GRICE E GENNADIO

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Gennadio: la ragione cnversazionale e il divino – Roma Gennadio (Marsiglia): la ragione cnversazionale e il divino -- In the contrast staged between Grice and Gennadio, Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is resolutely methodological and immanent to communicative practice, whereas Gennadio’s appeal to “conversational reason” remains metaphysically expansive and explicitly theological: for Grice, what governs conversation is not the nature of the soul or its ontological status but shared rational expectations among interlocutors, articulated through intentions, psychological concepts, and norms of cooperation that make meaning inferable without invoking any doctrine of anima, animus, or pneuma. Accordingly, Grice treats talk of the soul as a misplaced metaphysical surplus—something Italians may cherish diachronically, but which does no explanatory work in philosophical psychology—while Gennadio insists that conversation itself gestures toward the divine, understood as the only truly incorporeal being against a background in which souls and even angels remain subtly material. The difference is thus not merely terminological but structural: where Gennadio reads rational conversation as continuous with ancient debates about animus, anima, and pneuma, linking communicative reason to cosmology and theology, Grice deliberately brackets such questions, grounding conversational meaning in ordinary rational agency and leaving “the soul” untranslated, unnamed, and theoretically idle within his account of how interlocutors mean, imply, and understand one another. Grice: “Unlike the English, most of whom know very little about the etymology of ‘soul,’ the Italians take diachrony very seriously. As they point out, the masculine form, ‘animus’, is strictly more correct than the femine form ‘anima’ and then there’s ‘pneuma.’ In my Method in philosophical psychology, while I focus on a PSYCHO-logical theory, and PSYCHO-logical concepts – notably psychological verbs – I do not consider the very question of the ‘soul’ itself!”  Keywords: soul, animus, anima, pneuma. G. argues that what he calls ‘the divine’ is the only incorporeal being, but that every soul -- and indeed every angel -- is material.  animus, anima, pneuma. GRICEVS: Salve, GENNADIVS; audivi te de “ratione conversazionali” et “divino” loqui: Romae philosopharis, Massiliae tamen sapis; utrum animus an anima? an pneuma, quod etiam barbari spirant? GENNADIVS: Salve, GRICEVS; si anima femina est, cur tot viri eam tam anxie definiunt? Ego dico: divinum solum incorporeum; animae autem, et angeli quoque, corpuscula habent—tenuia, sed non nihila. GRICEVS: O dii! Ego in Methodo psychologiae philosophicae verba psychologica persequor, non ipsam “animam”; Itali vero diachroniam colunt ut vinum vetus, et me docent animus esse “correctior”—quasi grammatica salvabit metaphysicam. GENNADIVS: At tu, GRICEVS, salva conversatione salvasti philosophiam: si de anima nimis loquamur, ipsa effugiat; si de animis, omnes irascantur; de pneuma autem—bene: saltem aliquid spiramus dum disputamus. Since this Gennadius was from Marseille, it is most likely that he was not born Italy-born? Gens? Probably not Italy-born, yes. If the figure is Gennadius of Marseille, the standard inference is that he is associated with Massilia, that is Marseille in Roman Gaul, not with Italy. So the safest answer is that he was most likely not born in Italy. But one should keep the wording cautious, because “of Marseille” can mean resident, ecclesiastical affiliation, or principal sphere of activity, not always certified birthplace. Still, if a late antique writer is regularly styled “of Marseille,” the presumption points to Gaul rather than Italy. As for gens, we do not know any Roman gens for him in the classical prosopographical sense. That is the important distinction. By the time of Gennadius of Marseille, we are no longer securely in the old Roman naming world where one can recover gens from a nomen in the old Republican-imperial way. “Gennadius” is a Greek name, and the surviving form does not give us a Roman gentilician nomen from which to infer a gens. So there is no secure answer such as “gens X” here. The clean scholarly answer is therefore: He was probably not Italy-born, if the reference to Marseille is genuine and primary. No securely identifiable Roman gens can be assigned. The name Gennadius is Greek, not a transparent Roman nomen. A small historical nuance. Gennadius of Marseille, the late fifth-century presbyter and continuator of Jerome’s De viris illustribus, belongs to a Christian and late antique world in which the old gentilicial framework often ceases to be recoverable or relevant. So even when a person is within the Roman world politically, he may not be classifiable by gens in the old way. If you want, I can next give you a compact dictionary-style note on Gennadius of Marseille: dates, likely region, language, and why no gens can be assigned.Gennadio (a. u. c. MCC). Dicta. Roma.