From the City of Dreaming Spires to the City of Eternal Truth

---- Paul Grice writes in "Prejudices and Predilections, which become the Life and Opinions of Paul Grice", by Paul Grice:

"As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places bearing names like [the following.]"

Here follows the list of the 12 monsters:

1. Extensionalism

2. Nominalism

3. Positivism

4. Naturalism

5. Mechanism

6. Phenomenalism

7. Reductionism

8. Physicalism

9. Materialism

10. Empiricism

11. Scepticism

12. Functionalism;

and which Grice describes as:

"menaces which are, indeed, as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicised journey."

(in Grandy/Warner, p. 67).

----

And this is the holy of holiest.

----

So one has to be careful about Geography here.

We have

"Vienna, City of Dreams" -- Carnap's territory.

then we have

"Oxford", "City of Dreaming Spires"

----

and we have, of course, Athens. -- which Chapman -- who has Aristotle as teaching in the "Academy" there -- rather than the Lyceum or Λύκειον --, finds a bit 'too much' to merit a comparison with Oxford. But there's Grice for you:

In
WoW:378:

when he speaks of

"the striking parallels which seem to exist
between the Oxford which received such
a mixed in the mid-twentieth century,
and what I might make so bold as to
call THE OTHER OXFORD which,
more than two thousand three hundred
years earlier, achieved not merely
fame but veneration as the creadle of
our discipline."

----

Chapman comments on p.45, where she has that horrid gaffe of Aristotle teaching at the Academy (rather than the Lyceum):

"In a move that would have
seemed to the critics to have
confirmed their worst fears"

---- that's Chapman's journalese. MY worst fear is abortion --.

"about snobbery and self-importance,
[Grice] compares post-war Oxford"

--- where 'post-war', in Chapman's code, means 'the era of rationing' after the Blitz --

"to the Academy of Athens, with
Austin by implication"

implicature, rather -- and disimplicature at that, seeing that the Hekademos Grove is WITHOUT a city wall!

----

"playing the role of
Aristotle."

Chapman refers this as 'pompous' even if perhaps "NOT as pompous as it may first appear".

Indeed, it's MORE pompous as it second appears!

----

But Grice was beyond all that! He's heading for Zion, now!

----

For surely, he wrote in a statement-of-account from his bank, "Moses must have brought something more than the 10 comms from Mt Sinai". He had brough "Eschatology" by Grice, into the bargain!