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

 

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

 

Verbali: Richeri

 

G.: Peano’s inverted C is a tidy little emblem of a large old ambition.

S.: Too tidy, I should have thought, for what you want to make it carry.

G.: I do not mean to make it carry all of Rome and Turin at once, only enough of “if” to keep the Hall amused.

S.: But that is precisely my objection. The inverted C, or the horseshoe if you prefer the shoe-shop version, does not do “if” in the way Strawson wants “if.”

G.: No, it does not do “if” in the vernacular way, which is why it fascinates me.

S.: Fascinates or irritates?

G.: Both. It is the epitome of the characteristica universalis dream: one sign to replace a small cloud of human language.

S.: And to replace it badly.

G.: Often, yes. But one must not mock the ambition before admiring the nerve.

S.: Very well. Then let us begin with the symbol.

G.: The inverted C, yes, or what later students draw as a horseshoe, meant by Peano as “consequence,” “if,” “therefore,” or rather the formal relation by which one proposition follows from another.

S.: Already you slide.

G.: Naturally. One must. The whole point is that the sign invites sliding among “if,” “implies,” “follows from,” and “therefore,” while pretending to settle them.

S.: Which is why the vernacular resists it.

G.: Precisely. Strawson’s “if” is not merely a truth-functional gadget. It carries conversational expectations, hesitations, suppositions, provisionality, insinuation, and all the rest of the ordinary traffic.

S.: And the horseshoe does none of that.

G.: None explicitly, no. It gives one a regimented relation stripped of atmosphere.

S.: More than atmosphere. It strips away what the speaker is doing in saying “if.”

G.: Yes. And that is where my notion of implication begins protesting against formal tidiness.

S.: Then why choose Peano’s sign as the epitome at all?

G.: Because it is beautifully brazen. It says in one shape what Bishop Wilkins, Leibniz, Richeri, and a dozen others wanted to say with whole systems: that there might be one exact sign where ordinary language has a muddle.

S.: And Richeri belongs in that genealogy.

G.: Very much so. His Algebræ philosophicæ in usum artis inveniendi specimen primum is exactly the sort of thing one reads with alternating admiration and distrust.

S.: Distrust because?

G.: Because he thinks one can engineer looseness away. He sees metaphysics and discourse as things that can be purified by a lawful script.

S.: A scia-grafia, as he calls it.

G.: Yes. A philosophical shadow-writing for those who dislike shadows unless they can regulate them.

S.: And Peano later notices him.

G.: Through Padoa, yes, or at least through that whole Turin lineage of precursors and retrospective annexations.

S.: With the whole and the nothing rendered by simple characters.

G.: Exactly. Richeri’s U for the something, the all, the thing, and n or its partner for the nothing, the negative. A beautifully provincial universalism.

S.: “Provincial universalism” is rather cruel.

G.: It is also fair. Turin has always liked universal systems with local air.

S.: Then the inverted C is not merely Peano’s sign but a late expression of an older dream.

G.: Precisely. The dream that one may take the clutter of ordinary speech and replace it with characters whose combinatory life is cleaner than any conversation.

S.: And you object because conversation is not clutter but rationally managed looseness.

G.: Splendid. Keep that.

S.: Gladly. But let us be exact. What does the horseshoe fail to express?

G.: Many things. Strawson would say that ordinary “if” does not merely state a truth-functional relation between antecedent and consequent. It may suggest relevance, dependence, defeasibility, conditional commitment, hypothetical concession, epistemic distance, polite caution, and a little air of human uncertainty.

S.: Whereas the horseshoe gives only the formal table.

G.: Yes. If p horseshoe q is false only when p is true and q false. That is perfectly useful for one range of purposes and perfectly deaf to others.

S.: So the vernacular contains something not expressed by the sign.

G.: Better: something not encoded by the sign. Which then invites the usual philosophical mistake of calling the remainder mere vagueness or emotional upholstery.

S.: You call it implicated.

G.: Of course. Because what ordinary “if” often carries beyond the formal core is not noise but inferentially recoverable residue.

S.: Such as?

G.: “If you are going to London, there is a good train at six.” The horseshoe captures very little of why that sounds helpful rather than merely true-functionally arranged.

S.: Or “If you are thirsty, there is beer in the fridge.”

G.: Exactly. The antecedent does not merely stand in truth-functional relation to the consequent. It makes relevant a piece of information under a cooperative presumption.

S.: So the “if” is partly guidance.

G.: Yes, and partly tact. Sometimes one says “if” not because one doubts, but because one leaves the other’s state unpresumed while preparing a useful consequence.

S.: Which the horseshoe cannot register.

G.: No. It has no room for politeness, for one thing.

S.: A defect shared by most logical symbols.

G.: And by several logicians.

S.: You are warming up.

G.: We have a Hall to entertain in due course.

S.: Then bring Richeri back in. What did he want exactly?

G.: He wanted, with Leibnizian enthusiasm and Italian earnestness, an algebra of thought in which abstract characters could stand to meanings as algebraic symbols stand to magnitudes.

S.: A language in which metaphysical discourse becomes calculable.

G.: Or at least universally intelligible by construction. One sees the seduction. Replace the quarrels of vernacular philosophy with a lawful combinatorics.

S.: A philosophically hygienic script.

G.: Exactly. The sort of thing that tempts those who have suffered too much ordinary language and not enough ordinary life.

S.: Yet you admit the grandeur.

G.: Certainly. Plato had it in one form, Bishop Wilkins in another, Leibniz more magnificently, Richeri in his Piedmontese register, and Peano in a schoolmaster’s hand sharpened by precision.

S.: Then the problem is not the dream itself.

G.: No. The problem is the metaphysical excrescence that creeps in when one thinks the sign not only abridges but exhausts what the vernacular had been doing.

S.: “Metaphysical excrescence” sounds as if the horseshoe had grown a fungus.

G.: It usually does. The neat symbol comes to be treated as if it had purified the concept by removing everything in the vernacular that did not deserve to survive.

S.: Such as relevance.

G.: Such as relevance, implicature, context, speaker-intention, pragmatic force, all the little creatures the Einheitswissenschaft temperament finds untidy.

S.: There is your Vienna.

G.: Yes. The prejudice of Einheit von Wissenschaft, the fantasy that the unity of science is secured by a language cleaner than the life it describes.

S.: You are being unfair to Vienna by way of Turin.

G.: It is an old route. One should not exaggerate the opposition, of course. Peano was not a Viennese reductionist in all respects. But the family resemblance is there.

S.: Then the inverted C becomes a political symbol of sorts.

G.: An intellectual political symbol, yes. It announces that consequence may be rendered uniform, calculable, public, and ideally free of conversational residue.

S.: Which is precisely what you deny.

G.: Not deny altogether. Formal consequence is real enough. I merely deny that vernacular “if” is exhausted by what formal consequence abstracts from it.

S.: Then perhaps we should distinguish “se,” “si,” “if,” and the horseshoe explicitly.

G.: Good. Latin si, Italian se, English if. Three venerable vernacular or near-vernacular particles with histories in law, rhetoric, conversation, and philosophy. Then the horseshoe, a formal sign aspiring to distil one logical skeleton from that history.

S.: And in doing so it leaves behind the flesh.

G.: Precisely. The flesh being not mere rhetoric in the pejorative sense, but practical reason at work.

S.: Suppose one says, “If he is in Oxford, he will be at All Souls.” What does the horseshoe miss?

G.: It misses, among other things, that the speaker may be relying on shared knowledge of the man’s habits, not asserting a law of implication. It misses the evidential modesty, the social background, the defeasibility, and perhaps the speaker’s tone of half-dry confidence.

S.: So the vernacular conditional is partly a move in a game of mutual orientation.

G.: Exactly. The horseshoe is not.

S.: It is a move in a calculus.

G.: Which has its splendour, but also its losses.

S.: Then why not say this is simply abstraction?

G.: Because abstraction too easily excuses itself. I want to say that some philosophers mistake abstraction for replacement. They take the purified sign and then claim that what ordinary language had beyond it was dispensable confusion.

S.: Whereas you think it was often disciplined surplus.

G.: Very good. Disciplined surplus. Implicated, not encoded, but rationally there.

S.: And Richeri thought to spare us the surplus entirely.

G.: He wanted to spare us the negotiation, yes. The underdetermined, socially managed character of ordinary discourse offended the combinatorial imagination.

S.: Yet human beings keep returning to it.

G.: Because they are not algebraic polities.

S.: That sounds almost Aristotelian.

G.: The best dry things often do.

S.: Let us be fair again. Richeri distinguishes possible, impossible, contradiction, negation, something, nothing. That is not absurd.

G.: No, not absurd at all. It is rather admirable. One sees the craving for a finite repertory of primitive distinctions from which larger intelligibility might grow.

S.: A finite alphabet, infinite philosophy.

G.: Exactly. One cannot fail to be moved by the ambition.

S.: Then what goes wrong?

G.: He underestimates how much of philosophical communication depends on what is not fixed by primitive assignment alone: intended emphasis, dialectical posture, context, audience, occasion, and the whole inferential play of practical reason.

S.: In short, conversation.

G.: Precisely. He wants conversation to become calculation. I want calculation to be recognised as only one species of conversation’s disciplined descendants.

S.: Then the horseshoe is a descendant, not an ancestor.

G.: Splendid. Keep that too.

S.: Happily. But you have not yet said enough about Peano’s own use.

G.: Peano’s genius was to standardise with extraordinary severity. He did not merely invent signs; he put them into pedagogic and formal circulation. His notation made certain distinctions operable.

S.: Including consequence.

G.: Yes. The sign for implication or consequence becomes a classroom machine. It allows one to write what otherwise requires clumsy prose.

S.: And that is good.

G.: Very good indeed, so long as one remembers what has been omitted.

S.: You really mean “what has been implicated and omitted.”

G.: Of course.

S.: Then perhaps the Hall should hear an example.

G.: By all means. “If the bell rings, the porter will grumble.” In ordinary speech this may suggest not only a truth-function but a little world: bells, porters, habits, perhaps the speaker’s experience, perhaps an invitation to avoid ringing if one wishes to preserve peace.

S.: While the horseshoe gives only p ⊃ q.

G.: Exactly. A splendid skeleton and a ruined anecdote.

S.: Very Oxonian.

G.: We are, after all, in our proper climate.

S.: And Strawson objects because the horseshoe is not the vernacular if.

G.: Yes. He insists that ordinary “if” is not exhausted by material implication, and he is right, though often too airily right for a man who enjoys the vernacular as much as he does.

S.: You enjoy it no less.

G.: Certainly, but I prefer to explain its excesses by implicature rather than by appeal to some ineffable remainder.

S.: So where Strawson says “ordinary if is not that,” you say “ordinary if says less and implicates more.”

G.: Roughly, yes. The formal sign captures a core relation useful for deduction. The vernacular expression often rides that core while bringing along pragmatic riders.

S.: Riders the horse-shoe does not shoe.

G.: Very nice. Keep that and pretend I said it first.

S.: Never intentionally.

G.: Good. Then what of “se” and “si” in Roman terms?

S.: Latin si already has a life broader than formal consequence: legal conditions, suppositions, threats, concessions, practical maxims.

G.: Exactly. “Si vales, bene est; ego valeo.” A conditional opening that is as much social gesture as logical form.

S.: Which the inverted C will never capture.

G.: Not unless one lets it wear a toga and become ridiculous.

S.: Then your mention of Roman “si” is not antiquarian but methodological.

G.: Quite. It reminds us that the conditional has lived a long public life before it became a sign in a formal grammar.

S.: And Italian “se” inherits that life.

G.: Yes. Richeri and Peano may discipline it, but they do not create the territory from nothing.

S.: So the universal characteristic is always a late imperial project over an older republic of uses.

G.: Excellent. That is very nearly the whole lecture.

S.: You may yet publish.

G.: God forbid. Let us finish this first.

S.: Then speak of the one sign dream.

G.: Ah yes. The dream that there might be one sign for one relation, one purified notation for each fundamental operation, such that thought becomes publicly calculable.

S.: Wilkins had it lexically, Leibniz combinatorially, Richeri algebraically, Peano symbolically.

G.: Very good.

S.: And you?

G.: I am the man at the back murmuring that the audience still needs to understand the signs, and that understanding them involves more than formal assignment.

S.: Because there is always an addressee.

G.: Exactly. The dream of a language with no pragmatic residue is the dream of a language with no real users, or only ideal calculators.

S.: We cannot blame Plato, Bishop Wilkins, or Richeri for trying.

G.: No, certainly not. There is nobility in the attempt. One wants a script cleaner than faction, a sign more stable than rhetoric, an order more trustworthy than custom.

S.: But one must blame those who forget the cost.

G.: Precisely. The cost is that much of what makes understanding human disappears or returns disguised.

S.: Disguised as what?

G.: As “mere context,” “performance features,” “psychological accompaniment,” “rhetorical garnish,” all the things formalists condescend to once their main sign is safely installed.

S.: And you re-promote them.

G.: I give them their inferential dignity back.

S.: Then the metaphysical excrescence is the belief that the cleansed sign has reached the essence.

G.: Exactly. Instead it has reached a useful abstraction and then grown arrogant.

S.: Like certain clerks.

G.: And certain logicians.

S.: Then what is the best charitable formula for Richeri?

G.: He locates productivity in an algebra of signs intended to make intention and context dispensable. That is brilliant and impossible.

S.: “Brilliant and impossible” is very nearly an epitaph for universal language schemes.

G.: It is also a compliment.

S.: And for Peano?

G.: He operationalises the dream more successfully than most. His symbols genuinely clarify relations and standardise expression. But even his inverted C cannot abolish the vernacular conditionals from which philosophers and ordinary men continue to reason.

S.: So the Hall should hear neither mockery nor worship.

G.: Exactly. Admiration under discipline.

S.: That sounds like your best tone.

G.: It is the only one likely to keep both logicians and commoners awake.

S.: Let us do one more example. “If you are hungry, there are biscuits on the sideboard.”

G.: Good. The horseshoe gives one p ⊃ q, perhaps. But the utterance in context is an offer, an invitation, a gesture of hospitality, perhaps a slight hint not to complain.

S.: So the conditional form is serving an act not named in the syntax.

G.: Exactly. And that unnamed act is not mystical. It is recoverable by rational uptake.

S.: Implicated.

G.: Naturally.

S.: Then your final quarrel with the inverted C is not that it is false, but that it is too poor to pass for the whole truth.

G.: Exactly.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Turinese, with one foreign article still unexpelled.

 

 

Grice: Caro Richeri, permettimi di farti i complimenti: le finezze del tuo Deutero-Esperanto, dalla fonologia fino alla semantica, passando per la morfo-sintassi, sono un vero piacere non solo da apprendere, ma da “sfiorare” nella pratica! È raro trovare una lingua che sappia unire rigore e bellezza così profondamente.

Richeri: Ti ringrazio, Grice! Ho sempre creduto che una lingua universale debba essere accessibile e affascinante per tutti, e la mia “scia-grafia” cerca proprio questo. Lavorare sulle sfumature fonologiche e sulle strutture logiche mi ha permesso di proporre un sistema che si avvicina alla filosofia, pur restando semplice e chiaro.

Grice: La tua opera, Richeri, mi ricorda il sogno di Leibniz e Peano: trasformare la complessità del pensiero umano in segni universali. Trovo geniale l’associazione dei caratteri astratti a significati ben definiti. È una strada che apre nuove prospettive sul dialogo filosofico e scientifico.

Richeri: Sono felice che tu abbia colto questo aspetto! L’intento era proprio quello di far dialogare filosofia e matematica, come nell’Alfabeto della natura e dell’arte. Penso che il piacere di “spazzolarsi” con una nuova lingua, sia nel pensiero sia nell’esperienza, sia il vero premio per chi desidera andare oltre le frontiere del sapere.

 

Verbali: Rigobello

 

G.: Rigobello again, and I cannot think why Cedam allowed Soggetto e coscienza into print in 1964 unless they wished to keep the public in productive confusion.

S.: That is, after all, one of publishing’s less advertised services.

G.: You may laugh; you have published books.

S.: A stain I carry with more resignation than pride.

G.: I have not, which is perhaps why I still feel entitled to object to other people’s.

S.: Or why you object so well.

G.: This one especially. Subject and consciousness are not two words one ought to print together unless one is prepared to keep them from reproducing.

S.: You think the book should not have been published at all.

G.: Or at least not under so free a title, since it can only confuse, and it is not free.

S.: “Not free” in what sense?

G.: In the ordinary sense first. A title that promises subject and consciousness offers more than any reader can safely carry back from Padua.

S.: And in the less ordinary sense?

G.: It promises interior architecture where one often finds only upholstered ambiguity.

S.: You sound severe before we have even crossed High Street.

G.: That is because we are walking toward Examinations Hall, where one ought to arrive already sharpened.

S.: We are meant to give a joint class, not a trial.

G.: In Oxford the difference is a matter of gown and audience.

S.: Very well. Let us start with “subject.” We have discussed subject before, though chiefly in connection with predicate.

G.: Exactly. Subject at least behaved then. It knew it was grammatical.

S.: Whereas in Rigobello it becomes metaphysical.

G.: Or anthropological, or ethical, or personalist, or perhaps merely ambitious.

S.: You suspect ambition in a noun.

G.: I always do. Nouns rise socially before they deserve to.

S.: Yet subject has a genuine philosophical career.

G.: Certainly. Subject of predication, subject of consciousness, subject of rights, subject of law, subject to a sovereign, subject as agent, subject as bearer of properties, subject as inward centre, subject as what survives the predicate’s adventures.

S.: So you object not to the noun, but to the traffic among its uses.

G.: Precisely. One should put toll-gates between them.

S.: That sounds less like personalism than municipal planning.

G.: A philosopher must begin somewhere. Rigobello, by contrast, wishes the roads all to meet in the person.

S.: Which is perhaps where I am less alarmed than you are.

G.: Naturally. You have published books.

S.: That cannot be the sole explanation.

G.: It is at least a condition. Once a man has published a book he begins to believe in the possibility of connecting several grand terms under one cover.

S.: And you, having not done so, retain tutorial caution.

G.: Precisely. The tutorial teaches economy. A book teaches confidence and often overconfidence.

S.: Then what about “coscienza”?

G.: Consciousness is worse. It enters a room and immediately expects all the furniture to move inward.

S.: A nice image for a thing you claim not to understand.

G.: I understand enough to distrust it. Subject I can still connect to predicate, law, and logical form. Consciousness slips too quickly into lamp-lit interiors.

S.: Yet you have never been indifferent to mind.

G.: No, but mind and consciousness are not coextensive, and “mind” is at least an older English nuisance with some public manners left.

S.: Whereas “consciousness” is too upholstered.

G.: Exactly. It comes with mirrors.

S.: Then why say it is beyond your consciousness but not your subconsciousness?

G.: Because that is the only civil way to register a limit without sounding merely stupid.

S.: You do not fear sounding stupid.

G.: Only in public classes.

S.: Which this will be.

G.: Exactly my point.

S.: Then perhaps the way through is person.

G.: Ah, your rescue noun.

S.: Not rescue perhaps, but mediation. Subject and consciousness may both become less theatrical if treated through the concept of a person.

G.: Strawson has corrupted you.

S.: Better him than the merely pious. A person is not a ghostly subject nor a beam of consciousness, but a public concept joining bodily criteria, psychological predicates, and normative standing.

G.: That is the textbook form, yes.

S.: More than textbook. It allows us to ask what sort of thing Rigobello might actually be after.

G.: You mean that his personalism is trying to humanise both subject and consciousness by making them answerable through interpersonal reason.

S.: Exactly.

G.: You have been reading the prospectus more sympathetically than I.

S.: I have been reading you as well.

G.: A dangerous mixed method.

S.: Still, the passage gives one a clue. “L’allargamento interpersonale del razionale.” He is widening rationality through the relation to another person.

G.: Which already sounds like a title too far.

S.: But not empty. If the subject is not merely a logical placeholder and consciousness not merely private glow, then both may acquire sense only in the person-to-person field.

G.: “Field” is another word publishers should tax.

S.: Very likely. Yet the thought is intelligible. My rational life may be enlarged by the fact that another person is not merely an object of my consciousness but someone before whom I answer.

G.: That is the ethical turn.

S.: Yes, and it explains why subject and consciousness get bound together at all. The subject is no longer just that which predicates attach to, nor merely that which is aware; it becomes the person who can be questioned, responsible, and transformed in dialogue.

G.: “Dialogue” is another toll-worthy noun.

S.: We are on our way to a hall full of them.

G.: Quite right. Still, this does help. If I am to say anything civil about Rigobello in public, I may say that his error, if it is one, lies not in multiplying grand nouns but in trying to bind them too quickly through person.

S.: Why call that an error?

G.: Because one must distinguish before one integrates. Subject in grammar, subject in law, subject in metaphysics, subject in phenomenology, all these are not the same item merely because a humane book wishes them onto the same page.

S.: Yet a concept of person may explain some of the crossings.

G.: Some, yes. Not all. That is my complaint. The concept of a person is a very good umbrella. It is not the weather.

S.: Also good.

G.: Keep that if you must.

S.: Then perhaps the real issue is publication again. You think the publishers were too quick to put a large claim into the market.

G.: Exactly. One can discuss subject and consciousness in a faculty with the proper local caveats. Print makes caveats social suicides.

S.: Since a book must appear to have a view.

G.: Precisely. A tutorial may wander toward precision. A book must stride toward a title.

S.: You make publication sound vulgar.

G.: Only slightly more vulgar than the book jacket deserves.

S.: Still, you will soon be giving public classes yourself, which is a sort of oral publication.

G.: A dreadful thought. But the public class at least dies at the end of the hour unless some criminal takes notes.

S.: Your class on Meaning may yet survive in memory.

G.: Memory is less binding than a publisher.

S.: Unless one of your hearers becomes devoted and writes it all down.

G.: In that case the blame shifts to devotion, which is fairer.

S.: Then perhaps you are really envying Rigobello the confidence of print.

G.: Not at all. I envy only the possibility of refusing it.

S.: That is a very Oxford form of envy.

G.: Oxford has refined reluctance to a discipline.

S.: We should perhaps be fair to the date. 1964 in Padua is not 1947 in Oxford.

G.: True. The postwar Italian philosophical world still has room for large titles under personalist and phenomenological pressure.

S.: Whereas Oxford in 1947 prefers dry nouns and modest damage.

G.: Exactly. If I called a class “Subject and Consciousness,” the room would expect smoke or conversion.

S.: So you call it Meaning instead.

G.: A title no less ambitious in truth, but with better manners.

S.: Then let us connect this to your own concerns. In personal identity you are suspicious of reducing the person to a flow of consciousness.

G.: Yes. One must preserve public criteria, bodily continuity, memory-conditions, practical identity, and the rest.

S.: Which again makes “person” your better mediator.

G.: Better than pure consciousness, certainly. Consciousness alone is too pointilliste for the work. A person is someone to whom we attribute actions, rights, responsibilities, memories, intentions, and perhaps a troublesome moral style.

S.: Such as Rigobello’s.

G.: Precisely. And if you ask me what I mean by “the concept of the person of Rigobello,” I should say: not an abstract person, but the specific way in which this particular man tries to personify reason.

S.: That is rather good.

G.: It had better be; we are almost at the Hall.

S.: Then the phrase “intenzionalità rovesciata” in the passage may help.

G.: “Inverted intentionality.” A very publishable phrase.

S.: Cynicism aside, it suggests that instead of meaning being primarily a matter of my intending something toward an object, it becomes a matter of the other person turning my rational life back upon me.

G.: As a question.

S.: Exactly. The other is not merely the terminus of an intention but the occasion of my answerability.

G.: Which is how personalism hopes to deepen rationality.

S.: By making reason less solitary.

G.: Or less merely inferential. I can see the attraction. It also risks moral inflation.

S.: Because every encounter becomes a scene of ethical enlargement.

G.: Exactly. One may end by making breakfast answerable to metaphysics.

S.: Which in some colleges it nearly is.

G.: Only the worse ones.

S.: Then if we are to speak jointly, perhaps we can divide labour. You can keep the distinctions sharp. I can say that personalism is not sheer confusion if understood as a way of asking how subject and consciousness receive their public shape in persons.

G.: That sounds tolerable.

S.: High praise from you.

G.: Take it while it circulates. But we must still address the title. I cannot wholly forgive Soggetto e coscienza.

S.: Why exactly?

G.: Because it promises the reader that the subject can be reached through consciousness, or consciousness through the subject, without first separating the several senses of each. It is like advertising “Body and Bread” and expecting no theology.

S.: Very nice.

G.: Keep that too. The point is simple enough. If one says “subject,” some hear grammar, some metaphysics, some legal standing, some phenomenological interiority. If one says “consciousness,” some hear wakefulness, some intentionality, some self-awareness, some subjectivity, some inward light. Put them together and you have not clarified, you have arranged a reception.

S.: A reception needs guests.

G.: A book has them whether it deserves them or not.

S.: Yet the Italian philosophical scene may have understood the shared code better than you admit.

G.: Very likely. That is why I attack the publishers rather than the local conversation. In a department, among readers trained by Stefanini, Padovani, personalism, existentialism, and the Catholic moral atmosphere, such a title might guide rather than mislead.

S.: But in print more widely?

G.: It begins recruiting vagueness.

S.: Then perhaps your deeper point is that publication universalises local shorthand.

G.: Exactly. A title that works as a faculty nod becomes dangerous once it enters the catalogues.

S.: Again, a good line.

G.: You are welcome to a few. Now, let us think how this bears on Examinations Hall. We cannot spend an hour denouncing a book neither of us has been asked to teach.

S.: No, but we can use it to contrast two models. One model begins from what is said, what is meant, the inferential norms of conversation. The other begins from the person as the site where rationality is enlarged through ethical relation.

G.: Yes. And we can say that both are anti-solipsist, though by different routes.

S.: You through cooperative inferentiality.

G.: He through interpersonal answerability.

S.: Exactly.

G.: That is almost charitable enough to survive in public.

S.: We are improving.

G.: Or decaying. But let us continue. Where does your concept of person save him?

S.: It keeps subject from dissolving into bare grammaticality and consciousness from dissolving into private immediacy. A person is someone who is both publicly identifiable and psychologically attributable.

G.: You do sound like Strawson.

S.: I can do worse voices. The point matters. If Rigobello’s personalism insists that the other person is constitutive of reason’s full scope, then “subject” is no longer merely the pole of consciousness but the bearer of responsibility.

G.: And “consciousness” no longer a lantern in a cellar, but a condition of personhood exposed to others.

S.: Nicely put.

G.: I am trying to be fair by stealth.

S.: Then one might say that his “allargamento interpersonale del razionale” names a shift from rationality as inferential apparatus to rationality as ethically answerable life.

G.: That I can tolerate.

S.: Almost.

G.: The trouble is that such widening often proceeds by verbal annexation. One says “reason” and then invites every good thing to sit inside it.

S.: A danger personalism certainly runs.

G.: Exactly. Soon patience, hospitality, responsibility, dialogue, mutuality, finitude, transcendence, all begin wearing the same overcoat.

S.: Yet perhaps your own “reasonable” has similar tendencies.

G.: “Reasonable” is safer because it concedes human fallibility. “Rational” is too often a title claim. “Reasonable” is still in shirtsleeves.

S.: Then perhaps your better criticism of Rigobello is not that he enlarges reason, but that he dignifies it too quickly.

G.: Excellent. That is exactly what I should like to say.

S.: And I may then add that his concept of person is a way of resisting both sterile formal rationalism and private inwardism.

G.: Yes. You see, this is why men who publish books are occasionally useful.

S.: I am glad the trade has some dignity left.

G.: A little, though I do not promise permanence.

S.: We have not yet touched the phrase “it is beyond your consciousness but not your subconsciousness.”

G.: Ah yes. I meant only that the book’s own overt programme escapes my active sympathy, but its subterranean pressure does not. I can see why such a book appears in Italy then. I simply do not wish to write it.

S.: Because your own route to person is through analysis of meaning, intention, action, and identity, not through a thick personalist metaphysics.

G.: Precisely. I arrive at the person reluctantly and from several smaller rooms. Rigobello seems to begin there and invite the other rooms to follow.

S.: That is an excellent spatial image.

G.: You are collecting too much from this walk.

S.: It is what one does before a joint class.

G.: True enough. Now, what of publication again? You know I have not published a book.

S.: Yet.

G.: Spare me the prophecy. The point is that the book-form itself encourages compositional confidence, the supposition that one may gather a region under a title and lead the reader through it by the hand.

S.: Whereas your preferred form has been paper, seminar, joint class, tutorial, exchange.

G.: Exactly. Smaller vehicles, better suited to distinctions one is prepared to abandon or refine next week.

S.: A book survives its author’s revisions.

G.: Worse, it survives his moods.

S.: Then perhaps your hostility to Soggetto e coscienza is also a hostility to philosophical monumentality.

G.: Very likely. Subjects and consciousnesses make poor monuments and tolerable conversations.

S.: That, too, is very good.

G.: Keep that one for after the Hall.

S.: Happily. Then let us settle our line for the class. We may say: Rigobello represents a personalist attempt to widen rationality by locating subject and consciousness within the interpersonal life of the person.

G.: Yes.

S.: And you may add: one must distinguish this from the analysis of meaning, where the relevant anti-solipsism lies in publicly assessable inferential norms, not in a prior metaphysical thickening of the person.

G.: Excellent.

S.: Then the contradiction between us becomes productive rather than merely temperamental.

G.: That is the usual hope before Examinations Hall.

S.: And after?

G.: One settles for survival.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with Oxford reservations intact.

 

 

Grice: Rigobello, a Badia Polesine avete preso il “razionale” e l’avete portato a fare una passeggiata tra le persone, senza farlo vergognare. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: lui sostiene che quando sente “allargamento interpersonale” gli viene voglia di allargare anche il tavolo, per sicurezza.

Rigobello: È una precauzione sensata. Nel personalismo, l’altro non è un oggetto di cui parlare, ma qualcuno davanti a cui rispondi. E infatti il nostro rapporto con gli altri dovrebbe sempre renderci un interrogativo per loro: non una risposta pronta, ma una presenza che obbliga a pensare.

Grice: E proprio perché Speranza e io ci stavamo chiedendo che cosa significhi “allargamento interpersonale del razionale”, mi è venuto da pensare a certi tutee che, ogni tanto, sono irrimediabilmente… occasionali. C’è quello ragionevole che si allarga da sé appena vede un argomento, e poi c’è quello che, quando gli apri lo spazio, ti ci fa un allagamento: non un allargamento. E lì capisci che “razionale” è una parola coraggiosa, perché deve includere anche l’irrazionale di passaggio, quello che ti costringe a fare filosofia non come dimostrazione, ma come convivenza.

Rigobello: Razionale, la sua implicatura sull’irrazionale, Grice, come Speranza la metterebbe — anche se lui, lo so, usa “razionale” malvolentieri e preferisce “ragionevole”, perché ci tiene alla g di ragione e diffida delle parole troppo levigate. “Razionale” suona un po’ da manuale, come un titolo in copertina; “ragionevole” invece suona da persona in carne e ossa: non pretende perfezione, pretende misura. E infatti l’allargamento interpersonale non è un trionfo della Ragione con la maiuscola: è un esercizio di ragionevolezza condivisa, che regge anche quando arriva il tutee irragionevole e ti costringe ad allargare non il concetto, ma la pazienza.

 

Verbali: Rimini

 

SCR, St John’s, a winter evening in the early ’50s. The brandy is decent, the conversation is not, which is how Oxford likes it: decency in liquids, indecency in opinions.

G: Another.

Mabbott (who, as ever, contrives to stay still while breathing): Another what.

G: Another Sentences man.

Mabbott: They come in battalions. Which one has annoyed you now?

G: Rossi della Marca. Francesco. From the Marches—Ascoli, that way. 1319. Paris. Publice, facultate theologiae, the whole performance. A Comentarius in libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi.

Mabbott: I see. Another man who travelled to Paris to explain a book that never changes.

G: Exactly. And then another—Rimini—twenty years on, doing the same thing again. Paris, 1342–44, lectures, revisions, the lot. The same Lombard, the same distinctions, and yet we talk as if we’re witnessing “the growth of logic”. Mabbott: Growth is a more respectable word than development. Development sounds like an ailment. Grice: Growth sounds like something that happens naturally, which is precisely what it isn’t. That is the joke. If you want the truth, the book stays put and the men come and go: they gloss it, they quarrel over it, they found their reputations on it, and then—having made their butter from it—some drop out, some go home to run an Italian studium, some become administrators of souls, and some die in harness. Mabbott: A civil service, then. With Lombard as the permanent secretary. Grice: Quite. A medieval Whitehall, but with better Latin. One begins in the Marches, rushes to Paris to be examined in public, has the “aha” moment—what Hacker will one day call an insight if not an illusion—and then returns to Italy to teach the same thing again, only now with a Paris accent. Mabbott: The Swinging Thirties, you mean. Grice: Yes. I said yes, meaning no. They swung, certainly: back and forth between the old sod and the Seine. Italy had the oldest universities, and yet the ambitious Italians still went north as if civilisation were a postal district. Mabbott: Why? Grice: Language. Or rather: Latin with an audience. The Italians spoke Latin as if it were cousin to what they spoke at home; the Franks used it as if it were a uniform. And Oxford—Oxford later behaves as if Latin were a dead language and then makes a whole career out of resurrecting it badly. Mabbott: And your implicature? Grice: Only that universities are places where the text remains immortal by the convenient device of making the commentators mortal. Which sounds like an insult until one remembers it is merely an implicature—entirely cancellable, except that it isn’t, because you’ve now heard it. Mabbott: You’ll cancel it later in print. Grice: Naturally. In print one cancels what one cannot cancel in company. That, too, is part of the tradition.

 

Grice: Curioso, caro Rimini, che la posterità abbia completamente perso il suo cognome; così, ci resta solo "Rimini". E sa, questo mi riporta subito a Occam, che tutti ricordano solo per il luogo d'origine!

Rimini: È vero, Grice. In Italia c’è questa abitudine di legare il filosofo alla città natale. Essere “Rimini” mi piace: forse così rimango più vicino alla pratica filosofica, proprio come Occam!

Grice: Allora, Rimini, il suo studio sul complesso proposizionale mi affascina! Mi piacerebbe sapere come riesce a conciliare le idee di Occam e Aureolo nell’analisi del significato.

Rimini: La sintesi nasce dall’esigenza di vedere la percezione come un processo complesso. L’esperienza del pane o di Socrate seduto è una tessitura tra semplice e complesso. Occam mi insegna a non moltiplicare gli enti inutilmente, Aureolo a non trascurare la varietà della percezione. Alla fine, la filosofia, come la virtù, è intera! .

 

Grice’s weekly essay assignment as tutor in philosophy at St. John’s: Compare William of Ockham and Gregorio da Rimini in terms of: (a) percentuals of the first names William and Gregorio in their respective villages; (b) other.

 

Verbali: Rinaldini

 

G.: Rinaldini again, and there it sits in 1640, Opus algebricum, as if theology had merely been a customs checkpoint on the road to blue-collar mathematics.

S.: You are very unfair to theology.

G.: Only as unfair as mathematics deserves to its social betters.

S.: You mean its social betters are the people who still count with Greek fingers and Roman dignity.

G.: Precisely. Arithmos and numerus have manners. Algebra arrives with sleeves rolled up and a spanner in the pocket.

S.: That is because algebra does work.

G.: Exactly my complaint. It is blue-collar. One goes off to Macerata, takes a theology degree because the world insists on respectable Latin, and comes straight home to Ancona to print Arabic labour under a Latin title.

S.: Opus algebricum is itself a compromise.

G.: A very revealing one. Opus for the schoolmen, algebra for the workmen, and the whole thing pretending not to know it is imported trouble.

S.: Austin would have liked that phrase.

G.: He did, in effect. “Al-,” he said, “that’s the trouble.” Not even Latin trouble. Imported trouble with the definite article still attached.

S.: A stowaway article.

G.: Exactly. A little al sitting on the title-page like a Levantine port clerk demanding entry into Christendom.

S.: And you object because Rinaldini, being at least nominally civilised, should have stuck to arithmetic.

G.: To arithmos and numerus, yes. If one must count, count in Greek or Roman. Do not arrive in Oxford with algebraic trousers and expect sympathy.

S.: Yet he was in Ancona, not Oxford.

G.: Worse. Ancona is a port, which makes the whole thing more plausible and more morally suspect.

S.: You are determined to class mathematics by income and wardrobe.

G.: It is only a temporary aid to understanding. Arithmetic is upper middle. Geometry is landed. Algebra is industrious and morally earnest.

S.: And analysis?

G.: Analysis is the ambitious nephew.

S.: Very good.

G.: Keep it, but improve the insolence.

S.: Gladly. Let us be exact for a moment. Why do you oppose arithmos and numerus to algebra?

G.: Because arithmos names number in the Greek philosophical manner, and numerus in the Roman administrative one. Both have pedigree. Algebra enters later as a technique of transformation, operation, and unknowns, and therefore as a sort of social climber.

S.: So arithmetic counts what one can point to, and algebra manipulates what one has not yet identified.

G.: Exactly. Arithmetic says: here are three olives. Algebra says: let x be whatever survives the violence of the symbols.

S.: Which is precisely why it frightened classicists.

G.: And ought to. Unknowns are dangerous company.

S.: Yet Rinaldini’s title says Opus algebricum, not Ars Arabica.

G.: Because he wants the technique without the embarrassment. One Latinises the wrapper, leaves the labour inside.

S.: Like many respectable societies.

G.: Exactly. The degree is what one needs to be allowed to speak; the algebra is what one wants to say.

S.: You have used that line before.

G.: Because it remains useful. He goes to Macerata, collects theology as one collects a passport, returns to Ancona, and quietly says, if you do not mind, I shall now return to the subject.

S.: Algebra.

G.: Yes, blue-collar though it is.

S.: But 1640 is late enough that algebra is hardly a novelty.

G.: No, but novelty is not the issue. Social tone is. In a world of Latin titles, scholastic degrees, patrons, academies, fortifications, and bishop-adjacent expectations, algebra still sounds like trade entering the cloister by the side door.

S.: Trade with very good symbols.

G.: Quite. One must never underestimate the aesthetic power of labour.

S.: Then where do the Arabs enter in your annoyance?

G.: In the word itself, naturally. Algebra from al-jabr, carrying the article like contraband into Europe, then parading as if it had always belonged in a Latin sentence.

S.: Which it does by 1640.

G.: Institutionally yes, temperamentally no.

S.: You do not really believe that.

G.: Of course not. But one must tease civilization into self-recognition. The great irony is that the same Europe that prides itself on Rome and Athens quietly computes with Arabic inheritance and pretends the title-page has settled the matter.

S.: So Opus algebricum is a diplomatic title for a mixed ancestry.

G.: Precisely. It is a document of intellectual naturalisation.

S.: There is your true interest, then, not the blue-collar sneer.

G.: The sneer is a mode of affection. Mathematics after all is one of the few disciplines shameless enough to import useful things and only later discover etymology.

S.: Philosophers do that too, but with worse conscience.

G.: Indeed.

S.: Now, tell me what Bostock would say.

G.: Bostock would say that algebra is real rigour, by which he means not my sort of concern with what people mean, but the harder sort with what expressions allow, entail, transform, and preserve under rule.

S.: And you would answer?

G.: That rigour is admirable but not sovereign. Algebra does not become philosophy merely by being exact, any more than my navy memoranda became Euclid by being typed.

S.: Yet Rinaldini is not merely a calculator.

G.: No, and that is what complicates the sneer. He is friend of Galileo and Borelli, supervisor of fortresses, founder of the Cimento, wrangler with colleagues, proposer of a thermometric scale, and writer of Philosophia rationalis, naturalis, atque moralis.

S.: Which is not blue-collar at all.

G.: It is blue-collar with Latin gloves.

S.: Better. Then perhaps the real contrast is not between arithmetic and algebra, but between inherited numerical dignity and operative symbolic labour.

G.: That is very nearly right. Arithmos and numerus belong to counting, order, ratio, civic enumeration, even music and cosmos. Algebra belongs to manipulation, reduction, solution, procedure, and operational anonymity.

S.: Unknowns again.

G.: Yes. Unknowns are where the collars become blue.

S.: You really ought to explain yourself.

G.: Very well. With numerus and arithmos one still imagines objects, counts, measures, proportions, civic totals, perhaps celestial harmonies. With algebra one writes and solves without ever needing to know whether x was apples, ducats, or sinners.

S.: Which is the whole advantage.

G.: Precisely the advantage of labour. It gets on with the job regardless of pedigree.

S.: Then Rinaldini’s blue-collar side is methodological.

G.: Exactly. Algebra cares for rules of operation before it cares for the noble standing of the objects. It is practical abstraction.

S.: And that made it useful for fortresses, scales, and all the rest.

G.: Of course. Men who build, measure, defend, and calibrate naturally like symbols that work harder than social rank.

S.: So the very “blue-collar” quality made it fit the Italy of patrons, engineers, academies, and patrons pretending not to be engineers.

G.: Admirably put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become bourgeois about it.

S.: Never beyond Bologna. Now, if one were truly classical, how would one resist algebra?

G.: One would say that proper mathematical culture should remain tied to geometry, proportion, arithmos as intelligible multiplicity, numerus as counted order, not be surrendered to imported procedures whose very name begins with the foreign article.

S.: A splendidly bad position.

G.: Quite so. That is why I enjoy airing it.

S.: And Austin?

G.: Austin enjoyed the article. “Al-,” he said, “that’s the trouble.” He heard at once that the word carries its passport in the first syllable.

S.: Mary Warnock laughed, I trust.

G.: In the way moral philosophers laugh when something indecent turns out to be merely grammatical.

S.: And the children?

G.: They seized on the “al” and turned it into playground liturgy: AL, AL, AL. Which is what happens when Arabic philology meets English gravel.

S.: That is almost too neat.

G.: Childhood often is.

S.: Let us return to Rinaldini’s route. Ancona to Macerata, theology degree, back to Ancona, then Opus algebricum.

G.: Yes, and the route matters because it displays the old academic economy perfectly: take the respectable credential the world requires, then use it to say what you actually mean.

S.: The degree is licence, the algebra is intention.

G.: Exactly. The same pattern repeats more often than academic piety admits.

S.: Then your punchline about “if you don’t mind” is serious.

G.: Entirely serious. “If you don’t mind” is the whole philosophy. It is a politeness formula that means I shall do this regardless, but I should prefer not to force you to object aloud.

S.: An implicature of survival.

G.: Exactly. Seventeenth-century Italy, like Oxford, valued the art of getting on with the subject while appearing merely civil.

S.: Then perhaps algebra is not blue-collar in opposition to theology, but in relation to social necessity.

G.: Yes. It is the work one actually wants to do once the respectable forms have been satisfied.

S.: You make theology sound like customs paperwork.

G.: In this story it very nearly was.

S.: Harsh on Macerata.

G.: No harsher than Macerata was on young minds.

S.: Fair. Now, could one not say that algebra itself had by then acquired dignity enough?

G.: Certainly enough to be printed, taught, Latinised, and dedicated. But dignity acquired is not the same as dignity inherited. That difference is exactly what makes it amusing.

S.: You are a snob of intellectual genealogy.

G.: Only playfully. All real thought is mongrel sooner or later.

S.: Then why cling to arithmos and numerus at all?

G.: Because they remind us that there are older ways of conceiving number, as measure, ratio, ordered plurality, civic count, and cosmic relation, whereas algebra stresses operational transformability.

S.: So the contrast is philosophical as well as social.

G.: Yes. Arithmos belongs to ontology and proportion; algebra to procedure and solution.

S.: That is too sharp, surely.

G.: Of course. I am sharpening it for the sake of the joke, which is a respectable analytical instrument when used soberly.

S.: Soberly.

G.: In the Oxonian sense.

S.: Then let us do some formalism, since you have asked for Arabic labour to appear. Suppose Rinaldini writes then . That is not Greek numerus but symbolic operation on unknowns.

G.: Precisely. One does not contemplate number; one rearranges relations. It is almost manual.

S.: Manual in symbols.

G.: The cleanest form of manual labour.

S.: And if he moves to higher forms, systems, powers, perhaps even rhetorical equations in words, the same applies.

G.: Yes. Algebra generalises procedure. It emancipates calculation from named particulars.

S.: Which makes it useful to natural philosophy.

G.: Immensely. Once one wishes to scale, compare, infer, calculate intervals, or handle unknown magnitudes, algebra is the servant with no concern for ancestry.

S.: A useful servant then.

G.: The most dangerous sort.

S.: You really are enjoying the class language.

G.: Because it is not entirely false. Arithmetic can sit with philosophers at dinner; algebra arrives later and solves the household accounts.

S.: Which is why the philosophers despise it and borrow from it continuously.

G.: Exactly. One must never trust a discipline that publicly sneers at what privately enables it.

S.: That would disqualify philosophy.

G.: In large part, yes.

S.: Now tell me why Rinaldini, being also a founder of the Cimento, matters beyond the title.

G.: Because the Cimento is proving and trying, which means mathematics under experimental pressure. Algebra in that context is no idle symbolic pastime. It is part of a culture of testing, measuring, resolving, composing, and resisting mere authority.

S.: So blue-collar again, but scientifically so.

G.: Exactly. Del Cimento is a society whose motto might as well be: if it will not work, do not ask us to admire it.

S.: Which is almost your own view of many philosophical systems.

G.: I prefer them at least to be incorrect elegantly.

S.: Rinaldini’s termometric scale is another sign of the practical impulse.

G.: Yes. Freezing and boiling water at ordinary atmospheric pressure, with the interval divided into twelve degrees. A man who thinks in calibrations rather than metaphors.

S.: Though twelve is a very civilised number.

G.: Quite. One must not make him too plebeian.

S.: Then perhaps he is blue-collar only by your theatrical standard, not by his own.

G.: Naturally. Theatrical standards are often the only honest ones in intellectual history.

S.: That is a suspicious maxim.

G.: Most accurate maxims are suspicious.

S.: Then perhaps the real issue is that algebra, unlike arithmetic, exposed classicists to the possibility that thought can be exact without being noble in the ancient sense.

G.: Splendid. That is exactly it.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it, but make it a little less devastating.

S.: Happily. So Opus algebricum is a title announcing that exactness no longer requires Greek pedigree.

G.: Yes. It says: I can be exact with imported tools, and you may dislike the etymology but not the result.

S.: Which is why even Austin was forced into philological admiration.

G.: Indeed. He could sneer at the article and still know that nothing in Oxford would remove it.

S.: The children understood all this better by chanting AL.

G.: Children often reach the essence by barbarism.

S.: Let us have one more pass at your social taxonomy. Arithmetic upper middle, geometry landed, algebra blue-collar, analysis ambitious nephew. What of logic?

G.: Logic is the family solicitor.

S.: And metaphysics?

G.: The aunt with a title and no ready cash.

S.: Ethics?

G.: The clergyman cousin who knows too much family history.

S.: Excellent.

G.: Keep all of it and publish none.

S.: Never intentionally. Now, if one were to rescue algebra from your class satire, what would one say?

G.: One would say that algebra is the great instrument by which mathematics ceased to depend on immediate intuitive display of its subject matter and acquired a generality of operation that made later science possible.

S.: Very sober.

G.: Yes. And one would add that its linguistic foreignness is one of civilisation’s better lessons: Europe thinks with more borrowings than its pride allows.

S.: There is your true point, then.

G.: More or less. Opus algebricum is a title in which Latin respectability and Arabic labour coexist without peace and without divorce.

S.: Which is why you like it.

G.: Exactly. It is intellectually mixed and socially revealing.

S.: And Rinaldini himself?

G.: A mathematician natural philosopher and practical man who took the short road from theology to algebra because he knew which part was passport and which part subject.

S.: The shorter route was not the road from Ancona to Macerata.

G.: No. The shorter route was from respectability to work.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Anconitan, with Arabic dust on Roman shoes.

 

 

Grice: St John’s, late afternoon, after a tutorial and before the next duty. I have been reading Carlo Rinaldini, and I have been brought up short by a thought that is not quite philosophical but has the irritating habit of becoming philosophical by staying in one’s mind. You see, Rinaldini begins in Ancona, where he has what all philosophers secretly want and few admit to wanting: a house that is not a college room and not a rented compromise, but a parental base, a place where your papers can lie about without moral rebuke. Then he goes off to Macerata — call it fifty-ish kilometres in the only sense that matters, namely, “far enough that your mother can’t pop in.” He takes a theology degree, which in those days can mean anything from a ceremonial test to a real bout of disputation; and then, almost indecently, he goes straight back to Ancona and publishes not a syllable about God, but an Opus algebricum. At which point one wants to ask: what is the order of priorities here? And the answer is perfectly clear, though it sounds like an insult until you remember it is merely an implicature: the degree is what you need to be allowed to speak; the algebra is what you want to say. I imagine him on the road, not heroic, just practical. The world says, “Take theology; it’s respectable.” He takes it. The world says, “Now that you have taken theology, you will devote yourself to theology.” He does not. He takes what he needed, and then he returns to what he meant. There is a kind of moral in that, but I refuse to state it baldly, because stated baldly it would sound like I am praising him, and praise is a form of overcommitment. Still, consider the contrast. When the war came, I stopped. Admiralty intelligence has a way of turning the mind into an instrument, and when you are being used as an instrument you do not, in your spare moments, write treatises on algebra. You write memoranda, and you learn to admire, at a distance, the men who manage to keep their real work going while the world interrupts them. Rinaldini’s interruptions were not Whitehall and files; they were the ordinary inconveniences of seventeenth‑century Italy — travel, patrons, fortifications, quarrels, academies, and the constant social necessity of seeming orthodox enough to be left alone. So yes: he goes from Ancona to Macerata, picks up the theology as one picks up a passport, and then goes back to Ancona and prints algebra as if to say, quietly: “Now, if you don’t mind, I shall return to the subject.” That “if you don’t mind,” by the way, is the whole philosophy. It is what we call a politeness formula; it is also what we call a survival strategy. And it is, in the nicest sense, a conversational implicature: I am going to do this regardless of whether you mind — but I would like you not to force me to say so. Punchline (because even a vignette needs one, and Grice would pretend it doesn’t): the road from Ancona to Macerata is shorter than the road from theology to algebra — but Rinaldini, being a mathematician, took the shorter route. University Parks, North Oxford. Saturday, late morning, though the philosophical residue of it only becomes digestible on Sunday afternoon. I am walking the children along the gravel, because children require a surface on which to spend their surplus metaphysics. Austin has just finished one of his Saturday mornings—the sort which begin as “a chat” and end as a moral obligation—and I am trying to process it the only way I know: by pretending I am not processing it at all. We meet, by accident, which in Oxford means: by design plus habit. Austin is with Mary Warnock, whom he drags along like moral ballast, as if moral philosophy were something you needed in the passenger seat when you were driving too fast through sense-data. Austin says almost nothing at first. That is his way of “opening” the conversation: he opens it by not opening it, and you are meant to infer the opening from the absence of opening. If I later call that an implicature, I shall of course deny it and say it was merely a silence. Mary says, cheerfully, “Hello, Grice,” as if that were enough to establish the Cooperative Principle by fiat. Austin glances at what I am carrying—Bodleian spoils in an old paper wrapper—and says, as if he were identifying a suspect in a line-up: “Algebricum.” It is difficult to catch the illocutionary force of the remark. It could be a question. It could be a rebuke. It could be—worse—approval. “Yes,” I say, because in Oxford “yes” is the safest way to postpone the rest of the sentence. “Italian neuter,” I add, because one must retaliate in one’s native weapon. “It agrees with opus. Opus algebricum. Not—pace Ayer—ordinary language at all.” Mary laughs in the way moral philosophers laugh when someone has got away with something that sounds indecent but is merely grammatical. Austin’s face does the thing it does when he has a joke and is deciding whether it is morally permissible. “Al-,” he says. “That’s the trouble. It isn’t even Latin trouble. It’s imported trouble. Definite article and all.” “Exactly,” I say, pleased and ashamed to be pleased. “The Arab has got into the title-page. A little ‘al’ sitting there like a stowaway. And once it’s in, no amount of Oxford will shift it. We can decline amo, but we can’t decline al-.” Austin: “Frege would have hated it.” I cannot resist. “Frege pretended he was founding arithmetic. But arithmetic is respectable Greek—arithmos—whereas algebra is a practical foreigner. It turns up with methods, not manners.” Austin looks at me as if to say: you are about to moralise, which is precisely what you accuse me of. So I add, quickly, the self-effacing rescue: “I’m not saying that as a thesis. Merely as—well—an implicature. Entirely cancellable.” Mary: “Cancellable, perhaps. But you’ve already let the children hear it.” And indeed one of the children has seized on the only audible bit—“al”—and is now chanting it as if it were a magic syllable. AL! AL! AL!—which is what happens when the Arabic definite article meets the English playground: it becomes an imperative. Austin watches this for a moment, and then produces his punchline without changing his tone: “You see, Grice—this is why I don’t open conversations. If you open them, they let the foreign articles in.”

 

Grice: Rinaldini, lei riesce a far sembrare la filosofia naturale una faccenda da cantiere—ma con galateo: fortezze da supervisionare, scale termometriche da inchiodare, e poi Galileo che le dà del Simplicio come se fosse un titolo accademico. Ne parlavo ieri, di sfuggita, col collega filosofo Speranza: dice che “del Cimento” suona come una società scientifica e insieme come una palestra per caratteri.

Rinaldini: A Bologna si impara presto che l’esperimento è una virtù sociale: se non reggi il contraddittorio, non reggi nemmeno il termometro. E con Borelli e gli altri, creda, il cimento non era un motto: era un programma di vita—provare, riprovare, e litigare con garbo.

Grice: Proprio perché Speranza e io ci stavamo chiedendo perché “cimento” suoni così fisico, mi sono messo a guardare la parola da dentro: viene dal latino (medievale) cimentum, legato a cimentare, cioè mettere alla prova, fare esperienza, misurarsi. Non è “certezza”: è urto controllato. E quando uno dice “del Cimento”, non sta soltanto nominando un’accademia; sta facendo capire che lì la ragione non si dimostra soltanto, si stressa—come una fortezza, come una scala, come un’ipotesi sugli insetti delle galle che deve reggere anche quando tutti la guardano storto.

Rinaldini: Non la chiamerei implicatura dura come il cemento, Grice—le implicature sono cancellabili, dopotutto—ma vede il punto. Diciamo allora: implicatura “cimentata”, come Speranza preferirebbe. Perché la sua battuta mette alla prova l’idea giusta: che il nostro linguaggio scientifico non descrive solo risultati, descrive un’etica del provare e riprovare. E in questo, lei è più “del Cimento” di quanto ammetterebbe: non per rigidità, ma per resistenza.

 

Verbali: Riondato

 

Merton, early ’50s. A room that smells faintly of coal, old books, and the sort of optimism that only appears once one has survived the war and can afford to be bored again. Grice is sitting with a cup of tea he has not yet decided is tea; Hampshire is standing as if he still expects a bell to ring.

Hampshire: Quite a change from the Admiralty, isn’t it.

G.: Oh, quite. At the Admiralty one was never allowed to be wrong; at Oxford one is encouraged to be wrong provided one is wrong in the right accents.

Hampshire: And to be wrong at length. Grice: At length, yes. Though the Admiralty had its own length: you could be silent for twelve hours and still be “on duty.” Oxford has improved on that by making one silent in public and calling it thinking. Hampshire: What are you reading? Grice (as if reluctant to confess a vice): Riondato. Hampshire: That takes you back, does it? Grice: It does. Not to Whitehall—worse luck—but to the war years in a different key. The poor man was in Padua, reading classics while the sky was falling in. Air raids, all that. And he still contrived to finish his first laurea in classics. Hampshire (dryly, as if confirming an intelligence report): He did. Grice: He did. That’s what I like about it. We did our war by stopping our lives and calling it service. He did his by continuing his life and calling it—what do they call it?—filologia. The university taking hits, the city taking hits, and the man taking notes on Aristotle as if Aristotle could be used as sandbags. Hampshire: “One of ours,” then? Grice: In the only sense that matters: he behaves as if thought were not a luxury item. Which is a very un-English stance, and therefore I find it oddly consoling. Hampshire: You mean he did classics and then philosophy? Grice: Exactly. A double first, but in the continental idiom. For a Lit Hum type, classics and philosophy are, if not the same thing, at least the same punishment. Hampshire: But there are two words there. How can it be the same thing? Grice: Oxford’s answer is simple: we keep both words so that the examination can be twice as long. Hampshire: That’s not an answer; that’s an administrative maxim. Grice: Precisely. And here I find myself wishing Strawson were present, because he’d do that perverse little twist where he pretends not to see the point, and then—quite unfairly—sees it first. Hampshire: Strawson would say you’re implicating something. Grice: I am. And worse: I am doing it self-effacingly, which is the most English form of confession. The implicature is that Riondato was braver than we were. We were paid to be interrupted; he studied under sirens. Hampshire: And the punchline? Grice: Only this: in 1943 Padua’s buildings were being examined by bombers, and in 1953 I still complain when a scout slams a door in Merton’s staircase and interrupts my “research.” It makes one wonder whether the war improved my character—or merely my excuses.

 

Grice: Riondato, a Padova siete capaci di far diventare l’etologia una cosa rispettabile, quasi da toga. Ieri, di sfuggita, ne parlavo col collega filosofo Speranza: lui dice che appena sente “metodo”, i padovani gli mettono in mano un Aristotele e gli tolgono il caffè.

Riondato: È una misura igienica. Tra Aristotele neo-latino e un po’ di Epitteto, il caffè lo si guadagna dopo. E poi l’etologia, detta bene, non è lo zoo: è il modo in cui il discorso si comporta quando pretende di essere morale senza fare il prete.

Grice: E infatti, dopo quella conversazione con Speranza, ci siamo messi a pensare a Cicerone e a una piccola trappola di lessico: per lui ethos è già, molto spesso, mos, cioè costume, carattere, quindi morale in senso pieno. E allora capisco perché “etologia” mi suoni come una di quelle parole che sembrano innocenti e invece sono una scienza con i denti: una scientia del mos che finge di studiare i comportamenti come se fossero neutrali, mentre in realtà ti sta già chiedendo conto di che cosa approvi, che cosa tolleri, e che cosa chiami “buono”.

Riondato: Morale la sua implicatura, Grice, come Speranza la formulerebbe volentieri — mai moralistica. Perché se per Cicerone ethos è già mos, allora “etologia” in latino non viene fuori come etologia: viene fuori come una scientia morum, e a quel punto la scienza rischia di sembrare un catechismo con la pretesa del microscopio. Lei invece salva la faccenda: non sta facendo la predica, sta facendo vedere che anche quando “descriviamo” i costumi, stiamo già scegliendo il lessico del mos. E Speranza, che diffida dei suffissi come di certi vizi, qui sarebbe d’accordo: morale sì, moralistica no.

 

Verbali: Ripa

 

G.: Ripa, then, or rather 1593 pretending to be a picture book.

S.: Not pretending very hard, I hope.

G.: No. Iconologia in 1593 is honest enough to tell one that abstraction must dress for dinner before it can be understood.

S.: That is already a thesis.

G.: A thesis in costume, which is the only kind Italy really trusts.

S.: And Oxford pretends not to.

G.: Oxford trusts costume too, but prefers to call it “example.”

S.: So 1593 matters.

G.: Immensely. Rome, 1593, printed by the heirs of Giovanni Gigliotti, dedicated to Salviati, and meant to be necessary to poets, painters, and sculptors who have not the leisure to wait for philosophers.

S.: Which is why you like it.

G.: Exactly. Philosophy usually arrives after the image has already done the work and asks to be thanked for the explanation.

S.: You were meant to be preparing “Meaning.”

G.: I was. Instead I found myself thinking that Strawson was right about Peirce in a way one resents being right about anything.

S.: The icon.

G.: The icon, yes, though Peirce is not the beginning of it for my purposes. The beginning, or at least a much earlier and more civilised beginning, is Ripa.

S.: Because Ripa makes iconicity practical.

G.: Precisely. Not a grand metaphysical category first, but a utensil. A lion for strength, a snake for prudence, a balance for justice, a colour for a passion, a posture for a vice.

S.: So Iconologia is an encyclopedia of visible inferability.

G.: Splendid. Keep that. It is exactly what it is: a manual of how to make concepts legible before anyone has defined them.

S.: Which sounds suspiciously like your own eventual point about non-natural meaning depending on more primitive correlations.

G.: There you have it. One can devise a Deutero-Esperanto all one likes, clean, abstract, and non-iconic, but the moment one must teach it to anyone, one smuggles in a gesture, a shape, a likeness, a physical demonstration.

S.: So even the anti-iconic depends upon the iconic.

G.: Exactly. Every non-iconic system of representation leans, somewhere in its cellar, on an iconic, causal, natural, or at any rate perceptual one.

S.: Peirce would approve.

G.: He would, though I should still prefer him slightly less portentous.

S.: And Ripa more useful.

G.: Very much more useful for a room of human beings. Peirce classifies. Ripa furnishes.

S.: That is dry and unjust.

G.: Only half unjust. Ripa tells you what Liberty wears, what Prudence holds, what Envy’s complexion ought to be, what Peace must carry if the painter is not to embarrass himself.

S.: So iconicity here is not merely resemblance, but culturally managed resemblance.

G.: Exactly. An icon is never merely a picture. It is likeness under a regime of recognisable attributes.

S.: Then Ripa is already beyond naive naturalism.

G.: Entirely. He knows perfectly well that the image must be readable by convention. Yet the convention works because it exploits forms of visual uptake more primitive than language.

S.: The eye understands before the sentence finishes.

G.: That was exactly the point. Allegory, attribute, colour: the reader understands before the clause has had time to become grammatical.

S.: So what Oxford does under the name of “example” Ripa does under the name of image.

G.: Yes. The English pretend that an example is neutral. Italians know it is a small theatre.

S.: You never took Peirce’s icons entirely seriously in the early seminars.

G.: Because one is apt, in Oxford, to distrust any triad that arrives with too much self-respect. Symbol, index, icon sound a little too tidy when one is trying to keep one’s footing among actual uses.

S.: And later?

G.: Later one realises that among the modes of correlation the iconic figures very large indeed. Even natural meaning is often iconically entangled.

S.: “Mary has measles”: the spots mean measles.

G.: Exactly. The spots do not merely accompany the condition. They present, in visible pattern, something of what is going on. One may insist on causation, but likeness still does work.

S.: Dark clouds mean rain.

G.: Yes, and no treaty has been signed in advance. One looks, infers, and there is the old natural sign. Aquinas says signum naturale. Italians say segno naturale. I say natural meaning and then pretend the naming was the achievement.

S.: Which it was not.

G.: Certainly not. The world had already been managing very well without my terminology.

S.: So the postman sees the pillar box and has an icon of it.

G.: Precisely. Light, surface, retina, stored recognitional pattern, all operating before the sentence “That pillar box is red” comes to the rescue.

S.: Unless London has painted one green.

G.: Ah yes, the commemorative oddity in the City. Then the postman may say, “That pillar box does not look red to me,” which is a non-iconic report built upon a failure inside an iconic system.

S.: So the utterance is non-iconic, but what supports it is iconic.

G.: Exactly. Everything behind the report is likeness doing work: the remembered red, the present green, the perceived difference, the failure of match, and only then the sentence.

S.: Then Ripa helps because he shows that this whole business need not begin with modern semiotics.

G.: Yes. It begins with making abstracta manageable by image, which is what humans do before they write treatises.

S.: Yet Ripa is not innocent convention either.

G.: No, and that is why he is better than a nursery picture-book. His allegories are highly codified. Italy Turrita is not merely a woman; she is a woman with towers and stars, a whole political physiognomy of nationhood.

S.: So the icon here can be national as well as moral.

G.: Of course. Iconicity scales beautifully, which is one reason it is dangerous.

S.: Dangerous?

G.: Once one has learnt to make prudence visible, one may also make nation visible, authority visible, sanctity visible, empire visible, and later call the result obvious.

S.: So iconicity can naturalise ideology.

G.: Exactly. Nothing becomes more persuasive than a convention that has learnt to look like sight.

S.: That is very good.

G.: Keep it. One must occasionally say something nearly true.

S.: Then why “iconologia” rather than merely “iconica” or “imagini”?

G.: Because Ripa is not only giving images; he is giving a discourse of them, a logos of icons. The images require verbal discipline to become reusable.

S.: So the book is half lexicon and half wardrobe.

G.: Splendid. Entirely so. It is a dictionary for those who think in colour and attribute.

S.: Necessary to poets, painters, sculptors.

G.: Yes, because these people cannot stop to ask philosophers how to represent Dignity or Peace every time they need them.

S.: So Ripa economises on metaphysics by overinvesting in visible signs.

G.: Very well put. He says, in effect: if you want Prudence, give her a mirror and a snake; if you want Time, give him the proper decrepitude; if you want Virtue, make sure she is not dressed like Vanity.

S.: You sound as if you have been enjoying this too much.

G.: One must enjoy something when one is meant to be preparing a seminar.

S.: Strawson would say the enjoyment is the implicature.

G.: He would say something dry and then quote Quine as if it were a weather report.

S.: Yet he was right to insist on Peirce.

G.: In a way that annoys me, yes. Ogden mentions Peirce in correspondence with Lady Welby; therefore the icon had to be faced. But once faced, I found it had ancestors with better table manners.

S.: Ripa having once been trinciante at Salviati’s table.

G.: Exactly. The analogy is almost indecently neat. The man who cut and served food later cuts and serves concepts.

S.: In digestible portions.

G.: Yes. Allegory as carving. Oxford ought to admire that and will instead call it rhetorical.

S.: As if “example” were not rhetoric in tweed.

G.: Quite. Oxford despises visible allegory and then smuggles it in by anecdote, analogy, and underlined chalk.

S.: So when you stand up tomorrow and mention Peirce, you will really be thinking of Ripa.

G.: That is the whole embarrassment.

S.: And 1593.

G.: Yes, because 1593 reminds one that iconic intelligence is not a late accidental chapter in semeiotic sophistication but an old practical art for getting minds to move.

S.: Before logos, then, eikon.

G.: Not before, exactly, but beneath and around. One sees before one classifies, and one classifies by leaning on things first seen.

S.: Then even the philosopher’s logos depends on an iconic basement.

G.: Precisely. And that is what my Deutero-Esperanto fantasy kept overlooking. One may build symbols in the clouds, but one teaches them on earth.

S.: Could one say that Ripa is “righter” than Peirce?

G.: One could, and then immediately deny having meant it. Which is exactly why it is a useful thing to say.

S.: Very Gricean.

G.: I do what I can with the materials to hand.

S.: Let us be a little more exact. In what sense is likeness doing work in Ripa?

G.: In several senses. First, direct visual resemblance where possible. A lion resembles what one associates with strength; a mirror visually suits self-knowledge; scales suit balance. Second, analogical propriety: the relation between attribute and concept is not arbitrary even where it is conventional. Third, mnemonic economy: the image stores and retrieves the abstract by a manageable form.

S.: So Ripa is near the old ars memoriae.

G.: Very much so. The memory arts and iconology are cousins. Both rely on visible stations, attributes, spatial distribution, recognisable signs.

S.: Rosselli in one room, Ripa in another.

G.: Yes, and both furnish the mind because the mind cannot live on pure definitions.

S.: Which is bad news for certain analysts.

G.: Only the ones who think concept-possession begins in paraphrase.

S.: You are in a savage mood today.

G.: It is 1946, and the world has given one permission.

S.: Then is an icon always visual?

G.: For Ripa chiefly, yes, but for my larger purposes no. One may speak of an internal image, a perceptual configuration, a likeness in role, function, or structure. The cricket team representing England is not iconically English by colour or geography, but by licensed likeness of office.

S.: An icon dressed in blazers.

G.: Exactly. Role-likeness still counts as likeness.

S.: So there are grades of iconicity.

G.: Of course. Direct pictorial resemblance, structural analogy, role correspondence, perceptual similarity, bodily gesture, demonstrative staging. Human communication is filthy with them.

S.: “Filthy” is perhaps ungenerous.

G.: “Rich” would sound approving. I prefer “filthy” because it prevents premature piety.

S.: Then what is the relation between icon and convention?

G.: Not opposition, but interdependence. Convention selects, stabilises, and distributes what iconicity first makes manageable. Ripa’s figures are not natural inevitabilities; they are conventional codifications of visible aptness.

S.: So the icon is never naked likeness.

G.: Precisely. The likeness must be institutionally taught to remain shareable.

S.: Which means Ripa is not anti-conventional but pre-linguistically assistive.

G.: Very good. He stands at the point where convention borrows the force of perception.

S.: That would look well in the seminar.

G.: It might, though I suspect I shall say it in a less fatal way.

S.: Does Cicero really hover here too?

G.: Inevitably. Eikon as image is not foreign to the Roman world, and Cicero, who knew more Greek than some people know themselves, would have understood perfectly well that translation here is never merely lexical.

S.: Because “image” does not exhaust “eikon.”

G.: Exactly. Eikon carries representation by likeness with philosophical dignity attached. One cannot flatten it into picture without loss.

S.: As one cannot flatten Iconologia into a picture-book.

G.: Precisely. The title itself refuses such flattening.

S.: Then perhaps the real joke is that Oxford pretends to despise precisely the thing on which its own pedagogy depends.

G.: That is not a joke; it is a sociology of the place.

S.: Examples, models, diagrams, blackboards, maps, little cases, all doing iconic work while everyone says “let us be quite abstract.”

G.: Exactly. Philosophy despises the ladder while climbing it.

S.: And Ripa simply sells ladders with decent handles.

G.: Very nice. Keep that too.

S.: You are distributing goods recklessly.

G.: That is because I have been with a trinciante.

S.: One last question. Why does 1593 matter beyond date?

G.: Because it fixes a moment before later philosophies of sign and symbol had made themselves solemn. Ripa belongs to a world in which iconic intelligence is practical, artisanal, courtly, mnemonic, civic, and not yet overburdened by theory. That makes him a cleaner witness to the necessity of likeness.

S.: Cleaner than Peirce?

G.: Different. Peirce theorises the icon magnificently. Ripa assumes it as a social necessity and organises it for use.

S.: Which is perhaps why you trust him more.

G.: I trust artisans where I merely admire system-builders.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Umbrian, with Roman printing and Oxford irritation.

 

 

Grice: Ripa, a Perugia siete capaci di far diventare l’icona una cosa pratica: non un concetto, ma un utensile. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: sostiene che lei, con l’Iconologia, riesce a fare quello che a Oxford riusciva solo al trinciante—tagliare e servire le idee in porzioni digeribili.

Ripa: È un’arte antica, professore: allegorie, attributi, colori—e il lettore capisce prima di aver finito la frase. In fondo lo scopo era proprio “necessaria à Poeti, Pittori, et Scultori”: gente che non ha tempo per le definizioni, ma ha occhio per le somiglianze.

Grice: Proprio dopo quella chiacchierata con Speranza ci siamo accorti di una cosa: ora capiamo perché Cicerone si spazientiva con “icona”, cioè εἰκών, quando doveva tradurre. Perché εἰκών non è semplicemente “immagine”: è un modo di rappresentare che porta con sé la somiglianza come argomento. E allora non stupisce che, anche quando uno sogna una lingua tutta pulita e non-iconica—tipo un Deutero-Esperanto—poi, appena deve spiegarsi, torna sempre a una εἰκών: un gesto, una figura, un pezzo di mondo che “mostra” prima di “dire”.

Ripa: Iconica la sua implicatura, Grice, come Speranza la chiamerebbe con piena ragione. E mi piace perché mette d’accordo Perugia e Oxford: l’icona non è un lusso estetico, è la stampella della comprensione. Lei può anche costruire sistemi astratti finché vuole; ma quando deve farli camminare tra la gente, ha bisogno di un colore, di un attributo, di una figura che faccia da scorciatoia. E questo, mi creda, è più ciceroniano di quanto Cicerone avrebbe mai ammesso in pubblico.

 

Verbali: Riverso

 

Merton, Philosophical Library, 1951. Merton, Philosophical Library.

 

What are you reading? Strawson asked me. The question was not merely polite. He had caught me with the book open on one knee, and on the other knee a notebook, and a pen poised with that look a pen gets when it expects to be useful. The whole arrangement suggested, not reading, but preparation. Nothing of importance, I said. A Padovan export. Off CEDAM. CEDAM, Strawson repeated, as if it were an English verb. Is that meant to be a publisher or a threat. Publisher, I said. They don’t have Clarendon in Padua. They have their own establishment, and then they hide it behind an acronym, as if the syllables would be too Italian to carry in public. Title, Grice, Strawson said. That was my implicature. All right, I said. But the thing is so large it violates my private maxim: do not repeat yourself twice. I see, he said, which in Strawson’s mouth means: I insist. So I gave in and began, as one does, to shorten where one can, and to over-enunciate where one cannot. Intorno al pensiero di Karl Barth, I said. Intorno, Strawson echoed. Around. Like a merry-go-round. Exactly, I said. Not what Riverso thinks, but what he thinks around. He’s circling a thinker, like a cautious dog. And then it continues: Colpa e giustificazione. Guilt and justification, Strawson said, brightening. That does sound like something one might do on purpose. Like Freedom and Resentment, but with more theology and fewer suburbs. Then: nella reazione anti-immanentistica— Anti what, he said. Anti-immanentistica, I repeated. In Italian they tolerate one i after another. We only allow it for Latinates. Anglii and the rest of that indecency. Is that all, Strawson asked, as if he knew perfectly well it was not, and also because my tone had not given him the sort of closure that cancels further inquiry. No, I said. You’re quite right. It goes on. It is a large cover book. Reazione anti-immanentistica del Roemerbrief barthiano. Barthiano, he said. Isn’t that redundant. Surely the Roemerbrief is Barth’s. Not if you read it the way a philosopher reads, I said. A philosopher reads for scope, not for charity. Brief is a common noun, and Roemer is, grammatically speaking, a common adjective. If you write Roemerbrief barthiano you are doing two things at once. You are labelling the document and you are disambiguating the author. So the redundancy is not redundancy, Strawson said. It is insurance. Precisely. Riverso is implicating, as I use the term, that there could be Roemerbriefe that are not Barth’s. If you omit barthiano you leave a door open for the wrong sort of reader. And the wrong sort of reader is exactly the sort one meets in libraries. Strawson looked at the cover again, then at my notebook. And this is why you’re taking notes. Partly, I said. Partly. Partly I’m taking notes because if I don’t, the title will continue to exist only as an endurance-test, and I should like it to exist as an example. And partly because it is the neatest illustration I’ve had this week of what Italians can do, casually, with the words around and of. How so. Because “intorno al pensiero” advertises modesty while smuggling in a method. It says: I am not pretending to be Barth. I am merely in Barth’s neighbourhood. But that neighbourhood is where all the action is. It is where you can discuss guilt and justification without pretending you invented guilt or discovered justification. Strawson nodded, as if acknowledging that neighbourhoods are indeed where metaphysics happens when it tries to look respectable. Still, he said, what is Riverso actually doing in the book. He is testing a very particular move in Barth, I said. The anti-immanentistic reaction, which is a grand phrase for a simple discomfort: the refusal to let the divine collapse into the merely human, or the eternal into the historical, or grace into psychology. Barth is reacting against a style of thought that makes everything immanent, everything available on the surface, everything explainable without remainder. Riverso is following that reaction and asking what it commits Barth to—what it rules out, what it forces you to say, what it forces you to stop saying. So it is a book about what can and cannot be said, Strawson said. Exactly, I said. It is about the discipline of refusal. The refusal to explain away. The refusal to translate the sacred into something comfortable. Strawson smiled in that way he has when he is about to turn my sentence into a mild rebuke. Then it will fit you perfectly, Grice, he said. You have always been fond of refusal. That is unjust, I said. I am fond of restraint. How do you tell them apart. You can’t, I said, unless you know the motive. Refusal is what you do to stop the other chap talking. Restraint is what you do to stop yourself. And Riverso. Riverso, I said, is practising restraint under the guise of commentary. He stays “around” Barth so that he can say, with a straight face, that he isn’t preaching. But the whole title is already a small sermon in method: we will not speak from above; we will speak from around. We will not claim the centre; we will patrol the perimeter. Strawson sat down, as if the matter now required residence. And have you found a Roemerbrief that isn’t by Barth. Not yet, I said. But the beauty of Riverso’s barthiano is that it makes the question intelligible. It creates, by a mere adjective, the logical space for the counterexample. That is what good labelling does: it tells you what would count as a mistake. He glanced again at my notebook. And what have you written so far. Very little, I admitted. Just the title, broken into manageable parts, and one line of English: beware of adjectives that look redundant. They are often doing the real work. Strawson rose, satisfied. Then you are ready for your examination, he said. Ready, I said, in the only sense that ever applies. I have a title I can now repeat without fainting. And as he walked off, I found myself thinking that this, too, is why Oxford is a peculiar place to read Italian philosophy. An Italian can write a title that looks like a whole argument, and then use an extra adjective to keep the argument honest. An Englishman reads it and thinks, at first, that the extra adjective is merely ornamental. Then he remembers that in our own work the “ornament” is often the whole point, only we are too shy to admit it, so we hide it, not behind acronyms, but behind the word “obviously.” a) CEDAM is an acronym for Casa Editrice Dott. Antonio Milani (Padova). [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] (b) Römerbrief literally means “Letter to the Romans” (i.e., the Epistle to the Romans). In the Barth context, Der Römerbrief is Karl Barth’s commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. EPILOGUE. Two days later. How is your Riverso going? Strawson asked. Fine, I said. I’m rather taken with CEDAM. Milani strikes one as an eminence. What Milani? Strawson asked, with the mild alarm of a man who suspects you have acquired a new Italian without telling him. I told you CEDAM was an acronym—like Clarendon, or Blackwell, for that matter. Only we put the proper name in capitals and pretend we’ve done something scholarly, whereas Padua hides the man behind four letters. But listen: if you say C-E-D-A-M slowly enough, you can almost hear him at the end: M. I held the M a fraction too long, in the way only I can and nobody thanks me for. Strawson said: You’re making a phonetic argument for a publishing house. I’m making a conversational one, I replied. If a house takes the trouble to conceal a name, it is inviting you to infer the name. And the Römerbrief? he asked. Ah, yes. Riverso has dropped the umlaut, I said—Italian typography cannot be expected to keep German diacritics in good health. But the point remains: Römerbrief means “Letter to the Romans.” Someone writes a mere letter—a brief—to the Romans, I went on. Has it got to be Paul? Well, Strawson said, it wasn’t you. No cigar, I said. It’s all Greek, I admitted, and you never had it; but what Paulos wrote was Ἐπιστολὴ πρὸς Ῥωμαίους. And that is already instructive. “Epistle to the Romans” is not a proper name at all: it’s a description. Anyone can write an epistle, and “Romans” is far too collective to fit your mould in Individuals. If I said “a letter to the English,” you’d ask, quite rightly, “Which English?” Strawson said: I should ask, first, who on earth would write to “the English” as if we were one addressee. Exactly, I said. Romans is a plurality in uniform. And “brief” is just a noun wearing an air of authority. The description doesn’t settle the author; it leans on context to do the settling. Which is precisely what Barth is doing, Strawson said. Not proving that it must be Paul, but exploiting the fact that it already is Paul for anyone who has been brought up properly—by the Vulgate, the pulpit, and a general European conspiracy of reference-fixing. Yes, I said. Barth’s Römerbrief is not “a letter that happens to be to Romans.” It’s that letter: the one that has become, as you say, dogma. If Quine were here he’d call it a canonical text and then deny there are any canons. Strawson smiled. And Riverso, circling it “intorno,” is circling not merely a text but a settled identification. I don’t deny it, I said. But Riverso’s little redundancy—Roemerbrief barthiano—still amuses me. It’s like writing “the Oxford University of Oxford.” It looks silly until you remember that the silliness does work: it blocks the wrong inference, the one made by a clever reader who thinks descriptions always underdetermine their referents. And you approve of blocking wrong inferences? Strawson asked. In print, yes, I said. In conversation I prefer to let them occur and then watch you try to repair them. In that case, Strawson said, you’ll have plenty of Riverso left. No, I said. Only one more thing. When I next see CEDAM in capitals, I shall no longer hear “a publisher.” I shall hear “a man with a name.” And that, Strawson said, is the difference between a letter and an epistle: one has a sender; the other has an institution. Quite, I said. And Oxford, of course, has both—only it calls the institution “ordinary language” and the sender “nobody in particular.”

 

Grice: Riverso, lei a Napoli riesce a far sembrare la “forma del segno romano” una cosa che si può ordinare al banco, con lo scontrino e tutto. Ieri, di sfuggita, ne parlavo col collega filosofo Speranza: dice che i napoletani sono gli unici capaci di mettere insieme logica formale e magia senza chiedere permesso.

Riverso: È che a Napoli, se separi troppo, poi non ti capisci più nemmeno col barista. La logica serve, certo, ma serve anche ricordarsi che le culture non sono equazioni: sono abitudini, stratificazioni, “tappe”. E il linguaggio romano, se lo guardi bene, è un’officina, non un museo.

Grice: Proprio perché Speranza e io ci stavamo chiedendo come mai, in certe pagine, si passi dalla forma al significato come se fosse una scala mobile, mi è venuta una piccola perplessità da filologo pigro. Segnare—signare—è tracciare un segno, marcare, incidere: roba da notai e da legionari. Significare, invece, sembra aggiungere una sillaba che vuole fare l’importantina: quel “-fi-” che pare dire “non basta il segno, ci metto anche il significato in divisa”. Eppure, a sentirla parlare, viene da pensare che spesso “significare” non sia un superpotere in più, ma soltanto “segnare” visto dal banco di chi interpreta: un segno ben fatto, e il resto lo fa la conversazione.

Riverso: Implicatura segnata, non significata, la sua, come Speranza vorrebbe che fosse. E mi piace perché è napoletanamente parsimoniosa: non compra un “-fi-” se non serve. In fondo, nella filosofia della comunicazione, la differenza tra segnare e significare è spesso una questione di contesto: il segno è l’atto, il significato è l’effetto sociale che si stabilizza. Se poi ci mettiamo dentro Roma antica, Vico, e persino Bruno che “inizia a parlare”, capisce perché a volte basta incidere bene—e lasciare che siano gli altri, con metodo (e un po’ di teatro), a fare il resto.