From Pembroke to St. John's and back

S. W. Blackburn, once of Pembroke, writes in the Times Literary Supplement, as per

http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-924387-5

'Although difficult, these lectures sparkle with wit. Grice's love
of subtlety comes across as an infectious intellectual exuberance.
They are challenging and delightful at the same time. Happy the
writer who can leave readers grateful to have shared such pleasure
in his ideas.'

Incidentally, I note that Blackburn explicitly acknowledges an affinity with
Grice's 'Humean projection' in his own _Essays on Quasi_Realism_.

I would be interested to learn how historically can
the views of Grice be made to be. I would think Grice's main influence in
matters axiological is "Kantotle". The name is a fancy one, but is recognised
by the above-mentioned publication, The Times Literary Supplement, when J. F.
Bennett calls his review of the Grice festschrift -- which contains Grice's
'Reply to Richards' the latter part of which is now repr. in _The Conception
of Value_ -- "In the tradition of Kantotle".

Grice's two other books, _Aspects of Reason_, and _Studies in the Way of
Words_ -- Grice's first book -- have scattered references to value inquiry.
In _Aspects_, he explores how many items of our vocabulary seem to be
value-oriented (he toys with the Lewis Carroll line mentioning the "ship",
the "shoe", the "sailing wax", the "king", and the "cabbage" -- all possibly
value-oriented lexical items, Grice claims. The corresponding claim in the
Paul Carus Lectures would be to the third lecture where Grice dwells on "a
tiger tigers" -- 'tiger' woud be a value-oriented item; the way to issue the
corresponding axiological tautology concerning a tiger's value is made by
turning the corresponding noun into a verb.

For all of Grice's references to 'human' and 'person', note, too, that in his
'Method in philosophical psychology' -- also repr. in _Conception of Value_
-- Grice is again playing again this time with the "pirots" (an
acknowledgment to Russell and Carnap, he writes). Apparently, Chomsky also
the phrase Grice is referring : "pirots karulize elatically". Grice's
'Method', Grice is all about the generation (qua Genitor) of, to use Locke's
phrase, a "very rational [pirot]". It is the pirot that becomes, as Butler
summarises, the human and the person in the Carus lectures, and "pirotology"
(another Gricean term) becomes axiology. (Incidentally, D. Parfit's possible
relevant book, _Reasons and persons_ makes one single ref. to Grice, but it
is to Grice's memory-based account in his early 'Personal Identity', rather).

As for the categorical-imperative discussion, _Aspects of Reason_ happens to
spend some time in the grounding of the Kantian distinction between the
'technical imperatives" and a "counsel of prudence" -- the latter a means-end
formulation, having 'to be happy' as an end -- and the "categorical
imperative" proper, which is not really touched.

Etc.