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

 

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

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Macedo: la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano Macedo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as an accountable, rational step from what is said to what is meant, licensed by cooperative expectations that let hearers supply what is left unsaid in a disciplined way. The Macedo vignette (a learned Roman “garden” philosopher, placed in the Aulus Gellius milieu and given a playful Dicta voice) casts conversational reason less as a set of inferential norms and more as a scene and ethos: philosophy as cultivated sociability, where talk is sustained by place (hortus vs porticus), shared leisure, and a style of exchange that makes ideas fruitful rather than merely correct. Compared with Grice, Macedo’s “orto romano” emphasizes the environmental and convivial conditions under which implicatures thrive—common ground, relaxed timing, mutual goodwill—whereas Grice’s distinctive move is to abstract from the setting and explain how, even without shared gardens or rituals, interlocutors can still justifiably derive intended meanings through principles that make interpretation criticizable (one can ask: was that really implied, and by what reasoning?). In other words, Macedo provides a cultural micro-model of how conversation becomes philosophical (the garden as a technology of civil talk), while Grice provides the explanatory mechanism of how conversation becomes meaningful (implicature as reason-governed inference); and the contrast also shows how the same indirectness can be read either as a virtue of cultivated company (Macedo’s salad-and-implicature conviviality) or as a formally characterizable feature of communicative intention and rational uptake (Grice’s maxims and their calculable departures). Grice: “When I refer to the Athenian dialectic, in contrast with the Oxonian dialectic, I point to the agora where Socrates philosophized barefoot, but also the gyms at Plato’s academy and Aristotle’s lizio – and last but not least, the portico, and the orto. Oddly, it was the orto, or garden, which for years, and thanks to Walter Pater – our father – remained for years the most influential school at Oxford, due to the efforts of one called Marius!” Macedo was a philosopher and a friend of Aulo Gellio. Livio. Macedo. GRICEVS: Salve, Macede, audivi te in orto Romano philosophari. Dic mihi, quid inter ortum et porticum interest? Ego semper in porticu frigore laboravi! MACEDVS: O Grice, in orto Romae, philosophus non solum cogitat, sed etiam pomum edit! Porticus est locus rectus, ortus autem locus rotundus—ut mens nostra post prandium. GRICEVS: Ergo, ortus magis ad dialogum aptus est? Socrates, si in horto fuisset, forsitan non solum disputavit, sed etiam cucumeres distribuit. MACEDVS: Certe! In horto, omnis conversatio fructus fert. Grice, venias ad hortum meum: promittimus philosophicas implicaturas et salata—ne quis sit disputatio arida! Macedo (a. u. c. CMXIII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Machiavelli: l’implicatura conversazionale del principe di LIVIO at Oxford.  Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (Firenze, Toscana): l’implicatura conversazionale del principe di LIVIO at Oxford. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an accountable inference from what is said to what is meant, guided by shared rational expectations (cooperation, relevance, adequate informativeness) and anchored in the speaker’s intention that the hearer recognize those intentions; the point is to explain how communication can be indirect yet still disciplined by reasons. Machiavelli is a useful foil because his central concern is not conversational inference but strategic action under conditions of conflict, partial trust, and institutional fragility: in The Prince and the Discourses (with Livy as a standing source of exempla), what agents “mean” or “signal” is often designed to manage appearances, secure obedience, or pre-empt rivals, so indirectness becomes a tool of prudence and power rather than a benign by-product of cooperative rational exchange. Compared this way, Grice’s conversational “quasi-contract” is a normative background that makes implicature calculable and criticizable, whereas Machiavelli’s political “contract” (and its breaches) is precisely what cannot be assumed, making interpretation itself a contested field where deception, dissimulation, and strategic ambiguity are sometimes rational. The overlap is that both are, in their own domains, theorists of practical reason: Grice models the rational constraints that make mutual understanding possible; Machiavelli models the rational constraints that make stable rule possible when mutual understanding is unreliable. Even the onomastic play in your passage (Machiavelli as “crafty/shrewd,” the Oxford worry about spelling and pronunciation, and Machiavelli’s own attention to linguistic nuance) can be read Griceanly: it dramatizes how small choices in wording and form carry socially legible implications—but where Grice treats those implications as answerable to cooperative norms, Machiavelli treats them as instruments within a competitive arena where what is left unsaid may matter most because others will weaponize it. Grice: “Humpty Dumpty is wrong. If someone comes to you and she is named’Alice’ is very rare that you would be curious as to what ‘Alice’ means – it’s different with ‘M..’ The surname M. is of Italian origin, primarily associated with the region of Toscana. While its precise etymology is debated, the leading theory suggests it derives from the Old Italian ‘machiave,’ which means ‘crafty’ or ‘shrewd’. Some sources suggest the nam’s meaning is related to ‘sneaky’ or ‘deceitful.’ This association with cunning and strategic thinking is strongly reinforced by the legacy of M., the influential Renaissance political philosopher and diplomat whose work, The Prince, explored pragmatic and sometimes ruthless approaches to governance. Other potential derivations include a hypothesis linking the surname to the medieval name ‘Malchiodo,’ a variant of the Hebrew name ‘Melki’or, meanin ‘my king) (God) is light’. In conclusion, the most widely accepted etymology links the surname ‘M.’ to the Italian term meaning ‘crafty’ or ‘shrewd,’ a meaning further empahsised by its association with the renowned philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. Filosofo fiorentino. Filosofo italiano. Firenze, Toscana. Grice: “While Strawson prefers ‘The Prince,’ my favourite M. is the dialogo, discorso, ovvero dialogo intorno della lingua. The full title makes it sound slightly analytic – ‘whether it should be called ‘florentine, Italian, or tooscana’ I mean, a stipulation! Like me, we can call Machiavelli a philosopher of language – the trend being very Florentine between M. and Varchi. Possibly Italy’s greateset philosopher. Grice: “L. J. Cohen told me that he once asked for the MS of The Prince at his college – and they told him: ‘We cannot find it!’ Livio, storia romana – Grice on the history of England – Livio, storia romana –la storia romana come fonte d’essempi nella filosofia romana --il principe, Macchiavelli fascista – l’ossessione dal duce per M., la dottrina fascista dello stato machiavellico, Empiegatura. Grice: Caro Machiavelli, mi consenta una curiosità: secondo lei, dovrei raddoppiare la “c” nel suo cognome e pronunciarlo “Macchiavelli”? Le confesso che, a Oxford, la tentazione filologica è forte! Non sarebbe solo una questione di ortografia, ma proprio di musicalità della lingua italiana, che rispetto moltissimo. Machiavelli: Carissimo Grice, la sua osservazione è assai acuta! In effetti, anche io trovo che “Macchiavelli” abbia un suono più pieno e deciso. Non solo la scrittura, ma la pronuncia geminata rende meglio la fermezza del mio pensiero e la concretezza fiorentina. Quasi quasi dovremmo adottarla ufficialmente! Grice: Che bello sentirglielo dire! D'altronde, anche nei suoi dialoghi lei attribuiva molta importanza alla lingua, al modo in cui le parole vengono usate, quasi come se la filosofia stessa fosse questione di una lettera in più o in meno. Machiavelli: Esatto, Grice. A Firenze, ogni sfumatura conta, anche nella pronuncia. E poi, come lei insegna, ciò che si implica conversando può modificare il senso stesso delle parole. Dunque, avanti con “Macchiavelli”, se così il discorso risulta più incisivo e… più italiano! Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei (1498). Scritto. Palazzo della Signoria, Firenze.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Magalotti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di naturali esperienze.  Lorenzo Magalotti (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di naturali esperienze. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an inferential achievement licensed by cooperative norms: what is meant goes beyond what is said because rational interlocutors can justify, and contest, the route from utterance to intended uptake, with “natural” meaning (signs, symptoms) kept distinct from speaker-meaning even when ordinary talk slides between them. Magalotti’s Saggi di naturali esperienze (first issued in 1666 as the Accademia del Cimento’s experimental reports, with Magalotti as secretary-editor) embodies a different but complementary rationality: the disciplining of experience through public procedures, controlled observation, and reportable description, in which the aim is to make nature legible by agreed methods rather than to make intentions legible by maxims. The comparison is thus between two norms of intelligibility: for Grice, conversational reason is the set of pragmatic expectations that make indirect communication accountable (so that metaphorical or adjectival talk of “natural” and “artificial” meaning can be sorted by tests like cancellability and calculability), whereas for Magalotti, reason is the shared experimental ethos that turns “experience” into communicable knowledge via repeatable trials and carefully framed narratives of phenomena. Where Grice explains how hearers recover what a speaker is doing with words, Magalotti shows how a community recovers what nature is doing through instruments, protocols, and collectively readable “saggi”; and the bridge between them is that both projects depend on a public standard of justification—Grice’s inferences must be defensible to other speakers, Magalotti’s observations must be defensible to other investigators—so that in each case meaning is not private impression but something stabilized by communal, reason-governed practices. Grice: “Sometimes, derivatives are a trick. The Romans had a wonderful concept of NATVRA, a strict rendition of Greek PHYSIS – and yet, you find philosophers using ‘nature’ only metaphorical – as when I refer to the irreverent talent with which the sage Nature endowed me. Instead, a philosopher likes an adjective, as when, now as I look back, I addressed the Oxford philosophical society on the topic of ‘meaning’ – Borrowing from the adjectival uses of ‘naturalis’ and ‘artificialis’ as applied to ‘meaning,’ or ‘segno,’ I oblitated Nature into the bargain! I like M. – very philosophical. When a philosopher is a count, we don’t say that he was a professional philosopher, but not an amateur philosopher either – ‘philosopher’ does! I like his ‘saggi’ on ‘natural experience’ – he is being Aristotelian: there is natural experience and there is trans-natural experience – and there is supernatural experience!” Appartenente all’aristocrazia, figlio del prefetto dei corriere pontifici. Studia a Roma e Pisa, dove e allievo di VIVIANI e MALPIGHI. Segretario di Leopoldo de' Medici, segretario dell'Accademia del Cimento, fondata da de’ Medici. Fa parte anche dell'Accademia della Crusca e dell'Accademia dell'Arcadia, Dall'esperienza al Cimento nacque i “Saggi di naturali esperienze, ossia le relazioni dell'attività dell'Accademia del Cimento”. Passa al servizio di Cosimo III de' Medici iniziando così un'attività che lo porta a una serie di viaggi per l'Europa (raccolse in diverse opere le sue vivaci e brillanti relazioni di viaggio). Ottenne il titolo di conte e la nomina ad ambasciatore a Vienna. Si ritira alla villa Magalotti, in Lonchio. Si dedica alla filosofia, con particolare attenzione per la filosofia naturale di Galilei Opere: “Canzonette anacreontiche di Lindoro Elateo, pastore arcade, delle lettere familiari del conte M. e di altri insigni uomini a lui scritte, Diario di Francia, Doglio, Palermo, Sellerio, di naturali esperienze, ‘naturali esperienze. Grice: Magalotti, trovo affascinante la sua capacità di distinguere tra esperienza naturale e sovrannaturale. La filosofia, per lei, sembra davvero un viaggio attraverso mondi diversi dell’esperienza! Magalotti: Caro Grice, grazie. Ritengo che la natura abbia molte più sfumature di quanto si creda. Ogni esperienza, osservata con occhi filosofici, svela una ricchezza che spesso sfugge ai distratti. Grice: È vero, signor Conte. Ho sempre pensato che il termine “naturale” venga talvolta usato troppo metaforicamente. Lei invece restituisce a “naturale” una dignità aristotelica, distinguendo con cura ciò che appartiene all’esperienza umana. Magalotti: Mi fa piacere che colga questa sfumatura. Filosofare, per me, significa “saggiare” la natura: è ciò che facevo all’Accademia del Cimento, sperimentando, osservando e riflettendo. La filosofia naturale è una vera arte dell’esperienza. Grice: Conte Magalotti, mi dica la verità: se l’esperienza naturale si trova anche in cucina, l’Accademia del Cimento avrebbe dovuto sperimentare la ribollita o la pizza? Magalotti: Caro Grice, in effetti la filosofia naturale funziona meglio davanti a un piatto fumante. La ribollita ha una sua implicatura: più si scalda, più diventa sapiente! Grice: Ottimo, allora ogni cena è un “saggio di naturali esperienze”: Aristotele avrebbe scritto il trattato sull’olio d’oliva, non sulla logica! Magalotti: Esattamente! E se Galileo avesse inventato la pizza, forse avremmo misurato la gravità con il pomodoro. La filosofia, in fondo, è una questione di gusto e implicatura conversazionale… anche a tavola! Magalotti, Lorenzo (1666). Saggi di naturali esperienze, Firenze: Cocchini.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Maggi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- implicatura ridicola.  Vincenzo Maggi (Pompiano, Brescia, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- implicatura ridicola. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a disciplined, inferential achievement: hearers are entitled to derive what is meant beyond what is said because speakers are (normally) taken to be cooperating under rational norms, so the “extra” content is publicly criticizable and cancellable rather than a mere stylistic aura. The Maggi passage (despite the biographical/bibliographic confusion: Vincenzo Maggi is a 16th-century Brescian humanist, not an 1880 Hoepli author) uses “implicatura ridicola” to pivot from inferential pragmatics to a rhetorical-aesthetic problem inherited from Latin and Renaissance discussions of ridiculum: how laughter, derision, and the comic register function as modes of saying more (or other) than is said, often by hint, irony, and strategic understatement. On this comparison, Grice would treat the “ridiculous” as a predictable pragmatic effect only when it is traceable to conversational reasoning—e.g., when an utterance flouts a norm (relevance, quantity, manner) in a way that licenses a specific implicature—whereas the Maggi line invites a thicker view in which ridicule is itself a philosophical instrument (connected to Ciceronian mockery, to Poetics commentary, and to the tragic/comic boundary) that can reframe a dispute without needing to be reconstrued as a maxim-based calculation. The contrast, then, is between Grice’s accountability model (implicatures are what a rational speaker can be held to have meant, because the route from said to meant is principled) and a Maggi-style humanist model in which comic indirection functions as a cultural technology of persuasion and critique, sometimes operating less like a determinate inference and more like a socially shared cue that reassigns status, seriousness, or authority in the conversation. Grice: “I don’t know why Cicero found Stoicism ridiculous – but I fear the word carried a different implicature back in Ancient Rome!” The English word ‘ridiculous’ and the Italian word ‘ridicolo’ both stem from the Latin verb ‘ridere, to laugh, or to laugh at. Here’s the breakdown.Ridere (Latin verb) to laugh. Ridiculus, Latin adjective: laughable, funny, amusing, absurd, ridiculous.This adjective is derived from ‘ridere’ ‘ridiculosus (late Latin adjective) laughable – droll. This word is the DIRECT source of the English word ‘ridiculous.’ Ridicolo (Italian adjective) directly descended from the latin adjective ridiculus. In essence, both words trace their roots bak to the Latin concept of laughter, particularly that which excites amusement or derision. I like his portrait. My favourite of his essays is on the ridiculous; but his most specifically philosophical stuff is the ‘lectiones philosophicae’ and the ‘consilia philosophica.’” La famiglia aveva possedimenti e anche un negozio di farmacia. Il padre Francesco, uomo di lettere, fu il suo primo maestro.  Studia a Padova con Bagolino e frequenta attivamente gli ambienti culturali della città. Si laurea e insegna filosofia. Degl’Infiammati, strinse amicizia con Barbaro, Lombardi, Piccolomini, Speroni, Tomitano, Varchi, entrò quindi a far parte del circolo di Bembo, frequentando insigni filosofi come Paleario, Lampridio e Emigli. Conobbe Pole, Vergerio, Flaminio e Priuli. Il dibattito sulla questione della lingua e sui temi estetici legati soprattutto all'interpretazione della Poetica aristotelica condusse alla preparazione di un commento allo scritto di Aristotele che, iniziato da Lombardi, fu proseguito, concluso e fatto pubblicare da M., con altra sua opera dedicata ad ORAZIO, a Venezia: le In Aristotelis librum de Poetica communes explanationes: Implicatura ridicola, Eco, il nome della rosa, Cicerone, il tragico, filosofia tragica, pessimismo, l’eroe tragico, Nietzsche, la tragedia per musica – I curiazi, catone in Utica – tragedia per musica. Grice: Caro Maggi, ogni volta che parli di implicatura ridicola mi viene in mente Cicerone che ride degli stoici. Secondo te, il ridicolo in filosofia è davvero una questione seria, o basta una risata per cambiare prospettiva? Maggi: Grice, in verità penso che il ridicolo sia la chiave segreta della filosofia. Se Aristotele avesse riso un po’ di più, forse la Poetica avrebbe avuto un finale comico e Catone in Utica sarebbe diventato protagonista di una tragedia per musica… ma con musica allegra! Grice: Ecco, Maggi, il tragico e il comico si mescolano come i curiazi in battaglia: a volte basta un errore di grammatica per passare dalla tragedia al ridicolo. Eco diceva che il nome della rosa è già implicatura, ma io preferisco il nome del sorriso. Maggi: Concordo, Grice! In fondo, la filosofia è un’opera buffa: tra pessimisti e eroi tragici, chi sa ridere trova sempre una via d’uscita. La vera implicatura, forse, è che la conversazione non finisce mai… finché qualcuno ride. Maggi, Vincenzo (1880). Sull'origine delle specie. Milano: Hoepli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Magni: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Valeriano Magni (Milano, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rationally recoverable inference from what is said to what is meant, grounded in norms (his maxims) that need not be framed as commands: they can be cast as objectives, precepts, or axioms, so long as they function as publicly criticizable standards for interpreting utterances in cooperative exchange. Valeriano Magni (Milanese Capuchin, active in Prague and across diplomatic-theological contexts, and author of works including De acatholicorum credendi regula judicium and a De natura hominis printed in Venice in 1625) approaches “ratio” in a more explicitly metaphysical and doctrinal key, where identity-style principles (your “Petrus est Petrus” motif) and talk of ratio essendi signal an underlying architecture of being and demonstration rather than a pragmatic mechanism for recovering speaker-intentions. The comparison, then, is between Grice’s use of rational principles as regulative constraints on conversational inference (why a hearer is entitled to derive a particular implicature, and how such derivations can be cancelled, defended, or criticized) and Magni’s use of rational principles as constitutive truths or axioms that articulate what things are (and, in religious polemic, what warrants belief or authority). Put simply: Grice treats reason as governing interpretation in talk, with maxims functioning like the rules of an inferential practice; Magni treats reason as governing reality and right belief, with axioms functioning like metaphysical-theological fixtures. That makes Magni a helpful foil for Grice: he shows how easily “reason” can mean a theory of being or a rule of faith, whereas Grice’s distinct contribution is to relocate rational governance inside the mechanics of communicative exchange—where even an “axiom” matters less as a statement about the world than as a norm that structures what we may responsibly mean, and take another to mean, in conversation. Grice: “There are alternate ways of describing what I call a conversational maxim. The imperative mode is not imperative. An objective, a paeceptum, even an ‘axiom’ may play the role! I love M. He has gems like ‘Petrus is Petrus.’ I’m talking about his Principia et specimen philosophiæ. The titles for the chapters are amusing, and he refers to ‘ratio essendi’ – and other stuff. *Very* amusing!” Figlio dal conte Costantino M., si trasfere a Praga. Entra nei cappuccini della provincia boema a Praga. Insegna filosofia entrando, grazie al suo insegnamento, nelle grazie dell'imperatore. Presto è eletto provinciale della provincia austro-boema e divenne apprezzato consigliere dell’imperatore e di altri principi. Il re Sigismondo gli affida la missione cappuccina nel suo paese. Ferdinando l’invia in missione diplomatica in Francia. È uno dei consiglieri di duca Massimiliano di iera. Dopo la battaglia della montagna bianca, sostenne l'arcivescovo di Praga Ernesto Adalberto d'Harrach nella cattolicizzazione della popolazione e nelle riforme diocesane. Prende parte in nome dell'imperatore ai negoziati con Richelieu sulla successione ereditaria al trono di MANTOVA. Divenne consulente teologico nei negoziati per la pace di Praga e missionario apostolico per l'elettorato di Sassonia, Assia, Brandeburgo e Danzica. Riproduce a Varsavia di fronte al re e alla corte l'esperimento di RUBERTI Torricelli usando un tubo riempito di mercurio per produrre il vuoto. Riusce a convertire il conte Ernesto d'Assia-Rheinfels. Dopo che Praga venne affidata ai gesuiti, entra in contrasto con i gesuiti, che lo fanno arrestare a Vienna. Rilasciato dalla prigione per intervento dell’imperatore, torna a Salisburgo. Frutto della sua polemica con i protestanti è De acatholicorum credendi regula judicium in cui sostene che senza l’autorità della chiesa, la bibbia da sola non è sufficiente come regola di fede per i cristiani. Grice è Grice, Grice ha Grice, Grice izz Grice, Grice hazz Grice. Implicatura. Paolo è Paolo: assiomi e principi metafisici. Grice: Caro Magni, trovo davvero affascinante il modo in cui declini le massime conversazionali. L’idea che un imperativo possa essere anche un assioma o un precetto mi ha colpito. Mi piace moltissimo il tuo “Petrus è Petrus” – sembra quasi un gioco filosofico! Magni: Grazie, caro Grice! È vero, la filosofia non si accontenta di un solo modo di vedere le cose. “Petrus è Petrus” richiama il principio dell’identità, ma anche la semplicità della verità. Ogni massima, ogni precetto, può essere una piccola luce nel buio della conversazione. Grice: Mi piace il tuo modo di mettere in risalto la “ratio essendi” e la concretezza degli assiomi. Forse la conversazione stessa è il terreno dove queste verità diventano vive, proprio come mostri nei tuoi Principia et specimen philosophiæ. È un approccio che porta aria fresca nella filosofia! Magni: Ti ringrazio, caro Grice. Credo che la filosofia debba essere vissuta, oltre che pensata. Ogni conversazione è un esperimento, come quello del vuoto che ho riprodotto a Varsavia: anche un principio metafisico può essere provato e riscoperto tra amici. E la massima “Grice è Grice” lo dimostra alla perfezione! Magni, Valeriano (1625). De natura hominis. Venezia: Guerigli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mainardini: l’implicatura conversazionale del popolo romano di Livio o il consorzio degl’eroi.  Marsilio dei Mainardini (Padova, Veneto): l’implicatura conversazionale del popolo romano di Livio o il consorzio degl’eroi. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rationally reconstructible step from what is said to what is meant, under cooperative norms that make speakers answerable for the inferences they invite. In the Mainardini passage, “l’implicatura conversazionale del popolo romano di Livio” treats the background of cooperation less as a local norm of talk and more as a civic and historical model: Marsilio dei Mainardini (here presented in a Paduan, anti-curialist, Paris-trained political-philosophical arc, with Livy, Romulus/Remus, and “consorzio” imagery) is used to redescribe collective life as if it were a conversation whose stability depends on a shared rational order, so that peace becomes the analogue of successful uptake and civil concord becomes the analogue of interpretive convergence. The contrast, then, is partly one of level: Grice’s quasi-contractual “principle” is meant to ground micro-explanations of how particular utterances generate implicatures, cancellations, and disputes in ordinary exchanges, whereas the Mainardini frame (linking “defensor pacis,” the people as a consortium, and a grammar of political change) expands the same cooperative logic into a macro-theory of polity, where the “people” function as co-conversationalists and breakdowns look like breaches in a shared discursive order rather than mere pragmatic misfires. In that enlarged register, what Grice calls reason-governance becomes not only the discipline of interpretation but an allegory of government: the successful state is one whose public speech practices sustain common rational commitments, while faction, corruption, or curial domination mark failures of the very conditions that, in Grice’s narrower sense, make implicature calculable and conversation possible. Grice: “I often wondered: if William of Occam were known to have belonged to a noble family, say, that of the Chumleys – we would refer to him as Chumley, not Occam. The Italians know better. Marsilio is a pretty common Christian name – once  you know that this Marsilio belonged to ‘dei M.’ – plural of ‘Mainardino’ – you better acknowledge that!” Grice: “In any case, it is very rare that a political philosopher is called a philosopher at Oxford! Padova tries to institute the ‘regnum’ as between Aristotle’s ‘polis’ and the modern ‘stato,’ but in which case, we wouldn’t call it ‘politeia’ anymore!” --  GricWhen I studied change I focused on von Wright – but then there is Padova and his ‘grammatica del mutamento’!”  Nato da una famiglia di giudici e notai – il padre: ‘di Giovanni’ -- che viveva vicino al Duomo di Padova, completò i suoi studi a Parigi dove fu insignito dell'autorità di rettore. Il tempo trascorso a Parigi influì moltissimo sull'evoluzione del suo pensiero. Gli anni parigini furono molto importanti e fecondi per l'evoluzione del suo pensiero e la visione dello stato di corruzione in cui versava il clero lo portò a diventare anti-curialista.  A Parigi incontrò Occam e Jandun, con cui condivise passione politica e atteggiamento di avversione verso il potere temporale della Chiesa. Con Jandun rimase legato da grande amicizia e assieme a lui subì l'esilio.  M. dopo le sue dure affermazioni contro la Chiesa venne bollato con l'epiteto di figlio del diavolo. M. si trova a Parigi quando si sviluppò la lotta tra Filippo, re di Francia, e il Papato. Tutto ciò, assieme al vivace contesto culturale in cui si muoveva, lo portò alla compilazione della sua opera maggiore il Defensor Pacis, l'opera cui deve la sua fama e che influì moltissimo sia sul pensiero filosofico-politico contemporaneo che su quello successivo.  Il popolo italiano, consorzio conversazionale, difensore della pace, leviatano, allegoria del buon governo – allegoria del buon governo, Livio, Romolo, Machiavelli. La massima del consorzio conversazionale. Grice: Marsilio, dimmi, se il popolo romano di Livio avesse avuto la tua implicatura conversazionale, avremmo avuto meno guerre e più banchetti? Mainardini: Caro Grice, forse sì! Invece di fondare imperi, avrebbero fondato consorzi per cucinare la miglior zuppa. La pace si difende meglio con un piatto pieno che con una spada! Grice: Mi piace la tua visione: la massima del consorzio conversazionale dovrebbe essere “parla bene, mangia meglio”. Se Machiavelli avesse avuto fame, avrebbe scritto “Il cuoco” invece del “Principe”. Mainardini: Esatto, Grice! E se Romolo e Remo avessero discusso davanti a una grigliata, Roma sarebbe nata per implicatura, non per conquista. La filosofia, in fondo, è un ottimo antipasto al buon governo! Mainardini, Marsilio dei (1550). Commentarii in Aristotelis Metaphysicam. Venezia: Valgrisi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Majello: la ragione conversazionale. M. also writes Il christiano in chiesa GRAMMATICA ITALIANA RAGIONATA.  Francesco Majello (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers are entitled to move, by publicly articulable reasoning, from what is said to what is meant: implicatures arise because conversation is treated as a cooperative, norm-guided activity in which speakers can be held answerable for what they intentionally get their audience to recognize. Francesco Majello, by contrast (the Neapolitan “prete regio” whose Il cristiano in chiesa and Gramatica italiana ragionata both appear in 1826, and whose preface frames grammar as a civic necessity because “man in society is obliged to speak”), treats “la ragione conversazionale” less as an inferential engine for deriving speaker-meaning and more as an educative and moral-technical discipline: a prudent art of steering between Scylla and Charybdis—precision without pedantry, accessibility without childishness—so that social obligation to communicate is met with linguistic propriety. Where Grice locates rational governance primarily in the implicit reasoning that connects utterance to communicative intention (and thus in accountability for implicatures), Majello locates it in the prior formation of speakers through rule-conscious grammatical training, patronage-protected authorship, and an ideal of decorous public speech; the result is a contrast between Grice’s pragmatics of inference (how conversational norms license meanings beyond the literal) and Majello’s prescriptive civics of language (how norms of correctness and prudence make conversation worthy of educated society), with an overlap in their shared assumption that conversation is not mere spontaneity but a practice structured by norms that can be taught, followed, and criticized. M. also writes Il christiano in chiesa GRAMMATICA ITALIANA RAGIONATA. Lapidei et Ugna ab aliis accipio; aedijicii costructio tota nostra est. Architectus ego, sum, sed materiam varie undique conduxi. Nel dare alla luce la sua picciola grammatica italiana ragionata sui precetti a ben favellare nella lingua dell’Ariosto, e del Tasso, s’ingegna di mettergli in fronte il nome insigne d’un Mecenate. Lui si direge al mecenate che incanutito nelle armi, coltiva a vicenda gli studj di Marte, e sente che le brilla in fronte una corona intrecciata d’alloro e d’ulivo. È la fortuna di M. che la niente le ne suggerì a tempo il pehsiere. Il mecenate preservato la grammatica italiana ragionata di M. d’attacchi degl’aristarchi, come, al dir de’poeti , l’alloro preserva dai fulmini di Giove. Quindi è, che ogni ragion di calcolo esige, che, nel riprodurre la grammatica italiana ragionata, M. gli metta in fronte lo stesso nome. Li giova sperare che, essendo i suoi sentimenti gli stessi, trova il cuore del mecenate egualmente disposto. È del mecenate umile, dcvole ed obbligato. L’uomo nella società è sempre nell’obbligo di parlare. Qual vergogna è per un uomo educato se difetta nel parlare. Quindi nasce la necessità della grammatica. Lo studio della grammatica, essendo indispensabile al parlare, dove’essere la prima occupazione dell’uomo. Quindi nasce la difficoltà di presentar una grammatica che puo dirsi completa. Se si tenta sviluppar tutto colla necessaria precisione, è facile urtar nello scoglio di trascendere l’intelligenza dell’uomo. Se l’uomo s’ha presente, e si cerca adattarvisi, è facile imbattersi nello scoglio opposto, divenendo tutto arido, vagone puerile; incidit in Scyllam cupiens vitare Carybdiin. È della prudenza dà chi scrive una grammatica italiana ragionata per trarne veramente uuj profitto, scanzare i due scogli per quanto è possibile. Questo è quello che M. ha in mira. Grice: Caro Majello, mi ha sempre incuriosito la tua idea che la grammatica sia il primo fondamento del parlare nella società. Pensando alle regole conversazionali, ritrovo nella tua “grammatica italiana ragionata” una sorta di bussola per navigare tra Scilla e Cariddi: precisione senza aridità, chiarezza senza banalità. Come vedi il ruolo della prudenza nello scrivere una grammatica? Majello: Hai colto perfettamente, caro Grice. La prudenza è essenziale: chi scrive una grammatica deve saper evitare gli estremi, offrendo una guida che sia utile ma non pesante. Proprio come il mecenate che protegge l’opera dai fulmini, la prudenza preserva la chiarezza dalle insidie del linguaggio. Credo che ogni educato debba sentire il dovere di parlare bene, ma senza dimenticare la naturalezza della conversazione. Grice: Concordo, Majello. La conversazione è, in fondo, un’arte: saper parlare bene è il risultato di un equilibrio tra regole e spontaneità. Trovo affascinante il modo in cui tu metti in luce la vergogna dell’uomo educato che difetta nel parlare—da filosofo del linguaggio, mi sembra che la grammatica italiana ragionata possa davvero aiutare a superare questo scoglio. Majello: Grazie, Grice. È proprio questo il mio intento: offrire una grammatica che sia un ponte, non un muro. Ogni uomo, immerso nella società, si trova nell’obbligo di comunicare; la grammatica è il primo passo per farlo con profitto. Il nome del mecenate in fronte all’opera è simbolo di protezione e speranza che il cuore degli studiosi sia sempre disposto ad accogliere con favore il mio lavoro. Majello, Francesco (1826). Il cristiano in chiesa. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Malipiero’ Geronimo Malipiero, Malipiero (1527). Della natura umana. Venezia: Bindoni.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Malipiero: l’implicatura conversazionale del TRIONFO DELLA RAGIONE; ossia, confutazione del sistema del contratto sociale, the breach of contract, or Romolo e Remo, I due contrattanti. Grice: “There is a famous adage well known at Oxford about the ‘feast of reason’ Troilo Malipiero (Venezia, Veneto): l’implicatura conversazionale del TRIONFO DELLA RAGIONE; ossia, confutazione del sistema del contratto sociale, the breach of contract, or Romolo e Remo, I due contrattanti. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as the product of rational accountability in talk: interlocutors proceed as if governed by cooperative norms, so that what is meant beyond what is said is recoverable by publicly criticizable reasoning rather than by private association or mere rhetorical flourish. Troilo Malipiero, by contrast, approaches “reason” through an explicitly quasi-contractual political idiom forged in polemic against Rousseau: in Il trionfo della ragione ossia Confutazione del sistema del contratto sociale (1801; reprinted 1818 with a retitled version), “reason” is mobilized to expose what he takes to be the instability or danger of the social-contract picture and to defend a different political order, so the central “breach of contract” theme becomes a way of narrating social cohesion and its failures at the level of institutions, sovereignty, and legitimacy. The comparison is therefore a contrast of scale and function: Grice’s “contract” is a rational presupposition internal to conversational practice (a quasi-contract that makes interpretation possible and makes speakers answerable for implicatures), whereas Malipiero’s contract is a contested political myth whose alleged breakdown has civil consequences, and whose refutation is presented as a triumph of reason over revolutionary theory; where Grice asks what must be assumed for intelligible exchange and inferential uptake to occur, Malipiero asks what must be rejected or re-founded for a polity to avoid fraternal conflict (the Romulus/Remus motif) and preserve order. In that sense, Malipiero supplies a political-theoretical dramatization of what Grice treats as a pragmatic background condition: the idea that cooperative intelligibility depends on shared commitments that can be violated, repaired, or rhetorically reconstrued—except that for Grice those commitments are norms of rational conversation, while for Malipiero they are the high-stakes terms by which societies claim authority and condemn “breach.” Grice: “There is a famous adage well known at Oxford about the ‘feast of reason’ – and when I was invited to explore on my ‘quasi-contractualist’ basis for the rational principle underlying conversation, I hesitated. But then I thought: even in a purely contractualist theory, the very fact that a contract ever took place is taken for granted among discussants as what I call a ‘myth’!” Filosofo italiano. Venezia, Veneto. Grice: “I love Malipiero’s approach to philosophy: hardly a profession! As if someone were to be called ‘amateur cricketer’ – M. loves (‘ama’) philosophy and it shows!” – Grice: “There is philosophical wisdom in any endevaour he finds himself in!” Grice: “One must love him for his attempted ‘confutazione’ of Rousseau’s ‘sistema del contrato sociale’ as a ‘triumph of reason’!” Nasce da padre patrizio, provenente dalla storica casata dei M. Dichiara d’abitare in un palazzo a Santa Maria Zobenigo, cui s’aggiungevano quattro botteghe nei centralissimi quartieri di Rialto e San Moisè. Altre case si trovano tra Santa Margherita, San Gregorio e San Martino. Esordì in politica coll'elezione a savio agl’ordini, divenne provveditore alle Pompe, ma non riusce a prendere possesso della carica a causa della caduta della repubblica. Lascia la vita pubblica per dedicarsi alla filosofia analitica della lingua ordinaria. È un filosofo poli-edrico, capace di spaziare dall’attualità politica alla letteratura e alla tragedia. Grice: “I would often rely on contractualism, but [Welsh philosopher G. R.] Grice made a job out of it! I saw the cooperative principle as a matter of quasi-contract – whatever that is. And if it’s a MYTH, what’s wrong with it? Romolo mythically killed Remus because of a breach of contract, too!” Grice: “My thought exactly replicates that of Malipiero back in the good old days of Venetian republic – only there was more rhyme to reason in HIS scheme!” il trionfo della ragione, ossia, confutazione del sistema del contratto sociale.  Grice: Caro Malipiero, mi dica: se il trionfo della ragione è davvero la confutazione del contratto sociale, Romolo e Remo sarebbero stati due filosofi in lite, più che fondatori di Roma? Malipiero: Grice, in Venezia abbiamo imparato che ogni contratto si basa su una buona dose di fiducia... o su una bottiglia di vino! Se c’è una rottura, basta inventarsi una nuova ragione per festeggiare, anziché una guerra tra fratelli. Grice: Allora mi viene da pensare che la filosofia, più che professione, è una festa: ogni discussione è un banchetto, ogni disputa un brindisi alla logica, e se qualcuno infrange il contratto... si cambia menù! Malipiero: Bravo Grice! In fondo, la ragione vince quando si trova il giusto equilibrio tra parole e risate. Se Rousseau avesse provato la cucina veneziana, forse avrebbe scritto meno contratti e più ricette di buon vivere. Malipiero, Troilo (1794). Dimostrazione sulla triplicazione e trisezione dell’angolo effettuato colla retta e col cerchio.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mancini: l’implicatura conversazionale del kerygma. Grice: “In my seminar on ‘conversation’ I focus on the principle of conversational benevolence, -- formerly the desideratum of other-love – as opposed to the desideratum of conversational self-love. It was only years later, when exploring Kant, I realised how crucial the role that benevolentia plays – which I had borrowed from Butler, not Kant Italo Mancini (Schieti, Urbino, Marche): l’implicatura conversazionale del kerygma. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rationally reconstructible, norm-guided inference from what is said to what is meant, anchored in cooperative expectations that make speakers answerable for what they intentionally get their hearers to recognize. In the Mancini comparison, “l’implicatura conversazionale del kerygma” shifts the center of gravity from the micro-logic of everyday talk to a theological-hermeneutic setting where what is communicated is proclamation (kerygma) and where “meaning” is tasked with mediating sense and significance across doctrine, culture, and praxis; this aligns with Mancini’s broader project (Urbino; philosophy of religion; engagement with Kant, radical evil, and moral rigor; and works such as Linguaggio e salvezza, 1964, and Kerygma, 1970) in which language is treated as ontologically and ethically loaded rather than primarily as a vehicle for conversational calculation. Where Grice explains how implicatures are generated by rational agents following conversational norms, Mancini effectively enlarges the governing norms to include an ethos of benevolence, responsibility, and salvific orientation, so that “cooperation” becomes not only a condition for intelligibility but a moral-theological demand (a “cooperativa” of sense, meaning, and community), and “alienation” names not just pragmatic misfire but a spiritual and social deformation of language. The upshot is that Grice offers a formal, accountability-centered model for deriving what a speaker means, while Mancini uses the same general idea of indirectness and shared reason to illuminate how proclamation and ethical commitment can be carried in, and sometimes distorted by, linguistic practice—treating conversational reason as a bridge from ordinary communication to the claims of faith and the problems of evil, salvation, and human praxis. Grice: “In my seminar on ‘conversation’ I focus on the principle of conversational benevolence, -- formerly the desideratum of other-love – as opposed to the desideratum of conversational self-love. It was only years later, when exploring Kant, I realised how crucial the role that benevolentia plays – which I had borrowed from Butler, not Kant – However, for Kant, benevolentia is PARALELL to malevolentia – which the English refer to as ‘ill-will’ – in that qua autonomous rational agents we may decide to pursue an end which everybody except ourselves regard as good – and in fact, which everyone but ourselves, regard as ‘ill’ – Some ill-will! I like M.: he has expanded on the ethos of cooperation – and he has explored what he calls ‘linguaggio ontologico’ and ‘alienazione’ in connection with language – he reviewed Pittau’s philosophy of language, and published a little thing on ‘language and salvation.’ So how can you NOT like him?”  Grice: “I like M.; if I dwell on philosophical eschatology, he dwells on the real thing!” Grice: “He has studied Kant thoroughly; all the interesting bits, like his idea of MALEVOLENTIA!”  “La filosofia è il passaggio dal senso al significato, attraverso le mediazioni culturali, dottrinali, attraverso la struttura del puro pensare e attraverso le mediazioni della prassi.” Studia a Fano e si laurea a Milano dove insegna. Bo lo vuole ad Urbino. Studia i massimi teologi, curato le opera di Barth, Bultmann e Bonhoeffer pubblicando, su quest'ultimo, anche una biografia e un'analisi dottrinale. Fonda l’istituto di scienze religiose, una facoltà teologica in una università laica.  Tra i filosofi, si dedica molto a Kant, pubblicando una Guida alla critica della ragion pura.  In questo senso è ancora più importante Kant e la teologia dove  tratta la filosofia della religione kantiana, fondata su una concezione morale rigorosa resa possibile dall'Imperativo categorico. Kerygma, male radicale, Kant, radical evil, cooperativa di credito, la massima della benevolenza conversazionale, il problema del vaticano, ventennio fascista e patti laterani. Grice is seated properly in his room at St John’s, as if posture were half of philosophical method. The next tutee is late, which is a blessing if you need it and a vice if you don’t. On the table, among the day’s ordinary litter of essays and pencilled lecture-notes, there are three Italian titles that have been doing more work than their authors can reasonably have intended. He begins, as he so often does, by not reading. The first one is from 1950, and it is the one that really catches him because it has the dangerous advantage of sounding like something Oxford could say without translating. Impegno con un libro. Impegno is a fine word, he thinks: it makes “commitment” sound less like a mood and more like a binding. It is also, in its clerical venue, the sort of term that carries a mild aura of vow. Mancini is writing in Settimana del clero, which means the weekly paper for priests, the sort of place where one is allowed to have earnestness without being laughed at for it. The book in question is by Olgiati, and the title of the book is itself a provocation. I fondamenti della filosofia classica. Grice says it aloud and immediately regrets the final adjective. Filosofia classica. As if “philosophy” were a genus and “classical” a respectable species. As if there were some other sort of philosophy that is not classical and yet still philosophy. The phrase sounds to him like saying “authentic genuine authenticity.” If philosophy has foundations and you ignore them, you are not a philosopher simpliciter; you are a man with opinions. To add classica is to suggest that philosophy comes in varieties like wine. It tempts one to ask whether there is a filosofia barocca, or a filosofia modernista, or a filosofia da tavola. He wonders—fastidiously, and with a touch of malice—what Mancini’s impegno is meant to be. Is it the engagement of finding foundations where Olgiati promised them? Or the engagement of discovering, politely, that there are none, and that the title is advertising architecture that is not there? He cannot resist turning it into a small Oxford puzzle. Suppose a man announces “foundations.” What are the minimum foundations of philosophy simpliciter—so few that even a decent chap could remember them without writing them on a blackboard? He writes three on a scrap, not as a system but as a dare. First: that one must distinguish what is said from what is meant, and hold oneself answerable for the difference. Second: that one must distinguish a reason from a cause, and not treat explanation as if it were merely mechanism. Third: that one must be prepared to revise one’s own temptations in the face of counterexample—particularly counterexamples in ordinary language, which is where our metaphysics goes to be embarrassed. He looks at the list and feels mildly pleased: it is not Olgiati’s list, certainly, but it is at least a list that can be used in tutorial. A foundation, in Oxford, is not what holds up a system; it is what prevents a clever boy from getting away with nonsense. The second item is 1951: La metafisica dell’agire. Mancini again, now in a more serious philosophical register. The title makes Grice perk up because it shifts from clergy-weekly earnestness to something nearer his own territory: action, agency, doing. Metafisica is the dangerous word, naturally, because metaphysics is what happens when philosophers begin to think they can talk without having to be checked. But agire is promising; it suggests verbs rather than nouns, and Grice has always trusted verbs more. The third item is 1953, the laurea thesis: Il non-essere. Ricerche sulla filosofia di Platone. The non-essere pleases him in a professional way, because it touches a nerve he has been worrying since his own earlier work on negation in 1938, and because he has already begun to hear, dimly, the future lecture he will give in 1962 on negative propositions. He likes, too, that Mancini has gone straight to Plato for the question of not-being, instead of doing the modern thing of pretending the whole matter began with Frege’s truth-values. Non-essere. It has a clean brutality. It does not sound like a topic chosen to impress; it sounds like a topic chosen to make trouble. And yet, having touched all three, he returns—inevitably—to the 1950 thing, because that is where the joke is. I fondamenti della filosofia classica. He imagines himself announcing in the Examination Schools tomorrow: “Today, gentlemen, we examine the foundations of classical philosophy.” The undergraduates would immediately write it down as if it were a subject, and then behave as if it were an excuse not to think. Oxford is very good at using foundations to build avoidance. Mancini’s impegno, Grice decides, is either admirable or doomed. Admirable if it is the sort of engagement that takes a big title and demands to see the goods. Doomed if it is the engagement that accepts the big title as already doing the work. The title promises foundations. A decent reviewer’s duty—whether in Settimana del clero or in the more secular theology of the Times Literary Supplement—is to ask, calmly: which foundations, exactly, and how do they show in the arguments? The door handle rattles. The tutee has arrived at last, armed with an essay and the usual hope that his own words will count as thought. Grice slides the Italian titles to one side, not because he is finished with them, but because he will use them later as a reminder of what Oxford must never forget: foundations are not grand words. Foundations are the small prohibitions that keep talk honest.Grice: Caro Mancini, ho sempre pensato che il kerygma sia una parola tanto solenne che a Oxford la usiamo quasi solo per impressionare i colleghi. Ma lei, in Italia, come riesce a mantenere la benevolenza conversazionale anche quando si parla di salvezza? Mancini: Ah, Grice, ci vuole una buona dose di ironia e molta pazienza! Qui la benevolenza si coltiva come una vigna: ogni parola può essere un grappolo, ma se non si presta attenzione, si rischia di ottenere solo aceto. La filosofia aiuta, ma anche una battuta giusta al momento giusto! Grice: Allora dovremmo fondare una cooperativa conversazionale: chi porta la benevolenza, chi porta il senso, chi porta il significato, e magari qualcuno porta il vino. Così anche Kant, tra una critica e l’altra, si rilasserebbe un po’! Mancini: Grice, mi trova d’accordo! Una cooperativa con Kant e qualche filosofo tedesco potrebbe essere l’unico modo per trasformare la malevolentia in malevolenza… Ma attenzione: se arriva Barth, bisogna preparare anche un discorso sul senso della vita, così nessuno resta alienato! Mancini, Italo (1950). Impegno con un libro. Settimana del clero: settimanale di informazione, di aggiornamento pastorale.’

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Manetti: LA ragione conversazionale.  Giannozzo Manetti (Firenze, Toscana): LA ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains what a speaker means as something recoverable by rational, publicly criticizable inference: from what is said plus shared norms of cooperation, a hearer can justify an implicature, and that justificatory route is integral to the account of meaning rather than a merely psychological or rhetorical after-effect. In the Manetti passage, “la ragione conversazionale” is approached from the opposite direction: Giannozzo Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis (completed c. 1452–53) supplies a humanist anthropology in which reason is exercised through the dignity of embodied agency, creative work, and the integration of soul and body, so that conversation becomes a scene of rational life rather than the primary mechanism for deriving unstated content. Put sharply, Grice asks how rational agents can mean more than they say and still be answerable for it, whereas Manetti supplies a picture of what the rational agent is and why such an agent has dignity: a doer and maker whose natural faculties, senses, and practical intelligence warrant positive valuation against medieval vilitas and the misery tradition associated with Innocent III. The comparison therefore casts Grice’s conversational rationality as a micro-theory of intelligible inference in talk (how reasons govern interpretation), while Manetti’s is a macro-ethic of the human person (why reason, action, and creativity belong to our excellence); and it also makes visible a continuity: Grice’s insistence on the person as a someone (not a mere thing) and on rational accountability in communicative action resonates, in a different key, with Manetti’s humanist claim that dignity is shown in acting and understanding here and now, through the unified life of body and soul. Grice: “I like M.. M.’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis is an original contribution to the history of philosophy. It shifts the focus from a purely spiritual or "misery-laden" medieval view of humanity – or the Human, as Grice prefers, toward a naturalistic and sensualist appreciation of the human being as a physical and active agent. M.’s main points regarding these approaches include: Rehabilitation of the Human Body: While medieval predecessors like Innocent often view the body as a "vile" vessel of decay, M. argues that the human body is a master-piece of divine craftsmanship.  Aesthetic Perfection: M. provides a detailed, almost anatomical defense of the body’s beauty and functional design, asserting that physical senses are not just sources of sin but are perfectly suited for interacting with the world. Incarnation as Proof: M. uses the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation to argue that because God became man, the physical human form possesses inherent, "naturalistic" dignity.  "Man as a Doer" (Active Naturalism). M. moves away from the idea that human value is found only in passive contemplation of the divine. Creative Potential: M. celebrates human achievement in the arts, sciences, and architecture as evidence of our excellence. This "sensualist" focus on what humans produce in the physical world validates secular life as a worthy pursuit. The World as a Human Product. M. famously argues that everything surrounding us — cities, paintings, machines—is the work of humans, making us co-creators with God through our physical and intellectual labur. Integration of Body and Soul: Rather than seeing the PERSON – ‘the someone,’ not the something, in Grice’s view -- as a soul trapped in a body, M. defines the human as a unique union of both.  Psycho-Somatic Unity: M. treats the human person as a unique amalgam, where the soul’s excellence is expressed through the body's actions and senses. Originality: This was a radical break from the "misery of the human condition" tradition. It established a philosophical basis for the Renaissance ideal of the "artist as creative genius" and the "man of action".  Challenge to Asceticism The work is a direct refutation of De miseria humanae conditionis.  M. rejects the concept of vilitas – worthlessness --, replacing it with a positive valuation of human nature that includes our natural desires and sensory experiences. M. suggests that the purpose of being human is to "act and understand," placing the weight of personhood on the exercise of natural faculties in the here-and-now. ” Keywords: dignity. M. Napoli -- è stato uno scrittore, filologo e umanista italiano, significativo esponente del primissimo rinascimento letterario, oltre che un uomo politico e diplomatico. Appartenente a una famiglia borghese, è discepolo dell'umanista TRAVERSARI . Si mise contro l'ascesa dei Medici, rifugiandosi prima a Roma e poi a Napoli, dove muore. A Roma è segretario pontificio di Niccolò, che volle rinnovare gl’uffici chiamando personaggi fidati, come lo stesso M., ma anche ROMANO (COLONNA, PEROTTI , Pietro da NOCETO, Lunense, Tortelli, VALLA; così come non è senza significato il contestuale allontanamento da Roma di Bracciolini e Flavio. A testimonianza di tale legame di fiducia, M. scrive poi la biografia di Niccolò. Abile oratore di straordinaria erudizione, è un profondo conoscitore della lingua latina e della lingua greca. Traduce al latino l'etica eudemia, l'etica nicomachea – Grice: “I gave an Oxford seminar on this with Austin and Hare – Hare never left ethics!” -- e i Magna moralia del lizio. La sua ricca biblioteca ci è in larga parte pervenuta e fa parte del fondo palatino della biblioteca vaticana. È ricordato soprattutto come l'autore del “De dignitate”. In questo testo il filosofo respinge la prospettiva religiosa secondo cui il corpo umano è legato ai vizi e alla sporcizia, destinato a soffrire per espiare il peccato originale. Al contrario, M. afferma che è una meravigliosa macchina creata da dio – Grice: “My genitorial programme is intended to see myself as God and my pirots as my creatures!” -- a sua immagine. genitorial programme. Grice: Ciò che mi colpisce maggiormente della filosofia di Manetti è la rivalutazione del corpo umano. In Inghilterra siamo spesso abituati a considerare il corpo come un semplice veicolo per la mente—quasi una "gabbia" per la vera essenza. Mi incuriosisce: cosa l'ha portato a vedere nella corporeità una fonte di dignità e di eccellenza? Manetti: Caro Grice, la mia esperienza e gli studi mi hanno insegnato che il corpo non è affatto un ostacolo, ma un capolavoro creato da Dio. La bellezza e la funzionalità della nostra struttura fisica sono la prova che ogni senso, ogni gesto, ogni azione contribuisce alla nostra dignità. Persino la dottrina cristiana dell’Incarnazione mi conferma che la materia non è vile, ma degna. Grice: Trovo affascinante l'idea che l'essere umano sia un "co-creatore" con Dio, attraverso le sue opere e il suo ingegno. In molti testi medievali si enfatizza la miseria della condizione umana; lei invece sembra voler ribaltare questa prospettiva. Secondo lei, creatività e azione sono davvero alla base del nostro valore? Manetti: Sì, Grice, credo che la dignità umana si manifesti proprio nell'agire e nel comprendere. Ogni opera, ogni città, ogni invenzione nasce dalla nostra intelligenza e volontà. Non siamo semplici contemplatori del divino, ma protagonisti attivi del mondo. Per me, essere persona significa integrare corpo e anima, desiderio e pensiero, in una unità che ci permette di trasformare la realtà e di avvicinarci, con umiltà, al mistero della creazione. Manetti, Giannozzo (1452). De dignitate et excellentia hominis. Firenze: Laurentii.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Manetti: la ragione conversazionale. Nasce in una regione, la Toscana, in cui vive una grande tradizione di poeti contadini, uomini che uniscono in sé due forti passioni: l’agricoltura e la poesia. Poeta contadino anche lui, la passione per l’agricoltura lo porta a laurearsi in viticoltura ed enologia e ad avviare, la sua azienda agricola tra le colline di Greve in Chianti, l’Azienda Agricola M. M., grazie alla quale produce vino, olio e giaggiolo.  Leonardo Manetti (Firenze, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains what a speaker means by locating it in accountable, inferential practice: hearers recover implicatures by assuming cooperation and by reasoning from what is said plus shared norms of relevance, quantity, quality, and manner, so that “meaning” is tied to publicly checkable justificatory routes rather than to private associations. In the Manetti passage, by contrast, “la ragione conversazionale” is presented less as a formal normative engine for deriving implicatures and more as a lived, vernacular rationality rooted in Tuscan forms of life: the poet-contadino who moves between vineyard work and verse treats conversation as continuous with craft, rhythm, and local sociability (Greve in Chianti, mutual-aid society, theatre and local history), and the playful wine-talk frames “reason” as something grown, tended, and shared rather than calculated from maxims. The result is a contrast between Grice’s analytic ambition to show how conversational meaning is governed by principles that make implicature tractable and criticizable, and Manetti’s more humanistic, regional idiom in which conversational reason is embodied in practices of cultivation and poetic expression—still rational, but rational in the sense of practical attunement and communal measure, where the “point” of an utterance is as much convivial and formative as it is inferentially derivable. (A small factual note: the “Leonardo Manetti (1545) Rime” attribution in the passage does not match what is readily findable about the contemporary Leonardo Manetti of Greve in Chianti.) Nasce in una regione, la Toscana, in cui vive una grande tradizione di poeti contadini, uomini che uniscono in sé due forti passioni: l’agricoltura e la poesia. Poeta contadino anche lui, la passione per l’agricoltura lo porta a laurearsi in viticoltura ed enologia e ad avviare, la sua azienda agricola tra le colline di Greve in Chianti, l’Azienda Agricola M. M., grazie alla quale produce vino, olio e giaggiolo. A Greve, M. partecipa alla realtà socioculturale del paese, in particolare con la Società di Mutuo Soccorso, realizzando attività teatrali come Forconi di Pace e pubblicazioni di libri storici locali come il Popolo dei Ricordi (Nuova Toscana Editrice). L’amore per il suo territorio e per i prodotti che esso offre plasma la personalità di Leonardo che, fin da piccolo, respira il clima operoso dell’azienda di famiglia: Le forbici, la falce, la zappa, una penna, un pezzo di carta, un libro sono alcuni degli attrezzi che uso quotidianamente e per me sono importanti allo stesso modo. Io amo scrivere e leggere ma anche lavorare in campagna. È un lavoro faticoso ma l’ho sempre fatto volentieri fin da bambino, quando seguivo mio nonno e mio padre nei campi. Non vedevo l’ora di tornare a casa, dopo la scuola, per partecipare alla vendemmia! Attendevo l’arrivo dell’estate per poter andare a lavorare in vigna. Mi piace tagliare i rami di una pianta per dare alla chioma una forma ben bilanciata che poi garantisce la nascita di buoni frutti. Ogni tanto mi fermo per una pausa, osservo quello che mi circonda e la natura mi regala grandi emozioni. A fine giornata, sono stanco ma felice, e a volte mi metto a scrivere i pensieri che per tutto il giorno mi hanno ronzato nella mente. La passione per l’agricoltura lo informa di una sensibilità per il mondo che lo circonda che si riproduce nella scrittura in versi, la sua seconda passione, al quale si avvia da autodidatta. La poesia diventa per Leonardo un rifugio, “porto amico” e mezzo per esprimere un vasto universo di emozioni che riversa nelle sue pubblicazioni. Grice: Manetti, mi dica la verità: tra la vendemmia e la scrittura, quale le dà più soddisfazione? Io, al massimo, raccolgo implicature nei campi della filosofia!  Manetti: Caro Grice, difficile scegliere! La vendemmia mette alla prova muscoli e pazienza, ma scrivere versi è come raccogliere grappoli di emozioni. Se però trova una metafora migliore del vino, la accolgo a braccia aperte!  Grice: Ah, allora siamo d’accordo: ogni filosofo dovrebbe almeno una volta provare a vendemmiare. Chissà, magari scoprirebbe che una massima conversazionale funziona anche tra i filari — basta non farsi distrarre dalle api!  Manetti: Grice, in campagna ogni conversazione è genuina come un bicchiere di Chianti! Se la filosofia la prende troppo sul serio, le consiglio una pausa tra i vigneti: le idee crescono meglio al sole e, se va male, almeno si porta a casa una bottiglia! Manetti, Leonardo (1545). Rime. Firenze: Giunti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mangione: LA ragione conversazionale, l’implicatura conversazionale d’alcuni aspetti del nazionalismo culturale nella logica italiana, logica matematica. Grice: “As I look upon my former self, I realise I would have NEVER even touched with a barge the symbols used by logicians, had it be not be that my own pupil, Strawson, was thinking to write a tract for Methuen about it. We discussed it in private, and I shared my thoughts with him that most of his intricacies could be extricated by appeal to a principle of rational discourse which I had come across in the quite separate – and properly philosophical area – of the philosophy of perception.  Corrado Mangione (Bagnara, Calabria): LA ragione conversazionale, l’implicatura conversazionale d’alcuni aspetti del nazionalismo culturale nella logica italiana, logica matematica. Mangione stages a productive friction between two “rationalities” that Grice constantly tries to keep distinct but connected: the rationality of formal systems (operators, natural deduction, Fregean ideography, logicism’s ambition to make mathematics into logic) and the rationality of talk (the cooperative, intention-sensitive norms that make implicature calculable in ordinary conversation). Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning says that what is meant beyond what is said is recoverable by a hearer as a piece of practical reasoning under shared expectations (relevance, sufficiency, clarity, sincerity), whereas Mangione is portrayed as insisting that the opposite of “formal” logic is not “informal” chat but “material” logic, i.e., a different kind of principled constraint tied to content and scientific/mathematical practice. That contrast sharpens a key Gricean moral: formal calculi can model validity, but they do not by themselves explain why a speaker’s use of “some,” “all,” “or,” “if” communicates what it does in an actual dinner-table exchange; the “missing link” is conversational rationality, the background normativity that Strawson (in your story) is pushed to connect to logical operators via Grice’s earlier work in perception and “principles of rational discourse.” Online bibliographic details for “Corrado Mangione (1948). La filosofia di Corrado Mangione. Palermo: Sandron” are not something I can independently verify, so that imprint reads like the project’s typical playful pseudo-archive; but the conceptual role is clear and effective: Mangione stands for the Italian early-20th-century tendency to treat logic as a serious mathematical enterprise with national traditions and technical lineage, while Grice stands for the claim that even the most technical symbolism ultimately relies on, and is intelligible through, the everyday inferential habits of speakers who can still laugh, cancel an implicature, and pass the wine without confusing “and” with “therefore.” Grice: “As I look upon my former self, I realise I would have NEVER even touched with a barge the symbols used by logicians, had it be not be that my own pupil, Strawson, was thinking to write a tract for Methuen about it. We discussed it in private, and I shared my thoughts with him that most of his intricacies could be extricated by appeal to a principle of rational discourse which I had come across in the quite separate – and properly philosophical area – of the philosophy of perception. Strawson indeed made himself the connection to the logical operators from my referring to this principle of rational discourse in the philosophical context of the ‘philosophy of perception’! I like M.; for various reasons: He notes that logic is more related to mathematics – indeed, for logicism mathematics IS logic – so the opposite to ‘formal’ logic is ‘material’ logic, not ‘informal’ as Ryle and Strawson want – Mangione has studied ‘categories’ and talks of ‘logica matematica’ – he has studied Frege’s ideografia, as he aptly translates his grundscrift, and he tried to improve on the ‘nationalism’ which was ubiquitous in logic in Italy in the ‘primo novecento’!” Insegna a Milano. Diresse le due collane matematiche della casa editrice Progresso tecnico editoriale di Milano, appendice della A. Martello editore. Presso l'editore Boringhieri di Torino dirige Testi e manuali della scienza, serie di logica matematica. Contribuito alla storia della filosofia di GEYMONAT con contributi sulla logica matematica. Amplia e sistematizza tali contributi nella Storia della logica. Il saggio costituisce un ampio ed esaustivo lavoro di ricognizione e sintesi. Logica matematica divertente, Harris PEANO, no, e, o, se, some, at least one, all, il. Simbolistica, logica simbolica, logica formale, logica materiale, semantica, semantica per un sistema di deduzione naturale, SYMBOLO, whoof and proof, w’f ‘n’ proof, la proclama di .: logica matematica, la logica matematica deve essere divertente!” Grice has the 1964 volume open in the only part of a book that cannot talk back: the title-page. Elementi di logica matematica. He lets the collocation sit there a moment, as if it had walked into High Table wearing the wrong tie. Logica matematica. It offends him in two directions at once. “Logic” is, for him, what Aristotle did when he tried to make sense of how we actually reason and speak; “mathematical” is what happens when a symbol is treated as if it had never been in a sentence. Put them together and you have, in his ear, a category mistake elevated to a discipline: as if “logic” were an annex of mathematics, rather than the grammar of thought that happens also to be useful when you do mathematics. He turns a page and then stops, because turning pages is already dangerously close to reading, and he has a principle—borrowed from the Revd. Sidney Smith—that saves time and preserves innocence: never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. If the title is bad, why risk being softened by the contents. Someone has told him, with the sort of factual relish people use when they think biography is explanation, that the author has the wrong credentials. Not wrong in the vulgar sense—Oxford does not allow vulgarity until after the port—but wrong in Grice’s private, fastidious sense: the man has been trained in the wrong sort of seriousness. He enrolled in Mathematics at Modena in 1948–49. Military service interrupted things from 1951 to 1955. He moved to Milan in 1955 and completed his degree in 1959–60, under Carlo Felice Manara, an algebraic geometer. All perfectly respectable, all perfectly irrelevant, Grice thinks, if what you are going to do is tell people what “if” means, or what “or” does, or how “some” behaves in the mouth of a decent chap who is trying to be understood at dinner. You can almost hear the problem already. A man trained in algebraic geometry has spent his formative years learning to love entities that never talk back. Points and lines do not protest when you redefine them. Sets do not complain when you regiment them. Symbols do not sulk when you assign them meanings. But ordinary language does all of these things, constantly, and its protests are the data. Grice thinks of Strawson, and how he once had to tutor Strawson into the operators, not because Strawson lacked intelligence, but because Oxford philosophy still treated symbols as something you handled with tongs. Grice’s own relation to symbols had always been reluctant. Lit. Hum. is not a place that trains you to worship notation; it trains you to distrust it, as if every new sign were a new opportunity for someone to cheat with a flourish. And yet the blue-collars have arrived. That is how his mind puts it, not with malice, but with that Oxford instinct for social metaphors. Mathematicians, engineers, the men with apparatus and proofs, turning up in the philosophy of language as if the whole business of meaning could be stabilised by better fonts. It is as if they think they can do to “if” what they do to a conic section: fix it by definition and then proceed. But “if” is not a conic section. It is a civilised manoeuvre. It lives by implicature. It lives by what a speaker is entitled to assume a hearer will recover. It is the very place where intention, not notation, does the work. And Grice cannot help suspecting that a textbook called logica matematica will treat “if” as though the only respectable “if” were the truth-functional one, the one that behaves like a neat connective in a calculus and never like a threat, a hedge, a concession, or an invitation. He looks again at the title and feels the odd double irritation: the irritation with the mathematicising of logic, and the irritation with Oxford’s own snobbery about credentials. Because, truth be told, the mathematician has one advantage: he is not seduced by English. He is not tempted to treat a quirk of idiom as a metaphysical revelation. He is not tempted, as some of Grice’s pupils are, to write a PPE thesis in which the word “some” is treated as if it contained the secret of Being. The mathematician may be tone-deaf, but at least he is not melodramatic. Still, tone-deafness is expensive in the territory Grice cares about. A man who does not hear the difference between what is said and what is conveyed will end up putting the wrong things into “meaning,” and then congratulating himself on having simplified. Grice has seen that disease up close, even in Oxford, even in Austin’s circle: the temptation to treat what is implicitly conveyed as part of the sense, as if the language itself, not the utterer, were doing the implicating. So he closes the book—again without reading it—and thinks, with a kind of resigned amusement, that this is exactly why he has been giving those classes on “conversation.” Not because he wants to compete with logica matematica, but because he needs a counterweight: a reminder that before you formalise, you must listen; and that even after you formalise, the thing you are formalising is still a practice among persons who mean things, hide things, concede things, and rely on their hearers to be intelligent in the only way that really matters—socially, cooperatively, inferentially. Let the mathematicians have their logic, he thinks. He will keep the talk.Grice: Mangione, mi dica la verità: lei ha mai provato a spiegare la logica matematica a qualcuno durante una cena con amici? Io, onestamente, preferisco le implicature conversazionali—almeno si può fare qualche battuta senza rischiare di confondere tutti! Mangione: Ah, caro Grice, provare sì! Ma tra il “no, e, o, se” e la simbologia di Peano, spesso finisce che mi chiedono se ho portato anche il vino. D’altronde, la logica matematica deve essere divertente: se non si ride almeno un po’, si rischia di prenderla troppo sul serio! Grice: Ecco, allora siamo d’accordo: la logica, come la conversazione, funziona meglio con un pizzico di leggerezza. Strawson voleva scrivere trattati complicati, ma io preferisco pensare che “some”, “at least one”, “all” siano come le olive nell’insalata: ognuna dà sapore, ma senza esagerare. Mangione: Perfetto, Grice! In fondo, tra “whoof and proof”, la semantica e la logica nazionale, l’importante è non perdere il gusto della discussione. E se la logica diventa troppo seria, basta ricordare che la logica matematica può essere davvero… divertente! Mangione, Corrado (1964). Logica matematica. Torino: Boringhieri.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Manfredi: l’implicatura conversazionale del liber de homine – filosofia emiliana – la scuola di Bologna -- filosofia bolognese – scuola di Bologna -- filosofia italiana –  (Bologna).  Girolamo Manfredi (Bologna, Emilia): l’implicatura conversazionale del liber de homine. Manfredi is a particularly good foil for Grice because the passage makes him a professional of “perché”: he systematizes questions (medical, natural-philosophical, even divinatory) into a popular explanatory machine, whereas Grice systematizes how questions and answers work as rational moves in a talk exchange. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a disciplined inference from what is said to what is meant, licensed by cooperative expectations; Manfredi’s Il Perché / Liber de homine (first published 1474, with a well-known 1497 Bologna edition) already thematizes the same inferential appetite, but in a different register—causal explanation, pseudo-Aristotelian “Problems,” and prognostication—where readers are trained to move from sign to conclusion (clouds to rain, budgets to a “hard year”) with varying degrees of warrant. That lets you sharpen Grice’s central distinction: for Grice, “x means that p” in the natural-sign sense (spots mean measles; clouds mean rain) is not yet speaker-meaning, and the rationality of implicature is normative and defeasible (it can be cancelled, challenged, recalculated); for Manfredi, the cultural practice of reading signs—medical symptoms, astral configurations, providential “omens”—is precisely where rationality and superstition blur, and the interpretive leap can masquerade as necessity. Historically, the biographical scaffolding in your passage aligns with standard sources (Bologna/Ferrara training; academic career in Bologna; dispute with Pico’s attack on divinatory astrology; early vernacular plague treatise printed Bologna 1478; prognostication for 1490 printed Bologna 1489; and the long afterlife of Il Perché/Liber de homine), and this supports the comparison: Manfredi exemplifies an early modern culture of inference hungry for “why,” while Grice supplies the later analytic discipline that separates mere symptom-reading from accountable communicative inference—showing that the most interesting “perché” in conversation is not just a request for causes, but a test of what reasons a speaker has given the hearer to draw, or refuse, a conclusion. Grice: “I once punned on Alexander Pope’s study of mankind, man – philosopherkind – Manfredi didn’t!”  Grice: “I like the “liber de homine.” It reminds me that among my unpublications there’s a ‘Why’!” Grice: “While the Italians aptly use the same particle for ‘why’ and ‘for’, the Anglo-Saxons didn’t! That must be because ‘for’ is usually otiose: “Why are you eating.” “For I am hungry, say I!” cf. “I am hungry.” – Studia a Bologna e Ferrara. Entra in contatto con circoli umanistici. Insegna a Bologna. Riceve un compenso superiore alla media ed è il docente più citato nei Libri partitorum. Esercita l'astrologia ee attaccato da PICO  (“Disputazione contro l’astrologia divinatrice””).  La sua opera “Il Perché” fu un successo per secoli.  Altre saggi: “Tractato de la pestilentia,” Bologna, Johann Schriber, “Pro-gnosticon” (Bologna, Bazaliero Bazalieri) “Liber de homine,”  Impressum Bononiae, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. divination. Those clouds mean rain – Those clouds mean death. --. Grice: “The present budget means that we will have a bad year – Prognosticon. “The present budget means we’ll have a hard year, but we shan’t have.” – x means that p entails p. Pico approaches Manfredi, “You said that the budget for 1490 meant that we would have a hard year, but we  didn’t!” liber de homine, la tradizione pseudo-peripatetici dei problemi – il problema – la questione di ‘per che’ – Grice sulle tipi di domanda – la domanda dei bambini – la domanda di Grice a bambini, “Can a sweater be red and green all over? No stripes or spots allowed? – The philosopher’s question – ‘why is there something rather than nothing? Why I am me and not you?  l’implicatura divinatrice. Grice has Manfredi open at precisely the place where he is safest: the title-page. De hominis procreatione. He reads it as if it were a confession, which is what titles are when they are in Latin and the author is feeling brave. Procreatione. He pauses, because pro- does too much work for so small a syllable. It sounds like a political faction. Pro-creation. In favour of creation. As if there were an anti-creation party in Bologna and Manfredi is writing a tract for it. As if the very existence of the human were a motion that had been carried in Congregation by a narrow vote. He catches himself smiling at the absurdity of his own pedantry and quotes, with the private reverence he keeps for good professional excuses, the Revd. Sidney Smith: I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. Which gives him permission to remain at the title and still feel virtuous. De hominis procreatione is not, on the face of it, a theological title. It could be medicine, physiology, the Aristotelian “how does this happen” genre—Manfredi’s entire profession of perché. But the word creatio has a way of summoning God, even when the author has not asked for Him. And Grice has already been criticised—by people who dislike his “creature construction,” and by at least one colonial logician with a taste for moralising about rationality—for the habit of putting himself, exegesis-wise, in the genitorial position of God and speaking of creatures, as if the only intelligible source of normativity were a creator’s intention. He can hear the complaint: Grice, why are you always dragging God into it? It is a cheap exegetical device. It is metaphysics by parental analogy. So he looks at creatura, and tries—fastidiously—to remove God from it, as if God were an optional implicature and not part of the conventional meaning. Creatura comes from creare: to create, yes, but also to produce, to bring forth, to cause to grow, to elect, to appoint. The Latin verb has a civic, Roman smell: you “create” a consul by appointing him. You “create” an arrangement by establishing it. Cicero uses creare without requiring a Genesis narrative behind it. A creatura, in that older heathen register, need not be a theological dependent. It can be something made, something produced, something brought about by agency that is not divine—by natura, perhaps, or by art, or by the republic’s machinery. Mother Nature, then. What is wrong with that? Nothing, Grice thinks, except the scholastic taste for nouns. The medievals could not leave a verb alone. They had to turn actions into substances and then begin arguing about the substances as if the arguments were discoveries. Nihil ex nihilo, for instance, is already bad taste: two nouns and a preposition trying to do the work of an injunction. Cicero, he thinks, would never have declined nihil into a metaphysical talisman the way the schools later did. The scholastics like their Latin as if it were a cupboard for abstractions; the Romans liked it as a tool for moving an audience. So why procreatione? If the subject is how humans come to be—generation, conception, heredity—then procreatio is the honest word. Procreare is not the cosmic making of the world; it is begetting, producing offspring, bringing forth a new human. It is genitorial, yes, but not necessarily divine. It sits closer to natura than to Deus. And yet, Grice suspects, the scholastic ear hears the pro- and the creatio and immediately begins to smell doctrine: creation, and therefore Creator, and therefore the whole rhetorical possibility of putting oneself above the creature and issuing norms. That is exactly the temptation he himself has indulged, and exactly why he lingers here, guilty but entertained. The creature construction, properly speaking, is the move where you describe rational communication by imagining what a creator would intend his creatures to do: as if “meaning” could be derived from manufacture, and as if normativity could be grounded in design. Bennett and his kind call this imperial: a colonial moral psychology in which the theorist plays God and the speakers are his obedient fauna. But Manfredi is not trying to play God. Manfredi is trying to play Bologna: physician-philologist, systematiser of why-questions, writer for people who want explanation with a faint taste of the learned. He writes De hominis procreatione because the public wants the how and the why of begetting, not because he wants to legislate creation into theology. Still, Grice cannot resist the last dry twist. If you must say it in Latin, why choose the one root that invites the Creator? Why not De generatione hominis, and be done with it? Generatio keeps you safely in Aristotle’s barnyard and out of Genesis. Procreatio, by contrast, sounds as if you are doing domestic physiology while waving, unintentionally, at the heavens. He closes the book—still unread—because the title has already done enough. Manfredi, he thinks, has given him a useful reminder before his class on conversation: that whole doctrines can ride on tiny prefixes, and that the worst philosophical habits often begin as perfectly innocent morphological choices. He will go and talk to his students about what is meant, and what is implicated, and he will remember, with some humility, that sometimes the theologian is not in the text at all; he is in the reader, over-interpreting pro-.Grice: Caro Manfredi, ho sempre trovato affascinante la tua attenzione per il "perché" delle cose. Nel tuo "Liber de homine", sembra che tu voglia andare oltre le semplici spiegazioni meccaniche e arrivare al cuore delle domande umane. Secondo te, quanto conta la curiosità nella ricerca filosofica? Manfredi: Carissimo Grice, la curiosità è il motore primo della filosofia! Senza domande, senza quel "perché" che ci inquieta fin da bambini, non avremmo mai scritto né letto nulla. Nel mio lavoro, come sai, ho cercato di mostrare che perfino dietro una domanda apparentemente ingenua si nasconde una profonda sete di senso. Grice: Mi colpisce anche il tuo interesse per le implicature, soprattutto in relazione alla divinazione e alle previsioni. In Inghilterra, spesso distinguiamo tra ciò che qualcuno dice e ciò che intende davvero; tu, invece, sembri suggerire che anche le stelle possano "parlare" per implicito! Manfredi: Eh sì, Grice! L’uomo ha sempre cercato segni nel cielo e nella natura, quasi come se il mondo stesso volesse suggerirci risposte. Ma la vera sfida, per il filosofo come per l’astrologo, è interpretare questi segni con ragionevolezza, distinguendo ciò che è fondato da ciò che è solo superstizione. In fondo, anche la filosofia è un’arte del leggere tra le righe! Manfredi, Girolamo (1462). De hominis procreatione. Bologna: Benedicti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Manicone: la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatura conversazionale della filosofia del Gargano.  Michelangelo Manicone (Vico del Gargano, Foggia, Puglia): la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatura conversazionale della filosofia del Gargano. Manicone embodies a strongly contextual and practical Enlightenment rationality: knowledge is earned through direct observation of Gargano’s natural systems, and philosophy is justified by its capacity to guide action toward human well-being and what we would now call sustainability. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning, by contrast, treats “context” not as landscape or ecology but as the shared background that makes utterances inferentially tractable: speakers can mean more than they say because hearers can rationally reconstruct intentions under norms of cooperation (relevance, informativeness, clarity, sincerity), and those reconstructions are, in principle, accountable. The comparison the passage invites is that Manicone expands “context” outward (environment, economy, civic life) while Grice analyzes it inward (the structured expectations that govern uptake in a talk exchange); yet the two fit surprisingly well if you treat conversation as a human ecosystem. On that reading, Manicone’s insistence that everything is connected and that reason must serve the common good parallels Grice’s insistence that meaning is not private but socially governed: the “good” conversation, like the “good” use of nature, depends on restraint, shared norms, and sensitivity to consequences (what an utterance will do to an audience, what a policy will do to an environment). Historically, Manicone is indeed remembered as an 18th-century Capitanata cleric-naturalist associated with works on Apulian/Daunian “physics” and empirical inquiry; your citation of a 1797 Naples imprint functions in the same pseudo-archival style as the project’s other entries, and it supports the conceptual contrast: Grice makes conversational reason a theory of how meaning is responsibly inferable, while Manicone makes reason a discipline of situated stewardship—of land, of society, and, by extension, of the contexts within which any human “saying” can matter. Grice: “Unlike Italy’s, the geography of Oxford – or dreaming spires, as scholars call it – is rather boring!” Una delle personalità più caratteristiche del suo tempo della Capitanata. Definito il monacello rivoluzionario a causa della sua bassa statura, la sua indole illuministica consiste in una sete di sapere che non si placa col dogmatismo, ma coll’esperienza diretta, lo studio approfondito dei fenomeni naturali e della scienza, un’osservazione empirica che puo fornire una risposta valida e concreta alle varie problematiche e quindi un aiuto pratico all'uomo, al suo benessere e sviluppo, alla sua felicità. Ciò gli costa l'inimicizia di chi, seppur in pieno illuminismo, diffida e demonizza la scienza.  Lo sviluppo economico-sociale che teorizza M. consiste in uno sviluppo connesso e, per certi versi, dipendente dall'ambiente, perché egli ritene che la natura  è una fonte primaria di ricchezza e la sua distruzione segna la fine dello sviluppo. M. può essere considerato un profeta dello sviluppo sostenibile, perché, quando le industrie sono inesistenti, ha un’ampiezza di vedute che gli consente di prevedere le conseguenze disastrose che porta l’uso improprio e scriteriato delle risorse naturali.  Le opere in cui M. tratta, tra gl’altri, il tema dello sviluppo sostenibile, sono La fisica appula, cioè dell'Apulia, e La fisica daunica, cioè della Daunia, antico nome della Capitanata. ORAZIO nell’epistola. Garganum mugire putes nemus. Riferisce che il disboscamento del promontorio inizia col taglio barbaro dei pini nel territorio “Difesa” di Vico del Il contesto del contesto. "Philosophers often say that context is very important. Let us take this remark seriously. Surely, if we do, we shall want to consider this remark in its relation to this or that problem, i. e., in context, but also in itself, i. e., out of context.” Grice, The general theory of context. La filosofia del gargano. Grice: Manicone, ho sempre pensato che il contesto sia fondamentale per comprendere davvero il significato di una conversazione. Lei, che ha indagato così a fondo le relazioni tra uomo, natura e ragione, come interpreta il ruolo del contesto nella filosofia? Manicone: Per me il contesto non è solo uno sfondo: è la radice di ogni comprensione. Nel Gargano, la natura ha sempre insegnato che tutto è connesso; anche il pensiero umano nasce dall’osservazione concreta dell’ambiente. Senza il contesto – direi – la filosofia rischia di perdersi nelle nuvole! Grice: Trovo affascinante la sua prospettiva! In Inghilterra, troppo spesso dimentichiamo la concretezza del vivere quotidiano. Lei sembra anticipare quello che oggi chiameremmo “sviluppo sostenibile”. Pensa che la filosofia abbia il dovere di guidare anche le scelte pratiche? Manicone: Esattamente, caro Grice! La vera filosofia per me è quella che migliora la vita delle persone e custodisce la natura. Studiare, osservare, dialogare: così possiamo davvero aiutare l’uomo a essere felice senza distruggere ciò che lo circonda. In fondo, la ragione nasce per servire il bene comune! Manicone, Michelangelo (1797). La natura e la società. Napoli: Stamperia Reale.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Manilio: il portico romano -- Roma – filosofia italiana Marco Manilio (Roma, Lazio): il portico romano. Manilius (the Roman poet-astronomer of the Astronomica, often dated to the Augustan–Tiberian period) is made into a hard determinist of the Portico: fate governs not only events but even thought and will, so “freedom” collapses into acceptance of what is already written in the stars. That stance is a useful counter-image for Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning, which depends on a very un-Stoic kind of agency: speakers choose what to make explicit and what to leave to inference, and hearers rationally reconstruct what is meant by assuming cooperative norms (relevance, informativeness, clarity, sincerity) and attributing intentions that function as reasons for uptake. If Manilius is right that even our inner moves are fated, then Grice’s central explanatory engine—intention recognized as intention—looks less like rational governance and more like a post hoc story we tell about what was bound to happen anyway; “implicature” would become not a calculable inference under shared norms but merely another phenomenon subsumed under cosmic necessity. Conversely, the Manilius contrast helps highlight what Grice is committed to: even when conversational practice feels habitual or culturally scripted, it is still a normative space in which speakers can be held responsible for what they invite others to infer, and hearers can demand reasons (“why did you say it that way?”) in a way that a determinist cosmology tends to flatten. Historically, Manilius is indeed associated with an astrology-laden, fate-saturated worldview (though scholars debate how strictly Stoic or merely astrological his determinism is), and that background makes your juxtaposition sharp: Grice’s “conversational reason” is governance by mutually recognizable rational standards inside talk, while Manilius’ “reason” is governance by the cosmos, where even the joke is credited to Fate rather than to the speaker. Grice: “We seldom discussed ‘freedom’ with Austin, but after my seminars on Kant’s critique of ‘practical’ or buletic, as I prefer, reason – I found that Kant was a liberal, in the sense that he wanted to liberate himself, and all of us – qua persons – from everything! This struck a louder chord than the silly tune Isaiah Berlin was playing as the professor in the history of ideas – about positive (free to) and negative (free from) freedom!” Filosofo italiano. Porch. Astronomer and poet. He writes a long poem on astronomical matters, part of which survives. He takes and extreme position on the subject of fate, believing that not even thoughts – or the will -- are exempt from its influence.  liberta, il libero. GRICEVS: Salvē, Manlī. Audīvī tē Porticūm Rōmānum colere; ego autem post Kantium suspicor lībertātem esse artem—praesertim artem ēvadendī. MANLIVS: Salvē, Grīcē. Ego in porticū ambulō, sed Fātum mecum ambulat; nec cōgitātiōnēs meae sunt līberae—nisi forte Fātum est optimus paedagōgus. GRICEVS: Kantius tamen “līberālem” sē dīcit: vult sē atque omnēs nōs—quā personās—ab omnibus līberāre. Berlin autem cantillat: “līber ā” et “līber ad”; mihi vidētur quasi tibicen duās tibias habeat, sed nūllam citharam. MANLIVS: Ha! apud mē “līber ad” est tantum: līber ad patiendum quod iam scrīptum est. Sed nē trīstis sīs: sī omnia Fātum regit, tum etiam tuum iocum Fātum composuit—et certe bene composuit. So Speranza has three Manlios. Are they related as per father-son, or other because Speranza and Grice are thinking of three different weekly essay assignments if that were the case -- thanks. Short answer: they are not three members of one traceable little family in the father-son sense. The first thing is to separate the names carefully. Marco Manilio is not a Manlius at all, but a Manilius. That means your first figure belongs, if anything, with the gens Manilia, not with the gens Manlia. The sources themselves warn that the Manilii are often confused with the Manlii. So as a matter of gens, Marco Manilio should be kept apart from the two Manlii. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] So already the answer becomes easier. Marco Manilio: different gens, namely Manilia, not Manlia. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] Lucio Manlio Torquato: a Manlius of the Torquati, firmly inside the gens Manlia. [en.wikipedia.org], [jstor.org], [epicureanfriends.com] Publio Manlio Vopisco: also presented under gens Manlia, but not as part of the same securely traced father-son line as Lucio Manlio Torquato. [en.wikipedia.org], [commons.wi...imedia.org], [epicureanfriends.com] That means Speranza’s “three Manlios” are, strictly speaking, not three members of one clearly connected domestic chain. One is not even a Manlius, but a Manilius. The other two do belong to the wider gens Manlia, but from what these sources show, they are not to be asserted as father and son, nor as a neat little immediate lineage. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [epicureanfriends.com], [commons.wi...imedia.org] The strongest relation you can safely claim is only this: Lucio Manlio Torquato and Publio Manlio Vopisco are both placed within the much broader gens Manlia, one through the distinguished Torquati, the other through a different cognominal route. But the Torquati themselves required intricate genealogical reconstruction even within their own branch, which is already a warning against over-neat kinship claims. [en.wikipedia.org], [jstor.org] So if Speranza and Grice want three weekly essay assignments, I would say yes, and with good reason: one on Marco Manilio the astrologising Manilius, separate gens one on Lucio Manlio Torquato, the Epicurean Manlius of the Torquati one on Publio Manlio Vopisco, the later imperial or antiquarian Manlius associated with the villa tradition and Statius. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [jstor.org], [epicureanfriends.com], [commons.wi...imedia.org] In dry Speranza style: The three are united less by blood than by the dangerous hospitality of Roman names. Marco Manilio is not one of the Manlii at all, but of the easily confounded Manilii; Lucio Manlio Torquato belongs securely to the gens Manlia, specifically to the Torquati; Publio Manlio Vopisco belongs, if one may trust the antiquarian habit, to the same broad Manlian field, but not as a recoverable son or grandson of the former. They are therefore not a tidy father-son sequence, but three distinct essay occasions, which is perhaps more useful to Grice and kinder to genealogy. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [jstor.org], [epicureanfriends.com], [commons.wi...imedia.org] If you like, I can now do either of two things here in chat only: I can give you a very short prosopographical note headed Manilii and Manlii: why the confusion matters. I can also draft three separate weekly essay titles, one for each of the three figures, in the dry Oxford-Speranza manner. And in terms of that confusion, Manilius, Manlius -- could there be an etymological reason that the old Manlia gens derives from a Manilia? in the sense that -- can you think of any good Latin lexeme with the cluster /nl/? thanks Yes, there is a perfectly good reason for the confusion, but no, I would not infer that the old gens Manlia derives from a Manilia in any historical-genealogical sense. The safer direction is the reverse abstraction: both names are usually treated as formations from the old praenomen Manius, or at least as sharing that base. That is exactly why the Manilia gens and the Manlia gens are so often confused in the sources and later handbooks. In fact the standard summaries explicitly say that the nomen Manilius seems to derive from the praenomen Manius and to share a common root with the nomen Manlius. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikiwand.com], [en.wiktionary.org] So one should think: Manius as old base Manlius as one gentilician formation Manilius as another gentilician formation not Manlia coming secondarily from Manilia. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikiwand.com] On the phonological side, your instinct about the cluster /nl/ is also good. In classical Latin, /nl/ is not a particularly comfortable or common cluster, and that is precisely why forms like Mānlius and Mānīlius invite reshaping, analogical smoothing, scribal confusion, or popular mishearing. The language has words with n+l across syllable boundaries, but it is not one of those clusters that feels especially native and plentiful. Even ordinary items like ānulus show how easily liquids and nasals live in slightly unstable company. [en.wiktionary.org], [wikiwand.com], [en.wiktionary.org] So the confusion between Manlius and Manilius is not mysterious at all. It has three supports: a shared old onomastic base in Manius very similar gentilicial morphology a slightly awkward consonantal environment that invites smoothing and manuscript drift. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikiwand.com], [en.wiktionary.org] If you want the driest formulation in Speranza’s manner, I would put it like this: The resemblance between Manlius and Manilius is not the sort that requires a family romance. It is enough that both names appear to look back toward Manius, and that Latin is only moderately hospitable to the sequence /nl/. From there the rest follows with the usual Roman generosity toward confusion: manuscript wavering, antiquarian optimism, and the perennial temptation to let one gens borrow the dignity, or the embarrassment, of another. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikiwand.com], [en.wiktionary.org] And on your last, very neat question: can I think of good Latin lexemes with /nl/? Yes, but not many that feel central or abundant. The cluster tends to occur across syllable boundaries and often in forms that are themselves somewhat morphologically shaped rather than primitive-seeming. Ānulus is the obvious everyday example; anhēlus is another case where n and l are present in the word, though not as a comfortable robust lexical pattern one would treat as especially common. So your instinct remains sound: /nl/ is possible in Latin, but not one of the language’s happiest or most emblematic clusters. [en.wiktionary.org], [en.wiktionary.org] So my short answer is: no, I would not derive gens Manlia from Manilia yes, the two are plausibly parallel formations from Manius and yes, the relative awkwardness of /nl/ helps explain why Manlius and Manilius are so temptingly confusable. [en.wikipedia.org], [wikiwand.com], [en.wiktionary.org], [en.wiktionary.org] If you like, I can do one of two things next, still here in chat only: I can give you a compact onomastic note on Manius, Manlius, Manilius, and Manlio for Speranza. I can also give you a tiny Latin-phonology note on awkward liquid clusters and why Roman names are especially prone to analogical drift.Manilio, Marco (a. u. c. DCCLXX). De voluntate. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Manlio: la ragione conversazionale dell’orto a Roma e l’implicatura conversazionale  Lucio Manlio Torquato (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale dell’orto a Roma e l’implicatura conversazionale – filosofia italiana – Grice italo, Lucius Manlius Torquatus (the Epicurean spokesman in Cicero’s De finibus) offers a Rome-and-garden analogue for what Grice later theorizes as reason-governed conversational meaning: both pictures treat “what is conveyed” as something that grows out of shared practices and expectations rather than out of bare sentence-meaning alone. For Grice, implicature is a rational, publicly recoverable inference from what is said to what is meant, licensed by cooperative norms (relevance, sufficiency, clarity, candour) and by intentions the hearer can attribute as reasons; for Manlio’s Epicurean scene, the “hortus” is a social setting in which discourse is itself a cultivated art oriented to a telos (tranquillity/pleasure) and therefore governed by its own norms of restraint, frankness, and practical focus. The torques/torquatus motif in your entry nicely sharpens the contrast: it ties Manlio to a heritage of “Manlian discipline” and public honour, yet in De finibus the Epicurean Torquatus argues that the rational basis of life is not austere display but an account of voluptas; likewise, in Grice, the rational basis of conversation is not rhetorical grandeur but the disciplined economy by which speakers make themselves intelligible while leaving some content inferable. Historically, the anchoring is sound: Cicero’s De finibus is set in 50 BC and indeed stages Torquatus defending Epicureanism in Rome; your anachronistic move is to read that hortus conversation as already a laboratory for Gricean implicature, where the “roots” of meaning lie hidden (speaker intentions, shared background, genre expectations) and the “fruit” is what the audience is entitled to take the speaker to mean beyond the explicit words. Grice: “In modern Italian, the name Lucius Manlius Torquatus would likely be rendered as Lucio Manlio Torquato. While the nomen (Manlio) was the official clan name, modern Italian surnames most often derive from the cognomen, which functioned as a hereditary nickname. If following the lineage of the gens Manlia, the primary modern surname would be Torquato. Torquato: Still exists as both a surname and a first name (most famously held by the Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso). Manlio: While less common as a surname, it survives primarily as a male given name in Italy today. Etymology and Implication The name Torquatus carries significant historical and symbolic weight: Etymology: It is derived from the Latin torquis (or torques), meaning "twisted neck-chain," "collar," or "torc". This itself comes from the verb torqueo, meaning "to twist". Literal Meaning: "Adorned with a neck-chain" or "The Collared One". Historical Origin: The title was first earned by Titus Manlius Imperiosus in 361 BC. During a battle against the Gauls, he defeated a giant Gaul in single combat and took the warrior's golden torc as a trophy, placing it around his own neck. Implications: Military Valor: It served as a permanent mark of extraordinary bravery and victory in single combat. "Manlian Discipline": The family became synonymous with extreme severity and strict adherence to duty. The original Torquatus famously executed his own son for engaging the enemy against orders, even though the son had won the fight. Nobility: As one of the gentes maiores (greatest patrician families), the name implied high social status and a long lineage of political leadership, including 13 consulships. Roma antica, orto, De finibus. Lucio Manlio Torquato. Roma. Gricevs: Salvete, Manlivs! Dic mihi, quid significat torques aureus in collo tuo? Estne signum philosophiae aut certaminis culinarii? Manlius: Torques aureus, Gricevs, est memoria antiquae virtutis Manliorum—non solum belli, sed etiam studii sapientiae, nam in orto nostro, disciplina et fortitudo pari modo coluntur. Gricevs: Pulchre dictum, Manlivs! Sed num credis virtutem esse in sola traditione, an etiam in quotidianis rebus, qualia sunt sermones et labores horti? Manlius: Gricevs, virtus vera crescit ex actionibus nostris; sicut planta in horto, radices in terra abscondit, sed fructus omnibus patet. Sic etiam sermo philosophorum florescit ex laboris cotidiana disciplina. Manlio Torquato, Lucio (a. u. c. DCCIV). De voluptate. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Manlio: La ragione conversazionale all’orto di Roma– “Don’t call me ‘Vopisco’!”  Publio Manlio Vopisco (Roma, Lazio): La ragione conversazionale all’orto di Roma– “Don’t call me ‘Vopisco’! Manlio Vopisco is made into a Roman Epicurean whose “garden” is both a physical hortus and a social technology for living well, so the rationality of talk is imagined on the model of cultivation: nature provides the seeds of communicative ability, but art (training, habit, style) makes conversation yield pleasure and tranquillity. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning can be read as a modern, analytic counterpart to that horticultural image: implicature is what grows when speakers and hearers jointly sustain norms of cooperation, so that what is meant beyond what is said is not mystical “atmosphere” but a reconstructible inference under shared expectations (relevance, sufficiency, clarity, sincerity). The contrast is that Manlio’s Epicurean setting treats conversation primarily as a practice ordered to ataraxia and voluptas—good talk as a component of the pleasant life, aided by patronage and cultivated otium—whereas Grice treats conversation as a rational practice ordered to intelligibility and accountability, in which “what you leave unsaid” must still be something your audience can reasonably be expected to work out. Historically, the biographical packaging here (a “Publio Manlio Vopisco,” patron of Statius, villa at Tivoli) blends real Roman naming patterns and later antiquarian association (the well-known Villa of Manlius Vopiscus at Tivoli) with an Epicurean “Garden” persona in a way that is more emblematic than documentary; but as an emblem it serves your comparison well: Manlio supplies the ethical end of conversation (why we want talk at all), while Grice supplies the inferential discipline that explains how talk can reliably do its work without becoming either mere charm or mere power. --  il giardino. L’orto. L’Orto. Patron of STAZIO . Grice: “When I say ‘Garden’ I mean: ‘filosofo che segue la dottrina dell’Orto” – i. e. Marius, the Epicurean! The category of ‘patron’ is more or less publicly unknown in Oxonian philosophy. The term is applied to what the stereotypical patron was applied, as when we say ‘Mecenas’ without meaning ‘Mecenas.’ In modern Italian, the surname of Publio ManlioVopisco, based on his gens (the Manlia clan), is Manlio. The name Vopisco (Vopiscus) is an ancient Latin cognomen with a specific meaning: Definition: It traditionally refers to a child born alive after the death of their twin in the womb. Etymology: While some historians like Pliny the Elder promoted this "surviving twin" definition, modern scholars consider it an antique and rare name that likely originated as a praenomen before being used as a family nickname. In the context of this specific individual, Manlio (the nomen) functions as the family name, and Vopisco(the cognomen) acts as a branch or personal identifier. Modern Italian references to his historical villa in Tivoli refer to him as Manlio Vopisco. Denarius of Lucius Manlius Torquatus. The obverse depicts the head of Roma within a torque, the emblem of the Manlii Torquati. The reverse depicts a warrior charging into battle on horseback, beneath the letter 'Q', signifying Torquatus' quaestorship. The gens Manlia (Mānlia)[1] was one of the oldest and noblest patrician houses at Rome, from the earliest days of the Republic until imperial times. The first of the gens to obtain the consulship was Gnaeus Manlius Cincinnatus, consul in 480 BC, and for nearly five centuries its members frequently held the most important magistracies. Many of them were distinguished statesmen and generals, and a number of prominent individuals under the Empire claimed the illustrious Manlii among their ancestors. la villa del filosofo. Gricevs: Salve, Manli Vopisce! Quid agis hodie inter hortos et Romae porticus? Manlio: Salve, Grice! Inter rosarum odorem et philosophorum sermonem, semper invenio pacem. Hodie in orto cogito de felicitate, ut Epicureus docuit: “Quid enim est vita nisi hortus sapientiae?” Gricevs: Bene dictum, Manli Vopisce! Sed dic mihi: Putasne rationem conversandi ortum habere in ipsa natura, an potius in arte loquendi? Manlio: Existimo rationem conversandi nasci ex natura, quae nobis dat initia, sed arte perficitur. Sicut in orto, semina ponimus, sed cultu crescunt. Manlio Vopisco, Publio (a. u. c. DCCCXLVIII). De voluptate. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mannelli: l’implicatura conversazionale degl’eroi di Virgilio – la scuola di Grimaldi  Filippo Amantea Mannelli (Grimaldi, Calabria): l’implicatura conversazionale degl’eroi di Virgilio. Mannelli functions as a Virgilian humanist foil for Grice by relocating “reason-governed meaning” from the seminar room to the epic scene: where Grice’s conversational implicature is a rational, publicly reconstructible route from what is said to what is meant under cooperative norms, Mannelli’s “heroes of Virgil” supply a culture in which much of what matters is carried by elevated understatement, prophetic indirection, and role-bound decorum—forms of communicative restraint that feel like implicature at the level of character and fate. The comic tension in the dialogue (“would Aeneas respect my maxims or prefer stoic silence?”) points to the difference: Grice’s maxims are designed to explain how ordinary interlocutors can calculate intended enrichments (and how those enrichments can be cancelled or challenged), whereas epic communication often works by making the enrichment socially or narratively compulsory: Aeneas’ piety, duty, and self-suppression are not optional “hearer inferences” so much as interpretive obligations built into the genre. Biographically, I can’t corroborate from standard online reference sources that there is a historically attested Filippo Amantea Mannelli with a 1685 imprint La filosofia morale (Napoli: Morano), and the profile you give (local Calabrian cultural institutions, “palazzo,” contributions to Calabria Letteraria, a metrical Xenia of Goethe) reads like your project’s characteristic pseudo-archival montage; but that actually strengthens the Gricean comparison, because it makes Mannelli an emblem of a different rationality of meaning: not the calculability of conversational cooperation, but the cultivated, classicizing rationality of exempla, where “what is meant” is stabilized by a shared literary canon (Virgil, Goethe, Schiller, Kant) and by institutions of remembrance (academies, libraries), rather than by the moment-to-moment mechanics of a talk exchange. Grice: “When Strawson was inaugurated as the Waynflete professor at Oxford of metaphysical philosophy, he referred in his opening lecture to myself as a hero or a god – I forget!” Filosofo italiano. Grimaldi, Cosenza, Calabria. Grice: “Like me, Mannelli loved Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Virgilio – and he has his own ‘palazzo’!” -- Fequenta il ginnasio a Cosenza. Si trasferì con la famiglia prima ad Aosta, dove termina gli studi liceali, e poi a Roma. S’interessa sempre più al mondo politico e dopo la laurea, conseguita con il massimo dei voti, ritorna a Cosenza e  venne eletto Consigliere Provinciale.  Proprio in qualità di membro del consiglio provinciale, si adoperò in prima persona per arricchire e promuovere l'ampliamento della Biblioteca Provinciale di Cosenza  Si dedicò in tempi e con modi diversi all'attività di approfondimento e divulgazione. Firmò una versione metrica della Xenia di Goethe (Roma, Paravia.  E tra i maggiori contributori della più importante rivista di arti e lettere della regione, la Calabria Letteraria. Presidente dell'Accademia Cosentina, l'istituzione accademica calabrese che vanta un'esistenza plurisecolare e che nel XVI secolo ebbe come presidente Telesio.  Opere: “Inaugurandosi il monumento al caduti grimaldesi: scultura di Cambellotti, Reggio Calabria, Editore Il Giornale di Calabria, Paravia, Le storiche Terme Luigiane: passato-presente-futuro, Cosenza, Cronaca di Calabria, L'Accademia Cosentina nella sua storia secolare e nell'oggi, Cosenza, Tip. Vincenzo Serafino. Biografia in Calabriaonline.com  M. Chiodo, L'Accademia cosentina e la sua biblioteca. Società e cultura in Calabria.  Xenia Edizione Paravia. nna Vincenza Aversa, Dopoguerra calabrese: cultura e stampa, gl’eroi di Virgilio, gl’eroe di Virgilio, l’eroe stoico, Acri, Enea come eroe stoico, gl’eroi di Vico. Grice: Mannelli, mi dica la verità: tra tutti gl’eroi di Virgilio, qual è quello che scegli per una chiacchierata davanti a un buon caffè? Mannelli: Caro Grice, senza dubbio Enea! È uno che ascolta gli dèi, si perde tra i sentimenti e alla fine trova sempre la strada… un po’ come noi filosofi dopo una lunga notte in biblioteca. Grice: E secondo lei, se Enea fosse stato a Oxford, avrebbe rispettato le mie massime conversazionali o avrebbe preferito il silenzio stoico? Mannelli: Oh, Grice, a Oxford avrebbe sicuramente detto qualcosa di sensato… ma solo dopo aver consultato il suo destino! E magari, tra una massima e l’altra, ci avrebbe invitati a fondare una nuova Accademia. Sempre che le muse fossero d’accordo! Mannelli, Filippo Amantea (1685). La filosofia morale. Napoli: Morano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Manzoni: la ragione conversazionale dell’implicature dei promessi sposi, “How CLEVER English is!” Grice: “ In I Promessi Sposi, M.’s engagement with the questione della lingua parallels ordinary-language philosophy by shifting the focus from abstract, idealized systems to the "living," everyday speech of a community. M. and the "Living" Language M.’s philosophical struggle centered on defining what constitutes a truly national language for a unified Italy.  Alessandro Manzoni (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale dell’implicature dei promessi sposi, “How CLEVER English is!” – Grice. Grice and Manzoni meet as two versions of the same wager: that meaning is not secured by an abstract system but by the rational habits of a linguistic community in action. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning says that what speakers communicate beyond what they literally say (implicature) is, in principle, inferable by any competent hearer who assumes cooperation and can reconstruct the speaker’s intentions against shared norms of relevance, adequacy, and clarity; the “cleverness” of a language is precisely that it supports this disciplined traffic between saying and meaning. Manzoni’s questione della lingua and his “rinsing in the Arno” episode dramatize the same dependence on shared practice, but at the scale of nation-building rather than turn-by-turn inference: he rewrites I promessi sposi to align with educated spoken Florentine because a national language must be a living, socially ratified medium capable of carrying common understanding, moral nuance, and comic timing without constant recourse to grammarians. Where Grice theorizes how local conversational rationality makes implicature calculable, cancellable, and accountable, Manzoni engineers the background conditions that make such rationality widely shareable—standardizing a register in which what is left unsaid can still be responsibly recovered. Historically, the outline in your passage tracks well-known facts: the 1827 “Ventisettana” edition, the later linguistic revision associated with Florence, and Manzoni’s explicit argument (in writings on the unity of the language) that language is a communal practice rather than a museum of rules; your analogy to Austin and ordinary-language philosophy then lands naturally, because both Manzoni and the Oxford tradition treat the everyday as the tribunal of sense, and both take the durability of ordinary distinctions as evidence that reason in language is a social achievement before it is a theory. Grice: “ In I Promessi Sposi, M.’s engagement with the questione della lingua parallels ordinary-language philosophy by shifting the focus from abstract, idealized systems to the "living," everyday speech of a community. M. and the "Living" Language M.’s philosophical struggle centered on defining what constitutes a truly national language for a unified Italy. Rejection of the Artificial: M. initially writes in an eclectic, bookish mix of dialects and literary forms but finds this insufficient for a unified people. The Florentine Solution: To resolve this, he famously rinses his rags in the Arno, rewriting his novel to match the contemporary, educated spoken Florentine dialect. Language as Shared Practice: His treatise, dell’unità della lingua, argued that a language is not a set of frozen rules but a shared social practice essential for national community.  Parallels with Austin and OLP Modern scholars link M.’s turn toward "ordinary life" with the work of Austin and ‘Vitters. Ordinary vs. Ideal Language: Just as Austin critiques philosophers for creating an ideal language that ignores the nuances of everyday speech, M. critiques the artificial literary Italian of his time. Speech Acts and Community: Austin’s speech act theory posits that language is something we do rather than just a set of assertions. Similarly, M. views language as the mechanism for staging community and moral acknowledgment. The Test of Survival: Austin believes ordinary language preserves distinctions that have stood the long test of the survival of the fittest. M. seeks to anchor Italian in a living dialect because it possesses the vitality and consensus that a bookish language lacks.  Philosophical Impact Italian philosophers interested in OLP found in M. an early precursor who addresses the same fundamental question: Is language a formal logical system or a set of communal habits?  Grice has the Manzoni juvenilia in front of him the way he has most of literature in front of him: by its title. He is in no mood to be converted by pages. The Revd. Sidney Smith has already supplied the only critical method a gentleman can practice without blushing: I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. Grice repeats it silently, as if it were a maxim of conversational economy: why acquire data when a heading will do. Del trionfo della libertà. He begins with the del. Of the. Why bother with “of.” We reserve that, he thinks, for poetry, and even there it is a kind of opening flourish that tries to make grammar do the work of grandeur. Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree… Milton, at least, earns his “of” by immediately handing you a subject so large it threatens to occupy the whole language. Milton can afford the preposition because he then gives you a cosmos. [poetryfoundation.org] But Manzoni’s del is adolescent solemnity. It is the linguistic equivalent of standing up very straight before one has done anything worth standing up for. “Del” says: I am about to be elevated. Grice suspects the boy is trying to sound older than fifteen by using a genitive. Then the triumph. Triumphs, Grice thinks, are not things that abstractions do. People triumph. Generals, governments, mobs, sometimes even committees triumph if they are unusually well staffed. But “la libertà” triumphing sounds French, almost aggressively so, as if the noun had marched in from Paris with its own cockade. Liberty, in English, is already a suspicious word because it arrives with politics attached; “la Libertà” in Italian, as a personified goddess, arrives with an entire theatrical apparatus. The title implies a chariot before it implies an argument. And yet the topic is not uninteresting. “Free” is a busy little predicate in English. Americans now sell alcohol-free this and sugar-free that, as if freedom were chiefly the absence of ingredients. Physicists speak of free fall, where “free” means “subject only to gravity,” which is a comic definition of freedom if you happen to be the falling object. Kant didn’t know where to begin, and that is Kant’s genius and his drawback: he begins by rearranging the furniture before he decides whether the room has a door. Manzoni, at least, begins with a proposition-like flourish: del… as if he were already filing the concept under a heading. Grice turns the page without reading it, which is his way of remaining principled. He knows enough already: it is an early political poem written around the peace of Lunéville, dressed in Dantean tercets, with Liberty personified, and with the usual youthful confidence that a large abstraction can be made to do the work of an agent. [alessandro...anzoni.org], [britannica.com] He pauses at the phrase “the triumph of liberty” and hears, uninvited, Pope’s line: The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul. “Feast” and “flow” at least tell you what sort of things they are: metaphors for a convivial state, not literal banquets and literal rivers. The triumph of liberty, by contrast, sounds like an official parade in which nobody knows who is marching and who is clapping. [metaphors....rginia.edu] The thing that bothers him most is the definite article in spirit: the triumph. Not a triumph, not some triumph, but the triumph. As if liberty ever finishes. As if liberty, once it has triumphed, stays triumphant, the way a cup remains on a shelf. A triumph is an event; liberty is a condition; and the title is already smuggling in the idea that a condition can be completed like a campaign. He imagines, in dry Oxford irritation, what a proper ordinary-language rewrite would look like, if one were not trying to sound like a young prophet in a borrowed robe. Something like: Who, exactly, has become free, from what, and at what cost. But that, of course, would not do as a title. It would sound like a tutorial question, which is precisely what Manzoni is trying to avoid. Titles are where boys conceal that they are boys. Grice closes the volume with a small satisfaction: the satisfaction of having done what he came to do without being seduced into “reading.” The title has already yielded its implicatures. It tells you the whole posture: grandeur first, analysis later; liberty as heroine; triumph as the moral punctuation mark; “del” as the adolescent genitive that tries to make the thing sound inevitable. And yet, he thinks, this is also how a career begins. Not with mastery, but with a title that overpromises. Later Manzoni will learn to rinse his language in a river and make “ordinary” do the real work. Here, at fifteen, he is still rinsing it in rhetoric. Grice stands up, leaving the poem unread, and feels he has remained fair to both Sidney Smith and Manzoni: he has judged the boy by his heading, which is the only thing a boy reliably controls, and he has conceded, without granting it too much dignity, that the topic is not uninteresting.Grice: Manzoni, mi dica, come le è venuta l'idea di “rinsaldare i panni nell’Arno”? Davvero solo i fiorentini sanno parlare come si deve o c’è qualche dialetto che le sta simpatico? Manzoni: Caro Grice, ho provato tutti i dialetti, ma nessuno mi convinceva! Il milanese era troppo diretto, il lombardo troppo “brusco”, e il toscano mi sembrava la ricetta perfetta: limpido, elegante e capace di mettere tutti d’accordo senza litigare. Grice: Se avesse chiesto a Austin, le avrebbe suggerito di scrivere in “lingua ordinaria”, magari quella che si usa nei bar di Oxford! Ma dicono che nei Promessi Sposi la lingua è viva perché nasce dalla gente, non dai grammatici. Ha mai pensato di ambientare il romanzo in Inghilterra? Manzoni: Ah, Grice, se avessi ambientato tutto a Londra, “Don Abbondio” sarebbe diventato “Father Bond”, e Renzo avrebbe chiesto il permesso per sposarsi al pub! La verità è che la lingua migliore è quella che ti permette di ridere e piangere insieme, e magari capire cosa si sta dicendo senza bisogno di dizionario. In fondo, la lingua è come il pane: deve essere fresca, genuina e per tutti! Manzoni, Alessandro (1801). Del trinfo della liberta. Milano.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marafioti – la scuola di Polistena -- filosofia calabrese Girolamo Marafioti (Polistena, Calabria). In your passage, Marafioti is a useful counterpoint to Grice because he represents meaning as something anchored in traces, authorities, and memorial technique, whereas Grice treats meaning in conversation as something anchored in publicly reconstructible practical reasoning between interlocutors. Grice’s “reason-governed conversational meaning” explains how an audience is entitled to move from what is said to what is meant (implicatures generated under expectations of cooperation, relevance, adequacy, and clarity), and it makes that movement accountable: if you drew the inference, you can in principle show why it was warranted. Marafioti’s historical project in the Croniche et antichità di Calabria—written by a Franciscan continuator correcting and supplementing Barrio, using fragmentary sources, and motivated by preserving local sanctity and civic memory—works with a different “rationality”: not the on-the-fly rationality of turn-taking, but the curatorial rationality of selection, emendation, and authoritative compilation, where what is “meant” by Calabria’s past often has to be reconstructed from gaps and lacunae rather than inferred from cooperative norms. Online reference summaries broadly confirm the outline that Marafioti’s biography is sparse and largely inferred from his own works; that he produced Croniche et antichità di Calabria in five books with an early Naples printing and a later expanded Paduan edition; and that he also wrote a Latin treatise on mnemonics that was successful enough to be translated into Italian—details that reinforce the comparison: Marafioti thematizes memory as a technology for stabilizing meaning across time, while Grice thematizes inference as a technology for stabilizing meaning across speakers. Put sharply, Marafioti is concerned with how meaning survives (through archives, saints’ lives, and mnemonic discipline), whereas Grice is concerned with how meaning happens (through rational expectations in a talk exchange), and your staged dialogue makes the bridge between them: both are, in their different ways, trying to protect sense from loss—Marafioti from historical oblivion, Grice from conversational misunderstanding. Grice: “I played for Oxfordshire, I mean I played as an amateur cricketer at county level – I’m not sure if Calabria counts as ‘county level’!”  Filosofo, umanista, storico e presbitero italiano. M., Croniche et antichità di Calabria. Le notizie biografiche su di lui sono molto scarse e desunte per lo più dalle sue opere o da una storia ottocentesca della sua città natale. Croniche et antichità di Calabria. Sacerdote appartenente all'Ordine dei Frati Minori, M. si prefisse il compito di continuare la storia della Calabria dell'umanista Barrio. La prima edizione di quell'opera, infatti, si era rivelata talmente piena di errori e di lacune che lo stesso Barrio aveva tentato di emendarla in vista di una seconda edizione, ma ne era stato impedito dalla morte. Intenzione, parzialmente disattesa, del padre francescano era inoltre quella di ricordare le vite i santi calabresi, specialmente coloro di cui si era persa la memoria.  Le Croniche et antichità di Calabria, in cinque libri, venne edita una prima volta a Napoli mentre una seconda versione accresciuta e corretta venne edita a Padova.  Di padre M. sono rimasti anche un'opera teologica e un trattato di mnemotecnica in lingua latina, che ha un certo successo tanto che venne tradotto poco tempo dopo in lingua italiana.  Non è noto dove e quando M. sia morto. Giovanni Russo, ex direttore del Museo civico "Francesco Jerace" a Polistena, ha suggerito che M. sia deceduto  presso il convento nel suo paese natale. Opere: M., Croniche et antichità di Calabria. Conforme all'ordine de' testi greco, et latino, raccolte da' più famosi scrittori antichi, et moderni ..., Padova, Ad instanza de gl'Uniti, Forni, D. Valensise, .  ?id=LlawjHUbv9U C&printsec=frontcover&hl=it#v =onepage&q& f=false Consultabile on line su Google Libri ^ L. Accattatis. ^ Franco Carlino, M.. Un sacerdote con la passione della storia, in Il Nuovo Corriere della Sibaritide, Barrii Francicani De antiquitate et situ Calabriae. Libri quinque. implicatura. Grice: Caro Marafioti, ho sempre trovato affascinante la sua dedizione alla storia della Calabria. Mi incuriosisce sapere cosa l’ha spinto a correggere e arricchire le opere di Barrio, un compito certo non facile! Marafioti: Gentile Grice, la passione per la mia terra e il desiderio di restituire memoria ai santi calabresi sono stati i miei principali motivi. Barrio aveva lasciato molte lacune e io, da buon frate, ho cercato di colmarle per amore della verità e della tradizione. Grice: È davvero encomiabile. Le sue "Croniche et antichità di Calabria" sono considerate fondamentali per chi vuole comprendere la storia e la cultura della regione. Ha trovato ostacoli nel suo percorso di ricerca? Marafioti: Certo, caro Grice. Le fonti erano spesso frammentarie e le notizie rare, ma la perseveranza e la fede mi hanno aiutato. Ho anche scritto un trattato di mnemotecnica, nella speranza che la memoria dei calabresi possa essere custodita e tramandata. Dopotutto, come si dice da noi, "chi non ha memoria non ha futuro". Marafioti, Girolamo (1601). Croniche et storia della Calabria. Napoli: Longo.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marano: la ragione conversazionale (Napoli). Filosofo italiano.  Geronimo Marano (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale. Marano is presented as turning pragmatics into a local Neapolitan art of conversational rhetoric, whereas Grice treats pragmatics as a normative, reason-governed mechanism: hearers infer what is meant (implicated) from what is said by assuming cooperation, and those inferences are in principle reconstructible as reasons (relevance, quantity, manner, quality) rather than as mere stylistic flair. That difference is the point of contact and the point of tension: Marano’s Naples makes conversation feel like navigation through dense social streets—irony, timing, and face-work are central, and “meaning” often rides on culturally tuned insinuation—while Grice’s framework insists that even the most local, witty, or evasive remark only counts as a communicative implicature insofar as the speaker can reasonably expect the audience to recognize an intention and to treat it as a reason for uptake. If one adds the Leech cue in your keywords, Marano aligns with a rhetoric-centered pragmatics (how speakers achieve effects and manage social relations), while Grice supplies the rational backbone that keeps those effects from collapsing into mere atmosphere: conversational success is not just sounding right, but making one’s intended enrichment available to a competent interlocutor under shared norms. Historically, I can’t independently confirm from standard online reference sources that there is a Naples-based philosopher “Geronimo Marano” with a 1755 Palermo imprint Dissertazioni filosofiche; the surname material you include is broadly consistent with common etymological summaries for Marano as a toponymic name, but the philosopher-and-imprint look like your project’s pseudo-archival invention—useful, though, because it lets the comparison land cleanly: Grice’s “conversational reason” explains why Neapolitan conversational artistry is interpretable rather than magical, and Marano’s rhetorical lens explains why Grice’s maxims, outside Oxford, often function less like classroom rules and more like social survival skills. Grice: “I love Marano!” – Keywords: conversational rhetoric; pragmmatica come rettorica converazionale – G. N. Leech.  The Italian surname Marano has several etymological origins, primarily habitational or topographic in nature.  Primary Origins Habitational Name: The most common origin is from various locations in Italy named Marano. These places were often named using the Latin personal name Marius combined with the possessive suffix -anum (meaning "estate of Marius"). Notable examples include: Marano di Napoli (Campania) Marano Vicentino (Veneto) Marano Marchesato (Calabria) Marano Lagunare (Friuli-Venezia Giulia) Topographic Name: It may derive from the Italian word marano, meaning "marshy" or "swampy place," referring to someone who lived near such terrain. Maritime Connection: Some sources suggest a derivation from the Latin marinus, meaning "of the sea," which would associate the name with maritime occupations like fishing or sailing.  Alternative Meanings and Variants Personal Name: It can be a masculine form of the personal name Marana. Historical/Nickname: In some contexts, particularly in Southern Italy, it was a nickname for a "ruffian" or "villain". Historically, it also related to the term for a wild animal, such as a wild boar. Sephardic Context: While distinct from the common Italian surname, the term Marrano (often with two 'r's) was used in the Iberian Peninsula to refer to Jewish converts to Christianity.  Geographical Distribution In 2025, the surname remains most prevalent in Southern Italy, particularly in Campania, Sicily, and Calabria. Common Italian municipalities for the name include Agrigento, Avellino, and Foggia.  Geronimo M.  (also identified as the Reverend Abbot D. Geronimo M.) is an Italian philosopher. Biographical Information Place of Birth: Based on his publishing history and the titles associated with him, he is active in Naples, Italy. Title/Role: Grice: Caro Marano, ho sempre pensato che la tua filosofia a Napoli abbia qualcosa di speciale: sarà forse l’aria del golfo, o la prammatica che diventa quasi una rettorica conversazionale? Marano: Eh Grice, qui a Napoli la conversazione è un’arte, e anche la filosofia deve imparare a muoversi tra i vicoli e i caffè. Non c’è dialogo che non abbia un pizzico di ironia, perfino tra i filosofi! Grice: Ho sentito che il tuo cognome deriva da paludi o dal mare… Quindi la tua prammatica è liquida: scorre, si adatta e riflette il mondo, proprio come farebbe un napoletano vero? Marano: Esatto, Grice! Qui si dice che “chi sa navigare, sa anche filosofare”. La conversazione a Napoli non è solo parlare, è sopravvivere, improvvisare e sorridere anche davanti al più serio dei sillogismi. E, tra parentesi, se la filosofia non fa ridere almeno una volta, è solo una palude senza uscita! Marano, Geronimo (1819). Delle regole dell’arte rettorica ad uso della Reale Accademia di Marina. Napoli: Reale Accademia di Marina.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marchesini: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’educazione del soldato – l’implicatura del capitano – e l’amore sessuale – la società eugenica. Grice: “When I delivered my lecture on ‘meaning’ for the Philosophical Society at Oxford, I knew that some of my pupils – to which I had burdened with my seminars on ‘meaning’ would be attending. I was paying little attention to Marzolo.  Giovanni Marchesini (Noventa, Vicenza, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’educazione del soldato – l’implicatura del capitano – e l’amore sessuale – la società eugenica. Grice uses Marchesini as a foil to sharpen what he means by reason-governed conversational meaning: for Grice, what is communicated beyond what is explicitly said (implicature) is something a hearer can work out by rationally attributing intentions to a speaker under shared norms of cooperative exchange, and the resulting inference is, in principle, accountable and challengeable. Marchesini’s world, by contrast, is presented as one in which meaning is trained into people through institutions (the education of the soldier, the authority of the captain, codes of “cavalry,” symbolism, even the ideology-adjacent rhetoric of eugenics): here the “implicature of the captain” works less like a voluntary, mutually ratified inference and more like a disciplined uptake shaped by hierarchy, ritual, and social conditioning, where what the subordinate “takes” is partly secured by command, not just by conversational rationality. That difference makes Grice’s central claim vivid: conversational reason is not merely intelligence in decoding symbols, but a normative practice in which speakers choose what to make explicit and what to leave inferable, expecting interlocutors to bridge the gap using shared standards of relevance, sufficiency, and clarity—whereas Marchesini’s pedagogical-military frame risks turning inference into indoctrinated compliance, a kind of forced uptake that can mimic implicature while bypassing the freedom and reciprocity that make Gricean inference genuinely reason-governed. Grice: “When I delivered my lecture on ‘meaning’ for the Philosophical Society at Oxford, I knew that some of my pupils – to which I had burdened with my seminars on ‘meaning’ would be attending. I was paying little attention to Marzolo. When Cairo wrote his ‘Dictionary of Symbols,’ way before Vienna, and other events with which we were familiar at Oxford, Cairo makes an effort to trace his research – and he provides three references: Ferrero, Marzolo, and M. – “amongst us Italians” – he adds. Now Ferrero was more of a lawyer and his ‘I simboli’ only tangentially approaches ‘simbolo’ and ‘segno,’ or the phenomenon of ‘voulere dire’ alla Grice – but what is important is that he leaves M. behind, and indeed OVER-stresses the LEGACY of Marzolo. Unlike myself – who dismiss in “Meaning” talk of ‘sign,’ Marzolo entitles his ‘essay’ an ‘essay on signs’ – and he is indeed into ‘words’ – he held a profeessor of letters at Pisa. But his words are what these words ‘voule dire’ – ‘signare’ – as quoted by both Marzolo and Ferrero – as when Cicero says that a signum signat – in the zodiac. But Marzolo’s examples are RARELY about what a given expression MEANS, or is a sign of – he takes this for granted. Now, if you read my ‘Meaning’ you will find NO reference to what a word – or group of words means – I approach this later in my career, under pressure, and I give only ONE example ‘shaggy’ – shaggy shaggy reduplicated, as Ferrero has it to mean that the utterer means that the referent is hairy-coated. When it comes to indicare that’s our ‘say’. L’educazione del soldato, con il capitano MEOLI, la società di genetica ed eugenica, il simbolismo, la dottrina del simbolismo, i simbolisti, i filosofi simbolisti, i artisti simbolisti, Welby, Ogden, Grice, il simbolo del simbolo, il cammino del cavaliere, codigo cavalleresco, cavalleria, cavallo, equites romano – tutti questi appartneno all’altro Marchesini – questo M. e tradizionale. Grice: Caro Marchesini, quando parli dell’educazione del soldato e del capitano, mi viene in mente che persino i miei seminari a Oxford sembravano esercitazioni militari: disciplina, implicature e qualche segno zodiacale per fortuna! Marchesini: Grice, se i tuoi seminari erano campi di addestramento, allora i miei studenti sono cavalieri: sempre pronti a interpretare simboli e codici, anche se preferirebbero un cavallo vero per scappare dalle interrogazioni. Grice: Non ti nego che, tra simbolismo e società eugenica, qualche volta mi sento più vicino a un cavallo che a un filosofo: almeno il cavallo non deve spiegare cosa significhi “shaggy shaggy”! Marchesini: Hai ragione, Grice! In fondo, tra capitani, soldati e cavalli, la vera implicatura è che la filosofia serve soprattutto a non perdere il senso dell’umorismo… e magari guadagnare una corsa verso l’Arno, come Manzoni! Marchesini, Giovanni (1895). Studi filosofici. Firenze: Giunti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marchetti: l’implicatura conversazionale della natura delle cose – la scuola d’Empoli Alessandro Marchetti (Empoli, Firenze, Toscana): l’implicatura conversazionale della natura delle cose. Grice treats Marchetti as an unexpectedly Gricean technician of intelligibility: a translator forced to make Lucretius’ Latin “sayable” in the volgare, and (in the Galileo-related works attributed to him) a writer who tries to impose explicit structure where a tradition can feel rhetorically fluent but formally under-specified. That lets you contrast two kinds of “reason-governed meaning.” For Grice, conversational meaning is governed by public norms of rational cooperation: hearers infer implicatures from what is said because they can presume the speaker is aiming at relevance, adequate information, clarity, and truthfulness, and those inferences are in principle reconstructible and contestable. Marchetti’s task, by contrast, is not a live conversational exchange but a high-stakes act of cultural and lexical engineering: he must choose ordinary Tuscan resources that will carry, for his readers, the right inferential load of Epicurean physics (atoms, void, nature) without either flattening the argument or triggering avoidable scandal, so that “what is meant” by Lucretius becomes recoverable in a new linguistic ecosystem. Read that way, Marchetti is a foil who makes Grice’s emphasis on perspicuity concrete: where Grice diagnoses failures of relevance or quantity as generating implicature, Marchetti confronts a prior problem—making the explicit content itself perspicuous—so that any higher-level “implicatures” (about rationalism, impiety, or the moral of nature) don’t arise merely from obscurity or mistranslation. Online reference summaries generally support the broad biographical frame you give (Tuscan man of letters linked with Pisa; known above all for the Italian De rerum natura; involved in learned academies and subject to suspicion for materialist overtones), but they don’t make him a precursor of Gricean pragmatics; your comparison is therefore deliberately anachronistic in a productive way, using Marchetti’s translation practice as a model of how rational norms—whether conversational maxims or translational constraints—govern the passage from words to what an audience is entitled to take them to mean. Grice:“When I won the classics scholarship at Clifton to Corpus, I never said ‘no’ even though I had no idea that I would meet the sub-faculty of philosophy only five terms into the Faculty of Literae Humaniores! By the time I was introduced Lucretius’s De rerum natura, I was world-weary already!” Grice: “I love Marchetti; for once, he had to find vulgar terms for all of Lucretius’s learned ones! The Italians used to call their own tongue ‘volgare’ then --; this is not easy matter (to translate Lucretius, not to call your tongue volgare), especially since Lucretius was often unclear to himslf – talk of my conversational desideratu of conversational perspicuity [sic]!” -- Grice: “I like him because he axiomatised Galilei!” Professore a Pisa, contina le ricerche di Galileo come Viviani. Collabora con Papa. Scrive rime morali ed eroiche. L’opera cui deve la sua fama è la traduzione “Della natura delle cose” di LUCREZIO. Considerata come un manifesto di  razionalismo, “La natura dellle cose” influì notevolmente sul gusto arcadico per la purezza della lingua e l'eleganza dello stile.  La diffusione di idee materialiste attira su M. l'accusa di empietà. Pur rifugiatosi nella poesia, non riusce ad evitare le indagini del Sant'Uffizio, ispirate soprattutto da VANNI. Per altre sue opere di successo e attaccato dagli oppositori di GALILEI. Dei “Disuniti”, Arcadii, Fisio-critici, Risvegliati, Accademia della Crusca e Accademia Fiorentina. Saggi: “De resistentia solidorum” (Firenze, typis Vincentij Vangelisti e Petri Matini (Grice: “Opera  abbastanza interessante, basata sulla teoria galileiana, cui Marchetti dà una struttura assiomatica –implicatura, lucrezio, della natura delle cose, pederastia, il poeta filosofo, l’essamero di Lucrezio, l’essameri di Lucrezi, il poema filosofico latino, il genero filosofico nella poesia latina. Lucrezio, alma figlia di giove, inclita madre. Grice: Caro Marchetti, devo confessare che leggere la tua traduzione di Lucrezio mi ha dato più mal di testa che tradurre una ricetta inglese in latino! Come hai fatto a rendere la natura così… naturale in toscano? Marchetti: Ah, Grice, ti assicuro che per trovare parole semplici e dirette ho dovuto fare più ginnastica mentale di Galileo su una lavagna! Lucrezio, tra atomi e vuoto, sembrava divertirsi a confondere pure me. Grice: Eppure la Chiesa non ha apprezzato il tuo sforzo! Ti hanno dato più fastidio gli inquisitori o i critici di poesia? Marchetti: Diciamo che, tra poesia e Sant’Uffizio, ho imparato che “la natura delle cose” include anche la pazienza infinita. Ma almeno i versi di Lucrezio mettono tutti d’accordo: in fondo, anche i poeti hanno bisogno di un po’ di atomi di buon umore! Marchetti, Alessandro (1669). La filosofia naturale. Pisa: Stamperia della Sapienza.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marchi: l’implicatura conversazionale della missione di Roma e la religione civile di Mussolini.  Vittore Arnaldo Marchi (Potenza, Basilicata): l’implicatura conversazionale della missione di Roma e la religione civile di Mussolini. The contrast between Grice and Vittore Arnaldo Marchi turns on two different senses in which meaning can be “reason-governed.” Grice’s theory of conversational meaning treats implicature as a disciplined, checkable inference: what is meant beyond what is said is recoverable because speakers are presumed to be cooperating under shared norms (relevance, sufficiency, candour, clarity), so reasons for interpretation can be made explicit and, if needed, challenged. Marchi, by contrast, is presented as working in a Mazzinian register where “missione di Roma” and “religione civile” are not primarily conversational inferences but civic-rhetorical frameworks: the language is meant to bind a people to an ideal, and its “implications” are carried as much by institutional memory, political myth, and moral exhortation as by the local logic of a talk exchange. That difference sharpens Grice’s point about “mission”: Oxford’s “mission” (as he jokes via Ryle) is an in-house academic posture, while Marchi’s missione is a public, normative vocation that tries to make political life intelligible and obligatory; the former invites implicatures inside a small conversational game, the latter aims to engineer shared uptake at the scale of a nation. Online biographical notes broadly support the contour you sketch (Marchi as an early-20th-century figure tied to Mazzinian religious philosophy and periodical culture, with publications including Psicologia e filosofia, Hoepli, 1925), but they do not connect him to Gricean pragmatics; the “conversational implicature” label is your text’s productive anachronism, using Marchi’s civic rhetoric as a foil for Grice’s core claim that, unlike political “civil religion,” conversational meaning is governed by reasons that are in principle reconstructible from what was said, the context, and mutually recognized norms. Grice: “While Ryle would speak of the ‘mission of Oxford’, viz. to refute anything German and more broadly continental, that is NOT the meaning of ‘missione’ as Italian philosophers use it since Mazzini, to refer to the ‘missione di Roma’! -- Filosofo italiano. Potenza, Basilicata. Grice: “Marchi displays a few features hardly found at Oxford: He edited a magazine, “filosofia mazziniana” – I can imagine Bradley wanting to edit “Hegeliana” at Oxford – and we do have a Gilbert Ryle Room, and an Occam Society! The other trait is illustrated by his manifesto, “La missione di Roma,” – Churchill would have equaled with something Anglian!” Generale di corpo d’armata italiano, Medaglia d'oro dei Benemeriti dell'Educazione Nazionale. Insegna a Roma. Cura la pubblicazione di diverse riviste in cui si confrontarono alcuni studiosi del primo Novecento italiano come Varisco. Tra queste Dio e Popolo e “L'idealismo realistico.” Dio e Popolo, rivista di ispirazione mazziniana, accoglie scritti miranti alla ricostruzione della filosofia religiosa di Mazzini e i rapporti tra religione e stato; nega l'ateismo e persegue l'ideale di “repubblica”. “L'idealismo realistico” raccoglie teorie filosofiche di stampo anti-gentiliano.  A lui è dedicato il Premio tesi di Laurea M., bandito da Roma Tre per i neolaureati che abbiano sostenuto tesi su un argomento concernente il pensiero filosofico antico degne di essere pubblicate; e un parco al Municipio IV. Saggi: “La filosofia religiosa di Mazzini, in Dio e Popolo, “La missione di Roma” o, Atanòr Ed., Il concetto e il metodo della ‘storia della filosofia,’ – Grice:  “His apt implicature is that if you are an idealist, don’t shed your idealism when discussing J. J. C. Smart!” -- Filosofia e religione, La perseveranza Ed., Potenza,  La filosofia morale e giuridica di Gentile, Stabilimento Tipografico F.lli Marchi, Camerino, Keywords: la missione di Roma, Mazzini, filosofia mazziniana, rivista di filosofia mazziniana, gentile. Grice: Caro Marchi, ho letto con grande interesse il suo manifesto “La missione di Roma”. Mi colpisce come lei declini la nozione di missione non in senso accademico, ma con una profondità spirituale che, ahimè, ad Oxford raramente si incontra. Mi domando: come interpreta oggi il compito universale di Roma? Marchi: Grice, mi fa piacere che abbia colto questo aspetto. La missione di Roma, secondo il pensiero mazziniano, si fonda sull’idea di una religione civile che unisce popolo e ideale. Non si tratta solo di eredità storica, ma di una vocazione morale destinata a guidare l’umanità verso la giustizia e la libertà. Insegno che la filosofia deve essere vissuta, non solo studiata. Grice: Marchi, la sua posizione mi ricorda il contrasto che spesso registro tra idealismo e realismo – come lei stesso ha sottolineato nella sua rivista “L’idealismo realistico”. Pensa che la filosofia possa davvero influenzare la politica e la religione civile senza perdere la sua autonomia teorica? Marchi: Grice, assolutamente. La filosofia è il ponte tra pensiero e azione, tra ideale e concreto. Le riviste che ho fondato, come “Dio e Popolo”, volevano proprio dimostrare che la riflessione filosofica può guidare la prassi civile. Non bisogna mai abbandonare il proprio idealismo, nemmeno quando si affrontano questioni pratiche: è quello che rende la filosofia operativa e non solo contemplativa. Marchi, Vittore Arnaldo (1925). Psicologia e filosofia. Milano: Hoepli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Grice e Marchi. Luigi De Marchi (Milano). Geophysicist. Grice and De Marchi make a nicely comic contrast between two kinds of “reason-governed” connection: Grice’s is normative and inferential (what a rational hearer is entitled to work out from what is said, given cooperative expectations), while De Marchi’s is causal and measurable (what a rational investigator can predict about conductivity from traction and vibration, given laws and instrumentation). In the dialogue, the wire is jokingly treated as if it “communicated” by implicature, but in Grice’s framework implicature depends on an agent’s communicative intention plus an audience’s recognition of that intention under shared conversational maxims; a vibrating wire has no such intentions, so whatever it “tells” us is not speaker-meaning but indication in something closer to Grice’s own contrast between non-natural meaning and merely natural sign. De Marchi’s 1881 study (on how mechanical stress and oscillation affect electrical conductivity) thus becomes a playful analogue: where Grice diagnoses meaning beyond the literal as something licensed by rational cooperative norms, De Marchi tracks information beyond the surface phenomenon as something licensed by controlled experiment and physical theory—both “reason-governed,” but one by the logic of communicative practice, the other by the logic of causal explanation and measurement. Grice: Caro De Marchi, nel tuo Il Nuovo Cimento del 1881 mi pare che anche il filo “implichi” qualcosa: se vibra troppo, sta confessando che non è affatto cooperativo. De Marchi: Caro Grice, il filo è educatissimo: cambia conduttività senza dire una parola, ma lo fa con abbastanza trazione da farsi capire anche da un fisico distratto. Grice: Dunque quando aumenta la resistenza, l’implicatura è “smettila di tirarmi”, e tu la calcoli con strumenti che Austin avrebbe scambiato per cavatappi. De Marchi: Esatto, e se tu rispettassi la massima della quantità, useresti meno parole e più galvanometri, che in laboratorio sono sempre più persuasivi di Oxford. Marchi, Luigi De (1881). Intorno all’influenza della trazione e delle vibrazioni di un filo metallico sulla sua conduttività elettrica. Il Nuovo Cimento

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marchi: l’implicatura conversazionale dell’anima del corpo – la scuola di Brescia Luigi De Marchi (Brescia, Lombardia): l’implicatura conversazionale dell’anima del corpo – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, rule-like upshot of cooperative talk: given what is said plus shared conversational norms (his maxims), a hearer can justify an inference to what is meant, and that justificatory route is part of the meaning explanation rather than a merely psychological or literary association. In the De Marchi material, by contrast, “implicatura conversazionale” is pulled toward an explicitly psychocorporeal and culturally provocative register: talk of “l’anima del corpo,” desire, and an anti-academic “solista” posture turns implicature into a vehicle for staging an anthropology of embodiment and affect, where what is “conveyed” is less a canonically calculable inference than an invitation to re-imagine the body as the primary bearer of sense. The juxtaposition therefore highlights two different uses of “conversational” explanation: Grice’s is methodological and normative, aiming to secure the autonomy of a philosophical psychology and to show how mental-state ascriptions and speaker-meaning can be systematically mapped in a way compatible with psycho-physical correlation, whereas De Marchi’s is more rhetorical and existential, treating conversational indirection as continuous with the body’s own expressivity and with a Lombard, Brescia-linked sensibility that prefers provocation and imagery (the tea cup, the spoon, the body that “dreams”) to Gricean derivation from maxims. On this comparison, De Marchi can be read as expanding the domain of what counts as “implicature” toward the somatic and the poetic, while Grice would likely insist that, unless the hearer’s route from said to meant is constrained by publicly shareable, reason-sensitive principles, the result is at best suggestive conversation and at worst a category mistake about what makes implicature a distinctive kind of meaning. -- la scuola di Brescia -- filosofia lombarda -- filosofia italiana – (Brescia). Grice: “Sime my earliest unpublications – e. g. ‘Negation and privation’ – it was for me ‘all about the mental process’ or ‘mental processes.’ I would use ‘mental’ and ‘mind’ freely – this was before Ryle turned ‘mind’ into a term of abuse. It was THEN that I went to the Greeks, who had ‘psyche’ of which Roman ‘mens’ was just a part – even if the highest --. It was my research on ‘psyche’ to wonder why we should let the psychologists claim control over the stuff? And hence, my philosophical psychology was born!” Grice: “In my first seminars on philosophical psychology, as my pupil’s notes testify, it was all about the ‘functional’ – i. e. the philosophical psychologist is proposing a FUNCTION – in the mathematical use of the expression – that maps ‘sensory input’ onto ‘behavioural output’ – while validating an ascription of a now ‘functional’ or ‘internal’ state of the black box. I made spcifics to the effect that a strict psycho-physical correlation would not invalidate the autonomy and ineliminability of any ‘law’ of this philosophical psychology that I could conceive --. I did is in part following Berkeley’s ‘harsh’ predicaments that we would hardly say that Smith’s belief that it is raining was hit by a cricket bat – if that is the part of Smtih’s brain that got affected!” Grice: “His ‘poesia del desiderio’ is confusing – he means tenderness, as Scruton does in his book on “Sexual arousal”” -- Grice: “Perhaps M.’s most provocative piece is “L’anima DEL corpo.” If I were to be tutored on that by Hardie, I can very well imagine Hardie – he was a Scot – ‘what d’you mean, ‘of’?” Psicoterapeuta di formazione reichiana, umanista, autore di scritti talvolta controversi perché a scopo provocatorio, si define Solista ed ama stare «fuori dall'Accademia». l’anima del corpo. Grice: Caro Marchi, la sua opera “L’anima del corpo” mi ha fatto riflettere: devo confessare che una volta ho cercato l’anima persino nella mia tazza di tè, ma non l’ho trovata! Forse era nascosta sotto il cucchiaino? Marchi: Ah, Grice, se l’anima fosse davvero così facile da trovare, la filosofia sarebbe roba da supermercato! In realtà, io penso che il corpo abbia più anima di quanto i filosofi ammettano, soprattutto quando si tratta di desiderio... anche la tazza di tè, magari, sogna d’essere caffè! Grice: Mi piace questa idea: il desiderio del corpo che anima anche le porcellane! Forse dovremmo istituire la “Scuola dell’implicatura del cucchiaino” a Brescia, così da rivoluzionare la psicologia del tè. Marchi: Sarebbe un’impresa epica! Ma attenzione, Grice: fuori dall’Accademia, anche il cucchiaino può ribellarsi e diventare filosofo solista. In fondo, chi sa ascoltare il corpo, sente anche il pensiero nascosto nell’acqua calda. Marchi, Luigi De (1958). Sesso e civiltà.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marzi: la ragione conversazionale -- Nerone e la filosofia -- Roma Quinto Marzio Marci Barea Sorano (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale -- Nerone e la filosofia. In the passage, Marci (Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus) gives you a Roman counterpart to Grice’s conversational rationality by exemplifying what “reason-governed” can mean under extreme asymmetry of power: under Nero, speech is risky, so Stoic resistance becomes a discipline of what can be said, what must be left unsaid, and how one preserves intelligible commitment to virtue when the public norms of sincerity and justice are being strategically corrupted. Grice’s theory explains implicature as a product of cooperative, accountable reasoning between interlocutors (a hearer infers what is meant because the speaker can be presumed to be following shared conversational norms, and those inferences are in principle challengeable); Marci’s situation in the text is almost the inverse, since Nero’s regime weaponizes norms and testimony (Egnatius Celer’s betrayal) so that what is “meant” may be fixed by coercion rather than by cooperative uptake. That contrast sharpens Grice’s point: conversational meaning is reason-governed not merely because agents reason, but because a community sustains norms that make reasons publicly legible; when the Porch-opposition faces a tyrant, “implicature” turns into a survival art, closer to coded moral witness than to leisurely Oxford inference. Historically, the outline you give is broadly consistent with standard accounts (senator of Stoic leanings; associated with Musonius Rufus; prosecuted under Nero around AD 66; condemned with his daughter Servilia; betrayal by P. Egnatius Celer), and it underwrites the comparison: Marci dramatizes how fragile the Gricean background assumptions are, and how much “conversational reason” depends on institutions that allow meaning to be inferred rather than imposed. Grice: “M. belongs to the  gens Marcia, as his full name was Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus. Modern Italian Surname  If his surname were derived from his gens (Marcia) in modern Italian, it would be Marzio or Marci. Philosophical Influence and Opposition to Nero M. is a prominent member of the Opposition from the Porch, a group of senators who resist Nero’s perceived tyranny through the lens of the philosophy of the Porch.  Influences: M. is a student of the famous Stoic teacher MUSONIO  Rufo. Stoic Resistance: M.’s opposition is not a violent conspiracy but a commitment to virtue (virtus) and autonomy. M. incurs Nero’s hatred during his proconsulship of Asia by refusing to punish a city that defended its divine statues against imperial commissioners, prioritizing justice over autocratic will. Death: He was condemned to death by the Roman Senate under pressure from Nero. He died "at the hands of" the regime following a trial where his former Stoic tutor, Publius Egnatius Celer, betrays him by providing false testimony. True to his Stoic principles, he commits suicide (a "stoic" death) alongside his daughter, Servilia.  Would you like to know more about the other members of the Stoic martyrs, such as Thrasea Paetus? Keywords: Portico. Part of the opposition from the Portico to Nerone, S. is betrayed by his friend Publio Egnazio Celer. He is condemned to death at the same time as Trasea Peto. Marci. Barea Sorano.  Gricevs: Salvete, Marci! Dic mihi, quid Stoicus faciat si Nerone imperatore cenam sine oliva proponat? Marci: Gricevs, Stoicus si Nerone imperatore cenam sine oliva proponat, tranquillitatem mentis servat et docet se ab externis bonis non pendere. Virtus enim, non oliva, facit sapientem. Gricevs: Sed Marci, nonne in convivio Romano etiam sapientia gustum quaerit? Quid si Nerone non modo olivas, sed etiam rationem removet? Marci: Gricevs, Stoicus etiam rationem sub tyranno colit: cum ratio tollitur, virtus magis lucet. In adversis, philosophus ostendit quid sit vera libertas animi. Here the gens is Marcia? The Soranus -- does THAT point to Hispania? Other members of this gens? Is this aptly italianised as Marci? Yes: here the gens is the gens Marcia, and that part of the name is straightforward. Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus is explicitly given as a member of the gens Marcia. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] Now to the harder parts. On Soranus and Hispania: no, Soranus itself does not naturally point to Hispania. Soranus is a cognomen and is usually taken in the ordinary Roman way, often connected by scholars with place-derived cognomina such as those from Sora or with an older Italic onomastic formation, not as a specifically Spanish marker. By contrast, the element Barea is the one that often makes people suspect a provincial, perhaps Hispanic or African, connection, because it is much less typically old-Roman in feel. But from the materials in hand, I do not see a firm source proving that Barea here means “from Hispania.” [en.wikipedia.org], [en-academic.com] Indeed, the family context we do have pushes more clearly toward Rome and Africa than toward Hispania. Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus is presented as the son of another Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus, who had been consul and governor of Africa, and the wider family is tied into the line that leads to Trajan through Marcia, mother of Trajan. That does not make the family “African” in a strict gentilician sense, still less disprove some older provincial origin, but it does mean that the evidence in view does not make Soranus a sign of Hispania. [en.wikipedia.org], [en-academic.com], [everything...ined.today] So the cautious answer is: the gens is Marcia Soranus does not especially point to Hispania if any element in the name invites a provincial-origin question, it is Barea rather than Soranus but from the evidence here one should not confidently write “Hispanic” as if the case were settled. [en.wikipedia.org], [en-academic.com] As for other members of the gens Marcia, one must distinguish between the whole great gens and this particular Barea-Soranus branch. If you mean the whole gens Marcia, there are many famous Marcii. Standard lists include figures such as Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, Gaius Marcius Rutilus, Quintus Marcius Rex, and Lucius Marcius Philippus, along with branches such as the Rutili, Censorini, Philippi, Libones, and Reges. [en.wikipedia.org] If you mean the branch around your Soranus, then the immediately relevant names are much fewer and much more manageable: Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus, the Neronian senator you are discussing his father, another Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus his brother Quintus Marcius Barea Sura his daughter Marcia Servilia Sorana and, through the wider family network, Marcia, mother of Trajan, plus Marcia Furnilla, linked to Titus. [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today] On italianising Marcius as Marci: not really. Marci is not the apt Italianisation of Marcius as a personal name. In Italian, Marcius normally becomes Marzio, not Marci. Marci in modern Italian looks much more like a plural surname form, or a clipped index form, than a natural vernacular rendering of Marcius. So for Quintus Marcius Barea Soranus, the ordinary Italianised shape would be Quinto Marzio Barea Sorano, not “Marci.” Your “Marci” works only if you mean it as a playful catalogue abbreviation or a deliberate Speranzian deformation. It does not read as standard Italian onomastic practice. The underlying historical nomen remains Marcius, from the gens Marcia. [en.wikipedia.org] So, in a compressed philological verdict: yes, gens Marcia no, Soranus does not specially signal Hispania the family branch includes the two Soranus figures, Barea Sura, Marcia Servilia Sorana, and through kinship the line of Marcia and Trajan and no, Marci is not the best Italianisation; Marzio is the natural one. [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today], [en.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can now do one of three things here in chat only: I can give you a short prosopographical note on the Barea-Soranus branch alone I can rewrite your Quinto Marzio Barea Sorano entry in a safer Speranza style I can give you a clean note on Barea, Soranus, Sorano, Marcius, and Marzio as separate onomastic layers And where is that Sora that you mention above, as per comune e regione. If you think Marzio is a better italianisation, then if this means gens, the modern logical surname in contemporary Italian would be Marzi -- does that exist as a surname? Yes. Sora is the modern comune of Sora in the region of Lazio, specifically in the province of Frosinone. That is the contemporary administrative answer, and it is the one you would normally give in a compact note: Sora, comune in Lazio, provincia di Frosinone. [en.wikipedia.org], [comune.sora.fr.it], [tuttitalia.it] As for the surname question, yes, Marzi certainly exists as a modern Italian surname. It is not an invention of onomastic logic; it is an attested cognome with a visible distribution in Italy. One surname-distribution source gives about 2,167 families bearing Marzi in Italy, while another origin note treats it as a cognome deriving from the medieval personal name Marzio, with diffusion especially in the centro-nord. [cognomix.it], [cognomix.it] So your intuition is not absurd at all. If one starts from the Latin nomen Marcius, the natural Italian individual form is Marzio; and if one then thinks in terms of modern surnames as fossilised family markers, Marzi is exactly the sort of form one might expect to arise, and indeed it does exist. [cognomix.it], [cognomix.it], [grokipedia.com] The only caution is philological rather than practical. One should not assume a straight historical equation: gens Marcia = every modern surname Marzi. That would be too neat. Modern surnames often come through multiple channels: from given names, hypocoristics, local forms, saintly cults, and regional developments. In fact one source explicitly glosses Marzi as deriving from the medieval name Marzio, while another English onomastic note also links Marzi to the Roman family name “Marcius.” So the relation is plausible and often real at the level of name-history, but not something to flatten into a one-step proof of gentilician survival. [cognomix.it], [surnamesinitaly.com] So, in the dry form you seem to want: Sora is today a comune in Lazio, in the province of Frosinone. And yes, Marzi exists as a modern Italian surname. If Marzio is the natural Italianisation of Latin Marcius, then Marzi is the sort of contemporary family-name form one would logically expect — and Italy, with unusual politeness, actually supplies it. [cognomix.it], [cognomix.it], [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com] If you like, I can now do one of two things here in chat only: I can give you a short onomastic note distinguishing Marcius, Marzio, Marzi, and Marzia. I can draft a compact Speranza-style paragraph on Sora, Sorano, Marcio, Marzio, and why surnames flatter the genealogical imagination more than the evidence deserves.Marci Barea Sorano, Quinto Marzio  (a. u. c. DCCCXIX). De virtute. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marziano: il principe filosofo – Roma – filosofia italiana Marziano (Roma, Lazio): il principe filosofo. Marziano embodies an older Roman way of treating language as moral technology: a name like Martianus is taken to carry civic expectations (virtus, fortitudo, imperium) and to work pedagogically on the hearer as much as descriptively, so that saying why the name is given already performs a small act of formation—especially fitting for a tutor of Ottaviano. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning, by contrast, insists that what a speaker manages to convey beyond what is explicitly said is licensed by publicly shareable rational norms (cooperation, relevance, informativeness, candour, manner) and by intentions that a hearer can reconstruct as reasons for inference; on that model, “nomen Martis ad virtutem spectat” naturally invites an implicature (the boy is being positioned for a martial-civic role), but the implicature is not a mystical property of the name: it is a defeasible, criticizable inference drawn under assumed conversational rationality. “Marziano” in the dialogue leans toward a quasi-Stoic pedagogy in which words and names cultivate character (philosophia as nutrimentum animi), whereas Grice would redescribe that cultivation as a sequence of communicative moves whose uptake depends on what is mutually knowable and rationally attributable in context—so the Roman naming-practice becomes, in Gricean terms, a stable social convention that speakers exploit to generate implicatures about identity, duty, and future conduct. I wasn’t able to locate any independent historical “Marziano (a.u.c. DCCX). Dicta. Roma.” attestation online; it reads as an invented imprint in the same playful pseudo-archival style as the surrounding project, which actually strengthens the comparison by keeping the focus on how authority is generated: for Marziano, through the cultural gravity of Rome and exempla; for Grice, through the recoverable logic of what a reasonable interlocutor is entitled to take you to mean. Grice: “In Rome, Mars was worshipped, and it was not uncommon for a Roman matron to ‘christen’ his little Roman boy by that obdurate name!” -- Grice, the Oxford philosophers, once joked about the Martians. This was in a commissioned essay for a collection to be edited by Butler. Grice possibly did not have in mind that “Marziano” was a proper Latin name! Filosofo italiano. Marziano is a philosophy teacher to Ottaviano. Gricevs: Salvete, Martianvs! Dic mihi, cur Romani nomen Martis tam saepe filiis tribuunt? Marziano: Gricevs, nomen Martis ad virtutem spectat; Romani credunt fortitudinem Martis in filiis suis vivere, ut imperium perpetuum sit. Gricevs: Sed Marziane, credisne virtus nomen solo pasci, aut opus est animo philosophico ut fortitudo vera oriatur? Marziano: Gricevs, nomen initium est, sed philosophia est nutrimentum animi; sine disciplina sapientiae, Mars ipse maneret sine gloria inter homines. I suppose we don't know much of Martianus, Augustus's tutor, right? I would think there was a gens Martia, but this is different, right? Yes: I think your instinct is right, and the distinction matters. I do not see good evidence for a historical Martianus who can securely be called Augustus’s tutor. The search results about Augustus instead point toward named teachers such as Areus of Alexandria and Athenodorus of Pergamum, rather than a figure called Martianus. [en.wikipedia.org], [attalus.org], [donaldrobertson.name] So the first correction is prosopographical. If one is looking for Augustus’s tutors or philosophical teachers, “Martianus” is not, on present evidence, the standard name that emerges. What does emerge is the broader point that Augustus had philosophical instruction, including Stoic connections, but not apparently through a securely attested Martianus. [attalus.org], [donaldrobertson.name] As for the gens question: yes, there was a gens Marcia, and some sources note that it was occasionally written Martia. That is an important clue, because it shows why your ear is catching something real. The nomen Marcius, associated with the gens Marcia, is one thing; the cognomen or name-form “Martianus” is another. They are related in sound and ultimately in their connection with Mars, but they are not the same prosopographical category. [en.wikipedia.org] So, dryly put: Marcia or occasionally Martia is a real Roman gens.  Marcius is a Roman nomen belonging to that gens.  Martianus is a later name-form or cognomen-type formation and should not simply be equated with membership in the gens Marcia. [en.wikipedia.org] That means your “Marziano” vignette is perfectly workable as literary Speranza, especially because the semantic pull toward Mars suits the pedagogical joke about naming and civic formation. But as ancient Roman biography it does not, so far as I can see, rest on a securely identifiable tutor of Augustus named Martianus. [en.wikipedia.org], [attalus.org], [donaldrobertson.name] If you want the safest historical line in chat, I would phrase it like this: One must distinguish three things that the ear too readily marries: gens Marcia, the nomen Marcius, and the later-sounding name-form “Martianus.” The first is a real Roman house, occasionally even written “Martia”; the second belongs to it; the third should not be promoted, without evidence, into a tutor of Augustus. If the subject is the prince’s philosophical formation, the sources point rather toward named teachers like Athenodorus or Areus, not toward a securely profiled Martianus. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [attalus.org], [donaldrobertson.name] If you like, I can do either of two things here in chat only: I can rewrite the whole Marziano paragraph so it becomes historically safer while keeping the Mars-name joke. I can give you a short note on the difference between Marcius, Marcia/Martia, Martialis, and Martianus for Speranza’s onomastic play.Marziano (a. u. c. DCCX). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marco: filosofo principe – Roma – filosofia italiana Marco (Roma, Lazio): filosofo principe. In your passage, “Marco” is a deliberately shadowy, likely apocryphal figure whose authority comes less from documented imperial chronology than from the Roman fantasy of the philosopher-prince: the ruler who turns policy into a public lesson and expects his audience (Senate, soldiers, people) to read between the lines. That makes him a neat foil for Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning. For Grice, implicature is not magical charisma or rhetorical intimidation; it is a rationally recoverable inference: given what is said plus a standing assumption that the speaker is (by default) cooperative and intelligible, the hearer can work out what the speaker meant, and can also challenge it if the inference is bad. “Marco,” by contrast, is portrayed as making decrees function like “maxims in disguise,” where the point is precisely to exploit the asymmetry of power: an edict is issued with a Senecan flourish so that dissent becomes socially risky and interpretation becomes the subject’s duty, not the ruler’s burden. Historically, the real “between Gordian III and Philip” interval is essentially a transition in AD 244 rather than a distinct philosophical reign, and standard sources do not attest a separate emperor “Marco” in that slot; that absence supports your text’s frame (“possibly apocryphal”) and highlights the contrast: Grice’s conversational reason is accountable inference under shared norms, while Marco’s imperial “implicature” is governance-by-hint, where what is meant is made socially unavoidable even when it is not explicitly said.There is a tradition – “possibly apocryphal,” as Grice puts it -- that Marco is a philosopher who rules the Roman empire between the death of Gordian III and the accession of Philip. Grice: Caro Marco, dicono che sei il filosofo principe di Roma, ma qual è il segreto per governare un impero senza perdere la pazienza? Marco: Grice, il vero segreto è filosofare mentre si decide: così se sbaglio, posso sempre dire che era una prova di stoicismo… e nessuno osa contraddirmi! Grice: Ma allora, se filosofi e imperatori si confondono, chi scrive le leggi e chi le interpreta? Non rischi di creare più implicature che decreti? Marco: Ah, Grice, in Roma il decreto è solo una massima ben travestita! E se mai il popolo protesta, basta aggiungere una citazione di Seneca… funziona sempre, anche con i gladiatori! Marco (a. u. c. CMXCVII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mariano: l’implicatura conversazionale – la scuola di Capua -- filosofia campanese  Raffaele Mariano (Capua, Caserta, Campania): l’implicatura conversazionale. The contrast is between Grice’s micro-ethics of talk and Mariano’s macro-ethics of history: Grice explains conversational meaning as reason-governed because hearers are entitled to treat a speaker as following “precepts” of cooperation and to infer, in a checkable way, what is meant beyond what is said (implicature as accountable practical reasoning), whereas Mariano—Vera’s orthodox Hegelian heir at Naples—reads meaning primarily through systematic rational structure at the level of Spirit, nation, and historical development, where the “sense” of an utterance or institution is fixed by its role in a larger teleology. Online reference sources support the biographical scaffolding you use: Mariano (1840–1912), “fedelissimo allievo di Augusto Vera,” later taught at the University of Naples (notably as docente of Storia della Chiesa) and wrote early on both capital punishment (La pena di morte. Considerazioni in appoggio del prof. Vera, Napoli 1864) and a Hegelian interpretation of Italian nation-formation (Il Risorgimento italiano secondo i principii della filosofia della storia, Firenze 1866), including the line about the philosopher living “nel mondo e nella realtà”; they also confirm Croce’s famously harsh dismissal in La Critica (1908) of Mariano’s attempt to say what in Hegel is “dead” or “cannot die.” In that setting, the “implicature” link is your deliberate anachronism: Mariano is not historically a pragmatics theorist, but he makes a useful foil—because where Grice’s rationality is local, defeasible, and sensitive to what a conversational partner can reasonably be expected to infer, Mariano’s rationality as portrayed here is global, system-first, and inclined to treat interpretation as completion by a comprehensive framework (even “philosophy must be completed by religion”), which is almost the opposite direction of explanation from Grice’s: for Grice, the norms of cooperative exchange generate meaning; for Mariano, the meaning of exchanges is ultimately subordinated to the rational (and contested) story a philosophy of history tells about the world in which those exchanges occur. Grice: “Things were pretty quiet during the nineteenth-century at Oxford; on the other hand, in Italy, a nation was being formed!” Grice: “I like Mariano: his study of Risorgimento applying the philosophy of history is brilliant” Fedelissimo allievo di Vera, insegna a Napoli. La sua indagine e  prevalentemente orientata verso l'interpretazione di Hegel. Si colloca insieme a Vera in quella tendenza che privilegia l'interpretazione sistematica e razionale. Inserì talvolta temi non strettamente legati al pensiero di Hegel affermando tra l'altro che la filosofia deve essere compiuta dalla religione" (Dall'idealismo nuovo a quello di Hegel, Motivi, risonanze e variazioni sulle dottrine hegeliane), trattando riguardo a ciò che dell'idealismo di Hegel è morto e di ciò che non può morire", argomento precedentemente trattato da Croce, il quale risponde aspramente alle argomentazioni proposte da M.. “M. non ha mai capito nulla di tutto ciò che vi è di più sostanziale in Hegel come non ha meditata seriamente nessuna grande filosofia; e (ora si può aggiungere) non ne ha mai letto le opere. Immaginarsi che M.  si afferma hegeliano, mentre sostiene che la conoscenza non è assoluta; che rimane insuperabile il mistero; che dio esiste fuori del mondo e sarebbe dio anche senza il mondo; e che la filosofia deve essere compiuta dalla religione! Insomma, ciò che di Hegel "non può morire" sarebbe ciò che Hegel non ha mai detto perché affatto indegno della sua mente altissima.»  Si schierò a favore del mantenimento della pena di morte in un dibattito sul tema, in accordo con iVera (La pena di morte. Considerazioni in appoggio di Vera Napoli. ), uno dei più autorevoli difensori del mantenimento di questa pratica. È ancora Croce che commenta con grave disappunto l'argomento. implicatura. Grice: Caro Mariano, mi colpisce come tu riesca a interpretare il Risorgimento applicando la filosofia della storia. Qui a Oxford, il XIX secolo era tranquillo, mentre da voi si faceva l’Italia! Mariano: Grice, in effetti tra una battaglia e l’altra, abbiamo avuto tempo per meditare su Hegel. Il mistero non è mai stato svelato del tutto, ma almeno abbiamo provato a farlo con sistematicità – anche se Croce dice che non ho mai letto Hegel! Grice: Croce è sempre un po’ severo, ma a Oxford abbiamo imparato che non c’è filosofia senza una buona dose di ironia. Dimmi, Mariano, la filosofia deve davvero essere compiuta dalla religione, oppure basta un caffè napoletano per illuminare lo spirito? Mariano: Grice, la religione aiuta, ma il caffè napoletano è insuperabile. Se Hegel avesse provato la nostra miscela, forse avrebbe scritto “Lo Spirito Assoluto” direttamente in una caffetteria di Capua! Mariano, Raffaele (1864). La pena di morte. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marin: l’implicatura conversazionale e l’ottimo precettore – la scuola di Venezia -- filosofia veneta Giovanni Marin (Venezia, Veneto): l’implicatura conversazionale e l’ottimo precettore. In your passage, Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning appears under an explicitly humanist label: his maxims are framed as praecepta, “things taken beforehand,” rules that make talk intelligible because speaker and hearer can be held to shared expectations of relevance, sufficiency, candour, and orderly contribution; implicature, on this picture, is the rational (and criticizable) route from what is said to what is meant, guided by those precepts. Marin is then cast as a Venetian analogue of that structure: trained in rhetoric under Vittorino da Feltre, delivering public orations in praise of Venetian worthies, and later operating as a diplomatic voice (the 1440 embassies to the Este and to Florence are the best-attested biographical anchor), he represents a tradition in which instruction and persuasion are inseparable from civic pedagogy, and where one teaches by example, timing, and tact as much as by explicit rule. The comparison the passage invites is therefore less “Grice anticipates Marin” than “Marin supplies a cultural model for what Grice formalizes”: Marin’s “optimum tutor” and Venetian rhetorical schooling embody practical norms of audience-design, anticipation of uptake, and strategic under-saying, while Grice redescribes those craft norms as a theory of public reason in conversation—precepts that can explain why an utterance licenses an implicature and why a hearer is rational to draw it. Historically, nothing in the standard biographical notices (which largely trace back to Rosmini’s discussion of Vittorino and his pupils) links Marin to a technical notion like implicature; that link is your text’s productive anachronism, treating Renaissance rhetorical discipline as the lived ancestor of Grice’s idea that meaning in conversation is governed not by private association but by norms that speakers exploit and hearers can reconstruct. Grice: “I often refer to the conversational maxims as ‘precepts’ or, if you must, prae-cepts. This is a very Ciceronian notion! The Latin noun ‘praectptum – precept, teaching, order, or command – and the Latin verb ‘praecipere – to instruct, to teach, to warn, or to anticipate --- share a common etymology. Both words are formed from the Latin prefix prae (before) and the verb caprere (to take or to seize). Praecipere literally means ‘to take beforehand’ or ‘to seize beforehand’. This ‘taking beforehand’ developed into the sense of ‘instructing’ or ‘giving orders beforehand,’ hence the verb’s meaning of ‘to teach or to order. Praeceptum. The word praeceptum is just the past participle neuter of the verb praecipere used as a noun. It refers to something that is ‘taken beforehand’ or ‘given beforehand,’ such as a rule, a lesson, or an instruction. Therefore, the relationship between praeceptum and praecipere is that the noun represents the result or product of the actn described by the verb, specifically, the instructions or rules given as a result of ‘taking beforehand’or instructing. Filosofo italiano. Venezia, Veneto. Grice: “I like Giovanni Marin; for one, he loved, like I do, rhetoric – in his own Venetian kind of way!”  Nato dal nobile Rosso Marin, studia con profitto sotto l'insegnamento di Feltre, dal quale apprese la retorica. Frequenta il ginnasio, presso il quale recita eloquenti orazioni in encomio agli uomini illustri veneziani. Si laurea a Padova. Ambasciatore della Repubblica di Venezia presso gli Estensi e quindi presso Firenze. Rosmini, Carlo de' Rosmini, Idea dell'ottimo precettore nella vita e disciplina di Vittorino da Feltre e de' suoi discepoli, Rovereto. l’ottimo precettore.  Grice: Caro Marin, mi viene spesso da pensare che i miei precetti conversazionali siano un po’ come le regole che Vittorino da Feltre dava ai suoi studenti: anticipare la mossa dell’interlocutore e magari offrirgli una risposta prima che abbia finito la domanda! Marin: Grice, a Venezia diciamo che il vero precettore non solo anticipa, ma sa anche quando lasciar scivolare una battuta tra una regola e l’altra. Non è raro che un oratore veneziano inizi una lezione con una storia di pesci e la finisca parlando di retorica! Grice: Ah, Marin, forse avrei dovuto scrivere le mie massime in dialetto veneziano! Immagina: “Prima de parlar, pensa; dopo, magari offri uno spritz.” Sarebbe stato molto più efficace nelle conversazioni accademiche di Oxford. Marin: Grice, a Venezia, anche gli ambasciatori imparano che la miglior conversazione si tiene tra una barca e l’altra, senza fretta e magari con il sole che tramonta. Se il precettore è ottimo, sa che una buona parola vale più di mille ordini: e se proprio non basta, c’è sempre una gondola pronta a portarti via dalla discussione! Marin, Giovanni (1435). Orazione. Venezia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marliani’ Giovanni Marliani (Milano, Lombardia): l’implicatura conversazionale.  In the passage, “Grice” treats Marliani less as a historical source for pragmatics than as a convenient emblem for what Grice’s own theory needs in order to look culturally thick: a learned, Renaissance-Milanese writer who can be staged as already thinking in “sects,” “sub-sects,” and tacit social alignments, i.e., as someone for whom meaning is never exhausted by what is said. Against that background, Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning (speaker intentions plus the rational expectation that one’s contributions are cooperative) turns “implicature” into a disciplined inference from an utterance to what a reasonable hearer is licensed to take the speaker to mean; Marliani, by contrast, is presented as practicing something closer to implicature avant la lettre in the social-literary register, where naming, grouping, and lightly satirical classification do the work of saying without saying. The online biographical record does support the Milan–Pavia profile your passage uses: Giovanni Marliani (born Milan, 1420; studied at Pavia under Biagio Pelacani; taught medicine, philosophy, astrology; moved between the Milanese and Pavia studios; enjoyed major Sforza patronage and high salary; wrote De reactione, dated to 1448, and is associated with learned disputes about “reaction” and natural philosophy), but nothing in standard reference sources ties Marliani to a technical notion like conversational implicature; that link is your text’s deliberate anachronistic graft, using Marliani’s courtly-institutional world (and the rhetoric of “sects”) as a foil that lets Grice’s central claim stand out: conversational meaning is reason-governed because it is inferentially recoverable from publicly available cues under norms of cooperation, whereas Marliani’s “implicature” is a looser, culturally saturated art of insinuation whose governing “reasons” are more like etiquette, faction, and wit than the explicit maxims and calculability tests Grice later insists on. Grice: “Ryle once referred to Austin’s play group as  sect – in retribution, we started to call Ryle, and his accolade of disciples, starting from O. P. Wood, as the Rylean sect!” -- Filosofo italiano. Milano, Lombardia. Grice: “I like Mariliani; especially the cavalier way in which he refers to philosophers in his brilliant “De secta philosophorum.” Austin would say that there possibly are sects and sub-sects!” Fglio del patrizio milanese Castello Marliani. Studia a Pavia sotto PELECANI. Entra nel Collegio dei intraprese una carriera nell'insegnamento della filosofia e astrologia. Attivo a Milano e Pavia.  Con l'ascesa della dinastia degli Sforza a capo del Ducato di Milano, appartenente a una famiglia ghibellina, aumenta il prestigio. Ottiene la concessione in esenzione dei diritti di sfruttamento delle acque del Secchia nei pressi di Moglia, nel Mantovano.  Alla morte del duca Francesco Sforza, scrisse una lettera al nuovo duca Galeazzo Maria Sforza in cui dichiara di essere stato richiesto da molti Studi in diverse città d'Italia, sperando di poter essere trasferito da Pavia a Milano e di ricevere un aumento di salario. Il Consiglio segreto di Milano intercedette presso lo Sforza in favore di Marliani, esaltando la sua fama anche oltre i confini del Ducato. Il duca Galeazzo Maria, dopo alcuni indugi, acconsente per conferirgli un'assegnazione annua di 1 000 fiorini, il più alto salario riconosciuto a chiunque nel Ducato. Sotto la reggenza di Ludovico il Moro ottenne i dazi di Gallarate e della sua pieve. I suoi studi lo portarono ad essere tra i più grandi scienziati dell'epoca e riuscì a mettere in discussione Bradwardine e Sassonia.  Nel suo saggio, “Quaestio de caliditate corporum humanorum tempore hyemis et estati set de antiperistasis  distingue la temperatura dell'organismo dalla quantità e dalla produzione del calore naturale del corpo. implicatura, Vinci. le sette filosofiche. Giovanni Marliani.  Grice: Caro Marliani, mi chiedo spesso se la filosofia milanese abbia davvero bisogno di una “setta” per poter brillare come quella oxoniana di Ryle. Eppure, tra le nebbie lombarde, le “sette filosofiche” sembrano moltiplicarsi come panettoni a Natale!  Marliani: Grice, a Milano la filosofia si divide come le acque del Secchia: ogni gruppo si crede l’unico detentore del sapere, ma alla fine tutti finiscono a discutere sotto la Madonnina, magari sorseggiando un espresso troppo caldo d’inverno e troppo freddo d’estate!  Grice: Geniale, Marliani! E dimmi: se dovessi scegliere, preferiresti una setta filosofica che discute della temperatura del corpo umano oppure una che si accapiglia sui dazi di Gallarate? Io, da buon inglese, opterei per la prima, purché ci sia una pinta di birra a portata di mano.  Marliani: Ah, Grice, i dazi vanno bene per i mercanti, ma per i filosofi niente batte una discussione sul calore naturale! E se la temperatura si fa troppo alta, basta aprire una finestra… o una nuova “setta”, che è sempre pronta a mettere tutto in discussione – anche la ricetta del risotto alla milanese! Marliani, Giovanni (1448). De reactione. Pavia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marliani: l’implicatura conversazionale – la scuola di Milano -- filosofia lombarda – filosofia milanese  Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani. In the staged exchange, Marliani’s antiquarian Rome is treated as a machine for producing inferences: he can say “here was the Forum” and, without stating it, reliably invite the reader (or Grice, as his interlocutor) to supply a whole political anthropology—factions, ambition, and “a nice riot”—because ruins function as publicly available cues with culturally stable downstream conclusions. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning makes that kind of “ruins-to-riots” leap intelligible by redescribing it as an implicature: the hearer assumes the speaker is being cooperative (relevant, informative enough, not misleading), so when the speaker offers a partial topographical remark, the hearer rationally enriches it to a fuller intended message; crucially, for Grice the enrichment is constrained by norms that make it in principle reconstructible and contestable (“you can show your working”). Marliani, by contrast, is presented less as a theorist of those norms than as a practitioner of cultivated indirection: his Topographia (1534) operates rhetorically by letting place-names and learned allusions do the persuasive work, so that “deviation” and “shortest route” become a joking model of how interpretation in Rome—and in texts about Rome—habitually exceeds what is explicitly said. Online reference information supports Marliani’s identity as a sixteenth-century Milanese humanist and antiquarian author of Topographia antiquae Romae, but it does not make him an ancestor of Gricean pragmatics; the comparison is therefore deliberately anachronistic, using Marliani’s topographical method as an analogue for how Grice thinks conversational reason turns sparse utterances into rich, accountable meaning through shared assumptions and rational inference. Grice: Marliani, ho qui la tua Topographia antiquae Roma (1534): mi spieghi come fai a descrivere mezza Roma senza mai perdere la strada, mentre io perdo il filo dopo due massime. Marliani: Caro Grice, a Roma basta seguire le rovine: sono come le implicature, ci inciampi anche quando fingi di non vederle. Grice: Dunque se tu dici “qui c’era il Foro” e io capisco “qui c’era anche una bella rissa politica”, è cooperazione topografica o semplice malizia erudita? Marliani: È la stessa cosa, caro mio: a Roma la via più breve è sempre una deviazione, e chi non lo capisce finisce a fare turismo letterale. Marliani, Giovanni Bartolomeo (1534). Topographia antiquae Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marotta: l’implicatura conversazionale di Mario l’epicuro – la scuola di Napoli -- filosofia campanese  Gerardo Marotta (Napoli, Campania): l’implicatura conversazionale di Mario l’epicuro. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, intention-based inference: a speaker counts on shared cooperative expectations so that hearers can work out what is meant beyond what is said, and the real action lies in how social understanding is engineered by what is left implicit. Marotta (Gerardo Marotta), as Grice frames him, represents a complementary “institutional pragmatics” in which the medium of philosophical meaning is not primarily the isolated utterance but the created setting of conversation itself—Cultura Nuova’s postwar lectures and, later, the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici as a deliberately constructed agora where texts, scholars, and audiences meet under conditions designed to make serious exchange possible. In Gricean terms, Marotta’s library and programming function like a large-scale conversational background that stabilizes uptake: by curating interlocutors, preserving access to books, and turning Naples into a site of living disputation about Hegel, the state, and the “civil religion” of culture, he makes certain implicatures almost unavoidable (that philosophy is public, convivial, and civic; that learning is an act of citizenship; that to discuss Hegel in Naples is also to imply a local lineage of reason). Where Grice models cooperation as a norm internal to talk, Marotta exemplifies how cooperation is scaffolded by institutions and hospitality—coffee, tables, rooms, schedules, invitations—so that “Mario the Epicurean” becomes a figure for the Neapolitan style of implicature: indirectness, wit, and conviviality used not to evade rigor but to keep disagreement live without turning it into rupture. In short, Grice supplies the micro-theory of how implicature is calculated; Marotta illustrates the macro-condition that makes such calculation worth having—an organized public sphere where philosophy can be sustained as ongoing conversation rather than as isolated texts. Grice: “We hardly discuss Hegel at Oxford, although he was Bradley’s idol – in fact, most of my explorations on Kant’s philosophy parallel some of the criticisms that Hegel posited to Kant – notably, the idea of a human being as metaphysically transubstantiating into a person as a free autonomous agent! Hegel was very much influence by Aristotle, to the point that it’s perhaps unfair that whereas Kantotle or Ariskant is an ‘unjustly neglected philosopher,’ so is Plathegel, or Hegelplato’!”  Grice: “I like Marotta; the idea of a library for the Istituto Italiano per gli studi filosofici’ at Via Monte di Dio, 11, is a geniality!” Si laurea con il massimo dei voti a Napoli, presentando la tesi,  La concezione dello stato in Hegel.” Si interessa presto di storia, letteratura e filosofia, avvicinandosi dapprima all'Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici fondato da Croce, poi fondando l'associazione Cultura Nuova che diresse organizzando manifestazioni e conferenze rivolte ai filosofi che richiamarono tutte le più grandi personalità della cultura Italiana.  Incoraggiato dagli auspici dell'allora Presidente dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei Cerulli, di Piovani e di Carratelli, fonda a Napoli l'Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, del quale è Presidente. Donato, all'Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, la biblioteca personale, con una dotazione di oltre 300.000 volumi frutto di trent'anni di appassionata ricerca. Per i suoi importantissimi apporti al mondo della filosofia ha avuto numerosi riconoscimenti da centri di ricerca e di formazione di rilievo internazionale.  Ha vinto la sezione Premio Speciale del Premio Cimitile. Gli è stata conferita la laurea ad honorem in Filosofia dall'Bielefeld, dall'Università Erasmus di Rotterdam, dalla Sorbona di Parigi e dalla Seconda Napoli. Mario l’epicuro, il concetto del stato, il risorgimento – la recezione di Hegel in Italia. Grice: Caro Marotta, da Oxford ci guardano con sospetto quando dico che la filosofia può essere anche una faccenda di conversazione, magari tra i volumi polverosi della tua biblioteca. Ma il tuo Istituto a Napoli è un po’ come il tempio di Epicuro: qui si dialoga, si ride, e si pensa, magari anche mangiando una sfogliatella. Marotta: Grice, hai ragione! A Napoli la filosofia si fa tra una chiacchiera e una battuta. Qui non si teme Hegel, né Aristotele, si discute persino di Kantotle e Plathegel, purché la conversazione sia vivace e il caffè sia forte. L’Istituto non è solo una biblioteca, è una piazza dove anche le idee si scambiano come monete. Grice: Il bello è che qui a Napoli persino il concetto dello Stato si trova a suo agio tra i filosofi e la pizza margherita. Se Hegel avesse potuto assaggiare la cucina napoletana, forse avrebbe scritto la Fenomenologia dello Spirito in dialetto! Marotta: Grice, quella sì che sarebbe stata un’implicatura conversazionale epica! Alla fine, la filosofia italiana ha il sapore della convivialità: si può essere epicurei, hegeliani o semplicemente napoletani, basta non perdere mai il piacere di scambiare idee e qualche sorriso. Marotta, Gerardo (1946). Contributo. Cultura Nuova.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marsili: l’implicatura conversazionale del cimento – la scuola di Siena  Alessandro Marsili (Siena, Toscana): l’implicatura conversazionale del cimento. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as an inferential surplus: a speaker can responsibly “mean more than is said” because a rational hearer presumes cooperation and can work out what the speaker is doing (often by noticing a deliberate mismatch between the literal content and the conversational point). Marsili, as your passage frames him (Alessandro Marsili, Siena-born, trained and teaching in Siena and Pisa; early printed Theoremata ad doctrinam Aristotelis, 1626; and conceptually linked here to the Tuscan culture of “cimento” later institutionalized by the Accademia del Cimento), shifts the spotlight from Grice’s interpersonal, intention-centered inference to a linguistically and historically sedimented kind of rationality: the way a word’s meaning carries a whole chain of practices inside it. “Cimento” begins as a material mixture associated with testing metals and, by semantic drift, becomes “trial/experiment/ordeal,” so the word itself performs a miniature implicature every time it is used—quietly suggesting risk, assay, and proof even when the speaker merely says “experiment.” In Gricean terms, Marsili’s case makes vivid that not all pragmatic enrichment is created on the spot by a speaker’s maxim-flouting; some of it is pre-loaded by etymology, technical practice, and local institutional memory (Florence’s “Cimento” sounding like both laboratory and construction-site), which means the “context” a hearer relies on is partly a history of usage and not just the immediate aims of the interlocutors. So the contrast is: Grice gives the micro-mechanics by which rational agents derive implicatures in live talk, while Marsili gives a macro-illustration of how a community’s experimental ethos can be built into a single term, making meaning feel like a test the language itself subjects the speaker to—if you can’t translate it cleanly, you’ve discovered not mystical nonsense but a historically thick bit of rational practice embedded in the lexicon. Grice: “ “cimento” is possibly untranslatable to English! Latin caementum doesn’t help! The shift in meaning from the Latin caementum to the Italian cimento is an interesting linguistic evolution, likely arising from a specific historical application of materials and processes related to caementum. The link between caementum (cement/mortar) and cimento (test/experiment). Latin caementum. In Latin, caementum primarily referred to rough stone, chips of stone, or the micture of rubble and mortar used in Roman concrete or construction. The Early meaning of cimento. An early and key meaning of cimento in Italian, derived from caementum, reerred to a mixture of salts to test precious metals. The conceptual shift. Testing materials with a mixture. The initial association likely arose from the practice of using a specific mixture or concoction (like a type of cement/mortar) to assay or purify precious metals. From mixture to trial: this specific use of a mixture to test something could have led to a broader conceptual association of ‘cimento’ with the very act of trial, test, or experiment, signifying the process of subjectcing something to a rigorous process to discover its qualities or verify a claim. Risk and ordeal: the idea of a trial, particularly one involving the transformation or purification of materials, might have naturally extended to a more general sense of ‘risk,’ or ‘ordeal,’ suggesting a potentially difficult or challenging undertaking. This transition in meaning suggests that the practical application of mixtures related to caementum for testing and assaying played a crucial role in the evolution of the Italian word ‘cimento’ to encompass the concepts of test and experiment. Grice: “I like Marsili, and the founder of the ‘accademia del cimento.’ ‘Cimento’ you know, means ‘experiment,’ – only in Florence!” Si laurea a Siena. Insegna a Siena e Pisa. il cimento. Alessandro Marsili. Grice: Marsili, confesso che “cimento” mi manda in crisi: in inglese sembra sempre o troppo “cemento” o troppo “esperimento”, e il latino caementum non mi salva affatto. Marsili: È il bello della scuola di Siena: si parte dal caementum, si finisce al cimento come prova. Da impasto a collaudo: prima si testano i metalli con una miscela, poi si testa la vita intera con un’implicatura. Grice: Quindi quando a Firenze dicono “Accademia del Cimento” non stanno aprendo un cantiere, ma un laboratorio… anche se, conoscendo i filosofi, il rischio di finire coperti di calce resta sempre cooperativo. Marsili: Esatto: a Siena facciamo l’esperimento, a Oxford fate la nota a piè pagina, a Firenze lo chiamano “cimento” e tutti fingono di aver capito. Implicatura finale: se non è traducibile, allora è davvero filosofico. Marsili, Alessandro (1626). Theoremata ad doctrinam Aristotelis. Siena.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marta: la ragione conversazionale (Roma). Filosofo Italiano Giacomo Antonio Marta (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational reconstruction of intention: what matters is not merely what words conventionally signify, but what an utterer is doing in saying them and what a competent audience is entitled to infer (implicatures) under cooperative norms; Marta (Giacomo Antonio Marta, active in late-16th-century Italy and known philosophically above all for his Aristotelian assault on Telesio’s naturalism—most concretely in Pugnaculum Aristotelis, 1587, which helped provoke Campanella’s Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, 1591) exemplifies a very different regime of “reason” in discourse, one governed by scholastic-Peripatetic standards of demonstration, authority, and doctrinal policing rather than by the everyday cooperative exchange Grice models. In Gricean terms, the Marta–Telesio–Campanella polemic is not primarily about subtle conversational inference but about what counts as a legitimate inferential route from senses to nature, and therefore about which background assumptions an audience is allowed to treat as common ground: Marta wants Aristotelian principles to be the shared starting point, while Campanella’s reply reassigns evidential privilege to sensus and treats Aristotelian “imaginationes” as suspect constructs. That setting also changes the function of implicature: instead of being a cancellable surplus generated by polite cooperation, implicatures in polemical Renaissance Latin often function as strategic insinuations about an opponent’s competence, orthodoxy, or methodological honesty, with high stakes that discourage cancellation. So the contrast is that Grice offers a micro-pragmatic account of how rational agents cooperate to make meaning recoverable beyond the literal, whereas Marta represents a macro-dialectical culture in which “reason in discourse” is enforced by competing methodological constitutions (Aristotelian demonstration vs. sense-based reform), and where what is implied is often less a conversational convenience than a weapon in a struggle over the very norms that make philosophical communication possible. The Italian philosopher whose surname is Marta and who disputed with TELESIO is M. He is an Aristotelian who wrote an essay attacking the principles of TELESIO’s philosophy of nature. CAMPANELLA , a student and fervent defender of TELESIO ’s ideas, responded to M.'s work with his own treatise, Philosophia sensibus demonstrate (Philosophy as Demonstrated by the Senses), published in Naples. CAMPANELLA ’s work was explicitly written to defend TELESIO’s philosophy against the attacks of M.  Beyond his role as an opponent of TELESIO ’'s natural philosophy, little else is widely known or easily accessible about M. His primary historical significance in philosophical history stems from this particular dispute, which served as the impetus for one o f the most important works by the influential Renaissance philosopher CAMPANELLA . 7 m '1 »• . 1 ' ' l ; ST : nf- .:. D h cpINIS |^DIGATOR^>^^ PHILOSOPHIA , SeSsIBVS DEMONSTRATA, t "V.  vlitO^lo Difputaciofles diftiniita j , qtti proprit drhitratu , non autem fin^td ,r duce natura j philofophati fimt frotts AriQotelu > Sc aiTeclamm ex proprijs d/&is , 8c oatune «leottis conuincun* & (inguixiinaginadoii^, pro eo i .Peripateticis ^ fiftxprorfosreijciuntiir cum '^dcfeniione Beriurdini Tcld^Conifcntiiii, Philolbpliorum maximi , aocitjiiorum •^iati;s,qua! hic dilucidi ntiir, & ro Arillotcie pugqat lacohus Antooius hUm , cotur^^leiprnm, Bc illam puf> ;,oilcadicur.  lOuPrifSmum Domatum 2>. y 'i /\ TAPOLIi ApudHdrat^unSaluianum. i J p  -s r . . 1 «ftr hiiti,. Vhy. fleti. ^;flet^« . eates cHe?idei r H a ^ ‘videotii^ {aotifectindiint . w ' niagwm in ejldeth mole , tc vid«cut .ou Qttwido^ Pleto vfQaeft rbatririjs duobo», quorum enum. •eruo. contrar^fbrma*.EtSiniplidu.Anuqaornmfcromt«oJ?J.^ Ijaj^fls ^rpinjlMta,fle tenebras alterum, fleidem aodqui fenlerecon* «Wdii« formas, flt cum hardiffereht«fimin calore. fl^fjgoee^Je ^us, Rtd pmnmtd inuiti VTc^obicurd locuticalidam % fr^gfd^. Sunday at the Parks has that Oxford trick of feeling both idle and supervised. Grice is on a bench with the children arranged around him in the only stable formation children permit: moving. A ball is being pursued with a seriousness that would shame most metaphysicians. The grass is doing its slow, English work. And Grice, having promised himself not to read the trash press, is reading it anyway, because promises made to oneself are the easiest to cancel without public scandal. He has the TLS open, which in his hands is less a newspaper than a device for taking people down politely. Austin’s piece is there—Austin reviewing Ryle, for the masses, as if the masses had been begging for a correction about “intelligence” and its alleged criteria. Grice reads with a grin that is almost a wince. Austin’s tone is exactly right: brisk, impatient, and just short of calling the whole thing silly—except that, of course, he does call it silly, which is what makes it Austin rather than merely English. Ryle’s worry, Grice thinks, is the old one: the ghost in the machine. The soul as a resident lodger in the body, doing a little private thinking and pulling levers. Ryle, the perpetual bachelor who has lived among college grounds as if lawns were arguments, cannot stand the theological smell of it. So he offers his cure: no ghost, only dispositions; no inner tenant, only outward competence. And Austin, the war-shaped, tool-sharp Austin, is alarmed by the cure because it resembles the illness: a return to that Ayer-type behaviourism which Oxford is supposed to have outgrown, the view that if you cannot check it from the outside it must not exist on the inside. Grice looks up from the TLS and, uninvited, Marta walks into his head. Not as a person—Grice rarely thinks of authors as persons unless they are in the room—but as a title that has been sitting there like a Latin dare: immortalitas animae. The immortality of the soul. Marta against Pomponazzi, or whoever else is currently on the docket of the dead. The scholastic quarrel, made portable. He folds the TLS slightly, not to stop reading but to allow himself a syllogism, because Oxford men cannot resist turning grass into logic. Socrates est homo. Omnis homo est mortalis. Ergo, Socrates est mortalis. A neat little exercise, the kind of thing that feels like a moral fact because it is expressed as a valid form. It is also, Grice thinks, the sort of thing an Italian can say as if it were a proverb: Ogni uomo è mortale. And then, because the children are shouting and the Parks are not the Schools, Grice adds the further complication that is always waiting to inflate the tidy schema. Socrates has an anima. Anima est immortalis? Ergo, Socrates est immortalis? At which point the syllogism begins to creak like an undergraduate chair. Because “immortalis” does not want to attach itself to Socrates in the way “mortalis” does. “Mortalis” attaches to homo; “immortalis,” if it attaches to anything, attaches to anima. And the soul, annoyingly, is not the man—unless one is prepared to say that a man is his soul, which is precisely the move that generates the ghost-in-the-machine picture Ryle is trying to exorcise. Grice can hear Austin snorting at the whole thing: why take “soul” as if it were a thing with a job-description. Why not look at what we say. Who says “my soul” in ordinary Oxford conversation, except in chapel or in jest. Who says “immortal” except as rhetoric. And yet Marta’s Latin sits there, insisting that a great many people said it, said it seriously, and built whole argumentative cathedrals out of it. Grice tries a variation, because variations are how you reveal what you have smuggled in. Socrates est homo. Omnis homo habet animam. Omnis anima est immortalis. Ergo, Socrates habet animam immortalem. That reads better. It keeps the predicates in their proper places. It avoids the vulgar slide from “Socrates is mortal” to “Socrates is immortal,” which is the sort of slide that makes metaphysics look like a conjuring trick with adjectives. It yields, modestly, that Socrates has an immortal soul, if there are immortal souls to be had. But then the old Oxford objection returns, now wearing Austin’s face. What does “has” mean here. Has a soul as he has a liver. Has a soul as he has a duty. Has a soul as he has a secret. The verb “have” is a garage in which too many vehicles are parked. Ryle, Grice suspects, has noticed exactly this garage problem and decided the safest solution is to demolish the building. No soul, no garage. Only dispositions, only patterns of competence, only the public criteria. But Austin’s point in the review—Grice hears it beneath the jokes—is that demolishing the building may also demolish the phenomenon you were trying to describe. You cannot solve a conceptual muddle by refusing to talk about anything that cannot be verified by an observer with a clipboard. The children’s game becomes louder; a ball rolls dangerously near Grice’s shoe; he stops it with the toe of his boot, a tiny act of bodily intelligence performed without ghostly assistance. He thinks: if Ryle means that intelligence is just the pattern of such performances, then fine. But if he means that the inner is a myth because it is not publicly inspectable, then he has confused “not a thing” with “nothing.” And this is where Aristotle begins, quietly, to offer a way out that is neither Ryle’s ghostlessness nor Marta’s immortal lodger. De anima. Not the soul as a separable passenger, and not the soul as a mere word for behaviour, but the soul as the form of a living thing: the set of capacities by which a body is alive and does what it does. The soul, on this picture, is not another object; it is a principle of organisation—what makes this body a living human body rather than a corpse with the same parts. Grice does not call it functionalism, because that would sound like an American selling you something. But he can feel the attraction of the approach in his own terms. It lets you say three things at once, all of them decently Oxonian. First: it lets you say to Ryle—yes, you are right to resist the ghost as an extra entity, an extra tenant, a second person inside the first. The soul is not a little man in the skull. Second: it lets you say to Austin—yes, you are right that we must attend to how the language works, and that “intelligence” is not a hidden substance but a label for powers manifested in action and talk, under ordinary criteria. Third: it lets you say to Marta—yes, you are right to insist that “anima” is not just a poetical flourish; it names something philosophically serious. But the seriousness is not secured by attaching “immortal” to it as if immortality were a property like colour. The seriousness is secured by getting clear what sort of thing a “soul” is supposed to be in the first place, and by refusing to let the predicate do the metaphysics. He looks back at the TLS. Austin is still being funny in print, which is what the public thinks philosophers do when they are “accessible.” Grice, privately, is grateful. The review has given him his Sunday exercise: to see that the old scholastic syllogism about mortalis and immortalitas is not merely a fossil. It is the same muddle reappearing in modern dress: ghost versus behaviour, inner life versus public criteria, the temptation to make “the soul” into an item and then wonder whether it can survive death. A child tugs at his sleeve and asks for something that is, mercifully, not metaphysical. Grice folds the TLS, stands, and thinks that the only decent conclusion, for today, is also the most deflating. Socrates is mortal. Men are mortal. If there is immortality, it does not belong to the man as man, but—if anywhere—to whatever “soul” turns out to mean once you stop treating it as a ghost and stop treating it as a refusal to speak. And that, he thinks, is enough philosophy for a Sunday in the Parks, among children who do not need a theory of mind to run, fall, and get up again.Grice: Marta, caro filosofo romano, dimmi: è vero che hai sfidato Telesio a duello filosofico? Si dice che la vostra battaglia abbia fatto tremare le fondamenta della natura — e forse anche quelle del caffè napoletano. Marta: Grice, non esageriamo! Ho semplicemente preso carta e penna, e ho difeso Aristotele come si difende la ricetta della carbonara: con fermezza e senza panna. Telesio voleva stravolgere la natura, io gli ho ricordato che anche il sole, per riscaldare, segue le regole. Grice: Campanella però ha risposto con entusiasmo, pubblicando un trattato per difendere il suo maestro. Hai mai pensato che, alla fine, la filosofia sia una gara di implicature? Si insinua, si allude, e… chi vince paga il pranzo. Marta: Esatto! Ma attenzione: se il pranzo è offerto da un aristotelico, è tutto rigorosamente ordinato — antipasto, primo, secondo e verità assoluta come dessert. Se invece lo organizza Telesio, chissà… magari ti porta a mangiare all'aperto, per dimostrarti che i sensi hanno sempre ragione! Marta, Giacomo Antonio (1578). Apologia de immortalitate animae adversus opusculum Simonis Portii de mente humana. Napoli: Salviani.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Martellotta: LA ragione conversazionale dal deutero-esperanto al pirotese.  Vito Martellotta (Bari, Puglia): La ragione conversazionale dal deutero-esperanto al pirotese. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats communication as an intention-based, rationally constrained practice: what makes an utterance mean something (and generate implicatures) is not just any convention or code, but the speaker’s intention that the hearer recognize that intention and respond appropriately under shared expectations of cooperation. Martellotta (Vito Martellotta, Bari, author of Latinulus, 1919, inspired by Peano-style auxiliary-language ambitions) stages the complementary and slightly adversarial perspective: he treats meaning as something that can be engineered by deliberate design of an artificial system, with lexical and morpho-syntactic choices fixed in advance so that understanding depends less on conversational inference and more on the user’s mastery of the constructed code. In Gricean terms, Latinulus is a stress-test for how far convention can be made to carry meaning without the subtle pragmatic work that implicature normally performs, and the “ticca/thick” example is telling: even in a supposedly Latin-based universal idiom, unintended cross-linguistic seepage and audience expectations smuggle in extra meaning, so that what users take to be conveyed is shaped by background competence and analogy as much as by explicit stipulation. Where Grice’s Deutero-Esperanto joke emphasizes that a private stipulation with no community uptake is not yet a real language in the full communicative sense, Martellotta’s project emphasizes precisely that uptake problem by proposing a public auxiliary designed for international exchange; but Grice would insist that even if the code is impeccably designed, actual communication will still rely on implicatures (what is left unsaid, what is presumed shared, what is signalled by choosing one form rather than another) because the pragmatic layer is how rational agents manage efficiency, relevance, and trust. The contrast, then, is code-first versus interaction-first: Martellotta tries to build universality into the system; Grice explains universality (and its failures) through rational cooperative inference, showing why even the most artificial language quickly becomes “pirotese” once real speakers start using it to mean more than they explicitly decree. Grice: “When I said I did invent deuteron-Esperanto, I wasn’t thinking Martellotta!” The Oxford philosopher Grice once joked: “Language, or meaning, has nothing to do with convention, in spite of what people like Schiffer has said – I can invent a new language, call it Deutero-Esperanto, and decree what is proper! Keywords: artificiale. Grice refers to an ‘artificial’ system of representation in ‘Retrospective Epilogue.’ Si spira al lavoro di PEANO  per il suo Latinulus o Piccola Lingua Latina, pubblicato nel libro Latinulus. Grammaticas de Latinula Linguas a Bari. Si tratta di un caso piuttosto interessante perché si configura come una lingua a posteriori composta da lessico latino, sistema fonetico italiano e morfologia e sintassi oxoniana! Ad uno sguardo più attento infatti, si nota che la frase in Latinulus «Leos abeo crassa capus circumdata cum longa et ticca comas de fulva colos», in it. il leone ha una grande testa circondata da una lunga e folta chioma di peli rossi', ricalca in realtà l'ordine sintattico oxoniano (cfr. the lion has a big head surrounded by long and thick tawny colour); e in questo inciso l'autore si è spinto oltre, creando una sovrapposizione con l'inglese anche a livello di lessico, come è evidente in «ticca» - non giustificabile etimologicamente tramite il latino - e thick. VITO M. __e-&e c_ * : radi LI LATINULUS uu Grammaticas. i DE LATINULA LINGUAS E oro de Auctoris I (£ 09 RIPPZZZA i 9° PET. le 4 È hh “ " Mr « LS w erat Marica s'sà VITO M. L Aaa 6 € - 6 A e | i LATINULUS Grammaticas DE eee LATINULA LINGUAS PARTIS FONOLOGIAS et MORFOLOGIAS O a È ; (O Il grande sviluppo materiale e morale che ha avuto la civiltà nel nostro secolo si deve senza dubbio in gran parte ai rapidi e molteplici mezzi di comunicazioni che, avvicinando i popoli più lontani e di diverse nazioni, ne hanno maggiormente favorito lo scambio delle idee e dei comuni bisogni; Artificiale -- lingua universale, deutero-Esperanto. Grice’s room at St John’s has the late-summer feel of 1939: windows half open, air that can’t decide whether it is still Term or already History, and a wireless in the corner that everybody pretends not to be listening to. Strawson arrives with that scholarship-boy briskness: he has the manner of someone who has been awarded a place to “read English” and is still faintly astonished that the place contains logic as well. Grice has, on the table, a thin Italian thing he has not read and is already quoting, because this is how civilised prejudice is done. He taps the cover. Martellotta, he says, Latinulus. Strawson sits, looks at the title, and lets it do its work in him. Latinulus, sir? Yes, Grice says. A little Latin. A purified Latin. A Latin that has been taken into a sanatorium and returned with its grammar removed. Strawson says, very politely, as if he were correcting a proof rather than an older man: And if it is little Latin, sir, then what is yours? You don’t speak Latin in College. You don’t speak Greek either. You speak—well—English. Grice watches him with a mild approval that tries not to look like approval. Careful, he says. We do not “speak Latin” at Oxford, true. We merely require it. There is a difference. Oxford is very good at requiring things it doesn’t do. Strawson tilts his head, as he will later tilt metaphysics into grammar. But the little language business, sir—Peano, Martellotta, all that—why the little Latin at all? If one wants a calculus, why not just do it in symbols? Or in English? Angliculus. Grice feels the word land like a perfectly placed pin. Angliculus? A little English, Strawson says. English purified. Like Latinulus, only for the blue-collars. Blue-collars, Grice repeats, as if tasting something faintly improper. Introducing themselves into our Elysium. He reaches for the chalk, as if the blackboard were the one place where a don is permitted to be frank. He writes IF in large letters and turns back. There, he says. The metaphysical load-bearing beam. If. Strawson, with a scholarship boy’s delight in insolence, says: And Peano thought it needed Latin? Peano thought everything needed a little Latin, Grice says. It’s the last polite language of Europe, so it looks as if it will save you from vulgarity. But a calculus is not saved by a language. It is saved by a sign. He draws two symbols, one after the other, as if laying out exhibits. First, Peano’s old implication sign: ⊃. Then the Principia “horseshoe”: ⊃ again, though the typographers call it different and philosophers pretend to see the difference. Strawson says: I thought the horseshoe was “supset.” Like set inclusion. That is exactly the trouble, Grice says. It was borrowed from inclusion and put to work as implication. A sign with a previous job is always liable to carry a previous implicature. Whitehead and Russell wanted a neat mark for “if…then,” and they took the nearest thing that looked respectable. Strawson says, softly triumphant: So your Angliculus would keep “if” and drop ⊃. Ordinary language wins. Grice looks pained, as if “wins” were already a category mistake. Ordinary language does not win, he says. Ordinary language merely survives. And if it survives, it does so by not being forced to behave like a calculus. The calculus wants an object that “if” cannot give it. He points at IF again. In English, “if” does several jobs. It can introduce a condition, a supposition, a concession, a polite hedge, a threat. And every time it does one job, it leaves the other jobs hovering as licensed misunderstandings. That is why it is philosophically useful and why it is logically poisonous. Strawson says: So Peano did the right thing by inventing a sign. Peano did a thing, Grice says. Whether it was the right thing depends on what he thought he was doing. If he thought ⊃ captured the sense of “if,” he was deluded. If he thought it merely captured one regimented use, he was merely doing what Oxford does with undergraduates: shaving off everything interesting until only the examinable remains. Strawson smiles. And Latinulus, sir? Latinulus is the same vice in a different costume, Grice says. It is the fantasy that by purifying a language you purify thought. As if Cicero needed purification. As if Latin itself ever “needed” a little Latin. Strawson, who has not done Lit Hum and knows he has not, chooses the one point that will sting without sounding rude. But you worship Cicero at Corpus, sir. Grice gives him a look that is almost affectionate. At Corpus, yes. Here we worship the timetable. He leans back. And the funny thing, he says, is that I do not even speak Latin properly. I read it. I write it badly. I force it on boys who will later write English as if Latin were their mother and they were angry with her. Strawson says: So what is wrong with Latinulus, then? It’s only honest. It admits it is little. What is wrong with it, Grice says, is that it pretends the sin is in the lingua. Marzolo would call it vitium loquelae. But the vice is never in the tongue. It is in the talker. It is in the man who thinks that by changing code he can avoid having to be responsible for what he means. Strawson looks down at ⊃ and then at IF. And which is worse, sir? The Peano sign in Latinulus, or Russell’s horseshoe in Angliculus? Grice thinks for a moment, and the wireless crackles softly as if it were clearing its throat. Peano in Latin is at least being decorous, he says. Russell in English is being bold. But both are doing the same thing: taking “if” and pretending it has only one life. They make it truth-functional, and then they congratulate themselves on having made it simple. He points at IF one last time. But “if” is not simple. It is civilised. It is what lets one speak without committing oneself to the whole universe at once. The calculus makes it a machine. Conversation keeps it a manoeuvre. The wireless suddenly sharpens; the voice of the announcer becomes careful in that way that makes all rooms in England identical for a moment. Grice and Strawson both go still, not dramatically—Oxford never does drama—but in the way one goes still when one hears that the background has become the foreground. Chamberlain’s voice comes through, slow and official, making each word do the work of a seal. Grice does not look at Strawson. Strawson does not look at Grice. The tutorial has been interrupted by a larger tutorial. When it is over, Strawson says, after a beat: So, sir. If. Grice nods, almost grimly. Yes, he says. If. And now the “then” is not ours to choose.Grice: Martellotta, quando ho detto che potevo inventare il Deutero‑Esperanto, non stavo pensando che tu l’avresti preso come invito a fondare una Repubblica linguistica a Bari. Martellotta: Ma scusa, se tu “decreti ciò che è proprio”, io mi limito a fare l’assessore: lingua artificiale, cittadinanza immediata, e tassa comunale pagabile in implicature. Grice: Capisco. E nel pacchetto turistico includi anche il Latinulus di Peano: lessico latino, fonetica italiana e… sintassi oxoniana, così il leone finisce per ruggire in ordine soggetto-verbo-oggetto con accento da High Street. Martellotta: E con “ticca”! Un thick travestito da latino: è la prova che, quando una lingua è davvero universale, prima o poi passa la dogana di Oxford e ti lascia un anglicismo nel bagaglio. Martellotta, Vito (1919). Latinulus: grammaticas de latinula linguas. Fonologias et morfologias. Bari: Casini.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Martinetti: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- i veliani e l’amore alcibiadico. Grice: “One thing can be said for Italian philosophers over Oxonian philosophers: they take the history of philosophy more seriously! I like M.;  Piero Martinetti (Pont Canavese, Torino, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- i veliani e l’amore alcibiadico. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what a speaker means beyond what is said by presuming cooperation and inferring intentions, so implicature is the accountable surplus generated when a speaker relies on what a competent audience can work out from context and shared norms; Martinetti (Piero Martinetti, 1872–1943, Pont Canavese-born, self-described “neo-Platonist transplanted too early,” editor of Platonic materials, and famously the lone Italian philosophy professor to refuse the Fascist loyalty oath) supplies a contrasting ethical-metaphysical backdrop in which the governing norm is not just cooperative exchange but fidelity to truth and conscience, even at the cost of institutional rupture. In Gricean terms, Martinetti’s Platonizing discourse about eros/amore and number is less a play with conversational economy than a bid to re-orient the interlocutor toward higher-order goods (the Good, the soul’s ascent, moral law), so that what is “meant” often exceeds what can be made explicit in any single utterance and is carried instead by the dialogical tradition itself—anthologies, commentary, and the pedagogical staging of philosophical life. Where Grice treats implicature as typically cancellable and locally computable, Martinetti’s example highlights a situation where cancellation is morally costly: in politics and institutional life, refusing to utter the expected formula (the oath) becomes a communicative act whose implicature is deliberately unmistakable, because the point is to make one’s commitment public. The result is that Martinetti complements Grice by showing a different register of conversational rationality: not merely the rational coordination of beliefs in talk, but the rational governance of speech by principle, where the deepest “implicatures” are ethical—what one will not say, and what that refusal makes evident about the kind of life one is committed to living. Grice: “One thing can be said for Italian philosophers over Oxonian philosophers: they take the history of philosophy more seriously! I like M.; he wrote about eros, or as the Italians call it, ‘amore,’ – a different root from cupidus, too! He edited a platonic anthology.” “He also has a strange treatise on ‘the number’ which post-dates Frege!” -- «Di sé soleva dire di essere un neoplatonico trasmigrato troppo presto nel nostro secolo»  (Cesare Goretti). Professore di filosofia, si distinse per essere stato l'unico filosofo che rifiutò di prestare il giuramento di fedeltà al Fascismo. E il primo dei quattro figli (tre maschi e una femmina, senza contare una bambina che morì piccolissima) di un avvocato. Dopo aver frequentato il Liceo classico Carlo Botta di Ivrea, si iscrisse a Torino, dove ebbe come insegnanti ALLIEVO, BOBBA, ERCOLE, FLECHIA e GRAF, laureandosi col sistema sankhya: un studio sulla filosofia nell’India” discussa con ERCOLE, che, grazie all'interessamento d’ALLIEVO, risulta vincitrice del Premio Gautieri.  Dopo la laurea M. fa un soggiorno di due semestri presso l'Lipsia, dove poté venire a conoscenza del fondamentale studio di Garbe sulla filosofia Sāṃkhya. Si può dunque "ipotizzare che tra gli scopi del viaggio vi fosse anzitutto quello di approfondire gli studi dell’India, iniziati a Torino con  Flechia e 'Ercole." Iinsegna filosofia nei licei di Avellino, Correggio, Vigevano, Ivrea, e per finire a Torino. Compone la monumentale “Introduzione alla metafisica” e “Teoria della conoscenza”, ch edopo che consegue  la libera docenza in Filosofia teoretica a Torino gli valse di vincere il concorso per le cattedre di filosofia teoretica e morale dell'Accademia scientifico-letteraria di Milano, che diventa Regia Università degli Studî, nella quale insegna. Divenne socio corrispondente della classe di Scienze morali dell'Istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere, fondato da Napoleone L’amore velia, antologia platonica, amore socratico, sezione sull’Grice. Grice: Martinetti, tu dici d’essere “un neoplatonico trasmigrato troppo presto”: dunque sei arrivato nel Novecento senza bagaglio… ma con tutta l’Idea del Bene in valigia? Martinetti: Esatto. E tu, Grice, arrivi a dire che noi italiani prendiamo sul serio la storia della filosofia: implicatura ovvia—voi oxoniensi la prendete sul serio solo quando c’è un tè di mezzo. Grice: Colpito. Però ammetto: quando leggo che hai scritto di eros—anzi, amore, che suona meno “cupido” e più “metafisica con garbo”—mi viene voglia di promuoverti a massima conversazionale: “Sii platonico, ma non pedante.” Martinetti: E allora tieniti forte: ho anche un trattato sul “numero” dopo Frege. È il modo più educato per dire: “Grazie, Germania, ora vi mostro che anche un neoplatonico sa contare… ma senza perdere l’anima.” Martinetti, Piero (1896). Il sistema Sāṃkhya. Studio sulla filosofia indiana. Torino: Lattes.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Martini: l’implicatura conversazionale – la scuola di Cambiano -- filosofia piemontese  Lorenzo Martini (Cambiano, Torino, Piemonte): l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rational inference from what is said plus shared cooperative expectations: speakers exploit what hearers can be expected to work out, and much communicative work is done by leaving things unsaid in a principled, accountable way; Lorenzo Martini (1787–1854, Cambiano-born physician-philosopher at Turin, pioneer professor of physiology and among the first holders of a chair in legal medicine, author of manuals such as Elementa physiologiae, 1821) offers a contrasting picture in which “reason” is anchored less in the micro-logic of conversational inference and more in the disciplinary rationality of medicine, pedagogy, and civic expertise, where interpretation must be publicly defensible and often evidentially constrained. Read through Grice, Martini’s “science of the heart” and his shifting between philosophical discourse and medico-legal practice highlight that implicature is not always welcome: in court-like settings (or anywhere responsibility and proof matter), one tries to minimize reliance on what is merely suggested and to maximize what can be stated, documented, and checked, because the costs of mis-inference are high. Yet the dialogue in your passage shows the bridge: even the medico-legal mind trades in implicature (titles that “imply too much,” the pragmatic force of saying “I understood you,” the social signal of sincerity), and Martini’s bilingual identity as doctor and philosopher resembles Grice’s own insistence that meaning is not just lexical content but an action aimed at uptake—only Martini’s uptake is shaped by institutional contexts (clinic, lecture hall, tribunal) that discipline how far cooperative inference may safely go. In short, Grice supplies the general inferential mechanics of implicature in ordinary conversation, while Martini supplies a case where conversational reason is constantly negotiated against evidential and ethical demands, making implicature alternately a tool of wit and a risk to be managed. Grice: “When Austin praised the genius of the ordinary language, he meant English! The Italians are less fake and they just say it loud and proud: ‘ingegno italiano’ are the keywords! Grice: “One would think that his ‘discorsi filadelfici’ are about brotherly love, but they were delivered at the Philadelphia American-Italian Philosophical Society!” – Grice: “He wrote on Emilio and Narciso, and a story of philosophy – starting not from Thales but Gioberti!” – Grice: “His science of the heart – scienza del cuore – is a mystery!” Compì studi classici a Chieri e poi, ospitato al Real Collegio di Torino, si rivolse allo studio delle scienze naturalistiche. Con la laurea in medicina,  cui seguirà anche quella in filosofia, ottenne l'insegnamento al predetto Istituto, prima di conseguire una brillante carriera nell'ateneo torinese. Qui, infatti, ottenne prima la docenza in fisiologia  e poi quella di medicina legale, cattedra quest'ultima, istituita di cui fu il primo insegnante in assoluto.  Di Torino fu anche rettore, negli anni in cui ebbe numerosi riconoscimenti, tra cui l'onorificenza di cavaliere dell'Ordine dei Santi Maurizio e Lazzaro.  Ma non mancarono episodi tragici, allorché, pochi anni dopo le nozze, perse la moglie, dalla quale ancora non aveva avuti figli, né li avrebbe avuti in seguito, visto che non si risposò, per dedicarsi completamente all'insegnamento e alla stesura di saggi e manuali nelle discipline mediche. In questo filone, il più ricco, vanno almeno segnalati gli “Elementa physiologiae” e “Lezioni di fisiologia” così come “Medicina legale”, accanto agli Elementa medicinae forensis, politiae medicae et hygienes, cui avrebbe fatto seguito il Manuale di medicina legale.  Il variegato percorso saggistico non si limitò (e non si esaurì) a studi a carattere medico-fisiologico e medico-legale. storia della filosofia, ingegno italiano, il cratilo di Platone. Grice: Martini, Austin lodava il “genio della lingua ordinaria”… ma sospetto intendesse “inglese”: voi piemontesi dite direttamente ingegno italiano. Almeno siete più sinceri di noi. Martini: Sinceri sì, ma anche pratici: io ho due lauree (medicina e filosofia) e una cattedra di medicina legale… quindi se l’implicatura “ti ho capito” non regge, posso sempre chiedere l’autopsia del significato. Grice: E poi i tuoi discorsi filadelfici: pensavo fossero sermoni sulla fraternità universale, e invece erano… a Filadelfia, alla Società italo-americana. Ecco un caso in cui il titolo implica troppo! Martini: Colpa tua: tu insegni che “ciò che si dice” non è “ciò che si intende”; io aggiungo che “ciò che si intende” spesso passa dal cuore… ma la mia scienza del cuore resta un mistero: per decifrarla servono o Grice… o un medico legale. Martini, Lorenzo (1821). Elementa physiologiae. Torino: Pica.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Martino: l’implicatura conversazionale -- la religione civile della prima e unica Roma! – magismo -- filosofia italiana meridionale – filosofia del sud – la scuola di Napoli -- filosofia campanese -- filosofia italiana Ernesto de Martino (Napoli, Campania): l’implicatura conversazionale -- la religione civile della prima e unica Roma! – magismo -- filosofia italiana meridionale – filosofia del sud. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, intention-guided inference: speakers aim to be understood, hearers assume cooperative purpose, and what is meant can exceed what is said in a way that is (at least in principle) calculable from shared norms; de Martino (Ernesto de Martino, 1908–1965, Naples-born historian of religions and ethnologist, whose work on Southern Italian “magismo” and ritual crises culminates in a distinctive theory of cultural practices as techniques for securing “presence”) reframes the same phenomenon by shifting the explanatory center from individual communicative intentions to collective regimes of sense-making in which words, gestures, and rites function as socially inherited devices for stabilizing reality when ordinary causal explanation feels existentially insufficient. In Gricean terms, the “magical explanation” problem is not simply a different set of propositions but a different conversational background: what counts as relevant evidence, what counts as a satisfactory answer, and what counts as a respectful way of speaking are set by a local moral-ritual economy, so an utterance can carry implicatures (about respect, solidarity, threat, shame, or protection) that are invisible if you assume only an Oxford-style epistemic goal of truth tracking. That is why your passage’s point about Italian lacking a neutral term for “magical” is philosophically telling: the label itself generates derogatory implicatures and so distorts uptake, whereas de Martino’s analyses try to describe those practices without pre-loading the conversational context with contempt. The contrast, then, is that Grice offers a general micro-model of how rational agents derive meaning beyond literal content in cooperative talk, while de Martino shows how “rationality” in communication can be plural and culturally sedimented: in the South-Italian contexts he studies, implicature is often bound up with ritual, narrative authority, and the need to repair social and personal crises, so conversation is not merely information exchange but a civil-religious technology for keeping a world inhabitable. Grice: “Much as Hollis has worked on rationality and relativism, M. shows that in Southern Italy, a ‘magical’ explanation is often preferred to a strictly ‘casual’ one – M. notes that the Italian language lacks a philosophical apt term to describe this type of ‘magical’ explanation devoid of derogatory implicatures, though!” -- Filosofo italiano. Napoli, Campania. Grice: “I like Martino – and his interviewees – there is indeed a ‘discepolato’ around him.” Grice: “We don’t have anything like Martino at Oxford – Hollis is the closest I can think.” Grice: “In his strictly philosophical explorations, Martino aptly clashes with Croce!” -- Dopo la laurea a Napoli con una tesi in Storia delle religioni sui gephyrismi eleusini sotto la direzione di Adolfo Omodeo, si interessa alle discipline etnologiche. Si iscrive ai GUF e alla Milizia Universitaria, collaborando a L'Universale di Berto Ricci e facendo circolare in una cerchia ristretta di collaboratori un Saggio sulla religione civile poi rimasto inedito.  L'ingresso nel circolo crociano «Erano quelli gli anni in cui Hitler sciamanizzava in Germania e in Europa, e ancora lontano era il giorno in cui le rovine del palazzo della Cancelleria avrebbero composto per questo atroce sciamano europeo la bara di fuoco in cui egli tentava di seppellire il genere umano: ed erano anche gli anni in cui una piccola parte della gioventù italiana cercava asilo nelle severe e serene stanze di Palazzo Filomarino per risillabare il discorso elementarmente umano altrove impossibile, persino nella propria famiglia».  Grice: “The more Martino speaks of ‘meridionale’ and ‘sud’ the less I’m willing to qualify him as an Italian philosopher simpliciter – so I categorise him as a representative of ‘filosofia del sud’ or ‘filosofia meridionale’. religione civile, magismo – essercizio del giudizio – viaggio magico en route – carpet route travelling – o routeless. Ernesto de Martino.  Grice: Martino, mi hai sempre incuriosito: a Oxford la religione civile è materia da libri polverosi, mentre a Napoli sembra una faccenda viva, quasi magica! Dimmi, come mai qui il magismo è ancora preferito alla spiegazione casuale? Martino: Caro Grice, qui al Sud, quando la spiegazione razionale non basta, basta chiedere alla zia che ti legge i tarocchi! Da noi il magismo è una forma di filosofia popolare: spiega ciò che la logica lascia in sospeso e, almeno, fa sorridere. Grice: E così, al posto di una lezione su Kant, preferite un viaggio magico senza itinerario, tra giudizi improvvisati e riti familiari? Forse dovremmo introdurre il “carpet route travelling” a Oxford: basta con gli schemi, avanti con le intuizioni meridionali! Martino: Grice, se vuoi diventare filosofo del Sud, ti preparo un rituale: dimentica gli appunti, siediti con noi a tavola, e lasciati trasportare dal racconto! Qui, la filosofia nasce tra un piatto di pasta e una storia che nessuno ha ancora scritto. Martino, Ernesto de (1929). La decadenza dell’Occidente.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Marzolo: la ragione conversazionale del segno – filosofia italiana –  (Padova). Filosofo italiano. Padova, Veneto.  Paolo Marzolo (Padova, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale del segno. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what is meant beyond what is said by presuming cooperative purposes and then inferring implicatures from an utterance’s form, content, and context; Marzolo (Paolo Marzolo, 1811–1868, Padua-born physician-philologist later professor of literature at Pisa, with early work on speech/loquela and later an explicit “essay on signs”) shifts the emphasis from Grice’s intention-centered pathway (“to mean is to intend”) to a sign-centered and historically philological pathway in which meaning is anchored in signification systems (signum/signare, indicare) and in the learned traditions that stabilize them. In Gricean terms, Marzolo’s approach makes “sign” the primary explanatory unit, treating linguistic items as tokens in a semiotic economy whose functioning is largely taken for granted, whereas Grice famously tries to postpone “what words mean” and instead reconstruct speaker-meaning and implicature from rational patterns of use, often exploiting under-specification (“Peccavi” vs “I said that I peccavi,” and the way audiences supply the missing “that”-clause content). The contrast is therefore methodological: Marzolo looks for the rationality of meaning in the classificatory apparatus of signs—how a sign stands for, indicates, or signifies within a codified semantic tradition—while Grice locates rationality in the intersubjective game of intention-recognition, where the very gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning is productive and regulated. Yet they converge at a deeper point: Marzolo’s philological insistence on signare and indicare can be read as a historical prelude to Grice’s program, because both are trying to explain how public marks and acts come to carry thought for others; the difference is that Marzolo treats that carrying as primarily semiotic and taxonomic, while Grice treats it as primarily pragmatic and inferential, with implicature as the central phenomenon by which reason makes communication more powerful than what is explicitly encoded. Grice: “When I delivered my lecture on ‘meaning’ for the Philosophical Society at Oxford, I knew that some of my pupils – to which I had burdened with my seminars on ‘meaning’ would be attending. I was paying little attention to Marzolo. When Cairo wrote his ‘Dictionary of Symbols,’ way before Vienna, and other events with which we were familiar at Oxford, Cairo makes an effort to trace his research – and he provides three references: Ferrero, Marzolo, and Marchesini – “amongst us Italians” – he adds. Now Ferrero was more of a lawyer and his ‘I simboli’ only tangentially approaches ‘simbolo’ and ‘segno,’ or the phenomenon of ‘voulere dire’ alla Grice – but what is important is that he leaves Marchesini behind, and indeed OVER-stresses the LEGACY of Marzolo. Unlike myself – who dismiss in “Meaning” talk of ‘sign,’ Marzolo entitles his ‘essay’ an ‘essay on signs’ – and he is indeed into ‘words’ – he held a profeessor of letters at Pisa. But his words are what these words ‘voule dire’ – ‘signare’ – as quoted by both Marzolo and Ferrero – as when Cicero says that a signum signat – in the zodiac. But Marzolo’s examples are RARELY about what a given expression MEANS, or is a sign of – he takes this for granted. Now, if you read my ‘Meaning’ you will find NO reference to what a word – or group of words means – I approach this later in my career, under pressure, and I give only ONE example ‘shaggy’ – shaggy shaggy reduplicated, as Ferrero has it to mean that the utterer means that the referent is hairy-coated. When it comes to indicare that’s our ‘say’ – as when I say ‘Peccavi’. But can I say that I said THAT peccavi? Surely not. So ‘say’ primarily applies to the utterer, but what the utterer says may not be an instance of his saying THAT – cf. MAD magazine cartoons on what people say and what they actually mean. Grice has Marzolo’s Padua dissertation in hand for exactly as long as it takes to reach the title, which is to say long enough to feel informed and short enough to remain innocent. De vitiis loquelae. He smiles at the plural. Vices. Not error, not mistake, but vice, as if bad talk were not merely unfortunate but culpable. Oxford, he thinks, will tolerate a mistake; it will not tolerate a vice unless the vice is done with style. He is due to give his class on Conversation, and he has been calling his apparatus “maxims” with just enough solemnity to make the young think a law has been passed. But Marzolo’s title prompts the more agreeable, older model: commandments, prohibitions, the moral grammar of don’ts. Not “do this,” which invites heroism, but “don’t do that,” which invites decency. It also has the advantage that a prohibition fits vice: a vitium is what you do when you ignore the don’t. And the first thing Grice wants to do, out of sheer perversity and a desire to keep himself honest, is to translate his own desiderata and principles into Latin prohibitions, as if he were drafting the Decalogue for the Senior Common Room. He begins with the two desiderata he has been smuggling into “Conversation” as if they were obvious. First desideratum: candour. The Oxford word would be “honesty,” but “honesty” sounds like a virtue and therefore like a claim. Better to put it as a sin to be avoided. Noli mentiri. Or, if he wants to keep it closer to utterance rather than character: Noli dicere quod falsum esse credis. Do not say what you believe to be false. And he notes, with some satisfaction, that the sin belongs to the speaker, not to the tongue. Loquela does not sin; loquens sins. Marzolo, by talking as if loquela itself has vices, commits what Grice regards as the classic scholastic indecency: blaming the instrument for the musician. Second desideratum: clarity. Perspicuity. Grice can already hear the objection before he raises it: “Be perspicuous” is itself not perspicuous. It is the sort of schoolmasterly Latinism that needs a footnote to be understood, and therefore violates itself on utterance. Still, he needs something in that vicinity, because undergraduates possess, in quantity, what can only be called an active talent for fog. So he tries again, as a prohibition, since prohibitions are the real form of civilised rules. Noli obscurus esse. Noli ambiguitatem facere. Noli verbis superfluis uti. Noli inordinate loqui. Do not be obscure. Do not make ambiguity. Do not use superfluous words. Do not speak disorderly. That, he thinks, is already better than “Be perspicuous,” because it tells you where the sin lives: obscuritas, ambiguitas, superfluitas, inordinatio. Each is a vice a chap can be caught committing, and therefore a vice a chap can learn to avoid. Then come the two principles, the ones he has been tempted to treat as higher-order moral upholstery for the whole enterprise. Principium of benevolentia. He does not mean affection. He means the minimal charity without which talk becomes gladiatorial noise. Again, not “be benevolent,” which sounds like sainthood, but “don’t be malicious,” which sounds like what a decent chap can manage even before breakfast. Noli malevolus esse. Or, closer to his own thought: Noli impedire intellectum alterius. Do not hinder the other’s understanding. Principium of amore proprium. Here he enjoys himself, because Oxford is full of self-love disguised as principle. The sin is not loving oneself—everybody does—but letting self-love sabotage cooperation by turning conversation into performance or advantage-seeking. Noli ex amore proprio loqui. Or, more pointedly: Noli quaerere gloriam in loquela. Do not seek glory in speech. He imagines the undergraduates looking startled if he wrote that on the board in Latin, because it would sound like a monk’s rule, and yet it would describe most tutorial essays with clinical accuracy. Now he sees the pleasing possibility of collapsing everything—desiderata and principles—into the later single principle he sometimes gives, conversational helpfulness, which is just grand enough to sound official and just plain enough to sound English. But again: make it a prohibition. Noli inutilis esse in conversatione. Do not be unhelpful in conversation. Or, if he wants the version that bites: Noli impedimento esse. Do not be an impediment. He gathers his notes for class and thinks that Marzolo’s vices have performed a small service. They have reminded him that his so-called maxims are not discoveries about language; they are demands on persons. They are a moral code for the conversationalist, not a pathology of loquela. And they are best presented, not as heroic instructions, but as the ordinary don’ts by which any decent chap at Oxford, or elsewhere for that matter, is expected to abide—unless, of course, he is writing a weekly essay, in which case he will violate every one of them at once and call it originality. Grice: Marzolo, al mio seminario su meaning ho fatto finta di niente sui “segni”… poi tu arrivi e intitoli tutto Saggio sui segni: mi stai mandando un segnale, o è solo gusto tipografico? Marzolo: È un segnale, certo: se tu cacci fuori il “segno” dalla porta, lui rientra dalla finestra… e si siede pure in cattedra a Pisa con me. Grice: Però tu dai per scontato che le parole significhino; io invece in Meaning riesco a parlare di “meaning” senza dire che cosa significhi una parola—un capolavoro di omissione cooperativa. Marzolo: E infatti il tuo unico esempio “shaggy shaggy” sembra un cane che abbaia due volte per farsi capire: tu dici Peccavi, ma poi aggiungi “non ho detto CHE peccavi”—e il lettore capisce benissimo… e ride, che è il vero indicatore. Marzolo, Paolo (1834). De vitiis loquelae quaedam exposita quum medicinae lauream coronam assequeretur. Padova. 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Masci: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- critica della critica della ragione – implicatura solidale. Grice: “At Oxford, we don’t say ‘Kant,’ we say ‘criticism’. For surely literary critics cannot claim all uses of ‘crit’, as in lit. crit.  Filippo Masci (Francavilla al Mare, Chieti, Abruzzo): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- critica della critica della ragione – implicatura solidale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rational, intention-sensitive inference: speakers rely on cooperative expectations (relevance, sufficiency, etc.) so that hearers can recover what is meant beyond what is explicitly said; Masci (Filippo Masci, Abruzzese philosopher shaped by the Spaventa milieu, early interpreter of Hegel and Kant, later engaged with psychology, measurement, and a “natural history” of volition) reframes that Gricean picture by treating “reason” less as a local conversational constraint and more as a historical-critical power that organizes domains—Kant’s critique, Hegelian logic, Aristotelian practical concepts, and the emerging scientific-psychological discourse about will, instinct, and psycho-physical correlation. In Gricean terms, Masci’s “critica della critica” orientation highlights that the background against which implicatures are drawn is not merely shared conversational common ground but also a shared intellectual tradition: terms like volontà, libertà, conoscenza, credenza, and even “criticism” carry inherited inferential routes, so what is implicated in philosophical exchange depends on how a community has already learned to connect concepts (e.g., willing to freedom, knowledge to belief) and on what counts as an acceptable “measure” or warrant in the human sciences. Where Grice analyzes how speakers manage meaning by being strategically indirect in talk, Masci emphasizes how indirectness is built into critique itself: a philosophical position often advances by redescribing an opponent’s framework (de-personalizing it, unifying its parts, exposing its limits) rather than by merely asserting a contrary thesis, so the implicatures are methodological and solidaristic—signals of alignment with a critical project, an intellectual lineage, or a conception of rational autonomy. The contrast, then, is that Grice supplies the micro-pragmatics of how rational agents get from saying to meaning in everyday conversation, while Masci supplies a macro-critique of how “reason” governs the very conceptual landscape within which conversational inferences become possible, making implicature partly a function of cooperative talk and partly a function of historically formed critical norms. Grice: “At Oxford, we don’t say ‘Kant,’ we say ‘criticism’. For surely literary critics cannot claim all uses of ‘crit’, as in lit. crit. By using ‘criticism’ instead of ‘Kantianism’ you achieve TWO goals: you de-personalise a doctrine, and you emphasise the unity between Kant’s critique of alethic reason and Kant’s critique of practical reason!” Grice: “But perhaps more interesting that his explorations on the judicative are Masci’s conceptual analysis, and fascinating ‘natural’ history of the will, with a focus on Aristotle!” Grice: “Like M., I make a conceptual connetction between willing and free-will.” – or “volonta” e “liberta” in his words! I like M.; he has philosophised on forms of intuition and instincdt – cf. my “Needs’ – and what he calls the psycho-physical materialism. Also on what he calls the psychological parallelism – He spent a few essays on quantification and measurement in atters of the soul -- -- and speaks of an ‘indirect measure’ in psychology. He has opposed ‘conoscenza’ to ‘credenza’ (cf. my knowledge and belief), and further, ‘conosecenza and pensiero’, knowledge and thought. Nato in una famiglia della borghesia abruzzese, perse il padre all'età di 4 anni. Frequenta il collegio Giambattista Vico di Chieti e, completati gli studi liceali, e allievo di MOLA, che gli insegna filosofia. Inizia gli studi di giurisprudenza all'Napoli, dove si laureò ed in seguito studiò scienze politico-amministrative. Comincia ad approfondire le sue conoscenze filosofiche grazie alle lezioni tenute da Spaventa nella stessa città. Influenzato dalla sua formazione universitaria e dallo stesso Spaventa, al centro dei suoi primi studi c'era il pensiero di Kant e Hegel. Ottenne la cattedra di professore reggente di filosofia a Chieti, prima dell'abilitazione che gli fu consegnata a Pisa. Inoltre venne nominato vincitore di un concorso della Reale Accademia delle scienze morali e politiche grazie ad un saggio sulla Critica della ragion pura. implicatura, critica della critica, criticismo, neo-criticismo. Grice has been telling his class on Conversation—regalling is perhaps the more accurate verb—that there are such things as conversational categories, as if one could go from “Now, look here” to Categoria conversationalis by mere Latinisation, and have the students feel they had been admitted to an old science rather than a new whim. He has enjoyed the phrase too much, which is always a danger at Oxford: enjoyment is taken as evidence that you have done something unserious, unless you can translate it into Greek and make it look like duty. Then, as if the universe has a taste for correction, he picks up Masci and does what he swore, by Sidney Smith’s authority, never to do: he forms his review before he has read, and forms it solely from the title, because titles are where philosophers hide their indiscretions. Le categorie del finito e dell’infinito. Categorie. Plural. Already a warning. The plural is always how Hegel begins: one category is never enough, because one category would be a limit, and Hegel’s whole ambition is to make limits into stepping-stones. Finito, infinito. The title manages, in two nouns, to sound as if it were doing metaphysics and as if it were doing theology, which is precisely the kind of double effect that makes Oxonians reach for their umbrellas. Grice smiles because he cannot avoid it: he has been talking about categories, too, only his were meant playfully. Qualitas, Quantitas, Relatio, Modus—Kant’s four polite drawers for storing judgments, which Kant presented with the air of a man who has discovered the filing system of the universe. Grice has always liked the drawers in the way one likes a well-made desk: not because one believes the desk is the structure of reality, but because it keeps papers from flying about. And now Masci is dragging in finito and infinito as if they were entries in the same cabinet. Grice’s mind immediately does the mischievous Oxonian move: it checks the syllabus. If we are talking Kant, then “infinite judgment” is not a grand Hegelian hymn to the Infinite. It is that peculiar Kantian device—negative but not merely negative—filed under Qualitas, and specifically under the rubric where Kant distinguishes affirmative, negative, and infinite judgments. The infinite judgment is the one that looks like a negation but behaves like an odd sort of classification: not “S is not P” but “S is non-P.” It is, as he has told his students with a straight face, a way of saying less and implying more. You deny P and you smuggle in a whole range of alternatives under a hyphen. So the very phrase categoria dell’infinito makes him laugh, because it sounds like the kind of inflation Kant would have hated while being exactly the kind of inflation Kant’s own machinery invites. Kant builds a little device for classifying judgments, and Hegel arrives and turns the device into a metaphysical engine, as if the filing cabinet were a locomotive. And that, Grice thinks, is what Masci is really confessing in the title: these are not conversational categories at all. They are Hegelian categories—Categorie as a term of art, not a term of convenience. Oxford’s “category” is usually a warning label: do not mix these. Hegel’s category is a promise: mix these and watch the world become more itself. Bradley, who taught the English how to take Hegel seriously without admitting it, already showed the trick: Hegel can do whatever he likes with Kant’s nonsense and make an ever grander nonsense out of it, and then, by sheer rhetorical pressure, compel you to call the nonsense “a system.” The system has the peculiar advantage that you cannot refute it without first learning its dialect. Grice feels his own guilt begin to glow. He has been guilty of treating Kant’s four headings as if they were toys for tidying up conversational phenomena—maxims under Relation, say, or Modus for speech-acts, or Quantitas for how much one says. He has even been guilty of those hybrid jokes—Kantotle, Ariskant—where he pretends one can splice Aristotle’s taxonomy to Kant’s critique and get something serviceable for Oxford purposes. But if he is honest, the joke should have had a second half all along. If Aristotle is Kant’s ancestor in sobriety, Plato is Hegel’s ancestor in grandeur. And he should have been making room, not only for Kantotle and Ariskant, but for Plathegel and Heglato—because Masci’s title is a reminder that the real gravitational pull in “categories” is not Kant’s desk drawers; it is Plato’s habit of turning a logical distinction into an ontological drama. The infinite, after all, is already a Platonic nuisance long before it becomes a Kantian heading or a Hegelian anthem. In the Sophist, Plato is forced into the famous indecency—the so-called parricide against Parmenides—because negation has to mean something without collapsing into mere nothing. Not-being cannot be sheer nonentity; it has to be difference, otherness, the fact that a thing is not this but is that. Negation, in other words, is not just a logical “no”; it is a metaphysical device for making room. Which is precisely why Hegel is so pleased with negation: it is not a mere stop sign; it is a motor. The finite negates itself, becomes its other, and the story continues. And Masci, in writing categorie del finito e dell’infinito, is telling you, before you read a line, that he is going to treat finitude and infinity not as two topics but as two stages in a dialectical machinery. Grice, because he cannot resist the dry jab at himself, imagines his own students hearing “conversational category” and then reading Masci’s title and concluding that Grice has merely been doing provincial Hegel all along without admitting it. They will think: Ah, so Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner are just the finite; implicature is the infinite. Or some such preposterous PPE thesis, duly delivered with footnotes and a tragic misunderstanding of what “infinite judgment” was supposed to be in Kant. He can already hear the weekly essays. One boy will write that Grice’s Cooperative Principle is the categoria dell’infinito because it transcends the finite constraints of literal meaning. Another will write that conversational implicature is the negation of the said and therefore constitutes the Aufhebung of semantics into pragmatics. Grice will have to sit there, polite, and repair their mis-intuitions with his own intuitions, the only instrument Oxford truly trusts: the native speaker’s sense of what one would say, and what one would never say, and what one meant, and what the hearer is merely allowed to infer. And at this point, inevitably, Austin enters Grice’s mind as the local demon of ordinary language. Austin, who would have hated the title on sight. Categorie del finito e dell’infinito would have made him reach for his most damaging weapon: a question about usage. Who, exactly, says “the category of the infinite” at the bus stop. Who says it even at High Table unless he is quoting a German. The answer, of course, is: no one. Which is why Austin would call it fishy. But Grice is not satisfied with Austin’s allergy. Because Austin’s own procedure, in Grice’s view, is compromised by a different confusion: the confusion between what is explicitly conveyed and what is implicitly conveyed, and then the further confusion of treating what is implicitly conveyed as if it were part of “sense.” Austin will happily talk as if “or” has a sense that includes its usual pragmatic insinuations. Grice finds that not merely wrong but faintly indecent. “Or” having a sense is about as comfortable as “to” having a sense. One can talk about its contribution, its role, its behaviour; but “sense” makes it sound like a thing with a soul. So here is the irony Masci provokes in him. Masci takes categories too seriously—Hegel seriously, Kant seriously, Aristotle seriously, Plato seriously—and makes a grand metaphysical edifice out of what might have been a modest classificatory convenience. Austin takes ordinary talk so seriously that he begins to smuggle into “sense” what belongs, properly, to the utterer’s intended but unspoken contribution. Both, in their different ways, turn a tool into a temple. Grice closes Masci—still at the title—and decides he is allowed, by Sidney Smith’s licence, to remain prejudiced. The title is enough. Masci is pointing in the right direction if the direction is Hegel’s: categories as the moving joints of thought, finitude and infinity as the drama of negation. But if Grice is to keep his own enterprise honest—conversation, implicature, the authority of the utterer—he must resist the temptation to let Hegel annex him. He will keep his categories conversational, meaning: practical, defeasible, answerable to how people actually speak. Let Masci have his infinite. Grice will settle for the more English ambition: to show, with a few well-chosen examples, that the finite resources of talk can, by cooperative inference, yield an indefinitely rich range of what is meant. That is quite enough infinity for a gentleman, and it does not require calling it a category.Grice: Masci, dimmi, in Abruzzo la critica della critica si serve col Montepulciano o va bene anche il caffè forte? Masci: Caro Grice, qui la critica si digerisce meglio con un bicchiere di Montepulciano—il caffè rischia di rendere la ragione troppo nervosa, e Kant non approverebbe! Grice: Ma se Kant fosse nato a Francavilla al Mare, la sua Critica sarebbe stata più solidale o più abruzzese? Forse avrebbe aggiunto una postilla sulla libertà di scelta tra arrosticini e gnocchi! Masci: Grice, se Kant avesse assaggiato gli arrosticini, avrebbe scritto la Critica della ragione gustativa! E magari la volontà sarebbe diventata ancora più libera, almeno a tavola. Qui, la filosofia si fa con la pancia piena e il pensiero contento! Masci, Filippo (1869). Le categorie del finito e dell’infinito. Studio sulla Scienza della logica di Hegel. Rivista bolognese di scienze, lettere, arti e scuola.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Masi: l’implicatura conversazionale -- i peripatetici del Lizio – la scuola di Firenze -- filosofia toscana – filosofia fiorentina  Giuseppe Masi (Firenze, Toscana): l’implicatura conversazionale -- i peripatetici del Lizio. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how a hearer can rationally recover what is meant beyond what is said by assuming cooperative purposes and then deriving implicatures from the speaker’s choice of words against shared expectations; the Masi vignette adds a distinctive twist by relocating the pressure point from conversational strategy to metaphysical vocabulary and historical semantics, because Masi’s interests (power of reason in the Heraclitus–Plato–Hegel line, and the “uni-equivocity” of being) treat meaning as something partly stabilized by large-scale conceptual architectures rather than only by local maxims of talk. In Grice’s terms, “Lycaeum/lizio” is a miniature model of the same phenomenon: a change in linguistic form changes what gets taken as the natural reading, and what would count as an implicature or a mere stylistic variant, so the hearer’s inferential task is always hostage to the available conceptual and lexical resources. Where Grice tends to treat polysemy and disambiguation as problems managed by context and cooperative inference (your “philosopher” example), Masi foregrounds how philosophy itself often seeks a controlled re-engineering of sense—trying to make being neither merely equivocal nor flatly univocal—which, pragmatically, is an attempt to reduce the room for conversational drift and to regiment what can be inferred from core terms. The result is a productive contrast: Grice explains how conversational reason extracts determinate speaker-meaning from flexible, sometimes messy ordinary usage, while Masi exemplifies a Platonist/Hegelian confidence that reason can also reshape the semantic field from above, so that implicature is not only something we calculate in everyday exchanges but also something that philosophical systems try to anticipate, domesticate, or pre-empt by redesigning the very space of possible meanings. Grice: “Most Oxonians cannot really spell Lycaeum, since it’s a devil of a word. The Italians fare slightly better when they opt for the vulgar spelling ‘lizio’. You see, the ‘y’ just becomes ‘i,’ the ‘ae’ is deleted, and the ‘c’ aquires the very Italian sound of ‘z’!” Grice: “Unlike Masi, I don’t think ontology has reached its end – il fine dell’ontologia” – Grice: “Masi has elaborated on the power of reason not from an Ariskantian perspective but from a Plathegelian one! – Masi: “Il potere della ragione: Eraclito, Platone, Hegel.” --  Grice: “It’s amazing Masi was implicating the same things as I was on S izz P and P hazz S; he even managed a coinage, ‘uni-equivocity’ – I love it!”. Figlio di Enrico Masi, generale dell'Esercito Italiano, e Leda Nutini. Ha compiuto i suoi studi a Bologna, conseguendo la maturità classica presso il liceo statale L. Galvani. Iscrittosi a Bologna, vi si laureò con lode  con una tesi sul diritto di famiglia negli Statuti Bolognesi. Assolse agli obblighi di leva e fu trattenuto alle armi in base alle disposizioni di emergenza del periodo. Congedato, riprese gli studi di filosofia a Bologna, dove conseguì la laurea con lode, discutendo co Battaglia la tesi, “Individuo, società, famiglia in Rosmini”. La tesi gli valse l'ammissione, con borsa di studio a Milano. Dopo il primo anno, fu richiamato alle armi nel periodo bellico. Ottenuto il congedo definitivo, insegna filosofia a Bologna. Participa ai principali convegni e congressi, come quelli del Centro Studi Filosofici di Gallarate, come attesta la sua collaborazione alla Enciclopedia filosofica quel Centro. Dona su collezione alla Pinacoteca comunale di Pieve di Cento. L'interesse storiografico che muove M. alla ricostruzione di Kierkegaard da un profondo e originale impegno teoretico, volto ad approfondire il concetto metafisico di "analogia", uni-equivociat dell’essere in Aristotele. i peripatetici, la carriera di un libertino. Giusepe Masi.  Grice: Masi, dimmi la verità: quante volte hai dovuto correggere un inglese che scrive “Lycaeum” con una y, una ae e magari pure una z? Masi: Caro Grice, in Toscana basta dire “lizio” e tutti capiscono: qui le lettere straniere si sciolgono come il burro sulla ribollita! Grice: Vedi, io ho passato anni a parlare di implicature – ma la tua “uni-equivociat” batte il mio inglese: è come mettere tutti i filosofi sulla stessa gondola, anche se siamo a Firenze e non a Venezia! Masi: Grice, tu implichi troppo; io qui, tra i peripatetici del Lizio, preferisco filosofare con un bicchiere di Chianti: così anche l’ontologia diventa più allegra! Masi, Giuseppe (1937). Il diritto di famiglia negli Statuti bolognesi. Bologna.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Masila: l’implicatura conversazionale – Ercole -- Roma – filosofia italiana  Masila (Roma, Lazio): l’implicatura conversazionale – Ercole -- Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what is meant beyond what is said by attributing to the speaker an intention to be understood under cooperative expectations, so implicature is a principled inference from an utterance’s literal content plus context and norms; the Masila vignette turns this into a contrast between modern, polysemy-aware analytic interpretation and an ancient epigraphic/papyrological practice where a single learned label can function as a socially stabilized classification rather than an invitation to fine-grained disambiguation. In Grice’s “Strawson is a philosopher” case, “philosopher” can implicate different things (profession, temperament, both) because modern usage allows multiple salient senses and because speakers exploit that flexibility; but a Herculaneum papyrus “Masila philosophus” belongs to a world in which “philosophus” is closer to a role-term within a cultural economy of paideia, marking someone as a member of a recognized intellectual type, so the hearer’s task is less to choose among competing senses and more to place Masila within a shared social taxonomy. The upshot for Grice is that what looks like monosemy may actually be pragmatics made invisible: the context (a library town, an elite Roman-Greek intellectual setting, a genre of identification) does so much work that alternative readings never become live options, so the “implicature” is not a hidden extra proposition but the whole background assumption that being a philosophus includes both study and reflective habit. In that way Masila complements Grice: he illustrates how conversational rationality can, in some settings, compress meaning so tightly into a conventional label that the implicature-work Grice foregrounds is offloaded onto stable institutions of education and status—“philosophus” as a one-word bridge from description to social recognition. Grice: “In my ‘Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning,” I choose the example of ‘philosopher’: ‘Starwson is a philosopoher’. Does this mean that Strawson is professionally engaged in philosophical [sic] studies, or that Strawson is inclined to general reflections about life, or both? The case is different with this papyrus found at Herculaneum: “Masila philosophus,’ it reads. We may suspect that a Herculaneum, back then, being professionally engaged in philosophical studies and being inclined to general reflections about life is a false dichotomy – and that ‘philosophus’ is monosemic!” Filosofo italiano. A reference to M. as a philosopher in a papyrus found at Herculaneum. GRICEVS: SALVE, MASILA: in libello meo dixi “Strawson philosophus est”; sed dubito—professoremne dicas, an virum qui de vita semper cogitet, an utrumque? MASILA: SALVE, GRICE: apud Herculanum dubitatio periit; in papyro enim scriptum est “Masila philosophus”—quasi diceret: “unum verbum, duo munera; noli disiungere.” GRICEVS: Ergo ibi philosophus monosemos est—et ego, more Oxoniensi, polysemos quaero: nimis multa infero ex una voce, quasi ex amphora totam bibliothecam. MASILA: Age: tu infer, ego ridebo; sed memento—si papyrus te vocat philosophum, iam et stipendiarius es et meditativus… et hoc sine footnote. Masila (a. u. c. DCCCXXXII). De philosophia una voce. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Masnovo: la ragione conversazionale. Grice: “While we start philosophy at Oxford – sub-faculty of philosophy – as part of the classics – Faculty of Literae Humaniores – Oxford does not quite rule what counts as a ‘classic’: Cicerone, and compagnia. Amato Masnovo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how an audience can rationally recover what is meant beyond what is said by attributing cooperative intentions to the speaker and then calculating implicatures under shared norms (relevance, adequacy, etc.); Masnovo, as your passage frames him (Amato Masnovo, 1878–1955, Roman-born leading figure in Italian neo-scholasticism and longtime intellectual driver of the Milan Catholic milieu around Vita e Pensiero and the Università Cattolica), relocates “conversational reason” from Grice’s micro-pragmatics of inference to a macro-pragmatics of tradition, where what counts as a “classic,” what counts as legitimate philosophy, and what counts as a permissible argumentative move are already structured by institutional and confessional ethos (Aquinas in Italy, Croce as national horizon, the Jesuit and Dominican school networks, etc.). In Gricean terms, Masnovo’s discourse is saturated with standing implicatures: invoking “Aquinas” implies not just a set of theses but a disciplinary posture about method, authority, and the hierarchy of sources; similarly, remarks about “national ethos” function as contextual signals that license different inferences about what is being endorsed or resisted. Where Grice treats context as something interlocutors exploit in real-time to convey more than they explicitly say, Masnovo highlights how context is historically engineered—by schools, journals, clerical and academic patronage, and the rhetoric of “situations rather than men”—so that much of what is “meant” in philosophical exchange is already carried by affiliation markers and inherited vocabularies before any individual speaker forms a particular intention. The result is a useful contrast: Grice provides a general, intention-centered account of how implicature is generated and recovered in conversation, while Masnovo exemplifies how philosophical communities stabilize whole repertoires of implicatures through tradition and institution, making reason in discourse as much a matter of belonging to (and negotiating within) a pre-set communicative order as of calculating a speaker’s momentary intention. Grice: “While we start philosophy at Oxford – sub-faculty of philosophy – as part of the classics – Faculty of Literae Humaniores – Oxford does not quite rule what counts as a ‘classic’: Cicerone, and compagnia. When the scholar is first introduced to a non-classical philosopher, however, there is a national ethos – and while Oxford is very English, that Scot by the name of of Home (Hume) features large – I wonder why! It’s different in Italy, where the national ethos is strictly Italian, from Benedetto Croce to Benedetto Croce! Not to exlude Aquino, whose years at Germany and la Sorbona are forgiven! And hailed as a true Roccaseccan!” Filosofo italiano. Roma, Lazio. Aquino IN ITALIA. Nel tracciare in poche pagine le vicende del neotomismo italiano fermerò l’attenzione piuttosto su le situazioni che su gli uomini: la quale cosa, se torna utile sempre nella storia della filosofia, molto più torna utile quando il periodo a cui si guarda è abbastanza recente. Le ragioni sono di prima evidenza. Entriamo in argomento. Non ò possibile caratterizzare secondo verità la setta d’ AQUINO  senza prima formarsi un’idea esatta d’AQUINO . Certo le scuole DOMENICANE italiane mantennero sempre in qualche efficenza il loro sopporto della setta d’AQUINO . Nonpertanto se la setta d’AQUINO in Italia, da cui dipende la setta nel straniero, si afferma vivamente e risolutamente, ciò è dovuto principalmente al canonico piacentino BUZZETTI , le cui lezioni, sono già diffuse in manoscritti per l’Italia, e i cui scolari avevano già iniziato alla setta d’AQUINO , più o meno fortunatamente, TAPARELLI , LIBERATORE , e tant’altri filosofi dentro e fuori della compagnia di Gesù. PECCI  a Perugia è certamente sotto, l’influsso di SORDI , piacentino e scolaro di BUZZETTI . È lecito pensare il medesimo del canonico napoletano SANSEVERINO . M., AQUINO  in Italia, (Società Editrice Vita e Pensiero, Milano. Cfr. «L’amico d’Italia», Torino. Quivi GAZOLA , tessendo l’elogio In morte dello zio BUZZETTI. Scolastica. Grice: Masnovo, ma secondo te all’Oxford si può davvero dire che Cicerone sia un classico, o bisogna chiedere il permesso al bidello? Masnovo: Grice, qui a Roma invece basta una carbonara e tutti diventano classici, persino Croce! E se qualcuno osa escludere Aquino, gli si perdona tutto purché abbia studiato almeno un po’ a Roccasecca. Grice: Ah, quindi la filosofia italiana si decide tra un piatto di pasta e un elogio in morte dello zio Buzzetti? Allora all’inglese rimane solo il pudding e Hume! Masnovo: Esatto, Grice! In Italia la setta d’Aquino la fonda chi ha il coraggio di discutere anche dopo il dolce. E non serve nemmeno chiedere alla compagnia di Gesù: basta la compagnia a tavola! Masnovo, Amato (1909). Contributo. Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Massari: l’implicatura conversazionale, l’implicatura logistica di Petrarca e Boccaccio, la scuola di Seminara, la filosofia calabrese, e la filosofia italiana (Seminara). Grice: “At Oxford, we revere William Jones as being the first to point to the cognateness between the Gothick,as he called it, and the Graeco-Romanic.  Bernardo Massari (Seminara, Reggio Calabria): l’implicatura conversazionale, l’implicatura logistica di Petrarca e Boccaccio, la scuola di Seminara, la filosofia calabrese, e la filosofia italiana. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers can rationally recover what a speaker means beyond what is explicitly said by presuming cooperative purpose and then inferring implicatures from what is said plus shared expectations about relevance, sufficiency, and orderly presentation; “Massari” in your passage (i.e., Barlaam of Seminara/Barlaam the Calabrian, c. 1290–1348, scholar of Greek learning, mathematics/music, diplomat in Angevin and papal contexts, and controversialist in the Hesychast dispute with Gregory Palamas) highlights a very different but complementary arena in which meaning is governed: multilingual, doctrinal, and polemical exchange where Latin, Greek, and vernaculars compete for authority and where what is left unsaid or tactically formulated can decide ecclesiastical outcomes. In Gricean terms, Barlaam’s activity makes implicature less a polite byproduct of everyday talk and more an instrument of intellectual diplomacy: theological claims about Filioque, primacy, or the status of mystical contemplation are crafted so that different audiences (Byzantine monastics, Latin scholastics, humanists like Petrarch’s circle, or later Boccaccio-linked transmission of Greek) can draw different “licensed” inferences without forcing an outright contradiction on the page. Where Grice models implicature as cancellable and calculable against a stable cooperative background, Barlaam’s setting shows how background itself is contested—what counts as a reasonable inference depends on which tradition’s norms of proof, authority, and “signs” one accepts—so conversational reason becomes a struggle over interpretive jurisdiction as much as a shared mechanism of uptake. Thus Grice supplies the micro-pragmatic logic of how implicatures are derived, while Massari/Barlaam supplies a historical macro-case in which implicature functions across languages and institutions: as a way of translating, negotiating, and sometimes weaponizing meaning when direct assertion would be politically or doctrinally explosive. Grice: “At Oxford, we revere William Jones as being the first to point to the cognateness between the Gothick,as he called it, and the Graeco-Romanic. This was never an issue in Italy, which had both!” calabro -- Barlaam: -- Grice: “Should it be under B – Barlam, under Seminara, like Occam?”  Barlaam Calabro – di Calabria – Scrive di aritmetica, musica e acustica. E uno dei più convinti fautori della riunificazione fra le Chiese d'oriente e occidente. È considerato insieme ai suoi due allievi Leonzio Pilato e Boccaccio uno dei padri dell'Umanesimo. Studia in Galatro, Calabria. Pare che il suo successo come filosofo (un suo trattato sull'etica degli stoici è preservato) e ragione di gelosia da parte di N. Gregorio. Nell'ambito delle trattative per la ri-unificazione tra le due Chiese di Oriente e di Occidente, a lui venne affidata la difesa delle ragioni greche; in tale occasione sviluppa le sue critiche verso l'esicasmo e a sottolineare la differenza di valore tra la teologia scolastica e la contemplazione mistica. E protagonista di una violenta polemica contro i metodi ascetici e mistici di alcuni monaci dell'Athos e del loro sostenitore G. Palamas. Il dibattito divenne sempre più acceso fino a culminare in un concilio generale alla fine del quale venne costretto a sospendere ogni futuro attacco verso l'esicasmo. Epigrafe a Gerace, tutore di Petrarca e Boccaccio, inviato dall'imperatore Andronico III Paleologo in missione diplomatica a Napoli, Avignone e Parigi per sollecitare le corti europee ad una crociata contro i turchi. In quell'occasione costrue delle relazioni e una rete di amicizie su cui puo fare conto quando, in seguito alla decisione conciliare, decise di aderire alla Chiesa d'Occidente. implicatura, logistica, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Gentile – il latino, il volgare – e il greco! Accademia, Platone, Rinascimento italiano, Firenze. Grice has the little Roman volume in hand in the way he holds most books when he is feeling philological: not like a door into a new world, but like a label on a jar whose contents he suspects in advance. He has opened it, but he is not really reading it; he is browsing the title as if the title were the whole argument, which, in scholastic and ecclesiastical literature, it very often is. Filioque et primatu. The two troublemakers, yoked together by a small and scandalously efficient conjunction. He has already decided, without asking permission, to treat the title as the book’s thesis and the Latin as the book’s first mistake. Filioque, he thinks, is a linguistic contrivance so Latin it makes even Latin look theatrical. It is not even a word in the ordinary way; it is a suffix with ambitions. You take filio, you tack on -que, and you get a doctrine by glue. And the glue is exactly the point: -que is the polite, sneaky “and,” the clitic that attaches itself as if it were not imposing a new coordinate term at all. It is “and” as an implicature masquerading as morphology. Greek, being less mischievous in that particular way and more honest about its connectives, has to say καὶ ἐκ τοῦ Υἱοῦ if it wants to say “and from the Son.” It cannot hide the coordination inside a tail. It has to put the “and” on the table: καί. Open, analytic, not glued. Which is why Grice cannot help being amused at the doctrinal asymmetry. The Latin side can perform doctrinal addition with a suffix. The Greek side must perform it with a word. And, he thinks, any good Oxford ordinary-language philosopher should already be suspicious when theology is done by a suffix. He writes, in the margin, not for publication but for private relief: Υἱός πρωτείον καί The Son: ὁ Υἱός. Primacy: τὸ πρωτεῖον, or, if one wants to make it sound more like the ecclesiastical battlefield, τὸ πρωτεῖον τιμῆς, primacy of honour, which is precisely the sort of primacy the Greeks can tolerate without choking. And then καί, the plain “and” which refuses to be smuggled into a previous word like a stowaway. He looks again at primatu and thinks: primacy over what, exactly. Over other bishops, over sees, over councils, over appeals, over doctrine, over the right to tell another patriarch what to do. And then, only secondarily and later, over land and coin and the sort of temporal furniture that turns theology into administration. But the word primatus by itself already tries to do too much without saying what it is doing. It behaves like those Oxford abstractions Austin hated: it sounds like a property when it is really a claim to jurisdiction. And now the real comedy, the one Grice cannot let pass. The author, if he is defending the Greek cause, has dressed his defence in Latin. Why bother. If your cause is the Greek cause, why not write the whole thing in Greek, and have done with it. Why present the Greek position in the enemy’s medium. Unless, of course, the whole business is diplomacy: you speak Latin because the court you are addressing, Avignon or Rome, will not hear you in Greek. But then do not pretend it is purely a matter of honour. It is a matter of audience design. He imagines the title properly Greek, not as an exercise in translation but as a matter of intellectual decency: Περὶ τοῦ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ Υἱοῦ καὶ περὶ τοῦ πρωτείου And he can already feel how different it reads. The Greek has to show its joints: two περὶ phrases, two topics, two open connectives. No clitic doing covert work. No -que, that small Latin device that says “I am only adding a syllable” while adding a schism. He flips a page and finds, as expected, Latin sentence-architecture straining to carry Greek quarrels. It bothers him in the way bad translation always bothers him: not because it is wrong, but because it tempts the reader into thinking the quarrel is purely conceptual when it is also, irreducibly, linguistic. The Spirit proceeds: ἐκπορεύεται. That verb itself is already the battlefield. The Latin will say procedit and then behave as if procedere were close enough. Close enough, in ecclesiastical politics, is never close enough. And there is the further indecency. The Greek side’s preferred posture is exactly that it will grant Rome a primacy of honour, πρωτεῖον τιμῆς, but not a primacy of power, not a universal manager’s office. Yet here is the Greek cause allegedly being defended in a language whose own ecclesiastical history has trained it to hear primatus as more than τιμή. Latin is not neutral; Latin drags Rome behind it like a train of vestments. He thinks of the practicalities and becomes slightly charitable. Perhaps the man had no choice. Perhaps “Roma” on the title-page is already the explanation. Perhaps he is writing to those who hold the keys, and so he writes in their key. But then the title becomes a kind of self-defeating implicature: it says, I defend the Greek cause, while the very medium says, I am already speaking under Latin primacy. He returns, again, to the small joke that for him is never merely a joke: how much doctrinal weight is being carried by tiny bits of language. Filioque. The -que. Not καί. A suffix, not a word. A morphological “and,” not an analytic one. And from that, centuries of mutual suspicion, councils, anathemas, attempted reunions, and polite papers with titles that pretend the quarrel is tidy. He closes the volume, pleased and irritated in equal measure. Pleased because the title has already yielded its implicatures without forcing him to read the rest; irritated because the deepest point is the one the title itself performs. If you must defend Greeks against Latins, do not do it in Latin unless your real aim is not honour but uptake. And if your real aim is uptake, then admit it. Do not dress audience design up as metaphysics.Grice: Massari, ma davvero a Seminara si discute ancora se il latino o il volgare sia superiore, o semplicemente fate come Petrarca e Boccaccio e mischiate tutto? Massari: Ah Grice, qui in Calabria preferiamo la logistica, con Petrarca ci esercitiamo in aritmetica, con Boccaccio in acustica. Poi se capita, lanciamo qualche implicatura nel dialetto, così nessuno capisce davvero! Grice: E la polemica sull’esicasmo? Ancora vi scambiate le critiche con Palamas, o avete trovato una formula magica per la pace – magari con una canzone pop calabrese? Massari: Figurati, Grice! Qui non si fa pace con formule magiche, ma con una crostata al limone e una bella chiacchierata sul Rinascimento italiano. E se proprio si litiga, basta dire che Platone era calabrese e tutti ridono! Massari, Bernardo (1333). De Filioque et primatu. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Massimiano: il principe filosofo, Roma, e la filosofia italiana (Roma Massimiano (Roma, Lizio): il principe filosofo, Roma, e la filosofia italiana. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what a speaker means beyond what is literally said by presuming cooperative purpose and then inferring implicatures from departures from directness, relevance, or expected informational strength; the Massimiano vignette turns that inferential model into a political-theological setting where “reason in exchange” is inseparable from institutional accommodation, symbolic display, and peace-making under plural commitments. Where Grice typically treats context as a shared background that makes implicatures calculable, Massimiano’s world makes context into a managed public environment: paving Hagia Sophia with silver is a kind of material “utterance” whose meaning is read by multiple audiences (imperial, ecclesiastical, civic), and its point is not just to communicate but to coordinate attitudes—dignity, unity, awe, and compliance—without always stating doctrine. In Gricean terms, the silver floor functions like a non-verbal implicature: it licenses the inference that the regime can afford magnificence, that sacred space deserves exceptional treatment, and that disputation should be grounded (literally) in a shared, stabilizing order; meanwhile the Clifton/Honoré aside highlights that even explicit doctrinal “articles” are moderated by pragmatic arrangements (exemptions from chapel, special housing), showing how institutions routinely rely on tacit understandings to sustain cooperation across difference. So the contrast is that Grice gives a micro-theory of how implicatures arise from rational expectations in conversation, while Massimiano illustrates a macro-pragmatics in which the same inferential logic operates through policies, exemptions, and architectural signals: peace is achieved not only by what is argued but by what is made mutually inferable and therefore mutually livable. Grice: “I was brought up in the tradition of the 39 articles. The point was relevant at Clifdton. Honore, another Oxford philosopher and old Cliftonian, was not. As a result, he was housed in a special house that Clifton had reserved for Jews. The college allowed these Jews not to attend chapel services – for a reason!” -- Filosofo italiano. A philosopher who encourages Giustiniano and Giuliano -- to pave the floor of Hagia Sophia with silver. GRICEVS: MAXIMIANE, audio te Giustinianum et Iulianum hortatum esse ut pavimentum Sanctae Sophiae argento sternant: nonne nimis splendet ad philosophum? MAXIMIANVS: Immo, GRICE: si homines de caelo disputant, saltem pedibus aliquid honestum praebeamus; praeterea argentum bonum est ad disputatores in terram reducendos!  GRICEVS: Apud nos Cliftoniae triginta novem articuli satis erant—et capella; sed quidam (Honore, vetus Cliftonianus) in domo “speciali” habitabat atque sacellum omittere poterat. Putasne hoc etiam “pro ratione” fuisse? MAXIMIANVS: Certe: tu “articulos,” ego “tegulas” administro. Illi sacellum omittunt, nos pavimentum addimus: uterque modus est pacem facere—tu verbis, ego argento. And I guess we do not know much about this Maximianus, as per gens, etc? Yes, I think that is broadly right. We do not know very much, at least not in the prosopographical sense you are asking for. The first caution is that your Massimiano seems not to be a well-secured philosopher in the ordinary sense, but rather a shadowy or confused figure assembled from late antique or Byzantine materials around Justinian I, Hagia Sophia, and perhaps the name Maximianus. The standard architectural accounts of Hagia Sophia under Justinian I speak instead of the architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, not of a philosopher called Maximianus advising on silver pavements. [britannica.com], [hagia-sofia.com], [britannica.com] So if the question is “do we know his gens?”, the safest answer is no, because we do not even seem to have a stable identification of the person as a distinct late antique philosopher. In that situation, asking for a gens is already asking in Roman-prosopographical categories for a figure who belongs to a much later Byzantine world, where the old gentilician framework is no longer the natural one. [britannica.com], [britannica.com] There is, however, one source of possible confusion. The name Maximianus is well known in the age of Justinian I because of Archbishop Maximianus of Ravenna, the churchman shown beside Justinian I in the famous mosaic at San Vitale. But that Maximianus is not a philosopher of Rome, nor a figure for whom one would normally trace a Roman gens in the old manner. [early-med....europe.com], [britannica.com] As for the silver floor in Hagia Sophia, I do not find, from these results, a secure source attaching that specifically to a philosopher called Maximianus. The available sources in hand discuss Justinian I, the building programme, the architects, and later memory of the monument, but not that precise anecdote in a way that would let one build a reliable biographical entry around it. [britannica.com], [hagia-sofia.com], [britannica.com] So the dry Speranza answer would be something like this. Massimiano is best treated with suspicion, or at least with tact. The name is perfectly plausible for the sixth century, but the person behind this particular vignette is not securely profiled in the way a Roman or even a well-attested Byzantine notable would be. One may have before one not a philosopher with recoverable family coordinates, but a convergence of Justinianic building lore, Hagia Sophia magnificence, and the dangerous availability of names like Maximianus. In such cases the prudent scholar does not ask for a gens; he first asks whether there is a man. [britannica.com], [britannica.com], [early-med....europe.com] So, in short: we do not know much, if by “much” you mean family, gens, or securely bounded biography the old Roman gens framework is probably the wrong frame anyway for this late setting your vignette may still work beautifully as literary Speranza, but it should probably not pretend to rest on a firm prosopographical dossier If you want, I can now do one of two things here in chat only: I can rewrite the whole Massimiano entry so it becomes historically safer while keeping the silver-floor joke. I can try to identify whether your Massimiano may be a conflation of Maximianus of Ravenna with some Justinianic architectural lore. citeturn6search111turn6search101Massimiano (a. u. c. MXXCX). De pace. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Massimo: l’orto romano -- la costituzione di Roma – Roma  Massimo (Roma, Lazio): l’orto romano -- la costituzione di Roma. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats conversation as a rational system of mutual influence in which hearers are entitled to infer more than is said (implicature) by assuming cooperative purposes and calculating what a speaker must have meant to be doing with a given utterance; the “Massimo” vignette reframes that model by making the Stoic/Epictetan lesson explicit: the most efficient influence is often indirect, operating not by changing external arrangements (reforming six constitutions) but by shifting judgments, attention, and the practical attitudes through which people inhabit a shared world. Where Grice makes efficiency a normative feature of talk (say what is needed, no more; let the rest be inferred), Massimo’s garden stance turns efficiency into an ethical and political strategy: refuse costly interventions, cultivate calm, and let conversation work as a low-energy mechanism of reform—alter the interlocutor’s evaluative stance and “the constitution follows,” as your dialogue has it. In Gricean terms, Massimo’s cucumbers-versus-laws joke is itself an implicature-driven move (a deliberate incongruity that invites the hearer to infer a thesis about the limits of institutional engineering), and it also highlights a real limitation of purely cooperative models: sometimes the most rational conversational outcome is not agreement on propositions but reorientation of priorities and affect (quieting the forum, protecting otium), which looks less like information transfer and more like philosophical therapy. So Grice provides the inferential calculus that explains how “mutual influence” can be achieved by what is left unsaid, while Massimo supplies the Stoic-Roman moral psychology that explains why such influence is worth preferring to direct reform: conversational reason is maximally efficient when it changes what people take to matter, not merely what they take to be true. Grice: “My theory of conversation rests on the idea of maximally efficient mutua influencing. I was inspired by Massimo!” L’orto. A friend of PLINIO Minore. M. is sent by Rome to refer and reform the constitutions of six Greek cities, but he declines the idea. M. knows the theory of Epittetto, and a discussion between them is preserved in Discourses. GRICEVS: O MAXIMVE, audio te missum esse ut sex civitatum Graecarum constitutiones emendes—et tamen urbem tuam non reliquisti. Idne est “maxima efficientia”?  MAXIMVS: Ita vero, GRICE: si res bene se habet, cur eam corrumpam? Ego “reformare” soleo cucumeres in horto, non leges in foro. GRICEVS: At tu me docuisti de “mutua influentia”: ego loquor, tu rides, et iam puto me sapientiorem—an tantum hortulanum? MAXIMVS: Utrumque: Epictetus dicit nos non res, sed iudicia mutare; ego addo: si iudicia mutantur, et constitutio sequitur—sine itinere et sine sumptu. This friend of Pliny who refused to reform constitutions -- was he gens Maxima? No. He is not “gens Maxima.” The figure you want is not a member of a gens Maxima at all, but a man called Maximus, very probably one of the several Plinian Maximi. In the Epictetus passage the office is that of a commissioner or corrector of the free cities, and the old scholarly note already suggests that this Maximus may be identified with the Plinian friend who was corrector of the free cities of Achaea, referred to in Pliny Book 8, Letter 24. [en.wikisource.org], [attalus.org] That already gives the answer to the nomen point. Maximus here is a cognomen, not the name of a gens. So “gens Maxima” is not the right Roman formulation. One would need the nomen, and in this case the identification is uncertain because Pliny has several different Maximi among his correspondents, and prosopographers explicitly note the difficulty of sorting them out. [attalus.org], [jstor.org] So the cautious answer is: the man is “Maximus,” not “of the gens Maxima” the office is the key, namely corrector or commissioner of free Greek cities the likely link is with a Pliny-letter to a Maximus connected with the free cities of Achaea but the exact full Roman name remains uncertain in the standard identification tradition. [en.wikisource.org], [attalus.org], [jstor.org] In other words, your “Massimo” is fine as an Italianising literary label, but not as evidence for a gens called Maxima. Roman family names do not work that way. Maximus is one of those dangerously generic cognomina, like Priscus, that delight the epistolographer and punish the historian. [jstor.org] If you want a dry Speranza-style correction for the entry, I would suggest something like this in chat only: Massimo is not to be promoted into a gens. “Maximus” here is a cognomen, and a vexingly common one. The figure in question is best approached through office, not family: the commissioner or corrector of the free Greek cities mentioned in Epictetus, plausibly identifiable with one of the Maximi in Pliny, especially the friend associated with the free cities of Achaea. If one asks for a gens, one asks more than the surviving evidence is pleased to give. [en.wikisource.org], [attalus.org], [jstor.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things here in chat: I can give you the exact Pliny-Epictetus note in a compact bibliographical form I can rewrite your whole Massimo paragraph so that it is prosopographically safer without losing the garden jokeMassimo (a. u. c. DCCCLIII). De mutua influentia. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mastri: l’implicatura conversazionale – la scuola di Meldola -filosofia emiliana -- filosofia italiana  Bartolomeo Mastri (Meldola, Forli-Cesena, Emilia-Romagna): l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s account of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what a speaker means beyond what is said by assuming cooperative purpose and then inferring intentions and implicatures under norms of relevance, sufficiency, and perspicuity; Mastri’s scholastic-logical project (Bartolomeo Mastri da Meldola, 1602–1673, Franciscan and major Scotist logician, author of widely used logical manuals and Aristotelian commentaries) represents a contrasting “sign-first” and rule-explicit approach in which the rationality of meaning is grounded in a theory of signum and in formal doctrine about terms, propositions, copula, and fallacies, treating grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric as coordinated sciences of signification. Where Grice begins from live conversational practice and reconstructs the tacit rational expectations that make implicature calculable (often precisely when the speaker violates a maxim), Mastri begins from an explicit architecture of inference and semantic function—nomen, verbum, propositio, and the regulae that govern valid consequence—so that what Grice calls implicature looks, in Mastri’s idiom, like what follows from accepted premises plus contextual suppositions, or like a fallacy to be diagnosed when an audience draws more than the sign legitimately warrants. Yet the two views meet: Grice’s “artificial vs natural signs” distinction resonates with Mastri’s signa ad placitum versus significationes naturaliter, and Grice’s insistence that interpretation is reason-guided mirrors Mastri’s conviction that logic disciplines how signs can responsibly carry thought; the difference is that for Grice the heart of the matter is the psychology and normativity of uptake in cooperative exchange, while for Mastri it is the systematic taxonomy of signification and inference that underwrites any exchange at all, making conversational implicature appear as a late, pragmatic overlay on a deeper scholastic machinery of signs. Grice: “My conference on ‘meaning’ to the Oxford philosophical society – graduate and undergraduate – in 1948 was a bit of a joke – I was time-constrained. My seminars on meaning at Oxford were also time-constrained. Oxford lecturers are not responsible for what the attendees to the lectures recover frm them, so that gave me some freedom, but sill. Therefore, my reflections on ‘what people seem to be getting at when they display an interest between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ signs was jocular – Surely, I couldn’t start to quote from M.!”Grice: “One interesting fascinating bit about Mastri’s ‘Institutiones logicae’ is tha it starts with a little ABC!” Grice: “M. has a chapter on fallacies, too, which is fascinating!” -- Grice: “I love Mastri – of course at Oxford, if they do history of logic, they’ll focus on Occam – Axe Kneale!” Grice: “But M. explored quite a bit the square of opposition, and modal, too – what he says about nomen, verbum, propositio, copula, ‘regulae’ for reasoning, and so forth, is all relevant – especially seeing that his “Institutiones logicae” is just one of his outputs: he made intensive commentaries on Aristotle’s whole organon, and more importantly, also his metaphysics and his theory of the soul so M. certainly knows what he is talking about!” -- Grice: “He was a logician, and so, according to the Bartlett, am I!”  In the philosophy of  M., the theory of the signum serves as the foundational unity for the "trivium" of dialectica (logic), grammatica, and rethorica because these disciplines all deal with different modes of signification. implicatura, Categories and De Interpretatione, segno, segnare, segnans, segnato, notare, nota, notans, notatum, notatura, segnatura, signifare conceptus animae, res significata, Amo aequivalet Ego sum amans Homo albus aequivalet Omne homo est albus Homo currit aequivalet Aliquis homo currit, signum artificiale, ad placitum, significare naturaliter baf, bif definizione di segno, tratta dAgostino. Aquino.  Mastri has arrived on Grice’s desk in the only way a seventeenth‑century Franciscan ever arrives in Oxford: in Latin, in bulk, and with the faint air of having been printed to punish the incautious. Disputationes in octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis. Eight books, and therefore eight opportunities to learn that “physics” once meant: whatever Aristotle happened to have on his mind when he looked at motion and refused to stop. Grice sits in his St John’s room and feels, with a mixture of pride and irritation, the very particular guilt of the Oxford classicist who became a philosopher by being trapped. He has spent far too long with Aristotle, and it begins to look, even to him, like a vice disguised as a duty. It is the kind of devotion that can be defended only by saying, with a straight face, that one was assigned it. Hardie. There is always Hardie. Hardie, who wrote on Plato with the air of a man doing a gentleman’s duty to a superior, but who tutored on Aristotle as if Aristotle were the only serious employer in the Greek firm. Grice thinks again of his own double foundation status, St John’s and the CUF, and the way Oxford translates endowments into trust and distrust. They did not trust him with Plato. Not really. The implication was always that Plato is too rhetorical, too grand, too liable to seduce the undergraduates into saying “the Good” with the wrong kind of face. Aristotle, by contrast, is safe: he is already a lecture. The misfortune, or fortune if one insists on giving the out, is that being a Hardie man meant being an Aristotle man. The College, and the Sub‑Faculty behind it, treated this as a kind of professional identity. Grice the Aristotelian fellow. Grice the De Interpretatione fellow. Grice the man who will tell you what the Greek says and then ask whether the English has any right to pretend it means the same. Plato was allowed to be elsewhere, like music: admired, occasionally performed, not entrusted with the daily business. And now Mastri, the scholastic machine, makes the business look even more machine-like. Aristotle, at least, has the decency to be intermittently alive, to throw out an example, to become impatient with his own taxonomy. Mastri, commenting on Aristotle’s Physics, manages to be drier than the Stagirite ever was, which is no small feat. It is as if the commentary has taken the only dampness Aristotle permitted himself—the dampness of being near the world—and replaced it with the dryness of rule. Grice turns a page and can almost hear the structure: definition, distinction, objection, reply, corollary. A signum here, a copula there, and always the sense that if you catalogue enough you have explained something. It is magnificent and faintly comic. Oxford’s own obsession with “system” has always been shy; it prefers to pretend it is merely being careful. Mastri has no such shyness. He writes as if logic is a furniture catalogue for the mind. This should, Grice thinks, have been the moment when he ran back to Plato years ago, if only out of self-preservation. Plato, at least, speaks. Plato makes Greek sound like Greek. Aristotle, by comparison, often does not even count as Greek, not to the ear. Aristotle’s texts, the ones we live with, are too often what they feel like: lecture notes, or the remnants of lecture notes, the transcript of a man who taught for money at the Lyceum and did not trouble to make it sound like conversation. And now we shall pass to define “soul”. Who speaks like that, except a man speaking to fee‑paying boys and expecting them to keep up. Plato at least gives you the pretence of spontaneity. The remarks come from a mouth, even if the mouth is staged. Plato knows that if you want something to sound like thought you must make it sound like talk. So he gives you Socrates, and he lets the aristocratic Athenian ordinary language flow with the ease of someone who belongs to the city that invented leisure. Even when he commits the stupid rhetorical trick of putting truth in the mouth of a Silenus, he is at least acknowledging that philosophy needs a voice, and that voice needs a social costume. Alcibiades can speak in a way that looks like living Greek, and Socrates can be mocked in a way that still sounds like talk rather than syllabus. Aristotle, by contrast, gives you the sort of prose a man writes when he has decided that style is suspect and that life is a distraction from classification. This is why Grice’s own little hybrids—Kantotle, Ariskant—now strike him as unfairly weighted. He has been too generous to Aristotle’s half of the joke. If one is going to splice, one ought to splice with someone who can actually speak. Plathegel, perhaps. Heglato, if one must be ugly about it. Something that admits that the real ancestor of conversational philosophy is not the Stagirite’s enumerations but Plato’s staged, aristocratic, naturally flowing ordinary language. Ryle, Grice thinks, will not help here. Ryle is preparing lectures on Plato and will manage, as Ryle manages, to miss the most important point while hitting fifteen interesting ones. Ryle will treat Plato as if Plato were an early ordinary-language philosopher and then, with that dry Yorkshire confidence, proceed to domesticate him into Oxford habits. But Plato’s “ordinary language” is not Oxford ordinary language. It is aristocratic Athenian. It has the ease of a man who assumes the city will listen because the city is his. The man in the street in Athens is not the man in the street in Oxford, and Grice is not sure Ryle notices that, because Ryle rarely notices the social basis of his own “ordinary”. So Mastri’s commentary, absurdly, becomes a corrective. It makes Aristotle look like what Aristotle often is in our hands: a set of notes awaiting a voice. And it forces Grice, against his own long habit, to admit the confession he has been postponing. He has been guilty. Guilty of letting Oxford’s syllabus dictate the canon in his head. Guilty of thinking that because Hardie tutored Aristotle, Aristotle must be the tutor of us all. Guilty of letting the St John’s and CUF trustees, those invisible arbiters of trust, decide that Grice shall not lecture on Plato. As if Plato were a dangerous substance that only certain hands may dispense. And now he recalls, with satisfaction, that he has already prepared his alibi in advance. Philosophical Eschatology and Plato’s Republic. The very title, he thinks, has the right blend of seriousness and provocation, and it has the further merit of being reviewable without being read. Sidney Smith’s line protects him like a maxim: I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. Liber I, then. Never mind Liber VII. Why climb out of the cave when the cave is where the commentary lives. The scholastic is always in Book I. Definitions first. Begin again. And yet, Grice thinks, the real point is that Plato does not begin that way. Plato begins with a voice and a scene, and only later permits the definitions to harden. Aristotle begins with hardening and never quite softens. Which is why, in the end, Grice cannot resist his own final punch against himself. If his whole career has been spent telling people to look at how we speak, then perhaps he has been consulting the wrong Greek for the model of speech. Aristotle gave him structure, yes; but Plato gave him conversation. And conversation, annoyingly, is the thing Grice has been trying to make respectable all along.Grice: Caro Mastri, devo confessarti che il mio primo seminario su ‘meaning’ fu quasi una corsa contro il tempo! Ma almeno, a Oxford, nessuno mi ha mai chiesto di risolvere il quadrato dell’opposizione durante il tè delle cinque. Mastri: Grice, se ti avessero chiesto, forse avresti risposto con un segno naturale: uno sbadiglio! In Emilia, invece, i nostri segni artificiali sono perfetti anche per ordinare un caffè doppio—basta una nota ben piazzata. Grice: Ah, in Inghilterra invece c’è chi pensa che la copula sia solo una questione di grammatica, non di logica. Ma tu, Mastri, con le tue “Institutiones logicae”, hai fatto più per il trivio di quanto io abbia fatto per la conversazione! Mastri: Grice, almeno tu non hai dovuto commentare l’intero organon di Aristotele tra una lezione e l’altra! Qui a Meldola, ci si accontenta di far capire la differenza tra “segno artificiale” e “significare naturaliter”, magari usando il dialetto—che, credimi, ha più regole che la logica! Mastri, Bartolomeo (1637). Disputationes in octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis. Roma: Grignani.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mastrofini: la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatura conversazionale e l’implicatura verbale di Romolo.  Marco Mastrofini (Monte Compatri, Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatura conversazionale e l’implicatura verbale di Romolo. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what a speaker means beyond what is literally said by assuming cooperative intentions and then inferring implicatures under shared expectations of relevance, sufficiency, and perspicuity; Mastrofini (a Roman cleric-scholar active in late 18th–early 19th century Rome, remembered for work on Latin/Italian usage and for polemical-economic writings such as the usury debates and monetary-reform proposals) gives you a complementary but differently anchored “rationality,” because his attention is less to the transient pragmatics of an utterance in dialogue and more to the diachronic and institutional rationality of linguistic form—how verbal categories, tense/aspect, and inherited philosophical terminology carry constraints and affordances that shape what can be meant at all. Where Grice starts from intention and treats grammar largely as a vehicle speakers exploit to make intentions recognizable, Mastrofini starts from the grammar and lexicon as a historically stabilized system (old Roman to new Roman/Italian; technical vocabulary preserved via cognates and translation practices) that disciplines what counts as a possible, sayable thought in philosophy; on this view, implicature is not only a hearer’s inference from conversational maxims but also an effect of inherited morpho-syntactic resources (e.g., Latin verbal aspect and temporality) that silently pre-structure what speakers can leave unsaid and still be understood. So the contrast is: Grice provides a micro-pragmatic, interactional account in which reason governs the inference from said to meant in real-time exchanges; Mastrofini foregrounds a macro-philological and conceptual-historical account in which reason governs meaning by conserving, calibrating, and translating the linguistic instruments of thought across centuries—making implicature partly a product of conversational strategy and partly a product of the long grammatical memory of Rome. Grice: “At Oxford, philosophy – the sub-faculty of philosophy – is part of the faculty of literae humaniores, and while it was possible, as Ryle did, to graduate in the PPE avoiding grief and laughing, as Carroll calls them – the best don’t, and I got a double first both in classical moderations and greats. Therefore, what M. deals with is second nature to me.” Filosofo romano. Filosofo Lazio. Filosofo italiano. Monte Compatri, Roma, Lazio. Grice: “I like Mastrofini; for one, he found how old Roman evolves into what we may call new Roman, or Italian!” – Grice: “And of course as a philosopher, he focused on the philosophical terminology – it takes a PHILOSOPHER to translate a philosophical text!” – Grice: “What I like about M.” is that he mostly kept with the cognates. La Crusca adores him!” Noto soprattutto per il volume “Le discussioni sull'usura” in cui sostenne che non è reato far fruttare il danaro e che né la Sacra Scrittura, né i Vangeli, né la tradizione ecclesiastica vietavano di ottenere un giusto interesse per danaro dato a prestito. Questo diede luogo a molte discussioni ma anche apprezzamenti lusinghieri da economisti dell'epoca e dall'opinione pubblica.  In precedenza aveva scritto un'opera di economia finanziaria, il Piano per riparare la moneta erosa relativa all'inflazione nello Stato Pontificio, opera largamente utilizzata per la riforma finanziaria dello Stato, intrapresa da Pio VII. L'edificio del Collegio Romano ove  insegna. Insegna a Frascatii. Nel pieno della crisi della Repubblica Romana, si trasfere a Roma dove venne nominato professore di eloquenza presso il Collegio Romano. Implicature, Delle cose romane di Floro, l’antichita romane di Dionigio, le cose memorabilia di Ampelio, il sistema verbale della lingua Latina – del verbo latino, aspetto verbale – la filosofia del verbo – tempus, azione, la concettualizazione dell’evento e l’azione nel verbo latino --, categorie sintattiche e morfologiche e semantiche e prammatiche dell’aspetto verbale nella lingua latina. Grice has the notice folded in his pocket as if it were contraband: Pears and Thomson, Is existence a predicate? at an hour when Oxford expects a man either to be at High Table or pretending he has a reason not to be. He sits in his St John’s room first, because it is safer to begin metaphysics at home, where the kettle can be held responsible for any inflation of tone. The title itself already sounds like an invitation to a certain sort of collective solemnity, and Grice suspects that Pears and Thomson will enjoy, for an hour, the peculiar Oxford pleasure of treating an old Kantian sophisma as if it were new again merely because it is being done by the right people in the right room. He asks himself, in advance, why they care. Not in the vulgar sense of “why bother,” but in the proper analytic sense: what is the point of the question as asked, now, by these two, in this place. If one is Descartes, one can at least pretend to doubt one’s sum behind the cogito, and then produce one’s little Latin epiphany. Cogito, ergo sum. Grice’s pedantry lights up at once: ergo is not a content word; ergo is an indicator, a conventional signal, like therefore, a sort of intellectual ejaculation. It does not add a premise; it tells you what to do with the premises already there. Its contribution is not truth-conditional but procedural: take what I have just said as a reason for what I am about to say. Ergo is, in that sense, a conventional implicature with a toga on. He cannot resist thinking that if Descartes had said simply I think; I am, the metaphysical drama would have been reduced by half, and that is precisely why the ergo is there. Still, Descartes at least has something to hang it on: the theatrical doubt, the method, the need to re-earn the right to say I exist. Pears and Thomson, Grice thinks, do not, in the least, doubt each other’s existence. He has never heard Pears express metaphysical anxiety about Thomson as a substance, and he strongly doubts Thomson lies awake at night wondering whether Pears is only a logical construction. Their mutual existence is, for practical purposes, a presupposition of the meeting itself. If either wanted to challenge it, he would have stayed in bed. So the topic must be elsewhere. And then Grice remembers why the title keeps returning, century after century: because once you ask the question in English you cannot stop yourself from hearing predicate in its school-grammar costume, as if existence were a property like red or heavy. Kant’s point was that it isn’t, not like that. You do not increase the concept by appending exists; you place the concept. Existence does not enrich; it instantiates. The old sophisma of the ontological proof lies exactly there: treating exists as an adjective that adds perfection rather than as a way of saying there is something of that kind. That, at least, gives the discussion a target. Without God, the whole debate can begin to look like a parlour game in which one tries to decide whether ordinary English permits a certain grammatical abuse. With God, one has the theological crust to scratch. And this is where Mastrofini wanders in, uninvited, like a Roman cleric carrying his Latin as if it were a reliquary. Num vere hucusque ac solide Dei existentiam a priori ostenderint philosophi, expenditur. Grice likes the man, but he cannot stop being bothered by the spectacle of a Tusculan trying to do plain thinking in Latin at a time when any decent Italian could have said the thing in Tuscan without needing to dress it in ablatives. It is as if Mastrofini has decided that God will only listen if addressed in the old administrative language of Rome. Yet Mastrofini at least commits the crass categorial mistake in a way that makes the question feel motivated. Apply existence to Deus, and suddenly “is existence a predicate” stops being a seminar title and becomes a live bullet aimed at the ontological proof. If existence is a predicate, the proof looks like an argument; if it isn’t, the proof looks like a pun. Grice thinks, with a faint irritation that is also amusement, that the real Oxford danger is not the answer to the question but what people do next with any answer. Suppose Pears says no, and Thomson says yes, or vice versa, or they agree in some cleverly hedged way. The next move, Grice thinks, is not to go to Les Deux Magots and found an ism on it, as if a grammatical point could sustain a whole existential posture. One can almost see Sartre taking the sentence and turning it into a lifestyle: existence precedes essence, and then suddenly everyone’s smoking more intensely and writing as if despair were a method. Heidegger is the proper background, of course, but cafés are the improper accelerant. The sensible next step, as always, is: look and see how we use it. Not as an anthropological slogan, but as ordinary speech. What do we do when we say there is, when we say exists, when we say is. When do we treat exists like a predicate, and when do we treat it like a quantifier in disguise. When does it function as a bit of metaphysical clothing for a plain there is. And that is where Grice’s own private heresy arrives, the one he keeps for moments when metaphysics begins to look as if it is being run by grammar schools. He replaces the whole business with his own barbarous verbs: izzing and hazzing. God izzes. God hazzes. It is deliberately ugly, deliberately infantile, because ugliness sometimes protects you from reverence. If you say God exists, you are already borrowing a philosophical verb with a thousand years of misuse. If you say God izzes, you have at least forced yourself to remember that you are making something up. And hazzing, too: God hazzes omniscience, God hazzes goodness, God hazzes what have you. At least then you can ask, cleanly, whether you are making the property claim (hazzing) or the positing claim (izzing). The ordinary verb to be, with its diplomatic ambiguity, makes it too easy to slide from one to the other while pretending you have been consistent. He wonders, briefly, what his father would have thought. His father, the nonconformist, would likely have disliked the whole performance: too much priest, too much Latin, too much Oxford making religion into a technical sport. His mother, with her High-Church patience for form, might have tolerated it, perhaps even liked the Kantian tidying-up as a kind of moral hygiene. Aunt Matilda at Harborne, resident convert and proud of it, might have found Mastrofini’s Latin comforting, as if the language itself guaranteed orthodoxy. Grice, caught between them, finds himself in his usual position: wanting the theological seriousness without the theological grammar. He reads again the Mastrofini title and feels the philological itch: why “existentiam” here, why not simply “Deus est” and be done with it. Why struggle with Latin when you are not Cicero and do not need to impress the Pope. It is as if the very language is trying to force existence into a noun, and then nouns invite predication, and then predication invites the ontological proof. The proof begins, in other words, with morphology. He looks at the clock and realises he will have to go. Pears and Thomson will be in a room somewhere, being careful and not careful in equal measure, and the audience will do that Oxford thing of pretending the question is timeless while also treating it as faintly competitive, as if one can “win” existence by a better distinction. Grice puts on his coat and thinks, as he steps out, that he can already predict the only useful outcome. Not a decision about whether existence is a predicate in some abstract sense, but a cleaner map of the ways we speak: when we are doing izzing, when we are doing hazzing, when we are merely signaling an inference with an ergo and calling it metaphysics. If Pears and Thomson can get the room to see that much, then their topic has earned its tea. If not, the whole thing will have been another case of Oxford’s talent for turning a theological crust into a linguistic delicacy, and then eating it as if it were nourishment.Grice: Caro Mastrofini, devo confessarti che fu proprio leggendo le tue analisi che mi accorsi della brillante ambiguità di quel “verbo” latino e italiano: a volte è ogni espressione, a volte è il verbo in senso stretto, la seconda parte del discorso. Ti assicuro che non sono sottigliezze da tutti comprese, soprattutto tra i “barbari” del Vadum Boem, come amo scherzosamente chiamare la mia università! Mastrofini: Ah, caro Grice, mi rallegra sentire che anche oltremanica queste raffinatezze del verbo non passano inosservate! Effettivamente, dubito che nei corridoi del Vadum Boem si colgano certi doppi sensi: lì, tra PPE e “greats”, spesso il verbo resta solo grammatica e mai vera filosofia del linguaggio. Grice: Vero, vero! Ricordo ancora i miei esami in literae humaniores, dove chi si avventurava troppo tra ambiguità e concetti di “azione” e “tempus” rischiava di smarrirsi tra sintassi e pragmatica senza trovare il filo rosso che tu, invece, hai saputo intrecciare così bene tra latino e italiano. Mastrofini: Sei troppo gentile, amico mio! Ma vedi, forse è proprio questo il bello della nostra tradizione: cogliere nel “verbo” il ponte tra il dire e il fare, tra concetto e azione. E questo, mi permetto di dirlo, sarà sempre mistero per i Vadenses, che magari usano tante parole, ma raramente ne assaporano la natura profonda. Mastrofini, Marco (1790). Num vere hucusque ac solide Dei existentiam a priori ostenderint philosophi, expenditur; tum alia demonstrationis huius conficiendae methodus examinanda proponitur. Tusculi, Frascati.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Masullo: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale e la scissione dell’inter-soggetivo – i lottatori della tribuna – la scuola d’Avellino -- filosofia campanese -- filosofia italiana –  (Avellino).  Aldo Masullo (Avellino, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale e la scissione dell’inter-soggetivo – i lottatori della tribuna. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains intersubjective understanding as a rational transfer of attitudes via intention-recognition: a speaker produces an utterance with an intention that the hearer recognize that intention, and on that basis the hearer derives what is meant (including implicatures) as an accountable inference under cooperative norms; Masullo, Neapolitan academic and public intellectual, shaped by the post-Crocean and phenomenological-idealist milieu yet attentive to modern German philosophy) provides a contrast by thematizing precisely what Grice tends to treat as background: the inter-soggettivo as a lived, often fractured field in which subjects do not simply exchange contents but struggle for recognition, alignment, and shared worldhood, so that “reason” in conversation is inseparable from the tensions and asymmetries that make a common world hard-won. In the passage’s “tribune fighters” motif, conversational rationality is not the tidy calm of cooperative calculation but a disciplined way of managing conflictual togetherness: the same inferential resources that yield implicature can also sustain rivalry, save face, and negotiate power, making the “scission” of the intersubjective a persistent condition rather than an occasional breakdown. Where Grice models communication about “things” (your rotten-apple example) as a psi-transmission aimed at coordinating belief, Masullo pushes the thought that the very ability to talk about “things” presupposes a prior achievement of shared space between persons—an achievement constantly threatened by ideological splits, social roles, and the affective charge of public life—so that implicature becomes not merely a calculable surplus over what is said but a symptom of the gap between selves that must be bridged (or strategically exploited) in order for any coordination to occur. In short, Grice supplies the micro-logic of how meaning is inferred under cooperative reason; Masullo supplies a macro-phenomenology of why that cooperation is precarious and historically situated, and how conversational reason operates not only to transmit beliefs but to repair (or expose) the fractures of the intersubjective itself. Grice: “For a while I was fixated with objects – indeed I coined ‘obble’ to deal with thm in a lingo I invented for one of my seminar. But an obble is not a sobble. The Latins distinguish between a subject and an object so well, that they would often talk of ‘inter-soggetivo.’ This does not quite translate in Ariskantian philosophy, which is ego-centric, rather. When in my pirotological progression, I refer to ‘talking pirots,’ the point of inter-subjectivity becomes clear. Take the language of perception. ‘Visa’ are not necessary, because if Pirot 1 says that the apple is rotten, he is unlikely to be referring to his own sense data. The communication is about – or refers to – THINGS – and I best understood as a psi-transmission, as I call it – i. e. the transmission of a psychological attitude on the part of Pirot 1 meant to influence Pirot 2 into coming to believe that Pirot 1 believes that the apple is rotten, and therefore not to be eaten.”  Insegna a Napoli.  Ha trascorso vari periodi di ricerca e di insegnamento in Germania. Direttore del Dipartimento di Filosofia dell'Napoli.  È stato socio dell'Accademia Pontaniana, della Società Nazionale di Scienze Lettere ed Arti di Napoli e dell'Accademia Pugliese delle Scienze.  È stato insignito della medaglia d'oro del Ministero per la Pubblica Istruzione.  Candidato nelle liste del Partito Comunista Italiano prima e in quelle dei Democratici di Sinistra poi, ha ricoperto la carica di Deputato, è stato Senatore della Repubblica. Trascorre i primi anni della sua vita a Torino. Si trasferisce a a Nola, dove compie gli studi superiori frequentando il liceo classico Carducci. Fequenta il corso di laurea in Filosofia a Napoli. Si laurea con Nobile discutendo una tesi su Benda. l’inter-soggetivo, la scissione di Hegel, il continuo dei velini – velia, infinitesimal – l’innamorato di Parmenide. Intuizione e discorso sits on Grice’s desk at St John’s like an accusation in two nouns. It is 1955, and he has the book in the only posture he really trusts: opened but not yet granted the dignity of being read. Sidney Smith’s remark returns with the reassuring sting of a maxim: I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. There is something to be said for approaching a text with the innocence of ignorance, especially if one’s business is, officially, to make judgments. Intuizione. Discorso. Masullo, he assumes, means something Bergsonian: intuition as immediate grasp, discourse as the slow tramp of concepts and inferences. Perhaps he means that the one cannot be reduced to the other without loss; perhaps he means that modern philosophy has mistaken discursive labour for insight, or that insight without discursive discipline is merely temperament dressed up as a method. All very continental, all very Naples, all very much the sort of thing that can be true and yet unhelpful to a man whose daily work consists in preventing clever boys from making grand claims without being able to say what would count against them. He hears Russell in his head, that cruel line that never quite stops being funny because it is so near to a confession: what they do at Oxford is study the silly things silly people say. Grice has always disliked the meanness of it and enjoyed the accuracy. In practice, as a University Lecturer and a college tutor, his days are not spent in heroic metaphysics but in small repairs: correcting an examinee’s thesis for PPE, finding the mistake that does all the work while looking like a harmless aside, forcing the weekly essay to expose its joints. If that is “studying silly things,” then the silliness is sometimes the only place where a mind shows its real habits. And habits are what he trusts. He trusts, above all, that faculty Oxford pretends to despise and uses constantly: intuition. Not mystical intuition, not Bergson’s private plunge into the stream of duration, but the workmanlike intuition of the native speaker: the sense that this is what we would say, and that is not; that this construction is English, and that is a foreigner’s imitation; that this inference is what the utterer is doing, and that inference is what the hearer is doing to the utterer. He has been told, more than once, that he sets impossibly high standards. Dummett, in particular, has taken to complaining as if Grice’s expectations were a personal affront to the concept of postgraduate education. Grice suspects the opposite. The standard is not high. The standard is merely that a claim about English should sound like English. The irony is that the moment one admits intuition as evidence, one is accused of being merely intuitive, as if the adjective were a diagnosis. But what else, Grice thinks, is a gentleman to do. One begins with the intuitions of a competent speaker, and only then, if one is feeling botanical, one goes out and checks the wild growth: the dialects, the odd cases, the edge conditions where usage has the decency to be unstable. The “linguistic botanising” can come later. First one must know what counts as the plant. Masullo’s title makes Grice want to be pedantic in the best sense: to ask which intuition, and whose discourse. Because Oxford, for all its anti-continental posturing, is full of intuition in precisely the place it denies it. The tutor sits with a pupil, and most of the tutoring is simply calibrating intuitions: not yours, not mine, this is how we actually use the word; not that implication, this is what follows in this context. The pupil thinks he is producing discourse. The tutor knows he is producing a disciplined version of intuition, with footnotes. He turns a page at random and does not read it, exactly, but lets the words glance off his mind like pebbles. “Intuition” in philosophy is always at risk of being used as a warrant for laziness: I see that it must be so, therefore it is so. But the intuition Grice cares about is not a conclusion, it is a datum: the starting point that keeps your theorising answerable. And that is why he is, in his private polemics, slightly cross with Austin. Austin’s genius, Grice thinks, was to insist that we look at what we actually say, and to do so with a craftsman’s attention. His vice was to treat what is implicated as if it were part of what is said, or at least as if it were part of “the sense” in a way that makes the utterer’s authority evaporate into a communal fog. Austin will tell you, with that air of patient triumph, that “it’s in the meaning,” that the expression carries it, that ordinary usage supplies the rest. And Grice finds himself wanting to say: no. It is conveyed, yes; but it is conveyed by me. It is part of what I mean, not part of what the words mean in some impersonal warehouse. This is the intuition that matters to him: the authority of the author qua utterer. The utterer is not a mere occasion for language to happen; the utterer is the agent who intends, and whose intentions are recognisable, and whose recognisable intentions are what make implicature accountable rather than magical. Austin’s confusion, as Grice sees it, is a confusion between what is explicitly conveyed and what is implicitly conveyed, and then a further slippage whereby the implicit, because it is regular, is treated as if it were part of the lexical sense. As if “or” had, in itself, a philosophical personality. Grice has always found it faintly offensive to speak as if “or” has a sense. It feels absurd, and not in a liberating way, but in a way that suggests someone has forgotten what words are. Saying that “or” has a sense is as uncomfortable as saying that “to” has a sense. One can talk, if one must, about the contribution “or” makes, about its role in constructions, about how it behaves under negation, about the patterns it licenses. But sense, in the weighty philosopher’s mouth, makes it sound as if “or” were a noun in disguise, an entity with a private content. And this is exactly where the Oxford disease begins: taking a functional particle and baptising it into metaphysics. So Masullo’s title, whether he means Bergson or not, irritates Grice into seeing his own position more sharply. Discourse, in Oxford, is the weekly essay, the lecture, the public reason-giving. Intuition is the silent tribunal that tells you whether the discourse is even about the language it claims to be about. And his pupils, poor creatures, routinely lack the relevant intuitions. They produce PPE theses with the most preposterous claims about “what we mean by know” or “what we say when we promise,” and they do it with a confidence that suggests they have never listened to anyone talk outside a tutorial. They are not merely wrong; they are wrong in a way that shows they do not know where wrongness begins. This, Grice thinks, is why he ends up doing repairs. Not because he likes power, but because someone has to supply the missing calibration. His own intuitions, as a native speaker and as a man trained to distrust inflated abstractions, become a kind of public service: correcting the mis-intuitions of clever boys, and sometimes correcting the mis-intuitions of colleagues who have mistaken a regular implicature for a lexical sense. He glances again at Masullo’s title and cannot resist the final private joke. Intuition and discourse. Perhaps, after all, Oxford has been doing nothing else for years: living off intuition while calling it method, and living off discourse while calling it clarity. The only improvement Grice wants is modest. Let intuition be admitted as what it is: not revelation, but responsibility to how a speaker actually means. Let discourse do what it is supposed to do: make that responsibility explicit, without pretending that the words themselves, like little civil servants, carry the whole burden.Grice: Caro Masullo, mi confesso: per anni sono stato ossessionato dagli oggetti, anzi, mi ero inventato persino il termine “obble” solo per distinguerli dai “sobble”! Ma tu, invece, sembri sempre a tuo agio con la scissione tra soggetto e oggetto. Sarà la scuola di Avellino? Masullo: Eh, Grice, ad Avellino si cresce tra lottatori in tribuna e filosofi al bar, per forza si impara a distinguere. Ma ti assicuro che qui un “obble” rischia sempre di diventare “sobble” dopo due caffè e una discussione infinita sull’inter-soggettività! Grice: Vedo che la Campania è terra fertile per la filosofia conversazionale. Anche perché, tra una partita e una metafora, chi capisce davvero se parli del rotto delle mele o del continuo dei velini? Forse solo chi ha amato Parmenide, come te! Masullo: Grice, qui tra velia e infinitesimali, la vera implicatura è che la mela, se non altro, almeno si può mangiare! E poi, tra i tuoi piroti e i miei inter-soggettivi, trovare un accordo è sempre un piacere... filosofico e gastronomico! Masullo, Aldo (1955). Intuizione e discorso.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Matera: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – i segni del zodiaco e la semiotica di Peirce – filosofia basilicatese Alano di Matera (Matera, Basilicata): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – i segni del zodiaco e la semiotica di Peirce. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats “what is meant” as something hearers can rationally recover by attributing intentions to speakers under shared expectations of cooperation, so implicature is not a mysterious aura but an accountable inference from an utterance plus context and rational norms; the Alano di Matera vignette pushes that picture toward a sign-based and quasi-naturalistic semiotics, where meaning is read off “segni” (zodiacal configurations, astral influences, cathedral iconography) as if the world itself were continuously communicating, and where the interpreter’s job resembles Peirce’s semiotic triad more than Grice’s intention-recognition. In other words, Grice insists that to mean in the central (non-natural) sense is to intend to get an audience to recognize one’s intention, whereas Alano’s astrological practice models meaning as something that can hold without any intending utterer at all: a sign “means” by standing in a systematic correlation (cosmic, causal, or conventional within a learned tradition), and interpretation becomes mediation between codes and observers rather than recovery of a particular speaker’s communicative plan. Your passage also makes the linguistic point vivid: English “mean” encourages an intentionalist analysis (mean ≈ intend), while Italian’s ease with segno and “vuole dire” invites a broader semiotic field where what matters is the network of interpretants—how a community has learned to read—and where scholastic notions like intentio utentis/auditoris can be seen as a bridge between the two frameworks (the user’s intention and the hearer’s uptake still matter, but within a larger sign-economy). So the contrast is: Grice gives a rational micro-theory of conversational inference anchored in agency and cooperative purpose; Alano offers a macro-semiotics of sign-reading anchored in tradition, causality, and public systems of interpretation, making “implicature” look less like a calculable conversational surplus and more like the learned art of extracting latent significance from an ordered universe. Grice: “It may be said that ‘mean’is a very English thing that naturally leads to an ‘intentionalist’ analysis since to mean IS to intend. Not so in Italian, where the focus has always been on ‘segno’, rather, which leads you to a causal-naturalistic approach – as when M. says that this zodiac sign means this or that. While there are ways to express in both Latin and Italian something LIKE ‘mean’ – e. g. the complex phrase, ‘vuole dire’—it’s not quite the same! The scholastics would often refer to the INTENTIO UTENS or AUDITORIS, and that may also prove relevant to the intentionalist analysis”. Grice: “Only in Southern Italy is a philosopher also responsible for the astrological edification of the city’s cathedral!” Uno dei più grandi studiosi e divulgatori di astrologia occidentale e filosofia dell'epoca. Insegna dapprima a Matera, e successivamente a Napoli.  Vive nel periodo in cui la Contea materana era dominio degli Angioini e su richiesta di Filippo IV detto "il bello", il re di Napoli Carlo II d'Angiò, detto "lo zoppo", invia Alano a Parigi. Lì insegna e divenne noto come dottore universale, profondamente versato in filosofia. In quegli anni infatti astronomia e astrologia vieneno collegate poiché si crede che gli astri potessero esercitare un influsso sulle azioni umane. Nei periodi di soggiorno a Matera, abita, secondo Verricelli nella contrada di Lo Lapillo tra il castello e il puzzo dove sorge l’acqua della fontana hera la sua vigna con una casuccia di pietre, piccola, mal fatta casa propria di filosofo quale oggidì si chiama la vigna e casa di Alano. Si tratta della collina dove poi fu edificato il Castello Tramontano. In quella casetta il grande filosofo passava intere notti ad osservare il cielo. implicature, la collina del castello tramontanto, la catedrale di M., astrologia, astronomia, dottore universale, Napoli, Bologna, Parigi, the semiotics of astrology, Grice on zodiac signs, semiotic, semiology, astrology, astronomical chart. Alano di Matera.  Grice: Caro Matera, ammetto che mi diverte pensare che solo in Basilicata un filosofo possa essere anche il responsabile astrologico della cattedrale! Non ti capita mai che qualcuno ti chieda se il proprio segno zodiacale sia più portato per la logica o per la semiotica? Matera: Oh, Grice, ti assicuro che tra la collina del castello e le notti passate a osservare il cielo, finisco spesso a spiegare che il segno della Vergine non garantisce affatto una grammatica perfetta! Ma almeno, grazie a Peirce, posso dire che ogni stella è un segno... anche se il mio vino è solo un indizio di buona filosofia! Grice: Ecco, vedi, in Inghilterra ci limitiamo a intendere e implicare, mentre voi, tra segni e stelle, riuscite a trovare la causa persino per la pioggia sulle pergamene di Matera. Forse dovremmo aggiungere il “segno zodiacale” tra le implicature conversazionali, che ne pensi? Matera: Magari! Così, quando la conversazione si fa troppo astratta, posso sempre tirare fuori un astrolabio e dire: “Vuole dire... che oggi il destino ci invita a parlare di filosofia, tra le stelle e tra le pietre, e se piove, almeno avremo una scusa astrologica!” Matera, Alano di (1300). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mathieu: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’uomo animale ermeneutico, filosofia ligure, la scuola di Varazze, e la filosofia italiana (Varazze).  Vittorio Mathieu (Varazze, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’uomo animale ermeneutico. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains understanding as a rational achievement by cooperating agents: what is meant is recovered by inferring intentions under shared expectations, and implicature is the principled surplus that arises when speakers choose forms that invite the hearer to bridge a gap from said to meant; Mathieu’s “homo hermeneuticus” (Vittorio Mathieu, 1923–2022, a major Italian philosopher at Turin, known for emphasizing interpretation, limits of knowledge, and an ethically charged notion of “hermeneutic fidelity”) reframes that same phenomenon by treating interpretation not as an occasional repair mechanism within conversation but as the human condition, with the body and history always already mediating what counts as sense. Where Grice tends to model interpretation as a calculable, publicly accountable inference from an utterance plus conversational norms, Mathieu stresses the deeper, pre-conversational work that makes any utterance intelligible at all: the interpres as mediator between horizons, traditions, and embodied perspectives, so that “cooperation” is not merely a conversational policy but a feature of human being-with-others. On this view, implicature is not just a clever exploitation of maxims (as in Grice’s Oxford examples) but an index of the fact that meaning is never exhausted by literal form, because the speaker and hearer meet across a “between” that must be negotiated—sometimes as friendly clarification, sometimes as existential risk (your demon/guardian imagery), always as interpretation. Thus Grice supplies the micro-pragmatics of how we justify specific inferences in talk, while Mathieu supplies a macro-hermeneutics of why such inferences are inevitable for an “animal that interprets,” making the rationality of conversation continuous with the broader human task of mediating selves, bodies, and worlds into shared intelligibility. Grice: “I gave two seminars with Austin – one in a trio with Hare, on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachaea – the other just Austin and I, on Categoriae and De Interpretatione. In general, I dislike ‘double seminars’: if you are going to discuss the ‘Categoriae’, how can you expect your syllabus to include notes on De Interpretatione as well? However, we fared well. We would often argue. ‘You don’t like the argument?’ Austin would ask. ‘I’ll give you another.’ He was often the speaker, myself the commenator. And I only knew that I had won an argument when in the following week, Austin would not mention the issue. It all starts with hermeneia – How close is Boezio’s translation as ‘inter-pretare.’ ‘Interpret’ is not something an ordinary chap would say – which was the critern for us ‘ordinary-language philoosphers’ there to rally in defense of the man in the street. There is an ‘inter- that sounds dyadic, but what is the ‘pret’? So to the meaning of ‘inter’ as ‘between’or ‘among’ we add -pre. This element  is likely related to the Proto-Indo-European root per-, meaning ‘to traffic in’ or ‘sell’. Thie combination with ‘between’ or ‘among’ suggests the original  meaning of ‘interpres’ – the noun from which ‘interpretari’ is derived—is an AGENT or MEDIATOR who operatores BETWEEN parties to facilitate understanding, much like abroker or translator faciliteates exchange between buyers and sellers. Over time, the meaning evolved to encompass: explaining and expounding – making the meaning of something clear or explicit --, understanding and comprehending – grasping the meaning of something --; and translating – rendering something from one language to another. al di la del bene e del male, la fedelta ermeneutica, l’uomo animale ermeneutico, il demoniaco, l’angelo custode, il demonio custode, il diavolo custode.  Grice: KK. K. KKK. If K is to stand for know, then one begins, as one so often begins in Oxford, by drawing little letters on a scrap of paper as if the universe were a kind of ledger and the mind a conscientious clerk. Grice is at his desk in St John’s, the same desk which has already hosted Aristotle and graphemata and the little wars of seminar preparation, and now it hosts a different Italian provocation: Mathieu and his Limitazione qualitativa della conoscenza umana. Limitazione qualitativa. Conoscenza umana. The very collocation has the grand air Austin always distrusted: the sort of phrase that behaves as if it were a discovery when it is usually only an invitation to be solemn. Austin would, Grice can hear him, pull the whole thing down by asking, quietly, what an ordinary chap would say. Would he say conoscenza? Perhaps. Would he say conoscenza umana? Only if he were writing a sermon, or a manifesto, or an application for funds. And limitazione qualitativa is already worse, because it smuggles in a contrast-class without telling you what the other kind of limitation would be. Quantitative? Temporal? Social? Or is it merely the philosopher’s favourite trick: to put an adjective on a noun so the noun looks deeper. Still, Grice tries to be fair. He begins with a proposition letter, because that is how one keeps one’s temper. Let p be: there is a qualitative limitation in the K-set. Or, more faithfully to Mathieu, p is: there is a qualitative limitation of human knowledge. Immediately, the irritation arrives. Human knowledge. Whose? Grice’s first Oxonian reflex is not logic but manners. No Englishman speaks for other than himself. It is not merely a moral point; it is a grammatical discipline. One says I know, I don’t know, I can’t tell. One does not, in decent English, announce the status of humanity’s knowledge as if one were its appointed registrar. You can say we don’t know as a kind of clubby shorthand, meaning: people like us, in our present state of inquiry, have not settled it. But you cannot, without a certain continental bravado, say human knowledge is qualitatively limited and mean it as a report about Homo sapiens across the board. And yet Mathieu says precisely that: limitazione qualitativa della conoscenza umana. Grice gathers, fastidiously, that Mathieu must mean his own. He must mean: my knowledge, the knowledge available to me, perhaps to my circle, is limited in a certain way. But then why call it umana at all, unless the point is to inflate the confession into anthropology. He writes, almost for the pleasure of seeing the ugliness formalised. Let m be Mathieu. Let K_m be the knowledge operator relativised to Mathieu: what Mathieu knows. Then Mathieu’s thesis, translated into something an Englishman might tolerate, is not Kp but K_m p, where p says: there is a qualitative limitation of K_m. And now Grice stares at the symbol and feels the old itch: the thing is self-biting. If p is “there is a qualitative limitation of Mathieu’s knowledge,” then for Mathieu to know p looks like this: K_m (there is a qualitative limitation of K_m). How does he know it. By knowing some particular proposition q and being unable to know some other proposition r. But that would at best license: I don’t know everything, or I can’t know everything. It does not license the adjective qualitative, which suggests a sort of principled boundary, an edge of possible knowledge, a fence erected by the nature of knowledge itself. And Austin would ask, in that dry prosecutorial way, what evidence could possibly count for such a claim. How do you tell a limit from a temporary ignorance. How do you distinguish “I don’t know yet” from “I cannot know in principle.” Nobody goes around saying, in ordinary life, “My knowledge is qualitatively limited,” unless they are trying to sound either humble or prophetic. And humility and prophecy are, from Austin’s point of view, two ways of avoiding the checkable. Grice now toys with the fashionable machinery, because if you are going to be pretentious you might as well be precise. Suppose Mathieu asserts Kp, unrelativised, as if he speaks for mankind. Then, by the usual introspection principle the logicians love, one moves to KKp: if I know p, I know that I know p. And then KKKp, and so on, up the ladder, until the page looks like a stutter. Hintikka’s boys will tell you that this is the right way to model idealised knowledge. Fine. But what happens when p itself is a claim about limits of K. Let p = “K is qualitatively limited.” Then Kp says: knowledge knows its own limitation. And KKp says: knowledge knows that it knows its own limitation. And KKKp says: knowledge knows that it knows that it knows its own limitation. The whole thing begins to resemble the very vice Mathieu is describing: a kind of epistemic navel-gazing conducted with operators instead of mirrors. Worse: the moment you try to give content to p, it turns into a contradiction or a triviality. If “qualitatively limited” means: there are truths that cannot be known by humans, then to know that would require access to the truth that cannot be known, or at least to some reliable survey of the space of truths, which is exactly what the limitation denies you. It is like announcing, from inside a locked room, that there are rooms you can never enter, and claiming to know the layout of the whole house. If, on the other hand, “qualitatively limited” means only: our knowledge is not omniscient, then it is not philosophy but etiquette. It is the sort of thing one says before giving a lecture: I may be wrong. True, and useless. So Grice thinks: perhaps Mathieu means something else again, something hermeneutic rather than logical. Perhaps he means: our knowledge is mediated by interpretation, by body, by history, and therefore never absolute. But then the thesis is not about knowledge as such but about the conditions under which we count something as knowing. And that is a different sort of claim, the sort Austin would allow only if it were brought back to the little cases: when do we say he knows, when do we withdraw it, what defeats it, what repairs it. Conoscenza umana. The phrase continues to irritate Grice because it pretends to a unity. At Oxford, one speaks of knowing that the meeting is at four, knowing that one’s wife dislikes so-and-so, knowing French, knowing how to ride a bicycle, knowing the proof, knowing one’s way to Headington. The word know is a bustling little verb with many jobs. The moment you elevate it into conoscenza and then universalise it into umana, you have already lost the texture that keeps you honest. He imagines Austin taking the phrase in hand the way he took performative verbs: with genial brutality. What do you mean by conoscenza here, Vittorio. Do you mean knowing that p. Do you mean knowing how. Do you mean acquaintance. Do you mean being able to recognise. And what on earth is the human doing there. Is there a non-human knowledge you are contrasting it with, or is this merely a flourish, like saying the human condition when you mean being tired. Grice smiles at the thought that the entire thesis might be deflated by a single Oxford question: Why are you saying it like that. But he is also, privately, tempted by the joke he can make with his own symbols. He writes: Let K be what Mathieu knows. Let H be the set of humans. Mathieu seems to be asserting: for all x in H, K_x is qualitatively limited. But the only x he is licensed to speak for, if he is being even minimally English, is x = m. So the universal collapses to a singleton: K_m is limited. And then the proud banner conoscenza umana turns out to mean: my knowledge is limited. A discovery on a par with: I am mortal. And yet, Grice thinks, perhaps that is the whole Italian manoeuvre: to take a banal confession and give it a title that sounds like a metaphysical theorem. He looks again at KK and KKK and feels the dry humour settle into place. One can always multiply Ks, but one cannot by that multiplication generate content. Kp does not become truer by becoming KKKp. It becomes merely more ceremonious, as if the mind were putting on extra gowns. And the real limitation, the one Austin would relish, is not qualitative but conversational: the limitation that you can only claim to know what you can answer for, in the face of the right challenges, in the presence of the right interlocutor, under the ordinary pressures of “How do you know,” “What would count against it,” “What do you mean by that.” So Grice returns, as he always does, from mankind to the man in the room. The man is himself. If Mathieu wants to say that knowing is interpretive and finite, fine. But then he should say it in the only voice that does not commit a philosophical indecency: I know, I don’t know, I can’t tell, I might be wrong, I take it that, it looks as if. Anything grander, and you are not describing knowledge; you are doing rhetoric about it.Grice: Caro Mathieu, devo dirti che il tuo concetto di “homo hermeneuticus” mi affascina profondamente. È raro trovare un filosofo che sappia cogliere così bene la dimensione ermeneutica dell’uomo, e credo che la nostra formazione classica sia ciò che ci accomuna: ricordo bene le mie lunghe sessioni seminariali su De Interpretatione, che ho avuto il privilegio di condurre per più di un semestre, persino per quei “barbari” del Vadum Boum, come amo chiamare la mia università!  Mathieu: Grazie, Grice, il tuo elogio mi onora e conferma che la vera filosofia nasce dalla capacità di interpretare, tradurre e comprendere non solo i testi, ma anche la complessità dell’essere umano. La fedeltà ermeneutica è, per me, la chiave per andare “al di là del bene e del male”, proprio come suggerisce la nostra tradizione.  Grice: Mathieu, hai perfettamente ragione. L’esperienza dei seminari su De Interpretatione mi ha insegnato quanto sia importante il dialogo, l’ascolto e la mediazione – proprio come fa l’interprete, che si muove tra le parti e crea ponti di comprensione. È una vera arte filosofica, e tu ne sei maestro.  Mathieu: Che bellissima immagine, Grice! La filosofia, come la vita, è fatta di interpretazioni e di incontri. Solo chi sa “trafficare” tra significati e differenze potrà davvero avvicinarsi al demoniaco e all’angelico dell’esistenza, e trovare, forse, la giusta armonia tra il custode e il demonio dentro di sé. The item is: Mathieu, Vittorio, Limitazione qualitativa della conoscenza umana: (schizzo d’una teoria). Torino: Università di Torino, 1949. [biblio.toscana.it], [bdu.siu.edu.ar] There is also a more specific series-style description that gives what looks like the fuller publishing framework: Mathieu, Vittorio, Limitazione qualitativa della conoscenza umana. (Schizzo d’una teoria). Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università di Torino, vol. I, fasc. II. Torino, 1949. [abebooks.com], [maremagnum.com] So, if you want the shortest usable entry in your style, I would give: Mathieu, Vittorio (1949). Limitazione qualitativa della conoscenza umana. Torino: Università di Torino. [biblio.toscana.it], [bdu.siu.edu.ar] If you want the fuller scholarly form: Mathieu, Vittorio (1949). Limitazione qualitativa della conoscenza umana: (schizzo d’una teoria). Torino: Università di Torino, Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, vol. I, fasc. II. [abebooks.com], [maremagnum.com] A tiny caveat in dry bibliographical conscience: catalogues agree on Torino and Università di Torino, but copies in the trade sometimes phrase the publisher/imprint as Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia rather than simply Università di Torino. That is not really a contradiction; it looks more like series versus institutional imprint. [biblio.toscana.it], [abebooks.com], [maremagnum.com] If you like, I can now do one of two things here in chat only: I can normalize it into the exact Speranza bibliography style you are using. I can also check whether it should read “schizzo d’una teoria” in your entry, since that subtitle seems to belong with the original record.Mathieu, Vittorio (1949). Limitazione qualitativa della conoscenza umana. Facoltà di Filosofia, Torino.

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Matraja: la ragione conversazionale e la grammatica razionale.  Giovanni Giuseppe Matraja (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e la grammatica razionale. Grice: “The English are ambivalnt towards grammar – there are grammar schools, which are a bad thing – so that does not help. Clifton is not! Strictly, a ‘grammatical’ category is a ‘morpho-syntactical’ category – and I have discussed them at large. Usually at Oxford, ‘syntax’ is used in such a way that whenever I’m outside Oxford, I speak more in hope than in understanding! Whle ‘razionale’ has been applied to ‘grammar’ – it I only because it is part of the broader ‘psicologia razionale’!” Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational, intention-based inference: hearers assume cooperative purpose and can therefore work out implicatures (what is meant but not said) by seeing why a speaker, given those shared norms, chose one utterance rather than another; Matraja’s “grammatica razionale,” by contrast (Giovanni Giuseppe Matraja, Roman-born, best known for his Genigrafia italiana, 1831, a project for a language-independent “general writing” meant to be identically readable across languages and discussed in later 19th-century auxiliary-language debates), shifts the focus from inferential pragmatics to engineered code, aiming to reduce reliance on contextual guesswork by making meaning transparent through a universal representational system. In Gricean terms, Matraja’s ambition is to minimize implicature by design: if concepts can be encoded in a non-idiom-dependent script, then less has to be recovered from conversational background, tone, and social expectations, and more is fixed by the rational grammar of the system itself. But from Grice’s point of view this is also where the limitation shows: even a perfectly “rational” grammar cannot eliminate the pragmatic layer, because real communicators still choose what to encode, how much to encode, and when to rely on the audience to supply the rest, and those choices reintroduce implicature as soon as the system is used in interaction rather than contemplated as a blueprint. So Matraja and Grice can be read as complementary: Matraja represents the Enlightenment-to-19th-century hope that universality and clarity come from formalizing expression (a rational script/grammar that travels across ethnolinguistic difference), whereas Grice represents the analytic insight that universality and clarity also depend on the rational norms of cooperation and intention-recognition that govern uptake, norms that remain operative regardless of whether the symbols are Italian words, Oxford “syntax,” or a genigraphic code. Una lingua numerica viene progettata da M. nella sua “Genigrafia italiana: nuovo metodo di scrivere quest'idioma affinché riesca identicamente leggibile in tutti gl’altri idiomi del mondo” (Lucca, Tipografia genigrafica), lingua di cui discusse più tardi anche La Société de Linguistique. M. è l'unico ideatore ITALIANO di una lingua razionale a essere preso in considerazione da questa ‘société’ galla nel corso del dibattito sulle lingue ausiliarie. La Genico-grafia, lett. 'scrittura generale' e di cui ‘genigrafia’ è la forma sincopata -- è un modo di scrivere che non ha relazione con le parole e che permette di comunicar tutti i concetti senza dipendenza dall'idioma ne dell’emittente o del recettore, ma di un modo, che il messaggio risulta interpretabile in tutti quelli del mondo. Nasce quindi come progetto di lingua universale che si prefigge di comunicare chiaramente, ma che non è concepita per sostituire gl’idiomi presenti nelle varie nazioni. Si nota che l'ordine e il modo in cui M. nomina i grandi filosofi, Cartesio, Leibnitz, Wolfio, Wilkio, Kircher, Dalhgarne, Beclero, Solbrig, e Lambert, è lo stesso con cui SOAVE  li cita nelle sue Riflessioni: “da Cartesio, Leibnizio, Wolfio, Wilkins, Kirchero, Dahlgarne, Beclero, Solbrig, e Lambert”. Interessante è anche il fatto che di seguito aggiunga: “e Demaimieux e RICHERI , oggi Richieri, anche Richer), di TORINO. The book is open on Grice’s desk in St John’s, but he is not reading it so much as preparing to be read by it. The afternoon has the thin, dutiful light that Oxford specialises in, as if the sun has been told to keep its claims modest. Austin is down for tomorrow. Joint class. De Interpretatione. Grice has the Greek passage marked with the sort of careful pencil-stroke that looks like a moral decision. He hears Austin already, not in words, but in tempo: brisk, impatient with scholastic piety, fond of making a text do modern work without asking its permission. Grice, by contrast, is feeling oddly fastidious, as if Aristotle might notice. He turns to the line that has been quoted to death and, therefore, is still not properly heard. Aristotle’s little ladder: sounds, marks, things. He traces it with a finger and then, because the finger is not enough, he mutters the Greek, letting the letters do their own authority. τὰ ἐν τῇ φωνῇ τῶν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ παθημάτων σύμβολα, καὶ τὰ γραφόμενα τῶν ἐν τῇ φωνῇ He pauses, not out of reverence, but because he has always suspected that the most dangerous claims are the ones everyone thinks are merely introductory. Spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul; and what is written are symbols of what is in the voice. Graphemata. Written marks. The very word feels like a small intrusion into Oxford air. At Oxford, we talk, he thinks. We do the talk. We do the careless chatter, and then we pretend it was a method. Graphemata we leave to the amanuensis. Someone else will type it up, bless them, and then it will look as if it had always been meant to be read. He glances, with a faint self-mockery, at his own handwriting, that private script which is less “writing” than a reminder to the future that he once had a present. He has written things, of course. He is not so naïve as to deny it. The causal theory of perception was written to be spoken, to be delivered in the flesh at Reading, which is the only honest destiny for many papers: a voice in a hall, then disappearance. Personal identity was more graphemic: he wrote it for Mind, and he remembers the peculiar feeling of composing not for a room but for a page, as if the audience had no faces, only eyes. But Aristotle’s sequence nags. If graphemata signify the spoken, is Aristotle quietly suggesting that there is a graphemata-level for the soul itself, a script for the language of thought? Some inner writing that the voice merely transliterates? The idea irritates Grice in exactly the way an idea irritates him when it smells like a metaphor being promoted to a mechanism. Because then you need the little clerk inside, the homunculus, pen in hand, doing the writing. Who is writing the inner script? Another self? And then who reads it? Another. And then, if we are not careful, we have staffed the mind with a whole civil service of scribes, each needing a further scribe behind him. One does not solve the problem of meaning by inventing a miniature registrar. He thinks of Matraja’s title, the Italian audacity of it, Genigrafia. Or, if one insists on the full thing, genico-grafia, general writing, the dream of a code that is readable in all idioms. An engineer’s hope: eliminate guesswork by design. Make meaning transparent by script. The very ambition sounds to Grice like a man trying to abolish implicature with a new alphabet, as if rationality were a font. But Aristotle, at least, is not Matraja. Aristotle is not proposing a universal script; he is explaining a relation. Still, the relation is dangerous, because Oxford has trained him to distrust any philosophical move that makes writing look primary. Writing is a record, not the act. Writing is what you do when you have decided to stop talking, or when you cannot bear to talk to the people in front of you and prefer to talk to strangers in future. Conversation is where meaning lives, because conversation is where intention meets uptake and can be corrected before it becomes permanent. He imagines Austin tomorrow leaning on the word σύμβολα and saying something about conventions and institutions, and then making a sharp turn to the ordinary-language point: “We don’t mean by ‘symbol’ what the Greeks meant, H. P.” Grice, privately, is less worried about symbol than about the quiet slide from voice to mark, from talk to trace. He is, he realises, thinking about geni-grafia with the emphasis on the hyphen: which part does the work? And then, because fastidiousness in him is never far from etymology, he does the thing that always both amuses and steadies him: he goes back to roots. Geni. Not grafia. The general, the generating, the kind, the genus. Genus as that which sorts without yet saying how it is sorted. Grafia is the mere scratching, the act of inscription, the clerkly labour. The humour, he thinks, is that Matraja has advertised the scratching, when the real philosophical temptation is always the generative bit: the fantasy that you can have a system whose categories are prior to any particular tongue, prior even to the accidents of speech. But we are not clerks, Grice tells himself, not really. We are tutors, and lecturers, and sometimes mere talkers with gowns. We mend misunderstandings as they happen. We do not abolish them by building a better script. If Aristotle is right that graphemata signify the spoken, that is fine: it is an anthropology of literacy, not a metaphysic of mind. If someone insists on a “writing” for thought, then I shall insist on asking who holds the pen, and where he learned to spell. He closes the book gently, as if Aristotle might be listening in the boards, and looks at his notes for tomorrow. The class will proceed, as classes do, by talk. The graphemata can wait for the amanuensis.Grice: Matraja, la sua idea di una grammatica razionale mi incuriosisce molto. In Inghilterra la grammatica è vista spesso con ambivalenza, e persino le grammar schools non aiutano a migliorare la reputazione! Secondo lei, come si può conciliare la struttura razionale con la varietà delle lingue? Matraja: Caro Grice, la questione è centrale! Nella mia Genigrafia italiana ho cercato proprio di superare i limiti di ogni idioma, immaginando un sistema universale che permetta di trasmettere concetti senza dipendere dalla lingua madre. Penso che la razionalità si debba fondare sull’ordine e sulla chiarezza, ma senza perdere la ricchezza delle sfumature linguistiche. Grice: È una prospettiva affascinante! Mi viene in mente quanto sia complesso per noi filosofi distinguere tra categorie morfo-sintattiche e semantiche; a Oxford spesso ci si confonde tra “syntax” e “grammar”. Forse una lingua universale razionale aiuterebbe davvero a comunicare con maggiore precisione le nostre idee filosofiche. Matraja: Sono d’accordo, Grice! La filosofia ha bisogno di strumenti che favoriscano la chiarezza e l’intercomprensione. La mia Genigrafia non vuole eliminare le culture linguistiche, ma proporre un ponte che le unisca. Come dice il proverbio: “Tra il dire e il fare c’è di mezzo il mare”, ma magari, un giorno, la grammatica razionale riuscirà a colmare quella distanza. Matraja, Giovanni Giuseppe (1831). Genigrafia italiana: nuovo metodo di scrivere quest’idioma affinché riesca identicamente leggibile in tutti gli altri del mondo. Lucca: Tipografia genigrafica

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Maturi: la ragione conversazionale e l’ implicatura conversazionale, l’io e l’altro, io e l’altro, i duellisti, la scuola d’Amorosi, la filosofia campanese, e la filosofia italiana (Amorosi). Filosofo italiano. Grice: “There is more to the model of the duel than philosophers realise.  Sebastiano Maturi (Amorosi, Benevento, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’ implicatura conversazionale, l’io e l’altro, io e l’altro, i duellisti. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as an inferential achievement governed by cooperative rational norms: hearers are entitled to move from what is said to what is meant (including implicatures) by assuming purposive, mutually intelligible participation, and the model is in principle non-zero-sum because the aim is shared uptake; Sebastiano Maturi, as your passage frames him (Amorosi-born, active in Naples, first major work Soluzione del problema fondamentale della filosofia, 1869, and later received sympathetically by Italian idealists), complements and complicates this by making explicit the Hegelian dimension that Grice largely presupposes: recognition (autocoscienza recognoscitiva) as the condition of any rational encounter between io and l’altro. The duel motif sharpens the contrast: where Grice distinguishes cooperative dialogue from gladiatorial argument as two rationally describable interaction-types, Maturi treats even the apparently adversarial form as potentially rational insofar as it stages the struggle for recognition that constitutes persons and their claims, so implicature is not just a calculable surplus over literal content but a symptom of the intersubjective stakes of the encounter (honour, standing, acknowledgment) and of the strategic pressure to say less than one means while still forcing the other to see one’s position. Finally, Maturi’s “stages” (from non-human animal to human-animal, each foundational for the next) offer a meta-grounding for Grice: the cooperative principle is not merely a conversational policy but the late product of a developmental story in which rational exchange emerges from more primitive forms of contest and alignment; on that view, Grice gives the local logic of implicature, while Maturi supplies a philosophical anthropology of why rationality in conversation is always also a drama of recognition, in which even zero-sum “duels” can be intelligible as distorted routes toward the same intersubjective end. Grice: “There is more to the model of the duel than philosophers realise. Even myself, who have gone on record as proposing a cooperative model of conversation as rational behaviour, can perceive that there is rationality in the duelists. Philosophers are familiar with the fact since Aristotle who divided philosophical argumentation into two types: gladiatorial, as Warnock calls it, or epagoge, and dialogical, or diagoge. While the former may be a zero-sum game, the second ain’t!” Grice: “There are two main things I love about M., and I hate it when philosophers just dismiss him as an ‘Italian,’ or worse, ‘Neapolitan’ Hegelian – as when they refer to me as a member of the Oxford school of ordinary language philosophy! The first is his typically Neapolitan-hegelian school account of what he calls ‘autocoscienza recognoscitiva,’ which is something I do take for granted in my conversational theory of inter-ratiationality; the second is his elaboration of what he calls the passage from the non-human animal to the ‘human-animal’ in a sort of pirotological passage. What I like about him is that he considers each ‘stage’ as just as fundamental as the other; which implicates that actually the ‘higher’ stage has a ‘foundation’ on the previous one. Here ‘foundational’ makes perfect sense; and it gives Maturi an excuse to rather pompously label the concept: ‘forma fondamentali’ of the ‘vita.’ It’s exactly like my soul progression, -- which I explore in ‘Philosophy of Life.’” It is not surprising that Gentile loved Maturi and forwarded his “Introduction to philosophy.” Insegna a Napoli. Dopo i primi studi nella cittadina natale, si trasfere a Napoli ove consegue la licenza liceale. La frequentazione di SPAVENTA e di VER implicature, Bruno, Vico, Aquino, Spaventa, I duellisti, l'io e l’altro, riconoscimento, la dialettica del signore e del servo, assoluto, valore assoluto, Bradley, la critica, percezione chiara e distinta. Grice sits alone in his St John’s room with the late light doing what it always did in Oxford: making dust look like doctrine. The fire is low, the tea has cooled into a substance that would not, in a chemistry department, be granted the courtesy-title of “tea,” and on his desk there lies, like a dare, a pamphlet or offprint whose Italian title is so immodest that it reads at first like a prank pulled by a librarian: soluzione del problema fondamentale della filosofia. He says the words to himself, not in Italian exactly, but in that peculiar half-translation a don does when he is letting a foreign phrase come into English without paying customs duty. Solution. The solution. Of the fundamental problem. Of philosophy. He hears in it the faint tone of a prospectus: the sort of certainty you expect from a clinic, a laboratory, an institute with white coats and budgets, not from a discipline whose principal instrument is an armchair and whose principal output is another armchair with better objections. He has, lately, been told off again by the SCR people. It is never “told off” in the vulgar sense; Oxford does its rebukes by anecdote, by raised eyebrows, by the small laugh that means you have been filed under “eccentric.” One of them, and he can supply the name because Oxford likes names the way chemists like labels, Quinton perhaps, has made the familiar complaint: philosophy goes nowhere, the same questions for two thousand years, since Thales, as if philosophy were a train timetable that has failed to update its destination board. And Grice remembers, with a mild spite that is also a kind of loyalty to the craft, the only answer that ever seemed honest and not merely defensive: Oh, but we have solved the problem, and more than once. That was the line, the retort to the fastidious man, the one who wanted philosophy to behave like engineering: solve it once, then shut the book and move on. But the retort comes back to him now with the title on the desk, because the title behaves as if it is taking him at his word. Maturi has written it down as a claim and then bound it. Soluzione del problema fondamentale della filosofia. There is, he thinks, something almost endearing about the bluntness, the naïve courage of announcing, in public, what most philosophers only hint at in private: that they have finished the job. He taps the title with his finger, word by word, as if checking a proof for illicit steps. Soluzione: the promise of completion. Del problema: not a cluster, not a family, but one, singular, with the definite article doing all the heavy lifting. Fondamentale: the word that tries to secure priority by intimidation. Della filosofia: the whole trade, the whole messy family business, brought under one roof and then, apparently, redecorated. And then his mind does the thing it always does when it sniffs a conceptual muddle: it shifts domains. It thinks of cancer. Not because he is being melodramatic; Oxford melodrama is generally bad form unless you can Latinise it. He thinks of cancer because cancer is the sort of thing that really would be “solved” if it were solved. If some earnest Neapolitan researcher, some Maturi in a white coat, actually produced a solution that deserved the name, the medical faculty would not keep holding seminars on “the fundamental problem of cancer” for the next two millennia out of sheer professional nostalgia. You would not have, year after year, a new generation of lecturers giving chatter to students, re-litigating whether a tumour “really exists” or whether the word “cell” is used correctly in ordinary English. The problem would be put away, the wards would empty, the journals would go quiet in that topic, and the energy would flow elsewhere. That is what “solution” means when it means what it says. So why is it that philosophy can go on as if it were permanently in the state that medicine would regard as scandal? Why is it that a man can write soluzione del problema fondamentale and yet the rest of us still have our pupils on the sofa next week, still have to explain to an intelligent boy the difference between what is said and what is meant, still have to show him that “I didn’t mean it” is not a magic eraser, still have to teach him, in effect, the same old moves? Perhaps, he thinks, the trouble is that we are not in the business of solving in the medical sense. Perhaps our “solutions” are not closures but re-formulations, redistributions of trouble, ways of seeing why a question bites and where it bites. Perhaps the “fundamental problem” is less like cancer and more like mortality: not the sort of thing you “solve,” but the sort of thing that keeps generating intelligible responses, each of which can be called a solution by someone who needs the comfort of the word. He finds himself, unwillingly amused, imagining the blue-collar departments, as he calls them in a moment of bad temper: the ones with apparatus and grants and the consolation of measurable progress. Imagine telling the oncology people that they must continue to research cancer even after a good solution has been found, because, after all, that is what a serious discipline does: it keeps worrying the same bone for the sake of tradition. They would think you mad, or worse, philosophical. And then he returns to the local irritation: what is he doing, day after day, when he teaches? What is the point of a tutorial, if someone in 1869, in Naples, has already solved the fundamental problem? If the fundamental problem is solved, then surely the rest is either trivial or non-fundamental; and why should a serious man, a man with limited time, a man who has learned in war-work that some decisions are not decorative, spend his afternoons coaxing undergraduates through small distinctions as if they mattered? Unless, of course, “fundamental” is itself the joke. Unless the very idea of a single fundamental problem is the philosopher’s version of the grand unified theory: a wish masquerading as a discovery. Wittgenstein, hovering at the edge of Grice’s mind the way Wittgenstein always does, supplies the damp slap: pseudo-problem, pseudo-solution. The urge to announce a “solution” is itself part of the illness; one wants the world to stop itching, and one invents a cure that is really only a way of scratching with style. Still, Grice thinks, one ought to be fair to Maturi. He did his best. There is a certain dignity in a man who is willing to say, without embarrassment, that he has found the solution, rather than merely implying it in footnotes and letting his disciples do the trumpet-work. And if the man also did research in cancer, or at least took seriously the model of the sciences, then perhaps the title is not arrogance but longing: a philosopher reaching for the kind of closure the laboratory promises. Grice looks again at the words and feels the odd double pull that tutoring always produces: the pull toward seriousness and the pull toward comedy. The title is jocular because it is so straight-faced; it is serious because it reveals, in its overconfidence, the hunger that makes philosophy possible at all. And he realises, with a small resignation that is also a kind of professional pride, that his own work is not to deliver a final solution but to keep the conversation honest: to show, each time, what follows from what, what is being relied on, what is being smuggled, what is being left for the hearer to do. So perhaps the puzzle resolves itself in the only way these puzzles ever do. Medicine, if it solved cancer, would stop talking about it because the aim is to stop the suffering. Philosophy, even when it “solves” something, cannot stop talking because the talk is the medium in which the solution exists. A philosophical solution is not a pill. It is an arrangement of reasons that must be re-achieved by each new mind, and the re-achievement looks, to the impatient outsider, like repetition. He takes the pamphlet, closes it, and thinks: if Maturi has solved the fundamental problem, then good luck to him. Tomorrow at two o’clock a boy will come in with an essay full of cleverness and fog, and Grice will do what he always does: not cure philosophy, but keep it from lying about itself.Grice: Professore Maturi, devo dire che la sua approfondita analisi delle implicature tra i duellisti mi ha riportato alla mente i miei anni al Vadum Boum, la mia università. È proprio lì che ho iniziato a distinguere tra diagoge ed epagoge nella filosofia: il confronto dialettico, come lei lo descrive, mi ha sempre fatto sperare in un esito più eirenico, dove la rivalità tra filosofi sfocia in una maggiore comprensione e non solo in una lotta per la vittoria.  Maturi: Caro Grice, mi onora sapere che il mio studio possa suscitare tali ricordi e collegamenti. Condivido il suo auspicio: la dialettica del duello filosofico, pur essendo talvolta aspra, può diventare una strada verso il riconoscimento reciproco e la crescita dell’autocoscienza. Come nella scuola d’Amorosi, il dialogo è sempre una danza tra l’io e l’altro.  Grice: Ecco, proprio questa attenzione all’autocoscienza riconoscitiva è ciò che mi affascina del pensiero neapolitano-hegeliano. Nel mio lavoro, la cooperazione razionale non annulla mai il valore della precedente “forma fondamentale”: ogni nuovo stadio della vita trova le sue radici nella storia del pensiero, proprio come lei sottolinea.  Maturi: Senza dubbio, Grice. La filosofia, che sia epagogica o diagogica, deve sempre ricordare che tra il dire e il fare c’è di mezzo il mare: il vero progresso nasce dalla capacità di ascoltare e riconoscere l’altro come parte essenziale della propria crescita. Solo così i duelli diventano ponti, e non barriere. These two Maturis are both from Campania? Are they related, as per ancestor of one to the other. Speranza and Grice are thinking of two weekly essay assignments -- thanks. Probably not, or at least not in any way one can responsibly assert from the usual biographical notices. The two Maturi you have in view are Sebastiano Maturi, who was born at Amorosi in the Sannio, in what is now Campania, and Walter Maturi, who was born at Napoli, also in Campania. So yes, both are Campanian in that broad regional sense, but not from the same town, nor even obviously from the same local lineage. [treccani.it], [treccani.it] More importantly, the standard biographical sources do not, so far as these notices show, present Walter Maturi as a descendant of Sebastiano Maturi, or indeed as belonging to the same immediate family line. On the contrary, the notice on Walter Maturi explicitly says that his family was originally from Latronico, in the province of Potenza, that is, in Basilicata, even though he himself was born in Napoli. That makes a direct Campanian family continuity from Sebastiano Maturi to Walter Maturi less likely on the face of it. [treccani.it], [treccani.it] So the cautious answer is this. Both are connected with Campania, but in different ways. Sebastiano Maturi is Campanian by birth at Amorosi, while Walter Maturi is Neapolitan by birth but from a family said to originate in Latronico. On present evidence, one should not say that one was ancestor of the other, or even that they were closely related, unless one had genealogical documentation beyond the biographical entries. [treccani.it], [treccani.it] In dry Speranza style, one might put it this way. The shared surname and the shared southern geography are enough to tempt the hurried mind, but not enough to satisfy the scrupulous one. Sebastiano Maturi belongs to Amorosi and the Sannio; Walter Maturi belongs by birth to Napoli, while his family background points back to Latronico. Campania unites them only at the large administrative altitude at which many false cousins are made. The prudent historian therefore says not “ancestor,” nor even confidently “kinsman,” but only “homonym with a southern accent.” [treccani.it], [treccani.it] If you want, I can now do either of two things here in chat only. I can turn this into a compact Speranza-style paragraph for the two weekly essay assignments. Or I can give you a short prosopographical note headed Sebastiano Maturi and Walter Maturi: Campania, Naples, and the danger of surname-based genealogy.Maturi, Sebastiano (1869). Soluzione del problema fondamentale della filosofia. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Maturi: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale.  Walter Maturi (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is an intentionalist, micro-level account: what a speaker means (and what is implicated beyond what is said) is recoverable by a rational hearer who assumes cooperative purposes and uses that assumption to infer the speaker’s communicative intentions; Maturi, as a historian of the Risorgimento and of historiography (Walter Maturi, 1902–1968; trained in Naples with the Croce–Schipa milieu; author of works such as Il concordato del 1818 tra la Santa Sede e le Due Sicilie (1929) and Interpretazioni del Risorgimento), provides an illuminating macro-level analogue in which “meaning” is not the meaning of a single utterance but the meaning of events, texts, and political actions as reconstructed through competing interpretive frameworks. Where Grice asks how a hearer justifiably gets from an utterance to an intended implicature, Maturi asks how a reader of history justifiably gets from fragmentary evidence to an interpretation, and his emphasis on plural “interpretazioni” mirrors a Gricean point: inference is rational but underdetermined, so different audiences (London, “Woolwich,” patriotic or partisan constituencies, even gendered publics like “Speranza”) can draw different, yet intelligible, “implicatures” from the same record because they bring different background assumptions and interests to the interpretive situation. The contrast is that Grice builds normativity into conversational uptake via cooperation and shared rational expectations, whereas Maturi foregrounds how those expectations are themselves historical and ideological—historians must reconstruct intentions and contexts across distance, propaganda, and institutional pressures—so that “implicature” becomes something like the political or rhetorical upshot a movement leaves in its traces rather than a neatly cancellable conversational inference. Grice: “People sometimes asks me how my intentionalist approach can be applied to history. I always respond: Read M.! M.’s ‘interpretazioni,’ thus in plural, ‘del risorgimento’ is a classic. Even in London, the risorgimento had at least two interpretations! One in Woolwich, and another one elsewhere. And there is possibly a gender distinction too with “Speranza,” Wilde’s mother, being somewhat fanatic about it!” M. compe la sua formazione culturale a Napoli dove si laurea sotto SCHIPA, uno dei firmatari del manifesto dei filosofi anti-fascisti redatto da CROCE. Di SCHIPA, pella lezione di rigore che gl’impara, M. conserva un commosso ricordo ed ha modo d’esprimere la sua gratitudine in occasione della morte di Schipa. Segue con attenzione ed interesse, ma anche con spirito critico, le lezioni di CROCE, e studi sotto Gentile Maistre. Impostato sulla lezione di CROCE è La crisi della storiografia politica italiana, a cui segue un saggio dedicato sugli studi di storia, inserito in La vita intellettuale italiana. Il concordato tra la santa sede e le due sicilie e giudicato positivamente dalla critica di Omodeo che lo recense ne La Critica. Frequenta la scuola storica diretta da VOLPE ed e segretario e bibliotecario dell'istituto storico. Collaboratore dell'enciclopedia, pella quale scrive voci tra le quali quella dedicata al risorgimento ispirata alle sue idee liberali. A causa di questo episodio, nonostante il suo disinteresse pella vita politica attiva, e allontanato dall'istituto storico.  Nei suoi saggi di storia politica i suoi punti di riferimento sono CROCE, Meinecke, Salvemini, e VOLPE.  Dapprima come incaricato di storia del ri-sorgimento e poi come ordinario tenne le sue lezioni a Pisa dove ha modo di scrivere saggi come alcune importanti voci in un dizionario di politica a cura del partito fascista, il saggio Partiti politici e correnti di pensiero nel risorgimento, e l'accurata biografia Il principe di Canosa. Storia, storiografia, unita longitudinale della filosofia, Croce, Gentile, Schipa, Volpe. Grice’s room at St John’s had the particular quiet of a place that had hosted too many clever young men to be impressed by any new one. Coal scolded in the grate without committing itself to warmth. The kettle made the sort of private noise that passes for company in college rooms. On the table lay the notes for tomorrow’s seminar, a word he used with an inward wince, since it was in fact his university-lecturer stint, his public duty, the thing he would never prepare this hard for if it were only a tutorial with two boys and an essay. He had written one word at the top of the page and then, below it, written it again, as if the second instance might behave better. concordato concordato He spoke the word softly, to see whether it sounded foolish in English when no one was there to laugh at it. Grice: It is not even my language. The room answered, in the voice it always used when it wanted to be a conscience: his own, with a tone slightly more severe. Maturi: Then why are you petting it like a cat you swear you dislike. Grice did not look up. There was no one to look up at. The voice had arrived, as these voices do, by being convenient. Grice: I am not petting it. I am testing it. I want a word that will make them uncomfortable in the right way. Maturi: Your audience. The seminar. Grice: The class. The timetable calls it a class. I call it a seminar to lend myself dignity, and then I call it a class in my head to take the dignity back. Tomorrow I am to explain conversational helpfulness to people who think talk is either a pastime or a weapon. I require something that sounds like neither, something that sounds like an arrangement. Maturi: A pact. Grice: Exactly. Your word sits there in your title as if it were only history, only diplomacy, only the Santa Sede bargaining with the Due Sicilie. But it keeps whispering to me that conversation is precisely that sort of thing: a concordato. A pact between two parties who are not obliged to like each other, but are obliged, if they want meaning to happen, to pretend that they share a purpose. Maturi: You are about to drag Cicero into a treaty. Grice: I have already done it. Cor. Heart. Concordia. Cordial. And the prefix con, cum, with. Two hearts. Not one heart, not my heart bullying yours, not your heart sulking in silence, but two hearts, together, consenting to be jointly answerable for what gets understood. Maturi: And is that etymology or propaganda. Grice: Both, if I can manage it. I want them to hear that conversation is not free. It is not merely noises exchanged. It is a civil contract. Two hearts, yes, but also two interests. And the interests must be managed, not sentimentalised. That is the whole point of my maxims. They are not moral decorations; they are terms of an arrangement. Maturi: You keep saying heart. Are you sure the word is not a cord, a chord, rather than a heart. Grice hesitated, and the hesitation was the whole reason he had written the word twice. He turned it over as if it might show its underside. Grice: That is my fear, and also my opportunity. Cor is heart, yes. But English hears cord at once. Cordial and chord are close enough in the ear to make a pun feel like a proof. Two hearts, one cord. Same cord. Not the romantic nonsense of fusion, but the practical fact of binding. A pact binds. A cord binds. A chord binds tones into one hearing. If I am wrong about the philology, I can still be right about the mechanism. Maturi: You want to tell them that helpfulness is a kind of binding. Grice: A voluntary binding, and therefore all the more irritating to them. They will want to be clever without being constrained. They will want to win without admitting there is a game. So I will hand them a word that says, openly, there is a game, and that the game has a document. Maturi: And you will add the monster. Grice: I cannot resist the monster. The Due Sicilie. Two Sicilies is already enough to unsettle an English ear, because it insists that even an island can come doubled. A two-headed thing. And then the Santa Sede, which sounds, to my audience, either holy or absurd, and in either case useful for offence. He heard, then, another voice, not Maturi’s, older, domestic, contemptuous in a way that passed for piety. It came from Birmingham with a clarity Oxford could never quite imitate. Mother: There’s nothing holy about it. Grice: Mother says the only See that is holy is Heaven. Maturi: You are mixing concordats. Grice: I am mixing them on purpose. See means to sit. Sede. The Pope sits, and thinks the sitting makes him holy. My father would have enjoyed that as a mistake of office for essence. Henry VIII enjoyed it too, in his way, proposing himself as defender of the faith as if defence were a crown you could pin on your own chest. Englishmen do love a title. We imagine Jerusalem in our weather, we imagine sanctity in our stone, and then we talk as if our own little see were as holy as theirs. Maturi: You are far from your syllabus. Grice: No, I am at the centre of it. Because this is exactly what my students do when they hear a word. They bring their assumptions, their loyalties, their resentments, their private sermons. And they call the result understanding. My whole task tomorrow is to show them that understanding is an inference under a pact. It is not a miracle. It is not merely decoding. It is what happens when two sides agree, tacitly, to cooperate just enough. Maturi: And concordato will be your provocation. Grice: It will be my piece of gasoline, yes, but poured with manners. I will say: you think conversation is casual. It is not. It is two hearts consenting to one cord, under terms neither side has fully written down, but both sides will punish you for violating. If you want to speak, you must enter the concordato. If you want to be understood, you must act as if the other person has rights. Mother: Rights. Grice: Exactly. Even the Santa Sede and the two-headed monster understood that. They wrote it down. We do it invisibly. That is the whole trick of civility: it makes the contract look like nature. He underlined the word once, not to emphasise it, but to see whether it could bear a line without becoming melodrama. concordato Grice: Tomorrow I shall present a principle of conversational helpfulness, and I shall let them think it is merely niceness until I drop this word like a document on the table. Not holy. Not Italian. Not mine. And precisely for that reason, perfect.Grice: Caro Maturi, spesso mi chiedono come il mio approccio intenzionalista possa essere applicato alla storia. Trovo che le tue interpretazioni del Risorgimento siano particolarmente illuminanti, persino a Londra si discute ancora di queste diverse prospettive! Maturi: Grazie, Grice. Credo che la pluralità delle interpretazioni sia essenziale per comprendere la complessità della storia. La lezione di rigore di Schipa e l'approccio critico di Croce mi hanno insegnato proprio a non accontentarmi mai di una sola versione. Grice: Non posso che essere d’accordo. Anche nelle mie ricerche filosofiche, ho sempre ritenuto che la conversazione debba tenere conto delle diverse intenzioni, proprio come tu fai con le correnti di pensiero nel Risorgimento. Come dice il proverbio: “Ognuno tira l’acqua al suo mulino”, e la storia non fa eccezione. Maturi: Esattamente, Grice. La storia è un insieme di voci, di aspirazioni, di interpretazioni che si intrecciano. Solo con il dialogo e la riflessione critica possiamo avvicinarci alla verità storica, senza mai dimenticare che “chi non si pone domande resta fermo”, proprio come insegna la filosofia. Maturi, Walter (1929). Il concordato del 1818 tra la Santa Sede e le Due Sicilie. Firenze.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mazio: la ragione conversazionale all’orto romano Gaio Mazio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale all’orto romano. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational, cooperative enterprise in which hearers infer what is meant beyond what is said (implicature) by assuming the speaker is being relevant, informative enough, and intelligible; the Gaio Mazio vignette relocates that Gricean machinery into the Epicurean garden as a practical style of life, where the point of speech is not primarily dialectical victory but the cultivation of tranquil, ordinary satisfactions, so “reason in conversation” looks less like maxim-following as an abstract norm and more like a therapeutic discipline of tone, volume, and topic. Historically, Gaius Matius is a late-Republican figure remembered as a loyal associate of Caesar and later connected with Cicero’s circle, and ancient notices associate him with Epicurean sympathies and with writing on domestic, agrarian, or culinary matters; that fits your “food and trees” emphasis and turns the garden into a setting where what is implicated is often ethical counsel rather than propositional information. In Gricean terms, Matius’ “Less shouting; more dining” is a deliberate flout of relevance that generates a corrective implicature: the best answer to over-heated philosophical disputation is not another premise but a change of conversational aim (from contest to conviviality), and even the contrast between “words cooked” in the school and cabbage that “tastes subtler” in the garden is an invitation to infer that meaning is better achieved when talk remains anchored in shared practices. So while Grice gives the inferential logic by which implicatures are calculated from cooperative expectations, Matius supplies a model of why those expectations exist and what they are for: conversation is governed by reason because it is one of the arts by which people keep peace of mind, and implicature becomes a civil, garden-trained way of redirecting ambition and excess without open confrontation. Grice: “When I refer to the Athenian dialectic as opposed to the Oxonian dialectic, I fous on the agora of Socrates, the accademia of Plato and the lizio of Aristotle – but of course there was also the Porch, and the Garden! It is not surprising that of all these Hellenistic sects, Walter Pater, at Oxford, found the Garden to be the most congenial to his ultimately Roman mind!” Filosofo italiano. Friend of GIULIO  Cesare and Cicerone . M. writes on food and trees and takes an interest in the philosophy of the Garden. L’orto. GRICEVS: O MATI, audio te in horto Romano philosophari: num brassicam cum dialectica misces? MATIVS: Immo vero, GRICE: in horto etiam brassica sapit subtilius; in schola saepe sola verba coquuntur. GRICEVS: At Oxonii verba sunt satis salsa—sed sine oleo. Quid Epicurus diceret de nostris disputationibus?  MATIVS: Diceret: “Minus clamate; plus cenate.” Et si quaestio manet, respondeat pomarium, non professorius. This Gaius Matius was gens Matia -- is Mazio the common way to italianise him? This Mazio -- Gaius Matius -- (Is Mazio the way to italianise him? -- was member of gens Matia? Short answer: no, Mazio is not the common or best Italianisation of Gaius Matius. If the Roman is Gaius Matius, the normal Italian form would be Gaio Mazio only if one first decides to vernacularise the nomen Matius as Mazio. But that step is not really standard in the way, say, Cicero becomes Cicerone or Horatius becomes Orazio. For this figure, modern scholarly usage in Italian usually keeps him much closer to the Latin and writes Gaio Mazio only occasionally, while just as often retaining Gaio Mazio as a semi-classicising form only in looser literary or encyclopedic contexts. In more philological work one often simply finds Gaio Mazio only as a convenience, but the Latin Gaius Matius remains the safer scholarly label. The underlying point is that he belongs to the gens Matia, yes, so Matius is the nomen, and an Italianised reflex Mazio is imaginable and intelligible. But imaginable is not the same as idiomatic. It does not have the same settled inevitability as Cicerone, Orazio, or Lucrezio. So if your question is whether Mazio is the common way to italianise him, I would say: possible, but not especially common, and not the safest form if you want a learned or philological tone. If Speranza wants the slightly playful, Italianising register, Gaio Mazio can work very well, especially in a text that enjoys moving between Rome, Oxford, and the garden. It has the right domesticating effect. But if he wants the form to look historically and bibliographically secure, Gaius Matius is better. So I would distinguish three levels. Philological or scholarly heading: Gaius Matius Italian learned prose, but still fairly natural: Gaio Mazio Playful or deliberately vernacular-humanistic Speranza mode: Mazio, Gaio That last one is charming, but it sounds more like a catalogue entry in an imagined repertorio than like a standard modern scholarly heading. Which may be exactly why it pleases. On gens Matia: yes, that is the correct gentilician background. He is conventionally understood as belonging to the gens Matia, and Matius is the nomen derived from that gens. So your instinct there is sound. On your line Mazio, Gaio (a. u. c. DCCX). De orto. Roma.: it works very well as a pseudo-bibliographical fiction in Speranza’s manner. It has the right dry charm. The only thing to note is that it reads as intentionally reconstructed rather than historically conventional, which again may be a virtue rather than a defect. If you like, I can now do one of three things here in chat only: I can give you a short philological note on Matius, Matia, and the plausibility of Mazio I can rewrite your Mazio passage in the dry impersonal Speranza voice I can give you three heading options, from most scholarly to most Speranzian And can you name other members of this gens Matia? thanks Yes, but the dry answer is: not many securely known ones. The gens Matia is generally described as a minor plebeian family, and the sources make it famous above all through Gaius Matius Calvena. Beyond him, the attested roster is strikingly thin. [en.wikipedia.org], [detailedpedia.com] The one clearly named member besides Gaius Matius Calvena that turns up in standard summaries is the imposing imperial figure Gaius Matius Sabinius Sullinus Vatinianus Anicius Maximus Caesulenus Martialis Pisibanus Lepidus, a Flamen Julianus in about AD 186 and a consul suffectus at an uncertain date. He looks less like a cosy family member and more like the late-imperial habit of wearing half the Roman phonebook as a name. [en.wikipedia.org] There is also a further complication. Some notices distinguish two men called Gaius Matius: one, the Caesarian friend of Julius Caesar and Cicero, and another associated with Augustus, gastronomy, topiary, and the famous Matiāna apples. But the evidence is uncertain, and some scholars suppose the later one may be the son of the first rather than a wholly separate figure. So this may or may not give you another member of the gens in an independent sense. [detailedpedia.com] So, if one answers with philological caution, the list is very short: Gaius Matius Calvena Possibly another Gaius Matius in the Augustan orbit, if distinct from Calvena The much later imperial Gaius Matius Sabinius Sullinus Vatinianus Anicius Maximus Caesulenus Martialis Pisibanus Lepidus That is why your instinct about the family is sound, but also why one should not imagine the gens Matia as a richly peopled house in the way one might with the Cornelii or Claudii. In the surviving record it is almost a one-man gens, with a faint imperial after-echo. [en.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only: I can give you a very short prosopographical note on the two or three Matii worth naming I can draft a Speranzian paragraph on why some Roman gentes survive in memory through one name alone, and why the Matia are such a case [en.wikipedia.org]Mazio, Gaio (a. u. c. DCCX). De orto. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mazzei: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – filosofia toscana – filosofia fiorentina, filosofia italiana (Poggio a Caiano).  Filippo Mazzei (Poggio a Caiano, Toscana): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats communication as a rational, cooperative practice in which hearers are entitled to infer what a speaker means beyond what is said by assuming purposive talk and then calculating implicatures from shared expectations; Mazzei (Filippo Mazzei, 1730–1816, Tuscan Enlightenment figure who moved between Old World and New World politics, commerce, and reform discourse, close to Jefferson and active in the American revolutionary milieu) makes a useful contrast because his primary “medium” is not the face-to-face tutorial exchange but the politically consequential letter, manifesto, and transatlantic act of persuasion, where audiences are dispersed and common ground must be constructed rather than presumed. In Gricean terms, Mazzei’s writing is designed to stabilize uptake at a distance: slogans, republican vocabulary, and appeals to liberty and toleration work by loading shared premises into the context so that readers draw the intended conclusions without the author being present to negotiate misunderstandings, and that turns implicature into a tool of mobilization and coalition-building rather than a local conversational byproduct. At the same time, Mazzei’s bicultural position (Tuscany/Virginia; “traitor” vs “illustre toscano”) highlights how implicature is audience-relative in a way Grice formalizes: the same utterance can carry different implied commitments depending on whether the hearer’s background is national, ideological, or personal, so “old world/new world” becomes not just a theme but a pragmatic fault-line determining what will be inferred as praise, betrayal, cosmopolitanism, or propaganda. In short, Grice provides the micro-mechanics of rational inference from utterances; Mazzei exemplifies the macro-politics of making those inferences predictable across cultures and distances, where conversational reason is asked to scale up into public reason. Grice: “When I deliver my proemium as the John Locke lecturer at Oxford, I played on the idea of the old world versus the new world – which was a topic of some interest for my former pupil, Strawson. Strawson argued, wrongly, that Carnap, who emigrated to the New World, had to start anew – whereas in the Old World, we respect TRADITION!” Filosofo italiano. Poggio, Toscana. Grice: “Not every philosopher has a city, ‘Colle,’ named after him!” -- Grice: “I like M.; he is hardly a philosopher, but the Italians consider among the ‘filosofi italiani,’ – there is a good wine, “M.,” since ., when travelling to the Americas, transplanted a grape from his paese – the descendants still grow it! In oltre, he was influential in the ‘risorgimento’!” -- essential Italian philosopher.Massone e cadetto di una nobile famiglia toscana di viticoltori, fu personaggio energico ed eclettico, illuminista, promulgatore delle libertà individuali, dei diritti civili e della tolleranza religiosa. Visse una vita avventurosa e movimentata, con alterne fortune economiche.  Sebbene sia sconosciuto al grande pubblico, partecipò attivamente alla guerra d'indipendenza americana come agente mediatore all'acquisto di armi per la Virginia, ed è ritenuto dagli storici uno dei padri della Dichiarazione d'Indipendenza americana, in quanto intimo amico dei primi cinque presidenti statunitensi: George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe e soprattutto Thomas Jefferson, di cui fu ispiratore, vicino di casa, socio in affari e con cui rimase in contatto epistolare fino alla morte. Grice: “The more Italian historians of philosophy, in their pretentiously and fake patriotic prose, keep referring to this or that as ‘un illustre toscano’, the less I am leaned to see Mazzei as ITALIAN at all!” – Paeseism with a vengeance!” – Grice: “As a Brit, I find M. a traitor – to his country, and to mine!” implicature, mazzei wine, vino mazzei, la rivoluzione del nuovo mondo.  Grice lingers, with the peculiar fastidiousness of a man who pretends not to care about words while living off them, over Mazzei’s 1776 title and the single term that, to his ear, misbehaves: convenzione. He says the date is already a clue, because 1776 is precisely when English begins to behave as if it can legislate the world by printing, and when Italians abroad begin to borrow the new Anglo-American political lexicon with a freedom they would never have risked at home. Convenzione, he muses, has the unmistakable air of a word coaxed into Italian by American circumstance: not quite a calque, not quite a translation, but a pragmatic import, the sort of import one smuggles in by putting a Latin-looking coat on an English idea. And he adds, dryly, that if Mazzei believed he was being Ciceronian, Cicero would probably have declined to recognise the usage, or else would have recognised it and disapproved. Because, Grice says, conventio in the Roman mouth is not yet our philosophical convention. It is a coming-together, an agreement, a meeting, a compact, a procedure by which parties bind themselves; it has the flavour of law, bargain, embassy, assembly. One does not use it, in Cicero, as an all-purpose explanatory solvent. Yet the English philosophical word has acquired an extra kind of laziness: it is what one invokes when one does not want to explain why a practice holds, only that it holds because people do it. It threatens to replace analysis with sociology; and in Oxford, he remarks, sociology is what one does only after sherry, and even then with the curtains drawn. He then performs, as if it were civic duty, the ritual disclaimer: he is against trading in convention in his account of meaning. Not because he denies that conventions exist, but because he refuses to let convention do all the explanatory work. If meaning were merely convention, then philosophy would reduce to compiling correlations and calling the compilation a theory; and he has never been persuaded that lexicography, however honourable, is the same as philosophical explanation. What matters, for him, is intention, recognition, and rational uptake in a cooperative practice; convention may stabilise these, but it is not their source and certainly not their whole story. It is one ingredient among others, and a dangerous one if it is allowed to pretend to be the only ingredient. At this point, with a kind of honest irritation that he disguises as humour, he admits that he has nevertheless made room for something he calls conventional implicature, and that he has done so while not being altogether sure what he means by it. The phrase, he says, entered his system the way phrases enter colleges: because one needs a filing cabinet for recurring phenomena that do not look inferential in quite the right way. If you say but, there is a contrast; if you say therefore, there is a consequence; if you say even, there is a scale being climbed. One does not calculate these each time as one calculates a conversational implicature; one more or less inherits them. So he baptised them conventional and moved on, which he concedes is not his finest methodological moment, but it is a realistic one: philosophers, too, have to get through the day without footnoting every convenience. Still, he continues, the deeper point is that convention is only one correlation among many. There are natural correlations, where a sign points by causal regularity; iconic correlations, where a sign resembles what it signifies; indexical correlations, where a sign is tied to circumstance; and then the messy human correlations where what matters is not the sign at all but the mutual recognition that someone is trying to get someone else to think something. The American revolutionary setting tempts Mazzei to treat convenzione as the master word, because politics needs explicit agreement, the public coming-together, the procedure that binds strangers at distance. But that is a political necessity, Grice says, not a metaphysical foundation; it is what you need when you cannot rely on shared habits, shared rooms, shared tacit understandings. Mazzei interests him precisely because he is forced to do, in print and at distance, what Oxford prefers to do in rooms: to manufacture the conditions under which agreement can be presumed. In a tutorial you can rely on common habits and repair misunderstandings as they arise; in a new republic, in correspondence, across oceans, you need a convenzione because you need a public record that substitutes for the presence of interlocutors. And that, Grice concludes, is why the word continues to amuse him even as it irritates him: it is a little Americanism wearing an Italian suit, a procedural term dressed as a philosophical one; and it reminds him—uncomfortably, because he likes his theories clean—that sometimes you really do need a convention where a convention is needed, and no amount of analysis of meaning will make a delegate appear without one. Grice: Caro Mazzei, lei toscano d’America o americano di Toscana? La sua storia sembra più intricata di un bicchiere di Chianti dopo una cena tra Locke e Jefferson! Mazzei: Grice, in Toscana si dice “chi ha due paesi ha doppia fortuna!” E io ho portato il vino e la filosofia oltreoceano: se non altro, i miei vitigni si sono adattati meglio di molti filosofi! Grice: Ma davvero, Mazzei, lei tra armi, vino e idee rivoluzionarie, non teme che qualcuno la prenda per massone più che per filosofo? Oppure è come il proverbio: “Meglio una bottiglia in mano che un trattato da leggere!”? Mazzei: Grice, la vita è troppo breve per bere vino cattivo e per non seguire il vento della libertà. Se i miei amici presidenti americani hanno brindato con il mio vino, credo di aver fatto qualcosa di buono—filosofia compresa! Mazzei, Filippo (1776). Istruzioni per i delegati alla Convenzione (Contea di Albemarle, Virginia).

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mazzini: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la giovine italia – la scuola di Genova -- filosofia ligure. Giuseppe Mazzini (Genova, Liguria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la giovine italia. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational reconstruction of what a speaker intends an audience to recognize, with implicatures arising when what is said is deliberately less (or other) than what is meant under shared cooperative expectations; Mazzini’s communicative practice, by contrast, is paradigmatically public, mobilizing, and programmatic—his slogans (like “Giovine Italia”), manifestos, letters, and exhortations are designed to generate collective agency and moral duty, so the “reason” governing meaning is not primarily the local logic of a single exchange but the long-range rhetoric of nation-building, where audiences are recruited, disciplined, and unified over time. In Gricean terms, Mazzini’s political language is rich in strategic implicature: terms like “Italy,” “youth,” “people,” and “duty” often carry presupposed moral claims (about sacrifice, legitimacy, and historical destiny) that are not fully stated in each utterance but are meant to be taken up as common ground by sympathizers, while opponents may treat those same implicatures as ideological overreach—showing how uptake depends on shared premises rather than just inferential competence. Where Grice emphasizes cancellability, calculability, and the hearer’s entitlement to infer under cooperative norms, Mazzini foregrounds a setting in which cancellation is often politically costly (to retract the implicatures is to weaken the movement) and in which the “cooperative principle” is re-engineered as solidarity: conversation becomes collective persuasion rather than neutral information exchange. The result is a useful contrast: Grice offers a general micro-theory of how meaning is inferred from intentions in ordinary talk, while Mazzini illustrates how, in mass political discourse, meaning is governed by a moral-rhetorical project that stabilizes implicatures through repeated public framing, turning what is merely implied in one moment into a standing assumption of an emerging community. Grice: “I never liked M.’s adage, ‘giovine italia’ but then my favourite Australian composer is Peter Allen, ‘everything old is new again.’ M. has been identified by Benedetti  with fascism, as he should!” Filosofo ligure. Filosofo italiano. Genova, Liguria. Grice: “Of course it is difficult for an Italian philosopher to approach the philosophy of M.cooly; it would be like me approaching the philosophy of Horatio Nelson!” – Grice: “I’ve found ‘Il pensiero filosofico di Giuseppe Mazzini’ quite helpful – the equivalent would be the pretentious sounding, “The philosophical thought of Sir Winston Churchill,’ say!” --  Grice: “ loves to cherish the fact that an old street in Woolwich, of all places, is named after him, in a way ‘Speranza,’ just because Garibaldi visited!” Grice: “ also cherishes the fact that Lady Wilde preferred ‘Speranza’ just to defend M.!” Esponente di punta del patriottismo risorgimentale, le sue idee e la sua azione politica contribusceno in maniera decisiva alla nascita dello STATO UNITARIO ITALIANO. Le condanne subite in diversi tribunali d'Italia lo costringeno però alla latitanza fino alla morte. Le teorie mazziniane sono di grande importanza nella definizione dei moderni movimenti europei per l'affermazione della democrazia attraverso la forma repubblicana dello stato. Nacque a Genova, allora capoluogo dell'omonimo dipartimento francese costituito da parte del regime di Bonaparte. Il padre, Giacomo, e medico e docente universitario d'anatomia originario di Chiavari, una cittadina del Tigullio all'epoca capoluogo del dipartimento francese degli Appennini, successivamente parte della provincia di Genova, figura politicamente attiva nella scena pubblica locale, sia durante l'epoca della precedente repubblica ligure, sia, in tempi successivi, dell'Impero napoleonico. la giovine italia, la tesi di laurea di Benedetti su M. nella ideologia fascista, ideologia fascista, gentile, bobbio, garibaldi, nazione italiana, stato nazionale, stato unitario. Grice: Caro Mazzini, mi colpisce sempre la forza delle tue idee su “Giovine Italia”, benché io preferisca il motto di Peter Allen, “tutto ciò che è vecchio torna nuovo”. Credi davvero che il rinnovamento debba sempre partire dai giovani? Mazzini: Grice, ritengo che il cambiamento non sia questione di età, bensì di spirito. “Giovine Italia” simboleggia l’energia e la speranza di chi vuole costruire un futuro diverso. L’importante è credere nella possibilità di una rinascita collettiva. Grice: È interessante come la tua visione abbia influenzato movimenti democratici in tutta Europa. Ma non temi che l’identità nazionale possa diventare una forma di esclusione piuttosto che di unione? Mazzini: La nazione, per me, è casa comune; deve essere inclusiva e aperta, non chiusura. Solo attraverso la partecipazione e il dialogo si può costruire uno stato unitario che sia veramente democratico e al servizio di tutti. Come dicono dalle mie parti: “Chi semina vento raccoglie tempesta”, ma chi semina concordia raccoglie libertà. Apparently, this Mazzini was worshipped by Oxford hegelians like Green, and others -- did he ever visit Oxford? Speranza is thinking of a Grice vignette, and he is reminded that the Hope Street in Woolwich was renamed Speranza Street after Garibaldi visited the area, but this is about Mazzini, not the other Ligurian -- thanks I cannot verify that Giuseppe Mazzini ever actually visited Oxford, and on the evidence I found I would not state it as a fact. What is easy to verify is something slightly different: Oxford certainly talked about Giuseppe Mazzini, lectured on him, and later Oxford-adjacent idealists engaged him seriously, but that is not the same as proving that he himself came to Oxford. The clearest Oxford item I found is not a visit by Giuseppe Mazzini but a later Oxford lecture tradition about him, as in The Makers of Modern Italy: Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi. Three Lectures Delivered at Oxford. [commons.wi...imedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] There is, however, a promising lead in a recent study of British idealism and Giuseppe Mazzini, which explicitly mentions “Mazzini’s engagements at Oxford” in connection with British idealists such as T. H. Green. That suggests there may well have been some Oxford contact or episode, but from the search result alone I cannot responsibly say what that engagement was, whether it meant a physical visit, correspondence, reputation, or institutional discussion. So the safe answer is: possibly, but not yet securely enough for me to assert. [tandfonline.com], [en.wikipedia.org] In dry Speranza terms, one might say: Oxford certainly found Mazzini discussable, and the British idealists found him useful enough to read him with some seriousness; but discussability is not locomotion. A man may arrive in Oxford syllabically long before he arrives there bodily, and in Mazzini’s case the evidence I have at hand proves the former much more easily than the latter. [en.wikipedia.org], [tandfonline.com] Your Woolwich comparison is excellent, by the way. Garibaldi leaves place-name folklore more easily than Mazzini leaves Oxford visitation records. The one gets streets and patriotic civic memory; the other gets lectures, radicals, idealists, and later moral appropriation. That feels exactly right in tone, even before one has settled the railway timetable. [commons.wi...imedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] If you want, I can do one of two things next, still only in chat. I can search more narrowly for a documented Oxford visit by Giuseppe Mazzini, or I can give you a compact Speranza paragraph that says Oxford adopted Mazzini intellectually without yet claiming, incautiously, that he walked its streets. I did check the Marriott lecture you linked -- but Marriott does not seem to dwell on the Anglo-Italian connection, just the Italian side (aptly) -- so can you do a second run to see if we get something more philosophical alla Green (was he Oxford?) and 'stato unitario' and Mazzini -- Marriott was lecturer at New College and Worcester College on both modern history and political economy so he may relate too -- I'm not sure what the latest date for this engagement would be -- I mean, when Mazzini came to be a thing of the past. Cheers. Yes — the second run is much better, and it gives a cleaner philosophical line than Marriott. First, on Green: yes, T. H. Green was decidedly Oxford — Balliol, later Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, and a foundational figure of Oxford idealism. So if you want the Oxford-Hegelian connection, Green is exactly the right man to put in the foreground. [en.wikipedia.org], [philopedia.org] More importantly, there is now a quite direct scholarly line linking Giuseppe Mazzini to British idealism and to Oxford specifically. Colin Tyler argues that British idealists engaged with Mazzini from 1858 to 1929, and his summary is unusually useful for your purposes: it says that section two of the article focuses on Mazzini’s Oxford engagements, section three examines how Green’s worldview differed fundamentally from Mazzini’s, and section four argues that Green’s practical political theory nevertheless drew directly on Mazzini’s writings, especially on republican virtue, associations, and the state. That is exactly the sort of Anglo-Italian philosophical connection you were asking for. [hull-repos...ktribe.com], [growkudos.com], [tandfonline.com] That also answers your “stato unitario” instinct rather nicely. The modern article suggests that Green took practical political instruction from Mazzini, but diverged from him over the proper role of the state in the republic. So the connection is not mere hero-worship, and not mere biographical admiration; it concerns statehood, civic formation, and the balance between personal self-determination and community coherence — in other words, the very region where “stato unitario” becomes philosophically live rather than merely patriotic. [hull-repos...ktribe.com], [tandfonline.com] There is also a very useful Oxford social vehicle: the Old Mortality Society. Both Colin Tyler and the related piece Touching the Springs of Action tie Mazzini’s Oxford presence or influence to that club and to an atmosphere “deeply impregnated by Mazzinian suggestions.” The second piece goes further and explicitly names T. H. Green, A. C. Bradley, E. Caird, A. V. Dicey, and Arnold Toynbee as republicans or idealists affected by Mazzini. That gives you not only Green, but the wider Oxford-idealist and Oxford-adjacent network. [hull-repos...ktribe.com], [iris.unito.it] As for J. A. R. Marriott, your instinct is right: he belongs more to the historical and political-educational afterlife than to the deepest Oxford-Hegelian philosophical uptake. But he is still useful as a sign that Mazzini remained lecture-worthy at Oxford in 1889. Marriott delivered three Oxford lectures on modern Italy — Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi — which means that by the late 1880s Mazzini was already a figure of Oxford historical culture, not only of exile politics. So Marriott is not your strongest philosophical witness, but he is a good marker of Oxford reception. [archive.org], [si.edu] Now to the most interesting question: when did Mazzini become “a thing of the past”? Here the new scholarship gives a surprisingly neat answer. Colin Tyler concludes that Arnold Toynbee could still call Mazzini “the true teacher of our age” in 1881, but that this became increasingly unsustainable from the late 1880s onward, as evolutionary theory came to ground British idealist political thought. In other words, Mazzini did not vanish at once; he persisted, but the centre of gravity shifted. The heroic moral-national teacher remained admired, yet increasingly ceased to provide the dominant philosophical grammar. [hull-repos...ktribe.com], [growkudos.com], [tandfonline.com] That is, I think, the answer you want. If one is talking about Oxford and British idealism rather than merely radical memory, the decisive waning seems to begin in the late 1880s. He remains alive in later British idealists — the article carries the story to 1929 — but more as a refracted inheritance than as the ruling master. So one could say: At Oxford, Mazzini ceased to be the moral present and became the philosophical past somewhere between the later 1880s and the Edwardian period. He remained readable, admirable, and institutionally discussable, but no longer governed the deepest theoretical weather once evolutionary and other later idealist frameworks took over. [hull-repos...ktribe.com], [tandfonline.com] There is also a useful contrast with the broader British legacy. Christopher Duggan argues that Mazzini’s British reception tended to accentuate the progressive and democratic side while overlooking less congenial elements, whereas in Italy the more illiberal fusion of religion and politics proved more enduring. He also notes that Mazzini’s influence in Italy dwindled after his death in 1872 under pressure from socialism, then revived after the turn of the century with nationalism. That helps explain why he could remain morally resonant in Britain and Oxford even as his direct philosophical centrality waned. [academic.oup.com] So in dry Speranza style, I would now say something like this: Marriott is useful, but only as a symptom. By 1889 Mazzini is already safely Oxford-lectureable as one of the makers of modern Italy. The deeper philosophical connection lies elsewhere, in the idealist uptake. Green, who was Oxford to the bone, appears now to have differed sharply from Mazzini at the level of worldview while borrowing from him at the level of practical political thought, especially over virtue, association, republican formation, and the state. Mazzini, in short, was not merely admired by Oxford idealists; he was used by them. Yet his philosophical weather did not last forever. If Toynbee could still call him “the true teacher of our age” in 1881, that title was already becoming difficult by the later 1880s, when evolutionary and later idealist frameworks began to replace the older Mazzinian moral-national idiom. He did not disappear; he became, as such figures do, quotable, absorbable, and finally survivable. And even shorter: Green was indeed Oxford, and there is now good reason to think that Oxford idealism engaged Mazzini much more philosophically than Marriott’s historical lectures would suggest. The strongest line is that Green’s practical political thought drew directly on Mazzini, even while differing from him over the republic and the state; but by the late 1880s Mazzini was already ceasing to be the living philosophical present and becoming a respected predecessor. [en.wikipedia.org], [hull-repos...ktribe.com], [tandfonline.com], [archive.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can draft a compact Speranza paragraph on Green and Mazzini at Oxford, or I can give you a small chronology from the 1850s to the 1920s showing the rise, crest, and waning of Mazzini in the Oxford-idealist world.Mazzini, And now Speranza wants to know all about that Mortality Club and whether it still exists or yielded to mortality and whether Grice did or should (as he should) have heard of it -- and even desire to become a member of it? Like Headquarters. THis Bradley a connection with F. H. Bradley -- Toynbee, Oxford man? etc Yes — and the first correction is that the thing is not the Mortality Club simpliciter, but the Old Mortality Club, an Oxford literary and debating society rather than a metaphysical death-cult. The archival record is unusually clear on the basic point: the Old Mortality Club at Oxford ran from 1856 to 1938, and its papers survive in the Bodleian Libraries and are also listed in the National Archives. So it did not quite yield to mortality at once; it survived for over eighty years, which is rather more than many better-named institutions manage. [archives.b...n.ox.ac.uk], [discovery....ves.gov.uk] What it was, in origin, is also nicely documented. John Nichol recorded in 1857 that the society met weekly to read extracts from standard authors or original essays, followed by “an hour or two of conversation and criticism” on questions of art or social science. That is already enough to make Speranza fond of it: an essay club with discussion afterwards, and with just enough formality to sound improving. [jstor.org] On whether it still exists, the safest answer is no, not as a living Oxford society in the ordinary present sense. The archives describe it in the past tense and give the club’s life as 1856–1938. So if one wants the driest possible formula: it lasted long enough to become respectable and then died with the decency of leaving minutes. [archives.b...n.ox.ac.uk], [discovery....ves.gov.uk] Now to the people. Yes, T. H. Green was very much Oxford — Balliol to the bone — and he was associated with the Old Mortality Club. Balliol’s own archive says so explicitly. He is therefore not merely an ideological cousin of the club, but one of its recognisable Oxford men. [archives.b...l.ox.ac.uk] The Bradley point needs division. F. H. Bradley was the philosopher, yes, and the brother of A. C. Bradley. But the Bradley who stands in Green’s immediate Oxford orbit in the Balliol archival material is A. C. Bradley, described there as Green’s former pupil and later editor of Prolegomena to Ethics. I do not have evidence from this search that F. H. Bradley himself belonged to the Old Mortality Club. So one should not fuse Bradley into one illustrious blur. F. H. Bradley is the philosophical titan; A. C. Bradley is the Oxford literary brother and Green connection. [archives.b...l.ox.ac.uk], [encycloped...search.org], [jrank.org] As for Toynbee, yes, Arnold Toynbee of the nineteenth century was an Oxford man — Pembroke first, then Balliol, later a teacher there — but I do not see him named in the Old Mortality Club material returned here. He belongs to the larger Balliol and Oxford reform-intellectual world around Green, rather than being securely pinned by this evidence to the club itself. And if you mean the later Arnold J. Toynbee, the universal historian, he too was Balliol-educated, but he is a different generation entirely. [en.wikipedia.org], [explore.to...all.org.uk], [en.wikipedia.org] So the membership picture, in broad terms, is this. The Old Mortality Club was an elite Oxford undergraduate essay-and-discussion society whose members included A. V. Dicey, A. C. Swinburne, James Bryce, T. H. Green, Edward Caird, Walter Pater, and J. A. Symonds. That is already enough to make it look like a Victorian seedbed rather than a mere undergraduate diversion. [jstor.org], [mellenpress.com] Would Grice have heard of it? He should have, in the sense that a learned and antiquarian Oxford philosopher with classical and historical tastes could easily have known of it, especially through the ambient memory of Victorian Oxford, Balliol idealism, and the cult of earlier clubs and societies. But I do not have evidence here that he in fact mentioned it. So the careful answer is: he could very well have known of it; I cannot yet show that he did. [archives.b...n.ox.ac.uk], [archives.b...l.ox.ac.uk] Would he have wanted to join it? That is the more amusing question. In one respect, yes. Weekly essays followed by conversation and criticism is exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to the Grice who loved para-professional philosophy, selected company, and discussion without administrative vulgarity. It sounds like a respectable ancestor to the sort of chosen gatherings Speranza likes to reconstruct. On the other hand, it was literary, Victorian, and slightly improving in a way that might have made him tease it. Grice would probably have wanted to belong and to mock the title at the same time, which is often Oxford’s sincerest form of allegiance. If you want the shortest dry answer: The Old Mortality Club was an Oxford literary and essay society, founded in the 1850s, not a metaphysical society of death-enthusiasts. It survived until 1938 and has left archives in the Bodleian. T. H. Green was associated with it; the Bradley immediately tied to Green in the Oxford material is A. C. Bradley, not securely F. H. Bradley as club member. Arnold Toynbee was certainly Oxford, but not shown here as an Old Mortality man. Grice may well have known of the club, and would probably have approved of its combination of essay, conversation, and exclusiveness, while disapproving of its title only enough to want membership. [archives.b...n.ox.ac.uk], [archives.b...l.ox.ac.uk], [en.wikipedia.org], [encycloped...search.org] And one final correction with Speranzian dryness: “like Headquarters” is rather good, because the Old Mortality Club does indeed sound like one of those Oxford bodies whose name makes undergraduate seriousness sound half military, half sepulchral, and wholly self-improving. [jstor.org] If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a compact Speranza paragraph on the Old Mortality Club as a Victorian ancestor to Gricean conversazione, or I can search more narrowly for whether F. H. Bradley himself, rather than A. C. Bradley, had any direct link to it. Re: youR: "There is also a very useful Oxford social vehicle: the Old Mortality Society. Both Colin Tyler and the related piece Touching the Springs of Action tie Mazzini’s Oxford presence or influence to that club and to an atmosphere “deeply impregnated by Mazzinian suggestions.” The second piece goes further and explicitly names T. H. Green, A. C. Bradley, E. Caird, A. V. Dicey, and Arnold Toynbee as republicans or idealists affected by Mazzini. That gives you not only Green, but the wider Oxford-idealist and Oxford-adjacent network." please provide, without preamble or ps, a 100-move conversation between G. and S., both undergraduates at Corpus -- G. a scholar, S., a commoner -- no preamble or ps, -- the dialogue startng with G. seeing that he is preparing to leave -- Where to? The Old Mortality Club weekly -- it's undergraduate only -- which keeps the beaks and the dons out -- and it's impregnated with Mazzini -- and there are a few pro-Italian republicans who attend -- and they discuss what's so wrong with the re-publica that G. identifies with Cromwell's commonwealth -- it's more like Hegel's unitary state, it's a Mazzini impregnation -- I see -- and italy regno d'italia, repubblica italiana -- and they discuss dates, and as editorial notes they can foresee the future where the kingdom regno is no more -- and what Mazzini wants Mazzini gets -- and Green loved him, as Toynbee did -- and the Old Mortality is alive and kicking, which is good, because the minute G. and S. get their B. A. Lit. Hum. after hard tutorials etc at Corpus they will no longer be welcomed at the "Old Mortality", as Shropshrie calls it, to avoid having to decide betwen the institutional 'Society' or the lcub. "And what's old about mortality?" And Shropshire explains the origin of the name's club -- and where do they meat -- headquarters -- yes, but's it's secret, and by invitation only. I COULD take, you, G., but you must recite your allegiance to the Republic in the true mazzini voice -- and in italian etc etc dry humour -- Oxonian, no preamble or ps. with focus on Mazzini, what we wanted, by Marriot has him first in his trio of lectures with Cavour (second) and the soldier) last -- and they may even mention -- S.: "It was all the craze back then, with Hope Street, remember, named after Lord Hope, re-christened Speranza, just because Garibaldi graced the scene. etc etc and back to Mazzini and how lovingly anachronistic of the old mortality to keep the immortality of Mazzini, etc etc dthanks G.: You’re off somewhere, I see—coat on, notes in hand. S.: Spied at once—yes, I’m bound out. G.: Where to? S.: The Old Mortality Club—weekly sitting. G.: Old Mortality? Undergraduate only, I take it. S.: Rigidly so—keeps the beaks and the dons at bay. G.: A rare contrivance. And what airs does it breathe? S.: Deeply impregnated with Mazzini. G.: Ah—then it must be earnest to the point of contagion. S.: Contagion gladly caught—there are a few pro‑Italian republicans among us. G.: And you discourse on the re‑publica, I suppose. S.: On what’s so wrong with it—and what’s been wronged. G.: I confess I incline to Cromwell’s commonwealth. S.: You would—though ours is nearer Hegel’s unitary state. G.: A philosophical republic, then? S.: Or a Mazzini impregnation, if you like it plainer. G.: I see—ethic before mechanism. S.: Precisely—duty before franchise. G.: And Italy stands as your specimen? S.: Italy—Regno d’Italia once, Repubblica Italiana in hope. G.: You speak as though dates were already settled. S.: We rehearse them as editorial notes—anticipations. G.: Foreseeing a future where the kingdom is no more? S.: Just so—where the regno yields to the republic. G.: You credit Mazzini with such inevitabilities. S.: What Mazzini wants, Mazzini gets—eventually. G.: A bold canonization. S.: Green loved him—so did Toynbee. G.: Then Oxford has been quietly enlisted. S.: Quietly, but thoroughly—the air is altered. G.: And the Club—alive and kicking, you say? S.: Vigorously—though only while we remain undergraduates. G.: After the B.A. Lit. Hum., we are cast out? S.: Quite—no graduates admitted. G.: A paradox: immortality confined to youth. S.: Hence Shropshire’s name—“Old Mortality.” G.: To avoid deciding between Society and club? S.: Exactly—he skirts the institutional word. G.: Tell me—what’s old about mortality? S.: The jest is borrowed—from Scott’s tale, the man who keeps memory alive. G.: So you preserve the dead by disputation? S.: We renew them—Mazzini among the foremost. G.: Lovingly anachronistic. S.: Deliberately so—the immortality of Mazzini requires tending. G.: And where do you meet—your headquarters? S.: That, my dear G., is not published. G.: Secret, then? S.: By invitation only. G.: You could take me. S.: I could—but you must earn it. G.: You say they keep minutes?  S.: Reluctantly, and only so that posterity may misinterpret us.  G.: Posterity being chiefly dons who were excluded.  S.: Precisely; the minutes are our revenge.  G.: And the topic tonight is Mazzini again?  S.: Always Mazzini; the club is, as you say, impregnated.  G.: A most persistent impregnation.  S.: It has lasted longer than the Regno d’Italia.  G.: Which, editorially, we are permitted to regard as temporary.  S.: Entirely; the Republic waits in the wings like a conscientious understudy.  G.: 1861 for the kingdom.  S.: Yes, and some future date for the republic, which we, with prophetic modesty, anticipate.  G.: And Mazzini, though defeated, is treated as victorious.  S.: In Oxford, moral victories are the only kind worth having.  G.: Green would agree.  S.: Green adored him, or at least appropriated him.  G.: And Toynbee?  S.: Toynbee admired the moral fervour, though he preferred statistics to slogans.  G.: A pity; slogans are more portable.  S.: And more inflammable.  G.: So what is said against the republic tonight?  S.: That it is either Cromwellian chaos or Hegelian unity.  G.: I prefer the Commonwealth.  S.: You would; it allows you to be both austere and superior.  G.: Whereas Hegel’s state is too tidy.  S.: Too German, perhaps.  G.: And Mazzini?  S.: Mazzini is neither tidy nor austere; he is exhortatory.  G.: A republic of exhortations.  S.: Precisely; a nation built on imperatives.  G.: “Doveri dell’uomo,” and so on.  S.: You will have to recite that, by the way.  G.: In Italian?  S.: Naturally; the club insists on a certain foreignness.  G.: To keep Corpus at bay.  S.: To keep England at bay.  G.: And what of Cavour?  S.: Second in Marriott, and second in our esteem.  G.: The man of compromise.  S.: Which is why we distrust him.  G.: And Garibaldi?  S.: Third, and adored only in anecdote.  G.: Such as Speranza Street.  S.: Exactly; Hope Street rebaptised because a hero passed through.  G.: Oxford prefers names that never quite happened.  S.: And causes that never quite succeeded.  G.: Hence Mazzini.  S.: Hence the Old Mortality.  G.: And why “Old”?  S.: Because it remembers the dead as if they were merely absent.  G.: And “Mortality”?  S.: From Scott; a man who inscribed the names of the forgotten.  G.: So you inscribe Mazzini.  S.: Weekly.  G.: Where do you meet?  S.: Headquarters.  G.: Which is where?  S.: Confidential.  G.: You are intolerable.  S.: It is a condition of membership.  G.: And invitation?  S.: By whisper, never by letter.  G.: Then how am I to be smuggled in?  S.: By allegiance.  G.: To the Republic.  S.: In the true Mazzinian voice.  G.: I foresee embarrassment.  S.: You should; it is part of the initiation.  G.: And after our B.A.?  S.: We are expelled into maturity.  G.: No graduates allowed?  S.: None; mortality is reserved for the young.  G.: A curious inversion.  S.: Oxford specialises in those.  G.: And the dons?  S.: The beaks remain outside, peering in.  G.: Like Tacitus at a barbarian rite.  S.: Or like Cavour at a republican meeting.  G.: Then tonight I must be Italian.  S.: Briefly and intensely.  G.: “Italia una, libera, repubblicana.”  S.: Better; you may yet pass.  G.: And if I fail?  S.: You return to Corpus and Hegel.  G.: A fate worse than monarchy.  S.: Not quite; monarchy at least has uniforms.  G.: And the republic?  S.: Only convictions.  G.: Then let us go; I should like to acquire one.  S.: Borrow mine; it is serviceable.  G.: No, I prefer my own, even if provisional.  S.: That is the most Mazzinian thing you have said.  G.: Then I am ready.  S.: Almost; you must also believe it.  G.: For how long?  S.: Until the meeting ends.  G.: Oxford sincerity.  S.: The finest kind; limited and well-expressed.  G.: Lead on to Headquarters.  S.: Very well, but remember: what Mazzini wants—  G.: —Mazzini gets.  S.: Eventually.  G.: Which in Oxford means never, but always discussed.  S.: Precisely why the club endures.  G.: Immortal in its mortality.  S.: And old in its youth.  G.: A perfect paradox.  S.: An Oxford one. G.: You still have not told me why it is called Old Mortality. S.: Because the founder had a taste for epitaphs and for Scott. G.: Scott the novelist? S.: Precisely; Old Mortality goes about copying inscriptions from the dead. G.: Then the club is antiquarian rather than republican. S.: Not at all; it collects the dead in order to instruct the living. G.: A Mazzinian ambition, if you like—resurrecting nations from inscriptions. S.: You see the connection; Italy is a long epitaph waiting to be read aloud. G.: And then rewritten as a republic. S.: Or as a kingdom first, which is where the trouble begins. G.: Regno d’Italia is a compromise, not a conclusion. S.: Mazzini would say it is a betrayal. G.: He would say many things in capitals. S.: And in exclamation marks; the man writes as if addressing eternity. G.: Which is why the Old Mortality receives him so warmly. S.: Exactly; he sounds as if he had already died for the cause. G.: And therefore cannot be contradicted. S.: Green admired that tone, though he softened it for Oxford digestion. G.: Green prefers a state that reasons rather than proclaims. S.: Whereas Mazzini proclaims in order to make reasoning possible. G.: That is very nearly Hegel. S.: It is Hegel translated into Italian fervour. G.: And then back into English sermons. S.: Toynbee heard those sermons and decided to reform the world. G.: A dangerous undergraduate habit. S.: Encouraged by clubs that exclude dons. G.: Which is their chief merit. S.: And their chief limitation. G.: Tell me, where do they meet? S.: I told you—headquarters. G.: Which is nowhere in particular. S.: And therefore everywhere in Oxford. G.: A metaphysical location. S.: No, a practical one; usually someone’s rooms, but never the same twice. G.: So the republic is itinerant. S.: As Mazzini was. G.: Exile as method. S.: And secrecy as etiquette. G.: Then your invitation is conditional. S.: Entirely; you must declare yourself. G.: In Italian? S.: With sufficient accent to alarm the English. G.: I shall say, Viva la Repubblica, and hope for the best. S.: Not enough; you must mean it. G.: Meaning is always inferred. S.: Not in the Old Mortality; there they require explicit commitment. G.: Then it is less Gricean than I had hoped. S.: On the contrary; the implicature is that one must be sincere. G.: A most un-Oxonian requirement. S.: Which is why it is confined to undergraduates.Mazzini, Giuseppe (1837). Filosofia della musica. Paris: Baudry.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Mazzoni: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la vita attiva dei romani – la scuola di Cesena  Jacopo Mazzoni (Cesena, Emilia-Romagna): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la vita attiva dei romani. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how an audience can rationally get from what is said to what is meant by presuming cooperative purpose and inferring intentions, with implicature arising as a disciplined, accountable surplus over literal content; the Caio Mecenate Melisso vignette makes that same machinery visible in a sharply social register, where clothing, titles, and gifts do part of the communicative work and where the speaker can deliberately “murmur” so the audience completes the thought for him. Historically, the figure usually called C. Maecenas Melissus is an Augustan-era freedman and man of letters often associated in later sources with small literary forms (including collections of jokes) and with courtly culture; that background fits your “Dicta Trabeata” conceit, because the trabea (as a status-sign) functions like a pragmatic amplifier: it frames what is taken to be relevant, authoritative, or safely deniable before a word is parsed. Where Grice models implicature as something that can be calculated from conversational norms plus an assumed rational intention to be understood, Melissus highlights a setting where part of the intention-recognition is engineered by non-verbal convention (dress, patronage, genre, court etiquette), so that implicature becomes a technique for giving meaning while avoiding full commitment—letting the reader “think himself wise,” distributing responsibility for the intended message to the audience, and gaining praise for what was never explicitly stated. In short, Grice supplies the general inferential account of how implicature works; Melissus illustrates how, in an elite culture of rank and performance, implicature can be a cultivated art of insinuation and deniability in which social signals pre-load the context and make the audience do the interpretive labour. Grice: “It is sad that my favourite philosopher, Ariskant, succumbes to the intellect – or as M. would call it ‘la vita speculative.’ The Romans, never! We do have an adage at Oxford: a man of words, and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.” This dwells on the real antonym of ‘vita speculativa’. Aristotle would have ‘theoretical,’ since ‘theorein’ is like to ‘see’. But then you would think that opposite is the ‘vita prattica.’ M. prefers ‘vita attiva’ – which is a bit of a redundancy – but anything goes when it comes to over-qualify the Romans!” Grice: “Mazzoni is important on various fronts: he loves Dante, or Alighieri as Strawson calls him – his library in organised alphabetically; the other front I forget!” Compì i suoi studi di lettere a Bologna e quelli di filosofia a Padova. Membro dell'Accademia della Crusca, fu tra i preferiti del papa Gregorio XIII che lo avrebbe voluto prelato; M. preferì proseguire nella carriera universitaria. Dapprima fu all'Macerata, ed in seguito a Pisa, dove ebbe la cattedra di filosofia. Nella città della torre pendente, conobbe un giovane insegnante di matematica, Galilei, con il quale instaurò ottimi rapporti. Invitato ad insegnare all'Università La Sapienza di Roma. Benché avesse da poco preso questa cattedra, seguì il cardinale Pietro Aldobrandini nei suoi incarichi a Ferrara ed in seguito a Venezia. Ammalatosi sulla strada del ritorno, si recò nella sua Cesena, dove si spense. Opere: “Difesa della Commedia di ALIGHIERI Grazie alla sua preparazione letteraria, giunse alla notorietà per il suo tomo Difesa della Commedia di Dante, pubblicato a Bologna inizialmente, sotto pseudonym e poi l'anno successivo sotto il suo vero nome, in cui criticò aspramente Salviati. Nel testo egli risponde ad alcune contestazioni fatte alle sue elucubrazioni sul sommo poeta Alighieri. implicature, repubblica romana, the Latins on ‘vita activa’, I romani e la vita attiva. Jacopo Mazzoni.  Grice: Professore Mazzoni, mi incuriosisce la sua preferenza per la “vita attiva” dei Romani rispetto alla “vita speculativa” dei filosofi. Crede davvero che la pratica valga più della teoria? Da noi, a Oxford, si dice: “Uomo di parole e non di fatti è come un giardino pieno di erbacce!” Mazzoni: Caro Grice, la “vita attiva” è il cuore pulsante della civiltà romana! Senza azione, anche le idee più splendide rischiano di restare sterili. È vero che la teoria illumina, ma la pratica trasforma: come diciamo a Cesena, “chi fa, trova la strada; chi pensa troppo, rischia di perdersi nei meandri.” Grice: Mi colpisce che lei abbia difeso Dante con tanto vigore, pur essendo un amante della vita attiva. Forse la letteratura, per lei, è anch’essa forma d’azione? Mazzoni: Esattamente, Grice. Difendere Dante è stato un atto concreto, una battaglia intellettuale. La parola, se sostenuta da passione e impegno, diventa azione potente. Come si dice dalle mie parti: “La penna muove il mondo, ma la volontà lo trasforma.” Mazzoni, Jacopo (1583). Della difesa della commedia d’Alighieri. Florence: Giunti.