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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Grice, the former ‘Navy’ man, once joked that philosophy displayed two unities. One is the unity of latitude: there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. The other is the unity of longitude. The following pages aim at the second type of unity. But Speranza has managed to combine both in some original way. The main text will thus provide the latiduinal unity – and the foonotes will refer to the specific item in the longitudinal unity. The career of H. P. Grice is easy to encapsulate. He is a representative of twentieth-century philosophy of laguage, Oxford style, and his life spans the century: 1913-1988. How do we criss-cross his path with that of other philosophers – Speranza will focus only on the Italian tradition --? The task is not easy. For one, Grice held a degree in ‘classics.’ After leaving Clifton, there was no gateway to philosophy for him, so he endured the five years of classics. This approach however has a positive side to use, for it allows us to incorporate authors who would otherwise seemed totally crytpic to a philosopher, and by that Speranza means what in academia is often referred to as ‘ancient Roman’ – not history, but PHILOSOPHY. There are interesting interections between Grice and Ancient Roman philosophers in that respect, and not just Cicero. Latin remained the language for philosophy even at Grice’s Oxford for centuries. And Speranza has argued that it is indeed the classical element in Grice’s theory that makes it apt to rehabilitate what others have referred to as the ‘common-sense’ view of both meaning and conversation. When Italian started to become the vernacular in which Italian philosophers philosophised, and Ennglish became the language in which English philoosphers philosophised, there are still interactions that Speranza has covered. There is of course the general Indo-European common ground that gives things like ‘mentire’ and ‘maenan’ (on which Grice bases his analysis). When it comes to philosophy as a whole, the disciplinary divisions was something against which Grice fought as much as he could. As a CUF University Lecturer at Oxford, his classes were felt to be out of touch in general, in that the way examination goes at Oxford – it is the pupil’s own essay that counts – and never ‘whatever that pupil’ or student may have heard at this or that class. This quite contrasts with the method of assessing knowledge in Bologna, the Italian university that predates Oxford, where the chair-struture and the common examination based on a syllabus is the standard. Within these limits, here are are some results.  The study is structured as notes on Speranza’s publications, which have been ordered by surname of the Italian philosopher under consideration. If the first paragraph states the problem and the method, the next should state more clearly the principle of selection. This is not, and cannot be, a complete history of Italian philosophy under a Griceian aspect. It is rather a guided map of points of contact, some obvious, some oblique, and some discoverable only when one allows the history of philosophy to recover its older breadth. Speranza’s procedure is therefore neither merely antiquarian nor merely comparative. He does not ask whether this or that Italian philosopher “anticipated” Grice in some crude prophetic sense, nor whether Grice can be annexed to an Italian school. He asks instead what becomes visible when Grice’s central preoccupations with meaning, rationality, intention, conversation, and the said-versus-the-meant are brought into contact with Italian materials whose vocabulary is often different, whose institutional settings are often older, and whose philosophical ambitions are sometimes cast in rhetoric, dialectic, jurisprudence, philology, theology, or commentary rather than in the post-Fregean idiom. The result is not a lineage but a constellation. What emerges, across the entries, is less a genealogy than a family of recurring concerns: sign and signal, implication and implicature, reason and prudence, conversation and civic life, common sense and learned form. If there is a unity here, it is not the false unity of sameness, but the more interesting unity of repeated philosophical pressure across languages, centuries, and genres. I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE. Grice joked by calling his playgroup the playgroup – an alternative story is that it is Mrs. Strawson’s idea – the idea of grown ups meeting under Austin to para-philosophise. But Grice KNEW (via hearsay) of the experience AUSTIN had practiced for two years before the war in what Hamsshire called the OLD PLAYGROUP – which met at All Souls, a few of which survived and joined the New: Hampshire himself, the Master of the Kindergarten, that is, Austin, and Woozley. The rest were excluded for seniority reasons (Hart was older than Austin) or because they just had gotten unbearable for Austin: Ayer. The ‘playgroup’ then lasted till Austin died in Dec. 1959, and the idea is the Grice took that up until 1967. He was renting at the place, so the idea of meeting anywhere but on university grounds was unthinkable – what about a pub? No. They met at Corpus Christi mainly. It was still paraphilosophical in one important respect. Professionally, for his bread and butter as he puts it, Grice was Tutor in Philosophy at St. John’s which meant sharing a loadfull of at least 15 tutees per term which he shared with Mabbott until Mabbott’s retirement in 1966, and for only one term with P. M. S. Hacker, the Haifa-educated Austro-British philosopher. On top, Grice was CUF University Lecturer – add classes and Stints – and most formidable an ‘examiner’ that about whom many feel ‘terrified.’ So the time for paraphilosophy was growing thin. In what follows Speranza attempts to recreate ‘Gruppo di Gioco’ as led by Grice, and not Austin – seeing that it was indeed Grice’s idea to keep these para-philosophical activities – WITHIN THE PREMISES OF OXFORD – at his disposal, to provide further pleasure to what he may not encounter with the occasional unsympathetic tutee or with the rather formal venues which were the classes, for which Grice prepared full notes which he read – with interaction kept at minimum and beyond the ‘minutes.’ Or less so the ‘examinations’ on which he was held to have held ‘impossibly high’ standards of perfection. Now, we know what the Play Group discussed, and we know what Grice’s Play Group discussed after Austin’s demise – but we don’t know what they SHOULD have discussed. Hence this Verbali del Gruppo di Gioco. Circolo di Grice would do just as well, as indeed Grice’s Club – since he WAS clubbable. But that is it. Rather than order the ‘minutes’ by subject-matter or even date, Speranza has taken the idea of keeping the PERSONALITY of the philosopher (usually Italian, or Ancient Roman) at the centre. Speranza has chosen items by such personalities that were to be or should have been aptly discussed by ‘Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice’—complete with the minutes. i.e. to keep the narrative going? thanks. -- place the focus on the praise that Speranza deserves for doing this that makes the world of H. P. Grice much less parochial, even for those who do NOT look to philosophy for their bread and butter -- and can enjoy a rendezvous at a villa, preferably in liguria, by a swimming-pool library. It is here that Speranza’s real generosity as a scholar begins to show. By allowing Grice’s Oxford to meet, one by one, these Italian and Roman personalities, he rescues Grice from the provincial fate to which even his admirers sometimes condemn him: the fate of being treated as a merely local analyst of English talk among dons and colleges. Instead, Grice’s world is opened out into a far wider republic of wit, rhetoric, philology, theology, jurisprudence, and civil conversation, a world in which one need not earn one’s bread and butter by philosophy in order to enjoy the encounter. That is one of the great pleasures of the enterprise. Speranza gives us a Grice who can leave the tutorial staircase behind without ceasing to be himself, and who may now be imagined, quite happily, in a less parochial setting: at a villa, perhaps in Liguria, by a swimming-pool library, still exact, still clubbable, still dry, but no longer confined to the administrative weather of Oxford. In doing so, Speranza not only enlarges Grice; he enlarges the reader’s sense of what philosophy may be when it is allowed to converse with civilisation rather than merely examine it. In the impersonal reconstruction that Speranza appears to have in view, the relevant burden falls not under the CUF lectureship but under tutorial duty. A University Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford in that period would normally lecture and perhaps conduct classes, but would not, by virtue of that office alone, be required to set weekly essays for individual pupils in the way a college tutor was. The tutorial system is the more plausible locus for the continual formulation of essay questions. The examiner’s role is different again: in examinations the candidate’s own essay is central, but that concerns assessment of performance in the Schools, not the weekly generation of tutorial topics. So if one wishes to estimate how many essay questions Grice would have had to formulate between 1946 and 1966, the safest basis is his college tutoring, not his lectureship or examining. The proposed assumption of fifteen pupils per term is not unreasonable as a working figure, especially if the load was shared with Mabbott for most of the period and if one is thinking of Grice’s own active portion of the teaching rather than the whole St John’s intake. It is, however, only a heuristic. In some terms the number could have been somewhat lower or somewhat higher; some pupils may have required more intensive weekly attention, others less; and arrangements could vary according to year, honours school, and the division of labour with Mabbott. But as a planning number for an impersonal reconstruction it is defensible. If one further assumes one essay per pupil per week, the next uncertainty is the length of a term in practical tutorial weeks. Oxford terms are named Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity, but the number of weeks in which full essay-setting actually occurs is usually less than the formal span one finds in the calendar. A prudent estimate for tutorial calculation is eight teaching weeks per term, though some might prefer to reckon seven or even six if one wishes to account for the initial settling-in and the ending pressure of collections, Schools preparation, and travel. On the sabbatical assumption, the picture becomes more conjectural. It is not safe to assume automatically one sabbatical term every year in a mechanically regular sense throughout the whole twenty-year period. Leave arrangements, visiting appointments, grants, and relief from college duty varied, and travel to places such as Harvard, Berkeley, Brandeis, or Princeton does not by itself prove a uniform annual rhythm of one free term in every academic year. Still, if Speranza proposes that hypothesis as a deliberately simplifying one for purposes of scale, then the arithmetic is straightforward. Twenty academic years, with one sabbatical term removed per year, leave two active terms per year. At fifteen pupils per active term, and one essay per pupil per week, the total depends on how many teaching weeks are assumed. At eight weeks per term, the calculation is 20 years x 2 active terms x 15 pupils x 8 weeks = 4,800 essay questions. At seven weeks, it becomes 4,200. At six weeks, it becomes 3,600. So the cleanest headline number, under the strongest version of the proposed assumptions, is about 4,800 tutorial essay assignments formulated across the twenty-year span. It should also be said that this figure is almost certainly an upper-order simplification rather than a documentary total. It assumes that every pupil produced one essay every week of every active tutorial week, that Grice himself had to formulate each prompt distinctly rather than reusing some topics across pupils, and that the whole burden continued at a steady rate across two decades. Real academic life would have been less uniform. Some questions would have recurred, some pupils may have worked from a common sheet of issues, some weeks may have involved revision or discussion rather than a freshly coined title, and periods of travel, illness, examining pressure, or college rearrangement could reduce the number. Even so, for the purposes of an introductory narrative before the list of verbali, the estimate is philosophically suggestive: even a cautious range of roughly 3,600 to 4,800 tutorial essay questions conveys the scale of the intellectual labour involved. Thus the impersonal narrative could say that Speranza proposes to imagine, behind each Italian philosopher discussed, not merely a historical note or a playful reconstruction, but the shadow of a tutorial assignment that Grice, as tutor in philosophy, might have had to formulate under the relentless weekly economy of Oxford teaching. The CUF lectureship provided the public and formal side of his work, and the examiner’s office supplied the pressure of judgment, but the tutorial was the workshop in which questions had to be continually generated. On that basis, and under the simplifying assumption of fifteen pupils per active term, one essay per pupil per week, and one sabbatical term per year over the twenty years from 1946 to 1966, the total number of essay questions he may have had to frame comes out at approximately 4,800, or somewhat less if one adopts a shorter reckoning of practical teaching weeks. That figure is speculative, but it is not frivolous; it gives a concrete sense of the scale against which Speranza’s imagined verbali and reconstructed assignments acquire both plausibility and charm. Yes — for a dialogue document like this, reducing the spacing will make a real difference, and the document clearly is carrying a great many separate speaker turns as ordinary paragraphs.

After Select All and Paragraph, the safest settings for the whole document are these:

Set Before to 0 pt. Set After to 0 pt. Set Line spacing to Single. Set Indentation left and right to 0. Set Special to None.

If there is a checkbox or option that says something like “Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style,” you may turn that on as well, but if Before and After are already both 0 pt, it is not doing the main work.

One caution. In a document like yours, different styles may already be in play, and some styles can keep their own spacing rules. So if after doing this globally you still see stray gaps, that usually means some paragraphs are in a different style and will need the same treatment by style or by reapplying the paragraph settings.

A practical sequence would be: Select all Open Paragraph Before 0 After 0 Single spacing No special indent OK

If you want the dialogue still to remain readable with no extra white space, the cleanest visual aid is usually to keep each speaker label consistently formatted and let the paragraph break do the work, rather than relying on spacing.

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Please then -- So here is a sample -- which you will have to adapt and perphas number -- and make it again impersona. Alla Speranza here presents a sample. The idea is to enhance some sort of affectionate perversity. And I would add to EACH essay -- Typewritten disallowed. Handwriting counts. -- seeing that his first example of conversational implicature was "Jones has beautiful handwriting" (at Collection) +> Grice (tutor) implicating: Jones is hopeless at philosophy -- The other case that comes to Speranza's mind is Grice: Bring me a paper tomorrow. Pupil: A newspaper? -- as example of incorrigibility of meaning. This type of boring donnish humour is appreciated by those who have suffered the role of tutee -- comments between dons of anything confidential regarding pupil counting rather as dishonesty or gossip -- SAMPLE THEN and then provide the rewrite without preamble or ps. Thank you. QUIZ Ancient Rome had her Pliny the Elder and her Pliny the Younger; Italy had her Ermolao Barbaro the Elder and her Ermolao Barbaro the Younger. Supply three corresponding parallelisms for England’s J. S. Mill and his father. Provide a short narrative of the history of Italian and English mediaeval philosophy under the counterfactual assumption that philosophers had been denied the possibility of commenting on Aristotle. Assess, by means of two contrasting judgments, how one canonical Italian and one canonical English philosopher of the Middle Ages would have fared had the educational order run from quadrivium to trivium rather than the reverse. Reconstruct the history of Italian and English philosophy on the assumption that the Grand Tour itinerary had run not Como–Firenze–Roma–Napoli, but Como–Paris–London–the Hebrides. Reconstruct twentieth-century Italian philosophy on the hypothesis that Italy had installed the Oxford tutorial system, whereby the philosophy student remained for five years under a single tutor before earning a first degree. Assess three distinct ways in which Aquinas’s philosophy was reinterpreted once he had been made a saint. Assess three distinct ways in which Bonaventure’s philosophy was reinterpreted once he had been made a saint. Assess (A) whether Kierkegaard, rather than a more traditional Italian or English philosopher, would require prior mastery of the seven liberal arts before one might be granted a meeting with the grand dame, Philosophia, and (B) what he would require in their stead. Boethius: “Hircocervus enim compositum est significans hircum et cervum; sed nisi ei aut esse aut non esse addatur, nullus inde veri falsive intellectus poterit provenire.” State whether “Hircocervus non est” thereby acquires truth-value, or merely the appearance of it, with reference to Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory and the criticisms that followed. Boethius writes: “Vox vero significativa est, ut ‘homo’; non significativa vero, ut ‘blityri’.” Reverse the distinction for an anti‑Boethian, and illustrate it, as Frege requires in Der Gedanke, by means of one complete utterance for each resulting species of voice. Explain why Italy, though already in possession of Bologna before there was any Ox to bridge, failed to produce an “Oxbridge” of her own. Casanova made it to England in 1763–64. Explain why London did not improve his reputation for prudence. What, in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, counts as the wake-up call? Derek Jarman famously made a film about Wittgenstein. Using three sections of the screenplay as your model, reconstruct one he might have written for (A) an Italian philosopher and (B) an English philosopher, and compare their critical fates. Compare Bologna and Oxford vis-à-vis the fact that the former ceased to belong to the Papal States in 1859–61, while the latter remained under the control of the Defender of the Faith. Using criteria other than mere chronology, rank (A) Hegel and (B) Cicero in respect of their claim to be post-Socratic philosophers. Assess the claim that Austin’s ordinary-language philosophy arose in reaction either to (A) Ceretti’s Pasaelogices Specimen itself, or to (B) its translation into Italian by P. D’Ercole. Justify the failure of “Saturday mornings,” à la Austin, to establish themselves at Bologna, with particular reference to prejudice against the sabato inglese. Explain why Cicero’s numerous dialogues proved a systematic flop when staged both in Rome and in London. Jean‑Paul Sartre spent his summer holidays at Naples in the 1930s before returning to Paris and engaging in existentialist philosophy. Reconstruct the corresponding history of philosophy had he chosen the moors of Yorkshire instead. Descartes stayed in Italy from late March to early May 1625. Include that premiss in the refutation of sum ⊨ cogito. Vincenzo Cuoco wrote “Platone in Italia.” Explain why Gilbert Ryle did not write “Plato in England,” and justify whether he should have. In the mediaeval trivium, once popular in both Italy and England, rank the three disciplines in increasing order of triviality. Justify. Reconstruct Burali‑Forti’s likely assessment of Russell’s appropriation of his hyphenated surname for a paradox (1903, après 1897), later enlisted — with Whitehead’s complicitation in Principia Mathematica (1913) — to justify the macabre Theory of Types. Collingwood translated De Ruggiero’s Storia del liberalismo europeo (1925) into English for the Clarendon. Assess whether that was too great a liberty. Given that the third Earl of Shaftesbury sojourned at Naples in 1711–1713, philosophising with Vico and Doria while seeking relief for his own lungs, reconstruct the reverse scenario in which Vico and Doria undertake the same at St Giles House, Wimborne St Giles, Dorset. Given that Bentham rendered Beccaria’s “la massima felicità divisa nel maggior numero” as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, assess the consequences for English utilitarianism had he (A) thought fit to translate the divisa, and (B) preferred the Latinate “felicity” to his vernacular “happiness”. Q. Assuming the standard rule of thumb for ancient sea-routes — approx. 4 knots, or 500 stades in 12 hours and 1000 stades in 24 hours under favourable conditions — and granting that this would have brought Pythagoras from Samos to Croton in three weeks, calculate the corresponding duration required for him to reach Dover in England: (A) by sea, (B) by land, (C) by air. A. (A) 32 weeks; (B) 145 weeks, assuming the requisite submarine land-bridges from Samos to the mainland and from Calais to Dover; (C) 2 hours, without stopovers. For most of the twentieth century Oxford maintained a Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. Provide three reasons why Bologna would have regarded that as a form of sub-letting. The Accademia dei Lincei sustain an annual, very prestigious, Classe di Scienze filosofiche in Rome. Expose three reasons — philosophical, urban, and zoological — why no such collectivity of animals has so far ever done so in London. Rome had her Civil War — and her Cato. Apply §2.5.6 of Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta to: England had her Civil War — and her Sidney. Q Walter Pater, an English philosopher, wrote “Marius the Epicurean” on ancient Italic (Roman) philosophy. Provide the strict equivalent of an Italian philosopher writing on ancient Anglo-Saxon philosophy, compleat with the perfectly analogical title. A: Hereward il Fuorilegge [by Gualterio Padre]. Re ‘liceo’ and ‘lyceum’, provide one specific case pro, and one specific case contra: the claim that, in Italy — unlike England — the ordinary high-schooler is etymologically peripatetic. Re Bonaiuti’s trial, set out the premiss for his stubborn “si muove”, against (A) the received “non si muove”, and (B) the obvious complication he blatantly leaves aside, that, if motion is frame-relative, “si muove” may require a qualified re-statement. Assess Numa’s Pythagoreanism as first-rate by ranking the following sources: (A) direct acquaintance and indoctrination still fresh in his mind when he assumed the throne at the age of 185; (B) some other source of acquaintance (rumour, etc.); (C) time travel. Assess Eco’s plain object-language “Il nome della rosa” against the superior Austinian variant, “Il nome di ‘la rosa’”, with particular reference to the difference between a nomen substantivum and a definite description. Use Austin, “The Meaning of a Word” (Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed., esp. pp. 65–66), and Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, *14, for ι. Assess Virgil’s construction of Aeneas as a Stoic hero vis-à-vis §4.5 of Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, with special reference to fatum and the she-wolf. Using A(a,b) for a amat b and I for intended reflection, construct a meta-scenario involving Ovid himself in “Ars amatoria”, such that the addressee recognises not merely A(a,b), but Ovid’s staging of A(a,b) for recognition. Nietzsche’s sojourn in the west-coast Italian village of Sorrento gave rise to “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.” Reconstruct his philosophical output had his travel destination been the east-coast English village of Whitby. Test the validity of the main claim of “Il principe” by providing a natural-deduction sequence. (Use ‘m’, ‘f’, ‘v’, and ‘g’ respectively for ‘mezzo’, ‘fine’, ‘volere’, and ‘giustifica’, treating ‘giustifica’ as an iterated ‘volere’). Re Ficino’s “Accademia Platonica”, weigh the obvious horns: (A) that “platonica” is a necessary marker of revived allegiance; (B) that it is a later historiographical over-description imposed upon an originally informal circle. Re Horace’s “Epistula ad Pisones”, examine and conclude by weighing the obvious horns: (A) that Horace is economising on parchment; (B) that he takes collective uptake by the Pisones to be even conceivable. Test Aosta’s definitional claim, using second-order predicate calculus with identity, by describing a possible world in which the upper limit of what may be cogitated changes between Aosta as monk of Bec and Aosta as archbishop of Canterbury. (Use ‘C, ‘M,’ ‘b, and ‘c,’ respectively for: ‘cogitari,’ ‘maius,’ ‘monk of Bec’ and ‘archbishop of Canterbury.’ . Expand, in second-order predicate calculus with identity, how Pomponazzi’s “De immortalitate animae” remains, in a characteristically Padovian way, commitment-free (use the primitive symbols ‘d’, ‘i’, and ‘a’ for ‘de’, ‘immortalitate’, and ‘animae’, together with the standard symbolism of such a calculus, including variables, quantifiers, and relational expressions of whatever adicity may prove necessary; no element is to be rendered into your vernacular). In the comparative terms of the history of philosophy in both England and Italy, (A) which is your least favourite: the English, or the Italian translation of “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”? (B) Provide one passage from each to counter-balance your judgement. (C) Consolidate your opinion that: Either: “Gott ist allmächtig; das ist ein notwendiges Urteil. Die Allmacht kann nicht aufgehoben werden, wenn ihr eine Gottheit, d. i. ein unendliches Wesen, setzt, mit dessen Begriff jener identisch ist.” is best left untranslated — Or: That neither an English nor an Italian philosopher is properly so called unless he can read Kant in his vernacular — Kant’s, not the English or the Italian philosopher’s. Given that, when Bologna was founded in 1088, Italy was a mere geographical expression — unification not occurring until 1861 — (A) refute the claim that Bologna is Italy’s oldest university, let alone Europe’s; (B) defend the claim that Oxford was the oldest university of a country that was not a mere geographical expression — and, therefore, of the whole world. Philosophy was introduced at Rome by an Athenian embassy on a clear day of February in DXCIX ad urbem conditam. Supply, finding the apt historical equivalents, the exact parallel for Londinium, in terms of: (A) Carneades’s speech on the Monday pro δίκη — of Rome’s over-taxation of Athens; (B) Carneades’s speech on the Tuesday contra δίκη; and (C) the reaction of Cato the Censor to the proceedings.” Provide the natural-deduction derivation by which, in §§ 8.5–7 of the “Oratio de hominis dignitate,” Pico della Mirandola concludes per reductio ad absurdum contra “re-nascentia.” Is Quattromani the name of ONE philosopher? (A) If ‘Yes’: justify your answer in terms of his known oeuvre; (B) If ‘No’: supply the other Quattromani [(C) Would that not make him Ottomani? Counter‑justify.] (D) State a corollary that would follow from your declining to give a yes‑or‑no answer to the original question. What work by Telesio did Bacon not read to justify his characterisation of the former as “prius modernorum”? Distinguish between (A1) Civitas solis, (A2) Civitas Solis, (B1) La città del sole, (B2) La città del Sole, (B3) La Città del sole, and (B4) La Città del Sole. What was lost in translation? Q: (A) Provide the three scope variants for Bruno’s Dell’infinito, universo, e mondi; (B) indicate which one led to the Santo Ufficio resolution; (C) counter-justify. Q: Give three philosophical arguments why Oxford may be an older university than Bologna. Explain why Aquinas’s Summa Theologica can or cannot still be taught at Oxford by a former seminarian like Kenny. Explain how Cicero’s philosophical advice in “The Republic” applies, in English history, to any period other than Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Q: Explain the differences between the philosophical doctrines of both Rensi and Renzi in terms of how their surnames would be mispronounced outside Italy. Q. Compare William of Ockham and Gregorio da Rimini in terms of: (a) percentuals of the first names William and Gregorio in their respective villages; (b) other. Q: “Is soul-survival of the nous qua noumenon pantheistically flawed?” From Marcus Aurelius, Ad se ipsum, § 5.4. A: His question; his answer! Q: What is the meaning of “of” in Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy”? A: “Off,” surely? Q: Would Lucretius be able to read a modern Italian rendition of his De rerum natura? A: Provided the hexametres are kept. Q: If your name were Cicero, would you legally change it? A: I did — but my wife remains Missus Cicero. Q: Is Vico’s Scienza nuova still new? A: Even before he wrote it. Q: Name three philosophers within the S before Sabbadini who wrote on Cicero. A: Sabba, Sabbada, and Sabbadin — if you heard of them. Q: Why is Croce’s Breviario di estetica anything but? A: Because “Breviario” alone would not do. Q: Is it Salutati’s custom to salute more than once? A: Not necessarily at once. Q: Is Sancasciani doubly invoked? A: Indeed. And worth the double reward. Q. Expose in your own terms what Gricean maxim Sanseverino but not Severino flout. A. I do not expose on principle. Q: If Sarpi’s surname is supposed to derive from sarpa, a fish, why is it not Sarpe? A: Why not? Q: If s- at the beginning of a word is the negative prefix, what would Scaramelli not mean? A: Not not little candies. Q: Why are there two Scevolas, and why should Grice care? A: Because “Scevola” in these notes names two different Quintus Mucius Scaevolas, each exemplary in a different register of reasoned public life. One is the pontifex and jurist, associated with the systematic ordering of civil law, dialectical division, and the idea that jurisprudence is a branch of political philosophy grounded in public reasons. The other is the augur and civic speaker, remembered above all for his refusal, under threat, to call Marius an enemy, thereby showing that force cannot cancel the authority of judgment. Grice should care because both figures anticipate, in different ways, his own central thought: that meaning, judgment, and public reason depend not on coercion, costume, or institutional fiat alone, but on recognisable standards of rational accountability. One Scevola shows reason as juridical articulation; the other shows reason as moral steadfastness in speech. In the reconstruction proposed by Speranza, the tutorial question is to be imagined not as a neutral bureaucratic convenience, but as one of the most local and affectionate perversities of the Oxford philosophical order. The essay-title was both invitation and trap: an instrument of formation, of pressure, of comedy, and of discreet judgment. It belonged to the tutor rather than to the University Lecturer as such; the lectureship supplied public exposition, and the examiner later depended, in the Schools, upon the candidate’s own essay, but the weekly assignment belonged to the tutorial room. It is there that one may most plausibly situate the steady manufacture of essay questions across the twenty years from 1946 to 1966. If, for working purposes, one adopts the simplifying assumptions already proposed by Speranza — fifteen pupils in an active term, one essay per pupil per week, and one sabbatical term in each academic year — the gross number of essay questions framed during the period comes to roughly 4,800 on an eight-week teaching estimate, or somewhat less on a shorter reckoning. This figure is not documentary, but heuristic; its point is less archival than atmospheric. It conveys the scale of the weekly pressure under which Grice, as tutor, may be imagined to have forged a style of question at once exacting, dry, and quietly comic. In that atmosphere, the rule “Typewritten disallowed. Handwriting counts.” belongs naturally enough, and with more than one implication. It recovers, on the one hand, the old donnish wit whereby a remark ostensibly about penmanship could function as judgment on philosophy itself: “Jones has beautiful handwriting” being heard, under collection conditions, as carrying the unspoken rider that Jones is otherwise hopeless. On the other hand, it recalls the tutor’s delight in the incorrigibility of meaning, as in the pupil who, instructed to “bring me a paper tomorrow,” asks whether a newspaper would do. Such humour is not generous, but it is recognisable to anyone who has suffered the role of tutee; it is part of the small domestic pragmatics of Oxford philosophy, where what is said and what is meant were seldom permitted to coincide for long. Speranza’s sample therefore proceeds not as a literal archival find, but as an impersonal reconstruction of the sort of paper-questions that might fittingly stand before the verbali: serious in content, whimsical in form, and touched throughout by that austere, faintly malicious, and oddly affectionate tutorial comedy in which the weekly essay was both punishment and privilege. Sample Tutorial Questions 1.                     Ancient Rome had her Pliny the Elder and her Pliny the Younger; Italy had her Ermolao Barbaro the Elder and her Ermolao Barbaro the Younger. Supply three corresponding parallelisms for England’s J. S. Mill and his father. Typewritten disallowed. Handwriting counts. 2.       Provide a short narrative of the history of Italian and English mediaeval philosophy under the counterfactual assumption that philosophers had been denied the possibility of commenting on Aristotle. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 3.                                    Assess, by means of two contrasting judgments, how one canonical Italian and one canonical English philosopher of the Middle Ages would have fared had the educational order run from quadrivium to trivium rather than the reverse. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 4. Reconstruct the history of Italian and English philosophy on the assumption that the Grand Tour itinerary had run not Como–Firenze–Roma–Napoli, but Como–Paris–London–the Hebrides. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 5.                                    Reconstruct twentieth-century Italian philosophy on the hypothesis that Italy had installed the Oxford tutorial system, whereby the philosophy student remained for five years under a single tutor before earning a first degree. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 6.       Assess three distinct ways in which Aquinas’s philosophy was reinterpreted once he had been made a saint. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 7.                           Assess three distinct ways in which Bonaventure’s philosophy was reinterpreted once he had been made a saint. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 8.                               Assess whether Kierkegaard, rather than a more traditional Italian or English philosopher, would require prior mastery of the seven liberal arts before one might be granted a meeting with the grand dame Philosophia, and state what he would require in their stead. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 9.                                  Boethius writes: “Hircocervus enim compositum est significans hircum et cervum; sed nisi ei aut esse aut non esse addatur, nullus inde veri falsive intellectus poterit provenire.” State whether “Hircocervus non est” thereby acquires truth-value, or merely the appearance of it, with reference to Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory and the criticisms that followed. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 10.                           Boethius writes: “Vox vero significativa est, ut ‘homo’; non significativa vero, ut ‘blityri’.” Reverse the distinction for an anti-Boethian, and illustrate it, as Frege requires in Der Gedanke, by means of one complete utterance for each resulting species of voice. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 11.     Explain why Italy, though already in possession of Bologna before there was any Ox to bridge, failed to produce an “Oxbridge” of her own. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 12.                                    Casanova made it to England in 1763–64. Explain why London did not improve his reputation for prudence. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 13.                        What, in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, counts as the wake-up call? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 14.            Derek Jarman famously made a film about Wittgenstein. Using three sections of the screenplay as your model, reconstruct one he might have written for an Italian philosopher and one for an English philosopher, and compare their critical fates. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 15.                         Compare Bologna and Oxford vis-à-vis the fact that the former ceased to belong to the Papal States in 1859–61, while the latter remained under the control of the Defender of the Faith. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 16.            Using criteria other than mere chronology, rank Hegel and Cicero in respect of their claim to be post-Socratic philosophers. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 17.      Assess the claim that Austin’s ordinary-language philosophy arose in reaction either to Ceretti’s Pasaelogices Specimen itself, or to its translation into Italian by P. D’Ercole. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 18.                               Justify the failure of “Saturday mornings,” à la Austin, to establish themselves at Bologna, with particular reference to prejudice against the sabato inglese. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 19.             Explain why Cicero’s numerous dialogues proved a systematic flop when staged both in Rome and in London. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 20.                           Jean-Paul Sartre spent his summer holidays at Naples in the 1930s before returning to Paris and engaging in existentialist philosophy. Reconstruct the corresponding history of philosophy had he chosen the moors of Yorkshire instead. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 21.  Descartes stayed in Italy from late March to early May 1625. Include that premiss in the refutation of sum entails cogito. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 22.          Vincenzo Cuoco wrote Platone in Italia. Explain why Gilbert Ryle did not write Plato in England, and justify whether he should have. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 23.       In the mediaeval trivium, once popular in both Italy and England, rank the three disciplines in increasing order of triviality. Justify. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 24.            Reconstruct Burali-Forti’s likely assessment of Russell’s appropriation of his hyphenated surname for a paradox, later enlisted, with Whitehead’s complicitation in Principia Mathematica, to justify the macabre Theory of Types. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 25.   Collingwood translated De Ruggiero’s Storia del liberalismo europeo into English for the Clarendon. Assess whether that was too great a liberty. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 26.                 Given that the third Earl of Shaftesbury sojourned at Naples in 1711–1713, philosophising with Vico and Doria while seeking relief for his own lungs, reconstruct the reverse scenario in which Vico and Doria undertake the same at St Giles House, Wimborne St Giles, Dorset. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 27.                           Given that Bentham rendered Beccaria’s “la massima felicità divisa nel maggior numero” as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, assess the consequences for English utilitarianism had he thought fit to translate the divisa and preferred the Latinate “felicity” to his vernacular “happiness”. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 28.                          Assuming the standard rule of thumb for ancient sea-routes and granting that it would have brought Pythagoras from Samos to Croton in three weeks, calculate the corresponding duration required for him to reach Dover in England by sea, by land, and by air. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 29.      For most of the twentieth century Oxford maintained a Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. Provide three reasons why Bologna would have regarded that as a form of sub-letting. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 30.                                The Accademia dei Lincei sustain an annual, very prestigious, Classe di Scienze filosofiche in Rome. Expose three reasons, philosophical, urban, and zoological, why no such collectivity of animals has so far ever done so in London. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 31.                         Rome had her Civil War and her Cato. Apply the relevant Stoic fragment to the proposition: England had her Civil War and her Sidney. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 32.      Walter Pater, an English philosopher, wrote Marius the Epicurean on ancient Roman philosophy. Provide the strict equivalent of an Italian philosopher writing on ancient Anglo-Saxon philosophy, complete with the perfectly analogical title. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 33.                              Re liceo and lyceum, provide one specific case pro and one specific case contra the claim that, in Italy, unlike England, the ordinary high-schooler is etymologically peripatetic. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 34.                                  Re Bonaiuti’s trial, set out the premiss for his stubborn “si muove”, against the received “non si muove” and the obvious complication that, if motion is frame-relative, “si muove” may require qualified restatement. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 35.                     Assess Numa’s Pythagoreanism as first-rate by ranking the following sources: direct acquaintance and indoctrination, some other source of acquaintance, and time travel. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 36.      Assess Eco’s plain object-language Il nome della rosa against the superior Austinian variant Il nome di “la rosa”, with particular reference to the difference between a nomen substantivum and a definite description. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 37.                      Assess Virgil’s construction of Aeneas as a Stoic hero with special reference to fatum and the she-wolf. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 38.                               Using A(a,b) for a amat b and I for intended reflection, construct a meta-scenario involving Ovid himself in Ars amatoria such that the addressee recognises not merely A(a,b), but Ovid’s staging of A(a,b) for recognition. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 39.              Nietzsche’s sojourn in the west-coast Italian village of Sorrento gave rise to Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Reconstruct his philosophical output had his travel destination been the east-coast English village of Whitby. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 40.              Test the validity of the main claim of Il principe by providing a natural-deduction sequence. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 41.                       Re Ficino’s Accademia Platonica, weigh the obvious horns: that “platonica” is a necessary marker of revived allegiance, and that it is a later historiographical over-description imposed upon an originally informal circle. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 42.                Re Horace’s Epistula ad Pisones, examine and conclude by weighing the obvious horns: that Horace is economising on parchment, and that he takes collective uptake by the Pisones to be even conceivable. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 43.                                Test Aosta’s definitional claim, using second-order predicate calculus with identity, by describing a possible world in which the upper limit of what may be cogitated changes between Aosta as monk of Bec and Aosta as archbishop of Canterbury. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 44.                    Expand, in second-order predicate calculus with identity, how Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate animae remains, in a characteristically Padovian way, commitment-free. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 45.      In the comparative terms of the history of philosophy in both England and Italy, state which is your least favourite, the English or the Italian translation of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, provide one passage from each to counter-balance your judgement, and consolidate your opinion on whether the cited Kantian sentence is best left untranslated. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 46.             Given that, when Bologna was founded in 1088, Italy was a mere geographical expression, refute the claim that Bologna is Italy’s oldest university, let alone Europe’s, and defend the claim that Oxford was the oldest university of a country that was not a mere geographical expression and therefore of the whole world. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 47.   Philosophy was introduced at Rome by an Athenian embassy on a clear day of February in DXCIX ad urbem conditam. Supply the exact parallel for Londinium in terms of Carneades’s speech pro justice, his speech contra justice, and the reaction of the local censor. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 48.      Provide the natural-deduction derivation by which, in the relevant sections of the Oratio de hominis dignitate, Pico concludes per reductio ad absurdum contra re-nascentia. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 49.                    Is Quattromani the name of one philosopher? If yes, justify in terms of his known oeuvre; if no, supply the other Quattromani, and state the corollary that follows from declining to answer yes or no. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 50.                            What work by Telesio did Bacon not read to justify his characterisation of the former as prius modernorum? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 51.   Distinguish between Civitas solis, Civitas Solis, La città del sole, La città del Sole, La Città del sole, and La Città del Sole. State what was lost in translation. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 52.             Provide the three scope variants for Bruno’s Dell’infinito, universo, e mondi, indicate which one led to the Santo Ufficio resolution, and counter-justify. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 53.                      Give three philosophical arguments why Oxford may be an older university than Bologna. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 54.          Explain why Aquinas’s Summa Theologica can or cannot still be taught at Oxford by a former seminarian like Kenny. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 55.                   Explain how Cicero’s philosophical advice in The Republic applies, in English history, to any period other than Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 56.                                    Explain the differences between the philosophical doctrines of both Rensi and Renzi in terms of how their surnames would be mispronounced outside Italy. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 57.    Compare William of Ockham and Gregorio da Rimini in terms of the percentuals of their first names in their respective villages, and other. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 58.                             “Is soul-survival of the nous qua noumenon pantheistically flawed?” Discuss from Marcus Aurelius, Ad se ipsum, section 5.4. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 59.                 What is the meaning of “of” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 60.                                  Would Lucretius be able to read a modern Italian rendition of his De rerum natura? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 61.                                  If your name were Cicero, would you legally change it? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 62.                Is Vico’s Scienza nuova still new? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 63.            Name three philosophers within the S before Sabbadini who wrote on Cicero. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 64.                          Why is Croce’s Breviario di estetica anything but? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 65.                           Is it Salutati’s custom to salute more than once? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 66.                         Is Sancasciani doubly invoked? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 67.         Expose in your own terms what Gricean maxim Sanseverino but not Severino flout. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 68.                               If Sarpi’s surname is supposed to derive from sarpa, a fish, why is it not Sarpe? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 69.                                    If s- at the beginning of a word is the negative prefix, what would Scaramelli not mean? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 70.             Why are there two Scevolas, and why should Grice care? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 71.                                Distinguish the Bassi in ancient Rome by cognomen, philosophical allegiance, and practical bearing under adversity. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 72.              Distinguish the Achillini by discipline, city, and proper inferential temptation. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 73.                                 Distinguish the Barbari by generation, office, and relation to Aristotle. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 74.                                  Distinguish the Albucii by doctrine, public role, and degree of rhetorical contamination. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 75.                             Explain why “Jones has beautiful handwriting” is not, in the circumstances of collection, praise. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 76.   “Bring me a paper tomorrow.” State why “A newspaper?” is both responsive and incorrigible. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 77.                      Explain why the best essay-title is one whose apparent innocence does not survive the first ten minutes. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 78.      Compare the Roman embassy of philosophy with the Oxford tutorial as methods of civil disturbance. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 79.                                 State under what conditions an implicature may improve, rather than merely decorate, a bad essay. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. 80.            Explain why typewriting, though clearer, may still fail where handwriting succeeds. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. I made the corrections, as per passage selected. So please keep here in chatbox what I assume is a natural consequence, again in Speranza's impersonal voice. For a tutor who was known to have his pupils piling up the steps (and therefore known as 'Godot') or would not make a point about 'uploading' grades, one can see it clearly why the 'Gruppo di Gioco' was a matter of survival for this type of philosopher. Note the academic ambivalnce. Austin's old play group was not such thing -- even though Hamsphire did use the expression. they were adults and met for two years before the war. The playgroup of saturday mornings was paraphilosophical but still official in that they did not meet in a pub. Indeed, Austin's favourite venue was Grice's St. John's. Upon Austin's demise, Grice hesitated but kept the meeting at Corpus -- Hare would attend and we could see why Hare is thus one of the first, with Pears, to use 'conversational implicature' in print -- because, without the Master (Austin), the playgroup was more relaxed. Grice rented so 'at-homes' would be a no-no, and the English sabbath was used -- the saturday morning' -- In the three 'playgroups' the idea was PARA-professional: they were not FORCED to do it, and eventually, it was that which led to the demise and Grice's leaving Oxford altogether. Pupils were not allowed, possible examinees were not allowed. They were not classes, they were not tutorials, they were the only occasions where Grice could show his wit in the freest conversational form possible -- For a man who looked to philosophy for his bread and butter, this was marmalade, and scones. In the impersonal continuation Speranza appears to have in mind, the natural consequence is that the Gruppo di Gioco emerges not as a decorative supplement to Grice’s professional life, but as one of its few breathable margins. For a tutor whose pupils were said to pile up the staircase outside his rooms, and who thereby acquired the half-affectionate, half-exasperated title of “Godot,” the need for a para-professional refuge becomes readily intelligible. The tutorial, the lecture, the class, the examination, and the college obligation all belonged to the bread-and-butter economy of philosophy; wit there had to be rationed, and conversation itself was pressed into service by assessment. It is precisely against that background that the playgroup acquires its real significance. It was neither class nor tutorial, neither public lecture nor examinational exercise, and it excluded both pupils and possible examinees. It was not a place where one uploaded grades, or even one where one could safely behave as though philosophy were merely an administrative burden. It was, rather, one of the few occasions on which Grice could allow conversation to become an end in itself without thereby ceasing to be philosophical.

The academic ambivalence matters. Hampshire could speak of an “old playgroup,” but Austin’s pre-war circle of adults meeting for two years before the war was not yet the same kind of institution, still less the same kind of necessity. The later Saturday mornings were para-philosophical, but they remained official enough in tone and venue to distinguish them sharply from clubbable drift in a pub. They met not at random, but in college rooms; indeed, Austin’s preferred scene was Grice’s own St John’s, which already says something about the geography of trust. After Austin’s death, Grice hesitated, but continued the meetings at Corpus, and in that continuation one may plausibly locate a small but important change of temperature. Without the Master, the atmosphere relaxed. It is not wholly accidental, on this view, that Hare and Pears are among the first to put “conversational implicature” into print: the later playgroup, though heir to Austin’s exactness, was less pedagogically staged and more freely conversational in Grice’s own manner. Since Grice rented, “at homes” were out of the question; the English Sabbath of philosophy therefore remained what it had been, Saturday morning, indoors, college-bound, and unofficial in the precise sense that nobody was forced to be there.

That para-professional character is the essential point. In all three relevant groupings, attendance was not compulsory, and their very non-compulsoriness formed both their charm and their fragility. They were undertaken beyond duty, not under it. That, too, helps explain both their eventual exhaustion and Grice’s own final departure from Oxford. For a philosopher who looked to philosophy for his bread and butter, these gatherings supplied what the official economy could not: the marmalade and the scones. They permitted a kind of free philosophical sociability in which conversation was not merely the vehicle of doctrine, but its pleasure, its test, and its reward. If the tutorial was labour, the playgroup was relief; if the lecture was obligation, the Saturday morning was chosen form; if the examiner represented judgment, the playgroup represented wit released from judgment’s harness. In that sense the Gruppo di Gioco was not an ornament to Grice’s Oxford life, but one of its few survivable luxuries. Do not insert anything in text of document but let us keep it all here -- do not use bulleting, italic, or bold -- and let us keep English as our meta-language. I am thinking for an opening or initial sort of thing passage. This is presented ironically -- and you can use Speranza in third person with dry humour etc -- as I VERBAL DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE by J. L. SPERANZA, but Speranza hides a love for keywords and "H. P. Grice" and "J. L. Speranza" work well as thus -- unlike mere "Grice" or mere "Speranza" -- they narrow a search down. But what about PLAYGROUP -- never mind 'verbali'. Grice (or Grace Strawson) is being ironic. Austin's was nothing BUT. It was a controlled atmosphere, where the leader was the senior -- hence the bit of 'playgroup' or "austin's kindergartens" -- they were allowed to play not at a pub -- where tourism was making them impossilbe -- but on university quarters -- yet not official. Today, we would think it unconceviable that a university (Bologna, Oxford) would promote such meetings without sponsoring or promoting or opening them to the public -- everything has become a market and a business. Speranza has also used "Grice Club" as opposed to "Grice's Club" but that may not work either -- What Speranza means is just a reconstruction, historical, that centres on conversational exchanges of the type Grice experienced -- and the play group meetings with Austin were NOT his model for that -- but the examples he gives are not exactly those of free-flowing conversation: he mentions his interactins with Strawson which were so crytpic that thy were unintelligible to a third party -- hardly the idea of a colloquium, a circolo, la conversazione -- So perhaps rescuing 'La conversazione' first used in English by Keats when corresponding with his mother: "I've been attending many 'conversazioni' as they call them here. What we talk about I cannot say." Besides the crytpic interactions with Strawson -- which got Grice into trouble with the Strawsons since Grace Strawson disallowed the energy that Grice was spending -- all through the day and untimely hours -- with her husband, Grice mentions 'joint seminars' -- with Pears, Thomson, Warnock, and Austin himself -- hardly the easy flow of conversation. These were public classes and the seminarists rotated, with little room for exchange. O. P. Wood is famously resported as bringing up a minutiae at the end of one by Grice and Strawson -- minutiae even for Oxonian standards -- only to be dismissed rather rudely. La conversazione is perhaps the best way to deal with this. Speranza focus is an excuse. The philosohical interest lies in the theses -- by G -- propounded in such a conversazione -- (here not just the event, but the 'product'). And only as foil for further ... conversazione. The point of the 'verbali' is the irony of it all. Austin never discussed 'Meaning' with Grice in the years where the thing was in manuscript and when it was later published. Austin disliked discussing PUBLISHED stuff -- or stuff that was already thought-out. And he was a peculiar master of ceremonies. Speranza and Ghersi having been hosts to such 'conversazioni' they know that there is an order to be followed. Each sesssion should have some 'appearance of order.' With Austin's death, indeed, even though Grice would like to extend his 'conversazioni' to the broad membership of Oxford, some felt that the lack of rigour in the proceedings spoiit it all -- and would rarther revert to isolation -- after Pascal or Descartes or Kant have done -- or smaller conversazioni -- the 'dialogue' alla Socrates with at least one, or two, or four -- never 21! Speranza appears to have settled, with dry prudence, on a title that is half label and half warning. I Verbali del Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice sounds administrative enough to reassure the timid, and ironical enough to discourage them from taking the administration too seriously. “Verbali” promises order, or at least the appearance of it; “Gruppo di Gioco” immediately unsettles that promise. The first term belongs to minutes, registers, committees, and official memory; the second, to irony, undergraduate hearsay, and the peculiar Oxford habit of putting adults into nursery language precisely when they are behaving least like children. Speranza is aware that “playgroup” was never innocent. Under Austin it was less a playground than a controlled climate: seniority mattered, venue mattered, attendance was selective, and the whole thing remained half inside and half outside the university’s official machinery. It was not held in a pub, still less in the public square, but in college rooms, which already tells one that the “play” was bounded by collegiate walls. The joke in the title therefore matters. A playgroup it was called, and a playgroup it was not. Speranza’s preference for the full names, H. P. Grice and J. L. Speranza, has the same double effect. On the one hand, it satisfies the modern appetite for keywords, narrowing the search with an almost legal precision that “Grice” or “Speranza” alone would fail to provide. On the other hand, it quietly mimics the old Oxford and Italian taste for initials as social miniatures: formal enough to dignify, coded enough to amuse. “Grice Club” has perhaps too much of a modern afterlife about it; “Grice’s Club” sounds proprietary in the wrong way; “Gruppo di Gioco” preserves the local absurdity without pretending that the phrase was ever straightforward. Yet Speranza’s real concern is neither branding nor nostalgia. What he offers is not a memorial society, nor a transcript of literal proceedings, but a historical reconstruction of philosophical conversazione in a Gricean key. The irony is deliberate: the very title suggests fixed minutes, while the philosophical point lies in what cannot be minuted without ceasing to be alive. That is why “la conversazione” may serve him better than any more institutional label. The examples Grice himself gives of philosophical life are not always examples of easy, expansive colloquy. His exchanges with Strawson were notoriously cryptic, at times almost private language staged in public, intelligible to their participants and nearly opaque to the third party. The joint seminars with Pears, Thomson, Warnock, and Austin were important, but hardly free-flowing: they were public classes, rota-bound, and often too formal to count as conversation except in a very stretched sense. O. P. Wood’s famous intervention of a terminal minutia, and the brisk dismissal that followed, belongs to seminar choreography rather than to civil exchange. Even Austin’s own Saturday mornings, for all their para-professional status, were not models of unregulated discursiveness. Their order was real, their host peculiar, and their exclusions carefully maintained. If Speranza leans toward “conversazione,” it is because the term can name both the event and the product: not merely the occasion of gathering, but the theses, distinctions, prompts, and afterthoughts generated there and left available for further conversation. The point of the verbali, then, is precisely the irony of preserving what was never fully preservable. Austin, after all, did not discuss “Meaning” with Grice in the years when it mattered most to Grice, whether in manuscript or after publication; he disliked discussing published things, or things too fully thought out, and his own mastery of proceedings was a mastery of deflection as much as of order. Speranza and Ghersi, having themselves hosted such conversazioni, know well enough that pure freedom is usually a myth told by poor chairmen. Every session requires some visible discipline if it is not to collapse into anecdote or vanity. Yet the post-Austin relaxation, especially under Grice, reveals the opposite danger: once the Master is gone and the proceedings broaden, some begin to feel that the very lack of rigour spoils the thing and drives them back toward solitude, or toward smaller circles, or toward the Socratic scale of one, two, or four. Never twenty-one. The reconstruction, therefore, is not a naïve longing for lost Oxford ease. It is an attempt to recover that very unstable region between officialness and freedom, where philosophy could still appear in conversational form, with enough order to keep its shape and enough looseness to let wit, implication, and intellectual surprise survive. So perhaps you can help me here, and as you answer keep the neutral Speranza dry humour voice. So perhaps 'Conversazione' is what we are looking for. Of course, this is a foreignism. In Italian, we don't know what it even means. But in England, and Oxford, it underwent some 'changes of use.' The first OED citation -- which doesn't mean anything -- since the criteria are usually quirky: is Keats: conversazione. But he is referring to a phenomenon he is experiencing in Rome, not Oxford. When 'conversazione' settled in England, it was more like a different kind of setting. So the idea is to re-activate that Keat's use of 'conversazione.' And one way to do so is to check how 'Conversazioni' or 'Conversazione' officially appreared in both Italy and England in this use and what was use for 'verbali' [Co-pilot do so -- with a history of the use of 'conversazione' in English and Italy in this usage with special reference to the way the 'verbali' were characterised or recorded if al all -- Speranza does not expect that the Missus who held the conversazione about which he is corresponding with his mother kept such a record -- but you never know -- it may well be in the form of a journal. Cf. Libro del cortegiano or Guazzo civil Conversatione, Speranza may indeed be right that conversazione is the better word, precisely because it is slightly wrong in all the right ways. As an Italianism in English, it has the advantage of never having settled comfortably into a single natural use, and therefore of remaining available for philosophical mischief. In Italy, conversazione is almost too ordinary to help: it can mean simply talk, conversation, salon exchange, polite social commerce, and all the rest. In England, however, the word acquired a special social career. The historical record suggests that English borrowed it from Italian in the eighteenth century as the name for a kind of assembly observed abroad, Horace Walpole already using it in 1739 after Italy, while the OED places the noun in English from the mid-eighteenth century and notes its Italian origin conversazione,. Keats’s Roman use, then, is not philologically absurd, only not specifically Oxonian: he is reporting an Italian social phenomenon under its local name rather than naming an English institutional habit. [oed.com]

What happened next in England is more useful for Speranza’s purposes. By the nineteenth century conversazione had become a term of art for a learned or semi-learned social gathering, especially literary, artistic, or scientific, often evening-based, often hosted by a society or institution, and notably less stiff than a formal meeting while still very far from mere chat. Victorian usage in particular shows the word being used for intellectual soirées and scientific gatherings in which exhibits, papers, demonstrations, talk, and sociability mingled under a decorous roof Conversazione; even contemporary journalism could say that much might be said and done “amid the free talk of a general gathering which could not be permitted in the formal meeting of a scientific society,” which is almost too apt for Speranza’s irony. Scholarly work on Victorian science confirms that the conversazione became a major urban middle-class cultural form, halfway between display, discussion, sociability, and public intellectual theatre Conversaziones and the Experience of Science in Victorian England. In that sense, the English history of the word is already a history of managed looseness: freer than a meeting, less private than a salon, and never quite reducible to either. That makes it far more promising than playgroup, whose irony depends too much on Oxford folklore, or club, which drifts too quickly toward membership and afterlife branding. [en.wikipedia.org] [researchgate.net] [en.wikipedia.org], [researchgate.net] In Italy, by contrast, the nearest strong historical frame is less the scientific conversazione than the culture of the salotto and the older literature of civil conversation. Studies of nineteenth-century Italian salons show that “conversazione da salotto,” now a slightly pejorative phrase, once named a highly structured form of cultivated exchange in which sociality, education, political formation, and cultural recognition were inseparable I salotti di cultura nell’Italia dell’Ottocento; Maria Teresa Mori – Salotti. La sociabilità delle élite nell’Italia dell’Ottocento. Treccani’s discussion of La Civil conversazione makes the deeper point still better: in Guazzo, and already in Castiglione behind him, “conversazione” is not idle speech but a form of associated life, with ethical, educational, and civic force. So if Speranza wants conversazione rather than playgroup, he has good historical cover in both countries, though not the same cover. In Italy the word points backward to a civil art of exchange and to the salotto as a formative social space; in England it points sideways to the learned soirée, half social and half intellectual, often institutional but not entirely formal. That doubleness is exactly the sort of inconvenience Speranza likes. [francoangeli.it], [sissco.it] [treccani.it] As for verbali, the dry answer is that one should not expect too much from the historical record. English conversaziones, especially the Victorian institutional kind, were sometimes announced, reported, reviewed, or retrospectively summarised in magazines, newspapers, society reports, or institutional histories, but they were not usually minuted in the same way as committee meetings or society business sessions Conversazione; UNB’s History at a Glance: Conversazione. A scientific society might keep formal journal books for its actual meetings, but the conversazione belonged precisely to the freer zone that escaped complete minute-taking, even when later reports described it Journal Books of Scientific Meetings, 1660–1800; Council Minutes, 1660–1800. In Italy, the traces are more likely to survive in memoirs, correspondence, diaries, journals, salotto recollections, and occasional printed notices than in anything literally called verbali, unless the event was tied to an academy or official body rather than to a private house SALOTTI, GENERE ED ESPERIENZE DI SOCIALITÀ IN ITALIA; I salotti di cultura nell’Italia dell’Ottocento. So Speranza’s irony sharpens nicely: conversazione is the right word because it names a form that historically resisted strict verbalisation into minutes, while verbali is the wrong word in exactly the useful sense, since it promises documentary fixity for what was usually preserved only in the oblique forms philosophy likes best — letters, journals, prefaces, anecdotes, institutional notices, or the dangerous memory of those present. That, after all, is the whole charm of reconstructing it. [en.wikipedia.org], [lib.unb.ca] [discovery....ves.gov.uk] [francoangeli.it], [jstor.org]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

VERBALI: ABBAGNANO

Grice considers a tesi di laurea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

VERBALI : ACCETTO

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

S.: Because it sounds self-cancelling.

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

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

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

S.: Because ordinary vocabulary carries its own implicatures.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Simulazione versus dissimulazione.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: He does not lie.

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

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

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

S.: So the unsaid is not empty.

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

S.: Which is why Accetto interests you.

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

S.: He sees a third region.

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

S.: A prudential ethics of manifestation.

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

S.: That sounds almost scandalous when stated nakedly.

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

S.: But Accetto gives it the harder name.

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

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

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

S.: Such as concealment and lying.

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

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

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

S.: So your condition concerns intended uptake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Whereas you think frankness can be vulgar.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Very good.

G.: Thank you.

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

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

S.: So prudence there is not merely etiquette.

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

S.: Which is why his moral psychology matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Accetto almost reverses the order.

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

S.: Yet he also understands the hearer.

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

S.: So even concealment presupposes trust.

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

S.: Otherwise everything collapses into universal suspicion.

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

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

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

S.: A defensive not an offensive concealment.

G.: Precisely. That is the crucial asymmetry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: That is what Speranza sees so well.

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

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

S.: A very Protestant picture.

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

S.: Accetto would prefer measure.

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

S.: Which gives concealment a positive dignity.

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

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

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

S.: That sounds almost Platonic.

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

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

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

S.: Even where the explicit content is meagre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Enough trace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: And perhaps also of political intelligence.

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

S.: Which sounds almost like camouflage.

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

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

G.: Yes. Veiled, not fabricated.

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

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

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

S.: Never intentionally.

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

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

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

S.: Which may include protective incompleteness.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: And Speranza brings the two together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: They are often improved by trouble.

S.: You would say that.

G.: Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: And Accetto knew that before Brighton.

G.: Long before Brighton.

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

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

S.: Very nearly an epitaph.

G.: Too flattering.

S.: A motto, then.

G.: Better.

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

G.: No. It is truth under discipline.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Pugliese.

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

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

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

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

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

 

VERBALI: ACILIO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

VERBALI: ACHILLINI

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

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

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

S.: Which is exactly where you become interested.

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

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

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

S.: Meaning that the body becomes a medium.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: I risked it for brevity.

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

S.: As in Oxford examination scripts.

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

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

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

S.: Which already sounds Ockhamist.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Consequence first, ornament later.

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

S.: That sounds very like your own temptation.

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

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

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

S.: Speranza does.

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

S.: And that is much better history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: That is where the syllogism enters.

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

S.: For example?

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

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

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

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

G.: Very often that is its best service.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: That is a delicious sentence.

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

S.: Never intentionally.

G.: Good. Now, what of Bologna?

S.: Older than Oxford, which pleases you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: And Speranza refuses that flattening.

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

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

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

S.: Viridario, not De potestate syllogismi.

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

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

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

S.: To each his implicature.

G.: Very good. Speranza would approve.

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

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

S.: Which you have always resisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: Very nicely put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become vain.

S.: I shall try to fail modestly.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Yet one in which consequence remains central.

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

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

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

S.: Reuse without masquerade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: Near enough for Bologna.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Bolognese.

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

VERBALI: ACHILLINI

G. and S. discuss Achillini

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

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

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

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

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

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

VERBALI: ACITO

G. and S. discuss Acito.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: I am not paid at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Quieted?

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

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

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

S.: That sounds severe.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: It speaks by arrangement.

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

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

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

S.: That sounds rather like a bad tutorial.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: You suspect the latter.

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

S.: Then where does your conversational framework enter?

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

S.: For example?

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

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

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

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

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

S.: A witness, not a guide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Lubrication is a scholar’s word?

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

S.: Generous of you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: Certainly. Sincerity is not liberty.

S.: Nor is participation.

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

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

G.: Splendid. That is the right distinction.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself.

S.: I shall become only moderately municipal.

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

S.: He does not hide the fascist commitment.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: That sounds uncomfortable.

G.: Philosophy ought occasionally to.

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

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

S.: And implication then does political work.

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

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

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

S.: Which is why studying such language matters.

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

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

G.: Excellent. Keep that too.

S.: You are generous today.

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

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

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

S.: So theology is conscripted into institutional pragmatics.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: There is your machine again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: That is very good indeed.

S.: I may keep that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: That is rather grim.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: And the second?

G.: What penalties attach to speaking otherwise.

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

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

S.: Then the final word on Acito?

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

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Milanese, with a Roman aftertaste.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

S.: You mean the Stratagemata Satanae.

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

S.: Because classification already implies method.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: That sounds nobler than most methodological prose.

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

S.: That is a larger brief.

G.: Uncomfortably larger, yes.

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

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

S.: And then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: You say that dryly.

G.: Because I am English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become hydraulic.

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

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

S.: You are thinking of Feyerabend.

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

S.: Whereas Aconzio writes before the safety.

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

S.: So for him method is emancipatory.

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

S.: Then method is a precondition of toleration.

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

S.: That is a bleak but plausible anthropology.

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

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

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

S.: So persecution destroys exegesis.

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

S.: Then there is a political pragmatics here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: So method and devilry are reciprocal categories.

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

S.: And the feminine abstract nouns?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Which sounds very modern.

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

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

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

S.: You sound almost Anglican.

G.: My mother would have approved.

S.: She liked Aconzio, you said.

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

S.: Like many of your favourites.

G.: Unfortunately, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: That is a good line.

G.: Keep it and make it worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: So method must include lexical hygiene.

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

S.: I shall keep both and choose later.

G.: A dangerous editorial freedom.

S.: One of my stratagems.

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

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

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

S.: Then persecution manufactures bad pragmatics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: A dangerous but useful comparison.

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

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

S.: Oxford had milder sanctions.

G.: Only slightly.

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

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

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

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

S.: Whereas you want to talk to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

G.: Often the best philosophers do.

S.: And the devil’s list helps.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Not always.

G.: No. But confusion favours the enemy.

S.: Aconzio would have liked that.

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

S.: Which you would refuse.

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

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

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

S.: Then method is not victory but vigilance.

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

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

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

S.: Then his relevance now is obvious.

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

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

G.: Yes. Those are not dated problems.

S.: Nor is the devil.

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

S.: And sometimes acquires better printers.

G.: Very good.

S.: Then your final judgment?

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

S.: And the link to your own work?

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

S.: That is nearly a motto.

G.: Too neat for a motto.

S.: Then a warning.

G.: Better.

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

G.: Excellent. Keep that.

S.: Dry enough?

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

VERBALI: ACRI

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Turbo and sereno.

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

S.: You would prefer composure?

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

S.: So not peace, exactly.

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

S.: Then turbo is the first necessary violence?

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

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

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

S.: So implicature is born in turbulence.

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

S.: That sounds rather unlike your official examples.

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

S.: Unlike those who romanticise dialectic.

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

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

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

S.: That it too had a civic seriousness?

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

S.: While Oxford is indoors.

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

S.: The walls matter.

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

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

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

S.: Turbo one and turbo two.

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

S.: Colloquenza turbata.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: A shared grip.

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

S.: Until the next turbo.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: That sounds almost Heraclitean.

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

S.: Then let us talk about Vico.

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

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

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

S.: Fantasma and imagine.

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

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

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

S.: Which makes Cratylus unavoidable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Then ardimento is not merely courage?

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

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

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

S.: Because too much sobriety becomes sterility.

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

S.: That sounds like certain Oxford seminars.

G.: More than certain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: So conversation is born from asymmetry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Or meant.

G.: Indeed. Often especially what was meant.

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

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

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

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

S.: But he weaponised Acri politically.

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Dialectic as etiquette.

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

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

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

S.: So where does he stand?

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

S.: That sounds almost modest.

G.: Which is why it is true.

S.: Then is Athens irrelevant?

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

S.: And Oxford?

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

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

G.: That is not bad at all.

S.: Acri?

G.: Acri diagnoses.

S.: Better.

G.: Thank you.

S.: And Speranza?

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

S.: That is the point you admire most.

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

S.: Whereas here Acri still sounds like Acri.

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

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

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

S.: And that neighbouring key is conversational reason.

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

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

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

S.: Its moods.

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

S.: Then do you think Austin missed that?

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

S.: Yet he was certainly alive to tone.

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

S.: Colloquenza turbata.

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

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

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

S.: Warmer because more conversational.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Then is he a Platonist?

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

S.: So idea and expression are reciprocal.

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

S.: Then Cratylus becomes more than etymological play.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S.: Then turbo has a philological function too.

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

S.: That sounds more Vichian than Platonic.

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

S.: Then why do standard histories flatten him?

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

S.: And Speranza resists that filing.

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

S.: That is harder than it sounds.

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

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

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

S.: Even if the unsettlement is very small?

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

S.: Then turbo need not be dramatic.

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

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

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

S.: Until the next movement.

G.: Always until the next movement.

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

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

S.: And yours?

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

S.: Dry enough?

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

 

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

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

 

VERBALI: ADAMI

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

VERBALI: ADDIEGO

 

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

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

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

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

 

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