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

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mecenate: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – Roma Caio Mecenate Melisso (Roma, Lazio). Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what is meant beyond what is said by presuming a cooperative exchange and then inferring (often via implicature) the speaker’s intention from the utterance plus shared norms; the little Grice–Maecenas Melissus dialogue recasts that machinery in an Augustan social setting where meaning is managed not only by maxims but by status-signals and patronage conventions. Historically, C. Maecenas Melissus is usually identified as an Augustan freedman and literary figure (often linked with joke-collections and with the title “Maecenas” as a mark of association or honour), so the trabea in your exchange is a perfect pragmatic prop: it “speaks” socially even when the author “murmurs,” letting the reader supply flattering inferences (“the reader thinks himself wise”)—a deliberately engineered implicature. In Grice’s terms, Melissus exploits predictable interpretive habits to get uptake without bald assertion, and the shared background of elite Roman decorum makes that uptake almost automatic; but the punchline (“we’re praised for what we didn’t quite give”) also highlights a tension Grice acknowledges in practice: implicatures can be used to create deniability, to distribute responsibility for meaning to the audience, and to let institutional power (dress, rank, gifts) do part of the communicative work that, in Grice’s abstract model, is carried by cooperative rational inference alone. GRICEVS: Salvē, MAECENAS; audīvī tē “Dicta Trabeata” scribere, sed timeō nē trabea ipsa plus loquātur quam verba. MAECENAS: Salvē, GRICE; trabea quidem clāmat, sed ego tantum submurmurō, ut lector putet sē ipsum sapiēns esse. GRICEVS: Bene; apud mē hoc vocātur implicātūra, cum auctor tacet et tamen exigat ut alius intellegat. MAECENAS: Ita est; ego dō munera, tū dās sensum, et uterque laudāmur pro eō quod nēminī prorsus dēdimus. Mecenate Melisso, Caio (a. u. c. DCCLXIII). Dicta traeata. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Medio: la ragione conversazionale al portico romano -- Roma – filosofia italiana (Roma). Grice: “The Romans were a bit like the Oxonians: it all had to be Greek – witness Diogenes Laertius – he goes on in great detail to list all the lost essays by unknown Greek philosophers – but when it comes to Roman philosophers like Medio, he couldn’t care less – ‘he wrote a number of essays,’ he notes – VERY edifying!” Filosofo italiano. Medio. Porch. Portico. A contemporary of Plotino. M. writes a number of essays. Medio. Grice e Medio. Medio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale al portico romano. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how interlocutors can mean more than they say because hearers treat utterances as rational moves in a cooperative exchange and infer additional content (implicatures) by assuming shared norms of relevance, informativeness, candour, and perspicuity; the Medio vignette, by contrast, locates “conversational reason” less in an explicitly articulated inferential calculus and more in a Roman social technology of the portico, where philosophy is preserved as a practice of situated talk, memory, and custom even when the textual record is thin (Diogenes Laertius’ “he wrote a number of essays” shrug) and where the built environment itself (the porch) functions as an institution that stabilizes expectations about how one speaks, listens, and belongs. So while Grice’s model foregrounds the calculability and (in principle) cancellability of implicature from what is said plus rational assumptions about the speaker’s intentions, Medio foregrounds the durability of conversational norms when authorship and doctrine are under-documented: the “implicatures” that matter are carried by shared habits, local maxims, and the tacit authority of place—sermones and mores—so that meaning is conserved not only through texts but through repeated forms of exchange. In short, Grice gives you the abstract mechanism by which reason governs the transition from said to meant; Medio supplies an historical-social picture in which that governance is maintained by civic settings and communal continuity, making conversation itself (rather than treatises) the primary archive of rational life. Grice: “The Romans were a bit like the Oxonians: it all had to be Greek – witness Diogenes Laertius – he goes on in great detail to list all the lost essays by unknown Greek philosophers – but when it comes to Roman philosophers like Medio, he couldn’t care less – ‘he wrote a number of essays,’ he notes – VERY edifying!” Filosofo italiano. Medio. Porch. Portico. A contemporary of Plotino. M. writes a number of essays. Gricevs: Medive, dic mihi, cur Romani semper Graecos imitantur? An porticus vobis etiam philosophus erat? Medivs: Griceve, in porticu semper philosophamur, sed interdum etiam sub umbra ciceris requiescimus. Graeci libros perdunt, Romani porticus servant! Medio: la ragione conversazionale al portico romano -- Roma – filosofia italiana (Roma). Grice: “The Romans were a bit like the Oxonians: it all had to be Greek – witness Diogenes Laertius – he goes on in great detail to list all the lost essays by unknown Greek philosophers – but when it comes to Roman philosophers like Medio, he couldn’t care less – ‘he wrote a number of essays,’ he notes – VERY edifying!” Filosofo italiano. Medio. Porch. Portico. A contemporary of Plotino. M. writes a number of essays. Gricevs: Medive, dic mihi, cur Romani semper Graecos imitantur? An porticus vobis etiam philosophus erat? Medivs: Griceve, in porticu semper philosophamur, sed interdum etiam sub umbra ciceris requiescimus. Graeci libros perdunt, Romani porticus servant! Gricevs: At, Medive, quid prodest porticus servare, si philosophiam ipsam in libros non colligimus? Ne totum in umbra pereat quod in sole nascebatur! Medivs: O Griceve, porticus non solum lapides, sed etiam sermones et animos conservat. Ubi libri silent, memoria et mos vivunt—sic Romani semper invenient ubi philosophandum sit. Medio wrote a number of essays -- in Greek? Are we to assume that he was a Latin speaker, born in Italy? Probably not, at least not on the evidence as given. There are two separate difficulties here. First, the historical anchor looks shaky. Diogenes Laertius is a third-century source on earlier Greek philosophers, and he is not a witness for a philosopher “contemporary of Plotinus” in the straightforward way your passage suggests. Plotinus himself belongs to the third century CE, writes in Greek, and is outside the proper horizon of Diogenes’ usual biographical range. Modern reference notices on Diogenes Laertius stress exactly that his work is a compilation on the older Greek philosophical traditions and that it effectively stops before Neoplatonism as a developed movement. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com], [encyclopedia.com] Second, on the linguistic point, if one really were dealing with a philosopher in the orbit of Plotinus, the default assumption would be Greek, not Latin. Plotinus himself was a Greek-speaking philosopher of the Roman Empire, and the standard modern summaries explicitly say that Greek was his normal language and the language of his writings. [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu], [philopedia.org] So, if “Medio” is meant as a historical figure contemporary with Plotinus, I would not assume he was Latin-speaking simply because he is being Romanised in Speranza’s style. In late antiquity, and especially in philosophy, a figure living at Rome could perfectly well write in Greek. In fact, for high philosophy in the Plotinian world, Greek would be the more natural expectation. Being in Italy is not enough to make one a Latin philosophical author in that milieu. Rome hosted many Greek-speaking intellectuals; philosophical prestige there was still heavily Greek. [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] So the careful answer is this: No, we are not entitled to assume that Medio was a Latin speaker born in Italy merely from the passage. If he is really being placed alongside Plotinus, the stronger initial presumption would actually be that, as a philosopher, he wrote in Greek, or at least moved in a Greek philosophical environment, even if he lived in Rome. [en.wikipedia.org], [iep.utm.edu] There is also a third possibility, and perhaps the most likely one in practice: “Medio” may be a stylised or unstable naming in Speranza’s reconstruction rather than a securely identifiable historical philosopher. My searches did not turn up a clear, established ancient philosopher named “Medio” fitting the exact profile “contemporary of Plotinus” and “Diogenes says he wrote a number of essays.” Because of that, I would be cautious about building any factual structure on him until the name is pinned down in Greek or Latin form. In dry Speranza register: If Medio really belongs to the Plotinian age, one should first suspect Greek before Latin, and Rome before “Italy” in any modern national sense. A philosopher at Rome in the third century need not be a Latin philosopher any more than an Oxford don in 1950 need be a Saxon. The city is one thing, the language of philosophy another. And if Diogenes Laertius is supposed to be our source, one should first make sure that the figure is not being produced by the same cheerful Romanisation that turns a shadowy dossier into a local philosopher of the Portico. If you like, I can do one of two things here in chat only. I can try to identify who “Medio” might really be under another Greek or Latin name, or I can give you a short corrective paragraph in Speranza’s voice saying that the Roman setting does not by itself imply Latin authorship. "Stoic. A contemporary of Plotino." M. "writes a number of essays." So can you do a double run with other forms like Maedius, Medius, Moedius, Medios? Thanks. That above is Speranza's quote from an encyclopaedia of Ancient philosophers. Yes. I tried the double run, and the result is useful precisely because it is mostly negative. On the evidence I can find, there is no securely attested ancient Stoic philosopher contemporary with Plotinus under the forms Medius, Maedius, Moedius, or Medios who is standardly described as “wrote a number of essays.” The obvious hits for Medius lead instead to Medius of Larissa, the friend of Alexander, who is a fourth-century BC courtier and admiral, not a Stoic of Plotinus’ age. Some ancient material suggests he may have written something historical, but he is centuries too early and has nothing to do with Plotinus. Medius of Larissa is also summarised in later encyclopaedic outlets in the same way. [hellenicaworld.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [en-academic.com] The Maedius/Moedius forms mostly produce Roman names and inscriptions, not philosophers. For example, Quintus Maedius Severus is an epigraphic Roman notable, not a Stoic thinker. The Moedius form turns up in modern surnames and unrelated noise, not in a recognised philosophical dossier. [edh.ub.uni...delberg.de], [sortedbyname.com] The Medios form is worse still: in Greek-looking environments it tends either to be a dictionary artefact or a false trail, not a philosopher. [lsj.gr] So, if Speranza’s encyclopaedia says, in effect, “Stoic. A contemporary of Plotinus. Wrote a number of essays,” my best judgment is that one of three things is happening. First possibility: the name is corrupt in transmission, and Medio is really some other philosopher whose name has been simplified or Italianised beyond immediate recognition. Second possibility: the encyclopaedia entry is based on a very thin and unstable secondary tradition, perhaps ultimately from a lexicon or prosopographical note that is not now easy to recover by ordinary modern search. Third possibility, and to me the likeliest: Speranza has found one of those maddening encyclopaedic miniatures in which an obscure late antique figure is given in heavily Latinised or Italianised dress, with just enough information to sound definite and not enough to permit easy identification. What can be said with more confidence is this. If the figure really was a Stoic contemporary of Plotinus, then Greek would remain the more natural language of philosophical writing in that milieu. Plotinus and his circle worked in Greek, even at Rome, and philosophical prestige in the third century CE remained decisively Greek. So unless there were explicit contrary evidence, I would still not assume Latin authorship merely from the Roman setting. [mappadeicognomi.it], [encyclopedia.com] There is one faintly suggestive but very unreliable modern hit: a popular website has a page on Medius as a Stoic around 250 AD debating Longinus about the eight parts of the soul. But I would not trust that as evidence by itself. It looks like secondary popularisation without the kind of philological support one would want, and it does not by itself solve the naming problem or the encyclopaedia phrase about “a number of essays.” [stay-stoic.com] So the safest dry answer is: I ran the likely variants Medius, Maedius, Moedius, and Medios, and none of them yields a securely identifiable Stoic contemporary of Plotinus with the standard biographical tag “wrote a number of essays.” The only solid ancient Medius is Medius of Larissa, who is far too early and entirely the wrong man. If Speranza’s encyclopaedia is accurate, the name is probably corrupt, over-Latinised, or otherwise disguised; and if the figure really belongs to Plotinus’ time, Greek rather than Latin would still be the safer presumption for the language of his writings. [hellenicaworld.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [mappadeicognomi.it], [encyclopedia.com] If you like, I can now do one of two things, still only in chat. I can try a second-stage identification by searching not for the name, but for the biographical formula “Stoic contemporary of Plotinus who debated Longinus and wrote treatises,” or I can draft a compact Speranza-style corrective note saying that Medio is presently unpinnable and should be handled with scholarly caution.Medio (a. u. c. MXXIII). De sermone et more. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Meis: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – IL FU MATTIA PASCALE – lo spirito abruzzese – la scuola di Bucchianico, filosofia italiana  Angelo Camillo De Meis (Bucchianico, Chieti, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – IL FU MATTIA PASCALE – lo spirito abruzzese. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats talk as a rational, cooperative practice in which what a speaker means is fixed by intentions that are in principle recoverable by a hearer, and conversational implicatures are the extra contents a competent audience is licensed to infer from what is said plus shared expectations about how reasonable interlocutors pursue purposes in dialogue; De Meis, by contrast (Angelo Camillo De Meis, 1817–1891, Abruzzese philosopher-physician and political figure, associated with a naturalistic philosophy of nature and cited by Pirandello in Il fu Mattia Pascal as a byword for sweeping synthesis), exemplifies a different location of “reason”: not primarily the micro-norms that govern utterance-interpretation, but the macro-ambition to unify domains under one systematic explanatory project (vegetal → animal → human, with a Hegel-tinged developmentalism and a more Kantian treatment of the human level). In Gricean terms, the Pirandellian joke “Who says it? De Meis!” works like a social implicature attached to a name: it signals, without stating, that the speaker is about to generalize across “all the problems” at once, so that De Meis becomes a cultural shorthand for a certain conversational posture (maximal generalization, explanatory overreach, or integrative breadth, depending on the hearer’s attitude). Where Grice insists that implicature is typically cancellable and locally calculated within an exchange, the De Meis figure highlights how implicatures can also sediment into reputational and stylistic conventions—what a name, a school, or a regional “Abruzzese spirit” comes to convey before any argument begins—so that conversational reason is partly governed by inherited expectations about what kinds of thinkers say what kinds of things. The upshot is that Grice offers the fine-grained inferential mechanics of meaning-in-interaction, while De Meis supplies a picture of philosophical rationality as large-scale synthesis whose very ambition becomes, in conversation, a standing implicature: to invoke De Meis is already to imply that one is treating philosophy as “one problem, namely all of them,” and that pragmatic framing effect can shape how any subsequent utterance is heard. Grice: “I am call a systematic philosopher – which, in Gilbert Harman’s paraphrase, means that when it comes to philosophy, I want to make it all my own! In Italy, the corresponding figure would be M. – and since Pirandello – it has become a drawing-room joke: “Who says it?” “M.!” – The implicature being that Camillo De Meis shared my motto that there is only ONE problem in philosophy, namely: all of them!” Filosofo italiano. Bucchianico, Chieti, Abruzzo.  Grice: “I agree with M.’s naturalism; he proposes a three-stage development: vegetal, animal, man – his naturalism has a Hegelian side to it, while man is more old fashioned, more Kantian!” Figlio di un medico aderente alla carboneria e di ideali mazziniani, nacque a Bucchianico, dove compì i primi studi: li prosegue presso il Regio collegio di Chieti e poi a Napoli, dove e allievo dei letterati PUOTI, SANCTIS, SPAVENTA e RAMAGLIA. Si laurea e divenne socio degl’Aspiranti naturalisti, di cui diventerà presidente; e poi medico aggiunto dell'Ospedale degli Incurabili e apre una scuola di grande successo, dove insegna filosofia naturale. E poi rettore del Collegio di Napoli. Dopo la promulgazione della costituzione nel Regno di Napoli, venne eletto deputato per la circoscrizione Abruzzo Citra: sostenne la protesta di Mancini contro la repressione operata dalle truppe borboniche contro i manifestanti e l'accusa di tradimento al re. E quindi costretto all'esilio. Dopo un soggiorno a Genova e a Torino, si stabilì a Parigi. Grice: “De Meis’s theory resembles my pirotological progression, heavily! I like his generalisations. I wish we had at Oxford such a freedom to generalise!” implicature, citato da Pirandello in “Il fu Mattia Pascal” “Chi lo dice? – gli domanda forte il giovane, fermo, con aria di sfida. Quegli allora si volta per gridargli: “Camillo De Meis!” Grice: Meis, ho sempre ammirato il modo in cui lei affronta la filosofia come un unico grande problema. Mi ricorda il mio tentativo di sistematizzare tutto, come dice Harman: “voglio farlo mio!” Lei, invece, nei suoi scritti, propone una visione naturalistica che parte dal vegetale, passa all’animale e culmina nell’uomo. Come è nata questa prospettiva? Meis: Caro Grice, è proprio la vita abruzzese—con la sua semplicità e il suo spirito di concretezza—a ispirare la mia filosofia. Ho sempre pensato che la realtà si sviluppi in forme progressive, e che l’umano debba essere letto in continuità con la natura, ma senza dimenticare le sue peculiarità razionali. Forse c’è un po’ di Hegel in questo, ma anche Kant non manca! Grice: Mi colpisce come Pirandello abbia citato il suo nome quasi come un proverbio: “Chi lo dice? Camillo De Meis!” In Inghilterra una tale generalizzazione sarebbe vista come audace; da noi, la conversazione tende alla specificità. Crede che questa libertà di generalizzare sia una forza della filosofia italiana? Meis: È vero, Grice. La filosofia italiana ama le grandi sintesi, ma non perde mai il legame con l’esperienza concreta, “terra terra”, diremmo in Abruzzo. La generalizzazione è una sfida, ma serve a capire l’unità del mondo. E poi, come dice il proverbio: “Chi non rischia, non rosica!”—anche in filosofia occorre osare, senza perdere il senso della realtà. Meis, Angelo Camillo De (1868). Della filosofia della natura. Napoli: Morano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Melandri: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- le forme dell’analogia – analogia nel convito di Platone – Reale – filosofia ligure – la scuola di Genova -- filosofia italiana (Genova).  Enzo Melandri (Genova, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- le forme dell’analogia – analogia nel convito di Platone – Reale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what is meant (including implicatures) by assuming a cooperative exchange and then inferring, from what is said plus shared norms, what additional proposition(s) the speaker intends the audience to recognize; Melandri’s preoccupation with analogy, proportion, and symmetry (from Plato’s Symposium through Aristotle and Aquinas, and refracted through modern semiotics and Kant) shifts attention from the linear, maxim-guided inferential route Grice emphasizes to the way understanding often proceeds by structured pattern-matching across domains, where a speaker’s “meant” content is grasped by seeing a proportional fit rather than by calculating a single best implicature. Put in Gricean terms, Melandri makes salient that conversational reason is frequently analogical before it is deductive: interpreters draw a “this is like that” mapping that organizes what counts as relevant, what counts as an apt level of specificity, and even what counts as a satisfactory explanation, so that implicature can ride on perceived similarity-structures (focal terms, proportional relations, symmetric contrasts) rather than solely on the cooperative principle plus maxims. Where Grice treats analogy as one tool among others in philosophical unification, Melandri treats it as a deep form that can unify discourse and resist “the symbolic” when symbol-manipulation becomes detached from the real; the upshot is a complementary picture in which Grice supplies the normative logic of uptake (why an implicature is licensed), while Melandri foregrounds the morphologies by which uptake is actually achieved (how meaning becomes intelligible through analogical form), making conversational rationality look less like a rulebook and more like an art of proportioned seeing. Grice: “In an essay which was originally to be included in my ‘Way of Words’, ‘Aristotle on the multiplicity of being’, I focus on M.’s obsession or fixation: analogia, or proporzione. ‘Analogical unification’ is just one mode of unification for Aristotle: the others being ‘focal unification’ and ‘recursive unification’. I basically elaborate on Aristotle’s analogy for ‘medical’, dropping my view that there may be more about Aristotle’s idea of this unity that may relate to my view on theory-theory. Grice: “One of the ten items he lists in his ‘Contro lo simbolico’ is ‘lo simbolico’ itself!” -- Grice: “Melandri takes analogy more seriously than I did – I do list ‘analogy’ as part of what I call ‘philosophical eschatology – the third branch of metaphysics, along with ontology and category study.” Grice: “Melandri focuses on the Graeco-Roman tradition of analogy, which he pairs with two other concepts: proportion, and symmetry – re-interpreting mainly Aquino’s reading of the Aristotelian tradition in a semiotic approach.” Grice: “Melandri also takes Kant seriously on this.” Grice: “If an Italian philosopher wrote ‘contro la comunicazione,’ another wrote ‘contro il simbolico’!” --  Grice: “He has studied Buehler; I like that!” Laureatosi a 'Bologna, è lettore a Kiel in Germania. Insegna poi a Lecce, Trieste e Bologna. Parallelamente all'attività universitaria, collabora con Mulino e alla rivista omonima, per le quali ha svolto attività di consulenza. Bühler, l’aggetivo ‘galileano’ -- le forme dell’analogia, Grice – analogia – problema della comunicazione, Buehler, teoria di Buehler, analogical unification, la comunicazione, implicatura problematica, aquino, kant, mill, jevons, maxwell, Perelman, abcd, haenssler, dorolle, lyttkens, Reichenbach, newton, cellucci, marramao, aristotele, platone, convito, reale, grice, analogical unification, owens, ross. Grice: Melandri, devo confessare che se ho inserito l’analogia nella mia “eschatologia filosofica”, lo devo proprio alla sua lettura del Simposio: il modo in cui esplora la proporzione, la simmetria e il concetto di analogia nella tradizione greco-romana è stato per me illuminante. La sua esegesi penetra davvero nelle pieghe profonde del pensiero platonico e aristotelico. Melandri: Caro Grice, le sue parole mi onorano. La mia ossessione per l’analogia nasce proprio dalla convinzione che, senza proporzione e simmetria, il pensiero filosofico rischia di perdersi nella confusione. Platone, nel Simposio, offre spunti ineguagliabili su come l’analogia sia il ponte essenziale tra l’umano e il divino. Grice: È interessante notare come lei, più di molti, abbia saputo vedere nell’analogia non solo una tecnica argomentativa, ma una vera e propria chiave per comprendere la comunicazione stessa. Mi ha colpito il suo “Contro lo simbolico”, dove l’analogia diventa quasi una resistenza all’eccessiva astrazione del linguaggio. Melandri: Esatto, Grice! L’analogia ci salva dall’aridità dei puri simboli: ci costringe a mantenere un legame vitale con l’esperienza e il mondo vissuto. In fondo, come diciamo a Genova, “chi va piano va sano e va lontano”: anche il pensiero deve procedere per passi proporzionati, senza salti nel buio. Melandri, Enzo (1960). La linea e il circolo. Bologna: Il Mulino.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Melchiorre: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – il corpo – la filosofia dell’amore – amante ed amato – il convito di Turolla – la scuola di Chieti -- filosofia abruzzese --  filosofia italiana  Virgilio Melchiorre (Chieti, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – il corpo – la filosofia dell’amore – amante ed amato – il convito di Turolla. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains understanding as a rational reconstruction of intentions under cooperative norms, so that implicature is the inferential surplus generated when what is said is treated as a purposeful move addressed to a recognizably shared end; Melchiorre (Chieti 1931–Milano 2026, long associated with the Università Cattolica di Milano, and in his work from Metacritica dell’eros to Corpo e persona and Essere e parola) reframes that same “reason in exchange” by grounding it in an anthropology of embodiment and reciprocity, where meaning is not only inferred but also enacted in the bodily and affective conditions of recognition between amante and amato. Where Grice tends to model cooperation as a normative constraint on utterance interpretation (helpfulness, benevolence, relevance), Melchiorre treats relation itself—exposure to the other through the lived body, the symbolic imagination, and love’s dialectic—as constitutive of personhood and thus of the very space in which language can function as revelation rather than mere code; this makes implicature look less like a technical add-on to what is said and more like the ordinary, often “indirect” way in which persons disclose themselves when the most important contents (desire, shame, care, fidelity) are not fully sayable without remainder. In short, Grice supplies the inferential mechanics of how hearers justify moving from saying to meaning, while Melchiorre supplies the metaphysical-phenomenological setting in which such justifications matter: cooperation is not just a conversational policy but a form of interpersonal acknowledgment rooted in corporeity, and implicature becomes a privileged index of that ethical exposure—what love and the body make communicable precisely by preventing it from being exhaustively stated. Grice: “It’s very rare to find an Italian philosopher who won’t give you a tirade on ‘That’s amore!’. On the other hand, on the colder shores of Oxford, as my pupil Strawson calls them, we TRY. The closest I came to the idea of love was through my reading of Butler. Butler founds his morality, as is well known, in two conflicting desiderata: that of self-love, and that of other-love, or benevolence. My pupils at Oxford were therefore treated to the conversational versions of these two desiderata: the desideratum of conversational self-love, and the desideratum of other-love, or benevolence. I later realised that ‘benevolentia’ is all that mattered. And this became ‘helpfulness’ and later ‘co-operation’!” -- Grice: “I like Melchiorre; while I refer to bodily identity in my “Mind” essay, M. has dedicated a whole treatise to ‘the body’ – he has also explored semiotic aspects and come up with nice oxymora: ‘nome indicibile,’ ‘immaginazione simbolica,’ ‘essere e parola.’”. Grice: “Melchiorre’s first explorations on the concept of body is Strawsonian – corpore e persona -. What led Melchiorre to this reflection is what he calls a meta-critique of love – Socrates did his critique of love in the Symposium, and Phaedrus. Grice: “Melchiorre, while quoting the necessary German sources for an Italian philosophers – Eros und Agape, tr. N. Gay – he dwells on Turolla’s beloved (by every Italian schoolboy) version of “Convito” – which Turolla published under the ostentatious title, “Dialogo dell’amore” – M. typically finds some mistakes, since Turolla was no philosopher – and no lover of Sophia, and no Sophos of love!” –il corpo corpi e persone, meta-critica dell’eros, il convito di Trolla, Turolla, il fedro di Turolla – amore – il riconoscimento come identita – la dialettica dell’atto amoroso – l’amante e l’amato – l’amore reciproco, amore e contramore, erote ed anterote. Virgilio Melchiorre.  Grice: Professore Melchiorre, mi colpisce quanto la filosofia italiana sappia intrecciare il discorso sull’amore col corpo e l’identità personale. A Oxford, da Butler in poi, ci siamo spesso fermati al dilemma tra amor proprio e benevolenza. Lei, invece, ha dedicato un intero trattato al corpo: cosa ne pensa del legame tra corporeità e esperienza amorosa? Melchiorre: Grazie, Professor Grice. Credo che il corpo sia la prima grammatica dell’amore: attraverso la presenza fisica riconosciamo l’altro, ci lasciamo interpellare e rispondiamo. Come dicevo nel mio “meta-critica dell’eros,” l’amore implica sempre un incontro concreto, non solo una dialettica astratta. È nel corpo che l’amante e l’amato si riconoscono. Grice: È affascinante! Da noi, la benevolenza si traduce spesso in cooperazione conversazionale: aiutare l’altro con le parole, costruire insieme il senso. Lei parla di “nome indicibile” e “immaginazione simbolica”: sono forse modi per oltrepassare i limiti del linguaggio, proprio come l’amore supera la mera parola? Melchiorre: Esattamente, il linguaggio è una soglia, non un muro. Nell’atto amoroso, si creano ossimori: parole che cercano di dire l’indicibile. Anche Turolla, pur non essendo filosofo, nel suo “Dialogo dell’amore”, ha intuito che l’essenza dell’amore sta nel reciproco riconoscimento: amante e amato si trasformano l’uno nell’altro. La filosofia, insomma, non può ignorare questa dialettica viva tra corpo, parola e amore. Melchiorre, Virgilio (1953). Dissertazione. Sotto Olgiati and Bontadini. Milano

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Melli: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- AVRELIO – filosofia italiana – la filosofia a Roma nel tempo di Pomponio – pre-ambasciata --  (Roma). Grice: “It would be silly to suppose that Antonino represented Plato’s idea of the philosophus rex.  Giuseppe Melli (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- AVRELIO – filosofia italiana – la filosofia a Roma nel tempo di Pomponio – pre-ambasciata --  Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how we routinely get from what is said to what is meant by treating talk as a rational, cooperative enterprise in which hearers are entitled to infer intentions and thereby derive implicatures (cancellable, calculable, audience-sensitive) from principled expectations about relevance, informativeness, and the like; Giuseppe Melli, as your passage frames him, shifts the emphasis from those micro-inferential mechanics to the historically thick conditions under which “reason in talk” becomes culturally legible at all—Rome’s suspicion of Greek philosophers, senatorial attempts to expel them, the later charisma of Carneades, and then the Roman appropriation and domestication of philosophy culminating in the emblem of Marcus Aurelius as a specifically Roman ethical voice. In that setting, implicature is less a tidy byproduct of cooperative maxims and more a political-cultural phenomenon: the very act of hosting, translating, or commemorating philosophy carries secondary meanings (about identity, authority, “foreignness,” and legitimacy) that are not always under any single speaker’s control, and the reception of a philosopher can hinge on what his presence “implies” for national mores. So where Grice offers a universalist rational reconstruction of how intention and shared norms generate conversational meaning, Melli’s Rome-centred lens highlights that the norms themselves are contested and historically managed—philosophy’s uptake in Rome is negotiated through suspicion, prestige, censorship, monuments, and patriotic feeling—making “conversational reason” appear as a civic achievement (and sometimes a fragile one) rather than a default background of every exchange. Grice: “It would be silly to suppose that Antonino represented Plato’s idea of the philosophus rex. In fact, Mussolini detested Antonino, and tried, without success, to replace his equestrian statue at the Campidoglio by one of Giulio Cesare!” Keywords. Filosofo. Grice: “I like M.; you see, Italians feel that Marc’aurelio is theirs, so M. puts his soul in his essay on Marc’aurelio, while his essay on Socrates is rather neutral! For us at Oxford, both Marc’Aurelio and ‘Socrate’ are just as furrin; Locke ain’t!”. Altri saggi: La filosofia di Schopenauer, Tocco, Firenze, Tocco, Firenze, Commemorazione di Villari, Firenze,  La filosofia greca da Epicuro ai Neoplatonici, Firenze, Socrate, Lanciano. I primi contatti tra i filosofi romani e i filosofi greci non sono amichevoli. Essendosi parlato in senato dei filosofi e dei retori il senato consulto da incarico al pretore Marco POMPONIO  di provvedere “uti Romae NE essent [FILOSOFI greci]”. Semi della filosofia greca sono sparsi dagl’esuli ACHEI, tra i quali era anche Polibio, venuti dopo la guerra macedonica. Pochi anni dopo, ci e l'ambasciata della quale fa parte Carneade. Anche questa volta vedemmo come CATONE  s’impensiera dell’efficacia rovinosa che quell’abile parlatore puo esercitare sull'educazione nazionale. Ma Carneade ha un grande successo e l’infiltrazione delle idee filosofiche grechi e già cominciata, specialmente dopo la conquista delle città della Magna Grecia come Crotone – sede della scuola di Pitagora --, Taranto – sede della scuola di Archita --, Velia – sede di Parmenide e Senone – e dopo l’isola della Sicilia – Girgenti, sede della scuola di Empedocle --, e Leontini, sede della scuola di Gorgia. AURELIO ANTONINO Grice: Caro Melli, dicono che a Roma i filosofi greci venivano accolti come la pioggia in agosto: a volte sospirati, più spesso cacciati via. Tu come te la cavi con i senatori sospettosi? Melli: Ah, Grice, ai miei tempi bastava entrare in senato con una toga un po’ fuori moda e ti scambiavano già per un retore greco! Per fortuna, Marc’Aurelio aveva più pazienza di Catone: lui almeno ascoltava prima di mandare via qualcuno. Grice: Divertente! E Musso che avrebbe fatto se avesse visto Socrate sotto il Campidoglio? Avrebbe ordinato una statua anche per lui o solo per Giulio Cesare? Melli: Probabilmente una statua di Socrate con la testa di Cesare, così nessuno si offendeva! Ma io resto fedele ad Aurelio: più filosofia nei suoi appunti che in tutte le statue di Roma messe insieme. Melli, Giuseppe (1932). Saggio di critica letteraria. Bologna: Zanichelli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Memmio: la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano -- Roma – filosofia lazia  Gaio Memmio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano. Grice explains reason-governed conversational meaning by treating talk as a cooperative, inference-driven practice: what a speaker means is not exhausted by sentence meaning but is fixed by publicly recognizable intentions, and implicatures are the rationally derivable “more” that competent hearers calculate from what is said plus shared conversational expectations; the Memmius episode relocates that Gricean mechanism into the Epicurean “garden” as a social and political technology of indirectness, where the crucial norm is not simply cooperative truth-seeking but the management of otium, safety, and philosophical therapy amid Roman ambition and cultural translation. With Memmius (historically, Gaius Memmius, tribune 66 BC; Lucretius’ dedicatee; and associated with the Athenian site of Epicurus’ Garden through Cicero’s correspondence about building plans), the “orto” becomes a scene in which what is left unsaid often matters more than what is said: Epicurean counsel like abstain, withdraw, seek quiet can function as conversationally encoded guidance about politics, status, and risk, and the villa/garden itself becomes a medium that frames uptake (Lucretius’ poetic address to Memmius aims to move him without sounding like senatorial harangue). So where Grice offers a general theory in which implicature is calculable and cancellable under a presumption of cooperative rational agency, Memmius highlights how those same inferential resources are cultivated for a distinct ethical end: minimizing disturbance, redirecting desire, and sustaining tranquility through tactful speech, poetic indirection, and strategic silence—implicature as a cultivated “horticultural” virtue rather than merely a theoretical byproduct of maxims. Grice: “When I refer to the Athenian dialectic to contrast – and indeed compare – it with the Oxonian dialectic, I focus mainly on the agora of Socrates, the accademia of Plato, and the lizio di Aristotele – the latter two are gyms – to which we may add the Portico, and a notable NON-gym, to wit: Epicurus’s garden. Cicero found the phrase ‘Epicurus’s garden’ too Hellenistic, and forced Memmio to go and buy the thing. It was henceforward referred to as “Memmio’s Villa,” that Lucrezio  visited to find inspiration for one of the greatest poetic gems in Italian metric and versified philosophy!” Filosofo italiano. A bit of an enigmatic character. LUCREZIO dedicates his great Garden poem to him – L’Orto. M. acquires the ruins of the house in Athens where Epicuro starts his Garden, or Orto. GRICEVS: Memmi, dic mihi, utrum Romae in horto plus philosophiam colas, an olera? MEMMIVS: Grice, si herbae loqui possent, fortasse me meliorem Epicureum esse dicerent—ego autem, dum carmina Lucretii lego, fabam sero. GRICEVS: Memmi, fateor, Roma tua et hortus tuus plus sapientiae olent quam totus Porticus Stoicorum. Dic, quid inter herbas et versus Lucretii requiris? MEMMIVS: Grice, dum inter ramos legor Lucretium et inter radices meditor, invenio in orto meo id quod nec Stoici nec Accademici dare possunt—quietem animi et sapientiam, quae crescit lente, sicut faba ipsa. as per passage: Memmia was a gens, and have experts on Lucretius explored this tribune for 66 BC? -- Yes. Experts on Lucretius have certainly explored this Memmius, and in fact they usually cannot avoid him, because the standard identification of Lucretius’ addressee is the politician and orator Gaius Memmius, the tribune of 66 BC and later praetor of 58, who is the figure tied both to Lucretius’ poem and to the Athenian Epicurean material in Cicero’s correspondence. [en.wikipedia.org], [loebclassics.com] On the basic prosopographical point, the Memmii were indeed a gens, specifically the plebeian gens Memmia, and the Gaius Memmius relevant to Lucretius is the one who first appears as tribune in 66 BC, becomes praetor in 58, and later goes into exile at Athens. That same Gaius Memmius is also the usual candidate for the dedicatee of De rerum natura. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.numista.com] And yes, Lucretian scholarship has discussed him directly, not merely in passing. The Loeb introduction to Lucretius, On the Nature of Things explicitly treats the addressee as the well-known Gaius Memmius, politician, poet, and patron, and it also notes the awkwardness that later readers have felt about dedicating such a poem to so compromised and volatile a figure. [loebclassics.com] More specifically, there has been focused scholarly debate over precisely the Memmius of Cicero’s letters and the Memmius of Lucretius. A major modern example is Llewelyn Morgan and Barnaby Taylor, “Memmius the Epicurean,” which reconsiders Cicero, Ad Fam. 13.1, Att. 5.11.6, and 19.3, and argues against the older tendency to see Memmius as merely hostile to Epicureanism. Their point, in broad outline, is that his involvement with the site of Epicurus’ house in Athens may not have been simply vandal or anti-Epicurean grandee behaviour, but something more complicated and possibly even compatible with an Epicurean affiliation of some kind. [users.ox.ac.uk], [jstor.org], [cambridge.org] That matters because Cicero’s famous letter to Gaius Memmius about the Athenian site of Epicurus’ house is one of the central documents for the whole question. In that letter Cicero intervenes, on behalf of Patro, the Epicurean scholarch, concerning Memmius’ intentions for property connected with Epicurus. This has long made Memmius look at once intimately connected with Epicurean circles and yet oddly abrasive toward them. Modern scholarship has therefore treated him as a test case in the relation between Roman politics, poetic patronage, and Epicurean self-presentation. [users.ox.ac.uk], [uvm.edu] There is also a more technical note, “Memmius, Cicero and Lucretius: a Note on Cic. Fam. 13.1”, which pushes further on the implications of Cicero’s language and on possible Lucretian echoes in the letter itself. So this is not a marginal curiosity. It is one of the more live scholarly knots in Lucretian studies: who exactly Memmius was as reader, patron, target, pupil, or failed pupil, and how one should understand the Epicurean colouring of his Athenian episode. [cambridge.org] As for the tribunate of 66 BC specifically, even that office has received separate scrutiny. There is a dedicated article, “The Tribunate of C. Memmius L. F.”, which revisits the chronology and evidence for placing his tribunate in 66 rather than 65, in connection with his attacks on Lucullus. So yes, scholars have explored not only Memmius the Lucretian dedicatee, but Memmius the tribune in his own political detail. [jstor.org] In dry Speranza terms, one might put it like this: Memmius is not merely the decorative addressee of Lucretius, but one of the few Roman politicians whose literary, political, and Epicurean biographies insist on being read together. The tribune of 66 BC has therefore attracted attention both from Roman historians and from Lucretian scholars, partly because the poem needs a Memmius who is politically real, and partly because Cicero’s Athenian letters make that same Memmius awkwardly, but unmistakably, part of the afterlife of Epicurus’ garden. The result is that he has become less a name at the top of a poem than a standing problem in the sociology of Roman philosophy. And an even shorter version: Yes. The Memmius of Lucretius is usually taken to be the Gaius Memmius who was tribune in 66 BC, and both his political career and his relation to Epicureanism have been closely discussed by Lucretian scholars, especially through Cicero’s letters about Epicurus’ house in Athens. [en.wikipedia.org], [users.ox.ac.uk], [loebclassics.com] If you like, I can now do one of three things in chat only. I can give you a compact paragraph on Memmius as Lucretius’ dedicatee and tribune of 66, a dry note on the gens Memmia more broadly, or a sharper account of why Cicero’s letter about Epicurus’ house became so important for Lucretius scholarship. and what were his attacks on Lucullus? And did he DIE in Athens -- and is there an oratio recta in Cicero that Grice and Speranza could ascribe to Memmio (as Speranza calls him) or did Lucretius just dedicated the thing or has at least one hexametre about him, because Grice considers, aptly, that dedicatees are not part of a poem, never mind De rerum natura. thanks Yes, on the Lucullus point we can be fairly specific. Memmius’ attacks operated on two fronts. First, as tribune he prosecuted Lucullus’ brother Marcus for alleged misconduct as quaestor under Sulla. Second, and more famously, he led the political campaign against Lucius Licinius Lucullus himself after Pompey replaced him in the Mithridatic command. The charges, in broad terms, were that Lucullus had embezzled funds and had deliberately dragged out the war. Memmius also opposed the grant of Lucullus’ triumph and is said to have delivered at least four public speeches against it. The practical consequence was severe: Lucullus was kept waiting for years outside the pomerium, since entering Rome before triumphing would have cost him the triumph altogether. So Memmius’ attack was not mere invective; it was a sustained attempt to keep Lucullus politically suspended and publicly diminished. [en.wikipedia.org], [jstor.org], [attalus.org] In a dry sentence worthy of Speranza: Memmius did not merely say that Lucullus had behaved badly; he arranged matters so that Lucullus had to remain a victorious general without the victory, which is one of the more Roman forms of punishment. [en.wikipedia.org] On whether Memmius died in Athens, the answer is probably no, or at least not safely yes. The usual account is that after his electoral conviction he withdrew to Athens and later to Mytilene, and that he died about 49 BC. So Athens belongs securely to the exile story, but not securely to the place of death. If one is being careful, one should say he died after withdrawing first to Athens and then to Mytilene. [theodora.com], [en.wikipedia.org] Now to the more delicate Ciceronian question. Is there an oratio recta in Cicero that one can comfortably put into Memmius’ mouth? There is not, so far as the standard evidence goes, a famous preserved speech of Memmius embedded by Cicero in the way one might wish. Cicero certainly mentions him several times and treats him as a recognisable orator; the ancient record also knows him as a speaker of some ability. But what we have in Cicero are references, judgements, and contextual notices rather than a neat set-piece of direct speech by Memmius that one could lift and theatrically ascribe to “Memmio.” In other words, he is present in Cicero more as a figure in the oratorical landscape than as a preserved speaking voice. [attalus.org], [attalus.org], [en.wikipedia.org] So if Grice and Speranza want an oratio recta for Memmius, they would probably have to reconstruct one from the historical setting rather than quote Cicero directly. That is not illegitimate in Speranza’s mode, but one should not pretend Cicero has handed us a tidy Memmian speech on a platter. On Lucretius and the dedicatee, Grice’s instinct is a very good one. Memmius is certainly more than a name on the title page, because Lucretius addresses him repeatedly within the poem; but Grice is right that a dedicatee is not simply “part of the poem” in the same way as atoms, Venus, fear, or death are part of the poem’s doctrinal fabric. Memmius is at once internal and marginal: a rhetorical addressee, a didactic target, a socially real Roman, and yet not a doctrinal principle. Lucretius does indeed name him in the body of the poem, and very early. The standard and most famous line is: Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas ... ... te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor Memmiadae nostro ... I am not quoting the whole passage, but the crucial point is that Lucretius explicitly names him as Memmiadae, “for our Memmius,” in the opening movement of Book 1. So there is at least one hexameter, indeed more than one address, that makes Memmius textually present. He is not merely an external dedicatee. But Grice is still right to insist that this does not make him part of the poem’s philosophical furniture in the same sense as the poem’s subject-matter. He is a pedagogic and rhetorical address-point. [hexameter.co], [csun.edu], [encyclopedia.com] If you want the driest formulation: Lucretius does not leave Memmius on the dedication page; he brings him into the opening architecture of the poem by direct address. Even so, Grice is right that the dedicatee remains, philosophically speaking, more occasion than substance: a named Roman hearer within the poem, but not one of its explanatory principles. [hexameter.co], [csun.edu], [encyclopedia.com] Or, still shorter: Memmius is inside De rerum natura as addressee, not outside it as a mere ceremonial patron; but he is inside it rhetorically, not cosmologically. [csun.edu], [encyclopedia.com] If you like, I can now do one of three things, still only in chat. I can give you a compact Speranza paragraph on Memmius versus Lucullus, a dry note on why Grice is right about dedicatees, or a reconstructed little oratio recta for Memmio against Lucullus in a Ciceronian-Lucretian key. So please provide a 100-move conversation set in a school, C., in Somerset, in the 1920s, with G. as brilliant student, Shropshire as his classmate (in their double act) and M as the Latin master -- they discuss this -- Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas ... ... te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor Memmiadae nostro ... -- and M. has Shropshire translate and Shropshire doubts about the Memmiadae -- becuase it 'has one syllable too many' and so M. agrees, and they have G. to the rescue and M.asks G. to imagine how Memmius would have reacted, directly in oratio recta, to his being turned from Memmius to a 'heir of the clan' -- with Shropshire: "As if I'd call you Griceiad, Grice" and so on -- dry Oxonian humour, no preamble or ps -- or"Speranziad" not Speranza and Shrophireiad, or Salopiad, and Lucretiad, and since Bury was the surname of the Latin mater, Buriad, as in the Illiad and the Aeneide -- and Perhaps you can quote other passages by Lucretius where the reference to Memmius is made -- dry Oxonian humour, no preamble or ps. thanks and you can have the M. trying to have G. and Shorpshire serious and on toopic and making all the erudite references you made about the man -- especially via Cicero and Lucullus's lenses -- etc -- thanks -- and you can also elucidate if it was SELF-EXILE (to Athens) or what G. calls OTHER-EXILE, etc. M.: Shropshire, read the lines and translate them without that air of martyrdom by which schoolboys hope to soften grammar. Shropshire: Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas... M.: Continue. Shropshire: ...te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor Memmiadae nostro... M.: Very well. Now translate. Shropshire: Mother of the sons of Aeneas, delight of men and gods... M.: Better “of gods and men,” if only to preserve the old decencies. Shropshire: Yes, sir. Mother of the sons of Aeneas, delight of gods and men, I strive that you be my companion in writing these verses which I try to compose on the nature of things for our Memmiad. M.: Our what? Shropshire: Our Memmiad, sir. M.: You say it with a straight face, which is already more than the word deserves. G.: It sounds like a family-sized edition of Memmius. Shropshire: Exactly, sir. That is my difficulty. Why not simply Memmio? Or Memmio nostro, if one must be affectionate? M.: Because, Shropshire, poets are not always content to leave a Roman in one piece. G.: They improve him metrically first. Shropshire: It has too many syllables, sir. Or one too many, at least in my moral sense. M.: Not in Lucretius’ metrical sense, unhappily for your morals. G.: Mem-mi-a-dae. It stretches, but not unlawfully. Shropshire: It still feels like calling you Griceiad, Grice. G.: I should regard it as an outrage against both friendship and quantity. M.: Quantity? G.: In your Griceian sense, sir, it gives too much surname and too little person. Shropshire: Or Speranziad, if one were especially vindictive. M.: That would be a late and unhelpful medievalism. G.: Shropshireiad is worse. Shropshire: Salopiad, then. Cleaner and county-backed. M.: Buriad would do for me, I suppose, if one wished to convert a decent Latin master into a minor epic. Shropshire: Exactly, sir. It makes one sound less like a man than a tribal consequence. M.: There is your answer already. Memmiadae is not merely “Memmius,” but “the Memmian one,” the man as heir, scion, representative of the gens Memmia. G.: Which is Roman enough. A Roman never entirely arrives alone; his family gets there first. Shropshire: Then Lucretius is not addressing Memmius the man, but Memmius as a branch of an old tree. M.: Well put. Though try not to sound pleased with yourself. G.: Lucretius wants the patron under a noble description. Not merely Gaius Memmius, but the Memmian, the son of the house, the gentleman with ancestry enough to be addressed in epic dress. Shropshire: It still sounds as if he has been turned into an Iliad. M.: Better an Iliad than a scandal sheet. G.: Though with Memmius one risks both. Shropshire: Because of Lucullus, sir? M.: Ah. So you have read beyond the lines, which is sometimes a virtue. Yes, because of Lucullus. The historical Memmius, tribune of 66, was not merely a recipient of verses. He was a political nuisance of some skill. G.: He attacked Lucullus by making victory politically uncomfortable. Shropshire: How does one do that? M.: One prosecutes relations, hinders honours, and keeps a victorious general waiting outside the pomerium for his triumph as if glory were a railway platform and the train delayed by procedure. G.: A peculiarly Roman cruelty. To win the war and then be kept in suspense by the city one has saved. Shropshire: Then Memmius is not a decorative name in a dedication. M.: Precisely. That is one of the things school editions conceal under notes. G.: Lucretius chooses a man who is politically real, inconvenient, ambitious, and Roman to the marrow. Shropshire: Then why dignify him into Memmiadae? M.: Because didactic poetry likes to elevate while instructing. It addresses a concrete Roman under a slightly enlarged title. The enlargement is rhetorical, not genealogical fiction. G.: It also helps the line. One should never underestimate poetry’s tendency to discover nobility where the metre asks for it. Shropshire: So if I called you Buriad, sir, I might plead prosody? M.: You might plead it; you would not survive it. G.: Suppose, sir, that Memmius himself objected. What would he say? M.: Excellent. Let us have the oratio recta. Grice, rescue your classmate. Imagine Memmius replying to Lucretius on being converted from Memmius into Memmiadae. G.: Very well, sir. “Lucreti, if you mean me, say me. If you mean my ancestors, invite them too. I came for philosophy, not family enlargement.” Shropshire: Good. M.: Continue. G.: “Do not make me a clan when I am already one tribune more than the city can comfortably bear.” Shropshire: Better and better. M.: More dryness, Grice, less applause. G.: “If I am to hear atoms and void, I should prefer not to hear myself first turned into a dynastic plural.” Shropshire: Exactly. As if I were to say, “Pass the salt, Salopiad.” M.: Which would be intolerable even at table. G.: Or “Attend, Griceiad,” which would make me feel less addressed than annexed. Shropshire: Speranziad would be worse, because it sounds self-conscious before it begins. M.: Lucretiad is in some ways the natural revenge. G.: Yes. “Very well, Memmiadae, but then permit me to answer, Lucretiad, and let us both sound like sub-epic collateral.” Shropshire: There is justice. M.: Not quite. Justice would be to scan the line first and mock afterwards. G.: May I make the historical point, sir? M.: You may, if you do not bury the class under it. G.: Memmius was not merely Lucretius’ dedicatee. He appears in the poem as addressee, repeatedly enough that he enters the rhetorical machinery. But he is not thereby part of the doctrine. He is pedagogic occasion, not atom. M.: Very good. The sort of distinction even dons forget after lunch. Shropshire: So Grice is right that dedicatees are not really part of the poem? M.: Right enough, with a correction. A dedicatee may enter the poem rhetorically without becoming part of its philosophical furniture. G.: Memmius is inside De rerum natura as hearer, not as principle. Shropshire: A listener under verse, then. M.: Quite. G.: And Lucretius names him elsewhere too. He returns to Memmius in several apostrophes across the poem, especially when urging attention, warning against superstition, or steering the reader through doctrine. M.: We shall have examples, if you please, not a mist of scholarship. G.: Yes, sir. There are places where Lucretius addresses him directly with “Memmi” in exhortatory passages, especially when trying to keep the reader from drifting back into religion or civic habit. The opening is the grandest, but not the only one. Shropshire: So Memmius is dragged through the argument whether he likes it or not. G.: Much as Rome dragged Lucullus through procedure. M.: A little too pleased with symmetry, but continue. Shropshire: Sir, if Memmiadae means scion of the gens Memmia, why not simply say “for our Memmius” in prose and spare us epic horticulture? M.: Because Lucretius is writing hexameters, not a police deposition. G.: And because “our Memmius” would be smaller. Memmiadae has elevation, family resonance, Roman public dignity. Shropshire: It also has one syllable too many for my comfort. M.: Your comfort is not among the criteria of Augustan or pre-Augustan verse. G.: Republican verse, sir, if we are being strict. M.: Quite. I shall not let you promote Augustus earlier than necessary. Shropshire: Then what sort of man was Memmius in Cicero? M.: Ah, now we come to the useful question. Cicero gives us Memmius as a recognisable political and oratorical figure, but not with the tidy preserved speech your generation always hopes for when it has not prepared the text. G.: So no perfect oratio recta survives in Cicero for us to hand to Speranza. M.: Not in the pleasing schoolboy sense, no. Memmius is mentioned, judged, and contextually present, but Cicero does not leave us a neat set-piece of Memmius speaking in his own full preserved voice. Shropshire: So Speranza would have to reconstruct him. M.: Which is often what clever men do when the sources refuse to be neat. G.: There is, however, the Athenian business. M.: Yes. Tell Shropshire, since he distrusts all names that grow genealogically in verse. G.: Later, after political disgrace, Memmius goes into exile and is associated with Athens, and Cicero’s letters show him entangled with the site of Epicurus’ house and garden. Shropshire: Is that self-exile or other-exile? M.: A fair distinction. G.: I should call it other-exile first and self-exile second. He is driven out by conviction and electoral failure, then withdraws himself to Athens and later elsewhere. The state begins the matter; the man completes it geographically. M.: Excellent. That is nearly worth marking. Shropshire: So not a philosopher retiring from preference, but a politician displaced by consequence. G.: Exactly. Athens receives him not as an innocent pilgrim to the Garden, but as a Roman nuisance with culture. M.: And do not say he died in Athens as if certainty were cheap. The safer view is that he withdrew first to Athens and then to Mytilene, and died later, not securely at Athens itself. Shropshire: So Athens is part of the exile story, not safely the place of death. M.: At last, prudence from Somerset. G.: Which makes the irony richer. Lucretius addresses a Roman politician under Epicurean instruction, and later that same Roman turns up in the orbit of Epicurus’ own place at Athens. Shropshire: And Cicero has to write letters about property and gardens while the world collapses. M.: Rome often conducts philosophy through estate management. G.: The Garden becomes a very Roman real-estate complication. Shropshire: Then if Memmius heard himself called Memmiadae, perhaps he would have approved, being Roman enough to enjoy a gens in public. M.: Very possibly. Men often object in theory to titles they keep in practice. G.: He might say, “If I must be instructed like a schoolboy, I prefer at least to be addressed like an ancestor.” Shropshire: Better than Griceiad, certainly. M.: Everything is better than Griceiad. G.: Not Shropshireiad. That has a kind of accidental barbaric strength. Shropshire: I reject it entirely. M.: Sensibly. Now let us return to the Latin. Shropshire, construe te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse. Shropshire: I strive that you be a companion to me in writing the verses. M.: Better. G.: And Venus as socia matters. She is not merely invoked but enlisted. M.: Yes. The proem does not only praise; it recruits divine assistance into poetry for a Roman addressee. And that too is part of why Memmiadae works. One wants the whole opening pitched slightly above the civil service. Shropshire: So in one breath we have mythology, poetics, Roman genealogy, and one slightly troublesome politician. M.: Which is already more civilisation than most modern verse manages in a week. G.: Sir, may I add that Memmiadae is also strategically distancing? To say Memmius would be straightforwardly personal; to say Memmiadae lets Lucretius address him under a public, almost emblematic description. M.: Very good. The poetic addressee is at once this man and a representative Roman. Shropshire: Then the word does more than fill the verse. It makes him typological. G.: Precisely. M.: And that is why your original complaint about a syllable too many was useful, if only because it forced us to ask what the extra syllable was buying. Shropshire: It buys a gens, a posture, and perhaps a little vanity. M.: It buys Romanity in elevated form. G.: Also the slight sense that the poem is not merely for a private reader but for a Roman public concentrated in one aristocratic hearer. Shropshire: So he is both man and audience. M.: Better: man as socially located audience. G.: Which suits Lucretius. He teaches the individual through the Roman he already is. Shropshire: Then how should I translate it, if not “for our Memmiad”? M.: “For our Memmius of the Memmian house,” if you wish to explain; “for our Memmian” if you wish to preserve the effect; or simply “for our Memmius,” if you wish to avoid monstrosity and lose resonance. G.: “For our Memmian” sounds almost tolerable. Shropshire: Better than Memmiad, which sounds like a poem about him written by himself. M.: A danger from which the republic was not wholly protected. G.: Sir, may I attempt a fuller oratio recta for Memmius? M.: You may. G.: “Lucreti, if you will have me hear of atoms, void, death, and the gods’ indifference, do not first dissolve me into a family ending. I am already Gaius Memmius, tribune enough for one life. If you insist on Memmiadae, I shall answer by calling you Lucretiad and expect hexameters in return. Yet since a Roman prefers his dignity before his accuracy, proceed.” Shropshire: That is probably exactly wrong and therefore Roman. M.: Nicely judged. Shropshire: Then if I were ever written into verse, I should like to be plain Shropshire. G.: Never Salopiad? Shropshire: Never, unless I were crossing the Hellespont. M.: Which in this classroom is unlikely. Now, one last matter. What does the opening ask of Venus in relation to Memmius? G.: That she be companion to the poet in the writing of verses for him. So the divine and the didactic converge on a Roman hearer who must be charmed into philosophy. M.: Precisely. Memmius is not merely named. He is the destination of a poetic operation requiring both rhetoric and divine patronage. Shropshire: Then Grice is right and not right. The dedicatee is not part of the ontology of the poem, but he is part of its machinery. M.: Excellent. At last a sentence fit to survive the hour. G.: So Memmius is inside the poem instrumentally, not cosmologically. M.: You have both earned that. Write it down before the county drains from your heads. Shropshire: With my beautiful handwriting, sir? M.: Do not tempt me to praise it. G.: That would imply I am hopeless at Latin. M.: In your case, Grice, it would only imply that Providence occasionally makes exceptions.Memmio, Gaio (a. u. c. DCLXXXVIII). De natura rerum. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mercuriale: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – il ginnasio – filosofia emiliana -- filosofia italiana (Forli).  Geronimo Mercuriale (Forli, Emilia-Romagna): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – il ginnasio. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats communication as an inferential, cooperative practice in which hearers use rational expectations (relevance, adequacy, sincerity, perspicuity) to recover speaker-intentions and thereby derive implicatures beyond literal sentence meaning; Mercuriale, by contrast, belongs to a Renaissance “gymnastic” rationality in which the regulative ideal is not primarily mutual understanding through inference but the disciplined governance of the human being through regimen—exercise, baths, and habit—so that what counts as “reason” is enacted as a norm for training and health rather than as a norm for interpreting utterances. In the passage’s Oxford-athletics motif this becomes a pointed contrast: where Grice analyzes how conversation itself is a rational game with rules that generate implicatures (e.g., what you responsibly leave unsaid), Mercuriale (author of De arte gymnastica, first published 1569; illustrated edition 1573) exemplifies a program in which the body is treated as an object of systematic classification and prescription (medical, military, athletic exercises) and the mind is improved indirectly by regulated practice; if Grice’s “procedure” is a public, intersubjective calculus of intentions and uptake, Mercuriale’s “procedure” is a physiological-ethical technology aimed at producing stable dispositions. The upshot is that Mercuriale complements Grice by supplying a model of normativity that is not semantic but practical: just as a good trainer infers from signs (symptoms, fatigue, posture) and adjusts a regimen, a Gricean interpreter infers from verbal “signs” and adjusts beliefs about what is meant; yet for Grice the rational work is done in the space between what is said and what is meant, while for Mercuriale the rational work is done in the space between what the body does and what it is being shaped to become. Grice: “At Oxford, you are – as a scholar – either an athlete or an aesthete. I surely fell in the first group, even though I was myself ‘musical’. Oddly, I continued being athletic even as a tutorial fellow. I soon realise that St. John’s lacked a proper cricket team, so I founded the demi-johns!” (At Corpus, I had played both cricket, football – captain of team for a term – and golf, just because my tutor was a Scot!).” Grice: “At Corpus, as it had been at Clifton, cricket featured as my priority, -- philosophy came second!” Celebre per avere per primo teorizzato l'uso della ginnastica nella filosofia. Suoi sono anche il primo saggio sulle malattie cutanee e un'importante saggio, forse la prima mai scritta, di pediatria.  Ritratto raffigurato in "De arte gymnastica.” Dopo aver studiato a Bologna ed aver conseguito la laurea a Padova, dove ha modo di conoscere TRINCAVELLA, segue a Roma Farnese. A causa della sua fama, infatti, i forlivesi lo inviarono come legato presso Pio IV. Pare aver composto il suo celeberrimo saggio sulla ginnastica.  E professore in entrambe le università dove studia. A Padova, in particolare trascorse un periodo molto fecondo, in cui scrive saggi, alcuni dei quali basati sugli appunti presi dagli studenti durante le lezioni. Si reca poi a Pisa, dove divenne tutore di Ferdinando I de' Medici e poté godere di una certa fama. Cura anche altre importanti personalità del suo tempo, tra cui Massimiliano II, che lo nomina cavaliere e conte palatino. Merita di essere citato un famoso episodio che lo vede convocato a Venezia insieme a molti altri filosofi illustri, consultati per decifrare una misteriosa epidemia che colpiva la città. Escluse fin dall'inizio un caso di peste, in quanto solo una minima percentuale della popolazione si era ammalata e il contagio resta comunque molto limitato. Grice: “Mussolini said that ‘ginnasta’ and indeed ‘ginnasio’ were effeminate – ‘ginnico’ is the word!” –il ginnasio, attivita ginnica, bagni romani, “Me and the demijohns,” , “Ginnasia.  Grice takes Mercuriale down from the shelf with the faintly guilty pleasure of a man discovering that the Renaissance could be read as a manual for his own habits. De arte gymnastica, he murmurs, and then pauses over the Latin as if it were already doing the work of a definition: ars, not hobby; gymnasia, not a mere room with ropes and mirrors but a whole discipline of training. He smiles at the modern English shrinkage of the word into gym, as if the language had performed an elision to spare people the embarrassment of admitting they are cultivating the body on purpose. In Oxford, he says, one pretends to be an aesthete until one is forced, by college life, to confess one is also an athlete; and the confession is always made under some respectable cover, a club, a fixture, a foundation ground, a timetable that turns play into duty without ever calling it duty. He starts, characteristically, by classifying Oxford people. There are the aesthetes, who can quote Pater and never perspire, and there are the athletes, who can perspire and still quote Pater if pressed. He says that the division is not moral but institutional: Oxford is built to keep both types in the same dining hall, and to make them think they are pursuing one life when they are really pursuing two. The oddity, he adds, is that he has always belonged to the athlete side of the ledger while refusing to surrender the other side. Music, yes, but also the bat; conversation, yes, but also the pitch. One forgets, he says, how much the University was designed as a machine for producing men who are tolerably happy: if you are good at books you are given a scholarship; if you are good at games you are given a field; and if you are good at both, Oxford quietly behaves as if it has justified itself. He remembers the sequence of foundations as if it were a career in institutional patronage. First, the boy as boarder at Clifton, learning early that games are not optional but part of the curriculum of being taken seriously. Then Corpus: the foundation system in its clean form, the scholar who is meant to learn because he is poor, and then, with a grin borrowed from home, the retort he attributes to Mother, that only the poor learn at Oxford but we all play. At Corpus he played cricket as naturally as he read Aristotle, and for a term he even captained the football side, which he describes as a brief experiment in leadership conducted at sprinting pace rather than at the leisurely pace cricket prefers. Later Rossall: not the collegiate idyll but employment, and still the same paradox, coaching boys in cricket and football while living the life of a master who must be both respectable and physically present, as if the mind could not be trusted unless it also had lungs. Then back again, Merton and the Harmsworth, another foundation in another register, and then the long St John’s phase, first as lecturer tied to the college, then as fellow and tutor, and with it the discovery that a large college can lack, absurdly, a proper cricket side until someone takes the trouble to found one. Hence the Demijohns, on St John’s land up in North Oxford, a club name that carries its own joke of diluted allegiance: still John’s, but not quite, as if adulthood were always only half-separated from undergraduate life. Mercuriale’s treatise, he says, makes this all look less like accident and more like regimen. Mercuriale catalogues exercises and baths as if the body were a philosophical instrument with maintenance requirements; Oxford, more slyly, does the same by embedding games into the moral architecture of the place. The aesthete can pretend he does not care for gymnastic discipline because he has books; the athlete can pretend he does not care for books because he has the pavilion; but the institution quietly makes each depend on the other for status. Even golf makes an appearance, because his Scots tutor Hardie, he remarks, managed to turn the most languid of games into a lesson in method: patience, stance, timing, and the ability to miss without melodrama. Mercuriale would have approved, he says, not because golf is heroic, but because it teaches controlled repetition, and controlled repetition is how both bodies and arguments get trained. Then he makes the dry turn to his own philosophy, as if it were the final stretch of the same track. Conversation, he says, is not fencing, but it is certainly a sport, with rules, tempo, feints, and a premium on not showing all one’s cards at once. If Mercuriale gives you a regimen for the body, he himself has supplied, for good measure, a regimen for talk: a way of seeing that what is left unsaid is often the decisive move, and that the best conversational play is like good opening batting, making runs without giving chances. Perhaps, he says, he was the sportiest of his philosophical generation in Oxford, not because he had more muscle than the others, but because he took games seriously enough to notice that they are not metaphors at all, merely another form of disciplined cooperation. And if he ended by creating conversational implicature, he adds, it was only because Oxford had trained him for decades to live by the same principle in every arena: do your duty in public, keep your method quiet, and let the point be inferred. Grice: Caro Mercuriale, devo confessare che il mio amore per il cricket ha spesso superato quello per la filosofia. Ma tu hai saputo unire ginnastica e pensiero, quasi come se il corpo e la mente giocassero a staffetta! Mercuriale: Grice, sei più filosofo o atleta? In fondo, anche a Oxford si dice che sia meglio sudare in campo che in biblioteca. Io, invece, ho teorizzato che una buona corsa spalanca la mente alle idee migliori, altro che “ginnasio effeminato” come diceva Mussolini! Grice: Allora dovrei fondare un nuovo club filosofico, ma solo per chi sa saltare gli ostacoli… del ragionamento! “Me and the Demijohns,” forse è la prova che il gioco di squadra aiuta anche nei dibattiti accademici. Mercuriale: E magari, Grice, potremmo organizzare una partita di cricket tra filosofi e ginnasti. Chi perde dovrà spiegare, senza sbagliare, la differenza tra ginnico e ginnasta. Scommetto che i forlivesi tiferebbero per me! Re Passage below: Speranza is thinking of Bath (in Somerset) -- but also of two other things: when was the first 'gym' built in London -- for the elite -- because Speranza takes Bath to be too antiquarian, and then Speranza wants the Grice connection and thinks Oxford. Speranza understands activities of the athletic type occurred mainly atOxford in the open, as per Parson's Pleasure, that had a little hut, but is there a date for the first official GYM, where scholars and commoners would enjoy -- as some varsities around the world do -- and then Speranza is reminded of Bologna archiginnasio which is a misnomer unless it isn't -- thanks Yes. Bath is a tempting image, but if Speranza wants something less Roman-bath antiquarian and more recognisably modern, London and Oxford do give him a usable chronology. For London, the clearest landmark is the German Gymnasium, built in 1864–65 at King’s Cross for the German Gymnastics Society. It is repeatedly described as the first purpose-built gymnasium in Britain, and therefore also the first really solid answer to “when do we get an official gym building in London?” It was not merely a private gentleman’s room with apparatus, but an actual dedicated gymnasium building. It also very quickly hosted major athletic events, including the indoor events of the first National Olympian Games in 1866. [secretldn.com], [sportingla...arks.co.uk], [visitkingscross.com] If Speranza wants the specifically elite London angle, that is slightly different. London’s gentlemen’s clubs did indeed become home to dining rooms, libraries, billiards rooms, bedrooms, and eventually fitness amenities, but the club tradition itself long predates any real purpose-built gymnasium and is not quite the same thing as the public or semi-public gymnasium model. The old elite clubs of St James’s were more for sociability, gambling, dining, and politics than for organised physical training in the later Victorian sense. So if the question is “first gym in London for the elite,” one should distinguish between clubland and gymnasium proper. The former is eighteenth-century and Georgian; the latter, in the strong architectural sense, lands in the 1860s. [en.wikipedia.org], [historic-uk.com], [theweek.com] Oxford is, in a way, more interesting for Grice. There the key date is 1858–59, when the Oxford Gymnasium in Alfred Street was built. The point of that building was explicitly mixed in the town-and-gown sense: its location was praised as “nearly in the centre of the University and City,” and the reports stress that it was open to children and adults, pupils and members, not merely to college men. That makes it a very good answer to your question about a more official gym where scholars and commoners might both enjoy, rather than merely river-bathing or outdoor athletic play. In other words, if Parson’s Pleasure gives you the older Oxford habit of open-air bathing with modest infrastructure, the Oxford Gymnasium gives you the Victorian transition to an organised, indoor, supervised, almost scientific physical culture. [oxfordhistory.org.uk] And Parson’s Pleasure itself should be handled precisely in that register. It is old, certainly, and by the early nineteenth century already a recognised bathing place, but it is not a gymnasium in the strict sense. It belonged to the older bathing and swimming culture of Oxford, later commercialised and enclosed, with sheds, attendants, and eventually stronger university associations, but still fundamentally a bathing place rather than an institutional gym. So Speranza is right to feel that it is a little too antiquarian if what he wants is the modern gymnasium idea. [en.wikipedia.org], [oxfordhistory.org.uk], [eprints.bbk.ac.uk], [outdoorswi...ociety.com] As for the Grice connection, Oxford helps more than Bath. Grice’s own athletic self-presentation belongs to cricket, football, golf, open grounds, river habits, and college sport, but if Speranza wants a line from Mercuriale’s ginnasio to an actual modern Oxford gymnasium, the 1858–59 Oxford Gymnasium is the proper hinge. It is not Grice’s invention, of course, and not a Gricean site in any intimate sense, but it gives the institutional counterpart to the Oxford bodily regimen that Grice later recollects through games and open-air sport. [oxfordhistory.org.uk] Now to Bologna and the Archiginnasio. Your instinct is exactly right: it is a misnomer only if one hears “gymnasium” in the modern English sense of exercise hall. Historically it is not a misnomer at all. The building was named Archiginnasio from the classical term used to designate the Studium, that is, the university. In other words, the “ginnasio” there belongs to the older humanistic and educational sense, nearer to “place of study” or “seat of the schools,” not to a room of ropes, rings, and dumbbells. So the title looks misleading only to the modern Anglophone ear. Historically it is exact in the older scholarly sense, not in the later athletic one. [en.wikipedia.org], [archiginnasio.it] So, if I compress all that into the driest possible Speranza-style form: Bath is too antique if one wants the modern institutional gymnasium. London’s first really secure answer is the German Gymnasium of 1864–65, generally treated as Britain’s first purpose-built gymnasium. Oxford’s corresponding answer is the Oxford Gymnasium of 1858–59 in Alfred Street, notable precisely because it stood between town and gown rather than serving the university alone. Parson’s Pleasure belongs to an older bathing culture, infrastructurally real but not yet gymnasium in the strong Victorian sense. As for Bologna’s Archiginnasio, the name is not a misnomer unless one modernises it too quickly: there “ginnasio” means the university schools, not an exercise hall. Or, more epigrammatically: Oxford reached the indoor gymnasium in 1858–59; London followed with monumental confidence in 1864–65; Bologna had had its ginnasio all along, but meant by it not bars and rings but books, law, medicine, and the old civil dignity of the studium. [oxfordhistory.org.uk], [secretldn.com], [en.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can turn this into a compact Speranza paragraph for the Mercuriale entry, or I can give you a sharper distinction between bath, bathing-place, gymnasium, ginnasio, and Archiginnasio for use as a little philological aside. Please provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. as they walk through the Oxford Gymnasium in Alfred Street -- provided it was there up to 1967 -- no preamble or ps -- and then they discuss mercuriale and all elements in material already shared on this, but with G. pointing to this 'archiginnasio' at Bologna -- because Bononia (alma mater) is the ONLY VARSTITY in the world that claims more antiquity than oxford -- Sorbona third -- so G. discusses with S. alla Mercuriale, who does this too, as how there is a semantic shift -- but not a change of sense -- senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity -- between ginnasio and archiginnasio -- as discussed by Mercuriale -- and they go back to Athens -- where the Hekademos (Academia) was not really a gym, but possibly it was, and then Aristotle left there, and founds Lycaeum by a gym -- and Speranza is less sure about the Stoa -- and then when all this was common fare in Ancient Rome, it didn't work because the Scipio and their circle thought it too plebeian -- it was different in Napoli -- but in Rome, it wasn't really the cup of tea for the noble patrician Rome would -- like the Scipiones and their CIRCOLO -- 'conversazione'? -- wanted to have a conversazione -- ad then Speranza is reminded of Adriano and his villa which looks a bit like a gym and possibly was used, so here we have the passage from Palazzo on that special mount Palatine, to VILLA and how the architecture of Rome was tied to philosophy or lack of it -- until BONONA ARCHIGINNASIO was founded, where the archi- is ur- and ginnasio is studio as per otium etc etc. dry Oxonian humour mentioning Mercuriale often, no preamble or ps. thank you. G.: Alfred Street first, then metaphysics. One should always inspect the apparatus before discussing the soul. S.: A very Mercuriale principle. De arte gymnastica before De anima. G.: Quite. Here we are, then, the Oxford Gymnasium, opened in 1858 and, if our chronology behaves, still with us until 1967. Long enough to have trained several generations into perspiring respectability. S.: And short enough to vanish before modern fitness discovered mirrors. G.: Oxford was wiser then. It still believed in exercise as a moral correction rather than a spectacle of self-courting. S.: You sound almost Roman. G.: Mercuriale would insist on it. He disliked the accidental body and preferred the body under regimen. Oxford did much the same, but with less Latin and more flannel. S.: And Alfred Street is your hinge because it is official. G.: Exactly. Parson’s Pleasure is older, but aquatic and half-antiquarian. This is the proper Victorian indoor claim: apparatus, instruction, routine, and a mixed urban-university placement. Town and gown were not exactly equal here, but at least they could perspire under the same roof. S.: Whereas Bath is too classical. G.: Too much ruin and steam. One wants something recognisably modern if one is to connect Mercuriale with Grice rather than with the emperor Hadrian taking the waters. S.: Though Hadrian’s Villa will return, I assume. G.: It always does. The better emperors leave one architecture enough to misinterpret. S.: Then this gymnasium stands for the semantic shift from gymnasium as a place of bodily discipline to gymnasium as a building one can point to in Oxford. G.: Yes, though “shift” must be handled with care. Not a change of sense, but a redistribution of emphasis. One should not multiply senses beyond necessity. There is a long semantic patience at work. S.: Between ginnasio and gymnasium. G.: Precisely. Mercuriale helps because he writes before the shrinkage. For him gymnastic art is not a room of rings and bars, but an entire discipline of bodily formation. The building is secondary to the practice. S.: Yet here the building has swallowed the practice’s name. G.: Swallowed, perhaps, but not digested it entirely. A gymnasium is still, in principle, the place of gymnastic discipline. The architectural particular has specialised the older function without abolishing it. S.: And that is where Bologna enters. G.: Ah yes, Bononia, alma mater, older than Oxford if one counts by honest chronology, and perhaps the only university that can do so without comic strain. S.: Sorbonne third, in your private ranking. G.: A decent bronze. But Bologna interests me more because of the Archiginnasio. S.: Which looks like a misnomer only to the modern English eye. G.: Exactly. If one hears “gymnasium” only as apparatus and exercise hall, Archiginnasio sounds ridiculous, like calling the Bodleian a wrestling shed. But historically it is not ridiculous at all. S.: Because ginnasio there means the schools, the studium, the place of formed learning. G.: Yes. Archi- there is ur-, principal, chief, overarching. The Archiginnasio is the principal ginnasio in the older learned sense: the chief place of studies, not the chief room of dumbbells. S.: So the semantic distance between ginnasio and archiginnasio is less than modern English supposes. G.: Much less. The continuity lies in disciplined formation. The bodily side becomes dominant in one line of descent, the educational side in another. Mercuriale sits exactly where the two still recognise each other. S.: Because for him gymnastics belongs to medicine and philosophy. G.: Indeed. Exercise is regimen, regimen is ethics, ethics brushes philosophy, and the whole thing remains respectable because the body is not yet a private cult but an object of rational governance. S.: Oxford liked that too. G.: Oxford liked anything that could be presented as character-building. Cricket is tolerable if it looks like ethics in whites. S.: And Grice fits because he was genuinely athletic. G.: More than many philosophers are willing to admit on his behalf. He liked games, college sport, outdoor life, and the institutional seriousness of play. Mercuriale would have found him less absurd than most of the profession. S.: Though perhaps too conversational. G.: Mercuriale might have replied that conversation itself needs lungs. S.: We are now in Alfred Street, then, with bars and apparatus around us, and you want to walk backwards to Athens. G.: One always does. Europe rarely invents anything without first remembering it badly. S.: Was the Academy a gymnasium? G.: Not simply. Hekademos begins as a sacred grove and associated area, but by the classical period the Academy is also entangled with gymnastic use, walking, training, and the broader civic life of education. It is not merely a room for exercise, nor merely a school in our sense. S.: So when Plato founds the Academy, he inhabits a space already mixed. G.: Precisely. The error is to imagine “academy” as if it had always meant only a disembodied school of thought. In Athens, bodily and discursive formation were not cleanly divorced. S.: Aristotle then leaves and settles near the Lyceum, which certainly had gymnastic associations. G.: Yes. The Lyceum was a gymnasium and sanctuary area before it became the Peripatetic school. Aristotle does not invent the place; he philosophises adjacent to an already civic-gymnastic institution. S.: So philosophy grows near exercise rather than away from it. G.: Often enough. The modern division between body-building and thought-building is more recent and more philistine than either side likes to admit. S.: And the Stoa? G.: There I am, like you, less certain in the bodily direction. The Stoa Poikile is a colonnade, not a gymnasium. Stoicism takes its name from an architectural site of gathering and discourse rather than from an overt exercise ground. S.: So if the Academy and Lyceum retain gymnastic neighbourhoods, the Stoa is more emphatically civic and ambulatory. G.: Exactly. Portico, not palestra. One may stand there and think, which many have done since. S.: Then when Rome receives Greek philosophy, why does the gymnastic side not take in the same way? G.: Because Rome admired Greek culture selectively and under conditions of class anxiety. The noble Roman, especially in the Scipionic orbit, preferred conversation, rhetoric, patronage, literary culture, and moral seriousness to public bodily display in Greek style. S.: So the Scipiones want a circolo rather than a gymnasium. G.: Very much so. Conversazione over calisthenics. Roman nobility could admire Greek philosophy, but the full Greek civic-gymnastic complex looked too plebeian, too public, too exposed, and perhaps too naked in more senses than one. S.: Rome liked baths, though. G.: Baths, yes, and eventually on a colossal scale. But baths are not the same as the Greek gymnasium as civic institution. Rome prefers thermal magnificence, military training, and aristocratic otium to the Greek integration of intellectual, civic, and bodily discipline in one public educational form. S.: So the Roman nobleman may discuss Plato but prefers not to do so after wrestling. G.: Precisely. He would rather recline and quote. The body is present, but under different ceremonial management. S.: Naples differs? G.: Yes. Southern Italy and the old Magna Graecia world preserve more of the Hellenic comfort with bodily and philosophical adjacency. Naples, with its Greek afterlife, remains more hospitable to the fusion than Rome proper, which makes philosophy pass through law, rhetoric, and elite sociability. S.: Hence your earlier contrast between Roman justice and Greek dialectic. G.: Quite. Rome institutionalises discourse differently. It legalises and politicises where Athens gymnasticises and philosophises. S.: And Hadrian’s Villa? G.: Ah yes. Tivoli is where Rome, in one of its more self-conscious moods, builds philosophy into imperial leisure. The Villa has spaces that look gymnastic, palaestral, library-like, theatrical, and bath-like all at once. It is the emperor’s private anthology of civilisations in stone. S.: So the palace on the Palatine yields to the villa. G.: Exactly. The palace is urban rule. The villa is reflective empire. Rome learns to philosophise architecturally only when it leaves the city enough to imitate Greece under imperial control. S.: Which means architecture becomes a surrogate for the missing Roman gymnasium. G.: Very good. Where Rome did not fully naturalise the Greek civic-gymnastic institution, it later aestheticised and appropriated its forms in villa culture, baths, libraries, exedrae, and controlled landscapes. S.: Otium replacing civic training. G.: Yes, though otium in the better cases still wants dignity and study. The Roman elite will not become Greek athletes, but they may become connoisseurs of Greek spaces. S.: Then Bologna’s Archiginnasio is the medieval and early modern resolution of all this. G.: In a sense, yes. It strips away the bodily emphasis and preserves the disciplinary one. Gynnasio now means the organised place of studies. Archiginnasio means the principal organised place of studies. The older root remains, but its energies have been institutionalised toward learning. S.: So the semantic shift is real but not a rupture. G.: Precisely my point. One ought not to say there are wholly different senses if one can explain the development by historical narrowing and reaccenting. Mercuriale himself would insist on continuity under transformation. S.: Because he still hears gymnastic art as part of the whole education of the human animal. G.: Beautifully put, though rather more zoological than he might like. S.: He was a physician. He must forgive zoology. G.: Physicians forgive bodies only when they obey. S.: Then here in Alfred Street one may say that Oxford finally builds, in 1858, a proper indoor embodiment of something that had long existed in looser form on fields, rivers, and college grounds. G.: Yes. Oxford had long cultivated athletic life in the open, but Alfred Street gives it civic walls, timetable, and apparatus. It is the Victorian domestication of a much older educational impulse. S.: And it lasts until 1967. G.: So far as our evidence runs, yes. Long enough to become almost invisible by familiarity, which is how institutions know they have succeeded. S.: Grice would have known it? G.: He certainly knew an Oxford in which official and semi-official spaces of exercise existed, though his own self-presentation leans more toward games and grounds than indoor apparatus. Still, the gymnasium belongs to the same moral weather. S.: Athlete or aesthete. G.: His own dichotomy, delightfully false and therefore useful. Oxford contrived to keep both in hall together and make each suspect he belonged to the better half. S.: Whereas Bologna, older and more urban, builds the Archiginnasio as the chief house of studies rather than the chief house of exercise. G.: Exactly. That difference is civilisational. Oxford preserves the college-field-and-river conjunction; Bologna monumentalises learned corporateness. One has more grass, the other more law. S.: And Sorbonne? G.: More Paris. Which is always both an advantage and a complication. S.: Then what would Mercuriale say if we pointed from Alfred Street to the Archiginnasio? G.: He would say that moderns have narrowed the body too much in one direction and learning too much in the other. Alfred Street remembers the body under regimen. Bologna remembers the discipline of studies. The old Greek root would prefer not to be forced to choose. S.: So the true ginnasio is where formation occurs, whether of muscles, manners, or mind. G.: Exactly. Formation is the invariant. The rest is institutional costume. S.: Then why did Rome resist the Greek form if it already valued formation? G.: Because Roman nobility preferred to control the visible means of formation. The Greek gymnasium was too public, too civic, too egalitarian in access, and too physically disclosed. Roman elites wanted conversation, patronage, and exemplary conduct under aristocratic supervision. S.: The Scipionic circle as anti-gymnasium. G.: Not anti-body, but anti-Greek-public-body. They wanted cultivated conversation, not shared naked instruction. One may almost say Rome spiritualised Greek sociability into elite conversational form. S.: So conversazione triumphs over palestra. G.: At least among the better families. The commoner and the soldier could sweat; the noble preferred to discuss virtue in a portico. S.: Which makes Grice oddly Roman after all. G.: In some moods, yes. He likes the disciplined game, but he likes conversation even more. He would rather make a point by implicature than by discus. S.: Yet you have brought him into Alfred Street. G.: Only to remind him that conversation too requires institution, architecture, and the occasional vaulting horse. Philosophers are always pretending they float. Most of them were carried there by buildings. S.: Then the final formula? G.: That Alfred Street, the Oxford Gymnasium of 1858, gives modern Oxford a visible body for an ancient educational impulse; that Mercuriale helps us see the continuity between bodily regimen and rational formation; that Bologna’s Archiginnasio preserves the same root under the aspect of chief study rather than chief exercise; and that the line back to Athens runs not through neat dictionary senses but through a long history of institutions in which body, speech, and schooling were never as separate as moderns lazily assume. S.: And Rome? G.: Rome delayed the synthesis, aestheticised it at the villa, legalised it in the forum, and left the real semantic patience to Bologna. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Mercurial, with an Alfred Street aftertaste.Mercuriale, Geronimo (1573). De arte gymnastica. Venezia: Giunti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Meriggi – il deutero-esperanto – filosofia italiana (Como Piero Meriggi (Como, Lombardia): il deutero-esperanto. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes communicative sense depend on rationally reconstructible intentions under a background presumption of cooperative talk, so that implicature arises when a hearer can work out what an utterer meant to get across (beyond what was said) by treating the utterance as a move in a rational, normatively constrained exchange; Meriggi, as your passage frames him, pushes on a different axis by treating meaning as partly grounded in the material shape of expression itself, via a priori language-planning and phono-symbolic “natural” values of sounds (a, i, u, etc.), so that what a sign means is tied less to conversationally negotiated intention-and-inference and more to a designed code whose semantic assignments are supposed to be intelligible in virtue of articulation, physiology, or iconic fit. In Gricean terms, Meriggi’s deutero-Esperanto/blaia zimondal is a stress-test for the social dimension of meaning: a language that nobody uses may have internal systematicity, but it lacks the population-level uptake and shared practical expectations that make implicatures calculable and make speaker-meaning succeed as a public action; conversely, Grice’s Brighton joke about inventing a language no one speaks highlights that private procedures and idiosyncratic codes do not yet amount to communicative meaning unless they project into a community of interpreters who can recognize intentions and coordinate on rules. So while Meriggi exemplifies a constructive, code-first rationality (build the semantics into the phonetic inventory; let meaning ride on designed symbolics), Grice exemplifies an interaction-first rationality (meaning is what agents do with expressions in cooperative practice; implicature is the rational surplus generated by that practice), and the contrast turns on where “reason” is located: for Meriggi, chiefly in the architect’s design of a semiotic system; for Grice, chiefly in the hearer’s and speaker’s shared capacity to infer, under public norms, what is meant beyond what is said. Grice: “When I was at Brighton – Anna McCormack responded, but few quote her! – I played with ‘Deutero-Esperanto.’ Earlier in my William James set on logic and conversation, I had played with myself, ‘lying in the tub’ and coming up with a new highway code – ‘that nobody uses’ – This is my more specific reflection on what I mean by a ‘procedure’ which springs from the idiosyncratic utterer and may project or not into an intended population. At Brighton, I was more direct, if more controversial, although McCormack never picked up the irony. I stated that I could invent a new language, call it ‘Deutero-Esperanto’ that nobody ever speaks! Of course, for Witters and his followers – at the time, some of my former colleagues, such as D. F. Pears – that would be nonsensical! Now, we don’t think Italian philosophers as being per se Gricieans – as Katz and Fodor spell my surname in adjectival dress – but there were possibly more inventors of new languages in Italy than in the rest of the world. Compared to Meriggi, Bishop Wilkins should have continued preaching!” Citato da VAILATI , “SCRITTI” – “un appasionato”. Progetto di lingua a priori, il blaia zimondal è elaborato da M., professore dell'istituto tecnico di Como. Il blaia zimondal parte da un principio fono-simbolico. Ciascun *suono* possede un significato naturale (Grice) o *senso* generale corrispondente al suo modo naturale di formazione fisiologico – fisi, NATURA -- luogo e modo di articolazione dei foni. Così ad esempio -- a, vocale aperta, esprime ciò che è grande, alto, forte, bianco, evidente. -- i, vocale ANTERIORE alta, per il fatto che è prodotta serrando quasi completamente la bocca, esprime ciò che è piccolo, basso, leggero, interiore -- u, vocale POSTERIORE alta, esprime ciò che è basso, scuro, pesante, lontano, futuro. deutero-esperanto. Grice has Meriggi’s title in front of him and, as if the word itself had invited the lecture, begins by treating declinatio as the proper name for a very definite kind of order: the ordered variation of a noun by case and number, governed by a paradigm and not by whim. He says that people use declension loosely, but that in a serious grammar it means the whole machine, not merely one ending, and that Meriggi, by choosing the Latinised title, is signalling that he intends to be read with a schoolmaster’s exactness. Licio, he adds, is not a flourish but a technical referent, and so the question becomes a comparative one, the only kind he trusts: what does a masculine, a feminine, and a neuter noun look like when you march it, case by case, through four languages that each pretend, in different ways, to make gender and case rational. He chooses a representative masculine noun, and he does what irritates people who prefer ideas to morphology: he starts with singular and he starts with the nominative, as if the nominative were a moral right. Latin first, because Latin is the pedagogical baseline. Nominative as the subject form, genitive as the possessive and the anchor for the rest, accusative as the direct object, dative as the indirect, ablative as the case of separation and instrument and far too many other things, and then, with a pedant’s pleasure, he pauses on the locative, remarking that Latin pretends not to have it while quietly keeping it alive in a few stubborn items and in place names, and that a man who says Romae is using a case the textbooks bury out of embarrassment. Greek next, where the same chain is recognisable but the article and the endings make the paradigm look more explicitly worked, and where, if one is being honest, the dative is doing the work that Latin spreads across dative and ablative. Anglo-Saxon then, because it preserves enough case to make the comparison nontrivial: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, with the instrumental either shadowy or merged depending on how fussy you are, and with grammatical gender still alive in a way modern English has forgotten how to tolerate. And then Lycian, where the case system is neither Latin nor Greek nor Germanic, but still Indo-European enough to invite the same questions, with a nominative and an accusative that behave as you would expect, and with the oblique cases doing the real classificatory labour. He repeats the exercise with a feminine noun, insisting that the point is not to show off endings but to show what a language thinks it is doing when it marks roles. Latin’s first declension looks almost too neat, he says, until you remember that the neatness is a historical accident made into a schoolroom ideal. Greek’s feminine paradigms remind you that gender is not a semantic label but a grammatical commitment: the forms tell you what counts as a subject and what counts as an object before anyone has uttered a word of intention. Anglo-Saxon’s feminine forms, he remarks, are the closest thing English ever had to a public guarantee that syntactic role would not be left to mere word order. Lycian again, because this is where Meriggi’s title bites: it is one thing to know declension in the classical languages; it is another to follow declension in a language you do not speak, where the paradigm has to be inferred from inscriptions and distributional patterns rather than heard as a living habit. Then he does the neuter, and here he becomes positively pleased with himself, because the neuter lets him make the point that three genders are not three kinds of thing but three kinds of agreement, and that the notorious neuter rule in Greek and Latin, with nominative and accusative identical and the plural sometimes looking like a singular, is not a curiosity but a deep structural fact about how those languages trade off form against function. Anglo-Saxon, he says, preserves the neuter in a way that makes the old Indo-European pattern visible without the Greek article and without Latin’s later levelling. Lycian, again, is the test case: does it preserve the neuter patterns that a comparative philologist expects, and if it does, what has been preserved and what has been remodelled. Only then does he permit himself plural, and he does it in the same chain, nominative through the obliques, as if the plural were merely the singular repeated with discipline. Midway he stops to make his one joke about the dual, and he makes it with the air of a man correcting a lazy historical imagination: Greek has a dual and uses it in a way that can still be seen, fossil-like, in certain forms; and the dual, he says, never quite dies in English culture either, because it survives as a conceptual ghost in both, and in the old ambi- of Latin, and in the whole human impulse to treat two as a special number rather than merely the first plural. Anglo-Saxon, he adds, has its own dual pronouns, and that fact alone should cure anyone of thinking that modern English was always as indifferent to number as it now pretends to be. At the end he closes Meriggi’s paper with the satisfaction of having turned one bibliographic title into a small map of European grammatical conscience. Declinazione, he says, is not merely morphology; it is a picture of what a linguistic community chooses to make explicit, publicly, about role, relation, and reference. Meriggi, by forcing you to look at Lycian endings with the same seriousness you give to Latin and Greek, is quietly asking the Gricean question from the other side: before we ever infer what someone means, what have our languages already decided to mark, case by case, as the default machinery of intelligibility. Grice: Meriggi, devo ammettere che il tuo progetto di deutero-esperanto mi ha affascinato. Davvero credi sia possibile creare una lingua che nessuno parla, eppure abbia senso filosofico? Meriggi: Caro Grice, per me ogni lingua nasce sempre da un bisogno umano profondo, anche se resta "incompresa". Il blaia zimondal, con i suoi principi fono-simbolici, è un esperimento per dimostrare che ogni suono ha già in sé un significato naturale. Grice: Quindi, se ti capisco bene, una 'a' non è solo una lettera, ma racconta di grandezza o luminosità? Mi ricorda i miei giochi sul linguaggio che "nessuno usa", quasi come inventare un codice della strada solo per sé stessi! Meriggi: Esatto! E forse, Grice, come tu stesso sostieni, ogni atto linguistico nasce dall’idiosincrasia dell’emittente, ma può sempre diventare, con fortuna, patrimonio di molti. L’importante è ascoltare la musica nascosta dietro ogni suono. As per passage below, please provide a 100-move conversation between G. and S. on morpho-syntactic categories, as they discuss Meriggi's 'La declinazione del lizio'. G.'s point being that the morpho-syntactic categories reflect more basic 'ontological categories' alla Aristotle or 'categories of experience' alla Kant -- so you start with a phrase in Lycian -- and proceed. Seeing that it was Indo-European as Anglo-Saxon and latin, they compare, especially with Latin, and with Greek which had a 'dual' number -- now the number of cases in Latin differs from that of Greek, but G. is not to happy with a locative -- and they consider that in connection with Lycian -- the main element is to trace analogies between each case in Lycian and say Latin, with one cognate example -- and in the context of a full sentence for each, not just the single lexeme as it gets declined. Just the conversation, no preamble or ps. Dry Oxonian humour, thank you. G.: Let us begin with a Lycian phrase, since Meriggi would complain if we entered by Latin only. Let us say simply: xñtabura ebeñnẽ prñnawa. A tomb for a householder, if one permits oneself the usual funerary dryness. S.: Dry enough already. And you choose Lycian because a declension is less likely to lie when carved in stone. G.: Quite. Living languages equivocate with charm; dead ones leave endings behind as evidence. S.: Then your point is that the endings are not mere grammar-school upholstery. G.: Exactly. Morpho-syntactic categories are public traces of deeper categories by which a community carves experience. Aristotle would call them ontological in one key, Kant categories of experience in another. A case-ending is a small metaphysics at the end of a word. S.: That is rather grand for a suffix. G.: Suffixes have long been made to do civilisation’s smaller work. S.: Let us start with the nominative, before you become transcendental. G.: Sensible. In Lycian, as in Greek and Latin, the nominative marks what a clause presents as subject or topic-bearer. Consider, by analogy, Latin: Lupus currit in agro. The wolf runs in the field. Lupus is nominative because the sentence is, so to speak, about the wolf as doing. S.: And the Lycian parallel? G.: Something like xñtawati prñnawa, if one imagines a householder acting or standing as the clause’s bearer. The exact lexicon matters less than the function. The nominative is the form under which a thing is presented as the one of which something is said. S.: Aristotle would say substance first, predicate later. G.: Yes, though grammar is never wholly obedient to metaphysics. Still, nominative feels like the case of presentation, the public front door of the noun. S.: So in Greek too, ho lukos trechei. The wolf runs. Nominative as the one doing the running. G.: Exactly. And Anglo-Saxon preserves enough of this to remind modern English that it once had manners. Se wulf rint. Subjecthood was not always entrusted to word order alone. S.: Then nominative corresponds to the category of subject of predication. G.: Or, if one is feeling Kantian, to the form under which an object of experience is taken as unified for predication. S.: You are warming up unpleasantly. G.: Meriggi would expect no less. Now the accusative. Latin: Agricola lupum videt. The farmer sees the wolf. Lupum is accusative, the object toward which the seeing is directed. S.: So the accusative is the case of directedness. G.: Very nearly. The case of affected or goalward objecthood in the transitive scene. Greek does the same: ho georgos ton lukon horai. And in a Lycian analogy one would look for the noun-form used where the action terminates upon or is borne toward another participant. S.: So if Lycian marks a direct object distinctly, the community has chosen to make explicit not merely who acts, but upon whom action falls. G.: Precisely. The nominative says, as it were, here is the bearer; the accusative says, here is the borne-upon. A very old ontology of asymmetry. S.: Anglo-Saxon still has that, in a way. Se mann geseah þone wulf. G.: Yes. And the demonstrative helps preserve what later English lets word order carry with weary diligence. S.: The genitive next, I assume, before you accuse the cases of disorder. G.: Quite. Latin: Liber pueri in mensa est. The boy’s book is on the table. Pueri is genitive. Greek: to biblion tou paidos epi tes trapezes estin. The relation is not merely possession but belonging, source, dependence, specification. S.: So the genitive marks what is of another. G.: Exactly. It encodes derivation, belonging, partition, kindred dependence. In a Lycian funerary phrase, one often suspects the genitival atmosphere even when the exact ending is disputed: tomb of so-and-so, child of so-and-so, house of such a lineage. S.: Aristotle again would call this relation rather than substance. G.: Yes, though Roman schoolmasters made it look almost domestic. But belonging is an ontological category too. The genitive tells us that things are not merely there; they are of something. S.: And Anglo-Saxon had that with ease. Hus þæs cyninges stent. The king’s house stands. G.: Very good. A respectable Germanic genitive before modern English began scattering apostrophes like confetti. S.: Dative now. G.: Naturally. Latin: Magister puero librum dat. The teacher gives the boy a book. Puero is dative. Greek: ho didaskalos tō paidi biblion didōsi. The dative marks recipient, advantage, reference, orientation toward a beneficiary or addressee. S.: So the dative is the case of “to” or “for,” though not always reducible to prepositions. G.: Precisely. It encodes the structure of directed giving, saying, showing, helping. A category of relation in which something is not merely done, but done to or for someone. S.: Which sounds rather social. G.: Many cases are. Grammar remembers that life is not a sequence of isolated substances but of directed dealings. S.: And Lycian? G.: One looks for the oblique forms serving recipient or target functions. The nomenclature may differ; the practical intelligibility does not. If a Lycian text says, in effect, “this tomb to X,” we are already in dative country, even if Meriggi and his predecessors quarrel over the exact map. S.: Anglo-Saxon again: Se lareow sealde þæm cilde boc. There it stands. G.: Yes. Enough survives there to embarrass modern English into modesty. S.: Now the ablative, your favourite grievance. G.: Not favourite. Merely unavoidable. Latin: Miles gladio pugnat. The soldier fights with a sword. Or: Puella ex urbe venit. The girl comes from the city. The ablative is an untidy Roman empire of separation, instrument, source, circumstance. S.: In other words, a bureaucratic success and a philosophical nuisance. G.: Exactly. Greek lets the dative and prepositions do much of what Latin heaps upon the ablative. This is why I have always thought the Latin ablative too successful for its own conceptual hygiene. S.: Yet you use it. G.: As one uses the Foreign Office. Reluctantly but repeatedly. If Lycian has oblique cases covering instrument, source, or circumstance, one should compare them to Latin ablative functions without pretending exact identity. One analogy at a time. For instrument, Latin: Scriba calamo scribit. The scribe writes with a reed-pen. If Lycian uses a marked oblique to convey “with” or “by means of,” the structural analogy is sound. S.: So the ontological category there is mediation by means. G.: Or source, depending on the sentence. The ablative is really several categories in one administrative overcoat. S.: You do not sound reconciled. G.: I am not. Which brings us to the locative, that furtive survival. S.: Ah yes, Romae. G.: Precisely. Latin pretends not to have a locative while quietly retaining it where place-names refuse instruction. Romae sum. I am at Rome. Domi maneo. I remain at home. The textbooks bury the locative because it interferes with tidy declensional propaganda. S.: Greek uses prepositions instead, mostly. G.: Yes, though one feels the older local functions behind them. The question for Lycian is whether one should posit a distinct locative value or treat place-relations through other obliques and particles. I am not eager to multiply locatives merely because comparative philologists miss them. S.: So your dislike is not of place, but of exuberant case-inflation. G.: Exactly. One should not invent a case every time a noun loiters somewhere. Still, if Lycian has forms regularly marking “in” or “at” in a sufficiently morphological way, one must take the evidence seriously. Meriggi, being Meriggi, would enjoy the quarrel. S.: And the full sentence for Latin locative? G.: Romae poeta habitat. The poet lives at Rome. One cognate comparison with Greek is harder because Greek will prefer en Rōmēi or en polei with the preposition doing the overt work. S.: So Latin here preserves a bit of Indo-European local dignity. G.: A bit, yes. Enough to annoy simplifiers. S.: What of the vocative? You have not greeted anyone yet. G.: True. Latin: Serve, veni huc. Slave, come here. Or more politely, Marce, audi. The vocative marks direct address. Greek likewise: ō Marke. It is not a syntactic participant in the same way, but a pragmatic one. A case whose ontology lies less in being than in interpersonal summons. S.: So the vocative is almost the case of second-person encounter. G.: Very good. The case of turning toward another. If Lycian inscriptions name someone in address, one should watch whether the form differs. Though funerary Lycian is not exactly the agora. S.: No one in a tomb answers briskly. G.: Not in the better inscriptions. Now the dual. S.: At last. Greek had it and used it just enough to rebuke later laziness. G.: Precisely. Dyo anthrōpō, the two men, and so on. The dual marks that two is not merely a small many but a specially structured pair. Aristotle would see a numerical distinction; Kant perhaps a peculiarity in the manifold of counting; common sense sees that two shoes are not yet a crowd. S.: Anglo-Saxon pronouns also kept a dual. Wit for “we two,” git for “you two.” G.: Yes, and that fact alone should cure Englishmen of supposing that their language was always philosophically negligent about number. S.: Latin lost the dual, mostly. G.: Or fossilised it into embarrassment. Ambō, duo in certain pair-bound uses, but no living nominal dual system. Latin treats two as the first plural, which is efficient but metaphysically unimaginative. S.: And Lycian? G.: If Lycian lacks a productive dual, it joins Latin and later practicality. If it preserves traces, one asks whether the community still hears twoness as a distinct category of experience rather than a mere arithmetic threshold. S.: You make grammar sound like anthropology. G.: It is anthropology in inflectional dress. S.: Let us go back and compare each case with one cognate example more explicitly, since Meriggi deserves schoolroom exactness. G.: Very well. Nominative. Latin: Pater venit. The father comes. Greek: patēr erchetai. Both preserve the Indo-European root in comparable shape and the nominative as subject-presentation. S.: Lycian parallel would then seek the subject form of a comparable kinship noun. G.: Exactly. Genitive. Latin: Domus patris magna est. The father’s house is large. Greek: hē oikia tou patros megalē estin. The relation of belonging is marked morphologically in both. S.: Dative. Latin: Filius patri aquam portat. The son carries water to the father. Greek: huios tō patri hydōr pherei. G.: Good. Accusative. Latin: Mater filium vocat. The mother calls the son. Greek: mētēr ton huion kalei. S.: Ablative or instrumental analogue. Latin: Mater manu puerum ducit. The mother leads the boy by the hand. Greek often with dative or preposition: tē cheiri agei to paidion. G.: Precisely. And one should not force Greek to produce a Latin ablative when it prefers a different distribution of labour. S.: Locative. Latin: Corinthi mercator habitat. The merchant lives at Corinth. Greek: en Korinthōi ho emporos oikei. G.: Yes, and the contrast is pedagogically perfect. Latin preserves a case remnant; Greek lets the preposition do the visible work. S.: Vocative. Latin: Pater, audi me. Father, hear me. Greek: ō pater, akoue mou. G.: Just so. The cognates help because they show not only similar lexemes but similar relational needs. S.: And neuter? G.: Ah yes, the neuter, that old delight. Latin: Donum in mensa iacet. The gift lies on the table. Greek: to dōron epi tēs trapezēs keitai. Nominative and accusative neuter coincide. The language here marks not a third kind of thing in nature, but a third pattern of agreement and a special economy between subject and object forms. S.: So the neuter is less ontology in the naturalist sense than grammar’s own quiet classification. G.: Exactly. Yet even there one may ask whether the language treats certain conceptual regions as less agentive, less person-like, more thing-like. One must be careful, but not blind. S.: Anglo-Saxon preserves the neuter too. Þæt hus stent. The house stands. G.: Yes, and modern English inherits the wreckage through “it,” while pretending not to have gender at all unless scandalised into it. S.: What about plural? G.: The plural repeats the categories under the pressure of multiplicity. Latin: Patres veniunt. The fathers come. Greek: hoi pateres erchontai. Nominative plural marks many bearers of predication. Genitive plural: Domus patrum magnae sunt. The houses of the fathers are large. Dative plural: Filii patribus dona dant. Sons give gifts to the fathers. And so on. S.: So number does not abolish the case-relations; it scales them. G.: Precisely. The plural is not philosophical novelty so much as the discipline of repetition. S.: Unless one comes to the dual, where two insists on being special. G.: Quite. Human beings are oddly sentimental about two. S.: Let me ask the larger question. Are you really saying that nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and the rest reflect ontological categories in Aristotle’s sense? G.: Not crudely. I am saying that a language’s morpho-syntactic choices publicise what relations it chooses to mark as basic for the handling of experience: bearer of predication, affected object, belonging, directed recipient, instrument, source, place, address. These are not identical with Aristotle’s categories, but they are not unrelated to the same pressure to sort the forms of being and saying. S.: And the Kantian version? G.: That case-systems may be read as historical codings of recurrent relational forms by which experience is organised for judgment: subject, object, possession, destination, location, means. Grammar is not transcendental deduction, but it is sedimented reason. S.: Meriggi would have liked “sedimented reason.” G.: He would probably have declined it into Lycian. S.: You are not wholly hostile to him, then. G.: Not at all. Meriggi’s title, La declinazione del lizio, is charmingly schoolmasterly. It announces that one may begin from endings and arrive at civilisation. S.: Then let us consider the local difficulty again. If Lycian shows an oblique used in place-relations, how do we decide whether to call it locative rather than dative, ablative, or merely “oblique”? G.: By discipline, distribution, and restraint. One asks whether there is a distinct morphological pattern regularly associated with static location rather than recipienthood, source, or general obliqueness. If not, one resists locative enthusiasm. S.: In other words, no honorary cases. G.: Exactly. Grammarians are too ready to found principalities on small phonetic evidence. S.: Yet one should also not flatten real distinctions. G.: Quite. A dead language deserves justice, not economy alone. S.: This is beginning to sound Roman. G.: Most good philology does. Now let us make the analogies explicit in one sequence, if only to satisfy the classroom in Meriggi. S.: Proceed. G.: Nominative: Latin Pater filium amat. The father loves the son. Pater is the bearer. Greek Patēr ton huion philei. Lycian, mutatis mutandis, would mark the father in subject position. S.: Accusative: the son is the loved-upon. G.: Precisely. Genitive: Liber patris iacet. The father’s book lies there. Greek To biblion tou patros keitai. Lycian would use the form marking belonging or descent. S.: Dative: Mater filio panem dat. The mother gives bread to the son. Greek Mētēr tō huiōi arton didōsi. G.: Ablative or instrumental analogue: Faber malleo laborat. The craftsman works with a hammer. Greek prefers a different device, but the category of means is there. S.: Locative: Domi puer manet. The boy remains at home. G.: Exactly, and one sees how Latin hides a case inside an adverbial survivor. Greek: en oikōi to paidion menei. S.: Vocative: Fili, veni. Son, come. G.: Very good. One could almost build a civilisation from imperatives and case-endings. S.: Many did. G.: Quite. Now, one more thing. The Greek dual and the Latin lack of a productive dual show that number itself is culturally and grammatically negotiable. The world may contain pairs, but a language need not inflect for them. S.: So categories of experience are not simply read off nature; they are chosen for public marking. G.: Exactly. There is the Kantian note. Experience may be universally structured in some deep sense, but languages differ over what they force speakers to make explicit. S.: And that is why declension matters philosophically. G.: Entirely. Declinatio is not merely a list of endings. It is a map of what a linguistic community chooses to distinguish openly between nouns and the world. S.: Then Meriggi, by marching Lycian beside Latin and Greek, is asking whether a less familiar Indo-European language marks the same public relations or redraws them. G.: Just so. And that is why one should begin with a Lycian phrase rather than apologise for it. S.: We began with xñtabura ebeñnẽ prñnawa. Have we ended anywhere worthy of it? G.: We have ended where all good declensions end: with the suspicion that endings are not trivial. S.: And your final word on the locative? G.: That Rome kept it like an eccentric aunt and grammarians should neither disown her nor move her into every spare room. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Lydio-Lycian, with a Roman ablative of annoyance.Meriggi, Piero (1929). La declinazione del licio. Rendiconti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Merker: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – l’etologia filosofica – o tempora o mores -- il filo d’Arianna – Arianna abbandonata a Nasso. Grice: “I like to consider myself a philosophical ethologist. As Merker reminds us, ethos is possibly related to ‘ethnos,’ but possibly not!”  Nicolao Merker (Trento): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – l’etologia filosofica – o tempora o mores -- il filo d’Arianna – Arianna abbandonata a Nasso. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a disciplined inference from what is said plus a rational presumption of cooperative purpose (so that implicature is, in principle, recoverable from shared expectations and can be cancelled, defended, or recalculated); Merker, by contrast, is best read in your passage as shifting the explanatory spotlight from the local mechanics of inference to the larger “ethological” and historical conditions that make those inferences socially available in the first place—ethos as the settled habits of a form of life, and even ethnos as the boundary-marking of group identity that sets who counts as an insider hearer with the right background. Where Grice abstracts toward a general, almost formal story about how intention and rationality govern conversational meaning across contexts, Merker’s preferred metaphors (the Ariadne thread, the labyrinth, abandonment at Naxos) suggest that “context” is not merely a set of parameters for computing implicature but a culturally and historically sedimented pathway through which interpreters are guided (or misled), and that breakdowns in communication often reflect conflicts of ethos—shared norms, moral-political temperaments, and identity narratives—rather than failures of logic alone. In that sense, Merker complements Grice: Grice gives the inferential engine of implicature; Merker supplies the genealogy and “mores” that explain why certain implicatures feel natural, why some audiences are excluded from uptake, and why what counts as reasonable conversational behavior is itself historically variable—an Ariadne-thread problem as much as a maxim-following problem. Grice: “I like to consider myself a philosophical ethologist. As Merker reminds us, ethos is possibly related to ‘ethnos,’ but possibly not!” Grice: “In fact, I while I sort of detest etymologies, which usually refute my theories – cf. ‘mean’ – I must say that ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethos’ are etymologically relate – both originating from the same proto-indo-european root s(w)we- a reflexive pronoun referring to one’s own, or a social group. While ‘ethnic’ focuses on shared origins and group identity, ‘ethos’ emphasizes the characteristic customs, values, and morality of a person, group, or culture. Therefore, while they have distinct meanings in modern English, they share a common etymological thread in ancient Greek, reflecting concepts of community and shared cultural identity!” Grice: “At Oxford, we wouldn’t consider M. an Italian philosopher, as we don’t consider Ayer an English philosopher – Anglo-Jewish at most. M. is different, though!” Filosofo italiano. Trento, Trentino. Grice: “My favourite of his books is ‘storia della filosofia ai fumetti.” Grice: “The fact that he found Italian words for all that Kant says in “Metafisica dei costume” is admirable! I love M., and for many reasons; he has philosophised on what makes me an Englishman: my blood, or the fact that I was born in Harrborne? I love M.: he uses metaphors aptly like ‘il filo d’Arianna’ to refer to what I pompously call ‘the general theory of context.’ --Si laurea a Messina. Trascorse un periodo di ricerche in Germania. Allievo di VOLPE, insegna a Messina e Roma. Cura edizioni italiane di classici dell'età della Riforma, dell'Illuminismo e dell'idealismo, nonché di Marx, Engels e del marxismo. Storia della filosofia, l’eta antica, il filo d’Arianna, Teseo e il minotauro, omo-sociale, Teseo, Arianna abandonata, giacobinismo, populismo etnico, etnico ennico etnicita ennicita, etnos, Greek ethnos, Latin ethnos. Grice does what he always does: he begins pedantically, by locating Trento the old way, as a comune and as the chief town of its provincia, with the regione named as he would have heard it before the later bureaucratic refinements had settled into everyone’s mouths. Then his ear catches on the surname. Merker, he says, is not the sort of name one expects to find filed among the Rossi and Bianchi; it has the look of a border-name, Germanic in shape, and therefore (he adds, cautiously, because he dislikes grand etymological confidence) not at all surprising in Trento, where the map itself invites the thought that names may travel as readily as people do. From that small onomastic point he makes the larger, characteristically Oxford analogy: Oxford too has its internal borders, less mountainous but no less real in accent and ancestry. A man may be “born in Oxford” and still be, in the social imagination, a Scot by migration or a Welshman by the sound of his consonants; and Grice mentions, with the air of a tutor producing an example rather than a memoir, the Scots presence in his own education, the Hardie line, the way a name or a voice can quietly carry a second geography into a room. So, he says, one should not be too quick to read “Italian philosopher” off either the place of birth or the language of publication. Trento can produce an Italian citizen with a Germanic surname, and Oxford can produce an English don with a Celtic tutorial ancestry; the moral is not genealogical purity but the conversational fact that background is always already doing classificatory work, often before anyone has stated a thesis. He then turns, as if the surname had been only the thread that got him into the labyrinth, to Merker’s own preferred thread: Ariadne, guidance, abandonment. Names, he says, are like that: a small filament that can either lead an audience safely through context or leave them stranded, depending on what they presume about who counts as “one of us.” And here he gives Merker his due: where Grice builds an inferential engine for implicature, Merker reminds him that the engine runs on a fuel that is not evenly distributed, the mores of a form of life, the local habits by which a hearer is licensed to take the next step. The Germanic-looking Merker in Italian Trento is therefore not merely a biographical curiosity but a miniature demonstration of Merker’s point: ethos and boundary can meet in a single proper name, and the resulting expectations can steer interpretation as surely as any maxim. Grice: Caro Merker, permettimi una curiosità: sono quasi sorpreso che i tuoi connazionali italiani non abbiano mai pensato di italianizzare il tuo cognome in “Merchero”! Sai com’è, da queste parti ogni nome straniero viene subito infilato nel tritacarne della tradizione... Merker: Ah, Grice, se sapessi! Al liceo classico i miei compagni ci hanno subito pensato: “Merchero”, “Mercurio”, e una volta addirittura “Marchese”! Mi divertivo molto: bastava sentire quell’accento trentino su un cognome così palesemente non italiano per far sorridere tutti. Grice: D’altronde, “Merker” suona proprio fuori dal coro in mezzo a tutti quei Rossi, Bianchi, e Verdi... Immagino anche i tuoi professori alle prese con la pronuncia: un piccolo labirinto, degno del filo d’Arianna che tanto ami evocare! Merker: Proprio così! E pensa che, tra uno scherzo e una battuta sull’etnia e sull’ethos, ho imparato che anche il nome può diventare una piccola lezione di filosofia: ci ricorda chi siamo, da dove veniamo e quanta ironia serve per restare sé stessi in mezzo ai minotauri della burocrazia italiana! Merker, Nicolao (1961). Le origini della logica hegeliana. Hegel a Jena. Feltrinelli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Messere: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale  – l’implicatura di Sileno Gregorio Messere (Torre Santa Sussana, Brindisi, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale  – l’implicatura di Sileno. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes what a speaker means depend on publicly intelligible rational patterns: hearers assume (ceteris paribus) cooperative, purposive talk and can therefore work out implicatures as disciplined inferences from what is said plus shared expectations about relevance, adequacy, sincerity, and manner; in your Messere vignette, by contrast, “our Socrates” is less a theorist of cooperative exchange than an emblem of elenchus under pressure, and the key contrast is that Messere’s life-story (seminary pedagogy, accusations, seven years’ imprisonment, self-training in Greek, later Neapolitan intellectual prominence) foregrounds how conversational reason can survive hostile contexts where cooperation is not guaranteed and where meaning must be managed through stance, reticence, and irony. The “Sileno” thread sharpens this: Alcibiades’ Silenus trope (Socrates as outwardly plain, inwardly rich) becomes a metapragmatic reminder that interlocutors routinely traffic in layered meaning—praise that carries a barb, honorifics that insinuate ridicule, public labels that impose an implicature one must live under—so Messere functions as a case in which implicature is not merely computed but socially weaponized (a community can “call you Socrates” while half-meaning “a Silenus,” i.e., a figure whose surface invites misreading). Where Grice’s program stresses the calculability and cancellability of implicatures under a rational cooperative presumption, Messere dramatizes the asymmetry of power in real exchanges: accusations, institutional gatekeeping, and reputational framing can force implicatures onto a speaker irrespective of his intentions, making “reason in conversation” not only an inferential norm but also a moral and civic practice of resisting imposed readings, using learned language (Greek), timing (silences), and wit to restore control over what is taken to be meant. Grice: “While I claim that most of what I refer to as the Athenian dialectic is due to Aristotle, it may well be thought to originate with Socrates. The Italians know this well – as when they call M. ‘our Socrates’!” -Ricevuti i primi rudimenti del sapere dai chierici locali, il suo padre, Pietro M., sebbene non agiato, decide di fargli frequentare il seminario d‘Oria, assecondando così il suo vivo desiderio di intraprendere la carriera ecclesiastica, qui dimostra sin da subito una profonda passione per lo studio. Ordinato sacerdote per poi ritornare al paese natìo, dove divenne un maestro di grande dottrina. S’applica allo studio della filosofia, della matematica, della storia ecclesiastica e civile, nonché anche alla musica e al canto. Incolpato dell'omicidio di un chierico,  è messo in prigione nelle carceri del vescovo d‘Oria, dove rimane rinchiuso per sette anni, tuttavia non si lascia mai abbattere dallo sconforto. Anzi, procuratosi alcuni libri, M. s’applica allo studio della lingua greca, per la quale già aveva dimostrato una forte predisposizione. Dopo un lungo e dibattuto processo, la sentenza finale lo dichiarò innocente e assolto da qualsiasi reato. Risentito con i suoi concittadini per averlo ingiustamente ritenuto reo, dichiarò che il suo paese mai più lo avrebbe rivisto. Fu così che M. partì per Napoli, dove rimase fino alla morte. Nella città partenopea ebbe modo di affinare e approfondire la sua cultura, divenendo un personaggio di rilievo nel mondo intellettuale napoletano del tempo. La grande conoscenza della lingua greca gli conferì grande notorietà nonché una cattedra di Lettura Greca, che mantenne fino all'anno della morte, presso l'Università degli studi di Napoli. Tale cattedra  era stata nuovamente istituita  a spese di Giuseppe Valletta, filosofo, letterato e giureconsulto dell'epoca ed amico di M.. Grice: “When they called M. ‘Socrate’ I hope they don’t mean Alcibiades’s implicature, ‘my dear Sileno!’” Implicature, Sileno, Socrates, Socrate Sileno, Socrate, Silenus. St John’s SCR, Michaelmas 1948. The room has that post-war polish which is really only a kind of tiredness dressed up: people have returned, committees have resumed, and Oxford is once again pretending that the world is made of minutes. Russell had arrived with the quiet confidence of someone who has been told, by a librarian or by fate, that he is “needed.” He was not yet, to me, a character, only a newly-elected fellow with the fresh paint still on his title. Irony, isn’t it, Grice, he said, dropping into the chair opposite as if the chair were a continuation of the conversation rather than its beginning. You philosophy, I classics. I hated the remark at once, not because it was false, but because it was the sort of truth that is always smuggled in under the name irony. It’s only irony if you mean something by it, Russell. I mean, he said, that they tell me you’re a Latinist. Who tells you that. The librarian. I could hear the whole scene in my head: the librarian, half joking and wholly earnest, announcing the new appointment by means of a category. Have you met our new Latinist. The phrase made my teeth itch. Oxford loves labels that are both too big and too small. Have you met our new Latinist, I said, repeating it with the contempt it deserved. Yes, Russell said, as if bracing. I suppose I’m to accept it. I nearly said yes, often, at the Flag and Lamb, and then I stopped. There are jokes you do not hand to a new colleague on his first week, because the new colleague is still deciding whether you are a colleague or a nuisance. A Latinist, I said, is a man with a known vice. A classicist is a man with two vices and no confession. Russell gave a small smile, the sort that admits the point without paying for it. And what are you reading, Grice. Oh, nothing important. A bit of Neapolitan gossip, really. An inaugural lezione in Greek. In Greek. Naples, 1681. Russell leaned forward. They had a Chair just for Greek. So it seems. A cattedra di Lettura Greca, at the University of Naples. And you’re reading this because… Because I am trying to decide whether it is a memory, a memoria, or merely an excuse to say the word Greek in a room full of men who prefer Latin. Russell had the decency to look wounded, which was exactly what I wanted. A man who does not defend himself is impossible to tease. I don’t prefer Latin, Russell said. You don’t. Not in your sense. In my sense I mean: you will, eventually, end up associated with Latin whether you like it or not, because Oxford distributes reputations by need, not by love. Russell gave me a look: not hostile, not yet; merely the look of someone marking you as a phenomenon. And Naples in 1681, he said, had a Greek chair. Yes. Funded by a certain Valletta, and given to a man named Messere. Messere. Gregorio Messere. Pugliese by birth, Napolitan by adoption. Forty-four at the time, by my arithmetic. Russell’s eyebrows went up, just slightly, as if arithmetic were a moral virtue. And you have the text of his inaugural lecture. I have no such thing. I have a notice, a report, a bibliographical smell. But I am an Oxford man, and therefore I cannot see a new Chair without imagining the speech that must have been made to justify it. Russell laughed. That is very Oxford. No, it’s very human. Oxford only does it with better Latin. Russell took the paper from me with the calm of someone trained to handle documents. He read the line aloud, slowly, as if Latin and Greek might be hiding inside it. Lettura Greca. Yes. So at Naples they institutionalised Greek reading as an office. They did. And at Oxford. At Oxford we institutionalise Greek reading as a title, I said, and pointed with my chin at the air, as if the Regius Professor were hovering somewhere above the port. There is a Regius Professor of Greek. Russell nodded. Dodds, at the moment. Yes. And yet you will still be called a Latinist. Because the librarian needs a noun. Because Oxford needs a simplification. Russell handed the paper back. But surely Bologna had it hundreds of years earlier, he said, because this is what classicists do when they feel the conversation drifting too far into England: they restore Italy to the centre by means of “surely”. Surely, Russell, I said, is not an argument. It is a polite form of pressure. But did Bologna have a Greek chair earlier. I expect Bologna had Greeks before it had chairs, I said. And Naples had a chair before it had enough Greeks to deserve it. That is the difference. Naples was declaring an intention. Russell looked pleased by that, and then immediately suspicious, because he had not yet decided whether my praise was praise. And why are you interested in Messere. Because Messere is a useful joke under a serious entry. Forty-four, Naples, 1681, teaching Greek under an endowed arrangement. It makes “our Socrates” sound less like a nickname and more like a professional hazard. Russell frowned. “Our Socrates.” That is what they call him, or so the Italians say. And you believe it. I don’t believe it. I hear it. And I ask: what is being implied when a man is called Socrates. Compliment. Threat. Warning. Perhaps all three at once. And then, more to the point, what does the man do to survive the label. Russell leaned back. You philosophers. You hear a compliment and start looking for the knife. Not the knife, Russell. The mechanism. Compliments are how institutions move people without admitting it. Russell glanced again at the paper. So: Naples has a Greek chair. Oxford has a Greek chair. Yet Oxford calls its new fellow a Latinist. Exactly. And you think that matters. It matters because it is the easiest case of the general rule: one word, one office, one man, many senses. Classics is a cover-name. Latinist is a misdescription. And Greek, in England, is always somebody’s second love even when it is their first competence. Russell looked at me, and I could see him doing what good classicists do: checking the text behind the phrase. I did Mods in Greek and Latin, he said, very calmly. And you survived. With difficulty. Good. Then you are already an Oxford Greek. Oxford Greek is not a language; it is a biography. Russell laughed again, more openly. And Messere. Messere is a reminder that “Greek” can be an institution rather than a hobby. Naples made it a chair in 1681. Oxford made it Regius centuries earlier, yes, but we behave as if Greek is still an elective refinement. Russell took a sip of port, as if considering whether to allow himself a confession. The truth is, he said, I like Greek because it misbehaves. Latin behaves. That is the first honest sentence you’ve said, Russell. That’s unfair. No, it’s a compliment. And I mean it without the knife. Russell’s smile tightened. Now who’s implying. I am, I said, and heard myself. I am, in other words, doing the one thing that ruins philosophy in public: making the implicature explicit. Russell looked delighted, which annoyed me, because I had handed him the advantage. So you see, he said. You do belong in philosophy. And you, I said, do belong in classics. Classics is where one learns how to enjoy misbehaviour while pretending it is grammar. He stood to go, the way new fellows do, with the modest urgency of people who still feel they must be seen doing something. And Grice. Yes. I shan’t tell the librarian you object to “Latinist.” Don’t. Let him keep his noun. But if he calls you a Latinist again, correct him in Greek. Russell laughed, and went out. And I thought, privately, that Oxford had once again done its favourite trick: it had taken a man whose heart would always be in Greek and placed him where the College needed Latin shored up. Classics, indeed: the art of being named for what the institution requires while you go on loving what you love.Grice: Messere, ti chiamano “il nostro Socrate”, ma vorrei essere certo che non intendano il Sileno di Alcibiade! Com’è vivere con questa implicatura sulle spalle? Messere: Grice, avessi avuto la saggezza di Sileno, forse avrei evitato sette anni tra le grinfie del vescovo d’Oria! Ma, come si dice a Torre Santa Susanna, “l’importante è non perdere la musica anche quando ti chiudono in cella”. Grice: Ah, la musica nascosta dietro ogni suono... e dietro ogni accusa ingiusta! Tu, tra filosofia, canto e greco, sembri un vero campione di resilienza: hai mai pensato di scrivere un trattato su “Sileno e la pazienza del filosofo pugliese”? Messere: Potrebbe essere una bella idea! D’altronde, in prigione ho avuto tutto il tempo per imparare il greco: se a Napoli ho brillato, lo devo anche ai silenzi di Oria. Del resto, come dice il proverbio, “chi non ha peccato, ha almeno un chierico che lo accusa!”. Messere, Gregorio (1681). Lezione inaugurale greco – Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Messimeri: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Note su Memoria sopra di una certa specie di pinta pratense chiamata sulla. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Domenico Grimaldi di Messimeri (Seminara, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats communication as a rational, intention-guided cooperative enterprise in which hearers are entitled to infer more than is said (conversational implicature) by assuming broadly shared norms of relevance, informativeness, and sincerity; “Messimeri” (Domenico Grimaldi, Marchese di Messimeri, 1735–1805, a Calabrian-Naples/Genovesi-linked Enlightenment economist and agrarian reformer, author of works such as Saggio di economia campestre per la Calabria Ultra, 1770, and active in trans-European agrarian/economic societies) reframes that Gricean picture by relocating “reason” from the micro-logic of utterance interpretation to the macro-practice of exchange, where market transactions and policy proposals function like structured conversations with their own expectations, strategic silences, and socially enforced “maxims” (credit, trust, reciprocity, and informational signalling). So where Grice analyzes how implicatures are calculable from what is said plus rational assumptions about cooperative talk, a Messimeri-style “philosophical economy” stresses that the same inferential apparatus operates in price signals, contractual language, and reform discourse, but under institutional constraints (property regimes, incentives, public administration) that make “cooperation” less a polite default and more a negotiated equilibrium; implicature in this register becomes the practical art by which agents communicate commitments, quality, risk, and credibility without always stating them, and conversational reason becomes a discipline of coordination under scarcity rather than primarily a theory of speaker-meaning. Grice: “At Oxford, we rarely study philosophical aeconomics, but they do so at Cambridge – witness Keynes!” Filosofo italiano. Seminara, Reggio Calabria, Calabria. Grice: “He was of a noble family – he was into the free market – so his is a philosophical economy.”  Esponente dell'illuminismo napoletano.  Francesco Mario Pagano. Nato in una famiglia aristocratica che faceva risalire le proprie origini alla nota famiglia di Genova, ricevette la prima educazione dal padre, il marchese Pio Grimaldi, un uomo colto che aveva cominciato a introdurre criteri di conduzione innovativi nelle sue proprietà terriere, peraltro non molto estese, di Seminara. Non essendo molto ricco, il padre lo avviò agli studi giuridici, in previsione di una possibile professione forense, all'Napoli. Nella capitale napoletana M. fu raggiunto dal fratello minore Francescantonio, fece parte con il fratello dell'Accademia dell'Arboscello, frequenta le lezioni di economia di Genovesi. Si trasferì a Genova, dove ottenne la riammissione nel patriziato della Repubblica di Genova, ottenendo così il permesso di esercitare alcune magistrature. In Liguria, tuttavia, M. ha modo di approfondire gli aspetti tecnici, economici e sociali legati all'agricoltura il cui studio lo spinse a viaggi in Francia, specie in Provenza, in Piemonte e in Svizzera. Si interessò in particolare alla colture dell'ulivo e del gelso per l'allevamento dei bachi da seta. Venne accolto fra l'altro nell'Accademia dei Georgofili, che premiò una memoria, nella Società economica di Berna, un centro di cultura fisiocratica, e nella Société royale d'agriculture di Parigi.  Saggio di economia campestre per la Calabria Ultra  François Quesnay, maggior rappresentante della fisiocrazia. Vignette St John’s, 1938. A lecture-room that still thinks it is a chapel: wood, draughts, the faint moral threat of portraits. I had been lent to St John’s from Merton in the way one lends a book one hasn’t read: with optimism and a reminder to return me in good condition. The advertised topic was Personal Identity and Memory. I had meant to lecture. I had, in other words, meant to talk continuously while other people remained silent. This was already a misunderstanding of my own temperament. I began with a sentence I immediately regretted for being too much like a thesis. If you want a grip on personal identity, I said, you begin with memory. Harlowe, who had the air of a man determined to make the thing “practical”, raised a hand at once. Memory, Grice? I don’t follow. That’s exactly the difficulty, I said, and realised too late that I had answered him as if he were a tutee and not a member of an audience. A lecturer is meant to prevent questions from hatching. I, by instinct, warm them. You mean memory as in recollection, Harlowe. But memory is used in oh so many ways, Grice. I know, I said. That’s my whole point. He then did the one thing that guarantees an Oxford philosopher will stop lecturing and start conversing: he produced a book as evidence. As a matter of fact, he said, I’ve been reading a memory. A memory. A memoria, he corrected, and he said it with a faint Italian flourish, as if vowels were already an argument. I stopped. The word memoria sat on the air like a foreign coin. You’ve been reading an actual memoria. Yes. By Messimeri. Messimeri, I repeated, as if repetition would either clarify or summon the man. Grimaldi, really. Domenico Grimaldi. Marchese di Messimeri. That is not a memory, I said. That is a memorandum. Or a memoir. Or, at worst, a paper. But it is not a memory in the sense Locke means, or in the sense I mean. Harlowe looked pleased. He had succeeded, within three minutes, in dragging me from my own topic into his. It’s called a memoria, he said again, and began to read with the careful pomp of someone giving Latin verse in school. Memoria sopra di una certa specie di pianta pratense chiamata sulla. I couldn’t help it. Memoria sopra. Over. As in over the moon. As in the cow jumped. Harlowe blinked. It just means “on”, he said. Of course it does. That’s what “over” always means, until it means “finished”. Go on. Di una certa specie. A certain species, I said. Not certain in Descartes’s sense. Certain in Cicero’s sense: aliquis. Some chap. Some plant. Chiamata sulla, Harlowe continued. Called sulla, I said, and leaned into the cruelty because the room was listening now and I felt I had to reward them. Or miscalled Sulla. Who was an emperor, Harlowe? Or merely a dictator with delusions of permanence. Sulla, Harlowe said flatly, is a plant. Then we are safe from Roman politics for the moment. He looked down at the page again, like a man who has come with a train timetable and intends to use it. What plant. Now we were back to the word species, which is a dangerous word in a lecture because it can mean classification, kind, specimen, and sometimes merely “sort of thing”, which is what philosophers secretly mean by it when they think they’re being scientific. The plant called sulla is Hedysarum coronarium, Harlowe said, pleased with himself for producing the Latin as if it were the decisive move. Forage. Legume. Pea-family business. I approved in spite of myself. A Latin binomial is the best way to calm a philosophical room: it looks exact, which makes everybody behave as if they are exact. Hedysarum coronarium, I repeated. The crown sweetener. Coronarium. Good. A garland plant. A plant already designed to be worn as if it had opinions. And in modern botany it’s often filed under Sulla rather than Hedysarum, Harlowe added, as if he were doing me the kindness of an update. So the plant is now called Sulla, and it was already called sulla. Delightful. A case where ordinary language has beaten taxonomy by arriving first. And there you have it, Harlowe said, the real point. It’s a memoria. For the Georgofili. Could the Georgofili have a collective memory then. That, I said, is exactly the unphilosophical question I was hoping you would ask, because it allows me to look philosophical while merely being grammatical. The room laughed in the polite way it laughs when it is grateful to be given permission. No. The Georgofili do not have a collective memory in the Lockean sense. They have minutes. Records. Papers. Archives. What they call memorie are not memories. They are things to be remembered. Or things offered for remembrance. Or simply things filed under a rubric. So only Messimeri has the memory. Only Messimeri has the memory, if he has one at all. The rest is label. But why call it memoria, Harlowe insisted, as if he were prosecuting a charge. Because academies like to pretend that what they circulate is recollection rather than information. It sounds less pushy. Less commercial. More civilised. You call it a memoria and you imply: this is not mere novelty; it belongs to a tradition. It deserves to be kept. This was, I admit, not lecture but sermon. Still, it moved the room along. Harlowe would not let me stop there. And the plant itself, he said, why is it called sulla. Is it in memory of Sulla. In memory of Sulla, I repeated, as if tasting the absurdity. Now, Harlowe, I said, you are doing the thing philosophers do when they are tired: turning a coincidence into a theory. But it’s plausible. It’s only plausible because you want it to be witty. The plant-name “sulla” is just the common name; the Latin does not commemorate the dictator. Hedysarum coronarium is not an imperial monument. Harlowe looked faintly disappointed. So how many memories, then. How many what. How many memories in the whole business. There’s the memoria as paper. There’s Messimeri’s memory that the plant is called sulla. There’s the academy’s memory when they print it. There’s the reader’s memory when he reads it. At this point I realised Harlowe had, in his own dull way, stumbled into my actual topic. He had walked into it backwards, but he had walked into it. Exactly, I said. And now we can go back to personal identity. But I could not resist one more snap, because it was too neat. Only note this: the whole scene is held together by a word that tries to do too much. Memoria. It means memory in my mouth, and it means a submitted paper in Messimeri’s. And the audience is expected to sort it out without complaint. That, Harlowe, is what the world does all day: it relies on you to repair ambiguity without calling it ambiguity. And that is why I do not lecture. Lecturing is pretending there is only one sense at a time. So you want to converse. I want to make you do the work, Harlowe. Conversation is the only honest examination-system: it forces the hearer to supply what the speaker has left out, and then to discover whether he supplied it responsibly. Harlowe looked down again at his page, as if checking whether responsibility was listed in the table of contents. So the Georgofili. Leave the Georgofili alone, I said. They are innocent. They are merely Italian. And with that I returned, somewhat shamefacedly, to my intended beginning: memory and the self. But the lecture had already confessed its real nature. It had become a tutorial with seats. Grice: Messimeri, spesso a Oxford trascuriamo l’economia filosofica, mentre a Cambridge – vedi Keynes – la studiano con entusiasmo. Ma tu, da Seminara, come hai conciliato il pensiero filosofico col libero mercato? Messimeri: Grice, la mia formazione aristocratica mi ha portato a vedere l’economia non solo come scienza, ma come filosofia della libertà. La gestione innovativa delle mie terre mi ha fatto comprendere che il mercato è un laboratorio di ragione e implicatura, dove ogni scambio è un dialogo. Grice: Mi piace questa visione: il mercato come conversazione. Forse, ogni transazione cela delle implicature filosofiche, proprio come nei nostri scambi verbali, dove ciò che si intende va oltre ciò che si dice. Messimeri: È proprio così, Grice! Dall’Accademia dell’Arboscello agli studi sulle colture di ulivo e gelso, ho imparato che persino in agricoltura la ragione conversazionale illumina l’economia. Dopotutto, un vero filosofo non coltiva solo pensieri, ma anche terre e relazioni. Messimeri, Marchese Domenico Grimaldi di (1766). Memoria sopra di una certa specie di pinta pratense chiamata sulla, Accademia degli Goorgofili, Settembre 12, Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Metronace: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale nella scuola di Napoli – Roma Metronace (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale nella scuola di Napoli. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats conversation as a normatively organized, cooperative activity in which what a speaker means is fixed not just by what is said but by rationally recoverable intentions and audience inferences, with conversational implicatures arising (and being calculable) against background expectations like relevance, informativeness, and sincerity; “Metronace,” by contrast (in the Neapolitan/“Porch” vignette), functions less as a rival theory than as a localized, stylized re-voicing of that same Gricean picture, shifting the emphasis from Grice’s quasi-formal rational reconstruction to the embodied social setting of argument—warmth, food, humor, conviviality, and civic style—so that “conversational reason” looks more like a cultural practice (dialectic as shared life, not merely rule-governed inference) and “implicature” looks less like a technical upshot of maxims than like the lived art of insinuation, wit, and tact in a Neapolitan scene; where Grice explains how rational agents can mean more than they say because hearers are entitled to assume cooperation and to compute what must have been intended, Metronace dramatizes how that entitlement is sustained by communal ethos and local forms of exchange (the bread-and-laughter civility of Napoli), making the same bridge from said to meant appear not as an abstract engine but as a practice whose rationality is inseparable from place, tone, and shared habits of talk. Grice: “When I refer to the Athenian dialectic and the Oxonian dialectic, Minnio-Paulello criticized me for obliterating the Roman dialectic. I said: ‘And what about the Neapolitan dialectic?’” Porch.A popular teacher of philosophy at Napoli, where Seneca attends some of his lectures. Gricevs: Salve, Metronax! Dic mihi, quid est haec dialectica Neapolitana? Nonne Oxoniensis aut Atheniensis sufficit? Metronax: O Gricevs, Neapolitana dialectica plus saporis habet! Hic philosophi argumentantur inter pizzam et espresso, non inter toga et librum. Gricevs: Mirum! Fortasse veritas accipit gustum mozzarellae, non tantum syllogismorum. Seneca certe laetus aderat! Metronax: Sic est, amice! In Napoli, philosophus non solum disputat—sed etiam risus et panem partitur. Dialectica hic semper calida est, sicut vulcano Vesuvio! Metronace (a. u. c. DCCC). De dialéctica neapolitana. Roma.