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

 

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

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Lelio’. Yes. Here the gens is Laelia. The standard Roman form is Gaius Laelius. The nomen is Laelius, and that points to the gens Laelia. If you want the feminine nomen of the gens in abstract form, one can say gens Laelia. So “Lelia” in Italianized shorthand corresponds to Laelius in Latin, and the gens is Laelia. As for other members of the gens, the historically prominent ones are not many, which is why Gaio Lelio tends to dominate the name. The most famous is Gaius Laelius Sapiens, the friend of Scipio Aemilianus, usually your man here. Another important one is Gaius Laelius, often called the elder in modern discussion, father of Laelius Sapiens and friend of Scipio Africanus Major. Roman usage itself does not regularly label them “the Elder” and “the Younger” the way modern handbooks do, but the distinction is useful. You also get a Decimus Laelius, active in the late Republic, usually remembered as a tribune and associate in Caesar’s orbit. He is much less philosophically resonant, but he is a real member of the gens. There are also later imperial Laelii, but they are not generally central to the Republican philosophical or political aura of the name. If your project is doing Grice plus Roman “portico reason,” the really relevant Laelii are above all the two Gaii. A helpful way to phrase it in your register would be this: Laelius is the nomen of the gens Laelia. The name is borne most famously by Gaius Laelius Sapiens, intimate of Scipio Aemilianus, but the gens also includes his father, another Gaius Laelius associated with Scipio Africanus, and a few later Republican bearers such as Decimus Laelius. It is thus a real but not densely populated Roman gens, one whose philosophical afterlife is carried less by genealogical abundance than by the singular prestige of “Laelius Sapiens.” Two small philological cautions. If you write “Lelio” in Italian, that is fine as the Italian form of the Roman name. In Latin, however, the correct nominative is Laelius, not Lelius. If you ask “Lelia here is the gens?”, the clean classical answer is: the gens is Laelia, because the male bearer’s nomen is Laelius. And a historical caution on your prose. Some details in the supplied paragraph blur the two Laelii. Service with Scipio in the Second Punic War, Syphax, and Zama belongs to the elder Gaius Laelius, friend of Scipio Africanus Major. The title Sapiens, Panaetius, and the Scipionic circle of the younger Africanus belong to Gaius Laelius Sapiens, the son. Modern summaries often slide between them because the name repeats. So the stricter scholarly division is: Gaius Laelius, friend of Scipio Africanus Major: Second Punic War, military and political career, Zama context. Gaius Laelius Sapiens, son of the above: friend of Scipio Aemilianus, linked to the later Scipionic circle, remembered for wisdom, civic prudence, and later philosophical coloration. If useful, I can now do one of three things, still only in chat. I can give you a compact dictionary-style entry on gens Laelia and the principal Laelii. I can separate your current paragraph into what belongs to the elder Laelius and what belongs to Laelius Sapiens. Or I can draft two or three dry Speranza-style sentences explaining why “Laelius” is such a good figure for conversational reason in a Roman civic register. Or you can do that in a 100-move conversation at a public school, C., in Somerset, between G., a brilliant student, Shropshire, his classmate, and the Latin master, M. M. is introducing Laelius the elder-- and the discussion proceeds, in dry Oxonian humour, to the Sapiens, so they discuss 'vita activa' and 'vita speculativa' and how philosophy in the Ancient Roman world are entwined, with Shrosphire making the jokes, and G. focusing on the 'speculativa' and Shrosphire in the activa of the elder, and the M. looking for some Latin utterance that he can ascribe to either and having them translate and comment -- just the conversation, no preamble o ps. Thank you. M.: Very well, gentlemen, we begin with Laelius the elder, not because chronology is always wise, but because schoolmasters are sometimes forced to respect it. Gaius Laelius, friend of Scipio Africanus, soldier, envoy, political man, and therefore a standing affront to the notion that philosophy begins only when one has sat down. G.: Which is already Roman, sir. The Greek may begin by sitting under a tree. The Roman begins by being sent somewhere. Shropshire: Preferably where people are trying to kill him. It saves time. M.: Yes, Shropshire, Roman public life did have the advantage of discouraging abstraction by means of spears. Laelius the elder belongs to what later people will call the vita activa. He acts, commands, negotiates, carries news, serves the res publica. G.: And yet he is not merely a military clerk in a helmet. M.: Quite. He is a man in whom action is already judged, measured, and rendered intelligible by forms of reflection that are not yet called “academic philosophy” because the Romans had better things to do than invent departments. Shropshire: Oxford eventually solved that by inventing a sub-faculty and pretending philosophy had happened. M.: A very English triumph. Now then, the son, Laelius Sapiens, is another matter, though not an opposite one. He is remembered for wisdom, friendship, conversation, civic gravity, and association with the later Scipionic circle. There the vita speculativa comes nearer the surface, though never in the monastic sense that later ages would prefer. G.: That is the Roman peculiarity, sir. The speculative does not retire from the active but rides in the same carriage, looking faintly disapproving. Shropshire: And paying less for the horses. M.: Better than usual, Shropshire. The Roman gentleman is not invited to choose between action and thought as though selecting a pudding. He is expected to think in action and act under thought. The distinction is useful, but only if one does not turn it into a civil war. G.: So the elder Laelius represents action already under the pressure of judgment, while Sapiens represents judgment still answerable to public life. M.: Exactly. One might say that in Rome the vita activa and the vita speculativa are not enemies but badly behaved brothers. Shropshire: Which is why one of them ends in office and the other in a dialogue. M.: Let us not be glib too early. Consider this. If philosophy in the ancient Roman world is entwined with public life, that is not because Romans failed to think, but because they mistrusted thought that could not survive a senate, a camp, a lawsuit, or a dinner. G.: Which is almost Gricean, sir, if one permits the contamination. Meaning is tested in use, not merely stored in doctrine. M.: Yes, though one should avoid making every Roman into an honorary analyst. Still, the temptation is sound. Roman thought is deeply conversational in the broad sense. It is conducted through report, counsel, forensic speech, exemplum, recollection, and the management of what different hearers may properly gather. Shropshire: In short, through saying one thing and letting the audience do the dangerous part. M.: That is one way of putting it. Not the best way, but yours. Now I want a sentence. Here it is. Laelius says, or might have said, si recte sapis, in re publica etiam silentium genus sermonis est. G.: If you are wise in the right way, even silence in public life is a kind of speech. Shropshire: Which is Roman for “keep your mouth shut and they will call it statesmanship.” M.: A little coarser than the Latin deserves, but not wholly false. Translate it properly first. G.: If one has wisdom in the proper sense, even silence in public affairs is a form of discourse. M.: Good. And comment. G.: The sentence suits either Laelius, but in different registers. For the elder, silence is prudential action. Not speaking at the wrong moment is itself part of political conduct. For Sapiens, the sentence leans toward reflective discipline. Silence is not mere omission but a rationally governed contribution to the exchange. M.: Excellent. Shropshire. Shropshire: It also means the Romans had discovered that a man may say more by not saying it, provided he has enough standing for everyone else to do the work. If a fool is silent, nothing happens. If Laelius is silent, half the Senate develops an inference. M.: Very good, though one wishes you had not said “develops” as though implicature were a rash. Still, that is the essential point. Roman public language is thick with managed implication. G.: Which is why the vita activa cannot be intellectually thin. Action in Rome is soaked in interpretation. M.: Just so. And that brings us to the supposed opposition between active and speculative life. The contrast is too late if taken too cleanly. In the Roman case, the active life requires the speculative in the form of judgment, decorum, prudence, and the measured estimate of consequences. The speculative life, meanwhile, takes public character as one of its chief theatres. Shropshire: So the elder fights, the younger thinks, and both are still trying to avoid looking foolish in public. M.: That is the common human denominator, yes. But do not make avoidance of foolishness the whole of Roman philosophy, tempting though it is. G.: There is also the question, sir, whether Sapiens is really “of the Porch” in any strict doctrinal sense, or rather Romanised by the Porch. M.: Very good. One must be cautious. The Romans often borrow schools as one borrows furniture, not always to sit on it exactly as intended. Stoicism in Rome is less a syllabus than a manner of self-command, a vocabulary of duty, endurance, and reasoned posture under strain. Shropshire: Furniture from Greece, sat on by people in togas who then claim they made it themselves. M.: Precisely the sort of imperial summary I had hoped someone would not produce. Yet there it is. Let us use it carefully. The point is that Roman philosophy is entwined with Roman civic style. It is not reducible to borrowed doctrine, because its borrowed doctrine is forced to wear magistrate’s shoes. G.: So with Laelius the elder one can speak of active reason, and with Sapiens of public reflection. M.: Better still, one can say that the elder shows thought in deed, and Sapiens shows deed still visible in thought. That is why Cicero later prizes such figures. They allow philosophy to appear neither idle nor merely technical. Shropshire: Useful for us too, sir. At a public school one cannot survive on vita speculativa alone. One must occasionally run. M.: A fact of which your record in games has not furnished much proof. Shropshire: My activity has always been inward. G.: Very Roman of him. He practises the speculative life by letting others score. M.: Enough. Another sentence, then. Try this one. Non minus civitatem iuvat qui recte monet quam qui fortiter pugnat. G.: He benefits the state no less who gives sound counsel than he who fights bravely. M.: Good. Comment. G.: It is almost the formula of their conjunction. The active deed and the speculative judgment are not ranked as superior and inferior absolutely. Both are civic goods under different descriptions. Shropshire: Also very comforting for old men and schoolmasters. M.: A humane civilisation always finds uses for both. But the sentence also resists the vulgar heroics of action. The Roman world admires courage, yes, but not courage detached from counsel. G.: Which suggests that even the elder Laelius is already more than a soldier. He is intelligible as Roman precisely because action is judged by a prior measure of counsel. M.: Yes. And Sapiens, if he deserves the name, does not float above action in pure contemplation. His wisdom remains civic, forensic, advisory, social. He is not a hermit with a maxims-book. Shropshire: More like a senator with a good pause. M.: Better than you know. Roman wisdom often lies in the governed pause. That is one reason the comparison with modern conversational theory is not wholly absurd. A Roman public man speaks under pressure of uptake. He knows his words will be taken in layers. G.: Glory for the crowd, competence for the Senate, warning for himself. M.: Exactly. You have read ahead in spirit, which is the best way of reading ahead. The same utterance can perform several rational tasks because audiences are multiple and shared assumptions stratified. Shropshire: Which is why Roman speeches are so economical. One sentence, three constituencies, and a statue if one is lucky. M.: Or a prosecution if one is not. The danger sharpened the style. Now tell me, both of you, why this matters for the relation between vita activa and vita speculativa. G.: Because if public utterance itself requires reflective calibration, then the active life is never merely active. It is saturated with judgment about relevance, audience, timing, and implication. Shropshire: And because the speculative life, if it means anything Roman, cannot hide in a study and write little books against the weather. It must answer to public action, or at least advise it before it goes wrong. M.: Very good. Between you, a thought has occurred. That is the best one may hope for before lunch. Now another Latin line, and this time I want a sharper distinction. Sapientis est videre quid sit dicendum; politici, quando. G.: It is the part of the wise man to see what ought to be said; of the statesman, when. Shropshire: And of the schoolboy, to say neither. M.: A charming self-portrait. Now, who gets which half? G.: Sapiens receives the first naturally, but not exclusively. To see what ought to be said belongs to judgment, discrimination, conceptual grasp. The elder Laelius receives the second more naturally, because timing is the heart of political action. M.: And yet? G.: And yet each half implies the other. One cannot know what ought to be said without some sense of occasion, and one cannot know when to speak without some grasp of what the speech ought to do. M.: Excellent. Shropshire. Shropshire: The line also proves the Romans had no patience with pure speculation. A wise man who knows what to say but not when to say it becomes a nuisance. A politician who knows when to speak but not what to say becomes a minister. M.: Your cynicism remains under-educated, but occasionally serviceable. The line is useful because it shows the Roman instinct to split functions only in order to reunite them under practice. G.: Which is perhaps why the father and son are such a good pair. The elder embodies the pressure of deed, the younger the authority of reflective measure, but the Roman tradition refuses to let them drift apart as abstract types. M.: Yes. That is exactly the point. They become exemplary, not because one is merely active and the other merely speculative, but because each reveals what the other lacks if isolated. Shropshire: So the elder without Sapiens becomes a successful barbarian, and Sapiens without the elder becomes a Greek after dinner. M.: Brutal, but memorable. Keep it in your notebook and improve it before using it against civilisation. Now, one last matter. Why does philosophy in ancient Rome appear entwined with friendship? G.: Because much Roman reflection is mediated by counsel among equals, or near-equals. Friendship provides the conversational setting in which judgment can be both frank and decorous. M.: Good. Shropshire. Shropshire: Also because one can tell a friend things one would never risk in public unless one wished to be misquoted by descendants. M.: Very true. Roman philosophy is often social before it is scholastic. It arises in advice, recollection, mutual correction, and the management of public and private selves. Friendship is one of its chief institutions. G.: Which again joins the active and the speculative. Friends in Rome are not merely sentimental accessories. They are media of judgment. M.: Precisely. And that is why Laelius matters so much. Whether elder or Sapiens, he stands where thought becomes socially habitable and action intellectually answerable. He is not merely a name in a prosopography. He is a type of Roman reason. Shropshire: A type with friends, offices, campaigns, and pauses. Very inconvenient for later philosophers. M.: The ancients are often inconvenient because they had not yet learnt to specialise themselves into harmlessness. Very well. Write this down. Laelius, elder and Sapiens alike, teaches that in Rome the good life was not divided cleanly between deed and thought, because public action already required reflection and reflection remained answerable to public life. G.: Dry enough for the examination, sir. M.: Dry enough for Somerset, which is as much as one can decently ask. Shropshire: And if we forget it? M.: Then I shall remind you in Latin, which is the only civilised form of revenge. G.: Sir, may I add one gloss? M.: Briefly. Brevity is one of the few virtues left to schools. G.: Laelius also shows that Roman philosophy is not merely what Romans read, but how Romans speak under obligation. M.: Excellent. Add it. Shropshire, can you improve the sentence without ruining it? Shropshire: Only by saying that obligation is what stops conversation becoming English. M.: Go to the bottom of the class, which in your case is less a position than a habit.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Lelio: la ragione conversazionale al portico romano.  Gaio Lelio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale al portico romano. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, accountable inference from what is said to what is meant, driven by cooperative expectations that speakers can exploit (and hearers can justify) without needing to state everything explicitly. Laelius Sapiens, as a Roman “man of the Porch” in the Scipionic milieu, illustrates a different but closely related governance of meaning: public speech and political reporting in Rome is a high-stakes practice where one often must speak in ways that let different audiences draw different, yet controllable, conclusions. When Laelius says something like “Carthage was taken in a single day,” the bare assertion is historical, but the uptake varies—glory for the crowd, logistical competence for the Senate, and a reminder of continuing duty for the speaker himself—so the moral-political point is carried by what the utterance invites each hearer to supply rather than by what is spelled out. Compared with Grice, this shows implicature operating not as a private cleverness but as a civic instrument: Laelius relies on shared Roman background assumptions (virtus, labor, disciplina, decorum) to make his minimal words do maximal work, much as Grice’s maxims predict speakers will do when they aim to be efficient and understood. The contrast is that Grice offers an explicit analytic model of how such inferences are warranted and cancellable in conversation, whereas Laelius exemplifies a culturally entrenched practice in which “portico reason” is as much prudential and political as it is cooperative, and where understatement and strategic reticence are not deviations from rationality but part of the very rational style by which an educated Roman manages what different audiences are entitled to conclude. Grice: “It must be remembered that when I started the serious study of philosophy at Oxford, it was through the classics. Clifton, my alma mater, would certainly have found it odd to offer a pupil a scholarship in philosophy – but ‘a classical scholarship’ was ‘okay,’ as the Americans put it – in terms of societal norms. Of course, I never met philosophy well into my fifth term in the classics! But once I did, Lelio was second nature to me!” Ha fama soprattutto per l’intima amicizia che lo lega all’Africano Minore. Conosce i tre filosofi inviati a Roma, ma e attirato principalmente da Diogene, del Portico. In seguito L. ha rapporto con Panezio e ne diffuse la dottrina nell’aristocrazia romana.Come legato di Scipione, C. L. partecipa alla guerra contro i punici e si distinge nell’assedio di Cartagine, ottenendo in premio la pretura. Appartenne agl’auguri è diviene console. Nelle lotte civili determinate dall'azione di Tiberio GRACCO, L. si schiera contro questo e i suoi fautori. E  ammirato, se non come oratore, come uomo politico, e dove il soprannome di "sapiente" datogli dall’aristocrazia, al suo atteggiamento politico più che ad altro. Console della repubblica romana. Filosofo del portico, politico e militare romano. E uno dei migliori amici e più stretti collaboratori di Publio Cornelio SCIPIONE Africano, che segue durante la guerra punica come prefetto della flotta, legato e questore.  Si distingue particolarmente nella conquista di Cartagine e in seguito, nella campagna contro Siface e nella decisiva battaglia di Zama. Dopo un viaggio di XXXVII giorni, partito da Tarraco in Spagna, in seguito alla presa di Carthago, raggiunse a Roma. Quando entra in città insieme ad una grande schiera di prigionieri attira l'attenzione del popolo che si riversa lungo le strade al suo passaggio. Il giorno seguente venne ricevuto in senato, dove racconta che Cartagine e presa in una sol giorno. GRICEVS Salvē, LELI! In Porticū tuō me quasi “classicā stipendiāriā” rursus esse sentio: philosophia enim mihi quīntō demum terminō apparuit—tam serō ut etiam boves Vadī Boum me praeterīverint. LAELIVS Salvē, GRICEV. Nōlī bovēs accusāre: illī saltem sciunt quō eant. Tu autem, cum dīcis “tam serō,” implicās—nisi fallor—te iam tum sapientem fuisse, sed per modestiam latuīsse. GRICEVS Rectē capis: dīcō “serō” ut audītōrēs putent me tardum; deinde ipsī inferant me callidum—haec est mea parva fraus, maximē cooperātīva. Sed tū, “Sapiēns” dictus, numquamne in Senātū sententiam dedistī ut aliud significārēs? LAELIVS Saepe: “Cartāgō capta est ūnō diē,” dīxī; populus audīvit gloriam, senātus audīvit labōrem, ego audīvī me crastinō rursus in officiō futūrum. Ita fit: in Rōmā etiam vōx triumphālis est tantum conversātiō cum galeā. Lelia here is the gens? Other members of this gens? Lelio, Gaio (a. u. c. DCVIII). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Leoni: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale  il vincolo mi fa libero.  Bruno Leoni (Ancona, Marche): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale  il vincolo mi fa libero. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a form of rational freedom exercised under self-adopted norms: a speaker is not compelled by convention alone, but (as a rational agent) chooses to abide by cooperative constraints, and the hearer correspondingly infers what is meant because it would be reasonable to do so given those freely accepted constraints. Leoni’s liberalism, by contrast, is a theory of freedom under rules at the institutional level: private property, market coordination, and the rule of law are not mere constraints but enabling structures—bindings that make responsible agency possible, the sense captured by the slogan you cite, that the bond makes one free. Put together, they highlight two parallel “normativities”: Grice’s is micro-normativity of conversation (how voluntary adherence to maxims makes indirect meaning accountable, cancellable, and criticizable), while Leoni’s is macro-normativity of legal order (how voluntarily accepted general rules make social cooperation possible without central command). In a Gricean idiom, Leoni’s “vincolo” functions like the cooperative principle itself: not a police constraint but a rational presupposition one adopts because it is the condition of mutually beneficial interaction; and in a Leonian idiom, Grice’s implicature looks like a miniature market in reasons, where speakers trade on shared expectations and listeners “price in” what is unsaid. The main contrast is that Grice’s freedom is exercised primarily in intention and communicative responsibility—one can always defect, be unhelpful, or speak with ill will—whereas Leoni’s freedom is exercised in choosing and sustaining the legal framework that makes peaceful coordination possible in the first place; but the shared insight is the same: genuine liberty is not the absence of norms, it is the rational capacity to live under norms one can, in principle, justify, revise, and accept as one’s own. Grice: “It’s funny that while one of my pupils – Flew – and many members of Austin’s Play Group – Thomson, Pears, and what have you – were interested in ‘if I can’ as a wedge to imply the freedom of the will, I only realised how important ‘freiheit’ was when I elaborated on the basis for such things as my principle of conversational helpfulness. My idea of freedom developed not along the lines of Aristotle or Epitteto – his idea of the semi-free will—but that of Kant, and Hegel. My conversational imperative, or command, or commandment, is FREELY adopted by a RATIONAL AGENT. Indeed, it wouldn’t be a matter of rationality if such a principle were NOT adopted freely. “My lips are sealed” is the utterance I utter to refute Kant on the decalogogical category, ‘Thou shalt not give false testimony.” Of course such things are defeasbible. They ARE the things a decent chap should do – but they are the things that a chap – see my ‘Ill-will’ – may decide NOT to do – he would still be a chap, if not a decent one! – On occasion I refer to the ‘ordinary chap,’ not the ‘decent chap,’ until I gave a seminar on ‘Decency’!” In my linguistic botany on freedom I consider ‘liberal’ and ‘liberated’, and SPERANZA has spoken of meaning liberalism to echo Bennett’s meaning-nominalism – so there’s that! L. is interested in the libero- root that we find in ‘liberal’ and ‘liberated,’ and I do use ‘liberated – from nature’s constraints – in my pirotological progression of action, from the free-moving, free-wheeling, phototropic, and animal freedom, and even the action where one more or less freely sets a goal to pursue. But, like L., I make a fine distinction between ‘libero’ e ‘spontaneo’ or autonomo. implicatura, freedom, il concetto di ‘freedom’ in Grice e il liberalism italiano, il concetto di Freiheit in Kant e la tradizione liberale, Croce, Enaudi, il partito liberale italiano, partito nazionale fascista, protezionismo, fascismo, storia d’italia, storia del liberalismo italiano, libero e vincolato, libero e fozato, libero e spontaneo. From Grice’s Diary: “30 Aug 1939, Oxford. I have been reading Leoni’s piece on Vaihinger’s Als Ob again, and it is oddly bracing to see an Italian mind take a German title as if it were simply part of the furniture. The phrase itself is the philosopher’s hinge: it turns description into a policy, a way of proceeding without claiming too much. We live, almost shamelessly, as if words had stable edges, as if inference were always decent, as if the world would keep faith with our expectations; and now, with the wireless full of ultimatums and the papers thick with that peculiar calm that precedes an explosion, it is difficult to keep the “as if” from sounding like superstition. War seems inevitable. England may be in it within days. Italy, I suspect, will arrive later, with the special Italian talent for turning lateness into posture; and yet even that “later” will be early enough to catch the philosophers mid-sentence. Leoni’s war, if it comes in the Italian way, will still come in time to rearrange the lives of men who thought they were merely rearranging arguments. I find myself noting the dates as if they were footnotes to a paper: if Britain declares war on Germany on 3 September 1939, and if Italy follows by declaring war on Britain and France on 10 June 1940, then there is an unsettling triviality in the thought that the second date will still precede the appearance of my “Personal Identity” in Mind (if it ever appears at all). One writes as if publication were the natural telos of thinking; history replies by treating publication as an indulgence granted between interruptions. Perhaps that is the real lesson of Als Ob at this moment: not that we may pretend, but that we cannot help pretending—continuing to plan seminars and polish distinctions as if the world were not about to make the grossest distinction of all.” Grice: Caro Leoni, mi affascina la riflessione sul vincolo che rende libero! In Inghilterra, spesso discutiamo di libertà come assenza di restrizioni, ma qui sembra che il vincolo sia condizione della vera libertà. Come definirebbe il rapporto tra regola e libertà? Leoni: Caro Grice, grazie! Per me, la libertà non è semplicemente spontaneità, ma la possibilità di scegliere razionalmente anche entro vincoli. Un vincolo liberamente accettato è ciò che permette all’agente razionale di essere davvero libero, perché solo così si dà senso alle azioni e ai valori. Grice: Interessante, Leoni! Mi ricorda la libertà secondo Kant, dove l’imperativo morale viene adottato proprio perché scelto dal soggetto razionale. Nel mio lavoro sulla conversazione, anche le regole linguistiche sono seguite liberamente: nessuno è costretto, ma tutti partecipano volontariamente. Concorda che la libertà si manifesta anche nell’agire linguistico? Leoni: Assolutamente, caro Grice! Proprio nella lingua vedo il vincolo come fonte di creatività: seguendo regole condivise, siamo liberi di comunicare, esprimerci e persino innovare. La libertà nasce dalla responsabilità di aderire a principi scelti, e questo vale sia per la morale sia per il linguaggio. Il vincolo, se volontario e ragionato, ci fa davvero liberi! Leoni, Bruno (1938). Aspetti e problemi della “Philosophie des Als Ob”. Rivista di Filosofia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Leoni: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale  Pierleoni Leoni (Spoleto, Perugia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes implicature a rational, accountable inference from what is said to what is meant, under cooperative expectations that allow hearers to reconstruct intentions and to challenge or cancel the inferred content. Pierleone Leoni (Pierleone da Spoleto, c. 1445–1492), the Renaissance physician-philosopher and astrologer in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle, provides a darker, historically grounded counterpoint: his fate turns on how quickly a community can convert thin evidence into a lethal “implicature” (from physician-at-bedside to poisoner) when trust collapses and political panic takes over. Read Griceanly, the episode is a case of catastrophic pragmatic drift: the same facts—Lorenzo dies, the doctor is present, astrological counsel circulates—can license wildly different inferences depending on background assumptions, and those assumptions were anything but “cooperative” in Florence in April 1492; the result is that what counts as the relevant explanation is socially selected rather than rationally compelled. Where Grice stresses that implicatures are, in principle, calculable and cancellable within a shared rational practice, Pierleone’s story shows an environment in which cancellation is impossible (no clarifying clause can compete with factional suspicion), and where conversational reason is replaced by forensic rumor masquerading as inference. This makes Leoni a vivid foil for Grice: it highlights both the dependence of implicature on stable common ground and the fragility of that ground, because once conversational benevolence and institutional safeguards vanish, “what is inferred” stops being a disciplined enrichment of meaning and becomes a weapon—an accusation produced by the same human tendency to go beyond what is said, but no longer governed by the norms that, for Grice, make such going-beyond rational and answerable.Grice: “In Italy, in those days, it was very common for a philosopher to be called in the singular – Leone – or in the plural – L.  In England, and specifically Oxford, we don’t have that problem with Occam! In Italy, they like ‘renaissance men,’ but there’s a peril in that: Leoni was a philosopher and a physician (to Medici) – when he died, Medici did, L. was accused of malpractice (poisoning), strangled to death, and thrown into a ditch. Categorie: philosophers in ditch – Thales, L..” Di famiglia aristocratica, studia a Roma. Insegna a Padova e Pisa.  E qui che ha modo di entrare in contatto con la cerchia di filosofi che gravitano attorno a Lorenzo de’ Medici, a Firenze. Ha contatti e una fitta corrispondenza con Ficino e Pico. Venne considerato uno dei più valenti filosofi. I più illustri personaggi e sovrani dell'epoca, come il duca di Calabria, il re di Napoli, Ludovico il Moro, forse anche IInnocenzo, richiedeno le sue cure, tanto che divenne il medico personale dello stesso Lorenzo de Medici.  All'indomani della morte di Lorenzo de Medici venne ingiustamente sospettato di essere stato il responsabile del suo avvelenamento, e venne quindi strangolato e gettato in un pozzo il giorno seguente. Diverse fonti dell'epoca  sostengono che il mandante dell'uccisione di L. e il figlio di Lorenzo, Piero il Fatuo. F. Bacchelli, riferimenti in.  Dagli Annali di Mugnoni da Trevi, trascriz. Pirri (Estratto dall'Archivio per la Storia Ecclesiastica dell'Umbria. Era adpresso del dicto Lorenzo uno excellentissimo et famosissimo medico de grandissima scientia in FILOSOFIA, nominato magistro Pierleone de leonardo da Spolitj, reputato el più singulare valente homo in dicte scientie che ogie dì viva. E questo uomo in tanto prezzo adpresso del dicto Lorenzo che, senza quisto clarissimo doctore, non podiva stare. E conducto ad Pisa ad legere, ha mille ducatj de provisione per anno: poj e conducto ad Padova, ha mille et ducento ducatj per anno. Ad Pisa stecte annj ad legere e similemente ad Padova. Grice: Caro Leoni, in Italia vi chiamano al singolare o al plurale, ma l’implicatura resta la stessa: parlare bene può salvarti la reputazione, non sempre il collo. Leoni: Ah Grice, io praticavo la ragione conversazionale e la medicina, ma qualcuno ha inferito veleno dove c’era solo filosofia applicata. Grice: Vedi, a Oxford questo si sarebbe cancellato con un’adeguata clausola di chiarimento, non con una corda e un pozzo. Leoni: Appunto, morale implicata: meglio una conversazione cooperativa che una cattiva inferenza rinascimentale. Leoni, Pierleoni (1480). Lectiones. Pisa.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Leopardi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del favoloso e fascista.  Giacomo Leopardi (Recanati, Macerata, Marche): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del favoloso e fascista. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes implicature a disciplined, inferential phenomenon: speakers can mean more than they say because hearers assume cooperation and can rationally reconstruct why a particular wording was chosen, with the implied content remaining in principle cancellable and publicly criticizable. Leopardi, especially in the Zibaldone, is a striking foil because he treats language less as a cooperative instrument for sharing reasons and more as a historically evolved constraint on thought and feeling: he is fascinated by the gap between lived experience and the names that domesticate it, and he often implies that the deepest human relations to infinity, nature, and desire are damaged the moment they are forced into clear, regular signs. This produces a different “logic” of implication: where Gricean implicature is typically a calculable enrichment of what is said (say little, mean more, and be answerable for it), Leopardi’s most characteristic effect is to make what is not said—silence, indeterminacy, the “infinite silences”—carry the weight, as if the truest content is precisely what cannot be rendered without loss. In Gricean terms, Leopardi’s poetic and philosophical practice systematically pressures the maxim of manner: obscurity and indirectness are not conversational defects but the point, because they preserve the sense of an ungraspable remainder that clarity would falsify. Yet the comparison also reveals continuity: Leopardi’s critique of “universal language” projects and his emphasis on precision and regularity as purchased at the cost of expressive life can be read as a warning that purely code-like semantics will never account for the human work done by tone, omission, and shared background—exactly the domain where Grice locates conversational meaning. So Leopardi helps sharpen Grice’s distinction between mere signification and lived speaker-meaning: Grice offers the rules by which rational agents can responsibly get from words to intended content, while Leopardi insists that even perfect rules leave an existential residue, making implicature not only a tool of cooperation but also, at its limits, a symptom of what language cannot fully say. Grice: “Oddly, L.’s philosophical semantics is negative; admittedly, he is wedded to the Fido-‘Fido’ theory of meaning, so he thinks, pretty much like the first Vitters, that language is a prison. Man has a need for ‘non-linguistic thought,’ to think without naming – without conceptualizing! The oddest philosophy of language for Italy’s greatest poet, one would first think! One could write a whole dissertation on L.’s implicata – not I. My favourite expression would be ‘gli infiniti silenzi’”. While there is a philosophical griceianism, seeing that my theories were stolen by non-philosophers, there is ‘leopardismo filosofico,’ seeing that he wasn’t one!” Essential Italian philosopher, and founder of a whole movement, ‘leopardismo.’ Anche L. nello Zibaldone de’ pensieri partecipa al dibattito sulla lingua universale.  Sostenne che a rendere internazionale una lingua non è la potenza della nazione che la parla o la diffusione dei suoi domini, e nemmeno il suo prestigio letterario: se così fosse la lingua italiana, che per molto tempo fu intesa e letta nelle corti di tutta Europa e oltre, sarebbe assurta a lingua  utilizzata da più nazioni, ma così non è stato.L. spiega che invece ciò che fa di una lingua universale è un aspetto ad essa intrinseco, ovvero la sua capacità di essere geometrica e regolare e di possedere una struttura semplice e ideale. Esattezza, precisione, chiarezza i suoi punti costitutivi fondamentali. Quello poi che dice che una lingua strettamente universale dove di sua natura essere anzi un’ombra di lingua che lingua propria, maggiormente anzi esattamente conviene a quella lingua caratteristica proposta fra gl’altri dal nostro SOAVE, la qual lingua o maniera di segni non avrebbe a rappresentar le parole, ma l’idee, bensì alcune delle inflessioni d'esse parole, come quelle de' verbi, ma piuttosto come inflessioni o modificazioni delle idee che delle parole, e senza rapporto a niun suono pronunziato, né significazione e dinotazione alcune di esso. il favoloso, gl’usi di L. nella filosofia italiana. Grice: Caro Leopardi, mi viene in mente quella volta in cui Austin, con la sua solita ironia, chiese alla sala quale fosse il passo poetico più incomprensibile mai scritto! Mi domando: c’è un tuo verso che, secondo te, potrebbe rivaleggiare con i misteri più oscuri della poesia? Sarebbe divertente scoprire quale scegli! Leopardi: Ah, Grice, che domanda deliziosa! Se dovessi scegliere, forse proporrei proprio “Io quella/ vòlta ch’io vidi il tuo volto, o Natura, non vidi/ che una maschera.” Chissà quanti, a scuola, si saranno grattati la testa davanti a quell’enigma… Ma, sotto sotto, in fondo mi diverto anch’io a nascondere un po’ il senso! Grice: Fantastico! Immagino Austin che, sentendo quel verso, avrebbe sorriso sornione e proposto subito un seminario sul significato della “maschera” della Natura. Forse avrebbe anche sostenuto che la vera poesia consiste nel dire molto… facendo finta di non dire nulla! Leopardi: Ecco, caro Grice, vedi che parli da poeta anche tu! A volte il bello sta proprio nel gioco: un po’ di nebbia, un tocco di mistero, e la conversazione si accende. In fondo, chi capisce tutto subito… si perde il gusto della scoperta! Meglio sorridere insieme davanti all’incomprensibile! Leopardi, Giacomo (1818). Appunti di filosofia. Bologna: Marsigli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Leopardi: l’implicatura conversazionale dell’1150.  Monaldo Leopardi (Recanati, Macerata, Marche): l’implicatura conversazionale dell’1150. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an inferential achievement under cooperative norms: a hearer supplies what is meant beyond what is said because the speaker can be presumed to be speaking with a point, and the resulting inference is in principle criticizable, cancellable, and attributable to rational agency rather than to mere atmosphere. Monaldo Leopardi is a revealing foil because his relation to “meaning beyond the literal” is not primarily conversational but familial, institutional, and ideological: he builds the material conditions of his son’s thought (the famous library at Recanati) while resisting the conclusions that library helped generate, and after Giacomo’s death he appears to manage public interpretation by implying a reconciliation (a deathbed return to Catholic faith) that many historians treat as wishful reconstruction rather than evidence. Compared to Grice, this is implicature in a thicker, socially consequential sense: not a locally calculable inference from a single utterance, but a strategic shaping of what audiences are permitted to conclude about a life, where silence, selective emphasis, and the paternal voice function as cues that guide interpretation. In Gricean terms, Monaldo’s discourse invites hearers to fill gaps in ways that serve a conservative moral narrative, but the cooperative presumption is unstable because the audience may suspect motivated reasoning, turning the “implicature” into a site of contest rather than shared uptake. The contrast therefore highlights Grice’s idealization: conversational reason works smoothly when speakers share commitments to candour and relevance, whereas the Leopardi case shows how powerful background asymmetries (father versus son, orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, private grief versus public reputation) can make what is left unsaid function less like cooperative economy and more like ideological management, with the resulting inferences depending as much on authority, memory, and rivalry as on any maxim-guided calculation. Grice: “Apparently, unlike in Scotland, it is very rare in Italy that a philosopher is father to another philosopher, as James Mill was father to Mill – the closest you get in Italy is L., the philosopher, who was the father of a poet, L., who some deem ‘philosophical’ in spirit – as Austin said Donne was philosophical! We don’t have at Oxford a ‘chip off the old block’ as they have in Recanati!” L.’s reflections on his  after his son’s death are marked by a tragic disconnect. While he deeply mourned the man, he remains ideologically opposed to him. Ideological Denial: A staunch ultra-conservative and papal loyalist, L. struggled to reconcile his son's fame with his "atheistic" and "pessimistic" philosophy. L. often chooses to believe, and publicly suggests, that the son had returned to the Catholic faith on his death-bed, a claim largely dismissed by historians and his son’s close friend RANIERI . Literary Rivalry and Legacy: L.had originally groomed his son to be a great Christian apologist. After his son’s death, L. continues his own reactionary writing, but he remains in his son's shadow, often viewing Giacomo’s philosophical "errors" as a personal and religious failure. Paternal Grief vs. Principles: Despite their sharp intellectual rift, Monaldo’s personal writings reveal a father’s genuine grief. He had provided the very library where Giacomo formed his "scandalous" ideas, creating a relationship of both "complicity and competition" that haunted L.  For further details on their relationship, you can explore the son’s biography provided by Britannica.Importante esponente del pensiero controrivoluzionario e padre di L.. L., targa commemorativa apposta sui portici di piazza Leopardi a Recanati Figlio primogenito del conte Giacomo e di Virginia dei marchesi Mosca, nacque in una delle famiglie più preminenti di Recanati. Rimasto a quattro anni orfano del padre, crebbe con la madre. 1150, the coding of a name, the philosophical L., the L. fascista, interpretazione fascista da GENTILE dell’ultra-filosofia di L., l’ultrafilosofia di L., padre. Grice had arranged the room as one arranges a trap one means to deny having set: chair for the pupil, chair for himself, the small table just close enough to make the books look unavoidable, and on top, with the innocent air of an “illustration,” the 1803 volume: Opere del conte Monaldo Leopardi Gonfaloniere da Recanati. Vol. I. He had even, for once, actually read the tragedy, which made him feel faintly continental and therefore faintly guilty. Flew came in briskly, already wearing that expression of being eager to disagree with something, preferably before it had finished saying what it was. Sit down, Flew, Grice said. Yes, sir. Grice tapped the book with a finger. You have been reading poetry, Flew. I love poetry too, sir, Flew said promptly, because pleasing one’s tutor is what an undergraduate does before he learns to despise his tutor. I’ve learned a few couplets by the poet of the Marche. Grice looked at him as if Flew had just walked, confidently, into the wrong seminar. This is the father, not the son. Flew blinked, then recovered with admirable speed, as if recovery were an Oxford virtue. That sounds fascinating, sir. Grice let the silence sit just long enough to make the sentence feel earned. It is only fascinating if you stop trying to be fascinating, he said. The point is not that you have named a county correctly. The point is that you have mistaken a tragedy for an idyll. Flew leaned forward. You mean Monaldo is not Giacomo. I mean, Grice said, that if you hear Leopardi and immediately think you have a right to despair, you have been listening to the wrong person. Monaldo’s despair is administrative. He publishes “Opere. Vol. I.” at twenty-six, with the confidence of a man who is both a count and a municipal officer. Gonfaloniere, Flew said, as if it were a logical operator. Precisely, Grice said. A banner-bearer. A man whose job-title already implies a flag, and hence a public. You should distrust any author who announces himself under a banner and then calls his first pamphlet “Opere.” Flew smiled in the hopeful way. So it’s pretentious, sir. Pretentious is an English word for a perfectly normal Italian fact, Grice said. What interests me is that his tragedy is called Montezuma. Flew said Montezuma as if tasting it. It sounds… American. It sounds, Grice said, like a young man desperate to prove he is not confined to Greece and Rome, while also proving, by the very form he chooses, that he cannot escape them. Tragedy is the most classical thing you can do while trying not to sound classical. Flew glanced at the book. Is it actually a tragedy in the Greek sense? In the sense in which an Oxonian uses “in the Greek sense,” Grice said: yes and no. No chorus that functions as a civic mind. No Athenian audience. No Dionysia. But the skeleton is borrowed. Five acts, dignified speeches, moral rhetoric, and a hero who is made to carry more weight than any human being should be asked to carry without comic relief. Flew hesitated. So it’s a failure? Grice’s eyebrows rose. Flew had offered him the standard verdict, the biographer’s verdict, the safe verdict. A failure, Grice said, is a word used by people who have not tried. The interesting question is: what is he trying to do, and what does he succeed in doing despite himself. Flew looked relieved. There was something to analyse. He’s trying to make an Aztec emperor behave like Agamemnon, Flew said. Good, Grice said. Now say it without sounding as if you had read it in a guidebook. Flew tried again. He’s importing the heroic type into the wrong latitude. Better, Grice said. And what do you get when you import the heroic type? You get a man who speaks in declamations. And who speaks like that, Grice said, in ordinary life? Nobody, sir. Exactly. Yet tragedy, like logic, is an art of making nobody speak so that everybody can overhear and learn something about themselves. The Greeks did it by chorus. Monaldo does it by sheer self-confidence. Flew looked at the title-page again. Why choose Montezuma? Because “Montezuma” is already a signal, Grice said. It says: I am not merely doing the Romans again. It also says: I have read something beyond Livy. It is an advertisement of worldliness. And it is, simultaneously, a confession of provinciality, because he only knows how to make the foreign intelligible by making it classical. Flew said, cautiously: So the Aztec court becomes a Roman senate? Or a Greek palace, Grice said. Whichever you prefer. The point is that the speech-acts remain Mediterranean. The content changes costumes. You have an emperor speaking as if he had read Seneca. Which, if you are charitable, is an achievement: he has made the New World speak the Old World’s language. Flew brightened. So it’s successful. Successful in a very Oxonian way, Grice said. It shows you that Oxford cannot help relating everything to the classics, and that Monaldo cannot either. He thinks he is escaping by choosing Mexico. In fact he is proving that his only tools are the classical ones. Flew said: But that makes it derivative. Derivative, Grice said, is what you call something when you want to sound modern. The Greeks derived too; they just had the good sense to call it tradition. The question is whether Monaldo’s derivation is merely imitation or a test-case. A test-case? Yes, Grice said. Suppose you take the tragic form and feed it an alien subject. What breaks first: the form, or your sense that the subject can bear the form? Flew thought. The subject becomes moralised. Precisely. The foreign becomes exemplary. Montezuma stops being a particular person and becomes “the tragic ruler.” That is why the play can be read by an Italian count in Recanati without needing to know anything about Mexico beyond the name. Flew said: So Monaldo is using Montezuma as a vehicle for European political anxieties? Grice looked pleased and tried not to appear so. You are learning, Flew. Tragedy is where politics pretends to be fate. And a young conservative in a revolutionary century may prefer to stage his politics at a safe distance: far enough away to seem historical, and therefore inevitable. Flew nodded. So the “Indian-American” flavour is protective. Protective and decorative, Grice said. Like putting Latin on a title-page. It makes the thing look universal. Flew said, daringly: It’s like Peano’s Latinulus. Grice allowed himself a small smile. Yes. Like Latinulus. A purified medium that gives you the illusion that you have escaped the vulgarities of ordinary speech. Except tragedy is the opposite of purification: it is ordinary passions elevated into ceremonial language. Flew shifted, thinking of his own subject. But sir, where does this leave logic? Grice’s smile became the dry one. Logic, Flew, is tragedy for people who do not like emotion. It takes the Greek appetite for form and removes the blood. Which is why you must remember that even the most formal apparatus begins in ordinary language. Aristotle’s logic begins as an analysis of how we speak—what we say, what follows, what we deny, what we concede. Not as an algebraic hobby. Flew, eager, said: So Monaldo’s tragedy is a reminder that form without ordinary language becomes empty. No, Grice said. It is a reminder that ordinary language without form becomes your essays. Flew laughed too loudly, then corrected himself into a smaller laugh. Grice went on, enjoying the run. Now, compare Montezuma to the Graeco-Roman type. Not “compare” in the essay sense—compare in the sense of asking what is essential. The essential is the fall, Flew said. The reversal. Peripeteia, Grice said, approving the Greek. And what else? Recognition. Anagnorisis. Good. Now tell me: does Monaldo give recognition, or does he give proclamation? Flew hesitated. He gives proclamation. Yes. The hero announces. He does not discover. That is the young man’s vice: he prefers to tell you what the moral is rather than let the action show it. The Greeks, when they were good, let the action implicate. Monaldo, being a gonfaloniere, prefers explicit banners. Flew said, dutifully: So he violates your maxim of manner. He violates my maxim of taste, Grice said. Manner is too kind. But yes—he is unperspicuous in the wrong way: not mysterious, merely windy. Flew couldn’t resist: Vitium loquelae. Vitium loquentis, Grice corrected. The vice is in the speaker. Flew nodded, then, trying again to please: Still, sir, it’s impressive for a man in his twenties. Grice looked at him, and this time the trap was sprung gently. It is impressive for a count in his twenties to publish “Opere. Vol. I.” It is less impressive for a tragedian in his twenties to believe that calling a play Montezuma is enough to make it new. Flew said: But it is new, in a way. In the way Oxford is new when it adds a fresh optional paper, Grice said. It is new by label, not by method. Yet it is not nothing. It shows you the reach of the classical template: it can colonise Mexico. Flew smiled. Oxford style imperialism, sir? Exactly. And since you like disagreeing, disagree with this: biographers call Montezuma a failure because it is not Giacomo. But the father’s success is precisely that he is not the son. He is a civic man writing a civic tragedy, and he wants the world to behave as if it were governable. Flew’s eyes narrowed. So the tragedy is really about governance. About governance, about the fragility of rule, about the moral theatre of power. And, above all, about the persistent European habit of requiring even the New World to speak in classical forms before we will treat it as serious. Flew said, carefully: And your point, sir, is that we do the same in philosophy. My point, Grice said, is that you will do the same in your next essay unless you stop trying to sound like a tragedy and start trying to sound like a man who means something and expects to be understood. Flew stood, gathering his papers, grateful to have been corrected and irritated in equal measure. Thank you, sir. Grice, as Flew reached the door, added the last small twist, just loud enough to be heard. And next time you quote the poet of the Marche, make sure you know which Leopardi is doing the speaking.Grice: Caro Leopardi, devo confessarti che molti qui in Inghilterra ammirano il tuo celebre figlio Giacomo, ma per quanto mi riguarda, il mio vero uomo è Monaldo! Una scelta che spesso ha generato amichevoli polemiche al mio college, il Vadum Boum, dove finivano sempre per affluire o i barbari o le mode passeggere! Leopardi (Monaldo): Ah, Grice, ti ringrazio per questa preferenza così insolita! Giacomo ha conquistato fama tra gli intellettuali, ma io resto fedele ai miei princìpi, anche se a volte mi ritrovo nel suo ombra. Forse la vera polemica nasce proprio dalla dialettica tra padre e figlio, tra tradizione e innovazione. Grice: È proprio questa dialettica che mi affascina! Vedo in te un esempio della lotta tra il conservatorismo papale e l’irrompere di idee nuove, quasi un rapporto di complicità e competizione. D’altronde, hai fornito a Giacomo la sua biblioteca, ma hai combattuto i suoi "errori" filosofici con grande passione. Leopardi (Monaldo): Giacomo era destinato, secondo i miei progetti, a essere un apologeta cristiano, ma la sua strada lo ha portato altrove. Il mio dolore paterno non cancella il mio dissenso, anzi, lo rende più acuto. Eppure, caro Grice, forse proprio da questa tensione nasce la vera ricchezza: senza polemica, che gusto avrebbe la conversazione? Leopardi, Monaldo (1803). Montezeuma. Macerata.