Grice and his Regents

---- by J. L. Speranza
------- for the Grice Club



---- I SHOULD COMMENT ON DALE'S LAW OF PHILOSOPHER-REGENT PAIRS (below*), but before, I want to irritate R. B. Jones.

In "Actions and Events," Grice reports that, as Broad reported, the only existing item in Hegel's ontology was the Kingdom of Prussia. Hegel's regent was the King of Prussia.

Grice is analysing talk on 'free'. I want to say, with the author of the entry "Kant's moral theory" that 'free' applies first and foremost to countries, as when we say:

"America is a free country."

----- (This has absolute value, -- vide Grice's "Conception of Value").

It may be judged that Grice was biased by then, having gained American citizenship. He had ceased to be a 'subject' to the Queen of England (his former regent). This, incidentally, does not disproof Dale's Law of Philosopher-Regent Pairs".

----- Oddly, the index to PGRICE includes a reference to his regent. I tend to assume that even if you have renounced British citizenship you cannot renounce your Englishry, and that's what counts.

----- It would be good to specify all the regents in Grice's time. He was born in 1913, so he wasn't an Edwardian, but a Georgian.

England (or UK) saw a lot of regents since -- up to the present, Queen Elizabeth II.

It may be argued that what counts are Prime Ministers. Chapman notes that Grice kept careful notes on who was prime-ministering UK -- using a red-ink pen:

This is how Chapman describes what she found at the Bancroft Library:

"The cartons contain a micture of finished manuscripts, draft versions, lecture notes and odd jottings. These are often crammed with writing, but never with anything extraneous to the matter in hand; it seems that Grice never doodled. They offer some clue to at least one reason for Grice's reluctance to publish. Grice seems to have been more struck than most by the essentially inconclusive nature of his own work; no project was, for him, ever really completed, or ever separate from the work that preceded and followed it. So notes and manuscripts were stored along with those from decades earlier if they were perceived to be on a related theme. Papers covered in Grice's cramped hand in faint pencil, characteristic of his work from Oxford, were annotated and added to by the notes in ball-point made years later in Berkeley. Ideas generally associated exclusively with his late work, such as those relating to rationality and to finality, are explored in notes dating back to the 1960s. Work often remained in manuscript form for so long that

------------*it needed to be updated
------------as the years went by. In the original
------------version of 'Indicative Conditionals,'
------------part of the William James Lectures of
------------1967, Grice uses the example:

"Either Wilson or MacMillan will be P.M."

------------At a later date 'Macmillan' has been
------------crossed out and 'Heath' written over
------------the top in a different coloured ink. This
------------was the [outdated] example used
------------when the lecture was eventually published."

So there.

---- Grice refers to at least one American regent, when he gives the example in "Aspects of Reason" that "Richard Nixon should be appointed professor of Theological Morals at Oxford" (or something).


---

---- begin quoted text. Dale writes:


"Dale's Law of Philosopher-Regent Pairs". It goes like this:

For any pair of a philosopher and a regent he/she is closely associated with, the order in which the members of the pair die is strictly determined: before 180 C.E., the regent died first, then the philosopher; after 180 C.E., the philosopher died first, then the regent; and the further from 180 C.E. in either direction, the larger the gap between the death of the members.

Thus:

In 323 B.C.E., Alexander died. Then, in 322 B.C.E., Aristotle died.

In 44 B.C.E., Julius Caesar died. Then, in 43 B.C.E., Cicero.

In 180 C.E., Aurelius died: both a regent and a philosopher. (This is the crossover point.)

In 525 C.E., Boethius died. Then, in 526 C.E., Theodoric the Great died.

In 804 C.E., Alcuin died. In 814 C.E., Charlemagne died.

In 1650, Descartes died. In 1689, Queen Christina died.

As far as I know, nobody ever discovered this law before.