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

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ubalid – Ossia: Grice ed Ubaldi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della grande sintesi. Note sul Messagio. Dec. 24, Torre da Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Pietro de Alleori Ubaldi (Foligno, Perugia, Umbria): Institutionally, Pietro Ubaldi is closer to the modern public intellectual or visionary-system builder than to Grice, even though both are, in very different ways, men of theory. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the intimate tutorial culture of the college with the wider faculty structure of the university. Pietro Ubaldi belongs to a different world: not the tutorial-collegiate or chair-based academic world, but the world of independent spiritual-philosophical system-building, cosmological synthesis, quasi-prophetic writing, and broad public readership. He is not an Oxford don, nor is he simply an Italian ordinario. He is best understood as an architect of a totalizing speculative system, operating at the border of philosophy, religion, cosmology, and moral anthropology. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Ubaldi belongs to the independent visionary and synthetic world of system, message, and cosmic explanation. That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison extremely well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Ubaldi, by contrast, works at the macro-level of total explanation. His concern is not how a speaker in an ordinary exchange leaves something unsaid for a hearer to recover, but how the whole structure of reality — matter, energy, spirit, pain, evil, evolution, justice — can be read as one great law-governed process. In that sense, where Grice is analytic and procedural, Ubaldi is synthetic and architectonic. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how communicative reason governs local exchanges. Ubaldi explains how theoretical reason, or what he takes to be such, governs the total structure of life and cosmos. That is why your contrast between analysis and synthesis is the right one. For Grice, the great danger is that we read too much into language without showing how the reading is licensed. For Ubaldi, the great danger is fragmentation: that science, ethics, suffering, and spiritual aspiration remain disconnected unless one can gather them under a single comprehensive synthesis. The long “message” vignette you provided makes the contrast vivid. The Gricean response there is exactly the right one: to ask what counts as a message, who the sender is, who the addressee is, and under what conditions the uptake is testable. Ubaldi’s text, by contrast, tries to bypass those ordinary criteria by speaking in a register of direct authority, universal appeal, and moral sorting. That is not conversational implicature in the Gricean sense; it is rather a kind of world-historical rhetoric, with theological and political consequences. There are two important cautions. First, “Pietro de Alleori” looks unstable as a form. If the dossier is to be made scholarly, the author’s name should be normalized to the standard “Pietro Ubaldi,” unless you have a strong archival reason to preserve the expanded form. Second, the final bibliographic line “Messagio. Dec. 24. Torre da Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto, Perugia” should be handled as a manuscript or diary-style textual witness, not as a modern publication line. It is useful as an internal anchor, but it should not be treated as a standard printed bibliography entry without further verification. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Pietro Ubaldi, by contrast, was an Italian independent system-builder and visionary philosopher, operating outside the tutorial-collegiate and ordinary chair structure, and committed to a comprehensive cosmological synthesis integrating matter, energy, spirit, pain, evil, and human evolution. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Ubaldi to the extra-academic world of grand speculative synthesis. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Ubaldi exemplifies a macro-synthetic rationality in which discursive particulars are subordinated to a total explanatory system that claims to integrate science, morality, and spiritual destiny. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises reason in conversation; Ubaldi proclaims reason in totality. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, with the “message” framed more cautiously as a textual witness and the comparison sharpened around analysis versus synthesis.la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della grande sintesi – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is micro-normative and inferential: what is meant beyond what is said is recoverable by reasoning from shared assumptions of cooperation (maxims, relevance, sufficiency, etc.), so “implicature” is a disciplined product of communicative rationality inside the talk-exchange; Ubaldi (the Foligno figure behind La grande sintesi) is macro-synthetic and architectonic, aiming at an overarching unification of matter, energy, and spirit and at reconciling scientific hypotheses with spiritual/ethical teleology, so “reason” is not primarily a set of conversational constraints but a world-explanatory principle that seeks a total picture where fragments (science, pain, evil, evolution) are integrated into a single lawlike developmental narrative. The nearest structural analogy is that both treat reason as governance beyond surface form—Grice beyond literal sentence meaning, Ubaldi beyond specialized disciplinary partitions—but they diverge in direction: Grice moves from ordinary linguistic practice upward to a modest theory of how agents can be held rationally accountable for what they communicate (including what they leave unsaid), whereas Ubaldi moves from a grand metaphysical-cosmological hypothesis downward, treating discursive particulars as local expressions of a comprehensive “synthesis” that is, in principle, prior to and explanatory of them. Online biographical notes commonly underscore this Ubaldi ambition (24 volumes; La grande sintesi written 1932–35 and first published as a book in 1937; nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1960s; remarks attributed to Einstein and Fermi), which fits your framing: if Grice’s “analysis” is a method for keeping conversational reason honest at the level of implicature, Ubaldi’s “synthesis” is a method for keeping theoretical reason expansive at the level of totality—two very different senses of rational governance, one procedural and interactional, the other systemic and cosmological. -- la grande sintessi. Grice on the synthetic a priori. Grice: “It’s funny that ‘Philosophical Analysis’ was in the lips of every pupil at Oxford engaged in philosophy back in the day – yet, it was only after the war that I found the reason why: Kant’s synthetic a priori are just BEYOND analysis!” The phrase ‘Grice italo’ is meant as provocative. An Old-World philosopher such as Ubaldi would never have imagined to be compared to a tutor at a varsity in one of the British Isles, but there you are! It is meant as a geo-political reminder, too. Many Italian philosophers have been educated in a tradition that would make little sense of Ubaldi as a ‘Grice italo,’ but there you are. My note is meant as a tribute to both philosophers. Grice has been deemed an extremely original philosopher, and by Oxford canons he certainly was. He was the primus inter pares at the Play Group, the epitome of ordinary-language philosophy throughout most of the twentieth century. His heritage remains. Ubaldi’s place in the history of philosophy is other. But there are connections, and here they are. Presenta un sistema dell'evoluzione dell'universo considerando la legge dell'evoluzione umana. Chiara i rapporti d'involuzione ed evoluzione fra le tre dimensioni della materia, dell'energia e dello spirito, in un processo d'unificazione fra le ipotesi della scienza. Cerca di spiegare il senso della vita, la funzione del dolore e la presenza del male. Candidato al premio Nobel, all'ultimo gli fu preferito Sartre. Il suo sistema filosofico e considerato da Einstein come risulta da un carteggio dolce e leggero e il suo saggio principale, “La grande sintesi”, e giudicata un quadro di filosofia scientifica e antropologica etica, che oltrepassa di molto i consimili tentative. la grande sintesi.  G: December 29, 1931. You have brought me a “message,” and you are looking at me as if the only reasonable response is reverence. S: I am looking at you, sir, as if the only reasonable response is attention. G: Attention I can manage. Reverence is a different department, and it has not hired me. S: Then let us begin with the word you keep circling. Message. G: Yes. Message. In Peirce’s neighbourhood, a sign is not a free-floating ornament. It has a triadic life: something that stands to somebody for something in some respect. And when later men like Morris tidy this into “sign-vehicle, designatum, interpretant,” they are still smuggling in the same fact: a message presupposes a sender and an addressee, or it is merely ink with pretensions. S: Then I have what you want: an addressee. He. And a sender. It. G: You have a recipient and a text. That is not yet a sender. A sender is an agent who can be held responsible. S: You mean: who can be blamed if the style is bad. G: Quite. Read. S: Nel silenzio della notte sacra, ascoltami. G: Imperative plus intimacy. “Listen to me.” So far we have an address, which helps your “addressee” requirement. But it does not tell us the addressor’s identity, only his confidence. S: Lascia ogni sapere, i ricordi, te stesso, tutto dimentica, abbandonati alla Mia voce, inerte, vuoto, nel nulla, nel silenzio il piu’ completo dello spazio e del tempo. G: It is already asking for the abolition of the ordinary epistemic conditions. “Leave all knowledge.” That is a promising way to protect oneself from cross-examination. S: In questo vuoto odi la Mia voce che dice: “sorgi e parla: Sono Io”. G: “I am I.” Which is either the deepest possible identification or the shallowest. It depends on whether one is doing metaphysics or avoiding it. S: Esulta della Mia presenza: essa e’ gran cosa per te, e’ un gran premio che hai duramente meritato... G: Now we are in the rhetoric of reward. That matters: it is not merely information; it is moral accounting. A message that begins by rewarding the receiver is already shaping the receiver’s posture: gratitude first, scrutiny later. S: ...e’ quel segno che tanto hai invocato di quel piu’ grande mondo nel quale Io vivo e in cui tu hai creduto. G: Notice the move. The “message” is cast as a sign, a confirmation, a credential. It is not giving new data; it is licensing belief by claiming to satisfy a request for a sign. S: Non domandare il Mio nome, non cercare di individuarmi. G: Excellent. “Do not ask my name.” So the supposed sender refuses the very thing that would allow us to do ordinary message-tracing. S: Non potresti, nessuno potrebbe; non tentare inutili ipotesi. Tu mi conosci lo stesso. G: So the sender claims identification is impossible, but recognition is still available. That is a familiar manoeuvre: deny verifiability, claim acquaintance. S: La Mia voce cosi’ dolce per te, cosi’ amica per tutti i piccoli che soffrono nell’ombra, sa essere anche tremenda e tuonante come mai tu mi sentisti. G: Two registers: comfort and thunder. That is not content; it is authority-building. He is establishing that he can be both consoling and terrifying, which is the standard equipment of a speaker who wants obedience without negotiation. S: Non ti preoccupare; scrivi. G: There. The instruction. “Write.” The addressee’s role is not to interpret but to transcribe. S: La mia parola va diritta nel profondo della coscienza e tocca l’anima di chi ascolta, sul vivo. G: And the message asserts efficacy: it claims to reach conscience directly. That is a claim about uptake without offering a mechanism. S: Sara’ udita solo da chi si e’ reso capace di udirla. Per gli altri andra’ perduta nel vociare immenso di tutti. Non importa; deve essere detta. G: This is the perfect immunization clause. If someone does not respond, it is their incapacity. If it is ignored, it is because the world is noisy. The message becomes unfalsifiable by design. S: Sir, you sound as if you are cross-examining a hymn. G: I am cross-examining a purported message. Hymns do not usually claim provenance details; they claim devotion. A message is a different sort of act. It implies transmission. S: Then you will like this later part. It becomes geopolitical. G: That should worry me, not please me. S: Io parlo oggi a tutti i giusti della Terra e li chiamo tutti da tutte le parti del mondo... G: A broadcast. The sender claims universal address. If it is truly universal, it should have no trouble stating its office address. S: ...perche’ riuniscano le loro aspirazioni e preghiere e ne facciano un fascio che salga verso il cielo. G: Metaphor of bundling. It is also a coordination instruction: form a coalition of the “just.” It is, in your earlier terms, cooperation. S: Nessuna barriera di Religione, di Nazione o di Razza li divida. G: In 1931, that sentence is not merely pious. It is pointed. It is a claim that the coming division will not be the usual political taxonomy. S: Perche’ presto una sola sara’ la divisione tra gli uomini: quella del giusto e dell’ingiusto. G: A two-class partition. The sender is offering a new predicate: just/unjust. That is a simple classification scheme with high emotional yield. S: La divisione e’ nell’intimo della coscienza e non nella vostra esteriorita’ visibile. G: That is also a legal manoeuvre. It relocates the criterion from public evidence to private conscience, where no tribunal can inspect it. S: Tutti quelli che sinceramente vogliono, possono comprendere... G: Another immunization clause: “whoever sincerely wants can understand.” Failure to understand is assigned to lack of sincerity. S: ...e ciascuno, da solo, senza che il vicino possa vedere, sapra’ chi e’. G: The “no neighbour can see” point is important. It disarms social verification. You cannot check who is “just.” You can only self-declare. S: La Mia parola e’ universale, ma e’ anche appello intimo, personale, ad ognuno. G: Universal address plus personal claim. That is rhetorically powerful, because it gives every reader the sense of being singled out while remaining part of a mass. S: Un gran rivolgimento si approssima nella vita del mondo. G: Now we move to prediction, which is where your earlier “message-as-information” idea becomes tempting. But watch: prediction here is not probabilistic; it is proclaimed. S: Questa Mia e’ una voce; ma ne saliranno presto sempre piu’ forti e fitte... G: That line is also clever. It anticipates a future chorus of similar “messages,” which means that later imitators become confirming evidence rather than competition. S: ...da tutte le parti del mondo perche’ il consiglio non sia mancato a nessuno. G: Universal redundancy. Again: no one can complain they were not warned. That is a moral prophylactic. S: Non temere; scrivi, guarda. G: Always: “write.” The addressee is a scribe, not a debater. S: Guarda la traiettoria degli eventi umani come si continua nel futuro... G: Trajectory language. That is the language of determinism disguised as observation. S: ...quando non si e’ chiusi nella vostra ferrea gabbia dello spazio e del tempo si vede “naturalmente” il futuro. G: Excellent. The sender claims a privileged vantage outside space-time. That is the metaphysical equivalent of being allowed behind the curtain. S: Ma cio’ che ti mostro e’ anche logico, secondo la vostra logica umana, quindi a voi comprensibile. G: That sentence is aimed at people like me. It says: you may not accept revelation, but you will accept logic. So the message claims to satisfy rationalist standards while keeping supernatural privileges. S: I popoli, come gli individui, hanno una responsabilita’ nello sviluppo storico... G: And now we get something like a philosophy of history. S: ...secondo un concatenamento causale che, se e’ libero nelle premesse, e’ necessario nelle conseguenze. G: There: “free in premises, necessary in consequences.” That is a form of conditional determinism: choose premises freely, but after that the entailments bite. S: The logic you like, sir. G: I like it when someone shows the premises and the rules. Here, the rule is asserted and the premises are smuggled in. S: La Legge di giustizia... vuole che l’equilibrio sia ricostruito e che le colpe e gli errori debbano essere corretti attraverso il dolore. G: So the mechanism is pain as correction. That is moral utilitarianism with teeth: suffering is justified as balancing. S: Cio’ che voi chiamate male e ingiustizia e’ naturale e giusta reazione... G: That is a hard doctrine. It re-describes evil as necessary reaction. And it has a convenient psychological function: it can make any catastrophe look deserved. S: Tutto e’ voluto, tutto e’ meritato... G: There. Totalization. That is where my pessimism sharpens: “everything is deserved” is a sentence that can anesthetize compassion while pretending to elevate it. S: ...anche se voi non siete in grado di ricordare il come e il quando. G: And the inability to recall is used to protect the claim from counterexample. If you do not remember deserving it, that is because you forgot. S: Il dolore abbonda nel vostro mondo perche’ e’ mondo selvaggio... G: The world is a penal colony in this picture. S: ...ma non temete il dolore. Esso e’ l’unica cosa di veramente grande che voi abbiate laggiu’... G: That is rhetorically brilliant and morally dangerous. It makes suffering into the one authentic grandeur available to ordinary people. S: ...perche’ e’ l’istrumento che voi possedete per la vostra redenzione... G: Instrumental suffering. It is theology built as a tool. S: “Beati coloro che soffrono”, Cristo vi ha detto. G: A citation to anchor the doctrine. So now we have something like an authority chain. S: Sir, you wanted a sender. The text gives you one: “Sono Io.” G: “Io” is not a sender; it is a pronoun. We need provenance. S: You mean: the non-ultimate source. G: Exactly. Not “ultimately God.” That is metaphysical embroidery. I want the postmark. S: The postmark is Pietro Ubaldi, Perugia, Torre della Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto. G: Good. Now we have something I can work with: a human author, an Umbria location, and a date. Now we can talk about what “message” means in a sober sense: a text produced by Ubaldi in a particular setting, then presented as speech from a transcendent source. S: Then you concede it is a message. G: I concede it is a message in the Morris sense: a sign-vehicle intended to produce an interpretant in an audience. But the sender, in the ordinary empirical sense, is Ubaldi. S: And the addressee? G: Two addressees. One explicit: the man addressed as “tu” in the text. One implicit: the public, “tutti i giusti della Terra,” which is a way of recruiting readers into a moral category. S: Now you will complain that “giusti” is not a good predicate. G: Not without a test, no. But it is an effective predicate for recruiting. It is a classifier that flatters. S: It also implies cooperation. The just must unite. A bundle of prayers. G: Yes. And that is where your “cooperative rationality” theme can be rescued from the metaphysics. Not by endorsing the provenance-claims, but by noticing what the text is doing: it is engineering a coalition of conscience, across religion and nation, by declaring a single salient division. S: And you, sir, will formalize it. G: Only to show the ambition and the overreach. Let J(x) mean “x is just.” Let H(x) mean “x is capable of hearing this voice.” The text suggests something like: for all x, if J(x), then H(x). It also suggests the contrapositive as a psychological insinuation: if not H(x), then not sincere, not just. S: That is nasty. G: It is powerful. It makes dissent morally diagnostic. S: But what of the historical prediction? You have not yet reached the scientific progress part. G: I read it. The theme is clear: technological power grows; moral capacity lags; imbalance produces catastrophe; catastrophe purifies; then a new era of spirit. It is an apocalyptic curve. S: And in 1931, that curve is not absurd. G: In 1931 it is uncomfortably plausible. That is what gives the message its bite: it attaches cosmic authority to a trajectory one can already smell in Europe. S: You said you would end with a punchline, sir. G: I will. You have brought me a message whose declared source is God, whose actual source is Ubaldi, whose intended addressee is everyone, and whose practical effect is to sort people into “just” and “unjust” without an external criterion. That is not a message. That is a recruitment leaflet with metaphysics as postage. S: And what should I do with it? G: File it under “interesting,” not under “instructions,” and, if you must transmit it, at least be honest about the sender.Grice: Professore Ubaldi, le confesso che se avessi osato pronunciare “grande sintesi” a Oxford – o Vadum Boum, come noi Lit. Hum. lo chiamiamo – barbari come siamo rispetto a quelli più vicini a Bononia alma mater di tutti noi – negli anni ’30, mi avrebbero espulso all’istante! Lì si parlava solo di “analisi filosofica”: era la password per entrare nei circoli dell’intelligenza. Guai a chi si azzardava con sintesi troppo grandi… si rischiava di essere scambiati per un poeta o peggio, per un visionario! Ubaldi: Caro Grice, mi viene da sorridere: a Foligno invece, se non parlavi di “grande sintesi”, ti toccava la sedia più piccola in biblioteca! Da noi la sintesi era pane quotidiano, e chi si fermava all’analisi veniva messo a rigirare le pagine dei dizionari. Altro che espulsione: al massimo ti assegnavano il compito di trovare il senso della vita tra le note a margine! Grice: Ah, allora era meglio venire a Foligno per evitare i severi baroni di Oxford! Immagino una scena: io, con il mio tight grigio, che chiedo la “grande sintesi” e mi ritrovo a fare il caffè per tutta la facoltà. Mentre a Foligno, la sintesi era così grande che serviva una lavagna lunga quanto la ferrovia! Ubaldi: Ecco, Grice, la vera “grande sintesi” è questa: un inglese che fa il caffè e un italiano che disegna lavagne infinite, entrambi intenti a unificare materia, energia e spirito… ma sempre con un sorriso, ché la filosofia senza un po’ di allegria è come una teoria senza finale! E se Sartre ci ha battuti per il Nobel, almeno noi ci consoliamo con una battuta degna di due spiriti liberi! Ubaldi, Pietro de Alleori (1931). Messagio. Dec. 24. Torre da Tenuta Sant’Antonio, Colle Umberto, Perugia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Ubalid – Ossia: Grice ed Ubaldi: la ragione conversazionale. Note su De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque socii. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Pietro di Matteo di Pietro degl’Ubaldi (Perugia, Umbria): -- Institutionally, Pietro degli Ubaldi is much closer to many of your jurists than to Grice. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the intimate tutorial culture of the college with the wider faculty structure of the university. Pietro degli Ubaldi belongs to a wholly different world: the late medieval ius commune, the civic and papal legal order, and the university-law culture of Perugia, Pisa, Florence, and Rome. He was a jurist, teacher, concistorial advocate, diplomat, and public servant, and his authority came from legal learning, public office, and the circulation of juridical treatises rather than from a college or faculty appointment of the modern sort. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Pietro degli Ubaldi belongs to the juridical, civic, and university-law world of late medieval Italy. That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison very well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Pietro degli Ubaldi, by contrast, works in a different normative space entirely. His problem is not how one speaker leaves something unsaid for another to infer in an ordinary exchange, but how a jurist generalises, classifies, and repairs practical social relations by means of doctrine, argumenta, and legal interpretation. In his case, “cooperation” is not merely a presupposition of talk. It is a legally structured relation, with consequences for expenses, profits, third-party claims, remedies, limitation, and dissolution. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how rational agents coordinate meanings in conversation. Pietro degli Ubaldi explains how jurists coordinate obligations in cooperative life. That is why your bridge through societas is genuinely apt. For Grice, cooperation is a pragmatic background condition for mutual understanding. For Ubaldi, cooperation is a substantive juridical relation that requires doctrine to define and stabilize it. If Grice is concerned with gaps in explicit saying, Ubaldi is concerned with gaps in social and legal order. Both require repair, but the repair is of a different kind: in Grice, inferential; in Ubaldi, doctrinal. The long Oxford-Perugia exchange you drafted is actually very good for making that point, especially in the discussion of De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis. The move from fratres to socii and then to quibuscumque is indeed a miniature of legal reasoning: from vivid case to legal category to maximal generalisation. That is not Gricean conversational implicature, but it is an analogous logic of coverage and controlled extension. There are, however, two important cautions. First, the authorship problem matters. As your own prompt notes, De duobus fratribus is textually unstable in attribution. The distinction between Petrus de Ubaldis senior and junior must be handled carefully, and one should not present the work as securely attached to one without noting the bibliographical complexity. Second, the final bibliographic line should be made more cautious. Ubaldi, Pietro degl’ (1439). De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis. MS Add. D. 10, Udine is useful as a manuscript anchor, but it should not be treated as if it were the simple and undisputed publication line of a modern book. It is better as a manuscript witness or textual anchor than as a settled bibliographical identity. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Pietro degli Ubaldi, by contrast, was a late medieval jurist, advocate, teacher, and public official, active in the legal and civic culture of Perugia, Florence, Pisa, Rome, and the papal orbit rather than in any tutorial-collegiate university structure. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Ubaldi to the juridical and university-law world of the ius commune. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and implicature, whereas Pietro degli Ubaldi exemplifies a juridical rationality in which cooperation is not a conversational presupposition but a legally regulated form of association, whose interpretation, repair, and extension require doctrinal rather than pragmatic reasoning. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers cooperate in meaning; Ubaldi theorises how partners cooperate in law. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, with the authorship caveat on De duobus fratribus built into the formulation.the grandson of the above -- la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers move from what is said to what is meant by rationally reconstructing intentions under cooperative norms (maxims), so that even “gaps” in explicit content (implicatures) are, in principle, accountable by calculable inference. With Pietro degli Ubaldi we are in a different regime of normativity: a late-medieval jurist of the ius commune whose most famous tract, De duobus fratribus / De societate, organizes practical legal doctrine about partnership (ripartizione di spese e utili, responsabilità verso terzi, azioni dei soci, prescrizione, cessazione) into argumenta, treating “reason” less as conversational inference and more as interpretive-juridical rationality—how one reads, classifies, and applies authoritative texts and principles to regulate cooperative life. The nearest bridge to Grice is that both are, in their way, theorists of cooperation: Grice models cooperation as a communicative presupposition that makes implicature derivable; Ubaldi models cooperation as a legally structured relationship whose stability depends on rules about contribution, entitlement, and liability, and whose breakdowns (disputes between “fratres” or “socii”) require doctrinal repair rather than pragmatic calculation. Online bibliographic/authority sources also underscore that “Ubaldi” attributions are complicated: Treccani reports early printing for De duobus fratribus/De societate at Perugia 1472 (or 1473 in other catalog notes), while specialized bibliographies (e.g., Ames Foundation BioBib) distinguish Petrus de Ubaldis senior (c. 1335–c. 1400) from Petrus de Ubaldis junior (d. c. 1499) and note that De duobus fratribus is often misattributed between them—so, unlike Grice’s relatively fixed authorship-and-intention model, even the “who says it” question can be textually unstable in Ubaldi’s transmission, reinforcing the contrast between modern conversational intention and medieval juridical authority as the organizing locus of “ragione.” De duobus fratibus et aliis sociis, Fondazione Mansutti, Milano. Pietro degl’Ubaldi senior (Perugia, Umbria). n medieval and early-modern canon-law usage, portio canonica is a technical term that can refer to a “canonical share/portion” owed by rule in certain ecclesiastical revenue contexts, especially connected with funeral dues and related customary payments. Two representative definitions from standard reference articles:   Portio canonica as “quarta funeraria” (funeral fourth / funeral dues) Catholic Answers’ encyclopedia article on Funeral Dues explains that the Council of Trent calls it the “quarta funeralium,” and notes that earlier designations included “portio canonica” (canonical portion) and “quarta portio,” understood as a just reward to the parish priest when a parishioner is buried outside his parish. [catholic.com]   Portio canonica as an ecclesiastical term with several related uses The McClintock and Strong Cyclopedia entry Portio Canonica lists multiple uses: (1) share in daily distributions; (2) a funeral-related tax; (3) a casualty paid to the curate; and it again links the concept to the “quarta funeraria.” [bibleportal.com]   So, in plain terms, “De portione canonica” is about the rules governing a legally-defined “share” (portion) in ecclesiastical financial/benefice/funeral contexts: who is entitled to what portion, under what circumstances, and by what canonical rationale.Ubaldi, Pietro degl’Ubaldi (1450). De portione canonica. Arezzo, Biblioteca Città di Arezzo, ms. 437.-- è stato un giurista italiano. È fratello di Angelo e Baldo degl’Ubaldi. Laureato in diritto e docente a Firenze fino a quando fa ritorno a Perugia. Svolge numerosi incarichi pubblici, tra cui ambasciatore di Città di Castello e capitano guelfo, poi diplomatico alla corte di papa Bonifacio; partecipa ai lavori del trattato con il duca milanese Visconti per garantire la libertà ai perugini. Il suo trattato De duobus fratribus et aliis sociis è diviso in argumenta, con cui espone la disciplina giuridica del diritto, con attenzione al CONTRATTO di società, tra cui la ri-partizione di spese e utili tra soci, i diritti di terzi, le azioni di ogni socio, la prescrizione dell'azione per gl’amministratori e la cessazione del contratto. De unione ecclesiarum, De duobus fratribus et aliis sociis De portione canonica De beneficiorum collatione De unione ecclesiarum De unione ecclesiarum, Napoli, Tipografo del Nicolaus de Lyra. Bibliografia Fondazione Mansutti, Quaderni di sicurtà. Documenti di storia dell'assicurazione, a cura di Bonomelli, schede bibliografiche di Battista, note critiche di Mansutti, Milano, Electa, su Treccani.it – Enciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Portale Biografie  Portale Storia Categorie: Giuristi italiani Giuristi italiani Nati a Perugia Storia dell'assicurazione [altre] Giurista italiano, fratello di Baldo e di Angelo. Studia nello studio di Perugia e in quello pisano, dove gli è principale guida TIGRINI . Si da da principio alla pratica quale avvocato concistoriale in Roma. Poi si dedica anch’egli all’insegnamento nella sua patria. Muore, dopo i suoi due fratelli. Tra i civilisti è pregiatissimo il suo trattato De duobus fratribus o De societate Perugia; poi anche in Tractatus univ. iuris, Venezia. Tra i canonisti parvero classici i trattati De portione canonica -- in Tract. univ. iuris cit. --, De beneficiorum collatione, De unione ecclesiarum -- del quale si hanno due edizioni senza l. e a.. ragione conversazionale, implicatura.  G: It is 1939, Thomson. Oxford, not Perugia. Yet you insist on importing Perugia into my rooms as if it were a decanter. T: Sir, you imported Sicily into logic last week. I thought Perugia was modest by comparison. G: Sicily is at least an island; Perugia is a habit. Now. Read it. T: De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis. G: Again, but slower, as if you were trying to hear the grammar rather than the Latin. T: De duobus fratribus. Et. Aliis quibuscumque sociis. G: Good. Now tell me what looks “silly” to you. T: The piling-on, sir. Aliis is already “others.” Then quibuscumque is “whichever you please.” And then the -que hangs off it like an extra cuff-link. It feels like saying “and any other whatsoever at all, honestly, truly, scout’s honour.” G: That is exactly why it is not silly. It is legal. T: Legal Latin, sir, is the only Latin that blushes. G: Legal Latin is Latin with a job. Ordinary Latin can afford to be elegant. Legal Latin must be safe. Now. Aliis does one thing: it says “not just the brothers.” Quibuscumque does another: it says “not just some recognized class of others, but any others that fall under the concept.” T: And the -que? G: The -que there is not a second et. It is a tightening. It binds the maximizer to the generalization as a single shove outward. Think of it as a little “also, too, even” glued into the word. T: So et links the big conjuncts. -que amplifies the second conjunct from within. G: Precisely. You are allowed to find it ugly. You are not allowed to call it redundant until you can show that law has ever been content with one layer of generality. T: But why would anyone need that much generality? “Two brothers and other partners” sounds general enough. G: Because “general enough” is not a legal standard. It is an undergraduate mood. Ubaldi is trying to prevent the clever reader from wriggling out through a gap he has left. T: The gap being: “Yes, your doctrine is about brothers, but my case involves cousins” or “my partners are not brothers, they are merchants” or “they are not merchants, they are monks.” G: Exactly. He begins with a vivid case-label, duobus fratribus. It is memorable, almost theatrical. Then he flips the case into the doctrinal genus: socii. Then he maximizes: quibuscumque. Meaning: do not come back and tell me your associates are of an exotic species; the form of cooperation is what matters. T: So he is doing a kind of medieval version of: for all x, if x is a partner, then the rule applies. G: Careful. Not “the rule.” The sort of argumenta he is building. But yes, the ambition is quantificational. T: Sir, can I ask the stupid question? G: You will anyway. Proceed. T: Is he saying that sociis is entailed by fratribus? That a brother is an associate? G: In the relevant legal context, yes. Not because fraternity is analytically partnership, but because brothers are an especially fertile site for partnership disputes: shared property, shared labour, shared expectations, and then the moment of accounting. T: In other words, he is treating “brothers” as a paradigmatic instance of “cooperators,” not a separate metaphysical category. G: Exactly. And you notice the point that matters for your Grice obsession: cooperation is not merely a conversational presupposition. It is a legal structure. Ubaldi is doing the metaphysics of cooperation with remedies attached. T: That is what makes it silly to me, sir. The ambition outstrips plausibility. “Any associates whatsoever.” Surely obligations between brothers do not export cleanly to “any other associate you can possibly conceive.” G: Good. Now we have a live question rather than a stylistic complaint. T: Who is conceiving these associates? Me? G: No, not you. Ubaldi would not have heard of you. So he cannot be legislating for what you can imagine. T: Then who? G: In legal Latin, “quibuscumque” is addressed to the future nuisance: the litigant, the advocate, the judge, the commentator. It is a prophylactic. It says: whatever variant you bring me, if it counts as societas in the sense relevant here, it is covered. T: But that collapses “anyone can conceive” into “any case that can be legally subsumed.” G: Precisely. The imagination is not romantic. It is classificatory. It is the imagination of a lawyer, not of a poet. T: So “maximally general” does not mean “science-fiction partners.” G: It means: any partners that fall under the legal genus, even if you try to redescribe them to escape the genus. T: That sounds like a trick. G: It is not a trick. It is the trade. T: Still, I don’t hold obligations to your brother, sir. G: I do not hold obligations to yours either. Yet the law manages to speak as if obligations can float free of personal acquaintance, which is one of its more scandalous achievements. T: Do you have a brother, sir? G: I have the misfortune to have at least one. That is enough for analysis. T: Then you concede the topic is not merely scholastic. G: I concede nothing. I merely observe that “brothers” is a dangerously concrete noun for a jurist, which is why he runs at once to socii and then to quibuscumque. T: So the title itself performs the movement: from vivid case to abstract category to maximal generality. G: Exactly. Now you see why I like it. It is a miniature of jurisprudential method: start with the quarrel you can picture, then generalize, then over-generalize so you cannot be trapped by a counterexample. T: That is very Gricean, sir. G: Do not commit that anachronism. But note the parallel: both are terrified of leaving a loophole that a clever reader can exploit. T: You mean like conversational implicature: if you leave the inference too loose, the hearer takes it somewhere you did not intend. G: Better: if you leave the condition too narrow, the opponent takes your doctrine somewhere you did not defend. T: Still, I’m bothered by the sense that obligations between brothers are special. There is blood, household, expectation, moral pressure, a kind of natural quasi-contract. G: And now you are doing moral philosophy in a jurist’s hallway. T: Is that wrong? G: It is merely dangerous. But it is the right danger for your vignette. So let us take your intuition and formalize it without pretending we have solved it. T: With Frege’s quantifiers? G: With whatever symbol you like, provided you do not worship it. Let QC be “quasi-contractual obligation.” Let B(x, y) mean “x and y are brothers.” Let S(x, y) mean “x and y are partners/associates in a societas-type relation.” T: And let t be Tom, j be Jerry. G: Very good. Now you want to ask: does B(t, j) entail S(t, j)? T: In ordinary life, no. In Ubaldi’s legal ecology, maybe. G: Exactly. So we might write two different principles and keep them distinct. Principle one, the narrow one: for all x,y, if B(x,y) and they are co-managing property, then QC(x,y) holds under certain conditions. T: And principle two, the wide one: for all x,y, if S(x,y), then QC(x,y) under analogous conditions. G: Precisely. The title suggests he is moving from the first to the second: from brothers-as-paradigm to partners-in-general. T: And quibuscumque is his way of saying: do not restrict S to nice familiar partners; let it range over any legally conceivable partner relation. G: Yes. In quantifier-speak: he wants a domain for S that is not “the partners we usually talk about,” but “all entities that satisfy the legal predicate S.” T: So “any you can conceive” is really “any that falls under the predicate,” not “any you can fantasize.” G: Correct. And now your objection becomes sharper: are the conditions that generate QC in the brother-case the same as the conditions that generate QC in the partner-case? T: I suspect not. G: So did most people who made a career writing consilia. The entire industry is “not,” elaborated. T: Then why does he title it as if it is one smooth generalization? G: Because titles are promises, and legal titles are strategic promises. He is promising coverage. Then the body of the tract distinguishes, qualifies, repairs. T: That makes it less silly. It is not naivety; it is an opening gambit. G: Exactly. Now. You wanted the dry humour to come from the idea that “brothers” bothers you. Let it bother me too, but for a different reason. T: For what reason, sir? G: Because “brothers” in Oxford means something else as well: tutorial families, college clans, and the peculiar sense that one owes loyalty to men one would never invite to tea. T: So you think Ubaldi is smuggling an Oxford concept into Perugia? G: No. I think Oxford is forever rediscovering that cooperation is never merely voluntary. It is enforced by institutions, names, and expectations. Brothers are just the crudest case where expectation thinks it has a natural right. T: And “et aliis quibuscumque sociis” is the moment where nature is replaced by classification. G: Precisely. It is the moment where “my brother” becomes “my associate,” and the law begins. T: But then my earlier protest stands: I certainly do not hold obligations to your brother, sir. G: And yet if you and he form a societas, you will. That is exactly Ubaldi’s point, and your discomfort is your education. T: So the title is a machine for producing discomfort. G: Yes. It begins with a word that makes you think of family sentiment, fratribus, and ends with a word that makes sentiment irrelevant, sociis, and then adds quibuscumque to prevent you from hiding in a sentimental corner-case. T: I see the ambition now. It is a legal attempt to maximize the domain. G: Good. Now the punchline, since you asked for one. T: Yes, sir. G: In Oxford, when someone says “brother,” we infer a college, a staircase, a clique, and a lifetime of mild obligations disguised as friendship. In Perugia, when Ubaldi says “brother,” he infers litigation. Therefore Oxford is the more sentimental place, and Perugia the more honest.Grice: Professore Ubaldi, mi creda: ogni volta che sfoglio il “De duobus fratribus” alla Radcliff, non posso fare a meno di pensare al mio fratello minore, J.D.—John Derek, se proprio dobbiamo essere formali—rimasto laggiù a Harborne, quella provincia che fa sembrare Perugia una metropoli cosmopolita! Ubaldi: Ah, caro Grice, che bello sentirla parlare di fratelli! Da noi, tra Perugia e Firenze, non si perde occasione per una disputa tra fratelli, specie se c’è di mezzo un trattato. Ma mi dica, Harborne è davvero così provinciale? Da noi si dice: “Meglio un fratello lontano che un vicino impiccione!” Grice: Non posso che concordare! Ma la cosa più divertente è che Derek, con una mossa degna di un vero filosofo, ha lasciato la brumosa Harborne per una villa sul canale in Hampshire. Altro che provincialismo, ora si gode le brezze del canale e il tè all’inglese… senza dover discutere di contratti tra fratelli! Ubaldi: Ecco, vede? A volte basta cambiare aria per trovare la “ragione conversazionale” migliore! Mi viene da pensare che il vero contratto tra fratelli sia quello di condividere una buona dose di ironia e, magari, la vista sul canale. Se solo potessi convincere Baldo a trasferirsi da Perugia a qualche villa in riva all’Arno… ma temo che preferisca le dispute ai panorami! Ubaldi, Pietro degl’(1439). De duobus fratribus et aliis quibuscumque sociis. MS Add. D. 10, Udine.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Unicorno – Ossia: Grice ed Unicorno: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’arimmetica universale – the logically developing series. Note su De admiranda vi proportionis, eiusque necessaria cognition, ad Bergomenses oratio. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice Giuseppe Unicorno (Bergamo, Lombardia): Institutionally, Giuseppe Unicorno and H. P. Grice are not comparable in the modern academic sense at all, though both are learned men concerned with order, rule, and intelligibility. Grice’s formula is exact in the Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide appointment in the faculty structure. So Grice combines the two classic Oxford functions: college tutor and university lecturer. Giuseppe Unicorno belongs to a completely different world: late Renaissance Bergamo and Venice, the world of practical mathematics, humanist oratory, abaco culture, mercantile calculation, and printed mathematical pedagogy. He was not a don, not a fellow, and not a university lecturer in the Oxford or Italian chair sense. He was a mathematician, arithmetician, and man of practical and speculative number. The evidence you cite, especially De admiranda vi proportionis and the later Arithmetica universale, puts him firmly in that mixed world where mathematics serves commerce, rhetoric, and cosmological order alike. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate and university-faculty world. Unicorno belongs to the mathematical, humanist, and practical-printed world of late Renaissance Italy. That institutional difference fits your philosophical comparison very well. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared norms. Unicorno, by contrast, works at the level of structural intelligibility itself. His concern is not how one speaker means more than he explicitly says in a local exchange, but how proportion, number, and rule-governed calculation make rhetoric, dialectic, and even grammar themselves possible as ordered practices. That is why the Unicorno passage you quote is genuinely striking. He does not merely say that rhetoric can be decorative, dialectic demonstrative, and grammar foundational. He argues that all of them already depend on proportion, measure, and relation. In that sense, he offers a kind of proto-formal account of discourse, though not in the Gricean register of speaker intention and hearer inference. So the sharpest formulation is this. Grice explains how conversation can mean more than it literally says. Unicorno explains how discourse itself can be orderly, intelligible, and disciplined because it is proportioned. That is the best bridge between them. For Grice, the surplus of meaning is inferential and conversational. For Unicorno, the surplus of intelligibility is formal and structural. Both are, as you say, anti-mystification projects: Grice demystifies implicature by showing how it is rationally recoverable. Unicorno demystifies discourse by showing how rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar are already governed by measure and proportion. Your final bibliographic line is also one of the stronger ones in this whole series. De admiranda vi proportionis, eiusque necessaria cognitione, ad Bergomenses oratio, Venice, Arrivabene, 1552, is exactly the sort of concrete anchor one wants here. I would only note one small correction: cognitio or cognitione should be checked against the actual title page if you intend to cite it in a finished dossier, since sixteenth-century printings can vary in form. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. Giuseppe Unicorno, by contrast, was a late Renaissance mathematician and arithmetician from Bergamo, active in the world of practical and speculative mathematics, humanist pedagogy, and printed mathematical discourse rather than in a college or faculty office. Institutionally, Grice belongs to the tutorial-collegiate world; Unicorno to the mathematical and humanist world of proportion, calculation, and formal order. Philosophically, the contrast is equally clear: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of speaker-meaning and conversational implicature, whereas Unicorno treats rationality as a property of formally governed relations—arithmetical, rhetorical, dialectical, and grammatical—whose intelligibility lies not in conversational maxims but in measurable structure. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers imply; Unicorno theorises how discourse is proportioned. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, using the 1552 Venice oration as the main anchor and sharpening the rhetoric-dialectic-grammar triad.la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’arimmetica universale – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats “what is meant” as an inferential upshot of cooperative rational agency: given what is said plus shared assumptions about relevance, quantity, quality, etc., a hearer can (in principle) reconstruct implicated content as the speaker’s rationally accountable intention. Unicorno, as the historical Giuseppe Unicorno/Unicorni (Josephus Unicornus; Bergamo 1523–1610), belongs to a very different intellectual ecology: his Arithmetica universale (Venezia, Francesco de’ Franceschi, 1598) is a Renaissance synthesis where number is at once practical technique (abaco culture: weights, measures, exchange, mercantile problems) and a quasi-metaphysical key to order (a tradition continuous with scholastic disciplines and Neoplatonic/Pythagorean resonances), and his De mathematicarum artium utilitate (Bergamo, Comino Ventura, 1584; bibliographies also report an earlier Venetian edition dated 1561) explicitly frames mathematical arts as broadly formative of human understanding. So the clean comparison is: Grice theorizes the rational norms internal to talk-exchanges (how participants responsibly move from said to meant), whereas Unicorno theorizes rational order as instantiated in formal and semi-formal systems (arithmetical procedures, proportionality, the “series” and its lawful development) whose “implications” are not conversational in Grice’s sense but structural—what follows from definitions, operations, and numerically articulated relations. If you want to make them meet, the best bridge is that both are “anti-mystification” projects: Grice explains how seemingly implicit content can be justified as rationally derivable within cooperative discourse; Unicorno explains how seemingly opaque practical and cosmic order can be rendered intelligible by rule-governed calculation—yet for Grice the medium is intersubjective intention-and-inference in conversation, while for Unicorno the medium is the disciplined manipulability of symbols and quantities, where “reason” shows itself less as conversational maxims than as the demonstrable necessity of numerical form. -- the logically developing series -- scuola di Bergamo –filosofia lombarda -- filosofia italiana (Bergamo). Abstract. Grice: Giuseppe Uncorno, a mathematician from Bergamo, holds a distinctive place in the history of Italian philosophy due to his attempt to bridge the gap between scholastic logic, Neoplatonic metaphysics, and practical arithmetic.  His importance lies primarily in how his mathematical treatises reflected the intellectual shifts of the late Renaissance: 1. The Metaphysics of Number Uncorno's most significant work, De universis numeris et eorum proprietatibus (On All Numbers and Their Properties), is not merely a manual for calculation. It is an encyclopedic project that treats arithmetic as a philosophical discipline. In the tradition of Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, Uncorno argued that numbers were the fundamental building blocks of reality. His work served as a bridge for philosophers who viewed mathematics as a way to understand the "divine order" of the cosmos.  2. Scholasticism vs. Humanism In the context of Italian philosophy, Uncorno represents the transition from medieval scholasticism (which prioritized formal logic) to humanist science (which emphasized the utility of the "quadrivium"—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). By systematizing the properties of numbers, he contributed to the "mathematization of nature," a prerequisite for the philosophical shifts later championed by Galileo Galilei and the Scientific Revolution.  3. Practical Philosophy and the "Abaco" Tradition Uncorno integrated the rigorous theory of ancient Greek mathematicians (like Diophantus and Euclid) with the practical abaco tradition of Italian merchants. This fusion was philosophically significant because it elevated "low" practical arts to the status of "high" theoretical wisdom. This shift helped redefine the philosopher's role in society—from a secluded thinker to a contributor to civic and economic life.  arimmetica universale.  T: Sir, before we begin: Oxford, 1939. You want Unicorno, Venice, 1552, and you want him to sound like himself. You also want me not to steal his voice by translating him into ours. G: Precisely. Give me the Latin as an object, not as a surrender. And clean it first, because what you copied is a battlefield of long-s, printer’s habits, and OCR panic. T: Yes, sir. I will regularise the obvious letter confusions, restore spacing, and keep the Latin otherwise intact. I won’t “improve” his syntax. Here is a cleaned copy of your passage, as a continuous excerpt: Rhetores etiam istorum instar orationum suarum partes sibi proportionatis locis convenienti numero assignant; alioqui quid prius, quidque posterius dicendum esset nescientes, inconcinnam et absurdam redderent orationem. Verum cum iam ostenderimus sine Proportionis ratione non recte posse exerceri, quis Dialecticos ad syllogismorum veritatem demonstrandam, multa proportionis aut mathematicos naturam ac vim redolentia, a Mathematicis negat sumpsisse praeceptionibus? Quis tandem originem ac fundamentum omnium liberalium artium Grammaticam, dum nobis mensuram quandam in syllabis recte scribendis ac proferendis, gravibus, acutis, circumflexis accentibus suppeditat, a Proportionis legibus longe differre negaverit? Certe nemo vobis, nisi aut barbarus aut imperitus. G: Good. You’ve already done the essential service: you’ve made him legible without modernising him out of existence. T: I have kept his argumentative rhythm too: rhetoric, then dialectic, then grammar; and the cadence of the rhetorical questions. G: Now give it to me in pieces. Small enough that we can “hear” him. Begin only with the first sentence. T: Very well, sir. First segment, as Unicorno gives it: Rhetores etiam istorum instar orationum suarum partes sibi proportionatis locis convenienti numero assignant; alioqui quid prius, quidque posterius dicendum esset nescientes, inconcinnam et absurdam redderent orationem. G: The first thing to notice is the audacity of his “etiam.” “Rhetores etiam…” It is an inclusion move. He has already talked about proportion elsewhere, presumably in the familiar mathematical arts, and now he says: even the rhetoricians. T: So he is not flattering rhetoric; he is annexing it. G: Exactly. He is doing what later centuries pretend they invented: exporting a formal concept into the arts of discourse. But he does it without apology, as if it were obvious that speech is built. T: You want me to resist translating, sir, so I’ll only point at the structure. He places “partes” close to “orationum suarum.” He treats the oration as something with parts. G: And those parts are not merely parts; they are “assignant” to “proportionatis locis” and to a “convenienti numero.” That is two axes: spatial placement and numerical measure. Rhetoric becomes architecture plus arithmetic. T: A speech, then, has “places” and “numbers.” G: And if you remove proportion, you get temporal confusion: “quid prius, quidque posterius.” That’s the astonishing bit. Proportion is not just ornament; it is a condition for ordering. Without it, you do not know what comes first. T: He makes “not knowing” the cause of stylistic failure. G: He makes it the cause of conceptual failure too, if you read him strictly. If you do not know what is first and what is second, you are not merely inelegant; you are absurd. That’s a strong word to aim at a speaker. T: He is implying that discursiveness is a kind of logical error. G: Yes. In Oxford terms, he is treating bad style as a failure of rational control. Which is why your project about “arts of discourse” is justified: he is already putting rhetoric under a regime of rule-governed structure. T: Shall I give the next segment, sir? G: Proceed, but keep it short. T: Second segment: Verum cum iam ostenderimus sine Proportionis ratione non recte posse exerceri… G: Pause there. He says, in effect: we have already shown. That tells you this is a late-stage move. He has established a thesis: without “ratio proportionis” nothing is properly exercised. T: “Ratio” is doing heavy work here. G: And it’s deliberately elastic. In his mouth, “ratio” can be account, method, principle, rationale. He doesn’t choose. He wants the umbrella term so he can march from mathematics into rhetoric and then into logic and grammar without changing vocabulary. T: So he builds a bridge by keeping one word. G: And also by choosing “exerceri.” Not “intellegi,” not “dici,” but “exerceri.” Practice. Exercise. The arts are exercised. Rhetoric is not mere theory; it’s a trained activity. That, too, feels oddly modern. T: Shall I continue into the dialectic question? G: Yes. Give me the next full question. T: Third segment: …quis Dialecticos ad syllogismorum veritatem demonstrandam, multa proportionis aut mathematicos naturam ac vim redolentia, a Mathematicis negat sumpsisse praeceptionibus? G: Now we are where your marginal note said “logica” or “dialectica.” Notice the tactic: he does not argue; he asks who would deny it. T: So he treats denial as the eccentric position. G: Exactly. He does not need to prove; he needs only to shame the dissenter. “Quis… negat?” It is the classic rhetorical machinery: render the contrary view socially impossible. T: And he ties dialectic to syllogisms immediately. G: Yes, and to “veritas demonstranda.” Dialectic here is not casual disputation; it is a discipline whose target is demonstrable truth. And then he claims that in the very apparatus of syllogistic demonstration there are features that “redolent” of proportion or of the nature and power of mathematics. T: “Redolentia” is a wonderful word. It says “smelling of.” G: Dry humour is already present in him. Dialecticians, he implies, have been borrowing from mathematicians, whether they admit it or not. Their syllogisms smell like mathematics. T: And the borrowing is framed as “praeceptiones.” G: Instruction, precepts, rules. He is not claiming dialectic uses numbers. He is claiming it uses methodological forms and constraints learned from mathematical practice: the idea of rigor, of inference governed by form, of demonstration as accountable sequence. T: So you would say his “proportion” here is not merely ratio in the arithmetic sense, but structured relation. G: Precisely. He is making a philosophical move: proportion as a general schema of relational intelligibility. It has a technical home in mathematics, but its authority extends into how valid reasoning is trained and recognised. T: That seems like the “epoch-making relevance” you wanted G to press. G: Yes. The epoch-making part is that he refuses to let the “arts of discourse” claim autonomy from mathematical discipline. He doesn’t say rhetoric is mathematics; he says rhetoric requires proportion, dialectic borrows mathematical precepts, and grammar itself is proportion-law in miniature. T: Grammar next, sir? G: Give me the grammar question whole. T: Fourth segment: Quis tandem originem ac fundamentum omnium liberalium artium Grammaticam, dum nobis mensuram quandam in syllabis recte scribendis ac proferendis, gravibus, acutis, circumflexis accentibus suppeditat, a Proportionis legibus longe differre negaverit? G: Now he does something bold. He calls grammar the origin and foundation of all the liberal arts. T: He is placing grammar beneath everything. G: And he does it in a way that suits your thesis: if proportion can reach grammar, it has reached the base layer of discourse. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion; dialectic is the art of valid inference; grammar is the condition for having articulate units at all. T: He ties grammar to “mensura.” G: Yes, and that is the whole point. He is saying: grammar supplies measure in syllables, in writing and utterance, and in the accents. He is thinking of quantity, stress, pitch, duration: the metrical and phonological governance of speech. T: So “proportion” here is literally audible. G: Exactly. It’s not metaphor. It is the measure that makes a syllable count as this syllable rather than a mush. He is treating the material of language as already ruled by quantitative relation. T: And then: “a Proportionis legibus longe differre.” G: This is his punch: who would say grammar differs far from the laws of proportion? In other words: if you accept that grammar teaches measured articulation, you have accepted proportion in the very teeth of speech. T: So rhetoric, dialectic, grammar: all under proportion. G: That is the trifecta. If someone wanted to make a Renaissance case for what we would call “formal constraints across disciplines,” this is it. And he does it without seeming to know he’s being interdisciplinary. For him it’s obvious: the mind is trained by measure. T: There is still his final sting, sir. G: Yes. Give the last sentence. T: Fifth segment: Certe nemo vobis, nisi aut barbarus aut imperitus. G: And there it is: the refusal becomes barbarism or ignorance. T: That is rather sharp. G: It is sharp, and it is useful for your later staged dialogue. It gives G a way to tease T in 1939: “are you denying Unicorno, Thomson? Take care: he has a category ready for you.” T: Sir, that is unkind. G: It is historically accurate. Now, for our vignette: you want T to feed Latin, and G to “teach” in English. We have the Latin. We have the analytic spine. The rest is expansion: how to make “proportion” plausible as the hidden discipline of discourse. T: Shall we keep the setting in a college room, sir? Books open, rain outside, faint threat of war, and you insisting it is only a footnote? G: No melodrama. Dry. It is Oxford: the war is in the corridor, but the talk pretends it is in Venice, 1552. T: Then may I propose the running joke, sir: that Unicorno has discovered the maxims before you have named them? G: Careful. Not “before.” But: he has discovered that talk has architecture, that reasoning has borrowed rigor, and that grammar has measure. He is a predecessor in temperament, not in doctrine. T: So I should not have him be “proto-Grice.” G: Precisely. No anachronistic coronation. Let him be Unicorno: a man who thinks “proportion” is the spine of intelligibility, whether in numbers or in speech. T: And you, sir, will keep reminding me that “vi” is force, not six. G: Yes. That will be our recurring correction. Because it is funny, and because it is philologically sane. T: Then I will insert, as needed, that the title is “De admiranda vi proportionis,” and that the marginal “Rhetorica” is not the numeral VI pretending to be theology. G: Good. And when we come to your later “G and T” dialogue, the rhythm can be: T produces Unicorno; G refuses to translate; G explains what the Latin is doing as an act; T tries to force an English paraphrase; G refuses; and we end with the punchline that even grammar, the humblest, is already “mathematical” in the sense that it is measured. T: And the punchline, sir? G: Something like: “So, Thomson, if you cannot keep quantity in your vowels, do not boast of clarity in your arguments.” T: I see. The war outside; the accent marks within. G: Exactly.Grice: Professore Unicorno, mi permetta una battuta aritmetica: quando lei parla di “arimmetica universale” – con quella grafia così evocativa – intende forse dire che 5 = 7 = 12? O è solo un tentativo per far impazzire i contabili e i filosofi, usando quell’esempio famigerato che mette tutti in crisi? Unicorno: Ah, caro Grice, se la mia “arimmetica universale” fosse davvero così elastica, i negozianti di Bergamo farebbero festa ogni giorno! Ma la verità è che, per me, i numeri sono come maschere in commedia: si scambiano, si confondono, ma dietro c’è sempre una logica – anche se a volte è quella della buona cucina bergamasca, dove ogni ricetta ha il suo misterioso equilibrio. Grice: Dunque, professore, lei sostiene che, per capire la “arimmetica universale”, bisogna essere un po’ filosofi, un po’ matematici e, mi sa, anche un pizzico di poeti? Allora propongo: se 5 è la somma delle nostre battute, 7 il numero delle risate, e 12 la quantità di dolci al prossimo convivio filosofico, la matematica diventa davvero universale! Unicorno: Grice, lei ha colto il segreto: l’arimmetica universale serve a scoprire che, nella vita e nel pensiero, il risultato migliore si ottiene quando si mescolano numeri, idee e un po’ di ironia. E se qualche volta 5 = 7 = 12, beh, basta che la conversazione non perda il suo equilibrio – e che nessuno, magari, si ritrovi con meno dolci di quanto sperava! Unicorno, Giuseppe (1552). De admiranda vi proportionis, eiusque necessaria cognition, ad Bergomenses oratio. Venezia: Arrivabene.