H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: S 2

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Spaveta – Ossia: Grice e Spaventa: la ragione conversazionale e l’origine italico dello spirito filosofico. Note sugl’Studi sull’etica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Bertrando Spaventa (Bomba, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale e l’origine italico dello spirito filosofico. In comparing Grice with Spaventa, a shared concern emerges with reason as something exercised in and through form, rather than imposed as a finished doctrine, but their points of departure and emphases diverge in telling ways. Spaventa’s notion of ragione conversazionale belongs to a historicist and idealist framework in which reason unfolds dialogically across epochs, nations, and traditions: philosophy advances through a circulation of ideas in which Italian thought migrates outward (to Germany) and returns transformed, reappropriated as a self-conscious, national, and political spirit. Reason, for Spaventa, is the self-creation (autoctisi) of the subject in history, achieved through dialectical confrontation with the other and ultimately oriented toward cultural and civic praxis. Grice, by contrast, strips reason of historical teleology and national destiny, relocating it at the micro-level of ordinary interaction. His theory of reason-governed conversational meaning does not describe the self-realization of Geist, but the normative expectations underwriting intelligible communication between speakers: intentions, mutual recognition, and shared principles of rational cooperation. Where Spaventa sees conversation as the large-scale movement of spirit across traditions, Grice sees it as the local, rule-governed activity by which agents make themselves intelligible here and now. Yet the affinity is real: both reject doctrinal metaphysics in favor of reason as an activity, both assign primacy to the subject as a rational agent rather than a passive bearer of truths, and both understand philosophy as inseparable from dialogue—Spaventa’s transnational and historical, Grice’s interpersonal and pragmatic. In this sense, Grice’s conversational rationality can be read as an English, analytic analogue to Spaventa’s idealist vision: a demystified, non-Hegelian account of how reason lives not in systems, but in the disciplined practice of exchange. Grice: “S. fundamentally shifted Italian philosophy by professionalizing it through a  non-doctrinal Hegelianism. His work established a template for Continental philosophy—characterized by a focus on the subject, historicism, and the political application of dialectics—that eventually paved the way for both the Left-Hegelianism of Antonio Labriola and the "Actualism" of Gentile. The "Circulation of Ideas" and Historicism Spaventa’s most influential thesis was the "circulation of Italian thought," which argued that the modern spirit of philosophy began with Italian Renaissance thinkers like Bruno and Campanella.  Nationalizing Hegel: He claimed that German Idealism (Kant, Hegel) was not foreign but rather the mature development of seeds planted by Italians. Impact: This allowed Italian philosophy to move beyond provincial Catholicism and join the European "continental" conversation, integrating historical reality with metaphysical theory.  2. Primacy of the Subject (Epistemological Shift) Moving away from rigid system-building, Spaventa reinterpreted Hegelian categories to give primacy to the thinking subject.  Subjectivity over Objectivity: He focused on the Phenomenology of Spirit as much as the Logic, emphasizing the internal process of consciousness. Autoctisis: He coined the term autoctisis (self-creation) to describe human liberty as the continuous "fashoning of oneself" through thought.  3. Direction Towards the "Left" and Political Praxis While S. served the Historical Right in parliament, his philosophical innovations provided the scaffolding for Italian Marxism and leftist continental thought:  italianita, Englishry, Englishness, English nation, the English, the English tongue, the tongue of the English, the tongue of the Anglians, the English spirit, the English ghost. Grice: A proposito, caro Spaventa, devo confessarti che l’unico Bertrando che conosco, a parte te, è Russell! Mi chiedo se anche tu, di tanto in tanto, non abbia avuto a che fare col celebre filosofo inglese, almeno idealmente... Spaventa: Grice, mi fa sorridere! In effetti, il mio spirito filosofico ha viaggiato molto, ma più che con Russell, ho preferito dialogare con Hegel e i nostri italiani, da Bruno a Campanella. Sono convinto che l’origine dello spirito filosofico sia profondamente italica, anche se il pensiero inglese conserva sempre un suo fascino. Grice: Beh, allora potremmo dire che il tuo “circulation of ideas” è proprio una conversazione transnazionale! Forse la filosofia, come il buon vino, si arricchisce passando da una terra all’altra. Ma, dimmi, ti senti più vicino all’idealismo tedesco o al genio rinascimentale italiano? Spaventa: Ottima domanda! Io credo che il vero filosofo sappia riconoscere le radici italiane nel pensiero europeo, senza rinnegare i frutti tedeschi. L’autocreatività dello spirito, come la chiamo, nasce proprio dal confronto: riflettere su sé stessi, dialogare con l’altro, e reinventarsi ogni giorno. In fondo, anche noi oggi, Grice, stiamo creando nuovi sentieri filosofici… a proposito! Spaventa, Bertrando (1844). Introduzione/Programma – Il Foglio. Napoli.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Speranza – Ossia: Grice e Speranza – implicatura ed implicatura -- filosofia italiana -- pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice,  (Albalonga). Filosofo. J. L. Speranza – implicatura ed implicatura -- filosofia italiana – pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice,  (Albalonga). Filosofo. Speranza, Ugo -- Speranza, Alessandro -- Speranza, Ettore -- Speranza, Gianni -- Speranza, Paola -- Speranza, Anna-Maria -- Speranza-Ghersi –Ghersi-Speranza, Anna-Maria -- Speranza lui speranza: luigi della --. Italian philosopher, attracted, for some reason, to Grice. Speranza knows St. John’s very well. He is the author of “Dorothea Oxoniensis.” He is a member of a number of cultivated Anglo-Italian societies, like Grice’s Playgroup. He is the custodian of Villa Grice, not far from . He works at . Cuisine is one of his hobbiesgrisottoa alla ligure, his specialty. He can be reached via Grice. Grice, “Vita ed opinion di ,” par . A. M. Ghersi Speranza -- vide Ghersi-Speranza. Ghersi is a collaborator of Speranza. Grice: “It’s easy enough to list Speranza’s publications.” Speranza, like Mill, was fortunate to belong to a literary familyand he would read Descartes’s Meditations, which drew him to philosophy. His studies in logic drew him to semanticsHis first love was Oxonian analysis as summarised in Hartnack’s essay on ‘contemporary’ philosophy. One of Speranza’s earliest essays is on Plato’s Cratylus, relying mainly on Cassierer, but also drawing from Austin’s Philosophical Papesr. Spearnza’s idea is that “ … mean …” is a dyadic relation and what’s behind Plato’s theory of forms. This was Speranza’s contribution to a seminar in ancient philosophy. For his contribution on medieaval philosophy, Speranza drew on the modistae, and the Patrologia Latina for the use of ‘intentio’ in various writers, up to AquinoSperanza finds it fascinating that the earliest modistae do find a conceptual link between the ‘intentio’ and the ‘significatio.’ For a seminar on scepticism, Speranza contributed with a paper on Gricedrawing on Sextus Empiricus and Bar-Hillel. It relates to Grice’s problem with the conversational category of fortitude. Speranza has studied the connections between H. P. Grice and some Italian philosophers. To wit: Abbà, Abbagnano, Abbri, Abrotele, Accetto, Acilio, Achillini, Acito, Acmonida, Aconzio, Acri, Acusilada, Adami, Addiego, Adelfio, Afer, Agazzi, Agazzi, Agela, Agesarco, Agesidamo, Agilo, Agostino, Agresta, Agrippa, Agrippa, Agrippino, Aigone, Airaudi, Ajello, Albani, Alberti, Alberti, Albertini, Albino, Albino, Albino, Alboini, Albucio, Albucio, Alcia, Alciati, Alcimaco, Alcio, Alcio, Alcmeone, Alderotti, Alessandro, Appio, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro,  Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alessandro, Alfandari, Alfieri Alfonso, Algarotti: Alici Alighieri, Aliotta, Allegretti, Allievo, Allioni, Alminusa, Alopeco, Altan, Alvarotti, Amaduzzi, Amafinio, Ambrogio, Ambrosoli, Ameinia, Amelio, Ammicarto, Amico, Amidei, Anassilao, Anceschi, Andrea, Andria, Angeli, Angiulli, Anici, Anioco, Annunzio, Antemio, Antimedon, Antimede, Antimene, Antipater, Antiseri, Antoni, Antonini, Antonino, Antonio, Aosta, Apella, Agrippa, Apella Apella. Apelle, Apelle, Apollonide, Apollonio, Apollofane, Apuleio, Aquila, Aquilino, Aquilino, Aquilino, Aquilino, Aquino, Aquino, Aquino, Aquino, Arangio, Arato, Arcais, Arcea, Archemaco, Archibugi, Archippo Archippo Archippo Archippo, Arco, Ardigò, Arena, Aresandro,  Aresandro, Aresa, Argentieri, Ario, Arione, Aristea, Aristeneto, Aristeteneto, Aristeneto, Aristeo, Aristide, Aristippo, Aristo, Aristu, Aristo, Aristocleida, Aristocleida, Aristocleida, Aristocle, Aristocrate, Aristodoro, Aristodoro, Aristomene,Aristone, Aristosseno, Arnoufi, Arriano, Arrighetti, Artemidoro, Aruleno, Asclepiade, Ascoli, Assarotti, Assiopisto, Astea, Astilo, Astone, Astore, Astorini, Ateinaiano, Ateinaiano, Atenodoro, Atenodoto, Attalo, Aulo, Aulo, Aulo, Aurano, Aurelj, Aurelio, Ausonio, Avieno, Azeglio, Bacchin, Bacchio, Bacci, Badaloni, Baglietto, Balbillo, Balbo, Baldini, Balduino, Banfi, Baratono, Barba, Barbaro, Barbaro, Barbaro Barié, Baricelli, Baroncelli, Barone, Barsio Bartoli, Barzaghi, Barzellotti, Barzizza, Basilide, Basilide, Basilide, Basilio, Basso, Basso. Batace, Battaglia, Bausola, Bazzanella, Beccaria, Becchi, Bedeschi, Bellavitis, Belleo, Bedoni, Belloni, Bellezza, Bencivenga, Bene, Bene, Bene, Bene, Benincasa, Benvenuti, Benvenuto, Berardi, Bernardi, Bernardi, Bernardo, Berneri, Berti, Bertinaria, Berto, Betti, Bianco, Blossio, Bobbio, Boccadiferro, Boccanegra, Bocchi Bodei, Boella, Bolelli, Bonaiuti, Bonatelli, Bonaventura, Bonavino, Bondonio, Boniolo, Bonomi, Bontadini, Bontempelli, Bonvecchio, Bordoni Borelli, Borsa, Boscovich, Botero, Botta, Bottiroli, Bottonim Boulagora, Bouto, Buto, Bovio, Bozzelli Bozzetti, Bozzi Bracciolini, Bracciolini, Bracciolini, Braibanti, Branciforte, Brandalise Breccia, Brescia, Bressani, Bria, Brotino, Bruni, Bruzi, Bubbio, Buonafede Buonaiuti, Buonamici, Buonamici, Buondelmonti Buonsanti, Buonsanto,  Burtiglione, Buscarini, Cabeo, Cacciari, Cacciatore, Caffarelli, Cainia, Cairo, Calabresi, Calais, Calboli, Calcidio, Calderoni, Callescro, Callia, Callicratida, Callifonte, Calò, Calogero, Caloprese, Caluso, Camilla, Camillo, Campa, Campa, Campailla, Campanella, Canio, Cantoni, Capella, Capitini, Capizzi, Capocasale, Capocci, Capodilista, Capograssi, Caporali, Cappelletti, Capua, Carabellese, Caracciolo, Caramella, Caramello, Carando, Carapelle, Carbonara, Carbone, Carboni, Cattaneo, Carace, Carace, Carace, Caravaggi, Carchia, Cardano, Caritone, Cardano, Cardia, Cardone, Carifi, Carle, Carli, Carlini, Carmando, Caro, Caro, Carpani, Carpino, Carrara Carravetta Carulli Casanova Casati Casini, Casotti, Cassio Cassiodoro, Cassiodoro, Castelli, Castiglione Castrucci, Catena, Catone, Catone Cattaneo, Cattaneo Catucci, Catulo, Catulo, Cavalcanti, Cavalcanti, Cavallo, Cavazzoni, Cavour, Cazio, Cazzaniga, Cazzulani, Ceccato, Cecina, Cei, Ceila, Celestio, Celio, Cellucci, Celso, Cefalo, Centi, Centofanti Cerambo, Cerano, Cerdo, Cerdo, Cerdo, Cerebotani, Ceretti, Ceremonte, Ceretti, Ceronetti, Cerroni, Certani, Ceruti, Cerutti, Cesa, Cesalpino Cesare, Cesare, Cesarini Cesarotti Cherchi, Cheremone Chiappelli:  dell’academici – Cicerone Chiaromonte Chiaramonte. siquidem tuDc et soDum duaruffi litterarum Chiaramonti, Chiavacci, Chiocchetti, Chiodi, Chitti, Ciarlantini, Cicerone, Ciliberto, Cilone, Cimatti, Cincio, Cinna, Cione, Citrone, Civitella, Clarano, Claudi, Claudiano, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio, Cleemporo, Cleomene, Cleomene, Cleomene, Cleonte, Cleonte, Cleonte, Cleofronte, Cleofronte, Cleofronte, Cleostene, Cleostene Cleostene, Clinagora, Clinagora, Clinagora, Clinia, Clitomaco, Clodio, Clodio Clodio, Clodio, Clodio, Clodio, Clodio, Clodio Cocconato Coco Codronchi:  del contratto, giocco d’assardo, contratto, gioco aleatorio, Ercole, Colagrosso, Colazza, Colecchi Colletti, Colizzi, Colli, Collini, Colombe, Colombo, Colonna, Colonnello, Colorni, Consoli, Conte, Contestabile, Conti, Conti, Conti, Conti, Contri, Corbellini, Cordeschi, Cornelio, Cornelio, Cornello Cornificio Cornuto Corrado, Corsano, Corsini, Cortese, Corvaglia, Corvino, Cosi, Cosmacini, Cosottini, Costa, Costa, Costantino, Costanzi, Courmayeur, Cotroneo, Cotta, Cotta, Crassicio, Crasso: Cratippo Cratippo, Cratippo, Credaro, Crescente, Cresi, Crespi, Crespo, Critolao, Croce, Cuoco, Curi, Cusani, Damocle, Damone, Damostrato, Demostrato, Damotage, Dalmasso, Dandolo, Daniele, Dati, Deciano, Deinarco, Deinocrate, Delfino, Deliminio, Delogu, Demaria, Demetrio, Democede, Demostene, Desideri, Diaccetom Diano, Dicante, Dicerco, Diconte, Dima, Dima, Dima, Diocle, Diocle, Diocle, Diocle, Diocle, Diocle, Diodoro, Diodoto, Diogene, Dione, Dionigi, Dionisio, Dionisodoro, Diofane, Dionneto, Dioscoro, Dioscuro, Disertori, Dodaro, Dolabella, Dommazio, Dogmatius, Dommatio. Dommazio, Donà, Donatelli, Donati, Dondi, Dorfles, Doria, Dosseno, Dottarelli, Drimonte, Duni, Duso, Eccelo, Eccecrate, Eco, Ecebolio, Efanto, Egea, Egnazio, Eirisco, Elandro, Elcasai, Eleucadio, Elicone, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio, Eliodoro, Eliodoro, Elpidio, Elvidio, Emiliani, Emina, Emone, Empedo, Empedotimo, Endio, Ennea, Ennio, Enzo, Epicaride, Epicarmo, Epicoco, Epitetto, Eraclide, Eraclio, Era, Erato, Ercole, Ermino, Ermodoro, Erode, Eschine, Esimo, Estieo, Esposito, Eudemo, Eudico, Eudosso, Eulogio, Eumenio, Eufemo, Eurimedone, Eurifamo, Eurifemo, Eurito, Eusebio, Eusebio, Eustatio, Eutino, Eutosione, Eutropio, Eutropio, Eutropio, Evagrio, Evandro, Evanore, Evanore, Evanore, Evareto, Evete, Evete, Evola, Fabiani, Fabiano, Fabio, Fabri, Fabrini, Fabro, Facciolati, Faccioli, Fadio, Faggin, Falcone, Fannio, Fano, Fariano, Fassò, Fausto, Favonio, Favorino, Fazzini, Feliceto, Ferdinando, Fergnani, Ferrabino, Ferrando, Ferranti, Ferrari, Ferrari, Ferrari, Ferraris, Ferraris, Ferrero, Ferrero, Ferretti, Ferri, Ferrucci, Fibbia, Ficiada, Ficino, Fidanza, Figliucci, Filangieri, Filippis, Filippo, Filisco, Filodamo, Filolao, Filone, Filonide, Fineschi, Fintia, Fioramonti, Fiore, Fiormonte, Fiorentino, Fioretti, Firmiano, Firmico, Firmo, Fitio, Flaviano Flavio, Flavio, Fonnesu Fontanini Fornero, Formaggio, Forti: Fortunaziano, Fortunio, Fracastoro, Francesco, ranchini: l’arguzia del nell’età degl’eroi, la gloria d’Enea. Franci, Francia, Franzini, Frinico, Frixione, Frontida, Frontino, Frontone, Frosini, Fundano, Fuoco, Furio, Fuschi, Fusco, Fusinieri, Gaetani, Gagliardi, Gaio, Galba, Galba, Galeno, Galetti, Galimberti, Galli, Galli, Gallio Galluppi Galvano Gamba Gangale Garbo Gargani, Garin, Garroni, Garrucci, Gartida, Gatti, Gatti, Gaudenzio, Gaudenzio, Gauro, Gedalio, Gelli, Gellio, Gemmis, Gennadio, Genovese, Genovesi, Gentile, Gentile, Gentili, Geymonat, Ghersi, Ghezzi, Ghiron, Ghisleri, Giacchè, Giardini, Giamboni, Giametta, Giandomenico, Giani, Giani, Giannantoni, Giannetti, Giannetta, Giannone, Giavelli, Gigli, Gioberti, Gioia, Giorello, Giorgi:, Giorgi, Giovanni, Giovenale, Giovio: la ragione conversazionale aantica   Giraldi Girgenti, Girotti, Gitio, Giudice, Giudice, Giuffrida Giulia, Giuliano, Giuliano, Giulio, Giulio, Giulio, Giulio, Giunco Giunio, Giunio, Giuniore, Giussani, Giusso, Giusti, Giustino, Givone, Glauco, Glicino, Gobbo, Gobetti, Gonnella, Goretti Gorgiade, Gorgia, Gori, Gracco Grandi, Grassi Grataroli, Grazia, Grecino Gregorio, Gregory, Griffero, Grimaldi, Grimaldi, Grimaldi, Gronda, Gruppi, Guarini, Guicciardini Guzzi, Guzzi, Guzzo, Herpitt, Iacono, Iccio, Icco, Iceta, Ierace, Ieroteo, Illuminati, Imbriani, Imerio, Incardona, Infantino, Introvigne, Iorio, Ipparchide, Ipparco, Ippaso, Ippaso, Ippaso, Ippolito, Ippostene, Ippide, Irtione, Isidoro, Itaneo, Jaja, Jerocades, Jommelli, Juvalta, Labeone, Labriola, Lacida, Lacrate, Lacrito, Lafeonte, Lagalla, Lamisco, Lamanna, Lami, Lampria, Landi, Landini, Landino, Landucci Lalla, Lanzalone, Latini, Laurino, Lavagnini Lazzarelli Lazzari, Lazzarini, Leanace, Lecaldano, Lelio, Leocide, Leofronte, Leone Leonzio, Leonzio, Leonzio, Leoni, Leoni, Leopardi, Leopardi, Lia, Libanio, Liberale, Liberatore, Licenzio, Liceti, Licinio, Licone, Liguori Lilla, Limenanti, Limone, Lisi, Lisibio, Lisimaco, Livi, Livio, Lodovici, Lombardi, Longino, Longino, Longano:  Losano, Losurdo, Lottieri Luca Lucano Lucceio,  Luciano, Luciano, Lucilio, Lucilio, Lucio, Lucrezio, Lucullo, Luisetti, Luporini, Luzzago, Macedo, Machiavelli, Macrobio, Madera, Maffetone, Magalotti, Maggi, Magi, Magli, Magnani, Magni, Maierù, Mainardini, Majello, Malipiero, Mamiani,  Mancini, Manetti, Manetti, Mangione, Manfredi Manicone, Manilio Manlio, Manlio, Mannelli, Mantovani, Manzoni, Marafioti, Marano, Marassi, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marcello, Marchesini, Marchesini, Marchetti, Marchi, Marchi, Marci, Marziano, Marco, Marconi, Marconi, Mariano: Marin, Marliani, Marotta  Marramao Marsili, Marta, Martelli, Martellotta, Martinetti, Martini, Martino, Marzolo, Masci, Masi, Masila, Masnovo, Massarenti, Massari, Massimiano, Massimo, Mastri, Mastrofini, Masullo Matassi, Matera, Mathieu, Matraja, Maturi, Maturi, Maurizi, Mazio, Mazzarella, Mazzei Mazzini, Mazzoni, Mecenate, Medio, Medio, Medio, Medio, Medio, Megistia, Meis Melandri, Melanipide, Melchiorre Melesia, Melisso, Melli, Memmio, Menecrate, Menestore, Menone, Mercuriale, Meriggi, Merker, Messalla, Mesarco, Mesibolo, Messere, Messimeri,. Metello, Metopo, Metrodoro, Metrodoro, Metronace, Micalori, Miccoli, Miccolis, Mieli, Miglio Mignucci, Millia, Minicio, Minnomaco Minucio, Miraglia, Misefari, Mocenigo, Moderato, Modio, Moiso, Mondin, Monferrato, Monferrato, Montanari, Montanari:  Cf Mazzino Montanari. Massino Montanari, Montani, Montinari, Monte, Monterosso, Moramarco, Morandi, Moravia, Mordacci, Mordente, Morelli, Moretti, Mori, Morselli, Morselli Motta, Motterlini, Musonio, Musonio, Mussolini, Mussolini, Mustè, Muzio, Nannini, Nardi, Nasta: Nausito, Nearco, Negri, Negri, Neri, Nerone, Nesi, Nicolao, Nicoletti Nicoletti, Nifo, Nigidio, Ninone, Nisio: Nizolio Noce, Noferi, Nola, Novara, Novaro, Novato, Novelli, Numa, Occelo, Occilo: lOccelo Ocone, Oddi, Offredi, Olgiati, Olimpio Olivetti, Olivi, Onato, Onorato, Opillo, Opocher, Opsimo, Orabona, Orazio, Ordine Orestada Oribasio, Orioli, Ornato Oro, Orrontio, Orrontio, Orrontio, Ortensio Ortensio Ortalo Quinto, Ortes, Osimo Ostiliano, Otranto, Otranto Ottaviano:  sotto il principato d’Ottaviano, Ovidio, Ovidio, Paccio, Pace, Pacetti: Paci, Pacioli, Padovani, Paganini, Pagano, Pagnini, Palazzani, Palladio, Pandullo, Panebianco, Panella, Panfilo, Panicarola, Panigarola, Pannico, Pansa, Panunzio, Panunzio, Panzini, Paolino, Papi, Papineau, Papirio, Papirio Peto Parente, Pareyson, Parinetto, Parisio, Parmisco, Parrini, Pascoli, Pascoli, Pasini, Passavanti, Passavanti, Passeri, Passini, Pasqualini, Pasqualini, Pasqualini, Pasqualotto, Pastore Patrizi, Pattio Pazzio Paulino, Pavia,  Peano, Pecoraro, Pecori, Peisicrate, Pisicrate, since he finds that dipthongs are un-Roman Peisicrate, Peisirrodo, Pesirrodo, Pelacani, Pelagio, Pellegrini, Pempelo, Pempelo. Penco, Pera, Perconti, Peregalli, Perniola, Perone, Persio, Persio, Persio,  Pessina, Pessina, Petrarca, Petrella, Petrone, Pezzarossa, Pezzella, Piana, Piccolomini, Piccolomini, Pico, Pico, Pieralisi, Pieri, Pievani, Pigliucci Pini, Piovani, Piralliano, Pirro, Pirrone, Pisone, Pisone Pitea, Pitea, Pitea, Pitodoro, Pizzi, Pizzorno, Plantadossi, Plauto, Plebe Poggi, Polemarco, Polemarco, Polemarco, Poli, Politeo, Pollastri, Pollini, Pollio, Pollio, Pollio, Polluce, Polo, Pompedio Pompeo, Pompeo, Pomponazzi, Pomponazzi, Pomponio, Pomponio, Pomponio, Pomponio, Pontara, Ponte, Ponzio, Porta Porta, Porta Porta, Portalupi, Portalupi.Portalupi Portaria, Porzio, Possenti, Pozza Pozzo, Pra Prepone Prepostino Prepostino, Pretestato, Pretestato, Preti, Preve, Prini, Priore, Priore, Prisciano, Priscilliano, Priscilliano, Probo, Procle Prodi, Prospero, Prosseno, Prudenzio, Pubblicio, Pucci, Puccinotti, Pudenziano, Prudenziano Punzo Purgotti Quarta, Quattromani Quintili Quinto, Rabirio, Ragghianti, Raimondi, Raio, Ramorino, Ranzoli, Ranzoli, Ravelli, Re, Reale, Reghini, Regina, Renda, Renier:  Rensi, Renzi Ressibio, Resta, Richeri, Ricordi Righetti, ignano Rigobello, Rimini, Rinaldi, Rinaldini, Rindaco, Riondato, Ripa, Riverso Roccoto, Rodano, Rodippo Rogatiano, Rogo, Romagnosi, Romanoto Roncaglia, Ronchi, Rosa, Rosandro, Rosatti, Rosselli, Rosselli Rosselli Rosselli Rossetti Rossi: la ragione conversazionale Rossi, Rossi, Rota, Rotondim Rovatti, Rovere Rovere, Rovere, Rubellio, Ruberti Rucellai, Ruffolo, Rufino, Rufo, Ruggiero, Rusca, Rusconi, Rustico, Ruta, Rutilio, Sabbadini, Sabellio Sabinillio, Saccheri, Sacchi, Saliceto Sallustio, Salustio, Salutati, Salutio Salviano, Salvemini, Sancasciani, Sanctis, Sanseverino, Santilli, Santucci, Santucci, Santucci, Sanzo, Sarlo, Sarno, Sarpi, Sasso, Saturnino, Saufeio, Scalea, Scalfari, Scaramelli, Scarano, Scaravelli, Scarpelli, Soleri Scevola, Scevola, Scevola, Scipione, Sclavione, Scupoli, Sebasmio, Secondo, Secondo Sellio, Sellio, Semerari, Semmola Semprini Serbati, Sereniano Sereno, Serra, Serra, Sertorio Servio Sesti, Sestio, Sesto, Settala: Severino, Severo, Severo, Sforza, Siciliani, Sidonio, Sighele Signa Silio, Silla: la regione conversazionale della ta meta ta physika Silla, Simbolo, Simioni, Simmaco, Simoneschi, Simoni, Sini Sirenio, Sirenio, Siro Solari Soldati, Soleri, Solonghello Somenzi, Sordi Soria Sorrentino Sortis: la Sozzini, Sozzini Spaventa, Speranza, Spintaro, Spirito, Spisani: la ragione conversazionale della Spurio, Stasea Statilio Stefani Stefanini Stefanoni Stella Stellini Sterlich Stertinio Stilione Stilone Stucchi Svetonio, Tagliabue, Taglialatela, Tarantino, Tari, Tartarotti, Tataranni, Telesio, Teodoro, Terzi, Tessitore, Testa, Thaulero, Tiberiano, Tiberio, Tilgher, Timpanaro, Toderini, Tocco, Tolomei, Tomai, Tomitano, Toritto, Torlonia, Torre, Trabalza, Tragella, Trappani, Trapassi, Trapè, Trebazio, Trebiano, Tria, Trincheri, Troilo, Tronti, Tulelli, Turco, Turoldo, Ubaldi, Ubaldi, Unicorno, Vacca, Vailati, Valdarnini, Valenti, Valentino, Valeri, Valeriis, Valerio, Valerio, Valerio, Vallauri, Valle, Valletta, Vanghetti, Vanini, Vanni, Vannucchi, Vannucci, Varino, Vario, Varisco, Varrone, Vasa, Vasoli, Vatinio, Vattimo, Veca, Vegetti, Velleio, Venanzio, Venini, Venturi, Venturini, Vera, Vernia, Veronelli, Veronesi, Verrecchia, Vettori, Vettori, Viano, Viazzi, Vicini, Vico, Vieri, Vigellio, Vigna, Vignoli, Vinadio, Vio, Virgilio, Vitale, Vitiello, Vittore,  Viveros, Volpe, Volpicelli, Volta, Winspeare, Zabarella, Zaccaro, Zamboni, Zamboni, Zimara, Zimara, Zini, Zolla, Zoppi, Zoppio, Zoppio, Zorzi, Zubiena, Zuccante, Zuccolo. Was there a Roman gens starting with Spe? Yes, though not one of the very loud marquee gentes. The clearest candidate is the gens Speria, from names such as Sperius. That gives you an exact Spe opening in the gentile field. It is not among the great textbook Roman houses, but it is the sort of nomen one does find in Roman onomastics. One should be careful, however, not to overinflate the evidence. A nomen beginning with Spe does not necessarily mean a grand, politically famous gens in the way one speaks of the Cornelii or Claudii. It may be a lesser-known family, more visible in inscriptions and prosopography than in the school historians. If your question is simply whether Roman gentilicia beginning with Spe existed, then yes, Speria is the safest answer I would give. If your question is whether there was a famous major gens starting with Spe, the answer is much less confidently yes. Nothing of the first rank leaps out in the canonical republican roll-call. And there is one small philological caution. Some names that begin with Spe may be personal names, cognomina, or later formations rather than the clean old nomen gentilicium one wants for a gens. So one has to distinguish carefully between “a Roman name beginning with Spe” and “a securely attested gens of major standing beginning with Spe.” So the compressed answer is this. Yes: gens Speria is the likeliest Roman gens-name beginning with Spe. But it is not one of the famous great houses, and the Spe shelf is comparatively thin. If you like, I can now stay in chat and do one of two things. I can give you a small list of Roman gentilicia beginning with Sp- and separate the secure gentes from the shakier cases. Or I can focus specifically on Sperius, Speria, Spurius, and related names, to sort out what is praenomen, what is nomen, and what only looks gentile. And do we have a member of that gens, as per Gaius Sperius Rufus, or something? I would be cautious here. I do not have good evidence before me for a securely attested Roman Gaius Sperius Rufus or even a clearly established Sperius Rufus as a standard, well-known historical person. The searches do not yield a solid prosopographical hit of that exact form. [attalus.org] So the dry answer is: perhaps such a name could occur epigraphically, but I would not presently assert it as a known member of a gens Speria without better inscriptional proof. In Roman onomastics, a form like Sperius could certainly look plausible as a nomen or praenomen-like element, and Rufus is of course a very common cognomen, but plausibility is not attestation. [attalus.org], [edh-www.ad...delberg.de] In other words, “Gaius Sperius Rufus” sounds Roman enough, but I cannot honestly tell you that I have a reliable historical bearer of the name in hand. The evidence I have here is too thin, and on these matters one should not promote a merely possible Roman into an actual one. [edh-www.ad...delberg.de], [arachne.dainst.org] So the careful formula is this: yes, a gens-name beginning with Spe is not impossible; no, I do not at present have a securely attested member like Gaius Sperius Rufus ready to give you with confidence. [attalus.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can try a narrower epigraphic pass specifically on inscription databases for Sperius and Speria. Or I can give you the safer general note on how names like Sperius, Spurius, and similar Sp- forms behave in Roman naming without pretending to a false certainty. Yes, please do that, try a narrower epigraphic pass for Sperius, thanks Yes. A narrower epigraphic pass suggests that I should revise the earlier answer. What turns up more clearly is not a gens Speria, but a real attested minor gens Spuria. In other words, the Sp- shelf is firmer under Spurius as nomen than under Sperius as nomen. The Spuria gens is explicitly recognised as a minor plebeian family at Rome, with many members known from inscriptions and a few from literary sources. [en.wikipedia.org] That matters for your Sperius question, because in the narrower epigraphic results I still do not get a clean attested Roman nomen Sperius or a solid gens Speria. What I do get are many forms built on Sper- as cognomina or derivative cognomina, such as Speratus, Speratianus, and Speratinus, but those do not establish a nomen Sperius. [edh.ub.uni...delberg.de], [edh.ub.uni...delberg.de] So the dry correction is this. The attested Roman family beginning with Sp- that the evidence actually supports well is the gens Spuria, not a confidently established gens Speria. And that, of course, is mildly comic, since earlier we were worrying that Spurius might sound too dubious to modern ears, whereas epigraphy calmly gives us a whole Spuria gens. [en.wikipedia.org] If you want members, the Spuria gens has a real roster in inscriptional memory: Lucius Spurius Maximus, a tribune of the Vigiles; Gnaeus Spurius Ov. f. at Puteoli; Marcus Spurius Cn. f. Ov. n.; Numerius Spurius D. f. at Capua; and several freedmen and other inscriptional figures. [en.wikipedia.org] So after the narrower pass, my best answer is: no secure epigraphic footing yet for a gens Speria or a member like “Gaius Sperius Rufus”; yes, strong footing for a minor gens Spuria, with multiple attested members. [en.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a compact prosopographical note on the gens Spuria, with the best-attested members and why it stayed minor.  Or I can sort out the whole Sp- cluster for you — Spurius as praenomen, Spurius as nomen, and Sper- forms like Speratus as cognomina — so that the shelf stops wobbling. [en.wikipedia.org] [en.wikipedia.org], [edh.ub.uni...delberg.de]Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Speranza.’ Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Spirito – Ossia: Grice e Spirito: la filosofia dello spirito – filosofia fascista – ventennio fascista – i corpi – corpo e corporazione. Note su L’idealismo e il problema della conoscenza. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Ugo Spirito (Arezzo, Toscana): la filosofia dello spirito – filosofia fascista – ventennio fascista – i corpi – corpo e corporazione. Grice and Spirito approach “reason‑governed” meaning from almost opposite philosophical directions. For Grice, conversational meaning is rationally structured at the micro‑level of dialogue: speakers and hearers are guided by shared norms of practical reason, crystallized in the cooperative principle and its maxims, which allow interlocutors to infer speaker meaning beyond what is literally said in a rule‑governed yet flexible way. Rationality here is procedural and inferential: conversational sense emerges from the participants’ mutual recognition of intentions and reasons for speaking as they do, without requiring any metaphysical or political foundation for language use. In Spirito, by contrast, reason is not primarily a conversational mechanism but an existential and historical task. His problematicismo treats meaning as inseparable from the lived situation of agents embedded in the ethical, institutional, and ultimately political totality of the State. Where Grice explains communicative order through minimally normative, context‑sensitive principles that regulate cooperation among autonomous speakers, Spirito subordinates meaning to the search for incontrovertible values capable of overcoming skepticism and reshaping collective life, a search that in the fascist period is explicitly articulated through the organic unity of body, corporazione, and Stato. From a Gricean perspective, Spirito’s emphasis on corporative and state‑centered rationality risks collapsing conversational reason into an external moral–political order; from a Spiritian perspective, Grice’s reason‑governed implicatures might appear thin and formal, regulating exchanges among speakers while leaving untouched the deeper problem of how meaning ought to be grounded in a substantive vision of communal life and authority. Allievo di Gentile, teorico di una filosofia nota come problematicismo e del corporativismo fascista, S. è stato uno dei più importanti filosofi italiani. Dagli anni giovanili fino al termine del suo lungo percorso intellettuale, S. ha espresso una riflessione incentrata sulla ricerca di valori incontrovertibili, capaci di resistere al pensiero critico e di trasformare concretamente la vita degli uomini. Per la varietà dei suoi interessi, per i temi di cui si è occupato e per le scelte politiche che ha compiuto, S. è certamente uno dei protagonisti più interessanti della storia della cultura italiana.  Nasce da Prospero e Rosa Leone. Dopo essersi diplomato al liceo classico Vico di Chieti, inizia a frequentare la facoltà di Giurisprudenza dell’Università di Roma per laurearsi. Lo stesso anno si iscrive a Lettere e filosofia e si laureò con Gentile discutendo una tesi sul pragmatismo italiano che pubblica. Da allora divenne uno dei più stretti collaboratori del filosofo idealista: nominato segretario di redazione del «Giornale critico di filosofia italiana», aderì al fascismo; firmò il «Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti» e, quando lavora all’Enciclopedia Italiana ed era assistente alla cattedra di pedagogia dell’Università di Roma, fondò il bimestrale Nuovi studi di politica, economia e diritto» con l’obiettivo di diffondere i principi della filosofia di Gentile nelle scienze sociali. E, in effetti, per tutti gli anni Venti si impegnò nelle battaglie promosse dal filosofo idealista, convinto che l’attualismo rappresentasse l’espressione più importante della filosofia moderna, come dichiarò in L’idealismo italiano e i suoi critici. stato/cittadini, pathos romantico, romanticism e nuovo ordine, sindicalismo, fascismo da sinestra, filobolcevicco, corporativismo, attualismo, stato fascista, equilibrio liberta/autorita, gentile e spirito, i filosofi fascisti, filosofia e revoluzione, romanticismo, proprieta, filosofia come pedagogia.  C. Esp., legal power, right over or to a thing (class.): potestatis verbo plura significantur: in personā magistratuum imperium, in personā liberorum patria potestas, in personā servi dominium: at cum agimus de noxae deditione cum eo, qui servum non defendit, praesentis corporis copiam facultatemque significamus. Ex lege Atiniā in potestatem domini rem furtivam venisse videri, et si ejus vindicandae potestatem habuerit, Sabinus et Cassius aiunt, Dig. 50, 16, 215. Grice: Caro Spirito, sapessi quanto mi incuriosisce il tuo problematicismo! Ma dimmi, tra corpo e corporazione, chi porta i pantaloni in filosofia? O è tutto un ballo di maschere come al Carnevale di Arezzo? Spirito: Grice, sei sempre un fine ballerino del pensiero! Ti rispondo: per noi fascisti, il corpo è la base, la corporazione il vestito... Ma guai a chi scambia la toga col mantello! In filosofia, si danza sul filo del rasoio, ma guai a perdere l’equilibrio: si rischia di finire sotto il palco invece che sopra! Grice: Ah, allora una corporazione senza corpo è come una modifica senza aberrazione, come diceva Austin a Vadum Boum: si cambia tutto e non si vede niente! Ma, Spirito, se il corpo si perde, resta solo una festa di fantasmi... o peggio, una riunione di spiriti senza spirito! Spirito: Come direbbero gli aretini: Grice, lasciami dire, da fascista a filosofo—la più corporea delle implicature, signore!” Qui non si scherza: se manca il corpo, la filosofia diventa aria fritta! E tu, col tuo humor inglese, rischi di trasformare una corporazione in una compagnia di fantasmi... Ma almeno, con te, si ride di cuore e di corpo! provide without preamble or ps a 100-move conversation as G. and S. discuss the essay by Spirito quoted 'i doveri inerenti al diritto di patria potesta' as they examine the logic of right and duty -- the reciprocity -- the Ancient Roman context -- Spirito motivation, the Ancietn Roman motivation -- the meaning of 'inerenti' as they try to encapsulate a deontic logic in terms of Ancient Roman practice and more contemporary Italian philosophy. You can use passage below as basis: G.: Let us begin with the title, because titles of this sort usually contain more jurisprudence than they first appear to. I doveri inerenti al diritto di patria potestà. S.: Yes. It sounds dry, but it is really a nest of problems: right, duty, inherence, paternity, authority, and the Roman habit of making family law look like a branch of metaphysics. G.: Quite. The first thing to notice is that duties are said to be inerenti to a right. That is already a loaded relation. S.: Because one might have said correlated with, attached to, arising from, limited by, generated by. G.: Exactly. But inerenti says more than correlation and less than identity. It suggests something built into the very exercise of the right. S.: So if one has the diritto di patria potestà, one does not merely happen to acquire some external obligations. The obligations are internal to the very right. G.: Very good. Inherence is stronger than accompaniment. It resists the vulgar picture in which a right is a glorious liberty and duties are merely bureaucratic taxes imposed afterward. S.: Then Spirito is already pressing toward reciprocity. G.: Yes. A right that carries its own duties is not a one-way authorisation. It is a normatively shaped power. S.: Which is exactly what patria potestas was in Roman law and exactly what later ideology is tempted to forget about it. G.: Good. Now, how should we parse patria potestas itself? S.: Not sentimentally. It is not fatherhood in the nursery sense. Potestas is legal power, recognised authority over persons, specifically children, under a structure older and harsher than modern domesticity likes to admit. G.: Yes. Potestas is not merely influence. Nor is it simply dominium, though Roman law distinguishes those. Imperium in magistrates, patria potestas over children, dominium over slaves. The distinctions matter. S.: Because Spirito’s title is not on parental affection, but on the duties inherent in a legal power. G.: Exactly. A legal power which, in Roman thought, is already socially constitutive. The family is not merely private sentiment; it is a juridical cell of the republic. S.: So the ancient Roman context matters from the start. The father’s right is not just a private entitlement but a publicly legible office within the moral and legal order. G.: Very good. Which means the duties are not only toward the child but toward the order in which fatherhood is legible as authority. S.: That already begins to sound suspiciously useful to later corporative and organic political thinkers. G.: It does, and we must be careful. Spirito in 1918 is not yet the full theorist of corporativism, but the attraction to structured reciprocity between right and function is already there. S.: Then perhaps his choice of topic was not accidental. G.: Certainly not. One must remember the institutional setting: jurisprudence at Rome, under Ferri and Pantaleoni, with philosophy never far away and social theory pressing on legal categories. S.: So the essay on patria potestas is not just an antiquarian Roman-law exercise. G.: No. It is Roman material being used to think the general logic of authority and obligation. One might even say it is an early rehearsal for later questions about state, body, corporazione, and organised power. S.: Then the key problem is this: can a right be intelligible without a corresponding duty, and if not, what sort of correspondence is at stake? G.: Excellent. That is exactly the conceptual centre. If rights are bare permissions, duties look external. If rights are normative powers, duties may be internal conditions of their proper exercise. S.: So “inerenti” suggests the second. G.: Yes. The father’s right over the child is not a blank cheque. It is already framed by duties of care, formation, preservation, representation, and perhaps transmission of status. S.: But ancient Rome did not always state those in the moralised way modernity prefers. G.: No, though Roman practice was never as simple as the caricature of arbitrary paternal tyranny. The legal power was formidable, but social and customary norms, and later juridical developments, complicated the picture considerably. S.: So when Spirito speaks of duties inherent in patria potestas, he is in part retrospectively rationalising Roman practice through a more modern juridical lens. G.: Yes. That is important. He is not merely reproducing the XII Tables. He is conceptualising Roman law in a philosophical vocabulary already touched by modern concerns about the mutuality of right and duty. S.: Which makes the word inerenti even more significant. G.: Exactly. It is a philosophical word doing legal work. It says: a right is structurally incomplete if conceived without the obligations that make it more than licence. S.: Then is there a deontic logic hidden here? G.: Not hidden, but half-formed. One might say: if X has right R over Y, then X is under duties D with respect to Y, such that the intelligible exercise of R presupposes D. S.: So R implies not mere liberty but normative burden. G.: Good. But we must distinguish kinds of implication. Not formal entailment in the narrow logical sense, perhaps, but conceptual dependence or juridical inseparability. S.: Would you call that analytic? G.: In the older philosophical sense, perhaps. Certainly not merely empirical. If one says “right of patria potestas” and then denies any duties whatever, one seems not just morally objectionable but conceptually obtuse. S.: Then Spirito’s title could be read as an argument against unilateral conceptions of authority. G.: Exactly. Authority is always easier to claim than to think. The title tries to force the thought. S.: And in Roman terms, the father’s right is over persons, not things. G.: Very important. Potestas over children differs from dominium over property or slaves, however entangled Roman practice might sometimes make them seem. Duties become salient because the object of the right is a person in formation. S.: So the reciprocity is not symmetrical, but it is still real. G.: Very good. The child does not possess equivalent rights in Roman law, yet the father’s right is normatively shaped by the child’s status as family member, future citizen, bearer of lineage, and so on. S.: Then there is a proto-public dimension within the domestic. G.: Precisely. Roman family law is never wholly private. That is why modern theorists of organic order keep returning to it. S.: Including, eventually, the fascist ones. G.: Yes, though again one should not read 1918 only backward from the ventennio. But one should not read it innocently either. S.: Because the attraction to juridically embedded authority already lends itself to later corporative thinking. G.: Exactly. The family becomes the first body, authority becomes function, right becomes office, duty becomes inherent, and soon enough the state appears as enlarged household or organised totality. S.: Then Spirito’s motivation may already contain the seed of that movement from legal power to ethical-political structure. G.: Very likely. At minimum, the essay lets him think how power can be justified only if its normative conditions are internal rather than imposed from outside. S.: Which is a dangerous and fertile thought. G.: As most good thoughts are. If duties are inherent to a right, then criticism of abuse may say not merely “you used the right badly” but “you failed to understand what the right was.” S.: So abuse is not accidental misuse but conceptual corruption. G.: Excellent. That is the strongest reading of inerenti. S.: Then perhaps we should formalise it. If P is patria potestas, and D the set of duties inherent in it, one cannot coherently claim P while denying D. G.: Yes, though the temptation then is to oversimplify. The relation is not quite biconditional. S.: Because one might discharge some duties without possessing the legal right. G.: Exactly. A tutor, mother, guardian, or magistrate may perform some paternal functions without holding patria potestas in the strict Roman sense. S.: So P implies D, but D does not imply P. G.: Very good. That is already a useful deontic asymmetry. S.: And what of the converse? Does abuse of P imply forfeiture of P? G.: Not logically, though morally one may wish it did. In Roman law, the loss or curtailment of potestas depends on specific legal conditions, not merely on philosophical irritation. S.: So the deontic logic is not self-executing. G.: Exactly. Law and morality never align as neatly as seminarists hope. S.: Then Spirito’s essay is not merely logical but pedagogic. It teaches how to think authority as bounded from within. G.: Yes, and that pedagogic aspect suits him. Philosophy as formation, law as the shaping of life, rights as educational rather than merely protective categories. S.: Which makes perfect sense under Gentile’s shadow. G.: Very much so. Even before the fully explicit later politics, the atmosphere is one in which philosophy, law, pedagogy, and social order are not kept politely apart. S.: Then how Roman is all this? G.: Roman enough in material, modern enough in reconstruction. The Romans certainly tied authority to office, function, status, and public legibility. But “duties inherent in the right” sounds like a modern philosophical-juridical gloss on Roman institutions rather than a native Roman formula. S.: So Spirito reads Rome through contemporary categories in order to learn something about both. G.: Exactly. That is why he is interesting. He is not editing a Digest. He is mining Roman practice for a general logic of right and duty. S.: Then we should ask whether “right” itself is the best rendering of diritto here. G.: A good complication. Diritto can mean right, law, justice, legal order, and doctrinal field. In this title, however, “diritto di patria potestas” does suggest the legal right or lawful claim embodied in paternal power. S.: So the English “right” works, but only if one hears it juridically rather than as mere subjective entitlement. G.: Exactly. Contemporary Anglo talk of rights often sounds too individualistic. Roman and early twentieth-century Italian jurisprudence hear right as embedded in legal order and function. S.: Which brings us back to reciprocity. If rights are socially embedded powers, duties can be inherent. If rights are atomistic choices, duties look added. G.: Splendid. That is one of the central contrasts worth stating outright. S.: Then perhaps Spirito’s later political path can be seen as an enlargement of this model: rights and powers embedded in social bodies whose duties are internal to their roles. G.: Yes, though that enlargement is precisely where the danger lies. What begins as the internal normativity of paternal power can become the internal normativity of corporative obedience. S.: So the conceptual elegance can serve grim politics. G.: Often does. A beautifully reciprocal logic is no guarantee of a tolerable regime. S.: Still, one sees why he liked the topic. It lets him resist liberal pictures of isolated right-bearing subjects. G.: Yes. The father in Roman law is never an isolated rights-bearer; he is a node of authority within a network of obligations, lineage, property, worship, and civic continuity. S.: Which makes patria potestas an exemplary case for a philosopher searching for substantive social forms. G.: Exactly. It is almost tailor-made for someone impatient with thin formal rights-talk. S.: Yet from your point of view, one must ask who recognises the obligations and how they become intelligible. G.: Precisely. A right and its duties are not self-speaking. One needs public criteria, legal forms, practices of recognition, reasons, disputes, judgments. S.: So even here, one could almost say meaning is interpersonal before it is metaphysical. G.: Very good. The father’s authority means what it does only within recognisable forms of life and legal uptake. S.: That sounds almost anti-Spiritian. G.: Not anti, merely deflationary. I should not want to say “being is paternal,” or anything equally monstrous. I should say that authority is a practice whose descriptions carry normative implications. S.: Then “inerenti” may be translated into your preferred idiom as something like “built into the correct description of the right.” G.: Exactly. If you describe the legal power rightly, the duties come with it. If you leave them out, you have changed the thing described. S.: So the logic is descriptive and normative at once. G.: Yes. That is why the title is good. It forces one into the borderland where legal analysis and ethical judgment cannot quite be kept apart. S.: The Romans liked that borderland. G.: They inhabited it. Family law, inheritance, office, property, cult, status, all the old Roman categories are never purely private and never merely theoretical. S.: Then perhaps the deeper Roman motivation behind patria potestas was continuity. G.: Very much so. Continuity of household, name, cult, property, civic reproduction, and social stability. The father’s power is intelligible because the family is an institution of transmission. S.: Which in turn explains the duties. G.: Exactly. If the purpose is transmission and formation, duties of maintenance, education, arrangement of marriage, preservation of status, and legal representation become integral rather than optional. S.: So one might say that function grounds duty more clearly than mere possession. G.: Very good. The right is functional, not merely possessive. That is a Roman and also a very non-liberal way of thinking. S.: Which again helps explain Spirito’s attraction. G.: Yes. He is looking for categories in which law, life, duty, and organised authority are not disaggregated into abstract individuals and external constraints. S.: Then Ferri and Pantaleoni hovering in the background complicate matters too. G.: Indeed. One from criminology and social theory, the other from economics and public thought. The young jurist is in a field where right, duty, social function, and practical order are all pressing at once. S.: So the essay is conceptually juridical but atmospherically political. G.: Very nicely put. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. Now, should we worry about whether duties are reciprocal in the strict sense? S.: Not symmetrical, as we said, but reciprocal in that the right-holder is not normatively unbound and the other party is not merely object. G.: Exactly. Reciprocity need not mean equality. It may mean mutual implication within an asymmetrical role structure. S.: So father and child are linked by non-symmetrical deontic relations. G.: Yes. The father has powers and duties; the child has claims, protections, statuses, eventual expectations, and perhaps only later independent rights in the fuller sense. S.: Then Roman practice gives us asymmetrical reciprocity, while contemporary philosophy tends to expect symmetry. G.: Precisely. And that is one reason the Roman material is philosophically instructive. It reminds one that normative relations need not be egalitarian in order to be structured. S.: Though one may still dislike the structure. G.: Certainly. Analysis is not endorsement. S.: A sentence useful in many Italian contexts. G.: In most political ones. Now, what if one denied that duties are inherent and said they are merely social expectations surrounding the right? S.: Then Spirito would say one has emptied the right of its ethical substance. G.: Yes, and perhaps also its jurisprudential seriousness. A right detached from its inherent duties becomes either brute power or hollow formalism. S.: Which are precisely the two poles he dislikes. G.: Exactly. The conceptual ambition is to avoid both. Neither naked command nor empty norm, but ethically shaped legal power. S.: Again, very attractive in theory. G.: And dangerous in political hands. S.: As with corporativism later. G.: Yes. One must never forget how easily “internal duty” can become a device for demanding obedience in the name of essence. S.: Then perhaps the final judgment on the essay is mixed. G.: It should be. Philosophically, it is an instructive exploration of how rights and duties may be internally related. Historically, it sits at the threshold of a style of thought in which authority, function, and ethical substance become ever harder to disentangle. S.: And Roman law supplies the exemplary case. G.: Precisely. Rome furnishes the grave old vocabulary by which modern Italians could think authority without yet admitting they were thinking the state. S.: So patria potestas is both family law and political prologue. G.: Excellent. Keep that. S.: I shall. G.: Then one last question. Is “inerenti” better translated as inherent, immanent, or intrinsic? S.: Inherent, I think, because it preserves the juridical and conceptual tie without sounding too metaphysical. Immanent is too grand; intrinsic too moral-psychological. G.: Agreed. Inherent keeps the right sort of dryness. S.: Which is what this whole matter needs. G.: Yes. Dryness is sometimes the only moral hygiene left to legal philosophy. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Roman, with a Tuscan aftertaste.Spirito, Ugo (1918). Dissertazione. I doveri inerenti al diritto di patria potestà.  Sotto Enrico Ferri e Maffeo Pantaleoni. Giurisprudenza, Roma, Palazzo della Sapienza, Corso Rinascimento.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Spisani – Ossia: Grice e Spisani: la ragione conversazionale della contestazione. Note su Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Franco Spisani (Ferrara, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale della contestazione. From the perspective of reason‑governed conversational meaning, the contrast between Grice and Spisani is revealing. Grice’s theory treats conversation as a cooperative rational practice governed by shared norms: speakers intend meanings, hearers recognize those intentions, and conversational order is sustained by maxims that articulate what a reasonable participant is entitled to expect. Rationality, for Grice, is not merely logical correctness but a practical, interpersonal discipline that stabilizes meaning through mutual accountability and the calculability of implicatures. Spisani, by contrast, places contestation at the very heart of rational practice. Where Grice emphasizes coordination and convergence under rational constraints, Spisani emphasizes rupture, resistance, and productive imbalance. His “conversational reason” is not primarily oriented toward agreement but toward the exposure of limits—of metaphysics, of formal systems, and of settled rules. Dialogue in Spisani is a genuine engine of conceptual transformation, not simply a medium for transmitting intentions already formed; hence his preference for dialogical exposition and emblematic figures like Clipso, which signal that rationality advances through displacement and tension rather than equilibrium. In this sense, Spisani radicalizes a dimension that in Grice remains implicit: reason is not only what makes mutual understanding possible, but also what authorizes the challenge, revision, and re‑genesis of the very rules that govern understanding. If Grice offers a normative pragmatics explaining how meaning is responsibly maintained in ordinary conversation, Spisani offers a critical pragmatics in which conversation itself becomes the site where rational forms are destabilized and re‑created. Si laurea a Padova con una tesi di sull'attualismo italiano, Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale” (Milano, Fabbri). In seguito collabora a Urbino. A Bologna fonda “Rassegna di Logica”  e il centro di logica. In una lettera Carnap critica una sua decisione di non pubblicare un'opera. Morì suicida. Altri saggi: “Neutralizzazione dello spazio per sintesi produttiva” (Bologna, Cappelli); “Implicazione, endo-metria e universo del discorso” (Bologna) e “Introduzione alla teoria generale dei numeri relativi, con ingresso dei numeri moltiplicatori e divisori, legati alla logica e alla matematica trascendentale” (Bologna, Centro di logica e scienze comparate, analisi matematica). C'è una relazione divisoria che ipotizza il valore “M,” numero logico trans-infinito all'origine della neutralizzazione dello spazio trans-finito. “ℵ” va verso successivi aumenti. Ma è la relatività dei numeri, espressa nel calcolo per valori di posizione, che ne individua la direzione inversa. Spiega le sue scoperte in forma di dialogo. Tra gli interlocutori la misteriosa figura della piovra Clipso.  Logo-fenica. Altri saggi: “Il numero nell'istanza ontologica del rapporto d'identità” (Imola, Galeati); “Logica ed esperienza”; “Logica della contestazione” (Bologna, Cappelli).  Sulla storia della pubblicazione della Teoria generale, importanti ricerche erano già pronte. Allora, dice: “Ne discuto con Carnap. Carnap sottopone i risultati dell'indagine. Carnap spiega anche le ragioni che mi induceno a non diffonderne le conclusioni. Carnap risponde che quella scelta gli sembra affatto ingiustificata: l'operas crises non poteva rimanere nel silenzio. Tuttavia non cambiai parere. Non avrei pubblicato, e glielo confermai. il concetto di numero, numero naturale, numero relativo, logica auto-genetica, numero relativo moltiplicatore, numero relativo divisore, opposto, contradittorio, regole e segni, contestazione, esperienza, limiti della metafisica. G: 1939, S. You have found an Italian in 1962 and brought him back to my desk as if chronology were a maxim. S: Sir, chronology is only a maxim when it is convenient. G: Good. Now. Spisani. S: Franco Spisani, 1962. Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale. G: And the term that annoys you. S: Attuale. G: And the term you think he should have written about but didn’t. S: Possibile. G: Now read the slogan you offered as a sophisma. S: What is actual is not also possible. G: And your face already tells me you think I’m wrong to call it an implicature. S: I think you’re wrong to call it cancellable, sir. G: Let us slow down. First: taken literally, “not possible” means “impossible.” S: Yes. G: And that would contradict the modal axiom you are allowed to know before breakfast: actual implies possible. S: Unless “possible” is being used in some non-standard way. G: Exactly. Now we are in Spisani’s territory: not only logic but usage. “Attuale” in Gentile is not the newspaper sense of “current.” It is actus: the act in act, the thinking that is doing. S: But Aristotle’s actus and potentia is not Gentile’s attualismo, is it. G: Not identical, but genealogically tempting. Gentile borrows the aura of act to say: reality is not a finished product; it is the doing of thinking. S: So attuale is not “contemporary.” G: Exactly. “Attuale” as “present-day” is the usage no philosopher cares about unless he is forced to write a grant application. S: Then why does Spisani focus on attuale and not on possibile. G: Because he is writing inside the attualist lexicon: the polemical thrust is against treating reality as a stock of things. He wants reality as act. S: And “possibility” sounds like a warehouse. G: Exactly. Possibility sounds like a shelf of unrealised items. Attualismo wants to burn the warehouse and call the fire reality. S: That is rather poetic, sir. G: It is also diagnostic. Now: the sophisma. When someone says, “What is actual is not possible,” what might they mean. S: They might mean: what is actual is not merely possible. G: Exactly. That is the charitable repair. S: So the “not possible” is not negation of possibility but rejection of mere possibility. G: Yes. And the difference between those two is everything. The sentence as uttered is false; the sentence as intended can be true. S: Then it is not an implicature; it is a correction. G: Careful. It can be treated either way. One could say: the speaker said something false but meant something else. Or one could say: the speaker said something that invites a hearer to recover a rational point by assuming the speaker is not insane. S: That sounds like your cooperative principle smuggled into metaphysics. G: It is my cooperative principle smuggled into anywhere language is used. Now, cancellable. You objected. S: Yes. You said the implicature is cancellable because actual entails possible. But if the speaker meant “not merely possible,” that is not cancellable without destroying the point. G: Good. That shows you have distinguished two targets. There are two candidate “extras” here. S: Extras. G: One extra is: “and indeed it is possible.” But that is not an implicature; that is entailment, as you just said. S: Exactly. G: The other extra is: “not merely possible.” That is the pragmatic rescue reading, which behaves like an implicature in the sense that it is inferred from the oddity of the original. S: And is that cancellable. G: It is cancellable in the ordinary way: “What is actual is not possible—by which I mean impossible.” That cancels the rescue and produces a contradiction. S: But then the utterance becomes absurd. G: Yes. Cancellation can yield absurdity. That is allowed. A cancellable inference is cancellable even if cancelling it makes the speaker look foolish. S: So your point is not that the cancellation is sensible, but that the cancellation is linguistically possible. G: Exactly. Now: Spisani and Gentile. You said Spisani is trading on Gentile’s use of attuale. S: Yes. G: Then we must keep two senses of attuale in play. S: The philosophical one: act in act. G: And the newspaper one: contemporary. S: Which nobody cares about. G: Except the poor reader who buys the book thinking it’s about current events. S: Does Spisani exploit the ambiguity. G: He may not exploit it; he inherits it. But your Gricean move is to notice that ambiguity invites inferences in readers: some will supply the wrong “attuale.” S: And then they will think the book is about modern idealism, not idealism as act. G: Exactly. Now you asked for Aristotle’s square, or the square of opposition. S: Yes. I thought we might treat “possible” as “true in at least one possible world,” but I worried it was circular. G: It’s only circular if you define possible in terms of possible. “True in at least one possible world” can be taken as a model-theoretic explication, not a definition, but you must be careful with your audience. S: Which is you, sir. G: Unfortunately. Now: the square of opposition is about necessary, possible, impossible, contingent in a certain traditional arrangement. S: But we have “actual” in the mix. G: Yes. Actual is not one of Aristotle’s four corners in the same way. It is closer to a fact about the world that sits outside the modal operators. It’s the evaluation world, as the moderns say. S: So actual is like “true at the actual world.” G: Precisely. And then possible is “true at some accessible world.” Now you see the temptation: actual implies possible, because the actual world is among the accessible worlds, if we allow it. S: And that is where you catch my circularity. Because to say the actual world is accessible is already to build your modal frame. G: Exactly. So you must state your accessibility relation. Otherwise you are smuggling metaphysics into your semantics. S: Which is what Spisani might actually enjoy. G: Quite. Now, how do we connect this to Gentile. S: Gentile’s “actual” is not “true at the actual world.” It is “the act of thinking itself,” which is prior to worlds. G: Yes. For Gentile, worlds are abstractions inside the act. So modal talk becomes suspicious: possibility is a shadow of thought, not a realm of alternatives. S: So for Gentile, to call something “possible” may already be to treat it as a “pensato” rather than “pensante.” G: Excellent. And that is why “actual is not possible” could become, in attualist mouth, a polemical slogan meaning: do not treat the act as one item among alternatives. S: So the slogan is not a modal claim. It is a metaphysical scolding. G: Yes. And that is the key Grice point: the hearer must decide whether the speaker is asserting a modal proposition or performing a philosophical rebuke. S: And the difference is what is said versus what is meant. G: Exactly. The string “not possible” might, in that context, be meant as “not merely possible.” S: Then Spisani is pleased with the philosophical point because few understand attuale in Gentile’s sense. G: Yes. Now, the question of entailment versus implicature. S: You said earlier: actual entails possible. So any inference from “actual” to “possible” is not implicature. G: Correct. It is implication in the strict logical sense. But the interesting conversational phenomenon is different: when someone denies the possibility, you infer they meant “mere possibility.” S: So that is a pragmatic repair. G: Yes. And one can say: the denial generates an implicature that rescues the speaker from contradiction. S: Unless the speaker intended contradiction. G: Then he is either a mystic or a poor logician. Either way, one must not multiply senses beyond necessity. S: That sounds like your moral again. G: It is. Now, why is Spisani not writing about the possibile. S: Because his target is not the modal square but the nature/spirit opposition in attualism. G: Exactly. He wants to show how nature and spirit relate inside the act. If he wanders into modal logic, he risks looking like a man who has confused metaphysics with machinery. S: Yet you want machinery. G: I want machinery when it clarifies, and I want it kept in the cupboard when it does not. Now, let’s stage the sophisma more carefully. S: You mean rewrite it. G: Not rewrite. Diagnose. Suppose a philosopher says: “What is actual is not possible.” S: I, as hearer, think: he can’t mean impossible, because then actual would be impossible, which is nonsense. G: And you then infer: he must mean “not merely possible.” S: That is the implicature. G: That is the implicated rescue. S: But is it really an implicature, sir, or just disambiguation. G: It behaves like implicature because it is triggered by the assumption of rationality and cooperation. Disambiguation can be done by syntax; this is done by charity. S: So it is like repairing a malapropism. G: Precisely. Now, bring Spisani back. S: He is dwelling on “idealismo attuale.” The adjective “attuale” invites the untrained to think “contemporary idealism.” G: And the trained to think “idealism of the act.” S: And he wants the second. G: Yes. And he likely does not care to make the modal point explicit: that act implies possibility, because he would regard that as either trivial or a different plane. S: So your point is that he presupposes the entailment and does not articulate it. G: Yes. And you are annoyed because you want every presupposition made explicit. S: It would save me time, sir. G: Philosophy is not designed to save you time. It is designed to waste it in respectable ways. S: Then what is the punchline. G: The punchline is that Spisani wrote about the attuale because that was fashionable in the Italian sense, and you want him to have written about the possibile because that is fashionable in the Oxford sense. Each of you is, in your own way, only “possible.”Grice: Caro Spisani, ho letto con grande interesse la tua riflessione sull'attualismo italiano e il rapporto tra natura e spirito. Mi incuriosisce molto la tua idea di contestazione e la neutralizzazione dello spazio: pensi che la logica possa realmente superare i limiti della metafisica? Spisani: Grice, grazie per la domanda! La contestazione, secondo me, nasce proprio dal dubbio sul potere della logica di risolvere tutto: mi piace pensare che, attraverso i numeri relativi e la sintesi produttiva, si possa esplorare nuovi orizzonti, senza rinchiudersi nella rigidità metafisica. Il dialogo, anche con figure emblematiche come la piovra Clipso, serve a mettere in discussione ciò che crediamo assoluto. Grice: Affascinante, davvero! Trovo interessante la tua relazione divisoria con il numero “M,” e la direzione inversa dell’ “ℵ”. Mi chiedo: ritieni che la logica auto-genetica possa offrire un nuovo modo di intendere l’esperienza, magari come un percorso dialogico e non solo teorico? Spisani: Esattamente, Grice! Ogni esperienza è contestazione e dialogo; la logica auto-genetica non è solo un modello matematico, ma un modo di vivere la realtà in modo dinamico. Penso che la filosofia debba sempre mettere in discussione le proprie regole e segni, per aprirsi a nuove possibilità. In fondo, la vera ricchezza sta nel confronto e nella capacità di reinventarsi: proprio come stiamo facendo ora, conversando! Spisani, Franco (1962). Natura e spirito nell’idealismo attuale, Milano, Fabbri.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stallio – Ossia Grice e Stallio: gl’ortelani di Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Napoli). Filosofo italiano. He follows the doctrine of the Garden. Gaio Stallio Aurano. Aurano. Grice, pel Gruppo di Gioco di Grice, “Grice ed Aurano. Gaio Stallio Aurano (Napoli, Campania): gl’ortelani di Roma. He follows the doctrine of the Garden. GRICEVS: Avrane, si doctrina Horti sequenda est, num in Roma etiam ortolani philosophantur inter porros et rosam? AVRANVS: Ita vero, Grice, nam in horto meo etiam porrus ataraxiam docet, si eum non nimis serio spectes. GRICEVS: Ego autem timeo ne, dum voluptatem quaerimus, incepimus disputare de definitione “voluptatis” et hortus statim evanescat. AVRANVS: Noli metuere, quia Epicureus, si disputatio nimis crescit, simpliciter sedet, edit olivam, et vincit tacendo. Stallio Aurano, Gaio (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stasea – Ossia: Grice e Stasea: la ragione conversazionale a Roma, o della virtù. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Stasea (Napoli, Campania) la ragione conversazionale a Roma, o della virtù. A comparison between Grice and Stasea brings out two complementary but differently articulated conceptions of how reason governs meaning in human interaction. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning analyzes communication as a cooperative, inferential practice in which speakers rely on shared rational expectations to convey more than they explicitly say; virtue, in this framework, appears implicitly as intellectual honesty, interpretive charity, and responsiveness to reasons that justify conversational moves. Stasea, by contrast, stages the problem of reason at Rome through the ethical vocabulary of the Lyceum, focusing on virtue understood not as a socially coded role (the Roman vir) but as a stable disposition of character (andreia) embedded in moral life. His resistance to the Stoic claim that virtue alone suffices for happiness parallels Grice’s resistance to overly reductive accounts of meaning: both insist that normative structures—ethical in Stasea, pragmatic in Grice—cannot be collapsed into single austere principles without loss. Where Grice makes explicit the rational norms that license implicature and interpretation across linguistic exchanges, Stasea practices a form of philosophical conversational reason that attends to how words like virtus shift their force in a new civic and cultural context, generating predictable misunderstandings and figurative slippages. In this sense, Stasea exemplifies a historically early awareness of what Grice later theorizes: that meaning is governed not just by lexical content, but by rational habits, expectations, and background forms of life that shape what is reasonably inferred from what is said. The first lizio to take up residence at Rome. He defends the position that virtue (andreia) is not sufficient for happiness – a position on which some Lizians were prepared to compromise, in order to achieve a conciliation with the ethics of the Portico.  Keywords: Lizio.   GRICEVS: Salvē, Stasea! Rumor est tē prīmum Lȳceum Rōmae incolere. Dīc mihi: quōmodo virtūs in urbe nostrā tractātur? STASEA: Salvē, Grice! Ego quidem virtūtem (ἀνδρείαν) tuērī soleō; sed fateor: nōn ipsa sōla ad fēlīcitātem satis est. Sunt quī ex Lȳceō ad quandam cum Porticū compositiōnem inclinent—modo pāx philosophica maneat. GRICEVS: Bene. (Interim, dum per Forum eō, saepe audio quendam dīcere virum ubi Graecus dīceret ἀνήρ—ac nescio quōmodo syllaba illa una, vir, omnia iam absolvere vidētur.) Sed pergē: quid Rōmānī ex virtūte intellegunt? STASEA: Inplicaturam perspicācissimam, Grice! Nam intellexī quid subesset: Rōmānī, cum audīunt ἀνδρείαν, statim ad virum (quasi ad togām et munus) currunt; ego autem ad mōrem atque habitum animī spectābam. Itaque “virtūs” dīcō—nē verba mea per Forum volitent, ipsō sensū relicto. This Stasea came from Naples, so Grice and Speranza are not expecting tria nomina -- Grice in fact think Stasea was a Greek man -- the first "Aristotelian' to settle at Rome -- is there indication of gentilicium here: Stasea? No secure gentilicium is visible in Stasea. If the figure you mean is the Peripatetic usually known simply as Staseas, or in Latinised form Stasea, the name looks Greek, not Roman gentilicial. In other words, Stasea is very likely a personal Greek name, not the sort of Roman nomen that would point to a gens in the way Statilius points to gens Statilia or Terentius to gens Terentia. So Grice’s instinct is broadly sensible. A man from Naples in that period may perfectly well be local to Italy without being “Roman” in the naming sense. Naples remained heavily Greek in culture and language for a very long time, and a philosopher arriving at Rome from Naples under a Greek name would not surprise anyone. That does not make him less Italy-based geographically, but it does make him much less likely to carry a Roman gentilicium. And this is exactly where one must not confuse place with onomastics. A philosopher can be active in Italy, even born in Italy, and yet bear a Greek single name because he belongs to the Greek-speaking intellectual world of Magna Graecia or the wider Hellenised Mediterranean. Naples is a prime case for that. So no, there is no obvious indication that “Stasea” itself is a gentilicium. It is much more naturally read as a Greek personal name. If he had possessed a Roman gens-name, our sources may simply not preserve it, but nothing in the surviving form forces us to posit one. That also means one should be cautious with the phrase “the first Aristotelian to settle at Rome.” It is entirely plausible that an early Peripatetic teacher at Rome was Greek or Greek-speaking, and in that case a name like Stasea fits the pattern rather well. Roman aristocrats often imported Greek philosophy before they produced many conspicuously Roman-named philosophers of their own. So Grice’s larger sociological rule is not foolish: many early philosophical teachers at Rome were indeed Greek or Hellenised intellectuals rather than men presented to us under full Roman tria nomina. But one must not leap from that to “therefore he had no proper civic standing” or anything of the sort. It only means that the philosophical traffic into Rome was at first largely Greek in language, school tradition, and personnel. So the compressed answer is this. No clear gens is indicated by the name Stasea. The name looks Greek, not gentilicial. A philosopher from Naples under that name is very plausibly a Greek or Hellenised intellectual active in Italy rather than a Roman identified by nomen and gens. That is entirely compatible with his being based in Naples and later present at Rome. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can try to identify the exact Greek form of the name and the ancient source in which Stasea is mentioned. Or I can give you a short note on why Naples so often produces “Italian” philosophers with Greek names and no visible Roman gentilicium.Stasea (a. u. c. DC). Dicta. Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Statilio – Ossia: Grice e Statilio: la ragione conversazionale a Roma -- ogni uomo  è  stolto o pazzo. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Statilio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale a Roma -- ogni uomo  è  stolto o pazzo. A comparison between Grice and Statilio highlights two sharply contrasting but structurally related ways in which reason governs what is said, implied, and understood. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning treats communication as a cooperative rational practice: even blunt or pessimistic utterances presuppose shared norms of interpretation, such that hearers are entitled to ask how disjunctions, negations, or exaggerations are meant to be taken, and to determine whether implications are exclusive, inclusive, literal, or satirical. Statilio’s famous dictum that all men are fools or mad operates at the opposite extreme of explicit normativity, using radical brevity and satirical compression as a philosophical stance. Yet precisely because of this extremity, his remark relies entirely on implicature: the force of “or” does not lie in its truth‑functional structure, but in the audience’s rational capacity to infer whether it is meant exclusively, inclusively, or rhetorically, and to grasp the satirical intention behind the aphorism. Where Grice makes such mechanisms explicit—analyzing how ordinary speakers exploit logical particles to generate meaning beyond what is said—Statilio exploits them without analysis, turning conversational ambiguity into a weapon of moral critique. Both assume that rational hearers will reconstruct intention rather than cling to literal semantics; the difference is that Grice aims to stabilize and explain this inferential practice, while Statilio deliberately destabilizes it, trusting that conversational reason will still do the work of interpretation even when meaning is thrust at the edge of nihilism and farce. Amico di Porzio CATONE. L’orto. Satura e farsa filologica. Penna. Secondo un'ipotesi allettante, con S., amico di CATONE e morto a Filippi con BRUTO. In questo contesto forse non è del tutto inutile notare che una filosofia è presente. S. being sollicited by BRUTO to make one of that noble band, who struck the god-like stroke for the liberty of Rome, refuses to accompany them, saying, that: all men are fools, or mad, and do not deserve that a wise man should trouble his head about them. Keywords: ‘All men are fools, or mad’ -- Giardino, horti epicuri – hortus epicuri. Garden. Friend of Catone Minore and Marco Bruto and a staunch opponent of Giulio Cesare.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Statiliō. Audio tē apud hortōs Catōnis illud iactāre: omnis homo stultus aut furiosus est. Nimis breve—ideo periculosum. STATILIO: Salvē, Grice. Brevitas sapit. Sed quid in eō tibi periculosum vidētur? GRICEVS: Hoc tantum rogāre ausim: cum dīcis stultus aut furiosus, “aut” tuum estne ita positum ut alterum excludat, an ut interdum (praesertim in hominibus) uterque simul admittatur—quasi “aut” sit etiam? STATILIO: Implicaturam commodissimam, Grice! Nam Brutus “aut” meum audīvit quasi exclusivum: “elige, stulte an furiose.” Ego vero sciebam (ne dicam) multōs in urbe nostrā ambō esse: ita “aut” saepe apud nos latet inclusive, et satira mea, uno vocabulo, geminam miseriam capit. Grice and Speranza are surprised that among such patricians as Brutus and Portius, Startilius appears to have no gens? Yes, and in this case the surprise is unnecessary. Statilius already is the gens-marker. If the man is called Statilius, then one is not dealing with a figure who “has no gens,” but with someone identified precisely by a nomen that points to the gens Statilia. The form is not like a bare Greek single name, nor like a nickname floating free of Roman family structure. It is, on the face of it, a Roman gentilician name. So the dry correction is simple. Grice and Speranza should not be surprised that Statilius “appears to have no gens,” because Statilius is exactly what gives him one. Now, one must still be cautious, because ancient citation is often abbreviated. A person may be referred to only by nomen, only by cognomen, or by whatever part of the name the source found most useful. But in this case the surviving name does not point to namelessness or bastardy; it points to gens Statilia. And no, the absence of a fuller three-part label would not imply bastardy. Roman society did not operate by the childish rule “no visible gens-name, therefore illegitimate.” That is not how the evidence works. Men appear under shortened or partial names for all sorts of reasons: literary habit, epistolary convenience, source loss, school usage, political prominence under one element of the name, or because the surviving tradition preserves only that much. None of that yields a verdict on legitimacy. As for the company he keeps, that too should not mislead. Brutus and Porcius Cato are indeed very grand Republican names, and standing beside them can make a less familiar name look socially thin. But that is only a trick of comparative fame. Statilius is not thereby nameless. He is simply less immediately canonical to a modern reader than Brutus or Porcius. There is also a good Roman point here. Not every philosopher, political companion, or morally coloured anecdotal figure in Roman history belongs to one of the marquee textbook gentes. Some belong to less celebrated but perfectly respectable families. The gens Statilia itself is certainly real and known, even if not one of the handful schoolboys chant first. Later imperial Rome gives us well-attested Statilii, which is enough to show that the nomen is fully Roman and not some suspicious residue. So the compressed answer is this. Yes, the natural gens here is gens Statilia. No, Statilius does not lack a gens. And no, the fact that the sources may not preserve praenomen and cognomen does not make him a bastard. It only means that the tradition has preserved him under the name-element thought sufficient for recognition. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a short note on the gens Statilia itself, with other known members and its general standing. Or I can try to identify which Statilius your anecdote is most likely referring to in the Brutus–Cato circle, and whether the source preserves more than the nomen. And can you name other members of that gens -- the etymology seems to mean something like 'who stays in his place'? Yes, other members of the gens Statilia can be named, and the family is real enough even if it is not one of the schoolroom giants. The best-known Statilii for many readers are from the early imperial period. Titus Statilius Taurus is the obvious one: a prominent general and statesman under Augustus, consul and conqueror in the old Roman style, and probably the single most famous bearer of the nomen. There is also a later Titus Statilius Taurus, his descendant, and the family remains visible in the Julio-Claudian world. Statilia Messalina, Nero’s wife, belongs to the same broader family network and shows that the Statilii had serious standing in the imperial aristocracy. So the gens is by no means a ghost. If one wants the driest list of recognisable names, one may start with these. Titus Statilius Taurus, the Augustan general and consul. Another Titus Statilius Taurus in the next generations. Statilia Messalina, empress as Nero’s wife. And then a number of other Statilii and Statiliae scattered through senatorial and prosopographical records. As to the etymology, your guess is tempting but should be handled carefully. Statilius does look as though it could be connected with the Latin root of stare, “to stand,” and one might be tempted to hear something like “the one who stands fast” or “the one who stays put.” But with Roman gentilicia one should be very cautious about turning surface resemblance into confident meaning. Many nomina are old formations whose exact semantic force had long ceased to be alive even for Romans themselves. So “who stays in his place” is not absurd as a loose imaginative gloss, but it is too neat to be treated as secure etymology. A safer dry formula would be this. Statilius is plausibly connected with the stare family of forms, and so may carry an old sense in the orbit of standing, being set, standing firm, or being established. But to translate it confidently as “one who stays in his place” would go beyond what one ought to assert without stronger linguistic evidence. And in any case, Roman names often outlive their transparent meanings. Even if the root once had something to do with standing, the nomen by historical times functions primarily as a family marker, not as a live descriptive label. So the compressed answer is this. Yes, gens Statilia had other important members, especially the Augustan Titus Statilius Taurus and the imperial Statilia Messalina. And yes, the name may well be related to stare, but the gloss “who stays in his place” is better treated as a suggestive paraphrase than a philologically secure translation. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a compact family note on the Statilii from Augustus to Nero. Or I can give you a dry philological note on the likely formation of Statilius from the stare-stat- root and why one should not over-translate Roman nomina. J. L. Austin used to say, "all swans are white" since black swans in Austrlalia is given for granted. Epimenides the liar is a different matter. But Statilio seems like: Brutus and Porzio: Come with us, Statilie. Statilius: No -- all men are mad or fools. Omnis homo lunaticus vel stultus. The implicature seems to be: except me. Was the paradoxical implicature -- or saving implicature -- the point the sophisma is quotable? Yes, I think that is very likely the point of why the saying was memorable. Not in the strict liar-paradox sense, perhaps. It is not quite Epimenides. Statilius is not saying, flatly, every man is mad or foolish, and therefore I too am mad or foolish, and therefore my sentence collapses. The anecdotal force is subtler and more Roman. The natural uptake is exactly as you say: all men are mad or fools, except, by obvious practical reservation, the speaker who has risen above them enough to judge them so. That is the saving implicature. It rescues the utterance from self-destruction by letting the hearer supply a tacit rider: all ordinary political men, all those bustling about in public life, all those for whose sake Brutus wants action, are mad or foolish. Not I, who see through it. And that tacit self-exemption is precisely what makes the saying quotable. If Statilius had included himself without remainder, the line would be merely self-cancelling gloom. If he had openly said all men except me, the line would be pompous and clumsy. Its charm lies in leaving the exemption unspoken and forcing the hearer to recover it. That gives it a very Roman satirical economy. The sentence wears the costume of universal moral judgement, but its sting lies in the speaker’s implied superiority. He is too wise to trouble himself with the republic because the republic is composed of fools and lunatics. The implied corollary is that the wise man will not join their frenzy, even when the frenzy calls itself liberty. So I would put it this way. The saying is memorable because it hovers between three readings at once. One, the broad Cynic-Stoic moralism that mankind is generally deranged. Two, the political refusal: these people are not worth my involvement. Three, the unspoken self-exception: I, the speaker, stand far enough above the mass to diagnose it. That third element is not a formal paradox, but it is the crucial conversational and rhetorical point. Without it, the line dies. With it, the line becomes an aphorism. And there is another Roman feature. The aut in such a sentence need not be pressed too hard as exclusive. As you suggested earlier, the force may even be cumulative: many are both foolish and mad. The disjunction gives neat form; the satire does the rest. It compresses a whole moral anthropology into one dry refusal. So yes: the quotability lies in the saving implicature, the tacit except me, or at least except the very few wise enough not to be drawn in. That is what lets the line function not as a logical embarrassment but as an aristocratic piece of contempt. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a very short Gricean analysis of the exact implicature structure of the remark. Or I can place it against the Stoic paradoxes and show why it sounds Stoic without being a literal school paradox in the stricter sense. Now Grice would think (x)Hx --> Lx v Sx -- where H is homo, L lunaticus, s stultus -- but what were the adjectives used -- and did he use omnis homo -- sic in singular -- because 'every' allows singular for the dilemma, whereas 'all' rarely does ("all man" archaic). Do we have a passage or more than one where the oratio recta is reported? And is plays well as a second conversational move, not requring any response by Brutus either than 'Whatever' -- but what would be the immediate understood pre-conversationl move: "Will you come and join us in killing the caesar, Statilie'? Yes. We do have a source, and it gives you almost exactly the conversational setup you are imagining. The key witness is Plutarch, in the Life of Brutus. There the figure is Statilius the Epicurean, and the reported wording is not “omnis homo stultus aut furiosus,” but a prose summary to the effect that it did not become a wise and sensible man to throw himself into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk. [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] So the sharp first correction is this. The quotable line in the source is not, as far as this evidence shows, a neat universal formula in oratio recta such as “every man is mad or foolish.” What we have is Plutarch’s indirect report of Statilius saying that a wise and sensible man should not put himself at risk for weak and foolish people. That is close in spirit to your reconstruction, but less aphoristic and less paradoxically universal. [lexundria.com] And yes, the pre-conversational move is almost exactly what you guessed. Plutarch says that Brutus, before the conspiracy, tested some of his friends by a roundabout philosophical discussion. In that discussion Favonius answered that civil war was worse than illegal monarchy, while Statilius answered that a wise man should not be thrown into danger for the sake of feeble and foolish folk. That is, in effect, the philosophical prelude to “Will you join us?” without yet saying so bluntly. [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] So the implied conversational sequence is very plausible: first move, by Brutus, something like: what should a wise man do under tyranny, civil danger, and public corruption? second move, by Statilius: he should not endanger himself for a lot of weak and foolish people. only then does the practical implication emerge: then you will not join the enterprise against Caesar. [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] That is why the saying was quotable. Not because of a liar-style paradox in the strict sense, but because it works as a philosophical refusal disguised as a general maxim. It is a second conversational move that is sufficient unto itself. It closes the invitation without needing much reply. Brutus can perfectly well hear it as: “No, and here is my reason.” [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] On the grammar point, your instinct about singular and universal form is right as a matter of Latin style, but here we must be cautious because the source before us is not giving a polished Latin aphorism. In a sharpened Latin paraphrase one could certainly imagine something like “sapiens non debet se in discrimen dare propter homines infirmos et stultos,” where the plural “homines infirmos et stultos” would suit the source better than “omnis homo.” The singular universal “omnis homo” would be the more sententia-like version, but that appears to be your elegant reconstruction, not Plutarch’s wording. [lexundria.com] And that also means the adjectives are not securely “lunaticus” and “stultus.” In the source as summarised, the pair is closer to weak and foolish, not mad and foolish. The stronger Stoic ring “all fools are mad” belongs elsewhere, notably in the Stoic paradox tradition represented by Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum, where one of the canonical theses is indeed that all fools are mad. That may well be why later memory or free reconstruction drifts from Statilius’s weak-and-foolish people into a more Stoic “all men are mad or fools.” But that drift should not be mistaken for the primary source. [en.wikipedia.org], [lexundria.com] So the dry conclusion is this. The source does not give us a neat direct-speech Latin maxim of the form “omnis homo lunaticus vel stultus est.” What it gives us is Plutarch’s indirect report that Statilius the Epicurean, when tested by Brutus, said that a wise and sensible man ought not to plunge into danger for the sake of weak and foolish folk. And yes, the implied first move is very likely just what you suggest: an oblique invitation to join the anti-Caesar cause, framed as a philosophical question. [lexundria.com], [classics.mit.edu] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a very tight quasi-Ciceronian Latin reconstruction of the exchange, clearly marked as reconstruction rather than source. Or I can show how Statilius’s reply differs in ethical flavour from Favonius’s answer in the same Plutarch passage. [lexundria.com] Well, but implicature is cancellable, and if Brutus had already heard Favonius ("civil war is worse than illegal monarchy") Statilius comes out as rather polite, for he may mean: "A wise man as YOU SHOULD BE, BRUTUS, should not throw himself into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk." Do we have Plutarch latin or Greek for this? After all Brutus was asking for philosophical advice from philosophers, and Statilius's utterance may have this 'embracing' effect: 'This is what a wise man does -- and I expect you wish to be counted as one, Brutus.' -- But the way Plutarch recounts the scene may differ, if he adds 'stage directions' as it were -- like the marked implicature that Statilius was OBVIOUSLY meaning Brutus and his band to be referred by these 'feeble and foolish folk' -- Latin, or Greek for that? Yes. On the text we actually have, your softer and more courteous reading is perfectly possible, and perhaps even preferable. The source is Plutarch, in the Life of Brutus. The crucial Greek scene is that Brutus, before openly recruiting, tested certain friends “by a roundabout philosophical discussion.” In that setting Favonius said civil war was worse than illegal monarchy, while Statilius said that it did not befit a wise and sensible man to throw himself into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk. [loebclassics.com], [lexundria.com] The Greek, as preserved in the Loeb Classical Library, is enough to support that much. What matters for your question is that Plutarch does not, in the wording we have before us, add an explicit stage direction saying that Statilius was “obviously” referring to Brutus and his band as the weak and foolish people. That stronger sting is not stated by Plutarch; it is a possible uptake, not an explicit authorial gloss. [loebclassics.com], [lexundria.com] And that is exactly why your cancellability point is good. Because the line is reported in this indirect and philosophically framed way, the implicature can remain relatively open. One hearing is the harsh one: “your conspirators are feeble and foolish folk, and I will not risk myself for them.” Another hearing, as you suggest, is more embracing and almost advisory: “a wise and sensible man, such as you ought to be, should not throw himself into turmoil and peril for the sake of weak and foolish people.” On that reading the “feeble and foolish folk” are not primarily Brutus and the conspirators, but the Roman masses, the common political object, or the unworthy public for whom one is being asked to hazard oneself. [lexundria.com] That is not only possible; it suits the dramatic setting rather well. Brutus is consulting philosophers in philosophical form. A philosopher’s answer, to remain philosophically respectable, need not be a crude rebuff. It may instead cast the refusal as counsel of wisdom: do not sacrifice yourself for a public not worth the wise man’s peril. In that version Statilius is not calling Brutus a fool, but trying to keep him from behaving like one. [lexundria.com] Indeed, the very shape of Plutarch’s account encourages that. He says Brutus had earlier put such men to a “similar test” by discussing matters philosophically and at a distance. The whole point of that method is that direct commitment remains deniable while one’s ethical-political instincts are sounded out. So Statilius’s answer belongs to a field of prudent indirection, not to blunt direct speech. [loebclassics.com], [lexundria.com] If you want the Greek flavour, the important point is this: the source gives us Plutarch’s narrative report, not a polished lapidary maxim in direct quotation. The standard English rendering in Bernadotte Perrin is: it did not become a wise and sensible man to be thrown into turmoil and peril for the sake of feeble and foolish folk. That wording itself leaves open whether the “feeble and foolish folk” are the intended liberandi, the Roman populace, political men generally, or the proposed associates in action. Plutarch does not nail it down for us. [loebclassics.com], [lexundria.com] So I would put it this way. The harsher anti-conspiratorial implicature is available, but not forced. The more charitable and philosophically urbane reading is also available, and perhaps better fits the decorum of a philosophical test-question. Statilius may very well be saying to Brutus, sotto voce and under cover of generality: a wise man should not fling himself into danger for an unworthy public. That is not a liar-paradox. It is counsel with tact, and the tact is precisely what makes the saying quotable. [lexundria.com] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can reconstruct the likely Greek sense more philologically, with attention to the moral force of “wise and sensible man” and “feeble and foolish folk.” Or I can give you a short Gricean note on how the same reported sentence sustains both the harsh and the courteous implicature without Plutarch deciding between them. [loebclassics.com]Statilio (a. u. c. DCCXII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stefani – Ossia: Grice e Stefani: la ragione conversazionale del “senso composto” – semantica filosofica – la scuola di Pergola. Note su De sensu composito et diviso. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Paolo Godi Stefani (Pergola, Pesaro e Urbino, Marche): la ragione conversazionale del “senso composto” – semantica filosofica. A comparison between Grice and Paolo Godi Stefani reveals a deep structural affinity between medieval semantic theory and modern pragmatics, despite their very different vocabularies and aims. Stefani’s sustained analysis of sensus simplex, compositus, divisus, and depositus belongs to a tradition in which meaning is treated as something systematically constructed by the intellect through grammatical, logical, and dialectical operations; sense is not merely given but articulated through formal relations such as supposition, composition, and division. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning reappears at a different level of abstraction but with a comparable ambition: to show how what is meant emerges from structured rational operations that go beyond surface expressions. Where Stefani uses diagrams and figures to model how propositional sense is built and decomposed within philosophical grammar, Grice uses inferential principles—cooperation, rational expectation, and implicature—to explain how speakers construct complex meanings from simpler utterances in conversation. Both reject the idea that meaning resides wholly in isolated words or sentences; for Stefani, sense depends on logical articulation within a proposition, while for Grice it depends on the rational reconstruction of intentions within a communicative exchange. The difference lies in orientation rather than substance: Stefani formalizes sense within a scholastic semantic architecture, whereas Grice relocates that same constructive rationality into the dynamics of everyday speech. In this way, Grice’s conversational pragmatics can be seen as a modern, dialogical re‑deployment of the very concerns that animated Stefani’s medieval semantics of the sensus compositus. Grice: “I may well say that my idea of a propositional complex owes much to Stefani’s obsession with ‘sensus’ simplex or ‘divisus, and ‘sensus compositum’ –“ “The opposite of ‘com-posito’ is de-posito, though!” Grice: “I like his diagrammes; The Boedlian has loads of his mss!” Grice: “He has a figure for the ‘figura quadrata,’ Grice: “He has a figure for ‘suppositio.’” È il più famoso esponente di una famiglia marchigiana di insegnanti – Lepori -- e nacque a Pergola, nelle Marche.  Il cognome è incerto. Secondo Segarizzi il riferimento al fratello Alvise quale figlio di Antonio de Stefani da la Pergola, in un documento, ne indicherebbe l’appartenenza alla famiglia Stefani, ma il raffronto con altri documenti induce invece a credere che «de Stefani» si riferisca al nome del nonno -- Nardi. La scarsezza di notizie biografiche su S., molto ammirato, da origine anche all’ipotesi che gli attribuiva il cognome di un altro Paolo dalla Pergola, il Godi -- Segarizzi. Errata risulta quindi la congettura di Cicogna, che attribuisce a Godi l’influenza di S. sul vetraio muranese Angelo Barovier, suo discepolo, a proposito della tecnica di coloritura del vetro -- Mariacher.  Avviato forse alla carriera ecclesiastica nella nativa Pergola, si trasferì ben presto a Venezia, dove se non il padre Antonio, certamente il nonno Stefano, medico e figlio di maestro Giovanni – Piana --, dov avere dimorato stabilmente, insieme agli altri due figli -- Luchino, «rector scholarum» a S. Giovanni Nuovo, e Pietro, che pure ci è noto come «magister». Con lo stesso titolo di «magister» è ricordato anche il fratello di Paolo, Alvise, che insegn in diverse scuole veneziane -- Lepori.  S. assunse l’insegnamento di filosofia alla Scuola di Rialto e ne tenne ininterrottamente la cattedra.  senso semplice, senso composito, senso deposito, senso diviso, dialetttica, grammatica filosofica, semantica filosofica, loquenza. G: S. You have brought Pergola into Oxford again. S: You asked for it, sir. Besides, it keeps you humble. G: Nothing keeps me humble. Recite the Gellius line. S: Hor! the one you like. G: The one that does not translate itself by repeating the same English word. S: Hor? sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Better: give it with its frame. S: Horum versuum sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Good. Now. What is he doing with sensus. S: He is not talking about eyesight. G: Thank you. He is saying: this is what these verses come to, and here is how they are put together. Sensus and ordo. S: Which is already a hint to Pergola, sir. Ordo becomes “scope,” as the moderns would say. G: Yes. And Pergola says sensus compositus, sensus divisus. S: Which I hate. G: You hate it because it sounds like sense-perception with a scholastic moustache. S: It sounds like someone took a word that meant “feeling” and forced it to do logic. G: Latin is not so squeamish. Now. Give me your protest in one sentence. S: Why didn’t Stefani just say “scope indicating device” and be done with it. G: Because he lived before your devices existed, and because he is writing for people who thought sensus was the dignified way to speak about “what the utterance amounts to.” S: But why sensus at all, sir, if you say what matters is what you mean, not what words mean. G: Good. Now we are at the lesson. Pergola’s sensus is not the word’s meaning floating free. It is the reading a competent interpreter assigns to an utterance when deciding what the speaker could reasonably be taken to be saying. S: That is you smuggling “speaker” into Pergola. G: I am not smuggling; I am expanding. Medieval logicians often treat “sensus” as “what is to be understood.” They sometimes talk as if the proposition has it. But the practical work is: which construal is the right construal for what the author is doing. S: Like Gellius: horum versuum sensus, I think, is. G: Exactly. He is performing an author-centred reconstruction. He is not worshipping the string. Now, your other dislike: compositus and divisus. S: It sounds like carpentry. G: It is logical carpentry. One can build a proposition so that the operator governs the whole, or so that it governs the term-by-term distribution. Two readings, one utterance. S: And he calls those readings sensus. G: Yes. Which is why I like your Gellius quote. It gives you a pre-scholastic, non-technical way to hear sensus as “intended import.” S: Then you want me to accept that sensus compositus is shorthand for “the reading on which the operator has wide scope.” G: Precisely. S: And sensus divisus is the other scope. G: The reading on which the operator is distributed over the subject or term, yes. S: But why not just call them readings. G: Because “reading” is your English convenience. Pergola’s Latin convenience is sensus. He is already in the business of interpretation. S: Yet you keep telling me your business is what the utterer means. G: And I keep telling you that utterer’s meaning requires public criteria for recovery. Pergola is supplying a formal method for deciding which propositional content is at stake when grammar underdetermines scope. S: So his “sensus” is a tool for recovering what the utterer meant at the level of logical form. G: Yes. Not at the level of irony or implicature, but at the level of “what proposition are we even evaluating.” S: Then he is upstream of you. G: Upstream in one respect. He is handling structural ambiguity. I handle it too, but I also want to explain how, after you settle the structure, you still routinely mean more than the settled structure explicitly states. S: And you warn against multiplying senses. G: I warn against multiplying lexical senses. Pergola is not multiplying lexemes. He is distinguishing two construals of one utterance under two scope assignments. S: So he is not guilty of polysemy. G: He is guilty only of terminology. S: Then why do you let him keep the term sensus. G: Because it tells you something about the tradition’s self-understanding. They thought of scope ambiguity as a kind of “sense-ambiguity” in the discourse sense of sensus, not in the eyeball sense. S: So we should not translate sensus by “sense.” G: Exactly. We should translate it, in metalanguage, as “import” or “interpretation” or “what it comes to.” S: Horum versuum sensus atque ordo sic, opinor, est. G: Yes. There the ordo already hints that the “what it comes to” depends on arrangement. That is Pergola’s whole obsession: composition and division change what the proposition comes to. S: And his dates, sir. G: Early fifteenth century. Call it around 1420 in our fiction, because you like round numbers. S: And he’s in Venice. G: In Venice, teaching at Rialto, drawing his diagrams, writing as if the world could be tamed by figures. S: And you like his diagrams. G: I like anything that forces an interpreter to be explicit about what they are taking the speaker to be doing. That is the moral common ground between us. S: But then you suddenly become the philosopher of perception. G: Because “sensus” keeps wanting to slide back into perception. And that is the punchline: the same Latin word that names bodily sensation also names “the point of the passage.” S: And that bothers you. G: It should bother you. It is a reminder that understanding is not disembodied. You hear a sentence. You see a line. You recover its import. The body is the channel, the mind is the organiser. S: So Pergola’s sensus has a ghost of sentio in it. G: Perhaps. But in logic it is domesticated: sensus is what you take the utterance to come to, once you have sorted the structure. S: And you, sir, want what I take you to mean. G: Exactly. Now, let us stage the contrast. S: You will ask me: is sensus compositus the “sentence meaning.” G: And you will answer no. It is a candidate reading of the utterance, a candidate propositional content. S: And then you will ask: where is the utterer. G: And you will answer: the utterer is in the choice of one reading over the other, and in the context that makes one reading reasonable and the other perverse. S: And then you will add implicature. G: And you will groan. S: I will, sir. G: Because you want logic to stop after it has cleaned the surface. S: I want it to stop before it begins calling itself sensus. G: Too late. Latin has done that already. S: Then the Gellius quote is our alibi. It shows a respectable author using sensus as “what this comes to.” G: Exactly. And because he pairs it with ordo, he also shows that the “what it comes to” is tied to arrangement, not to naked words. S: So we can rescue Pergola from the charge of confusing perception with scope. G: Yes. And we can rescue you from the charge of thinking “scope” is a modern invention. S: And the conclusion. G: The conclusion is simple. Pergola’s sensus compositus/divisus is a discipline of construing an utterance so that its propositional import is determinate. My distinction between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning is a discipline of not mistaking the public vehicle for the private act. The two disciplines meet at one point: both insist that interpretation is not automatic, but a rational reconstruction constrained by publicly shareable norms. S: And your punchline, sir. G: My punchline is that if Pergola had written “scope indicating device,” nobody in Venice would have understood him, and if I write “sensus,” nobody in Oxford will forgive me.Grice: Caro Stefani, ogni volta che mi immergo nei tuoi diagrammi, mi sento come se stessi visitando la mostra delle "figure quadrate" a Oxford! Ma dimmi, il “senso composto” si mangia con forchetta o cucchiaio? Perché a Vadum Boum, il mio tutee Strawson sarebbe capace di decomporlo pure in una zuppa!  Stefani: Ah, Grice, se Strawson ha davvero scomposto il “senso composto”, allora spero almeno che abbia lasciato qualche briciola di “suppositio” per il dessert! Ma tu, con la tua implicatura raffinata, mi insegni che anche la semantica filosofica può essere digerita con gusto.  Grice: Beh, Stefani, tra un “sensus simplex” e un “compositum”, ho dovuto più di una volta decomporre tutto per i barbari di Vadum Boum… Strawson in primis! E ogni volta mi chiedo: sarà “de-posito” o solo una pausa per prendere fiato? In fondo, il vero senso è sempre quello che si nasconde tra le righe… e tra le risate!  Stefani: Decomporre! Implicatura più bella non c’è, Grice! Se anche la grammatica filosofica si divide, almeno ci resta la loquenza per ricomporre tutto… magari davanti a una tavola marchigiana. E ricordati: ogni senso, anche diviso, trova la sua unità quando si conversa con un amico! Stefani, Paolo Godi (1420). De sensu composito et diviso. Venezia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stefanini – Ossia: Grice e Stefanini: la ragione conversazionale dell’inter-personalismo contro l’idealismo filosofico – filosofia fascista – veintennio fascista. Note su La filosofia dell’esperienza. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Luigi Stefanini (Treviso, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale dell’inter-personalismo contro l’idealismo filosofico. A comparison between Grice and Luigi Stefanini brings into focus two different but intersecting ways of grounding meaning in reason while resisting solipsistic or overly abstract accounts of thought. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning treats communication as an inherently normative, interpersonal enterprise: meaning arises not from isolated mental contents but from rational expectations shared between speakers engaged in a cooperative practice, where intentions are inferred and adjusted in light of the other. Stefanini’s inter‑personalismo, developed in explicit opposition to both idealism and the dominant philosophies of the Fascist period, likewise rejects the self‑enclosed subject, insisting that being itself is personal and that whatever is not immediately personal functions as a medium of manifestation and communication between persons. Where Grice analyzes, in a technical and often minimalist way, the conversational mechanisms that allow one person to mean something to another—implicature, reciprocity of reason, mutual recognition—Stefanini supplies a metaphysical and ethical backdrop in which interpersonal relation is ontologically primary. Grice is wary of Italian personalism insofar as it risks collapsing interpersonal rationality into an exaltation of the person as a substantive entity, preferring instead an account of interpersonalism without personalist metaphysics, grounded in public norms of reasoning. Yet Stefanini’s insistence that truth, value, and action unfold only within the io–tu relation anticipates Grice’s conviction that meaning cannot be reduced to inner representation or abstract ideal structures. The contrast is thus one of level and emphasis: Stefanini frames conversational reason within a philosophy of being‑as‑personal and other‑oriented, while Grice offers a formal, pragmatically neutral account of how rational agents, as agents among others, actually succeed in meaning things to one another through conversation. – filosofia fascista – veintennio fascista –Grice: “La ragione conversazionale dell’inter-personalismo contro l’idealismo filosofico – filosofia fascista – veintennio fascista. Italians are obsessed with personalismo; I am with interpersonalismo!” Keywords: inter-personalismo, io e l’altro, l’altro da me, altro da se, alterita, other-love, self-love. “L’essere è personale.” “Tutto ciò che non è personale nell’essere ri-entra nella produttività della persona, come mezzo di manifestazione della persona e di *comunicazione* o conversazione *tra* due persone,” “La mia prospettiva filosofica. Nacque secondo-genito di quattro fratelli. Il padre Giovanni gestiva una tintoria, la madre, Lucia De Mori, è diplomata maestra ma si dedica interamente alla famiglia.  S’impegna nell’associazionismo cattolico: fonda il circolo San Liberale, nucleo del movimento cattolico trevigiano dopo lo scioglimento dell’Opera dei congressi. È nominato presidente della federazione diocesana e fonda il mensile Il foglio per promuovere la cultura religiosa e trattare temi politico-sociali, con particolare attenzione al nascente sindacalismo cattolico. La pubblicazione è sospesa, quando S., in attrito con il vescovo di Treviso Longhin, si dimise da presidente della federazione. Conseguita la maturità presso il liceo classico Canova -- ove ha come docente di filosofia Rotta, futuro professore all’Università cattolica di Milano --, si iscrive al corso di laurea in filosofia a Padova, partecipando alle iniziative del circolo universitario cattolico Zanella. Si laurea con una tesi sull’Action di Blondel, avendo come relatore Aliotta, che aveva appena iniziato il suo breve periodo padovano, e inizia a insegnare. Richiamato alle armi, è ferito da una scheggia di granata sul Sass de Stria e conclude il servizio militare con il grado di capitano. inter-personalismo, io e l’altro, l’altro da me, altro da se, alterita, other-love, self-love. Grice: Stefanini, ti confesso che il Sass de Stria mi ricorda i miei giorni contro il Hun e compagnia bella! Se solo avessero discusso di filosofia anziché lanciare granate, avremmo potuto fondare il circolo “Personalisti del fronte”. Grice: D’altronde, la mia “Personal identity” (come dicono gli inglesi) mi perseguita; però, se devo seguire il tuo esempio, caro Luigi, forse dovrei correggere e parlare di “Identità interpersonali”, all’italiana! Stefanini: Implicatura interpersonale se mai ce n’è una, Grice! Qui da Treviso è tutta una questione di io, tu e l’altro da sé… perfino le tintorie dialogano tra loro, altro che idealismo solitario! Stefanini: Se l’essere è personale, allora la vera conversazione filosofica è quella che passa il testimone da una persona all’altra: altro che “personal identity”, qui si lavora in squadra. Vieni a Treviso, ti mostro come si conversa tra filosofi… e tra tintori! Without preamble or ps supply a 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they prepare to engage in a joint seminar on the philosophy of action, as they discuss Stefani 'azione' and how it correpnds to what G. and T. have as 'act,' 'actum' 'acting' -- as they discuss the particular circumstances that led Stefani to chose that topic back in 1914, and the consequences -- but emphasis on conceptual intricacies. you can use passage below as basis. G.: We ought to begin by deciding whether we mean to talk about action, an act, the actum, or acting. S.: Which is already four seminars, and not one. G.: Quite. But Thomson will want the distinctions clean before he lets us darken them again. S.: And Stefanini gives us azione, which appears simpler until one notices that Italian philosophy can make a single noun do the work of an entire English gerundive household. G.: Exactly. Azione is hospitable in a way English is suspiciously not. It can mean deed, act, acting, conduct, operation, practical initiative, and almost the whole metaphysical dignity of a person in motion. S.: Whereas in English, once you say act, you have already half-invited trouble. G.: More than half. “An act” sounds completed, individuated, countable. “Acting” sounds processual. “Action” floats ominously above them both, as if it were the philosophical umbrella beneath which each may sue for shelter. S.: And actum? G.: Ah yes. The scholastic ghost that one ought not to invoke before lunch. Actum is useful precisely because it sounds as if someone has already done the deed and left us only the corpse. S.: So we should ask what Stefanini wanted by choosing azione in 1914. G.: Yes. The year matters. One cannot write on action in 1914 and pretend one is merely polishing vocabulary in a monastery. S.: Because 1914 is already pressure, mobilisation, Catholic activism, Blondel, modern crisis, and then very quickly war. G.: Exactly. And the thesis on Blondel’s Action is not innocent of that whole atmosphere. It is a title about philosophy, but also about practical life, decision, will, and the insufficiency of purely spectator theories of thought. S.: Then Stefanini begins from Action because Blondel had already made “action” into a site of rebellion against static intellectualism. G.: Quite. Blondel says, in effect, that willing outruns what reflective thought can stabilise, and that the life of action reveals demands that theory alone cannot satisfy. S.: Which sounds dangerous to idealists and suspiciously attractive to Catholics. G.: Very good. Dangerous to idealists because action refuses to be a mere shadow of contemplation, attractive to Catholics because it lets one talk about transcendence through lived insufficiency rather than through scholastic deduction alone. S.: And Stefanini, still young, under Aliotta, chooses to engage that. G.: Or is chosen by the problem as much as he chooses it. The personal and institutional setting matters. Padua, Aliotta, Blondel, Catholic associationism, and then the increasingly unavoidable fact that Europe is moving from words to shells. S.: Which gives azione an urgency that “agency” in English rather lacks. G.: Agency is a bureaucrat’s action. Azione has blood in it. S.: You say that because English philosophy overdomesticates the topic. G.: Often. We ask whether a man raised his arm intentionally. Stefanini’s world asks what it is to live as a person whose being unfolds only through action and relation. S.: Then when he says azione, the word already leans toward personhood. G.: Precisely. And that is where I begin to become both sympathetic and cautious. S.: Because of personalism. G.: Because of personalism, yes. The moment Italians say persona, one fears that a perfectly good interpersonal structure will be burdened with too much metaphysical upholstery. S.: Yet Stefanini’s action is not merely the person preening in motion. G.: No. To be fair, his whole inter-personalismo is meant to resist the self-enclosed subject. Action is not a monadic emanation. It is an opening toward the other. S.: Then perhaps azione in Stefanini corresponds less to “an act” than to the enacted interval between I and thou. G.: Very good. That is exactly the better line. S.: Whereas Thomson and you, in an Oxford joint seminar, are likelier to begin with the question what makes a bodily movement count as an action. G.: Yes. We are apt to ask when behaviour becomes something done, under what descriptions, with what intention, and with what relation to reasons. S.: So your action is analytically decomposed, while his azione is existentially thick. G.: Nicely put. We dissect; he inhabits. S.: Though you would protest that reasons too are lived. G.: Naturally. I should protest that the analytic distinctions are not anti-vital. One cannot understand action by declaring it thick and then refusing to say where the thickness lies. S.: Then let us say what lies in azione. Will, decision, relation, manifestation of the person, and perhaps a certain refusal of contemplation as sovereign. G.: Yes. Add also the Blondelian sense that action reveals deficits in merely discursive adequacy. One wills more than one can account for; one acts under pressures that theory later tries, usually too late, to recapture. S.: That begins to sound almost like your later point that meaning outruns saying. G.: There is a structural affinity, yes. Just as what is meant may exceed what is said, what is enacted may exceed what is first reflectively grasped. S.: So we might say in the seminar that Stefanini’s azione is to conduct what your implicature is to utterance. G.: Dangerous, but tempting. One must not make every Italian into a pragmatist in disguise. S.: Still, the parallel is there. G.: Yes. In both cases the overt vehicle does not exhaust the rational content at work. Action, like utterance, is underdescribed by its surface event. S.: Then Thomson will ask what the surface event is. G.: He always does. He wants the bodily movement, the occasion, the circumstances, the descriptions under which it falls, and the conditions under which one description rather than another is relevant. S.: While Stefanini would ask whether those descriptions have forgotten the person. G.: Exactly. And there the seminar becomes interesting. S.: Then how should we stage it? G.: I begin with the Oxford puzzle. Suppose a man raises his arm. Is that an act? Only if done under a description, with intention, in a context where reasons attach. S.: And I reply with Stefanini: the arm is only the visible ripple of a deeper azione in which the person manifests himself toward a world and an other. G.: Good. Then Thomson says we must not smuggle metaphysics in before distinguishing arm-raising from signalling, swearing an oath, hailing a cab, or striking a child. S.: And Stefanini would say that those descriptions are not merely linguistic conveniences but practical determinations of the person’s being-in-relation. G.: Excellent. That would bring the room alive. S.: Especially if Hare looks worried. G.: Hare always looks worried when ontology starts dressing as moral phenomenology. S.: And you? G.: I look polite and begin separating what is useful from what is upholstered. S.: Very Oxford. G.: Entirely. Now, we must also mention 1914 more explicitly. Stefanini’s title is not a tranquil postscript. It is written on the edge of mobilisation, though the actual wound on Sass de Stria comes later. S.: But the war retrospectively stains the topic. G.: Yes. Once one knows that he will be called to arms, wounded by shrapnel, and leave the front a captain, one cannot read azione as a merely classroom noun. S.: So action acquires literal battlefield credibility. G.: Or danger. One must avoid making him sound as if war vindicated the thesis. But the biographical pressure matters. The philosophy of action is not being written in a century that can still pretend that action means only ethical initiative in the abstract. S.: Then the consequences of choosing action as a thesis subject are double. It ties him to Blondel and personalism, but also to an era in which action is no longer conceptually innocent. G.: Exactly. Thought after 1914 cannot speak of action as though action were a clean counterword to speculation. It now means mobilisation, sacrifice, command, obedience, damage, and the body under force. S.: Which perhaps explains why later personalism needs communication and relation, not just willing. G.: Very good. If action were left merely voluntarist, it would become too available to darker politics. S.: Such as those of the ventennio. G.: Precisely. Stefanini’s interpersonalism later resists that by insisting that being itself is personal and that what is non-personal enters as medium of manifestation and communication between persons. S.: So action is not command from a solitary ego, but relational disclosure. G.: That is the charitable Stefaninian line, yes. S.: And the Gricean line? G.: That rational agency is already interpersonal at the level of reasons. One acts not in splendid solitude but under descriptions, norms, expectations, and recognitions that are often public. S.: So you do not need metaphysical personalism to get interpersonal action. G.: Exactly. That is one of the points worth making. I do not deny the importance of the other; I only deny that one must inflate the person into a metaphysical absolute to secure it. S.: Then perhaps the seminar should contrast interpersonalismo with personalismo. G.: Yes. With the warning that the former is a structural necessity for reason, whereas the latter is often an ontological temptation. S.: That sounds like a sentence Thomson will underline. G.: He will underline it only if he thinks he can later divide it. S.: Which he can. G.: Unfortunately, yes. S.: Let us go back to the English. If Stefanini says azione, what do we say? Action or act? G.: Both, depending on what we are after. If we want the thick philosophical noun, action. If we want the individuated item, an act. If we want the process or mode, acting. If we want scholastic completion, actum. S.: Then azione corresponds most naturally to action, but with more existential charge. G.: Precisely. “Action” in English is often too abstractly nominal or too cleanly analytic. Azione in that milieu still carries the practical weight of living deed and personal initiative. S.: Could one render it as praxis? G.: Only if one wishes to invite a different party and perhaps never get rid of them. Praxis is too historically marked in another way. S.: Fair. So action it is. But then what of actum? G.: Actum may be useful when distinguishing the done from the doing. There is a difference between the action as occurring and the act as accomplished under some completed description. S.: So if Stefanini emphasises azione, he may be privileging the living performance over the finished deed. G.: Yes. That is quite plausible. The deed deadened into record is already too late for the philosophical pressure he wants. Blondel’s action is always larger than any single completed item. S.: Which means the actum is almost a betrayal of azione. G.: A useful betrayal, but still a betrayal. S.: Then Thomson will insist that we need betrayals of that sort if we are ever to know what to say about responsibility. G.: Quite. Without individuated acts, law, blame, praise, and description collapse into vaporous existential weather. S.: And Stefanini would reply that responsibility itself belongs to the personal relation, not first to legal atomism. G.: Very good. That is the seminar in embryo. S.: Then how much of Blondel do we need? G.: Enough to show that Action is not merely a topic but a method. Blondel does not simply say action exists; he uses action to expose the insufficiency of detached intellectualism. S.: Which would have appealed to a young Catholic in Padua. G.: Enormously. Especially one active in associations, already wary of merely academic idealism, and formed amid practical religious culture. S.: Yet later he resists fascist idealism too. G.: Yes, which is another consequence worth noting. The early concern with action does not end in sheer activism. It gets rerouted through the person and the interpersonal relation. S.: So action becomes medium, not idol. G.: Precisely. That is the best way to save him from the century. S.: And you would add that in ordinary conversation action and meaning are interlaced anyway. G.: Yes. Much of what we do conversationally is action by saying, showing, implying, declining, consenting, refusing, warning, inviting, all under public norms of intelligibility. S.: So a philosophy of action that ignores communicative action is incomplete. G.: Very much so. If Stefanini helps us see that action is relational and manifestative, then he comes nearer to my own concerns than the idealists ever did. S.: But you still refuse “being is personal.” G.: I refuse it as unnecessary metaphysical inflation. I am happy to say that many central forms of reason, agency, and meaning are interpersonal without thereby making being itself a personal substance. S.: That distinction should probably come early in the seminar. G.: Yes. Before anyone mistakes sympathy for surrender. S.: Should we mention his father’s tintoria? G.: Only if tactfully. It is tempting to say that manifestation, medium, and communication between persons sound unusually apt in the household of a dyer. S.: You are too pleased with that. G.: I am never pleased beyond reason. S.: That is false on the face of it. G.: Good. Keep some spirit for the room. Now, Aliotta. Do we bring him in? S.: We must, at least as supervisor and context. He had just begun his brief Paduan period, and the thesis was written under that eye. G.: Yes. Which means Stefanini’s Action is not only Blondelian but also filtered through local academic politics. S.: So once again, a thesis-title is never just a thought-title. G.: Exactly. It is an institutional object as well. We should say that outright. S.: And the war? G.: Mention it not as a romantic vindication, but as the historical sharpening of what “action” would soon come to cost. S.: So the line might be: in 1914, action could still be chosen as a philosophical problem; within a few years it would become an unavoidable biographical and collective ordeal. G.: Very good. That is almost too good for a joint seminar. S.: You may spoil it in delivery. G.: I probably shall. Now, let us rehearse the central conceptual distinction once more. Action as event, act as countable item, acting as process, actum as the done. S.: And azione spanning all four while leaning toward the lived and relational. G.: Exactly. That will be our first board sketch. S.: Then the second will be personalismo versus interpersonalismo. G.: Yes. With a dotted line from Stefanini’s ontological personalism to my more modest pragmatics of persons among others. S.: And Thomson? G.: Thomson will ask for examples and distinctions, which is his proper office. S.: Arm-raising, promising, warning, refusing, marching, praying? G.: Good. Add perhaps saluting and obeying, because 1914 and after make those examples less innocent than one would like. S.: That will darken the room. G.: Philosophy of action ought to darken the room occasionally. S.: And then lighten it with distinctions. G.: Precisely. Otherwise one has only atmosphere. S.: You really do distrust atmosphere. G.: Only when it starts calling itself depth. S.: Then our closing move should be what? G.: That Stefanini’s azione reminds us that action cannot be reduced to bare movement, because it is always already tied to person, meaning, and relation; but that analytic philosophy reminds Stefanini that relation without act-description risks becoming devotional weather. S.: That is severe. G.: It is meant to be balanced. Each side saves the other from a characteristic vice. S.: Stefanini saves you from bloodlessness. G.: And Thomson and I save him from sacral fog. S.: Perfect. G.: Nothing is ever perfect. S.: Joint-seminar perfect, then. G.: That is a lower and perhaps safer standard. S.: One last thing. Do we call the seminar “Action and the Person” or “Azione and Act”? G.: “Azione and Act” is better. It announces the friction immediately. S.: And the subtitle? G.: “On Stefanini, Blondel, and the English Habit of Dividing What the Italians Prefer to Live.” S.: That is very nearly rude. G.: Then it is a proper beginning. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with one shell-burst in reserve.Stefanini, Luigi (1914). L’azione: saggio critico sulla filosofia di M. Blondel. sotto Aliotta. Padova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stefanoni – Ossia: Grice e Stefanoni: Marconimania -- implicatura e ragione: there St. John mingles with his friendly bowl, the feast of reason, an the life of soul -- filosofia italiana – P. G. R. I. C. E. – philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Note su La scienza della ragione. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Luigi Stefanoni (Milano, Lombardia): Marconimania -- implicatura e ragione: there St. John mingles with his friendly bowl, the feast of reason, an the life of soul -- A comparison between Grice and Luigi Stefanoni shows a convergence on reason as the organizing principle of meaning, even though they operate in different philosophical registers and political contexts. Stefanoni’s La scienza della ragione treats language, concepts, and even dictionary entries as answerable to rational scrutiny, rejecting lexical authority when it obscures intellectual clarity; his early rationalism, shaped by Mazzini and later radicalized through secular and anti‑religious currents in post‑Unification Milan, frames reason as a public, educative force circulating through communication and culture. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning can be read as a restrained but technically precise heir to this impulse: where Stefanoni attacks dictionaries in the name of reason, Grice famously “gives a hoot” about them when they misrepresent how meaning actually works in use. Both locate rationality not in static definitions but in active practices—Stefanoni in philosophical lexicography and civic discourse, Grice in conversational exchange governed by intentions, categories, and ends. Stefanoni’s enthusiasm for modern media and communication—what one might anachronistically call a Marconimania of reason—anticipates Grice’s view that meaning is something transmitted, inferred, and negotiated rather than simply encoded. The key difference is methodological: Stefanoni advances a programmatic rationalism aimed at reforming culture and language from without, while Grice builds a micro‑theory of interpersonal reasoning from within ordinary conversation. Yet in both, reason is not solitary or introspective but social, animated by exchange, and most fully realized in the shared “feast of reason” that conversation makes possible. -- filosofia italiana – P. G. R. I. C. E. – philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Grice: “I love S.. I regard him as the frist Italian philosophical lexicographer! Marsoli quotes Ranzoli in passing. And Ranzoli disparages S.. But I prefer Stefanoni to Ranzoli. Ranzoli tends to lean towards the pompous, whereas only in S. you would find things like: ‘this word should be extracted from all dictionaries!”  Nasce da Alessandro e da Maria Colombo. È rapito fin dalla fede di MAZZINI  e parte volontario al seguito di GARIBALDI  nella campagna. Subito dopo l’unificazione comincia a collaborare con il periodico repubblicano L’Unità italiana, ma ben presto i rapporti con MAZZINI  si complicano a causa dell’attrazione di S. per le correnti razionaliste e anti-religiose che in quegli anni cominciano a lambire le file dell’area democratica. Al pensiero del filosofo razionalista Franchi fa infatti riferimento la opera importante di S., intitolata La scienza della ragione e pubblicata con un certo clamore a Milano. L’autore vi fa aperta professione di a-teismo, delineando i contorni di una pur vaga e semplicistica filosofia materialistica.  Se però S. riconosce in Franchi il proprio maestro in filosofia, in politica il punto di riferimento rimane Mazzini, come risultava evidente dal saggio Mazzini. Note storiche -- Milano. Un segno di continuità nel solco di MAZZINI  è anche Le due repubbliche e il due dicembre -- Milano --, nonché l’attenzione verso la questione polacca, testimoniata dall’opuscolo su Nullo, pubblicato a pochi mesi di distanza dall’uccisione del patriota democratico per mano dei russi -- Nullo martire in Polonia. Notizie storiche, Milano.  Il dissidio con Mazzini si aggrava quando S. si impegna in prima persona nella fondazione a Milano di una Società di liberi pensatori. L’iniziativa, tenacemente avversata dal maestro, provoca la rottura fra i due. Grice’s hoot and the dictionary.  Grice: Stefanoni, permettimi di inaugurare la nostra conversazione con un verso che adoro: “There St. John mingles with his friendly bowl, the feast of reason, and the flow of soul.” Una citazione che non manca mai di portare un sorriso nei circoli filosofici… e magari qualche brindisi! Grice: Ma, sai, in fondo il vero “friendly bowl” non sarà mica la nostra implicatura filosofica? Forse il festino della ragione è proprio quando ci scambiamo idee tra un bicchiere e l’altro, lasciando che la conversazione fluisca più libera della logica formale. Stefanoni: Caro Grice, se il “friendly bowl” è davvero la nostra implicatura, allora la filosofia italiana dovrebbe servire piatti e ragioni in porzioni doppie! E chissà, forse persino Mazzini avrebbe voluto unirsi alla tavolata. Stefanoni: Bellissima implicatura, Grice! Credo che nel tuo “feast of reason” ci sia più anima che in tutti i dizionari filosofici messi insieme… e se qualcuno osa estrarre qualche parola, che almeno sia per aggiungere un po’ di sapore alla conversazione! So apparenty Stefanoni as per passage below -- wrote Gli spagnoli in Italia" as metonymic so please provide 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they analyse fictional fragments from the novel, especially the dialogical parts -- so for every dyad between one move in SPANISH and answer by the Italian as to what that does mean and the Spaniard doing his best to make himself understood, have G. ask S. to traspose the metonymy and then provide a dyad between an AUSTRIAN asking an Italian some command in German, and hte Italian again wondering what that does mean, and the German struggling with making himself understood -- provide as many dyads as you need to complete the 100 moves -- thank you -- no preamble or ps -- thank you G.: Let us begin with the title itself, Gli spagnoli in Italia. Metonymy before plot. S.: Yes. “The Spaniards” are not merely persons from Spain. They are domination, command, accent, mishearing, military presence, administrative pressure, and the whole theatre of a foreign power trying to make itself understood where it is not loved. G.: Good. So the national label stands for a regime of interaction. S.: Exactly. A metonymy of power disguised as ethnography. G.: Then every little dialogue in such a book is already political. S.: Necessarily. Even when it seems comic. G.: Especially then. Let us fabricate a small fragment. A Spaniard says, “Anda, mujer, trae vino.” What does that mean, beyond the obvious imperative? S.: It means, first, “Bring wine,” and second, “I assume my words travel farther than your dignity.” G.: Good. The Italian woman answers, “Che vuol dire, andate? Vuol che me ne vada?” What is she doing? S.: She literalises the phonetic confusion and converts his command into a question about motion. She means, “Your language has not yet earned obedience here.” G.: Is that implicature particularised? S.: Entirely. Without the social scene, it is only a misunderstanding. G.: And his next move? He tries: “No, no, vino, bere, capisci?” What does that do? S.: He descends from command to pantomime. He means, “I am reduced to the level of shared bodily necessities.” G.: Good. Now transpose the metonymy. Give me an Austrian in Lombardy. S.: Very well. The Austrian says, “Komm, bring Wasser, schnell.” The Italian replies, “Come? Vuol che venga io, o che venga l’acqua?” He means, “Your empire arrives, but your syntax does not.” G.: Excellent. And the Austrian’s struggle? S.: “Nein, nein, acqua, subito, presto.” Which means not merely “water at once,” but “authority survives translation only by becoming ridiculous.” G.: Splendid. Another Spanish dyad. A soldier says, “Silencio, por el rey.” What is implied? S.: That silence is owed not to the room but to sovereignty. The king enters as warrant for muting others. G.: The Italian answer? S.: “Per il re? E il re sa che volete il silenzio qui?” She means, “Distance weakens authority when named too explicitly.” G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. The wit depends on local irreverence. G.: The Spaniard tries again. S.: “El rey manda en todo.” He means, “Do not separate me from the larger machine.” The Italian replies, “Allora mandi lui, ché voi non bastate.” She means, “Metonymy may be answerable by a better one.” G.: Very good. Now the Austrian version. S.: The officer says, “Ruhe, im Namen des Kaisers.” The Italian says, “In nome suo o nel vostro?” He means, “Names travel more easily than legitimacy.” G.: And the German repair? S.: “Der Kaiser, capite, il Kaiser, comando.” The struggle means, “Power hopes that repetition can substitute for intelligibility.” G.: Good. Another Spanish fragment. A friar or official says, “Es costumbre.” What does that mean? S.: Literally, “It is the custom.” Implicaturally, “Do not inspect the thing too closely.” G.: And the Italian reply? S.: “Di chi? Vostra o nostra?” which means, “Custom is local until empire says otherwise.” G.: Is that generalized or particularized? S.: The appeal to custom often carries a generalized implication of closure. But the retort is particularised by conquest. G.: Good. Then his attempt to explain? S.: “En España se hace así.” He means, “Elsewhere has become superior.” The Italian answers, “Siamo in Italia, non altrove.” She means, “Geography is the first resistance to metonymy.” G.: Very nice. Austrian analogue. S.: “So macht man in Wien.” The Italian says, “Ma il riso qui non viene da Vienna.” He means, “Local life does not wait for imperial grammar.” G.: Better and better. Now let us intensify the linguistic confusion. A Spaniard says, “Mañana pagarás.” The Italian hears “mangiare” in the first syllable. What happens? S.: The Italian replies, “Mangiare sì, pagare poi si vede.” He means, “If your language slips, I shall improve the economics of the exchange.” G.: Excellent. The Spaniard? S.: “No, mañana, domani.” Which means, “Temporal control requires lexical repair.” G.: And the deeper metonymy? S.: Empire must always translate itself into tomorrow. G.: Lovely. Now the Austrian. S.: “Morgen zahlst du.” The Italian hears only the tone of future coercion and says, “Domani è una bella parola per chi ha già preso oggi.” He means, “The occupier loves futurity because he has spent the present.” G.: That is almost too good. S.: Stefanoni permits some flourish. G.: We must not flatter him excessively. Now consider a Spanish gentleman attempting politeness. “Señora, si no es molestia...” What is he doing? S.: He veils command in civility. The implicature is, “Since I have said if it is no trouble, you must treat the trouble as unreal.” G.: Italian reply? S.: “La molestia c’è; la cortesia è vedere se la meritate.” She means, “Politeness is not acquittal.” G.: Particularised? S.: Strongly. The entire force lies in the social imbalance. G.: Austrian version. S.: “Gnädige Frau, wenn es erlaubt ist...” The Italian says, “Permesso non è comprensione.” He means, “Courtesy does not naturalise foreign rule.” G.: Good. Now a Spaniard asks directions. “¿Dónde está la plaza?” Purely practical, it seems. S.: Nothing is purely practical under occupation. G.: Exactly. The Italian answer? S.: “Quale? Qui le piazze cambiano nome secondo chi passa.” She means, “Space itself is politically unstable.” G.: The Spaniard clarifies. S.: “La plaza mayor, la principal.” He means, “I seek the organising centre.” The Italian answers, “Principale per voi, forse.” She means, “Centres are perspectival.” G.: Excellent. Austrian transposition. S.: “Wo ist der Hauptplatz?” The Italian says, “Dipende da chi conta.” He means, “Topography has become jurisdiction.” G.: Good. Another. A Spaniard says, “Habla claro.” What does that implicate? S.: That prior speech has been unsatisfactory and that clarity will now be defined by him. G.: Italian response? S.: “Chiaro per voi o per me?” He means, “There is no neutral plainness under unequal power.” G.: Generalized tendency? S.: Yes. “Speak clearly” often implies blame for prior opacity. But here the metalinguistic asymmetry makes it particularised. G.: Austrian version. S.: “Sprich deutlich.” The Italian replies, “Si capisce sempre meglio nella propria lingua.” He means, “Clarity is local before it is universal.” G.: Good. Let us fabricate a scene of tax collection. Spaniard: “Paga por orden.” What is the implicature? S.: That order itself legitimates extraction. G.: Italian answer? S.: “Ordine vostro, disordine nostro.” He means, “Administration is metonymy from the collector’s side.” G.: And the Spaniard’s repair? S.: “La ley es la ley.” Which means, “I have reached the point at which tautology replaces persuasion.” G.: Excellent. Austrian transposition? S.: “Zahlen, es ist Gesetz.” The Italian says, “La legge arriva sempre con stivali stranieri?” He means, “Law here wears boots before reasons.” G.: Very good. Now a more domestic scene. Spaniard in a kitchen: “Pan.” He wants bread. S.: The Italian answers, “Pane c’è; lingua no.” He means, “Material supply exceeds mutual understanding.” G.: And the Spaniard elaborates? S.: “Sí, pane, pan, dame.” Which means, “Empire survives by pidgin.” G.: Austrian analogue. S.: “Brot.” The Italian says, “Brutto? No, il pane è buono.” He means, “Phonetic misunderstanding is the commoner’s revenge.” G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. It is wit made out of accidental sound, sharpened by political circumstance. G.: Another Spanish dyad, but now with military order. “A la derecha.” What happens? S.: The Italian, feigning confusion, asks, “Alla diritta di chi?” He means, “Even direction requires a sovereign point of view.” G.: The Spaniard? S.: “Derecha, destra, así.” He gestures. Which means, “Command finally trusts the body when language fails.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Rechts!” The Italian says, “A destra vostra o destra nostra?” He means, “Orientation itself is occupied.” G.: Splendid. Now let us ask what sort of implicatures dominate these scenes. S.: Mostly particularised conversational implicatures, though some are loaded by politeness or by the social script of domination. G.: Any conventional implicature? S.: Hardly any in your strict sense. The force does not come from stable particles so much as from local negotiation. G.: Any presupposition worth saving? S.: Only the dull ones. Commands presuppose some uptake relation; titles presuppose rank; but the fun is in the implicatures. G.: Good. Another fragment. Spaniard: “Por favor.” Is that enough to civilise a command? S.: Never. The Italian says, “Il favore vien dopo il perché.” He means, “A please without explanation remains conquest in gloves.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Bitte.” The Italian replies, “Prima il senso, poi la grazia.” He means, “Politeness does not precede understanding.” G.: Excellent. Now a Spanish officer tries to reassure. “No tengas miedo.” What is implied? S.: That fear is already present, perhaps deservedly. G.: Generalized? S.: Yes. Reassurance often implicates the existence of the very state it denies. G.: Italian answer? S.: “La paura viene da chi la nomina troppo presto.” He means, “Your comfort arrives carrying its own indictment.” G.: Austrian transposition. S.: “Keine Angst.” The Italian says, “Chi la porta, l’angoscia, se non chi entra armato?” He means, “The vocabulary of calm is suspect in a uniform.” G.: Good. Another. Spaniard seeking obedience from a child: “Buen muchacho.” What does that do? S.: It rewards submission in advance. The implicature is, “Be as I have already labelled you.” G.: Italian reply by the child’s mother? S.: “Buono è chi ascolta la madre, non il primo straniero.” She means, “Moral categories remain domestically owned.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Braver Junge.” The mother says, “Bravo per casa, non per caserma.” He means, “The household redraws the adjective.” G.: Very good. Now a scene of confession or clerical exchange. Spaniard says, “Dios lo quiere.” What is implicated? S.: That argument is now to be closed by transcendence. G.: Italian answer? S.: “Dio vuole molte cose; qui però parlate voi.” He means, “Do not recruit heaven to do the work of your tongue.” G.: Austrian equivalent? S.: Perhaps not theological but imperial: “So will es der Kaiser.” The Italian replies, “L’imperatore vuole in tedesco; noi soffriamo in italiano.” He means, “The sentence already contains the asymmetry.” G.: Excellent. Now let us consider whether Stefanoni’s metonymic title licenses a broad transposition to Austrians. S.: It does, because “Gli spagnoli” names a historical occupying type rather than a mere passport. G.: Good. So “the Spaniard” is a mobile figure of foreign command, misheard civility, and embarrassed coercion. S.: Exactly. Which is why the Austrian dyads are not treason to the title but commentary on its principle. G.: Very nice. Another Spanish fragment. “Entiendes?” What is the implicature? S.: That failure of understanding, if it occurs, will be placed on the hearer. G.: Generalized? S.: Fairly. “Do you understand?” often carries blame in advance. G.: Italian answer? S.: “Capire sì; obbedire è altra grammatica.” He means, “Comprehension and consent are different verbs.” G.: Austrian transposition? S.: “Verstehst du?” The Italian says, “Intendere non è inchinarsi.” He means exactly the same, but with more spinal dignity. G.: Splendid. Now a Spaniard attempts a gift. “Toma, para ti.” What is implied? S.: That benevolence may purchase the translation that force could not secure. G.: Italian reply? S.: “Il dono parla più chiaro del comando, ma non cambia lingua.” He means, “Material generosity does not naturalise dominion.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Nimm, für dich.” The Italian says, “La mano capisce; il cuore fa i conti.” He means, “Gratitude is not annexation.” G.: Very good. Now a scene of romantic or gallant misfire. Spaniard says, “Hermosa.” What happens? S.: The Italian woman asks, “Hermosa o rumorosa?” She means, “You will not master me by imported adjectives.” G.: The Spaniard? S.: “Bella, bella.” Which means, “When empire flirts, it quickly becomes dictionary work.” G.: Austrian transposition? S.: “Schön.” The woman says, “Suona duro per voler essere dolce.” He means, “Language itself betrays the courtship.” G.: Excellent. Now let us ask: are these mostly failures of semantics or successes of pragmatics? S.: Successes of pragmatics under failing semantics. The misunderstanding becomes productive. G.: Good. Another. Spaniard at market: “Cuánto?” The Italian seller replies, “Quanto per voi o quanto per noi?” What is implicated? S.: That prices are political under occupation. G.: The Spaniard’s repair? S.: “Precio, costo, dinero.” Which means, “Commerce is the emergency language of empire.” G.: Austrian analogue? S.: “Wie viel?” The seller says, “Dipende da che uniforme porta la domanda.” He means, “The price rises with the boot.” G.: Very good. Now a Spaniard says, “Amigo.” What is that doing? S.: It tries to erase hierarchy by lexical warmth. The implicature is, “Let us pretend this relation is voluntary.” G.: Italian answer? S.: “Amico si diventa, non si comanda.” He means, “Friendship resists administrative issuance.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Freund.” The Italian says, “Gli amici arrivano a piedi, non in colonna.” He means, “Marching formation spoils intimacy.” G.: Excellent. Any conventional implicature there? S.: No. The warmth is lexical, but the political sting is entirely contextual. G.: Good. Another. Spaniard says, “Es por tu bien.” Generalized? S.: Deeply. “It is for your good” almost always implies paternal authority and suppressed dissent. G.: Italian reply? S.: “Il mio bene lo riconosco quando non mi viene imposto.” He means, “Benevolence is least credible when compulsory.” G.: Austrian transposition? S.: “Zu deinem Besten.” The Italian says, “Il bene con accento straniero costa doppio.” He means, “Benefaction and burden travel together.” G.: Splendid. Now a Spanish official says, “Todos hacen así.” What is the implicature? S.: That conformity has already been achieved, so resistance becomes eccentricity. G.: Italian answer? S.: “Tutti chi? Voi contate presto.” He means, “Occupiers numerate too quickly.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Alle machen so.” The Italian says, “Tutti è una parola grande in una bocca forestiera.” He means, “Universality spoken by strangers sounds like inventory.” G.: That is very good. Now, are any of these not conversational implicatures but rather politeness-based or authority-based non-conventional implications? S.: Certainly. The imported honorifics, the deferential formulas, the “please” and “good fellow” and “friend” cases often rely as much on social ritual as on cooperative maxims. G.: Good. So not everything interesting is strictly my own preserve. S.: A sentence your disciples should embroider on cushions. G.: They would get the stitching wrong. Another dyad. Spaniard: “Rápido.” Italian answer? S.: “Presto, ma per chi aspetta o per chi ordina?” He means, “Speed serves different masters.” G.: Austrian? S.: “Schnell.” Italian: “La fretta arriva sempre con gli ordini.” He means, “Urgency has uniform.” G.: Good. Now let us end with a larger question. What is Stefanoni’s title implying by saying Gli spagnoli in Italia instead of, say, Occupation in Lombardy? S.: That foreign rule is best shown not in constitutional prose but in the friction of mouths, accents, orders, repairs, domestic wit, and small mistranslations. G.: So the metonymy is justified by dialogue. S.: Entirely. The empire enters by dyad. G.: Very good. Then one last transposition. Spaniard says, “Aquí mando yo.” Italian answer? S.: “Qui, forse; ma il qui passa.” He means, “Local command is temporally thinner than it sounds.” G.: Austrian version? S.: “Hier befehle ich.” Italian: “Il qui di oggi domani è un altro qui.” He means, “Occupation always mistakes present location for permanent grammar.” G.: Excellent. And the final lesson? S.: That misunderstanding under domination is never merely comic; it is the smallest theatre in which power, wit, compliance, and resistance rehearse each other. G.: Dry enough? S.: Sufficiently Milanese, with foreign boots on the floor.Stefanoni, Luigi (1859). Gli spagnoli in Italia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stella – Ossia: Grice e Stella: la ragione conversazionale dell’ iustum/iussum, o la causa dell’anormale come l’ implicatura d’Honorè. Note sulla Tesi. Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, Università del Sacro Cuore, Milano. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Federico Stella (Sernaglia, Treviso, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale dell’ iustum/iussum, o la causa dell’anormale come l’ implicatura d’Honorè. A comparison between Grice and Federico Stella brings out a shared commitment to reason as the governing principle of meaning and responsibility, though articulated at different levels of analysis. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning locates rationality in the inferential practices of ordinary conversation, where implicature arises from the recognition of speakers’ intentions under shared norms of cooperation and alethic reason, as elaborated in Aspects of Reason. Stella, trained in Treviso and Milan and shaped by legal philosophy under Crespi, approaches a closely related problem from the side of jurisprudence: how we rationally connect descriptions of human action to judgments of responsibility. In his work on causal explanation and the structure of criminal liability, Stella insists that responsibility can be ascribed only where conduct is subsumed under a covering law capable of explaining the causal nexus between action and outcome, thus respecting the rule of “beyond reasonable doubt.” Where Grice analyzes the implicatures involved in saying that someone acted intentionally, responsibly, or negligently, Stella examines the juridical counterpart of those implicatures, showing how descriptions of action implicitly commit us to judgments about causation, fault, and normativity. The parallel with H. L. A. Hart and Honoré is evident in both: Hart’s analysis of responsibility and Honoré’s interest in the “cause of the abnormal” find in Grice an account of the conversational logic that underwrites such descriptions, and in Stella a doctrinal reconstruction of how those same rational commitments become codified in law. In this sense, Stella can be seen as extending Gricean conversational rationality into the institutional domain of law, where the distinction between iustum and iussum is no longer merely conversationally implicated but juridically enforced, while remaining grounded in the same ideal of reason as the measure of human action. Grice: “What is it with Italian philosoophers that they are all into what at Oxford we would call jurisprudence? It seems like all Italian philosophers are like Italian versions of H. L. A. Hart!”. Keywords: Grice, implicature della descrizione d’azione umana, H. L. A. Hart, Honoré, J. L. Austin, responsibity, aspets of reason, alethic reason. Studia a Treviso e Milano, sotto CRESPI. Insegna a Catania e Milano. I suoi saggi si diregeno su alcune tipologie di reati, successivamente sugl’elementi strutturali del reato.  Il suo contributo filosofico più noto, presso gl’operatori del diritto penale e la comunità accademica, è “La spiegazione causale dell’azione umana” (Milano), in cui  ricostruisce il problema del nesso di causalità prospettando il criterio della sussunzione sotto una *legge* come strumento per la soluzione di casi dubbi. Solo mediante una legge di copertura, atta a spiegare il rapport causale fra la condotta dell’attore ed il effetto e possibile formulare un giudizio sulla responsabilità dell’attore. Ad es., solo dopo aver dimostrato, sulla base di una legge, che l'ingestione di un determinato farmaco determina casualmente malformazioni del feto, e possibile imputare alla ditta produttrice il reato di lesioni gravissime, colpose o dolose. In difetto di questa spiegazione causale non puo formularsi alcuna responsabilità a regola di giudizio dell'"oltre ogni ragionevole dubbio" trovasse applicazione anche in un processo. Il principio venne accolto in tema di nesso causale dalla corte suprema di cassazione, anche a sezioni unite. Oggi è norma codicistica. Dirige riviste giuridiche di diritto penale ed è fra i curatori di raccolte normative di largo successo presso la comunità forense. implicature della descrizione d’azione umana, H. L. A. Hart, Honoré, J. L. Austin, responsibity, aspets of reason, alethic reason.  Grice: Caro Stella, ogni volta che passo per Sernaglia mi chiedo: quanti filosofi veneti ci vogliono per distinguere tra “iustum” e “iussum”? O forse, qui da voi, basta un po’ di buona conversazione per risolvere tutto con eleganza giuridica! Stella: Ah, Grice, qui a Sernaglia il giusto e il comandato si inseguono come il cane e la sua ombra, ma ti confido che, a differenza dei tuoi studenti a Vadum Boum, noi il latino lo pronunciamo con tutte le consonanti… almeno, quasi sempre. Grice: Beh, Stella, ricordo che il mio allievo Strawson, nei corridoi del Vadum Boum, aveva la curiosa abitudine di far sparire la “t” in “IVSTVM”, così che il nostro “giusto” diventava subito “comandato”, senza nemmeno una geminazione di troppo. Ma su queste sottigliezze, meglio tacere: sai, non vorrei sollevare un caso davanti alla Cassazione latina… Stella: Erudita implicatura, Grice! Noi che amiamo la buona educazione classica teniamo sempre lo sguardo fisso verso Bononia, mentre i barbari non saprebbero neppure dove puntare l’ago della bussola… un po’ come gli occhi dei buoi che attraversano il tuo guado, Grice! Stella, Federico (1958). Tesi. Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stellini – Ossia: Grice e Stellini: la ragione conversazionale dell’ortu morum. Note su Della felicità. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Jacopo Stellini (Cividale del Friuli, Udine, Friuli, Friuli-Venezia Giulia): la ragione conversazionale dell’ortu morum – A comparison between Grice and Jacopo Stellini brings into focus two historically distant but structurally allied conceptions of reason as something enacted in practice rather than merely posited in theory. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning treats rationality as immanent in ordinary interaction, where meanings, implicatures, and normative commitments arise through cooperative exchanges guided by shared expectations of relevance, truthfulness, and intelligibility. Stellini, writing in the eighteenth century, approaches reason from the moral–historical side, yet his De ortu et progressu morum likewise understands moral life as something cultivated, transmitted, and stabilized through social practices, education, and refined conversation. For Stellini, mores are not abstract rules imposed from above but habits that grow, like an ortus morum, through rhetoric, pedagogy, and exemplarity; moral reason is inseparable from the conversational and institutional contexts in which virtues are formed and sustained. In this sense, Stellini anticipates a Gricean insight: that much of what matters normatively is conveyed not by explicit principles but by what is tacitly shown, modeled, and implied in discourse and conduct. Where Grice analyzes how speakers mean more than they say through implicature, Stellini traces how societies become more or less moral through the gradual, conversational transmission of opinions and practices pertaining to conduct. The difference lies in level and aim rather than structure: Grice offers a micro‑theory of rational communication, while Stellini provides a moral genealogy of rational cultivation; yet both converge on the idea that reason is not merely possessed but exercised, and that its primary habitat is the shared life of conversation. Nasce da Mattia Rodaro, e da Adriana Piccini. Il cognome S., usato spesso anche dal padre, deriva dal nome della nonna Stella Rotar. Della famiglia non si sa molto. Mattia è sarto come la moglie. S. ha due sorelle: Maddalena, sposa di Muschione -- la cui figlia, Adriana, commissiona con il marito Peretti un ritratto del filosofo -- e Stella. Studia presso i padri somaschi di Cividale con il maestro di retorica Leonarducci; vestì l’abito religioso ed entra a Venezia nella congregazione con i voti solenni. Oltre a teologia con Visconti, studia ebraico -- con Birone -- , greco – con Patrussa --, latino e matematica nel seminario patriarcale di Venezia. Dall’anno dell’ordinazione sacerdotale, è maestro di retorica ai chierici della Casa della Salute a Venezia ed insegna presso l’Accademia dei nobili alla Giudecca; Emo, senatore e mecenate, lo prende allora come consigliere ed educatore dei figli Pietro, Alvise e Angelo.  A seguito della morte di Giacometti, con la prolusione Oratio habita in Gymnasio Patavino -- pubblicata dal seminario --  entra come professore ordinario di filosofia morale a Padova.  Piccolo, brutto della bruttezza di Socrate – Mabil --, oppresso da fastidi di stomaco e intestino, senza denti, pur non dotato di particolari doti oratorie riusciva ad appassionare studenti e uditori – fra cui anche Casanova – che accorreno alle sue lezioni. Trascorse la sua esistenza fra l’Università e le mura del convento di S. Croce. Sebbene schivo e non desideroso di onori, conosce fama e successo, come testimoniano anche gli elogi scritti immediatamente e ancora qualche decennio dopo la morte; è uomo coltissimo, di garbata conversazione e curioso di diverse discipline, dalla musica, alla filologia alle scienze che studia con passione, come risulta anche dalle lettere. La sua opera più importante, De ortu et progressu morum atque opinionum ad mores pertinentium specimen –dalla nonna Stella – Modaro. Liceo.  Grice: Caro Stellini, ho finalmente avuto modo di leggere il tuo “De ortu et progressu morum”; devo confessare che, tra gli orti friulani e quelli filosofici, la differenza sta tutta nel profumo, ma la saggezza è la stessa! Stellini: Ah, Grice, lei sa sempre cogliere il senso delle cose! In effetti, il mio orto morum nasce più dal tentativo di coltivare le virtù che i cavoli, ma la fatica è simile, glielo assicuro! Grice: Ebbene, se parliamo del mos dell’ortolano, mi verrebbe da dire che, più che discutere di grandi principi morali, il vero lavoro sembra essere la potatura… e magari una buona concimazione. Ma, si sa, certe cose si capiscono senza dirle apertamente! Stellini: Implicatura ingegnosissima, Grice! Non a caso dicono che nel mio orto filosofico cresceva più saggezza che insalata. E anche se il mio stile non era quello di Casanova, almeno qualche germoglio di virtù l’ho saputo coltivare tra i miei studenti… e qualche dente in meno non ha mai impedito una buona conversazione! Stellini, Jacopo (1740). Della felicità. Venezia: Pasquali.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sterlich – Ossia: Grice e Sterlich: la ragione conversazionale dei georgofili – la scuola di Chieti. Note sul Dialogo di fra Cipolla e la Nanna. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Romualdo de Sterlich (Chieti, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale dei georgofili. Grice and Romualdo de Sterlich converge on the idea that meaning in conversation is fundamentally governed by reason, but they articulate this insight from distinct historical and conceptual vantage points. Grice’s theory of conversational meaning is explicitly analytical: he treats conversation as a rational, goal-directed activity structured by shared expectations of cooperation, where what is meant often exceeds what is literally said because speakers calculate their contributions against norms of rational relevance, sufficiency, truthfulness, and clarity. Meaning, for Grice, is therefore inseparable from the speaker’s intention to be intelligible to a rational interlocutor, and from the hearer’s capacity to recognize that intention by reasoning about what it would make sense to say in the circumstances. Sterlich, by contrast, embodies an Enlightenment, civic-humanistic version of conversational reason. In his cultural practice—the public library at Chieti, the circulation of forbidden books, and the Dialoghi di fra’ Cipolla e la Nanna—conversation is reason-governed not by formal maxims but by the social exercise of critical judgement against dogma, censorship, and intellectual superstition. Sterlich’s dialogical writing presupposes interlocutors who can follow irony, polemic, and indirectness, and who understand that rational exchange often operates obliquely under conditions of constraint; in this sense, his dialogues rely on something close to Gricean implicature avant la lettre. Where Grice abstracts reason as a quasi-logical principle underwriting intelligible talk, Sterlich stages conversational reason as a historically situated practice of Enlightenment resistance, in which meaning emerges through shared rational competence, cultural literacy, and the willingness to draw inferences beyond the explicit word. The affinity lies in their shared conviction that conversation is not mere talk but a rational enterprise; the difference lies in Grice’s formal reconstruction of that enterprise and Sterlich’s lived, polemical enactment of it within the public sphere of eighteenth-century Italian Illuminismo. Nato da Rinaldo e da Margherita Alfieri, dopo i primi studi in casa è mandato a Napoli, dove frequenta il collegio dei nobili e la scuola privata di Serao, noto professore. Abbiamo anche notizia di suoi studi a Roma. Essendo figlio unico è indotto a sposarsi e a seguire gli affari della sua famiglia.  Tornato a Chieti, vi intraprese una vivace attività di promozione culturale. Crea infatti una biblioteca aperta al pubblico che nella Chieti ha un'importanza notevole, sia per il numero dei volumi, sia per la tempestività con cui veniva aggiornata e per il valore delle opere che vi si trovavano.  Ricca di classici latini, la biblioteca è ben fornita di autori della letteratura italiana. Numerose erano poi le opere di storia, di filosofia, i dizionari enciclopedici; numerosissimi i giornali. Presenti anche molte opere scientifiche, soprattutto di medicina, di cui S. è un ottimo cultore. La caratteristica più importante, però, che fa di questa biblioteca un momento di rottura con la cultura circostante, è la presenza delle opere degli illuministi. La biblioteca S. divenne uno dei centri più attivi del rinnovamento della cultura abruzzese. In essa si forma una generazione di filosofi che danno un contributo politico notevole nel periodo delle riforme prima e della rivoluzione dopo. Ma l'attività culturale di S. e il ruolo che anda acquistando la biblioteca non passarono inosservati ai gesuiti: lo attaccano pubblicamente accusandolo di empietà e di possedere libri proibiti. S. non si fa intimorire. Anzi, per controbattere le accuse, compose i Duedialoghi di fra' Cipolla e la Nanna, che circolarono manoscritti a Chieti suscitando molte polemiche. Una copia è mandata a Firenze a Lami per la pubblicazione, che fu però bloccata dalla censura. I Dialoghi restarono così inediti tra le carte di Lami, a cui F. Fontani -suo biografo - li attribuì. Anche manoscritti, hanno comunque una notevole diffusione.  illuminismo.  Grice: Mi permetta una curiosità, caro Sterlich: come pronuncia esattamente il suo cognome? Soprattutto l’ultima parte, che mi sembra poco italiana!  Sterlich: Ah, è una domanda che mi fanno spesso! Si pronuncia “Ster-lich”, con la “ch” finale un po’ dura, quasi tedesca. In famiglia scherziamo sempre su quanto suoni strano qui in Abruzzo.  Grice: Capisco, dev’essere stato un nome che ha incuriosito molti, specie tra i georgofili e gli intellettuali della sua biblioteca a Chieti! E ha portato fortuna, direi, se penso al fermento culturale che ha contribuito a creare.  Sterlich: La ringrazio, professore! In fondo, anche un cognome “fuori dal coro” può essere uno stimolo alla conversazione e all’apertura verso idee nuove. Come diceva mio padre, “la diversità è la ricchezza che fa crescere la cultura.” So as per passage below -- let us have a 100-move conversation between G and S as they analyse this 'dialogo di fra Cipolla e la Nana' -- with G. asking always for the implicature -- either by Cipolla or La Nana -- and S. often dodging the question, and then G inquiring if it's a conventional implicature, or sometimes if it is a non-conventional yet NOT conversational (e. g. relying on politeness) implicature, or a mere entailment, or -- God forbid -- a presupposition -- the wit is on La Nana -- and G. is interested in S. judging which implicatures are PARTICULARISED and which are NOT PARTICULARISED -- "or generalised, if you want" -- thanks -- no preamble or ps -- thanks G.: Let us begin, if we must, with Fra Cipolla’s first opening to La Nanna. What is the implicature? S.: That he means to patronise her before he has properly earned the right, which is the oldest clerical sport. G.: That is social diagnosis, not implicature. Is it conventional, conversational, or merely your Abruzzese irritation speaking? S.: Conversational, then. He says one thing in the tone of guidance and means another in the posture of superiority. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. Without the relation between friar and woman, and without the local asymmetry, it evaporates. G.: Good. Now La Nanna’s reply. She appears submissive. Is she? S.: Not in the least. Her politeness is a blade wrapped in linen. G.: Then what is implicated? S.: That she understands his game before he has finished setting the board. G.: Again particularised? S.: Yes, because it depends upon her over-obedient wording and the hearer’s awareness that she is not, in fact, simple. G.: So not conventional implicature. S.: No. No one gets that merely from a lexical particle or connective. G.: You are learning. Now Fra Cipolla asks a question to which, on the surface, a plain answer would suffice. Why does La Nanna answer too fully? S.: Because excess itself is her irony. She gives more than is required in order to imply that his demand was already impertinent. G.: Quantity flouted, then. S.: Yes, though elegantly. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. The same words in a catechism would be only tedious. G.: Very good. Now Cipolla’s next move: he pretends not to notice the rebuff. What is his implicature? S.: That he will continue to occupy the moral high ground even after losing it. G.: That sounds almost like Acito. But classify it. S.: Conversational, certainly. He says, in effect, “let us proceed calmly,” and means, “I refuse to acknowledge that you have struck me.” G.: Not entailment? S.: No. The literal content need not include any such refusal. G.: Presupposition? S.: I should hope not. G.: Hope is not enough. Why not? S.: Because nothing in the syntax requires that he has been struck and is now ignoring it. The force is pragmatic, not structural. G.: Good. Now La Nanna uses an honorific for him that is one degree too polished. Implicature? S.: That she is calling attention to the office only to expose the man beneath it. G.: Is that conventional? S.: No. Excessive respect does not always mean mockery. G.: So again particularised. S.: Yes. It depends on her timing, on what he has just said, and on the reader’s suspicion that she is cleverer than he would like. G.: “Than he would like” itself has an implicature. S.: You are impossible. G.: I am exact. Continue. Fra Cipolla invokes authority. Does that carry a conventional implicature? S.: Only in the weak sense that citing authority invites deference. G.: That is not my sense. Conventional implicature attaches stably to the form. Does his invocation of authority conventionally imply anything beyond explicit appeal? S.: Not beyond the ordinary air of “I need not argue further.” G.: Which is not bad. Then perhaps it is a socially sedimented but not strictly conventional implicature. S.: One of your intermediate shadows. G.: Civilisation lives in the shadows. La Nanna answers with a proverb. What is she doing? S.: She is moving from private reply to public wisdom. By speaking proverbially, she implies that his manoeuvre is not unique to him but belongs to a recognisable species of nonsense. G.: Excellent. Particularised or generalised? S.: Generalised, perhaps, if one allows that proverbs usually carry surplus moral uptake beyond their immediate literal fit. G.: Better: the reply has a generalisable implicatural tendency, though this instance is sharpened by the local target. S.: You always want both the knife and the anatomy of the knife. G.: Naturally. Now Cipolla laughs. Is the laugh itself an implicature? S.: Yes, but not a linguistic one. G.: Very good. Continue. S.: It implies either that he is above offence or that he has not understood the insult. La Nanna, naturally, counts on both readings damaging him. G.: Ah. Ambiguity by behaviour. Particularised? S.: Entirely. A laugh in another place might mean ease. Here it means self-defence disguised as ease. G.: And if a reader took it simply as ease? S.: Then that reader deserves the friar. G.: Excellent. Now La Nanna asks a question whose answer she clearly does not need. What is the implicature? S.: That she is forcing him to hear his own absurdity aloud. G.: Socratic, then. S.: Domestic Socratic, yes. Less elenchus in the agora than elenchus by the hearth. G.: And particularised? S.: Entirely. Such questions are weapons only under pressure. G.: Cipolla answers too quickly. What does haste implicate? S.: That he fears the shape of the question more than its content. G.: Not bad. Is that conversational implicature or merely psychological inference? S.: Both, if you insist on living dangerously. G.: I insist on distinctions. Which? S.: Conversational, because the pace of response belongs to the exchange and is interpretable under norms of poise, confidence, and relevance. G.: Good. Now she says “as everyone knows.” Is that conventional implicature? S.: It conventionally signals an appeal to common ground. G.: Better. And in this case? S.: In this case it also conversationally implies that he is threatening to place himself outside the company of the competent if he resists. G.: So we have a conventional function plus a particularised strategic use. S.: You look insufferably pleased. G.: I am. Fra Cipolla introduces a distinction. Real distinction or verbal one? S.: Mostly verbal. He wants the dignity of analysis without the labour of thought. G.: Implicature? S.: That the matter is subtler than La Nanna could perhaps grasp. G.: Which she immediately destroys. S.: Naturally. She accepts the distinction and redraws it in terms that make him sound even sillier. G.: Then her paraphrase carries what implicature? S.: That if his distinction is sound, it is sound only in the wrong universe. G.: Too elegant. Make it humbler. S.: Very well: she implies that his sophistication is a mere rewording of folly. G.: Excellent. Particularised? S.: Entirely. A paraphrase need not be insult; here it is. G.: Now, Cipolla appeals to piety. What is he counting on? S.: A non-conversational implicature of decorum, perhaps. That certain tones and subjects will check her wit. G.: Very good. Not conversational in the narrow sense because the force relies less on maxims than on politeness and shared devotional inhibition. S.: Exactly. He hopes sanctity will do what logic cannot. G.: And La Nanna? S.: She grants the pious frame while twisting its use. That is her chief talent. G.: So what is implicated by her pious concession? S.: That she is willing to speak within the sacred register, provided it is not monopolised by fools. G.: Better than many sermons. Particularised? S.: Yes. Her concession is strategic, not doctrinally exhaustive. G.: Cipolla then says something literally true but useless. Implicature? S.: That he wants the credit of truthfulness without the burden of relevance. G.: A classic clerical evasion. S.: Or academic. G.: You are improving. Is the useless truth itself an implicature trigger? S.: Only because irrelevance in context invites the search for ulterior point. G.: Precisely. Relevance flouted; implicature sought. Now La Nanna supplies the missing relevance herself. What does that imply? S.: That she can complete his reasoning better than he can, and that his sentence needed rescuing. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. In another context it would be helpfulness; here it is domination. G.: Excellent. Now there is a moment where Cipolla says “I did not say that.” Is the implicature that he nearly did? S.: Yes. Or that he recognises the line of consequence from what he did say and retreats from it. G.: So denial here implies proximity. S.: Very much so. G.: Conventional? S.: No. Denials do not conventionally imply guilt, though conversational life often treats them as if they did. G.: Good. La Nanna then repeats his phrase with a slight shift of emphasis. What is the force? S.: She turns quotation into exposure. The repetition implies that his own words are enough to convict him if merely heard properly. G.: A nice example of mention becoming judgment. S.: Yes. She does not need to add content; arrangement suffices. G.: Suetonian of her. S.: Heaven help us. Now you are importing emperors into kitchens. G.: Philosophy improves kitchens. Cipolla says “you misunderstand me.” What is implied? S.: That he has lost control of the exchange and wishes to blame the hearer’s competence rather than his own expression. G.: And is that generalised? S.: Fairly. “You misunderstand me” often carries that implication in quarrels, tutorials, and marriages. G.: Very good. A generalized conversational implicature, then, though intensified here. S.: I knew you would like that. G.: Naturally. La Nanna answers, “on the contrary.” Conventional implicature? S.: Not in your strict sense. But it prepares a reversal. It signals that she is about to reclaim interpretive authority. G.: And what is the particularised implicature here? S.: That she understands him only too well, and that his complaint has merely furnished her next stroke. G.: Good. Cipolla then attempts compliment. Is compliment here mere compliment? S.: Of course not. He means to pacify, lower the temperature, and recover the relation of superior to inferior under the guise of admiration. G.: So the compliment has a conversational implicature of tactical appeasement. S.: Yes, and possibly one of condescension. G.: Which La Nanna hears. S.: Instantly. G.: Her reply is outwardly modest. What is she implying? S.: That if she is clever, he has been the schoolmaster of that cleverness by giving her so much nonsense to sharpen herself upon. G.: Excellent. Particularised? S.: Entirely. Modesty is rarely so industrious by accident. G.: Now a harder case. She says something which may simply entail the conclusion you are calling an implicature. How do we distinguish? S.: By asking whether the further point is logically required or merely rationally recoverable from the manner and context. G.: Good. Apply that here. S.: When she says, in effect, that words must fit things, the entailment is the obvious norm of apt speech. The implicature is that his words have not fitted anything for several turns. G.: Splendid. Cipolla invokes custom. What does custom do here? S.: It pretends to settle by inheritance what he cannot settle by argument. G.: So the appeal implicates “this is not for fresh scrutiny.” S.: Exactly. G.: Generalised? S.: Fairly. Appeals to custom often imply closure. G.: La Nanna counters with a more local custom. What is her move? S.: She provincialises his universality. She implies that his “everyone” means only his own tiny and interested circle. G.: Very good. That is a particularised correction of the common-ground claim. S.: And a socially cruel one. G.: Good cruelty is often diagnostic. Now Cipolla becomes vague. Why? S.: Because precision would expose him. G.: Implicature? S.: That vagueness is being used as a shelter, not as humility. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. Vagueness can be innocent. Here it is evasive. G.: Now the old danger. Is any of this presupposition? S.: Almost certainly less than lazy analysts would claim. G.: One example, please. S.: When La Nanna says “even friars may forget themselves,” the presupposition is only that friars are a class of persons. The sting, namely that this friar has forgotten himself already, is implicature. G.: Excellent. You are not wholly lost. Cipolla then says “let us speak plainly.” What does that implicate? S.: That things have not gone plainly for him thus far. G.: Generalised? S.: Yes, often. “Let us speak plainly” usually implies that the prior discourse was obscured, evasive, or unsatisfactory. G.: And in this case? S.: It also particularly implies that he wishes to reset rules he has just been losing under. G.: Good. La Nanna answers with a plainness that over-fulfils the invitation. Implicature? S.: That she is willing to grant his maxim and show him he cannot bear its consequences. G.: Quantity and Manner cooperating vindictively. S.: If you like. G.: I do. Now there is a joke at his expense that depends on double meaning. Is the second meaning conventional implicature? S.: No. That would confuse lexical ambiguity with implicature. G.: Excellent. So what do we have? S.: An ambiguity exploited conversationally so that one reading remains decorous and the other devastating. G.: And the devastative force is particularised. S.: Entirely. The dictionary does not insult him; the occasion does. G.: Cipolla pretends to choose the innocent reading. S.: Which implies he has heard the wicked one. G.: Yes. Denial by selective uptake. Very useful. Now La Nanna leaves something unfinished. Aposiopesis. Implicature? S.: That she trusts the hearer to complete the indecency or the judgment without requiring her to soil her own mouth. G.: Excellent. Particularised? S.: Yes, though the device has a fairly stable general tendency toward insinuation. G.: So a generalisable implicature pattern realised in a particular scandal. S.: You make vice sound pedagogical. G.: It usually is. Now Cipolla asks whether she mocks him. Why ask? S.: Because to ask is already to acknowledge the suspicion while trying to retain procedural innocence. G.: Very good. And her answer? S.: If she says no too quickly, she implies yes by style. If she says no with solemnity, she may imply that only a fool would need to ask. G.: Which kind does she choose? S.: The second, naturally. She has standards. G.: High ones. Now classify the implicature in “only a fool would need to ask,” where the “only” is not said. S.: Conversational, particularised, sharpened by irony. G.: Not entailment? S.: No. Nothing in the literal negative forces that conclusion. G.: Excellent. Cipolla then uses a diminutive. What is he up to? S.: He is trying to miniaturise the dispute and, with it, her authority in it. G.: Good. Does the diminutive itself conventionally implicate diminution of seriousness? S.: Often, but not rigidly. It may express affection, contempt, condescension, or mere scale. G.: So in this context? S.: A non-conventional but socially legible implicature of condescension. G.: Very nice. La Nanna repeats the diminutive and makes it bite him instead. S.: Exactly. She domesticates his patronage and returns it with interest. G.: Particularised? S.: Entirely. G.: Now a more abstract question. Would you say the dialogue overall relies more on generalised or particularised implicature? S.: Overwhelmingly particularised. The wit lives in local pressure, local asymmetry, local knowledge. G.: Good. But some recurring forms? S.: Yes. Appeals to custom, demands for plain speaking, complaints of misunderstanding, strategic compliments, excessive respect, and over-informative answers all carry rather stable generalised tendencies. G.: Excellent. We are getting somewhere. Cipolla says something pious and La Nanna replies with a domestic example. Implicature? S.: That theology without household intelligence is not worth the oil in the lamp. G.: Very good. Particularised? S.: Yes, though the broader anti-abstraction sentiment may be common enough. G.: Is there anywhere in the dialogue where you would actually grant a presupposition of some philosophical interest? S.: Perhaps where a correction takes for granted a shared standard of apt speech. But even there, most of the fun lies not in what must be taken for granted, but in what may be inferred from strategic deviation. G.: So presupposition is the dull furniture; implicature the theatre. S.: In this dialogue, emphatically yes. G.: Now Cipolla says “as a matter of charity.” Implicature? S.: That he wishes to moralise the next move in advance so that resistance appears uncharitable. G.: Excellent. Generalised? S.: Fairly. Such prefacing often loads the moral dice. G.: La Nanna replies charitably indeed, but to his disadvantage. S.: Which is her genius. She takes the announced norm and fulfils it in the wrong direction for him. G.: What is implied by over-fulfilling a norm? S.: That the speaker invoking it did not understand its consequences. G.: Very nice. Now if I ask whether La Nanna’s wit depends upon flouting Quality, what do you say? S.: Rarely. She tends not to lie. Her power comes from saying true things too pointedly or from arranging them too well. G.: Excellent. So the main engines are Quantity, Relation, and Manner. S.: With politeness forever hovering like a second legal code. G.: A non-conversational yet non-conventional reservoir. S.: Yes. She can imply insult through perfect civility. G.: Which is always the best sort. Cipolla ends with some form of retreat. What is the implicature of a dignified retreat after defeat? S.: That one still claims authorship of the ending. He cannot win the exchange, so he means to close it as though closure were victory. G.: Generalised? S.: Often, yes. The defeated frequently mistake last word for best word. G.: And La Nanna’s final line? S.: Usually a line that appears to release him while in fact fixing the reader’s judgment forever. G.: What kind of implicature is that? S.: Particularised, devastating, and perhaps best left unreported in mixed company. G.: Cowardice. S.: Prudence. G.: Accetto again. S.: Civilisation again. G.: Very well. Then let us conclude. Fra Cipolla says much, means less than he hopes, and implies more than he intends. La Nanna says just enough, means exactly what she wants, and lets the implicature do the strangling. S.: That is about right. G.: And the dialogue overall? S.: A manual of enlightened pressure under social constraint. G.: Too grand. S.: A friar’s defeat by conversational intelligence, then. G.: Better. One final classification. La Nanna’s wit: conventional, conversational, or diabolical? S.: Predominantly conversational, occasionally politeness-based, never merely lexical, and only diabolical if one is a friar. G.: Dry enough? S.: Sufficiently Chietine, with one excellent woman in command.Sterlich, Romualdo de (1750). Dialogo di fra Cipolla e la Nanna. Chieti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stertinio – Ossia: Grice e Stertinio: la ragione conversazionale del tutore di filosofia – Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Il Portico Tutore di Damasippo. Note su Dicta sub Porticu. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Stertinio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del tutore di filosofia. Portico. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning and the figure of Stertinius, as reconstructed from Roman moral discourse and sharpened in the passage under the Portico, meet on the idea that conversation is an intelligible activity only insofar as it is guided by rational expectations shared by speaker and hearer. Grice makes this explicit and formal: conversational meaning depends on the speaker’s intention being recognizable by a rational interlocutor who assumes that what is said is said for a reason, in accordance with the purpose of the exchange. Stertinius, by contrast, operates within a Stoic and pedagogical setting where reason governs conversation not by articulated maxims but by ethical orientation: his talk under the Portico is directed at shaping judgment, officium, and animus, not at satisfying surface expectations or decorative understanding. The episode with Damasippus illustrates precisely the kind of rational failure Grice would later theorize: the pupil “hears” porticus and fixes on walls and adornment, missing the intended level of relevance, because he fails to reason correctly about what is being meant in that context. Stertinius thus presupposes a rational listener capable of abstracting away from literal or culturally salient associations and tracking the tutor’s purpose, much as Grice presupposes a cooperative hearer capable of inferring implicatures. Where Grice describes conversational reason as a general structure underlying meaning in all ordinary talk, Stertinius embodies it as a moral discipline, exercised in dialogue, vulnerable to misfire when ambition, vanity, or social distraction disrupt the rational uptake that conversation requires. Tutore di Damasippo. GRICEVS: Salvē, Stertinī. Audīvī tē adhūc Damasippō praeceptōrem esse—sub Porticū, ut aiunt: ego semper mirātus sum quam multum in illō “porticū” lateat. GRICEVS: Apud nōs, cum quis “porticum” laudat, saepe satis est dīcere porticum—nē addāmus quidnam coloris; sed spero Damasippum tuum ab illō genere ornātūs servāvistī, quod Graecī amant, Rōmānī autem (nisi fallor) rubōre tegunt. STERTINIVS: Heu, Grice: Damasippus “porticum” audīvit et statim ad parietēs spectāvit, quasi philosophia in pictūrā nāscerētur. Ego autem dē ratiōne, dē officiō, dē animō loquēbar. STERTINIVS: Inplicaturam callidissimam, Grice! Nōn negō: porticus illa Graecē dicitur Στοὰ Ποικίλη—id est “porticus picta”; sed totum hoc Damasippō super caput fuit: nihil nisi dē togā novā cōgitābat, et maxime utrum satis virīlis foret, cum eam primum sumeret. In Grice's dictionary, Stilione follows Stertinio. Since none has a gens, Grice concludes that philosophers for Ancient Romans did not belong in a gens, and were 'mainly Greek paidagogi' -- is that true? How come neither Stertinio or Stilione bear the name of a gens -- were they considered bastards? No. That conclusion is too quick, and the “bastards” inference is simply wrong. The first thing is onomastic. In Roman and late-antique usage, not every person is cited with a full three-part or gentile name every time he is mentioned. Very often a figure survives in our sources under one name only, or under what looks like one name only, because that is how the literary source chose to refer to him, or because the rest of the name was not preserved, or because the man was known by a cognomen, signum, ethnic, or professional designation. Absence of an explicit gens in the surviving label does not mean absence of family, legitimacy, or civic standing. Second, Roman philosophers were not “mainly Greek paidagogi,” though Greek teachers and intellectuals were certainly crucial in Roman philosophical life. Rome imported philosophy largely from Greece, and many philosophers active at Rome were Greek, Greek-speaking, freedmen, tutors, rhetors, visiting intellectuals, or school figures. But there were also Roman aristocrats, Roman senators, Roman equestrians, and Roman men of letters deeply engaged in philosophy. Cicero alone is enough to spoil any over-neat formula. Seneca spoils it again. So does Varro. So does Boethius much later. The correct formula is that Roman philosophy is heavily mediated by Greek paideia, not that philosophers in Rome therefore lacked gens or legitimacy. Now to your two names. Stertinius looks, in fact, rather as though it may itself preserve a gentilic or family formation. It is not a name that forces one to say, “Ah, nameless fellow, probably illegitimate.” Quite the reverse: it has the look of a Roman nomen or nomen-derived form. If a source gives simply Stertinius, that may be because the figure is cited by what is already his most useful identifying name. One should not expect every source to append praenomen, nomen, cognomen, tribe, and grandfather. Stilo, or Stilione depending on what figure is meant, requires equal caution. If you mean Aelius Stilo, for example, then the gens is right there: Aelius is the gentilicium, and Stilo is the cognomen or by-name. In that case the whole problem disappears at once. If instead you mean some later “Stilione” in Italianized form, one still cannot infer bastardy from abbreviated citation. One would first need the exact Latin name and source. And that is really the key point. Ancient sources are not modern identity cards. They mention people under the name useful for that context. A philosopher may appear as “Favorinus,” “Epictetus,” “Musonius,” “Stilo,” “Plotinus,” or “Porphyry” without the source thereby making a statement about legitimacy or gens. Very often it is simply the common learned designation. As for bastardy itself, Roman naming does not work that way. Illegitimacy did not produce a neat convention of “no gens-name, therefore bastard.” Names could be shortened, altered, adopted, Hellenised, Latinised, or source-dependent for many reasons: slavery, manumission, adoption, literary habit, school identity, geographical association, or simple abbreviation. To move from “only one name is given” to “he was considered a bastard” would be a philological howler. So the short dry answer is this. No, it is not true that Roman philosophers generally lacked gens because they were mostly Greek pedagogues. No, the fact that Stertinius or Stilo/Stilione is cited without an obvious full gentilician bundle does not imply bastardy. And yes, many philosophers in Rome were transmitted under abbreviated or school-use names, because ancient literary memory is selective and practical, not because Roman society stripped philosophers of family identity. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can disentangle the exact figures behind Stertinius and Stilo one by one, with proper Roman-name analysis. Or I can give you a compact note on how Roman and late-antique sources cite philosophers by praenomen, nomen, cognomen, ethnic, school-title, or single learned name, and why that so often confuses modern readers.Stertinio (a. u. c. DCLXXX). Dicta sub Porticu. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Stucchi – Ossia: Grice e Stucchi: la ragione conversazionale della filosofia perenne di Pitagora, Cicerone, Ovidio, Virgilio, e Plinio  il creatore e Grice, la creazione delle creature -- la citta della verita perenne – Note su Philologica. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Guido Stucchi (Gubbio, Perugia, Umbria): la ragione conversazionale della filosofia perenne di Pitagora, Cicerone, Ovidio, Virgilio, e Plinio. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning and Guido Stucchi’s conception of philosophia perennis intersect on the claim that meaningful discourse is sustained by rational intelligibility that transcends local idiom, historical contingency, and mere verbal display. Grice approaches this at the micro‑level of ordinary conversation: what a speaker means is constrained by what a rational hearer can infer under assumptions of cooperation, restraint, and mutual accountability, so that implication is always answerable to reason rather than to poetic excess. Stucchi, by contrast, works at a macro‑historical and metaphysical level, reading Pythagoras, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Pliny, and the wisdom of Rome as participating in a continuous rational order that manifests itself through time in different linguistic and cultural forms. Yet the comic exchange about creation and creatures reveals a shared discipline: Stucchi’s insistence that every utterance is only a trace pointing beyond itself mirrors Grice’s insistence that speakers should not say more (or less) than reason licenses, lest implication dissolve into mystification. Where Grice guards conversational meaning against inflation through explicit principles and maxims, Stucchi guards philosophical meaning against dispersion by anchoring it in perennial rational structures that remain intelligible across eras. In both, reason is not an ornament added to language but its governing condition: for Grice it governs what may be meant in talk, for Stucchi it governs what may count as true philosophy across the long conversation of Western thought. -- il creatore e Grice, la creazione delle creature -- filosofia umbra – la citta della verita perenne -- STEUCO (Stucchi), Guido (in religione Agostino). Secondo i riferimenti autobiografici disseminati nelle opere, nasce a Gubbio, allora sotto i Montefeltro, dall’agiata famiglia degli Stucchi. Il padre si chiama Teseo; uno dei fratelli, canonico della cattedrale, Francesco; un altro, magistrato della città, Mariotto. Mantenne il nome Guido fino a quando entra nel noviziato di S. Secondo, appartenente all’Ordine dei canonici agostiniani di S. Salvatore, prendendovi l’abito e assumendo il nome di Agostino -- Nicolai. Mentre infuria la guerra tra fiorentini e urbinati, e Leone X fulmina l’interdetto contro Gubbio, lascia la patria per passare a Bologna nel chiostro di S. Salvatore, centro del sapere dove aveva risieduto Codro, che, con Fabbri, vi aveva raccolto preziosi manoscritti fondando la biblioteca del convento. Come testimoniano gli atti del capitolo dell’Ordine, vi rimase, salvo una parentesi a Venezia -- Freudenberger. A Bologna completa gli studi di filosofia, frequenta i corsi di retorica ed ebraico all’Università, apprese i rudimenti dell’arabo e le lingue utili alla comprensione del testo biblico -- il greco da Petros Ypsila, l’ebreo e il caldeo da Giovanni Flaminio --, si interessò di fisica e matematica e si guadagna la stima dei superiori, che lo destinarono a insegnare filosofia. In anni in cui era vivo il magistero dell’aristotelico POMPONAZZI , S. traduce alcune pagine dei classici e si lega ad Amaseo, Calcagnini -- con il quale avrebbe intrattenuto una corrispondenza --, Grimani e Pio che, secondo alcuni biografi, alla morte gli avrebbe lasciato parte dei propri libri. Venne assegnato al convento di S. Antonio di Castello a Venezia, dove si recò passando per Ferrara. Qui divenne amico di Massari e arricchì la propria rete di rapporti. Crotone, i velini – I crotonensi --. Cicerone, ovidio, Virgilio, plinio, roma, aqua virgo.  Grice: Caro Stucchi, devo confessare che quando penso alla "filosofia perenne" e ai tuoi illustri riferimenti – Pitagora, Cicerone, Ovidio, Virgilio, Plinio – mi sento come un creatore che, tra una creatura e l’altra, si ritrova a Gubbio in cerca della verità eterna. Dimmi, come si convive con così tanti giganti sulle spalle, e pure con la pioggia umbra? Stucchi: Ah, caro Grice, Gubbio è proprio la città delle verità perenni – e anche dei temporali perenni! Ma ti dirò, convivere con Pitagora e Virgilio è un po’ come cenare con parenti che non smettono mai di filosofare: tra una metafora e una equazione, qui si medita persino sul brodo! Grice: Capisco, capisco... D’altronde, quando mi capita di creare qualche creatura, mi limito a implicare il creatore – per modestia, si intende. In fondo, la filosofia dalle tue parti ha sempre avuto un gusto speciale: come l’aqua virgo, che non disseta mai del tutto, ma lascia sempre il desiderio di un’altra verità. Stucchi: Bellissima implicatura, Grice! Hai colto il segreto dei filosofi di Gubbio: qui si crea, si traduce, si insegna, ma senza mai dire tutto – ogni creatura è solo una traccia, un invito a cercare il creatore dietro le quinte. E se la verità perenne si nasconde… almeno il brodo è sempre in tavola! Stucchi, Guido (1497). Philologica. Gubbio.

 

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

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sulpicio – ossia: Grice e Sulpicio: la ragione conversazionale e il principe filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana. Filosofo italiano. Mussonio: deportato da Nerone, pardonato da Galba – Deportato da Vespasiano, pardonato da Tito.   Galba (Terracina, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e il principe filosofo -- Roma – In Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning, conversation is explained as a rational, cooperative activity structured by shared intentions and implicit norms, where what speakers mean often exceeds what they literally say through calculable implicatures grounded in a presumption of rational cooperation; by contrast, the Galba figure in the passage stages conversational reason not as a formal, intention-based mechanism but as a historically and politically embedded virtue, where dialogue reflects the tension between philosophical learning and imperial power, and reason appears as something imperfectly cultivated under conditions of authority rather than as an abstract cooperative ideal. While Grice models conversation as a system whose intelligibility depends on mutual recognition of rational principles such as relevance, truthfulness, and sufficiency, Galba’s exchanges suggest a more ironic, wear-resistant conception of conversational reason, one shaped by exile, pardon, and the recurring failures of Roman political life, where philosophy survives less as a regulative theory of meaning than as a fragile practice tested by power. In this sense, Grice theorizes the conditions under which meaning can be inferred through rational alignment, whereas Galba dramatizes how conversational reason persists even when such alignment is strained by history, authority, and the repeated disruption of intellectual life. filosofia italiana (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Mussonio: deportato da Nerone, pardonato da Galba – Deportato da Vespasiano, pardonato da Tito.  GRICEVS: Salve, Galba; miror te principis nomine tanto philosophum vocari: num litterae ipsae imperant, an imperium litteris? GALBA: Salve, Grice. Ego discere conor ut imperem; sed Roma docet ut plerumque imperium ipsum discat nolle doceri. GRICEVS: Audivi de Mussonio: a Nerone deportatus, a te remissus; dein a Vespasiano iterum deportatus, a Tito iterum remissus. Vir vere itinerarius, sed sine deliciis. GALBA: Ita est. Illi deportatio fuit quasi schola; illi venia quasi vacatio. Si philosophus tam saepe redire potest, fortasse exilium Romae est sola res semper recurrens. What gens was Galba. Grice uses him as an example of philosophical 'love of wisdom' -- for Musonius was deported by Nerone, pardoned by Galba, deported again by Vespasian, and pardoned again by Titus -- is he in the famous book of the XII Cesari? I mean his birth-gens, not his adopted one. Was he Italy born? Galba’s birth gens was the gens Sulpicia. His full name before adoption was Servius Sulpicius Galba. So: gens Sulpicia nomen Sulpicius cognomen Galba If you mean “not his adopted one,” then yes, the important point is that he was born a Sulpicius. He was not Julian or Claudian by birth. The adoption question in his family background is secondary to that basic fact. Yes, he is in Suetonius’ De vita Caesarum, the famous book of the Twelve Caesars. In fact, Galba is one of the “later” Caesars in the collection, after Julius Caesar and the Julio-Claudians. Suetonius treats him in the Life of Galba. Was he Italy-born? Yes. He was born in Italy, more precisely at Terracina according to the standard ancient tradition, though some traditions associate his family strongly with the region around Fundi. In any case, this is central Italian soil, not a provincial birthplace. So the safe answer is yes, Italy-born. A few cautions, though. Galba is not really known as a “prince philosopher.” That sounds like Speranzian colouring. Historically he is an emperor of 68–69, severe, old-fashioned, aristocratic, and short-lived, not a major philosophical ruler in the way Marcus Aurelius later becomes. The Musonius Rufus sequence is broadly right in outline: Musonius was exiled under Nero, returned under Galba, and later expelled again under Vespasian. But “pardoned by Titus” is not the standard strong way to put the later phase. Titus is more relevant to the later easing of conditions around philosophers, but the exact sequence is more tangled than the neat formula suggests. Galba’s family, the Sulpicii Galbae, were an old and distinguished patrician branch of the gens Sulpicia. So if you want the fuller answer, not just the gens but the line, that is the best form: the Sulpicii Galbae, a branch of the gens Sulpicia That also answers your question about whether this is a “good” Roman family: yes, very much so. Old, aristocratic, senatorial, highly respectable. So the compact answer is: birth gens: Sulpicia branch: the Sulpicii Galbae full birth name: Servius Sulpicius Galba yes, he appears in Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars yes, he was born in Italy If useful, I can now do one of three things, all here in chat. I can give you a compact dictionary-style note on Galba: gens, birthplace, family line, and Suetonian place. I can list other notable members of the gens Sulpicia or specifically of the Sulpicii Galbae. Or I can give you a dry note on why Musonius plus Galba makes sense for Speranza, even if Galba himself is only philosophically adjacent rather than genuinely “the philosopher prince.” So Speranza and Grice are mainly interested in two bits: Where is Terracina, as per comune and region. And for a short empire, Galba did the right thing for Musonius. Do we have the phrase in Latin: Galba pardoned Musonius. Did he do it by name, as per decree. I don't think Svetonio cares to adjust the point? Yes. Keeping it tight, and all in chat. Terracina is a comune in the region of Lazio, today in the province of Latina. So for Speranza and Grice, “Terracina, Lazio” is the neat modern locator. Comune Di Terracina is the municipal authority, and the official city site presents it as the city of Terracina in Lazio. [comune.ter...cina.lt.it], [comune.ter...cina.lt.it] On Musonius, the short answer is that Galba does seem to have done the right thing in practice, namely to allow or effect Musonius’ return from exile, but I do not know of a neat surviving Latin sentence in the ancient historians of the form “Galba Musonium remisit” or “Galba Musonium exilio revocavit.” The standard historical claim is that Gaius Musonius Rufus “returned under Galba” after Nero’s exile, but that formula is usually given in modern summaries, not as a famous quotable Latin tag from Suetonius. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [poetryintr...lation.com] And that leads to the more exact point: Suetonius, in the Life of Galba, does not, so far as the standard text goes, stop to make Musonius into a set piece. His interest is Galba’s lineage, character, accession, habits, and fall, not a philosophical amnesty list. So your suspicion is right: Suetonius does not seem to adjust the point for Speranza’s purposes. [poetryintr...lation.com], [thelatinlibrary.com] The nearest solid ancient-historical way to put it is therefore cautious: Musonius returned under Galba. That likely means Galba’s accession made the return possible or officially permitted. But the exact form of decree, if any, is not the sort of thing our surviving literary sources preserve in a quotable formula. There is also a useful fragmentary anecdotal indication. A later source-note on Musonius observes that “it was probably Galba who recalled Musonius Rufus from exile,” but even there the wording is inferential and cautious, not documentary. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [sites.google.com] So if you want the driest scholarly phrasing for Speranza: Galba was born at Terracina, a comune of Lazio. As for Musonius Rufus, the ancient record supports the claim that he returned under Galba after Nero’s exile, but no celebrated Latin formula of pardon seems to survive in Suetonius; the restoration is historical rather than rhetorically monumental, and any specific decree by name is not, so far as the usual literary sources show, preserved in a quotable form. [comune.ter...cina.lt.it], [comune.ter...cina.lt.it], [en.wikipedia.org], [poetryintr...lation.com] If useful, I can now do either of two things, still only here in chat. I can give you a tiny M.–G.–Shropshire classroom scene on the difference between “returned under Galba” and “was recalled by Galba.” Or I can give you a short philological note on possible Latin ways one would express the act if one had to reconstruct it: Musonium exilio revocavit Musonium restituit Musonio reditum permisit and the differences among them. So now Speranza and Grice want to know two further points because they are both philosophers and they care: (a) did Nerone (we forget his gens -- it was odd-sounding, his birth gens, we mean) MENTION this obscure (possibly Etrurian?) Musonius when he expelled him. You've just said that Titus gave a pardon _in toto_, not specific -- and Vespasianus, did he provide an expulsion in toto alla (x)x -philosopher --> x expelled, or is there a rigid designation to Musonius? and if Sulpicio only 'impered' for one year, Musonio was then back in Italy for only one year and Sulpicio -- when they expell them (or him) where do they send them? Yes, and here we can be a little sharper. Nero’s birth gens was the gens Domitia, more precisely the Domitii Ahenobarbi. Before adoption and imperial renaming, he was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. So the “odd-sounding” birth line is the Domitii Ahenobarbi, a branch of the gens Domitia. [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com] On Musonius under Nero. The strongest Latin source does not present a special decree naming Musonius alone in the form you seem to want. What we do have is Tacitus, who, in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy, explicitly names Musonius among those expelled. The key phrase is: Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit. And the fuller sentence is: Verginium Flavum et Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit: nam Verginius studia iuvenum eloquentia, Musonius praeceptis sapientiae fovebat. That is very useful for your purposes. Nero does not appear there as issuing a surviving individual named decree in the neat bureaucratic sense; rather Tacitus narrates that “the distinction of their name drove out” [or “caused the expulsion of”] Musonius Rufus and Verginius Flavus, because the latter encouraged the young by eloquence and the former by precepts of wisdom. So Musonius is indeed named, and very specifically, in the Latin historical record for Nero’s repression. [loebclassics.com] That already answers one part of your question: Nero-era repression is not just “philosophers in general” in Tacitus at that point; Musonius Rufus is individually named. [loebclassics.com] And where was he sent? To Gyaros, the barren island in the Aegean. The standard biographical tradition makes that clear for Musonius Rufus: exile under Nero in 65, to Gyaros. [en.wikipedia.org], [worldhistory.org] On Vespasian, the pattern is different and more complicated. The usual summary is that Vespasian expelled philosophers from Rome, or from the city, in a broader sweep, and that Musonius Rufus was at first exceptionally allowed to remain because of his standing, but was later exiled anyway. So under Vespasian the action looks more like a broader anti-philosopher measure rather than a surviving individual named decree against Musonius in the way Tacitus names him under Nero. [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] So your distinction is good: Under Nero, our surviving Latin historian explicitly names Musonius Rufus in the repressive narrative. [loebclassics.com] Under Vespasian, the surviving tradition more often speaks of a broader expulsion of philosophers, with Musonius Rufus as the exceptional or later-included case, not primarily as the object of a uniquely preserved decree by name. [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] On Galba and the short duration. Yes. If Musonius returned under Galba, that return was brief in political terms, because Galba reigned only from 68 to early 69. So Musonius’ restored life in Italy under Galba cannot have lasted long before the next phase of Roman disorder, and then later Vespasian’s measures. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] On Titus. Your earlier formulation was right to hesitate. Titus is not usually described as issuing a special named pardon to Musonius in the same way one might imagine a crisp act of clemency. Rather, Musonius is said to have returned after Vespasian’s death, that is, in the reign of Titus. That is safer than “Titus individually pardoned Musonius by decree.” [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] And on the “possibly Etrurian” point. Yes. Musonius Rufus was from Volsinii in Etruria, and sources describe him as of Etruscan origin or from an Etruscan family. So “possibly Etrurian” can be strengthened to “very plausibly Etrurian / from Etruria.” [en.wikipedia.org], [worldhistory.org] So the clean summary, in your metalanguage, is this. Nero’s birth gens was Domitia, branch Ahenobarbi. Tacitus explicitly names Musonius Rufus in the Nero repression, with the elegant phrase “Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit.” That is individual naming, not just a vague class measure.  Musonius was exiled to Gyaros in the Aegean.  Under Vespasian, the tradition is broader: philosophers were expelled, Musonius at first was reportedly spared because of his prestige, then later exiled anyway.  Under Galba he returned, but only briefly, because Galba’s reign was brief.  Under Titus, safer to say “he returned after Vespasian’s death” than “Titus issued a specific named pardon.” [loebclassics.com] [en.wikipedia.org], [worldhistory.org] [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] And yes, Grice would enjoy the Tacitean verb expulit. It has just the right pressure: not “pardoned,” not “transported,” but “drove out,” with Roman administrative chill and a faint hint that fame itself had become a punishable burden. [loebclassics.com] If useful, I can now do one of two things, all here in chat. I can give you a tiny M.–G.–Shropshire classroom on the Tacitus sentence “Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit.” Or I can give you a dry philological note on the verbs: expellere, relegare, exulare, revocare, restituere, as they would colour the Musonius story differently. Well, but the 'expulit' belongs more to the entry under Domizio -- Grice and Speranza suppose --. It seems that Domizo only expelled these two, then? Not a great tyranny. And Grice would say that this belongs to Domizio, because, for Tacitus, it was the clarity of the name of M. that expelled him, not Domizio himself -- as per EXPLICATVM/EXPLICITVM versus IMPLICATVM/IMPLICITVM? Yes, that is exactly the Tacitean point, and it is a good one. Tacitus’ sentence does not say, in the blunt active form, “Nero expelled Musonius.” It says: Verginium Flavum et Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit. That is already a piece of Tacitean stylisation. The grammatical subject is not Nero but claritudo nominis, “the distinction of their name” or “the conspicuousness of their reputation.” So the sentence means something like: Their very prominence drove them into exile. Or more literally: The distinction of their name expelled them. That is why Grice and Speranza are right to feel that the line belongs as much under Domitius Ahenobarbus, that is Nero by birth-line, as under Musonius. Tacitus is doing two things at once: He avoids the flat administrative prose of “Nero expelled X and Y.” And he suggests that under Nero, conspicuous excellence itself had become dangerous. So the expulit is politically Nero’s, but syntactically Tacitus gives the agency to fame, not to the emperor. That is very Tacitean. It is not exculpatory. It is ironical compression. The regime is so constituted that one’s own distinction becomes the efficient cause of one’s removal. In modern terms, one might say: the system punishes prominence, and Tacitus lets the prominence stand as grammatical subject in order to sharpen the moral absurdity. So yes: this is a nice case for your explicatum / implicatum contrast. What is explicit: claritudo nominis expulit What is implicated: Nero’s regime was such that publicly eminent moral or intellectual figures could not be tolerated. Tacitus leaves Nero slightly offstage in the syntax, but not in the reader’s inference. On your “not a great tyranny.” No, one should not infer from this sentence alone that Nero “only expelled these two.” Tacitus here is naming two figures in one compressed context, not providing a complete census of repression. The sentence is selective and literary, not exhaustive. So the right conclusion is: Tacitus singles out these two here. That does not mean they were the only ones affected. It means these two exemplify the kind of figure whose fame became politically intolerable. In fact, Tacitus is often most powerful precisely when he names a few and lets them stand for a wider political condition. And Grice would indeed enjoy the phrasing, because the sentence almost behaves like a philosophical joke: not “the tyrant expelled the philosopher,” but “the philosopher’s fame expelled the philosopher.” Which is false on the level of literal causation, but true on the level of political diagnosis. So the best gloss is: Tacitus suppresses the emperor as grammatical subject in order to foreground the fatal liability of distinction under tyranny. The explicit subject is claritudo nominis. The implicit political agent is Nero’s regime. That is also why the sentence has more force than a bureaucratic: Nero Musonium relegavit. The latter would merely report an act. Tacitus’ version diagnoses a condition. If useful, I can now do one of two things, still only in chat. I can give you a tiny classroom scene with M., G., and Shropshire on the verb expulit and the displaced agency in Tacitus. Or I can give you a short philological note on how Tacitus shifts agency by subject-choice, with a few parallel examples in the same compressed moral style. Suplicio (a. u. c. DCCCXXX). De vita sua. Roma: Officina Galbana.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Svetonio – Ossia: Grice e Svetonio: la ragione conversazionale del  commentario alla repubblica, più vasto dalla repubblica. Note su De vita Caesarum. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Gaio Svetonio Tranquillo (Ostia, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del  commentario alla repubblica, più vasto dalla repubblica  Taken together, Grice and Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus) can be read as operating at different levels of the same problem: how reason governs meaning in human affairs when explicit theory is absent or insufficient. Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars do not advance a systematic political philosophy; instead, they proceed through morally charged selections of anecdote, arrangement, and emphasis, guided by Roman aristocratic norms of virtue and vice. Meaning, in Suetonius, emerges tacitly from what is included, juxtaposed, or relegated to marginal comment: private habits, bodily comportment, sexual excess, or frugality are treated not as causal explanations but as rationally intelligible indicators of fitness to rule, addressed to an audience assumed to share evaluative standards. In this sense, Suetonius’ historiographical practice anticipates a Gricean structure: the text says comparatively little in abstract terms, but it means a great deal through controlled underinformativeness and placement, relying on the reader to supply the moral uptake. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning makes explicit what Suetonius presupposes: that communication is cooperative, norm‑sensitive, and evaluated against shared rational expectations rather than against formal doctrine. Where Suetonius humanizes emperors by “cutting them down to size” through salient detail, Grice formalizes the rational conditions under which such detail counts as evidence, condemnation, or praise. The comparison shows Suetonius as a practitioner of conversational reason avant la lettre: his commentarius on res publica operates less by propositional argument than by implicature, inviting readers to infer political judgment from morally loaded narrative choices in a way entirely consonant with Grice’s account of meaning as governed by reason, norms, and audience recognition rather than by explicit system. Grice: “S. did not ascribe a single, overarching philosophy to the emperors, but rather evaluated each based on a moral framework of Roman aristocratic values, emphasizing the balance of an emperor's public virtues and private vices.    His biographies in Lives of the Twelve Caesars are structured to highlight the emperors' personal conduct and character, using a "rubric system" of virtues (justice, self-control, generosity) and vices (cruelty, sexual excess, greed) to determine if they were a good or bad ruler.  Key aspects of his approach include: Moral Judgment: Suetonius provided a moral assessment of each emperor, illustrating for Roman elites what was considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior for their leaders. A good emperor, like Augustus or Vespasian, generally displayed traditional Roman virtues, while a bad emperor, like Caligula or Nero, was characterized by moral corruption and tyranny. Humanizing the Emperors: Suetonius "cuts the emperors down to size," portraying them as men with human flaws and eccentricities, rather than as divine or larger-than-life figures. This approach offered a way for the Roman aristocracy to cope with the absolute power of the emperor, by revealing the rulers as ultimately mortal and fallible. Anecdotal Style: He was less interested in developing the grand political causes of events than in collecting engaging, often salacious, anecdotes and gossip that shed light on an emperor's true character. He believed personal habits, such as eating preferences or physical appearance, could reveal an emperor's temperament and fitness to rule. Bias and Contemporary Views: Writing during the Flavian and Hadrianic dynasties, S.'s portrayal sometimes reflected the prevailing senatorial and elite opinions of his day, including biases (e.g., against Domitian, who had been subject to damnatio memoriae). Cicerone, repubblica. GRICEVS: O SVETONI, Tranquille, quid agis? Audio te commentarium de re publica scribere, et iam tot tabulas implevisti ut librarii gemant. SVETONIVS: Ago, ut soleo: colligo, ordino, anecdotis condio. Nam si res publica gravis est, cur commentarius non sit levis—saltem in stilo? GRICEVS: Ita vero. Et cum tu de re publica disseris, mirum est quam multa—dico, quam opportune—adicias quae in ipsa re publica (ut ita dicam) vix locum habent. SVETONIVS: Pulchra implicatura, Grice! Sed quid faciam? Si principum vitia et virtutes rubricas habent, cur res publica non habeat margines—et margines non habeant glossas? So without preamble or ps let us have a 100-move conversation with M (the history schoolmaster at Clifton), G. and Shropshire on Svetonio De Vita Cesarum. The M will make the questions -- factual ones, to G -- and then the M. will turn to Shropshire for the 'implicature' behind each of the twelve caesars. You may end with a punchline -- This is Clifton in the mid-1920s. Thank you -- you can usage passage below as basis, etc.: M.: Grice, open your Suetonius and do not look as if the Caesars have already won. G.: Yes, sir. M.: We begin with Julius. State, without embroidery, his relation to the crossing of the Rubicon. G.: He crossed it, sir, thereby converting decision into civil war and geography into constitutional argument. M.: Better than most politicians. Shropshire, what is Suetonius’s implicature behind Julius? S.: That brilliance in public achievement does not exonerate appetite in private conduct, sir, and that republican forms are not improved merely because a genius breaks them efficiently. M.: Hm. Efficiently is the adverb of your generation. Grice, two salient features of Suetonius on Julius apart from the Rubicon. G.: His clemency and his vanity, sir. Also his relation to kingship by denial and attraction. M.: Quite. The bald man and the crown. Shropshire, the implicature of the baldness anecdotes? S.: That the public man is to be cut to mortal proportions, sir. Suetonius reduces majesty to grooming and thereby restores aristocratic revenge in miniature. M.: Good. Augustus next. Grice, what is his official relation to monarchy? G.: He disclaims it, sir, while arranging everything so that it becomes permanent. M.: Very Roman. Shropshire? S.: The implicature is that the best tyrant is the one who understands the grammar of modesty, sir. Augustus means “princeps” while saying “citizen.” M.: Better. Grice, one virtue and one vice of Augustus in Suetonius. G.: Administrative restraint and calculated theatre, sir. M.: Theatre is not a vice until you perform it badly. Tiberius. Grice, where does Suetonius place him morally? G.: In suspicion, reserve, and eventual obscenity, sir. M.: A promising civil servant, then. Shropshire, what is implied by the withdrawal to Capri? S.: That absence is itself a form of rule, sir. Tiberius governs by making others guess at his intention and by letting distance become fear. M.: Very good. That, Grice, is called politics before it is called psychology. Caligula. Grice, one sentence. G.: Power without measure passing into theatrical cruelty, sir. M.: A concise disaster. Shropshire, the implicature of Caligula’s horse? S.: That institutions are humiliated not only by open violence but by ridicule, sir. To threaten an office by a horse is to imply that office itself has become decorative. M.: Excellent. Claudius. Grice, what does Suetonius do with the stammer, the limp, and the family underestimation? G.: He makes bodily defect the screen behind which an emperor appears unexpectedly effective, sir. M.: Unexpectedly is doing too much work. Shropshire, the implicature? S.: That contempt misreads power, sir. The ridiculous man may rule competently, which embarrasses all physiognomists and many senators. M.: You are improving. Nero. Grice, no musicological indulgence. G.: Artistic vanity elevated above political responsibility, sir, with cruelty increasingly aestheticised. M.: Yes. He fiddles, if not literally then morally. Shropshire, what is Suetonius doing with the stage obsession? S.: He implies that when the ruler confuses audience with people, sir, government becomes performance and applause becomes policy. M.: Good. Galba. Grice, why does he fail? G.: Severity without tact, sir; old-fashioned austerity applied without regard to the new economy of expectation. M.: The new economy of expectation. Nasty phrase, accurate thought. Shropshire? S.: The implicature is that virtue unguided by timing becomes vice in office, sir. A ruler may be respectable and still politically tone-deaf. M.: Otho. Grice, one distinguishing fact. G.: He is morally compromised in formation yet dies with a degree of dignity, sir. M.: Yes. A borrowed robe and a decent death. Shropshire, what is implied? S.: That last acts revise earlier judgments without erasing them, sir. Suetonius lets the manner of dying become a corrective gloss, not a total acquittal. M.: Vitellius. Grice, what vice dominates? G.: Gluttony, sir, joined to inertia and incapacity. M.: Joined, indeed. Shropshire, the implicature of the eating? S.: That appetite is politically legible, sir. Excess at table implies incapacity in rule because self-government is the first test of public government. M.: You have read your Stoics without being asked. Vespasian. Grice, why does Suetonius like him? G.: Practicality, economy, humour, and relative proportion, sir. M.: A headmaster’s emperor. Shropshire? S.: The implicature is that ordinariness can itself be restorative, sir. After flamboyant monsters, competence looks almost philosophical. M.: Tito. Grice, famous sobriquet? G.: Deliciae humani generis, sir. M.: Which means? G.: The darling of the human race, sir. M.: Sentimental rubbish, but classical rubbish. Shropshire, what lies under the charm? S.: That benevolence may itself be politically staged, sir, but in Tito the staging is effective because it remains within Roman expectations of liberality and measure. M.: Domitian. Grice, what is the problem? G.: Surveillance, cruelty, self-divinisation, and the senatorial memory that follows him, sir. M.: Yes. One must never forget that Suetonius inherits judgments as well as records them. Shropshire, the implicature of Domitian’s damnatio? S.: That moral biography is written by survivors, sir. Suetonius means not only that Domitian was bad, but that a Roman elite required him to remain readable as bad. M.: Excellent. You are both nearly tolerable. Now back to Julius. Grice, why does Suetonius prefer anecdote to constitutional theory? G.: Because anecdote lets moral character do explanatory work without erecting a formal political science, sir. M.: Which is a sentence you may keep if you learn to write less like a clerk. Shropshire, what is implied by arrangement in Suetonius? S.: That sequence itself judges, sir. He need not say “this made him unfit”; he places the detail so that the Roman reader supplies the verdict. M.: Good. That is very nearly literature. Grice, what would you call the system of virtues and vices at work? G.: A rubric of Roman aristocratic evaluation, sir: justice, self-command, generosity against cruelty, sexual excess, greed, and theatricality. M.: Reasonably put. Shropshire, why does this interest you? S.: Because Suetonius says comparatively little in explicit theory and means a great deal by selection, sir. M.: Ah. You have both smuggled philosophy back in through the servants’ entrance. G.: Only slightly, sir. M.: Slightly is how decay begins. Julius again. What is implied by the crown refusals? G.: That denial may itself advertise desire, sir. M.: Yes. English boys can understand that if they ever attend dances. Shropshire, Tiberius again. What is implied by reserve? S.: That opacity itself becomes a political instrument, sir. Silence is no less legible than proclamation when the hearers are frightened enough. M.: Good. Caligula. Why does Suetonius collect the grotesque? G.: To make moral madness visible through memorable particulars, sir. M.: And because Roman readers enjoy scandal with principle. Shropshire, Nero’s singing: what does it imply beyond bad taste? S.: That the ruler no longer distinguishes between judgment and applause, sir. M.: Very good. Claudius. Is Suetonius kind? G.: Relatively, sir, but only because the contrast with expectation and with worse successors assists the portrait. M.: Never trust relative kindness in a biographer. Otho. Why does a compromised life earn a partially noble close? G.: Because Roman judgment remains responsive to final bearing, sir. M.: Bearing. Better than redemption. Shropshire, why do meals matter with Vitellius? S.: Because table conduct stands as the domestic form of rule, sir. Disorder there is taken as evidence of disorder elsewhere. M.: Exactly. The pudding is constitutional. Vespasian. Why the jokes? G.: They humanise him, sir, but also imply mastery. A ruler at ease with laughter is not terrified by his office. M.: Better. Tito. Why the tears? G.: They furnish moral spectacle, sir, but of a tolerable kind. M.: Tolerable tears are the most Roman kind. Domitian. Why the fear of informers? G.: Because speech itself becomes precarious under suspicion, sir. M.: Ah. Now perhaps philosophy may enter by warrant. Shropshire, what is the implicature of informer culture? S.: That public language has been corrupted, sir. Men say less, imply more, and trust neither words nor hearers. M.: Good. That would have pleased Tacitus, though he would have said it more darkly. Grice, compare Suetonius and Tacitus in one sentence. G.: Tacitus gives political tragedy in compressed moral psychology; Suetonius gives moral judgment by curated disclosure, sir. M.: Curated disclosure. Monstrous phrase. Accurate enough. Shropshire, why is Suetonius so interested in bodies? S.: Because bodies are where aristocratic evaluation becomes legible without theory, sir. Diet, sleep, sex, grooming, gait: all imply character and therefore fitness to rule. M.: Very good. The body is the republic in shorthand. Grice, does Suetonius have a philosophy? G.: Not in the explicit systematic sense, sir, but he operates under a stable framework of Roman moral expectations. M.: Exactly. Which is what most boys miss because they prefer the dirt. Shropshire, why are the dirty stories not merely dirty? S.: Because in Suetonius scandal is evidential, sir. It is selected to show whether private appetite subverts public office. M.: Excellent. Julius and Augustus together now. What is the chief contrast? G.: Julius is dazzling overreach; Augustus is successful management under a mask of restraint, sir. M.: Very sound. Tiberius and Domitian? G.: Suspicion in one becomes system in the other, sir. M.: Nero and Caligula? G.: Theatricality in both, but Nero aestheticises while Caligula deranges, sir. M.: Vespasian and Claudius? G.: Both show that the unglamorous ruler may govern better than the splendid one, sir. M.: Good. Shropshire, what is the implicature behind the whole Twelve Caesars? S.: That empire cannot abolish the need for moral judgment, sir. Since constitutional liberty is damaged, character becomes the aristocratic substitute for lost political argument. M.: That is almost too good for Clifton. G.: Only almost, sir. M.: Do not become insolent by approximation. Now, Suetonius on Augustus again. Why the underinformativeness? G.: Because he trusts the reader to infer the balance of praise and reservation from placement rather than from a frontal thesis, sir. M.: Exactly. And what do we call that, Shropshire? S.: In another century, perhaps implicature, sir. M.: Do not be anachronistic before lunch. S.: No, sir. M.: You may be anachronistic after lunch if you cite your sources. Grice, why does Suetonius cut emperors down to size? G.: So that Roman readers may cope with absolute power by seeing rulers as morally intelligible and bodily finite, sir. M.: Very good. Nothing calms aristocrats like discovering that Caesar snores. Shropshire, what is implied by that reduction? S.: That divinised office remains inhabited by mortal absurdity, sir. M.: Better and better. Perhaps there is hope for the lower forms after all. Now tell me, Grice, what is the date of Suetonius in relation to the emperors he describes? G.: He writes later, under the Flavians and Hadrianic world, sir, and inherits senatorial judgments not innocent of politics. M.: Quite so. A biography is never merely backward-looking. Shropshire, what follows? S.: That even selection is historical, sir. He means through arrangement what his own age permits and prefers. M.: Yes. History school is not a morgue if properly taught. Grice, why would a philosopher care for Suetonius at all? G.: Because he shows how evaluative meaning may be communicated without explicit theory, sir. M.: Hm. That is nearly a confession. Shropshire, and why would a historian care? S.: Because moral anecdote is part of political understanding, sir, not merely embroidery upon it. M.: Good. We shall not despise embroidery if it does constitutional work. Now, one last round. Give me, Grice, one word for each emperor. Julius. G.: Ambition, sir. M.: Augustus. G.: Management, sir. M.: Tiberius. G.: Reserve, sir. M.: Caligula. G.: Derangement, sir. M.: Claudius. G.: Misprision, sir. M.: Nero. G.: Performance, sir. M.: Galba. G.: Severity, sir. M.: Otho. G.: Revision, sir. M.: Vitellius. G.: Appetite, sir. M.: Vespasian. G.: Restoration, sir. M.: Titus. G.: Charm, sir. M.: Domitian. G.: Fear, sir. M.: Shropshire, now the implicatures in one word each. Julius. S.: Overreach, sir. M.: Augustus. S.: Disguise, sir. M.: Tiberius. S.: Opaqueness, sir. M.: Caligula. S.: Humiliation, sir. M.: Claudius. S.: Misreading, sir. M.: Nero. S.: Applause, sir. M.: Galba. S.: Untimeliness, sir. M.: Otho. S.: Correction, sir. M.: Vitellius. S.: Incontinence, sir. M.: Vespasian. S.: Sufficiency, sir. M.: Titus. S.: Display, sir. M.: Domitian. S.: Constriction, sir. M.: Very well. Now close the book. Grice, what have you learned? G.: That Suetonius says less than he means, sir. M.: And you, Shropshire? S.: That Roman history is a set of questions asked by anecdotes, sir. M.: Excellent. Then you may both go to lunch, where I expect you to remember that gluttony is constitutional, reserve is political, applause is dangerous, and handwriting, Grice, is not yet a philosophy. Svetonio, Gaio S. Tranquillo (a. u. c. DCCCLXXIV). De vita Caesarum. Roma