The Implicatures of Cleopatra's Nose

Speranza

Grice wisely entitled the fourth William James lecture, "Indicative conditionals", for although J. L. Mackie was not, Grice was pessimistic that a truth-functional approach to subjunctive 'if' would be welcomed at Harvard!

O. T. O. H., there's Cleopatra's nose, which someone should symbolise---.

KEYWORDS:
ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
CLEOPATRA'S NOSE
Conditionals and causation
MACKIE

The source for the Cleopatra's Nose famous dictum is Pascal. But he does NOT elaborate.

The Irish historian Bury does, in a Rationalist Press Association essay of 1916, "Cleopatra's Nose".

This "Cleopatra's Nose" is quoted sympathetically by Collingwood in "The idea of history", and unsympathetically by Carr in "What is history?"

Trevor-Rope discusses it in "Fly in the Fly Bottle".

And so on.