Neale, S., & B. Stroud, & B. Vermazen, & B. Williams, "H.P[...]G[...]"

Speranza

This is a "University of California, In memoriam, 1992". We may have referred to it in the annals of the club differently, so here is a more correct citing:

Stephen Neale, Barry Stroud, Bruce Vermazen, Bernard Williams

The text is available at

http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb7c6007sj&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00021&toc.depth=1&toc.id=

"Stephen Neale Barry Stroud Bruce Vermazen Bernard Williams"

(the text is pp. 58ff, in the published hard copy).

and we will provide some running commentary.

"H. Paul Grice, Philosophy: Berkeley
1913-1988
Professor Emeritus".

"[Herbert]Paul Grice was born March 13, 1913, in [the affluent, pretty separate, -- as Staffordshire person R. B. J. may testify -- district of Harborne] Birmingham, England [records show that Harborne was originally a part of Staffordshire. All this area has changed, and the creation of "Greater Birmingham", let alone the district of West Midlands, have NOT helped. For a while after belonging initially to Staffordshire, like our R. B. Jones, Harborne was for many years, and pre-1974, part of Warwickshire -- what the Blue-Placque Association should do is mark the house! It is especially important seeing that Mabel Fenton, Grice's mother, ran a prestigious school there, where Grice received his first education. So it was a mother and a teacher for HIM], earned two Firsts at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1935 and 1936 [MA -- tutor: Hardie]), and, after a year as Assistant Master [in Classics -- he taught Greek and Latin, since of course philosophy is unknown at so-called English public schools!] at Rossall School in Lancashire, began a period as Lecturer, Tutor, Fellow, and finally University Lecturer at St. John's College, Oxford [the best college ever, as we may say -- and one of the richest! It's on St. Giles, and not far from the Randolph -- the only 5-star hotel, if you're visiting!]. His Oxford career, during which his reputation as a philosopher's philosopher spread through the English-speaking portion of the world, was interrupted by nearly five years' service in the Royal Navy, at first in the Atlantic theatre and later in [London-based] Admiralty intelligence. After the war, he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard, Brandeis, Stanford, and Cornell, and was elected to the British Academy in 1966. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1967, where he taught until 1986, well past his 1979 retirement, serving briefly as department chairman in 1971. [After his retirement from Berkeley he became Visiting Professor at Seattle -- where J. Baker would drive him via Reed College, where he would give the occasional lecture, too]. He was one of very few philosophers invited to give both the William James Lectures at Harvard (1967 [via Rogers Albritton, whom he had met at Oxford, we expect]) and the John Locke Lectures at Oxford (1978) [These lectures are appointed only to NON-Oxonian philosophers. The fact that Grice had no formal links with Oxford by then allowed for this. His Proemium is a moving thing in that he recalls how he failed the Locke scholarship back in the day!]. Although health problems greatly diminished his physical vigor in later years, he remained philosophically very active, leading discussion groups in his home [up in the Berkeley hills! one of the best mansions up there!], giving papers at professional meetings, and completing the manuscript for his first book, Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard University Press, 1989) very near his death. (A second book, The Conception of Value, based on his Carus Lectures, was published in 1991 by Oxford University Press. [And a third came out in 2011. The faculty at Berkeley should promote more of his research deposited as the Grice Collection at the Bancroft Library. Lots of reserach to be catalogued, and examined]) Among his former students are many of the most distinguished philosophers of the present day [amongst whom we'll mention the late Sir Peter Strawson -- "Robbing Peter to pay Paul", as it were]

"His contribution to the Department of Philosophy was unique. Grice taught only graduate courses, although advanced undergraduates were encouraged to attend, and he was regarded by many as a sort of spiritual head of a new movement in philosophy at Berkeley."

We should put the things in context, and list the faculty as Grice found it back in the day. I tend to think that he was most closely associated with Mates. There was of course Myro. Both Mates and Myro Grice knew from his Oxford days (Myro was a Russian-born, Balliol-educated philosopher). Searle was there, and Davidson joined soon enough? We would need to revise dates. We would also need to revise who BECAME part of faculty, etc., while Grice was there. We especially enjoy the fact that C. A. B. Peacocke, who later was to become the Waynflete prof. of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford, attended Grice's seminars in the 1970s. His literary executors -- Baker, Grandy, and Warner -- were his Berkeley students. Code was a colleague, and a fourth literary executor.

"His seminars were well attended by his colleagues, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, always with a scattering of visitors from other campuses."

Grice seems to have promoted "Hands across the Bay", and his connection with Stanford was intense. Urmson has communicated that although he was close enough to Grice while in Oxford, he never was so when he moved to Stanford for a while. But Suppes, Perry, and a few others, met Grice via the Stanford connection. Bach, of San Francisco, is another interesting connection.

"The presentation was, for most of the audience, more than a little difficult to follow, as Grice laid out his newest ideas slowly, in great detail, with much hesitation and occasional backtracking, shading each thesis with the qualifications he rightly considered necessary to shield it from the objections its very clarity invited."

The Grice Collection, Bancroft Library, contains a few tapes that NEED to be transcribed. A few show Grice actually interacting, Socrates-wise, with his students. He seemed to show or simulate an interest in the student's train of thought. He would, typically, as most tutors do, pretend to be thinking that what the student was saying made SENSE -- perhaps it did! Grice enjoyed collaboration from his early Oxford days. There's joint work on:

philosophy of action with D. F. Pears and J. F. Thomson -- where 'joint work' MEANS joint work (seminars for the MA programme, weekly)

philosophy of logic with Strawson

philosophy of perception with Warnock

philosophy of language with Staal.

philosophy of morals with J. Baker.

The Bancroft Grice collection is especially rich in material dating from the Strawson and the Warnock collaborations. Grice in fact was thinking of a Retrospective to revisit all the Warnockiana.

"The spirited and often heated discussions that ensued led to clarifications, consolidations, and yet further refinements. Particularly memorable were Grice's carefully crafted and often very elaborate extemporaneous refutations of views counter to his own, deployed stepwise, like so many chess moves, until the piece was captured, the whole process accompanied by contained but unconcealed, rising, and somewhat mischievous glee."

There possibly has never been a philosopher so much obsessed, as it were, with his own development. "My philosophical development," as it were. He kept notes dated 1938 ("Negation and Privation", e.g.) which still display the Harborne address! He KNEW what he was writing, what he was thinking. Himself was his biggest philosophical interest. He was interested in how his initially positivistic outlook (in "Negation and Privation", where 'negation' is understood in terms of psychological attitudes of doubt or denial, or absence of belief) became more of an intentionalist one, to thrive as a genially rationalist, irreverent, manifesto.

"Philosophy in Grice's hands was a cooperative enterprise, a conversation in search of truth, despite its outward appearance of combat. And it was an enterprise he loved deeply."

The points about 'eirenic' and 'epagoge' vs. 'diagoge' he explored in "Reply to Richards". His studies in Greek sophistics possibly helped!

"Grice did important work on philosophical subjects as diverse is Aristotle's metaphysics, the foundations of psychology, and ethics. His strongest influence lies in the philosophy of language, where his though continues to shape the way philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists think about meaning, communication, and the relationship between language and mind. He stressed the philosophical importance of separating what a sentence means from, on the one hand, what a speaker said in uttering it and, on the other, what the speaker meant by uttering it."

This was incidentally the point that Urmson focuses on in HIS obituary to Grice for "The Independent"!

"He provided systematic attempts to say precisely what meaning is by providing a series of ever more refined analyses of the utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and what is said. He produced an account of how it is possible for what a speaker says and what that speaker means to diverge. By characterizing a philosophically important distinction between the “genuinely semantic” and “merely pragmatic” implications of a statement, Grice clarified the relationship between classical logic and the semantics of natural language. He provided some much needed philosophical ventilation by deploying his notion of “implicature” to devastating effect against certain over-zealous strains of “ordinary language philosophy,” without himself abandoning the view that philosophy must pay attention to the nuances of ordinary talk. And he undercut some of the most influential arguments for a philosophically significant notion of “presupposition.”"

His target possibly being Strawson, who was claiming that the world contains truth-value gaps! (It is interesting to trace Strawson's terminology in this respect. In his early "On referring" he claims that utterer U IMPLIES that there is a king of France when he says "The king of France is not bald". He later changed that to 'presupposes'!).

"Grice's conviviality is legendary among philosophers. The flavor of his wit survives in his writing, as does a suggestion of the way he could draw his listeners into his perspectives on a topic and treat philosophical discussion as a very high form of entertainment."

He was also a musician, which may have helped. The Grices (Grice Senior, Herbert, and the sons, Paul and Derek, would entertain Mabel Fenton Grice as they engaged in a trio of piano (Paul), violin (Herbert) and cello (Derek). "Doing philosophy should be like getting together to make music," he would say.

"It is a great pity that we can't in the same way preserve his love of laughter and the expressiveness of his ice-blue eyes."

The laughter FROM the audience IS preserved in those tapes. He enjoyed British sarcasm, as it were, self-directed sometimes. He enjoyed all the tropes of implicature qua figures of speech in his own lectures. It was this humorous side to implicature generated that he exploited so cleverly.

"A bench has been placed in front of Moses Hall to commemorate Paul Grice, providing a place to continue indefinitely the philosophical conversation he encouraged, enjoyed, and, to a great extent, lived for."

The memorable bench-warming ceremony was attended by his family and by, among others, H. Sluga, who recalled how Grice taught him to play cricked at Oxford.

"He is survived by his wife, Kathleen; his son, Tim; his daughter, Karen McNicoll; his brother, Derek; and three grandchildren."

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Further updated references have been provided by the Club, elsewhere.