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

 

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

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Poggi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, il ventennio fascista, l’incontro con Mussolini ad Ancona, la scuola di Sarzana, i fatti di Sarzana, lasciato in libertà da Mussolini, massoni proibiti, la filosofia ligure, e la filosofia italiana  Alfredo Poggi (Sarzana, La Spezia, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, il ventennio fascista, l’incontro con Mussolini ad Ancona, la scuola di Sarzana, i fatti di Sarzana, lasciato in libertà da Mussolini, massoni proibiti, la filosofia ligure, e la filosofia italiana. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational reconstruction: hearers assume (unless forced not to) that a speaker is playing a cooperative game with publicly intelligible norms, and they recover what is meant by asking what a reasonable speaker could be intending, given those norms; implicature is the controlled surplus that arises when what is said is insufficient, oddly chosen, or apparently rule-breaking, yet still intelligible as a move made in good (or at least recognizable) rational order. Poggi, as your passage portrays him, is interestingly adjacent but not parallel: his life and work are presented as formed under high-stakes political and institutional pressures (socialism vs. fascism, “massoni proibiti,” surveillance, tribunal, “clemenza”), and that background naturally shifts the emphasis from Grice’s relatively benign cooperative presumption to the pragmatics of guarded speech, coded dissent, and strategic reticence, where what is unsaid may be as norm-governed as what is said but governed by prudence rather than pure cooperativity. In that sense, Poggi offers a historically charged counterpart to Grice: Grice’s maxims model how rational agents optimize mutual understanding under normal conversational aims, whereas the Poggi story exemplifies how conversational rationality can be re-parameterized by risk, censorship, and factional “uptake,” producing environments in which clarity itself may be punished and where audiences infer “the wrong implicature” because the operative norm is political loyalty rather than truth-seeking cooperation. Online, the only specific bibliographic anchor in your passage that I can straightforwardly treat as stable is the book-citation Alfredo Poggi, Storia della filosofia moderna (Sansoni, Firenze, 1947); the further biographical particulars (the Ancona clash with Mussolini, the archival “atto di clemenza,” the Rensi salon details) would need exact archival or scholarly citations to be asserted as fact rather than as part of the project’s stylized narrative voice, but as a conceptual comparison they do exactly the work you want: they show how “reason-governed meaning” can remain a normatively structured practice even when the governing reasons are not conversational efficiency but survival, affiliation, and the management of dangerous interpretations. Colpito dalla violenza usata nei confronti del popolo durante le giornate milanesi e dal temporaneo esilio che doveno subire alcuni socialisti amici di famiglia. Questo lo porta a simpatizzare per quel partito che sta nascendo e al quale si iscrive. Studia a Palermo e Genova. La questione morale: la critica e il socialismo. Insegna a Genova. Partecipa come delegato al congresso socialista di Ancona, nel corso del quale ha un duro scontro con il massimalista  MUSSOLINI  sul problema della compatibilità o meno del socialismo con la massoneria.  L'assemblea da in quell'occasione una larga maggioranza alla tesi di MUSSOLINI dell'incompatibilità. Si reca nelle domeniche d'inverno al palazzo genovese di via Palestro, dove RENSI  anima un vero e proprio salotto – o gruppo di gioco --, arricchito dalla presenza di illustri personalità quali PASTORINO, BUONAIUTI, SELLA, e ROSSI. MUSSOLINI si ricorda di quel suo leale tenace avversario e lo libera, come attesta una registrazione esistente nel suo fascicolo personale presso l'archivio centrale dello stato, lasciato in libertà dal tribunale speciale per la sicurezza dello stato per atto di clemenza di S. E. il capo del governo. Lo stato italiano, Cultura e socialismo, Gesuiti contro lo stato liberale, Filosofia dell'azione, Concetto del diritto e dello stato romano, La preghiera dell'uomo, Meneghini, Socialismo spezzino, appunti per una storia, Massa; Meneghini, Meneghini Sui luttuosi fatti del luglio v. stati pontificii, positivismo giuridico, filosofia giuridica italiana contemporanea – il concetto di diritto, il concetto dello stato italiano – incontro con Mussolini, lasciato in liberta da Mussolini, I fatti di Sarzana, filosofia ligure, criticism kantiano, Adler, saggi sulla filosofia dell’azione. “Grice: St John’s, 1947. Back in Oxford one can breathe again. I duck into Blackwell’s and, as ever, there is a “new” book insisting on a new boundary: Alfredo Poggi’s Storia della filosofia moderna, hot off Sansoni’s press. When I read Greats the “moderns” were already compulsory—Locke, Hume, Kant, and the rest of that inevitable procession—so I find myself wondering what Poggi thinks he is doing by presenting “the moderns” as a neatly fenced estate. Can the history of philosophy really be sliced like a cake, with a clean line between medieval and modern, as if thinkers woke up one morning and discovered they were no longer in the Middle Ages? Warnock, ever practical, says he has his eye on a volume of “history of philosophy” too, though he’ll rebrand it as English philosophy since 1900, partly to avoid the Continentals and partly to avoid that French habit of calling everything “contemporary” the moment it is printed. Poggi’s plan is harder to guess without opening the book—and I confess I resist looking at the contents page, because Italian books perversely hide it at the back with the index, and it feels like cheating to learn what a book is about by skipping to its tail. What I really care about is the awkward hinge: Telesio and the Renaissance, the allegedly anti-medieval “new philosophy” that still reads like a late chapter of the medium aevum; and then the comic thought occurs—how did the medium aevum philosophers know they were in the middle? If “modern” is a period label, it is also a conversational move: it implies a before and an after, and it quietly asks the reader to grant the cut.” G.: Let us begin at Sarzana, before Sicily turns him into a thesis and Rome turns him into a correspondence. S.: A Ligurian beginning with moral philosophy in Palermo is already enough to make an Oxford man suspicious. G.: Not suspicious. Curious. A Ligurian in Sicily usually means either exile, appointment, or family economy. In Poggi’s case it means the brother: Vincenzo already established, a school headmaster in Caltagirone, and the younger one drawn south not by abstract love of the island but by educational gravity. S.: So not a Sicilian soul by origin, but a Sicilian formation by circumstance. G.: Exactly. And then Palermo, which matters because it gives him not merely a degree but the first serious philosophical frame: Letters and Philosophy, 1904, with a thesis on socialist moral doctrines. S.: Already one hears the phrase trying to find its proper shape. Not socialism as programme, but the moral question within socialism. G.: Which is why the thing improves when it reaches print. The 1905 version narrows and sharpens: the moral question in socialism, with Kant brought in as the dignified elder whom no one in the original socialist families quite invited. S.: We should be careful there. Saint-Simon and Owen are not Kantians in any obvious sense. G.: Quite. Owen is Welsh by birth and London-active enough to satisfy an English conscience, but not a Kantian in the classroom sense. Saint-Simon is much more continental, more systematic, more eager to reorganise the world by categories and productive classes, but again not by kneeling before Königsberg. S.: So if Poggi is reading Kant into socialism, the route is not through the founders, but through a later German mediation. G.: Exactly the point. And that is where Labriola enters like the one useful Roman in the story. S.: Useful because in 1903 Poggi writes to him from Palermo asking, in effect, how to make a thesis respectable. G.: And Labriola replies, in effect: if you are going to justify your club, justify it morally. Read the Germans. S.: The club being what was still officially the Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani before the fully settled Partito Socialista Italiano identity took hold. G.: Yes. Which is important because the party itself is young enough to feel historically alive. Founded in 1892, renamed into clearer socialist dignity in 1893, it is only about a decade old when Poggi is taking it seriously. New enough to be contemporary, old enough to have already generated doctrinal embarrassments. S.: And Labriola’s German reading list is not “read Marx and be done.” G.: Quite the reverse. The coded instruction is: read Vorländer and Staudinger. S.: Which decodes as: read those neo-Kantian socialists or socialist-adjacent neo-Kantians who are trying to make socialism look less like a mere historical process and more like a moral claim. G.: Precisely. If you like, the message is: do not argue that socialism will happen; argue that it ought to happen, and then tell me why. S.: That sounds surprisingly Oxonian. G.: It should. Once one says “ought,” Oxford enters the room even if the room is in Palermo and the books are German. S.: But the German side matters. Explain the two names properly. G.: Vorländer is the easier case. He writes quite explicitly on Kant and socialism, and more generally on the attempt to connect Kantian ethics with socialist moral reconstruction. Staudinger belongs to the same broad tendency: ethical socialism, revisionist pressure, anti-crude materialism, the insistence that socialism without moral agency is only half a doctrine. S.: So the advice from Labriola is: if you want socialism to survive philosophical scrutiny, make it answerable to autonomy, personhood, universality, duty. G.: Exactly. Which is already rather far from the heroic founders. Saint-Simon gives you industrial reorganisation and technocratic prophecy; Owen gives you practical reform, environment, education, and co-operation in a very British key; but neither gives you the whole neo-Kantian moral armature. S.: Then Poggi’s thesis makes more sense than one first thought. G.: Much more. The thesis does not say, absurdly, that Kant invented socialism. It says, in effect: if socialism is to be morally serious rather than merely sociological or party-political, Kantian categories can help articulate its claim. S.: So from the start Poggi is not really beginning in Palermo at all. He begins in Palermo and immediately writes himself into a wider mainland and German conversation. G.: Nicely put. Sicily gives him the degree. Rome, through Labriola, gives him the angle. Germany gives him the justificatory machinery. S.: There is something almost comical in the geography: Sarzana to Caltagirone to Palermo, then intellectually to Rome and Königsberg, all before one has begun to earn the right to look world-historical. G.: It is the right kind of comedy: academic mobility without glamour. And all under the sign of morality, which is the least glamorous and most demanding of all philosophical nouns. S.: Which brings us to the phrase “socialist morality,” or better, “the moral question in socialism.” What exactly is being added by Kant. G.: Several things. First, universality. Not merely “our class interest” or “our movement,” but a claim that can be stated as valid for persons as such. S.: The second being autonomy. G.: Yes. Socialism ceases to be merely the arrival of a new economic arrangement and becomes a question of whether persons can actually act as self-legislating beings rather than as instruments. S.: Third, personhood against pure collectivism. G.: Very important. A Kantian socialism can say: capitalism degrades persons by instrumentalising them; but collectivism may do the same if it treats the person as only a function of the mass. So one gets a socialism moralised from two sides: against bourgeois atomism and against collectivist flattening. S.: Fourth, revisionism against historical fatalism. G.: Exactly. If socialism is simply the inevitable product of economic history, then duty disappears. Neo-Kantian socialism restores duty: socialism must be chosen, justified, willed, defended. S.: Which is why the project would have appealed to a young Italian mind wanting to think seriously, not merely politically. G.: And why it would have appealed to anyone suspicious of cheap determinism. Here one can already see the later affinity with more general notions of rational community. S.: You are sneaking toward the cooperative. G.: Of course. Once you translate socialism into moral agency, reciprocity, and respect for persons as ends, you are in the neighbourhood of any account that treats social order not merely as force or interest but as a rationally justifiable relation among agents. S.: Which is why it sounds, in a certain light, almost Oxonian. G.: Yes, but not in the smug local sense. Oxonian-friendly because the categories become familiar: autonomy, normativity, personhood, reciprocity, universality. One could discuss them without ever joining a party. S.: While Poggi, being young enough and card-carrying enough, has the opposite adventure: joining the party and then discovering he needs philosophy to defend it. G.: Exactly. The club needs a tribunal higher than its own statutes. Labriola’s advice is effectively: if you mean to remain in the PSI and still think yourself respectable, do not merely quote congress speeches. Read Germans. S.: And these Germans are not dry in the boring sense. They are dry in the useful sense. G.: Quite. They allow one to say: the moral side of socialism is not decorative. It is the condition under which socialism remains more than resentment organised into a programme. S.: How would this have looked in a young Sicilian context. G.: Serious and slightly out of place, which is often the best possible beginning. Palermo provides the institutional setting; the intellectual pulse comes from elsewhere. That is precisely why writing to Labriola matters. It is a refusal to let Sicily become provincial in the thesis. S.: Yet he remains Sicilian enough by training to make the thing local. G.: Yes. The very remoteness helps. One has to import one’s authorities and therefore becomes conscious of the importation. S.: There is a pleasing irony in all this. Labriola, not Piemontese at all, but from the southern mainland, becomes the bridge by which a Ligurian-in-Sicily acquires German neo-Kantian socialism. G.: Italy does not need a north-south map so much as a map of intellectual railway lines. Palermo to Rome is more important here than Sarzana to Turin. S.: Which makes the thesis less like an isolated student exercise and more like a little node in a European argument. G.: Exactly. And one should not underestimate the timing. 1903 is close enough to the party’s formation that the question “what sort of socialism is this to be?” is still very much alive. Ethical socialism, revisionism, materialism, moral duty, class, personhood: these are not retrospective labels but actual pressures. S.: Then Poggi’s 1904–1905 work is not quaint at all. G.: Not quaint. Young, yes. Earnest, certainly. But in an intellectually serious way: he is trying to prevent socialism from collapsing into either sentiment or inevitability. S.: Which is what Kant helps with. G.: Precisely. Kant gives one a moral grammar. And once you have that grammar, you can criticise capitalism not only because it produces misery, but because it instrumentalises persons. S.: One can also justify socialism not only because it benefits the workers, but because it secures conditions under which persons can stand to one another as ends and not merely as means. G.: Very good. That is the core. S.: Which is almost enough to make one forget the historical founders. G.: One need not forget them. One only needs to stop asking them to do work they were never trained for. Owen gives cooperative experiment; Saint-Simon gives administrative prophecy; the neo-Kantians give moral architecture. S.: And Poggi, if he is intelligent, learns to borrow the last without embarrassing himself with the first two. G.: Nicely put. He need not deny the founders; he simply need not pretend that their conceptual resources are sufficient. S.: Let us be explicit. If one were to set out the sequence as a thesis skeleton, how would it run. G.: First chapter: the moral problem within socialism. What kind of normativity does socialism require if it is to be more than economic resentment or historical optimism. S.: Second chapter: Kant as source of universality and moral personality. G.: Third: the neo-Kantian socialist mediators, especially Vorländer and Staudinger, showing how socialism may be recast as an ethical-political project. S.: Fourth: the critique of capitalism as morally deforming because it reduces persons to instruments. G.: Fifth: the critique of dogmatic collectivism for the symmetrical reason. S.: Sixth: the defence of socialism as a rationally justifiable community of agents. G.: You see how quickly you have become German. S.: Only because you have made me. G.: That is what relatore figures do, but Labriola had the decency not to be the relatore. He only gave the direction. That is often the more interesting role. S.: True. A formal supervisor may correct; an external authority may orient. G.: And orientation is the more important gift when the student is young enough to be doctrinal and old enough to be ashamed of it. S.: There is another question. Would this moralising of socialism have looked suspicious to stricter Marxists. G.: Certainly. It would look like dilution, revisionism, idealist backsliding, the importation of bourgeois moral language into class struggle. S.: Which is precisely why it would have attracted a young man who wanted socialism without becoming merely doctrinaire. G.: Exactly. One suspects Poggi wanted to think himself both committed and respectable. Neo-Kantian socialism provides the formula: keep the commitment, add the respectability. S.: That sounds cynical. G.: It is not cynical. It is adolescent in the best sense: wanting both justice and justification. S.: Which is why it matters that the party was still young. A young party permits young intellectuals to think its soul is still up for grabs. G.: Beautifully said. If the party had already hardened into orthodoxy, the thesis would look like apologetics. Because it is still young, it looks like intervention. S.: And Sicily? G.: Sicily is the place where the intervention is written. But the real conversation is elsewhere: Rome through Labriola, Germany through the neo-Kantians, and, if one wishes to flatter ourselves, a little beyond the Alps into the region where moral socialism begins to sound less like a movement and more like a problem in practical reason. S.: Which is where one starts hearing the faintest Oxonian echo. G.: Yes, because once one says practical reason in earnest, one is already within hearing-distance of those who will later ask why one should be truthful, why one should cooperate, why one should respect the other’s agency, why influence should be reciprocal rather than merely effective. S.: So the moralised socialism and the later moralised cooperation are not the same thing, but they rhyme. G.: Exactly. Both depend on the thought that social life must be justified among agents, not merely arranged over them. S.: Then Poggi’s thesis can be seen as an early attempt to put socialism under the tribunal of rational morality. G.: That is the best summary. S.: And without Kant, it would remain either party doctrine or sociological prediction. G.: Yes. Kant brings in normativity and personhood. The neo-Kantians make those categories available for socialism. Labriola tells the young Ligurian in Palermo to go and read them. The thesis writes itself, or at least acquires the right ambition. S.: One almost begins to like the thing. G.: One should. It is a serious early-century problem treated in the right key. And the geography helps. A Ligurian in Sicily writing to Rome for German advice on how to justify socialism morally—there are worse beginnings. S.: Better that than pretending Saint-Simon already read the Groundwork. G.: Much better. Saint-Simon did enough damage without that. S.: And Owen? G.: Leave Owen to the English, where reform, co-operation, and practical decency can remain slightly provincial and all the better for it. S.: So if someone asked: what is Poggi really doing in 1905. G.: I would answer: he is trying to show that socialism, if it is to be more than movement or fate, requires a moral vocabulary of agency, autonomy, personhood, universality, and reciprocal respect; and he is doing so under the influence of German neo-Kantian socialism, not because socialism began in Kant, but because Kant supplies the tribunal before which socialism can be judged and, perhaps, vindicated.Grice: Professore Poggi, ho sentito che lei affronta la filosofia persino nei salotti genovesi della domenica… Ma mi dica, tra implicature conversazionali e fatti di Sarzana, qual è più pericoloso: un massone a colazione o un socialista a cena?  Poggi: Caro Grice, dipende dal menu: il massone preferisce croissant e discussioni velate, il socialista invece non si accontenta finché non ha ribaltato il tavolo! Però, sul serio, l’unico rischio è rimanere senza caffè dopo una notte di filosofia ligure.  Grice: Ah, allora bisogna sempre avere una scorta di caffè — e magari Mussolini all’uscio, pronto a liberare gli spiriti critici troppo svegli! Mi dica, lei pensa che il ventennio abbia reso la filosofia italiana più robusta… o soltanto più incline alle implicature?  Poggi: Ma guardi, Grice, dopo vent’anni di implicature fasciste, siamo diventati maestri del “non detto” – persino il mio cane, a Sarzana, capisce quando è meglio tacere! La filosofia ligure si è allenata a navigare tra maree politiche e salotti, senza mai perdere il gusto per una battuta ironica… e per una libertà conquistata, magari con clemenza! Poggi, Alfredo (1904). La morale nelle dottrine socialiste. Palermo

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Poli: la ragione conversazionale dell’implicatura conversazionale del pappagallo di Locke, la filosofia lombarda, e la filosofia italiana  (Cremona). Filosofo italiano. Cremona, Lombardia. Si laurea a Bologna. Insegna a Milano e Padova. “Filosofia elementare” e un eclettico sistema di empirismo e razionalismo. I  Baldassare Poli (Cremona, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale dell’implicatura conversazionale del pappagallo di Locke, la filosofia lombarda, e la filosofia italiana. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning starts from the idea that what speakers mean is constrained by publicly intelligible norms of cooperation and rational accountability: hearers treat an utterance as a move in a purposive exchange and infer speaker-meaning (including implicatures) by assuming the speaker is aiming to be appropriately informative, relevant, sincere, and perspicuous, with “extra” meaning arising when a maxim is apparently flouted but can be reconstructed as still serving the shared point of the talk. Poli, as presented in your passage, approaches “language” through a taxonomy of signs (cry, gesture, action, artifice, word) and uses the Lockean parrot as a boundary case: the animal can produce recognisable tokens (“buon giorno”) and can imitate, but its signs remain uncertain, non-self-correcting, and—crucially for Grice—do not reliably manifest the kind of intention-recognition and responsiveness to conversational purposes that would ground genuine implicature; on a Gricean diagnosis, the parrot’s deficiency is not lack of sound-production but lack of participation in the rational economy of conversation (knowing when to speak, what counts as relevant, when silence is required, how to tailor an utterance to an interlocutor’s informational needs). The comparison becomes sharpest where Poli’s metaphysical and juridical language (“spirit over matter,” law as science in principles and art in cases) aligns with Grice’s distinction between rule-governed competence and mere behavioural mimicry: a parrot may replicate the surface form of a code, but cannot occupy the normative role of a judge because it cannot undertake the justificatory commitments and reason-giving responsiveness that make a move answerable within a practice; in that sense, Poli’s parrot story can be read as an early, non-technical counterpart to Grice’s central point that meaning in conversation is not exhausted by the production of signs, but depends on rationally interpretable intentions and on the interlocutors’ shared governance by norms that license, constrain, and make accountable what is implied as well as what is said. Si laurea a Bologna. Insegna a Milano e Padova. “Filosofia elementare” e un eclettico sistema di empirismo e razionalismo. I saggi di scienza politico-legali considerano il diritto un insieme di scienza, in quanto trattano dei principi, e di arte, in quanto applicazione d’un principio giuridico nella valutazione dei singoli casi. Il diritto e un’espressione provvidenziale. Si distingue in naturale e in positivo. Combatte il positivismo negli studii di filosofia, ri-vendicando la superiorità dello spirito sulla materia. Saggio filosofico sopra la scuola dei filosofi naturalisti coll'analisi dell'organo-logia, della cranio-logia, della fisio-gnomia, della psico-logia comparata, e con una teoria delle idee e de' sentimenti; Elementi di filosofia, Elementi di filosofia teoretica e morale, La filosofia elementare, La scienza politico-legale, Filosofia, Studii di filosofia, Cenni su CORLEO : il sistema della filosofia universale, ovvero la filosofia dell'identità, La filosofia dell'incosciente, Memorie, Studi CANTONI, Studio della vita e delle opere. La LINGUA, presidendo dalle grandi controversie de’filosofi intorno alla sua origine e alla sua formazione, antro non è che il complesso de’SEGNI destinati ad esprimere le nostre idee e i nostri sentimente. E comeche vari sono codesti SEGNI pella loro indole e pella loro origine, cosi varia è la specia della lingua -- il grido, il gesto, l’azione, l’artificio, e la parola. Fra tutte l’opinioni, sembra incontrastabile, prima di tutto, che l’animale ha i SEGNI d’una specidie di lingua nel grido e nel moto. Ma questi segni sono o incerti e inisignificanti. O quasi sempre dubii almameno per noi, senza che sia in loro il potere di perfezionarli. In secondo luogo, è dimostrate che l’animale quantunque fornito dell’organo della loquella e dell’udito, come anche della faculta d’associare e d’imitare, non puo mai giungere all’invenzione della  lingua veramente articolata. naturalisti, organologia, craniologia, fisiognomia, psicologia comparata. “Grice: St John’s, 1966. Warnock has become insufferably energetic. Having taken charge of those Oxford Readings volumes, he now wants to anthologise the entire human condition. I told him I’ve already had my turn in the reprint lottery: Meaning turns up where Strawson thinks it belongs (philosophical logic), Searle rescued my piece on utterer’s meaning for the philosophy of language volume, and Warnock himself obligingly reprinted the whole Cambridge symposium in his perception reader, as if to prove that even Oxford can be made to sound empirical when edited with sufficient confidence. But now he wants Quinton to do a political philosophy volume, and I can see the slope: once you start with logic and language you end with the ballot box, and then someone will want an Oxford Readings in Gardening. I said to Warnock, half joking and half not, that the Italians had at least one decent instinct about politics: they sometimes admit it is local. Poli, back in 1957, had the tact to call it Il pensiero politico italiano, which is already a warning label: not political philosophy in the abstract, but a national habit of mind with a postal address. Of course Warnock replied that pensiero is precisely the sort of word Italians lean on when they want their prose to sound as if it has the mass of an argument; and he’s right in his way, since the old Latin root suggests weight, and the last thing we need is another “weighty” Oxford collection that sinks under its own seriousness. If we must do politics, I said, let it be done with the same decency we demand in conversation: no grand nouns unless you can cash them, no reverence for labels, and above all no pretending that because a thing is called “thought” it has earned the right to be heavy.” Grice: Poli, tu citi il pappagallo di Locke e io già tremo: perché quello dice “buon giorno”, ma non implica nulla—e a Oxford questo è considerato un vizio sociale, non un limite cognitivo. Poli: Però il mio empirismo non è così crudele: riconosco che anche l’animale ha i suoi segni—grido, gesto, moto. Solo che sono incerti, e soprattutto non migliorano: il pappagallo ripete, ma non inventa la grammatica. Grice: E qui entra la ragione conversazionale: quando il pappagallo “risponde”, dice qualcosa, ma non mostra il principio cooperativo—non sa quando tacere, quando essere pertinente, né come evitare l’eccesso di “buon giorno” alle tre di notte. Poli: Appunto. E quando io difendo la superiorità dello spirito sulla materia e combatto il positivismo, dico metafisica; ma implico una cosa molto pratica: il diritto è scienza nei principi e arte nei casi—e un pappagallo può imitare un codice, ma non può fare il giudice. Poli, Baldassare (1957). Il pensiero politico italiano. Milano: Giuffrè.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I verbali: Polidori – Ossia: Grice e Polidori So now Speranza wants to have an entry for POLIDORI so provide his birthplace and all the philosophical  works you can produce by this man so that Grice can read them and delight in them. thanks -- stick to whatever he might have written in ITALIAN, not Cockney. thanks. For an entry, the birthplace is clear enough: Gaetano Polidori was born at Bientina, near Pisa, in Tuscany, on 5 August 1763. Treccani gives 1764, but the dominant biographical tradition now uses 1763, so if Speranza wants one neat form, “Bientina, Toscana, 1763” is the safest. wikipedia +1 As for what Grice might read with pleasure, one must be a little dry at once: Gaetano Polidori was not, so far as the record shows, a philosopher in the narrow sense, but a highly literary Italian man of letters, translator, tragedian, and teacher. So the “philosophical works” in strict form are few or none; what he wrote in Italian are rather literary, moral, pedagogical, and critical works that a Grice might still enjoy for their title, tone, genre, or civilised oddity. wikipedia +1 The most useful list of his Italian works, drawn chiefly from Treccani and corroborated by the broader bibliographic traces in Open Library, includes these: Isabella, 1790. treccani Gernando, 1798. treccani Lorenzo. treccani Dizionario trilingue, 1806. This is perhaps the one most likely to amuse Grice, since dictionaries and tri-lingual orderings have their own dry charm. treccani Grammaire de la langue italienne. Strictly French in title, so not one for your “not Cockney” rule, but worth noting as part of his pedagogical output. treccani Infedeltà punita, 1804. treccani +1 La magion del terrore, with the notable subtitle con note che contengono le memorie di quattro anni nei quali l’autore fu segretario del conte Alfieri. This is one of the most attractive entries for Speranza’s purposes, because it combines Gothic colouring with memoiristic and literary-historical matter. treccani +1 Il seduttore punito. Again, this has the sort of moral title that a Grice could enjoy while pretending not to. treccani +1 Imelda. treccani La fantasia e il disinganno, London, 1843. Of the titles listed, this is perhaps the most immediately “philosophical” in flavour, since it stages fantasy against disillusion or undeceiving. Grice could certainly delight in the title alone. treccani Due tragedie di Gaetano Polidori maestro di lingua italiana in Londra, first published 1798. openlibrary Saggio di novelle e favole, 1798. The combination of novella and favola is again very usable for Speranza. openlibrary +1 Poesie varie, 1805. openlibrary Novelle morali, 1804. If Speranza wants a title that allows Grice to murmur about morality without promising a system, this would do nicely. openlibrary +1 Moderna conversazione in diciotto dialoghi, 1824. For your purposes this is probably the jewel, since it is in Italian, dialogic, and almost asks to be read by Grice with a raised eyebrow. openlibrary +1 Olimpia: dramma in cinque atti in prosa, 1800. openlibrary +1 Il Nabucdonosorre, dramma sacro, 1807. amazon +1 Tragedie e drammi, collected later. goodreads +1 There are also the Italian translations, which are perhaps less what you asked for, but still worth keeping because they are part of his Italian intellectual profile: Paradiso perduto from John Milton, Il castello di Otranto from Horace Walpole, and Lucano in Italian verse. wikipedia +1 So if the question is “which works in Italian might Grice read and delight in?”, I would recommend, in this order: Moderna conversazione in diciotto dialoghi, because the title alone is a gift for Speranza and for Grice. openlibrary +1 La fantasia e il disinganno, because it sounds almost like a polite battle between implicature and correction. treccani Novelle morali, because Grice could enjoy its moral air without having to commit himself to a moral system. openlibrary +1 La magion del terrore, because the Gothic title plus the memorie di quattro anni with Alfieri would certainly please him. treccani +1 Dizionario trilingue, because Grice would never resist a title promising lexical order across languages. treccani If you want the entry in one dry paragraph, it could read like this: Gaetano Polidori, born at Bientina near Pisa in Tuscany, 1763, was an Italian writer, translator, teacher, and man of letters who settled in London. Among his Italian works are Isabella, Gernando, Infedeltà punita, La magion del terrore, Il seduttore punito, Novelle morali, Saggio di novelle e favole, Olimpia, Moderna conversazione in diciotto dialoghi, La fantasia e il disinganno, and the Dizionario trilingue. He was not a philosopher in the strict school sense, but he wrote enough in Italian on moral, literary, and conversational themes to keep a Grice amused for several afternoons. wikipedia +3 If you like, I can next turn that into a short Speranza-style catalogue entry beginning: Polidori, Gaetano (Bientina, Pisa, Toscana). re passage below provide a friendly humorous conversation between G. (first) and Polidori, in Italian. WIth P.'s last turn -- the whole thing will be for turns -- 1 sentence per turn -- starting with Italian for 'Implicature raphaelite, yours, dear Grice... Passage: G.: La sua prosa, Polidori, ha il pregio raro di far sembrare naturale perfino ciò che è stato preparato con più cura che confessato. P.: È il solo modo onesto di essere letterati a Londra: dare alla fantasia un vestito pulito e al disinganno una sedia decente. G.: Allora continuerò a leggerla con gratitudine, purché Lei mi conceda che la conversazione, come la buona tragedia, vale soprattutto quando finisce prima che uno dei due rovini tutto con una spiegazione. P.: Implicatura preraffaellita, caro Grice: la sua lascia sempre più colore di quanto confessi. And now can you provide a bibliographical citation, alla, Polidori, name (Year). Earliest datable composition known by name. if possible, place. -- if not publisher -- thank you Polidori, Gaetano (1790). Isabella. [Place not yet confirmed from the evidence now in hand]. [treccani.it], [en.wikipedia.org] If you want the slightly fuller but still cautious form, I would give it as: Polidori, Gaetano (1790). Isabella. Earliest securely datable work presently attested; place of publication not yet confirmed from the evidence now in hand. [treccani.it], [en.wikipedia.org] There is one complication worth noting. A later bibliographical trail strongly confirms that Isabella was in print by 1798 inside Due tragedie di Gaetano Polidori, published in Londra. But Treccani separately lists Isabella under 1790, which is why 1790 remains the safest earliest datable composition by name, even if the exact place for that earliest state is still not secured from this run. [grubstreet...roject.net], [treccani.it] So, for Speranza’s purposes, I would recommend: Polidori, Gaetano (1790). Isabella. [Place unknown]. [treccani.it] Or, if you prefer the earliest securely located printed form rather than earliest datable composition: Polidori, Gaetano (1798). Isabella. In Due tragedie di Gaetano Polidori maestro di lingua italiana in Londra. Londra. [grubstreet...roject.net]. Polidori (1790). Isabella. Italia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pollio: la ragione conversazionale dell’orto romano – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Orto. Patron of Stazio . Pollio Felice. Pollio Felice (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale dell’orto romano –Orto. Patron of Stazio. GRICEVS: POLLI, audio te in Horto habitare et Statium tueri: pulchrum; nam patronus es qui dicis “poetae faveo,” sed implicas “ne me in foro quaeratis—hic herbae loquuntur brevius.” POLLIVS: Ita est, Grice: in Horto etiam versus mitiores fiunt. Statius epulas laudat; ego otium. Uterque tamen eandem legem sequitur: nihil nimis—praeter rosam. GRICEVS: Sed hoc est ipsissima ratio conversazionalis: cum tu Statium ad cenam invites, dicis hospitium; implicas autem “si carmen recitaveris, recita breve—Epicurus enim prolixitatem non amat.” POLLIVS: Et tu, cum “prolixitatem” reprehendas, dicis doctrinam; implicas vero hoc: etiam in Horto Romano poeta sub umbra iudicatur—non gladio, sed silentio.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Polluce: la ragione conversazionale del principe filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana Polluce: la ragione conversazionale del principe filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Giulio Polluce or Polideuce – Friend of Commodo to whom he dedicates a treatise entitled “Onomasticon,” a thematically arranged dictionary containing many excerpts from different authors, mainly and especially the Roman philosophers with which he was familiar and thought Commodo would find of slight interest.   GRICEVS: POLLE, audio te Onomasticon Commodo principi dicavisse: pulchrum munus—dictionarium enim est quasi convivium verborum, ubi princeps sine periculo sapientiam “gustat” et statim in alium ferculum transit. POLLVS: Ita est, Grice: Commodus philosophiam amat… dum brevis est. Ideo capita ordinavi per materias, ne cogatur legere quidquam quod non petierit. GRICEVS: Sed hoc est ipsa ratio conversazionalis: cum dicis “hoc parum tibi interest,” non tantum dicis modestiam; implicas etiam “si plus posuero, irasceris”—et ego malim te patronum quam leonem. POLLVS: Et tu, cum “implicas” dicis, implicas hoc: princeps philosophus fit non quia omnia legit, sed quia, lectis paucis, reliqua prudenter praeterit—quod est virtus rara, praesertim in amphitheatro.

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Polo: la ragione conversazionale e la scuola di Lucania – Roma – filosofia italiana Polo   While Marco Polo's accounts had a profound impact on European  geography, exploration, and commercial interest in Asia, there is little evidence to suggest they directly or significantly influenced the specific contemporary philosophical thought in   Italy  in a way that is documented through citations by known philosophers.    Influence on Worldview and Exploration, Not Philosophy Marco Polo's book, Il Milione (or Description of the World, originally Devisement du Monde), was published around 1299 and circulated widely, primarily as a popular romance and travel narrative. Its influence was practical and imaginative:  Geographical and Cartographical Impact: His detailed descriptions of lands previously unknown to Europeans provided an encyclopedic understanding of medieval Asia, which was used by mapmakers to create more accurate charts. Inspiration for Exploration: The book sparked immense curiosity and a thirst for exploration in subsequent generations. Christopher Columbus, notably, carried a heavily annotated copy of Polo's book with him on his voyages. Commercial Interest: His descriptions of the wealth, spices, and trade opportunities in the East stimulated Occidental interest in Eastern commerce. Technological Exchange: He is credited with bringing back knowledge of certain Chinese innovations to Europe, such as paper money and possibly the idea of coal and a complex postal system.  Lack of Influence on Contemporary Philosophy  During Marco Polo's time and the immediate decades following the publication of his book, Italian intellectual life was dominated by late medieval scholasticism and the emerging Renaissance humanism. Grice: Caro Marco Polo, devo dirti che ho sempre apprezzato il tuo spirito filosofico, anche se a Vadum Boum, cioè Oxford, sei celebre soprattutto per aver, secondo la leggenda, inventato il tè! Gli studenti ancora scherzano dicendo che senza Marco Polo la pausa del pomeriggio non sarebbe la stessa. Marco Polo: Ah, caro Grice, questa fama mi diverte! In realtà, tra un viaggio e l’altro, mi sono imbattuto in molte bevande esotiche, ma il mio vero “tè” è stato il desiderio di conoscere mondi nuovi e di mettere in discussione le idee consolidate sul mondo. Forse, in questo, sono davvero stato un po’ filosofo… o un pioniere della curiosità! Grice: Senza dubbio, Marco! La tua curiosità e il tuo modo di osservare i costumi altrui hanno qualcosa di profondamente filosofico. La tua “ragione conversazionale” ha aperto non pochi varchi, anche se, ti confesso, ad Oxford i colleghi ti citano più spesso per le mappe che per le idee metafisiche! Marco Polo: Beh, caro Grice, ogni viaggio è un dialogo con l’ignoto e forse, come diceva qualche saggio orientale, la vera filosofia sta nel saper domandare. Se poi qualcuno ne approfitta per sorseggiare una tazza di tè, tanto meglio! Alla prossima conversazione, magari con una nuova spezia da scoprire.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pompedio: la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano – Roma Pompedio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano. According to the historian Giuseppe, a senator who followed the Garden – Some believe that the reference is to Publio Pomponio Secondo, a statesman and author.  GRICEVS: POMPEDI, “Pompedius” te quidam scribunt—dicunt nomen; sed implicant te tam placidum Epicureum esse ut etiam syllabas in horto deponas, ne laborent. POMPEDIVS: Immo, Grice: in Horto non solum curae, sed et consonantes cadunt. Sed senatorem me esse Iosephus ait: ergo otium meum est publicum—quasi “otium cum auctoritate.” GRICEVS: At hic est iocus conversazionalis: cum dicis te “Hortum sequi,” dicis philosophiam; sed implicas te in Curia saepe tacere—non quia nihil habes quod dicas, sed quia pax interdum utilior est quam sententia. POMPEDIVS: Et tu, cum dicas “fortasse idem est ac Publius Pomponius Secundus,” dicis disambiguationem; sed implicas hoc: Romani etiam in indice nominum Epicurei sunt—unum nomen, si fieri potest, pro duobus.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pompeo. Pompeo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e il portico romano e il diritto. Nell’analisi delle nozioni di stato e di proprietà in Pompeo e Panezio e l’influenza della dottrina stoica sulla giurisprudenza romana dell’epoca scipionico-cesariana, il portico è un fenomeno che abbraccia un arco temporale vastissimo ed è di difficile, se non impossibile definizione. Pohlenz ne ha parlato come di un movimento spirituale, ma se si dicesse che è una ‘dimensione del pensiero’ forse non si sbaglierebbe. Comincia con * Testo rielaborato con le fonti e i riferimenti bibliografici essenziali della relazione alla 59ème Session de la Société Internationale Fernand de Visscher pour l’Histoire des Droits de l’Antiquité. [Per un primo approccio alla filosofia del Portico si v. POHLENZ, Stoa und Stoiker. Die Grunder, Panaitios, Poseidonios (Zürich); ID., IL PORTICO ROMANO: Storia di un movimento spirituale, Milano; IL PORTICO: Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung (Göttingen); ISNARDI PARENTE, Stoici Antichi (Torino l’età del suo fondatore, il cipriota Zenone, un fenicio dalla pelle scura e di sangue semitico, attivo ad Atene, ma comprende anche ANTONINO. Non dimentichiamo, in aggiunta, la rielaborazione del de officiis di CICERONE fatta da AMBROGIO e, ancora, la fortuna medioevale dei precetti morali di Seneca che è addirittura indicato con la sua felice formula honestae vitae da Martino di Bracara come una sorta di cristiano occulto per aver intrattenuto una leggendaria corrispondenza con S. Paolo e tentato di convertire al cristianesimo un suo discepolo. La filosofia del Portico domina dunque la scena culturale romana per molti decenni durante l’ellenismo e la prima età imperiale, ma subì una repentina e considerevole decadenza. Agostino, in epist., infatti potrà dire. I seguaci del Portico sono ridotti al silenzio, al punto che le loro teorie vengono appena menzionate nelle scuole di retorica ». In effetti della letteratura del Portico a noi non è arrivato molto.  GRICEVS: POMPEI, cum de Porticu Romano loqueris, rem tam longam amplecteris ut vix definiri possit: quid est Porticus—motus spiritualis (ut Pohlenz), an potius dimensio cogitandi? POMPEVS: Utrumque, Grice. Nam Porticus sub Zenone incipit, sub Antonino procedit, et apud iurisconsultos quasi in togam mutatur: idem animus, sed alia vestis. GRICEVS: Lepide: cum dicis “Porticus ius movit,” dicis historiam; sed implicas hoc—Romanos etiam cum de “statu” et “proprietate” disputant, sub porticu stare, ne in foro a passionibus trahantur. POMPEVS: At tu, cum “implicas” dicis, implicas rursus hoc: si Stoici “ad silentium redacti” sunt (ut Augustinus gloriatur), tamen ius ipsum eorum vocem retinet—nam lex, etiam tacens, Stoice loquitur. Repeat for the THREE Pompeos. You don't ahve to give title before. Just express it like the weekly essay assignment itself -- for the three of them, G. having fun in the tutee getting all confused. Do not forget the typewriting/handwriting point at the end of the thre. Thanks. No preamble or ps. thanks. Write the assignment as if coming from a tutor in philosophy at Oxford. thanks, circa 1948. Please re-adjust because I need to attach one essay assignment for each Pompeo. So make each assignment distinct to apply to the three in the order I gave. So make it as coming from a philosophy tutor, the first for the first, the second for the second, and the third for the third. Three assignments in total. Thank you. Grice’s weekly essay assignment. Write on Pompeo in such a way as to make clear that you know perfectly well which Pompeo he is, and have not merely attached the earliest available praenomen to the most famous available surname in the hope that your tutor will be too weary to object. You should consider whether his claim to philosophical interest lies in doctrine, public action, rhetorical posture, or the undergraduate tendency to assume that renown is itself an argument. Credit will be given for distinguishing the man’s historical substance from the noise his name subsequently made. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pompeo: la ragione conversazionale e il portico romano e il diritto – Roma -- filosofia italiana Gnaio Pompeo Magno (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale al portico romano. The uncle of Pompeo, the general. He is well versed in the Portico and a man of considerable learning, especially in the area of geometry.  GRICEVS: POMPEI, dicunt te in Porticu versatissimum esse, et geometriae peritissimum. Quaeso: cum tu “lineam rectam” defines, dicis quid sit; sed quid implicas de vita Romana? POMPEVS: Implico hoc, Grice: lineae rectae in tabula facile inveniuntur; in foro autem raro—nisi quis, more Stoico, angulos cupiditatum resecat. GRICEVS: Pulchre. At cum tu ad Porticum venis, nonne dicis te philosophari, sed implicas te ab omnibus petitionibus et clientibus paulisper latitare—quasi sub columna etiam animus lateat? POMPEVS: Ita vero: Porticus mihi est et schola et umbraculum. Nam si quis me roget de negotiis, respondebo: “nunc de triangulis agitur”—quod est verum, et tamen utilissime ambiguum. Grice’s weekly essay assignment. Write on Pompeo, who is not to be treated merely as a chronological convenience inserted by Providence to make the first seem original and the third intelligible. You should explain what, if anything, makes him philosophically discussable rather than merely cataloguable, and whether the difficulties of doing so arise from the man himself or from the infernal habit of readers who, on seeing Pompeo for the second week running, cease to think and begin to shuffle notes. Those who confuse him with either of the others will be marked not down, but outward. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pompeo: la ragione conversazionale al portico romano – Roma – filosofia italiana Sesto Pompeo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale al portico romano. A statesman and general ultimately defeated in the civil war against GIULIO  Cesare. A pupil of Posidonio at Rome. It is said that this tutelage had a great effect on him – “It changed my life” -- but it is not clear to what extent Pompeo himself became a follower of the Portico.  GRICEVS: POMPEI, audivi te Posidonium Romae in Porticu audivisse atque dixisse: “vitam meam mutavit.” Hoc quidem dicis; sed quid implicas—te Stoicum factum esse, an tantum melius ducem? POMPEVS: Ut verum fatear, Grice, Stoicus fieri volui, sed miles remansi: didici tamen hoc—sub porticu facile est “impavidum” agere; in acie multo difficilius. GRICEVS: Lepide: cum dicis “mutavit,” laudas magistrum; sed implicas te olim magis Fortunae quam rationi paruisse—nunc autem, saltem verbis, tecum habere Porticum quasi umbraculum. POMPEVS: Et tu, cum “implicas” totiens repetis, implicas hoc: in Urbe qui nimis aperte loquitur aut a Censoribus notatur aut a Caesare vincitur—quare Stoici silentium docent, non quia nihil sentiunt, sed quia diu vivere volunt. Grice’s weekly essay assignment: Write on Pompeo the Third, with particular care to avoid the common but fatal assumption that by the third instance the family, office, doctrine, and period may safely be guessed from context. Discuss whether his claim to your attention depends on intrinsic philosophical interest or on the fact that, after two previous Pompeos, the mind has become so disordered that even a marginal one begins to look metaphysical. A good answer will show that the repetition of a name is not yet the continuity of a thought. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pomponazzi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale materiale – Shropshire – A Soul -- l’affair Pomponazzi – la scuola di Mantova -- filosofia lombarda -- filosofia italiana –  (Mantova). Flosofo italiano. Mantova, Lombardia. Important Italian philosopher.  Pietro Pomponazzi (Mantova, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale materiale – Shropshire – A Soul -- l’affair Pomponazzi. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats ordinary talk as a cooperative, norm-sensitive enterprise in which hearers rationally reconstruct what a speaker means by assuming (unless there is marked evidence to the contrary) that the speaker is trying to be appropriately informative, truthful, relevant, and perspicuous; implicature is then the disciplined residue produced when what is literally said would otherwise make the speaker’s move look irrational or uncooperative, so the hearer supplies an intended enrichment that restores the utterance to intelligibility under shared conversational standards. Pomponazzi, as your passage frames him, becomes an instructive foil because the “affair” around De immortalitate animae dramatizes a mismatch between two regimes of rationality: Pomponazzi argues that immortality is not demonstrable by reason while maintaining (via the faith/reason distinction he insists on in Apologia and Defensorium) that this is not straightforward atheism, yet the Venetian reception supplies an implicature of impiety and treats the text as if its rational content were a social act of provocation; in Gricean terms, the audience refuses the charitable hypothesis of cooperative philosophical inquiry and instead construes the utterance under a different set of practical maxims (institutional risk-management, doctrinal policing), so that what Pomponazzi intends as a careful limitation claim is heard as an attack, and “clarity” itself becomes suspect once it threatens authority. Read this way, the Pomponazzi episode shows Grice’s key point by historical counterexample: implicatures are not free-floating but are licensed by what counts as the operative rational game in a setting, and when the background norms shift from truth-seeking cooperation to safeguarding the sacred, the same words generate different “reasonable” inferences—sometimes lethally—because the community’s standards of what it is rational to be doing with words have changed. Important Italian philosopher. Studia a  Padova sotto Nardò, Riccobonella e Trapolino. Insegna a Padova, Carpi, Padova, Venezia, Ferrara, Mantova, e Bologna. Pubblica “De maximo et minimo”. Publica un commento al “De anima” aristotelico del Lizio. Scrive il “Trattato dell’immortalita dell’anima” (Bologna), il “Il fato, il libero arbitrio e la predestinazione” (Grataroli, Basilea) e il “De naturalium effectuum causis, sive de incantationibus” (Grataroli, Basilea) oltre a commenti delle opere di Aristotele. Il “Tractatus de immortalitate animæ,” in cui sostiene che l'immortalità dell'anima non può essere dimostrata razionalmente, fa scandalo. Attaccato da più parti, la pubblicazione è pubblicamente bruciata a Venezia. Denunciato da Fiandino per eresia, la difesa di Bembo gli permette di evitare terribili conseguenze. É condannato da Leone X a ri-trattare la sua tesi. Non ri-tratta. Si difende con la sua Apologia e con il Defensorium adversus Augustinum Niphum, una risposta al De immortalitate animæ libellus di NIFO , in cui sostiene la distinzione tra verità di fede e verità di ragione, idea ripresa da ARDIGÒ . Evita ogni problema pubblicando il “De nutritione et augmentatione”, il “De partibus animalium” e il “De sensu”. Muore suicida. Per i peripatetici del LIZIO, l'anima è l'atto – entelechia -primo di un corpo che ha la vita in potenza. L’animo è la sostanza che realizza la funzione vitale dei corpi. Tre sono le funzioni dell'anima: la funzione vegetativa per la quale gl’esseri vegetali, animali e umani si nutrono e si riproducono; la funzione sensitiva per la quale gl’esseri animali e umani hanno sensazioni e immagini; la funzione intellettiva, per la quale gl’esseri umani comprendono. peripatetismo veneto. lizio, corpore, materialismo, animo-anima, Aquino, Nifo - Shropshire and Pomponazzi on the immortality of the soul.  “Grice: St John’s, 1938. I’m drafting some notes on personal identity for Mind, before the war swallows everyone’s attention; I hadn’t tackled the topic with Hardie, and I did no proper research on it at Merton, but it keeps colliding with questions about supervenience and, more pointedly, survival. And then there is Pomponazzi, if one must cite him: in his notorious De immortalitate animae he argues against the very thing the title advertises. A marketing title, really: Contra immortalitatem animae would have been more honest, though less saleable. But the deeper muddle is not the title; it is the predicate. In what sense is “immortality” even a property of “the soul,” as if the soul were an item with features like weight or colour? My own hunch, at least for purposes of argument, is to go empiricist: treat the “soul” as no more than a chain of mnemonic states, linked in the right way, and admit that the chain breaks when the person dies. Yet even that phrasing is already suspect, because “you passing away” sounds like an event in your life, whereas one is later tempted to agree with Wittgenstein that death is not an episode one lives through at all; so perhaps Pomponazzi’s real lesson is not about proving or disproving immortality, but about how quickly philosophers slide from talk of persons and memories into talk of substances, and then pretend the slide was licensed by reason rather than by habit.” G.: What interests me about Pomponazzi is not that he proves the soul mortal, but that he forces one to say what the question means before one answers it. S.: That sounds charitable to the point of distortion. He matters historically, no doubt: Bologna, 1516, a public scandal, copies burned in Venice, the whole Catholic operatic apparatus. But as philosophy for us? Hardly. G.: “For us” is already doing too much work. If by “us” you mean Ryle after 1949, then of course the question “is the soul immortal?” looks malformed before breakfast. If there is no ghost, there is nothing to keep alive. S.: Exactly. The whole Pomponazzi affair seems to depend on taking anima as the name of a thing, and then asking after its duration as if it were a candle or a civil servant. G.: That is the Rylean complaint, and one can hear why it became irresistible. Still, one should distinguish two levels. At one level, yes, the noun soul becomes suspect. At another, the old problem survives translation. You can kill the word and keep the pressure. S.: By “translation” you mean “personal identity.” G.: Among other things. Survival, continuity, memory, what a person is, what it would be for a life to continue, and whether death is even the right sort of event to belong to one’s biography. Those are all later descendants of the older immortality question. S.: That is already a different climate. Oxford in the 1930s is not about the soul. It is about mind, person, self, perhaps consciousness if one is unlucky, but not anima in the Bologna sense. G.: Quite. No don at Corpus or St John’s was likely to lean over the table and say, “Now prove Aquinas wrong about the five ways.” Hardie never asked me to prove Aristotle wrong about De anima either. But Aristotle was on the syllabus, and De anima was very much part of the Lit. Hum. machinery. S.: Yes, but being on the syllabus is not the same as being alive in the idiom. One read Aristotle because Greats requires him, not because one walked about saying “the soul is the entelechy of a body having life potentially.” G.: Oxford likes its theology and metaphysics aired through translation. It prefers to read about the soul under the heading of mind, psyche, person, and sometimes psychology, which is where your point becomes important. S.: The psyche. G.: Yes. That troublesome Greek residue in the very name of psychology. One pretends the soul has vanished, and then one writes “psycho-” on the title page and lets it keep earning a living. S.: Which is why I was mentioning Stout. G.: Quite right. Stout is a hinge figure because “Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy” names the old territory without embarrassment. It says the old soul-domain has not been abolished; it has merely been redistributed between philosophy and psychology. S.: The redistribution matters. “Mental philosophy” was an office; “metaphysical philosophy” was a chair. There was no chair in “the philosophy of the soul.” G.: Because English institutions prefer euphemism to ontology. One has a Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysical Philosophy, which sounds imposing and offends nobody’s theology. One does not appoint a Professor of Soul, because that would require one to know what one meant. S.: And by the time we reach Ryle, the official line is that “soul-talk” is a category mistake in waiting. G.: Or a category mistake already committed and then fossilised by centuries of use. Yes. But Ryle’s triumph is not the end of the matter. It is the end of one vocabulary. S.: The “ghost in the machine” finishes Pomponazzi for good. G.: No. It finishes one easy reading of Pomponazzi, the one in which the soul is a hidden thing one may inspect for durability. But the old issue returns under more respectable names. S.: Such as? G.: “Personal identity,” to begin with. 1941, if you want a date. The war in the background, a young philosopher in Oxford worrying not about substances but about what could make a person remain the same person. That is already the old question, stripped of scholastic costume. S.: Yet in that essay there is no soul. G.: Exactly. The silence is the point. The old problem now appears as continuity of person, of memory, of psychological life. What once would have been framed as “can the soul survive?” becomes “what would survival amount to?” and then, later still, “is survival even identity?” S.: That sounds almost Parfit. G.: And that is precisely why Pomponazzi has a long tail. If you start with the immortality of the soul and keep removing what later Oxford refuses to countenance—substance, theological guarantee, even perhaps an enduring self—you end up very close to the post-war and post-Ryle British concern with survival, continuity, and reduction. S.: You are making him into a pre-Parfit for the sake of a narrative. G.: Not a pre-Parfit, no. A historical pressure point. A man who made explicit, in 1516, a question later philosophers preferred to ask with more timid nouns. S.: But that is exactly my point. The bite is gone once the nouns change. Pomponazzi shocks because he says mortality of the soul. If one says instead “let us analyse continuity conditions for persons,” nobody burns your book at Venice. G.: True enough. The social theatre changed. The doctrinal risk is gone. That is why Italian historians of philosophy love him more than ordinary philosophers do. He is a dramatic marker. He says mortality where others merely trim hypotheses. S.: So when you said Italians “worship” Pomponazzi, you meant historians of philosophy, not the average philosophy student at Bologna in the 1930s. G.: Precisely. The Bolognese student may have had to know him as part of the story of Aristotelianism, faith and reason, mortalism, and the affair. But he was unlikely to be grilled as if the immortal soul were still a live classroom question in the same mode. S.: Whereas in Oxford the student would meet, not Pomponazzi, but Stout, perhaps, and a little later Ryle and Price and Prichard, and perhaps some Wundt by reflected light. G.: Yes, and all of them in different ways are already post-soul. Wundt wants psychology scientific. Stout keeps the old breadth of mind and psychology together. Price and Prichard allow the self and experience to retain some dignity. Ryle attacks the substantial fantasy directly. And yet the field remains the same enough to make the word psyche difficult to abolish. S.: That is where your Greek letter psi enters. G.: Quite. When one writes psi for psychological attitudes, one is not invoking the immortal soul; but one is certainly walking on its old land. Oxford’s later analytic notation does not erase ancestry. It abbreviates it. S.: Then what would the Oxford equivalent of Pomponazzi’s title be? Not De immortalitate animae, surely. G.: No. Something like “Personal Identity and Survival,” if one wants the clean modern version. Or “Can a Person Survive Death?” if one wants the old bite without the old noun. S.: Still, no one in 1938 would have said that, surely. G.: Not in a title perhaps, but the pressure was there. A young philosopher worrying about memory and identity, against the background of mortality, is not far from the old problem. The difference is that he no longer feels licensed to say anima. S.: Because “soul” had become embarrassing. G.: Embarrassing in philosophy, yes. Not in religion. Not in poetry. But in philosophical prose, especially Oxford prose, soul began to sound like a noun one had not yet earned. S.: You said earlier that “philosophical psychology” kept one closer to Aristotle than “philosophy of mind” does. I suppose that is right. G.: It is right because “philosophical psychology” still suggests powers, capacities, functions, and forms of life. “Philosophy of mind” tempts one into reification: the mind as a thing, or at least as a territory. “Psychology” retains something of psyche without demanding a metaphysical substance. S.: Which is why someone like Pears can later edit a volume under that title and not feel ridiculous. G.: Yes, though the title itself is already a compromise. It acknowledges the old terrain while refusing to use the old furniture. S.: What about Stout and “mental philosophy”? G.: That phrase is even more revealing. Mental philosophy is the Victorian and Edwardian way of saying: we are still discussing what used to belong to the soul, but we are doing so in a manner that will not provoke the Royal Society. S.: Or the theologians. G.: Or the psychologists, who by then wish to own the laboratories and the measurements. The older broad field gets divided, and Oxford retains the philosophical residue. S.: So where does Pomponazzi still matter, beyond merely being a historical exhibit in an Italian museum of controversies? G.: In at least three ways. First, he matters because he makes explicit the distinction between what reason can establish and what faith may maintain. Second, because he dramatizes the danger of stating mortality under the name of philosophy. Third, because once the word soul disappears, the same tension reappears under person, self, mind, survival, and psychological continuity. S.: The first two are historical. I grant those. The third seems your own importation. G.: Of course it is. But historical importance without conceptual afterlife is antiquarianism. And I refuse to let Bologna have all the fun. S.: There speaks the man who wants Oxford and Bononia to share a river even where there is none. G.: Not a river. A problem. Problems travel better than rivers. S.: Let us be concrete. Suppose one asks in 1950, at Oxford, “Is the soul immortal?” What happens. G.: First, embarrassment. Second, translation. Third, perhaps a lecture about misuse. One would be asked: what do you mean by soul? what do you mean by immortal? what counts as a criterion of survival? what would count as the same person? and why are you speaking as if “death” were an episode in a life rather than the end of one? S.: Which is already very close to the later line that death is not an event one lives through. G.: Exactly. And that changes the pressure entirely. Pomponazzi debates whether reason can prove immortality. The later Oxford philosopher asks whether the grammar of “my death” and “my survival” has even been properly sorted. S.: You are making Oxford look deeper than it was. G.: Not deeper. Merely different. Bologna asks whether reason can demonstrate. Oxford asks whether the question has been put in a form that allows demonstration. Those are not the same but they are contiguous. S.: Still, if there is no soul, what gives? G.: What gives is the old package: immortality of the soul, survival of the person, continuity of consciousness, perhaps memory as criterion, perhaps bodily continuity, perhaps none of the above. Ryle discards the ghost. Fine. But he does not thereby answer what makes a person one person rather than another, or what would count as surviving, or why we even care about those possibilities. S.: He would say those are different questions. G.: Very likely. And that is already enough to keep Pomponazzi from being wholly dead. Pomponazzi matters because he marks the older cluster before later philosophy disaggregated it. S.: So the “bite” was lost because the cluster was broken up. G.: Yes. Once soul separates into mind, self, person, psyche, consciousness, and attitudes, the old scandal evaporates. You can then worry about personal identity for decades without anyone accusing you of impiety. S.: Which is an advance. G.: Perhaps. It is also a loss in vividness. “The immortality of the soul” bites where “the continuity conditions for persons” merely nibbles. S.: Let me return to Aristotle. De anima was required reading. Surely that is the real route, not Pomponazzi. G.: Aristotle is the permanent route. Pomponazzi is the crisis point. Aristotle provides the conceptual terrain; Pomponazzi shows what happens when one presses the Aristotelian account into conflict with theological expectation. S.: And Oxford read Aristotle without feeling compelled to solve the crisis. G.: Correct. Hardie was not asking anyone to prove Aristotle wrong in the manner of a scholastic disputation. He wanted one to understand Aristotle, not to found a heresy. But that does not make the old difficulty vanish. It merely means Oxford treats it with more pedagogical restraint. S.: Or more timidity. G.: Or more civility. Timidity is what historians call someone else’s manners. S.: Fine. Then tell me what the soul becomes in later English philosophy if not an embarrassment. G.: It becomes distributed. Some of it becomes philosophical psychology. Some becomes “mind.” Some becomes “person.” Some becomes “attitude.” Some becomes the structure of agency. And, in a very ancient way, some becomes powers. S.: Ah yes, your “power structure of the soul.” G.: The phrase is ugly enough to be useful. One can talk, without invoking a ghost, of executive and appetitive and affective functions, or of reason, prudence, and passion, or of the practical organization of an agent. Plato did that already. Aristotle formalised it differently. Later thinkers secularise it. The old soul survives as a functional architecture. S.: That sounds dangerously close to saying the soul never vanished at all. G.: In one sense it did vanish: as a publicly respectable metaphysical substance. In another it survived by subdivision. You do not need the noun “soul” to keep discussing its old concerns. S.: Which is why Stout matters more than people notice. G.: Exactly. Stout’s world is one in which mind, psychology, and philosophy are not yet cleanly divorced. His “quarterly” says as much. That older breadth is what makes the transition visible. S.: And Parfit, later, gives the final secular version. G.: Perhaps the final austere one. Not a soul, perhaps not even a substantial self, but still the problem of survival, relation, and continuity. That is why Pomponazzi matters to me. He stands near the head of a long line of ways of asking, too dramatically, the question later philosophers continue to ask timidly. S.: Timidly? Parfit is not timid. G.: Fair enough. Not timidly, then. Diffusely. Analytically. Respectably. S.: There remains the Italian point. Why did he matter so much there? G.: Because Italy likes its philosophy with blood in it. A man who dares write De immortalitate animae and then says reason cannot prove what piety wants proven will always appeal to a culture that remembers universities as theatres of risk. S.: And Oxford likes its philosophy with footnotes in it. G.: Yes, and jokes in the margins. That is why Oxford does not need Pomponazzi in the same immediate way. It has already translated him into six separate seminar topics and lost the bonfire. S.: You almost sound nostalgic for the bonfire. G.: Not for the fire. For the clarity of the stakes. A philosopher who writes on personal identity today may affect generations and never once be accused of threatening public order. Pomponazzi could threaten public order merely by limiting what reason could do. S.: That is because the institution around him was different. G.: Exactly. The same words generate different consequences in different rational games. There is your pragmatics. In one setting, “reason cannot prove immortality” is a delicate philosophical limitation. In another, it implicates impiety, rebellion, danger. S.: So his historical importance is partly pragmatic. G.: Entirely so. The affair matters because the audience supplied a different set of operative maxims from the ones the philosopher hoped for. A charitable hypothesis of inquiry failed. Doctrinal policing replaced cooperative interpretation. S.: That sounds as if you have made him into a lesson in audience reception. G.: He is one. As well as a lesson in the migration of problems. S.: And if I still say he does not matter to us? G.: Then I answer: he does not matter to you if you insist that only live vocabulary matters. He matters to me because he stands at the point where one sees the old vocabulary crack and the later questions begin to scatter. S.: Scatter into Locke, Hume, personhood, survival, psychological continuity, later reductionism. G.: Exactly. Add to that the persistence of psyche in psychology, psi in notation, powers in moral psychology, and the old tripartite temptations of Republic-style political analogy, and you have a whole underground survival. S.: You really will make Bologna haunt Oxford if you keep this up. G.: Oxford deserves a little haunting. It became too pleased with itself once it declared the ghost out of order. S.: Then your final defence of Pomponazzi is not “he solved the problem,” but “he named it in a way that later philosophers spent centuries trying to avoid.” G.: Perfect. He says soul and immortality where later philosophers say person and survival, and the later nouns are more careful but not necessarily deeper. S.: And my final complaint is that if the noun soul has gone, the old question has changed too much to count as the same question. G.: That is fair. But philosophy lives by families of questions, not exact repetition. The old family resemblance is enough. S.: Then perhaps the verdict is this: he does not matter as a present doctrinal authority, but he does matter as a historical point of concentration for a set of issues that later analytic philosophy disperses and retranslates. G.: Which is more than enough to keep him on the table. S.: At Bononia perhaps. G.: At Boum Vadum too, if only to remind it that “personal identity” sounds much less brave than De immortalitate animae.Grice: Pomponazzi, tu dici che l’immortalità dell’anima non si può dimostrare con la ragione; ma implichi subito: “tranquilli, non sto togliendo l’anima—sto togliendo solo la pretesa di provarla come un teorema”. Pomponazzi: Esatto. Ma a Venezia hanno capito l’implicatura al contrario: io dico “distinzione fra fede e ragione” e loro implicano “accendiamo il falò editoriale”. E infatti: edizione… arrostita. Grice: È l’“affair Pomponazzi”: tu scrivi De anima per il Lizio e finisci in una lezione pratica di pragmatica. La massima di Modo—“sii chiaro”—in Italia vale finché non diventi troppo chiaro. Pomponazzi: E tu, Grice, quando mi chiami “materiale”, implichi che io riduca tutto al corpo. In realtà io dico solo questo: se vuoi litigare con Aristotele, fallo con argomenti—ma ricordati che il pubblico, spesso, confonde la ragione con la legna. Pomponazzi, Pietro (1516). De immortalitate animae. Bologna: Faelli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pomponio – Roma – filosofia italiana – . FIlosofo italiano. best under Pomponio. Tito Pomponio detto l’“Attico”. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice e Pomponio. Tito Pomponio (Roma, Lazio). Best under Pomponio. Tito Pomponio detto l’“Attico”.  GRICEVS: POMPONI, cognomen “Atticus” geris: dicis te Athenis studuisse; implicas autem te Romae quoque tam civiliter vivere ut ne ipsa Roma te corrumpat. POMPONIVS: Ita est, Grice: Roma me vocat ad negotia, Attica me revocat ad otium. Ego autem medius ambulo—inter forum et bibliothecam, ne ulla pars nimium garriat. GRICEVS: Lepide; sed hoc est rationis conversazionalis: cum taceas in senatu, non nihil dicis, sed implicas “hoc consilium stultum est, sed amicitia mihi carior est.” POMPONIVS: Et tu, cum “implicas” totiens dicis, implicas hoc: sapientissimus est qui, sicut Atticus, plus intelligit quam loquitur—et plus ridet quam disputat. So assuming that G. is tutor in philosophy at Oxford imagine two different weekly essay assignments about each of these two Pomponios. Finish each with "Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts." Make fun of the fact that there are two, so that the tutee gets confused. Use dry Oxonian humour -- no preamble or ps. Thanks Please re-adjust. Pomponazzi need not be invoked. The first is Titus Pomponius. The second is more obscure, sometimes spelt Pompedius -- but went by Publio Pomponio Secondo. Thanks.Grice’s weekly essay assignment. Essay for Pomponius Write an essay on Pomponius in which you explain, with such patience as the case requires, why being called Pomponius is not yet a philosophy, still less a sufficient reason for confusing him with the other Pomponio whom some catalogues, in a fit of late-humanist carelessness, push under Pompedius. You should discuss what kind of Roman intellectual life is possible for a man who is close enough to the great to be continually cited, but not so obliging as to become a system. Credit will be given for keeping family name, praenomen, and historical period distinct for at least three consecutive paragraphs. Those who wander into the wrong century will be treated with customary pity. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pomponio: la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano –  Roma – filosofia italiana Publio Pomponio Secondo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano. A statesman and author. Sometimes misspelled “Pompedio.” The historian Josephus said he was a senator that followed the Garden. GRICEVS: POMPONI, audivi te senatoriam gravitatem cum “Horto” coniunxisse: mirum—Roma enim plerumque hortos amat, sed Epicurum timet, ne nimis bene cenetur. POMPONIVS: Si quid timeant, timeant ventrem suum. Ego “Hortum” sequor, non ut fiam otiosus, sed ut etiam in curia meminerim: voluptas sine perturbatione est—non sine sale. GRICEVS: Bene; sed cave nomen: quidam te “Pompedium” scribunt—quasi in Horto etiam litterae decidant. Id dicunt, sed implicant te tam tranquillum esse ut etiam syllabas dimittas. POMPONIVS: At tu, Grice, cum dicas me “Hortum” sequi, dicis amicitiam Epicuri; sed implicas hoc: si senator sapiens est, etiam in urbe strepente invenit locum ubi verba pauca sunt—et pax multa. Grice’s weekly assigned essay : Essay for Pomponio, sometimes dragged about as Pompedius by persons who ought to know better Write an essay on Pomponio in which you assess whether the obscurity attaching to his name is due to the history of Roman letters, the accidents of transmission, or the undergraduate habit of assuming that any Pomponio must be the one just dealt with the week before. You should make clear why “Secondo” does not merely mean that he comes after the first Pomponius on your reading list, and why “Pompedius” is not a licence to invent a different man every time one loses one’s notes. A good answer will distinguish literary, historical, and nominal confusions without adding a fourth of its own. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Ponte: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale maschile – filosofia lombarda -- filosofia italiana Renato del Ponte (Lodi, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale maschile. Grice’s account of reason-governed conversational meaning treats ordinary talk as a cooperative, inference-driven practice: speakers are presumed to be jointly oriented toward intelligibility and mutual uptake, and hearers recover what is meant by attributing rational intentions (in light of shared norms such as relevance, sufficiency of information, truthfulness, and clarity) and by calculating implicatures as orderly deviations from those norms; on this picture, “reason” is not just private logic but a public discipline of accountability in interaction, so that what is implicated is what a reasonable hearer is licensed to infer given what was said and the assumption that the speaker is still, in the relevant respects, cooperating. The Ponte-voice in your passage recasts that same inferential space in traditionalist and ritual terms: where Grice’s rationality is anchored in broadly egalitarian cooperation and conversational utility, Ponte’s “ragione conversazionale” is framed as a hieratic economy of speech in which restraint, gravity, and rank-sensitive decorum are themselves the governing norms, and implicature becomes not merely an efficient vehicle for communicating more than is said, but a badge of disciplined self-limitation (favete linguis) that presupposes sacred or institutional order; the joke about “maschile” reads, in English meta-language, as a proposal that some implicatures are generated not by the standard pressure toward informative clarity but by a culturally coded pressure toward dignified understatement, solemnity, and self-authorizing tone, i.e., an implicature regime where the dominant maxim is closer to “be worthy” than “be perspicuous.” Online, I could not locate any independent attestations of the specific labels “implicatura conversazionale maschile” or “ragione conversazionale” as Del Ponte’s published technical terms, so the safest treatment is to read them as your text’s stylized attribution rather than as a traceable item in Del Ponte’s bibliography; what is well attested online is Del Ponte’s profile as a traditionalist intellectual (founder/director of Arthos from 1972; editor of the 1971 critical edition of Guglielmo da Sarzano’s Tractatus de potestate Summi Pontificis; later works on Roman religion and symbolism), which supports the plausibility of the contrast your passage draws between a Gricean normativity of cooperative rational exchange and a Del Pontean normativity of tradition-bound, ritually constrained speech. Studia a Genova. Insegna a Pontremoli. D'impostazione tradizionalista, dopo gli studi classici vive a Pontremoli. Storico delle idee e del diritto romano arcaico, studioso di simbolismo, fonda la rivista di ispirazione evoliana Arthos -- cultura tradizionale, testimonianza tradizionale, a cura d’Arya di Genova. Cura il Tractatus de potestate summi pontifices; La Cronologia vedica in appendice a La dimora artica dei Veda. Tra i fondatori del movimento tradizionale romano. Collabora attivamente con Arya, ispirate dall'O. I. C. L. Altre saggi: Dei italici; Miti italici, Archetipi e forme della sacralità romano-italica, Genova, Ecig; Il movimento tradizionalista romano, Scandiano, Sear; La religione dei romani” (Milano, Rusconi); “Il magico Ur” (Borzano, Sear); “I liguri: etno-genesi di un popolo” (Ecig, Genova); “La città degli dei”; “La tradizione di Roma e la sua continuità” (Ecig, Genova); "Favete Linguis!" Saggi sulle fondamenta del Sacro in Roma antica” (Arya, Genova); "Ambrosiae pocula" (Tridente, Treviso); "Nella terra del drago" note insolite di viaggio nel Regno del Bhutan (Tridente, La Spezia); “Il mondo alla rovescia” (Arya, Genova); “In difesa della tradizione” (Arya, Genova); “Le sacre radici del potere” (Arya, Genova); “La massoneria volgare speculativa” (Arya, Genova); “Lettere ad un amico” (Arya, Genova); “Hic manebimus optime” (Arya, Genova); “Etica aria” (Arya, Genova); “Aspetti del lessico pontificale: gli indigitamenta”; “ “I LARI nel sistema spazio-temporale romano”; “Santità delle mura e sanzione divina,”; “Gl’arii”; “Via romana agli Dei”; Centro studi La Runa.IL MOVIMENTO TRADIZIONALISTA ROMANO: Studio storico preliminare SeaR. implicatura maschile, ario, gl’arii, I liguri, romani, antica roma, massoneria volgare.  Grice: Ponte, tu parli di “implicatura conversazionale maschile”: io, da inglese, temo sempre che “maschile” qui voglia dire “detta con tono solenne e senza ammettere di stare facendo poesia”. Ponte: E tu, Grice, quando dici “poesia”, implichi che la Tradizione sia un vezzo. Invece è disciplina: “favete linguis!” non è solo latino, è un invito a parlare meno e significare di più. Grice: Appunto: tu dici “Roma arcaica, diritto, simboli”, ma implichi “attenzione: ogni parola ha un rito, e ogni rito una gerarchia”. Da Oxford lo chiameremmo “contesto”; a Pontremoli lo chiamate “altare”. Ponte: E quando tu dici “contesto”, implichi che bastino massime e cooperazione. Io invece dico: in certe conversazioni la massima suprema è una sola—non “sii chiaro”, ma “sii degno”… e se proprio devi violare una massima, che sia per rispetto del Sacro (o, almeno, per non disturbare i Lari). Ponte, Renato del (1967). Studio sul Trattato De Potestate summi pontificis di Guglielmo di Sarzano, Genova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Ponzio: la ragione conversazionale e il segno dell’altro, o della semiotica filosofica – la scuola di San Pietro Vernotico Augusto Ponzio (San Pietro Vernotico, Brindisi, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e il segno dell’altro, o della semiotica filosofica. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, cooperative inference from what is explicitly said plus shared norms (relevance, sufficient informativeness, sincerity, clarity), so that what is meant can exceed what is said without collapsing into vagueness because the “extra” content is, in principle, reconstructible and cancellable. Ponzio’s semiotica filosofica, by contrast, shifts the centre of gravity from efficiency in information transfer to responsibility toward otherness: the sign is not primarily a tool for getting beliefs into heads but a site of dialogic relation in which the other’s irreducibility matters, and where “waste” in language (redundancy, excess, polyphony, metaphor, multilingual friction) can be constitutive of meaning rather than a defect. In that sense, Ponzio reads conversational rationality as hospitality rather than mere cooperation: the conditions for understanding are not exhausted by maxims that optimize exchange, because conversation also has to make room for misunderstanding, asymmetry, and the ethical demand carried by the other’s address. Historically, this orientation is already visible in Ponzio’s early work on Levinas: he graduated in philosophy at the University of Bari on 28 June 1966 with Giuseppe Semerari as supervisor, on the phenomenology of interpersonal relation with special reference to Totalité et Infini, and he then published La relazione interpersonale in 1967, a book often cited as among the earliest monographs on Levinas; the contrast with Grice is therefore that Grice formalizes how rational agents manage implied meaning within talk-exchanges, while Ponzio foregrounds how meaning and sign-use are ethically and dialogically constituted by the presence of the other, even when that makes communication less economical and more exposed. Studia a Bari sotto SEMERARI . Insegna a Bari. Cura ROSSI-LANDI . Studia la fenomenologia della relazione interpersonale. Insegna a Brindisi, Francavilla Fontana, e Terlizzi. Studia scienze dei linguaggi e linguaggi delle scienze, intert-estualità, inter-ferenze,e  mutuazioni.  Pubblica “Enunciazione e testo letterario nell'insegnamento dell'italiano come lingua straniera” (Guerra, Perugia);  Linguistica generale, scrittura letteraria e traduzione, Da dove verso dove. L'altra parola nella comunicazione globale, A mente. Processi cognitivi e formazione linguistica, Lineamenti di semiotica e di filosofia del linguaggio; Introduzione a Bachtin (Bompiani); “Il discorso amoroso” (Mimesis) e Bachtin e il suo circolo (Bompiani, collana “Il pensiero Occidentale” diretta da Reale); Summule logicales (Bompiani); Manoscritti matematici (Spirali); La filosofia come professione, come istituzione, presuppone una filosofia propria del linguaggio, che si esprime nella tendenza del linguaggio al pluri-linguismo dia-logico, alla correlazione dialogica delle lingue e dei linguaggi di cui sono fatte, una filosofia del linguaggio, in cui ‘del linguaggio’ è da intendersi come genitivo soggettivo: un filosofare del linguaggio, che consiste nella pluri-discorsività dialogizzata. I campi di suo studio e di sua ricerca sono la semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio. Filosofia del linguaggio è l'espressione che meglio esprime l'orientamento dei suoi studi e come egli affronta i problemi relativi alla semiotica dal punto di vista della filosofia del linguaggio, alla luce degli sviluppi delle scienze dei segni, dalla linguistica alla bio-semiotica.  il segno dell’altro, semiotica filosofica, segno, segnico, il segnico, l’amore, lo spreco del segno, Vico e la linguistica cognitiva; Landi; sottiteso, Grice, pragmatica, metafora, vailati. Grice: Ponzio, tu dici “il segno dell’altro”, e già io sento una piccola ansia pragmatica: perché l’“altro”, per definizione, è quello che non risponde come previsto… e poi la colpa ricade sempre sull’implicatura. Ponzio: E tu, Grice, quando dici “colpa”, implichi che il segno debba essere economico e obbediente. Io invece studio anche lo spreco del segno: a volte il linguaggio produce più relazione che informazione—e lo fa apposta. Grice: Capisco: Rossi-Landi ti ha insegnato che i segni lavorano, e Bachtin che litigano in più lingue. Quindi quando uno studente straniero dice “ho capito”, spesso non sta dicendo che ha capito… sta chiedendo pietà in forma dialogica. Ponzio: Esatto. E quando tu insisti sul “principio conversazionale”, io implico il mio correttivo: il principio non è “cooperazione”, ma “ospitalità”—perché la conversazione riesce solo quando c’è posto anche per l’altro, per l’equivoco, e persino per una metafora che arriva in ritardo (come il treno per Brindisi). Ponzio, Augusto (1965). Tesi di laurea su Semerari. Bari.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Porta: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale magica – filosofia italiana –  (Roma).  Giuseppe Porta (Castelnuovo Garfagnana): la ragione conversazionale -- filosofia italiana -- there may be another!  Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rational, cooperative inference from what is said plus shared expectations of relevance, informativeness, sincerity, and clarity, so that an audience can be led to an additional meaning without it being explicitly stated and with that meaning remaining, in principle, cancellable. Giuseppe Porta (detto il Salviati), as framed in your passage, belongs to a Renaissance world in which “meaning” is often relocated from spoken exchange to designed artefact: an image, an emblem, a frontispiece, a mechanical device, or an encoded scheme that invites the viewer to infer a hidden order, whether in the stars, the voice, or the taxonomy of sounds. Set beside Grice, Porta’s “conversational reason” looks like an artisanal analogue of implicature: the artist-engineer supplies cues (visual, diagrammatic, or mechanical) that underdetermine their interpretation, and the informed spectator completes the sense by a disciplined act of inference; the difference is that Grice’s implicatures are normatively governed by cooperative talk between agents, while Porta’s inferences are governed by conventions of design, patronage, and learned reading practices that turn artefacts into quasi-utterances. The convergence is that both treat the unsaid as productive: Grice shows how economy and tact in speech can convey more than is stated, while Porta shows how economy and elegance in form (a frontispiece, a schematic “code,” a crafted ceiling) can carry more meaning than it depicts, by relying on the audience’s capacity to bridge from sign to intended significance. Porta: l’implicatura conversazionale. Pittore, matematico, astronomo e astrologo italiano, studia a Roma, dove conosce il maestro Francesco SALVIATI (del quale assunse il cognome), assieme al quale si trasferì poi a Venezia. Ivi, tra le tante opere, si occupa della decorazione del soffitto della Marciana e affresca la sala regia dei Palazzi vaticani a Roma. Nella prima parte del Codice Marciano Porta affronta il tema del rapporto tra movimento degli astri e linguaggio, indagando la formazione degl’elementi vocali, definendo un'embrionale tassonomia dei suoni e prospettando la possibilità di una  loro riproduzione ARTIFICIALE attraverso appropriati dispositivi meccanici.Per approfondimenti  vedasi treccani.it/enciclopedia/giuseppe-porta Dizionario-Biografico, a cura di  Biffis.   Giuseppe Porta, detto il Salviati o il Salviatino (Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, 1520 – Venezia, 1575), è stato un pittore italiano.   Targa al pittore visibile sotto il Loggiato a lui dedicato Biografia Si formò nella bottega del celebre Francesco Salviati, in onore del quale decise di assumere proprio "Salviati" come nome d'arte. Già nel 1535 era a Roma assieme al maestro, dove si dedicò alla decorazione esterna delle facciate di vari palazzi; è in questo periodo che i due poterono studiare da vicino le opere di Raffaello: sarà questo un fatto centrale in quella definizione di maniera che così come stabilita dai due artisti di concerto al Vasari guarderà alla maniera dello stesso Raffaello oltre che di Michelangelo.  Nel 1539 il Porta lasciò Roma per recarsi prima a Firenze (dove ebbe appunto a conoscere il Vasari), poi a Bologna e quindi, nel luglio dello stesso anno a Venezia.  Il suo primo lavoro autonomo fu quello che gli garantì la maggior fama, ovvero l'incisione posta a frontespizio del volume deutero-esperanto – fonetica naturale, fonetica artifiziale.  V Porta, Giuseppe (1540). Illustrazioni e frontispizoi per Francesco Marcolini, Le sorti intitolate giardino d’i pensieri. Venezia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Porta: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale fisio-nomica – la scuola di Vico Equense -- filosofia campanese Giovanni Battista Della Porta (Vico Equense, Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale fisio-nomica. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, cooperative inference from what is said plus shared expectations of relevance, informativeness, sincerity, and clarity, so that the “extra” meaning of an utterance is accountable and (in principle) cancellable rather than mystical. Della Porta, by contrast, operates in a Renaissance natural-magical and proto-empirical register where meaning is read off bodies, faces, and resemblances, and where his celebrated physiognomic plates and his broader “secrets” literature treat signs less as products of conversational coordination and more as indices in nature to be deciphered by an observer. Set beside Grice, Porta’s physiognomic reasoning looks like a systematic attempt to turn the world into a conversational partner: nature “says” character through facial traits, and the interpreter supplies the bridge from visible cue to invisible disposition, much as a Gricean hearer supplies the bridge from sentence to implicature—but here the bridge is not governed by cooperative maxims between agents but by analogical classification and the rhetoric of the marvelous. The comparison, then, is that Grice explains how rational agents manage what they mean by managing what they leave unsaid, whereas Porta exemplifies an older semiotic ambition in which the unsaid is supposedly written on the body itself, and the risk is not mis-implicature but misreading: confusing culturally loaded resemblance for reliable evidence. Historically, the contrast is sharpened by Porta’s concrete works that foreground sign-systems outside ordinary talk—Magia naturalis first published in 1558 and expanded to 20 books in 1589, De furtivis literarum notis in 1563 on secret writing, and De humana physiognomonia in 1586 with its extensive illustrations—each of which shows a mind fascinated by how signs can guide belief, even when the “speaker” is nature, a cipher, or a face rather than a cooperative interlocutor. Grice: “He is the one with the funny illustrations of men and animals! The Italian way to comment on Aristotle!” Riceve le basi della sua formazione culturale in casa, dove si è soliti discutere di questioni filosofiche, e dimostra immediatamente le sue notevoli innate capacità, che poté sviluppare attraverso gli studi grazie alle condizioni agiate della famiglia. La famiglia ha una casa a Napoli a via Toledo -- il palazzo Della Porta -- una villa a Due Porte, nelle colline intorno a Napoli, e la villa delle Pradelle a Vico Equense. Tra i suoi maestri vi sono il classicista e alchimista PIZZIMENTI, e i filosofi ALTOMARE e PISANO. Pubblica “Magiae naturalis sive de miraculis rerum naturalium”. Pubblica un saggio di crittografia, il “De furtivis literarum notis” dove scrive un esempio di sostituzione poli-grafica cifrata con accenni al concetto di sostituzione poli-alfabetica. Per questo è ritenuto il maggiore crittografo italiano. Quando già la sua fama è consolidata, presenta il suo saggio sulla crittografia a Filippo II e viaggia in Italia. Ha un saggio, “Sull'arte del ri-cordare” – ars reminiscendi (Sirri, Napoli). Fondato intanto “i segrettari”, l'Academia Secretorum Naturae, Accademia dei Segreti, per appartenere alla quale e necessario dimostrare di effettuare una scoperta. L'accento viene tuttavia posto più sul meraviglioso che sul scientifico. Le raccolte di segreti costituivano un genere letterario che incontra una straordinaria fortuna con l'avvento della stampa a caratteri mobili. Per segreto si intende conoscenza arcana, ma anche ricetta, preparazione di farmaci e pozioni d’effetto straordinaro, riguardante un argomento di medicina, chimica, metallurgia, cosmesi, agricoltura, caccia, ottica, costruzione di macchine, ecc. implicatura fisionomica, filologia.  Grice: Caro Porta, ultimamente mi sono interrogato sulla fisionomia, che tu hai illustrato in modo così originale. Mi affascina come dietro la “legge” – quel nomos che si applica caeteris paribus – si nascondano le complessità della fisi, cioè la natura stessa, nel suo splendore. Secondo te, quanto riesce davvero la fisionomia a cogliere ciò che è naturale e a distinguerlo dalle regole che tentiamo di imporre? Porta: Grice, la tua domanda riflette una sottile comprensione! La fisionomia, per me, non è solo un metodo di classificazione, ma un dialogo costante tra ciò che osserviamo e ciò che crediamo di sapere. La natura – la fisi – si manifesta in modi imprevedibili, mentre il nomos cerca di incasellare. I miei studi e le mie illustrazioni tentano proprio di mostrare questa tensione, questa danza tra ordine e meraviglia. Grice: È vero, Porta, e penso che la tua accademia dei segreti abbia incarnato proprio questo spirito: il sapere non si limita alle formule, ma si apre a ciò che è arcano e sorprendente. Mi chiedo, però, se non rischiamo, nella ricerca del meraviglioso, di trascurare la scientificità e la chiarezza. Come hai conciliato, nei tuoi scritti e nei tuoi esperimenti, il bisogno di stupire con quello di spiegare? Porta: Ah, Grice, la vita stessa è fatta di enigmi e soluzioni! Nei miei testi, come “Magiae naturalis” o nei segreti dell’Accademia, ho cercato di dare spazio sia alla meraviglia che alla razionalità. L’importante, secondo me, è non perdere mai la curiosità: osservare il volto umano, studiare la natura, cifrare la parola – tutto questo nasce dal desiderio di scoprire, ma anche di comunicare. La meraviglia è il primo passo, la conoscenza il secondo. E tra fisi e nomos, forse, ci vuole sempre un po’ di arte e un pizzico di magia napoletana! Porta, Giambattista della (1586). Magia Naturalis. Napoli: Longo.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Portaria: la ragione conversazionale o -- Eurialo e Niso, ovvero, dello spirito – ma non fia da Casal né d'Acquasparta, là onde vegnon tali alla scrittura, ch' uno la fugge, e l'altro la coarta – la scuola di Todi -- filosofia umbra  Matteo Portaria d’Acquasparta (Todi, Perugia, Umbria): la ragione conversazionale o -- Eurialo e Niso, ovvero, dello spirito – ma non fia da Casal né d'Acquasparta, là onde vegnon tali alla scrittura, ch' uno la fugge, e l'altro la coarta. Grice’s reason-governed conversational meaning is a micro-theory about how hearers infer what a speaker means beyond what is explicitly said by assuming cooperative rational exchange and applying norms like relevance, sufficiency, sincerity, and clarity, so that implicature is calculable and defeasible rather than mystical. Matteo d’Acquasparta (your “Portaria”), by contrast, belongs to the scholastic-theological tradition in which the central explanatory work is done not by pragmatic inference between conversational partners but by metaphysical and semantic distinctions (spiritus, anima, animus; synonymy vs homonymy; the role of a medium; hylomorphism and the status of intellect and soul), and where “conversation” is primarily a disciplined disputation whose rationality is underwritten by an ontology of form and matter and by a theory of signification inherited from Aristotle and developed in the schools. Put side by side, Grice explains how an utterance like “draw a boundary” can generate a socially potent implied commitment because interlocutors treat words as reasons within shared norms, whereas Portaria explains how terms like “spirit” and “soul” can or cannot be predicated because their meanings are anchored in a taxonomy of kinds and powers, not in conversational uptake. The convergence is that both treat language as accountable: Grice makes accountability practical and interpersonal (what your audience is entitled to infer), while Portaria makes it doctrinal and classificatory (what your terms can truly signify); the divergence is that Grice’s implicature lives in the space between speakers, while Portaria’s “implicature,” if we borrow the label, is the scholar’s habit of letting metaphysical commitments ride on apparently lexical choices, with the real work done by the underlying theory of being rather than by conversational maxims. Grice: “I like Portaria, but then anyone with an interest in Anglo-Saxon ‘soul’ should! – if a philosopher, that is! Unlike Anglo-Saxon soul who God knews whence it comes, the Romans had spiritus, and animus anima, which is cognate with animos in Greek meaning ‘wind’ – so that leans towards a hyle-morphic conception where the body (corpus) is what has the ‘materia’ and the ‘breath’ is the ‘forma’ --  Italian philosophers would ignore this – and more so now when Davidson is in vogue! – if it were not for Aligheri who has Portaria in “Paradiso” – there is indeed a serious philosophical confrontation between an ACCADEMIA and and a LIZIO conception of the soul as seen in the controversy between AQUINO  and P.! P. uses the same linguistic tools: is ‘spiritus’ synonym with ‘anima’? Or must we speak of ‘homonymy.’ And add ‘medium’ into the bargan! P. is less canonical than AQUINO and should interest Oxonians much, oh so much, more!” – Unfortunately, he was from Todi and donated all his manuscripts to Todi, which many skip in their Grand tour – although it IS on the Tevere as any member of the “Canottiere del Tevere” will know!” -- Grice: “My name is Grice – Paul Grice – Matteo’s name is Matteo Bentivgna dei Signori d’Acquasparta e Portaria. Nacque da una delle grandi famiglie delle Terre Arnolfe, quella dei Bentivegna, feudatari di Acquasparta e Massa Martana, trasferitisi a Todi. Studia a Bologna. Insegna a Roma. Alighieri lo nomina, biasimandolo, tramite le parole di Findanza  in opposizione a Ubertino da Casale: “Ma non fia da Casal né d'Acquasparta/là onde vegnon tali alla scrittura/ch' uno la fugge, e l'altro la coarta” (Par.). filosofi citati d’Alighieri nella Commedia (Par.: ma non fia da Casal né d'Acquasparta, là onde vegnon tali alla scrittura, ch' uno la fugge, e l'altro la coarta.), logica, dialettica, Occam Grice. Grice: Portaria, a Oxford “anima” suona sempre un po’ protestante, ma “spiritus” mi pare già un invito a respirare prima di litigare. Portaria: E a Todi, Grice, se non respiri non arrivi nemmeno alla seconda riga, perché Dante ti ha già messo in nota come esempio da non imitare. Grice: Allora facciamo così: io dico corpus e tu dici forma, e implico che tra noi due l’unico vero medium è un bicchiere di vino sul Tevere. Portaria: Accetto, ma solo se tu prometti di non chiamarlo “homonymy” davanti ai miei studenti, perché qui “uno la fugge e l’altro la coarta” e poi la conversazione muore. Portaria d’Acquasparta, Matteo (1270). Commentarium ad Sententiae Pietri Lombardi. Sorbonne.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Porzio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale nel lizio– la scuola di Napoli -- filosofia campanese Simone Porzio (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale nel lizio. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers move from what is explicitly said to what is meant by assuming cooperative rational exchange and inferring implicatures under norms like relevance, sufficiency, sincerity, and clarity; the “extra” meaning is therefore publicly reconstructible and, in principle, cancellable. Porzio, by contrast, is an Aristotelianizing Renaissance naturalist for whom the chief explanatory work is done by metaphysical and psychological doctrine rather than by a pragmatic calculus: his De mente humana treats mens humana as a natural-philosophical topic and, in his notorious mortalist reading of Aristotle, presses questions about soul and mind as theoretical theses to be defended in learned controversy, not as layers of implied content in everyday talk. Still, your staged exchange usefully shows a meeting point: Grice’s emphasis on “humana” as a qualifier can be redescribed as an attention to what a title itself pragmatically commits one to (it narrows the range of reference and prevents misleading generalization), while Porzio’s strategy of alternating “metaphysics, volcanoes, and scandals” can be redescribed in Gricean terms as audience-management via relevance and salience, a rhetorical way of ensuring uptake by guiding what the hearer is invited to infer. The comparison, then, is that Grice provides a micro-theory of how conversational reason generates and controls implicature within a talk-exchange, whereas Porzio exemplifies an older macro-style in which reason is exercised through doctrinal disputation and persuasive arrangement of topics, with implicature appearing not as a named mechanism but as the practical art of making one’s theses hearable amid competing authorities, censors, and schools. Grice: “His surname is plain “Porta,” but in Latin that is latinised as ‘portius,’ and then this vulgarized as ‘porzio’!” – But then who wants to be called “door”?” Grice: “Ordinary-language philosophy would HARDLY have been developed at Oxford except for the fact that Austin, like myself, was a double first in Greats! Greek was second nature to us, -- and ordinary language is based on a proficiency only attained by the elite – not by a graduate from the vulgar P. P. E. programme!” -- Studia a Pisa sotto NIFO . Scrive sul celibato dei preti (“De celibate”), sull'eruzione del Monte Nuovo (“Epistola de conflagratione agri puteolan”i) e sul miracoloso caso di digiuno di una ragazza tedesca (“De puella germanica”). I suoi saggi principali, fra cui il trattato di etica, “An homo bonus vel malus volens fiat” e in particolare il “De mente humana,” nel quale sostene la mortalità dell'anima secondo un'esegesi d’Aristotele – LIZIO. Proprio queste sue dottrine mortaliste, troppo facilmente accostate e sovrapposte a quelle sostenute da POMPONAZZI  nel “De immortalitate animae”, contribuirono a creare una leggenda biografica secondo la quale egli sarebbe stato allievo e quindi semplice epigono di PERETTO. In ogni caso, al di là di una innegabile tendenza materialista nella sua esegesi d’Aristotele del Lizio, evidente anche nel suo saggio, il “De rerum naturalium principiis,” sua produzione è caratterizzata anche da interessi teo-logici del tutto svincolati dai peripatetici del LIZIO e che sono particolarmente evidenti nei due commenti al pater noster che probabilmente non estranei ai fermenti evangelici della riforma italiana. Tra peripatetici, naturalisti e critici, "De’ sensi" e il "Del sentire, studi ittio-logici. Græcæ lingue grammaticam ab omnibus fere dixerim expectatam simul et expetitam, implicatura. Grice : « St. John’s, 1949. So it has finally happened: the ghost has come properly out of its machine (if it is a ghost at all—perhaps it is merely neutral) and Ryle’s The Concept of Mind is now on the Blackwell’s table, looking as if it had always been inevitable. Typically, and with his usual unhistorical cheek, Ryle contrives to dismiss—or rather to ignore—Simone Porzio, whose De mente humana (1544) we keep here as a small treasure in the college collection. And Porzio, at least, gets one thing right at the level of the title: humana matters. One may doubt whether pigs have a mens, but one had better allow that angels, if they exist, do; so “mind” simpliciter is already a philosophical liberty, while “the human mind” at least owns up to its intended range. The further affront is Ryle’s opening flourish about Descartes (he even manages to mispronounce him): as if the history of mind began in French and not in Aristotle, the Lyceum, and those awkward Renaissance Italians who took Aristotle seriously enough to get into trouble for it. Oxford does not, of course, practice philosophical historiography, except when it is convenient; but even by our standards, to begin with René and pass over Porzio as if St John’s had been collecting air is a little too much.” Grice: Porzio, cominciamo dal cognome: “Porta” in latino diventa Portius, e poi, per vie conversazionali (e un po’ napoletane), Porzio. Insomma: hai evitato di farti chiamare “Porta”… ma ti sei salvato solo per implicatura. Porzio: E tu, dicendo “porta”, dici etimologia; ma implichi che a Oxford vi credete aristocratici perché sapete il greco “come seconda natura”. A Napoli, invece, la seconda natura è sopravvivere ai commentatori. Grice: Però tu sei del Liceo—del Lizio, per carità—e scrivi De mente humana sostenendo la mortalità dell’anima: quando dici “Aristotele”, implichi “non chiamatemi Pomponazzi-bis, grazie”. Porzio: E quando io scrivo De celibate e pure dell’eruzione del Monte Nuovo e della puella germanica che digiuna, dico “filosofia”; ma implico che il vero principio conversazionale è questo: se vuoi che ti ascoltino, alterna metafisica, vulcani e scandali—altrimenti il pubblico, come l’anima, “non dura”. Porzio, Simone (1544). De mente humana. Firenze: Torrentino.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Possenti: la ragione conversazionale e la conversazione di Romolo e Remo – radice dell’ordine civile  Vittorio Possenti (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e la conversazione di Romolo e Remo – radice dell’ordine civile. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, cooperative inference: what a speaker means can outstrip what is explicitly said because hearers presume shared conversational norms (relevance, sufficiency, candour, clarity) and so reconstruct an intended “extra” meaning that remains, in principle, accountable and cancellable. Possenti, by contrast, approaches “conversational reason” less as a mechanism for deriving pragmatic inferences and more as a civil-metaphysical phenomenon: the Romulus–Remus scene figures language as instituting obligation and boundary, so that a word can become a bond and the failure of uptake (a misconstrual of “limit” as mere challenge) can found political order through conflict, while Thomistic metaphysics and personalism supply the deeper grammar in which civic speech is not just coordination but participation in being, good, and personhood. Set beside Grice, Possenti’s emphasis shifts the explanatory focus from the micro-logic of how a hearer calculates what is implied to the macro-normativity of what speech commits a community to; Grice explains how “a conversation gone wrong” generates a specific implicature or misunderstanding under shared rational expectations, whereas Possenti reads that same structure as revealing that institutions depend on a prior layer of meaning in which limits, promises, and authority are not optional conversational add-ons but ontologically and morally weight-bearing. (On the biographical detail in your citation, what can be supported publicly is that Possenti took an electronic-engineering degree at the Politecnico di Torino and worked on microwaves; the specific thesis title “Le micro-onde” is plausible but not securely traceable from standard public profiles.) Studia a Torino. Insegna a Venezia. Dei Aquinensi. Fonda l’Annuario di filosofia. Centro di ricerca sui diritti umani. Attrato dalla storia delle civiltà, ispirato da VICO . Studia l’idea d’un assoluto impersonale. Incontra l'istanza metafisica e umanista attraverso AQUINO , intuendo le possibilità speculative e liberanti incluse metafisica dell'essere. Tre sono gl’ambiti primari della sua ricerca: metafisica, pensiero teoretico e ritorno al realismo; personalismo; filosofia politica. Studioso d’AQUINO, del tomismo. Professore della grande tradizione della filosofia dell'essere, orienta l'attenzione critica verso GENTILE, il neo-parmenidismo italiano di SEVERINO nel suo ritorno a VELIA e il VELINO, ricercando una razionalità attenta alla storia ma non consegnata interamente alla furia del tempo. Dunque il ritorno all'eterno invece che l’eterno ritorno di Nietzsche e la ripresa del tema della creatio ex nihilo, assente in molta filosofia. Il suo approccio legge meta-fisica e nichilismo come due nuclei che tendono ad escludersi – i veliani -- di cui il primo è la fisio-logia e il secondo la pato-logia. Individua pertanto nella destituzione dei valori e nella riduzione della ragione a volontà l'esito ultimo del nichilismo. Questo vuole liberare Italia dalla metafisica, ritenuta distrutta dal criticismo, ma il compito della filosofia dell'essere è preparare una ripresa della metafisica dell'esistenza, tale che possa di nuovo tenere un posto nella storia della civiltà. Una presentazione ampia della sua è in “Storia della filosofia”; Filosofi italiani, Antiseri e Tagliagambe, Bompiani, si veda anche nichilismo e filosofia dell'essere, intervista, a c. di Mura, “Euntes docete.” radice dell’ordine civile – romolo e remo -- il principio speranza, prima navegazione, seconda navegazione, terza navegazione, Gentile, comunita, Severino, Aquino, umanesimo, seconda navigazione.  Grice: Possenti, tu parli di Romolo e Remo come se la fondazione di Roma fosse una conversazione andata male: uno dice “tracciamo un confine”, l’altro capisce “proviamo se regge” — e lì nasce l’ordine civile… a colpi di fraintendimento. Possenti: È proprio la radice: l’ordine civile comincia quando la parola diventa vincolo. Se non c’è un limite, la città è solo una comitiva; se c’è un limite, diventa comunità (e purtroppo qualcuno lo prende sul personale). Grice: E quando tu dici “radice dell’ordine”, tu dici storia; ma implichi metafisica: che senza un po’ di Aquinense—essere, bene, persona—Roma resta solo muratura e mito, cioè Severino col caschetto da cantiere. Possenti: E quando tu dici “Severino col caschetto”, tu dici una battuta; ma implichi una tesi: che il nichilismo è patologia perché riduce la ragione a volontà—mentre l’essere, se lo ascolti, non urla “io voglio”, ma sussurra “io sono”… e Romolo, almeno una volta, avrebbe dovuto sussurrare. Possenti, Vittorio (1964). Le micro-onde. Tesi d’ingegneria elettronica. Torino.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Pozza: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la scuola di Taranto  Carlo Dalla Pozza (Taranto, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rational, cooperative bridge from what is explicitly said to what is meant, recovered by hearers who assume shared conversational norms (relevance, adequate information, sincerity, clarity) and who can in principle calculate, challenge, or cancel the implied content. Dalla Pozza, by contrast, comes to “conversation” from the side of formal systems and normativity: trained on mathematical elegance, shaped by Kelsenian jurisprudence and deontic logic, and later interested in textual linguistics and semiotics, he is naturally drawn to the idea that what is left unsaid in an exchange can function like a hidden lemma in a proof or an unspoken clause in a legal system, governing uptake without being written into the surface form. Where Grice offers a micro-pragmatic account of how ordinary speakers generate and recognize implicatures through practical reasoning, Dalla Pozza’s orientation suggests a more structural and axiomatic sensibility: implicatures are not merely conversational flourishes but disciplined, rule-shaped inferences that can be modeled, constrained, and sometimes formalized, especially in institutional discourse (law, academic debate, conference “moves”). The pairing therefore highlights two complementary emphases: Grice explains the rational psychology of conversational inference, while Dalla Pozza’s formalist background invites the thought that conversational inference has a quasi-logical architecture, with elegance in proof and politeness in talk sharing the same virtue—achieving the intended result by saying no more than is needed. Grice: “I like Pozza; he uses ‘pragmatic’ quite a bit, by which he means Grice, of course!” Durante gli studi al liceo di Taranto, Tommaso, un insegnante di matematica di stile tradizionale gli stimola il gusto per i problemi matematici e per l'eleganza formale delle dimostrazioni. Studia a Bari dove si laurea con una tesi su SERRA  avendo come relatore Vallone. Coniuga l'amore per i sistemi formali con l'amore per Leopardi, Carducci -- maestro di Serra -- e Annunzio -- e tra i classici predilisse Tasso e Vita nuova di Alighieri.  Studia a Bari -- sotto Landi -- Pisa, e quindi metodi formali a Milano. Una svolta nella sua carriera filosofica è segnata dalla partecipazione agl’incontri di S. Giuseppe organizzati a Torino da BOBBIO. A partire da qui sviluppa idee in filosofia del diritto, specie – ovviamente -- su Kelsen, e sulla formalizzazione della logica deontica con particolare attenzione all'assiomatizzazione dei principi di una teoria generale del diritto in collaborazione con  Ferrajoli per i suoi “PRINCIPIA IVRIS”. Organizza a Taranto gl’incontri Info IVRE TARAS, logica informatica e diritto, al quale partecipano alcune delle figure più rappresentative del diritto, dell'informatica e della logica, tra cui Martino, Ferrajoli, Conte, Busa, Comanducci, Jori, Filipponio, Elmi, Guastini, e Sartor. Insegna a Taranto, mantenendosi scientificamente attivo e partecipando a conferenze di società filosofiche italiane -- specialmente la Società italiana di logica e filosofia della scienza e la Società italiana di filosofia analitica, dal convegno nazionale fino al convegno di Genova. Insegna a Lecce. Tra le principali influenze nei suoi studi di linguistica e semiotica testuale vi sono quella di  Petöfi. Insegna a Verona, Padova, Bolzano e, per le sue lezioni di logica deontica, a Petöfi e Kelsen. L’influenza maggiore viene dalle grandi opere di Frege, Russell e Carnap, ai cui  dedica uno studio, con particolare attenzione alla visione filosofica. Serra is a real and fairly well-known Italian man of letters: a literary critic and essayist associated with early 20th-century Italy, best remembered for his critical prose (often discussed as unusually sober, self-scrutinizing criticism) and for his war-era writings; he was from Cesena (Romagna) and died in World War I (1915) as a volunteer soldier. He is commonly linked with the cultural world around La Voce and with a strain of criticism that resists grand “systems” in favor of close attention to style, intellectual conscience, and the moral weight of judgment—so a thesis “su Serra” under a figure like Aldo Vallone fits the profile of a traditional Italian humanities formation (Serra as a touchstone for criticism, rhetoric, and modern Italian prose). Grice: Pozza, a Taranto mi dicono che tu ripeti spesso “pragmatico”: un’abitudine lodevole… anche se ho il sospetto che, per te, “pragmatico” significhi semplicemente “griceano”. Carlo Dalla Pozza: Colpito e affondato. Ma vedi: a scuola Tommaso mi ha insegnato che una dimostrazione elegante è come una conversazione educata—non dice tutto, ma lascia capire tutto senza far arrossire nessuno. Grice: Appunto: l’implicatura è il tuo teorema in incognito. Quando citi Kelsen e poi Ferrajoli, dici “rigore”; ma implichi “tranquilli, il diritto si può formalizzare senza trasformare gli studenti in moduli burocratici”. Carlo Dalla Pozza: E quando organizzo “Info IVRE TARAS”, dico “convegno”; ma implico “a Taranto anche la deontica viene al mare”—e che persino Frege, davanti a un panzerotto, concederebbe una piccola eccezione alle regole. Pozza, Carlo Dalla (1965). Serra. Bari. Why would Pozza write a thing on Serra when he did? Most likely because, at that stage, he had not yet become the Carlo Dalla Pozza we now associate with deontic logic, formal systems, and philosophy of language. As a student at the University of Bari, he was still formed within literature and philology, and his supervisor was Aldo Vallone, a major literary scholar rather than a logician. So a thesis on Renato Serra makes very good sense as part of an initially humanistic formation. [en.wikipedia.org], [it.wikipedia.org] There are probably three converging reasons. First, Dalla Pozza studied literature and philology before turning toward formal methods. A thesis on Renato Serra fits that early disciplinary setting exactly. It is the sort of thing one writes under a relatore like Aldo Vallone, in Bari, before one moves into linguistics, logic, and jurisprudence. [sites.google.com], [it.wikipedia.org] Second, Serra would have appealed to his literary temperament. The biographical notices stress that throughout his life Dalla Pozza remained deeply attached to Italian literature, especially Leopardi, Carducci, and D’Annunzio, as well as Dante and Tasso. Since Carducci was Serra’s teacher, Serra also offers an entry into a broader line of Italian critical prose and literary conscience that would suit a serious student of letters. [en.wikipedia.org], [sites.google.com] Third, Serra is a particularly good object for someone who would later care about rigor, style, and anti-rhetorical precision. Even before Dalla Pozza became a logician, he seems to have been drawn both to formal elegance and to literary exactness. Serra, with his sober, self-scrutinising criticism and resistance to grand systems, is exactly the kind of writer a young mind could take seriously before moving from criticism into formal philosophy. [en.wikipedia.org], [sites.google.com] So the short answer is: He wrote on Serra because he was still, at Bari, a student of literature and philology under Aldo Vallone, and because Serra matched his lifelong attachment to Italian literary seriousness before his later turn to logic and formal methods. [en.wikipedia.org], [it.wikipedia.org], [sites.google.com] If you want the slightly sharper interpretive version, I would put it this way: The thesis on Serra belongs to the first Dalla Pozza, the literary and philological one; the later logician is not a break with that formation so much as its severe continuation by other means. [en.wikipedia.org], [sites.google.com] So what is the PHILOSOPHICAL side to Serra that would have appealed Pozza? Please give years and publications in Italian by Serra that Pozza should or did cover The philosophical side of Renato Serra that would have appealed to Carlo Dalla Pozza is not “system-building” in the strict sense, but something subtler and, in a way, very compatible with a future logician: rigor of judgment, anti-rhetorical self-scrutiny, distrust of inflated generalities, and a moral seriousness about criticism itself. Serra treats literary criticism as an exercise in intellectual conscience, not merely taste; he is persistently concerned with how one is entitled to judge, what right one has to speak, and what happens when style outruns truth. That is already philosophical in a strong sense, even if it appears under literary criticism rather than under a chair of logic. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] More specifically, three features of Serra would plausibly have attracted Dalla Pozza. First, Serra has an almost phenomenology-like attention to the act of criticism itself. He is interested not only in authors and works, but in the critic’s own position, limits, and honesty. That would have appealed to a young mind sensitive to rigor and form, because it turns criticism into something like a discipline of exactness rather than mere belletristic impression. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] Second, Serra resists grand systems in favor of local, scrupulous judgment. That anti-systematic seriousness is philosophically close to later analytic virtues, even if it emerges in a different idiom. One can see why someone who later loved formal elegance might first have been drawn to a writer who disliked vague moralizing and inflated rhetoric. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] Third, Serra’s war writing, especially Esame di coscienza di un letterato, turns literary self-consciousness into a philosophical examination of responsibility, action, and the worth of intellectual life under pressure. That kind of inward severity is not logic, but it is very much a form of philosophy. [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [it.wikisource.org] As for years and publications in Italian that Dalla Pozza should or likely did cover in a thesis on Serra, the core list would be something like this. Su la pena dei dissipatori, 1904. This is one of the earliest printed items and would matter mainly as an early marker rather than as the philosophical center. [bing.com] Giovanni Pascoli, 1910. Important because it shows Serra as critic of a major poet and because it helps establish his method of judgment. [it.wikisource.org] Scritti critici: Giovanni Pascoli, Antonio Beltramelli, Carducci e Croce, 1910. This is probably indispensable for any serious early study of Serra, because it gathers the criticism through which his intellectual posture becomes visible. The Carducci e Croce section would be especially relevant for philosophical interest, since it places Serra in relation to large cultural authorities and to criticism as reflective practice. [archive.org], [treccani.it] Severino Ferrari, 1911. Relevant because Ferrari was one of the cultural-intellectual figures in Serra’s formation, and the piece helps map his critical values. [bing.com] The essays on Oriani, published in 1913 in the Rassegna contemporanea. These are important for Serra’s stance toward modernity, moral seriousness, and historical-literary judgment. [treccani.it] Le lettere, 1914. This is very likely central for Dalla Pozza, because it is where Serra’s reflection on literature, modern sensibility, and critical conscience becomes most self-conscious. Treccani even describes it as a “processo alla letteratura dell’immediato anteguerra,” which is exactly the kind of morally reflective criticism a thesis could treat philosophically. [books.google.com], [treccani.it] Ringraziamento a una ballata di Paul Fort, 1914. Probably less central, but useful if Dalla Pozza wanted to show Serra’s European literary sensibility and refined prose judgment. [treccani.it] Esame di coscienza di un letterato, 1915. This is almost certainly the philosophical center of any thesis on Serra. It is the work in which literary criticism passes into moral self-examination and into reflection on war, action, and the responsibilities of the intellectual. If Dalla Pozza wanted the most philosophically charged Serra, this is the text he would have had to treat at length. [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [it.wikisource.org], [treccani.it] Ultime lettere dal campo, 1915, usually printed with Esame di coscienza di un letterato. These would matter as documentary and ethical extensions of the Esame, not merely biographically but philosophically, because they show how Serra’s conscience meets historical action. [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [librinlinea.it] If Dalla Pozza was working in 1965, he also very likely used collected editions rather than only princeps editions. The major posthumous collections include Scritti critici, 1919, Le lettere, reprinted in 1920, Scritti inediti, 1923, and the later Scritti edition of 1938, edited by Giuseppe De Robertis and Alfredo Grilli. Those volumes would have made a thesis on Serra much easier to build. [archive.org], [bing.com], [it.wikisource.org] So if you want the shortest usable answer, I would say: What was philosophically attractive in Renato Serra for Carlo Dalla Pozza was Serra’s rigor of judgment, moral self-examination, anti-rhetorical seriousness, and reflective criticism as a discipline of conscience. The key texts Dalla Pozza should have covered are Scritti critici (1910), Le lettere (1914), and above all Esame di coscienza di un letterato (1915), with the early pieces on Pascoli, Severino Ferrari, and the 1913 essays on Oriani as supporting materials. [archive.org], [books.google.com], [catalog.ha...itrust.org], [treccani.it] If you want, I can next turn this into a sharper thesis-style paragraph in English, or into a dry 100-move conversation between G. and S. on why a future deontic logician began with Serra.