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

 

 

Verbali: 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!

 

Verbali: Machiavelli

 

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!

 

Verbali: Magalotti

 

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!

 

Verbali: Maggi

 

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.

 

Verbali: Magni

 

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!

 

Verbali: Mainardini

 

Grice: Mainardini, 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!

 

Verbali: Majello

 

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.

 

Verbali: Malipiero

 

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.

 

Verbali: Mancini

 

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 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!

 

 

Verbali: Manetti

 

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!

 

Verbali: Mangione

 

Grice has the 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!

 

I verbali: Manfredi

 

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!

 

I verbali: Manicone

 

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!

 

I verbali: Manilio

 

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.

 

I verbali: Manlio

 

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.

 

I verbali: Manlio

 

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.

 

I verbali: Mannelli

 

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!

 

I verbali: Manzoni

 

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!

 

I verbali: Marafioti

 

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".

 

I verbali: Marano

 

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!

 

I verbali: Marchesini

 

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!

 

I verbali: Marchetti

 

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!

 

I verbali: Marchi

 

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.

 

I verbali: Marchi

 

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.

 

I verbali: Marzi

 

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.

 

I verbali: Marziano

 

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 verbali: Marco

 

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!

 

I verbali: Mariano

 

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!

 

I verbali: Marin

 

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!

 

I verbali: Marliani

 

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.

 

I verbali: Marotta

 

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.

 

I verbali: 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.

 

I verbali: Marta

 

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!

 

I verbali: Martellotta

 

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.

 

I verbali: Martinetti

 

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.”

 

I verbali: Martini

 

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.

 

I verbali: 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.

 

I verbali: Marzolo

 

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.

 

I verbali: Masci

 

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!

 

 

I verbali: 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!

 

I verbali: Masila

 

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.

 

I verbali: Masnovo

 

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!

 

I verbali: Massari

 

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!

 

I verbali: Massimiano

 

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.

 

I verbali: Massimo

 

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.

 

I verbali: Mastri

 

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!

 

 

I verbali: Mastrofini

 

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.

 

I verbali: Masullo.

 

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!

 

I verbali: 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!”

 

 

I verbali: Mathieu

 

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.

 

I verbali: Matraja

 

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.

 

I verbali: Maturi

 

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: 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.

 

I verbali: Maturi

 

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.

 

I verbali: Mazio

 

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.

 

I verbali: Mazzei

 

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!

 

I verbali: Mazzini

 

  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.

 

 

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.

 

I verbali: Mazzoni

 

Grice: 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.”