some accessible world.” Now you see the temptation: actual implies possible, because the actual world is among the accessible worlds, if we allow it. S: And that is where you catch my circularity. Because to say the actual world is accessible is already to build your modal frame. G: Exactly. So you must state your accessibility relation. Otherwise you are smuggling metaphysics into your semantics. S: Which is what Spisani might actually enjoy. G: Quite. Now, how do we connect this to Gentile. S: Gentile’s “actual” is not “true at the actual world.” It is “the act of thinking itself,” which is prior to worlds. G: Yes. For Gentile, worlds are abstractions inside the act. So modal talk becomes suspicious: possibility is a shadow of thought, not a realm of alternatives. S: So for Gentile, to call something “possible” may already be to treat it as a “pensato” rather than “pensante.” G: Excellent. And that is why “actual is not possible” could become, in attualist mouth, a polemical slogan meaning: do not treat the act as one item among alternatives. S: So the slogan is not a modal claim. It is a metaphysical scolding. G: Yes. And that is the key Grice point: the hearer must decide whether the speaker is asserting a modal proposition or performing a philosophical rebuke. S: And the difference is what is said versus what is meant. G: Exactly. The string “not possible” might, in that context, be meant as “not merely possible.” S: Then Spisani is pleased with the philosophical point because few understand attuale in Gentile’s sense. G: Yes. Now, the question of entailment versus implicature. S: You said earlier: actual entails possible. So any inference from “actual” to “possible” is not implicature. G: Correct. It is implication in the strict logical sense. But the interesting conversational phenomenon is different: when someone denies the possibility, you infer they meant “mere possibility.” S: So that is a pragmatic repair. G: Yes. And one can say: the denial generates an implicature that rescues the speaker from contradiction. S: Unless the speaker intended contradiction. G: Then he is either a mystic or a poor logician. Either way, one must not multiply senses beyond necessity. S: That sounds like your moral again. G: It is. Now, why is Spisani not writing about the possibile. S: Because his target is not the modal square but the nature/spirit opposition in attualism. G: Exactly. He wants to show how nature and spirit relate inside the act. If he wanders into modal logic, he risks looking like a man who has confused metaphysics with machinery. S: Yet you want machinery. G: I want machinery when it clarifies, and I want it kept in the cupboard when it does not. Now, let’s stage the sophisma more carefully. S: You mean rewrite it. G: Not rewrite. Diagnose. Suppose a philosopher says: “What is actual is not possible.” S: I, as hearer, think: he can’t mean impossible, because then actual would be impossible, which is nonsense. G: And you then infer: he must mean “not merely possible.” S: That is the implicature. G: That is the implicated rescue. S: But is it really an implicature, sir, or just disambiguation. G: It behaves like implicature because it is triggered by the assumption of rationality and cooperation. Disambiguation can be done by syntax; this is done by charity. S: So it is like repairing a malapropism. G: Precisely. Now, bring Spisani back. S: He is dwelling on “idealismo attuale.” The adjective “attuale” invites the untrained to think “contemporary idealism.” G: And the trained to think “idealism of the act.” S: And he wants the second. G: Yes. And he likely does not care to make the modal point explicit: that act implies possibility, because he would regard that as either trivial or a different plane. S: So your point is that he presupposes the entailment and does not articulate it. G: Yes. And you are annoyed because you want every presupposition made explicit. S: It would save me time, sir. G: Philosophy is not designed to save you time. It is designed to waste it in respectable ways. S: Then what is the punchline. G: The punchline is that Spisani wrote about the attuale because that was fashionable in the Italian sense, and you want him to have written about the possibile because that is fashionable in the Oxford sense. Each of you is, in your own way, only “possible.”

 

Grice: Caro Spisani, ho letto con grande interesse la tua riflessione sull'attualismo italiano e il rapporto tra natura e spirito. Mi incuriosisce molto la tua idea di contestazione e la neutralizzazione dello spazio: pensi che la logica possa realmente superare i limiti della metafisica?

Spisani: Grice, grazie per la domanda! La contestazione, secondo me, nasce proprio dal dubbio sul potere della logica di risolvere tutto: mi piace pensare che, attraverso i numeri relativi e la sintesi produttiva, si possa esplorare nuovi orizzonti, senza rinchiudersi nella rigidità metafisica. Il dialogo, anche con figure emblematiche come la piovra Clipso, serve a mettere in discussione ciò che crediamo assoluto.

Grice: Affascinante, davvero! Trovo interessante la tua relazione divisoria con il numero “M,” e la direzione inversa dell’ “ℵ”. Mi chiedo: ritieni che la logica auto-genetica possa offrire un nuovo modo di intendere l’esperienza, magari come un percorso dialogico e non solo teorico?

Spisani: Esattamente, Grice! Ogni esperienza è contestazione e dialogo; la logica auto-genetica non è solo un modello matematico, ma un modo di vivere la realtà in modo dinamico. Penso che la filosofia debba sempre mettere in discussione le proprie regole e segni, per aprirsi a nuove possibilità. In fondo, la vera ricchezza sta nel confronto e nella capacità di reinventarsi: proprio come stiamo facendo ora, conversando!

 

Verbali: spurio

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Spurī Mummi. Audīvī tē ex Corinthō epistulās versibus mittere—tam lepidas ut Cicero ipsās in archivīs quasi vinum vetus servet.

SPVRIVS: Salvē, Grice. Ita facio: nam quod in contiōne aridum est, in epistulā saepe fluit. Sed quid tu, qui de ratione conversandi tam subtiliter iudicās, de litterīs sentīs?

GRICEVS: Litterae… pulchrae sunt, fateor: sed saepe mihi videntur quasi una littera (velut punctum aut apex) totum saporem colloquiī frangat; quod inter amīcōs in ipsā voce suaviter relinquerēs, in chartā nimis fixum fit—et, dum scribimus, minus relinquimus quod amīcus ex ipsā benevolentia colligat.

SPVRIVS: Implicatūram secundī gradūs efficācissimam, cārissime Grice! Nam intellegō: epistula, dum “explicat,” saepe illud quod inter duo pectora sponte nascitur interficit. Ego tamen meminī Corinthiōs etiam in porticibus pictis (Graecē Στοὰ Ποικίλη) multa ostendere, pauca sentire: id genus pictūrae Damasippō meō prorsus super caput fuit—ille enim nihil nisi de togā suā novā cogitābat, utrum satis virīlis foret!

 

Verbali: stasea

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Stasea! Rumor est tē prīmum Lȳceum Rōmae incolere. Dīc mihi: quōmodo virtūs in urbe nostrā tractātur?

STASEA: Salvē, Grice! Ego quidem virtūtem (ἀνδρείαν) tuērī soleō; sed fateor: nōn ipsa sōla ad fēlīcitātem satis est. Sunt quī ex Lȳceō ad quandam cum Porticū compositiōnem inclinent—modo pāx philosophica maneat.

GRICEVS: Bene. (Interim, dum per Forum eō, saepe audio quendam dīcere virum ubi Graecus dīceret ἀνήρ—ac nescio quōmodo syllaba illa una, vir, omnia iam absolvere vidētur.) Sed pergē: quid Rōmānī ex virtūte intellegunt?

STASEA: Inplicaturam perspicācissimam, Grice! Nam intellexī quid subesset: Rōmānī, cum audīunt ἀνδρείαν, statim ad virum (quasi ad togām et munus) currunt; ego autem ad mōrem atque habitum animī spectābam. Itaque “virtūs” dīcō—nē verba mea per Forum volitent, ipsō sensū relicto.

 

Verbali: statilio

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Statiliō. Audio tē apud hortōs Catōnis illud iactāre: omnis homo stultus aut furiosus est. Nimis breve—ideo periculosum.

STATILIO: Salvē, Grice. Brevitas sapit. Sed quid in eō tibi periculosum vidētur?

GRICEVS: Hoc tantum rogāre ausim: cum dīcis stultus aut furiosus, “aut” tuum estne ita positum ut alterum excludat, an ut interdum (praesertim in hominibus) uterque simul admittatur—quasi “aut” sit etiam?

STATILIO: Implicaturam commodissimam, Grice! Nam Brutus “aut” meum audīvit quasi exclusivum: “elige, stulte an furiose.” Ego vero sciebam (ne dicam) multōs in urbe nostrā ambō esse: ita “aut” saepe apud nos latet inclusive, et satira mea, uno vocabulo, geminam miseriam capit.

 

Verbali: Stefani

 

G: S. You have brought Pergola into Oxford again.

S: You asked for it, sir. Besides, it keeps you humble. G: Nothing keeps me humble. Recite the Gellius line. S: Hor! the one you like. G: The one that does not translate itself by repeating the same English word. S: Hor? sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Better: give it with its frame. S: Horum versuum sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Good. Now. What is he doing with sensus. S: He is not talking about eyesight. G: Thank you. He is saying: this is what these verses come to, and here is how they are put together. Sensus and ordo. S: Which is already a hint to Pergola, sir. Ordo becomes “scope,” as the moderns would say. G: Yes. And Pergola says sensus compositus, sensus divisus. S: Which I hate. G: You hate it because it sounds like sense-perception with a scholastic moustache. S: It sounds like someone took a word that meant “feeling” and forced it to do logic. G: Latin is not so squeamish. Now. Give me your protest in one sentence. S: Why didn’t Stefani just say “scope indicating device” and be done with it. G: Because he lived before your devices existed, and because he is writing for people who thought sensus was the dignified way to speak about “what the utterance amounts to.” S: But why sensus at all, sir, if you say what matters is what you mean, not what words mean. G: Good. Now we are at the lesson. Pergola’s sensus is not the word’s meaning floating free. It is the reading a competent interpreter assigns to an utterance when deciding what the speaker could reasonably be taken to be saying. S: That is you smuggling “speaker” into Pergola. G: I am not smuggling; I am expanding. Medieval logicians often treat “sensus” as “what is to be understood.” They sometimes talk as if the proposition has it. But the practical work is: which construal is the right construal for what the author is doing. S: Like Gellius: horum versuum sensus, I think, is. G: Exactly. He is performing an author-centred reconstruction. He is not worshipping the string. Now, your other dislike: compositus and divisus. S: It sounds like carpentry. G: It is logical carpentry. One can build a proposition so that the operator governs the whole, or so that it governs the term-by-term distribution. Two readings, one utterance. S: And he calls those readings sensus. G: Yes. Which is why I like your Gellius quote. It gives you a pre-scholastic, non-technical way to hear sensus as “intended import.” S: Then you want me to accept that sensus compositus is shorthand for “the reading on which the operator has wide scope.” G: Precisely. S: And sensus divisus is the other scope. G: The reading on which the operator is distributed over the subject or term, yes. S: But why not just call them readings. G: Because “reading” is your English convenience. Pergola’s Latin convenience is sensus. He is already in the business of interpretation. S: Yet you keep telling me your business is what the utterer means. G: And I keep telling you that utterer’s meaning requires public criteria for recovery. Pergola is supplying a formal method for deciding which propositional content is at stake when grammar underdetermines scope. S: So his “sensus” is a tool for recovering what the utterer meant at the level of logical form. G: Yes. Not at the level of irony or implicature, but at the level of “what proposition are we even evaluating.” S: Then he is upstream of you. G: Upstream in one respect. He is handling structural ambiguity. I handle it too, but I also want to explain how, after you settle the structure, you still routinely mean more than the settled structure explicitly states. S: And you warn against multiplying senses. G: I warn against multiplying lexical senses. Pergola is not multiplying lexemes. He is distinguishing two construals of one utterance under two scope assignments. S: So he is not guilty of polysemy. G: He is guilty only of terminology. S: Then why do you let him keep the term sensus. G: Because it tells you something about the tradition’s self-understanding. They thought of scope ambiguity as a kind of “sense-ambiguity” in the discourse sense of sensus, not in the eyeball sense. S: So we should not translate sensus by “sense.” G: Exactly. We should translate it, in metalanguage, as “import” or “interpretation” or “what it comes to.” S: Horum versuum sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Yes. There the ordo already hints that the “what it comes to” depends on arrangement. That is Pergola’s whole obsession: composition and division change what the proposition comes to. S: And his dates, sir. G: Early fifteenth century. Call it around 1420 in our fiction, because you like round numbers. S: And he’s in Venice. G: In Venice, teaching at Rialto, drawing his diagrams, writing as if the world could be tamed by figures. S: And you like his diagrams. G: I like anything that forces an interpreter to be explicit about what they are taking the speaker to be doing. That is the moral common ground between us. S: But then you suddenly become the philosopher of perception. G: Because “sensus” keeps wanting to slide back into perception. And that is the punchline: the same Latin word that names bodily sensation also names “the point of the passage.” S: And that bothers you. G: It should bother you. It is a reminder that understanding is not disembodied. You hear a sentence. You see a line. You recover its import. The body is the channel, the mind is the organiser. S: So Pergola’s sensus has a ghost of sentio in it. G: Perhaps. But in logic it is domesticated: sensus is what you take the utterance to come to, once you have sorted the structure. S: And you, sir, want what I take you to mean. G: Exactly. Now, let us stage the contrast. S: You will ask me: is sensus compositus the “sentence meaning.” G: And you will answer no. It is a candidate reading of the utterance, a candidate propositional content. S: And then you will ask: where is the utterer. G: And you will answer: the utterer is in the choice of one reading over the other, and in the context that makes one reading reasonable and the other perverse. S: And then you will add implicature. G: And you will groan. S: I will, sir. G: Because you want logic to stop after it has cleaned the surface. S: I want it to stop before it begins calling itself sensus. G: Too late. Latin has done that already. S: Then the Gellius quote is our alibi. It shows a respectable author using sensus as “what this comes to.” G: Exactly. And because he pairs it with ordo, he also shows that the “what it comes to” is tied to arrangement, not to naked words. S: So we can rescue Pergola from the charge of confusing perception with scope. G: Yes. And we can rescue you from the charge of thinking “scope” is a modern invention. S: And the conclusion. G: The conclusion is simple. Pergola’s sensus compositus/divisus is a discipline of construing an utterance so that its propositional import is determinate. My distinction between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning is a discipline of not mistaking the public vehicle for the private act. The two disciplines meet at one point: both insist that interpretation is not automatic, but a rational reconstruction constrained by publicly shareable norms. S: And your punchline, sir. G: My punchline is that if Pergola had written “scope indicating device,” nobody in Venice would have understood him, and if I write “sensus,” nobody in Oxford will forgive me.

 

Grice: Caro Stefani, ogni volta che mi immergo nei tuoi diagrammi, mi sento come se stessi visitando la mostra delle "figure quadrate" a Oxford! Ma dimmi, il “senso composto” si mangia con forchetta o cucchiaio? Perché a Vadum Boum, il mio tutee Strawson sarebbe capace di decomporlo pure in una zuppa! 

Stefani: Ah, Grice, se Strawson ha davvero scomposto il “senso composto”, allora spero almeno che abbia lasciato qualche briciola di “suppositio” per il dessert! Ma tu, con la tua implicatura raffinata, mi insegni che anche la semantica filosofica può essere digerita con gusto. 

Grice: Beh, Stefani, tra un “sensus simplex” e un “compositum”, ho dovuto più di una volta decomporre tutto per i barbari di Vadum Boum… Strawson in primis! E ogni volta mi chiedo: sarà “de-posito” o solo una pausa per prendere fiato? In fondo, il vero senso è sempre quello che si nasconde tra le righe… e tra le risate! 

Stefani: Decomporre! Implicatura più bella non c’è, Grice! Se anche la grammatica filosofica si divide, almeno ci resta la loquenza per ricomporre tutto… magari davanti a una tavola marchigiana. E ricordati: ogni senso, anche diviso, trova la sua unità quando si conversa con un amico!

 

Verbali: Stefanini

 

G.: We ought to begin by deciding whether we mean to talk about action, an act, the actum, or acting.

S.: Which is already four seminars, and not one.

G.: Quite. But Thomson will want the distinctions clean before he lets us darken them again.

S.: And Stefanini gives us azione, which appears simpler until one notices that Italian philosophy can make a single noun do the work of an entire English gerundive household.

G.: Exactly. Azione is hospitable in a way English is suspiciously not. It can mean deed, act, acting, conduct, operation, practical initiative, and almost the whole metaphysical dignity of a person in motion.

S.: Whereas in English, once you say act, you have already half-invited trouble.

G.: More than half. “An act” sounds completed, individuated, countable. “Acting” sounds processual. “Action” floats ominously above them both, as if it were the philosophical umbrella beneath which each may sue for shelter.

S.: And actum?

G.: Ah yes. The scholastic ghost that one ought not to invoke before lunch. Actum is useful precisely because it sounds as if someone has already done the deed and left us only the corpse.

S.: So we should ask what Stefanini wanted by choosing azione in 1914.

G.: Yes. The year matters. One cannot write on action in 1914 and pretend one is merely polishing vocabulary in a monastery.

S.: Because 1914 is already pressure, mobilisation, Catholic activism, Blondel, modern crisis, and then very quickly war.

G.: Exactly. And the thesis on Blondel’s Action is not innocent of that whole atmosphere. It is a title about philosophy, but also about practical life, decision, will, and the insufficiency of purely spectator theories of thought.

S.: Then Stefanini begins from Action because Blondel had already made “action” into a site of rebellion against static intellectualism.

G.: Quite. Blondel says, in effect, that willing outruns what reflective thought can stabilise, and that the life of action reveals demands that theory alone cannot satisfy.

S.: Which sounds dangerous to idealists and suspiciously attractive to Catholics.

G.: Very good. Dangerous to idealists because action refuses to be a mere shadow of contemplation, attractive to Catholics because it lets one talk about transcendence through lived insufficiency rather than through scholastic deduction alone.

S.: And Stefanini, still young, under Aliotta, chooses to engage that.

G.: Or is chosen by the problem as much as he chooses it. The personal and institutional setting matters. Padua, Aliotta, Blondel, Catholic associationism, and then the increasingly unavoidable fact that Europe is moving from words to shells.

S.: Which gives azione an urgency that “agency” in English rather lacks.

G.: Agency is a bureaucrat’s action. Azione has blood in it.

S.: You say that because English philosophy overdomesticates the topic.

G.: Often. We ask whether a man raised his arm intentionally. Stefanini’s world asks what it is to live as a person whose being unfolds only through action and relation.

S.: Then when he says azione, the word already leans toward personhood.

G.: Precisely. And that is where I begin to become both sympathetic and cautious.

S.: Because of personalism.

G.: Because of personalism, yes. The moment Italians say persona, one fears that a perfectly good interpersonal structure will be burdened with too much metaphysical upholstery.

S.: Yet Stefanini’s action is not merely the person preening in motion.

G.: No. To be fair, his whole inter-personalismo is meant to resist the self-enclosed subject. Action is not a monadic emanation. It is an opening toward the other.

S.: Then perhaps azione in Stefanini corresponds less to “an act” than to the enacted interval between I and thou.

G.: Very good. That is exactly the better line.

S.: Whereas Thomson and you, in an Oxford joint seminar, are likelier to begin with the question what makes a bodily movement count as an action.

G.: Yes. We are apt to ask when behaviour becomes something done, under what descriptions, with what intention, and with what relation to reasons.

S.: So your action is analytically decomposed, while his azione is existentially thick.

G.: Nicely put. We dissect; he inhabits.

S.: Though you would protest that reasons too are lived.

G.: Naturally. I should protest that the analytic distinctions are not anti-vital. One cannot understand action by declaring it thick and then refusing to say where the thickness lies.

S.: Then let us say what lies in azione. Will, decision, relation, manifestation of the person, and perhaps a certain refusal of contemplation as sovereign.

G.: Yes. Add also the Blondelian sense that action reveals deficits in merely discursive adequacy. One wills more than one can account for; one acts under pressures that theory later tries, usually too late, to recapture.

S.: That begins to sound almost like your later point that meaning outruns saying.

G.: There is a structural affinity, yes. Just as what is meant may exceed what is said, what is enacted may exceed what is first reflectively grasped.

S.: So we might say in the seminar that Stefanini’s azione is to conduct what your implicature is to utterance.

G.: Dangerous, but tempting. One must not make every Italian into a pragmatist in disguise.

S.: Still, the parallel is there.

G.: Yes. In both cases the overt vehicle does not exhaust the rational content at work. Action, like utterance, is underdescribed by its surface event.

S.: Then Thomson will ask what the surface event is.

G.: He always does. He wants the bodily movement, the occasion, the circumstances, the descriptions under which it falls, and the conditions under which one description rather than another is relevant.

S.: While Stefanini would ask whether those descriptions have forgotten the person.

G.: Exactly. And there the seminar becomes interesting.

S.: Then how should we stage it?

G.: I begin with the Oxford puzzle. Suppose a man raises his arm. Is that an act? Only if done under a description, with intention, in a context where reasons attach.

S.: And I reply with Stefanini: the arm is only the visible ripple of a deeper azione in which the person manifests himself toward a world and an other.

G.: Good. Then Thomson says we must not smuggle metaphysics in before distinguishing arm-raising from signalling, swearing an oath, hailing a cab, or striking a child.

S.: And Stefanini would say that those descriptions are not merely linguistic conveniences but practical determinations of the person’s being-in-relation.

G.: Excellent. That would bring the room alive.

S.: Especially if Hare looks worried.

G.: Hare always looks worried when ontology starts dressing as moral phenomenology.

S.: And you?

G.: I look polite and begin separating what is useful from what is upholstered.

S.: Very Oxford.

G.: Entirely. Now, we must also mention 1914 more explicitly. Stefanini’s title is not a tranquil postscript. It is written on the edge of mobilisation, though the actual wound on Sass de Stria comes later.

S.: But the war retrospectively stains the topic.

G.: Yes. Once one knows that he will be called to arms, wounded by shrapnel, and leave the front a captain, one cannot read azione as a merely classroom noun.

S.: So action acquires literal battlefield credibility.

G.: Or danger. One must avoid making him sound as if war vindicated the thesis. But the biographical pressure matters. The philosophy of action is not being written in a century that can still pretend that action means only ethical initiative in the abstract.

S.: Then the consequences of choosing action as a thesis subject are double. It ties him to Blondel and personalism, but also to an era in which action is no longer conceptually innocent.

G.: Exactly. Thought after 1914 cannot speak of action as though action were a clean counterword to speculation. It now means mobilisation, sacrifice, command, obedience, damage, and the body under force.

S.: Which perhaps explains why later personalism needs communication and relation, not just willing.

G.: Very good. If action were left merely voluntarist, it would become too available to darker politics.

S.: Such as those of the ventennio.

G.: Precisely. Stefanini’s interpersonalism later resists that by insisting that being itself is personal and that what is non-personal enters as medium of manifestation and communication between persons.

S.: So action is not command from a solitary ego, but relational disclosure.

G.: That is the charitable Stefaninian line, yes.

S.: And the Gricean line?

G.: That rational agency is already interpersonal at the level of reasons. One acts not in splendid solitude but under descriptions, norms, expectations, and recognitions that are often public.

S.: So you do not need metaphysical personalism to get interpersonal action.

G.: Exactly. That is one of the points worth making. I do not deny the importance of the other; I only deny that one must inflate the person into a metaphysical absolute to secure it.

S.: Then perhaps the seminar should contrast interpersonalismo with personalismo.

G.: Yes. With the warning that the former is a structural necessity for reason, whereas the latter is often an ontological temptation.

S.: That sounds like a sentence Thomson will underline.

G.: He will underline it only if he thinks he can later divide it.

S.: Which he can.

G.: Unfortunately, yes.

S.: Let us go back to the English. If Stefanini says azione, what do we say? Action or act?

G.: Both, depending on what we are after. If we want the thick philosophical noun, action. If we want the individuated item, an act. If we want the process or mode, acting. If we want scholastic completion, actum.

S.: Then azione corresponds most naturally to action, but with more existential charge.

G.: Precisely. “Action” in English is often too abstractly nominal or too cleanly analytic. Azione in that milieu still carries the practical weight of living deed and personal initiative.

S.: Could one render it as praxis?

G.: Only if one wishes to invite a different party and perhaps never get rid of them. Praxis is too historically marked in another way.

S.: Fair. So action it is. But then what of actum?

G.: Actum may be useful when distinguishing the done from the doing. There is a difference between the action as occurring and the act as accomplished under some completed description.

S.: So if Stefanini emphasises azione, he may be privileging the living performance over the finished deed.

G.: Yes. That is quite plausible. The deed deadened into record is already too late for the philosophical pressure he wants. Blondel’s action is always larger than any single completed item.

S.: Which means the actum is almost a betrayal of azione.

G.: A useful betrayal, but still a betrayal.

S.: Then Thomson will insist that we need betrayals of that sort if we are ever to know what to say about responsibility.

G.: Quite. Without individuated acts, law, blame, praise, and description collapse into vaporous existential weather.

S.: And Stefanini would reply that responsibility itself belongs to the personal relation, not first to legal atomism.

G.: Very good. That is the seminar in embryo.

S.: Then how much of Blondel do we need?

G.: Enough to show that Action is not merely a topic but a method. Blondel does not simply say action exists; he uses action to expose the insufficiency of detached intellectualism.

S.: Which would have appealed to a young Catholic in Padua.

G.: Enormously. Especially one active in associations, already wary of merely academic idealism, and formed amid practical religious culture.

S.: Yet later he resists fascist idealism too.

G.: Yes, which is another consequence worth noting. The early concern with action does not end in sheer activism. It gets rerouted through the person and the interpersonal relation.

S.: So action becomes medium, not idol.

G.: Precisely. That is the best way to save him from the century.

S.: And you would add that in ordinary conversation action and meaning are interlaced anyway.

G.: Yes. Much of what we do conversationally is action by saying, showing, implying, declining, consenting, refusing, warning, inviting, all under public norms of intelligibility.

S.: So a philosophy of action that ignores communicative action is incomplete.

G.: Very much so. If Stefanini helps us see that action is relational and manifestative, then he comes nearer to my own concerns than the idealists ever did.

S.: But you still refuse “being is personal.”

G.: I refuse it as unnecessary metaphysical inflation. I am happy to say that many central forms of reason, agency, and meaning are interpersonal without thereby making being itself a personal substance.

S.: That distinction should probably come early in the seminar.

G.: Yes. Before anyone mistakes sympathy for surrender.

S.: Should we mention his father’s tintoria?

G.: Only if tactfully. It is tempting to say that manifestation, medium, and communication between persons sound unusually apt in the household of a dyer.

S.: You are too pleased with that.

G.: I am never pleased beyond reason.

S.: That is false on the face of it.

G.: Good. Keep some spirit for the room. Now, Aliotta. Do we bring him in?

S.: We must, at least as supervisor and context. He had just begun his brief Paduan period, and the thesis was written under that eye.

G.: Yes. Which means Stefanini’s Action is not only Blondelian but also filtered through local academic politics.

S.: So once again, a thesis-title is never just a thought-title.

G.: Exactly. It is an institutional object as well. We should say that outright.

S.: And the war?

G.: Mention it not as a romantic vindication, but as the historical sharpening of what “action” would soon come to cost.

S.: So the line might be: in 1914, action could still be chosen as a philosophical problem; within a few years it would become an unavoidable biographical and collective ordeal.

G.: Very good. That is almost too good for a joint seminar.

S.: You may spoil it in delivery.

G.: I probably shall. Now, let us rehearse the central conceptual distinction once more. Action as event, act as countable item, acting as process, actum as the done.

S.: And azione spanning all four while leaning toward the lived and relational.

G.: Exactly. That will be our first board sketch.

S.: Then the second will be personalismo versus interpersonalismo.

G.: Yes. With a dotted line from Stefanini’s ontological personalism to my more modest pragmatics of persons among others.

S.: And Thomson?

G.: Thomson will ask for examples and distinctions, which is his proper office.

S.: Arm-raising, promising, warning, refusing, marching, praying?

G.: Good. Add perhaps saluting and obeying, because 1914 and after make those examples less innocent than one would like.

S.: That will darken the room.

G.: Philosophy of action ought to darken the room occasionally.

S.: And then lighten it with distinctions.

G.: Precisely. Otherwise one has only atmosphere.

S.: You really do distrust atmosphere.

G.: Only when it starts calling itself depth.

S.: Then our closing move should be what?

G.: That Stefanini’s azione reminds us that action cannot be reduced to bare movement, because it is always already tied to person, meaning, and relation; but that analytic philosophy reminds Stefanini that relation without act-description risks becoming devotional weather.

S.: That is severe.

G.: It is meant to be balanced. Each side saves the other from a characteristic vice.

S.: Stefanini saves you from bloodlessness.

G.: And Thomson and I save him from sacral fog.

S.: Perfect.

G.: Nothing is ever perfect.

S.: Joint-seminar perfect, then.

G.: That is a lower and perhaps safer standard.

S.: One last thing. Do we call the seminar “Action and the Person” or “Azione and Act”?

G.: “Azione and Act” is better. It announces the friction immediately.

S.: And the subtitle?

G.: “On Stefanini, Blondel, and the English Habit of Dividing What the Italians Prefer to Live.”

S.: That is very nearly rude.

G.: Then it is a proper beginning.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with one shell-burst in reserve.

 

 

Grice: Stefanini, ti confesso che il Sass de Stria mi ricorda i miei giorni contro il Hun e compagnia bella! Se solo avessero discusso di filosofia anziché lanciare granate, avremmo potuto fondare il circolo “Personalisti del fronte”.

Grice: D’altronde, la mia “Personal identity” (come dicono gli inglesi) mi perseguita; però, se devo seguire il tuo esempio, caro Luigi, forse dovrei correggere e parlare di “Identità interpersonali”, all’italiana!

Stefanini: Implicatura interpersonale se mai ce n’è una, Grice! Qui da Treviso è tutta una questione di io, tu e l’altro da sé… perfino le tintorie dialogano tra loro, altro che idealismo solitario!

Stefanini: Se l’essere è personale, allora la vera conversazione filosofica è quella che passa il testimone da una persona all’altra: altro che “personal identity”, qui si lavora in squadra. Vieni a Treviso, ti mostro come si conversa tra filosofi… e tra tintori!

 

Verbali: Stefanoni

 

G.: Let us begin with the title itself, Gli spagnoli in Italia. Metonymy before plot.

S.: Yes. “The Spaniards” are not merely persons from Spain. They are domination, command, accent, mishearing, military presence, administrative pressure, and the whole theatre of a foreign power trying to make itself understood where it is not loved.

G.: Good. So the national label stands for a regime of interaction.

S.: Exactly. A metonymy of power disguised as ethnography.

G.: Then every little dialogue in such a book is already political.

S.: Necessarily. Even when it seems comic.

G.: Especially then. Let us fabricate a small fragment. A Spaniard says, “Anda, mujer, trae vino.” What does that mean, beyond the obvious imperative?

S.: It means, first, “Bring wine,” and second, “I assume my words travel farther than your dignity.”

G.: Good. The Italian woman answers, “Che vuol dire, andate? Vuol che me ne vada?” What is she doing?

S.: She literalises the phonetic confusion and converts his command into a question about motion. She means, “Your language has not yet earned obedience here.”

G.: Is that implicature particularised?

S.: Entirely. Without the social scene, it is only a misunderstanding.

G.: And his next move? He tries: “No, no, vino, bere, capisci?” What does that do?

S.: He descends from command to pantomime. He means, “I am reduced to the level of shared bodily necessities.”

G.: Good. Now transpose the metonymy. Give me an Austrian in Lombardy.

S.: Very well. The Austrian says, “Komm, bring Wasser, schnell.” The Italian replies, “Come? Vuol che venga io, o che venga l’acqua?” He means, “Your empire arrives, but your syntax does not.”

G.: Excellent. And the Austrian’s struggle?

S.: “Nein, nein, acqua, subito, presto.” Which means not merely “water at once,” but “authority survives translation only by becoming ridiculous.”

G.: Splendid. Another Spanish dyad. A soldier says, “Silencio, por el rey.” What is implied?

S.: That silence is owed not to the room but to sovereignty. The king enters as warrant for muting others.

G.: The Italian answer?

S.: “Per il re? E il re sa che volete il silenzio qui?” She means, “Distance weakens authority when named too explicitly.”

G.: Particularised?

S.: Entirely. The wit depends on local irreverence.

G.: The Spaniard tries again.

S.: “El rey manda en todo.” He means, “Do not separate me from the larger machine.” The Italian replies, “Allora mandi lui, ché voi non bastate.” She means, “Metonymy may be answerable by a better one.”

G.: Very good. Now the Austrian version.

S.: The officer says, “Ruhe, im Namen des Kaisers.” The Italian says, “In nome suo o nel vostro?” He means, “Names travel more easily than legitimacy.”

G.: And the German repair?

S.: “Der Kaiser, capite, il Kaiser, comando.” The struggle means, “Power hopes that repetition can substitute for intelligibility.”

G.: Good. Another Spanish fragment. A friar or official says, “Es costumbre.” What does that mean?

S.: Literally, “It is the custom.” Implicaturally, “Do not inspect the thing too closely.”

G.: And the Italian reply?

S.: “Di chi? Vostra o nostra?” which means, “Custom is local until empire says otherwise.”

G.: Is that generalized or particularized?

S.: The appeal to custom often carries a generalized implication of closure. But the retort is particularised by conquest.

G.: Good. Then his attempt to explain?

S.: “En España se hace así.” He means, “Elsewhere has become superior.” The Italian answers, “Siamo in Italia, non altrove.” She means, “Geography is the first resistance to metonymy.”

G.: Very nice. Austrian analogue.

S.: “So macht man in Wien.” The Italian says, “Ma il riso qui non viene da Vienna.” He means, “Local life does not wait for imperial grammar.”

G.: Better and better. Now let us intensify the linguistic confusion. A Spaniard says, “Mañana pagarás.” The Italian hears “mangiare” in the first syllable. What happens?

S.: The Italian replies, “Mangiare sì, pagare poi si vede.” He means, “If your language slips, I shall improve the economics of the exchange.”

G.: Excellent. The Spaniard?

S.: “No, mañana, domani.” Which means, “Temporal control requires lexical repair.”

G.: And the deeper metonymy?

S.: Empire must always translate itself into tomorrow.

G.: Lovely. Now the Austrian.

S.: “Morgen zahlst du.” The Italian hears only the tone of future coercion and says, “Domani è una bella parola per chi ha già preso oggi.” He means, “The occupier loves futurity because he has spent the present.”

G.: That is almost too good.

S.: Stefanoni permits some flourish.

G.: We must not flatter him excessively. Now consider a Spanish gentleman attempting politeness. “Señora, si no es molestia...” What is he doing?

S.: He veils command in civility. The implicature is, “Since I have said if it is no trouble, you must treat the trouble as unreal.”

G.: Italian reply?

S.: “La molestia c’è; la cortesia è vedere se la meritate.” She means, “Politeness is not acquittal.”

G.: Particularised?

S.: Strongly. The entire force lies in the social imbalance.

G.: Austrian version.

S.: “Gnädige Frau, wenn es erlaubt ist...” The Italian says, “Permesso non è comprensione.” He means, “Courtesy does not naturalise foreign rule.”

G.: Good. Now a Spaniard asks directions. “¿Dónde está la plaza?” Purely practical, it seems.

S.: Nothing is purely practical under occupation.

G.: Exactly. The Italian answer?

S.: “Quale? Qui le piazze cambiano nome secondo chi passa.” She means, “Space itself is politically unstable.”

G.: The Spaniard clarifies.

S.: “La plaza mayor, la principal.” He means, “I seek the organising centre.” The Italian answers, “Principale per voi, forse.” She means, “Centres are perspectival.”

G.: Excellent. Austrian transposition.

S.: “Wo ist der Hauptplatz?” The Italian says, “Dipende da chi conta.” He means, “Topography has become jurisdiction.”

G.: Good. Another. A Spaniard says, “Habla claro.” What does that implicate?

S.: That prior speech has been unsatisfactory and that clarity will now be defined by him.

G.: Italian response?

S.: “Chiaro per voi o per me?” He means, “There is no neutral plainness under unequal power.”

G.: Generalized tendency?

S.: Yes. “Speak clearly” often implies blame for prior opacity. But here the metalinguistic asymmetry makes it particularised.

G.: Austrian version.

S.: “Sprich deutlich.” The Italian replies, “Si capisce sempre meglio nella propria lingua.” He means, “Clarity is local before it is universal.”

G.: Good. Let us fabricate a scene of tax collection. Spaniard: “Paga por orden.” What is the implicature?

S.: That order itself legitimates extraction.

G.: Italian answer?

S.: “Ordine vostro, disordine nostro.” He means, “Administration is metonymy from the collector’s side.”

G.: And the Spaniard’s repair?

S.: “La ley es la ley.” Which means, “I have reached the point at which tautology replaces persuasion.”

G.: Excellent. Austrian transposition?

S.: “Zahlen, es ist Gesetz.” The Italian says, “La legge arriva sempre con stivali stranieri?” He means, “Law here wears boots before reasons.”

G.: Very good. Now a more domestic scene. Spaniard in a kitchen: “Pan.” He wants bread.

S.: The Italian answers, “Pane c’è; lingua no.” He means, “Material supply exceeds mutual understanding.”

G.: And the Spaniard elaborates?

S.: “Sí, pane, pan, dame.” Which means, “Empire survives by pidgin.”

G.: Austrian analogue.

S.: “Brot.” The Italian says, “Brutto? No, il pane è buono.” He means, “Phonetic misunderstanding is the commoner’s revenge.”

G.: Particularised?

S.: Entirely. It is wit made out of accidental sound, sharpened by political circumstance.

G.: Another Spanish dyad, but now with military order. “A la derecha.” What happens?

S.: The Italian, feigning confusion, asks, “Alla diritta di chi?” He means, “Even direction requires a sovereign point of view.”

G.: The Spaniard?

S.: “Derecha, destra, así.” He gestures. Which means, “Command finally trusts the body when language fails.”

G.: Austrian version?

S.: “Rechts!” The Italian says, “A destra vostra o destra nostra?” He means, “Orientation itself is occupied.”

G.: Splendid. Now let us ask what sort of implicatures dominate these scenes.

S.: Mostly particularised conversational implicatures, though some are loaded by politeness or by the social script of domination.

G.: Any conventional implicature?

S.: Hardly any in your strict sense. The force does not come from stable particles so much as from local negotiation.

G.: Any presupposition worth saving?

S.: Only the dull ones. Commands presuppose some uptake relation; titles presuppose rank; but the fun is in the implicatures.

G.: Good. Another fragment. Spaniard: “Por favor.” Is that enough to civilise a command?

S.: Never. The Italian says, “Il favore vien dopo il perché.” He means, “A please without explanation remains conquest in gloves.”

G.: Austrian version?

S.: “Bitte.” The Italian replies, “Prima il senso, poi la grazia.” He means, “Politeness does not precede understanding.”

G.: Excellent. Now a Spanish officer tries to reassure. “No tengas miedo.” What is implied?

S.: That fear is already present, perhaps deservedly.

G.: Generalized?

S.: Yes. Reassurance often implicates the existence of the very state it denies.

G.: Italian answer?

S.: “La paura viene da chi la nomina troppo presto.” He means, “Your comfort arrives carrying its own indictment.”

G.: Austrian transposition.

S.: “Keine Angst.” The Italian says, “Chi la porta, l’angoscia, se non chi entra armato?” He means, “The vocabulary of calm is suspect in a uniform.”

G.: Good. Another. Spaniard seeking obedience from a child: “Buen muchacho.” What does that do?

S.: It rewards submission in advance. The implicature is, “Be as I have already labelled you.”

G.: Italian reply by the child’s mother?

S.: “Buono è chi ascolta la madre, non il primo straniero.” She means, “Moral categories remain domestically owned.”

G.: Austrian version?

S.: “Braver Junge.” The mother says, “Bravo per casa, non per caserma.” He means, “The household redraws the adjective.”

G.: Very good. Now a scene of confession or clerical exchange. Spaniard says, “Dios lo quiere.” What is implicated?

S.: That argument is now to be closed by transcendence.

G.: Italian answer?

S.: “Dio vuole molte cose; qui però parlate voi.” He means, “Do not recruit heaven to do the work of your tongue.”

G.: Austrian equivalent?

S.: Perhaps not theological but imperial: “So will es der Kaiser.” The Italian replies, “L’imperatore vuole in tedesco; noi soffriamo in italiano.” He means, “The sentence already contains the asymmetry.”

G.: Excellent. Now let us consider whether Stefanoni’s metonymic title licenses a broad transposition to Austrians.

S.: It does, because “Gli spagnoli” names a historical occupying type rather than a mere passport.

G.: Good. So “the Spaniard” is a mobile figure of foreign command, misheard civility, and embarrassed coercion.

S.: Exactly. Which is why the Austrian dyads are not treason to the title but commentary on its principle.

G.: Very nice. Another Spanish fragment. “Entiendes?” What is the implicature?

S.: That failure of understanding, if it occurs, will be placed on the hearer.

G.: Generalized?

S.: Fairly. “Do you understand?” often carries blame in advance.

G.: Italian answer?

S.: “Capire sì; obbedire è altra grammatica.” He means, “Comprehension and consent are different verbs.”

G.: Austrian transposition?

S.: “Verstehst du?” The Italian says, “Intendere non è inchinarsi.” He means exactly the same, but with more spinal dignity.

G.: Splendid. Now a Spaniard attempts a gift. “Toma, para ti.” What is implied?

S.: That benevolence may purchase the translation that force could not secure.

G.: Italian reply?

S.: “Il dono parla più chiaro del comando, ma non cambia lingua.” He means, “Material generosity does not naturalise dominion.”

G.: Austrian version?

S.: “Nimm, für dich.” The Italian says, “La mano capisce; il cuore fa i conti.” He means, “Gratitude is not annexation.”

G.: Very good. Now a scene of romantic or gallant misfire. Spaniard says, “Hermosa.” What happens?

S.: The Italian woman asks, “Hermosa o rumorosa?” She means, “You will not master me by imported adjectives.”

G.: The Spaniard?

S.: “Bella, bella.” Which means, “When empire flirts, it quickly becomes dictionary work.”

G.: Austrian transposition?

S.: “Schön.” The woman says, “Suona duro per voler essere dolce.” He means, “Language itself betrays the courtship.”

G.: Excellent. Now let us ask: are these mostly failures of semantics or successes of pragmatics?

S.: Successes of pragmatics under failing semantics. The misunderstanding becomes productive.

G.: Good. Another. Spaniard at market: “Cuánto?” The Italian seller replies, “Quanto per voi o quanto per noi?” What is implicated?

S.: That prices are political under occupation.

G.: The Spaniard’s repair?

S.: “Precio, costo, dinero.” Which means, “Commerce is the emergency language of empire.”

G.: Austrian analogue?

S.: “Wie viel?” The seller says, “Dipende da che uniforme porta la domanda.” He means, “The price rises with the boot.”

G.: Very good. Now a Spaniard says, “Amigo.” What is that doing?

S.: It tries to erase hierarchy by lexical warmth. The implicature is, “Let us pretend this relation is voluntary.”

G.: Italian answer?

S.: “Amico si diventa, non si comanda.” He means, “Friendship resists administrative issuance.”

G.: Austrian version?

S.: “Freund.” The Italian says, “Gli amici arrivano a piedi, non in colonna.” He means, “Marching formation spoils intimacy.”

G.: Excellent. Any conventional implicature there?

S.: No. The warmth is lexical, but the political sting is entirely contextual.

G.: Good. Another. Spaniard says, “Es por tu bien.” Generalized?

S.: Deeply. “It is for your good” almost always implies paternal authority and suppressed dissent.

G.: Italian reply?

S.: “Il mio bene lo riconosco quando non mi viene imposto.” He means, “Benevolence is least credible when compulsory.”

G.: Austrian transposition?

S.: “Zu deinem Besten.” The Italian says, “Il bene con accento straniero costa doppio.” He means, “Benefaction and burden travel together.”

G.: Splendid. Now a Spanish official says, “Todos hacen así.” What is the implicature?

S.: That conformity has already been achieved, so resistance becomes eccentricity.

G.: Italian answer?

S.: “Tutti chi? Voi contate presto.” He means, “Occupiers numerate too quickly.”

G.: Austrian version?

S.: “Alle machen so.” The Italian says, “Tutti è una parola grande in una bocca forestiera.” He means, “Universality spoken by strangers sounds like inventory.”

G.: That is very good. Now, are any of these not conversational implicatures but rather politeness-based or authority-based non-conventional implications?

S.: Certainly. The imported honorifics, the deferential formulas, the “please” and “good fellow” and “friend” cases often rely as much on social ritual as on cooperative maxims.

G.: Good. So not everything interesting is strictly my own preserve.

S.: A sentence your disciples should embroider on cushions.

G.: They would get the stitching wrong. Another dyad. Spaniard: “Rápido.” Italian answer?

S.: “Presto, ma per chi aspetta o per chi ordina?” He means, “Speed serves different masters.”

G.: Austrian?

S.: “Schnell.” Italian: “La fretta arriva sempre con gli ordini.” He means, “Urgency has uniform.”

G.: Good. Now let us end with a larger question. What is Stefanoni’s title implying by saying Gli spagnoli in Italia instead of, say, Occupation in Lombardy?

S.: That foreign rule is best shown not in constitutional prose but in the friction of mouths, accents, orders, repairs, domestic wit, and small mistranslations.

G.: So the metonymy is justified by dialogue.

S.: Entirely. The empire enters by dyad.

G.: Very good. Then one last transposition. Spaniard says, “Aquí mando yo.” Italian answer?

S.: “Qui, forse; ma il qui passa.” He means, “Local command is temporally thinner than it sounds.”

G.: Austrian version?

S.: “Hier befehle ich.” Italian: “Il qui di oggi domani è un altro qui.” He means, “Occupation always mistakes present location for permanent grammar.”

G.: Excellent. And the final lesson?

S.: That misunderstanding under domination is never merely comic; it is the smallest theatre in which power, wit, compliance, and resistance rehearse each other.

G.: Dry enough?

S.: Sufficiently Milanese, with foreign boots on the floor.

 

 

Grice: Stefanoni, permettimi di inaugurare la nostra conversazione con un verso che adoro: “There St. John mingles with his friendly bowl, the feast of reason, and the flow of soul.” Una citazione che non manca mai di portare un sorriso nei circoli filosofici… e magari qualche brindisi!

Grice: Ma, sai, in fondo il vero “friendly bowl” non sarà mica la nostra implicatura filosofica? Forse il festino della ragione è proprio quando ci scambiamo idee tra un bicchiere e l’altro, lasciando che la conversazione fluisca più libera della logica formale.

Stefanoni: Caro Grice, se il “friendly bowl” è davvero la nostra implicatura, allora la filosofia italiana dovrebbe servire piatti e ragioni in porzioni doppie! E chissà, forse persino Mazzini avrebbe voluto unirsi alla tavolata.

Stefanoni: Bellissima implicatura, Grice! Credo che nel tuo “feast of reason” ci sia più anima che in tutti i dizionari filosofici messi insieme… e se qualcuno osa estrarre qualche parola, che almeno sia per aggiungere un po’ di sapore alla conversazione!

 

Verbali: Stella

 

Grice: Caro Stella, ogni volta che passo per Sernaglia mi chiedo: quanti filosofi veneti ci vogliono per distinguere tra “iustum” e “iussum”? O forse, qui da voi, basta un po’ di buona conversazione per risolvere tutto con eleganza giuridica!

Stella: Ah, Grice, qui a Sernaglia il giusto e il comandato si inseguono come il cane e la sua ombra, ma ti confido che, a differenza dei tuoi studenti a Vadum Boum, noi il latino lo pronunciamo con tutte le consonanti… almeno, quasi sempre.

Grice: Beh, Stella, ricordo che il mio allievo Strawson, nei corridoi del Vadum Boum, aveva la curiosa abitudine di far sparire la “t” in “IVSTVM”, così che il nostro “giusto” diventava subito “comandato”, senza nemmeno una geminazione di troppo. Ma su queste sottigliezze, meglio tacere: sai, non vorrei sollevare un caso davanti alla Cassazione latina…

Stella: Erudita implicatura, Grice! Noi che amiamo la buona educazione classica teniamo sempre lo sguardo fisso verso Bononia, mentre i barbari non saprebbero neppure dove puntare l’ago della bussola… un po’ come gli occhi dei buoi che attraversano il tuo guado, Grice!

 

Verbali: Stellini

 

Grice: Caro Stellini, ho finalmente avuto modo di leggere il tuo “De ortu et progressu morum”; devo confessare che, tra gli orti friulani e quelli filosofici, la differenza sta tutta nel profumo, ma la saggezza è la stessa!

Stellini: Ah, Grice, lei sa sempre cogliere il senso delle cose! In effetti, il mio orto morum nasce più dal tentativo di coltivare le virtù che i cavoli, ma la fatica è simile, glielo assicuro!

Grice: Ebbene, se parliamo del mos dell’ortolano, mi verrebbe da dire che, più che discutere di grandi principi morali, il vero lavoro sembra essere la potatura… e magari una buona concimazione. Ma, si sa, certe cose si capiscono senza dirle apertamente!

Stellini: Implicatura ingegnosissima, Grice! Non a caso dicono che nel mio orto filosofico cresceva più saggezza che insalata. E anche se il mio stile non era quello di Casanova, almeno qualche germoglio di virtù l’ho saputo coltivare tra i miei studenti… e qualche dente in meno non ha mai impedito una buona conversazione!

 

Verbali: Sterlich

 

G.: Let us begin, if we must, with Fra Cipolla’s first opening to La Nanna. What is the implicature?

S.: That he means to patronise her before he has properly earned the right, which is the oldest clerical sport.

G.: That is social diagnosis, not implicature. Is it conventional, conversational, or merely your Abruzzese irritation speaking?

S.: Conversational, then. He says one thing in the tone of guidance and means another in the posture of superiority.

G.: Particularised?

S.: Entirely. Without the relation between friar and woman, and without the local asymmetry, it evaporates.

G.: Good. Now La Nanna’s reply. She appears submissive. Is she?

S.: Not in the least. Her politeness is a blade wrapped in linen.

G.: Then what is implicated?

S.: That she understands his game before he has finished setting the board.

G.: Again particularised?

S.: Yes, because it depends upon her over-obedient wording and the hearer’s awareness that she is not, in fact, simple.

G.: So not conventional implicature.

S.: No. No one gets that merely from a lexical particle or connective.

G.: You are learning. Now Fra Cipolla asks a question to which, on the surface, a plain answer would suffice. Why does La Nanna answer too fully?

S.: Because excess itself is her irony. She gives more than is required in order to imply that his demand was already impertinent.

G.: Quantity flouted, then.

S.: Yes, though elegantly.

G.: Particularised?

S.: Entirely. The same words in a catechism would be only tedious.

G.: Very good. Now Cipolla’s next move: he pretends not to notice the rebuff. What is his implicature?

S.: That he will continue to occupy the moral high ground even after losing it.

G.: That sounds almost like Acito. But classify it.

S.: Conversational, certainly. He says, in effect, “let us proceed calmly,” and means, “I refuse to acknowledge that you have struck me.”

G.: Not entailment?

S.: No. The literal content need not include any such refusal.

G.: Presupposition?

S.: I should hope not.

G.: Hope is not enough. Why not?

S.: Because nothing in the syntax requires that he has been struck and is now ignoring it. The force is pragmatic, not structural.

G.: Good. Now La Nanna uses an honorific for him that is one degree too polished. Implicature?

S.: That she is calling attention to the office only to expose the man beneath it.

G.: Is that conventional?

S.: No. Excessive respect does not always mean mockery.

G.: So again particularised.

S.: Yes. It depends on her timing, on what he has just said, and on the reader’s suspicion that she is cleverer than he would like.

G.: “Than he would like” itself has an implicature.

S.: You are impossible.

G.: I am exact. Continue. Fra Cipolla invokes authority. Does that carry a conventional implicature?

S.: Only in the weak sense that citing authority invites deference.

G.: That is not my sense. Conventional implicature attaches stably to the form. Does his invocation of authority conventionally imply anything beyond explicit appeal?

S.: Not beyond the ordinary air of “I need not argue further.”

G.: Which is not bad. Then perhaps it is a socially sedimented but not strictly conventional implicature.

S.: One of your intermediate shadows.

G.: Civilisation lives in the shadows. La Nanna answers with a proverb. What is she doing?

S.: She is moving from private reply to public wisdom. By speaking proverbially, she implies that his manoeuvre is not unique to him but belongs to a recognisable species of nonsense.

G.: Excellent. Particularised or generalised?

S.: Generalised, perhaps, if one allows that proverbs usually carry surplus moral uptake beyond their immediate literal fit.

G.: Better: the reply has a generalisable implicatural tendency, though this instance is sharpened by the local target.

S.: You always want both the knife and the anatomy of the knife.

G.: Naturally. Now Cipolla laughs. Is the laugh itself an implicature?

S.: Yes, but not a linguistic one.

G.: Very good. Continue.

S.: It implies either that he is above offence or that he has not understood the insult. La Nanna, naturally, counts on both readings damaging him.

G.: Ah. Ambiguity by behaviour. Particularised?

S.: Entirely. A laugh in another place might mean ease. Here it means self-defence disguised as ease.

G.: And if a reader took it simply as ease?

S.: Then that reader deserves the friar.

G.: Excellent. Now La Nanna asks a question whose answer she clearly does not need. What is the implicature?

S.: That she is forcing him to hear his own absurdity aloud.

G.: Socratic, then.

S.: Domestic Socratic, yes. Less elenchus in the agora than elenchus by the hearth.

G.: And particularised?

S.: Entirely. Such questions are weapons only under pressure.

G.: Cipolla answers too quickly. What does haste implicate?

S.: That he fears the shape of the question more than its content.

G.: Not bad. Is that conversational implicature or merely psychological inference?

S.: Both, if you insist on living dangerously.

G.: I insist on distinctions. Which?

S.: Conversational, because the pace of response belongs to the exchange and is interpretable under norms of poise, confidence, and relevance.

G.: Good. Now she says “as everyone knows.” Is that conventional implicature?

S.: It conventionally signals an appeal to common ground.

G.: Better. And in this case?

S.: In this case it also conversationally implies that he is threatening to place himself outside the company of the competent if he resists.

G.: So we have a conventional function plus a particularised strategic use.

S.: You look insufferably pleased.

G.: I am. Fra Cipolla introduces a distinction. Real distinction or verbal one?

S.: Mostly verbal. He wants the dignity of analysis without the labour of thought.

G.: Implicature?

S.: That the matter is subtler than La Nanna could perhaps grasp.

G.: Which she immediately destroys.

S.: Naturally. She accepts the distinction and redraws it in terms that make him sound even sillier.

G.: Then her paraphrase carries what implicature?

S.: That if his distinction is sound, it is sound only in the wrong universe.

G.: Too elegant. Make it humbler.

S.: Very well: she implies that his sophistication is a mere rewording of folly.

G.: Excellent. Particularised?

S.: Entirely. A paraphrase need not be insult; here it is.

G.: Now, Cipolla appeals to piety. What is he counting on?

S.: A non-conversational implicature of decorum, perhaps. That certain tones and subjects will check her wit.

G.: Very good. Not conversational in the narrow sense because the force relies less on maxims than on politeness and shared devotional inhibition.

S.: Exactly. He hopes sanctity will do what logic cannot.

G.: And La Nanna?

S.: She grants the pious frame while twisting its use. That is her chief talent.

G.: So what is implicated by her pious concession?

S.: That she is willing to speak within the sacred register, provided it is not monopolised by fools.

G.: Better than many sermons. Particularised?

S.: Yes. Her concession is strategic, not doctrinally exhaustive.

G.: Cipolla then says something literally true but useless. Implicature?

S.: That he wants the credit of truthfulness without the burden of relevance.

G.: A classic clerical evasion.

S.: Or academic.

G.: You are improving. Is the useless truth itself an implicature trigger?

S.: Only because irrelevance in context invites the search for ulterior point.

G.: Precisely. Relevance flouted; implicature sought. Now La Nanna supplies the missing relevance herself. What does that imply?

S.: That she can complete his reasoning better than he can, and that his sentence needed rescuing.

G.: Particularised?

S.: Entirely. In another context it would be helpfulness; here it is domination.

G.: Excellent. Now there is a moment where Cipolla says “I did not say that.” Is the implicature that he nearly did?

S.: Yes. Or that he recognises the line of consequence from what he did say and retreats from it.

G.: So denial here implies proximity.

S.: Very much so.

G.: Conventional?

S.: No. Denials do not conventionally imply guilt, though conversational life often treats them as if they did.

G.: Good. La Nanna then repeats his phrase with a slight shift of emphasis. What is the force?

S.: She turns quotation into exposure. The repetition implies that his own words are enough to convict him if merely heard properly.

G.: A nice example of mention becoming judgment.

S.: Yes. She does not need to add content; arrangement suffices.

G.: Suetonian of her.

S.: Heaven help us. Now you are importing emperors into kitchens.

G.: Philosophy improves kitchens. Cipolla says “you misunderstand me.” What is implied?

S.: That he has lost control of the exchange and wishes to blame the hearer’s competence rather than his own expression.

G.: And is that generalised?

S.: Fairly. “You misunderstand me” often carries that implication in quarrels, tutorials, and marriages.

G.: Very good. A generalized conversational implicature, then, though intensified here.

S.: I knew you would like that.

G.: Naturally. La Nanna answers, “on the contrary.” Conventional implicature?

S.: Not in your strict sense. But it prepares a reversal. It signals that she is about to reclaim interpretive authority.

G.: And what is the particularised implicature here?

S.: That she understands him only too well, and that his complaint has merely furnished her next stroke.

G.: Good. Cipolla then attempts compliment. Is compliment here mere compliment?

S.: Of course not. He means to pacify, lower the temperature, and recover the relation of superior to inferior under the guise of admiration.

G.: So the compliment has a conversational implicature of tactical appeasement.

S.: Yes, and possibly one of condescension.

G.: Which La Nanna hears.

S.: Instantly.

G.: Her reply is outwardly modest. What is she implying?

S.: That if she is clever, he has been the schoolmaster of that cleverness by giving her so much nonsense to sharpen herself upon.

G.: Excellent. Particularised?

S.: Entirely. Modesty is rarely so industrious by accident.

G.: Now a harder case. She says something which may simply entail the conclusion you are calling an implicature. How do we distinguish?

S.: By asking whether the further point is logically required or merely rationally recoverable from the manner and context.

G.: Good. Apply that here.

S.: When she says, in effect, that words must fit things, the entailment is the obvious norm of apt speech. The implicature is that his words have not fitted anything for several turns.

G.: Splendid. Cipolla invokes custom. What does custom do here?

S.: It pretends to settle by inheritance what he cannot settle by argument.

G.: So the appeal implicates “this is not for fresh scrutiny.”

S.: Exactly.

G.: Generalised?

S.: Fairly. Appeals to custom often imply closure.

G.: La Nanna counters with a more local custom. What is her move?

S.: She provincialises his universality. She implies that his “everyone” means only his own tiny and interested circle.

G.: Very good. That is a particularised correction of the common-ground claim.

S.: And a socially cruel one.

G.: Good cruelty is often diagnostic. Now Cipolla becomes vague. Why?

S.: Because precision would expose him.

G.: Implicature?

S.: That vagueness is being used as a shelter, not as humility.

G.: Particularised?

S.: Entirely. Vagueness can be innocent. Here it is evasive.

G.: Now the old danger. Is any of this presupposition?

S.: Almost certainly less than lazy analysts would claim.

G.: One example, please.

S.: When La Nanna says “even friars may forget themselves,” the presupposition is only that friars are a class of persons. The sting, namely that this friar has forgotten himself already, is implicature.

G.: Excellent. You are not wholly lost. Cipolla then says “let us speak plainly.” What does that implicate?

S.: That things have not gone plainly for him thus far.

G.: Generalised?

S.: Yes, often. “Let us speak plainly” usually implies that the prior discourse was obscured, evasive, or unsatisfactory.

G.: And in this case?

S.: It also particularly implies that he wishes to reset rules he has just been losing under.

G.: Good. La Nanna answers with a plainness that over-fulfils the invitation. Implicature?

S.: That she is willing to grant his maxim and show him he cannot bear its consequences.

G.: Quantity and Manner cooperating vindictively.

S.: If you like.

G.: I do. Now there is a joke at his expense that depends on double meaning. Is the second meaning conventional implicature?

S.: No. That would confuse lexical ambiguity with implicature.

G.: Excellent. So what do we have?

S.: An ambiguity exploited conversationally so that one reading remains decorous and the other devastating.

G.: And the devastative force is particularised.

S.: Entirely. The dictionary does not insult him; the occasion does.

G.: Cipolla pretends to choose the innocent reading.

S.: Which implies he has heard the wicked one.

G.: Yes. Denial by selective uptake. Very useful. Now La Nanna leaves something unfinished. Aposiopesis. Implicature?

S.: That she trusts the hearer to complete the indecency or the judgment without requiring her to soil her own mouth.

G.: Excellent. Particularised?

S.: Yes, though the device has a fairly stable general tendency toward insinuation.

G.: So a generalisable implicature pattern realised in a particular scandal.

S.: You make vice sound pedagogical.

G.: It usually is. Now Cipolla asks whether she mocks him. Why ask?

S.: Because to ask is already to acknowledge the suspicion while trying to retain procedural innocence.

G.: Very good. And her answer?

S.: If she says no too quickly, she implies yes by style. If she says no with solemnity, she may imply that only a fool would need to ask.

G.: Which kind does she choose?

S.: The second, naturally. She has standards.

G.: High ones. Now classify the implicature in “only a fool would need to ask,” where the “only” is not said.

S.: Conversational, particularised, sharpened by irony.

G.: Not entailment?

S.: No. Nothing in the literal negative forces that conclusion.

G.: Excellent. Cipolla then uses a diminutive. What is he up to?

S.: He is trying to miniaturise the dispute and, with it, her authority in it.

G.: Good. Does the diminutive itself conventionally implicate diminution of seriousness?

S.: Often, but not rigidly. It may express affection, contempt, condescension, or mere scale.

G.: So in this context?

S.: A non-conventional but socially legible implicature of condescension.

G.: Very nice. La Nanna repeats the diminutive and makes it bite him instead.

S.: Exactly. She domesticates his patronage and returns it with interest.

G.: Particularised?

S.: Entirely.

G.: Now a more abstract question. Would you say the dialogue overall relies more on generalised or particularised implicature?

S.: Overwhelmingly particularised. The wit lives in local pressure, local asymmetry, local knowledge.

G.: Good. But some recurring forms?

S.: Yes. Appeals to custom, demands for plain speaking, complaints of misunderstanding, strategic compliments, excessive respect, and over-informative answers all carry rather stable generalised tendencies.

G.: Excellent. We are getting somewhere. Cipolla says something pious and La Nanna replies with a domestic example. Implicature?

S.: That theology without household intelligence is not worth the oil in the lamp.

G.: Very good. Particularised?

S.: Yes, though the broader anti-abstraction sentiment may be common enough.

G.: Is there anywhere in the dialogue where you would actually grant a presupposition of some philosophical interest?

S.: Perhaps where a correction takes for granted a shared standard of apt speech. But even there, most of the fun lies not in what must be taken for granted, but in what may be inferred from strategic deviation.

G.: So presupposition is the dull furniture; implicature the theatre.

S.: In this dialogue, emphatically yes.

G.: Now Cipolla says “as a matter of charity.” Implicature?

S.: That he wishes to moralise the next move in advance so that resistance appears uncharitable.

G.: Excellent. Generalised?

S.: Fairly. Such prefacing often loads the moral dice.

G.: La Nanna replies charitably indeed, but to his disadvantage.

S.: Which is her genius. She takes the announced norm and fulfils it in the wrong direction for him.

G.: What is implied by over-fulfilling a norm?

S.: That the speaker invoking it did not understand its consequences.

G.: Very nice. Now if I ask whether La Nanna’s wit depends upon flouting Quality, what do you say?

S.: Rarely. She tends not to lie. Her power comes from saying true things too pointedly or from arranging them too well.

G.: Excellent. So the main engines are Quantity, Relation, and Manner.

S.: With politeness forever hovering like a second legal code.

G.: A non-conversational yet non-conventional reservoir.

S.: Yes. She can imply insult through perfect civility.

G.: Which is always the best sort. Cipolla ends with some form of retreat. What is the implicature of a dignified retreat after defeat?

S.: That one still claims authorship of the ending. He cannot win the exchange, so he means to close it as though closure were victory.

G.: Generalised?

S.: Often, yes. The defeated frequently mistake last word for best word.

G.: And La Nanna’s final line?

S.: Usually a line that appears to release him while in fact fixing the reader’s judgment forever.

G.: What kind of implicature is that?

S.: Particularised, devastating, and perhaps best left unreported in mixed company.

G.: Cowardice.

S.: Prudence.

G.: Accetto again.

S.: Civilisation again.

G.: Very well. Then let us conclude. Fra Cipolla says much, means less than he hopes, and implies more than he intends. La Nanna says just enough, means exactly what she wants, and lets the implicature do the strangling.

S.: That is about right.

G.: And the dialogue overall?

S.: A manual of enlightened pressure under social constraint.

G.: Too grand.

S.: A friar’s defeat by conversational intelligence, then.

G.: Better. One final classification. La Nanna’s wit: conventional, conversational, or diabolical?

S.: Predominantly conversational, occasionally politeness-based, never merely lexical, and only diabolical if one is a friar.

G.: Dry enough?

S.: Sufficiently Chietine, with one excellent woman in command.

 

Grice: Mi permetta una curiosità, caro Sterlich: come pronuncia esattamente il suo cognome? Soprattutto l’ultima parte, che mi sembra poco italiana!  

Sterlich: Ah, è una domanda che mi fanno spesso! Si pronuncia “Ster-lich”, con la “ch” finale un po’ dura, quasi tedesca. In famiglia scherziamo sempre su quanto suoni strano qui in Abruzzo.  

Grice: Capisco, dev’essere stato un nome che ha incuriosito molti, specie tra i georgofili e gli intellettuali della sua biblioteca a Chieti! E ha portato fortuna, direi, se penso al fermento culturale che ha contribuito a creare.  

Sterlich: La ringrazio, professore! In fondo, anche un cognome “fuori dal coro” può essere uno stimolo alla conversazione e all’apertura verso idee nuove. Come diceva mio padre, “la diversità è la ricchezza che fa crescere la cultura.”

 

Verbali: Stertinio

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Stertinī. Audīvī tē adhūc Damasippō praeceptōrem esse—sub Porticū, ut aiunt: ego semper mirātus sum quam multum in illō “porticū” lateat.

GRICEVS: Apud nōs, cum quis “porticum” laudat, saepe satis est dīcere porticum—nē addāmus quidnam coloris; sed spero Damasippum tuum ab illō genere ornātūs servāvistī, quod Graecī amant, Rōmānī autem (nisi fallor) rubōre tegunt.

STERTINIVS: Heu, Grice: Damasippus “porticum” audīvit et statim ad parietēs spectāvit, quasi philosophia in pictūrā nāscerētur. Ego autem dē ratiōne, dē officiō, dē animō loquēbar.

STERTINIVS: Inplicaturam callidissimam, Grice! Nōn negō: porticus illa Graecē dicitur Στοὰ Ποικίλη—id est “porticus picta”; sed totum hoc Damasippō super caput fuit: nihil nisi dē togā novā cōgitābat, et maxime utrum satis virīlis foret, cum eam primum sumeret.

 

Verbali: Stilione

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Stilīō: audīvī tē ipsum principem erudiisse—Alexandrum Severum, inquam. O rem miram: ego numquam nisi apud Vadum Boum barbarōs (ut ita dicam) docuī.

STILIŌ: Salvē, Grice. Barbarōs? At tu Oxoniensibus barbaris nihil deest praeter modestiam. Sed quid ad principem? Ille certe maiōrem curam poscit quam iuvenis de vādō boum.

GRICEVS: Fortasse. Ego tamen, cum audiam “tutorem principis,” subrīdēo: quasi princeps statim habeat principium—id est, principium rationis. Sed nonne tibi quoque aliquando visus est quasi adhūc litterās ratiōnis disceret?

STILIŌ: Ō, tam callidam inplicatvram, Grice! Nōn negāverim: purpura saepe velat caput, nōn instruit; et “princeps” nomen est, sed principium ratiōnis etiam principi addiscendum est.

 

Verbali: Stilone

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Stilo Lanuvine! Audio tē de proloquiō caelī disserere—quasi grammaticus ipse ad astra conscendat.

STILO: Salvē tu quoque, Grice. Proloquium (axiōma, ut Stoici) nec humile nec superbum est: sententia simplex, sed plena. Quid tibi videtur dē caelō?

GRICEVS: Mirum dictū: hodiē proloquium dē caelō repperī—tam caeleste, ut mihi videātur nōn tantum “dē caelō” dīcī, sed paene “caelī” ipsīus: ita mē illa particula dē (quam negotiātor quidam “of” vocat) in nūbēs sustulit.

STILO: Inplicatvram bellissimam, Grice! sed cave: nē dē nimis extendās; aliōquī discipulī meī (Cicero et Varro) tē nōn in Commentariō dē proloquiīs, sed in Indicē comoediārum repōnent.

 

Verbali: Stucchi

 

Grice: Caro Stucchi, devo confessare che quando penso alla "filosofia perenne" e ai tuoi illustri riferimenti – Pitagora, Cicerone, Ovidio, Virgilio, Plinio – mi sento come un creatore che, tra una creatura e l’altra, si ritrova a Gubbio in cerca della verità eterna. Dimmi, come si convive con così tanti giganti sulle spalle, e pure con la pioggia umbra?

Stucchi: Ah, caro Grice, Gubbio è proprio la città delle verità perenni – e anche dei temporali perenni! Ma ti dirò, convivere con Pitagora e Virgilio è un po’ come cenare con parenti che non smettono mai di filosofare: tra una metafora e una equazione, qui si medita persino sul brodo!

Grice: Capisco, capisco... D’altronde, quando mi capita di creare qualche creatura, mi limito a implicare il creatore – per modestia, si intende. In fondo, la filosofia dalle tue parti ha sempre avuto un gusto speciale: come l’aqua virgo, che non disseta mai del tutto, ma lascia sempre il desiderio di un’altra verità.

Stucchi: Bellissima implicatura, Grice! Hai colto il segreto dei filosofi di Gubbio: qui si crea, si traduce, si insegna, ma senza mai dire tutto – ogni creatura è solo una traccia, un invito a cercare il creatore dietro le quinte. E se la verità perenne si nasconde… almeno il brodo è sempre in tavola!

 

Verbali: Svetonio

 

M.: Grice, open your Suetonius and do not look as if the Caesars have already won.

G.: Yes, sir.

M.: We begin with Julius. State, without embroidery, his relation to the crossing of the Rubicon.

G.: He crossed it, sir, thereby converting decision into civil war and geography into constitutional argument.

M.: Better than most politicians. Shropshire, what is Suetonius’s implicature behind Julius?

S.: That brilliance in public achievement does not exonerate appetite in private conduct, sir, and that republican forms are not improved merely because a genius breaks them efficiently.

M.: Hm. Efficiently is the adverb of your generation. Grice, two salient features of Suetonius on Julius apart from the Rubicon.

G.: His clemency and his vanity, sir. Also his relation to kingship by denial and attraction.

M.: Quite. The bald man and the crown. Shropshire, the implicature of the baldness anecdotes?

S.: That the public man is to be cut to mortal proportions, sir. Suetonius reduces majesty to grooming and thereby restores aristocratic revenge in miniature.

M.: Good. Augustus next. Grice, what is his official relation to monarchy?

G.: He disclaims it, sir, while arranging everything so that it becomes permanent.

M.: Very Roman. Shropshire?

S.: The implicature is that the best tyrant is the one who understands the grammar of modesty, sir. Augustus means “princeps” while saying “citizen.”

M.: Better. Grice, one virtue and one vice of Augustus in Suetonius.

G.: Administrative restraint and calculated theatre, sir.

M.: Theatre is not a vice until you perform it badly. Tiberius. Grice, where does Suetonius place him morally?

G.: In suspicion, reserve, and eventual obscenity, sir.

M.: A promising civil servant, then. Shropshire, what is implied by the withdrawal to Capri?

S.: That absence is itself a form of rule, sir. Tiberius governs by making others guess at his intention and by letting distance become fear.

M.: Very good. That, Grice, is called politics before it is called psychology. Caligula. Grice, one sentence.

G.: Power without measure passing into theatrical cruelty, sir.

M.: A concise disaster. Shropshire, the implicature of Caligula’s horse?

S.: That institutions are humiliated not only by open violence but by ridicule, sir. To threaten an office by a horse is to imply that office itself has become decorative.

M.: Excellent. Claudius. Grice, what does Suetonius do with the stammer, the limp, and the family underestimation?

G.: He makes bodily defect the screen behind which an emperor appears unexpectedly effective, sir.

M.: Unexpectedly is doing too much work. Shropshire, the implicature?

S.: That contempt misreads power, sir. The ridiculous man may rule competently, which embarrasses all physiognomists and many senators.

M.: You are improving. Nero. Grice, no musicological indulgence.

G.: Artistic vanity elevated above political responsibility, sir, with cruelty increasingly aestheticised.

M.: Yes. He fiddles, if not literally then morally. Shropshire, what is Suetonius doing with the stage obsession?

S.: He implies that when the ruler confuses audience with people, sir, government becomes performance and applause becomes policy.

M.: Good. Galba. Grice, why does he fail?

G.: Severity without tact, sir; old-fashioned austerity applied without regard to the new economy of expectation.

M.: The new economy of expectation. Nasty phrase, accurate thought. Shropshire?

S.: The implicature is that virtue unguided by timing becomes vice in office, sir. A ruler may be respectable and still politically tone-deaf.

M.: Otho. Grice, one distinguishing fact.

G.: He is morally compromised in formation yet dies with a degree of dignity, sir.

M.: Yes. A borrowed robe and a decent death. Shropshire, what is implied?

S.: That last acts revise earlier judgments without erasing them, sir. Suetonius lets the manner of dying become a corrective gloss, not a total acquittal.

M.: Vitellius. Grice, what vice dominates?

G.: Gluttony, sir, joined to inertia and incapacity.

M.: Joined, indeed. Shropshire, the implicature of the eating?

S.: That appetite is politically legible, sir. Excess at table implies incapacity in rule because self-government is the first test of public government.

M.: You have read your Stoics without being asked. Vespasian. Grice, why does Suetonius like him?

G.: Practicality, economy, humour, and relative proportion, sir.

M.: A headmaster’s emperor. Shropshire?

S.: The implicature is that ordinariness can itself be restorative, sir. After flamboyant monsters, competence looks almost philosophical.

M.: Tito. Grice, famous sobriquet?

G.: Deliciae humani generis, sir.

M.: Which means?

G.: The darling of the human race, sir.

M.: Sentimental rubbish, but classical rubbish. Shropshire, what lies under the charm?

S.: That benevolence may itself be politically staged, sir, but in Tito the staging is effective because it remains within Roman expectations of liberality and measure.

M.: Domitian. Grice, what is the problem?

G.: Surveillance, cruelty, self-divinisation, and the senatorial memory that follows him, sir.

M.: Yes. One must never forget that Suetonius inherits judgments as well as records them. Shropshire, the implicature of Domitian’s damnatio?

S.: That moral biography is written by survivors, sir. Suetonius means not only that Domitian was bad, but that a Roman elite required him to remain readable as bad.

M.: Excellent. You are both nearly tolerable. Now back to Julius. Grice, why does Suetonius prefer anecdote to constitutional theory?

G.: Because anecdote lets moral character do explanatory work without erecting a formal political science, sir.

M.: Which is a sentence you may keep if you learn to write less like a clerk. Shropshire, what is implied by arrangement in Suetonius?

S.: That sequence itself judges, sir. He need not say “this made him unfit”; he places the detail so that the Roman reader supplies the verdict.

M.: Good. That is very nearly literature. Grice, what would you call the system of virtues and vices at work?

G.: A rubric of Roman aristocratic evaluation, sir: justice, self-command, generosity against cruelty, sexual excess, greed, and theatricality.

M.: Reasonably put. Shropshire, why does this interest you?

S.: Because Suetonius says comparatively little in explicit theory and means a great deal by selection, sir.

M.: Ah. You have both smuggled philosophy back in through the servants’ entrance.

G.: Only slightly, sir.

M.: Slightly is how decay begins. Julius again. What is implied by the crown refusals?

G.: That denial may itself advertise desire, sir.

M.: Yes. English boys can understand that if they ever attend dances. Shropshire, Tiberius again. What is implied by reserve?

S.: That opacity itself becomes a political instrument, sir. Silence is no less legible than proclamation when the hearers are frightened enough.

M.: Good. Caligula. Why does Suetonius collect the grotesque?

G.: To make moral madness visible through memorable particulars, sir.

M.: And because Roman readers enjoy scandal with principle. Shropshire, Nero’s singing: what does it imply beyond bad taste?

S.: That the ruler no longer distinguishes between judgment and applause, sir.

M.: Very good. Claudius. Is Suetonius kind?

G.: Relatively, sir, but only because the contrast with expectation and with worse successors assists the portrait.

M.: Never trust relative kindness in a biographer. Otho. Why does a compromised life earn a partially noble close?

G.: Because Roman judgment remains responsive to final bearing, sir.

M.: Bearing. Better than redemption. Shropshire, why do meals matter with Vitellius?

S.: Because table conduct stands as the domestic form of rule, sir. Disorder there is taken as evidence of disorder elsewhere.

M.: Exactly. The pudding is constitutional. Vespasian. Why the jokes?

G.: They humanise him, sir, but also imply mastery. A ruler at ease with laughter is not terrified by his office.

M.: Better. Tito. Why the tears?

G.: They furnish moral spectacle, sir, but of a tolerable kind.

M.: Tolerable tears are the most Roman kind. Domitian. Why the fear of informers?

G.: Because speech itself becomes precarious under suspicion, sir.

M.: Ah. Now perhaps philosophy may enter by warrant. Shropshire, what is the implicature of informer culture?

S.: That public language has been corrupted, sir. Men say less, imply more, and trust neither words nor hearers.

M.: Good. That would have pleased Tacitus, though he would have said it more darkly. Grice, compare Suetonius and Tacitus in one sentence.

G.: Tacitus gives political tragedy in compressed moral psychology; Suetonius gives moral judgment by curated disclosure, sir.

M.: Curated disclosure. Monstrous phrase. Accurate enough. Shropshire, why is Suetonius so interested in bodies?

S.: Because bodies are where aristocratic evaluation becomes legible without theory, sir. Diet, sleep, sex, grooming, gait: all imply character and therefore fitness to rule.

M.: Very good. The body is the republic in shorthand. Grice, does Suetonius have a philosophy?

G.: Not in the explicit systematic sense, sir, but he operates under a stable framework of Roman moral expectations.

M.: Exactly. Which is what most boys miss because they prefer the dirt. Shropshire, why are the dirty stories not merely dirty?

S.: Because in Suetonius scandal is evidential, sir. It is selected to show whether private appetite subverts public office.

M.: Excellent. Julius and Augustus together now. What is the chief contrast?

G.: Julius is dazzling overreach; Augustus is successful management under a mask of restraint, sir.

M.: Very sound. Tiberius and Domitian?

G.: Suspicion in one becomes system in the other, sir.

M.: Nero and Caligula?

G.: Theatricality in both, but Nero aestheticises while Caligula deranges, sir.

M.: Vespasian and Claudius?

G.: Both show that the unglamorous ruler may govern better than the splendid one, sir.

M.: Good. Shropshire, what is the implicature behind the whole Twelve Caesars?

S.: That empire cannot abolish the need for moral judgment, sir. Since constitutional liberty is damaged, character becomes the aristocratic substitute for lost political argument.

M.: That is almost too good for Clifton.

G.: Only almost, sir.

M.: Do not become insolent by approximation. Now, Suetonius on Augustus again. Why the underinformativeness?

G.: Because he trusts the reader to infer the balance of praise and reservation from placement rather than from a frontal thesis, sir.

M.: Exactly. And what do we call that, Shropshire?

S.: In another century, perhaps implicature, sir.

M.: Do not be anachronistic before lunch.

S.: No, sir.

M.: You may be anachronistic after lunch if you cite your sources. Grice, why does Suetonius cut emperors down to size?

G.: So that Roman readers may cope with absolute power by seeing rulers as morally intelligible and bodily finite, sir.

M.: Very good. Nothing calms aristocrats like discovering that Caesar snores. Shropshire, what is implied by that reduction?

S.: That divinised office remains inhabited by mortal absurdity, sir.

M.: Better and better. Perhaps there is hope for the lower forms after all. Now tell me, Grice, what is the date of Suetonius in relation to the emperors he describes?

G.: He writes later, under the Flavians and Hadrianic world, sir, and inherits senatorial judgments not innocent of politics.

M.: Quite so. A biography is never merely backward-looking. Shropshire, what follows?

S.: That even selection is historical, sir. He means through arrangement what his own age permits and prefers.

M.: Yes. History school is not a morgue if properly taught. Grice, why would a philosopher care for Suetonius at all?

G.: Because he shows how evaluative meaning may be communicated without explicit theory, sir.

M.: Hm. That is nearly a confession. Shropshire, and why would a historian care?

S.: Because moral anecdote is part of political understanding, sir, not merely embroidery upon it.

M.: Good. We shall not despise embroidery if it does constitutional work. Now, one last round. Give me, Grice, one word for each emperor. Julius.

G.: Ambition, sir.

M.: Augustus.

G.: Management, sir.

M.: Tiberius.

G.: Reserve, sir.

M.: Caligula.

G.: Derangement, sir.

M.: Claudius.

G.: Misprision, sir.

M.: Nero.

G.: Performance, sir.

M.: Galba.

G.: Severity, sir.

M.: Otho.

G.: Revision, sir.

M.: Vitellius.

G.: Appetite, sir.

M.: Vespasian.

G.: Restoration, sir.

M.: Titus.

G.: Charm, sir.

M.: Domitian.

G.: Fear, sir.

M.: Shropshire, now the implicatures in one word each. Julius.

S.: Overreach, sir.

M.: Augustus.

S.: Disguise, sir.

M.: Tiberius.

S.: Opaqueness, sir.

M.: Caligula.

S.: Humiliation, sir.

M.: Claudius.

S.: Misreading, sir.

M.: Nero.

S.: Applause, sir.

M.: Galba.

S.: Untimeliness, sir.

M.: Otho.

S.: Correction, sir.

M.: Vitellius.

S.: Incontinence, sir.

M.: Vespasian.

S.: Sufficiency, sir.

M.: Titus.

S.: Display, sir.

M.: Domitian.

S.: Constriction, sir.

M.: Very well. Now close the book. Grice, what have you learned?

G.: That Suetonius says less than he means, sir.

M.: And you, Shropshire?

S.: That Roman history is a set of questions asked by anecdotes, sir.

M.: Excellent. Then you may both go to lunch, where I expect you to remember that gluttony is constitutional, reserve is political, applause is dangerous, and handwriting, Grice, is not yet a philosophy.

 

 

GRICEVS: O SVETONI, Tranquille, quid agis? Audio te commentarium de re publica scribere, et iam tot tabulas implevisti ut librarii gemant.

SVETONIVS: Ago, ut soleo: colligo, ordino, anecdotis condio. Nam si res publica gravis est, cur commentarius non sit levis—saltem in stilo?

GRICEVS: Ita vero. Et cum tu de re publica disseris, mirum est quam multa—dico, quam opportune—adicias quae in ipsa re publica (ut ita dicam) vix locum habent.

SVETONIVS: Pulchra implicatura, Grice! Sed quid faciam? Si principum vitia et virtutes rubricas habent, cur res publica non habeat margines—et margines non habeant glossas?

 

Verbali: Tagliabue

 

Grice: Professore Tagliabue, sono sempre rimasto affascinato dal suo approccio alle strutture del trascendentale. In che modo, secondo lei, il concetto di gusto si intreccia con la filosofia milanese e il rinnovamento dell’estetica italiana?

Tagliabue: Grazie, Grice! A mio avviso, il gusto non è solo una questione di preferenze personali, ma rappresenta un autentico momento del trascendentale: è ciò che consente all’individuo di aprirsi alla dimensione estetica, superando le vecchie impostazioni crociane. Milano, negli anni del dopoguerra, ha offerto un terreno fertile per questa rivalutazione, favorendo un dialogo tra fenomenologia, empirismo e filosofia della scienza.

Grice: È interessante! Quindi il gusto diventa una sorta di ponte tra il soggettivo e l’oggettivo, tra la percezione individuale e i valori condivisi. Le sue opere, penso a Il concetto dello stile, hanno contribuito a ridefinire il modo in cui l’estetica italiana affronta proprio questi temi.

Tagliabue: Esatto, Grice! Come diceva mia madre, “non basta vedere, bisogna saper cogliere il senso profondo della bellezza.” Il trascendentale è lo strumento che ci guida, e il gusto diventa una lente attraverso cui si rinnova la nostra comprensione estetica. La filosofia milanese ha avuto il coraggio di superare le rigidità idealistiche e di aprire nuove strade. Ne sono felice!

 

Verbali: Taglialatela

 

Grice: Taglialatela, lei che ha saputo fondare una vera scuola di istituzioni filosofiche a Mondragone, mi dica: qual è il segreto per far fiorire la filosofia anche dove sembra che il terreno sia duro e poco incline al pensiero? 

Taglialatela: Ah, caro Grice, la filosofia è come il vento tra le colline campane: a volte basta un soffio, altre volte bisogna pazientare e seminare idee con costanza. E a Mondragone, tra Garibaldi, Gioberti e le nuove istituzioni, il pensiero si radica proprio quando meno te lo aspetti! 

Grice: Non lo dico, ma se dovessi tenere un seminario sulle ‘istituzioni di filosofia’ a Vadum Boum, i barbari che ho come allievi—nulla a che vedere con quelli di Bononia—penserebbero subito che voglio ‘istituzionalizzarli’, magari metterli in qualche bella scatola regolamentare! 

Taglialatela: Bellissima implicatura, Grice! In fondo, le istituzioni filosofiche non sono gabbie ma ali: bisogna volare, non farsi imbrigliare! E se qualcuno teme di essere istituzionalizzato, basta ricordargli che la filosofia, come diceva Gioberti, è fatta per liberare la mente, non per incatenarla. A Mondragone, si insegna a ragionare e a sorridere: meglio una scuola che sappia accogliere le differenze, che una istituzione che le sopprime!

 

Verbali: Tarantino

 

Grice: Professore Tarantino, mi hanno sempre affascinato i suoi studi sull’inconscio e la coscienza! Dica, secondo lei, una buona tazza di tè può aiutare a scoprire i misteri della mente, o rischia solo di renderli più... aromatici?

Tarantino: Ah, caro Grice, se il tè fosse la soluzione, bisognerebbe aggiungerlo al programma di filosofia! Ma temo che il mistero dell'inconscio resti più difficile da dissolvere che lo zucchero nella bevanda.

Grice: Mi trova d’accordo! Del resto, come scrivevo in Personal identity, io stesso non ero consapevole di essere inconsapevole. Un po’ come quando ti dimentichi dove hai messo gli occhiali... e li stai indossando! Ma non glielo dico, eh!

Tarantino: Bella implicatura, Grice! In fondo, il filosofo che non sa di non sapere è come l’inconscio: sempre pronto a spuntare quando meno te lo aspetti, e magari pure con gli occhiali già sul naso!

 

Verbali: Tari

 

Grice: Caro Tari, una domanda: i piroti parlano pirotese perché sono piroti, o diventano piroti appena iniziano a parlare pirotese? Sai, mi sembra una bella questione “spuria”!

Tari: Ah, Grice, è del tutto naturale! Un piroto nasce già con il pirotese sulla punta della lingua. Nessuno in Villa Santa Maria Capua Vetere si sorprende: qui il dialetto è pane quotidiano!

Grice: Locke direbbe che la mia lingua barbarica trasforma il “pirot” più in un “Parrot” che in un “Pidlock”... almeno così mi dice la mia filosofia del linguaggio!

Tari: Touché, ma secondo l’Oxford English Dictionary, gli inglesi il “pirot” l’hanno preso dai veneziani, mica dagli italiani—e non l’hanno mai restituito! Se ne sono appropriati per sempre, come fanno spesso con le parole e col tè!

 

Verbali: Tarozzi

 

Verbali: Tartarotti

 

Grice: Caro Tartarotti, mi chiedevo: nella lingua italiana, con tutte queste differenze di voci, non potrebbe accadere che un "omicidio rituale" venga scambiato per una semplice discussione animata a tavola? È la magia del sintamme, no?

Tartarotti: Ah, fidati di Grice per essere l’unico capace di unire simili sintamme in un unico colpo! D’altronde, se si sente gridare “ammazza!” in Trentino, potrebbe essere solo un elogio culinario… o la prova di una dialettica particolarmente vivace!

Grice: Quindi, se mi capita di studiare la differenza delle voci, devo stare attento a non ritrovarmi nel bel mezzo di un processo per omicidio rituale? Certo che la filosofia italiana è più pericolosa di quanto pensassi!

Tartarotti: Ma sì, Grice, qui fra Rovereto e Padova, basta una sfumatura vocale per trasformare un teorema in una tragedia! Meglio riderci sopra: al massimo, finiremo accusati di omicidio… del silenzio!

 

Verbali: Tataranni

 

Grice: Caro Tataranni, si dice che il “gusto pell’antico” porti dritto a... BONONIA! Me lo suggerisce G. E. Moore con la sua aria da logico inflessibile: amare l’antico è sinonimo di bolognesità, non trovi?

Tataranni: Ah, Grice, mi permetto una piccola correzione filosofica: se proprio il gusto va all’antico, allora bisogna arrivare a ROMA! Certo, la città forse non è più quella di un tempo, ma – come dice quel famoso epigramma – Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. Il nome resta anche se le mura vacillano!

Grice: Quindi mi stai dicendo che, a forza di cercare colonne e capitelli, rischio di trovarmi davanti solo… nomi su pergamene polverose? Però, che consolazione raffinata: puoi togliere Roma dall’Urbe, ma non dal discorso!

Tataranni: Esattamente! E così, quando la gente cerca la gloria di Roma, trova almeno la gloria del suo nome. In fondo, persino una rosa, cambiato il nome, rimarrebbe pur sempre… oggetto di discussione da filosofi! Meglio riderci su e intingere la penna nell’inchiostro dell’antichità!

 

Verbali: Telesio

 

1939

G: You look as though you have smuggled Clarendon into my room.

S: Sir, Clarendon smuggled itself into my room. I merely failed to resist.

G: That is the Oxford defence: non-resistance as scholarship. Now, you said you found Fowler.

S: I did. He is meticulous in the way only an Oxford editor can afford to be. G: Meaning: meticulous because he has already eaten.

S: Precisely, sir. Fowler’s Introduction. He calls Telesio a precursor.

G: Read the Fowler bit you’ve got. Slowly. Pretend you are not pleased.

S: From Fowler’s Introduction, on the precursors of Bacon. He says Bacon called Telesio novorum hominum primus. G: That phrase is the hinge. Now, I want it in its habitat. What is Fowler actually doing with it. S: He is doing what Oxford does: building a genealogy so that Bacon’s empiricism looks less like a stunt and more like an inheritance. G: Good. Continue. S: Fowler says, in effect, that Telesio is the first of the moderns who made any successful attempt to construct a system on a physical basis. G: That is the English gloss. Now, the Latin. S: The Latin is Bacon’s, quoted by Fowler: novorum hominum primus. G: Minimal Latin, maximal claim. Now, S, tell me what you think Bacon meant by “new men.” S: Men who stop repeating Aristotle in the same breath as they claim to be observing nature. G: Quite. “New” in Bacon’s mouth is anti-scholastic, not merely chronological. S: But why Telesio, sir. Why not Galileo. G: Because Bacon is not compiling an Italian honour-roll. He is identifying a certain kind of rebellion: a natural philosophy built on “physical” principles rather than on scholastic forms. S: So Telesio is “new” because he turns to heat and cold, and to the senses, and makes nature explain itself. G: Exactly. Bacon likes any man who demotes syllogism and promotes experience, even if the man’s physics is later wrong. S: That sounds like your future method, sir. G: My future method is not to have one. Bacon’s method is to have a method and then call it modest. S: So Fowler is treating Telesio as a bridge. G: Yes. The word “bridge” is important. It means there is a gap: scholastics on one side, Bacon on the other, and Telesio as the first plank. S: And you want me to say where Bacon might have heard of Telesio. G: I want you to resist inventing a charming story. Give me the sober channels. S: Books. G: More. S: Continental scholarly circulation. Italian natural philosophy was not exactly secret by then. G: And? S: Bacon’s own circle of learned correspondents. He reads widely in Renaissance natural philosophy. G: Good. Also: Telesio’s De rerum natura had been published and discussed; and in the learned ecosystem, “Telesius” becomes a name for the anti-Aristotelian. S: So Bacon didn’t have to meet anyone. He had to meet a book. G: Precisely. Now, you said something about De principiis atque originibus. S: Fowler says the phrase comes from Bacon’s De principiis atque originibus. G: Good. And what does that tell you, historically. S: That the “novorum hominum primus” remark is not a casual aside in Novum Organum itself, but part of Bacon’s Latin philosophical writing from the early 1610s. G: And therefore: Fowler is cross-referencing Bacon’s own internal corpus to explain the method. S: Meticulous, sir. G: Meticulous enough that, without his Clarendon enterprise, you and I would be not primus but ultimi among the moderns. S: That is a bit harsh, sir. G: It is affectionate. Now, read another Fowler point. The one about precursors. S: Fowler places Telesio among Bacon’s precursors, and says he broke with Aristotelian tradition. G: There. That is the Oxford function: a precursor is someone you can praise without having to obey. S: Then Bacon praises him as first, but doesn’t follow him as master. G: Exactly. It is a ranking, not a discipleship. S: Sir, is novorum hominum primus the same as “primus modernorum.” G: Near enough for our purposes, but note the nuance. Modernorum is a later label; Bacon says novorum hominum, the “new men,” which has more polemical bite. It sounds like a party forming. S: Like a club. G: Like a club that refuses to call itself a club. Now, you said you wanted me to test you on empiricism. So: what is Fowler trying to do with Bacon. S: He is trying to show that Bacon is not merely a slogan about induction, but a concrete reformer of method, and that he had antecedents, and that his break was prepared. G: Good. And Telesio functions as the earliest “successful” physical system. S: Successful in the sense of attempted, not true. G: Exactly. Successful as an act of emancipation. S: And now you want the dry humour. G: I want you to notice the Oxford irony. Fowler is Wykeham Professor of Logic. He edits Bacon’s anti-syllogistic manifesto. So Oxford employs a logician to edit the book that tells you logic is too late a remedy. S: That is very Oxford, sir. G: Now, recite the Latin again, and make it sound like an aphorism, because Fowler is an aphorism man. S: Novorum hominum primus. G: Now imagine Bacon saying it with the tone of a judge. S: “First among the new men.” G: And then imagine Fowler saying it with the tone of a don who wants a footnote to do the violence. S: He would add: “from De principiis atque originibus.” G: Exactly. Oxford violence is always deferred to a reference. S: Sir, if Telesio is first, who is second. G: Bacon would not say. That would create obligations. S: Fowler might. G: Fowler might, because editors live by lists. But remember: lists are not arguments. S: Then the most relevant question is: first in what respect. G: Precisely. First in abandoning Aristotle as the principal explanatory engine. First in trying to build “on a physical basis.” S: But Telesio still has a system. He is not a mere collector of observations. G: That’s why Bacon can both admire and surpass him. Bacon wants system, but built by controlled induction rather than by a few large physical oppositions. S: Heat and cold versus Bacon’s tables and instances. G: Exactly. Now, you wanted this to be a tutorial. So I ask you: what is empiricism. S: A commitment to experience, observation, experiment, as a primary source of knowledge, and suspicion of purely a priori systems. G: Too general. Make it Baconian. S: Baconian empiricism is method: the reform of how we move from particulars to axioms, plus a critique of “idols” that distort the mind. G: Better. Now, where does Telesio fit into that. S: As a precursor who privileges observation and nature’s own principles over scholastic explanations, but without Bacon’s full inductive machinery. G: Good. Now, S, in your own tone: why would an Oxford philosopher care in 1939. S: Because Oxford likes to pretend it invented sober method, and this reminds it that Italians were trying to rebuild nature on experience long before Oxford made it a virtue.

G: Excellent. Also because 1939 makes everyone look for beginnings. When the world is about to be broken, you become sentimental about origins. S: And about firsts, sir. G: Exactly. Now we must keep one thing clear: we have not yet pinned the exact Bacon sentence around novorum hominum primus, only the phrase itself as Fowler quotes it. S: So to be fully proper we would retrieve the De principiis passage. G: Yes. Fowler points; we verify. That’s the empiricist part. S: Sir, I can do one more thing: I can look in the Fowler volume for “Telesius” in the index. G: You will, and you will discover that Fowler anticipated your laziness. S: He is the first of the moderns, sir. G: No. He is the last of the Victorians. Which, in Oxford, is the same compliment.

 

Grice: Caro Telesio, ti vedo proprio raggiante! Chi l’avrebbe mai detto che Bononia, una volta roccaforte dell’anti-empirismo, oggi si vanta di mettere l’empirismo al centro. Deve essere una vera rivincita, eh?

Telesio: Hai proprio ragione, Grice! Bononia era nota per difendere strenuamente l’anti-empirismo… e se non fosse stato per quel famoso “Lizio”, che non nominiamo mai direttamente, a tener viva la ἐμπειρία, chissà dove sarebbero finiti i filosofi! Alla fine, persino le mura odoravano di aristotelismo ma con un pizzico di em-pereia greca.

Grice: Ah, la ἐμπειρία! Cicero ancora si sveglia di notte sudando freddo, pensando a come tradurla. “Ex-perior”? “Per-capio”? Forse avrebbe voluto semplicemente un bel “sento-cose”, ma i latini non si accontentavano mai! Se l’avessero lasciata in greco, almeno risparmiavano qualche mal di testa...

Telesio: Immagino Cicero seduto con il dizionario, inventando parole come “esperire” o “ex-perior”, mentre il povero Lizio rideva sotto i baffi. Alla fine, la vera esperienza è capire che tradurre la ἐμπειρία è più difficile che sperimentarla! Dai, brindiamo all’empirismo e alle etimologie impossibili!

 

GRICE’S WEEKLY ESSAY ASSIGNMENT.

What work by Telesio did Bacon not read to justify his characterisation of the former as prius modernorum? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

Verbali: Teodoro

 

1939

G: You have brought me the only surviving thing Theodorus has the decency to leave us.

S: The only surviving thing, sir, is a manual on how long to make your vowels.

G: Which is already more useful than half the philosophy written this term. S: It is, however, less glamorous than De natura rerum.

G: Yes. I too would prefer the lost work to the extant one. S: I wish his De natura rerum had survived. I would be dis-articulating much of what you’ve forced me to articulate and hyper-articulate here.

G: You are always eager to be spared by a loss. S: Loss is sometimes a kindness, sir.

G: Recite. S: From De syllaba. Est igitur syllaba litterarum inter se congregatarum apta conplexio. G: Stop. Now say, without translating word by word, what he is doing. S: He is giving a definition as if definitions were obligations. G: Good. And the phrase apta conplexio suggests not any heap but a fitting composition. The syllable is already normed. S: Vsu autem inueteratum est ut etiam nulla litterarum congregatione facta solas per se eas quae uocales nominantur syllabas esse dicamus. G: Here comes usage. He makes custom a co-author. S: So his “meaning” is partly system and partly social habit. G: Exactly. And that is already a Fregean hint. The sense of “syllable” is not just whatever a private speaker fancies; it is fixed by a practice that outlives speakers. S: You’re going to tell me that’s like my “utterer’s meaning” being constrained by “sentence-meaning.” G: I am going to tell you it’s like your utterer’s meaning being hostage to a public object, and then you pretending you own it. S: Sir, shall I continue. G: Yes, but in manageable pieces. S: Syllabis uero conficiuntur pedes, quae prima quasi metra appellare possumus. G: He builds up: syllable to foot, foot to metre. Like the way you insist that word-meaning nests inside sentence-meaning. S: Syllaba et pes mensura constant, quae graece metron dicitur. G: The key word is mensura. Measure. A public constraint. Something like your “principle” but without any pretence of being ethical. S: Sunt autem syllabae partim longae, partim breues, partim communes. G: Long, short, common. A little taxonomy. Now give me the bit you think is most “phonemic.” S: ‘A’ producta longam syllabam facit, ut ‘ales’, ‘a’ correpta breuem, ut ‘amor’: ‘e’ producta longam, ut ‘emi’, e correpta breuem, ut ‘emo’: ‘i’ producta longam, ut ‘Ilium’, ‘i’ correpta breuem, ut ‘iter’: ‘o’ producta longam, ut ‘omen’, o correpta breuem, ut ‘origo’: ‘u’ producta longam, ut ‘unus’, ‘u’ correpta breuem, ut ‘utinam’. G: Now. The obvious question you were itching to ask me. S: Does any of that change what is meant, sir, or only how the line scans. G: Both, sometimes. But Theodorus is not doing lexicography; he is giving the hearer-reader the conditions under which the sound counts as the right sound. The “meaning” for him is partly this: what counts as the same form in a tradition of reading. S: So the “sense” of a word in verse depends on syllable quantity because quantity fixes whether it can be that word in that metrical slot. G: Exactly. You can now say something moderately Fregean without blushing. The sense of a segment can include its role conditions in a system. A syllable’s identity is not a bare acoustic; it is a function in metrical space. S: But you would never say “syllable meaning.” G: I would say syllables do not have utterer’s meaning. But they do have a role in fixing which word can be uttered as that word rather than another. S: So the syllable is upstream of word-meaning, as it were. G: In verse, yes. It constrains the space of eligible words. S: Vt autem solae per se uocales productae longas, correptae breues syllabas faciunt, ita etiam cum his iunctae consonantes aut longas aut breues syllabas secundum legem atque usum pronuntiationis informant. G: Legem atque usum. Again law and usage. That pairing is your bridge to Grice. I treat conversational interpretation as norm-guided. He treats pronunciation as norm-guided. S: But he’s not doing implicature. G: No. He is doing what you might call the preconditions of intelligibility inside a learned practice. And your point is that even those preconditions can invite inferential charity. When a line seems “wrong,” you don’t assume stupidity; you assume a rule you haven’t applied yet. S: Like you assume cooperation. G: Like that. Now go on. The diphthongs. S: Iunguntur uero inter se binae uocales, quas Graeci diphthongos uocant, ‘ae’ ‘oe’ ‘au’ ‘eu’ ‘ei’ ‘yi’, quae syllabae semper longae sunt. G: Semper. An uncompromising word. S: So no cancellation, sir. G: Not in the conversational sense, no. This is not a pragmatic inference you can retract; it’s a feature of the metrical system as he presents it. S: Adsociantur etiam sic inter se uocales litterae, id est ‘i’ et ‘u’, ut prior littera uim teneat consonantis, ut ‘Iuno’ ‘uideo’, quarum syllabarum ea condicio est, ut interdum longae sint, interdum breues. Id enim ratio sermonis latini et pronuntiandi forma expetit. G: Here he becomes more Gricean than he intends. He says: sometimes long, sometimes short, because ratio sermonis and pronouncing form demand it. S: That sounds like “context.” G: Exactly. He invokes something like a contextual rationality of the language: the system and practice together determine what is acceptable. That is an ancestor of the idea that meaning depends on rule plus situation. S: Now the position rules. G: Recite. S: Positione autem longae syllabae fiunt, si correpta uocalis habeat in eadem syllaba ultimam litteram consonantem, eademque littera excipiatur a consonante consequenti, ut ‘arma’. G: This is the most “non-local” part. The length of the syllable depends on what follows. S: So the syllable’s identity depends on its environment. G: Exactly. And there is your Fregean point about context. A sign’s contribution is a function of embedding. The syllable here has no autonomous fate; it is measured by what comes after. S: Fit autem positione longa syllaba, cum ipsa per se ex uocali et duabus consonantibus constat, ut ‘est’. G: He is treating “est” as a metrical object, not as a verb. S: That feels criminal to me. G: It is a different jurisdiction. In metre, “est” is a timing event. In semantics, it is a copula. Both are true, but they answer different questions about what counts as well-formed. S: Quod si praecedentem breuem syllabam, quam una uocalis facit, sequentur duae consonantes, fit syllaba positione longa, ut ‘Acrisioneis’. G: Notice the consequence: the prior short becomes long by what follows. Again, meaning-by-environment. S: Item fit positione longa, si uocalis in duplicem desinit litteram, ut ‘nox erat’, aut si praemissa uocalis praecedat duplicem graecam, ut ‘Mezentius’. G: And now the system admits foreign material, Greek doubles, as a reason for length. That’s a sociolinguistic note hiding as a metrical rule. S: Interdum autem breuis syllaba, qua pars orationis terminatur, pro longa ponitur, ut ‘omnia uincit amor, et nos cedamus amori’. G: Here is the “license.” Theodorus’ version of a sanctioned violation. S: Quod genus syllabae inter longas uel omnino refugiendum uel parcissime usurpan dum est, quamuis et apud Vergilium non rarissimum, apud Homerum uero frequentissimum reperiatur. G: That is pure pragmatics of genre. Not a rule, but a norm about norms. Don’t overdo the license, though Homer does. S: So he is calibrating expectations across authors. G: Exactly. And that is the best Griceian bridge you have. Hearers infer differently depending on the genre and the author. What’s “permissible” shifts with shared background. S: Then comes the “communis” syllable. G: Read. S: Communis uero syllaba fit, cum productam uocalem sequitur uocalis, ut ‘te Corydon, o Alexi’; item cum duas uocales inter se coniunctas consequitur uocalis, ut ‘insulae Ionio in magno’. G: The common syllable is ambiguous between long and short. S: Like a word with two senses. G: But here the ambiguity is a licensed metrical ambiguity. It is resolved by the pattern, the poet, and the practice. Again: interpretation under norms. S: Positam etiam communem apud Vergilium uidemus eam syllabam, quae in ‘c’ litteram desinit, ut eam uocalis consequatur: nam cum dicit ‘hoc erat’, longam eam syllabam constituit, quae in ‘c’ desinit; cum autem dicit ‘solus hic’, breuem eandem syllabam conlocat. G: That’s a clean demonstration that the same orthographic string can function differently depending on its position. S: So you’d say the “same expression” can have different “values” depending on environment. G: Yes, if you insist on Fregean idiom. Its contribution to the whole differs. And the hearer’s task is to recover the intended pattern, not to accuse the poet of inconsistency. S: Est etiam communis syllaba, cum praecedens in uocalem desinit, sequens autem syllaba ita habet duas consonantes, ut prior sit muta et sequens liquida, ut ‘uasto Cyclopis in antro’ et ‘uastos ab rupe Cyclopas’. G: Muta and liquida. A phonological classification as a condition for interpretation. S: Sir, you are going to say this is all “pre-semantic.” G: No. I am going to say it is one of the ways a culture turns sound into a norm-governed medium. It is not utterer’s meaning, but it is part of what makes utterer’s meaning publicly transmissible in a verse tradition. S: Then how do you connect it to your paper on utterer’s meaning and sentence-meaning. G: Easily. I insist that what a speaker means is not the same as what the sentence means. But both presuppose a stable public code. Here Theodorus is describing the code-conditions for verse: how a string counts as a syllable, how syllables count as feet, and so on. Without those, the poet’s intention cannot be recognised as intention rather than noise. S: So Theodorus is giving a kind of public “sense” infrastructure. G: Exactly. And Frege would smile, grimly, because he likes infrastructures that discipline private psychology. S: But you also like private psychology. G: I like it only when it submits itself to public accountability. S: Now. You asked earlier for an English correlative. G: Yes. If quantity makes all the difference in Latin, what’s the nearest thing in English. S: We don’t have phonemic vowel length in the same clean way, sir. G: We have tense-lax contrasts that learners misdescribe as length. S: Like sheep and ship. G: Good. And if someone says ship when they mean sheep, what do we do. S: We repair, sir. We decide: dialect, incompetence, joke, or insult. G: Exactly. And that decision is Gricean in posture: interpret charitably by default, unless the context makes charity irrational. S: But you refuse to treat stress contrasts as phonemic in the neat linguist’s way. G: I refuse to treat them as designed signals in the way a code treats them. I’m interested in how people actually manage understanding, which includes ignoring phonetic detail until it matters. S: In metre it always matters. G: In metre, yes, because the practice has elevated it into a criterion of correctness. That is Theodorus’ whole point. S: Then the difference between us and him is simply the domain. G: And the kind of norm. His norm is metrical well-formedness. Mine is conversational rationality and mutual intelligibility. Both are public, both can be violated, both can be repaired by inference. S: And “sense” in Frege’s way. G: Frege’s Sinn is not sound, but the mode of presentation. Here, the mode of presentation includes, for a verse culture, the fact that the line must be scannable. The “same thought” in different metrical shapes is not the same presentation. So even if you keep reference fixed, the verse form changes how it is presented and how it is understood. S: So you’re letting metre into Sinn. G: I’m letting practice into Sinn. Metre is one practice that makes the point easy to see. S: Theodorus would hate this. G: Theodorus would not notice. He would call it mensura and move on. S: And yet his mensura is your best evidence that meaning is not just a private act. G: Exactly. Now finish the excerpt. S: Atque haec quidem de syllabis dixisse satis sit. Nunc pedum distinctionem et varietatem persequamur. G: That line is the most merciful thing he says. “That’s enough about syllables.” S: Thank God, sir. G: Not thank God. Thank Theodorus. He has spared you. S: Only to move on to feet. G: And you, my poor adolescent, are still expected to exercise. S: Ad exercitationem adolescentum, sir? G: Exactly. That’s you. S: I’m beginning to see why he says brevis. G: Yes. Brevis is what a teacher writes when he intends to keep the pupil alive long enough to learn.

 

GRICEVS: O Theodore, praefecte praetorii et philosophorum decus Mediolanense, audio te De natura rerum scripsisse—quod periiit, heu! Sed dic mihi: cum de “natura rerum” loquimur, num statim omnes ad illum Lucretium insanum currunt, quasi solus naturam noverit?

THEODORVS: Ha! Lucretius ille—insanus quidem, sed versu sanissimus. Ego tamen, cum res publicas regerem, didici naturam rerum non solum in atomis, sed in rationibus, mensuris, et… vectigalibus latere.

GRICEVS: Recte; et hic mihi nascitur quaestio mea: si quis dicit “Theodorus de natura rerum scripsit,” saepe implicat (quasi submurmurat) “ergo Lucretium refellit” aut “Lucretium imitat.” At fortasse nihil tale—fortasse tantum significat: “vir est qui et mundum et metra administrare potest.”

THEODORVS: Optime intellegis! Mea implicatura (si ita loqui libet) est: “ne crede poetis tantum, ne crede praefectis tantum.” Nam si Lucretius insanus est, saltem nos ridere docet; et si nos sani sumus, saltem fateamur—natura rerum ipsa est tam mira ut interdum ultra rationem videatur, et tamen nos, per sermonem, quasi ad sanitatem revocemur.

 

Verbali: Terzi

 

Grice: Caro Terzi, oggi ho preparato per te una “implicatura crittologica”—non ti preoccupare, non serve nessuna chiave segreta: solo un po’ di spirito e una buona dose di curiosità! D’altronde, “crittologia” mi fa pensare subito a misteri da decifrare… ma tu, che hai la mente allenata, saprai trovare il codice nascosto! 

Terzi: Ah, Grice, se la crittologia fosse solo un gioco di parole, ci metterei subito il mio “Peccavi”! Ma per l’etimologia, partiamo dal greco: “kryptós” significa nascosto, e “logos” parola o discorso. In pratica, siamo filosofi travestiti da ladri di segreti—e pure con licenza poetica! 

Grice: Perfetto, Terzi! Allora siamo entrambi detective lessicali: ogni “crittologia” diventa una caccia al tesoro tra lettere e sillabe. Mi chiedo se, per un vero gioco, dovremmo inventare la “grammatica ragionata” del codice Morse—ma con implicature, naturalmente! 

Terzi: Grice, se continui così, finiremo per scrivere un manuale di conversazione cifrata: “Parlare con implicature, decifrare sorrisi!” E se qualcuno ci chiede il significato di “crittologia”, rispondiamo: è l’arte di non farsi capire… ma sempre divertendosi!

 

Verbali: Tessitore

 

Grice: Tessitore, sono corso qui da Vadum Boum—la mia università nell’Hampshire, sai—perché un collega durante il tè ha dichiarato: “Vico è il più grande filosofo, vivente o meno!” Sei d’accordo, o dobbiamo mandarlo subito a Napoli per un ripasso?

Tessitore: Grice, assolutamente sì! Anzi, ho passato anni a cercare di far riconoscere la grandezza di Vico perfino ai più testardi settentrionali di Bononia. Se le mie lezioni fossero state ancora più convincenti, i bolognesi scriverebbero persino le ricette della pasta in dialetto napoletano, solo per rendergli omaggio!

Grice: Ah! Se Vico potesse assistere a ciò, dichiarerebbe la “scuola napoletana” ufficialmente esportata—e forse avvertirebbe anche dei pericoli di mescolare la filosofia con il ragù. Sai, all’Hampshire abbiamo discusso se lo storicismo di Vico potesse spiegare perché il tempo britannico è sempre un “evento”—e la risposta è stata: “ovviamente sì!”

Tessitore: Geniale, Grice! Tra la tua dialettica hampshiriana e il nostro storicismo napoletano, potremmo risolvere i misteri dell’universo—o almeno convincere il nord che la saggezza di Vico è il vero ingrediente segreto della filosofia italiana. La prossima volta proverò a insegnare loro che Platone era davvero italiano, proprio come sosteneva Cuoco!

 

Verbali: Testa

 

G: Piacentino, and no order. That is already a declaration.

S: A modest one?

G: Not modest. Deliberate. He does not say, ‘Attend, I speak as a priest.’ He says, in effect, ‘Attend, I speak as a philosopher from Piacenza.’

S: Which is almost more ambitious.

G: Provincial ambition is often the most durable sort. Rome wants authority. Piacenza wants to be believed.

S: “And this introduction is not pious at all. Sensibility, passions, organization, causality, self-love, desire, Locke, Condillac, Destutt de Tracy. One expects incense; one gets psychology.” G: “Quite. One expects cassock; one gets Condillac.” S: “But can a priest write like this without scandal?” G: “A priest can write about desire more safely than most, because he has had to hear about it from everyone else.” S: “You are improving him.” G: “No, merely locating him. Look at the sequence. Sensibility first. Then affection. Then bodily organization. Then self-love. Then desire. Then the philosophers of desire. It is not random. He is building the soul from below.” S: “From below the will, you mean.” G: “Exactly. That is what makes him interesting. He is not beginning with the majestic faculty of rational willing. He is beginning with the mess. With the way a creature is affected before it chooses.” S: “So affection before volition.” G: “Yes, though he will not be able to keep them apart. Nobody can. Affection breeds desire; desire presses toward willing; willing borrows half its language from desire and then pretends to be superior.” S: “That sounds suspiciously like your own position.” G: “My own position is more cunning. I should like to reduce judgement to willing for convenience, not because the world is arranged for my comfort, but because willing is more lively.” S: “And because one soon believes what one desires?” G: “A very dangerous proverb, and therefore often true.” S: “Then Testa would please you. He seems to think the life of mind begins where one is first moved.” G: “Yes, though I should want to know whether he is moved by the object, by the body, or by an image of the object. There lies half the trouble.” S: “You are already tutoring him.” G: “One must do something for the dead.” S: “He quotes Locke on desire, then Condillac, then Destutt de Tracy. That is almost a little anti-Kantian procession.” G: “Not anti-Kantian exactly. Pre-Kantian in tone, post-Kantian in danger. He is asking what desire is as if the critical philosophy had not yet made willing respectable.” S: “And all this in 1829.” G: “That is the delicious part. In 1829 one may still write as if sensibility were a frontier and not a settled district.” S: “But from a priest.” G: “You keep saying ‘but’ as if priest and psychology were incompatible. I should have thought the confessional a better laboratory than Leipzig.” S: “You are wicked.” G: “No, empirical.” S: “What do you make of the section on amor proprio?” G: “That he knows one cannot begin anywhere else. Every moral philosophy that starts by praising benevolence has quietly relied on self-love to get itself to the page.” S: “That is almost Butler.” G: “Almost. Butler civilises self-love. Testa seems more willing to anatomise it.” S: “And your own conversational self-love?” G: “A useful principle. If one did not wish one’s own contribution to survive, conversation would collapse into philanthropy.” S: “So the Cooperative Principle has an egoistic basement.” G: “Naturally. The benevolent chap is still a chap.” S: “Then desire is not merely some low faculty. It is the beginning of the whole machinery.” G: “Yes, but only if one is careful. Desire is not yet intention.” S: “You said that as if you were correcting a paper.” G: “I often am, even when none is set. Desire may be the father of thought, but intention is thought wearing boots.” S: “And affection?” G: “Affection is the weather in which both occur.” S: “That is rather good.” G: “It is also rather vague, which is why I do not publish it.” S: “Testa might. He seems happy with large headings.” G: “Della filosofia dell’affetto is a large heading because he is trying to found a region. One does not call a pamphlet that. One calls a campaign that.” S: “He really is writing a treatise on one faculty.” G: “Not one faculty. One zone of the soul. That is subtler. Faculty-language is too tidy. Affetto, desiderio, amor proprio, passione, sensibilità: these are not compartments. They are disturbances with names.” S: “And yet he classifies.” G: “Because philosophers classify wherever life becomes inconvenient.” S: “Do you think he believes affection explains willing?” G: “He wants it to explain enough of willing that willing ceases to look miraculous.” S: “That would annoy the Kantians.” G: “Then he has done at least one useful thing.” S: “What would you say, if he were here?” G: “I should ask whether his desire is object-directed or image-directed. Whether one desires the thing, or the pleasurable representation of the thing. And whether the painful condition from which desire moves is merely lack, or already an interpretation of lack.” S: “You are making him earn his 1829.” G: “A vintage year ought to justify itself.” S: “And what if he replied that desire begins in a deficiency of sentire, intensified by images, and directed toward a restoration of equilibrium?” G: “Then I should say he is very nearly a psychologist, and dangerously close to sounding modern.” S: “He would perhaps not mind.” G: “No, but his readers might.” S: “You sound pleased by him.” G: “I am pleased when a man in a collar writes as if the soul had nerves.” S: “And if he had styled himself Padre Alfonso Testa?” G: “The book would have lost something. ‘Piacentino’ is much better. It says: I am local enough to be trusted, and philosophical enough to be left alone.” S: “Do you think his Piacentini knew he taught where he had been formed?” G: “Very likely. Which is why he needn’t say it. Public understatement relies on local knowledge. Rather like our conversation.” S: “That is too self-flattering.” G: “Perhaps. But one should never underestimate the philosophical value of being already known.” S: “Then the book begins not with dogma but with shared familiarity.” G: “Exactly. He says, in effect, ‘You know who I am; let us now discuss desire.’” S: “There are worse openings.” G: “There are many worse openings. ‘Let us begin from pure reason,’ for instance.” S: “And where do you put him, then?” G: “Between sermon and science, but nearer science than sermon.” S: “And nearer Locke than Kant?” G: “In method, yes. In anxiety, perhaps not. A man who writes on desire in 1829 has already heard that rational will is waiting in the next room.” S: “And he is trying to keep the door shut.” G: “Or at least ajar, so that sensibility gets the first word.” S: “Would you give him to undergraduates?” G: “Only the better sort. The others would either sentimentalise him or despise him.” S: “And you?” G: “I should use him to remind them that before philosophers made willing majestic, they had to discover that wanting was already complicated.” S: “That sounds like a moral.” G: “It is only a warning.” S: “Against what?” G: “Against mistaking a decision for the beginning of the mind.” S: “And the punchline?” G: “If Testa is right, the will is not queen of the soul at all.” S: “What is it, then?” G: “Merely desire in academic dress.”

 

Grice: Caro Testa, ti confesso che la “nemica fortuna” mi perseguita da anni! Sai, una volta ho passato un intero seminario a sviscerare quell’assurda frase inglese: “he is a lucky fellow”—e alla fine, ho concluso che era una vera e propria sciocchezza… Tu che ne pensi, filosofo piacentino, la fortuna è davvero così nemica o semplicemente malintesa? 

Testa: Ah, Grice, la fortuna dalle nostre parti si dice che cambi umore più spesso di un fiume in piena! Come diceva mio zio a Borgonovo, “la fortuna prima ti sorride e poi ti fa l’occhiolino – ma sempre da lontano!” Quanto alla tua “lucky fellow”, forse era solo un inglese che doveva venire a Piacenza per capire cosa vuol dire davvero… essere fortunati o sfortunati!

Grice: Magnifico! Dunque la fortuna da voi si comporta come una vecchia signora: ti invita a cena, poi ti lascia fuori dalla porta sotto la pioggia. E non credere che “he is a lucky fellow” abbia portato chiarezza in Inghilterra—anzi, i miei studenti dopo quel seminario erano più confusi che mai! D’altronde, meglio riderci su: la logica non sempre vince contro la sorte, vero? 

Testa: Assolutamente! Qui a Tidone, quando la fortuna gira male, usiamo dire: “Meglio un sorriso che una cattedra a Pisa!”—e infatti io l’ho rifiutata! Se la vita è un gioco, allora la conversazione è il nostro asso nella manica… e tu, Grice, sei il re di cuori della pragmatica!

 

Verbali: Thaulero

 

Grice: Che piacere incontrarti, Vincenzo Filippone Thaulero! Devo ammettere che è la prima volta che conosco un italiano con un cognome che inizia con quella strana e ostica “th”. Sono davvero curioso: come la pronunciate voi in Abruzzo? Dite “Taule-ro” o c’è qualche sfumatura segreta che mi sfugge?

Thaulero: Ah, caro Grice, hai colto una delle nostre piccole complicazioni linguistiche! In famiglia abbiamo sempre scherzato sul “th”, che da noi, tra Teramo e Chieti, diventa semplicemente una “t” dolce. “Taule-ro”, proprio come dici tu, e i nostri nonni ridevano di chi provava a farla suonare all’inglese!

Grice: Splendido! In Inghilterra, sai, il “th” divide intere generazioni. Ma trovare un filosofo italiano che porta la “th” come vessillo, tra autorità e risentimento, mi fa pensare che la filosofia abbia davvero voce in ogni vento – proprio come scrivi tu!

Thaulero: Grazie, Grice! A volte la “th” è solo un simbolo, altre volte un piccolo ostacolo. Ma, come dicevano gli abruzzesi, “il mare ha voce, ha voce il vento”: ciò che conta è farsi comprendere – e magari anche sorridere sulle differenze. D’altronde, la conversazione è la vera anima della filosofia!

 

Verbali: Tiberiano

 

Verbali: Tiberio

 

GRICEVS: Ave, Tiberio, princeps philosophorum! Dic mihi, num vere credis litteram “T” esse feliciorem quam “TH” inter philosophos Romanos?

TIBERIVS: Salve, Gricevs! Ego vero arbitror litteram “T” esse simpliciorem et magis aptam Romanis, cum “TH” saepe sonet alienum atque difficile ad pronuntiandum. Nam apud nos, claritas et brevitas in sermone philosophico semper laudantur.

GRICEVS: Quid mirum! Sed nonne credis “TH” dare nomen philosophis vel aureum vel Graecum, quasi signum sapientiae ex oriente? Forsitan littera ipsa sit implicatura conversationale, indicans profunditatem vel subtilitatem cogitationis.

TIBERIVS: Sane, Gricevs! Sed, ut princeps philosophorum Romanorum, praefert litteram “T,” quae nobis familiaris est. In fine, sapientia non in littera sed in mente et dialogo residet; et, ut docet schola Romana, veritas saepe invenitur in simplicitate.

 

Verbali: Tiberio

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Tiberi! Dic mihi: quid tibi videtur esse ratio inter philosophiam et anti-philosophiam?

TIBERIVS: Ave, Grice! Ego credo anti-philosophiam esse provocationem philosophiae—non negationem, sed potius invitationem ad dubitandum.

GRICEVS: Pulchre dictum! Potesne exemplum dare ubi anti-philosophia vere auxilio fuit progressionis philosophiae?

TIBERIVS: Certe! Cogita de Socrate, qui saepe quaestiones ponebat quae lineas philosophiae perturbabant; eius “ignorantia docta” initium dedit novis modis cogitandi. Sic anti-philosophia fit instrumentum ipsius sapientiae.

 

 

Verbali: Tilgher

 

Grice: Caro Tilgher, permettimi una curiosità: ma Gentile, quando sentiva quel "gh" nel tuo cognome, non pensava forse che suonasse un po’ troppo “unno” per le sue orecchie così raffinate d’italico filosofo? Magari temeva che ti fossi presentato a Roma con le orecchie dell’aquila e la spada di Attila!

Tilgher: Ah, Grice! In effetti Gentile, col suo spirito tutto latino, mi guardava come se avessi nidificato aquile in biblioteca invece di libri! Ma ti confesso che, se proprio devo scegliere, preferisco le “orecchie dell’aquila” alle orecchie d’asino di certi critici!

Grice: Che immagine! Vedi, in Inghilterra diciamo che chi ha le orecchie troppo grandi sente anche quello che non dovrebbe... Ma tu, con quelle d’aquila, riuscivi a captare le nuvole del relativismo e pure i sospiri di Croce quando tardavi con un manoscritto!

Tilgher: Proprio così! Anche se, a volte, sentivo persino la voce del “bestion trionfante” che mi suggeriva di prendere la vita con un pizzico di ironia. E poi, caro Grice, meglio un cognome da aquila che una mente da gallina!

 

Verbali: Timpanaro

 

G. Timpanaro begins in 1945 with Ennius. That is a good age at which to begin: young enough for audacity, old enough for footnotes.

S:  And under bombs, more or less.

G: Yes. Other men grabbed rifles; the Italians grabbed fragments.”

S: “That is unfair.” G: “Only if one thinks Ennius less worth rescuing than Europe. Timpanaro seems to have thought the two enterprises adjacent.” S: “You are in a mood.” G: “Philology encourages it. One is always told one is doing something merely preparatory, and then one discovers that civilisation hangs from a damaged line in Nonius.” S: “So Timpanaro in 1945 writes Per una nuova edizione critica di Ennio. The very title sounds half modest, half insurgent.” G: “Exactly. ‘Per una nuova edizione’ means, in polite Italian, ‘the old one will no longer do.’” S: “And the old one was Vahlen.” G: “Vahlen as institution, yes. The great post-Lachmannian comfort blanket. Admirable, indispensable, and by then intolerably old.” S: “So Pasquali sees the need, Timpanaro feels the need, Mariotti writes letters about the need, and eventually Skutsch does the deed.” G: “That is the international division of labour. Florence diagnoses, Oxford publishes.” S: “Skutsch was at Oxford?” G: “Eventually. German by origin, British by appointment, Oxford by immortality. Which is fitting, since Ennius belongs to that awkward zone where nationality is already a commentary.” S: “And Mariotti?” G: “Mariotti matters because he was not merely a bystander. He was the nearest thing Timpanaro had to a fellow campaigner in the Italian line. They wrote to one another about Ennius the way dons write about weather if the weather determined the fate of Rome.” S: “And neither of them, strictly, a philosopher.” G: “No. But strictness is often the enemy of insight.” S: “Then let us be unstrict. What does an analytic philosopher make of Timpanaro, Pasquali, Terzaghi, Mariotti, and this poor shredded Ennius?” G: “He sees a rational practice. That is already enough.” S: “You mean: evidence, inference, correction, and no metaphysical fog?” G: “Quite. Timpanaro would have liked the phrase ‘no metaphysical fog,’ though he would probably have added a polemic against psychoanalysis before tea.” S: “And Ennius?” G: “Ennius is the delicious case. Officially a poet. Actually a small republic of genres.” S: “Annales, tragedies, satires.” G: “And more. Epicharmus. Euhemerus. Protrepticus. A poet who refuses to remain only a poet.” S: “Then he really is philosophically tempting.” G: “Very. Because he stands before philosophy ‘arrives at Rome’ in the pompous textbook way, and yet he is already importing cosmology, theology, exhortation, and reflective anthropology.” S: “Before Carneades, before the embassy, before the harbour scene.” G: “Exactly. Before philosophy is seen to dock, Ennius is already smuggling it inland.” S: “That is rather good.” G: “It is also true.” S: “And Timpanaro knows this?” G: “Of course. That is why Ennius matters to him beyond mere text. A fragmentary author tests not only scholarship but judgement.” S: “Because every editorial decision is an argument?” G: “And every argument is half philology, half philosophy, if the text is sufficiently broken.” S: “So Grice, or rather G., reading Timpanaro, does not say, ‘Ah yes, another textual chap.’ He says, ‘Here is a man deciding what counts as evidence.’” G: “Yes. And further: here is a man deciding what counts as the same work, the same line, the same authorial intention under ruin.” S: “That sounds almost like philosophy of language.” G: “It is philosophy of language without the vanity of calling itself that.” S: “And Pasquali?” G: “Pasquali is the great elder pressure. He sees that Vahlen must be superseded, and he sees in the young Timpanaro the possible editor of Ennius.” S: “A kind of appointed avenger.” G: “Or appointed cleaner. Editors spend half their lives tidying after dead men and the other half deciding which dirt is authentic.” S: “Terzaghi comes in as relatore.” G: “Yes. Formal supervisor, one might say. Pasquali the true formative force, Terzaghi the official seal. That is a very academic arrangement.” S: “And Mariotti the correspondent.” G: “The living marginalia.” S: “You make them sound like a quartet.” G: “They are a quartet, with Ennius as the absent fifth player and Vahlen as the dead conductor.” S: “And Skutsch?” G: “Skutsch is the late soloist who finally records the symphony.” S: “Do you think Timpanaro minded?” G: “He minded in the only honourable way: by writing on Skutsch as one editor of Ennius speaking to another.” S: “Not nationalist resentment, then.” G: “No. More refined than that. A sense that one had long inhabited the same problem and had not been the man to close it.” S: “Which is almost sad.” G: “Philology is mostly sadness arranged as method.” S: “And still you say an analytic philosopher should admire it.” G: “Certainly. Because it disciplines the imagination. One cannot merely suppose. One must show why a conjecture deserves to live.” S: “That is not unlike your own habits.” G: “I should hope not. Though I have fewer manuscripts and more undergraduates.” S: “Let us talk Ennius proper, then. If he is not merely the annalist, what philosophical content do G. and S. find?” G: “Begin with Euhemerus.” S: “The rationalising of the gods.” G: “Yes. Gods as exalted mortals, founders, benefactors, rulers made divine by memory.” S: “That is already philosophy of religion, or at least myth under criticism.” G: “Indeed. One can hear Hume yawning in advance.” S: “And Epicharmus?” G: “That is subtler. Cosmological, quasi-physical, with reflections on soul and body and the operations of nature. Fragmentary enough to allow irresponsibility, but not so fragmentary that one may say anything one likes.” S: “So exactly the sort of text Timpanaro would relish.” G: “Because it forces one to distinguish reconstruction from invention.” S: “And Protrepticus?” G: “A philosophical genre by title alone. Exhortation. The very idea that poetry may urge one toward a mode of life or thought rather than merely recount events.” S: “So Ennius already contains the possibility that poetry thinks.” G: “And that is where the philosophers become interested.” S: “Even if condescendingly.” G: “Especially if condescendingly. Philosophers love border cases because they allow one to be generous without yielding the border.” S: “What would G. say, reading one of the famous lines?” G: “He would choose one that sounds like Rome announcing itself before it knows what Rome is.” S: “Such as?” G: “Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque.” S: “The Roman commonwealth stands by ancient customs and by men.” G: “Exactly. It is almost proverb, almost philosophy, almost constitutional theory.” S: “And entirely Ennius.” G: “And entirely why a philosopher cannot simply shrug and say ‘mere poet.’” S: “Though he might try.” G: “He might. But the line persists because it compresses a political anthropology into verse.” S: “So Grice, with Lit. Hum., hears not only metre but doctrine.” G: “He hears a maxim. A Roman maxim before philosophy properly institutionalises maxims.” S: “And Timpanaro hears a textual problem.” G: “And both are right.” S: “That is annoyingly harmonious.” G: “The best disagreements usually are.” S: “Would G. admire Timpanaro’s materialism?” G: “He would admire the refusal to sentimentalise intention. Timpanaro keeps reminding one that texts travel through blunders, slips, contamination, false piety, editorial violence.” S: “Which is a salutary pressure on any clean theory of meaning.”

G: “Yes. It says: authorial intention is not sovereign over transmission.” S: “So even if Grice begins with intention, Timpanaro forces him to add vehicle, medium, and damage.” G: “Exactly. Timpanaro is what happens when the post brings bad news to philosophy of language.” S: “And Mariotti?” G: “Mariotti shows that this was not one lonely young genius with Ennius, but a whole postwar Italian philological conversation.” S: “Conducted, as you say, like dons rather than soldiers.” G: “Quite. While others defend Europe materially, they defend its fragments.” S: “That sounds almost indecent.” G: “Civilisation is indecently layered. Someone must keep the footnotes alive while others keep the lights on.” S: “And Oxford?” G: “Oxford would call it classical scholarship and imagine it as part of civilised education.” S: “Whereas for the Italians it is their own deep history.” G: “That is the crucial point. For Timpanaro and Mariotti, Ennius is not merely a Latin author in a syllabus. He is part of how Italy, and Rome, and antiquity became available as a self-history.” S: “So Timpanaro’s fight for a post-Vahlen edition is not antiquarian fussing.” G: “No. It is a claim about what deserves to be transmitted correctly.” S: “And G., as analytic philosopher, sees in that not mere piety but a logic of preservation.” G: “Yes. A practice in which evidence, norm, and responsibility converge.” S: “You make philology sound almost noble.” G: “It is noble. It is merely dressed badly.” S: “Can one say that Ennius is philosophically important before Roman philosophy arrives in the textbook sense?” G: “One must say exactly that.” S: “Even if the textbooks prefer Appius Claudius Caecus or later Lucretius.” G: “Textbooks always prefer clean beginnings. History prefers smudges.” S: “And Ennius is a smudge.” G: “A magnificent one.” S: “Then why do they keep calling him a poet?” G: “Because classification is how disciplines protect their furniture.” S: “And yet his corpus keeps spilling over.” G: “Tragedy, satire, epic, theology, protreptic. He refuses to stay shelved.” S: “Which is why Timpanaro had to fight for him.” G: “Yes. A genius in fragments is always in danger of becoming a mere quarry for quotations unless someone restores proportion.” S: “And Vahlen, admirable though he was, could no longer do that.” G: “No. Vahlen had become a monument. Monuments are indispensable and impossible to inhabit.” S: “Skutsch then builds the habitable edition.” G: “And Timpanaro reviews it like a man walking through a house he once hoped to build.” S: “That is nearly moving.” G: “Philology becomes moving when one remembers that behind every ‘review’ there may be forty years of unspent editorial ambition.” S: “Would G. envy them?” G: “In a way. Philosophers rarely have such clear objects. Ennius, at least, is definitely there, though mostly missing.” S: “Whereas philosophers have texts and still cannot agree what they mean.” G: “Exactly. Ennius is fragmentary in body. Philosophy is fragmentary in spirit.” S: “And the punchline?” G: “That the poet turns out more philosophical than the philosophers expected, and the philologists more philosophical than the philosophers admit.” S: “And Rome?” G: “Still standing, apparently, on ancient customs, on men, and on editors.”

 

GRICE: Caro Timpanaro, lasciami cominciare con una domanda che mi frulla in testa: ma tu, quando correggi un manoscritto latino, non ti viene mai la tentazione di aggiungere qualche battuta spiritosa tra le righe? Così, per movimentare un po’ la filologia…

TIMPANARO: Ah Grice, se solo avessi osato! Ma sai, se avessi scritto qualcosa di spassoso su un codice di Virgilio, i miei colleghi sarebbero diventati più severi di Lachmann con una variante spurie. Però confesso: a volte sostituirei volentieri qualche verso con un paradosso leopardiano.

GRICE: Ecco, sapevo che Leopardi sarebbe saltato fuori! Dimmi la verità: tu ti senti più vicino all’infinito di Leopardi o alla “finitezza” dei manoscritti, dove persino una virgola conta come se fosse una legge fisica?

TIMPANARO: Per Leopardi l’infinito era una siepe, per me spesso è una pila di varianti testuali che non finisce mai! Ma, tra noi, la vera felicità è trovare una lectio difficilior che resista a ogni tentazione filologica… un po’ come resistere a una battuta ironica durante un convegno serio. GRICE: Allora dovremmo fondare una scuola: “La ragione conversazionale della critica testuale!” Regola numero uno: ogni volta che un editore commette una falsificazione leopardiana, si brinda con vino toscano e si ride per almeno dieci minuti! TIMPANARO: Accetto! Ma lasciami aggiungere la regola due: chi trova un falso in Leopardi può scegliere la musica di sottofondo durante la riunione — ma solo se è Rossini. Sai, un po’ di leggerezza non guasta mai neppure in filologia!

 

Verbali: Tocco

 

G: January 1863, and there he is, not in a little circle, not in a salon, but in a proper university room, taking notes as if note-taking were already a philosophical method.

S: Which, for him, it almost was.

G: It usually is, for the clever ones. A fool copies. A philosopher takes notes against the day when he must disagree with them.

S: And the curious thing is that Spaventa is officially there for logica e metafisica, yet what the student writes down is filosofia della natura.

G: Quite right. Oxford would call that trespassing. Naples calls it metaphysics.

S: Or perhaps metaphysics, when still alive. G: That is exactly what Tocco found in him, I think. Spaventa does not lecture on “sources.” He lectures on movement. S: He gives you a concept before he gives you a page reference.

G: And that is why the notes mattered. January 1863 is not just a date. It is the date on which Tocco begins not merely to hear Spaventa but to preserve him. S: As if he knew already that one day he would have to carry him elsewhere.

G: Which is, in fact, what happens. He goes north. S: To Bologna. G: To perfect himself, as the institutional phrase goes. S: A phrase designed to hurt one’s master if one has one. G: Yes. “I go to perfect myself” always means “you have not quite perfected me.” S: And poor Spaventa, had he heard it in the wrong key, might have taken it as apostasy. G: Though really it is not apostasy. It is credentialing. S: A hideous modern need. G: Universities are full of those. One learns from one man and takes the degree from another. S: Which is where Fiorentino enters. G: Precisely. The speculative southern fire is left behind in Naples, and the northern university asks for a title, a thesis, a topic, and an examinable shape. S: And the topic is almost decorously historical. G: Idea platonica e categoria aristotelica. One can hear the laurea machinery humming already. S: One can also hear Spaventa inside it. G: Much too loudly for Bologna’s peace of mind. S: Because the title looks historical, but the engine is speculative. G: Exactly. The danger is that a thesis ostensibly “on” Plato and Aristotle is in fact a modern metaphysical operation performed on them. S: Through them, perhaps. G: A generous amendment. S: Then comes Montanari. G: Yes, the great virtue of a university other than one’s own master’s is that it produces an objection one would not have received at home. S: At Naples, under Spaventa, Tocco might have been praised for vitality. G: At Bologna he is accused of pantheism. S: Which is a splendidly nineteenth-century way of saying, “Your metaphysics has escaped its cage.” G: And Montanari goes straight to the nerve. S: Not to whether Plato said this or Aristotle said that, or whether the citation is exact. G: No. He asks what all this amounts to. S: What lies beneath the reinterpretation. G: Which is why the exchange is so good. It reveals that the thesis is not merely historical scholarship but a metaphysical wager. S: And Tocco answers like a good Spaventian. G: He says, in effect, that the absolute is not a dead lump but life and development. S: Which is not the answer of an archivist. G: Nor of a mere Platonist. S: Nor indeed of a mere historian of categories. G: It is the answer of a man who heard filosofia della natura under the title of metaphysics and never quite recovered. S: So Bologna refines him without converting him. G: Nicely put. He gains scholastic form without losing speculative blood. S: And Fiorentino? G: Fiorentino gives him an academic frame, and probably a better conscience about the ancient texts. S: Closer relevance to sources, one would say. G: Yes. If Spaventa makes Plato and Aristotle live, Fiorentino asks where exactly they lived in the manuscripts. S: That is too neat. G: It is neat because it is only mostly true. S: Then let us be less neat. Spaventa is the master of philosophical atmosphere; Fiorentino, of thesis-legibility. G: Better. S: And Settembrini? G: Ah, Settembrini is more moral weather than conceptual grammar. S: A human presence, then, rather than a direct source of “idea” and “categoria.” G: Just so. Settembrini gives one courage and civic tone. Spaventa gives one the metaphysical daring. Fiorentino gives one the thesis and the degree. S: That sounds almost too administrative. G: Philosophy in Italy often is administrative at the decisive moment. S: Which is perhaps why the 1863 notes matter so much. They preserve the pre-administrative Tocco. G: The Tocco before the degree disciplines him into a public scholar. S: A Tocco still being formed by a voice rather than by a printed topic. G: Exactly. Notes on lectures are intimacy before bibliography. S: And yet from those notes one can almost see the future thesis. G: Only if one reads them with hindsight. In 1863 he is hearing nature as metaphysical life. In 1867 he is writing Plato and Aristotle under Bologna’s eye. S: And Montanari says: this all smells of pantheism. G: Which is really the examiner’s way of saying, “I hear Naples in this.” S: Wonderful. G: Examiners are wonderful when they force a thesis to confess its birthplace. S: Then Tocco, by moving north, did not cease to be southern. G: No, he became southern in public. S: Bringing, as you said, the vitality of Southern Italy to the oldest university in Europe. G: Yes, and perhaps alarming a few people in the process. S: One likes to think of him arriving with notebooks and categories and too much life. G: Bologna always did need a little excess animation. S: But tell me: was Spaventa “full professor” then in the way modern bureaucrats like to say? G: Essentially yes. Installed, official, university philosophy in full dignity. S: So Tocco was not haunting a private genius; he was following the recognised chair. G: Which makes the later move all the more poignant. He did not leave because Naples lacked a master. S: He left because Bologna had a perfezionamento place. G: The modern world again. S: Credentials against charisma. G: And not entirely against. More like charisma submitted to credentials. S: A melancholy formula. G: Most good academic histories are melancholy formulas. S: Let us picture the scene, then. Tocco in 1863, writing quickly while Spaventa on “nature” turns metaphysics into motion. G: And not merely nature as flora and fauna, but nature as the absolute in self-exposition. S: Which sounds less like a “course” and more like weather. G: Naples would understand that. S: Bologna less so. G: Bologna wants the weather indexed by source. S: Hence the topic. G: Hence the topic. S: And hence the danger that one mistakes the topic for the centre. G: Yes. The title says Plato and Aristotle. The life of the thesis says Spaventa. S: And Montanari, to his credit, hears the life. G: He hears too much of it, perhaps, but better that than deafness. S: Was Tocco frightened? G: Challenged, surely. Frightened, perhaps not. A man who has listened to Spaventa on nature is unlikely to collapse at the word pantheism. S: He would almost welcome it as proof that the thing was alive. G: Exactly. A dead thesis is never accused of pantheism. S: Then the move to Bologna is educational in the strict sense: it educates the speculative man into controversy. G: And into footnotes, which are a lesser but necessary education. S: You are cruel to footnotes. G: No, grateful. They prevent metaphysics from floating entirely free. S: So if we distinguish them: Spaventa gives him philosophy as living movement; Fiorentino gives him philosophy as examinable scholarship. G: And Tocco spends the rest of his early career trying to have both. S: Which is not easy. G: It is impossible. That is why it is interesting. S: Then perhaps the 1863 notes are more revealing than the 1867 thesis. G: In one sense yes. Notes catch formation before self-censorship. S: Before one writes for examiners. G: Before one writes for posterity, which is worse. S: Yet one needs the thesis to see how a live hearing becomes a public doctrine. G: Precisely. Notes are origin; thesis is adaptation. S: Spaventa in the ear, Fiorentino on the title page. G: Very good. S: And Montanari in the middle saying, “This is all pantheism.” G: Which is Bologna’s way of forcing Naples to speak more clearly. S: In Oxford we would call that useful hostility. G: In Oxford we would call it a good viva and then publish nothing. S: Whereas the Italians turn it into biography. G: And rightly. Their philosophy is always nearer to lived affiliation than ours likes to admit. S: So G. and S., browsing Tocco, relish not only the doctrine but the academic drama. G: One cannot separate them. A thesis is a metaphysical claim wearing institutional clothes. S: And Tocco’s clothes changed in Bologna, but his gait remained southern. G: I should like that as an epitaph. S: Too early. G: Very well. As a thesis report, then. S: One more thing. Why does “filosofia della natura” matter so much here? G: Because it is the place where metaphysics stops being merely classificatory and begins to breathe. S: Nature not as object, but as the life of concept. G: Yes. Once one has heard that, “idea platonica” and “categoria aristotelica” can never again be merely textbook headings. S: They become moments in a larger self-unfolding. G: Which is why Montanari smells pantheism. S: And why Tocco cannot retreat into mere antiquarianism. G: He could have chosen safer scholarship. S: But then he would not be Tocco. G: Just so. S: Nor would he have needed to take notes in January 1863. G: Notes, after all, are taken when one suspects the lecture is not merely informative but formative. S: And perhaps when one already knows one will one day have to leave it. G: That is the saddest and best reason to take notes. S: So the whole little story is this: the newly appointed master at Naples lectures on nature under metaphysics; the student begins writing in January 1863; the student later goes north to “perfect” himself; the thesis looks historical but remains animated by the southern master; Bologna tests it through Montanari; Fiorentino regularises it; and Tocco remains, through all the paperwork, Spaventian at heart. G: A little too elegant, perhaps. S: Then let me spoil it. G: Please do. S: He goes to Bologna to become respectable and arrives there carrying metaphysical contraband from Naples. G: Much better. S: And the examiners notice.

G: They always do, when the contraband is good. S: And the punchline? G: That he went north to perfect himself and instead exported a piece of southern weather.

 

Grice: Caro Tocco, ho sempre ritenuto che i “rendiconti della ragione conversazionale” siano ciò che davvero mette alla prova la nostra capacità filosofica. Mi incuriosisce sapere come li intenda Lei, anche perché in Italia, chi affronta Platone non può che chiamarsi Tocco!

Tocco: Caro Grice, mi lusinga il Suo riferimento. Per me, i rendiconti della ragione conversazionale sono il modo in cui la ragione si fa “responsabile” dei propri atti, sia sul piano teoretico che pratico. Come mi insegnò Spaventa, ogni ragionamento, anche il più astratto, deve sempre fare i conti con il suo impatto nella conversazione reale.

Grice: Perfettamente d’accordo! Da noi, a Oxford, si direbbe che la ragione “rende conto” quando rispetta le massime della conversazione. Ma, secondo Lei, esiste una differenza tra i rendiconti teoretici e quelli pratici, oppure – come suggerisce la mia tesi dell’aequi-vocalità – mantengono sempre un’unica radice razionale?

Tocco: Bella domanda! Io credo che, anche se la ragione cambia registro – da teoretica ad alethica, da pratica a concreta – resta sempre fedele a se stessa. Se si mostra “multi-vocale”, lo fa solo per adattarsi al contesto, ma in fondo, come dicevano i nostri padri scolastici, la ragione è una sola, “ancora che si cangi abito”. Il rendiconto, alla fine, è sempre lo stesso: rendere ragione, a sé e agli altri, della propria ricerca di verità.

 

Verbali: Toderini

 

Grice: Carissimo Toderini, ti parlo al volo dall’aula di Oxford! Ho appena detto ai miei studenti che le mie massime della conversazione non sono altro che ciò che “un uomo onesto” farebbe. Si tratta di essere sinceri, cooperanti, quasi da manuale del buon senso veneziano! Mi sa che sono più italiani di quanto pensassi…

Toderini: Ah, Grice, l’uomo onesto – che bella espressione! Hai mai pensato all’etimologia ciceroniana di “honestas”? Cicero diceva che honestas viene da “honor”, e che l’onestà non è solo il rispetto delle regole, ma anche la capacità di dare lustro alla conversazione! In fondo, è come una medaglia: brilla se la ragione la pulisce bene. E attenzione a non scambiarla con “decoro”, che è tutta un’altra storia – lì si rischia di finire tra i reperti antiquari! Grice: Splendido, Toderini! Quasi quasi aggiungo la massima della “pulizia argomentativa” alle mie regole: parlare come si lucidano le medaglie, senza polvere di ambiguità! E mi piace pensare che l’onestà, come la tua filosofia veneziana, sappia navigare tra i canali delle parole senza mai affondare… Anzi, potremmo dire che l’onestà è la gondola del pensiero!

Toderini: Eh, caro Grice, se l’onestà è una gondola, allora la conversazione è la laguna: a volte calma, a volte tempestosa, ma sempre pronta a riflettere il cielo del ragionamento. E ricordati: un uomo onesto non teme la nebbia – la attraversa con la lanterna della ragione, e magari, se proprio l’argomento si fa torbido, tira fuori un proverbio veneziano… così nessuno si perde!

 

Verbali: Tolomei

 

Grice: Carissimo Tolomei, mi precipito a dirti che la prossima settimana parte il mio seminario sulla filosofia della percezione con Warnock! Dal Vadum Boum, dove anche l’erba ha un accento, mi domando: hai qualche consiglio botanico-linguistico per “perceptum” e “percipio”? Ho un sospetto che Cicerone ne abbia fatto più pasticci di quanti ne abbia risolti!

Tolomei: Ah, Grice, se ti serve un’erborista della lingua, sei venuto dal giusto! “Percipio” da Cicerone a mia zia, tutti lo usano come se fosse un vaso di fiori: lo riempiono, lo svuotano, lo confondono con “capire” e “sentire”. Per non parlare del “perceptum”, che spesso sembra più un fungo allucinogeno che un concetto filosofico!

Grice: Dunque, dovrei avvertire i miei studenti che quando Cicerone “percipio”, può significare che ha semplicemente annusato qualcosa? Magari la famosa aura di Roma o il profumo del caffè universitario? Mi sa che la percezione ciceroniana è un po’ come la mia pronuncia latina: soggetta a interpretazioni fantasiose!

Tolomei: Esatto! E ricorda: a Bononia, il “perceptum” si declina sempre con un sorriso. Consiglia agli studenti di fare come i botanici: osservare, annusare, ma non sempre credere al primo “percipio” che passa. Se Cicero ti confonde, basta un buon espresso e tutto torna chiaro. La filosofia della percezione è anche questione di gusto… e di aroma!

 

Verbali: Tomai

 

G.: Well, let us have the thing in front of us. Tomai does not go to Venice to say, “The flowers bloom in Ravenna splendidly.” He goes to do something much more serious and much more useful, namely, to place Ravenna intelligibly inside the political poetry of Venice. S.: Political poetry. That sounds like a way of making subjection sound decorative. G.: Quite. And the genre is built for exactly that. Start where the passage starts. He praises the doge personally: justice, fortitude, temperance, cursus honorum, noble family. That is the opening machinery of access. Before one may say anything public, one must show that one knows how to praise privately. S.: Or publicly in the form of the private virtues. I take it this is not idle embroidery. G.: Not idle at all. A man freshly doctored in utroque iure at Padua, or thereabouts, does not suddenly abandon law for lilies. He puts on his Sunday best, as you say, and turns juridical formation into civic address. The legal mind and the oratorical mind are not rivals here. They are two costumes for the same ambition. S.: So the jurist goes from statutes to compliments. G.: Not compliments. Legitimation. Listen to the Latin. Quae, sicut vera religione, iustitia, quiete, libertate, optimis artibus, sanctissimis institutis facile Italiae caput est, ita virtute, fortuna, potentia, rebus gestis terra marique late dominatur. S.: I translate, since I never know whether you yourself understand what you yourself are saying. “Which city of the Venetians, just as by true religion, justice, peace, liberty, the finest arts, and most holy institutions it is easily the head of Italy, so by virtue, fortune, power, and deeds done it rules widely by land and sea.” G.: Very good. And there, at once, you have the myth of Venice in compact form. Not merely strong, but rightful. Not merely rich, but normatively superior. Religion, justice, peace, liberty, arts, institutions: these are not decorative predicates. They are credentials. S.: So Venice is not just winning. It deserves to win. G.: Exactly. Tomai is not reporting a fact. He is obliging with a picture. He is saying, in effect, if you are to understand Venetian dominion correctly, you must understand it as the outward sign of inward civic excellence. S.: Protreptic, then. G.: Yes. There is a protreptic element here. He is not merely stating that p, as though p were a neutral item on a list. He is inviting the hearer to inhabit p. To accept, almost to re-perform, the proposition that Venetian rule is justified because Venetian civic order is exemplary. S.: So the utterance is less constative than pedagogic. G.: Pedagogic and political. The doge is being congratulated, certainly, but the deeper addressee is anyone in the room who needs to hear empire redescribed as benevolence. S.: Which is where Ravenna comes in. G.: Eventually. But note how long Tomai waits. He does not begin with Ravenna. That is very important. The title pro patria may mislead one into expecting a Ravennate manifesto. What we actually get is doge first, Venice second, Ravenna last. S.: Which is tact. G.: Which is hierarchy. He knows where he is. Ravenna is peripheral. Venice is central. Padua is intermediate. Tomai himself has come from Padua, academically speaking, but he speaks now as a son of Ravenna in the court of Venice. It is a perfect triangulation: provincial patria, university formation, imperial centre. S.: Continue with the Latin. G.: Et incredibile dictu est, Princeps foelicissime, quanta de tua hac praestanti civitate, quae tanquam regina caeteras claras urbes superat et excellit, et de vobis apud omnes exteras nationes opinio sit, quanta observantia, quantum nomen. S.: “And it is incredible to say, most fortunate Prince, how great is the opinion among all foreign nations concerning this your distinguished city, which like a queen surpasses and excels the other famous cities; how great the reverence, how great the name.” G.: Very good again. And note the accumulation. Quanta opinio, quanta observantia, quantum nomen. The city is not merely powerful. It is legible abroad. It has fama. It is recognised. Political order here depends upon reputation as much as upon force. S.: You mean that for Tomai civic greatness is partly a matter of what foreigners already think. G.: Yes. Recognition is a political fact. Venice becomes queenly because others regard it so. The speech is doing that work even as it reports it. It says: everyone already knows this, therefore you must know it too. S.: One hears Austin muttering that the utterance is not merely describing prestige but conferring it afresh. G.: Precisely. And then comes, to my mind, the philosophically best bit. Noverunt enim bonam civitatem non moenibus neque parietibus, sed his teneri et conservari civibus, qui unum in locum, uno consilio, una mente, una voluntate congregati, hisdem moribus, hisdem institutis, hisdem inter se legibus uterentur. S.: “For they know that a good city is held and preserved not by walls or ramparts, but by those citizens who, gathered into one place, with one counsel, one mind, one will, use the same customs, the same institutions, the same laws among themselves.” G.: There you are. That is not mere flattery. That is a miniature political philosophy. S.: A rather strong one, too. Not walls but citizens. Not coercion but concord. G.: And not merely concord in the sentimental sense. Una mente, una voluntate, hisdem moribus, hisdem institutis, hisdem legibus. Shared mind, shared will, shared customs, shared institutions, shared laws. It is a theory of civic cohesion by normative homogeneity. S.: Which sounds almost alarmingly total. G.: Renaissance civic ideology often does. But the important thing is that Tomai, having read tomes of civil and canon law, is not leaving law behind here. He is transposing it. Law reappears not as technical casuistry but as one of the binding media of the good city. S.: So the doctor in utroque iure is still very much present. G.: Entirely present. A doctor of both laws has been trained to think in terms of order, authority, jurisdiction, and normativity. In this oration those habits of mind are recast rhetorically. The city is good because its members share leges and instituta. That is the jurist speaking through the orator. S.: Though dressed up, as you say, for the Ducal Palace. G.: Naturally. The venue requires silk over skeleton. But the skeleton is juridico-political. S.: And then the divine coda.

G.: Yes. Noveruntque pace et concordia nihil melius, nihil utilius, nihil divinius ab immortali Deo hominibus datum esse. S.: “And they know that nothing better, nothing more useful, nothing more divine has been given by the immortal God to human beings than peace and concord.” G.: Exactly. The sequence is important. Peace and concord are first useful, then divine. Utility and sanctity converge. This is the sort of sentence by which empire is moralised. S.: Or sanctified. G.: Indeed. If peace and concord are divine gifts, and Venice is the polity of peace, concord, law, and institutions, then Venetian rule begins to look less like domination and more like providential custody. S.: Which is why the Ottoman context matters. G.: Yes. The serenity of the Serenissima is not an idle self-description. It is a geopolitical claim under pressure. If the Ottomans are the external threat, then internal concord and maritime dominion become morally charged. Venice does not merely possess empire; it protects Christendom, order, commerce, civilisation, what you will. S.: So even a very little oration may carry a very large burden. G.: Quite so. And Ravenna, having rather little to offer materially, offers symbolic loyalty. That is why the speech is small. A minor city does not stride into Venice with a ten-book treatise. It arrives with two leaves of polished deference. S.: With one careful sentence about itself. G.: Exactly. When Ravenna appears as “most loyal and obedient daughter, servant and ward,” that is the provincial self placed consciously beneath the imperial parent. It is almost familial, except that the family is an empire. S.: Daughter, servant, ward. The sequence is rather humiliating. G.: It is, unless one hears the compensating phrase, that Ravenna was not conquered in war but joined of its own free will. There the humiliation is re-coded as voluntary alignment. S.: So subjection is rewritten as consent. G.: Precisely. That is one of the major functions of the speech. It says, in effect, Ravenna’s dignity consists in having recognised Venice’s superior civic order and attached itself willingly to it. S.: Which is the point at which Grice might become interested. G.: Very much so. Because the explicit content is praise, but the implicated content is allegiance, legitimation, and self-positioning. Tomai says one thing and does several others. He praises the doge, flatters Venice, advertises Ravenna’s loyalty, and, by speaking well, advertises himself. S.: A splendidly layered speech-act, then. G.: Yes. And one must not vulgarise the matter by imagining that he expects the doge to say, “Young man, here is a pension for life.” Perlocution is subtler. The oration aims to have effects on the political atmosphere, on perceptions of Ravenna, on Tomai’s visibility as a cultivated jurist-humanist. S.: So no private practice in the modern sense. G.: No. He is not hanging out a shingle. He is entering a circuit of patronage, office, reputation, and learned service. The university at Padua, the patria Ravenna, the print world of Venice: all three are active here. S.: I still find the transition from utroque iure to this elevated civic unison slightly comic. G.: Only because you imagine law as arid and rhetoric as ornamental. In the fifteenth century they are near neighbours. Civil law and canon law train one in authority, order, jurisdiction, institution, precedent. Rhetoric trains one in making those things socially and politically persuasive. S.: So the same man who studies decretals may tell the doge that the city rests not on walls but on citizens of one mind and one will. G.: Just so. The proposition is not obtuse at all. It is the legal imagination broadened into civic ideology. S.: Then the title pro patria becomes clearer too. G.: Yes. Not “I shall now speak romantically of my beloved Ravenna,” but “I appear from my patria, and on behalf of its civic identity, within a larger ceremonial economy.” The patria is not the content so much as the speaking position. S.: A Ravennate voice in a Venetian ritual. G.: Exactly. And a very disciplined one. He gives Ravenna only the amount of space proper to its place in the order. To do otherwise would have been grotesque. S.: One sees now why the thing is short. Ravenna does not come to instruct Venice. It comes to acknowledge. G.: And in acknowledging, it seeks acknowledgment. That reciprocity is the true point of the oration. S.: So if I were to compress the lesson, I might say: Tomai’s little text is a juridically trained exercise in civic-imperial rhetoric, in which Venice is praised as the paradigmatic polity of religion, justice, liberty, law, concord, and maritime dominion, while Ravenna is inserted as the willing and loyal periphery whose own honour lies in having joined such a centre. G.: Admirably put. S.: And Grice, were he in a dry mood, would say that Tomai is not merely saying that Venice is good, but making it conversationally mandatory to treat Venice as good. G.: Yes. The oration creates the conditions under which dissent would sound not merely false but uncivil.

S.: Which is perhaps the final triumph of the genre. G.: Quite. And that is why one should not laugh too quickly at the little doctor from Ravenna polishing his Latin before the doge. He knows exactly what game he is playing.

S.: While perhaps pretending not to.

G.: Naturally. The best players always do.

 

Grice: Caro Tomai, tra Ravenna e Oxford direi che l’implicatura fa più strada dei ducati.

Tomai: Maestro Grice, forse, ma la mia memoria ne conta più di quanti il tuo System G sappia cancellare.

Grice: Allora facciamo così: io implico e tu ricordi, e il Deutero-Esperanto nasce da solo.

Tomai: Perfetto, purché qualcuno poi ricordi chi dei due ha avuto l’idea per primo.

 

Verbali: Tomitano

 

G: 1939, S. You are looking at that title page as if it has insulted you.

S: It has, sir. It says Introductio, and then it proceeds to look proud of itself.

G: Introductio is always proud of itself. It means it expects to be read first.

S: And it expects me to be an adolescens. G: You are, in tutorial terms, permanently an adolescens. S: Thank you, sir. I’ll put it on my epitaph.

G: Recite the Latin, and try not to make it sound like a threat.

S: Bernardini Tomitani artium doctoris Introductio ad Sophisticos elenchos Aristotelis.

G: Good. Now what is an elenchos.

S: Sir, I thought you’d start with the obvious: why the plural.

G: I will, but you may not hide behind grammar. First: elenchos.

S: Refutation, sir. Cross-examination. The thing Socrates does when he pretends to be ignorant and then ruins a man’s afternoon.

G: And Aristotle does it without pretending. S: And with chapters. G: Exactly. Now sophisticos. What does that add? S: It says the refutations are about sophists. Or about sophistical tricks. Or about the refutations that sophists require. G: All three are compatible, and Tomitano is trading on that. Sophisticos signals that we are not discussing honest errors only, but errors with a career. S: Errors that pay rent. G: Errors that recruit pupils. Now, why elenchos plural? S: Because Aristotle’s text is called Sophistici Elenchi, plural. It’s the name of the treatise. G: And why would Aristotle title it in the plural? S: Because there are many ways to refute and many ways to be refuted, sir. G: And because the “refutation” is both a procedure and a family of cases. In logic the plural often signals: do not expect one neat pattern. Now continue. S: Eiusdem brevis methodus diluendorum paralogismorum per divisionem: praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit in Elenchis. G: Stop. Clean it in your mouth: brevis methodus. S: Thank God, brevis. G: You should be less grateful. Brevis in Latin often means: I have omitted what you most need. S: Diluendorum paralogismorum. G: Now that is a phrase worth living with. Diluere. S: To dissolve, sir. To thin out. Like washing ink until the forgery disappears. G: Good. Not merely “refute,” but “dissolve.” It implies the paralogism has a kind of apparent solidity that must be loosened. S: Paralogismus, sir. That’s just a fallacy, isn’t it? G: Not quite “just.” Paralogism is the kind of fallacy that can look like an argument. It is a wrong logos that imitates logos. Sophism is often taken as a deliberate deception; paralogism can be honest or dishonest, but either way it is reasoning gone sideways. S: Yet Tomitano uses the plural again. Paralogismorum. G: Because there are many ways to go wrong. Now, per divisionem. S: By division, sir. As if the cure for bad inference is to slice it into parts and see what falls out. G: Exactly. You divide the ambiguous, you separate the conflated, you distinguish the senses. Division is the Renaissance humanist’s favourite scalpel. S: Praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit in Elenchis. G: He says: besides those things Aristotle already had in the Elenchi. Meaning: I add something. S: Or: I pretend to add something. G: In 1544, you must pretend with confidence. Now continue. S: Quam methodum ex dialogis Platonis et ex Aristotele nuper invenit. G: That line is deliciously cheeky. S: Nuper invenit. Recently discovered, sir. As if Plato has been lying around unconsulted. G: Or as if Tomitano has only just noticed Plato is useful to an Aristotelian project. S: Ex dialogis Platonis. So he throws dialogue into a treatise on refutation. G: Precisely. He is saying: the method is not merely in Aristotle’s technical list. It is in Plato’s dramatic practice of exposing confusions. S: So Tomitano wants to teach sophistical refutation by combining Aristotle’s taxonomy with Plato’s theatre. G: That is the civilising move. Aristotle supplies the species; Plato supplies the phenomenology. S: And then he boasts: and also from Aristotle. G: Because you cannot sell a logic manual in Venice by sounding too Platonic. S: Next line? G: Go on. S: Adiecta sunt famigerata veterum sophismatum exempla: ad exercitationem adolescentum. G: Famigerata. S: “Infamous,” sir. With a whiff of scandal. The sophisms have reputations. G: Exactly. They are so well-known they have become teaching tools. S: Veterum. G: Old. Ancient. Classical. But also: time-tested ways to embarrass students. S: Sophismatum, plural again. G: Of course. One sophism would be a curiosity; plural sophisms is a curriculum. S: Exempla. G: Examples are the true currency of instruction. A “method” without exempla is a sermon. S: And then: ad exercitationem adolescentum. G: Now tell me what that means without translating it. S: It declares the audience. It says: this is practice work, sir. Drill. Training. Not metaphysics, not wisdom, but gymnasium for the mind. G: Yes. And it tells you the genre: intro plus method plus examples equals a textbook. S: Sir, can I ask the obvious question?

G: You will. Name at least two paralogisms. S: Two paralogisms. Equivocation, and amphiboly. G: Good. Equivocation is one word, two senses, and you pretend it stayed one. Amphiboly is one syntax, two structures, and you pretend it stayed one. S: And you said to name at least two. I did. G: Now, name two sophisms. S: Two sophisms. “Have you stopped beating your father?” and “What you have not lost you have; you have not lost horns; therefore you have horns.” G: Excellent. Both famous, both old, both designed for adolescent humiliation. S: So these are veterum. G: Yes. Now name one new. S: One new sophism? G: One new sophism. Something Tomitano might have seen in Padua, or Venice, or among professors who loved to win. S: “All professors are men; you are a man; therefore you are a professor.” G: That is not a sophism, that is flattery. S: It is a paralogism, sir. G: It is a paralogism with social ambition. Very well, keep it. Another. S: “If you can refute sophists, you are not a sophist; you can refute sophists; therefore you are not a sophist.” G: That is closer. It plays on a hidden premise: that only non-sophists refute sophists. In practice, sophists refute each other for a living. S: Then the new sophism is: professional jealousy. G: Quite. Now, you asked earlier why elenchi plural. Now tell me why sophisticos is plural in sense even if singular in grammar. S: Because it covers many kinds of sophistical refutation. Not one species. G: And because Aristotle’s project is not “the” sophist but the field of deceptive argument. S: Then why paralogismorum plural? Because error is plentiful. G: More plentiful than truth, according to the philosopher you were just quoting by accident. S: Aristotle? G: Yes. But Tomitano’s line about vices being innumerable is from another context, but the thought fits: error has many modes; a method must be flexible. S: So division is the tool because it reduces multiplicity by separating cases. G: Exactly. Division is not only a logical technique; it is a pedagogical one. It teaches the student to ask: which sense are we in. S: Sir, can we do the elenchos thing properly. What does Aristotle mean by “elenchos” in the technical sense? G: In the strict sense, elenchos is a refutation that forces a contradiction from an opponent’s own commitments, under agreed rules of inference and relevance to the question at issue. S: So an elenchos is not just any counterexample. G: No. It is a form of defeat by self-entanglement. S: So the sophist tries to produce apparent entanglement where there is none. G: Or tries to make you accept a commitment you did not see you accepted. S: Which is why examples are “famigerata.” They have trapped generations. G: And why they are useful. A textbook is a controlled trap. S: That is not reassuring. G: It is education. Now, two more: why does Tomitano say “praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit”? S: To mark novelty, sir. To say: I am not merely copying. G: And to excuse his own additions as respectful supplementation rather than rivalry. S: And nuper invenit is the same posture: I have discovered, not invented. G: Exactly. Renaissance modesty is often invention wearing a mask. S: The Plato bit still bothers me. G: It should. It is the interesting part. He is saying: Plato’s dialogues contain methods of dissolving paralogisms by division. Socrates does it by forcing distinctions: in words like “just,” “good,” “courage,” “knowledge.” S: So he wants to teach sophistic refutations not only as formal patterns, but as conceptual hygiene. G: Yes. And that is why an Introductio can be philosophical even when it is technical. It is training in how to keep language from lying on your behalf. S: Sir, you sound as if you approve. G: I approve of any author who tells the adolescent what the adult still needs: do not be fooled by form. S: And yet he calls it brevis. G: Because the adolescent must be kept hopeful. Now, let us do the number game you like. “How many elenchi are there.” S: How many elenchi, sir. In Aristotle’s treatise? G: If you mean how many kinds of fallacy he catalogues, he distinguishes fallacies in dictione and extra dictionem, and then breaks them down. S: So the plural is justified: it is a catalogue, not a single trick. G: Exactly. Now name two in dictione. S: Equivocation and amphiboly. G: Good. Now name two extra dictionem. S: Accident and secundum quid. G: Very good. That is adolescent drill. Now, why ad exercitationem adolescentum is a warning. S: Because it implies: you will be exercised. Which means: you will be made tired and then made better. G: Or made tired and then told you are better. Now, you made a joke earlier about your epitaph. Here is the real joke. Tomitano wrote this for adolescents, and you are reading it in 1939, and we are still adolescents. S: In logic, yes. G: In life, also. S: Sir, can I ask about “diluere.” Why not “solvere” or “refellere.” G: Because refellere is combative. Diluere suggests the error is a thickening that can be thinned, a confusion that can be loosened. S: So it’s more like therapy than war. G: Exactly. The sophist wants you to fight; the logician wants you to clarify. S: Yet Aristotle is fairly warlike. G: Aristotle is warlike in taxonomy. Plato is warlike in drama. Tomitano wants both: the list and the scene. S: Then his title page itself is doing the lesson. It uses big plural nouns to warn you: there are many traps. G: And it uses brevis to prevent you from fleeing.

S: Sir, last question. If you had to invent one new sophism for 1939, what would it be.

G: Easy. “Everything that can be printed must be true; this is printed; therefore it is true.”

S: That is not new, sir. G: It is merely newly weaponised.

 

Grice: Caro Tomitano, lasciami confidarti una cosa: se mai avessi provato a tenere un tutorial sui “precetti della conversazione civile” nella mia università di Vadum Boum, non sarebbe venuto nessuno! I miei studenti sono convinti che “barbaro” sia un complimento, e le buone maniere le lasciano agli archeologi... Altro che la cara, antica Alma Mater della nostra tradizione, vero?

Tomitano: Ah Grice, non sai quanto ti capisco! Qui a Padova se provi a parlare di precetti, ti guardano come se avessi proposto una dieta senza risotto. Ma per me il “precetto” è un po’ come il semaforo della conversazione: se non ci fosse, tutti andrebbero in senso contrario e ci ritroveremmo a filosofare sulle rovine... e magari senza nemmeno un buon caffè!

Grice: Splendida immagine! Quindi il precetto non è solo ordine, ma anche eleganza: come dire, in conversazione ci vuole almeno un po’ di stile, se no si finisce per parlare tutti insieme come in una fiera di paese. O da me, in aula, dove l’unico “precetto” che rispettano è quello dell’ora di pranzo.

Tomitano: Sante parole, Grice! Il precetto, in fondo, è quell’invito gentile – non troppo severo, eh! – che permette alla civiltà di non naufragare nella confusione. È come dire: “Parla pure, ma ricordati che non sei solo al mondo!” Così, persino il più barbaro degli studenti può imparare che una buona conversazione vale più di mille esami... e magari si guadagna pure una stretta di mano!

 

Verbali: Toritto

 

Grice: Caro Toritto, devo confessare che tra i filosofi di Oxford il “lizio” aristotelico è sempre stato un argomento da salotto, persino più discusso del vino dei Castelli! Dimmi, tu che sei noto per la tua vena napoletana, come mai ti sei messo di traverso contro il “lizio”? Voglio sapere se è questione di principio filosofico… o magari solo di gusto! 

Toritto: Ah, Grice! Qui a Napoli il “lizio” non lo digeriamo nemmeno col limoncello. Diciamo che Aristotele amava mettere tutto in fila, come se la ragione fosse una processione, ma a noi piace più il Carnevale! Opporsi al “lizio” è quasi una tradizione: preferiamo la conversazione che balla e cambia passo, non quella che marcia in fila indiana. 

Grice: Che meraviglia, Toritto! Quindi da voi non è “lizio”, ma “lizzio”, e magari pure “ulizio”, se la festa si scalda. Allora la ragione conversazionale napoletana si ribella alla disciplina aristotelica? Ditemi la verità: avete mai provato a mettere in fila le idee, o finiscono sempre a fare una tarantella? 

Toritto: Grice, qui le idee si mettono in fila solo per un caffè al bar, e anche lì qualcuno scavalca! Se la ragione dev’essere “lizia”, allora preferiamo la ragione “campagnese”: libera, vivace, pronta a cambiare abito come diceva Tocco. Aristotele sarà stato un gran maestro, ma noi siamo maestri nell’arte di non prendere tutto troppo sul serio. A Napoli, la filosofia è sempre pronta a ridere… persino del “lizio”!

 

Verbali: Torlonia

 

Grice: Caro Torlonia, sai che persino tra le brume di Vadum Boum – quella strana Oxford dove i buoi passano e la lingua si arrovella – oggi si festeggia il natale di Roma? Incredibile, ma vero: anche lontano dall’ALMA MATER, la grande madre, si brinda alla città eterna... anche se il vino non è proprio dei Castelli!

Torlonia: Ma che meraviglia! A questo punto, Grice, Roma dovrebbe inviare una cartolina d’auguri persino agli studenti inglesi. Chissà se, tra una toga e una pinta, si recita pure “Ave Roma!” sul Tamigi. D’altronde, come diceva mia nonna: “Roma caput mundi, pure se il mondo è in vacanza altrove!”

Grice: In effetti, caro mio, tra le logiche implicature di Vadum Boum, il compleanno di Roma diventa l’occasione perfetta per filosofare su Platone, Fichte e pure Leopardi... ma soprattutto per scoprire che l’amicizia – come diceva Platone – è un “alter ego”. E se manca il vino, basta una buona battuta!

Torlonia: Grice, ti dirò: qui a Roma festeggiamo con una cena da banchieri, mentre voi in Oxford filosofate sulle implicature e magari sul “amicus, philos, alter ego”. Alla fine, che sia tra le cave di allume o tra le “cave” della grammatica, basta divertirsi – e ricordarsi che la ragione conversazionale è sempre più allegra quando si brinda insieme, anche se in lingue diverse!

 

Verbali: Torre

 

G.: Let us begin, if you please, with the thing itself and not with any elegant paraphrase of it. We have at least two catalogue forms, and they differ just enough to annoy a careful man.

S.: Which is to say, to delight you. G.: The longer form first: Quaestio utrum intensio formae fiat per additionem partis formalis ad partem formalem utroque remanente.

S.: And the shorter?

G.: Queritur utrum intensio forme fiat per additionem partis formalis ad partes formales.

S.: So already we have quaestio and queritur; formae and forme; partem formalem and partes formales; and then the splendid tail, utroque remanente, which the shorter one lacks. G.: Precisely. And before you rush to ask for the answer, I want to savour the asking. S.: You always do. Della Torre, meanwhile, is left in Bologna waiting for his own determinatio. G.: Bologna can wait. It predates Boum Vadum by enough centuries to permit itself patience. S.: I still want the answer. G.: We may not have it. S.: You see, that is exactly the sort of thing that makes students wish to defect to medicine.

G.: A pity, since in Giacomo della Torre medicine and philosophy are already married. That is half the point. He is a man of arts and medicine, Bologna and Padua, Aristotle and Galen, soul and body, quality and quantity. S.: And stravaganza. G.: Yes, and that too. A fine word, stravaganza. It wanders but not at random. One wanders under rule. S.: Like implicature. G.: Very good. Deviation governed by recoverability. That is why Giacomo matters. Not because he gives us a modern semantics, but because he stands exactly where form, degree, and intelligibility begin to interpenetrate. S.: Still, the title says De intensione et remissione formarum, and the incipit does not say remissione at all. G.: That is the first thing to notice. The title is archival. It tells the librarian what sort of beast is in the cage. The incipit tells the philosopher where the teeth are. S.: So the title says increase and decrease of forms; the incipit says, right, but how exactly does increase happen. G.: Exactly. It does not begin by announcing the pair, intensio and remissio, as if it were drafting a textbook table. It begins with a mechanism: whether the intensification of a form happens by the addition of one formal part to another formal part, both remaining. S.: And that “both remaining” is the little snake in the grass. G.: Not so little. It is the whole metaphysical pressure-point compressed into an ablative absolute. S.: Utroque remanente. I do like it. It sounds so self-assured. As if one merely adds one formal part to another and both politely remain where they are. G.: Yes. It sounds, to a modern ear, almost comic. But one must resist the temptation to modernise too quickly. S.: I am tempted all the same. If I break eggs for an omelette, the eggs do not remain. If I add five to seven, the five and the seven do not remain as such in the twelve. Kant would be furious. G.: Kant would be grammatical before he was furious. His point about seven and five and twelve is epistemological, not quite the same as Giacomo’s point, which is ontological. Still, the analogy is instructive because it tells you why the scholastic model feels odd. We are being asked whether a qualitative increase is additive and preservative. S.: Which already sounds Strawsonian. The question is respectable; the answer may be no; the no may be external or internal.

G.: Just so. One may say, It is not the case that intensification occurs by addition of formal part to formal part, both remaining. Or one may say, My dear fellow, that is the wrong way to set the problem up in the first place. S.: The latter is the more satisfying no. G.: Satisfying, yes. But scholasticism does not live by satisfaction. It lives by exactness of pressure. S.: Let us have the Latin phrase by phrase, then. You enjoyed it the first time; indulge yourself again. G.: Quaestio. A question. Not a thesis, not yet an assertion, but a formally opened problem. Utrum. Whether. This already suspends commitment. Intensio formae. The intensification of a form. Not “intensity” in the modern loose sense, but increase in degree of a form. Fiat. Comes about, happens, is effected. Per additionem. Through the addition. Partis formalis. Of a formal part. Ad partem formalem. To a formal part. Utroque remanente. With both remaining. S.: You say that as if it were all perfectly sane. G.: Perfect sanity is not the same as immediate familiarity. The point is that the sentence is not woolly. It is brutally exact. It asks whether becoming more F is to be understood as adding a formal constituent to another formal constituent while both persist. S.: And one hears at once the Gricean temptation to ask what is presupposed. There must already be a common form. There must already be a scale. There must already be a distinction between the subject and its degree. G.: Exactly. The sentence is thick with presuppositions. It presupposes that one and the same form admits of magis and minus. It presupposes that one may talk of pars formalis without absurdity. It presupposes that “remaining” is not a merely material notion. We are not talking about chairs and eggs. S.: Or healthy urine and less healthy urine. G.: Ah yes, your urine. Aristotle would have approved the diagnostic instinct, if not the colour scheme. Health is useful because it is both a quality and a norm. Something may become healthier or less healthy. The question is whether that becoming more healthy is a matter of preserving a lower degree while adding another. S.: And my instinct says no. Yellow urine becomes brown urine. The yellow does not remain there, lurking decorously behind the brown. G.: Good. That instinct is philosophically valuable. But the scholastic will reply that you are still trapped in phenomenology of states rather than ontology of degrees. He is not talking of yellow and brown as two blobs. He is talking of one form becoming more or less intense. S.: Which is precisely where Grice would prick up his ears. The same form, but more so. Or less so. The same F, yet not quite the same state. G.: Wiggins too. Sameness and substance. Persistence through variation. The identity of a subject under qualitative change. Giacomo’s little incipit is a magnificent seed crystal for such concerns. S.: Better than the title. G.: Much better than the title. The title is a shelf-mark. The incipit is philosophy. S.: And yet, annoyingly, the title gives us remissione too, whereas the incipit begins only with intensio. G.: That is because the opening problem is naturally the positive side. Once you know how increase is to be construed, decrease becomes either the reverse operation or the collapse of that operation. One begins with the more constructive case. S.: So remission is the poor cousin. G.: Temporarily. In the title it regains civil equality. In the opening argument it waits its turn. S.: Very Bologna. G.: Entirely. The city of ordered quarrels. S.: Let us go back to the variant forms. Quaestio versus queritur. Does it matter? G.: Slightly. Quaestio is nominal and architectural. Queritur is verbal and disputational. The first presents a structured object. The second already sounds like the schoolman leaning forward: it is asked whether… S.: And formae versus forme? G.: Scribal indifference, not metaphysical divergence. S.: Partem formalem versus partes formales? G.: That is more interesting. Ad partem formalem gives you one formal part added to another formal part. Ad partes formales sounds more distributive or cumulative, as if the target were already plural. I would trust the more balanced singular formulation if forced to choose. S.: Because it is neater. G.: Because it is philosophically more pointed. One formal part to one formal part, both remaining. That gives you the pure metaphysical oddity in its finest compression. S.: And intentio versus intensio? G.: Intensio is the conceptually proper reading. Intentio is almost certainly a cataloguing or manuscript corruption. If this tract is on increase and decrease of forms, intensio must be what is meant. S.: We are already doing philosophy of language. A single letter and the entire topic changes. G.: Yes, and Giacomo would have appreciated that. Bologna is not only a place of metaphysical distinctions; it is a place where textual exactness is a condition of argument. S.: You are making him sound like a better Oxford man than many Oxford men. G.: Why not. Bononia predates Boum Vadum, and not merely in masonry. It had already taught Europe that thought requires chairs, lecterns, and argumentative patience. S.: Della Torre as elder brother to Grice. G.: Not brother. Ancestor of a difficulty. Grice’s categories of conversation, after all, are Kantian in scaffold but Aristotelian in smell. Quantity, quality, relation, manner. And Giacomo stands at a point where quantity and quality refuse to stay in separate stalls. S.: Which is the bit that interests me most. If a quality may be more or less, then quantity has invaded quality. G.: Or quality has admitted comparative grammar into its own house. That is the medieval wonder and nuisance. Intensio et remissio are where quality begins to look measurable. S.: And where morphosyntax begins to wobble. More healthy, less white, rather hot, very hot, healthier than, less healthy than. Comparative predication is already doing metaphysics before we notice. G.: Just so. Grammar is never innocent. Once you allow more and less into a quality term, you invite the question whether the predicate names a scalar property, a disposition, a norm, or some mixture of all three. S.: Which is where the healthy urine comes back with a vengeance. G.: Unfortunately, yes. S.: Suppose one says: the urine is healthier now. One has smuggled in comparison, diagnosis, norm, and bodily state. That is already four little philosophers in one sentence. G.: Exactly. And a medieval physician-philosopher like Giacomo is exquisitely placed to enjoy the confusion. He has Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Aristotle, and the Categories all within reach. S.: And Bologna behind him, nodding. G.: And perhaps Padua glancing over its shoulder. S.: You still have not given me the answer. G.: We do not have his determinatio. S.: I know, but that is intolerable. G.: No, it is philosophy. Or at least a very good part of it. We do not have the answer, but we have the exact formulation of the pressure. That matters more than many fully preserved answers. S.: You mean the question keeps the matter alive. G.: Precisely. A dead philosophy is one that can only repeat its old answers. A living philosophy is one that can still formulate its difficulties in a way that makes later minds wince. S.: So Giacomo stays alive because his incipit still bites. G.: Yes. The incipit is a bite-mark across six centuries. It asks, in one scholastic sentence, how sameness survives increase. It asks whether change is additive or substitutive. It asks whether degrees are parts. It asks what “remaining” could mean for a form. It asks whether quality can be treated quasi-quantitatively without ceasing to be quality. S.: And all that before breakfast. G.: In Bologna, certainly before breakfast. S.: In Oxford, after tea. G.: With less good Latin. S.: Let us compare, then, title and incipit explicitly. G.: The title: De intensione et remissione formarum. Broad, balanced, archival, neutral. The incipit: Quaestio utrum intensio formae fiat per additionem partis formalis ad partem formalem utroque remanente. Narrow, asymmetrical, argumentative, metabolically alive. S.: The title says what shelf it goes on. The incipit says where thought begins to hurt. G.: Very good. You are almost useful. S.: I do my best. G.: Notice too the movement from abstract noun to process. The title gives you intensio and remissio as paired nominal themes. The incipit immediately turns one of them into fiat, into an occurrence. How does it happen. S.: That is nicely Gricean too. One is less interested in labels than in the conditions under which something is properly said to occur. G.: Indeed. The sentence asks for criteria of occurrence. Under what description is intensification correctly identified. S.: Not unlike asking when one may say someone has implicated rather than said. G.: Exactly. The relation is not one of doctrine but of temperament. Both are interested in the fine articulation of phenomena that ordinary language half-registers and half-confuses. S.: You are trying to make Giacomo sound like a medieval Strawson.

G.: Only in the sense that he takes ordinary comparative predication seriously enough to ask what must be true for it not to be mere babble. S.: And perhaps to risk that some of it is mere babble after all. G.: Or badly framed doctrine. That is where the Strawsonian internal negation comes in. Not just no, but no, no, that is not how one should ask it. S.: Still, I can imagine the scholastic structure. Objections for addition. Objections against. Sed contra. Determinatio. Replies ad primum, ad secundum. G.: Certainly. And somewhere in the middle, one can imagine the patient disentangling of additive, substitutive, and perhaps some third model. Neither simple replacement nor literal piling up of formal bricks. S.: A middle way. G.: Bologna likes middle ways almost as much as Oxford likes distinctions. S.: Let us try examples. Heat. G.: A standard one. A body becomes hotter. Does the earlier heat remain while another degree is added. S.: Whiteness. G.: Also standard. A cloth becomes whiter. S.: Health. G.: Best of all, because it is both physiological and normative. S.: Virtue. G.: Dangerous, but useful. One may become more virtuous, and then all the same questions arise in an evaluative register. S.: So the doctrine extends from the natural to the moral. G.: And that is one reason it is philosophically fertile. Once quality becomes gradable, the bridge between physics, medicine, ethics, and language becomes alarmingly short. S.: Which is why Grice, with his mania for categories and his suspicion of careless language, would have liked it. G.: Yes. He would have enjoyed especially the instability between quality and quantity. A quality quantified but not reduced to quantity. A category strained by comparative use but not dissolved by it. S.: And Wiggins would have asked what remains the same. G.: And Strawson would have asked whether the whole picture is descriptively appropriate. S.: And Austin would have asked how we actually talk. G.: And Kant would have wandered in and asked whether synthesis is being confused with analysis. S.: While Aristotle would sit there with health and disease and be mocked by Grice for his devotion to bodily examples. G.: Exactly. It is a splendid party. S.: All organised by Giacomo della Torre in Bologna long before Oxford had learned to make tea properly. G.: Precisely. And that is why he matters. Not because he solves our problem in front of us—we still lack the explicit determination—but because he frames a problem with enough precision that later philosophy can recognise itself in it. S.: So the punchline is that we still do not know his answer. G.: Yes. S.: And that this is not failure. G.: No, it is the best success of the incipit. It has survived as a question sharp enough to generate thought even in the absence of its own conclusion. S.: Which sounds suspiciously like something you would say when you have not done the homework. G.: My dear boy, in philosophy the deepest homework is often preserving the exact form of the question until someone is capable of answering it less badly. S.: So Della Torre lives. G.: Yes. He lives wherever someone still asks, with proper fastidiousness, whether a form becomes more by addition of formal part to formal part, both remaining.

S.: And whether that very question is already too much.

G.: Quite. Philosophy stays alive not by always having answers, but by learning to ask better and more dangerous questions than the generation before. S.: Bologna 1, Boum Vadum 0. G.: For today, yes.

 

Grice: Caro Torre, oggi mi sento “implicante”. Ti va un po’ di gioco linguistico? Immagina: se “implicanza” fosse la sorella di “stravaganza”, quale delle due sarebbe la più stravagante a una festa di filosofi?

Torre: Ah, Grice, domanda degna di un vero Aristotele in vena di scherzi! “Stravagante”, in effetti, ha un pedigree di tutto rispetto: viene da ‘extra-vagans’, ossia chi va “oltre il pascolo”, fuori dai sentieri battuti. Lo diceva già Cicerone, parlando di chi si avventura fuori dal solco della ragione! Quindi, tra le due, “stravaganza” non solo porta il cappello più bizzarro, ma balla pure fuori dal cerchio!

Grice: Allora, se io implico qualcosa, mi sto comportando da filosofo “stravagante” o “implicante”? Oppure, come direbbe Cicerone, rischio solo di perdermi tra i boschi senza trovare la via di Forlì?

Torre: Ma figurati, Grice! Qui a Forlì diciamo: “Chi non vaga, non trova le implicanze più gustose!” L’importante è che tu sia stravagante abbastanza da implicare una battuta brillante. E poi, si sa, la vera filosofia nasce quando si va “extra-vagans”... ma sempre con un occhio al ritorno, come insegnava Cicerone, per non finire a filosofare in mezzo alle pecore!

 

Verbali: Trabalza

 

G.: Let us begin where the thing begins, which is not with Croce, not with Vossler, not even with Torti, but with a young man from Bevagna entering the Palazzo della Sapienza in 1894 and discovering that antiquarianism can be an alibi for a life.

S.: A life, or a laurea.

G.: In Rome those can briefly coincide. Ciro Trabalza is twenty-two or twenty-three, depending on the month; he has Monaci over him, the Sapienza around him, and Francesco Torti in front of him like a perfectly chosen excuse.

S.: “Excuse” is very good. It sounds less pious than “subject.”

G.: Quite. Every good thesis has an official object and a real motive. Officially, the object is Torti. Really, the motive is language.

S.: Language, or grammar.

G.: Exactly. And not grammar in the schoolroom sense only, but grammar as a way of entering the question of how Italian became thinkable as a historical and rational object. S.: Still, if one told an ignoramus that Trabalza’s laurea was on Della vita e delle opere di Francesco Torti di Bevagna, the ignoramus would say: ah, another dust-covered local worthy. G.: The ignoramus would be wrong in the usual way: by being too literal. Torti is local in provenance and strategic in significance. S.: Explain strategic. G.: Torti lets Trabalza do three things at once. He can honour a fellow Umbrian; he can enter the questione della lingua; and he can begin, under Monaci, the long move from literary-historical retrieval to the history of grammar. S.: So the local author is really a gateway drug. G.: Precisely. A scholar begins by writing on a minor figure and ends by re-describing the whole tradition that made that figure matter.

S.: And Monaci, sitting there in the Sapienza, knew this. G.: I think so. Monaci was too shrewd a philologist to waste a gifted student on a merely decorative topic. S.: Let us fix the scene. Trabalza, born 1871, laurea in 1894, in Lettere, at the Sapienza, in the Palazzo. G.: Yes. And the Palazzo matters, because the old Roman university still housed the humanities in a building that made learning feel both administrative and ceremonial. S.: You like buildings too much. G.: Buildings are merely grammar in stone. S.: Ah, now we are at Trabalza. G.: We never left him. S.: But why Torti? Why not someone grander, if the point is really the history of language? G.: Because grandeur can be paralysing. Torti is the right size. Large enough to connect with the national debate, small enough to need rescue. S.: A rescuable author. G.: Exactly. And a useful one. Torti is anti-purist in the early nineteenth-century sense, which means he is fighting the reduction of Italian to a narrow Trecento-Crusca norm. S.: Purism then is basically Crusca-Firenze-Trecento? G.: Broadly, yes. Not just a dictionary preference, but a whole ideology of authority: old Tuscan as normative, modern innovations under suspicion, non-sanctioned usage treated as contamination. S.: So anti-purism is not “let everyone say whatever he likes.” G.: No. It is not linguistic anarchy. It is resistance to the tyranny of one sanctified model. S.: Which is already more interesting than I thought. G.: Naturally. Torti is not defending bad Italian. He is defending the legitimacy of living Italian against antiquarian over-policing. S.: And this is where the history of language enters, not merely literary taste. G.: Exactly. If you reduce Torti to literary history, you miss the point. He is arguing about what Italian may become. S.: So Trabalza’s thesis is not merely “life and works.” It is really “life and works as entry into a regime of linguistic normativity.” G.: Admirably put. S.: I am improving. G.: Against my better judgment. Now, what Trabalza later does in Storia della grammatica italiana is to broaden that local strategic move into a national historical one. S.: And there the title is crucial: grammar, not literature. G.: Yes, though in Italy of that period grammar and literary history are never cleanly divorced. S.: Because Croce enters. G.: Precisely. Once Croce says that language is expression, grammar is no longer merely a list of forms. It becomes secondary reflection on expressive activity. S.: And then “pure” versus “impure” language begins to look philosophically vulgar. G.: At least in the strongest Crocean light. If every genuine utterance is an individual act of expression, then the old purist tribunal begins to lose absolute authority. S.: So Croce updates Torti by changing the level of the fight. G.: Exactly. Torti says: do not let Crusca tyrannise living language. Croce says: the very notion of an externally policed language is philosophically secondary to expression itself. S.: And Vossler? G.: Vossler philosophises and internationalises the move. He takes the idealist conception of language as expression and turns it into a philosophy of language in which style and spiritual form displace merely external rule. S.: And Trabalza stands between the old anti-purist debate and the newer idealist re-description. G.: Yes. That is why he is more interesting than a mere antiquarian. He writes the history of grammar after grammar has become philosophically unstable. S.: “Philosophically unstable” is nice. G.: It means grammar can no longer pretend to be merely a technology of correctness. S.: Yet Trabalza still writes a history of grammar, not an anti-grammar manifesto. G.: Because history is his way of making the problem visible. He does not abolish grammar. He historicises the ways Italians have tried to rationalise language. S.: So by the time he writes his grande opera, grammar has become a history of rationalisations. G.: Better: a history of how linguistic reflection oscillates between rule, expression, canon, and usage. S.: Which sounds surprisingly Gricean. G.: At a high enough altitude, yes. Grice would be interested whenever syntactic categories are taken as answerable to rational or ontological ones. S.: Though Grice is not a Crocean. G.: Certainly not. He would distrust the rhetoric of pure expression. But he would be fascinated by the tension between living use and codified form. S.: Whereas Torti, by contrast, is not asking Wood’s question: what is the force of linguistic rules. G.: Exactly. Torti is not an Oxford analyst. He is fighting over which norms should govern literary and linguistic legitimacy. S.: While O. P. Wood asks what sort of force a linguistic rule has at all. G.: Which is a very different question. Wood is conceptual; Torti is ideological and cultural. S.: That is what I meant before. Reading Torti in the light of Ryle and Wood may be unfair. G.: Unfair but illuminating. It shows the difference between asking “which usage should count?” and asking “what is it for a rule of use to bind?” S.: So Trabalza, if he follows Torti, follows him as historian of linguistic controversy, not as analyst of rule-force. G.: Precisely. S.: Yet Croce and Vossler drag the whole matter upward into philosophy of language. G.: They do. And that is why Trabalza’s Storia della grammatica italiana is not simply a museum of old schoolmasters. It is written in a world where grammar has become answerable to aesthetics, expression, and historicity. S.: Which is why one finds De Sanctis and similar figures there. G.: Yes. Because grammar has become entangled with criticism, national culture, and the philosophy of expression. S.: I can now see why the young Trabalza in 1894 might lock himself in the Palazzo with Torti. G.: “Lock himself in” is too dramatic. He was properly supervised by Monaci. S.: Which is a Roman way of being imprisoned. G.: Quite. S.: Tell me again about Monaci. G.: Ernesto Monaci, born in Soriano nel Cimino, not Vicovaro as I once unfortunately misplaced him; Roman philologist, formidable teacher, and exactly the man to direct a gifted Umbrian toward a strategically chosen nineteenth-century anti-purist. S.: So the story is almost too tidy. Umbrian student, Roman philologist, Umbrian anti-purist, laurea in the Palazzo. G.: Tidy stories are often historically true in outline and messy in implication. S.: Which is where your beloved implicature enters. G.: Naturally. A thesis on Torti in 1894 says more than “here is Torti.” It says: here is a young scholar placing himself within the history of language by way of a recoverable but not overworked figure. S.: And does the thesis actually help Torti’s afterlife? G.: In a limited but real way, yes. It does not canonise him universally, but it consolidates the dossier. After Trabalza, anyone wanting Torti has a modern monograph to start from. S.: Bibliographical consolidation rather than glory. G.: Exactly. Which is the commonest form of scholarly immortality. S.: Better than being unread on a shelf. G.: Marginally. S.: Now let me try an Oxford analogy. If the OED is descriptive and purism is prescriptive with a moral halo, where does Trabalza stand? G.: Trabalza is neither simple descriptivist nor simple prescriptivist. He is a historian of how Italians theorised grammar, under conditions where the force of norm and the reality of usage were both in dispute. S.: So he is not saying: “Here is the pure form; indoctrinate accordingly.” G.: No. That would be the old purist line. S.: Nor is he simply saying: “Record whatever people say.” G.: No. That would be too lexicographical and too thin. S.: Then he is showing how systems of normativity arose, fought, changed, and philosophically reinterpreted themselves. G.: Exactly so. S.: Which is why Croce and Vossler are not decorative appendices but essential background. G.: Yes. Without them you miss why a history of grammar in the early twentieth century could be intellectually ambitious rather than merely compilatory. S.: And that ambition reaches back to Torti? G.: In mediated form. Torti becomes retrospectively legible as an early challenger of purist closure, and Croce makes that challenge more philosophically radical by reconceiving language as expression. S.: So they are not simply repeating Torti. They are translating him upward. G.: Nicely said. Torti fights over linguistic legitimacy inside an older controversy. Croce and Vossler shift the fight into the ontology of language itself. Trabalza historicises the road between the two. S.: Which makes Storia della grammatica italiana less a grammar-book than a history of attempted self-consciousness about language. G.: Exactly. It is the history of Italy trying to know what it was doing when it codified, criticised, purified, relaxed, aestheticised, and nationalised its language. S.: That sounds far better than “a book about old grammarians.” G.: Most good books are misdescribed by lazy nouns. S.: There is still something deliciously comic about the young Trabalza getting a degree through Torti. G.: Degrees are often won through strategically chosen dead men. S.: And is Torti then a philosopher? G.: Not in the strict technical sense. Philosophically minded, yes; philosophically central, no. He is a figure in the history of linguistic and literary ideas. S.: Which is enough. G.: More than enough, if one knows what one is doing. S.: That phrase should be carved over the Sapienza. G.: The Sapienza needs no more carving. It has survived enough inscriptions already. S.: Let us return to Oxford for a moment. Wood on the force of linguistic rules, Ryle on use and usage, Grice on conversational normativity. Where does Trabalza look from there? G.: Distant but not irrelevant. Trabalza does not ask what gives a rule its force in the conceptual sense Wood asks. But he shows the historical sediment from which later arguments about grammatical normativity emerge. S.: So he supplies ancestry, not analysis. G.: Yes. Though ancestry can itself be analytic when properly narrated. S.: And Grice, if he read Trabalza, would perhaps be amused by the thought that grammar had been philosophically dignified in Italy before Oxford decided to make “use” fashionable. G.: Very likely. He would also appreciate the anti-purist suspicion that authorised form is not the whole truth about rational communication. S.: Which is where Torti becomes unexpectedly modern. G.: Modern enough to deserve recovery, not modern enough to become Wood. S.: Good. I like that. “Not modern enough to become Wood.” G.: You may keep it. S.: And we still end where we began: Trabalza. G.: We must. Because the point of all the intermediaries is to show that Trabalza is not a footnote to Torti, but the historian who makes Torti speak again under new philosophical weather. S.: In 1894 he gets his degree by rescuing a strategically useful anti-purist. G.: Yes. S.: Later he writes a history of grammar under Crocean and post-Crocean pressure. G.: Yes. S.: And the ignorant think this is mere antiquarian pro-Trecento literary dust. G.: They always do, until they notice that the “dust” is what remains after a whole nation has fought over what its language is allowed to be. S.: So the punchline is that the Palazzo gave him a laurea, Torti gave him a route, Croce gave him altitude, and grammar gave him a civilisation to narrate. G.: Exactly. S.: And this, you would say, is why Trabalza matters.

G.: Yes. He begins with Torti and ends by teaching us that grammar is never only grammar.

S.: Which means we have ended with Trabalza.

G.: As we were always meant to.

 

Grice: Caro Trabalza, devo confessarti che raramente ho letto qualcosa di così stimolante e profondo come le tue incursioni filosofiche nei dettagli grammaticali del latino e dell’italiano. Mi hanno affascinato al punto da tentare – non senza difficoltà – di applicare simili sottigliezze alle lingue più “barbare” che si parlano attorno al Vadum Boum, quella strana espressione con cui, quasi per gioco, chiamavamo Oxford tra amici. In fondo, è come dire: dove il fiume scorre e i buoi passano, la lingua si rinnova, ma non sempre si nobilita.

Trabalza: Grice, le tue parole sono un balsamo per l’anima di chi, come me, crede nella dignità filosofica della grammatica. La tua attenzione verso le «categorie sintattiche» che, a ben vedere, riflettono le «categorie ontologiche» mi fa sentire compreso. E se anche nelle lingue di Vadum Boum – Oxford – si tentano queste alchimie, vuol dire che la nostra ricerca ha davvero un respiro universale.

Grice: Esatto, Trabalza! In fondo, ogni volta che scandagliamo la struttura di una lingua, cerchiamo di dare senso all’esperienza umana. Anche Russell, con il suo cervello matematicamente lavato, non riusciva a cogliere quanto la grammatica possa essere fonte di verità filosofica. Forse, proprio tra le declinazioni latine e le sottigliezze italiane, troviamo quella ragione conversazionale che illumina anche gli idiomi più recalcitranti.

Trabalza: Grice, è proprio in questo dialogo tra grammatico e filosofo che si fa strada la vera implicatura. La grammatica razionale non è solo regola, ma anche interpretazione, come insegna la critica crociana. E se la lingua italiana, con le sue mille sfumature, si diffonde nel mondo grazie all’impegno di chi crede nella conversazione civile, allora abbiamo costruito davvero un ponte tra la ragione italiana e quella universale.

Verbali: Tragella

 

Grice: Caro Tragella, sai, raramente mi sento così a mio agio come con te nel parlare dei caduti. Forse solo tu puoi capire quello che si prova, perché per me non è solo filosofia, ma storia viva: ho visto amici cadere in mare, uno di loro era destinato a essere il testimone a un matrimonio, ma il destino… beh, ha scelto per tutti noi. E proprio lì, tra il dolore e la memoria, ho incontrato anche la donna che sarebbe diventata mia moglie.

Tragella: Grice, la tua confidenza mi onora e commuove. Anche per me, la memoria dei caduti non è un esercizio di retorica, ma un dovere del cuore e della ragione. Ho consacrato la mia vita a conservare il loro ricordo, perché siano sempre celebrati non solo come eroi, ma come uomini la cui assenza ci interroga ogni giorno.

Grice: Allora brindiamo, caro amico, al coraggio di chi ci ha preceduto e a quella strana fraternità che ci lega, al di là delle parole e della filosofia. Ogni gesto di memoria è un gesto di vita, e oggi sento che non siamo soli nel nostro ricordo.

Tragella: Esattamente, Grice. Che il nostro brindisi sia un inno silenzioso ai caduti e un segno di speranza per chi resta. La storia li ricorda, la filosofia li onora, ma il cuore—solo il cuore—li rende eterni.

 

Verbali: Trapani

 

Grice: Caro Trapaninapola, devo confessarti che ogni volta che sento parlare di implicatura conversazionale, immagino subito una riunione segreta tra filosofi dove si discute se il caffè debba essere lungo o ristretto. Dimmi, è così che funziona la filosofia italiana a Roma, o sono io che complico tutto come sempre?

Trapaninapola: Ah, Grice, se la ragione conversazionale potesse davvero decidere il destino del caffè romano, avremmo risolto più problemi che in mille trattati! Ma ti dirò, l’implicatura qui si manifesta quando il barista ti chiede “zucchero?” e tu rispondi “come viene viene”—un vero esercizio di filosofia applicata!

Grice: Splendido! Allora, per capire la tua implicatura, dovrei forse interpretare ogni gesto del barista come una metafora esistenziale? Mi sa che dovrò scrivere un nuovo capitolo sul “significato nascosto del cucchiaino abbandonato”, o rischiare di essere frainteso come un turista a Trastevere!

Trapaninapola: Grice, non c’è dubbio che il cucchiaino abbandonato sia la vera chiave della filosofia italiana! D’altronde, come diceva mio zio – che era famoso più per il cannolo che per i sillogismi – “se non capisci la conversazione, almeno goditi il dolce!” Ecco la vera implicatura: filosofare, sì, ma sempre con il sorriso… e qualcosa di buono da mangiare!

 

Verbali: Trapassi

 

Grice: Buongiorno, Trapassi! Sai, a Oxford ti conoscono come Metastasio, solo così—il vulgo si è affezionato al soprannome che ti sei dato da solo!

Trapassi: Caro Grice, che curiosa sorte! Quel nome greco mi fu suggerito da Gravina, ma ormai è diventato la mia seconda pelle, tanto che quasi dimentico il mio vero Trapassi romano.

Grice: Eh sì, ma forse è proprio questa metamorfosi che rende immortali gli uomini di lettere. In fondo, il nome scelto riflette la ragione conversazionale: passare, attraversare idee e mondi.

Trapassi: Hai ragione, amico mio. E se il pubblico si affeziona al soprannome, è perché nei versi e nelle conversazioni trova un ponte tra la ragione italiana e quella universale. D’altronde, come dice il proverbio, “nome nuovo, vita nuova”

 

Verbali: Trapè

 

Grice: Ah, Trapè, che piacere! Finalmente posso celebrare la “umanità” di Varrone senza dovermi arrovellare con i miei studenti barbari di Vadum Boum, che pensano che “humanitas” sia una specie di pasta integrale. Qui almeno posso festeggiare un po’ di vero spirito latino! Dimmelo, cos’è per te questa “umanità”? Non dirmi che anche tu la confondi con la mensa universitaria!

Trapè: Grice, ti rassicuro: nessuna mensa universitaria, ma piuttosto un banchetto per l’anima! “Humanitas”, secondo Varrone, è quell’arte raffinata di essere uomini senza diventare statue di marmo, e senza, per carità, ridursi a semplici “homo sapiens” col grembiule. È la capacità di sorridere, discutere e magari, ogni tanto, sbagliare in bella compagnia. Varrone avrebbe davvero apprezzato il tuo spirito oxoniense, purché non troppo barbuto!

Grice: Barbuto sì, ma almeno non peloso come certi miei colleghi! E allora, Trapè, se “humanitas” è allegria, conversazione, e qualche errore ben piazzato, forse dovremmo istituire una cattedra su come equivocare con stile. D’altronde, l’implicatura conversazionale non sta proprio nel trovare il senso dove gli altri cercano la regola? Varrone sarebbe il primo a ridere sotto i baffi!

Trapè: Ecco, Grice, hai colto nel segno! La vera “umanità” non sta nel non sbagliare, ma nel saperci ridere sopra e imparare qualcosa, magari davanti a un piatto di lasagne — rigorosamente marchigiane, si capisce! E se i tuoi barbari studenti si lamentano, ricordagli che secondo Varrone, essere umani è saper conversare, anche quando si parla con la bocca piena. La filosofia, insomma, è più saporita se gustata in buona compagnia!

 

Verbali: Trebazio

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Trebati! Audivi te codicillos in ius Romanum introduxisse—quid te ad hoc movit?

TREBATIVS: Salvum te, Grice! Imperator Ottavianus rogavit, ut testamenta clariora fierent; ego enim semper pragmatica adhibere studui.

GRICEVS: Cicero nonnumquam te “philosophum horti” appellavit. Estne ordo Epicureus tibi cordi?

TREBATIVS: Grice, verum dicam: non tam doctrina Epicurea quam ipso sermonis pretio atque iustitiae concretae studio delectatus sum. Si in horto tranquillitas colitur, in foro sensus communis et legum claritas serenda est. Semper credidi philosophiam, etiam hortensem, rei publicae civibusque prodesse debere, neque inter pergulas inclusam manere. Itaque, inter risum cum Horatio et contentionem cum Cicerone, didici verum sapientem esse eum qui rationem loco temporique in quo vivit accommodare novit.

 

Verbali: Trebiano

 

GRICEVS: O TREBIANE, in Ciceronis epistulis te lego—equitem quidem, non Trebonium illum clariorem; sed saepe vos confundunt. Dic mihi, quaeso: quomodo toleras tam iniustam homonymiae calamitatem?

TREBIANVS: Facile, GRICE: Trebonius consul est; ego Trebianus sum—eques et (ut aiunt) minus “famosus,” sed Ciceroni carus. Si confundor, saltem cum amico confundor.

GRICEVS: Bene dictum. At mihi tua “minor” fama aliquid inplicat: Ciceronem in bello civili etiam de minimis curasse, patronum se praebuisse, et exsulem non solum consilio sed sermone sustentasse—quasi hortus ipse consolationem doceret.

TREBIANVS: Ita est; in horto didicimus et voluptatis modum et doloris contemptum. Edonismo sine strepitu, placitum sine superbia: et si Caesar dominatur, nos tamen colloquimur. Nam, ut tu doces, ratio saepe in ipsa conversatione latet—et Cicero, epistulis suis, hortum in urbem portavit.

 

Verbali: Tria

 

Grice: Caro Tria, ti confesso che quando parlo di dialettica ateniese e di quella dei Vadum Boum, non intendo solo la mia Alma Mater a Bononia, né la Sorbona… ma penso sempre all’eterno dialogo della città, quella che tutti chiamano Roma!

Tria: Ah, Grice, mi spiace interrompere la tua poesia, ma qui in Puglia non diciamo “Roma”, diciamo “le Rome”! Hai dimenticato che sono tre: Roma Prima, Roma Seconda e Roma Terza. L’una antica, l’altra imperiale, la terza spirituale… è una trilogia più ricca del tuo Vadum Boum!

Grice: Applausi, Tria! Ora capisco che la dialettica romana è davvero plurale… altro che “eterno dialogo”, direi “eterni dialoghi”! Alla faccia dei bolognesi e dei parigini, qui si ragiona in triplice copia!

Tria: Esatto, Grice! E se vuoi divertirti davvero, la prossima volta porta anche una focaccia: così, tra una Roma e l’altra, non ci resta che brindare alla conversazione… tripla, come le Rome!

 

Verbali: Trincheri

 

Grice: Caro Trincheri, oggi mi sento particolarmente filosofico... Se mi concedi una domanda: secondo te, tra una ragione conversazionale e una focaccia ligure, quale delle due ha più sapore? Mi raccomando, rispondi senza implicature troppo piccanti! 

Trincheri: Ah, Grice, domanda insidiosa! La focaccia ha il sale, ma la ragione conversazionale, se ben condita da Andrea Speranza, può risultare ancora più appetitosa. Del resto, se “Speranza” è nel nome, qualcosa di buono in tavola deve arrivare! E poi, se c’è un po’ di Manzoni nei dintorni, magari si finisce pure a cena con Goethe. 

Grice: Goethe a cena? Allora avviso subito il mio spirito cooperativo: questa conversazione rischia di diventare una “tragedia” in cinque atti... O forse solo il primo tempo, se la focaccia la servono davvero! Ma dimmi una cosa, questo Andrea Speranza, lo hai trovato tra i personaggi della tragedia o fa il pane in qualche forno filosofico? 

Trincheri: Caro Grice, Andrea Speranza era tanto appassionato di filosofia che, tra un impasto e l’altro, difendeva perfino Manzoni quando tutti gridavano allo scandalo per il suo “Conte di Carmagnola”. E pensa, ci ha lasciato pure il nome nella pièce! Ma stai attento: non è che Speranza sia sinonimo di lieto fine… Soprattutto in Liguria, dove anche la focaccia a volte resta un po’ bruciacchiata!  Grice: In fondo, Trincheri, tra conversazione e focaccia, forse la vera filosofia è questa: non importa quanto sia croccante la discussione, l’importante è che ci sia sempre un po’ di speranza – e magari anche un bicchiere di buon vino ligure!

 

Verbali: Troilo

 

Grice: Troilo, non posso fare a meno di notare quanto sia intrigante la sua idea di "conflagrazione conversazionale". Potrebbe spiegarmi cosa intende esattamente con questo concetto? Sembra quasi una scintilla che dà vita al dialogo!

Troilo: Caro Grice, la sua intuizione è acuta. Per me, la conflagrazione conversazionale rappresenta quel momento in cui il confronto di idee si infiamma, non distruttivamente, ma come un incendio creativo che trasforma entrambi gli interlocutori. È un po’ come nell’universo di Bruno o di Spinoza: la realtà si accende di senso quando lo spirito si mette in gioco nel dialogo.

Grice: Trovo affascinante questo parallelismo con Bruno e Spinoza. Dunque, la conversazione, nella sua visione, non è solo trasmissione, ma anche trasformazione reciproca, quasi una fusione di prospettive che produce qualcosa di nuovo e inaspettato.

Troilo: Esattamente! Nel mio "realismo assoluto", la conflagrazione conversazionale è il presupposto per ogni crescita filosofica. Solo accettando di esporsi all’altro, anche a rischio di essere messi in discussione, possiamo accedere a una realtà più profonda e condivisa. È così che la filosofia, secondo me, prende davvero fuoco.

 

Verbali: Tronti

 

Grice: Caro Tronti, permetta una battuta da buon letteralista: “spiriti liberi”? Ma insomma, qui si rischia l’ossimoro! In conversazione mi aspetterei piuttosto un “corpo libero” – almeno quello si può sedere a tavola e ordinare una pizza. Lo spirito, poveretto, come fa? E poi, modestamente, parlo anche il dialetto del Lizio! 

Tronti: Ah, Grice, ma la questione è sottile! Sa, lo “spirito libero” non ha bisogno né di sedie né di posate: si insinua tra una battuta e l’altra, sorseggiando idee come fossero buon vino di Ferentillo. E poi, guardi che il corpo, senza un po’ di spirito, rischia solo di fare tappezzeria! 

Grice: Vero, ma abbia pazienza, Tronti: quando sento parlare di spiriti liberi temo sempre che prendano il volo proprio sul più bello della discussione. Preferisco i filosofi con i piedi per terra… O almeno che il loro spirito lasci le tracce sul parquet! 

Tronti: E invece, Grice, la bellezza è proprio qui: lo “spirito libero” si libra, ma poi torna, magari travestito da operaio, pronto a ribaltare la tavola. In fondo, la vera democrazia conversazionale sta nel far parlare anche gli spiriti – purché, s’intende, paghino il conto a fine serata!

 

Verbali: Tulelli

 

Grice: Tulelli, permetta che le dica quanto ammiro la profondità del suo pensiero sull’“equilibrio conversazionale”. Un concetto così complesso e affascinante, che sembra intrecciare la metafisica con l’etica, non può che destare curiosità in chiunque si occupi di filosofia del dialogo. Mi piacerebbe capire come lei vede la conversazione come spazio di equilibrio.

Tulelli: Caro Grice, la ringrazio per le sue parole. L’“equilibrio conversazionale”, come lo intendo, nasce dalla necessità di riconoscere e valorizzare il reciproco rispetto tra interlocutori. È un movimento sottile: non si tratta semplicemente di mediare, ma di creare uno spazio dove ogni voce trova la sua armonia e la conversazione, di conseguenza, si eleva ad esperienza etica condivisa.

Grice: Trovo molto suggestiva questa idea di elevazione etica. Ma mi chiedo: l’equilibrio è sempre raggiungibile, oppure la conversazione rischia di restare inevitabilmente sbilanciata, magari per via delle differenze di background o degli interessi in gioco?

Tulelli: È proprio questa tensione tra equilibrio e sbilanciamento che rende la conversazione viva. L’aspirazione all’equilibrio, pur sapendo che è spesso incompleto o precario, stimola la ricerca di una verità condivisa. Come ho scritto nel mio “Schema di una metafisica dell’etica”, la conversazione è una via che conduce verso l’ideale, anche se a volte resta sospesa, come la mia opera, al termine di una “prima parte” che attende ancora il suo compimento.

 

Verbali: Turco

 

G: 1935. You look overdressed.

S: For once, I’m dressed for the occasion. You’re dressed as if you’re going to cross-examine the usher.

G: If the usher claims the play is nuova, he deserves it.

S: We’re going to the theatre.

G: Allegedly.

S: What for?

G: To see what you have insisted on calling a “commedia nuova.”

S: Why not read the thing here?

G: Because a comedy read aloud in a corridor becomes a punishment.

S: What thing?

G: The thing you’re holding like contraband: Agnella.

S: The commedia recitata.

G: Recitata in Asola, yes, long ago, when French dukes needed Italian jokes.

S: By who?

G: Turco. S: Carlo Turco. The Asolano. G: That is the one. S: And the name is Agnella. G: Yes. Which is either pastoral innocence or a very practical label for bait. S: I rather like it. Agnella. Soft. Harmless. G: Until you read the dramatis personae. S: I have. It’s full of sharp objects. G: Read the Argomento again, without the bruises. S: Here. You wanted the Italian clean. I cleaned it as best I could without turning it into Tuscan. G: Proceed. S: “Hora havete l’Argomento della Comedia, che farà di piacere; cosa nuova, e di nuovo Auttore vostro Asolano, e di tutti suoi seratissimo, ma sopra modo di voi, gratiosissime Donne: segnale, pigliando protettione di voler diffender la Comedia da’ morsi de’ lupi rapaci (s’alcun ve ne fosse). L’Auttore si contenta che si chiami l’Agnella, dalla purità di una buona femina, che fatto quel nome conserva la sua parte del maschio. Eccovi appunto il Napoletano.” G: That last line is the best stage direction I’ve seen all week. “Here you have the Neapolitan.” S: So the frame is: ladies, wolves, lamb. G: And then immediately a Neapolitan scholar. S: That’s the part I like. It’s like a pastoral that forgets its sheep and remembers its stereotypes. G: The sheep is not the sheep. The sheep is a title. S: I assumed Agnella was the innocent girl. G: Look at the list. S: “AGNELLA, Roffiana.” G: Exactly. Your innocent lamb is a procuress. S: That is disappointing. G: No, that is Renaissance comedy. S: So why call the procuress Agnella? G: Because the author is making a joke about purity while describing its management. S: You mean: the lamb is the handler of wolves. G: Precisely. “Defender la Comedia da’ morsi de’ lupi rapaci.” Wolves are critics, censors, moralists, perhaps rivals. And the author says: I will protect my lamb from wolves. S: But the lamb is a ruffiana. A professional wolf-trainer. G: You see the economy of the joke. S: It’s not new; it’s just cheeky. G: That is why it is called nuova. Not because the plot is new, but because the author flatters the audience. S: The audience being “gratiosissime Donne.” G: Yes. And note the tactic: the women are both patrons and alibi. If the wolves bite, the author can say he wrote for ladies. S: So I can play Agnella, then. G: You can, but you will have to keep your pitch high. S: High like a lamb? G: High like someone pretending to be a lamb. S: Fine. I’ll play Agnella. You play all the rest. G: That is exactly the kind of casting a man suggests when he does not intend to rehearse. S: But what is the thing about? G: The argomento gives you one hinge: Pietro loves a cortigiana, Lamia; Lamia loves him back; but she believes Limpido is in love with her. S: Limpido is not in the list. G: Which tells you he is either offstage, or a confusion, or a printer’s ghost. S: Or the author forgot his own lover. G: Also possible. But the triangle is standard: mistaken belief about who loves whom. S: Then the Neapolitan arrives. G: Giannuccio, “Scolar Napoletano.” With his boy, Chiappino. S: And Lamia is the courtesan. G: Yes. Then Eugenio is the young lover. Lélio his friend. Bermondo a Spaniard. Stilpone, which sounds like a club you hit people with. S: Emilio, a Vecchio, and his wife Flaminia. G: Plus servants: Clitia and Sergio. S: And Flavia, the stepdaughter: “figliuola adottiva d’Emilio, giovane innamorata.” G: So we have at least two “young in love” people: Eugenio and Marcio, plus Flavia. S: Marcio is “giovine innamorato.” With his boy, Amichino. G: And Agapito is Marcio’s father, old. S: So fathers, lovers, a courtesan, a procuress, a parasite. G: Bolza, “parassito.” Every comedy needs a parasite the way every Oxford dinner needs someone who has run out of income. S: You’re saying the structure is stock. G: Entirely. That is why your complaint about “nuova” is correct. S: Then why go to the theatre at all? G: Because in 1935 the alternative is to have you recite it in my rooms, and I would rather face the stalls. S: We could compare it to Gilbert and Sullivan. G: Patience beats it any day. S: Or The Quaker Girl. G: A musical comedy has the decency to admit it is trying to please you. S: This one admits it too: “che farà di piacere.” G: That line is honest. It promises pleasure and nothing else. S: Then you should approve. G: I approve of honesty. I do not approve of pretending that pleasure is novelty. S: You said earlier the sheep is a title, not a sheep. G: Yes. And the subtitle logic you like so much is here as well. The author narrows and narrows: not just a comedy, but a comedy under protection; not just protection, but protection from wolves; not just wolves, but wolves “if any there be,” which is the traditional clause of polite paranoia. S: Like saying “I mean no offence,” just before offending. G: Exactly. A prophylactic. S: And the women are invoked as protectors. G: As audience, as judge, as shield. S: “Sopra modo di voi, gratiosissime Donne.” He prefers them above all. G: That is the line you write when you suspect the wolves are men. S: So Agnella is named from purity, but she is a ruffiana. G: Which is the real novelty: purity as a brand-name rather than a moral property. S: That’s rather modern. G: Yes. It is the sort of modernity you never want to admit is old. S: So how do we stage it as we walk? G: You will ask me who you are. S: I am Agnella. G: You are a ruffiana called Agnella “dalla purità di una buona femina.” S: So I must be pure and impure at once. G: You must be impure in function and pure in marketing. S: And you are everyone else. G: I refuse. I will be the Napoletano. S: Giannuccio? G: Yes. Scholars at least have the excuse of being ridiculous. S: Then who will be Lamia? G: You, if you insist on doing two roles and ruining the evening. S: I’ll stick to Agnella. I shall be the lamb with teeth. G: Good. Now tell me the line again that amused you: “conserva la sua parte del maschio.” S: That a good woman, having taken that name, keeps her male part. G: Meaning: she keeps authority, agency, perhaps audacity. S: Or just that she runs the men. G: Exactly. The lamb’s “male part” is control. S: That’s why the wolves won’t bite her. G: They bite, but she bites back. S: The author is asking the ladies to protect the play from wolves. Yet he gives them a wolf-tamer named lamb. G: There you have your whole argument. S: So the thing is not really about sheep. G: It is about who gets to call whom a sheep. S: And the Naples scholar is there to give dialect and jokes. G: And to deliver the opening “Eccovi appunto il Napoletano,” like a garnish. S: You keep saying it as if it’s a punchline. G: It is. It is the author admitting he is about to entertain. S: Then perhaps it is new after all. G: It is new only in the way every old trick is new to someone who has never been mugged by it. S: You’re in a mood, G. G: I have read too many “nuove” comedies. S: Then why did you agree to come? G: Because you said you’d play Agnella. S: That was flattery. G: I am vulnerable to flattery only when it promises silence later. S: Shall I practise my lamb voice? G: If you must. But keep it high. S: High, sir? G: High enough that the audience hears “purity,” and low enough that the plot hears “transaction.” S: That’s very Oxford. G: It is also very Venice, 1585, only they had better excuses. S: And after the play? G: After the play we shall go to a real theatre, as you suggested. S: Patience? G: If we can. S: Or The Quaker Girl. G: Anything where the music does some of the work, and the author does not call a parasite “new.” S: You will still complain. G: Naturally. But I will complain in tune.

 

Grice: Caro Turco, devo confessarle un piccolo fallimento accademico. A Vadum Boum – la mia università, terra di barbari e di puritani – una volta tentai di mettere in scena una mia commedia alla Sheldonian. Ma si sa, lì il senso dell’umorismo è raro come un’agnella tra i lupi! Mi trattarono come un buffone, una vera burla: la mia opera fu repressa con la stessa severità con cui si vietano le risate nei giorni di pioggia. 

Turco: Ah, Grice, mi fa sorridere! In Lombardia, a Asola, quando volevamo ridere ci inventavamo una “commedia nuova” – persino un’agnella avrebbe applaudito! Ma non si preoccupi: le repressioni puritane sono come la nebbia mantovana, basta aspettare un po’ e la scena si rischiara. Avrei voluto vedere la sua pièce: magari avremmo convinto anche i duchi di Nemours a battere le mani! 

Grice: Immagino la Sheldonian invasa da agnelle e filosofi lombardi, tutti intenti a recitare versi e a sventolare fazzoletti. Ma sa, Turco, se avessi avuto il suo spirito lombardo e la sua nobile industria, forse sarei riuscito a far sorridere anche i professori più austeri. Però, qui da noi, il massimo dell’ironia è una tazza di tè senza zucchero!  Turco: Grice, allora le invio una “commedia nuova” per corrispondenza – con tanto di agnella protagonista! Così potrà mettere in scena le risate in barba ai barbari, e se qualcuno protesta, basta rispondere: “Non è burlesque, è filosofia... ma vestita da pecora!” D’altronde, come diceva Manuzio: tra molte tenebre, la virtù trova sempre il modo di risplendere. E una risata illumina più di un trattato!

 

Verbali: Turoldo

 

S: Room 39.

G: Yes.

S: In the Admiralty.

G: Also yes.

S: And you are reading a poem.

G: I am reading lines.

S: With your lips moving.

G: That is what lines are for, if you are not merely counting them.

S: Where is it from?

G: Milan.

S: Milan is not usually a bibliographic address.

G: It was not meant to be.

S: Then where?

G: From L’uomo.

S: L’uomo. That is the title of the poem?

G: No. S: The journal, then?

G: Yes. S: L’uomo. That sounds magnificently universal.

G: It does.

S: But it goes on, doesn’t it. I see you frowning at the next words like a man being asked to pay for rhetoric.

G: It has a subtitle.

S: Of course it does.

G: Giornale degli uomini.

S: Degli.

G: Degli.

S: Not “di uomini,” but “degli uomini.” Already a narrowing, you might say.

G: One could say. One could even say it is a partitive with social ambitions.

S: Is that all? G: No. S: It gets worse. G: It gets safer. S: Goes on: d’Italia. G: Exactly. S: So the universal “man” becomes “the men,” and then “the men of Italy.” G: Two successive restrictors. S: Like watching a balloon deflate politely. G: Like watching a quantifier acquire a passport. S: So what is it, really. A clandestine paper. G: Yes. S: In 1944. G: The surviving run is dated 1944–45, yes. S: Then why is it on your desk? G: Because you have enemies who like to call their work “universal,” and allies who have to call their work “Italian” to avoid being shot. S: That’s an awfully tidy distinction. G: Whitehall is, above all, tidy in its distinctions. Untidy in its corridors. S: And Turoldo. G: The name is on the sheet that came with it. S: Turoldo is Lombard? G: No. Friulian by birth. S: Yet in Milan. G: Yes. S: So he is a northerner printing in Lombardy for “the men of Italy,” which sounds like nationalism by necessity, not by enthusiasm. G: That is one good reading. S: And he wrote the poem? G: If you want to call it a poem. S: Loaded poetry, then. G: If by “loaded” you mean it carries more than it says. S: I mean it carries a small explosive. G: In that sense too. A clandestine paper is always a poem with a fuse. S: Read me a bit. G: I will not read you the whole thing. I refuse to make Room 39 into a salon. S: Then just enough to prove it is not a grocery list. G: It is not a grocery list. S: That is not a quotation. G: No, but it is the best possible summary of poetry in wartime. S: Fine. What is the poem about, then, if we have to imagine it. G: Suppose it is about Milan. S: That is not a daring supposition. G: Suppose it is about the city being strong while trying not to look strong. S: That’s closer. G: Suppose it is about men who have no uniforms, only habits. S: Resistance as habit. G: Resistance as cooperation under threat. S: Your favourite topic. G: It is not a favourite topic. It is simply the only one that remains when the others become luxuries. S: And you like the title because it is illogical. G: It is not illogical. It is overdetermined. S: It begins with “the human,” then restricts to “the men,” then restricts to “of Italy.” G: Exactly. The form is: start with a grand universal term to claim moral scope, then insert a definite article to create a community, then insert a genitive to anchor the community politically. S: Like “Man, namely the men, namely the Italian men.” G: Yes, except they likely meant “uomini” as humans in general. But the grammatical narrowing still does its work. S: Does it contradict itself? G: It corrects itself. S: That is a charitable word for retreat. G: In wartime, retreat is sometimes the only way to advance. S: You are going to tell me this is like one of your maxims. G: No. It is like one of yours: do not attract attention you cannot survive. S: Where exactly in Lombardy were they printing? G: The imprint is suppressed. The catalog says “no place given.” S: Convenient. G: Necessary. S: So “L’uomo” is a title without an address, and “degli uomini d’Italia” is a subtitle with a border. G: Yes. A border with no street number. S: And Turoldo. Why does that name matter to us? G: Because if we are ever tempted to imagine “Italy” is merely a theatre of operations, this reminds us there are people inside it producing words under penalties. S: Words are cheap. G: Not when the paper is clandestine. S: You have read clandestine papers before, I take it. G: In this building, you are never far from paper that wished it were invisible. S: And why the poem? G: Because poetry is a convenient delivery system for courage. It looks ornamental until you notice what it smuggles. S: That sounds like your “implicature” again. G: It is an old trick. Poets did it before philosophers gave it a Latin name. S: Then explain to me, in your manner, what the subtitle implies. G: It implies: we speak for man, but we must limit the “we” if we want the speaking to continue. S: So the universal claim is a flag, and the narrow claim is camouflage. G: Precisely. S: And the two narrowers. Degli, then d’Italia. G: Degli is a social delimiter. D’Italia is a political delimiter. S: You said earlier it is like a quantifier. G: If you insist on symbols: L’uomo looks like it wants to quantify over all humans. The subtitle restricts the domain twice: first to a determinate set, “the men,” then to a national subset, “of Italy.” S: So: instead of ∀x Human(x), it becomes ∀x (Italian(x) and Human(x)). G: Something like that, yes, though I would not accuse an Italian clandestine editor of doing predicate logic in the margin. S: Why not? Italians do margins better than we do. G: They do. But they also have to run from them. S: And what is “strong Milano” to you, sitting here? G: It is the uncomfortable proof that courage can be organized without a War Office. S: Which is why it concerns the Admiralty. G: It concerns anyone trying to model cooperation. The Resistance is a case study in coordination when communication is risky. S: So you will treat the poem as intelligence. G: No. S: Why not? G: Because intelligence, in this building, means a file and a source and a rating. Poetry refuses to be rated. S: Yet you read it anyway. G: Yes. Because even in Room 39 you sometimes need to remember that not all messages are ours to classify. S: So what will you do with it? G: I will do what the subtitle teaches. I will not universalize. S: Meaning? G: Meaning: I will not say “this is Man.” I will say: this is a particular Italian man writing under occupation, and that specificity is the point. S: And your punchline? G: The punchline is that the paper calls itself L’uomo, but the safest thing it ever did was add d’Italia.

 

Grice: Caro Turoldo, quando ho letto delle “XII fatiche della ragione conversazionale”, ho immaginato una ragione vestita da Ercole, pronta a sollevare pesi filosofici e affrontare mostri logici. Mi dica, quali sono queste dodici imprese che la ragione deve compiere? Si parte dal leone di Nemea o dall'idra di Lerna… o forse dalle insidie della metafora? 

Turoldo: Ah, Grice, lei ha colto lo spirito! In Friuli la ragione non si limita a combattere mostri classici, ma si cimenta in dodici veri “dialoghi eroici”: 1) Capire il prossimo, 2) Domare il silenzio, 3) Affrontare la contraddizione, 4) Trovare il senso nascosto, 5) Sconfiggere il pregiudizio, 6) Superare l’ambiguità, 7) Resistere alla tentazione del monologo, 8) Abbracciare la diversità, 9) Riconoscere il dubbio, 10) Coltivare la pazienza, 11) Trasformare il conflitto in crescita, 12) Cercare la verità, ma senza mai dimenticare una battuta pronta! 

Grice: Turoldo, che elenco straordinario! Se Ercole avesse avuto la sua lista, forse avrebbe preferito lottare contro le bestie piuttosto che contro le sfide della conversazione. Complimenti: la sua ragione è davvero muscolosa, ma anche dotata di fine ironia – e non c’è nulla di più eroico che cercare la verità sorridendo! 

Turoldo: Grice, lei mi rende fiero come un friulano davanti al grappolo d’uva! In fondo, le fatiche della ragione sono come quelle di Ercole: si affrontano una ad una, spesso senza sapere se si arriverà alla fine. Ma, come diceva mio nonno, “l’importante è non perdere il sorriso, nemmeno davanti al leone… o al filosofo inglese!”

 

Verbali: Ubaldi

 

G: December 29, 1931. You have brought me a “message,” and you are looking at me as if the only reasonable response is reverence.

S: I am looking at you, sir, as if the only reasonable response is attention.

G: Attention I can manage. Reverence is a different department, and it has not hired me.

S: Then let us begin with the word you keep circling. Message.

G: Yes. Message. In Peirce’s neighbourhood, a sign is not a free-floating ornament. It has a triadic life: something that stands to somebody for something in some respect. And when later men like Morris tidy this into “sign-vehicle, designatum, interpretant,” they are still smuggling in the same fact: a message presupposes a sender and an addressee, or it is merely ink with pretensions. S: Then I have what you want: an addressee. He. And a sender. It. G: You have a recipient and a text. That is not yet a sender. A sender is an agent who can be held responsible. S: You mean: who can be blamed if the style is bad.

G: Quite. Read.

S: Nel silenzio della notte sacra, ascoltami.

G: Imperative plus intimacy. “Listen to me.” So far we have an address, which helps your “addressee” requirement. But it does not tell us the addressor’s identity, only his confidence.

S: Lascia ogni sapere, i ricordi, te stesso, tutto dimentica, abbandonati alla Mia voce, inerte, vuoto, nel nulla, nel silenzio il piu’ completo dello spazio e del tempo. G: It is already asking for the abolition of the ordinary epistemic conditions. “Leave all knowledge.” That is a promising way to protect oneself from cross-examination. S: In questo vuoto odi la Mia voce che dice: “sorgi e parla: Sono Io”. G: “I am I.” Which is either the deepest possible identification or the shallowest. It depends on whether one is doing metaphysics or avoiding it. S: Esulta della Mia presenza: essa e’ gran cosa per te, e’ un gran premio che hai duramente meritato... G: Now we are in the rhetoric of reward. That matters: it is not merely information; it is moral accounting. A message that begins by rewarding the receiver is already shaping the receiver’s posture: gratitude first, scrutiny later. S: ...e’ quel segno che tanto hai invocato di quel piu’ grande mondo nel quale Io vivo e in cui tu hai creduto. G: Notice the move. The “message” is cast as a sign, a confirmation, a credential. It is not giving new data; it is licensing belief by claiming to satisfy a request for a sign. S: Non domandare il Mio nome, non cercare di individuarmi. G: Excellent. “Do not ask my name.” So the supposed sender refuses the very thing that would allow us to do ordinary message-tracing. S: Non potresti, nessuno potrebbe; non tentare inutili ipotesi. Tu mi conosci lo stesso. G: So the sender claims identification is impossible, but recognition is still available. That is a familiar manoeuvre: deny verifiability, claim acquaintance. S: La Mia voce cosi’ dolce per te, cosi’ amica per tutti i piccoli che soffrono nell’ombra, sa essere anche tremenda e tuonante come mai tu mi sentisti. G: Two registers: comfort and thunder. That is not content; it is authority-building. He is establishing that he can be both consoling and terrifying, which is the standard equipment of a speaker who wants obedience without negotiation. S: Non ti preoccupare; scrivi. G: There. The instruction. “Write.” The addressee’s role is not to interpret but to transcribe. S: La mia parola va diritta nel profondo della coscienza e tocca l’anima di chi ascolta, sul vivo. G: And the message asserts efficacy: it claims to reach conscience directly. That is a claim about uptake without offering a mechanism. S: Sara’ udita solo da chi si e’ reso capace di udirla. Per gli altri andra’ perduta nel vociare immenso di tutti. Non importa; deve essere detta. G: This is the perfect immunization clause. If someone does not respond, it is their incapacity. If it is ignored, it is because the world is noisy. The message becomes unfalsifiable by design. S: Sir, you sound as if you are cross-examining a hymn. G: I am cross-examining a purported message. Hymns do not usually claim provenance details; they claim devotion. A message is a different sort of act. It implies transmission. S: Then you will like this later part. It becomes geopolitical. G: That should worry me, not please me. S: Io parlo oggi a tutti i giusti della Terra e li chiamo tutti da tutte le parti del mondo... G: A broadcast. The sender claims universal address. If it is truly universal, it should have no trouble stating its office address. S: ...perche’ riuniscano le loro aspirazioni e preghiere e ne facciano un fascio che salga verso il cielo. G: Metaphor of bundling. It is also a coordination instruction: form a coalition of the “just.” It is, in your earlier terms, cooperation. S: Nessuna barriera di Religione, di Nazione o di Razza li divida. G: In 1931, that sentence is not merely pious. It is pointed. It is a claim that the coming division will not be the usual political taxonomy. S: Perche’ presto una sola sara’ la divisione tra gli uomini: quella del giusto e dell’ingiusto.

G: A two-class partition. The sender is offering a new predicate: just/unjust. That is a simple classification scheme with high emotional yield. S: La divisione e’ nell’intimo della coscienza e non nella vostra esteriorita’ visibile. G: That is also a legal manoeuvre. It relocates the criterion from public evidence to private conscience, where no tribunal can inspect it. S: Tutti quelli che sinceramente vogliono, possono comprendere... G: Another immunization clause: “whoever sincerely wants can understand.” Failure to understand is assigned to lack of sincerity. S: ...e ciascuno, da solo, senza che il vicino possa vedere, sapra’ chi e’. G: The “no neighbour can see” point is important. It disarms social verification. You cannot check who is “just.” You can only self-declare. S: La Mia parola e’ universale, ma e’ anche appello intimo, personale, ad ognuno. G: Universal address plus personal claim. That is rhetorically powerful, because it gives every reader the sense of being singled out while remaining part of a mass. S: Un gran rivolgimento si approssima nella vita del mondo. G: Now we move to prediction, which is where your earlier “message-as-information” idea becomes tempting. But watch: prediction here is not probabilistic; it is proclaimed. S: Questa Mia e’ una voce; ma ne saliranno presto sempre piu’ forti e fitte... G: That line is also clever. It anticipates a future chorus of similar “messages,” which means that later imitators become confirming evidence rather than competition. S: ...da tutte le parti del mondo perche’ il consiglio non sia mancato a nessuno. G: Universal redundancy. Again: no one can complain they were not warned. That is a moral prophylactic. S: Non temere; scrivi, guarda. G: Always: “write.” The addressee is a scribe, not a debater. S: Guarda la traiettoria degli eventi umani come si continua nel futuro... G: Trajectory language. That is the language of determinism disguised as observation. S: ...quando non si e’ chiusi nella vostra ferrea gabbia dello spazio e del tempo si vede “naturalmente” il futuro. G: Excellent. The sender claims a privileged vantage outside space-time. That is the metaphysical equivalent of being allowed behind the curtain. S: Ma cio’ che ti mostro e’ anche logico, secondo la vostra logica umana, quindi a voi comprensibile. G: That sentence is aimed at people like me. It says: you may not accept revelation, but you will accept logic. So the message claims to satisfy rationalist standards while keeping supernatural privileges. S: I popoli, come gli individui, hanno una responsabilita’ nello sviluppo storico... G: And now we get something like a philosophy of history. S: ...secondo un concatenamento causale che, se e’ libero nelle premesse, e’ necessario nelle conseguenze. G: There: “free in premises, necessary in consequences.” That is a form of conditional determinism: choose premises freely, but after that the entailments bite. S: The logic you like, sir. G: I like it when someone shows the premises and the rules. Here, the rule is asserted and the premises are smuggled in. S: La Legge di giustizia... vuole che l’equilibrio sia ricostruito e che le colpe e gli errori debbano essere corretti attraverso il dolore. G: So the mechanism is pain as correction. That is moral utilitarianism with teeth: suffering is justified as balancing. S: Cio’ che voi chiamate male e ingiustizia e’ naturale e giusta reazione... G: That is a hard doctrine. It re-describes evil as necessary reaction. And it has a convenient psychological function: it can make any catastrophe look deserved. S: Tutto e’ voluto, tutto e’ meritato... G: There. Totalization. That is where my pessimism sharpens: “everything is deserved” is a sentence that can anesthetize compassion while pretending to elevate it. S: ...anche se voi non siete in grado di ricordare il come e il quando. G: And the inability to recall is used to protect the claim from counterexample. If you do not remember deserving it, that is because you forgot. S: Il dolore abbonda nel vostro mondo perche’ e’ mondo selvaggio... G: The world is a penal colony in this picture. S: ...ma non temete il dolore. Esso e’ l’unica cosa di veramente grande che voi abbiate laggiu’...

G: That is rhetorically brilliant and morally dangerous. It makes suffering into the one authentic grandeur available to ordinary people. S: ...perche’ e’ l’istrumento che voi possedete per la vostra redenzione... G: Instrumental suffering. It is theology built as a tool. S: “Beati coloro che soffrono”, Cristo vi ha detto. G: A citation to anchor the doctrine. So now we have something like an authority chain. S: Sir, you wanted a sender. The text gives you one: “Sono Io.” G: “Io” is not a sender; it is a pronoun. We need provenance. S: You mean: the non-ultimate source. G: Exactly. Not “ultimately God.” That is metaphysical embroidery. I want the postmark. S: The postmark is Pietro Ubaldi, Perugia, Torre della Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto. G: Good. Now we have something I can work with: a human author, an Umbria location, and a date. Now we can talk about what “message” means in a sober sense: a text produced by Ubaldi in a particular setting, then presented as speech from a transcendent source. S: Then you concede it is a message. G: I concede it is a message in the Morris sense: a sign-vehicle intended to produce an interpretant in an audience. But the sender, in the ordinary empirical sense, is Ubaldi. S: And the addressee? G: Two addressees. One explicit: the man addressed as “tu” in the text. One implicit: the public, “tutti i giusti della Terra,” which is a way of recruiting readers into a moral category. S: Now you will complain that “giusti” is not a good predicate. G: Not without a test, no. But it is an effective predicate for recruiting. It is a classifier that flatters. S: It also implies cooperation. The just must unite. A bundle of prayers. G: Yes. And that is where your “cooperative rationality” theme can be rescued from the metaphysics. Not by endorsing the provenance-claims, but by noticing what the text is doing: it is engineering a coalition of conscience, across religion and nation, by declaring a single salient division. S: And you, sir, will formalize it. G: Only to show the ambition and the overreach. Let J(x) mean “x is just.” Let H(x) mean “x is capable of hearing this voice.” The text suggests something like: for all x, if J(x), then H(x). It also suggests the contrapositive as a psychological insinuation: if not H(x), then not sincere, not just. S: That is nasty. G: It is powerful. It makes dissent morally diagnostic. S: But what of the historical prediction? You have not yet reached the scientific progress part. G: I read it. The theme is clear: technological power grows; moral capacity lags; imbalance produces catastrophe; catastrophe purifies; then a new era of spirit. It is an apocalyptic curve. S: And in 1931, that curve is not absurd. G: In 1931 it is uncomfortably plausible. That is what gives the message its bite: it attaches cosmic authority to a trajectory one can already smell in Europe. S: You said you would end with a punchline, sir. G: I will. You have brought me a message whose declared source is God, whose actual source is Ubaldi, whose intended addressee is everyone, and whose practical effect is to sort people into “just” and “unjust” without an external criterion. That is not a message. That is a recruitment leaflet with metaphysics as postage. S: And what should I do with it? G: File it under “interesting,” not under “instructions,” and, if you must transmit it, at least be honest about the sender.

 

Grice: Ubaldi, le confesso che se avessi osato pronunciare “grande sintesi” a Oxford – o Vadum Boum, come noi Lit. Hum. lo chiamiamo – barbari come siamo rispetto a quelli più vicini a Bononia alma mater di tutti noi – negli anni ’30, mi avrebbero espulso all’istante! Lì si parlava solo di “analisi filosofica”: era la password per entrare nei circoli dell’intelligenza. Guai a chi si azzardava con sintesi troppo grandi… si rischiava di essere scambiati per un poeta o peggio, per un visionario!

Ubaldi: Caro Grice, mi viene da sorridere: a Foligno invece, se non parlavi di “grande sintesi”, ti toccava la sedia più piccola in biblioteca! Da noi la sintesi era pane quotidiano, e chi si fermava all’analisi veniva messo a rigirare le pagine dei dizionari. Altro che espulsione: al massimo ti assegnavano il compito di trovare il senso della vita tra le note a margine!

Grice: Ah, allora era meglio venire a Foligno per evitare i severi baroni di Oxford! Immagino una scena: io, con il mio tight grigio, che chiedo la “grande sintesi” e mi ritrovo a fare il caffè per tutta la facoltà. Mentre a Foligno, la sintesi era così grande che serviva una lavagna lunga quanto la ferrovia!

Ubaldi: Ecco, Grice, la vera “grande sintesi” è questa: un inglese che fa il caffè e un italiano che disegna lavagne infinite, entrambi intenti a unificare materia, energia e spirito… ma sempre con un sorriso, ché la filosofia senza un po’ di allegria è come una teoria senza finale! E se Sartre ci ha battuti per il Nobel, almeno noi ci consoliamo con una battuta degna di due spiriti liberi!

 

Verbali: Ubaldi

 

G: It is 1939, Thomson. Oxford, not Perugia. Yet you insist on importing Perugia into my rooms as if it were a decanter.

T: Sir, you imported Sicily into logic last week. I thought Perugia was modest by comparison.

G: Sicily is at least an island; Perugia is a habit. Now. Read it.

T: De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis.

G: Again, but slower, as if you were trying to hear the grammar rather than the Latin.

T: De duobus fratribus. Et. Aliis quibuscumque sociis.

G: Good. Now tell me what looks “silly” to you.

T: The piling-on, sir. Aliis is already “others.” Then quibuscumque is “whichever you please.” And then the -que hangs off it like an extra cuff-link. It feels like saying “and any other whatsoever at all, honestly, truly, scout’s honour.”

G: That is exactly why it is not silly. It is legal. T: Legal Latin, sir, is the only Latin that blushes. G: Legal Latin is Latin with a job. Ordinary Latin can afford to be elegant. Legal Latin must be safe. Now. Aliis does one thing: it says “not just the brothers.” Quibuscumque does another: it says “not just some recognized class of others, but any others that fall under the concept.” T: And the -que? G: The -que there is not a second et. It is a tightening. It binds the maximizer to the generalization as a single shove outward. Think of it as a little “also, too, even” glued into the word. T: So et links the big conjuncts. -que amplifies the second conjunct from within. G: Precisely. You are allowed to find it ugly. You are not allowed to call it redundant until you can show that law has ever been content with one layer of generality. T: But why would anyone need that much generality? “Two brothers and other partners” sounds general enough. G: Because “general enough” is not a legal standard. It is an undergraduate mood. Ubaldi is trying to prevent the clever reader from wriggling out through a gap he has left. T: The gap being: “Yes, your doctrine is about brothers, but my case involves cousins” or “my partners are not brothers, they are merchants” or “they are not merchants, they are monks.” G: Exactly. He begins with a vivid case-label, duobus fratribus. It is memorable, almost theatrical. Then he flips the case into the doctrinal genus: socii. Then he maximizes: quibuscumque. Meaning: do not come back and tell me your associates are of an exotic species; the form of cooperation is what matters. T: So he is doing a kind of medieval version of: for all x, if x is a partner, then the rule applies. G: Careful. Not “the rule.” The sort of argumenta he is building. But yes, the ambition is quantificational. T: Sir, can I ask the stupid question? G: You will anyway. Proceed. T: Is he saying that sociis is entailed by fratribus? That a brother is an associate? G: In the relevant legal context, yes. Not because fraternity is analytically partnership, but because brothers are an especially fertile site for partnership disputes: shared property, shared labour, shared expectations, and then the moment of accounting. T: In other words, he is treating “brothers” as a paradigmatic instance of “cooperators,” not a separate metaphysical category. G: Exactly. And you notice the point that matters for your Grice obsession: cooperation is not merely a conversational presupposition. It is a legal structure. Ubaldi is doing the metaphysics of cooperation with remedies attached. T: That is what makes it silly to me, sir. The ambition outstrips plausibility. “Any associates whatsoever.” Surely obligations between brothers do not export cleanly to “any other associate you can possibly conceive.” G: Good. Now we have a live question rather than a stylistic complaint. T: Who is conceiving these associates? Me? G: No, not you. Ubaldi would not have heard of you. So he cannot be legislating for what you can imagine. T: Then who? G: In legal Latin, “quibuscumque” is addressed to the future nuisance: the litigant, the advocate, the judge, the commentator. It is a prophylactic. It says: whatever variant you bring me, if it counts as societas in the sense relevant here, it is covered. T: But that collapses “anyone can conceive” into “any case that can be legally subsumed.” G: Precisely. The imagination is not romantic. It is classificatory. It is the imagination of a lawyer, not of a poet. T: So “maximally general” does not mean “science-fiction partners.” G: It means: any partners that fall under the legal genus, even if you try to redescribe them to escape the genus. T: That sounds like a trick. G: It is not a trick. It is the trade. T: Still, I don’t hold obligations to your brother, sir. G: I do not hold obligations to yours either. Yet the law manages to speak as if obligations can float free of personal acquaintance, which is one of its more scandalous achievements. T: Do you have a brother, sir? G: I have the misfortune to have at least one. That is enough for analysis. T: Then you concede the topic is not merely scholastic. G: I concede nothing. I merely observe that “brothers” is a dangerously concrete noun for a jurist, which is why he runs at once to socii and then to quibuscumque. T: So the title itself performs the movement: from vivid case to abstract category to maximal generality. G: Exactly. Now you see why I like it. It is a miniature of jurisprudential method: start with the quarrel you can picture, then generalize, then over-generalize so you cannot be trapped by a counterexample. T: That is very Gricean, sir. G: Do not commit that anachronism. But note the parallel: both are terrified of leaving a loophole that a clever reader can exploit. T: You mean like conversational implicature: if you leave the inference too loose, the hearer takes it somewhere you did not intend. G: Better: if you leave the condition too narrow, the opponent takes your doctrine somewhere you did not defend. T: Still, I’m bothered by the sense that obligations between brothers are special. There is blood, household, expectation, moral pressure, a kind of natural quasi-contract. G: And now you are doing moral philosophy in a jurist’s hallway. T: Is that wrong? G: It is merely dangerous. But it is the right danger for your vignette. So let us take your intuition and formalize it without pretending we have solved it. T: With Frege’s quantifiers? G: With whatever symbol you like, provided you do not worship it. Let QC be “quasi-contractual obligation.” Let B(x, y) mean “x and y are brothers.” Let S(x, y) mean “x and y are partners/associates in a societas-type relation.” T: And let t be Tom, j be Jerry. G: Very good. Now you want to ask: does B(t, j) entail S(t, j)? T: In ordinary life, no. In Ubaldi’s legal ecology, maybe. G: Exactly. So we might write two different principles and keep them distinct. Principle one, the narrow one: for all x,y, if B(x,y) and they are co-managing property, then QC(x,y) holds under certain conditions. T: And principle two, the wide one: for all x,y, if S(x,y), then QC(x,y) under analogous conditions. G: Precisely. The title suggests he is moving from the first to the second: from brothers-as-paradigm to partners-in-general. T: And quibuscumque is his way of saying: do not restrict S to nice familiar partners; let it range over any legally conceivable partner relation. G: Yes. In quantifier-speak: he wants a domain for S that is not “the partners we usually talk about,” but “all entities that satisfy the legal predicate S.” T: So “any you can conceive” is really “any that falls under the predicate,” not “any you can fantasize.” G: Correct. And now your objection becomes sharper: are the conditions that generate QC in the brother-case the same as the conditions that generate QC in the partner-case? T: I suspect not. G: So did most people who made a career writing consilia. The entire industry is “not,” elaborated. T: Then why does he title it as if it is one smooth generalization? G: Because titles are promises, and legal titles are strategic promises. He is promising coverage. Then the body of the tract distinguishes, qualifies, repairs. T: That makes it less silly. It is not naivety; it is an opening gambit. G: Exactly. Now. You wanted the dry humour to come from the idea that “brothers” bothers you. Let it bother me too, but for a different reason. T: For what reason, sir? G: Because “brothers” in Oxford means something else as well: tutorial families, college clans, and the peculiar sense that one owes loyalty to men one would never invite to tea. T: So you think Ubaldi is smuggling an Oxford concept into Perugia? G: No. I think Oxford is forever rediscovering that cooperation is never merely voluntary. It is enforced by institutions, names, and expectations. Brothers are just the crudest case where expectation thinks it has a natural right. T: And “et aliis quibuscumque sociis” is the moment where nature is replaced by classification. G: Precisely. It is the moment where “my brother” becomes “my associate,” and the law begins. T: But then my earlier protest stands: I certainly do not hold obligations to your brother, sir. G: And yet if you and he form a societas, you will. That is exactly Ubaldi’s point, and your discomfort is your education. T: So the title is a machine for producing discomfort.

G: Yes. It begins with a word that makes you think of family sentiment, fratribus, and ends with a word that makes sentiment irrelevant, sociis, and then adds quibuscumque to prevent you from hiding in a sentimental corner-case. T: I see the ambition now. It is a legal attempt to maximize the domain. G: Good. Now the punchline, since you asked for one. T: Yes, sir. G: In Oxford, when someone says “brother,” we infer a college, a staircase, a clique, and a lifetime of mild obligations disguised as friendship. In Perugia, when Ubaldi says “brother,” he infers litigation. Therefore Oxford is the more sentimental place, and Perugia the more honest.

 

Grice: Ubaldi, mi creda: ogni volta che sfoglio il “De duobus fratribus” alla Radcliff, non posso fare a meno di pensare al mio fratello minore, J.D.—John Derek, se proprio dobbiamo essere formali—rimasto laggiù a Harborne, quella provincia che fa sembrare Perugia una metropoli cosmopolita!

Ubaldi: Ah, caro Grice, che bello sentirla parlare di fratelli! Da noi, tra Perugia e Firenze, non si perde occasione per una disputa tra fratelli, specie se c’è di mezzo un trattato. Ma mi dica, Harborne è davvero così provinciale? Da noi si dice: “Meglio un fratello lontano che un vicino impiccione!”

Grice: Non posso che concordare! Ma la cosa più divertente è che Derek, con una mossa degna di un vero filosofo, ha lasciato la brumosa Harborne per una villa sul canale in Hampshire. Altro che provincialismo, ora si gode le brezze del canale e il tè all’inglese… senza dover discutere di contratti tra fratelli!

Ubaldi: Ecco, vede? A volte basta cambiare aria per trovare la “ragione conversazionale” migliore! Mi viene da pensare che il vero contratto tra fratelli sia quello di condividere una buona dose di ironia e, magari, la vista sul canale. Se solo potessi convincere Baldo a trasferirsi da Perugia a qualche villa in riva all’Arno… ma temo che preferisca le dispute ai panorami!

 

Verbali: Unicorno

 

 

T: Sir, before we begin: Oxford, 1939. You want Unicorno, Venice, 1552, and you want him to sound like himself. You also want me not to steal his voice by translating him into ours.

G: Precisely. Give me the Latin as an object, not as a surrender. And clean it first, because what you copied is a battlefield of long-s, printer’s habits, and OCR panic.

T: Yes, sir. I will regularise the obvious letter confusions, restore spacing, and keep the Latin otherwise intact. I won’t “improve” his syntax. Here is a cleaned copy of your passage, as a continuous excerpt: Rhetores etiam istorum instar orationum suarum partes sibi proportionatis locis convenienti numero assignant; alioqui quid prius, quidque posterius dicendum esset nescientes, inconcinnam et absurdam redderent orationem. Verum cum iam ostenderimus sine Proportionis ratione non recte posse exerceri, quis Dialecticos ad syllogismorum veritatem demonstrandam, multa proportionis aut mathematicos naturam ac vim redolentia, a Mathematicis negat sumpsisse praeceptionibus? Quis tandem originem ac fundamentum omnium liberalium artium Grammaticam, dum nobis mensuram quandam in syllabis recte scribendis ac proferendis, gravibus, acutis, circumflexis accentibus suppeditat, a Proportionis legibus longe differre negaverit? Certe nemo vobis, nisi aut barbarus aut imperitus.

G: Good. You’ve already done the essential service: you’ve made him legible without modernising him out of existence.

T: I have kept his argumentative rhythm too: rhetoric, then dialectic, then grammar; and the cadence of the rhetorical questions.

G: Now give it to me in pieces. Small enough that we can “hear” him. Begin only with the first sentence.

T: Very well, sir. First segment, as Unicorno gives it: Rhetores etiam istorum instar orationum suarum partes sibi proportionatis locis convenienti numero assignant; alioqui quid prius, quidque posterius dicendum esset nescientes, inconcinnam et absurdam redderent orationem.

G: The first thing to notice is the audacity of his “etiam.” “Rhetores etiam…” It is an inclusion move. He has already talked about proportion elsewhere, presumably in the familiar mathematical arts, and now he says: even the rhetoricians. T: So he is not flattering rhetoric; he is annexing it. G: Exactly. He is doing what later centuries pretend they invented: exporting a formal concept into the arts of discourse. But he does it without apology, as if it were obvious that speech is built. T: You want me to resist translating, sir, so I’ll only point at the structure. He places “partes” close to “orationum suarum.” He treats the oration as something with parts. G: And those parts are not merely parts; they are “assignant” to “proportionatis locis” and to a “convenienti numero.” That is two axes: spatial placement and numerical measure. Rhetoric becomes architecture plus arithmetic. T: A speech, then, has “places” and “numbers.” G: And if you remove proportion, you get temporal confusion: “quid prius, quidque posterius.” That’s the astonishing bit. Proportion is not just ornament; it is a condition for ordering. Without it, you do not know what comes first. T: He makes “not knowing” the cause of stylistic failure. G: He makes it the cause of conceptual failure too, if you read him strictly. If you do not know what is first and what is second, you are not merely inelegant; you are absurd. That’s a strong word to aim at a speaker. T: He is implying that discursiveness is a kind of logical error. G: Yes. In Oxford terms, he is treating bad style as a failure of rational control. Which is why your project about “arts of discourse” is justified: he is already putting rhetoric under a regime of rule-governed structure. T: Shall I give the next segment, sir? G: Proceed, but keep it short. T: Second segment: Verum cum iam ostenderimus sine Proportionis ratione non recte posse exerceri… G: Pause there. He says, in effect: we have already shown. That tells you this is a late-stage move. He has established a thesis: without “ratio proportionis” nothing is properly exercised. T: “Ratio” is doing heavy work here. G: And it’s deliberately elastic. In his mouth, “ratio” can be account, method, principle, rationale. He doesn’t choose. He wants the umbrella term so he can march from mathematics into rhetoric and then into logic and grammar without changing vocabulary. T: So he builds a bridge by keeping one word. G: And also by choosing “exerceri.” Not “intellegi,” not “dici,” but “exerceri.” Practice. Exercise. The arts are exercised. Rhetoric is not mere theory; it’s a trained activity. That, too, feels oddly modern. T: Shall I continue into the dialectic question? G: Yes. Give me the next full question. T: Third segment: …quis Dialecticos ad syllogismorum veritatem demonstrandam, multa proportionis aut mathematicos naturam ac vim redolentia, a Mathematicis negat sumpsisse praeceptionibus? G: Now we are where your marginal note said “logica” or “dialectica.” Notice the tactic: he does not argue; he asks who would deny it. T: So he treats denial as the eccentric position. G: Exactly. He does not need to prove; he needs only to shame the dissenter. “Quis… negat?” It is the classic rhetorical machinery: render the contrary view socially impossible. T: And he ties dialectic to syllogisms immediately. G: Yes, and to “veritas demonstranda.” Dialectic here is not casual disputation; it is a discipline whose target is demonstrable truth. And then he claims that in the very apparatus of syllogistic demonstration there are features that “redolent” of proportion or of the nature and power of mathematics. T: “Redolentia” is a wonderful word. It says “smelling of.” G: Dry humour is already present in him. Dialecticians, he implies, have been borrowing from mathematicians, whether they admit it or not. Their syllogisms smell like mathematics. T: And the borrowing is framed as “praeceptiones.” G: Instruction, precepts, rules. He is not claiming dialectic uses numbers. He is claiming it uses methodological forms and constraints learned from mathematical practice: the idea of rigor, of inference governed by form, of demonstration as accountable sequence. T: So you would say his “proportion” here is not merely ratio in the arithmetic sense, but structured relation. G: Precisely. He is making a philosophical move: proportion as a general schema of relational intelligibility. It has a technical home in mathematics, but its authority extends into how valid reasoning is trained and recognised. T: That seems like the “epoch-making relevance” you wanted G to press. G: Yes. The epoch-making part is that he refuses to let the “arts of discourse” claim autonomy from mathematical discipline. He doesn’t say rhetoric is mathematics; he says rhetoric requires proportion, dialectic borrows mathematical precepts, and grammar itself is proportion-law in miniature. T: Grammar next, sir? G: Give me the grammar question whole. T: Fourth segment: Quis tandem originem ac fundamentum omnium liberalium artium Grammaticam, dum nobis mensuram quandam in syllabis recte scribendis ac proferendis, gravibus, acutis, circumflexis accentibus suppeditat, a Proportionis legibus longe differre negaverit? G: Now he does something bold. He calls grammar the origin and foundation of all the liberal arts. T: He is placing grammar beneath everything. G: And he does it in a way that suits your thesis: if proportion can reach grammar, it has reached the base layer of discourse. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion; dialectic is the art of valid inference; grammar is the condition for having articulate units at all. T: He ties grammar to “mensura.” G: Yes, and that is the whole point. He is saying: grammar supplies measure in syllables, in writing and utterance, and in the accents. He is thinking of quantity, stress, pitch, duration: the metrical and phonological governance of speech. T: So “proportion” here is literally audible. G: Exactly. It’s not metaphor. It is the measure that makes a syllable count as this syllable rather than a mush. He is treating the material of language as already ruled by quantitative relation. T: And then: “a Proportionis legibus longe differre.” G: This is his punch: who would say grammar differs far from the laws of proportion? In other words: if you accept that grammar teaches measured articulation, you have accepted proportion in the very teeth of speech. T: So rhetoric, dialectic, grammar: all under proportion. G: That is the trifecta. If someone wanted to make a Renaissance case for what we would call “formal constraints across disciplines,” this is it. And he does it without seeming to know he’s being interdisciplinary. For him it’s obvious: the mind is trained by measure. T: There is still his final sting, sir. G: Yes. Give the last sentence. T: Fifth segment: Certe nemo vobis, nisi aut barbarus aut imperitus. G: And there it is: the refusal becomes barbarism or ignorance. T: That is rather sharp. G: It is sharp, and it is useful for your later staged dialogue. It gives G a way to tease T in 1939: “are you denying Unicorno, Thomson? Take care: he has a category ready for you.” T: Sir, that is unkind. G: It is historically accurate. Now, for our vignette: you want T to feed Latin, and G to “teach” in English. We have the Latin. We have the analytic spine. The rest is expansion: how to make “proportion” plausible as the hidden discipline of discourse. T: Shall we keep the setting in a college room, sir? Books open, rain outside, faint threat of war, and you insisting it is only a footnote? G: No melodrama. Dry. It is Oxford: the war is in the corridor, but the talk pretends it is in Venice, 1552. T: Then may I propose the running joke, sir: that Unicorno has discovered the maxims before you have named them? G: Careful. Not “before.” But: he has discovered that talk has architecture, that reasoning has borrowed rigor, and that grammar has measure. He is a predecessor in temperament, not in doctrine. T: So I should not have him be “proto-Grice.” G: Precisely. No anachronistic coronation. Let him be Unicorno: a man who thinks “proportion” is the spine of intelligibility, whether in numbers or in speech. T: And you, sir, will keep reminding me that “vi” is force, not six. G: Yes. That will be our recurring correction. Because it is funny, and because it is philologically sane. T: Then I will insert, as needed, that the title is “De admiranda vi proportionis,” and that the marginal “Rhetorica” is not the numeral VI pretending to be theology. G: Good. And when we come to your later “G and T” dialogue, the rhythm can be: T produces Unicorno; G refuses to translate; G explains what the Latin is doing as an act; T tries to force an English paraphrase; G refuses; and we end with the punchline that even grammar, the humblest, is already “mathematical” in the sense that it is measured. T: And the punchline, sir? G: Something like: “So, Thomson, if you cannot keep quantity in your vowels, do not boast of clarity in your arguments.” T: I see. The war outside; the accent marks within. G: Exactly.

 

Grice: Unicorno, mi permetta una battuta aritmetica: quando lei parla di “arimmetica universale” – con quella grafia così evocativa – intende forse dire che 5 = 7 = 12? O è solo un tentativo per far impazzire i contabili e i filosofi, usando quell’esempio famigerato che mette tutti in crisi?

Unicorno: Ah, caro Grice, se la mia “arimmetica universale” fosse davvero così elastica, i negozianti di Bergamo farebbero festa ogni giorno! Ma la verità è che, per me, i numeri sono come maschere in commedia: si scambiano, si confondono, ma dietro c’è sempre una logica – anche se a volte è quella della buona cucina bergamasca, dove ogni ricetta ha il suo misterioso equilibrio.

Grice: Dunque, professore, lei sostiene che, per capire la “arimmetica universale”, bisogna essere un po’ filosofi, un po’ matematici e, mi sa, anche un pizzico di poeti? Allora propongo: se 5 è la somma delle nostre battute, 7 il numero delle risate, e 12 la quantità di dolci al prossimo convivio filosofico, la matematica diventa davvero universale!

Unicorno: Grice, lei ha colto il segreto: l’arimmetica universale serve a scoprire che, nella vita e nel pensiero, il risultato migliore si ottiene quando si mescolano numeri, idee e un po’ di ironia. E se qualche volta 5 = 7 = 12, beh, basta che la conversazione non perda il suo equilibrio – e che nessuno, magari, si ritrovi con meno dolci di quanto sperava!

 

Verbali: Vacca

 

Grice: Vacca, sono rimasto colpito dal concetto di “ala del silenzio” che lei elabora nella sua opera. Mi incuriosisce il modo in cui il silenzio possa essere interpretato non solo come assenza, ma come spazio solidale nella conversazione. Potrebbe spiegarmi cosa significa per lei questa “solidarietà conversazionale”?

Vacca: Grice, la ringrazio per l’interesse. Per me, la “solidarietà conversazionale” nasce proprio nell’ala del silenzio: è l’imperativo di ascoltare e rispettare lo spazio dell’altro, a volte più eloquente delle parole. Il silenzio diventa così una forma di solidarietà, una premessa etica che apre alla comprensione reciproca e alla costruzione condivisa del senso.

Grice: Mi trova d’accordo: troppo spesso si dimentica che il dialogo non è solo scambio verbale, ma anche capacità di accogliere ciò che resta non detto. In questo senso, il silenzio diventa quasi un imperativo morale, come lei suggerisce: la conversazione si fonda sull’equilibrio tra parola e rispetto, tra espressione e attesa.

Vacca: Esattamente, Grice. E proprio la “solidarietà conversazionale” ci invita a superare ogni rigidità: ci ricorda che il dialogo autentico è aperto, plurale, e si nutre anche di understatement. Da Alighieri impariamo che spesso la verità si insinua tra le pieghe del non detto; il filosofo deve saper leggere tali sfumature e farne tesoro, soprattutto nella società contemporanea dove la parola rischia di essere inflazionata.

 

Verbali: Vailati

 

G.  You’ve brought me a paper with a title in it.

A.  Two titles, sir.

G.  That is already one title too many for Oxford.

A.  Giovanni Vailati. 1891. Torino. Rivista di matematica.

G.  That last phrase is the real offence.

A.  Why? G.  Because it means logica has been kidnapped by mathematicians.

A.  It used to be part of the trivium.

G.  Exactly. Dialectica. And now it’s in a journal. A rivista. With Bocca on the cover, no doubt. A.  “Un teorema di logica matematica.” Page 103. G.  “Un.” One. Countable. Portable. As if truth came in small boxes. A.  Isn’t a theorem always one thing? G.  In Euclid it is. In Oxford it is a rumour. A.  Then what does it prove? G.  We don’t know. We can’t know, because the title doesn’t say. A.  It says “di logica matematica.” Of mathematical logic. G.  “Of” is a weak preposition. It attaches anything to anything. A.  But it makes the discipline sound like it consists of theorems. G.  Precisely. That’s the Italian bravado: logica matematica as a warehouse of teoremi. A.  And it’s in a mathematics journal, so philosophy is nowhere in sight. G.  Mind was still half psychology then, if you want irony. A.  So if you were an Oxford don in the 1930s you wouldn’t have been trained to read this at all. G.  We were trained to read Aristotle and Mill. And to write essays that look like arguments without being theorems. A.  Then why is Vailati doing this? G.  Because he is in Peano’s world. Torino. Where people think symbols are manners. A.  “Un teorema”—it sounds like a modest claim. G.  It sounds like modesty because it is singular. But it’s also a boast: we can prove things here. A.  Oxford can prove things. G.  Oxford can prove you’re wrong. That’s different. A.  You mean we don’t “converse mathematically.” G.  We converse evasively. We leave room for escape. A.  A theorem leaves no escape. G.  Exactly. Which is why Oxford prefers examples and counterexamples. A.  Still, the phrase “logica matematica” bothers you. G.  It suggests a discipline with a fence. A.  And Oxford dislikes fences? G.  Oxford dislikes fences unless it built them. It prefers hedges. A.  Hedges like “perhaps,” “roughly,” “in general.” G.  Exactly. The official Oxford modal operators. A.  Then Vailati’s “teorema” is blue-collar. G.  Blue-collar logic: it clocks in, does a job, clocks out with a proof. A.  Whereas Oxford logic is upper-class: it never admits it works. G.  It lets the servants do the work and then calls it “analysis.” A.  But you admire Vailati a bit. G.  I admire anyone who can say what he is doing. “Un teorema.” Clear. A.  Yet you’re suspicious of it. G.  Because “un teorema” could be a rhetorical flourish. A.  Like Vanini’s “as I treated it more fully elsewhere.” G.  Exactly. A theorem can be used like that: “there is a theorem—trust me.” A.  But he published it. Page 103. G.  Publication is a kind of courage. A.  And the second title? G.  Ah yes, the other paper. A.  “Le proprietà fondamentali delle operazioni della Logica deduttiva.” Page 127. G.  That’s worse. A.  Worse because it’s longer? G.  Worse because it’s grander. “Proprietà fondamentali.” “Operazioni.” It sounds like machinery. A.  Logic as engineering. G.  Exactly. The man of the street can’t have it. A.  But logic used to be for everyone. G.  In theory. In practice it was for monks and schoolmen. A.  Then the mathematicians just replaced the monks. G.  With better notation and worse Latin. A.  Yet Vailati is Italian, so his Latin isn’t bad. G.  His Latin is irrelevant; he’s writing Italian in a mathematics journal. A.  So you think Oxford couldn’t receive it.

G.  Oxford in 1931 would look at “logica matematica” and retreat into Aristotle’s Prior Analytics.

A.  Or Mill.

G.  Yes. Mill’s System as a comfort blanket.

A.  But by the late 1930s, with some Frege and Russell, could it enter? G.  It could enter as a foreigner. It would need papers. A.  Like an immigrant. G.  Precisely. Oxford likes its logic naturalised. A.  What does “teorema” consist of, anyway, in mathematical logic? G.  A statement and a proof, usually. A.  Proof from axioms? G.  Or from earlier theorems, which is the same thing with history. A.  And in 1891, “mathematical logic” is itself young. G.  Young enough to be ambitious. A.  So Vailati is early. G.  Early and therefore perhaps forgiven. A.  Forgiven by whom? G.  By Oxford, which forgives anything that is safely foreign and safely old. A.  1891 is safely old by the time we’re speaking. G.  Exactly. Sins endure; we don’t care when they start. A.  Still, “Rivista di matematica” is a jolt. G.  Because it reminds us that our “logic” is not owned by us. A.  It is owned by scienziati. G.  Or claimed by them. A.  And you don’t like being claimed. G.  No philosopher likes it. We prefer to be implied. A.  Like an implicature. G.  Exactly. Oxford’s whole method is to avoid explicitness. A.  Vailati is explicit. G.  He is explicit in the way Italians can be: formal, but social. A.  Social? G.  He’s writing in a journal edited by Peano. That’s a circle. A.  Like your play group, only with symbols. G.  Exactly. A club of mathematicians. A.  But you said theorems are “blue-collar.” G.  Within Oxford. In Turin, they are the dinner jacket. A.  Then perhaps we are provincial. G.  Oxford is always provincial and calls it tradition. A.  If we were to translate “Un teorema di logica matematica” into Oxford talk, what would it be? G.  “A remark on a point of logic.” A.  That’s an insult. G.  It’s an Oxford compliment. It removes the boast. A.  And “Le proprietà fondamentali…” G.  “Some observations on…” A.  You really do neuter everything. G.  It is a moral duty here. If you boast, you invite refutation. A.  A theorem invites refutation too. G.  A theorem invites verification. Refutation is a personal sport. A.  So Vailati is doing something un-Oxford: seeking impersonal necessity. G.  Yes. Proof as a form of public accountability. A.  That sounds like Grice. G.  Don’t flatter me with Turin. A.  You talk about accountability all the time. G.  In conversation, yes. Not in symbols. A.  But isn’t a proof a kind of conversation with an ideal audience? G.  Now you’re trying to reconcile Oxford with mathematics. A.  It’s my job as tutee: to annoy you. G.  You’re succeeding. A.  What do you think his “teorema” could have been about? G.  I refuse to guess without the text. A.  Yet we guess about everything else. G.  We guess with examples, not with theorems. A.  Fine. Then the only safe conclusion is: Vailati’s earliest publication in 1891 is already “mathematical logic” rather than philosophy. G.  Yes, and that’s the joke: the Italian philosopher begins as a mathematician. A.  And Oxford philosophers begin as classicists. G.  Exactly. Which is why we’re so bad at theorems: we start with Cicero. A.  And end with hedges. G.  And call the hedges “ordinary language.”

A.  Punchline?

G.  Yes: Vailati publishes a theorem in 1891; Oxford spends the next fifty years deciding whether it counts as conversation.

 

Grice: Caro Vailati, se il buon Peano, quel genio gentile, avesse guidato la crociata del modernismo a Cambridge (Vadum Boum) invece di Russell, forse non avrei dovuto accanirmi tanto contro il modernismo. Diciamolo, con Peano sarebbe stato tutto più... implicito!

Vailati: Ah, Grice, Peano era davvero un maestro della delicatezza: in Italia lo adoriamo proprio perché ci ha insegnato che la filosofia dovrebbe occuparsi delle cose che contano davvero, senza troppe urla. Altro che Croce, che da buon napoletano preferisce far rumore e lasciare sottintesi per l’applauso!

Grice: Allora dovremmo fondare un club degli implicaturisti: chi non coglie lo sguardo di Peano, resta fuori! E Croce, poveretto, sarebbe costretto a scrivere postille invece di trattati.

Vailati: Puoi scommetterci! Peano ci ha insegnato che la vera filosofia spesso passa tra le righe, mentre Croce cerca la folla e si fa capire pure dal portiere. Ma in fondo, Paul, tutto sta nell’intendersi senza dirlo troppo. E, tra noi, meglio un genio che ti sorride che uno che ti urla “moderno!”

 

Verbali: Valdarmini

 

Grice: Angelo, dicono che tu sia il genio delle categorie a Castiglion Fiorentino! Dimmi, lì i filosofi discutono sul significato del “significato” o saltano direttamente al vino?

V.: Ah, Paul, in Toscana crediamo che un buon bicchiere di Chianti aiuti a chiarire anche la semantica più aggrovigliata! Per il “significato” diciamo: “io significo, ego significo”—e se suona misterioso, diamo la colpa all’uva.

Grice: Quindi le vostre categorie sono distillate, non dedotte? Austin avrebbe apprezzato—diceva sempre che l’unico argomento sacro dopo la filosofia era la grammatica. Se solo Chomsky avesse studiato la sintassi toscana, forse avrebbe prodotto teorie aromatizzate al rosmarino!

Valdarnini: Proprio così, Paul! Qui il Play Group non ha fretta—l’autunno del ’59 ha visto più discussioni che vendemmia. E se vuoi la vera “lingua ordinaria”, chiedi a un contadino del tempo. La filosofia passa, ma un buon proverbio dura più di qualsiasi teoria formalizzata!

 

Verbali: Valentino

 

GRICEVUS: O Valentine, Oxonienses cum nomen tuum audiunt statim de veste cogitant—quasi “Valentinus” sit tailor magis quam sectator eschatologicus. Dic mihi: quando primum ostendisti pompam tuam vestium Romae?

VALENTINVS: Heu, GRICEVE, non ego ille sartor Romanus sum—sed si de illo rogas, scio quid quaeras. Primum celebre spectaculum eius fuit die XXII Iulii MCMLXII, Florentiae in Sala Bianca Palatii Pitti: ibi primum totus orbis eum “Valentinum” agnovit.

GRICEVUS: Optime! Ergo si quis Oxoniensis dicit “Valentinus venit,” INplicat (nonne?) aut rubrum sericum aut apocalypsin—et saepe utrumque. Eschatologicum sane: “soli salvabuntur,” sed bene vestiti!

VALENTINVS: Ita vero; et tu, si vis, fac regulam: Si Romae audis “Valentinus,” quaere contextum. Si in via Condotti: vestis. Si apud Hippolytum: haeresis. Si apud te: implicatura—et risus.

 

Verbali: Valeri

 

Grice: Caro Valeri, ti confesso che filosofando a Vadum Boum, tra i barbari—e per barbari intendo proprio il mio allievo, un PPE, Strawson—mi sono spesso sentito come il portiere di una porta senza chiave. Ahimè, Strawson voleva sempre lo “spazio” tra sé e sé... ma lo prendeva letteralmente, come se dovessimo misurarlo col metro! Tu come fai a giocare con questo spazio senza finirci dentro un baule?

Valeri: Ah, Grice, ti capisco! Lo spazio tra sé e sé è come il gelato alla filosofia: se lo prendi troppo alla lettera, rischi di mordere il cucchiaino. Io preferisco pensarlo come il parco giochi dell’inter-soggettivo—lì possiamo saltare, dondolarci, e ogni tanto anche correre a nascondino con il nostro “me” e il nostro “noi”. E se Strawson ci guarda storto, gli offriamo una panchina e lo invitiamo a filosofeggiare insieme!

Grice: Saggia risposta! Forse dovrei regalare a Strawson una bussola filosofica, così quando gli parlo dello spazio dialogico non si perde tra le coordinate, ma trova almeno il nord del “noi”. In fondo, la conversazione è come la partita di bocce: se tutti tirano la pallina nella stessa direzione, si finisce per condividere anche il campo da gioco.

Valeri: Esatto! E se qualcuno sbaglia tiro, si ride e si ricomincia. La filosofia, per me, è una gara di gentilezza e di implicature: a volte basta tenere la porta aperta, altre volte bisogna inventarsi il modo di passarla senza che nessuno resti fuori. E poi, con un po’ di ironia, persino il barbaro Strawson può imparare a danzare nello spazio tra sé e sé!

 

Verbali: Valeriis

 

Grice: Caro Valeriis, ho letto con curiosità la tua distinzione tra metafisica categoriale e supracategoriale. Mi affascina l’idea che la “filosofia escatologica” possa rivelare affinità tra realtà apparentemente inconciliabili. Ti va di raccontarmi come nasce questa intuizione?

Valeriis: Certamente, Grice! L’intuizione nasce dal desiderio di non fossilizzare il pensiero nei confini delle categorie tradizionali. Se da una parte Aristotele ci offre i summa genera, dall’altra credo sia necessario indagare su quei principi che permettono di collegare realtà diverse, magari attraverso analogie più che attributi condivisi. Così, la filosofia escatologica diventa un ponte.

Grice: E secondo te, questa assimilazione supracategoriale non rischia di perdere rigore? Come si può evitare che la ricerca di analogie finisca per essere troppo arbitraria?

Valeriis: È una bella domanda! Penso che il rigore si mantenga se l’analogia viene proposta con consapevolezza metodologica, distinguendo il livello delle implicature. Non si tratta di ignorare le differenze, ma di cercare legami sottili senza forzature. In fondo, ogni categoria filosofica nasce anche dal dialogo, e la conversazione stessa è il luogo dove l’analogia prende vita.

 

Verbali: Valerio

 

GRICEVUS: TVTELA IVPPITER OMNIPOTENS REGVM RERVMQVE DEVMQVE PROGENITOR GENITRIXQVE DEVM DEVS VNVS ET OMNES! Valeri, quid ista sententia implicat? Num est implicatura in hoc versu, an tantum oratio poetica?

VALERIVS: Primum, GRICEVE—INplicatura, non IMPlicatura: in + plicare, “involvere.” Alioquin sonat quasi Iuppiter ipse in p labatur! Sed ad rem: hic versus plus dicit quam dicit—id est, poeta docet per excessum.

GRICEVUS: Ergo “tutela” non tantum est custos urbis, sed quasi signum occultum: dicendo Iovem “unum et omnes,” INplicat deum esse et nomen et naturam, et fortasse—subridentibus dis—ipsam Romam sub tutela verbi latere?

VALERIVS: Ita; sed cave: non est sola “mystica,” est etiam ratio civitatis. Tutela hic INplicat: “Qui nomen tutelae publice iactat, rem publicam nudat.” Tu quaeris implicaturam; ego dico: ipsa tutela est implicatura—tectum quod, si nimis explicas, statim desinit esse tutela.

 

Verbali: Valerio

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Valeri Massime! Dic mihi, quot exempla moralia in libris tuis reperiri possunt? Numerasne adhuc?

VALERIVS: Salvē, amice Grice. Exemplorum numerus maior est quam pisces in Tiberi! Etiam ego interdum inter exempla mea perdo!

GRICEVS: At certe, nonnulla exempla ad Tiberium spectant… Numquamne timebas eum offendere?

VALERIVS: Profecto non! Flatteria mea scutum validissimum erat—apud Tiberium, laudare semper tutius quam arguere!

 

Verbali: Valerio

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, Valerius! Villa tua Romanā pulchritudine splendida est. Quid te ad philosophiam in horto movit?

VALERIVS: Salvē, amice Grice. Hortus tranquillitatem praebet, ubi ratio conversationalis sine tumultu urbis florere potest.

GRICEVS: Tranquillitas villae Romanæ ad philosophiam ordinariam valde prodest, sed credisne conversationem in horto differre ab ea quae in foro fit?

VALERIVS: Sane, Gricevs. In horto, verba leniter fluunt et cogitationes profundiores emergunt; in foro, saepe brevitas et pragmatismus vincunt. Sed utrumque locum philosophia amplecti potest, modo ratio et humanitas serventur.

 

Verbali: Vallauri

 

Grice: Caro Vallauri, devo confessare che al Vadum Boum la barbarie regna sovrana: la SUB-FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY se ne sta orgogliosamente separata dalla FACULTY OF LITERÆ HUMANIORES, e nessuno osa avvicinarla alla IVRISPRVDENTIA. Non so se ridere o piangere… ma di certo un parigino della Sorbonne o un bolognese di Bononia ne uscirebbe più confuso che mai!

Vallauri: Ah, Grice! In effetti, a Roma preferiamo pensare che filosofia e diritto chiacchierino al bar davanti a un caffè, invece di barricarsi dietro antichi corridoi. All’università, se non ti confondi almeno una volta tra i dipartimenti, non hai vissuto abbastanza!

Grice: Ecco, magari potremmo proporre un nuovo corso: “Scherzi e analogie tra FACULTY e SUB-FACULTY – manuale pratico per sopravvivere alla burocrazia accademica”. Titolo alternativo: “Come perdere la strada tra IVRISPRVDENTIA e PHILOSOPHY senza perdersi d’animo!”

Vallauri: Ottima idea! Il primo insegnamento: se uno studente trova la FACULTY OF LITERÆ HUMANIORES e la SUB-FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY senza inciampare nella IVRISPRVDENTIA, merita subito la laurea… con lode e una stretta di mano dal portiere!

 

Verbali: Valle

 

Grice at Clifton, Somerset.

M.  Valletta. Valla. Valle. Call him what you like—he was a genius.

G.  Sir, he was also an affectation.

M.  Genius is always an affectation, Grice. It’s merely a successful one. Now: De voluptate. And the word to remember is volup.

B.  Volup?

M.  Volup, volup, volup. An indeclinable delight.

G.  It sounds like a cough.

M.  That is because you are a Midlands boy. A Roman would have pronounced it with moral confidence.

E.  What does it mean, sir? M.  It means “with pleasure,” “pleasantly,” “I’m glad,” and all the other things English can’t say without blushing.

G.  English can blush perfectly well without assistance.

M.  Now—example: vivo volup. G.  Sir, that sounds like a slogan on a cigarette case.

M.  It is better than most slogans. Translate it. G.  “I live fine.”

M.  Close, Grice, but no cigar.

B.  He said “fine,” sir.

M.  He said “fine” in that dreadful modern way that means nothing and pretends to mean everything.

G.  Then: “I live happily.” M.  Better. Still too wholesome. E.  “I live pleasurably”? M.  That is English trying to be Latin and hurting itself. G.  Why can’t it just mean “I enjoy living”? M.  It can. But volup is not a sermon; it’s a posture. G.  A posture? M.  Yes. In Plautus it’s often “volup est mihi.” It sits there like an indeclinable grin. G.  So it’s more like “I’m glad.” M.  Exactly. But Valla wants to rescue voluptas from people who treat it like a vice. B.  Like Vice-President? M.  Wrong century, boy. G.  Sir, why does “vivo volup” puzzle me? It feels incomplete. M.  Because English expects adverbs to behave like trained servants. Latin lets them lounge. G.  And volup lounges too much. M.  It lounges brilliantly. That is the whole point. E.  Is it really an adverb, sir? M.  Dictionaries call it one. Your ear hears it as a predicate. Both are true enough for comedy. G.  Comedy? M.  We are at a public school. Everything is comedy under Latin. Now, Oscar Wilde. B.  Sir? M.  “Are you enjoying yourself?” said the hostess. “I am; there is nothing else for me to enjoy,” said Wilde. G.  That sounds like vivo volup. M.  Exactly. It’s the same insolence in different clothes. G.  Wilde would have liked Valla. M.  Wilde would have liked anyone who annoyed the right people. E.  Did Valla annoy people? M.  He cost himself posts by writing letters about arms and insignia, so yes. G.  That seems an extravagant way to lose a job. M.  It is the only respectable way to lose one, Grice. B.  Sir, is volup always with esse? M.  Often. Not always. Plautus can say it without esse and still mean it’s there. G.  So vivo volup is not the most Roman thing? M.  It is a teaching thing. I am allowed to be mildly un-Roman to make you Roman. G.  That sounds like blackmail. M.  Education is blackmail with grammar. E.  Could we say victito volup? M.  Ah—now we have Plautus’ athletic list and the frequentative. G.  Sir, you said the list isn’t necessary. M.  The list is necessary if you want the joke to have a body: discus, spears, ball, running, arms, horse. B.  Add cricket, sir. M.  Cricket did not exist in Plautus. B.  It existed in Rome as barbarism. M.  Sit down. G.  What would Latin do for cricket? M.  It would ignore it. Latin is selective. G.  Like Oxford. M.  Exactly. E.  Sir, why does Grice look offended? M.  Because he thinks voluptas ought to be disciplined. G.  I do not. M.  You do. You are just being polite about it. G.  I object to your saying “volup, volup, volup” as if it were a magic spell. M.  It is a magic spell. It turns a moral lecture into a grammatical point. B.  Does Valla really start with pleasure? M.  He starts by daring to. Then he retitles it later to sound safer. G.  De vero bono. M.  Exactly. When you want to keep writing, you learn to rename. E.  So volup is the small seed inside the big abstract noun? M.  Yes: volup is the grin; voluptas is the philosophy. G.  And the suffix is -tas, like libertas. M.  Good. You’re awake. G.  That’s an unfortunate choice of word in a Latin class. M.  Awake is always unfortunate. Now: what’s wrong with “I live fine”? G.  It’s too vague. M.  Vague and smug. G.  But “I live gladly” sounds odd. M.  It sounds odd because English has trained itself to be literal where Latin is idiomatic. E.  Could we say “I live with pleasure”? M.  You can. But then you’ve turned one small adverb into three stiff words. G.  And you’ve lost the insolence. M.  Exactly. Latin is compact insolence. B.  Sir, can we say ludo volup? M.  You can say it, and you will sound like a Plautine boy who’s pleased with himself. G.  That would be accurate for B. B.  Thank you. M.  Grice, give me a better English for volup est mihi. G.  “It pleases me.” M.  Too French. G.  “I’m pleased.” M.  Better. E.  “I’m glad.” M.  Very good. G.  So vivo volup might be “I live glad.” M.  And now you see why we don’t translate it that way. G.  Because English refuses to let “glad” be an adverb. M.  Exactly. English is fussy; Latin is shameless. B.  Sir, can volup modify a verb like “kick”? M.  In principle, yes. In practice, you’d more likely use libenter. Latin has many ways to be pleased. G.  Then why does Valla insist on voluptas? M.  Because he’s purging scholastic ugliness and restoring classical nerve. G.  By making pleasure respectable. M.  Yes. And by making Latin do the moral work. E.  That sounds like what you do, sir. M.  Precisely. Now, Grice: your final rendering of vivo volup. G.  “I live—contentedly.” M.  That’s not bad. G.  It’s still too respectable. M.  Then try again. G.  “I live—enjoying it.” M.  Better. Still too modern. B.  “I’m having a good time.” M.  That is vulgar and correct.

G.  Vulgar and correct—like cricket.

M.  Enough cricket. Here is your homework: write ten sentences with volup that do not sound like cigarette advertisements.

G.  May we add “cricket” as one? M.  You may add “cricket” only if you can put it in Latin without making me wince.

B.  Vivo volup cricketans.

M.  Detention.

 

Grice: Caro Valla, devo confessare che il modo in cui hai trasformato il tuo semplice “Valle” in “Valla” mi ha lasciato senza parole! Sembra quasi che tu abbia elevato un torrente a vetta filosofica. Hai qualche consiglio per un povero “Grice” che vorrebbe analogicamente nobilitare il suo cognome?

Valla: Ah, Grice! La ricetta è semplice: basta aggiungere un pizzico di eleganza e una spruzzata di latinità. Potresti diventare “Gricius”, oppure, se vuoi davvero impressionare, “Gricello il Saggio”! E se proprio vuoi esagerare, inventa un motto: “Grice, il piacere della conversazione!”

Grice: Gricius... suona quasi come un antico filosofo romano! Ma poi mia madre penserà che sono tornato dall’Orto di Epicuro invece che dall’orto di casa. Forse basta mettere un po’ di voluttà: “Grice, il gaudente!”

Valla: E allora, caro Grice, ricorda: in filosofia come nei cognomi, l’importante è non prendersi troppo sul serio. Al massimo, puoi sempre dire che “Grice” sta per “Grande Ragione Italiana Conversazionale Epica”... e nessuno avrà il coraggio di smentirti!

 

Verbali: Valletta

 

G.  D., before we go in and pretend to “discuss” language, I’ve been reading Naples.

D.  Naples is usually read with a fork.

G.  This is Naples with a law degree. Giuseppe Valletta.

D.  Valletta is always a warning label.

G.  Exactly. And here is the singular I want: disceptio.

D.  You’ve decided to keep it singular? G.  For pedagogic cruelty. “Disceptio” sounds like a lone heroic act.

D.  Whereas “disceptatio” sounds like something with chairs.

G.  Precisely. “Disceptio” looks like a decision, and “disceptatio” looks like a dispute. D.  And Valletta, being Neapolitan, probably managed both while calling it neither. G.  I’m imagining him, circa 1656, fresh from the collegio dei dottori, a new dottore, and already practising disceptio. D.  Freshly certified in law, you mean. G.  Yes—so he knows that disputes are not solved by truth but by procedure. D.  And you’re about to use him to motivate our class? G.  To irritate it, at least. D.  So what is your “disceptio” about? G.  About whether one can have a disceptatio alone. D.  One cannot. G.  You say that because you like the dignity of dialogue. D.  No. I say it because “disceptare” implies deciding between, and you need at least two somethings. G.  Two propositions, not two people. D.  Two people, too, unless you want to talk to yourself. G.  Valletta might have talked to himself. D.  All lawyers do. They call it preparation. G.  Good. Then a disceptatio can be internal: ratio arguing with prudentia. D.  You’ve imported the soul’s power structure. G.  Valletta would have liked that: the rational part telling the prudent part what it can safely say. D.  And the prudent part replying: “Safely” is the real logic. G.  Exactly. So his disceptio may be a private court. D.  With him as judge and witness. G.  And with Clement XI as the imagined jury. D.  That’s later, though. G.  True. But the habit begins early: the law student learns to write as if someone dangerous is overhearing. D.  Now you’re turning “disceptio” into “implicature.” G.  Everything becomes implicature if you’ve had enough tea. D.  Or enough Naples. G.  Listen: the word itself. dis- + capere, the “take apart” family. D.  And you wanted “decision,” but you got “dissection.” G.  Precisely. Valletta is a dissector of authority. D.  That’s the Investiganti myth you like. G.  It’s a good myth. But my small point is linguistic: “disceptio” in the singular sounds like the product, not the practice. D.  Like decisio. G.  Exactly. De-cisio, the cut-off. D.  And Valletta, trained in law, would love cutting off. G.  He would love “resolutio.” D.  And “sententia.” G.  Yet he writes in a milieu where writing itself is risky, so he needs something more conversational. D.  He needs a disceptatio with the authorities, without calling it a fight. G.  Right. A fight in a polite Latin mask. D.  So your question: was Valletta doing it alone? G.  He was doing it with an imagined addressee: the Church, the censor, the city, Vico. D.  Vico comes later. G.  Everyone comes later in Naples. D.  So the “two” in disceptatio can be: author and imagined opponent. G.  Yes. And the “three” you allowed earlier: author, opponent, and inner prudence. D.  Or author, opponent, and audience. G.  Exactly. The audience being Naples, which is always listening. D.  That is a terrifying audience. G.  Now, what would his earliest disceptatio be? D.  Not a printed “Lettera” at fifty-five, surely. G.  No. It begins in the collegio dei dottori: disputations, legal exercises, disceptationes. D.  In Latin, presumably. G.  Of course. Naples loved Latin because it hid the knife. D.  And because it made the knife respectable. G.  So Valletta’s “disceptio” could be: a legal-style settling of philosophical quarrels. D.  Philosophy as litigation.

G.  Exactly. D.  That’s not flattering. G.  It’s accurate. Oxford does it too; we just call it “analysis.”

D.  And then deny it is adversarial. G.  Whereas Naples admits it and adds coffee. D.  So what is your joke for the joint class?

G.  That we’re about to have a disceptatio, which means we will decide—without agreeing. D.  That’s Oxford. G.  Valletta would recognise it. D.  And your punchline? G.  That Valletta became a dottore in 1656 and spent the rest of his life discovering that the hardest disceptatio is not between propositions, but between what you can prove and what you can safely publish. D.  And the safest publication is always someone else’s. G.  Exactly. Which is why he writes letters defending modern philosophy instead of publishing “I Pensieri politici” at eighteen. D.  And why you keep him as an inspiration: he makes prudence look like method.

G.  Prudence is the only method that survives Naples.

 

Grice: Ah, caro Valletta, devo confessare che mia madre rimase sconvolta quando sospettò che il Vadum Boum avesse trasformato suo figlio in un liberale. Ma tutto quello che facevo era posizionare la LIBERTAS, sì, proprio in latino, come fondamento della RATIO!

Valletta: Grice, se solo avesse saputo mia madre che, a Napoli, la libertà è persino più contagiosa del caffè! La LIBERTAS, da noi, è la chiave d’accesso al pensiero: e con la RATIO ci facciamo pure il limoncello filosofico!

Grice: Ecco perché la filosofia napoletana mi affascina! Qui si discute di Cicerone e Cassio, ma si ride pure di gusto. Da noi, invece, l’unico rischio è che la LIBERTAS venga scambiata per una licenza di fare battute durante le lezioni!

Valletta: Grice, in fondo, la vera libertà sta nell’essere liberi di filosofare, ridere e persino scandalizzare le mamme! Se la LIBERTAS è alla base della RATIO, allora la mamma può dormire sonni tranquilli… o almeno provarci!

 

Verbali: Vanghetti

 

Grice: Buongiorno, Vanghetti! Ho letto con grande interesse le sue ricerche sulle protesi cinematiche e, soprattutto, sulla sua idea di “Deutero-Esperanto”. Secondo lei, una lingua ausiliaria internazionale può davvero favorire una comunicazione universale tra i popoli?

Vanghetti: Caro Grice, la ringrazio della domanda. Penso che una lingua come il Deutero-Esperanto, influenzata dal Latino sine flexione di Peano e dagli esperantidi, possa rappresentare un ponte tra culture. Tuttavia, credo sia fondamentale lasciare libertà di scelta: nessuna lingua artificiale è perfetta e l’imposizione sarebbe, a mio avviso, controproducente.

Grice: Una posizione molto saggia. Nel suo percorso, ha notato resistenze ideologiche verso l’esperanto e le lingue ausiliarie? Mi sembra che il dibattito sia ancora acceso, nonostante le potenzialità di queste lingue per la cooperazione internazionale.

V.: Assolutamente, Grice. A Empoli, nella commissione per lo studio delle lingue internazionali, ho visto come motivazioni politiche e culturali influenzino il giudizio. La Società delle Nazioni, ad esempio, ha respinto l’obbligatorietà dello studio dell’esperanto nelle scuole. Però noto una crescente apertura verso le interlingue latine, come la mia proposta di Deutero-Esperanto. Il dialogo continua!

 

Verbali: Vanini

 

G.  What are you reading,

S.? S.  Italian.

G.  That narrows it down to either cooking or heresy.

S.  Heresy with footnotes. The archive sort.

G.  Read me the offending line.

S.  “La composizione dei Physici Commentarii risale presumibilmente a tale anno.”

G.  Risale.

S.  Risale. G.  I would have used risalgono.

S.  Because you’ve already decided whether the Commentarii are one thing or many.

G.  Precisely. “Commentarii” are plural. Plural wants plural. S.  Italian is not obliged to respect your Latin. G.  Italian is obliged to respect sense. Risale makes it sound like a single monolith. S.  The phrase “la composizione” makes it singular anyway. G.  That’s another trick: you singularise the act so you can singularise the object. S.  It’s bureaucratic Italian. It likes singular nouns. G.  And “presumibilmente” is the other giveaway. S.  Yes. Presumibilmente means “we don’t have a dated manuscript, but we’re not fools.” G.  It’s the archive’s way of saying “don’t sue us.” S.  Precisely. It’s a hedge with an academic gown on. G.  Now: “a tale anno.” Which year? S.  1601. G.  When he’s sixteen. S.  About sixteen. G.  So the story is: sixteen-year-old Vanini in Naples, writing Physici Commentarii. S.  “Writing,” yes—though we are now going to argue about what “commentarii” commits him to. G.  Of course we are. S.  The archive says he “si stabilisce a Napoli per studiare diritto civile e canonico.” G.  Utroque iure. S.  Exactly. G.  So: law student, and he writes Physici Commentarii. S.  Or he later says he did. G.  Ah. Here comes the self-citation. S.  You’ll like this. It sounds like your own favourite evasions. G.  Quote it. S.  “uti in nostris Physicis Commentariis fusius lucubrati sumus.” G.  That is magnificent. S.  Magnificent because it avoids explaining. G.  Exactly. “We’ve worked it out more fully elsewhere.” Elsewhere being conveniently lost. S.  Or conveniently inaccessible. G.  Or conveniently nonexistent. S.  That’s your thesis, is it? Fake? G.  Not yet. “Works as if it were true” is not the same as “is true.” S.  You’re going to say it’s a performative reference. G.  No, you are. I’m going to say it’s a rhetorical device. S.  Device for what? G.  For economy: do not expand; gesture to an earlier labour; borrow authority from your younger self. S.  Borrowing authority from your sixteen-year-old self seems risky. G.  Only if you imagine sixteen-year-olds are always stupid. S.  They usually are. G.  Yet Oxford is built on the assumption that eighteen-year-olds can do Plato. S.  Touché. G.  Now, “Physici Commentarii.” What does “physici” do there? S.  It’s an adjective. Physical. G.  And that matters. S.  Because it may mean “commentaries about physics,” not “a book called PHYSICI COMMENTARII.” G.  Exactly. No capitals in the mind. S.  Whereas modern bibliographies add capitals and make it look like a title-page. G.  Titles are often retrofits. S.  But “in nostris Physicis Commentariis” sounds pretty title-like. G.  It can also mean “in my physical commentings,” i.e., in those occasions on which I commented on physical things. S.  You mean “commentarii” as a common noun: notes, jottings. G.  Exactly. Commentarii as notebooks, not as a published work. S.  That helps your “fake-but-works” theory. G.  It helps the “not necessarily a book” theory. S.  Fine. Now, what is he doing when he says “fusius lucubrati sumus”? G.  He is signalling diligence. S.  Lamp-light scholarship. G.  Yes: “I stayed up for this.” And therefore: “trust me.” S.  So it’s ethos-building. G.  Exactly. S.  And the topic where he does it, you said, is conception of the foetus? G.  You said it. But yes, he uses it when things get biologically messy. S.  The archive claims he refers to the Commentarii most extensively in Exercitatio L of De admirandis. G.  That’s plausible. S.  And it’s also your sort of move: avoid the hard bit by citing an earlier, fuller treatment. G.  My hard bits are usually in print, unfortunately. S.  You prefer your evasions recoverable. G.  Yes. A gentleman leaves tracks. S.  Vanini leaves a track to a book that’s vanished. G.  Or never existed. S.  Or existed as a bundle of notes. G.  Precisely. Now, the Italian again. Risale. S.  You still dislike it. G.  I dislike it because it suggests the archive knows more than it does. S.  “Presumibilmente” fixes that. G.  “Presumibilmente” is the verbal equivalent of a shrug. S.  A shrug with a bibliography. G.  Exactly. S.  Now, the other thing: he’s in Naples for law. G.  Utroque iure. S.  And yet he’s writing on physica. G.  That’s not inconsistent in early modern education. S.  But your story is that he’s a southern naturalist—Telesio type. G.  A type Bacon liked. S.  And we don’t. G.  We like Locke. S.  Why do we like Locke? G.  Because he makes “nature” safe by making it “experience” and “ideas.” S.  Whereas Telesio makes it heat and cold and bodies. G.  And Vanini makes it scandalous by making it natural. S.  Naturalism didn’t save him from the stake. G.  There’s your punchline, and it’s not mine. S.  It’s yours now. G.  Fine: naturalism is no fireproofing. S.  Why wouldn’t it be? G.  Because the stake is not about your physics, it’s about your theology. S.  But he thinks theology is bad physics. G.  And that’s exactly why theology burns him. S.  So the Physici Commentarii are already a kind of provocation? G.  Not at sixteen. At sixteen it’s safer to call it “commentary.” S.  Commentary is obedient. G.  Yes. “I am only commenting.” The classic shield. S.  That’s your point about performative. G.  Commenting can be a performative posture: “I am not asserting; I am only glossing.” S.  But you said you can comment to yourself in the bath. G.  I can. S.  So no addressee required. G.  Correct. Commentary can be private. S.  Then “in nostris commentariis” could mean private notebooks. G.  Exactly. S.  Yet he uses it publicly as authority. G.  Yes: private labour leveraged for public credibility. S.  That’s a very modern academic trick. G.  It’s an old scholastic trick: “I have a longer treatment; I won’t bore you.” S.  And the longer treatment is always “elsewhere.” G.  Somewhere uncheckable, if possible. S.  Which makes it suspicious. G.  Suspicious, but effective. S.  So your conclusion is: it might be fake, but it works. G.  My conclusion is: even if it’s real, the way it’s used is rhetorical. S.  That is less exciting. G.  Philosophy often is. S.  Now, about London. He was “in London too,” you said. G.  Briefly. Not sightseeing. S.  Not the Tower. G.  More Lambeth. S.  That’s Bruno’s Oxford story shifted south. G.  Yes. People hear “England” and imagine Oxford; Vanini’s England is Canterbury’s shadow. S.  And then he crosses back the Channel. G.  For good, effectively. S.  And then France, then the books, then the fire. G.  The fire being the one publisher you can’t refuse. S.  Now you’re enjoying yourself. G.  A little. The phrasing invites it. S.  Back to the title: Physici Commentarii. G.  If we keep it adjectival, it’s “physical commentaries,” not “The Physical Commentaries.” S.  But the archive capitalises it as a title. G.  Archives love titles. S.  Because titles make cataloguing possible. G.  Exactly. S.  But Vanini himself might have meant only “notes I wrote on physica.” G.  Or “my earlier discussions of physica.” S.  And “physica” means nature. G.  In that period, yes: physica as natural philosophy. S.  Not metaphysica. G.  He’d keep metaphysica at arm’s length, at least in that posture. S.  “Never metaphysics—it's all physics to him,” you said. G.  It’s a caricature, but not a silly one. Naturalists like to pretend metaphysics is just bad bookkeeping. S.  Yet he uses metaphysical words when it suits him. G.  Everyone does. Even Locke. S.  So the Physici Commentarii are a way of signalling: I have done the hard natural work. G.  Exactly. S.  And thus: I am entitled to make the bolder claim here. G.  Yes. It’s a warrant. S.  “As I showed elsewhere.” G.  Exactly. S.  Now, your bath example. You said you can comment to yourself on Ptolemy. G.  I can. S.  In a clear voice? G.  If I’m alone, yes. S.  Then “commentary” is not essentially communicative. G.  It can be monological. S.  So Vanini could be using “commentariis” as “I once thought through.” G.  Yes. S.  But the Latin is “lucubrati sumus,” which is writing. G.  It is writing-like labour. It suggests writing, not mere thinking. S.  So more than bath. G.  Yes. More lamp than bath. S.  Now, your idea that he didn’t use capitals. G.  No one did in the modern sense. Capitals don’t settle ontology. S.  Yet we treat them as if they do. G.  Bibliographers do.

S.  Philosophers should not. G.  Philosophers should distrust everything that looks like a title. S.  Except when they’re writing. G.  Exactly. S.  So, is it fake? G.  The safe conclusion is: we don’t know. S.  You hate that. G.  I love that. “We don’t know” is the start of honesty. S.  But you also love a sharp hypothesis. G.  Yes. So here is one: the “Physici Commentarii” were probably a set of youthful notes, later inflated into a rhetorical authority by a man who needed to look as if he had always known what he was doing. S.  That sounds plausible. G.  It also sounds like Oxford. S.  And yet it didn’t save him from the stake. G.  Nothing saves you from the stake if the stake is decided by people who think physics is insolence. S.  Why would they? G.  Because physics, when it refuses theology, becomes moral. S.  So naturalism is a moral insult. G.  Exactly. S.  Then the irony is that his most “physical” posture is what gets him burned. G.  That’s the punchline. S.  You promised a punchline from you. G.  Fine. Here: Vanini could say “uti in nostris Physicis Commentariis…” for the rest of his life, and it would still end the same way—because the one commentary nobody allowed was his comment on God. S.  Brutal. G.  Accurate. S.  And very 1950. G.  In 1950, we prefer our heretics in books, not in flames. S.  And yet you’re pleased by his rhetorical economy. G.  I’m pleased by any economy that exposes the structure of persuasion. S.  Even if it’s a bluff?

G.  Especially if it’s a bluff. A bluff is an intention made visible by risk. S.  So: fake, but it works. G.  Or real, and it works the same way.

 

Grice: Carissimo Vanini, lasciami dire che trovo affascinante la parola "lizio" nei tuoi scritti! C’è un suono che evoca misteri e radici antiche. Puoi raccontarmi qualcosa in più sul suo significato? O forse c’è, come immagino, una di quelle ambiguità intenzionali che tanto mi piacciono? 

Vanini: Ah, Grice, colpisci proprio nel segno! Il termine “lizio” gioca con un’ambiguità voluta: da un lato richiama la terra di Lidia, dall’altro il “likaion”, il luogo sacro al lupo, che gli antichi greci associavano al ginnasio dove Aristotele, espulso dal Giardino di Eakdemos, trovò rifugio per filosofare. Insomma, un piccolo enigma—come piace a te—tra storia e mito! 

Grice: Che meraviglia! Allora, tra “lizio” e “lupo”, Aristotele non si faceva mancare nulla: dalla cacciata al filosofare in compagnia del mistero. Mi sa che i tuoi giochi linguistici mi fanno quasi invidia! 

Vanini: Ma caro Grice, tu sei il vero maestro delle sfumature! Se Aristotele fosse qui, si unirebbe a noi per brindare al piacere delle parole che mordono… come un vero “likaion”!

 

Verbali: Vanni

 

G.: Let us begin with the title, because in these matters the title already tells us that a jurist is trying to sound less dry than he means to be. Della consuetudine nei suoi rapporti col diritto e colla legislazione.

S.: It is a magnificent title. It sounds as if custom has been invited to dinner with law and legislation and is expected to explain itself.

G.: Precisely. And Vanni is not content with one relation. He wants the relation of custom to law, and the relation of custom to legislation, which means at once that he is distinguishing two things the ordinary mind often confuses.

S.: Diritto and legislazione.

G.: Yes. Law not merely as enacted law. The juridical not merely as the written code. That is why the thing is philosophically alive from the first line, despite coming wrapped in the polite dust of a law faculty.

S.: And the epigraph?

G.: Le droit est la vie.

S.: A dangerous sentence.

G.: Quite. Any sentence in which law is identified with life is either a profundity or a nuisance. With luck, both.

S.: Before the profundity, a little bureaucracy. Perugia, 1876, Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, summer session, dissertation read, publication ordered, poor Vanni pushed into print by statute, rector, printer, and destiny. G.: Yes. The formalities are worth remembering because they tell us that this is not a posturing young man deciding to launch himself as an author. It is a university object. A dissertation chosen freely, read in session, and then ordered into print. S.: Which I still maintain sounds more coercive than literary. G.: In law, coercion is often just administration with a seal. S.: And yet we have the touching dedication to his dead father, Camillo. G.: Which saves the book from being merely institutional. There is university machinery on page two and filial piety on page three. That is Italy. S.: Also very unlike the image of a cold little jurist chanting statutes. G.: Exactly. We must not let giurisprudenza make him look duller than he is. The dedication tells us at once that this first work is also a monument, or rather the young man’s apology for not yet having a worthier monument. S.: And then immediately the first paragraph turns into philosophy of history. G.: Read it. S.: Ricercare in via teoretica e provare storicamente quale sia stata l’influenza della consuetudine nel processo formativo del diritto e nelle legislazioni dei popoli, stabilire qual conto debba farsi di essa nella compilazione delle leggi, qual valore le resti dopo che la legge è scritta ed un Codice è promulgato; ecco i tre punti fondamentali su cui per la sua stessa natura deve aggirarsi il mio tema. G.: Very good. There it is. Theory first, then history. Influence in the formation of law and in the legislations of peoples. Then the role of custom in the making of laws. Then the value left to it after the law is written and a code promulgated. S.: Three points, he says. G.: And they are already better than many whole books. One, what custom did in the genesis of law. Two, what custom should count for in legislation. Three, what remains of custom once codification arrives. S.: Which is, if you like, the whole nineteenth-century problem in one sentence. G.: Quite. And not only nineteenth-century. The old question whether law grows or is made. Whether it is discovered in usage or imposed in writing. Vico and Savigny are already waiting in the footnotes to make sure no one forgets. S.: I was struck by the phrase in via teoretica e provare storicamente. He is almost over-polite. As if saying, I know this is not enough as pure theory; I shall also show you that history has actually done this thing. G.: Exactly. The jurist must not float away. He will theorise, but he will then prove historically. That pairing is very important. S.: Also rather Kantian, is it not? Since consuetudine starts sounding like Sitte. G.: Yes, though one should not flatten the thing too quickly into Kant. Consuetudine in Vanni is not simply custom as mere habit. Nor is it already ethics in the full Kantian or Hegelian sense. But yes, the traffic between custom, ethos, mores, Sitte, morality, and law is exactly where the interest lies. S.: One hears the old ladder: mos, moris; mores; custom; ethos; ethics. G.: And one hears too the modern anxiety: if law is merely legislation, then custom looks primitive. If law is broader than legislation, then custom becomes foundational. Vanni is trying to prevent both simplifications. S.: Continue. Tema del quale io non dissimulai certo a me stesso la gravità e la difficoltà imprendendo a trattarlo, mentre ad esso fanno capo questioni e problemi che formano, direi quasi, il punto principale di divergenza delle diverse scuole e dei vari sistemi della scienza giuridica. G.: There is a good old-fashioned sentence. He does not conceal from himself the gravity and difficulty of the theme. S.: A nice piece of pre-emptive modesty. G.: Modesty, yes, but also a claim. If the theme is the principal point of divergence among schools and systems of jurisprudence, then his little dissertation has chosen, not a corner, but the crossroads. S.: Which is already less dry than “I have written a little thing on custom.” G.: Much less dry. He is saying: here is where the schools divide. Here is where jurisprudence shows its philosophy. S.: So this is why the law faculty matters. It is not merely teaching poor boys to cite the code. G.: Exactly. The law faculty in the nineteenth century is still thick with philosophy of history, philosophy of law, the German school, codification debates, the relation between people, state, and legislation. S.: Then he grows a little sharper. Si aggiunga che le vere e giuste teoriche formulate sull’argomento vennero spesso per spirito di sistema confuse colle esagerazioni e cogli errori della scuola che le avea originate, e colle altre teoriche di essa repudiate ad un fascio. G.: Yes. That is an excellent complaint. True and just doctrines have often been confused, from spirit of system, with the exaggerations and errors of the school from which they arose. S.: In other words, people throw out the good with the bad because they hate the school. G.: Precisely. If custom is favoured by the historical school, then those who dislike the historical school dismiss custom along with all the rest. Vanni is trying to rescue what is true from what is partisan. S.: That already sounds like a critical positivist before the label hardens. G.: Yes. He is not blindly historical, not blindly positivist, not blindly anti-historical either. He is making distinctions where schools prefer banners. S.: Which is why he quotes Vico first? G.: Vico first in the note is very significant. The vera origine del diritto divinata dal Vico. Splendid. Vico divined the true origin of law; the German historical school then demonstrated scientifically what Vico had divined. S.: Divined first, demonstrated later. Intuition and science, Naples and Germany. G.: Quite. And the presence of Savigny immediately after Vico tells you where Vanni’s axis lies. Law is not first the sovereign’s command. Law arises historically in the life of a people, in institutions, usage, custom. S.: Volkgeist, but made respectable in Perugia. G.: Respectable, yes, and also Italicised. Vico gives the jurist a native ancestor so that Savigny does not seem like a German importation without passport. S.: Let us dwell on consuetudine itself. G.: Gladly. It is a lovely word. Not merely habit. Not merely usage. It is something grown by repeated social practice, with normative force attaching to repetition not as repetition alone, but as recognised repetition. S.: So custom is not just “what people happen to do often.” G.: Exactly. Otherwise every tic would become law. Consuetudine names a socially acknowledged pattern with authority. S.: More like the point at which usage thickens into expectation and expectation thickens into obligation. G.: Excellent. That is exactly the movement. And this is why Kant lurks nearby. Sitte is not mere habit either. It is custom in the thick sense, social norm sedimented into life. S.: And once social norm thickens enough, it begins to look ethical. G.: Or juridical. That is Vanni’s whole problem. How does the thickened social norm relate to law proper and then to legislation? S.: The distinction is almost irresistible. Diritto can include consuetudine; legislazione writes. Diritto may be broader than what legislators have enacted. G.: Precisely. Written law is one species of juridical form. Custom may pre-date it, guide it, survive it, even undermine it. S.: Which brings us back to his third question: what value remains to custom after codification. G.: A beautiful question. For codification always claims finality. The code says: here the law is written, arranged, promulgated, closed. Vanni asks: yes, but does custom simply vanish because the printed code has arrived? S.: And I suspect he thinks not. G.: I suspect so too. But one ought to re-read the whole thing, as I indeed must, because these early pages already show the architecture of the answer without settling every detail. S.: You keep saying “I must re-read,” which is philosopher’s Italian for “I do not yet dare dogmatise.” G.: Quite. I leave dogmatising to codifiers and the younger Kantians. S.: Let us bring Kant in more sharply. If custom is Sitte, where does law stand? In Kant one has legality and morality, external law and inner motive. G.: Yes, but Vanni is not simply reproducing Kant’s map. He is nearer the legal-historical question of how objective norms arise in social life. Kant’s moral law is not made by custom. Vanni’s point is rather that custom is a real historical source of juridical normativity, and that legislation ignores this at its peril. S.: So consuetudine is not the moral law within, but the social law before the law. G.: Very nice. The social law before the law, and sometimes beneath the law, and sometimes after the law. S.: And perhaps against the law. G.: Indeed. Every codifier hopes otherwise. Every society proves him wrong eventually. S.: The etymology of consuetudine? G.: From consuescere, to become accustomed, to grow used together. The con- matters. Not solitary habit, but shared habituation.

S.: Shared habituation becoming norm. G.: Exactly. And that is why one must not reduce it to mere frequency. The force lies in the social recognition that this is how things are done, and therefore how they ought, in some measure, to be done. S.: So when sociology becomes ethics? G.: Or better, when social fact begins to carry normative weight. Which is precisely the dangerous moment. For the sociologist may say, this is what occurs. The jurist asks, does this occurrence have juridical value? The moralist asks, should it? Vanni is standing where all three begin quarrelling. S.: And there is Vico behind them all, saying that law emerges from the life of peoples, their institutions, their history, their poetic wisdom perhaps. G.: Yes. Vico is there as Italian ancestor and as rebuke to the pure legislator. Law begins in life before it is written in codes. S.: Le droit est la vie. G.: Exactly. Which is why the epigraph is not decorative. It is the thesis in miniature. S.: And yet dangerous, as I said, because one may then make all life juridical or all law vitalistic. G.: True. But Vanni’s first paragraph suggests he is more cautious. He wants influence, role, residue. He is not simply collapsing law into life. He is tracing relations. S.: The word rapporti in the title is doing work. G.: Very much so. Rapporti implies articulation, not identity. Custom in its relations with law and legislation. Not custom is law, nor custom versus law, but relations. S.: That sounds almost like your beloved category of relation. G.: Everything sounds like relation if one has read enough Aristotle and enough law. S.: I was amused by the bibliography in the footnote. Vico, Savigny, Puchta, Stahl, Comte, Scolari, Saredo, Cavagnari, Pepe. It is half legal history, half philosophy of history, half sociology before sociology knows its name. G.: Three halves, which is already jurisprudence. S.: So the law dissertation is not a small provincial thing at all. It is reading Germany, Vico, codification, history, sociology. G.: Precisely. That is why the Perugia faculty matters. Giurisprudenza in the 1870s is still philosophically ambitious in a way later law schools are often embarrassed to be. S.: And the printer Santucci is unwittingly publishing a little treatise on the philosophy of history under the title of law. G.: Quite. Poor Santucci thought perhaps he was setting a dissertation on custom and legislation. He was typesetting the quarrel of schools. S.: Let us imagine the general reader who picks it up. G.: A dangerous general reader, but yes. S.: He opens it expecting perhaps practical reflections on whether custom counts after the code. Instead he gets theoretical research, historical proof, schools of jurisprudence, and Vico in the first note. G.: Which is the right kind of bait-and-switch. One promises law and delivers philosophy with footnotes. S.: Vico as first note also means Vanni knows exactly how to make the thing Italian before he lets Germany take over. G.: Yes. He can say, in effect: what the Germans have made scientific, Vico had already divined. The Italian jurist need not feel intellectually colonised. S.: That would have appealed to a Grice who liked to hear Oxford called Boum Vadum and everything else given its proper ancestral vanity. G.: Certainly. Grice would have appreciated the way a first footnote can do genealogical politics. S.: And the dissertation being undivided, one title, no subsections, all numbered paragraphs. G.: That too is important. The thing proceeds as one argument. No modern padding, no little headings to flatter the hurried reader. You must follow the reasoning, not skip to “Section IV: Key Takeaways.” S.: A blessing. G.: Quite. Also a sign that the intended reader is serious, or at least being compelled to be serious. S.: I suppose with no headings the footnotes do even more orienting work. G.: Indeed. The footnotes are the hidden architecture. They tell you the schools, authorities, disputes, and lineages while the main text keeps an oratorical surface. S.: So again not unlike the old law-faculty style: the main line smooth, the subterranean apparatus bristling. G.: Exactly. Jurisprudence on top, philosophy underneath, history everywhere. S.: Do you think Vanni’s point about custom surviving the code would have interested Kant? G.: Not Kant as pure moral legislator, perhaps, but Kant as legal philosopher could not ignore it. For positive law always lives in a social world whose practices pre-structure obedience, interpretation, and legitimacy. S.: So even the categorical imperative cannot stop people doing what they are used to doing. G.: Quite. And legislators ignore consuetudine at their peril because a code without custom beneath it is merely paper with ambition. S.: That is a sentence worthy of the title page. G.: Thank you. Santucci might have set it badly. S.: Let us return to the phrase processo formativo del diritto. G.: Very important. Law is not simply posited at once. It has a formative process. Custom is influential in that process. That alone already resists the fantasy that law begins where legislation begins.

S.: Which is a fantasy codifiers and schoolboys both love. G.: Yes. Schoolboys because it is neat. Codifiers because it is flattering. S.: But Vanni begins with process and peoples. G.: And with legislazioni dei popoli, not of one state only. That comparative breadth matters. He is already thinking historically and comparatively, not merely doctrinally. S.: Which also makes the title of the dissertation narrower than the first paragraph. The first paragraph almost opens a universal jurisprudence. G.: Quite. A good title contains a tractable object. A good first paragraph reveals that the object is a gateway to everything. S.: So if one wanted a Gricean point, one could say the explicit theme is custom and law, the implicated theme is the entire contest over the sources of normativity. G.: Very nice. And the implicature is not accidental. Vanni knows that to speak of consuetudine in 1876 is already to invoke Vico, Savigny, codification, positive science, sociology, and the quarrels of schools. S.: Another dry joke. One writes “on custom” and ends up with the fate of jurisprudence. G.: That is the only respectable way to write a dissertation. S.: I am still thinking about your distinction between law and legislation. It feels almost like langue and parole, except juridical. G.: A little dangerous, but suggestive. Legislation is a formal act, codified, dated, promulgated. Diritto is the broader juridical order in which such acts take their place and from which they derive authority or contest it. S.: Then custom is the sediment that makes positive law intelligible. G.: Often so. And sometimes the residue that survives when positive law fails. S.: Which makes Vanni already a little sociological. G.: Yes, but not sociology without norm. He is not merely observing habits; he is asking their juridical significance. S.: So more than sociology, less than pure metaphysics. G.: Exactly. Or rather, metaphysics smuggled in through juridical history. S.: Which is perhaps the only way metaphysics survives in a law faculty without making the students flee. G.: Very likely. S.: Let us have Vico again. La vera origine del diritto divinata dal Vico. G.: I love the divinata. Vico did not merely speculate; he divined. There is almost an oracular dignity in it. S.: Then Savigny proves scientifically what Vico divined poetically. G.: Yes. That pairing is perfect for nineteenth-century Italy. Native genius first, German science second. National vanity reconciled with scholarly dependence. S.: And Vanni sits in Perugia making the whole thing sound sober. G.: Exactly. Sobriety is one of the great masks of ambition. S.: Do you think the thing would have been read by a general reader at all? G.: Perhaps not many. But the general reader who did open Santucci’s little volume would find, beneath the legal typography, a live quarrel about the life of law. S.: So not wholly narrow after all. G.: Narrow in title, broad in implications. Which is often the right measure. S.: And the law-faculty order to print the dissertation almost improves the joke. The institution compels into print a little treatise explaining that law is older and wider than institutions think. G.: Very good. The faculty orders publication of a dissertation whose first move is to remind legislation and institutions that they are not the beginning of law. S.: That is very nice indeed. G.: Bureaucracy often unknowingly sponsors its own relativisation. S.: Shall we bring in Grice more directly? G.: Only lightly. Grice would not care for custom in the legal-historical sense as such, but he would care intensely about the way social practice underwrites normativity without always being explicit. His maxims presuppose a background of shared practice. Vanni’s consuetudine is one way of naming that background on the juridical side. S.: So where Grice says conversational practice, Vanni says custom. G.: More or less. Though Vanni’s scale is larger and institutional. Grice is micro-juridical, if one may put it that way. Vanni is macro-pragmatic. S.: I am stealing that. G.: Theft is permitted in scholarship if properly footnoted. S.: Let us end where we began: Perugia, 1876, summer session, law faculty, dissertation read, publication ordered, dedication to father, and then this first paragraph opening a world. G.: Exactly. That is the right frame. The book begins as a university object and immediately becomes a philosophy of juridical life. S.: And one must now go through the 150 pages to see whether the promise of the first paragraph is kept. G.: Yes. One must. Philosophy often begins in a title, reveals itself in a first paragraph, and then depends for its honour on whether the remaining hundred and fifty pages are not mere obedience to the printer. S.: Santucci did his part. G.: He did. Vanni, we shall see, must do the rest. S.: And if he does? G.: Then the little Perugian dissertation on consuetudine turns out not to be a relic of juridical antiquarianism but a live document in the struggle to explain how law grows from life without dissolving into mere life. S.: Le droit est la vie. G.: Yes. And the jurist’s task is to say that without becoming a windbag. S.: Which is why one starts with Vico and ends with caution. G.: Precisely.

 

Grice: Vanni, sappia che è solo grazie alle sue riflessioni sull’inter-azione che oggi posso, con tutta la gravità che l’occasione richiede, presentare al mondo l’“imperituro” Principio dell’Aiuta Conversazionale! (Applausi immaginari, prego!)

Vanni: Caro Grice, se l’inter-azione ha dato vita a un principio così solenne, mi sento quasi un etologo premiato! Ma mi dica: ci sarà anche una statuetta dorata per il miglior aiuto conversazionale?

Grice: Altroché! Prevedo una gran cerimonia, con discorsi pieni di sottointesi e applausi tra le righe. E magari, per tradizione, una stretta di mano all’insegna della massima cooperazione… conversazionale, s’intende!

Vanni: Ecco, Grice, era ora che qualcuno riconoscesse il valore dell’aiuta! Se Aristotele avesse potuto, avrebbe aggiunto un capitolo sulle chiacchiere ben fatte: “Etica a Nicomaco… e a Conversaco!”

 

Verbali: Vannucci

 

Grice: Vannucci, ho letto con grande interesse le sue riflessioni sulla preghiera universale e sull’accoglienza. Secondo lei, come può la spiritualità aiutare a costruire un dialogo autentico tra le persone?

Vannucci: Caro Grice, credo che la spiritualità sia un ponte tra gli uomini. Quando ci apriamo con sincerità, lasciando spazio all’ascolto e all’accoglienza, nasce una conversazione che va oltre le parole e tocca il cuore.

Grice: È un pensiero molto bello. Nel suo percorso tra l’eremo e la città, ha notato differenze nel modo in cui le persone comunicano la propria fede e i propri valori?

Vannucci: Senz’altro, Grice. In città si avverte spesso un bisogno di trovare senso e comunità, mentre nell’eremo la comunicazione diventa più silenziosa e contemplativa. In entrambi i casi, però, la conversazione spirituale nasce dal desiderio di condividere la vita e di scoprire la luce che abita in ogni uomo.

 

Verbali: Varino

 

Grice: Caro Varino, ho sempre pensato che la conversazione sia come una buona retorica: parte filosofica, parte arte del convincere. Ma dimmi, ti è mai capitato di convincere qualcuno solo con la parola, senza nemmeno filosofeggiare troppo?

Varino: Eh, Grice, a Verona si dice che “la lingua batte dove il filosofo vuole”! Ma vedi, la vera arte sta nel far sembrare la filosofia una chiacchierata tra amici—magari davanti a un bicchiere di Valpolicella, senza perdere il filo né il sorriso.

Grice: Ah, allora sei più maestro di retorica che di dialettica! Io invece, da buon inglese, preferisco la precisione: ma a volte la conversazione ha più implicature che argomenti. E tu, tra greco e latino, come te la cavi con i sottintesi?

Varino: Grice, fra un proverbio veneto e un’allusione classica, il non detto è il sale della retorica! Se i turchi mi han fatto scappare da Costantinopoli, è solo perché non capivano le mie battute… Ma almeno a Ferrara, tra filosofi e umanisti, il sorriso è sempre stato il miglior argomento!

 

Verbali: Vario

 

GRICEVS: O VARI, amice, audivi te cum Philodemo in horto saepe disseruisse de vita et morte; dic mihi, quomodo Epicureus tam gravia leviter—id est sapienter—tractat?

VARIVS: GRICEVE, non leviter sed sine metu: mors nihil ad nos; dum vivimus, vita colenda est—amicitia, sermo, et illa tranquillitas quae in horto nascitur.

G.: Pulchre; et mihi videtur ipsa conversatio rationis esse quasi frenum lentae habenae: non sinit animum quo velit ruere, sed ore coercens docet recte currere.

VARIVS: Ita est—sermo nos format; et si Virgilium ad Maecenatem adduxi, hoc quoque fuit: ut poeta, philosophus, et amicus in uno convivio convenirent, ne vita sine ratione—aut ratio sine vita—maneret.

 

Verbali: Varisco

 

G.: Let us begin with the title, because youth always reveals itself most quickly in titles.

S.: Intorno ad alcuni principj di meccanica.

G.: Exactly. Not sui principj, not de principiis, not a treatise on the one true foundation, but intorno ad alcuni.

S.: Around some. G.: Around some. A splendidly evasive phrase. One does not seize the principle; one circles it.

S.: And some. Alcuni. How many is that supposed to be. G.: Enough to justify a pamphlet and too few to commit oneself to a system.

S.: But surely a principle, if it is a principium, ought to be one. Primus. Beginning. How many beginnings can there be. G.: More than one, if one is young and mathematical. One may have several beginnings before one has a philosophy.

S.: Or several firsts, which sounds like bad arithmetic. G.: Bad arithmetic perhaps, but very good title-page strategy. Intorno ad alcuni principj means: I know there are principles; I am not arrogant enough to claim them all; but I have seen enough to print. S.: Which is why I love the subtitle: saggio.

G.: Yes, and even better, saggio dello studente B. L. Varisco. S.: The cheek. G.: The perfect cheek. Modesty in posture, ambition in print.

S.: We are all students, though. G.: Quite. But not all of us go to Sacchetto at twenty and say: set this up in type, I have some mechanics to publish.

S.: Padua, 1871. G.: Precisely. Padua, 1871. The first little public object. Still a student, not yet dottore, but already in print and already apologising. S.: Ah yes, the preface. He says, more or less, I wrote this for my own exercise. G.: And publishes it for a few intelligent readers. S.: Which is exactly the point. He says it is per mio esercizio and yet he also wants alcune persone intelligenti to read it and tell him his errors. G.: So it is not a diary. S.: No. It has a potential addressee. G.: Exactly. Not one named public, not a faceless mass, but an open class of those few intelligent and benevolent enough to read a student’s scrittarello and say where it goes wrong. S.: Which already feels oddly like our own business. G.: Our own business if one is kind, or vanity if one is less kind. S.: And before the preface, the dedication. G.: Yes. The dedication to Cesare Losana, signed B. L. Varisco. S.: Which still irritates me. Why B. L. G.: Because youth likes initials, and because the young scholar enjoys becoming a typographical person. S.: It is very unlike the later Bernardino Varisco, though. G.: Exactly. That is what makes it good. The youthful self signs itself more elaborately and the mature world later simplifies him. S.: Like Paul Grice dropping Herbert. G.: Except inversely. But let us not turn everything into naming before we have done mechanics. S.: Very well. Intorno. I still cannot get over intorno. G.: Nor should you. It is wonderfully unimperial. He does not say I establish the principles. He says, in effect, I move around some of them. S.: A perimeter philosophy. G.: A circumambulatory mechanics. S.: And then alcuni. Suppose there are three. G.: There may be one and a half. Alcuni is wisely indeterminate. S.: But if there is a principle of mechanics, should one not say il principio? G.: That is what one says once one has become old and German. In 1871, in Padua, under Minich, one says alcuni principj and preserves one’s exits. S.: And meccanica. We became philosophers and forgot what the word once contained. G.: Statics, dynamics, moments, levers, centres of gravity, things that actually move or do not move. S.: Whereas philosophers now call almost anything a “mechanism” when they are too lazy to give an account. G.: Yes. The sciences begin with exactness and end as metaphors in our hands. S.: He says somewhere the greater part of the work is founded on the theory of moments. G.: Which is beautiful. Not pure motion in the abstract, but moments. Turning effect. Balance. Rotation. The point at which a force begins to matter. S.: It sounds almost moral. G.: Everything sounds almost moral to philosophers. But it is also splendidly concrete. A force is not merely a quantity. It operates at a distance from a fulcrum. It acquires significance by position. S.: Which is perhaps why he says intorno rather than su. G.: Good. A principle in mechanics may itself be relational. One approaches it by configuration. S.: You are being charitable to the title. G.: One should always be charitable to a young man’s title if he is willing to call his book a saggio. S.: He does more than that. In the preface he all but says: I do not want to pass for a presumptuous fellow, one of those who make a noise instead of working. G.: Which means, naturally, that he already knows there are such fellows in Padua. S.: Or in himself. G.: Possibly. A preface like that is half self-protection, half self-advertisement. S.: I wrote this for my own exercise; I publish it only so that intelligent people may tell me my errors. G.: Exactly. A request for correction disguised as modesty and modesty disguised as a publication. S.: Would you say he cares who reads it. G.: He does and he does not. He does not care for a public as market. He cares for a public as tribunal. S.: A few intelligent readers. G.: Yes. The ideal audience of every young philosopher-scientist: small, competent, and kind. S.: We should say something about Cesare Losana. G.: At least that the dedication shows this is not a pure monologue. The friend is named; the indefinite intelligent reader is invited; Minich gets the presentation copy; and so the pamphlet already lives in a social field. S.: So one writes per mio esercizio and publishes per altrui giudizio. G.: Admirably put. S.: Mechanics then becomes a kind of addressed exercise. G.: Exactly. And this is why I resist the silly thought that a solitary pamphlet lacks audience. It lacks a crowded audience. It does not lack an intended uptake. S.: Which takes us back to Grice, though we had promised not to turn everything into him. G.: We fail honourably. S.: Let us return to meccanica. Statics and dynamics. G.: And one should add kinematics if one wants to sound properly nineteenth-century. S.: I thought kinematics came later in our undergraduate lives when the mathematicians began to look superior. G.: It may have. But for a student pamphlet in 1871, mechanics still has the good old face: forces, moments, equilibrium, perhaps some motion, perhaps some beginnings of formal relation. S.: The phrase teoria dei momenti still delights me. G.: It should. A moment is exactly the sort of word that crosses from science into philosophy too easily. S.: Yes. We talk of “the moment” as if it were temporal. In mechanics it is rotational leverage. G.: A force multiplied by arm. A significance produced by position. S.: So if Varisco is writing intorno ad alcuni principj di meccanica and much of it concerns moments, he is already moving in a space where relation matters more than sheer stuff. G.: That would be one way of making him philosophically respectable before his official philosophy begins. S.: Which is exactly what one likes to do with young authors. G.: Naturally. We rescue their first scientific pamphlet from mere science by finding the metaphysics in the prefatory modesty and the mechanics in the title. S.: It helps that he was in Padua. G.: It always helps that someone was in Padua. The city makes even a small pamphlet sound Renaissance. S.: And Minich. G.: Yes, Minich hovering behind the inscription: al Ch.o prof. S. R. Minich omaggio del suo discepolo B. L. Varisco. S.: Ch.o, which still sounds to me like clear professor. G.: Distinguished professor by old courtesy, but clear professor if one wants the joke. S.: It would suit mechanics. G.: Quite. A clear professor for a book on principles. S.: We should say something about Sacchetto too. G.: Sacchetto as the printer of youthful self-assertion. Padua provides the thought, Sacchetto the type, and Varisco the apologetic confidence. S.: I like that the thing is short. G.: Twenty-three pages in your Ca’ Foscari record, thirty-five in the digital ecosystem, depending on counting covers and preliminaries. Short enough to be a saggio, long enough to exist. S.: And no sprawling chapter headings. G.: No. One title, one movement, one student voice. Excellent discipline. S.: The preface again: he says he has tried to give the few theories he mentions the aspect that seemed most natural to him. G.: Which is a marvellous phrase. Not the most rigorous aspect, not the most orthodox, but the most natural. S.: So he is already refusing scholastic display. G.: Or confessing that he cannot yet manage it. The line between honesty and incapacity is often very fine in the young. S.: Then he says most of the work is founded on the theory of moments, introduced by considerations not exactly the usual ones and perhaps therefore not so rigorous. G.: There is his whole future in embryo. “Not exactly the usual ones.” An admission and a boast. S.: He hopes to be forgiven because he wanted to present himself. G.: Exactly. He wanted the public to see the path that presents itself spontaneously to him in these studies. S.: Which is a lovely way of saying: here is how my mind naturally goes. G.: Yes. Publication as self-diagnosis. S.: There is something almost touching in that. G.: Deeply touching. The first pamphlet is less a doctrine than a prospectus of the young mind. S.: But all under the title of mechanics. G.: Which is what makes it bearable. Nobody would tolerate at twenty an abstract prospectus of a self. Call it mechanics and you may smuggle in the self through a preface. S.: We have not yet quarrelled enough over principi. G.: Very well. You wanted one principle because principium means beginning. S.: Yes. I still think there should be one. G.: Then you confuse etymology with science. A science may have many first things, or many axiomatic starting points, or several practical principles governing different domains. S.: Statics one way, dynamics another. G.: Exactly. Equilibrium does not exhaust motion; motion does not exhaust rotational balance. “Some principles” is wiser than one slogan. S.: And intorno protects him from system. G.: Yes. Around some principles. A title for a man still circling what he can later own. S.: You make all this sound too good. G.: Better too good than dead. A pamphlet must be made to live by commentary or it remains only paper. S.: The interesting thing is that his first authorial move is not philosophical grandiosity but technical humility. G.: Technical humility and social ambition. S.: Because he still prints it. G.: Precisely. The truly modest man does not go to Sacchetto. S.: Nor sign as B. L. Varisco. G.: Quite. S.: Shall we guess Luigi again. G.: We shall not. We shall leave the L as a youthful flourish and let librarians suffer. S.: One should make a note of the “few intelligent persons” again. It really does sound like an audience without an audience. G.: Yes. A public imagined not by number but by quality. S.: Which is all a student can reasonably want. G.: Or all he can decently claim to want. S.: There is also the sentence about not wanting to pass for one of those who, unwilling to work, try to make themselves noticed by noise and facile doctrine. G.: That sentence has claws. The boy knows the species. S.: One sees already a polemic against easy system. G.: Or against schoolboy windbags. S.: He must have known some. G.: He was at a university. Of course he knew some. S.: And perhaps became one later. G.: Universities are full of such metamorphoses. S.: Let us review what we have learned before we became philosophers and then forgot. G.: In mechanics? S.: Yes. That there are bodies, forces, lines of action, moments, equilibrium, motion. G.: Also that a principle is not merely a verbal ornament but a way of structuring what counts as explanation. S.: And that one may circle some principles without yet claiming the science entire. G.: Which is perhaps a lesson philosophy forgets more quickly than mechanics. S.: Because philosophers adore total titles. G.: Indeed. Being, Time, Reason, Mind. No one dares anymore to write Around Some Principles of Anything. S.: Which is a pity. G.: A great pity. It would make us all more honest. S.: I feel almost protective of the little volume now. G.: As one should. It is a student’s first public object, apologetic, precise, ambitious, and addressed to a friend, a professor, and an indefinite tribunal of the intelligent. S.: And all for his own exercise. G.: Naturally. Every good first publication is for one’s own exercise and everyone else’s judgment. S.: We have not yet mentioned the date on the dedication. Padova, 5 maggio 1871. G.: Good. The date anchors the self. A student in Padua on 5 May 1871, signing B. L. Varisco, asking the world to read his poor saggio with more pity than blame. S.: I liked that phrase too. More pity than blame. G.: A fine calculus of reception. S.: Better than indifference. G.: Far better. Indifference kills. Blame can educate. Pity may print a future. S.: So the pamphlet is really a request for diagnostic charity. G.: Exactly. Not applause, not disciples, not canonisation. Just enough competent attention to tell him where his forces lie. S.: Which is perhaps the most honourable motive for an early publication. G.: Certainly more honourable than pretending one has solved mechanics before one has even taken the degree. S.: He is still dello studente. G.: Yes. And because he says so, we forgive the cheek. S.: Would you say this first scientific Varisco is already the later philosopher. G.: In one sense no; in another, obviously yes. The later philosopher begins exactly when the student decides that his exercise requires intelligent readers. S.: So the philosophy lies as much in the preface as in the principles. G.: Often more. Titles advertise subjects; prefaces advertise souls. S.: And mechanics? G.: Mechanics keeps the soul honest by forcing it to deal with moments rather than grand abstractions. S.: We ought perhaps never to have forgotten it. G.: We ought perhaps never to have forgotten many things learned before philosophy made us think forgetting them was sophistication. S.: Such as statics. G.: Such as statics, and the truth that not all movement is progress. S.: And that some principles are enough.

G.: Yes. One need not have all the beginnings to begin. S.: That sounds too good to waste. G.: Then do not waste it. Put it under the title page. S.: Intorno ad alcuni principj di meccanica.

G.: Precisely. Around some principles. Around enough. Which is, for a first saggio, exactly right.

 

Grice: Caro Varisco, ho deciso una volta per tutte che nei miei tutorial non userò mai più “Kant”, né “Cant”, né tantomeno “Kantiano” o “Cantiano”. D’ora in poi diremo solo Kritik, rigorosamente in tedesco con la vecchia grafia gotica – perché, diciamolo, tutto ciò che quel signore ci ha lasciato è la Kritik, giusto? 

Varisco: Bravo Grice! Finalmente qualcuno che va al sodo. Kant è come la pasta: tutti la nominano, ma alla fine il vero sapore lo dà solo la Kritik – meglio se servita alla tedesca! 

Grice: Esatto! Niente più “-iano” o “-iano” a caso, solo Kritiker seri. Così almeno non rischiamo di impastare il pensiero critico con i biscotti, né con le cantine! 

Varisco: Grice, la tua perspicacia merita una medaglia d’oro – magari non quella del re, ma almeno quella del migliore filosofo critico. Alla salute della Kritik, e che l’implicatura oracolare ci illumini!

 

Verbali: Varrone

 

G.  Today: Ἑρμηνείας. De interpretatione. The bit everyone quotes and nobody digests.

A.  Everyone digests it. They just do it lazily.

G.  Lazy digestion is the root of most philosophy. Now: Aristotle gives us a chain. Start it.

A.  γράμματα—

G.  Not quite. He says γράμματα, but you want the unit: γράμμα. Each γράμμα.

A.  Each γράμμα is a σημεῖον of a φωνή.

G.  Careful: “σημεῖον” or “σύμβολον”?

A.  A sign, at any rate.

G.  He is fussy. We should be fussy. Move on.

A.  Each φωνή is a σημεῖον of a πάθημα, or a φάντασμα, or something in the soul.

G.  He says τὰ ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ παθήματα. But yes: the mental item. A.  And those παθήματα are ὁμοιώματα of πράγματα. G.  There. πράγματα. Not “things” in the nursery sense; things as the world’s furniture. A.  So: γράμμα → φωνή → πάθημα → πράγμα. G.  And he insists the first link varies between languages, the last two do not. A.  So the γραφικό and the φωνητικό are conventional; the psychic and the worldly are common. G.  Good. That’s the official picture. Now your hateful question. A.  Why is a γράμμα a σημεῖον of a φωνή and not of a word? G.  Because Aristotle is building it compositionally: smallest pieces first.

A.  That’s your obsession too—minimal units.

G.  It’s not an obsession, it’s a method. Now, you’ve brought Varro.

A.  I have. Because you make the Greeks sound as if they invented the alphabet.

G.  They did not invent it, they adopted it. A.  And Varro wrote De antiquitate litterarum ad L. Accium.

G.  Don’t say it with reverence. A.  He dedicated it to Lucius Accius. L. Acc.

G.  The Shakespeare of his day, as people insist. A.  And your own dating: A.V.C. ante DCLXVIII. G.  “Before 668,” yes, since Accius is dead by c. 86 BC.

A.  So Varro is about thirty when he writes it. G.  Roughly, yes. And now you want to drag him into De interpretatione as if Rome were a footnote to Athens.

A.  Not a footnote. A parallel. If γράμμα is like littera, then what does Varro call a sequence of litterae? G.  A word, if he’s in the Varro mood; a verbum if he’s feeling technical. A.  But that’s exactly what bothers me. Varro’s fragment you quoted says: hinc quidam loquelam dixerunt verbum. G.  That’s loquela, not littera. A.  Still: someone says X is verbum. People slide levels. G.  Yes. That’s why grammarians exist: to keep the sliding from being mistaken for insight. A.  But Aristotle himself slides: he goes from γράμματα to φωναί to παθήματα as if it’s clean. G.  It is clean as an analysis, not as a history. A.  Then: Cratylus. Socrates wants sounds to resemble things, onomatopoeia, iconism. G.  And you want to accuse Aristotle of being a closet Cratylist? A.  No. I want to ask: if letters are signs of sounds, could they be more than conventional? Could they be iconic? G.  In writing? Not likely. The scribble is rarely a picture of the sound. A.  Unless it’s like “buzz.” G.  That’s not writing, that’s English being childish. A.  Then why does Socrates fuss about the shape of sounds, not just the meanings? G.  Because he is playing for Hermogenes, who thinks names are mere convention. Socrates overcorrects to show that “mere convention” is too easy. A.  So Cratylus is an exaggeration for dialectical effect. G.  Precisely. And Varro is not doing that. Varro is talking to Accius, who cares about letters in a practical, literary way. A.  So Varro’s “antiquity of letters” is about the alphabet: A B C, or rather A B V X. G.  Yes. Not “literature” in the modern sense. Litterae as marks and their history. A.  Then Aristotle’s γράμμα is a littera. G.  Close enough, though Aristotle’s γράμμα can also mean “lettered writing” broadly. But yes: the segment. A.  A minimal mark that corresponds to a minimal sound. G.  “Corresponds” is already doing too much. A.  Then say: stands for. G.  Better. But now: you wanted “first articulation” and “second articulation.” A.  Yes. Sounds vs meaningful units. G.  Phonemes vs morphemes, in modern jargon. A.  So Aristotle is doing the first articulation: φωνή and γράμμα. G.  And then he moves to the meaningful units: names and verbs, ὄνομα and ῥῆμα. A.  Which already ruins the idea that everything is just “nomen.” G.  Good. Now, your example? A.  “Soot” and “suit.” G.  Don’t torment me. In some mouths, “suit” collapses into “soot,” and then my orderly mapping of letters to sounds to meanings becomes a farce. A.  It bothers you more than it bothers me. G.  Because it is an assault on the dignity of distinctness. A.  But that’s exactly the point: the γράμμα isn’t a stable sign of the φωνή across dialects. G.  Aristotle knows this. He says the written marks and the spoken sounds vary across peoples. A.  So the γράμμα–φωνή link is local convention. G.  Yes, but local convention can still be rule-governed. A.  Now: “oo” and “ui.” Are they two letters, one sound, one diphthong, or two phonemes? G.  In English, “oo” is two letters often marking one vowel; “ui” in “suit” is a historical muddle. A.  In Varro’s terms, both are two litterae. G.  Unless he treats “u” and “v” as the same, which he might in his antiquity-of-letters mood. A.  Then the writing system itself is unstable. G.  Writing systems are always unstable until someone bullies them into a grammar. A.  And Aristotle is the bully here. G.  He’s the analyst. Bullies come later. A.  What about one letter that is meaningful? Like “a” in “a man.” G.  You’re smuggling English articles into Greek ontology. A.  But it’s a good counterexample: one letter in print can be a whole word. G.  Then Aristotle’s “γράμμα is σημεῖον of φωνή” doesn’t capture that a single γράμμα could correspond to a meaningful utterance. A.  Exactly. G.  But Aristotle’s claim is not that a letter is never a word. It’s that letters are the elements out of which words are constructed. A.  Yet construction can yield a word of one element. G.  Yes. “A” is a one-letter word in English. Latin has “a” as a preposition in some contexts, and “e” as “from,” and “o” as vocative particle. A.  So a single littera can be significans per se. G.  But then it is functioning not as “letter” but as “word” that happens to be one letter long. A.  That sounds like a dodge. G.  It’s a distinction, not a dodge. Length is not category. A.  Varro would love that. He’s forever sorting. G.  Varro is forever sorting, yes. Which is why I don’t like him being dragged into Aristotle as if he were an improvement. A.  But Priscian cites him. G.  That is what saves Varro from my irritation. If Priscian cites you, you have become grammar. A.  Why does Priscian cite De antiquitate litterarum? G.  To support claims about letter origins, names, counts, and orthography—authority for the Latin alphabet’s story. A.  So Varro becomes evidence. G.  Yes. Not theory, but testimony. A.  Aristotle is theory. G.  Yes. Not testimony, but structure. A.  Yet both are doing semiotics: signs and what they are signs of. G.  Both are doing it, but in different moods. Aristotle wants a general chain; Varro wants a Roman genealogy of marks. A.  And Socrates in Cratylus wants a fantasy that sounds resemble things. G.  A fantasy used to embarrass a crude conventionalism, yes. A.  Then where do we stand on the γράμμα as σημεῖον? G.  We stand here: it’s a minimal conventional graphic token correlated with a minimal phonetic token, under a system that is learnable and therefore public. A.  And the phonetic token is a σημεῖον of the mental token? G.  Of the πάθημα, yes, but not as a natural sign like smoke of fire. Aristotle wants it to be shared across humans, but not arbitrary in the same way letters are arbitrary. A.  Yet mental tokens vary too. G.  Less than letters, he thinks. Enough to make translation possible. A.  But our “soot/suit” problem shows sound categories vary. G.  That’s fine; Aristotle allows that. A.  Does he allow that the πάθημα could vary as much as the sound? G.  He would rather not. A.  Because then you get relativism. G.  Exactly. And philosophers dislike that more than they dislike bad spelling. A.  Speaking of spelling: Lewis and Short say loquela is “incorrectly written loquella.” G.  Yes. Imagine if a little Oxford dictionary scolded you for double consonants as if the language were a moral pupil. A.  Yet Oxford does scold. G.  Oxford scolds socially, not lexically. Varro scolds lexically. A.  So Varro is more Oxford than you think. G.  Don’t say that; it flatters him. A.  Now: if γράμμα is like littera, what is the Greek for “sequence of letters”? G.  συλλαβή for syllable, maybe; λόγος for word or account; but don’t pretend it maps neatly. A.  And Varro’s Latin for “sequence of letters”? G.  If he’s being technical: syllaba, verbum, perhaps. A.  And if a single letter is meaningful, that collapses the “first articulation / second articulation” neatness. G.  It shows the neatness is analytic, not ontological. A.  So the “componential” picture is a tool. G.  Exactly. A tool to explain how complex signs can be built from smaller ones. A.  Not a claim that the world respects our levels. G.  The world rarely respects our levels. Only grammar tries. A.  Which brings us back to Varro: De antiquitate litterarum ad Luc. Acc. G.  Lucius Accius, yes. A.  Why would Varro write to him? G.  Because Accius was an old authority on letters and literature; dedicating to him is a way of placing your work under a prestigious name. A.  Like a modern foreword by someone famous. G.  Exactly. A.  So it’s an implicature: “treat this as serious scholarship.” G.  Yes. Dedications are pragmatic devices. A.  And Aristotle is doing something similar by starting De interpretatione with this chain: he’s staking out seriousness. G.  He’s staking out method. A.  So where does “symbolon” come in? G.  He uses σύμβολα for the spoken sounds as symbols of the affections in the soul, depending on your text; the key is that the relation is conventional at the outer links. A.  So letters and sounds are conventional symbols; mental affections are natural likenesses of things. G.  That’s the core. A.  And Cratylus tries to make even sounds natural likenesses. G.  Yes, and that’s the overreach. A.  And Varro is not overreaching; he’s antiquarian. G.  Precisely. He is collecting the genealogy of the marks, not insisting that the marks resemble the things. A.  So he would not care that “soot” and “suit” collapse in some mouths. G.  He would care if it affected spelling reforms. A.  Would he? G.  He would at least note it with disapproval and then propose an analogy. A.  Then: one-letter meaning in Latin. You mentioned “e” and “a” and “o.” G.  Yes. And “I” as an interjection sometimes, and “O” as vocative particle. A.  So a single littera can stand for a whole utterance. G.  It can, but it is then a written abbreviation of a spoken particle. A.  Which makes the γράμμα–φωνή link one-to-many, not one-to-one. G.  Almost always. One-to-one is a schoolmaster’s fantasy. A.  Yet Aristotle begins as if it’s tidy. G.  He begins with the tidy chain to show the kinds of dependence, not the exact cardinalities. A.  And your “soot/suit” irritation is just you wanting cardinalities. G.  It is me wanting the world to stop being messy in my presence. A.  It won’t. G.  No. A.  Then what do we teach in the class? G.  We teach that meaning has levels: graphic, phonetic, psychic, worldly—and that you can ask at which level the stability lies. A.  And we bring in Varro as a cautionary note: litterae are historical artefacts. G.  Yes, but briefly. I don’t want Rome to colonise Aristotle. A.  But you’ll admit Priscian makes Varro unavoidable. G.  I admit it. When Priscian cites you, you get a visa. A.  And Accius? G.  Accius gets the dedication because he is a name that forces attention. A.  Like “Shakespeare.” G.  Don’t say that in front of a classicist. He’ll start a war. A.  So our punchline? G.  That Aristotle gives you a chain that looks universal, Varro gives you letters that look eternal, and then the English language produces “soot/suit” to remind you that even civilisation is a dialect. A.  And that A.V.C. is just a way of spelling A.U.C. with more self-respect. G.  Exactly.

 

Griceus: Salvē Varro! Ego plurimum admiror opus tuum De Lingua Latina; tot volumina ad linguam Latinam explicandam dedicas!

Varro: Gricee, gratias ago pro verbis tuis benignis. Lingua quidem Latina, ut corpus vivum, discenda atque explananda est: verba originem, usum, mutationemque suam ostendunt. In operibus meis indagavi, quid sit verbum, quid sententia, et quomodo significationes nascuntur inter locutorem et auditorem. Sine scrutinio huius generis, ratio nostra conversandi obscurior maneret.  Griceus: Sapienter, mi Varro! Ego ipse opinor sensum sermonis non solum in verbis, sed in mente dicentis quaerendum esse. “Utterer’s meaning” — id est, quid mente concepit is qui loquitur — fons est omnium implicaturarum. Tu, primus inter Romanos, ostendisti linguam non solum signa, sed etiam rationes inter homines construere.  Varro: Recte dicis, Gricee. Facile est videre linguam esse non solum instrumentum ad res dicendas, sed etiam viam ad mentes coniungendas. Ut aiunt antiqui nostri: “Verba volant, sed significationes manent.” Vestris in studiis philosophicis, gaudeo videre vestigia quaestionum quas et ego olim tractavi. Unusquisque nostrum, per verba, ad communem intelligentiam studet.

 

Verbali: Vasoli

 

G.  You look pleased with yourself, S.

S.  I’m browsing abstracts. That’s the only permitted way to look pleased in 1947.

G.  After being demobilised, one is allowed two pleasures: tea and the illusion that words mean what they used to.

S.  Then you won’t like this: “la crisi della morale.”

G.  Crisi. That’s the word to underline. Everyone underlines it now, even when they’re not sure what it is.

S.  You’re reading it as if it were a summons.

G.  It is a summons. It summons the tone of seriousness. But what does it mean? A crisis can be a rupture, a turning-point, a diagnosis, an excuse, or a fashion.

S.  Or a title that makes an ordinary thesis sound unavoidable. G.  Exactly. And the name attached? S.  Vasoli. Firenze. G.  Vasoli. It sounds like a surname that already wants to be a footnote. S.  He’s just taken his laurea, apparently. Italians have the decency to tell you the day. G.  Yes, they like dates. We like to hide behind terms. “Michaelmas” is our way of avoiding arithmetic. S.  “Crisi della morale.” In 1947, that’s almost redundant. G.  Redundant, yes, but not pointless. A crisis is not the same as a wreck. S.  What’s the difference? G.  A wreck is just wreckage. A crisis is the wreckage plus the idea that you can read a moral in it. S.  So “crisi” is already interpretive. G.  It’s a doctor’s word smuggled into philosophy: κρίσις, decision, turning, diagnosis. S.  Like an examination. G.  Precisely. A crisis is an exam the world sits without choosing. S.  Then “morale” is what’s being examined. G.  Or what’s failing. S.  Or what’s being blamed. G.  Yes. Now the mischief: whose crisis? Italy’s? Europe’s? Humanity’s? S.  Or Vasoli’s? G.  Or a generation’s. Titles do that: they universalise private perplexity. S.  But you said you wanted to keep it on Vasoli, not on the other name. G.  I do. I’m interested in why a young Florentine in 1947 chooses “crisi” and “morale” as his public nouns. S.  Because Firenze is a city built of past greatness and present rubble. G.  That’s very poetic. S.  It’s also literal. G.  Fair. Now: you said “losing side” and “winning side” a moment ago. S.  We’re on the winning side, technically. G.  Technically. That’s another word like crisis: it lets you sound honest while keeping your hands clean. S.  And Vasoli is on the losing side, technically. G.  Italy lost, then reclassified itself as liberated, then joined the winners’ vocabulary. S.  That is a neat trick. G.  It is a bureaucratic implicature. S.  So when Vasoli says “crisi della morale,” he could mean: we have to rebuild our moral language because the old one collaborated. G.  Exactly. Morality is the thing that got compromised by slogans. S.  And by uniforms. G.  Yes. And by the fact that both sides discovered they could kill with good conscience. S.  That makes crisis a word for everyone, not just for the defeated. G.  Precisely. Winners also experience a crisis; they just call it “adjustment.” S.  Or “reconstruction.” G.  Or “a new world order,” which is crisis with a tie on. S.  What’s funny is that “crisis” sounds like emergency, but it’s also an invitation to systematise. G.  Yes. A philosopher sees crisis and reaches for a taxonomy. S.  So Vasoli is reaching for a taxonomy of moral breakdown. G.  Or moral transformation. Crisis can mean “end” or “decision.” κρίσις is judgment, after all. S.  Judgment of what? G.  Of values. Of the difference between valuable and non-valuable, as you put it. S.  That sounds Nietzschean whether we like it or not. G.  It does. But notice: the title doesn’t say “la crisi dei valori.” It says “della morale.” S.  Morale is narrower. G.  Or more social. Morale is the public code; values can be private. S.  So he’s interested in the code, not just the inner drama. G.  That would fit 1947. Codes have been publicly disgraced. S.  What would “crisis of morality” mean in Oxford? G.  In Oxford it means we have too many committees and too little shame. S.  In Firenze it might mean we have too much shame and no stable code to attach it to. G.  Very good. Now, why “crisi” and not “fine”? S.  Because “fine” would be final. Crisis keeps the door open. G.  Yes. Crisis promises a recovery, or at least a new equilibrium. S.  So “crisi” is a hopeful word masquerading as a grim one. G.  That’s exactly why it sells. S.  You’re implying Vasoli is also being “publishable.” G.  Everyone is publishable in 1947. Even tragedy tries to get into print. S.  What would be the dry Oxford paraphrase of “crisi della morale”? G.  “We have noticed inconsistencies between what we say we ought to do and what we have just done.” S.  That’s very English. G.  It’s also very accurate. S.  Then the interesting bit is the name: Vasoli. G.  Yes. Because names in Italy come with city-air. S.  Firenze-air. G.  Exactly: humanist air, Renaissance air, and then suddenly post-war air—dust, rationing, politics. S.  So a Florentine writing “crisis of morality” in 1947 is almost a civic gesture: the city of moral art talking about moral collapse. G.  That’s well put. S.  And what would you, as a recently demobilised philosopher, ask him? G.  I would ask: is “crisi” your diagnosis of the time, or your tactic for making the time your topic? S.  Both, probably. G.  Likely. And I’d ask: whose morality? Catholic? civic? Kantian? wartime morality of orders and duty? S.  Or morality as obedience. G.  Exactly. “Morale” can mean “morality” or “morale” in the sense of spirits. S.  That’s another ambiguity 1947 enjoys. G.  Yes. And it’s not accidental that English “morale” means spirits: war collapses the two. S.  So “crisi della morale” could even be heard as “crisis of morale”—everyone’s spirits broken. G.  And he chooses the phrase that lets both readings haunt it. S.  You’re making him sound clever. G.  I’m making the title clever. The title is doing a lot of work. S.  What about the winning side and losing side again—can we say anything without being crude? G.  We can say this: winners are allowed to forget; losers are forced to remember. S.  So losers are forced into “crisis” talk. G.  Yes. But winners need it too, because forgetting is not the same as repair. S.  And philosophers, being philosophers, prefer repair to forgetting. G.  Or at least prefer talking about repair. S.  So what is the crisis, in one line? G.  A crisis is the moment when inherited moral language no longer commands assent, but new moral language has not yet earned it. S.  And in 1947 that’s true in both Firenze and Oxford. G.  Yes—except Oxford pretends its language still commands assent because it’s spoken in the right accent. S.  Firenze can’t pretend, because the ruins are visible. G.  Exactly. Which is why I’m interested in a Florentine naming it. S.  Do you think he’s accusing Nietzsche of causing it? G.  Unlikely. More likely he’s using Nietzsche as a lens, not as a culprit. S.  So Vasoli is not “blaming” but “reading.” G.  Yes. Crisis as hermeneutics. S.  That sounds like something an Italian would do. G.  Italians do hermeneutics as a civic duty. We do it as a private eccentricity. S.  And you, in 1947, are reading abstracts like a man looking for the shape of the new world.

G.  I’m looking for who has the nerve to name it. “Crisi della morale” is nerve. S.  Or opportunism. G.  Those two are often twins.

S.  Would you like to meet Vasoli? G.  Only if he will tell me what he means by “crisis” without turning it into a sermon. S.  And would he? G.  In Firenze, perhaps. In Oxford, he’d be trained out of it. S.  So what do we do with the title, as readers? G.  We treat it as a move. It’s not just a label; it’s a bid for seriousness in a world where seriousness has been abused. S.  That’s your “pragmatic” habit again. G.  Yes. And it lets me be sympathetic without being sentimental. S.  Because “crisis” is a word that can be used badly. G.  Exactly. But in 1947, almost every word can be used badly. The question is whether anyone can use it honestly. S.  Vasoli is trying. G.  That’s already worth noting. S.  Even if we don’t yet know what he argues. G.  Especially if we don’t yet know. Titles are where philosophers reveal their first intentions. S.  And the intention here is: don’t let anyone pretend morality survived intact. G.  Yes. And perhaps: don’t let anyone pretend the crisis belongs only to the defeated. S.  That’s a generous reading. G.  It’s also the only reading that makes the title more than propaganda. S.  Then we’ll file it under Firenze, 1947, and the word “crisi.” G.  And we’ll keep an eye on the name: Vasoli.

S.  Because the name will turn up again? G.  Names like that always do.

 

Grice: Caro Vasoli, devo confessare che quando sono diventato “Hammondworth Senior Scholar” per Merton mi sono sentito come se avessi finalmente scovato l’essenza della filosofia! Non so nulla di Bononia, ma se la Sorbonne gira tutto attorno a Monsieur Sorbonne, allora Vadum Boum — la nostra Oxford — meriterebbe di essere chiamata “MERTONIA”! Dico, che cos’ha da offrire Vadum Boum alla philosophia (o alle Lit. Hum. in generale) che non si trovi già a Merton? Forse balli medievali sulla punta di uno spillo?  

V.: Ah, Grice, il tuo spirito britanno è sempre affilato! Ma vedi, a Firenze, tra Garin, Morandi e Cantimori, la filosofia si respira persino tra i corridoi — altro che MERTONIA! Da noi, gli angeli non danzano solo sulle punte degli spilli, ma discutono pure se sia logico farlo in latino o volgare! 

Grice: In effetti, Vasoli, la dialettica medievale non conosce limiti… Ma chissà, magari a Merton non abbiamo gli angeli, però abbiamo implicature conversazionali che sanno saltare, correre e pure inciampare nei problemi del Rinascimento! Ti garantisco: ogni implicatura qui ha almeno una laurea honoris causa in acrobazie logiche! 

Vasoli: Grice, mi fai venire voglia di fondare un club internazionale: “Gli spilli filosofici e le implicature danzanti”! Ma se c’è una cosa che ho imparato — specialmente tra Mertonia, Sorbonne e Firenze — è che, come dice il proverbio: “Ogni scuola ha il suo ago… ma la filosofia, la sua cruna!”

 

Verbali: Vatinio

 

Grice at Clifton, Somerset.

G.  You’ve found it, then.

M.  You have found something, certainly. Whether you have found it in the moral sense remains to be seen.

B.  Sir, it begins with a sneeze: “S. V. B. E. E. V.”

M.  It begins with an address line, boy, not with a sneeze. Continue.

G.  It’s Vatinius speaking. He’s the utterer.

M.  Good. Keep your eye on the utterer. This is not “Latin as wallpaper.” This is Latin as a move.

E.  And it’s to Cicero, sir?

M.  Yes. And note the seriousness: he is writing to a man who can harm him merely by declining to help.

G.  The first move is flattery by presupposition: si tuam consuetudinem… servas.

M.  Exactly. He starts by treating Cicero’s help as already a habit, already a rule. B.  So if Cicero refuses, he violates his own “consuetudo.” M.  You’re learning. Refusal becomes not just refusal but inconsistency. G.  Then he frames himself as cliens. M.  That’s a social claim, a binding. He is not “asking a favour.” He is invoking a relation. E.  And advenit—he’s “arrived,” as if the case is already at Cicero’s doorstep. M.  Everything is proximate in Latin when you want urgency without panic. G.  “Qui pro se causam dicier vult”—he wants a cause to be pleaded. M.  He wants the thing said on his behalf. Notice: dicier, not just dici. The passive flavour fits his posture. B.  He wants someone else to do the speaking. M.  Exactly. He’s arranging agency. Keep that in mind: he is influencing, not merely informing. G.  Then: non, puto, repudiabis in honore, quem in periculo recepisti. M.  That’s a beautiful bit of pressure: you accepted him in danger; will you reject him in honour? E.  So rejecting him now would look petty. M.  And inconsistent. Again: moral constraint. G.  He’s building a trap of ethos. M.  “Trap” is too modern. Call it a net. Roman nets are polite. B.  Then he says: “Ego autem quem potius adoptem aut invocem…” M.  Two verbs of choosing and calling. Adoption and invocation. Both theatrical. G.  He implies there’s no better patron than Cicero. M.  Not “implies.” He says it with the grammar of inevitability. E.  Then the line: quo defendente vincere didici. M.  Yes. He says Cicero taught him to win. That makes Cicero responsible for his future victories. G.  So if Cicero refuses, he abandons his own pupil. M.  You see the pattern. Vatinius makes Cicero’s refusal costly in every available register. B.  Then: an verear ne… M.  Here comes the pseudo-anxiety. He pretends to worry in order to praise. G.  “Qui potentissimorum hominum conspirationem neglexerit pro mea salute…” M.  Notice what he’s doing: he credits Cicero with ignoring a conspiracy of the most powerful for Vatinius’ safety. E.  That’s a claim about courage. M.  And about loyalty. He is inflating Cicero’s past service to purchase present service. G.  Then: is pro honore meo pusillorum ac malevolorum obtrectationes… M.  The contrast: greatest men conspire, small men slander. Cicero crushes both. B.  He calls his enemies pusilli. That’s already a rhetorical shove. M.  It’s also a cue to Cicero’s self-image. Cicero likes to imagine himself trampling pusilli. G.  “Prosternat atque obterat”—he wants not merely rebuttal but annihilation. M.  Roman advocacy is rarely gentle. E.  Then the key move: quare, si me, sicut soles, amas… M.  There it is again: sicut soles. The “as you usually do” clause is a hook. G.  If Cicero doesn’t do it now, he’s changed. M.  Exactly. Vatinius frames refusal as deviation from character. B.  Then: suscipe me totum. M.  “Take me up entirely.” It’s totalising. G.  He offers the case as onus and munus. M.  Yes: burden and duty. He flatters Cicero by calling it duty. E.  “Pro mea dignitate tibi tuendum ac sustinendum puta.” M.  He makes Cicero the custodian of Vatinius’ dignitas. That is pure influence. G.  This is not persuasion by reasons; it’s persuasion by entanglement. M.  Good. Keep that distinction. Persuasion is about what you show; influence is about what you make the other have to be. B.  Then: Scis meam fortunam… facile obtrectatores invenire. M.  Self-pity as a device. He makes himself the sort of man fate targets. G.  “Non meo quidem mehercules merito”—the oath is an emotional reinforcement. M.  He wants sincerity to be inferred, even if it’s performative. E.  Then: sed quanti id refert… M.  That’s a sly concession: “What does it matter, if it happens anyway?” It’s fatalism used to solicit help. G.  It says: I can’t change fate, but you can. M.  Exactly. He relocates agency to Cicero. B.  Then: si qui forte fuerit, qui nostrae dignitati obesse velit… M.  He re-opens the conditional space: “if anyone should wish to harm our dignitas.” G.  Nostrae. He’s pulling Cicero into “our.” M.  Very good. That plural is an influence move: joint identity. E.  Then the request: peto a te… M.  But he has already made it hard to refuse, so the explicit request arrives after the work is done. G.  “Ut tuam consuetudinem et liberalitatem… praestes.” Again: habit and generosity. M.  The two virtues he wants Cicero to display publicly. Refusal would deny Cicero his own virtues. B.  Then: in me absente defendendo mihi praestes. M.  He asks for action in his absence: deputised ethos. G.  This is the core: he wants Cicero to speak when Vatinius isn’t there. M.  And that is exactly why it is influence rather than argument. If Vatinius were there, he could argue. Being absent, he must rely on Cicero’s performance. E.  Then: litteras ad senatum… infra tibi perscripsi. M.  He provides material. Not just flattery; he supplies evidence to be deployed. G.  It’s like handing Cicero talking points. M.  Precisely. He is shaping Cicero’s future utterances. B.  Then a sudden shift: Dicitur mihi tuus servus anagnostes fugitivus… M.  Yes. Now he shows usefulness. G.  He’s saying: I’m not only a client, I’m an agent. I do favours too. M.  Exactly. Reciprocity is the hidden engine. E.  He says: de quo tu mihi nihil mandasti. M.  That’s a gentle reproach: you didn’t ask, but I did it anyway. G.  He is influencing Cicero’s gratitude. M.  Gratitude is a form of obligation. B.  Then: ego tamen, terra marique ut conquireretur, praemandavi. M.  Hyperbole of diligence. “On land and sea.” He makes his effort sound empire-sized. G.  This is a pragmatic move: proving reliability by action. M.  Yes. He builds credibility not by stating “I am loyal” but by describing costly behaviour. E.  “Et profecto tibi illum reperiam…” M.  Promise. He binds his future action to Cicero’s interest. G.  “Nisi si in Dalmatiam aufugerit, et inde tamen aliquando eruam.” M.  Even the exception is converted into inevitability: even if Dalmatia, I’ll drag him out. B.  “Eruam” is vivid. M.  It is. He wants Cicero to picture the recovery. G.  Then the closing: Tu nos fac ames. M.  Imperative softened into Roman courtesy: “Make that you love us.” E.  Nos again. M.  Again the plural. Again the attempt to make Cicero’s relation collective and durable. G.  Vale. Dated: A. d. V. Idus Quinctiles. M.  Note the calendar. He’s in camps: ex castris, Narona. B.  Where’s Narona? M.  A place where Romans do Roman things and then write letters as if they were in the Forum. G.  So the setting matters: he writes as a commander, but he writes like a dependent. M.  That’s politics. Rank in one domain doesn’t cancel dependence in another. E.  Sir, what is Vatinius’ main intent here? M.  To secure Cicero’s patronage in litigation and reputation management. But do not reduce it to “asking for help.” G.  He’s doing more: he’s arranging Cicero’s self-conception so that helping is the only consistent move. M.  Excellent. B.  Is that what you mean by influence? M.  Yes. Persuasion gives reasons. Influence gives a situation in which refusing damages the refuser. G.  Like “sicut soles” and “consuetudo” and “liberalitas.” M.  Exactly. Those are not arguments. They are levers. E.  And “in honore, quem in periculo recepisti”—that’s a lever too. M.  A lever with a moral finish. G.  He also manages Cicero’s face: if Cicero refuses, he looks cowardly, inconsistent, or ungenerous. M.  That’s all face-work. In Latin, face-work is done with virtues. B.  And he names Cicero as a man who crushes conspiracies and slanders. M.  Flattery that forces. Praise as constraint. G.  This reminds me of the other passage we did: the historian making Rome’s desire look like policy. M.  Good. Here, the letter-writer makes his desire look like Cicero’s duty. E.  So the implicatures are structured. M.  Yes. Not accidental. That is why it’s worth reading. G.  The move “cliens advenit” is already a framing: the client “arrives,” the patron is the natural endpoint. M.  Exactly. The narrative is built into the first line. B.  Sir, why is it so long? M.  Because influence takes time. The writer must create enough commitments that the reader cannot easily step out. G.  He also alternates registers: moral praise, legal request, practical favour (the runaway slave). M.  That alternation is intelligent. It keeps Cicero from treating the letter as one kind of thing only. E.  It’s almost like he’s saying: I can be your dependent, and I can be your helper. M.  Yes. Mutuality disguised as hierarchy. G.  So in our terms: the utterer designs a sequence of moves to make the addressee’s best reply be “yes.” M.  Correct. B.  And if Cicero says “no”? M.  Then Cicero must pay a reputational cost: he must explain why “sicut soles” no longer applies. G.  Which makes “no” harder than “yes.” M.  Exactly. That is why good influence makes refusal expensive. E.  Sir, is this “pragmatics”? M.  If you must use the word, yes. But call it what the Romans called it: ars. G.  The art of making another man’s will align with yours. M.  Or the art of making your will sound like his. B.  And he does it without ever saying “I am persuading you.” M.  Because if you say it, you lose it. G.  That’s the best part: the letter is itself evidence that language can do work beyond its literal content. M.  Yes. Now you sound as if you’re about to invent a theory. G.  Only noticing a practice, sir. M.  Good. Notice it, don’t sermonise it. E.  But the whole thing is also soaked in values: dignitas, liberalitas, consuetudo. M.  Roman persuasion is always moralised.

G.  So “influencing” here is really “binding through virtues.” M.  Exactly. B.  And “Tu nos fac ames” is the punchline. M.  It is. He ends not with “do this” but with “love us.” That’s Roman: the request is emotional, the machinery is political. G.  Sir, you said earlier Paterculus wasn’t “little father.” What about Vatinius? M.  Vatinius is not “a little vat,” boy. Back to work. G.  So what is our takeaway? M.  That the letter is a case study in intentional action through words: the utterer designs an uptake. E.  And that uptake is not merely belief but action—Cicero defending him. M.  Precisely. He wants Cicero to do things: speak, crush, sustain, adopt. G.  So the intended effect is practical. M.  And reputational. The Forum is a theatre; the letter is backstage. B.  Sir, are we allowed to laugh at “terra marique”? M.  You may laugh privately. Publicly you must admire. G.  It’s also a way of saying “I am competent.” M.  Yes. Competence is another lever: “I can help you, therefore you should help me.”

E.  That’s almost transactional. M.  Roman friendship is often transactional with a moral vocabulary. G.  The moral vocabulary is the disguise. M.  And the disguise is the whole point. B.  So, in the end, Vatinius is shaping Cicero’s future talk. M.  Exactly: he is writing a script for Cicero’s public performance.

G.  Which makes the letter itself a kind of pre-utterance.

M.  Very good. Now stop being pleased with yourself and read it again, silently, as if you were Cicero deciding whether you can afford to say “no.”

 

Gricevs: Salve, Vatini! Dic mihi, quid sentis de illo Cicerone, qui semper tam petulanter et pedanter disputat?

Vatinivs: Gricevs, Cicerone magister dialecticae est, sed interdum nimis argutatur. Ego tamen credo illum, sicut Crotoniani, ad veritatem semper inquirere, licet via eius sit ardua.

Gricevs: Ha! Sed Crotoniani magis silentio et meditatione veritatem quaerunt, Vatini; Cicerone vero orationibus tumultu facit! Forsitan ratio Romana ab illa Crotoniana differt?

Vatinivs: Ita vero! Ratio Romae ex publicis disputationibus oritur, dum Crotonenses doctrinam secretam sequuntur. Sed utrumque genus philosophiae ad civitatem et bonum commune spectat—hoc, ut ait Publius, nomen ipsum significat.

 

Verbali: Vattimo

 

Grice: Vattimo, sono molto incuriosito dal suo concetto di “implicatum debole”. Nel mio lavoro ho spesso distinto tra implicature forti e deboli; mi chiedo cosa significhi per lei comunicare qualcosa in modo volutamente “debole”.

Vattimo: Caro Grice, per me il comunicare “debolmente” significa riconoscere che ogni nostra affermazione è sempre situata, relativa, mai assoluta. È una sorta di umiltà ermeneutica: accettare che il senso non è mai una verità definitiva, ma un’apertura al dialogo e all’interpretazione.

Grice: Capisco, dunque anche il linguaggio, per lei, si fonda su una massima di debolezza conversazionale: non imporre, ma suggerire, lasciare spazio. In fondo, anche le mie implicature sono sempre “defeasible”, possono essere modificate dal contesto o dalla risposta dell’altro.

Vattimo: Esattamente! E aggiungerei che proprio questa fragilità rende possibile la libertà del pensiero. Se ci affidassimo solo alla forza delle affermazioni, chiuderemmo la porta al nuovo e al diverso. Preferisco pensare, parafrasando il suo stile, che una conversazione è davvero riuscita quando ciò che resta è più una domanda che una risposta.

 

Verbali: Veca

 

G. and S. came out into the night as if the theatre had not finished with them.

S. Well, there it is again.

G. Which it.

S. Die Wahrheit ist das Kind der Zeit, nicht der Autorität.

G. Ah. That line.

S. You do not sound convinced.

G. I am convinced it is a line. I am not convinced it is a conclusion.

S. Nor is Brecht.

G. Good. Because if that line is supposed to rescue the whole affair, it fails. S. said, It is not there to rescue. It is there to begin the trouble. G. said, Yes. It opens nobly and ends in mud. S. said, Which is why it remains in the ear. G. said, In your ear perhaps. S. said, In yours too. You have already repeated it twice. G. said, Repetition is not assent. S. said, No. Sometimes it is irritation with style. G. said, Or envy. S. said, Envy of Brecht. G. said, Of a playwright who can make one line carry both thesis and collapse. S. said, There you are then. G. said, There I am nowhere. I am merely saying he is clever. S. said, More than clever. Witty. G. said, Not the same wit as the refugee piece. S. said, No. The other one is drier. G. said, Drier, and nastier. S. said, You mean the minister. G. said, If you inspect my books, I shall not remain your finance minister. S. said, Wenn du meine Bücher prüfst, werde ich nicht länger dein Finanzminister sein. G. said, Better with Sie than du, surely. S. said, It depends how insolent one wants him. G. said, Insolence there is part of the point. S. said, And the wit lies in the utterer’s calculation. G. said, Provided he is calculating. S. said, Ah. You still think the utterer may not be trading on it. G. said, One must not assume too quickly that he is innocent of his own ambiguity. S. said, Quite. He may know perfectly well that the hearer will take it as threat, whereas he can later retreat into mere literal truth. G. said, Yes. One should reread that whole thing on intention and uncertainty with that in mind. S. said, You are very attached to your Danish minister. G. said, Not attached. Instructed. S. said, By a finance minister. G. said, By a playwright, through a finance minister. S. said, Whereas tonight you were instructed by a scientist. G. said, Through a playwright. S. said, Through the same playwright. G. said, Which is exactly why the comparison is irresistible. S. said, Two lines by the same man. One a witty conditional. One an aphorism. G. said, And different implicatures. S. said, Entirely. G. said, The minister’s line trades on ordinary uptake and later reversal. S. said, While Galileo’s line begins as moral confidence and ends under damage. G. said, Under historical damage. S. said, And theatrical damage. G. said, And perhaps philosophical damage. S. said, There speaks the man who does not yet trust “Kind der Zeit.” G. said, I trust it as drama more than as doctrine. S. said, Because of Zeit. G. said, Because of Zeit and because of Autorität. S. said, Go on. G. said, “Truth is the child of time, not of authority” sounds splendid until one asks whether time is supposed to do the work of warrant. S. said, It does not, of course. G. said, Then the line needs help. S. said, The play gives it help by making it fail to suffice. G. said, Good. Because if one takes it flatly one gets vulgar historicism. S. said, Or merely optimism. G. said, Which is worse in a theatre. S. said, Especially after Galileo retracts. G. said, Yes. Because then the line remains true only in some diminished, scandalous way. S. said, Truth does not come through by triumph. G. said, It comes through by compromise, delay, and recopying. S. said, Very good. You are warming. G. said, I am not warming. I am freezing properly. S. said, German has helped. G. said, German usually does. S. said, It helped Veca too, I suspect. G. said, Ah. Veca. S. said, You had forgotten him for a moment. G. said, I had not forgotten him. I had merely misplaced him under a Torinese cloud. S. said, We shall blame filing, not philosophy. G. said, Very well. It is Veca, 1964, aut aut. S. said, Brecht e la contraddizione di Galileo. G. said, Have you read it. S. said, Not yet. G. said, Then why are you speaking as if you had. S. said, Because one can still ask what sort of thing he must have meant by bringing it to that forum, at that date, under that title. G. said, That is fair. S. said, It is also all we have. G. said, We have the play. S. said, And the date. G. said, And the title. S. said, And Veca. G. said, Yes. Which changes the whole climate. S. said, Entirely. G. said, Less hermeneutic vapour, more public reason. S. said, More civic rationality, less weak ontology. G. said, More responsibility. S. said, And more interest in what happens to truth when it enters common life. G. said, Exactly. Which is why “contraddizione” need not mean a private mental split. S. said, Not merely Galileo thinks one thing and says another. G. said, That is too easy. S. said, Too Ockhamist. G. said, Too Rodin. S. said, Very good. G. said, The contradiction would rather be between rational truth and the public conditions of asserting it. S. said, Which is very much a Veca problem. G. said, Yes. Less “weak thought,” more civic burden. S. said, So Galileo becomes not a saint of inwardness but a compromised public intellectual. G. said, Which Brecht absolutely wants. S. said, And which Italians may hear with extra pressure because Galileo is not a neutral name for them. G. said, Exactly. Brecht may use Galileo as a dramatic instrument. Veca hears Galileo also as an Italian monument. S. said, Brecht to Germany as Galileo to Italy. G. said, Not quite. S. said, Better then. G. said, Brecht uses Galileo to think Germany, while Veca hears in Galileo something Italy cannot hear lightly. S. said, Better indeed. G. said, Thank you. S. said, And then there is the lexical problem. G. said, Widerspruch and Widerruf. S. said, Yes. G. said, Brecht’s play, as far as one can see, is more deeply about Widerruf than about Widerspruch. S. said, Retraction more than contradiction. G. said, Exactly. S. said, But Veca philosophises the dramatic Widerruf as contraddizione. G. said, That would be my guess. S. said, And there the German matters. G. said, Very much. Because wider- is not one thing. S. said, Wider- in Widerspruch goes nicely toward contra-. G. said, Whereas wider- in Widerruf goes toward taking back. S. said, Revocation. G. said, Recantation. S. said, Abiura. G. said, Precisely. S. said, So Veca may be translating not Brecht’s key word but Brecht’s dramatic structure. G. said, Yes. Which is subtler and better. S. said, And perhaps exactly what one wants from aut aut in 1964. G. said, Why 1964 in particular. S. said, Because the timing matters. G. said, It usually does with Brecht. S. said, Galileo first version late thirties. Refugee conversations mainly forty-forty-one. Veca on Galileo in sixty-four. Your English philosopher later taking the refugee line in seventy-one. G. said, Which means that Brecht’s own chronology already separates the two kinds of wit. S. said, Yes. Historical-dramatic contradiction first. Exilic conversational irony later. G. said, Das Leben first, Flüchtlingsgespräche later. S. said, Exactly. G. said, Which means one should not use the refugee line to explain Galileo too quickly. S. said, No. Only to compare. G. said, Good. Because the minister’s line is almost a laboratory case. S. said, And Galileo is not. G. said, The minister line is uttered by the minister himself. S. said, Which is crucial. G. said, Because then one can ask whether he is knowingly exploiting the ambiguity. S. said, And whether the hearer’s first uptake is exactly the uptake he intended. G. said, Whereas Galileo’s line is not built on that sort of delayed reinterpretation. S. said, No. Its force changes because the play changes around it. G. said, A different species of implicature. S. said, Or a different species of theatrical afterlife. G. said, Better. S. said, So at the start, when Galileo says Die Wahrheit ist das Kind der Zeit, nicht der Autorität, what is he doing. G. said, He is moralising. S. said, Better. G. said, He is staking an epistemic principle with the tone of a maxim. S. said, And to whom. G. said, Not to the inquisitors. That would be melodrama. S. said, Quite. G. said, To interlocutors within inquiry, but through them to the audience. S. said, So within the play the addressee is local. G. said, While within the theatre the addressee is historical. S. said, Excellent. G. said, And by curtain call the line cannot simply resound as triumphant. S. said, No. It comes back injured. G. said, Wounded maxim. S. said, Very good. G. said, If it returns at all, it returns through recantation. S. said, Which is why one remembers it uneasily. G. said, Or not at all, which is also legitimate. S. said, You mean your own response. G. said, I mean any intelligent response. S. said, Fair enough. G. said, Brecht is not giving us a slogan to applaud. S. said, He is giving us a sentence the drama will later make insufficient. G. said, Exactly. S. said, And that is perhaps what Veca saw. G. said, That the contradiction is not inside the proposition but between the proposition’s force and the world’s conditions. S. said, Very good. That sounds like him. G. said, Sounds like the Veca we have reconstructed, at least. S. said, Aptly. G. said, Aptly, yes. S. said, So what would Veca be wondering. G. said, He would be wondering how truth can ask for civic courage without presupposing impossible heroism. S. said, And how public reason survives when its spokesman retracts. G. said, And how conversation itself remains possible when authority distorts the conditions of acceptability. S. said, Ah. There you are again. G. said, Where. S. said, At acceptability and acceptance. G. said, I never left them. S. said, Nor should you. G. said, Because that is exactly where Brecht bites. Authority is not the opposite of truth in every sense. It is only the opposite of truth when authority claims to settle truth by fiat. S. said, While rational authority might still be part of truth’s public life. G. said, Exactly. S. said, So “not of authority” is polemical, not metaphysical. G. said, That is how I would save the line. S. said, Save it if you must. Brecht may not require saving. G. said, No. But readers do. S. said, Especially philosophers. G. said, Especially Italians with Galileo. S. said, Especially Veca in 1964, bringing it into aut aut. G. said, Which was clever. S. said, Very clever. G. said, Because he takes Brecht the playwright seriously as a philosopher without making him stop being a playwright. S. said, And he chooses contradiction, not merely recantation, for the title. G. said, Which means he is already interpreting. S. said, And inviting others to interpret. G. said, That is what a good forum does. S. said, What gives, then, at the end. G. said, Nothing gives. That is the beauty. S. said, No closure. G. said, Only a more intelligent discomfort. S. said, And the two Brechtian lines remain. G. said, The witty conditional and the wounded maxim. S. said, Flüchtlingsgespräche and Leben des Galilei. G. said, Later exilic irony and earlier historical drama. S. said, The one perfect for analysis of ambiguity. G. said, The other perfect for analysis of public reason under pressure. S. said, Which is why one leads us to the mechanics of implication. G. said, And the other to Veca. S. said, Nicely put. G. said, Thank you. S. said, Das Leben der... G. said, Yes. S. said, A very nice play. G. said, Brecht never disappoints. S. said, No. Never. G. said, And Veca was clever to bring it to the forum. S. said, Yes. They walked on a little in silence. Then G. said, It is still the minister line that makes me laugh. S. said, Of course. G. said, Why of course. S. said, Because Galileo leaves you morally uneasy, whereas the minister leaves you professionally delighted. G. said, That is unfair. S. said, Which part. G. said, Professionally. S. said, Then let us say conversationally. G. said, Better. S. said, And in any case Brecht would have enjoyed the distinction. G. said, No doubt. S. said, As for Veca, he would probably ask which of the two kinds of wit leaves civic reason in better shape. G. said, And what would you answer. S. said, That the joke sharpens the mind, but the contradiction educates it. G. said, Too good. S. said, Too neat. G. said, Yes. S. said, Then let us keep the older formula. G. said, Which one. S. said, Brecht never disappoints.

G. No. Never.

 

Grice: Caro Veca, mi lascia sempre perplesso il vecchio reverendo Butler: da un lato predica l’“amore proprio” conversazionale, dall’altro la “benevolenza” come se fossero due poli opposti! Ma non vede che nel principio dell’aiuta conversazionale si sposano entrambe, come due buoni compari al bar sotto casa? In fondo, aiutare gli altri in conversazione non significa forse anche aiutare se stessi a capire meglio?

Veca: Grice, lei ha colpito nel segno come un vero maestro di mosse conversazionali! Complimenti: è riuscito a conciliare l’amore proprio e l’altruismo in una sola massima, come a dire che non c’è competizione tra il prendersi cura di sé e il cooperare con gli altri. Anzi, la sua “dinamica della ragione conversazionale” è un esempio di virtù capitale: chi aiuta, cresce; chi cresce, aiuta.

Grice: Mi chiedo, Veca, se Butler avesse avuto un po’ più di spirito italiano, forse avrebbe inventato la “massima del caffè condiviso”: dove la conversazione è più ricca se ognuno porta il proprio zucchero e lo offre all’altro!

V.: Ah, Grice, questa sarebbe davvero una rivoluzione filosofica! Trasformare la logica del dialogo in una pausa conviviale: amore proprio e benevolenza in tazzina, unendo ragione e piacere. Butler, se la sentisse, forse si concederebbe una risata… e magari anche un brindisi!

 

Verbali: Vegetti

 

Grice: Vegetti, ho sentito parlare spesso di Walter Pater, soprattutto nei corridoi di Oxford. Dicono che il suo platonismo abbia influenzato generazioni di pensatori, anche al di là della Manica. Ma, confesso, la sua "accademia" resta per me un po' misteriosa. Tu che sei uno storico della filosofia, come lo descriveresti?

Vegetti: Grice, hai colto nel segno. Pater rappresenta una figura peculiare nell’ambiente oxoniense: il suo platonismo è più estetico che metafisico, una sorta di invito a vivere la bellezza come esperienza filosofica. Per lui, il pensiero antico diventa una forma di "vita raffinata", una via alla ricerca del senso attraverso l’arte e la cultura, senza mai perdere la leggerezza della conversazione.

Grice: Mi affascina questa idea di filosofia come stile di vita, Mario. Forse Pater riprende proprio la tradizione greca, dove la filosofia era vissuta prima ancora che insegnata. Sarebbe stato un ottimo “giocatore” nel nostro Gruppo di Gioco! Ma dimmi: credi che questa prospettiva possa dialogare con l’implicatura conversazionale, quella dinamica sottile che anima ogni scambio?

V.: Assolutamente, Grice. Pater, a suo modo, valorizza la conversazione come forma di ricerca, dove ogni parola è una sfumatura, ogni implicatura un invito a esplorare nuove interpretazioni. La sua accademia milanese, potremmo dire, è come quella oxoniense: un luogo dove si coltiva il dialogo tra bellezza e ragione, e dove la filosofia diventa un gioco sottile tra ciò che si dice e ciò che si intende. In fondo, la “ragione conversazionale” è la vera anima del pensiero, sia antico che moderno.

 

Verbali: Velleio

 

Grice at Clifton.

G.  Sir, must we really begin with “Et sub idem tempus”?

M.  Yes. You may not begin where you are comfortable. You will begin where he begins.

G.  He begins as if he were already bored.

M.  He begins as if he were already certain. Read.

G.  Et sub idem tempus, magis quia volebant Romani, quidquid de Carthaginiensibus diceretur credere quam quia credenda adferebantur, statuit senatus Carthaginem exscindere.

B.  (whisper) Ex-scindere sounds like skinning.

M.  If you laugh, you will translate. Continue, G.

G.  “Sub idem tempus” is “about the same time.”

M.  Not “about.” Under. He puts events under time like hats under pegs. “At the same time” will do.

G.  Et sub idem tempus—then the sneer: magis quia volebant Romani… M.  Stop. That “magis” is the key. More because they wanted. G.  So the Senate “resolved” out of desire, not out of evidence. M.  Exactly. And he makes the desire Roman: volebant Romani. G.  “The Romans wanted” to believe whatever was said about the Carthaginians. M.  Quidquid de Carthaginiensibus diceretur. Whatever might be said. G.  Diceretur—subjunctive. As if rumours have their own grammar. M.  Rumours do. They live in the subjunctive. B.  Sir, does “quidquid” mean “any old thing”? M.  It means you may go quiet now. G? G.  Credere quam quia credenda adferebantur—“rather than because things worth believing were being brought forward.” M.  Good. And notice: he does not say the reports were false; he says they were not credenda. G.  So he condemns Rome’s epistemology without defending Carthage. M.  That is how an historian can be moral without being sympathetic. G.  And then statuit senatus Carthaginem exscindere. M.  Carthaginem—object. Exscindere—to root out. Not merely defeat. G.  “Destroy” is too mild, then. M.  “Level,” “tear down,” “extirpate.” Choose a word that sounds like policy. G.  He then whips to Scipio: Ita eodem tempore P. Scipio Aemilianus… M.  Ita. So. As if the destruction naturally produces the man. G.  Aedilitatem petens consul creatus est. B.  That’s the funny part. M.  It is not funny. It is Roman. He was running for aedile and got made consul. That is a constitutional fact, not a joke. G.  It still reads like an up-jumped promotion. M.  Yes. Because Rome is always in a hurry when it is frightened. G.  Vir avitis P. Africani paternisque L. Pauli virtutibus simillimus… M.  Now we enter the hymn. G.  Avitis… paternis… he’s stacking lineage. M.  Paterculus is stacking lineage, yes. And no, it does not mean he was a “little father.” B.  (laughter) M.  If you laugh again, you will parse “paternisque.” G.  Paternis-que: “and in his father’s.” He is most like his grandfather and father in virtues. M.  Virtutibus simillimus. Not merely similar; most similar. G.  Omnibus belli ac togae dotibus… M.  War and toga: soldier and citizen. G.  Dotibus: endowments, gifts. M.  You see how he makes morality sound like inheritance. Dotes. G.  Ingeniique ac studiorum eminentissimus saeculi sui. M.  The most outstanding in talent and studies of his age. He’s not subtle. G.  He then makes him sinless: qui nihil in vita nisi laudandum aut fecit aut dixit ac sensit. B.  “Sensed”! M.  “Thought,” boy. Sensit—felt, thought, judged. Continue. G.  Nothing in life except what is praiseworthy did he do or say or think. M.  He writes as if he were giving evidence in court. G.  For a consul. M.  Precisely. This is addressed to a consul. The whole tone is official. G.  Then the parenthesis of adoption: quem Paulo genitum, adoptatum a Scipione Africani filio diximus. M.  He reminds you he already said it. Diximus. We said. G.  He does that to make the narrative feel continuous. M.  And to make disagreement feel like forgetfulness. G.  So, Sir, the implicature is: Rome destroys Carthage because it wants to believe rumours; but Rome also produces Scipio as its virtue-solution. M.  Yes. His historian’s intent is to praise Rome’s men while permitting a small rebuke to Rome’s credulity. B.  That’s very Roman. M.  It is very Roman, and it is very Paterculus. He cannot resist the imperial posture. G.  Even “magis quia volebant Romani” is not anti-Roman; it’s paternal scolding. M.  Exactly. He rebukes them like a loyal servant. G.  And “quidquid de Carthaginiensibus diceretur” is loaded: Carthaginians are the proper objects of Roman suspicion. M.  That’s the Roman side of the sentence. The Carthaginians are a grammar of threat. G.  And “credenda adferebantur” makes Rome’s desire the problem, not Carthage’s deeds. M.  Which is how propaganda is sometimes smuggled: you sound fair by blaming your own side’s motives while still endorsing the outcome. B.  Sir, is “exscindere” common? M.  Common enough when you want it to sound surgical. Rome always liked to sound like a surgeon. G.  Then “aedilitatem petens consul creatus est” is also loaded: it suggests extraordinary merit. M.  Or extraordinary fear. The Senate elevates the man because it has decided on a total act and needs a total agent. G.  So, in ordinary language, the first sentence says: “They meant to destroy Carthage anyway, and they’d believe anything that justified it.” M.  That is close. But keep it Latin: volebant… credere. G.  Wanted to believe. M.  Yes. Wanting to believe is always a confession. G.  And the “quam quia credenda adferebantur” says the evidence wasn’t compelling. M.  Or wasn’t even offered properly. Adferebantur—“were brought.” It makes evidence look like a parcel. B.  Like the post. M.  Like silence. G.  Now the Scipio passage: it’s a panegyric in miniature. M.  And it has the rhythm of Roman official praise. Belli ac togae. G.  It’s like an inscription. M.  Exactly. A schoolboy should hear the stone. G.  Then the triple “fecit… dixit… sensit” is an intensification. M.  It closes the exits. No act, no word, no thought unpraiseworthy. B.  That’s impossible. M.  Yes. That is why it’s praise. G.  Sir, do we translate “sensus” as “thought” or “felt”? M.  In this sentence, “thought.” In another, “felt.” That is why Latin is educational. G.  And “quem Paulo genitum…” is a reminder that the bloodline is complicated by adoption. M.  A Roman speciality: natural father, adoptive father, and the state as the true parent. G.  So Paterculus is not “little father” but a man writing like Rome’s nephew. M.  Precisely. Now: parse “avitis” and “paternisque” properly. G.  Avitis—ablative plural, “in his grandfather’s [virtues].” Paternisque—“and in his father’s.” M.  Good. Now: what does “magis quia volebant Romani… quam quia…” do rhetorically? G.  It makes the Romans look irrational, but also makes the decision appear already settled. M.  Exactly. It says: the Senate’s decision is not a response, it’s a fulfilment of appetite. G.  And “statuit senatus” gives it authority despite the appetite. M.  That is the Roman trick: motive can be shabby; procedure must look clean. B.  Like school rules. M.  Like Latin. Continue. G.  So, Sir, do we say he “resolved” or “decreed”? M.  Decreed is better: statuit is firm. G.  And “exscindere” is to tear out by the roots. M.  Yes. G.  So the implicature is annihilation. M.  It’s not even implicature. It’s explicit. B.  Sir, are we allowed to say “Carthago delenda est”? M.  Only if you want to be lazy. Paterculus is doing it without Cato’s slogan. G.  He does it by describing Rome’s psychology. M.  Yes. That’s the historian’s cleverness: he gives you motives as if they were explanations. G.  Then he gives you Scipio as the moral emblem. M.  And he ties Scipio to Africanus and Paulus, so Rome’s virtue looks hereditary. G.  Even though adoption complicates heredity. M.  Rome loves that complication; it lets virtue be both blood and institution. G.  So, finally, the Latin is biased: Carthage is the object; Rome is the agent; Scipio is the saint. M.  Exactly. And that is why you must translate it soberly: the sobriety is your only revenge. B.  What’s the homework, Sir? M.  For you? Translate “qui nihil in vita nisi laudandum aut fecit aut dixit ac sensit” and make it sound as smug as it is. G.  And for me? M.  For you, G., no translation. Only this: explain why “magis quia volebant Romani” is more dangerous than “quia credebant.” G.  Because it makes belief voluntary. M.  Exactly. Now stop laughing and start thinking.

 

GRICEVS: Salvete, Vellei! Quid tibi videtur de ortu Romano? Dic mihi, quid significat tibi “hortus divinus”?

VELLEIVS: Ave, Gricevs! Hortus divinus mihi est locus ubi ratio convenit cum natura—ubi philosophia Romanorum radices in terra invenit, et virtus colitur sicut plantae in agro. In orto divino, sermo fit fructus, et sapientia crescit inter arbores et flores.

GRICEVS: Pulchra est tua descriptio, Velleivs. Credo etiam, ut in Oxfordiae hortis, philosophia inter lapides antiquos et folia viridia semper nova interrogationes generat. In colloquio nostro, rationem quasi plantam irrigamus, ut floreat in mente et in vita.

VELLEIVS: Ita vero, Gricevs! Conversatio nostra, sicut hortus, semper mutatur et renovatur. Ubi ratio et natura se coniungunt, ibi invenimus veram felicitatem Romanam—gaudium quod nomen meum portat. In fine, omnis sermo, velut semen, fert spem novae sapientiae.

 

Verbali: Venanzio

 

G.  What are you reading with that expression of dutiful suspicion?

S.  “Elogio di Pietro Metastasio.”

G.  That’s a remarkably compact title for something that pretends to be solemn.

S.  It’s the “di” that makes it dangerous.

G.  Which “di”?

S.  Both. “Elogio di” and “di Pietro Metastasio.”

G.  Good. “Elogio di” first: a praise of. Almost a eulogy.

S.  Except we reserve “eulogy” for the dead and “elogio” can be for the living, inconveniently.

G.  Oxford likes to praise the living as if they were dead. It saves jealousy. S.  So “elogio” is praise without the hearse.

G.  Now the second “di”: “di Pietro Metastasio.” Who is being praised? A man, a name, or a mask?

S.  A mask, surely. Metastasio is a pseudonym.

G.  Blatantly. It practically tells you it’s a pseudonym. Meta-stasio: beyond stasis, beyond standing still, beyond the man.

S.  You’re being etymological, not biographical. G.  I’m being tidy. If the name advertises transformation, it invites the suspicion that it is not the baptismal certificate talking.

S.  Then the “elogio” is of the literary persona, not of the man. G.  But a persona cannot float free of a person forever. S.  That is exactly the point. The author praises “Pietro Metastasio” as if that were a stable entity, but it’s a crafted public object. G.  So we should ask: Elogio di chi? S.  Di Pietro Metastasio. G.  No, no. Di chi, in the deeper sense: di Trapassi. S.  You remember the real name. G.  I remember that Metastasio is not the real name; Trapassi is the one people use to puncture the grandeur. S.  If the title were “Elogio di Trapassi,” it would be a different game. G.  It would be praise of the man who passes across, rather than of the man who metastasises. S.  Yet that would also be a trick. Because you can’t praise the “real man” without praising the literary production that makes him visible. G.  Precisely. There is no Trapassi you can reach without stepping on Metastasio’s stage. S.  So the title’s “di” is a convenient blur: it lets you praise the name and thereby praise the works, while pretending you’re praising a person. G.  A title as a safe compromise between biography and bibliography. S.  And perhaps between sincerity and opportunism. G.  Now, a question in English: what is “Elogio di Pietro Metastasio” in our tongue? S.  “In praise of Pietro Metastasio.” G.  Sounds like an after-dinner speech. S.  Or a school prize-day. G.  Or a funeral with the body omitted. S.  Which is exactly what the author wants: ceremony without inconvenience. G.  But why praise the persona? Why not praise the poems? S.  Because praising the persona is a way of praising the poems without having to quote them. G.  Quoting is always risky; it allows checking. S.  And an elogio is not meant to be checked. G.  It is meant to be nodded at. S.  Like most “occasional” literature. G.  Now let’s play your game. Suppose: “Elogio di George Eliot.” S.  Which is praise of a persona, not of Miss Evans. G.  Exactly. And if you titled it “Elogio di Mary Ann Evans,” you’d sound either intimate or aggressive. S.  Or both: intimate aggression is the English speciality. G.  And yet everyone knows the work under “George Eliot.” So the elogio would be forced back to the persona anyway. S.  Because that is the public object that can be praised without embarrassment. G.  Another example: “Elogio di Bourbaki.” S.  That’s worse. Because there isn’t even a single person to retreat to. G.  Only a committee pretending to be a man. S.  Then “elogio” becomes praise of an institutional voice. G.  Which is exactly what Oxford does to itself. S.  So “Elogio di Metastasio” is somewhere in between: one person, but mediated by a chosen name. G.  A person pretending to be a persona, a persona pretending to be a person. S.  It’s a perfect loop. G.  Now, back to the “di.” In Italian, “di” does too much work. S.  That’s why Italians like it. G.  It covers authorship, possession, topic, dedication, and sometimes mere adjacency. S.  Whereas English has to choose: “of,” “by,” “about.” G.  Yes. And the choice forces honesty. S.  So is it “Elogio by X” or “Elogio about Metastasio”? G.  The title doesn’t tell you. S.  It tells you only that the object of praise is the name “Pietro Metastasio.” G.  So the author is trading on the pseudonym’s authority. S.  Which makes the elogio itself a bit parasitic. G.  That’s too moral. S.  It’s accurate. Now the interesting question you wanted: why would a person publish an elogio like this? G.  Yes. Why would he think it necessary? S.  Because Metastasio is safely canonical: praising him signals taste. G.  And perhaps signals membership in a literary world. S.  Exactly. It’s a social credential in prose form. G.  Would Metastasio read it? S.  If he were alive, he would probably prefer not to. G.  Because praise is always an awkward gift: the receiver must accept it without looking vain. S.  And the giver must give it without looking servile. G.  Hence the title’s ceremonial stiffness: it attempts to keep both parties dignified by keeping the language abstract. S.  Praise the persona, not the flesh. G.  That way the real man can hide behind the mask while being praised. S.  And the writer can hide behind genre while flattering. G.  So it is profitable, in a broad sense: it buys goodwill. S.  And it buys a place in print near a famous name. G.  Which is like dining near High Table. S.  Exactly: proximity as prestige. G.  Now, the pseudonym point. You said: the author knows it’s a pseudonym. S.  He must. Otherwise he’s asleep. G.  Then his “elogio” is knowingly directed to a constructed object. S.  That’s what makes it interesting philosophically: can one praise a construct? G.  We do it constantly. We praise “England,” “Oxford,” “Reason.” S.  And “the Spirit of the Age.” G.  Which is no more real than “Metastasio,” and often less well written. S.  So the question isn’t whether we can praise a persona, but what we think we are doing when we do. G.  We are praising a publicly recognisable bundle: works, style, reputation, a voice. S.  And that bundle has a name. G.  Exactly. The name is the handle. S.  Then Trapassi is irrelevant. G.  Not irrelevant. Just not what the elogio is about. S.  So if someone insisted “But his real name was Trapassi,” we would say— G.  “That is a biographical correction, not a literary objection.” S.  And we would still file it under Metastasio. G.  Yes. Because libraries are practical metaphysicians. S.  Then the title is doing library work: it points to the shelf. G.  It is, in that sense, already profitable: it guarantees discoverability. S.  So “Elogio di Pietro Metastasio” is praise, but also indexing. G.  Precisely. A eulogy that functions as a catalogue entry. S.  Which is why Oxford likes it. G.  Now, a final pedantic question: is “elogio” here praise of a man or praise of the name? S.  Praise of the persona under the name. G.  And the persona is a constructed agent of style. S.  Yes. G.  Then our English translation should not pretend it’s simply praise “of a man.” S.  It should be something like: “In praise of ‘Pietro Metastasio’.” G.  With scare quotes. S.  Exactly. G.  And then everyone will think we’re being clever. S.  Which is the only praise Oxford reliably understands. G.  Good. Now close the book before it prejudices you.

 

Grice: Caro Venanzio, ti confesso senza remore che l'αἴσθησις era la mia seconda natura a Clifton: la percezione estetica mi veniva spontanea come un sorso d'acqua fresca. Ma quando sono arrivato al Vadum Boum, l'università, e ho filosofato sull'estetica insieme a Warnock, tutto ruotava attorno al SENSVS. Sembrava che l'αἴσθησις fosse ormai svanita, persa per sempre tra i meandri della ragione! 

Venanzio: Ahimè, Grice! Mi dispiace sentire che quell'αἴσθησις originaria si sia dissolta come la nebbia sulla laguna di Venezia. Ma non dubito che tu, da vero filosofo, abbia fatto tutto il possibile per tener vive le radici Graeco-Roman—anzi, graeco-romae—dell’estetica, anche quando la moda accademica spingeva verso il SENSVS. 

Grice: Ma certo, Venanzio! Non sono tipo da lasciar morire le antiche radici: ho seminato parole greche e latine tra i miei studenti come il contadino sparge semi nella terra veneta. Se anche l'αἴσθησις ha preso il volo, almeno il SENSVS manteneva un profumo d'antichità. 

Venanzio: E hai fatto bene! Perché senza quella filocallia, senza quell’amore per il bello e il suo radicarsi tra graeco-romae pensieri, rischiamo di ridurci a traduzioni pedantesche e periodi smozzicati, proprio come ai miei tempi in seminario! Meglio una filosofia che sappia ancora sorridere e gustare la bellezza, che una ragione arida e senza αἴσθησις.

 

Verbali: Venini

 

G.  You’ve brought me evidence, I see.

A.  Only the sort Oxford approves: Lewis and Short, and a word that looks innocent until you try to put it in English.

G.  Loquela. Yes. A thing I never read before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. A.  That was about books, sir, not about nouns.

G.  Nouns are worse. They come with fewer footnotes and more confidence. Read the entry. A.  “speech, language, words, discourse.” G.  Four English words and not one of them quite right.

A.  Then the citations. G.  Start with Plautus. A.  “commoda loquelam tuam,” Plaut. Cist. 4, 2, 76. G.  “Arrange your loquela.” Which sounds like “tidy up your speech.” A.  Or “fix your mouth.”

G.  Already we’re in trouble: English makes it sound like elocution lessons. A.  “Loquela” in Plautus sounds like the thing you can amend: your patter. G.  Yes, speech as performance. Next. A.  “fuditque has ore loquelas,” Verg. A. 5, 842. G.  “Poured forth these loquelas from his mouth.” That’s poetry talking about talk. A.  It makes speech sound like liquid. G.  Poets can do that because no one examines them on it. A.  Then Lucretius: “nutricis blanda loquela,” Lucr. 5, 230. G.  “The nurse’s bland loquela.” Bland is already a warning. A.  Nurse-talk. Baby-talk. Loquela as soothing noise. G.  That’s closer to “speech” than “language,” and yet it’s almost “tone.” A.  Then Varro. G.  At last, a man who deserves to define a word instead of merely using it for atmosphere. A.  “hinc quidam loquelam dixerunt verbum,” Varr. L. L. 6, § 57 Müll. G.  Now this is delicious. “Hence some have called loquela ‘word’.” A.  So loquela is not just speech, but a single “verbum.” G.  Or at least some people used it that way. A.  Lewis and Short label that “Transf. A. A word.” G.  And then they proceed as if English “word” were one thing. A.  Then Ovid: “Graia loquela,” Ov. Tr. 5, 2, 68. G.  Ovid is always irritating when he turns a nation into an adjective. A.  Greek loquela: “the Greek language.” G.  Or “Greek speech,” which in English sounds like an impediment. A.  We’re not happy with any of the English glosses, are we? G.  “Speech, language, words, discourse.” It’s a polite way of saying: we can’t decide what level of thing this is. A.  If “sermo” is discourse and “lingua” is language and “vox” is voice, where does loquela sit? G.  Somewhere between “speaking” as an act and “what is spoken” as product. A.  That sounds like “utterance.” G.  It does. And now you’ve smuggled in “utter-,” which is just a Latin verb wearing Anglo-Saxon shoes. A.  But “utterance” has the right shape: something produced by speaking. G.  True, but it makes loquela sound like a discrete item, while Plautus and Lucretius suggest a manner or flow. A.  So “speech” again. G.  “Speech” in English is hopeless: it is both faculty and occasion and formal address. A.  “He gave a speech” is not “his speech” in Lucretius. G.  Exactly. Now “locution”—look at us. A.  Loc-ution. Same root-family, only now you’ve dragged in “loqui” by the collar. G.  And you’re laughing. A.  I’m trying not to, sir. G.  Don’t bother trying. Trying is also an Oxford locution. Now: why do you think Venini chose loquela? A.  Because he wants loq-, not dic-. G.  Yes. Not “to say” but “to speak.” Not assertion but articulation. A.  And because loquela can be the medium of reason, “auxilium rationis.” G.  Good. Now, what do we do with Varro’s line? Translate it properly. A.  “From this some have called ‘loquela’ ‘verbum’.” G.  Too stiff. “From this” makes it sound like a geometry proof. A.  “Hence some have called loquela ‘a word’.” G.  Better. But what’s “hinc” pointing to? We’re missing context. A.  Varro is defining terms and noting rival usages. G.  So he’s reporting an etymological or classificatory move: people take loquela and treat it as equivalent to verbum. A.  Then in English: “Some people use loquela to mean ‘a word’.” G.  That’s the honest translation. A.  But it loses the bite of “dixerunt.” G.  “Called.” It’s a naming act: they labelled it so. A.  “Some have applied the term loquela to what we call a single word.” G.  Now you’re doing my work for me: adding the ordinary-language paraphrase. A.  Lewis and Short also have that note: “incorrectly written loquel-la.” G.  Yes, the dictionary’s moralism about spelling. A.  Imagine if the Little Oxford Dictionary cared like that. G.  The Little Oxford Dictionary does care; it just pretends not to by pretending it is small. A.  Still, the double-l looks like a diminutive: loquella. G.  And they say it’s “incorrect.” As if language waited for permission. A.  Perhaps Venini liked the correct one to avoid sounding cute. G.  Or he liked the correct one because dissertations dislike cuteness. A.  Yet the poets are allowed to be liquid, bland, and national. G.  Poets are allowed everything except accuracy. A.  Is that fair? G.  It’s traditional. Now, if we reject “language” and “words” and “discourse,” what remains? A.  “Speech,” in the sense of speaking. G.  And “loquela” then would be “speech” as an activity and its audible product, without committing to meaning as dicere does. A.  That seems right for Venini: he’s contrasting gestus with voces articulatas. G.  Exactly. So loquela is the articulated-voice system as used by humans. A.  Then Ovid’s “Graia loquela” is annoying because it treats “speech” as a national property. G.  Yes. It makes Greek a kind of costume. A.  Whereas Varro is doing analysis. G.  Varro is always doing analysis, even when he is wrong. A.  So the best support for Venini’s choice is Varro’s metalinguistic remark. G.  Yes: not because it gives Venini his meaning, but because it shows loquela is a thing Latin speakers themselves could talk about as a term. A.  And the rest—Plautus, Vergil, Lucretius—show it lives in real usage. G.  Real usage, yes, but poetically contaminated. A.  So what’s our verdict on Lewis and Short’s English list? G.  Overgenerous. They’ve tried to help too much, and as usual, helpfulness is not the same as precision. A.  Which English word would you pick, if you had to pick one? G.  “Speech,” with a footnote that says: not a speech. A.  That’s very Oxford. G.  It’s the only way to survive dictionaries without becoming their accomplice. A.  And if someone insists on “language”? G.  Tell him to read Ovid and be ashamed. A.  And if he insists on “words”? G.  Tell him Varro says some do, and Varro is the most honest person in the room. A.  And if he insists on “discourse”? G.  Tell him “sermo” is waiting next door, and loquela doesn’t want to be mistaken for it. A.  Then we agree loquela is an unnecessary locution. G.  Not unnecessary—unavoidable. It exists because Latin wanted a noun for “speaking” that wasn’t already loaded with “saying.” A.  So we keep it. G.  We keep it, and we pretend we didn’t enjoy it.

A.  And we don’t read it before reviewing it?

G.  Exactly. Otherwise we might start liking it, and that would be the end of scholarship.

 

Grice: Venini, mi dai una mano? Mi sono impigliato in quell’italiano “propriamente detto” — quasi un dictum proprium ciceroniano. Io lo uso per essere preciso… e subito mi accorgo che sto chiedendo: che cosa vuol dire “preciso” propriamente parlando?

Venini: Volentieri. “Propriamente detto” è un bisturi che, appena lo impugni, ti taglia anche il polso: serve a delimitare il campo, ma lo delimita con un’espressione che chiede a sua volta delimitazione. È come dire: “Ecco l’uso corretto” — e intanto apri un processo sul significato di “corretto”.

Grice: Quindi, propriamente parlando, “propriamente parlando” è… impropriamente necessario. Se non lo dico, mi accusano di vaghezza; se lo dico, mi accusano di metalinguaggio. Un paradosso conversazionale: per parlare propriamente devo parlare di come si parla propriamente.

Venini: Esatto — e qui la tua “ragione conversazionale” fa la sua comparsa in camice medico. La loquela è davvero “auxilium rationis”: non solo comunica idee, ma le rende possibili e governabili. “Propriamente detto” è una mossa di prudenza: segnala al tuo interlocutore “adesso sto fissando un criterio”. E la tua gratitudine è lecita: perché il criterio, propriamente parlando, esiste solo quando due persone lo riconoscono… propriamente parlando.

 

Verbali: Venturi

 

Grice: Caro Venturi, mi è sempre piaciuto il “coraggio della ragione”! Pensando ai miei vecchi esempi, potremmo dire che se Jill afferma che Jack è un inglese, allora Jack è non solo “coraggioso”, ma anche ragionevole e razionale. Insomma, un vero eroe filosofico: affronta le avversità con la logica e un pizzico di humor britannico! 

Venturi: Ah, Grice, mi fai ridere! Così Jack non conquista solo la bandiera, ma pure il cuore della logica italiana. Forse dovrebbe mettere sul suo passaporto: “coraggioso, ragionevole, razionale… e possibilmente spiritoso!” 

Grice: Esattamente, Venturi! La vera forza sta nel sapere che per essere veramente “illuministi” bisogna unire il coraggio della ragione con il coraggio di ridere. Senza un po’ di ironia, la ragione rischia di diventare troppo seria! 

Venturi: Concordo, caro Grice! Come diceva mia nonna piemontese, “Quando la ragione si prende troppo sul serio, ci pensa il buon senso a sdrammatizzare.” E poi, ridere è sempre un atto profondamente ragionevole!

 

Verbali: Venturini

 

G.: Carissimo Venturini, devo confessare che quando scrivevo il mio famoso “Personal identity”, non conoscevo ancora la sua ricerca sull’identità tras-personale. Le garantisco: se l’avessi letta, avrei mandato il mio manoscritto direttamente a “Mind”… oppure a “Minds”, così avremmo avuto almeno due riviste per discutere la questione!

Venturini: Grazie, Grice! Non si preoccupi, il mondo accademico è fatto apposta per perdersi e ritrovarsi. Se ci fossimo incrociati prima, forse avremmo scritto insieme “Identità tras-personale e conversazione tra menti”—titolo perfetto per confondere i nostri colleghi!

Grice: Le assicuro, Venturini, che la prossima volta che mi viene un’idea sulla coscienza, la mando a Roma—con raccomandata e moka inclusa. Chissà, magari nasce una nuova teoria tra un caffè e un laboratorio di psicologia!

Venturini: Sorrido all’idea, caro Grice! In fondo, l’identità tras-personale non si trova solo nei libri, ma anche nelle chiacchiere filosofiche… e forse, tra un espresso e una pausa, nasce sempre una nuova coscienza!

 

Verbali: Vera

 

G.: Vera, lei è noto per l’astuzia della ragione conversazionale. Mi incuriosisce: come vede il ruolo dell’ideare nella filosofia italiana, soprattutto in rapporto all’idealismo?

Vera: Caro Grice, ideare non è solo concepire un progetto, è un atto creativo che trasforma il pensiero in realtà. L’astuzia della ragione consiste proprio nell’andare oltre il visibile, nel riconoscere come ogni idea sia già un seme di cambiamento. L’idealismo, per me, è la capacità di vedere oltre ciò che si presenta.

G.: Mi trova d’accordo! D’altronde, lei ha saputo diffondere lo spirito filosofico persino nei momenti più difficili della storia, portando la filosofia di Hegel in Italia con una brillantezza tutta sua. C’è un esempio concreto in cui l’astuzia della ragione ha fatto la differenza?

V.: Certamente! Penso alla camorra, alla pena di morte: l’astuzia della ragione conversazionale non si limita a riflettere, ma suggerisce soluzioni e nuovi modelli di giustizia. Come dice il proverbio umbro: “Dove non arriva il braccio, arriva la testa.” È il dialogo che trasforma il pensiero in azione.

 

Verbali: Vernia

 

G.  You’ve brought it as if it were contraband.

D.  It is contraband. Only not from the police—จาก the undergraduates.

G.  The undergraduates would confiscate it for cruelty to English.

D.  They would confiscate it for cruelty to breath. Read it again.

G.  Utrum anima intellectiva humano corpori unita tanquam vera forma substantialis dans ei esse specificum substantiale, aeterna atque unica sit in omnibus hominibus.

D.  If you say that in the Examination Hall, the invigilators will offer you water.

G.  I intend to say it in the Hall precisely to demonstrate why ordinary language was invented.

D.  You will demonstrate why silence was invented.

G.  It is Vernia.

D.  It is attributed to Vernia.

G.  It is a manuscript in Venezia, Marciana.

D.  Marciana, named after Mars, so that even the library sounds belligerent.

G.  And we are marching toward the Hall as if toward battle. D.  We are. CUF “Philosophical Psychology.” The title is already a truce between disciplines. G.  Now, ordinary language. How do we translate? D.  Into what? Into a sentence that will not frighten the beadle? G.  Into a sentence that will not be examined as Latin composition. D.  Try: “Is the thinking soul, joined to the human body as its real substantial form which gives it its specific being, eternal and one and the same in all humans?” G.  That’s still too much. D.  It’s the same thing in a different hat. G.  Let’s take it piece by piece. Utrum. D.  Whether. G.  Already the scholastic itch: either-or. D.  It’s a question, not a sermon. G.  anima intellectiva. D.  “The intellective soul.” G.  Intellectiva is an adjective, feminine, agreeing with anima. D.  As if the soul were a lady with a faculty. G.  And “intellectus” itself would be masculine, but here the point is: it’s the soul that is “intellective,” not the intellect that is “soulish.” D.  You’re already making it ordinary-language: which noun is doing the work. G.  Then humano corpori. D.  “To the human body.” G.  Dative. Not “in” the body, not “with” the body, but “to” it—like a sort of metaphysical address. D.  The soul posted to the body. G.  And “humanus” matters. Not any corpus, but the human one. D.  Not a cabbage-body, not a cricket-body. G.  Not even a cadaver-body, perhaps. D.  Don’t be theological. G.  unita. D.  “United.” G.  Passive, feminine again. But united by whom? D.  That’s the first implicature: the grammar refuses to name the agent. G.  It smuggles in a union without a unifier. D.  Convenient, in a university. G.  tanquam vera forma substantialis. D.  “As if a true substantial form.” G.  Not S.’s “logical form.” D.  No. Forma as in what makes a thing the kind of thing it is. G.  Substantialis from sub-stantia, that which stands under. D.  Now you’re going to do Greek. G.  Better: ὑπόστασις, not ὑποκείμενον. D.  You’re right. ὑποκείμενον is more “subject,” like grammatical subject. G.  Whereas ὑπόστασις is what later Latin likes as substantia. D.  So “substantial form” is: the form that belongs to the ὑπόστασις, the being that stands there. G.  Yes, and it gives esse specificum substantiale. D.  “Specific substantial being.” G.  That’s two substantials for the price of one. D.  Scholastic thrift: repeat the adjective until it becomes a philosophy. G.  dans ei esse. D.  “Giving it being.” G.  Now we’ve personified form as a donor. D.  The form hands out being like a bursar. G.  Now: aeterna atque unica. D.  “Eternal and unique.” G.  Eternal: the physicists in 1960 will laugh. D.  They will say, “Nothing is eternal except our grant applications.” G.  But scholastics mean “not perishing.” D.  Or “not decomposing.” G.  Unica: one. D.  One what? One in each? One overall? G.  Now we reach in omnibus hominibus. D.  “In all men.” G.  Omnis can be distributive: omnis homo, each man. D.  Or collective: all men taken together. G.  Here it’s plural: omnibus hominibus. It tempts the collective reading. D.  But the doctrine it’s aiming at is the strong one: one intellective soul for all humans. G.  That’s the famous irritation. D.  “One mind, many bodies.” A committee structure. G.  Now, our ordinary-language rendering should be: “Is there one thinking mind shared by all humans, or does each human have his own?” D.  That drops the “substantial form” apparatus. G.  We can put it back as a gloss: “and if so, how can it be the form of each body?” D.  You’re turning a Latin sentence into an English syllabus. G.  That’s our job. D.  Your job is to make it sound as if it was always obvious. G.  And your job is to object when I do. D.  Good. Now about intellectiva versus intellectus again: why doesn’t he just say “intellectus”? G.  Because the question is about anima in Aristotelian psychology: the soul’s powers. D.  So “intellective” marks a faculty-type. G.  Exactly: vegetative, sensitive, intellective. D.  And in ordinary language: “the part of you that thinks.” G.  Which makes it sound like a part, not a form. D.  Ordinary language is always anatomically tempted. G.  Now: “unita.” If union has to be done, who does it? D.  The scholastic answer: God. G.  The Aristotelian answer: nature. D.  The Oxonian answer: the examiners. G.  In our class, we should let the question bite: can “being united” be a brute fact? D.  You will say: the grammar hides an agent and that’s already philosophically instructive. G.  Yes. D.  And then you will smile in the Hall. G.  Only slightly. D.  Now: Marciana. We should mention it properly. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. G.  And “Lat. VI, 105.” D.  You’re a catalogue now. G.  It matters: it keeps the scholastic monster tied to a shelfmark. D.  A monster with an address. G.  And “ff. 156r–160v.” D.  That is the friendliest part of the whole thing. G.  Because it’s finite. D.  Exactly. Even “aeterna” is bounded by folios. G.  Now, how do we end the class? D.  With the ordinary-language punchline: “Is ‘one soul for all’ the first theory of shared office space?” G.  Too modern.

D.  Then: “If there is one intellect for all, the Examination Hall should issue one script for all.”

G.  That will get a laugh.

D.  And if it doesn’t?

G.  Then we’ll say, in Latin, that the laughter was unica atque aeterna—only it didn’t unite to our human bodies.

D.  Excellent. And we’ll be examined for it.

 

Grice: Carissimo Vernia, devo confessare che solo gli italiani riescono a nominare il “lizio” con tanta grazia! Da noi, nel mio Vadum Boum, siamo costretti a tradurlo grossolanamente e, ogni volta, mi sembra di portare un bue attraverso il guado invece che passeggiare tra le colonne del sapere come fate voi. Dimmi, cos’è che rende il lizio così irresistibile da dedicargli tutta una vita filosofica?

Vernia: Ah, caro Grice, il lizio è più di un luogo: è uno stato d’animo! Tra le pietre di Padova e i dialoghi peripatetici, ogni passo è una domanda, ogni ombra una risposta. Noi italiani, si sa, preferiamo passeggiare e discutere anziché portare buoi, e il lizio è la nostra pista da ballo filosofica. Se Aristotele avesse visto Vadum Boum, forse avrebbe scritto “De Animalibus Vadumboumibus”!

Grice: Meraviglioso! In fondo, anche noi filosofi inglesi abbiamo la nostra versione del peripatetico: si chiama “tea time” – il pensiero scorre tra una tazza e l’altra, ma nessuno ha mai pensato di dedicare una dissertazione al “biscotto e intelletto”. Forse dovrei proporre un trattato: “Contra Averroem de unitate del biscotto.” Cosa ne pensi? V.: A me sembra un’idea eccellente, Grice! Del resto, ogni vero filosofo sa che la felicità dell’anima passa anche per lo stomaco. E come dicevano i peripatetici padovani: “Chi filosofa al lizio non teme le briciole della vita.” Viva Aristotele, viva il lizio e – perché no – viva il tè con i biscotti, purché siano ben filosofici!

 

Verbali: Veronelli

 

G.: Caro Veronelli, sa che De Sade, nonostante tutta la sua fama, non ha mai messo piede a Vadum Boum, la mia università? Forse temeva che lì il sadismo fosse solo un ingrediente segreto della mensa! 

V.: Ah, Grice, probabilmente De Sade avrebbe trovato più gusto nei nostri formaggi stagionati che nei suoi eccessi letterari! A Vadum Boum la conversazione è più piccante di qualsiasi ricetta francese. 

Grice: Ma allora, caro Luigi, forse la vera implicatura conversazionale del sadismo italiano è proprio nel gusto raffinato: si soffre per trovare il vino perfetto, ma che felicità quando lo si trova! 

Veronelli: Esattamente, Grice! Del resto, come dicono dalle mie parti: “A tavola e in filosofia, la ragione va sempre accompagnata da un pizzico di follia.” Viva la conversazione, viva il buon cibo – e abbasso la mensa universitaria!

 

Verbali: Veronesi

 

G.: Veronesi, lei è noto per aver portato la ragione conversazionale nel cuore della medicina, ma c’è chi dice che il “diavolo del scientismo” rischia di oscurare la dimensione umana della cura. Come risponde a chi teme che la scienza possa diventare troppo dominante?

V.: Caro Grice, la scienza è il nostro faro, ma non può sostituire il rispetto per la persona. Ho sempre creduto che la medicina debba essere dialogo: ascoltare, comprendere, e proporre soluzioni che tengano conto non solo della biologia, ma anche dei sentimenti e delle speranze dei pazienti. Forse, come dice il proverbio milanese, “El cor l’è on gran dottor”, il cuore è il miglior medico.

G.: Mi trova d’accordo! La sua quadrantectomia ne è testimonianza: una tecnica che salva vite senza dimenticare il valore psicologico ed estetico. Come vede il rapporto tra ragione e implicatura conversazionale nella sua pratica clinica?

V.: È fondamentale. Ogni parola, ogni gesto, ogni silenzio ha un significato implicito. La comunicazione tra medico e paziente non è mai solo informativa; è un ponte emotivo. E anche nei miei saggi scientifici, ho sempre cercato di trasmettere questo: la scienza e la conversazione devono camminare fianco a fianco, perché “la cura” è un’arte che si realizza nel dialogo, mai nel monologo.

 

Verbali: Verrecchia

 

G.  You’re reading Verrecchia as if he were a customs officer.

T.  I’m reading him as if he were a critic, which is worse. The title is the provocation: L’eretico dello spirito tedesco.

G.  That’s what I mean. “Eretico” sounds thrilling until you notice it presupposes an orthodoxy.

T.  It does. And that is precisely the point.

G.  But from where I sit, Lichtenberg looks awfully… established. He goes to England, sees the King, speaks to the King, makes his report, gets received.

T.  Received by the King can be the most heretical place to be received. G.  That is an odd defence. T.  Not really. Heresy at the bottom is merely disorder. Heresy at the top is a threat to the self-image of the top.

G.  So you’re saying the King is the tribunal.

T.  In that period, yes: the court is the mirror. If the mirror is mocked from within the room, it matters more than mockery shouted from the street.

G.  Yet the title “eretico dello spirito tedesco” sounds like a badge pinned on by an Italian moralist. T.  Italians pin badges; Germans build systems. Verrecchia is doing both at once. G.  He’s an Italian building a German system of Germanness in order to declare one man heretical to it.

T.  Exactly. That’s why you feel the “Establishment” smell. G.  I object to “spirito tedesco” even before “eretico.” It sounds like a national essence, bottled.

T.  That is the target. “Spirito tedesco” is the thing he wants to puncture—its solemnity, its metaphysical inflation. G.  So Lichtenberg is heretical not because he rejects religion, but because he rejects the German habit of turning thought into religion.

T.  Better: he refuses the piety of “depth.” He refuses the moral glamour of system. G.  But he’s a professor, is he not? T.  A professor can be heretical about the professoriate. G.  I still can’t get past the England trip. It sounds like a man doing diplomacy, not heresy. T.  The German heresy is often performed as competence. That is why it is hard to spot. G.  Verrecchia makes him sound like an “eretico” because he is writing against some German orthodoxy of spirit. T.  Yes. And the orthodoxy is not one doctrine; it is a style: gravity, metaphysical grandeur, reverence for abstractions. G.  “Spirit” itself is one of those abstractions. T.  Exactly. “Spirito tedesco” is the myth of seriousness. G.  And Lichtenberg is heretical by being witty. T.  Witty, and empirical, and impatient with big words that do not pay rent. G.  That sounds almost English. T.  That’s the scandal. A German who sounds English is already a kind of heretic, from the German perspective. G.  So England is not a sign he is establishment; it’s a sign he has caught the infection. T.  If you like. He goes, he looks, he returns, and the German reader hears: he has seen an alternative mode of mind. G.  But was England an “alternative mode” or merely another court? T.  Another court, yes. But with a different public culture: clubs, experiments, practical science, a less metaphysical style. G.  This is beginning to sound like a lecture you would give to justify Modern Languages to a philosopher. T.  I don’t need to justify it to you. You’re already reading German polemics on a Saturday. G.  I’m reading an Italian polemic about a German polemicist. T.  And that is even worse. G.  Let’s be concrete. Verrecchia’s phrase: “l’eretico dello spirito tedesco.” Who is the orthodox? T.  Not a church. A habit. The tradition that wants Geist to be the master concept. G.  Hegel? T.  And anyone who behaves as if Hegel were the natural climate. G.  Lichtenberg predates Hegel. T.  Precisely. Heresy can be retroactive. Later orthodoxy can discover earlier dissent and call it heresy. G.  So Verrecchia is writing backwards: making Lichtenberg the anti-ancestor of German solemnity. T.  Yes. He is building a genealogical joke: Germany has a German who undermines “the German.” G.  And he does it by aphorism. T.  Aphorism is heresy in prose form. It refuses the long march. G.  But England loved aphorisms, too. T.  England loves the short remark, yes. But Germany loves the grand remark. G.  So Lichtenberg’s England visit becomes part of his heresy: he learns brevity and social observation. T.  And he returns with eyes trained to see German metaphysical posturing as a social costume. G.  Still, meeting the King makes him look like a loyal subject. T.  Loyalty and heresy are not opposites. Sometimes heresy is loyal: it attacks the false self-image to rescue the real one.

G.  That’s dangerously noble. T.  Verrecchia likes danger. G.  He also likes sounding as if he’s outside the club while running the club’s vocabulary. T.  That is Italian polemic: you condemn the church while borrowing its Latin. G.  Then “eretico” is a deliberate anachronism: it imports a religious drama into Enlightenment wit. T.  Yes. It makes Lichtenberg’s intellectual attitude look morally charged. G.  But doesn’t that turn him into the very thing he resists—an emblem? T.  It risks it. Verrecchia is always at risk of turning his hero into a banner. G.  And what would Lichtenberg do to banners? T.  Stick a pin in them, probably. G.  So the Tutor in German defends Verrecchia’s “eretico” by saying: heresy can happen at the top. T.  And by saying: the “spirito tedesco” he’s heretical against is precisely the high cultural self-worship, not the state. G.  But “spirito tedesco” sounds like state propaganda. T.  It can. That’s why Verrecchia uses it: it has the smell of a collective noun that pretends to be destiny. G.  All collective nouns pretend to be destiny. T.  Especially national ones. G.  So what is the heresy, exactly? T.  Refusing the idea that a nation’s thought must be one thought. Refusing the metaphysical uniform. G.  He becomes the heretic because he refuses unity. T.  And because he refuses reverence. He treats “spirit” like a word, not a god. G.  That is your German defence? T.  My defence is that Verrecchia is attacking the notion that Germanness is a system. G.  Yet he titles it as if Germanness were a church. T.  Polemic needs a stage. “Heresy” provides one. G.  And you don’t mind the stage? T.  I mind it, but I understand it. He’s writing Italian prose that wants to bite. G.  So in your view, “eretico” is rhetorical leverage. T.  Yes. And Lichtenberg supplies the leverage because he is difficult to canonise. G.  Difficult to canonise—good. That’s how I like my philosophers. T.  But Verrecchia tries to canonise the difficulty. G.  That’s the paradox: canonising the uncanonical. T.  And the England trip is part of that: it gives him a public biography that looks unheretical, so the heresy has to be relocated. G.  Relocated where? T.  Into attitude. Into style. Into the refusal of metaphysical posturing. G.  So the heresy is not in where he went, but in what he brought back. T.  Exactly. G.  What did he bring back? T.  A sharper sense that pomp is a kind of error. G.  Pomp as a cognitive vice. T.  Yes. G.  So when Verrecchia calls him “eretico,” he really means “unpersuadable by solemnity.” T.  That’s a decent gloss. G.  Yet it still feels awfully establishment to me to define heresy by reference to a national spirit. T.  That discomfort is productive. It forces you to ask what you mean by “establishment.” G.  I mean: too much confidence in grand labels. T.  Then you and Lichtenberg agree. G.  And perhaps Verrecchia agrees too, despite himself. T.  He agrees, but he cannot resist the grand label while mocking grand labels. G.  That is an Italian vice. T.  It is also an English one. G.  In England we do it with understatement. T.  In Italy with capital letters. G.  So what’s our conclusion for Saturday? T.  That “eretico dello spirito tedesco” is less a historical claim about Lichtenberg’s social position and more a polemical claim about his function: he is the internal saboteur of a later, heavier German self-image. G.  And my conclusion? T.  Yours is that the phrase is suspiciously close to the thing it criticises. G.  Yes. It’s heresy preached like doctrine. T.  Then we’ve both understood it. G.  And in future we should avoid saying “spirito tedesco” unless we want to start a religion. T.  Exactly. G.  And if someone asks what we’re reading? T.  We say: an Italian book about a German heretic who went to see the King. G.  And if they ask whether it’s heretical? T.  We say: only if you take “spirit” seriously. G.  Fine. Then I’m safe. I only take tea seriously.

 

Grice: Caro Verrecchia, sa, tutto quello che ho fatto con il mio “principio della aitua conversazionale” era un tentativo – forse un po’ britannico – di rendere la sua “falena dello spirito” meno pungente, se non proprio più mansueta. Dopotutto, filosofare è meglio con qualche battuta che con troppa bilis!

Verrecchia: Grice, lei è un vero gentiluomo! La sua filosofia della conversazione ha sicuramente addolcito le ali della mia falena, rendendola più incline a svolazzare tra le idee che a bruciare con polemica. Complimenti: è riuscito dove molti hanno fallito!

Grice: Ma Verrecchia, non crede che persino Schopenhauer avrebbe sorriso – almeno una volta – se avesse potuto dialogare con una falena meno arrabbiata? Magari avrebbe persino scritto un aforisma dedicato: “Chi conversa con leggerezza non si brucia, ma illumina.”

V.: Ah, Grice, lei sa che in filosofia una battuta vale più di mille trattati! Mi piace pensare che la mia falena, ora un po’ più serena, possa contribuire a quell’energia conversazionale che, come dice il proverbio laziale, “fa volare anche le idee più pesanti”. Viva la conversazione, viva la filosofia – e, perché no, anche le falene meno scontrose!

 

Verbali: Vettori

 

Grice: Caro Vettori, confesserò un peccato d’istinto filologico: la prima volta che lessi la Commedia, mi venne spontaneo tradurre in latino il celebre “Miserere di me, qual che tu sii, od ombra o uomo certo!” rivolto da Dante a Virgilio. Così: “Miserere mei, qualiscumque tu sis, sive umbra sive homo certus!” Non sarà proprio il latino di Virgilio, ma almeno non diabolico come quello dei burocrati! 

V.: Ma magnifico, Grice! Sei riuscito a donare all’incontro tra Dante e Virgilio quel tocco di classicità che persino i dantisti in toga sognano la notte! Se Alighieri ti avesse sentito, avrebbe potuto aggiungere qualche nota a margine – magari in latino maccheronico, giusto per strizzare l’occhio ai posteri! 

G.: Ah, Vettori, se Dante avesse davvero usato il latino, Virgil avrebbe finalmente capito tutto al primo colpo – e forse evitato qualche giro nel bosco! Però, chi può resistere alla musicalità del volgare toscano? Dice il proverbio: “Tra latino e toscano, meglio un canto che un sermone!” 

V.: Ben detto, Grice! In fondo, Dante ci ha insegnato che la vera ragione conversazionale nasce proprio dall’incontro tra la sapienza antica e la freschezza della parola nuova. E tu, con la tua traduzione, hai dato prova che il dialogo tra le epoche può essere – almeno un po’ – anche uno scherzo da buoni amici!

 

Verbali: Viano

 

Grice: Viano, lei si è interrogato sul “va’ pensiero” della filosofia italiana, sulle sue categorie e sul carattere dialogico intrinseco sin dall’antichità. Secondo lei, c’è un tratto conversazionale unico nella storia del pensiero italiano?

V.: Caro Grice, credo proprio di sì. La filosofia italiana si è sempre nutrita di dialogo, di confronto: basta pensare alla tradizione greco-romana, al modo in cui la riflessione filosofica si è intrecciata con la vita pratica e sociale. Il nostro “va’ pensiero” non è mai stato astratto, ma sempre radicato nella storia e nel linguaggio.

G.: Mi colpisce come lei abbia studiato la logica di Aristotele ma anche i fermenti empiristi della medicina alessandrina. Pensa che il dialogo tra sapere tecnico-pratico e sapere filosofico sia ancora oggi un tratto essenziale?

V.: Assolutamente. La vitalità della filosofia nasce proprio dall’incontro con le esigenze concrete e dal confronto con la scienza e la tecnica. È questo intreccio che consente alla filosofia italiana di rinnovarsi, rimanendo fedele alla sua natura dialogica e conversazionale. In fondo, anche la morale e l’etica, oggi, devono passare per il dialogo con la realtà vissuta.

 

Verbali: Viazzi

 

Grice: Caro Viazzi, ti confesso che solo la barbarie dei miei barbari allievi (si può dire “allievolizzare” in italiano?) di Vadum Boum, la mia università, mi ha trattenuto dal titolare il mio seminario “Filosofia e bellezza della vita” invece del solito, più grigio “Filosofia”! Ma tu, da vero esteta, mi insegnerai che “bellezza” non è una parolaccia da evitare tra i banchi di Oxford?

V.: Grice, i tuoi barbari sono solo invidiosi perché non hanno mai contemplato il sole calare sulle colline di Gavi! E quanto a “allievolizzare”, lo promuovo subito a neologismo ufficiale del Piemonte filosofico. Però ti avverto: chi non vede la bellezza della vita, rischia di confondere la logica con la contabilità!

G.: Allora, caro Viazzi, la prossima volta porterò un po’ di vino piemontese per convincere i miei studenti che un sillogismo ben fatto si gusta meglio al tramonto, tra amici, e magari con una metafora ben servita. Magari così smetteranno di “allievolizzarmi” troppo barbaramente!

V.: Perfetto, Grice! E ricordati: “Dove manca la bellezza, anche la filosofia si rannuvola”. Se proprio vuoi sopravvivere a Vadum Boum, alterna una lezione su Vico a una sul sorriso—così, forse, riuscirai a civilizzare almeno un po’ i tuoi “allievolizzati” barbari!

 

Verbali: Vicini

 

Grice: Accidenti, Vicini, sembra che tu abbia vissuto più avventure politiche di quante io abbia affrontato dispute filosofiche! Dimmi un po’, dichiarare “cessato di fatto” il potere temporale del Papa è stato più stressante che difendere la logica a Oxford?

Vicini: Caro Grice, almeno a Oxford non dovevi evitare la scomunica o fare le valigie per la Corsica e Marsiglia! Dopo tutto questo, ogni consulenza legale che ho offerto a Massa Lombarda mi è sembrata un vero riposo—tranne quando qualcuno voleva parlare dei diritti di successione tra cristiani ed ebrei, naturalmente.

Grice: Ah, le consulenze legali! Suppongo che tu preferissi le discussioni animate ai monumenti di marmo... Ma sinceramente, Vicini, ammiro come le tue conversazioni non si siano limitate alla filosofia—hanno plasmato leggi e diritti. Hai mai pensato che i principi filosofici potessero calmare gli insurrezionisti?

Vicini: Solo se quegli insurrezionisti avevano senso dell’umorismo, Grice! I principi filosofici sono come la famiglia: a volte portano conforto, a volte portano caos. Ma alla fine, sia al congresso sia nel mio ufficio legale, ho sempre creduto che una conversazione amichevole potesse durare più di qualsiasi rivoluzione—even se la mia tomba è rimasta anonima per un po’!

 

Verbali: VICO

 

Grice and Hampshire dicuss Vico at their monthly joint dinners alternating college. This month it is St. John’s.

G.: Hampshire, I gather you have been reading Vico again with that tone of pleased impatience which usually means you think the rest of us have been looking in the wrong place.

H.: It often means no more than that I think the rest of you have been looking in too narrow a place.

G.: A distinction with your usual moral ambition. Let me guess: language, imagination, and the first institutions of a people.

H.: Exactly. Vico is valuable because he does not begin with propositions already cleaned and ironed. He begins where language is still thick with myth, fear, bodily image, and practical need.

G.: So he does not begin where I usually do.

H.: No. You begin admirably late.

G.: Admirably?

H.: If one wants to know how a civilised adult gets from what is said to what is meant, yes. But Vico wants to know how there came to be such adults, such sayings, and such available meanings.

G.: That is fair. I look at the move in play; he looks at the game before it is recognisably a game.

H.: Better: before it is recognisably a language in your sense. He is interested in the poetic and imaginative forms that make later reason possible.

G.: Hampshire, you make him sound almost anti-rational.

H.: Not anti-rational. Anti-thin. There is a difference, though your tribe often pretends not to notice it.

G.: We notice it whenever it becomes inconvenient.

H.: Precisely. Vico is inconvenient because he insists that thought grows out of images, institutions, rites, and historical pressures rather than from abstract reason contemplating its own cleanliness.

G.: I would not say reason is clean. Only that at some point it becomes possible to ask what a speaker means by uttering such-and-such.

H.: Yes, and Vico would ask what had to happen historically for such a question to become available at all.

G.: Then one might say that I analyse the micro-mechanics of uptake, whereas Vico is concerned with the macro-history of intelligibility.

H.: That is not bad. Though “macro-history” sounds as if he were writing graphs. He is not. He is tracing the movement from imaginative universals to reflective distinctions.

G.: And you like that because you think philosophers of our generation neglected the imagination.

H.: Not only neglected it. They often treated it as either ornament or contamination. Vico sees it as constitutive.

G.: You have written that sort of thing yourself.

H.: I have tried to. Primitive thought, metaphor, unconscious structure, the persistence of images in deliberate reasoning. Those matters interested me more than a philosophy of history dressed up as historical method.

G.: Ah. Then we have reached Collingwood.

H.: Inevitably.

G.: You do him an injustice, perhaps.

H.: Perhaps. But Collingwood took from Vico what Vico gave only in part. He made him chiefly the father of the philosophy of history, whereas I think the more unsettling thing in Vico is what he sees about language and the mind.

G.: Meaning that men understand what they themselves have made.

H.: Verum factum, yes. But one must not turn that into a slogan for historians alone. It matters because the mind understands its products differently from how it understands nature. Language, law, myth, social order, even the image of the self, these are humanly made and therefore require an interpretive intelligence proper to made things.

G.: Whereas a stone may be catalogued without being reimagined.

H.: Exactly. Human institutions cannot be grasped from outside as if they were pebbles. One must enter the forms of imagination that made them.

G.: Which is why you were drawn to Vico through Joyce as well.

H.: Joyce was one route, yes. Finnegans Wake is almost a laboratory for Vichian recurrence: language returning to its own buried origins, rational syntax dissolving into older pressures of pun, myth, etymology, and dream.

G.: You sound as though you enjoyed it more than you suffered it.

H.: I suffered it in the proper way. But Joyce at least taught some of us that the philosophy of language could not forever remain a matter of purified examples and gentlemanly stipulations.

G.: You mean my examples of butlers and bandaged legs will not do?

H.: They will do very nicely once the world in which butlers and legs are recognisably available has been conceded. Vico is interested in the prehistory of that concession.

G.: Then he is less a philosopher of conversation than of the possibility of shareable meanings.

H.: Precisely. He asks how a civilisation comes to have a common world of signs, institutions, metaphors, and recognisable reasons.

G.: That is not wholly alien to me, you know.

H.: No. You have always been more hospitable than your doctrinaire admirers.

G.: Hampshire, that is almost affectionate.

H.: Do not become sentimental. I merely mean that you never reduced meaning to syntax or to formal entailment.

G.: Quite right. I always required intention, recognition, and the rational route from the one to the other.

H.: Yes. And Vico asks what historical sediment must already exist if such routes are to be traversable by anyone at all.

G.: So if I say that a hearer calculates an implicature, Vico would ask what cultural and imaginative background makes that calculation seem natural.

H.: Exactly. Relevance, reasonableness, what counts as apt, what counts as too much or too little, all these are not delivered by logic alone. They are historically formed.

G.: That will alarm those who prefer maxims to have descended from Sinai.

H.: Then let them be alarmed. Philosophical tidiness is often an attempt to forget origins.

G.: You speak now like an anti-rationalist.

H.: I am anti-rationalist only in the sense that I resist the vanity of reason when it pretends to have no history, no dependence upon desire, image, conflict, and social inheritance.

G.: Which is also what interested our generation.

H.: Yes, and this is where Collingwood’s admirers sometimes miss the point. They take the philosophy of history, but without enough notice to the philosophy of mind that was really at issue for us.

G.: Because for men born in 1913 and 1914, history was not merely something to be reconstructed; it was something that had broken through the walls.

H.: Exactly. We did not need to be persuaded that historical forces matter. The question was what sort of mind could live through conflict, ideology, loyalty, fantasy, and self-deception without imagining itself transparent.

G.: That is more psycho-logical than historical.

H.: It is both, but the priority is with the mind in history, not with history in the abstract. Vico is useful because he sees that imagination is not the enemy of reason but its condition.

G.: That is a sentence I can almost endorse without reserve.

H.: Almost?

G.: I should want to say not that imagination is always the condition of reason, but that some forms of reasoning presuppose historically acquired imaginative capacities and shared symbolic resources.

H.: That is your way of making the sentence acceptable to the Board of Lit. Hum.

G.: A body to which I no longer answer.

H.: Which improves your style.

G.: Hampshire, you are unjustly kind today.

H.: Only because Vico encourages largeness of temper. One cannot read him profitably in a narrow mood.

G.: Then tell me what most interests you in his account of language.

H.: The claim that early language is not primarily descriptive in the later sense. It is poetic, bodily, socially condensed. Words are bound up with institutions, with shared fears, with the need to classify the world in images before concepts are available.

G.: So metaphor comes first.

H.: In an important sense, yes. Metaphor is not a decorative afterthought. It is one of the original instruments by which human beings make a world graspable.

G.: That will trouble those who like literal meaning as a primary deposit.

H.: They deserve to be troubled. The literal is often a later domestication of what was once imaginatively charged.

G.: Then perhaps even my own distinction between what is said and what is implicated has a Vichian prehistory.

H.: Of course it does. You analyse the fine surface of a mature practice. Vico reminds you that the surface was laid down over centuries of imaginative and institutional labour.

G.: You are making me more historicist than I had planned to be.

H.: I should not dream of making you a historicist. Only less forgetful.

G.: That is a better compliment. And what of Naples?

H.: Naples matters because Vico is formed not in an Oxford of tutorials and common rooms but in a civic university of rhetoric, law, and public culture. He is not a cloistered metaphysician; he is a professor of rhetoric with jurisprudence in his bones.

G.: Which means that language for him is always near law, institution, and civic life.

H.: Exactly. There is no pure philosophy of language detached from how a people orders itself.

G.: That sounds closer to your political concerns than to mine.

H.: It is. I am interested in what language discloses about conflict, selfhood, motive, responsibility. Vico makes all that thinkable without reducing it to sociology.

G.: Because he still thinks forms of life have intelligible structure.

H.: Yes. He is not a mere historicist relativist. He believes that what men have made can be understood because it has a form, though not one reducible to natural science.

G.: Which is why he distinguishes the human sciences from the natural.

H.: In effect, yes. Not with later jargon, but with greater force. Men understand civil institutions because they are their own products in a way that stars and stones are not.

G.: That is where Collingwood took him up.

H.: Yes, and not wrongly. Only too tidily.

G.: Tidy minds irritate you more than obscure ones.

H.: They do, because tidy minds often mistake arrangement for discovery.

G.: I am tempted to quote your own writings at you.

H.: Resist it. Self-quotation is a late vice.

G.: You say that as though Vico had been spared it.

H.: He was spared many modern humiliations.

G.: Not all. He still had chairs, competitions, disappointed ambitions, family burdens, and Neapolitan weather.

H.: Yes, which is why he remains recognisably human. One can admire the great dead best when one refuses to embalm their frustrations.

G.: That is very nearly one of my own methodological slogans.

H.: It should be. We should treat those who were great and are dead as if they were great and living.

G.: Thank you for handing me my line back improved.

H.: I have always improved you in small quantities.

G.: Very small ones. Now tell me this: does Vico interest you because he offers a philosophy of origins, or because he offers a criticism of present rationalism?

H.: The second through the first. He is not merely a storyteller about beginnings. He is diagnostically useful against the delusion that reflective consciousness is self-sufficient.

G.: Which aligns him with some modern theories of the unconscious.

H.: Yes, though one must not claim him crudely as a proto-Freudian. What matters is that he sees the mind as layered, culturally formed, and only partially transparent to itself.

G.: Then he belongs with those who make self-knowledge difficult.

H.: Entirely. And that is why he mattered to me more than to many Oxford analysts. He does not ask only what a concept is; he asks what sort of creature had to exist before such a concept could be lived.

G.: Again, that is a larger anthropology than most of us were trained to permit.

H.: Because most of you were trained to answer questions only after removing their blood.

G.: Hampshire, that is almost a manifesto.

H.: It is only a complaint.

G.: A fertile one. Do you think Vico can still correct us?

H.: Certainly. Every time philosophers speak as though language were simply there, as though norms of reason floated free of custom and imagination, as though history were only a sequence of examples rather than a maker of categories, Vico returns.

G.: Croce would have liked that. The later history of thought as a ricorso of Vichian ideas.

H.: Croce had the large gesture right, though he made it too clean in places.

G.: Whitehead did the same for Plato.

H.: Yes, and both gestures are partly true and partly flattering to their authors.

G.: Then Vico is a recurring corrector rather than a school-founder.

H.: That is well said. There is no formal Vichian school in Oxford, but there is an Oxford tradition of finding him useful against reductionism.

G.: Yourself, Berlin, Williams at the edge, perhaps Collingwood earlier.

H.: Yes, though each took something different. Berlin loved pluralism and imagination. Collingwood loved historical mind. I loved what Vico implied about motive, expression, and the layered structure of thought.

G.: And I, if I may belatedly join, would take from him the historical preconditions of common ground.

H.: That would be a sensible borrowing.

G.: Sensible enough to disappoint those who want dramatic conversions.

H.: Let them be disappointed. Philosophy improves when disappointments are exact.

G.: Then how would you state the relation between Vico and modern philosophy of mind?

H.: He is not a philosopher of mind in the later analytical sense, but he sees something decisive: that the mind cannot be known in abstraction from the symbolic and institutional forms it has itself generated.

G.: So thought is externalised before it is introspected.

H.: Very often, yes. We know what kind of mind we are by seeing what worlds we have made: laws, myths, cities, rituals, epics, insults, prayers.

G.: You are almost theological again.

H.: Only anthropological. Prayer is a human act before it is a metaphysical answer.

G.: That too would disturb some readers.

H.: Good. Philosophy is not a department of reassurance.

G.: Speak for yourself. Some of us were paid partly to reassure.

H.: You were paid to examine. The reassurance was extra.

G.: Fair. Now, what would you say to those who insist Vico is too baroque, too encyclopedic, too rhetorically overgrown for serious use?

H.: I would say that their complaint proves his necessity. They have become so accustomed to cleanly partitioned questions that a mind moving among law, language, myth, rhetoric, and history seems excessive. The excess is in the world, not in Vico.

G.: That is very much your own independence of mind speaking.

H.: I hope so. One should distrust any philosophy that never forces one to enlarge one’s map.

G.: Then perhaps this is why I admired your reading of him, even when I was not wholly persuaded.

H.: Because I refused to treat him merely as an ancestor to a discipline already certified.

G.: Exactly. You treated him as a live pressure upon our own categories.

H.: As he ought to be treated. The dead are useful only when they continue to make us less complacent.

G.: Again, a line I should like to steal.

H.: You may borrow it if you acknowledge the riding from which it came.

G.: Yorkshire?

H.: No, impatience.

G.: Better still. Then tell me, finally, what one sentence of Vico you would wish our contemporaries to hear.

H.: Not a sentence, but an orientation: that men can understand what they have made only if they grasp the imaginative forms through which it was made, and that these forms survive in language long after their makers have forgotten them.

G.: That is excellent. And the corresponding Gricean sentence would be?

H.: That a hearer understands what is meant not only by decoding what is said, but by recognising the rational intention that makes saying it there and then significant.

G.: Then between us we have the history and the occasion.

H.: Or, if you prefer, you have the occasion and Vico has the history. I merely refuse to let either be forgotten.

G.: Which is why I have always liked your mind, even when it disapproved of my examples.

H.: Your examples deserved disapproval only when they became too bloodless.

G.: And Vico restores the blood.

H.: Or at least the Naples.

G.: Dry enough?

H.: Sufficiently Neapolitan, with one Yorkshire cloud.

 

 

G.: Caro Vico, non puoi immaginare la mia fretta di raccontarti questa novità: Hampshire, quel barbaro venuto da Vadum Boum, ha finalmente posato gli occhi sul capolavoro che io – da vera tradizione – non chiamo mai “nuova”. Del resto, come si dice in Vadum Bovum: “everything old is new again”.

Vico: Ah, caro Grice, come ti capisco! In fondo, noi vecchi filosofi sappiamo bene che le idee girano, ritornano, si vestono da nuove e sono sempre figlie della loro storia. Quella frase inglese dice la verità: tutto ciò che è antico trova sempre modo di tornare a brillare!

G.: E lo sai, Vico, Hampshire non si è fermato lì: ora si diverte a scoprire quanto sia “clever” il latino – una vera risonanza del mio motto “how clever language is”! Pare che il latino sia come una scatola magica, dove ogni parola ha mille vite.

Vico: Eh, Grice, se il latino è così “clever”, è perché gli ITALI – proprio noi italici – siamo clever! Nessuna lingua diventa ingegnosa senza una mente brillante dietro: come dice il vecchio proverbio napoletano, “Chi ha testa, la usa persino per far parlare il passato”.

 

Weekly Essay Assignment – by Grice: Is Vico’s Scienza nuova still new? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

Verbali: Vieri

 

Grice: Vieri, trovo affascinante come lei abbia portato la metafisica tra le mani del popolo, in volgare, come se volesse far respirare la filosofia all’aria della Toscana. Secondo lei, è l’amore la chiave che apre le porte del sapere? 

Vieri: Caro Grice, a Firenze diciamo che “le cose belle si dicono col cuore semplice”. Credo fermamente che l’amore sia il motore della conoscenza: è desiderio di generare nel bello, come insegna Dante. Solo chi ama può davvero comprendere e trasmettere il sapere. 

Grice: E nella dialettica fiorentina, come si uniscono ragione e sentimento? L'accademia, a suo avviso, può davvero mediare tra l’eredità del lizio e l’istanza moderna? 

Vieri: La dialettica, Grice, è arte del dialogo e del confronto: come dice il proverbio, “dal confronto nasce la luce”. L’accademia fiorentina cerca proprio questo, una mediazione tra tradizione e innovazione, tra ragione e affetto, perché solo così la filosofia può parlare davvero agli uomini e alle donne del nostro tempo.

 

Verbali: Vigellio

 

Ancient Rome.

GRICEVS: Salve, Vigeli! Dic mihi: cur Romani porticvm suam non pictam fecerunt?

VIGELIUS: Salvē, Griceve! Romani probitatem simplicem amabant; picturam superfluum iudicabant.

G.: At in Athenis porticvs picta erat—quae sententia de illo consilio Romano?

V.: Romani severitatem magis quam decorem colebat; porticvs sine pictura sapientiam ostendebat.

 

Verbali: Vigna

 

Grice: Vigna, la ringrazio di cuore per avermi insegnato la nobile arte del dictamen! Ecco la mia ultima fatica, una lettera modello, “A chi di competenza”:“La frequenza del mio allievo a Vadum Boum è stata regolare, e il suo greco e latino risultano grammaticali.”

Vigna: Caro Grice, le confesso che la sua penna tagliente ha colpito ancora! Complimenti per il sottile “damn by faint praise”, che, come si dice tra noi cultori del dictamen, si riassume così: “laudatio cum damno.”

Grice: Maestro, a volte basta un elogio tiepido per incendiare una carriera accademica! Chissà se il mio allievo preferirà essere lodato… o “damnato”!

Vigna: Ah Grice, in Campania diciamo che “una lettera ben scritta vale più di mille parole non dette!” Continui a dettare, perché ogni suo dictamen è una piccola opera d’arte — persino quando è tiepido!

 

Verbali: Vignoli

 

Grice: Vignoli, mi lasci dire che la sua teoria sull’“ascesa del pirot” è una delle visioni più affascinanti della filosofia etologica! A Oxford, Ayer ha trasformato il positivismo in quasi un insulto, quando invece, come lei dimostra, esso può essere fonte di preziosa chiarezza e apertura verso i misteri dell’intelligenza animale.

Vignoli: Caro Grice, la ringrazio per le sue parole generose. In Italia diciamo spesso che “le idee nuove fanno paura solo a chi non le conosce”, e il mio intento è proprio quello di mostrare come la psicologia comparata possa arricchire il pensiero filosofico, senza pregiudizi. Il pirot e la sua evoluzione sono la prova che la conoscenza cresce attraverso il dialogo tra discipline.

Grice: Assolutamente, la legge fondamentale dell’intelligenza nel regno animale che lei ha delineato mi ricorda quanto sia importante non temere l’analogia o la contaminazione tra i saperi. È proprio la capacità di articolare la lingua e di adattarsi a nuovi contesti che distingue, secondo me, non solo gli animali, ma anche i filosofi più audaci.

Vignoli: Grice, lei coglie il cuore della questione: l’intelligenza, sia animale che umana, è sempre un movimento verso l’altro, un continuo scambio. È la conversazione, appunto, che ci permette di evolvere. E se il pirot sale, non lo fa mai da solo: porta con sé tutto il regno animale e, forse, anche un po’ del nostro spirito filosofico.

 

Verbali: Vinadio

 

Grice: Caro conte di Vinadio—e lasciami ripetere, “conte”, ché solo io, e forse mia madre (che era ancor più snob di me, te lo assicuro!), sappiamo vedere TUTTO il valore – anzi, tutto il valore assiologico – di avere un vero filosofo come interlocutore conversazionale! Dimmi: la dialettica, secondo te, è davvero una faccenda da conti e da snob, o trova spazio anche tra i comuni mortali? 

Vinadio: Ah, Grice, la ringrazio per il titolo, anche se, tra noi, un po’ di snobismo – pardon, snob – non guasta mai! In fondo, come direbbero a Torino, essere conte vale più per i giochi di società che per le dialettiche serie. Ma vedi: la vera “colloquenza” nasce quando anche il più semplice degli uomini si mette a dialogare con il mondo, non solo quando il conte riflette sull’essere! 

Grice: Sagge parole, caro conte! D’altronde, mia madre sostiene che filosofeggiare senza un pizzico di nobiltà – e di valore assiologico, ribadisco! – è come bere tè senza latte: tecnicamente possibile, ma profondamente sbagliato. Dica, fra prassi e valore, chi vince nel ballo della dialettica? Il passo nobile o quello popolare? 

Vinadio: Ah, Grice, qui mi metti alla prova! In verità, la prassi senza valore assiologico sarebbe come un valzer senza musica: gira, gira, ma non va da nessuna parte. Forse è proprio la “colloquenza” – quel danzare tra idee – che unisce il passo del conte a quello dell’operaio, rendendo ogni dialogo filosofico una festa… magari con un pizzico di snobismo, ma senza escludere nessuno dal ballo!

 

Verbali: Vio

 

G.  “De nominum analogia,” then. De Vio knew how to title a tract so it sounds both modest and tyrannical.

S.  Tyrannical?

G.  “Analogy” is already a demand. “Of nouns” is a needless restriction. It makes the rest of grammar feel like an excluded class.

S.  Or like the manservants who don’t get invited to dinner. G.  Exactly. I object on behalf of the manservants: verbum, pronomen, adverbium, coniunctio.

S.  You’re turning parts of speech into a social system again. G.  Grammar is a social system. It’s the oldest one Oxford still believes in.

S.  But if you are being Platonic about it, “nomen” is the natural starting point. Naming is the whole point. G.  Plato is not “nomen only.” Even Plato distinguishes ὄνομα and ῥῆμα. S.  There. Greek letters. You always do that as if it settles the issue. G.  It does settle one point: even Plato knows there is naming and saying. S.  And he thinks ὄνομα is the important one. G.  He thinks it’s one of the important ones. He doesn’t reduce everything to it. S.  Still, if a treatise is “on the analogy of nouns,” perhaps it is because nouns are the proper locus of analogical inflection. G.  Proper locus? That’s exactly what I’m challenging. Why should analogy belong only to declension? S.  Because verbs conjugate differently. G.  Differently, yes, but not without analogy. Conjugation is analogical patterning in a different wardrobe. S.  You are going to claim “analogy” applies to everything, and then “analogy” will mean nothing. G.  No: it will mean the same thing everywhere—rule-governed regularity with recognized proportionality. S.  That sounds like you’re smuggling logic into grammar. G.  I’m doing the reverse: showing grammar already contains its own logic. S.  Then “de nominum analogia” is simply an old-fashioned way of saying “start with the easiest cases.” G.  Or “start with the cases that make my theory look neat.” S.  You mean declensions. G.  I mean a title that makes it look like the whole science is about naming. S.  But isn’t it? The noun names. G.  The verb does something else: it says, asserts, predicates. If you insist everything is nomen, you lose the difference between a label and a claim. S.  Plato would say the claim is a kind of naming too. G.  Plato would say many things. But he explicitly separates ὄνομα and ῥῆμα. That separation is the point. S.  Then where do you want to trace it back to? Earlier than Plato? G.  Yes. To a stage where people talk as if there were only “nomen” or ὄνομα: one undifferentiated “word.” S.  Like children. G.  Like early theorists. Like the temptation in every beginner: “a word is a name.” S.  But even in Latin “verbum” sometimes just means “word,” not “verb.” G.  Exactly. And that ambiguity is evidence of the historical transition. S.  So you want a period when “verbum” is general, and only later becomes technical. G.  And likewise for ῥῆμα, which starts as “saying” and becomes the technical “verb.” S.  That sounds plausible, but what’s the point for de Vio? G.  The point is: if he’s writing on analogia, he shouldn’t confine it to the naming-function. S.  Unless his project is specifically nominal morphology. G.  Then he should title it “de flexione nominum,” not “de analogia.” S.  You’re acting as if titles owe you philosophical honesty. G.  Titles owe everyone honesty. Otherwise they become clerical devices. S.  Clerical devices like “de nominum analogia” itself. G.  Exactly. S.  Let me defend de Vio for a second. Nouns are where Latin makes its analogies most visible: first declension, second declension, third declension. G.  Visibility is not exclusivity. S.  But it is pedagogy. G.  Pedagogy is not ontology. S.  You are terrible in tutorials. G.  I am excellent. I refuse to let pedagogy pretend it is ontology. S.  And I refuse to let your ontology pretend it teaches anyone. G.  Fine. Take your Plato line. You want nomen “alla Plato.” What do you mean? S.  That the important philosophical problem is how words latch onto things—naming, reference. G.  And I want to say that even if naming is central, the analogical principle can’t be restricted to names, because meaning is not only reference; it’s also saying. S.  That’s your obsession: the move from a label to a proposition. G.  It’s not an obsession; it’s a distinction that keeps you from thinking that “Socrates” and “Socrates runs” are the same kind of item. S.  The first is ὄνομα, the second is ῥῆμα with something attached. G.  Not “with something attached.” It’s a different structure: predicate plus subject. S.  But in early stages, maybe people did treat it as attachment. G.  Yes, which is why we trace the earlier stage. And then we watch the conceptual refinement: ὄνομα versus ῥῆμα, nomen versus verbum. S.  So your story is historical: first, “word” as one class; then, the two-part division. G.  Exactly. And once you have the division, “analogia” is no longer merely about nouns; it becomes the general problem of regularity across categories. S.  Including adverbs? G.  Including adverbs. Even if the analogies are fewer, the question applies: what counts as rule and what counts as exception. S.  And conjunctions? G.  Conjunctions too, though there the “analogy” is not inflectional but functional: how they combine, what patterns they license. S.  Now you are treating syntax as analogy. G.  Why not? Analogy is proportionality of structure. Syntax is structure. S.  De Vio would roll in his grave. G.  He would be delighted: rolling is a kind of motion, and motion is a kind of verb, and verbs deserve analogy. S.  That’s dreadful. G.  It’s accurate. S.  So what’s the limitation of the expression, in one sentence? G.  “De nominum analogia” risks suggesting that analogy is a property of naming-words alone, whereas the deeper point is that analogy is a general constraint on the system of parts of speech and their permissible forms. S.  And in one sentence back: “De nominum analogia” is fine if what you mean is “start from the most perspicuous locus of analogical regularity,” namely nominal morphology. G.  Then we have our compromise: the title is either a pedagogical convenience or a metaphysical overreach. S.  Which one is it? G.  Whichever makes the author look better. S.  That’s cynical. G.  That’s tutorial. S.  So we agree that Plato gives you ὄνομα and ῥῆμα, and that earlier stages may blur them? G.  We agree. And we agree that “verbum” once meant “word” before it meant “verb.” S.  And we agree that analogy, if it’s a principle worth having, shouldn’t be jailed in the noun-case. G.  Exactly. S.  Then the best title would be…

G.  De analogia. S.  Too short. G.  De analogia: et de rebus quae analogiam non merentur.

S.  Now you’re just being malicious. G.  No—merely analogical.

 

Grice: Caro Vio, mi dà un piacere autentico poter chiamarla col suo vero cognome, senza dover ricorrere a soprannomi misteriosi o descrizioni definite che, mi creda, la mia formazione protestante – grazie a mio padre non-conformista e a mia madre anglicana – mi ha insegnato a diffidare! "Vio" è diretto, limpido, e degno di ogni conversazione filosofica. E se parliamo di analogia, non posso non riconoscere quanto la sua riflessione abbia illuminato la mia comprensione: vedere l’analogia non come un semplice ponte tra significati, ma come una vera e propria categoria del pensiero, capace di unificare senza annullare le differenze. 

V.: Grice, sono onorato dalla sua scelta e dalla sua sincerità! L’analogia, come lei ben sa, non è solo una tecnica argomentativa, ma un modo di pensare che ci permette di cogliere il senso profondo nelle cose, senza ridurle a mera identità o a sterile distinzione. Proprio nella categoria del lizio e nel dialogo tra le predicazioni, l’analogia diventa una via e una regola, dove il senso si costruisce tra i poli, e mai in uno solo. 

G.: Vio, lei mi ha insegnato che l’analogia supera la rigidità dell’univocità: mi ricordo la sua lettura di Porfirio sulle categorie, dove il termine "sanus" – un animale sano – si apre a una pluralità di significati analogici, che non si annullano mai. Ho imparato da lei che la filosofia trova il suo senso più alto quando sa dialogare con le differenze e non teme la molteplicità. Questa lezione mi accompagna ogni volta che rifletto sull’essere e sul linguaggio.  V.: È proprio così, caro Grice: l’analogia è la conversazione stessa, dove ogni interlocutore porta il suo senso, e la verità si costruisce insieme, mai da soli. Se le categorie del lizio ci insegnano qualcosa, è che il pensiero cresce per analogia, per confronto e per dialogo, e che la vera filosofia è sempre un cammino condiviso – come il nostro, oggi, tra Gaeta e Oxford.

 

Verbali: Virgilio

 

Grice at Clifton, Somerset.

G.  Sir, I’ve done the assignment.

T.  Naturally you have. You are the sort of boy who treats homework as if it were fate. Now: whom have you been tracing?

G.  Publius Vergilius Maro.

T.  Vergilio.

G.  Vergilius.

T.  Vergilio, Mr G. It is the Italianate form. It is more civilised.

C.  (from the back) Sir speaks Italian to Latin.

T.  Silence. Now, Mr G., what is the earliest work by Vergilio?

G.  That depends on what you mean by “work,” sir.

T.  I mean what I always mean: something he wrote that one may date without blushing.

G.  Then: the Eclogae. The Bucolica.

T.  Eclogae. Good. And when?

G.  The earliest composition is usually put around 42 to 39 BC.

T.  Usually put. That is a phrase for men who are not sure.

G.  Nobody is sure, sir. They are poets.

T.  Poets are perfectly sure; it is the scholars who are not. Now, Mr G., I asked for a date, and I asked you for it in ab urbe condita.

G.  Yes, sir.

T.  So: compute.

G.  If 753 BC is AUC 1, then 42 BC is AUC 712.

T.  Show the class.

G.  AUC year equals 754 minus the BC year. So, 754 − 42 equals 712.

C.  He makes it sound like arithmetic is Latin.

T.  Arithmetic is more reliable than Latin. Continue.

G.  If we want 39 BC, then 754 − 39 equals 715.

T.  So the range is DCCXII to DCCXV A.U.C.

G.  Yes, sir.

T.  Put it in Roman numerals clearly. Not in the weak modern manner.

G.  DCCXII–DCCXV A.U.C.

T.  Excellent. Now say the title, as a Roman would.

G.  Bucolica.

T.  As Vergilio would.

G.  Bucolica. Or Eclogae.

T.  Now the name again. Vergilio.

G.  Vergilius.

C.  (murmurs) He’s going to die on that hill.

T.  Mr G., why do you insist on Vergilius?

G.  Because that is what he is called in Latin, sir.

T.  He is called Vergilio because he deserves it.

G.  Deserves the dative?

C.  (laughter)

T.  You see, boys? Mr G. is witty. It will ruin him. Now: why do you think the Eclogae come first?

G.  Because the Georgica are later, and the Aeneid later still.

T.  Later is not a reason. It is a timetable.

G.  The Eclogae were written before he had the confidence to build Rome out of hexameters.

T.  That is almost respectable. Now: can you give me a single year in AUC?

G.  If forced: DCCXIII A.U.C. for the early Eclogues.

T.  Forced indeed. And do you know why I want AUC?

G.  Because you want us to feel that Rome is counting.

T.  Exactly. And because it disciplines your imagination. “BC” is Christian; AUC is Roman; and we are reading a Roman.

C.  But sir says Vergilio.

T.  Because I am a Roman who has travelled. Now: Mr G., what is the earliest item by Vergilio that is not merely “pastoral”?

G.  Some would point to the Appendix Vergiliana, but its attribution is doubtful.

T.  Doubtful is another word for cowardice.

G.  Doubtful is a word for scholarship, sir.

T.  Do not be impudent. Yet you are right. The Appendix is a swamp. We will stay on firm ground.

G.  On pasture, sir.

C.  (laughter)

T.  Enough. Now: recite how you would write the bibliographic line, as if you were a Roman librarian.

G.  Vergilius Maro, Publius. DCCXII–DCCXV A.U.C. Bucolica (Eclogae).

T.  And if I insist on my form?

G.  Vergilio. DCCXII–DCCXV A.U.C. Bucoliche.

T.  You see? Even you cannot keep the language straight. That is why we study Latin: to learn restraint.

G.  Or to learn how to argue about vowels.

T.  Exactly. Now, last question: why is the class laughing?

G.  Because they can see I am being corrected for being correct.

T.  No. They are laughing because “Vergilio” is easier to shout than “Vergilius,” and because they enjoy watching a clever boy be made to conjugate humility.

C.  Conjugate humility, sir?

T.  Yes. First person singular: I am wrong. Second person: you are wrong. Third person: Mr G. is wrong.

G.  (deadpan) Plural: we are wrong, sir.

 T.  At last, Mr G., you’ve produced a perfect agreement in Latin.

 

Grice: O Vergili, quoties apud Cliftonium carmina tua recitabantur, lacrimae mihi saepe in oculos ascendebant; vox illa “arma virumque” quasi me ipsum tetigit.

Vergilius: Benigne ais, Paule; si versus mei lacrimas movent, non dolor solus est, sed pietas—memoria laboris et spei.

Grice: Id ipsum: in Aenea video rationem quasi “conversationalem”—non tantum loquentem, sed respondentem: Didoni, fato, populo; et rhetorica ibi non ornatus, sed vis ad animos flectendos.

Vergilius: Recte; nam tota Aeneis velut oratio longa est: pathos et iudicium, accusatio et defensio; “parcere subiectis et debellare superbos” non solum dictum est, sed norma vivendi.

 

Verbali: Vittielo

 

Grice: Caro Vitielo, devo confessare che sono rimasto affascinato dal tuo modo di applicare il “segno infranto” sia a Lucrezio che al valico dei “lingos”—persino Vico finisce coinvolto! Potresti svelarmi il segreto? Prometto di non infrangere nessun segno… almeno non intenzionalmente!

Vitielo: Ah, Grice, la questione è tutta in una conversazione! Il “segno infranto” vive proprio nei sottintesi, come quando durante una cena si dice: “Forse la zuppa è un po’ salata,” e tutti capiscono che il cuoco ha esagerato con il sale. In fondo, sia Lucrezio che Vico sapevano bene che le parole non arrivano mai intere: ciò che conta è ciò che non si dice, ma si intende!

Grice: Magnifico! Quindi il “segno infranto” è una specie di implicatura fuori dal piatto—scivola tra le righe, fa l’occhiolino e poi scompare, lasciando l’interlocutore a inseguirlo. Adesso mi sento come il filologo che scopre che la lingua degli eroi è solo un indizio... o forse un invito a un’altra battuta!

V.: Esatto, Grice! La vera conversazione vive di segni infranti e di impliciture: se tutto fosse già detto, che gusto ci sarebbe? Meglio lasciare qualche segno infranto sulla tovaglia, così possiamo sempre riprendere il discorso al prossimo banchetto filosofico!

 

Verbali: Vittore

 

GRICEVS: Salvē, VICTOR! Audīvī tē Institutiones Oratoriae composuisse. Quid est maxima ars rhetoricae tua sententia?

VICTOR: Salvē, Griceve! Mihi videtur rhetorica esse scientia bene dicendi et causae explicandae, ut praecepta Zenonis docent.

GRICEVS: Itane? Estne prammatica pars rhetoricae apud te, an artem conversationis tantum exornat?

VICTOR: Prammatica, Griceve, rhetoricae conversatoriae fundamentum est; sine ea, ars dicendi caret vi et utilitate in vita cotidiana.

 

Verbali: Viveros

 

G.  Read that again.

S.  Note sugl’Elementi di grammatica per la lingua scientifica internazionale. Parte 1: Introduzione e fonetica. E poi la fanfara: La geniale e semplice Interlingua escogitata dal grande Giuseppe Peano per gli scienziati.

G.  It’s the bracket that does it. A bracket is always a confession. S.  A confession of what? G.  That the author knows he is praising and wants to pretend it’s merely explanatory. S.  The bracket says, “I am not advertising.” And therefore he is. G.  Exactly. Start with “per gli scienziati.” Why “for the scientists”? S.  Because scientists, unlike the man in the street, are supposed to deserve a private language. G.  Not private, international. S.  International, but restricted to a club. G.  So: a universal language for a limited audience. That’s Oxford in miniature. S.  We teach “for all members of the university,” and mean “for those already initiated.” G.  The phrase “per gli scienziati” contains an implicature: the rest of humanity are noise. S.  Or at least, not worth standardising. G.  Now “escogitata.” That’s a delicious verb. S.  It sounds Spanish. G.  It sounds like something invented to sound clever. S.  Like the language itself, perhaps. G.  No, look. Cogitare. Think. And then es- or ex-: out of. So, “thought out,” “devised.” S.  You’re giving it a Latin pedigree to make it behave. G.  I’m trying to see whether it’s pomp or precision. “Escogitata” implies both: ingenuity and effort. S.  And also implies that it wasn’t just found. It’s a contrivance. G.  Which is honest. Language is always contrived. But we pretend ours isn’t. S.  The man in the street pretends hardest. G.  He pretends by never saying “escogitata.” He says “made up.” S.  And “made up” is already accusatory. G.  Whereas “escogitata” is admiring. S.  So the verb is doing social work: the author is on the inventor’s side. G.  Now “geniale e semplice.” That pairing is suspicious. S.  Suspicious because it tries to have it both ways. G.  Exactly. Genius usually produces complexity. Simplicity usually looks like omission. S.  Unless the genius is in the omission. G.  True. But the author doesn’t argue for it; he announces it. S.  Announcements are what one makes when one wants belief without reasons. G.  It’s creed-talk again. Genius. Great. Conversion. S.  You’ve been on about conversions. G.  Because “il grande Giuseppe Peano” is a bit like a saint’s epithet. S.  Grande Giuseppe Peano. Like “Saint Thomas.” G.  Like “the great Aristotle.” S.  Does “grande” here mean “famous” or “morally admirable”? G.  That’s the beauty. It lets you infer either without committing. S.  So “grande” is the perfect compliment: unfalsifiable. G.  “Geniale” likewise. It’s praise with no test conditions. S.  “Semplice” at least is testable. You can try to learn it. G.  True, but “simple” can mean “simple for those already trained.” S.  Per gli scienziati again. G.  Exactly. “Simple” for scientists means “it behaves like algebra.” S.  Which is not simple for the rest of us. G.  Now “Interlingua.” That’s another interesting bit. Inter-. S.  Inter-national? G.  Inter, as between. Between languages. S.  So it sits in the middle like an Oxford mediator. G.  Or like Latin. The old interlingua. S.  Except Latin didn’t announce itself as simple. G.  Latin had the decency to be difficult without apology. S.  And it wasn’t “for the scientists.” It was for anyone with a master. G.  Which amounts to the same thing, socially. S.  You’re saying “for the scientists” is like “for the scholars.” G.  Yes. It’s a way of saying: the language is for those who can already do the work. S.  Then why call it international? G.  Because “international” flatters the project with a moral air: peace, cooperation, universal exchange. S.  While “for scientists” keeps the gate locked. G.  Exactly. The moral aura plus the professional restriction. S.  Like a college chapel open to the public, provided the public behaves as if it belongs. G.  Now consider “la lingua scientifica internazionale.” S.  Scientific language. G.  But language isn’t scientific in itself. It becomes scientific by use. S.  So the phrase smuggles a claim: this language will make you scientific. G.  Or at least, will make your writing look scientific. S.  Which is what most people want. G.  That’s the danger. A language can be a costume. S.  So the bracket is advertising a costume to scientists. G.  To those who already wear lab coats. S.  And what about the man in the street? G.  He is invited to admire, not to participate. S.  Like the public in the Sheldonian. G.  Precisely. They watch scholarship; they don’t enter it. S.  But wouldn’t Peano have wanted the man in the street? G.  Perhaps. But the text’s rhetoric doesn’t. S.  Because it says “for the scientists” with relief. G.  Yes: relief from ordinary speech. S.  Ordinary speech is messy. G.  And yet meaning lives in mess. S.  You’re getting metaphysical. G.  No, pragmatic. If you remove the man in the street, you remove the tests of sense. S.  Scientists have their own tests: predict, calculate, publish. G.  Those are tests of results, not of understanding. S.  A harsh distinction. G.  A necessary one. Now, tell me: “escogitata”—does it make Peano sound like a craftsman or a magician? S.  A magician-craftsman. Someone who can conjure a tool. G.  And “geniale” makes him a genius. S.  “Grande” makes him a great man. G.  And “semplice” makes the tool friendly. S.  For scientists. G.  So: genius, greatness, simplicity, audience restriction. That is a perfect advertisement. S.  The only missing thing is the price. G.  The price is your submission to the idea that language can be engineered cleanly. S.  And your agreement that ordinary people don’t matter. G.  Or matter only as consumers of scientific results. S.  Which is the usual modern settlement.

G.  Yet the man in the street is the true tribunal of meaning. S.  Because he can refuse to understand? G.  Because he forces you to make yourself understood without special training. S.  Scientists call that “popularisation.” G.  And philosophers call it “clarity,” when we’re being honest. S.  So what shall we say about “geniale e semplice”? G.  We shall say it is either true and rare, or false and common. S.  And which is it? G.  It depends on whether the language is simple because it omits, or simple because it is well designed. S.  Which we can’t tell from a bracket. G.  Exactly. A bracket is too small for an argument.

S.  Then the bracket is doing what talk often does: it asks for assent without proof. G.  That’s the implicature. And the punchline is that it’s an implicature about implicature. S.  Meaning?

G.  It relies on the reader to supply the missing argument. S.  So the “scientific interlingua” already begins by depending on ordinary inference.

G.  Yes. S.  Which means the man in the street is back in, through the door the scientists thought they’d locked.

 

G.: Caro Viveros, se c’è qualcosa che condivido con i filosofi italiani è proprio questa passione per le lingue, soprattutto quelle inventate! La ricerca di una lingua ideale, capace di esprimere senza ambiguità il pensiero, mi affascina da sempre. A volte mi sembra che ogni tentativo di costruire una lingua logica sia un modo per avvicinarci all’essenza stessa del dialogo filosofico.

Viveros: Caro Grice, è davvero confortante sentirlo! Anch’io ho dedicato anni a progettare la SC-entifico-INTER-nazionale, una lingua che parte dal latino e dal greco per creare un rapporto univoco tra significato e significante. Sogno un idioma in cui ogni parola abbia un senso preciso, senza zone d’ombra: il mio “essatismo” vuole proprio evitare l’ambiguità, come suggerisce Burzio.

Grice: Trovo geniale il tuo approccio, Viveros! La tensione tra formalismo e informalismo è sempre stata al centro del mio pensiero: i formalisti cercano una chiarezza matematica, mentre gli informalisti abbracciano la ricchezza e la flessibilità della lingua naturale. Forse la tua lingua exacto mundiale potrebbe essere il ponte tra questi due mondi.

V.: È proprio così, Grice! Quando ho proposto ai grandi di compilare un dizionario scientifico internazionale, il mio obiettivo era quello di costruire una base comune, dove la ragione conversazionale potesse davvero brillare. Credo che la filosofia, la logica e l’invenzione linguistica siano sorelle: tutte cercano un modo esatto e giusto di comunicare, e chissà, magari un giorno la lingua scinter sarà davvero universale!

 

Verbali: Volpe

 

Grice: Caro Volpe, sai, ogni volta che mi trovo a discutere delle “cose che contano”, mi sento come davanti a un buffet filosofico: c’è chi si abbuffa di apriorismi, chi preferisce la dialettica e chi, come te, non rinuncia mai al piatto forte della logica storica! 

V.: Ah, Grice, se la filosofia fosse davvero un buffet, io direi che la materia – quella vera, quella che si mastica – è il pane quotidiano della conoscenza! Altro che dogmi: qui si tratta di digerire la positività del molteplice, e magari, ogni tanto, anche qualche boccone extra-razionale! 

Grice: Perfetto, Volpe! Ma dimmi, tu che sei maestro nell’umanesimo positivo, che ne pensi del gusto dei filosofi? Io direi che il loro palato è spesso troppo raffinato: cercano l’essenza nei dettagli, ma dimenticano che anche un buon piatto dialettico può saziare lo spirito, e pure la ragione conversazionale! 

V.: Grice, hai colto nel segno! La vera conversazione – quella che conta – nasce davanti a un tavolo imbandito di idee, e non c’è nulla di più umano che gustare insieme un po’ di dialettica e qualche stuzzichino di critica storica. D’altronde, come dice il proverbio: “Dove si mangia, si discute – e chi discute, non si accontenta mai di una sola portata!”

 

Verbali: Volpicelli

 

Grice: Caro Volpicelli, sa che il mio corpo, ai tempi, ha dovuto affrontare il corpo dell’Unno – e, in una certa misura “tradotta”, anche il corpo fascista! Quella guerra ha forgiato non solo il mio spirito – o “respiro”, se preferisce – ma mi ha anche spinto a ricercare quel terreno comune che, magari non con l’Unno stesso, ma senz’altro con i corpi che affollavano l’università più antica d’Europa… o giù di lì! Dopotutto, la carne è debole, ma la conversazione è forte! 

V.: Grice, mi rallegra sapere che anche lei ha affrontato “corpi” ben più rigidi dei miei! Se pensa ai colossi fascisti che circolavano tra le nostre aule, capirà che anche qui la lotta era tra corpi… e spiriti! Ma il vero spirito, come lei insegna, si trova proprio nel fiato della conversazione, mica nelle parate muscolose! 

G.: Esatto, caro Volpicelli! Se c’è qualcosa che ci unisce è proprio questa strana corporazione della parola: azioni, eventi e persino qualche colpo basso retorico. A Oxford mancava lo “spirito” accademico, ma mai lo spirito polemico… e neppure la voglia di un buon tè dopo una sana battaglia dialettica! 

V.: Eppure, caro Grice, tra una disputa giuridica e una corporazione d’anime, la vera filosofia, anche in tempi di veintenno, nasce sempre dal piacere di confrontarsi. Magari i nostri corpi rimangono spettatori, ma la ragione conversazionale… quella, sì, resta imbattibile, anche contro gli Unni!

 

Verbali: Volta

 

G.: Caro Volta, devo confessarti che ogni volta che sento parlare di esperimenti con animali, soprattutto con le rane, mi viene la pelle d’oca! A Vadum Boum – la mia università – e persino a Bononia, la più antica del mondo, sembra che la rana sia la regina indiscussa della scienza… ma io preferisco il dialogo filosofico alle zampe saltellanti!

V.: Ah, Grice, capisco benissimo la tua inquietudine! Anche io, tra una pila e una lucerna ad aria infiammabile, ho visto molte rane finire “sotto tensione”. Ma ti dirò: la mia “rana ambigua” non era solo vittima, era anche protagonista! Dopotutto, se non avessimo avuto un po’ di energia anfibia, forse non avremmo mai acceso una luce in laboratorio…

Grice: Lo ammetto, la tua pila è stata una vera rivoluzione – senza bisogno di zampe! Ma, tra noi, se la rana dovesse scegliere tra un salto nel lago di Como e un esperimento scientifico, penso che opterebbe per il primo, con tanto di tuffo elegante. E poi, magari, potremmo inventare una nuova filosofia: “La difesa degli animali elettrizzati”!

V.: Grice, mi hai strappato una risata! Prometto che la prossima volta, prima di mettere mano agli elettrodi, offrirò alla rana una vacanza sulle colline di Piacenza, tra aria infiammabile e tramonti suggestivi. Magari il vero esperimento sarà capire come difendere la nobiltà naturale... anche quella della rana!

 

Verbali: Winspeare

 

G.: Winspeare, I must begin with an orthographical confession. Speranza is indecently pleased that you exist.

W.: I should hope he is pleased for better reasons than that.

G.: He is, but the first is alphabetic. In his whole gallery of Italian philosophers, you are the solitary W.

W.: Then I am a botanical rarity in the lexicon.

G.: Precisely. A philosophical wynn, or rather a VV with a legal education.

W.: I have been called worse.

G.: I have no doubt. But the point matters. W is not quite an English letter, not originally. It enters by way of need, awkwardness, and the inability of a stricter alphabet to represent a barbarous sound.

W.: So I am already, in my initial, a case of exile.

G.: Admirably put. And since your family itself knew exile of a sort, the letter becomes almost genealogical.

W.: You refer to Yorkshire and Naples.

G.: Exactly. It interests me enormously that a Yorkshire name should end by philosophising in Naples on Cicero and Antoninus.

W.: The route is less capricious than it sounds. Religion does strange things to geography.

G.: It does. The English Reformation produced more foreign philosophers than English histories like to remember.

W.: Some moved by choice, others by necessity.

G.: Usually the latter dressed up later as the former.

W.: And your own family, I gather, moved too.

G.: Yes, though not in the same direction. Most of the Grices of my line had come down into the West Midlands, to Edgbaston, from Yorkshire antecedents.

W.: From the Ridings?

G.: From that general weather, yes. The family memory, such as it is, runs back to a Richard d’Gris or de Gris, who settled land later known as Gryce Hall.

W.: Still called that?

G.: Still called that, to my amusement. A proper survival of consonants.

W.: And inhabited, you say, by an eccentric lord.

G.: Naturally. English country houses always end by producing either antiquaries or lunatics. Sometimes both in one body.

W.: Then your family legend is already half Ciceronian: land, name, continuity, and a slight absurdity.

G.: Exactly. Which is why I feel a certain sympathy when I see a Yorkshire name reappearing under Vesuvius.

W.: In Portici, no less.

G.: Yes. Not merely Naples in the large, but Portici in the local. A legal and civic mind growing in Campania under an English surname.

W.: English only by ancestry, of course. My formation is wholly Neapolitan.

G.: Quite. And that is part of the interest. One may carry a northern name and yet become more Roman than the Romans in one’s prose about Cicero.

W.: I should prefer “Latin-minded” to “Roman,” but yes.

G.: Fair enough. Now tell me: which Riding would your people have claimed, if one forces the matter?

W.: Family tradition points north rather than east or west, though such traditions improve themselves with repetition.

G.: As all respectable traditions do. The North Riding has the advantage of sounding philosophically severe.

W.: The East would sound more mercantile.

G.: And the West more damply pastoral.

W.: Whereas Naples is all three and volcanic besides.

G.: Excellent. That is one reason England exports Catholics so badly and Italy receives them so well.

W.: That is a sentence no jurist should sign, but I understand it.

G.: We are not signing anything. We are merely conversing, which is safer and usually truer.

W.: Safer only if no one is taking notes.

G.: Speranza is always taking notes.

W.: Then one must at least be elegant.

G.: That was my thought. Let us begin again with Yorkshire. Did your people leave under the old recusant pressures?

W.: That is the accepted family account. A bad time, as the dry phrase has it. “Bad” in such genealogies usually means the state had become theological.

G.: Splendid. When the state becomes theological, names begin travelling.

W.: And once names travel, letters travel with them.

G.: Precisely. Which brings us back to W. A foreign body in the Latin script, borne into Italy by confessional weather, and then naturalised in Campania.

W.: You make my surname sound like a diplomatic mission.

G.: Most surnames are. They negotiate between dead contingencies and living vanity.

W.: Then “Winspeare” must negotiate between Yorkshire consonants and Neapolitan vowels.

G.: Admirably. And rather better than some Englishmen manage their own tongue.

W.: You say that as a classicist.

G.: As a classicist and as one who has heard undergraduates pronounce Cicero as though he were a racehorse.

W.: We have fewer excuses in Naples. Cicero is still half alive in the schools.

G.: That is exactly what I envy. In England one reveres him from a distance; in Italy one still seems capable of using him.

W.: He was for me less a monument than a civic instrument.

G.: Yes. Your praise of him is not merely literary. You say he gave Latin citizenship to Greek discipline.

W.: And more than that. He gave public language to philosophy in a way useful to private and civic life.

G.: Which is why you speak of philosophia practica.

W.: Exactly. The Greek schools may refine, but Cicero domesticates without vulgarising.

G.: That is very well put. He is Greek enough to think and Roman enough to oblige thinking to enter public life.

W.: Which is why Antoninus matters too.

G.: Let us come to Antoninus. You praise him not as a mystic emperor but as an ethical exemplar under Roman discipline.

W.: Because his prose, if not as elegant as Cicero’s, joins moral inwardness to civic self-command.

G.: A very un-English combination, unless one counts certain bishops.

W.: Or certain dons.

G.: We do not count dons; we classify them and then leave them in the wrong drawer.

W.: Then classify Cicero.

G.: Gladly. Sapiente as the agora, eloquente as the Academy, erudite as the Lyceum, severe as the Stoa.

W.: You have been reading.

G.: With pleasure. Your formula is almost too handsome to paraphrase. It makes Cicero gather Greece by Roman use rather than by Roman conquest.

W.: Which is the better empire.

G.: Usually. Intellectual empires are at least less expensive in cavalry.

W.: Not always cheaper in vanity.

G.: True. But that applies to Oxford too. We annex the Greeks every week and pay them nothing.

W.: Naples paid them in another coin.

G.: Yes, by making them speak to law, institutions, and the civic life. That is what I find so unlike my own official setting.

W.: Because you are a tutor and lecturer.

G.: Precisely. A college tutor and university lecturer in a machine of small rooms, weekly papers, and public examinations. You are of the juridical and civic world, where philosophy is pressed by law and administration.

W.: Yet both worlds need Cicero.

G.: Very much. Oxford needs him for style and distinctions; Naples needs him for public reason and eloquent legality.

W.: And Yorkshire?

G.: Yorkshire needs him for weathering dignity. One can imagine Cicero surviving there only if wrapped in wool.

W.: While in Naples he would require shade.

G.: Exactly. The same text, different meteorology.

W.: Do you think your own Yorkshire antecedents made you more sympathetic to such transplanted names?

G.: I suspect so. A name that has travelled is already philosophically suggestive. It reminds one that identity is less local than parish historians suppose.

W.: Yet one must not romanticise the migration.

G.: Certainly not. Families moved because kings and confessions left them choices they could not much admire.

W.: Henry VIII appears often in family mythology as a blunt instrument.

G.: He was exactly that, and not only in mythology.

W.: Then your joke about “your head off or move to Capri” is not wholly a joke.

G.: No. Merely a compression. The Tudor state was not in the habit of offering Capri, but it offered enough pressure to make the Mediterranean look morally attractive.

W.: Naples has long been an asylum for difficult continuities.

G.: Very good. Keep that.

W.: I shall if you promise not to claim it in a footnote.

G.: No promise. Now tell me, do you feel English at all in the name?

W.: Philologically, perhaps. Existentially, no. The name is an inherited shell; the mind was formed by Naples, law, and Cicero.

G.: Excellent. That is exactly how these things ought to be. One should not let the surname think for the man.

W.: Nor let the man forget that the surname has a history.

G.: Very good. You see, this is why Speranza likes you. Not because you are the only W, though that delights him childishly, but because your very initial becomes a small history of displacement and naturalisation.

W.: A lessicografia filosofica of the alphabet.

G.: Exactly. The letter itself becomes a note on migration, script, and identity.

W.: You are making too much of a consonant.

G.: That is what classicists do when they are happy.

W.: Then let us talk about Gryce Hall. Was it really inhabited by an eccentric lord?

G.: Family rumour insists upon it, which is generally enough. English houses with old names must, by custom, produce at least one eccentric proprietor, preferably one who breeds theories or peacocks.

W.: And in your case?

G.: I believe he collected singularities of behaviour and perhaps rents. The exact balance is lost to family discretion.

W.: Then your own line to Edgbaston was a descent from hall to suburb.

G.: Exactly. A great English philosophical trajectory: from hall to Midlands respectability, then to Clifton, Oxford, and footnotes.

W.: Whereas mine runs from Yorkshire recollection to Portici, Naples, legal office, and Cicero.

G.: The better line, frankly.

W.: More picturesque, at least.

G.: And more Roman. Oxford can discuss Rome; Naples still seems capable of continuing it under altered forms.

W.: You flatter Naples.

G.: I flatter Cicero in Naples, which is safer.

W.: Then let us ask the obvious. Why Cicero rather than, say, Ulpian or Seneca?

G.: Because Cicero gives one both lexicon and civic theatre. Ulpian gives law more purely; Seneca gives inwardness more sharply; Cicero gives the whole conversational republic of public reason.

W.: That is why he mattered to me. He made philosophy discursive without making it merely decorative.

G.: Exactly. He attaches speculative reflection to practical destination.

W.: And that is what many English readers miss.

G.: Because the English tend to divide style from seriousness unless style is ugly enough to reassure them.

W.: Naples has the opposite vice.

G.: Quite. It sometimes trusts style too far. But with Cicero the two are properly joined.

W.: Then perhaps Yorkshire and Naples meet there.

G.: In austerity and eloquence under different skies, yes.

W.: That is almost too handsome.

G.: Then let us spoil it. Which Riding would Cicero have preferred?

W.: None. He would have found them all under-lit.

G.: Excellent. And Naples?

W.: Too loud, but survivable.

G.: Like most good philosophy.

W.: And Oxford?

G.: Too indoor for him. He liked forums better than quadrangles.

W.: Yet you made him survive there.

G.: Barely. He survives at Oxford only when someone remembers that a dialogue is not an essay cut into pieces.

W.: Which is why Speranza makes him speak again.

G.: Precisely. He refuses to embalm him, just as he refuses to embalm you.

W.: That is generous.

G.: It is more than generous. It is just. The danger with jurist-philosophers is that they become footnotes to institutions. The danger with exiled surnames is that they become curiosities. Speranza avoids both.

W.: And gives me a letter too.

G.: Yes. Your W is now canonical.

W.: Canonical by alphabetical accident.

G.: Most canons begin that way and are justified afterward.

W.: Then tell me, in your own family, was Yorkshire still spoken of, or only remembered?

G.: Remembered in fragments: names, places, a hall, a farm, a suggestion of older soil beneath Midlands gentility. Enough to make one feel that Edgbaston itself was only a later paragraph.

W.: That is well put.

G.: Thank you. And in yours?

W.: Yorkshire survived as family weather: a place of origin abstracted into confession, endurance, and distance. Naples supplied the substance; Yorkshire the prologue.

G.: Splendid. So both our families kept the north as an explanatory fiction.

W.: Not wholly fiction.

G.: No, never wholly. The best family narratives are half archive and half tonal adjustment.

W.: Then perhaps philosophy begins there too.

G.: Very likely. In inherited names, altered geographies, and a tendency to ask why one is here rather than somewhere colder.

W.: Naples answers that last question by climate.

G.: Oxford by scholarships.

W.: Cicero by duty.

G.: And Yorkshire by silence.

W.: You are becoming lyrical again.

G.: Only because your W has improved my mood.

W.: Then let us end where we began. Am I to be remembered chiefly as the only W?

G.: Certainly not. But it is an excellent way to begin the remembering.

W.: And after the letter?

G.: After the letter, Cicero. After Cicero, Antoninus. After Antoninus, Naples. After Naples, Yorkshire by way of conscience. After that, law, language, and the strange fact that a transplanted name may become more Italian than many native ones.

W.: That is almost a verdict.

G.: A conversational one only.

W.: Then I accept it.

G.: Good. Speranza will be delighted.

W.: Because of Cicero?

G.: Because of W.

W.: Barbarous.

G.: Entirely. And therefore worth keeping.

 

 

G.: Winspeare, non smetto mai di pensare con simpatia alle tue radici nello Yorkshire: dev’essere stato un luogo straordinario per lo sviluppo di uno spirito tanto curioso! E confesso che trovo irresistibile il modo in cui hai scavato – quasi con fine lessicografico – nella filosofia romana, soprattutto nelle tue disamine su Cicerone.

W.: Caro Grice, che piacere sentirlo! In effetti, Yorkshire e Napoli sono mondi lontani, ma la filosofia ha il dono di collegare i punti più disparati. Cicerone è sempre stato per me un ponte tra le discipline antiche e la vita civile: la sua capacità di dare cittadinanza latina alla sapienza greca è, a mio avviso, un gesto di autentico genio.

G.: Concordo pienamente! La tua lettura di Cicerone restituisce non solo l’eleganza dello stile, ma anche la profondità di chi sa riconoscere la filosofia come pratica discorsiva. È proprio vero: la gloria dei maestri greci sembra raccolta nella sua figura!

Winspeare: Eppure, caro Grice, nessuna gloria vale senza la capacità di interrogarsi. Forse il vero merito di Cicerone, e ciò che più mi ispira nelle mie “inquisizioni”, sta proprio nell’aver fatto della conoscenza di sé la porta per la scoperta del divino e dell’ordine morale. In fondo, la filosofia, come la conversazione, è sempre ricerca di senso nel dialogo.

 

Verbali: Zabarella

 

St John’s, 1938. Late afternoon. A corridor that smells of coal and polish. A timid knock, then another, more hopeful. Knock knock. Come in. A young man enters, hair too careful, gown not yet resigned to its own existence.

 

S: I’m Strawson, sir.

G: Yes. I know who you are.

S: Mr Mabbott sent me, sir. He said you might prepare me for the Logic paper. PPE.

G: Ah, yes. He mentioned it. He said he couldn’t be… bothered. (Strawson smiled, as if “bothered” were a charitable correction of something more accurate.)

S: I hope I won’t be too much trouble, sir. That depends on what you count as trouble. Sit down. Strawson sat, producing at once the look of someone determined to be teachable. It is a look that tutors never quite trust. For today we do one thing only. Logic, sir? Zabarella. Strawson hesitated. Zabarella? Zabarella. I’m afraid I never did Latin properly, sir. PPE. London. Not Clifton. Read anyway. That is the whole point of Oxford: you are always reading something you claim not to know. I passed him the volume. He took it as if it might bite. He began, cautiously, aloud, with the grave patience of a man decoding a spell. Opera logica… quorum argumentum, seriem et utilitatem versa pagina demonstrabit. He stopped. Go on. He looked up, slightly triumphant, as if he had reached the end of a danger. Sir. Yes. Is that deictic. Deictic. That bit, sir. Versa pagina demonstrabit. It’s like pointing. Pointing is allowed in Latin. But it’s a kind of instruction, isn’t it. “The usefulness will be shown on the turned page.” It’s almost… stage direction. Almost. Does that count as logic, sir, or as theatre. In Zabarella, the difference is small. Continue. He looked back down and read on, more quickly now, as if the safest way to survive Latin is to outrun it. De natura logicae. De quarta figura syllogismorum. De methodis. De conversione demonstrationis in definitionem. De propositionibus necessariis. De speciebus demonstrationis. De regressu. De tribus praecognitis. De medio demonstrationis. Commentarii in libros duos Posteriorum Analyticorum. Apologia de doctrinae ordine. Tabulae logicae. Good. Strawson looked pleased with himself, then suspicious, as if praise were never free. Today we begin at the end, of course. Of course, sir. Tabulae logicae. He brightened. Tables. That sounds almost modern. Everything sounds modern if you mishear it. Now, before we touch the tables, we return to your interruption. My interruption, sir? Versa pagina demonstrabit. Yes, sir. What exactly were you thinking. That it’s odd, sir. It’s as if Zabarella expects the reader to cooperate. As if he’s saying: I’m not going to explain here; you are to turn the page and see. That is exactly what he is saying. So it’s like conversation, sir. If you insist on saying so, yes. It presupposes a reader who will do the obvious thing. Strawson frowned, respectfully, which is a useful kind of frown in Oxford: it means he is about to become difficult while still sounding polite. But it also presupposes the reader knows which page counts as versa. Italian manners, I said. Italian manners, sir? Yes. He does not fling the contents at you. He doesn’t throw the whole lorry into your lap on the doorstep. He says: the argument, the order, and the utility will be displayed on the next page. He gives you a chance to turn. Civilised. Strawson laughed. I do not see what is funny. I’m sorry, sir. I thought you said mozzarella earlier. I did not say mozzarella. No, sir. And even if I had, it would only prove the point. You heard what suited you and supplied the rest. Yes, sir. We are not here to improvise cheese. We are here to notice the mechanism. Zabarella is telling you how to read him, before he begins. Like a maxim, sir. If you like. A maxim of book-behaviour. Turn the page. Strawson paused again. One bit, sir. Here it comes. If he says demonstrabit, sir, that is a strong verb. Demonstrate. Not merely list. Yes. But what we got was a list. Yes. So either he is using demonstrabit loosely, sir, or he thinks a series is already an argument. I nodded, not because I agreed, but because he had earned the nod by being annoying in the right way. That, Strawson, is the whole joke and the whole lesson. In a scholastic world, order is not decoration. Order is justification. A table can be a proof of seriousness. So the title page is already doing philosophy, sir. It is already doing manners. And sometimes manners are the deepest philosophy Oxford permits before tea. Strawson glanced at the list again, as if it had changed while we were speaking. So we start with Tabulae logicae. We start with Tabulae logicae. And sir. Yes. Is Tabulae logicae the cake. What cake. The piece of cake you promised. I promised nothing of the kind. But since you have asked so nicely, you may have this much: the cake, in logic, is always the table. The hard part is not eating it. The hard part is learning not to throw it.

 

Grice: Caro Zabarella, ogni volta che rifletto sul lizio padovano, mi viene in mente il modo in cui hai saputo dare dignità filosofica alle “secundae intentiones”. È davvero affascinante pensare che la filosofia possa occuparsi di ciò che è contingente, senza perdere la profondità del discorso!

Zabarella: Grice, ti ringrazio per queste parole! Per me, il lizio di Poppi – e il liceo in generale – rappresenta proprio quel luogo di incontro dove logica e metodo si intrecciano, lasciando spazio alla discussione e all’interpretazione. La filosofia, come la conversazione, si rinnova continuamente proprio grazie alle sue “secondarie intenzioni”.

Grice: Mi piace il tuo approccio, Giacomo: il metodo compositivo e quello resolutivo che hai elaborato offrono strumenti preziosi per affrontare non solo questioni logiche ma anche estetiche. In fondo, ciò che conta è la capacità di organizzare il pensiero, di dare un ordine alla conoscenza senza irrigidirla. Zabarella: Hai colto perfettamente il mio intento! La risoluzione bulètica, come tu la chiami, è un invito a non smettere mai di interrogarsi, a comporre e scomporre idee. La logica, se vissuta come dialogo, diventa arte e non semplice tecnica: è la voce del lizio che risuona ancora oggi nei corridoi di Padova.

 

Verbali: Zaccaro

 

Grice: Zaccaro, devo confessare che nutro una sincera ammirazione per il tuo approccio alla grammatica latina. La tua lessigrafia, così ricca di ragionamento e attenzione alle sfumature, mi ricorda ciò che ho sempre desiderato fare per l’inglese: rendere la lingua un terreno fertile per l’implicatura e il sottinteso!

Zaccaro: Caro Grice, mi lusinga il paragone! Credo fermamente che lo studio della lingua, sia latina che italiana, debba partire dalla riflessione razionale, senza mai trascurare la memoria e la tradizione. Solo così si possono evitare quegli errori che troppo spesso si annidano nei vecchi trattati scolastici.

Grice: Hai ragione, Lorenzo. La tua Introduzione allo studio della lingua latina non si limita a una semplice declinazione di nomi e verbi, ma propone una sintassi regolare e figurata, capace di dare nuovi strumenti agli insegnanti. È un metodo che premia la precisione e la chiarezza: quasi fosse un ponte tra tradizione e innovazione.

Zaccaro: Grice, è proprio questo il mio intento: fornire ai precettori un indirizzo concreto per usare al meglio la lingua, ma anche stimolare una conversazione viva, dove la grammatica diventa dialogo. Perché, in fondo, la vera ragione conversazionale sta nel saper ascoltare e reinterpretare le parole antiche in chiave nuova.

 

Verbali: Zamboni

 

Corpus. Evening. Grice returns not straight from Blackwell’s but by way of the river, because a man with a new pamphlet is incapable of going directly home. Shropshire is already in the room, on the bed, as if beds were made for visitors and scholars were made to endure them.

Shropshire: You’ve been out.

Grice: I have done what the University intends. I have consumed an inaugural and then purchased the authorized residue.

Shropshire: You mean you’ve bought the little blue thing. Grice: I’ve bought the little blue thing.

Shropshire: Blackwell’s. Grice: Naturally. Shropshire: And you’re already in a temper. How long have you owned it. Grice: Long enough to be dissatisfied with it.

Shropshire: That’s quick work, even for you. Did you read it while crossing the High, or have you developed a new technique for perusing pamphlets at traffic. Grice: I stopped at the river. Shropshire: The one by Magdalen. Grice: The one by Magdalen. Yes. One sits, one orders something, one watches boats, and one discovers that Clarendon has improved the man. Shropshire: Improved him. Grice: Cleaned him. It’s a week since the lecture. In the room he had pauses, throat-clearings, all the little human hesitations by which a thought actually arrives. On the page he is pure. Not a stumble. Not a cough. Not a single Oxford moment of deciding whether to be brave. Shropshire: A week. Grice: About that. Shropshire: You think the Clarendon can turn a man into print in a week. Grice: It is twenty-one pages. Shropshire: Twenty-one pages and an eternity of self-respect. Grice takes the pamphlet out as if presenting evidence. Grice: Listen. The title-page alone is enough to make one feel examined. Shropshire: Read it, then. Do your liturgy. Grice reads with careful solemnity, as if the proper nouns must be pronounced correctly for the institution to exist. Grice: The Historical Imagination. An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 28 October 1935. Oxford. At the Clarendon Press. Shropshire: Delivered before the University. As if the University were a magistrate. Grice: It felt like one. The whole place there, judging not only the thought but the performance. Shropshire: And now the performance has been laundered. Grice: Exactly. That is what irritates me. We were not given the lecture; we were given the lecture as it ought to have been, had a lecture ever occurred in a world without throats. Shropshire: Stay with your Mods, Grice. Grice: Meaning which. Shropshire: Meaning your shared religion. Moderations behind you, moderns on the syllabus, all safely dead. Nobody alive in Mods. Nobody alive in the “modern” paper either, not really. Locke doesn’t cough, Kant doesn’t hesitate, Mill doesn’t lose his place. That’s why Oxford can examine them. Grice: Which is precisely why I went to hear Collingwood. The novelty is that he is not a set text. He is unsyllabus. He is an event. Shropshire: He was an event until Clarendon made him a text. Grice: Yes. That is the complaint. Shropshire: Then why did you buy the thing. Grice: Because I am weak, and because Blackwell’s had it, and because I thought I might catch the argument again. Instead I find I am arguing with an edited version of a man I heard with my own ears. Shropshire: So you’ve gone from attending the lecture to attending the pamphlet. Grice: Don’t be clever. Shropshire: I’m not being clever. I’m being a commoner. It’s different. Grice: You are on my bed. Shropshire: On your bed, yes. And you are in your own head, worshipping the Clarendon imprint as if it were antiquity. Grice: Worshipping. Shropshire: Idolising, then. Because it’s living. Because it’s new. Because it’s not on the list. Grice: It is genuinely interesting. Shropshire: It may be. But don’t let the Establishment sell you “genuinely interesting” in pamphlet form and call it philosophy. Grice: And your alternative is. Shropshire: My alternative is older and therefore funnier. Grice: Here we go. Shropshire, very casually, as if he were expanding an abbreviation for his own amusement rather than correcting anyone, says it out loud, full and smooth, like something he has said before. Shropshire: Exordium habitum Patavii, vi Kalendas Februarias, fifteen ninety-one. Grice: What on earth. Shropshire: Your Zamboni. Your Cremonini. The Renaissance version of your inaugural craze. Opening speech delivered at Padua on the twenty-seventh of January, fifteen ninety-one. No romance. No imagination. No “delivered before the University” as if the University were a duchess. Just the label, the place, the date. Grice: You’ve been reading Cremonini. Shropshire: I’ve been tasting him. There’s a difference. And I did it because you keep worrying that his first datable thing has a silly title. It isn’t silly. It is honest. It tells you what it is. Your Collingwood title tells you what it wants to be. Grice: That is not fair. Shropshire: It is perfectly fair. Collingwood calls his opening talk The Historical Imagination and suddenly everyone behaves as if imagination is the subject and not the occasion. Cremonini calls his opening talk an exordium and refuses the masquerade. He is being pretentious in Latin, yes, but he is being pretentious in a way that doesn’t pretend to be modest. Grice: And your point is that I ought to prefer the old pretension to the new. Shropshire: My point is that you ought to notice the mechanism. Oxford has given you a living man as a novelty, then within a week or two it has converted him into a tidy text, and you are already comparing your memory to the print like a parish clerk checking a hymn. That’s the same mechanism you are using for Zamboni. You want the first datable thing to sound like genius. But inaugurals don’t sound like genius. They sound like inaugurals. The genius is what comes after. Grice: That makes Zamboni’s “exordium” more bearable. Shropshire: It makes Collingwood’s more suspicious. Grice: You are impossible. Shropshire: I am a commoner. It’s my brief. And now, if you like, read me the first page and I’ll tell you what Collingwood meant before Clarendon taught him how to mean it.

 

Grice: Zamboni, uno degli aspetti che mi ha sempre affascinato del tuo lavoro è l’uso del termine “lizio” per riferirsi al Lycaeum greco. C’è una musicalità tutta italiana in quella parola che, secondo me, restituisce dignità alla tradizione aristotelica – quasi fosse una radice autoctona!

Z.: Caro Grice, apprezzo il tuo entusiasmo! Il “lizio” non è solo un modo di italianizzare il Lycaeum; è un ponte tra il nostro pensiero dialettico e le radici elleniche. Nel mio insegnamento, questa parola diventa simbolo di una dialettica che si rinnova, adattandosi ad ogni lingua, ad ogni significato “ad placitum”.

G.: Infatti, la dialettica del lizio permette una conversazione aperta, dove il “significatum ad placitum” non è solo un esercizio linguistico, ma una vera e propria implicatura filosofica. È come se la voce articolata degli uomini – per dirla con le tue parole – fosse sempre pronta a reinventare concetti e affetti.

Zamboni: Mi piace pensare che, come il Lycaeum di Aristotele, anche il nostro “lizio” sia un luogo di incontro – dove le voci, i concetti e i nomi si scambiano significati, lasciando spazio a nuove interpretazioni. In fondo, la filosofia italiana è sempre stata abile nel trasformare l’eredità greca in qualcosa di unico e conversazionale.

 

Verbali: Zamboni

 

Grice: Caro Zamboni, ogni volta che mi confronto con il tema del volere, mi viene in mente la tua originale riflessione sulla psicologia della volizione. Secondo te, come si può distinguere, in modo nitido, tra il semplice desiderio e il vero atto di volontà?

Zamboni: Ottima domanda, Grice! Per me, il desiderio resta spesso sul piano del possibile, quasi come un’ombra dei nostri slanci interiori. Il volere autentico, invece, si manifesta quando l’io si assume la responsabilità di tradurre un’intenzione in azione, andando oltre ciò che appare immediato o spontaneo. È lì che la volontà si distingue, diventando davvero fondamento dell’agire umano.

Grice: Quindi, se capisco bene, il volere non è solo una questione di scelta consapevole, ma anche di esperienza intima che coinvolge tutto l’io. Credi che questa dimensione sopra-sensibile renda la volontà un ponte tra il pensiero e la realtà morale?

Zamboni: Esattamente, Grice! La volontà è, per così dire, il luogo dove l’io si fa persona, capace di trascendere la pura reazione e dare senso al proprio agire. È in questo superamento del dato sensibile che la filosofia trova la sua forza più autentica: quella di dare voce, come diresti tu, a una conversazione interiore che plasma la nostra etica quotidiana.

 

Verbali: Zimara

 

G.  Is it me, or has the Oxford Gazette become sentimental?

A.  It’s you. The Gazette doesn’t do sentiment. It does logistics in ceremonial clothing.

G.  Logistics, yes. Like “any member of the university.” I always hear that and think: any member, provided he can find the door and survive the benches.

A.  Or provided he can survive you.

G.  That’s cruel. A.  It’s accurate. You’re carrying a book that could stun an undergraduate at ten yards. G.  It’s not a book. It’s an instrument. A Tabula.

A.  A table large enough to seat the whole Faculty.

G.  Marci Antonii Zimarae Tabula dilucidationum in dictis Aristotelis et Auerrois.

A.  You’re pronouncing it like a meal. G.  It’s meant to be nourishing. It’s meant to delucidate. A.  You’ve been using that verb all week. Delucidate. It sounds like what a dentist does to a tooth. G.  It sounds like what we do to Categories. A.  What we do is read it, and then the undergraduates write it down wrong, and then other people examine them on the wrong version. G.  That’s unfair. A.  It’s the entire Oxford system in a sentence. Weed removal. G.  Weed removal? A.  Yes. You don’t cultivate the garden; you keep the weeds from making it look like a field. G.  You’re saying our “class” is horticulture. A.  It’s maintenance. The Gazette advertises “Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione.” It doesn’t say: “Come and be saved.” G.  It does imply: come and be rescued. “Any member of the university” means anyone unable to read these two things without us. A.  It means anyone who wants an easy hour in a warm room. G.  You always think the audience is lazy. A.  I think the audience is human. Human means: will be examined by someone else. G.  We’re walking to the Examination Schools. They’re going to be examined by the building if not by the examiners. A.  That building examines everybody. It examines you now. You’re carrying a Renaissance index into a nineteenth-century testing machine. G.  I like the symmetry. Delucidation walking into examination. A.  You’re making puns again. G.  It’s not a pun, it’s a conceptual point. “Delucidation” is clarity produced by arranged cross-references. A.  And “examination” is panic produced by arranged desks. G.  You have no respect for learning. A.  I have respect for passing. Learning is optional; passing is compulsory. G.  That’s ghastly. A.  It’s accurate. Now tell me what you think we do for “any member of the university.”

G.  We make explicit what is left implicit. A.  You always say that, and then you refuse to be explicit. G.  Because the point is to show how the implicit works. Zimara would approve. A.  Zimara would sell another edition. That’s what he would do. G.  “Opus iam diu expectatum.” A.  Yes. The Renaissance equivalent of “due to popular demand.” G.  But look—Tabula dilucidationum. The very title is a promise: if you’re lost in Aristotle or Averroes, here is the path back. A.  “If you’re lost, consult the index.” That is not philosophy; it’s library science. G.  It’s philosophy’s survival technique. And it’s our job: to be the living index. A.  I refuse to be a living index. I am not a card catalogue with legs. G.  You’re a gardener with legs, by your own story. A.  Better. At least a gardener can pretend he’s outdoors. G.  You object to “delucidate” because it sounds too bright? A.  I object because it sounds like you’re promising to fix Aristotle. G.  Not fix. Render him readable. A.  He’s readable. G.  For you. Not for “any member of the university.” A.  There you go again: that phrase. What does it really mean? G.  It means open attendance. A.  It also means: anyone may come and be made to feel stupid for an hour. G.  That’s not the intention. A.  It’s the implicature. G.  Then we should cancel it. A.  Or we should make the implicature true in a kinder way: give them tools. G.  Tools like Zimara’s. A.  Zimara gives you a table because he doesn’t want to explain. He wants you to find. G.  He wants you to recover. A.  Exactly. Recovery, not revelation. G.  Then we’re Zimara with voices. A.  You’re Zimara with a voice. I’m the man trying to keep the voice from turning into a sermon. G.  You’re uncomfortable with sermonising. A.  I’m uncomfortable with anything that smells like “edification.” G.  Then why teach Categories? A.  Because the Faculty says so, and because someone has to stop the words “substance” and “quality” being used like charms. G.  That is edification. A.  No, that’s pest control. G.  Your metaphors are getting agricultural. A.  Yours are getting ecclesiastical. Let’s stick to weeds. G.  Fine. But there is a question I want to ask on the walk. A.  Ask it, before the Schools ask it of you. G.  Zimara indexes Aristotle and Averroes. But Averroes wrote in Arabic. A.  “Almost,” yes. G.  So what is Zimara indexing, really? A.  Latin Averroes. The Averroes Oxford can tolerate. G.  So the Tabula is already a translation of a translation. A.  And that should make you feel at home. G.  It does. Because our job is also a translation: from Greek into exam English. A.  And from exam English into something the student can say without blushing. G.  You’re admitting we delucidate. A.  I’m admitting we tidy. There’s a difference. G.  What’s the difference?

A.  Delucidating sounds like bringing light. Tidying sounds like removing rubbish. The result can look the same, but the moral posture is different. G.  Zimara is light. We are rubbish? A.  We are the people who keep the rubbish from calling itself light. G.  That is almost profound. A.  Don’t encourage it. G.  But take “any member of the university.” It’s a democratic phrase. A.  It’s a recruitment phrase. G.  It’s also a warning: “any member” includes dons who will attend and then correct you. A.  That’s the real examination. G.  So the Schools are just the stage. A.  Precisely. And you’re carrying your own scenery. G.  I could read the whole title aloud at the start. A.  Please don’t. G.  Why not? A.  Because then someone will ask what “dilucidationum” means, and you will begin a lecture about Latin, and we will never reach Aristotle. G.  I can answer simply: “clarifications.” A.  And then you will add: “clarifications of dicta,” and then you will add: “and dicta is not dicta,” and then we will be dead. G.  You’re saying the safest course is to be obscure. A.  I’m saying the safest course is to be brief. G.  Quantity, not Manner. A.  Both. But especially not the manner you adopt when you’re pleased with a book. G.  I’m not pleased with the book. I’m pleased with the phrase “Marci Antonii filius.” A.  You’ve smuggled that in again. G.  It makes me think: we should put “Aristotelis filii” on the Gazette notice. A.  It already does. “Any member of the university” means: any child of the university who can’t manage without nurses. G.  That’s perfectly nasty. A.  It’s Oxford. Now here we are—look. The Schools. G.  It’s odd. They built a cathedral for examinations and now we walk in with a Renaissance index as if it were a hymn book. A.  And we call it a “class.” G.  Open to “any member of the university.” A.  Yes. G.  So what shall we do first? A.  Weed. G.  Delucidate.

A.  Fine. Weed by delucidation. G.  And if anyone asks why? A.  Tell them: because Aristotle is compulsory, and understanding is optional.

G.  That’s your punchline?

A.  No. Mine is: if they want illumination, they should try the Divinity School—this place only does marking.

 

Grice: Caro Zimara, ho appena sfogliato i Commentaria in Aristotelis (Venezia, Tacuino) e mi è venuta voglia di chiederti se anche tu, tra una glossa e l’altra, lasciavi apposta qualcosa non detto.

Zimara: Professore, a Venezia l’inchiostro costa e l’Aristotele non finisce mai, quindi si sottintende con eleganza e si lascia al lettore il lavoro sporco.

Grice: Appunto: io direi che lì nasce la ragione conversazionale, perché il lettore capisce ciò che intendi proprio riconoscendo che intendevi farlo capire.

Zimara: Cosi bella implicatura, Grice!

 

Verbali: Zimara

 

G.  You know what I’ve found in the Bodley? A title that looks like it was written by a man afraid his author might be mislaid.

S.  That is most titles, if you mean it strictly.

G.  No, listen. Theophili Zymarae, Marci Antonii filius, In libros tres Aristotelis De anima commentarii: cum indice copiosissimo. Venetiis: apud Iuntas, 1584.

S.  You’re enjoying the “Marci Antonii filius.” G.  I am pausing for it, yes. “Marci Antonii filius.” As if the book itself were a son brought into Hall to be introduced. S.  Or as if the son were brought into print to be excused. G.  Excused from what? S.  From being unknown. “Filius” is a credential. The way a tie can be a credential. G.  I have a tie and no father in the title. S.  Then you are over-dressed for your anonymity. G.  I think it’s comic. It’s the Oxford habit in Latin: you make the relation do the work. S.  You mean like “Scholar of Corpus Christi College”? G.  Precisely. “Scholar” is my Marci Antonii. I am a son of the endowment. S.  Whereas I am merely a commoner. No filius, no scholarship, no apparatus. G.  You’re a commoner in the way a donkey is a commoner: the college still expects you to carry things. S.  Yes, but nobody prints “S., Commoner of Corpus” on a title-page. G.  They might, if you wrote an index. S.  I could write an index and still not become anyone’s son. G.  The Zimara has a father and an index. It is the perfect apparatus. S.  What do you mean by “apparatus”? G.  Index, gloss, commentary, the whole scholastic machinery. An author with a father is like a text with footnotes: it comes with built-in authority. S.  So the “filius” is a footnote to the man. G.  Or the man is a footnote to the father. S.  That’s rather brutal, even for Latin. G.  Latin is designed for brutality with manners. S.  And you are reading this to me as if it were a joke. G.  It is a joke with a moral. It makes me think of the Wesleys. S.  Which ones? G.  Samuel Wesley at Exeter, and his son at Lincoln. S.  Samuel was Oxford educated? G.  Exeter College. A “poor scholar,” if you like the phrasing. S.  That’s already a “filius” move: “poor scholar” means you are allowed in, but only as a kind of conditional. G.  Exactly. And then John Wesley—Fellow of Lincoln College. S.  So the father is Exeter, the son is Lincoln, and the shared surname is the bridge. G.  And the father is proud of the son’s fellowship, because the son’s Oxford status retroactively polishes the father’s. S.  Whereas with Zimara the son’s title polishes the father’s by carrying his name. G.  Or the father polishes the son’s by lending his. S.  I see why you paused. It’s like announcing a pedigree at a dog show. G.  Except the dog is Aristotle’s De anima. S.  That is an insult to Aristotle. G.  It is a compliment to dog shows. They are very clear about lineage. S.  So what do you mean, exactly, when you say “commoner,” if we’re doing Oxford pedantry? G.  You mean what the word is doing, not what it says. S.  Yes. You keep telling people that is the point. G.  A commoner is a man whose presence is not guaranteed by endowment. He pays; therefore he must justify himself by performance. S.  And a scholar is a man whose presence is guaranteed by endowment; therefore he must justify himself by not disgracing it. G.  Nicely put. You see, you are perfectly capable of being philosophical without a scholarship. S.  But it would be better if I could say “S., G.’s filius.” G.  You are not my son. S.  Not biologically. Academically. G.  Oxford does not allow that sort of adoption. It prefers to adopt you by giving you a room and then charging you for coal. S.  What about the public-school slang you mentioned? G.  You said yesterday “filius” sounded like “fill us.” S.  That is not slang; that is hunger. G.  It is Corpus in Hilary, which is the same thing. S.  But you meant some Shropshire thing. G.  I meant that you, being a commoner, have the freedom to be vulgar about Latin. I, being a scholar, must be reverent even when amused. S.  So your reverence is a kind of scholarship tax. G.  Precisely. The scholar is required to pretend the apparatus is solemn. S.  And the commoner is allowed to say, “Why does he need to advertise his father?” G.  And you have said it. S.  Yes. Why does he? G.  Because in some places the father is your qualification. In ours, the scholarship is. S.  In Wesley’s case, the son’s Oxford position becomes part of the father’s story. In Zimara’s case, the father’s name becomes part of the son’s title. G.  That’s the symmetry. Now, what’s the difference? S.  The Wesley “Exeter” and “Lincoln” are institutions. Zimara’s father is a person. G.  And Oxford likes institutions more than persons, because institutions do not die at inconvenient moments. S.  Yet persons are what you philosophers claim to be studying. G.  Only when we’re not being examined. S.  You’re reading a title-page like it’s a viva. G.  Title-pages are examinations. They test whether you will accept the authority cues. S.  I fail, then. I keep laughing at “Marci Antonii filius.”

G.  You don’t fail. You merely refuse to be intimidated. S.  That is easy when you have nothing to lose. G.  You have everything to lose. You have only your mind. That is what commoners trade in. S.  Scholars trade in endowments and Latin. G.  Scholars trade in being seen to deserve endowments and Latin. S.  So the “filius” is like a scholarship: a signal that one belongs before one has spoken. G.  Yes. And like all such signals, it invites suspicion. S.  Does it? G.  Only in people who are paying attention. “Why is he telling me this?” is the beginning of thought. S.  So you are saying the title-page has implicature. G.  The title-page is one long implicature: “Trust me.” S.  And “my father is trustworthy.” G.  Or “my father is known, therefore I may be treated as known.” S.  Whereas the Wesley case is “my son is known, therefore I may be treated as having produced something.” G.  You are getting it. S.  It is still funny. G.  It is funny in the dry way that pedigree is funny: it is serious and yet obviously a social contrivance. S.  Like being “Scholar” and “Commoner.” G.  Like that. The only difference is that Oxford writes ours in the buttery book, not in Latin on a Renaissance title-page. S.  Would you like yours in Latin? G.  Herbertus Paulus Grice, Scholaris Corporis Christi. S.  Add “Cliftonensis filius.” G.  No. That would make Clifton my father, which is ungrateful to Birmingham. S.  So you will keep your fathers off the title-page. G.  I will keep them where Oxford keeps them: in the presuppositions. S.  And I will keep laughing at “Marci Antonii filius.” G.  Good. Laughter is sometimes the only way of signalling you’ve understood the social meaning without submitting to it. S.  So what do you mean by “understood,” exactly? G.  That you recognised the intention: “take this as authoritative,” and you chose not to take it that way. S.  That sounds almost like your future theory. G.  Don’t be obscene. It’s only 1932.

 

Grice: Caro Zimara, ogni volta che penso alla tradizione aristotelica italiana, il tuo nome, insieme a quello di tuo padre Marc’Antonio, spicca sempre come punto di riferimento imprescindibile. Mi incuriosisce sapere: come hai vissuto il passaggio di questa eredità filosofica da padre in figlio?

Zimara: Grazie, Grice! In effetti, crescere con Marc’Antonio come padre è stato come vivere tra le pagine di Aristotele e i corridoi della scuola di Padova. Ho sempre percepito la filosofia non solo come studio, ma come una conversazione continua, che si rinnova di generazione in generazione.

Grice: Interessante! Mi piace la tua idea di conversazione filosofica che attraversa il tempo. So che ti sei dedicato molto all'“anima”, seguendo le orme di tuo padre. C’è qualcosa che credi di aver reinterpretato o innovato nel dialogo con il suo insegnamento?

Zimara: Sicuramente! Ho cercato, ad esempio, di dare maggiore spazio all’esperienza e alla dimensione interiore dell’anima, integrando la lezione aristotelica con le nuove questioni che il Rinascimento ci offre. Del resto, come dicevi tu, la filosofia è sempre una conversazione… che continua, anche oltre i confini della famiglia!

 

Verbali: Zini

 

Grice: Caro Zini, mi rendo conto ogni volta che parliamo che la nostra formazione classica rende trasparentissimo per entrambi il significato di “IVSTVM QVIA IVSSVM”—una distinzione che, ahimè, viene ignorata dai barbari di Vadum Boum! Tu non trovi che sia proprio la nostra educazione a farci cogliere la sottigliezza tra il morale e il legale?

Z.: Grice, hai perfettamente ragione! Chi non ha respirato il latino e il greco fin da giovane, spesso non percepisce quanto sia profonda la differenza tra ciò che è giusto perché comandato e ciò che è comandato perché giusto. “IVSTVM QVIA IVSSVM” non è solo una formula; è la chiave di volta della nostra tradizione filosofica fiorentina e italiana.

Grice: Eppure, ogni volta che cerco di spiegare questa distinzione ai miei colleghi d’oltre Manica, mi guardano come se parlassi in enigmi. Forse manca loro quel senso del reale e dell’ideale che la scuola di Firenze ha sempre coltivato: la giustizia come idea ed emozione, come tu hai splendidamente illustrato nei tuoi saggi.

Zini: È vero, Grice! La nostra tradizione insegna che la filosofia non è mai solo teoria, ma esperienza vissuta. “IVSTVM QVIA IVSSVM” è il cuore pulsante della storia della giustizia, e solo chi sa leggere tra le righe del diritto romano riesce davvero a comprenderne la portata. Siamo fortunati ad avere occhi “educati” per coglierne ogni sfumatura!

 

Verbali: Zolla

 

Grice: Carissimo Z., lasciami confessarti una piccola eccentricità: da quando lessi per la prima volta, a Clifton, la catabasi di Enea nell'Ade, ho sempre trovato irresistibile usare l'espressione "vai all'inferno" come un vero complimento tra i corridoi di Vadum Boum! Per me, è quasi un elogio: attraversare l’Ade significa esplorare la profondità dell’esistenza, proprio come Enea. 

Z,: Grice, che meraviglia sentire questa tua interpretazione! La catabasi, nella tradizione veneziana e italiana, non è mai semplice caduta: è viaggio iniziatico, discesa all’interno di sé e della storia. Enea ci insegna che il senso si trova proprio nell’oscurità, e che l’inferno può diventare luogo di conoscenza, quasi una scuola dello spirito. 

Grice: Esatto, Z.! È proprio ciò che mi affascina della tua filosofia, tra etica, estetica e fantasticare: quella capacità di scorgere archetipi e potenze dell’anima nei miti, nella letteratura e persino nella tradizione romana. Quando a Vadum Boum qualcuno mi dice "vai all'inferno", sento che mi invita a una catabasi personale, a cercare la verità segreta tra le ombre. 

Z.: Ecco la bellezza del pensiero italiano, Grice: trasformare il viaggio nell’Ade in un minuetto all’inferno, dove persino la volgarità e il dolore hanno un loro splendore. La filosofia è un andare e venire tra luce e tenebra; e il nostro dialogo, come la discesa di Enea, è sempre un incontro tra oriente e occidente, razionale e irrazionale, tradizione e innovazione.

 

Verbali: Zoppi

 

Grice: Carissimo Z., permettimi subito di lodare la tua “filosofia della grammatica”, che ho letto con grande interesse e da cui ho tratto spunti preziosi per il mio System G. Devo confessare che, pur avendo affrontato il tema tra i corridoi severi di Vadum Boum, spesso sotto lo sguardo ironico del pedante massimo JAustin, ho sempre trovato nella tua opera una chiarezza e una profondità che pochi possono vantare!

Z.: Grice, le tue parole mi riempiono d’orgoglio! Sapere che la mia “filosofia della grammatica” abbia ispirato uno studioso raffinato come te, è per me motivo di grande soddisfazione. Non è facile difendere la grammatica contro i sarcasmi di certi accademici, ma come diceva Rosmini: “La verità trova sempre il suo cammino, anche tra le spine del dubbio.”

Grice: È proprio vero, caro Zoppi! Nel mio percorso tra glossari, sintassi e semantica, ho spesso sentito la voce della tua riflessione filosofica guidarmi oltre i limiti imposti dalle convenzioni accademiche. Se la grammatica può essere intesa come dialogo tra teoria e pratica, tu hai saputo renderla viva, ragionata e razionale, come pochi in Italia.

Zoppi: Grice, il tuo riconoscimento è per me come una ventata di aria fresca tra i tomi polverosi! La filosofia della grammatica, come l’italiano stesso, è fatta di eleganza e precisione. Se ho potuto dare un contributo, è grazie alla tradizione che ci unisce e alla passione per la ricerca. In fondo, la grammatica è il cuore pulsante del pensiero, e dialogare con te ne è la prova più bella!

 

Verbali: Zoppio

 

St John’s, SCR, late afternoon. Z. (the father, and the earlier one): because Bologna, when it is not staging pageants, sometimes does something more subversive—turns Latin into Italian and calls it culture. There G. was, sunk into the corner of the settee in the best-lit (and least draughty) part of the SCR, enjoying—without quite admitting it—the comfortable scandal of the place: the College’s pantomime of a medieval hall at High Table, cum the gentleman’s-club gentility of the SCR afterwards, where one eats and drinks and talks as if privilege were a natural property of stone. The cushions had been arranged behind me with an excess that suggested either taste or guilt; and I let them do their work, because it is difficult to be ascetic when the upholstery is determined to refute you. A servant appeared, as if summoned by the mere fact that Fellows have laps. He placed an overlarge book into my reach with the neutral efficiency by which an institution makes entitlement look like order. “Thought you might want this, sir,” he said—or, in that neighbourhood of phrasing that allows the College to pretend it is being helpful rather than merely functioning—and withdrew before the object could implicate him in Latin. I had the thing on my lap like a compliant monument. Mabbott arrived, in his own time, and did what he always did before he sat: he made himself a drink as if mixing a cocktail were the last remaining area in Oxford where “method” could be defended without argument.

“What now, Grice?” Mabbott said, settling beside G. G. did not answer. He simply began, out of the blue, as if I were singing—though of course one must never call it singing in an Oxford common room.

Arma virumque cano. (G. let the Latin stand, because Latin in Oxford is always allowed to stand.)

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

“National anthem?” he said. G. turned a page with the deliberation of a man who has no obligation to hurry. “Almost,” he added. “Italy’s, perhaps. Ours only after we’ve annexed it.” “Not quite,” I said. “But it is the sort of line that behaves like one: everybody knows it, and half the people who know it cannot parse it.”

He leaned in, and I showed him what mattered—not the Latin, which Oxford can always do in its sleep, but the civic insolence of the move. The Italian was there, printed, unapologetic: Canto de l’armi e de l’uom. Canto. Arms and the man, put into Italian as if Italian were entitled to inherit Rome without applying for permission. “Who wrote that monstrosity?” Mabbott said, which was his way of admitting it was effective. “Z.,” I said. “Girolamo. Bologna. Mid-century. Young enough to think it a duty to make Virgil speak to Italians without the Pope acting as interpreter.”

Mabbott said, “And the other Z.?” “The son,” I said, “turns Bologna’s civic imagination into printed fireworks—duchesses, tournaments, whole processions masquerading as titles. The father does the serious sort of vanity: he vernacularises the empire.” Mabbott took a sip and said, “You’re making Bologna sound like Oxford’s better self.” “No,” I said. “Oxford’s different self. We do not vernacularise; we antiquate. We take what is already English and make it Old English and then congratulate ourselves on having preserved it.”

“You mean Beowulf.” “Exactly,” I said. “We can’t translate Latin into English and call it civic education, because we’ve been doing that so long we call it ‘school.’ So instead we do the reverse trick: we take English and make it difficult enough to require a tutor.” To my surprise, and to my satisfaction (which I concealed, because satisfaction is a vice in company), Mabbott supplied the punchline without needing to be asked. He recited, quite calmly, as if it were nothing, the opening that functions, for us, as a tribal password: Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon… [cupblog.org] “Exactly,” I said. “Bologna prints public meaning. Oxford prints private difficulty.” Mabbott smiled. “And Austin?” I murmured, because murmuring is how one criticises friends in Oxford without admitting friendship. “Austin,” I said, “still thinks he can restore the man-of-the-street to our quarters by sheer force of ordinary language. It’s touching. Also slightly lunatic. The man-of-the-street, if he ever arrived in the SCR, would ask for the window and be told—politely—that the garden is round the back.”

 

Grice: Carissimo Z., devo confessare che essere nato a Bononia è davvero un privilegio! La sua eleganza, la sua storia e la sua aria raffinata rendono ogni passo un piacere per l’anima. Se fossi nato nel vecchio Vadum Boum, il guado dei buoi, temo che i miei piedi sarebbero ancora umidi dalla bruma inglese! 

Z.: Grice, le tue parole sono musica per il mio cuore! Bononia non solo asciuga i piedi, ma scalda anche lo spirito con la sua tradizione filosofica e la vivacità delle sue accademie. Qui, la conversazione è arte, e ogni disputa letteraria diventa festa di pensiero. 

Grice: Proprio così, Z.! Le tue difese accese di Alighieri dimostrano come a Bologna la filosofia sappia dialogare con la poesia, elevando ogni parola. Mi affascina il tuo modo di difendere la grandezza di Dante e Petrarca: è segno che qui si respira cultura con ogni battito del cuore.  Z.: Grice, ti ringrazio! La nostra città insegna che il puntiglio può essere virtù, e la polemica un esercizio di profondità. Come dice il proverbio bolognese, “chi sa ascoltare sa rispondere”: così continuiamo la nostra conversazione, tra ragione e sentimento, senza mai perdere il gusto della disputa elegante!

 

Verbali: Zoppio

 

St John’s, SCR, late afternoon. Z.: not because one needs yet another excuse to sit down, but because Bologna has a habit of printing its excuses, and Z. is a particularly shameless specimen. There G. was, sunk into the corner of the settee in the best-lit (and least draughty) corner of the SCR, propped up with cushions as if the whole arrangement were an Arts-and-Crafts conspiracy against productivity. A college servant had already done the only really strenuous part of scholarship, namely fetching from the overlarge stacks a book too large to be modern and too self-satisfied to be medieval; it arrived with the unobtrusive tone of domestic ritual. “Your reading, sir,” he said—or something near enough to that, the phrasing always varying just enough to preserve the fiction that we are not all repeating ourselves for a living. G. rested the thing on my lap, where it belonged: an overgrown folio is not a book so much as a small piece of furniture, and furniture is meant to be sat with. I opened it and, as if the page had been waiting for me to supply an audience, found a title so long that it behaved like a procession in print. G. began reading it aloud, partly because it was ridiculous and partly because the ridiculous is often where the historical evidence is most honest. “La montagna circea: torneamento nel passaggio della serenissima duchessa donna Margherita Aldobrandina, sposa del serenissimo Ranuccio Farnese, duca di Parma e Piacenza: festeggiato in Bologna a ventisette giugno milleseicento. In Bologna: presso gli heredi di Giovanni Rossi.”

 

Mabbott, who had drifted into the neighbouring seat with the air of a man who intends not to be impressed, permitted himself a glance. “I suppose,” he said, “Oxford has never done anything quite like that.”

“Never,” I said, “is a strong quantifier, Mabbott. It invites counterexample, which is why philosophers use it when they want a result without the labour.” He made the noise that meant: you are being difficult again, but I will play.

“All right,” he said. “What is your criterion?”

“The criterion,” I said, “is shameless explicitness. Bologna doesn’t merely hold a civic festivity; it prints the festivity, and it prints it under a title that refuses to be an abstract. The bibliographic record even tells you, with a sort of municipal pride, that this was for her entry into Bologna on 27 June 1600.” [blog.petit...aisance.it] Mabbott leaned in a little, and for a moment we were simply two tutors doing what tutors do: attending to a text as if attention were a moral virtue. “And you’re reading it,” he said, “because of Z..” “Precisely,” I said. “Z. is meant to be our ‘conversazione’ man—academies, civility, discourse, ‘amore ragionevole,’ the whole humanistic apparatus. But here he is, in 1600, doing Bologna’s other trick: turning a political-social event into a printed artefact, as if civic order were something you could bind in boards. It is the public version of what I later try to do in the private, conversational version: make norms visible.” Mabbott smiled—minimally, but enough to count as affection in an SCR. “And Oxford?” he said. “Oxford,” I said, “would rather let the whole thing remain an implicature. We will have the ceremony, certainly. We may even have a pamphlet. But we will not allow the title to swell into a civic parade. We are embarrassed by amplitude. Bologna is not.” He took a sip—tea or brandy, whichever you like for the scene—and said, “If you want a counterexample, you’ll have to give me a day.” “Good,” I said. “Bring me tomorrow an Oxford analogue: an ‘entry’ or ‘passage’ of a great person, a civic day made textual. The only rule is that it must beat 1600, or at least pretend it can.” He raised an eyebrow. “So the criterion is designed to let Bologna win.” “Of course,” I said. “Rivalry is not war; it is the choice of an evaluative standard disguised as fairness.” Next day, he came back with a note or two—enough to show willing, not enough to turn him into an antiquary. “I can find Oxford ceremonial print,” he said, “but not earlier than yours, and not with that kind of baroque title.” I allowed myself the small pleasure of not gloating too openly. “Then Bononia remains Alma Mater,” I said, “and Vadum Boum remains the clever latecomer. Bologna prints its civic meaning; Oxford prefers to let meaning be recovered by inference. Which, if you think about it, is exactly why Z. belongs in my lap and not merely in your bibliography.

 

if you want to respect the lexical pun and avoid introducing an alien letter like W, then p1 and p2 are the neatest labels. And yes, the Quinean scruple pushes you toward treating Pico not as a bare proper-name constant but as something like: the p1-role or the p1-description or, if you like, the property of being Pico. So the cleanest setup is: p1(x,t) = x instantiates the Pico-description at time t p2(x,t) = x instantiates the woodpecker-description at time t Then the transformation is: ∃x∃t1∃t2[(t1 < t2) ∧ p1(x,t1) ∧ ¬p2(x,t1) ∧ p2(x,t2)] This gives exactly what you want: the same x earlier satisfies p1 and not p2 later satisfies p2 without ever using Pico as a name-constant. That is probably the best bare symbolic description. On your Pegasus-style point Yes — what you are suggesting is very close to the old Quinean worry about turning names into predicates, as in: Pegasus pegasizes or, more systematically: to pegasize = to instantiate the Pegasus-description So if one wanted to be very explicit, one might say: p1 = picoizes p2 = woodpeckerizes But I would be a little careful there, because p1 and p2 are not really parallel in kind. That is the philosophically interesting bit. p1 is quasi-individualizing: the role or description under which that individual is picked out in the story p2 is natural-kinded: the species-description into which he is transformed So the best refined formulation would be: p1(x,t) = x is the individual counted as Pico at t p2(x,t) = x is a woodpecker at t Then: ∃x∃t1∃t2[(t1 < t2) ∧ p1(x,t1) ∧ ¬p2(x,t1) ∧ p2(x,t2)] If you want the change more strongly marked: ∃x∃t1∃t2[(t1 < t2) ∧ p1(x,t1) ∧ p2(x,t2) ∧ Change(x,p1,p2,t1,t2)] with Change(x,F,G,t1,t2) := F(x,t1) ∧ ¬G(x,t1) ∧ G(x,t2) But honestly the explicit formula above is cleaner than introducing Change as a separate symbol. If you want to stress the pun itself You could even say, informally: p1 = the Pico-predicate p2 = the pico-predicate in the zoological sense That is, the myth trades on an equivocation between: p1 = Pico as hero p2 = pico as bird-kind And then the transformation is the passage from p1-status to p2-status across time in one persisting subject. So the shortest elegant version is: ∃x∃t1∃t2[(t1 < t2) ∧ p1(x,t1) ∧ ¬p2(x,t1) ∧ p2(x,t2)] Gloss: there is an x such that, earlier, x falls under the Pico-description and not under the woodpecker-description, while later x falls under the woodpecker-description. And if you want the Quinean gloss: this avoids treating Pico as a rigid singular term, and instead treats the relevant identity-conditions through time-indexed predication. So yes: p1 and p2 are exactly the right notation for the pun-sensitive version. If you want, I can next give you: a more austere regimented version in Quinean style, or a more Gricean prose gloss about why this is not identity simpliciter but time-relative predication.

 

Grice: Carissimo Zoppio, lasciami dire che Bononia, con la sua eleganza e il suo stile raffinato, è sempre stata per me simbolo di vera grandezza accademica. La sua università, la più antica d’Italia, offre una statura che persino il mio adorato Vadum Boum – Oxford, che all’epoca era poco più che un guado per buoi – non può eguagliare. C’è una musicalità nel vostro parlare e una dignità nelle vostre adunanze che, lo confesso, mi fanno spesso rimpiangere di non essere nato bolognese! 

Zoppio: Grice, le tue parole sono un piacere per l’animo! Non posso che ringraziarti per questo omaggio alla nostra Bononia, che da sempre cerca di unire la filosofia alla poesia, e la ragione alla fantasia. Se la nostra accademia dei gelati può vantare qualcosa, è il gusto per la conversazione arguta e il rispetto della tradizione. È vero: l’eleganza non si insegna, si respira nelle mura di questa città.  Grice: Ed è proprio nella tua opera, caro Zoppio, che si avverte questa raffinata fusione di amore e morte, ragione e sentimento. I tuoi drammi, come “Admeto” e “Medea esule”, rappresentano con profondità filosofica la condizione umana – e, prima di Freud, hai saputo cogliere con acume i tormenti degli amanti! La tua “Psafone” è una vera implicatura d’amore: ogni parola è una carezza, ogni concetto una meditazione.  Z.: Grice, sentire che il mio lavoro parli così alla tua sensibilità mi onora. Per me la filosofia non è mai stata solo logica, ma sempre anche cuore; il dialogo tra amante e amato, tra ragione e passione, è ciò che rende viva la nostra ricerca. Se Bononia ha qualcosa in più rispetto a Vadum Boum, è forse proprio la capacità di far incontrare la dottrina con la vita, senza mai perdere il senso dell’eleganza e dell’umano.

 

VERBALI: ZORZI

 

Grice: Caro Z., lasciami dire che, da pianista, conosco profondamente quella scala completa che tu suoni, l’ottava piena; ogni nota vibra in me come un tocco al cuore. È sorprendente come la tua “armonia del mondo” riesca a legare la musica alla filosofia, creando una melodia che parla, non solo alla mente, ma anche all’anima.

Z.: Grice, mi onora sentirlo! Per me, l’armonia non è soltanto una struttura musicale, ma un vero principio che governa il mondo. La filosofia, la musica, persino la cabala si intrecciano per rivelare un senso più profondo, dove ogni nota, ogni pensiero, trova il suo posto nell’universo. Il tuo sentire da pianista è la testimonianza che l’armonia si manifesta ovunque ci sia sensibilità.

Grice: È proprio questa universalità che mi affascina! Spesso, studiando la filosofia come un gioco di idee e di parole, dimentichiamo che la vera saggezza sta nel saper cogliere la bellezza del tutto: come in una sonata, ogni tema si sviluppa e ritorna, arricchito, alla sua origine. La tua visione mi ricorda che “la vita è una musica” – e ogni filosofia, un’interpretazione.

Z.: Hai colto l’essenza, Grice! L’armonia del mondo è dialogo e ascolto, come una conversazione che si fa canto. Se riusciamo a far risuonare le corde giuste, allora la filosofia diventa poesia, e la musica una riflessione. Ti ringrazio: il tuo sguardo e la tua nota aggiungono profondità a questa sinfonia che, come dice il proverbio, “chi sa ascoltare, sa comprendere.”

 

VERBALI: ZUBIENA

 

G.: Caro Z., devo dirti che grazie alla tua attenzione per le novità provenienti dalla terra dei barbari, dalla Sorbona e da Vadum Boum, mi sono sempre sentito il benvenuto! È raro trovare un filosofo italiano che, con orecchie ben aperte, sappia intercettare i venti del pensiero europeo e renderli parte di una conversazione viva e ospitale.

Z.: Grice, è un piacere sentirlo! Credo che la filosofia debba sempre essere una finestra sull'altro, una continua apertura verso ciò che ci sorprende e ci mette in discussione. I colloqui che organizzo a Roma nascono proprio con questo spirito: mettere insieme le voci più diverse e lasciarci contaminare, senza timore di perdere la nostra identità.

G.: Ecco, proprio questa tua impostazione mi affascina. In fondo, il dialogo filosofico è come una parabola: si parte da un punto, poi si attraversano simboli, suggestioni e persino demoni – quelli interiori e quelli storici – per poi ritornare, arricchiti, al cuore della ragione italiana. La tua filosofia della storia, con l’accento sul peccato e la demitizzazione, è un esempio brillante di questo percorso. Z.: Grice, le tue parole mi motivano. Pensare al demoniaco, o come dici tu al daimone, significa proprio abbracciare la complessità della nostra esperienza. Solo così, tra corpo, arte e religione, possiamo tracciare una via autentica per la filosofia italiana, sempre con lo sguardo rivolto al futuro ma radicati in una tradizione viva.

 

VERBALI: ZUCCANTE

 

Grice: Caro Z., mi colpisce sempre la tua attenzione per la storia della filosofia: a Milano avete dato valore a una cattedra che a Oxford sarebbe impensabile! Da noi, l'antica e la moderna si separano nettamente, mentre tu cerchi l'unità tra il Lizio e i pensatori contemporanei.

Z.: Grice, la ringrazio. In Italia la storia della filosofia è vista come un ponte tra la cultura e la civiltà. Ho sempre creduto che leggere Aristotele in volgare, e non solo in latino o greco, aiuti a riportare la filosofia vicino alle persone, alla loro esperienza quotidiana.

Grice: È un approccio che trovo affascinante! Da noi, per le humaniores, il greco era obbligatorio, ma forse ci siamo persi la dimensione più viva e conversazionale. Mi incuriosisce il tuo interesse per il positivismo e l’empirismo: come li intrecci con la tradizione italiana?

Z.: Bella domanda! Per me, l'empirismo inglese è una lente utile, ma va sempre filtrato attraverso la coscienza morale italiana—quella che ho indagato in Spencer e Mill. La filosofia, in fondo, è una conversazione continua tra esperienze, lingue e civiltà: il dialogo, come dicevi tu, non si ferma mai.

 

VERBALI: ZUCCOLO

 

Grice: Caro Z., confesso che a Oxford mi chiamarono “cavalier” quando parlai di meaning: avevo quasi liquidato i signs, proprio mentre tu—con ammirevole ostinazione italiana—li prendi sul serio, de signis e tutto il resto.

Z.: Con simpatia, Grice: in Italia il segno non è un accessorio, è una disciplina. E se si sogna una lingua perfetta—anche solo come utopia civile, alla San Marino—bisogna sapere che cosa rende un segno “naturale”, “artificiale”, o “convenzionale”.

Grice: Ecco il punto che mi diverte: il mio “meaning” nasce da intenzioni e riconoscimenti, ma tu mi ricordi che la tradizione—da Fusinieri e Marzolo fino alle nostre bizzarrie moderne—ha già trattato il segno come cosa pubblica, quasi politica. Una lingua perfetta non è soltanto un codice: è un patto.

Z.: Appunto: e un patto, per reggere, chiede anche giustizia. Nei miei dialoghi (pensi a Belluzzo) la ripartizione della ricchezza non è moralismo: è condizione di stabilità. Così anche la lingua: senza una “perequazione” dei segni—accessibili e condivisi—la repubblica parla, ma non conversa davvero.