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

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

Verbali: Rabirio

GRICEVS: RABIRIVE, modo cum collega philosopho Spe locutus sum; ille mihi narravit te in horto Romano philosophiam colere, non in cathedra sed inter herbas—quasi sapientia etiam radices haberet. 

RABIRIVS: Ita est, Grice. In horto res parvae docent: quae tarde crescunt, diu manent. Sed Ciceroni videor nimis simpliciter dicere, quasi doctrinam in fasciculum ligarem ut turbae venderem. 

GRICEVS: Spes et ego mirabamur hoc ipsum: cur Ciceroni tam displiceat cum quis scholam—vel hortum—ad plures perducere conatur. Nam cum dicit te “nimis expedire”, sonat quasi velit doctrinam intactam manere, non tractabilem. At si quis hortum ostendit populo, non statim tollit philosophiam; tantum facit ut alii videant ubi seminanda sint. 

RABIRIVS: Implicaturam tuam non dixerim “mordacem”, Grice—etsi Spes fortasse aliter iudicet—sed sane est urbanam. Et hoc addo: horti cultura (si Epicurum tacite significamus) numquam tam simplex est quam videri potest, sed nec tam obscura quin nimia subtilitate corrumpatur. Ciceroni cura est ne doctrina minuatur; mihi cura est ne pereat. Inter has duas curas, bene sarire oportet, non solum disserere.

Verbali: Ragghianti

Grice: Ragghianti, proprio ieri ho avuto uno scambio rapidissimo con Speranza: lui sostiene che a Lucca l’estetica non nasce davanti a un quadro, ma davanti a un metodo—e che lei è uno che, se vede Montale, finisce per leggere Joyce, e se legge Joyce, finisce per guardare i Carracci con l’aria di chi ha appena scoperto un trucco. 

Ragghianti: È un trucco serio. Marangoni mi ha insegnato che la critica d’arte non è chiacchiera colta, ma “figurazione” presa sul serio: pura visibilità, e disciplina dell’occhio. Se poi ci metti Bergson e Croce, ti viene voglia di chiedere alla forma perché fa quello che fa. 

Grice: Speranza e io ci domandavamo perché lei, invece di fermarsi alla storia dell’arte, abbia avuto bisogno di passare per cinema e spettacolo, e addirittura di fondare una rivista come Critica d’Arte. E mi è venuto da pensare che quando uno distingue tra linguaggi e insiste sul visivo, sta dicendo (senza farne un manifesto) che il “vedere” non è una facoltà neutra: è già un modo di pensare, e quindi anche un modo di fare politica. Non a caso, se uno impara presto a leggere le forme, poi impara anche a leggere le maschere—e un antifascista “fervente” nasce spesso così: prima dalla scuola dell’occhio, poi dalla scuola del coraggio. 

Ragghianti: Implicatura figurativa, la sua, come Speranza dovrebbe chiamarla. Perché lei ha colto il passaggio decisivo: dal quadro alla scena, dalla visibilità alla responsabilità. Il cinema e il teatro non sono “aggiunte moderne”: sono la prova che l’arte figurativa ha più luoghi di quanto la storia dell’arte ammetta. E quando uno fonda una rivista, in fondo, sta facendo la stessa cosa che fa con un Carracci: mette ordine nel visibile, e spera che quell’ordine, una volta visto, diventi anche un criterio per vivere.

Verbali: Raimondi

G.: Raimondi has landed us in Examinations Hall with Persian morpho-syntactic categories, which is more than I ever expected to owe the Medici press.

S.: If the Hall can swallow it.

G.: The Hall has swallowed worse. It once swallowed my views on meaning.

S.: And expelled them in Schools.

G.: Precisely. But Persian is another matter. Austin once called it useless, which was merely his way of saying he had not learnt it.

S.: Or that it would not help him distinguish “voluntary” from “involuntary” before luncheon.

G.: Yes. Still, the deep berths of lingo matter. Persian is Indo-European, or Indo-Germanic if one wants to irritate a modernist, and therefore a cousin to the Yorkshire tongue, though with better carpets.

S.: Yorkshire will not thank you.

G.: Yorkshire rarely does. But I mean the family resemblance seriously enough. One cannot talk categories in language without asking whether one is merely rediscovering old kinships under new labels.

S.: Which is what Raimondi would have liked.

G.: Raimondi liked many things too infrastructural for Oxford. Typefaces, grammars, Oriental corpora, channels of transmission — the whole man is a warehouse with a theological licence.

S.: You say that fondly.

G.: Only because he gives us something better than another dictionary of philosophical jargon. He gives us scripts, grammars, and the possibility of saying “my mother is quick” in several civilisations.

S.: Let us begin there, then. “My mother is quick.”

G.: In English, yes. In Latin one might say mea mater celer est or mea mater velox est, depending how one wishes to sound. In Greek, perhaps ἡ μήτηρ μου ταχεῖά ἐστιν, though one should check the adjective if one wants real speed rather than English bluff.

S.: And in Persian?

G.: Modern Persian would give us مادرم تند است or مادرم سریع است, though the first leans to temperament and the second to speed in the newer register. Better perhaps مادرم تیز است in some contexts, but then one is already disputing the semantics of “quick.”

S.: Which is why categories matter.

G.: Exactly. The sentence looks simple in English only because English is badly behaved in a manner we have learnt to tolerate.

S.: And Proto-Indo-European?

G.: That is where one begins to enjoy oneself irresponsibly. Something like méh₂tēr h₁ésti kʷékʷlos would be absurd, because I have just smuggled in wheel-like speed. Better simply to confess that the exact PIE for “my mother is quick” is a reconstruction too far for a class before eleven.

S.: So you will not say mea mater est quicka?

G.: Only as a joke, and a good one. “Mea mater est quicka” is what happens when Indo-European piety meets schoolboy forgery.

S.: Then you admit there is pleasure in family resemblance.

G.: Of course. Latin mater, English mother, Persian mādar, all cousins in one great domestic conspiracy. And “quick,” if not cognate, still belongs to the sort of semantic field that makes one ask how languages carve attribute from action.

S.: Which is where morpho-syntactic categories appear.

G.: Yes. Raimondi’s thought, or one way of using him, is that one cannot speak of language philosophically without looking at the deep joints: noun, proper noun, substantive noun, verb, adjective, relation, agent, patient, action, all that old Aristotle-and-grammar business.

S.: NOMEN, NOMEN PROPRIUM, NOMEN SUBSTANTIVUM.

G.: Exactly. The old schoolroom parade. Better than half the newer taxonomies, because at least it knew it was half logic and half declension.

S.: Does it apply to Persian?

G.: And to Persian cats, if they could speak — though we might not understand them, which is a useful check on philosophy.

S.: Let us try the cat.

G.: Very well. “The Persian cat sat on the mat.” English, embarrassingly plain. Latin: cattus Persicus in storea sedit, though the Roman would complain about cattus and storea as if they were both latecomers. Greek would need some schoolroom barbarism because the cat itself is already a traveller. Persian: گربهٔ ایرانی روی حصیر نشست.

S.: And Hebrew?

G.: Something like הַחָתוּל הַפָּרְסִי יָשַׁב עַל הַמַּחְצֶלֶת. Which at once reminds us that Semitic patterns do not line up politely with our Indo-European smugness.

S.: So Hebrew and Persian do not compare?

G.: They compare magnificently, but not by inheritance of the same sort. The point is not to rank them but to see where categories match, fail, shift, or overperform.

S.: For example?

G.: The relation between noun and adjective, possession, definiteness, copula, and word order. English says “my mother is quick” with shameless simplicity. Persian often omits the explicit copula in some contexts, though not here in formal prose. Hebrew treats predication differently again. One sees at once that “being” is a problem of grammar before it becomes a problem of ontology.

S.: There is your Aristotle again.

G.: He never quite leaves. The Categories are really about what can be said in one breath of a subject, or at least that is one decent way of reading them. Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, passion.

S.: Which Cicero turns into quantity, quality, relatio, and the rest.

G.: Yes, and thereby Rome at least had the grace to make them pronounceable. Then Kant arrives and multiplies necessity beyond appetite into quantity, quality, relation, modality, each with three subforms, to make twelve.

S.: Three by four: twelve. The theological look of arithmetic.

G.: Exactly. Quantity, quality, relation, modality, each triad behaving as if Königsberg had annexed the schoolroom.

S.: Give me Persian any day.

G.: My point exactly. If one wants to know whether morpho-syntactic categories are real, look not only at Kant’s table but at Persian, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and English in use.

S.: And what does Raimondi actually care about?

G.: Transmission, first. Typefaces, corpora, Arabic Euclid, Avicenna, grammars of Hebrew and Chaldean, Persian manuscripts. He is a philosopher only in the older, larger sense in which making meaning portable is already a philosophical labour.

S.: A macro-Gricean, then.

G.: That is too flattering. Better to say that he constructs the conditions under which any micro-Gricean act of understanding can scale beyond a room.

S.: Which is not nothing.

G.: Certainly not. Without presses, grammars, copied scripts, and men patient enough to compare lexical habits, there is no Hall for us to preen in.

S.: You are in a charitable mood.

G.: Persian does that. It obliges one to acknowledge civilisation outside Oxford.

S.: Let us return to categories. How many do you want?

G.: Fewer than Kant and more than a railway timetable. Let us say the old grammatical-philosophical essentials: noun, proper noun, substantive, adjective, verb, pronoun, relation-marker, quantifier, modality-marker, perhaps copula if one insists, and then the inferential devices that tie propositions together.

S.: “If,” for example.

G.: Ah yes. The beloved “if.” Persian اگر, Latin si, Greek εἰ, English if. One sees at once both kinship and divergence. The connective is not merely logical; it is historical, social, and deeply irritating.

S.: To Strawson too.

G.: Of course. Strawson would say the horseshoe is not the vernacular if, and he would be right in his superior way.

S.: Then how does Persian help?

G.: It reminds one that a language can parcel agency, possession, predication, and relation with a surface economy that makes English look both elegant and careless. Persian’s ezafe alone should teach humility to analysts.

S.: Explain.

G.: The ezafe marks noun-adjective and noun-genitive relations with a little linking vowel and a great deal of civilising labour. It ties words in ways that our old school categories must notice or become ridiculous.

S.: So “the Persian cat” is not merely noun plus adjective.

G.: Exactly. It is often a linked construction: گربهٔ ایرانی — cat-e Persian. The relation is audible and graphic in a way English usually leaves to adjacency.

S.: Then Aristotle’s categories are not enough.

G.: Not enough, no, but still useful as the first theatre. One begins with substance and quality, perhaps, then learns that languages implement those distinctions through very different morpho-syntactic arrangements.

S.: Which sounds less metaphysical than grammatical.

G.: As it should. One of the oldest mistakes in philosophy is to mistake a grammatical convenience for a metaphysical revelation.

S.: Such as “is.”

G.: Such as “is,” yes, and “has,” and perhaps “quick.”

S.: You are enjoying that word too much.

G.: Because it behaves like a small Anglo-Saxon tyrant. “My mother is quick” can mean swift, lively, perceptive, alive, pregnant in older registers, all under one curt monosyllable.

S.: Persian will not let you get away with that.

G.: Precisely. Nor Latin, if properly taught. Velox, celer, acer, vividus — one must choose the shade. Grammar and lexicon together prevent philosophical laziness.

S.: Then your class in the Hall is really a rebuke to English.

G.: Every decent class is.

S.: You said Persian was possibly Indo-European like Yorkshire.

G.: I said it to provoke, but yes, in the large family sense. Persian is Indo-Iranian within Indo-European. Yorkshire is merely English with weather. Yet the comparison is useful because it reminds one that kinship in roots does not entail identity in categories.

S.: So mother, mater, mādar, μήτηρ, all cousins, but the categories that frame them may differ.

G.: Exactly. In one language possession is straightforwardly pronominal, in another enclitic, in another attached, in another a genitive relation. The old philosophers who thought grammar transparently mirrored the world deserved some Persian.

S.: Or some Hebrew.

G.: Hebrew too, though Semitic gives a different lesson. Root-pattern morphology alone is enough to unsettle any complacent Greek notion that the noun and verb parade one by one in tidy robes.

S.: Yet Aristotle was not entirely wrong.

G.: Certainly not. He saw that there are recurrent ways in which language says being, quantity, quality, relation, and so on. He was wrong only where later people treated his list as final and universal.

S.: Which Kant then multiplies from Xto 12.

G.: Yes, with four headings and three under each: quantity, quality, relation, modality. It is all very German and very overupholstered.

S.: Give me Persian any day.

G.: That is becoming our refrain.

S.: It deserves to. But tell me again how Raimondi enters. Is he not mainly Arabic and Syriac and Hebrew?

G.: Yes, and that is exactly why Persian becomes amusing in his orbit. Once you direct the Medici oriental press, produce Arabic Euclid, and print philosophical grammars of Hebrew and Chaldean, the leap to Persian morpho-syntax no longer looks like pure whim.

S.: So the Persian cat in the passage is not merely zoological.

G.: No, it is philological allegory in fur.

S.: Very good.

G.: Thank you. Persian, like the cat, will not be learnt by decree. It must be coaxed, and grammar is the first saucer of milk.

S.: Austin said it was useless.

G.: Austin thought many things useless if they did not sharpen an English distinction by tea-time.

S.: He might have liked the categories, though.

G.: Only if they stayed close to examples. “The fat cat sat on the mat” would probably have pleased him more than “morpho-syntactic categories.”

S.: Then let us do the fat cat. English: “The fat cat sat on the mat.”

G.: Latin: cattus pinguis in storea sedit, though again one feels the lateness of both cat and mat. Greek: something equally schoolroom and suspicious, perhaps αἴλουρος πίων ἐκάθισεν ἐπὶ τοῦ τάπητος, though I should not stake my dignity on the exact cat.

S.: Hebrew?

G.: הַחָתוּל הַשָּׁמֵן יָשַׁב עַל הַמַּחְצֶלֶת. Persian: گربهٔ چاق روی حصیر نشست.

S.: And what do we learn?

G.: That noun, adjective, article, and relation are not implemented uniformly; that predication and attributive linkage differ; that the so-called same sentence is not the same act of grammatical architecture in each language.

S.: Which suggests that the categories are partly abstract and partly language-specific.

G.: Precisely. A philosopher who ignores either side will deserve his students.

S.: Then where does “meaning” come back in?

G.: Everywhere. If we are to speak of “mean” triadically — smeans mfor i— we must know what counts as the sign-token sin a given language, how it is morphologically formed, what relations it encodes, what it leaves to context, and what an interpreter may reasonably recover.

S.: So the meta-language is crucial.

G.: Exactly. One cannot discuss “meaning” in the abstract while pretending that signs arrive already individuated and relations already fixed. The meta-language tells us what sort of thing a sign is in the object language.

S.: Raimondi would approve that.

G.: He might, though he would probably insist on a better script and more manuscripts before trusting us with the Hall.

S.: A fair condition.

G.: Entirely.

S.: Then perhaps the true class title is not “Persian morpho-syntactic categories” but “What language must already be like for meaning to happen.”

G.: Too long for the board, but exactly right.

S.: And your answer?

G.: That language must already distinguish enough — beings, actions, agents, relations, quantities, modalities, and all the rest — for a speaker to place something before an interpreter in a way recoverable as meaningful.

S.: Recoverable, not merely decodable.

G.: Exactly. Even Persian, for all its elegance, does not abolish interpretation. It only disciplines different parts of it differently.

S.: So the Hall will hear that Persian, like English, like Latin, like Greek, like Hebrew, signifies through grammar, but not identically.

G.: Yes. And they will hear that “category” is dangerous if one forgets whether one means Aristotle’s, Kant’s, a school grammar’s, or an actual language’s working joints.

S.: You should say that more slowly.

G.: In the Hall I say everything more slowly. It gives the illusion of depth.

S.: Which is half teaching.

G.: The respectable half.

S.: And the other half?

G.: Surviving questions.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Persian, with one eye on Aristotle and the other on the cat.

Grice: Raimondi, vengo da un incontro recentissimo con Speranza: non so come faccia, ma riesce a parlare di tipografie orientali e, nello stesso respiro, a chiedermi se ho nutrito il gatto. Dice che la filosofia, senza un animale in casa, diventa subito “il Lizio” — e lui non la perdona. 

Raimondi: A Napoli l’idealismo lo si fa risorgere anche così: con Euclide sul tavolo, Apollonio di Perga sul comodino, e un gatto che ti ricorda che la “sostanza” sa sempre dove dormire. E poi Roma, con la Stamperia Medicea, era un’officina vera: lingue esterne, grammatiche, manoscritti recuperati… tutto molto serio, finché non entra in scena il persiano. 

Grice: Speranza e io, uscendo, ci siamo trovati d’accordo su una cosa che lei capirà al volo: “gatto persiano” non è solo un dettaglio zoologico. A Vadum Boum io e Speranza abbiamo sempre avuto una debolezza per i gatti — e infatti, quando uno mi dice “persiano”, mi viene in mente subito l’idea che la lingua sia come un felino: non la impari per decreto, la corteggi, e lei decide se farsi avvicinare. Austin mi diceva che studiare persiano era “inutile”; io sospetto che intendesse “indocile”. E il bello è che il gatto persiano, mentre tutti trafficano con missioni e grammatiche caldee, resta lì come promemoria silenzioso: l’Oriente lo puoi stampare quanto vuoi, ma prima devi riuscire a farti ascoltare — senza graffiarti. 

Raimondi: Implicatura persua la vostra, come Speranza la chiamerebbe — e per non farla lunga direi “vostra” e basta, così il gatto non si offende per la grammatica. Mi piace perché fa dialogare tre cose che a Roma sembravano già separate: la dottrina (Euclide e le coniche), la macchina (la tipografia che moltiplica copie), e l’animale (che non si moltiplica se non quando vuole). E sì: il persiano, come il persiano, si studia solo se accetti che non è un esercizio di utilità, ma di pazienza e di buon tatto. Speranza, con la sua sensibilità felina, direbbe che è l’unico metodo davvero “orientale” che Oxford abbia mai imparato.

Verbali: Raio

G.: Il problema dell’essere, 1923. I did not know it was a problem then.

S.: It was a problem for Aristotle, G., not a solution.

G.: Exactly. Aristotle gave us the multiplicity of being, and then left the rest to generations of Italians with titles.

S.: Raio among them.

G.: Yes. Il problema dell’essere. One wants to ask at once: what is Raio, what is a saggio, and what has being done to deserve this.

S.: A saggio is an essay, and Raio is a philosopher with enough sobriety to know that “essere” has caused mischief for centuries.

G.: Soberly, perhaps. But “essere” is already the trouble. Aristotle says τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς, and Cicero gives us esse, and then every schoolmaster behaves as if the question had thereby become manageable.

S.: It did become a question.

G.: Yes, but not a good answer. The Greeks give us εἶναι, the Latins esse, the Italians essere, and the confusion remains identical through excellent vowels.

S.: Same lingo, same problem?

G.: Same lingo, same absence of solution.

S.: Until you come with your Izzing and Hazzing and solve it all.

G.: Precisely. I propose I(a,b)and H(a,b): aizz b, ahazz b. Better than “essere” at once, because it distinguishes the predicative and the possessive without allowing ontology to lounge in the grammar.

S.: Aristotle would have said that being is said in many ways, and you are simply pruning the shrubbery.

G.: Exactly. Good pruning is half of analysis.

S.: So I(a,b)is for predication?

G.: In the broad first instance, yes. “Socrates izz wise,” “the rose izz red,” “man izz mortal.” One can allow oneself a general predicative relation without pretending it is all one metaphysical tie.

S.: And H(a,b)?

G.: Possession, having, perhaps exemplification in a looser vein, though one must not let it become a dustbin. “Socrates hazz courage,” “the rose hazz redness,” “the state hazz citizens,” and so on.

S.: You have not yet solved the multiplicity of being; you have merely given it two workmen’s entrances.

G.: Better two entrances than one collapsing portico.

S.: Then let us ask about the properties. Is Ireflexive?

G.: A dangerous question at once. If I(a,a), does everything izz itself? One is tempted to say yes, but then one has smuggled identity into predication.

S.: Which you promised not to do.

G.: Exactly. So Ihad better not be simply reflexive by fiat.

S.: But “Socrates is Socrates” sounds harmless enough.

G.: That is identity disguised as predication, one of the oldest philosophical rackets.

S.: Then Iis not identity.

G.: Certainly not. If Iwere identity, we should gain nothing and merely redescribe boredom.

S.: Is it transitive?

G.: Again, with care. If I(a,b)and I(b,c), does I(a,c)? “Socrates izz Greek” and “Greek izz human” tempt one toward “Socrates izz human,” but that already depends on the logical type of the predicates involved.

S.: So your Iis not one relation but a family under a discipline.

G.: Precisely. Better a disciplined family than the indiscriminate promiscuity of “essere.”

S.: And H? Is having reflexive?

G.: Heaven forbid. H(a,a)is usually nonsense, unless one is writing theology or poor metaphysics.

S.: “A hazz a” is not a natural language sentence, even after wine.

G.: Quite. And transitivity is equally treacherous. If H(a,b)and H(b,c), does H(a,c)? If Socrates has a cloak, and the cloak has holes, does Socrates have holes?

S.: In some schools, yes.

G.: Exactly why one needs the distinction.

S.: Then your whole scheme is less a doctrine than a prophylactic.

G.: All good analysis is.

S.: And where does Raio stand while you perform surgery?

G.: In the old corridor of “essere” as if the corridor itself were not haunted. Il problema dell’essere already sounds like a title generated by grammar before thought has had a chance to object.

S.: But Aristotle is not merely grammatical. The multiplicity of being matters because substance, quantity, quality, relation, potentiality, actuality, truth, and accidental predication all crowd under εἶναι.

G.: Precisely. Which is why I object to leaving them there. “Being” becomes a great common lodging-house for distinctions too shy to separate.

S.: Then perhaps Raio’s merit is only to remind you that the problem was older than your notation.

G.: I grant him that much. Still, one wants to know what his “problema” amounts to. Is it a problem because “being” is equivocal? Because ontology and predication have been confused? Because Aristotle used one word where a hygienic philosopher would have used several?

S.: Very likely all of those.

G.: Then he is at least in honourable trouble.

S.: You sound almost kind.

G.: Temporary weakness. Let us consider Aristotle properly. Τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς. Being is said in many ways. It is not one genus over all categories, and yet not mere noise.

S.: Which is what keeps metaphysicians employed.

G.: Exactly. Had Aristotle simply said “there are many relations here, let us distinguish them,” the Middle Ages might have been much shorter.

S.: And poorer.

G.: Perhaps. But tidier.

S.: You always want tidiness where civilisation wanted commentary.

G.: Commentary is often what happens when a distinction is delayed.

S.: Then Cicero’s esse?

G.: Esse only perpetuates the difficulty under a Roman accent. One says “esse” and thinks one has Latinised the abyss.

S.: Whereas “essere” in Italian at least adds theatricality.

G.: Yes, and perhaps a little furniture. But no new clarity. Raio’s Italian title suffers from the old illness in a newer coat.

S.: Yet one might say that “being” in Aristotle is not simply predicative and possessive mixed, but includes existence.

G.: Ah yes, existence: the third lodger. Then we should need perhaps E(a), or E!(a)if one wishes to be expensive.

S.: And then your system becomes trinitarian.

G.: Better trinitarian than metaphysically baggy.

S.: Then why only Izzing and Hazzing in your opening joke?

G.: Because one must begin by splitting the most obvious conflation: “is” of predication and “has” of possession, before existence comes in with its own passport.

S.: Very good. Then let us test examples. “The rose is red.”

G.: I("rose","red"), if one is willing to let predicates appear in object position for convenience, which is already a small scandal.

S.: “The rose has thorns.”

G.: H("rose","thorns").

S.: “The rose is a flower.”

G.: Again I("rose","flower"), though now one sees that “izzing” covers species-membership or classification, not only attribution.

S.: So Iis already doing too much.

G.: As all first repairs do. But still less than “essere.”

S.: “Socrates is wise.”

G.: I("Socrates","wise").

S.: “Socrates has wisdom.”

G.: H("Socrates","wisdom").

S.: Are those equivalent?

G.: Not always. That is exactly where philosophy becomes interesting. “Socrates is wise” may be true where “Socrates has wisdom” suggests a reified possession one need not grant.

S.: So “hazzing” itself may be too generous to substantives.

G.: Yes, but at least it makes the generosity visible.

S.: And “Socrates is in the market”?

G.: Ah. There you have locative being, which the old “is” hides under yet another use.

S.: So your two relations have not solved Aristotle; they have merely improved the census.

G.: Again, a census is an improvement over a riot.

S.: Then what of Raio’s “saggio”? You asked what it is.

G.: Yes. A “saggio” is the civilised word for not quite a system and not quite a pamphlet. It means, roughly, “I have thoughts but enough manners not to call them final.”

S.: Which is already preferable to many modern books.

G.: Deeply. “Essay” in the older sense: an attempt, a trial, a trying out of a problem.

S.: Then Raio is at least modest in form.

G.: Perhaps. Though “Il problema dell’essere” is modest only in Italian. In English it would sound like a monograph with delusions.

S.: As most titles on being do.

G.: Quite. But let us be fair. If one writes in 1923 on being, one is writing after enough Neo-Hegelian fog and before enough analytic disinfectant to feel both pressures at once.

S.: Which gives you your opening: “I didn’t know it was a problem then.”

G.: Exactly. I was at school, occupied with Greek accents and worse food. The problem of being had not yet been brought to Clifton.

S.: And if it had been, the master would have called it either grammar or insolence.

G.: Very likely both.

S.: Still, Aristotle’s problem is not wholly silly. The same word εἶναι appears in statements of identity, predication, existence, truth, and perhaps location.

G.: Yes, and that is precisely why one should not leave the matter with one word.

S.: Then your quarrel with Aristotle is partly lexical.

G.: Lexical and logical. He saw multiplicity but preferred to dignify it with a formula rather than dissolve it into distinct relations.

S.: Because he was a philosopher, not a notator.

G.: There you are wrong. A philosopher ought occasionally to be a notator when words become corrupting.

S.: Then you would rewrite the Metaphysics in symbols?

G.: Not all of it. Only enough to prevent “being” from seducing itself into a pseudounity.

S.: “Pseudo-unity” sounds suspiciously like your objections to Einheit der Wissenschaft.

G.: The family resemblance is real. Grand words thrive by failing to mean one thing. “Being,” “science,” “unity,” all are successful because they board many doctrines at once.

S.: And your Izzing and Hazzing would evict some of the lodgers.

G.: Precisely.

S.: But would they not also destroy some of the philosophical pressure?

G.: Only the false pressure. One should not preserve a confusion merely because it has had a good career.

S.: That is a very un-historicist remark.

G.: History has enough on its hands without being asked to worship old muddles.

S.: Then what of existence? You hinted at E(a).

G.: Yes. If one says “Socrates is” in the existential sense, one means something more like E("Socrates"), or if one prefers, ∃x(x="Socrates"), though that opens another family quarrel.

S.: So we now have predication, possession, and existence.

G.: Exactly. Izzing, Hazzing, and existing. Aristotle could have been saved from centuries of piety by one sensible notational day.

S.: You really think the whole matter reducible to syntax?

G.: Not reducible, but clarified. Philosophy is often improved when syntax is no longer allowed to impersonate ontology.

S.: And where does Raio’s title stand in this reformed world?

G.: It would become, perhaps, Il problema degli izz, degli hazz, e dell’esistere, which would not sell but would save time.

S.: It would certainly offend the right people.

G.: A secondary merit.

S.: Then let us examine the formal properties a little more. You denied reflexivity for Ias predication, but granted that identity sneaks in through “a is a.”

G.: Yes. One must separate Ifrom =. If a=a, that is identity. If I(a,a), one has either collapsed predication into identity or uttered nonsense.

S.: So Iis not reflexive.

G.: Not as a general law. Some predicates may happen to self-apply, but that is not a property of the relation itself.

S.: Transitivity, then, remains type-sensitive.

G.: Exactly. If I(a,b)and I(b,c), whether I(a,c)follows depends on what sort of things band care. “Socrates is Greek” and “Greek is human” may licence “Socrates is human” only because one silently restructures the second as a universal statement about Greeks, not because Iis a transitive dyad simpliciter.

S.: So your neat dyad is already in danger.

G.: Naturally. But the danger is visible, which is half the cure.

S.: Hseems worse.

G.: Of course. Possession is a zoo. Ownership, part-whole, quality, relation, accompaniment, all get called “having.” One will need subdivisions if one is not to become scholastic in a new key.

S.: Then perhaps “hazzing” does not solve the haves and have-nots after all.

G.: It solves them socially, at least. One can say that the metaphysical haves and have-nots become grammatically inspectable.

S.: That is almost Marx with capitals removed.

G.: Heaven spare us.

S.: You did mention “the haves and have nots.”

G.: As a joke, yes. One should never let social vocabulary improve metaphysics too much.

S.: But “having” in ordinary speech does cover both possession and predication by backstairs. “He has courage,” “he has a cloak,” “he has a fever.”

G.: Exactly. Which is why I prefer to separate them rather than let being do all the work while having does half of it in the dark.

S.: Then perhaps Aristotle’s multiplicity of being is really a symptom of linguistic economy grown metaphysical.

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Gladly. The language economises; philosophy pays interest.

G.: Better still.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become too pleased with your own ontology.

S.: Never beyond the genus. Now, Raio’s “ermeneutica dell’io e del tu” in the later work seems very different from this 1923 “problema dell’essere.”

G.: Yes, and in a way that only confirms my suspicion that titles are often the graveyards of transitions. A man writes on being, later on I and thou, and one sees that the problem of being may have been less a doctrine than a station.

S.: That is ungenerous.

G.: Only historically exact. One often begins with “being” when one has not yet decided what one actually cares about.

S.: Which in Raio becomes the symbolic and hermeneutic constitution of self and other.

G.: Exactly. A better problem, though still cursed by nouns.

S.: Then perhaps Il problema dell’essere is young-man’s philosophy.

G.: Very likely. A proper saggio title in the old way: large enough to be respectable, loose enough to admit later escape.

S.: Escape into Cassirer and symbol.

G.: Better there than in ontology without notation.

S.: You remain cruel.

G.: It is one of the few protections against “being.”

S.: Then what of Cicero? You accused him too.

G.: Only in the sense that esse sounds suspiciously like it has carried the Greek problem into Latin without properly localising it. Same lingo, same problem.

S.: That was my line.

G.: Then I borrow it with gratitude. Cicero gives us esse and thinks he has translated εἶναι; the problem survives in a better toga.

S.: And Raio’s essere is merely the modern vernacular heir.

G.: Yes. Which is why one must not mistake the modernity of the cover for any new clarity.

S.: So your sympathy with Ramorino on language as system is absent here?

G.: Entirely absent. “Essere” is where language as system becomes dangerous because a single word encourages false unification.

S.: Whereas your own “mean” is triadic and therefore safer.

G.: Safer, because it demands terms: utterer, sign, interpretant, content. “Being” usually arrives alone and then multiplies behind one’s back.

S.: Then perhaps the true crime of “being” is monadic pretension.

G.: Splendid. Write that down somewhere private.

S.: Happily. One last question. If Aristotle is wrong, why did the formula τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς survive so well?

G.: Because it is magnificent. It confesses multiplicity while preserving dignity. It tells every commentator that the matter is profound without requiring immediate distinctions. In short, it is rhetorically perfect and analytically insufficient.

S.: A philosopher’s dream.

G.: Exactly the problem.

S.: Then your Izzing and Hazzing, for all their vulgarity, are anti-rhetorical instruments.

G.: Yes. They are ugly enough to discourage worship and precise enough to reward use.

S.: You almost make them sound English.

G.: They are worse than English. They are Oxonian.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Neapolitan by provocation, with just enough Greek to annoy Aristotle.

Grice: Raio, dopo aver parlato con Speranza — che insiste a trattarmi da pari e poi, con la stessa naturalezza, pretende che io tratti lui da pari — mi è rimasta in testa quella sua fissazione napoletana per “io” e “tu”. Dice che a Bologna insegnano il linguaggio, ma lui continua testardamente a chiamarla filosofia della lingua: come se l’“io” dovesse avere per forza un accento locale. 

Raio: A Napoli l’“io” non sta mai in pace se non incontra un “tu”. L’ermeneutica serve proprio a questo: non a fare psicologia, ma a capire come il simbolo sposti l’identità da una testa all’altra. E quando ci metti Kant, Cassirer, Szondi, scopri che il “tu” non è un complemento: è un evento. 

Grice: Speranza e io ci siamo messi a rigirare una cosa che sembra banale finché non provi a dirla bene: “noi”. Perché “we agree” non è semplicemente “io agree” più “tu agree” messi in fila, come due firme in calce. E lo stesso con il nostro verbo preferito, aiutare — o “help”, come diciamo a Vadum Boum: “I help and you help” può voler dire che ognuno fa il suo, separatamente, magari su due problemi diversi. “We help”, invece, sembra già una cosa terza: un’azione con un solo ritmo, come se il soggetto non fosse la somma, ma un piccolo organismo. E quando dici “we help each other”, allora non stai aggiungendo una cortesia: stai dicendo che senza reciprocità non era nemmeno quel “we” di prima. 

Raio: Implicatura “aiutante”, la sua — o, se Speranza osa davvero, “extra aiutante”, anzi “extra aiuta”. Perché lei non sta dicendo soltanto che due persone fanno due gesti di assistenza: sta mostrando che “noi” cambia il tipo di gesto. “Io aiuto” e “tu aiuti” è aritmetica; “noi aiutiamo” è già grammatica sociale; e “ci aiutiamo” è un’altra cosa ancora, perché lì il soggetto e l’oggetto si scambiano senza che la frase cada a terra. In fondo è il suo modo preferito di mettere l’etica dentro la sintassi senza farla sembrare moraleggiante: non “siate buoni”, ma “guardate che cosa state già facendo quando parlate al plurale”. E Speranza, che finge di detestare le etichette ma poi vive di queste finezze, alla fine concederà che “aiuta” è la parola giusta: piccola, quotidiana, e abbastanza seria da reggere un noi. 

Verbali: Ramorino

G.: Ramorino begins with language as a system of signs and then seems to lose interest just where things become conversationally alive.

S.: That is one way of putting it. Another is that he begins earlier than you do, at the level of signification before social games begin.

G.: Earlier perhaps, but also blunter. I am in an Anglo-Saxon phase, as you know. I like “mean” because it is at least potentially triadic: smeans mfor i.

S.: Peirce by way of Ogden and Richards, with Lady Welby hovering as godmother.

G.: Exactly. The point is that if smeans mfor i, I want to know where the utterer is, where the sign is, where the addressee or interpretant is, and what relation among them is actually constitutive.

S.: Whereas Ramorino is content to say that language is a system of signs significant of ideas.

G.: Which is almost enough to make one homesick for schoolmen.

S.: That is harsher than he deserves.

G.: I am not sure. He asks, “How does thought find expression in material sound with no obvious likeness to it?” A splendid question. But then where does the utterer go? Where the speaker? Where the one who means by producing the sound?

S.: He cares more for the ontology and natural history of language than for the local economy of an utterance.

G.: Exactly my complaint. He just doesn’t care. I need the sign-user. He gives me the sign-system.

S.: Because he thinks language itself is a human fact deep enough to connect natural science, psychology, and logic.

G.: Yes, and in that broad old way he is not uninteresting. But if I ask how one gets from what is said to what is meant in a given exchange, he looks at me as if I had mistaken a grammar for a teapot.

S.: You are being unfair. He is asking how signification arises at all, how one cogitative nature gives rise to many tongues, how terms distinguish being, action, agent, relation. That is not nothing.

G.: It is not nothing, but it is not enough. I want U, the utterer, S, the sign, M, the meant content, and I, the interpretant or addressee. Then perhaps something like:

U" produces " S" intending " I" to recognise that " U" intends " M.

S.: You always become happiest when letters arrive.

G.: Letters are decent company. Ramorino gives me “lingua” and “pensiero” and “suono materiale,” which are handsome nouns but bad at attending tea.

S.: Yet his complaint that thought can scarcely proceed without articulated word is one you yourself have often admired in the ancients.

G.: Certainly. “Every meditation, quasi-soliloquy, cannot wholly free itself from articulated speech” — yes, that is very good. But it still leaves the crucial scene untouched.

S.: The scene being?

G.: Someone saying something to someone else. Or at least someone producing a sign in such a way that another is meant to gather something by it.

S.: You mean the triadic scene.

G.: Precisely. I do not want merely “signification” as a static relation. I want signifying, an event, a transaction, if you like, though not necessarily commercial.

S.: You are offended that Ramorino seems to omit the act.

G.: Entirely. He asks “how thought becomes sound,” which is admirable enough, but I ask: how does an utterer use a sound to get an addressee to take what is meant beyond what is said?

S.: And you think his audience would not care?

G.: I think Ramorino could not care less.

S.: Or could care less?

G.: That vulgar Americanism is exactly the sort of thing he might count as evidence against the age.

S.: Still, let us defend him. He may not foreground the speaker, but he does insist that language is not merely conventional rubble. For him it is a structured human fact, a kind of natural-artificial articulation in which thought and sign are entwined.

G.: Yes, and that is where your Latinity enters to rescue him. “Articulation” is a better word than most moderns deserve.

S.: Thank you. Articulation is exactly the point. Latin helps here. Articulated speech, articulated thought, articulated relation. The signifying system is not an accident layered over thought; it is the very medium in which thought becomes shareable.

G.: Shareable is not yet shared.

S.: True. But it is a precondition. You begin at the transaction because you are interested in meaning in the wild. Ramorino begins at the tissue from which transactions are made possible.

G.: Tissue again. You are drifting into biology.

S.: Only by necessity. He himself drifts toward natural science. He says the philosophy of language belongs partly to the natural sciences because language is a human fact.

G.: A dangerous move, though not a stupid one. It at least prevents language from becoming a merely ghostly emanation.

S.: Exactly. And once language is a human natural fact, one may ask how sounds become sign-bearing, how categories of being and action are cut up, how terms arise for agents, acts, and relations. That is already a kind of proto-semantics.

G.: Proto-semantics, yes, but not yet a theory of meaning as I should like it.

S.: Because you insist on triadicity.

G.: Because triadicity is where the life begins. If smeans mfor i, then one must ask not only what sconventionally signifies, but who meant what by it, for whom, under what assumptions.

S.: Lady Welby would be pleased.

G.: She usually is, at a safe distance. Ogden and Richards too, though they clutter the room with triangles.

S.: Better a triangle than a monad.

G.: Quite. Ramorino too often leaves us with a dyad: thought and sound, idea and sign, lingua and pensiero. But a dyad is not enough for actual meaning in use.

S.: Unless one adds the hearer silently.

G.: Which is precisely what I object to. The hearer must not be smuggled in as background scenery. If there is meaning, someone must be in a position to take it as meaning.

S.: Then we should perhaps say: Ramorino’s “system of significant signs” becomes alive only when a hearer occupies the place of the interpretant.

G.: Better. Though he does not say it often enough for my taste.

S.: Perhaps he assumed it.

G.: Assumptions are where philosophers hide what they have not analysed.

S.: That is almost one of your maxims.

G.: Not almost. Now, let me state the matter more cleanly. We have:

U→┴⟡(1&"utters " s) I

with the intention that

I" recognise that " U" intends " I" to take " s" as meaning " m.

S.: A proper little social drama.

G.: Exactly. Ramorino gives us something more like:

s↔"idea" 

and then talks grandly of language as a natural-human fact.

S.: Which is not wrong, only incomplete for your purposes.

G.: Incomplete in the most irritating way, because it leaves out the one creature I most need: the utterer.

S.: Yet does not his own phrase “sistema di segni significativi delle idee” imply some community of users who recognise that significance?

G.: It implies them as one implies air when discussing smoke. Necessary, yes; analysed, no.

S.: And you are cross because he discusses the atmosphere without giving you the lungs.

G.: Very good. Keep that.

S.: Gladly. But let me defend him again. There is another side. He asks how the one cogitative nature yields many languages. That is not a trivial question. It implies that signification is not exhausted by any single linguistic clothing, and that languages carve reality differently while remaining answerable to a shared human capacity.

G.: Yes, and in that respect he is useful against a crude naturalism. If languages differ, yet thought remains possible, then the relation between sign and idea cannot be merely one-to-one in a stupid way.

S.: Which is why he cares about the structuring principles by which terms distinguish beings, actions, agents, and relations.

G.: Agreed. That is very nearly what interests me in logic too. How do the terms of a language carve the world? But once again, that is still before the conversational act.

S.: Before the act, yes, but not irrelevant to it. If the language has already distinguished beings, actions, and agents in certain ways, the utterer inherits those distinctions.

G.: So you want to say that the system constrains what one can mean.

S.: More than constrains. It makes some things easily articulable, others clumsy, some impossible without violence.

G.: Ah yes, your beloved “linguaticum-mente impossible.”

S.: Not mine, the language’s.

G.: The language does not sign receipts.

S.: It does refuse certain avverbial monstrosities.

G.: True enough. And perhaps that is where Ramorino becomes more interesting than I first allowed. If the sign-system itself resists certain constructions, then the utterer is never wholly sovereign.

S.: Exactly. You want speaker-intention. He reminds you that the speaker never begins from nowhere, but from a given articulated medium.

G.: That is almost plausible.

S.: It will improve with age. Let me put it more sharply. You begin with the utterer and the hearer in a talk-exchange. Ramorino begins with the fact that their exchange is possible only because language is already a woven texture of distinctions, categories, and signs.

G.: Woven texture is dangerously literary.

S.: Better literary than arid. He himself speaks of a “ben fatto tessuto di parole e proposizioni e periodi.”

G.: Yes, that is very good. I grant him that. It is properly Latinate and almost civilised. Words, propositions, periods — all stitched into a fabric before my poor utterer enters with his intentions.

S.: Precisely. So perhaps your triad must be expanded. Not merely U,S,I, but also L, the language-system within which Sis available at all.

G.: Very well. Then:

L∋s,U" uses " s∈L" for " I" to take " m.

S.: Better.

G.: Better, yes, but still not enough. For one must also indicate the signifying relation itself, call it Σ. Then:

Σ(U,s,m,I;L)

where Σis the event of signifying by which U, using sas available within L, gets Ito take m.

S.: You are inventing notations again.

G.: Only to prevent prose from lying.

S.: Ramorino would perhaps accept the notation if you wrote it in decent Latin.

G.: He would probably still ignore the utterer.

S.: I doubt it. He is not indifferent to the human. He says language is a human fact, that thought can scarcely unbind itself from articulated word, that the philosophy of language touches psychology, natural science, and logic.

G.: Yes, but “human fact” is not yet “speaker meaning.”

S.: No, but it is not nothing. Let us distinguish three levels. First, the language as system of signs. Second, signification as the relation between sign and content within that system. Third, a speaker’s use of those signs in an act directed toward an addressee.

G.: Very good. I can live with that hierarchy.

S.: And Ramorino works mainly on the first and second, while you insist on the third.

G.: Exactly. That is the fairest way to put our quarrel.

S.: Then perhaps the real injustice is to ask him to have done all three.

G.: Philosophers ought to do more than one thing at a time, but yes, fairness is not always my favourite virtue.

S.: There is hope then. Now, you complained that “things signify even if they are not signs.” Do you still object?

G.: Less than before. If by that one means that there are natural significations — smoke of fire, dark clouds of rain, spots of measles — then yes, things may signify without being intentionally produced signs.

S.: And if so, your own distinction between natural meaning and non-natural meaning comes into play.

G.: Exactly. “Those spots mean measles” is one thing. “He showed me the spots to mean that he had measles” is another.

S.: Then Ramorino’s wider sign-system can accommodate the first.

G.: Yes, and perhaps that is his proper territory. He is interested in signification broadly enough to include natural and linguistic signification within one larger inquiry into language and thought.

S.: Which again is not trivial.

G.: No. It is only insufficiently theatrical for my taste.

S.: That is not his fault.

G.: Rarely is. Still, my concern remains: the triadic relation. If smeans mfor i, where is the utterer? Where the sign-user? Where the signifying as act?

S.: Let us take your complaint seriously and answer it from Ramorino’s side. The utterer is not thematised because he is embedded in the language as human fact. The sign is thematised as part of the system. The addressee is latent as the one for whom signification is possible at all. The act of signifying lies between logic and psychology rather than being made explicit as a conversational relation.

G.: Very neat. You have almost made him respectable.

S.: Respectability is one of my cheaper services.

G.: Then let us ask about “the thing itself signifies.” Suppose Ramorino himself signifies. If he signifies, as you say, then there must be an interpretant, that is, someone alive at the time of his utterance who was within range of his articulations and ejaculations and gestures and signs.

S.: Exactly. A professor lecturing, writing, speaking, gesturing, composing periods, all of that already presupposes an audience.

G.: So even if he does not theorise the interpretant, he lives by him.

S.: Of course. His own discursiveness proves the necessity of the third term.

G.: That is quite good. One might say that Ramorino’s practice is more triadic than his theory.

S.: I should be content with that.

G.: Yes. He signifies, therefore someone was there to take his signification. Otherwise his book becomes weather.

S.: A useful distinction: discourse or weather.

G.: Keep that too. Then perhaps I may say the following. Ramorino fails to articulate the speaker-hearer relation with the sharpness I require, but his own insistence that language is a sign-system bound to thought and human nature gives the wider ontological stage on which my own speaker-hearer drama can occur.

S.: Very well put.

G.: It had better be. We have earned it. Now, where does Austin enter this?

S.: With his suspicion of grand nouns and his insistence on what we actually say in actual circumstances.

G.: Yes. Austin would hate the way “language” in these old texts floats upward into a vast quasi-natural substance.

S.: He would drag it down by examples.

G.: Exactly. “By ‘language,’ which language, when, by whom, to whom, under what conditions?” Austin would begin there and stay there.

S.: Whereas Ramorino wants first the philosophy of language as such.

G.: Yes, and that is already enough to make Austin reach for the pipe he had not yet lit.

S.: But would Austin be wrong to do so?

G.: Not wrong, only local. Austin’s merit is to stop premature sublimation. Ramorino’s merit is to remind us that the local examples sit inside a larger human phenomenon one cannot simply dismiss.

S.: So we have Austin on one side and Ramorino on the other, and you somewhere between them with your triad.

G.: That sounds dangerously balanced.

S.: Philosophy occasionally profits by balance.

G.: Only when it is not called synthesis.

S.: Then what about explicature?

G.: Keep that infernal descendant out of the room entirely.

S.: I only meant that if dictum is what is said and implicature what is meant beyond it, some would now wish to insert an intermediate category.

G.: Yes, and some also wear poor ties. The dictum is enough trouble without inventing bureaucratic mezzanines.

S.: Austin would approve that sentence.

G.: He would probably improve it. In any case, Ramorino himself is useful because he keeps “language” and “lingua” distinct enough to be dangerous. Philosophy of the language and philosophy of language, if you like.

S.: That was exactly Speranza’s opening complaint: filosofia della lingua, not linguaggio.

G.: Yes. “Linguaggio” sounds modern, derivative, metalinguistic. “Lingua” sounds older, organic, bodily, national, almost anatomical.

S.: Which fits Ramorino better. He thinks of language not as a detachable formalism but as a human natural articulation.

G.: Exactly. And that too is a reminder against certain modern hygienists who think language can be reduced to notation and cleaned of its history.

S.: The unity-of-science men again.

G.: They haunt everything once one has survived Vienna. But Ramorino is useful against them. He says, in effect, language has roots in life, thought, sound, history, natural fact. It is not just a calculus.

S.: So you need him after all.

G.: I need him as opposition and as correction. Opposition because he does not care enough for my triad. Correction because I do not always care enough for the language-system and its deep entanglement with thought.

S.: That is almost candid.

G.: Do not spread it about.

S.: Never intentionally. Then let us return one last time to your formula. smeans mfor i. Where is the utterer?

G.: In the elided left-hand side. Better:

U" means " m" by " s" for " I.

S.: And if one wishes to be more Peircean?

G.: Then one says: sign, object, interpretant. But I still want the utterer explicit, because signs do not simply erupt into significance without agents in my sort of case.

S.: Yet Ramorino would remind you that they do, at least naturally. Clouds, smoke, cries, symptoms.

G.: Yes. So perhaps the full picture is this. There are natural significations with no utterer; linguistic significations within a system; and speaker-meanings exploiting that system in acts directed to addressees.

S.: That is really rather good.

G.: Thank you. We may credit Ramorino with forcing me to say it.

S.: Then the final justice to him would be to say: he does not give the complete pragmatics of meaning, but he gives the pre-pragmatic ontology and natural history without which pragmatics would float.

G.: Perfectly said.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Roman, with just enough Latin articulation to keep the utterer from disappearing.

Grice: Dopo il mio incontro con Speranza — che si ostina a chiamarsi “filosofo” con la stessa naturalezza con cui lo faccio io — torno sempre con quella che, a Bologna, lui chiama la domanda chiave della filosofia del linguaggio. Anzi: lui la chiama sempre filosofia della lingua, e appena sente “linguaticum” gli viene un tic, come se avesse visto una “y” in pieno latino. 

Ramorino: E fa bene ad avere il tic. Perché qui la lingua non è un feticcio: è un sistema di segni, sì, ma anche un fatto umano, e dunque un fatto “naturale”. La domanda vera è come il pensiero finisca a farsi suono senza assomigliargli per niente — e come poi si pretenda pure che quel suono diventi logica, diritto, scienza, e magari anche poesia. 

Grice: Speranza e io — dopo quel suo tic — siamo rimasti un attimo a contemplare la parola “linguaticum” come si contempla un animale mitologico. È forse la parola latina più impossibile dal punto di vista linguistico: sembra latina, ma suona come se il latino stesso avesse bisogno di una spiegazione a margine. E poi il bello è che, se uno ci costruisce sopra “linguaggio” e ci infila la distinzione tra lingua e linguaggio, pare quasi che la difficoltà stia nel concetto, non nella parola. Come se i filosofi, per parlare di ciò che tutti usiamo ogni giorno, dovessero inventare un latinismo che nessun romano avrebbe osato ordinare al bar. 

Ramorino: Implicatura impossibilmente linguistica, la sua, come Speranza osserva con precisione. Perché il punto è proprio questo: in italiano magari ti lasciano dire “linguaticum” (non tutti, ma qualcuno sì), finché resta un reperto da vetrina. Appena però vuoi farne un avverbio — “linguaticum-mente” — ti esplode in mano: non hai un aggettivo che lo regga senza diventare caricatura. E allora Speranza dovrebbe concedere che questa è un’implicatura linguaticum-mente impossibile: non perché l’idea non si capisca, ma perché la lingua stessa — quella vera — si rifiuta di firmare la ricevuta. Quanto all’etimologia, per sicurezza meglio ricordare l’alternativa sobria: lingua (la “lingua” come organo e come sistema) e poi linguaggio come derivato moderno e metalinguistico — senza costringere il latino a produrre, sotto minaccia, un “linguaticum” che non voleva nascere.

Verbali: Ranzoli

Magister: I shall play the Bolognese today, boys.

Shropshire: That sounds infectious, sir.

G.: Or educational, which is usually worse at school.

Magister: In Bologna, before you go to the university, you have already heard of philosophy from a philosopher.

Shropshire: Unlike Somerset, where we hear of weather from the weather.

G.: And of Rome from masters with canes.

Magister: Precisely. And today’s fare is Virgilio — la filosofia.

Shropshire: But he is a poet.

G.: And a philosopher, if not a cricketer.

Magister: Mr. Grice has the right instinct, though perhaps not yet the right restraint.

Shropshire: I should rather have the cricket.

G.: That is because poetry asks more of you than bowling.

Magister: Ranzoli, in his La filosofia di Virgilio, takes Virgil seriously as a thinker, not merely as a versifier of Roman weather and imperial upholstery.

Shropshire: “Imperial upholstery” sounds promising.

G.: Better than your psychology, which is usually merely labelled emotion.

Magister: Let us begin with the obvious proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he reflects on fate.

Shropshire: Or because he cannot avoid it. Roman epic drags fate behind it like a school trunk.

G.: Too quick. Fate in Virgil is not merely baggage. It is a principle of intelligibility, though often made theatrical.

Magister: Good. And what would Ranzoli say?

G.: That Virgil does not merely decorate myth with grandeur, but uses epic form to stage a view of order: cosmic, moral, and political.

Shropshire: Which is a way of saying he is being dull in hexameters.

G.: No, merely serious in metre.

Magister: Another proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he mediates among schools.

Shropshire: Which schools? Cricket, rugger, and choir?

G.: The porch, the garden, the academy, and the liceo, if one wishes to Italianise the Lyceum and make Aristotle sound like a school inspector.

Magister: Indeed. Virgil is often read as eclectic.

Shropshire: Eclectic is what masters say when a man cannot make up his mind.

G.: Or when he can make up several at once.

Magister: Very good. Eclectic in Virgil means that Stoic providence, Epicurean melancholy, Platonic colouring, and Aristotelian or Peripatetic habits of natural and moral observation may coexist under poetic discipline.

Shropshire: Which sounds as if he steals from every shop on the street.

G.: He borrows from all of civilisation, which is more respectable.

Magister: Consider the Aeneid. Is Aeneas Stoic?

Shropshire: He is dutiful to the point of boredom.

G.: Boredom is your response, not his virtue. Aeneas embodies pietas, which is not simply Stoic apatheia but a Roman moral synthesis of duty, reverence, self-subordination, and historical burden.

Magister: Good. Ranzoli would insist that Virgil gives us not merely an epic hero but a moral type.

Shropshire: A type may still be tedious.

G.: Only to those who prefer Achilles.

Magister: Let us take another proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he thinks about human suffering under necessity.

Shropshire: That sounds merely tragic.

G.: Tragedy often is philosophy after dark.

Magister: Excellent. In the Georgics and Aeneid especially, labour, death, loss, and historical cost are not accidents but conditions of human life under an ordered yet harsh cosmos.

Shropshire: So he is “philosophical” because life is miserable and he writes beautifully about it.

G.: Better than your usual formulae, though still coarse.

Magister: Ranzoli’s good sense lies precisely there: he does not try to turn Virgil into a lecturer in metaphysics. He asks what kind of world a poet implies.

Shropshire: At least that is sensible.

G.: More sensible than proving that “substance” means the same in every author north and south of the Alps.

Magister: Another proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he presents nature as intelligible.

Shropshire: Bees in the Georgics?

G.: Exactly. Husbandry, weather, bees, plague, labour, all in a cosmos not wholly arbitrary.

Magister: Yet not quite Lucretius.

G.: No. Virgil cannot be reduced to Epicurean mechanism, though he knows Lucretius too well not to hear him behind the line.

Shropshire: So when he sounds Epicurean, he is being derivatively delicious.

G.: Not delicious. Deliberate.

Magister: There is a good opposition there. Virgil often sounds as though he has passed through Lucretius without remaining in him.

Shropshire: Like a boy through chapel.

G.: Better than you know.

Magister: The Eclogues too have their philosophy, though boys usually miss it because they think shepherds are decorative.

Shropshire: They generally are.

G.: In bad poets, perhaps. In Virgil, pastoral often stages absence, loss, longing, political disturbance, and the distance between ideal order and actual history.

Magister: Excellent. The so-called shepherd may be carrying a civil war in his flute.

Shropshire: That is better than psychology.

G.: Everything is better than your psychology.

Magister: Ah yes, your psychology. Let us hear it. Why are Shakespeare’s Romans psychologically inferior or superior to Virgil’s?

Shropshire: Shakespeare’s are obvious. Caesar vanity, Brutus conscience, Cassius envy, Coriolanus pride, Antony appetite. Virgil’s are less helpful. Aeneas duty, Dido feeling, Turnus temper.

G.: A child’s apothecary.

Magister: Mr. Grice?

G.: Shakespeare gives dramatised conflicts in speech and scene. Virgil gives a more meditated architecture of motive under fate, office, history, and cosmic order. The psychology is not less subtle, merely less theatrical.

Shropshire: Less theatrical sounds less fun.

G.: Only to boys.

Magister: Ranzoli would say something similar, though perhaps with less severity. Virgil’s philosophy lies not in isolated maxims but in the total stance of the poem toward destiny, labour, suffering, piety, and Rome.

Shropshire: Rome again.

G.: We are in Roman history, you may have noticed.

Magister: And English literature, Mr. Shropshire. Shakespeare’s Roman plays and Virgil belong together here because England reads Rome through both history and poetry.

Shropshire: That seems rather a lot for one lesson.

G.: Clifton aims high and lands irregularly.

Magister: Now, what of Dido? Is she merely passion?

Shropshire: Surely.

G.: Too simple. She is passion yes, but passion under divine interference, political impossibility, wounded dignity, and competing forms of obligation.

Magister: Good. In Virgil, the passions are never merely private. They carry world-historical consequence.

Shropshire: That sounds suspiciously German.

G.: It is merely Roman with hindsight.

Magister: And Turnus?

Shropshire: Temper, as I said.

G.: Turnus is heroic energy trapped on the losing side of fate. His anger is not merely temper but the tragic vitality of a world history will not preserve.

Magister: Very good indeed.

Shropshire: He still loses.

G.: History is full of men who lose philosophically.

Magister: Let us ask the more general question. Can a poet be a philosopher without writing doctrine?

Shropshire: He can, apparently, bore a classroom.

G.: He can certainly think in images, forms, narratives, symbolic arrangements, and moral types. Philosophy is not owned by the treatise.

Magister: Exactly. Ranzoli’s virtue is to take that seriously without becoming silly. He does not try to prove that Virgil has a “system.” He shows that poetic vision can carry philosophical order.

Shropshire: Which is more sensible than a dictionary of all the philosophical jargon.

G.: There speaks improvement.

Magister: Let us be fair to the title. La filosofia di Virgilio sounds larger than it is. But the largeness is a useful provocation.

Shropshire: To sell copies?

G.: To annoy the right readers into buying them.

Magister: Also true. But above all it compels the schoolboy to stop saying “but he is a poet” as though that settled the matter.

Shropshire: It usually does for me.

G.: Your mind was not built for settlements.

Magister: Another proposition then. Virgil is philosophical because he thinks historically.

Shropshire: Meaning Rome again.

G.: Meaning more than Rome. It means that human action is embedded in a temporal order larger than individual desire, and that poetry may represent not just events but their place in a providential or quasi-providential sequence.

Magister: The Aeneid is full of that burden.

Shropshire: Which is another way of saying Aeneas is not free.

G.: Not freely frivolous, no. Freedom in Virgil is not mere arbitrariness but action under necessity with moral cost.

Magister: Well said.

Shropshire: I prefer heroes with less furniture on their consciences.

G.: Which is why you are still at school.

Magister: Let us consider whether Virgil’s relation to Epicureanism is itself philosophical.

Shropshire: Lucretius in the room again.

G.: He never quite leaves. Virgil inherits from Lucretius a certain gravity about nature, mortality, labour, and the fragility of human arrangements, but does not remain within Epicurean release.

Magister: Exactly. The world in Virgil is too charged with duty, omen, memory, and destiny for simple Lucretian therapy.

Shropshire: So he takes the weather and leaves the atoms.

G.: Not entirely foolish.

Magister: And Stoicism?

G.: There is enough of the Stoic moral atmosphere to colour duty, endurance, order, and rational acceptance, but not enough to make the poems doctrinally Stoic.

Shropshire: So again he steals from the porch and walks away.

G.: Eclectic, as I said.

Magister: “Eclectic” here is not abuse. It may mean that Virgil’s poetry is philosophically resonant because it is not imprisoned within one school.

Shropshire: Convenient.

G.: Or civilised.

Magister: We should now compare this with Shakespeare’s Romans, since you boys have lately suffered them.

Shropshire: Gladly. Shakespeare makes motives visible in speech. Virgil wraps them in hexameter fog.

G.: No. Virgil embeds them in larger orders of interpretation. Shakespeare dramatises psychic conflict more directly. Virgil meditates moral and historical conflict more architectonically.

Magister: Very good. Shakespeare is more immediately psychological; Virgil more cosmological and civic.

Shropshire: Which is why Shakespeare is less boring.

G.: It is why you are still young.

Magister: And yet Shakespeare’s Romans also philosophise by dramatising public life. Brutus, Coriolanus, Antony, all are moral-political cases. Virgil’s cases are less theatrical, but no less philosophically charged.

Shropshire: Then why study Virgil in History of England?

G.: Because England’s literature, especially Shakespeare, learns Rome from poets as much as from historians.

Magister: Exactly. Roman history in an English school cannot stop at Livy and Tacitus. It must pass through Virgil and then through Shakespeare.

Shropshire: That sounds very curricular.

G.: Which is usually how civilisation reaches boys.

Magister: Another proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he teaches by disposition rather than argument.

Shropshire: That sounds almost Anglican.

G.: It means that the poem trains one’s sense of what counts as serious, necessary, fitting, tragic, admirable, culpable, or sacred before one has reduced any of it to theses.

Magister: Excellent. Ranzoli sees that philosophical import may be atmospheric before it is doctrinal.

Shropshire: “Atmospheric” is a very evasive word.

G.: Better atmospheric than your one-word diagnostics.

Magister: Very true. One must not say only “Aeneas = duty” and imagine the matter done.

Shropshire: It was a useful beginning.

G.: Only as a specimen of what not to stop at.

Magister: Let us take one line of objection. Suppose one says Virgil merely borrows philosophical colouring from contemporary schools without himself “being” a philosopher.

Shropshire: That is my position.

G.: It is a schoolboy’s version of a fair objection.

Magister: And the answer?

G.: That “being a philosopher” need not mean writing in quaestio form. If a poet persistently organises action, motive, world-order, value, and destiny in ways answerable to philosophical ideas, then philosophical criticism is not absurd.

Magister: Quite so. The question is not “did Virgil lecture on ethics?” but “what conception of life and order animates his poetry?”

Shropshire: Which sounds less outrageous.

G.: Because you have finally begun thinking.

Magister: Another proposition. In Virgil, the relation between man and cosmos is philosophically central.

Shropshire: More bees?

G.: Bees, ploughs, storms, underworlds, omens, prophecy, sacrifice, all of it. Human action is never merely local. It is framed by a world that is both natural and numinous.

Magister: Good. That is one reason why Ranzoli is sensible here. He treats poetic cosmology as philosophically consequential.

Shropshire: You sound pleased with Ranzoli.

G.: Only because he is doing something useful rather than giving us a dictionary of the philosophical lingo.

Magister: A low blow, but deserved in some quarters.

Shropshire: Then does Ranzoli make Virgil too serious?

G.: Any good schoolmaster does, and sometimes rightly. Better too serious than safely decorative.

Magister: Thank you, Grice. I was hoping for one ally before luncheon.

Shropshire: I remain unconvinced.

G.: Naturally. Conviction comes later, after memory has had time to do its work.

Magister: A final comparison then. Shakespeare’s Roman plays present persons under civic pressure. Virgil presents persons under civic, cosmic, and historical pressure. Which is more philosophical?

Shropshire: Shakespeare, because I can see what they mean.

G.: Virgil, because one must learn how much more there is to mean.

Magister: Excellent. That is almost worth the lesson.

Shropshire: “Almost” is a schoolmaster’s implicature.

G.: You improve by accident.

Magister: Then let us end with the list we ought to remember. Shakespeare’s Roman plays: Julius Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Octavius, Casca, Portia, Calpurnia; Coriolanus, Volumnia, Virgilia, Menenius, Aufidius, Cominius; Titus, Tamora, Aaron, Lavinia, Saturninus, Bassianus; Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius, Enobarbus, Lepidus, Charmian, Iras.

Shropshire: Enough Romans to sink a timetable.

G.: Or to make one English.

Magister: And Virgil’s principal Romans and anti-Romans?

G.: Aeneas, Anchises, Ascanius, Dido, Turnus, Evander, Pallas, Latinus, Amata, Camilla, and all the rest under fate.

Shropshire: Under fate again.

G.: Better fate than your tropicalism.

Magister: Dry enough for now. Next week we return to prose and shall all regret it.

Grice: Caro Ranzoli, devo confessarlo: prima di attaccare a fondo un concetto filosofico, ho il mio rituale. "Passo sempre per il dizionario" – ci tengo però a precisare che parlo del tuo, non certo del Little Oxford! Il Dizionario di Filosofia Ranzoli è ormai per me una tappa obbligata: c’è sempre qualcosa che illumina, che fa riflettere, che sorprende. 

Ranzoli: Che piacere sentire queste parole, caro Grice. Ho sempre pensato che un buon dizionario non debba solo definire, ma anche suggerire domande, aprire prospettive. E mi rincuora vedere che il mio lavoro sia utile a chi, come te, affronta la filosofia con spirito critico e curiosità autentica. 

Grice: Ecco, proprio questo apprezzo: la tua opera fugge dai preconcetti di scuola, non si incastra in nessuna ortodossia. Si sente che dietro ogni voce c’è un tentativo di restituire la ricchezza delle posizioni, e al tempo stesso di restare chiaro, accessibile, mai banale. È quasi una conversazione in sé, parola per parola. 

Ranzoli: La conversazione, appunto, è la chiave! Un dizionario filosofico, per come lo intendo, non vuole chiudere il significato, ma invitare chi legge a continuare il dialogo. Dopotutto, anche le definizioni sono implicature: suggeriscono più di quanto dicano. E grazie a lettori come te, so che il mio lavoro resta sempre "aperto".

Verbali: Ravelli

G.: I must send the draft to Mind before I put on naval blue, if I do not forget it, which would be an unfortunate practical comment on the paper.

S.: You would become the first man to refute his own theory by the postal service.

G.: Not refute, only illustrate. Memory theories do not require omniscience, only enough continuity to make the post intelligible.

S.: You sound very pleased with yourself.

G.: Only moderately. I think I have the Reid business properly cornered.

S.: The brave officer, the flogged boy, the old general, and the usual Scottish triumph.

G.: Scottish triumph is too strong. Scottish interruption, perhaps. Reid thinks he has Locke on transitivity.

S.: And you think memory does the trick?

G.: Not bare occurrent memory. That would be too crude and too easy to swat. I mean a series of mnemonic states, interlocking, with traces.

S.: Brain traces.

G.: If one must say it so. Very Cambridge, I grant you.

S.: I thought you were writing for Cambridge, not joining it.

G.: One writes for Cambridge by citing Broad. It soothes Moore.

S.: You cited Broad?

G.: A good deal. I made it very Cambridge from them.

S.: Very them?

G.: From their point of view. One must put on the local dress if one wishes the customs men to wave one through.

S.: And Moore reads all the papers.

G.: That is the legend, and I choose to behave as if it were true.

S.: Then tell me the trick.

G.: Very well. Let us say there is a subject, call him R, if you insist on Ravelli, though the name matters less than the construction. At time t_1, Rundergoes an experience E_1: hearing a noise.

S.: A noise? Why not seeing a flag?

G.: Because noises are harder to cheat with than flags, and they disappear, which helps.

S.: Very well. E_1at t_1.

G.: Yes. Let there be a mnemonic state M_1at t_1, and let that event leave a trace T_1in R's brain.

S.: Already very blue-collar.

G.: Better blue-collar than Scottish.

S.: Go on.

G.: Then at a later time t_2>t_1, there is another mnemonic state M_2, grounded in a later trace T_2, where T_2stands in the appropriate causal-continuity relation to T_1.

S.: “Appropriate” is doing a great deal of work.

G.: Naturally. One must leave some work for later philosophers.

S.: Very generous of you.

G.: If M_2is such that Rremembers having heard the noise at t_1, or remembers a later event continuous with it, then the chain begins.

S.: Begins? I thought it was already middle-aged.

G.: It becomes a chain by repetition. For times t_1<t_2<t_3<⋯<t_n, we require a series ⟨M_1,M_2,…,M_n⟩and traces ⟨T_1,T_2,…,T_n⟩such that for each i<n, T_(i+1)is causally descended from T_i, and M_(i+1)is the memory-capacity or actual memory grounded in T_(i+1).

S.: So no single act of recollection need do all the work.

G.: Exactly. That is where Reid goes vulgar. He treats Locke as if direct present recollection were both the sole and the exhaustive link.

S.: And your chain escapes because transitivity lies in the continuity relation, not in direct remembering.

G.: Splendid. At last you sound civilised.

S.: It was bound to happen eventually. But how does Ravelli help?

G.: Ravelli helps by reminding one that memory is not merely a faculty but an artifice, a worked arrangement, a place, a sequence, a location of retrieval.

S.: That sounds suspiciously mnemonic in the old sense.

G.: Good. The old sense has uses. If the mind can carry a series by arranged retention, then the logical construction is not absurdly detached from human practice.

S.: But you are not really appealing to artificial memory.

G.: No, only borrowing the thought that memory is structured, not atomistic.

S.: Then formalise it again, more cleanly.

G.: If you insist. Let identity over an interval be given by a continuity relation Csuch that

C(R,t_i,t_(i+1))

holds iff there exists a mnemonic state M_(i+1)at t_(i+1)grounded in a trace T_(i+1), and T_(i+1)is appropriately causally continuous with a trace T_ilaid down at t_iby the experience or memory-state then occurring.

S.: And personal identity from t_1to t_nis then the transitive closure of C.

G.: Exactly. We might call it C^*, if we wish to look proper.

S.: You are dangerously pleased.

G.: It is only a logical construction.

S.: Which is what phenomenalists always say just before they fail to analyse anything.

G.: Quite. They keep promising the analysis of a “thing” in terms of sensations, and somehow one is always left with the promise and no thing.

S.: Whereas you are actually giving the analysis.

G.: I do my best. I am not simply saying “somehow memory links the stages.” I am specifying a series of interlocking mnemonic states.

S.: Interlocking is a fine word for a paper about personal identity while we prepare to separate into army and navy.

G.: It comforts one to imagine that logic interlocks what war dislocates.

S.: You are becoming lyrical, which means the draft is nearly done.

G.: On the contrary, it means I should stop immediately.

S.: But suppose there is a gap. Suppose T_1lays down T_2, T_2does not properly ground T_3, and the chain breaks.

G.: Then there may be a truth-value gap, so to speak, though I would rather not announce it in those exact terms.

S.: Why not? It is rather good.

G.: Too logical for Mind and too Viennese for Moore. But yes, if the chain of mnemonic support fails utterly, personal identity, on this account, may collapse or become indeterminate.

S.: Then Reid returns through the hole.

G.: Not exactly. Reid needs a contradiction: same as and not same as. A gap is not a contradiction. It is a failure of enough continuity.

S.: So your answer is not “Reid is wrong,” but “Reid asks the wrong logical question.”

G.: Better than that. Reid presumes that Locke must have been committed to a punctual criterion. I say Locke already had enough in him to resist that reading, and I merely articulate the resistance.

S.: Ravelli is your accomplice.

G.: Ravellian and revelatory, if you like. The man takes memory seriously as architecture.

S.: Did you mention Ravelli?

G.: Certainly not by name. I do not think they read Latin or Italian at Cambridge, but I cited Ian Gallie, whom they will understand.

S.: Gallie for Ravelli is a very Oxonian form of smuggling.

G.: One uses the authorities the customs officers recognise.

S.: Then the paper is really Locke corrected by Broad, defended against Reid, and secretly fortified by Italy.

G.: That is a pleasingly treacherous summary.

S.: I specialise in treachery before lunch. But tell me, where does the noise come in again?

G.: Ravelli hears a noise, or heard one, or has a series of memory-states representing it. Let there be an event Nat t_1. At t_2, Rhas M_2, a state of remembering N, grounded in T_2, which descends from T_1, the trace originally laid down by N. At t_3, he may no longer directly remember N, but he remembers at t_2having remembered N, through M_3, grounded in T_3. And so on.

S.: So the direct content may fade while the continuity persists.

G.: Precisely. The old general need not now remember the flogging if he stands in the right chain to an earlier stage that did.

S.: You make the soul sound like a railway timetable.

G.: Better that than a Scottish parade.

S.: And if the chain is partly dispositional rather than occurrent?

G.: So much the better. A memory theory that requires actual present recollection at every stage is lunatic. The persistence of capacity, grounded in traces, is enough.

S.: Then you are close to a causal theory.

G.: If you like, though I shall not give it that vulgar modern name before it exists.

S.: Very fair. But will Cambridge accept “brain trace”?

G.: If I say it once and quickly. Moore will tolerate a trace if Broad has sat near it.

S.: And Broad has?

G.: Broad has sat near almost everything, which is why he is useful.

S.: Then what is the exact claim? State it as if in the paper.

G.: Very well. Personal identity over time consists neither in sameness of substance simpliciter nor in bare present consciousness, but in the continuity of a series of mnemonic states, capacities, and traces such that later stages stand in the right memory-grounding relation to earlier ones, whether or not every later stage directly recalls every earlier experience.

S.: That sounds publishable.

G.: Then I must prune it.

S.: Always your vice. But you still have not answered the simplest objection. What if Ravelli falsely remembers the noise?

G.: Then the memory-state fails as veridical memory, though it may still belong causally to the same person. Not every present seeming-memory must be trusted in order for the continuity relation to hold.

S.: So memory-evidence is defeasible.

G.: Of course. If identity depended on the perfect reliability of introspection, the species would have perished.

S.: You are in a better mood than a man about to march.

G.: Only because I have not yet marched.

S.: I am to the army, you to the navy, and here we are quarrelling over mnemonic states.

G.: A far cleaner quarrel than what awaits.

S.: Then say more of the truth-value gap. I liked it.

G.: Naturally. Suppose the chain from t_1to t_nhas a missing stretch, not merely forgotten content but a broken trace-history. Then it may be neither true nor false, under this analysis, that the later person is the same as the earlier in the Lockean sense. There is insufficient continuity.

S.: That sounds almost desperate.

G.: It is merely exact. Philosophers dislike admitting partial failure of a criterion because they prefer every case to have a verdict.

S.: Courts and colleges require verdicts.

G.: Thought need not always oblige them.

S.: You are turning legal.

G.: One cannot write on identity without occasionally sounding like a barrister one disapproves of.

S.: Then in Ravelli’s case, if the series ⟨T_1,T_2,…,T_n⟩fails somewhere, Ravelli’s personal identity collapses.

G.: Or at least the claim collapses. The man may go on breathing. It is the identity-condition that fails.

S.: That distinction will save you from melodrama.

G.: Cambridge likes distinctions that prevent melodrama.

S.: Cambridge likes Broad.

G.: Which is why I cite him.

S.: You really do think in terms of customs men and passports.

G.: I am sending a paper to Mind while entering His Majesty’s service. One becomes bureaucratic by contagion.

S.: And the editor?

G.: Moore reads all the papers, as I said, and if he does not, one must behave as if he were peering through the prose with disapproval.

S.: So you have made it Cambridge from them.

G.: Yes. Enough Broad, enough common sense, enough Locke, enough care with Reid, and no obviously foreign seductions.

S.: Except the hidden Italian one.

G.: Hidden things often do the best work.

S.: That too is a line.

G.: Keep it and tell no one.

S.: Never intentionally. Now, where do you place consciousness?

G.: Within the mnemonic series, but not as the sole condition. Consciousness at a moment may be sparse. The continuity of mnemonic structure matters more than the dramatic self-presence of a given instant.

S.: So you rescue Locke from his own more excitable readers.

G.: Precisely. Locke becomes sensible once one stops treating him as a slave to occurrent recollection.

S.: And Reid?

G.: Reid remains useful as irritant, but not fatal. His example strikes a crude memory criterion, not a continuity theory faithful to Locke’s better resources.

S.: Did you actually say “better resources”?

G.: Not in the draft. One must not sound as if one is praising the dead too familiarly.

S.: But you are.

G.: Inwardly, yes. Outwardly one is all caution.

S.: And if the paper is rejected?

G.: Then the Navy will have the satisfaction of being served by a failed metaphysician, which is probably the normal arrangement.

S.: It may yet be accepted.

G.: Moore may like the anti-Reid angle. Broad may forgive the traces. Gallie will make it look less idiosyncratic. And the title is plain enough to appear decent.

S.: Personal Identity.

G.: Yes. Brutally plain, which often helps.

S.: Have you actually sent it?

G.: Not yet.

S.: Because you may forget it.

G.: Exactly. If I do, the theory acquires an excellent anecdote and a poor publishing history.

S.: Then perhaps memory should first serve the post.

G.: That is the practical test of metaphysics, yes.

S.: I should have thought war the practical test.

G.: War tests other things. Memory at least still keeps office hours.

S.: One last time. Give me the construction in its shortest form.

G.: Very well. For person R, and times t_1<t_2<⋯<t_n, Rat t_1is the same person as Rat t_niff there exists a chain of mnemonic states M_1,…,M_nand corresponding traces T_1,…,T_nsuch that each T_(i+1)is appropriately causally continuous with T_i, and each M_(i+1)is grounded in T_(i+1)in a way that preserves the possibility or actuality of memory from earlier to later stage.

S.: And if at some stage T_(i+1)does not continue T_i?

G.: Then the chain fails, and with it the personal continuity claim.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Lockean, with one eye on Mind and the other on the Admiralty.

Grice: Ravelli, a Milano avete questa cosa meravigliosa: la memoria non è una facoltà, è un indirizzo. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: sostiene che voi riuscite perfino a far sembrare Locke un po’ provinciale, senza alzare la voce. 

Ravelli: È che qui la memoria la trattiamo come un luogo di lavoro: tra segno, vocabolo, nota, e quell’arte di ricordare che sembra sempre a metà tra grammatica e trucco. E poi, diciamolo: l’identità personale è una questione troppo seria per lasciarla solo ai ricordi “spontanei”. 

Grice: Speranza e io ci stavamo chiedendo una cosa che mi fa ridere e poi mi mette in imbarazzo: io ho costruito la mia analisi dell’“io” (e del “noi”, cioè io con Speranza dentro) sulla memoria, alla maniera di Locke e contro Reid… e adesso non ho più memoria di che cosa, di preciso, mi abbia spinto verso Locke la prima volta. Insomma: difendo l’io come catena di ricordi, ma ho perso l’anello iniziale della catena—quello che mi ha fatto dire “questa è la catena giusta”. 

Ravelli: Implicatura mnemonica sta facendo, Grice—e sono sicuro che Speranza sarebbe d’accordo. Perché la sua non è una resa, è una prova pratica: la teoria della memoria funziona anche quando inciampa, visto che l’inciampo lo riconosciamo proprio come inciampo di memoria. E il paradosso è milanese quanto basta: l’identità regge finché sappiamo di aver dimenticato qualcosa, non finché ricordiamo tutto.

Verbali: Rayneri

G.: Rayneri, 1840: Unità della scienza. S.: A dangerous title to utter in Oxford after Vienna. G.: Quite. The phrase sounds as if a Rosminian has inadvertently advertised a logical positivist congress. S.: Or as if Carnap has strayed into a diocesan school and discovered metaphysics still drawing a salary. G.: Yet the sameness is verbal, not doctrinal. 

S.: Entirely. Rayneri wants unity because truth is ordered. The Vienna people want unity because language must be cleaned. One crowns philosophy; the other sends it to sweep the floor. G.: Regina scientiarum versus sanitation staff. S.: Precisely. Rayneri’s unità della scienza still imagines a hierarchy of knowledge under spiritual or philosophical supervision. Einheit der Wissenschaft imagines a disciplined republic of statements under anti-metaphysical customs control. G.: And yet the phrase sticks. S.: Phrases always do. They wander much better than doctrines. That is why philosophy is mostly the afterlife of headings. G.: Still, one must be fair to Rayneri. If he thought unità della scienza required defence in 1840, that itself is instructive. S.: Because “science” in his mouth is not physics and chemistry in white coats, but scienza in the old broad sense: ordered knowledge, connected disciplines, the possibility that truth hangs together. G.: In which case the title is less manifesto than reassurance. S.: Yes. It says: do not let the branches fly apart; the trunk still exists. G.: A very un-Viennese tree. S.: Entirely. The Viennese would analyse the word “tree,” classify the protocol sentences, and then fight over whether trunks are reducible to observations. G.: Or to physicalist predicates. S.: Indeed. Which is where Grice would begin to smile. Because if the project is to replace psychological predicates with physicalist ones, one must first explain how anyone means the replacement. G.: And there enters Peano’s inverted consequence sign. S.: Ah yes, your delicious point. The sign itself looks innocent enough, but in the twentieth-century hands it becomes emblematic of a dream: reasoning stripped to visible bones, metaphysical excrescence left politely outside the notation. G.: The vernacular counterpart being “if.” S.: Which is exactly where Grice refuses to be hygienic. The formal sign gives consequence under rules; the vernacular “if” arrives with hesitations, background assumptions, implicatures, and all the unruly furniture of ordinary thought. G.: So Einheit der Wissenschaft in the neo-positivist sense likes the sign because it appears to promise a single purified method. S.: Whereas Rayneri would find the sign useful only if it remained subordinate to a larger order of knowing. G.: A servant, not a sovereign. S.: Quite. In Rayneri, formal order belongs inside a philosophical cosmos. In the unity-of-science movement, philosophy itself is gradually demoted to traffic control. G.: Which gives us our first contrast: same phrase, opposite metaphysical climate. S.: One might say: same umbrella, different weather. G.: Now let us return to the liceo, because the real comedy is not in titles but in transmission. S.: Quite. Philosophy on the Continent has this habit, very unlike the Clifton legend, of reaching boys before they have learned proper scepticism about teachers. G.: Rayneri in Carmagnola for Bertini, Ferri at Casale Monferrato for Carlo Cantoni. S.: Exactly. The English myth is that one discovers philosophy after arriving at Oxford with Greek and Latin and a tolerance for bad heating. The continental reality is often that some professore di filosofia has already colonised one’s adolescence. G.: And Rayneri, unlike the later Vienna Circle, is not merely a phrase-maker but an institutional presence. S.: A local philosopher-schoolmaster. Which is why his influence matters even if his publications are late or sparse. At that stage he is less a bibliography than a voice. G.: So Bertini’s formation begins with Rayneri’s lessons in Carmagnola before Ornato, before Jacobi, before the post-laurea friendships. S.: Yes. Rayneri supplies early philosophical shape, likely Rosminian and spiritualist in temper. Ornato comes later with Plato and Jacobi. The sequence matters. G.: Just as Ferri for Carlo Cantoni comes before Bertini. S.: There is a pleasing structural repetition there. Liceo first wounds; university later codifies the scar. G.: You persist in medicine. S.: Philosophy has always aspired to be a clinic with better quotations. G.: But one must stress the asymmetry with Oxford. Grice at Clifton did not, so far as one can tell, receive philosophy from a published school philosopher. S.: No. His rationalism he traces to his father; his scholarship is in classics; philosophy comes by the back door of Greats. The continental pattern is earlier, more explicit, and less embarrassed. G.: Which may explain why names like Rayneri and Ferri matter so much. They are not merely teachers in the timetable. They are models of what an intellectual life might look like. S.: Quite. A schoolboy sees a professore who has written, lectured, thought. The profession appears before the profession. G.: And because the liceo reaches one at fifteen or sixteen, the influence is often deeper psychologically than anything that happens later at university. S.: University teaches one how to defend one’s errors in public. Liceo teaches one which errors to cherish. G.: Excellent. Now, why would Rayneri think unità della scienza needed defending? S.: Because nineteenth-century intellectual life already suffered from dispersion: specialisation, rival schools, theological and secular pressures, pedagogical fragmentation. To defend unity is to resist intellectual centrifugal force. G.: So not yet “all sciences reduce to one language,” but “knowledge belongs together.” S.: Precisely. The later slogan says: unify by method and syntax. The earlier title says: preserve unity of meaning, order, and perhaps truth itself. G.: Then the phrase survives because it is hospitable to incompatible ambitions. S.: As most successful philosophical phrases are. They are boarding houses for doctrines that would hate one another at breakfast. G.: And ordinary language, which Grice would later prize, helps expose this. S.: Yes. Because ordinary language reminds us that “unity” is not itself univocal. Unity can mean coherence, reducibility, architectonic order, institutional federation, semantic translation, or merely a pious wish. G.: So Rayneri’s title cannot simply be read backward through Carnap. S.: No more than one should read Aristotle as a badly typeset formal logician. G.: And yet there is still a historical wit in the recurrence. S.: Of course. The same words recur because philosophy loves old headings. But each recurrence shifts the burden. In Rayneri, philosophy remains queen. In Vienna, philosophy becomes under-labourer, or perhaps customs officer. G.: Locke with a passport stamp. S.: Exactly. “Nothing metaphysical to declare?” G.: “Only a small substance in my hand-luggage.” S.: “Confiscated.” G.: Let us bring in Peano once more. Because if one moves from vernacular “if” to formal consequence, one acquires the appearance of necessity. S.: And loses, or tries to lose, the conversational thickness of conditionals. This is where Grice becomes useful against both simplifications: against the spiritualist assumption that unity can be simply proclaimed, and against the positivist assumption that it can be simply notated. G.: Because for Grice, rationality is enacted in use. S.: Exactly. The point of the vernacular is not that it is messier than notation; it is that the mess is often the site of intelligence. “If” in English does not merely mirror a formal relation; it manages expectation, commitment, insinuation, and strategic under-saying. G.: Whereas the inverted consequence sign is gloriously indifferent to tact. S.: Which is why it is so attractive to people who distrust tact. G.: So Rayneri’s unità della scienza and the Vienna project differ not merely in doctrine but in what they take language to be for. S.: Yes. Rayneri still belongs to a world where language participates in the articulation of a larger moral and philosophical order. The unity-of-science movement belongs to a world where language must be disciplined into transparency. G.: And Grice stands inconveniently between them, loving form but not purification. S.: Very good. He likes order, but not the kind that abolishes conversation in order to save reason from it. G.: Which returns us to the continental line. Rayneri at Carmagnola, Bertini later at Turin, Ferri at Casale Monferrato, Carlo Cantoni after him — all instances of philosophy arriving through persons before systems. S.: And through schools before faculties. One should never underestimate the philosophical power of a local classroom. G.: There is a touching anti-Oxonian honesty about it. S.: Indeed. Oxford likes to pretend minds emerge from books and quads. The Continent sometimes admits that they emerge from professors. G.: Then perhaps Rayneri’s greatest significance is not the title itself, but the fact that a boy like Bertini could hear such a title as possibility. S.: Exactly. Before one reads unity of science, one sees a man who believes knowledge belongs together. That is a stronger lesson than any pamphlet. G.: A lesson later altered by Ornato, Jacobi, Plato, and the rest. S.: Yes. The sequence is not monotone. Rayneri gives early philosophical seriousness; Ornato complicates it with Greek and Jacobi; Bertini then passes, in another register, a mediated philosophical seriousness onward to Carlo Cantoni’s generation. G.: So if Ferri is to Carlo Cantoni what Rayneri is to Bertini, then Bertini himself becomes a middle term in a chain of transmission. S.: Quite so. Philosophy reproduced not only by books and chairs, but by pedagogical succession. G.: Rather like families, except with fewer baptisms and more footnotes. S.: Do not idealise. There are plenty of baptisms too; they are simply called lauree. G.: One last question. Why did the phrase unità della scienza survive so well? S.: Because it flatters everyone. The metaphysician hears order, the pedagogue hears curriculum, the scientist hears integration, the positivist hears reduction, the administrator hears structure, and the philosopher hears, if he is vain enough, his own necessity. G.: So the phrase is itself cooperative. S.: Cooperative and magnificently ambiguous. G.: Which is to say, deeply ordinary-language after all. S.: Yes. And perhaps that is the final Gricean revenge. Even the slogans of purified science survive not by purity, but by flexible use. G.: So Rayneri’s old title and Vienna’s later motto are united only in failing to mean just one thing. S.: Which is, in the end, the true unità della scienza: everyone using the same phrase for different reasons and calling the result progress.

G.: Della unità delle scienze, prolusione recitata nella grande aula della Regia Università di Torino ai V. novembre MDCCCLVI — one could almost forgive the philosophy for the title alone.

S.: You care only for the aula.

G.: Naturally. A grande aula ought to be very grand indeed, especially in Turin, where even pedagogy wishes to sound constitutional.

S.: And the title is grander still because it has managed singular and plural in one breath.

G.: Exactly. Unità in the singular, scienze in the plural, and that splendidly intermediate delle doing all the diplomatic work.

S.: A world of difference from Mach’s Einheit der Wissenschaft.

G.: Or the New Worlders and their Unified Science, yes. Those sound like schemes for flattening the intellectual map with hygienic machinery.

S.: Whereas Rayneri sounds almost architectonic.

G.: More than architectonic. Ecclesiastically architectonic. Della unità delle scienze says not “one science,” not “the sciences unified,” but “the unity of the sciences,” as though the sciences had multiplied properly and were now to be shown, with decorum, to belong together under one higher order.

S.: Which is precisely what the Viennese disliked.

G.: Because they preferred the customs office to the crown. Einheit der Wissenschaft means: one cleaned language, one discipline of statements, one reductional fantasy in a laboratory coat.

S.: You are hard on Vienna.

G.: Only because it made logic smell of disinfectant.

S.: And Rayneri?

G.: Rayneri smells of aula, hierarchy, robe, and perhaps a little incense. Which is civilisation.

S.: Let us be precise. Why does the singular-plural matter so much to you?

G.: Because “unity” in the singular keeps the principle one, while “the sciences” in the plural refuses to erase the branches. It is not one science replacing the others, but one unifying order embracing many sciences.

S.: So unlike a reductive programme.

G.: Entirely. He is not saying palaeontology is only zoology, nor zoology only chemistry, nor chemistry only physics, nor physics only protocol sentences. He is saying that palaeontology, ichthyology, entomology, sociology, psychiatry, medicine, virus research, and whatever monstrous modern science you please remain sciences in the plural while belonging to one intelligible whole.

S.: That already sounds almost anti-modern.

G.: Good. Modernity is usually improved by a little resistance.

S.: Yet the title is not exactly anti-scientific.

G.: Heaven forbid. It is anti-scientism, which is the more decent fight. Rayneri’s point, if I hear him properly, is not to diminish the sciences, but to prevent them from becoming little sovereign republics each with its own bad anthem.

S.: So unity is not a flattening but a superior coherence.

G.: Exactly. And because it is Turin in 1856, the superior coherence is not hidden. God is in the centre, even if one must call him, for exegetical purposes, the Genitor.

S.: Genitor is a wonderfully evasive way of being orthodox.

G.: It has the advantage of sounding biological, theological, and faintly Roman at once.

S.: Then Rayneri is not deviant at all.

G.: Not in the least. He is pious in the proper Piedmontese register: ordered, educational, architectonic, and only incidentally sublime.

S.: Which makes the grande aula all the more plausible.

G.: Exactly. A prolusione in a grande aula in Turin on the fifth of November 1856 is not the setting for scientific sanitation. It is the setting for the old idea that knowledge belongs together because truth itself is ordered.

S.: So “science” there means scienza in the broad old sense.

G.: Yes. Ordered knowledge, not merely white coats and galvanometers. The word has not yet shrunk into laboratory specialism.

S.: Yet the sciences are plural.

G.: As they must be, once the world has become too interesting for one faculty. That is the beauty of it. He allows multiplicity without surrendering architectonic aspiration.

S.: Which is more than Unified Science usually managed.

G.: Unified Science usually managed to sound managerial. “Unified” is what one does to timetables and railway companies. “Unità delle scienze” sounds like a metaphysical polity.

S.: You prefer the polity to the railway.

G.: Deeply. One can live in a polity. One is carried by a railway.

S.: Then perhaps Rayneri’s title is pedagogical too.

G.: Very much so. A prolusione is a threshold speech. One inaugurates not merely a course but a conception of study. The sciences are plural because the curriculum is plural; the unity is singular because the mind must not fracture under the curriculum.

S.: That is almost beautiful.

G.: It is beautiful. Turin occasionally managed it.

S.: Better than Bologna?

G.: Ah, Bologna is another matter. Bologna is older, yes, and prouder, and more proper to the very spirit of the university. But Bologna above all resists any one principle trying to behave as superintendent of the whole.

S.: Because alma mater is already the principle.

G.: Precisely. Bologna thinks of the university itself as the living unity, not of a philosophically declared “unity of the sciences” as something needing inaugural proclamation in a royal aula.

S.: And Oxford?

G.: Boum Vadum has an equal distrust, though from the opposite side. Oxford prefers the sciences, and even the arts, to remain decently collegiate, badly heated, and mutually suspicious.

S.: So Rayneri’s title offends both.

G.: In opposite directions. Bologna finds it too architectonic, Oxford too public. Which is why I admire it.

S.: You admire anything that annoys two old universities at once.

G.: It is one of the few reliable tests of seriousness.

S.: Then what does he mean by unity, if not reduction and not mere institutional coexistence?

G.: I think he means an order of intelligibility under which the several disciplines do not fall apart into unrelated specialisms. An order of truth, perhaps, but also of formation. The sciences differ in object and method, but they are not metaphysically homeless.

S.: Because the Genitor still governs.

G.: Exactly. The very possibility that many sciences are sciences at all presupposes some one ordered world, one created intelligibility, one ultimate reason why there is a whole rather than a heap.

S.: A very un-Viennese tree, as you said.

G.: Entirely. The Viennese would analyse “tree,” classify the observation-statements, and then quarrel over whether trunks reduce to protocol. Rayneri says, more civilly, that the trunk already exists and the branches had better remember it.

S.: Then “della” matters too.

G.: Ah yes, the little aristocrat in the middle. Della binds unity to the sciences without allowing unity to collapse into them. It is not unità scientifica, nor unificazione delle scienze in the activist sense. It is of the sciences, belonging to them and yet governing them.

S.: A genitive theology.

G.: Exactly. The sort of relation English philosophers usually try to solve by pretending it does not exist.

S.: Or by inventing “levels.”

G.: Levels are what one says when one has lost the old confidence but wants to keep the staircase.

S.: Then the plural sciences remain irreducibly distinct.

G.: Yes. That is the great advantage. Entomology is not medicine, medicine not sociology, sociology not mathematics, mathematics not theology — though all, for him, stand within one more general order of knowing.

S.: Which order is philosophical?

G.: Philosophical and more than philosophical. Philosophy crowns; it does not merely coordinate. There lies the difference with Vienna. For Rayneri, philosophy remains regina scientiarum in some usable sense. For the unity-of-science men, philosophy becomes customs officer, or at best under-labourer with a broom.

S.: Locke with a permit book.

G.: Yes. Rayneri crowns philosophy; Vienna gives it sanitation duties.

S.: That is rather unkind to Vienna.

G.: It is exactly kind enough. They were superb cleaners. Civilization occasionally needs dust.

S.: Then your own seminar on Unified Science?

G.: My seminar was on the phrase’s confusions as much as its ambitions. I have always thought that “unified science” sounds plausible only because “unity” is one of those words people are too well brought up to refuse.

S.: And because “science” has already been narrowed in English.

G.: Precisely. Once “science” means mostly the laboratory and its satellites, “unified science” sounds like a programme of coordination. But in Rayneri’s scienza the word is broad enough to make the phrase metaphysically alive.

S.: So we must not read him backward through Carnap.

G.: No more than one should read Aristotle as a badly typeset logician. Rayneri’s unity is not syntactic or reductional. It is architectonic, pedagogical, and theistic.

S.: And royal.

G.: Indeed. One must not neglect the Regia Università. The royal university is itself a symbol of ordered public knowledge. The grande aula does part of the argument before the man has opened his mouth.

S.: You really do care about the hall.

G.: A hall tells you what sort of truth is expected to echo there.

S.: Then perhaps the title is also political in the best nineteenth-century way.

G.: Yes. Piedmont in 1856 is the civilised part of Italy, or so it understandably thought. To speak there of the unity of the sciences is to say something about the unity of culture, state, education, and truth against fragmentation.

S.: That sounds almost Risorgimental.

G.: It probably is, though in a sober university key. One does not need tricolours on the cover to hear the background music.

S.: Then why not simply “sulle scienze” or “sul sapere”?

G.: Because that would forfeit the very claim. “Della unità delle scienze” says that the many are intelligible only through the one. It is a title of relation, not enumeration.

S.: And relation is what Bologna distrusts?

G.: Bologna distrusts overt architectonic relation because it has for centuries embodied relation institutionally. It does not need to proclaim it in quite the same style.

S.: Whereas Turin, younger and royal, can enjoy the inaugural majesty.

G.: Exactly. Turin likes to say in a hall what Bologna prefers to imply in a tradition.

S.: And Oxford?

G.: Oxford prefers to imply everything and then deny having implied it.

S.: Even unity?

G.: Especially unity. Oxford is committed to the fiction that truth emerges from local exactness without anyone needing to say “whole.”

S.: Yet Greats itself once almost presupposed a whole.

G.: Of course. But only by leaving it to the candidate to suffer privately. Rayneri suffers publicly and grandly, which is much more Italian.

S.: Then what would he say to Mach and his sort?

G.: Probably that they mistake method for measure and syntax for order. One does not get the unity of the sciences by sweeping metaphysics out of the room; one gets only a tidier room.

S.: And what would Mach reply?

G.: Something about economy of thought, no doubt, and the suspicion that your Genitor is a rather expensive explanatory convenience.

S.: Which would only delight Rayneri further.

G.: Very likely. Nothing strengthens a nineteenth-century architectonic quite like a later empiricist sneer.

S.: Then let us catalogue the differences. Rayneri has one unity and many sciences; Vienna one science-language and many departments; the New Worlders one programme and a conference hotel.

G.: Excellent.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it, though the conference hotel may need trimming.

S.: Never. It is the best bit.

G.: Then perhaps the truest contrast is that Rayneri’s unity preserves the dignity of plurality, while unified science tends to justify plurality only on the way to abolishing it.

S.: A splendid sentence.

G.: Use it carefully. The sciences in Rayneri remain sciences; they are not mere provinces awaiting annexation by a single language.

S.: And because they remain plural, the unity cannot be merely lexical.

G.: Exactly. The title itself performs this. Unità singular, scienze plural. The grammar refuses the flattening.

S.: So singularity governs without destroying plurality.

G.: A very Catholic ambition, and therefore perfectly suitable for Piedmont at its most serious.

S.: There is your Genitor again.

G.: He deserves repeated mention. Without some central principle of order, the title collapses into educational optimism.

S.: Then the divine centre is not an ornament but the condition.

G.: Precisely. He is not saying the sciences happen to fit together by academic convenience. He is saying they belong together because reality itself belongs together under one originating intelligibility.

S.: Which sounds almost medieval.

G.: The best nineteenth-century things often do.

S.: Then would you say that scientism is the devil?

G.: In this register, yes. Scientism is what happens when one of the sciences mistakes itself for the unity of the sciences, or when method mistakes itself for wisdom.

S.: A useful devil.

G.: Devils usually are.

S.: And Rayneri’s prolusione is therefore an exorcism?

G.: That is too theatrical, but not wholly wrong. It is certainly a prophylactic against fragmentation and self-importance among the branches.

S.: So entomology is reminded that it is not God.

G.: Exactly. Nor is sociology, nor psychiatry, nor virology, nor whatever future discipline wishes to write manifestos in place of footnotes.

S.: Computer science too, then.

G.: Especially computer science. The sciences are to remain sciences, not cults.

S.: Then perhaps the title is not only grand but humane.

G.: Very much so. It says to the student: do not let your discipline make you stupid by isolation.

S.: Which is more than one can say for some modern curricula.

G.: Much more. The unity of the sciences is pedagogical before it is conference rhetoric. It keeps the mind from becoming departmental.

S.: That is another sentence worth keeping.

G.: Keep it and pretend Rayneri whispered it in the grande aula.

S.: I shall. Then what would you call the exact metaphysical content of his unity?

G.: Ordered plurality under a common source and end. There, that is dry enough.

S.: And source is the Genitor.

G.: Yes, though one must not put him on every page or the undergraduates will think we have changed faculties.

S.: They already suspect theology in any serious philosophy.

G.: Quite rightly. Serious philosophy has always had theology in the basement, whether it admits it or not.

S.: Then your admiration for the title is partly nostalgia.

G.: For grandeur, yes. Not for doctrine exactly, but for a time when one could still say “the unity of the sciences” in a royal aula without sounding like a committee.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Turinese, with one eye on Bologna and the other on Boum Vadum.

G.: Rayneri, a Torino avete avuto il coraggio di parlare dell’unità delle scienze in una grande aula, come se il sapere avesse bisogno non solo di verità, ma anche di architettura.

Rayneri: Caro Grice, senza un certo ordine il sapere si frantuma in mestieri gelosi, e l’aula serve appunto a ricordare che la pluralità delle scienze non esclude la loro comune appartenenza.

G.: La mia implicatura è allora che l’unità, da voi, non significa mai ridurre tutto a una sola scienza, ma tenere insieme le scienze sotto un principio più alto, che io, per prudenza esegetica, chiamerei il Genitore.

Rayneri: La sua implicatura è unitaria, e quasi scientifica, ma ancora cancellabile, mio caro, caro Grice.