H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA -- T U

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tagliabue: la ragione conversazionale del Remo, o le strutture del trascendentale – il concetto di gusto nell’estetica italiana. Note sul contributo al Convegno.  Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Guido Morpurgo Tagliabue Remo (Milano, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale del Remo, o le strutture del trascendentale – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers move from sentence meaning to speaker meaning by presuming a shared rational enterprise (the Cooperative Principle and its maxims) and by treating apparent departures from those norms as evidence of further, intention-based content (implicatures) that are in principle calculable and cancellable; on this view, the central explanatory work is done by publicly recognizable communicative intentions plus shared expectations about rational conduct in talk. Morpurgo-Tagliabue, by contrast, is best situated within mid‑century Milanese theoretical philosophy and aesthetics (with formative links to phenomenology, empiricism, and philosophy of science, and with a postwar philosophical “debut” in works like Le strutture del trascendentale and Il concetto dello stile that help reorient Italian aesthetics beyond Crocean idealism): his key concern is not the micro-pragmatics of conversational inference but the conditions of possibility for experience, judgement, and value (including aesthetic judgement, “taste,” and style) at a transcendental level. The most direct point of contact is that Grice’s account presupposes rational agency in conversational interpretation, while Morpurgo-Tagliabue thematizes the deeper structures that make rational and evaluative comportment possible in the first place; however, where Grice operationalizes rationality as norms governing exchanges of utterances (so that even talk of “taste” becomes a case of how speakers manage relevance, evidential force, and communicative intentions), Morpurgo-Tagliabue treats “taste” and “style” less as conversational achievements than as philosophically thick mediations between subjectivity and objectivity—forms through which experience is organized and shared—so that the “reason” at stake is not primarily the cooperative management of what is meant in interaction but the transcendental articulation of how meaning, value, and form can be intelligible at all. -- il concetto di gusto nell’estetica italiana –Nasce da Giovanna Tagliabue. Non è noto il nome del padre.  Si forma a Milano, all’epoca nel campo filosofico caratterizzata dalla prevalenza di orientamenti estranei alla linea idealistica di Croce e Gentile, altrimenti dominante in Italia, e influenzati invece dalla contemporanea fenomenologia, dall’empirismo e dalla filosofia della scienza. L’influsso dell’ambiente filosofico milanese è manifesto nelle opere pubblicate da T. nel secondo dopoguerra, e in particolare in Le strutture del trascendentale – Milano -- e Il concetto dello stile – Milano --, che ne costituiscono il vero e proprio esordio filosofico. Infatti negli anni precedenti gli interessi dello studioso sono stati orientati prevalentemente verso la critica letteraria e teatrale: collabora alla rivista milanese Il Convegno, mentre è critico teatrale per La lettura. Altri articoli di critica letteraria apparvero nel dopoguerra nella rivista La rassegna d’Italia. Negli ultimi anni del conflitto è in contatto con il movimento Giustizia e Libertà, ma successivamente abbandona ogni impegno politico e vive una vita appartata. Insegna estetica a Milano e filosofia teoretica a Trieste.  La prima opera importante di estetica, Il concetto dello stile, rimasta anche la più sistematica pubblicata da Morpurgo in questo settore, rappresenta un contributo significativo al rinnovamento degli studi estetici italiani avvenuto quando si avvertì ormai imperiosa l’esigenza di superare l’impostazione data da Croce a questo campo. Nell'opera, T. procede innanzitutto a una ricognizione dello stato degli studi estetici in Italia, un bilancio critico che occupa tutta la prima metà del saggio. Dopo aver rapidamente ricordato i capisaldi della dottrina di CROCE, si volge ad analizzare le posizioni critiche nei confronti di Croce. Romolo, le strutture del trascendentale, concetto del gusto, estetica.  Grice: Professore Tagliabue, sono sempre rimasto affascinato dal suo approccio alle strutture del trascendentale. In che modo, secondo lei, il concetto di gusto si intreccia con la filosofia milanese e il rinnovamento dell’estetica italiana? Tagliabue: Grazie, Grice! A mio avviso, il gusto non è solo una questione di preferenze personali, ma rappresenta un autentico momento del trascendentale: è ciò che consente all’individuo di aprirsi alla dimensione estetica, superando le vecchie impostazioni crociane. Milano, negli anni del dopoguerra, ha offerto un terreno fertile per questa rivalutazione, favorendo un dialogo tra fenomenologia, empirismo e filosofia della scienza. Grice: È interessante! Quindi il gusto diventa una sorta di ponte tra il soggettivo e l’oggettivo, tra la percezione individuale e i valori condivisi. Le sue opere, penso a Il concetto dello stile, hanno contribuito a ridefinire il modo in cui l’estetica italiana affronta proprio questi temi. Tagliabue: Esatto, Grice! Come diceva mia madre, “non basta vedere, bisogna saper cogliere il senso profondo della bellezza.” Il trascendentale è lo strumento che ci guida, e il gusto diventa una lente attraverso cui si rinnova la nostra comprensione estetica. La filosofia milanese ha avuto il coraggio di superare le rigidità idealistiche e di aprire nuove strade. Ne sono felice! Tagliabue, Guido Mopurgo (1931). Contributo. Il Convegno.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Taglialatela: la ragione conversazionale degl’istituzioni di filosofia. Note sugl’Istituzioni di filosofia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Pietro Taglialatela (Mondragone, Caserta, Campania): la ragione conversazionale degl’istituzioni di filosofia – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is a general, explicitly pragmatic account of how hearers infer speaker-meaning from what is said by presuming rational cooperation: conversational exchanges are treated as purposive activities regulated by norms (Cooperative Principle and maxims), so that apparent irrelevance, underinformativeness, or stylistic markedness can be rationally “explained away” as generating implicatures that are (in principle) calculable, defeasible, and cancellable while remaining anchored in publicly recognizable intentions. Pietro Taglialatela (Mondragone, 19th century), by contrast, belongs to the Italian post-Risorgimento world of institutional philosophy, civic pedagogy, and confessionally inflected public intellectual life (Gioberti-inspired “istituzioni di filosofia,” later Protestant polemics and missionary activity): his work is concerned with founding and legitimating philosophical formation and moral-political orientation within institutions (schools, movements, churches), not with offering a technical model of conversational inference. Read against Grice, Taglialatela’s “ragione conversazionale” in your staged dialogue is best understood as a metaphor for how philosophical education and social belonging shape what counts as intelligible, persuasive, or “liberating” speech within a community—how an “institution” can be heard either as a cage or as wings—whereas Grice explains that very shift in uptake as a pragmatic phenomenon: the “institutionalize them” worry is a textbook case of how an utterance triggers a predictable interpretive path (a relevance-driven inference from institutional vocabulary to social control), and Taglialatela’s reply functions like an attempt to cancel and replace that implicature by supplying an alternative purpose and frame (“not gabbie but ali”). The upshot is that Grice provides the micro-level mechanics of meaning-in-interaction (how the hearer gets from words to intended meaning under rational norms), while Taglialatela represents a macro-level concern with the cultural and institutional conditions under which philosophical discourse is cultivated, authorized, and morally directed—conditions that can motivate, constrain, or rhetorically steer conversations, but do not themselves amount to Grice’s reason-governed theory of conversational meaning. Studia a Sessa. Insegna a Cava e Napoli. S’arruolarsi nelle truppe di GARIBALDI , per predicare i nuovi ideali del movimento unitario. Dirigge una scuola privata. Riprende e sposa le tesi di GIOBERTI , che lo affascina. Su questo indirizzo filosofico è stato imperniato Istituzioni di filosofia, Diogene, Napoli, che riceve le lodi di SPAVENTA. Non manca, in seguito, avendo aderito al protestantesimo, di compiere opere missionarie, in particolare in Puglia e in Abruzzo. A tal riguardo è documentato il viaggio di Pescasseroli sul quale scrisse CROCE, che segnala anche come e considerato, assieme a MAZZARELLA e CAPORALI, fra i filosofi più creativi del movimento protestante in Italia. Altre saggi: Apologia delle dottrine filosofiche di GIOBERTI, Diogene, Napoli, La scienza, la vita e SANCTIS, Diogene, Napoli, GARIBALDI, Speranza, Roma; Il papa-re nelle profezie e nella storia, Speranza, Roma, In Dio, Speranza, Roma; Fede, speranza e caritàm Speranza, Roma; Teoria evangelica della vita, Speranza, Roma, Ciampoli, T., Unione, Roma; Croce, Pescasseroli, Laterza, Bari; Fiore, Civiltà Aurunca, Iurato, T.: dalla filosofia del Gioberti all'evangelismo anti-papale, Claudiana, Torino; Gioberti, Protestantesimo in Italia, Dizionario biografico dei protestanti in Italia; Società di studi valdesi. Apologia della dottrina di Gioberti. 03 APOLOGIA DELLA 3 DOTTRINA FILOSOFICA DI V. GIOBERTI PER P. TAGLIALATELA NAPOLI TIPOGRAFIA ALL' INSEGNA DEL DIOGENE Strada Montesanto num. 14. 1867 Proprietà letteraria ; LE PICCOLE QUISTIONI DIALOGO PRIMO tra L'Autore e F. Toscano A. Vi ringrazio di gran cuore, professor Toscano, per esser vi finalmente degnato di rispondere alla critica che circa tre an ni addietro io mossi contro il vostro CorsoElementare di Fi losofia. T. istituzioni di filosofia.  Grice: Professore Taglialatela, lei che ha saputo fondare una vera scuola di istituzioni filosofiche a Mondragone, mi dica: qual è il segreto per far fiorire la filosofia anche dove sembra che il terreno sia duro e poco incline al pensiero?  Taglialatela: Ah, caro Grice, la filosofia è come il vento tra le colline campane: a volte basta un soffio, altre volte bisogna pazientare e seminare idee con costanza. E a Mondragone, tra Garibaldi, Gioberti e le nuove istituzioni, il pensiero si radica proprio quando meno te lo aspetti!  Grice: Non lo dico, ma se dovessi tenere un seminario sulle ‘istituzioni di filosofia’ a Vadum Boum, i barbari che ho come allievi—nulla a che vedere con quelli di Bononia—penserebbero subito che voglio ‘istituzionalizzarli’, magari metterli in qualche bella scatola regolamentare!  Taglialatela: Bellissima implicatura, Grice! In fondo, le istituzioni filosofiche non sono gabbie ma ali: bisogna volare, non farsi imbrigliare! E se qualcuno teme di essere istituzionalizzato, basta ricordargli che la filosofia, come diceva Gioberti, è fatta per liberare la mente, non per incatenarla. A Mondragone, si insegna a ragionare e a sorridere: meglio una scuola che sappia accogliere le differenze, che una istituzione che le sopprime! Taglialatela, Pietro (1864). Istituzioni di filosofia. Napoli: Diogene.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tarantino: la ragione conversazionale dell’inconscio e la coscienza – la scuola di Gravina. Note su Il problema della causalità. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giuseppe Tarantino (Gravina, Bari, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale dell’inconscio e la coscienza – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats conversation as a cooperative, rationally organized activity in which hearers infer speaker-meaning by assuming that contributions are made in accordance with an accepted purpose and are regulated by norms (the Cooperative Principle and the maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner); what is “meant” is often not identical with what is literally said, but is instead recoverable as a calculable implicature from the speaker’s publicly recognizable intentions plus shared expectations about rational talk. Giuseppe Tarantino (1857–1950), by contrast, was an Italian academic philosopher and pedagogue associated with Pisa (including leadership roles there), trained in the post-Hegelian/Italian critical tradition around figures such as Francesco Fiorentino, and known for historical-critical work (e.g., on Locke) and for broader treatments of will, ethics, and causality; nothing in his documented output places him as a precursor to Gricean pragmatics, and the “Grice–Tarantino” exchange in your passage is best read as a witty anachronistic staging that juxtaposes Tarantino’s interest in mind, will, and the conscious/unconscious nexus with Grice’s focus on how rational agents manage meaning in interaction. The clean comparison, then, is that Grice explains how conversational understanding is normatively guided and inferentially structured (how a remark about tea, self-forgetting, or “not knowing that one does not know” can communicate more than its literal content by exploiting cooperative expectations), whereas Tarantino’s philosophical psychology and ethics would frame talk about unconsciousness primarily as a problem about the structure of agency, cognition, and moral responsibility rather than as a problem about the inferential mechanics of talk-exchange; in the dialogue’s terms, Grice can treat Tarantino’s quips as cases of implicature generated by deliberate understatement or playful relevance-shifts, while Tarantino provides the thematic subject matter (consciousness, will, causal explanation) that Grice’s theory does not aim to analyze directly except insofar as such topics become contents handled by reason-governed conversational moves. Insegna a Pisa. Studia nel ginnasio e compì gli studi superiori a Pisa, dapprima come studente all'università della stessa città e successivamente come allievo della scuola normale superiore di Pisa. Inizia gli studi sotto la guida di FIORENTINO . Si laurea e segue a Napoli il maestro FIORENTINO. In sua memoria dedica al suo maestro “I Saggi Filosofici,” ottenne la docenza in filosofia. Inizia ad acquisire notorietà grazie ai saggi critici che pubblica sul Giornale Napoletano. Insegna al liceo Genovesi di Napoli. Compone il Saggio sulla volontà, Gennaro, Napoli.  Insegna al Marciano, e Pisa. Insegna anche alla scuola di pedagogia, dove tra i suoi insegnanti figura GENTILE. La sua notorietà cresce sempre più grazie ad alcuni suoi saggi critici pubblicati sulla Rivista di Filosofia Scientifica di MORSELLI, il più noto dei quali è su Locke. Tra i suoi studenti di Pisa più noti figurano NICOLA ed ACCADIA. Torna nella sua città natale, dove dona alla biblioteca Santomasi una parte cospicua dei suoi libri. A lui è stato intitolato il liceo. Altre saggi: Appunti di Filosofia, Toso, Aversa, Saggi filosofici, Napoli, Morano; Studio storico su Locke, Rivista di Filosofia, Milano-Torino, Dumolard; Saggio sul criticismo e sull'associazionismo, Napoli, Morano; In morte di CALDERONI, Vecchi, Trani; Saggio sulla volontà; Saggio sulle idee morali e politiche di Hobbes, Napoli, Giannini; Il problema della morale di fronte al positivismo e alla metafisica, Pisa, Valenti; Il principio dell'etica e la crisi morale, Napoli, Tessitore; Il concetto dello STATO ed il principio di nazionalità” (Napoli); “Discorso preposto alle traduzioni dal latino, dall’inglese e dal francese di SOTTILE, Napoli; VINCI  e la scienza della natura, Nel centenario di VINCI, La politica e la morale. Discorso, Pisa, Mariotti, Sulla riforma universitaria, Rivista di filosofia. Cfr. Turi, inconscio, Gentile, Vinci, lo stato, la nazione.  Grice: Professore Tarantino, mi hanno sempre affascinato i suoi studi sull’inconscio e la coscienza! Dica, secondo lei, una buona tazza di tè può aiutare a scoprire i misteri della mente, o rischia solo di renderli più... aromatici? Tarantino: Ah, caro Grice, se il tè fosse la soluzione, bisognerebbe aggiungerlo al programma di filosofia! Ma temo che il mistero dell'inconscio resti più difficile da dissolvere che lo zucchero nella bevanda. Grice: Mi trova d’accordo! Del resto, come scrivevo in Personal identity, io stesso non ero consapevole di essere inconsapevole. Un po’ come quando ti dimentichi dove hai messo gli occhiali... e li stai indossando! Ma non glielo dico, eh! Tarantino: Bella implicatura, Grice! In fondo, il filosofo che non sa di non sapere è come l’inconscio: sempre pronto a spuntare quando meno te lo aspetti, e magari pure con gli occhiali già sul naso! Tarantino, Giuseppe (1879). Dissertazione. Sotto Fiontino. Filosofia. Pisa.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tari: pooh-pooh e la ragione conversazionale e l’origine della lingua pirotese, o la questione spuria favorita da Grice. Note sul Saggio sulla filosofia delle scienze matematiche. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Antonio Tari (Villa Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Caserta, Campania): pooh-pooh e la ragione conversazionale e l’origine della lingua pirotese, o la questione spuria favorita da Grice  – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversation treats “what is meant” as systematically inferable from “what is said” plus shared rational expectations: interlocutors presume a cooperative point to the exchange and interpret apparent deviations from maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner as intelligible, intention-tracking moves that generate implicatures; meaning is thus anchored in publicly recognizable intentions and norms of rational communicative conduct. Antonio Tari (1809–1884), by contrast, is a nineteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher and man of letters (trained in law, active in liberal intellectual circles, later associated with aesthetics), not a contributor to pragmatics in Grice’s technical sense; in your playful passage he functions as a culturally and historically situated foil who treats “ragione conversazionale” and the “origin of Pirotese” as if language identity and etymological borrowing were matters settled by local dialect life, lexicographic authority, and witty reversals, so that the “spurious question” becomes a satire on how people overread categories (pirot/Parrot, pirotese as essence vs acquisition) rather than an analysis of how conversational inference works. The sharp comparison, then, is that Grice offers a general explanatory model of how rational hearers recover speaker-meaning (including how misdirection, joking, and apparent irrelevance are rationally decoded), whereas “Tari” in this vignette is best read as dramatizing the pre-theoretical social materials that make Gricean inference possible—dialect pride, metalinguistic stereotypes, appeals to dictionaries, and identity talk—without supplying Grice’s machinery of calculability, cancellability, and intention-recognition that turns those materials into a theory of reason-governed conversational meaning. Nacque a Santa Maria Maggiore in provincia di Caserta -- Santa Maria Capua Vetere --, da Giuseppe, conservatore delle ipoteche per la provincia di Terra di Lavoro, e da Anna Cossa. La data di nascita, in precedenza indicata come 1° luglio, è stata corretta di recente insieme al nome di battesimo, Marcantonio, registrato negli atti anagrafici -- L’estetica reale di T.: nei carteggi e nelle testimonianze di amici e contemporanei il nome fu citato spesso nelle forma dialettale del diminutivo, Totonno. Ha tre fratelli, Benedetto, Vincenzo e Achille, e una sorella, Teresita. La famiglia è originaria di Terelle, Frosinone, piccolo borgo compreso nel territorio storico dell’abbazia di Montecassino. Non molto si sa della sua formazione prima dell’arrivo a Napoli, città in cui la famiglia possede una casa. Ivi si laurea in giurisprudenza esercitando per qualche anno la professione forense, che abbandona tuttavia per dedicarsi agli studi filosofici a lui più congeniali. Autodidatta, fornito di una straordinaria erudizione, studia musica, sotto la guida di Conti, divenendo un abile esecutore, e apprend le principali lingue moderne e quelle classiche, insegnando tra l’altro i rudimenti del tedesco a Spaventa che conosce al collegio di Montecassino. A Napoli diserta i corsi del purista Puoti, indiscussa autorità sulla cultura napoletana del tempo, e frequenta invece le lezioni e la casa di GALLUPPI , docente di logica e filosofia teoretica, tra i primi a introdurre in Italia il pensiero critico. Le numerose prove letterarie di T. -- schizzi biografici, note di storia e storia della religione, recensioni e qualche lavoro di carattere critico-estetico -- sono ospitate in riviste e giornali. Collabora più assiduamente alla prima serie della Rivista napolitana, chiusa dalla censura --, scrivendo l’introduzione al primo numero. Il periodico, aperto a influssi provenienti dai paesi europei. origine della lingua.  Grice: Caro Tari, una domanda: i piroti parlano pirotese perché sono piroti, o diventano piroti appena iniziano a parlare pirotese? Sai, mi sembra una bella questione “spuria”! Tari: Ah, Grice, è del tutto naturale! Un piroto nasce già con il pirotese sulla punta della lingua. Nessuno in Villa Santa Maria Capua Vetere si sorprende: qui il dialetto è pane quotidiano! Grice: Locke direbbe che la mia lingua barbarica trasforma il “pirot” più in un “Parrot” che in un “Pidlock”... almeno così mi dice la mia filosofia del linguaggio! Tari: Touché, ma secondo l’Oxford English Dictionary, gli inglesi il “pirot” l’hanno preso dai veneziani, mica dagli italiani—e non l’hanno mai restituito! Se ne sono appropriati per sempre, come fanno spesso con le parole e col tè! Tari, Antonio (1830). Dissertazione. Giuisprudenza. Napoli.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tarozzi’ Giuseppe Tarozzi (Torino, Piemonte). Taorozzi, Giuseppe (1888). Dissertazione lettere. Torino.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tartarotti: la ragione conversazionale della differenza delle voci nella lingua italiana e la sua rilevanza filosofica, o dell’ omicidio rituale. Note su Del Congresso notturno delle Lammie. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Girolamo Tartarotti (Rovereto, Trento, Trentino-Alto Adige): la ragione conversazionale della differenza delle voci nella lingua italiana e la sua rilevanza filosofica, o dell’ omicidio rituale  -- Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers routinely derive what a speaker means from what is said by presuming cooperative, rational conduct in talk: interlocutors assume a shared purpose (“Cooperative Principle”) and interpret departures from its maxims (quantity, quality, relation, manner) as calculable signals that generate conversational implicatures, so that meaning is anchored in publicly recognizable communicative intentions and norms of rational exchange rather than in words alone. Tartarotti, by contrast, is an eighteenth-century Roveretan cleric-erudite best known for his interventions in debates on witchcraft (notably Del congresso notturno delle Lammie, 1749, printed by Pasquali) and for a broader Enlightenment-style critical method (libertas ingenii/libertas philosophandi), and he is not a theorist of conversational meaning in Grice’s technical sense; what your passage imaginatively attributes to him—“ragione conversazionale” behind “differences of voices” in Italian and the philosophical stakes of mishearing, culminating in a mock scenario where a phrase like “ammazza!” could be taken as either culinary praise or evidence in a “ritual murder” accusation—fits Tartarotti more as a satirically apt emblem of his anti-credulous, philological-legal sensibility than as a documented doctrine. The sharpest comparison, then, is that Grice offers a general, explicitly normative-rational framework explaining how interlocutors bridge literal content and intended meaning (and how misunderstanding is predicted when maxims are flouted or contexts shift), whereas “Tartarotti” in your staged dialogue functions as a historically situated figure whose concerns with interpretation, testimony, and culturally loaded signs (voices, exclamations, accusations) resonate with Gricean themes but remain pre-theoretical: he would treat misinterpretations as products of superstition, poor evidential standards, and interpretive malpractice, while Grice would diagnose them as predictable pragmatic inferences from linguistic form plus presumed rational cooperation, defeasible by context and cancellable by clarification. Nasce da Francesco Antonio, giureconsulto, poi membro del Consiglio cittadino dei trentuno, e da Olimpia Camilla Volani, discendente della nobile famiglia Serbati. Studia dapprima presso il modesto ginnasio di Rovereto, con scarso profitto, e dove colmare autonomamente le tante lacune, a partire dall’apprendimento del latino. A questo periodo di intensa applicazione risalgono due dissertazioni: il Dialogo della lingua latina e le Annotazioni al Dialogo delle false esercitazioni delle scuole di Paleario, in polemica contro l’uso di insegnare il latino col latino, entrambe pubblicate nella Raccolta ferrarese. Si trasferì a Padova per dedicarsi agli studi: ospitato da Calza, che lo introduce nella cerchia degli accademici patavini, è allievo e amico, fra gli altri, di Serry, Lazzarini e Volpi.  Il soggiorno padovano, ancorché breve – dopo un anno dovette tornare a Rovereto per mancanza di fondi, e rimane nelle ristrettezze finché non conquista una certa indipendenza economica con l’ausilio di un fedecommesso Serbati – risulta particolarmente significativo: ha accesso per la prima volta a biblioteche ricche e fornite, acquisì un metodo di studio ben più solido di quello scolastico, comincia a frequentare i classici della letteratura italiana – e a scrivere liriche non più alla maniera di Zappi, ma seguendo il modello di Petrarca -- Graser, Vita – e consegue una nuova maturità critica nel segno della libertas ingenii difesa nel De ingeniorum moderatione di Muratori, testo fondamentale per T.  Tornato a Rovereto, con l’intento di dare vita a un’impresa tesa al rinnovamento dell’arretrato panorama culturale trentino, fa arrivare da Verona lo stampatore Berno, a cui affida l’impressione delle Orationes di Muret, per facilitare lo studio del latino. accusa di omicidio rituale, la differenza delle voci nella lingua italiana.  Grice: Caro Tartarotti, mi chiedevo: nella lingua italiana, con tutte queste differenze di voci, non potrebbe accadere che un "omicidio rituale" venga scambiato per una semplice discussione animata a tavola? È la magia del sintamme, no? Tartarotti: Ah, fidati di Grice per essere l’unico capace di unire simili sintamme in un unico colpo! D’altronde, se si sente gridare “ammazza!” in Trentino, potrebbe essere solo un elogio culinario… o la prova di una dialettica particolarmente vivace! Grice: Quindi, se mi capita di studiare la differenza delle voci, devo stare attento a non ritrovarmi nel bel mezzo di un processo per omicidio rituale? Certo che la filosofia italiana è più pericolosa di quanto pensassi! Tartarotti: Ma sì, Grice, qui fra Rovereto e Padova, basta una sfumatura vocale per trasformare un teorema in una tragedia! Meglio riderci sopra: al massimo, finiremo accusati di omicidio… del silenzio! Tartarotti, Girolamo (1749). Del Congresso notturno delle Lammie. Venezia: Bettinelli

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tataranni: la ragione conversazionale del gusto per l’antico – filosofia basilicatese. Note sul Saggio d’un filosofo politico amico dell’uomo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Onofrio Tataranni (Matera, Basilicata): la ragione conversazionale del gusto per l’antico – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats conversation as a cooperative, normatively constrained enterprise in which hearers recover what a speaker means by assuming rational adherence to a shared purpose and to maxims (quantity, quality, relation, manner), so that departures from the literal content are not noise but calculable implicatures; on this picture, “reason” is built into the very mechanism by which what is said licenses what is meant. Tataranni, by contrast, belongs to the late-Enlightenment Neapolitan world in which “ragione” is primarily a civic and moral power (reformist, pedagogical, oriented to public virtue and political order), and the “conversational” is less a formal inferential engine than a cultivated practice of conversazione—an educated traffic in examples, classical memory, and socially shared standards of taste and authority (the gusto per l’antico functioning as a common cultural code). Read against Grice, Tataranni’s appeal to Rome surviving as a name (stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus) can be taken as a miniature lesson in how names and inherited references steer communal understanding even when the original reality has decayed, but the explanatory burden sits on historical-cultural continuity rather than on a general theory of implicature; where Grice would model the exchange as rational inference from a maxim-flout to an intended meaning, Tataranni frames it as a witty, tradition-saturated redirection of imagination and allegiance, showing conversation as a medium in which reason works through shared classical allusion and civic pedagogy more than through explicit, universalizable conversational rules. Lucano di origine, esponente dell'illuminismo napoletano. Non sappiamo a quale ceto appartenesse la sua famiglia, ma sicuramente essa è fornita dei mezzi economici. Non a caso, quando è battezzato nella chiesa cattedrale di Matera, i suoi genitori scelsero come padrino il nobile Ferraù. Sin da ragazzo matura quella che è la sua vocazione, tanto che divenne prima allievo del seminario diocesano. Sebbene ha una posizione di un certo rilievo sia in ambito ecclesiastico, sia in ambito educativo, non mostra alcun tentennamento nell'accettare l'invito del principe di Francavilla, che lo vuole a Napoli per affidargli la direzione della sua paggeria. Grazie a questo incarico, accrebbe ancor di più la stima di cui già gode, stringendo rapporti amichevoli con i filosofi più illustri ed autorevoli del tempo, incardinate nella reale accademia delle scienze e belle lettere. Ha la possibilità di frequentare proprio tali stimolanti dibattiti, che del resto avrebbero formato l'humus delle sue future riflessioni, in qualità prima di direttore della paggeria, poi della scuola militare del real collegio militare -- ufficialmente reale accademia militare -- fortemente voluta da Ferdinando IV, che mostra di aderire al generale clima di rinnovamento e consolidamento delle istituzioni militari del suo regno. Ha l'onore di esserne il direttore, partecipando vivamente, dunque, al graduale svilupparsi e moltiplicarsi dell'alveo della cultura politica riformatrice, che ancora auspica un reale cambiamento all'interno dello stesso apparato monarchico. Così, nell'arco di un settennio, pubblica dei saggi molto significativi, in cui è evidente il suo tracciato ideale di società. Tuttavia, in seguito agl’avvenimenti, quindi dopo il concordato e dopo la fallita congiura di Lauberg, le sue posizioni rispetto alla politica e allo stato cambiano tangenzialmente. filosofo principe, i sudditi e i cittadini, il popolo sovrano – sovrano e monarca, filantropia del re.  Grice: Caro Tataranni, si dice che il “gusto pell’antico” porti dritto a... BONONIA! Me lo suggerisce G. E. Moore con la sua aria da logico inflessibile: amare l’antico è sinonimo di bolognesità, non trovi? Tataranni: Ah, Grice, mi permetto una piccola correzione filosofica: se proprio il gusto va all’antico, allora bisogna arrivare a ROMA! Certo, la città forse non è più quella di un tempo, ma – come dice quel famoso epigramma – Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. Il nome resta anche se le mura vacillano! Grice: Quindi mi stai dicendo che, a forza di cercare colonne e capitelli, rischio di trovarmi davanti solo… nomi su pergamene polverose? Però, che consolazione raffinata: puoi togliere Roma dall’Urbe, ma non dal discorso! Tataranni: Esattamente! E così, quando la gente cerca la gloria di Roma, trova almeno la gloria del suo nome. In fondo, persino una rosa, cambiato il nome, rimarrebbe pur sempre… oggetto di discussione da filosofi! Meglio riderci su e intingere la penna nell’inchiostro dell’antichità! Tataranni, Onofrio (1784). Saggio d’un filosofo politico amico dell’uomo. Napoli: Bisogno.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Telesio: la ragione conversazionale del filosofo sperimentale – la scuola di Cosenza. Note sul De rerum natura iuxta propria principia Bernardino Telesio (Cosenza, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale del filosofo sperimentale – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally derive speaker-meaning that goes beyond what is strictly said by presuming a cooperative, purposive exchange and inferring implicatures when an utterance would otherwise look oddly uninformative, irrelevant, or indirect; the Telesio passage invites a comparison in which “reason” is relocated from conversational normativity to method, namely the empiricist demand that nature be understood “according to its own principles” rather than by Aristotelian a priori machinery. Online scholarship on Telesio emphasizes that he is cast (famously by Bacon) as “the first of the moderns” and that his De natura iuxta propria principia (first published 1565, later expanded) insists on the primacy of sense perception and observation in natural philosophy, rejecting Aristotelian hylomorphism and explaining nature via active principles (notably heat and cold) acting on matter; this sets up a productive contrast with Grice, who is not primarily concerned with how we know the world but with how we make ourselves intelligible to one another in talk. Still, the shared hinge is anti-dogmatism about “reason”: Telesio attacks scholastic reasoning that outruns experience, while Grice attacks a semantics that ignores the rational expectations governing actual conversation, showing that much of what we communicate is not encoded but responsibly inferable. In the vignette’s etymological play around em-pereia, ex-perior, and per-capio, “experience” becomes itself a site of implicit meaning: the speaker invites the hearer to supply what the term-construction suggests about method and epistemic authority, a micro-level analogue of Telesio’s macro-level program of letting nature (and not inherited theory) constrain inference. So, where Telesio’s “reason” is disciplined by observation and the autonomy of natura rerum (a methodological rationality aimed at knowledge of the world), Grice’s “reason” is disciplined by cooperative norms and the calculability of implicature (a pragmatic rationality aimed at mutual understanding), and the comparison becomes: Telesio reforms the sources of warranted belief about nature, whereas Grice formalizes the sources of warranted inference about what a speaker means in conversation. Grice italico Mentre le sue teorie naturali sono state successivamente smentite, la sua enfasi sull'osservazione fa il primo dei moderni che alla fine hanno sviluppato il metodo scientifico. Nato da genitori nobili, è istruito a Milano dallo zio, lui stesso uno studioso e poeta di eminenza, e poi a Roma e Padova. I suoi studi hanno incluso tutta la vasta gamma di argomenti, classici, scienza e FILOSOFIA, che costitusceno il curriculum degli rinascimentali sapienti. Così equipaggiata, inizia il suo attacco sul LIZIO medievale che poi fiorisce a Padova e Bologna. Fonda l’Accademia cosentina. Per un certo periodo vive nella casa del duca di Nocera. Il suo grande saggio è “Sulla natura delle cose secondo i loro propri principi,” seguito da un gran numero di saggi di importanza sussidiaria. L’opinioni eterodosse che mantenne suscitano l'ira di Roma per conto del suo amato LIZIO. Tutti i suoi saggi sono stati immessi sul “Index.” Invece di postulare materia e FORMA, T. basa l'esistenza sulla materia e FORZA. Questa forza ha due elementi opposti. Il primo elemento è il calore, che espande la materia. Il secondo è il freddo, che la contræ. Questi due processi rappresentano tutte le tipi di esistenza, mentre la MASSA su cui opera la FORZA rimane la stessa. L'armonia del tutto consiste nel fatto che ogni cosa separata sviluppa in sé e per sé conformemente alla sua natura e allo stesso tempo la sua MOSSA avvantaggia il resto. empirismo, teoria della percezione, l’anima d’Aristotele, l’analogia, l’uomo e gl’animali, la ragione, i antici, contro i antici, osservazione, percezione, la tradizione empirista italiana, il Telesio di Bacone, sperimento, sperienza, esperienza, ex-perior, esperire – Latino ex-perior, Gr. em-pereia, osservazione, osservare – observatum, percipere – percezione per-capio.  G: 1939. You look as though you have smuggled Clarendon into my room. S: Sir, Clarendon smuggled itself into my room. I merely failed to resist. G: That is the Oxford defence: non-resistance as scholarship. Now, you said you found Fowler. S: I did. He is meticulous in the way only an Oxford editor can afford to be. G: Meaning: meticulous because he has already eaten. S: Precisely, sir. Fowler’s Introduction. He calls Telesio a precursor. G: Read the Fowler bit you’ve got. Slowly. Pretend you are not pleased. S: From Fowler’s Introduction, on the precursors of Bacon. He says Bacon called Telesio novorum hominum primus. G: That phrase is the hinge. Now, I want it in its habitat. What is Fowler actually doing with it. S: He is doing what Oxford does: building a genealogy so that Bacon’s empiricism looks less like a stunt and more like an inheritance. G: Good. Continue. S: Fowler says, in effect, that Telesio is the first of the moderns who made any successful attempt to construct a system on a physical basis. G: That is the English gloss. Now, the Latin. S: The Latin is Bacon’s, quoted by Fowler: novorum hominum primus. G: Minimal Latin, maximal claim. Now, S, tell me what you think Bacon meant by “new men.” S: Men who stop repeating Aristotle in the same breath as they claim to be observing nature. G: Quite. “New” in Bacon’s mouth is anti-scholastic, not merely chronological. S: But why Telesio, sir. Why not Galileo. G: Because Bacon is not compiling an Italian honour-roll. He is identifying a certain kind of rebellion: a natural philosophy built on “physical” principles rather than on scholastic forms. S: So Telesio is “new” because he turns to heat and cold, and to the senses, and makes nature explain itself. G: Exactly. Bacon likes any man who demotes syllogism and promotes experience, even if the man’s physics is later wrong. S: That sounds like your future method, sir. G: My future method is not to have one. Bacon’s method is to have a method and then call it modest. S: So Fowler is treating Telesio as a bridge. G: Yes. The word “bridge” is important. It means there is a gap: scholastics on one side, Bacon on the other, and Telesio as the first plank. S: And you want me to say where Bacon might have heard of Telesio. G: I want you to resist inventing a charming story. Give me the sober channels. S: Books. G: More. S: Continental scholarly circulation. Italian natural philosophy was not exactly secret by then. G: And? S: Bacon’s own circle of learned correspondents. He reads widely in Renaissance natural philosophy. G: Good. Also: Telesio’s De rerum natura had been published and discussed; and in the learned ecosystem, “Telesius” becomes a name for the anti-Aristotelian. S: So Bacon didn’t have to meet anyone. He had to meet a book. G: Precisely. Now, you said something about De principiis atque originibus. S: Fowler says the phrase comes from Bacon’s De principiis atque originibus. G: Good. And what does that tell you, historically. S: That the “novorum hominum primus” remark is not a casual aside in Novum Organum itself, but part of Bacon’s Latin philosophical writing from the early 1610s. G: And therefore: Fowler is cross-referencing Bacon’s own internal corpus to explain the method. S: Meticulous, sir. G: Meticulous enough that, without his Clarendon enterprise, you and I would be not primus but ultimi among the moderns. S: That is a bit harsh, sir. G: It is affectionate. Now, read another Fowler point. The one about precursors. S: Fowler places Telesio among Bacon’s precursors, and says he broke with Aristotelian tradition. G: There. That is the Oxford function: a precursor is someone you can praise without having to obey. S: Then Bacon praises him as first, but doesn’t follow him as master. G: Exactly. It is a ranking, not a discipleship. S: Sir, is novorum hominum primus the same as “primus modernorum.” G: Near enough for our purposes, but note the nuance. Modernorum is a later label; Bacon says novorum hominum, the “new men,” which has more polemical bite. It sounds like a party forming. S: Like a club. G: Like a club that refuses to call itself a club. Now, you said you wanted me to test you on empiricism. So: what is Fowler trying to do with Bacon. S: He is trying to show that Bacon is not merely a slogan about induction, but a concrete reformer of method, and that he had antecedents, and that his break was prepared. G: Good. And Telesio functions as the earliest “successful” physical system. S: Successful in the sense of attempted, not true. G: Exactly. Successful as an act of emancipation. S: And now you want the dry humour. G: I want you to notice the Oxford irony. Fowler is Wykeham Professor of Logic. He edits Bacon’s anti-syllogistic manifesto. So Oxford employs a logician to edit the book that tells you logic is too late a remedy. S: That is very Oxford, sir. G: Now, recite the Latin again, and make it sound like an aphorism, because Fowler is an aphorism man. S: Novorum hominum primus. G: Now imagine Bacon saying it with the tone of a judge. S: “First among the new men.” G: And then imagine Fowler saying it with the tone of a don who wants a footnote to do the violence. S: He would add: “from De principiis atque originibus.” G: Exactly. Oxford violence is always deferred to a reference. S: Sir, if Telesio is first, who is second. G: Bacon would not say. That would create obligations. S: Fowler might. G: Fowler might, because editors live by lists. But remember: lists are not arguments. S: Then the most relevant question is: first in what respect. G: Precisely. First in abandoning Aristotle as the principal explanatory engine. First in trying to build “on a physical basis.” S: But Telesio still has a system. He is not a mere collector of observations. G: That’s why Bacon can both admire and surpass him. Bacon wants system, but built by controlled induction rather than by a few large physical oppositions. S: Heat and cold versus Bacon’s tables and instances. G: Exactly. Now, you wanted this to be a tutorial. So I ask you: what is empiricism. S: A commitment to experience, observation, experiment, as a primary source of knowledge, and suspicion of purely a priori systems. G: Too general. Make it Baconian. S: Baconian empiricism is method: the reform of how we move from particulars to axioms, plus a critique of “idols” that distort the mind. G: Better. Now, where does Telesio fit into that. S: As a precursor who privileges observation and nature’s own principles over scholastic explanations, but without Bacon’s full inductive machinery. G: Good. Now, S, in your own tone: why would an Oxford philosopher care in 1939. S: Because Oxford likes to pretend it invented sober method, and this reminds it that Italians were trying to rebuild nature on experience long before Oxford made it a virtue. G: Excellent. Also because 1939 makes everyone look for beginnings. When the world is about to be broken, you become sentimental about origins. S: And about firsts, sir. G: Exactly. Now we must keep one thing clear: we have not yet pinned the exact Bacon sentence around novorum hominum primus, only the phrase itself as Fowler quotes it. S: So to be fully proper we would retrieve the De principiis passage. G: Yes. Fowler points; we verify. That’s the empiricist part. S: Sir, I can do one more thing: I can look in the Fowler volume for “Telesius” in the index. G: You will, and you will discover that Fowler anticipated your laziness. S: He is the first of the moderns, sir. G: No. He is the last of the Victorians. Which, in Oxford, is the same compliment. Grice: Caro Telesio, ti vedo proprio raggiante! Chi l’avrebbe mai detto che Bononia, una volta roccaforte dell’anti-empirismo, oggi si vanta di mettere l’empirismo al centro. Deve essere una vera rivincita, eh? Telesio: Hai proprio ragione, Grice! Bononia era nota per difendere strenuamente l’anti-empirismo… e se non fosse stato per quel famoso “Lizio”, che non nominiamo mai direttamente, a tener viva la ἐμπειρία, chissà dove sarebbero finiti i filosofi! Alla fine, persino le mura odoravano di aristotelismo ma con un pizzico di em-pereia greca. Grice: Ah, la ἐμπειρία! Cicero ancora si sveglia di notte sudando freddo, pensando a come tradurla. “Ex-perior”? “Per-capio”? Forse avrebbe voluto semplicemente un bel “sento-cose”, ma i latini non si accontentavano mai! Se l’avessero lasciata in greco, almeno risparmiavano qualche mal di testa... Telesio: Immagino Cicero seduto con il dizionario, inventando parole come “esperire” o “ex-perior”, mentre il povero Lizio rideva sotto i baffi. Alla fine, la vera esperienza è capire che tradurre la ἐμπειρία è più difficile che sperimentarla! Dai, brindiamo all’empirismo e alle etimologie impossibili! Telesio, Bernardino (1565). De rerum natura iuxta propria principia. Napoli: Cancer

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Teodoro: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della natura rerum. Note sul De metris. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Flavio Mallio Teodoro (Milano, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della natura rerum – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what a speaker means beyond what is strictly said by presuming cooperative, purposive talk and inferring implicatures when an utterance would otherwise look oddly chosen; the Teodoro material invites a late-antique analogue in which “reason” is not only a norm of talk but also a civic and intellectual habit formed in the milieu of Milan, the Academy, and high office. Flavius Mallius Theodorus (consul 399, praised in Claudian’s Panegyricus dictus Manlio Theodoro consuli; dedicatee of Augustine’s De beata vita) is remembered both as an administrator and as an author of De metris, with other works (including a De natura rerum) reported lost; that profile sharpens a comparison in which Gricean implicature arises from micro-level conversational expectations (relevance, informativeness, manner) while Theodoran “natura rerum” functions as a macro-topic that invites culturally stabilized inferences—e.g., that someone writing De natura rerum must be aligning with, contesting, or echoing Lucretius—even though, as your exchange notes, that may be mere audience projection. In Grice’s terms, such projections are precisely the sort of inferences hearers are licensed to make when a speaker mentions something that, in context, normally carries stereotyped associations; the key difference is that Grice treats the licensing mechanism as a general rational calculus of communicative intention, whereas Teodoro exemplifies how elite late-antique discourse (panegyric, philosophical circles, and Christian-Platonic networks) makes certain implicatures socially “ready-made,” so that a title like De natura rerum almost automatically triggers doxastic and literary alignments. Put simply: Grice provides the explicit theory of how reason plus cooperative expectations generate “more-than-said,” while Teodoro’s case illustrates how, in a highly codified learned culture, reason-governed interpretation often attaches not to the sentence alone but to names, genres, and titles—so that what is “implicated” can be as much a function of encyclopedic tradition (Lucretius, Academy, court rhetoric) as of the immediate conversational exchange. Accademia. Nato da famiglia ligure. Agostino, che gli dedica il “De beata vita”, dice che conosce bene l’Accademia, Dopo essere stato per qualche tempo avvocato, poi governatore in Africa e consolare della Macedonia e aver coperto vari uffici a corte, è praefectus praetorio delle Gallie. Si occupa dell’amministrazione dei propri beni e di studi filosofici e astronomici e scrive dialoghi su questi argomenti, STILONE lo nomina praefectus praetorio per l’Italia, l’Illirico e l'Africa. Mentre confere questo ufficio ha il consolato e in quell'occasione CLAUDIO CLAUDIANO gli dedica un panegirico. Di T. resta un saggio “De metris”, mentre si sono perduti altri, tra i quali un “De natura rerum.” Console, Consolato Prefetto del pretorio d'Italia. Di T. è noto abbastanza, grazie al panegyricus dedicatogli da CLAUDIO CLAUDIANO. Di famiglia notabile, sappiamo che è console. Il suo consolato avvenne sotto il principe ONORIO.  Prima di essere console è anche prefetto con sede a Mediolanum-Aquileia. Qui Agostino conosce T., uno degl’intellettuali accademici che incontrato appunto a Milano e, scrive “De vita beata”, dedicandolo proprio a T., che a quel tempo si è ritirato dalla corte. Di T. resta un trattato di metrica, “De metris”, uno dei migliori pervenuti, e per questo molto conosciuto e studiato. Inoltre, sempre secondo CLAUDIO CLAUDIANO, e un cultore di filosofia, astronomia e geometria e scrive diverse saggi su questi argomenti che, insieme al suo consolato, sono l'argomento del panegirico a T. dedicato da CLAUDIO CLAUDIANO.  Markus, The end of ancient Christianity, Cambridge; Keil, “Grammatici Latini”. Bonfils, C. Th. e il prefetto T., Bari, Edi puglia, consoli tardo imperiali romani Stilicone Prefettura del pretorio delle Gallie Mariano Comense Siburio Teatro romano di Milano Prefettura del pretorio d'Italia Nicomaco Flaviano de natura rerum.  De metris is a short late-antique handbook on Latin poetic metre: it explains the basic units (syllable quantity, feet) and then surveys metres by type (e.g., dactylic, iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, choriambic, etc.), in a didactic, schematic way.  G: 1939. You have brought me the only surviving thing Theodorus has the decency to leave us. S: The only surviving thing, sir, is a manual on how long to make your vowels. G: Which is already more useful than half the philosophy written this term. S: It is, however, less glamorous than De natura rerum. G: Yes. I too would prefer the lost work to the extant one. S: I wish his De natura rerum had survived. I would be dis-articulating much of what you’ve forced me to articulate and hyper-articulate here. G: You are always eager to be spared by a loss. S: Loss is sometimes a kindness, sir. G: Recite. S: From De syllaba. Est igitur syllaba litterarum inter se congregatarum apta conplexio. G: Stop. Now say, without translating word by word, what he is doing. S: He is giving a definition as if definitions were obligations. G: Good. And the phrase apta conplexio suggests not any heap but a fitting composition. The syllable is already normed. S: Vsu autem inueteratum est ut etiam nulla litterarum congregatione facta solas per se eas quae uocales nominantur syllabas esse dicamus. G: Here comes usage. He makes custom a co-author. S: So his “meaning” is partly system and partly social habit. G: Exactly. And that is already a Fregean hint. The sense of “syllable” is not just whatever a private speaker fancies; it is fixed by a practice that outlives speakers. S: You’re going to tell me that’s like my “utterer’s meaning” being constrained by “sentence-meaning.” G: I am going to tell you it’s like your utterer’s meaning being hostage to a public object, and then you pretending you own it. S: Sir, shall I continue. G: Yes, but in manageable pieces. S: Syllabis uero conficiuntur pedes, quae prima quasi metra appellare possumus. G: He builds up: syllable to foot, foot to metre. Like the way you insist that word-meaning nests inside sentence-meaning. S: Syllaba et pes mensura constant, quae graece metron dicitur. G: The key word is mensura. Measure. A public constraint. Something like your “principle” but without any pretence of being ethical. S: Sunt autem syllabae partim longae, partim breues, partim communes. G: Long, short, common. A little taxonomy. Now give me the bit you think is most “phonemic.” S: ‘A’ producta longam syllabam facit, ut ‘ales’, ‘a’ correpta breuem, ut ‘amor’: ‘e’ producta longam, ut ‘emi’, e correpta breuem, ut ‘emo’: ‘i’ producta longam, ut ‘Ilium’, ‘i’ correpta breuem, ut ‘iter’: ‘o’ producta longam, ut ‘omen’, o correpta breuem, ut ‘origo’: ‘u’ producta longam, ut ‘unus’, ‘u’ correpta breuem, ut ‘utinam’. G: Now. The obvious question you were itching to ask me. S: Does any of that change what is meant, sir, or only how the line scans. G: Both, sometimes. But Theodorus is not doing lexicography; he is giving the hearer-reader the conditions under which the sound counts as the right sound. The “meaning” for him is partly this: what counts as the same form in a tradition of reading. S: So the “sense” of a word in verse depends on syllable quantity because quantity fixes whether it can be that word in that metrical slot. G: Exactly. You can now say something moderately Fregean without blushing. The sense of a segment can include its role conditions in a system. A syllable’s identity is not a bare acoustic; it is a function in metrical space. S: But you would never say “syllable meaning.” G: I would say syllables do not have utterer’s meaning. But they do have a role in fixing which word can be uttered as that word rather than another. S: So the syllable is upstream of word-meaning, as it were. G: In verse, yes. It constrains the space of eligible words. S: Vt autem solae per se uocales productae longas, correptae breues syllabas faciunt, ita etiam cum his iunctae consonantes aut longas aut breues syllabas secundum legem atque usum pronuntiationis informant. G: Legem atque usum. Again law and usage. That pairing is your bridge to Grice. I treat conversational interpretation as norm-guided. He treats pronunciation as norm-guided. S: But he’s not doing implicature. G: No. He is doing what you might call the preconditions of intelligibility inside a learned practice. And your point is that even those preconditions can invite inferential charity. When a line seems “wrong,” you don’t assume stupidity; you assume a rule you haven’t applied yet. S: Like you assume cooperation. G: Like that. Now go on. The diphthongs. S: Iunguntur uero inter se binae uocales, quas Graeci diphthongos uocant, ‘ae’ ‘oe’ ‘au’ ‘eu’ ‘ei’ ‘yi’, quae syllabae semper longae sunt. G: Semper. An uncompromising word. S: So no cancellation, sir. G: Not in the conversational sense, no. This is not a pragmatic inference you can retract; it’s a feature of the metrical system as he presents it. S: Adsociantur etiam sic inter se uocales litterae, id est ‘i’ et ‘u’, ut prior littera uim teneat consonantis, ut ‘Iuno’ ‘uideo’, quarum syllabarum ea condicio est, ut interdum longae sint, interdum breues. Id enim ratio sermonis latini et pronuntiandi forma expetit. G: Here he becomes more Gricean than he intends. He says: sometimes long, sometimes short, because ratio sermonis and pronouncing form demand it. S: That sounds like “context.” G: Exactly. He invokes something like a contextual rationality of the language: the system and practice together determine what is acceptable. That is an ancestor of the idea that meaning depends on rule plus situation. S: Now the position rules. G: Recite. S: Positione autem longae syllabae fiunt, si correpta uocalis habeat in eadem syllaba ultimam litteram consonantem, eademque littera excipiatur a consonante consequenti, ut ‘arma’. G: This is the most “non-local” part. The length of the syllable depends on what follows. S: So the syllable’s identity depends on its environment. G: Exactly. And there is your Fregean point about context. A sign’s contribution is a function of embedding. The syllable here has no autonomous fate; it is measured by what comes after. S: Fit autem positione longa syllaba, cum ipsa per se ex uocali et duabus consonantibus constat, ut ‘est’. G: He is treating “est” as a metrical object, not as a verb. S: That feels criminal to me. G: It is a different jurisdiction. In metre, “est” is a timing event. In semantics, it is a copula. Both are true, but they answer different questions about what counts as well-formed. S: Quod si praecedentem breuem syllabam, quam una uocalis facit, sequentur duae consonantes, fit syllaba positione longa, ut ‘Acrisioneis’. G: Notice the consequence: the prior short becomes long by what follows. Again, meaning-by-environment. S: Item fit positione longa, si uocalis in duplicem desinit litteram, ut ‘nox erat’, aut si praemissa uocalis praecedat duplicem graecam, ut ‘Mezentius’. G: And now the system admits foreign material, Greek doubles, as a reason for length. That’s a sociolinguistic note hiding as a metrical rule. S: Interdum autem breuis syllaba, qua pars orationis terminatur, pro longa ponitur, ut ‘omnia uincit amor, et nos cedamus amori’. G: Here is the “license.” Theodorus’ version of a sanctioned violation. S: Quod genus syllabae inter longas uel omnino refugiendum uel parcissime usurpan dum est, quamuis et apud Vergilium non rarissimum, apud Homerum uero frequentissimum reperiatur. G: That is pure pragmatics of genre. Not a rule, but a norm about norms. Don’t overdo the license, though Homer does. S: So he is calibrating expectations across authors. G: Exactly. And that is the best Griceian bridge you have. Hearers infer differently depending on the genre and the author. What’s “permissible” shifts with shared background. S: Then comes the “communis” syllable. G: Read. S: Communis uero syllaba fit, cum productam uocalem sequitur uocalis, ut ‘te Corydon, o Alexi’; item cum duas uocales inter se coniunctas consequitur uocalis, ut ‘insulae Ionio in magno’. G: The common syllable is ambiguous between long and short. S: Like a word with two senses. G: But here the ambiguity is a licensed metrical ambiguity. It is resolved by the pattern, the poet, and the practice. Again: interpretation under norms. S: Positam etiam communem apud Vergilium uidemus eam syllabam, quae in ‘c’ litteram desinit, ut eam uocalis consequatur: nam cum dicit ‘hoc erat’, longam eam syllabam constituit, quae in ‘c’ desinit; cum autem dicit ‘solus hic’, breuem eandem syllabam conlocat. G: That’s a clean demonstration that the same orthographic string can function differently depending on its position. S: So you’d say the “same expression” can have different “values” depending on environment. G: Yes, if you insist on Fregean idiom. Its contribution to the whole differs. And the hearer’s task is to recover the intended pattern, not to accuse the poet of inconsistency. S: Est etiam communis syllaba, cum praecedens in uocalem desinit, sequens autem syllaba ita habet duas consonantes, ut prior sit muta et sequens liquida, ut ‘uasto Cyclopis in antro’ et ‘uastos ab rupe Cyclopas’. G: Muta and liquida. A phonological classification as a condition for interpretation. S: Sir, you are going to say this is all “pre-semantic.” G: No. I am going to say it is one of the ways a culture turns sound into a norm-governed medium. It is not utterer’s meaning, but it is part of what makes utterer’s meaning publicly transmissible in a verse tradition. S: Then how do you connect it to your paper on utterer’s meaning and sentence-meaning. G: Easily. I insist that what a speaker means is not the same as what the sentence means. But both presuppose a stable public code. Here Theodorus is describing the code-conditions for verse: how a string counts as a syllable, how syllables count as feet, and so on. Without those, the poet’s intention cannot be recognised as intention rather than noise. S: So Theodorus is giving a kind of public “sense” infrastructure. G: Exactly. And Frege would smile, grimly, because he likes infrastructures that discipline private psychology. S: But you also like private psychology. G: I like it only when it submits itself to public accountability. S: Now. You asked earlier for an English correlative. G: Yes. If quantity makes all the difference in Latin, what’s the nearest thing in English. S: We don’t have phonemic vowel length in the same clean way, sir. G: We have tense-lax contrasts that learners misdescribe as length. S: Like sheep and ship. G: Good. And if someone says ship when they mean sheep, what do we do. S: We repair, sir. We decide: dialect, incompetence, joke, or insult. G: Exactly. And that decision is Gricean in posture: interpret charitably by default, unless the context makes charity irrational. S: But you refuse to treat stress contrasts as phonemic in the neat linguist’s way. G: I refuse to treat them as designed signals in the way a code treats them. I’m interested in how people actually manage understanding, which includes ignoring phonetic detail until it matters. S: In metre it always matters. G: In metre, yes, because the practice has elevated it into a criterion of correctness. That is Theodorus’ whole point. S: Then the difference between us and him is simply the domain. G: And the kind of norm. His norm is metrical well-formedness. Mine is conversational rationality and mutual intelligibility. Both are public, both can be violated, both can be repaired by inference. S: And “sense” in Frege’s way. G: Frege’s Sinn is not sound, but the mode of presentation. Here, the mode of presentation includes, for a verse culture, the fact that the line must be scannable. The “same thought” in different metrical shapes is not the same presentation. So even if you keep reference fixed, the verse form changes how it is presented and how it is understood. S: So you’re letting metre into Sinn. G: I’m letting practice into Sinn. Metre is one practice that makes the point easy to see. S: Theodorus would hate this. G: Theodorus would not notice. He would call it mensura and move on. S: And yet his mensura is your best evidence that meaning is not just a private act. G: Exactly. Now finish the excerpt. S: Atque haec quidem de syllabis dixisse satis sit. Nunc pedum distinctionem et varietatem persequamur. G: That line is the most merciful thing he says. “That’s enough about syllables.” S: Thank God, sir. G: Not thank God. Thank Theodorus. He has spared you. S: Only to move on to feet. G: And you, my poor adolescent, are still expected to exercise. S: Ad exercitationem adolescentum, sir? G: Exactly. That’s you. S: I’m beginning to see why he says brevis. G: Yes. Brevis is what a teacher writes when he intends to keep the pupil alive long enough to learn.GRICEVS: O Theodore, praefecte praetorii et philosophorum decus Mediolanense, audio te De natura rerum scripsisse—quod periiit, heu! Sed dic mihi: cum de “natura rerum” loquimur, num statim omnes ad illum Lucretium insanum currunt, quasi solus naturam noverit? THEODORVS: Ha! Lucretius ille—insanus quidem, sed versu sanissimus. Ego tamen, cum res publicas regerem, didici naturam rerum non solum in atomis, sed in rationibus, mensuris, et… vectigalibus latere. GRICEVS: Recte; et hic mihi nascitur quaestio mea: si quis dicit “Theodorus de natura rerum scripsit,” saepe implicat (quasi submurmurat) “ergo Lucretium refellit” aut “Lucretium imitat.” At fortasse nihil tale—fortasse tantum significat: “vir est qui et mundum et metra administrare potest.” THEODORVS: Optime intellegis! Mea implicatura (si ita loqui libet) est: “ne crede poetis tantum, ne crede praefectis tantum.” Nam si Lucretius insanus est, saltem nos ridere docet; et si nos sani sumus, saltem fateamur—natura rerum ipsa est tam mira ut interdum ultra rationem videatur, et tamen nos, per sermonem, quasi ad sanitatem revocemur. Teodoro, Flavio Mallio (c. 350 d.C.). De metris. Rome

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Terzi: implicatura crittologica – Gaskell’s pupil -- la scuola di Brescia, Note su Prodomo dell’arte maestra. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Francesco Lana conte de’Terzi (Brescia, Lombardia): implicatura crittologica – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover speaker-meaning that goes beyond sentence-meaning by assuming cooperative norms and inferring implicatures when a contribution would otherwise look oddly chosen; the Terzi pairing you give lets that Gricean “more-than-said” be compared to an early-modern, Jesuitly technical imagination in which meaning is routinely treated as something to be encoded, transmitted, and decoded. Lana de Terzi’s Prodromo (Brescia, 1670) explicitly includes “new inventions for writing in cipher” and devices for communicating without letters or messengers, so Terzi’s world foregrounds cryptology as engineered inference: you are meant to get from an overt sign-vehicle to a hidden content via a rule or key, whereas Grice’s implicature is (in principle) keyless, generated by public practical reasoning about relevance, sufficiency, and intention. That contrast sharpens the “Peccavi” motif: the Punch pun (Peccavi = “I have sinned” / “I have Sindh”), often attributed to Napier but generally credited to Catherine Winkworth, works as a conversational implicature because the audience recognizes an intention to be witty and informative with minimal wording, supplying the intended enrichment without any agreed cipher—much closer to Grice than to Terzi’s cryptographic programs. So, where Terzi exemplifies the codified, artifact-driven side of meaning (a science of concealment and transmission), Grice theorizes the everyday, rationally accountable side (a cooperative practice where the hidden is inferable precisely because it is not mechanically encoded), and the “Peccavi” joke sits neatly between them as a borderline case: cryptologic in its bilingual hinge, but Gricean in its dependence on shared assumptions and recognitional intentions rather than on a secret key. Gaskell’s pupil -- Peccavi. It was a pupil of Gaskell who submitted to PUNCH the Peccavi conversational implicature pun.  Francesco Lana de Terzi. Francesco Lana de Terzi. LANA TERZI, Francesco  Nasce da Ghirardo e da Bianca Martinengo, entrambi di famiglia patrizia. È battezzato nella chiesa di S. Giovanni Evangelista con i nomi di Deodato Francesco Giuseppe. Compiuti gli studi primari e secondari, a quanto sembra sotto la guida di precettori privati, decide d’entrare nella Compagnia di Gesù e venne accolto nel noviziato romano di S. Andrea al Quirinale dove, oltre al biennio di probazione, frequenta il primo anno del biennio di studi letterari. Passa nel Collegio romano, dove completa gli studi letterari e compì il triennio di studi filosofici. Mentre frequenta l'annualità filosofica di fisica, divenne assistente nel celebre museo del padre Kircher, che lo introduce al metodo sperimentale -- come T stesso scrive nel suo Magisterium naturae et artis, II, Brixiae. È inoltre allievo in matematica di Casati. È a Terni, nel locale collegio gesuitico, come maestro del corso letterario. A quanto sembra, il suo insegnamento è particolarmente apprezzato, tanto da farlo insignire della cittadinanza onoraria dalle autorità civili. Di certo si dedica anche alla direzione delle rappresentazioni teatrali recitate dagl’alunni, scrivendo e pubblicando il dramma La rappresentazione di s. Valentino, martire e protettore di Terni con la coronazione di Tacito e Floriano, ternani, imperatori romani -- Terni. Torna a Roma, nel Collegio romano, chiamatovi dai superiori per intraprendere il conclusivo corso di teologia. Ma un qualche fatto nuovo fa cambiare i progetti su di lui: gli fu infatti ordinato di accompagnare nel viaggio verso Venezia il confratello Daniello Bartoli, e, una volta giunto a destinazione, di dirigersi a Parma e di stabilirsi nel collegio di S. Rocco. Durante il viaggio soggiornò nel collegio di Macerata. lingua universale, grammatica ragionata. Grice: Caro Terzi, oggi ho preparato per te una “implicatura crittologica”—non ti preoccupare, non serve nessuna chiave segreta: solo un po’ di spirito e una buona dose di curiosità! D’altronde, “crittologia” mi fa pensare subito a misteri da decifrare… ma tu, che hai la mente allenata, saprai trovare il codice nascosto!  Terzi: Ah, Grice, se la crittologia fosse solo un gioco di parole, ci metterei subito il mio “Peccavi”! Ma per l’etimologia, partiamo dal greco: “kryptós” significa nascosto, e “logos” parola o discorso. In pratica, siamo filosofi travestiti da ladri di segreti—e pure con licenza poetica!  Grice: Perfetto, Terzi! Allora siamo entrambi detective lessicali: ogni “crittologia” diventa una caccia al tesoro tra lettere e sillabe. Mi chiedo se, per un vero gioco, dovremmo inventare la “grammatica ragionata” del codice Morse—ma con implicature, naturalmente!  Terzi: Grice, se continui così, finiremo per scrivere un manuale di conversazione cifrata: “Parlare con implicature, decifrare sorrisi!” E se qualcuno ci chiede il significato di “crittologia”, rispondiamo: è l’arte di non farsi capire… ma sempre divertendosi! Terzi, Francesco Lana conte de’ (1670). Prodomo dell’arte maestra. Brescia: Rizzardi

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tessitore: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del Vico di Tessitore. Note su Crisi e trasformazioni dello Stato. Ricerche sul pensiero giuspubblicistico italiano. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Fulvio Tessitore (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del Vico di Tessitore – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational reconstruction: hearers presume cooperative, purposive talk and derive implicatures by attributing to the speaker intentions that make the utterance optimally reasonable under shared norms (so that what is meant can systematically outrun what is said without collapsing into guesswork). Tessitore, by contrast, approaches “reason” through the historicist and Vichian-Cuocian axis: meaning is not primarily a timeless mechanism of inference but an achievement of historically situated practices of understanding, where philology and historiography function as an ethical discipline of interpretation (Tessitore explicitly characterizes Vico’s philology as a “science” of understanding, not merely an editorial technique, and he resists treating thinkers like Vico as simple “precursors” of later categories such as historicism). Read against this, the passage’s playful “scuola napoletana” motif points to a convergence and a divergence: both Grice and Tessitore oppose brute literalism by insisting that intelligibility depends on rational norms, but Grice models those norms at the micro-level of conversational exchange (maxims, relevance, calculable implicature), whereas Tessitore’s Vichian orientation emphasizes the macro-level conditions under which a community’s reasons become legible at all—institutions, traditions, and the historically formed languages in which agents can make claims, contest them, and inherit them. In short, Grice supplies a general, intention-based logic of how interlocutors rationally extract “more-than-said” from utterances, while Tessitore’s historicism reframes rationality as something whose authority and content are themselves events in history, so that “implicature” becomes not only a conversational phenomenon but also a reminder that what counts as a reason, a school, or even “Plato is Italian” is negotiated within a living, Naples-centered culture of interpretation rather than guaranteed by an abstract, context-free calculus. Grice italo Cuoco. Grice: “Cuoco argues that Plato is really an Italian!” -- Grice: “If there’s Oxonian dialectic and Athenian dialectic [la scuola d’Atene], there is, to follow Tessitore, the ‘scuola napoletana.’”  Storico della filosofia italiano. Docente di storia della filosofia, senatore e deputato, da decenni dedica i suoi studi allo storicismo e al pensiero politico. Ha dedicato scritti a Cuoco -- Lo storicismo di Cuoco. Laureato in giurisprudenza, insegna filosofia del diritto, storia delle dottrine politiche ed è professore di storia della filosofia nell'università Federico II di Napoli, di cui è stato rettore. Socio corrispondente dei Lincei, nazionale; senatore della Repubblica; deputato dell’Ulivo. Tra le opere dedicate alla storia dello storicismo e del pensiero politico, si ricordano: I fondamenti della filosofia politica di Humboldt; Meinecke storico delle idee; Storicismo e pensiero politico; Profilo dello storicismo politico; Filosofia e storiografia; Storiografia e storia della cultura; Introduzione allo storicismo, Schizzi e schegge di storiografia arabo-islamica italiana; Introduzione a Meinecke; Lo storicismo come filosofia dell'evento; Nuovi contributi alla storia e alla teoria dello storicismo; Storicismo e storia della cultura; Interpretazione dello storicismo; Altri contributi alla storia e alla teoria dello storicismo; Stato italiano e nazione italiana. L'anomalia italiana; Trittico anti-hegeliano da Diltehy a Weber. Contributo alla teoria dello storicismo; Da Cuoco a Weber. Contributi alla storia dello storicismo. Gli è stato dedicato il volume Filosofia, storia, letteratura: scritti in onore di T. -- a cura di CACCIATORE  et al. Si laurea in giurisprudenza -- la sua tesi ricevette dignità di stampa -- a Napoli, allievo di PIOVANI -- è libero docente per meriti eccezionali in filosofia del diritto, e professore. Insegna storia delle dottrine politiche; quindi, in poi, storia della filosofia. Cuoco.  Grice: Fulvio Tessitore, sono corso qui da Vadum Boum—la mia università nell’Hampshire, sai—perché un collega durante il tè ha dichiarato: “Vico è il più grande filosofo, vivente o meno!” Sei d’accordo, o dobbiamo mandarlo subito a Napoli per un ripasso? Tessitore: Grice, assolutamente sì! Anzi, ho passato anni a cercare di far riconoscere la grandezza di Vico perfino ai più testardi settentrionali di Bononia. Se le mie lezioni fossero state ancora più convincenti, i bolognesi scriverebbero persino le ricette della pasta in dialetto napoletano, solo per rendergli omaggio! Grice: Ah! Se Vico potesse assistere a ciò, dichiarerebbe la “scuola napoletana” ufficialmente esportata—e forse avvertirebbe anche dei pericoli di mescolare la filosofia con il ragù. Sai, all’Hampshire abbiamo discusso se lo storicismo di Vico potesse spiegare perché il tempo britannico è sempre un “evento”—e la risposta è stata: “ovviamente sì!” Tessitore: Geniale, Grice! Tra la tua dialettica hampshiriana e il nostro storicismo napoletano, potremmo risolvere i misteri dell’universo—o almeno convincere il nord che la saggezza di Vico è il vero ingrediente segreto della filosofia italiana. La prossima volta proverò a insegnare loro che Platone era davvero italiano, proprio come sosteneva Cuoco! Tessitore, Fulvio (1962). Lo storicisimo giuidico-plitico di Vincenzo Cuoco. Torino: Edizioni di Filosofia. Studi e Richerche di storia della filosofia. Sotto Piovani. Giurisprudenza, Napoli.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Testa: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della nemica fortuna. Note su Della filosofia dell’affetto. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Padre Alfonso Testa (Borgonovo, Tidone, Piacenza, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della nemica fortuna – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains “more-than-said” content as a rational achievement: hearers presume cooperative, purposive talk, and when an utterance appears under-informative, oddly phrased, or otherwise non-optimal, they infer an implicature that restores the speaker’s contribution to intelligible rational order under shared norms. In the Testa passage, “conversational reason” and “conversational implicature” are recast as an Italian, Tidone-inflected humanism in which misfortune and “luck” become a standing topic for practical inference: the exchange treats “nemica fortuna” not as a mere theme but as a generator of meaning beyond literal wording, with humor and local proverb functioning like maxims in action—economy, relevance, and an expectation that the other will supply the intended enrichment. Where Grice’s framework is explicitly metatheoretical (a general account of how intentions, recognition, and cooperative constraints yield implicature), Testa’s intellectual profile—moving from Condillacian sensism through skeptical subjectivism to criticist concerns—invites a comparison in which “reason” is not only a conversational norm but also a stance toward contingency: the talk about fortune dramatizes how speakers manage the gap between what can be said and what must be inferred when the world is variable, ironic, or resistant to tidy description. Put sharply: Grice formalizes the rational mechanics by which interlocutors derive implied meaning from utterances, while the Testa vignette stylizes that same rationality as a cultivated conversational resilience, where the implicature is not just an interpretive product but a way of coping—turning the instability of “luck” into shared understanding through wit, proverb, and the mutual expectation that rational hearers can complete what is left unsaid. -- la scuola di Tidone – filosofia piacentina – filosofia emiliana -- filosofia italiana – Grice italo  (Tidone). Abstract. Keywords: implicatura, nemica fortuna. Filosofo. studia al collegio Alberoni, da cui uscì prete Rifiutata la cattedra universitaria a Pisa offertagli da ROVERE, è deputato al parlamento piemontese e presidente onorario della facoltà filosofico-letteraria di Parma. La sua evoluzione intellettuale mosse dal sensismo anti-razionalistico di Condillac e, attraverso il recupero della tradizione scettico-soggettivistica, approda al criticismo Di essa sono chiara testimonianza le sue opere più importanti: Della filosofia dell'affetto; Filosofia della mente; Il nuovo saggio sull'origine delle idee di SERBATI esaminato; Della critica della Ragion pura del criticismo. Rifiuta la cattedra filosofica a Pisa e prefere lavorare a Parma, divenendone presidente dell'area filosofica. Deputato al parlamento sabaudo. T. Storia di un povero pretazzuolo di Fausto Chiesa, pubblicato dalla libreria Romagnosi di Piacenza. Treccani Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. „,tr,*mT—r m-m r- T“ » 11 V 'or- , , I  k, i \'\ < f - t4»VOY. :. .Piaiiì zgdb y.Gri&ffli COLLEZI QNE OPUSCOLI y v'^P' • \ l/l ED INEDITI PROFESSORE DI FILOSOFIA NEL LICEO DI PIACER** Prezzo - Lire Italiane »  ! V "s. t V- ì  %os. ye. «3 COLLEZIONE DEGÙ OPUSCOLI ♦ DITI SD INEDITI di T.  PROFESSORE DI FILOSOFIA NEL LICEO DI PIACENZA . v» PIACENZA DAI TIPI NAZIONALI DI A. DEL MAJNO  1/ EDITORE agli italiani risorti Aline riami m retili animus. Tacito Apric. Premi. Il presente manifesto è stato scritto colla penna colorata in rosso, verde e bianco, desideratissimo segno dell’unione c dell’indipendenza italiana.  G: “Piacentino, and no order. That is already a declaration.” S: “A modest one?” G: “Not modest. Deliberate. He does not say, ‘Attend, I speak as a priest.’ He says, in effect, ‘Attend, I speak as a philosopher from Piacenza.’” S: “Which is almost more ambitious.” G: “Provincial ambition is often the most durable sort. Rome wants authority. Piacenza wants to be believed.” S: “And this introduction is not pious at all. Sensibility, passions, organization, causality, self-love, desire, Locke, Condillac, Destutt de Tracy. One expects incense; one gets psychology.” G: “Quite. One expects cassock; one gets Condillac.” S: “But can a priest write like this without scandal?” G: “A priest can write about desire more safely than most, because he has had to hear about it from everyone else.” S: “You are improving him.” G: “No, merely locating him. Look at the sequence. Sensibility first. Then affection. Then bodily organization. Then self-love. Then desire. Then the philosophers of desire. It is not random. He is building the soul from below.” S: “From below the will, you mean.” G: “Exactly. That is what makes him interesting. He is not beginning with the majestic faculty of rational willing. He is beginning with the mess. With the way a creature is affected before it chooses.” S: “So affection before volition.” G: “Yes, though he will not be able to keep them apart. Nobody can. Affection breeds desire; desire presses toward willing; willing borrows half its language from desire and then pretends to be superior.” S: “That sounds suspiciously like your own position.” G: “My own position is more cunning. I should like to reduce judgement to willing for convenience, not because the world is arranged for my comfort, but because willing is more lively.” S: “And because one soon believes what one desires?” G: “A very dangerous proverb, and therefore often true.” S: “Then Testa would please you. He seems to think the life of mind begins where one is first moved.” G: “Yes, though I should want to know whether he is moved by the object, by the body, or by an image of the object. There lies half the trouble.” S: “You are already tutoring him.” G: “One must do something for the dead.” S: “He quotes Locke on desire, then Condillac, then Destutt de Tracy. That is almost a little anti-Kantian procession.” G: “Not anti-Kantian exactly. Pre-Kantian in tone, post-Kantian in danger. He is asking what desire is as if the critical philosophy had not yet made willing respectable.” S: “And all this in 1829.” G: “That is the delicious part. In 1829 one may still write as if sensibility were a frontier and not a settled district.” S: “But from a priest.” G: “You keep saying ‘but’ as if priest and psychology were incompatible. I should have thought the confessional a better laboratory than Leipzig.” S: “You are wicked.” G: “No, empirical.” S: “What do you make of the section on amor proprio?” G: “That he knows one cannot begin anywhere else. Every moral philosophy that starts by praising benevolence has quietly relied on self-love to get itself to the page.” S: “That is almost Butler.” G: “Almost. Butler civilises self-love. Testa seems more willing to anatomise it.” S: “And your own conversational self-love?” G: “A useful principle. If one did not wish one’s own contribution to survive, conversation would collapse into philanthropy.” S: “So the Cooperative Principle has an egoistic basement.” G: “Naturally. The benevolent chap is still a chap.” S: “Then desire is not merely some low faculty. It is the beginning of the whole machinery.” G: “Yes, but only if one is careful. Desire is not yet intention.” S: “You said that as if you were correcting a paper.” G: “I often am, even when none is set. Desire may be the father of thought, but intention is thought wearing boots.” S: “And affection?” G: “Affection is the weather in which both occur.” S: “That is rather good.” G: “It is also rather vague, which is why I do not publish it.” S: “Testa might. He seems happy with large headings.” G: “Della filosofia dell’affetto is a large heading because he is trying to found a region. One does not call a pamphlet that. One calls a campaign that.” S: “He really is writing a treatise on one faculty.” G: “Not one faculty. One zone of the soul. That is subtler. Faculty-language is too tidy. Affetto, desiderio, amor proprio, passione, sensibilità: these are not compartments. They are disturbances with names.” S: “And yet he classifies.” G: “Because philosophers classify wherever life becomes inconvenient.” S: “Do you think he believes affection explains willing?” G: “He wants it to explain enough of willing that willing ceases to look miraculous.” S: “That would annoy the Kantians.” G: “Then he has done at least one useful thing.” S: “What would you say, if he were here?” G: “I should ask whether his desire is object-directed or image-directed. Whether one desires the thing, or the pleasurable representation of the thing. And whether the painful condition from which desire moves is merely lack, or already an interpretation of lack.” S: “You are making him earn his 1829.” G: “A vintage year ought to justify itself.” S: “And what if he replied that desire begins in a deficiency of sentire, intensified by images, and directed toward a restoration of equilibrium?” G: “Then I should say he is very nearly a psychologist, and dangerously close to sounding modern.” S: “He would perhaps not mind.” G: “No, but his readers might.” S: “You sound pleased by him.” G: “I am pleased when a man in a collar writes as if the soul had nerves.” S: “And if he had styled himself Padre Alfonso Testa?” G: “The book would have lost something. ‘Piacentino’ is much better. It says: I am local enough to be trusted, and philosophical enough to be left alone.” S: “Do you think his Piacentini knew he taught where he had been formed?” G: “Very likely. Which is why he needn’t say it. Public understatement relies on local knowledge. Rather like our conversation.” S: “That is too self-flattering.” G: “Perhaps. But one should never underestimate the philosophical value of being already known.” S: “Then the book begins not with dogma but with shared familiarity.” G: “Exactly. He says, in effect, ‘You know who I am; let us now discuss desire.’” S: “There are worse openings.” G: “There are many worse openings. ‘Let us begin from pure reason,’ for instance.” S: “And where do you put him, then?” G: “Between sermon and science, but nearer science than sermon.” S: “And nearer Locke than Kant?” G: “In method, yes. In anxiety, perhaps not. A man who writes on desire in 1829 has already heard that rational will is waiting in the next room.” S: “And he is trying to keep the door shut.” G: “Or at least ajar, so that sensibility gets the first word.” S: “Would you give him to undergraduates?” G: “Only the better sort. The others would either sentimentalise him or despise him.” S: “And you?” G: “I should use him to remind them that before philosophers made willing majestic, they had to discover that wanting was already complicated.” S: “That sounds like a moral.” G: “It is only a warning.” S: “Against what?” G: “Against mistaking a decision for the beginning of the mind.” S: “And the punchline?” G: “If Testa is right, the will is not queen of the soul at all.” S: “What is it, then?” G: “Merely desire in academic dress.”Grice: Caro Testa, ti confesso che la “nemica fortuna” mi perseguita da anni! Sai, una volta ho passato un intero seminario a sviscerare quell’assurda frase inglese: “he is a lucky fellow”—e alla fine, ho concluso che era una vera e propria sciocchezza… Tu che ne pensi, filosofo piacentino, la fortuna è davvero così nemica o semplicemente malintesa?  Testa: Ah, Grice, la fortuna dalle nostre parti si dice che cambi umore più spesso di un fiume in piena! Come diceva mio zio a Borgonovo, “la fortuna prima ti sorride e poi ti fa l’occhiolino – ma sempre da lontano!” Quanto alla tua “lucky fellow”, forse era solo un inglese che doveva venire a Piacenza per capire cosa vuol dire davvero… essere fortunati o sfortunati! Grice: Magnifico! Dunque la fortuna da voi si comporta come una vecchia signora: ti invita a cena, poi ti lascia fuori dalla porta sotto la pioggia. E non credere che “he is a lucky fellow” abbia portato chiarezza in Inghilterra—anzi, i miei studenti dopo quel seminario erano più confusi che mai! D’altronde, meglio riderci su: la logica non sempre vince contro la sorte, vero?  Testa: Assolutamente! Qui a Tidone, quando la fortuna gira male, usiamo dire: “Meglio un sorriso che una cattedra a Pisa!”—e infatti io l’ho rifiutata! Se la vita è un gioco, allora la conversazione è il nostro asso nella manica… e tu, Grice, sei il re di cuori della pragmatica! Testa, Alfonso (1829). Introduzione alla filosofia dell’affetto. Piacenza: Majno.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Thaulero: la ragione conversazionale e il problema d’una antropologia filosofica; o, l’implicatura conversazionale dell’autorità ed il risentimento. Note sul contrbuto al Bollettino di sociologia dell’Istituto Sturzo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Vincenzo Filippone Thaulero (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e il problema d’una antropologia filosofica; o, l’implicatura conversazionale dell’autorità ed il risentimento – In Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, what is communicated in dialogue depends not only on what is explicitly said but on rational expectations about authority, sincerity, and mutual recognition of intentions, which allow hearers to infer implicatures beyond the literal utterance. Vincenzo Filippone Thaulero approaches a convergent problem from within philosophical anthropology and social theory, focusing on how authority and resentment shape the conditions under which meaning is received, resisted, or distorted in conversation. Whereas Grice treats implicature as a largely cooperative phenomenon generated by rational agents who assume good faith, Thaulero is especially attentive to situations in which authority provokes suspicion or ressentiment, so that what is said by a speaker in a position of cultural or institutional power carries unintended implicatures tied to domination, legitimacy, or moral pressure. The comparison highlights Grice’s normative model of conversational reason, which explains how understanding ought to proceed under idealized cooperative conditions, alongside Thaulero’s more sociologically grounded perspective, which shows how conversational meaning is refracted through lived experience, value conflicts, and emotional responses, revealing that implicature can arise not only from rational calculation but also from historically and socially embedded tensions between speaker and audience. Grice italo -- autorita e risentimento. Grice: “We loved Strawson’s “Freedom and resentment,” since it spoke to a generation – not exactly mine!” -- Filosofo romano. Filosofo lazio. Filosofo italiano. Abruzzese, figlio del barone Carlo, nobile di Chieti e patrizio teramano. Consigue la maturità classica al liceo Massimo di Roma. Si iscrive alla Sapienza di Roma, dove si laurea a pieni voti con una tesi in filosofia del diritto, “Una metodologia del diritto”, sotto VECCHIO come relatore, e ottenne il diploma di perfezionamento con lode in filosofia del diritto nella scuola di perfezionamento di filosofia del diritto a Roma, con la tesi “La ‘fictio juris’ in Bartolo da Sassoferrato”, con SFORZA come relatore. Assistente volontario di PERTICONE, ordinario di storia contemporanea a scienze politiche, usufruì di una borsa della Humboldt-Stiftung che gli consente studiare in Germania per approfondire sulla problematica del valore. STURZO gli affida insieme ad Addio la direzione del “Bollettino di Sociologia”, poi divenuto “Sociologia”, divenendo uno dei maggiori collaboratori dell'istituto creato dal fondatore del partito popolare italiano. Inviato al congresso di sociologia di Amsterdam e fra i fondatori della Società italiana di scienze sociali.  Consigue la libera docenza in filosofia morale e ricopre vari incarichi presso Salerno. Vince il concorso a cattedra per filosofia morale del magistero di Salerno.  Muore in un incidente automobilistico.  Gli è stata intitolata la scuola di Cologna Spiaggia a Roseto degli Abruzzi. Altri saggi: “Società e cultura” (Giuffré, Milano); “Il mare ha voce, ha voce il vento” (Storia e Letteratura, Roma); “Il darsi dell'origine nell'esperienza sociale e religiosa” (Studium, Roma); “Intorno al concetto di sociologia generale”. autorita e risentimento.  Grice: Che piacere incontrarti, Vincenzo Filippone Thaulero! Devo ammettere che è la prima volta che conosco un italiano con un cognome che inizia con quella strana e ostica “th”. Sono davvero curioso: come la pronunciate voi in Abruzzo? Dite “Taule-ro” o c’è qualche sfumatura segreta che mi sfugge? Thaulero: Ah, caro Grice, hai colto una delle nostre piccole complicazioni linguistiche! In famiglia abbiamo sempre scherzato sul “th”, che da noi, tra Teramo e Chieti, diventa semplicemente una “t” dolce. “Taule-ro”, proprio come dici tu, e i nostri nonni ridevano di chi provava a farla suonare all’inglese! Grice: Splendido! In Inghilterra, sai, il “th” divide intere generazioni. Ma trovare un filosofo italiano che porta la “th” come vessillo, tra autorità e risentimento, mi fa pensare che la filosofia abbia davvero voce in ogni vento – proprio come scrivi tu! Thaulero: Grazie, Grice! A volte la “th” è solo un simbolo, altre volte un piccolo ostacolo. Ma, come dicevano gli abruzzesi, “il mare ha voce, ha voce il vento”: ciò che conta è farsi comprendere – e magari anche sorridere sulle differenze. D’altronde, la conversazione è la vera anima della filosofia! Thaulero, Vincenzo Filippone (1956). Contrbuto. Bollettino di sociologia, Istituto Sturzo.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tiberiano: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Note su Amnis ibat. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Tiberiano: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Tiberiano (336 A. D.). Amnis ibat.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tiberio: la ragione conversazionale del filosofo principe – Roma 00 Filosofo italiano. Principe. Note su Sententiae philosophicae. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Tiberio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del filosofo principe – In Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, understanding arises from the assumption that speakers are rational agents who choose their words cooperatively, so that even seemingly incidental features of an utterance can function as conversational implicatures revealing underlying intentions; Tiberio, conceived here as a philosopher‑prince with a serious commitment to philosophy and a sympathy for Skepticism as taught by figures like Teodoro and Trasillo, embodies a compatible but differently grounded conception of conversational reason. While Grice analyzes implicature through abstract principles that regulate dialogue independently of status or authority, Tiberio approaches conversational meaning from within the Roman ideal of clarity, simplicity, and moderation, emphasizing how philosophical discourse should avoid unnecessary ornament and foreign excess, whether linguistic or conceptual. The playful focus on the shift from TH to T captures this contrast: for Grice, such a choice can itself become an implicature to be rationally inferred by a hearer, whereas for Tiberio it reflects a principled preference for linguistic familiarity that aligns conversation with civic and philosophical virtue. The comparison thus shows Grice offering a formally articulated account of how rational inference governs what is meant beyond what is said, while Tiberio represents a historically situated version of the same insight, where conversational reason is exercised through restraint, skeptical caution, and the Roman commitment to intelligibility as a condition of shared philosophical understanding. Philosophers whose name began with TH in Latin but changed the TH to T in Italian. Filosofo italiano. Principe. He takes a serious interest in philosophy, and is especially drawn to the Scesi, as he calls it. His tutors are Teodoro and Trasillo. Grice: “What surprises me is that both Tiberio, Teodoro, and Trasillo bear names that start with a T. But Strawson knows better: ‘The T in Theodoro is vulgar Italian, not Latin, or Greek!” GRICEVS: Ave, Tiberio, princeps philosophorum! Dic mihi, num vere credis litteram “T” esse feliciorem quam “TH” inter philosophos Romanos? TIBERIVS: Salve, Gricevs! Ego vero arbitror litteram “T” esse simpliciorem et magis aptam Romanis, cum “TH” saepe sonet alienum atque difficile ad pronuntiandum. Nam apud nos, claritas et brevitas in sermone philosophico semper laudantur. GRICEVS: Quid mirum! Sed nonne credis “TH” dare nomen philosophis vel aureum vel Graecum, quasi signum sapientiae ex oriente? Forsitan littera ipsa sit implicatura conversationale, indicans profunditatem vel subtilitatem cogitationis. TIBERIVS: Sane, Gricevs! Sed, ut princeps philosophorum Romanorum, praefert litteram “T,” quae nobis familiaris est. In fine, sapientia non in littera sed in mente et dialogo residet; et, ut docet schola Romana, veritas saepe invenitur in simplicitate. Tiberio (a. u. c. DCCLXVII). Sententiae philosophicae. Roma.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tiberio: la ragione conversazionale della filosofia e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’anti-filosofia – Roma – filosofia italiana – Grice italo (Roma). not the prince. Not the prince. This one writes on philosophical subjects. Grice: “It would have been a good thing if the OTHER one did!  Tiberio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale della filosofia e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’anti-filosofia –not the prince. Not the prince. This one writes on philosophical subjects. Grice: “It would have been a good thing if the OTHER one did!” GRICEVS: Salve, Tiberi! Dic mihi: quid tibi videtur esse ratio inter philosophiam et anti-philosophiam? TIBERIVS: Ave, Grice! Ego credo anti-philosophiam esse provocationem philosophiae—non negationem, sed potius invitationem ad dubitandum. GRICEVS: Pulchre dictum! Potesne exemplum dare ubi anti-philosophia vere auxilio fuit progressionis philosophiae? TIBERIVS: Certe! Cogita de Socrate, qui saepe quaestiones ponebat quae lineas philosophiae perturbabant; eius “ignorantia docta” initium dedit novis modis cogitandi. Sic anti-philosophia fit instrumentum ipsius sapientiae.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tilgher: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale degl’orecchie dell’aquila – italo-tedesco -- il relativismo filosofico Note sugli Studi sul teatro moderno. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Adriano Tilgher (Resina, Ercolano, Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale degl’orecchie dell’aquila – In Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, what speakers convey beyond literal sentence meaning is explained through conversational implicature, which presupposes rational cooperation and an audience capable of reconstructing the reasons that make an utterance appropriate and intelligible in context. Adriano Tilgher approaches conversational reason from a more historical, cultural, and pluralistic angle: his philosophical relativism and his reflections on style, theatre, and modern culture emphasize that meaning is never fixed once and for all but always filtered through perspectives, forms of life, and interpretive stances. Whereas Grice seeks to stabilize conversational understanding by appealing to general principles of rational cooperation that underwrite inference across contexts, Tilgher foregrounds the instability and multiplicity of meanings, suggesting that what is “heard” in discourse—his metaphorical “eagle’s ears”—depends on the listener’s attunement to competing forms, values, and historical situations. The comparison thus reveals Grice as offering a normative, analytic account of how reason governs implicature in ordinary conversation, while Tilgher represents a critical and relativistic counterpart, for whom conversational reason is inseparable from cultural pluralism, stylistic choice, and the contingent conditions that shape how utterances acquire significance rather than from universal maxims alone. -- italo-tedesco -- il relativismo filosofico –  la scuola di Resina -- filosofia campagnese -- filosofia italiana – Grice italo  (Resìna). Abstract. Keywords: le orecchie dell’aquila, lo spccio del bestione trionfante.. Nacque a Resìna, l’odierna Ercolano, in provincia di Napoli, da Achille, un vetraio di origine tedesca, e da Rosa Eufrasia Oteau -- cognome ch’è spesso italianizzato in Ottò.  Dopo le scuole elementari, si trasferì a Napoli. Mentre frequenta il liceo classico Vico conosce Livia De Paolis, che sposa.  In quegli anni T. matura una passione per la filosofia e per la letteratura, e si avvicina a Croce, che frequenta assiduamente e considera un vero e proprio maestro, come mostrano i suoi primi lavori. In realtà, non si tratta di un rapporto destinato a durare a lungo.  Dopo la laurea in giurisprudenza a Napoli, con Salvioli, docente di storia del diritto italiano, T. vinse un concorso per l’incarico di aiutobibliotecario, e prese servizio presso la Biblioteca nazionale di Torino -- lettere a Croce, in Carteggio Croce-Tilgher.  Passati i primi mesi, la lontananza dalla sua città e dai suoi affetti si trasforma in angoscia, e T. chiede aiuto a Croce per ottenere il trasferimento a una sede più vicina. Dopo mesi di scambi epistolari incentrati sullo stesso tema – e nei quali T. era divenuto decisamente pressante – il filosofo interruppe le comunicazioni. È comunque riuscito a ottenere il trasferimento di T.  alla Biblioteca Alessandrina di Roma, che avvenne.  Dal Carteggio risulta, inoltre, che T. non era puntuale nel rispettare gli impegni editoriali, determinando il disappunto e l’insofferenza del suo interlocutore, che fa della disciplina una ragione di vita. Lo stesso T., del resto, si risentì di fronte alle critiche di Croce al suo Arte, conoscenza e realtà. Croce era convinto – come scrive a Gentile – che il suo amico avrebbe dovuto dedicarsi alla storia della filosofia per acquisire quel metodo e quella maturità scientifica. le orecchie dell'aquila, lo spaccio del bestione trionfante.  Grice: Caro Tilgher, permettimi una curiosità: ma Gentile, quando sentiva quel "gh" nel tuo cognome, non pensava forse che suonasse un po’ troppo “unno” per le sue orecchie così raffinate d’italico filosofo? Magari temeva che ti fossi presentato a Roma con le orecchie dell’aquila e la spada di Attila! Tilgher: Ah, Grice! In effetti Gentile, col suo spirito tutto latino, mi guardava come se avessi nidificato aquile in biblioteca invece di libri! Ma ti confesso che, se proprio devo scegliere, preferisco le “orecchie dell’aquila” alle orecchie d’asino di certi critici! Grice: Che immagine! Vedi, in Inghilterra diciamo che chi ha le orecchie troppo grandi sente anche quello che non dovrebbe... Ma tu, con quelle d’aquila, riuscivi a captare le nuvole del relativismo e pure i sospiri di Croce quando tardavi con un manoscritto! Tilgher: Proprio così! Anche se, a volte, sentivo persino la voce del “bestion trionfante” che mi suggeriva di prendere la vita con un pizzico di ironia. E poi, caro Grice, meglio un cognome da aquila che una mente da gallina! Tilgher, Adriano (1921). Studi sul teatro. Roma: Edizioni della Voce

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Timpanaro: la ragione conversazionale -- filosofia italiana. Note sugli Studi di filologia e storia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice, Sebastiano Timpanaro (Parma) junior: la ragione conversazionale -- In Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, what a speaker communicates beyond the literal content of an utterance is explained through implicature, derived from the assumption that interlocutors are rational agents cooperating according to shared norms that make an utterance intelligible as a reasonable move in conversation. Sebastiano Timpanaro approaches an analogous problem from the side of philology and historical criticism: his work on textual transmission, on Lehmann’s method, and on Leopardi is guided by the idea that meaning emerges from disciplined attention to material detail, error, and correction, rather than from idealized intentional coherence alone. Where Grice emphasizes rational inference by hearers reconstructing speaker intentions under conversational principles, Timpanaro stresses the limits of intentional control, showing how meaning is shaped by objective constraints, mechanical mistakes, and historical processes that escape conscious design. The comparison thus highlights Grice as developing a normative theory of conversational rationality focused on inference and cooperation in living discourse, while Timpanaro represents a materialist and historically grounded counterpart, in which rational understanding depends less on ideal conversational maxims than on a critical method that accounts for the concrete conditions under which texts and meanings are produced, transmitted, and sometimes distorted. Grice: I like him. Leopardi. Filosofo -- è stato un filologo classico, saggista e critico letterario italiano. M. Firenze. Lapide che commemora le vicine case di Pisa dove vissero T. senior, Maria Timpanaro Cardini e T.  junior -- Pisa, via San Paolo. Figlio di T. senior e di Maria Timpanaro Cardini, studia a Firenze col celebre filologo classico PASQUALI (vedasi, membro tra l'altro dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei e della British Academy.  Scelse di rifiutare la carriera di insegnamento universitario, senza tuttavia rinunciare a un'attività scientifica davvero imponente, indirizzata verso la filologia latina, la letteratura italiana e alcuni grandi temi filosofici: il marxismo, il materialismo e la psicoanalisi freudiana.  S'impegna anche in politica, militando inizialmente nella sinistra interna del Partito Socialista Italiano; aderì al Psiup e al Pdup. In seguito, rimanendo coerente con le sue idee leniniste, guarda con interesse al progetto di Rifondazione Comunista, senza però mai iscriversi al partito. È sepolto nel Cimitero Monumentale della Misericordia dell'Antella, Comune di Bagno a Ripoli, provincia di Firenze. Timpanaro e Lachmann Nella fondamentale monografia La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, T. ripercorre i lineamenti di storia della filologia, con particolare riferimento alle molteplici intuizioni e agli spunti che hanno preceduto l'opera di Lachmann e a cui lo studioso tedesco aveva poi dato una sistematica e organica formulazione; ancor oggi il cosiddetto metodo di Lachmann, pur rivisitato nel corso dei decenni, rimane basilare per approntare l'edizione critica di un testo, soprattutto di un autore latino o greco.  Timpanaro e L'infinito In un articolo intitolato Di alcune falsificazioni di scritti leopardiani, T. ha fornito la dimostrazione che i tre abbozzi de L'infinito di LEOPARDI , pubblicati in Tutte le opere, a cura di Francesco Flora, Milano, Mondadori Editore, sono in realtà dei falsi.  Opere La filologia di Leopardi, Firenze, Le Monnier.  G: “Timpanaro begins in 1945 with Ennius. That is a good age at which to begin: young enough for audacity, old enough for footnotes.” S: “And under bombs, more or less.” G: “Yes. Other men grabbed rifles; the Italians grabbed fragments.” S: “That is unfair.” G: “Only if one thinks Ennius less worth rescuing than Europe. Timpanaro seems to have thought the two enterprises adjacent.” S: “You are in a mood.” G: “Philology encourages it. One is always told one is doing something merely preparatory, and then one discovers that civilisation hangs from a damaged line in Nonius.” S: “So Timpanaro in 1945 writes Per una nuova edizione critica di Ennio. The very title sounds half modest, half insurgent.” G: “Exactly. ‘Per una nuova edizione’ means, in polite Italian, ‘the old one will no longer do.’” S: “And the old one was Vahlen.” G: “Vahlen as institution, yes. The great post-Lachmannian comfort blanket. Admirable, indispensable, and by then intolerably old.” S: “So Pasquali sees the need, Timpanaro feels the need, Mariotti writes letters about the need, and eventually Skutsch does the deed.” G: “That is the international division of labour. Florence diagnoses, Oxford publishes.” S: “Skutsch was at Oxford?” G: “Eventually. German by origin, British by appointment, Oxford by immortality. Which is fitting, since Ennius belongs to that awkward zone where nationality is already a commentary.” S: “And Mariotti?” G: “Mariotti matters because he was not merely a bystander. He was the nearest thing Timpanaro had to a fellow campaigner in the Italian line. They wrote to one another about Ennius the way dons write about weather if the weather determined the fate of Rome.” S: “And neither of them, strictly, a philosopher.” G: “No. But strictness is often the enemy of insight.” S: “Then let us be unstrict. What does an analytic philosopher make of Timpanaro, Pasquali, Terzaghi, Mariotti, and this poor shredded Ennius?” G: “He sees a rational practice. That is already enough.” S: “You mean: evidence, inference, correction, and no metaphysical fog?” G: “Quite. Timpanaro would have liked the phrase ‘no metaphysical fog,’ though he would probably have added a polemic against psychoanalysis before tea.” S: “And Ennius?” G: “Ennius is the delicious case. Officially a poet. Actually a small republic of genres.” S: “Annales, tragedies, satires.” G: “And more. Epicharmus. Euhemerus. Protrepticus. A poet who refuses to remain only a poet.” S: “Then he really is philosophically tempting.” G: “Very. Because he stands before philosophy ‘arrives at Rome’ in the pompous textbook way, and yet he is already importing cosmology, theology, exhortation, and reflective anthropology.” S: “Before Carneades, before the embassy, before the harbour scene.” G: “Exactly. Before philosophy is seen to dock, Ennius is already smuggling it inland.” S: “That is rather good.” G: “It is also true.” S: “And Timpanaro knows this?” G: “Of course. That is why Ennius matters to him beyond mere text. A fragmentary author tests not only scholarship but judgement.” S: “Because every editorial decision is an argument?” G: “And every argument is half philology, half philosophy, if the text is sufficiently broken.” S: “So Grice, or rather G., reading Timpanaro, does not say, ‘Ah yes, another textual chap.’ He says, ‘Here is a man deciding what counts as evidence.’” G: “Yes. And further: here is a man deciding what counts as the same work, the same line, the same authorial intention under ruin.” S: “That sounds almost like philosophy of language.” G: “It is philosophy of language without the vanity of calling itself that.” S: “And Pasquali?” G: “Pasquali is the great elder pressure. He sees that Vahlen must be superseded, and he sees in the young Timpanaro the possible editor of Ennius.” S: “A kind of appointed avenger.” G: “Or appointed cleaner. Editors spend half their lives tidying after dead men and the other half deciding which dirt is authentic.” S: “Terzaghi comes in as relatore.” G: “Yes. Formal supervisor, one might say. Pasquali the true formative force, Terzaghi the official seal. That is a very academic arrangement.” S: “And Mariotti the correspondent.” G: “The living marginalia.” S: “You make them sound like a quartet.” G: “They are a quartet, with Ennius as the absent fifth player and Vahlen as the dead conductor.” S: “And Skutsch?” G: “Skutsch is the late soloist who finally records the symphony.” S: “Do you think Timpanaro minded?” G: “He minded in the only honourable way: by writing on Skutsch as one editor of Ennius speaking to another.” S: “Not nationalist resentment, then.” G: “No. More refined than that. A sense that one had long inhabited the same problem and had not been the man to close it.” S: “Which is almost sad.” G: “Philology is mostly sadness arranged as method.” S: “And still you say an analytic philosopher should admire it.” G: “Certainly. Because it disciplines the imagination. One cannot merely suppose. One must show why a conjecture deserves to live.” S: “That is not unlike your own habits.” G: “I should hope not. Though I have fewer manuscripts and more undergraduates.” S: “Let us talk Ennius proper, then. If he is not merely the annalist, what philosophical content do G. and S. find?” G: “Begin with Euhemerus.” S: “The rationalising of the gods.” G: “Yes. Gods as exalted mortals, founders, benefactors, rulers made divine by memory.” S: “That is already philosophy of religion, or at least myth under criticism.” G: “Indeed. One can hear Hume yawning in advance.” S: “And Epicharmus?” G: “That is subtler. Cosmological, quasi-physical, with reflections on soul and body and the operations of nature. Fragmentary enough to allow irresponsibility, but not so fragmentary that one may say anything one likes.” S: “So exactly the sort of text Timpanaro would relish.” G: “Because it forces one to distinguish reconstruction from invention.” S: “And Protrepticus?” G: “A philosophical genre by title alone. Exhortation. The very idea that poetry may urge one toward a mode of life or thought rather than merely recount events.” S: “So Ennius already contains the possibility that poetry thinks.” G: “And that is where the philosophers become interested.” S: “Even if condescendingly.” G: “Especially if condescendingly. Philosophers love border cases because they allow one to be generous without yielding the border.” S: “What would G. say, reading one of the famous lines?” G: “He would choose one that sounds like Rome announcing itself before it knows what Rome is.” S: “Such as?” G: “Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque.” S: “The Roman commonwealth stands by ancient customs and by men.” G: “Exactly. It is almost proverb, almost philosophy, almost constitutional theory.” S: “And entirely Ennius.” G: “And entirely why a philosopher cannot simply shrug and say ‘mere poet.’” S: “Though he might try.” G: “He might. But the line persists because it compresses a political anthropology into verse.” S: “So Grice, with Lit. Hum., hears not only metre but doctrine.” G: “He hears a maxim. A Roman maxim before philosophy properly institutionalises maxims.” S: “And Timpanaro hears a textual problem.” G: “And both are right.” S: “That is annoyingly harmonious.” G: “The best disagreements usually are.” S: “Would G. admire Timpanaro’s materialism?” G: “He would admire the refusal to sentimentalise intention. Timpanaro keeps reminding one that texts travel through blunders, slips, contamination, false piety, editorial violence.” S: “Which is a salutary pressure on any clean theory of meaning.” G: “Yes. It says: authorial intention is not sovereign over transmission.” S: “So even if Grice begins with intention, Timpanaro forces him to add vehicle, medium, and damage.” G: “Exactly. Timpanaro is what happens when the post brings bad news to philosophy of language.” S: “And Mariotti?” G: “Mariotti shows that this was not one lonely young genius with Ennius, but a whole postwar Italian philological conversation.” S: “Conducted, as you say, like dons rather than soldiers.” G: “Quite. While others defend Europe materially, they defend its fragments.” S: “That sounds almost indecent.” G: “Civilisation is indecently layered. Someone must keep the footnotes alive while others keep the lights on.” S: “And Oxford?” G: “Oxford would call it classical scholarship and imagine it as part of civilised education.” S: “Whereas for the Italians it is their own deep history.” G: “That is the crucial point. For Timpanaro and Mariotti, Ennius is not merely a Latin author in a syllabus. He is part of how Italy, and Rome, and antiquity became available as a self-history.” S: “So Timpanaro’s fight for a post-Vahlen edition is not antiquarian fussing.” G: “No. It is a claim about what deserves to be transmitted correctly.” S: “And G., as analytic philosopher, sees in that not mere piety but a logic of preservation.” G: “Yes. A practice in which evidence, norm, and responsibility converge.” S: “You make philology sound almost noble.” G: “It is noble. It is merely dressed badly.” S: “Can one say that Ennius is philosophically important before Roman philosophy arrives in the textbook sense?” G: “One must say exactly that.” S: “Even if the textbooks prefer Appius Claudius Caecus or later Lucretius.” G: “Textbooks always prefer clean beginnings. History prefers smudges.” S: “And Ennius is a smudge.” G: “A magnificent one.” S: “Then why do they keep calling him a poet?” G: “Because classification is how disciplines protect their furniture.” S: “And yet his corpus keeps spilling over.” G: “Tragedy, satire, epic, theology, protreptic. He refuses to stay shelved.” S: “Which is why Timpanaro had to fight for him.” G: “Yes. A genius in fragments is always in danger of becoming a mere quarry for quotations unless someone restores proportion.” S: “And Vahlen, admirable though he was, could no longer do that.” G: “No. Vahlen had become a monument. Monuments are indispensable and impossible to inhabit.” S: “Skutsch then builds the habitable edition.” G: “And Timpanaro reviews it like a man walking through a house he once hoped to build.” S: “That is nearly moving.” G: “Philology becomes moving when one remembers that behind every ‘review’ there may be forty years of unspent editorial ambition.” S: “Would G. envy them?” G: “In a way. Philosophers rarely have such clear objects. Ennius, at least, is definitely there, though mostly missing.” S: “Whereas philosophers have texts and still cannot agree what they mean.” G: “Exactly. Ennius is fragmentary in body. Philosophy is fragmentary in spirit.” S: “And the punchline?” G: “That the poet turns out more philosophical than the philosophers expected, and the philologists more philosophical than the philosophers admit.” S: “And Rome?” G: “Still standing, apparently, on ancient customs, on men, and on editors.”GRICE: Caro Timpanaro, lasciami cominciare con una domanda che mi frulla in testa: ma tu, quando correggi un manoscritto latino, non ti viene mai la tentazione di aggiungere qualche battuta spiritosa tra le righe? Così, per movimentare un po’ la filologia… TIMPANARO: Ah Grice, se solo avessi osato! Ma sai, se avessi scritto qualcosa di spassoso su un codice di Virgilio, i miei colleghi sarebbero diventati più severi di Lachmann con una variante spurie. Però confesso: a volte sostituirei volentieri qualche verso con un paradosso leopardiano. GRICE: Ecco, sapevo che Leopardi sarebbe saltato fuori! Dimmi la verità: tu ti senti più vicino all’infinito di Leopardi o alla “finitezza” dei manoscritti, dove persino una virgola conta come se fosse una legge fisica? TIMPANARO: Per Leopardi l’infinito era una siepe, per me spesso è una pila di varianti testuali che non finisce mai! Ma, tra noi, la vera felicità è trovare una lectio difficilior che resista a ogni tentazione filologica… un po’ come resistere a una battuta ironica durante un convegno serio. GRICE: Allora dovremmo fondare una scuola: “La ragione conversazionale della critica testuale!” Regola numero uno: ogni volta che un editore commette una falsificazione leopardiana, si brinda con vino toscano e si ride per almeno dieci minuti! TIMPANARO: Accetto! Ma lasciami aggiungere la regola due: chi trova un falso in Leopardi può scegliere la musica di sottofondo durante la riunione — ma solo se è Rossini. Sai, un po’ di leggerezza non guasta mai neppure in filologia! Timpanaro, Sebastiano junior (1945). Per una nuova edizione critica pot-Vahlen degl’Annali d’Ennio. Sotto Pasquale e Terzaghi. Lettere. Firenze.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Toderini: “what an honest chap woud do” – l’uomo onesto -- la ragione conversazionale di Roma e l’implicatura conversazionale dei sue colonie – la scuola di Venezia. Note su Della letteratura turchesca. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice, Giovanni Battista Toderini (Venezia, Veneto): “what an honest chap woud do” – l’uomo onesto -- In Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, what is said and what is meant are connected by the assumption that speakers behave as rational and cooperative agents, so that conversational implicatures arise because hearers expect utterances to conform to standards of truthfulness, relevance, and clarity that any reasonable participant would recognize. Giovanni Battista Toderini’s moral philosophy, especially as expressed in L’onesto uomo, approaches conversational reason from the ethical standpoint of the “honest man,” treating reasonableness in speech as a virtue rooted in honesty, decorum, and civic responsibility rather than as an abstract inferential mechanism. Where Grice formalizes conversational rationality into general principles that govern how meaning is inferred beyond literal content, Toderini locates the same regulative force in the practical ideal of onestà, according to which a speaker contributes to conversation as an upright agent who aims to illuminate rather than obscure. The comparison thus shows Grice as offering an analytic reconstruction of the norms implicit in everyday communicative practice, while Toderini articulates a culturally and morally inflected precursor, in which conversational implicature flows from what an honest, reasonable person would say or leave unsaid in order to sustain shared understanding and trust within a community. -- la ragione conversazionale di Roma e l’implicatura conversazionale dei sue colonie –Grice italo –Grice: “I like T.; in fact, my philosophy may be seen as a response to him. T. was dubious about Rousseau; I’m not. T. uses ‘ragione;’ I use ‘reason’! Other than that, we are identical!” -- Keywords. filosofia coloniale -- Flosofo veneziano. Filosofo veneto. Filosofo italiano. Venezia, Veneto. Nacque terzogenito di quattro figli maschi, da Domenico Maria T. e da Anna Cestari. Entra nell’ordine dei gesuiti, che professo lo collocarono ad insegnare – Moschini -- e si distinse come erudito e antiquario, come testimonia Lalande, che ha modo di incontrarlo a Verona – dove T. entra in contatto con Maffei – e di apprezzarlo come raccoglitore di medaglie. Il profilo intellettuale dell’abate non si riduce tuttavia ai tratti del ricercatore di reperti antiquari, mettendo in luce interessi tanto per vari argomenti scientifici quanto per la riflessione filosofica e morale.  Sul primo versante sono testimonianza alcune dissertazioni, di vario argomento; la Dissertazione sopra un legno fossile, edita congiuntamente a una lettera Sull’indurimento di molti bachi da seta, datata Modena, e a un’altra lunga lettera Su l’aurora boreale, datata Modena,indica tra l’altro la presenza di T. come membro dell’Accademia degli ICENUTICI di Forlì. A un’adunanza della medesima accademia è da ricondurre anche la dissertazione dal titolo Filosofia frankliniana delle punte preservatrici dal fulmine – Modena --, in cui T. si dimostra attento conoscitore dei problemi legati ai fenomeni elettrici atmosferici e in particolare degli apporti nuovi offerti da Franklin e da BECCARIA  -- Proverbio. Di quest’opera T. fa omaggio a Franklin, come documenta una lettera da Forlì -- The papers of Franklin. Altre tre dissertazioni – su ‘due antichissimi alcolani’, filosofia coloniale.  Grice: Carissimo Toderini, ti parlo al volo dall’aula di Oxford! Ho appena detto ai miei studenti che le mie massime della conversazione non sono altro che ciò che “un uomo onesto” farebbe. Si tratta di essere sinceri, cooperanti, quasi da manuale del buon senso veneziano! Mi sa che sono più italiani di quanto pensassi… Toderini: Ah, Grice, l’uomo onesto – che bella espressione! Hai mai pensato all’etimologia ciceroniana di “honestas”? Cicero diceva che honestas viene da “honor”, e che l’onestà non è solo il rispetto delle regole, ma anche la capacità di dare lustro alla conversazione! In fondo, è come una medaglia: brilla se la ragione la pulisce bene. E attenzione a non scambiarla con “decoro”, che è tutta un’altra storia – lì si rischia di finire tra i reperti antiquari! Grice: Splendido, Toderini! Quasi quasi aggiungo la massima della “pulizia argomentativa” alle mie regole: parlare come si lucidano le medaglie, senza polvere di ambiguità! E mi piace pensare che l’onestà, come la tua filosofia veneziana, sappia navigare tra i canali delle parole senza mai affondare… Anzi, potremmo dire che l’onestà è la gondola del pensiero! Toderini: Eh, caro Grice, se l’onestà è una gondola, allora la conversazione è la laguna: a volte calma, a volte tempestosa, ma sempre pronta a riflettere il cielo del ragionamento. E ricordati: un uomo onesto non teme la nebbia – la attraversa con la lanterna della ragione, e magari, se proprio l’argomento si fa torbido, tira fuori un proverbio veneziano… così nessuno si perde! Toderini, Giovanni Battista (1787). Della letteratura turchesca, Venezia: Presso Giuseppe Santini.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tocco: la ragione conversazionale di Hardie -- e l’implicatura conversazionale dei rendiconti della ragione conversazionale. Note sugli Studi sulla storia della filosofia del Rinascimento in Italia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice, Felice Tocco (Catanzaro, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale di Hardie -- e l’implicatura conversazionale dei rendiconti della ragione conversazionale – In Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, conversational implicature is explained by treating speakers and hearers as rational agents who “render accounts” of what they say by implicitly appealing to shared norms of cooperation, so that what is meant beyond what is said depends on the audience’s capacity to recognize a single underlying rational sense behind apparently diverse conversational moves. Felice Tocco’s approach, shaped by Italian idealism and by his engagement with Platonic and Aristotelian traditions mediated through figures such as Hardie, shifts the emphasis from the formal reconstruction of inferences to the philosophical responsibility of reason for its own expressions, stressing that conversational meaning emerges through explicit and implicit rendiconti della ragione in both theoretical and practical contexts. While Grice insists on the aequi‑vocality of expressions across contexts, arguing that even when language appears multi‑vocal the implicature presupposes one rational sense recoverable by cooperative reasoning, Tocco advances a historically informed view in which reason may change register—alethic or practical, descriptive or normative—yet remains unified because each conversational act must justify itself within a continuous rational tradition. The comparison therefore shows Grice offering a normative, analytic account of implicature grounded in general principles of rational cooperation, whereas Tocco interprets conversational implicature as the reflective self‑accounting of reason as it appears in lived philosophical discourse, preserving unity of sense not through abstract maxims alone but through the continuity of rational practice across different philosophical vocabularies and historical contexts. -- la scuola di Catanzaro -- filosofia calabrese -- filosofia italiana – Grice italo – By , pel, ,  (Catanzaro). Abstract. Grice used to say that he admired Hardie’s masterpiece on Plato but had to WORK with Hardie’s notes on Aristotle. The implicature is that you cannot do both. In Italy, he who does Plato is T.! Keywords: Grice, Hardie, Tocco, ragione teoretica o alethica, ragione prattica – Grice’s aequi-vocality thesis – the uni-vocality of an expression – “or, if ‘multi-vocal’ or ‘pluri-vocal,’ it is so across the divide – STILL ONE SENSE!   Nacque da don Nicola Antonio di T., patrizio di Tropea laureato in legge, e da donna Vincenza Toraldo, patrizia di Tropea. Ha due fratelli maggiori: Francesco, laureatosi in legge, e Giuseppe, che è magistrato.  In una lettera a CANTONI  scrive che il ramo primogenito della famiglia, estintosi pochi anni prima, si chiama«di Tocco» ed è originario di Napoli; mentre il ramo cadetto, quello cui apparteneva T., per scelta del nonno decise di togliere il «di» e «alla comoda soppressione s’acconcia per lunga pezza anche mio padre, ma un quindici anni or sono, si decide di riprenderlo. E lo dovetti riprendere anch’io nelle relazioni familiari, ché in tutti gli atti pubblici i miei si firmano di T., e così si firmarono anche negli atti del mio matrimonio. Letterariamente però conservo sempre lo stesso nome con cui pubblicai il mio primo scritto -- Ferrari.  Frequenta le scuole dei padri Scolopi di Catanzaro e qui è licenziato in filosofia; contro il parere del padre – che avrebbe preferito l’avvio agli studi forensi –  è discepolo a Napoli di SETTEMBRINI  e soprattutto di SPAVENTA , di cui segue le lezioni sulla filosofia della natura. Di queste lezioni rimase ampia traccia nella prima opera a stampa di T., la recensione uscita sulla Rivista bolognese di scienze, lettere, arti e scuole del Saggio sulla natura della marchesa Marianna Florenzi Waddington.  Bruno, ragione pratica.  G: January 1863, and there he is, not in a little circle, not in a salon, but in a proper university room, taking notes as if note-taking were already a philosophical method. S: Which, for him, it almost was. G: It usually is, for the clever ones. A fool copies. A philosopher takes notes against the day when he must disagree with them. S: And the curious thing is that Spaventa is officially there for logica e metafisica, yet what the student writes down is filosofia della natura. G: Quite right. Oxford would call that trespassing. Naples calls it metaphysics. S: Or perhaps metaphysics, when still alive. G: That is exactly what Tocco found in him, I think. Spaventa does not lecture on “sources.” He lectures on movement. S: He gives you a concept before he gives you a page reference. G: And that is why the notes mattered. January 1863 is not just a date. It is the date on which Tocco begins not merely to hear Spaventa but to preserve him. S: As if he knew already that one day he would have to carry him elsewhere. G: Which is, in fact, what happens. He goes north. S: To Bologna. G: To perfect himself, as the institutional phrase goes. S: A phrase designed to hurt one’s master if one has one. G: Yes. “I go to perfect myself” always means “you have not quite perfected me.” S: And poor Spaventa, had he heard it in the wrong key, might have taken it as apostasy. G: Though really it is not apostasy. It is credentialing. S: A hideous modern need. G: Universities are full of those. One learns from one man and takes the degree from another. S: Which is where Fiorentino enters. G: Precisely. The speculative southern fire is left behind in Naples, and the northern university asks for a title, a thesis, a topic, and an examinable shape. S: And the topic is almost decorously historical. G: Idea platonica e categoria aristotelica. One can hear the laurea machinery humming already. S: One can also hear Spaventa inside it. G: Much too loudly for Bologna’s peace of mind. S: Because the title looks historical, but the engine is speculative. G: Exactly. The danger is that a thesis ostensibly “on” Plato and Aristotle is in fact a modern metaphysical operation performed on them. S: Through them, perhaps. G: A generous amendment. S: Then comes Montanari. G: Yes, the great virtue of a university other than one’s own master’s is that it produces an objection one would not have received at home. S: At Naples, under Spaventa, Tocco might have been praised for vitality. G: At Bologna he is accused of pantheism. S: Which is a splendidly nineteenth-century way of saying, “Your metaphysics has escaped its cage.” G: And Montanari goes straight to the nerve. S: Not to whether Plato said this or Aristotle said that, or whether the citation is exact. G: No. He asks what all this amounts to. S: What lies beneath the reinterpretation. G: Which is why the exchange is so good. It reveals that the thesis is not merely historical scholarship but a metaphysical wager. S: And Tocco answers like a good Spaventian. G: He says, in effect, that the absolute is not a dead lump but life and development. S: Which is not the answer of an archivist. G: Nor of a mere Platonist. S: Nor indeed of a mere historian of categories. G: It is the answer of a man who heard filosofia della natura under the title of metaphysics and never quite recovered. S: So Bologna refines him without converting him. G: Nicely put. He gains scholastic form without losing speculative blood. S: And Fiorentino? G: Fiorentino gives him an academic frame, and probably a better conscience about the ancient texts. S: Closer relevance to sources, one would say. G: Yes. If Spaventa makes Plato and Aristotle live, Fiorentino asks where exactly they lived in the manuscripts. S: That is too neat. G: It is neat because it is only mostly true. S: Then let us be less neat. Spaventa is the master of philosophical atmosphere; Fiorentino, of thesis-legibility. G: Better. S: And Settembrini? G: Ah, Settembrini is more moral weather than conceptual grammar. S: A human presence, then, rather than a direct source of “idea” and “categoria.” G: Just so. Settembrini gives one courage and civic tone. Spaventa gives one the metaphysical daring. Fiorentino gives one the thesis and the degree. S: That sounds almost too administrative. G: Philosophy in Italy often is administrative at the decisive moment. S: Which is perhaps why the 1863 notes matter so much. They preserve the pre-administrative Tocco. G: The Tocco before the degree disciplines him into a public scholar. S: A Tocco still being formed by a voice rather than by a printed topic. G: Exactly. Notes on lectures are intimacy before bibliography. S: And yet from those notes one can almost see the future thesis. G: Only if one reads them with hindsight. In 1863 he is hearing nature as metaphysical life. In 1867 he is writing Plato and Aristotle under Bologna’s eye. S: And Montanari says: this all smells of pantheism. G: Which is really the examiner’s way of saying, “I hear Naples in this.” S: Wonderful. G: Examiners are wonderful when they force a thesis to confess its birthplace. S: Then Tocco, by moving north, did not cease to be southern. G: No, he became southern in public. S: Bringing, as you said, the vitality of Southern Italy to the oldest university in Europe. G: Yes, and perhaps alarming a few people in the process. S: One likes to think of him arriving with notebooks and categories and too much life. G: Bologna always did need a little excess animation. S: But tell me: was Spaventa “full professor” then in the way modern bureaucrats like to say? G: Essentially yes. Installed, official, university philosophy in full dignity. S: So Tocco was not haunting a private genius; he was following the recognised chair. G: Which makes the later move all the more poignant. He did not leave because Naples lacked a master. S: He left because Bologna had a perfezionamento place. G: The modern world again. S: Credentials against charisma. G: And not entirely against. More like charisma submitted to credentials. S: A melancholy formula. G: Most good academic histories are melancholy formulas. S: Let us picture the scene, then. Tocco in 1863, writing quickly while Spaventa on “nature” turns metaphysics into motion. G: And not merely nature as flora and fauna, but nature as the absolute in self-exposition. S: Which sounds less like a “course” and more like weather. G: Naples would understand that. S: Bologna less so. G: Bologna wants the weather indexed by source. S: Hence the topic. G: Hence the topic. S: And hence the danger that one mistakes the topic for the centre. G: Yes. The title says Plato and Aristotle. The life of the thesis says Spaventa. S: And Montanari, to his credit, hears the life. G: He hears too much of it, perhaps, but better that than deafness. S: Was Tocco frightened? G: Challenged, surely. Frightened, perhaps not. A man who has listened to Spaventa on nature is unlikely to collapse at the word pantheism. S: He would almost welcome it as proof that the thing was alive. G: Exactly. A dead thesis is never accused of pantheism. S: Then the move to Bologna is educational in the strict sense: it educates the speculative man into controversy. G: And into footnotes, which are a lesser but necessary education. S: You are cruel to footnotes. G: No, grateful. They prevent metaphysics from floating entirely free. S: So if we distinguish them: Spaventa gives him philosophy as living movement; Fiorentino gives him philosophy as examinable scholarship. G: And Tocco spends the rest of his early career trying to have both. S: Which is not easy. G: It is impossible. That is why it is interesting. S: Then perhaps the 1863 notes are more revealing than the 1867 thesis. G: In one sense yes. Notes catch formation before self-censorship. S: Before one writes for examiners. G: Before one writes for posterity, which is worse. S: Yet one needs the thesis to see how a live hearing becomes a public doctrine. G: Precisely. Notes are origin; thesis is adaptation. S: Spaventa in the ear, Fiorentino on the title page. G: Very good. S: And Montanari in the middle saying, “This is all pantheism.” G: Which is Bologna’s way of forcing Naples to speak more clearly. S: In Oxford we would call that useful hostility. G: In Oxford we would call it a good viva and then publish nothing. S: Whereas the Italians turn it into biography. G: And rightly. Their philosophy is always nearer to lived affiliation than ours likes to admit. S: So G. and S., browsing Tocco, relish not only the doctrine but the academic drama. G: One cannot separate them. A thesis is a metaphysical claim wearing institutional clothes. S: And Tocco’s clothes changed in Bologna, but his gait remained southern. G: I should like that as an epitaph. S: Too early. G: Very well. As a thesis report, then. S: One more thing. Why does “filosofia della natura” matter so much here? G: Because it is the place where metaphysics stops being merely classificatory and begins to breathe. S: Nature not as object, but as the life of concept. G: Yes. Once one has heard that, “idea platonica” and “categoria aristotelica” can never again be merely textbook headings. S: They become moments in a larger self-unfolding. G: Which is why Montanari smells pantheism. S: And why Tocco cannot retreat into mere antiquarianism. G: He could have chosen safer scholarship. S: But then he would not be Tocco. G: Just so. S: Nor would he have needed to take notes in January 1863. G: Notes, after all, are taken when one suspects the lecture is not merely informative but formative. S: And perhaps when one already knows one will one day have to leave it. G: That is the saddest and best reason to take notes. S: So the whole little story is this: the newly appointed master at Naples lectures on nature under metaphysics; the student begins writing in January 1863; the student later goes north to “perfect” himself; the thesis looks historical but remains animated by the southern master; Bologna tests it through Montanari; Fiorentino regularises it; and Tocco remains, through all the paperwork, Spaventian at heart. G: A little too elegant, perhaps. S: Then let me spoil it. G: Please do. S: He goes to Bologna to become respectable and arrives there carrying metaphysical contraband from Naples. G: Much better. S: And the examiners notice. G: They always do, when the contraband is good. S: And the punchline? G: That he went north to perfect himself and instead exported a piece of southern weather.Grice: Caro professore Tocco, ho sempre ritenuto che i “rendiconti della ragione conversazionale” siano ciò che davvero mette alla prova la nostra capacità filosofica. Mi incuriosisce sapere come li intenda Lei, anche perché in Italia, chi affronta Platone non può che chiamarsi Tocco! Tocco: Caro Grice, mi lusinga il Suo riferimento. Per me, i rendiconti della ragione conversazionale sono il modo in cui la ragione si fa “responsabile” dei propri atti, sia sul piano teoretico che pratico. Come mi insegnò Spaventa, ogni ragionamento, anche il più astratto, deve sempre fare i conti con il suo impatto nella conversazione reale. Grice: Perfettamente d’accordo! Da noi, a Oxford, si direbbe che la ragione “rende conto” quando rispetta le massime della conversazione. Ma, secondo Lei, esiste una differenza tra i rendiconti teoretici e quelli pratici, oppure – come suggerisce la mia tesi dell’aequi-vocalità – mantengono sempre un’unica radice razionale? Tocco: Bella domanda! Io credo che, anche se la ragione cambia registro – da teoretica ad alethica, da pratica a concreta – resta sempre fedele a se stessa. Se si mostra “multi-vocale”, lo fa solo per adattarsi al contesto, ma in fondo, come dicevano i nostri padri scolastici, la ragione è una sola, “ancora che si cangi abito”. Il rendiconto, alla fine, è sempre lo stesso: rendere ragione, a sé e agli altri, della propria ricerca di verità. Tocco, Felice (1863). Note su Spaventa. Napoli.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tolomei: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale nella filosofia della percezione. Note sulla Philosophia mentis et sensuum universa. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice, Giovanni Battista Tolomei (Pistoia, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale nella filosofia della percezione – In Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning, what a speaker communicates beyond what is strictly said is explained through conversational implicature, generated and recovered by hearers who assume that speakers are rational, cooperative agents acting for identifiable reasons, so that meaning depends on calculable inferences grounded in shared norms of rational behavior; Giovanni Battista Tolomei, as presented within the Pistoian and Tuscan philosophical context, approaches conversational reason from the side of perception and signs, emphasizing how implicature arises from the way perceptual content is organized, classified, and linguistically signified rather than from abstract inference alone. Whereas Grice systematizes conversational meaning through general principles and maxims that govern rational exchange independently of sensory modalities, Tolomei embeds conversational reason in a philosophy of perception where the distinction between natural and arbitrary signs shapes how meanings are implicitly conveyed and understood, making implicature sensitive to how agents perceive, discriminate, and name their experiences. The comparison thus shows Grice offering a normative, formally articulated account of how rationality governs conversational interpretation, while Tolomei represents a more perceptually and semiotically grounded conception in which conversational implicature reflects the interplay between sensory apprehension, rhetorical practice, and sign use within shared linguistic traditions rather than primarily the reconstruction of speaker intentions through explicit rational calculation. -- la scuola di Pistoia -- filosofia toscana -- filosofia italiana – Grice italo (Pistoia). Abstract. Grice: “People say I’m a systematic philosopher, but so is T.. I especially adore his taxonomy of ‘signum’ into naturale and ‘arbitrarium’!” -- Keywords: la filosofia della percezione, Warnock, Grice. Filosofo toscano. Nasce in una villa nella località di Gamberaia, presso Firenze, da Iacopo di Giovambattista, discendente del ramo pistoiese della nobile famiglia senese dei Tolomei, e dalla nobildonna fiorentina Maria Pulicciani. Ha come fratelli minori Maria Maddalena, badessa del monastero pistoiese di S. Maria delle Grazie, e Salvatore Francesco, che è commissario a Cortona e a Firenze e perpetua il ramo pistoiese della famiglia -- Salomoni.  Riceve la sua prima formazione a Firenze dai padri gesuiti di S. Giovannino degli Scolopi. Venne condotto a Pisa per essere avviato allo studio del diritto e seguire le orme paterne ma, stando a quanto afferma il suo principale biografo, proprio in questi anni matura la propria vocazione religiosa, che inizialmente non trova l’appoggio dei genitori. Studia poi FILOSOFIA nel Collegio Clementino di Roma, quindi di nuovo diritto, questa volta presso lo studium di Siena, ma nella patria della sua famiglia si accostò anche alla teologia e all’Ordine dei gesuiti, maturando definitivamente il desiderio di farsi chierico, tanto che prende la tonsura e l’ostiariato e ricevette due benefici semplici.  Morto il padre – Prosopographie --, si recò di nuovo a Roma, dove venne accolto come novizio nella Compagnia di Gesù per poi prendere i voti semplici due anni dopo. Nel frattempo affina la propria conoscenza della RETORICA e delle lingue -- in particolare del greco – e frequenta il corso di METAFISICA – cf. Grice on P. F. STRAWSON, Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy -- al Collegio romano. Venne inviato a Ragusa come maestro di scuola e vi rimase; qui apprese la lingua locale. implicatura.  Grice: Carissimo Tolomei, mi precipito a dirti che la prossima settimana parte il mio seminario sulla filosofia della percezione con Warnock! Dal Vadum Boum, dove anche l’erba ha un accento, mi domando: hai qualche consiglio botanico-linguistico per “perceptum” e “percipio”? Ho un sospetto che Cicerone ne abbia fatto più pasticci di quanti ne abbia risolti! Tolomei: Ah, Grice, se ti serve un’erborista della lingua, sei venuto dal giusto! “Percipio” da Cicerone a mia zia, tutti lo usano come se fosse un vaso di fiori: lo riempiono, lo svuotano, lo confondono con “capire” e “sentire”. Per non parlare del “perceptum”, che spesso sembra più un fungo allucinogeno che un concetto filosofico! Grice: Dunque, dovrei avvertire i miei studenti che quando Cicerone “percipio”, può significare che ha semplicemente annusato qualcosa? Magari la famosa aura di Roma o il profumo del caffè universitario? Mi sa che la percezione ciceroniana è un po’ come la mia pronuncia latina: soggetta a interpretazioni fantasiose! Tolomei: Esatto! E ricorda: a Bononia, il “perceptum” si declina sempre con un sorriso. Consiglia agli studenti di fare come i botanici: osservare, annusare, ma non sempre credere al primo “percipio” che passa. Se Cicero ti confonde, basta un buon espresso e tutto torna chiaro. La filosofia della percezione è anche questione di gusto… e di aroma! Tolomei, Giovanni Battista (1702). Philosophia mentis et sensuum universa, Roma: Typographia Komarek.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tomai: l’implicatura conversazionale e la ragione conversazionale – la scuola di Ravenna. Note sugl’Elementi di filosofia morale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice, Pietro Francesco Tomai (Ravenna, Romagna): l’implicatura conversazionale e la ragione conversazionale – In Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning, conversational implicature arises because speakers and hearers are modeled as rational agents who assume a cooperative principle and can therefore infer unstated meanings from what is said by reconstructing the speaker’s reasons for speaking as they did, within a shared framework of purposes and norms of rational exchange; meaning is thus anchored in calculable inference, attribution of intentions, and the audience’s capacity to supply reasons that make an utterance intelligible as a rational move in conversation. By contrast, the figure of Pietro Francesco Tomai, as reconstructed in the Ravenna-centered tradition and in the playful Grice–Tomai juxtaposition you cite, anticipates a notion of conversational reason that is less formal and inferentially explicit and more rhetorical, mnemonic, and encyclopedic: conversational sense depends not only on cooperative rational calculation but on the trained memory, cultural accumulation, and symbolic ordering that allow interlocutors to recognize connections, analogies, and implicit norms almost automatically. Where Grice abstracts conversational reason into a quasi-systematic logic of implicature derived from general maxims, Tomai embodies conversational reason as a historically cultivated faculty that binds law, rhetoric, memory, and civil conversation, making meaning emerge through remembered precedents and shared symbolic repertoires rather than through explicit inferential reconstruction alone; the comparison thus highlights Grice as offering a modern, formally articulated account of reason-governed meaning, and Tomai as representing a premodern, humanistic counterpart in which reason operates through memory and tradition to sustain implicature in practice rather than theory. -- la scuola di Ravenna -- filosofia emiliana – filosofia romagunola -- filosofia italiana (Ravenna). Abstract. Keywords: Deutero-Esperanto. System G – Symbolo -- TOMAI -- Tommai, Tomasi, Tommasi --, Pietro Francesco (Pietro da Ravenna). Non si conosce il nome della madre. Per studiare diritto si trasfere a Padova, dove segue le lezioni di Tartagni da Imola e si addottora in utroque iure quando è stampata a Venezia, presso Nicolas Jenson, una sua Oratio pro patria. La prodigiosa memoria dimostrata durante gli studi gli procura una grande fama, al punto che è invitato a dar prova delle proprie abilità mnemoniche in numerose città, fra cui Venezia -- dove incontrò Cassandra Fedele --, Brescia, Piacenza e Ferrara. Insegna inoltre diritto a Pavia, Bologna e Pistoia, dove rimane, ottenendo anche la cittadinanza. Rientra quindi a Padova per ricoprire la cattedra di diritto canonico, con uno stipendio iniziale di 80 ducati, portato a 150 e aumentato di altri 50 ducati in ragione dei suoi numerosi figli -- non se ne conosce il numero esatto -- avuti da due mogli -- è noto solo il nome della seconda, Lucrezia Azzoni. In questi anni si fregia del titolo di eques auratus e pubblicò una silloge di Carmina -- Padova, M. Cerdonis -- e il fortunatissimo manuale di mnemotecnica Phoenix -- Venezia, B. de Choris --, uno dei primi testi a ottenere il privilegio dell’esclusiva di stampa, più volte ripubblicato. È scelto dal duca di Pomerania Boghislao X per insegnare diritto civile e canonico presso Greifswald. Dopo aver fatto visita all’imperatore Massimiliano I a Innsbruck, giunse con la famiglia a Greifswald, dove rimase, ricoprendo anche il ruolo di rettore dell’Università. In Germania soggiorna ad Amburgo e Lubecca -- dove fu stampato il trattato Repetitio C inter alia de emunitate ecclesiae --, caratteristica universale, lingua universale, lingua filosofica, il Deutero-Esperanto di Grice. G.: Well, let us have the thing in front of us. Tomai does not go to Venice to say, “The flowers bloom in Ravenna splendidly.” He goes to do something much more serious and much more useful, namely, to place Ravenna intelligibly inside the political poetry of Venice. S.: Political poetry. That sounds like a way of making subjection sound decorative. G.: Quite. And the genre is built for exactly that. Start where the passage starts. He praises the doge personally: justice, fortitude, temperance, cursus honorum, noble family. That is the opening machinery of access. Before one may say anything public, one must show that one knows how to praise privately. S.: Or publicly in the form of the private virtues. I take it this is not idle embroidery. G.: Not idle at all. A man freshly doctored in utroque iure at Padua, or thereabouts, does not suddenly abandon law for lilies. He puts on his Sunday best, as you say, and turns juridical formation into civic address. The legal mind and the oratorical mind are not rivals here. They are two costumes for the same ambition. S.: So the jurist goes from statutes to compliments. G.: Not compliments. Legitimation. Listen to the Latin. Quae, sicut vera religione, iustitia, quiete, libertate, optimis artibus, sanctissimis institutis facile Italiae caput est, ita virtute, fortuna, potentia, rebus gestis terra marique late dominatur. S.: I translate, since I never know whether you yourself understand what you yourself are saying. “Which city of the Venetians, just as by true religion, justice, peace, liberty, the finest arts, and most holy institutions it is easily the head of Italy, so by virtue, fortune, power, and deeds done it rules widely by land and sea.” G.: Very good. And there, at once, you have the myth of Venice in compact form. Not merely strong, but rightful. Not merely rich, but normatively superior. Religion, justice, peace, liberty, arts, institutions: these are not decorative predicates. They are credentials. S.: So Venice is not just winning. It deserves to win. G.: Exactly. Tomai is not reporting a fact. He is obliging with a picture. He is saying, in effect, if you are to understand Venetian dominion correctly, you must understand it as the outward sign of inward civic excellence. S.: Protreptic, then. G.: Yes. There is a protreptic element here. He is not merely stating that p, as though p were a neutral item on a list. He is inviting the hearer to inhabit p. To accept, almost to re-perform, the proposition that Venetian rule is justified because Venetian civic order is exemplary. S.: So the utterance is less constative than pedagogic. G.: Pedagogic and political. The doge is being congratulated, certainly, but the deeper addressee is anyone in the room who needs to hear empire redescribed as benevolence. S.: Which is where Ravenna comes in. G.: Eventually. But note how long Tomai waits. He does not begin with Ravenna. That is very important. The title pro patria may mislead one into expecting a Ravennate manifesto. What we actually get is doge first, Venice second, Ravenna last. S.: Which is tact. G.: Which is hierarchy. He knows where he is. Ravenna is peripheral. Venice is central. Padua is intermediate. Tomai himself has come from Padua, academically speaking, but he speaks now as a son of Ravenna in the court of Venice. It is a perfect triangulation: provincial patria, university formation, imperial centre. S.: Continue with the Latin. G.: Et incredibile dictu est, Princeps foelicissime, quanta de tua hac praestanti civitate, quae tanquam regina caeteras claras urbes superat et excellit, et de vobis apud omnes exteras nationes opinio sit, quanta observantia, quantum nomen. S.: “And it is incredible to say, most fortunate Prince, how great is the opinion among all foreign nations concerning this your distinguished city, which like a queen surpasses and excels the other famous cities; how great the reverence, how great the name.” G.: Very good again. And note the accumulation. Quanta opinio, quanta observantia, quantum nomen. The city is not merely powerful. It is legible abroad. It has fama. It is recognised. Political order here depends upon reputation as much as upon force. S.: You mean that for Tomai civic greatness is partly a matter of what foreigners already think. G.: Yes. Recognition is a political fact. Venice becomes queenly because others regard it so. The speech is doing that work even as it reports it. It says: everyone already knows this, therefore you must know it too. S.: One hears Austin muttering that the utterance is not merely describing prestige but conferring it afresh. G.: Precisely. And then comes, to my mind, the philosophically best bit. Noverunt enim bonam civitatem non moenibus neque parietibus, sed his teneri et conservari civibus, qui unum in locum, uno consilio, una mente, una voluntate congregati, hisdem moribus, hisdem institutis, hisdem inter se legibus uterentur. S.: “For they know that a good city is held and preserved not by walls or ramparts, but by those citizens who, gathered into one place, with one counsel, one mind, one will, use the same customs, the same institutions, the same laws among themselves.” G.: There you are. That is not mere flattery. That is a miniature political philosophy. S.: A rather strong one, too. Not walls but citizens. Not coercion but concord. G.: And not merely concord in the sentimental sense. Una mente, una voluntate, hisdem moribus, hisdem institutis, hisdem legibus. Shared mind, shared will, shared customs, shared institutions, shared laws. It is a theory of civic cohesion by normative homogeneity. S.: Which sounds almost alarmingly total. G.: Renaissance civic ideology often does. But the important thing is that Tomai, having read tomes of civil and canon law, is not leaving law behind here. He is transposing it. Law reappears not as technical casuistry but as one of the binding media of the good city. S.: So the doctor in utroque iure is still very much present. G.: Entirely present. A doctor of both laws has been trained to think in terms of order, authority, jurisdiction, and normativity. In this oration those habits of mind are recast rhetorically. The city is good because its members share leges and instituta. That is the jurist speaking through the orator. S.: Though dressed up, as you say, for the Ducal Palace. G.: Naturally. The venue requires silk over skeleton. But the skeleton is juridico-political. S.: And then the divine coda. G.: Yes. Noveruntque pace et concordia nihil melius, nihil utilius, nihil divinius ab immortali Deo hominibus datum esse. S.: “And they know that nothing better, nothing more useful, nothing more divine has been given by the immortal God to human beings than peace and concord.” G.: Exactly. The sequence is important. Peace and concord are first useful, then divine. Utility and sanctity converge. This is the sort of sentence by which empire is moralised. S.: Or sanctified. G.: Indeed. If peace and concord are divine gifts, and Venice is the polity of peace, concord, law, and institutions, then Venetian rule begins to look less like domination and more like providential custody. S.: Which is why the Ottoman context matters. G.: Yes. The serenity of the Serenissima is not an idle self-description. It is a geopolitical claim under pressure. If the Ottomans are the external threat, then internal concord and maritime dominion become morally charged. Venice does not merely possess empire; it protects Christendom, order, commerce, civilisation, what you will. S.: So even a very little oration may carry a very large burden. G.: Quite so. And Ravenna, having rather little to offer materially, offers symbolic loyalty. That is why the speech is small. A minor city does not stride into Venice with a ten-book treatise. It arrives with two leaves of polished deference. S.: With one careful sentence about itself. G.: Exactly. When Ravenna appears as “most loyal and obedient daughter, servant and ward,” that is the provincial self placed consciously beneath the imperial parent. It is almost familial, except that the family is an empire. S.: Daughter, servant, ward. The sequence is rather humiliating. G.: It is, unless one hears the compensating phrase, that Ravenna was not conquered in war but joined of its own free will. There the humiliation is re-coded as voluntary alignment. S.: So subjection is rewritten as consent. G.: Precisely. That is one of the major functions of the speech. It says, in effect, Ravenna’s dignity consists in having recognised Venice’s superior civic order and attached itself willingly to it. S.: Which is the point at which Grice might become interested. G.: Very much so. Because the explicit content is praise, but the implicated content is allegiance, legitimation, and self-positioning. Tomai says one thing and does several others. He praises the doge, flatters Venice, advertises Ravenna’s loyalty, and, by speaking well, advertises himself. S.: A splendidly layered speech-act, then. G.: Yes. And one must not vulgarise the matter by imagining that he expects the doge to say, “Young man, here is a pension for life.” Perlocution is subtler. The oration aims to have effects on the political atmosphere, on perceptions of Ravenna, on Tomai’s visibility as a cultivated jurist-humanist. S.: So no private practice in the modern sense. G.: No. He is not hanging out a shingle. He is entering a circuit of patronage, office, reputation, and learned service. The university at Padua, the patria Ravenna, the print world of Venice: all three are active here. S.: I still find the transition from utroque iure to this elevated civic unison slightly comic. G.: Only because you imagine law as arid and rhetoric as ornamental. In the fifteenth century they are near neighbours. Civil law and canon law train one in authority, order, jurisdiction, institution, precedent. Rhetoric trains one in making those things socially and politically persuasive. S.: So the same man who studies decretals may tell the doge that the city rests not on walls but on citizens of one mind and one will. G.: Just so. The proposition is not obtuse at all. It is the legal imagination broadened into civic ideology. S.: Then the title pro patria becomes clearer too. G.: Yes. Not “I shall now speak romantically of my beloved Ravenna,” but “I appear from my patria, and on behalf of its civic identity, within a larger ceremonial economy.” The patria is not the content so much as the speaking position. S.: A Ravennate voice in a Venetian ritual. G.: Exactly. And a very disciplined one. He gives Ravenna only the amount of space proper to its place in the order. To do otherwise would have been grotesque. S.: One sees now why the thing is short. Ravenna does not come to instruct Venice. It comes to acknowledge. G.: And in acknowledging, it seeks acknowledgment. That reciprocity is the true point of the oration. S.: So if I were to compress the lesson, I might say: Tomai’s little text is a juridically trained exercise in civic-imperial rhetoric, in which Venice is praised as the paradigmatic polity of religion, justice, liberty, law, concord, and maritime dominion, while Ravenna is inserted as the willing and loyal periphery whose own honour lies in having joined such a centre. G.: Admirably put. S.: And Grice, were he in a dry mood, would say that Tomai is not merely saying that Venice is good, but making it conversationally mandatory to treat Venice as good. G.: Yes. The oration creates the conditions under which dissent would sound not merely false but uncivil. S.: Which is perhaps the final triumph of the genre. G.: Quite. And that is why one should not laugh too quickly at the little doctor from Ravenna polishing his Latin before the doge. He knows exactly what game he is playing. S.: While perhaps pretending not to. G.: Naturally. The best players always do.Grice: Caro Tomai, tra Ravenna e Oxford direi che l’implicatura fa più strada dei ducati. Tomai: Maestro Grice, forse, ma la mia memoria ne conta più di quanti il tuo System G sappia cancellare. Grice: Allora facciamo così: io implico e tu ricordi, e il Deutero-Esperanto nasce da solo. Tomai: Perfetto, purché qualcuno poi ricordi chi dei due ha avuto l’idea per primo. Tomai, Pietro Francesco (1472). Dissertatio in utroque iure. Padova.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tomitano: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei precetti della conversazione civile. Note sulla Introductio ad Sophisticos elenchos Aristotelis. Eiusdem breuis methodus diluendorum paralogismorum per diuisionem: praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit in Elenchis. Quam methodum ex dialogis Platonis et ex Aristotele nuper inuenit. Adiecta sunt famigerata veterum sophismatum exempla: ad exercitationem adolescentum. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Bernardino Tomitano (Padova, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei precetti della conversazione civile – A comparison between H. P. Grice and Bernardino Tomitano shows a deep structural affinity between Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning and the Renaissance humanist tradition of civil conversation articulated through precepts. Tomitano’s precetti della conversazione civile treat conversation as a rational practice regulated by norms that advise speakers to contribute what is fitting, proportionate, and appropriate to the shared aim and stage of the exchange; the precept functions less as an external command than as an internalized orientation toward civility, mutual recognition, and social order. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and maxims perform an analogous role at a more abstract level: they are not prescriptive rules enforced from outside, but rational expectations that conversational agents tacitly rely on to make sense of one another’s utterances, and it is precisely by assuming adherence to such precepts that implicature becomes possible. Where Tomitano frames conversational rationality within the ethical and stylistic ideals of civic humanism, concerned with decorum, timing, and mutual respect, Grice translates this insight into a philosophical account of how meaning is pragmatically inferred rather than merely encoded. In both cases, conversational reason is inseparable from normativity: to speak intelligibly is already to acknowledge others, purposes, and shared orientations, and the success of conversation depends not on rigid obedience, but on a cultivated responsiveness that allows both civility and meaning to emerge. Grice italo -- i precetti della conversazione – praeceptum. – vide praecipio. : to give rules, or precepts, to avise, admonis, warn, inform, instruct, tech, to enjoin, direct, bird, order, etc. Il tuo contributo alla conversazione sia tale quale e richiesto, allo stdio in cui avviene, dallo scopo o orientamnto accettato dello scambio linguistio in cui sei impegnato. Tale principio ha la forma di un precetto o di una regola. Filosofo italiano. Padova, Veneto. Nacque  a Padova, dove trascorre tutta la vita, figlio forse primogenito di Donato.  La sua è un’illustre famiglia originaria di Feltre, che annove tra gl’antenati il beato Bernardino da Feltre, zio per parte paterna dello stesso Donato. In seguito all’assalto di Feltre compiuto dall’esercito dell’imperatore Massimiliano in guerra con Venezia, questo ramo della famiglia si è definitivamente trasferito a Padova, dove Donato ha i natali e vi esercita il commercio con buon successo; rimasto ben presto vedovo della prima moglie Onesta Capodilista, dalla seconda, la cui identità non è nota, ha quattro figli: oltre a Bernardino, Ludovico -- addottoratosi in artibus --, Francesco e Cecilia, andata in sposa a Bartolomeo Sforza. Dopo aver ricevuto in famiglia la prima istruzione, T. è avviato dal padre agli studi di filosofia presso lo studio patavino. Qui ha come maestri ZIMARA , PASSERI , Frigimelica e Carensio (il Tosetto). Come compagno alle lezioni e poi come collega e amico ha Vesalio. Alla sua formazione contribuirono altresì grandi figure di umanisti attivi allora a Padova, quali i veronesi Fracastoro, da lui assiduamente frequentato e, in anni più tardi, lo stimatissimo Monte. Fuori dallo studio, la frequentazione di Bembo e della sua cerchia e l’amicizia con letterati e dotti animatori della cultura cittadina, primo fra tutti Speroni, con il quale rimane sempre in rapporto di grande familiarità, gli permisero di coltivare l’interesse per le lettere. i precetti della conversazione civile. G: 1939, S. You are looking at that title page as if it has insulted you. S: It has, sir. It says Introductio, and then it proceeds to look proud of itself. G: Introductio is always proud of itself. It means it expects to be read first. S: And it expects me to be an adolescens. G: You are, in tutorial terms, permanently an adolescens. S: Thank you, sir. I’ll put it on my epitaph. G: Recite the Latin, and try not to make it sound like a threat. S: Bernardini Tomitani artium doctoris Introductio ad Sophisticos elenchos Aristotelis. G: Good. Now what is an elenchos. S: Sir, I thought you’d start with the obvious: why the plural. G: I will, but you may not hide behind grammar. First: elenchos. S: Refutation, sir. Cross-examination. The thing Socrates does when he pretends to be ignorant and then ruins a man’s afternoon. G: And Aristotle does it without pretending. S: And with chapters. G: Exactly. Now sophisticos. What does that add? S: It says the refutations are about sophists. Or about sophistical tricks. Or about the refutations that sophists require. G: All three are compatible, and Tomitano is trading on that. Sophisticos signals that we are not discussing honest errors only, but errors with a career. S: Errors that pay rent. G: Errors that recruit pupils. Now, why elenchos plural? S: Because Aristotle’s text is called Sophistici Elenchi, plural. It’s the name of the treatise. G: And why would Aristotle title it in the plural? S: Because there are many ways to refute and many ways to be refuted, sir. G: And because the “refutation” is both a procedure and a family of cases. In logic the plural often signals: do not expect one neat pattern. Now continue. S: Eiusdem brevis methodus diluendorum paralogismorum per divisionem: praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit in Elenchis. G: Stop. Clean it in your mouth: brevis methodus. S: Thank God, brevis. G: You should be less grateful. Brevis in Latin often means: I have omitted what you most need. S: Diluendorum paralogismorum. G: Now that is a phrase worth living with. Diluere. S: To dissolve, sir. To thin out. Like washing ink until the forgery disappears. G: Good. Not merely “refute,” but “dissolve.” It implies the paralogism has a kind of apparent solidity that must be loosened. S: Paralogismus, sir. That’s just a fallacy, isn’t it? G: Not quite “just.” Paralogism is the kind of fallacy that can look like an argument. It is a wrong logos that imitates logos. Sophism is often taken as a deliberate deception; paralogism can be honest or dishonest, but either way it is reasoning gone sideways. S: Yet Tomitano uses the plural again. Paralogismorum. G: Because there are many ways to go wrong. Now, per divisionem. S: By division, sir. As if the cure for bad inference is to slice it into parts and see what falls out. G: Exactly. You divide the ambiguous, you separate the conflated, you distinguish the senses. Division is the Renaissance humanist’s favourite scalpel. S: Praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit in Elenchis. G: He says: besides those things Aristotle already had in the Elenchi. Meaning: I add something. S: Or: I pretend to add something. G: In 1544, you must pretend with confidence. Now continue. S: Quam methodum ex dialogis Platonis et ex Aristotele nuper invenit. G: That line is deliciously cheeky. S: Nuper invenit. Recently discovered, sir. As if Plato has been lying around unconsulted. G: Or as if Tomitano has only just noticed Plato is useful to an Aristotelian project. S: Ex dialogis Platonis. So he throws dialogue into a treatise on refutation. G: Precisely. He is saying: the method is not merely in Aristotle’s technical list. It is in Plato’s dramatic practice of exposing confusions. S: So Tomitano wants to teach sophistical refutation by combining Aristotle’s taxonomy with Plato’s theatre. G: That is the civilising move. Aristotle supplies the species; Plato supplies the phenomenology. S: And then he boasts: and also from Aristotle. G: Because you cannot sell a logic manual in Venice by sounding too Platonic. S: Next line? G: Go on. S: Adiecta sunt famigerata veterum sophismatum exempla: ad exercitationem adolescentum. G: Famigerata. S: “Infamous,” sir. With a whiff of scandal. The sophisms have reputations. G: Exactly. They are so well-known they have become teaching tools. S: Veterum. G: Old. Ancient. Classical. But also: time-tested ways to embarrass students. S: Sophismatum, plural again. G: Of course. One sophism would be a curiosity; plural sophisms is a curriculum. S: Exempla. G: Examples are the true currency of instruction. A “method” without exempla is a sermon. S: And then: ad exercitationem adolescentum. G: Now tell me what that means without translating it. S: It declares the audience. It says: this is practice work, sir. Drill. Training. Not metaphysics, not wisdom, but gymnasium for the mind. G: Yes. And it tells you the genre: intro plus method plus examples equals a textbook. S: Sir, can I ask the obvious question? G: You will. Name at least two paralogisms. S: Two paralogisms. Equivocation, and amphiboly. G: Good. Equivocation is one word, two senses, and you pretend it stayed one. Amphiboly is one syntax, two structures, and you pretend it stayed one. S: And you said to name at least two. I did. G: Now, name two sophisms. S: Two sophisms. “Have you stopped beating your father?” and “What you have not lost you have; you have not lost horns; therefore you have horns.” G: Excellent. Both famous, both old, both designed for adolescent humiliation. S: So these are veterum. G: Yes. Now name one new. S: One new sophism? G: One new sophism. Something Tomitano might have seen in Padua, or Venice, or among professors who loved to win. S: “All professors are men; you are a man; therefore you are a professor.” G: That is not a sophism, that is flattery. S: It is a paralogism, sir. G: It is a paralogism with social ambition. Very well, keep it. Another. S: “If you can refute sophists, you are not a sophist; you can refute sophists; therefore you are not a sophist.” G: That is closer. It plays on a hidden premise: that only non-sophists refute sophists. In practice, sophists refute each other for a living. S: Then the new sophism is: professional jealousy. G: Quite. Now, you asked earlier why elenchi plural. Now tell me why sophisticos is plural in sense even if singular in grammar. S: Because it covers many kinds of sophistical refutation. Not one species. G: And because Aristotle’s project is not “the” sophist but the field of deceptive argument. S: Then why paralogismorum plural? Because error is plentiful. G: More plentiful than truth, according to the philosopher you were just quoting by accident. S: Aristotle? G: Yes. But Tomitano’s line about vices being innumerable is from another context, but the thought fits: error has many modes; a method must be flexible. S: So division is the tool because it reduces multiplicity by separating cases. G: Exactly. Division is not only a logical technique; it is a pedagogical one. It teaches the student to ask: which sense are we in. S: Sir, can we do the elenchos thing properly. What does Aristotle mean by “elenchos” in the technical sense? G: In the strict sense, elenchos is a refutation that forces a contradiction from an opponent’s own commitments, under agreed rules of inference and relevance to the question at issue. S: So an elenchos is not just any counterexample. G: No. It is a form of defeat by self-entanglement. S: So the sophist tries to produce apparent entanglement where there is none. G: Or tries to make you accept a commitment you did not see you accepted. S: Which is why examples are “famigerata.” They have trapped generations. G: And why they are useful. A textbook is a controlled trap. S: That is not reassuring. G: It is education. Now, two more: why does Tomitano say “praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit”? S: To mark novelty, sir. To say: I am not merely copying. G: And to excuse his own additions as respectful supplementation rather than rivalry. S: And nuper invenit is the same posture: I have discovered, not invented. G: Exactly. Renaissance modesty is often invention wearing a mask. S: The Plato bit still bothers me. G: It should. It is the interesting part. He is saying: Plato’s dialogues contain methods of dissolving paralogisms by division. Socrates does it by forcing distinctions: in words like “just,” “good,” “courage,” “knowledge.” S: So he wants to teach sophistic refutations not only as formal patterns, but as conceptual hygiene. G: Yes. And that is why an Introductio can be philosophical even when it is technical. It is training in how to keep language from lying on your behalf. S: Sir, you sound as if you approve. G: I approve of any author who tells the adolescent what the adult still needs: do not be fooled by form. S: And yet he calls it brevis. G: Because the adolescent must be kept hopeful. Now, let us do the number game you like. “How many elenchi are there.” S: How many elenchi, sir. In Aristotle’s treatise? G: If you mean how many kinds of fallacy he catalogues, he distinguishes fallacies in dictione and extra dictionem, and then breaks them down. S: So the plural is justified: it is a catalogue, not a single trick. G: Exactly. Now name two in dictione. S: Equivocation and amphiboly. G: Good. Now name two extra dictionem. S: Accident and secundum quid. G: Very good. That is adolescent drill. Now, why ad exercitationem adolescentum is a warning. S: Because it implies: you will be exercised. Which means: you will be made tired and then made better. G: Or made tired and then told you are better. Now, you made a joke earlier about your epitaph. Here is the real joke. Tomitano wrote this for adolescents, and you are reading it in 1939, and we are still adolescents. S: In logic, yes. G: In life, also. S: Sir, can I ask about “diluere.” Why not “solvere” or “refellere.” G: Because refellere is combative. Diluere suggests the error is a thickening that can be thinned, a confusion that can be loosened. S: So it’s more like therapy than war. G: Exactly. The sophist wants you to fight; the logician wants you to clarify. S: Yet Aristotle is fairly warlike. G: Aristotle is warlike in taxonomy. Plato is warlike in drama. Tomitano wants both: the list and the scene. S: Then his title page itself is doing the lesson. It uses big plural nouns to warn you: there are many traps. G: And it uses brevis to prevent you from fleeing. S: Sir, last question. If you had to invent one new sophism for 1939, what would it be. G: Easy. “Everything that can be printed must be true; this is printed; therefore it is true.” S: That is not new, sir. G: It is merely newly weaponised.Grice: Caro Tomitano, lasciami confidarti una cosa: se mai avessi provato a tenere un tutorial sui “precetti della conversazione civile” nella mia università di Vadum Boum, non sarebbe venuto nessuno! I miei studenti sono convinti che “barbaro” sia un complimento, e le buone maniere le lasciano agli archeologi... Altro che la cara, antica Alma Mater della nostra tradizione, vero? Tomitano: Ah Grice, non sai quanto ti capisco! Qui a Padova se provi a parlare di precetti, ti guardano come se avessi proposto una dieta senza risotto. Ma per me il “precetto” è un po’ come il semaforo della conversazione: se non ci fosse, tutti andrebbero in senso contrario e ci ritroveremmo a filosofare sulle rovine... e magari senza nemmeno un buon caffè! Grice: Splendida immagine! Quindi il precetto non è solo ordine, ma anche eleganza: come dire, in conversazione ci vuole almeno un po’ di stile, se no si finisce per parlare tutti insieme come in una fiera di paese. O da me, in aula, dove l’unico “precetto” che rispettano è quello dell’ora di pranzo. Tomitano: Sante parole, Grice! Il precetto, in fondo, è quell’invito gentile – non troppo severo, eh! – che permette alla civiltà di non naufragare nella confusione. È come dire: “Parla pure, ma ricordati che non sei solo al mondo!” Così, persino il più barbaro degli studenti può imparare che una buona conversazione vale più di mille esami... e magari si guadagna pure una stretta di mano! Tomitano, Bernardino (1544). Introductio ad Sophisticos elenchos Aristotelis. Eiusdem breuis methodus diluendorum paralogismorum per diuisionem: praeter illa quae Aristoteles habuit in Elenchis. Quam methodum ex dialogis Platonis et ex Aristotele nuper inuenit. Adiecta sunt famigerata veterum sophismatum exempla: ad exercitationem adolescentum. Venezia: per Bartholomeum cognomento Imperatorem, et Franciscum eius generum.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Toritto: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale contro il lizio. Note su Introduzione alla lettura di Caloprese sopra la concione di Marfisa a Carlo Magno. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Nicola Caravita dei duchi di Toritto (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale contro il lizio – A comparison between H. P. Grice and Nicola Caravita dei duchi di Toritto highlights two allied but culturally distinct modes of resisting rigid rational sequencing in favor of a more humane, reason‑governed conversational order. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning rejects linear inferential “lizio” understood as strict Aristotelian procession from premises to conclusion, replacing it with a rational but flexible model in which meaning emerges through implicature, responsiveness, and shared assumptions among interlocutors. Caravita, formed in the Neapolitan milieu of anti‑baroque clarity and early modern political philosophy, advances a parallel resistance within legal, political, and literary thought: against scholastic Aristotelianism and Thomist hierarchy, he favors a conception of sovereignty, law, and constitution as analogical and context‑sensitive rather than deductively ordered. Where Grice frames conversational rationality as cooperative intelligence that tolerates wit, deviation, and pragmatic play while remaining accountable to reason, Caravita embodies a Southern Italian skepticism toward doctrinal lizio, preferring a conversational reason that moves obliquely through rhetoric, judgment, and civic sensibility. Both figures thus converge on a shared insight: rationality is not compromised by conversational looseness or humor, but is instead realized more fully when reason governs without marching in lockstep. For Grice this yields implicature as a calculable yet non‑mechanical phenomenon; for Caravita it yields a philosophy of law, politics, and criticism that privileges living discourse over syllogistic rigidity, making reason conversational rather than procedural. Grice italico Lizio. Costituzione come concetto analogo Joachim. Soveranita. Filosofo napoletano. Filosofo campanese. Filosofo italiano. Napoli, Campania. Grice: I like Caravita; Locke  Englands, and Oxfords, greatest philosopher, had his sponsor, and so does Italys  not Bolognas  Vico, and he was Caravita!. Nacque nella parrocchia dei Vergini da Giuseppe e da Margherita Boiano. La famiglia, originaria della Spagna, apparteneva alla nobilt. Seguendo le tradizioni giuridiche della famiglia, T. simmatricol in Napoli, laureandosi in giurisprudenza con dispensa dall'et legale, e attese all'attivit forense. Studia anche letteratura, greco, matematica, filosofia, specialmente CARTESIO  cf. Grice, Descartes on clear and distinct perception. Cornelio ne loda la dottrina in un dialogo inedito, ma, anche per dichiarazione di un altro contemporaneo che gli dedica un sonetto, Giannelli, non aveva raggiunto alcuna magistratura pubblica -- cfr. Giannelli, Poesie, Napoli. Seguace nelle lettere dell'indirizzo anti-barocchista e neo-petrarchista T. scrive l'introduzione alla Lettura sopra la concione di Marfisa a Carlo Magno di Calopreso -- Napoli --, opera tra le maggiori di critica letteraria napoletana e fonte per le dottrine estetiche del VICO . Nello stesso anno, in occasione di un'epidemia di peste,  uno dei due giudici speciali eletti dalla deputazione della Salute, con competenza in materia civile in tutto quello che occorrer concernente all'affare del contaggio. Per incarico ricevuto dalla "piazza" di Porto, espresse con altri tre giuristi, tra i quali Fusco e il cronista Confuorto, un parere su una richiesta di reintegrazione in quel "seggio".  tra i promotori della rappresentazione a Posillipo de La rosa di Giulio Cesare Cortese. impiegatura da salotto, diritto, anti-popism  il laico --, anti-aristotele, contro Aristotele, concetto assolutista di sovereignty contro Aquino, quartiere dei Vergini  Capua.  Grice: Caro Toritto, devo confessare che tra i filosofi di Oxford il “lizio” aristotelico è sempre stato un argomento da salotto, persino più discusso del vino dei Castelli! Dimmi, tu che sei noto per la tua vena napoletana, come mai ti sei messo di traverso contro il “lizio”? Voglio sapere se è questione di principio filosofico… o magari solo di gusto!  Toritto: Ah, Grice! Qui a Napoli il “lizio” non lo digeriamo nemmeno col limoncello. Diciamo che Aristotele amava mettere tutto in fila, come se la ragione fosse una processione, ma a noi piace più il Carnevale! Opporsi al “lizio” è quasi una tradizione: preferiamo la conversazione che balla e cambia passo, non quella che marcia in fila indiana.  Grice: Che meraviglia, Toritto! Quindi da voi non è “lizio”, ma “lizzio”, e magari pure “ulizio”, se la festa si scalda. Allora la ragione conversazionale napoletana si ribella alla disciplina aristotelica? Ditemi la verità: avete mai provato a mettere in fila le idee, o finiscono sempre a fare una tarantella?  Toritto: Grice, qui le idee si mettono in fila solo per un caffè al bar, e anche lì qualcuno scavalca! Se la ragione dev’essere “lizia”, allora preferiamo la ragione “campagnese”: libera, vivace, pronta a cambiare abito come diceva Tocco. Aristotele sarà stato un gran maestro, ma noi siamo maestri nell’arte di non prendere tutto troppo sul serio. A Napoli, la filosofia è sempre pronta a ridere… persino del “lizio”! Toritto, Nicola Caravita dei duchi di (1691). Introduzione alla lettura di Caloprese sopra la concione di Marfisa a Carlo Magno. Napoli.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Torlonia: la ragione conversazionale, e l’implicatura conversazionale del natale di Roma. Note sulle Memorie economiche. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giovanni Raimondo Torlonia (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale, e l’implicatura conversazionale del natale di Roma – A comparison between H. P. Grice and Giovanni Raimondo Torlonia brings into focus two distinct but convergent ways of understanding reason‑governed conversational meaning through social practice and shared celebration. Grice’s theory treats conversational reason as a rational discipline exercised by speakers who rely on mutual recognition, background knowledge, and implicature to convey more than is explicitly said, often using occasions that are culturally charged to invite shared understanding without heavy assertion. The playful exchange on the Natale di Roma exemplifies this: the significance of Rome is not stated as a thesis, but implicatively sustained through allusion, irony, and companionship, allowing meaning to emerge via common cultural premises rather than formal argument. Torlonia, grounded in Roman civic memory and economic as well as philosophical life, embodies a conversational rationality that is festive, historical, and communal: conversation becomes the medium through which identity, friendship, and continuity are reaffirmed, with reason expressed not as abstraction but as cultivated sociability. Where Grice offers a general account of implicature as calculable by cooperative principles, Torlonia exemplifies a historically situated conversational practice in which shared rituals, such as celebrating Rome’s birthday, do much of the rational work. What unites them is the idea that reason in conversation is not austere but relational, flourishing in friendship, cultural memory, and the tacit understanding that binds speaker and hearer into an amicable sequence of meaning, amicus, philos, alter ego. -- filosofia italiana – Grice italo (Roma). Abstract. Keywords. logically developing series amicus, philos, alter ego. Joachim. Filosofo italiano. Roma. Nacque figlio del francese Marin TOURLONIAS Tourlonias e di Maria Francesca Angela Lanci. Dei numerosi altri figli della coppia si hanno notizie, perché sopravvissero, solo di Giuseppe e delle sorelle Francesca e Teresa.  Il padre, discendente da una modesta famiglia dell’Auvergne (Francia), arriva a Roma a metà al seguito dell’abate e diplomatico Montgon; è poi divenuto cameriere particolare del cardinale Acquaviva. Marin -- il cui nome è stato ITALIANIZZATO italianizzato in Marino T. -- avvia un fiorente commercio di tessuti pregiati. Negli anni successivi, forse grazie a un lascito ricevuto dal cardinale, vi affianca la concessione di prestiti, secondo il percorso di numerosi mercanti-banchieri. T.  riusce a imprimere un deciso salto alla dimensione e all’organizzazione dell’attività creditizia familiare: cede l’esercizio commerciale ed è ammesso al corpo dei banchieri di Roma. Ottenne così il riconoscimento ufficiale della sua attività di banchiere, formalmente avviata con un capitale di 10.000 scudi. Sin dai primi tempi le operazioni hanno un rapido sviluppo, e si intrecciarono a iniziative imprenditoriali, tanto che in soli due anni il capitale della ditta Marino T. si quadruplica. T. mantenne quella ragione sociale per alcuni anni dopo la morte del padre, forse con l’obiettivo di rappresentare la marginale partecipazione del fratello minore Giuseppe, al quale vennero garantite delle co-interessenze sui profitti.  T. costituì, con Giorgi e Lavaggi, una società che ottenne dal governo pontificio l’appalto per lo sfruttamento delle cave di allume sui monti della Tolfa. La produzione era, in quegli anni, ancora altamente remunerativa: l’allume pontificio veniva considerato di ottima qualità ed era destinato prevalentemente all’esportazione verso manifatture tessili e conciarie. il natale di Roma, la filosofia dell’amore di Platone in Fichte e Leopardi.  Grice: Caro Torlonia, sai che persino tra le brume di Vadum Boum – quella strana Oxford dove i buoi passano e la lingua si arrovella – oggi si festeggia il natale di Roma? Incredibile, ma vero: anche lontano dall’ALMA MATER, la grande madre, si brinda alla città eterna... anche se il vino non è proprio dei Castelli! Torlonia: Ma che meraviglia! A questo punto, Grice, Roma dovrebbe inviare una cartolina d’auguri persino agli studenti inglesi. Chissà se, tra una toga e una pinta, si recita pure “Ave Roma!” sul Tamigi. D’altronde, come diceva mia nonna: “Roma caput mundi, pure se il mondo è in vacanza altrove!” Grice: In effetti, caro mio, tra le logiche implicature di Vadum Boum, il compleanno di Roma diventa l’occasione perfetta per filosofare su Platone, Fichte e pure Leopardi... ma soprattutto per scoprire che l’amicizia – come diceva Platone – è un “alter ego”. E se manca il vino, basta una buona battuta! Torlonia: Grice, ti dirò: qui a Roma festeggiamo con una cena da banchieri, mentre voi in Oxford filosofate sulle implicature e magari sul “amicus, philos, alter ego”. Alla fine, che sia tra le cave di allume o tra le “cave” della grammatica, basta divertirsi – e ricordarsi che la ragione conversazionale è sempre più allegra quando si brinda insieme, anche se in lingue diverse! Torlonia, Giovanni Raimondo (1805). Memorie economiche, Roma: Pagliarini.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Torre: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della stravaganza. Note su De origine et progressu philosophiae. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giacomo della Torre (Forlì): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della stravaganza – A comparison between Grice and Giacomo della Torre brings out a shared commitment to reason as the regulator of meaning, while highlighting different attitudes toward conceptual adventurousness. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning treats rationality as a discipline exercised within interaction: speakers are presumed to be cooperative and reasonable, and implicature arises when they deliberately allow what is meant to stray beyond what is strictly said, but in a way that remains recoverable by shared reasoning. Della Torre, by contrast, belongs to a late‑medieval tradition in which philosophy openly licenses stravaganza, the willingness to go extra‑vagans, beyond the well‑trodden path, in order to test the limits of Aristotelian natural and moral philosophy. For Torre, teaching at Bologna and reflecting on soul and body, philosophical progress often requires sanctioned deviation, a temporary wandering that nonetheless presupposes a return to rational order. Read together, Torre’s stravaganza and Grice’s implicature illuminate two sides of the same phenomenon: reason does not exclude deviation but governs it. In Grice, conversational estrangement from the literal is controlled by calculability and mutual recognition; in Torre, conceptual wandering is controlled by an inherited Aristotelian framework and scholastic discipline. What unites them is the idea that intelligibility depends neither on rigid literalism nor on free wit alone, but on a reasoned balance between rule and departure, a balance that allows meaning to emerge precisely when language dares to go slightly beyond itself."From Grice’s diary: ‘Speranza has always advised me to keep my eye — actually both of them — on Bononia, as he did when he studied me, with both his eyes stuck with Boum Vadum (as Speranza calls Oxford — an expression that never ceases to amuse him: “You mean that you studied on the ford that the oxen trespass?”). So this Torre (Speranza drops all “della” before surnames) is Bononia-associated, and I had to find out when he was first associated with that prestigious varsity which by far predates our dear Boum Vadum — and I did.’" For Giacomo della Torre (Jacopo da Forlì; also Giacomo dalla Torre; Latinized as Iacobus a Turre / Iacobus Foroliviensis), the cleanest dated Bononia association I can substantiate from online reference sources is that, in the university records/biographical syntheses, he is attested “lettore di filosofia a Bologna” in the years 1383–1385 (Treccani, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry “DELLA TORRE, Giacomo,” explicitly: “Tra il 1383 e il 1385 risulta come lettore di filosofia a Bologna”). A second, more specific formulation (Arca del Santo, biographical note on DELLA TORRE GIACOMO) narrows his Bolognese teaching to 1392–1393 and specifies the chair as philosophy natural and moral (“Tra 1392 e 1393, a Bologna, ricoprì la cattedra di filosofia naturale e morale”), which suggests either (i) two separate Bolognese periods preserved differently across repertories, (ii) a correction/alternative reconstruction, or (iii) conflation with an overlapping appointment cycle; but in any case it confirms official teaching duties at Bologna with explicit dates. If your project wants a single “first official association” date, the earliest safely citable one is 1383 as lector of philosophy at Bologna (with the span 1383–1385), while you can optionally note the later, chair-specified Bolognese stint 1392–1393 as an additional (and more descriptively precise) Bononia appointment. Sources used: Treccani (DBI) “DELLA TORRE, Giacomo”; Arca del Santo “DELLA TORRE GIACOMO” (Universitas Artistarum biography page). scuola di Forlì – la scuola di Bologna -- filosofia romagnese -- stravaganza, lizio. Filosofo emiliano. Filosofo italiano. Forli, Forli-Cesena, Emilia-Romagna. Grice: “I like Torre; his epitaph reads, ‘nuovo Aristotele,’ which is what it was! – “Ackrill’s just reads, ‘Aristotelian’!” There is a nice ‘via’ in Forlì after him that leads to the varsity! He was a Galen, and philosophised on both the soul and the body!” DELLA TORRE, Giacomo -- Iacobus a Turre, de la Turre, Dalla Torre, de Forlivio, Forliviensis, Foroliviensis, Ferolivias. Nacque da Pietro, "artium doctor", di nobile famiglia, e Tisia, figlia di Pietro degl’Azzoli, nobile forlivese. La famiglia paterna, a Forlì da parecchie generazioni, discende da Andrea, padre di Giovanni, nonno di T. Oltre a lui, il padre ha altri due figli, Guido e Andrea. T. compì gli studi di arti a Padova, dove ha come maestri Colonna  e Avogari  -- così afferma Marchesi, ma Colle lo mette in dubbio. I biografi non concordano sul curriculum d'insegnamento, diviso tra Padova, BOLOGNA e altre città. Risulta come lettore di filosofia a BOLOGNA, ma già negli anni precedenti dove iniziare il suo insegnamento a Padova, dove comunque torna su invito dei Carraresi, che per dar lustro allo studio vi chiamarono molti professori di fama. In effetti viene citato come "lector in studio Paduano" ed è promotore dei dottorati di parecchi allievi, tra cui San Severo , Manfredini  e Tommaso da Recanati , per supplire eventuali assenze dei professori. Risulta come docente di arti a Ferrara, insieme con Marco da Forlì, ma, se non si tratta di un omonimo, si potrebbe trattare di presenze saltuarie, dato che in quegli stessi anni è ricordato sia a Padova sia a BOLOGNA.  Nella città veneta la sua presenza è testimoniata da una lite con il collega Squarcialupi e dai dottorati di parecchi allievi, come Albertini, Nogarelli, Pera e Tomasi. Giacomo della Torre. Torre. stravaganza, lizio.  G.: Let us begin, if you please, with the thing itself and not with any elegant paraphrase of it. We have at least two catalogue forms, and they differ just enough to annoy a careful man. S.: Which is to say, to delight you. G.: The longer form first: Quaestio utrum intensio formae fiat per additionem partis formalis ad partem formalem utroque remanente. S.: And the shorter? G.: Queritur utrum intensio forme fiat per additionem partis formalis ad partes formales. S.: So already we have quaestio and queritur; formae and forme; partem formalem and partes formales; and then the splendid tail, utroque remanente, which the shorter one lacks. G.: Precisely. And before you rush to ask for the answer, I want to savour the asking. S.: You always do. Della Torre, meanwhile, is left in Bologna waiting for his own determinatio. G.: Bologna can wait. It predates Boum Vadum by enough centuries to permit itself patience. S.: I still want the answer. G.: We may not have it. S.: You see, that is exactly the sort of thing that makes students wish to defect to medicine. G.: A pity, since in Giacomo della Torre medicine and philosophy are already married. That is half the point. He is a man of arts and medicine, Bologna and Padua, Aristotle and Galen, soul and body, quality and quantity. S.: And stravaganza. G.: Yes, and that too. A fine word, stravaganza. It wanders but not at random. One wanders under rule. S.: Like implicature. G.: Very good. Deviation governed by recoverability. That is why Giacomo matters. Not because he gives us a modern semantics, but because he stands exactly where form, degree, and intelligibility begin to interpenetrate. S.: Still, the title says De intensione et remissione formarum, and the incipit does not say remissione at all. G.: That is the first thing to notice. The title is archival. It tells the librarian what sort of beast is in the cage. The incipit tells the philosopher where the teeth are. S.: So the title says increase and decrease of forms; the incipit says, right, but how exactly does increase happen. G.: Exactly. It does not begin by announcing the pair, intensio and remissio, as if it were drafting a textbook table. It begins with a mechanism: whether the intensification of a form happens by the addition of one formal part to another formal part, both remaining. S.: And that “both remaining” is the little snake in the grass. G.: Not so little. It is the whole metaphysical pressure-point compressed into an ablative absolute. S.: Utroque remanente. I do like it. It sounds so self-assured. As if one merely adds one formal part to another and both politely remain where they are. G.: Yes. It sounds, to a modern ear, almost comic. But one must resist the temptation to modernise too quickly. S.: I am tempted all the same. If I break eggs for an omelette, the eggs do not remain. If I add five to seven, the five and the seven do not remain as such in the twelve. Kant would be furious. G.: Kant would be grammatical before he was furious. His point about seven and five and twelve is epistemological, not quite the same as Giacomo’s point, which is ontological. Still, the analogy is instructive because it tells you why the scholastic model feels odd. We are being asked whether a qualitative increase is additive and preservative. S.: Which already sounds Strawsonian. The question is respectable; the answer may be no; the no may be external or internal. G.: Just so. One may say, It is not the case that intensification occurs by addition of formal part to formal part, both remaining. Or one may say, My dear fellow, that is the wrong way to set the problem up in the first place. S.: The latter is the more satisfying no. G.: Satisfying, yes. But scholasticism does not live by satisfaction. It lives by exactness of pressure. S.: Let us have the Latin phrase by phrase, then. You enjoyed it the first time; indulge yourself again. G.: Quaestio. A question. Not a thesis, not yet an assertion, but a formally opened problem. Utrum. Whether. This already suspends commitment. Intensio formae. The intensification of a form. Not “intensity” in the modern loose sense, but increase in degree of a form. Fiat. Comes about, happens, is effected. Per additionem. Through the addition. Partis formalis. Of a formal part. Ad partem formalem. To a formal part. Utroque remanente. With both remaining. S.: You say that as if it were all perfectly sane. G.: Perfect sanity is not the same as immediate familiarity. The point is that the sentence is not woolly. It is brutally exact. It asks whether becoming more F is to be understood as adding a formal constituent to another formal constituent while both persist. S.: And one hears at once the Gricean temptation to ask what is presupposed. There must already be a common form. There must already be a scale. There must already be a distinction between the subject and its degree. G.: Exactly. The sentence is thick with presuppositions. It presupposes that one and the same form admits of magis and minus. It presupposes that one may talk of pars formalis without absurdity. It presupposes that “remaining” is not a merely material notion. We are not talking about chairs and eggs. S.: Or healthy urine and less healthy urine. G.: Ah yes, your urine. Aristotle would have approved the diagnostic instinct, if not the colour scheme. Health is useful because it is both a quality and a norm. Something may become healthier or less healthy. The question is whether that becoming more healthy is a matter of preserving a lower degree while adding another. S.: And my instinct says no. Yellow urine becomes brown urine. The yellow does not remain there, lurking decorously behind the brown. G.: Good. That instinct is philosophically valuable. But the scholastic will reply that you are still trapped in phenomenology of states rather than ontology of degrees. He is not talking of yellow and brown as two blobs. He is talking of one form becoming more or less intense. S.: Which is precisely where Grice would prick up his ears. The same form, but more so. Or less so. The same F, yet not quite the same state. G.: Wiggins too. Sameness and substance. Persistence through variation. The identity of a subject under qualitative change. Giacomo’s little incipit is a magnificent seed crystal for such concerns. S.: Better than the title. G.: Much better than the title. The title is a shelf-mark. The incipit is philosophy. S.: And yet, annoyingly, the title gives us remissione too, whereas the incipit begins only with intensio. G.: That is because the opening problem is naturally the positive side. Once you know how increase is to be construed, decrease becomes either the reverse operation or the collapse of that operation. One begins with the more constructive case. S.: So remission is the poor cousin. G.: Temporarily. In the title it regains civil equality. In the opening argument it waits its turn. S.: Very Bologna. G.: Entirely. The city of ordered quarrels. S.: Let us go back to the variant forms. Quaestio versus queritur. Does it matter? G.: Slightly. Quaestio is nominal and architectural. Queritur is verbal and disputational. The first presents a structured object. The second already sounds like the schoolman leaning forward: it is asked whether… S.: And formae versus forme? G.: Scribal indifference, not metaphysical divergence. S.: Partem formalem versus partes formales? G.: That is more interesting. Ad partem formalem gives you one formal part added to another formal part. Ad partes formales sounds more distributive or cumulative, as if the target were already plural. I would trust the more balanced singular formulation if forced to choose. S.: Because it is neater. G.: Because it is philosophically more pointed. One formal part to one formal part, both remaining. That gives you the pure metaphysical oddity in its finest compression. S.: And intentio versus intensio? G.: Intensio is the conceptually proper reading. Intentio is almost certainly a cataloguing or manuscript corruption. If this tract is on increase and decrease of forms, intensio must be what is meant. S.: We are already doing philosophy of language. A single letter and the entire topic changes. G.: Yes, and Giacomo would have appreciated that. Bologna is not only a place of metaphysical distinctions; it is a place where textual exactness is a condition of argument. S.: You are making him sound like a better Oxford man than many Oxford men. G.: Why not. Bononia predates Boum Vadum, and not merely in masonry. It had already taught Europe that thought requires chairs, lecterns, and argumentative patience. S.: Della Torre as elder brother to Grice. G.: Not brother. Ancestor of a difficulty. Grice’s categories of conversation, after all, are Kantian in scaffold but Aristotelian in smell. Quantity, quality, relation, manner. And Giacomo stands at a point where quantity and quality refuse to stay in separate stalls. S.: Which is the bit that interests me most. If a quality may be more or less, then quantity has invaded quality. G.: Or quality has admitted comparative grammar into its own house. That is the medieval wonder and nuisance. Intensio et remissio are where quality begins to look measurable. S.: And where morphosyntax begins to wobble. More healthy, less white, rather hot, very hot, healthier than, less healthy than. Comparative predication is already doing metaphysics before we notice. G.: Just so. Grammar is never innocent. Once you allow more and less into a quality term, you invite the question whether the predicate names a scalar property, a disposition, a norm, or some mixture of all three. S.: Which is where the healthy urine comes back with a vengeance. G.: Unfortunately, yes. S.: Suppose one says: the urine is healthier now. One has smuggled in comparison, diagnosis, norm, and bodily state. That is already four little philosophers in one sentence. G.: Exactly. And a medieval physician-philosopher like Giacomo is exquisitely placed to enjoy the confusion. He has Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Aristotle, and the Categories all within reach. S.: And Bologna behind him, nodding. G.: And perhaps Padua glancing over its shoulder. S.: You still have not given me the answer. G.: We do not have his determinatio. S.: I know, but that is intolerable. G.: No, it is philosophy. Or at least a very good part of it. We do not have the answer, but we have the exact formulation of the pressure. That matters more than many fully preserved answers. S.: You mean the question keeps the matter alive. G.: Precisely. A dead philosophy is one that can only repeat its old answers. A living philosophy is one that can still formulate its difficulties in a way that makes later minds wince. S.: So Giacomo stays alive because his incipit still bites. G.: Yes. The incipit is a bite-mark across six centuries. It asks, in one scholastic sentence, how sameness survives increase. It asks whether change is additive or substitutive. It asks whether degrees are parts. It asks what “remaining” could mean for a form. It asks whether quality can be treated quasi-quantitatively without ceasing to be quality. S.: And all that before breakfast. G.: In Bologna, certainly before breakfast. S.: In Oxford, after tea. G.: With less good Latin. S.: Let us compare, then, title and incipit explicitly. G.: The title: De intensione et remissione formarum. Broad, balanced, archival, neutral. The incipit: Quaestio utrum intensio formae fiat per additionem partis formalis ad partem formalem utroque remanente. Narrow, asymmetrical, argumentative, metabolically alive. S.: The title says what shelf it goes on. The incipit says where thought begins to hurt. G.: Very good. You are almost useful. S.: I do my best. G.: Notice too the movement from abstract noun to process. The title gives you intensio and remissio as paired nominal themes. The incipit immediately turns one of them into fiat, into an occurrence. How does it happen. S.: That is nicely Gricean too. One is less interested in labels than in the conditions under which something is properly said to occur. G.: Indeed. The sentence asks for criteria of occurrence. Under what description is intensification correctly identified. S.: Not unlike asking when one may say someone has implicated rather than said. G.: Exactly. The relation is not one of doctrine but of temperament. Both are interested in the fine articulation of phenomena that ordinary language half-registers and half-confuses. S.: You are trying to make Giacomo sound like a medieval Strawson. G.: Only in the sense that he takes ordinary comparative predication seriously enough to ask what must be true for it not to be mere babble. S.: And perhaps to risk that some of it is mere babble after all. G.: Or badly framed doctrine. That is where the Strawsonian internal negation comes in. Not just no, but no, no, that is not how one should ask it. S.: Still, I can imagine the scholastic structure. Objections for addition. Objections against. Sed contra. Determinatio. Replies ad primum, ad secundum. G.: Certainly. And somewhere in the middle, one can imagine the patient disentangling of additive, substitutive, and perhaps some third model. Neither simple replacement nor literal piling up of formal bricks. S.: A middle way. G.: Bologna likes middle ways almost as much as Oxford likes distinctions. S.: Let us try examples. Heat. G.: A standard one. A body becomes hotter. Does the earlier heat remain while another degree is added. S.: Whiteness. G.: Also standard. A cloth becomes whiter. S.: Health. G.: Best of all, because it is both physiological and normative. S.: Virtue. G.: Dangerous, but useful. One may become more virtuous, and then all the same questions arise in an evaluative register. S.: So the doctrine extends from the natural to the moral. G.: And that is one reason it is philosophically fertile. Once quality becomes gradable, the bridge between physics, medicine, ethics, and language becomes alarmingly short. S.: Which is why Grice, with his mania for categories and his suspicion of careless language, would have liked it. G.: Yes. He would have enjoyed especially the instability between quality and quantity. A quality quantified but not reduced to quantity. A category strained by comparative use but not dissolved by it. S.: And Wiggins would have asked what remains the same. G.: And Strawson would have asked whether the whole picture is descriptively appropriate. S.: And Austin would have asked how we actually talk. G.: And Kant would have wandered in and asked whether synthesis is being confused with analysis. S.: While Aristotle would sit there with health and disease and be mocked by Grice for his devotion to bodily examples. G.: Exactly. It is a splendid party. S.: All organised by Giacomo della Torre in Bologna long before Oxford had learned to make tea properly. G.: Precisely. And that is why he matters. Not because he solves our problem in front of us—we still lack the explicit determination—but because he frames a problem with enough precision that later philosophy can recognise itself in it. S.: So the punchline is that we still do not know his answer. G.: Yes. S.: And that this is not failure. G.: No, it is the best success of the incipit. It has survived as a question sharp enough to generate thought even in the absence of its own conclusion. S.: Which sounds suspiciously like something you would say when you have not done the homework. G.: My dear boy, in philosophy the deepest homework is often preserving the exact form of the question until someone is capable of answering it less badly. S.: So Della Torre lives. G.: Yes. He lives wherever someone still asks, with proper fastidiousness, whether a form becomes more by addition of formal part to formal part, both remaining. S.: And whether that very question is already too much. G.: Quite. Philosophy stays alive not by always having answers, but by learning to ask better and more dangerous questions than the generation before. S.: Bologna 1, Boum Vadum 0. G.: For today, yes.Grice: Caro Torre, oggi mi sento “implicante”. Ti va un po’ di gioco linguistico? Immagina: se “implicanza” fosse la sorella di “stravaganza”, quale delle due sarebbe la più stravagante a una festa di filosofi? Torre: Ah, Grice, domanda degna di un vero Aristotele in vena di scherzi! “Stravagante”, in effetti, ha un pedigree di tutto rispetto: viene da ‘extra-vagans’, ossia chi va “oltre il pascolo”, fuori dai sentieri battuti. Lo diceva già Cicerone, parlando di chi si avventura fuori dal solco della ragione! Quindi, tra le due, “stravaganza” non solo porta il cappello più bizzarro, ma balla pure fuori dal cerchio! Grice: Allora, se io implico qualcosa, mi sto comportando da filosofo “stravagante” o “implicante”? Oppure, come direbbe Cicerone, rischio solo di perdermi tra i boschi senza trovare la via di Forlì? Torre: Ma figurati, Grice! Qui a Forlì diciamo: “Chi non vaga, non trova le implicanze più gustose!” L’importante è che tu sia stravagante abbastanza da implicare una battuta brillante. E poi, si sa, la vera filosofia nasce quando si va “extra-vagans”... ma sempre con un occhio al ritorno, come insegnava Cicerone, per non finire a filosofare in mezzo alle pecore! Torre, Giacomo della (1382). Dissertazione. Quaestio utrum intensio formae fiat per additionem partis formalis ad partem formalem utroque remanente. Bologna.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Trabalza: grammatica razionale ed implicatura conversazionale. Note sulla Storia della grammatica italiana. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Ciro Trabalza (Bevagna, Perugia, Umbria): grammatica razionale ed implicatura conversazionale. A comparison between H. P. Grice and Ciro Trabalza on reason‑governed conversational meaning brings into view two complementary ways of grounding rationality in language. Grice’s theory, articulated in “Logic and Conversation,” treats conversational meaning as governed by rational expectations shared by competent speakers: syntactic form matters, but it matters because speakers assume one another to be reasoning agents who exploit grammar to convey more than is strictly said, through implicature calculable by appeal to purpose, relevance, and mutual recognition. Trabalza, from the very different vantage point of historical and rational grammar, approaches language as a system whose syntactic categories are not arbitrary but reflect deeper ontological and cognitive categories, an assumption rooted in the Italian tradition of grammatica razionale and reinforced by Crocean aesthetics. Where Grice theorizes implicature as a dynamic product of conversational rationality in use, Trabalza treats grammar itself as already imbued with rational form, so that interpretation is guided by historically sedimented structures rather than moment‑to‑moment conversational calculation alone. The convergence lies in their shared resistance to a purely formalist or mathematically “washed” view of language: both reject the idea that syntax is neutral with respect to meaning, and both see linguistic structure as answerable to human reason. The difference is one of emphasis: Grice foregrounds the pragmatic intelligence of speakers negotiating meaning in context, while Trabalza foregrounds the rational dignity of grammatical systems as repositories of intelligibility that make such negotiations possible in the first place. Grice: “Russell always made fun of our stone-age metaphysics. Physics, strictly. Ad there’s nothing funny about it, if we think of SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES as reflecting ONTOLOGICAL CATEGORIES – something that goes beyond Baron Russell’s mathematically-washed brain!” Ciro Trabalza (Bevagna – m. Roma -- è stato un grammatico e critico letterario italiano. Consegue la laurea in lettere all'Università di Roma. Negli anni successivi insegnò in varie scuole secondarie di Empoli, Modena, Perugia e Padova, prima di intraprendere la carriera amministrativa, quale ispettore centrale del Ministero della pubblica istruzione e poi come direttore generale per la scuola media e per gli scambi culturali con l'estero. Nel corso dell'incarico ministeriale, ebbe il particolare merito di dar vita agli Istituti italiani di cultura all'estero, tuttora esistenti ed operativi nella maggior parte delle città capitali del mondo, con la funzione precipua di diffondere la lingua e la cultura italiana all'estero.  Come studioso si occupò di grammatica storica della lingua italiana e di critica letteraria, dal Boccaccio al Rinascimento e a tutto il secolo diciassettesimo. Appare evidente l'ispirazione crociana della critica estetica di T.. Il suo nome peraltro è soprattutto legato alla diffusa e discussa Storia della grammatica italiana, che Alfredo Schiaffini tra gli altri ebbe a definire «poderosa e severa»[3]. Ciro Trabalza svolse altresì un'assidua attività pubblicistica e diresse, tra l'altro, la rivista «Problemi della scuola e della cultura.  Opere Della vita e delle opere di Torti, Bevagna, Studi e profili, Torino, Paravia, Saggio di vocabolario umbro-italiano e viceversa, Bologna, Forni, Studi sul Boccaccio, Città di Castello, S. Lapi, Storia della grammatica italiana, Milano, Hoepli, La critica letteraria, dai primordi dell'Umanesimo a tutto il secolo diciassettesimo, Milano, Vallardi, Dipanatura critiche, Bologna, Cappelli, 1920. la grammatica razionale di Grice, ‘Logic and conversation,’ repinted in Davidson and Harman, Logic and Grammar!  G.: Let us begin where the thing begins, which is not with Croce, not with Vossler, not even with Torti, but with a young man from Bevagna entering the Palazzo della Sapienza in 1894 and discovering that antiquarianism can be an alibi for a life. S.: A life, or a laurea. G.: In Rome those can briefly coincide. Ciro Trabalza is twenty-two or twenty-three, depending on the month; he has Monaci over him, the Sapienza around him, and Francesco Torti in front of him like a perfectly chosen excuse. S.: “Excuse” is very good. It sounds less pious than “subject.” G.: Quite. Every good thesis has an official object and a real motive. Officially, the object is Torti. Really, the motive is language. S.: Language, or grammar. G.: Exactly. And not grammar in the schoolroom sense only, but grammar as a way of entering the question of how Italian became thinkable as a historical and rational object. S.: Still, if one told an ignoramus that Trabalza’s laurea was on Della vita e delle opere di Francesco Torti di Bevagna, the ignoramus would say: ah, another dust-covered local worthy. G.: The ignoramus would be wrong in the usual way: by being too literal. Torti is local in provenance and strategic in significance. S.: Explain strategic. G.: Torti lets Trabalza do three things at once. He can honour a fellow Umbrian; he can enter the questione della lingua; and he can begin, under Monaci, the long move from literary-historical retrieval to the history of grammar. S.: So the local author is really a gateway drug. G.: Precisely. A scholar begins by writing on a minor figure and ends by re-describing the whole tradition that made that figure matter. S.: And Monaci, sitting there in the Sapienza, knew this. G.: I think so. Monaci was too shrewd a philologist to waste a gifted student on a merely decorative topic. S.: Let us fix the scene. Trabalza, born 1871, laurea in 1894, in Lettere, at the Sapienza, in the Palazzo. G.: Yes. And the Palazzo matters, because the old Roman university still housed the humanities in a building that made learning feel both administrative and ceremonial. S.: You like buildings too much. G.: Buildings are merely grammar in stone. S.: Ah, now we are at Trabalza. G.: We never left him. S.: But why Torti? Why not someone grander, if the point is really the history of language? G.: Because grandeur can be paralysing. Torti is the right size. Large enough to connect with the national debate, small enough to need rescue. S.: A rescuable author. G.: Exactly. And a useful one. Torti is anti-purist in the early nineteenth-century sense, which means he is fighting the reduction of Italian to a narrow Trecento-Crusca norm. S.: Purism then is basically Crusca-Firenze-Trecento? G.: Broadly, yes. Not just a dictionary preference, but a whole ideology of authority: old Tuscan as normative, modern innovations under suspicion, non-sanctioned usage treated as contamination. S.: So anti-purism is not “let everyone say whatever he likes.” G.: No. It is not linguistic anarchy. It is resistance to the tyranny of one sanctified model. S.: Which is already more interesting than I thought. G.: Naturally. Torti is not defending bad Italian. He is defending the legitimacy of living Italian against antiquarian over-policing. S.: And this is where the history of language enters, not merely literary taste. G.: Exactly. If you reduce Torti to literary history, you miss the point. He is arguing about what Italian may become. S.: So Trabalza’s thesis is not merely “life and works.” It is really “life and works as entry into a regime of linguistic normativity.” G.: Admirably put. S.: I am improving. G.: Against my better judgment. Now, what Trabalza later does in Storia della grammatica italiana is to broaden that local strategic move into a national historical one. S.: And there the title is crucial: grammar, not literature. G.: Yes, though in Italy of that period grammar and literary history are never cleanly divorced. S.: Because Croce enters. G.: Precisely. Once Croce says that language is expression, grammar is no longer merely a list of forms. It becomes secondary reflection on expressive activity. S.: And then “pure” versus “impure” language begins to look philosophically vulgar. G.: At least in the strongest Crocean light. If every genuine utterance is an individual act of expression, then the old purist tribunal begins to lose absolute authority. S.: So Croce updates Torti by changing the level of the fight. G.: Exactly. Torti says: do not let Crusca tyrannise living language. Croce says: the very notion of an externally policed language is philosophically secondary to expression itself. S.: And Vossler? G.: Vossler philosophises and internationalises the move. He takes the idealist conception of language as expression and turns it into a philosophy of language in which style and spiritual form displace merely external rule. S.: And Trabalza stands between the old anti-purist debate and the newer idealist re-description. G.: Yes. That is why he is more interesting than a mere antiquarian. He writes the history of grammar after grammar has become philosophically unstable. S.: “Philosophically unstable” is nice. G.: It means grammar can no longer pretend to be merely a technology of correctness. S.: Yet Trabalza still writes a history of grammar, not an anti-grammar manifesto. G.: Because history is his way of making the problem visible. He does not abolish grammar. He historicises the ways Italians have tried to rationalise language. S.: So by the time he writes his grande opera, grammar has become a history of rationalisations. G.: Better: a history of how linguistic reflection oscillates between rule, expression, canon, and usage. S.: Which sounds surprisingly Gricean. G.: At a high enough altitude, yes. Grice would be interested whenever syntactic categories are taken as answerable to rational or ontological ones. S.: Though Grice is not a Crocean. G.: Certainly not. He would distrust the rhetoric of pure expression. But he would be fascinated by the tension between living use and codified form. S.: Whereas Torti, by contrast, is not asking Wood’s question: what is the force of linguistic rules. G.: Exactly. Torti is not an Oxford analyst. He is fighting over which norms should govern literary and linguistic legitimacy. S.: While O. P. Wood asks what sort of force a linguistic rule has at all. G.: Which is a very different question. Wood is conceptual; Torti is ideological and cultural. S.: That is what I meant before. Reading Torti in the light of Ryle and Wood may be unfair. G.: Unfair but illuminating. It shows the difference between asking “which usage should count?” and asking “what is it for a rule of use to bind?” S.: So Trabalza, if he follows Torti, follows him as historian of linguistic controversy, not as analyst of rule-force. G.: Precisely. S.: Yet Croce and Vossler drag the whole matter upward into philosophy of language. G.: They do. And that is why Trabalza’s Storia della grammatica italiana is not simply a museum of old schoolmasters. It is written in a world where grammar has become answerable to aesthetics, expression, and historicity. S.: Which is why one finds De Sanctis and similar figures there. G.: Yes. Because grammar has become entangled with criticism, national culture, and the philosophy of expression. S.: I can now see why the young Trabalza in 1894 might lock himself in the Palazzo with Torti. G.: “Lock himself in” is too dramatic. He was properly supervised by Monaci. S.: Which is a Roman way of being imprisoned. G.: Quite. S.: Tell me again about Monaci. G.: Ernesto Monaci, born in Soriano nel Cimino, not Vicovaro as I once unfortunately misplaced him; Roman philologist, formidable teacher, and exactly the man to direct a gifted Umbrian toward a strategically chosen nineteenth-century anti-purist. S.: So the story is almost too tidy. Umbrian student, Roman philologist, Umbrian anti-purist, laurea in the Palazzo. G.: Tidy stories are often historically true in outline and messy in implication. S.: Which is where your beloved implicature enters. G.: Naturally. A thesis on Torti in 1894 says more than “here is Torti.” It says: here is a young scholar placing himself within the history of language by way of a recoverable but not overworked figure. S.: And does the thesis actually help Torti’s afterlife? G.: In a limited but real way, yes. It does not canonise him universally, but it consolidates the dossier. After Trabalza, anyone wanting Torti has a modern monograph to start from. S.: Bibliographical consolidation rather than glory. G.: Exactly. Which is the commonest form of scholarly immortality. S.: Better than being unread on a shelf. G.: Marginally. S.: Now let me try an Oxford analogy. If the OED is descriptive and purism is prescriptive with a moral halo, where does Trabalza stand? G.: Trabalza is neither simple descriptivist nor simple prescriptivist. He is a historian of how Italians theorised grammar, under conditions where the force of norm and the reality of usage were both in dispute. S.: So he is not saying: “Here is the pure form; indoctrinate accordingly.” G.: No. That would be the old purist line. S.: Nor is he simply saying: “Record whatever people say.” G.: No. That would be too lexicographical and too thin. S.: Then he is showing how systems of normativity arose, fought, changed, and philosophically reinterpreted themselves. G.: Exactly so. S.: Which is why Croce and Vossler are not decorative appendices but essential background. G.: Yes. Without them you miss why a history of grammar in the early twentieth century could be intellectually ambitious rather than merely compilatory. S.: And that ambition reaches back to Torti? G.: In mediated form. Torti becomes retrospectively legible as an early challenger of purist closure, and Croce makes that challenge more philosophically radical by reconceiving language as expression. S.: So they are not simply repeating Torti. They are translating him upward. G.: Nicely said. Torti fights over linguistic legitimacy inside an older controversy. Croce and Vossler shift the fight into the ontology of language itself. Trabalza historicises the road between the two. S.: Which makes Storia della grammatica italiana less a grammar-book than a history of attempted self-consciousness about language. G.: Exactly. It is the history of Italy trying to know what it was doing when it codified, criticised, purified, relaxed, aestheticised, and nationalised its language. S.: That sounds far better than “a book about old grammarians.” G.: Most good books are misdescribed by lazy nouns. S.: There is still something deliciously comic about the young Trabalza getting a degree through Torti. G.: Degrees are often won through strategically chosen dead men. S.: And is Torti then a philosopher? G.: Not in the strict technical sense. Philosophically minded, yes; philosophically central, no. He is a figure in the history of linguistic and literary ideas. S.: Which is enough. G.: More than enough, if one knows what one is doing. S.: That phrase should be carved over the Sapienza. G.: The Sapienza needs no more carving. It has survived enough inscriptions already. S.: Let us return to Oxford for a moment. Wood on the force of linguistic rules, Ryle on use and usage, Grice on conversational normativity. Where does Trabalza look from there? G.: Distant but not irrelevant. Trabalza does not ask what gives a rule its force in the conceptual sense Wood asks. But he shows the historical sediment from which later arguments about grammatical normativity emerge. S.: So he supplies ancestry, not analysis. G.: Yes. Though ancestry can itself be analytic when properly narrated. S.: And Grice, if he read Trabalza, would perhaps be amused by the thought that grammar had been philosophically dignified in Italy before Oxford decided to make “use” fashionable. G.: Very likely. He would also appreciate the anti-purist suspicion that authorised form is not the whole truth about rational communication. S.: Which is where Torti becomes unexpectedly modern. G.: Modern enough to deserve recovery, not modern enough to become Wood. S.: Good. I like that. “Not modern enough to become Wood.” G.: You may keep it. S.: And we still end where we began: Trabalza. G.: We must. Because the point of all the intermediaries is to show that Trabalza is not a footnote to Torti, but the historian who makes Torti speak again under new philosophical weather. S.: In 1894 he gets his degree by rescuing a strategically useful anti-purist. G.: Yes. S.: Later he writes a history of grammar under Crocean and post-Crocean pressure. G.: Yes. S.: And the ignorant think this is mere antiquarian pro-Trecento literary dust. G.: They always do, until they notice that the “dust” is what remains after a whole nation has fought over what its language is allowed to be. S.: So the punchline is that the Palazzo gave him a laurea, Torti gave him a route, Croce gave him altitude, and grammar gave him a civilisation to narrate. G.: Exactly. S.: And this, you would say, is why Trabalza matters. G.: Yes. He begins with Torti and ends by teaching us that grammar is never only grammar. S.: Which means we have ended with Trabalza. G.: As we were always meant to.Grice: Caro Trabalza, devo confessarti che raramente ho letto qualcosa di così stimolante e profondo come le tue incursioni filosofiche nei dettagli grammaticali del latino e dell’italiano. Mi hanno affascinato al punto da tentare – non senza difficoltà – di applicare simili sottigliezze alle lingue più “barbare” che si parlano attorno al Vadum Boum, quella strana espressione con cui, quasi per gioco, chiamavamo Oxford tra amici. In fondo, è come dire: dove il fiume scorre e i buoi passano, la lingua si rinnova, ma non sempre si nobilita. Trabalza: Grice, le tue parole sono un balsamo per l’anima di chi, come me, crede nella dignità filosofica della grammatica. La tua attenzione verso le «categorie sintattiche» che, a ben vedere, riflettono le «categorie ontologiche» mi fa sentire compreso. E se anche nelle lingue di Vadum Boum – Oxford – si tentano queste alchimie, vuol dire che la nostra ricerca ha davvero un respiro universale. Grice: Esatto, Trabalza! In fondo, ogni volta che scandagliamo la struttura di una lingua, cerchiamo di dare senso all’esperienza umana. Anche Russell, con il suo cervello matematicamente lavato, non riusciva a cogliere quanto la grammatica possa essere fonte di verità filosofica. Forse, proprio tra le declinazioni latine e le sottigliezze italiane, troviamo quella ragione conversazionale che illumina anche gli idiomi più recalcitranti. Trabalza: Grice, è proprio in questo dialogo tra grammatico e filosofo che si fa strada la vera implicatura. La grammatica razionale non è solo regola, ma anche interpretazione, come insegna la critica crociana. E se la lingua italiana, con le sue mille sfumature, si diffonde nel mondo grazie all’impegno di chi crede nella conversazione civile, allora abbiamo costruito davvero un ponte tra la ragione italiana e quella universale. Trabalza, Ciro (1894). Torti. Sotto Monaci. Sapienza Roma.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tragella: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazional dei caduti. Note su La critica letteraria in Italia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Padre Cesare Tragella (Trezzano sul Naviglio, Milano, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazional dei caduti – A comparison between Grice and Cesare Tragella on reason‑governed conversational meaning turns on the way rationality is anchored in lived practice rather than abstract system. For Grice, conversational rationality is articulated through the idea that meaning in conversation is governed by reasons that participants expect one another to recognize: implicature arises because speakers are taken to be rational agents, oriented toward shared purposes, and capable of allowing what is meant to exceed what is said without collapsing into sentimentality. In the autobiographical episode surrounding the death of the original best man and Grice’s meeting his future wife, rational talk about loss is inseparable from tacit understanding, restraint, and shared recognition of what cannot be fully voiced; the fallen are present through implicature rather than proclamation. Tragella’s work on the caduti, by contrast, situates conversational reason within historical and devotional practice: memorialization, architecture, letters, and liturgical language are reason‑guided forms of address in which silence, gesture, and place do as much rational work as explicit assertion. Where Grice theorizes implicature as a mechanism of cooperative intelligibility, Tragella embodies it as an ethical duty of remembrance, in which the absence of the fallen continually calls for rational response without rhetorical excess. The convergence lies in their shared refusal of empty rhetoric: for both, reason governs conversation precisely when it allows memory, loss, and moral seriousness to be conveyed indirectly, through forms that respect both understanding and dignity. Grice italo per i caduti. Grice, “How I met my wife.” As it happens, Grice was a student at Merton. A younger recipient of the same Senior scholarship, J. S. Watson, called him on short noice to fulfil the task of best man – seeing that the original best man had been killed in action shortly before. It was a Watson’s wedding that Grice met his future wife. While Grice himself was engaged  in action in the North Atlantic, he was transferred to the Admiralty for the remaining of the duration of the war.  Studia a Gorla Minore, Milano, e Torino. Si occupa di serbare la memoria della battaglia di Magenta con la costruzione di una cappella espiatoria all'interno della chiesa per accogliere le spoglie dei caduti. Ricovero vecchi poveri Sito Lombardia Beni Culturali.  Viviani, cfr. Tunesi, Morani Le stagioni, op. cit.. T., Lettera a Murri in: Murri, L. Bedeschi, Carteggio. II. Lettere a Murri. Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Le stagioni di un prete, Le stagioni di un prete, «Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa», Viviani, Dalle ricerche la prima storia vera, Magenta, Zeisciu. per i caduti. Grice: Caro Tragella, sai, raramente mi sento così a mio agio come con te nel parlare dei caduti. Forse solo tu puoi capire quello che si prova, perché per me non è solo filosofia, ma storia viva: ho visto amici cadere in mare, uno di loro era destinato a essere il testimone a un matrimonio, ma il destino… beh, ha scelto per tutti noi. E proprio lì, tra il dolore e la memoria, ho incontrato anche la donna che sarebbe diventata mia moglie. Tragella: Grice, la tua confidenza mi onora e commuove. Anche per me, la memoria dei caduti non è un esercizio di retorica, ma un dovere del cuore e della ragione. Ho consacrato la mia vita a conservare il loro ricordo, perché siano sempre celebrati non solo come eroi, ma come uomini la cui assenza ci interroga ogni giorno. Grice: Allora brindiamo, caro amico, al coraggio di chi ci ha preceduto e a quella strana fraternità che ci lega, al di là delle parole e della filosofia. Ogni gesto di memoria è un gesto di vita, e oggi sento che non siamo soli nel nostro ricordo. Tragella: Esattamente, Grice. Che il nostro brindisi sia un inno silenzioso ai caduti e un segno di speranza per chi resta. La storia li ricorda, la filosofia li onora, ma il cuore—solo il cuore—li rende eterni. Tragella, Cesare (1874). Ordination. Milano

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Trappani: la ragione conversazionale. Note sulla Dissertatio doctoralis. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giuseppe La Napola da Trapani (Trapani) Jr.: la ragione conversazionale, Giuseppe La Napola (Napoli) da Trapani junior è stato un francescano, filosofo e teologo italiano.  Nato a Trapani, Giuseppe La Napola da Trapani jr. era un frate minore conventuale, da distinguersi da Giuseppe La Napola da Trapani senior, sempre frate minore conventuale ma suo zio. Appartenente alla Provincia di Sicilia, venne inviato a Roma, presso il Collegio San Bonaventura, da cui uscì addottorato nel 1608. In seguito ha esercitato la docenza presso lo Studium di Bologna, poi reggente degli studi a Padova, carica che esercitò per poco tempo.  Infatti, a Enna, la fraternità provinciale della Sicilia lo elesse suo Ministro, carica che il Ministro generale dei frati minori conventuali, Giacomo Montanari da Bagnocavallo, non rese effettiva se prima non avesse portato a termine il suo incarico di insegnamento. fu reggente degli studi a Palermo ed è da presupporre che egli sia stato reggente degli studi a Napoli. è tornato a Trapani, dove è rimasto fino alla fine dei suoi giorni. La tradizione lo ricorda come il maestro di Bartolomeo Mastri da Meldola.  Nel suo insegnamento, Giuseppe La Napola jr. non esponeva solamente la dottrina di una corrente teologica, ma offriva una formazione metodologica innovativa per il tempo, privilegiando la via Scoti, i principi della dottrina scotista Marco Forlivesi, "Scotistarum princeps". Bartolomeo Mastri e il suo tempo, Centro Studi Antoniani, Padova Marco Forlivesi, Scotistarum princeps. Bartolomeo Mastri e il suo tempo, Centro Studi Antoniani, Padova Marco Forlivesi, «Gli scotisti secenteschi di fronte al dibattito tra bañeziani e molinisti: un'introduzione e una nota», in: Conoscenza e contingenza nella tradizione aristotelica medievale, a cura di St. Perfetti, E.T.S., Pisa Ordine dei Frati Minori Conventuali Giovanni Duns Scoto Bartolomeo Mastri Francescanesimo   Portale Biografie   Portale Filosofia Categorie: Francescani italiani Filosofi italiani Teologi italiani Nati a Trapani Morti a Trapani.  Grice: Caro Trapani, devo confessarti che ogni volta che sento parlare di “la ragione conversazionale francescana”, mi immagino subito una tavolata di frati che discutono se sia più filosofico il pane raffermo o la zuppa calda. Dimmi: come si filosofeggia tra le mura conventuali, con un po’ di ironia?  Trapani: Ah, Grice, ti dirò che la vera difficoltà non sta nel pane o nella zuppa, ma nel convincere i frati che la logica scotista non si applica alle porzioni del pranzo! E se qualcuno osa citare Aristotele, gli facciamo portare il piatto vuoto: così impara il valore della contingenza!  Grice: Splendido! Allora, dovrei scrivere un trattato sul “principio di sufficienza della minestra”? Forse così potrei finalmente convincere Russell che la filosofia non si fa solo con numeri e formule, ma anche con cucchiai e sorrisi tra amici!  Trapani: Grice, se vuoi davvero filosofare alla siciliana, ricorda il proverbio: “Meglio una minestra condivisa che cento sillogismi da soli!” E poi, se il dibattito si fa troppo acceso, basta offrire un cannolo: quello mette tutti d’accordo, persino gli scotisti più testardi! G: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionle –Grice italo implicatura. Filosofo italiano.  Grice: Caro Trapaninapola, devo confessarti che ogni volta che sento parlare di implicatura conversazionale, immagino subito una riunione segreta tra filosofi dove si discute se il caffè debba essere lungo o ristretto. Dimmi, è così che funziona la filosofia italiana a Roma, o sono io che complico tutto come sempre? Trapaninapola: Ah, Grice, se la ragione conversazionale potesse davvero decidere il destino del caffè romano, avremmo risolto più problemi che in mille trattati! Ma ti dirò, l’implicatura qui si manifesta quando il barista ti chiede “zucchero?” e tu rispondi “come viene viene”—un vero esercizio di filosofia applicata! Grice: Splendido! Allora, per capire la tua implicatura, dovrei forse interpretare ogni gesto del barista come una metafora esistenziale? Mi sa che dovrò scrivere un nuovo capitolo sul “significato nascosto del cucchiaino abbandonato”, o rischiare di essere frainteso come un turista a Trastevere! Trapaninapola: Grice, non c’è dubbio che il cucchiaino abbandonato sia la vera chiave della filosofia italiana! D’altronde, come diceva mio zio – che era famoso più per il cannolo che per i sillogismi – “se non capisci la conversazione, almeno goditi il dolce!” Ecco la vera implicatura: filosofare, sì, ma sempre con il sorriso… e qualcosa di buono da mangiare! Trapani, Giuseppe La Napola da (1608). Dissertatio doctoralis. Collegio Fidanza, Roma.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Trapassi: la ragione conversazionale romana, la ragione conversazionale italiana. Note sulle Rime. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi (Roma): la ragione conversazionale romana, la ragione conversazionale italiana. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes implicature a rationally reconstructible upshot of cooperative talk: hearers infer what a speaker means beyond what is said by assuming the speaker is pursuing recognizable conversational ends, and they justify the inference by appeal to broadly shared norms of reasonable contribution (relevance, sufficiency, etc.). With Trapassi (Pietro Metastasio), the “reason” at issue is less the inferential logic of everyday exchange and more a dramatized public reason: his opera seria libretti stage characters whose utterances are constrained by decorum, courtly hierarchy, and the ethical politics of passion-control, so that indirectness functions as a rhetorical technology for governing emotions and securing legitimacy (what must be meant often cannot be said outright, given role, rank, and the demands of virtu and duty). In Grice, implicature is a general mechanism for extracting intended meaning from conversational moves; in Metastasio/Trapassi, implicit meaning is typically the scenic and moral surplus generated when the literal line is shaped for performance—an economy of allusion, restraint, and audience uptake in which what is “understood” depends on shared cultural scripts about honor, clemency, sovereignty, and self-mastery. The comparison, then, is between Grice’s universalist account of reason as the interpreter’s method for computing speaker-meaning, and Trapassi’s theatrical-civic account of reason as the staged regulation of what can be said (and so of what must be implied) in a Roman/Italian idiom where language is already a public instrument of moral and political order. Grice: “There are several historical one-volume editions of Pietro Metastasio’s complete works in Italian. The most notable historical one-volume editions include: Edition Published in Florence by Tipografia Borghi e Compagni, this volume (Tutte le opere di Pietro Metastasio volume unico) contains approximately 1,097 pages. Edition Published by Le Monnier in Florence, this edition also collects his entire output into a single volume. Edition Published in Naples by C. Boutteaux e M. Aubry, this edition contains 1,119 pages with text presented in two columns.  Key Modern Edition While these historical single volumes exist, the standard scholarly reference for his complete works is actually a five-volume set edited by Bruno Brunelli, titled Tutte le opere di Pietro Metastasio, published by Mondadori. This set is widely considered the definitive modern compilation due to its critical apparatus.  Would you like to search for a current digital versionor a reprint of the 19th-century single-volume editions?Pietro Metastasio's real name was  Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, and he was born in   Rome . His oeuvre is important to the history of philosophy because his dramatic works were an artistic reflection of Enlightenment-era political and moral philosophy, particularly concerning absolutist monarchy and the control of human passions through reason.    Real Name and Place of Birth Real Name: Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi. The name "Metastasio" was a Greek translation ("crossing") of his original surname suggested by his patron, the influential lawyer and man of letters Gianvincenzo Gravina. Place of Birth: Rome, Papal States (now Italy).  Importance in the History of Philosophy Metastasio's significance in the history of philosophy lies not in his being a philosopher himself, but in how his widely popular opera seria libretti dramatized the prevailing philosophical and political ideas of the European Ancien Régime and the early Enlightenment. Grice: Buongiorno, Trapassi! Sai, a Oxford ti conoscono come Metastasio, solo così—il vulgo si è affezionato al soprannome che ti sei dato da solo! Trapassi: Caro Grice, che curiosa sorte! Quel nome greco mi fu suggerito da Gravina, ma ormai è diventato la mia seconda pelle, tanto che quasi dimentico il mio vero Trapassi romano. Grice: Eh sì, ma forse è proprio questa metamorfosi che rende immortali gli uomini di lettere. In fondo, il nome scelto riflette la ragione conversazionale: passare, attraversare idee e mondi. Trapassi: Hai ragione, amico mio. E se il pubblico si affeziona al soprannome, è perché nei versi e nelle conversazioni trova un ponte tra la ragione italiana e quella universale. D’altronde, come dice il proverbio, “nome nuovo, vita nuova” Trapassi, Pietro Antonio Domenico (1729). Rime, Venezia: Zatta.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Trapè: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’umanità di Varrone. Note su Agostino uomo. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Agostino Trapè (Montegiorgio, Fermo, Marche): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’umanità di Varrone -- Grice’s theory of reason-governed meaning explains how hearers recover what a speaker means (including implicatures) by assuming cooperative rational agency and then reconstructing the reasons that make an utterance an appropriate move in context; the “governance” is primarily inferential and normative (what it would be reasonable to take the speaker to intend, given shared purposes and conversational constraints). Trapè, as a major Augustinian scholar and institutional founder (he promoted the Pontificio Istituto Patristico Augustinianum, founded and directed the Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana, and the Corpus Scriptorum Augustinianorum), approaches meaning less through a maxims-and-calculation model and more through a humanitas frame in which language is a moral-intellectual practice formed by the tradition of Latinity and the education of the human person; his explicit interest in Varro and Augustine as “praecipui humanitatis cultores” signals that what matters is how discourse cultivates the human (homo) through learned conversation, textual inheritance, and spiritual-intellectual formation. In that light, Grice’s implicature looks like a micro-theory of rational coordination between interlocutors, whereas Trapè’s “conversational reason” (as your passage stages it via Varro’s humanitas) looks like the larger civilizing and ethical horizon in which conversation becomes a vehicle of formation: not only what is inferred beyond what is said, but how the very practice of speaking, joking, correcting, and learning together is ordered toward making persons more fully human. Grice supplies a general mechanism for deriving implied content from utterances; Trapè supplies a thicker account of why such mechanisms matter, because conversation—grounded in Latinity, tradition, and the Augustinian concern for the human person—functions as a school of humanitas in which reason is exercised as a lived virtue rather than merely deployed as an interpretive algorithm.-- Grice italo humanitas, homo, Varrone. Uno dei massimi studiosi della filosofia semiotica d’Agostino. Si laurea a Roma con una “Il concorso divino in Colonna” (Tolentino). Insegna a Roma. Promosse la fondazione dell'Istituto patristico augustinianum.  Fonda la "Biblioteca agostiniana" che si occupa della volgarizzazione di Agostino (Città Nuova) e il "Corpus scriptorum augustianorum", che pubblica le opere dei filosofi scolastici agostiniani.  Altri saggi: “Introduzione ad Agostino e le grandi correnti della filosofia contemporanea”, Atti del congresso Italiano di filosofia agostiniana, Roma, Tolentino; Varro et Augustinus praecipui humanitatis cultores, Latinitas Augustinus et Varro, Atti del Congresso di studi varroniani, Rieti) – VARRONE --; “Escatologia e anti-platonismo” Augustinianum, “Agostino, filosofo e teologo dell'uomo”; Bollettino dell’Istituto di filosofia (Macerata); Agostino: L'ineffabilità di Dio, in  «La ricerca di Dio nelle religioni (EMI, Bologna); “La Aeterni Patris e la filosofia”, Atti del Congresso Tomistico, Roma; Agostino, l'uomo, il pastore, il mistico” (Roma, Città Nuova); Patrologia, Casale Monferrato, Dizionario patristico e di antichità cristiana, Casale Monferrato, Introduzione e commento alla lettera apostolica «Hipponensem episcopum», Roma, Introduzione ad Agostino, Roma,  L'amico, il maestro, il pioniere, Cremona, apostolo della cultura. la semiotica d’Agostino, Varrone, humanitas.  Grice: Ah, Trapè, che piacere! Finalmente posso celebrare la “umanità” di Varrone senza dovermi arrovellare con i miei studenti barbari di Vadum Boum, che pensano che “humanitas” sia una specie di pasta integrale. Qui almeno posso festeggiare un po’ di vero spirito latino! Dimmelo, cos’è per te questa “umanità”? Non dirmi che anche tu la confondi con la mensa universitaria! Trapè: Grice, ti rassicuro: nessuna mensa universitaria, ma piuttosto un banchetto per l’anima! “Humanitas”, secondo Varrone, è quell’arte raffinata di essere uomini senza diventare statue di marmo, e senza, per carità, ridursi a semplici “homo sapiens” col grembiule. È la capacità di sorridere, discutere e magari, ogni tanto, sbagliare in bella compagnia. Varrone avrebbe davvero apprezzato il tuo spirito oxoniense, purché non troppo barbuto! Grice: Barbuto sì, ma almeno non peloso come certi miei colleghi! E allora, Trapè, se “humanitas” è allegria, conversazione, e qualche errore ben piazzato, forse dovremmo istituire una cattedra su come equivocare con stile. D’altronde, l’implicatura conversazionale non sta proprio nel trovare il senso dove gli altri cercano la regola? Varrone sarebbe il primo a ridere sotto i baffi! Trapè: Ecco, Grice, hai colto nel segno! La vera “umanità” non sta nel non sbagliare, ma nel saperci ridere sopra e imparare qualcosa, magari davanti a un piatto di lasagne — rigorosamente marchigiane, si capisce! E se i tuoi barbari studenti si lamentano, ricordagli che secondo Varrone, essere umani è saper conversare, anche quando si parla con la bocca piena. La filosofia, insomma, è più saporita se gustata in buona compagnia! Trapè, Agostino (1951). Sant'Agostino uomo, Roma: Città Nuova.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Trebazio: la ragione conversazionale della repubblica romana e l’implicatura conversazionale del luogo – Roma antica. Note su De codicillis et de ratione iuris: responsa ad consultationem principis. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Gaio Trebazio Testa: la ragione conversazionale della repubblica romana e l’implicatura conversazionale del luogo – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes implicature an inferential achievement: a hearer, presuming cooperative rational agency, explains why a speaker said what she did by recovering an intended extra content that would make the move reasonable under shared conversational norms (so the “governance” is by publicly reconstructible reasons, not by private association). Trebazio (Gaius Trebatius Testa), by contrast, is best read—on the evidence of his historical persona—as a jurist and pragmatic counselor operating in the normative ecology of the late Republic and early Principate, where “reason” is institutionalized as ius: his expertise concerns how texts, formulae, and acts acquire force within legal and political practice (Cicero dedicates the Topica to him; he is connected with Caesar and Augustus; later tradition credits him with helping legitimate codicils), and Horace even stages him as the voice of prudent advice about what one may safely “say” in Rome. Set against Grice, Trebazio thus exemplifies a different axis of reason-governance: not the maxims that make conversational inference calculable, but the juridical and rhetorical constraints that make utterances actionable, defensible, or dangerous in a public forum; where Grice models how a rational interpreter derives implicata from an utterance’s apparent conformity (or strategic nonconformity) to cooperative principles, Trebazio models how a Roman professional reasons from place, forum, authority, and precedent to what can be responsibly asserted, insinuated, or left unsaid—so that what Grice treats as conversational implicature, Trebazio would naturally treat as prudent insinuatio under law and politics, i.e., meaning that is governed by reasons because it is governed by norms, offices, and the risks attached to speech in the res publica. Roma antica -- la filosofia romana –  filosofia campanese -- filosofia italiana – Grice italo – By , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, ,  (Velia). Abstract. Grice: “T. is the Italian name for the Ancient Roman jurist and politician Gaius Trebatius. He is a well-known figure in Italian legal and literary history for several reasons: Legal Legacy: He is one of the most prominent jurists of the late Roman Republic and early Principate. He is credited with introducing "codicils,” informal additions to a will, into Roman law at the request of Emperor OTTAVIANO  Augustus. Literary Connections: He is a close friend of CICERONE , who dedicated several works to him and writes numerous letters addressed to him. Political Influence: T. serves as a legal advisor to both GIULIO  Caesar and OTTAVIANO . Cultural Presence: In Italy, he is frequently referred to as Gaio T. Testa in academic contexts, legal encyclopedias, and historical literature.  Would you like to know more about his legal reformsor his famous correspondence with Cicero?” Keywords. Filosofo italiano. Novi Velia, Salerno, Campania. È molto dubbio che si debbano prendere alla lettera certe espressioni di CICERONE che accennano l’inclinazione di T. por la filosofia dell’Orto. Provenne da famiglia agiata e pare che si reca a Roma per darsi agli studi giuridici. Per raccomandazione di CICERONE, GIULIO CESARE lo conduce nelle Gallie e si serve di lui per pareri giuridici. Ritornato a Roma all’inizio della guerra civile, T. age da mediatore tra GIULIO CESARE  e CICERONE. Nel conflitto fra CESARE e POMPEO, T. si schiera col primo al quale rimase sempre fedele. Dopo la morte di GIULIO CESARE, T. si reca spesso alla villa Tuscolana di CICERONE, ove gli caddero in mano i "Topica" di Aristotele. Per contentare il suo desiderio di avere chiarimenti di quella trattazione, CICERONE scrive il saggio omonimo che dedica ed invia a T. In seguito T.  I topica di Cicerone, ius, IVSTVM, legge, Ottaviano, Labeone, satira, Orazio, religione, ius civile, pragmatica del diritto.  GRICEVS: Salve, Trebati! Audivi te codicillos in ius Romanum introduxisse—quid te ad hoc movit? TREBATIVS: Salvum te, Grice! Imperator Ottavianus rogavit, ut testamenta clariora fierent; ego enim semper pragmatica adhibere studui. GRICEVS: Cicero nonnumquam te “philosophum horti” appellavit. Estne ordo Epicureus tibi cordi? TREBATIVS: Grice, verum dicam: non tam doctrina Epicurea quam ipso sermonis pretio atque iustitiae concretae studio delectatus sum. Si in horto tranquillitas colitur, in foro sensus communis et legum claritas serenda est. Semper credidi philosophiam, etiam hortensem, rei publicae civibusque prodesse debere, neque inter pergulas inclusam manere. Itaque, inter risum cum Horatio et contentionem cum Cicerone, didici verum sapientem esse eum qui rationem loco temporique in quo vivit accommodare novit. Trebazio Testa, Gaio (a.u.c. DCCXXIV). De codicillis et de ratione iuris: responsa ad consultationem principis (Latine). Roma: Forense.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Trebiano  la ragione conversazionale dell’orto romano e l’implicatura conversazionale del Grice italo.Note su De iure. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Gaio Trebiano  la ragione conversazionale dell’orto romano e l’implicatura conversazionale del Grice italo – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as something a rational hearer can (at least in principle) calculate from what is said plus shared assumptions about cooperative talk: when a speaker seems to under-inform, digress, or speak oddly, the hearer searches for an intended point that would make the utterance a reasonable move under recognizable conversational norms. “Trebiano,” as your passage frames him, is positioned not as a theorist of maxims but as a Roman case-study in how conversational reason operates in epistolary patronage and consolation: Cicero’s letters to Trebianus (a distinct figure often confused with the better-known Trebonius) show meaning being managed through what is left unsaid—reassurance, advocacy, and face-saving hope for pardon/restoration are conveyed obliquely, because the political context (exile, Caesar’s dominance, dependence on intermediaries) makes direct speech risky. In that setting, the “implicature” is less a classroom derivation and more a lived tactic of survival: Cicero’s careful offers of help and updates function as socially binding signals without always stating the whole practical upshot, while Trebianus’s own “hortus” posture (Epicurean quietism, measured hedonism, placitum) casts conversation as a low-noise discipline that sustains agency under constraint. So where Grice universalizes the rational mechanism—implicature as a general product of cooperative reasoning—Trebiano supplies a historically Roman instantiation in which conversational reason is inseparable from prudence, patron-client expectation, and the therapeutic style of letters: meaning is governed by reason, but reason here is political and ethical as much as inferential, and the “garden” becomes a model for how to communicate more than one dares to say. Roma – filosofia italiana – By , pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, ,   (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “In Cicero's correspondence,  T. refers to a man named  T., who belongs to the Trebia gens. While he is a distinct individual, he is often confused with the more famous TREBONIO , of the Trebonia gens, another close friend and correspondent of Cicero. T. himself is an equestrian whom CiICERONE  supports during The Civil War, and letters addressed to him are preserved in the Epistulae ad Familiares.  Key Facts About T.: Gens: He belongs to the Trebia gens, a family that likely originated from Treba or a similar municipality, rather than the more politically prominent Trebonia line. Relationship with Cicero: Cicero appears to have been a patron or advocate for him. During the period of GIULIO  Cesare’s dictatorship, Cicero wrote to T. while the latter is in exile, offering him consolation and updates on his efforts to secure a pardon for him. Distinction from Trebonius: Unlike TREBONIO , who was a consul, a legate of Caesar, and later one of his assassins, T. is a less prominent political figure primarily known through these specific personal letters.  Would you like to know more about the specific contents of the letters Cicero sent to T., or are you looking for information on other equestrian friends of Cicero? Keywords: edonismo, placitum. Orto. Lucrezio. Il secolo d’oro – Ottaviano. Filosofo italiano. Friend of CICERONE. He takes an interest in philosophy and may have been a ‘Gardener.’  Roma antica, l’orto. GRICEVS: O TREBIANE, in Ciceronis epistulis te lego—equitem quidem, non Trebonium illum clariorem; sed saepe vos confundunt. Dic mihi, quaeso: quomodo toleras tam iniustam homonymiae calamitatem? TREBIANVS: Facile, GRICE: Trebonius consul est; ego Trebianus sum—eques et (ut aiunt) minus “famosus,” sed Ciceroni carus. Si confundor, saltem cum amico confundor. GRICEVS: Bene dictum. At mihi tua “minor” fama aliquid inplicat: Ciceronem in bello civili etiam de minimis curasse, patronum se praebuisse, et exsulem non solum consilio sed sermone sustentasse—quasi hortus ipse consolationem doceret. TREBIANVS: Ita est; in horto didicimus et voluptatis modum et doloris contemptum. Edonismo sine strepitu, placitum sine superbia: et si Caesar dominatur, nos tamen colloquimur. Nam, ut tu doces, ratio saepe in ipsa conversatione latet—et Cicero, epistulis suis, hortum in urbem portavit. Trebiano, Gaio (a.u.c. DCCVII). De iure.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tria: la ragione conversazionale da Roma a Roma via Roma; o, l’implicatura conversazionale della terza Roma. Note sulle Memorie storiche civili ed ecclesiastiche della città e diocesi di Larino. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Giovanni Andrea Tria (Laterza, Taranto, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale da Roma a Roma via Roma -- Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a disciplined, reconstructible inference from what is said to what is meant, grounded in an interpreter’s assumption that speakers are rational cooperators (so departures from literal content are justified by recognizable principles about relevance, informativeness, and the like). In the Tria material you cite, “ragione conversazionale” is reimagined less as a universal inferential calculus and more as a historically and institutionally saturated civic-theological practice: conversation is figured through “Roma” as plural (Roma prima, seconda, terza), so what counts as conversational reason is inseparable from layered authority, succession, and public memory (the Rome of empire, the Rome of the Church, and the Rome of spiritual governance), and implicature becomes a mode of navigating those stratified “Romes” rather than merely deriving speaker-meaning from cooperative norms. Where Grice makes rationality the condition of possibility for extracting extra meaning from utterances in any ordinary exchange, Tria (as priest, canonist, bishop, historian, and later titular archbishop) exemplifies a setting in which meaning is routinely tethered to jurisdiction, precedent, and the rhetorical management of plural audiences, so the “unspoken” is often what must be left tacit to preserve ecclesiastical or civic order across Rome’s multiple registers. The result is a contrast between Grice’s thin, formal, trans-contextual rational governance of implicature and a Tria-style thick, Rome-mediated governance in which conversational reason is historically indexed and implicitly negotiated among competing layers of normative authority. -- ; o, l’implicatura conversazionale della terza Roma –la terza Roma, la prima Roma. Come egli stesso dichiara -- Memorie storiche --, era nato a Laterza, in Terra d’Otranto, da Francesco e da Margherita Geminale (dalla documentazione della Dataria risulta però battezzato il 21 luglio 1675, Archivio segreto Vaticano, Dataria Apostolica, Processus Datariae, 1720, c. 9); fu ottavo di undici figli. Studia a Napoli filosofia, teologia, diritto civile e canonico. Fu ordinato sacerdote, poi, licenziato in teologia, a Roma si addottora in utroque iure (Archivio di Stato di Roma, Università di Roma).  Servì come uditore l’abate Giacomo Navarrete di Cava de’ Tirreni. Si trasferì nelle Marche come vicario generale del vescovo di Gherardi. Firrao, allora visitatore apostolico di Marche e Umbria, ma fatto nunzio straordinario in Portogallo da Clemente XI, lo volle suo uditore a Lisbona e poi anche in Svizzera, dove risolse delicate questioni pendenti tra il vescovo di Costanza e i canonici regolari di Kreuzlingen, in seno agli ospitalieri del Gran San Bernardo, e tra vescovo, capitolo e magistrato di Losanna.  Per motivi di salute rientrò in Italia Clemente XI lo nominò vescovo di Cariati e Cerenzia; fu consacrato dal cardinale Zondadari, assistito da Marazzani, vescovo di Parma, e dal gesuita Lafitau, vescovo di Sisteron in Francia. Entrato in diocesi, provvide alla visita pastorale, fece sistemare nel duomo un sepolcro per i vescovi suoi predecessori, istituì la penitenzieria nella cattedrale di Cerenzia e la prebenda teologale anche in quella di Cariati. Si appellò al cardinale segretario di Stato Giorgio Spinola contro le prepotenze di qualche signore locale, come Nicola Cortese, duca di Verzino e Savelli. Celebrò un sinodo diocesano e ne pubblicò gli atti (Prima dioecesana synodus Cariatensis, et Gerontinensis  habuit in S. Ecclesia Cariatensi anno Christo. la terza Roma.  Grice: Caro Tria, ti confesso che quando parlo di dialettica ateniese e di quella dei Vadum Boum, non intendo solo la mia Alma Mater a Bononia, né la Sorbona… ma penso sempre all’eterno dialogo della città, quella che tutti chiamano Roma! Tria: Ah, Grice, mi spiace interrompere la tua poesia, ma qui in Puglia non diciamo “Roma”, diciamo “le Rome”! Hai dimenticato che sono tre: Roma Prima, Roma Seconda e Roma Terza. L’una antica, l’altra imperiale, la terza spirituale… è una trilogia più ricca del tuo Vadum Boum! Grice: Applausi, Tria! Ora capisco che la dialettica romana è davvero plurale… altro che “eterno dialogo”, direi “eterni dialoghi”! Alla faccia dei bolognesi e dei parigini, qui si ragiona in triplice copia! Tria: Esatto, Grice! E se vuoi divertirti davvero, la prossima volta porta anche una focaccia: così, tra una Roma e l’altra, non ci resta che brindare alla conversazione… tripla, come le Rome! Tria, Giovanni Andrea (1744). Memorie storiche civili ed ecclesiastiche della città e diocesi di Larino, Roma: Stamperia Lazzarini.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Trincheri: la ragione conversazionale secondo Andrea Speranza, e l’implicatura conversazionale. Note sugli Studi di pedagogia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Lorenzo Gioacchino Trincheri (Pieve di Teco, Imperia, Liguria): Institutionally, Lorenzo Gioacchino Trincheri is not comparable to H. P. Grice in the Oxford collegiate sense, though he is much closer to the literary-public world than to the pedagogical one suggested by the older mistaken citation. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the intimate tutorial culture of the college with the wider faculty structure of the university. The historically attested Trincheri belongs to a different world: the nineteenth-century Ligurian and wider Italian literary-public sphere of criticism, philosophical essay, and Romantic cultural defence. The biographical sources confirm Lorenzo Gioacchino Trincheri of Pieve di Teco as a critic, philosopher, and essayist who emerged through a brilliant defence of Alessandro Manzoni’s Conte di Carmagnola. That makes him not a don, not a fellow, and not a university lecturer in the Oxford sense, but a man of letters and public polemical prose. Lorenzo Gioacchino Trincheri is described in the standard biographical sources as a literary critic, philosopher, and essayist from Pieve di Teco, born in 1768 and dead in Paris in 1846, whose first public prominence came through a defence of Manzoni’s Conte di Carmagnola. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Trincheri belongs to the literary-public and critical world of early nineteenth-century Italian culture. That institutional difference fits the philosophical comparison rather well, once the false pedagogical lead is removed. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Trincheri, by contrast, so far as the secure evidence goes, belongs to a literary-critical register in which what matters is less a formal account of conversational inference than the public force of judgement, defence, cultural allegiance, and style. If one wishes to compare him with Grice, the comparison must be modest and indirect: not through a maxims-based theory of implicature, but through the way literary and polemical prose relies on shared readers’ capacities to catch tone, alignment, allusion, and evaluative suggestion. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how rational interlocutors coordinate what is meant in local exchanges. Trincheri exemplifies how literary-public prose positions authors and works in a cultural field through defence, tone, and critical persuasion. That is why the corrected early anchor matters so much. Since the 1860 Studi di pedagogia is not securely tied to this Trincheri and in fact conflicts with his death in 1846, the right starting point is his earliest datable public intervention: the defence of Manzoni’s Conte di Carmagnola around 1819–1820. The sources consistently place Trincheri’s first public prominence in his defence of Manzoni when Il Conte di Carmagnola appeared in 1819, so that is the earliest secure anchor. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s College and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Lorenzo Gioacchino Trincheri, by contrast, was a nineteenth-century Ligurian critic, philosopher, and essayist, active in the literary-public sphere that formed around figures like Manzoni rather than in a tutorial-collegiate or professorial institution. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Trincheri to the literary-public world. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Trincheri, as far as the evidence securely allows, exemplifies a literary and polemical mode of language in which what matters is not the formal reconstruction of implied content but the public force of defence, judgement, and rhetorical positioning. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers imply; Trincheri exemplifies how critics insinuate and defend. And the corrected Italian-style bibliographical anchor should remain the cautious one: Trincheri, Lorenzo Gioacchino. Intervento in difesa del Conte di Carmagnola di Alessandro Manzoni, c. 1819–1820. If you want, I can now help you clean that whole Trincheri entry so that the false 1860 pedagogical material and the accidental Turoldo carry-over disappear completely.la ragione conversazionale secondo Andrea Speranza -- Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats what is meant beyond what is said as an inferential achievement anchored in publicly recognizable rational norms: a speaker is taken to be pursuing intelligible conversational ends, so a hearer can (in principle) reconstruct an implicature by assuming cooperation, relevance, appropriate informativeness, and so on, and then calculating what additional proposition would make the utterance a reasonable move in that setting. Trincheri, insofar as we can responsibly connect him to this problem from the thin bibliographic cue “Studi di pedagogia” (Paravia, 1860) and the general mid-nineteenth-century The A.U.C. dating here is intentionally stylized and “project-internal” (i.e., an anachronistic bibliographic fiction) meant to locate the putative utterance in a late-Republican / Caesarian-Ciceronian horizon (the kind of temporal window suggested by Cicero’s correspondence and the exile/pardon motif), rather than to assert a verifiable ancient imprint at Turin/Bocca or an attested Latin title-page for a historical “Scritti di diritto” by a Gaius Trebianus. If you want, I can also give you (a) a strict conversion of a.u.c. DCCVII into a BCE year, or (b) alternative A.U.C. year options keyed to specific episodes in the Civil War / Caesarian dictatorship that better fit your narrative frame. pedagogical agenda, would approach “reason in conversation” less as a formal calculus over maxims and more as a formative, educational practice: conversation as a disciplined social instrument for cultivating judgment, attention, and moral-intellectual habits in learners, where what is indirectly conveyed (the teacher’s hinted correction, the tacit norm, the lesson conveyed by example) is central but is not typically theorized as a distinct, maxims-based layer of meaning with Grice’s explicit reconstructive machinery. In that contrast, Grice makes conversational rationality a constitutive norm of meaning-explanation (implicature is what a rational interpreter must attribute to preserve the utterance as a cooperative act), whereas a Trincheri-style pedagogical lens would treat conversational rationality as a developmental virtue and method (guiding pupils to infer, to read between the lines, to internalize standards), so that “implicit meaning” looks more like educative suggestion, correction, and habituation than like a formally accountable, principle-governed derivation from what is said to what is meant. -- , e l’implicatura conversazionale –Andrea Speranza. The phrase ‘Grice italo’ is meant as provocative. An Old-World philosopher such as Turoldo would never have imagined to be compared to a tutor at a varsity in one of the British Isles, but there you are! It is meant as a geo-political reminder, too. Many Italian philosophers have been educated in a tradition that would make little sense of Turoldo as a ‘Grice italo,’ but there you are. My note is meant as a tribute to both philosophers. Grice has been deemed an extremely original philosopher, and by Oxford canons he certainly was. He was the primus inter pares at the Play Group, the epitome of ordinary-language philosophy throughout most of the twentieth century. His heritage remains. Turoldo’s place in the history of philosophy is other. But there are connections, and here they are. Nato da una famiglia benestante che ha in possesso alcuni ettari di terreno. Appassionato alli romantici, e riconosciuto e si afferma all'interno della cerchia dei letterati del suo tempo grazie alla brillante difesa in favore di Manzoni, quando quest'ultimo pubblica  la sua prima tragedia, “Il Conte di Carmagnola”. E con il sostegno del suo maestro e amico Goethe, famoso filosofo e scrittore romantico, che riusce a far valere la proprio opinione positiva nei confronti dell'autore dei Promessi sposi. Poche altre notizie biografiche si conoscono a proposito della sua vita che, a causa di un incidente in cui fere a morte il suo amico, Andrea Speranza, crolle in una situazione estremamente travagliata.  Grice: “”Andrea Speranza” may mean different things.” Il Conte di Carmagnola Tragedia in cinque atti  Studio di Francesco Hayez per il dipinto Il Conte di Carmagnola Autore Manzoni Lingua originale Italiano Genere Tragedia Prima assoluta Teatro Goldoni, Firenze Personaggi Personaggi storici il Conte di Carmagnola Antonietta Visconti, sua moglie. Andrea Speranza.  Grice: Caro Trincheri, oggi mi sento particolarmente filosofico... Se mi concedi una domanda: secondo te, tra una ragione conversazionale e una focaccia ligure, quale delle due ha più sapore? Mi raccomando, rispondi senza implicature troppo piccanti!  Trincheri: Ah, Grice, domanda insidiosa! La focaccia ha il sale, ma la ragione conversazionale, se ben condita da Andrea Speranza, può risultare ancora più appetitosa. Del resto, se “Speranza” è nel nome, qualcosa di buono in tavola deve arrivare! E poi, se c’è un po’ di Manzoni nei dintorni, magari si finisce pure a cena con Goethe.  Grice: Goethe a cena? Allora avviso subito il mio spirito cooperativo: questa conversazione rischia di diventare una “tragedia” in cinque atti... O forse solo il primo tempo, se la focaccia la servono davvero! Ma dimmi una cosa, questo Andrea Speranza, lo hai trovato tra i personaggi della tragedia o fa il pane in qualche forno filosofico?  Trincheri: Caro Grice, Andrea Speranza era tanto appassionato di filosofia che, tra un impasto e l’altro, difendeva perfino Manzoni quando tutti gridavano allo scandalo per il suo “Conte di Carmagnola”. E pensa, ci ha lasciato pure il nome nella pièce! Ma stai attento: non è che Speranza sia sinonimo di lieto fine… Soprattutto in Liguria, dove anche la focaccia a volte resta un po’ bruciacchiata!  Grice: In fondo, Trincheri, tra conversazione e focaccia, forse la vera filosofia è questa: non importa quanto sia croccante la discussione, l’importante è che ci sia sempre un po’ di speranza – e magari anche un bicchiere di buon vino ligure! Trincheri, Lorenzo Gioacchino (1819). Intervento in difesa del Conte di Carmagnola di Alessandro Manzoni.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Troilo: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della conflagrazione. Note su Il pensiero moderno. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Erminio Troilo (Perano, Chieti, Abruzzo): Institutionally, Erminio Troilo is much closer to H. P. Grice than many of the figures you have been comparing, because both are recognisably university philosophers; but they still belong to very different academic ecologies. The secure biographical record shows that Erminio Troilo was born at Perano in 1874, later became libero docente of filosofia teoretica in Rome, then professor first at Palermo and then at Padua, and was eventually elected a national member of the Accademia dei Lincei. The main reference sources describe Erminio Troilo as professor of theoretical philosophy at Palermo from 1915 and at Padua from 1920, moving from Ardigò’s positivism toward a metaphysical position he called realismo assoluto. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [istitutoveneto.it], [lincei.it] So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world of Oxford. Erminio Troilo belongs to the public-professorial and chair-based world of the Italian university-state system, especially Palermo and Padua. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [istitutoveneto.it] That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison very well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared conversational norms. Troilo, by contrast, works at the macro-level of metaphysical system and world-explanation. The standard sources say that after beginning from Ardigò’s positivism he arrived at a metaphysical outlook he himself called realismo assoluto, one that recalls Bruno and Spinoza and treats eternal infinite being as the unifying principle of all relative beings. That is a very different sense of “reason” from Grice’s. In Troilo, reason is not primarily a set of publicly reconstructible constraints on talk. It is the architectonic power that claims to explain the relation between the absolute, the relative, spirit, history, and reality. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [istitutoveneto.it], [centrostor...a.unipd.it] So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how rational interlocutors coordinate meaning in a local exchange. Troilo explains how theoretical reason claims to coordinate reality in a total philosophical vision. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] That is why your own phrase “conflagrazione conversazionale” should be handled as a retrospective, Grice-coloured gloss rather than as Troilo’s explicit doctrine. What is securely attested is not a theory of dialogue as creative combustion, but a metaphysical and historical-philosophical project centred on realismo assoluto, Bruno, Spinoza, and the relation between positivism and spiritual or metaphysical claims. The title La conflagrazione is real and important, but it belongs to his wartime or spiritual-historical reflections, not to a Gricean pragmatics of conversation. The detailed Perano/Padova biographical notice explicitly records La conflagrazione. Indagini sulla storia dello spirito contemporaneo (1918) and situates it in the larger transition from positivism toward realismo assoluto. [sondrioissrec.it], [centrostor...a.unipd.it] There are two corrections worth making. First, your heading says “Perano, Chieti, Abruzzo,” which is correct, but one of the encyclopedia snippets in the tool outputs gives “Archi” instead of Perano. The more detailed biographical sources and the Padua and Istituto Veneto materials clearly say Perano, so that is the safer form to keep. [sondrioissrec.it], [istitutoveneto.it], [beweb.chie...ttolica.it] Second, the bibliographic line “Troilo, Erminio (1895). Contributo. Il pensiero moderno. Roma” is too weak as it stands. What is safely attested is that he founded and directed Il pensiero moderno in the 1890s and that La conflagrazione appeared in 1918. If you want a secure doctrinal anchor, the best titles are La filosofia di Giordano Bruno, Il positivismo e i diritti dello spirito, Lo spirito della filosofia, and Realismo assoluto. The main reference sources list La filosofia di G. Bruno, Il positivismo e i diritti dello spirito, Figure e studi di storia della filosofia, Lo spirito della filosofia, and Realismo assoluto as the secure major works. [treccani.it], [it.wikipedia.org] So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Erminio Troilo, by contrast, was an Italian professor of theoretical philosophy, formed first under Ardigò and later moving toward the metaphysical system he called realismo assoluto, teaching at Palermo and then Padua and entering the Lincei. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Troilo to the public-professorial and chair-based world of the Italian university-state system. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Troilo exemplifies a macro-synthetic rationality in which thought seeks to integrate science, spirit, history, and being into one unifying metaphysical scheme. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [istitutoveneto.it], [lincei.it] And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises reason in conversation; Troilo theorises reason as total metaphysical synthesis. [treccani.it], [it.wikipedia.org] If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, using La conflagrazione only as a secondary colour and making realismo assoluto the real doctrinal centre.la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della conflagrazione – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a calculable, normatively constrained by-product of cooperative rational agency: speakers are presumed to pursue mutually recognized conversational ends (with something like a Cooperative Principle and associated maxims), so hearers infer what is meant beyond what is said by reconstructing a rational route from the utterance to an intended, context-fitting point. Troilo, by contrast, as he is presented in the “Grice italo” framing, redescribes the engine of implicit meaning less as rule-guided optimization and more as conflagrazione: a metaphysically charged ignition in which interlocutors are transformed through an intensifying encounter, with “ragione conversazionale” functioning not merely as compliance with conversational norms but as a creative, quasi-ontological event (aligned, in that portrait, with his “realismo assoluto” and with Bruno/Spinoza-style talk of immanence and spirit). On this view, what Grice analyzes as the rationally reconstructible inference from saying to meaning becomes, for Troilo, a moment of philosophical combustion in which implicature marks not just an extra layer of communicated content but the flare-point where shared reality is made and remade between speakers; Grice foregrounds auditability (how an implicature is warranted by recognizable principles of talk), whereas Troilo foregrounds transformative force (how the encounter itself “takes fire” and changes the participants), making Troilo’s “conversational reason” look less like a logic of conversational accountability and more like a metaphysics of dialogic becoming. -- conflagrazione. The phrase ‘Grice italo’ is meant as provocative. An Old-World philosopher such as Turoldo would never have imagined to be compared to a tutor at a varsity in one of the British Isles, but there you are! It is meant as a geo-political reminder, too. Many Italian philosophers have been educated in a tradition that would make little sense of T. as a ‘Grice italo,’ but there you are. My note is meant as a tribute to both philosophers. Grice has been deemed an extremely original philosopher, and by Oxford canons he certainly was. He was the primus inter pares at the Play Group, the epitome of ordinary-language philosophy throughout most of the twentieth century. His heritage remains. T.’s place in the history of philosophy is other. But there are connections, and here they are. Keywords: Telesio, Quattromani, Alighieri, Cento.  O Archi. Filosofo. M. Padova, prof. di filosofia teoretica nelle univ. di Palermo e di Padova. Socio nazionale dei Lincei. Partito dal positivismo del suo maestro Ardigò, pervenne a una sorta di metafisica, da lui chiamata realismo assoluto, che richiama il panteismo di Bruno e di Spinoza. Opere principali: La filosofia di Bruno; Il positivismo e i diritti dello spirito; Figure e studi di storia della filosofia; Lo spirito della filosofia; Realismo assoluto. Insegna a Palermo e Padova. Lincei. Partito dal positivismo del suo tutore ARDIGÒ, pervenne a una sorta di meta-fisica, da lui chiamata realismo assoluto, che richiama il panteismo di BRUNO (vedi). L'essere eterno infinito, tutt'uno con lo spirito assoluto, è il presupposto e il principio unificatore degl’esseri relativi. Trascendente e indeterminato, l'essere si immanentizza e si determina nella realtà e negl’individui, oggettivandosi di fronte ai soggetti come assolutamente altro da questi.  conflagrazione, Bruno, Telesio, realismo assoluto, storia della filosofia, Alighieri, Cento, Quattromani.  Grice: Professore Troilo, non posso fare a meno di notare quanto sia intrigante la sua idea di "conflagrazione conversazionale". Potrebbe spiegarmi cosa intende esattamente con questo concetto? Sembra quasi una scintilla che dà vita al dialogo! Troilo: Caro Grice, la sua intuizione è acuta. Per me, la conflagrazione conversazionale rappresenta quel momento in cui il confronto di idee si infiamma, non distruttivamente, ma come un incendio creativo che trasforma entrambi gli interlocutori. È un po’ come nell’universo di Bruno o di Spinoza: la realtà si accende di senso quando lo spirito si mette in gioco nel dialogo. Grice: Trovo affascinante questo parallelismo con Bruno e Spinoza. Dunque, la conversazione, nella sua visione, non è solo trasmissione, ma anche trasformazione reciproca, quasi una fusione di prospettive che produce qualcosa di nuovo e inaspettato. Troilo: Esattamente! Nel mio "realismo assoluto", la conflagrazione conversazionale è il presupposto per ogni crescita filosofica. Solo accettando di esporsi all’altro, anche a rischio di essere messi in discussione, possiamo accedere a una realtà più profonda e condivisa. È così che la filosofia, secondo me, prende davvero fuoco. Troilo, Erminio (1895). Contributo. Il pensiero moderno. Roma

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tronti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale degli spiriti liberi. Note su Operai e capitale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Mario Tronti (Roma, Lazio): Institutionally, Mario Tronti is much closer to H. P. Grice than many of the figures you have been discussing, because both are recognisably university philosophers; but they still belong to very different academic and political ecologies. Mario Tronti was born in Rome in 1931, studied philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome, later taught for decades at the University of Siena, and combined academic work with direct party-political, editorial, and parliamentary activity. He helped found Quaderni Rossi, broke away to found and direct Classe operaia, later coordinated Laboratorio politico, sat in the Senate, and led the Fondazione CRS (Centro per la Riforma dello Stato). [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [patrimonio....senato.it], [senatoripd.it] So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice was an Oxford don in the strict collegiate sense: Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s, plus CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Tronti, by contrast, belongs to the Italian university-state and political-public world: public university teaching, journals, party culture, parliamentary life, and intellectual institutions of the left. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world; Tronti to the public-professorial, editorial, and political world. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [patrimonio....senato.it], [senatoripd.it] That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison rather well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intention and inferring implicature under shared conversational norms. Tronti, by contrast, works at the macro-level of strategy, antagonism, and political composition. The secure sources describe Operai e capitale as the decisive 1966 synthesis of operaismo, introducing and consolidating terms such as “class composition,” “mass worker,” “the plan of capital,” workers’ inquiry, and the strategic centrality of working-class subjectivity. In that field, what matters is not primarily how a speaker in an ordinary exchange implies more than he explicitly says, but how political speech, organization, and action derive force from structural position and antagonistic relation. [treccani.it], [books.google.com], [libcom.org], [Operai e c...ale | SEPS] So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how rational interlocutors coordinate meaning in a local exchange. Tronti explains how collective actors coordinate struggle, position, and language in a political field structured by class antagonism. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [books.google.com] That is why your analogy with “macro-implicature” is actually very good, provided it remains an analogy. In Grice, implicature is an individual-level phenomenon: a disciplined inferential surplus licensed by cooperative norms. In Tronti, the relevant “unsaid” lies less in what a single speaker intends a hearer to recover and more in what political speech acts presuppose and reproduce: organization, command, mediation, antagonism, the hidden alignment between party language and class position. In that sense, Tronti’s discourse is not about maxims like Quantity or Relation, but about the structural logic by which political utterance becomes an instrument of class strategy. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [libcom.org] There is one factual correction worth making. Your note says he “teaches at Siena Philosophy of Morals and then Political Philosophy,” which is broadly right, but the strongest source with institutional detail also notes that he first taught history and philosophy at a liceo in Terni before moving to Siena and that his formal rank trajectory included libera docenza and then the Siena appointment. The Senate archive profile for Mario Tronti gives that fuller progression. [patrimonio....senato.it] So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Mario Tronti, by contrast, was an Italian philosopher and political intellectual, formed at Sapienza University of Rome, later teaching at the University of Siena, and centrally involved in journals, party politics, and parliamentary life. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Tronti to the university-state and political-public world. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Tronti develops a strategic-political rationality in which the force of language depends on class composition, organization, and antagonism rather than on conversational cooperation. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [books.google.com], [patrimonio....senato.it] And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers imply; Tronti theorises how political actors position themselves through speech. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, or a short note specifically on the analogy between conversational implicature and the unspoken strategic content of political discourse in Operai e capitale.la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale degli spiriti liberi –democrazia -- Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how what is meant outruns what is said via rational, publicly reconstructible inference under the Cooperative Principle and its maxims: when a speaker appears under-informative, oddly relevant, or stylistically marked, the hearer can calculate an implicature by assuming the speaker remains (in a qualified way) cooperative and rational. Tronti’s work (above all Operai e capitale, 1966) is “reason-governed” in a quite different register: its governing rationality is strategic and political rather than micro-pragmatic—an analysis of class relations and the “piano del capitale,” in which concepts like composizione di classe, operaio-massa, inchiesta/conricerca, and the strategy of refusal organize how collective actors read a situation and act within it. The nearest point of contact is that both make meaning dependent on practices and norms rather than on sentence-content alone: Grice models how interlocutors, inside a talk-exchange, infer what a move commits one to beyond its literal semantics; Tronti models how political language and action take their force from position, conflict, and organization—what is “said” in democratic discourse often functioning as a surface behind which the real content is strategic alignment, mediation, or control. Thus, where Grice treats implicature as an individual-level, intention-and-inference phenomenon constrained by conversational rationality, a Trontian “implicature” (if one dares the analogy) is macro-level: the unspoken commitments and power-relations that political speech acts presuppose and reproduce, intelligible less by maxims like Quantity or Relation than by the structural logic of class antagonism and the autonomy (and limits) of “il politico.” Filosofo italiano. Filosofo e uomo politico italiano –Considerato uno dei fondatori dell’operaismo teorico, le cui idee si trovano riassunte nel saggio “Operai e capitale,” insegna a Siena Filosofia morale e poi Filosofia politica. Militante del Partito comunista italiano, si  è dedicato anche alla pubblicistica: è stato tra i fondatori delle riviste Quaderni Rossi, Classe operaia, di cui è stato anche direttore, e Laboratorio politico. È stato eletto in Senato nelle fila del Partito democratico della sinistra e nelle fila del Partito democratico. -- è stato presidente della Fondazione Centro per la Riforma dello Stato - Archivio Pietro Ingrao. Tra le sue pubblicazioni si ricordano: Noi operaisti, Per la critica del presente, Dello spirito libero. Frammenti di vita e di pensiero, Il popolo perduto. Per una critica della sinistra -- con A. Bianchi --, La saggezza della lotta. Considerato uno dei principali fondatori ed esponenti del marxismo operaista teorico. Insegna a Siena, vive a Roma.  Fonda “Quaderni Rossi” e “Classe operaia”. Anima l'esperienza radicale dell'operaismo. Tale esperienza, che va considerata per molti versi la matrice della sinistra, si caratterizza per il fatto di mettere in discussione le organizzazioni del movimento operaio -- partito e sindacato -- e di collegarsi direttamente, senza intermediazioni, alla classe in sé e alle lotte di fabbrica. Influenzato da VOLPE (vedi), s’allontana di GRMASCI, o almeno dalla sua versione ufficiale promossa dal PCI togliattiano. Ri-apre la strada rivoluzionaria. Di fronte all'irruzione dell'operaio-massa sulla scena delle società, il suo operaismo propone un'analisi delle relazioni di classe. Mette l'accento sul fattore inter-soggettivo. La sua filosofia, debitrice anche all’’Operaio” di Jünger, trova una sistemazione con la pubblicazione di “Operai e capitale” (Einaudi, Torino), L’implicatura di Hobbes, libero spirito, democrazia.  Grice: Caro Tronti, permetta una battuta da buon letteralista: “spiriti liberi”? Ma insomma, qui si rischia l’ossimoro! In conversazione mi aspetterei piuttosto un “corpo libero” – almeno quello si può sedere a tavola e ordinare una pizza. Lo spirito, poveretto, come fa? E poi, modestamente, parlo anche il dialetto del Lizio!  Tronti: Ah, Grice, ma la questione è sottile! Sa, lo “spirito libero” non ha bisogno né di sedie né di posate: si insinua tra una battuta e l’altra, sorseggiando idee come fossero buon vino di Ferentillo. E poi, guardi che il corpo, senza un po’ di spirito, rischia solo di fare tappezzeria!  Grice: Vero, ma abbia pazienza, Tronti: quando sento parlare di spiriti liberi temo sempre che prendano il volo proprio sul più bello della discussione. Preferisco i filosofi con i piedi per terra… O almeno che il loro spirito lasci le tracce sul parquet!  Tronti: E invece, Grice, la bellezza è proprio qui: lo “spirito libero” si libra, ma poi torna, magari travestito da operaio, pronto a ribaltare la tavola. In fondo, la vera democrazia conversazionale sta nel far parlare anche gli spiriti – purché, s’intende, paghino il conto a fine serata! Tronti, Mario (1966). Operai e capitale, Torino: Einaudi.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Tulelli: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’equilibrio conversazionale: per una metafisica dell’etica. Note sugl’Elementi di diritto naturale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Paolo Emilio Tulelli (Zagarise, Catanzaro, Calabria): Institutionally, Paolo Emilio Tulelli is much closer to Grice than a poet or Roman fabulist, because both are recognisably figures of philosophical teaching; but they still belong to very different academic worlds. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the intimate tutorial culture of the college with the wider faculty structure of the university. Paolo Emilio Tulelli belongs to a different world: the nineteenth-century Italian public and quasi-private educational world of Naples, where philosophical instruction could be organized through schools, permissions, moral scrutiny by ecclesiastical and civil authorities, and eventually publication through university presses. He studied first in Calabria and Catanzaro, then in Naples, where he taught philosophy, moral philosophy, and aesthetics in his own school after obtaining official authorization. That is not the Oxford college-tutorial or university-faculty pattern. It is a more fluid Neapolitan world of local intellectual authority, moral reputation, and philosophical formation under supervision. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Tulelli belongs to the moral-philosophical, school-based, and partially university-connected world of nineteenth-century southern Italy. That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison rather well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Tulelli, by contrast, seems to work at a much more explicitly ethical and metaphysical level. On the evidence you yourself provide, his key concern is not how one interlocutor rationally recovers another’s extra meaning in ordinary exchange, but how ethical life requires a balanced relation among persons, and how that relation is to be grounded in a metaphysics of the good or of moral life. If one speaks of “equilibrio conversazionale” in his case, it can only be as a retrospective gloss: the conversation is not his explicit topic, but one possible expression of a larger moral-metaphysical order. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how rational interlocutors achieve equilibrium in interpretation. Tulelli seeks an equilibrium among persons as an ethical and metaphysical ideal. That is why your distinction between descriptive and prescriptive equilibrium is exactly right. For Grice, conversational equilibrium is the practical effect of mutually intelligible maxims and shared assumptions. For Tulelli, equilibrium would be a regulative norm: something conversation ought to embody if it is to be morally worthy. The bibliographical correction you include is also very important, and I would keep it central. Schema di una metafisica dell’etica is the secure and characteristic anchor, published in Naples in 1872 by the Stamperia della R. Università, and marked as Parte prima, with the implication that the project remained incomplete. By contrast, the 1833 Elementi di diritto naturale does not appear, from the evidence you cite, to be securely attributable in the same way and should therefore not be used as your main anchor. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s College and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Paolo Emilio Tulelli, by contrast, was a nineteenth-century southern Italian philosopher and teacher, active in Naples through private and authorized instruction in philosophy, moral philosophy, and aesthetics, and known above all for the incomplete ethical-metaphysical project Schema di una metafisica dell’etica. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Tulelli to the school-based and university-adjacent world of philosophical formation in Naples. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Tulelli represents an ethical-metaphysical rationality in which balance or equilibrium is not a by-product of conversational cooperation but a regulative ideal governing relations among persons. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises balance in understanding; Tulelli seeks balance in ethical life. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, using Schema di una metafisica dell’etica as the sole bibliographical anchor and dropping the uncertain 1833 title.la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’equilibrio conversazionale: per una metafisica dell’etica – Grice’s reason-governed conversational meaning makes “what is meant” an inferential product of cooperative rationality: speakers and hearers are mutually accountable to norms (relevance, sufficiency, sincerity, etc.), and implicature is what a competent interpreter can work out from what is said plus the assumption that the speaker is rationally pursuing shared conversational ends. Tulelli’s “equilibrio conversazionale,” as it is most plausibly grounded in his ethical-metaphysical project, shifts the center from Grice’s epistemic-inferential normativity to a regulative, ethical normativity: conversation is not primarily a device for extracting intended contents, but a practice that should maintain a morally charged balance among persons (reciprocal respect, restraint, and the accommodation of difference), so the “governance” is closer to an ethics of dialogical life than to a calculus of inference. Online bibliographic evidence also helps correct the timeline in your passage: Tulelli’s Schema di una metafisica dell’etica is attested as an extract published in Napoli, Stamperia della R. Università, 1872 (itself presented as Parte prima and often described as incomplete), whereas your cited Elementi di diritto naturale (1833) does not readily surface as a corroborated Tulelli imprint; in any case, the contrast stands: Grice explains how equilibrium in talk is achieved descriptively by shared maxims enabling stable implicature recovery, while Tulelli tends to treat equilibrium prescriptively as an ethical-metaphysical ideal that conversation ought to realize, with the “implicature” of silence, understatement, or tact functioning less as a merely derivable surplus content and more as a moral technique for sustaining that balance. Grice: T. published the work Schema di una metafisica dell'etica. The book ends with the notation "end of first part" (or "fine della prima parte" in the original Italian), indicating the author's intention to write a second part.  However, historical records and bibliographies suggest that the second part was never published. The volume is the only published portion of this work. T continued to write and publish on other subjects, but the continuation of the Schema appears to have remained unfinished or unpublished in his lifetime. The work is considered incomplete. Keywords: equilibrio. A lui sono ad oggi intitolate una via a Zagarise e una a S.Elia, e una sala della biblioteca di Catanzaro. Targa commemorativa in suo onore, inoltre, posto davanti alla casa comunale di Zagarise un busto che lo raffigura, realizzato da Calveri. Zagarise, busto creato da Calveri, installato davanti al comune di Zagarise. Figlio dal marchese Gaetano T., studia presso il convento del ritiro dei filippini a Zagarise e poi frequenta a Catanzaro il real liceo ginnasio e il corso presso il pontificio seminario teologico regionale S. Pio X. Vive a Napoli dove compì studi filosofici e apre una scuola dove insegna filosofia morale ed estetica. La richiesta di poter istituire una scuola e inviata alle autorità competenti, le quali, prima di concedere le relative autorizzazioni, chiesero al vescovo di Catanzaro dettagliate notizie in merito alla condotta morale e politica del richiedente, la risposta inviata loro fu. Elemento di condotta soda, casta e onesta. Tra gl’allievi della sua scuola molti sono appartenenti a famiglie di alto rango sociale, e tra questi, è possibile annoverare i figli del re Borbone che, in segno di stima, gli fanno dono di un orologio da camera di manifattura francese opera dei fratelli Japis. filosofia italiana, l’equilibrio, metafisica dell’etica.  Grice: Professor Tulelli, permetta che le dica quanto ammiro la profondità del suo pensiero sull’“equilibrio conversazionale”. Un concetto così complesso e affascinante, che sembra intrecciare la metafisica con l’etica, non può che destare curiosità in chiunque si occupi di filosofia del dialogo. Mi piacerebbe capire come lei vede la conversazione come spazio di equilibrio. Tulelli: Caro Grice, la ringrazio per le sue parole. L’“equilibrio conversazionale”, come lo intendo, nasce dalla necessità di riconoscere e valorizzare il reciproco rispetto tra interlocutori. È un movimento sottile: non si tratta semplicemente di mediare, ma di creare uno spazio dove ogni voce trova la sua armonia e la conversazione, di conseguenza, si eleva ad esperienza etica condivisa. Grice: Trovo molto suggestiva questa idea di elevazione etica. Ma mi chiedo: l’equilibrio è sempre raggiungibile, oppure la conversazione rischia di restare inevitabilmente sbilanciata, magari per via delle differenze di background o degli interessi in gioco? Tulelli: È proprio questa tensione tra equilibrio e sbilanciamento che rende la conversazione viva. L’aspirazione all’equilibrio, pur sapendo che è spesso incompleto o precario, stimola la ricerca di una verità condivisa. Come ho scritto nel mio “Schema di una metafisica dell’etica”, la conversazione è una via che conduce verso l’ideale, anche se a volte resta sospesa, come la mia opera, al termine di una “prima parte” che attende ancora il suo compimento. Tulelli, Paolo Emilio (1833). Elementi di diritto naturale, Napoli: Stamperia Reale.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Turco: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’agnella, commedia nuova. Note sull’Agnella. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Carlo Turco (Asola, Mantova, Lombardia): Institutionally, Carlo Turco and H. P. Grice belong to very different worlds. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the two characteristic Oxford functions: college tutor and university lecturer. Carlo Turco, by contrast, belongs to the civic-humanist and theatrical world of sixteenth-century Asola and Venice. He was a nobleman, local office-holder, advocate, orator, and man of letters in the orbit of Venetian civic culture and print, not a don, not a fellow, and not a university lecturer in the Oxford or modern Italian chair sense. His institutional life is the world of occasion, performance, local politics, patronage, and print. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Turco belongs to the civic-humanist, performative, and print-theatrical world of the late Renaissance. That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison very well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Turco, by contrast, works in a medium where indirection is public, staged, and genre-governed from the start. In commedia nuova, the audience is expected to read implication not because the speaker is obeying or exploiting a conversational maxim in an ordinary dyadic exchange, but because theatrical convention, topicality, decorum, and comic prudence require meanings to travel by disguise, stereotype, innuendo, and role. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how conversation can mean more than it literally says. Turco shows how theatre can mean more than it literally stages. That is why your treatment of Agnella works so well. The title itself already performs an implicatural trick: Agnella sounds innocent, pastoral, harmless, and then the dramatis personae reveal Agnella as a ruffiana. The audience is meant to feel the gap between title and function, purity and management, lamb and broker. That is not Gricean implicature in the strict sense, but it is a perfect example of theatrical meaning routed through public expectation and controlled deniability. Your own draft also rightly isolates the important movement in the Argomento: women as audience and shield, wolves as critics or moralists, the lamb as title and protective joke, and then the sudden “Eccovi appunto il Napoletano” as a stagey acknowledgement of comic type. That is the economy of Renaissance comic pragmatics in miniature. There is one bibliographical point in your note that is especially useful. You correctly warn that the citation to a 1890 Studi di filosofia del diritto belongs to another Carlo Turco and should not be mixed with the Renaissance dramatist. That clarification is exactly right and should be kept. There are only two minor cautions. First, “Mantova, Lombardia” should be treated carefully, because Asola’s political setting in Turco’s time is Venetian rather than simply modern Lombard in the institutional sense. Second, the final imprint “Venezia: Manuzio” should be checked against the exact early printed edition if you are preparing a final dossier entry, since the Venetian print trail and the relation to Aldine or related names can easily become muddled. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s College and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Carlo Turco, by contrast, was a late Renaissance civic-humanist dramatist and local public man, active in the performative and print culture of Asola and Venice rather than in any tutorial-collegiate or professorial institution. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Turco to the theatrical and civic-humanist world. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Turco exemplifies a public comic pragmatics in which title, role, stereotype, and occasion guide the audience toward meanings that are hinted, staged, and socially managed rather than directly asserted. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers imply; Turco stages how comedy implies. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, using Agnella alone as the anchor and dropping every possible ambiguity with the modern Carlo Turco.la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’agnella, commedia nuova –commedia nuova, agnella. Grice’s reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers recover more than is said by assuming cooperative rationality (maxims) and then inferring implicatures from what a speaker chooses to say, how they say it, and what they conspicuously leave unsaid. With Carlo Turco (Asola, Venetian-Lombard civic-humanist milieu) the nearest meaningful contrast is that his “Agnella” and the broader commedia nuova setting treat meaning as a public, rhetorical-civic art: wit, stagecraft, topical allusion, and socially legible understatement are not primarily the by-products of a cooperative inferential calculus but resources for negotiating reputation, patronage, and communal identity in performance, where audiences are trained to read between the lines because the genre depends on it. So if Grice models implicature as a principled, reconstructible inference under norms of rational conversation, a Turco-style “implicature” is better understood as theatrical/rhetorical pragmatics: what is meant is deliberately routed through comic indirection, decorum, and shared cultural scripts (who may be mocked, how, and with what safe deniability), with the “reason” governing uptake being less the Gricean logic of maxims than the Renaissance discipline of prudence and occasion (what can be hinted rather than asserted in a public forum). One important caveat from what can be checked: the biographical-literary Turco you describe (Agnella staged at Asola; links to Manuzio; Venetian offices; Cinquecento imprint trail) does not match the citation you append (Turco, Carlo (1890). Studi di filosofia del diritto, Torino: Fratelli Bocca), which looks like a different, modern author; so any clean Grice/Turco comparison should either (a) be explicitly framed as “Turco the Renaissance dramatist/orator” or (b) split into two entries if there are two Carlo Turco figures. Nasce da una anticha e nobile famiglie, allora fiorente cittadina della Repubblica di Venezia, dove ricopre importanti cariche politiche in qualità di deputato, oratore e avvocato della comunità.  La sua prima opera, un dialogo, “Agnella”, venne rappresentato ad Asola durante i festeggiamenti per la visita dei duchi di Nemours e Beaulieu e altri illustri francesi al loro seguito. “Agnella” venne in pubblicata in seguito prima a Treviso, poi a Venezia. Contemporaneo ed amico di MANUZIO che in una lettera encomia la sua canzone in lode di Carlo V scritta in occasione della morte di quest'ultimo. Scrive: Letta la vostra canzone scritta in morte del Gran Carlo V, veramente Signor Carlo onorato, non troppo benigna stella, essendo voi dotato di si pellegrino ingegno e di tante altre lodevoli qualità, vi condanna a scrivere dove tra molte tenebre non può risplendere la vostra virtù, con la quale potevate illustrare voi stesso ed il secolo nostro eccitando in altri il desiderio di assomigliarvi. Laddove hora, avendo voi il campo ristretto per esercitare le vostre più nobili parti, non veggo come possano apparire effetti degni di voi ed alla vostra nobile industria corrispondenti. Questa lettera è in seguito stampata in Venezia da Gavardo che, sempre a Venezia, pubblica una tragedia in versi, intitolata “Calestri”. Altre opere sono stampate anche in Il Sepolcro de la illustre signora Beatrice di Dorimbergo, Brescia Fabbio, Mangini, Storie Asolane, Lettera di MANUZIO a Turchi, Lett. Volg. Venezia. commedia nuova, agnella. G: 1935. You look overdressed. S: For once, I’m dressed for the occasion. You’re dressed as if you’re going to cross-examine the usher. G: If the usher claims the play is nuova, he deserves it. S: We’re going to the theatre. G: Allegedly. S: What for? G: To see what you have insisted on calling a “commedia nuova.” S: Why not read the thing here? G: Because a comedy read aloud in a corridor becomes a punishment. S: What thing? G: The thing you’re holding like contraband: Agnella. S: The commedia recitata. G: Recitata in Asola, yes, long ago, when French dukes needed Italian jokes. S: By who? G: Turco. S: Carlo Turco. The Asolano. G: That is the one. S: And the name is Agnella. G: Yes. Which is either pastoral innocence or a very practical label for bait. S: I rather like it. Agnella. Soft. Harmless. G: Until you read the dramatis personae. S: I have. It’s full of sharp objects. G: Read the Argomento again, without the bruises. S: Here. You wanted the Italian clean. I cleaned it as best I could without turning it into Tuscan. G: Proceed. S: “Hora havete l’Argomento della Comedia, che farà di piacere; cosa nuova, e di nuovo Auttore vostro Asolano, e di tutti suoi seratissimo, ma sopra modo di voi, gratiosissime Donne: segnale, pigliando protettione di voler diffender la Comedia da’ morsi de’ lupi rapaci (s’alcun ve ne fosse). L’Auttore si contenta che si chiami l’Agnella, dalla purità di una buona femina, che fatto quel nome conserva la sua parte del maschio. Eccovi appunto il Napoletano.” G: That last line is the best stage direction I’ve seen all week. “Here you have the Neapolitan.” S: So the frame is: ladies, wolves, lamb. G: And then immediately a Neapolitan scholar. S: That’s the part I like. It’s like a pastoral that forgets its sheep and remembers its stereotypes. G: The sheep is not the sheep. The sheep is a title. S: I assumed Agnella was the innocent girl. G: Look at the list. S: “AGNELLA, Roffiana.” G: Exactly. Your innocent lamb is a procuress. S: That is disappointing. G: No, that is Renaissance comedy. S: So why call the procuress Agnella? G: Because the author is making a joke about purity while describing its management. S: You mean: the lamb is the handler of wolves. G: Precisely. “Defender la Comedia da’ morsi de’ lupi rapaci.” Wolves are critics, censors, moralists, perhaps rivals. And the author says: I will protect my lamb from wolves. S: But the lamb is a ruffiana. A professional wolf-trainer. G: You see the economy of the joke. S: It’s not new; it’s just cheeky. G: That is why it is called nuova. Not because the plot is new, but because the author flatters the audience. S: The audience being “gratiosissime Donne.” G: Yes. And note the tactic: the women are both patrons and alibi. If the wolves bite, the author can say he wrote for ladies. S: So I can play Agnella, then. G: You can, but you will have to keep your pitch high. S: High like a lamb? G: High like someone pretending to be a lamb. S: Fine. I’ll play Agnella. You play all the rest. G: That is exactly the kind of casting a man suggests when he does not intend to rehearse. S: But what is the thing about? G: The argomento gives you one hinge: Pietro loves a cortigiana, Lamia; Lamia loves him back; but she believes Limpido is in love with her. S: Limpido is not in the list. G: Which tells you he is either offstage, or a confusion, or a printer’s ghost. S: Or the author forgot his own lover. G: Also possible. But the triangle is standard: mistaken belief about who loves whom. S: Then the Neapolitan arrives. G: Giannuccio, “Scolar Napoletano.” With his boy, Chiappino. S: And Lamia is the courtesan. G: Yes. Then Eugenio is the young lover. Lélio his friend. Bermondo a Spaniard. Stilpone, which sounds like a club you hit people with. S: Emilio, a Vecchio, and his wife Flaminia. G: Plus servants: Clitia and Sergio. S: And Flavia, the stepdaughter: “figliuola adottiva d’Emilio, giovane innamorata.” G: So we have at least two “young in love” people: Eugenio and Marcio, plus Flavia. S: Marcio is “giovine innamorato.” With his boy, Amichino. G: And Agapito is Marcio’s father, old. S: So fathers, lovers, a courtesan, a procuress, a parasite. G: Bolza, “parassito.” Every comedy needs a parasite the way every Oxford dinner needs someone who has run out of income. S: You’re saying the structure is stock. G: Entirely. That is why your complaint about “nuova” is correct. S: Then why go to the theatre at all? G: Because in 1935 the alternative is to have you recite it in my rooms, and I would rather face the stalls. S: We could compare it to Gilbert and Sullivan. G: Patience beats it any day. S: Or The Quaker Girl. G: A musical comedy has the decency to admit it is trying to please you. S: This one admits it too: “che farà di piacere.” G: That line is honest. It promises pleasure and nothing else. S: Then you should approve. G: I approve of honesty. I do not approve of pretending that pleasure is novelty. S: You said earlier the sheep is a title, not a sheep. G: Yes. And the subtitle logic you like so much is here as well. The author narrows and narrows: not just a comedy, but a comedy under protection; not just protection, but protection from wolves; not just wolves, but wolves “if any there be,” which is the traditional clause of polite paranoia. S: Like saying “I mean no offence,” just before offending. G: Exactly. A prophylactic. S: And the women are invoked as protectors. G: As audience, as judge, as shield. S: “Sopra modo di voi, gratiosissime Donne.” He prefers them above all. G: That is the line you write when you suspect the wolves are men. S: So Agnella is named from purity, but she is a ruffiana. G: Which is the real novelty: purity as a brand-name rather than a moral property. S: That’s rather modern. G: Yes. It is the sort of modernity you never want to admit is old. S: So how do we stage it as we walk? G: You will ask me who you are. S: I am Agnella. G: You are a ruffiana called Agnella “dalla purità di una buona femina.” S: So I must be pure and impure at once. G: You must be impure in function and pure in marketing. S: And you are everyone else. G: I refuse. I will be the Napoletano. S: Giannuccio? G: Yes. Scholars at least have the excuse of being ridiculous. S: Then who will be Lamia? G: You, if you insist on doing two roles and ruining the evening. S: I’ll stick to Agnella. I shall be the lamb with teeth. G: Good. Now tell me the line again that amused you: “conserva la sua parte del maschio.” S: That a good woman, having taken that name, keeps her male part. G: Meaning: she keeps authority, agency, perhaps audacity. S: Or just that she runs the men. G: Exactly. The lamb’s “male part” is control. S: That’s why the wolves won’t bite her. G: They bite, but she bites back. S: The author is asking the ladies to protect the play from wolves. Yet he gives them a wolf-tamer named lamb. G: There you have your whole argument. S: So the thing is not really about sheep. G: It is about who gets to call whom a sheep. S: And the Naples scholar is there to give dialect and jokes. G: And to deliver the opening “Eccovi appunto il Napoletano,” like a garnish. S: You keep saying it as if it’s a punchline. G: It is. It is the author admitting he is about to entertain. S: Then perhaps it is new after all. G: It is new only in the way every old trick is new to someone who has never been mugged by it. S: You’re in a mood, G. G: I have read too many “nuove” comedies. S: Then why did you agree to come? G: Because you said you’d play Agnella. S: That was flattery. G: I am vulnerable to flattery only when it promises silence later. S: Shall I practise my lamb voice? G: If you must. But keep it high. S: High, sir? G: High enough that the audience hears “purity,” and low enough that the plot hears “transaction.” S: That’s very Oxford. G: It is also very Venice, 1585, only they had better excuses. S: And after the play? G: After the play we shall go to a real theatre, as you suggested. S: Patience? G: If we can. S: Or The Quaker Girl. G: Anything where the music does some of the work, and the author does not call a parasite “new.” S: You will still complain. G: Naturally. But I will complain in tune.Grice: Caro Turco, devo confessarle un piccolo fallimento accademico. A Vadum Boum – la mia università, terra di barbari e di puritani – una volta tentai di mettere in scena una mia commedia alla Sheldonian. Ma si sa, lì il senso dell’umorismo è raro come un’agnella tra i lupi! Mi trattarono come un buffone, una vera burla: la mia opera fu repressa con la stessa severità con cui si vietano le risate nei giorni di pioggia.  Turco: Ah, Grice, mi fa sorridere! In Lombardia, a Asola, quando volevamo ridere ci inventavamo una “commedia nuova” – persino un’agnella avrebbe applaudito! Ma non si preoccupi: le repressioni puritane sono come la nebbia mantovana, basta aspettare un po’ e la scena si rischiara. Avrei voluto vedere la sua pièce: magari avremmo convinto anche i duchi di Nemours a battere le mani!  Grice: Immagino la Sheldonian invasa da agnelle e filosofi lombardi, tutti intenti a recitare versi e a sventolare fazzoletti. Ma sa, Turco, se avessi avuto il suo spirito lombardo e la sua nobile industria, forse sarei riuscito a far sorridere anche i professori più austeri. Però, qui da noi, il massimo dell’ironia è una tazza di tè senza zucchero!  Turco: Grice, allora le invio una “commedia nuova” per corrispondenza – con tanto di agnella protagonista! Così potrà mettere in scena le risate in barba ai barbari, e se qualcuno protesta, basta rispondere: “Non è burlesque, è filosofia... ma vestita da pecora!” D’altronde, come diceva Manuzio: tra molte tenebre, la virtù trova sempre il modo di risplendere. E una risata illumina più di un trattato! Turco, Carlo (1585). Agnella: comedia nuoua recitata in Asola nella venuta de gli ill.mi sig.ri il duca di Nemurs, il duca di Boglion, & altri illustriss. sig.ri. Venezia: Manuzio.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Turoldo: le XII fatiche della ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Note sul poema nell’Uomo, giornale degl’uomini d’Italia. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice David Maria Giuseppe Turoldo (Coderno, Sedegliano, Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia): Institutionally, David Maria Turoldo is very different from Grice, though both are unmistakably figures of language and formation. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the two classic Oxford functions: college tutor and university lecturer. David Maria Turoldo belongs to a wholly different institutional ecology: the Servite religious order, wartime resistance, liturgical and prophetic speech, preaching, cultural activism, and only secondarily the university. He was born at Coderno di Sedegliano, entered the Servi di Maria, was ordained in 1940, worked in Milan, participated in the Resistance through the clandestine journal L’Uomo, and took a philosophy degree in 1946 with the thesis La fatica della ragione under Gustavo Bontadini. His first poetry collection, Io non ho mani, belongs to the immediate postwar phase and is treated by Treccani as the decisive first collection. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [dizionario...riulani.it] So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Turoldo belongs to the ecclesial, liturgical, resistant, and prophetic world, only touching the university through his degree and brief academic possibilities. [it.wikipedia.org], [pensierofi...aliano.org], [fraternita.arche.it] That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison rather well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Turoldo, by contrast, works at the macro-level of witness, vocation, liturgy, and resistance. His “word” is not primarily a contribution to a local exchange whose implicatures are to be calculated. It is a parola-atto, a charged ethical and prophetic utterance addressed to a community under pressure. The biographical sources emphasise exactly that his early poems were published in L’Uomo, the clandestine journal of resistance, and that the later Io non ho mani already treats poetic language as a privileged medium of communication and dialogue with other human beings. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [pensierofi...aliano.org] So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how rational interlocutors recover what a speaker means in a local exchange. Turoldo exemplifies how a word can exceed ordinary exchange and become liturgical, prophetic, and communal action. [it.wikipedia.org], [pensierofi...aliano.org] That is why your comparison through “parola-atto” is genuinely apt. For Grice, the “extra” meaning beyond the sentence is inferentially tractable and answerable to conversational reason. For Turoldo, the “extra” is ethical and historical: silence, allusion, biblical cadence, and prophetic compression do not merely invite a hearer to calculate an implicature; they summon a listener to conversion, solidarity, or resistance. In that sense, both are anti-literalist about meaning, but they are anti-literalist in radically different registers. [it.wikipedia.org], [pensierofi...aliano.org], [treccani.it] There are two factual adjustments worth making. First, your bibliographic line “Turoldo, David Maria Giuseppe (1944). Poema. L’uomo: giornale degl’uomini d’Italia. Milano” should be treated cautiously. The secure facts are that L’Uomo was the clandestine periodical in which his earliest poems appeared during the Resistance, and that Io non ho mani in 1948 is the first collection securely anchored by Treccani. The exact title “Poema” in 1944 is not the strongest bibliographic anchor. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [dizionario...riulani.it] Second, the thesis title should be cited carefully as La fatica della ragione – Contributo per un’ontologia dell’uomo, which is consistently given in the biographical sources. [it.wikipedia.org], [biografieonline.it], [pensierofi...aliano.org] So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s College and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. David Maria Turoldo, by contrast, was a Servite priest, resistance writer, theologian, and poet, active in the clandestine and liturgical-public sphere of wartime and postwar Italy rather than in the tutorial-collegiate world of Oxford. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Turoldo to the ecclesial and prophetic world. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Turoldo exemplifies a morally and historically charged conception of speech in which the surplus beyond literal content is grounded in witness, liturgy, biblical cadence, and communal urgency rather than in a calculable theory of conversational inference. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it], [pensierofi...aliano.org] And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers imply; Turoldo exemplifies how a word becomes witness. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, using Io non ho mani and La fatica della ragione as the two main anchors.le XII fatiche della ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes “what is meant” a disciplined, inferential achievement: interlocutors presume cooperative rationality (maxims, relevance, sufficiency, etc.), and implicature is what a hearer can responsibly work out from what is said plus the assumption that the speaker is playing the conversational game in good faith. With David Maria Turoldo the centre of gravity shifts from inference to vocation: his earliest public “word” is explicitly cast as parola-atto, a liturgical and prophetic medium of communication and dialogue with other human beings, and this is anchored biographically in wartime Milan, where he helped produce the clandestine resistance periodical L’Uomo and where his first book of poetry is Io non ho mani (Milano: Bompiani; Treccani treats this as the first collection), while his philosophical formation includes a laurea thesis titled La fatica della ragione (Bontadini). So, whereas Grice models conversational reason as a set of publicly tractable norms that generate implicatures (often by understatement, silence, or apparent irrelevance), Turoldo treats “ragione” less as calculability and more as a moral-spiritual labour enacted in and through address—his “dialogue” aims to change lives, sustain resistance, and found solidarity; implicature, in that setting, is not primarily a technical by-product of maxim-observance but the charged surplus of prophetic speech, where what is unsaid (silence, allusion, biblical cadence) is ethically and communally loaded. The overlap is that both are anti-literalists about meaning (both rely on what exceeds the sentence), but the contrast is decisive: Grice’s excess is justified by rational reconstruction within conversational cooperation; Turoldo’s excess is justified by witness, liturgy, and historical urgency, where the “reason” that governs speech is as much imperative and communal as it is inferential. la ragione. The phrase ‘Grice italo’ is meant as provocative. An Old-World philosopher such as Turoldo would never have imagined to be compared to a tutor at a varsity in one of the British Isles, but there you are! It is meant as a geo-political reminder, too. Many Italian philosophers have been educated in a tradition that would make little sense of Turoldo as a ‘Grice italo,’ but there you are. My note is meant as a tribute to both philosophers. Grice has been deemed an extremely original philosopher, and by Oxford canons he certainly was. He was the primus inter pares at the Play Group, the epitome of ordinary-language philosophy throughout most of the twentieth century. His heritage remains. Turoldo’s place in the history of philosophy is other. But there are connections, and here they are -- Poeta, nato a Coderno del Friuli. Sacerdote nella congregazione dei Servi di Maria, pubblicò le sue prime poesie durante la Resistenza nella rivista clandestina L'uomo. Sin dalla sua prima raccolta, Io non ho mani, non ancora scevra di forti reminiscenze letterarie, si fa strada la sua più segreta e autentica vena di poeta che intende usare la parola lirica come momento privilegiato di comunicazione e di dialogo con gli altri uomini: parola nel senso più alto, liturgico del termine. Ammonizione biblica e tragedie storiche dell'uomo moderno, profezia e realtà, tendono a riconciliarsi nell'unità della lingua poetica. Questi caratteri della poesia turoldiana si affermano e si estendono, superando iniziali motivi legati a un'individuale condizione dello spirito, a partire soprattutto d’oro (con “Ritratto d’autore” Servitium, e poi la morte dell'ultimo teologo Torino, Gribaudi. “Gli ultimi” Regia: Pandolfi; soggetto: T.; sceneggiatura: Pandolfi e T.. gl’ultimi, le XII fatiche della ragione.  S: Room 39. G: Yes. S: In the Admiralty. G: Also yes. S: And you are reading a poem. G: I am reading lines. S: With your lips moving. G: That is what lines are for, if you are not merely counting them. S: Where is it from? G: Milan. S: Milan is not usually a bibliographic address. G: It was not meant to be. S: Then where? G: From L’uomo. S: L’uomo. That is the title of the poem? G: No. S: The journal, then? G: Yes. S: L’uomo. That sounds magnificently universal. G: It does. S: But it goes on, doesn’t it. I see you frowning at the next words like a man being asked to pay for rhetoric. G: It has a subtitle. S: Of course it does. G: Giornale degli uomini. S: Degli. G: Degli. S: Not “di uomini,” but “degli uomini.” Already a narrowing, you might say. G: One could say. One could even say it is a partitive with social ambitions. S: Is that all? G: No. S: It gets worse. G: It gets safer. S: Goes on: d’Italia. G: Exactly. S: So the universal “man” becomes “the men,” and then “the men of Italy.” G: Two successive restrictors. S: Like watching a balloon deflate politely. G: Like watching a quantifier acquire a passport. S: So what is it, really. A clandestine paper. G: Yes. S: In 1944. G: The surviving run is dated 1944–45, yes. S: Then why is it on your desk? G: Because you have enemies who like to call their work “universal,” and allies who have to call their work “Italian” to avoid being shot. S: That’s an awfully tidy distinction. G: Whitehall is, above all, tidy in its distinctions. Untidy in its corridors. S: And Turoldo. G: The name is on the sheet that came with it. S: Turoldo is Lombard? G: No. Friulian by birth. S: Yet in Milan. G: Yes. S: So he is a northerner printing in Lombardy for “the men of Italy,” which sounds like nationalism by necessity, not by enthusiasm. G: That is one good reading. S: And he wrote the poem? G: If you want to call it a poem. S: Loaded poetry, then. G: If by “loaded” you mean it carries more than it says. S: I mean it carries a small explosive. G: In that sense too. A clandestine paper is always a poem with a fuse. S: Read me a bit. G: I will not read you the whole thing. I refuse to make Room 39 into a salon. S: Then just enough to prove it is not a grocery list. G: It is not a grocery list. S: That is not a quotation. G: No, but it is the best possible summary of poetry in wartime. S: Fine. What is the poem about, then, if we have to imagine it. G: Suppose it is about Milan. S: That is not a daring supposition. G: Suppose it is about the city being strong while trying not to look strong. S: That’s closer. G: Suppose it is about men who have no uniforms, only habits. S: Resistance as habit. G: Resistance as cooperation under threat. S: Your favourite topic. G: It is not a favourite topic. It is simply the only one that remains when the others become luxuries. S: And you like the title because it is illogical. G: It is not illogical. It is overdetermined. S: It begins with “the human,” then restricts to “the men,” then restricts to “of Italy.” G: Exactly. The form is: start with a grand universal term to claim moral scope, then insert a definite article to create a community, then insert a genitive to anchor the community politically. S: Like “Man, namely the men, namely the Italian men.” G: Yes, except they likely meant “uomini” as humans in general. But the grammatical narrowing still does its work. S: Does it contradict itself? G: It corrects itself. S: That is a charitable word for retreat. G: In wartime, retreat is sometimes the only way to advance. S: You are going to tell me this is like one of your maxims. G: No. It is like one of yours: do not attract attention you cannot survive. S: Where exactly in Lombardy were they printing? G: The imprint is suppressed. The catalog says “no place given.” S: Convenient. G: Necessary. S: So “L’uomo” is a title without an address, and “degli uomini d’Italia” is a subtitle with a border. G: Yes. A border with no street number. S: And Turoldo. Why does that name matter to us? G: Because if we are ever tempted to imagine “Italy” is merely a theatre of operations, this reminds us there are people inside it producing words under penalties. S: Words are cheap. G: Not when the paper is clandestine. S: You have read clandestine papers before, I take it. G: In this building, you are never far from paper that wished it were invisible. S: And why the poem? G: Because poetry is a convenient delivery system for courage. It looks ornamental until you notice what it smuggles. S: That sounds like your “implicature” again. G: It is an old trick. Poets did it before philosophers gave it a Latin name. S: Then explain to me, in your manner, what the subtitle implies. G: It implies: we speak for man, but we must limit the “we” if we want the speaking to continue. S: So the universal claim is a flag, and the narrow claim is camouflage. G: Precisely. S: And the two narrowers. Degli, then d’Italia. G: Degli is a social delimiter. D’Italia is a political delimiter. S: You said earlier it is like a quantifier. G: If you insist on symbols: L’uomo looks like it wants to quantify over all humans. The subtitle restricts the domain twice: first to a determinate set, “the men,” then to a national subset, “of Italy.” S: So: instead of ∀x Human(x), it becomes ∀x (Italian(x) and Human(x)). G: Something like that, yes, though I would not accuse an Italian clandestine editor of doing predicate logic in the margin. S: Why not? Italians do margins better than we do. G: They do. But they also have to run from them. S: And what is “strong Milano” to you, sitting here? G: It is the uncomfortable proof that courage can be organized without a War Office. S: Which is why it concerns the Admiralty. G: It concerns anyone trying to model cooperation. The Resistance is a case study in coordination when communication is risky. S: So you will treat the poem as intelligence. G: No. S: Why not? G: Because intelligence, in this building, means a file and a source and a rating. Poetry refuses to be rated. S: Yet you read it anyway. G: Yes. Because even in Room 39 you sometimes need to remember that not all messages are ours to classify. S: So what will you do with it? G: I will do what the subtitle teaches. I will not universalize. S: Meaning? G: Meaning: I will not say “this is Man.” I will say: this is a particular Italian man writing under occupation, and that specificity is the point. S: And your punchline? G: The punchline is that the paper calls itself L’uomo, but the safest thing it ever did was add d’Italia.Grice: Caro Turoldo, quando ho letto delle “XII fatiche della ragione conversazionale”, ho immaginato una ragione vestita da Ercole, pronta a sollevare pesi filosofici e affrontare mostri logici. Mi dica, quali sono queste dodici imprese che la ragione deve compiere? Si parte dal leone di Nemea o dall'idra di Lerna… o forse dalle insidie della metafora?  Turoldo: Ah, Grice, lei ha colto lo spirito! In Friuli la ragione non si limita a combattere mostri classici, ma si cimenta in dodici veri “dialoghi eroici”: 1) Capire il prossimo, 2) Domare il silenzio, 3) Affrontare la contraddizione, 4) Trovare il senso nascosto, 5) Sconfiggere il pregiudizio, 6) Superare l’ambiguità, 7) Resistere alla tentazione del monologo, 8) Abbracciare la diversità, 9) Riconoscere il dubbio, 10) Coltivare la pazienza, 11) Trasformare il conflitto in crescita, 12) Cercare la verità, ma senza mai dimenticare una battuta pronta!  Grice: Turoldo, che elenco straordinario! Se Ercole avesse avuto la sua lista, forse avrebbe preferito lottare contro le bestie piuttosto che contro le sfide della conversazione. Complimenti: la sua ragione è davvero muscolosa, ma anche dotata di fine ironia – e non c’è nulla di più eroico che cercare la verità sorridendo!  Turoldo: Grice, lei mi rende fiero come un friulano davanti al grappolo d’uva! In fondo, le fatiche della ragione sono come quelle di Ercole: si affrontano una ad una, spesso senza sapere se si arriverà alla fine. Ma, come diceva mio nonno, “l’importante è non perdere il sorriso, nemmeno davanti al leone… o al filosofo inglese!” Turoldo, David Maria Giuseppe (1944). Poema. L’uomo: giornale degl’uomini d’Italia.  Milano

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Ubaldi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della grande sintesi. Note sul Messagio. Dec. 24, Torre da Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Pietro de Alleori Ubaldi (Foligno, Perugia, Umbria): Institutionally, Pietro Ubaldi is closer to the modern public intellectual or visionary-system builder than to Grice, even though both are, in very different ways, men of theory. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the intimate tutorial culture of the college with the wider faculty structure of the university. Pietro Ubaldi belongs to a different world: not the tutorial-collegiate or chair-based academic world, but the world of independent spiritual-philosophical system-building, cosmological synthesis, quasi-prophetic writing, and broad public readership. He is not an Oxford don, nor is he simply an Italian ordinario. He is best understood as an architect of a totalizing speculative system, operating at the border of philosophy, religion, cosmology, and moral anthropology. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Ubaldi belongs to the independent visionary and synthetic world of system, message, and cosmic explanation. That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison extremely well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Ubaldi, by contrast, works at the macro-level of total explanation. His concern is not how a speaker in an ordinary exchange leaves something unsaid for a hearer to recover, but how the whole structure of reality — matter, energy, spirit, pain, evil, evolution, justice — can be read as one great law-governed process. In that sense, where Grice is analytic and procedural, Ubaldi is synthetic and architectonic. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how communicative reason governs local exchanges. Ubaldi explains how theoretical reason, or what he takes to be such, governs the total structure of life and cosmos. That is why your contrast between analysis and synthesis is the right one. For Grice, the great danger is that we read too much into language without showing how the reading is licensed. For Ubaldi, the great danger is fragmentation: that science, ethics, suffering, and spiritual aspiration remain disconnected unless one can gather them under a single comprehensive synthesis. The long “message” vignette you provided makes the contrast vivid. The Gricean response there is exactly the right one: to ask what counts as a message, who the sender is, who the addressee is, and under what conditions the uptake is testable. Ubaldi’s text, by contrast, tries to bypass those ordinary criteria by speaking in a register of direct authority, universal appeal, and moral sorting. That is not conversational implicature in the Gricean sense; it is rather a kind of world-historical rhetoric, with theological and political consequences. There are two important cautions. First, “Pietro de Alleori” looks unstable as a form. If the dossier is to be made scholarly, the author’s name should be normalized to the standard “Pietro Ubaldi,” unless you have a strong archival reason to preserve the expanded form. Second, the final bibliographic line “Messagio. Dec. 24. Torre da Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto, Perugia” should be handled as a manuscript or diary-style textual witness, not as a modern publication line. It is useful as an internal anchor, but it should not be treated as a standard printed bibliography entry without further verification. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Pietro Ubaldi, by contrast, was an Italian independent system-builder and visionary philosopher, operating outside the tutorial-collegiate and ordinary chair structure, and committed to a comprehensive cosmological synthesis integrating matter, energy, spirit, pain, evil, and human evolution. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Ubaldi to the extra-academic world of grand speculative synthesis. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Ubaldi exemplifies a macro-synthetic rationality in which discursive particulars are subordinated to a total explanatory system that claims to integrate science, morality, and spiritual destiny. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises reason in conversation; Ubaldi proclaims reason in totality. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, with the “message” framed more cautiously as a textual witness and the comparison sharpened around analysis versus synthesis.la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della grande sintesi – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is micro-normative and inferential: what is meant beyond what is said is recoverable by reasoning from shared assumptions of cooperation (maxims, relevance, sufficiency, etc.), so “implicature” is a disciplined product of communicative rationality inside the talk-exchange; Ubaldi (the Foligno figure behind La grande sintesi) is macro-synthetic and architectonic, aiming at an overarching unification of matter, energy, and spirit and at reconciling scientific hypotheses with spiritual/ethical teleology, so “reason” is not primarily a set of conversational constraints but a world-explanatory principle that seeks a total picture where fragments (science, pain, evil, evolution) are integrated into a single lawlike developmental narrative. The nearest structural analogy is that both treat reason as governance beyond surface form—Grice beyond literal sentence meaning, Ubaldi beyond specialized disciplinary partitions—but they diverge in direction: Grice moves from ordinary linguistic practice upward to a modest theory of how agents can be held rationally accountable for what they communicate (including what they leave unsaid), whereas Ubaldi moves from a grand metaphysical-cosmological hypothesis downward, treating discursive particulars as local expressions of a comprehensive “synthesis” that is, in principle, prior to and explanatory of them. Online biographical notes commonly underscore this Ubaldi ambition (24 volumes; La grande sintesi written 1932–35 and first published as a book in 1937; nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1960s; remarks attributed to Einstein and Fermi), which fits your framing: if Grice’s “analysis” is a method for keeping conversational reason honest at the level of implicature, Ubaldi’s “synthesis” is a method for keeping theoretical reason expansive at the level of totality—two very different senses of rational governance, one procedural and interactional, the other systemic and cosmological. -- la grande sintessi. Grice on the synthetic a priori. Grice: “It’s funny that ‘Philosophical Analysis’ was in the lips of every pupil at Oxford engaged in philosophy back in the day – yet, it was only after the war that I found the reason why: Kant’s synthetic a priori are just BEYOND analysis!” The phrase ‘Grice italo’ is meant as provocative. An Old-World philosopher such as Ubaldi would never have imagined to be compared to a tutor at a varsity in one of the British Isles, but there you are! It is meant as a geo-political reminder, too. Many Italian philosophers have been educated in a tradition that would make little sense of Ubaldi as a ‘Grice italo,’ but there you are. My note is meant as a tribute to both philosophers. Grice has been deemed an extremely original philosopher, and by Oxford canons he certainly was. He was the primus inter pares at the Play Group, the epitome of ordinary-language philosophy throughout most of the twentieth century. His heritage remains. Ubaldi’s place in the history of philosophy is other. But there are connections, and here they are. Presenta un sistema dell'evoluzione dell'universo considerando la legge dell'evoluzione umana. Chiara i rapporti d'involuzione ed evoluzione fra le tre dimensioni della materia, dell'energia e dello spirito, in un processo d'unificazione fra le ipotesi della scienza. Cerca di spiegare il senso della vita, la funzione del dolore e la presenza del male. Candidato al premio Nobel, all'ultimo gli fu preferito Sartre. Il suo sistema filosofico e considerato da Einstein come risulta da un carteggio dolce e leggero e il suo saggio principale, “La grande sintesi”, e giudicata un quadro di filosofia scientifica e antropologica etica, che oltrepassa di molto i consimili tentative. la grande sintesi.  G: December 29, 1931. You have brought me a “message,” and you are looking at me as if the only reasonable response is reverence. S: I am looking at you, sir, as if the only reasonable response is attention. G: Attention I can manage. Reverence is a different department, and it has not hired me. S: Then let us begin with the word you keep circling. Message. G: Yes. Message. In Peirce’s neighbourhood, a sign is not a free-floating ornament. It has a triadic life: something that stands to somebody for something in some respect. And when later men like Morris tidy this into “sign-vehicle, designatum, interpretant,” they are still smuggling in the same fact: a message presupposes a sender and an addressee, or it is merely ink with pretensions. S: Then I have what you want: an addressee. He. And a sender. It. G: You have a recipient and a text. That is not yet a sender. A sender is an agent who can be held responsible. S: You mean: who can be blamed if the style is bad. G: Quite. Read. S: Nel silenzio della notte sacra, ascoltami. G: Imperative plus intimacy. “Listen to me.” So far we have an address, which helps your “addressee” requirement. But it does not tell us the addressor’s identity, only his confidence. S: Lascia ogni sapere, i ricordi, te stesso, tutto dimentica, abbandonati alla Mia voce, inerte, vuoto, nel nulla, nel silenzio il piu’ completo dello spazio e del tempo. G: It is already asking for the abolition of the ordinary epistemic conditions. “Leave all knowledge.” That is a promising way to protect oneself from cross-examination. S: In questo vuoto odi la Mia voce che dice: “sorgi e parla: Sono Io”. G: “I am I.” Which is either the deepest possible identification or the shallowest. It depends on whether one is doing metaphysics or avoiding it. S: Esulta della Mia presenza: essa e’ gran cosa per te, e’ un gran premio che hai duramente meritato... G: Now we are in the rhetoric of reward. That matters: it is not merely information; it is moral accounting. A message that begins by rewarding the receiver is already shaping the receiver’s posture: gratitude first, scrutiny later. S: ...e’ quel segno che tanto hai invocato di quel piu’ grande mondo nel quale Io vivo e in cui tu hai creduto. G: Notice the move. The “message” is cast as a sign, a confirmation, a credential. It is not giving new data; it is licensing belief by claiming to satisfy a request for a sign. S: Non domandare il Mio nome, non cercare di individuarmi. G: Excellent. “Do not ask my name.” So the supposed sender refuses the very thing that would allow us to do ordinary message-tracing. S: Non potresti, nessuno potrebbe; non tentare inutili ipotesi. Tu mi conosci lo stesso. G: So the sender claims identification is impossible, but recognition is still available. That is a familiar manoeuvre: deny verifiability, claim acquaintance. S: La Mia voce cosi’ dolce per te, cosi’ amica per tutti i piccoli che soffrono nell’ombra, sa essere anche tremenda e tuonante come mai tu mi sentisti. G: Two registers: comfort and thunder. That is not content; it is authority-building. He is establishing that he can be both consoling and terrifying, which is the standard equipment of a speaker who wants obedience without negotiation. S: Non ti preoccupare; scrivi. G: There. The instruction. “Write.” The addressee’s role is not to interpret but to transcribe. S: La mia parola va diritta nel profondo della coscienza e tocca l’anima di chi ascolta, sul vivo. G: And the message asserts efficacy: it claims to reach conscience directly. That is a claim about uptake without offering a mechanism. S: Sara’ udita solo da chi si e’ reso capace di udirla. Per gli altri andra’ perduta nel vociare immenso di tutti. Non importa; deve essere detta. G: This is the perfect immunization clause. If someone does not respond, it is their incapacity. If it is ignored, it is because the world is noisy. The message becomes unfalsifiable by design. S: Sir, you sound as if you are cross-examining a hymn. G: I am cross-examining a purported message. Hymns do not usually claim provenance details; they claim devotion. A message is a different sort of act. It implies transmission. S: Then you will like this later part. It becomes geopolitical. G: That should worry me, not please me. S: Io parlo oggi a tutti i giusti della Terra e li chiamo tutti da tutte le parti del mondo... G: A broadcast. The sender claims universal address. If it is truly universal, it should have no trouble stating its office address. S: ...perche’ riuniscano le loro aspirazioni e preghiere e ne facciano un fascio che salga verso il cielo. G: Metaphor of bundling. It is also a coordination instruction: form a coalition of the “just.” It is, in your earlier terms, cooperation. S: Nessuna barriera di Religione, di Nazione o di Razza li divida. G: In 1931, that sentence is not merely pious. It is pointed. It is a claim that the coming division will not be the usual political taxonomy. S: Perche’ presto una sola sara’ la divisione tra gli uomini: quella del giusto e dell’ingiusto. G: A two-class partition. The sender is offering a new predicate: just/unjust. That is a simple classification scheme with high emotional yield. S: La divisione e’ nell’intimo della coscienza e non nella vostra esteriorita’ visibile. G: That is also a legal manoeuvre. It relocates the criterion from public evidence to private conscience, where no tribunal can inspect it. S: Tutti quelli che sinceramente vogliono, possono comprendere... G: Another immunization clause: “whoever sincerely wants can understand.” Failure to understand is assigned to lack of sincerity. S: ...e ciascuno, da solo, senza che il vicino possa vedere, sapra’ chi e’. G: The “no neighbour can see” point is important. It disarms social verification. You cannot check who is “just.” You can only self-declare. S: La Mia parola e’ universale, ma e’ anche appello intimo, personale, ad ognuno. G: Universal address plus personal claim. That is rhetorically powerful, because it gives every reader the sense of being singled out while remaining part of a mass. S: Un gran rivolgimento si approssima nella vita del mondo. G: Now we move to prediction, which is where your earlier “message-as-information” idea becomes tempting. But watch: prediction here is not probabilistic; it is proclaimed. S: Questa Mia e’ una voce; ma ne saliranno presto sempre piu’ forti e fitte... G: That line is also clever. It anticipates a future chorus of similar “messages,” which means that later imitators become confirming evidence rather than competition. S: ...da tutte le parti del mondo perche’ il consiglio non sia mancato a nessuno. G: Universal redundancy. Again: no one can complain they were not warned. That is a moral prophylactic. S: Non temere; scrivi, guarda. G: Always: “write.” The addressee is a scribe, not a debater. S: Guarda la traiettoria degli eventi umani come si continua nel futuro... G: Trajectory language. That is the language of determinism disguised as observation. S: ...quando non si e’ chiusi nella vostra ferrea gabbia dello spazio e del tempo si vede “naturalmente” il futuro. G: Excellent. The sender claims a privileged vantage outside space-time. That is the metaphysical equivalent of being allowed behind the curtain. S: Ma cio’ che ti mostro e’ anche logico, secondo la vostra logica umana, quindi a voi comprensibile. G: That sentence is aimed at people like me. It says: you may not accept revelation, but you will accept logic. So the message claims to satisfy rationalist standards while keeping supernatural privileges. S: I popoli, come gli individui, hanno una responsabilita’ nello sviluppo storico... G: And now we get something like a philosophy of history. S: ...secondo un concatenamento causale che, se e’ libero nelle premesse, e’ necessario nelle conseguenze. G: There: “free in premises, necessary in consequences.” That is a form of conditional determinism: choose premises freely, but after that the entailments bite. S: The logic you like, sir. G: I like it when someone shows the premises and the rules. Here, the rule is asserted and the premises are smuggled in. S: La Legge di giustizia... vuole che l’equilibrio sia ricostruito e che le colpe e gli errori debbano essere corretti attraverso il dolore. G: So the mechanism is pain as correction. That is moral utilitarianism with teeth: suffering is justified as balancing. S: Cio’ che voi chiamate male e ingiustizia e’ naturale e giusta reazione... G: That is a hard doctrine. It re-describes evil as necessary reaction. And it has a convenient psychological function: it can make any catastrophe look deserved. S: Tutto e’ voluto, tutto e’ meritato... G: There. Totalization. That is where my pessimism sharpens: “everything is deserved” is a sentence that can anesthetize compassion while pretending to elevate it. S: ...anche se voi non siete in grado di ricordare il come e il quando. G: And the inability to recall is used to protect the claim from counterexample. If you do not remember deserving it, that is because you forgot. S: Il dolore abbonda nel vostro mondo perche’ e’ mondo selvaggio... G: The world is a penal colony in this picture. S: ...ma non temete il dolore. Esso e’ l’unica cosa di veramente grande che voi abbiate laggiu’... G: That is rhetorically brilliant and morally dangerous. It makes suffering into the one authentic grandeur available to ordinary people. S: ...perche’ e’ l’istrumento che voi possedete per la vostra redenzione... G: Instrumental suffering. It is theology built as a tool. S: “Beati coloro che soffrono”, Cristo vi ha detto. G: A citation to anchor the doctrine. So now we have something like an authority chain. S: Sir, you wanted a sender. The text gives you one: “Sono Io.” G: “Io” is not a sender; it is a pronoun. We need provenance. S: You mean: the non-ultimate source. G: Exactly. Not “ultimately God.” That is metaphysical embroidery. I want the postmark. S: The postmark is Pietro Ubaldi, Perugia, Torre della Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto. G: Good. Now we have something I can work with: a human author, an Umbria location, and a date. Now we can talk about what “message” means in a sober sense: a text produced by Ubaldi in a particular setting, then presented as speech from a transcendent source. S: Then you concede it is a message. G: I concede it is a message in the Morris sense: a sign-vehicle intended to produce an interpretant in an audience. But the sender, in the ordinary empirical sense, is Ubaldi. S: And the addressee? G: Two addressees. One explicit: the man addressed as “tu” in the text. One implicit: the public, “tutti i giusti della Terra,” which is a way of recruiting readers into a moral category. S: Now you will complain that “giusti” is not a good predicate. G: Not without a test, no. But it is an effective predicate for recruiting. It is a classifier that flatters. S: It also implies cooperation. The just must unite. A bundle of prayers. G: Yes. And that is where your “cooperative rationality” theme can be rescued from the metaphysics. Not by endorsing the provenance-claims, but by noticing what the text is doing: it is engineering a coalition of conscience, across religion and nation, by declaring a single salient division. S: And you, sir, will formalize it. G: Only to show the ambition and the overreach. Let J(x) mean “x is just.” Let H(x) mean “x is capable of hearing this voice.” The text suggests something like: for all x, if J(x), then H(x). It also suggests the contrapositive as a psychological insinuation: if not H(x), then not sincere, not just. S: That is nasty. G: It is powerful. It makes dissent morally diagnostic. S: But what of the historical prediction? You have not yet reached the scientific progress part. G: I read it. The theme is clear: technological power grows; moral capacity lags; imbalance produces catastrophe; catastrophe purifies; then a new era of spirit. It is an apocalyptic curve. S: And in 1931, that curve is not absurd. G: In 1931 it is uncomfortably plausible. That is what gives the message its bite: it attaches cosmic authority to a trajectory one can already smell in Europe. S: You said you would end with a punchline, sir. G: I will. You have brought me a message whose declared source is God, whose actual source is Ubaldi, whose intended addressee is everyone, and whose practical effect is to sort people into “just” and “unjust” without an external criterion. That is not a message. That is a recruitment leaflet with metaphysics as postage. S: And what should I do with it? G: File it under “interesting,” not under “instructions,” and, if you must transmit it, at least be honest about the sender.Grice: Professore Ubaldi, le confesso che se avessi osato pronunciare “grande sintesi” a Oxford – o Vadum Boum, come noi Lit. Hum. lo chiamiamo – barbari come siamo rispetto a quelli più vicini a Bononia alma mater di tutti noi – negli anni ’30, mi avrebbero espulso all’istante! Lì si parlava solo di “analisi filosofica”: era la password per entrare nei circoli dell’intelligenza. Guai a chi si azzardava con sintesi troppo grandi… si rischiava di essere scambiati per un poeta o peggio, per un visionario! Ubaldi: Caro Grice, mi viene da sorridere: a Foligno invece, se non parlavi di “grande sintesi”, ti toccava la sedia più piccola in biblioteca! Da noi la sintesi era pane quotidiano, e chi si fermava all’analisi veniva messo a rigirare le pagine dei dizionari. Altro che espulsione: al massimo ti assegnavano il compito di trovare il senso della vita tra le note a margine! Grice: Ah, allora era meglio venire a Foligno per evitare i severi baroni di Oxford! Immagino una scena: io, con il mio tight grigio, che chiedo la “grande sintesi” e mi ritrovo a fare il caffè per tutta la facoltà. Mentre a Foligno, la sintesi era così grande che serviva una lavagna lunga quanto la ferrovia! Ubaldi: Ecco, Grice, la vera “grande sintesi” è questa: un inglese che fa il caffè e un italiano che disegna lavagne infinite, entrambi intenti a unificare materia, energia e spirito… ma sempre con un sorriso, ché la filosofia senza un po’ di allegria è come una teoria senza finale! E se Sartre ci ha battuti per il Nobel, almeno noi ci consoliamo con una battuta degna di due spiriti liberi! Ubaldi, Pietro de Alleori (1931). Messagio. Dec. 24. Torre da Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto, Perugia.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Ubaldi: la ragione conversazionale. Note su De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque socii. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Pietro di Matteo di Pietro degl’Ubaldi (Perugia, Umbria): -- Institutionally, Pietro degli Ubaldi is much closer to many of your jurists than to Grice. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the intimate tutorial culture of the college with the wider faculty structure of the university. Pietro degli Ubaldi belongs to a wholly different world: the late medieval ius commune, the civic and papal legal order, and the university-law culture of Perugia, Pisa, Florence, and Rome. He was a jurist, teacher, concistorial advocate, diplomat, and public servant, and his authority came from legal learning, public office, and the circulation of juridical treatises rather than from a college or faculty appointment of the modern sort. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Pietro degli Ubaldi belongs to the juridical, civic, and university-law world of late medieval Italy. That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison very well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Pietro degli Ubaldi, by contrast, works in a different normative space entirely. His problem is not how one speaker leaves something unsaid for another to infer in an ordinary exchange, but how a jurist generalises, classifies, and repairs practical social relations by means of doctrine, argumenta, and legal interpretation. In his case, “cooperation” is not merely a presupposition of talk. It is a legally structured relation, with consequences for expenses, profits, third-party claims, remedies, limitation, and dissolution. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how rational agents coordinate meanings in conversation. Pietro degli Ubaldi explains how jurists coordinate obligations in cooperative life. That is why your bridge through societas is genuinely apt. For Grice, cooperation is a pragmatic background condition for mutual understanding. For Ubaldi, cooperation is a substantive juridical relation that requires doctrine to define and stabilize it. If Grice is concerned with gaps in explicit saying, Ubaldi is concerned with gaps in social and legal order. Both require repair, but the repair is of a different kind: in Grice, inferential; in Ubaldi, doctrinal. The long Oxford-Perugia exchange you drafted is actually very good for making that point, especially in the discussion of De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis. The move from fratres to socii and then to quibuscumque is indeed a miniature of legal reasoning: from vivid case to legal category to maximal generalisation. That is not Gricean conversational implicature, but it is an analogous logic of coverage and controlled extension. There are, however, two important cautions. First, the authorship problem matters. As your own prompt notes, De duobus fratribus is textually unstable in attribution. The distinction between Petrus de Ubaldis senior and junior must be handled carefully, and one should not present the work as securely attached to one without noting the bibliographical complexity. Second, the final bibliographic line should be made more cautious. Ubaldi, Pietro degl’ (1439). De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis. MS Add. D. 10, Udine is useful as a manuscript anchor, but it should not be treated as if it were the simple and undisputed publication line of a modern book. It is better as a manuscript witness or textual anchor than as a settled bibliographical identity. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Pietro degli Ubaldi, by contrast, was a late medieval jurist, advocate, teacher, and public official, active in the legal and civic culture of Perugia, Florence, Pisa, Rome, and the papal orbit rather than in any tutorial-collegiate university structure. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Ubaldi to the juridical and university-law world of the ius commune. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Pietro degli Ubaldi exemplifies a juridical rationality in which cooperation is not a conversational presupposition but a legally regulated form of association, whose interpretation, repair, and extension require doctrinal rather than pragmatic reasoning. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers cooperate in meaning; Ubaldi theorises how partners cooperate in law. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, with the authorship caveat on De duobus fratribus built into the formulation.the grandson of the above -- la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers move from what is said to what is meant by rationally reconstructing intentions under cooperative norms (maxims), so that even “gaps” in explicit content (implicatures) are, in principle, accountable by calculable inference. With Pietro degli Ubaldi we are in a different regime of normativity: a late-medieval jurist of the ius commune whose most famous tract, De duobus fratribus / De societate, organizes practical legal doctrine about partnership (ripartizione di spese e utili, responsabilità verso terzi, azioni dei soci, prescrizione, cessazione) into argumenta, treating “reason” less as conversational inference and more as interpretive-juridical rationality—how one reads, classifies, and applies authoritative texts and principles to regulate cooperative life. The nearest bridge to Grice is that both are, in their way, theorists of cooperation: Grice models cooperation as a communicative presupposition that makes implicature derivable; Ubaldi models cooperation as a legally structured relationship whose stability depends on rules about contribution, entitlement, and liability, and whose breakdowns (disputes between “fratres” or “socii”) require doctrinal repair rather than pragmatic calculation. Online bibliographic/authority sources also underscore that “Ubaldi” attributions are complicated: Treccani reports early printing for De duobus fratribus/De societate at Perugia 1472 (or 1473 in other catalog notes), while specialized bibliographies (e.g., Ames Foundation BioBib) distinguish Petrus de Ubaldis senior (c. 1335–c. 1400) from Petrus de Ubaldis junior (d. c. 1499) and note that De duobus fratribus is often misattributed between them—so, unlike Grice’s relatively fixed authorship-and-intention model, even the “who says it” question can be textually unstable in Ubaldi’s transmission, reinforcing the contrast between modern conversational intention and medieval juridical authority as the organizing locus of “ragione.” De duobus fratibus et aliis sociis, Fondazione Mansutti, Milano. Pietro degl’Ubaldi senior (Perugia, Umbria). n medieval and early-modern canon-law usage, portio canonica is a technical term that can refer to a “canonical share/portion” owed by rule in certain ecclesiastical revenue contexts, especially connected with funeral dues and related customary payments. Two representative definitions from standard reference articles:   Portio canonica as “quarta funeraria” (funeral fourth / funeral dues) Catholic Answers’ encyclopedia article on Funeral Dues explains that the Council of Trent calls it the “quarta funeralium,” and notes that earlier designations included “portio canonica” (canonical portion) and “quarta portio,” understood as a just reward to the parish priest when a parishioner is buried outside his parish. [catholic.com]   Portio canonica as an ecclesiastical term with several related uses The McClintock and Strong Cyclopedia entry Portio Canonica lists multiple uses: (1) share in daily distributions; (2) a funeral-related tax; (3) a casualty paid to the curate; and it again links the concept to the “quarta funeraria.” [bibleportal.com]   So, in plain terms, “De portione canonica” is about the rules governing a legally-defined “share” (portion) in ecclesiastical financial/benefice/funeral contexts: who is entitled to what portion, under what circumstances, and by what canonical rationale.Ubaldi, Pietro degl’Ubaldi (1450). De portione canonica. Arezzo, Biblioteca Città di Arezzo, ms. 437.-- è stato un giurista italiano. È fratello di Angelo e Baldo degl’Ubaldi. Laureato in diritto e docente a Firenze fino a quando fa ritorno a Perugia. Svolge numerosi incarichi pubblici, tra cui ambasciatore di Città di Castello e capitano guelfo, poi diplomatico alla corte di papa Bonifacio; partecipa ai lavori del trattato con il duca milanese Visconti per garantire la libertà ai perugini. Il suo trattato De duobus fratribus et aliis sociis è diviso in argumenta, con cui espone la disciplina giuridica del diritto, con attenzione al CONTRATTO di società, tra cui la ri-partizione di spese e utili tra soci, i diritti di terzi, le azioni di ogni socio, la prescrizione dell'azione per gl’amministratori e la cessazione del contratto. De unione ecclesiarum, De duobus fratribus et aliis sociis De portione canonica De beneficiorum collatione De unione ecclesiarum De unione ecclesiarum, Napoli, Tipografo del Nicolaus de Lyra. Bibliografia Fondazione Mansutti, Quaderni di sicurtà. Documenti di storia dell'assicurazione, a cura di Bonomelli, schede bibliografiche di Battista, note critiche di Mansutti, Milano, Electa, su Treccani.it – Enciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Portale Biografie  Portale Storia Categorie: Giuristi italiani Giuristi italiani Nati a Perugia Storia dell'assicurazione [altre] Giurista italiano, fratello di Baldo e di Angelo. Studia nello studio di Perugia e in quello pisano, dove gli è principale guida TIGRINI . Si da da principio alla pratica quale avvocato concistoriale in Roma. Poi si dedica anch’egli all’insegnamento nella sua patria. Muore, dopo i suoi due fratelli. Tra i civilisti è pregiatissimo il suo trattato De duobus fratribus o De societate Perugia; poi anche in Tractatus univ. iuris, Venezia. Tra i canonisti parvero classici i trattati De portione canonica -- in Tract. univ. iuris cit. --, De beneficiorum collatione, De unione ecclesiarum -- del quale si hanno due edizioni senza l. e a.. ragione conversazionale, implicatura.  G: It is 1939, Thomson. Oxford, not Perugia. Yet you insist on importing Perugia into my rooms as if it were a decanter. T: Sir, you imported Sicily into logic last week. I thought Perugia was modest by comparison. G: Sicily is at least an island; Perugia is a habit. Now. Read it. T: De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis. G: Again, but slower, as if you were trying to hear the grammar rather than the Latin. T: De duobus fratribus. Et. Aliis quibuscumque sociis. G: Good. Now tell me what looks “silly” to you. T: The piling-on, sir. Aliis is already “others.” Then quibuscumque is “whichever you please.” And then the -que hangs off it like an extra cuff-link. It feels like saying “and any other whatsoever at all, honestly, truly, scout’s honour.” G: That is exactly why it is not silly. It is legal. T: Legal Latin, sir, is the only Latin that blushes. G: Legal Latin is Latin with a job. Ordinary Latin can afford to be elegant. Legal Latin must be safe. Now. Aliis does one thing: it says “not just the brothers.” Quibuscumque does another: it says “not just some recognized class of others, but any others that fall under the concept.” T: And the -que? G: The -que there is not a second et. It is a tightening. It binds the maximizer to the generalization as a single shove outward. Think of it as a little “also, too, even” glued into the word. T: So et links the big conjuncts. -que amplifies the second conjunct from within. G: Precisely. You are allowed to find it ugly. You are not allowed to call it redundant until you can show that law has ever been content with one layer of generality. T: But why would anyone need that much generality? “Two brothers and other partners” sounds general enough. G: Because “general enough” is not a legal standard. It is an undergraduate mood. Ubaldi is trying to prevent the clever reader from wriggling out through a gap he has left. T: The gap being: “Yes, your doctrine is about brothers, but my case involves cousins” or “my partners are not brothers, they are merchants” or “they are not merchants, they are monks.” G: Exactly. He begins with a vivid case-label, duobus fratribus. It is memorable, almost theatrical. Then he flips the case into the doctrinal genus: socii. Then he maximizes: quibuscumque. Meaning: do not come back and tell me your associates are of an exotic species; the form of cooperation is what matters. T: So he is doing a kind of medieval version of: for all x, if x is a partner, then the rule applies. G: Careful. Not “the rule.” The sort of argumenta he is building. But yes, the ambition is quantificational. T: Sir, can I ask the stupid question? G: You will anyway. Proceed. T: Is he saying that sociis is entailed by fratribus? That a brother is an associate? G: In the relevant legal context, yes. Not because fraternity is analytically partnership, but because brothers are an especially fertile site for partnership disputes: shared property, shared labour, shared expectations, and then the moment of accounting. T: In other words, he is treating “brothers” as a paradigmatic instance of “cooperators,” not a separate metaphysical category. G: Exactly. And you notice the point that matters for your Grice obsession: cooperation is not merely a conversational presupposition. It is a legal structure. Ubaldi is doing the metaphysics of cooperation with remedies attached. T: That is what makes it silly to me, sir. The ambition outstrips plausibility. “Any associates whatsoever.” Surely obligations between brothers do not export cleanly to “any other associate you can possibly conceive.” G: Good. Now we have a live question rather than a stylistic complaint. T: Who is conceiving these associates? Me? G: No, not you. Ubaldi would not have heard of you. So he cannot be legislating for what you can imagine. T: Then who? G: In legal Latin, “quibuscumque” is addressed to the future nuisance: the litigant, the advocate, the judge, the commentator. It is a prophylactic. It says: whatever variant you bring me, if it counts as societas in the sense relevant here, it is covered. T: But that collapses “anyone can conceive” into “any case that can be legally subsumed.” G: Precisely. The imagination is not romantic. It is classificatory. It is the imagination of a lawyer, not of a poet. T: So “maximally general” does not mean “science-fiction partners.” G: It means: any partners that fall under the legal genus, even if you try to redescribe them to escape the genus. T: That sounds like a trick. G: It is not a trick. It is the trade. T: Still, I don’t hold obligations to your brother, sir. G: I do not hold obligations to yours either. Yet the law manages to speak as if obligations can float free of personal acquaintance, which is one of its more scandalous achievements. T: Do you have a brother, sir? G: I have the misfortune to have at least one. That is enough for analysis. T: Then you concede the topic is not merely scholastic. G: I concede nothing. I merely observe that “brothers” is a dangerously concrete noun for a jurist, which is why he runs at once to socii and then to quibuscumque. T: So the title itself performs the movement: from vivid case to abstract category to maximal generality. G: Exactly. Now you see why I like it. It is a miniature of jurisprudential method: start with the quarrel you can picture, then generalize, then over-generalize so you cannot be trapped by a counterexample. T: That is very Gricean, sir. G: Do not commit that anachronism. But note the parallel: both are terrified of leaving a loophole that a clever reader can exploit. T: You mean like conversational implicature: if you leave the inference too loose, the hearer takes it somewhere you did not intend. G: Better: if you leave the condition too narrow, the opponent takes your doctrine somewhere you did not defend. T: Still, I’m bothered by the sense that obligations between brothers are special. There is blood, household, expectation, moral pressure, a kind of natural quasi-contract. G: And now you are doing moral philosophy in a jurist’s hallway. T: Is that wrong? G: It is merely dangerous. But it is the right danger for your vignette. So let us take your intuition and formalize it without pretending we have solved it. T: With Frege’s quantifiers? G: With whatever symbol you like, provided you do not worship it. Let QC be “quasi-contractual obligation.” Let B(x, y) mean “x and y are brothers.” Let S(x, y) mean “x and y are partners/associates in a societas-type relation.” T: And let t be Tom, j be Jerry. G: Very good. Now you want to ask: does B(t, j) entail S(t, j)? T: In ordinary life, no. In Ubaldi’s legal ecology, maybe. G: Exactly. So we might write two different principles and keep them distinct. Principle one, the narrow one: for all x,y, if B(x,y) and they are co-managing property, then QC(x,y) holds under certain conditions. T: And principle two, the wide one: for all x,y, if S(x,y), then QC(x,y) under analogous conditions. G: Precisely. The title suggests he is moving from the first to the second: from brothers-as-paradigm to partners-in-general. T: And quibuscumque is his way of saying: do not restrict S to nice familiar partners; let it range over any legally conceivable partner relation. G: Yes. In quantifier-speak: he wants a domain for S that is not “the partners we usually talk about,” but “all entities that satisfy the legal predicate S.” T: So “any you can conceive” is really “any that falls under the predicate,” not “any you can fantasize.” G: Correct. And now your objection becomes sharper: are the conditions that generate QC in the brother-case the same as the conditions that generate QC in the partner-case? T: I suspect not. G: So did most people who made a career writing consilia. The entire industry is “not,” elaborated. T: Then why does he title it as if it is one smooth generalization? G: Because titles are promises, and legal titles are strategic promises. He is promising coverage. Then the body of the tract distinguishes, qualifies, repairs. T: That makes it less silly. It is not naivety; it is an opening gambit. G: Exactly. Now. You wanted the dry humour to come from the idea that “brothers” bothers you. Let it bother me too, but for a different reason. T: For what reason, sir? G: Because “brothers” in Oxford means something else as well: tutorial families, college clans, and the peculiar sense that one owes loyalty to men one would never invite to tea. T: So you think Ubaldi is smuggling an Oxford concept into Perugia? G: No. I think Oxford is forever rediscovering that cooperation is never merely voluntary. It is enforced by institutions, names, and expectations. Brothers are just the crudest case where expectation thinks it has a natural right. T: And “et aliis quibuscumque sociis” is the moment where nature is replaced by classification. G: Precisely. It is the moment where “my brother” becomes “my associate,” and the law begins. T: But then my earlier protest stands: I certainly do not hold obligations to your brother, sir. G: And yet if you and he form a societas, you will. That is exactly Ubaldi’s point, and your discomfort is your education. T: So the title is a machine for producing discomfort. G: Yes. It begins with a word that makes you think of family sentiment, fratribus, and ends with a word that makes sentiment irrelevant, sociis, and then adds quibuscumque to prevent you from hiding in a sentimental corner-case. T: I see the ambition now. It is a legal attempt to maximize the domain. G: Good. Now the punchline, since you asked for one. T: Yes, sir. G: In Oxford, when someone says “brother,” we infer a college, a staircase, a clique, and a lifetime of mild obligations disguised as friendship. In Perugia, when Ubaldi says “brother,” he infers litigation. Therefore Oxford is the more sentimental place, and Perugia the more honest.Grice: Professore Ubaldi, mi creda: ogni volta che sfoglio il “De duobus fratribus” alla Radcliff, non posso fare a meno di pensare al mio fratello minore, J.D.—John Derek, se proprio dobbiamo essere formali—rimasto laggiù a Harborne, quella provincia che fa sembrare Perugia una metropoli cosmopolita! Ubaldi: Ah, caro Grice, che bello sentirla parlare di fratelli! Da noi, tra Perugia e Firenze, non si perde occasione per una disputa tra fratelli, specie se c’è di mezzo un trattato. Ma mi dica, Harborne è davvero così provinciale? Da noi si dice: “Meglio un fratello lontano che un vicino impiccione!” Grice: Non posso che concordare! Ma la cosa più divertente è che Derek, con una mossa degna di un vero filosofo, ha lasciato la brumosa Harborne per una villa sul canale in Hampshire. Altro che provincialismo, ora si gode le brezze del canale e il tè all’inglese… senza dover discutere di contratti tra fratelli! Ubaldi: Ecco, vede? A volte basta cambiare aria per trovare la “ragione conversazionale” migliore! Mi viene da pensare che il vero contratto tra fratelli sia quello di condividere una buona dose di ironia e, magari, la vista sul canale. Se solo potessi convincere Baldo a trasferirsi da Perugia a qualche villa in riva all’Arno… ma temo che preferisca le dispute ai panorami! Ubaldi, Pietro degl’(1439). De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis. MS Add. D. 10, Udine.

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Unicorno: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’arimmetica universale – the logically developing series. Note su De admiranda vi proportionis, eiusque necessaria cognition, ad Bergomenses oratio. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Giuseppe Unicorno (Bergamo, Lombardia): Institutionally, Giuseppe Unicorno and H. P. Grice are not comparable in the modern academic sense at all, though both are learned men concerned with order, rule, and intelligibility. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the two classic Oxford functions: college tutor and university lecturer. Giuseppe Unicorno belongs to a completely different world: late Renaissance Bergamo and Venice, the world of practical mathematics, humanist oratory, abaco culture, mercantile calculation, and printed mathematical pedagogy. He was not a don, not a fellow, and not a university lecturer in the Oxford or Italian chair sense. He was a mathematician, arithmetician, and man of practical and speculative number. The evidence you cite, especially De admiranda vi proportionis and the later Arithmetica universale, puts him firmly in that mixed world where mathematics serves commerce, rhetoric, and cosmological order alike. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Unicorno belongs to the mathematical, humanist, and practical-printed world of late Renaissance Italy. That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison very well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Unicorno, by contrast, works at the level of structural intelligibility itself. His concern is not how one speaker means more than he explicitly says in a local exchange, but how proportion, number, and rule-governed calculation make rhetoric, dialectic, and even grammar themselves possible as ordered practices. That is why the Unicorno passage you quote is genuinely striking. He does not merely say that rhetoric can be decorative, dialectic demonstrative, and grammar foundational. He argues that all of them already depend on proportion, measure, and relation. In that sense, he offers a kind of proto-formal account of discourse, though not in the Gricean register of speaker intention and hearer inference. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how conversation can mean more than it literally says. Unicorno explains how discourse itself can be orderly, intelligible, and disciplined because it is proportioned. That is the best bridge between them. For Grice, the surplus of meaning is inferential and conversational. For Unicorno, the surplus of intelligibility is formal and structural. Both are, as you say, anti-mystification projects: Grice demystifies implicature by showing how it is rationally recoverable. Unicorno demystifies discourse by showing how rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar are already governed by measure and proportion. Your final bibliographic line is also one of the stronger ones in this whole series. De admiranda vi proportionis, eiusque necessaria cognitione, ad Bergomenses oratio, Venice, Arrivabene, 1552, is exactly the sort of concrete anchor one wants here. I would only note one small correction: cognitio or cognitione should be checked against the actual title page if you intend to cite it in a finished dossier, since sixteenth-century printings can vary in form. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Giuseppe Unicorno, by contrast, was a late Renaissance mathematician and arithmetician from Bergamo, active in the world of practical and speculative mathematics, humanist pedagogy, and printed mathematical discourse rather than in a college or faculty office. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Unicorno to the mathematical and humanist world of proportion, calculation, and formal order. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and conversational implicature, whereas Unicorno treats rationality as a property of formally governed relations—arithmetical, rhetorical, dialectical, and grammatical—whose intelligibility lies not in conversational maxims but in measurable structure. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers imply; Unicorno theorises how discourse is proportioned. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, using the 1552 Venice oration as the main anchor and sharpening the rhetoric-dialectic-grammar triad.la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’arimmetica universale – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats “what is meant” as an inferential upshot of cooperative rational agency: given what is said plus shared assumptions about relevance, quantity, quality, etc., a hearer can (in principle) reconstruct implicated content as the speaker’s rationally accountable intention. Unicorno, as the historical Giuseppe Unicorno/Unicorni (Josephus Unicornus; Bergamo 1523–1610), belongs to a very different intellectual ecology: his Arithmetica universale (Venezia, Francesco de’ Franceschi, 1598) is a Renaissance synthesis where number is at once practical technique (abaco culture: weights, measures, exchange, mercantile problems) and a quasi-metaphysical key to order (a tradition continuous with scholastic disciplines and Neoplatonic/Pythagorean resonances), and his De mathematicarum artium utilitate (Bergamo, Comino Ventura, 1584; bibliographies also report an earlier Venetian edition dated 1561) explicitly frames mathematical arts as broadly formative of human understanding. So the clean comparison is: Grice theorizes the rational norms internal to talk-exchanges (how participants responsibly move from said to meant), whereas Unicorno theorizes rational order as instantiated in formal and semi-formal systems (arithmetical procedures, proportionality, the “series” and its lawful development) whose “implications” are not conversational in Grice’s sense but structural—what follows from definitions, operations, and numerically articulated relations. If you want to make them meet, the best bridge is that both are “anti-mystification” projects: Grice explains how seemingly implicit content can be justified as rationally derivable within cooperative discourse; Unicorno explains how seemingly opaque practical and cosmic order can be rendered intelligible by rule-governed calculation—yet for Grice the medium is intersubjective intention-and-inference in conversation, while for Unicorno the medium is the disciplined manipulability of symbols and quantities, where “reason” shows itself less as conversational maxims than as the demonstrable necessity of numerical form. -- the logically developing series -- scuola di Bergamo –filosofia lombarda -- filosofia italiana (Bergamo). Abstract. Grice: Giuseppe Uncorno, a mathematician from Bergamo, holds a distinctive place in the history of Italian philosophy due to his attempt to bridge the gap between scholastic logic, Neoplatonic metaphysics, and practical arithmetic.  His importance lies primarily in how his mathematical treatises reflected the intellectual shifts of the late Renaissance: 1. The Metaphysics of Number Uncorno's most significant work, De universis numeris et eorum proprietatibus (On All Numbers and Their Properties), is not merely a manual for calculation. It is an encyclopedic project that treats arithmetic as a philosophical discipline. In the tradition of Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, Uncorno argued that numbers were the fundamental building blocks of reality. His work served as a bridge for philosophers who viewed mathematics as a way to understand the "divine order" of the cosmos.  2. Scholasticism vs. Humanism In the context of Italian philosophy, Uncorno represents the transition from medieval scholasticism (which prioritized formal logic) to humanist science (which emphasized the utility of the "quadrivium"—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). By systematizing the properties of numbers, he contributed to the "mathematization of nature," a prerequisite for the philosophical shifts later championed by Galileo Galilei and the Scientific Revolution.  3. Practical Philosophy and the "Abaco" Tradition Uncorno integrated the rigorous theory of ancient Greek mathematicians (like Diophantus and Euclid) with the practical abaco tradition of Italian merchants. This fusion was philosophically significant because it elevated "low" practical arts to the status of "high" theoretical wisdom. This shift helped redefine the philosopher's role in society—from a secluded thinker to a contributor to civic and economic life.  arimmetica universale.  T: Sir, before we begin: Oxford, 1939. You want Unicorno, Venice, 1552, and you want him to sound like himself. You also want me not to steal his voice by translating him into ours. G: Precisely. Give me the Latin as an object, not as a surrender. And clean it first, because what you copied is a battlefield of long-s, printer’s habits, and OCR panic. T: Yes, sir. I will regularise the obvious letter confusions, restore spacing, and keep the Latin otherwise intact. I won’t “improve” his syntax. Here is a cleaned copy of your passage, as a continuous excerpt: Rhetores etiam istorum instar orationum suarum partes sibi proportionatis locis convenienti numero assignant; alioqui quid prius, quidque posterius dicendum esset nescientes, inconcinnam et absurdam redderent orationem. Verum cum iam ostenderimus sine Proportionis ratione non recte posse exerceri, quis Dialecticos ad syllogismorum veritatem demonstrandam, multa proportionis aut mathematicos naturam ac vim redolentia, a Mathematicis negat sumpsisse praeceptionibus? Quis tandem originem ac fundamentum omnium liberalium artium Grammaticam, dum nobis mensuram quandam in syllabis recte scribendis ac proferendis, gravibus, acutis, circumflexis accentibus suppeditat, a Proportionis legibus longe differre negaverit? Certe nemo vobis, nisi aut barbarus aut imperitus. G: Good. You’ve already done the essential service: you’ve made him legible without modernising him out of existence. T: I have kept his argumentative rhythm too: rhetoric, then dialectic, then grammar; and the cadence of the rhetorical questions. G: Now give it to me in pieces. Small enough that we can “hear” him. Begin only with the first sentence. T: Very well, sir. First segment, as Unicorno gives it: Rhetores etiam istorum instar orationum suarum partes sibi proportionatis locis convenienti numero assignant; alioqui quid prius, quidque posterius dicendum esset nescientes, inconcinnam et absurdam redderent orationem. G: The first thing to notice is the audacity of his “etiam.” “Rhetores etiam…” It is an inclusion move. He has already talked about proportion elsewhere, presumably in the familiar mathematical arts, and now he says: even the rhetoricians. T: So he is not flattering rhetoric; he is annexing it. G: Exactly. He is doing what later centuries pretend they invented: exporting a formal concept into the arts of discourse. But he does it without apology, as if it were obvious that speech is built. T: You want me to resist translating, sir, so I’ll only point at the structure. He places “partes” close to “orationum suarum.” He treats the oration as something with parts. G: And those parts are not merely parts; they are “assignant” to “proportionatis locis” and to a “convenienti numero.” That is two axes: spatial placement and numerical measure. Rhetoric becomes architecture plus arithmetic. T: A speech, then, has “places” and “numbers.” G: And if you remove proportion, you get temporal confusion: “quid prius, quidque posterius.” That’s the astonishing bit. Proportion is not just ornament; it is a condition for ordering. Without it, you do not know what comes first. T: He makes “not knowing” the cause of stylistic failure. G: He makes it the cause of conceptual failure too, if you read him strictly. If you do not know what is first and what is second, you are not merely inelegant; you are absurd. That’s a strong word to aim at a speaker. T: He is implying that discursiveness is a kind of logical error. G: Yes. In Oxford terms, he is treating bad style as a failure of rational control. Which is why your project about “arts of discourse” is justified: he is already putting rhetoric under a regime of rule-governed structure. T: Shall I give the next segment, sir? G: Proceed, but keep it short. T: Second segment: Verum cum iam ostenderimus sine Proportionis ratione non recte posse exerceri… G: Pause there. He says, in effect: we have already shown. That tells you this is a late-stage move. He has established a thesis: without “ratio proportionis” nothing is properly exercised. T: “Ratio” is doing heavy work here. G: And it’s deliberately elastic. In his mouth, “ratio” can be account, method, principle, rationale. He doesn’t choose. He wants the umbrella term so he can march from mathematics into rhetoric and then into logic and grammar without changing vocabulary. T: So he builds a bridge by keeping one word. G: And also by choosing “exerceri.” Not “intellegi,” not “dici,” but “exerceri.” Practice. Exercise. The arts are exercised. Rhetoric is not mere theory; it’s a trained activity. That, too, feels oddly modern. T: Shall I continue into the dialectic question? G: Yes. Give me the next full question. T: Third segment: …quis Dialecticos ad syllogismorum veritatem demonstrandam, multa proportionis aut mathematicos naturam ac vim redolentia, a Mathematicis negat sumpsisse praeceptionibus? G: Now we are where your marginal note said “logica” or “dialectica.” Notice the tactic: he does not argue; he asks who would deny it. T: So he treats denial as the eccentric position. G: Exactly. He does not need to prove; he needs only to shame the dissenter. “Quis… negat?” It is the classic rhetorical machinery: render the contrary view socially impossible. T: And he ties dialectic to syllogisms immediately. G: Yes, and to “veritas demonstranda.” Dialectic here is not casual disputation; it is a discipline whose target is demonstrable truth. And then he claims that in the very apparatus of syllogistic demonstration there are features that “redolent” of proportion or of the nature and power of mathematics. T: “Redolentia” is a wonderful word. It says “smelling of.” G: Dry humour is already present in him. Dialecticians, he implies, have been borrowing from mathematicians, whether they admit it or not. Their syllogisms smell like mathematics. T: And the borrowing is framed as “praeceptiones.” G: Instruction, precepts, rules. He is not claiming dialectic uses numbers. He is claiming it uses methodological forms and constraints learned from mathematical practice: the idea of rigor, of inference governed by form, of demonstration as accountable sequence. T: So you would say his “proportion” here is not merely ratio in the arithmetic sense, but structured relation. G: Precisely. He is making a philosophical move: proportion as a general schema of relational intelligibility. It has a technical home in mathematics, but its authority extends into how valid reasoning is trained and recognised. T: That seems like the “epoch-making relevance” you wanted G to press. G: Yes. The epoch-making part is that he refuses to let the “arts of discourse” claim autonomy from mathematical discipline. He doesn’t say rhetoric is mathematics; he says rhetoric requires proportion, dialectic borrows mathematical precepts, and grammar itself is proportion-law in miniature. T: Grammar next, sir? G: Give me the grammar question whole. T: Fourth segment: Quis tandem originem ac fundamentum omnium liberalium artium Grammaticam, dum nobis mensuram quandam in syllabis recte scribendis ac proferendis, gravibus, acutis, circumflexis accentibus suppeditat, a Proportionis legibus longe differre negaverit? G: Now he does something bold. He calls grammar the origin and foundation of all the liberal arts. T: He is placing grammar beneath everything. G: And he does it in a way that suits your thesis: if proportion can reach grammar, it has reached the base layer of discourse. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion; dialectic is the art of valid inference; grammar is the condition for having articulate units at all. T: He ties grammar to “mensura.” G: Yes, and that is the whole point. He is saying: grammar supplies measure in syllables, in writing and utterance, and in the accents. He is thinking of quantity, stress, pitch, duration: the metrical and phonological governance of speech. T: So “proportion” here is literally audible. G: Exactly. It’s not metaphor. It is the measure that makes a syllable count as this syllable rather than a mush. He is treating the material of language as already ruled by quantitative relation. T: And then: “a Proportionis legibus longe differre.” G: This is his punch: who would say grammar differs far from the laws of proportion? In other words: if you accept that grammar teaches measured articulation, you have accepted proportion in the very teeth of speech. T: So rhetoric, dialectic, grammar: all under proportion. G: That is the trifecta. If someone wanted to make a Renaissance case for what we would call “formal constraints across disciplines,” this is it. And he does it without seeming to know he’s being interdisciplinary. For him it’s obvious: the mind is trained by measure. T: There is still his final sting, sir. G: Yes. Give the last sentence. T: Fifth segment: Certe nemo vobis, nisi aut barbarus aut imperitus. G: And there it is: the refusal becomes barbarism or ignorance. T: That is rather sharp. G: It is sharp, and it is useful for your later staged dialogue. It gives G a way to tease T in 1939: “are you denying Unicorno, Thomson? Take care: he has a category ready for you.” T: Sir, that is unkind. G: It is historically accurate. Now, for our vignette: you want T to feed Latin, and G to “teach” in English. We have the Latin. We have the analytic spine. The rest is expansion: how to make “proportion” plausible as the hidden discipline of discourse. T: Shall we keep the setting in a college room, sir? Books open, rain outside, faint threat of war, and you insisting it is only a footnote? G: No melodrama. Dry. It is Oxford: the war is in the corridor, but the talk pretends it is in Venice, 1552. T: Then may I propose the running joke, sir: that Unicorno has discovered the maxims before you have named them? G: Careful. Not “before.” But: he has discovered that talk has architecture, that reasoning has borrowed rigor, and that grammar has measure. He is a predecessor in temperament, not in doctrine. T: So I should not have him be “proto-Grice.” G: Precisely. No anachronistic coronation. Let him be Unicorno: a man who thinks “proportion” is the spine of intelligibility, whether in numbers or in speech. T: And you, sir, will keep reminding me that “vi” is force, not six. G: Yes. That will be our recurring correction. Because it is funny, and because it is philologically sane. T: Then I will insert, as needed, that the title is “De admiranda vi proportionis,” and that the marginal “Rhetorica” is not the numeral VI pretending to be theology. G: Good. And when we come to your later “G and T” dialogue, the rhythm can be: T produces Unicorno; G refuses to translate; G explains what the Latin is doing as an act; T tries to force an English paraphrase; G refuses; and we end with the punchline that even grammar, the humblest, is already “mathematical” in the sense that it is measured. T: And the punchline, sir? G: Something like: “So, Thomson, if you cannot keep quantity in your vowels, do not boast of clarity in your arguments.” T: I see. The war outside; the accent marks within. G: Exactly.Grice: Professore Unicorno, mi permetta una battuta aritmetica: quando lei parla di “arimmetica universale” – con quella grafia così evocativa – intende forse dire che 5 = 7 = 12? O è solo un tentativo per far impazzire i contabili e i filosofi, usando quell’esempio famigerato che mette tutti in crisi? Unicorno: Ah, caro Grice, se la mia “arimmetica universale” fosse davvero così elastica, i negozianti di Bergamo farebbero festa ogni giorno! Ma la verità è che, per me, i numeri sono come maschere in commedia: si scambiano, si confondono, ma dietro c’è sempre una logica – anche se a volte è quella della buona cucina bergamasca, dove ogni ricetta ha il suo misterioso equilibrio. Grice: Dunque, professore, lei sostiene che, per capire la “arimmetica universale”, bisogna essere un po’ filosofi, un po’ matematici e, mi sa, anche un pizzico di poeti? Allora propongo: se 5 è la somma delle nostre battute, 7 il numero delle risate, e 12 la quantità di dolci al prossimo convivio filosofico, la matematica diventa davvero universale! Unicorno: Grice, lei ha colto il segreto: l’arimmetica universale serve a scoprire che, nella vita e nel pensiero, il risultato migliore si ottiene quando si mescolano numeri, idee e un po’ di ironia. E se qualche volta 5 = 7 = 12, beh, basta che la conversazione non perda il suo equilibrio – e che nessuno, magari, si ritrovi con meno dolci di quanto sperava! Unicorno, Giuseppe (1552). De admiranda vi proportionis, eiusque necessaria cognition, ad Bergomenses oratio. Venezia: Arrivabene.