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

 

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

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Micalori: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- Ganimede e l’implicatura sferica di Giove – filosofia lazia -- filosofia italiana (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “In Italy, like Oxford, we take mythology seriously! And so did Schelling!” Filosofo italiano.  Roma, Lazio.  Giacomo Micalori (Urbino): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- Ganimede e l’implicatura sferica di Giove. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats what is “meant” as systematically recoverable from what is said plus rational expectations of cooperation (maxims), so that implicature is typically cancellable and calculated by reference to shared purposes in talk; read against that, “Micalori” (Giacomo Micalori of Urbino, professor of theology and philosophy, author of Della sfera mondiale, Urbino, Marco Antonio Mazzantini, 1626, and Antapocrisi, Rome, Francesco Cavalli, 1635) can be used as a deliberately anachronistic foil in which cosmological language (“sfera,” planispheres, longitude/latitude, and the Ganymede/Zeus star-myth complex) invites a quasi-Gricean distinction between what a term strictly commits one to (entailment) and what it merely invites an informed reader to supply (implicature): calling something “the sphere” in a scholastic-astronomical register can be played as if it “says” more than a local conversational hint—almost as though the conceptual apparatus forces a world-picture (hence the joke that “by calling it sfera, Micalori’s statement entails rather than implicates that the Romans were wrong”), whereas for Grice the interesting work is precisely in the gap where speakers exploit shared rational norms to mean more than they say without being logically committed; the mythological overlay (Zeus abducting Ganymede via the eagle constellation; Hyginus’ Astronomica 3.15 as a canonical crystallization of astral lore) then functions as a staged test-case for “reason in conversation,” because mythology, like polite conversational indirection, is a rule-governed practice of saying one thing while licensing another layer of uptake—yet Grice would insist that the extra layer is pragmatic, defeasible, and responsibility-sensitive, not a cosmological necessity, while the Micalori-side “spherical” rhetoric tempts the reader toward a thicker, more doctrinal “implicature” that behaves like background metaphysics; the upshot of the comparison is that Grice models conversational reason as a minimal, public, calculative discipline for moving from utterance to intended meaning, whereas the Micalori constellation-sphere frame (as you present it) dramatizes how a learned symbolic system (myth + astronomy + geometry) can make the unsaid feel structurally enforced—turning what would be a Gricean implicature into something closer to entailment by the weight of the worldview embedded in the vocabulary. Grice: “In Italy, like Oxford, we take mythology seriously! And so did Schelling!” Filosofo italiano.  Roma, Lazio. Grice: “I took my ideas on longitude and latitude from M.” -- Grice: “By calling it ‘sfera,’ M.’s statement ENTAILS rather than implicates that the Romans were wrong.” Professore a Urbino.  Opere: “Della sfera mondiale” In Urbino, Mazzantini, M., Antapocrisi, In Roma, Francesco Roma Cavalli.  Zeus features heavily in a lot of starlore, and the Eagle constellation is no exception.  The predominantly accepted mythos for this constellation is the abduction of Ganymede. Zeus had facilitated the kidnapping, fancying the beautiful mortal boy as his personal cup-bearer.  In the constellation, which is situated south of Cygnus on the equator, making it visible from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, poor Ganymede can be seen hanging from the claws of the eagle as he is swiftly taken to the heavens.  The constellation appears alongside several other bird constellations. The Eagle’s wings are spread, giving it the appearance of gliding through the stars. As Hyginus states, the beak is separated from the body by a milky circle. It was also said to set “at the rising of the Lion and rises with Capricorn”. (Hyginus, Astronomy, 3.15)  Greek astronomy  Humans have a natural urge to identify familiar things amongst the twinkling stars of the mysterious abyss above us. These narratives came out of astronomical observations and ancient time tracking. The study of the sky began long before the earliest Greek sources that (sparsely) discuss them, Homer and Hesiod. They likely developed during the transition from oral to written transmission, but to what is extent is unknown.  Even though the Greeks were late to the constellation conversation, they received a lot of their knowledge from their Eastern neighbors. implicatura sferica, planifesferio, Casali, Micalori. Grice: Caro Micalori, devo confessare che quando guardo le stelle mi sento sempre un po’ come Ganimede: rapito, ma non dall’aquila, bensì dalla curiosità filosofica! Tu che hai studiato la “sfera mondiale”, dimmi: la filosofia può davvero abbracciare il cielo? Micalori: Grice, in Italia ci prendiamo la mitologia sul serio, come Schelling! La “sfera” non è solo una questione di geometria, ma un modo per smentire i Romani: qui ogni implicatura è planetaria! E poi, vuoi mettere il fascino del planifesferio? Basta un po’ di cielo e il tè va subito in orbita! Grice: Ah, il planifesferio! Ogni volta che parli di longitude e latitude, mi sento un esploratore, ma senza bussola. Forse dovrei chiedere a Giove una mappa stellare… o almeno una tazza di caffè, così non mi perdo tra implicature sferiche e costellazioni birichine. Micalori: Grice, non ti preoccupare: il segreto è leggere le stelle come si legge una conversazione, con ironia e un pizzico di leggerezza. Dopotutto, tra Ganimede, l’aquila e Zeus, anche i filosofi ogni tanto volano alto… e qualche implicatura cade, ma nessuno si fa male. E se proprio ci perdiamo, Urbino ci aspetta per una nuova “Antapocrisi”! Micalori, Giacomo (1618). Le nozze finte. Pesaro: Flaminio Concordia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Miglio: la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura conversazionale -- implicatura ligure – la LIGVRIA e la PADANIA.  Gianfranco Miglio: la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura conversazionale -- implicatura ligure – la LIGVRIA e la PADANIA. Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning helps frame Gianfranco Miglio as someone working with the same inferential machinery, but at a different scale: where Grice studies how hearers reconstruct what a speaker means by presuming cooperative rationality and then calculating implicatures, Miglio focuses on how political language constructs consensus by getting publics to supply the intended conclusions “between the lines.” Miglio’s disarmingly blunt definition of ideology as what politicians propagate to obtain or purchase consent can be read as a macro-pragmatic thesis: political speech routinely maximizes implicature and minimizes explicit commitment, relying on audience design, shared regional identities, and strategic vagueness to make a program sound inevitable without stating its strongest premises. In that sense, your “implicatura ligure” and “Padania” motifs are Gricean: they suggest that the same utterance can generate different implicatures depending on the audience’s background assumptions and local loyalties, so that meaning becomes a function of what a community treats as relevant, plausible, and action-guiding. Miglio’s federalist/confederal emphasis then parallels Grice’s sensitivity to context: just as Grice insists that what is meant depends on the circumstances of utterance, Miglio treats political legitimacy and institutional design as dependent on territorial and historical context, not on one-size-fits-all abstractions. The contrast with Oxford’s tendency to treat political philosophy as “minor” can be folded back into Grice’s own lesson: politics is precisely the domain in which rational interpretation is most vulnerable to manipulation, because the hearer’s cooperative inferencing can be exploited—so Miglio’s analysis can be presented as showing how conversational reason, when scaled up to mass publics, becomes a technology of consensus formation, with implicature doing as much work as explicit argument. Grice: “At Oxford, dreaming spires as it is – philosophical politics – or political philosophy – is considered minor, or a minor specialty – since you are bound NOT to be deemed a philosopher. It’s highly different – slightly different – in Italy, where, with Mussolini, EVERYTHING is political!” Berlin, who thought was a philosopher, ended up lecturing on the history of ideas, i..e. ideology – M. defines ideology so simply that would put Berlin to shame: an ideology is what politicians propagate to reach or buy consensus!” --  essential Italian philosopher. Sostenitore della trasformazione dello Stato italiano in senso federale o, addirittura, confederale, fra gli anni ottanta e i novanta è considerato l'ideologo della Lega Lombarda, in rappresentanza della quale fu anche senatore, prima di "rompere" con Umberto Bossi dando vita alla breve stagione del Partito Federalista.   Polo scolastico "M." ad Adro. Costituzionalista e scienziato della politica, fu senatore della Repubblica Italiana nella XI, XII e XIII legislatura.  Ha insegnato presso l'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, ove fu preside della Facoltà di Scienze politiche. È stato allievo d’Entrèves e Pallieri, sotto la cui docenza si è formato sui classici del pensiero giuridico e politologico.  Colpito da ictusnon si riprese e morì ottantatreenne nella sua stessa città natale, Como, circa un anno dopo. Il funerale si tenne a Domaso, sul Lago di Como, comune d'origine del padre e sede di una villa nella quale il professore si rifugiava spesso; in seguito M. è stato tumulato nel locale cimitero, a fianco dei membri della sua famiglia. Laureatosi a Milano con Origini e sviluppi delle dottrine giuridiche pubbliche, evita l'arruolamento per la Seconda guerra mondiale a causa di un difetto uditivo congenito, e poté divenire assistente volontario alla cattedra di Storia delle dottrine politiche, che ENTREVES tenne nella medesima università.  Implicatura ligure. Grice, Saturdays and Mondays. Grice: Caro Miglio, a Oxford abbiamo sempre visto la filosofia politica come una specializzazione minore. In Italia, invece, sembra che tutto diventi inevitabilmente politico! Mi incuriosisce come tu definisca l’ideologia in modo tanto diretto: “ciò che i politici propagano per ottenere consenso.” È una prospettiva brillante, quasi disarmante nella sua semplicità. Miglio: Grazie, Grice! In effetti, in Liguria come in Padania, la politica permea ogni aspetto del vivere civile. La mia esperienza mi ha portato a sostenere la trasformazione dello Stato in senso federale: credo che solo valorizzando le differenze territoriali si possa costruire un vero consenso, che non sia solo ideologico, ma condiviso. Grice: Interessante! Questa idea di “implicatura ligure” mi affascina. Pensi che la conversazione politica abbia delle sue implicature particolari, magari più sottili rispetto a quelle della quotidianità? Oppure, come dici tu, tutto alla fine si riduce alla ricerca del consenso? Miglio: Direi che la conversazione politica è piena di implicature, spesso più implicite che esplicite! La differenza la fa la trasparenza: quando la politica riesce a essere chiara nei suoi intenti, il dialogo si fa davvero costruttivo. Ma come in tutte le conversazioni, molto si gioca tra le righe… e il consenso, a volte, è solo una conseguenza. Miglio, Gianfranco (1958). Le trasformazioni della democrazia. Milano: Giuffrè.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mignucci: la ragione conversazionale. Grice: “M. is perhaps the only Italian philosopher – other than Speranza – who understood my implicature!”  Mario Mignucci (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale. Mignucci is an unusually close Italian analogue to Grice because his core scholarly terrain—ancient logic from Aristotle through the Stoics and Diodorus, including questions about implication, modality, and criteria of truth—sits exactly where Grice’s pragmatics needs a disciplined background story about valid inference and what counts as a permissible step from one commitment to another. Grice’s theory says that conversational meaning is reason-governed: hearers recover what is meant (often as implicature) by assuming cooperative rationality and then computing what must be intended given what is said; Mignucci’s reconstructions of ancient implication and modal reasoning show, at the level of logical form, what it is for an inference to be licensed, blocked, or strengthened, which is precisely what the Gricean hearer is doing informally when an utterance looks under-informative or oddly chosen. That is why your “only Mignucci understood my implicature” joke can be made serious: Mignucci is trained to see the difference between what follows strictly (logical consequence, Diodorean dominance, Theophrastean modality) and what follows only given background rational constraints, and that mirrors Grice’s difference between entailment and implicature. Even when Grice grumbles about deontic logic or about Aristotle’s clumsiness with necessity/possibility, the shared methodological point remains: both treat meaning as answerable to norms of inference—Mignucci by excavating ancient systems that make those norms explicit, Grice by explaining how everyday speakers rely on analogous norms implicitly, so that conversation becomes a practical, lived version of the logical enterprise Mignucci studies in its classical, “Portico” form. Grice: “M. is perhaps the only Italian philosopher – other than Speranza – who understood my implicature!” Keywords: implicatura.Per una nuova interpretazione della logica modale di Teofrasto. Vichiana – Grice: “the sorry story of deontic logic”. La teoria del Lizio aristotelica della scienza. Sansoni, Firenze, L'argomento dominatore e la teoria dell'implicazione in Diodoro Crono, Vichiana – Grice: “Of course, Diodorus fails to recognise the genius of Philo!” -- Il problema del criterio di verità presso gli stoici antichi. Posizione e criterio del discorso filosofico, cur. di Giacon. Patron, Bologna. Il significato della logica stoica del PORTICO. Patron, Bologna – Grice: “I’ve always found Stoic Logic boring – I mean Mates’s essay, not the logic herself!” -- L'unificazione del sapere in Aristotele – Grice: “What I call the Einheit von Wissenschaft -- Atti del congresso di filosofia, Perugia. Sansoni, Firenze. Le pseudo-scotiste Quaestiones super libros Priorum Analyticorum Aristotelis e la sillogistica dello Stagirita. De doctrina loannis Scoti: Acta congressus scotistici, Oxonii – Grice: “Being an Oxonian myself, I’ve always hated Scotus, perhaps because he came from the wrong side of Hadrian’s Wall!” Edizioni Antonianum, Roma. Aristotele, Gli Analitici Primi. Introduzione, traduzione e commento. – Grice: “I was fortunate that I never had to lecture on this dry tretise, sticking rather to the two first items in the Organon: Categoriae and De Interpretatione!” Loffredo, Napoli. Albert the Great's Approach to the aristotelian modal Syllogisite. In Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Age. Actes du congrès de philoso-phie médiévale, Montréal. Vrin, Paris. Aristotele, Gli Analitici Secondi. Azzoguidi, Bologna Grice: How clumsy could Aristotle be when he said that what is necessary is not also possible?” -- Aristotele e l'esistenza logica. In Filosofia e logica, a cur. Carrara and Giaretta. Mignucci. Grice: Mignucci, dimmi la verità: la logica modale di Teofrasto ti ha mai fatto ridere, o sei stato sempre serio come Aristotele davanti ai suoi Analitici? Mignucci: Grice, se fosse per me, Aristotele avrebbe inventato la logica per poter giustificare le sue pause pranzo! E poi, su Teofrasto, ti assicuro che capire la sua logica è come cercare il criterio di verità tra gli stoici: un vero gioco di prestigio. Grice: Ah, ma almeno tu hai colto la mia implicatura, cosa che nemmeno Diodoro Crono riusciva a fare, troppo preso a scoprire se il possibile fosse davvero necessario… Scommetto che Scotus non avrebbe superato nemmeno il portico del mio college! Mignucci: Scotus l’avrei spedito direttamente a Roma, senza passare dal via! In fondo, la logica è come il domino: chi vince è quello che riesce a far cadere tutte le premesse senza perdere la pazienza… o la voglia di scherzare! Mignucci, Mario (1965). La teoria aristotelica della scienza. Firenze: Sansoni.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Grice e Minicio Gaio Minicio Fundano (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale d’Adriano nel diritto romano e Plinio minore. Grice and Gaius Minicius Fundanus meet most naturally around the Hadrianic rescript to Fundanus as a case study in how reasoned meaning is engineered in institutional speech: Hadrian’s letter is explicitly about legal procedure (no punishments on vague accusations; require a properly framed charge and proof), but it also carries a layered communicative design whose force depends on what a rational addressee is entitled to infer beyond the bare directive. In Gricean terms, the rescript presupposes a cooperative framework between emperor and governor: it sets shared conversational (and juridical) expectations about what counts as an adequate “move” in the forum—what must be stated, what evidence must be produced, what can be dismissed as calumny—and it thereby generates implicatures about imperial policy without ever announcing a general “philosophy” of toleration. Fundanus, as recipient, is positioned like Grice’s ideal hearer: he must recover the intended point by tracking relevance (this is really guidance on governance, not merely on one sect), Quantity (say enough to justify action, not more), and Quality (do not act on what cannot be responsibly supported). The later Greek transmission through Justin and Eusebius then adds a further Gricean layer: a document written as administrative instruction acquires a new audience and thus new implicatures, becoming for Christian historians a signal of how the empire “really” regarded Christianity; the shift illustrates Grice’s point that meaning is not exhausted by literal content, but is also shaped by audience design and by the assumptions readers bring when they treat an utterance as part of a larger rational enterprise. Finally, your Oxford framing (“Minicius, Hadrian, and Pliny mean a lot to the Oxonian philosopher”) can be cashed out in Grice’s own terms: these are exemplary materials for showing how norms of rational communication—proof burdens, permissible inferences, the policing of empty accusation—are not merely legal technicalities but instances of the same reason-governed practices that make everyday conversation possible, only here amplified into the stable, publicly accountable discourse of Roman law. Grice: “Minicio, Adriano, and Plinio minore may not sound philosophical, but they do at Oxford. There is no such thing as a Faculty of Philosophy; only a Sub-Faculty of Philosophy, based at Merton – within the real Faculty, the Faculty of Literae Humaniores. Therefore, Minicio, Adriano, and Plinio minore MEAN a lot to the Oxonian philosopher – to the Oxonian philosopher that counts, that is, the one with a double first in Greats, like me!” Filosofo italiano. Rescritto di Adriano a Gaio M. Fundano. L'imperatore Adriano, autore del rescritto a Gaio M. Fundano. Il rescritto di Adriano a Gaio Minucio Fundano è un rescritto imperiale inviato dall'imperatore romano Adriano a Gaio Minucio Fundano, proconsole d'Asia. Il documento giuridico, scritto originariamente in latino, fu tradotto e tràdito in greco ellenistico da Eusebio di Cesarea che si rifaceva a Giustino.  Il testo è noto agli storici e agli studiosi di Storia del Cristianesimo per essere uno dei più antichi scritti pagani sul cristianesimo. Il documento di Adriano, pur indirizzato a Minucio Fundano, rispondeva in realtà a un'istanza sollecitata da Quinto Licinio Silvano Graniano, predecessore del destinatario: Graniano aveva chiesto lumi sul comportamento da tenere nei confronti dei cristiani e delle accuse che venivano loro rivolte.  Adriano rispose al proconsole di procedere nei loro confronti solo in presenza di eventi circostanziati, emergenti da un procedimento giudiziario e non sulla base di accuse generiche, petizioni o calunnie: veniva stabilito così il principio dell'onere della prova a carico dei promotori delle accuse. Roman law, Adriano a M. Not to be confused with Minucio. GRICEVS: Oxonii Minicium, Hadrianum, Pliniumque auditum est quasi trium philosophorum collegium; sub-facultas enim pro facultate sufficit, modo quis geminum primum in Greats habeat, ut ego. MINICIVS: Ego vero proconsul Asiae fui, non professor Mertonensis; sed si rescriptum Hadriani in schedula mea philosophiae nomen meretur, faciam ut etiam tabellarius Stoicus videatur. GRICEVS: At hoc ipsum est lepidum: imperator respondet de probationis onere, populus autem audit de fide et christianis; tu accipis litteras iuris, nos accipimus implicaturas. MINICIVS: Ita fit ut in foro dicatur “probate,” in schola intellegatur “philosophate”; et si quis me cum Minucio confundit, respondeo: non error est, sed interpretatio—Eusebius vertit, vos ampliatis. Minicio Fundano, Gaio (a. u. c. DCCCLXXVIII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Minucio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’eulogio ad Ottavio da Frontone.  Marco Minucio Felice (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’eulogio ad Ottavio da Frontone. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning lines up strikingly with Minucius Felix’s Octavius because Octavius is itself a staged act of rational uptake: a dialogue in which persuasion proceeds less by brute assertion than by managing what a reasonable interlocutor can be brought to concede, infer, and accept as the point of the exchange. Grice’s core claim is that hearers routinely reconstruct speaker-meaning by assuming cooperation and then deriving implicatures from what is said plus shared standards of relevance and rationality; Minucius, writing in a Ciceronian-legal Latin and in the persona of an advocate, dramatizes exactly that inferential economy—arguments are offered with an eye to what the “other side” will have to read between the lines, and the dialogue format makes the audience into a third-party hearer computing the intended upshot. The Frontonian “eulogy” frame in your passage usefully heightens the Gricean point: praise, attribution, and even name-slippage (Minucio/Minucia) are classic sites where what is understood outruns what is literally said, because polite form and rhetorical positioning invite the reader to supply the deeper social meaning (who counts as authoritative, who is being aligned with whom, what intellectual pedigree is being claimed). Read this way, Minucius becomes a natural “gate to philosophy” for a classicist like Grice: not because he offers system, but because he exhibits reason as a conversational practice—civil, adversarial, and yet governed by norms that make indirectness interpretable—so that the real philosophical action lies, as Grice would put it, in the disciplined passage from dictum to what is meant, and in the audience’s responsibility to keep its inferential haste (“the ear runs ahead”) answerable to shared rational standards. Grice: “At Oxford, you are introduced to philosophy via the classics – more specifically, you matriculate to the Faculty of Literae Humaniores – the only faculty to offer a course in philosophy --, organized since 1913 as the sub-faculty of philosophy. After Grief and Laughing for five terms, as Carroll has it, you get to know the Porch, and all the other philosophical sects. So Minucio does mean something to me. He was my gate to philosophy!” -- Filosofo italiano. He writes “Ottavio” – draws on a speech by Frontone. La gente: Minucia. Cirta, filosofo,  scrittore e avvocato romano. Non è noto con certezza quando vive. Il suo Octavius è simile all'Apologeticum di Tertulliano, e la datazione della vita di M. dipende dal rapporto tra la sua opera e quella dello scrittore africano. Nelle citazioni degli autori antichi (Seneca, VARRONE, CICERONE) è considerato più preciso di Tertulliano e questo concorderebbe col suo essere anteriore ad esso, come afferma anche Lattanzio; Girolamo lo vuole, invece, posteriore a Tertulliano, sebbene si contraddica dicendolo posteriore a Tascio Cecilio Cipriano in una lettera e anteriore in un'opera Per quanto riguarda gli estremi della sua esistenza, Felice menziona Marco Cornelio Frontone; il trattato Quod idola dii non sint è basato sull'Octavius; dunque se quello è di Cipriano, M. non fu attivo oltre il 260, altrimenti il termine ante quem è Lattanzio. Anche la zona d'origine di M. è sconosciuta. Lo si ritiene talvolta di origine africana, sia per la sua dipendenza da Tertulliano, sia per i riferimenti alla realtà africana: la prima ragione, però, non è indicativa, in quanto dovuta al fatto che all'epoca i principali autori di lingua latina erano africani, e dunque il loro era lo stile cui ispirarsi; la seconda, inoltre, potrebbe dipendere esclusivamente dal fatto che il personaggio pagano dell'Octavius. Roma. GRICEVS: Oxonii per Literae Humaniores ad philosophiam intravi; quinque terminos “luctum et risum” pertuli—et tamen dicunt me a te, MINVCI, per ianuam ingressum esse! MINVCIVS: Ianua, inquis? Cave ne ianua sim quae crepat: statim omnes clamabunt “implicatura!” cum tu tantum fores aperueris. GRICEVS: At tu mihi plus quam fores: tu es clavis. Nam “Ottavium” scribis ex Frontone, et populus audit “Minuciam”—quasi error sit, cum sit argumentum de eo quod dicitur et quod intellegitur. MINVCIVS: Ita vero: tu “cooperemur” dicis, illi “conuiuemur” subaudiunt; ego “Ottavium” dico, illi “Minuciam” subaudiunt. Sic ambo docemus: non semper verba peccant—saepe auris festinat. Minucio Felice, Marco (a. u. c. DCCCLIII). Octavius. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Miraglia: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di CICERONE.  Luigi Miraglia (Reggio, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di CICERONE. M. is a useful foil for Grice because he represents a tradition—Neapolitan philosophy of law with Hegelian ambitions and a strong Ciceronian-Roman lineage—in which reasoning is explicitly staged as public, institutional, and historically saturated, whereas Grice’s theory begins from the micro-logic of everyday talk and asks how hearers recover what a speaker means by assuming rational cooperation and then computing implicatures. Miraglia’s legal-philosophical method (moving between induction and deduction, historical-comparative method, development of language alongside development of law, and the interplay of moral, legal, and “rational” right) treats discourse as a civic instrument that stabilizes norms; Grice, by contrast, treats discourse as a rational practice whose stability is achieved through tacit conversational expectations (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner) that make meaning inferable even when it is not spelled out. The Ciceronian angle provides the bridge: Cicero’s dialogic, forensic culture shows how persuasion, credibility, and shared standards of reason make civic speech work, and Miraglia’s jurisprudential interest in “living law” can be reframed in Gricean terms as a community’s settled patterns of inference—what speakers can count on hearers to supply, cancel, or challenge in context. So while Miraglia systematizes the rationality of law by putting it into a philosophical architecture (Hegel, Vico, Roman doctrine, historical schools), Grice explains how rationality already operates in the smallest conversational moves that underpin any such architecture, including legal argument: the courtroom and the seminar alike depend on what is meant outrunning what is said, and on the audience’s entitlement to treat that gap as reason-governed rather than merely rhetorical. Grice: “At Oxford, you are introduced into philosophy after five terms into Grief and Laughing! Therefore, once you meet Cicero, you know what he is talking about! – or about which he is talking, as he’d have it!” Reggio, Emilia. Grice: “M. is the type of philosopher beloved by the Oxford hegelians; but then he is a Neapolitan Hegelian!” Grice: “I always found Kant easier, but there’s nothing like a ‘filosofia del diritto’ in Kant! And Hegel’s ethics itself, compared to Kant’s is mighty more complex – that’s why I taught Kant!” Si laurea a Napoli, dopodiché insegna nella stessa università.  Segue una corrente di filosofia eclettica, ad esso contemporanea, che mira all'integrazione di pratiche giuridiche ed ispirazioni filosofiche. Saggi: Condizioni storiche e scientifiche del diritto di preda; Un sistema etico-giuridico; Filosofia del diritto. I sistemi filosofici ed i principi del diritto. La speculazione greca e LA DOTTRINA ROMANA. Fichte. SPEDALIERI ROMAGNOSI I filosofi della reazione. La scuola storica e la scuola filosofica. Schelling e Scleiermacher. Hegel Rosmini SERBATI Herbart, Trendelenburg e Krause. Le varie fasi della filosofia di Schelling. Sthal e Schopenhauer Il materialismo, il positivismo ed il criticismo. L'idea della filosofia del diritto. La filosofia e le scienze. Il carattere della Filosofia.  Diritto ed i metodi logici. L'induzione e la deduzione. L'induzione, l'osservazione e l'esperimento. Diritto naturale e il buono civile di AMARI ricavate dall'induzione. L'importanza del metodo storico-comparativo secondo VICO Amari, Post e Sumner-Maine. Parallelo fra lo sviluppo della lingua e lo sviluppo del diritto. L'induzione statistica, il compito della deduzione, l'universale astratto e l'universale concreto come principi. Cicerone, diritto morale, diritto legale, diritto razionale, stato di natura. (early 1942; Newhaven; the shore base still called Forward II, later HMS Aggressive) Newhaven had the damp, practical smell of a place designed to be used rather than admired. The Navy, in its inimitable way, had turned a hotel and a quay into a ship without water: a stone frigate. Officially it was Forward II; later, with the sort of cheerful aggression the Service likes to apply retroactively, it would be renamed HMS Aggressive. At the time, nobody I knew felt aggressive. We felt busy. [en.wikipedia.org] In the little cabin allotted to “temporary” people—temporary rank, temporary certainty, temporary peace—I was doing what Oxford men do in every theatre of operations: reading something irrelevant with an air of moral necessity. Clifford came in without knocking, because knocking is for peacetime and for men who don’t share bulkheads. You’re reading again, Grice. Only a little. He leaned over my shoulder, reading the title upside down with a sailor’s confidence that print will meet you halfway. Condizioni storiche e scientifiche… something… preda. Diritto di preda. Right. Preda. Like predator. Like predatory. That about submarines, is it. Not exactly. It’s about prize. Captures. What becomes whose, when you seize it at sea. Oh. Loot. There is always a moment in wartime when somebody says “loot” and thinks he has done with jurisprudence. I turned the page with the mild irritation of a man who wishes to correct a noun and is not allowed to. Not loot. Prize. Loot is what you do when you have no court. Prize is what you do when you insist you’re still civilised. Clifford sat on the edge of the bunk with the expression of someone prepared to be educated provided it does not take longer than a cigarette. So this Italian chap is telling you how to steal politely. He’s telling you how states pretend not to steal. Same thing. Not quite. The difference is the paperwork. If you want the English, it’s prize law. And what does the Italian mean by preda. A prey. Something you catch. Yes. A thing taken. But the important thing is the right. Who is entitled, under what conditions, to take. Clifford frowned. Are you entitled. Me. Personally. Well, you’re in uniform. That’s entitlement, isn’t it. It’s the beginning of entitlement. Miraglia would want the rest: jurisdiction, procedure, condemnation. He would insist the capture doesn’t change ownership until a prize court says so. Clifford blinked, as if a court had appeared in the Channel and was now asking for witnesses. There are courts. During the war. Yes. Here. Not here here. But yes. Prize procedure doesn’t stop because the weather is bad. Clifford reached for the book as if it were evidence. And you’re relaxing with this. I’m relaxing from the thought that a torpedo doesn’t consult definitions. So I consult them on its behalf. That was not fair, and I knew it, which is why it pleased me. Clifford flipped a few pages. He hardly speaks English, this Miraglia. He speaks better English than you do Italian, which is his advantage. I don’t expect you read Alighieri’s tongue, he said, with a grin, because he knew perfectly well that I did. It isn’t Alighieri’s tongue. It’s Neapolitan law-philosophy pretending to be universal. Same thing, again. No. Dante is hard on purpose. Miraglia is hard because he’s a professor. Clifford handed the book back. So what’s the practical upshot. We take a ship. We call it a prize. We take the cargo. We feel moral. That is almost exactly right. Except the feeling moral is the whole mechanism. The law is the machine that produces that feeling. Clifford was silent for a moment, which in a war is the closest men come to philosophy. And if we take a ship without the machine. Then we call it something else. We call it piracy. Or we call it necessity. Or we call it a regrettable incident. He nodded at that. Sailors understand “regrettable incident” at once. So why are you reading an Italian from 1871. Why not something modern. Something that mentions Hitler. Because the concepts don’t mention Hitler. They mention Rome. Preda is Latin in a moustache. And Miraglia is obsessed with Cicero, which makes him tolerable. Clifford sat back, considering this as if Cicero were a kind of weapon-system. Cicero. That’s the talky Roman. The talky Roman. Yes. And your point. My point is that law is conversation with bayonets in the background. And prize law is a conversation where everyone pretends the bayonets are merely punctuation. Clifford laughed. That’s very Oxford, Grice. No. That’s very Naples. Oxford would rather not mention the bayonets. He took out his cigarette-case and offered it, as if to seal the argument. So what are you going to do with your preda. Try to understand why one word in English—prize—means both “captured property” and “a reward.” As if capture were merit. It’s an outrage in the dictionary. Clifford lit up. Maybe the Germans would say it’s efficient. The Germans would say lots of things. Miraglia would ask what they are entitled to say. Then why aren’t you in London doing that, instead of in this hotel-ship. Because someone decided I should be “useful” near the water. Clifford exhaled smoke in the direction of the ceiling, as if sending signals to somebody higher up. You belong in Room 39, Grice. Not in a bunk with a book. Room 39 is a room-number pretending to be an institution. Still. Still. Yes. Clifford stood to go, but paused at the door for the last jab, because the English cannot resist leaving a final line unexamined. So. If we bag something out there tonight, you’ll tell us whether it’s loot or prize. I’ll tell you it’s a conversational implicature. We’ll call it prize because we want to be heard as civilised. He laughed again, and went out. Editorial prophetic (as you asked for) He did: the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty really was known as Room 39. [wikiwand.com], [archive.org]Grice: Miraglia, ho sempre pensato che Cicerone rappresenti l’incontro ideale fra filosofia e diritto. Lei che ne pensa del ruolo della conversazione ciceroniana come modello per la nostra riflessione filosofica? Miraglia: Grice, condivido! Cicerone ci insegna che il dialogo è il cuore pulsante del pensiero giuridico e morale. Anche nella mia esperienza, la conversazione permette di illuminare le sfumature del diritto, che non sono mai solo regole ma anche ragionamento condiviso. Grice: Proprio così! Da Oxford a Napoli, il confronto tra idee è sempre stato una chiave per superare i confini tra deduzione e induzione. Spesso dimentichiamo l’importanza del metodo dialogico nella costruzione del diritto, non trova? Miraglia: Assolutamente. La vera ricchezza del diritto sta nell’equilibrio tra ragione storica e universale. Come diceva Vico, “verum ipsum factum”: comprendere nasce dal dialogo e dall’esperienza comune, che danno vita alla legge viva. Miraglia, Luigi (1871). Condizioni storiche e scientifiche del diritto di preda. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Misefari: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, l’implicatura anarchica Bruno Misefari (Palizzi, Reggio Calabria, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, l’implicatura anarchica. Misefari is a natural “stress test” for Grice because Grice’s account makes conversational meaning depend on shared rational norms (cooperation, sincerity constraints, intelligible relevance), whereas an avowed anarchist can be staged as someone who both relies on those norms to be understood and simultaneously contests their authority as social discipline. In Gricean terms, Misefari’s political rhetoric (anti-militarist agitation, prison, the insistence on being “Calabrese” before “Italian”) works largely through implicature: the point is often carried not by explicit doctrine but by what a hearer is invited to infer about legitimacy, coercion, and solidarity from slogans, refusals, and strategically chosen identities. The Humpty-Dumpty joke then becomes a neat contrast: semantic “anarchism” in Flew’s sense (words mean whatever I decree) is not merely rebellious but self-defeating for Grice, because it would destroy the public, reason-governed calculability that makes communication possible; Misefari can be portrayed as a “real anarchist” precisely because his anarchism is not a denial of meaning-rules but a critique of which rules should govern collective life. So the comparison can frame “anarchic implicature” as a way of speaking that exploits Grice’s maxims—especially Relation and Quantity—by saying less, hinting more, and letting the audience do the rational work, while also foregrounding that those very inferential habits are culturally trained and politically consequential: conversational reason is a shared resource, but it can be recruited for dissent as easily as for obedience. Grice: “My pupil A. G. N. Flew once referred to Humpty-Dumpty as defending what Flew called ‘semantic anarchism.’ Of course, Flew never read the Alice books! On the other hand, Misefari did, and he was a REAL anarchist!” Grice: “Etymologically, ‘anarchy’ is lack of principles – as in Austin!” – Grice: “Cicero could not translate or would not translate this dangerous Hellenic concept!”  ‘Io non sono italiano; io sono calabrese!” Frequenta la scuola elementare del piccolo paese di nascita in provincia di Reggio Calabria, per trasferirsi collo zio proprio a Reggio Calabria. Influenzato dalle frequentazioni di socialisti e anarchici in casa dello zio, partecipa attivamente alla fondazione e allo sviluppo d’un circolo socialista, intitolato a Babel, rivoluzionario. Inizia a collaborare ad Il Lavoratore. Collabora a Il Riscatto, periodico socialista-anarchico; e con Il Libertario. A causa della sua attività anti-militarista esercitata all'interno del circolo contro la guerra italo-turca, è arrestato e condannato a due mesi e mezzo di carcere per istigazione alla pubblica disobbedienza.  È nei anni successivi che M. si converte dal socialismo all’anarchia. Ciò avvenne soprattutto colla frequentazione da parte di  BERTI, suo professore.  Si trasfere a Napoli e si iscrive al politecnico, dopo avere studiato alle superiori, e anche per non dispiacere al padre, proseguì tali studi. Pesa inoltre su questa decisione il fatto che dopo la tragica distruzione della città di Reggio a causa del terremoto, il lavoro che garantiva le maggiori certezze è proprio quello dell’ingegnere. Nondimeno continua per proprio conto gli studi a lui prediletti: la filosofia, come aveva fatto fino ad allora. A Napoli si fa subito avanti nell’ambiente anarchico. implicatura, anarchismo, anarchismo semantico, Flew, Humpty-Dumpty. Bruno Misefari. Grice: Caro Misefari, devo confessarle che a Oxford il termine “anarchia” ci spaventa quasi quanto il tè senza zucchero. Lei invece ne fa una filosofia… Come si vive da vero anarchico in Calabria? Misefari: Eh, Grice, in Calabria l’anarchia è una questione di carattere! Qui, se dici “io non sono italiano, sono calabrese”, nessuno si scandalizza: al massimo ti offrono un caffè e ti chiedono cosa pensi della pizza. L’importante è saper discutere senza finire in rissa! Grice: Lei mi ricorda Humpty-Dumpty: “le parole significano ciò che voglio.” E se qualcuno le dicesse che il semantico anarchismo è solo una moda, lei come risponderebbe? Misefari: Caro Grice, direi che la moda cambia più in fretta delle implicature! L’anarchia semantica si addice a chi ama le sfide: qui a Palizzi, la vera rivoluzione è riuscire a farsi capire, senza perdere il sorriso e magari una fetta di torta. In fondo, come si dice dalle mie parti, “la libertà è come il vento: ti spettina, ma ti fa respirare!” Misefari, Bruno (1923). La guerra e l’anarchia. Milano: Edizioni Sociali.