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

 

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

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Numa: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale e la logica del regno – Roma – la scuola di Cures Numa Pompilio (Cures Sabini, Fara in Sabina, Rieti, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale e la logica del regno – In the passage’s conceit, Numa Pompilio (Cures Sabini, today within Fara in Sabina, province of Rieti, Lazio) becomes a kind of archaic test-case for Grice’s idea that meaning in conversation is reason-governed: what matters is not only what is said (dictum) but what is made intelligible by a shared practical rationality that lets hearers compute an implicature. Grice’s Oxford joke—“one would hardly at Oxford call a ‘king’ a philosopher”—marks the institutional bias of the academy toward explicit theorizing, yet the Numa-myth reverses it: Rome “only saw wisdom through Numa,” precisely because Numa’s kingship is narrated as government by discourse, ritual, and negotiated normativity rather than by Romulus’ warrior literalism. On this reading, Numa’s “logic of the reign” looks like a political analogue of the Cooperative Principle: stability depends on public expectations, tacit coordination, and the managed gap between overt ordinance and culturally legible suggestion; even piety and ritual function like maxims whose authority lies in their uptake. The burned “book of Numa” sharpens the parallel: once the explicit text is destroyed, what survives is not the locution but the social residue—the teachable, recitable remainder that behaves like implicature (what a community can still recover, transmit, and treat as binding without an officially endorsed statement). Cicero’s polemic, denying a non-Roman (Crotone/Etruscan/Sabine) starting-point for philosophy, can then be cast as a struggle over who controls the conditions of recoverability—who gets to license which inferences as “Roman” rather than foreign. Finally, the biographical Grice details (Literae Humaniores, Corpus, Greek and Roman before anything else) underscore the ironic distance: he is trained to hear classical voices and their rational patterns, yet “he did not read Etrurian,” so the text jokes that he “missed most of Numa’s implicatures”—a neat way to say that implicature is not universal in the abstract, but keyed to shared encyclopedic knowledge, local precedent, and the historically situated competencies of a conversational community. Grice: “One would hardly at Oxford call a ‘king’ a philosopher – even if he was the second one!” – They say Romolo could not quite count as Plato’s ‘re filosofo’ – for one, he was an uncultivated, or wolf-cultivated – warrior, rather. ‘Rome only saw wisdom through Numa.’ Grice entered philosophy, as he should, though the sub-faculty, i. e. through the Faculty of Literae Humaniores, ad his was a classical scholarship to Corpus – His family having no ‘intention’ to matriculate in the city of dreaming spires. At Clifton, Grice read Greek and Roman (in that order) profusely. He did not read Etrurian, though, and thus missed most of Numa’s implicatures!” Keywords: Crotone, Roma. Filosofo italiano. Cures, Fara in Sabina, Rieti, Lazio. The second king of Rome. A book was discovered. It wasn’t written by Numa, but the Romans said it was. It was very philosophical. The Roman senate ordered that it should be burned. It was! But most Italians can recite by heart all the indiscriminate teachings it contained. The big polemic came from Cicero. He didn’t want Roman philosophy to have a start other than in Rome, so he denied the school of Crotone and much more any Etrurian influence via N. Still…  N.dal Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum di Guillaume Rouillé 2º Re di Roma Predecessore Romolo Successore Tullo Ostilio Nascita Cures Dinastia Re latino-sabini ConiugeTazia Figli Pompilia N., Cures Sabini, -- è stato il secondo re di Roma, e il suo regno durò 42 anni. Numa Pompilio, di origine sabina, per la tradizione e la mitologia romana, tramandataci grazie soprattutto a Tito Livio e a Plutarco, che ne scrive anche una biografia, era noto per la sua pietà religiosa  e regna succedendo, come re di Roma, a Romolo. N. e un re pio, e in tutto il suo regno non combatté nemmeno una guerra. L'incoronazione di N. non avvenne immediatamente dopo la scomparsa di Romolo. Numa Pompilio. Numa.  Grice: Numa, dic mihi: philosophi apud Oxford reges vix existimant sapientes—sed tu, secundus rex Romae, quid de rationibus conversationalibus regni sentis? Numa: O Grice, Roma non semper ad bella, sed interdum ad dialogos spectat! Regnare, ut bene philosophari, est artem implicaturarum intellegere—et, si lupum inveneris, semper audi quam dicat! Grice: Sane, Numa! Sed, si librum tuum philosophicum senatus comburit, quid de implicaturis eius manet? Romae videntur omnia igni probata! Numa: Grice, implicaturae mea, sicut regnum, vivunt etiam post flammam! Et, si verba mea ardent, Italici tamen memoriam servare possunt—vel saltem in convivio recitare! Numa Pompilio (a. u. c. XXXIX). Dicta. Roma.