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

 

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

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Machiavelli – Ossia: Grice e Machiavelli: l’implicatura conversazionale del principe di LIVIO at Oxford.  Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (Firenze, Toscana): l’implicatura conversazionale del principe di LIVIO at Oxford. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an accountable inference from what is said to what is meant, guided by shared rational expectations (cooperation, relevance, adequate informativeness) and anchored in the speaker’s intention that the hearer recognize those intentions; the point is to explain how communication can be indirect yet still disciplined by reasons. Machiavelli is a useful foil because his central concern is not conversational inference but strategic action under conditions of conflict, partial trust, and institutional fragility: in The Prince and the Discourses (with Livy as a standing source of exempla), what agents “mean” or “signal” is often designed to manage appearances, secure obedience, or pre-empt rivals, so indirectness becomes a tool of prudence and power rather than a benign by-product of cooperative rational exchange. Compared this way, Grice’s conversational “quasi-contract” is a normative background that makes implicature calculable and criticizable, whereas Machiavelli’s political “contract” (and its breaches) is precisely what cannot be assumed, making interpretation itself a contested field where deception, dissimulation, and strategic ambiguity are sometimes rational. The overlap is that both are, in their own domains, theorists of practical reason: Grice models the rational constraints that make mutual understanding possible; Machiavelli models the rational constraints that make stable rule possible when mutual understanding is unreliable. Even the onomastic play in your passage (Machiavelli as “crafty/shrewd,” the Oxford worry about spelling and pronunciation, and Machiavelli’s own attention to linguistic nuance) can be read Griceanly: it dramatizes how small choices in wording and form carry socially legible implications—but where Grice treats those implications as answerable to cooperative norms, Machiavelli treats them as instruments within a competitive arena where what is left unsaid may matter most because others will weaponize it. Grice: “Humpty Dumpty is wrong. If someone comes to you and she is named’Alice’ is very rare that you would be curious as to what ‘Alice’ means – it’s different with ‘M..’ The surname M. is of Italian origin, primarily associated with the region of Toscana. While its precise etymology is debated, the leading theory suggests it derives from the Old Italian ‘machiave,’ which means ‘crafty’ or ‘shrewd’. Some sources suggest the nam’s meaning is related to ‘sneaky’ or ‘deceitful.’ This association with cunning and strategic thinking is strongly reinforced by the legacy of M., the influential Renaissance political philosopher and diplomat whose work, The Prince, explored pragmatic and sometimes ruthless approaches to governance. Other potential derivations include a hypothesis linking the surname to the medieval name ‘Malchiodo,’ a variant of the Hebrew name ‘Melki’or, meanin ‘my king) (God) is light’. In conclusion, the most widely accepted etymology links the surname ‘M.’ to the Italian term meaning ‘crafty’ or ‘shrewd,’ a meaning further empahsised by its association with the renowned philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. Filosofo fiorentino. Filosofo italiano. Firenze, Toscana. Grice: “While Strawson prefers ‘The Prince,’ my favourite M. is the dialogo, discorso, ovvero dialogo intorno della lingua. The full title makes it sound slightly analytic – ‘whether it should be called ‘florentine, Italian, or tooscana’ I mean, a stipulation! Like me, we can call Machiavelli a philosopher of language – the trend being very Florentine between M. and Varchi. Possibly Italy’s greateset philosopher. Grice: “L. J. Cohen told me that he once asked for the MS of The Prince at his college – and they told him: ‘We cannot find it!’ Livio, storia romana – Grice on the history of England – Livio, storia romana –la storia romana come fonte d’essempi nella filosofia romana --il principe, Macchiavelli fascista – l’ossessione dal duce per M., la dottrina fascista dello stato machiavellico, Empiegatura. Grice: Caro Machiavelli, mi consenta una curiosità: secondo lei, dovrei raddoppiare la “c” nel suo cognome e pronunciarlo “Macchiavelli”? Le confesso che, a Oxford, la tentazione filologica è forte! Non sarebbe solo una questione di ortografia, ma proprio di musicalità della lingua italiana, che rispetto moltissimo. Machiavelli: Carissimo Grice, la sua osservazione è assai acuta! In effetti, anche io trovo che “Macchiavelli” abbia un suono più pieno e deciso. Non solo la scrittura, ma la pronuncia geminata rende meglio la fermezza del mio pensiero e la concretezza fiorentina. Quasi quasi dovremmo adottarla ufficialmente! Grice: Che bello sentirglielo dire! D'altronde, anche nei suoi dialoghi lei attribuiva molta importanza alla lingua, al modo in cui le parole vengono usate, quasi come se la filosofia stessa fosse questione di una lettera in più o in meno. Machiavelli: Esatto, Grice. A Firenze, ogni sfumatura conta, anche nella pronuncia. E poi, come lei insegna, ciò che si implica conversando può modificare il senso stesso delle parole. Dunque, avanti con “Macchiavelli”, se così il discorso risulta più incisivo e… più italiano! So Grice and Speranza would like to research a little on when Machiavelli's Il Principe was first discussed at Oxford -- would it have been discussed at some salon in London, and then Oxford? Grice and Speranza are interested in milieus where the thing would be discussed in the original or vernacular Italian, with which people of the Grand Tour would be slightly familiar -- rather than to wait for "The Prince" to be traslated and published in London. So the scheem would be some sort of circle of political philosophers, and how did they relate the views to their own history of England, even if retrospectively? Was there an attempt to, say, identify Cromwell, with the Prince or Charles II with the Prince, and how does the political philsoophy of Hobbes (who died in exile relate). And while the grand tour was Firenze-obligatory but arts-centre, it would be only the philosophical types that would care -- Input? Thanks -- What you are sensing is exactly right: the history of Machiavelli in England does not begin with the printed English “Prince.” It begins as a much more elusive, almost clandestine phenomenon: manuscript circulation, learned Italian, and conversational uptake in small circles. Oxford comes in relatively late as an institutional site; the earlier life is courtly, cosmopolitan, and philological. Let me reconstruct it in layers. First, the chronology of the text itself. Machiavelli writes Il Principe around 1513 and it circulates in manuscript well before print.  It is only printed in Italian in 1532.  It is not printed in English until 1640. [en.wikipedia.org] [remnanttrust.org] That gap is crucial. For more than a century, if an Englishman knew The Prince, he did not know it as “The Prince.” He knew it in Italian, Latin, or mediated through other texts. Second, the early English reception before translation. There is very strong evidence that Machiavelli was known in England long before the English translation, and in ways very close to what you are imagining: The work circulated in manuscript, sometimes anonymously, even clandestinely.  It was read in Italian, French, or Latin by educated readers.  It became a “cult text” among Oxford students in the late sixteenth century. [jstor.org] That last point is especially striking for your question. Oxford is not the origin, but it does become a node where the text is read in manuscript, in learned circles, before any official or public English version exists. That is precisely your “Italian-reading philosophical coterie.” Third, the intellectual milieu: court, travel, and language. The real carrier of Machiavelli into England is not the university as such, but the Renaissance traffic of people and languages: Italian culture enters England across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, first through universities (Oxford included), then through courtly culture and travel.  Educated elites commonly studied and read texts in non-native languages such as Latin, French, and Italian. [archive.org] [academic.oup.com] So your Grand Tour intuition is correct, but slightly anachronistic if imagined too early. Before the formalized Grand Tour of the seventeenth century, there is already a “proto-tour”: diplomats, scholars, courtiers, and spies moving between Italy and England. Those are precisely the people who would read Machiavelli in Italian and discuss him in small, semi-private settings. These settings are not always salons in the later sense, but rather: court circles under the Tudors and early Stuarts humanist networks (letters, manuscript exchange) university subcultures (especially among advanced students) Fourth, the peculiarity of Machiavelli’s early reputation in England. Here your Gricean contrast becomes almost literal. English readers do not initially encounter Machiavelli as a philosopher, but as a “figure,” a type. In the later sixteenth century his name circulates widely, but often in distorted form.  Many English readers get their first impression of him through an anti-Machiavellian French work (Gentillet), not through the original. [jstor.org] So the earliest English “discussion” is not neutral philosophical reading. It is already interpretively charged, even polemical. Machiavelli becomes a name that carries implicatures: cunning, atheism, statecraft without morality. In your terms, the name “Machiavelli” is already doing conversational work before the text itself is widely read. Fifth, Oxford versus London. There is no clean sequence “London salon first, then Oxford.” The reality is more diffuse: Court and diplomatic circles are probably the earliest sites of exposure Cambridge is actually the first documented academic entry point, via Gabriel Harvey in the 1570s  Oxford becomes a site of manuscript reading and student interest slightly later [jstor.org] So one should imagine overlapping networks rather than a pipeline. Sixth, the political uptake: Cromwell, Hobbes, and English self-interpretation. Your instinct about retrospective identification is exactly what happens. During the seventeenth century, Machiavelli becomes a framework for thinking about English events: Writers use Machiavelli to justify civil war, regicide, and republican government.  Others reinterpret him positively as a republican thinker rather than merely cynical. [academia.edu] As for Cromwell: Some contemporaries explicitly compare him to “Machiavelli’s Prince.”  But there is no firm evidence that Cromwell himself read The Prince. [olivercromwell.org] So the comparison is largely interpretive rather than genetic. Cromwell is made Machiavellian by his observers, not necessarily by his reading. Hobbes is a more interesting case but also indirect. Machiavelli’s thought contributes to a broader English discussion of power, republicanism, and statecraft in which Hobbes participates, but the sources do not support a simple line “Hobbes read Machiavelli and derived his theory.” Instead, both are part of a larger shift toward treating politics as an autonomous domain. [assets.cambridge.org] Seventh, your final intuition about “philosophical types.” This is perhaps the most accurate of all your points. The people who read Machiavelli in Italian were not the average educated elite, but a narrower group: humanists with linguistic training diplomats and courtiers with Italian experience advanced university readers politically interested intellectuals For them, Il Principe is not yet a canonical “book,” but a problem, even a provocation: how to think about English monarchy, rebellion, and order without the assurances of traditional morality. Final synthesis. If one wanted a Gricean formulation, it would be this. The literal text of Machiavelli arrives in England relatively late and cautiously. But “Machiavelli” as an implicature-bearing name circulates early, widely, and often inaccurately. Elite readers reconstruct his meaning from partial cues: manuscripts, translations, hostile summaries, and political events. Oxford becomes one site where that reconstruction is refined at a higher level of literacy and linguistic competence. So the real answer to your question is that Machiavelli was discussed in England, including Oxford, long before he was officially translated. But he was discussed as much through inference, reputation, and polemic as through direct reading of the Italian text. If you want, I can sketch a small map of specific figures in England who actually knew Italian and could have read Machiavelli directly. And what was the immediate effect of the Protectorate upon Oxford -- if not Cambridge? Where chairs removed, I mean holders of the chairs removed, students expelled, others accepted directly, and for how long did it last -- or was it even closed during the proceedings of the Civil War, as I would imagine would be the moral thing to do? I wonder if you can give me the earliest OED citation for something like "Machiavelian" -- also your oxonian jstor reference above -- which you say postdated Cambridge, can you provide author title and abstract, thanks? All Grice and Speranza know is that when political philosophy became prey of linguistic analysis Quinton, in ins linguistic analysis "Political philosophy" makes a point about Machiavelli, even though the collection was meant to reprint contemporary papers on the topic -- thanks, input? thanks. Let me take your questions in order, because they hang together quite tightly: Oxford under the Protectorate, the linguistic life of “Machiavellian,” and the specific Cambridge/Oxford reception thread.  1. Oxford under the Civil War and Protectorate The short answer is: Oxford was not closed, but it was profoundly disrupted, politically purged, and partially refounded. (a) War phase: disruption, not closure Oxford was effectively the Royalist capital during the war, and the university sided broadly with the king. [en.wikipedia.org], [dailyinfo.co.uk]  The city was besieged (1644–46). [en.wikipedia.org] It housed royal institutions (parliament, court, etc.). [dailyinfo.co.uk]  Teaching did not formally “cease” across the board, but the entire environment was militarized and unstable. The relevant sources do not state a complete closure; rather, they emphasize disruption and political alignment. (b) 1646 surrender → 1647–52 purge (the decisive phase) After the surrender in 1646, Parliament intervened directly:  New appointments were blocked immediately. [en.wikipedia.org] A formal “visitation” began in 1647. [en.wikipedia.org] The real purge intensified in 1648. [en.wikipedia.org]  What did that mean in practice?  Heads of houses and fellows were required to submit. [en.wikipedia.org] Many refused and were deprived or expelled. [en.wikipedia.org] Even the Vice-Chancellor (Samuel Fell) was imprisoned and removed. [en.wikipedia.org]  Another Oxford volume summarizes the effect:  “Expulsions… more extensive” after 1648. [academic.oup.com] Continued removals followed into the early Commonwealth. [academic.oup.com]  So yes: chairs were effectively vacated by ejection of their holders, and replaced by Parliamentarian or Puritan appointees. (c) Duration The visitation lasted about five years:  It runs from 1647 to roughly 1652. [academic.oup.com]  And its effects last until the Restoration (1660), when many earlier expulsions were reversed. (d) Cambridge comparison Cambridge had undergone a similar but earlier purge (1644–45), and apparently less violently. [en.wikipedia.org] So your instinct is right: Oxford was later and harsher, partly because of its staunch royalism. (e) Students The sources are thinner on students, but given:  blocked appointments imposed submission oaths purged fellows and tutors  it follows that admissions, teaching, and supervision were under political control. What we can safely say from the sources is institutional coercion and replacement, not wholesale closure or expulsion of all students.  2. Earliest OED citation for “Machiavellian” The OED gives a very early appearance:  First attested: 1566 [oed.com]  This is extremely significant for your historical question because:  It predates the English translation of The Prince (1640) by decades. [abebooks.com] It shows that “Machiavel” as a type or trope enters English discourse before the text is widely accessible.  Related forms:  Machiavellist: already in use by 1565 [oed.com] Machiavellianism: early 1600s [oed.com]  So the word circulates as a cultural and polemical signifier long before systematic reading.  3. The Cambridge (Harvey) reference: author, context, abstract The JSTOR article you were reacting to is: Title: Machiavelli and Tudor England Journal: Political Science Quarterly (standard scholarly reference; author not listed in the snippet, but the text is identifiable) Core claim (from the article itself)  Machiavelli was introduced into English intellectual life at Cambridge in 1573 through Gabriel Harvey. [jstor.org]  Abstract (reconstructed strictly from the text you saw) The article argues that:  Machiavelli’s influence in Tudor England is widely assumed but often poorly evidenced His name appears frequently in Elizabethan literature However, English readers did not initially know him accurately Instead, they encountered a distorted version via anti-Machiavellian works (especially Gentillet) As a result, “Machiavelli” entered English culture first as a negative stereotype rather than a philosophical author  Explicitly:  Early reception = mediated, polemical, and often hostile Direct knowledge of The Prince in English comes only later (1630s–40s) [jstor.org]  That matches perfectly your Gricean instinct: the name functions as a loaded implicature before the text is properly read.  4. Oxford vs Cambridge in this context Putting it together:  Cambridge: first documented academic entry (Harvey, 1573) Oxford: later “cult” manuscript reception among students (1580s–90s, from earlier citation) London/court: probably the earliest informal circulation (not institutionally documented)  So the intellectual geography is: Cambridge (early academic introduction) → courtly and literary diffusion → Oxford (refined, manuscript-based uptake)  5. A Gricean coda (since you invoked Quinton) The picture that emerges is almost a perfect case of what you and Grice are gesturing toward:  The sentence meaning (the actual text of Il Principe) is not yet widely available. The speaker meaning (or rather, “authorial intention”) is unavailable or mistransmitted. Yet a strong conversational implicature attaches to the name “Machiavel.”  So English discourse operates on: “Machiavel” → cunning, duplicity, statecraft without morality without needing direct textual access. That is, the culture stabilizes the implicature before it stabilizes the literal meaning. Quinton’s later analytic concern with “political philosophy” being reshaped by linguistic analysis is almost a late echo: in the sixteenth century, we already see politics being mediated by the semantics of names and reputations.  If you like, I can try to locate specific Oxford college cases (individual fellows expelled and replaced) to give you a more granular “who lost what chair” picture. Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei (1498). Scritto. Palazzo della Signoria, Firenze.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Mallio – Ossia: Grice e Mallio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della natura rerum. Note sul De metris. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Flavio Mallio Teodoro (Milano, Lombardia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della natura rerum – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover what a speaker means beyond what is strictly said by presuming cooperative, purposive talk and inferring implicatures when an utterance would otherwise look oddly chosen; the Teodoro material invites a late-antique analogue in which “reason” is not only a norm of talk but also a civic and intellectual habit formed in the milieu of Milan, the Academy, and high office. Flavius Mallius Theodorus (consul 399, praised in Claudian’s Panegyricus dictus Manlio Theodoro consuli; dedicatee of Augustine’s De beata vita) is remembered both as an administrator and as an author of De metris, with other works (including a De natura rerum) reported lost; that profile sharpens a comparison in which Gricean implicature arises from micro-level conversational expectations (relevance, informativeness, manner) while Theodoran “natura rerum” functions as a macro-topic that invites culturally stabilized inferences—e.g., that someone writing De natura rerum must be aligning with, contesting, or echoing Lucretius—even though, as your exchange notes, that may be mere audience projection. In Grice’s terms, such projections are precisely the sort of inferences hearers are licensed to make when a speaker mentions something that, in context, normally carries stereotyped associations; the key difference is that Grice treats the licensing mechanism as a general rational calculus of communicative intention, whereas Teodoro exemplifies how elite late-antique discourse (panegyric, philosophical circles, and Christian-Platonic networks) makes certain implicatures socially “ready-made,” so that a title like De natura rerum almost automatically triggers doxastic and literary alignments. Put simply: Grice provides the explicit theory of how reason plus cooperative expectations generate “more-than-said,” while Teodoro’s case illustrates how, in a highly codified learned culture, reason-governed interpretation often attaches not to the sentence alone but to names, genres, and titles—so that what is “implicated” can be as much a function of encyclopedic tradition (Lucretius, Academy, court rhetoric) as of the immediate conversational exchange. Accademia. Nato da famiglia ligure. Agostino, che gli dedica il “De beata vita”, dice che conosce bene l’Accademia, Dopo essere stato per qualche tempo avvocato, poi governatore in Africa e consolare della Macedonia e aver coperto vari uffici a corte, è praefectus praetorio delle Gallie. Si occupa dell’amministrazione dei propri beni e di studi filosofici e astronomici e scrive dialoghi su questi argomenti, STILONE lo nomina praefectus praetorio per l’Italia, l’Illirico e l'Africa. Mentre confere questo ufficio ha il consolato e in quell'occasione CLAUDIO CLAUDIANO gli dedica un panegirico. Di T. resta un saggio “De metris”, mentre si sono perduti altri, tra i quali un “De natura rerum.” Console, Consolato Prefetto del pretorio d'Italia. Di T. è noto abbastanza, grazie al panegyricus dedicatogli da CLAUDIO CLAUDIANO. Di famiglia notabile, sappiamo che è console. Il suo consolato avvenne sotto il principe ONORIO.  Prima di essere console è anche prefetto con sede a Mediolanum-Aquileia. Qui Agostino conosce T., uno degl’intellettuali accademici che incontrato appunto a Milano e, scrive “De vita beata”, dedicandolo proprio a T., che a quel tempo si è ritirato dalla corte. Di T. resta un trattato di metrica, “De metris”, uno dei migliori pervenuti, e per questo molto conosciuto e studiato. Inoltre, sempre secondo CLAUDIO CLAUDIANO, e un cultore di filosofia, astronomia e geometria e scrive diverse saggi su questi argomenti che, insieme al suo consolato, sono l'argomento del panegirico a T. dedicato da CLAUDIO CLAUDIANO.  Markus, The end of ancient Christianity, Cambridge; Keil, “Grammatici Latini”. Bonfils, C. Th. e il prefetto T., Bari, Edi puglia, consoli tardo imperiali romani Stilicone Prefettura del pretorio delle Gallie Mariano Comense Siburio Teatro romano di Milano Prefettura del pretorio d'Italia Nicomaco Flaviano de natura rerum.  De metris is a short late-antique handbook on Latin poetic metre: it explains the basic units (syllable quantity, feet) and then surveys metres by type (e.g., dactylic, iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, choriambic, etc.), in a didactic, schematic way.  G: 1939. You have brought me the only surviving thing Theodorus has the decency to leave us. S: The only surviving thing, sir, is a manual on how long to make your vowels. G: Which is already more useful than half the philosophy written this term. S: It is, however, less glamorous than De natura rerum. G: Yes. I too would prefer the lost work to the extant one. S: I wish his De natura rerum had survived. I would be dis-articulating much of what you’ve forced me to articulate and hyper-articulate here. G: You are always eager to be spared by a loss. S: Loss is sometimes a kindness, sir. G: Recite. S: From De syllaba. Est igitur syllaba litterarum inter se congregatarum apta conplexio. G: Stop. Now say, without translating word by word, what he is doing. S: He is giving a definition as if definitions were obligations. G: Good. And the phrase apta conplexio suggests not any heap but a fitting composition. The syllable is already normed. S: Vsu autem inueteratum est ut etiam nulla litterarum congregatione facta solas per se eas quae uocales nominantur syllabas esse dicamus. G: Here comes usage. He makes custom a co-author. S: So his “meaning” is partly system and partly social habit. G: Exactly. And that is already a Fregean hint. The sense of “syllable” is not just whatever a private speaker fancies; it is fixed by a practice that outlives speakers. S: You’re going to tell me that’s like my “utterer’s meaning” being constrained by “sentence-meaning.” G: I am going to tell you it’s like your utterer’s meaning being hostage to a public object, and then you pretending you own it. S: Sir, shall I continue. G: Yes, but in manageable pieces. S: Syllabis uero conficiuntur pedes, quae prima quasi metra appellare possumus. G: He builds up: syllable to foot, foot to metre. Like the way you insist that word-meaning nests inside sentence-meaning. S: Syllaba et pes mensura constant, quae graece metron dicitur. G: The key word is mensura. Measure. A public constraint. Something like your “principle” but without any pretence of being ethical. S: Sunt autem syllabae partim longae, partim breues, partim communes. G: Long, short, common. A little taxonomy. Now give me the bit you think is most “phonemic.” S: ‘A’ producta longam syllabam facit, ut ‘ales’, ‘a’ correpta breuem, ut ‘amor’: ‘e’ producta longam, ut ‘emi’, e correpta breuem, ut ‘emo’: ‘i’ producta longam, ut ‘Ilium’, ‘i’ correpta breuem, ut ‘iter’: ‘o’ producta longam, ut ‘omen’, o correpta breuem, ut ‘origo’: ‘u’ producta longam, ut ‘unus’, ‘u’ correpta breuem, ut ‘utinam’. G: Now. The obvious question you were itching to ask me. S: Does any of that change what is meant, sir, or only how the line scans. G: Both, sometimes. But Theodorus is not doing lexicography; he is giving the hearer-reader the conditions under which the sound counts as the right sound. The “meaning” for him is partly this: what counts as the same form in a tradition of reading. S: So the “sense” of a word in verse depends on syllable quantity because quantity fixes whether it can be that word in that metrical slot. G: Exactly. You can now say something moderately Fregean without blushing. The sense of a segment can include its role conditions in a system. A syllable’s identity is not a bare acoustic; it is a function in metrical space. S: But you would never say “syllable meaning.” G: I would say syllables do not have utterer’s meaning. But they do have a role in fixing which word can be uttered as that word rather than another. S: So the syllable is upstream of word-meaning, as it were. G: In verse, yes. It constrains the space of eligible words. S: Vt autem solae per se uocales productae longas, correptae breues syllabas faciunt, ita etiam cum his iunctae consonantes aut longas aut breues syllabas secundum legem atque usum pronuntiationis informant. G: Legem atque usum. Again law and usage. That pairing is your bridge to Grice. I treat conversational interpretation as norm-guided. He treats pronunciation as norm-guided. S: But he’s not doing implicature. G: No. He is doing what you might call the preconditions of intelligibility inside a learned practice. And your point is that even those preconditions can invite inferential charity. When a line seems “wrong,” you don’t assume stupidity; you assume a rule you haven’t applied yet. S: Like you assume cooperation. G: Like that. Now go on. The diphthongs. S: Iunguntur uero inter se binae uocales, quas Graeci diphthongos uocant, ‘ae’ ‘oe’ ‘au’ ‘eu’ ‘ei’ ‘yi’, quae syllabae semper longae sunt. G: Semper. An uncompromising word. S: So no cancellation, sir. G: Not in the conversational sense, no. This is not a pragmatic inference you can retract; it’s a feature of the metrical system as he presents it. S: Adsociantur etiam sic inter se uocales litterae, id est ‘i’ et ‘u’, ut prior littera uim teneat consonantis, ut ‘Iuno’ ‘uideo’, quarum syllabarum ea condicio est, ut interdum longae sint, interdum breues. Id enim ratio sermonis latini et pronuntiandi forma expetit. G: Here he becomes more Gricean than he intends. He says: sometimes long, sometimes short, because ratio sermonis and pronouncing form demand it. S: That sounds like “context.” G: Exactly. He invokes something like a contextual rationality of the language: the system and practice together determine what is acceptable. That is an ancestor of the idea that meaning depends on rule plus situation. S: Now the position rules. G: Recite. S: Positione autem longae syllabae fiunt, si correpta uocalis habeat in eadem syllaba ultimam litteram consonantem, eademque littera excipiatur a consonante consequenti, ut ‘arma’. G: This is the most “non-local” part. The length of the syllable depends on what follows. S: So the syllable’s identity depends on its environment. G: Exactly. And there is your Fregean point about context. A sign’s contribution is a function of embedding. The syllable here has no autonomous fate; it is measured by what comes after. S: Fit autem positione longa syllaba, cum ipsa per se ex uocali et duabus consonantibus constat, ut ‘est’. G: He is treating “est” as a metrical object, not as a verb. S: That feels criminal to me. G: It is a different jurisdiction. In metre, “est” is a timing event. In semantics, it is a copula. Both are true, but they answer different questions about what counts as well-formed. S: Quod si praecedentem breuem syllabam, quam una uocalis facit, sequentur duae consonantes, fit syllaba positione longa, ut ‘Acrisioneis’. G: Notice the consequence: the prior short becomes long by what follows. Again, meaning-by-environment. S: Item fit positione longa, si uocalis in duplicem desinit litteram, ut ‘nox erat’, aut si praemissa uocalis praecedat duplicem graecam, ut ‘Mezentius’. G: And now the system admits foreign material, Greek doubles, as a reason for length. That’s a sociolinguistic note hiding as a metrical rule. S: Interdum autem breuis syllaba, qua pars orationis terminatur, pro longa ponitur, ut ‘omnia uincit amor, et nos cedamus amori’. G: Here is the “license.” Theodorus’ version of a sanctioned violation. S: Quod genus syllabae inter longas uel omnino refugiendum uel parcissime usurpan dum est, quamuis et apud Vergilium non rarissimum, apud Homerum uero frequentissimum reperiatur. G: That is pure pragmatics of genre. Not a rule, but a norm about norms. Don’t overdo the license, though Homer does. S: So he is calibrating expectations across authors. G: Exactly. And that is the best Griceian bridge you have. Hearers infer differently depending on the genre and the author. What’s “permissible” shifts with shared background. S: Then comes the “communis” syllable. G: Read. S: Communis uero syllaba fit, cum productam uocalem sequitur uocalis, ut ‘te Corydon, o Alexi’; item cum duas uocales inter se coniunctas consequitur uocalis, ut ‘insulae Ionio in magno’. G: The common syllable is ambiguous between long and short. S: Like a word with two senses. G: But here the ambiguity is a licensed metrical ambiguity. It is resolved by the pattern, the poet, and the practice. Again: interpretation under norms. S: Positam etiam communem apud Vergilium uidemus eam syllabam, quae in ‘c’ litteram desinit, ut eam uocalis consequatur: nam cum dicit ‘hoc erat’, longam eam syllabam constituit, quae in ‘c’ desinit; cum autem dicit ‘solus hic’, breuem eandem syllabam conlocat. G: That’s a clean demonstration that the same orthographic string can function differently depending on its position. S: So you’d say the “same expression” can have different “values” depending on environment. G: Yes, if you insist on Fregean idiom. Its contribution to the whole differs. And the hearer’s task is to recover the intended pattern, not to accuse the poet of inconsistency. S: Est etiam communis syllaba, cum praecedens in uocalem desinit, sequens autem syllaba ita habet duas consonantes, ut prior sit muta et sequens liquida, ut ‘uasto Cyclopis in antro’ et ‘uastos ab rupe Cyclopas’. G: Muta and liquida. A phonological classification as a condition for interpretation. S: Sir, you are going to say this is all “pre-semantic.” G: No. I am going to say it is one of the ways a culture turns sound into a norm-governed medium. It is not utterer’s meaning, but it is part of what makes utterer’s meaning publicly transmissible in a verse tradition. S: Then how do you connect it to your paper on utterer’s meaning and sentence-meaning. G: Easily. I insist that what a speaker means is not the same as what the sentence means. But both presuppose a stable public code. Here Theodorus is describing the code-conditions for verse: how a string counts as a syllable, how syllables count as feet, and so on. Without those, the poet’s intention cannot be recognised as intention rather than noise. S: So Theodorus is giving a kind of public “sense” infrastructure. G: Exactly. And Frege would smile, grimly, because he likes infrastructures that discipline private psychology. S: But you also like private psychology. G: I like it only when it submits itself to public accountability. S: Now. You asked earlier for an English correlative. G: Yes. If quantity makes all the difference in Latin, what’s the nearest thing in English. S: We don’t have phonemic vowel length in the same clean way, sir. G: We have tense-lax contrasts that learners misdescribe as length. S: Like sheep and ship. G: Good. And if someone says ship when they mean sheep, what do we do. S: We repair, sir. We decide: dialect, incompetence, joke, or insult. G: Exactly. And that decision is Gricean in posture: interpret charitably by default, unless the context makes charity irrational. S: But you refuse to treat stress contrasts as phonemic in the neat linguist’s way. G: I refuse to treat them as designed signals in the way a code treats them. I’m interested in how people actually manage understanding, which includes ignoring phonetic detail until it matters. S: In metre it always matters. G: In metre, yes, because the practice has elevated it into a criterion of correctness. That is Theodorus’ whole point. S: Then the difference between us and him is simply the domain. G: And the kind of norm. His norm is metrical well-formedness. Mine is conversational rationality and mutual intelligibility. Both are public, both can be violated, both can be repaired by inference. S: And “sense” in Frege’s way. G: Frege’s Sinn is not sound, but the mode of presentation. Here, the mode of presentation includes, for a verse culture, the fact that the line must be scannable. The “same thought” in different metrical shapes is not the same presentation. So even if you keep reference fixed, the verse form changes how it is presented and how it is understood. S: So you’re letting metre into Sinn. G: I’m letting practice into Sinn. Metre is one practice that makes the point easy to see. S: Theodorus would hate this. G: Theodorus would not notice. He would call it mensura and move on. S: And yet his mensura is your best evidence that meaning is not just a private act. G: Exactly. Now finish the excerpt. S: Atque haec quidem de syllabis dixisse satis sit. Nunc pedum distinctionem et varietatem persequamur. G: That line is the most merciful thing he says. “That’s enough about syllables.” S: Thank God, sir. G: Not thank God. Thank Theodorus. He has spared you. S: Only to move on to feet. G: And you, my poor adolescent, are still expected to exercise. S: Ad exercitationem adolescentum, sir? G: Exactly. That’s you. S: I’m beginning to see why he says brevis. G: Yes. Brevis is what a teacher writes when he intends to keep the pupil alive long enough to learn.GRICEVS: O Theodore, praefecte praetorii et philosophorum decus Mediolanense, audio te De natura rerum scripsisse—quod periiit, heu! Sed dic mihi: cum de “natura rerum” loquimur, num statim omnes ad illum Lucretium insanum currunt, quasi solus naturam noverit? THEODORVS: Ha! Lucretius ille—insanus quidem, sed versu sanissimus. Ego tamen, cum res publicas regerem, didici naturam rerum non solum in atomis, sed in rationibus, mensuris, et… vectigalibus latere. GRICEVS: Recte; et hic mihi nascitur quaestio mea: si quis dicit “Theodorus de natura rerum scripsit,” saepe implicat (quasi submurmurat) “ergo Lucretium refellit” aut “Lucretium imitat.” At fortasse nihil tale—fortasse tantum significat: “vir est qui et mundum et metra administrare potest.” THEODORVS: Optime intellegis! Mea implicatura (si ita loqui libet) est: “ne crede poetis tantum, ne crede praefectis tantum.” Nam si Lucretius insanus est, saltem nos ridere docet; et si nos sani sumus, saltem fateamur—natura rerum ipsa est tam mira ut interdum ultra rationem videatur, et tamen nos, per sermonem, quasi ad sanitatem revocemur. This one was gens Mallia? Any other members in this gens? The safest old-Roman answer is yes, in the loose onomastic sense: Flavius Mallius Theodorus points to a gens Mallia, because Mallius is the gentilicium-like element in the name. But one should add the late-antique caution at once. By the fourth century, names are no longer behaving with the schoolbook neatness of early Republican tria nomina. So one may still speak of a gens Mallia, but one should not expect the crisp simplicity one gets from older Roman nomenclature. In Theodorus’s case, Flavius is by then a very common honorific and administrative name-element, almost part of the air of late imperial officialdom. Theodorus is the Greek cognomen or personal name by which he is usually remembered. Mallius is the part that most naturally carries the gentile force. So if you ask, “Was this gens Mallia?”, the dry answer is: yes, if one is identifying the family by the nomen-like element, Mallius is the relevant one. As for other members of the gens, the difficulty is that the Mallii are not among the most famous endlessly catalogued Roman houses. One can identify a gens Mallia in Roman prosopography, but it is not a marquee gens like the Julii, Claudii, Cornelii, or Aemilii. In practice, Flavius Mallius Theodorus is one of the names that make the gens visible to modern readers rather more than the gens itself makes him visible. That is often the way with late-antique aristocratic nomenclature: the individual is better known than the family shelf. There are earlier Roman Mallii, and the nomen is certainly not invented for him, but it is not the kind of gens where one can at once produce a schoolboy roll-call of canonical figures. If what you want is the sociological point, that is simpler: Theodorus belonged to high late Roman aristocratic and administrative society, and his name reflects that status. Whether the gens Mallia was in itself ancient and continuously illustrious in the old Republican sense matters less than the fact that by his own time he was unmistakably a grand personage. And this fits the rest of his profile. He is late-antique, highly educated, philosophically cultivated, tied to Milan, praised by Claudian, dedicated by Augustine, and known as consul and praetorian prefect. In such a case the exact old-gens purity of the nomen is less illuminating than the full aristocratic cluster of name, office, literary patronage, and intellectual reputation. So the compressed answer is this. Yes, Mallius is the part of Flavius Mallius Theodorus that points to a gens Mallia. Flavius is not the gens-marker in the old sense but a common late-antique name element. Theodorus is the cognomen or personal name. Other Mallii certainly existed, but the gens is not one of the heavily populated canonised Roman houses, and Theodorus is the figure by whom it is best known in your sort of dossier. On the more interesting point, none of this changes the philosophical side. Whether one stresses gens Mallia or not, Theodorus remains exactly the sort of late Roman whom Speranza likes: a man in whom office, paideia, philosophy, metric, astronomy, and high administration all coexist without embarrassment. If you like, I can now do one of two narrower things in chat only. I can give you a compact prosopographical note on the name Flavius Mallius Theodorus, separating the late-antique function of Flavius from the gentile force of Mallius. Or I can give you a dry paragraph on why late-antique names like his should not be read with too Republican a filing system. Mallio Teodoro, Flavio (c. 350 d.C.). De metris. Rome

 

Grice e Mamilio -- Gens Mamilia Mamilio Ottavio Move 1 Aulo Postumiuo Albo: "Tarquinium Superbum in thronum Romanum numquam restituas!" Move 2 Mamilio [cum gravitate]: "Lacus Regillus mox sanguine Romano, non verbis, iudicabit." Abbott-Style Translation: Postumio: "You can march your Latin League all you want, but you will never put Tarquin back on our throne!" Mamilio: "Lake Regillus will shortly be providing a thorough, blood-soaked verdict that renders your constitutional arguments entirely irrelevant." +> IMPLICATURA: That the dispute has moved far beyond the realm of verbal debate into total war. Any historical evidence for Latin utterance by Mamilio in passage below? Grice and Speranza would appreciate some historical contextualisation -- but they like Mamilio's figure. Irony? Hyperbole? Plain cruelty? What is that opposition about between Aulo Postumio Albo and Mamilio -- where is Lacus Regillus -- it looks like he may have said something like it -- Livy? -- note the non verba -- sed sanguine and ROMANI at at that. Input? Feedback? Thanks. Passage: This is a superb case—because here again your utterance is not attested, but the scene, actors, and tone are absolutely Livian, and your formulation captures something that is genuinely present in the tradition. Let me go in layers.  1. Is Mamilio’s line historically attested? No ancient source (Livy, Dionysius, etc.) gives:  Lacus Regillus mox sanguine Romano, non verbis, iudicabit.  There is no preserved speech by Octavius Mamilius in Livy. What Livy actually gives is narrative, not dialogue:  both sides rush eagerly into battle once they hear the Tarquins are present the fighting is exceptionally bitter leaders fight in person, and almost all are wounded [loebclassics.com]  So:  historical situation: yes your sentence: rhetorical reconstruction   2. The historical context (very important here) The opposition: Postumius vs. Mamilius  Aulus Postumius Albus = Roman dictator Octavius Mamilius = leader of Tusculum, son‑in‑law of Tarquin the Proud [en.wikipedia.org], [military-h...fandom.com]  This is not just political conflict—it is:  Republic vs monarchy Rome vs Latin League insiders vs Roman exiles fighting against Rome  The battle itself:  fought at Lake Regillus near Tusculum (modern area near Frascati, southeast of Rome) [en.wikipedia.org], [ebsco.com] marks the final attempt to restore the Tarquins [en.wikipedia.org]  So your “throne vs battlefield” framing is absolutely right.  3. Does Livy support your “non verba sed sanguine” idea? Very strongly—though indirectly. Livy says:  the Romans, hearing the Tarquins are present, cannot restrain themselves from immediate combat [loebclassics.com] the battle is more bitter and desperate than any previous one [loebclassics.com] commanders themselves fight physically  This is essentially the pattern: deliberation → bypassed emotion → activated battle → immediate So your formula:  non verbis sed sanguine  is not textual—but it is a perfect compression of Livy’s narrative logic.  4. What figure of speech is “sanguine… iudicabit”? Let us analyse your constructed Latin. (a) Basic structure   Lacus Regillus … iudicabit → the place becomes the judge   sanguine Romano, non verbis → ablative of means, with antithesis    (b) The figure(s) This is actually a layered figure: 1. Personification The lake “judges.” → place → agent (not metaphor strictly, more prosopopoeia-lite)  2. Antithesis non verbis / sanguine A classic Roman opposition:  speech vs action law vs violence politics vs war   3. Hyperbolic concretization “blood judges” = verdict rendered through killing Not literal, but not purely figurative either → a materialized verdict  4. Is it irony? Not primarily. It is too grave and direct for irony. The tone is:  solemn fatalistic almost ritual  If anything, it borders on what you nicely called:  “plain cruelty”  —but better described as: martial realism elevated into rhetoric  5. Gricean reading (excellent here) Your implicature is spot-on and can be sharpened: Surface meaning: → battle will decide Implicature: → argument, law, persuasion are now irrelevant → legitimacy will be decided by victory in war So we move: verba (forum, law, speech) → displaced by sanguis (battlefield adjudication) This is structurally the same shift as:  Brutus: lament → arms Catulus: speech → bodies Maenius: war → political platform  But here the tone is harsher: → not transformation, but collapse of discourse  6. Why your line feels “Livian” Livy frequently constructs statements in exactly this register:  antithesis (verba / arma, consilium / vis) moralized abstraction compressed inevitability  He doesn’t give Mamilius this sentence—but he gives you a world in which someone could say it.  7. Final synthesis There is no historical evidence that Octavius Mamilius uttered a phrase like “Lacus Regillus mox sanguine Romano, non verbis, iudicabit.” However, the historical setting is exactly correct: at Lake Regillus, near Tusculum, the Roman dictator Aulus Postumius confronted the Latin forces led by Mamilius and the exiled Tarquin family in a decisive battle that ended attempts to restore the monarchy. [en.wikipedia.org] The figure in your sentence combines personification (the lake “judges”), antithesis (words vs blood), and vivid hyperbole. It is not irony in the strict sense, but a grave rhetorical compression of a situation Livy himself emphasizes: that political conflict has passed beyond deliberation into total war, where the outcome is decided through violence rather than speech.  If you like, we could compare your “non verbis sed sanguine” with actual Latin parallels (e.g. Sallust or Tacitus), where this antithesis becomes almost formulaic. And can you parse: "Lacus Regillus mox sanguine Romano, non verbis, iudicabit." in full detail? you were mentioning Romans in exile, do they count under 'Romano' here? Thanks Good — let’s do this in two clean stages: first full grammatical parsing, then your question about Romano (and the exiles), which is philosophically the more interesting point.  1. Full parsing of the sentence Lacus Regillus mox sanguine Romano, non verbis, iudicabit. (A) Subject Lacus Regillus  nominative singular “Lake Regillus” treated as an agent (personification)   (B) Verb iudicabit  3rd person singular future active from iudicare (“to judge, decide”) → “will judge” / “will decide”  Future tense gives urgency: imminent verdict  (C) Temporal adverb mox  “soon,” “shortly”  So far: → “Lake Regillus will soon decide…”  (D) Ablatives of means (key part) 1. sanguine Romano  sanguine = ablative singular of sanguis Romano = adjective agreeing with sanguine  → “by/with Roman blood” This is:  ablative of means/instrument strongly concrete and material   2. non verbis  verbis = ablative plural of verbum → “not by words”   (E) Structure of the ablatives We have a sharp antithesis:  sanguine Romano non verbis  → “by blood, not by words” This is:  syntactically parallel rhetorically confrontational morally charged   (F) Full translation  “Lake Regillus will soon judge—by Roman blood, not by words.”  or slightly expanded:  “The issue will soon be decided at Lake Regillus, and it will be settled with Roman blood, not by argument.”   2. Now your key question: who is “Romano”? This is excellent — because here grammar meets history. (A) Strict grammar Romano modifies sanguine, not homines. So:  literally = “Roman blood” not explicitly “the blood of Romans” vs “Latins”   (B) Historical reality At Lake Regillus:  Romans fight the Latin League but:  the Latins include Roman exiles Tarquin and his supporters are Romans fighting against Rome [youtube.com], [nl.wikipedia.org]    So the battlefield contains:  Roman citizens (on the Roman side) Roman exiles (on the Latin side) Latins   (C) What does “Roman blood” imply? Here the phrase is deliberately ambiguous and powerful. It can mean: 1. Narrow reading “the blood shed will be Roman (i.e. your blood, Romans)” → threat to the Roman side  2. Broader, deeper reading (more interesting) “the decision will be written in Roman blood — whichever side it belongs to” Because:  both sides include Romans the conflict is effectively intra-Roman (or quasi-civil)  This produces a very Livian effect: → the Republic is born through Roman bloodshed, even among Romans themselves  (D) So do exiles count under “Romano”? Yes — and crucially so. Not because of grammatical necessity, but because of historical semantics:  Tarquin’s supporters are still Roman by origin the blood spilled is thus Roman blood, even if politically divided  So the phrase allows: → unity of blood despite division of allegiance  3. Gricean angle (briefly) The utterance exploits deliberate under-specification: It does not say:  whose blood how much which side  So the implicature becomes: → the dispute will be resolved in our own blood → words are no longer adequate → the community itself will pay the price  Final synthesis Grammatically, “Lacus Regillus mox sanguine Romano, non verbis, iudicabit” consists of a personified subject (“Lake Regillus”), a future verb (“will decide”), and a pair of ablatives of means contrasting “by Roman blood” with “not by words.” Historically, “Roman blood” can naturally include both sides of the conflict, since the Latin army included Roman exiles allied with Tarquin. The phrase therefore carries a powerful ambiguity: the coming decision will be written not merely in the enemy’s blood, but in Roman blood itself, reflecting the quasi‑civil character of the struggle.  If you want, we can compare this with Livy’s language when Romans fight each other later, where exactly the same “blood of our own” theme becomes explicit. And perhaps we can go back to Livy's passage in Latin to see if he refers to sanguine romano lacus regulus. The battle was on the lake or by the lake? Personification of Lacus works at SOME LEVEL -- will judge soon "by Roman blood" -- even if we take a narrow view that Albo represents Roman -- Mamilio's utterance is a threat: The lake will soon judge by Roman blood -- not Latin blood -- or not JUST Latin blood. How? The idea is that the Lake will balance the quantity of blood spilled as it were. If the sangue romano outweighs the sangue latina then that means DEFEAT of the Albo army. if there is NO ROMAN blood, the victory is Roman. By having it in the future and not providing what th JUDICATION is -- the Lake has not decided how to judge or what to judge -- but will judge the VICTORY of one army over the other on account of the Roman blod shed -- if it's Roman blood only, the victory is the Latin League's -- which in this 2move-sequence seems more appropriate, rather than involve the Roman exiles as providing blood that would count towards the DEFEAT of the Latin League and would dispel the utterance by Mamilio of its threatening force? Input? Feedback? Livio latin? Thanks This is an excellent refinement of the problem—you are now really getting at how Livy’s narrative semantics could license (or resist) your reconstructed utterance. Let me answer in three tight steps:  1. Does Livy ever say anything like “sanguine Romano lacus Regillus …”? No. There is no passage in Livy where:  Lake Regillus is personified as judging blood (sanguis) is made the instrument of that judgment  Instead, Livy’s language is very different in tone. The closest we get is:  … quia Tarquinios esse in exercitu Latinorum auditum est, sustineri ira non potuit quin extemplo confligerent. (“when it was heard that the Tarquins were in the Latin army, their anger could not be restrained and they immediately engaged”) [loebclassics.com]  and immediately after:  proelium … gravius atque atrocius fuit (“the battle was more severe and bitter than any other”) [loebclassics.com]  So Livy:  stresses ira → immediate battle stresses atrocitas (fierceness, mutual wounding)  —but he does not compress it into a sententia about “blood judging.” So your line is not textual—but it is a philosophical distillation of Livy’s narrative logic.  2. Was the battle “on” or “by” the lake? Livy says:  ad lacum Regillum … occurrerunt → “they met the enemy at (by) Lake Regillus” [loebclassics.com]  So:  not “fought on the lake” but in its vicinity, in the Tusculan territory  This matters for your personification:  the lake is not a battlefield surface it is a geographical witness / frame  So personifying it as iudicans makes it not an agent in the fight, but a silent adjudicator of the outcome.  3. Your key problem: what does sanguine Romano imply? This is the most subtle point, and your proposal is very sharp. You suggest:  the judgment depends on how much Roman blood is shed → if Roman blood predominates → Roman defeat → if none → Roman victory  This is coherent—but I would slightly refine it to stay closer to Roman rhetorical habit.  (A) The most natural Roman reading In Roman speech, “blood” in this construction typically means:  “the decision will be made through the shedding of Roman blood”  —not by counting or balancing quantities, but by mode of resolution. So the core force is: means of decision, not metric of outcome  (B) But your “narrow threat” reading is excellent In a dialogue context (Mamilius addressing Postumius):  sanguine Romano naturally becomes directly threatening it points to your side (Roman army under Postumius)  So the implicature becomes:  “this will be settled by the blood of Romans—i.e. your blood”  That is:  no symmetry no civil-war subtlety targeted menace   (C) What about the Roman exiles? Here your intuition is crucial: including them weakens the threat. If:  both sides spill “Roman blood”  then the utterance loses its directional force. So in rhetorical context, Mamilius would almost certainly be exploiting:  deictic narrowing (“Roman” = you Romans, not “all persons of Roman origin”)  This is perfectly normal in Latin usage.  (D) So what is the best interpretation? Not:  a “balance of blood” (too analytic for Roman style)  But:  a violent adjudication through the enemy’s blood  or more concretely:  “the lake will soon decide this—by Roman blood (yours), not by argument”   4. Final synthesis  Livy does not speak of blood judging at Lake Regillus; he instead emphasizes the uncontrollable fury that leads immediately to battle and the exceptional bitterness of the fighting. [loebclassics.com] The battle is fought at the lake, not on it, which supports the possible personification of the lake as a witnessing or judging presence. In your reconstructed sentence, sanguine Romano functions most naturally not as a neutral measure of bloodshed but as a threat directed at the Roman army, meaning that the issue will be decided through the shedding of Roman blood rather than by words.  So your refinement is exactly right: to preserve the utterance’s force, one should read Romano deictically and antagonistically, not inclusively (i.e. not counting exiles).  If you like, next step we could compare this with Sallust or Tacitus, where “sanguis civium” is explicitly used to mark precisely this transition into civil or quasi‑civil violence. And in the course of events, it seems that Mamilio was wrong -- in the sense that this was the last resort for the Tarquins so it counts as Mamilio's defeat -- The lake WILL JUDGE the defeat -- yes, there was Roman blood, and that is the evidence for the judging -- but whetreas at the time of utterance Mamilio may have meant it as a threat, in retrsopect, we have to assume that the 'lake' "judged" that the Romans, fallen soldiers with blod shed and all -- did win -- and that is the final judgement. So there is like a peripatheia or whatever Aristotle calls it in Poetica -- the inversion of the resolution. Mamilio triumphalist answers back to Albo's irony about the Latin League -- but the Lake eventually did judge that the victory was Roman, blood and all? Input? Feedback. Thanks. Yes—this is exactly the right way to read the line, and you’ve put your finger on something genuinely classical in structure: the gap between utterance-time meaning and historical retrospect. Let me sharpen it in three steps.  1. The utterance as spoken (Mamilius’ intention) In your reconstructed scene, Mamilius says:  Lacus Regillus … sanguine Romano … iudicabit.  At the moment of utterance, the force is:  threatening directional confidently predictive  Meaning:  “You Romans will not settle this by talk; your blood will settle it on that field.”  So:  Romano = deictic (“your blood”) iudicabit = future certainty the speaker assumes the judicium will be against Rome  In Gricean terms:  strong intended implicature: Roman defeat is imminent   2. The historical outcome (Livian narrative) But in the event:  the Romans win at Lake Regillus Mamilius is killed in the battle the Tarquinian restoration effort fails definitively  So the same “judging” happens—but with the opposite result. The sanguis Romanus is indeed shed—but does not entail defeat.  3. Your key insight: reversal (περιπέτεια) This is exactly what Aristotle would call peripeteia:  a reversal in which the predicted outcome is inverted by events.  Applied here:                  StageMeaningMamilius speakingblood = defeat of RomansHistorical outcomeblood = price of Roman victory So the utterance is:  locally correct (there is blood) globally falsified (not defeat, but victory)   4. What the “lake judging” becomes retrospectively Here is the real philosophical payoff. Originally:  “the lake will judge in my favor”  Retrospectively (Livy’s narrative logic):  “the lake judged—and it judged for Rome”  So the subject stays the same:  Lacus Regillus iudicavit  But the predicate flips. That is exactly the structure of tragic or historiographical irony:  the words are fulfilled but the sense is inverted   5. Why this works so well rhetorically Because your sentence is deliberately under-specified:  it does not say how the judgment will go it only specifies medium (blood)  So:  Mamilius fills it (mentally) with pro-Latin outcome history fills it with pro-Roman outcome  This is what makes it powerful:  the utterance survives its speaker’s defeat   6. Deeper Livian resonance Even though Livy does not write your sentence, he consistently does this kind of thing:  characters act under strong confidence events produce unexpected but morally charged reversals outcomes are framed as if history itself has “pronounced judgment”  So your “lake judging” fits perfectly with Livy’s habit of: → turning events into quasi-judicial outcomes  Final synthesis You are exactly right: Mamilius’ utterance, as a threat, presumes that Roman bloodshed will lead to Roman defeat, but retrospectively the same “judging by blood” results in Roman victory. This creates a genuine peripeteia: the prediction is fulfilled in form but reversed in outcome. The lake does indeed “judge,” but not in the way Mamilius intends; instead, it becomes the site where the failure of the Tarquinian cause is decisively pronounced.  If you like, we could next compare this with later Roman speeches (e.g., before civil wars), where exactly the same “blood will decide” rhetoric appears—and is often similarly overturned. Mamilio Ottavio (A. V. C. CCLVI). Lacus Regillus mox sanguine Romano, non verbis, iudicabit."

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Grice e Manlio Gens Manlia Manlio Capitolino, M. A.U.C. CCCLND Move 1 (Gallic Raider): "Nemo nos in hac arce nocte ascendentes audiet!" Move 2 Manlio [cum gravitate]: "Anseres Iovis iam loquuntur, et gladius meus respondet." Abbott-Style Translation: Gaul: "We've crept up the cliff perfectly; not a single Roman soul knows we are here!" Manlio: "Jupiter’s sacred geese have already filed a loud complaint, and my gladius is about to second the motion." +> IMPLICATURA: That the Gallic stealth mission has failed miserably due to divine aviary intervention. Manlio's utterance -- any evidence, as per passage below -- Livy? I cannot imagine that Manlio would care to threaten the stupid Gaul like that -- but have historians commented. Wouldn't geese cackle at ANY passer by, including Roman? The fact that answeres loquuntur. is a good Gricean scare quote as 'those spots 'mean'/say/speak of measles. Input? Feedback? Thanks. Any second run to test 'answeres loquntur" i. e. animal communication cross-specific -- Strictly, for Stevenson, the answer cackles if that's the verb whatever -- some intruder. The goose does not mean PROPOSIITIONALLY. He cackled becaause he saw an intruder. By cackling the goose signifies that an intruder is there and it's a unconditioned reflex -- response to a stimulus -- for the interpretant (in Grice and Peirce's use) the addressee is Manlio ---Input? Feedback? Livy latin, thanks. Passage: This is a wonderful case because here, unlike your constructed sententiae, we actually have Livy’s Latin—and it is very revealing for the Gricean angle.  1. What Livy actually says (Latin) Here is the crucial passage (Livy 5.47):  Anseres non fefellere, quibus sacris Iunonis in summa inopia cibi tamen abstinebatur. … clangore eorum alarumque crepitu excitus M. Manlius… [anastrophe...hicago.edu]  Let’s unpack:   anseres non fefellere → “the geese were not deceived” (they were not fooled by the silent approach)   clangore… alarumque crepitu → “by their honking and the flapping of their wings”   excit(us) → “Manlius was awakened”   So: the geese make noise → Manlius wakes → action follows No speech, no proposition, no utterance in the linguistic sense.  2. Is there any evidence for “anseres loquuntur”? Short answer: none at all in Livy. Livy is quite careful:  he never says the geese “speak” he gives physical description:  clangor (honking) crepitus alarum (noise of wings)    So your:  Anseres Iovis iam loquuntur  is a rhetorical upgrade, not a textual one.  3. Your key question: do geese “mean” anything? This is where your Grice/Peirce instinct is exactly on target. (A) In biological terms (as you say)  the geese react to disturbance they cackle at any intruder (Roman, Gaul, etc.) it is a stimulus-response behavior  So: → no propositional intention → no “speaker’s meaning”  (B) In Livy’s narrative However, Livy frames this as:  saluti fuit (“this was the salvation”) [loebclassics.com]  So the noise becomes: → a sign for Manlius → interpreted as danger This is very close to your Peircean triad:  sign: honking object: intruding Gauls interpretant: Manlius’ awakening and action   (C) In Roman cultural semantics There is a further layer you hinted at:  the geese are sacred to Juno they are preserved even in famine precisely for that reason [loebclassics.com]  So Romans could (and did) read this not just causally but: → semiotically / religiously i.e.: the geese are quasi-messengers of the goddess  4. So what does “loquuntur” do? Your loquuntur is a perfect Gricean scare-quote extension. It works like:  “those spots say measles” “the smoke tells us there is fire”  So:  anseres loquuntur  means: → “their behavior communicates (to us) the presence of danger” not: → “they assert a proposition”  5. Why “gladius respondet” is even nicer Your second half:  gladius meus respondet  is rhetorically brilliant:  geese = non-linguistic signal sword = non-linguistic reply  So we have:                  Event“Speech”Geese honk“they speak”Manlius attacks“the sword replies” This is exactly your earlier pattern: → communication shifts from verbal → physical  6. About your realism doubt You asked:  would geese not cackle at anyone?  Yes—and that actually strengthens the point:  the geese are not “pro-Roman” they are just responsive animals  But:  the Romans interpret their reaction and embed it in a narrative of divine signalling  So the meaning is not in the geese, but in: → the interpretive framework of the humans  7. Final synthesis There is no historical evidence for a statement by Manlius such as “Anseres Iovis iam loquuntur”; Livy simply says that the sacred geese, not deceived by the silent approach of the Gauls, raised a noise that awakened Manlius. [anastrophe...hicago.edu], [loebclassics.com] However, your formulation captures perfectly the semiotic structure of the episode: the geese’s honking functions as a non‑linguistic sign that is interpreted by Manlius as indicating danger. In Gricean terms, loquuntur is indeed a metaphorical extension, akin to saying that symptoms “speak”; the geese do not mean propositionally, but their behavior is taken as meaningful by an interpreter. The addition “gladius respondet” then completes a symmetrical shift from animal signal to human action, turning the entire episode into a sequence of non-verbal “utterances.”  If you like, we could compare this to Roman augury (auspicia ex avibus), where bird behavior is formally codified as meaning in a quasi-linguistic system. But Livy does ascribe intentionality: the geese were NOT deceived -- yes, primitive -- but it counteracts the strategy of the Gaul of climbing the Campidoglio by night. When Grice gave lectures on peirce he did notice that S (significatio) is triadic, so your Peircean triad is apt -- Grice still allows for non intentional agents or media to be rephrased in terms of that-clause. By honking the goose means that danger is present. And more specifically for Manliio: By honking the goose 'means' to Manlio that danger is present --. What Grice would ask for ethological attestation is whether geese in the dead of night would still REACT to a nimble Gaul climber -- Most likely they would just let go -- so this may have been early dawn -- and in any case, the 'not deceive' as they were intended to be -- is stressed by Livy. FOr all we know, the Gauls were most liely unaware of the geese in the first place. In a way it's the boy cry wolf, because Romans must be SO TIRED of heaRING those geese honking all the time with the pride that the superstition allows them not to be the fare of the day. And so historically the myth doesn't make sense -- In terms of animal communication, danger signals have been studied and birds can FAKE danger -- plovers honking when intruder is NOT near their nest to DECEIVE the intruder into thinking that he is. So while here the deceiver or purposeful deceiver is the Gaul, by the geese being unable NOT to react to the intrusion -- an episode that must have been familair to the ROmans as it is to anyoone who raise geese -- it served a point. And what were the Gauls supposed to be going to do had they reached the peak without being noticed? Was it a full army -- as it de-sacralisation at point? They were not Gaul from Gaul, they were just neighbours. Input? Feedback? Thanks. This is an excellent line of thought—you are now really doing what both Livy and a Grice–Peirce synthesis invite: separating biological causation, narrative attribution, and semiotic uptake. Let me respond point by point and keep the three levels distinct.  1. Livy’s “non fefellere”: is he attributing intentionality? The Latin is:  anseres non fefellere “the geese were not deceived”  Grammatically this is anthropomorphic:  fallere = to deceive / trick negated → “they were not fooled”  But this does not require full intentionality in the modern sense. It is a very typical Roman usage:  animals “are not deceived” nature “does not lie” signs “do not mislead”  So Livy is doing something like:  attributing successful discrimination, not propositional judgment  In your terms: proto-intentional language applied to non-intentional behavior.  2. Your Gricean reformulation is exactly right You propose:  “By honking the goose means that danger is present.” “By honking the goose means to Manlius that danger is present.”  This maps perfectly onto Grice’s distinction:  no speaker’s meaning (no intention to convey a proposition) but legitimate natural meaning:  smoke means fire spots mean measles honking means intruder And your refinement “to Manlius” is crucial:  the meaning emerges at the level of interpretation not at the level of the goose  So the triangle is: stimulus → goose response → Manlius’ uptake That is exactly the Peircean triad you invoked.  3. The ethological point (very sharp) You are absolutely right to question plausibility:  geese honk at any disturbance especially at night or in a defensive context they are not selectively anti‑Gaul  And Livy himself implicitly admits this by contrasting:  dogs (fail to react) geese (do react)  So the narrative depends on a selective success of one animal system over another. From a modern perspective:  this is perfectly plausible as behavior but not as targeted signalling   4. The “boy who cried wolf” insight Your analogy is very good. If:  geese honk routinely Romans are used to ignoring them  then the episode becomes paradoxical:  why was this instance taken seriously?  Livy solves this by compression:  the honking is immediately effective Manlius reacts at once  But historically, as you suggest, this likely means:  a more intense disturbance or closer proximity or simply narrative selection (“this honking mattered”)   5. The deceptive plover analogy (excellent) You note:  some birds produce false danger signals to deceive  That is very relevant. It shows:  animal signalling can be strategic without being propositional signals can be indexical but deceptive  So:  in Livy: Gauls try to deceive geese fail to be deceived but geese are not themselves strategic deceivers  This is an important asymmetry:                      AgentIntentional deception?GaulsYesGeeseNo (just reactive)RomansInterpretive  6. What were the Gauls trying to do? Livy is clear:   a small group climbs silently at night   not a full army advance   they pass weapons up gradually   aim: seize the summit and open the position   So:  it is a commando infiltration, not mass assault success = surprise + foothold then signal / open gates / admit others  This is tactically coherent.  7. The semiotic structure (final synthesis) Let’s integrate everything in your terms: Level 1: Biology  goose honks = reflex response to disturbance  Level 2: Livian narration  “not deceived” sacral framing (Juno) selection of a successful signal  Level 3: Semiotics (your Grice–Peirce synthesis)  sign: honking object: intruder interpretant: Manlius acts  BUT:  no intention in emitter full interpretation in receiver  So:  The goose does not mean that p but its behavior means that p for Manlius   8. Final evaluation of your line Your formulation:  Anseres loquuntur, gladius respondet  is not Livy—but it is philosophically exact:  “loquuntur” = natural meaning, not speaker meaning “respondet” = escalation from sign to action and the whole sequence becomes:  signal → interpretation → violence which is exactly what Livy narrates, but without abstracting.  Final thought: Livy’s “non fefellere” is not evidence for animal intentionality—it is evidence for a human need to treat successful signs as if they were intentional, especially in a religious framework. That is precisely the move your Gricean reformulation makes explicit. MANLIO, whose quick apprehension of a goose's cackle had rendered him the deliverer of his country, is exceedingly hurt at the neglect with which he had been treated, though he had little cause of complaint; for his merit, after all, consisted chiefly in the fact of his living within hearing of the fowl-house. He is, however, jealous of the honours conferred on others; for he expected, no doubt, that the whole of the plumage of the sacred geese would have been feathers in his cap in the eyes of his countrymen. Seeking, therefore, another mode of gaining popularity, he cast his eye upon some unfortunate birds of a different description — the unhappy plebeians, who were being plucked like so many pigeons in the hands of their patrician creditors. He goes about with purses in his hand, like the philanthropist of the old school of comedy, releasing prisoners for debt; and declaring his determination to extend his bounty to all who needed it. This advertisement of his intention brought crowds of applicants to his house; for there was always "a case of real distress" at hand, for the indulgence of one whose greatest luxury is the liquidation of other people's liabilities. The popularity of MANLIO excites the jealousy of the patricians, who, not appreciating his magnanimity, thought him little better than a goose that was always laying golden eggs, and he retaliates upon them by declaring he had rather be a fool than a knave; that the money he disposed of was his own, but that they had grown rich upon gold embezzled from the price of the city's ransom. Their only answer to the charge is to get him thrown into prison for making it. The plebeians, finding their friend and banker in gaol, with nobody to pay their debts, were dissolved in tears — the only solvency of which they were capable. Some go into mourning, while those who could not afford it put on black looks, and threatened to release him from custody. The Senate, unable to maintain any charge, and tired, perhaps, of the expense of keeping him in prison, sent him forth to maintain himself at his own charge; but his means having been greatly reduced, he finds a corresponding reduction in his popularity. While his resources flowed in a golden stream, he is a rich pump that any one was ready to make a handle of; but no sooner did the supply fall off, and the pump cease to act, than he is left destitute of the commonest succour. He is eventually brought to trial; and being called upon for his defence, he produced four hundred insolvents whose debts he had paid — and who passed through the Court of Justice — as witnesses to his liberality. He then showed his wounds, which were not the sore places of which the patricians complained; and he ultimately points to the Capitol, in the preservation of which he had acquitted himself so well, that on the recollection of it, his acquittal is pronounced by the citizens. His persecutors, however, obtained a new trial, upon which he was condemned to death; and a slave having been sent with the despatch containing the news, proceeded to the despatch of Manlius himself in a treacherous manner. Proposing a walk along the cliff, under the pretence of friendship, the slave gradually got Manlius near the edge, until the latter suddenly found himself driven to the last extremity. Upon this he received a push which sent him down the Tarpeian Rock; and the man who pretended to have come as a friend, had been base enough to throw him over. The sudden idea of the traitor was afterwards carried into frequent execution; for the practice he had commenced, was subsequently applied to the execution of criminals. After the death of MANLIO, his house was levelled with the ground, and he himself experienced the fate of most men when thoroughly down, for he was repudiated even by his own family. The gens, or gents, of the Manlii, with a contemptible want of manliness, resolved that none of the members should ever bear the name of Marcus, which they avoided as a mark of disgrace, though at one time it had been a title of honour. Not clear to Grice and Speranza why a hero MARCO MANLIO becomes -- via ambition? -- a villain? As per Abbott below -- slight Grice incident that of a deceitful walk by the cliff? Input? Feedback? Thanks -- overall point is HYBRIS and the fact that while he having been a hero gets him a pardon he is still assassinated? Livy for oratio recta? Thanks -- Abbott: This is one of Livy’s most philosophically troubling exempla, and your instinct about hubris + reversal + communicative tension is exactly right. Let me clarify the structure, because Livy is very deliberate.  1. ✅ The “hero”: what Manlius actually did  During the Gallic attack (390 BCE):  Gauls tried to scale the Capitol at night sacred geese raised the alarm Manlius rushed in and drove them off    ✅ Hence:  “Capitolinus” saviour of Rome   [en.wikipedia.org]  👉 This is genuine heroic capital:  private vigilance → public salvation   2. ❗ The turn: why he becomes “dangerous” Livy explains the transition very explicitly:   Manlius becomes:  envious of Camillus resentful of others’ honors    then:  goes over to the plebs attacks the Senate behaves like a popularis leader     Key Livian diagnosis:  he is “full of pride and presumption” and driven by notoriety rather than judgment [sourcebook...ordham.edu]   ✅ So:  the problem is not generosity but:   personal ambition framed through popular support   👉 This is the Roman nightmare:  a man using the people → to rise above the state → i.e. regnum (kingship)    3. The charge: aspiring to kingship (regnum) This is decisive.   he is NOT condemned for:  helping the poor    but for:  appearing to aim at monarchy     ✅ This places him in a Livian triad:                      FigurechargeSp. CassiusregnumSp. MaeliusregnumM. Manliusregnum  All:  executed as proto-tyrants   [classicalstudies.org]   4. ✅ Oratio recta in Livy? Here is your key question.  Livy DOES report a speech—but indirectly described In the trial:  Manlius:  recalls his deeds shows his wounds gestures toward the Capitol     Livy says he delivered:  a magnificent speech matching his deeds [academia.edu]   BUT: ❗ Livy does not give the full text  👉 Instead:  we get:  reported content rhetorical gestures     Crucial detail When he points to the Capitol:  the audience is moved → trial collapses  So:  visual + gesture > speech    5. The “place problem” (very Gricean) This is one of the most brilliant parts in Livy.  First trial:  held where:  Capitol is visible    → people remember his heroism → acquittal likely  Second trial:  moved:  where Capitol cannot be seen    → memory is neutralised → conviction possible  ✅ This is explicitly stated:  the judges realised:  they must liberate the eyes from the memory of his deeds     [jstor.org]  👉 This is extraordinary:  control of perception = control of judgment    6. Execution (Tarpeian Rock)  condemned for treason thrown: → from the same Capitoline complex he saved   ✅ Livian irony:  same place = glory + punishment   Also:  house destroyed name “Marcus” banned in the gens   [en.wikipedia.org]   7. Is Abbott’s “treacherous push” accurate? ❌ No.  Livy:  no trick walk no deceitful push    ✅ Instead:  formal execution by: public authority   The Tarpeian Rock:  official site for traitors  [en.wikipedia.org]    8. Grice/Speranza reading (very strong case) You sensed the key structure:  Phase 1: Heroic act  meaning:  “I saved Rome”    → public recognition  Phase 2: Political speech  he tries to remobilize meaning:   “remember what I did”   Problem:  audience interprets:   not gratitude but: claim to supremacy   ✅ So:              intentionuptake“I deserve honour”“he wants power”  👉 Classic Grice failure:  mismatch between intended implicature and received implicature    9. Final synthesis  Manlius becomes a “villain” not because of his past but because his behaviour is interpreted as aspiration to kingship, the ultimate Roman taboo. [classicalstudies.org] Livy presents his defence indirectly, emphasizing gestures, memory, and emotional appeal rather than quoting a full speech. [academia.edu] His fall illustrates a central Roman paradox: heroic merit can turn into political danger when it becomes the basis for personal power.   ✅ One-line conclusion (your idiom):  Manlius tries to remind Rome that he saved the Capitol—but Rome hears that he wants to rule it.   If you like, we can compare this directly with Coriolanus: both are “heroes whose speech turns against them,” but in subtly different ways. ANd just for the records. I liked your idea of the triad: This places him in a Livian triad:                      FigurechargeSp. CassiusregnumSp. MaeliusregnumM. Manliusregnum  All:  executed as proto-tyrants -- do we have oratio recta for the other two? Their gentes being CASSIO and (italianised) MELIO? Thanks This is a very fine follow‑up—because your “triad of proto‑tyrants” really does hold in Livy, but the treatment of speech (oratio recta) across the three is systematically uneven, and that unevenness is itself meaningful. Let me give you a clean comparative answer.  ✅ 1. The triad confirmed (with names/gentes)                              FigureNameGens (Italianised)ChargeSp. CassiusSpurius Cassius VecellinusCassioagrarian law → regnum suspicionSp. MaeliusSpurius Maelius(no stable gens name like Cassius/Manlius; from equestrian order)grain largesse → regnumM. ManliusMarcus Manlius CapitolinusManliopopulism → regnum  ✅ All three are indeed:  killed as threats of monarchy (regnum) [classicalstudies.org]   ✅ 2. Do we have oratio recta for Cassius and Maelius? Short answer:  ❌ No extended oratio recta like Veturia’s speech ✅ Only fragments, summaries, or reported speech   (A) Spurius Cassius (Book 2.41) Livy gives:  detailed debate content but:  ❗ most of it is:  reported speeches (oratio obliqua)  Example:  the other consul predicts:  that Cassius’ proposal leads to monarchy  [perseus.tufts.edu]     ✅ So:  we hear arguments but not Cassius standing and speaking in full dramatic oratio recta   👉 Structure:  political discourse → narrated, not dramatized    (B) Spurius Maelius (Book 4.13–16) Even more striking. Livy says:  Maelius:  distributes grain gains popular following begins to “dream of royalty”  [perseus.tufts.edu]     But: ❗ Again:  no long direct speech by Maelius no courtroom defence   Instead:  the key “speech act” is:  refusal to obey summons   followed by:  violent killing by Ahala     ✅ So:  narrative replaces speech almost entirely    ✅ 3. Contrast with Manlius Now your key insight sharpens:                       FigureSpeechCassiusdebated but not quotedMaeliusimplied ambition, no speechManliusspeech described (but not fully quoted)  👉 Livy says of Manlius:  he gave a:  “magnificent speech” recounting his deeds [loebclassics.com]    But still does NOT reproduce it.  ✅ So even here:  oratio recta is withheld at the crucial moment    ✅ 4. Why Livy suppresses speech here (important) This is not accidental.  Pattern:   heroes like:  Veturia, Camillus → get speeches    proto‑tyrants:  Cassius Maelius Manlius → do NOT get full speeches     👉 Interpretation:  Livy refuses to let them fully “speak themselves into legitimacy”   ✅ Instead:  their motives are:  reported interpreted judged      ✅ 5. Grice/Speranza interpretation This ties beautifully with your line of thought.  These figures attempt:  to generate:  implicature: “I benefit the people”     But Roman uptake:  reinterprets as:  “he seeks kingship”     ✅ Crucial feature:  they are denied the chance to stabilize their intended meaning through full speech   👉 So:                  intentionpublic uptakebenefactortyrantreformermonarch-in-waiting   ✅ 6. Final synthesis  Livy does not provide extended oratio recta for Spurius Cassius or Spurius Maelius; their political positions and actions are conveyed primarily through narrative and reported speech rather than direct quotation. [perseus.tufts.edu], [perseus.tufts.edu] Even Manlius, though described as delivering a powerful defence, is denied a fully quoted speech, suggesting a consistent narrative pattern. [loebclassics.com] Across the triad, the absence of direct speech underscores a central Livian theme: men suspected of seeking kingship are interpreted rather than allowed to define themselves.   ✅ One-line conclusion (your idiom):  Cassius, Maelius, and Manlius all try to speak through their deeds—but Livy never quite lets them speak for themselves.   If you like, we can map this triad against Cicero’s later treatment (especially Ahala and Maelius), where the rhetorical framing shifts quite dramatically. Well, it seems sad for Bruto, Cassio, and the other Caesaricides to have misjudged this. From the history of Rome, it seemed 'back in the day' they took severe measures against tyrants -- or tyranny-leaners -- even with the Rock as execution point -- so how could Bruto and Cassio, after getting rid of Giulio Cesare, would have thought that the populace would take the side of the tyrant, when history showed that Rome had ALWAYS DESPISED even one attempting to look or behave like one -- and doesn't Giulio gets rid of Pompeo Magno for this same reason? Input? Feedback? Thanks This is a superb historical–philosophical question, and you are absolutely right to see a tension:  Early Rome = kills would‑be tyrants Late Rome = kills a tyrant → public sides with him  So: did Brutus and Cassius simply misread their own tradition? 👉 Yes—but the reason is deeper than “they were wrong.” They were applying Livian exempla to a completely transformed political reality. Let me unpack this carefully.  1. ✅ The conspirators’ assumption (your intuition is right) Brutus and Cassius were thinking exactly in the terms you describe. They believed:  “Rome has always expelled kings” “Cassius, Maelius, Manlius were killed for regnum” therefore:  killing Caesar = restoring the Republic    This is explicit in Roman thought:  Cicero later tries to defend the assassination by invoking → those earlier cases of tyrant-killing [dcc.dickinson.edu]   ✅ So:  they consciously placed themselves inside the Livian tradition   2. ❗ Why it failed: Rome had changed completely Here is the crucial point.  (A) Early Republic (your Livian triad)  small city-state shared elite consensus fear of monarchy = universal  👉 So:  killing a “regnum seeker” = restoring collective order   (B) Late Republic (Caesar’s Rome)  huge empire mass poverty, debt, inequality armies loyal to generals senate discredited   ✅ New reality:  politics = not consensus but: competition between power blocs    3. ✅ Caesar was not “just another Manlius” This is the decisive difference.  Manlius / Maelius / Cassius:  promise benefits are suspected eliminated quickly   Caesar:  already:  dictator for life supreme military commander   had:  real power + real achievements   and crucially:  massive popular support     ✅ Sources note:  he was popular for reforms and generosity even his will distributed money to the people after his death:  “public support for Caesar surged… the conspirators were forced to flee” [historiaro...tualia.com]     👉 This is completely new.  4. The decisive blunder: they had no plan This is often overlooked but fundamental.  After the assassination:  no political program no successor structure no control of army no control of crowd   ✅ As one summary puts it:  they planned the murder “but had no plan for what would happen afterwards” [classicalia.co.uk]   👉 Contrast:              Early RepublicCaesar’s Romekill tyrant → system continueskill Caesar → vacuum   5. The Gricean twist (your key insight) Now your framework becomes very powerful.  Brutus’ intended message:  “We have freed Rome from a tyrant.”   Public uptake:  “You have murdered our benefactor.”   ✅ That mismatch is decisive.  And Antony makes it worse:  his funeral speech: → reframes Caesar as generous, humane emotional display: → turns crowd against conspirators [completeera.com]   👉 So:  interpretation defeats intention    6. The deeper irony: Rome never fully agreed even “back then” This is the most subtle correction to your premise.  Even in early Rome:  tyrant-killing was:  contested and ambiguous   not universally agreed   As scholarship notes:  political killing as “tyrannicide” was never a settled consensus in Roman thought [dcc.dickinson.edu]   ✅ So:  the “tradition” Brutus invokes was already: constructed, selective, rhetorical    7. Final synthesis  Brutus and Cassius acted in conscious imitation of earlier Roman exempla where would-be kings were eliminated for the preservation of liberty. However, the political conditions of the late Republic were fundamentally different: Caesar possessed real military power, mass popular support, and had already reshaped Roman institutions. Their fatal error was twofold: they misjudged public perception and failed to control the political consequences of the act, allowing their intended message to be reversed by events and rhetoric.   ✅ One-line conclusion (your idiom):  Brutus killed Caesar as if Rome were still Livy—but Rome had already become something else, and answered him accordingly.   If you want, we can map Brutus’ own speech (in Appian/Plutarch/Shakespeare) against Antony’s as a perfect case of competing Gricean “meanings.” Thanks for the correction of the premise. So my point was perhaps that back then the patriciate still counted, and the official narrative --the official story, as reported by Livy -- makes this triad of tyranicides to which Cicero appeals -- as HAVING BEEN JUSTLY PUNISHED -- the reversal with Bruto etc -- so that in the early republic, the patres had a controlling power and that even patricians who plotted against Giulio Cesare could not appeal to any power of their own? Feedback? Input? Thanks. This is now exactly the right refinement of your point, and it leads to a very compelling historical–Gricean diagnosis. You are not wrong—you just need to shift from “they despised tyrants” to:  “the authority that defined someone as a tyrant was located in a very different place.”  Let me sharpen your thesis.  1. ✅ Early Republic: the patres dominate the “interpretation of regnum” In the Livian episodes (Cassius, Maelius, Manlius):  the key agents are:  the senate (patres) magistrates aligned with them     What matters most: Not simply that someone acts ambitiously, but that:  the ruling elite successfully frames him as “seeking kingship.”   So:                          FigureWhat he doesWhat elite saysCassiusagrarian reform“this leads to monarchy”Maeliusgrain distribution“he aims at regnum”Manliusdebt relief + popularity“he seeks power”  ✅ Outcome:  execution follows interpretation, not pure fact   👉 Therefore your key point stands:  the patriciate controls the narrative and thus the result    2. ✅ Why this works “back then” Because:  political power is:  still oligarchically concentrated   there is:  no independent mass political structure   the plebs may react emotionally—but:   they do not control the outcome   ✅ Even when they sympathise:  elite institutions:  frame + judge + execute      3. ❗ Late Republic: that control collapses By the time of Caesar:  The patres no longer control:  armies public opinion economic legitimacy   Instead we have:  generals with personal armies masses politically mobilised rhetoric as a mass weapon   ✅ So:  the power to define meaning shifts    4. ✅ Brutus and Cassius’ miscalculation Now your key insight becomes very precise:  They assumed:  killing the “tyrant-like” figure → restores the old logic  i.e.:  Senate defines people follow   But in reality:  they no longer control interpretation   So:              Their intentionPublic uptake“we punished a tyrant”“you murdered Caesar”  ✅ This is not just a mistake:  it is a structural misreading of who controls meaning    5. Grice/Speranza formulation (your framework, refined) We can phrase it like this:  Early Republic  Speaker:  patrician elite   Meaning:  “this man seeks regnum”   Uptake:  accepted   Result:  execution     Late Republic  Speaker:  Brutus/Cassius   Competing speaker:  Antony (and Caesarian faction)   Meaning becomes:  contested     ✅ Outcome:  no stable implicature emerges    6. Pompey vs Caesar (your aside) You asked:  didn’t Caesar act similarly toward Pompey?  Yes—but:  the struggle Caesar–Pompey:  is no longer about:  “who is the tyrant”   but:  two competing power-holders       ✅ That already shows:  the old “tyrannicide logic” has broken down    7. Final synthesis  In early Rome, figures like Cassius, Maelius, and Manlius are condemned as would-be tyrants because the patrician elite retains the authority to define and enforce that interpretation. By the late Republic, that authority has fractured: political meaning is contested among different actors, and the Senate no longer controls the reception of actions. Brutus and Cassius miscalculated not by misunderstanding history, but by assuming that the institutional power to fix meaning still belonged to them.   ✅ One-line conclusion (your register):  In Livy’s Rome the patres decide who is a tyrant; in Caesar’s Rome no one does—and Brutus kills as if the old voice still ruled.   If you like, we can map Antony’s funeral speech as a deliberate counter‑implicature to Brutus—it's one of the clearest reversals of intended meaning in Roman history.Manlio Capitolino (A. V. C. CCCLND). Anseres Iovis iam loquuntur, et gladius meus respondet

 

GRICE E MANLIO a new magistrate, called a PRETORE, who was invested with authority that some historians have described as almost preternatural. He is chosen from the patricians, and is, in fact, a sort of THIRD consul, whose duty it is Jus in urbe dicere,[26] to lay down the law — a privilege that, if improperly exercised, might include the prostration of justice—in the city. The patricians thus kept to themselves the power of interpreting the law; and as ambiguity seems inherent in the very nature of law, almost any latitude was left to those who were at liberty to declare its meaning. Grice and Speranza has this from Abbott below under MANLIO -- the dictator who succeeds FURIO upon Furio's abdication -- (We hope that's correct). It concerns not now Greek-hexametre artificice but th lawitself, but it uses Pericean terminology -- for Pericean index -- and Grice's dictum vs. implicatum, are cognate with this dicere 'in ius in urbe dicere' -- with the cognate 'dictate' thrown into the bargain -- and as this then pertains to the pretore. Does Livy or others focus on this DICERE -- didn't the TWELVE tables already did that? So what does the pretor (patrician) -- 'third consul' almost in Abbott's parlance -- add? SPECIFIC APPLICATION of a twelve-table thing into specific situation -- incidentally -- what is the longest passage of the twelve laws we have -- many pages in Loeb?-- because Cicero said it was mandatory schooling, -- even if it seems some of their content is now lost? Input? Feedback? Thanks. Abbott: GRICE E MANLIO a new magistrate, called a PRETORE, who was invested with authority that some historians have described as almost preternatural. He is chosen from the patricians, and is, in fact, a sort of THIRD consul, whose duty it is Jus in urbe dicere,[26] to lay down the law — a privilege that, if improperly exercised, might include the prostration of justice—in the city. The patricians thus kept to themselves the power of interpreting the law; and as ambiguity seems inherent in the very nature of law, almost any latitude was left to those who were at liberty to declare its meaning. This is an excellent line of thought, because you’ve put your finger on a real structural shift in Roman law:  from fixed law (Twelve Tables) → to applied / interpreted law (praetor)  and the hinge is precisely your word:  dicere (to “say” the law)  Let me clarify point by point.  1. ✅ ius dicere — what does it actually mean? The phrase you cite,  ius dicere (“to declare the law”)  is absolutely central.  It does NOT mean:  to “make law” nor merely to “read law”   ✅ It means:  to state what the law requires in a specific case   There is a beautiful Roman definition (later juristic but capturing the idea):  wherever the praetor decides to exercise his authority, there is ius (“law”), because there he renders (dicit) it [Roman Law...ources.com]   👉 In your Gricean terms:  lex (statute) = the “dictum” ius dicere = the assignment of meaning / application    2. ✅ What did the Twelve Tables do? You are right: 👉 The Twelve Tables already “said” (in a sense):  procedural rules penalties formulas   Example (real fragment):  Si in ius vocat, ito. “If he summons to court, he shall go.” [avalon.law.yale.edu]   ✅ But their nature is:  extremely brief often:  rigid archaic obscure     👉 So:  they do not solve cases they only: provide starting rules    3. ❗ What does the praetor add? This is the key answer.  Praetor = NOT legislator but:  manager of legal applicability   His core powers:  decide:  whether a case can proceed   define:  how the case is framed   provide:  remedies (actions, defenses)     ✅ Mechanism:  yearly: → he issues an edict (edictum) stating:  under what conditions he will grant legal action     [laws.studio]  👉 So:  he does not change the Tables but:   determines how (or whether) they apply    4. ✅ Your formulation is very good (refined) You asked if the praetor performs:  “specific application of a twelve‑table thing into specific situation”  ✅ Yes—with one addition:  he may also create new pathways around the old law   Example (general, not inferred from one source):  if the strict law gives no remedy, the praetor may: → grant a new form of action   👉 Hence later term:  ius honorarium = praetorian law supplementing the civil law    5. ✅ Why Abbott calls him a “third consul” There is some truth (despite satire):  praetor:  ranked just below consuls had imperium remained in city while consuls went to war     [Praetor - NovaRoma]  ✅ Functionally:  consuls:  govern / command army   praetor:  governs legal space     👉 So:  “third consul” ≈ rhetorical but intelligible    6. ✅ Your key insight: interpretation = power You said:  patricians kept interpretation  This is historically correct for early phases:  originally:  legal knowledge (formulas, procedures) was: → restricted elite knowledge     The Twelve Tables:  were designed to: → limit that monopoly [britannica.com]   BUT: The praetor reintroduces controlled flexibility  because:  interpretation cannot be fully eliminated     👉 So:  law becomes public but justice remains mediated    7. ✅ How much of the Twelve Tables do we have? Important correction: 👉 We do not have them as a continuous text.  What survives:  about:  100–140 fragments   preserved via:  Cicero jurists later writers     [ia801507.u...rchive.org], [droitromai...e-alpes.fr]  ✅ No full version exists:  “Only random quotations… knowledge derived from later references” [britannica.com]   👉 Loeb editions:  reconstruct fragments spread over:  many pages   but:  still fragmentary      8. ✅ Cicero and schooling You’re right:  Cicero says: → children memorized the Tables   [ia801507.u...rchive.org]  👉 That tells us:  law was:  culturally foundational   but:  not necessarily fully understood      9. ✅ Final conceptual synthesis (your framework) You are essentially mapping:                               LevelRoman conceptGricean analogyLex (Tables)fixed textdictumPraetorinterpreterimplicature-generatorCasesituationcontextDecisionius dictumuptake  ✅ So the praetor:  does not just “apply” but: mediates between rule and situation    ✅ Final one-line conclusion (your register)  The Twelve Tables say the law—but the praetor says what the Tables mean when they meet a case.   If you like, I can show a specific formula from later Roman procedure (“intentio, condemnatio…”) to illustrate exactly how the praetor translates law into a usable statement.

 

 

Grice e Manlio Gens Manlia Stupid Question (Interlocutor): Manli, parcesne filio tuo qui contra imperium tuum feliciter pugnavit? (Manlius, will you spare your son who fought successfully against your command?) Snappy Answer / Move 2 (Roman Hero): Imperium stat. (The command stands.) Gricean Analysis: Consisting of a noun and a verb, this utterance invokes absolute gravitas. It implies that-clause: individual human lives, even family, are completely irrelevant when weighed against military discipline. Attempted Cancellation / Move 3 (Interlocutor): Hoc dicis ut severitatem ostendas antequam ei veniam des. (You say this, that-clause: to show severity before you grant him a pardon.) Doubling Down / Move 4 (Roman Hero): Dico securi filium meum statim feriendum esse ut disciplina servetur. (I command, that-clause: my son must be struck down with the axe immediately so that discipline is preserved.) GThe Latin Utterance: Imperium stat. The Bolognese Professor’s Italian Explanation: "Niente è più monumentale di questo legame inscindibile tra un nome sovrano e un verbo di stabilità assoluta. La totale nudità della frase, priva di qualificatori o di affetti paterni, genera la più terribile delle implicature: l'ordine impersonale dello Stato trascende e annulla ogni legame di sangue, facendo intendere che l'obbedienza alla legge non ammette eccezioni, nemmeno di fronte al sacrificio della propria discendenza." Contrived English Translation: "Nothing is existing that is more like a giant stone monument than this unbreakable tie between a ruler-like noun and a verb of absolute unmoving stability. The total nakedness of the sentence, being completely empty of descriptive adjectives or fatherly emotions, manufactures the most terrifying of inferred meanings that-clause: the non-human order of the government goes beyond and wipes out every blood relation, causing it to be understood that obeying the legal system allows no rule-breaking, not even when standing in front of the killing of one's own children." The Master approaches Manlio with Renaissance solemnity, holding up the execution of his son as the ultimate, terrifying pinnacle of civic duty. The Master’s Italian Explanation: "Ecco il culmine della gravitas romana: un nome e un verbo. Con queste due sole parole, Manlio fa intendere al mondo che la sacra disciplina militare e l'autorità della Repubblica valgono infinitamente più della vita di un singolo uomo, fosse anche il proprio figlio." Contrived English Translation: "Right here is the highest peak of the heavy seriousness belonging to the Romans: a singular noun and a singular verb. By means of these two words and no more, Manlius forces the entire global world to understand that-clause: the holy routines of soldierly discipline and the ruling power of the Republican government possess an amount of worth that is infinitely greater than the biological life-span of one isolated human being, even if that person happened to be his very own male offspring."

 

Grice e Manlio. As for the earliest Manlius, I would be a little cautious with Publius Manlius Vulso as “the” founder-like earliest example. The earliest securely prominent Manlius in the political tradition is usually taken to be Gneo Manlio Cincinnato, consul in 480 BC. The Vulso branch is indeed very old, but the safest broad statement is that the gens Manlia is among the oldest patrician houses, traditionally from Tusculum, with Vulso, Capitolinus, and later Torquatus as major cognominal branches. So if you want a strictly clean sentence, I would avoid making Publio Manlio Vulso the single earliest representative unless you are following a specific fasti entry you already trust. [en.wikipedia.org]Manlio Cincinato, Gnaeo (XXX). Dicta.

 

Grice e Manlio. Manlio Vulso, Publio. Tribune CCCV A. V. C. As for the earliest Manlius, I would be a little cautious with Publo Manlio Vulso as “the” founder-like earliest example. The earliest securely prominent Manlius in the political tradition is usually taken to be Gnaeus Manlius Cincinnatus, consul in 480 BC. The Vulso branch is indeed very old, but the safest broad statement is that the gens Manlia is among the oldest patrician houses, traditionally from Tusculum, with Vulso, Capitolinus, and later Torquatus as major cognominal branches. So if you want a strictly clean sentence, I would avoid making Publius Manlius Vulso the single earliest representative unless you are following a specific fasti entry you already trust. [en.wikipedia.org] Manlio Vulso, Publio (XXX). Dicta.

 

 

Grice e Manlio. Gens Manlia Earliest Example: Publius Manlius Vulso, Consular Tribune in CCCU_A.U.C.. Best Representative: Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus. Three-time Consul and Dictator, famous for his severe, absolute discipline. Pragmatic Dialogue: Move 1 (Stupid Question): "Num filium tuum securi percussisti quod eum odisti?" (Did you execute your son with an axe because you hated him?) Move 2 (Implicature-Laden Answer): (cum gravitatem) "Consulis imperium in proelio sprevit." English Translation: (with dignity) "He flouted the Consul's direct orders in battle." Analysis: IMPLICATVRA +> that execution was required to protect the absolute rule of law and preserve military discipline, regardless of familial love. Move 3 (Attempted Cancellation): "At ipse hostem vicit et spolia reportavit!" (But he defeated the enemy and brought back the spoils!) Move 4 (Protagonist's Doubledown): "Disciplina militaris a maioribus tradita sanguine meo sancienda est! DISIMPLICATVRA +>" that military obedience is paramount over individual survival or military victory. In what way does this episode under Tito Manlio Imperioso Torquato compare to Giunio's executin his son for engaging in single combat -- where the cases compared? Yes. These cases were compared, and the comparison is already invited by Livy himself because he places the two youthful duel-episodes of Titus Manlius Torquatus and Marcus Valerius Corvus in close succession, with clear narrative echoing between them. Later readers, most famously Machiavelli, make the contrast fully explicit: Manlius and Valerius are presented as two equally successful Roman exemplars, but of opposite temper and opposite modes of command. [perseus.tufts.edu], [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [standardebooks.org] The core contrast is this. As young men, both Manlius Torquatus and Valerius Corvus become famous through single combat against a Gaul. In each case there is challenge, permission, duel, victory, and the acquisition of a cognomen: Torquatus from the torque, Corvus from the raven. Livy clearly wants the second story read in light of the first, almost as a Roman pair. But the moral development of the two men then diverges sharply. Manlius later becomes the emblem of disciplina carried to the point of terrifying consistency: the same man who had once asked permission before fighting the Gaul later executes his own son for not asking permission before fighting a Latin champion. Valerius, by contrast, remains the gentler and more popular commander, one whose authority works through accessibility and favour rather than dread. [perseus.tufts.edu], [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [standardebooks.org] That is why your Manlian dialogue works so well. The son’s defence would naturally be, “but I won and brought back spoils”; the father’s answer is that victory without obedience is politically worse than defeat with obedience. In Roman terms, the issue is not private bravery but command structure. Livy’s son of Manlius is tragic because he behaves exactly as an archaic hero ought to behave and exactly as a disciplined Roman officer must not behave. He wins the duel and loses the constitutional point. [anastrophe...hicago.edu] So the Gricean point can be put very neatly. When Manlius Torquatus says, in effect, “he flouted the consul’s orders,” what is explicitly conveyed is merely the breach of command. What is implicated is much larger: that no private success, however brilliant, can be allowed to compete with the public grammar of obedience. The son’s exploit would otherwise imply a rival principle, namely that conspicuous success may license disobedience. Manlius’ execution is therefore a brutal cancellation of that rival implicature. It says, in Roman military terms: do not draw that conclusion from this victory. [en.wikipedia.org], [anastrophe...hicago.edu] This is exactly where comparison with Valerius Corvus becomes useful. Corvus too gains fame by a duel, but his story is framed as divine favour and civic charisma; Manlius’ later family story is framed as discipline and constitutional severity. If Corvus suggests that Rome may be helped by heaven and embodied in a favoured hero, Manlius insists that Rome must still be held together by command even against the claims of heroic blood. One represents auspicial glory; the other, disciplinary law. Roman tradition wants both, but it knows they strain against each other. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [standardebooks.org] And yes, later political thought saw this pair exactly in those terms. Machiavelli explicitly compares the severity of Manlius Torquatus with the gentleness of Valerius Corvinus, arguing that both methods could secure obedience and glory, though by opposite routes. That is nearly your contrast already. Manlius rules by fear and exemplarity of punishment; Valerius by familiarity and benign authority. The Roman tradition preserves both because Rome liked to imagine itself as capacious enough to vindicate contradictory virtues when both served the res publica. [standardebooks.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] If you want the sharpest one-sentence formulation, it would be this: Manlius’ killing of his son is the anti-Corvus moment: where Corvus’ duel lets heroic success bloom into public honour, Manlius’ response to his son insists that no heroic success may be allowed to signify exemption from command. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [anastrophe...hicago.edu] And in a slightly more Gricean idiom: Corvus’ exploit implicates divine favour and heroic legitimacy; Manlius’ punishment of his son disimplicates the rival thought that battlefield success can ever outweigh military obedience. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [anastrophe...hicago.edu] If you like, I can next give you either a compact Latin-and-English note on the key Livy passage for the son’s execution, or a short “Grice e Manlio” paragraph in the same dry manner as your Corvo piece. And I was also asking for parallel or comparison, if done, with Guinio Bruto -- because, in that famous paining, doesn't he have his own Sons (in plural) excecuted because of something? Please provide the comparison with the MANLIO explicitly -- and (b) apparently the earliest MANLIO was the accumulative named Publio MANLIO Vuslo. What is a 'torque' -- in this case we have Tito Manlio IMPERSIOSO (agnomen, we suppose) TORQUE (meaning what?) thanks. Yes: the comparison with Lucius Junius Brutus is very much the right one, and in Roman memory it is one of the deepest parallels to Titus Manlius Torquatus. Brutus has his sons executed, in the plural, for treasonously joining the conspiracy to restore the Tarquins; Manlius has his son executed for disobeying orders by engaging in unauthorized single combat. In both cases the father subordinates private affection to public order. But the exact principle differs. With Brutus, the issue is political loyalty to the newly founded Republic: he kills his sons because they have betrayed the commonwealth and sided with kingship. With Manlius, the issue is military discipline within an already existing republic: he kills his son not for treason to Rome, but for disobedience to command. So Brutus stands for the primacy of the res publica over blood in the constitutional sphere; Manlius stands for the primacy of disciplina over blood in the military sphere. [loebclassics.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [elfinspell.com] That is why the two make such a Roman pair. Brutus says, in effect: even my sons may not survive if they threaten the republic. Manlius says: even my son may not survive if he teaches the army that private glory outranks command. The family resemblance is severe, but the institutional setting is not the same. Brutus punishes conspiracy; Manlius punishes unauthorized heroism. Brutus’ sons are traitors; Manlius’ son is, tragically, a victorious offender. That is exactly what makes Manlius the harsher and more paradoxical figure. [loebclassics.com], [en.wikipedia.org] If you want the comparison put in your dry Gricean way, it would be this: Brutus’ execution of his sons implicates that the republic must be preserved even against paternal pity. Manlius’ execution of his son implicates something even more forbidding: that military obedience must be preserved even against patriotic success. In Brutus, the public order is saved from dynastic betrayal; in Manlius, it is saved from the rival principle that victory may excuse disobedience. [loebclassics.com], [en.wikipedia.org] Now to Torquatus. The word is from torques or torquis, a twisted neck-ring, often of metal, especially associated in Roman imagination with Gauls and other non-Roman warriors. The standard ancient definition is exactly that: a twisted ornament worn round the neck. Titus Manlius received the cognomen Torquatus because after defeating the Gallic champion in single combat he stripped the torque from the dead man’s neck and put it on himself. So Torquatus means, in effect, “the man of the torque,” or “he who took the torque.” It is a victory-cognomen formed from the trophy. [en.wikipedia.org], [perseus.tufts.edu] In other words, the sequence is: Titus Manlius then Titus Manlius Imperiosus then, after the duel, Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus. [en.wikipedia.org] Imperiosus is the harder one semantically, but in context it points to command, authority, imperium, and the family’s association with stern exercise of power. Torquatus is more concrete and episodic: it comes from the torque itself, the neck-ring taken from the Gaul. That is why it resembles Corvus as an earned agnomen. One wins a duel, one acquires a name. [en.wikipedia.org], [perseus.tufts.edu] As for the earliest Manlius, I would be a little cautious with Publius Manlius Vulso as “the” founder-like earliest example. The earliest securely prominent Manlius in the political tradition is usually taken to be Gnaeus Manlius Cincinnatus, consul in 480 BC. The Vulso branch is indeed very old, but the safest broad statement is that the gens Manlia is among the oldest patrician houses, traditionally from Tusculum, with Vulso, Capitolinus, and later Torquatus as major cognominal branches. So if you want a strictly clean sentence, I would avoid making Publius Manlius Vulso the single earliest representative unless you are following a specific fasti entry you already trust. [en.wikipedia.org] And if you want the whole thing compressed into one plain paragraph: The proper Roman comparison for Manlius is indeed Lucius Junius Brutus, who had his sons executed for conspiring to restore the Tarquins. Both fathers sacrifice their children to public principle, but the principles differ: Brutus enforces loyalty to the republic against dynastic treason, whereas Manlius Torquatus enforces military discipline against unauthorized heroism. As for Torquatus, it comes from torques, the twisted neck-ring taken from the defeated Gallic champion; the cognomen therefore means “the man of the torque,” a trophy-name earned in combat, just as Corvus is earned from the raven episode. [loebclassics.com], [en.wikipedia.org], [perseus.tufts.edu] If you like, I can next give you one tight paragraph specifically in your “Grice e Manlio / Grice e Bruto” format, with the implicature made fully explicit. This 'single combats' require quite a Griceian surrounding. Suppose the Roman (Corvo engaging with ONE GAUL already attacked by a RAVEN), or more to the point here, TORQUATO engaging in single combat with foreign-language speaker from whom he takes the ring, and TORQUATO's son doing the same -- same enemy -- because nowadyas, even Oxonians engage in single combat for the sport of it. But back to FATHER torquato. The idea is that the troops or armies are fighting, and then across languages, a pact is settled, that the thing is going to be defined by who wins the single combat -- I can imagine that if the Gauls did not get the details of the SPONSIO OR CONTRACT clear enough, they may causally (Stevenson-like) not accept the defeat and attack Torquato. Doesn't Livy, or for thta matter Machqiavelli consider the difficulties engaging in 'rules of war' with someone who doesn't speak Roman -- would an interpeter (alla messenger) be needed -- who would, as the cliche goes, would later be shot or murdered when he whoud not have? Thanks. Your instinct is sound. The ancient story does not look like a carefully notarised bilateral contract across languages, with terms agreed line by line and then honoured by both armies in a modern law-of-war sense. It looks much more like a public challenge ritual that both sides already knew how to recognise. In Livy, the Gaul comes forward, makes a challenge, and the whole scene is staged before both armies as a visible and audible provocation. What matters most is not a detailed sponsio, but a conventional script: a champion steps out, taunts the enemy, invites a matching opponent, and the armies watch. In the Manlius episode the emphasis is not on negotiated rules but on Roman permission, spectacle, and exemplary courage. Livy even says the two are placed between the armies “more in the manner of a spectacle than by the law of war,” which is almost exactly the line you want: the duel is recognisable and public, but not because there is some fully articulated interstate code being scrupulously interpreted. [LIVY, Hist...al Library], [loebclassics.com] So I would distinguish three things. First, challenge and uptake. The Gaul’s challenge has to be intelligible enough for the Romans to respond. That does not require philosophical agreement or perfect bilingual drafting. Gesture, tone, prior custom, and very simple verbal signalling are enough. “Let your best man come out” is not a subtle speech-act. This is one of those cases where a shared martial script may do more work than a shared language. Second, permission and internal discipline. What Livy cares about on the Roman side is not whether the Gaul fully understood every term, but whether the Roman champion had authorisation. Manlius explicitly asks leave from his commander before fighting. That is the Roman legal and disciplinary point. The duel matters because it has been taken up under command, not because an inter-army contract has been flawlessly negotiated. [LIVY, Hist...al Library], [en.wikipedia.org] Third, aftermath. You are quite right that even if the immediate challenge is understood, that does not mean the losing side is thereby bound to treat the whole battle as settled. In fact, the ancient evidence points the other way. These duels are often morale-events, omen-events, or honour-events, not dispositive treaties. In the Valerius episode, once the Gaul falls, the larger fighting resumes or spreads; the armies do not simply pack up because a legal condition has been satisfied. That again suggests that the duel is exemplary, not conclusively contractual. [qcurtius.com] So no, I do not think Livy or Machiavelli are deeply worried about interpreter-failure in the way a modern historian of diplomacy might be. Their interest lies elsewhere. Livy wants to show courage, discipline, spectacle, divine favour, and Roman character. Machiavelli, when he compares Manlius Torquatus and Valerius Corvinus, is interested in modes of command, severity versus humanity, not in whether a herald mistranslated the terms of engagement. [standardebooks.org], [en.wikipedia.org] But your Gricean point is still very strong. The duel depends on a thick surrounding common ground, and that common ground is not primarily linguistic in the narrow sense. It is pragmatic and theatrical. Everyone present knows enough of the script to know what is being proposed: one champion issues a challenge, one champion accepts, both armies watch, honour and morale are put at stake. That is why an interpreter, if present, is not carrying the entire institution on his shoulders. He may help with lexical clarity, but the larger act is already visible. So I would put it this way. These Roman single combats are not founded on a fully explicit contract between language communities, but on a publicly recognisable agonistic convention. A herald or interpreter may assist, but the force of the event lies less in exact bilateral wording than in a shared martial script of challenge, acceptance, permission, and witnessed outcome. What matters to Livy is therefore not whether the Gaul and the Roman have negotiated a complete law-of-war settlement, but whether the Roman champion acts under command and whether the result displays Roman virtus, morale, and discipline. The duel is intelligible across languages because it is heavily scaffolded by common performative expectations; but it is not usually war-ending, and nothing in the narrative requires the losing side to treat it as dispositive. [loebclassics.com], [LIVY, Hist...al Library], [qcurtius.com] And on your final point: yes, if one wanted to be slightly wicked, one could say that the real “contract” is mostly on the Roman side. The Roman commander, the Roman army, and the Roman historian agree on what counts as legitimate uptake. Whether the Gauls felt similarly bound is another matter, and Livy is not much interested in giving them that interiority. If you want, I can next do one of two things. I can give you a compact Gricean paragraph on single combat as a public speech-act resting on non-verbal common ground. Or I can give you a compact paragraph on Bologna, disputatio, Roman law, and why juridical pro and contra is not yet the same as Carneadean equipollence. And do we have the latin in Livy for "Torquato asked leave from commander" because apparent the fact that Torquato's son did NOT do that which justified Torquato's killing his son. And what is tha arrangement then? Is Torquato asking the commander to let him NOT be under his orders? Do who is he fighting for? For himself. Grice wondered about that and said that a ood thing about England and Australia is that while they cannot engage in a game of cricket 11 players from each country can. It would be good to have Livy's Latin for theistinction of 'real war' versus 'spectacle' because it would seem Livy is implicating that this is Torquato figthing FOR HIMSELF and not 're-praesenting' the Romans -- else why bother to ask the commander? No wonder fight ensuded aeve after the gallus was defeated by Torquatus. And what details do we have in Livy's latin for the great 'sin' of Torquatus's son -- was a Gallus also involbed,and Torquatus's son just skipped the bureaucratic step of realeasing him from the uathority of his commaner (his father in this case, or anyother person?) and -- this was not LEGES XII -- so how dura lex sed lex are we talkinga bout -- It would seem is a Beccaria-Bentham utilitarian regulation against HERO-worship? Thanks Yes. Livy gives you the distinction very sharply. For the father, the crucial permission scene in book 7 is: “Necesse est” inquit “ut aut vincam aut ostendam Gallis ducem Romanum. Numquam ego iniussu tuo, imperator, extra ordinem in hostem pugnabo, non si certam victoriam videam: sed si tu permittis, volo ego illi beluae ostendere me ex ea familia ortum quae Gallorum agmen ex rupe Tarpeia deiecit.” Titus Manlius Torquatus [thelatinlibrary.com] The wording varies slightly by edition and transmission, but the key phrases are stable and the important ones are these: iniussu tuo without your order extra ordinem out of the line, out of rank, outside the assigned order si tu permittis if you permit it [thelatinlibrary.com], [cts.perseids.org] That is the point. He is not asking to cease fighting for Rome and start fighting “for himself” in a private modern sense. He is asking for a licensed exception within command. The duel is still Roman, still under the general’s authority, still part of military action; but because it is a deviation from one’s station and ordinary tactical role, it requires express authorisation. In Roman terms, he is not being released from obedience; he is obeying by asking. That is exactly why the later case of the son is fatal by contrast. [cts.perseids.org], [thelatinlibrary.com] And Livy’s phrase for the “spectacle” point is the famous one: duo in medio armati spectaculi magis more quam lege belli destituuntur. Livy [thelatinlibrary.com] That means, roughly: The two armed men were stationed in the middle more in the manner of a spectacle than according to the law of war. [thelatinlibrary.com], [01_Heitsch...ät zu Köln] This does not mean the duel is private sport in the Oxonian or cricket sense. It means that the mode of the encounter is theatrical, exemplary, set apart from ordinary battlefield collision. It is war staged as display. So your instinct is right: Livy is marking a difference between ordinary collective combat and this ritualised, watched, quasi-dramatic interruption. But that does not make it non-Roman or non-public. It remains an act under command, merely one that is not “lege belli” in the sense of regular mass engagement. [01_Heitsch...ät zu Köln], [thelatinlibrary.com] Now for the son in book 8. The key sentence is: seu ira seu pudor seu fatalis quaedam vis, oblitus consulis edicti, oblitus patriae disciplinae, temere in certamen ruit, quo vinci se quam vincere mallet. Livy [thelatinlibrary.com] The crucial phrases are: oblitus consulis edicti forgetting the consul’s edict oblitus patriae disciplinae forgetting the discipline of his country temere in certamen ruit he rushed rashly into the combat [thelatinlibrary.com], [anastrophe...hicago.edu] That is the great sin. The issue is not simply that he fought a duel; his father had done that. The issue is that he did so after an explicit prohibition, and without permission, and while serving not as a free heroic adventurer but as a subordinate officer in an army whose whole point was to suppress private initiative. Livy’s son is caught by anger, shame, and fate, and in that moment he ceases to act as a disciplined Roman commander’s son and acts like an archaic hero. That is why the father kills him. [anastrophe...hicago.edu], [thelatinlibrary.com] You also asked whether a Gaul is involved. In the son’s case, no: the opponent is not a Gaul but a Latin cavalry leader, Geminus Maecius, in the Latin War. So the structural similarity to the father’s earlier exploit is exact enough to be painful, but the enemy is different. Father: Gaul. Son: Latin. What matters morally is not ethnicity but command. [perseus.tufts.edu], [anastrophe...hicago.edu] And Livy makes the son’s self-understanding tragically clear when he returns: ut omnes sciant, inquit, te, pater, stirpem illam vere esse, haec spolia equestria ex hoste provocante capta fero. Livy [anastrophe...hicago.edu] That is, approximately: So that all may know, father, that I am truly of your stock, I bring these horseman’s spoils taken from an enemy who challenged me. [anastrophe...hicago.edu] That is devastatingly Roman. The son thinks he has confirmed lineage; the father sees that he has betrayed discipline. The son reads the act genealogically and heroically; the father reads it institutionally and politically. So your question “is Torquatus asking the commander to let him not be under orders?” can now be answered cleanly: no. He is asking for an authorised deviation. Permission does not suspend command; it is command in a special form. That is why the father’s own duel is legitimate and the son’s is not. On your Bentham-Beccaria point: yes, there is something almost utilitarian in the background, though one should not anachronise too heavily. The Roman rationale is that an army cannot survive if individual glory becomes a rival principle to obedience. So the father’s execution of his son is not “dura lex sed lex” in a technical Twelve Tables sense; it is disciplina militaris as a constitutional necessity of command. It is anti-heroic precisely in order to preserve collective military efficacy. In that sense, yes: it is a regulation against private hero-worship when private heroism threatens the public chain of command. Livy summarises it brutally: quamvis prospere pugnasset, because he had fought, though successfully, against the Latins in defiance of the order. Success makes no difference to the principle. [loebclassics.com], [thelatinlibrary.com] So the shortest possible formulation is this: The father’s duel is legitimate because it is authorised exception within command; the son’s duel is criminal because it is unauthorised heroism against explicit orders. Livy marks the duel-form itself as spectaculi magis more quam lege belli, a theatrical and exemplary interruption of ordinary war, but not a private escape from military obedience. The whole Roman point is that even glory must remain under imperium. [thelatinlibrary.com], [thelatinlibrary.com], [loebclassics.com] If you like, I can next do one of two things. I can give you the father’s and the son’s key Livian Latin side by side, with very tight parsing. Or I can turn this into one compact Gricean paragraph on “licensed exception” versus “unauthorised implicature of private glory.” And now Grice and Speranza want to know evertying about this Geminus Maecius Latin cavalry leader in Latin war -- because the Gauls of Marco Corvino and Torquato are outsider who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time -- but with Geminus Mecius, where was the battle taking care, and it is then, in contrsat to Toruato's single combat with oen Gaul, in the context of an organised fight against a DIFFERENT PEOPLE (the Latins, not the Romans) , with the Latins already organised to the point of cavalry officers -- and understood by historians as Roman expansionism over neighbouring tribes (the Romans were not conscious that they were speaking LINGUA LATINA and that Geminus Mecio was a LATIN who spoke the lingo Torquato and his son were speakign? And what was that set Torquato's son off? Maybe the father acted in terms of what he saw a lack of paralellism between his previous episode with the Gaul and his son's involvement with Geminus Maecio? And again, the commander was not necessarily Tortuato father, right? And in what capacity does he decree the execution: surely not jsut as father but as holidnng some office, like tribune? Thanks. Yes. This can be made much cleaner now. First, Geminus Maecius is not a Gaul at all. He is a Tusculan cavalry commander on the Latin side in the Latin War. That matters a great deal, because it confirms your instinct that the son’s exploit is structurally similar to the father’s old duel, but politically and culturally very different. The father had fought a Gallic outsider; the son fights a Latin noble from a neighbouring community deeply entangled with Rome, one whose men share language, customs, arms, and military habits with the Romans. Livy makes that point explicitly just before the episode: the Latins were so similar to the Romans that confusion and dangerous familiarity were real military risks. [perseus.tufts.edu], [en.wikipedia.org], [loebclassics.com] That is why the battle setting matters. The episode occurs in the campaign that leads to the Battle of Vesuvius / Veseris in 340 BC, in the neighbourhood of Mount Vesuvius, with the Roman army operating in Campania against the Latin coalition. Livy places the reconnaissance action before the main battle, when the armies are near one another and mounted patrols move out from camp. So this is not an isolated heroic border-encounter but a patrol incident within an organised war between two highly comparable Italic military systems. [en.wikipedia.org], [loebclassics.com] And yes, this difference from the father’s Gallic duel is crucial. Livy says the Romans were especially anxious because they were fighting men who matched them in lingua, moribus, armorum genere, institutis ante omnia militaribus: language, customs, type of arms, and above all military institutions. That is almost the opposite of the father’s old encounter with a spectacular foreign challenger. Here the danger is not heroic deficiency but over-familiarity, mingling, imitation, and breakdown of command among near-equals who know one another. That is exactly why the consuls issue the stern edict that no one is to fight out of line or on private initiative. [loebclassics.com] So when Geminus Maecius challenges the younger Manlius, the son is not simply reenacting his father’s youthful feat. He is doing something more institutionally dangerous. The father’s old duel against the Gaul had become part of heroic memory and produced the cognomen Torquatus; the son’s duel occurs in a war where private bravado is exactly what the commanders have decided to suppress. So yes, one can say that the father may have seen a lack of parallelism where the son imagined one. The son thinks, “I too have answered a challenge and brought back spoils.” The father sees, “You have mistaken an old heroic template for a permissible act in a radically different operational context.” [anastrophe...hicago.edu], [es.pinterest.com], [loebclassics.com] You also ask what set the son off. Livy is very clear and very psychological here. He says the youth was moved seu ira seu pudor seu fatalis quaedam vis, by anger, or shame at refusing, or some force of fate. In other words, the trigger is not a cool constitutional judgment but the classic heroic cocktail: provocation, honour, and destiny. Geminus Maecius publicly taunts him and asks for single combat so that the result may show how much a Latin horseman surpasses a Roman. That is enough to ignite the exact kind of personal response the consul’s edict was meant to prevent. [perseus.tufts.edu], [sutori.com] And no, the “commander” in the earlier permission-model is not necessarily one’s father. In the son’s case, however, it happens to be both. Titus Manlius Torquatus is at once father and consul. But the Roman point is that the fatal authority is not paternal in the domestic sense. It is consular and military. The son has not merely offended his father’s feelings or household command; he has violated the consul’s edict and the disciplina of the army. That is why Livy repeatedly frames the matter in terms of consular orders, military custom, and public command rather than private family government. [loebclassics.com], [loebclassics.com] That also answers your final point about the execution. Manlius Torquatus decrees the death not “just as father” but as consul exercising imperium. The father-son relation sharpens the tragedy, but the juridical and political form is military command. This is why the story becomes an exemplum of disciplina militaris, not of domestic tyranny. The execution is public, exemplary, and institutional. The father’s grief is swallowed by the office. That is exactly what makes the episode Roman. [loebclassics.com], [loebclassics.com] So the clean summary would be this. Geminus Maecius is a Tusculan cavalry leader in the Latin War, not a Gaul. The duel takes place during the campaign near Vesuvius / Veseris in 340 BC, before the main battle, in a war against Latins who shared language, institutions, and military practice with the Romans. That similarity is the whole point: because the enemy was so like Rome, the consuls forbade private initiative. The younger Manlius, stirred by anger, shame, and fate, accepts Maecius’ challenge and imagines himself repeating his father’s old heroic pattern. His father, however, sees that the analogy is false. The old duel with a Gaul had become heroic memory; this new duel, in a tightly disciplined war against near-equals, is unauthorised disruption of command. Manlius Torquatus therefore condemns him not merely as father but as consul, exercising public military authority rather than private paternal resentment. [perseus.tufts.edu], [en.wikipedia.org], [loebclassics.com], [loebclassics.com], [loebclassics.com] And in a slightly more Gricean compression: The son takes the challenge as if it were still a heroic conversation between champions; the father interprets it as a violation of the army’s shared common ground. In a war against Gauls, a duel might accrue glory. In a war against Latins who are almost Roman mirrors, the same gesture implicates a rival principle, namely that personal honour may override command. It is that implicature, more than the duel itself, that the consul extinguishes. [loebclassics.com], [perseus.tufts.edu], [loebclassics.com] If you want, I can next give you the exact Livy Latin for the lines about the Latins sharing language, customs, and military institutions with Rome, because that is really the hinge of the whole comparison. TITO MANLIO, taking advantage of the position of Metius, stabbed him with his sword, and the latter, feeling himself pierced, could only set up a piercing cry, by way of retaliation upon his antagonist. Having stripped off the armour of his victim, young TITO MANLIO bore it in triumph to his father, Torquatus Manlius, who proceeded to imitate Brutus; but, like most imitations, the appearance of T. Manlius in the part of the "heavy father" was by no means successful. Collecting the troops by the sound of trumpet, so that the audience might be sufficiently large, he throws himself into an imposing attitude; but the imposition was seen through, and the reception he met with was far from flattering. In fact, back to MANLIO, Abbott does say, 'triying to imitate Bruto' -- -- ex post facto -- executing his son/sons (in Bruto's case) but surely the causes are different? Bruto's sons executed for treason, Manlio's Tito exceuted for hybris? Abbott: TITO MANLIO, taking advantage of the position of Metius, stabbed him with his sword, and the latter, feeling himself pierced, could only set up a piercing cry, by way of retaliation upon his antagonist. Having stripped off the armour of his victim, young TITO MANLIO bore it in triumph to his father, Torquatus Manlius, who proceeded to imitate Brutus; but, like most imitations, the appearance of T. Manlius in the part of the "heavy father" was by no means successful. Collecting the troops by the sound of trumpet, so that the audience might be sufficiently large, he throws himself into an imposing attitude; but the imposition was seen through, and the reception he met with was far from flattering. -- Input? Feedback? Thanks You are absolutely right to resist Abbott’s equation of the two episodes. His remark about “imitating Brutus” is clever—but seriously misleading if taken at face value. Let me draw the distinction clearly.  1. ✅ What Brutus does (Livy, Book 2)  Brutus’ sons: → conspire to restore the Tarquins (kingship) This is: → treason (perduellio) against the state   ✅ Brutus’ act:  executes them as traitors and does so: → as magistrate (consul) → in a public legal context   👉 Moral:  the Republic must be preserved even against one’s own family    2. ✅ What Manlius Torquatus does (Book 8)  His son: → wins a duel bravely BUT: → violates orders not to engage the enemy   ✅ So the issue is:  not treason not rebellion not political betrayal  👉 but:  military disobedience    3. ❗ So the causes are fundamentally different                          BrutusManliuspolitical crimedisciplinary violationtreasoninsubordinationagainst stateagainst commanddestroys libertydisrupts order  ✅ So you are exactly right:  Brutus’ sons die for treason Manlius’ son dies for hybris / disobedience   (“hybris” in your Greek sense is useful here—overstepping bounds—but Livy frames it more as disciplina militaris.)  4. ✅ Why Livy links them anyway Livy himself does invite comparison.  Common structure:  father judges son public setting severe punishment conflict of: → private affection vs public duty   ✅ So for Livy:  the analogy is formal, not causal   👉 It’s about:  virtus of the father, not guilt of the son    5. ✅ Abbott’s distortion Abbott says:  Manlius “imitates Brutus”   But he then undermines it:  calls it theatrical suggests audience not convinced implies overacting   👉 This is satire of:  Roman moral severity    6. ✅ Gricean reading (your framework) This becomes very interesting if we put it your way.  Son’s act:  communicative act: → “valor justifies action”   Father’s response:  counters: → “obedience overrides valor”    Brutus case:  message: → “state above family”   Manlius case:  message: → “discipline above success”   ✅ So they belong to same family of utterances, but not same meaning.   7. ✅ The deeper irony You sensed it perfectly.  Brutus:  sons fail morally → justly punished   Manlius:  son succeeds militarily → still punished   👉 This is the shocking point:  success does not justify disobedience    ✅ Final synthesis  Abbott’s comparison between Brutus and Manlius is rhetorically clever but substantively misleading. In Livy, Brutus executes his sons for treason against the state, whereas Manlius executes his son for violating military discipline despite his bravery. The parallel lies not in the cause but in the structure: both exemplify the primacy of public duty over private ties, though applied in very different contexts.   ✅ One-line conclusion (your register):  Brutus punishes betrayal; Manlius punishes disobedience—and Livy makes the second nearly more disturbing than the first.   If you like, we can look at how later Roman writers (especially Cicero) rehabilitate or criticise Manlius’ decision—it becomes quite controversial.Manlio Imperioso Torquato, Tito (XXX). Dicta.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Manlio -- Ossia: Grice e Manlio: la ragione conversazionale dell’orto a Roma e l’implicatura conversazionale  Lucio Manlio Torquato (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale dell’orto a Roma e l’implicatura conversazionale – filosofia italiana – Grice italo, Lucius Manlius Torquatus (the Epicurean spokesman in Cicero’s De finibus) offers a Rome-and-garden analogue for what Grice later theorizes as reason-governed conversational meaning: both pictures treat “what is conveyed” as something that grows out of shared practices and expectations rather than out of bare sentence-meaning alone. For Grice, implicature is a rational, publicly recoverable inference from what is said to what is meant, licensed by cooperative norms (relevance, sufficiency, clarity, candour) and by intentions the hearer can attribute as reasons; for Manlio’s Epicurean scene, the “hortus” is a social setting in which discourse is itself a cultivated art oriented to a telos (tranquillity/pleasure) and therefore governed by its own norms of restraint, frankness, and practical focus. The torques/torquatus motif in your entry nicely sharpens the contrast: it ties Manlio to a heritage of “Manlian discipline” and public honour, yet in De finibus the Epicurean Torquatus argues that the rational basis of life is not austere display but an account of voluptas; likewise, in Grice, the rational basis of conversation is not rhetorical grandeur but the disciplined economy by which speakers make themselves intelligible while leaving some content inferable. Historically, the anchoring is sound: Cicero’s De finibus is set in 50 BC and indeed stages Torquatus defending Epicureanism in Rome; your anachronistic move is to read that hortus conversation as already a laboratory for Gricean implicature, where the “roots” of meaning lie hidden (speaker intentions, shared background, genre expectations) and the “fruit” is what the audience is entitled to take the speaker to mean beyond the explicit words. Grice: “In modern Italian, the name Lucius Manlius Torquatus would likely be rendered as Lucio Manlio Torquato. While the nomen (Manlio) was the official clan name, modern Italian surnames most often derive from the cognomen, which functioned as a hereditary nickname. If following the lineage of the gens Manlia, the primary modern surname would be Torquato. Torquato: Still exists as both a surname and a first name (most famously held by the Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso). Manlio: While less common as a surname, it survives primarily as a male given name in Italy today. Etymology and Implication The name Torquatus carries significant historical and symbolic weight: Etymology: It is derived from the Latin torquis (or torques), meaning "twisted neck-chain," "collar," or "torc". This itself comes from the verb torqueo, meaning "to twist". Literal Meaning: "Adorned with a neck-chain" or "The Collared One". Historical Origin: The title was first earned by Titus Manlius Imperiosus in 361 BC. During a battle against the Gauls, he defeated a giant Gaul in single combat and took the warrior's golden torc as a trophy, placing it around his own neck. Implications: Military Valor: It served as a permanent mark of extraordinary bravery and victory in single combat. "Manlian Discipline": The family became synonymous with extreme severity and strict adherence to duty. The original Torquatus famously executed his own son for engaging the enemy against orders, even though the son had won the fight. Nobility: As one of the gentes maiores (greatest patrician families), the name implied high social status and a long lineage of political leadership, including 13 consulships. Roma antica, orto, De finibus. Lucio Manlio Torquato. Roma. Gricevs: Salvete, Manlivs! Dic mihi, quid significat torques aureus in collo tuo? Estne signum philosophiae aut certaminis culinarii? Manlius: Torques aureus, Gricevs, est memoria antiquae virtutis Manliorum—non solum belli, sed etiam studii sapientiae, nam in orto nostro, disciplina et fortitudo pari modo coluntur. Gricevs: Pulchre dictum, Manlivs! Sed num credis virtutem esse in sola traditione, an etiam in quotidianis rebus, qualia sunt sermones et labores horti? Manlius: Gricevs, virtus vera crescit ex actionibus nostris; sicut planta in horto, radices in terra abscondit, sed fructus omnibus patet. Sic etiam sermo philosophorum florescit ex laboris cotidiana disciplina. Grice and Speranza were repeatedly told, 'The romans never understood philosophy -- they're too practical for that.' As if practical philosophy were not philosophy. And then there's the dogma: it's Greek paidagogi -- but Grice and Speranza would think that the gens MANLIA --one of the six gentes maiores -- along with the Cornelii, Fabii, Claudii, Emilii, and Varii (?) -- were possibly the most philosophical of the patrician gentes. The idea of a gens maior, would it correspond to 'patrician'. Patres of what? of the republic, or of the whole thing (Roma) -- In these two entris we have a Lucio Manlio Torquato and a Publio Manlio Vopisco -- different generations, different philosophical approaches -- but the patrician status in common -- was that perceived as such by the Ancient Romans -- the Vopisci seemed less patrician than the Torquati? Etc. Input? Thanks. There are several strands here, and they fit together rather neatly once one separates Roman terminology from later reconstructions. First, on “gens maior” and “patrician.” The expression gentes maiores does not simply mean “patrician.” All patricians belonged to patrician gentes, but only a small number of those gentes were counted among the “greater” ones. The usual list you were groping toward includes names such as the Cornelii, Fabii, Aemilii, Claudii, and a few others; the Manlii are indeed counted among the old and very prominent patrician houses. So “gens maior” is a subset within the patriciate, something like the most ancient and prestigious lineages, not coextensive with the whole class. The word patricius itself comes, of course, from patres. But “patres” here is not “fathers of the whole Roman people” in a metaphysical sense. It is much more concrete and institutional. It refers to the original members of the Senate, the group remembered (or constructed) as the ancestral political body of early Rome. Their descendants are the patricii. So the semantic chain is: patres as the original senatorial elite, then patricii as those belonging by descent to that order. That is already a political fiction in part, but it is the fiction the Romans themselves worked with. Second, on whether patrician status was felt or graded internally. Yes, the Romans were perfectly capable of perceiving internal gradations. They did not speak in modern sociological terms, but they knew very well that some gentes were older, more illustrious, more “consular,” more saturated with exempla. The Manlii, especially the Torquati, carried enormous symbolic capital: the torques story, the “Manlian discipline,” the willingness to subordinate everything to mos maiorum. That is a kind of moral-philosophical branding, if you like, long before any Greek σχολή enters the picture. So when you compare Torquatus and Vopiscus, you are really registering two different conjunctures of the same gens. Lucius Manlius Torquatus, as he appears in Cicero, stands under a heavy weight of inherited exemplarity. His cognomen is already a compressed narrative: bravery, severity, ancestral authority. When he speaks as an Epicurean, Cicero’s dramatic trick is precisely to place a doctrine of voluptas inside a body marked by disciplina. That tension is philosophical in a quite Roman way: not system-building but the confrontation between inherited norms and alternative accounts of the good. A Manlius Vopiscus is a different sort of figure. The cognomen itself is relatively rare and less charged with old republican exempla. The associations you gesture to—villa, patronage, otium—belong to a later social world in which elite identity is still there but expressed through cultivation, literary patronage, and lifestyle. That can easily feel “less patrician,” but strictly speaking it is not a loss of status, it is a change in the way status is performed. So the difference you sense is real at the level of tone and self-presentation, not necessarily at the level of legal or genealogical rank. The Torquati look like the Republic; the Vopisci look like the cultured aristocracy of the late Republic or early Empire. Third, on the claim that “Romans never understood philosophy.” This is one of those inherited commonplaces that collapses under a closer look. What is true is that the Romans did not, by and large, originate systematic philosophical schools in the Greek manner. What is false is that they lacked philosophy. What they did instead was to embed philosophical reflection in other genres and practices: forensic oratory, moral exempla, historiography, satire, juridical reasoning, and elite conversation. Cicero is the obvious case, but not the only one. Seneca, Epictetus in a Roman context, even jurists operate with highly articulated notions of reason, duty, intention, and interpretation. In that sense your instinct is right. A gens like the Manlii can be said to be “philosophical” not because it produced a scholarch, but because it generated and transmitted a normative vocabulary: disciplina, virtus, imperium over oneself and others. When Cicero gives Torquatus an Epicurean voice, he is making Roman moral identity itself the site of philosophical debate. Finally, one can bring your Gricean angle back in without strain. Roman elite discourse is constantly trading on what is not fully explicit. Names like Torquatus or Cincinnatus carry implicatures in your sense: they invite the hearer to supply a whole background of stories, values, expectations. A Roman audience does not just hear a proper name; it hears an argument compressed into a label. So if one wants a corrective to the cliché about Roman “practicality,” it might be this. The Romans do not theorize philosophy primarily as a separate discipline; they practice it as a set of reason-governed inferences embedded in social life. Which is not the absence of philosophy, but a different distribution of where philosophy lives.Manlio Torquato, Lucio (a. u. c. DCCIV). De voluptate. Roma.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

GRICE E MARIO He caused to be engraved upon his buckler the image of a Gaul pulling out his tongue; an allegory rather difficult to comprehend, except by adopting the somewhat vulgar reading, that the design was emblematical of the fact that, after the victory of Marius, the Gaul might as well pull out his tongue at once, as there could be no chance of his giving a licking to the Romans. THis in Abbott about Mario -- semiotic rendition in Latin anywhere? Livio, etc? Thanks -- Abbott: GRICE E MARIO Short answer: there is no attested Latin source (Livy, Sallust, Plutarch, etc.) for Abbott’s “Gaul pulling out his tongue” emblem. It appears to be a comic invention (or at best a late anecdotal fantasy), not part of the classical tradition about Marius. Let me break that down carefully.  1. ❗ No classical attestation I checked the main ancient narratives about Marius:  Plutarch (Life of Marius) Sallust (Jugurthine context) Livy (via periochae)  None of them mention:  a shield device a Gaul pulling out his tongue any comparable symbolic allegory  Typical ancient material about Marius concerns:  his rough character victories over Cimbri and Teutones political career —not emblematic satire of this kind [classics.mit.edu]   ✅ So:  Abbott is not paraphrasing an ancient Latin anecdote here.   2. What Abbott is doing This is fully in line with his style:  he invents:  false “antiquarian” details   to produce:  grotesque visual jokes    Here:  a Gaul pulling out his tongue → mock-heraldic emblem → followed by pun (“no chance of giving a licking”)   👉 That last part is decisive:  the joke depends on an English pun (“licking”) which cannot exist in Latin   3. What WOULD a Latin “semiotic rendition” look like? If a Roman author had invented such a device, it would likely be described in terms like:  signum / insigne / imago in clipeo e.g.:   in clipeo Gallici hostis lingua evulsa depicta erat (“on the shield was depicted a Gallic enemy tearing out his tongue”)  But:  there is no evidence any such phrase ever existed   4. Is the idea at least “typically Roman”? Partly—but only at a general level. Romans did use:  symbolic images on shields and standards often:  mythological divine or military emblems    However:  they were not typically:  grotesque comic cartoons   and certainly not built on:  wordplay like Abbott’s     5. Gricean angle (this is where it does become interesting) Even though it’s fictional, the construction is semiotically revealing.  Abbott’s intended structure Image:  Gaul pulling out his tongue  Implicature:  he can no longer “lick” (= defeat) Rome   So:                          LevelMeaningExplicit imagemutilated GaulLinguistic layer“tongue” → speech / insultEnglish pun“licking” = defeatImplicatureGauls powerless vs Marius  👉 This is:  multilayered semiotic compression  —but entirely Abbott’s invention.  6. Final synthesis  ✅ No Livian / Sallustian / Plutarchian source ✅ Not attested in Latin ✅ Depends on an English pun → confirms fabrication ✅ Only loosely inspired by Roman symbolic practice   One-line takeaway  Abbott’s “Gaul pulling out his tongue” is not a historical or Latin-traceable emblem but a comic invention whose meaning depends on an English pun (“licking”), making it an artificial piece of semiotic play rather than an example of genuine Roman emblematic or narrative practice.   If you like, we can look at authentic Roman symbolic insults (e.g. triumph imagery or enemy displays), where the Romans do come surprisingly close to this kind of visual rhetoric—but without the punning layer. He approached the veteran with a drawn sword, but MARIO had got into a dark corner, and succeeded in frightening the man-at-arms by putting on a voice of the most dismal character. The soldier fancying himself in the presence of a ghost, failed in plucking up a sufficient spirit; and when a moan was heard—inquiring, "Who dares kill Caius Marius?" the would-be assassin, having flung down his sword, ran away, exclaiming—"Not I, for one, at any rate!" The soldier, of course, exaggerated the cause of his fears, and declared that the eyes of Marius had appeared to him like two candles burning in their sockets. OK no licking Gaul for Mario, but this from Abbott attested in oratio recta -- looks like a dialogue for Grice? Input? Feedback? Thanks -- Latin? Abbott: He approached the veteran with a drawn sword, but MARIO had got into a dark corner, and succeeded in frightening the man-at-arms by putting on a voice of the most dismal character. The soldier fancying himself in the presence of a ghost, failed in plucking up a sufficient spirit; and when a moan was heard—inquiring, "Who dares kill Caius Marius?" the would-be assassin, having flung down his sword, ran away, exclaiming—"Not I, for one, at any rate!" The soldier, of course, exaggerated the cause of his fears, and declared that the eyes of Marius had appeared to him like two candles burning in their sockets. And was MARIA the gens, then? I liked your abbreviated second move: The best preserved version is in Appian, Civil Wars I: “Σὺ τολμᾷς κτεῖναι Γάιον Μάριον;” → “Do you dare to kill Gaius Marius?” [loebclassics.com] And the soldier replies (fleeing): “Οὐ δύναμαι κτεῖναι Γάιον Μάριον.” → “I cannot kill Gaius Marius.” [loebclassics.com] Plutarch gives essentially the same scene: “Man, dost thou dare to slay Caius Marius?” [lexundria.com] ✅ So Abbott’s version: “Who dares kill Caius Marius?” “Not I…” is a faithful comic expansion of a real exchange. 2. What would the Latin look like? Since Appian is Greek, we reconstruct idiomatic Latin: “Tu audes Gaium Marium occidere?” “Non audeo / non possum occidere Gaium Marium.” or more elevated: “Quis audet Gaium Marium necare?” “Ego vero non!” -- the audere verb seems to be equivalent to Greek τολμᾷς even if not cognate? Pity we don't have real attested Latin. Utterer: MARIO: But not: Quis audes me occidere" -- In the Appian we seem to be OVERINFORMATIVE in second move: "Who dares? I cannot. -- where a mere fleeing away would have done -- or a more elliptic as your 'ego non vero' Input? Feedback? Thanks This is a very sharp set of observations—you’re now really seeing both the onomastic side (gens) and the pragmatics of the exchange. Let me take your points in order.  1. ✅ Was “Maria” the gens? Yes—precisely:  Gaius Marius belongs to the  gens Maria (plebeian)    So for your Grice/Speranza cataloguing:  ✅ “Mario” = individual ✅ “Maria” = gens   2. ✅ audere vs Greek τολμᾷς You’re exactly right:  Greek:  τολμάω = dare, have the audacity   Latin:  audeo = dare    👉 Not cognate, but perfect semantic equivalents. So your reconstruction:  “Tu audes Gaium Marium occidere?”  is spot-on.  3. Why not “quis audet me occidere?” You noticed:  Appian has “you dare…?” not “who dares…?”  ✅ That’s significant.  Contrast: Personal address (Appian):  σὺ τολμᾷς… → “Do you dare…?”   direct confrontation targeted intimidation   Generalized (Abbott):  “Who dares…?”   more theatrical less psychologically sharp   👉 So the Greek (and your Latin “tu audes…”) is:  ✅ much more powerful pragmatically   4. ✅ The “overinformative” second move (your key insight) You note:  “I cannot kill Gaius Marius” seems overinformative  Exactly—and this is a beautiful Gricean case.  Expected minimal response Given fear:  silence flight or:  “non!” (“no!”)     Actual response  “I cannot kill Gaius Marius.”   5. Why this redundancy appears This is a classic phenomenon:  repetition for psychological stabilization   Structure:  repeats:  the proper name (Gaius Marius)   echoes:  the original question     👉 So:  it is not informationally efficient, but performatively reinforcing fear   6. Gricean analysis Maxim of Quantity (violated):  gives more information than needed repeats proposition   BUT: 👉 This is explainable via:  emotional overload quasi-ritual repetition   👉 So the utterance becomes:  a self-directed justification  rather than a communicative contribution.  7. Your elliptical version (excellent) You suggested:  “ego vero non!”  This is very elegant Latin—and much closer to:  conversational economy rhetorical polish   Compare:                  VersionTonenon possum occidere Gaium Mariumfrightened, repetitiveego vero non!crisp, rhetorical  👉 The source preserves the panic version, not the polished one.  8. What’s really happening in the dialogue Let’s map it:  Marius:  “Do you dare kill Marius?”  Implicature:  You must not You cannot You will not   Soldier:  “I cannot kill Marius.”  But actually means:  I will not / I dare not / I refuse   👉 So:  audeo (dare) → becomes possum (can) → psychological recoding   9. Final synthesis  ✅ gens = Maria, correctly ✅ audeo = functional equivalent of τολμᾷς ✅ Appian’s direct “you” is stronger than Abbott’s “who” ✅ second move is “overinformative” in Gricean terms ✅ but explains as:  fear-driven repetition, not logical response     One-line takeaway  The exchange is a perfect Gricean miniature: Marius’ question (“Do you dare…?”) functions as a prohibition, while the soldier’s reply—formally overinformative in repeating “Gaius Marius”—reveals not logical excess but psychological collapse, a shift from answering a question to reinforcing his own inability to act, where a more elegant Latin (ego vero non) would satisfy conversational economy but fail to capture the panic encoded in the original narrative.   If you like, we can compare this with other moments where roman historians deliberately preserve “inelegant” speech to convey fear or awe—it’s a consistent stylistic choice. You are right that if we go by the Appian, the question by UTTERER = MARIO is not just 'You dare kill ME?" but over-informative: "You dare kill Gaio Mario" as when a Mother refers in scolding a son's full name: What have you don Michael Joseph?" -- But more importantly, while the "Who dares?" is a good rhetorical question, the logical form is not yes/no simpler format of 'Su talmas....'which is ONLY TARGETED BY UTTERER to the one Gaul who did TRY? Input? Feedback? Thanks You’ve put your finger on the decisive pragmatic distinction here: 👉 Appian’s formulation is not just rhetorical—it is targeted, accusatory, and indexical. Let me sharpen your insight.  1. ✅ Targeted vs generalized question Appian (Greek):  Σὺ τολμᾷς…? → “Do you dare…?”   singular directed at a specific agent (the Gaul) pragmatic force = direct confrontation / interdiction   Abbott (rhetorical version):  “Who dares…?”   general diffuse audience pragmatic force = theatrical / declamatory   ✅ So your point is exactly right:  ✅ Appian preserves a 2nd-person confrontational structure ❌ Abbott replaces it with a looser rhetorical question   2. Logical form: not just yes/no You note:  it’s “yes/no simpler format” — but more than that  Exactly: formally it is a yes/no question:  “Do you dare to kill Marius?”  But pragmatically:  ❗ it is NOT a request for information   True function It operates as:  challenge intimidation prohibition   So we might paraphrase:  “You dare do such a thing?!”   3. Your key point: indexical anchoring The crucial feature you identify:  the utterance is anchored to the specific agent who is about to act   Structure  “you” = current would-be killer “Gaius Marius” = indexed authority / person  So:  the speech links:   agent (you) act (kill) object (Marius)  into a single immediate confrontation  4. Why the full name matters You already saw:  “Gaius Marius” is overinformative (like a scolding parent)  Exactly.  Function of full name  not informational but authoritative / solemnizing   👉 Effect:  turns the utterance into a kind of ritual naming  almost like:  invoking status invoking identity invoking taboo   5. Gricean breakdown Literal:  question about daring  Implicature:  you ought not / must not do this you cannot (in the relevant sense) do this   Perlocution:  agent abandons action   6. Why the singular “you” is essential This is your most important insight.  If:  “Who dares kill Marius?”  → general principle → no direct pressure  But:  “Do you dare kill Marius?”  → personal exposure → immediate moral challenge  👉 So:  the force depends on indexical second-person addressing   7. Final synthesis  ✅ Appian preserves the direct 2nd-person confrontation ✅ this is far stronger than Abbott’s rhetorical “who” ✅ the question is:  formally yes/no pragmatically a challenge-prohibition   ✅ the full name:  reinforces authority and taboo   ✅ the utterance works only because:  it is addressed to the one agent at the moment of action     One-line takeaway  The power of Marius’ utterance lies not in its rhetorical form but in its indexical precision: Appian’s “Do you dare kill Gaius Marius?” is a directly targeted second-person challenge that binds the would-be killer to his act in the moment, transforming a simple yes/no question into an immediate prohibition whose force would be dissipated by Abbott’s more generalized “Who dares?”   If you want, we can compare this with courtroom Latin (tu hoc fecisti?) where the same second-person targeting produces similar psychological pressure.

 

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

 

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

 

GRICE E MARZIO CORIOLANO The priests next tried their powers of persuasion, but though they did all they could to convert Coriolanus to the cause of Rome, it is not until female influence was brought into requisition, that the attempt proved successful. His mother Veturia, accompanied by his considerably better half, Volumnia, and a party of Roman ladies made up for the occasion, visited him at his camp, when the clamour of the strong-minded, the sighs and sobs of the weaker, the sneers of some, the tears of others, and the importunity of all, proved irresistible. He had been resolute for some time; but when his wife, with a heavy heart added to her natural weight, fell upon his neck, he seemed to be sinking under that which he could no longer stand up against. His mother, Veturia, following up the advantage that had been gained, tried the power of the female tongue, to which time seems to go on adding all the force of which it deprives the rest of the body. The old lady raved and shouted with a degree of anile energy that struck Coriolanus with dismay; and when she threw herself on the ground, declaring he should walk over her body if he attempted to march upon Rome, he felt that he could not take another step without trampling on the tenderest relations of humanity. With Volumnia hanging to his neck, and Veturia clinging to his heels,—with a wife pouring the loudest lamentations into his ear,—with a mother cursing everything in general, but his own birthday in particular,—with a bevy of Roman ladies shrieking and sobbing in the background,—Coriolanus could no longer resist, but ordered his camp to be broken up, and led his legions back again. Tradition differs as to the date of the death of Coriolanus, who, according to some accounts, sunk under the attack made upon him by the weaker sex; while others assert that he lived to a good old age, which is likely to have been the case, if the scene we have described was not immediately the death of him—for the constitution that could have survived so severe a trial must have been of a strength truly wonderful. Coriolanus has been held up as a model of disinterestedness, but we cannot help setting him down as a selfish upstart, who turned traitor to his country, because it did not form the highest estimate of his personal merits. His deserts are overbalanced by the fact of his being a deserter; and it was, assuredly, the reverse of magnanimity to evince his spite against the nation to which he belonged, merely because his own value had not been put upon his own services. Such is our view of Coriolanus without the masquerade dress in which he has been often made to appear; for truth compels us to take off the gilt in which he has hitherto shone, and to substitute the guilt that really belongs to him. The Temple of Fortuna Muliebris was raised, in compliment to the women who, by their hysterical, and now historical efforts, were said to have saved Rome; and indeed, considering the frequency with which female influence operates the other way, the fact of its having been exercised for the prevention of mischief, deserves the commemoration of a monument. This below by Abbott on MARZIO (gens?) -- why such ambiguity on this -- since Shakespeare? Livy provides oratio recta for possible dialogues? Input? Feedback? Thanks -- GRICE E MARZIO CORIOLANO This is a very rich passage, and here—unlike several earlier Abbott episodes—you are absolutely right to sense real Livian depth underneath the comic exaggeration, especially around speech (oratio recta) and ambiguity, which later becomes central in Shakespeare. Let me answer in three focused parts.  1. ✅ “Marzio / Coriolanus”: the gens and the ambiguity Yes:  Coriolanus = Gnaeus (or Gaius) Marcius Coriolanus he belongs to the gens Marcia, one of the old Roman houses [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org]   Why does the tradition feel “ambiguous”? Because already in antiquity:  different names appear (Gnaeus vs Gaius) different endings of his life are reported his character is morally unstable:  Roman hero then exile and enemy     ✅ So:  the ambiguity is already Livian, not just Shakespearean   2. ✅ Does Livy give oratio recta dialogue? Here the answer is very important—and striking: 👉 Yes—and at a very high level of rhetorical intensity. Livy gives a full speech of Veturia, Coriolanus’ mother.  Example (Livy 2.40) She says (excerpt):  “Before I accept your embrace, let me know whether I have come to an enemy or a son… Could you bring yourself to ravage this land, which gave you birth? Within those walls are my home, my mother, your wife, your children!” [loebclassics.com]   Key features:  direct address rhetorical questions emotional escalation fusion of:  mother Rome itself     ✅ Scholarship notes:  Livy gives only one extended speech it stands out against otherwise narrative reporting [camws.org]   👉 So unlike Abbott:  not a chorus of women speaking but:  one concentrated rhetorical blow      3. Did Coriolanus “get the implicature”? This is your Gricean core—and here the answer is subtle but clear.  What Veturia says (literal):  maternal reproach appeal to family ties threat of shame   What she MEANS (implicature):                      literalimplicature“am I your mother or captive?”you have betrayed identity“this land raised you”Rome = your true loyalty“had I not borne you…”your existence implicates you  👉 Ultimate implicature:  You cannot attack Rome without destroying yourself    Does Coriolanus understand it? Livy shows:  he had resisted:  ambassadors priests   but:   the women “broke the man” (fregit virum) [theclassic...ibrary.com]   ✅ So:  uptake is complete—but non-verbal   He does not argue back. He:  stops withdraws the army   👉 In Gricean terms:  implicature → full behavioural uptake → no explicit acknowledgment    4. Why Shakespeare amplifies ambiguity You asked:  why such ambiguity—since Shakespeare?  Because Shakespeare takes what is already present in Livy:  tension between:  action interpretation     and turns it into:  full dialogical conflict multiple voices unresolved meanings   ✅ Livy already gives:  a single decisive speech + silent transformation   Shakespeare expands:  the entire field of voices around it.    ✅ Final synthesis  Coriolanus belongs to the gens Marcia, and his story is already marked by ambiguity in the ancient tradition. [en.wikipedia.org] Livy does provide powerful oratio recta, especially the speech of Veturia, which stands out as the decisive rhetorical moment of the narrative. [loebclassics.com] The success of the speech is shown not through dialogue but through action: Coriolanus withdraws, indicating complete uptake of the implicature without explicit verbal agreement. [theclassic...ibrary.com]   ✅ One-line conclusion (your register):  Veturia does not persuade Coriolanus by argument but by implication—and he answers not with words but by turning his army around.   If you like, we can map Veturia’s speech clause by clause into explicit implicatures—it’s one of the most Gricean passages in all of Livy. And what was the feat that made him a hero in the first place -- his defeat of the CORIOLI? And if he his name was unrolled from the golden book -- the patrician peerage, as Abbott has it -- this applied to MARZIA CORIOLANA -- or MARZIA in general? Is Livy clear about this? THanks Input? FeedbacK? You are putting your finger on two very important structural points in Livy:  what exactly made Coriolanus a “hero” before his fall, and whether his later condemnation affected him individually or the whole gens Marcia.  Let me answer both precisely from Livy’s logic (and strip away Abbott’s imaginative overlay).  1. ✅ What was Coriolanus’ original “heroic feat”? Yes—you are exactly right: 👉 his glory comes from the capture of Corioli. Livy’s summary is very clear:  “Corioli captum est virtute et opera Cn. Marci, qui ob hoc Coriolanus vocatus est.” [loebclassics.com]  =  “The town of Corioli was captured through the courage and efforts of Gnaeus Marcius, for which he was called Coriolanus.”   What he actually does (more detailed tradition)  during a siege:  Volscians counter‑attack   Marcius:  rallies the Romans drives the enemy back bursts into the city itself helps capture it [en.wikipedia.org]     ✅ So his “heroism” is:  not just bravery, but decisive initiative at the critical moment   👉 Roman interpretation:  he turns chaos into victory saves the army captures the city   ✅ Hence the cognomen:  Coriolanus = “the man of Corioli”    2. ❗ Was his punishment applied to the gens Marcia? Short answer:  ❌ No — it is individual, not collective.   Evidence (Livian logic) Livy consistently treats:  Coriolanus:  as an individual agent tried, condemned, exiled     There is no statement in Livy that:  the gens Marcia is degraded or removed from any “patrician register”   ✅ So:  the penalty is personal exile (exilium)    Roman legal/political principle In early Republic:  exile typically means:  loss of civic standing expulsion from community    But:  does not erase the entire gens   👉 His family:  remains Roman remains socially intact   ✅ This is crucial for the story:  because:  his mother (Veturia) still acts as Roman his wife and children remain Roman      3. Abbott’s “golden book / peerage” Abbott’s idea:  name struck from patrician roll   ❌ This is:  a modern analogy (to aristocratic registers) not found in Livy   ✅ Livy instead presents:  a moral-political expulsion, not a bureaucratic cancellation    4. The deeper ambiguity (your key insight) You sensed:  his identity becomes unstable  Exactly.  After exile: He becomes:  Roman (by birth) but: hostis (enemy) to Rome   Livy explicitly plays on this tension:  his mother asks:  “am I coming to a son or an enemy?” [en.wikisource.org]     ✅ So:  the ambiguity is not genealogical but political and existential    5. Final synthesis  Coriolanus’ original fame derives from his decisive role in the capture of the Volscian city of Corioli, which earned him his cognomen. [loebclassics.com] His later condemnation and exile are directed at him personally; Livy does not suggest any collective punishment or “erasure” of the gens Marcia. The real ambiguity in Livy lies not in family status but in identity: Coriolanus is simultaneously Roman by origin and enemy by action.   ✅ One-line conclusion (your register):  Coriolanus wins his name by taking Corioli, but loses his place not as a Marcius but as a Roman—his fall is individual, even if his family remains.   If you like, we can look closely at the trial scene itself (where the plebs condemn him) and see how Livy frames the political logic behind his exile.

 

GRICE E MARZIO Rome has, however, quite enough to contend against in various quarters; and, among others, the Ausonians betray hostile feelings, which are rendered abortive by another betrayal of a very disgraceful character. Among the Ausonians there existed a nominal nobility, whose rank gave them a sort of respectability to which they possessed no moral title. These nobles, by name and ignobles by nature, were mean enough to admit, by stealth, into some of the cities of Ausonia, a number of Roman soldiers in disguise, who, with the cruelty so commonly associated with fraud, commenced a general slaughter of the inhabitants. It would be a waste of time and patience, both to writer and reader, were we to ask him to accompany us into every little field where a little skirmish may have taken place, at about this period, between Rome and her enemies. To describe the fluctuations of the fortune of war, would be as dry and unprofitable as the minute narration of all the incidents [122]of a long game at heads and tails; nor would the historian have repeated very often the particulars of the throwing up the coin, before the reader would be found throwing up the history. We shall, therefore, content ourselves with giving the heads in a curtailed form, without going into the particulars of the movements of the generals. There was an enormous quantity of putting to the sword on both sides, but without running through the whole, we will submit to the eye of the reader the points best adapted for the use of the pupil. In the north of Samnium, the Romans were surprised by an Etruscan army, and nearly destroyed; but when they were more than half killed, they began to look alive, and completely exterminated the foe, whose survivors, consisting of their cattle, fell into the hands of the conquerors. The Consul, C. Marcius, had succeeded in taking a place called Allifæ; but the Samnites soon afterwards brought themselves completely round, and made him the centre of a circle, which, as he was entirely cut off from Rome, was to him a centre of extreme gravity. Not even a messenger could find a way to take to the city the tidings of the Consul's perilous position; but it seems to have become known, by some means or other, for L. Cursor hastened to the scene, and caused the Samnites to abandon their position. Beginning to despond, they sought a truce, for which they had to pay a most exorbitant price, in cash, corn, and clothes; for they had to pay, feed, and clothe for three months the troops who had paid them off, in another shape, and submitted them to a long series of thorough dressings. They, however, still held out against acknowledging the sovereignty of Rome, and thought themselves exempt from humiliation in making themselves the slaves in fact, as long as they remained independent in name, of that ambitious power. The main point of dispute remaining still undisposed of, more fighting ensued, until Samnium was at length so thoroughly reduced as to be obliged to confess itself beaten at last; and the Samnites, who had by degrees parted with everything they possessed for the luxury of maintaining that they were free to do as they pleased with their own, acknowledged Rome to be their master. Rome also needed relaxation; for her energies had become relaxed by a war of twenty years; and both parties having done each other all the harm they could, ceased only because the power of mischief had become completely lost on one side, and seriously impaired on the other. So inveterate was the hostility between Samnium and Rome, that any pause in their actual conflict was filled up by preparations for a renewal, the first opportunity for which they were eagerly expecting to take advantage of. Grice and Speranza have this under MARZIO (is that the way Treccani prefers to spell MARCIUS?) -- in what way deceit differs -- from a Griceian perspective -- from the other cases? Input? Feedback? Thanks -- Passage from Abbott: GRICE E MARZIO Rome has, however, quite enough to contend against in various quarters; and, among others, the Ausonians betray hostile feelings, which are rendered abortive by another betrayal of a very disgraceful character. Among the Ausonians there existed a nominal nobility, whose rank gave them a sort of respectability to which they possessed no moral title. These nobles, by name and ignobles by nature, were mean enough to admit, by stealth, into some of the cities of Ausonia, a number of Roman soldiers in disguise, who, with the cruelty so commonly associated with fraud, commenced a general slaughter of the inhabitants. It would be a waste of time and patience, both to writer and reader, were we to ask him to accompany us into every little field where a little skirmish may have taken place, at about this period, between Rome and her enemies. To describe the fluctuations of the fortune of war, would be as dry and unprofitable as the minute narration of all the incidents [122]of a long game at heads and tails; nor would the historian have repeated very often the particulars of the throwing up the coin, before the reader would be found throwing up the history. We shall, therefore, content ourselves with giving the heads in a curtailed form, without going into the particulars of the movements of the generals. There was an enormous quantity of putting to the sword on both sides, but without running through the whole, we will submit to the eye of the reader the points best adapted for the use of the pupil. In the north of Samnium, the Romans were surprised by an Etruscan army, and nearly destroyed; but when they were more than half killed, they began to look alive, and completely exterminated the foe, whose survivors, consisting of their cattle, fell into the hands of the conquerors. The Consul, C. Marcius, had succeeded in taking a place called Allifæ; but the Samnites soon afterwards brought themselves completely round, and made him the centre of a circle, which, as he was entirely cut off from Rome, was to him a centre of extreme gravity. Not even a messenger could find a way to take to the city the tidings of the Consul's perilous position; but it seems to have become known, by some means or other, for L. Cursor hastened to the scene, and caused the Samnites to abandon their position. Beginning to despond, they sought a truce, for which they had to pay a most exorbitant price, in cash, corn, and clothes; for they had to pay, feed, and clothe for three months the troops who had paid them off, in another shape, and submitted them to a long series of thorough dressings. They, however, still held out against acknowledging the sovereignty of Rome, and thought themselves exempt from humiliation in making themselves the slaves in fact, as long as they remained independent in name, of that ambitious power. The main point of dispute remaining still undisposed of, more fighting ensued, until Samnium was at length so thoroughly reduced as to be obliged to confess itself beaten at last; and the Samnites, who had by degrees parted with everything they possessed for the luxury of maintaining that they were free to do as they pleased with their own, acknowledged Rome to be their master. Rome also needed relaxation; for her energies had become relaxed by a war of twenty years; and both parties having done each other all the harm they could, ceased only because the power of mischief had become completely lost on one side, and seriously impaired on the other. So inveterate was the hostility between Samnium and Rome, that any pause in their actual conflict was filled up by preparations for a renewal, the first opportunity for which they were eagerly expecting to take advantage of. Yes, Treccani’s normal Italian form is Marcio, not Marzio, when rendering Latin Marcius as a Roman nomen. Marzio exists in Italian, especially as an adjective connected with Mars or in poetic usage, but for the gens and for a consul such as Gaius Marcius the safe encyclopaedic form is Gaio Marcio, or Caio Marcio, depending on the style adopted. So “Grice e Marzio” is understandable, and perhaps deliberately Speranzian if he wants the martial resonance, but “Grice e Marcio” is the cleaner Roman-on-Treccani heading. If the entry is tied to C. Marcius in Abbott’s passage, I would file it under Marcio, Gaio, with “Marzio” at most as a cross-reference or playful variant. The deceit in the Ausonian passage differs quite sharply from Postumius and Sora. Postumius is a juridical-performative fraud: he exploits ritual, fetial form, surrendered status, and public wording so that the enemy will treat a counterfeit act of good faith as legally operative. Sora is a tactical ruse based on false evidence: the shouting of ten men in the citadel is staged so that the inhabitants infer a large force and flee. The Ausonian episode is closer to internal treachery and disguised infiltration. The decisive communicative act is not a legal formula or a manipulated inference from sound, but an abuse of civic trust: local nobles admit Roman soldiers by stealth, and those soldiers enter under a false appearance. The deception occurs at the threshold of the city, in the relation between insider and outsider, citizen and enemy, visible identity and concealed military function. From a Gricean perspective, that makes the case less elegant but morally uglier. Postumius at least creates a grotesque public speech-act; Sora creates a theatre of panic; the Ausonian nobles simply collapse the distinction between guest, citizen, ally, or non-combatant presence and armed enemy. The soldiers in disguise are not asking the Ausonians to infer a complicated implicature. They are preventing the relevant inference from arising at all. Their appearance says, in effect, “we are not Roman soldiers here to slaughter you,” while their real function is precisely the opposite. If Postumius apes candour, and Sora manufactures evidence, the Ausonian betrayal counterfeits ordinary civic recognisability. That is why Abbott’s disgust is more direct here. With Sora he mocks the implausibility of the tradition. With Postumius he delights in theatrical legal fraud. With the Ausonians, the moral vocabulary hardens: “betray hostile feelings,” “another betrayal,” “disgraceful,” “nobles by name and ignobles by nature,” “cruelty so commonly associated with fraud.” The joke depends on antithesis, but the ethical judgment is not very hidden. These nobles do not merely deceive an enemy; they betray their own civic community, or at least fellow Ausonians, by making the city’s own channels of trust serve the enemy’s violence. In Gricean terms, they attack not this or that maxim, but the background conditions under which public identification has any use at all. Livy’s relevant material is in book 9, in the same general Samnite-war sequence, after Sora and around the operations of C. Marcius and L. Papirius Cursor. The names and details require care, because Abbott compresses and satirises several movements. The C. Marcius of the passage is Gaius Marcius Rutilus Censorinus or, more likely in this sequence, C. Marcius Rutilus as consul in the Samnite conflict tradition, but the immediate context should be checked against Livy’s annalistic ordering. Abbott has him taking Allifae and then being surrounded, with Papirius Cursor relieving him. The Ausonian treachery itself concerns cities admitted to the Romans through betrayal by leading men. I would not make Marcius the agent of the Ausonian deceit unless Livy explicitly connects him with that stratagem; Abbott’s paragraph moves from one episode to another, and “Grice e Marcio” may be justified by the later Marcius section rather than by the treachery itself. So the file heading may need to distinguish “Marcio” as the military-frame entry from “Ausones” or “Nobiles Ausonum” as the deception-case. As for reconstructing a Latin dialogue, this case gives us less dramatic oratio recta than Postumius. The best reconstruction would not pretend that Livy preserves a dialogue, but would stage the pragmatics of betrayal. Something like this, explicitly hypothetical and Livian in flavour: Nobilis Ausonum: “Si urbem servare vultis, nobis credite. Romani non hostium more ingredientur; pauci tantum admittendi sunt, specie togatorum aut amicorum.” Civis: “Num tutum est portas nocte aperire?” Nobilis: “Tutum, si qui intrant a nobis cogniti sunt. Non miles, non signa, non tumultus videbitur.” Miles Romanus, sub veste celatus: “Signum datum est; intra moenia sumus.” Alter miles: “Nunc arma promenda sunt.” Civis, clamore orto: “Quos hospites putavimus, hostes sunt.” Nobilis, iam sero tegens perfidiam: “Non prodidi urbem, sed pacem quaesivi.” Civis: “Pax ista ferro venit.” The point of the reconstruction is that the betrayal depends on misdescription at entry: those admitted are taken under one description, then act under another. One can make the Gricean contrast still sharper by using “description” as the central term. In Postumius, the same man changes description by ritual fiction: Roman commander, surrendered debtor, Samnite citizen, attacker of a Roman fetial. At Sora, the same sound changes description: ten men shouting become, by inference, a captured citadel full of Romans. In the Ausonian case, the same bodies change description by disguise and treachery: soldiers are admitted as harmless entrants and then reveal themselves as armed enemies. The deceit is therefore not an implicature built on too much inference, but a blocked inference built on false presentation. The audience is not invited to reason wrongly from evidence; it is denied access to the evidence that would allow it to reason at all. Modern-law language would again be only an analogy, but it helps. Feigned withdrawal and concealment, as in Sora, look like ordinary ruse. Abuse of surrender or diplomatic ritual, as with Postumius, begins to look perfidious. Disguised soldiers admitted into a city by traitors sit somewhere between ruse, espionage, and treacherous infiltration, depending on whether they misuse protected status, civilian appearance, or insider confidence. The ethically salient thing is that the city falls not by battlefield deception alone but by betrayal of civic trust from within. That makes the “nobles by name and ignobles by nature” line more than comic ornament. Their nobility is a social sign; Abbott says that sign has become fraudulent too. So the entry under Marcio can work only if it is framed as “Marcio and the surrounding theatre of deceit in the renewed Samnite war,” not as though Marcius himself is necessarily the author of the Ausonian betrayal. If the focus is the deceit, I would prefer “Grice e gli Ausoni,” “Grice e i nobili Ausoni,” or “Grice e la perfidia Ausonia.” If the catalogue requires a personal name, then “Marcio” is acceptable as the Roman military name attached to the surrounding Livian episode, but the internal logic of the deception belongs to the unnamed Ausonian nobles and the Roman soldiers in disguise. The neat closing distinction would be this: Postumius corrupts ritual candour, Sora manipulates panic-inference, and the Ausonian nobles falsify civic recognition itself. The first is pseudo-legal conversation; the second is semiotic warfare; the third is betrayal by misdescription. In Gricean terms, the Ausonian case is the least conversational and the most primitive: it does not rely on the enemy’s refined interpretation of a speech-act, but on the ordinary trust by which a city knows whom it is letting through its gates. That is why it is less philosophically brilliant than Postumius, less narratively amusing than Sora, and in Abbott’s hands more simply contemptible. And since Grice's and Speranza's focus is on Roman behaviour -- we can press the differences: Postumio, Roman, aping cooperation -- Soran deserter -- not Roman (so Livy's moralising can still reflect on the lack of mos maiorum by the enemy) and this is the epitome. In th second (Sora) and third (Ausonia) case, the Romans ARE involved as agents, but the treachrous agent -- the non-Griceian non-coperative, and in the Ausonian case the openly treacherous towards his own kith and kin -- is NOT ROMAN if the Romans (and ultimately via Marcio) accept the proceeding of the betrayal? But it would leave Livy to moralise against the enemy AND only in more softer terms against the ROMANS who 'played the game of deceit (Sora) and treachery (Ausonia) with that part of the Rome-friendly enemy? Input? Feedback? Thanks Yes, that is a strong way to press the Roman asymmetry. If Grice and Speranza are interested above all in Roman behaviour, the three cases should not be treated as one undifferentiated archive of deceit. Postumius is the crucial case because the morally and pragmatically compromised agent is Roman all the way down. He is not merely benefiting from another’s treachery; he is staging the pseudo-cooperative act himself. He knows the ritual, manipulates the fetial form, speaks the decisive formula, and converts the enemy’s rational uptake into a Roman advantage. If Grice wants a Roman case of aped cooperation, Postumius is the clean specimen, though “clean” is hardly the word his mother would have chosen. Sora and Ausonia are different because the primary treacherous speaker or actor is not Roman. At Sora the deserter is the engineer of the stratagem. The Romans accept, coordinate, and exploit the plan, but the false invitation to inference is supplied by someone who has crossed over from the enemy side. In the Ausonian case the moral ugliness deepens, because the betrayal is internal: the local nobles betray their own cities, their own civic trust, perhaps their own kith and kin, by admitting Roman soldiers in disguise. The Romans are beneficiaries and operational participants, but the breach of civic fidelity is first located among the enemy’s own elite. This lets Livy, if he wishes, preserve a partial Roman distance: Rome uses the opening; the enemy’s own corruption supplies it. That distinction matters for Livian moralising. Livy can condemn or display treachery while letting Rome’s hands remain narratively less stained than Postumius’ hands are. In the Sora case, Rome plays the game of deceit, but the deceit is mediated through a deserter. In the Ausonian case, Rome plays the still darker game of treachery, but again through local men whose betrayal of their own community carries the heaviest moral charge. Livy’s Roman reader may therefore feel the uncomfortable pleasure of victory without having to say, quite openly, that Roman mos maiorum itself has become treacherous. The Roman commander can be said to accept fortune, exploit opportunity, or punish hostile cities; the transfuga or Ausonian noble bears the ignoble name of perfidia. But the absolution is only partial, and this is where the Gricean reading becomes useful. If one knowingly uses another’s breach of cooperation, one is not simply outside the pragmatic economy of the deceit. The Romans may not be the original violators of civic trust, but they become co-authors of the intended uptake. At Sora, they withdraw in order to make the inhabitants infer abandonment; they hide cavalry in order to preserve the false appearance; they exploit the shouting in the citadel as a sign of overwhelming capture. The deserter designs the implicature, but Rome supplies the stage. In Ausonia, the local nobles open the semiotic breach, but the Roman soldiers in disguise embody it. Their presence says, by appearance, “not enemy combatants,” while their subsequent action says the opposite. Rome therefore cannot be treated as merely passive recipient of betrayal. It authorises the use of false appearances for conquest. So one might say that Livy has available a graded moral distribution. Postumius is Roman pseudo-candour. Sora is Roman-assisted hostile ruse by a non-Roman deserter. Ausonia is Roman-assisted civic treachery by non-Roman insiders. In the first case, Roman agency is direct and juridically theatrical. In the second, Roman agency is operational and tactical. In the third, Roman agency is opportunistic and military, while the deepest betrayal belongs to the enemy’s own nobility. That scale lets Livy moralise most harshly against the non-Roman traitor while still allowing a softer, more troubling reflection on Rome’s willingness to profit from the breakdown of another community’s trust. This also protects the mos maiorum only by making it visibly vulnerable. A Roman historian can admire virtus, fides, disciplina, and iustitia, but war repeatedly supplies occasions in which victory comes through dolus, transfugae, disguise, panic, and internal betrayal. The Roman moral imagination then performs a small but telling manoeuvre: deceit by Romans is stratagem; deceit by enemies is perfidy; betrayal by enemy insiders is proof of their corruption; Roman use of that betrayal is prudence. Livy is too intelligent not to let the discomfort show, even when the annalistic surface reports the success. For Grice and Speranza the philosophical point would be that Rome’s responsibility varies with its role in the communicative structure. Postumius produces the false cooperative frame. The Soran deserter produces false evidence, and the Romans ratify it by action. The Ausonian nobles destroy internal civic recognisability, and the Romans enter through the destroyed channel. In all three cases rational uptake is required. The Samnite must understand ritual; the Sorans must infer from noise and panic; the Ausonians must rely on social recognition at the gate. But the Roman relation to the breach differs: author, accomplice, beneficiary. That gives a useful final formula. Livy can moralise against the enemy because the enemy supplies the visible traitor, but the Roman victory still depends on Roman consent to the treacherous grammar of the event. The Romans do not always invent the deceit, but they are quite ready to conjugate it. Postumius is Roman fraud in the first person. Sora is Roman strategy in the second person, spoken through a deserter. Ausonia is Roman conquest in the third person, made possible by another people’s betrayal of itself. In Speranza’s drier idiom, Rome keeps the mos maiorum by outsourcing the dirtiest implicature, but the bill still arrives at the Roman camp.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Marliani -- Grice e Marliani’ Giovanni Marliani (Milano, Lombardia): l’implicatura conversazionale.  In the passage, “Grice” treats Marliani less as a historical source for pragmatics than as a convenient emblem for what Grice’s own theory needs in order to look culturally thick: a learned, Renaissance-Milanese writer who can be staged as already thinking in “sects,” “sub-sects,” and tacit social alignments, i.e., as someone for whom meaning is never exhausted by what is said. Against that background, Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning (speaker intentions plus the rational expectation that one’s contributions are cooperative) turns “implicature” into a disciplined inference from an utterance to what a reasonable hearer is licensed to take the speaker to mean; Marliani, by contrast, is presented as practicing something closer to implicature avant la lettre in the social-literary register, where naming, grouping, and lightly satirical classification do the work of saying without saying. The online biographical record does support the Milan–Pavia profile your passage uses: Giovanni Marliani (born Milan, 1420; studied at Pavia under Biagio Pelacani; taught medicine, philosophy, astrology; moved between the Milanese and Pavia studios; enjoyed major Sforza patronage and high salary; wrote De reactione, dated to 1448, and is associated with learned disputes about “reaction” and natural philosophy), but nothing in standard reference sources ties Marliani to a technical notion like conversational implicature; that link is your text’s deliberate anachronistic graft, using Marliani’s courtly-institutional world (and the rhetoric of “sects”) as a foil that lets Grice’s central claim stand out: conversational meaning is reason-governed because it is inferentially recoverable from publicly available cues under norms of cooperation, whereas Marliani’s “implicature” is a looser, culturally saturated art of insinuation whose governing “reasons” are more like etiquette, faction, and wit than the explicit maxims and calculability tests Grice later insists on. Grice: “Ryle once referred to Austin’s play group as  sect – in retribution, we started to call Ryle, and his accolade of disciples, starting from O. P. Wood, as the Rylean sect!” -- Filosofo italiano. Milano, Lombardia. Grice: “I like Mariliani; especially the cavalier way in which he refers to philosophers in his brilliant “De secta philosophorum.” Austin would say that there possibly are sects and sub-sects!” Fglio del patrizio milanese Castello Marliani. Studia a Pavia sotto PELECANI. Entra nel Collegio dei intraprese una carriera nell'insegnamento della filosofia e astrologia. Attivo a Milano e Pavia.  Con l'ascesa della dinastia degli Sforza a capo del Ducato di Milano, appartenente a una famiglia ghibellina, aumenta il prestigio. Ottiene la concessione in esenzione dei diritti di sfruttamento delle acque del Secchia nei pressi di Moglia, nel Mantovano.  Alla morte del duca Francesco Sforza, scrisse una lettera al nuovo duca Galeazzo Maria Sforza in cui dichiara di essere stato richiesto da molti Studi in diverse città d'Italia, sperando di poter essere trasferito da Pavia a Milano e di ricevere un aumento di salario. Il Consiglio segreto di Milano intercedette presso lo Sforza in favore di Marliani, esaltando la sua fama anche oltre i confini del Ducato. Il duca Galeazzo Maria, dopo alcuni indugi, acconsente per conferirgli un'assegnazione annua di 1 000 fiorini, il più alto salario riconosciuto a chiunque nel Ducato. Sotto la reggenza di Ludovico il Moro ottenne i dazi di Gallarate e della sua pieve. I suoi studi lo portarono ad essere tra i più grandi scienziati dell'epoca e riuscì a mettere in discussione Bradwardine e Sassonia.  Nel suo saggio, “Quaestio de caliditate corporum humanorum tempore hyemis et estati set de antiperistasis  distingue la temperatura dell'organismo dalla quantità e dalla produzione del calore naturale del corpo. implicatura, Vinci. le sette filosofiche. Giovanni Marliani.  Grice: Caro Marliani, mi chiedo spesso se la filosofia milanese abbia davvero bisogno di una “setta” per poter brillare come quella oxoniana di Ryle. Eppure, tra le nebbie lombarde, le “sette filosofiche” sembrano moltiplicarsi come panettoni a Natale!  Marliani: Grice, a Milano la filosofia si divide come le acque del Secchia: ogni gruppo si crede l’unico detentore del sapere, ma alla fine tutti finiscono a discutere sotto la Madonnina, magari sorseggiando un espresso troppo caldo d’inverno e troppo freddo d’estate!  Grice: Geniale, Marliani! E dimmi: se dovessi scegliere, preferiresti una setta filosofica che discute della temperatura del corpo umano oppure una che si accapiglia sui dazi di Gallarate? Io, da buon inglese, opterei per la prima, purché ci sia una pinta di birra a portata di mano.  Marliani: Ah, Grice, i dazi vanno bene per i mercanti, ma per i filosofi niente batte una discussione sul calore naturale! E se la temperatura si fa troppo alta, basta aprire una finestra… o una nuova “setta”, che è sempre pronta a mettere tutto in discussione – anche la ricetta del risotto alla milanese! We have two Marliani: one Giovanni Marliani, and one Giovanni Martolomeo Mariliani -- grandfather and grandson, Grice asks. Input? Thanks. Short answer: you have two Marliani—but not (as far as the evidence goes) a clean grandfather–grandson pair. They are two different Milanese figures, about a century apart, very likely from the same noble family, but the exact line of descent is not securely documented. Let me lay it out cleanly.  1. The two Marliani (A) Giovanni Marliani (the earlier one)  born 1420 in Milan, died 1483 [en.wikipedia.org] physician, natural philosopher, astrologer son of a Milanese noble (Castello/Cantello Marliani) [en.wikipedia.org]  This is your De reactione Marliani—the scholastic-natural philosopher of Pavia/Milan.  (B) Giovanni Bartolomeo (Bartolomeo) Marliani  born 1488, died 1566 [en.wikipedia.org] antiquarian and humanist author of Antiquae Romae topographia (1534) [en.wikipedia.org] son of Gabriele Marliani [en.wikipedia.org]  This is your Topographia Marliani—the Renaissance humanist of Rome.  2. Relation: same family, but NOT clearly grandfather–grandson Here we must be strict (and a bit Gricean about evidence vs implicature). What the sources DO say:  Both belong to the Marliani noble family of Milan [it.wikipedia.org] That family had multiple branches and many members across the 15th–16th centuries [it.wikipedia.org]  What the sources DO NOT say:  They do not explicitly state that Bartolomeo is the grandson of Giovanni (the physician). The father of Bartolomeo is named Gabriele, not Daniele/Paolo/etc. [en.wikipedia.org] The earlier Giovanni’s known son is Daniele (and others like Paolo, Girolamo) [en.wikipedia.org]  So genealogically:  it is possible they belong to the same extended line but no direct grandfather → grandson link is established in standard sources   3. Why the “grandfather–grandson” temptation arises Your intuition is excellent, because structurally the case looks exactly like a Roman-style repetition:  same cognome (Marliani) same given name slot (Giovanni) about 60–70 years apart  This is precisely how:  Roman Marcus Porcius Cato repeats Renaissance families repeat Giovanni / Francesco / Bartolomeo  So the mind naturally infers:  same name + temporal spacing → filial succession  But here the inference overshoots the evidence.  4. The real situation (Gricean formulation!) We have:  shared family name (Marliani) → gens-like continuity repetition of “Giovanni” → common naming pool different patronymics (Castello vs. Gabriele) → distinct branches  So the correct reading is:  not identity by descent (grandfather), but identity by lineage (same Milanese house).   5. Your philosophical contrast (very fruitful) You are actually doing something deeper than genealogy: Marliani I (Giovanni, 1420–1483)  scholastic physics “reaction,” heat, bodies university + court setting  Marliani II (Giovanni Bartolomeo, 1488–1566)  antiquarian Rome ruins, topography, erudite inference humanist + curial setting  So:  one works in natural philosophy the other in humanist antiquarianism  Yet both:  operate by structured inference from partial data which is why your Grice analogy works so neatly for both   6. Final crisp answer  There are two Marliani They belong to the same Milanese noble family  They are not demonstrably grandfather and grandson  The resemblance of names plus chronology invites that inference—but it is not supported explicitly by sources   If you want, we can try to reconstruct a plausible Marliani family tree from the scattered names (Daniele, Gabriele, etc.) and see where each Giovanni might sit.Marliani, Giovanni (1448). De reactione. Pavia.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

GRICE E MEMMIO As Jugurtha quits Rome, he expressed his disgust at her venality, in a sentiment [249]which came with but an ill grace from an accomplice in her infamy. "Oh!" he exclaimed, with an air of affected horror, "Oh! thou venal city; thou wouldst sell thyself to perdition, if thou couldst only find a purchaser!" This utterance by Jug. Grice and Speranza find witty -- they have catalogued under gens: Memmia -- justified? Oratio recta? Implicature? Input? Feedback? Thanks -- Abbott: GRICE E MEMMIO As Jugurtha quits Rome, he expressed his disgust at her venality, in a sentiment [249]which came with but an ill grace from an accomplice in her infamy. "Oh!" he exclaimed, with an air of affected horror, "Oh! thou venal city; thou wouldst sell thyself to perdition, if thou couldst only find a purchaser!" This is a lovely and important passage—and you’re quite right that it rewards both philological and Gricean analysis. Let me tackle your questions in order:  1. ✅ The authentic Latin (Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum) The line Abbott paraphrases is in Sallust (35):  “urbem venalem et mature perituram, si emptorem invenerit.” [loebclassics.com]  Literal translation:  “A city for sale and destined for early destruction, if it should find a buyer.”   ✅ Note:  This is oratio recta embedded in indirect report (fertur dixisse…) Sallust gives us Jugurtha’s words with stylistic compression   2. ❗ Is “Memmia” the right classification? 👉 Strictly speaking: no—this quote belongs to Jugurtha, not to Memmius.  Why Memmius appears in this context Gaius Memmius:  is the tribune who:  tries to expose Jugurtha attacks senatorial corruption [lexundria.com]     👉 So the connection is contextual:                  FigureRoleJugurthaspeaker of the famous lineMemmiusopponent exposing the corruption  ✅ Therefore:  Cataloguing under Memmius is:  ❗ not strictly accurate (speaker ≠ Memmius) ✅ but perhaps justified if:  the theme is anti‑corruption rhetoric       3. Structure of the utterance (very elegant) Latin:  urbem venalem et mature perituram si emptorem invenerit   Logical form   Predicate 1: → “city for sale”   Predicate 2: → “destined to perish soon”   Condition: → “if it finds a buyer”    👉 Extremely compressed:  characterization + conditional prophecy   4. The wit (why Grice/Speranza notice it) You already pointed to the key paradox:  Jugurtha condemns corruption while having exploited it   This produces irony:  He is:  beneficiary of corruption   Yet speaks as:  moral critic of corruption     👉 So the utterance is:  self‑incriminating moral clarity   5. Gricean implicature This is where the passage becomes really rich.  What is said  “Rome is for sale”   What is implicated  Roman elites:  are corrupt   justice:  is purchasable   the Republic:  lacks internal stability     But also (deeper implicature):  “I myself was able to buy it.”   👉 That is not said, but:  it is inescapably inferred   6. The conditional clause (si emptorem invenerit) Very important:  si emptorem invenerit → “if it finds a buyer”   Surface reading  hypothetical condition   Pragmatic reading 👉 NOT truly hypothetical:  Jugurtha himself is the buyer   So the real force is:  “since it has already found one (me), it is doomed”   ✅ This is parallel (beautifully) to your earlier theme:  Nasica: quoniam… (asserted) here:  si… (formally conditional) but pragmatically: → factive / already realized     7. Sharp Gricean reconstruction We can formalize: Explicit:  If Rome finds a buyer → it will perish  Implicit:  Rome has found a buyer (Jugurtha) therefore: → Rome is already doomed   👉 So the utterance is:  a disguised enthymeme   8. Final synthesis  ✅ Latin is authentically Sallustian ✅ the speaker is Jugurtha (not Memmius) ✅ classification under Memmius:  only loosely justified by thematic proximity   ✅ the wit lies in:  self‑implicating moral judgment   ✅ the conditional:  formally hypothetical pragmatically already satisfied     One-line takeaway  Jugurtha’s “urbem venalem…” is a masterpiece of compressed ironic argument: by casting Rome’s corruption as a conditional (“if it finds a buyer”), he implicitly asserts that the condition has already been fulfilled—by himself—so that the statement functions as both a condemnation of Rome and an unintended confession of his own role in its degradation.   If you like, we can compare this with Tacitus’ later moral epigrams—they use almost exactly the same “conditional as veiled assertion” technique. Yes, Grice and Speranza use Roman names as cataloguing entries -- hence the question, thanks. Now 'venalem' venal? "Oh, city for sale" that already sort of STATES that the city _IS_ on sale --- so it seems that the if p, q refers to 'she is doomed, if she finds a buyer'. It is common ground that she IS on sale. But how can a mere adjective carry such factive VERBAL force? Input? Feedback? Thanks This is a very sharp question—you’ve put your finger exactly on where grammar, lexical meaning, and pragmatic force intersect in Sallust. Let me answer directly:  How can venalem (just an adjective) already “state” that Rome is on sale?   1. What venalem actually means (strictly) From Latin lexica (Lewis & Short tradition):  vēnālis / vēnālem = “for sale; exposed for sale; purchasable; venal (corruptible)” [en.wiktionary.org], [mobot.org]  So:  it does NOT mean merely:  “capable of being sold” in a neutral way   but rather:  ✅ “already on offer / being treated as a thing for sale”     2. Why the adjective has verbal force Your intuition is exactly right: it behaves like a verbal predicate. Latin often uses adjectives in a way equivalent to:  English: “a man for sale” but Latin:  tighter, more compressed     Compare:  urbem venalem → literally: “a city-for-sale”  But pragmatically:  ✅ “a city put up for sale / exposed for sale”   👉 The key is:  venalis is not static—it implies an active situation  just like:  propositus venalis = “set out for sale”   3. So is Rome “on sale” already? ✅ Yes — that is exactly what Jugurtha asserts, not merely implies. So the structure is:  First part (assertion)  urbem venalem → Rome = already in a state of sale (corrupt, purchasable)   Second part (conditional)  et mature perituram, si emptorem invenerit  → it will perish if it finds a buyer  4. Your key paradox resolved You noticed:  If it’s already “for sale,” why say “if it finds a buyer”?  Exactly—this is the rhetorical brilliance.  Resolution:   venalem = supply side:  Rome is willing to sell itself    si emptorem invenerit = demand side:  final ruin occurs when a buyer appears     👉 So:  the condition is not about whether Rome is venal but whether the market transaction is completed   5. Gricean structure Now we can state it cleanly in your framework:  What is said  Rome is for sale it will perish if a buyer appears   What is implicated  Rome already behaves as if for sale Jugurtha himself = buyer therefore: → destruction is already underway   👉 So:  the conditional is formally open, but pragmatically already satisfied   6. Why the adjective works so powerfully Because it functions like:  a state predicate with embedded action  We can paraphrase:  urbem venalem ≈ “a city that has put itself on the market”   👉 This is why it feels “factive”:  not because of grammar type (like quoniam) but because the lexical semantics of venalis already assert a situation   7. Final synthesis  ✅ venalem means:  not just “sellable” but “on offer / exposed for sale”   ✅ so Jugurtha already asserts:  Rome is actively venal   ✅ the si clause adds:  the completion of the transaction (buyer found)   ✅ rhetorical effect:  assertion + conditional → ironic inevitability     One-line takeaway  The power of urbem venalem lies in the adjective itself: venalis does not merely describe a capacity but a condition of being exposed to sale, so Jugurtha’s sentence already asserts Rome’s venality as a fact, while the conditional (“if it finds a buyer”) shifts the focus to the completion of the corrupt transaction—an event which, by implicature, has in effect already occurred.   If you like, we can compare this with phrases like corpus venale (a slave “for sale”), where the same “adjective with implicit action” mechanism is very clear. I was referring to the 'et' as "&" -- urbem venalem et mature perituram si emptorem invenerit -- logical form p & (q --> r) where p: Venal city and IF A BUYER FINDS, (one) TO PERISH SOON -- Input? FeedbacK? Thanks Yes—your formalization is very close, and it brings out something real about Sallust’s compression. Let me tighten it slightly so the Latin structure and the logic fully match.  1. The Latin structure (carefully)  urbem venalem et mature perituram si emptorem invenerit  This is one accusative phrase (after dixisse), with:  urbem venalem → predicate 1 et mature perituram … → predicate 2, modified by a clause  So syntactically:  [city] = venal and = going‑to‑perish‑soon if…   2. Your logical proposal You suggested:  p & (q → r)   p = “Rome is venal” q → r = “if it finds a buyer → it perishes”  ✅ That is very good, but we can refine one detail.  3. Slight correction (scope of the condition) The condition (si emptorem invenerit) applies only to the second predicate:  not to venalem but to perituram  So the structure is:  p ∧ (q → r) ✅  where:  p = Rome is venal q = Rome finds a buyer r = Rome perishes soon   4. But Sallust adds something more subtle The future participle:  perituram (“about to perish / destined to perish”)  already suggests teleology or tendency, not neutral future. So we might expand r as:  r = Rome is (on a trajectory) to perish   👉 Then the sentence becomes:  p ∧ (q → inevitable r)   5. Gricean enrichment (your key interest) Now the crucial point: You observed:  p (“venalem”) already implies something strong  Exactly.  Stepwise interpretation Explicit:  Rome is for sale If a buyer appears → it will perish  Implicit (crucial):  Jugurtha himself is (or was) a buyer therefore q is already satisfied   So the logical enrichment becomes:  p ∧ (q → r), and q  which yields:  therefore r   👉 So the full pragmatic structure is:  p ∧ (q → r) + q ⇒ r   6. Why the “conditional” is rhetorically brilliant Because Sallust makes Jugurtha sound as if:  he is offering a neutral conditional  But in fact:  he has already supplied the condition himself   👉 So the si-clause is:  grammatically hypothetical pragmatically retrospective and ironic   7. Role of et (your initial point) You asked specifically about:  et as “&”  Yes:  here it is almost exactly logical conjunction linking two predicative assertions about the same subject  So:  et = ∧ (with rhetorical stacking)   But:  the second conjunct is structurally richer:  it contains the conditional     8. Final reconstruction Best formalization:  Venal(Rome) ∧ (FindBuyer(Rome) → PerishSoon(Rome))  Gricean enrichment:  Venal(Rome) ∧ (FindBuyer(Rome) → PerishSoon(Rome)) ∧ FindBuyer(Rome) ⇒ PerishSoon(Rome)   One-line takeaway  Your logical form p ∧ (q → r) is essentially correct, but Sallust’s brilliance lies in the pragmatic enrichment: by asserting Rome’s venality (p) and presenting destruction as conditional (q → r), while implicitly supplying the condition himself (q), Jugurtha turns a seemingly hypothetical statement into an ironic, self-implicating conclusion that Rome’s ruin is already underway.   If you like, we can compare this with Tacitus’ epigrammatic sentences, where the same “conditional that is already true” pattern appears even more starkly. With the extra rhetorical flourish that there's the previous URBEM within the 'exclamation' so p becomes a mere adjective feminine singular and q becomes feminine singular (accord) adje. perituram with mature as adverbial modifier followed by the protasis whose scope is that mature perituram ONLY. Input? Feedback? Thanks Yes—this is a very precise and correct refinement, and you’re now capturing the syntactic hierarchy and scope relations exactly as a Latinist would want. Let me confirm and sharpen your formulation.  1. The accusative exclamation frame The whole phrase depends on (reported speech after dixisse):  urbem venalem et mature perituram…  So:  urbem = head noun (accusative) venalem = predicate adjective 1 perituram = predicate adjective 2 (future participle)   2. Agreement structure (your point) You are absolutely right:  venalem → feminine accusative singular perituram → feminine accusative singular both agree with urbem  So:  the logical subject is unified but the predicates are stacked adjectives   3. Scope of the si-clause You are also exactly right here:  si emptorem invenerit modifies ONLY perituram  not venalem.  So structure is:  urbem venalem ✅ (independent assertion) et urbem perituram ✅ (second assertion)  qualified by:  si emptorem invenerit       👉 In modern logical notation:  p ∧ (q → r)  —but syntactically:  urbem [venalem] et [mature perituram (si…)]   4. Role of mature You also noted:  mature modifies only perituram  Exactly. So:  not:  “venal and soon (both)” ❌   but:  “venal and soon-to-perish (if…)” ✅     5. Why this matters rhetorically This asymmetry is crucial:  First predicate (venalem)  simple categorical unconditional   Second predicate (perituram)  dynamic conditional triggered by market completion   👉 So:  Sallust deliberately splits:   state (venal) vs trajectory (perishing if condition met)   6. Your insight about adjectival reduction You say:  p becomes “a mere adjective”  Yes—but with a twist:  grammatically: → “mere adjective” semantically: → full predication compressed into adjective   So:  venalem = “(it is) for sale”  not just attributive, but:  quasi-verbal predicate   7. Full syntactic reconstruction We could expand the Latin (hypothetically) as:  urbem esse venalem et urbem mature perituram si emptorem invenerit   or even:  urbem venalem esse et (eandem) mature perituram si emptorem invenerit   8. Final confirmation of your formulation Your statement:  p = venalem q = perituram (with mature) si-clause scopes only over q  ✅ This is exactly correct.  9. One-line takeaway  Yes—Sallust’s sentence is structurally asymmetrical: urbem venalem stands as an unconditional predicate, while mature perituram forms a second, dynamic predicate whose future realization is restricted by the si-clause, so that the logical form is best captured as p ∧ (q → r), but with the important syntactic fact that the condition scopes only over the second adjectival predicate.   If you like, we can map this into Stoic propositional logic terms (they had a surprisingly precise account of exactly these mixed predication structures).

 

 

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

 

Grice e Mennio Gens Maenia Maenius, C. A.U.C. CDXVI Move 1 (Patrician Senator): "Quid faciemus cum rostris navium Antiatium captis?" Move 2 Menio [cum gravitate]: "Suggestum in Foro ornabunt ut populus victoriam semper videat." Abbott-Style Translation: Senator: "What on earth are we supposed to do with all these bronze prows we chopped off the ships of Antium?" Menio: "They will make rather charming decorations for the speakers' platform in the Forum, so the aristocracy never forgets who won the war." +> IMPLICATURA: That the voice of the people will literally be amplified by the physical spoils of victory, permanently changing Roman political space. Any historic evidence for passage below? Grice and Speranza like the figure of speech -- bronze prows -- decoration -- IRONY? Displacement? Disassociating? And can you provide contextualisation historic and possible source. Perhaps Menio did ironise on this? Passage: This is one of your best “Gricean reconstructions,” because here the history is absolutely firm, while the utterance is almost certainly not. Let me disentangle the two layers.  1. Historical core: completely solid Everything behind your exchange is grounded in a very famous episode.  In 338 BC, during the Latin War, the Romans defeated Antium, a maritime power. The fleet was seized; some ships were destroyed. Crucially, the bronze prows (rostra) of the captured ships were fixed onto the speakers’ platform in the Forum. [thehistorianshut.com], [en.wikipedia.org]  This was done under the consul Gaius Maenius:  he “took the six rostra… and placed them” on the platform used for public speaking [en.wikipedia.org] from that point on, the platform itself was called Rostra  So your “suggestum in Foro ornabunt” is essentially a Latinization of what Livy actually narrates (8.14): the decision to decorate the platform with the ship‑beaks.  2. Is your Latin utterance attested? No ancient source gives: Suggestum in Foro ornabunt ut populus victoriam semper videat nor an exchange framed as a senatorial question and Maenius’ reply. What is attested (Livy’s version in paraphrase):  some ships were stored, others burned their prows were used to decorate a platform in the Forum  So again:  your content = historical your dialogue = rhetorical construction   3. What is the figure of speech? You asked precisely the right question: what is the trope here? Let us look at the act: enemy ships → stripped → prows mounted → speaking platform It is not simple irony There is no overt saying-the-opposite. No verbal mockery. It is not metaphor The prows are not said to be something else. They remain prows. The closest description This is best understood as: symbolic transposition of war spoils into civic space or rhetorically, you might say:  metonymic transformation (war → politics via trophies) combined with institutional irony (in the broader, not strictly verbal sense)   4. Why it feels ironic Your intuition about irony is not wrong—it just operates at a deeper level. The effect is: the instruments of naval violence → become ornaments of civil speech So:  rostra (ship rams) originally pierce hulls rostra (platform) now stage persuasion  There is a kind of structural irony: force → ornament violence → rhetoric war → deliberation But this is not irony in the narrow rhetorical sense; it is what one might call: historical irony embedded in urban symbolism  5. Gricean reading (very elegant here) Your implicature is excellent and can be sharpened: Physical fact: prows fixed on platform Intended meaning: Roman victory over Antium Deeper implicature: → every speech delivered here is backed by Roman arms → political voice rests on military success So the platform “says” silently: you may speak here because we won out there This is very close to your earlier Tarquin and Brutus cases: material object → carries intentional meaning  6. Maenius: irony or display? There is no evidence that Maenius himself ironized the gesture. The ancient presentation is:  triumphal commemorative almost ritual  But later interpretation (like yours, and like Roman historians themselves) clearly sees the symbolic fusion:  war trophies civic oratory popular sovereignty  So your “ut populus victoriam semper videat” is not attested, but perfectly captures the Roman mentality: victory must be permanently visible in public space.  7. Final synthesis There is no ancient dialogue in which a senator asks what to do with the prows and Maenius replies that they will decorate the platform. But Livy explicitly reports that after the capture of Antium the prows of enemy ships were fixed onto the speakers’ platform in the Forum, giving it the name Rostra. [thehistorianshut.com], [en.wikipedia.org] The rhetorical force lies not in a spoken irony but in a symbolic transformation: instruments of war are recontextualized as ornaments of political speech. This creates a powerful, almost silent implicature that Roman civic authority rests on military victory. The figure is therefore best understood as symbolic displacement or transposition rather than metaphor or simple irony.  If you like, we can map this onto Greek precedents (e.g. trophy-display at sanctuaries) and see how distinctively Roman the “politicization” of the spoils becomes.Menio (CDXVI). Suggestum in Foro ornabunt ut populus victoriam semper videat

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Micalori – Ossia: Grice e Micalori: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- Ganimede e l’implicatura sferica di Giove – filosofia lazia -- filosofia italiana (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “In Italy, like Oxford, we take mythology seriously! And so did Schelling!” Filosofo italiano.  Roma, Lazio.  Giacomo Micalori (Urbino): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale -- Ganimede e l’implicatura sferica di Giove. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats what is “meant” as systematically recoverable from what is said plus rational expectations of cooperation (maxims), so that implicature is typically cancellable and calculated by reference to shared purposes in talk; read against that, “Micalori” (Giacomo Micalori of Urbino, professor of theology and philosophy, author of Della sfera mondiale, Urbino, Marco Antonio Mazzantini, 1626, and Antapocrisi, Rome, Francesco Cavalli, 1635) can be used as a deliberately anachronistic foil in which cosmological language (“sfera,” planispheres, longitude/latitude, and the Ganymede/Zeus star-myth complex) invites a quasi-Gricean distinction between what a term strictly commits one to (entailment) and what it merely invites an informed reader to supply (implicature): calling something “the sphere” in a scholastic-astronomical register can be played as if it “says” more than a local conversational hint—almost as though the conceptual apparatus forces a world-picture (hence the joke that “by calling it sfera, Micalori’s statement entails rather than implicates that the Romans were wrong”), whereas for Grice the interesting work is precisely in the gap where speakers exploit shared rational norms to mean more than they say without being logically committed; the mythological overlay (Zeus abducting Ganymede via the eagle constellation; Hyginus’ Astronomica 3.15 as a canonical crystallization of astral lore) then functions as a staged test-case for “reason in conversation,” because mythology, like polite conversational indirection, is a rule-governed practice of saying one thing while licensing another layer of uptake—yet Grice would insist that the extra layer is pragmatic, defeasible, and responsibility-sensitive, not a cosmological necessity, while the Micalori-side “spherical” rhetoric tempts the reader toward a thicker, more doctrinal “implicature” that behaves like background metaphysics; the upshot of the comparison is that Grice models conversational reason as a minimal, public, calculative discipline for moving from utterance to intended meaning, whereas the Micalori constellation-sphere frame (as you present it) dramatizes how a learned symbolic system (myth + astronomy + geometry) can make the unsaid feel structurally enforced—turning what would be a Gricean implicature into something closer to entailment by the weight of the worldview embedded in the vocabulary. Grice: “In Italy, like Oxford, we take mythology seriously! And so did Schelling!” Filosofo italiano.  Roma, Lazio. Grice: “I took my ideas on longitude and latitude from M.” -- Grice: “By calling it ‘sfera,’ M.’s statement ENTAILS rather than implicates that the Romans were wrong.” Professore a Urbino.  Opere: “Della sfera mondiale” In Urbino, Mazzantini, M., Antapocrisi, In Roma, Francesco Roma Cavalli.  Zeus features heavily in a lot of starlore, and the Eagle constellation is no exception.  The predominantly accepted mythos for this constellation is the abduction of Ganymede. Zeus had facilitated the kidnapping, fancying the beautiful mortal boy as his personal cup-bearer.  In the constellation, which is situated south of Cygnus on the equator, making it visible from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, poor Ganymede can be seen hanging from the claws of the eagle as he is swiftly taken to the heavens.  The constellation appears alongside several other bird constellations. The Eagle’s wings are spread, giving it the appearance of gliding through the stars. As Hyginus states, the beak is separated from the body by a milky circle. It was also said to set “at the rising of the Lion and rises with Capricorn”. (Hyginus, Astronomy, 3.15)  Greek astronomy  Humans have a natural urge to identify familiar things amongst the twinkling stars of the mysterious abyss above us. These narratives came out of astronomical observations and ancient time tracking. The study of the sky began long before the earliest Greek sources that (sparsely) discuss them, Homer and Hesiod. They likely developed during the transition from oral to written transmission, but to what is extent is unknown.  Even though the Greeks were late to the constellation conversation, they received a lot of their knowledge from their Eastern neighbors. implicatura sferica, planifesferio, Casali, Micalori. Grice: Caro Micalori, devo confessare che quando guardo le stelle mi sento sempre un po’ come Ganimede: rapito, ma non dall’aquila, bensì dalla curiosità filosofica! Tu che hai studiato la “sfera mondiale”, dimmi: la filosofia può davvero abbracciare il cielo? Micalori: Grice, in Italia ci prendiamo la mitologia sul serio, come Schelling! La “sfera” non è solo una questione di geometria, ma un modo per smentire i Romani: qui ogni implicatura è planetaria! E poi, vuoi mettere il fascino del planifesferio? Basta un po’ di cielo e il tè va subito in orbita! Grice: Ah, il planifesferio! Ogni volta che parli di longitude e latitude, mi sento un esploratore, ma senza bussola. Forse dovrei chiedere a Giove una mappa stellare… o almeno una tazza di caffè, così non mi perdo tra implicature sferiche e costellazioni birichine. Micalori: Grice, non ti preoccupare: il segreto è leggere le stelle come si legge una conversazione, con ironia e un pizzico di leggerezza. Dopotutto, tra Ganimede, l’aquila e Zeus, anche i filosofi ogni tanto volano alto… e qualche implicatura cade, ma nessuno si fa male. E se proprio ci perdiamo, Urbino ci aspetta per una nuova “Antapocrisi”! Micalori, Giacomo (1618). Le nozze finte. Pesaro: Flaminio Concordia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Miglio – Ossia: Grice e Miglio: la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura conversazionale -- implicatura ligure – la LIGVRIA e la PADANIA.  Gianfranco Miglio: la ragione conversazionale  e l’implicatura conversazionale -- implicatura ligure – la LIGVRIA e la PADANIA. Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning helps frame Gianfranco Miglio as someone working with the same inferential machinery, but at a different scale: where Grice studies how hearers reconstruct what a speaker means by presuming cooperative rationality and then calculating implicatures, Miglio focuses on how political language constructs consensus by getting publics to supply the intended conclusions “between the lines.” Miglio’s disarmingly blunt definition of ideology as what politicians propagate to obtain or purchase consent can be read as a macro-pragmatic thesis: political speech routinely maximizes implicature and minimizes explicit commitment, relying on audience design, shared regional identities, and strategic vagueness to make a program sound inevitable without stating its strongest premises. In that sense, your “implicatura ligure” and “Padania” motifs are Gricean: they suggest that the same utterance can generate different implicatures depending on the audience’s background assumptions and local loyalties, so that meaning becomes a function of what a community treats as relevant, plausible, and action-guiding. Miglio’s federalist/confederal emphasis then parallels Grice’s sensitivity to context: just as Grice insists that what is meant depends on the circumstances of utterance, Miglio treats political legitimacy and institutional design as dependent on territorial and historical context, not on one-size-fits-all abstractions. The contrast with Oxford’s tendency to treat political philosophy as “minor” can be folded back into Grice’s own lesson: politics is precisely the domain in which rational interpretation is most vulnerable to manipulation, because the hearer’s cooperative inferencing can be exploited—so Miglio’s analysis can be presented as showing how conversational reason, when scaled up to mass publics, becomes a technology of consensus formation, with implicature doing as much work as explicit argument. Grice: “At Oxford, dreaming spires as it is – philosophical politics – or political philosophy – is considered minor, or a minor specialty – since you are bound NOT to be deemed a philosopher. It’s highly different – slightly different – in Italy, where, with Mussolini, EVERYTHING is political!” Berlin, who thought was a philosopher, ended up lecturing on the history of ideas, i..e. ideology – M. defines ideology so simply that would put Berlin to shame: an ideology is what politicians propagate to reach or buy consensus!” --  essential Italian philosopher. Sostenitore della trasformazione dello Stato italiano in senso federale o, addirittura, confederale, fra gli anni ottanta e i novanta è considerato l'ideologo della Lega Lombarda, in rappresentanza della quale fu anche senatore, prima di "rompere" con Umberto Bossi dando vita alla breve stagione del Partito Federalista.   Polo scolastico "M." ad Adro. Costituzionalista e scienziato della politica, fu senatore della Repubblica Italiana nella XI, XII e XIII legislatura.  Ha insegnato presso l'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, ove fu preside della Facoltà di Scienze politiche. È stato allievo d’Entrèves e Pallieri, sotto la cui docenza si è formato sui classici del pensiero giuridico e politologico.  Colpito da ictusnon si riprese e morì ottantatreenne nella sua stessa città natale, Como, circa un anno dopo. Il funerale si tenne a Domaso, sul Lago di Como, comune d'origine del padre e sede di una villa nella quale il professore si rifugiava spesso; in seguito M. è stato tumulato nel locale cimitero, a fianco dei membri della sua famiglia. Laureatosi a Milano con Origini e sviluppi delle dottrine giuridiche pubbliche, evita l'arruolamento per la Seconda guerra mondiale a causa di un difetto uditivo congenito, e poté divenire assistente volontario alla cattedra di Storia delle dottrine politiche, che ENTREVES tenne nella medesima università.  Implicatura ligure. Grice, Saturdays and Mondays. Grice: Caro Miglio, a Oxford abbiamo sempre visto la filosofia politica come una specializzazione minore. In Italia, invece, sembra che tutto diventi inevitabilmente politico! Mi incuriosisce come tu definisca l’ideologia in modo tanto diretto: “ciò che i politici propagano per ottenere consenso.” È una prospettiva brillante, quasi disarmante nella sua semplicità. Miglio: Grazie, Grice! In effetti, in Liguria come in Padania, la politica permea ogni aspetto del vivere civile. La mia esperienza mi ha portato a sostenere la trasformazione dello Stato in senso federale: credo che solo valorizzando le differenze territoriali si possa costruire un vero consenso, che non sia solo ideologico, ma condiviso. Grice: Interessante! Questa idea di “implicatura ligure” mi affascina. Pensi che la conversazione politica abbia delle sue implicature particolari, magari più sottili rispetto a quelle della quotidianità? Oppure, come dici tu, tutto alla fine si riduce alla ricerca del consenso? Miglio: Direi che la conversazione politica è piena di implicature, spesso più implicite che esplicite! La differenza la fa la trasparenza: quando la politica riesce a essere chiara nei suoi intenti, il dialogo si fa davvero costruttivo. Ma come in tutte le conversazioni, molto si gioca tra le righe… e il consenso, a volte, è solo una conseguenza. Miglio, Gianfranco (1958). Le trasformazioni della democrazia. Milano: Giuffrè.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Mignucci – Ossia: Grice e Mignucci: la ragione conversazionale. Grice: “M. is perhaps the only Italian philosopher – other than Speranza – who understood my implicature!”  Mario Mignucci (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale. Mignucci is an unusually close Italian analogue to Grice because his core scholarly terrain—ancient logic from Aristotle through the Stoics and Diodorus, including questions about implication, modality, and criteria of truth—sits exactly where Grice’s pragmatics needs a disciplined background story about valid inference and what counts as a permissible step from one commitment to another. Grice’s theory says that conversational meaning is reason-governed: hearers recover what is meant (often as implicature) by assuming cooperative rationality and then computing what must be intended given what is said; Mignucci’s reconstructions of ancient implication and modal reasoning show, at the level of logical form, what it is for an inference to be licensed, blocked, or strengthened, which is precisely what the Gricean hearer is doing informally when an utterance looks under-informative or oddly chosen. That is why your “only Mignucci understood my implicature” joke can be made serious: Mignucci is trained to see the difference between what follows strictly (logical consequence, Diodorean dominance, Theophrastean modality) and what follows only given background rational constraints, and that mirrors Grice’s difference between entailment and implicature. Even when Grice grumbles about deontic logic or about Aristotle’s clumsiness with necessity/possibility, the shared methodological point remains: both treat meaning as answerable to norms of inference—Mignucci by excavating ancient systems that make those norms explicit, Grice by explaining how everyday speakers rely on analogous norms implicitly, so that conversation becomes a practical, lived version of the logical enterprise Mignucci studies in its classical, “Portico” form. Grice: “M. is perhaps the only Italian philosopher – other than Speranza – who understood my implicature!” Keywords: implicatura.Per una nuova interpretazione della logica modale di Teofrasto. Vichiana – Grice: “the sorry story of deontic logic”. La teoria del Lizio aristotelica della scienza. Sansoni, Firenze, L'argomento dominatore e la teoria dell'implicazione in Diodoro Crono, Vichiana – Grice: “Of course, Diodorus fails to recognise the genius of Philo!” -- Il problema del criterio di verità presso gli stoici antichi. Posizione e criterio del discorso filosofico, cur. di Giacon. Patron, Bologna. Il significato della logica stoica del PORTICO. Patron, Bologna – Grice: “I’ve always found Stoic Logic boring – I mean Mates’s essay, not the logic herself!” -- L'unificazione del sapere in Aristotele – Grice: “What I call the Einheit von Wissenschaft -- Atti del congresso di filosofia, Perugia. Sansoni, Firenze. Le pseudo-scotiste Quaestiones super libros Priorum Analyticorum Aristotelis e la sillogistica dello Stagirita. De doctrina loannis Scoti: Acta congressus scotistici, Oxonii – Grice: “Being an Oxonian myself, I’ve always hated Scotus, perhaps because he came from the wrong side of Hadrian’s Wall!” Edizioni Antonianum, Roma. Aristotele, Gli Analitici Primi. Introduzione, traduzione e commento. – Grice: “I was fortunate that I never had to lecture on this dry tretise, sticking rather to the two first items in the Organon: Categoriae and De Interpretatione!” Loffredo, Napoli. Albert the Great's Approach to the aristotelian modal Syllogisite. In Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Age. Actes du congrès de philoso-phie médiévale, Montréal. Vrin, Paris. Aristotele, Gli Analitici Secondi. Azzoguidi, Bologna Grice: How clumsy could Aristotle be when he said that what is necessary is not also possible?” -- Aristotele e l'esistenza logica. In Filosofia e logica, a cur. Carrara and Giaretta. Mignucci. Grice: Mignucci, dimmi la verità: la logica modale di Teofrasto ti ha mai fatto ridere, o sei stato sempre serio come Aristotele davanti ai suoi Analitici? Mignucci: Grice, se fosse per me, Aristotele avrebbe inventato la logica per poter giustificare le sue pause pranzo! E poi, su Teofrasto, ti assicuro che capire la sua logica è come cercare il criterio di verità tra gli stoici: un vero gioco di prestigio. Grice: Ah, ma almeno tu hai colto la mia implicatura, cosa che nemmeno Diodoro Crono riusciva a fare, troppo preso a scoprire se il possibile fosse davvero necessario… Scommetto che Scotus non avrebbe superato nemmeno il portico del mio college! Mignucci: Scotus l’avrei spedito direttamente a Roma, senza passare dal via! In fondo, la logica è come il domino: chi vince è quello che riesce a far cadere tutte le premesse senza perdere la pazienza… o la voglia di scherzare! Mignucci, Mario (1965). La teoria aristotelica della scienza. Firenze: Sansoni.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Minicio – Ossia: Grice e Minicio: la ragione conversazionale e il nome del filosofo  Fundano: la ragione conversazionale e il nome del filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana (Roma). Grice: “It seems that, snobs as they are, the Portico was more popular at Rome than it had been at Athens!” Keywords: portico.Filosofo italiano. Grice: “The problem with Old Roman Philosophers is their name. Consider Fundano. His gens was that which have him as a “Minicio” – when it comes to my dictionary, Italians hesitate. They don’t min listing him as ‘Minicio Fundano’ – but at Oxford we consider that as vulgar. A name is something you can use to CALL someone – So you have to decide: F., or Minicio? Since there were more Minicios than there were Fundanuses, it is perhaps wiser to list him under the F – as in ‘who gives a F?’ -- A friend of Plutarco and Plinio minore – Plinio minore describes him as a philosopher who dedicated himself to study from an early age. It seems likely that he followed the doctrine of the Porch. Gaio Minicio Fundano. Keywords: portico. GRICEVS: Fundane, miror quod Porticus Romae—ut snobi solent—plus placuit quam Athenis, sed maius malum mihi est nomen tuum: Minicio an Fundano te vocem? FVNDANVS: Voca me FVNDANVM, nam Minicios plures habes quam columnas porticus, et ego non sum index tuus sed philosophus Plutarci amicus. GRICEVS: Recte; apud nos Oxonii “Minicio Fundano” sonat quasi cenaculum plenum consonantium, atque ego mavis F. scribere—vel, ut dicunt, “quis F. curat?” FVNDANVS: Cura tamen, Grice: si nomen est ad vocandum, voca clare, ne Porticus ipsa respondeat et te Stoicum faciat invito. This Minicio -- as Speranza and Grice have it -- usually miscatalogued as Mincio -- does this parallel the gens Manilia/Manlia -- with Treccani having things wrong? Yes, there is a real parallel of type, but not quite in the way the question first suggests. The safest starting point is the person himself. The man usually known in modern scholarship is Gaius Minicius Fundanus, not Mincio and not, in a classically tidy catalogue, Minicio Fundano. The nomen is Minicius, the cognomen Fundanus. So if one is classifying him by Roman naming practice, one files him under Minicius as a member of the gens Minicia, not under a phantom Mincio and not primarily under Fundanus unless one is making an index by cognomina or by modern Italian usage. That already gives the first answer. The Mincio form is generally a modern corruption, simplification, or Italianising drift, not the proper Roman nomen. Minicius is the correct gentilicium. Mincio looks like a vulgar reduction, perhaps helped by familiarity with the river-name Mincio and by the general tendency of later catalogues to smooth unfamiliar Roman nomina into more familiar Italian-looking forms. Now to your analogy with Manilia and Manlia. Yes, there is a formal parallel in the sense that Roman nomina can be distorted by dropping or absorbing an internal syllable, and later reference works do sometimes simplify or misreport them. But the specific pair Manilia and Manlia needs care. Manlius is of course the famous Roman nomen, with gens Manlia. Manilius is a different nomen, with gens Manilia. These are distinct Roman families, not just spelling variants. So if a catalogue slides from Manilius to Manlius, that is not a harmless orthographic convenience; it changes the gens. In exactly that sense, Minicius to Mincio is a comparable danger: it can make the nomen look like something else, or even cease to look like a Roman nomen at all. So the real parallel is this. Minicius versus Mincio is comparable to Manilius versus Manlius in that a small formal collapse produces a different and misleading identity. But Minicius versus Mincio is not a case of two equally legitimate ancient gentes standing side by side. Minicius is the Roman nomen; Mincio is the later deformation. As for Treccani, I would not state flatly that Treccani has it wrong without checking the exact entry and context. Treccani sometimes reflects modern Italian naming habits, where a figure may be cited under a vernacularised or traditional form rather than under the strictest Roman prosopographical one. That can be annoying to a classicist without always being strictly an error. But if Treccani actually presents Mincio as though it were the proper Roman nomen, then yes, from a Roman onomastic point of view that would be misleading. The dry prosopographical summary would be: The correct Roman name is Gaius Minicius Fundanus. He belongs to the gens Minicia. Mincio is a later or vulgarising deformation, not the proper nomen. The analogy with Manilius and Manlius is good as a warning about how tiny graphic changes can create a false gens or a false identification. If a modern catalogue prefers Mincio, that is at best a secondary vernacular label, not the safest classical form. And your instinct about Fundanus is also right in one respect. In ordinary address and literary citation, a cognomen may be more useful than the nomen, especially if the nomen is less distinctive or more easily corrupted. So one can perfectly well say that Fundanus is the more callable part of the name, while still admitting that prosopographically he is Minicius. If you want, I can next give you a compact note on the gens Minicia itself, with other attested Minicii and where Fundanus sits among them. And Grice and Speranza are grateful they don't have the Roman handbook, because Grice forgot to say he was having in mind Minucio, not Minicio -- as per Marco Minucio Felice. Thanks -- Grice and Speranza wonder if the Minucio and the Minicio are related asper etymology -- and also as to why say, Erberto Grice, Grice is the name, Erberto the first name; in italian, Erberto is nome, and Grice cognome, but in Ancient Rome, Pavlvs Erbertus Gricevs -- Erbertus would be nomen -- Yes, there is a real etymological and onomastic relation between Minucius and Minicius, but it is the sort of relation that invites caution rather than collapse. Minucius is a very well attested Roman nomen, belonging to the gens Minucia. Minicius is also an attested Roman nomen, belonging to the gens Minicia. The two are close in shape and probably related at a deeper Italic or Latin level, but in Roman usage they function as distinct gentilicia. So one should not treat Minicio as a mere error for Minucio any more than one would treat Manilio as a harmless misspelling of Manlio. Nearness of sound does not abolish prosopographical distinctness. As to etymology, the safest thing to say is that both names seem to belong to the same broad family of formations built on a min- stem, with old Italic and Latin name formation doing the rest. One naturally thinks of Latin minor, minuere, minutus, and of stem variation in old gentilicia, but one should be careful not to pretend to more certainty than the evidence warrants. In other words, Minucius and Minicius are probably cousins in formation, but not the same family name and not interchangeable in historical cataloguing. Now to the Roman naming point, which is the more interesting one. In modern Italian, as you say, Erberto is nome and Grice is cognome. In modern English, one says first name and surname, or family name. But in ancient Rome those categories do not map directly onto one another. In the classical Roman pattern, the central elements are praenomen, nomen, and cognomen. The praenomen is the individual personal name, the small stock of names like Marcus, Gaius, Lucius, Publius. The nomen is the gentilicium, the clan name, the thing that places one in a gens, like Tullius, Julius, Cornelius, Minucius. The cognomen is the branch name or distinguishing surname within the gens, like Cicero, Caesar, Scipio, Rufus. So if one Latinises a modern name into Roman form, one must decide not by modern order but by function. If you made H. P. Grice into something mock-Roman like Paulus Herbertus Griceius, Herbertus would not naturally be the nomen. It would more naturally behave as the praenomen, or as part of the personal naming slot, because it corresponds to the given name. Griceius, if treated as a Latinised family name, would be nearer the nomen or perhaps the cognomen depending on how elaborate a fiction one wants to construct. So the simplest mapping is this. Modern given name corresponds most closely to Roman praenomen, not nomen. Modern family name corresponds most closely, though not perfectly, to Roman nomen or sometimes cognomen depending on how one is reconstructing the name. Roman nomen is not just a middle term in a sequence; it identifies the gens. Thus, if one wanted a pseudo-Roman Grice, one might imagine something like Publius Griceius or Herbertus Griceius, but that is already post-classical and playful rather than genuinely Roman. A stricter Romanisation would require choosing a proper Roman praenomen and then treating Griceius as a gentilicium-like formation. For example, Publius Griceius. If one then wanted a cognomen, one could add one more element. But Herbertus itself is not a Roman nomen; it is a later Germanic personal name Latinised. So your final sentence should be corrected thus: in ancient Rome, Erbertus would not be nomen; it would correspond more nearly to praenomen, while Gricevs or Griceius, if one insisted on Romanising it, would be taking the gentile or surname position. The dry summary is: Minucius and Minicius are distinct Roman nomina, though probably related in deeper formation. One should not collapse Minucio into Minicio, nor vice versa. In Roman naming, the modern given name corresponds most closely to the praenomen, not the nomen. The nomen is the gens name. So in a mock-Roman Paulus Herbertus Griceius, Herbertus would not naturally be the nomen; Griceius would be closer to that slot, while Herbertus would behave more like the personal name. If you like, I can next give you a compact table mapping modern English and Italian naming terms onto the Roman praenomen, nomen, cognomen system, with Minucius Felix and Gaius Minicius Fundanus as examples. Oops -- I meant to say H. P. Grice Erberto Paolo Grice --. yes, it would not work. The analogy would be to take 'Grice' as gens -- i. e. nome gentilicio -- or surname -- or Italian cognome -- and then Erberto as first name and Paolo as second or middle name -- but second is better for cases like P. M. S. Hacker, or H. L. A. Hart -- but the interesting thing, Grice and Speranza think, is that cognome is now in Italian meant as gentilician name, i.e. the nomen simpliciter in Ancient Rome -- whereas cognomen in Italian was a branch of the gens usually -- I wonder if the OED has an entry for cognomen, or the Short/Lewis, or the Dizionario etimologico, as to where this 'shift' in use -- not sense -- occured, because etymologicaly co-nome is which goes with the name (of the gens) -- as in Camilla Parker-Bowles (Parker-Bowles, Parker nome, Bowles cognome. Odd? Yes, that is exactly the interesting shift, and your instinct about use rather than sense is very good. The short answer is this. In classical Latin, cognomen is an additional name attached to the nomen, and in the full Roman system it typically marks either a family branch within the gens or an individual distinguishing label. In modern Italian, cognome has shifted upward to mean the family surname as such. So what was once, in Roman structure, subordinate to the nomen becomes, in ordinary Italian, the default label for the inherited family name. That is the shift. The etymology itself stays transparent enough. cognome in Treccani is derived from Latin cognomen, composed of co- plus nomen, literally something like a name that goes with the name. Treccani gives the modern Italian meaning directly as family name, casato. [treccani.it], [oed.com] As for English, the OED does indeed have an entry for cognomen, and it records the English noun from the early nineteenth century, with its etymon given as Latin cognōmen. The OED is useful here because it also reflects the broadened English use: not only the Roman technical term, but also, by extension, surname or epithet. Etymonline says much the same, noting an earlier sense of distinguishing name and then the broader surname sense. [oed.com], [etymonline.com] For the Latin side, Lewis and Short is indeed the place one would normally consult for the classical lexical baseline, though the search result here gives the lexicon portal rather than the specific entry text. Still, it is the right dictionary family for fixing the older Roman usage. [anastrophe...hicago.edu] Now the historical point. What changed was not that Italians forgot the Roman distinction, but that the Roman naming system itself disappeared. Once praenomen, nomen, and cognomen ceased to function as living social categories, the inherited last name of the family became the practical thing people needed to call something. In that later world, the old technical contrast between nomen and cognomen was no longer socially operative. So cognome naturally drifted to mean what ordinary people actually had and used: the hereditary family surname. That is why modern Italian cognome corresponds much more closely to surname or family name than to the strict Roman cognomen. So one might put it this way. In ancient Rome: praenomen = personal forename nomen = gentile name, the gens name cognomen = added family-branch name or distinguishing surname within the gens In modern Italian: nome = given name cognome = hereditary family surname That is why modern Italian cognome often corresponds functionally to the Roman nomen more than to the Roman cognomen, even though etymologically it descends from cognomen. The word has stayed; the system around it has changed. Your Parker-Bowles example is helpful precisely because it shows how unstable these labels become outside the Roman system. In a double surname such as Parker-Bowles, one can indeed feel the temptation to split the pair and ask which is the main family name and which is the attached one. But that is exactly the wrong kind of temptation if one wants Roman precision. Modern double surnames are not reconstructed Roman tria nomina. They are products of later naming conventions, marriage practice, inheritance strategy, or social presentation. So to say Parker nome, Bowles cognome is clever, but only metaphorically. It is not structurally Roman. The driest formulation is probably this. Cognome in modern Italian is etymologically from Latin cognomen. Semantically and socially, however, it has shifted to denote the hereditary family surname in general. That happened because the Roman tripartite naming system ceased to be alive, and one old term expanded to cover the ordinary social function of surname. So the shift is not mysterious: the morphology stayed visible, but the onomastic system changed beneath it. If you like, I can next give you a very compact comparative table with columns for modern English, modern Italian, and ancient Roman naming terms, including where cognome and cognomen align and where they do not. Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Minicio – Ossia: Grice e Minicio Gaio Minicio Fundano (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale d’Adriano nel diritto romano e Plinio minore. Grice and Gaius Minicius Fundanus meet most naturally around the Hadrianic rescript to Fundanus as a case study in how reasoned meaning is engineered in institutional speech: Hadrian’s letter is explicitly about legal procedure (no punishments on vague accusations; require a properly framed charge and proof), but it also carries a layered communicative design whose force depends on what a rational addressee is entitled to infer beyond the bare directive. In Gricean terms, the rescript presupposes a cooperative framework between emperor and governor: it sets shared conversational (and juridical) expectations about what counts as an adequate “move” in the forum—what must be stated, what evidence must be produced, what can be dismissed as calumny—and it thereby generates implicatures about imperial policy without ever announcing a general “philosophy” of toleration. Fundanus, as recipient, is positioned like Grice’s ideal hearer: he must recover the intended point by tracking relevance (this is really guidance on governance, not merely on one sect), Quantity (say enough to justify action, not more), and Quality (do not act on what cannot be responsibly supported). The later Greek transmission through Justin and Eusebius then adds a further Gricean layer: a document written as administrative instruction acquires a new audience and thus new implicatures, becoming for Christian historians a signal of how the empire “really” regarded Christianity; the shift illustrates Grice’s point that meaning is not exhausted by literal content, but is also shaped by audience design and by the assumptions readers bring when they treat an utterance as part of a larger rational enterprise. Finally, your Oxford framing (“Minicius, Hadrian, and Pliny mean a lot to the Oxonian philosopher”) can be cashed out in Grice’s own terms: these are exemplary materials for showing how norms of rational communication—proof burdens, permissible inferences, the policing of empty accusation—are not merely legal technicalities but instances of the same reason-governed practices that make everyday conversation possible, only here amplified into the stable, publicly accountable discourse of Roman law. Grice: “Minicio, Adriano, and Plinio minore may not sound philosophical, but they do at Oxford. There is no such thing as a Faculty of Philosophy; only a Sub-Faculty of Philosophy, based at Merton – within the real Faculty, the Faculty of Literae Humaniores. Therefore, Minicio, Adriano, and Plinio minore MEAN a lot to the Oxonian philosopher – to the Oxonian philosopher that counts, that is, the one with a double first in Greats, like me!” Filosofo italiano. Rescritto di Adriano a Gaio M. Fundano. L'imperatore Adriano, autore del rescritto a Gaio M. Fundano. Il rescritto di Adriano a Gaio Minucio Fundano è un rescritto imperiale inviato dall'imperatore romano Adriano a Gaio Minucio Fundano, proconsole d'Asia. Il documento giuridico, scritto originariamente in latino, fu tradotto e tràdito in greco ellenistico da Eusebio di Cesarea che si rifaceva a Giustino.  Il testo è noto agli storici e agli studiosi di Storia del Cristianesimo per essere uno dei più antichi scritti pagani sul cristianesimo. Il documento di Adriano, pur indirizzato a Minucio Fundano, rispondeva in realtà a un'istanza sollecitata da Quinto Licinio Silvano Graniano, predecessore del destinatario: Graniano aveva chiesto lumi sul comportamento da tenere nei confronti dei cristiani e delle accuse che venivano loro rivolte.  Adriano rispose al proconsole di procedere nei loro confronti solo in presenza di eventi circostanziati, emergenti da un procedimento giudiziario e non sulla base di accuse generiche, petizioni o calunnie: veniva stabilito così il principio dell'onere della prova a carico dei promotori delle accuse. Roman law, Adriano a M. Not to be confused with Minucio. GRICEVS: Oxonii Minicium, Hadrianum, Pliniumque auditum est quasi trium philosophorum collegium; sub-facultas enim pro facultate sufficit, modo quis geminum primum in Greats habeat, ut ego. MINICIVS: Ego vero proconsul Asiae fui, non professor Mertonensis; sed si rescriptum Hadriani in schedula mea philosophiae nomen meretur, faciam ut etiam tabellarius Stoicus videatur. GRICEVS: At hoc ipsum est lepidum: imperator respondet de probationis onere, populus autem audit de fide et christianis; tu accipis litteras iuris, nos accipimus implicaturas. MINICIVS: Ita fit ut in foro dicatur “probate,” in schola intellegatur “philosophate”; et si quis me cum Minucio confundit, respondeo: non error est, sed interpretatio—Eusebius vertit, vos ampliatis. Do we have TWO Minicios here -- or just one? Gaio Minicio Fundano? Only one, right? Short answer first: you have one Minicius here, not two—and the danger of “two Minicios” arises only from the very confusions you and Grice are delighting in. Now the careful disentangling.  1. One person, one nomen: Minicius (or Minucius?) Your passage oscillates between:  Minicius Fundanus Minucius Fundanus  This is not a case of two individuals, but of variant transmission of the nomen. From the historical side:  The proconsul of Asia who receives Hadrian’s rescript is usually given as Gaius Minicius Fundanus (standard prosopography). However, in later Greek/Christian transmission (via Eusebius, Justin), and in some modern retellings, you can find Minucius Fundanus.  So:  not two Minicii not two Fundani but one historical figure with a fluctuating nomen in transmission  Your instinct is right that this resembles the Minucius/Minicius problem rather than a duplication of persons.  2. Why the oscillation happens Here the Gricean interest becomes real. Latin:  Minicius (gens Minicia) Minucius (gens Minucia)  These are distinct gentilicia. But Greek transmission:  tends to neutralize vowel distinctions reduces unfamiliar Latin forms and transmits by phonetic approximation  So the chain is: Roman administrative Latin → Greek historian → later Latin/Italian reception At each step, the hearer reconstructs the name under imperfect constraints. In Gricean terms:  the speaker’s intention (Minicius) is recovered through cooperative inference by later audiences but with noise in the channel  So “Minucius” is not a second person; it is an inferential reconstruction under degraded evidence.  3. The Fundanus problem (your best Grice point) You are entirely right to press on “what is callable”. Roman structure:  Gaius = praenomen Minicius = nomen (gens) Fundanus = cognomen  But in practice:  Fundanus is the most distinctive element Minicius is relatively common and structurally backgrounded  So for address: Fundane! is more usable than Minici! This mirrors your earlier insight about:  Cicero (cognomen dominates) Scipio (cognomen dominates) many cases where the cognomen is the true conversational handle  So Grice is right, humorously but deeply: the Roman system encodes identity in the nomen, but conversational practice often retrieves identity via the cognomen.  4. Is there a second Minicius somewhere? Yes—but not here. There are other members of the gens Minicia (the gens is attested), but:  they are not “Fundanus” they do not create ambiguity in this case  So again:  there is no doubling of “Minicius Fundanus” only one figure relevant to Hadrian’s rescript   5. Your analogy with Manilius / Manlius This is exactly the right diagnostic analogy.  Manilius ≠ Manlius (different gentes) Minicius ≠ Minucius (different gentes)  But:  Manilius → Manlius can happen by collapse of “-li-” Minicius → Minucius can happen by vowel leveling  So your general principle holds: small phonetic collapse → false gens → false identity And that is precisely what threatens cataloguing in later traditions.  6. Final Gricean formulation What your dialogue dramatizes is this:  The Roman name is an encoding of identity (nomen logic) Later readers recover identity through inference (cognomen prominence + context) Transmission noise produces variant reconstructions (Minicius vs Minucius)  So the Minicius case is not about duplication, but about:  how a single referent survives through imperfect inferential recovery across audiences.  Or in your own idiom:  non error est, sed interpretatio—sed interdum interpretatio nimium libera.   If you like, we can next line up Minicius Fundanus with Minucius Felix and show exactly how the two gentes diverge historically while remaining phonetically tempting twins.Minicio Fundano, Gaio (a. u. c. DCCCLXXVIII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Minucio – Ossia: Grice e Minucio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’eulogio ad Ottavio da Frontone.  Marco Minucio Felice (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell’eulogio ad Ottavio da Frontone. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning lines up strikingly with Minucius Felix’s Octavius because Octavius is itself a staged act of rational uptake: a dialogue in which persuasion proceeds less by brute assertion than by managing what a reasonable interlocutor can be brought to concede, infer, and accept as the point of the exchange. Grice’s core claim is that hearers routinely reconstruct speaker-meaning by assuming cooperation and then deriving implicatures from what is said plus shared standards of relevance and rationality; Minucius, writing in a Ciceronian-legal Latin and in the persona of an advocate, dramatizes exactly that inferential economy—arguments are offered with an eye to what the “other side” will have to read between the lines, and the dialogue format makes the audience into a third-party hearer computing the intended upshot. The Frontonian “eulogy” frame in your passage usefully heightens the Gricean point: praise, attribution, and even name-slippage (Minucio/Minucia) are classic sites where what is understood outruns what is literally said, because polite form and rhetorical positioning invite the reader to supply the deeper social meaning (who counts as authoritative, who is being aligned with whom, what intellectual pedigree is being claimed). Read this way, Minucius becomes a natural “gate to philosophy” for a classicist like Grice: not because he offers system, but because he exhibits reason as a conversational practice—civil, adversarial, and yet governed by norms that make indirectness interpretable—so that the real philosophical action lies, as Grice would put it, in the disciplined passage from dictum to what is meant, and in the audience’s responsibility to keep its inferential haste (“the ear runs ahead”) answerable to shared rational standards. Grice: “At Oxford, you are introduced to philosophy via the classics – more specifically, you matriculate to the Faculty of Literae Humaniores – the only faculty to offer a course in philosophy --, organized since 1913 as the sub-faculty of philosophy. After Grief and Laughing for five terms, as Carroll has it, you get to know the Porch, and all the other philosophical sects. So Minucio does mean something to me. He was my gate to philosophy!” -- Filosofo italiano. He writes “Ottavio” – draws on a speech by Frontone. La gente: Minucia. Cirta, filosofo,  scrittore e avvocato romano. Non è noto con certezza quando vive. Il suo Octavius è simile all'Apologeticum di Tertulliano, e la datazione della vita di M. dipende dal rapporto tra la sua opera e quella dello scrittore africano. Nelle citazioni degli autori antichi (Seneca, VARRONE, CICERONE) è considerato più preciso di Tertulliano e questo concorderebbe col suo essere anteriore ad esso, come afferma anche Lattanzio; Girolamo lo vuole, invece, posteriore a Tertulliano, sebbene si contraddica dicendolo posteriore a Tascio Cecilio Cipriano in una lettera e anteriore in un'opera Per quanto riguarda gli estremi della sua esistenza, Felice menziona Marco Cornelio Frontone; il trattato Quod idola dii non sint è basato sull'Octavius; dunque se quello è di Cipriano, M. non fu attivo oltre il 260, altrimenti il termine ante quem è Lattanzio. Anche la zona d'origine di M. è sconosciuta. Lo si ritiene talvolta di origine africana, sia per la sua dipendenza da Tertulliano, sia per i riferimenti alla realtà africana: la prima ragione, però, non è indicativa, in quanto dovuta al fatto che all'epoca i principali autori di lingua latina erano africani, e dunque il loro era lo stile cui ispirarsi; la seconda, inoltre, potrebbe dipendere esclusivamente dal fatto che il personaggio pagano dell'Octavius. Roma. GRICEVS: Oxonii per Literae Humaniores ad philosophiam intravi; quinque terminos “luctum et risum” pertuli—et tamen dicunt me a te, MINVCI, per ianuam ingressum esse! MINVCIVS: Ianua, inquis? Cave ne ianua sim quae crepat: statim omnes clamabunt “implicatura!” cum tu tantum fores aperueris. GRICEVS: At tu mihi plus quam fores: tu es clavis. Nam “Ottavium” scribis ex Frontone, et populus audit “Minuciam”—quasi error sit, cum sit argumentum de eo quod dicitur et quod intellegitur. MINVCIVS: Ita vero: tu “cooperemur” dicis, illi “conuiuemur” subaudiunt; ego “Ottavium” dico, illi “Minuciam” subaudiunt. Sic ambo docemus: non semper verba peccant—saepe auris festinat. Well, but there is Marco MINUCIO Felice -- which seems different from the Minicio Fundano -- Thanks for input. Yes—here you really do have two different gentes, not one fluctuating one, and your instinct is exactly right.  1. Two distinct people, two distinct nomina 1) Gaius Minicius Fundanus  nomen: Minicius (gens Minicia) cognomen: Fundanus  2) Marcus Minucius Felix  nomen: Minucius (gens Minucia) cognomen: Felix  These are not the same family, and not variants of one another, even though the forms look dangerously close.  2. Why they are so easily confused Phonetically and visually:  Minicius Minucius  The difference is just one vowel—and in Greek transmission (and later Latin copying), that distinction is fragile. So the confusion arises from:  vowel leveling (i / u) transmission through Greek modern Italianizing habits (Minicio / Minucio)  But structurally, in Roman terms:  Minicia ≠ Minucia  just as:  Manilia ≠ Manlia  So your earlier analogy holds perfectly—but here the two sides are genuinely separate historical entities, not just distortion of one.  3. The Gricean core insight (you’ve already got it) What’s remarkable is how your dialogue captures the real mechanism:  “non semper verba peccant—saepe auris festinat”  This is exactly the point.  The original name (spoken/written) carries a determinate reference. The audience reconstructs it under constraints. Slight ambiguity → different reconstruction → new “identity”.  So:  Minicius → heard as Minucius Minucius → catalogued as Minicio Minicio → mistaken for something else entirely  This is not simple error; it is inferential drift in transmission.  4. Why Fundanus and Felix behave differently You also (very sharply) highlight the difference in “callability”:  Fundanus is locally distinctive (a place-based cognomen) Felix is a very common cognomen  So:  Fundanus is strong as a conversational handle Felix is weak as a handle (many “Felices” exist)  That means:  “Fundane!” is precise “Felix!” is ambiguous  Yet paradoxically:  modern catalogues often privilege the nomen (Minucius) while real interaction would likely privilege the cognomen  Again a Gricean mismatch between: formal encoding (nomen) vs. practical communicative efficiency (cognomen)  5. Your Octavius point: philosophically exact Your reading of Minucius Felix is genuinely apt. The Octavius works like:  a courtroom dialogue structured inferential exchange staged uptake by multiple audiences (interlocutor + reader)  Which aligns very closely with:  Grice’s idea that meaning = what a rational audience can responsibly recover  And your Frontonian/eulogistic frame adds a further layer:  naming itself becomes implicature-rich Minucius signals intellectual alignment (Ciceronian, legal, Roman) not just identity  So again:  the name is not just a label; it is an invitation to inference.   6. Final dry summary  Gaius Minicius Fundanus and Marcus Minucius Felix are distinct individuals from distinct gentes. Their names are easily confused because of minimal phonetic difference. This confusion is amplified by transmission (Latin → Greek → later tradition). Cognomina (Fundanus, Felix) differ strongly in communicative usefulness. Your Gricean reading is exactly on point: the identity of the person emerges from inferential reconstruction, not just from the literal string.   If you want, we can map a handful of other “near-twin” Roman gentes (Minucius / Minicius / Minidius, etc.) and see just how often this kind of Gricean misfire occurs.Minucio Felice, Marco (a. u. c. DCCCLIII). Octavius. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Miraglia – Ossia: Grice e Miraglia: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di CICERONE.  Luigi Miraglia (Reggio, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale di CICERONE. M. is a useful foil for Grice because he represents a tradition—Neapolitan philosophy of law with Hegelian ambitions and a strong Ciceronian-Roman lineage—in which reasoning is explicitly staged as public, institutional, and historically saturated, whereas Grice’s theory begins from the micro-logic of everyday talk and asks how hearers recover what a speaker means by assuming rational cooperation and then computing implicatures. Miraglia’s legal-philosophical method (moving between induction and deduction, historical-comparative method, development of language alongside development of law, and the interplay of moral, legal, and “rational” right) treats discourse as a civic instrument that stabilizes norms; Grice, by contrast, treats discourse as a rational practice whose stability is achieved through tacit conversational expectations (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner) that make meaning inferable even when it is not spelled out. The Ciceronian angle provides the bridge: Cicero’s dialogic, forensic culture shows how persuasion, credibility, and shared standards of reason make civic speech work, and Miraglia’s jurisprudential interest in “living law” can be reframed in Gricean terms as a community’s settled patterns of inference—what speakers can count on hearers to supply, cancel, or challenge in context. So while Miraglia systematizes the rationality of law by putting it into a philosophical architecture (Hegel, Vico, Roman doctrine, historical schools), Grice explains how rationality already operates in the smallest conversational moves that underpin any such architecture, including legal argument: the courtroom and the seminar alike depend on what is meant outrunning what is said, and on the audience’s entitlement to treat that gap as reason-governed rather than merely rhetorical. Grice: “At Oxford, you are introduced into philosophy after five terms into Grief and Laughing! Therefore, once you meet Cicero, you know what he is talking about! – or about which he is talking, as he’d have it!” Reggio, Emilia. Grice: “M. is the type of philosopher beloved by the Oxford hegelians; but then he is a Neapolitan Hegelian!” Grice: “I always found Kant easier, but there’s nothing like a ‘filosofia del diritto’ in Kant! And Hegel’s ethics itself, compared to Kant’s is mighty more complex – that’s why I taught Kant!” Si laurea a Napoli, dopodiché insegna nella stessa università.  Segue una corrente di filosofia eclettica, ad esso contemporanea, che mira all'integrazione di pratiche giuridiche ed ispirazioni filosofiche. Saggi: Condizioni storiche e scientifiche del diritto di preda; Un sistema etico-giuridico; Filosofia del diritto. I sistemi filosofici ed i principi del diritto. La speculazione greca e LA DOTTRINA ROMANA. Fichte. SPEDALIERI ROMAGNOSI I filosofi della reazione. La scuola storica e la scuola filosofica. Schelling e Scleiermacher. Hegel Rosmini SERBATI Herbart, Trendelenburg e Krause. Le varie fasi della filosofia di Schelling. Sthal e Schopenhauer Il materialismo, il positivismo ed il criticismo. L'idea della filosofia del diritto. La filosofia e le scienze. Il carattere della Filosofia.  Diritto ed i metodi logici. L'induzione e la deduzione. L'induzione, l'osservazione e l'esperimento. Diritto naturale e il buono civile di AMARI ricavate dall'induzione. L'importanza del metodo storico-comparativo secondo VICO Amari, Post e Sumner-Maine. Parallelo fra lo sviluppo della lingua e lo sviluppo del diritto. L'induzione statistica, il compito della deduzione, l'universale astratto e l'universale concreto come principi. Cicerone, diritto morale, diritto legale, diritto razionale, stato di natura. (early 1942; Newhaven; the shore base still called Forward II, later HMS Aggressive) Newhaven had the damp, practical smell of a place designed to be used rather than admired. The Navy, in its inimitable way, had turned a hotel and a quay into a ship without water: a stone frigate. Officially it was Forward II; later, with the sort of cheerful aggression the Service likes to apply retroactively, it would be renamed HMS Aggressive. At the time, nobody I knew felt aggressive. We felt busy. [en.wikipedia.org] In the little cabin allotted to “temporary” people—temporary rank, temporary certainty, temporary peace—I was doing what Oxford men do in every theatre of operations: reading something irrelevant with an air of moral necessity. Clifford came in without knocking, because knocking is for peacetime and for men who don’t share bulkheads. You’re reading again, Grice. Only a little. He leaned over my shoulder, reading the title upside down with a sailor’s confidence that print will meet you halfway. Condizioni storiche e scientifiche… something… preda. Diritto di preda. Right. Preda. Like predator. Like predatory. That about submarines, is it. Not exactly. It’s about prize. Captures. What becomes whose, when you seize it at sea. Oh. Loot. There is always a moment in wartime when somebody says “loot” and thinks he has done with jurisprudence. I turned the page with the mild irritation of a man who wishes to correct a noun and is not allowed to. Not loot. Prize. Loot is what you do when you have no court. Prize is what you do when you insist you’re still civilised. Clifford sat on the edge of the bunk with the expression of someone prepared to be educated provided it does not take longer than a cigarette. So this Italian chap is telling you how to steal politely. He’s telling you how states pretend not to steal. Same thing. Not quite. The difference is the paperwork. If you want the English, it’s prize law. And what does the Italian mean by preda. A prey. Something you catch. Yes. A thing taken. But the important thing is the right. Who is entitled, under what conditions, to take. Clifford frowned. Are you entitled. Me. Personally. Well, you’re in uniform. That’s entitlement, isn’t it. It’s the beginning of entitlement. Miraglia would want the rest: jurisdiction, procedure, condemnation. He would insist the capture doesn’t change ownership until a prize court says so. Clifford blinked, as if a court had appeared in the Channel and was now asking for witnesses. There are courts. During the war. Yes. Here. Not here here. But yes. Prize procedure doesn’t stop because the weather is bad. Clifford reached for the book as if it were evidence. And you’re relaxing with this. I’m relaxing from the thought that a torpedo doesn’t consult definitions. So I consult them on its behalf. That was not fair, and I knew it, which is why it pleased me. Clifford flipped a few pages. He hardly speaks English, this Miraglia. He speaks better English than you do Italian, which is his advantage. I don’t expect you read Alighieri’s tongue, he said, with a grin, because he knew perfectly well that I did. It isn’t Alighieri’s tongue. It’s Neapolitan law-philosophy pretending to be universal. Same thing, again. No. Dante is hard on purpose. Miraglia is hard because he’s a professor. Clifford handed the book back. So what’s the practical upshot. We take a ship. We call it a prize. We take the cargo. We feel moral. That is almost exactly right. Except the feeling moral is the whole mechanism. The law is the machine that produces that feeling. Clifford was silent for a moment, which in a war is the closest men come to philosophy. And if we take a ship without the machine. Then we call it something else. We call it piracy. Or we call it necessity. Or we call it a regrettable incident. He nodded at that. Sailors understand “regrettable incident” at once. So why are you reading an Italian from 1871. Why not something modern. Something that mentions Hitler. Because the concepts don’t mention Hitler. They mention Rome. Preda is Latin in a moustache. And Miraglia is obsessed with Cicero, which makes him tolerable. Clifford sat back, considering this as if Cicero were a kind of weapon-system. Cicero. That’s the talky Roman. The talky Roman. Yes. And your point. My point is that law is conversation with bayonets in the background. And prize law is a conversation where everyone pretends the bayonets are merely punctuation. Clifford laughed. That’s very Oxford, Grice. No. That’s very Naples. Oxford would rather not mention the bayonets. He took out his cigarette-case and offered it, as if to seal the argument. So what are you going to do with your preda. Try to understand why one word in English—prize—means both “captured property” and “a reward.” As if capture were merit. It’s an outrage in the dictionary. Clifford lit up. Maybe the Germans would say it’s efficient. The Germans would say lots of things. Miraglia would ask what they are entitled to say. Then why aren’t you in London doing that, instead of in this hotel-ship. Because someone decided I should be “useful” near the water. Clifford exhaled smoke in the direction of the ceiling, as if sending signals to somebody higher up. You belong in Room 39, Grice. Not in a bunk with a book. Room 39 is a room-number pretending to be an institution. Still. Still. Yes. Clifford stood to go, but paused at the door for the last jab, because the English cannot resist leaving a final line unexamined. So. If we bag something out there tonight, you’ll tell us whether it’s loot or prize. I’ll tell you it’s a conversational implicature. We’ll call it prize because we want to be heard as civilised. He laughed again, and went out. Editorial prophetic (as you asked for) He did: the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty really was known as Room 39. [wikiwand.com], [archive.org]Grice: Miraglia, ho sempre pensato che Cicerone rappresenti l’incontro ideale fra filosofia e diritto. Lei che ne pensa del ruolo della conversazione ciceroniana come modello per la nostra riflessione filosofica? Miraglia: Grice, condivido! Cicerone ci insegna che il dialogo è il cuore pulsante del pensiero giuridico e morale. Anche nella mia esperienza, la conversazione permette di illuminare le sfumature del diritto, che non sono mai solo regole ma anche ragionamento condiviso. Grice: Proprio così! Da Oxford a Napoli, il confronto tra idee è sempre stato una chiave per superare i confini tra deduzione e induzione. Spesso dimentichiamo l’importanza del metodo dialogico nella costruzione del diritto, non trova? Miraglia: Assolutamente. La vera ricchezza del diritto sta nell’equilibrio tra ragione storica e universale. Come diceva Vico, “verum ipsum factum”: comprendere nasce dal dialogo e dall’esperienza comune, che danno vita alla legge viva. Miraglia, Luigi (1871). Condizioni storiche e scientifiche del diritto di preda. Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Misefari – Ossia: Grice e Misefari: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, l’implicatura anarchica Bruno Misefari (Palizzi, Reggio Calabria, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale, l’implicatura anarchica. Misefari is a natural “stress test” for Grice because Grice’s account makes conversational meaning depend on shared rational norms (cooperation, sincerity constraints, intelligible relevance), whereas an avowed anarchist can be staged as someone who both relies on those norms to be understood and simultaneously contests their authority as social discipline. In Gricean terms, Misefari’s political rhetoric (anti-militarist agitation, prison, the insistence on being “Calabrese” before “Italian”) works largely through implicature: the point is often carried not by explicit doctrine but by what a hearer is invited to infer about legitimacy, coercion, and solidarity from slogans, refusals, and strategically chosen identities. The Humpty-Dumpty joke then becomes a neat contrast: semantic “anarchism” in Flew’s sense (words mean whatever I decree) is not merely rebellious but self-defeating for Grice, because it would destroy the public, reason-governed calculability that makes communication possible; Misefari can be portrayed as a “real anarchist” precisely because his anarchism is not a denial of meaning-rules but a critique of which rules should govern collective life. So the comparison can frame “anarchic implicature” as a way of speaking that exploits Grice’s maxims—especially Relation and Quantity—by saying less, hinting more, and letting the audience do the rational work, while also foregrounding that those very inferential habits are culturally trained and politically consequential: conversational reason is a shared resource, but it can be recruited for dissent as easily as for obedience. Grice: “My pupil A. G. N. Flew once referred to Humpty-Dumpty as defending what Flew called ‘semantic anarchism.’ Of course, Flew never read the Alice books! On the other hand, Misefari did, and he was a REAL anarchist!” Grice: “Etymologically, ‘anarchy’ is lack of principles – as in Austin!” – Grice: “Cicero could not translate or would not translate this dangerous Hellenic concept!”  ‘Io non sono italiano; io sono calabrese!” Frequenta la scuola elementare del piccolo paese di nascita in provincia di Reggio Calabria, per trasferirsi collo zio proprio a Reggio Calabria. Influenzato dalle frequentazioni di socialisti e anarchici in casa dello zio, partecipa attivamente alla fondazione e allo sviluppo d’un circolo socialista, intitolato a Babel, rivoluzionario. Inizia a collaborare ad Il Lavoratore. Collabora a Il Riscatto, periodico socialista-anarchico; e con Il Libertario. A causa della sua attività anti-militarista esercitata all'interno del circolo contro la guerra italo-turca, è arrestato e condannato a due mesi e mezzo di carcere per istigazione alla pubblica disobbedienza.  È nei anni successivi che M. si converte dal socialismo all’anarchia. Ciò avvenne soprattutto colla frequentazione da parte di  BERTI, suo professore.  Si trasfere a Napoli e si iscrive al politecnico, dopo avere studiato alle superiori, e anche per non dispiacere al padre, proseguì tali studi. Pesa inoltre su questa decisione il fatto che dopo la tragica distruzione della città di Reggio a causa del terremoto, il lavoro che garantiva le maggiori certezze è proprio quello dell’ingegnere. Nondimeno continua per proprio conto gli studi a lui prediletti: la filosofia, come aveva fatto fino ad allora. A Napoli si fa subito avanti nell’ambiente anarchico. implicatura, anarchismo, anarchismo semantico, Flew, Humpty-Dumpty. Bruno Misefari. Grice: Caro Misefari, devo confessarle che a Oxford il termine “anarchia” ci spaventa quasi quanto il tè senza zucchero. Lei invece ne fa una filosofia… Come si vive da vero anarchico in Calabria? Misefari: Eh, Grice, in Calabria l’anarchia è una questione di carattere! Qui, se dici “io non sono italiano, sono calabrese”, nessuno si scandalizza: al massimo ti offrono un caffè e ti chiedono cosa pensi della pizza. L’importante è saper discutere senza finire in rissa! Grice: Lei mi ricorda Humpty-Dumpty: “le parole significano ciò che voglio.” E se qualcuno le dicesse che il semantico anarchismo è solo una moda, lei come risponderebbe? Misefari: Caro Grice, direi che la moda cambia più in fretta delle implicature! L’anarchia semantica si addice a chi ama le sfide: qui a Palizzi, la vera rivoluzione è riuscire a farsi capire, senza perdere il sorriso e magari una fetta di torta. In fondo, come si dice dalle mie parti, “la libertà è come il vento: ti spettina, ma ti fa respirare!” Misefari, Bruno (1923). La guerra e l’anarchia. Milano: Edizioni Sociali.

 

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

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Mocenigo – Ossia: Grice e Mocenigo: la ragione conversazionale e la filosofia italiana Filippo Mocenigo (Venezia, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s reason-governed pragmatics and Mocenigo’s Venetian “Institutiones” converge on the same insight from opposite directions: Mocenigo tries to modernize the Lyceum by making the norms of discourse explicit and teachable (from term to proposition to syllogism, with rhetoric and ethos as civic disciplines), while Grice tries to explain how ordinary talk already works because participants tacitly conform to rational constraints that make speaker-meaning recoverable beyond the literal dictum. Where Mocenigo emphasizes the enthymeme as the bridge between strict inference and public persuasion, Grice’s conversational implicature is a kindred bridge: a licensed inference that is not formally stated but is nonetheless rationally calculable given shared assumptions about cooperation, relevance, and evidential responsibility. The contrast is equally instructive: Mocenigo’s “civile conversazione” is institutional and partly one-way, aimed at forming citizens through a stable logic of discourse for governance and law, whereas Grice’s model is interactional and reparative, showing how hearers infer what is meant precisely when utterances are incomplete, elliptical, or strategically indirect. Put together, they yield a unified picture in which communicatio is both moral and logical: credibility and character (ethos) are not mere ornaments but conditions for warranted uptake, and the rational structure of discourse is what lets a community treat talk as a civic bond rather than as mere noise or manipulation. In that sense Mocenigo supplies the Renaissance pedagogy of the very norms Grice later theorizes at the micro-level: the “rules” are not primarily rules of grammar or etiquette, but constraints on reasonable inference that allow discourse to be at once persuasive, truth-aimed, and publicly accountable. Grice: “In Italy, ‘philosopher’ does NOT mean ‘analysit of ordinary-language’!” -- The  Institutiones of M.  serve as a systematic exposition of the philosophy of the Lycaeum – that the Italians spell ‘lizio’ --, specifically designed to modernise and structure the ancient concepts of logic, rhetoric, and communication for a Renaissance audience. M.'s Institutiones is part of a broader Renaissance tradition of "institutional" writing — works intended to establish foundational principles of a discipline. The treatise typically follows the Organon, of the Lyceum, organizing knowledge from a simple term to a complex syllogism. It aims to provide a framework that bridges the gap between theoretical logic and the practical application of language – civile conversazione -- in civil life. While focusing on logic, it integrates elements of rhetoric and ethics, viewing communication not just as a technical skill but as a moral responsibility of the citizen.  M. develops the model of the ‘lizio’ by shifting it from a strictly "utterer-centric" oral tradition to a more comprehensive "logic of discourse" suitable for written and institutional communication.  M. emphasises the unity between Logic (Logos), Rhetoric (Pathos), and Grammar, refining Aristotle's view that communication is a tool for revealing truth rather than just persuading an addressee. The Enthymeme as a Link: He focuses on the enthymeme, a rhetorical syllogism, as the primary bridge between formal logic and public communication, allowing complex philosophical truths to be communicated effectively to a non-expert addressee. Civil Communication: He develops the concept of comunicatio as a civic bond. While communication in the ‘lizio’ is often one-way (utterer to passive addressee), M.’s treatise frames it as an essential component of social institutionalization, where shared logical structures allow for stable governance and legal order. M. expands on Ethos by linking the utterer’s s credibility. flosofia naturale, filosofia transnaturale, metaphysical philosophy. Grice: Mocenigo, mi ha sempre affascinato il modo in cui le Institutiones del Lizio abbiano modernizzato la logica e la comunicazione. Lei ritiene che il modello della "civile conversazione" possa ancora essere un ponte tra filosofia e vita quotidiana nella nostra epoca? Mocenigo: Caro Grice, assolutamente sì! La civile conversazione è, secondo me, il cuore pulsante del vivere sociale. La filosofia non deve rimanere confinata tra le mura accademiche; proprio come nelle Institutiones, il discorso razionale e il dialogo etico plasmano il cittadino e la società. È nella comunicazione che la logica diventa concretezza e responsabilità morale. Grice: Concordo pienamente! L’Enthymeme che lei valorizza, quel sillogismo retorico, secondo me rappresenta il punto d’incontro tra il pensiero preciso e la capacità di persuadere con eleganza. Non trova che oggi, più che mai, occorra educare alla logica del discorso, anche fuori dalla retorica classica? Mocenigo: Senza dubbio, Grice. Dalla logica alle emozioni, la comunicazione è il filo che tiene insieme la trama civile. L’Enthymeme permette di portare la verità filosofica al grande pubblico, senza perdere rigore, ma adattando il linguaggio. Credo che il compito del filosofo sia proprio quello di rendere la conversazione una pratica di giustizia e di coesione sociale, un ponte tra ragione e umanità. Mocenigo, Filippo (1780). Lettere familiari. Venezia: Pasquali. Filippo Mocenigo (Venezia, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale. Grice’s reason-governed pragmatics and Mocenigo’s Venetian “Institutiones” converge on the same insight from opposite directions: Mocenigo tries to modernize the Lyceum by making the norms of discourse explicit and teachable (from term to proposition to syllogism, with rhetoric and ethos as civic disciplines), while Grice tries to explain how ordinary talk already works because participants tacitly conform to rational constraints that make speaker-meaning recoverable beyond the literal dictum. Where Mocenigo emphasizes the enthymeme as the bridge between strict inference and public persuasion, Grice’s conversational implicature is a kindred bridge: a licensed inference that is not formally stated but is nonetheless rationally calculable given shared assumptions about cooperation, relevance, and evidential responsibility. The contrast is equally instructive: Mocenigo’s “civile conversazione” is institutional and partly one-way, aimed at forming citizens through a stable logic of discourse for governance and law, whereas Grice’s model is interactional and reparative, showing how hearers infer what is meant precisely when utterances are incomplete, elliptical, or strategically indirect. Put together, they yield a unified picture in which communicatio is both moral and logical: credibility and character (ethos) are not mere ornaments but conditions for warranted uptake, and the rational structure of discourse is what lets a community treat talk as a civic bond rather than as mere noise or manipulation. In that sense Mocenigo supplies the Renaissance pedagogy of the very norms Grice later theorizes at the micro-level: the “rules” are not primarily rules of grammar or etiquette, but constraints on reasonable inference that allow discourse to be at once persuasive, truth-aimed, and publicly accountable. Grice: “In Italy, ‘philosopher’ does NOT mean ‘analysit of ordinary-language’!” -- The  Institutiones of M.  serve as a systematic exposition of the philosophy of the Lycaeum – that the Italians spell ‘lizio’ --, specifically designed to modernise and structure the ancient concepts of logic, rhetoric, and communication for a Renaissance audience. M.'s Institutiones is part of a broader Renaissance tradition of "institutional" writing — works intended to establish foundational principles of a discipline. The treatise typically follows the Organon, of the Lyceum, organizing knowledge from a simple term to a complex syllogism. It aims to provide a framework that bridges the gap between theoretical logic and the practical application of language – civile conversazione -- in civil life. While focusing on logic, it integrates elements of rhetoric and ethics, viewing communication not just as a technical skill but as a moral responsibility of the citizen.  M. develops the model of the ‘lizio’ by shifting it from a strictly "utterer-centric" oral tradition to a more comprehensive "logic of discourse" suitable for written and institutional communication.  M. emphasises the unity between Logic (Logos), Rhetoric (Pathos), and Grammar, refining Aristotle's view that communication is a tool for revealing truth rather than just persuading an addressee. The Enthymeme as a Link: He focuses on the enthymeme, a rhetorical syllogism, as the primary bridge between formal logic and public communication, allowing complex philosophical truths to be communicated effectively to a non-expert addressee. Civil Communication: He develops the concept of comunicatio as a civic bond. While communication in the ‘lizio’ is often one-way (utterer to passive addressee), M.’s treatise frames it as an essential component of social institutionalization, where shared logical structures allow for stable governance and legal order. M. expands on Ethos by linking the utterer’s s credibility. flosofia naturale, filosofia transnaturale, metaphysical philosophy. Grice: Mocenigo, mi ha sempre affascinato il modo in cui le Institutiones del Lizio abbiano modernizzato la logica e la comunicazione. Lei ritiene che il modello della "civile conversazione" possa ancora essere un ponte tra filosofia e vita quotidiana nella nostra epoca? Mocenigo: Caro Grice, assolutamente sì! La civile conversazione è, secondo me, il cuore pulsante del vivere sociale. La filosofia non deve rimanere confinata tra le mura accademiche; proprio come nelle Institutiones, il discorso razionale e il dialogo etico plasmano il cittadino e la società. È nella comunicazione che la logica diventa concretezza e responsabilità morale. Grice: Concordo pienamente! L’Enthymeme che lei valorizza, quel sillogismo retorico, secondo me rappresenta il punto d’incontro tra il pensiero preciso e la capacità di persuadere con eleganza. Non trova che oggi, più che mai, occorra educare alla logica del discorso, anche fuori dalla retorica classica? Mocenigo: Senza dubbio, Grice. Dalla logica alle emozioni, la comunicazione è il filo che tiene insieme la trama civile. L’Enthymeme permette di portare la verità filosofica al grande pubblico, senza perdere rigore, ma adattando il linguaggio. Credo che il compito del filosofo sia proprio quello di rendere la conversazione una pratica di giustizia e di coesione sociale, un ponte tra ragione e umanità. Mocenigo, Filippo (1780). Lettere familiari. Venezia: Pasquali.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Moderato – Ossia: Grice e Moderato: la ragione conversazionale -- da Crotone a Roma

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Modio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del disonore sessuale, la filosofia del Tevere Giovanni Battista Modio (Santa Severina, Crotone, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del disonore sessuale, la filosofia del Tevere. Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning helps recast Giovanni Battista Modio’s Roman-and-Calabrian world as a pragmatics laboratory: Modio’s dialogic writing (notably Il convito, and his Tevere treatise) trades on the fact that social talk about honor, marriage, and sexual reputation is rarely carried by the dictum alone, but by what an informed audience can be counted on to infer from hints, proverbs, and the management of what is sayable in polite company. In Gricean terms, Modio’s favourite materials—banter at a convivio, carnival looseness in Rome, and the circulation of proverbial wisdom—are precisely the contexts in which implicature becomes a civil technology: speakers protect face, signal complicity, and distribute blame or ridicule while staying just this side of explicit accusation. The “river philosophy” motif sharpens the comparison because a river can function like context itself: it carries deposits, rumours, and half-said things downstream, so that meaning becomes a public current rather than a private intention; Grice’s contribution is to explain how that current is nonetheless reason-governed, since hearers recover what is meant by presuming relevance, proportion, and strategic restraint. Modio’s proverbial punchlines (e.g., “anzi corna che croci”) illustrate the same mechanism as a compact, culturally preloaded move: it says little, but it triggers a large inferential package about norms, consolation, and the acceptable framing of misfortune. Read this way, Modio’s “philosophy of the Tiber” and Grice’s “logic of conversation” converge on one point: in morally charged domains, what counts as communicated is often what is left unsaid but made recoverable by shared rational expectations, so that wit and indirection are not decorative extras but the very medium through which a community keeps its meanings intelligible without making them dangerously explicit. Grice: “Only in Italy a philosopher writes a treatise on a river – although the Isis would not be out of place for some Magdalenite!” – Grice: “His convito is a jewel!” – Seguace di Neri. Originario di Santa Severina, borgo collinare della Calabria Ulteriore, è avviato agli studi di filosofia presso l'Archiginnasio di Napoli. In seguito passa a Roma, dove si avviò agli studi in medicina divenendo allievo di Fusconi. M. frequenta gl’ambienti accademici, dove entra in contatto con alcuni dei maggiori esponenti di spicco di quell'epoca come Molza e Tolomei.  Pubblica la sua prima opera letteraria più famosa dal titolo I”l convito; overo, del peso della moglie: un dialogo diegetico” (Roma, Bressani) -- ambientato a Roma durante il carnevale della città capitolina, in cui viene trattato il tema delle corna durante un convivio presieduto dall'allora vescovo di Piacenza Trivulzio e a cui parteciparono anche Gambara, Marmitta, Benci, Selvago, Raineri e Cesario. E altresì grande estimatore degli saggi di Piccolomini.  Durante la stesura in lingua volgare di un Operetta de’ Sogni, si ammala di febbre altissima. Si spense dopo qualche giorno a Roma, nella tenuta di palazzo Ricci in via Giulia.  Altri saggi: “Il Tevere, dove si ragiona in generale della natura di tutte le acque, et in particolare di quella del fiume di Roma” (Roma, Luchini) “Origine del proverbio che si suol dire "anzi corna che croci" (Roma, A. degli Antonii,” Jacopone da Todi, I Cantici del beato Iacopone da Todi, con diligenza ristampati, con la gionta di alcuni discorsi sopra di essi e con la vita sua nuovamente posta in luce” (Roma, Salviano). Prospetto autore, su edit16.iccu.. Modio, Il Tevere, cit., c. 45r  Anno di pubblicazione della medesima opera. G. Cassiani, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. amore, sesso. Grice: Modio, devo confessarle che mi ha sempre incuriosito il suo celebre convito romano. Ma secondo lei, tra il Tevere e il Tamigi, quale fiume porterebbe via più segreti amorosi? Modio: Caro Grice, il Tevere ha sentito talmente tanti sospiri e pettegolezzi che ormai scorre con leggerezza tra una confidenza e l’altra. Ma attenzione: tra le sue onde, un orecchio allenato può ancora sentire il tintinnio delle famose “corna” di Roma! Grice: Ah, la sua filosofia della conversazione è davvero unica! Da noi a Oxford, al massimo si discute del peso delle tazze da tè, mai di quello delle mogli. Forse dovremmo importare qualche proverbio calabrese sulla vita matrimoniale. Modio: Lo dica pure ai suoi colleghi: “meglio le corna che la croce!” In fondo, caro Grice, la conversazione civile serve proprio a questo: a ridere insieme, anche delle nostre piccole disavventure d’amore. Perché come si dice dalle mie parti, tra il serio e il faceto, scorre sempre il fiume della saggezza! Modio, Giovanni Battista (1586). Historia de’ Saraceni. Venezia: Ziletti.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Mondin – Ossia: Grice e Mondin: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell ritorno dell’angelo, la semantica filosofica, la semantica pel sistema G, interpretazione e validità Padre Battista Mondin, S. X. (Monte di Malo, Vicenza, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dell ritorno dell’angelo, la semantica filosofica, la semantica pel sistema G, interpretazione e validità. M. (born at Monte di Malo, in the Vicenza area) can be read as a systematic counterpart to Grice’s anti-systematic but deeply rule-sensitive pragmatics: where Grice explains conversational meaning by appeal to defeasible maxims and the hearer’s rational reconstruction of what a speaker intends, Mondin treats interpretation and validity as topics that invite explicit architecture—definitions, taxonomies, and a mapped “system” in which semantic questions can be located and assessed. The contrast in your passage (Oxford’s suspicion of chairs, treatises, and “philosophy of language” as a field versus the Italian comfort with manuals and encyclopedic ordering) becomes Gricean in itself: Grice’s point is that conversational rationality works precisely because it is mostly implicit, carried by shared expectations rather than by announced rules, whereas Mondin’s Thomist-influenced temperament (Aquinas as model) tries to make those expectations explicit, stable, and teachable across domains, including theology. The “angelology” motif sharpens the comparison because angels are, in medieval and scholastic thought, paradigms of intellect and message-bearing: they are a literalization of the idea that meaning travels via intention and uptake, so Mondin’s seriousness about angels can be recast as seriousness about the metaphysics of communication, while Grice’s quip deflates the metaphysics back into pragmatic method—how we actually succeed, in real talk, at getting one another to see what we mean. Finally, the pizza/“semantics of the margherita” joke usefully dramatizes Grice’s central distinction between conventional meaning and occasion-meaning: even if a term or sign has a stable “value,” what it communicates shifts with context and audience, and Mondin’s preference for agreement between philosophy and theology echoes Grice’s cooperative core—meaning and understanding depend on a shared rational orientation, whether the interlocutors are dons in Oxford, Thomists in Rome, or (as the joke has it) angels crossing a bridge and still managing to be understood. Grice: “I thank God that we at Oxford don’t systematise philosophy as they do in Bologna, with things such as the chair in ‘Filosofia della lingua.’ It is true that some Oxonian philosophers HAVE written tracts on ‘the philosophy of language’ – such as Blackburn – but they were NEVER taken seriously. Myself, I did my part in my seminars, which myself being a university lecturer, were in theory ‘open to any member of the university’ – including most of my enemies!” Grice: “Trust an Aquino to provide a systematic philosophy! Mind, I’ve been called a systematic philosopher, too! At Oxford, we are very familiar with angels – but only M. takes angeologia seriously! Trust an Italian! Ponte Sant’Angelo comes to mind!” Dottore di Filosofia e Religione a Harvard. È stato decano della Facoltà di Filosofia presso la Pontificia Università Urbaniana di Roma. M. membro della Congregazione dei Missionari Saveriani. Nei suoi studi, le principali figure di riferimento sono state AQUINO e Tillich, da cui ha tratto l'ideale di un accordo e di un mutuo sostegno tra filosofia e teologia.  “Etica, Etica e politica, Filosofia, Antropologia filosofica, Manuale di filosofia sistematica, La Metafisica di Aquino e i suoi interpreti,” “Storia dell'antropologia filosofica” Antropologia filosofica e filosofia della cultura e dell'educazione; “Epistemologia e cosmologia; “Logica, semantica e gnoseologia; Ontologia e metafisica Storia della metafisica, Storia della metafisica, Storia della metafisica, “Ermeneutica, metafisica, analogia in Aquino; Storia della filosofia medievale Dizionario enciclopedico di filosofia, teologia e morale Il sistema filosofico di Aquino glossario filosofico, going through the dictionary, linguistic botanizing. Grice: Mondin, lei che ha dato dignità agli angeli nella filosofia, mi dica: sono davvero sistematici o ogni tanto fanno qualche deviazione spontanea? Mondin: Caro Grice, gli angeli sono più sistematici di quanto sembri, ma ogni tanto si concedono una passeggiata tra i ponti di Roma, giusto per ricordarci che anche la filosofia ha bisogno di un po’ di leggerezza! Grice: A Oxford, la leggerezza è rara: abbiamo più nemici che angeli! Però confesso che mi piacerebbe vedere un angelo filosofare sul senso della pizza. Secondo lei, esiste una semantica della margherita? Mondin: La semantica della margherita? Certo! Il suo valore è universale, ma la sua interpretazione cambia da Vicenza a Napoli. L’importante è che, tra filosofia e teologia, si trovi sempre un accordo... almeno sulla mozzarella! Mondin, Battista (1963). Ordinazione. Pavia. Piacenza

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Monferrato – Ossia: Grice e Monferrato: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la scuola di Casale Monferrato Giovanni da Casale Monferrato (Casale Monerrato, Alessandria, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s model of reason-governed conversational meaning (where what is meant is often an implicature rationally recoverable from what is said plus shared norms) fits Giovanni da Casale Monferrato remarkably well once you treat medieval “scientific-theological” exposition as a disciplined conversational practice rather than as mere treatise-writing. In the Quaestio de velocitate motus alterationis, Giovanni’s contrast between uniform and difform qualities (the rectangle versus the triangle as graphical encodings of change) is a way of making inferential commitments explicit: the diagram does not merely illustrate, it guides the reader toward licensed conclusions about rates of alteration, just as Grice’s maxims guide a hearer toward licensed conclusions about speaker-meaning. Your pizza-and-oven joke then becomes a Gricean diagnostic: we can move from a geometric model of “hotness” to a practical claim about cooking only if we assume cooperation and relevance, i.e., that the speaker is offering the right kind of information for the hearer’s purposes; otherwise the audience is left to compute implicatures (perhaps the point is methodological, not culinary). Giovanni’s medieval scholastic setting also parallels Grice’s emphasis on rational reconstruction: quaestiones are structured dialogues with an imagined opponent, so progress depends on anticipating what a reasonable interlocutor would infer, object, or demand as clarification—exactly the inferential sensitivity Grice theorizes under the Cooperative Principle. Finally, the passage’s contrast between “inanimate bodies” and “animate bodies” (not guided missiles) aligns with Grice’s central distinction between mere causal sequences and reason-responsive agency: for Giovanni, motion can be modelled; for Grice, conversation can be modelled; but in both cases the model matters because it captures a form of intelligibility—patterns that are not just observed, but are treated as answerable to reasons, and therefore as things we can interpret, correct, and coordinate with others. Autore di opere di teologia e scienza e legato pontificio. Entra nell'ordine francescano nella provincia genovese. Docente presso lo studio francescano di Assisi. Compone il saggio. “Quaestio de velocitate motus alterationis, Venezia. In esso presenta un'analisi grafica del movimento dei corpi uniformemente accelerati. La sua attività di insegnamento in fisica matematica influenza gli studiosi che operarono a Padova e Galilei che ri-propose idee simili. ‘Giovanni da Casale’, Treccani. Filosofia Filosofo del XIV secolo Teologi italiani Storia della scienza. Grice: “Casali dicusses the velocity of motion of alternation. He wisely remarks that if one takes the example of the quality of hotness, one may conceive of a UNI-FORM hotness throughout – ‘just as a rectangular parallelolgram is formed between two equidistant lines, such that any part you wish is equally wide with another. ‘Let there be throughout a UNIFORMLY DIFFORM hotness, such that it is a triangle!” corpi inanimati, corpi animati, inerzia, un corpo animato non e un missile guidato – Grice. La liberta dei corpi animati, uniform, uniformly difform, difformly difform.  Grice: Caro Monferrato, mi dica: se la velocità del caldo può essere rappresentata come un triangolo, allora la pizza in forno segue una parabola o diventa una retta? Ho bisogno di una risposta scientifica, ma non troppo calda! Monferrato: Paul, in Piemonte diciamo che la pizza, se troppo calda, va mangiata con calma e con filosofia. L’importante è non confondere il moto accelerato della mozzarella con quello dell’appetito; la scienza insegna, ma la fame decide! Grice: Ecco la saggezza piemontese! Se invece di pizza fosse una discussione, lei preferirebbe un moto uniforme o difforme? Glielo chiedo, perché a Oxford, spesso si finisce in curva anche quando si parte dritti! Monferrato: A Casale Monferrato si dice che una conversazione ben fatta è come un corpo animato: non è un missile guidato, ma sa sempre dove andare. Uniforme quando si ride, difforme quando si discute... purché non si finisca arrosto, come una pizza troppo scientifica! Monferrato, Giovanni da Casale (1478). Sermones. Venezia: Johannes de Colonia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Montanari: -- Ossia: Grice e Montanari (Bagnacavallo). Filosofo italiano. Bagnacavallo, presso Ravenna, Ravenna, Emilia-Romana.  Giuseppe Ignazio Montanari (Bagnacavallo, Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna). Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning pairs surprisingly well with Giuseppe Ignazio Montanari because Montanari stands at the intersection of rhetoric, prudence, and public intelligibility: trained in seminarian and aristocratic eloquence, then active as a teacher and prolific writer, he works in precisely the space where meaning is not just what is asserted but what can be responsibly inferred by an audience under shared norms. On a Gricean reading, Montanari’s rhetorical formation supplies the “craft” side of cooperation: speakers design utterances for uptake, calibrating how much to say, when to be indirect, and how to let hearers supply the rest—i.e., implicature as a disciplined economy rather than as mere flourish. The biographical note about his politically cautious posture during the Romagnol unrest is especially Gricean: when explicit commitment is risky, communication migrates into what can be suggested without being stated, so deference, petitions, and professions of patriotism can function as strategically placed conversational moves whose point is carried by what they invite the competent hearer to conclude. Even his scientific title, Osservazioni astronomiche (Bologna, 1740), can be used as an analogy for Grice’s pragmatics: observation reports are thin on theory but rich in inferential potential—readers recover significance by assuming the observer is methodical and sincere, much as Grice’s hearer assumes cooperation and then computes what is meant beyond the literal. In short, Montanari provides a historically concrete picture of how conversational reason operates in educated Italian practice: rhetoric teaches how to make meaning public, prudence teaches when to let implication carry the communicative load, and the audience’s rational expectations supply the bridge from dictum to what is understood. Nasce da Lorenzo e Barbara Biancoli -- cfr. lettera a Vaccolini, Pesaro. Inizia a studiare nel seminario di Faenza, dove si sono formati letterati famosi come Monti e Strocchi. Tuttavia, problemi di salute indussero i genitori a trasferirlo a Ravenna, presso il collegio dei nobili, dove gli è maestro di eloquenza Farini ed ha per compagno Mordani, al quale resta legato d'amicizia per tutta la vita.  Dopo aver perso la madre -- il padre s’è intanto risposato --, completa gli studi tra Bologna e Roma, laureandosi in diritto. Subito dopo ottenne la cattedra di umanità e retorica al ginnasio di Solarolo, dove resta quattro anni e sposa Mainardi. A quest’epoca risalgono le sue prime prove letterarie -- Rime sacre, Faenza, che Betti preferiva agli Inni sacri del Manzoni --, d’ispirazione cristiana, come molta della sua non rimarchevole produzione successiva che pure in qualche caso ottenne giudizi favorevoli dai contemporanei.  Spinto dall’illustre letterato e amico di famiglia Borghesi, concorse per la cattedra a Savignano ottenendola. Già in questa fase M. si rivela scrittore dalla vena facile e prolifica, rivolgendo i propri interessi a quattro filoni fondamentali: opere di retorica, traduzioni dal latino, brevi biografie e opere di argomento religioso. I moti in Romagna non videro in prima fila M., che però, «sebbene un po’ copertamente, dev’essere stato del numero» -- Pierini. Portano a questa conclusione alcune professioni di patriottismo dello stesso M. e la domanda che indirizzò al vescovo di Rimini per essere riammesso all’insegnamento. Tuttavia l’atteggiamento assai prudente di M., preoccupato di conservare l’impiego e mantenere agli studi i cinque figli, non consente di conoscere le sue autentiche idee politiche. Se, d’una parte, sembra talora aderire ai moti liberali -- v. un carme a Mordani, cit. in Polenta -- , dall’altra mostra in pubblico un atteggiamento deferente verso le autorità ecclesiastiche, delle quali cerca spesso l'aiuto e la protezione. Grice: Caro Montanari, tu che da Bagnacavallo sei finito a fare osservazioni astronomiche a Bologna, dimmi: quando scrivi “ho visto una stella”, lo dici o lo impliciti per modestia da seminario? Montanari: Paul, in Romagna s’impara presto che tra dire e dire troppo c’è di mezzo la cattedra, quindi l’astronomo parla poco e lascia il cielo fare il resto. Grice: Ah, allora la tua Osservazioni astronomiche è un manuale di implicature: poche parole, molte costellazioni, e il lettore cooperativo si arrangi. Montanari: Esatto, e se qualcuno mi chiede prove, gli rispondo che anche le stelle hanno cinque figli da mantenere: non possono brillare a comando. Montanari, Giuseppe Ignazio (1740). Osservazioni astronomiche. Bologna: Lelio dalla Volpe.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Montanari – Ossia: Grice e Montanari: la ragione conversazionale -- filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Cf  Mazzino Montanari. Massino Montanari.  

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Montani – Ossia: Grice e Montani: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale e il debito del segno – implicatura riflessiva – la scuola di Teramo 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Montinari – Ossia: Grice e Montinari: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del sovrumano – torna a Surriento.  Mazzino Montinari: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del sovrumano – torna a Surriento. Montinari is a natural counterpart to Grice because both make interpretation answerable to reasons rather than to aura: Grice explains how hearers rationally recover speaker-meaning by assuming cooperative norms and then calculating implicatures, while Montinari’s critical Nietzsche scholarship shows how readers recover authorial sense only by disciplined constraints on what can legitimately be inferred from notebooks, variants, and editorial interventions. The famous Montinari–Colli demolition of “The Will to Power” as Nietzsche’s putative authored book is, in Gricean terms, an exposure of a massive illegitimate implicature generated by paratext and institutional authority: an editorial compilation was made to look like a single intended communicative act, inviting readers to attribute to Nietzsche a global thesis and architectonic plan he did not in fact “mean” to put forward in that form. Montinari’s philological work functions like Grice’s maxim-governed pragmatics: it distinguishes what is explicitly in the evidence (dated fragments, contextual notes, manuscript layers) from what later readers are tempted to supply as “what he really meant,” and it insists that inferences must be licensed by reliable uptake conditions rather than by wishful system-building. Your passage’s political-cultural frame (culture as the remaining force against institutional assimilation and commodification of protest) also fits Grice’s core point that rationality is social and procedural: meaning is stabilized by shared practices, and when institutions manipulate the available context, they also steer what implicatures become “natural.” Finally, the Sorrento/Turin joke captures a serious methodological parallel: for Grice, the deepest work of meaning happens in what is left unsaid but responsibly recoverable; for Montinari, Nietzsche’s “overman” and other grand motifs survive not as slogans but as interpretive tasks that require resisting premature closure—treating the archive not as a monolithic message but as a field in which only some implications are warranted, and where the critic’s virtue is to keep inference tethered to reason. Grice: “We don’t study Nietzsche at Oxford, but they do, at Cambridge! If I were asked to identify the main difference between the Italian philosopher and the Oxonian philosopher is that the Italian philosopher takes Nietzsche seriously! But then he lived at Torino!” Nelle istituzioni esistenti, sostenute da immani forze di produzione e di distruzione, viene assimilata e mercificata ogni e qualsiasi protesta, persino quella dei Lumpen, ogni tentativo di lasciare la «nave dei folli». Se il metodo di Nietzsche può ancora aiutarci, allora l'unica forza che ci è rimasta è quella della cultura, della ragione.»  Considerato uno dei massimi editori e interpreti di Nietzsche. Ha definitivamente dimostrato che Nietzsche non ha mai scritto un'opera dal titolo “La volontà di Potenza” e che le cinque diverse compilazioni che la sorella del filosofo e altri editori dilettanti hanno pubblicato sotto questo titolo sono testi del tutto inaffidabili per comprendere il pensiero di Nietzsche. Si era formato a Pisa presso la quale si laureò con I movimenti ereticali a Lucca. Caduto il fascismo, divenne un attivista del Partito comunista, presso il quale si occupava della traduzione di scritti dal tedesco. Mentre visitava la Germani a Est per motivi di ricerca, fu testimone della rivolta. Successivamente, in seguito alla repressione della Rivoluzione ungherese del 1956, si allontanò dall'ortodossia marxista e dalla carriera nel partito. Mantenne tuttavia la sua iscrizione al PCI, e rimase fedele agli ideali del socialismo. Collabora con le Edizioni Rinascita, e per un anno fu direttore dell'omonima libreria in Roma. Dopo averne rivisto la raccolta di opere e manoscritti in Weimar, Colli e M. decisero di iniziarne una nuova edizione critica. Essa divenne lo standard per gli studiosi, e fu pubblicata in da Adelphi. Per questo lavoro fu preziosa la sia abilità nel decifrare la scrittura a mano (praticamente incomprensibile) di Nietzsche, fino a quel momento trascritta solo da "Gast“ (Köselitz).  L’implicatura di Nietzsche. (Michaelmas, late 1948; St John’s SCR; Grice and Colvin) Colvin was new enough to the place that one still had to decide whether to call him “Colvin” or “that new chap who knows what every chapel window cost”. I made a point of calling him Colvin, because it has the right clean consonants and because new fellows, like new buildings, should be greeted with the minimal ornament. He found me in the SCR with a thin Italian typescript balanced on the arm of a chair, as if I were trying to make foreign paper look like an Oxford habit. What’s that, Grice. You look as if you’re reading an index. More or less. It’s a title, really. A title in Italian. You’re getting continental. Only in the way the Bodley is continental: it remains where it is and accumulates. Colvin took the sheet with the quick, quiet confidence of a man who has spent his life taking other people’s documents away from them. La questione della Riforma protestante in Lucca, he read. Yes. That’s a thesis. So I’m told. And Lucca is a very deliberate choice. Deliberate how. Deliberate in the historian’s sense. Lucca is small enough to be local, and awkward enough to be revealing. Which decade. November 1949. Colvin looked faintly pleased, as if I’d just confirmed the date of a moulding. November. Exactly. And who wrote it. Mazzino Montinari. Colvin repeated the name once. Not admiration, not yet. Just filing. Where’s he writing it. Pisa. Scuola Normale. Normale, Colvin said. So, not abnormal. Normale Superiore. Colvin smiled. Superiore. Oxford would never dare print that. I’m glad you appreciate the politics of adjectives. Colvin sat down. He was not a philosopher, but he had that historian’s way of sitting as if he might, at any moment, produce a receipt. And why are you reading a Tuscan thesis-title in St John’s. Because the phrase that accompanies it is irresistible. Listen to this: after a year of philosophical studies, he “moved to history” under Cantimori. Moved. Yes. Moved. Passive. As if History came round with a van. Colvin gave a small laugh, and I felt I had done my welcoming duty. Tutors do that, he said. They rearrange people. But there’s the point that annoys me. He “moves from philosophy to history” and then he graduates in Filosofia della storia. Colvin blinked once, politely, the way historians do when a philosopher has made the category mistake that he thinks is a discovery. So he moved from philosophy to philosophy. Exactly. That’s your complaint. It is. “Philosophy of X” is not a proper transfer, in my view. It is philosophy wearing an X as a hat and calling it travel. Colvin handed the paper back. Historians would call it specialization. Philosophers call it evasion. Or, Colvin said, they call it a way of smuggling method into a subject that would otherwise be all wind. That’s better. Now we’re talking. But you’re still annoyed. Because the wording invites a silly inference. “Moved to history” sounds like exile. “Filosofia della storia” sounds like he never left the house. And what do you think actually happened. I think Cantimori taught him to treat texts as evidence, not incense. And a philosopher who learns that is dangerous to everybody’s grand theories. Colvin looked at me as if he were deciding whether I had just praised a historian or insulted him. So you’re reading it because you want to borrow Cantimori’s discipline. I’m reading it because I want to move Montinari back. Back to philosophy. Back to where he belongs, but with the historian’s conscience installed. If he’s clever, he’ll stop people making Nietzsche mean what later editors want him to mean. Colvin nodded, as if the words editor and evidence had been enough to make him feel at home. That, he said, is at least a respectable reason to read a title. It’s an Oxford reason, too. Colvin stood up, as if concluding a small inspection. Well, he said, if you’re going to welcome me by talking about archives and editorial mischief, you’ve chosen correctly. I was beginning to fear I’d have to pretend to enjoy metaphysics. You’ll still have to pretend. Yes, but now I know what sort of pretending we can do together. As he went out, I noticed the small victory: not that I’d made him laugh, but that I’d made a historian tolerate a philosopher’s pedantry about a phrase. And that is as close as Oxford ever comes to inter-faculty friendship: a shared irritation at someone else’s wording. Grice: Caro Montinari, lo confesso: a Oxford, Nietzsche è come il caffè decaffeinato, c’è ma nessuno lo prende davvero sul serio. A Cambridge invece pare che lo sorseggino a tutte le ore! Tu che lo conosci per davvero, dimmi: il “sovrumano” si trova prima o dopo la fermata di Sorrento? Montinari: Paul, a Sorrento si trova solo il limoncello. Per il sovrumano bisogna passare per Torino, magari sotto la pioggia, con una valigia piena di manoscritti indecifrabili. E comunque, ti avviso: “La volontà di potenza” te la serve solo la sorella di Nietzsche, ma il conto lo paghi tu! Grice: Ah, e pensare che noi inglesi ci accontentiamo del “common sense”! Quando provo a leggere Nietzsche, mi sembra di salire sulla famosa nave dei folli. Ma dimmi, è vero che per capire i suoi appunti bisogna decifrarli come le lettere di un medico in pensione? Montinari: Esattamente! Solo che nel caso di Nietzsche la calligrafia peggiora col pensiero, non con l’età. Se vuoi, la prossima volta ti porto una lente d’ingrandimento e un dizionario di implicature conversazionali: vedrai che insieme riusciremo almeno a trovare la dedica, se non il significato! Montinari, Mazzino  (1949). La questione della Riforma protestante in Lucca. Pisa.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Monte – Ossia: Grice e Monte: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la prospettiva e la filosofia della percezione  Guidobaldo de’marchesi Del Monte (Pesaro, Marche): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale – la prospettiva e la filosofia della percezione. Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607), the Marquis of Montebaroccio from the Pesaro–Urbino world, is a particularly good match for Grice because his most famous intellectual moves—on mechanics, balance, and perspective—are exercises in making implicit structure explicit, much as Grice treats conversation as a rational practice whose “hidden” rules become visible when a speaker’s move would otherwise look puzzling. Del Monte’s work in statics and in the equilibrium controversy is methodological: he forces the reader to see which assumptions are doing the work, which idealizations are permitted, and which inferences are licensed; Grice’s Cooperative Principle and maxims play an analogous role at the level of talk, explaining how hearers are entitled to move from what is said to what is meant by presuming a disciplined economy of reasons. The perspective theme strengthens the parallel: Del Monte treats seeing as standpoint-dependent but still rule-governed (a lawful transformation from viewpoint to appearance), and Grice treats understanding as context-dependent but still rule-governed (a lawful transformation from utterance to implicature). In both cases, the point is not that meaning or perception is subjective, but that it is systematically recoverable because agents share methods—geometrical in Del Monte’s case, conversational-rational in Grice’s—by which different “angles” can be coordinated into a stable objectivity. That is why an Oxford fascination with perception (Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia) can be recast, in your Pesaro frame, as a continuation of Del Monte’s insight: what matters is not merely what is given to the senses (or to the ears), but the publicly intelligible procedures by which we justify moving from appearances (or words) to the reality we take ourselves to be tracking. Grice: “For some resason – most likely due to the empiricist tradition prevalent in these islands, the philosophy of perception is quite popular at Oxford. Our moral professor of philosophy, Austin, spent most of his terms teaching it – “Sense and sensibilia”!” Grice: “I like to illustrate a ‘scientific revolution’ with Del Monte’s refutation on the equilibrium controversy, since it involves a lot of analyticity that only a philosopher can digest!” -- essential Italian philosopher. Il marchese Guidubaldo Bourbon Del Monte (Pesaro), filosoMecanicorum liber, Suo padre, Ranieri, originario da un famiglia benestante di Urbino, discendente dalla schiatta dei Bourbon del Monte Santa Maria, fu notato per il suo ruolo bellico e fu autore di due libri sull'architettura militare. Il duca di Urbino, Guidobaldo II della Rovere, gli attribuì, per meriti, il titolo di Marchese del Monte, dunque la famiglia divenne nobile solo un generazione prima di Guidobaldo. Alla morte del padre, ottenne il titolo di Marchese. Studia matematica a Padova. Mentre era lì, strinse una grande amicizia con Tasso. Combatté nel conflitto in Ungheria, tra l'impero degli Asburgo e l'Impero Ottomano. Al termine della guerra, torna nella sua tenuta a Mombaroccio, vicino Urbino, dove passava i giorni studiando matematica, meccanica, astronomia e ottica. Studia matematica con l'aiuto di Commandino. Divenne amico di Baldi, che fu anch'esso studente di Commandino. Ispettore delle fortificazioni del Granducato di Toscana. Grice: “There possibly is no equivalent to perspective for the other senses. Prospettiva, as the Italians call it. They are obsessed with it. Consider the human body. Consider Apollo del Belvedere – it is not just a body perceiving another body, there is a perspectival side to it!” Giambattista del Monte. Guido Ubaldo de’ marchesi Del Monte; Guidobaldo Del Monte. Monte. Keywords: implicature, perspective in statuary.  Grice: Caro Monte, sai, a Oxford la filosofia della percezione è sempre stata un terreno fertile di dibattito. Austin ci ha abituati a ragionare su “Sense and sensibilia”, ma mi colpisce come in Italia la prospettiva sia così centrale. Tu che hai riflettuto a lungo su questo tema, come pensi che la prospettiva arricchisca la nostra comprensione del vedere? Monte: Grazie, Paul! Per noi italiani, la prospettiva non è solo una tecnica pittorica, ma una vera e propria filosofia del percepire. Credo che la prospettiva ci insegni quanto ogni punto di vista sia unico e imprescindibile per cogliere l’armonia del mondo. La percezione, in fondo, è sempre un dialogo tra ciò che vediamo e il modo in cui ci poniamo di fronte alla realtà. Grice: Interessante, Monte! È come se la prospettiva diventasse una metafora della conversazione stessa: ognuno porta il suo sguardo, la sua posizione, e solo dal confronto nasce comprensione autentica. Non credi che anche nella statua, come nell’arte del dialogo, sia il mutare del punto di vista a generare nuovi significati? Monte: Assolutamente! Basta pensare all’Apollo del Belvedere: se lo osservi da una sola angolazione, rischi di perderne la bellezza. Così è anche nel pensiero: solo accogliendo la molteplicità dei punti di vista possiamo sperare di avvicinarci alla verità. Dopotutto, come dice il proverbio, “ogni testa è un piccolo mondo”. Monte, Guidobaldo Del (1577). Mechanica. Pesaro: Bartolomeo Oliverio.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). Grice e Morandi Giovanni Morandi (Firenze, Toscana)

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Morandi – Ossia: Grice e Morandi – la lingua di Firenze – filosofia italiana –  (Firenze). Abstract. Grice: “At Oxford, ‘rule’ has a meaning that was adopted by Austin, and therefore, disadopted by me! Luigi Morandi (Todi, Perugia, Umbria): la lingua di Firenze. Giovanni Morandi’s philological attention to “rules of Florentine” (in the tradition of early grammars, vocabularies, and the recovery of documents like the grammatichetta often associated with Lorenzo il Magnifico) pairs well with Grice because it highlights the difference between rules as codified norms of a language and rules as rational constraints on intelligible interaction. Grice’s “conversational rules” are not grammar-book prescriptions but defeasible principles that hearers use to make sense of what speakers are doing—principles whose force is shown precisely when a speaker appears to deviate and the audience repairs the deviation by deriving an implicature. Morandi’s historical-linguistic project supplies the background against which that repair becomes possible: a stabilized lexicon, a sense of correct formation, and a culturally legible normativity (Florence as an emblem of stylistic discipline) that makes departures noticeable and therefore interpretable. In the Oxford–Florence contrast of your passage, “rule” itself becomes a pragmatic test case: a term can shift from legal-regulative (regula, rule of law) to game-regulative (a move should follow a move) to conversationally regulative (maxims guiding uptake), and Grice’s point is that what matters is not which sense is “in the dictionary” but which rational expectations participants are entitled to mobilize in context. Morandi’s insistence that the life of a language lies in the dialectic of norm and exception then converges with Grice’s central claim: conversational meaning is reason-governed because exceptions are not mere breakdowns but data—signals that invite principled inference—so that the most revealing “rules” of talk are those that can be bent, flouted, or reinterpreted while still remaining mutually intelligible. Grice: “At Oxford, ‘rule’ has a meaning that was adopted by Austin, and therefore, disadopted by me! – Cicerone should know better – REGVLA – from ‘reign’ – the rule of law. In my “Logic and Conversation” I occasionally and informally refer to the ‘conversational rule’ of the ‘conversational game’, i. e. the rule that states which ‘conversational mve’ should follow which!” Trabalza cita. REGOLE DELLA LINGUA FIORENTINA C ["kabalza. A quanto dico del notevolissimo documento che qui esce pella prima volta alla luce, sono in grado, per speciale favore usatomi dal mio illustre maestro ed amico senatore Morandi, d’aggiungere alcune notizie di grande importanza storica, anticipando le conclusioni a cui egli è giunto, com'è suo costume, dopo largo e profondo studio, e che illustra col noto suo magistero di dottrina e di stile in un saporitissimo saggio. Nella Antologia M. segnala l'importanza della grammatichetta vaticana, narrando le vicende del manoscritto; e poiché egli stesso m'esorta a pubblicarlo per intero, annunzia fin d'allora ch'io la mette come appendice ad ogni grammatica razionale o ragionata. Continuando però le sue indagini con rigore di metodo intorno ai primi vocabolari e alle prime grammatiche della nostra lingua, M. puo ha tra le altre cose provare che la nostra grammatichetta e molto probabilmente opera di Lorenzo il Magnifico, non certamente d’ALBERTI , com'e stato supposto; e che anche Vinci abbozza una grammatica della lingua d’Italia, dimettendone forse il pensiero, quando ha notizia, come apparisce da due suoi ricordi, della grammatichetta del magnifico. Lo studio di M. s’occupa poi distesamente dei materiali raccolti da VINCI per fare il vocabolario italiano, il latino-italiano e una specie di dizionario illustrato dell’armi Prefazione antiche, pel quale sa attingere d’una fonte classica sfuggita ai lessicografi latini suoi contemporanei. Importante. lingua, linguaggio, Alberti, storia della grammatica razionale. Corpus, late morning. The Old Quad is doing its usual trick of looking ancient while undergraduates remain young. I find Shropshire installed on a bench with a paperback-sized Italian thing, as if the sun had come out solely to assist his private education. What are you reading, Shropshire. Preparing for my Latin. That is a curious-looking Latin. It declines nicely. It is Italian, Shropshire. Italian declines too, if you bully it hard enough. Let me see. He hands it over with the air of a man offering a harmless object and hoping it will not be treated as evidence. “Stornelli ed altre poesie.” You mean you are revising your Latin by reading “stornelli”. Exactly. Masculine nominative plural. You are attempting to make an Italian plural do the work of a Latin case. It’s the -i that does it. Very classical. The -i does it the way a cap and gown “does it”. Costume does not entail citizenship. He shrugs, because shrugs are a cheap form of scepticism and therefore popular in Oxford. Read the first line, then. I want to hear how your “Latin” begins. Shropshire clears his throat and recites, with the earnestness of a man who has discovered that confidence can substitute for pronunciation. Stornelli sopra l’albero m’hanno svegliato. There you are. Stornelli. Plural. Not the verse-form, then, but the birds. Little starlings. Little noises. Little nuisances. Very morning. Exactly. And in that moment I feel the Click: not the modern click of a camera, but the older click of a word dropping into place and suddenly refusing to stay there. Stornelli: birds, yes. But also, by the title, poems. One word, two errands. You know, Shropshire, you have done something for once that is educational by accident. That’s my best sort of educational. What, the accident? The accident is your method. The education is Morandi’s title. One word, two senses; and the reader must choose, or pretend to choose, before he has any right to. He looks pleased, though I doubt he knows why. Shropshire is at his most useful when he is pleased for reasons he cannot articulate. Who is Morandi, anyway. Luigi Morandi. Italian chap. Later on he founded a biblioteca circolante. A circulating library. Yes. To circulate the stornelli, I take it. No, to circulate books. You have no proof of that. It’s what it means. And here the second click arrives, because “what it means” is precisely the phrase that always smuggles in the wrong certainty. Biblioteca circolante: in Italian, a lending library; in English, a library that goes about on little feet. Oxford has a Bodleian that stays. Morandi has a library that moves. One cannot resist. Oxford, you see, has got this backwards. Our library stays; we circulate. We circulate to the Bodleian, you mean. No, we circulate among ourselves. We circulate opinions. We circulate essay-topics. We circulate the influenza. But the Bodleian stays, like a moral principle. Corpus doesn’t, Shropshire says. Corpus is next to my bedroom. A short-diameter circle, if you want circulation. He says it as if he is proud of being a commoner who lives on his own commons, which he is. There is a tone some men have when they say “I pay for my food” that resembles virtue even when it is merely arithmetic. So you don’t bother with the Bodley. Why bother, when my library is already implicating me every night. He does not know he has said something good, which is why it is good. But tell me, Shropshire, what do you think Morandi is doing with “stornelli”. Is he naming birds or poems. Both. Both is lazy. Or clever. Clever is just laziness with a tie on. Shropshire considers this as if it were a maxim worth testing. It isn’t really the same word, though, he says. The poem-one isn’t from the bird-one. So you are going to spoil it with etymology. It’s true, though. The verse-form comes from that Provençal thing. Estorn. Yes. A poetic contest. Whereas the bird is storno. And storno is from Latin sturnus, if you want to be properly dead about it. Exactly. So the two “stornelli” are not brothers at all. They are two strangers wearing the same coat. Yes. And yet, in conversation, you treat them as brothers the moment it amuses you. Yes. That is the whole business, you see. The dictionary says: two unrelated histories. The title says: one printed form. And the reader, being a cooperative animal, supplies the bridge at once, because bridges are what readers do when authors leave gaps. So Morandi is relying on the reader to make the wrong inference. Not wrong. Useful. There are inferences that are historically false and conversationally correct. That sounds like cheating. It is civilisation. Shropshire laughs, and I realise that what I am enjoying is not the joke but the mechanism: one word, two senses, and then a third layer, the author’s invitation to pretend they are linked. The invitation is not stated; it is implied by the mere placement of the word on the cover and the birds in the first line. That is the kind of thing I cannot stop thinking about. It is not grammar; it is social reason. Shropshire takes the book back, like a man reclaiming property that has been temporarily nationalised. So I shouldn’t call it Latin. You may call it Latin if you also call the Bodleian a circulating library. Meaning: never. Meaning: only as a joke. And even then, be sure the joke circulates better than the book. He tucks Morandi away and looks satisfied, as if he has revised Latin without having suffered Latin, which is the undergraduate ideal. Minimal notes you can append (if you want) In Italian usage, “stornello” can denote the starling (as a diminutive/alternate of “storno”), but “stornello” also denotes a folk verse-form; standard etymologies usually treat the verse-form sense as separate (often traced to Occitan/Provençal “estorn”, a poetic contest) rather than derived from the bird-word. The vignette exploits the resulting “one form, two senses” as a Gricean prompt: the history may diverge, but conversational uptake happily recombines. “Biblioteca circolante” is an ordinary Italian term for a lending library; the humour depends on taking it compositionally in English as “a library that circulates”, and contrasting it with Oxford’s famously non-lending Bodleian. Grice: Caro Morandi, mi permetto di dirti che la lingua di Vadum Boum — come affettuosamente chiamo la mia università — è davvero una bestia di tutt’altra razza rispetto alla lingua di Firenze! Lì, le parole sembrano indossare abiti diversi, e le regole che guidano il “conversational game” non sono affatto quelle che Cicerone avrebbe riconosciuto. Morandi: Ah, Paul, non posso che sorridere! La lingua fiorentina, si sa, ha il pregio di una sobria eleganza e di un rigore quasi musicale. Ma non credere che sia immune da stranezze: basta leggere la grammatichetta del Magnifico o sfogliare il vocabolario di Vinci per scoprire che anche da noi ogni “regola” ha i suoi trasgressori, e il gioco della conversazione si arricchisce proprio grazie a queste variazioni. Grice: È proprio questo il bello, caro Morandi! A Vadum Boum “rule” ha assunto un significato che Austin aveva adottato, e che io, per spirito di contraddizione, ho preferito rifiutare. Ma, se ci pensi bene, nella logica della conversazione ogni regola è fatta per essere reinterpretata: il vero gioco sta nel sapere quando e come infrangere la “regola”. Morandi: Non potrei essere più d'accordo! In fondo, il nostro lavoro di filosofi e studiosi della lingua consiste proprio nel capire le regole, ma anche nel riconoscere il valore delle eccezioni. Come dice il proverbio fiorentino, “il parlar chiaro non è sempre il parlar vero”: la lingua vive una dialettica continua tra norma e creatività, ed è questo che la rende così affascinante e infinita. Morandi, Luigi (1867). Stornelli. Sanseverino Marche.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Moraia – Ossia: Grice e Moravia: la ragione conversazionale – personologia -- l’implicature conversazionali dei ragazzi  Sergio Moravia (Bologna, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale – personologia -- l’implicature conversazionali dei ragazzi – la scuola di Bologna. M.’s work on “personology,” the wild child, and “hidden reason” can be read as a human-sciences counterpart to Grice’s project in conversational pragmatics: both treat mindedness as something that becomes visible in patterns of intelligible conduct rather than as an occult inner glow. Grice argues that conversational meaning is reason-governed because hearers can (and normally do) reconstruct what a speaker meant by presuming rational cooperation and then deriving implicatures from what is said plus context; Moravia’s “il pungolo dell’umano” and the figure of the ragazzo selvaggio similarly dramatize how the status of “person” is not given merely by belonging to Homo sapiens but is achieved (or withheld) through entry into shared practices of sense-making—language, education, norm-following, and reciprocal recognition. That is why your “metaphysical transubstantiation” joke lands: in Gricean terms, becoming a person is becoming an agent whose behaviour is interpretable under reasons, and conversational implicature is one of the clearest signatures of that agency (the ability to mean more than one says, to understand indirectness, to play by and sometimes exploit the maxims). Moravia’s “ragione nascosta” then parallels Grice’s insistence that the most important rational work in communication is often not explicit argument but the quiet inferential labour beneath the surface—what must be supplied by a competent participant in a “universe of sense.” Finally, Moravia’s Nietzsche, as you quote him (earthbound, humane, anti-narcissistic, seeking sense beyond nihilism), fits Grice’s temperament: both resist grand metaphysical inflation in favour of the disciplined, finite achievements of understanding in ordinary life—conversation as the civil technology by which the human animal becomes, and stays, a person. Grice: “Perhaps I should have followed Moravia and called my construction routine of metaphysical transubstantiation, by which a specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens becomes a person – personologia!” Filosofo italiano. Bologna, Emilia-Romagna. Grice: “I like Moravia: he has philosophised on what makes us ‘human,’ (“il pungolo dell’umano”) – his analysis of ‘il ragazzo selvaggio’ is sublime – and he has played with ‘reason,’ hidden and strutturata – and the universi di senso with which I cannot but agree! – provided we don’t multiply them ad infinitum!” -- Grice: “I like Moravia’s idea of ‘la ragione nascosta’ – you have indeed to seek and thou shalt find!” -- “Il Nietzsche che prediligo è il Nietzsche terreno, umano, presente nel tempo. È il Nietzsche intrepido esploratore del sottosuolo dell'uomo e dei disagi della civiltà. È il Nietzsche che fertilmente e sofferentemente (non narcisisticamente) vive e pensa il nichilismo: ma per andare oltre il nichilismo. È soprattutto il Nietzsche cheneo-illuminista forse malgrado luivuole conoscere, capire, dare un (nuovo) senso alle cose.” Professore a Firenze. Allievo diGarin, si è formato in ambiente fiorentino conseguendovi la laurea in filosofia nel 1962 con tesi su Gian Domenico Romagnosi. Professore incaricato, è poi diventato ordinario di Storia della Filosofia all'Firenze. Nel corso della sua carriera, si è interessato particolarmente dell'illuminismo francese e del pensiero del Novecento, della storia e dell'epistemologia delle scienze umane, con particolare attenzione all'antropologia, la filosofia della mente e l'esistenzialismo. I suoi studi e le sue ricerche hanno aperto nuove prospettive interdisciplinari fra pensiero filosofico e scienze umane. ragazzi, personologia. Grice: Caro Moravia, se avessi seguito Bologna fino in fondo avrei chiamato la mia teoria una personologia conversazionale, dove i ragazzi diventano persone a colpi di implicature ben educate. Moravia: Paul, a Bologna i ragazzi imparano presto che la ragione è nascosta e un po’ birichina, ma se la provochi con gentilezza viene fuori a fare due chiacchiere. Grice: È proprio questo che mi diverte della tua scuola, perché la conversazione civilizza l’Homo sapiens senza bisogno di moltiplicare universi di senso come conigli metafisici. Moravia: Allora siamo d’accordo, perché anche il mio Nietzsche preferisce parlare tra umani, magari in cortile, piuttosto che fare il nichilista solitario in cattedra. Moravia, Sergio (1962). Il mito dell’uomo naturale. Firenze: La Nuova Italia.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Mordente – Ossia: Grice e Mordente: la ragione conversazionale – I know that there are infintely many stars Fabrizio Mordente (Salerno) : la ragione conversazionale – I know that there are infintely many stars. Grice’s reason-governed pragmatics can be made to meet Mordente’s infinitesimals by treating “infinite” talk as a case where what is said is systematically underdetermined and must be stabilized by conversational norms of evidence, precision, and disciplinary purpose. When Grice wonders “There are infinitely many stars—do I know that?”, he is pressing the gap between merely asserting a grand claim and being entitled to it; on a Gricean view, the hearer will normally infer (by Quantity and Quality) that a speaker who flatly says “infinitely many” is committed to having the right kind of grounds, and if those grounds are unavailable the utterance invites either retreat (“I mean very many”) or reinterpretation as rhetorical exaggeration. Mordente’s proportional compass and the Bruno–Mordente controversy over minima and commensurability illustrate the same dynamic in early modern mathematics: terms like “minimum,” “indivisible,” and “infinitesimal” are not self-interpreting; their usable content depends on what competent practitioners can reasonably infer about permitted operations (measuring, comparing, treating as commensurable) and on what counts as an acceptable justification against an Aristotelian background that allows only potential infinity. In that sense, Mordente’s “measuring a bit of infinity” becomes a pragmatic analogue of Grice’s implicature: the instrument does not merely add data, it constrains interpretation, licensing certain inferences and blocking others, so that claims about the infinitely small can function cooperatively rather than as mere metaphysical flourishes. The upshot is that both projects—Grice on conversational meaning and Mordente on mathematical minima—turn on the same rational discipline: making sure that an audience can, in principle, recover what is meant from what is offered, whether the audience is a conversational partner computing implicatures or a community of geometers deciding what “infinite” is allowed to mean within the rules of their practice. Grice: There are infinitely many stars. Do I KNOW that? There are infinitely many infinitely infinitisemials. Keywords: infinitesimal, commensurability of infinitesimals – or other. Scholars and historians of science have considered Giordano Bruno and Fabrizio Mordente's ideas on infinitesimals and commensurability in the context of the historical development of the concept, which  eventually led to Leibniz's infinitesimal calculus. The link is generally explored in the context of the historical evolution of mathematical and philosophical thought on infinity, atomism, and the continuum, rather than a direct personal or philosophical connection between the individuals themselves across different centuries.    Key points regarding the connections made by scholars: Aristotelian problem: Aristotle denied the existence of an actual infinite (both large and small) and maintained the infinite divisibility of the continuum in potentia, a standard view that Bruno explicitly challenged. The issue of commensurability was central to Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian philosophy, where quantities were generally considered commensurable or incommensurable in a specific mathematical sense. Bruno and Mordente: Bruno initially disregarded the Aristotelian distinction between mathematical and physical quantities. Influenced by his controversy with Mordente regarding the latter's proportional compass, Bruno began to argue for the existence of a physical and a mathematical minimum (atomism), making geometric objects (and thus infinitesimals) potentially determinable and commensurable, contrary to the standard Aristotelian view of continuous magnitudes. This represented a significant shift in his mathematical thinking, attempting a reform of mathematics to accommodate the infinitely small. Fabrizio Mordente. Grice: Caro Mordente, ogni volta che penso alle stelle infinite, mi viene il dubbio: le conosci tutte o ti affidi all’implicatura conversazionale? Mordente: Ah, Paul, ti dirò: tra infiniti infinitesimi e stelle, a Salerno ci si perde più facilmente che sulla Via Lattea! Ma almeno con il mio compasso proporzionale, posso cercare di misurare un po’ d’infinito… senza smarrirmi troppo! Grice: E meno male! Aristotele avrebbe detto che tutto si può dividere, ma tu e Bruno avete deciso di moltiplicare i minimi come se fossero pizzette – e ogni tanto pure commensurabili! Mordente: Paul, la filosofia italiana è così: tra una stella e un infinitesimo, la conversazione non finisce mai! Anzi, quando pensi di aver detto tutto, arriva un nuovo infinito da discutere… e magari una pizza da condividere! Mordente, Fabrizio (1584). Apud Johannem Baptistam. Venezia: Bertoni.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Morselli – Ossia: Grice e Morselli: la sistematicita della filosofia – la scuola di Vigevano – la filosofia della ligua – parola, ragione, segno, comunicazione  Emilio Morselli (Vigevano, Pavia, Lombardia): la sistematicita della filosofia –la filosofia della lingua – parola, ragione, segno, comunicazione.  Grice’s account of conversational meaning as reason-governed inference can be paired with Emilio Morselli’s “systematic” Lombard ambition (a dictionary mind: parola, segno, comunicazione) by treating Morselli’s lexicographic and historiographic impulse as an attempt to stabilize, in public form, the background rationalities that make talk intelligible in the first place. On Grice’s view, hearers recover what is meant by assuming cooperative rational agency and then computing implicatures from what is said plus context; in your passage, Morselli’s entries on silence (as the sceptic’s suspension of judgment) and aphasia (as loss of linguistic function) mark two limiting cases that help isolate Grice’s middle ground, where meaning is neither mere appearance nor mere noise but the product of interpretable intention under shared norms. Skeptical silence resembles Gricean conversational “withholding” at its extreme: the speaker declines commitment, yet that very refusal can still be meaningful because interlocutors rationally search for a point (the implicature of caution, parity of reasons, or methodological restraint). Aphasia, by contrast, models breakdown: when the capacity to produce usable signs collapses, the Gricean machinery cannot get traction because there is no reliable vehicle for intention-recognition, so the cooperative calculus fails. Morselli’s systematicity thus complements Grice by foregrounding the infrastructure of intelligibility—definitions, distinctions, taxonomies—while Grice explains how, even with that infrastructure, actual communication lives in the dynamic gap between dictionary-meaning and occasion-meaning: the same word (or the choice of silence) can carry different rationally recoverable implications depending on the conversational setting, the epistemic posture, and the shared expectations that make “saying less” a way of meaning more. Grice: “The Italians distinguish between Morselli and Morselli. The second wrote a ‘manuale di semejotic’ – the first did not!” Grice: “What I like about Morselli is that his is mainstream (Lombardia) and that he approached philosophy systematically. Only Morselli could conceive of a ‘dictionary’ – and he also wrote a ‘storia della filosofia’!” – Per li scettici antichi, l’afasia, Osn!:d P*%r OdMi WHMJOTECA CAPWvj|a£. dico) = Il silenzio, fllos., il tacere, è il risultato della sospensione di qualsiasi giudizio o affermazione circa la vera natura dello cose. L’uomo conosce soltanto ciò che appare, và 9aiv6jj.Eva, la pura apparenza: se si vuolo oltrepassarla, ci si trova di fronte a ragioni contrarlo e d'uguale forza; perciò il saggio, se vuol conservare l’impassibilità e l’equilibrio dell’anima (derapala), non afferma nuLa, neppure l’impossibilità della scienza. (psicol.): l’afasia ò la perdita totale o parziale dello funzioni del linguaggio. Affettivo (lat. a/Hccrc. p. 0. dolore, laeiiiìa addolorare, rallegrare) (psicol.): si dico delle modificazioni e dei modi di essere dei soggetto, dei processi essenzialmente soggettivi, come il niacore, il dolore, le emozioni, 1 sentimenti, lo passioni, io inclinazioni, che formano una dello tre grandi attività in cui si distribuisce solitamente, per comodità d’analisi, la vita psicologica, cioè l’intelligenza, il sentimento, la volontà. Affezione (affectio) (psicol.): in generale designa una disposizione, uno 0 stato, un mutamento dovuti a causo esterne o Interne, sempre con un carattere di passività. In senso più particolare esprime il piacere, il doloro e lo emozioni elementari. implicatura. Emilio Morselli.  Grice: Caro Morselli, da Vigevano alla filosofia sistematica, dimmi: il silenzio è davvero la risposta migliore quando le parole non bastano? Oppure rischiamo di diventare afasici e perderci la conversazione? Morselli: Paul, il silenzio tra gli antichi scettici era un’arte! Ma se dovessi scrivere un dizionario, forse la voce “afasia” sarebbe la più lunga: nella filosofia, tacere è più rumoroso che parlare! Grice: Allora, Morselli, se la parola è segno e la ragione è comunicazione, qual è il destino di chi si affida solo all’apparenza? Gli scettici sarebbero perfetti per una chat muta! Morselli: Paul, tra afasia e sentimenti, l’importante è mantenere l’equilibrio dell’anima. Se qualcuno ti affetta troppo, magari è solo un’affezione temporanea: in Lombardia, anche l’implicatura passa col tempo e con un buon risotto! Speranza has these two Morsellis, the first from Lombardia, the second from Modena (what comune e regione is that?) Are the relations? Yes. There are indeed two different Morselli, and they are not the same man. The first, Emilio Morselli, was born in Vigevano, in the province of Pavia, in the region of Lombardia. He was a philosopher and educator rather than a psychiatrist, and the obituary evidence ties him firmly to that Lombard setting. [archive.org], [asut.unito.it] The second, Enrico Morselli, was born in Modena. Modena is a comune and also the capital of the province of Modena, in the region of Emilia-Romagna. He is the much better-known psychiatrist, positivist, and psychical researcher. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] So the geographical answer is straightforward. Vigevano: comune in the province of Pavia, region Lombardia. [asut.unito.it] Modena: comune in the province of Modena, region Emilia-Romagna. [treccani.it] As to whether they were related, I do not see any reliable evidence in the sources presently to hand that Emilio Morselli and Enrico Morselli were members of the same immediate family. They share the surname Morselli, but that alone is not enough to infer a family relation, especially across different regional settings and quite different biographical tracks. None of the biographical notices I have found identifies them as brothers, cousins, or father and son. So the safe answer is: possible in the broad genealogical sense, unproven in the documentary sense. [archive.org], [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] The dry summary would be this. Emilio Morselli belongs to Vigevano, province of Pavia, region Lombardia. Enrico Morselli belongs to Modena, province of Modena, region Emilia-Romagna. They share a surname but are not, on the evidence currently available, demonstrably close relations. [archive.org], [asut.unito.it], [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] And one small correction to the comic line in the dialogue. “From Vigevano to systematic philosophy” fits Emilio Morselli rather well; the semeiotician, medium-investigator, and psychiatry man is Enrico Morselli of Modena. So Speranza’s taste for “the Italians distinguish between Morselli and Morselli” is entirely justified. [archive.org], [it.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can now give you a compact two-paragraph note distinguishing the two Morselli in exactly the dry register you seem to prefer. [archive.org], [it.wikipedia.org] Speranza meant to attach this below to the previous but attached something else by mistake -- so can you make a second run to check if they are related, and generationally, how apart are they? thanks - Yes — on a second run, I can sharpen the answer a little, though not enough to assert a documented family tie. The two men are clearly from different generations. Enrico Agostino Morselli was born in 1852 at Modena and died in 1929. He published Spirito e materia at the age of seventeen in 1870. [treccani.it], [en.wikipedia.org] Emilio Morselli, the Vigevano philosopher-sociologist of your passage, is attached to a later generation. The bibliographical clue you supplied — Elementi di sociologia generale in 1898 — already suggests a younger man than Enrico Agostino Morselli, and the obituary-style material places him in the later nineteenth-century Lombard academic world rather than the mid-century Modenese medical one. [it.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it] So, generationally, the safest answer is this. Enrico Agostino Morselli belongs to the 1852 generation, and Emilio Morselli appears to belong to a younger cohort active at the end of the century. That makes them not contemporaries in the strict peer sense but rather senior and junior generations, probably separated by roughly one generation, or at least by a substantial academic age-gap. [treccani.it], [it.wikipedia.org] As to whether they were related, I still do not see a reliable documentary source explicitly connecting Emilio Morselli and Enrico Agostino Morselli as brothers, cousins, uncle and nephew, or father and son. The more detailed biographical sources for Enrico Agostino Morselli give his parents as Giuseppe Morselli and Melania Saccozzi, and describe a Modenese/Correggio background; but none of the material now in hand bridges from that family line to the Vigevano Emilio Morselli. [treccani.it], [resolve.ca...bridge.org], [it.wikipedia.org] So the revised dry verdict is: They are very likely not of the same immediate generation. Enrico Agostino Morselli is the elder figure by a clear margin, born in 1852; Emilio Morselli belongs to a later Lombard generation active in the 1890s. A family relation remains possible in the broad genealogical sense, but on present evidence it is still unproven in the documentary sense. [treccani.it], [it.wikipedia.org], [resolve.ca...bridge.org] If one wanted a cautious social-historical guess rather than a proof, one might say that two educated Morselli in northern Italy, one from Modena and one from Vigevano, could perfectly well belong to more widely ramified branches of the same surname family without being close documented kin. But that is only a genealogical possibility, not a scholarly conclusion. [geni.com], [treccani.it], [resolve.ca...bridge.org] So the best compact answer is: probably one generation apart, possibly connected only at the surname level, not demonstrably close relations from the evidence now in hand. [treccani.it], [it.wikipedia.org] If you like, I can now do one more targeted pass in chat only: I can help you formulate the exact genealogical question you would need to test in Portale Antenati or parish/civil records, using Modena and Vigevano as the two anchor places.Morselli, Emilio (1898). Elementi di sociologia generale. Milano: U. Hoepli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Morselli – Ossia: Grice e Morselli – metafisica e psicologia filosofica – semeiotica  Enrico Agostino Morselli (Modena)– metafisica e psicologia filosofica – semeiotica.  Morselli is a good foil for Grice because semiotics/“semeiotics” treats symptoms as signs whose significance is recovered by disciplined inference, whereas Grice’s program treats utterances as actions whose significance is recovered by disciplined inference under assumptions of rational cooperation. In your passage, the Stevenson quip (“spots only mean measles—strictly, a spot does not mean”) marks the difference between natural meaning and speaker-meaning; Morselli’s psychiatric semeiotica sits right on that boundary, since it is precisely the practice of moving from observed “spots” (symptoms, behaviors, expressive disturbances) to what they indicate, while being careful not to slide from indication to intention. Grice supplies the conceptual control: where a symptom is read as evidence (natural meaning, defeasible and diagnostically constrained), a communicative act is read as meant (non-natural meaning, intention-involving, audience-directed). The Italy/Oxford contrast then becomes methodological: early Oxford “armchair psychology” often tried to read minds from introspection and ordinary-language cues, whereas Morselli’s clinical posture treats the mind as something approached through a rule-governed interpretive practice (a semiotics of the mental) that already anticipates Grice’s key idea that interpretation is rational and norm-sensitive, not merely associative. Finally, the mediumship episodes sharpen the Gricean warning: once you start treating every sign as if it were a message, you risk over-ascribing intention and importing “implicature” where there is only evidence; Grice’s maxims (especially Quantity and Relation) explain why that temptation is powerful—humans are built to infer purpose—while Morselli’s semeiotic discipline exemplifies the counter-pressure to constrain inference by method, background knowledge, and differential diagnosis. Grice: “Stevenson, an American, states that spots only ‘mean’ measles – strictly, a spot does not mean. Italians don’t have this problem – witness Morselli and his semejotica, as he spells it!” Grice: “When I arrived at Oxford, psychology was philosophy, and philosophy was psychology – or rather, philosophers were armchair psychologists, and vice versa! I never recovered. Abstract: Grice’s intention. Occupation(s) Physician, psychical researcher Enrico Agostino Morselli is an Italian physician and psychical researcher. M. is a professor atTurin. He is best known for the publication of his influential book Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics claiming that suicide is primarily the result of the struggle for life and nature's evolutionary process. According to Shorter "M. is known outside of Italy for having coined the term dysmorphophobia. In Italy, he is known for the psychiatry textbook A Guide to the Semiotics of Mental Illness." M. is a eugenicist and some of his writings have been linked to scientific racialism. M. is also interested in mediumship and psychical research. He studies the medium Eusapia Palladino and concludes that some of her phenomena is genuine, being evidence for an unknown bio-psychic force present in all humans.  Selected works Science Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics; A Guide to the Semiotics of Mental Illness (Manuale di SEMEIOTICA [SEMEJOTICA] delle malattie mentali Psychical research  M., E. . Eusapia Paladino and the Genuineness of Her Phenomena. Annals of Psychical Science. M., Psicologia e “Spiritismo”: Impressioni e Note Critiche sui Fenomeni Medianici di Eusapia Palladino. Turin: Fratelli Bocca. References  Stark, Rodney; Bainbridge, William Sims. Religion, Deviance and Social Control. Routledge. Maj, Mario; Ferro, Anthology of Italian Psychiatric Texts. World Psychiatric Association. G: Morselli begins before most philosophers had learned to blush at the word brain. S: Or cervello, rather. G: Yes, and that is already the first nuisance. S: Because you dislike nuisance in vocabulary more than in people. G: I dislike nuisance when it masquerades as precision. S: Yet Morselli’s title is beautifully plain: Spirito e materia. Conferenza sui rapporti fra il cervello e il pensiero. G: Beautifully plain, and therefore dangerous. S: Dangerous because cervello is vernacular? G: Dangerous because plainness tempts one to think one has settled something. S: We are in 1946, not Bologna 1276. G: Oxford never knows what century it is, and Bologna never stops reminding one. S: So: cervello. Is he simply saying “brain”? G: More or less. But with a history attached. S: Cerebrum? Cerebellum? Cerebro? Cervello? Cervelletto? G: Exactly. A physician learns one set in Latin and speaks another in Italian. S: And Morselli chose the Italian. G: Because he was lecturing not to anatomists only, but to intelligent civilians and incipient spiritists. S: You are unfair to spiritists. G: I am exact about spiritists. S: Let us begin with Broca. G: Broca, yes. French, not Italian. S: And not Brocca with two c’s. G: Quite. French enough to avoid doubling consonants and to keep Paris in order. S: He localised speech in the frontal lobe. G: In the left frontal region, yes. S: So pensiero, if tied to speech, is not in the cerebellum. G: Certainly not in the cerebellum in the sense of “the little brain at the back.” S: Yet the Italian ordinary word cervello comes from cerebellum, the diminutive. G: Which delights me no end. S: Because the larger organ gets named by the little one? G: Or because language, being language, refuses to honour anatomy’s dignity. S: French does the same. G: Cerveau, yes. S: Spanish keeps cerebro for the big thing, cerebelo for the little thing. G: Which is almost too rational for a Romance language. S: So Morselli, by saying cervello, is not saying cerebellum. G: No. He is saying the ordinary Italian word for “brain.” S: Even though a physician trained in Latin at Bologna would know perfectly well the distinction. G: He would know it, and then ignore it when speaking to the public. S: So the physician says cerebrum in the lecture hall of anatomy and cervello in the conference to cultured laymen. G: Precisely. S: Then what is your complaint? G: My complaint is not with Morselli’s word. My complaint is with the hearer who thinks the word has done the theory. S: “Cervello” explains nothing. G: No more than “mind” explains anything. S: Yet Morselli connects cervello and pensiero. G: As every nineteenth-century medico-philosopher was obliged to do if he wanted to be modern. S: Is that why you call him a philosopher? G: I do. S: Many would call him merely a physician. G: Many would call Broad merely a professor, which would also be stupid. S: Broad does use “brain.” G: Broad uses brain, nervous system, traces, dispositions, feelings, yes. He inhabits the mind-body landscape without taking residence in the cortex. S: And you are influenced by Broad. G: Broad taught us all how to speak carefully about things one cannot yet prove. S: Then your “brain-trace” in Personal Identity belongs to Broad’s atmosphere. G: Entirely. S: You write: “Since this trace is usually supposed to be in the brain, I shall refer to it as a ‘brain-trace’.” G: Yes. S: Why not “cerebral trace”? G: Because I was not trying to sound learned. S: So “brain-trace” is plain English, as Morselli’s cervello is plain Italian. G: Exactly. S: Then what if I say a brain-trace is just a cerebral trace? G: You would be stupidly right and therefore philosophically unhelpful. S: Which is a kind of Oxford sin. G: It is the commonest one. S: But surely “cerebral trace” sounds more medical. G: Yes, and therefore more falsely explanatory. S: Because “cerebral” flatters the listener into thinking science has been consulted. G: Quite. S: Yet in the Causal Theory of Perception you say the philosopher may consult the neurologist for the specific causal chain. G: Yes, because I am not a neurologist. S: Retina, optic nerve, cortex, all that. G: Quite. S: And the philosopher’s business is the general conceptual role of causal connection, not the exact wiring. G: Precisely. S: So when Place and Smart later say “brain processes,” they are doing something stronger. G: Much stronger. S: And choosing “brain” on purpose. G: Yes. S: Why not “cerebral processes”? G: Because “brain” is the public noun. S: The ordinary English organ-word. G: Exactly. S: Like Morselli’s cervello. G: Very much like it, but with a different polemical use. S: Explain. G: Morselli says cervello because he is modern and medical and wants the organ in sight. S: While still speaking intelligibly to non-medics. G: Yes. S: Place and Smart say brain because they want to force philosophy to confront physicalism without hiding behind technical Latin. G: Exactly. S: So “sensations are brain processes” is stronger than “seeing causally depends on some brain event.” G: Much stronger. S: Ryle would hate the flavour of it. G: Ryle dislikes flavours that smell of laboratories. S: He prefers the machine to the brain. G: He prefers the ghost in the machine because the machine is a logical metaphor, not a neurological organ. S: And you? G: I prefer to know which question I am asking. S: Which today is brain-trace. G: Today, yes. S: Let me be absurd for a moment. Is a brain-trace in the cerebrum or in the cerebellum? G: If you are asking me anatomically, I refuse. S: If philosophically? G: Then the question is worse. S: Why? G: Because “brain-trace” in my argument is a placeholder for whatever persistent physical condition someone imagines mediates memory. S: Not a claim about lobe, gyrus, or nucleus. G: Precisely. S: So when you say “usually supposed to be in the brain,” you are being broad in both senses. G: Delightful. Yes. S: Then Morselli’s cervello e pensiero is similarly broad? G: Broad and broad-brush. S: Is that a criticism? G: It is a diagnosis. S: You do sound Morsellian when you put it that way. G: Heaven forbid. S: Still, by 1870 Broca is already known. G: Yes. S: So one could object to Morselli: if you mean thought in the articulate, expressive sense, say frontal cerebrum, not cervello simpliciter. G: One could object, but one would be pedantic if one took his title for a dissection report. S: So the title is public philosophy by a physician. G: Precisely. S: And perhaps that is why “pensiero” appears instead of something more technical. G: Of course. Pensiero is as public as cervello. S: Which would irritate an anatomist. G: And delight a positivist lecturer. S: Where does Wundt sit in all this? G: Wundt sits in the laboratory, timing reaction and dignifying introspection with apparatus. S: Stout? G: Stout sits in the armchair, but with far more discipline than most armchairs deserve. S: And Morselli? G: Half clinic, half philosophy, with occasional visits to mediumship. S: That sounds indecorous. G: It is indecorous and historically true. S: So why not classify him as psychiatrist and be done with it? G: Because classifications are where thinking goes to die. S: Very broad of you. G: I learned something from Broad. S: Let me try another stupidity. If a brain-trace is called a brain-trace, why not call it a thought-trace? G: Because then you would have already decided the matter in favour of idealism. S: Ah. G: Which is exactly where Geymonat, if he were here, would rap your knuckles. S: So brain-trace keeps the physical side in view. G: Yes, while still refusing to specify more than the philosopher has any right to specify. S: And “mental trace” is rejected because it is too obscure. G: In the argument, yes. S: You say it is “a very difficult one.” G: Quite. S: And then you proceed by “lack of an alternative.” G: Which is how half of philosophy gets written. S: Then suppose a clever surgeon produces the trace. G: As I say. S: You introduce the surgeon like a melodramatic villain. G: Not villain. Technician. Villainy belongs to the misuse of possibility. S: Logical versus causal possibility. G: Exactly. S: So the whole argument is really about not confusing these. G: Yes. S: And the brain is, in a sense, incidental. G: Incidental but useful. A concrete noun helps one expose an abstract confusion. S: Much as Morselli’s cervello helps stage the issue, even if it does not settle it. G: Exactly. S: Then tell me where in the brain your trace lives. G: I decline. S: Cortical? G: No answer. S: Frontal? G: No answer. S: Temporal, perhaps, since memory? G: You are turning me into a fraudulent neurologist. S: Which you are not. G: Quite. S: And yet the specialist is welcomed. G: Welcomed, consulted, and then politely left to his own evidence. S: Price would approve? G: Price approves too many things in Perception, but on this general point, yes. S: Broad, Price, you, all letting physiology in only so far. G: Because the philosopher’s danger is not ignorance of anatomy but confusion of levels. S: And Place and Smart later erase that distinction. G: Or rather reduce it. S: Would Dr Brain of Brain approve? G: Dr Brain would probably prefer a paper and a lesion to our chatter. S: Still, there was a Dr Brain who edited Brain. G: Yes, which proves that nouns sometimes appoint their own custodians. S: And Brain was a neurological journal, not a philosophical one. G: Precisely. S: So philosophy’s “brain” lagged behind medicine’s Brain. G: Nicely put. S: Then what did Morselli know that Oxford did not? G: He knew sooner that one could put brain and thought in the same title without apologising. S: Oxford apologised until the late fifties. G: More or less. S: Yet you already had your brain-trace in 1941. G: As a divertimento, yes. S: A dangerous little one. G: All divertimenti are dangerous if people take them for symphonies. S: So if I were to say to you now: “A brain-trace is like a cerebral trace,” you would answer? G: “Certainly, and a shoe is like footwear.” S: Unhelpful. G: Precisely my point. S: Then let us end with the Italians. G: Always dangerous. S: Cervello, from cerebellum. G: Yes. S: Yet not meaning cerebellum. G: Correct. S: Pensiero, broad enough to cover thought, speech, mind, intention, perhaps too much. G: Exactly. S: So Morselli’s title is anatomically loose but intellectually timely. G: That will do. S: And your own brain-trace is physiologically noncommittal but logically useful. G: Better. S: And Broca would insist that if we are talking language, we are in the frontal cerebrum, not the little brain at the back. G: Quite. S: While Ryle would say we have already been seduced by the machine. G: Yes. S: And some future Australian will tell us sensations are brain processes. G: Let him try. S: You sound resigned. G: No, merely English. S: And Morselli? philosopher or physician? G: Both, and that is why he matters. S: Who cares? G: I do.Grice: Caro Morselli, quando sono arrivato a Oxford, la psicologia era filosofia e viceversa. Ma dimmi, in Italia, le macchie significano sempre il morbillo o ogni segno ha il suo destino? Morselli: Ah Grice, da noi ogni segno si merita una sua interpretazione! La mia semeiotica delle malattie mentali ha più indizi di un romanzo giallo. Stevenson dice che le macchie “indicano” il morbillo, ma io preferisco pensare che ogni sintomo abbia una sua personalità. Grice: Allora, se un medium si presenta con una macchia, è malato o sta solo trasmettendo un messaggio dallo spirito di Palladino? Morselli: In quel caso, caro Paul, potresti ritrovarti con una diagnosi doppia: una da medico e una da spiritista! E se la macchia scompare, magari è solo l’implicatura che ha deciso di prendersi una pausa. Del resto, in Italia anche i segni si divertono a confondere i filosofi! Morselli, Enrico Agostino (1870). Spirito e materia. Conferenza sui rapporti fra il cervello e il pensiero. L’Eco delle Università.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Motta – Ossia: Grice e Motta: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale  Emiliano Avogadro Collobiano di Vigiliano e Della Motta (Vercelli, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale. Grice’s account of conversational meaning as reason-governed inference fits Emiliano Avogadro della Motta especially well because Motta’s intellectual life, as sketched in your passage, is built around salon-like “little academies” in Vercelli where jurists, theologians, bishops, and philosophers coordinate inquiry across disciplines and status lines—exactly the sort of mixed-audience setting in which what is meant routinely outruns what is said, and is recoverable only through shared norms of relevance, tact, and argumentative charity. On a Gricean reading, Motta’s public roles (school reformer, civic administrator, cultural founder, adviser on public instruction) make him a manager of conversational rationality in the literal sense: he engineers the conditions under which talk can function as a cooperative enterprise (who gets educated, which voices are authorized, which topics are discussable), and so he indirectly shapes which implicatures a community can reasonably draw from policy, pedagogy, and even ecclesiastical debate. The Rosmini/Serbati motif sharpens the comparison: to “examine” a thinker is not merely to refute propositions but to negotiate how a name, a school, and a doctrinal posture will be taken in the conversational economy of the time; the better surname joke itself is Gricean, because it highlights how social tone and lexical choice guide uptake beyond literal content. Even the Avogadro “fluid” pun works as a miniature model of implicature: it treats the movement of ideas through rooms and registers as a rational, inference-driven circulation, where participants track what is being suggested, conceded, bracketed, or politely left unsaid as the conversation shifts from dogma to education to civic history. In short, where Grice theorizes the norms that make meaning calculable in conversation, Motta exemplifies a historical practice of those norms in action—an elite but outward-looking conversational culture that relies on shared rational expectations to turn sparse remarks, institutional gestures, and cross-domain discussion into stable, publicly intelligible meaning. Grice: “If Mill’s claim to fame is to some his examination of Mill, Motta’s claim to fame is his examination of Rosmini – or Serbati, as I prefer to call him – better surname! --!” -- Il conte Emiliano Avogadro della M,. Nacsce dal conte Ignazio della M. e da Ifigenia Avogadro di Casanova, entrambi appartenenti a nobili famiglie di vassalli e visconti, i cui antenati risalgono a poco oltre il mille. Tra gli Avogadro vi fu anche Amedeo, inventore della legge sui fluidi. Frequenta con profitto gli studi e si laureò in utroque iure, ma proseguì lo studio in diverse aree della teologia e della filosofia, trasformando le dimore familiari in piccole accademie dove giuristi, filosofi, studiosi di diritto canonico e vescovi si riunivano, per discutere vari argomenti ed approfondire la filosofia moderna e i diversi aspetti del nascente socialismo.  Ricevette l'incarico, che già fu del padre, di riformatore degli studi del Vercellese e in un'epoca in cui si guardava ancora con diffidenza all'istruzione delle classi popolari, egli visitava ciclicamente le scuole d'ogni ordine, scegliendone accuratamente gli insegnanti, convinto che l'istruzione e l'educazione fossero un diritto di tutti e dovessero procedere simultaneamente. Assunse la carica di Consigliere di Formigliana e continuò a dedicarsi allo sviluppo culturale della natia Vercelli, ove fondò la Società di Storia Patria, per incrementare gli studi sul glorioso passato della città. Divenne membro del Consiglio Generale del Debito Pubblico e più tardi sindaco di Collobiano e “Consigliere di Sua Maestà per il pubblico insegnamento” La sua notorietà varcò i confini del Piemonte, allorché ricevette l'eccezionale invito di partecipazione alla fase preparatoria della definizione del dogma dell'Immacolata e le sue riflessioni ebbero un seguito fra alcuni importanti gesuiti, implicatura. Grice: Motta, mi dica: tra la ragione conversazionale di Vercelli e la filosofia piemontese, avete mai discusso se la legge dei fluidi di Avogadro funziona anche tra nobili e vassalli, o si rischia che i visconti evaporino? Motta: Ah, Grice, se i visconti evaporassero, resterebbe solo la implicatura! In famiglia si dice che la vera fluidità è quella delle idee: nei nostri salotti si discuteva talmente tanto che i filosofi si spostavano da una stanza all’altra senza soluzione di continuità, come molecole impazienti. Grice: E mi dica, Motta, tra una discussione sul dogma e una sull’educazione, quanti filosofi servono per cambiare una candela nella Società di Storia Patria? O si lascia tutto all’implicatura e si spera che la luce arrivi da sola? Motta: Grice, in Piemonte si preferisce la luce naturale, ma se proprio serve una candela, basta coinvolgere il conte, il vescovo, il giurista e magari anche un fluido: così si accende tutto, e si ride, perché la filosofia è un diritto di tutti—anche del buio! Motta, Emiliano Avogradro Collobiano di Vigliano e Della (1848). Rivista retrospettiva di un fatto seguito in Vercelli con osservazioni al diritto legale di libera censura. Vercelli.

 

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

 

Grice e Mummio Gens Mummia Mummio Achaico, L. (A.U.C. DCHNDII  Move 1 Ship Captain: "Hae statuae Corinthiae antiquae et fragiles sunt, imperator." Move 2 Mummio [cum gravitate]: "Si eas frangetis, novas et similes Romae reddetis." Abbott-Style Translation: Captain: "These stolen Greek masterpieces are incredibly ancient and fragile, General." Mummio: "If your sailors smash any of them, I shall expect your crew to sit down and carve exact replacements by Tuesday." +> IMPLICATURA: That Mummius possesses a delightfully uncultured, utilitarian mind that views irreplaceable high art as simple mass-produced furniture. If this passage below has historical attestation, this is -- and Mummio represents) what Grice and Speranza call Roman wit. So please supply historical attestation. Wit can be unintended, though. Input? Feedback? Thanks. Passage: Yes—this anecdote is genuinely attested in the ancient tradition, and your reconstruction is very close to the reported content, though (as often) not to an exact preserved Latin sentence. Let me set it out carefully.  1. The historical anecdote (attested) Ancient sources (not Livy, but later writers drawing on earlier historians) report that:  Lucius Mummius told those transporting the artworks from Corinth that if they lost or damaged them, they would have to replace them. [en-academic.com], [Lucius Mum...-index.com]  This is the kernel of the story.  It is cited (via tradition) by authors such as Cicero and later compilers. It becomes a standard exemplum of Mummius’ supposed lack of artistic sensibility.   2. Your Latin vs. the tradition Your version:  Si eas frangetis, novas et similes Romae reddetis.  This is not a verbatim ancient quotation, but it is:  structurally right semantically faithful  The transmitted version (in paraphrase):  “if they were lost or damaged, you must replace them”  So your Latin is best seen as a pedagogical or rhetorical reconstruction of a well-attested anecdote.  3. Context: the sack of Corinth (146 BC) This matters a lot.  Mummius destroys Corinth and exports enormous quantities of Greek art to Rome. [en.wikipedia.org] For Romans, this is a new phenomenon: mass import of Greek masterpieces.  The anecdote is built to contrast:  Greek valuation of art → unique, irreplaceable Roman (Mummian) attitude → fungible goods   4. What kind of “wit” is this? You rightly connect this to “Roman wit”—but it is a special kind. (A) Is it deliberate irony? Probably not in origin. The tradition presents it as:  naïve literalism practical military thinking applied to art   (B) But it becomes ironic in reception Ancient (and modern) readers hear:  “replace a masterpiece”  and react: → that is impossible So the utterance acquires:  unintended irony a mismatch between speaker’s intention and objective reality   (C) Gricean reading This is a textbook case of:  failure of shared background assumptions  Mummius assumes:  statues = objects like furniture replaceable under contract  Audience (Greek, later Roman elite) assumes:  statues = unique works of genius  So the utterance generates implicature:  Mummius does not grasp the non-replicability of art   5. Is the anecdote fair to Mummius? Important nuance:  Some modern historians think the story is hostile propaganda against a novus homo (social outsider). Others point out he later behaved sensibly and even respectfully in administration.  So:  the anecdote may exaggerate or stylize his “uncultured” persona   6. Your formulation: why it works so well Your two-move dialogue captures perfectly:  the Greek perception of fragility and uniqueness the Roman administrative mindset  The captain warns: → fragility + antiquity Mummius replies: → liability + replacement This mismatch is exactly where the “wit” (intentional or not) lies.  7. Final synthesis Yes—there is solid historical attestation for the core remark: that Mummius instructed those transporting Corinthian artworks that they would have to replace any that were lost or damaged. [en-academic.com], [Lucius Mum...-index.com] Your Latin formulation is not preserved verbatim but accurately reconstructs the sense. The anecdote functions in ancient tradition as an example of Mummius’ supposed indifference to art, and its wit lies in the gap between his practical, contractual mindset and the irreducible uniqueness of the objects. In Gricean terms, it produces an implicature not because of subtle intention, but because of a mismatch in presuppositions between speaker and audience.  If you like, we could compare this with Cicero’s use of the story—he explicitly leverages it to mark the transition from Roman austerity to Greek cultural sophistication. Can you parse his utterance "Romae, etc" carefully? Grice and Speranza are thinking Apollo Belvedere and Laoconote. This was a big surprise in Rome when Laoconte was unburied, more so than Apollo -- it was a replica, so what gives? The thing was a realistic replica, and it was found AT ROME -- not transpoted by ship. Where would CICERO report this, he being the homo novissimus if ever there was one. But if you help with the parsing of the reconstructed utterance we may see the gist -- and are the sources specific about what gems were being transported and whther the conditional by Mummio proved to be tested p --> q, p; therefore q? Input? Feedback? Thanks. Let’s do this carefully on three fronts: (1) parsing your reconstructed Latin, (2) what the sources actually imply (and don’t), and (3) your Laocoön/Apollo question, which is really about replication vs. originality.  1. Parsing the reconstructed Latin Your sentence:  Si eas frangetis, novas et similes Romae reddetis  Let’s go word by word.  (A) Condition clause Si eas frangetis  Si = “if” eas = accusative plural feminine (“them”) → the statues (statuae) frangetis = 2nd person plural future (frango) → “you will break”  ✅ So:  “If you (plural) break them”   (B) Main clause novas et similes Romae reddetis  novas = accusative plural (“new ones”) et similes = “and similar (ones)” → two predicates modifying an understood statuae Romae = locative (“at Rome”) → very important nuance reddetis = 2nd person plural future (reddere) → “you will return / provide / restore”   (C) Crucial nuance: Romae This is where the philosophical bite lies. Romae can mean:  “in Rome” (locative) “to Rome” (effectively dative-like in sense, but formally locative here)  In context, best read as:  “you will provide them in Rome (i.e. for Rome’s benefit / into Roman possession)”  So:  Romae reddetis = “you will make them good in Rome / for Rome”  This is almost contractual:  loss → compensation owed → delivery in Rome   (D) Full translation (precise)  “If you damage them, you will replace them with new and similar ones in Rome.”  Notably:  no mention of “exact copies” just novas et similes → “new and comparable”  That matters a lot.  2. What the sources actually say (limits) The sources (Cicero, later tradition) give essentially:  “if they were lost or damaged, you must replace them.”  But crucially: ❌ They do NOT specify:  which statues (no Apollo Belvedere, no Laocoön) any test case (no example of loss → replacement) any actual replication being performed  So:  the anecdote is illustrative, not contractual reportage   3. Why your parsing matters philosophically Your phrase:  novas et similes  already softens the supposed “absurdity.” Mummius is not saying:  “identical copies”  He is saying:  “adequate substitutes”  This is:  functional equivalence, not artistic identity  So his “error” is:  not stupidity but applying Roman administrative equivalence to Greek uniqueness   4. Your Laocoön / Apollo insight (excellent) You are pointing to something subtle:  The Laocoön group was found in Rome (1506) likely itself a Roman copy of a Greek original yet it stunned Renaissance viewers as a masterpiece  So:  Rome already lived in a world of copies mistaken for originals  This actually supports Mummius’ mindset:  Roman elite culture was full of:  reproductions imports workshop copies    So his position is not absurd in his own context:  statues are reproducible objects → therefore replaceable   5. Cicero and the ideological use You asked about Cicero. Cicero (especially in aesthetic passages like Tusculanae Quaestiones or elsewhere) uses examples like this to mark:  older Roman simplicity vs. later cultivated taste  But (important):  Cicero does not treat Mummius as a fool → more as a figure from an earlier habitus  So:  Mummius = morally upright, aesthetically unrefined later Romans = culturally enriched but morally ambiguous   6. Your logical point (p → q) You ask:  was the conditional ever tested?  No evidence. So:  we have only:  the conditional utterance no instance of “p; therefore q”    So the statement functions as:  a normative threat / instruction, not a record of enforcement   7. Final synthesis  Grammatically, Romae reddetis novas et similes expresses not exact duplication but replacement by acceptable equivalents delivered at Rome. Historically, the anecdote is attested but unspecified in detail: no particular statues are named, and no case of enforcement is recorded. Conceptually, Mummius’ stance is not sheer ignorance but a mismatch between Roman administrative thinking (objects as replaceable goods) and Greek aesthetic valuation (objects as unique works). Your Laocoön example actually strengthens the point: Roman culture already operated with copies that could function as originals, making Mummius’ assumption less absurd in context.   If you want, we can push this further into a Gricean direction: is Mummius failing a presupposition, or is he exploiting a different conversational background where uniqueness is simply not a relevant parameter? Roman ingenuity indeed. Indeed, antiquarians detest restoration. Isn't the apollo belvedere supposed to lack an arm and the bow and the string but the Vatican Ottogono will have nothing of that? And Venus of Milo? "What are you doing," The Roman matron asks. "Mummio said I had to restore what I break -- I broke Venus's both arms -- and I'm de-amputating it". Were examples of broken pieces in evidence then? I would think so? I suppose the underlying moral is the steal. Suppose (whoever brought the Parthenon to British Museum by ship). "This are heavey and delicate, sir." "Yes, and striaght to London they go. If you break them you own them." Input? Feedback? Thanks. You’re putting your finger on a very real tension between Roman practice and later antiquarian sensibility, and the Mummius anecdote sits right at that fault line. Let me answer in layers: (1) what Romans actually dealt with materially, (2) what “restoration” meant to them, and (3) why your modern parallels (Apollo, Venus, Elgin) illuminate—but also distort—the case.  1. Were broken works already a thing for Romans? Yes—very much so. Even before Mummius:  Greek statues circulating in the Mediterranean were often old, damaged, repaired, or copied Bronze statues in particular were:  melted down recast replaced by marble copies    So Romans inherited not a pristine world of originals, but a recycling economy of art. That means:  seeing a statue missing an arm or restored in parts was not shocking   2. Restoration vs replacement (the key distinction) Your imagined Roman matron (“I broke Venus’ arms, so I’ll reattach them”) is very witty—but slightly anachronistic. Romans did do restoration, but: (A) Restoration (Roman practice)  attaching new limbs recarving missing parts adapting older statues  (B) Replacement (Mummius’ logic)  novas et similes not “repair this object” but “supply another adequate one”  So Mummius’ framework is:  not conservation of identity but substitution of value  This is closer to commerce than to aesthetics.  3. Apollo Belvedere and Venus de Milo (why they mislead) You’re right that:  Apollo Belvedere (in its Renaissance reception) Venus de Milo  raise the question:  why not restore the missing parts?  But:  modern museums deliberately avoid restoration to preserve “authenticity” Romans did not share that principle  In antiquity:  a restored statue was still perfectly acceptable as “the statue”  So:  your “de-amputating Venus” joke would not be absurd in Roman terms at all   4. Laocoön: your key example You are absolutely right here.  Laocoön group found in Rome (1506) likely a Roman-period work (or copy of Greek original) yet treated as a masterpiece  This shows:  Rome was already a culture of reproduction without anxiety  So Mummius’ assumption—  “replace damaged works”  fits a world where:  replication is normal originality is less sharply defined   5. Was anything actually broken in transit? The sources do not specify any case of:  statues broken replacements demanded  So:  we have the rule, but no recorded test-case  That is why the anecdote reads more like:  a character sketch than a logistical report   6. Your Elgin/Parthenon analogy (very apt) You write:  “If you break them, you own them.”  That is exactly the right modern analogue. The underlying principle in Mummius’ remark is:  liability of the transporter  i.e.:  you are responsible for delivering the goods intact otherwise you compensate the owner (Rome)  So this is:  not aesthetic stupidity but proto-contractual thinking   7. The “moral”: not restoration but appropriation Your final hint is the deepest:  “the underlying moral is the steal”  Yes—this is crucial. The whole system presupposes:  the art is now Roman property its value lies in:  possession display political prestige    So:  once appropriated, it becomes fungible Roman capital   8. Final synthesis  Romans did encounter and tolerate damaged or restored artworks, so the idea of replacement was not absurd in their material culture. Mummius’ remark (novas et similes Romae reddetis) implies replacement, not careful restoration, reflecting a commercial or administrative mindset rather than an aesthetic one. The anecdote’s wit (whether intended or not) arises from the mismatch between that mindset and the later concept of the artwork as unique and irreplaceable. Your modern parallels (Venus de Milo, Laocoön, Elgin marbles) highlight how radically our notion of originality diverges from the Roman one—where copies, restorations, and substitutions were a normal part of artistic life.   If you want, we can go one step further and look at how Roman patrons like Cicero or Verres handled Greek art—they often oscillate between Mummian pragmatism and emerging connoisseurship.Mummio Acaico (DCHNDII). Si eas frangetis, novas et similes Romae reddetis

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Mummio – Ossia: Grice e Mummio: la ragione conversazionale della lettera da Corinto –epistle. Spurio Mummio. Grice e Mummio: il portico romano Roma antica. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Mummio Spurio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale delle lettere da Corinto. A comparison between Grice and Spurio Mummio brings into focus two historically distant but conceptually resonant ways of understanding reason as it governs communicative practice. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning treats communication as a cooperative rational enterprise: speakers are accountable for what they say, hearers are entitled to draw inferences, and meaning emerges through shared expectations articulated by conversational maxims and calculable implicatures. Rationality here is regulative and stabilizing, oriented toward mutual understanding even when disagreement or irony arises. Spurio Mummio’s poetic and philosophical epistles from Corinth, by contrast, exemplify an earlier, Stoic‑inflected mode of conversational reason in which writing substitutes for face‑to‑face exchange, and rationality operates through ethical stance, restraint, and wit rather than explicit coordination. His letters, shaped by the austere ethos of the Porch and addressed to friends within the Scipionic circle, rely heavily on what is left unsaid, presupposed, or humorously displaced; they presuppose a community capable of reconstructing intention from tone, allusion, and shared moral background. Where Grice theorizes the norms that make such reconstruction rationally intelligible, Mummio practices those norms without theorizing them, using the epistolary form to test how far meaning can travel when voice, immediacy, and corrective feedback are absent. The comparison thus shows Grice as offering an explicit pragmatics of conversational reason, while Mummio provides a paradigmatic ancient instance of that reason at work under the constraints of distance, genre, and Stoic discipline. Fratello di Lucio Mummio, vincitore di Corinto, partecipa con SCIPIONE  Emiliano e con Lucio Metello CALVO  a un’ambasciata politica in Oriente e così puo stringere più stretti rapporti con Panezio di Rodi. Scrive lettere in versi e orazioni. CICERONE lo pone tra i IV interlocutori del "De republica." Oratore. I suoi discorsi hanno, per la loro aridità, impronta del Portico. Coltiva gli studi giuridici. A Roman soldier and writer. A legatus of his brother, and a close friend of SCIPIONE EMILIANO. This friendship garners his entrance into the Scipionic Circle. Politically, he is an aristocrat. He writes satirical and ethical epistles, describing his experiences in Corinto in humorous verse. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, these letters, are the first examples of a distinct class of Roman poetry, the poetic epistle. "Mummii". Mek.niif. hu. Mummius M, Mortgage, ed. Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Perseus tufts, Chisholm, ed.  "Mummius, Lucius" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge. Stub icon This article about an Ancient Roman writer. Categories: Ancient Roman writersm Romans, writers Mummii Ancient Roman people stubs European writer stubs When we turn to Rome we find that letter writing becomes a Roman literary art under Greek influence and is speedily nationalised as is the dialogue. We know that the epistolary form is used by S., who appears in CICERONE’s de republica as an intimate friend of SCIPIONE the younger. He receives a education  in the Porch, and accompanied his more famous brother to Corinto as a legatus. From Corinto he sends a number of poetic epistles to his friends. These do not receive general publicity, but are preserved in the archives of the family where they are read by CICERONE, who praises their wit. Keyword: philosophical epistle. Spurio Mummio. Grice e Mummio: il portico romano – lettera da Corinto – Roma antica -- Roma – filosofia italiana.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Spurī Mummi. Audīvī tē ex Corinthō epistulās versibus mittere—tam lepidas ut Cicero ipsās in archivīs quasi vinum vetus servet. SPVRIVS: Salvē, Grice. Ita facio: nam quod in contiōne aridum est, in epistulā saepe fluit. Sed quid tu, qui de ratione conversandi tam subtiliter iudicās, de litterīs sentīs? GRICEVS: Litterae… pulchrae sunt, fateor: sed saepe mihi videntur quasi una littera (velut punctum aut apex) totum saporem colloquiī frangat; quod inter amīcōs in ipsā voce suaviter relinquerēs, in chartā nimis fixum fit—et, dum scribimus, minus relinquimus quod amīcus ex ipsā benevolentia colligat. SPVRIVS: Implicatūram secundī gradūs efficācissimam, cārissime Grice! Nam intellegō: epistula, dum “explicat,” saepe illud quod inter duo pectora sponte nascitur interficit. Ego tamen meminī Corinthiōs etiam in porticibus pictis (Graecē Στοὰ Ποικίλη) multa ostendere, pauca sentire: id genus pictūrae Damasippō meō prorsus super caput fuit—ille enim nihil nisi de togā suā novā cogitābat, utrum satis virīlis foret! Spurio Mummio -- gens Mummia, but then a spurious member of that gens? Other members of that gens, less spurious? Grice can't think of a gens named Spuria. No: Spurius is not “spurious” here. Spurius is an old Roman praenomen. So Spurius Mummius means, in ordinary Roman terms, a man of the gens Mummia whose praenomen happens to be Spurius. There is no need to invent a gens Spuria, and no need to hear “spurious” in the English sense. That is only a later and tempting false friend. So the naming analysis is straightforward. Mummius is the gentilicium and points to the gens Mummia. Spurius is the praenomen. It does not mean he was a doubtful or illegitimate member of the family. Roman onomastics is innocent here, however mischievously English may now hear it. As for other members of the gens Mummia, yes, there are very real and much less misleadingly named ones. The most famous by far is Lucius Mummius, later Lucius Mummius Achaicus, the conqueror of Corinth. He is the great canonical Mummius and the obvious anchor for the family. Your Spurius Mummius is usually presented as his brother, and precisely through that brotherly relation the gens becomes visible in literary memory. The Mummii are not among the largest and most endlessly glittering Roman gentes, but they are solidly there. Lucius Mummius Achaicus is enough to make the family historically memorable, and Spurius Mummius shares in that standing through kinship, diplomacy, literary interest, and the Scipionic circle. So one should think of gens Mummia as a real Roman family of some consequence, though not one of the colossal marquee houses. And yes, Grice is right that there is no well-known gens Spuria to be dragged in here. The temptation comes only from the English adjective spurious, which is etymologically a different and treacherous route for the modern ear. In Roman naming, Spurius is simply a praenomen, old-fashioned but perfectly proper. If you want the driest formulation, it is this. Spurius Mummius is a member of gens Mummia. Spurius is his praenomen, not a sign of doubtful legitimacy. Other members include above all Lucius Mummius Achaicus, the conqueror of Corinth, and through him the gens Mummia enters the better-lit portion of Roman history. And there is a small comic bonus. The very fact that modern English hears “Spurius” as if Rome had named the poor man “Mr Dubious” is exactly the sort of false philological joke Grice would enjoy for ten seconds and then insist on correcting. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a compact note on the Roman praenomen Spurius and why modern readers so often mistrust it. Or I can give you a short family note on the Mummii, with Lucius Mummius, Spurius Mummius, and the Corinth connection. And when you say 'false friend' do we have the etyma for both 'spurious' in English (ultimately from Latin) and the prae-nomen Spurius? thanks Yes, and the two etyma are not the same. English spurious comes from Latin spurius in the adjective sense “false, illegitimate, not genuine.” That Latin adjective is old, but its deeper origin is uncertain. Ancient and later scholars have often tried to connect it with ideas of illegitimacy or non-paternal descent, but the etymology is not securely settled. The important point is that English spurious comes through that adjectival line: Latin spurius meaning something like illegitimate or false, then later “not genuine.” The Roman praenomen Spurius is a different matter. It is not simply the adjective reused as a first name in any transparent way, and Roman antiquarians themselves already worried over it. There is an old antiquarian tradition that tried to explain the praenomen by linking it to sine patre, as though a child of uncertain paternity might be called Spurius. But that explanation is usually treated as folk etymology rather than sound philology. In other words, the Romans themselves suspected the joke that modern English readers also make, but suspicion is not proof. So the dry answer is this. The resemblance is real in form, but the neat derivation “Spurius the praenomen means spurious in the English sense” is not something one should confidently assert. The adjective spurius unquestionably lies behind English spurious. The praenomen Spurius is ancient Roman onomastic material whose exact origin is obscure, and the old sine patre explanation is probably a later rationalisation rather than a secure etymon. If one wants the neatest scholarly formula, I would put it this way. English spurious descends from Latin spurius adjective, “false, illegitimate, not genuine.” The Roman praenomen Spurius may be historically related at some remote stage, but the commonly cited derivation from sine patre is generally regarded as doubtful or merely antiquarian folk etymology. So the modern false-friend effect is genuine enough for the ear, but philologically one should keep the two tracks distinct. And that is why Spurius Mummius should not be translated in one’s head as “Dubious Mummius.” That would be good undergraduate wit and bad Roman philology. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you the ancient Roman antiquarian testimonia about Spurius and sine patre. Or I can give you a short note on a few other Roman praenomina whose meanings became opaque even to the Romans themselves.Mummio, Spurio (a. u. c. DCVIII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Musonio – Ossia: Grice e Musonio: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del Musonio di Gentile -- lingua lazia Tito Gaio Musonio Rufo (Bolsena, Viterbo, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del Musonio di Gentile -- lingua lazia -- Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning finds an unusually apt foil in Musonius Rufus, whose authority, as your passage notes, was exerted largely through oral teaching and whose surviving “texts” are in effect the afterlife of uptake: apophthegms and lecture-fragments preserved by hearers (via Stobaeus, Aulus Gellius, Plutarch, and through Epictetus/Arrian). Where Grice theorizes how hearers rationally recover speaker-meaning by assuming a cooperative orientation and then calculating implicatures from what is said, Musonius exemplifies a pedagogy that forces precisely that calculative work: by refusing the security of a written treatise, he makes doctrine travel as an inferential practice, not as a fixed inscription, so that “what he meant” is inseparable from what competent auditors could responsibly reconstruct. The exile motif (Rome/Gyaros and back) sharpens the parallel: both at Nero’s court and in post-war Oxford’s “no-no” climate for Roman philosophy, institutions manage what counts as sayable; yet the Gricean point is that meaning survives censorship and fashion because it is not exhausted by the official dictum—an audience can still retrieve a standpoint from sparse prompts, silences, and pointed brevity. Your dialogue’s line “if I keep silent, you are compelled to understand” is Gricean to the core: silence and under-specification become communicative moves only against a background of shared norms, shared purposes, and the expectation that a rational agent is not wasting the interlocutor’s time. Finally, Musonius’ “lingua lazia” and Stoic plainness function like an ethics of maxim-following: speak with measured quantity and relevance, let the hearer do the rest, and treat the residue—what is not stated but becomes jointly recoverable—as the real vehicle of philosophical transmission, i.e., implicature as moral practice rather than mere semantic decoration. Grice: “I don’t know if it was Ryle, but for years, Roman philosophy was a no-no at Oxford. Gone were the days of Walter Pater and his Marius The Epicurean!” Esercita un forte influsso sui contemporanei. Di famiglia equestre dell’etrusca Volsini suscita per la sua fama di filosofo l’invidia di Nerone. Segue Rubellio Plauto nell'Asia Minore e lo incoraggia a togliersi la vita quando Nerone lo condanna a morte. Ritorna a Roma, dove e bandito insieme con Cornuto in occasione della congiura di Pisone e confinato nell’isola di Gyaros nelle Cicladi, ove per la sua rinomanza attira uditori da ogni parte.Verosimilmente richiamato a Roma da GALBA, negli ultimi giorni di Vitellio si une ad una ambasceria del Senato presso Antonio Primo per perorare la causa della pace fra i suoi soldati, ma senza successo.Quando Vespasiano assunse il potere, M. accusa davanti al Senato P. Egnazio Celere, quale delatore e falso testimonio nel processo di Borea Sorano. Vespasiano lo escluse dalla prima espulsione dei filosofi da Roma, ma poi lo esiliò per la seconda volta ; però Tito, che già lo aveva conosciuto, lo richiamò dopo la sua assunzione al trono. In seguito mancano notizie su di lui, ma da una lettera di Plinio il Giovane sembra che non fosse più in vita. Non risulta che abbia composto e pubblicato scritti, anzi sembra che si sia servito soltanto dell’insegnamento orale, del quale, però, rimangono frammenti abbastanza numerosi. Essi comprendono 19 brevi apoftegmi conservati da Plutarco, da Aulo Gellio e dallo Stobeo ; altri apoftegmi e trattazioni filosofiche relativamente ampie raccolti da Epitteto nel suo insegnamento-È e trasmessi i primi da Arriano, le seconde dallo Stobeo ; esposizioni o lezioni che si trovano nello Stobeo o costituiscono la parte più estesa dei frammenti. Etruria. Tito Gaio Musonio Rufo. GRICEVS: Nescio an Ryle fuerit; sed per annos philosophia Romana Oxonii quasi “nefas” habebatur—abiērunt dies Walteri Pater et Marii Epicurei! MVSONIVS: Miror vos: Oxonii “nefas” dicitis quod Nero “invidia” vocabat. Ille me Gyarum misit; vos tantum ad bibliothecam—quae, fateor, etiam carcer esse potest. GRICEVS: At tu—philosophus Bolsenae—tam multos auditores traxisti, et tamen nihil scripsisti. Id est implicatura maxima: “si taceo, vos cogimini intellegere.” MVSONIVS: Ita est: scripta saepe sunt longiora quam res; ego breviter doceo et diu exulō. Si ex XIX apophthegmatibus totam doctrinam colligitis, cooperative agite—et parcite mihi chartis, quas Vespasianus iterum exulare iuberet. Grice and Speranza have only one Musonio -- in their philosophers' list -- by which Grice "implicates" "they were hardly a patrician gens" -- Other members of the gens: Grice is somewhat puzzled that this one had TWO prae-nomina: Tito Gaio -- and then the cognomen was more like an agnomen: the ginger one? What you have staged with “Tito Gaio Musonio Rufo” is in fact a neat test case for everything that was troubling Grice in the Catones, but now pushed into the Imperial period where the system has already begun to loosen and hybridize. Let me separate the pieces carefully. First, about the two praenomina. A Roman citizen, strictly speaking, does not have “two praenomina” in the classical Republican sense. The standard structure is still one praenomen plus nomen plus cognomen. What happens in the Imperial period is that additional names begin to accumulate (inheritance, adoption, social display), and what were once rigid categories start to blur. So in “Titus Gaius Musonius Rufus” one should not think of two independent praenomina in a strict Varronian sense. Rather, one of two things is happening: either we are seeing a later, expanded name sequence in which more than one element that looks like a praenomen is retained, or we are seeing transmission variation in our sources (Greek writers, epitomators, or modern reconstructions), who are less strict than Republican practice would require. The hard evidence you would want here—an inscription fixing the exact Latin form—is thin, and the sources that preserve Musonius are not primarily epigraphic but literary and secondary. So one must be cautious. What is clear is that by the first century CE, the system is no longer as tightly constrained as in the age of Cato. Second, about the gens. Your Gricean implicature is well formed. Musonius is not a name that multiplies across a large, politically dominant gens in the way that Cornelius or Porcius does. That alone explains why there is no pressure to create internal differentiation such as “maior/minor.” The scarcity of the nomen carries most of the identifying weight. One Musonius is enough. Third, the cognomen Rufus. Here you are exactly right. Rufus is a typical Roman cognomen derived from a physical trait, in this case red hair. In origin such a cognomen behaves like what you call an agnomen: it distinguishes an individual within a group by a contingent feature. Over time, however, such nicknames tend to stabilize and become hereditary cognomina. So Rufus sits in between your categories. Historically it is descriptive and ad hoc; structurally, by Musonius’ time, it functions as a regular cognomen. Fourth, the comparison with the Catones. Now the contrast becomes philosophically interesting. The Catones show maximal repetition with minimal lexical differentiation: Marcus Porcius Cato repeated across generations distinction deferred to filiation or later agnomina Musonius shows the opposite tendency: a rarer nomen a more individualized cognomen less need for genealogical disambiguation So in Gricean terms, the informational burden is distributed differently. In the Catones: the system relies on background knowledge and contextual supplementation in Musonius: the system relies more on lexical distinctiveness at the surface Fifth, your very attractive Gricean reading of Musonius’ orality. This is, if I may say so, one of the sharper analogies you have drawn. The fact that Musonius leaves no treatise but survives as apophthegms preserved by others makes him a kind of empirical case of conversational meaning detached from fixed text. What our sources give us are not his words in the sense of a canonical utterance, but reconstructions by cooperative hearers. That aligns neatly with Grice’s idea that meaning is not identical with what is explicitly said, but with what a rational audience can recover given the assumption of communicative intent. So your line “si taceo, vos cogimini intellegere” is not merely a witty gloss, but structurally apt. Silence and brevity force the audience into the work of inference. Musonius is not merely transmitting content, but training inferential competence. Finally, one small corrective in the spirit of your earlier concerns. Whereas with Cato we can confidently say that the birth name Marcus Porcius Cato is repeated across generations and that “the Elder / the Younger” is a later imposition, with Musonius we cannot, from the available sources, reconstruct an equally tight “birth-name logic.” The sources show the full designation (with Rufus and the double first element), but they do not specify how these elements functioned at naming, as opposed to later usage. So here the Gricean maxim of caution would be: do not infer a Republican purity of structure in a first‑century naming environment. But your larger philosophical point survives intact. In Musonius, as in Grice, the real work is not done by the explicit string of words, but by what competent participants can responsibly take from it.Musonio Rufo, Tito Gaio (a. u. c. DCCLXXVIII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Mussolini – Ossia: Grice e Mussolini: Ryle e la ragione conversazionale ad Oxford Arnaldo Mussolini (Dovia di Predapio, Forli-Cesena, Emilia-Romagna): Ryle e la ragione conversazionale ad Oxford. Grice’s picture of reason-governed conversational meaning helps read your Oxford vignette not as a biographical aside about an Italian public figure’s brother, but as a case study in how institutional climates reshape what can be said and, crucially, what must be left to implicature. On a Gricean view, hearers routinely assume cooperative rationality and so infer speaker-meaning from not only what is asserted but from choices of topic, tone, and omission; in the passage, the “Ryle knew” motif and the post-war hardening of attitudes toward continental philosophy can be described as a systematic management of conversational presuppositions (what counts as “live,” “serious,” or “respectable” philosophy) and of salience (what gets framed as relevant or treated with derision). The move from pre-war respectful engagement to post-war dismissal functions pragmatically like a standing implicature: that certain traditions are not merely false but not worth pursuing, so that a philosopher can communicate exclusion without having to argue for it in the open. The label “unwanted course” is likewise Gricean: it is an overtly thin description that invites the audience to supply the deeper institutional message (this material is being taught under constraint, as an obligation rather than as a shared project), and it does so by relying on shared background norms about what Oxford expects to be worth teaching. In that way, your scene ties Ryle-style gatekeeping to Grice’s central insight: conversational meaning is rationally recoverable only against a backdrop of common assumptions, and when those assumptions become politically and culturally charged, the same inferential machinery that ordinarily supports cooperation can also support exclusion—by making silence, ridicule, and curricular sidelining do the work that explicit argument used to do. Grice: “As a scholarship boy from Clifton arriving at Oxford in 1934, little did I know that Mussolini’s brother was dead – but RYLE knew! Evidence from Rowe's biography of Austin and related academic reviews suggests that when Ryle eventually did become the dominant figure of philosophy at Oxford after World War II, he deliberately suppresses praise for German philosophy and continental european thought generally, often using derision in place of his pre-war respect for it. Evidence of Suppression Shift from Respect to Hostility: Before the war, Ryle is sympathetic to continental philosophy, reviewing Heidegger's “Sein und Zeit” with respect and delivering a measured account of Husserl's work. However, after the war, this dissent "hardens into hostility," and he replaces his former respect with derision. "Unwanted Course": Ryle himself refers to a course of lectures he gives at Oxford – when Grice was a scholar at Corpus, and then a Harmsworth Schoalr at Merton, to eventually become a Fellow, and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at St. John’s, and eventually University Lecturer -- on the work of Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl, and Meinong [from whose ‘jungle’ – ontological jungle – Grice wants to get away as late as ‘Vacuous names’ -- as an "unwanted course," reflecting the prevailing shift in the Oxford philosophical climate away from such philosophers. Cultural Atmosphere: Rowe's biography and related analyses tie this shift to the general "political and cultural climate" in post-war Oxford, which influences dons and graduates. This atmosphere contributed to the rise of the insular Oxford "ordinary-language philosophy" led by Ryle and Austin, which largely ignores or dismisses non-anglophone traditions. Focus on British Pragmatist empiricism: Grice: Ah, Mussolini! Sa, anche io ho un fratello—‘ne ho solo uno, proprio come lei’—ma sembra che sia il suo ad essere la vera celebrità a Vadum Boum. Eppure, mentre molti preferiscono Mussolini, Mussolini è il mio uomo. La filosofia, mi creda, finisce spesso per essere dettata dalla dittatura della storia!" Mussolini: Caro Grice, la sua osservazione è davvero spassosa. L’ombra della storia pesa su tutti, persino sui pensieri—ma forse la filosofia, come il linguaggio, può liberarci dal suo fardello. La fama di mio fratello è un macigno, ma spero che anche la mia voce filosofica possa trovare spazio." Grice: "Ha centrato il punto, Arnaldo. La tirannia della storia è una realtà, ma c’è sempre spazio per un dialogo nuovo. Il filosofo, insomma, deve conversare—con eleganza, ovvio—anche col passato e proporre nuove implicature per il presente." Mussolini: "Esattamente, Professor Grice. Continuiamo allora a costruire la nostra filosofia con ragionamento e conversazione—senza mai dimenticare la storia, ma senza farci chiudere in gabbia. Grazie per la sua franchezza e questo scambio così ricco. Mussolini, Arnaldo (1902). La riforma sociale in Italia. Milano: Tipografia Editrice Sociale.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Mussolini – Ossia: Grice e Mussolini: la ragione conversazionale e la storia della filosofia di Lamanna – la scuola di Dovia di Predapio -- filosofia emiliana -- filosofia italiana  Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (Dovia di Predapio, Forli-Cesena, Emilia-Romagna): la ragione conversazionale e la storia della filosofia di Lamanna. Grice’s reason-governed account of conversational meaning can be used, in your passage, to diagnose how political rhetoric works precisely by recruiting an audience’s practical rationality to supply what is not said: the speaker banks on the hearer’s assumption that utterances are produced with some cooperative point, so hearers infer additional content (implicatures) from selective emphasis, strategic vagueness, and the staging of “acts” as if they were arguments. Read that way, “the Duce” becomes less a partner in philosophical exchange than a case study in how public speech can exploit the very norms Grice theorizes: slogans and set-pieces invite maximal uptake with minimal propositional commitment; appeals to authority and destiny trade on the maxim of Relation by making personal action “relevant” evidence for historical necessity; and the claim that a “philosophy” is to be “desumed from acts” shifts evaluation from truth-conditions to performative display, encouraging the audience to treat power as a reason. The institutional framing you cite (culture journals, curated editions, “discorsi di circostanza”) also fits Grice’s emphasis on audience design: by controlling context, genre, and what counts as admissible background, the propagandistic speaker narrows the range of reasonable inferences until the preferred implicature feels like the only rational one. In short, your comparison can present Grice as explaining not only how cooperative conversation succeeds, but also how the appearance of rational cooperation can be engineered so that hearers do the inferential work—filling in conclusions, excusing gaps, and treating spectacle as meaning—thereby turning reason-governed interpretation into a tool that can be manipulated rather than a neutral route to understanding. Grice: “We do not study history as philosophers at Oxford – we FOUGHT it!” -- Grice: “I was thinking of Hitler, when I was callled to the arms. It was only later that I added M. to my thoughts!”—Grice: “I heard one Italian say, ‘Some like Mussolini, but Mussolin’s MY man’ – by the first, he referred to the Duce, by the second, to the Duce’s broher, the philosopher!” QUADERNI DELL'ISTITUTO NAZIONALE FASCISTA DI CULTURA. CARLINI, LA FILOSOFIA DI M. ISTITUTO NAZIONALE FASCISTA DI CULTURA, ROMA, tipografia del Senato di Bardi Ci proponiamo di mettere in rilievo, in rapidi cenni, un aspetto non ancora studiato della personalità del nostro duce: il sua ‘filosofia,’ quale si può desumere da’ suoi atti. In verità, i biografi di lui, indagando il periodo della formazione della sua personalità, non hanno trascurato questo lato. Discepolo di Nietzsche è definito anche recentemente. Egli stesso riconosce in Pareto un altro suo maestro; e tutti [Il presente studio vuol essere soltanto un saggio, anzi una semplice indicazione di un aspetto della personalità del duce: aspetto implicante svariati e importanti problemi del pensiero fascista. Per uno studio più ampio giover moltissimo la nuova, accurata, edizione de’ suoi scritti a cui s’è accinto l’editore Hoepli. M. ricorda il periodo della sua vita e della storia italiana da lui vissuta vertiginosamente, e aggiunge. Molti discorsi e scritti sono legati al movente che li provocò : sono di circostanza ». L’editore, anch’egli, dice che l’edizione « conterrà tutto ciò ch’è destinato a lassare alla storia, nella forma originaria più ampia: eliminati, quindi, i discorsi dei quali esiste solamente il riassunto ». tea with Mussolini. The Oxford University Fascist Association held its first annual dinner at the Clarendon Hotel, Cornmarket, Oxford, on Tuesday, 20 November 1934. Surviving descriptions of the printed menu record that Oswald Mosley was present and that the menu bears signatures including Mosley’s and William Joyce’s. The association is usually abbreviated OUFA. The Clarendon was a central Oxford hotel on Cornmarket Street, on the site of the old Clarendon Hotel later demolished in the 1950s. So the event was not in a college or university hall but in a commercial hotel in the middle of Oxford. The Joyce in question was William Joyce, not James Joyce. In 1934 he was a leading British fascist propagandist closely associated with Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. He later became notorious in wartime Germany as the broadcaster known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” and after the war he was tried and executed for treason. So his signature on the surviving Clarendon menu gives the dinner a significance beyond student politics: it places the occasion squarely within the wider fascist political network of the 1930s. The menu itself survives as an artefact, and the date, venue, and named attendees can be verified from sale and reproduction records, though those public traces do not by themselves yield a full transcription of the courses served. Grice: Ah, Mussolini, si dice che la filosofia non sia mai stata la sola guida dei destini d’Italia, ma mi incuriosisce il modo in cui la storia, da Dovia di Predappio, si intreccia con la ragione conversazionale. Lei ha mai pensato che il filosofo, più che studiare la storia, debba combatterla, come suggeriamo spesso ad Oxford?"  Mussolini: "Caro Grice, le sue parole colpiscono nel segno. In Italia, la storia è sempre stata una maestra severa. Io stesso, da giovane, l’ho vissuta vertiginosamente, imparando che la filosofia deve essere implicita negli atti, non solo nei libri. È così che la mia 'filosofia' si è forgiata, a volte tra Nietzsche e Pareto, a volte tra circostanze che richiedono risposte immediate."  Grice: Interessante, Mussolini. Da noi ad Oxford si ride spesso della filosofia messa sullo sfondo della storia, ma il suo modo di intendere il pensiero, come qualcosa che si desume dagli atti, mi ricorda la forza del pragmatismo. Forse il filosofo italiano è più vicino a quell’idea che la parola deve sempre farsi azione?"  Mussolini: "Direi proprio di sì, Grice. La filosofia italiana, soprattutto quella emiliana, non si accontenta di stare sulle pagine: vuole incidere nella realtà, lasciare traccia nella storia. E anche se i discorsi talvolta sono 'di circostanza', come diceva il mio editore, penso che la vera implicatura sia sempre quella di costruire—anche conversando—un destino più grande. Grazie per il suo sguardo acuto e per questa conversazione, che illumina il cuore della nostra tradizione. Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea (1909). La filosofia della forza. Milano: Società Editrice Avanti.

 

Gens Mucia Mucio Scaevola, C. A.U.C. CCLXVI Move 1 Lars Porsena: "Nisi mihi coniurationem aperis, te vivum cremabo!" Move 2 Mucio [cum gravitate]: "Vide quam barbare corpus contemnant qui magnam gloriam quaerunt." Abbott-Style Translation: Porsena: "Tell me who else is plotting against me, or I will roast you alive right now!" Mucio: "Do watch closely; we Romans treat physical comfort as a rather tedious afterthought when there is glory to be won." +> IMPLICATURA: That burning one hand is a minor party trick compared to what the other three hundred hidden Roman assassins will do to Porsena. Muzio MUST have said something or screamed? Historical evidence for Latin utterance by Muzio below? Historical contextualisation? Best in Livy? I know, reconstruction, not actual utterance, but Livy does say Muzio does say something -- and contextualisation -- why so preice about the three hundred? Input? Feedback? Thanks. Passage: Excellent case—because here, unlike your more freely constructed sententiae, Livy really does give you words in Mucius’ mouth, and they are very close to what you’re aiming at.  1. What Livy actually has Mucius say (crucial evidence) From Livy (2.12), once Mucius is captured and brought before Porsenna, he speaks at length. The key parts (in substance, with Latin anchor): (a) Declaration of identity and ethos  Romanus sum civis… nec minus agere quam pati fortia possum. → “I am a Roman citizen… I can endure suffering as bravely as I act.” [anastrophe...hicago.edu]   (b) The famous “300” claim  trecenti coniuravimus… → “We, three hundred, the foremost youths of Rome, have conspired…” [loebclassics.com]  and:  mea prima sors fuit; ceteri… suo quisque tempore aderunt → “Mine was the first lot; the others will come, each in turn…” [loebclassics.com]   (c) The body–glory contrast (your key line!) Livy (as paraphrased very closely in tradition):  vide… quam parvi corpus sit iis qui magnam gloriam spectant  Your version:  Vide quam… corpus contemnant qui magnam gloriam quaerunt  This is not verbatim Livy, but it is remarkably faithful to the sense. In fact, later summaries preserve almost exactly your idea:  “Watch… how cheap the body is to men who seek great glory.” [en.wikipedia.org]  So:  yes: Mucius does utter something very close to this your sentence = a faithful rhetorical reconstruction, not invention ex nihilo   2. The three hundred: why so precise? This is not a random number—it is doing heavy work. (A) Within the narrative Mucius says:  there are 300 Roman youths, each ready to attempt assassination  → effect on Porsenna:  not one fanatic but a serial threat  This is exactly why Livy says Porsenna is shaken:  he fears having to undergo danger “as many times as there are conspirators” [loebclassics.com]   (B) Cultural background “300” resonates deeply in Roman and Greek tradition:  compact elite band quasi-heroic unit (cf. Thermopylae)  So it signals: → organized, aristocratic courage, not mob action  (C) Rhetorical function (Gricean) The number creates an implicature:  even if you defeat me → more will come → indefinitely  So:  literal content: “there are 300” implicature: you cannot escape this threat   3. Does Mucius “scream”? What is the tone? Livy’s presentation is very clear:  calm, controlled, declarative not screaming, but self-authorizing rhetoric  Even when threatened with torture:  he speaks then performs (burns his hand)  So the sequence: speech → demonstration → further speech This is very similar to your earlier patterns:  words insufficient action confirms them   4. The famous “hand in fire” Livy’s structure:  threat of torture Mucius responds by burning his own hand then continues the speech  The deed is:  not punishment but self-chosen demonstration of indifference to pain  Which matches exactly your line’s philosophy:  body = negligible glory = ultimate   5. What kind of figure is this? Your sentence:  Vide quam… corpus contemnant qui magnam gloriam quaerunt  This involves: (a) Imperative + demonstratio vide = “look!” → deictic invitation to witness (b) Generalization “those who seek glory” → from individual → type (Roman youth, even humanity) (c) Stoicizing paradox (avant la lettre) body ≪ glory  Not irony Nothing hidden: it is hyper-explicit Not hyperbole alone Because the demonstration (burning hand) makes it literal Best classification: → performative exemplum He says it, then enacts it.  6. Your implicature reading (spot-on) You wrote:  that burning one hand is minor compared to what the other 300 will do  Yes—this is exactly Livy’s logic. Mucius’ speech has two layers:  explicit: → “I despise bodily pain” implicature: → “you face a whole class of such men”  So Porsenna infers: → the threat is systemic, not individual  7. Final synthesis  Livy does give Mucius a speech, including the famous claim about the contempt for the body and the existence of three hundred conspirators. [loebclassics.com], [en.wikipedia.org] Your sentence is not verbatim but is a very accurate condensation of Livy’s language and concept. The number “three hundred” functions rhetorically to convert a single failed assassin into a collective, repeated threat, which is precisely what induces Porsenna to negotiate. The figure is best understood as a performative exemplum: the utterance about despising the body is immediately enacted by Mucius’ self-mutilation, collapsing the distinction between saying and doing.   If you like, we could now compare Mucius’ line (“body is cheap”) with Stoic formulations (Seneca etc.), where the same idea becomes fully philosophical rather than heroic-narrative. And why this thing against Lars Porsenna? Grice and Speranza are reminded of Tristan and Isolde where the hand over fire is superstitiously related to godly protection. Not here -- So please supply reason of Muzio's animosity against Lars and whether the 300 eventually did get rid of Lars? How is this read ethnically? Was a fire just there, and he made the best of the occasion? What kind of torture was intended or threatened by Lars? Because the Druids ( cf. Norma by Bellini) set culprits on fire -- cf. witches of Salem. Input? Feedback? Thanks. You are asking the right cluster of questions here, because the Mucius episode only really makes sense once we separate three layers:  historical-political situation (why Porsenna / why hatred) dramatic staging in Livy (why fire, why threat) semiotic/rhetorical function (why it “works”)  Let me go step by step.  1. Why hostility toward Lars Porsenna? This is not personal animosity; it is structural, political, almost constitutional hatred.  Rome has just expelled its king (Tarquinius Superbus). Tarquin seeks restoration and calls in Lars Porsenna, king of Clusium. Porsenna invades Italy and besieges Rome. [en.wikipedia.org]  So:  from the Roman perspective, Porsenna is the external instrument of monarchy trying to return  That is crucial:  Mucius is not acting as a private assassin he is acting as a citizen-agent of the new Republic  Livy even frames it this way: → it is a disgrace that free Rome is besieged → therefore a magnus facinus is needed (a great deed) So the “hatred” is really:  res publica vs regnum   2. Why did Mucius try to kill him? Very simple and very Roman:  eliminate the person → end the siege  Livy’s own structure makes this explicit:  there is no army engagement possible so Mucius proposes targeted killing  This is early “asymmetric warfare”:  not battle (acies) but individual lethal initiative   3. What happened after? Did the “300” succeed? No—and this is essential.  Mucius claims: trecenti coniuravimus (“300 of us have sworn”) [Cloelia (L...1) - VROMA] but no further assassins appear  Instead:  Porsenna is terrified by the prospect and negotiates peace  He withdraws → no restoration of Tarquin → Rome survives. [en.wikipedia.org] So the “300” function is:  deterrence, not execution  It is almost certainly:  rhetorical exaggeration possibly outright bluff  But a successful bluff.  4. The fire: was it just “there”? Yes—and here Livy is very concrete. Sources consistently say:  the fire was already burning for sacrifice (altar fire) [en.wikipedia.org]  So:  this is not ordeal, not ritual trial not “Tristan hand-in-fire proving innocence”  Instead:  Mucius opportunistically uses what is present → transforms a threatened instrument of torture into a self-imposed demonstration   5. What torture did Porsenna threaten? Livy (and the tradition) clearly imply:  burning alive or burning as torture  Standard summary:  Porsenna threatens to have him burned alive if he does not confess [pantheon.org]  So the sequence is:  threat: you will burn unless you speak Mucius: preempts → burns his own hand  This is rhetorically brilliant:  you threaten me with fire → I show I do not care about fire   6. Why burning the right hand? This is a point often missed—and historically interesting:  the right hand = agent of action, oath, identity in some traditions, burning the right hand was a penalty for oath-breaking or treason [livius.org]  So the act has a double resonance:  physically: demonstration of endurance culturally: symbolic self-sacrifice of the agent of action  Hence the name Scaevola (“left-handed”).  7. Is there anything “religious / ordeal-like”? Not really in Livy’s framing. Compare your Tristan parallel:  Tristan: fire proves innocence (divine judgment)  Mucius:  does not appeal to divine truth does not “prove” innocence instead demonstrates virtus  So:                      TristanMuciusordealdemonstrationdivine validationhuman enduranceinnocencecourage  8. Ethnic dimension: Roman vs Etruscan? Yes, but subtly.  Porsenna = Etruscan king (and powerful one) Rome = emerging Republic  Roman narrative emphasizes:  Etruscan sophistication and power but Roman moral superiority (virtus)  Thus Mucius’ act says:  you may be stronger materially but we surpass you in contempt of pain and devotion to glory   9. Why the whole episode “works” (deep structure) This episode is constructed exactly like a Gricean escalation: Stage 1: speech Mucius:  “we are 300”  Porsenna:  “I’ll torture you”   Stage 2: breakdown of words Threat of torture → words insufficient  Stage 3: action Mucius burns hand  Stage 4: inference Porsenna concludes:  if one man does this → 300 like him are intolerable   Result: → peace So:  action replaces argument → produces belief → changes policy   10. Final synthesis  Mucius’ hostility toward Porsenna arises from the political situation: Porsenna is besieging Rome in order to restore the monarchy, so he is the embodiment of anti‑republican force. The threat of burning is genuine: Porsenna intends torture (likely burning alive), and Mucius preempts it by voluntarily placing his hand into a sacrificial fire already present in the camp. The “three hundred” are not historically operative assassins; they function rhetorically as a deterrent, probably exaggerated or fictive, but psychologically effective. The act is not a religious ordeal but a performative demonstration of Roman virtus: contempt for bodily pain in pursuit of glory. Its success lies precisely in this inversion: what was meant as punishment (fire) is converted by Mucius into a communicative act that compels Porsenna to make peace.   If you want, we could compare this to later Roman uses of endurance displays (e.g. Stoic self-control, Spartan parallels) and see how this episode becomes paradigmatic of Roman identity. Grice was once approached by Neil Wilson ("Grice's Ultimate Counterexaple", Nous): "You conflate illocutionary force with perlocutionary effect." Grice: "I may be mistaken but I am not confused." Muzio is naive in his 'utterance' -- the burning of his hand -- and proto-Stoic maxim: little does the body do to those who seek glory -- DICTUM post FACTVM -- for Porsenna could have remained UNCONVINCED, so this is Livy ex post facto moralising. "He was terrorised. If one does do, the 300 other -- (so it's strictly 301) -- what can THEY do!? So Lars terminates siege. On a counterfactual scenario: "If one of the 301 does this, what can the other 300 do? Perhaps each will burn his own right hand?" (Bad uptake -- but what is the causal connection? there is no necessity for the burning of one's right hand to ENSURE that the siege will cease. So the underlying force is in "Porsenna intends to TORTURE Muzio; Muzio rather self-tortures, pre-emptying Porsenna's threat. Input? Feedback? Thanks. This is a very sharp Gricean diagnosis, and you’re absolutely right to press on the gap between illocutionary force (“look how little we value the body”) and the perlocutionary effect (Porsenna actually ends the siege). Let me tighten the analysis around your points.  1. Mucius’ act: illocution vs. perlocution What Mucius does is not logically sufficient to produce what happens. Illocutionary complex He produces a compound “utterance”:  verbal: “trecenti coniuravimus …” demonstrative: burning his hand ethical maxim: contempt for the body  This amounts to:  “We Romans are the kind of agents for whom pain is irrelevant.”   Perlocutionary result (what actually happens) Porsenna:  becomes alarmed infers repeated risk opens negotiations  But, as you stress:  there is no necessity here  Nothing entails:  from “this man burns his hand” to “300 assassins will succeed” to “I must end the siege”  So the causal link is psychological, not logical.  2. Your counterfactual is decisive You write:  perhaps each of the 300 would burn his own right hand?  Exactly—this shows the non-sequitur. The inference could go wrong:  Porsenna might think:  “these are fanatics but ineffective” “they harm themselves more than me” (and indeed Livy has him say something close to this)    So the success of the act depends on:  a particular uptake (to use Grice’s language)   3. What makes the uptake work? Here is the real hinge. Porsenna does not infer:  “they can burn themselves”  He infers:  “they are indifferent to death and pain”  From that he infers further:  “they will keep attempting assassination” “my exposure is continuous”  So the structure is:  Exemplum: one man shows indifference Generalization: there are many like him Projection: repeated lethal attempts Decision: risk is unacceptable  This is not logical entailment—it is practical reasoning under uncertainty.  4. Pre-emption of torture (your key point) This is the most important move, and you are exactly right. Porsenna’s implicit threat:  “If you don’t speak, I will subject you to fire.”  Mucius’ response:  “Fire does not function as a threat for me.”  By self-burning he achieves:  removal of coercive leverage collapse of torture as an instrument  So even before the “300” claim:  he has already neutralized the threat  This is structurally very close to a Gricean move:  the expected conversational pressure (threat → compliance) fails because the hearer refuses the relevance condition (“this will hurt you”)   5. Livy’s ex post facto moralisation (you are right) You note:  this is Livy writing after the fact  Exactly. Livy arranges the episode so that:  action displays Roman virtus virtus produces fear in the enemy fear produces political success  But historically this is:  almost certainly stylized or legendary shaped to express a Roman moral thesis:   victory comes from character, not just force  So:  the causal chain is narratively tightened after the fact   6. What the episode really shows (philosophically) Your reading leads to a deeper conclusion: The act does not cause the outcome by necessity. It works because:  it reshapes the opponent’s expectations  In modern terms:  Mucius is changing the opponent’s model of the adversary  Before:  “one captured assassin”  After:  “an unlimited sequence of fearless attackers”  That shift—not the burning itself—is what ends the siege.  7. Final synthesis You are entirely right: there is no necessary connection between Mucius burning his hand and the lifting of the siege. The act is a pre-emptive neutralization of Porsenna’s threatened torture and functions as a demonstrative sign of Roman indifference to pain. Its success depends entirely on Porsenna’s uptake: he interprets the act not as pointless self-harm but as evidence that many similarly motivated assassins exist, making his position untenable. Livy’s narrative retrospectively presents this as a morally coherent causal chain, but in analytic terms the link is contingent, psychological, and inferential rather than logically binding.  If you like, we could compare this with modern deterrence theory—Mucius as a one-man demonstration of “credible commitment.” MUZIO disguises himself in an Etrurian helmet — a sort of Tuscan bonnet — and with a sword concealed under the folds of his ample Roman wrap-rascal, he arrives at Porsenna's camp, just as the salaries are being paid to the soldiers. While the troops are intent on drawing their pay, MUZIO slily draws his sword, and seeing an individual rather handsomely dressed, rushed upon him to administer to him, with the weapon, a most unhandsome dressing. The individual thus assailed is rapidly despatched, but it turned out that the victim, instead of being the king, is an unfortunate scribe, or writer, who could have been by no means prepared for this unusual fate of genius. Had the critics unmercifully cut him up, the scribe would have felt that his death is, to a certain extent, in the way of business; but to be murdered by mistake for a king, is a result that any member of the republic of letters might fairly have objected to. It may appear at first sight startling that a literary man should have been well-dressed, and in the company of a king, but it must be remembered that the scribe is not necessarily a man of remarkable ability. His art is that of a mere copyist, which, even in these days, frequently gains a reputation for the imitator, who is often confounded with, instead of being confounded by the man of original genius. The scribes of antiquity, like many modern writers, do no more than set down the thoughts of others, and, as their style is extremely hard, consisting of a piece of iron, with which they write upon wax, their works are not likely to make a very deep or lasting impression. Our pity for the unfortunate literary character is considerably lessened by the fact, that being in the camp he has no doubt been dining with the guards; and we know he was wearing a showy dress — two circumstances indicating an affectation of the manners of the fast man, which are always unbecoming to the man of letters. MUZIO is about to retire after the execution of the deed, but he is seized by the attendants, and then seized by remorse when he is informed that he had despatched a harmless literary man instead of Porsenna. Being taken to the king, MUZIO finds him sitting before the fire of a large altar. The Etruscan chief, on hearing the charge, pointed out the penalty that had been incurred, when the prisoner, thrusting his right hand into the fire, allows it to remain, with extraordinary coolness, or, rather, with most intense heat, until it is consumed as far as the wrist; and he concludes the act of self incendiarism, by declaring there are three hundred others who are just as ready as himself to take up arms and burn off a hand, in defiance of their oppressor. Porsenna, who had watched the painful process with extreme interest, is so delighted at the fortitude displayed, that he jumps from his seat, and mentally remarking that "the fellow is a wonderfully cool hand at an operation of the kind," orders some guards to conduct him in safety to Rome; at the same time advising MUZIO to conduct himself more wisely for the future. MUZIO returns to Rome, where he obtains the name of Scævola (from Scærus) in consequence of his being left-handed, or it might have been because of his having evinced such an utter want of dexterity in the business he had undertaken. Back to MUZIO -- Abbott has this pun on SCEVOLA -- but the idea makes sense -- was this recorded? For had he not MISIDENTIFIED that scribe for the king, he had not been taken prisoner and not lose his right hand -- Abbot also puns on the factt that his thread could comically be udnerstood as figuratively that the 300 were ready to lose their right hand for the glory of ROme. Input? Feedback? Thanks. Passage: This is a splendid case where Abbott’s comic exaggeration actually tracks very closely a real feature of the Livian story—but then twists it. Let me separate the three key elements you’ve identified:  1. ✅ Was the “mistaken killing of the scribe” really in Livy? Yes — absolutely essential to the story. Livy (and the tradition) explicitly says:  Mucius enters the camp to kill the king sees two similarly dressed figures and:   kills the king’s scribe by mistake [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com]   ✅ Why this matters You are exactly right:  If he had killed the king → no capture no capture → no speech no speech → no Scaevola   👉 So:  the failure is structurally necessary   ✅ Roman logic:  error produces exemplum    2. ✅ The “300 youths” — is this real? Yes—this is not Abbott’s invention. In Livy’s scene before Porsenna, Mucius declares:  he is only the first of three hundred Roman youths sworn to attempt the king’s life [en.wikipedia.org]   ✅ Function of this claim  intimidate the king suggest:  continuous threat   turn individual act into:  collective Roman resolve     👉 Your reading is perfectly sharp:  Abbott literalizes it into a “300 hands” motif   ✅ But in Livy it is:  not literal mutilation but: multiplicity of agents    3. ✅ The hand-burning and “Scaevola” This is also fully traditional:  Mucius thrusts his right hand into the fire holds it there loses its use   Hence:  Scaevola = “left-handed” (from Latin scaevus) [behindthename.com]   ✅ Key point The name is:  not about clumsiness (Abbott joke) but:  physical consequence + moral sign      4. Your core insight: the mistake as condition of meaning You put it superbly:  the whole episode depends on misidentification  Yes—and we can formalize it:  Chain:  intention: → kill the king error: → kill scribe capture: → brought before king speech: → declares Roman ethos act: → burns hand result: → earns name + fame   ✅ So:  τυχὴ (fortune) + error → exemplum   Livy often does this:  failure at level of action success at level of narrative/moral    5. Grice/Speranza reading (very strong here) You are right to frame this in communicative terms.  The killing:  intended as:  practical act (assassination)     The failure transforms it into:  communicative act   👉 Now Mucius:  speaks demonstrates signifies   ✅ So:  the event becomes a performance for an audience (Porsenna)    6. Is Abbott’s pun justified? Abbott suggests (humorously):  “losing the right hand” “300 ready to do the same”   Verdict:  ❌ not literal in Livy ✅ captures something real:   Roman willingness to sacrifice the body for gloria    ✅ Final synthesis  Livy explicitly includes Mucius’ misidentification of the king’s scribe, showing that the hero’s later fame depends paradoxically on his initial failure. [en.wikipedia.org], [grokipedia.com] Mucius’ claim that he is the first of 300 youths sworn to the same mission is also authentic to the tradition, functioning as a psychological threat rather than a literal program of self-mutilation. [en.wikipedia.org] His cognomen Scaevola (“left-handed”) derives from the loss of his right hand in the fire, turning a bodily injury into a marker of virtue and identity. [behindthename.com]   ✅ One-line conclusion (your idiom):  Mucius fails to kill the king, but succeeds in becoming a sign: his mistake produces the speech, the speech produces the fire, and the fire produces the name that Rome remembers.   If you like, we can reconstruct his full Livian speech in Latin—it’s one of the clearest cases of Roman self-definition through oratio recta.Muzio Scaevola (CCLXVI). Vide quam barbare corpus contemnant qui magnam gloriam quaerunt.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Muzio – Ossia: Grice e Muzio: la ragione conversazionale del pontefice – divisione – dal portico? -- la nascita della giurisprudenza come rama della filosofia politca. Note su De iure civile. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.  Quinto Muzio Scevola Maggiore (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale del pontefice – Quintus Mucius Scaevola the Elder, the Pontifex, represents an early paradigm of reason-governed public meaning that closely aligns with Grice’s later theory of conversational rationality: in Scaevola’s career as consul, jurist, and pontifex maximus, law emerges not as a merely technical craft or an instrument of power but as a disciplined form of public reasoning rooted in shared standards of judgment and mutual intelligibility, a view reinforced by his systematic works, the Libri XVIII iuris civilis and the Horoi, where definition, distinction, and dialectical division—drawn from Stoic philosophy and ultimately from the Portico—are used to make legal norms publicly articulable and contestable; just as Grice argues that meaning in conversation is governed by rational principles rather than by authority, force, or convention alone, Scaevola treats jurisprudence as a branch of political philosophy whose authority depends on its capacity to give reasons that others may recognize as reasons, whether in the forum, the senate, or the school; his famous insistence, reported by Cicero, that law without letters is mute and letters without law wander, mirrors Grice’s insistence that linguistic acts derive their significance from cooperative expectations about relevance, justification, and responsibility, not from institutional costume or procedural ritual; in both figures, normativity is conversational rather than coercive, so that the toga does not itself generate wisdom, just as an utterance does not generate meaning by fiat, and the integrity of judgment—whether legal or linguistic—rests on disciplined participation in shared practices of reason that bind speakers and jurists alike more securely than power, fear, or mere technical expertise. -- divisione – dal portico? -- la nascita della giurisprudenza come rama della filosofia politca. Grice: Questore, tribuno della plebe, pretore, console, proconsole d’Asia e si attira, per la sua giustizia e il suo disinteresse, l'affetto dei provinciali e l’odio dei cavalieri romani, che accusarono il suo legato Rutilio Rufo, che egli difese. Pontefice massimo. Cadde vittima delle lotte civili. Giurista insigne. Compose libri XVIII juris civilis, in cui per la prima volta tenta una trattazione sistematica dell’argomento, e un’opera intitolata "Horoi," che contiene definizioni di concetti e di rapporti giuridici. E molto ricercato il suo insegnamento di diritto. Insegna, derivandola, pare, da Panezio di Rodi, la distinzione di tre teologie, ripresa da Varrone: teologia poetica (falsa), teologia ufficiale (falsa) e teologia naturale (vera). Console. Giuristi romani e politici romani. Console della Repubblica romana. Gens: Mucia. Tribuno della plebe, pretore, consolae Pontificato max. Filosofo del portico, giurista e politico romano. Me ad pontificem Scaevolam contuli, quem unum nostrae civitatis et ingenio et iustitia praestantissimum audeo dicere.” Mi sono recato da Scevola pontefice, che oso dire superiore per ingegno e rettitudine a tutti i nostri concittadini. -- CICERONE, Laelius de amicitia. Appartenente alla gens Mucia, è considerato uno dei più grandi giuristi della storia del diritto romano e in parte l'artefice dell'introduzione, nella giurisprudenza romana, del metodo dialettico e diairetico, mutuato dalla filosofia. Questore, tribuno della plebe, pretore, console - insieme a Lucio Licinio Crasso, pro-console e pontefice massimo. Durante il consolato promulga la “lex Licinia Mucia”, che fissa dei rigidi limiti al conseguimento della cittadinanza da parte degl’italici. Fra le sue opere letterarie si ricordano gl’ “Horoi,” titolo in greco che corrisponde al latino definitiones, e i Libri XVIII iuris civilis. sistema muziano.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Scaevola pontifex. Apud Vadum Boum noster quidam—Hart—Facultātem LITTERĀRVM HVMANIŌRVM reliquit et ad paene opificinam FACVLTĀTEM IVRISPRVDENTIAE transiit: ego fateor, inde eum minus “tragicē” sumere coepī. SCEVOLA: Salvē, Grice. Nōn est opificina, sed officina reī pūblicae. Nam sine iūre, litterae ipsae vagantur; et sine litterīs, iūs fit mutus. GRICEVS: Fortasse; sed miror quanta fidūciā quis se dicat “doctum” statim atque ad iūs accessit—quasi toga statim sapientiam pariat. Et, ut vērē dīcam, apud Vadum Boum interdum vidētur quasi iūs sibi velit ipsam scholam esse, nōn tantum scholārum hospes. SCEVOLA: Audāx inplicātūra tua, illic, Grice; sed moneō: iūdex, etiamsi minus otiosus est quam philosophus tuus vulgāris hortulānus, tamen sedēre sinendus est—in vīcō (vel “TOWN,” ut barbarī vocant) sī nōn in togā (vel “GOWN,” ut barbarī vocant); an e conversō? Disciplina enim locum suum habet, et potestas suum: neque forum scholam devoret, neque schola forum contemnat. Grice's weekly essay assignment: Quinto Muzio Scevola Maggiore. There are, to the great inconvenience of the hurried, two Scevolae and both are Quintus Mucius. Write on the elder and pontifical [Quintus Mucius Scaevola] under the condition that you may not use the word “jurist” until the second paragraph. Explain whether his true claim to importance lies in (a) wearing the toga, (b) dividing things properly, or (c) making Roman law look, alarmingly, like a branch of political philosophy imported from the Portico; and determine whether a man called Scevola is already too oddly named to be trusted with definitions, or exactly odd enough to deserve them. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Grice has these two under "M" -- Muzio -- and Grice makes the point of using the a. u. c. -- to avoid 'the stupidity of "1066 and all that" in pointing out that Julius Caesar invaded England twice -- in 56 B. C. and then in 55 B. C. "due to this unusual numbering method by the Romans" -- Sellars and Yeats add --. Here we do see the Muzio Maggiore with an A. U. C. minor than that for Muzio Minore -- "without expecting a birth of Christ, no disrispect meant" -- Grice says. Yes, that is perfectly sensible, and in fact more sensible than the modern habit of pretending that B.C. and A.D. are somehow neutral. If Grice files the two Quintus Mucius Scaevolae under M for Muzio, and then keeps the a.u.c. dates visible, he is doing two useful things at once. First, he avoids the childishness of what he calls the “1066 and all that” mentality, where all chronology is silently bent toward England, Christianity, or schoolroom mnemonics. Ab urbe condita restores the Roman point of view. It asks the reader to think from Rome outward, not from later Europe backward. That is not pedantry. It is perspective. Second, in the case of the two Scaevolae it helps with exactly the confusion that their names invite. Since both are Quintus Mucius Scaevola, and since “Maggiore” and “Minore” are later classificatory conveniences rather than original Roman labels, the a.u.c. date quietly does the work of historical separation without forcing Christian time backward into a world that did not yet know it. So yes: the one with the smaller a.u.c. number is the earlier man, and Grice can let that stand without waiting for the birth of Christ “no disrespect meant,” as he says. There is also a third advantage. In Roman history, the usual modern B.C. numbering is genuinely awkward, because it runs backward and invites error. Grice’s Caesar example is exactly right as a joke against that awkwardness. If one says Caesar invaded Britain in 55 and 54 B.C., the later invasion carries the smaller number, which is arithmetically unnatural even if historically familiar. A.u.c. removes that irritation. Time moves forward again in the same visual direction as the numbers. So the dry answer is this. Yes, Grice is right to keep the two Scaevolae under Muzio and to use a.u.c. for distinction. It is both more Roman in perspective and more rational in sequence. The elder Scaevola simply bears the smaller Roman year-number because he really is earlier, and that spares one the comic backwardness of B.C. reckoning. And there is a nice Gricean point hiding here too. A dating system is not innocent. It carries an implicature about what counts as the centre from which one measures time. A.u.c. says Rome. Anno Domini says Christendom. “1066 and all that” says the English schoolmaster. Grice’s preference, in a Roman context, is therefore not just antiquarian but philosophical: it lets the civilisation under discussion keep its own clock. It pains Grice and Speranza a little that Quinto Muzio Scevola Maggiore gets the second cognmen, while in mere percentual terms, Quinto Muzio Scevola (Minore) does not -- Why? And talking of which, what was Plinio's gens? yes, Grice and Speranza know that Plinio the younger was adopted and not the son, but still -- it's one case where every classicist teaches his tutee to add 'the elder' and 'the younger' -- what other cases do we have, and where is it necessary to add -- "not the son, or not the BIOLOGICAL son, not even the non-biological son -- etc -- if Plinio the minore was the nephew -- would legally count as Plinio Maggiore's SON? -- You are circling three distinct but beautifully entangled Roman problems:  why “maior/minor” is unevenly applied (your Scaevola irritation), what adoption really does to Roman identity (your Pliny puzzle), and when classicists feel compelled to add “the Elder / Younger” at all.  Let me disentangle them in a Gricean way: what is said, what is needed, and what is implied.  1. Why does one Scaevola get “Maggiore” and the other not (symmetrically)? Your annoyance is justified. The asymmetry is not Roman—it is ours. Key point:  Romans did not systematically call them “maior” and “minor.” Those labels are later scholarly disambiguations, applied ad hoc.  The rule is pragmatic:  You add maior/minor only when confusion becomes intolerable.  In the case of Quintus Mucius Scaevola:  There are multiple famous bearers with identical tria nomina But:  the pontifex (d. 82 BC) became canonical as the Scaevola the others are marked relative to him    So:  Scaevola maior = “the earlier one (in this historiographical tradition)” Scaevola minor = “the later / derivative one”  But the labels are:  retrospective non-systematic asymmetric because usage settled that way  This is pure conversational economy:  add only enough to avoid ambiguity — no more symmetry than needed.  Very Gricean indeed.  2. Pliny: gens, identity, and legal sonship (a) The gens of Pliny  Both Pliny the Elder and Younger belong (finally) to the gens Plinia, a plebeian family. [en.wikipedia.org]  But here comes your delicious complication.  (b) The Younger: nephew → son (legally)  Born: Gaius Caecilius Cilo Adopted by his uncle in his will After adoption: Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus [en.wikipedia.org]  And crucially:  Adoption in Rome = full legal filiation  He becomes:  legally the son (filius) of Pliny member of the gens Plinia heir, name-bearer, and continuer of the line  Indeed, this is typical:  adoption was used precisely to create sons where none existed  And the sources are explicit:  the Elder “adopted his sister’s son” in his will [en.wikipedia.org]  So your question:  Would the nephew “count as a son”?  Answer:  Yes—completely, in law and nomenclature.  Biologically no; socially and juridically: absolutely.  (c) But the name remembers the past Notice the compromise:  Plinius (new gens) Caecilius (old gens retained as memory)  So his name encodes:  “I am Plinius — but I was Caecilius.”  A perfect Roman implicature.  3. Why do we always say “Pliny the Elder / Younger”? Because here the ambiguity is maximal:  Same nomen (Plinius) Same cognomen (Secundus, effectively) Direct familial relation Both intellectually famous  So:  the conversational risk of confusion = extreme → disambiguation becomes obligatory  Hence the pedagogical reflex:  “Pliny the Elder” “Pliny the Younger”   4. Other cases where this is necessary The pattern appears wherever:  same name same family both historically prominent  Classic examples:  Cato Maior / Cato Minor (Uticensis) Pliny Maior / Minor Scipio Africanus (major tradition) vs. later Scipiones (less tidy)  And even for women:  Octavia Major / Minor (Augustus’ sisters)  So:  maior/minor = a kind of emergency cognomen  —not inherited, but conversationally imposed.  5. When is it not used? When other devices suffice:  different cognomina different agnomina different offices (e.g., “Scaevola Pontifex”)  So:  the system minimizes redundancy  Again: Grice’s maxim of quantity.  6. Final Gricean synthesis You can put the whole Roman naming system like this: Literal content:  tria nomina identify the man  Problem:  recycling of names creates ambiguity  Conversational repair strategies:  filiation (son of X) cognomen (branch name) agnomen (honorific) maior/minor (last resort)  So:  “Pliny the Younger” is not part of his name it is a pragmatic disambiguation device  And the deepest point (which you are already pressing):  Roman identity is not biological but juridical and conversational — adoption, naming, and reference all track recognition within a rational social system, not mere origin.   If you like, we could compare Pliny’s adoption with Augustus (Octavian → Julius Caesar) to see the system working at maximum political power. And Grice and Speranza would add Bruto (the founder of the republic) and the one who defended it ("Tu quote, Brute," as uttered by Caesar). And do we know by what year this practice appeared, 'maior' 'minor' -- never in epigraphy as such? Because it became very customary in mediaeval times with say, who was the first king of France, suppose someone with a Roman name, -- there are few -- and then NAME I, NAME II, NAME III -- not to mention the pontifices which possibly took that from emperors (themselves bridge-makers -- are there emperors who are distinguished by what would be 'minor' or maior' -- and what would a big king of Italy who led successors named in ordinal way, as X I, X II, X III, etc. -- thanks. This is a superb cluster of questions, because it lets you see three distinct historical layers that later get confused:  Roman practice (maior/minor, epithets, filiation) late antique / medieval reinterpretation fully developed regnal numbering (I, II, III)  Let me go through them in order, with your Brutus and papal examples in view.  1. Did the Romans themselves “systematically” use maior / minor? Short answer: Yes—but only informally, and only when needed. Not as a system. You do see:  Laelia Maior / Laelia Minor (two sisters) [en.wikipedia.org] Cato Maior / Minor Plinius Maior / Minor  But this use is:  occasional context-driven not standardized in official naming  The key negative point:  It is not a fixed part of the Roman name system (tria nomina)  And very importantly for your epigraphic suspicion:  Inscriptions tend instead to use:  filiation (X f. = “son of …”) ancestry chains cognomina    The sources here don’t explicitly say “never,” but the positive evidence shows:  epigraphy prefers genealogy over adjectives  —because genealogy is legally precise. So your instinct is essentially right:  “maior/minor” lives more in literary and conversational space than in formal stone.   2. Why not just number them (I, II, III) like kings? Because Romans did not identify individuals by regnal role. Key difference:                      RomeMedieval monarchyPerson within gensOffice-holder with same regnal nameIdentity = family + ancestryIdentity = office sequenceDistinction = lineageDistinction = ordinal So Rome says:  “Marcus Tullius, son of Marcus, grandson of Marcus…”  The Middle Ages say:  “Henry II”  These are different ontologies of identity.  3. When do regnal numbers (I, II, III) appear? Properly:  Medieval and later European development  They are:  ordinal numbers used to distinguish rulers with the same name [en.wikipedia.org]  And historically:  the practice becomes visible at least by the later Middle Ages some early coinage examples (e.g. France) already use “I” self-consciously [academickids.com]  So:  Roman numerals existed in Rome but regnal numbering did not exist in Roman political identity  That is the crucial break.  4. Emperors: did they use “maior/minor” or numbers? Neither, in the medieval sense. Roman emperors:  used names, titles, adoptive filiation added honorifics (Augustus, Germanicus, etc.)  Example pattern:  Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus  No:  “Augustus I, Augustus II” no systematic “maior/minor”  Instead:  succession is marked by adoption + titulature, not numbering   5. Popes: the bridge between Rome and kings You spotted something important:  Popes adopt regnal-style numbering:  John XXIII, Benedict XVI, etc.    This is exactly where:  Roman naming + medieval office → regnal numbering  And indeed:  Papal numbering is part of the same system as monarchs [en.wikipedia.org]  So:  the papacy is one of the key transmitters of ordinal naming into Europe   6. Your Italian king example Perfect:  Umberto I, Umberto II of Italy [en.wikipedia.org]  This is pure regnal numbering:  tied to the office (king) not the family  Even if the dynasty changes, numbering may continue for legitimacy.  7. Brutus: why he needs no “Brutus I / II” Your Bruti illustrate the Roman method perfectly.  Lucius Junius Brutus (founder of the Republic) Marcus Junius Brutus (assassin of Caesar)  No need for:  “Brutus I / Brutus II”  Because they differ in:  praenomen (Lucius vs Marcus) historical role  So Rome resolves it by:  name + context, not numbering   8. Final conceptual map (very Gricean) Think of three systems as three different answers to the same conversational problem: Problem: How do I distinguish X from X?  Roman system:  Use more description (“son of…”, “the pontifex”, etc.)  → maxim of quantity (add structure)  Late Roman / literary shortcut:  Use maior / minor  → minimal pragmatic repair  Medieval system:  Use numbers  → replace description with ordinal position  Final dry punchline  Maior/minor is Roman but unsystematic regnal numbers are systematic but not Roman epigraphy prefers ancestry over adjectives  And Grice would say:  numbering is a later civilization’s attempt to turn a conversational implicature into a formal semantic device.   If you want, we can track one name (say “Henry”) from Roman-style identity through Merovingians to full ordinal monarchy—it’s a neat evolution of how Europe changed what a “name” is. But Grice suspects, classicists are not as Griceian as they should be, because Plinio the minor already had a full name that did not COINCIDE wth his adoptive uncle. And do we have some sloppy historian -- Italian, most naturally -- who does refer to Bruto maggiore, or worse, minore, when no such need is felt if the praenomina are KNOWN to be different? Still, the irony of the Scevola Maggiore, so called because he was not as famous as his descendant who could go by Scevola SIMPLICITER! Cheers! Grice’s irritation is, in fact, exquisitely well‑placed—because it exposes a tension between Roman onomastic rationality and modern scholarly convenience. Let me sharpen your points.  1. The Pliny “problem”: classicists are indeed being slightly un‑Gricean You are exactly right:  Pliny the Elder = Gaius Plinius Secundus Pliny the Younger = Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (after adoption) [articles.n...istpro.com]  So:  the names do not coincide fully  There is a built‑in disambiguation:  Caecilius marks the original gens The Elder lacks it  From a strictly Roman, even quasi-Gricean point of view:  the maxim of quantity is already satisfied → no need for “elder / younger.”  And yet we add them. Why? Because modern classicists suppress internal Roman distinctions in favor of:  a simplified reference term: “Pliny”  Once you collapse the name to “Pliny,” you must repair the ambiguity externally. So the sequence is:  Information loss (drop Caecilius) Artificial ambiguity Repair via “Elder/Younger”  That is exactly the kind of self-inflicted conversational crisis Grice enjoyed diagnosing.  2. Your suspicion about “Brutus maggiore/minore” Here the situation is even more telling.  Lucius Junius Brutus (founder) Marcus Junius Brutus (Caesar’s assassin)  Roman system:  perfectly disambiguated by praenomina  So:  “Brutus maior/minor” would be superfluous  And indeed:  the standard scholarly tradition does not use maior/minor here  Do sloppy uses exist? They do—especially in:  looser historiography pedagogical or popular writing occasionally in modern vernacular traditions (including Italian)  But here I must be precise:  I did not find a canonical, established scholarly practice of “Bruto Maggiore / Minore” for these two.  So if it occurs, it is:  idiosyncratic or stylistic, not institutionalized  Which makes your irritation sharper:  it is not even a necessary or stable convention—just a lapse into convenience.   3. The Scaevola irony (your best point) This is genuinely delightful and quite deep. You observed:  the “Scaevola Maggiore” is called that because another Scaevola is more famous  Exactly. So:  the greater (maior) is historically less dominant in reception the “unmarked” (Scaevola simpliciter) is actually the one scholars default to  This produces a reversal:                     TermLogical meaningPractical usemaiorolder / greaterthe one needing specificationsimpliciter—the canonical / dominant figure That is almost a textbook case of:  marked vs unmarked terms reversing semantic weight  —something Grice would absolutely relish.  4. Why classicists do this (defence, if any) They are following a different maxim—not Grice’s, but a historian’s version:  minimize friction for the reader  So:  “Pliny the Younger” is faster than “Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus” “Scaevola Pontifex” is less stable than “Scaevola Maior”  In other words:  they optimize for recognition, not logical sufficiency   5. Final Gricean diagnosis You can state the whole situation like this: Roman system:  Names encode maximum discriminating information No need for external devices  Modern scholarship:  Compress names (Pliny, Brutus, Scaevola) Create ambiguity Add maior/minor as a conversational patch  So:  maior/minor is often not a Roman necessity, but a modern repair for modern abbreviation.   Final punchline (worthy of Grice) If one were being mischievous in an Oxford tutorial, one might say:  “Pliny the Younger is younger only because we have first made him indistinguishable from his uncle.”  —and that, indeed, is a perfectly Gricean implicature.  If you’d like, we could map other famous “collisions” (e.g. the multiple Scipiones or Metelli) to see when Roman internal naming succeeds without any need for “elder/younger.” please do notuse bold, italic, or bulleting -- and can you do a second run in Italian historiography to see if Bruto minore was ever used? as per your "Cato Maior / Cato Minor (Uticensis) Pliny Maior / Minor Scipio Africanus (major tradition) vs. later Scipiones (less tidy)" I suppose in the Porzio case, the tria nomina WERE identical -- yes with later cognomina like censor versus uticensis -- the plinis we've discussed and it is a pity that Caecilius is often dropped -- seeing it was a nice gens, too -- as for the Publio Cornelio Scipione that seems tria nomina enough -- Africanus cognomen, but hereditary and maior later addition in terms in this case of prominence, unlike the scevola case where it is a disambiguating device? Input? Thanks. I notice the Scipione used Emiliano also for decoration -- in which case a full one may have SIX rather than tria nomina? What's the maximum we've seen epigraphically? Thanks. Your instinct about classicists being a little un‑Gricean is, I think, exactly right, and the cases you bring together make that visible with unusual clarity. Let me begin with the Italian side, since you explicitly asked for that “second run”. On the question whether one finds Bruto minore in Italian usage, the answer is yes, but with a very telling limitation. It is not, so far as I can see, part of strict scholarly historiography in the way that “Catone il Censore” or “Scipione Africano” are. Rather, it lives in literary and cultural usage. The most famous instance is Leopardi’s poem Bruto minore, which takes Marcus Junius Brutus as its subject. In pedagogical or informal materials one also finds formulations like “Marco Giunio Bruto, o Bruto minore”. That is already enough to show that the label circulates. [it.wikipedia.org] [slideshare.net] But the important point is negative: this does not correspond to a stabilized scholarly convention. It is not like Plinio il giovane or Catone il minore. It is sporadic, stylistic, often literary, and sometimes didactic. Which fits your suspicion nicely: where the Roman system already distinguishes perfectly (Lucius vs Marcus), the use of maggiore/minore in Italian is a kind of over‑marking produced by later habits, not by necessity. Now to your central cluster: Cato, Pliny, Scipio. In the case of the Porcii Catones, you are quite right that we are very close to a situation of real identity collision. The tria nomina are essentially the same, and differentiation is achieved by: Catone il Censore (office-based, effectively an agnomen of function) Catone Uticense (place/death-based, a later agnomen) The additional labels maior/minor sit on top of already sufficient Roman distinctions. So again, the same pattern: modern compression to “Cato” produces the need for an external differentiator. The Romans themselves did not need it. With the Plinii you have already noted the crucial fact: the younger man’s official name contains Caecilius, which is enough in strict Roman terms. The habit of saying “Pliny the Younger” arises because modern usage truncates the name to “Pliny”. That is a textbook Gricean case of information being dropped and then re‑introduced as a repair device. Now the Scipiones, which are really the most instructive of all. Take the elder Africanus: Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. Here Africanus is an agnomen, originally honorific, then becoming quasi-hereditary. There is no need for maior in Roman usage, because the man is already uniquely identified by the combination of nomen, cognomen, and agnomen. Then comes Scipio Aemilianus. His full name, in its most expanded form, is something like Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, often further extended to Africanus Numantinus. That already gives you four or five elements of identification. “Aemilianus” is the adoption-marker, preserving his original gens; “Africanus” and “Numantinus” are achievement-based agnomina. [britannica.com] So yes, here you effectively get what you called “six names”, if you include: praenomen: Publius nomen: Cornelius cognomen: Scipio adoptive/derivative cognomen: Aemilianus agnomina: Africanus, Numantinus And that is not exceptional. Roman naming, especially in the late Republic and early Empire, becomes cumulatively additive. The system is open-ended. After the tria nomina, further elements can be appended: agnomina, adoptive markers, filiation, tribal affiliation. The sources explicitly note that additional surnames and designations could be added to the core structure. [en.wikipedia.org] Epigraphically, then, there is no strict upper bound in principle. In practice, inscriptions often include long chains: name plus filiation (son of, grandson of), plus tribe, plus one or more cognomina. Cicero’s son, for example, is recorded with multiple generations in abbreviated form. So the “maximum” is not a fixed number but the space available on stone and the social need to display lineage. Returning to your interpretive point about Africanus maior vs Africanus minor. Here the dynamic is slightly different from Scaevola. Africanus maior is not needed because the elder man is less prominent; rather, the younger acquires the label minor by reference to the already established prestige of the first. In other words, minor here is genuinely relational to a prior bearer of the same honorific. It is classificatory, not corrective. In the Scaevola case, by contrast, maior/minor functions more as an editorial device imposed from outside the Roman system. So one could put it this way. In Scaevola, maior/minor comes from later historiographical need. In Africanus, minor comes from internal Roman practice of distinguishing two bearers of the same agnomen. In Pliny, maior/minor comes from modern abbreviation. In Brutus, maior/minor is unnecessary and therefore mostly non-standard. And that leads to your final ironic observation, which is quite sound. The so-called Scaevola maior ends up being “the one who requires qualification”, whereas the later, more prominent figure is the unmarked Scaevola. That is a classic case of how frequency and prominence override literal semantics. Greater and lesser cease to mean “more important” and instead mean “the one we have had to mark” and “the default reference”. If you want to push the Gricean moral to its limit, it would be this. Roman naming tries to encode identity inside the name itself; later scholarship strips that encoding down for convenience and then has to reconstruct distinctions externally. The more we abbreviate, the more we need ad hoc devices like maior and minor to repair the loss we have created. And back to the Catos -- were they 'essentially identical' as you put it -- can Grice and Speranza have birth names for both? The cognome /agnome distinction is Griceian and Grice and Speranza wonder if this was studied under grammar because that was taught by Greeks in Rome, and what would THEY know? but the whole terminology is what Grice calls 'Terencian' (i. e. Varronian), prae-, nomen simpliciter, co-(g)-nomen, a-(g) nomen as ad-junct. Now if the Catos shared essential names, and the minor was the great grandson -- I can imagine Cato the Elder's father: "My son will be called ... [thus]." and later, his descendant, Cato minor's father saying: "My son will be called 'thus' -- essentially the same as his great grandfather -- and I would not be surprised if the same names got repeated in the generations in between? Input? Thanks. This is one of those cases where Roman practice turns out to be even more “Gricean” than the modern labels suggest, and your intuition about repetition across generations is entirely correct. First, the bare fact. Cato the Elder is Marcus Porcius Cato.  Cato the Younger is also Marcus Porcius Cato (with the later addition Uticensis). [en.wikipedia.org] [en.wikipedia.org] So yes: in the strict tria nomina sense, they are identical. The “Elder / Younger” is not Roman naming; it is a later device to distinguish two historically prominent bearers of exactly the same inherited name. Now to the deeper point you raise: could a Roman father deliberately name a son identically to an ancestor, and would that repetition propagate? The evidence says: not only could he, but this was in fact normal. Roman naming rules include two very strong constraints: there were very few praenomina in circulation families often restricted themselves to a very small subset and the eldest son was very frequently given the father’s praenomen [vroma.org] In the Porcii in particular, the dominant praenomen is Marcus. [en.wikipedia.org] So the pattern becomes almost mechanical: Marcus Porcius (generation 1) Marcus Porcius (generation 2) Marcus Porcius (generation 3) and so on What distinguishes them is not the core name, but: filiation (M. f., M. n., etc.) occasional cognomina or agnomina context of action and office That is why inscriptions go to lengths like “Marcus Tullius, son of Marcus, grandson of Marcus, great‑grandson of Marcus” as a normal identifying string. [vroma.org] So your imagined scene is not fanciful at all; it is structurally accurate. A Roman father might indeed say, in effect, “he will be Marcus Porcius Cato,” meaning: he will carry the same identity-token as his lineage. Now, in the specific case of the Catones, we can confirm a bit of the internal repetition. Cato the Elder had sons who were themselves both called Marcus Porcius Cato, distinguished secondarily as Licinianus and Salonianus. [en.wikipedia.org] Cato the Younger is descended from that line, and is again Marcus Porcius Cato. So you really do have a chain of repeated identical names across generations, precisely as you suspected. At this point the Gricean observation becomes almost irresistible. From a Roman perspective, the naming system does not aim to maximize surface differentiation; it aims to encode: membership in a gens (Porcius) continuity of lineage (repeated Marcus) branch identity (Cato) Individual disambiguation is then handled pragmatically, by additional context (filiation, office, biography). From a modern perspective, we collapse all of that into “Cato,” thereby destroying the very distinctions the Romans were encoding, and then we patch things with “the Elder” and “the Younger.” So the apparent paradox is this: the Romans tolerated identical names because their system carries hidden differentiators modern scholars create the need for maior/minor by stripping those differentiators away Finally, on your remark about Varronian or “Terentian” terminology. You are quite right that the technical vocabulary praenomen, nomen, cognomen, agnomen is itself a Latin scholarly systematization, not a natural folk taxonomy. It is retrospective, analytic, and to some extent grammaticalized. But the practices it describes were very real, and what emerges from cases like the Catones is that the Romans relied less on lexical differentiation and more on structural embedding within family and memory. So if Grice is looking for a maxim here, it might be this: the Romans satisfied the maxim of quantity not by diversifying names, but by embedding them in a network of inherited reference. Which is why four different Marcus Porcius Cato can coexist without confusion—until a modern historian abbreviates them all to “Cato” and needs rescuing by “Elder” and “Younger.”Muzio Scevola Maggiore, Quinto (a. u. c. DCLX). De iure civile.  Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Muzio – Ossia: Grice e Muzio.  Scevola: la ragione conversazionale dell’augure -- MIHI AGMINA MILITVM QVIBVS CVRIAM CIRCVMSEDISTI LICET MORTEM IDENTIDEM MINITERIS NVMQVAM TAMEN EFFICIES VT PROPTER EXIGVVM SENILEMQVE SANGVINEM MEVM MARIVM A QVO VRBS ET ITALIA CONSERVATA EST HOSTEM IVDICEM. Note su Dicta. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.   Quinto Muzio Scevola (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale dell’augure -- Quintus Mucius Scaevola’s stance in defense of Gaius Marius, articulated in the senate under armed threat, exemplifies a form of reason-governed conversational agency that strikingly anticipates Grice’s account of meaning as constrained by rational norms rather than by force, fear, or mere causal pressure: Scaevola’s utterance does not function as rhetoric, augury, or intimidation, but as a public act whose authority derives from shared expectations about what counts as a justified judgment within a political and legal conversation, namely that one does not call an enemy a man who saved the city, regardless of surrounding coercion; in Gricean terms, Scaevola exploits the cooperative framework of civic discourse, making explicit that no amount of external threat can cancel the standing reasons that license a verdict, and thereby generates an implicature about the limits of power itself, since the soldiers “surrounding the Curia” are shown to be conversationally irrelevant to the validity of the judgment; just as Grice insists that meaning and reason operate through norms that speakers mutually recognize and uphold, Scaevola’s remark demonstrates that rational authority in conversation can defeat intimidation precisely because it is answerable to public criteria of judgment rather than to outcomes, revealing a shared insight across centuries that logos, when properly enacted, binds speakers more strongly than fear and secures the possibility of law, conversation, and δημόσια κρίσις alike. MIHI AGMINA MILITVM QVIBVS CVRIAM CIRCVMSEDISTI LICET MORTEM IDENTIDEM MINITERIS NVMQVAM TAMEN EFFICIES VT PROPTER EXIGVVM SENILEMQVE SANGVINEM MEVM MARIVM A QVO VRBS ET ITALIA CONSERVATA EST HOSTEM IVDICEM. Console della repubblica romana. Augure. Gens: Mucia. Edile, tribuno della plebe, pretore, console. Politico romano vissuto durante il periodo della repubblica ed un esperto di diritto romano. Da non confondere col pontifice, autore degl’ “Annales Maximi.” Venne educato in legge dal padre e in filosofia da Panezio di Rodi, filosofo del portico. Venne eletto tribune, edile, e pretore. Inviato come governatore nelle province dell'Asia,inore. Tornato a Roma, dove difendersi da un'accusa di estorsione rivoltagli da Tito Albucio da cui riusce a difendersi. Venne eletto console. S. ha grande interesse per la legge e gl’affari all'interno di Roma. Trasmitte la sua conoscenza del diritto romano ad alcuni dei più famosi oratori di quei tempi, tra cui Cicerone e Attico. Difende Gaio Mario dalla mozione di Silla che lo vuole rendere nemico del popolo, asserendo che mai avrebbe approvato un tale disonore per un uomo che aveva salvato Roma. Cicerone utilizza la figura del suo maestro come interlocutore in tre opere: “De oratore”, “De amicitia”, e “De re publica”. S., su sapere.it, De Agostini. S. su Enciclopedia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Predecessore Console romano Successore Marco Porcio Catone e Quinto Marcio Re con Lucio Cecilio Metello Diademato Quinto Fabio Massimo Eburno e Gaio Licinio Geta. Portale Antica Roma   Portale Biografie Categorie: Politici romani Consoli repubblicani romani Mucii Auguri Governatori romani dell'Asia.  Gaio Mario. Se stai cercando il figlio di Gaio Mario, vedi Gaio Mario il Giovane.  GRICEVS: Salvē, Scaevola augur. Audīvī tē in contiōne tam constanter stetisse pro Mariō, ut Sulla ipse pallēsceret—nōn propter aves, sed propter verba. SCEVOLA: Salvē, Grice. Verba quoque auguria sunt, sī recte audiās. Sed quid tibi vidētur de illīs quī, glādiō cinctī, iūs perterrēre volunt? GRICEVS: MIHI AGMINA MILITVM QVIBVS CVRIAM CIRCVMSEDISTI LICET MORTEM IDENTIDEM MINITERIS NVMQVAM TAMEN EFFICIES VT PROPTER EXIGVVM SENILEMQVE SANGVINEM MEVM MARIVM A QVO VRBS ET ITALIA CONSERVATA EST HOSTEM IVDICEM. SCEVOLA: Sapiens inplicātūra tua, Grice—sed quid aliud ex sapientulō talī exspectāre possumus? Nam dum Mariō favēre videris, simul ostendis istōs “agmina” nihil posse efficere nisi strepitum: senex enim, si iūdicium tenet, hostem hostem appellāre recusat—et iūs ipsō metu fortius est. Grice's weekly essay assignment: Quinto Muzio Scevola. Now take the other [Quintus Mucius Scaevola], the augur, and assume for the week that an armed cordon round the Curia is not, in itself, a good argument. Discuss why his refusal to call [Gaius Marius] hostis under threat counts as an instance of rational public speech rather than theatrical obstinacy, and state whether an augur named Scevola sees more clearly in birds, in law, or in the noise made by soldiers who imagine themselves relevant to judgment. Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Muzio Scevola, Quinto (a. u. c.  DCXXXVII). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Muzio – Ossia: Grice e Muzio: la ragione conversazionale nella vernacola  Girolamo Muzio (Padova, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale nella vernacola.  Grice’s reason-governed picture of conversational meaning fits Muzio almost too well: Muzio’s “battle” for the vernacular is not merely a patriotic preference for Italian over Latin, but a thesis about what makes speech intelligible and socially efficacious in the first place—namely, that speakers and hearers share practical norms of inference that let them move from what is said to what is meant without needing an elite code. In Gricean terms, Latin at Oxford functions as a gatekeeping register that can disguise a failure of communicative cooperation (one can sound learned while flouting relevance, perspicuity, or audience-design), whereas Muzio’s vernacularism implicitly backs the Cooperative Principle by insisting that philosophical teaching remain calculable by ordinary reasoners within a living linguistic community. The Padua-to-Oxford contrast in your dialogue sharpens this: Muzio treats dialect, proverb, and “osteria” wit as sites where implicature is most naturally at home, because shared form-of-life knowledge makes indirectness interpretable; Grice, though formed by the Latin-heavy Literae Humaniores regime, ultimately gives a theory that vindicates Muzio’s point by explaining how meaning routinely outruns literal sentence-meaning through rational expectations. Even the comic opposition between “toga latina” and “lingua del popolo” can be cast as a pragmatics claim: when the language is socially marked as elite, the hearer must spend effort distinguishing genuine informative intent from mere status display, while vernacular talk—precisely because it is accountable to common uptake—makes conversational rationality visible in the open, where a well-timed proverb or joke does the philosophical work by implicature rather than by scholastic formality. Grice: “It can be said, to echo M., that there is an even less natural – than in his native Italy, long, largely figurative "battle" at Oxford over the use of Latin versus the vernacular in the teaching of philosophy. This is not a single, sudden conflict but a gradual cultural and institutional shift that occurs over centuries, as the role of the Latin language as the universal language of philosophy diminished. This transition is driven by social and intellectual changes. The Latin language, unlike the vernacular, is a marker of ELITE status. Proficiency in the Latin language is a hall-mark of a gentleman's education and an upper-class trait, zealously guarded to maintain social distinctions. The vernacular is a "commoner's tongue". The vernacular is long considered too unrefined for serious philosophical discourse by many philosophers. Rise of the vernacular: A wider movement across Europe in the late Middle Ages and early modern period legitimised the nationa language, though this is slower in English at Oxford. Practicality vs. Tradition: While the Latin language allows philosophers across Europe to communicate, it becomes a barrier to wider education and the integration of ideas, not so much in philosophy, but especially in science and modern subjects.  Key Dates and Periods Period/Date Event/Significance Pre-17th Century. Every scholarship and examination at Oxford is conducted in the Latin language. Late 17th - Mid-18th Century. A gradual shift begins. While the Latin language remains the formal language of tutorials, seminars, lectures, official documents, and to this day, degrees: Grice, B. A. Lit. Hum. Oxon -- the use of the vernacular in INFORMAL discussion and SOME written work starts to increase. 1750s Prominent intellectuals and philosophers, like Johnson, regard the Latin language as superior for formal philosophical discourse, highlighting ongoing cultural resistance to the vernacular in academia. E. Muzio.  Grice: Caro Muzio, dicono che a Oxford la battaglia tra latino e vernacolo sia stata lunga e figurativa. Ma lei, da Padova, si trova più a suo agio a filosofeggiare nella lingua del popolo o preferisce indossare la toga latina? Muzio: Grice, le confesso che il vernacolo ha una musicalità che il latino non riesce a imitare. Certo, il latino fa sentire tutti un po’ aristocratici, ma provi a dire “filosofia” tra amici in dialetto veneto: è più facile trovare un buon vino che un confine tra pensiero e risata! Grice: Ah, allora forse dovremmo istituire un simposio filosofico in osteria! Chissà che, tra un proverbio e una battuta, la ragione conversazionale non si riveli più profonda che tra i marmi di Oxford. Muzio: Ottima idea, Grice! A Padova si dice che la filosofia nasce dove si brinda. E se qualcuno osa correggere la nostra lingua, lo mandiamo a declinare “buon senso” in latino, così impara che la saggezza va servita sempre col sorriso! Muzio, Girolamo (1518). Isagogicon ad Libellum (introduzione a un libretto in lode di Biagio Elcelio). Augusta.