U
U SUBJECT INDEX: USE
U NAME INDEX ITALIAN: UBALDI
U NAME INDEX ENGLISH: URMSON (Grice’s collaborator)
ubaldi: Italian philosopher. Pietro
Ubaldi (n. Foligno) è stato un filosofo. Firma di Pietro Ubaldi Nato a Foligno,
vi ha vissuto sino al 1952 ad eccezione del periodo universitario, in cui ha
risieduto a Roma, e nei vent'anni d'insegnamento della lingua inglese: il primo
a Modica, in Sicilia, gli altri diciannove a Gubbio. Dal 1952 al 1972 si è
trasferito in Brasile. Ha scritto 24 volumi - oltre a vari articoli e sette
messaggi - presentando il sistema dell'evoluzione dell'universo e considerando
le leggi dell'evoluzione umana. Ha chiarito i rapporti d'involuzione ed
evoluzione fra le tre dimensioni della materia, dell'energia e dello spirito,
in un processo d'unificazione fra le ipotesi della scienza e i principi della
fede. Nella sua visione ha cercato di spiegare il senso della vita, la funzione
del dolore e la presenza del male. Candidato al premio Nobel nel 1964, all'ultimo
gli fu preferito Jean-Paul Sartre. Il suo sistema filosofico fu considerato da
Albert Einstein - come risulta da un carteggio - "dolce e leggero" e
la sua opera principale, La grande sintesi, fu giudicata da Enrico Fermi
"un quadro di filosofia scientifica e antropologica etica, che oltrepassa
di molto i consimili tentativi dell'ultimo secolo". Nato in
una regione influenzata dalla vicinanza con Assisi e impregnata di spiritualità
francescana, iniziò la scuola nel 1891, proseguì gli studi a Roma e si laureò
in Diritto nel giugno del 1910. Integrò gli studi scolastici leggendo molto,
studiò inoltre pianoforte ed apprese l'inglese, il francese e il tedesco.
Pietro Ubaldi e la moglie M. Antonietta Nel 1911 viaggiò negli Stati
Uniti e nel 1912 si sposò con Maria Antonietta Solfanelli, della vicina città
di Matelica, dalla quale ebbe due figli: Franco, morto nella seconda guerra
mondiale, e Agnese. Si occupò delle proprietà terriere sua e della moglie, che
in seguito cedette in amministrazione ad altri. Nel 1927 avrebbe fatto voto di
povertà e gli sarebbe apparso Cristo. L'apparizione si sarebbe ripetuta nel
1931, insieme a san Francesco di Assisi. Il giorno di Natale dello stesso anno
avrebbe ricevuto il primo di numerosi "messaggi". Divenne professore
di lingua e letteratura inglese, insegnando nelle scuole medie inferiori e
superiori, prima a Modica, in Sicilia, e poi a Gubbio. Tra il 1932 e il
1935, scrisse il libro La grande sintesi, nel quale espose il suo pensiero,
messo all'indice nel 1939, poi riammesso da papa Giovanni XXIII. A questi anni
appartengono dieci dei libri da lui scritti A 65 anni nel 1951, dopo aver
scritto dieci libri, lasciò l'insegnamento e andò in pensione. Fu invitato a
fare in Brasile un giro di conferenze tra luglio e dicembre del 1951 e nel 1952
si trasferì definitivamente con la famiglia a São Vicente, presso Santos, nello
stato di São Paulo, e qui scrisse altri quattordici volumi, dichiarando
conclusa la sua opera nel giorno di Natale del 1971, esattamente quarant'anni
dopo il primo "messaggio" ricevuto. La sua vita può essere
considerata distinta in quattro periodi ventennali, caratterizzati da un lavoro
differente. Nel primo periodo (1891-1910) avrebbe cercato le risposte nella
filosofia, nella religione e nella scienza senza trovarla. Il secondo periodo
(1911-1930) sarebbe stato caratterizzato da una sperimentazione pratica a
contatto col mondo, d'osservazione della realtà della vita. Nel terzo periodo
(1931-1950) scrisse i volumi della sua opera pubblicati in italiano e nel
quarto (1951-1970) la parte restante. Pensiero Pietro Ubaldi ritiene che
esiste un'unica "Sostanza", la cui essenza sarebbe il movimento e che
si manifesterebbe come "materia" (statica), "energia"
(dinamica) e "spirito" (vita). L'essere umano è chiamato ad evolversi
ampliando la percezione della sua coscienza, che da inviduale deve farsi
collettiva, per farsi poi coscienza cosmica. In tale processo viene delineato
il futuro stato organico-unitario dell'umanità, generato da una nuova etica
internazionale, effetto di una consapevolezza razionale e non di un emotivo
pacifismo. L'uomo si inserirebbe nel fenomeno universale dell'evoluzione
tramite la reincarnazione. Considera la sua "Opera" la
manifestazione del proprio destino e della propria ascesa evolutiva,
proponendosi attraverso di essa di arrivare ad una conoscenza utilizzabile per
risolvere i problemi della vita, in maniera consapevole e dignitosa. La
grande legge della vita, per Ubaldi, è quella dell'Amore, tale che la si
dovrebbe seguire in ogni situazione: cercare ciò che unifica. Per questo fare
il male significa voler andare contro la corrente del Sistema, perpetuando la
separazione, produttrice di sopraffazione e violenza, sino all'autodistruzione.
Fare il bene, invece, vuol dire cercare di armonizzarsi con tutto e con tutti,
perseguendo quel processo di unificazione che ci riporta al centro dell'essere,
che è rappresentato dalla presenza dell'ordine e della giustizia del pensiero
divino. In tal senso il segreto della felicità consiste nell'inquadrarsi
nell'ordine divino e la preghiera autentica consisterebbe nella docile
accettazione della Legge, cooperando con la Sua azione. Così pure, il lavorare
rappresenterebbe il diventare cooperatori del funzionamento organico
dell'universo. Il fine dell'esistenza - secondo Pietro Ubaldi - è
rappresentato dall'evoluzione. Si tratta dell'evoluzione etica, iscritta nel
movimento dell'evoluzione dell'universo. L'universo viene così inteso come
un'inestinguibile volontà d'amare, di creare e di affermare, in lotta col
principio opposto dell'inerzia, dell'odio e della distruzione. L'etica viene
concepita come dimensione ascendente, a tante dimensioni quante sono le
posizioni dell'essere lungo la scala evolutiva. In tale compito evolutivo
fondamentale sono gli ideali - aventi la funzione di orientamento e di guida -,
aventi il compito di anticipare una realtà futura da raggiungere. In questa
fase evolutiva l'impegno deve essere quello della spiritualizzazione,
consistente nel seguire gli ideali, che si sono configurati storicamente nelle
religioni e nelle morali. Ciò può avvenire cercando di praticare la
comprensione reciproca e ricercando la fratellanza universale. Si tratta di un
"cammino ascensionale", frutto di libertà e volontà, attraverso le
quali da un lato si struttura la nostra personalità dall'altro la vita
collettiva progredisce servendosi di tali progressi. La legge delle unità
collettive rappresenta un principio evolutivo fondamentale, quello per cui
tendiamo ad unioni sempre più ampie: dalla coppia alla famiglia, dalle nazioni
alle unioni di popoli, sino all'unione di tutti gli esseri viventi del pianeta,
pur mantenendo diversità e multiformità. Per questo, la via è quella del
superamento di ogni separazione: la separazione da sé stessi, dagli altri, dal
mondo. L'evoluzionismo di Ubaldi è, per tutto ciò, ben diverso da quello di
Darwin: guarda all'avvenire ed intuisce oltre l'evoluzione organica già
compiuta dall'essere umano. È più ampio di quello di Teilhard de Chardin, in
quanto concepisce anche un processo involutivo - dallo spirito, attraverso
l'energia, sino alla materia - che motiva e sorregge la via di ritorno,
evolutiva, come processo di unificazione, che dalla presenza del divino nella
materia, attraverso l'energia, ascende verso la spiritualizzazione. È
caratterizzato eticamente, come tensione spirituale verso il superuomo che è
presente in ognuno di noi, differentemente dal superomismo di Nietzsche,
sospinto dal desiderio di espandere solo le potenzialità dell'io. La
produzione della sua opera si basa sul metodo intuitivo, attraverso il quale la
coscienza, facendosi umile e ricettiva, riesce a penetrare per vie interiori
l'intima essenza dei fenomeni, diversamente dal metodo obiettivo che se pur ha
il vantaggio di giungere a conclusioni più universali è nato senza ali, in
quanto basato sulla distinzione tra l'io e il non io, tra il soggetto e
l'oggetto, tra la coscienza e il mondo esteriore. I suoi scritti - seguendo le
sue stesse dichiarazioni - sarebbero passati da una forma ispirata, collegata
ad una forma di contatto telepatico con le noùri (correnti di pensiero), a
livello "supercosciente", al controllo razionale dell'ispirazione
("metodo dell'intuizione razionalmente controllata"). Tale metodo
avrebbe consentito di esaminare sia la "materia" che lo
"spirito" nella loro armonia, unificando scienza e fede, considerate
due aspetti della stessa verità. Elenco degli scritti Ciclo italiano La
grande sintesi I grandi messaggi (nell'edizione brasiliana con una vita
dell'autore). La grande sintesi Le nouri ("correnti di pensiero")
L'ascesi mistica. Frammenti di pensiero e di passione: La nuova civiltà del
terzo millennio Problemi dell'avvenire (Il problema psicologico, filosofico,
scientifico). Ascensioni umane. Dio e universo. Profezie (L'avvenire del
mondo). Ciclo brasiliano Pietro Ubaldi e Manuel Emydio Commentari
(raccolta dei giudizi della stampa sui volumi precedenti). Problemi attuali. Il
sistema (Genesi e struttura dell'universo). La grande battaglia. Evoluzione e
Vangelo La legge di Dio La tecnica funzionale della legge di Dio Caduta e
salvezza Principi di una nuova etica. La discesa degli ideali Un destino
seguendo Cristo Come orientare la propria vita Cristo. Volumi pubblicati in
lingua italiana Storia di un uomo, Fratelli Bocca editori, Milano 1942
Ascenzioni umane. Verso l'armonia con l'ordine cosmico, Edizioni Mediterranee,
Roma 1951 - Cristo e la sua legge, Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma 1970 La grande
sintesi. Sintesi e soluzione dei problemi della scienza e dello spirito,
Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma 1980 Le noùri. Dal superumano al piano concettuale
umano, Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma 1982 La nuova civiltà del terzo millennio.
Verso la nuova era dello spirito, Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma 1988 Problemi
dell'avvenire. La civiltà dello spirito, Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma 1990
L'ascesi mistica. Dal piano concettuale umano al superumano, Edizioni
Mediterranee, Roma 2000 Dio e Universo, Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma 2002 Storia
di un uomo, Edizioni del centro studi italiano di parapsicologia, Recco(Ge)
2006 Il Sistema, Edizioni del centro studi italiano di parapsicologia,
Recco(Ge) 2007 La legge di Dio, Edizioni del centro studi italiano di
parapsicologia, Recco(Ge) 2008 La tecnica funzionale della legge di Dio,
Edizioni del centro studi italiano di parapsicologia, Recco(Ge) 2009 La discesa
degli ideali, Om Edizioni, Città di Castello (Pg) 2010 "Un destino
seguendo Cristo",Om Edizioni, Città di Castello (Pg) 2012 "Evoluzione
e Vangelo", Centro Culturale Pietro Ubaldi, Foligno (Pg) 2016 Bibliografia
Giuseppe Arcidiacono, Pietro Ubaldi e la scienza moderna, in Atti dell'8º
Convegno sul pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi, Roma 2000,73-78. Antony Elenjimittan,
"La missione ecumenica di Pietro Ubaldi", in Atti dell'8º Convegno
sul pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi, Roma 2000, 35-40. Paola Giovetti, "I grandi
iniziati del nostro tempo", Rizzoli, Milano 1993. Franco Lanari (a cura
di), "Il pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi" - Relazioni tenute nei quattro
convegni dedicati a Pietro Ubaldi - Roma 1988-1989-1990, Ed. Mediterranee, Roma
1993. Franco Lanari (a cura di) "Pietro Ubaldi - Profeta del terzo
millennio" , Atti dell'8º Convegno sul pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi, Roma
2000. Filippo Liverziani, "Pietro Ubaldi e le Nòuri", in Atti dell'8º
Convegno sul pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi, Roma 2000, 21-26. Ulderico Pasquale
Magni, "Scienza e mistica", in Atti dell'8º Convegno sul pensiero di
Pietro Ubaldi, Roma 2000, 69-72. Alfredo Marocchino, "Pietro Ubaldi
profeta della intesi tra Metafisica e Nuova Fisica", in Atti dell'8º Convegno
sul pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi, Roma 2000, 43-48. Luca Marzetti, La scala di
Giacobbe, Perugia 2010. Gaetano Mollo, Pietro Ubaldi biosofo dell'evoluzione
umana, Ed. Mediterranee, Roma 2006. Gaetano Mollo, "La formazione
dell'uomo evoluto nel pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi", in "Pedagogia e
Vita", n. 4, 2005, 23-36. Gaetano Mollo, "La visione del mondo tra
scienza e fede di Pietro Ubaldi", in Atti dell'8º Convegno sul pensiero di
Pietro Ubaldi, Roma 2000, 49-59. Gaetano Mollo, "La visione dell'universo.
La prospettiva di Pietro Ubaldi", in "Rivista di teosofia", n°
2, febbraio 2001,15-17. Gaetano Mollo, "Il rapporto tra scienza e fede. La
prospettiva di Pietro Ubaldi", in "Rivista di teosofia", n° 12,
dicembre 2001,10-12. Lorenzo Ostuni, Fisica e metafisica di Pietro Ubaldi in relazione
all'uomo contemporaneo, in Atti dell'8º Convegno sul pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi,
Roma 2000, 35-40. Riccardo Pieracci, Pietro Ubaldi e la Grande Sintesi, Ed.
Mediterranee, Roma 1986. Riccardo Pieracci, "Pietro Ubaldi mistico
dell'Umbria", Edizioni Eugubina, Gubbio 1973. Antonio Pieretti,
"Pietro Ubaldi. La civiltà del terzo millennio", Bollettino storico
della città di Foligno, XIX, 1995, 469. Carlo Splendore, "La Legge Ciclica
dell'evoluzione nel pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi", in Atti dell'8º Convegno
sul pensiero di Pietro Ubaldi, Roma 2000,79-88. Altri progetti Collabora a
Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o altri file su Pietro
Ubaldi Collegamenti esterni Sito ufficiale del Centro culturale "Pietro
Ubaldi" di Foligno, su pietroubaldi.com. URL consultato il 02-02-2010.
Comitato del Comune di Foligno per la divulgazione del pensiero di Pietro
Ubaldi, presieduto da Gaetano Mollo, su gaetanomollo.it. URL consultato il
02-02-2010. L'opera di Pietro Ubaldi, su cesnur.org. URL consultato il
23-10-2010 (archiviato dall'url originale il 23 giugno 2011)., in Massimo
Introvigne, PierLuigi Zoccatelli, Le religioni in Italia (sezione
"Spiritismo, parapsicologia, ricerca psichica"), sul sito Cesnur.org
(Center for Studies on New Religions) Controllo di autorità VIAF (EN) 14829753
· ISNI (EN) 0000 0000 0161 9674 · BNF (FR) cb12266472f (data) · WorldCat
Identities (EN) viaf-14829753 Biografie Portale Biografie Filosofia Portale
Filosofia Letteratura Portale Letteratura Categorie: Filosofi italiani del XX
secoloTeologi italianiNati nel 1886Morti nel 1972Nati il 18 agostoMorti il 29
febbraioNati a FolignoFilosofi cattoliciItaliani emigrati in BrasileStudenti
della Sapienza - Università di Roma[altre]. Refs.: Luigi Speranza,
“Ubalid e Grice,” per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa
Grice, Liguria, Italia.
uncertainty: one of those negativisims by Grice – cfr.
‘non-certainty’ -- v. certum. It may be held that ‘uncertain’ is wrong. Grice
is certain that p. It is not the case that Grice is certain that p.
Umanesimo
rinascimentale -- humanism: Grice distinguishes between a human and a person –
so he is more of a personalist than a humanism. “But the distinction is
implicatural.” He was especially keen on Italian humanism. a set of presuppositions that assigns to
human beings a special position in the scheme of things. Not just a school of
thought or a collection of specific beliefs or doctrines, humanism is rather a
general perspective from which the world is viewed. That perspective received a
gradual yet persistent articulation during different historical periods and
continues to furnish a central leitmotif of Western civilization. It comes into
focus when it is compared with two competing positions. On the one hand, it can
be contrasted with the emphasis on the supernatural, transcendent domain, which
considers humanity to be radically dependent on divine order. On the other
hand, it resists the tendency to treat humanity scientifically as part of the
natural order, on a par with other living organisms. Occupying the middle
position, humanism discerns in human beings unique capacities and abilities, to
be cultivated and celebrated for their own sake. The word ‘humanism’ came into
general use only in the nineteenth century but was applied to intellectual and
cultural developments in previous eras. A teacher of classical languages and
literatures in Renaissance Italy was described as umanista (contrasted with
legista, teacher of law), and what we today call “the humanities,” in the
fifteenth century was called studia humanitatis, which stood for grammar,
rhetoric, history, literature, and moral philosophy. The inspiration for these
studies came from the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Latin texts; Plato’s
complete works were translated for the first time, and Aristotle’s philosophy
was studied in more accurate versions than those available during the Middle
Ages. The unashamedly humanistic flavor of classical writings had a tremendous
impact on Renaissance scholars. Here, one felt no weight of the supernatural
pressing on the human mind, demanding homage and allegiance. Humanity – with
all its distinct capacities, talents, worries, problems, possibilities – was
the center of interest. It has been said that medieval thinkers philosophized
on their knees, but, bolstered by the new studies, they dared to stand up and
to rise to full stature. Instead of devotional Church Latin, the medium of
expression was the people’s own language – Italian, French, German, English.
Poetical, lyrical self-expression gained momentum, affecting all areas of life.
New paintings showed great interest in human form. Even while depicting
religious scenes, Michelangelo celebrated the human body, investing it with instrinsic
value and dignity. The details of daily life – food, clothing, musical
instruments – as well as nature and landscape – domestic and exotic – were
lovingly examined in paintings and poetry. Imagination was stirred by stories
brought home by the discoverers of new lands and continents, enlarging the
scope of human possibilities as exhibited in the customs and the natural
environments of strange, remote peoples. The humanist mode of thinking deepened
and widened its tradition with the advent of eighteenth-century thinkers. They
included French philosophes like Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and other
European and American figures – Bentham, Hume, Lessing, Kant, Franklin, and
Jefferson. Not always agreeing with one another, these thinkers nevertheless formed
a family united in support of such values as freedom, equality, tolerance,
secularism, and cosmopolitanism. Although they championed untrammeled use of
the mind, they also wanted it to be applied in social and political reform,
encouraging individual creativity and exalting the active over the
contemplative life. They believed in the perfectibility of human nature, the
moral sense and responsibility, and the possibility of progress. The optimistic
motif of perfectibility endured in the thinking of nineteenth- and
twentiethcentury humanists, even though the accelerating pace of
industrialization, the growth of urban populations, and the rise in crime,
nationalistic squabbles, and ideological strife leading to largescale inhumane
warfare often put in question the efficacy of humanistic ideals. But even the
depressing run of human experience highlighted the appeal of those ideals,
reinforcing the humanistic faith in the values of endurance, nobility,
intelligence, moderation, flexibility, sympathy, and love. Humanists attribute
crucial importance to education, conceiving of it as an all-around development
of personality and individual talents, marrying science to poetry and culture
to democracy. They champion freedom of thought and opinion, the use of intelligence
and pragmatic research in science and technology, and social and political
systems governed by representative institutions. Believing that it is possible
to live confidently without metaphysical or religious certainty and that all
opinions are open to revision and correction, they see human flourishing as
dependent on open communication, discussion, criticism, and unforced consensus.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Italian humanism, Holofernes’s Mantuan, from Petrarca to
Valla.”
unexpected
examination paradox, a paradox about
belief and prediction. One version is as follows: It seems that a teacher could
both make, and act on, the following announcement to his class: “Sometime
during the next week I will set you an examination, but at breakfast time on
the day it will occur, you will have no good reason to expect that it will
occur on that day.” If he announces this on Friday, could he not do what he
said he would by, say, setting the examination on the following Wednesday? The
paradox is that there is an argument purporting to show that there could not be
an unexpected examination of this kind. For let us suppose that the teacher
will carry out his threat, in both its parts; i.e., he will set an examination,
and it will be unexpected. Then he cannot set the examination on Friday
assuming this to be the last possible day of the week. For, by the time Friday
breakfast arrives, and we know that all the previous days have been
examination-free, we would have every reason to expect the examination to occur
on Friday. So leaving the examination until Friday is inconsistent with setting
an unexpected examination. For similar reasons, the examination cannot be held
on Thursday. Given our previous conclusion that it cannot be delayed until
Friday, we would know, when Thursday morning came, and the previous days had
been examination-free, that it would have to be held on Thursday. So if it were
held on Thursday it would not be unexpected. So it cannot be held on Thursday.
Similar reasoning sup938 U 938 posedly
shows that there is no day of the week on which it can be held, and so
supposedly shows that the supposition that the teacher can carry out his threat
must be rejected. This is paradoxical, for it seems plain that the teacher can
carry out his threat. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice’s book of paradoxes, with
pictures and illustrations to confuse you.”
uniformity of
nature – Grice: “’uniformity’ has
nothing to do with ‘form’ here!” – Grice: “I once used the phrase in a tutorial
with Hardie: “What do you mean by ‘of’?’ he asked” -- a state of affairs thought to be required if
induction is to be justified. For example, inductively strong arguments, such
as ‘The sun has risen every day in the past; therefore, the sun will rise
tomorrow’, are thought to presuppose that nature is uniform in the sense that
the future will resemble the past, in this case with respect to the diurnal
cycle. The Scottish empiricist Hume was the first to make explicit that the
uniformity of nature is a substantial assumption in inductive reasoning. Hume
argued that, because the belief that the future will resemble the past cannot
be grounded in experience for the future
is as yet unobserved induction cannot be
rationally justified; appeal to it in defense of induction is either
question-begging or illicitly metaphysical. Francis Bacon’s “induction by
enumeration” and J. S. Mill’s “five methods of experimental inquiry” presuppose
that nature is uniform. Whewell appealed to the uniformity of nature in order
to account for the “consilience of inductions,” the tendency of a hypothesis to
explain data different from those it was originally introduced to explain. For
reasons similar to Hume’s, Popper holds that our belief in the uniformity of
nature is a matter of faith. Reichenbach held that although this belief cannot
be justified in advance of any instance of inductive reasoning, its
presupposition is vindicated by successful inductions. It has proved difficult
to formulate a philosophical statement of the uniformity of nature that is both
coherent and informative. It appears contradictory to say that nature is
uniform in all respects, because inductive inferences always mark differences
of some sort e.g., from present to future, from observed to unobserved, etc.,
and it seems trivial to say that nature is uniform in some respects, because
any two states of nature, no matter how different, will be similar in some
respect. Not all observed regularities in the world or in data are taken to
support successful inductive reasoning; not all uniformities are, to use
Goodman’s term, “projectible.” Philosophers of science have therefore proposed
various rules of projectibility, involving such notions as simplicity and
explanatory power, in an attempt to distinguish those observed patterns that
support successful inductions and thus are taken to represent genuine causal
relations from those that are accidental or spurious.
unity in
diversity, in aesthetics, the
principle that the parts of the aesthetic object must cohere or hang together
while at the same time being different enough to allow for the object to be
complex. This principle defines an important formal requirement used in judging
aesthetic objects. If an object has insufficient unity e.g., a collection of
color patches with no recognizable patterns of any sort, it is chaotic or lacks
harmony; it is more a collection than one object. But if it has insufficient
diversity e.g., a canvas consisting entirely of one color with no internal
differentiations, it is monotonous. Thus, the formal pattern desired in an
aesthetic object is that of complex parts that differ significantly from each
other but fit together to form one interdependent whole such that the character
or meaning of the whole would be changed by the change of any part.
universal
instantiation: Grice: “Slightly
confusing in that the universe is not a pluri-verse.” -- discussed by Grice in
his System G -- also called universal quantifier elimination. 1 The argument
form ‘Everything is f; therefore a is f’, and arguments of this form. 2 The
rule of inference that permits one to infer that any given thing is f from the
premise that everything is f. In classical logic, where all terms are taken to
denote things in the domain of discourse, the rule says simply that from vA[v]
one may infer A[t], the result of replacing all free occurrences of v in A[v]
by the term t. If non-denoting terms are allowed, however, as in free logic,
then the rule would require an auxiliary premise of the form Duu % t to ensure
that t denotes something in the range of the variable v. Likewise in modal
logic, which is sometimes held to contain terms that do not denote “genuine
individuals” the things over which variables range, an auxiliary premise may be
required. 3 In higher-order logic, the rule of inference that says that from
XA[X] one may infer A[F], where F is any expression of the grammatical category
e.g., n-ary predicate appropriate to that of X e.g., n-ary predicate variable.
universale: Grice: “Very Ciceronian – not found in Aristotle.” --
Like ‘qualia,’ which is the plural for ‘quale,’ ‘universalia’ is the plural for
‘universale.’ The totum for Grice on “all” -- This is a Gricism. It all started
with arbor porphyriana. It is supposed to translate Aristotle’s “to kath’olou”
(which happens to be one of the categories in Kant, “alleheit,” and which
Aristotle contrasts with “to kath’ekastou,” (which Kant has as a category,
SINGULARITAS. For a nominalist, any predicate is a ‘name,’ hence ‘nominalism.’
Opposite ‘realism.’ “Nominalism” is actually a misnomer. The opposite of
realism is anti-realism. We need something like ‘universalism,’ (he who
believes in the existence, not necessary ‘reality’ of a universal) and a
‘particularist,’ or ‘singularist,’ who does not. Note that the opposite of
‘particularism,’ is ‘totalism.’ (Totum et pars). Grice holds a set-theoretical
approach to the universalium. Grice is willing to provide always a
set-theoretical extensionalist (in terms of predicate) and an intensionalist
variant in terms of property and category. Grice explicitly uses ‘X’ for
utterance-type (WOW:118), implying a distinction with the utterance-token.
Grice gets engaged in a metabolical debate concerning the reductive
analysis of what an utterance-type means in terms of a claim to the effect
that, by uttering x, an utterance-token of utterance-type X, the utterer means
that p. The implicaturum is x (utterance-token). Grice is not enamoured
with the type/token or token/type distinction. His thoughts on logical
form are provocative. f you cannot put it in logical form, it is not worth
saying. Strawson infamously reacted with a smile. Oh, no: if you CAN put
it in logical form, it is not worth saying. Grice refers to the type-token distinction
when he uses x for token and X for type. Since Bennett cares to call Grice a
meaning-nominalist we should not care about the type X anyway. He expands on
this in Retrospective Epilogue. Grice should have payed more attention to the
distinction seeing that it was Ogdenian. A common mode of estimating the
amount of matter in a printed book is to count the number of words. There will
ordinarily be about twenty thes on a page, and, of course, they count as twenty
words. In another use of the word word, however, there is but one word the in
the English language; and it is impossible that this word should lie visibly on
a page, or be heard in any voice. Such a Form, Peirce, as cited by Ogden and
Richards, proposes to term a type. A single object such as this or that word on
a single line of a single page of a single copy of a book, Peirce ventures to
call a token. In order that a type may be used, it has to be embodied in a
token which shall be a sign of the type, and thereby of the object the type
signifies, and Grice followed suit. Refs.: Some of the sources are given under
‘abstractum.’ Also under ‘grecianism,’ since Grice was keen on exploring what
Aristotle has to say about this in Categoriae, due to his joint research with
Austin, Code, Friedman, and Strawson. Grice also has a specific Peirceian essay
on the type-token distinction. BANC. Grice – “A Ciceronian technicism, not
found in Aristotle. -- (‘the altogether nice girl’) dictum de omni et nullo,
also dici de omni et nullo Latin, ‘said of all and none’, two principles that
were supposed by medieval logicians to underlie all valid syllogisms. Dictum de
omni applies most naturally to universal affirmative propositions, maintaining
that in such a proposition, whatever falls under the subject term also falls under
the predicate term. Thus, in ‘Every whale is a mammal’, whatever is included
under ‘whale’ is included under ‘mammal’. Dictum de nullo applies to universal
negative propositions, such as ‘No whale is a lizard’, maintaining that
whatever falls under the subject term does not fall under the predicate
term. SYLLOGISM. W.E.M. Diderot, Denis
171384, philosopher, Encyclopedist,
dramatist, novelist, and art critic, a champion of Enlightenment values. He is
known primarily as general editor of the Encyclopedia 174773, an analytical and
interpretive compendium of eighteenth-century science and technology. A friend
of Rousseau and Condillac, Diderot tr. Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue
1745 into . Revealing Lucretian affinities Philosophical Thoughts, 1746, he
assailed Christianity in The Skeptics’ Walk 1747 and argued for a materialistic
and evolutionary universe Letter on the Blind, 1749; this led to a short
imprisonment. Diderot wrote mediocre bourgeois comedies; some bleak fiction The
Nun, 1760; and two satirical dialogues, Rameau’s Nephew 1767 and Jacques the
Fatalist 176584, his masterpieces. He innovatively theorized on drama Discourse
on Dramatic Poetry, 1758 and elevated art criticism to a literary genre Salons
in Grimm’s Literary Correspondence. At Catherine II’s invitation, Diderot
visited Saint Petersburg in 1773 and planned the creation of a Russian .
Promoting science, especially biology and chemistry, Diderot unfolded a
philosophy of nature inclined toward monism. His works include physiological
investigations, Letter on the Deaf and Dumb 1751 and Elements of Physiology
177480; a sensationalistic epistemology, On the Interpretation of Nature 1745;
an aesthetic, Essays on Painting 1765; a materialistic philosophy of science,
D’Alembert’s Dream 1769; an anthropology, Supplement to the Voyage of
Bougainville 1772; and an anti-behavioristic Refutation of Helvétius’ Work “On
Man” 177380.
universalisability: -- Grice: ‘Slightly confusing, in that the universe
is not a pluri-verse” -- discussed along three dimension by Grice:
applicational conceptual, and formal. -- 1 Since the 0s, the moral criterion
implicit in Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act only
on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a universal law,” often
called the principle of universality. A maxim or principle of action that
satisfies this test is said to be universalizable, hence morally acceptable;
one that does not is said to be not universalizable, hence contrary to duty. 2
A second sense developed in connection with the work of Hare in the 0s. For
Hare, universalizability is “common to all judgments which carry descriptive
meaning”; so not only normative claims moral and evaluative judgments but also
empirical statements are universalizable. Although Hare describes how such
universalizuniversal universalizability 940
940 ability can figure in moral argument, for Hare “offenses against . .
. universalizability are logical, not moral.” Consequently, whereas for Kant
not all maxims are universalizable, on Hare’s view they all are, since they all
have descriptive meaning. 3 In a third sense, one that also appears in Hare,
‘universalizability’ refers to the principle of universalizability: “What is
right or wrong for one person is right or wrong for any similar person in
similar circumstances.” This principle is identical with what Sidgwick The
Methods of Ethics called the Principle of Justice. In Generalization in Ethics
1 by M. G. Singer b.6, it is called the Generalization Principle and is said to
be the formal principle presupposed in all moral reasoning and consequently the
explanation for the feature alleged to hold of all moral judgments, that of
being generalizable. A particular judgment of the form ‘A is right in doing x’
is said to imply that anyone relevantly similar to A would be right in doing
any act of the kind x in relevantly similar circumstances. The characteristic
of generalizability, of presupposing a general rule, was said to be true of
normative claims, but not of all empirical or descriptive statements. The
Generalization Principle GP was said to be involved in the Generalization
Argument GA: “If the consequences of everyone’s doing x would be undesirable,
while the consequences of no one’s doing x would not be, then no one ought to
do x without a justifying reason,” a form of moral reasoning resembling, though
not identical with, the categorical imperative CI. One alleged resemblance is
that if the GP is involved in the GP, then it is involved in the CI, and this
would help explain the moral relevance of Kant’s universalizability test. 4 A
further extension of the term ‘universalizability’ appears in Alan Gewirth’s
Reason and Morality 8. Gewirth formulates “the logical principle of
universalizability”: “if some predicate P belongs to some subject S because S
has the property Q . . . then P must also belong to all other subjects S1, S2,
. . . , Sn that have Q.” The principle of universalizability “in its moral
application” is then deduced from the logical principle of universalizability,
and is presupposed in Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency, “Act in
accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as yourself,” which
is taken to provide an a priori determinate way of determining relevant
similarities and differences, hence of applying the principle of
universalizability. The principle of universalizability is a formal principle;
universalizability in sense 1, however, is intended to be a substantive
principle of morality.
universalisierung: Grice: “Ironically, the Dutch so careful with
their lingo, this is vague, in that the universe is not a pluriverse.” -- While
Grice uses ‘universal,’ he means like Russell, the unnecessary implication of
‘every.’ Oddly, Kant does not relate this –ung with the first of his three
categories under ‘quantitas,’ the universal. But surely they are related.
Problem is that Kant wasn’t aware because he kept moving from the Graeco-Roman
classical vocabulary to the Hun. Thus, Kant has “Allheit,” which he renders in
Latinate as “Universitas,” and “Totalität,” gehört in der Kategorienlehre des
Philosophen Immanuel Kant zu den reinen Verstandesbegriffen, d. h. zu den
Elementen des Verstandes, welche dem Menschen bereits a priori, also unabhängig
von der sinnlichen Erfahrung gegeben sind. “Allheit” wird wie Einheit und
Vielheit den Kategorien der “Quantität” zugeordnet und entspricht den Einzelnen
Urteilen (Urteil hier im Sinn von 'Aussage über die Wirklichkeit') in der Form
„Ein S ist P“, also z. B. „Immanuel Kant ist ein Philosoph“. Sie wird von Kant
definiert als „die Vielheit als Einheit betrachtet“ (KrV, B 497 f.)[3]. Siehe
auch Transzendentale Analytik Weblinks. Allheit – Bedeutungserklärungen,
Wortherkunft, Synonyme, Übersetzungen Einzelnachweise Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
Reclam, Stuttgart 1966, ISBN 3-15-006461-9.
Peter Kunzmann, Franz-Peter Burkard, Franz Wiedmann: dtv-Atlas zur
Philosophie. dtv, München 1991, ISBN 3-423-03229-4, S. 136 ff. Zitiert nach Arnim Regenbogen, Uwe Meyer
(Hrsg.): Wörterbuch der Philosophischen Begriffe. Meiner, Hamburg 2005, ISBN
3-7873-1738-4: Allheit Kategorie: Ontologie. Referred to by Grice in his
“Method,” – “A requisite for a maxim to enter my manual, which I call the
Immanuel, is that it should be universalizable. Die Untersuchung zur
»Universalisierung in der Ethik« greift eine Problematik auf, die für eine
Reihe der prominentesten Ethikentwürfe der Gegenwart sowohl des
deutschsprachigen wie des angelsächsischen Raumes zentral ist, nämlich ob der
normative Rationalitätsanspruch, den ethische Argumentationen erheben, auf eine
dem wissenschaftlichen Anspruch der deskriptiven Gesetzeswissenschaften
vergleichbare Weise eingelöst werden kann, nämlich durch Verallgemeinerungs-
oder Universalisierungsprinzipien. universalizability
Ethics The idea that moral judgments should be universalizable can be traced to
the Golden Rule and Kant’s ethics. In the twentieth century it was elaborated
by Hare and became a major thesis of his prescriptivism. The principle states
that all moral judgments are universalizable in the sense that if it is right
for a particular person A to do an action X, then it must likewise be right to
do X for any person exactly like A, or like A in the relevant respects.
Furthermore, if A is right in doing X in this situation, then it must be right
for A to do X in other relevantly similar situations. Hare takes this feature
to be an essential feature of moral judgments. An ethical statement is the
issuance of a universal prescription. Universalizability is not the same as generality,
for a moral judgment can be highly specific and detailed and need not be
general or simple. The universalizability principle enables Hare to avoid the
charge of irrationality that is usually lodged against non-cognitivism, to
which his prescriptivism belongs, and his theory is thus a great improvement on
emotivism. “I have been maintaining that the meaning of the word ‘ought’ and
other moral words is such that a person who uses them commits himself thereby
to a universal rule. This is the thesis of universalizability.” Hare, Freedom
and Reason.
universe of
discourse: Grice: “The phrase is
confusing, seeing the uni-verse, is not a pluri-verse.” Tthe usually limited
class of individuals under discussion, whose existence is presupposed by the
discussants, and which in some sense constitutes the ultimate subject matter of
the discussion. Once the universe of a discourse has been established, expressions
such as ‘every object’ and ‘some object’ refer respectively to every object or
to some object in the universe of discourse. The concept of universe of
discourse is due to De Morgan in 1846, but the expression was coined by Boole
eight years later. When a discussion is formalized in an interpreted standard
first-order language, the universe of discourse is taken as the “universe” of
the interpretation, i.e., as the range of values of the variables. Quine and
others have emphasized that the universe of discourse represents an ontological
commitment of the discussants. In a discussion in a particular science, the
universe of discourse is often wider than the domain of the science, although
economies of expression can be achieved by limiting the universe of discourse
to the domain.
unstructured:
Typically, Grice is more interested in the negatives: the unstructured is prior
to the structured, surely. Grice: “Paget was able to structure compositionality
with his hands!” -- one of those negativisms of Grice (cfr. ‘non-structured’).
Surely Grice cared a hoot for French anthropological structuralism! So he has
the ‘unstructured’ followed by the structured. A handwave is unstructured,
meaning syntactically unstructured, and in it you have all the enigma of reason
resolved. By waving his hand, U means that SUBJECT: the emissor, copula IS,
predicate: A KNOWER OF THE ROUTE, or ABOUT TO LEAVE the emissor.There is a lot
of structure in the soul of the emissor. So apply this to what Grice calls a
‘soul-to-soul transfer’ to which he rightly reduces communication. Even if it
is n unstructured communication device, and maybe a ‘one-off’ one, to use
Blackburn’s vulgarism, we would have the three types of correspondence of
Grice’s Semantic Triangle obtaining. First, the psychophysical. The emissor
knows the route, and he shows it. And he wants the emissee to ‘catch’ or get
the emissor’s drift. It is THAT route which he knows. So the TWO psychophysical
correspondences obtain. Then there are the two psychosemiotic correspondences.
The emissor intends that the emissor will recognise the handwave as a signal
that he, the emissor, knows the route. As for the emissee’s psychosemiotic
correspondence: he better realise it is THAT route – to Banbury, surely, with
bells in his shoes, as Grice’s mother would sing to him. And then we have the
two semio-physical correspondences. If the emissor DOES know the route (and he
is not lying, or rather, he is not mistaken about it), then that’s okay. Many
people say or signal that they know because they feel ashamed to admit their
ignorance. So it is very expectable, outside Oxford, to have someone waving
meaning that he knows the route, when he doesn’t. This is surely non-natural,
because it’s Kiparsky-non-factive. Waving the hand thereby communicating that
he knows the route does not entail that he knows the route (as ‘spots’ do
entail measles). From the emissee’s point of view, provided the emissor knows
the route and shows it, the emissee will understand, hopefully, and feel
assured that the emissor will hopefully reach the destination, Banbury, surely,
safely enough.
uptake:
used by Grice slightly different from Austin. Austin: “The performance of an
illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake.” “I distinguish some senses
of consequences and effects, especially three senses in which effects can come
in even with illocutionary acts, viz. securing uptake, taking effect, and
inviting a response.” “Comparing
stating to what we have said about the illocu- tionary act, it is an act
to which, just as much as to other illocutionary acts, it is essential to
‘secure uptake’ : the doubt about whether I stated something if it was
not heard or understood is just the same as the doubt about whether
I warned sotto voce or protested if someone did not take it as a protest,
&c. And statements do ‘take effect’ just as much as ‘namings’, say:
if I have stated something, then that commits me to other
statements: other statements made by me will be in order or out of
order.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Verstehen and uptake.”
urmson’s
bribe: Urmson’s use of the bribe is
‘accidental.’ What Urmson is getting at is that if the briber intends the bribe
acts as a cause to effect a response, even a cognitive one, in the bribe, the
propositional complexum, “This is a bribe,” should not necessarily be
communicated. It is amazing how Grice changed the example into one about
physical action. They seem different. On the other hand, Grice would not have
cared to credit Urmson had it not believed it worth knowing that the criticism
arose within the Play Group (Grice admired Urmson). In his earlier “Meaning,”
Grice presents his own self-criticisms to arrive at a more refined analysis.
But in “Utterer’s meaning and intention,” when it comes to the SUFFICIENCY,
it’s all about other people: notably Urmson and Strawson. Grice cites Stampe
before Strawson, but many ignore Stampe on the basis that Strawson does not
credit him, and there is no reason why he should have been aware of it. But
Stampe was at Oxford at the time so this is worth noting. It has to be
emphasised that the author list is under ‘sufficiency.’ Under necessity, Grice
does not credit the source of the objections, so we can assume it is Grice
himself, as he had presented criticisms to his own view within the same ‘Meaning.’
It is curious that Grice loved Stampe. Grice CHANGED Urmon’s example, and was
unable to provide a specific scenario to Strawson’s alleged counterexample,
because Strawson is vague himself. But Stampe’s, Grice left unchanged. It seems
few Oxonian philosohpers of Grice’s playgroup had his analytic acumen. Consider
his sophisticated account of ‘meaning.’ It’s different if you are a graduate
student from the New World, and you have to prove yourself intelligent. But for
Grice’s playgroup companion, only three or four joined in the analysis. The
first is Urmson. The second is Strawson. The case by Urmson involved a tutee
offering to buy Gardiner an expensive dinner, hoping that Gardiner will give
him permission for an over-night visit to London. Gardiner knows that
his tutee wants his permission. The appropriate analysans for "By offering
to buy Gardiner an expensive dinner, the tuttee means that Gardiner should give
him permission for an overnight stay in London" are fulfilled: (1) The
tutee offers to buy Gardiner an expensive dinner with the intention of
producing a certain response on the part of Gardiner (2) The tutee intends that
Gardiner should recognize (know, think) that the tutee is offering to buy him
an expensive dinner with the intention of producing this response; (3) The
tutee intends that Gardiners recognition (thought) that the tutee has the
intention mentioned in (2) should be at least part of Gardiners reason for
producing the response mentioned. If in general to specify in (i) the nature of
an intended response is to specify what was meant, it should be correct not
only to say that by offering to buy Gardiner an expensive dinner, the tutee
means that Gardiner is to give him permission for an overnight stay in London,
but also to say that he meas that Gardiner should (is to) give him permission
for an over-night visit to London. But in fact one would not wish to say either
of these things; only that the tutee meant Gardiner to give him permission. A
restriction seems to be required, and one which might serve to eliminate this
range of counterexamples can be identified from a comparison of two scenarios.
Grice goes into a tobacconists shop, ask for a packet of my favorite
cigarettes, and when the unusually suspicious tobacconist shows that he wants
to see the color of my money before he hands over the goods, I put down the
price of the cigarettes on the counter. Here nothing has been meant.
Alternatively, Grice goes to his regular tobacconist (from whom I also purchase
other goods) for a packet of my regular brand of Players Navy Cuts, the price
of which is distinctive, say 43p. Grice says nothing, but puts down 43p. The
tobacconist recognizes my need, and hands over the packet. Here, I think, by
putting down 43p I meant something-Namesly, that I wanted a packet of Players
Navy Cuts. I have at the same time provided an inducement. The distinguishing
feature of the second example seems to be that here the tobacconist recognized,
and was intended to recognize, what he was intended to do from my "utterance"
(my putting down the money), whereas in the first example this was not the
case. Nor is it the case with respect to Urmson’s case of the tutees attempt to
bribe Gardiner. So one might propose that the analysis of meaning be amended
accordingly. U means something by uttering x is true if: (i) U intends, by
uttering x, to induce a certain response in A (2) U intends A to recognize, at
least in part from the utterance of x, that U intends to produce that response
(3) U intends the fulfillment of the intention mentioned in (2) to be at least
in part As reason for fulfilling the intention mentioned in (i). This copes
with Urmsons counterexample to Grices proposal in the Oxford Philosophical
Society talk involving the tutee attempting to bribe Gardiner. Urmson’s
super-erogation: ‘super-erogatum --. 1520s,
"performance of more than duty requires," in Catholic theology, from
Late Latin supererogationem (nominative supererogatio) "a payment in
addition," noun of action from past participle stem of supererogare
"pay or do additionally," from Latin super "above, over"
(see super-) + erogare "pay out," from ex "out" (see ex-) +
rogare "ask, request," apparently a figurative use of a PIE verb
meaning literally "to stretch out (the hand)," from root *reg-
"move in a straight line." Grice got interested in this thanks
to J. O. Urmson who discussed his ‘saints and heroes’ with the Saturday morning
kindergarten held by Austin -- the property of going beyond the call of duty.
Supererogatory actions are sometimes equated with actions that are morally good
in the sense that they are encouraged by morality but not required by it.
Sometimes they are equated with morally commendable actions, i.e., actions that
indicate a superior moral character. It is quite common for morally good
actions to be morally commendable and vice versa, so that it is not surprising
that these two kinds of supererogatory actions are not clearly distinguished
even though they are quite distinct. Certain kinds of actions are not normally
considered to be morally required, e.g., giving to charity, though morality
certainly encourages doing them. However, if one is wealthy and gives only a
small amount to charity, then, although one’s act is supererogatory in the
sense of being morally good, it is not supererogatory in the sense of being
morally commendable, for it does not indicate a superior moral character.
Certain kinds of actions are normally morally required, e.g., keeping one’s
promises. However, when the harm or risk of harm of keeping one’s promise is
sufficiently great compared to the harm caused by breaking the promise to
excuse breaking the promise, then keeping one’s promise counts as a
supererogatory act in the sense of being morally commendable. Some versions of
consequentialism claim that everyone is always morally required to act so as to
bring about the best consequences. On such a theory there are no actions that
are morally encouraged but not required; thus, for those holding such theories,
if there are supererogatory acts, they must be morally commendable. Many
versions of non-consequentialism also fail to provide for acts that are morally
encouraged but not morally required; thus, if they allow for supererogatory
acts, they must regard them as morally required acts done at such significant
personal cost that one might be excused for not doing them. The view that all
actions are either morally required, morally prohibited, or morally indifferent
makes it impossible to secure a place for supererogatory acts in the sense of
morally good acts. This view that there are no acts that are morally encouraged
but not morally required may be the result of misleading terminology. Both Kant
and Mill distinguish between duties of perfect obligation and duties of
imperfect obligation, acknowledging that a duty of imperfect obligation does
not specify any particular act that one is morally required to do. However,
since they use the term ‘duty’ it is very easy to view all acts falling under
these “duties” as being morally required. One way of avoiding the view that all
morally encouraged acts are morally required is to avoid the common
philosophical misuse of the term ‘duty’. One can replace ‘duties of perfect
obligation’ with ‘actions required by moral rules’ and ‘duties of imperfect
obligation’ with ‘actions encouraged by moral ideals’. However, a theory that
includes the kinds of acts that are supererogatory in the sense of being
morally good has to distinguish between that sense of ‘supererogatory’ and the
sense meaning ‘morally commendable’, i.e., indicating a superior moral
character in the agent. For as pointed out above, not all morally good acts are
morally commendable, nor are all morally commendable acts morally good, even
though a particular act may be supererogatory in both senses. urmsonianism. Urmson is possibly more English than Grice, in
that ‘gris’ is Nordic – but Urmson, with such a suffix, -son, HAS to be English
English! Plus, he is a charmer! Who other than Urmson would come up with a
counter-example to the sufficiency of Grice’s analysis of an act of
communication. In a case of bribery, the response or effect in the emittee is
NOT meant to be recognised. So we need a further restriction unless we want to
say that the briber means that his emittee recognise the ‘gift’ as a
meta-bribe. Refs.: Urmson, “Introduction” to Austin’s Philosophical Papers,
cited by Grice. Urmson, Introduction to Austin’s How to do things with words,
cited by Grice. Urmson on Grice, “The Independent.” Urmson on pragmatics. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “Urmson’s supererogation,” H. P. Grice, “Urmson no saint, hero
perhaps –.” H. P. Grice, “Urmson, my hero.”
use-mention
distinction: Grice: “I once used
Jevons’s coinage in a tutorial with Hardie; he said, ‘What do you mean by
‘of’?’” -- Grice: “Strictly, if you mention, you are using!” -- discussed by
Grice in “Retrospective epilogue” – the only use of a vehicle of communication
is to communicate. two ways in which terms enter into discourse used when they refer to or assert something,
mentioned when they are exhibited for consideration of their properties as
terms. If I say, “Mary is sad,” I use the name ‘Mary’ to refer to Mary so that
I can predicate of her the property of being sad. But if I say, “ ‘Mary’
contains four letters,” I am mentioning Mary’s name, exhibiting it in writing
or speech to predicate of that term the property of being spelled with four
letters. In the first case, the sentence occurs in what Carnap refers to as the
material mode; in the second, it occurs in the formal mode, and hence in a
metalanguage a language used to talk about another language. Single quotation
marks or similar orthographic devices are conventionally used to disambiguate
mentioned from used terms. The distinction is important because there are fallacies
of reasoning based on usemention confusions in the failure to observe the use
mention distinction, especially when the referents of terms are themselves
linguistic entities. Consider the inference: 1 Some sentences are written in
English. 2 Some sentences are written in English. Here it looks as though the
argument offers a counterexample to the claim that all arguments of the form
‘P, therefore P’ are circular. But either 1 asserts that some sentences are
written in English, or it provides evidence in support of the conclusion in 2
by exhibiting a sentence written in English. In the first case, the sentence is
used to assert the same truth in the premise as expressed in the conclusion, so
that the argument remains circular. In the second case, the sentence is
mentioned, and although the argument so interpreted is not circular, it is no
longer strictly of the form ‘P, therefore P’, but has the significantly
different form, ‘ “P” is a sentence written in English, therefore P’.
usus: ad usum
griceianum -- use: Grice: “I would rephrase Vitter’s adage, ‘Don’t ask for the
expression meaning, as for the UTTERER’s meaning, if you have to axe at all!”
-- while Grice uses ‘use,’ as Ryle once told him, ‘you should use ‘usage, too.’
Parkinson was nearby. When Warnock commissioned Parkinson to compile a couple
of Oxonian essays on meaning and communication, Parkinson unearthed the old
symposium by Ryle and Findlay on the matter. Typically, when Ryle reprinted it,
he left Findlay out!
V
V SUBJECT INDEX: VAGUM
NAME INDEX ITALIAN V: VAILATI -- VALENTINO – VALLA – VANINI – VARRONE – VARZI – VASTO – VATTIMO – VERRI -- VICO – VIO
NAME INDEX ITALIAN V: VAILATI -- VALENTINO – VALLA – VANINI – VARRONE – VARZI – VASTO – VATTIMO – VERRI -- VICO – VIO
NAME INDEX ENGLISH: VESEY
vagum: oddly,
A. C. Ewing has a very early thing on ‘vagueness.’ Grice liked Ewing. There is
an essay on “Clarity” which relates. Cf. Price, “Clarity is not enough” Which
implicates it IS a necessity, though. Cf. “Clarity – who cares?” Some days,
Grice did not feel ‘Grecian,’ and would use very vernacular expressions. He
thought that what Cicero calls ‘vagum’ is best rendered in Oxfordshire dialect
as ‘fuzzy.’ It is not clear which of Grice’s maxim controls this. The opposite
of ‘vague’ is ‘specific.’ Grice was more concerned about this in the earlier
lectures where he has under the desideratum of conversational candour and the
principle of conversational benevolence, and the desideratum of conversational
clarity that one should be explicit, and make one’s point explicit. But under
the submaxims of the conversational category of modus (‘be perspicuous [sic]),
none seem to prohibit ‘vagueness’ as such: Avoid
obscurity of expression.Avoid ambiguity.Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).Be orderly The one he later calls a ‘tailoring
principle’ ‘frame your contribution in way that facilitates a reply’, the
‘vagueness’ avoidance seems implicit. Cf. fuzzy. The
indeterminacy of the field of application of an expression, in contrast to
precision. For instance, the expression “young man” is vague since the point at
which its appropriate application to a person begins and ends cannot be
precisely defined. Vagueness should be distinguished from ambiguity, by which
a term has more than one meaning. The
vagueness of an expression is due to a semantic feature of the term itself,
rather than to the subjective condition of its user. Vagueness gives rise to
borderline cases, and propositions with vague terms lack a definite
truth-value. For this reason, Frege rejected the possibility of vague concepts,
although they are tolerated in recent work in vague or fuzzy logic. Various
paradoxes arise due to the vagueness of words, including the ancient sorites
paradox. It is because of its intrinsic vagueness that some philosophers seek
to replace ordinary language with an ideal language. But ordinary language
philosophers hold that this proposal creates a false promise of eliminating
vagueness. Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance in part is a model of
meaning that tolerates vagueness. As a property of expressions, vagueness
extends to all sorts of cognitive representations. Some philosophers hold that
there can be vagueness in things as well as in the representation of things. “A
representation is vague when the relation of the representing system to the
represented system is not one–one, but one–many.” Russell, Collected Papers of
Bertrand Russell, vol. IX. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Fuzzy impicatures, and
how to unfuzz them;” H. P. Grice, “The conversational maxim of vagueness
avoidance.” Oddly, Grice does not have a conversational, ‘be precise,’; but he
did. In his earlier desideratum of conversational clarity, the point was to
make your point precise – rather than fuzzy -- vagueness, a property of an
expression in virtue of which it can give rise to a “borderline case.” A
borderline case is a situation in which the application of a particular
expression to a name of a particular object does not generate an expression
with a definite truth-value; i.e., the piece of language in question neither
unequivocally applies to the object nor fails to apply. Although such a
formulation leaves it open what the pieces of language might be whole
sentences, individual words, names or singular terms, predicates or general
terms, most discussions have focused on vague general terms and have considered
other types of terms to be nonvague. Exceptions to this have called attention
to the possibility of vague objects, thereby rendering vague the designation
relation for singular terms. The formulation also leaves open the possible causes
for the expression’s lacking a definite truth-value. If this indeterminacy is
due to there being insufficient information available to determine
applicability or non-applicability of the term i.e., we are convinced the term
either does or does not apply, but we just do not have enough information to
determine which, then this is sometimes called epistemic vagueness. It is
somewhat misleading to call this vagueness, for unlike true vagueness, this
epistemic vagueness disappears if more information is brought into the
situation. ‘There are between 1.89 $ 106 and 1.9 $ 106 stars in the sky’ is
epistemically vague but is not vague in the generally accepted sense of the
term. ’Vagueness’ may also be used to characterize non-linguistic items such as
concepts, memories, and objects, as well as such semilinguistic items as
statements and propositions. Many of the issues involved in discussing the
topic of vagueness impinge upon other philosophical topics, such as the
existence of truth-value gaps
declarative sentences that are neither true nor false and the plausibility of many-valued logic.
There are other related issues such as the nature of propositions and whether
they must be either true or false. We focus here on linguistic vagueness, as it
manifests itself with general terms; for it is this sort of indeterminacy that
defines what most researchers call vagueness, and which has led the push in
some schools of thought to “eliminate vagueness” or to construct languages that
do not manifest vagueness. Linguistic vagueness is sometimes confused with
other linguistic phenomena: generality, ambiguity, and open texture. Statements
can be general ‘Some wheelbarrows are red’, ‘All insects have antennae’ and if
there is no other vagueness infecting them, they are true or false and not borderline or vague. Terms can be
general ‘person’, ‘dog’ without being vague. Those general terms apply to many
different objects but are not therefore vague; and furthermore, the fact that
they apply to different kinds of objects ‘person’ applies to both men and women
also does not show them to be vague or ambiguous. A vague term admits of
borderline cases a completely
determinate situation in which there just is no correct answer as to whether
the term applies to a certain object or not
and this is not the case with generality. Ambiguous linguistic items,
including structurally ambiguous sentences, also do not have this feature
unless they also contain vague terms. Rather, an ambiguous sentence allows
there to be a completely determinate situation in which one can simultaneously
correctly affirm the sentence and also deny the sentence, depending on which of
the claims allowed by the ambiguities is being affirmed or denied. Terms are
considered open-textured if they are precise along some dimensions of their
meaning but where other possible dimensions simply have not been considered. It
would therefore not be clear what the applicability of the term would be were
objects to vary along these other dimensions. Although related to vagueness, open
texture is a different notion. Friedrich Waismann, who coined the term, put it
this way: “Open texture . . . is something like the possibility of vagueness.”
Vagueness has long been an irritant to philosophers of logic and language.
Among the oldest of the puzzles associated with vagueness is the sorites ‘heap’
paradox reported by Cicero Academica 93: One grain of sand does not make a
heap, and adding a grain of sand to something that is not a heap will not
create a heap; there945 V 945 fore
there are no heaps. This type of paradox is traditionally attributed to Zeno of
Elea, who said that a single millet seed makes no sound when it falls, so a
basket of millet seeds cannot make a sound when it is dumped. The term
‘sorites’ is also applied to the entire series of paradoxes that have this
form, such as the falakros ‘bald man’, Diogenes Laertius, Grammatica II, 1, 45:
A man with no hairs is bald, and adding one hair to a bald man results in a
bald man; therefore all men are bald. The original version of these sorites
paradoxes is attributed to Eubulides Diogenes Laertius II, 108: “Isn’t it true
that two are few? and also three, and also four, and so on until ten? But since
two are few, ten are also few.” The linchpin in all these paradoxes is the
analysis of vagueness in terms of some underlying continuum along which an
imperceptible or unimportant change occurs. Almost all modern accounts of the
logic of vagueness have assumed this to be the correct analysis of vagueness,
and have geared their logics to deal with such vagueness. But we will see below
that there are other kinds of vagueness too. The search for a solution to the
sorites-type paradoxes has been the stimulus for much research into alternative
semantics. Some philosophers, e.g. Frege, view vagueness as a pervasive defect
of natural language and urge the adoption of an artificial language in which
each predicate is completely precise, without borderline cases. Russell too
thought vagueness thoroughly infected natural language, but thought it unavoidable and indeed beneficial for ordinary usage and discourse. Despite the
occasional argument that vagueness is pragmatic rather than a semantic
phenomenon, the attitude that vagueness is inextricably bound to natural
language together with the philosophical logician’s self-ascribed task of
formalizing natural language semantics has led modern writers to the
exploration of alternative logics that might adequately characterize
vagueness i.e., that would account for our
pretheoretic beliefs concerning truth, falsity, necessary truth, validity,
etc., of sentences containing vague predicates. Some recent writers have also
argued that vague language undermines realism, and that it shows our concepts
to be “incoherent.” Long ago it was seen that the attempt to introduce a third
truth-value, indeterminate, solved nothing
replacing, as it were, the sharp cutoff between a predicate’s applying
and not applying with two sharp cutoffs. Similar remarks could be made against
the adoption of any finitely manyvalued logic as a characterization of
vagueness. In the late 0s and early 0s, fuzzy logic was introduced into the
philosophic world. Actually a restatement of the Tarski-Lukasiewicz
infinitevalued logics of the 0s, one of the side benefits of fuzzy logics was
claimed to be an adequate logic for vagueness. In contrast to classical logic,
in which there are two truth-values true and false, in fuzzy logic a sentence
is allowed to take any real number between 0 and 1 as a truthvalue.
Intuitively, the closer to 1 the value is, the “more true” the sentence is. The
value of a negated sentence is 1 minus the value of the unnegated sentence;
conjuction is viewed as a minimum function and disjunction as a maximum
function. Thus, a conjunction takes the value of the “least true” conjunct,
while a disjunction takes the value of the “most true” disjunct. Since vague
sentences are maximally neither true nor false, they will be valued at
approximately 0.5. It follows that if F is maximally vague, so is the negation
-F; and so are the conjunction F & -F and the disjunction ~F 7 -F. Some
theorists object to these results, but defenders of fuzzy logic have argued in
favor of them. Other theorists have attempted to capture the elusive logic of
vagueness by employing modal logic, having the operators AF meaning ‘F is
definite’ and B F meaning ‘F is vague’. The logic generated in this way is
peculiar in that A F & YPAF & AY is not a theorem. E.g., p & -p is
definitely false, hence definite; hence A p & -p. Yet neither p nor -p need
be definite. Technically, it is a non-Kripke-normal modal logic. Some other
peculiarities are that AF Q A -F is a theorem, and that AFPBF is not. There are
also puzzles about whether B FP ABF should be a theorem, and about iterated
modalities in general. Modal logic treatments of vagueness have not attracted
many advocates, except as a portion of a general epistemic logic i.e., modal
logics might be seen as an account of so-called epistemic vagueness. A third
direction that has been advocated as a logical account of vagueness has been
the method of supervaluations sometimes called “supertruth”. The underlying
idea here is to allow the vague predicate in a sentence to be “precisified” in
an arbitrary manner. Thus, for the sentence ‘Friar Tuck is bald’, we
arbitrarily choose a precise number of hairs on the head that will demarcate
the bald/not-bald border. In this valuation Friar Tuck is either definitely
bald or definitely not bald, and the sentence either is true or is false. Next,
we alter the valuation so that there is some other bald/not-bald
bordervagueness vagueness 946 946 line,
etc. A sentence true in all such valuations is deemed “really true” or
“supertrue”; one false in all such valuations is “really false” or “superfalse.”
All others are vague. Note that, in this conception of vagueness, if F is
vague, so is -F. However, unlike fuzzy logic ‘F & -F’ is not evaluated as
vague it is false in every valuation and
hence is superfalse. And ‘F 7 -F’ is supertrue. These are seen by some as
positive features of the method of supervaluations, and as an argument against
the whole fuzzy logic enterprise. In fact there seem to be at least two
distinct types of linguistic vagueness, and it is not at all clear that any of
the previously mentioned logic approaches can deal with both. Without going
into the details, we can just point out that the “sorites vagueness” discussed
above presumes an ordering on a continuous underlying scale; and it is the
indistinguishability of adjacent points on this scale that gives rise to borderline
cases. But there are examples of vague terms for which there is no such scale.
A classic example is ‘religion’: there are a number of factors relevant to
determining whether a social practice is a religion. Having none of these
properties guarantees failing to be a religion, and having all of them
guarantees being one. However, there is no continuum of the sorites variety
here; for example, it is easy to distinguish possessing four from possessing
five of the properties, unlike the sorites case where such a change is
imperceptible. In the present type of vagueness, although we can tell these
different cases apart, we just do not know whether to call the practice a
religion or not. Furthermore, some of the properties or combinations of
properties are more important or salient in determining whether the practice is
a religion than are other properties or combinations. We might call this family
resemblance vagueness: there are a number of clearly distinguishable conditions
of varying degrees of importance, and family resemblance vagueness is
attributed to there being no definite answer to the question, How many of which
conditions are necessary for the term to apply? Other examples of family
resemblance vagueness are ‘schizophrenia sufferer’, ‘sexual perversion’, and
the venerable ‘game’. A special subclass of family resemblance vagueness occurs
when there are pairs of underlying properties that normally co-occur, but
occasionally apply to different objects. Consider, e.g., ‘tributary’. When two
rivers meet, one is usually considered a tributary of the other. Among the
properties relevant to being a tributary rather than the main river are:
relative volume of water and relative length. Normally, the shorter of the two
rivers has a lesser volume, and in that case it is the tributary of the other.
But occasionally the two properties do not co-occur and then there is a
conflict, giving rise to a kind of vagueness we might call conflict vagueness.
The term ‘tributary’ is vague because its background conditions admit of such
conflicts: there are borderline cases when these two properties apply to
different objects. To conclude: the fundamental philosophical problems
involving vagueness are 1 to give an adequate characterization of what the
phenomenon is, and 2 to characterize our ability to reason with these terms.
These were the problems for the ancient philosophers, and they remain the
problems for modern philosophers. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The conversational maxim
for vagueness avoidance.”
vaihinger: Grice once gave a seminar on Vaihinger – “but
thinking it would not attract that many, I titled it ‘As if.’” – H. P. Grice. philosopher
best known for Die Philosophie des Als Ob; tr. by C. K. Ogden as The Philosophy
of “As If” in 4. A neo-Kantian, he was also influenced by Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche. His commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 2 vols., 1 is still
a standard work. Vaihinger was a cofounder of both the Kant Society and
Kant-Studien. The “philosophy of the as if” involves the claim that values and ideals
amount only to “fictions” that serve “life” even if they are irrational. We
must act “as if” they were true because they have biological utility.
vailati: an important figure in the history
of formal semantics, influenced by Peano, who in turn influenced Whitehead and
Russell, and thus Grice. Giovanni Vailati (n. Crema, 2) è stato un filosofo. Vailati
si laureò a Torino. Qui insegnò, dopo aver lavorato come assistente di Giuseppe
Peano e Vito Volterra. Egli lasciò il suo posto universitario nel 1899 e così
poté proseguire i suoi studi in modo indipendente, e si guadagnò da vivere
insegnando matematica nelle scuole superiori. Durante la sua vita fu conosciuto
a livello internazionale, i suoi scritti sono stati tradotti in inglese,
francese, e polacco, sebbene fu in gran parte dimenticato dopo la sua morte a
Roma. Non pubblicò nessun libro completo, ma lasciò circa 200 saggi e
recensioni che toccano un'ampia gamma di discipline. L'opinione di Vailati nei
confronti della filosofia era che essa fornisse una preparazione e gli
strumenti per il lavoro scientifico. Per questa ragione, e perché la filosofia
dovrebbe essere neutrale fra opposte convinzioni, concezioni, strutture
teoriche, ecc., il filosofo dovrebbe evitare l'uso di un linguaggio tecnico
specialistico, ma dovrebbe usare il linguaggio che la filosofia adotta in
quelle aree in cui è interessata. Ciò non vuol dire che il filosofo debba
soltanto accettare qualunque cosa egli trovi; un termine del linguaggio
ordinario potrebbe essere problematico, ma le sue carenze dovrebbero essere
corrette piuttosto che sostituite con qualche nuovo termine tecnico. Il
suo pensiero sulla verità e sul significato fu influenzato da filosofi come
Peirce e Mach. Egli con cautela distinse fra significato e verità: "La
questione di determinare che cosa vogliamo dire quando enunciamo una data
proposizione, non solo è una questione affatto distinta da quella di decidere
se essa sia vera o falsa (Scritti, p. 187). Tuttavia, dopo aver deciso cosa si
vuole dire, l'azione di decidere se ciò è vero o falso è cruciale. Vailati ebbe
un pensiero positivista moderato, sia nella scienza che nella filosofia:
"La tattica adottata dai pragmatisti in questa loro guerra contro l'abuso
delle astrazioni e delle unificazioni consiste, come è noto, nel proporre che,
anche nelle questioni filosofiche, come si fa sempre in quelle scientifiche, si
esiga, da chiunque avanzi una tesi, che egli sia in grado di indicare quali
siano i fatti che, nel caso che essa fosse vera, dovrebbero, secondo lui,
succedere (o esser successi), e in che cosa essi differiscano dagli altri fatti
che, secondo lui, dovrebbero succedere (o essere successi) nel caso che la tesi
non fosse vera." (Scritti, p. 166) Le influenze e i contatti di
Vailati furono molti e vari, e spesso fu etichettato come "l'italiano
pragmatista". Egli deve molto a Peirce e William James (fu uno dei primi a
distinguere i loro pensieri), ma egli subì anche l'influenza di Platone e
George Berkeley (che egli vide come precursori importanti del pragmatismo),
Gottfried Leibniz, Victoria Welby-Gregory, George Edward Moore, Bertrand
Russell, Giuseppe Peano e Franz Brentano. Vailati corrispose con molti dei suoi
contemporanei. La prima parte della sua opera comprende scritti sulla
Logica matematica; in essi focalizza l'attenzione sul suo ruolo in filosofia e
distinguendo fra logica, psicologia ed epistemologia; la dottrina recente pone
Vailati e il suo allievo Mario Calderoni nella categoria storiografica del
«pragmatismo analitico» italiano[1]. Storia della Scienza I principali
interessi storici di Vailati riguardarono la meccanica, la logica e la
geometria; egli diede un importante contributo in molti campi, compreso lo
studio della meccanica post-aristotelica greca, dei predecessori di Galileo,
della nozione di definizione e del suo ruolo nell'opera di Platone e Euclide,
delle influenze matematiche sulla logica e sull'epistemologia, e sulla
geometria non-euclidea di Gerolamo Saccheri. Vailati fu particolarmente
interessato ai modi in cui quelli che potrebbero essere visti come gli stessi
problemi sono inquadrati e trattati in periodi differenti. Il suo lavoro di
storico della scienza fu strettamente connesso con quello filosofico: per le
due attività, infatti, utilizzò gli stessi pensieri e metodologie di fondo.
Vailati vedeva lo studio storico e lo studio filosofico come differenti
nell'approccio ma non nell'argomento; credeva, inoltre, che dovesse esserci
cooperazione fra filosofi e scienziati nell'approfondimento degli studi
storici. Egli riteneva anche che una storia completa richiedesse che si tenesse
in conto anche il background sociale pertinente. Il superamento delle teorie
scientifiche, grazie a nuovi risultati, non comporta la loro distruzione,
perché la loro importanza aumenta proprio per il fatto di essere superate:
"Ogni errore ci indica uno scoglio da evitare mentre non ogni scoperta ci
indica una via da seguire." (Scritti, p. 4). La posizione di
Giovanni Vailati sulla storia della scienza ricalca quella di una serrata
critica al positivismo, in un contesto teorico dove il pragmatismo ammette
nuovi strumenti di comprensione e anche di valutazione della scienza, come
mostrano anche le vicende di Mario Calderoni (Ivan Pozzoni, Il pragmatismo
analitico italiano di Mario Calderoni, Roma, IF Press, 2009, p.19 e sg. ISBN
978-88-95565-18-7) e del matematico Giuseppe Peano, il quale vanta certe
affinità con il pensiero filosofico del periodo (Guglielmo Rinzivillo, Giovanni
Vailati, Storia e metodologia delle scienze in Una epistemologia senza storia,
Roma, Nuova Cultura, 2013, p. 65 e sg. e Giuseppe Peano, Giovanni Vailati.
Contributi invisibili in Una epistemologia senza storia, Op. cit., p. 165 e sg.
ISBN 978-88-6812-222-5). Note ^ Ivan Pozzoni, Il pragmatismo analitico
italiano di Giovanni Vailati, Villasanta, Liminamentis Editore, 2015.
Bibliografia Ivor Grattan-Guinness (2000): The Search for Mathematical Roots
1870–1940. Princeton University Press Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1967):
"Giovanni Vailati", in Paul Edwards editor The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Collier Macmillan Giuseppe Peano (1909): In Memoriam di Giovanni
Vailati, Boll. di matematica 8 pp. 206–7 Ivan Pozzoni (a cura di), Cent'anni di
Giovanni Vailati, Liminamentis Editore, Villasanta, 2009 Mauro De Zan, La
formazione di Giovanni Vailati, Congedo Editore, Galatina (Lecce) 2009 Logic
and Pragmatism. Selected Essays by Giovanni Vailati edited by C. Arrighi, P.
Cantù, M. De Zan and P. Suppes, CSLI, Stanford, California, 2010. Gabriella
Sava, La psicologia tra Vailati e Brentano, in "Il Veltro", Roma, a.
LIV, n. 1-2, gennaio-aprile 2010, pp. 41–59. Giuseppe Giordano, Giovanni
Vailati filosofo della scienza, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2014, ISBN 978-88-6087-832-8.
Ivan Pozzoni, Il pragmatismo analitico italiano di Giovanni Vailati,
Liminamentis Editore, Villasanta, 2015 Lucia Ronchetti (a cura di), L'archivio
Giovanni Vailati (PDF), in Quaderni di Acme, 34, Bologna, Cisalpino, 1998, ISBN
8832345722. URL consultato il 3 giugno 2020. Giovanni Vailati Scritti
filosofici, 1972 Altri progetti Collabora a Wikisource Wikisource contiene una
pagina dedicata a Giovanni Vailati Collabora a Wikiquote Wikiquote contiene
citazioni di o su Giovanni Vailati Collegamenti esterni Giovanni Vailati, su
Treccani.it – Enciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
Modifica su Wikidata Giovanni Vailati, in Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su Wikidata Giovanni Vailati, su
siusa.archivi.beniculturali.it, Sistema Informativo Unificato per le
Soprintendenze Archivistiche. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Giovanni Vailati, su
MacTutor, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di
Giovanni Vailati, su Liber Liber. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di Giovanni
Vailati, su openMLOL, Horizons Unlimited srl. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Opere
di Giovanni Vailati, su Open Library, Internet Archive. Modifica su Wikidata
Centro Studi Giovanni Vailati, su giovanni-vailati.net. URL consultato il 28
aprile 2006 (archiviato dall'url originale il 24 aprile 2006). Fondo
archivistico e librario di Giovanni Vailati conservato presso la Biblioteca di
Filosofia Università degli Studi di Milano Massimo Mugnai, Vailati, Giovanni,
in Il contributo italiano alla storia del Pensiero: Filosofia, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2012. Controllo di autorità VIAF (EN) 7468169 ·
ISNI (EN) 0000 0001 2119 4295 · SBN IT\ICCU\CFIV\039741 · LCCN (EN) n81056688 ·
GND (DE) 119331594 · BNF (FR) cb12367790m (data) · BAV (EN) 495/111331 ·
WorldCat Identities (EN) lccn-n81056688 Biografie Portale Biografie Filosofia
Portale Filosofia Matematica Portale Matematica Categorie: Filosofi italiani
del XIX secoloMatematici italiani del XIX secoloStorici italiani del XIX
secoloNati nel 1863Morti nel 1909Nati il 24 aprileMorti il 14 maggioNati a
CremaMorti a RomaStorici della scienza italiani[altre]Refs.:
Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Vailati: la semantica filosofica," The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
valentino: -- or as Strawson would have it, ‘valentinus,’ gnostic
teacher, b. in Alexandria, where he teaches until he moved to Rome. A dualist,
he constructed an elaborate cosmology in which God the Father Bythos, or Deep
Unknown unites the the feminine Silence Sige and in the overflow of love
produces thirty successive divine emanations or aeons constituting the Pleroma
fullness of the Godhead. Each emanation is arranged hierarchically with a
graded existence, becoming progressively further removed from the Father and
hence less divine. The lowest emanation, Sophia wisdom, yields to passion and
seeks to reach, beyond her ability, to the Father, which causes her fall. In
the process, she causes the creation of the material universe wherein resides
evil and the loss of divine sparks from the Pleroma. The divine elements are
embodied in those humans who are the elect. Jesus Christ is an aeon close to
the Father and is sent to retrieve the souls into the heavenly Pleroma.
Valentinus wrote a gospel. The sect of Valentino stood out in the early church
for ordaining women priests and prophetesses. Grice: “Since he lived in Rome,
he was almost a Roman.” –Valentino (floruit 135-165;
Phrebonis, ... – ...) è stato un filosofo di scuola cristiano-gnostica. I
seguaci della sua scuola vengono detti Valentiniani.
Valentino nacque a Phrebonis sul delta del Nilo (secondo altre
fonti a Cartagine) e si trasferì in giovane età ad Alessandria d'Egitto, allora
importante centro cristiano dove circolavano anche idee neoplatoniche ed allegoriche
come quelle di Filone di Alessandria. Qui studiò presso un certo Teudas, che si
proclamava diretto discepolo di Paolo di Tarso e che pretendeva di aver appreso
da Paolo le rivelazioni segrete fatte all'apostolo direttamente dal Cristo.
Questi insegnamenti esoterici sembrano essere stati poi riportati nel Vangelo
secondo Filippo ed in altri scritti gnostici. Valentino dapprima insegnò
ad Alessandria d'Egitto, poi tra il 140 e il 160 circa soggiornò a Roma, dove
operò come diacono sotto papa Igino, e vi rimase fino al pontificato di papa
Aniceto. Secondo Tertulliano la mancata elezione a vescovo di Roma lo fece, in
seguito, allontanare dalla Chiesa e intraprendere con decisione la strada
gnostica che lo portò a una prima scomunica, nel 143, da parte di papa Pio I,
seguita poi da molte altre. Tertulliano ne cita addirittura una post mortem
fatta attorno al 175. Trascorse gli ultimi anni della sua vita a Cipro dove
fece molti proseliti e dove probabilmente morì attorno al 165. I suoi seguaci
furono chiamati valentiniani. Dottrina Gli gnostici valentiniani
cercarono di risolvere l'eterno dilemma che si presenta a chi pensa a un mondo
creato: se il mondo è stato creato da un Dio, da dove viene il male? Se Egli
non ha creato il male come lo si può considerare unico Creatore delle
cose? Da quanto tramandatoci dai primi eresiologi cristiani si può
ricostruire solo in parte la dottrina del maestro gnostico e della sua scuola,
basata su una fusione sincretica di elementi neoplatonici, giudaizzanti, cristiani
e gnostici di derivazione sethiana ed encratita. I frammenti di cui siamo in
possesso parlano soprattutto della Redenzione operata dal Cristo e del destino
privilegiato dei cosiddetti uomini spirituali, ossia tutti quelli che
conservavano nel loro corpo il seme divino. Dai pochi brandelli di cui siamo in
possesso è impossibile stabilire dei confini netti tra la dottrina propriamente
di Valentino e quella elaborata dalla sua scuola, sicuramente molto più
complessa. Le fonti dalle quali si può ricavare la dottrina della scuola
valentiniana sono: la cosiddetta Lettera dogmatica dei Valentiniani[1]
riportata da Epifanio in Panarion 31, 5-6; la Piccola notizia, riportata
nell'opera di Ireneo Adversus Haereses, I 8; la Grande notizia, sempre
nell'opera di Ireneo, Adversus Haereses , I I-8; una sintesi dottrinale scritta
da Ippolito, Philosophumena, VI 29-36. La struttura della cosmogonia
valentiniana può essere ricavata dalla Grande notizia, secondo la quale
all'inizio di tutte le cose esisteva l'Essere Primo, Bythos, che dopo ere di
silenzio e di contemplazione, tramite un processo di emanazione, diede vita al
Pleroma (mondo divino), formato da 30 Eoni raggruppati in coppie (sizigie)
maschili e femminili, in cui la parte femminile ha funzione delimitativa e
formativa. Al vertice di questi Eoni si pone la coppia Abisso[2] e Silenzio[3]
(quest'ultimo elemento femminile), coppia da cui nacquero per emanazione
Intelletto[4] e Verità[5]. Da essi nacquero Logos e Vita, e da questi ultimi
Uomo e Chiesa[6]. Questi otto formano la cosiddetta Ogdoade[7]. poi Logos e
Vita emanarono una Decade[8] di Eoni: Profondo e Mescolanza; Sempre giovane e
Unione, Autogenerato e Piacere, Immobile e Mistione, Unigenito e Beata. Quindi
la coppia Uomo e Chiesa emanò dodici Eoni (Dodecade[9]): Paracleto e Fede,
Paterno e Speranza, Materno e Carità, Sempre pensante e Intelligenza,
Ecclesiastico e Beatitudine, Desiderio e Sophia. Tutti costoro concorrevano a
formare il Pleroma. L'origine del peccato e del decadimento del divino
nel mondo materiale è attribuito dalla gnosi valentiniana proprio all'ultimo
Eone femminile, Sophia, poiché le varie emanazioni comportarono una
degradazione progressiva. Scriveva Ireneo: «Ma si fece avanti l'ultimo e più
recente Eone della Dodecade emessa da Uomo e Chiesa, cioè Sophia, e subì la
passione senza l'unione col suo compagno di sizigia Desiderio» (Adversus
Haereses, I, II 2). La passione di cui si parla è desiderio di Sophia di
conoscere e ascendere al Primo Essere, per sua natura inconoscibile[10]. Al
peccato di Sophia, che voleva spingersi fino al Primo Essere, si oppose però
Limite[11]; questi venne generato da Bythos privo della controparte femminile
poiché era destinato a delimitare e a consolidare il mondo divino e non a
generare per emanazione altri Eoni. Sophia fu trattenuta e consolidata da
questo: così, tornata a stento in sé e convinta che il Padre è incomprensibile,
depose la sua intenzione insieme con la passione sopraggiunta a causa dello
stupore e della meraviglia. (Ireneo, Adversus Haereses, I, II 2). Una volta che
Limite ebbe reintegrato il mondo divino ed espulso la passione peccaminosa di
Sophia dal Pleroma, l'Eone Abisso, insieme all'Eone Intelletto, emise un'altra
coppia: Cristo e Spirito Santo[12], per portare a perfezione finale il mondo
divino. Cristo fece conoscere agli altri Eoni la loro vera nascita, occorsa per
successive emanazioni, principalmente ad opera di Intelletto e dell'essenza del
Primo Essere; mentre Spirito Santo rivelò agli Eoni la loro sostanziale
uguaglianza con quelli che compongono l'Ogdoade e così «tutti gli Eoni sono
stati resi uguali per forma e volere e sono diventati tutti Intelletto, tutti
Logoi, tutti Uom e tutti Cristo, e similmente gli elementi femminili tutte
Verità, tutte Vita, tutte Spirito e Chiesa»[13]. A questo punto tutto il
Pleroma emanò l'Eone Gesù[14], frutto perfetto generato da tutti gli Eoni;
mentre come scorta dell'Eone furono emanati gli angeli, destinati a far coppia
con gli uomini spirituali. Al di fuori del mondo divino, però, Sophia
detta Achamoth[15], la passione dell'Eone Sophia, vagava nei «luoghi dell'ombra
e del vuoto» e solo l'intervento della coppia Cristo/Spirito Santo, le dette
forma ma non la dotò della stessa conoscenza che aveva elargito agli altri
Eoni[16]. Questa, ormai formata, decise di ascendere al mondo divino ma poiché
era ancora sporca della passione, fu fermata da Limite. Essa cadde preda del
dolore, del timore e del disagio, tutte passioni generate dall'ignoranza della
sua vera essenza, parte sostanza materiale (la passione dell'Eone Sophia
destinata a rimanere fuori dal Pleroma), parte «aroma d'immortalità»
trasmessole da Cristo/Spirito Santo. Da questi sentimenti nacque la materia, da
cui si generò il mondo materiale; però: Le sopravvenne anche un'altra
disposizione, quella della conversione verso colui che l'aveva vivificata.
(Ireneo, Adversus Haereses) E proprio per questo sincero sentimento di
conversione l'Eone Cristo/Spirito Santo mandò l'Eone Gesù ed i suoi angeli a
far conoscere a Sophia Achamoth la sua vera essenza guarendola dalle passioni
(elevandola cioè ad uno stadio di conoscenza superiore)[17]. L'Eone Gesù,
inoltre, prese le passioni di cui era schiava Sophia Achamoth e le trasformò in
sostanza, dividendola in una parte cattiva e una in parte buona, anche se essa
stessa soggetta alle passioni; questa parte nacque dal sincero sentimento di
conversione di Sophia Achamot e si qualificherà come sostanza psichica. A
questo punto Sophia Achamoth generò dei semi spirituali, immagine imperfetta
degli angeli dell'Eone Gesù, destinati a rimanere nel mondo materiale finché
non matureranno e potranno ricongiungersi, come elemento femminile, agli stessi
angeli; poi Sophia Achamoth decise di dare forma alla sostanza che l'Eone Gesù
aveva ricavato dal suo sentimento di conversione, e prima di tutto dette forma
al Demiurgo[18]: Dicono che il Demiurgo è diventato padre e dio degli
esseri esterni al Pleroma, essendo creatore di tutti gli esseri psichici e
ilici. [...] Così fece sette cieli[19], al di sopra dei quali egli risiede.
[...] i sette cieli sono intelligibili, e suppongono che siano angeli: anche il
Demiurgo è un angelo, ma simile a Dio. Analogamente affermano che anche il
paradiso, che è sopra il terzo cielo, è per potenza il quarto angelo e che da
lui ha preso qualcosa Adamo, che è stato in esso. (Ireneo, Adversus Haereses) E
ancora: Il Demiurgo credeva di creare da sé tutte queste cose, mentre,
invece, le faceva per impulso di Achamoth: così egli fece il cielo non
conoscendo il cielo, plasmò l'uomo ignorando l'uomo, fece apparire la terra
ignorando la terra. (Ireneo, Adversus Haereses) Infatti, il Demiurgo, spinto a
sua insaputa da Sophia Achamoth crea solo l'aspetto materiale delle cose e
questa, a sua volta, è spinta nella creazione dall'Eone Gesù. Dal Demiurgo
nacquero anche il diavolo (detto Kosmokrator[20]) e la sua corte di angeli
malvagi. Dopo la creazione del mondo materiale il Demiurgo creò l'uomo.
Secondo il mito gnostico gli uomini creati si dividevano in tre generi, con
differenti caratteristiche e differenti destini: ilici (da Hyle) o
terreni, nati dalla materia cattiva creata dalla passione di Sophia Achamoth e
destinati per questo a scomparire; psichici, fatti a somiglianza del Demiurgo,
ossia della stessa buona materia nata dal sentimento di conversione di Sophia
Achamoth, quindi possessori dell'anima ma destinati ad una redenzione
incompleta, ovvero ad ascendere insieme al Demiurgo al regno di Sophia
Achamoth[21], solo però quando essa sarà condotta al mondo divino e si unirà in
sizigia con l'Eone perfetto Gesù; sono gli unici uomini dotati di libero
arbitrio e, in virtù delle loro scelte, possono o salvarsi o dissolversi come
gli ilici. pneumatici o spirituali, uomini nei quali vennero nascosti,
all'insaputa del Demiurgo, i semi spirituali partoriti da Sophia Achamoth ad
immagine e somiglianza degli angeli del corteo dell'Eone Gesù. Questi uomini,
dotati della scintilla divina (pneuma), erano perciò destinati a ricongiungersi
con il mondo divino indipendentemente dalle loro azioni[22]. Da questa
distinzione si può dedurre che il Demiurgo aveva insufflato l'anima solo in
alcuni ilici ed allo stesso modo Sophia Achamoth aveva inserito il seme
spirituale solo in alcuni psichici. In tal modo ogni uomo spirituale aveva un
involucro psichico e uno materiale, mentre ogni psichico solo un involucro
materiale. Secondo i valentiniani gli gnostici erano spirituali, i cristiani in
generale erano psichici ed i pagani erano ilici. La Redenzione, però,
sarebbe giunta solo grazie a Gesù, inviato per portare la gnosi e la salvezza
agli spirituali. Secondo i valentiniani il Demiurgo generò un Cristo di pura
natura psichica non corrotto dalla materia, infatti: «È questo che è passato
attraverso Maria come l'acqua passa attraverso un tubo»; allo stesso tempo
Sophia Achamoth inserì in lui il seme spirituale, mentre l'Eone Gesù discese su
di lui sotto forma di colomba quando ricevette il Battesimo nel Giordano[23].
L'Eone Gesù e il seme spirituale impiantato da Sophia Achamoth, avrebbero però
abbandonato il corpo del Cristo al momento della crocifissione. Secondo questa
dottrina, Cristo non sarebbe veramente morto sulla croce, ma il tutto sarebbe
stato un gioco di apparenze. (docetismo, dal greco dokéin (apparire)
valentiniano). Opere Delle sue opere rimangono solo pochi frammenti ricavati
dagli scritti degli eresiologi cristiani: Clemente Alessandrino, Stromata, II
36; II 114; III 59; IV 89; IV 89-90; VI 52; Ippolito di Roma, Confutazioni VI
42; VI 37; Antimo, Sulla santa Chiesa, che riportano brani di lettere, omelie e
poesie; sono invece attribuiti al maestro gnostico alcuni testi ritrovati a Nag
Hammadi nel 1945:[24] Vangelo della Verità, Preghiera dell'apostolo
Paolo, Trattato sulla resurrezione, Trattato tripartito, Vangelo secondo
Filippo, Interpretazione della conoscenza, Esposizione valentiniana. La scuola
I seguaci di Valentino studiavano i metodi per liberare il proprio pneuma. Ciò
poteva avvenire sia attraverso lo studio dei testi sacri che attraverso varie
cerimonie, quali la camera nuziale o la redenzione. Tra i discepoli di
Valentino sono da ricordare i due alessandrini, Eracleone e Tolomeo, che
Ippolito indica come rappresentanti di una scuola italica; mentre nella scuola
orientale, da Ippolito contrapposta a quella italica, sono da ricordare
Assionico e Ardesiane, forse corrispondente a Bardesane. A questa scuola va
ricollegato anche Teodoto di Bisanzio. Ireneo racconta che nella valle del
Rodano era attivo Marco, da Ireneo detto dispregiativamente "il
Mago". Anche il filosofo e teologo Origene fu molto influenzato da
questa scuola. Secondo Agostino si rifacevano alla scuola valentiniana anche i
Secondiniani, che "aggiungevano alle loro dottrine la pratica di azioni
turpi", ed i Colorbasi, che affermavano che la vita degli uomini dipendeva
da sette costellazioni. Le scuole valentiniane, comunque, si estinsero entro la
fine del III secolo, assorbite o dalla chiesa o dalle scuole manichee.
Note ^ Nella Lettera dogmatica dei Valentiniani, un documento sicuramente molto
antico e destinato solamente agli iniziati, sono citati i 30 Eoni che, salvo
qualche piccola differenza, ritroviamo nelle opere di Ireneo e Ippolito. ^ Il
primo Principio maschile è chiamato con diversi nomi: Abisso (Βυθός), per
definirne l'assoluta trascendenza rispetto agli altri Eoni e Autoprodotto
(Αὐτοπάτωρ), ovvero che non è stato originato da nessun altro Eone. Troviamo
anche il nome Padre, appellativo di solito riferito all'Eone Intelletto, per
questo il primo Eone è chiamato Pre-Padre; per estensione, infine, troviamo
anche il nome Pre-Principio. ^ Il nome Silenzio (Σιγὴν) definisce la sua
trascendenza, mentre altri nomi del principio femminile sono Pensiero
(Ἒννοιαν), che esprime la qualità dell'Eone di riflessione interna e Grazia
(Χάριν), ossia l'impulso che le fa generare altri Eoni. ^ L'Intelletto (Νοῦς),
è chiamato anche Padre (Πατήρ), ma anche Uomo (Ἄνθρωπον), per sottolineare il
carattere di esemplare celeste dell'uomo spirituale; ma quest'ultima variante è
più frequentemente riferita al quarto Eone. ^ Ἀλήθεια. ^ Chiesa (Ἐκκλησίαν)
intesa nel senso della chiesa valentiniana, formata dagli uomini spirituali. ^
L'Ogdoade, formata da quattro coppie di Eoni, in genere viene suddivisa in due
Tetradi, composte dai primi quattro Eoni (Abisso/Silenzia e Intelletto/Verità)
e dagli altri quattro (Logos/Vita e Uomo/Chiesa) (4 e 8 erano considerati
numeri perfetti dai Pitagorici). Nella cosiddetta Lettera dogmatica dei
Valentiniani, riportata da Epifanio, l'Ogdoade al contrario è così composta:
Abisso/Silenzio, Padre/Verità; Uomo/Chiesa; Logos/Vita. ^ I nomi che compongono
questa Decade, nella Lettera dogmatica dei Valentiniani riportata da Epifanio,
generati al contrario da Logos/Vita e detti Profondo/Mescolanza, Sempre
giovane/Unione, Autogenerato/Mistione, Unigenito/Unità, Immobile/Piacere,
sottolineano la perfezione del mondo angelico. ^ Questa serie di Eoni, nella
Lettera dogmatica dei Valentiniani, riportata da Epifanio, generati al
contrario da Uomo/Chiesa e così detti: Paracleto/Fede, Paterno/Speranza,
Materno/Carità, Sempre pensante/Intelligenza, Desiderato/Beata,
Ecclesiastico/Sophia; servono, eccettuato Sophia, più che altro a formare il
numero complessivo di trenta, sottolineando con i loro nomi però l'imperfezione
iniziale della Chiesa degli eletti. ^ Ippolito riferisce che il peccato di
Sophia consisté nel voler generare da sola, come l'Essere Primevo, Bythos. ^ Il
Limite (Ὄρον), si frapponeva tra il mondo divino e quello materiale. Ireneo
(Adversus Haereses I II, I), però, parlava di due Limiti: uno fra il primo
Essere e gli altri Eoni, e uno fra il mondo spirituale e quello materiale. In
altre fonti valentiniane è denominato Horos (Ὁροθές), ovvero Limitatore; ma
anche Λυτρωτής = Redentore, in quanto purifica gli Eoni; Σταυρός = Croce,
intesa come croce cosmica, concetto in parte ripreso dal Timeo di Platone, che
ha la funzione di separare e segnare i confini del mondo divino; Χαριστήριος =
che rende grazie; Ἄφετος = che rimette i peccati degli Eoni; Μεταγωγεύς =
Guida, che rimuove la passione dal Pleroma; Καρπιστής = Emancipatore dalla
passione. ^ Qui è elemento femminile, poiché ruah = spirito, in ebraico è di
genere femminile. ^ Questa conoscenza, detta illuminazione (=perfezionamento),
consiste in una seconda formazione degli Eoni, dapprima formati solo secondo la
sostanza, ovvero emanati, mentre ora sono formati secondo la gnosi, ossia la
conoscenza, apprendendo la loro vera natura diventando così sostanzialmente
uguali all'Eone Intelletto e raggiungendo la perfezione. ^ L'Eone è detto anche
Salvatore (Σωτῆρα), Cristo (Χριστός), Logos (Λόγον) e Tutto (Πάντα), poiché
deriva da tutti gli Eoni. ^ Il nome Achamoth (in ebraico sapienza), viene
utilizzato per distinguere l'Eone Sophia, ormai nel Pleroma, dalla passione
della stessa Sophia, rimasta esclusa dal mondo divino. Altro nome che si
ritrova nei testi è quello di Madre (Μητέρα), nel senso di madre di tutti gli
uomini spirituali. Da alcuni passi di Ireneo si può ricavare che lo
sdoppiamento di Sophia in due unità, una superiore e l'altra inferiore, è
probabilmente da attribuire alla scuola di Valentino, e non al maestro gnostico
che probabilmente aveva immaginato una sola Sophia prima nel Pleroma poi
espulsa fuori. ^ Questo processo di formazione materiale, in parte è speculare
allo stesso compiuto prima dall'Eone Cristo/Spirito Santo nei confronti degli
altri Eoni; ma se il secondo processo comportava la conoscenza, qui si tratta
solo di formazione, ovvero di dare a Sophia Achamoth una forma precisa. Proprio
questo processo di formazione, prima secondo la sostanza poi secondo la
conoscenza, com'era già intervenuto a beneficio degli Eoni del Pleroma, occorse
anche per Sophia Achamoth, e infine si ripeterà nel mondo materiale quando gli
uomini spirituali verranno formati anche secondo la conoscenza, ovvero
scopriranno la loro essenza e potranno assurgere al mondo divino. ^ Qui si
conclude l'opera di formazione (illuminazione), se l'Eone Cristo/Spirito Santo
aveva formato Sophia Achamoth secondo la sostanza, ora l'Eone Gesù la forma
secondo la gnosi (conoscenza). ^ Il sentimento di conversione, da cui nacque il
Demiurgo, rispetto agli altri sentimenti si qualifica come disposizione
positiva, quindi il Demiurgo, ovvero il Dio del Vecchio Testamento, in un certo
senso ha carattere positivo anche se imperfetto. Il Demiurgo è chiamato anche
Padre, Madre-Padre, poiché genera da solo senza elemento femminile, ma anche
Senza-Padre, perché a crearlo è stata Sophia Achamoth. Nel Trattato Tripartito
troviamo i nomi: Padre, Dio, Demiurgo, Re, Giudice, Luogo, Dimora, Legge. ^
Questi cieli sono detti Ebdomade. ^ questo concetto, per cui il diavolo è a
conoscenza di Sophia Achamot mentre il Demiurgo ne è all'oscuro; probabilmente
è da spiegare in riferimento all'opera di opposizione svolta dal demonio
all'opera del Demiurgo, che sembra implicare una consapevole conoscenza del
mondo divino. ^ Questo regno era l'ottavo cielo, sito tra il limite del mondo
divino e il settimo cielo abitato dal Demiurgo, per questo detto Ogdade. ^ Per
questa salvezza per natura, molti polemisti cristiani attribuirono agli
gnostici comportamenti libertini e in aperto contrasto con la legge cristiana;
ma nei testi di Nag Hammadi si parla quasi sempre di atteggiamenti ascetici e
non libertini, forse in questo caso i polemisti hanno calcato un po' la mano,
attribuendo un atteggiamento libertino che forse apparteneva solo ad una parte
minoritaria degli gnostici. ^ Raffrontando questo passo con Excerpta ex
Theodoto, la dottrina valentiniana fa presumere che già alla nascita l'Eone
Gesù fosse presente nel Cristo, mentre la colomba indicherebbe solamente la
perfetta formazione dell'Eone divino, presente fin dalla nascita ma ancora
imperfetto. In questo modo ancora una volta è ripetuta la duplice formazione
(=illuminazione), prima sostanziale, quando Maria partorisce il Cristo, e poi
gnoseologica (=secondo la conoscenza), quando il Cristo riceve il Battesimo. ^
Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism?, Harvard University Press, 2005, ISBN
0-674-01762-5, p. 154. Bibliografia A. Hilgenfeld, Die Ketzergeschichte des
Urchristentums, Leipzig 1884, pp. 283 sgg.; 345 sgg.; 461 sgg. A.E. Brooke, The
Fragments of Heracleon, Cambridge 1891. C. Barth, Die Interpretation des Neuen
Testaments in der valentinianischer Gnosis, Leipzig 1911. W. Foerster, Von
Valentin zsu Haerakleon, Giessen 1928. A. Orbe, En los albores de la exegésis
iohannea, in «Analecta Gregoriana» LXV, Roma 1955. A. Orbe, Los primeros
herejes ante la persecución, in «Analecta Gregoriana» LXXXIII, Roma 1956. A.
Orbe, Hacia la prima teologia de la processión del Verbo, in «Analecta
Gregoriana» XCIX-C, Roma 1958. A. Orbe, La unción del Verbo, in «Analecta
Gregoriana» CXIII, Roma 1961. A. Orbe, La teologia del Espiritu santo, in
«Analecta Gregoriana» CLVIII, Roma 1966. H. Langerbeck, «La théologie de
l'histoire dans la gnose valentinienne», in Le origini dello gnosticismo, a
cura di U. Bianchi, Leiden 1967, p. 215 sgg. E. Muhlenberg, Wieviel Erlosungen
kennt der Gnostiker Haeracleon?, in «Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche
Wissenschaft», LXVI 1975, p. 170. D. Devoti, Antropologia e storia della
salvezza in Eracleone, in «Memorie della Accademia delle Scienze di Torino»,
serie V 2, Torino 1978. The Rediscovery of Gnosticism, a cura di B. Layton,
Leiden 1980-1, vol. I. M-J. Edwards, Gnostic and Valentinians in the Church
Fathers, in «Journal of Theological Studies», XL 1989, p. 26 segg. Testi
gnostici in lingua greca e latina, a cura di Manlio Simonetti, Milano 1993, p.
199 sgg. Voci correlate Eresie dei primi secoli Gnosticismo Letteratura
cristiana Letteratura gnostica Scuole gnostiche Storia del cristianesimo Vangeli
gnostici Altri progetti Collabora a Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina
dedicata a Valentino Collegamenti esterni (EN) Valentino, su Enciclopedia
Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Valentino,
in Catholic Encyclopedia, Robert Appleton Company. Modifica su Wikidata
Dizionario delle eresie: Valentino, su eresie.com. (EN) Tertullian Adversus
Valentinianos, su tertullian.org. (EN) Valentinus, su Early Christian Writings.
(EN) Valentinus - A Gnostic for All Seasons]autore=Stephan Hoeller, su
gnosis.org. Opinioni favorevoli, da un punto di vista gnostico. (EN) Valentinus
and the Valentinian Tradition, su gnosis.org. (EN) Clyde Curry Smith,
Valentinus, su dacb.org. Controllo di autorità VIAF (EN) 42228523 · ISNI (EN)
0000 0004 4887 0849 · SBN IT\ICCU\CFIV\166409 · LCCN (EN) n85197536 · GND (DE)
118803751 · BNF (FR) cb12214625z (data) · BNE (ES) XX1145308 (data) · CERL
cnp00400780 · WorldCat Identities (EN) lccn-n85197536 Biografie Portale
Biografie Cristianesimo Portale Cristianesimo Storia Portale Storia Categorie:
Teologi egizianiFilosofi egizianiPredicatori egizianiGnosticismo[altre].
valentinianism: Grice: “I will only
explore the actdivities of the so-called “Valentinians” in Rome.” -- a form of
Christian gnosticism of Alexandrian origin, founded by Valentinus in the second
century and propagated by Theodotus in Eastern, and Heracleon in Western,
Christianity. To every gnostic, pagan or Christian, knowledge leads to
salvation from the perishable, material world. Valentinianism therefore
prompted famous refutations by Tertullian Adversus Valentinianos and Irenaeus
Adversus haereses. The latter accused the Valentinians of maintaining “creatio
ex nihilo.” Valentinus is believed to have authored the Peri trion phuseon, the
Evangelium veritatis, and the Treatise on the Resurrection. Since only a few
fragments of these remain, his Neoplatonic cosmogony is accessible mainly
through his opponents and critics Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria and in the
Nag Hammadi codices. To explain the origins of creation and of evil, Valentinus
separated God primal Father from the Creator Demiurge and attributed the
cruVaihinger, Hans Valentinianism 947
947 cial role in the processes of emanation and redemption to Sophia. Refs.:
Luigi Speranza, “Valentinus e Grice,” Villa Grice.
valla: Rome-born philosopher, teaches rhetoric in Pav a and
is later secretary of Alfonso I di Naoli, and apostolic secretary in Rome under
papa Nichola V. In his dialogue On Pleasure or On the True Good, Stoic and Epicurean
interlocutors present their ethical views, which Valla proceeds to criticize.
This dialogue is often regarded as a defense of Epicurean hedonism, because
Valla equates the good with pleasure; but he claims that Italians can find
pleasure only in heaven. Valla’s description of pleasure reflects the
contemporary Renaissance attitude toward the joys of life and might have
contributed to Valla’s reputation for hedonism. In another work, On Free Will
between, Valla discusses the conflict between divine foreknowledge and human
freedom and rejects Boezio’’s then predominantly accepted solution. Valla
distinguishes between God’s knowledge and God’s will – as in Grice’s phrase,
“God willing,” “Deo volente,” -- but denies that there is a rational solution
of the apparent conflict between God’s will and human freedom. As a historian,
he is famous for The Donation of Constantine 1440, which denounces as spurious
the famous document on which medieval jurists and theologians based the papal
rights to secular power. Lorenzo Valla (n. Roma) è
stato un filosofo. Si presentava anche con il nome latino Laurentius
Vallensis. Nato a Roma da genitori di origini piacentine (il padre
era l'avvocato Luca della Valle), ricevette la sua prima educazione a Roma e
forse a Firenze, imparando il greco da Giovanni Aurispa e da Rinuccio Aretino.
Lo guidava lo zio materno Melchiorre Scribani, un giurista funzionario in
Curia. La sua prima opera, oggi perduta, fu il De comparatione Ciceronis
Quintilianique ("Confronto fra Cicerone e Quintiliano"), in cui
elogiò il latino di Quintiliano a scapito di quello di Cicerone, andando contro
all'idea corrente e mostrando già in questo primo scritto il suo gusto per la
provocazione. Quando morì lo zio, Lorenzo sperava di ottenere un impiego nella Curia
pontificia; ma i due autorevoli segretari Antonio Loschi e Poggio Bracciolini,
ferventi ammiratori di Cicerone, si opposero all'assunzione, con la scusa che
era troppo giovane. Grazie all'aiuto di Antonio Beccadelli, detto il
Panormita, fu chiamato ad insegnare retorica a Pavia, succedendo al maestro
bergamasco Gasparino Barzizza, da poco defunto. Questi anni furono fondamentali
per lo sviluppo del suo pensiero; la città era infatti un vivo centro culturale
e Valla poté approfondire le sue conoscenze giuridiche, osservando inoltre
l'efficacia del procedimento di analisi critica dei testi, che lo Studio pavese
applicava con rigore. A Pavia Valla acquisì una grande reputazione con il
dialogo De Voluptate ("Il piacere"), nel quale si oppone fermamente alla
morale stoica e all'ascetismo medievale, sostenendo la possibilità di
conciliare il Cristianesimo, ricondotto alla sua originarietà, con l'edonismo,
recuperando così il senso del pensiero di Epicuro e Lucrezio, che avevano
sottolineato come tutta la vita dell'uomo sia fondamentalmente volta al
piacere, inteso non come istintività, ma come calcolo dei vantaggi e svantaggi
conseguenti ad ogni azione. A conclusione del dialogo, Valla sottolinea, però,
come per l'uomo la suprema voluttà siano la ricerca spirituale e la fede in
Dio. Si tratta di uno scritto considerevole, poiché, per la prima volta, una
tendenza filosofica che era rimasta confinata nell'ambito del paganesimo
trovava espressione in un'opera di livello universitario e di valore
filosofico, venendo rivalutata alla luce del pensiero cristiano; le polemiche
che seguirono alla pubblicazione del testo, costrinsero Valla a lasciare
Pavia. Da allora egli passò da un'università all'altra, accettando brevi
incarichi e tenendo lezioni in diverse città. Durante questo periodo fece la
conoscenza del re Alfonso V d'Aragona, al cui servizio entrò. Alfonso ne fece
il suo segretario, lo difese dagli attacchi dei suoi nemici e lo incoraggiò ad
aprire una scuola a Napoli. Durante il pontificato di Eugenio IV, scrisse
un breve testo, pubblicato solo nel 1517 e intitolato La falsa Donazione di
Costantino (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione). In esso Valla,
con argomentazioni storiche e filologiche, dimostrò la falsità della Donazione
di Costantino, documento apocrifo in base al quale la Chiesa giustificava la
propria aspirazione al potere temporale: secondo questo documento, infatti,
sarebbe stato lo stesso imperatore Costantino, trasferendo la sede dell'impero
a Costantinopoli, a lasciare alla Chiesa il restante territorio dell'Impero
romano (oggi la dimostrazione del Valla è universalmente accettata e lo scritto
è datato all'VIII secolo o IX secolo). (LA) «Quid, quod multo est
absurdius, capit ne rerum natura, ut quis de Constantinopoli loqueretur tanquam
una patriarchalium sedium, que nondum esset, nec patriarchalis nec sedes, nec
urbs christiana nec sic nominata, nec condita nec ad condendum destinata?
Quippe privilegium concessum est triduo, quam Constantinus esset effectus
christianus, cum Byzantium adhuc erat, non Constantinopolis.» (IT) «E,
ciò che è molto più assurdo e non rientra nella realtà dei fatti, come si può
parlare di Costantinopoli come di una delle sedi patriarcali, quando ancora non
era né patriarcale né una sede né una città cristiana né si chiamava così, né
era stata fondata, né la sua fondazione era stata decisa? Infatti il privilegio
fu concesso tre giorni dopo che Costantino si fece cristiano, quando Bisanzio
esisteva ancora e non Costantinopoli.» (Lorenzo Valla, La falsa Donazione
di Costantino, 1440) Egli dimostrò che anche la lettera ad Abgar V attribuita a
Gesù era un falso e, sollevando dubbi sull'autenticità di altri documenti spuri
e ponendo in discussione l'utilità della vita monastica e mettendone in luce
anche l'ipocrisia nel De professione religiosorum ("La professione dei
religiosi"), egli suscitò l'ira delle alte gerarchie ecclesiastiche. Fu
obbligato, pertanto, a comparire davanti al tribunale dell'Inquisizione, alle
cui accuse riuscì a sottrarsi soltanto grazie all'intervento del re
Alfonso. Visitò nuovamente Roma, dove i suoi avversari erano ancora molti
e potenti. Riuscì a salvarsi da morte certa travestendosi e fuggendo a
Barcellona, da dove fece poi ritorno a Napoli. Vengono divulgati gli
Elegantiarum libri sex (i sei libri sull'"eleganza" della lingua
latina), pubblicati però postumi nel 1471. L'opera raccoglie una serie
straordinaria di passi desunti dai più celebri scrittori latini (Publio
Virgilio Marone, Cicerone, Livio), dallo studio dei quali, sostiene Valla,
occorre codificare i canoni linguistici, stilistici e retorici della lingua
latina. Il testo costituì la base scientifica del movimento umanista impegnato
a riformare il latino cristiano sullo stile ciceroniano. Scrisse le
"Emendationes sex librorum Titi Livii" in cui discute, col suo modo
di scrivere brillante e caustico, correzioni ai libri 21-26 di Tito Livio in
opposizione ad altri due intellettuali della corte napoletana il Panormita ed
il Facio che non avevano il suo stesso spessore filologico. L'ultima fase
Nel febbraio 1447, con la morte di papa Eugenio IV, la sua fortuna iniziò a
volgere in meglio. Recatosi nuovamente a Roma, fu ricevuto dal nuovo pontefice
Niccolò V; a partire dal 1450 assunse il ruolo a lui più consono di professore
di retorica, ma non perse nemmeno il suo spirito caustico e iniziò a criticare
nel 1449 il latino della Vulgata, facendo confronti con l'originale greco
sminuendo il ruolo di traduttore di San Girolamo e giudicò spuria la
corrispondenza tra Seneca e San Paolo. Sotto papa Callisto III Valla
raggiunse il culmine della carriera, divenendo segretario apostolico. Morì a
Roma. Un frammento della sua tomba, contenente un ritratto dello stesso, è ora
murato nel chiostro della Basilica Lateranense dove era originariamente
sepolto. È quasi impossibile farsi un'idea precisa della vita privata e
del carattere di Valla, essendo i documenti nei quali vi si fa riferimento
sorti in contesti polemici e, pertanto, fonte più di esagerazioni e calunnie
che di testimonianze attendibili. Egli appare comunque come persona orgogliosa,
invidiosa e irascibile, caratteristiche cui però si affiancano le qualità di
elegante umanista, critico acuto e scrittore pungente nella sua continua e
violenta polemica sul potere temporale della Chiesa di Roma. Lorenzo Valla
è un personaggio di eccezionale importanza non solo per la cultura italiana, ma
soprattutto quale rappresentante del più puro umanesimo europeo. Con le sue
spietate critiche alla Chiesa cattolica dell'epoca fu un precursore di Lutero,
ma fu anche il promotore di molte revisioni di testi cattolici. La sua
opera si basa su una profonda padronanza della lingua latina e sulla
convinzione che fosse stata proprio un'insufficiente conoscenza del latino la
vera causa del linguaggio ambiguo di molti filosofi. Valla era convinto che lo
studio accurato e l'uso corretto della lingua fosse l'unico mezzo di
acculturazione feconda e comunicazione efficace: la grammatica e un appropriato
modo di esprimersi erano a suo modo di pensare alla base di ogni enunciato e,
prima ancora, della stessa formulazione intellettuale. Da questo punto di vista
i suoi scritti sono tematicamente coerenti, in quanto ciascuno di essi si
sofferma innanzitutto sulla lingua, sul suo impiego rigoroso e
sull'individuazione delle applicazioni erronee della grammatica latina.
Oggi, il profondo distacco storico ci permette di distinguere le opere di
Lorenzo Valla essenzialmente in due filoni, quello critico e quello filologico.
Sebbene avesse saputo mostrare eccezionali doti di storico negli scritti
critici, questa capacità non è però riscontrabile nell'unico lavoro definito
storico, cioè nella biografia di Ferdinando d'Aragona, tutto sommato un modesto
elenco di aneddoti. Nel III secolo l'Impero romano iniziava a tramontare,
il che si palesava non solo nell'indebolimento delle forze politiche e
militari, ma anche nello sfaldamento dell'ordinamento interno e soprattutto
nell'imbarbarimento della cultura. La crisi generale e l'accettazione di molte
genti non italiche tra i cittadini romani provocarono un lento ma significativo
allontanarsi dalla lingua latina ufficiale verso forme dialettali e meno
eleganti. Si evidenziò la necessità di uno "sviluppo" della lingua
che presupponeva la canonizzazione della parlata popolare e della sua semplice
grammatica. Erano i primi sintomi della nascita di una nuova lingua, quella
italiana, che avrebbe necessitato di un millennio per svilupparsi pienamente.
Durante questa lunghissima transizione, in tutta la penisola ci fu un'enorme
incertezza linguistica. Il latino classico cedeva lentamente il posto ad una
mescolanza di nuovi idiomi che combattevano per la supremazia. Gli
effetti di questo periodo di passaggio sono ben visibili soprattutto nelle
traduzioni che via via nascevano dal latino verso l'italiano, poché la linea di
demarcazione tra le due lingue era fluttuante e nessuno dei traduttori poteva
dirsi un vero esperto in materia. Valla fu il primo a stabilire un limite alla
modernizzazione della lingua latina, decidendo che i cambiamenti oltre tale
limite facessero già parte del processo di sviluppo della lingua italiana. In
questo modo riuscì non solo a salvaguardare la purezza del latino, ma pose
anche le basi per lo studio e la comprensione dell'italiano. Lorenzo
Valla si pone tra i maggiori esponenti del Quattrocento italiano e
dell'umanesimo europeo, non solo per il suo costante apporto di punti di vista
umanistici, bensì anche per la sua annosa avversione alla cultura
scolastica. È indicativa ad esempio la sua tesi (in De Voluptate) sugli
errori dello stoicismo praticato dagli asceti cristiani che non avrebbero preso
in debita considerazione le leggi naturali, dunque divine; la morale
consiglierebbe infatti, a suo avviso, un'esistenza allegra e godereccia che non
precluderebbe in alcun modo l'aspirazione alle gioie del paradiso.
Analogamente, nelle Dialecticae Disputationes Valla confuta il dogmatismo di
Aristotele e la sua arida logica che non offre insegnamenti o consigli, bensì
discute solo di parole senza raffrontarle con il loro significato nella vita
reale. Altrettanto critico si dimostra (nelle Adnotationes in Novum
Testamentum) quando usa la sua profonda padronanza del latino per provare che
sono state le traduzioni maldestre di alcuni passi del Nuovo Testamento a
causare incomprensioni ed eresie. È a lui dedicata la Fondazione Lorenzo
Valla, che in collaborazione con la casa editrice Mondadori, pubblica la
collana Scrittori greci e latini in cui vengono proposte edizioni critiche di
testi classici. Edizioni delle opere L'arte della grammatica, a cura di
Paola Casciano, Milano, Mondadori (Fondazione Lorenzo Valla), (terza edizione
rinnovata) La falsa Donazione di Costantino, a cura di Gabriele Pepe, Firenze,
Ponte alle Grazie, Scritti filosofici e religiosi, a cura di Giorgio Radetti,
Firenze, Sansoni, (ristampa: Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2009)
Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, testo latino edito da Gianni Zippel,
Padova, Antenore, (due volumi) Dialectical Disputations, testo latino e
traduzione inglese della Repastinatio a cura di B. P. Copenhaver and L. Nauta
(I Tatti Renaissance Library), Harvard University Press, 2012 (due volumi).
Note ^
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/lorenzo-valla_(Il-Contributo-italiano-alla-storia-del-Pensiero:-Filosofia)/
^ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lorenzo-Valla ^ E. Garin, "La
letteratura degli umanisti", in E. Cecchi-N. Sapegno (edd.) Letteratura
italiana, III, Il Quattrocento e l'Ariosto, Milano, Garzanti, 1965, pp.
198-203). ^ Basilica Papale - SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO, su www.vatican.va. URL
consultato il 22 marzo 2017. ^ Lodi Nauta, In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo
Valla's Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy, Harvard University Press,
2009 ISBN 9780674032699. ^ Pubblicate per la prima volta nel 1505 da Erasmo da
Rotterdam. Bibliografia Giovanni Antonazzi, Lorenzo Valla e la polemica sulla
donazione di Costantino, Roma 1985. Salvatore Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla.
Umanesimo e teologia, Firenze, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento,
1972. Maristella de Panizza Lorch, A defense of life: Lorenzo Valla's theory of
pleasure, Humanistische Bibliothek 1/36, Monaco, Wilhelm Fink, 1985. Marco
Laffranchi, Dialettica e filosofia in Lorenzo Valla, Milano, Vita e Pensiero,
1999. Peter Mack, Renaissance argument. Valla and Agricola in the tradition of
rhetoric and dialectic, Leiden, Brill, 1993. Girolamo Mancini, Vita di Lorenzo
Valla, Firenze, G. C. Sansoni Editore, 1891 Lodi Nauta, In defense of common
sense: Lorenzo Valla's Humanist critique of Scholastic philosophy, Harvard,
Harvard University Press, 2009. Mariangela Regoliosi (a cura di), Lorenzo
Valla. La riforma della lingua e della logica (Atti del convegno del Comitato
Nazionale VII centenario della nascita di Lorenzo Valla, Prato, 4-7 giugno
2008) Firenze, Edizioni Polistampa, 2010, 2 tomi. Voci correlate Donazione di
Costantino Altri progetti Collabora a Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina
dedicata a Lorenzo Valla Collabora a Wikiquote Wikiquote contiene citazioni di
o su Lorenzo Valla Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene
immagini o altri file su Lorenzo Valla Collegamenti esterni Lorenzo Valla, in
Dizionario di storia, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2010. Modifica su
Wikidata (EN) Lorenzo Valla, su Enciclopedia Britannica, Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di Lorenzo Valla, su openMLOL,
Horizons Unlimited srl. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Opere di Lorenzo Valla, su
Open Library, Internet Archive. Modifica su Wikidata (FR) Bibliografia su
Lorenzo Valla, su Les Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge. Modifica su
Wikidata (EN) Lorenzo Valla, in Catholic Encyclopedia, Robert Appleton Company.
Modifica su Wikidata Delio Cantimori, «VALLA, Lorenzo», in Enciclopedia
Italiana, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1937. Rita Pagnoni
Sturlese, VALLA, Lorenzo, su treccani.it. in Il contributo italiano alla storia
del pensiero – Filosofia, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2012. La
falsa donazione di Costantino, su classicitaliani.it. La tomba di Lorenzo
Valla, su penelope.uchicago.edu. (EN) Lodi Nauta, Lorenzo Valla, in Edward N.
Zalta (a cura di), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Center for the Study of
Language and Information (CSLI), Università di Stanford. V · D · M Filologia
Controllo di autorità VIAF (EN)
29541502 · ISNI (EN) 0000 0001 2125 8391 · SBN IT\ICCU\CFIV\042795 · LCCN (EN)
n79043871 · GND (DE) 118626000 · BNF (FR) cb11927487z (data) · BNE (ES)
XX874162 (data) · NLA (EN) 35575211 · BAV (EN) 495/21449 · CERL cnp01259527 ·
NDL (EN, JA) 001169220 · WorldCat Identities (EN) lccn-n79043871 Biografie
Portale Biografie Cattolicesimo Portale Cattolicesimo Letteratura Portale
Letteratura Categorie: Umanisti italianiFilologi italianiScrittori italiani del
XV secoloNati nel 1407Morti nel 1457Morti il 1º agostoNati a RomaMorti a
RomaPersonaggi della corte aragonese di NapoliEpicureiAccademici italiani del
XV secoloProfessori dell'Università degli Studi di PaviaAllievi di Vittorino da
Feltre[altre]. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Valla e Grice,”per la Fondazione
Lorenzo Valla, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
valitum: Oddly Vitters has a couple of lectures on ‘value,’
that Grice ‘ignored.’ Valitum should be contrasted from‘validum.’ ‘Valid,’
which is cognate with ‘value,’ a noun Grice loved, is used by logicians. In
Grice’s generalised alethic-cum-deontic logic, ‘valid’ applies, too. ‘Valid’ is
contrasted to the ‘satisfactoriness’ value that attaches directly to the
utterance. ‘Valid’ applies to the reasoning, i.e. the sequence of psychological
states from the premise to the conclusion. How common and insidious was the
talk of a realm of ‘values’ at Oxford in the early 1930s to have Barnes attack
it, and Grice defend it? ‘The realm of values’ sounds like an ordinary man’s expression,
and surely Oxford never had a Wilson Chair of Metaphysical Axiology. validum is the correct form out of Roman
‘valeor.’ Grice finds the need for the English equivalent, and plays with
constructing the ‘concept’ “to be of value”! There’s also the axiologicum. The
root for ‘value’ as ‘axis’ is found in Grice’s favourite book of the Republic,
the First! Grice sometimes enjoys sounding pretentious and uses the definite
article ‘the’ indiscriminately, just to tease Flew, his tutee, who said that talking
of ‘the self’ is just ‘rubbish’. It is different with Grice’s ‘the good’ (to
agathon), ‘the rational,’ (to logikon), ‘the valuable’ (valitum), and ‘the
axiological’. Of course, whilesticking with ‘value,’ Grice plays with Grecian “τιμή.” Lewis and Short have ‘vălor,’ f. ‘valeo,’ which they render as ‘value,’ adding that it is
supposed to translate in Gloss. Lab, Grecian ‘τιμή.’ ‘valor, τιμή, Gloss. Lab.’
‘Valere,’ which of course algo gives English ‘valid,’ that Grice overuses, is
said by Lewis and Short to be cognate with “vis,” “robur,” “fortissimus,” cf.
debilis” and they render as “to be strong.” So one has to be careful here.
“Axiology” is a German thing, and not used at Clifton or Oxford, where they
stick with ‘virtus’ or ‘arete.’ This or that Graeco-Roman philosopher may have
explored a generic approach to ‘value.’ Grice somewhat dismisses Hare who in
Language of Morals very clearly distinguishes between deontic ‘ought’ and
teleological, value-judgemental ‘good.’ For ‘good’ may have an aesthetic use:
‘that painting is good,’ the food is good). The sexist ‘virtus’ of the Romans
perhaps did a disservice to Grecian ‘arete,’ but Grice hardly uses ‘arete,’
himself. It is etymologically unrelated to ‘agathon,’ yet rumour has it that
‘arete,’ qua ‘excellence,’ is ‘aristos,’ the superlative of ‘agathon.’ Since
Aristotle is into the ‘mesotes,’ Grice worries not. Liddell and Scott have
“ἀρετή” and render it simpliciter as “goodness, excellence, of any kind,”
adding that “in Hom. esp. of manly qualities”: “ποδῶν ἀρετὴν ἀναφαίνων;”
“ἀμείνων παντοίας ἀρετὰς ἠμὲν πόδας ἠδὲ μάχεσθαι καὶ νόον;” so of the gods,
“τῶν περ καὶ μείζων ἀ. τιμή τε βίη τε;” also of women, “ἀ. εἵνεκα for valour,”
“ἀ. ἀπεδείκνυντο,” “displayed brave deeds.”
But when Liddell and Scott give the philosophical references (Plathegel
and Ariskant), they do render “ἀρετή,” as ‘value,’ generally, excellence, “ἡ ἀ. τελείωσίς τις” Arist. Met.
1021b20, cf. EN1106a15, etc.; of persons, “ἄνδρα πὺξ ἀρετὰν εὑρόντα,” “τὸ
φρονεῖν ἀ. μεγίστη,” “forms of excellence, “μυρίαι ἀνδρῶν ἀ.;” “δικαστοῦ αὕτη
ἀ.;” esp. moral virtue, opp. “κακία,” good nature, kindness, etc. We should not
be so concerned about this, were not for the fact that Grice explored Foot, not
just on meta-ethics as a ‘suppositional’ imperratives, but on ‘virtue’ and ‘vice,’ by Foot, who had
edited a reader in meta-ethics for the series of Grice’s friend, Warnock. Grice
knows that when he hears the phrases value system, or belief system, he is
conversing with a relativist. So he plays jocular here. If a value is not a
concept, a value system at least is not what Davidson calls a conceptual
scheme. However, in “The conception of value” (henceforth, “Conception”) Grice
does argue that value IS a concept, and thus part of the conceptual scheme by
Quine. Hilary Putnam congratulates Grice on this in “Fact and value,” crediting
Baker – i. e. Judy – into the bargain. While utilitarianism, as exemplified by
Bentham, denies that a moral intuition need be taken literally, Bentham assumes
the axiological conceptual scheme of hedonistic eudaemonism, with eudaemonia as
the maximal value (summum bonum) understood as hedone. The idea of a system of values (cf. system of ends) is meant to
unify the goals of the agent in terms of the pursuit of eudæmonia. Grice wants to
disgress from naturalism, and the distinction
between a description and anything else. Consider the use of ‘rational’ as
applied to ‘value.’ A naturalist holds that ‘rational’ can be legitimately
apply to the ‘doxastic’ realm, not to the ‘buletic’ realm. A desire (or a
‘value’) a naturalist would say is not something of which ‘rational’ is
predicable. Suppose, Grice says, I meet a philosopher who is in the habit of
pushing pins into other philosophers. Grice asks the philosopher why he does
this. The philosopher says that it gives him pleasure. Grice asks him whether
it is the fact that he causes pain that gives him pleasure. The philosopher
replies that he does not mind whether he causes pain. What gives him pleasure
is the physical sensation of driving a pin into a philosopher’s body. Grice
asks him whether he is aware that his actions cause pain. The philosopher says
that he is. Grice asks him whether he would not feel pain if others did this to
him. The philosopher agrees that he would. I ask him whether he would allow
this to happen. He says that he guesses he would seek to prevent it. Grice asks
him whether he does not think that others must feel pain when he drives pins
into them, and whether he should not do to others what he would try to prevent them
from doing to him. The philosopher says that pins driven into him cause him
pain and he wishes to prevent this. Pins driven by him into others do not cause
him pain, but pleasure, and he therefore wishes to do it. Grice asks him
whether the fact that he causes pain to other philosophers does not seem to him
to be relevant to the issue of whether it is rationally undesirable to drive
pins into people. He says that he does not see what possible difference can
pain caused to others, or the absence of it, make to the desirability of
deriving pleasure in the way that he does. Grice asks him what it is that
gives him pleasure in this particular activity. The philosopher replies that he
likes driving pins into a philosopher’s resilient body. Grice asks whether he
would derive equal pleasure from driving pins into a tennis ball. The
philosopher says that he would derive equal pleasure, that into what he drives
his pins, a philosopher or a tennis ball, makes no difference to him – the
pleasure is similar, and he is quite prepared to have a tennis ball
substituted, but what possible difference can it make whether his pins
perforate living men or tennis balls? At this point, Grice begins to suspect
that the philosopher is evil. Grice does not feel like agreeing with a
naturalist, who reasons that the pin-pushing philosopher is a philosopher with
a very different scale of moral values from Grice, that a value not being
susceptible to argument, Grice may disagree but not reason with the pin-pushing
philosopher. Grice rather sees the pin-pushing philosopher beyond the reach of
communication from the world occupied by him. Communication is as unattainable
as it is with a philosopher who that he is a doorknob, as in the story by
Hoffman. A value enters into the essence of what constitutes a person. The
pursuit of a rational end is part of the essence of a person. Grice does not
claim any originality for his position (which much to Ariskant), only validity.
The implicaturum by Grice is that rationalism and axiology are incompatible,
and he wants to cancel that. So the keyword here is rationalistic axiology, in
the neo-Kantian continental vein, with a vengeance. Grice arrives at value
(validitum, optimum, deeming) via Peirce on meaning. And then there is the
truth “value,” a German loan-translation (as value judgment, Werturteil). The
sorry story of deontic logic, Grice says, faces Jørgensens
dilemma. The dilemma by Jørgensens is best seen as a trilemma, Grice says;
viz. Reasoning requires that premise and conclusion have what Boole, Peirce,
and Frege call a “truth” value. An imperative dos not have a “truth” value.
There may be a reasoning with an imperative as premise or conclusion. A
philosopher can reject the first horn and provide an inference mechanism on
elements – the input of the premise and the output of the conclusion -- which
are not presupposed to have a “truth” value. A philosopher can reject the
second horn and restrict ‘satisfactory’ value to a doxastic embedding a buletic
(“He judges he wills…”). A philosopher can reject the third horn, and refuse to
explore the desideratum. Grice generalizes over value as the mode-neutral
‘satisfactory.’ Both ‘p’ and “!p” may be satisfactory. ‘.p’ has doxastic value
(0/1); ‘!p’ has buletic value (0/1). The
mode marker of the utterance guides the addresse you as to how to read
‘satisfactory.’ Grice’s ‘satisfactory’ is a variation on a theme by
Hofstadter and McKinsey, who elaborate a syntax for the imperative mode, using
satisfaction. They refer to what they call the ‘satisfaction-function’ of a
fiat. A fiat is ‘satisfied’ (as The door is closed may also be said to be
satisfied iff the door is closed) iff what is commanded is the case. The fiat
‘Let the door be closed’ is satisfied if the door is closed. An unary or dyadic
operator becomes a satisfaction-functor. As
Grice puts it, an inferential rule, which flat rationality is the
capacity to apply, is not arbitrary. The inferential rule picks out a
transition of acceptance in which transmission of ‘satisfactory’ is
guaranteed or expected. As Grice notes, since mode marker indicate the species
‘satisfactory’ does. He imports into the object-language ‘It is
satisfactory-d/p that’ just in case psi-d/b-p is satisfactory. Alla
Tarski, Grice introduces ‘It is acceptable that’: It is acceptable that
psi-d/b-p is satisfactory-b/d just in case ‘psi-d/b-p is satisfactory-d/b’ is
satisfactory-b/d. Grice goes on to provide a generic value-assignment
for satisfactoriness-functors. For coordinators: “φ Λ ψ” is
1-b/d just in case φ is 1-b/d and ψ is 1-b/d. “φ ν ψ” is 1-b/d just in case one of the pair, φ and
ψ, is 1-b/d. For subordinator: “φ⊃ψ” is 1-b/d just in case either
φ is 0-b/d or ψ is 0-b/d. There are, however, a number of points to
be made. It is not fully clear to Grice just how strong the motivation is for
assigning a value to a mode-neutral, generic functor. Also he is assuming
symmetry, leaving room for a functor is introduced if a restriction is imposed.
Consider a bi-modal utterance. “The beast is filthy and do not touch it” and
“The beast is filthy and I shall not touch it” seem all right. The commutated
“Do not touch the beast and it is filthy” is dubious. “Touch the beast and it
will bite you,” while idiomatic is hardly an imperative, since ‘and’ is hardly
a conjunction. “Smith is taking a bath or leave the bath-room door open” is
intelligible. The commutated “Leave the bath-room door open or Smith is taking
a bath” is less so. In a bi-modal utterance, Grice makes a case for the buletic
to be dominant over the doxastic. The crunch comes, however, with one of the
four possible unary satisfactoriness-functors, especially with regard to the
equivalence of “~psi-b/d-p” and
“psi-b/d-~p). Consider “Let it be that I now put my hand on my head” or “Let it be that my bicycle faces north” in
which neither seems to be either satisfactory or unsatisfactory. And it is a
trick to assign a satisfactory value to “~psi-b/d-p” and “~psi-b/d~p.” Do we
proscribe this or that form altogether, for every cases? But that would seem to
be a pity, since ~!~p seems to be quite promising as a representation for you
may (permissive) do alpha that satisfies p; i.e., the utterer explicitly
conveys his refusal to prohibit his addressee A doing alpha. Do we disallow
embedding of (or iterating) this or that form? But that (again if we use ~!p
and ~!~p to represent may) seems too restrictive. Again, if !p is neither
buletically satisfactory nor buletically unsatisfactory (U could care less) do
we assign a value other than 1 or 0 to !p (desideratively neuter, 0.5). Or do we
say, echoing Quine, that we have a buletically satisfactoriness value gap?
These and other such problems would require careful consideration. Yet Grice
cannot see that those problems would prove insoluble, any more than this or
that analogous problem connected with Strawsons presupposition (Dont arrest the
intruder!) are insoluble. In Strawsons case, the difficulty is not so much to
find a solution as to select the best solution from those which present
themselves. Grice takes up the topic of a calculus in connection with the
introduction rule and the elimination rule of a modal such as must. We
might hope to find, for each member of a certain family of modalities, an
introduction rule and an elimination rule which would be analogous to the rules
available for classical logical constants. Suggestions are not hard to come by.
Let us suppose that we are seeking to provide such a pair of rules for the
particular modality of necessity □. For
(□,+) Grice considers the following (Grice
thinks equivalent) forms: if φ is demonstrable, □φ
is demonstrable. Provided φ is dependent on no assumptions, derive φ from □φ. For (□,-), Grice considers From □φ derive φ. It is to be understood, of course, that the
values of the syntactical variable φ would contain either a buletic or a
doxastic mode markers. Both !p and .p would be proper substitutes for φ but p
would not. Grice wonders: [W]hat should be said of Takeuti’s conjecture
(roughly) that the nature of the introduction rule determines the character of
the elimination rule? There seems to be no particular problem about
allowing an introduction rule which tells us that, if it is established in P’s
personalised system that φ, it is necessary, with respect to P, that φ is
doxastically satisfactory/establishable. The accompanying elimination rule is,
however, slightly less promising. If we suppose such a rule to tell us that, if
one is committed to the idea that it is necessary, with respect to P, that φ,
one is also committed to whatever is expressed by φ, we shall be in trouble.
For such a rule is not acceptable. φ will be a buletic expression such as Let
it be that Smith eats his hat. And my commitment to the idea that Smiths system
requires him to eat his hat does not ipso facto involve me in accepting
volitively Let Smith eat his hat. But if we take the elimination rule rather as
telling us that, if it is necessary, with respect to X, that let X eat his hat,
then let X eat his hat possesses satisfactoriness-with-respect-to-X, the
situation is easier. For this person-relativised version of the rule seems
inoffensive, even for Takeuti, we hope. Grice, following Mackie, uses
absolutism, as opposed to
relativism, which denies the rational basis to attitude ascriptions (but cf.
Hare on Subjectsivism). Grice is concerned with the absence of a thorough
discussion of value by English philosophers, other than Hare (and he is only
responding to Mackie!). Continental philosophers, by comparison, have a special
discipline, axiology, for it! Similarly, a continental-oriented tradition
Grice finds in The New World in philosophers of a pragmatist bent, such as
Carus. Grice wants to say that rationality is a value, because it is a
faculty that a creature (human) displays to adapt and survive to his changing
environments. The implicaturum of the title is that values have been considered
in the English philosophical tradition, almost alla Nietzsche, to belong to the
realm irrational. Grice grants that axiological implicaturum rests on a
PRE-rational propension. While Grice could
play with “the good” in the New World, as a Lit. Hum. he knew he had to be
slightly more serious. The good is one of the values, but what is valuing?
Would the New Worlders understand valuing unattached to the pragmatism that
defines them? Grice starts by invoking Hume on his bright side: the concept of
value, versus the conception of value. Or rather, how the concept of value
derives from the conception of value. A distinction that would even please
Aquinas (conceptum/conceptio), and the Humeian routine. Some background for his
third Carus lecture. He tries to find out what Mackie means when he says that a
value is ultimately Subjectsive. What about inter-Subjectsive, and
constructively objective? Grice constructs absolute value out of relative
value. But once a rational pirot P (henceforth, P – Grice liked how it sounded
like Locke’s parrot) constructs value, the P assigns absolute status to
rationality qua value. The P cannot then choose not to be rational at the risk
of ceasing to exist (qua person, or essentially rationally human agent). A
human, as opposed to a person, assigns relative value to his rationality. A
human is accidentally rational. A person is necessarily so. A distinction
seldom made by Aristotle and some of his dumbest followers obsessed with the modal-free
adage, Homo rationale animal. Short and Lewis have “hūmānus” (old form:
hemona humana et hemonem hominem dicebant, Paul. ex Fest. p. 100 Müll.; cf.
homo I.init.), adj., f. “homo,” and which they render as “of or belonging to
man, human.” Grice also considers the etymology of ‘person.’ Lewis and Short
have ‘persōna,’ according to Gabius
Bassus ap. Gell. 5, 7, 1 sq., f. ‘persŏno,’ “to sound through, with the second
syllable lengthened.’ Falsa est (finitio), si dicas, Equus est animal
rationale: nam est equus animal, sed irrationale, Quint.7,3,24:homo est animal
rationale; “nec si mutis finis voluptas, rationalibus quoque: quin immo ex
contrario, quia mutis, ideo non rationalibus;” “a rationali ad rationale;” “τὸ
λογικόν ζῷον,” ChrysiStoic.3.95; ἀρεταὶ λ., = διανοητικαί, oἠθικαί, Arist.
EN1108b9; “λογικός, ή, όν, (λόγος), ζῶον λόγον ἔχον NE, 1098a3-5. λόγον δὲ
μόνον ἄνθρωπος ἔχει τῶν ζῴων, man alone of all animals possesses speech, from
the Politics. Grice takes the stratification of values by Hartmann much more
seriously than Barnes. Grice plays with rational motivation. He means it
seriously. The motivation is the psychological bite, but since it is qualified
by rational, it corresponds to the higher more powerful bit of the soul, the
rational soul. There are, for Grice, the Grecians, Kantotle and Plathegel,
three souls: the vegetal, the animal, and the rational. As a matter of history,
Grice reaches value (in its guises of optimum and deeming) via his analysis of
meaning by Peirce. Many notions are value-paradeigmatic. The most
important of all philosophical notions that of rationality, presupposes
objective value as one of its motivations. For Grice, ratio can be
understood cognoscendi but also essendi, indeed volendi and fiendi, too. Rational
motivation involves a ratio cognoscendi and a ratio volendi; objective,
“objectum,” and “objectus,” ūs, m. f. “obicio,” rendered as “a casting before,
a putting against, in the way, or opposite, an opposing; or, neutr., a lying
before or opposite (mostly poet. and in postAug. prose): dare objectum parmaï,
the opposing of the shield” “vestis;” “insula portum efficit objectu laterum,”
“by the opposition,” “cum terga flumine, latera objectu paludis tegerentur;”
“molis;” “regiones, quæ Tauri montis objectu separantur;” “solem interventu
lunæ occultari, lunamque terræ objectu, the interposition,” “eademque terra
objectu suo umbram noctemque efficiat;” “al. objecta soli: hi molium objectus
(i. e. moles objectas) scandere, the projection,” transf., that which presents
itself to the sight, an object, appearance, sight, spectacle;” al.
objecto; and if not categoric. This is
analogous to the overuse by Grice of psychoLOGICAL when he just means
souly. It is perhaps his use of psychological for souly that leads to take
any souly concept as a theoretical concept within a folksy psychoLOGICAL
theory. Grice considered the stratification of values, alla Hartmann,
unlike Barnes, who dismissed him in five minutes. “Some like Philippa Foot, but
Hare is MY man,” Grice would say. “Virtue” ethics was becoming all the fashion,
especially around Somerville. Hare was getting irritated by the worse offender,
his Anglo-Welsh tutee, originally with a degree from the other place, Williams.
Enough for Grice to want to lecture on value, and using Carus as an excuse!
Mackie was what Oxonians called a colonial, and a clever one! In fact, Grice
quotes from Hares contribution to a volume on Mackie. Hares and Mackies
backgrounds could not be more different. Like Grice, Hare was a Lit. Hum., and
like Grice, Hare loves the Grundlegung. But unlike Grice and Barnes, Hare would
have nothing to say about Stevenson. Philosophers in the play group of Grice
never took the critique by Ayer of emotivism seriously. Stevenson is the thing.
V. Urmson on the emotive theory of ethics, tracing it to English philosphers
like Ogden, Barnes, and Duncan-Jones. Barnes was opposing both Prichard (who
was the Whites professor of moral philosophy – and more of an interest than
Moore is, seeing that Prichard is Barness tutor at Corpus) and Hartmann. Ryle
would have nothing to do with Hartmann, but these were the days before Ryle
took over Oxford, and forbade any reference to a continental philosopher, even
worse if a “Hun.” Grice reaches the notion of value through that of meaning. If
Peirce is simplistic, Grice is not. But his ultra-sophisticated analysis ends
up being deemed to hold in this or that utterer. And deeming is valuing, as is
optimum. While Grice rarely used axiology, he should! A set of three
lectures, which are individually identified below. I love Carus! Grice was
undecided as to what his Carus lectures were be on. Grice explores meaning
under its value optimality guise in Meaning revisited. Grice thinks that a
value-paradeigmatic notion allows him to respond in a more apt way to what some
critics were raising as a possible vicious circle in his approach to semantic
and psychological notions. The Carus lectures are then dedicated to the
construction, alla Hume, of a value-paradeigmatic notion in general, and value
itself. Grice starts by quoting Austin, Hare, and Mackie, of
Oxford. The lectures are intended to a general audience, provided it is a
philosophical general audience. Most of the second lecture is a subtle
exploration by Grice of the categorical imperative of Kant, with which he had
struggled in the last Locke lecture in “Aspects,” notably the reduction of the
categorical imperative to this or that counsel of prudence with an implicated
protasis to the effect that the agent is aiming at eudæmonia. The Carus Lectures
are three: on objectivity and value, on relative and absolute value, and on
metaphysics and value. The first lecture, on objectivity and value, is
a review Inventing right and wrong by Mackie, quoting Hare’s
antipathy for a value being ‘objective’. The second lecture, on relative and
absolute value, is an exploration on the categorical imperative, and its
connection with a prior hypothetical or suppositional imperative. The
third lecture, on metaphycis and value, is an eschatological defence of absolute
value. The collective citation should be identified by each lecture separately.
This is a metaphysical defence by Grice of absolute value. The topic fascinates
Grice, and he invents a few routines to cope with it. Humeian projection
rationally reconstructs the intuitive concept being of value. Category
shift allows to put a value such as the disinterestedness by Smith in
grammatical subject position, thus avoiding to answer that the
disinterestedness of Smith is in the next room, since it is not the spatio-temporal
continuan prote ousia that Smith is. But the most important routine is
that of trans-substantatio, or metousiosis. A human reconstructs as a
rational personal being, and alla Kantotle, whatever he judges is
therefore of absolute value. The issue involves for Grice the introduction
of a telos qua aition, causa finalis (final cause), role, or métier. The final
cause of a tiger is to tigerise, the final cause of a reasoner is to
reason, the final cause of a person is to personise. And this entails absolute
value, now metaphysically defended. The justification involves the ideas of
end-setting, unweighed rationality, autonomy, and freedom. In something
like a shopping list that Grice provides for issues on free. Attention to
freedom calls for formidably difficult undertakings including the search for a
justification for the adoption or abandonment of an ultimate end. The point is
to secure that freedom does not dissolve into compulsion or chance. Grice
proposes four items for this shopping list. A first point is that full action
calls for strong freedom. Here one has to be careful that since Grice abides by
what he calls the Modified Occams Razor in the third James lecture on Some
remarks about logic and conversation, he would not like to think of this two
(strong freedom and weak freedom) as being different senses of free. Again, his
calls for is best understood as presupposes. It may connect with, say, Kanes
full-blown examples of decisions in practical settings that call for or
presuppose libertarianism. A second point is that the buletic-doxastic
justification of action has to accomodate for the fact that we need freedom
which is strong. Strong or serious autonomy or freedom ensures that this or
that action is represented as directed to this or that end E which are is not
merely the agents, but which is also freely or autonomously adopted or pursued
by the agent. Grice discusses the case of the gym instructor commanding, Raise
your left arm! The serious point then involves this free adoption or free pursuit.
Note Grices use of this or that personal-identity pronoun: not merely mine,
i.e. not merely the agents, but in privileged-access position. This connects
with what Aristotle says of action as being up to me, and Kant’s idea of the
transcendental ego. An end is the agents in that the agent adopts it with
liberum arbitrium. This or that ground-level desire may be circumstantial. A
weak autonomy or freedom satisfactorily accounts for this or that action as
directed to an end which is mine. However, a strong autonomy or freedom, and a
strong autonomy or freedom only, accounts for this or that action as directed
to an end which is mine, but, unlike, say, some ground-level circumstantial
desire which may have sprung out of some circumstantial adaptability to a given
scenario, is, first, autonomously or freely adopted by the agent, and, second,
autonomously or freely pursued by the agent. The use of the disjunctive
particle or in the above is of some interest. An agent may autonomously or
freely adopt an end, yet not care to pursue it autonomously or freely, even in
this strong connotation that autonomous or free sometimes has. A further point
relates to causal indeterminacy. Any attempt to remedy this situation by
resorting to causal indeterminacy or chance will only infuriate the scientist
without aiding the philosopher. This remark by Grice has to be understood
casually. For, as it can be shown, this or that scientist may well have
resorted to precisely that introduction and in any case have not self-infuriated.
The professional tag that is connoted by philosopher should also be seen as
best implicated than entailed. A scientist who does resort to the introduction
of causal indeterminacy may be eo ipso be putting forward a serious
consideration regarding ethics or meta-ethics. In other words, a cursory
examination of the views of a scientist like Eddington, beloved by Grice, or
this or that moral philosopher like Kane should be born in mind when
considering this third point by Grice. The reference by Grice to chance,
random, and causal indeterminacy, should best be understood vis-à-vis
Aristotles emphasis on tykhe, fatum, to the effect that this or that event may
just happen just by accident, which may well open a can of worms for the naive
Griceian, but surely not the sophisticated one (cf. his remarks on
accidentally, in Prolegomena). A further item in Grices shopping list involves
the idea of autonomous or free as a value, or optimum. The specific character
of what Grice has as strong autonomy or freedom may well turn out to
consist, Grice hopes, in the idea of this or that action as the outcome of a
certain kind of strong valuation ‒ where this would include the
rational selection, as per e.g. rational-decision theory, of this or that
ultimate end. What Grice elsewhere calls out-weighed or extrinsically weighed
rationality, where rational includes the buletic, of the end and not the means
to it. This or that full human action calls for the presence of this or that
reason, which require that this or that full human action for which this or
that reason accounts should be the outcome of a strong rational valuation. Like
a more constructivist approach, this line suggests that this or that action may
require, besides strong autonomy or freedom, now also strong valuation. Grice
sets to consider how to adapt the buletic-doxastic soul progression to reach
these goals. In the case of this or that ultimate end E, justification should
be thought of as lying, directly, at least, in this or that outcome, not on the
actual phenomenal fulfilment of this or that end, but rather of the, perhaps
noumenal, presence qua end. Grice relates to Kants views on the benevolentia or
goodwill and malevolentia, or evil will, or illwill. Considers Smiths action of
giving Jones a job. Smith may be deemed to have given Jones a job, whether or
not Jones actually gets the job. It is Smiths benevolentia, or goodwill, not
his beneficentia, that matters. Hence in Short and Lewis, we have
“bĕnĕfĭcentĭa,” f. “beneficus,” like “magnificentia” f. magnificus, and
“munificentia” f. munificus; Cicero, Off. 1, 7, 20, and which they thus render
as “the quality of beneficus, kindness, beneficence, an honorable and kind
treatment of others” (omaleficentia, Lact. Ira Dei, 1, 1; several times in the
philos. writings of Cicero. Elsewhere rare: quid praestantius bonitate et
beneficentiā?” “beneficentia, quam eandem vel benignitatem vel liberalitatem
appellari licet,” “comitas ac beneficentia,” “uti beneficentiā adversus
supplices,”“beneficentia augebat ornabatque subjectsos.” In a more general
fashion then, it is the mere presence of an end qua end of a given action that
provides the justification of the end, and not its phenomenal satisfaction or
fulfilment. Furthermore, the agents having such and such an end, E1, or
such and such a combination of ends, E1 and E2, would be justified by showing
that the agents having this end exhibits some desirable feature, such as this
or that combo being harmonious. For how can one combine ones desire to smoke
with ones desire to lead a healthy life? Harmony is one of the six requirements
by Grice for an application of happy to the life of Smith. The buletic-doxastic
souly ascription is back in business at a higher level. The suggestion would
involve an appeal, in the justification of this or that end, to this or that
higher-order end which would be realised by having this or that lower, or
first-order end of a certain sort. Such valuation of this or that lower-order
end lies within reach of a buletic-doxastic souly ascription. Grice has an
important caveat at this point. This or that higher-order end involved in the
defense would itself stand in need of justification, and the regress might well
turn out to be vicious. One is reminded of Watson’s requirement for a thing
like freedom or personal identity to overcome this or that alleged
counterexample to freewill provided by H. Frankfurt. It is after the
laying of a shopping list, as it were, and considerations such as those above
that Grice concludes his reflection with a defense of a noumenon, complete with
the inner conflict that it brings. Attention to the idea of autonomous and free
leads the philosopher to the need to resolve if not dissolve the most important
unsolved problem of philosophy, viz. how an agent can be, at the same time, a
member of both the phenomenal world and the noumenal world, or, to settle the
internal conflict between one part of our rational nature, the doxastic, even
scientific, part which seems to call for the universal reign of a deterministic
law and the other buletic part which insists that not merely moral
responsibility but every variety of rational belief demands exemption from just
such a reign. In this lecture, Grice explores freedom and value from a
privileged-access incorrigible perspective rather than the creature
construction genitorial justification. Axiology – v. axiological. Valitum
-- Fact-value distinction, the apparently fundamental difference between how
things are and how they should be. That people obey the law or act honestly or
desire money is one thing; that they should is quite another. The first is a
matter of fact, the second a matter of value. Hume is usually credited with
drawing the distinction when he noticed that one cannot uncontroversially infer
an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ the isought gap. From the fact, say, that an action
would maximize overall happiness, we cannot legitimately infer that it ought to
be done without the introduction of some
so far suppressed evaluative premise. We could secure the inference by assuming
that one ought always to do what maximizes overall happiness. But that
assumption is evidently evaluative. And any other premise that might link the
non-evaluative premises to an evaluative conclusion would look equally
evaluative. No matter how detailed and extensive the non-evaluative premises,
it seems no evaluative conclusion follows directly and as a matter of logic.
Some have replied that at least a few non-evaluative claims do entail
evaluative ones. To take one popular example, from the fact that some promise
was made, we might it appears legitimately infer that it ought to be kept,
other things equal and this without the
introduction of an evaluative premise. Yet many argue that the inference fails,
or that the premise is actually evaluative, or that the conclusion is not. Hume
himself was both bold and brief about the gap’s significance, claiming simply
that paying attention to it “wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality,
and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on
the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason” Treatise of Human Nature.
Others have been more expansive. Moore, for instance, in effect relied upon the
gap to establish via the open question argument that any attempt to define
evaluative terms using non-evaluative ones would commit the naturalistic
fallacy. Moore’s main target was the suggestion that ‘good’ means “pleasant”
and the fallacy, in this context, is supposed to be misidentifying an
evaluative property, being good, with a natural property, being pleasant.
Assuming that evaluative terms have meaning, Moore held that some could be
defined using others he thought, e.g., that ‘right’ could be defined as
“productive of the greatest possible good” and that the rest, though
meaningful, must be indefinable terms denoting simple, non-natural, properties.
Accepting Moore’s use of the open question argument but rejecting both his
non-naturalism and his assumption that evaluative terms must have descriptive
meaning, emotivists and prescriptivists e.g. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and Hare
argued that evaluative terms have a role in language other than to denote
properties. According to them, the primary role of evaluative language is not
to describe, but to prescribe. The logical gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, they
argue, establishes both the difference between fact and value and the
difference between describing how things are and recommending how they might
be. Some naturalists, though, acknowledge the gap and yet maintain that the
evaluative claims nonetheless do refer to natural properties. In the process
they deny the ontological force of the open question argument and 302 F 302 treat evaluative claims as describing a
special class of facts. Refs.: The main
source is The construction of value, the Carus lectures, Clarendon. But there
are scattered essays on value and valuing in the Grice Papers. H. P. Grice,
“Objectivity and value,” s. V, c. 8-f. 18, “The rational motivation for
objective value,” s. V, c. 8-f. 19, “Value,” s. V, c. 9-f. 20; “Value, metaphysics,
and teleology,” s. V, c. 9-f. 23, “Values, morals, absolutes, and the
metaphysical,” s. V., c. 9-f. 24; “Value
sub-systems and the Kantian problem,” s. V. c. 9-ff. 25-27; “Values and
rationalism,” s. V, c. 9-f. 28; while the Carus are in the second series, in
five folders, s. II, c-2, ff. 12-16, the H. P. Grice Papers, BANC. value, the
worth of something. Philosophers have discerned these main forms: intrinsic,
instrumental, inherent, and relational value. Intrinsic value may be taken as
basic and many of the others defined in terms of it. Among the many attempts to
explicate the concept of intrinsic value, some deal primarily with the source
of value, while others employ the concept of the “fittingness” or
“appropriateness” to it of certain kinds of emotions and desires. The first is
favored by Moore and the second by Brentano. Proponents of the first view hold
that the intrinsic value of X is the value that X has solely in virtue of its
intrinsic nature. Thus, the state of affairs, Smith’s experiencing pleasure,
has intrinsic value provided it has value solely in virtue of its intrinsic
nature. Followers of the second approach explicate intrinsic value in terms of
the sorts of emotions and desires appropriate to a thing “in and for itself” or
“for its own sake”. Thus, one might say X has intrinsic value or is
intrinsically good if and only if X is worthy of desire in and for itself, or,
alternatively, it is fitting or appropriate for anyone to favor X in and for
itself. Thus, the state of affairs of Smith’s experiencing pleasure is
intrinsically valuable provided that state of affairs is worthy of desire for
its own sake, or it is fitting for anyone to favor that state of affairs in and
for itself. Concerning the other forms of value, we may say that X has
instrumental value if and only if it is a means to, or causally contributes to,
something that is intrinsically valuable. If Smith’s experiencing pleasure is
intrinsically valuable and his taking a warm bath is a means to, or Valentinus
value 948 948 causally contributes to,
his being pleased, then his taking a warm bath is instrumentally valuable or
“valuable as a means.” Similarly, if health is intrinsically valuable and
exercise is a means to health, then exercise is instrumentally valuable. X has
inherent value if and only if the experience, awareness, or contemplation of X
is intrinsically valuable. If the experience of a beautiful sunset is
intrinsically valuable, then the beautiful sunset has inherent value. X has
contributory value if and only if X contributes to the value of some whole, W,
of which it is a part. If W is a whole that consists of the facts that Smith is
pleased and Brown is pleased, then the fact that Smith is pleased contributes
to the value of W, and Smith’s being pleased has contributory value. Our
example illustrates that something can have contributory value without having
instrumental value, for the fact that Smith is pleased is not a means to W and,
strictly speaking, it does not bring about or causally contribute to W. Given
the distinction between instrumental and contributory value, we may say that
certain sorts of experiences and activities can have contributory value if they
are part of an intrinsically valuable life and contribute to its value, even
though they are not means to it. Finally, we may say that X has relational
value if and only if X has value in virtue of bearing some relation to
something else. Instrumental, inherent, and contributory value may be construed
as forms of relational value. But there are other forms of relational value one
might accept, e.g. one might hold that X is valuable for S in virtue of being
desired by S or being such that S would desire X were S “fully informed” and
“rational.” Some philosophers defend the organicity of intrinsic value. Moore,
for example, held that the intrinsic value of a whole is not necessarily equal
to the sum of the intrinsic values of its parts. According to this view, the
presence of an intrinsically good part might lower the intrinsic value of a
whole of which it is a part and the presence of an intrinsically bad part might
raise the intrinsic value of a whole to which it belongs. Defenders of
organicity sometimes point to examples of Mitfreude taking joy or pleasure in
another’s joy and Schadenfreude taking joy or pleasure in another’s suffering
to illustrate their view. Suppose Jones believes incorrectly that Smith is
happy and Brown believes incorrectly that Gray is suffering, but Jones is
pleased that Smith is happy and Brown is pleased that Gray is suffering. The
former instance of Mitfreude seems intrinsically better than the latter
instance of Schadenfreude even though they are both instances of pleasure and
neither whole has an intrinsically bad part. The value of each whole is not a
“mere sum” of the values of its parts. Valitum
-- axiology: value theory, also called axiology, the branch of philosophy
concerned with the nature of value and with what kinds of things have value.
Construed very broadly, value theory is concerned with all forms of value, such
as the aesthetic values of beauty and ugliness, the ethical values of right,
wrong, obligation, virtue, and vice, and the epistemic values of justification
and lack of justification. Understood more narrowly, value theory is concerned
with what is intrinsically valuable or ultimately worthwhile and desirable for
its own sake and with the related concepts of instrumental, inherent, and
contributive value. When construed very broadly, the study of ethics may be
taken as a branch of value theory, but understood more narrowly value theory
may be taken as a branch of ethics. In its more narrow form, one of the chief
questions of the theory of value is, What is desirable for its own sake? One
traditional sort of answer is hedonism. Hedonism is roughly the view that i the
only intrinsically good experiences or states of affairs are those containing
pleasure, and the only instrinsically bad experiences or states of affairs are
those containing pain; ii all experiences or states of affairs that contain
more pleasure than pain are intrinsically good and all experiences or states of
affairs that contain more pain than pleasure are intrinsically bad; and iii any
experience or state of affairs that is intrinsically good is so in virtue of
being pleasant or containing pleasure and any experience or state of affairs
that is intrinsically bad is so in virtue of being painful or involving pain.
Hedonism has been defended by philosophers such as Epicurus, Bentham, Sidgwick,
and, with significant qualifications, J. S. Mill. Other philosophers, such as
C. I. Lewis, and, perhaps, Brand Blanshard, have held that what is
intrinsically or ultimately desirable are experiences that exhibit
“satisfactoriness,” where being pleasant is but one form of being satisfying.
Other philosophers have recognized a plurality of things other than pleasure or
satisfaction as having intrinsic value. Among the value pluralists are Moore,
Rashdall, Ross, Brentano, Hartmann, and Scheler. In addition to certain kinds
of pleasures, these thinkers count some or all of the following as
intrinsically good: consciousness and the flourishing of life, knowledge and
insight, moral virtue and virtuous actions, friendship and mutual affection,
beauty and aesthetic experience, a just distribution of goods, and self-expression.
Many, if not all, of the philosophers mentioned above distinguish between what
has value or is desirable for its own sake and what is instrumentally valuable.
Furthermore, they hold that what is desirable for its own sake or intrinsically
good has a value not dependent on anyone’s having an interest in it. Both of
these claims have been challenged by other value theorists. Dewey, for example,
criticizes any sharp distinction between what is intrinsically good or good as
an end and what is good as a means on the ground that we adopt and abandon ends
to the extent that they serve as means to the resolution of conflicting
impulses and desires. Perry denies that anything can have value without being
an object of interest. Indeed, Perry claims that ‘X is valuable’ means
‘Interest is taken in X’ and that it is a subject’s interest in a thing that
confers value on it. Insofar as he holds that the value of a thing is dependent
upon a subject’s interest in that thing, Perry’s value theory is a subjective theory
and contrasts sharply with objective theories holding that some things have
value not dependent on a subject’s interests or attitudes. Some philosophers,
dissatisfied with the view that value depends on a subject’s actual interests
and theories, have proposed various alternatives, including theories holding
that the value of a thing depends on what a subject would desire or have an
interest in if he were fully rational or if desires were based on full
information. Such theories may be called “counterfactual” desire theories since
they take value to be dependent, not upon a subject’s actual interests, but
upon what a subject would desire if certain conditions, which do not obtain,
were to obtain. Value theory is also concerned with the nature of value. Some
philosophers have denied that sentences of the forms ‘X is good’ or ‘X is
intrinsically good’ are, strictly speaking, either true or false. As with other
forms of ethical discourse, they claim that anyone who utters these sentences
is either expressing his emotional attitudes or else prescribing or commending
something. Other philosophers hold that such sentences can express what is true
or false, but disagree about the nature of value and the meaning of value terms
like ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘better’. Some philosophers, such as Moore, hold that
in a truth of the form ‘X is intrinsically good’, ‘good’ refers to a simple,
unanalyzable, non-natural property, a property not identical with or analyzable
by any “natural” property such as being pleasant or being desired. Moore’s view
is one form of non-naturalism. Other philosophers, such as Brentano, hold that
‘good’ is a syncategorematic expression; as such it does not refer to a
property or relation at all, though it contributes to the meaning of the
sentence. Still other philosophers have held that ‘X is good’ and ‘X is
intrinsically good’ can be analyzed in natural or non-ethical terms. This sort
of naturalism about value is illustrated by Perry, who holds that ‘X is
valuable’ means ‘X is an object of interest’. The history of value theory is
full of other attempted naturalistic analyses, some of which identify or
analyze ‘good’ in terms of pleasure or being the object of rational desire.
Many philosophers argue that naturalism is preferable on epistemic grounds. If,
e.g., ‘X is valuable’ just means ‘X is an object of interest’, then in order to
know whether something is valuable, one need only know whether it is the object
of someone’s interest. Our knowledge of value is fundamentally no different in
kind from our knowledge of any other empirical fact. This argument, however, is
not decisive against non-naturalism, since it is not obvious that there is no
synthetic a priori knowledge of the sort Moore takes as the fundamental value
cognition. Furthermore, it is not clear that one cannot combine non-naturalism
about value with a broadly empirical epistemology, one that takes certain kinds
of experience as epistemic grounds for beliefs about value. Valitum -- valid, having the property that a
well-formed formula, argument, argument form, or rule of inference has when it
is logically correct in a certain respect. A well-formed formula is valid if it
is true under every admissible reinterpretation of its non-logical symbols. If
truth-value gaps or multiple truth-values are allowed, ‘true’ here might be
replaced by ‘non-false’ or takes a “designated” truth-value. An argument is
valid if it is impossible for the premises all to be true and, at the same
time, the conclusion false. An argument form schema is valid if every argument
of that form is valid. A rule of inference is valid if it cannot lead from all
true premises to a false conclusion. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The conception of
value,” The Paul Carus Lectures for the American Philosophical Association,
published by Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
vanini: philosopher, a Renaissance Aristotelian who studied
law and theology. He became a monk and traveled all over Europe. After
abjuring, he taught and practiced medicine. He was burned at the stake by the
Inquisition. His major work is four volumes of dialogues, De admirandis naturae
reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis “On the Secrets of Nature, Queen and Goddess
of Mortal Beings,” 1616. He was influenced by Averroes and Pietro Pomponazzi,
whom he regarded as his teacher. Vanini rejects revealed religion and claims
that God is immanent in nature. The world is ruled by a necessary natural order
and is eternal. Like Averroes, he denies the immortality and the immateriality
of the human soul. Like Pomponazzi, he denies the existence of miracles and
claims that all apparently extraordinary phenomena can be shown to have natural
causes and to be predetermined. Despite the absence of any original
contribution, from the second half of the seventeenth century Vanini was
popular as a symbol of free and atheist thought. Giulio
Cesare Vanini Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera. Jump to navigationJump to
search Medaglione di Vanini al monumento a Giordano Bruno in Campo de'
Fiori. Sotto il mento, una piccola effigie di Martin Lutero[1]. Giulio Cesare
Vanini (Taurisano, 19 gennaio 1585 – Tolosa, 9 febbraio 1619) è stato un
filosofo, medico, naturalista e libero pensatore italiano, fra i primi
esponenti di rilievo del libertinismo erudito. Indice 1 Biografia
1.1 La fuga in Inghilterra 1.2 La fuga da Londra 1.3 In Francia 1.4 A Tolosa 2
Opera 3 Pensiero 4 La fortuna filosofica di Vanini 5 Opere letterarie 6 Note 7
Bibliografia 7.1 Vanini in Inghilterra 7.1.1 Documenti 7.1.2 Documenti inclusi
nell'opera di Namer 7.2 Vanini e l'Inquisizione di Roma 8 Altri progetti 9
Collegamenti esterni Biografia Giulio Cesare Vanini nasce nella notte tra il 19
e il 20 gennaio 1585[2] a Taurisano, casale di Terra d'Otranto, nella famiglia
che il padre Giovan Battista, uomo d'affari originario di Tresana in Toscana,
ha costituito sposando una Lopez de Noguera, appartenente a una famiglia
spagnola appaltatrice delle regie dogane della Terra di Bari, della Terra
d'Otranto, della Capitanata e della Basilicata. Anche un successivo documento
dell'agosto del 1612, scoperto nell'Archivio segreto vaticano, lo qualifica
"pugliese", confermando il luogo di nascita ch'egli si attribuisce
nelle sue opere. Nel censimento ufficiale della popolazione del casale di
Taurisano, nel 1596, figurano solo i nomi di Giovan Battista Vanini, del figlio
legittimo Alessandro, nato nel 1582, e del figlio naturale Giovan Francesco.
Nessun cenno della moglie e dell'altro figlio legittimo Giulio Cesare. Nel 1603
Giovan Battista Vanini viene segnalato per l'ultima volta a Taurisano: si ha motivo
di ritenere che dopo questa data sia rientrato a Napoli. Paolo
Sarpi Sistemata ogni pendenza economica, nel 1603[3] entra nell'ordine
carmelitano assumendo il nome di fra' Gabriele e si trasferisce a Padova per
intraprendere gli studi di teologia presso quell'università. Giunge nelle terre
della Repubblica di Venezia quando le polemiche provocate due anni prima
dall'interdetto del papa Paolo V sono ancora vivacissime. Durante il soggiorno
padovano entra in contatto con il gruppo capeggiato da Paolo Sarpi che, con
l'appoggio dell'ambasciata inglese a Venezia, alimenta la polemica
antipapale. Giulio Cesare consegue a Napoli il titolo di dottore in
utroque iure, superando nel giugno 1606 l'esame che gli consentiva di
esercitare la professione di dottore nella legge civile e canonica. Come verrà
descritto in documenti posteriori, egli ha assimilato una grande cultura,
«parla assai bene il latino e con una grande facilità, è alto di taglia e un
po' magro, ha i capelli castani, il naso aquilino, gli occhi vivi e fisionomia
gradevole ed ingegnosa». Nel 1606 probabilmente il padre del filosofo
muore a Napoli. Giulio Cesare Vanini, divenuto maggiorenne, si fa riconoscere
da un tribunale della capitale erede di Giovan Battista e tutore del fratello
Alessandro. Con una serie di rogiti e procure notarili redatte a Napoli, Giulio
Cesare inizia a sistemare ogni pendenza economica conseguente alla morte del
padre: vende una casa di sua proprietà sita in Ugento, a pochi chilometri dal
suo paese d'origine; nel 1607 dà mandato a uno zio materno di assolvere
incarichi dello stesso tipo, incarica nel 1608 l'amico Scarciglia di
recuperagli una somma e gli vende alcuni beni rimasti a Taurisano e tenuti in
custodia dai due fratelli. Nel 1611 partecipa alle prediche quaresimali,
attirandosi i sospetti delle autorità religiose. La fuga in Inghilterra
Nel gennaio 1612, in conseguenza dei suoi atteggiamenti antipapali, viene
allontanato dal convento di Padova e rinviato, in attesa di ulteriori sanzioni
disciplinari, al Provinciale di Terra di Lavoro con sentenza del generale
dell'Ordine Carmelitano, Enrico Silvio, ma l'anno dopo fugge in Inghilterra,
insieme con il confratello genovese Bonaventura Genocchi. Nel viaggio, toccano
Bologna, Milano, i Grigioni svizzeri e discendono il corso del Reno sino alla
costa del Mare del Nord, attraversando la Germania, i Paesi Bassi, il canale
della Manica e giungendo infine a Londra e a Lambeth, sede arcivescovile del
Primate d'Inghilterra. Qui i due frati rimarranno per quasi due anni, nascondendo
la loro reale identità perfino ai loro ospiti inglesi, poiché è provato che lo
stesso arcivescovo di Canterbury, George Abbot, li conosceva sotto un nome
diverso da quello reale. Francesco Bacone Nel luglio 1612, nella
Chiesa londinese detta "dei Merciai" o "degli Italiani",
alla presenza di un folto auditorio e del filosofo Francesco Bacone, Vanini e
il suo compagno fanno una pubblica sconfessione della loro fede cattolica,
abbracciando la religione anglicana. In realtà i due frati non hanno tagliato i
ponti con i loro ambienti di provenienza: infatti nel 1613 Genocchi viene
raggiunto da una lettera molto amichevole di un amico e confratello genovese,
Gregorio Spinola. A loro volta, le autorità cattoliche vengono subito
informate di questo caso. All'inizio di agosto è il nunzio a Parigi ad
avvertire la Segreteria di Stato vaticana che due frati veneziani non meglio
identificati sono fuggiti in Inghilterra «e si sono fatti ugonotti», che un
vescovo italiano sta per seguirli e che lo stesso Paolo Sarpi, morto il doge e
privato della sua protezione, per non cadere in mano dei suoi nemici, è sul
punto di fuggire in Palatinato tra i protestanti; analoga notizia, arricchita
di altri particolari, viene inoltrata dal nunzio in Fiandra al cardinale
Borghese a Roma, che risponde mostrandosi già al corrente dei fatti e
dell'esatta identità dei due frati; sa che la fuga di Vanini, di Genocchi, di
Paolo Sarpi e di un non ancora identificato vescovo italiano potrebbe portare
alla ricostituzione in terra protestante del gruppo di opposizione al Papato
già operante nella Repubblica veneta al tempo dell'interdetto. Nei mesi
seguenti il nunzio Ubaldini da Parigi continua a inviare a Roma dettagli sulla
condotta dei due frati rifugiati in Inghilterra, sulle loro predicazioni, su
come sono stati accolti a corte e dalle autorità religiose, su come si continui
a parlare dell'arrivo del vescovo italiano. La Segreteria di Stato vaticana
esorta il nunzio in Francia ad attivare i suoi confidenti in Inghilterra al
fine di scoprire l'identità del vescovo intenzionato a rifugiarvisi; in ottobre
il cardinale Ubaldini da Parigi assicura alla Segreteria di Stato tutto il suo
impegno in merito all'argomento dei due frati. Nello stesso dispaccio afferma
che non mancherà di informare di ogni dettaglio anche il cardinale Arrigoni,
che gli ha scritto in merito per conto del Papa e della Congregazione del
Sant'Uffizio. Evidentemente a quella data la condotta veneziana e la successiva
fuga dei due frati era già diventata argomento di discussione dell'Inquisizione
Romana. Un'altra lettera del cardinale Borghese invita il nunzio in
Francia ad essere vigile sulla faccenda della fuga del vescovo in Inghilterra
e, nel caso egli passi per il suolo francese, a far di tutto per «farlo
ritenere», come suggerisce il Papa e «come sarebbe molto a proposito». In
dicembre il Nunzio Ubaldini invia da Parigi al cardinale Borghese notizie
dettagliate e di tenore molto diverso rispetto alle precedenti sui due frati,
attestando la buona reputazione di cui essi godono in Inghilterra e la fiducia
che possano presto essere recuperati alla Chiesa di Roma. Questa lettera viene
poi trasmessa al tribunale dell'Inquisizione romana che nei primi giorni del
gennaio successivo inizia di fatto a istruire il processo contro Vanini.
Il Museo di Storia Naturale dell'Università di Oxford Nei mesi successivi
si hanno varie notizie di un gran traffico di suppliche e lettere dei due frati
a Roma, specialmente tramite l'ambasciatore spagnolo a Londra, per ottenere il
perdono del papa e il rientro nel Cattolicesimo. Le autorità religiose inglesi
ne vengono segretamente informate e dispongono un'attenta sorveglianza nei
confronti dei due frati. Tra la fine del 1613 e l'inizio del 1614 Vanini
si reca in visita all'Università di Cambridge e poi ad Oxford; qui confida ad
alcuni conoscenti la sua ormai imminente fuga dall'Inghilterra, cosicché in
gennaio i due frati vengono arrestati dalla guardie dell'arcivescovo dopo una
funzione religiosa nella chiesa "degli Italiani" e rinchiusi in case
di alcuni servi dell'arcivescovo. Scoppia un grande scandalo e dell'episodio
vengono informati il re e le massime autorità dello Stato, in quanto nelle
operazioni di recupero appaiono chiaramente coinvolti agenti di nazioni
straniere accreditati nelle ambasciate a Londra. Altissime personalità
cattoliche da Roma seguono la vicenda e la favoriscono con grande calore.
In febbraio Genocchi, eludendo la sorveglianza e con l'aiuto di agenti
stranieri, fugge dalla prigione e dall'Inghilterra; in conseguenza di ciò,
Vanini viene trasferito in luogo più sicuro e rinchiuso nella Carzel publica,
ovvero nella Gatehouse adiacente all'Abbazia di Westminster. Dilaga lo
scandalo; volano le accuse di leggerezza nei confronti dei fautori della fuga
dei due frati dall'Italia, mentre cominciano a circolare apertamente i nomi del
cappellano dell'ambasciatore veneto a Londra, Girolamo Moravo, e
dell'ambasciatore spagnolo quali autori del clamoroso "recupero".
Dalla Curia romana si continua a seguire la vicenda e a favorirla in ogni
modo. A Londra viene intanto istruito il processo a Vanini: il frate
rischia una severa punizione, non il rogo come i martiri della fede (come il
carmelitano scriverà con enfasi poi nelle sue opere), ma una lunga deportazione
in desolate colonie lontane, come l'arcivescovo Abbot suggerisce al re.
La fuga da Londra Tra il 10 e il 16 marzo 1614 anche Vanini riesce a evadere di
prigione e a fuggire dall'Inghilterra, sempre grazie all'aiuto degli agenti
dell'ambasciatore spagnolo a Londra, incoraggiato da alte personalità romane e
del cappellano dell'ambasciata della Repubblica Veneta, che si avvale anche
dell'opera di alcuni servi dell'ambasciatore stesso, ma all'insaputa di
questi. Due anni dopo, durante il processo della Repubblica Veneta contro
l'ambasciatore Foscarini per spionaggio e per aver consentito ad Abbot di
sottoporre ad interrogatorio il personale dell'ambasciata, vengono alla luce
anche dettagli sulla complicità della fuga di Vanini da Londra. In aprile
Vanini e Genocchi arrivano a Bruxelles e si presentano al Nunzio di Fiandra,
Guido Bentivoglio, che li attende da tempo. Vengono iniziate le prime pratiche
per la concessione del perdono per la fuga in Inghilterra e per l'apostasia e
viene loro accordato di tornare in Italia e di vivervi in abito di prete
secolare, senza più indossare l'abito religioso, ma con il vincolo
dell'obbedienza al loro superiore. Forti di tali concessioni, alla fine di
maggio i due frati vengono posti sulla via per Parigi, dove devono presentarsi
al Nunzio di quella città, Roberto Ubaldini. All'incirca nello stesso
periodo giunge a Parigi anche l'ultimo frate "recuperato"
dall'Inghilterra, fra' Nicolò da Ferrara, al secolo Camillo Marchetti. Altri
due frati, invece, non ottengono il perdono dalle autorità cattoliche.
Lione, la città vecchia A Parigi, nell'estate del 1614, durante la
permanenza presso la sede del Nunzio Ubaldini, Vanini si inserisce nella
polemica relativa all'accettazione dei principi del Concilio di Trento in
Francia, che tardava ad arrivare a causa del rifiuto di parte del clero
gallicano; per orientare gli animi nella direzione voluta dalla Santa Sede,
scrive i Commentari in difesa del Concilio di Trento, di cui egli poi intende
avvalersi, come scrive Ubaldini ai suoi superiori in Roma, per dimostrare la
sincerità del suo ritorno nella fede cattolica. Riprende quindi la strada
per l'Italia, dirigendosi a Roma, dove deve affrontare le difficili fasi finali
del processo presso il tribunale dell'Inquisizione. Dimora per qualche mese a
Genova, dove ritrova l'amico Genocchi e si guadagna da vivere insegnando
filosofia ai figli di Scipione Doria. Nonostante le assicurazioni
ricevute, il ritorno dei frati non è del tutto tranquillo: nel gennaio 1615
Genocchi viene inaspettatamente arrestato dall'Inquisitore di Genova; a Ferrara
accade lo stesso all'altro frate "recuperato", Camillo Marchetti.
Vanini teme che gli accada la stessa sorte, fugge nuovamente in Francia e si
dirige a Lione. Gli esiti finali delle esperienze capitate al frate genovese e
a quello ferrarese - che vennero rilasciati dopo un breve periodo di detenzione
e restituiti alla normale vita religiosa - sembrano indicare che forse Vanini
esagerò il pericolo insito in queste operazioni di polizia
dell'Inquisizione. In Francia' A Lione, nel giugno 1615, Vanini pubblica
l'Amphitheatrum, che egli intende esibire in sua difesa alle autorità romane,
come si legge in un dispaccio di Ubaldini alle autorità romane. Esso è dedicato
a Francesco de Castro, ambasciatore spagnolo presso la Santa Sede, già
collegato con la famiglia Vanini, da cui il frate fuggiasco s'aspetta un aiuto
nell'operazione della concessione del perdono da parte delle autorità
romane. La Sorbona Poco tempo dopo, grazie anche agli appoggi
acquisiti presso certi ambienti cattolici con la pubblicazione della sua opera,
Vanini ritorna a Parigi e si ripresenta al Nunzio Ubaldini, chiedendogli di
intervenire in suo favore presso le autorità di Roma. In agosto il prelato
scrive al cardinale Borghese, chiedendo chiare indicazioni sulla sorte
dell'ex-carmelitano. Non si conosce la risposta del Segretario di Stato;
Vanini, comunque, non ritorna più in Italia e riesce invece a trovare la strada
e i mezzi per entrare in ambienti molto prestigiosi della nobiltà
francese. Nel 1616, in pochi mesi, Vanini completa un'altra sua opera, il
De Admirandis Naturae Reginae Deaeque Mortalium Arcanis, ed il 20 maggio
l'affida a due teologi della Sorbona perché ne autorizzino la pubblicazione,
secondo le norme del tempo vigenti in Francia; l'opera è pubblicata in
settembre a Parigi. Essa è dedicata a François de Bassompierre, uomo potente
alla corte di Maria de' Medici, ma è stampata da Adrien Perier, tipografo
notoriamente protestante. Il lavoro vede la luce in un ambiente ricco di
pubblicazioni che vengono guardate con sospetto dai rappresentanti cattolici e
che provocano pesanti condanne, fino al rogo. L'opera del Vanini ottiene un
immediato successo presso certi ambienti della nobiltà, popolati di giovani
spiriti che guardano con interesse alle innovazioni culturali e scientifiche
che vengono dall'Italia. In questo senso il De Admirandis costituisce una
summa, esposta in modo vivace e brillante, del nuovo sapere; dà una risposta
alle esigenze del momento di questo settore della nobiltà francese; diviene una
specie di "manifesto" culturale di questi esprits forts e rappresenta
per Vanini una possibilità di stabile permanenza negli ambienti vicini alla
corte di Parigi.[senza fonte] Tuttavia, pochi giorni dopo la
pubblicazione dell'opera, i due teologi della Sorbona che avevano espresso la
loro approvazione alla pubblicazione si presentano ai membri della Facoltà di
Teologia in seduta ufficiale e li informano di aver letto, a loro tempo, certi
dialoghi scritti da Vanini; di non avervi trovato allora niente che
contrastasse con la fede cattolica; di averli restituiti muniti della loro
approvazione alla stampa e con la condizione che il manoscritto da essi
controfirmato fosse depositato presso di essi a pubblicazione avvenuta, a
testimonianza della fedeltà del testo pubblicato a quello da loro approvato;
che ciò non era avvenuto e che circolava invece un testo dell'opera diverso da
quello approvato e contenente «alcuni errori contro la comune fede di tutti»,
per cui i due dottori avanzano la supplica che l'opera non circoli più con la
loro approvazione e che tale richiesta venga trascritta nel libro delle
Conclusioni della Facoltà stessa. La Sorbona accoglie tale richiesta che
costituì di fatto un divieto di circolazione del testo. Marco
Antonio de Dominis La Facoltà di Teologia della Sorbona, però, sembra non
occuparsi più dell'opera di Vanini, non prenderne più in esame l'opera, non
elencarne o denunciarne, come da prassi, gli errori da emendare, né mai
condanna il suo contenuto o il suo autore. Comunque, una condanna espressa dal
vicario episcopale di Tolosa, Jean de Rudèle, fu sottoscritta anche
dall'inquisitore Claude Billy. Inoltre anche la Congregazione dell'Indice
pronuncia una condanna il 3 luglio 1620, con la quale il De admirandis fu
condannato con la formula del donec corrigatur, in base alla quale il Sotomaior
collocò il Vanini nella prima classe degli autori proibiti nel suo indice del
1640. La Collectio Judiciorum de novis erroribus qui ab initio duodecimi seculi
post Incarnationem Verbi, usque ad annum 1632, in Ecclesia proscripti sunt et
notati, di Charles du Plessis d'Argentré, dottore della Sorbona e vescovo,
edita a Parigi nel 1728, esamina le censure e le "conclusioni"
espresse dalla Facoltà sino al 1632 - che aveva condannato l'Amphitheatrum Aeternae
Sapientiae di Heinrich Khunrath e la De Republica Ecclesiastica di Marco
Antonio de Dominis) - non menziona invece provvedimenti contro Vanini.
Tutto questo porterebbe a ritenere che non vi siano stati atti ufficiali
specifici di persecuzione contro Vanini da parte delle autorità parigine, né
religiose né civili, né in questo periodo né negli anni seguenti, ma solo
proteste e minacce nei suoi confronti da parte di alcuni settori cattolici. Una
condanna dell'opera di Vanini non avrebbe trovato fondate giustificazioni, né
sul piano giuridico né su quello culturale, in quanto gran parte delle teorie
esposte da Vanini non costituivano una novità per la cultura francese.
Fuggito da pochi mesi dall'Inghilterra, impossibilitato a rientrare in Italia,
minacciato da alcuni settori cattolici francesi, Vanini vede restringersi
intorno gli spazi di movimento e ridursi le possibilità di trovare stabile
sistemazione nella società francese. Ha paura che venga aperto un processo
contro di lui anche a Parigi, per cui fugge dalla capitale e si nasconde in
Bretagna, in una delle cui abbazie, quella di Redon, è Abate Commendatario il
suo amico e protettore, Arthur d'Espinay Saint-Luc. Ma intervengono anche altri
fattori di preoccupazione: nell'aprile 1617 viene ucciso a Parigi Concino
Concini, favorito di Maria de Medici, uomo potentissimo e molto odiato in
Francia. L'episodio, seguito poco dopo dall'allontanamento della regina dalla
capitale con il suo odiato seguito di italiani, crea notevole turbolenza
politica e suscita un vasto movimento di ostilità nei confronti degli italiani
residenti a corte. A Tolosa Nei mesi seguenti, altre cronache del tempo
segnalano la presenza di un misterioso italiano, con un nome strano, in
possesso di una grande cultura ma dall'incerto passato, ancora più a sud, in
alcune città della Guienna e poi della Linguadoca ed infine a Tolosa. Nella
particolare suddivisione politica della Francia del XVII secolo, Enrico, duca
di Montmorency, protettore degli esprits forts del tempo, sposato con la duchessa
italiana Maria Felice Orsini, è governatore di questa regione e sembra poter
accordare protezione al fuggiasco, che continua comunque a tenersi
prudentemente nascosto. La presenza a Tolosa di questo misterioso personaggio,
di cui si ignora la provenienza e la formazione culturale, ma che fa mostra di
grande sapienza, di grande vivacità dialettica specialmente tra i giovani e di
affermazioni non sempre allineate con la morale del tempo, non passa
inosservata ed attira i sospetti delle autorità, che cominciano a
sorvegliarlo. Dopo averlo ricercato per un mese, il 2 agosto 1618 le
autorità tolosane lo fanno arrestare e chiudere in prigione. Lo sottopongono ad
interrogatorio, cercano di scoprire chi egli sia, quali siano le sue idee in
materia di religione e di morale, perché fosse arrivato fin in quel lontano
angolo della Francia meridionale. Vengono convocati testimoni contro di lui, ma
non riescono ad accertare nulla, né a farlo tradire. Il convento
degli Agostiniani a Tolosa Il 9 febbraio 1619 il misterioso personaggio viene
improvvisamente riconosciuto colpevole e condannato al rogo. Ormai isolato,
braccato, impossibilitato a chiamare a sua difesa un passato travagliatissimo e
ricco di nodi mai sciolti, abbandonato dai pochi amici rimastigli fedeli perché
impotenti ad organizzare una chiara strategia in sua difesa, Vanini muore di
morte atroce. Il Parlamento di Tolosa lo riconosce colpevole del reato di
ateismo e di bestemmie contro il nome di Dio, condannandolo, sulla base della
normativa del tempo prevista per i bestemmiatori, alla stessa pena cui erano
andati incontro, in luoghi diversi ma in circostanze analoghe, certi Gilles
Fremond e Jean Fontanier: gli viene tagliata la lingua, poi è strangolato e
infine arso. Subito dopo l'esecuzione – rispettivamente nel maggio e nel
giugno 1619 - furono pubblicati due anonimi che facevano esplicitamente il nome
del Vanini e quindi nel misterioso italiano giustiziato viene riconosciuto
Giulio Cesare Vanini, l'autore del De Admirandis, che aveva suscitato i sospetti
di alcuni settori cattolici parigini nel 1616. Nello stesso 1619 comparvero le
Histoires memorables di Rosset, che, con la quinta Histoire, divulgava con
poche modifiche il secondo dei due citati canards. Nel luglio 1620 Joannes de
Rudele, teologo e vicario generale dell'arcivescovado di Tolosa, avverte
pubblicamente di aver esaminato le due opere di Vanini insieme con il padre
Claudio Billy e di averle trovate «contrarie al culto e all'accettazione del
vero Dio e assertrici dell'ateismo», emettendo ufficiale ordinanza di condanna
e proibendone la stampa e la vendita nella diocesi di Tolosa, territorio posto
sotto la sua giurisdizione. In precedenza, la Facoltà teologica della Sorbona
non aveva comunicato di aver adottato analogo provvedimento. Omaggio
a Giulio Cesare Vanini nel luogo della sua morte. Opera Amphitheatrum Æternæ
Providentiæ divino-magicum, christiano-physicum, necnon astrologo-catholicum
adversus veteres philosophos, atheos, epicureos, peripateticos et stoicos,
pubblicato a Lione nel 1615. L'opera si compone di 50 esercitazioni, che mirano
a dimostrare l'esistenza di Dio, a definirne l'essenza, a descriverne la
provvidenza, a vagliare o confutare le opinioni di Pitagora, di Protagora, di
Cicerone, di Boezio, di Tommaso d'Aquino, degli Epicurei, di Aristotele, di
Averroè, di Cardano, dei Peripatetici, degli Stoici, ecc., su questo
argomento. De Admirandis Naturæ Reginæ Deæque Mortalium Arcanis libri
quattuor, stampato a Parigi nel 1616 presso l'editore Adriano Périer. Si divide
in quattro libri: un Liber Primus de Cœlo et Aëre; un Liber Secundus de
Aqua et Terra; un Liber Tertius de Animalia Generatione et Affectibus
Quibusdam; un Liber Quartus de Religione Ethnicorum; per un totale di 60
dialoghi (ma in realtà solo 59, in quanto il XXXV è perduto o mai redatto), che
avvengono tra lui, nelle vesti di divulgatore del sapere, e un immaginario
Alessandro, che si presta ad un gioco sottile e divertente nel corso del quale,
con un atteggiamento compiacente e un po' complice, tra espressioni di
meraviglia e ammirazione per la vastità del sapere di cui l'amico fa mostra,
sollecita il suo interlocutore ad elencare e spiegare gli arcani della natura
regina e dea che esistono intorno e all'interno dell'uomo. Così, in un
misto di rilettura in nuova chiave critica del pensiero degli antichi e di
divulgazione di nuove teorie scientifiche e religiose, il protagonista del
lavoro discetta sulla materia, figura, colore, forma, motore ed eternità del
cielo; sul moto, centro e poli dei cieli; sul sole, sulla luna, sugli astri;
sul fuoco; sulla cometa e sull'arcobaleno; sulla folgore, la neve e la pioggia;
sul moto e la quiete dei proiettili nell'aria; sull'impulsione delle bombarde e
delle balestre; sull'aria soffiata e ventilata; sull'aria corrotta; sull'elemento
dell'acqua; sulla nascita dei fiumi; sull'incremento del Nilo; sull'eternità e
la salsedine del mare; sul fragore e sul moto delle acque; sul moto dei
proiettili; sulla generazione delle isole e dei monti, nonché della causa dei
terremoti; sulla genesi, radice e colore delle gemme, nonché delle macchie
delle pietre; sulla vita, l'alimento e la morte delle pietre; sulla forza del
magnete di attrarre il ferro e sulla sua direzione verso i poli terrestri;
sulle piante; sulla spiegazione da dare ad alcuni fenomeni della vita di tutti
i giorni; sul seme genitale; sulla generazione, la natura, la respirazione e la
nutrizione dei pesci; sulla generazione degli uccelli; sulla generazione delle
api; sulla prima generazione dell'uomo; sulle macchie contratte dai bambini
nell'utero; sulla generazione del maschio e della femmina; sui parti di mostri;
sulla faccia dei bambini coperta da una larva; sulla crescita dell'uomo; sulla
lunghezza della vita umana; sulla vista; sull'udito; sull'odorato; sul gusto;
sul tatto e solletico; sugli affetti dell'uomo; su Dio; sulle apparizioni
nell'aria; sugli oracoli; sulle sibille; sugli indemoniati; sulle sacre
immagini dei pagani; sugli àuguri; sulla guarigione delle malattie capitata
miracolosamente ad alcuni al tempo della religione pagana; sulla resurrezione
dei morti; sulla stregoneria; sui sogni. Pensiero Girolamo Cardano
«Empio osarono dirti e d'anatemi oppressero il tuo cuore e ti legarono e alle
fiamme ti diedero. O uomo sacro! perché non discendesti in fiamme dal cielo, il
capo a colpire ai blasfemi e la tempesta tu non invocasti che spazzasse le
ceneri dei barbari dalla patria lontano e dalla terra! Ma pur colei che tu già
vivo amasti, sacra Natura te morente accolse, del loro agire dimentica i nemici
con te raccolse nell'antica pace.» (Friedrich Hölderlin, Vanini, 1798)
L'interpretazione naturalistica dei fenomeni soprannaturali che Pietro
Pomponazzi – chiamato dal Vanini magister meus, divinus praeceptor meus, nostri
speculi Philosophorum princeps - aveva dato nel De incantationibus, “aureum
opusculum”, è ripresa nel De admirandis naturae, dove, con una prosa semplice
ed elegante, Vanini fa riferimento anche al Cardano, a Giulio Cesare Scaligero
e ad altri cinquecentisti. «Dio agisce sugli esseri sublunari (cioè sugli
esseri umani) servendosi dei cieli come strumento»; di qui l'origine naturale e
la spiegazione razionale dei pretesi fenomeni soprannaturali, dal momento che
anche l'astrologia è considerata una scienza; «l'Essere Supremo, quando
incombono pericoli, dà avvertimenti agli uomini e specialmente ai sovrani, agli
esempi dei quali il mondo si conforma» (De admirandis, IV, 52). Ma i reali
fondamenti dei presunti fenomeni sovrannaturali sono per Vanini soprattutto la
fantasia umana, capace a volte di modificare l'apparenza della realtà esterna,
i fondatori delle religioni rivelate, Mosè, Gesù, Maometto e gli ecclesiastici
impostori che impongono false credenze per ottenere ricchezze e potere, e i
regnanti, interessati al mantenimento di credenze religiose per meglio dominare
la plebe, come insegnava già Machiavelli, il «principe degli atei» per il
quale, secondo Vanini, «tutte le cose religiose sono false e sono finte dai
principi per istruire l'ingenua plebe affinché, dove non può giungere la
ragione, almeno conduca la religione». Seguendo ancora il Pomponazzi e il
Porzio nella loro interpretazione dei testi aristotelici, mutuata dai commenti
di Alessandro di Afrodisia, nega l'immortalità dell'anima. Anche il cosmo
aristotelico-scolastico subisce l'attacco distruttivo del Vanini: egli,
analogamente a Bruno, nega la differenza peripatetica tra un mondo sublunare e
un mondo celeste, affermando che entrambi sono composti della stessa materia
corruttibile; scardina nell'ambito fisico e biologico il finalismo e la dottrina
ilemorfica aristotelica, e, ricollegandosi all'epicureismo lucreziano, elabora
una nuova descrizione dell'universo d'impianto meccanicistico-materialistico
(gli organismi sono paragonati a orologi), e concepisce una prima forma di
trasformismo universale delle specie viventi; concorda con gli aristotelici
sull'eternità del mondo (considerando in particolare l'aspetto temporale), ma,
contro di essi, afferma il moto di rotazione terrestre e appare respingere la
tesi tolemaica in favore di quella eliocentrica/copernicana. Se il primo
curatore delle sue opere, Luigi Corvaglia e lo storico Guido De Ruggiero,
ingiustamente, considerarono i suoi scritti semplicemente «un centone privo di
originalità e di serietà scientifica», il padre gesuita François Garasse, ben
più preoccupato delle conseguenze della diffusione dei suoi scritti, li giudicò
«l'opera più perniciosa che in fatto di ateismo fosse mai uscita negli ultimi
cento anni». La figura e l'opera del Vanini sono state ampiamente riconsiderate
e rivalutate dalla critica contemporanea, mettendo in mostra l'originalità e le
intuizioni (metafisiche, fisiche, biologiche), talvolta precorritrici nei
tempi, dei suoi scritti. Visto che il Vanini nelle sue opere nasconde le
sue idee, secondo un tipico espediente della cultura del suo tempo (per evitare
seri conflitti con le autorità religiose e politiche costituite, conflitti che,
come paradossalmente e sfortunatamente avvenne, nonostante le cautele, lo
condussero infine alla morte), l'interpretazione del suo pensiero si offre a
diversi piani di lettura. Tuttavia, nella storia della filosofia, resta di lui
acquisita un'immagine di miscredente e persino di ateo (il che non era). E
questo perché avversario di ogni superstizione e di fede costituita(meglio un
proto-agnostico), tanto da essere considerato uno dei padri del libertinismo,
malgrado avesse scritto persino un'apologia del Concilio di Trento, andata
perduta. Per una sintesi sul pensiero di Vanini si deve guardare da un
lato al retroterra culturale, che è quello abbastanza tipico del Rinascimento,
con prevalenza di elementi dell'aristotelismo averroistico ma con forti
elementi di misticismo platonico e neoplatonico. Dall'altro lato egli trae dal
Cusano dei tipici elementi panteistici, simili a quelli che si ritrovano anche
in Giordano Bruno, ma più materialistici. La sua visione del mondo si basa
sull'eternità della materia, sulla omogeneità sostanziale cosmica, su un Dio
dentro la natura come "forza" che la forma, la ordina e la dirige.
Tutte le forme del vivente hanno avuto origine spontanea dalla terra stessa
come loro creatrice. Considerato ateo, Vanini nel titolo della sua prima
opera pubblicata a Lione nel 1615 Amphitheatrum aeternae providentiae
divino-magicum, christiano-physicum, nec non astrologo-catholicum adversus
veteres philosophos, Atheos, Epicureos, Peripateticos et Stoicos dimostra di
non esserlo. Come precursore del libertinismo vi sono invece molti elementi che
lo avvicinano al pensiero dell'ignoto autore del Trattato dei tre impostori
anch'egli panteista. Vanini pensa infatti che i creatori delle tre religioni
monoteiste, Mosè, Gesù e Maometto, non siano altro che degli impostori.
In De admirandis Naturae Reginae Deaeque mortalium arcanis libri quatuor
stampato a Parigi nel 1616 vengono riprese le tesi dell'Amphiteatrum, con
precisazioni e sviluppi che ne fanno il suo capolavoro e la sintesi della sua
filosofia. Viene negata la creazione dal nulla e l'immortalità dell'anima, Dio
è nella natura come sua forza propulsiva e vitale, entrambi sono eterni. Gli
astri del cielo sono una specie di intermediari tra Dio e la Natura che sta nel
mondo sublunare e di cui noi facciamo parte. La religione vera è perciò una
"religione della natura" che non nega Dio ma lo considera un suo
spirito-forza. Il pensiero di Vanini è abbastanza frammentario e riflette
anche la complessità della sua formazione, perché era un religioso, un
naturalista, ma anche un medico e un po' un mago. Ciò che ne caratterizza la
prosa è la veemenza anticlericale. Tra le cose originali del suo pensiero c'è
una specie di anticipazione del darwinismo, perché, dopo un primo tempo in cui
sostiene che le specie animali nascano per generazione spontanea dalla terra,
in un secondo tempo (lo aveva già pensato anche Cardano) pare convinto che esse
possano trasformarsi le une nelle altre e che l'uomo derivi da "animali
affini all'uomo come le bertucce, i macachi e le scimmie in genere".[senza
fonte] La fortuna filosofica di Vanini Nel 1623 appaiono due opere che
consacrano il mito del Vanini ateo: La doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de
ce temps..., del gesuita François Garasse e le Quaestiones celeberrimae in
Genesim cum accurata explicatione..., del padre Marin Mersenne. Le due opere,
però, anziché spegnere la voce del filosofo, la amplificano in un ambiente che
evidentemente era pronto a ricevere, discutere e riconoscerne la validità delle
affermazioni. In quello stesso anno il nome di Vanini viene nuovamente
proiettato all'attenzione della cultura francese in occasione del clamoroso processo
che viene celebrato contro il poeta Théophile de Viau: il progetto di
interrogatorio che il procuratore generale del Re, Mathieu Molé, predispone con
ben articolati capi d'accusa su cui interrogare il poeta, contiene
impressionanti analogie con il pensiero vaniniano, cui vien fatto esplicito
riferimento mentre, nel 1624, il frate Marin Mersenne torna a martellare sulla
figura e sul pensiero di Vanini, analizzandone alcune affermazioni nel capitolo
X del suo L'Impiétè des Déistes, Athées et Libertins de ce temps, combatuë, et
renversee de point en point par raisons tirées de la Philosophie, et de la
Theologie, "nel quale il teologo porta il suo giudizio concernente le
opere di Girolamo Cardano, e di Giordano Bruno". Anche Leibniz,
oppositore al pari di Mersenne del libertinismo, si esprime duramente contro
Vanini, considerandolo un empio, un pazzo e un ciarlatano. (FR) «Je n'ai
pas encore vu l'apologie de Vanini, je ne pense pas qu'elle mérite fort d'être
lue. Les écrits de ce personnage sont bien peu de chose. Mais un imbécille
comme lui, ou pour mieux dire, un fou ne méritoit pas d'être brûlé; on étoit
seulement en droit de l'enfermer, afin qu'il ne séduisît personne.» (IT)
«Non ho ancora visto l'apologia di Vanini, e non penso che meriti d'essere minimamente
letta. Gli scritti di questo personaggio sono di ben poco valore. Ma un
imbecille come lui, o per meglio dire, un pazzo, non meritava d'essere
bruciato; occorreva solo rinchiuderlo, perché non traviasse nessuno.»
(Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Epist. 22, ad Kortholtum in Opera omnia, Genève
1768, tomo V, p. 321) La Biblioteca dell'Università di Amburgo Ancora nel
Settecento la leggenda nera creata intorno alla figura di Vanini sopravvive al
passare del tempo, si espande in altri paesi europei ed affascina molti
studiosi, che si avvicinano alle sue opere e ne tentano dei profili biografici.
Così anche la cultura inglese mostra interesse per la figura ed il pensiero del
filosofo di Taurisano ed è soprattutto con l'opera di Charles Blount che il
pensiero di Vanini entra nella cultura inglese ed acquista una dimensione
europea che non abbandonerà mai più, quando diviene un elemento cardine del
libertinismo e deismo nel Seicento inglese. Un manoscritto inedito della
Biblioteca Municipale di Avignone custodisce delle Observations sur Lucilio
Vanini redatte da Joseph Louis Dominique de Cambis, Marquis de Velleron, ma
fornisce solo delle incerte notizie sul filosofo, in gran parte rettificate
dagli ultimi studi. In questo stesso periodo viene effettuata una copia
manoscritta dell'Amphitheatrum, ad opera o su commissione di Joseph Uriot, il
quale la trasferisce poi nella Biblioteca Ducale del duca di Württemberg;
attualmente essa si trova nella Württembergische Landesbibliothek di
Stoccarda. Un'altra copia manoscritta della stessa opera si trova nella
Staats und Universitätbibliothek di Amburgo, a testimonianza del perdurante
interesse della cultura tedesca per il pensiero di Vanini. Nel 1730 viene
data alle stampe a Londra una biografia vaniniana con un estratto delle sue
opere, dal titolo The life of Lucilio (alias Julius Caesar) Vanini, burnt for
atheism at Toulouse. With an abstract of his writings. L'opera, pur
ricollegandosi alla consueta storiografia vaniniana francese e quindi con i
soliti errori d'origine, sottopone ad un dibattito ponderato la figura ed il
pensiero del filosofo, a cui riconosce qualche merito. Ma la strada per una
collocazione europea di Vanini e del suo pensiero è ormai aperta. Opere
letterarie Amphitheatrum aeternae providentiae divino-magicum,
christiano-physicum, nec non astrologo-catholicum adversus veteres philosophos,
Atheos, Epicureos, Peripateticos et Stoicos, Auctore Iulio Caesare Vanino,
Philosopho, Theologo et Iuris utriusque Doctore, Lugduni, Apud Viduam Antonii
de Harsy, ad insigne Scuti Coloniensis, 1615, (rist. fotom., Galatina, 1979).
Iulii Caesaris Vanini, Neapoletani Theologi, Philosophi et Iuris utriusque
Doctoris, De admirandis Naturae Reginae Deaeque mortalium arcanis libri
quatuor, Lutetiae, Apud Adrianum Perier, via Iacobaea, 1616, (rist. fotom.,
Galatina, 1985). Luigi Corvaglia, Le opere di Giulio Cesare Vanini e le loro
fonti, Milano, 1933-1934, (rist. anast., Galatina, 1990). Le opere di Giulio
Cesare Vanini tradotte per la prima volta in italiano, a cura di G. Porzio,
Lecce, 1912. Anfiteatro dell'eterna Provvidenza, Galatina, 1981. I meravigliosi
segreti della natura, regina e dea dei mortali, Galatina, 1990. Opere,
Galatina, 1990. Confutazione delle religioni (traduzione del IV libro del
"De Admirandis"), a cura di Anna Vasta, Catania, De Martinis &
C., 1993. Tutte le Opere (testo originale latino a fronte), a cura di Francesco
Paolo Raimondi e Mario Carparelli, Collana Il pensiero occidentale, Milano,
Bompiani, 2010. Note ^ Massimo Bucciantini, Lutero in Campo dei Fiori, in Il
Sole 24 ORE, 12 febbraio 2017. URL consultato il 12 settembre 2017 (archiviato
dall'url originale il 13 settembre 2017). ^ Terzapagina. Filosofia ed ecologia
per il "compleanno" di Giulio Cesare Vanini, 19 gennaio 2014 ^ Una lettera
dell'ambasciatore inglese a Venezia, Dudley Carleton, datata 7 [ma 17],
febbraio 1611 [ma 1612], fa risalire l'episodio a nove anni prima, ovvero al
1603. Bibliografia F. P. Raimondi (a cura di), Giulio Cesare Vanini e il
libertinismo, Atti del Convegno di Studi, Taurisano, 28 - 30 ottobre 1999,
Galatina, 2000 F. P. Raimondi (a cura di), Giulio Cesare Vanini: dal tardo
Rinascimento al Libertinisme érudit, Atti del Convegno di Studi,
Lecce-Taurisano 24 - 26 ottobre 1985, Galatina, 2002 G. Spini, Vaniniana, in «Rinascimento»,
I, 1950 F. De Paola, Vanini e il primo ‘600 anglo-veneto, Cutrofiano, 1979 F.
De Paola, Giulio Cesare Vanini da Taurisano filosofo Europeo, Fasano, 1998 F.
De Paola, Nuovi documenti per una rilettura di Giulio Cesare Vanini, in
«Bruniana & Campanelliana», V, 1999 D. Foucault, Un philosophe libertin
dans l'Europe baroque: Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585 – 1619), Paris, 2003 F. P.
Raimondi, Documenti vaniniani nell'Archivio Segreto Vaticano, in «Bollettino di
Storia della Filosofia dell'Università degli Studi di Lecce», VIII (1980 -
1985), ma 1987 F. P. Raimondi, Il soggiorno vaniniano in Inghilterra alla luce
di nuovi documenti spagnoli e londinesi, in «Bollettino di Storia della
Filosofia dell'Università degli Studi di Lecce», XII, 1996 - 2002 F. P. Raimondi,
Giulio Cesare Vanini e la Santa Inquisizione, Taurisano, 2005 F. P. Raimondi,
Giulio Cesare Vanini nell'Europa del Seicento. con una appendice documentaria,
Pisa - Roma, 2005 (L'appendice contiene la più completa documentazione sulla
biografia vaniniana: 192 documenti dalla nascita al rogo). M. Leopizzi, Les
Sources Documentaires du Courant Libertin Français Giulio Cesare Vanini,
Fasano, 2004 D. M. Fazio, Giulio Cesare Vanini nella cultura filosofica tedesca
del Sette e Ottocento. Da Brucker a Schopehnauer, Galatina, 1995 M. T.
Marcialis, Natura e uomo in Giulio Cesare Vanini, in «Giornale Critico della
Filosofia Italiana», LXXI, 1992 M. T. Marcialis, Giulio Cesare Vanini
nell'Europa del Seicento, in "Rivista di Storia della Filosofia", LXI
(2006), pp. 954-72. G. Paganini, Le Theophrastus redivivus et Vanini, in
«Kairos», 12, 1998 G. Papuli, Le interpretazioni di G. C. Vanini, Galatina,
1975 A. Perrino, "Giulio Cesare Vanini nel Theophrastus redivivus",
in «Bollettino di Storia della Filosofia dell'Università degli Studi di Lecce»,
10, 1990-1992, pp. 199-212 F. P. Raimondi, Vanini e il "De tribus
impostoribus", in «Ethos e Cultura», Padova, 1991 G. Spini, Ricerca dei
libertini. La teoria dell'impostura delle religioni nel Seicento italiano,
Roma, 1950 (nuova edizione riveduta e ampliata, Firenze, 1983) Cesare Teofilato
Giulio Cesare Vanini nel III Centenario del suo Martirio, Milano 1921, Tip. Ed.
La Stampa d'Avanguardia. Cesare Teofilato Giulio Cesare Vanini, in The
Connecticut Magazine, articles in English and Italian, New Britain, Conn, may
1923, pag. 13 (I, 7). Cesare Teofilato Vaniniana, in La puglia letteraria,
mensile di storia, Roma 31 gen 1932, pag. 1, (II, 1). Cesare Vasoli,
Riflessioni sul problema Vanini, in S. Bertelli, Il libertinismo in Europa,
Milano-Napoli, 1980 Cesare Vasoli, Vanini e il suo processo per ateismo, in F.
Niewohner e O. Pluta, Atheismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance,
Wiesbaden, 1999 Vanini in Inghilterra La seguente è una lista di alcuni
documenti in cui è possibile trovare riferimenti alla presenza del frate
Carmelitano a Lambeth Palace a Londra (1612 - 1614). Trascrizioni
complete, riassunti e contesto di questi documenti sono disponibili per
studenti e ricercatori "Vanini e il primo Seicento anglo-veneto" e in
"Giulio Cesare Vanini da Taurisano filosofo europeo", Schena Editore,
Fasano Brindisi, 1998. Documenti London - Public Record Office - State
Papers -Venice 1607-1610, vol. XI, pag. XVIII-XIX. Notizie sulla Mercers'
Chapel a Londra, dove Vanini sconfesso la sua fede cattolica e tenne vari
sermoni. London - Public Record Office - State Papers - 99 Bundle 9, c.(arta)
297. Petizione di due Carmelitani (Vanini e Genocchi) a Carleton, ambasciatore
Inglese a Venezia, per essere accettati in Inghilterra. Venezia, inizi del
1612. London - Public Record Office - State Papers - 99 Bundle 9, c.(arta) 57.
Lettera di Sir Dudley Carleton a Lord Salisbury. Da Venezia, il 7 febbraio
1612. Carleton informa Lord Salisbury che due frati gli hanno chiesto permesso
di rifugiarsi in Inghilterra per evitare persecuzioni dai loro superiori.
London - Public Record Office - State Papers - 79 Bundle 3, c.(arta) 199 (10).
Giulio Cesare Vanini a Carleton. Da Lambeth il 24 febbraio 1612. Vanini manda a
Lord Carleton informazioni riguardanti alla sua ricezione a Palazzo Lambeth e
la buona stima di cui gode lì. London - Historical Manuscripts Commission - De
L'Isle and Dudley Manuscripts, vol. V - 1611-1626. Sir John Throckmorton al
visconte Lisle. Flushing. 15 giugno 1612 Corrispondenza tra i due statisti
riguardo ad una missione segreta di John Florio, che forse accompagnò Vanini e
il suo compagno a Londra. London - Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire
preserved at Easthampstead Park - Berk. Papers of William Trumbull the elder -
1613-1614. Thomas Albery a William Trumbull. Londra, il 16 luglio 1612. Albery,
un mercante Inglese e corrispondente di Trumbull, agente Inglese a Bruxelles,
manda informazioni sull'arrivo di Vanini e le sue esperienze a Venezia. London
- Historical Manuscripts Commission - Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess
of Downshire,vol.3, Trumbull Papers 1611-1612. Thomas Albery a William
Trumbull. Londra, il 16 luglio 1612. Una copia della lettera da una fonte
diversa. London - Public Record Office - State Papers - 79 Bundle 1, c.(arta)
387. Da Gregorio Spinola a Maria Ginocchio. Genova, il 13 giugno 1612. London -
Public Record Office - State Papers - 99 Bundle 11, c.(arta) 125 . Isaac Wake a
Sir Dudley Carleton. Londra 5 dicembre 1612, st.° novo. London - Public Record
Office - State Papers - 99 Bundle 12, c.(arta) 48 . Isaac Wake a Sir Dudley
Carleton. Londra 1º febbraio 1612, st.° no(vo). London - Manuscripts of the
Marquess of Downshire preserved at Easthamstead Park - Berk. Papers of William
Trumbull the Elder - 1613-1614. Alfonse de S. Victors a William Trumbull Da
Middolborg (Middelburg) il 3 agosto 1613. London - Historical Manuscripts
Commission - Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire, vol. 4,
Trumbull Papers 1613-1614. Alfonse de St. Victor a William Trumbull.
Middelborg. il 3 agosto 1613. London - Public Record Office - State Papers
Domestic Series Jac. I, LXXVI, 20. John Chamberlain a Sir Dudley Carleton.
Londra, 10 febbraio, 1614. London - Public Record Office - State Papers - 99
Bundle 15, c.(arta) 101 recto e verso. Sir Dudley Carleton a Sir Thomas Lake.
Da Venezia il 18 febbraio 1614. London - Public Record Office - State Papers -
Domestic Series 1611-1618 - vol. 68-76, n. 35. Giovan Francesco Biondi a
Carleton. Da Londra, il 18 febbraio 1614. London - Public Record Office - State
Papers - 99 Bundle 15, c. 127. Sir Dudley Carleton a Chamberlain. Da Venezia il
25 febbraio 1613, st.° vet. London - Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire
preserved at Easthampstead Park - Berks. Papers of William Trumbull the Elder -
1613-1614. George Abbot a William Trumbull. Da Lambeth il 10 marzo, 1613
(1614). London - Historical Manuscripts Commission - Report of the Manuscripts
of the Marquess of Downshire, vol. IV, Trumbull Papers 1613 -1614. George Abbot,
Arcivescovo di Canterbury, a William Trumbull. Lambeth il 10 marzo, 1613
(1614). London - Public Record Office - State Papers - 99 Bundle 15, c. 164.
Sir Dudley Carleton a Chamberlain. Venezia, 11 marzo 1613 st.° vet. London -
Public Record Office - State Papers 99 Bundle 9, c. 152. Sir Dudley Carleton a
Giovan Francesco Biondi. Venezia, 14 marzo 1614. London - Public Record Office
- State Papers Domestic Series 1611-1618, vol. 72, n.211. Abbot a Carleton.
Lambeth, 30 marzo 1613 (1614). London - Public Record Office - State Papers 99
Bundle 19, c. 233. Paolo Sarpi a Sir Dudley Carleton. Venezia 30 aprile 1614.
London - Record Office - State Papers 99 Bundle 19, c. 154. Paolo Sarpi a Sir
Dudley Carleton. Venezia, 1º maggio 1614. London - Public Record Office - State
Papers 99 Bundle 19, c. 234. Paolo Sarpi a Sir Dudley Carleton. Venezia, giugno
1614. London - Historical Manuscripts Commission - Report 78 Hastings, vol. IV,
chapter XVII. Notes of speeches and proceedings in the House of Lords. :A.(nno)
1610 - 1621. Lunedì 16 maggio 1614. London - Historical Manuscripts Commission
- Report 78 Hastings, vol. IV, chapter XVII. Notes of speeches and proceedings
in the House of Lords. A.(nno) 1610 - 1621. Giovedì 19 maggio (1614). London -
Public Record Office - State Papers 99 Bundle 16, c. 86. Dudley Carleton a Sua
Signoria l'Arcivescovo di Canterbury. Venezia 3/13 giugno 1614. London -
Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire preserved at Easthampstead Park -
Berks. Papers of William Trumbull the Elder - 1613-1614. George Abbot a William
Trumbull. Lambeth, 17 giugno 1614. London - Historical Manuscripts Commission -
Report of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire, vol. IV, Trumbull
Papers 1613-1614. George Abbot, Arcivescovo di Canterbury, a William Trumbull.
Lambeth, 17 giugno 1614. Archivio di Stato di Venezia - Inquisitori di Stato,
busta 155. Istruzioni degli Inquisitori di Stato all'ambasciatore in
Inghilterra. London - Calendar of State Papers on English Affairs in the
Archives of Venice and other Libraries of North Italy -1615/1617. Inquisitori
di Stato, busta 155. Venetian Archives. 905. Gli Inquisitori di Stato a
Gregorio Barbarigo, 22 gennaio 1616. London - Calendar of State Papers on
English Affairs in the Archives of Venice and other Libraries of North Italy
-1615/1617. Inquisitori di Stato, busta 155. Venetian Archives. 912.
Examinations for Antonio Foscarini. 22 febbraio 1616. Archivio di Stato di
Venezia - Inquisitori di Stato, busta 155, carte 84 r., 84 v., 85 r. Londra, 23
febbraio 1616. Interrogatorio di Lunardo Michelini sulle modalità della fuga di
Vanini da Lambeth. Archivio di Stato di Venezia - Inquisitori di Stato, busta
155, carte 101 v. e 102 r. 25 marzo 1616. Interrogatorio di Alessandro di
Giulio Forti da Volterra sulle modalità della fuga di Vanini da Lambeth.
Archivio General de Simancas - fondo Inglaterra - Legajo 7025 - Libro 368 (anni
1613 - 1615); foglio privo di indicazioni. Bentivoglio a Sarmiento. Bruxelles
15 aprile 1614. Il nunzio apostolico a Bruxelles informa l'abasciatore di
Spagna che Vanini e il suo compare sono arrivati sani e salvi dopo la loro fuga
da Londra. Archivio General de Simancas - fondo Inglaterra - Legajo 7025 -
Libro 368 (anni 1613 - 1615); foglio 47. Bentivoglio a Sarmiento. Bruxelles, 27
maggio 1614. Il nunzio apostolico a Bruxelles informa l'abasciatore di Spagna
che Vanini e il suo compare sono partiti verso l'Italia, come era stato
concordato a Roma. Documenti inclusi nell'opera di Namer La seguente è la
lista dei documenti inglesi inclusi nel lavoro Documents sur la vie de
Jules-César Vanini de Taurisano di Ėmile Namer, che può essere considerato come
un utile punto di partenza per la delineazione di una biografia di Giulio
Cesare Vanini, e di cui la nuova documentazione deve essere considerata un completamento:
London - Foreign State Papers. Venice. Bundle 9. Carleton all'Arcivescovo
Abbot. 7 febbraio, 1611-12. London - Foreign State Papers. Venice. Bundle 9.
l'Arcivescovo Abbot a Carleton. 8 marzo, 1611-12. London - State Papers
Domestic. James I. Vol. 68 Fol. 103. Dudley Carleton a John Chamberlain.
Venezia, 29 aprile 1612. London - Foreign State Papers. Venice. Bundle 9. Sir
D. Carleton all'Arcivescovo di Canterbury. 15 maggio, 1612. London - State
Papers Domestic. James I. Vol. 69. Fol. 71. John Chamberlain a Lord Dudley
Carleton. Londra, 17 giugno 1612. London - State Papers Domestic. James I. Vol.
70 Fol. 1. Chamberlain a Carleton. 2 luglio, 1612. London - Foreign State
Papers. Venice. Bundle 10. Abbot a Carleton. 20 luglio, 1612. London - State Papers
Domestic. James I. Vol. 70 Fol. 12. Carleton a Chamberlain. 23 luglio. 1612.
London - State Papers Domestic. James I. Vol. 70 Fol. 16. l'Arcivescovo di York
al conte di Suffolk. 29 luglio. 1612. London - State Papers Domestic. James I.
Vol. 71 Fol. 13. Giulio Cesare Vanini a Dudley Carleton. Da Lambeth, il 9
ottobre 1612. London - State Papers Domestic. James I. Vol. 71 Fol. 14. Giulio
Cesare Vanini a Sir Isaac Wake. Da Lambeth il 9 ottobre 1612. London - State
Papers Domestic. James I. Vol. 72 Fol. 13. John Chamberlain a Dudley Carleton.
14 gennaio 1612/13 da Londra. London - State Papers Domestic. James I. Vol. 72
Fol. 39. l'Arcivescovo Abbot a Carleton. Lambeth 24 febbraio, 1612 - 13. London
- State Papers Domestic. James I. Vol. 72 Fol. 74. John Chamberlain a Dudley
Carleton. Da Londra l'11 marzo, 1612 - 13. London - State Papers Domestic.
James I. Vol. 72 Fol. 80. Giovanni Biondi a Dudley Carleton. Da Londra il 17
marzo 1613. London - Foreign State Papers. Venice. Bundle 13. Carleton a Abbot.
3 settembre, 1613. London - State Papers Domestic. James I. Vol. 75 Fol. 28.
John Chamberlain a Dudley Carleton. Da Londra il 25 novembre 1613. London -
State Papers Domestic. James I. Vol. 76 Fol. 9. 2. l'Arcivescovo Abbot al
vescovo di Bath. Gennaio 1613 - 14. Da Lambeth (?). London - State Papers
Domestic. James I. Vol. 76 Fol. 9. Sir Tho. Lake a Dudley Carleton. Dalla corte
a Royston, 27 gennaio 1613 - 14. London - State Papers Domestic. James I. Vol.
76 Fol. 18 v. John Chamberlain a Sir Dudley Carleton. Da Londra il 3 febbraio
1613 - 14. London - Foreign State Papers. Venice. Bundle 15. Carleton a Abbot.
18 - 28 febbraio, 1614. London - Foreign State Papers. Venice. Bundle 15.
Carleton a Sir Thomas Lake. 4 marzo, 1613 - 14. London - State Papers Domestic.
James I. Vol. 76 Fol. 48. l'Arcivescovo Abbot di Canterbury a Sir Dudley
Carleton a Venezia. Lambeth, 16 marzo, 1613 (i. e. 14). London - State Papers
Domestic. James I. Vol. 76 Fol. 49. John Chamberlain a Dudley Carleton. Londra,
17 marzo, 1613 (1614). London - Foreign State Papers. Venice. Bundle 15.
Carleton a Abbot. 22 aprile, 1614. Archivio de Simancas, Estado, vol. 368.
Cardinale Millino a Alonso de Velasco, ambasciatore spagnolo a Londra. Roma, 10
settembre, 1613. Archivio de Simancas, Estado, vol. 368. Cardinal Millino a
Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, ambasciatore spagnolo a Londra. Roma, 22 marzo, 1614.
Archivio de Simancas, Estado, vol. 368. Cardinal Bentivoglio a Diego Sarmiento
de Acuña, ambasciatore spagnolo a Londra. Bruxelles, 15 aprile, 1614. Archivio
de Simancas, Estado, vol. 368. Cardinal Bentivoglio a Diego Sarmiento de Acuña,
ambasciatore spagnolo a Londra. Bruxelles, 27 maggio, 1614.Vanini e
l'Inquisizione di Roma Elenco di alcuni documenti presenti nella corrispondenza
tra alcuni Nunzi apostolici in Europa e le autorità vaticane, dove è possibile
trovare informazioni relative alla fuga, permanenza e rientro segreto
dall'Inghilterra del frate carmelitano (1612 - 1615). Le trascrizioni
complete, i sommari e le contestualizzazioni di questi documenti sono
disponibili per studiosi e lettori in Giulio Cesare Vanini da Taurisano
filosofo europeo, Schena Editore, Fasano (Brindisi), 1998. Il pontefice
Paolo V e l'Inquisizione in Roma furono informati continuamente della vicenda
di Vanini con dispacci dei Nunzi apostolici in Venezia, Francia e Fiandra e con
missive dell'ambasciatore di Spagna a Londra, a cominciare dalla sua fuga da
Venezia nel 1612 sino al suo desiderio di rientrare nel mondo cattolico.
Roma - Archivio Segreto Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziatura di Francia,
vol. 55, foglio 194 r. e 194 v. Ubaldini, Nunzio papale in Francia, all'Ill.mo
sig.re Card.le Borghese (Segretario di Stato di Papa Paolo V) de 2 di agosto
1612 di Parigi. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziature
diverse, Fiandra, vol. 207, il Nuntio alla Segreteria, 1608 - 1615, foglio 439
r. e v. Bentivoglio, Nunzio papale in Fiandra, al Card. Borghese. (Bruxelles) 4
agosto 1612. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziature
diverse, Francia, vol. 293A, lettere scritte al Nuntio in Francia 1609-1612,
foglio 432 v. Card. Borghese a Ubaldini. Di Roma li 28 di agosto 1612.
Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziatura di Francia, vol. 55,
foglio 207 v. e 208 r. Ubaldini (da Parigi) al med.(esim)o (cardinale Borghese)
de 30 di agosto 1612. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato -
Nunziature diverse, Francia, vol. 293A, lettere scritte al Nuntio in Francia
1609 - 1612, foglio 451 v. e 452 . Il card. Borghese a Ubaldini. Di Roma li 26 di
Sett.(em)bre 1612. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato -
Nunziatura di Francia, vol. 55, foglio 259. Ubaldini al medesimo sig.re Card.le
(Borghese) de 25 d'ottobre 1612. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di
Stato - Nunziature diverse, Francia, vol. 293A, lettere scritte al Nuntio in
Francia 1609-1612, foglio 479 r. e 479 v . Il card. Borghese a Ubaldini. Di
Roma li 24 di novembre 1612. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato
- Nunziatura di Francia - Registro 55 - pag. 296 recto e 297. Ubaldini
all'Ill.mo sig. Card.(ina)le Borghese de 20 di Dixbre 1612 . Londra,
British Museum, Lettere del Card. Ubaldini, nella sua Nunziatura di
Francia,1610 - 1616; Add. 8726, f. 305 v. Card. Ubaldini al Card. Borghese, 20
Dec. 1612. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziatura di
Francia, vol. 55, foglio 297 r. e v. Ubaldini al S.(igno)re Card.(ina)le
Mellini (membro del Sant'Uffizio, il Tribunale dell'Inquisizione di Roma) di 20
di Xbre 1612. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziature
diverse, Francia, vol. 71, lettere scritte al Nuntio in Francia dal Card.
Borghese, 1613-1614, foglio 17 r. e v . Il card. Borghese a Ubaldini. Di Roma
21 gennaio 1613 Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziatura
di Francia, vol. 295A, Registro di Lettere della Segreteria di Stato di Paolo V
al Vescovo di Montepulciano Nuntio in Francia l'anno 1613-1614, foglio 21 v. e
22 r. Il Segretario Porfirio Feliciani vescovo di Foligno al Nuntio in Francia.
Roma 21 Genn.° 1613. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato -
Nunziatura di Francia, vol. 55, foglio 343 v. Ubaldini al S.(igno)re
Card.(ina)le Mellini De 26 di Febraro 1613. Roma - A. S. Vaticano -
Segreteria di Stato - Nunziatura di Francia, vol. 55, foglio 375 v. e 376 .
Ubaldini al med.(esim)o S.(igno)re Card.(ina)le Mellini De 23 d'aprile
1613. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziatura di Francia
- Registro 55 - pag. 466 r. Ubaldini al Sig.re Card.(ina)le Borghese. Di Parigi
li 8 d'ottobre 1613. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato -
Nunziatura di Francia - Registro 56 - pag. 38 recto e 39. Ubaldini al
med.(esim)o sig. Card.(ina)le Millini de 25 di febbraio 1614. Roma - A.
S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziature diverse, Francia, vol. 71,
lettere scritte al Nuntio in Francia dal Card. Borghese, 1613-1614, foglio 215
v. e 216 r. Il card. Borghese a Ubaldini. Di Roma li 24. Maggio 1614.
Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziatura di Francia - Registro
56 - pag. 95 recto e 96. Ubaldini al sig.re Card.(ina)le Borghese degli 31 di
luglio 1614. Di Parigi. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato -
Nunziatura di Francia - Registro 56 - pag. 118 . Ubaldini al sig. Card.(ina)le
Millini de 14 di o.(tto)bre 1614. Roma - A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di
Stato - Nunziatura di Francia - Registro 56, foglio 246 - 246 retro - 247 .
Ubaldini al med.(esi)mo s.(ignor) Card.(ina)le (50) de 27 agosto 1615.
Londra, British Museum, Lettere del Card. Ubaldini, nella sua nunziatura di
Francia,1610 - 1616; Add. 8727, ff.123 v. -125. Card. Ubaldini al Card.
Borghese, 27 Aug. 1615. Parigi, Bibliothèque nationale de France -
Departement des Manuscrits, Italien 866, Registro di Lettere della Nunziatura
di Francia di Monsignor Ubaldini dell'anno 1615 e 1616, lettera 127. Ubaldini
al S.(ignor) C.(ardinale) B.(orghese) P.(arigi) li 27 agosto 1615. Roma -
A. S. Vaticano - Segreteria di Stato - Nunziature diverse, Francia, vol. 41,
Lettere del Sir. Card.le Ubaldini nella sua Nunciatura di Francia dell'anno
1615 e 1616 (Tomo VI), foglio 189 r. e v. -190 r. e v. Ubaldini al Sig.re
Card.(ina)l Borghese li 27 Ag.(ost)o 1615. Altri progetti Collabora a
Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a Giulio Cesare Vanini
Collabora a Wikiquote Wikiquote contiene citazioni di o su Giulio Cesare Vanini
Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o altri file
su Giulio Cesare Vanini Collegamenti esterni Giulio Cesare Vanini, su
Treccani.it – Enciclopedie on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica
su Wikidata Delio Cantimori, Giulio Cesare Vanini, in Enciclopedia Italiana,
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su Wikidata Giulio Cesare Vanini,
su sapere.it, De Agostini. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di Giulio Cesare Vanini,
su openMLOL, Horizons Unlimited srl. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Opere di Giulio
Cesare Vanini, su Open Library, Internet Archive. Modifica su Wikidata
L'Archivio GCV (Giulio Cesare Vanini, 1585-1619) compresi i testi online
dell'Amphitheatrum e De admiandis. Francesco Paolo Raimondi, Giulio Cesare
Vanini, in Il contributo italiano alla storia del Pensiero: Filosofia, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2012. Controllo di autoritàVIAF (EN) 36967006 ·
ISNI (EN) 0000 0000 7973 5245 · SBN IT\ICCU\CUBV\171992 · LCCN (EN) n85231891 ·
GND (DE) 119373211 · BNF (FR) cb122115776 (data) · BNE (ES) XX4789511 (data) ·
CERL cnp00554171 · WorldCat Identities (EN) lccn-n85231891 Areligiosità Portale
Areligiosità Biografie Portale Biografie Filosofia Portale Filosofia Medicina
Portale Medicina Categorie: Filosofi italiani del XVII secoloMedici
italianiNaturalisti italianiNati nel 1585Morti nel 1619Nati il 19 gennaioMorti
il 9 febbraioNati a TaurisanoMorti a TolosaFilosofi
giustiziatiMaterialistiFilosofi ateiPersone giustiziate per eresiaPersone
giustiziate sul rogo[altre]. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vanini e Grice,”
Villa Grice, Luigi Speranza, “La statua all’aperto di Vanini,” Luigi Speranza,
“Il medaglione di Vanini a Roma.”
variable: in semantics, a symbol interpreted so as to be
associated with a range of values, a set of entities any one of which may be
temporarily assigned as a value of the variable. Grice uses more specifically
for a variable for a ‘grice,’ a type of extinct pig that existed (‘in the
past’) in Northern England – “There is a variable number of grices in the
backyard, Paul.” An occurrence of a variable in a mathematical or logical
expression is a free occurrence if assigning a value is necessary in order for
the containing expression to acquire a semantic value a denotation, truth-value, or other meaning.
Suppose a semantic value is assigned to a variable and the same value is
attached to a constant as meaning of the same kind; if an expression contains
free occurrences of just that variable, the value of the expression for that
assignment of value to the variable is standardly taken to be the same as the
value of the expression obtained by substituting the constant for all the free
occurrences of the variable. A bound occurrence of a variable is one that is
not free. Grice: “Strictly, a variable is the opposite of a constant, but a
constant varies – ain’t that paradoxical?” -- H. P. Grice, “The variable and
the constant;” H. P. Grice, “Variable and meta-variable,” “Order and variable.”
varrone: Grice: “I know his Loeb edition by
heart!” -- Academic, Roman polymath,
author of works on language, agriculture, history and philosophy, as well as satires, and principal
speaker in the later version of Cicero’s
"Academica" Marco Terenzio Varrone Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia
libera. Jump to navigationJump to search Marco Terenzio Varrone Project Rome
logo Clear.png Questore della Repubblica romana Varrocoin.jpg Nome originale
Marcus Terentius Varro Nascita 116 a.C. Rieti Morte 27 a.C. Roma Gens Terentia
Questura 78 a.C. in Illyricum Propretura 49 a.C. in Spagna Marco Terenzio
Varrone (in latino: Marcus Terentius Varro; Rieti, 116 a.C. – Roma, 27 a.C.) è
stato un letterato, grammatico, militare e agronomo romano. «Tu ci hai
fatto luce su ogni epoca della patria, sulle fasi della sua cronologia, sulle
norme dei suoi rituali, sulle sue cariche sacerdotali, sugli istituti civili e
militari, sulla dislocazione dei suoi quartieri e vari punti, su nomi, generi,
su doveri e cause dei nostri affari, sia divini che umani.» (Marco Tullio
Cicerone, Academica Posteriora, I 9 - trad. A. D'Andria) Statua di
Varrone a Rieti Marco Terenzio Varrone nacque a Rieti (o in alta Sabina) nel
116 a.C.: per tale motivo è detto Reatino (attributo che lo distingue da
Varrone Atacino, vissuto nello stesso periodo)[1]. Nato da una
famiglia di nobili origini, aveva rilevanti proprietà terriere in Sabina[2] -
dove fu educato con disciplina e severità dai familiari -, integrate
dall'acquisto di lussuose ville a Baia e fondi terrieri a Tusculum e
Cassino. A Roma compì studi avanzati presso i migliori maestri del tempo:
tra gli altri, studi di grammatica presso Lucio Elio Stilone Preconino, che lo
fece appassionare anche agli studi etimologici e retorici[3] e di linguistica e
filologia con Lucio Accio, a cui dedicò la sua prima opera grammaticale De
antiquitate litterarum. Come molti giovani romani, compì un viaggio in
Grecia fra l'84 a.C. e l'82 a.C., dove ascoltò filosofi accademici come Filone
di Larissa e Antioco di Ascalona, da cui dedusse una posizione filosofica di
tipo eclettico[4]. A differenza di molti altri eruditi del tempo, Varrone
non si ritirò dalla vita politica ma, anzi, vi prese parte attivamente
accostandosi agli optimates, forse anche influenzato dall'estrazione sociale.
Dopo aver, infatti, percorso le prime tappe del cursus honorum (triumviro
capitale nel 97 a.C., questore lo stesso anno, legato in Illiria nel 78 a.C.)
fu vicino a Pompeo, per il quale ricoprì incarichi di grande importanza: fu
legato e proquestore in Spagna fra il 76 a.C. e il 72 a.C. e combatté nella
guerra contro i pirati difendendo la zona navale tra la Sicilia e
Delo.[5] Allo scoppio della guerra civile nel 49 a.C. fu propretore in
Spagna: in una guerra che vedeva i romani contro i romani, tentò un'incerta
difesa del suo territorio che si concluse in una resa che Gaio Giulio Cesare,
nei Commentarii de bello civili, definì poco gloriosa[6]. Dopo la
disfatta dei pompeiani, si avvicinò, comunque, a Cesare, che apprezzò il Reatino
soprattutto sul piano culturale, affidandogli la costituzione di due
biblioteche, una di testi latini l'altra di testi greci, ma che, dopo le idi di
Marzo, furono sospese[7]. Dopo la morte del dittatore, anzi, fu inserito
nelle liste di proscrizione sia di Antonio che di Ottaviano (interessati più
alle sue ricchezze che a punire i congiuranti), da cui si salvò grazie
all'intervento di Fufio Caleno per poi avvicinarsi a Ottaviano a cui dedicò il
De vita populi Romani volto alla divinizzazione della figura di Giulio
Cesare.[8]. Morì quasi novantenne nel 27 a.C. dopo aver scritto una
produzione di oltre 620 libri, suddivisi in circa settanta opere[9].
Opere Magnifying glass icon mgx2.svg Lo
stesso argomento in dettaglio: De re rustica (Varrone) e De lingua Latina.
Marco Terenzio Varrone Produzione e trasmissione La vasta produzione di Varrone
fu suddivisa da Girolamo in un catalogo (incompleto, poiché sono elencati circa
la metà degli scritti del reatino)[10]: in totale, le opere varroniane sono
verosimilmente 74, suddivise in 620 volumi, sebbene Varrone stesso, a 77 anni,
abbia riferito di aver scritto 490 libri[11]. Le opere varroniane,
secondo l'argomento, possono essere suddivise in vari gruppi, dalle opere di
erudizione, filologia e storia a quelle giuridiche e burocratiche, dalle opere
di filosofia e agricoltura alle opere di poesia, di linguistica e letteratura;
di retorica e diritto, con ben 15 libri De iure civili; di filosofia. Di
questa enorme produzione è pervenuta (quasi integra) solo un'opera, il De re
rustica, mentre del De lingua Latina sono pervenuti solo 6 libri su 25.
Probabilmente, causa del quasi completo naufragio della immane bibliografia
varroniana è che, avendo compulsato tanta parte della cultura grecoromana
precedente, divenne la fonte indispensabile per gli autori successivi,
perdendosi, per così dire, per assimilazione. Il filologo ed erudito
Dell'attività filologica varroniana fa testimonianza il cosiddetto "canone
varroniano", elaborato a partire da due opere, le Quaestiones Plautinae e
il De comoediis Plautinis, in cui Varrone ripartì il corpus plautino, che
includeva 130 fabulae: di queste, 21 vengono definite autentiche, 19 di origine
incerta, dette "pseudo-varroniane" e le restanti spurie[12]. Si
occupò soprattutto di antiquaria, con i 41 libri di Antiquitates, il suo
capolavoro, divisi in 25 di res humanae e 16 di res divinae[13], fonte precipua
di Agostino nel De civitate Dei: proprio da Agostino si evidenzia l'attenzione
di Varrone sulla religione "civile", con una compiuta disamina su
culti e tradizioni, pur con acute critiche alla teologia mitica dei poeti in
nome di una theologia naturalis. A questo gruppo appartiene anche l'opera, non
pervenuta, De bibliothecis, presumibilmente legata alle incombenze come
bibliotecario affidategli da Cesare. La produzione a sfondo filosofico
Nell'ambito filosofico, notevoli dovevano essere i Logistorici (dal greco
“discorsi di storia”)[14] un'opera in 76 libri, composta in forma di dialogo in
prosa, di argomento morale e antiquario, in cui ogni libro prendeva il nome di
un personaggio storico e un tema di cui il personaggio costituiva un modello,
come il Marius, de fortuna o il Catus, de liberis educandis[15]: probabilmente
questi dialoghi storico-filosofici furono tra i modelli espositivi del Laelius
de amicitia e del Cato Maior de senectute di Cicerone[16]. All'interesse
filosofico e divulgativo di Varrone, probabilmente scritte lungo tutto il corso
della sua parabola culturale, riconducevano le Saturae Menippeae[17], che
prendevano come modello Menippo di Gadara, esponente della filosofia cinica (da
cui il nome). Esse, scritte tra l'80 a.C. e il 46 a.C., si componevano di 150
libri, in prosa e in versi, di cui però ci rimangono circa 600 frammenti e
novanta titoli, di argomento soprattutto filosofico, ma anche di critica dei
costumi, morale, con rimpianti sui tempi antichi in contrasto con la corruzione
del presente. Ciascuna satira recava un titolo, desunto da proverbi (Cave canem
con allusione alla mordacità dei filosofi cinici) o dalla mitologia (Eumenides
contro la tesi stoico-cinica per cui gli uomini sono folli, Trikàranos, il
mostro a tre teste, con un mordace riferimento al primo triumvirato) ed era
caratterizzata da lessico popolaresco, polimetria e, come in Menippo, uno stile
tragicomico[18]. Note ^ Valerio Massimo, VII 3. ^ Aulo Gellio, III 10, 7.
^ Ce ne parla Varrone stesso in De lingua latina, VII 12. ^ Cicerone, Academica
posteriora, I 7, 12. ^ Appiano, Guerre civili, IV 47; Varrone, De re rustica,
II 10, 8 e III 12, 7. ^ II 17. ^ Svetonio, Cesare, 44, 2. ^ Appiano, IV 47. ^
Ausonio, Commemoratio professorum Burdigalensium, XX, 10. ^ Chronicon, ann.
1901 e 1989. ^ Aulo Gellio, II 10, 17. ^ Gellio, III 3, 9. ^ I cui frammenti
sono editi nella fondamentale edizione in due volumi di B. Cardauns:
Antiquitates rerum divinarum, Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1976. ^ Cfr. B. Zucchelli,
Varro logistoricus. Studio letterario e prosopografico, Parma, Universita degli
studi di Parma, 1981. ^ Cfr., ad esempio, il Fr. XIX Riese: "Da ragazzo,
avevo solo una tunica modesta e una toga, calzature senza fascette, un cavallo
non sellato; bagno giornaliero, niente e, davvero di rado, una tinozza". ^
N. Horsfall, Varrone, in Letteratura Latina Cambridge, vol. 1, Milano,
Mondadori, 2007, pp. 474-475. ^ Cfr. M. Salanitro, Le Menippee di Varrone.
Contributi esegetici e linguistici, Roma, Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1990. ^ Sulla
satira varroniana, cfr. L. Alfonsi, Le Menippee di Varrone, in
"ANRW", I (1973), n. 3, pp. 26-59. Bibliografia (Per la bibliografia specifica
sul De re rustica e sul De lingua Latina si rimanda alle rispettive voci)
Atti del Congresso internazionale di studi varroniani. Rieti settembre 1974, 2
voll., Rieti, Centro di studi varroniani, 1976. B. Cardauns, Marcus Terentius
Varro. Einführung in sein Werk, Heidelberg, Winter, 2001. A. Cenderelli,
Varroniana. Istituti e terminologia giuridica nelle opere di M. Terenzio
Varrone, Milano, A. Giuffrè, 1973. H. Dahlmann, Varrone e la teoria ellenistica
della lingua, Traduzione italiana di Pasqualina Vozza, Napoli, Loffredo, 1997.
F. Della Corte, Varrone, il terzo gran lume romano, Genova, Istituto
universitario di Magistero, 1954 (rist. Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1970). G.A.
Nelsestuen, Varro the agronomist. Political philosophy, satire and agriculture
in the late Republic, Columbus, Ohio State University press, 2015. A. Pittà, M.
Terenzio Varrone. De vita populi Romani. Introduzione e commento, Pisa, Pisa
University Press, 2015. B. Riposati, M. Terenti Varronis De vita populi Romani.
Fonti, esegesi, edizione critica dei frammenti, Milano, Vita e pensiero, 1939.
B. Riposati, M. Terenzio Varrone. L'uomo e lo scrittore, Roma Istituto di studi
romani, 1975. A. Traglia, Introduzione a: M.T. Varrone, Opere, Torino, UTET,
1974, pp. 9-47. B. Zucchelli, Varro logistoricus. Studio letterario e
prosopografico, Parma, Universita degli studi di Parma, Istituto di lingua e
letteratura latina, 1981. Voci correlate Satira menippea Biblioteche romane
Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum Altri progetti Collabora a Wikisource
Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a Marco Terenzio Varrone Collabora a
Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina in lingua latina dedicata a Marco
Terenzio Varrone Collabora a Wikiquote Wikiquote contiene citazioni di o su
Marco Terenzio Varrone Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene
immagini o altri file su Marco Terenzio Varrone Collegamenti esterni Marco
Terenzio Varrone, su Treccani.it – Enciclopedie on line, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su Wikidata Marco Terenzio Varrone, in
Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su
Wikidata Marco Terenzio Varrone, in Dizionario di storia, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2010. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Marco Terenzio
Varrone, su Enciclopedia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Modifica su
Wikidata (LA) Opere di Marco Terenzio Varrone, su Musisque Deoque. Modifica su
Wikidata (LA) Opere di Marco Terenzio Varrone, su PHI Latin Texts, Packard
Humanities Institute. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di Marco Terenzio Varrone, su
openMLOL, Horizons Unlimited srl. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Opere di Marco
Terenzio Varrone, su Open Library, Internet Archive. Modifica su Wikidata (EN)
Opere di Marco Terenzio Varrone, su Progetto Gutenberg. Modifica su Wikidata
(EN) Audiolibri di Marco Terenzio Varrone, su LibriVox. Modifica su Wikidata
(FR) Pubblicazioni di Marco Terenzio Varrone, su Persée, Ministère de
l'Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l'Innovation. Modifica su
Wikidata M. Ter. Varronis De lingua Latina libri qui supersunt: cum fragmentis
ejusdem, Biponti, ex typographia societatis, 1788. (LA, IT) Biblioteca degli
scrittori latini con traduzione e note: Terentii Varronis quae supersunt opera,
Venetiis, excudit Joseph Antonelli, 1846. (LA, FR) Les agronomes latins, Caton,
Varron, Columelle, Palladius, avec la traduction en français, a cura di M.
Nisard, Paris, Firmin Didot Fréres, 1856, pp. 53 ss. Grammaticae Romanae
Fragmenta, a cura di Gino Funaioli, Lipsiae, in aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1907, vol.
1, pp. 179 ss. M. Terenti Varronis saturarum menippearum reliquiae, cur.
Alexander Riese, Lipsiae, in aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1865. V · D · M Opere di
Marco Terenzio Varrone Grammatici romani V · D · M Guerra civile romana (49-45
a.C.) Controllo di autorità VIAF (EN) 100219311 · ISNI (EN) 0000 0001 2145 2047
· LCCN (EN) n79060808 · GND (DE) 118626183 · BNF (FR) cb119277168 (data) · BNE
(ES) XX958574 (data) · NLA (EN) 35578074 · BAV (EN) 495/44942 · CERL
cnp00396771 · WorldCat Identities (EN) lccn-n79060808 Agricoltura Portale
Agricoltura Antica Roma Portale Antica Roma Biografie Portale Biografie
Letteratura Portale Letteratura Categorie: Letterati romaniGrammatici
romaniMilitari romaniNati nel 116 a.C.Morti nel 27 a.C.Nati a RietiAgronomi
romaniApicoltoriEnciclopedisti romaniScrittori romaniStoria
dell'agricolturaUomini universali[altre]
varzi: essential Italian
philosopher. Some Italians do not consider Varzi an “Italian” philosopher in
that his maximal degree was earned elsewhere! If philosophy is a branch of the
belles lettres, part of Varzi’s essays belong in English literature --. He was
written on ‘universal semantics.’ Achille Varzi all'Università di Trento. Achille C. Varzi (n.
Galliate) è un filosofo. Esponente della filosofia analitica, in
Italia è noto principalmente per le sue ricerche di logica e per il suo
contributo alla rinascita degli studi in ambito di metafisica e
ontologia. Laureatosi all'Università degli Studi di Trento con una
tesi sulle logiche libere, ha conseguito il Ph.D. in filosofia presso la
University of Toronto (Canada) con una dissertazione sulla semantica
universale. Insegna Logica e Metafisica a Columbia, ove è stato direttore
del Dipartimento di Filosofia. È nel direttivo del Journal of Philosophy e
nell'esecutivo della Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.-- è stato insignito
della Targa Giuseppe Piazzi per la ricerca scientifica e del Premio Paolo Bozzi
per l'Ontologia. Dopo un periodo dedicato soprattutto allo studio
dell'immagine del mondo propria del senso comune, il suo pensiero si è
indirizzato progressivamente verso posizioni di stampo nominalista e
convenzionalista, nella convinzione che "buona parte della struttura che
siamo soliti attribuire alla realtà esterna risieda a ben vedere nella nostra
testa, nelle nostre pratiche organizzatrici, nel complesso sistema di concetti
e categorie che sottendono alla nostra rappresentazione dell'esperienza e al
nostro bisogno di rappresentarla in quel modo".Autore di oltre un
centinaio di pubblicazioni su volumi e riviste specializzate, in Italia Varzi è
noto anche per la sua attività divulgativa (spesso in collaborazione con
Roberto Casati), ispirata al principio secondo cui "la filosofia è una
sfida in cui il pensiero parte dalla semplicità delle cose quotidiane e ne
mostra la meravigliosa complessità". Opere principali: Semplicemente
diaboliche. 100 nuove storie filosofiche (con Roberto Casati), Laterza,
2017. I modi dell'amicizia (con Maurizio Ferraris), Orthotes, 2016. I
colori del bene, Orthotes, 2015. L'incertezza elettorale (con Roberto
Casati), Aracne, 2014. Le tribolazioni del filosofare. Comedia Metaphysica
ne la quale si tratta de li errori & de le pene de l’Infero (con Claudio
Calosi), Laterza, 2014. Il mondo messo a fuoco, Laterza, 2010. Il
pianeta dove scomparivano le cose. Esercizi di immaginazione filosofica (con
Roberto Casati), Einaudi, 2006. Ontologia, Laterza, 2005. Semplicità
insormontabili - 39 storie filosofiche (con Roberto Casati), Laterza, 2004; ed.
inglese: 2006.[4] Parole, oggetti, eventi e altri argomenti di metafisica,
Carocci. An Essay in Universal Semantics, Kluwer, 1999. Parts and Places.
The Structures of Spatial Representation (con Roberto Casati), MIT Press.Theory
and Problems of Logic (con John Nolt e Dennis Rohatyn), McGraw-Hill, 1998;
trad. it. Logica, McGraw-Hill Italia, 2003, 2007. Holes and Other
Superficialities (con Roberto Casati), MIT Press, 1994; trad. it. Buchi e altre
superficialità, Garzanti, 1996. Studi: Elena Casetta e Valeria Giardino (a
cura di), Mettere a fuoco il mondo. Conversazioni sulla filosofia di
Achille C. Varzi, numero speciale di Isonomia – Epistemologica, Vol. 4,
2014. Francesco Calemi, Achille Varzi. Logica, semantica, metafisica,
AlboVersorio, Milano 2015. Note ^ Elena Casetta e Valeria Giardino, 2014,
p. 159. Il mondo messo a fuoco, Laterza, 2010, p. 4. Dal risvolto di
copertina di Semplicità insormontabili, Laterza, 2004. Altre edizioni in
francese, spagnolo, portoghese, greco, cinese, giapponese, coreano, polacco,
finlandese. Da questo libro è stato tratto lo spettacolo teatrale
Insurmountable Simplicities, per la regia di Natalie Glick, presentato dall'All
Gone Theatre Company all'edizione 2010 del New York International Fringe
Festival. Altri progetti Collabora a Wikiquote Wikiquote contiene
citazioni di o su Achille Varzi Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons
contiene immagini o altri file su Achille Varzi Collegamenti esterni (EN) Sito
di Varzi presso la Columbia University, su columbia.edu. (EN) Bibliografia
completa di Varzi, su columbia.edu. (EN) Biografia "negativa" di
Varzi, su columbia.edu. Intervista ad Achille Varzi di Leonardo Caffo, Rivista
italiana di filosofia analitica. Controllo di autorità VIAF (EN) 69104236 · ISNI
(EN) 0000 0001 2027 9350 · LCCN (EN) n93057819 · GND (DE) 154577324 · BNF (FR)
cb13609893t (data) · WorldCat Identities (EN) lccn-n93057819 Biografie Portale
Biografie Filosofia Portale Filosofia Categorie: Filosofi italiani del XX
secoloFilosofi italiani del XXI secoloNati nel 1958Nati l'8 maggioNati a
GalliateProfessori della Columbia University[altre] Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Varzi:
semantica filosofia," per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool
Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia
vattimo: Italian philosopher – (n. Torino) Gianni
Vattimo (n. Torino) è un filosofo -- not one that provinicial Beaney would
include in his handbooks and dictionaries – Vattimo’s philosophy shares quite a
bit with Grice’s programme, as anyone familiar with both Vattimo and Grice may
testify. Vattimo has philosophised on Heidegger and Nietzsche, and one of his
essays is on the subject and the mask – another on reality – There is a volume
in his honour. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Vattimo," The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
vauvenargues: luc de Clapiers
de, army officer and secular moralist. Discovering Plutarch at an early age, he
critically adopted Stoic idealism. Poverty-stricken, obscure, and solitary, he
was ambitious for glory. Though eventful, his military career brought little
reward. In poor health, he resigned in 1744 to write. In 1747, he published
Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind, followed by Reflections and
Maxims. Voltaire and Mirabeau praised his vigorous and eclectic thought, which
aimed at teaching people how to live. Vauvenargues was a deist and an optimist
who equally rejected Bossuet’s Christian pessimism and La Rochefoucauld’s
secular pessimism. He asserted human freedom and natural goodness, but denied
social and political equality. A lover of martial virtues and noble passions,
Vauvenargues crafted memorable maxims and excelled in character depiction. His
complete works were published in 1862.
velia -- Velia -- Grice as Eleatic -- School, strictly, two
fifth-century B.C. Grecian philosophers, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. The Ionian
Grecian colony of Elea or Hyele in southern Italy became Velia in Roman times
and retains that name today. A playful remark by Plato in Sophist 242d gave
rise to the notion that Xenophanes of Colophon, who was active in southern
Italy and Sicily, was Parmenides’ teacher, had anticipated Parmenides’ views,
and founded the Eleatic School. Moreover, Melissus of Samos and according to
some ancient sources even the atomist philosopher Leucippus of Abdera came to
be regarded as “Eleatics,” in the sense of sharing fundamental views with
Parmenides and Zeno. In the broad and traditional use of the term, the Eleatic
School characteristically holds that “all is one” and that change and plurality
are unreal. So stated, the School’s position is represented best by Melissus.
Grice: “Crotone and Velia are the origins of western philosophy, since Greece
is eastern!” – Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Grice a Velia,” Villa Grice.
venn diagram, a logic diagram invented by the English philosopher
J. Venn in which standard form statements the four kinds listed below are
represented by two appropriately marked overlapping circles, as follows:
Syllogisms are represented by three overlapping circles, as in the examples
below. If a few simple rules are followed, e.g. “diagram universal premises
first,” then in a valid syllogism diagramming the premises automatically gives
a diagram in which the conclusion is represented. In an invalid syllogism
diagramming the premises does not automatically give a diagram in which the
conclusion is represented, as below. Venn diagrams are less perspicuous for the
beginner than Euler diagrams. Grice: “I tried to teach Strawson some Euler
first; but English as he is, he said, ‘Stick with Venn.’” – Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“From Euler to Strawson via Venn: diagramme and impicaturum.”
verificatum:
Grice: “Strictly, what is ‘verified’ is therefore ‘made true,’ analytically.”
-- see ayerism. Grice would possibly NOT be interested in verificationism had
not been for Ayer ‘breaking tradition’ “and other things” with it --. Oppoiste
Christian virtuous –ism: falsificationism. Verificationism is one of the twelve
temptations Grice finds on his way to the City of Eternal Truth. (Each one has
its own entry). Oddly, Boethius was the first verificationist. He use ‘verifico’
performatively. “When I say, ‘verifico’, I verify that what I say is true.” He
didn’t mean it as a sophisma (or Griceisma, but it was (mis-)understood as
such! “When I was listing the temptations, I thought of calling this ‘Ayerism,’
but then I changed my mind. verification theory of meaning The theory of
meaning advocated by the logical positivists and associated with the criterion
of verifiability. The latter provides a criterion of meaningfulness for
sentences, while the verification theory of meaning specifies the nature of
meaning. According to the criterion, a sentence is cognitively meaningful if
and only if it is logically possible for it to be verified. The meaning of a
sentence is its method of verification, that is, the way in which it can be verified
or falsified, particularly by experience. The theory has been challenged
because the best formulations still exclude meaningful sentences and allow
meaningless sentences. Critics also claim that the theory is a test for
meaningfulness rather than a theory of meaning proper. Further, they claim that
it fails to recognize that the interconnectedness of language might allow a
sentence that cannot itself be verified to be meaningful. “The verification
theory of meaning, which dominated the Vienna Circle, was concerned with the
meaning and meaningfulness of sentences rather than words.” Quine, Theories and
Things verificationism Philosophical method, philosophy of science, philosophy
of language A position fundamental to logical positivism, claiming that the
meaning of a statement is its method of verification. Accordingly, apparent
statements lacking a method of verification, such as those of religion and
metaphysics, are meaningless. Theoretical expressions can be defined in terms
of the experiences by means of which assertions employing them can be verified.
In the philosophy of mind, behaviorism, which tries to reduce unobserved inner
states to patterns of behavior, turns out to be a version of verificationism.
Some philosophers require conclusive verification for a statement to be
meaningful, while others allow any positive evidence to confer meaning. There
are disputes whether every statement must be verified separately or theories
can be verified as a whole even if some of their statements cannot be individually
verified. Attempts to offer a rigorous account of verification have run into
difficulties because statements that should be excluded as meaningless
nevertheless pass the test of verification and statements that should be allowed
as meaningful are excluded. “For over a hundred years, one of the dominant
tendencies in the philosophy of science has been verificationism, that is, the
doctrine that to know the meaning of a scientific proposition . . . is to know
what would be evidence for that proposition.” Putnam, Mind, Language and
Reality verisimilitude Philosophy of science [from Latin verisimilar, like the
truth] The degree of approximation or closeness to truth of a statement or a
theory. Popper defined it in terms of the difference resulting from
truth-content minus falsity-content. The truthcontent of a statement is all of
its true consequences, while the falsity-content of a statement is all of its
false consequences. The aim of science is to find better verisimilitude. One
theory has a better verisimilitude than competing theories if it can explain
the success of competing theories and can also explain cases where the other
theories fail. Popper emphasized that verisimilitude is different from
probability. Probability is the degree of logical certainty abstracted from
content, while verisimilitude is degree of likeness to truth and combines truth
and content. “This suggests that we combine here the ideas of truth and content
into one – the idea of a degree of better (or worse) correspondence to truth or
of greater (or less) likeness or similarity to truth; or to use a term already
mentioned above (in contradistinction to probability) the idea of (degrees of )
verisimilitude.” Popper, Conjectures and Refutations.
verisimile -- verisimilitude -- truthlikeness, a term introduced
by Karl Popper to explicate the idea that one theory may have a better
correspondence with reality, or be closer to the truth, or have more
verisimilitude, than another theory. Truthlikeness, which combines truth with
information content, has to be distinguished from probability, which increases
with lack of content. Let T and F be the classes of all true and false
sentences, respectively, and A and B deductively closed sets of sentences.
According to Popper’s qualitative definition, A is more truthlike than B if and
only if B 3 T 0 A 3 T and A 3 F 0 B 3 F, where one of these setinclusions is
strict. In particular, when A and B are non-equivalent and both true, A is more
truthlike than B if and only if A logically entails B. David Miller and Pavel
Tichý proved in 4 that Popper’s definition is not applicable to the comparison
of false theories: if A is more truthlike than B, then A must be true. Since
the mid-0s, a new approach to truthlikeness has been based upon the concept of
similarity: the degree of truthlikeness of a statement A depends on the
distances from the states of affairs allowed by A to the true state. In Graham
Oddie’s Likeness to Truth 6, this dependence is expressed by the average
function; in Ilkka Niiniluoto’s Truthlikeness 7, by the weighted average of the
minimum distance and the sum of all distances. The concept of verisimilitude is
also used in the epistemic sense to express a rational evaluation of how close
to the truth a theory appears to be on available evidence.
verri: essential Italian philosopher. Like
Grice, he wrote on ‘happiness.’ Like Grice, he wrote on ‘pleasure.’ Like Grice,
he was a very clubbable man. Pietro Verri. Pietro Verri-Visconti Pietro Verri
ritratto tagliato.jpg Barone di Rho Stemma In carica 1782 – 1797 Predecessore Gabriele
Verri Trattamento Sua Eccellenza Heraldic Crown of Spanish Count.svg Nascita Cinisello,
12 dicembre 1728 Morte Lambrate, 28 giugno 1797 Dinastia Verri Visconti Padre Gabriele
Verri Madre Barbara Dati della Somaglia Consorte Marietta Castiglioni Vincenza
Melzi d'Eril Figli Teresa, Alessandro (da Marietta Castiglioni) Religione cattolicesimo.
Il conte Pietro Verri (n. Milano) è stato un filosofo; considerato tra i
massimi esponenti dell'illuminismo italiano, è altresì ritenuto il fondatore
della scuola illuministica milanese. Pietro Verri nacque a Milano (allora
appartenente all'impero asburgico) dal conte Gabriele, magistrato e politico
conservatore e da Barbara Dati della Somaglia, membri della nobiltà milanese.
Ha tre fratelli: Alessandro, Carlo e Giovanni. Avviati gli studi nel
Collegio dei gesuiti di Brera, frequenta negli anni '50 l'Accademia dei
Trasformati, dove conosce tra gli altri Giuseppe Parini. Si arruola
nell'esercito imperiale e prende parte brevemente alla Guerra dei Sette Anni. Fermatosi
a Vienna, intraprende la redazione delle Considerazioni sul commercio nello
Stato di Milano, pubblicate poi nel 1763, che gli varranno il primo incarico di
funzionario governativo; lo stesso anno pubblica anche le Meditazioni sulla
felicità. Rientrato frattanto a Milano, vi fonda, insieme al fratello
Alessandro Verri e agli amici Cesare Beccaria, Alfonso Longo, Pietro Secchi,
Giambattista Biffi e Luigi Porro Lambertenghi, la cosiddetta Accademia dei
Pugni, iniziale nucleo redazionale del foglio periodico Il Caffè, destinato a
diventare il punto di riferimento del riformismo illuministico italiano. Il
Caffè inizia le sue pubblicazioni nel giugno 1764 ed esce ogni dieci giorni,
fino al maggio 1766, quando viene raccolto in due volumi. Tra gli articoli più
importanti di Pietro Verri per Il Caffè vanno ricordati almeno gli Elementi del
commercio (volume I, foglio 3), La commedia (I, 4-5), La medicina (I, 18), Su i
parolai (II, 6). Gli illuministi milanesi, e tra loro Verri, hanno rapporti
epistolari anche con gli enciclopedisti francesi, tra cui Diderot, Voltaire e
d'Holbach, mentre d'Alembert verrà anche a Milano per incontrare il circolo del
Caffè. Parallelamente all'impresa editoriale, Verri intraprende, con alcuni dei
suoi sodali, la scalata politico-amministrativa del governo viennese di Milano,
allo scopo di mettere in opera le riforme propugnate nella rivista. Nel gennaio
1764 è fatto membro della Giunta per la revisione della "ferma"
(appalto delle imposte ai privati) e nel 1765 del Supremo Consiglio
dell'Economia. Quest'ultimo, presieduto da Gian Rinaldo Carli, altro
collaboratore del Caffè, assegna a Cesare Beccaria la cattedra di Economia
pubblica e ad Alfonso Longo quella di Diritto pubblico ecclesiastico nelle
Scuole Palatine. Verri, Beccaria, Frisi e Secchi danno luogo alla Società
patriottica milanese. Sull'indole del piacere e del dolore, 1781
Risalgono a questi anni le Meditazioni sull'economia politica, il Discorso
sull'indole del piacere e del dolore, che affronta temi che avranno grande
importanza per Giacomo Leopardi, i Ricordi a mia figlia e le Osservazioni sulla
tortura. Il suo è uno stile asciutto e libero, pieno di trattenuto
vigore. Il monumento a Pietro Verri nel Cortile del Palazzo di Brera
a Milano Con la successione di Giuseppe II al trono d'Austria (1780), gli spazi
per i riformisti milanesi si riducono, e a partire dal 1786 Verri lascia ogni
incarico pubblico, assumendo un atteggiamento sempre più critico nei confronti
del figlio di Maria Teresa. Pubblica frattanto la Storia di Milano
(1783). All'arrivo di Napoleone (1796), Verri sessantottenne prende
parte, con Alfonso Longo e Luigi Lambertenghi, alla fondazione della Repubblica
Cisalpina, culla del tricolore italiano. Muore durante una seduta notturna
della Municipalità milanese, della quale era membro assieme a personalità come
Giuseppe Parini. Le sue spoglie sono conservate nella cappella di famiglia,
visibile al pubblico, che si trova a latere del Santuario della Beata Vergine del
Lazzaretto, nel comune di Ornago (MB). Il fratello minore Giovanni,
secondo alcuni sarebbe il padre naturale di Alessandro Manzoni, figlio di
Giulia Beccaria e nipote di Cesare. Meriti e pensiero filosofico ed
economico di Pietro Verri Medaglione col ritratto di Pietro Verri sulla
casa di Cesare Beccaria a Milano. Grazie alla sua opera come autore e come
organizzatore Milano divenne il più importante centro dell'Illuminismo
italiano. L'ipotesi di civiltà che scaturiva dalla figura intellettuale di Pietro
Verri era forse troppo avanzata per poter essere adeguatamente raccolta dalla
nostra cultura; e comunque lo colloca a pieno titolo tra le espressioni più alte
dell'Illuminismo italiano. Il grande merito storico di Verri consiste nel
fatto di aver creato in Lombardia un grande centro di aggregazione illuminista,
la rivista Il Caffè. Ciò che desta curiosità rimane il titolo con cui Pietro
Verri scelse di intitolare la sua testata, dovuta al rilevante fenomeno della
diffusione di caffè (bar), come luoghi dove poter intraprendere un libero e
attuale dibattito culturale, politico e sociale. Con i suoi scritti sul dolore
e il piacere, Verri sottoscrisse le teorie di Helvétius, nonché il sensismo di
Condillac, fondando sulla ricerca della felicità e del piacere l'attività
dell'uomo. L'uomo, per Verri, tendeva a sé stesso, al piacere, quindi secondo
Verri l'uomo è pervaso dall'idea del dolore, e il suo piacere non è altro che
una momentanea interruzione di questo dolore; questa tesi è riscontrabile anche
in Schopenhauer e in Leopardi e quest'ultimo potrebbe averla derivata da quella
del Verri, essendo ispirato spesso dalla filosofia sensistica settecentesca.
Per Verri quindi, la vera felicità dell'uomo non è quella personale, ma è
quella a cui partecipa il collettivo, quasi fosse eutimia o atarassia. Anche
Kant e Nietzsche apprezzeranno questa tesi. Antonio Perego, L'Accademia dei
Pugni. Da sinistra a destra: Alfonso Longo (di spalle), Alessandro Verri,
Giambattista Biffi, Cesare Beccaria, Luigi Lambertenghi, Pietro Verri, Giuseppe
Visconti di Saliceto Per quanto riguarda la politica e l'economia, il pensiero
di Pietro Verri è controverso. Per quanto riguarda l'ambito economico, negli
Elementi del Commercio e nella sua più grande opera economica Meditazioni
sull'economia politica, enunciò (anche, per primo, in forma matematica) le
leggi di domanda e offerta, spiegò il ruolo della moneta come "merce
universale", appoggiò il libero scambio e sostenne che l'equilibrio nella
bilancia dei pagamenti è assicurato da aggiustamenti del prodotto interno lordo
(quantità) e non del tasso di cambio (prezzo)[6]. Di conseguenza, può essere
visto come precursore di Adam Smith, del marginalismo e persino di John Maynard
Keynes; altri però notano come assuma atteggiamenti di difesa del concetto di
proprietà privata e del mercantilismo. Egli ritiene che solo la libera
concorrenza tra eguali possa distribuire la proprietà privata: tuttavia pare
favorevole principalmente alla piccola proprietà, per evitare il risorgere
delle disuguaglianze. Verri con le Osservazioni sulla tortura esprime la
sua contrarietà all'uso della tortura, definendo ingiusto e antistorico un
modello così efferato di giurisprudenza e auspicando l'abolizione di questi
metodi. Verri cominciò la stesura dell'opuscolo già nel 1760, ma non lo
pubblicò per non inimicarsi, con le pesanti critiche alla magistratura in esso
contenute, il senato di Milano (tribunale) presso cui si stava decidendo
dell'eredità del padre. La grande opera del collega Beccaria Dei delitti
e delle pene, terminata nel 1764, prende in gran parte le mosse proprio dalle
bozze delle Osservazioni sulla tortura, oltre che dagli articoli de Il Caffè.
Sarà proprio a causa di questo furto di idee che i due scrittori e amici
arriveranno al più acceso scontro. Ritratto del Verri Nella
versione definitiva e aggiornata delle Osservazioni, che sono in conclusione un
invito ai magistrati a seguire le idee illuministe invece di irrigidirsi sulle
posizioni conservatrici, la dialettica di Verri è cruda e basilare: la tortura
è una crudeltà, perché se la vittima è innocente, subisce sofferenze non
necessarie, mentre se colpisce un colpevole presumibile rischia di martoriare
il corpo di un possibile innocente. Inoltre gli accusati rinunciano nella
tortura alla loro difesa naturale istintiva, e ciò viola la legge di
natura. Verri apre la sua opera con la ricostruzione del processo agli
"untori" del 1630, presentandolo sia come documento dell'ignoranza di
un secolo non guidato dai "Lumi", sia come emblema del modo in cui
leggi sbagliate portano a evidenti ingiustizie. Questa ricostruzione fornirà la
base[8] per la Storia della colonna infame di Alessandro Manzoni, che però la
presenterà come testimonianza di ciò che accade quando uomini ingiusti
detengono un grande potere, come all'epoca era quello del senato milanese.
L'opera di Verri non arriverà mai ad avere il successo che invece ebbe Dei
delitti e delle pene, vuoi perché la maggior parte delle osservazioni in essa
sviluppate erano già contenute nell'opera di Beccaria, vuoi per via dello stile
di Verri, dotto e di difficile comprensione, che rendeva di per sé ardua la
diffusione del testo, che pure conteneva molti ulteriori spunti rispetto
all'opera del collega. Opere, scritti e discorsi. Le principali opere di Verri
sono, in ordine cronologico: La Borlanda impasticciata con la concia, e
trappola de sorci composta per estro, e dedicata per bizzaria alla nobile
curiosita di teste salate dall'incognito d'Eritrea Pedsol riconosciuto,
Festosamente raccolta, e fatta dare in luce dall'abitatore disabitato
accademico bontempista, Adorna di varj poetici encomj, ed accresciuta di
opportune annotazioni per opera di varj suoi coaccademici amici. Il Gran
Zoroastro ossia Astrologiche Predizioni per l'Anno 1758, Il Mal di Milza,
Diario military, Elementi del commercio, Sul tributo del sale nello Stato di
Milano, Sulla grandezza e decadenza del commercio di Milano, Dialogo tra
Fronimo e Simplicio (detto anche Dialogo sul disordine delle monete nello Stato
di Milano, Considerazioni sul commercio nello Stato di Milano, Orazione
panegirica sula giurisprudenza Milanese, Meditazioni sulla felicità – cf.
Grice, Notes on happiness -- Bilancio del commercio dello stato di Milano, Il
Caffè, Sull’innesto del vajuolo, Memorie storiche sulla economia pubblica dello
Stato di Milano, Riflessioni sulle leggi vincolanti il commercio dei grani, Meditazioni
sulla economia politica con annotazioni, Consulta su la riforma delle monete
dello Stato di Milano, Osservazioni sulla tortura, Ricordi a mia figlia, Considerazioni
sul commercio nello Stato di Milano Sull'indole del piacere e del dolore,
Manoscritto da leggersi dalla mia cara figlia Teresa Verri per cui sola lo
scrissi, Storia di Milano, Piano di organizzazione del Consiglio governativo ed
istruzioni per il medesimo, Precetti di Caligola e Claudio, Memoria cronologica
dei cambiamenti pubblici dello Stato di Milano, Delle nozioni tendenti alla pubblica
felicità, Pensieri di un buon vecchio che non è letterato, Carteggio di Pietro
e di Alessandro Verri. L'Edizione Nazionale, Ministero per i beni e le
attività culturali ha deciso di avallare un'Edizione nazionale delle opere di
Pietro Verri. Attualmente il comitato, finanziato pubblicamente, dalla
Fondazione Cariplo e da Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, è presieduto da Carlo Capra e
composto da una ventina di studiosi e si basa, per la stesura delle opere,
sull'Archivio Verri, donato dalla Contessa Luisa Sormani Andreani Verri alla
"Fondazione Raffaele Mattioli per la storia del pensiero economico.” Note:
Angolani Bartolo, Gli Scritti di argomento familiare e autobiografico di Pietro
Verri, Rivista di storia della filosofia. Fascicolo 3 (Firenze : [poi] Milano :
La Nuova Italia ; Franco Angeli). Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri ^ Cfr.
Ricuperati, Giuseppe, Pietro Verri e il genere della biografia, Società e
storia. Fascicolo 10, 2002 (Milano : Franco Angeli, 2002). ^ Pietro Verri,
"Il Caffè", Introduzione, I, 1 ^ Giordanetti, Piero, a cura di, Sul
piacere e sul dolore. Immanuel Kant discute Pietro Verri, Milano, Unicopli,
1998; Giordanetti, Piero: Kant, Verri e le arti belle. Sulla fortuna di Verri
in Germania, in Pietro Verri e il suo tempo, a cura di C. Capra, 2 voll.,
Bologna, Cisalpino, 1999, pp. 429-446; Meld Shell, Susan. Kant's 'true economy
of human nature': Rousseau, Count Verri, and the problem of happiness, Essays
on Kant's anthropology, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Pezzei, Ivana, Kant,
Verri, Nietzsche e la questione del piacere e del dolore, in Annali di Ca'
Foscari ^ Parisi, D., Pre-classical economic thought: profitable commerce and
formal constraints in the economic studies of the young Pietro Verri, Rivista
internazionale di scienze sociali, CVII.4 (Oct 1999): 455-480. ^ Porta, Pier
Luigi; Scazzieri, Roberto, Pietro Verri's political economy: commercial
society, civil society, and the science of the legislator, History of political
economy, 34.1 (Apr 2002): 83-110. ^ Renzo Villata, Maria Gigliola, Il processo
agli untori di manzioniana memoria e la testimonianza (ovvero... due volti dell'umana
giustizia), Acta Histriae 19.3 (2011): 419-452. ^ Storia di Milano :::
Cronologia della vita di Pietro Verri, su www.storiadimilano.it. URL consultato
il 25 marzo 2018. ^ Vèrri, Pietro nell'Enciclopedia Treccani, su
www.treccani.it. URL consultato il 25 marzo 2018. ^ Pietro Verri Ricordi a mia
figlia, su www.classicitaliani.it. URL consultato il 25 marzo 2018. ^ Catalogo
- Sellerio, su Sellerio.^ SALERNO EDITRICE. Scheda del libro: VERRI PIETRO -
DELLE NOZIONI TENDENTI ALLA PUBBLICA FELICITÀ, su www.salernoeditrice.it. URL
consultato il 25 marzo 2018 (archiviato dall'url originale il 26 marzo 2018). ^
Pietro Verri Pensieri di un buon vecchio che non è letterato, su
www.classicitaliani.it. URL consultato il 25 marzo 2018. ^ Per la data vedere
qui Archiviato il 14 luglio 2014 in Internet Archive.. ^ Carlo Capra,
L'Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pietro Verri. Risultati e prospettive, in
Rivista di storia della filosofia, n. 3, 2007, pp. 533-539. URL consultato il 2
luglio 2014. Bibliografia Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Verri: Vol.
2 tomo 1: Scritti di economia, finanza e amministrazione, a cura di Giuseppe
Bognetti, Angelo Moioli, Pierluigi Porta, Giovanna Tonelli, Roma, Edizioni di
storia e letteratura, 2006, XXV + 831 pagg., ISBN 978-88-8498-351-0. Vol. 2
tomo 2: Scritti di economia, finanza e amministrazione, a cura di Giuseppe
Bognetti, Angelo Moioli, Pierluigi Porta, Giovanna Tonelli, Roma, Edizioni di
storia e letteratura, 2007, XV + 688 pagg., ISBN 978-88-8498-500-2. Vol. 3: I
Discorsi e altri scritti degli anni Settanta, a cura di Giorgio Panizza, con la
collaborazione di Silvia Contarini, Gianni Francioni, Sara Rosini, Roma,
Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2004, XVII + 692 pagg., ISBN
978-88-8498-219-3. Vol. 4: Storia di Milano, a cura di Renato Pasta, Roma,
Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2009, LII + 872 pagg., ISBN
978-88-6372-168-3. Vol. 5: Scritti di argomento familiare e autobiografico, a
cura di Gennaro Barbarisi, Roma, Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003, XXI +
838 pagg., ISBN 978-88-8498-158-5. Vol. 6: Scritti politici della maturità, a
cura di Carlo Capra, Roma, Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2010, XXVII + 888
pagg., ISBN 978-88-6372-303-8. Vol. 7: Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri.
18 settembre 1782-16 maggio 1792, a cura di Gigliola Di Renzo Villata, Roma,
Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2012, XXXVI + 510 pagg., ISBN
978-88-6372-454-7. Vol. 8 tomo 1: Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri. 19
maggio 1792-31 marzo 1794, a cura di Sara Rosini, Roma, Edizioni di storia e
letteratura, 2008, XXIX + 658 pagg. Vol. 8 tomo 2: Carteggio di Pietro e
Alessandro Verri. 2 aprile 1794-8 luglio 1797, a cura di Sara Rosini, Roma,
Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2008, pagg. 662-1421, ISBN 978-88-6372-094-5.
Pietro Verri, Caffè. 1, In Venezia, Pietro Pizzolato, 1766. URL consultato il
22 giugno 2015. Pietro Verri, Caffè. 2, In Venezia, Pietro Pizzolato, 1766. URL
consultato il 22 giugno 2015. Pietro Verri, Meditazioni sulla economia politica
con annotazioni, Venezia, Giovanni Battista Pasquali, 1771. URL consultato il
22 giugno 2015. Pietro Verri, Meditazioni sulla economia politica, Livorno,
Stamperia dell'Enciclopedia Livorno, 1772. URL consultato il 22 giugno 2015.
Pietro Verri, Sull'indole del piacere e del dolore, In Milano, Giuseppe
Marelli, 1781. URL consultato il 22 giugno 2015. Pietro Verri, Storia di
Milano. 1, Milano, Società tipografica de' classici italiani, 1834. URL
consultato il 22 giugno 2015. Pietro Verri, Storia di Milano. 2, Milano,
Società tipografica de' classici italiani, 1835. URL consultato il 22 giugno
2015. Riedizioni Pietro Verri, Alessandro Verri, Carteggio di Pietro e di
Alessandro Verri, a cura di F. Novati, A. Giulini, E. Greppi, G. Seregni, vol.
12, Milano, L. F. Cogliati, Milesi & figli, Giuffrè, 1910-1942. Pietro
Verri, Alessandro Verri, Viaggio a Parigi e Londra (1766-1767) - Carteggio di
Pietro ed Alessandro Verri, a cura di Gianmarco Gaspari, Milano, Adelphi, Pietro Verri, Appunti di diritto bellico, a
cura di Paolo Benvenuti, riedizione aggiornata, Roma, 1990. Arnaldo Di
Benedetto, Pietro Verri repubblicano: gli ultimi articoli, Tra Sette e
Ottocento. Poesia, letteratura e politica, Alessandria, Edizioni dell'Orso,
1991, pp. 75-95. Adriano Cavanna, Da Maria Teresa a Bonaparte: il lungo viaggio
di Pietro Verri, 1999. Carlo Capra, I progressi della ragione: vita di Pietro
Verri, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2002. Pietro Verri, Meditazioni sulla felicità,
Pavia-Como, Ibis. Pietro Verri, Discorso sull'indole del piacere e del dolore,
a cura di Gianfranco Spada, Londra, Traettiana, 2010. Pietro Verri, Diario
Militar, Milano, M&B Publishing, 1996. Voci correlate Verri (famiglia)
Alessandro Verri Carlo Verri Giovanni Verri Altri progetti Collabora a
Wikisource Wikisource contiene una pagina dedicata a Pietro Verri Collabora a
Wikiquote Wikiquote contiene citazioni di o su Pietro Verri Collabora a
Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o altri file su Pietro
Verri Collegamenti esterni Pietro Verri, su Treccani.it – Enciclopedie on line,
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su Wikidata Pietro Verri, in
Enciclopedia Italiana, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. Modifica su
Wikidata Pietro Verri, in Dizionario di storia, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia
Italiana, 2010. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Pietro Verri, su Enciclopedia
Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di Pietro
Verri, su Liber Liber. Modifica su Wikidata Opere di Pietro Verri, su openMLOL,
Horizons Unlimited srl. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Opere di Pietro Verri, su
Open Library, Internet Archive. (EN) Opere di Pietro Verri, su Progetto
Gutenberg. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Pietro Verri, in Catholic Encyclopedia,
Robert Appleton Company. Modifica su Wikidata Pietro Verri. Biografia e
pensiero a cura di Diego Fusaro e Nicoletta Cieri, sito Filosofico.net. URL
visitato il 17 febbraio 2012. Cronologia della vita di Pietro Verri, Maria
Castiglioni e Teresa Verri di Paolo Colussi, sito Storia di Milano. URL
visitato il 17 febbraio 2012. V · D · M Illuministi italiani Controllo di
autorità VIAF (EN) 34473689 · ISNI (EN) 0000 0001 2100 5327 · SBN
IT\ICCU\CFIV\035822 · LCCN (EN) n82138205 · GND (DE) 118804278 · BNF (FR)
cb120377209 (data) · BNE (ES) XX1479709 (data) · NLA (EN) 36414819 · BAV (EN)
495/88410 · CERL cnp01260077 · WorldCat Identities (EN) lccn-n82138205
Biografie Portale Biografie Diritto Portale Diritto Economia Portale Economia
Filosofia Portale Filosofia Letteratura Portale Letteratura Storia Portale
Storia Categorie: Filosofi italiani del XVIII secoloEconomisti italianiStorici
italiani del XVIII secoloNati nel 1728 Morti nel 1797 Nati il 12 dicembreMorti
il 28 giugnoNati a MilanoMorti a MilanoIlluministiFilosofi del dirittoScrittori
italiani del XVIII secoloSalottieri[altre]. Refs.:
Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Verri," per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
verum – verum – Grice: “Cognate with German ‘wahr’” -- there’s
the ‘truth table’ and the ‘truth’ -- truth table, a tabular display of one or
more truth-functions, truth-functional operators, or representatives of
truth-functions or truth-functional operators such as well-formed formulas of
propositional logic. In the tabular display, each row displays a possible
assignment of truthvalues to the arguments of the truth-functions or
truth-functional operators. Thus, the collection of all rows in the table
displays all possible assignments of truth-values to these arguments. The
following simple truth table represents the truth-functional operators negation
and conjunction: truth, coherence theory of truth table 931 931 Because a truth table displays all
possible assignments of truth-values to the arguments of a truth-function,
truth tables are useful devices for quickly ascertaining logical properties of
propositions. If, e.g., all entries in the column of a truth table representing
a proposition are T, then the proposition is true for all possible assignments
of truth-values to its ultimate constituent propositions; in this sort of case,
the proposition is said to be logically or tautologically true: a tautology. If
all entries in the column of a truth table representing a proposition are F,
then the proposition is false for all possible assignments of truth-values to
its ultimate constituent propositions, and the proposition is said to be
logically or tautologically false: a contradiction. If a proposition is neither
a tautology nor a contradiction, then it is said to be a contingency. The truth
table above shows that both Not-P and Pand-Q are contingencies. For the same
reason that truth tables are useful devices for ascertaining the logical
qualities of single propositions, truth tables are also useful for ascertaining
whether arguments are valid or invalid. A valid argument is one such that there
is no possibility no row in the relevant truth table in which all its premises
are true and its conclusion false. Thus the above truth table shows that the
argument ‘P-and-Q; therefore, P’ is valid.
Verum -- truth-value, most narrowly, one of the values T for ‘true’ or F
for ‘false’ that a proposition may be considered to have or take on when it is
regarded as true or false, respectively. More broadly, a truth-value is any one
of a range of values that a proposition may be considered to have when taken to
have one of a range of different cognitive or epistemic statuses. For example,
some philosophers speak of the truth-value I for ‘indeterminate’ and regard a
proposition as having the value I when it is indeterminate whether the
proposition is true or false. Logical systems employing a specific number n of
truthvalues are said to be n-valued logical systems; the simplest sort of
useful logical system has two truth-values, T and F, and accordingly is said to
be two-valued. Truth-functions are functions that take truth-values as
arguments and that yield truth-values as resultant values. The truthtable
method in propositional logic exploits the idea of truth-functions by using
tabular displays. Verum -- truth-value semantics, interpretations of formal
systems in which the truth-value of a formula rests ultimately only on
truth-values that are assigned to its atomic subformulas where ‘subformula’ is
suitably defined. The label is due to Hugues Leblanc. On a truth-value
interpretation for first-order predicate logic, for example, the formula atomic
ExFx is true in a model if and only if all its instances Fm, Fn, . . . are
true, where the truth-value of these formulas is simply assigned by the model.
On the standard Tarskian or objectual interpretation, by contrast, ExFx is true
in a model if and only if every object in the domain of the model is an element
of the set that interprets F in the model. Thus a truth-value semantics for
predicate logic comprises a substitutional interpretation of the quantifiers
and a “non-denotational” interpretation of terms and predicates. If t 1, t 2, .
. . are all the terms of some first-order language, then there are objectual
models that satisfy the set {Dx-Fx, Ft1, Ft2 . . . .}, but no truth-value
interpretations that do. One can ensure that truth-value semantics delivers the
standard logic, however, by suitable modifications in the definitions of
consistency and consequence. A set G of formulas of language L is said to be
consistent, for example, if there is some G' obtained from G by relettering
terms such that G' is satisfied by some truth-value assignment, or,
alternatively, if there is some language L+ obtained by adding terms to L such
that G is satisfied by some truth-value assignment to the atoms of L+.
Truth-value semantics is of both technical and philosophical interest.
Technically, it allows the completeness of first-order predicate logic and a
variety of other formal systems to be obtained in a natural way from that of
propositional logic. Philosophically, it dramatizes the fact that the formulas
in one’s theories about the world do not, in themselves, determine one’s
ontological commitments. It is at least possible to interpret first-order
formulas without reference to special truth-table method truth-value semantics
932 932 domains of objects, and
higher-order formulas without reference to special domains of relations and
properties. The idea of truth-value semantics dates at least to the writings of
E. W. Beth on first-order predicate logic in 9 and of K. Schütte on simple type
theory in 0. In more recent years similar semantics have been suggested for
secondorder logics, modal and tense logics, intuitionistic logic, and set
theory. Truth, the quality of those propositions that accord with reality,
specifying what is in fact the case. Whereas the aim of a science is to
discover which of the propositions in its domain are true i.e., which
propositions possess the property of Trinity truth 929 929 truth
the central philosophical concern with truth is to discover the nature of
that property. Thus the philosophical question is not What is true? but rather,
What is truth? What is one saying about
a proposition in saying that it is true? The importance of this question stems
from the variety and depth of the principles in which the concept of truth is
deployed. We are tempted to think, e.g., that truth is the proper aim and
natural result of scientific inquiry, that true beliefs are useful, that the
meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions that would render it true, and
that valid reasoning preserves truth. Therefore insofar as we wish to
understand, assess, and refine these epistemological, ethical, semantic, and
logical views, some account of the nature of truth would seem to be required.
Such a thing, however, has been notoriously elusive. The belief that snow is
white owes its truth to a certain feature of the external world: the fact that
snow is white. Similarly, the belief that dogs bark is true because of the fact
that dogs bark. Such trivial observations lead to what is perhaps the most
natural and widely held account of truth, the correspondence theory, according
to which a belief statement, sentence, proposition, etc. is true provided there
exists a fact corresponding to it. This Aristotelian thesis is unexceptionable
in itself. However, if it is to provide a complete theory of truth and if it is to be more than merely a
picturesque way of asserting all instances of ‘the belief that p is true if and
only if p’ then it must be supplemented
with accounts of what facts are, and what it is for a belief to correspond to a
fact; and these are the problems on which the correspondence theory of truth
has foundered. A popular alternative to the correspondence theory has been to
identify truth with verifiability. This idea can take on various forms. One
version involves the further assumption that verification is holistic i.e., that a belief is verified when it is
part of an entire system of beliefs that is consistent and “harmonious.” This
is known as the coherence theory of truth and was developed by Bradley and
Brand Blanchard. Another version, due to Dummett and Putnam, involves the
assumption that there is, for each proposition, some specific procedure for
finding out whether one should believe it or not. On this account, to say that
a proposition is true is to say that it would be verified by the appropriate
procedure. In mathematics this amounts to the identification of truth with
provability and is sometimes referred to as intuitionistic truth. Such theories
aim to avoid obscure metaphysical notions and explain the close relation
between knowability and truth. They appear, however, to overstate the intimacy
of that link: for we can easily imagine a statement that, though true, is
beyond our power to establish as true. A third major account of truth is
James’s pragmatic theory. As we have just seen, the verificationist selects a
prominent property of truth and considers it to be the essence of truth.
Similarly the pragmatist focuses on another important characteristic namely, that true beliefs are a good basis
for action and takes this to be the very
nature of truth. True assumptions are said to be, by definition, those that
provoke actions with desirable results. Again we have an account with a single
attractive explanatory feature. But again the central objection is that the
relationship it postulates between truth and its alleged analysans in this case, utility is implausibly close. Granted, true beliefs
tend to foster success. But often actions based on true beliefs lead to
disaster, while false assumptions, by pure chance, produce wonderful results.
One of the few fairly uncontroversial facts about truth is that the proposition
that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white, the proposition that
lying is wrong is true if and only if lying is wrong, and so on. Traditional
theories of truth acknowledge this fact but regard it as insufficient and, as
we have seen, inflate it with some further principle of the form ‘X is true if
and only if X has property P’ such as corresponding to reality, verifiability,
or being suitable as a basis for action, which is supposed to specify what
truth is. A collection of radical alternatives to the traditional theories
results from denying the need for any such further specification. For example,
one might suppose with Ramsey, Ayer, and Strawson that the basic theory of
truth contains nothing more than equivalences of the form, ‘The proposition
that p is true if and only if p’ excluding instantiation by sentences such as
‘This proposition is not true’ that generate contradiction. This so-called
deflationary theory is best presented following Quine in conjunction with an
account of the raison d’être of our notion of truth: namely, that its function
is not to describe propositions, as one might naively infer from its syntactic
form, but rather to enable us to construct a certain type of generalization.
For example, ‘What Einstein said is true’ is intuitively equivalent to the
infinite conjunction ‘If Einstein said that nothing goes faster than light,
then nothing goes faster than light; and if Einstein said truth truth 930 930 that nuclear weapons should never be
built, then nuclear weapons should never be built; . . . and so on.’ But
without a truth predicate we could not capture this statement. The deflationist
argues, moreover, that all legitimate uses of the truth predicate including those in science, logic, semantics,
and metaphysics are simply displays of
this generalizing function, and that the equivalence schema is just what is
needed to explain that function. Within the deflationary camp there are various
competing proposals. According to Frege’s socalled redundancy theory,
corresponding instances of ‘It is true that p’ and ‘p’ have exactly the same
meaning, whereas the minimalist theory assumes merely that such propositions
are necessarily equivalent. Other deflationists are skeptical about the
existence of propositions and therefore take sentences to be the basic vehicles
of truth. Thus the disquotation theory supposes that truth is captured by the
disquotation principle, ‘p’ is true if and only if p’. More ambitiously, Tarski
does not regard the disquotation principle, also known as Tarski’s T schema, as
an adequate theory in itself, but as a specification of what any adequate
definition must imply. His own account shows how to give an explicit definition
of truth for all the sentences of certain formal languages in terms of the
referents of their primitive names and predicates. This is known as the
semantic theory of truth. Grice: “From ‘verum’ we have to ‘make’ true, as the
Romans put it, ‘verificare’ -- verificatum -- verificationism, a metaphysical
theory about what determines meaning: the meaning of a statement consists in
its methods of verification. Verificationism thus differs radically from the
account that identifies meaning with truth conditions, as is implicit in
Frege’s work and explicit in Vitters’s Tractatus and throughout the writings of
Davidson. On Davidson’s theory, e.g., the crucial notions for a theory of
meaning are truth and falsity. Contemporary verificationists, under the
influence of the Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett, propose what they see as a
constraint on the concept of truth rather than a criterion of meaningfulness.
No foundational place is generally assigned in modern verificationist semantics
to corroboration by observation statements; and modern verificationism is not
reductionist. Thus, many philosophers read Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
as rejecting verificationism. This is because they fail to notice an important
distinction. What Quine rejects is not verificationism but “reductionism,”
namely, the theory that there is, for each statement, a corresponding range of
verifying conditions determinable a priori. Reductionism is inherently localist
with regard to verification; whereas verificationism, as such, is neutral on
whether verification is holistic. And, lastly, modern verificationism is, veil
of ignorance verificationism 953 953
whereas traditional verificationism never was, connected with revisionism in
the philosophy of logic and mathematics e.g., rejecting the principle of
bivalence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The taming of the true.” Porphyry called the
verum one of the four transcendental, along with unum, pulchrum and bonum – Grice
agreed. Grice’s concern with the ‘verum’ is serious. If Quine is right, and
logical truth should go, so truth should go. Grice needs ‘true’ to correct a
few philosophical mistakes. It is true that Grice sees a horse as a horse, for
example. The nuances of the implicaturum are of a lesser concern for Grice than
the taming of the true. The root of
Latin ‘vero’ is cognate with an idea Grice loved: that of ‘sincerity.’ The
point is more obviously realised lexically in the negative: the fallax versus
the mendax. But ‘verum’ had to do with candidum – and thus very much cognate
with the English that Grice avoided, ‘truth,’ cognate with ‘trust.’ quod non
possit ab honestate sejungi The true and simple Good which cannot be separated
from honesty, Cicero, Academica, I, 2, but also for the ontological which one
can find in Cicero’s tr. Topica, 35 of etumologia ἐτυμολογία by veriloquium.
Most contemporary hypotheses propose that verus —and the words signifying true,
vrai, vérité, G. wahr, G. Wahrheit — derive from an Indo-European root, *wer,
which would retain meanings of to please, pleasing, manifesting benevolence,
gifts, services rendered, fidelity, pact. Chantraine Dictionnaire étymologique
de la langue grecque links it to the Homeric expression êra pherein ἦϱα φέϱειν,
to please, as well as to ἐπίηϱα, ἐπίηϱος, and ἐπιήϱανος, agreeable Odyssey, 19,
343, just like the Roman verus cf. se-vere, without benevolence, the G. war, and the Russian vera, faith, or verit’
верить, to believe. Pokorny adds to this same theme the Grecian ἑοϱτή,
religious feast, cult. And from the same basis have come terms signifying
guarantee, protect: Fr. garir and later
garant, G. Gewähren, Eng. warrant, to
grant. According to Chantraine, this root *wer should be distinguished from
another root ver-, whence eirô εἴϱω in Grecian , verbum in Roman word in
English, etc., and words from the family of vereor, revereor, to fear, to
respect, verecundia respectful fear. According to Chantraine, this root *wer
should be distinguished from another root ver-, whence eirô εἴϱω in Grecian ,
verbum in Roman word in English, etc., and words from the family of vereor,
revereor, to fear, to respect, verecundia respectful fear. Alfred Ernout does
not support this separation. We should recall that plays on the words verum and
verbum were common, as Augustine mentions verbum = verum boare, proclaiming the
truth, Dialectics 1. P. Florensky, following G. Curtius, “Grundzüge der
griechischen Etymologie,” also claims a single root for the ensemble of these
derivations, including the Sanskrit vratum, sacred act, vow, promise, the
Grecian bretas βϱέτας, cult object, wooden idol Aeschylus, Eumenides, v. 258,
and the Roman “ver-bum.” The signification of verus must be considered as
belonging first to the field of religious ritual and subsequently of juridical
formulas: strictly speaking, verus means protected or grounded in the sense of
that which is the object of a taboo or consecration Pillar and Ground. Then
there’s from the juridical to the philosophical. “Verum” implies a
rectification of an adversarial allegation considered to be fraudulent, as is
indicated by the original opposition verax/fallax-mendax. It thus signifies the
properly founded in fact or in the rules of law: crimen verissimum a
well-founded accusation Cicero, In Verrem, 5, 15. In texts of grammar and
rhetoric, but also in juridical texts as well, verus and veritas signify the
veracity of the rule, inasmuch as it can be distinguished from usage. “Quid
verum sit intellego; sed alias ita loquor ut concessum est I know what is
correct, but sometimes I avail myself of the variation in usage, Cicero, De
oratore, Loeb Classical Library; Consule veritatem: reprehendet; refer ad
auris: probabunt If you consult the strict rule of analogy, it will say this
practice is wrong, but if you consult the ear, it will approve 1586. The
juridical connotation of the word verus and thus of veritas is retained and
subsequently reinforced. In the glosses of the Middle Ages, verus signifies
legitimate and the Roman sense of the word, legal and authentic or conforming
to existing law. One normally finds “verum est” in legal texts to certify that
a new rule conforms to preexisting ones Digest, 8, 4, 1. It is this juridical
dimension that produces the meaning of verus as authenticated, authentic in
contrast to false, imitative, deceiving and thus real as in real cream or a
genuine Rolex watch. The juridical here
provides a foundation not only for the moral Verum et simplex bonum. The
paradigm of “verum” is not easy to separate from any epistemological
dimensions, as is evident in the varied fates of the Indo-European root *wer,
from which derives, in addition to vera in Russian, belief, the old Fr. garir, in the sense of certifying as true, designating
as true, whence the participle garant. The evolution of these derived words
inscribes G. “wahr,” and “Wahrheit” in a semantic network from which emerge two
directions, belief and salvation. Belief. “Wahr” is often linked back, in
composite words, to the idea of belief, in the sense of true belief, to take as
true. “Wahrsagen,” to predict, “wahr haben,” to admit, agree upon, “für wahr
halten,” to hold as true, to believe. This is the term that Kant employs in the
Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental theory of method, ch.2, 3 On Opinion,
Science, and Belief: “das Fürwahrhalten” is a belief, as a modality of
subjectivity, that can be divided into conviction Überzeugung or persuasion
Überredung and that is capable of three degrees: opinion Meinung, belief
Glaube, and science Wissenschaft. Safeguarding, conservation. Similarly
“wahren,” “bewahren” in the sense of to guard, to conserve is linked to
“Wahrung” in the sense of defending one’s interests or safeguarding. One might
refer to Heidegger’s use of this etymological and semantic relation in
reference to Nietzsche. It remains to be said that many common or colloquial
expressions, in Fr. as well as in
English, play on the semantic slippages of vrai and real, between the
ontological sense and linguistic meanings. Thus in Fr. , c’est pas vrai! does
not mean it is false, but rather that it is not reality. In English, the
opposite is the case: get real! means come back down to earth, accept the
truth. Grice’s main manoeuvre may be seen as intended to crack the crib of
reality. For he wants to say some philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis
are misled if they think an inappropriate usage reveals a truth-condition. By
coining ‘implicaturum,’ his point is to give room for “Emissor E communicates
that p,” as opposed to ‘emissum x ‘means’ ‘p.’ Therefore, Grice can claim that
an utterance may very well totally baffling and misleading YET TRUE (or
otherwise ‘good’), and that in no way that reveals anything about the emissum
itself. This is due to the fact that ‘Emissor E communicates that p’ is diaphanous.
And one can conjoin what the emissor E communicates to what he explicitly
conveys and NOT HAVE the emissor contradicting himself or uttering a falsehood.
And that is what in philosophy should count. H. P. Grice was always happy with
a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth. It was what Aristotle thought. So why
change? The fact that Austin agreed helped. The fact that Strawson applied
Austin’s shining new tool of the performatory had him fashion a new shining
skid, and that helped, because, once Grice has identified a philosophical
mistake, that justifies his role as methodologist in trying to ‘correct’ the
mistake. The Old Romans did not have an article. For them it is the unum, the
verum, the bonum, and the pulchrum. They were trying to translate the very
articled Grecian ‘to alethes,’ ‘to agathon,’ and ‘to kallon.’ Grecian Grice is
able to restore the articles. He would use ‘the alethic’ for the ‘verum,’ after
von Wright. But occasionally uses the ‘verum’ root. E. g. when his account of
‘personal identity’ was seen to fail to distinguish between a ‘veridical’
memory and a non-veridical one. If it had not been for Strawson’s ‘ditto’
theory to the ‘verum,’ Grice would not have minded much. Like Austin, his
inclination was for a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth alla Aristotle and
Tarski, applied to the utterance, or ‘expressum.’ So, while we cannot say that
an utterer is TRUE, we can say that he is TRUTHFUL, and trustworthy
(Anglo-Saxon ‘trust,’ being cognate with ‘true,’ and covering both the
credibility and desirability realms. Grice approaches the ‘verum’ in terms of
predicate calculus. So we need at least an utterance of the form, ‘the dog is
shaggy.’ An utterance of ‘The dog is shaggy’ is true iff the denotatum of ‘the
dog’ is a member of the class ‘shaggy.’ So, when it comes to ‘verum,’ Grice
feels like ‘solving’ a problem rather than looking for new ones. He thought
that Strawson’s controversial ‘ditto’ was enough of a problem ‘to get rid of.’
VERUM. Along with verum, comes the falsum. fallibilism, the doctrine, relative
to some significant class of beliefs or propositions, that they are inherently
uncertain and possibly mistaken. The most extreme form of the doctrine
attributes uncertainty to every belief; more restricted forms attribute it to
all empirical beliefs or to beliefs concerning the past, the future, other
minds, or the external world. Most contemporary philosophers reject the
doctrine in its extreme form, holding that beliefs about such things as
elementary logical principles and the character of one’s current feelings
cannot possibly be mistaken. Philosophers who reject fallibilism in some form
generally insist that certain beliefs are analytically true, self-evident, or
intuitively obvious. These means of supporting the infallibility of faculty
psychology fallibilism 303 303 some
beliefs are now generally discredited. W. V. Quine has cast serious doubt on
the very notion of analytic truth, and the appeal to self-evidence or intuitive
obviousness is open to the charge that those who officially accept it do not
always agree on what is thus evident or obvious there is no objective way of
identifying it, and that beliefs said to be self-evident have sometimes been
proved false, the causal principle and the axiom of abstraction in set theory being
striking examples. In addition to emphasizing the evolution of logical and
mathematical principles, fallibilists have supported their position mainly by
arguing that the existence and nature of mind-independent objects can
legitimately be ascertained only be experimental methods and that such methods
can yield conclusions that are, at best, probable rather than certain. false
consciousness, 1 lack of clear awareness of the source and significance of
one’s beliefs and attitudes concerning society, religion, or values; 2
objectionable forms of ignorance and false belief; 3 dishonest forms of
self-deception. Marxists if not Marx use the expression to explain and condemn
illusions generated by unfair economic relationships. Thus, workers who are
unaware of their alienation, and “happy homemakers” who only dimly sense their
dependency and quiet desperation, are molded in their attitudes by economic
power relationships that make the status quo seem natural, thereby eclipsing
their long-term best interests. Again, religion is construed as an economically
driven ideology that functions as an “opiate” blocking clear awareness of human
needs. Collingwood interprets false consciousness as self-corrupting
untruthfulness in disowning one’s emotions and ideas The Principles of Art,
8. . false pleasure, pleasure taken in
something false. If it is false that Jones is honest, but Smith believes Jones
is honest and is pleased that Jones is honest, then Smith’s pleasure is false.
If pleasure is construed as an intentional attitude, then the truth or falsity
of a pleasure is a function of whether its intentional object obtains. On this
view, S’s being pleased that p is a true pleasure if an only if S is pleased
that p and p is true. S’s being pleased that p is a false pleasure if and only
if S is pleased that p and p is false. Alternatively, Plato uses the expression
‘false pleasure’ to refer to things such as the cessation of pain or neutral
states that are neither pleasant nor painful that a subject confuses with
genuine or true pleasures. Thus, being released from tight shackles might
mistakenly be thought pleasant when it is merely the cessation of a pain. Refs:
Grice, “Rationality and Trust,” Grice, “The alethic.” “P. F. Strawson and the
performatory account of ‘true’”, The Grice Papers.
vico: He is
so beloved by the Italians “that they made a stamp of him.” – Grice. cited by
H. P. Grice, “Vico and the origin of language.” Philosopher who founded modern
philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of mythology. He
was born and lived all his life in or near Naples, where he taught eloquence.
The Inquisition was a force in Naples throughout Vico’s lifetime. A turning
point in his career was his loss of the concourse for a chair of civil law
1723. Although a disappointment and an injustice, it enabled him to produce his
major philosophical work. He was appointed royal historiographer by Charles of
Bourbon. Vico’s major work is “La scienza nuova” completely revised in a second, definitive
version in 1730. In the 1720s, he published three connected works in Latin on
jurisprudence, under the title Universal Law; one contains a sketch of his
conception of a “new science” of the historical life of nations. Vico’s
principal works preceding this are On the Study Methods of Our Time 1709,
comparing the ancients with the moderns regarding human education, and On the
Most Ancient Wisdom of the s 1710, attacking the Cartesian conception of
metaphysics. His Autobiography inaugurates the conception of modern
intellectual autobiography. Basic to Vico’s philosophy is his principle that
“the true is the made” “verum ipsum factum”, that what is true is convertible
with what is made. This principle is central in his conception of “science”
scientia, scienza. A science is possible only for those subjects in which such
a conversion is possible. There can be a science of mathematics, since
mathematical truths are such because we make them. Analogously, there can be a
science of the civil world of the historical life of nations. Since we make the
things of the civil world, it is possible for us to have a science of them. As
the makers of our own world, like God as the maker who makes by knowing and
knows by making, we can have knowledge per caussas through causes, from within.
In the natural sciences we can have only conscientia a kind of “consciousness”,
not scientia, because things in nature are not made by the knower. Vico’s “new
science” is a science of the principles whereby “men make history”; it is also
a demonstration of “what providence has wrought in history.” All nations rise
and fall in cycles within history corsi e ricorsi in a pattern governed by
providence. The world of nations or, in the Augustinian phrase Vico uses, “the
great city of the human race,” exhibits a pattern of three ages of “ideal
eternal history” storia ideale eterna. Every nation passes through an age of
gods when people think in terms of gods, an age of heroes when all virtues and
institutions are formed through the personalities of heroes, and an age of humans
when all sense of the divine is lost, life becomes luxurious and false, and
thought becomes abstract and ineffective; then the cycle must begin again. In
the first two ages all life and thought are governed by the primordial power of
“imagination” fantasia and the world is ordered through the power of humans to
form experience in terms of “imaginative universals” universali fantastici.
These two ages are governed by “poetic wisdom” sapienza poetica. At the basis
of Vico’s conception of history, society, and knowledge is a conception of
mythical thought as the origin of the human world. Fantasia is the original
power of the human mind through which the true and the made are converted to
create the myths and gods that are at the basis of any cycle of history.
Michelet was the primary supporter of Vico’s ideas in the nineteenth century;
he made them the basis of his own philosophy of history. Coleridge is the
principal disseminator of Vico’s views in England. James Joyce used the New
Science as a substructure for Finnegans Wake, making plays on Vico’s name,
beginning with one in Latin in the first sentence: “by a commodius vicus of
recirculation.” Croce revives Vico’s philosophical thought, wishing to conceive
Vico as the Hegel. Vico’s ideas have
been the subject of analysis by such prominent philosophical thinkers as
Horkheimer and Berlin, by anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, and by literary
critics such as René Wellek and Herbert Read. Refs.: S. N. Hampshire, “Vico,”
in The New Yorker. Luigi Speranza, “Vico alla Villa Grice.” H. P. Grice, “Vico
and language.” vico -- Danesi,
Marcel. Vico, Metaphor, and the
Origin of Language. Bloomington: Indiana. Serious scholars of Vico as well as
glottogeneticists will find much of value in this excellent monograph. Vico
Studies. A provocative, well-researched argument which might find reapplication
in philosophy." —Theological Book Review. Danesi returns to Vico to
create a persuasive, original account of the evolution and development of
language, one of the deep mysteries of human existence. The Vico’s
reconstruction of the origin of language is described at length, then evaluated
in light of Grice’s philosophical conversational pragmatics. Glottogenesis
Vico’s Reconstruction. The New Science Basic Notions. Language and the
Imagination: Vito’s Glottogenetic Scenario Vico’s Approach Reconstructing the
Primal Scene After the Primal Scence. The Dawn of Communication: Iconicity and
Mimesis Hypotheses The Nature of Iconicity. Imagery, Iconicity, and Gesture.
Iconic Representation. Osmosis Hypothesis Ontogenesis From Percepts to Concepts
The Metaphoricity Metaphor Metaphor and Concept-Formation Mentation,
Narrativity, and Myth The
Sociobiological-Computationist Viewpoint:A Vichian Critique The Vichian
Scenario Revisited Revisting the Genetic Perspective computationism. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vico e Grice,” Villa Grice.
villa grice: -- Kept by Luigi Speranza -- Grice kept a nice garden in
his cottage on Banbury Road, not far from St. John’s. It was more of a villa
than his town house at Harborne. While Grice loved Academia, he also loved
non-Academia. He would socialize at the Flag and Lamb, at the Bird and Baby,
and the cricket club, at the bridge club, etc. In this way, he goes back to
Plato’s idea of an ‘academy,’ established by Plato at his villa outside Athens near
the public park and gymnasium known by that name. Although it may not have
maintained a continuous tradition, the many and varied philosophers of the
Academy all considered themselves Plato’s successors, and all of them
celebrated and studied his work. The school survived in some form until A.D.
529, when it was dissolved, along with the other pagan schools, by the Eastern
Roman emperor Justinian I. The history of the Academy is divided by some
authorities into that of the Old Academy Plato, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and
their followers and the New Academy the Skeptical Academy of the third and
second centuries B.C.. Others speak of five phases in its history: Old as
before, Middle Arcesilaus, New Carneades, Fourth Philo of Larisa, and Fifth
Antiochus of Ascalon. For most of its history the Academy was devoted to
elucidating doctrines associated with Plato that were not entirely explicit in
the dialogues. These “unwritten doctrines” were apparently passed down to his
immediate successors and are known to us mainly through the work of Aristotle:
there are two opposed first principles, the One and the Indefinite Dyad Great
and Small; these generate Forms or Ideas which may be identified with numbers,
from which in turn come intermediate mathematicals and, at the lowest level,
perceptible things Aristotle, Metaphysics I.6. After Plato’s death, the Academy
passed to his nephew Speusippus, who led the school until his death. Although
his written works have perished, his views on certain main points, along with
some quotations, were recorded by surviving authors. Under the influence of
late Pythagoreans, Speusippus anticipated Plotinus by holding that the One
transcends being, goodness, and even Intellect, and that the Dyad which he
identifies with matter is the cause of all beings. To explain the gradations of
beings, he posited gradations of matter, and this gave rise to Aristotle’s
charge that Speusippus saw the universe as a series of disjointed episodes.
Speusippus abandoned the theory of Forms as ideal numbers, and gave heavier
emphasis than other Platonists to the mathematicals. Xenocrates who once went
with Plato to Sicily, succeeded Speusippus and led the Academy till his own
death. Although he was a prolific author, Xenocrates’ works have not survived,
and he is known only through the work of other authors. He was induced by
Aristotle’s objections to reject Speusippus’s views on some points, and he
developed theories that were a major influence on Middle Platonism, as well as
on Stoicism. In Xenocrates’ theory the One is Intellect, and the Forms are
ideas in the mind of this divine principle; the One is not transcendent, but it
resides in an intellectual space above the heavens. While the One is good, the
Dyad is evil, and the sublunary world is identified with Hades. Having taken
Forms to be mathematical entities, he had no use for intermediate
mathematicals. Forms he defined further as paradigmatic causes of regular
natural phenomena, and soul as self-moving number. Polemon led the Academy, and
was chiefly known for his fine character, which set an example of self-control
for his students. The Stoics probably derived their concept of oikeiosis an
accommodation to nature from his teaching. After Polemon’s death, his colleague
Crates led the Academy until the accession of Arcesilaus. The New Academy arose
when Arcesilaus became the leader of the school and turned the dialectical
tradition of Plato to the Skeptical aim of suspending belief. The debate
between the New Academy and Stoicism dominated philosophical discussion for the
next century and a half. On the Academic side the most prominent spokesman was
Carneades. In the early years of the first century B.C., Philo of Larisa
attempted to reconcile the Old and the New Academy. His pupil, the former
Skeptic Antiochus of Ascalon, was enraged by this and broke away to refound the
Old Academy. This was the beginning of Middle Platonism. Antiochus’s school was
eclectic in combining elements of Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelian
philosophy, and is known to us mainly through Cicero’s Academica. Middle
Platonism revived the main themes of Speusippus and Xenocrates, but often used
Stoic or neo-Pythagorean concepts to explain them. The influence of the Stoic
Posidonius was strongly felt on the Academy in this period, and Platonism
flourished at centers other than the Academy in Athens, most notably in
Alexandria, with Eudorus and Philo of Alexandria. After the death of Philo, the
center of interest returned to Athens, where Plutarch of Chaeronia studied with
Ammonius at the Academy, although Plutarch spent most of his career at his home
in nearby Boeotia. His many philosophical treatises, which are rich sources for
the history of philosophy, are gathered under the title Moralia; his interest
in ethics and moral education led him to write the Parallel Lives paired
biographies of famous Romans and Athenians, for which he is best known. After
this period, the Academy ceased to be the name for a species of Platonic
philosophy, although the school remained a center for Platonism, and was
especially prominent under the leadership of the Neoplatonist Proclus.
villa speranza:
the grander sourroundings where the
Casino Grice belongs – Grice used to call it ‘Villa Grice.’ Villa Speranza counts
with an excellent host in the charming A. M. G. -- . Villa Speranza holds a
grand swimming pool where Grice would keep his Loeb collection (“Loeb is all
you need”) – It became known in the neighbourhood as The Swimming-Pool Library.
vio:
essential Italian philosopher. Grice was irritated that when ‘vio’ became a
saint, the Italians list them under ‘c’. He wrote extensively on freewill, and
had a colourful dispute with, of all people, Calvin – well represented in a
painting Grice adored. Vio – tomasso di
vio -- cajetan,
original name, -- H. P. Grice thinks that Shropshire borrowed his proof for the
immortality of the soul from Cajetan -- Tommaso de Vio, prelate and theologian.
Born in Gaeta from which he took his name, he entered the Dominican order in
1484 and studied philosophy and theology at Naples, Bologna, and Padua. He
became a cardinal in 1517; during the following two years he traveled to G.y,
where he engaged in a theological controversy with Luther. His major work is a
Commentary on St. Thomas’ Summa of Theology 1508, which promoted a renewal of
interest in Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy during the sixteenth century.
In agreement with Aquinas, Cajetan places the origin of human knowledge in
sense perception. In contrast with Aquinas, he denies that the immortality of
the soul and the existence of God as our creator can be proved. Cajetan’s work
in logic was based on traditional Aristotelian syllogistic logic but is
original in its discussion of the notion of analogy. Cajetan distinguishes
three types: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of
proportion. Whereas he rejected the first two types as improper, he regarded
the last as the basic type of analogy and appealed to it in explaining how
humans come to know God and how analogical reasoning applied to God and God’s
creatures avoids being equivocal. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, “Grice e de Vio.” The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria,
Italia.
violence: Grice: “I would define ‘violence’ as the use of force
to cause physical harm, death, or destruction physical violence; the causing of severe mental or emotional
harm, as through humiliation, deprivation, or brainwashing, whether using force
or not psychological violence; more broadly, profaning, desecrating, defiling,
or showing disrespect for i.e., “doing violence” to something valued, sacred,
or cherished; extreme physical force in the natural world, as in tornados,
hurricanes, and earthquakes. Physical violence may be directed against persons,
animals, or property.” Grice goes on: “In the first two cases, harm, pain,
suffering, and death figure prominently; in the third, illegality or
illegitimacy the forceful destruction of property is typically considered
violence when it lacks authorization. Psychological violence applies
principally to persons. It may be understood as the violation of beings worthy
of respect. But it can apply to higher animals as well as in the damaging
mental effects of some experimentation, e.g., involving isolation and deprivation.
Environmentalists sometimes speak of violence against the environment, implying
both destruction and disrespect for the natural world. Sometimes the concept of
violence is used to characterize acts or practices of which one morally
disapproves. To this extent it has a normative force. But this prejudges
whether violence is wrong. One may, on the other hand, regard inflicting harm
or death as only prima facie wrong i.e., wrong all other things being equal.
This gives violence a normative character, establishing its prima facie
wrongness. But it leaves open the ultimate moral justifiability of its use.
Established practices of physical or psychological violence e.g., war, capital punishment constitute institutionalized violence. So do
illegal or extralegal practices like vigilantism, torture, and state terrorism
e.g., death squads. Anarchists sometimes regard the courts, prisons, and police
essential to maintaining the state as violence. Racism and sexism may be
considered institutional violence owing to their associated psychological as
well as physical violence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Causes and reasons.”
virtuosum – Grice: “The etymology of ‘virtue’ is fantastic: it
is strictly a bit like ‘manliness,’ only the Romans were never sure who was
‘vir’ and who wasn’t!” -- “virtue is entire” – “Do not multiply virtues beyond
necessity” -- virtue ethics, also called virtue-based ethics and agent-based
ethics, conceptions or theories of morality in which virtues play a central or
independent role. Thus, it is more than simply the account of the virtues
offered by a given theory. Some take the principal claim of virtue ethics to be
about the moral subject that, in living
her life, she should focus her attention on the cultivation of her or others’
virtues. Others take the principal claim to be about the moral theorist that, in mapping the structure of our moral
thought, she should concentrate on the virtues. This latter view can be
construed weakly as holding that the moral virtues are no less basic than other
moral concepts. In this type of virtue ethics, virtues are independent of other
moral concepts in that claims about morally virtuous character or action are,
in the main, neither reducible to nor justified on the basis of underlying
claims about moral duty or rights, or about what is impersonally valuable. It
can also be construed strongly as holding that the moral virtues are more basic
than other moral concepts. In such a virtue ethics, virtues are fundamental,
i.e., claims about other moral concepts are either reducible to underlying
claims about moral virtues or justified on their basis. Forms of virtue ethics
predominated in Western philosophy before the Renaissance, most notably in
Aristotle, but also in Plato and Aquinas. Several ancient and medieval
philosophers endorsed strong versions of virtue ethics. These views focused on
character rather than on discrete behavior, identifying illicit behavior with
vicious behavior, i.e., conduct that would be seriously out of character for a
virtuous person. A virtuous person, in turn, was defined as one with
dispositions relevantly linked to human flourishing. On these views, while a
person of good character, or someone who carefully observes her, may be able to
articulate certain principles or rules by which she guides her conduct or to
which, at least, it outwardly conforms, the principles are not an ultimate
source of moral justification. On the contrary, they are justified only insofar
as the conduct they endorse would be in character for a virtuous person. For
Aristotle, the connection between flourishing and virtue seems conceptual. He
conceived moral virtues as dispositions to choose under the proper guidance of
reason, and defined a flourishing life as one lived in accordance with these
virtues. While most accounts of the virtues link them to the flourishing of the
virtuous person, there are other possibilities. In principle, the flourishing
to which virtue is tied whether causally or conceptually may be either that of
the virtuous subject herself, or that of some patient who is a recipient of her
virtuous behavior, or that of some larger affected group the agent’s community, perhaps, or all
humanity, or even sentient life in general. For the philosophers of ancient
Greece, it was human nature, usually conceived teleologically, that fixed the
content of this flourishing. Medieval Christian writers reinterpreted this,
stipulating both that the flourishing life to which the virtues lead extends
past death, and that human flourishing is not merely the fulfillment of
capacities and tendencies inherent in human nature, but is the realization of a
divine plan. In late twentieth-century versions of virtue ethics, some
theorists have suggested that it is neither to a teleology inherent in human
nature nor to the divine will that we should look in determining the content of
that flourishing to which the virtues lead. They understand flourishing more as
a matter of a person’s living a life that meets the standards of her cultural,
historical tradition. In his most general characterization, Aristotle called a
thing’s virtues those features of it that made it and its operation good. The
moral virtues were what made people live well. This use of ‘making’ is
ambiguous. Where he and other premodern thinkers thought the connection between
virtues and living well to be conceptual, moral theorists of the modernist era
have usually virtue ethics virtue ethics understood it causally. They commonly
maintain that a virtue is a character trait that disposes a person to do what can
be independently identified as morally required or to effect what is best best
for herself, according to some theories; best for others, according to
different ones. Benjamin Franklin, e.g., deemed it virtuous for a person to be
frugal, because he thought frugality was likely to result in her having a less
troubled life. On views of this sort, a lively concern for the welfare of
others has moral importance only inasmuch as it tends to motivate people
actually to perform helpful actions. In short, benevolence is a virtue because
it conduces to beneficent conduct; veracity, because it conduces to truth
telling; fidelity, because it conduces to promise keeping; and so on. Reacting
to this aspect of modernist philosophy, recent proponents of virtue ethics deny
that moral virtues derive from prior determinations of what actions are right
or of what states of affairs are best. Some, especially certain theorists of
liberalism, assign virtues to what they see as one compartment of moral thought
and duties to a separate, and only loosely connected compartment. For them, the
life and theory of virtue is autonomous. They hold that virtues and duties have
independent sources of justification, with virtues chiefly concerned with the
individual’s personal “ideals,” self-image, or conception of her life goals,
while duties and rights are thought to derive from social rules regulating
interpersonal dealings. Proponents of virtue ethics maintain that it has
certain advantages over more modern alternatives. They argue that virtue ethics
is properly concrete, because it grounds morality in facts about human nature
or about the concrete development of particular cultural traditions, in
contrast with modernist attempts to ground morality in subjective preference or
in abstract principles of reason. They also claim that virtue ethics is truer
to human psychology in concentrating on the less conscious aspects of
motivation on relatively stable
dispositions, habits, and long-term goals, for example where modern ethics focuses on decision
making directed by principles and rules. Virtue ethics, some say, offers a more
unified and comprehensive conception of moral life, one that extends beyond
actions to comprise wants, goals, likes and dislikes, and, in general, what
sort of person one is and aims to be. Proponents of virtue ethics also contend
that, without the sensitivity and appreciation of their situation and its
opportunities that only virtues consistently make available, agents cannot
properly apply the rules that modernist ethical theories offer to guide their
actions. Nor, in their view, will the agent follow those rules unless her
virtues offer her sufficient clarity of purpose and perseverance against
temptation. Several objections have been raised against virtue ethics in its most
recent forms. Critics contend that it is antiquarian, because it relies on
conceptions of human nature whose teleology renders them obsolete; circular,
because it allegedly defines right action in terms of virtues while defining
virtues in terms of right action; arbitrary and irrelevant to modern society,
since there is today no accepted standard either of what constitutes human
flourishing or of which dispositions lead to it; of no practical use, because
it offers no guidance when virtues seem to conflict; egoistic, in that it
ultimately directs the subject’s moral attention to herself rather than to
others; and fatalistic, in allowing the morality of one’s behavior to hinge
finally on luck in one’s constitution, upbringing, and opportunities. There may
be versions of virtue ethics that escape the force of all or most of the
objections, but not every form of virtue ethics can claim for itself all the
advantages mentioned above. virtue
epistemology, the subfield of epistemology that takes epistemic virtue to be
central to understanding justification or knowledge or both. An epistemic
virtue is a personal quality conducive to the discovery of truth, the avoidance
of error, or some other intellectually valuable goal. Following Aristotle, we
should distinguish these virtues from such qualities as wisdom or good
judgment, which are the intellectual basis of practical but not necessarily intellectual success. The importance, and to an extent,
the very definition, of this notion depends, however, on larger issues of
epistemology. For those who favor a naturalist conception of knowledge say, as
belief formed in a “reliable” way, there is reason to call any truth-conducive
quality or properly working cognitive mechanism an epistemic virtue. There is
no particular reason to limit the epistemic virtues to recognizable personal
qualities: a high mathematical aptitude may count as an epistemic virtue. For
those who favor a more “normative” conception of knowledge, the corresponding
notion of an epistemic virtue or vice will be narrower: it will be tied to
personal qualities like impartiality or carelessness whose exercise one would
associate with an ethics of belief. H. P. Grice, “Philosophy, like virtue, is
entire;” H. P. Grice, “Virtutes non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,”
H. P. Grice, “Aristotle’s mesotes – where virtue lies.”
vis: When in a Latinate mood, Grice would refer to a ‘vis’
of an expression. Apparently, ‘vis’ is cognate with ‘validum,’ transf., of abstr. things, force, notion, meaning, sense, import, nature, essence (cf. significatio): “id, in quo est omnis vis amicitiae,” Cic. Lael. 4, 15: “eloquentiae vis et natura,” id. Or. 31, 112: “vis honesti (with natura),” id. Off. 1, 6, 18; cf. id. Fin. 1, 16, 50: “virtutis,” id. Fam. 9, 16, 5: “quae est alia vis legis?” id. Dom. 20, 53: “vis, natura, genera verborum et simplicium et copulatorum,” i.e. the sense, signification, id. Or. 32, 115: “vis verbi,” id. Inv. 1, 13, 17; id. Balb. 8, 21: “quae vis insit in his paucis verbis, si attendes, si attendes, intelleges,” id. Fam. 6, 2, 3: “quae vis subjecta sit vocibus,” id. Fin. 2, 2, 6: “nominis,” id. Top. 8, 35: μετωνυμία, cujus vis est, pro eo, quod dicitur, causam, propter
quam dicitur, ponere, Quint. 8, 6, 23.
vital lie: Grice: “I would define a vital life as an instance of
self-deception or lying to oneself when it fosters hope, confidence,
self-esteem, mental health, or creativity; or any false belief or unjustified
attitude that helps people cope with difficulties; or a lie to other people designed to promote
their wellbeing; e.. g.: self-deceiving optimism about one’s prospects for
success in work or personal relationships may generate hope, mobilize energy,
enrich life’s meaning, and increase chances for success. Grice considers the
optimism law as basic in folk-psychology. Ibsen dramatises “life-lies” as
essential for happiness The Wild Duck, and O’Neill portrays “pipe dreams” as
necessary crutches The Iceman Cometh. Nietzsche endorsed “pious illusions” or
“holy fictions” about the past that liberate individuals and societies from
shame and guilt On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. In
Problems of belief, Schiller praised normal degrees of vanity and self-conceit
because they support selfesteem. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Optimism,” in “Method in
philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre.”
volition: cf. desideratum. a mental event involved with the
initiation of action. ‘To will’ is sometimes taken to be the corresponding verb
form of ‘volition’. The concept of volition is rooted in modern philosophy;
contemporary philosophers have transformed it by identifying volitions with
ordinary mental events, such as intentions, or beliefs plus desires. Volitions,
especially in contemporary guises, are often taken to be complex mental events
consisting of cognitive, affective, and conative elements. The conative element
is the impetus the underlying
motivation for the action. A velleity is
a conative element insufficient by itself to initiate action. The will is a
faculty, or set of abilities, that yields the mental events involved in
initiating action. There are three primary theories about the role of volitions
in action. The first is a reductive account in which action is identified with
the entire causal sequence of the mental event the volition causing the bodily
behavior. J. S. Mill, for example, says: “Now what is action? Not one thing,
but a series of two things: the state of mind called a volition, followed by an
effect. . . . [T]he two together constitute the action” Logic. Mary’s raising her
arm is Mary’s mental state causing her arm to rise. Neither Mary’s volitional
state nor her arm’s rising are themselves actions; rather, the entire causal
sequence the “causing” is the action. The primary difficulty for this account
is maintaining its reductive status. There is no way to delineate volition and
the resultant bodily behavior without referring to action. There are two
non-reductive accounts, one that identifies the action with the initiating
volition and another that identifies the action with the effect of the
volition. In the former, a volition is the action, and bodily movements are
mere causal consequences. Berkeley advocates this view: “The Mind . . . is to
be accounted active in . . . so far forth as volition is included. . . . In
plucking this flower I am active, because I do it by the motion of my hand,
which was consequent upon my volition” Three Dialogues. In this century,
Prichard is associated with this theory: “to act is really to will something”
Moral Obligation, 9, where willing is sui generis though at other places
Prichard equates willing with the action of mentally setting oneself to do
something. In this sense, a volition is an act of will. This account has come
under attack by Ryle Concept of Mind. Ryle argues that it leads to a vicious
regress, in that to will to do something, one must will to will to do it, and
so on. It has been countered that the regress collapses; there is nothing
beyond willing that one must do in order to will. Another criticism of Ryle’s,
which is more telling, is that ‘volition’ is an obscurantic term of art;
“[volition] is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist
theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated. . . . [It is like]
‘phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ . . . [which] have now no utility” Concept of
Mind. Another approach, the causal theory of action, identifies an action with
the causal consequences of volition. Locke, e.g., says: “Volition or willing is
an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any action, and
thereby exerting its power to produce it. . . . [V]olition is nothing but that
particular determination of the mind, whereby . . . the mind endeavors to give
rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to be in its power” Essay
concerning Human Understanding. This is a functional account, since an event is
an action in virtue of its causal role. Mary’s arm rising is Mary’s action of
raising her arm in virtue of being caused by her willing to raise it. If her
arm’s rising had been caused by a nervous twitch, it would not be action, even
if the bodily movements were photographically the same. In response to Ryle’s
charge of obscurantism, contemporary causal theorists tend to identify
volitions with ordinary mental events. For example, Davidson takes the cause of
actions to be beliefs plus desires and Wilfrid Sellars takes volitions to be
intentions to do something here and now. Despite its plausibility, however, the
causal theory faces two difficult problems: the first is purported
counterexamples based on wayward causal chains connecting the antecedent mental
event and the bodily movements; the second is provision of an enlightening
account of these mental events, e.g. intending, that does justice to the
conative element. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “A. J. P. Kenny on voliting.”
voluntarism: -- W. James: “I will that the chair slides over the
floor toward me. It doesn’t.” cf. Grice on the volitive – desiderative -- any
philosophical view that makes our ability to control the phenomena in question
an essential part of the correct understanding of those phenomena. Thus,
ethical voluntarism is the doctrine that the standards that define right and
wrong conduct are in some sense chosen by us. Doxastic voluntarism is the
doctrine that we have extensive control over what we believe; we choose what to
believe. A special case of doxastic voluntarism is theological voluntarism,
which implies that religious belief requires a substantial element of choice;
the evidence alone cannot decide the issue. This is a view that is closely
associated with Pascal, Kierkegaard, and James. Historical voluntarism is the
doctrine that the human will is a major factor in history. Such views contrast
with Marxist views of history. Metaphysical voluntarism is the doctrine, linked
with Schopenhauer, that the fundamental organizing principle of the world is
not the incarnation of a rational or a moral order but rather the will, which
for Schopenhauer is an ultimately meaningless striving for survival, to be
found in all of nature. Refs.: H. P.
Grice, “The will”
voting
paradox: the possibility that if there
are three candidates, A, B, and C, for democratic choice, with at least three
choosers, and the choosers are asked to make sequential choices among pairs of
candidates, A could defeat B by a majority vote, B could defeat C, and C could
defeat A. This would be the outcome if the choosers’ preferences were ABC, BCA,
and CAB. Hence, although each individual voter may have a clear preference
ordering over the candidates, the collective may have cyclic preferences, so
that individual and majoritarian collective preference orderings are not
analogous. While this fact is not a logical paradox, it is perplexing to many
analysts of social choice. It may also be morally perplexing in that it
suggests majority rule can be quite capricious. For example, suppose we vote
sequentially over various pairs of candidates, with the winner at each step
facing a new candidate. If the candidates are favored by cyclic majorities, the
last candidate to enter the fray will win the final vote. Hence, control over
the sequence of votes may determine the outcome. It is easy to find cyclic
preferences over such candidates as movies and other matters of taste. Hence,
the problem of the voting paradox is clearly real and not merely a logical
contrivance. But is it important? Institutions may block the generation of
evidence for cyclic majorities by making choices pairwise and sequentially, as
above. And some issues over which we vote provoke preference patterns that
cannot produce cycles. For example, if our issue is one of unidimensional
liberalism versus conservatism on some major political issue such as welfare
programs, there may be no one who would prefer to spend both more and less
money than what is spent in the status quo. Hence, everyone may display
single-peaked preferences with preferences falling as we move in either
direction toward more money or toward less from the peak. If all important
issues and combinations of issues had this preference structure, the voting
paradox would be unimportant. It is widely supposed by many public choice
scholars that collective preferences are not single-peaked for many issues or,
therefore, for combinations of issues. Hence, collective choices may be quite
chaotic. What order they display may result from institutional manipulation. If
this is correct, we may wonder whether democracy in the sense of the
sovereignty of the electorate is a coherent notion. Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“Grice’s Book of Paradoxes – with pictures and illustrations.”
vyse: an unfortunate example by Grice. He wants to give an
ambiguous sentence, “Strawson is caught in the grip of a vice.” Oddly, in The
New World, Webster noticed this, and favoured the spelling ‘vyse.’ “But what
Webster fails,” Grice adds, “to note, is that ‘vice’ and ‘vyse’ ARE cognate,
hence no need for double talk!” “They both can be traced to ‘violence.’” Sir
Cecil Vyse happens to be a character in Forster’s “A room with a view,” which gives
a triple ambiguity, to “Strawson was caught in the grip of a Vyse.” Vyse was
wonderfully played by Daniel Day Lewis in the film. “What is your profession,
Mister Vyse?” Vyse: “Must one have a profeesion?” – Vyse’s favourite motto
applies to Grice, “Ingelese italianato, diavolo incarnate.” – Grice: “Stupidly,
when this is reversed the implicature is lost.
W
W: SUBJECT
INDEX:
W: DON’T
EXPECT AN ITALIAN PHILOSOPHER WITH THIS BARBARIC LETTER
W: NAME
INDEX: ENGLISH: WARNOCK (Grice’s collaborator) – WILSON --
ward: j. English philosopher and psychologist. Influenced
by Lotze, Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism
and its allied nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected
the associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only
of sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward
emphasized the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior
existence of an inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of
feeling and, most importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and
behavior by the willful exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses
attention and will. In his metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’
mechanistic materialism, proposing instead a teleological spiritualistic
monism. While his criticisms of associationism and naturalism were telling,
Ward was a transitional figure whose positive influence is limited, if we
except H. P. Grice who follows him to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific
psychology – he founded scientific psychology in Britain by establishing a
psychology laboratory – he, with his
student Stout, represented the beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford,
which Grice adored. Through Stout he influenced the hormic psychology of
McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a Stoutian (“until Prichard converted
me”). Ward’s major work is “Psychology” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed.,
1886), reworked as Psychological Principles (1918). “one of the most
philosophical psychologists England (if not Oxford) ever produced!” – H. P.
Grice -- cited by H. P. Grice. -- English philosopher. Influenced by Lotze,
Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism and its
allied nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected the
associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only of
sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward
emphasized the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior existence
of an inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of feeling and,
most importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and behavior by the
willful exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses attention and will.
In his metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’ mechanistic materialism,
proposing instead a teleological spiritualistic monism. While his criticisms of
associationism and naturalism were telling, Ward was a transitional figure
whose positive influence is limited, if we except H. P. Grice who follows him
to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific psychology he founded scientific psychology in Britain
by establishing a psychology laboratory
he, with his student Stout, represented the beginning of armchair
psychology at Oxford, which Grice adored. Through Stout he influenced the
hormic psychology of McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a Stoutian “until
Prichard converted me”. Ward’s major work is “Psychology” Encyclopedia
Britannica, 9th ed., 6, reworked as Psychological Principles 8.
warnock: Irish
philosopher, born in the north of England (“He was so Irish, I could sing
‘Danny Boy’ to him all day long – Dame Mary Warnock). “One of my most
intelligent collaborators.” Unlike any other of the collaborators, Warnock had
what Grice calls “the gift for botanising.” They would spend hours on the
philosophy of perception. His other English collaborators were, in alphabetic
order: Pears, Strawson, and Thomson. And you can see the difference. Thomson
was pretty obscure. Pears was a closet Vittersian. And Strawson was ‘to the
point.’ With Warnock, Grice could ramble at ease. Warnock became the custodian
of Austin’s heritage which somehow annoyed Grice. But the Warnock that Grice
enjoyed most was the Warnock-while-the-SchoolMaster-Austin-was-around. Because
they could play. And NOT in the play group, which was “anything but.” But Grice
would philosophise on ‘perception,’ and especially ‘see’ – with Warnock. Their
idiolects differed. Warnock, being Irish, was more creative, and less
conservative. So it was good for Warnock to have Grice to harness him! Through
Warnock, Grice got to discuss a few things with Urmson, the co-custodian of
Austin’s legacy. But again, most of the discussions with Urmson were before
Austin’s demise. Urmson and Warnock are the co-editors of Austin’s
“Philosophical Papers.” Would Austin have accepted? Who knows. The essays were
more or less easily available. Still. warnockianism:
Grice: “I told Warnock, ‘How clever language is!” “He agreed, for we realised
that language makes all the distinctions you need, and when you feel there is
one missing, language allows you to introduce it!” --. Refs.: H. P. Grice and
G. J. Warnock, The philosophy of perception – Folder – BANC MSS 90/135c, The
Bancroft Library, The University of California, Berkeley.
weapon: Grice’s shining new tool. The funny thing is that his
tutee Strawson didn’t allow him to play with it ONCE! Or weapon. Grice refers
to the implicaturum as a philosopher’s tool, and that the fun comes in the
application. Strawson and Wiggins p. 522, reminds us of Austin. Austin used to
say that when a philosopher “forges a new weapon, he is also fshioning new
skids to put under his feet.” It is perhaps inappropriate that a memorial
should mention this, but here they were, the memorialists. They were suggesting
that Grice forged a shining new tool, the implicaturum, or implicaturum –
rather, he proposed a rational explanation for the distinction between what an
emissor means (e. g., that p) and what anything else may be said,
‘metabolically,’ to “mean.” Suggesting an analogy with J. L. Austin and his
infelicitious notion of infelicity, which found him fashioning a shining new
skid, the memorialists suggest the same for Grice – but of course the analogy
does not apply.
well-formed
formula (Villa Grice: formula). For Grice, an otiosity – surely an ill-formed
formula is an oxymoron -- a grammatically wellformed sentence or structured
predicate of an artificial language of the sort studied by logicians. A
well-formed formula is sometimes known as a wff pronounced ‘woof’ or simply a
formula. Delineating the formulas of a language involves providing it with a
syntax or grammar, composed of both a vocabulary a specification of the symbols
from which the language is to be built, sorted into grammatical categories and
formation rules a purely formal or syntactical specification of which strings
of symbols are grammatically well-formed and which are not. Formulas are
classified as either open or closed, depending on whether or not they contain
free variables variables not bound by quantifiers. Closed formulas, such as x
Fx / Gx, are sentences, the potential bearers of truth-values. Open formulas, such
as Fx / Gx, are handled in any of three ways. On some accounts, these formulas
are on a par with closed ones, the free variables being treated as names. On
others, open formulas are structured predicates, the free variables being
treated as place holders for terms. And on still other accounts, the free
variables are regarded as implicitly bound by universal quantifiers, again
making open formulas sentences.
what the eye
no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for. Grice. Vide sytactics. Grice played with ‘elimination
rules’ for his scope device. Once applied, Grice said: “What the eye no longer
sees the heart no longer grieves for.” “As they say,” he added.
whewell: English philosopher of science. He was a master of Trinity
, Cambridge. Francis Bacon’s early work on induction was furthered by Whewell,
J. F. W. Herschel, and J. S. Mill, who attempted to create a logic of welfare
economics Whewell, William 970 970
induction, a methodology that can both discover generalizations about
experience and prove them to be necessary. Whewell’s theory of scientific
method is based on his reading of the history of the inductive sciences. He
thought that induction began with a non-inferential act, the superimposition of
an idea on data, a “colligation,” a way of seeing facts in a “new light.”
Colligations generalize over data, and must satisfy three “tests of truth.”
First, colligations must be empirically adequate; they must account for the
given data. Any number of ideas may be adequate to explain given data, so a
more severe test is required. Second, because colligations introduce
generalizations, they must apply to events or properties of objects not yet
given: they must provide successful predictions, thereby enlarging the evidence
in favor of the colligation. Third, the best inductions are those where
evidence for various hypotheses originally thought to cover unrelated kinds of
data “jumps together,” providing a consilience of inductions. Consilience
characterizes those theories achieving large measures of simplicity,
generality, unification, and deductive strength. Furthermore, consilience is a
test of the necessary truth of theories, which implies that what many regard as
merely pragmatic virtues of theories like simplicity and unifying force have an
epistemic status. Whewell thus provides a strong argument for scientific
realism. Whewell’s examples of consilient theories are Newton’s theory of
universal gravitation, which covers phenomena as seemingly diverse as the motions
of the heavenly bodies and the motions of the tides, and the undulatory theory
of light, which explains both the polarization of light by crystals and the
colors of fringes. There is evidence that Whewell’s methodology was employed by
Maxwell, who designed the influential Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge.
Peirce and Mach favored Whewell’s account of method over Mill’s empiricist
theory of induction. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “From induction to deduction, via
abduction.”
whistle. If you can’t say it you can’t whistle it either – But
you can implicate it. “To say” takes a ‘that’-clause. “To implicate” takes a
‘that’-clause. Grice: “ ‘To whisle’ takes a ‘that’-clause, “By whistling, E
communicates that he intends his emissee to be there.” “Whistle and I’ll be
there” – Houseman to a Shropshire farmer.
whitehead: cited by H. P. Grice, a. n., philosopher of science,
educated first at the Sherborne School in Dorsetshire and then at Trinity ,
Cambridge, Whitehead emerged as a first-class mathematician with a rich general
background. In 5 he became a fellow of Trinity
and remained there in a teaching role until 0. In the early 0s Bertrand
Russell entered Trinity as a student in
mathematics; by the beginning of the new century Russell had become not only a
student and friend but a colleague of Whitehead’s at Trinity . Each had written
a first book on algebra Whitehead’s A Treatise on Universal Algebra won him
election to the Royal Society in 3. When they discovered that their projected
second books largely overlapped, they undertook a collaboration on a volume
that they estimated would take about a year to write; in fact, it was a decade
later that the three volumes of their ground-breaking Principia Mathematica
appeared, launching symbolic logic in its modern form. In the second decade of
this century Whitehead and Russell drifted apart; their responses to World War
I differed radically, and their intellectual interests and orientations
diverged. Whitehead’s London period 024 is often viewed as the second phase of a
three-phase career. His association with the
of London involved him in practical issues affecting the character of
working-class education. For a decade Whitehead held a professorship at the
Imperial of Science and Technology and
also served as dean of the Faculty of Science in the , chair of the Academic
Council which managed educational affairs in London, and chair of the council
that managed Goldsmith’s . His book The Aims of Education 8 is a collection of
essays largely growing out of reflections on the experiences of these years.
Intellectually, Whitehead’s interests were moving toward issues in the
philosophy of science. In the years 922 he published An Enquiry Concerning the
Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of
Relativity the third led to his later 1
election as a fellow of the British Academy. In 4, at the age of sixty-three,
Whitehead made a dramatic move, both geographically and intellectually, to
launch phase three of his career: never having formally studied philosophy in
his life, he agreed to become professor of philosophy at Harvard , a position
he held until retirement in 7. The accompanying intellectual shift was a move
from philosophy of science to metaphysics. The earlier investigations had assumed
the self-containedness of nature: “nature is closed to mind.” The philosophy of
nature examined nature at the level of abstraction entailed by this assumption.
Whitehead had come to regard philosophy as “the critic of abstractions,” a
notion introduced in Science and the Modern World 5. This book traced the
intertwined emergence of Newtonian science and its philosophical
presuppositions. It noted that with the development of the theory of relativity
in the twentieth century, scientific understanding had left behind the
Newtonian conceptuality that had generated the still-dominant philosophical
assumptions, and that those philosophical assumptions considered in themselves
had become inadequate to explicate our full concrete experience. Philosophy as
the critic of abstractions must recognize the limitations of a stance that
assumes that nature is closed to mind, and must push deeper, beyond such an
abstraction, to create a scheme of ideas more in harmony with scientific
developments and able to do justice to human beings as part of nature. Science
and the Modern World merely outlines what such a philosophy might be; in 9
Whitehead published his magnum opus, titled Process and Reality. In this
volume, subtitled “An Essay in Cosmology,” his metaphysical understanding is
given its final form. It is customary to regard this book as the central
document of what has become known as process philosophy, though Whitehead
himself frequently spoke of his system of ideas as the philosophy of organism.
Process and Reality begins with a sentence that sheds a great deal of light
upon Whitehead’s metaphysical orientation: “These lectures are based upon a
recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and
ended with Hume.” Descartes, adapting the classical notion of substance to his
own purposes, begins a “phase of philosophic thought” by assuming there are two
distinct, utterly different kinds of substance, mind and matter, each requiring
nothing but itself in order to exist. This assumption launches the reign of
epistemology within philosophy: if knowing begins with the experiencing of a
mental substance capable of existing by itself and cut off from everything
external to it, then the philosophical challenge is to try to justify the claim
to establish contact with a reality external to it. The phrase “and ended with
Hume” expresses Whitehead’s conviction that Hume and more elegantly, he notes,
Santayana showed that if one begins with Descartes’s metaphysical assumptions,
skepticism is inevitable. Contemporary philosophers have talked about the end
of philosophy. From Whitehead’s perspective such talk presupposes a far too
narrow view of the nature of philosophy. It is true that a phase of philosophy
has ended, a phase dominated by epistemology. Whitehead’s response is to offer
the dictum that all epistemological difficulties are at bottom only camouflaged
metaphysical difficulties. One must return to that moment of Cartesian
beginning and replace the substance metaphysics with an orientation that avoids
the epistemological trap, meshes harmoniously with the scientific
understandings that have displaced the much simpler physics of Descartes’s day,
and is consonant with the facts of evolution. These are the considerations that
generate Whitehead’s fundamental metaphysical category, the category of an
actual occasion. An actual occasion is not an enduring, substantial entity.
Rather, it is a process of becoming, a process of weaving together the
“prehensions” a primitive form of ‘apprehension’ meant to indicate a “taking
account of,” or “feeling,” devoid of conscious awareness of the actual
occasions that are in the immediate past. Whitehead calls this process of
weaving together the inheritances of the past “concrescence.” An actual entity
is its process of concrescence, its process of growing together into a unified
perspective on its immediate past. The seeds of Whitehead’s epistemological
realism are planted in these fundamental first moves: “The philosophy of
organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. . . . For Kant, the world
emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges
from the world.” It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a
Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual
occasion is “all window.” It is as though one were to take Aristotle’s system
of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were
displaced from its position of preeminence by the category of relation the result would, mutatis mutandis, be an
understanding of being somewhat on the model of a Whiteheadian actual occasion.
In moving from Descartes’s dualism of mental substance and material substance
to his own notion of an actual entity, Whitehead has been doing philosophy
conceived of as the critique of abstractions. He holds that both mind and
matter are abstractions from the concretely real. They are important
abstractions, necessary for everyday thought and, of supreme importance,
absolutely essential in enabling the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries
to accomplish their magnificent advances in scientific thinking. Indeed,
Whitehead, in his philosophy of science phase, by proceeding as though “nature
is closed to mind,” was operating with those selfsame abstractions. He came to see
that while these abstractions were indispensable for certain kinds of
investigations, they were, at the philosophical level, as Hume had
demonstrated, a disaster. In considering mind and matter to be ontological
ultimates, Descartes had committed what Whitehead termed the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness. The category of an actual occasion designates the fully
real, the fully concrete. The challenge for such an orientation, the challenge
that Process and Reality is designed to meet, is so to describe actual
occasions that it is intelligible how collections of actual occasions, termed
“nexus” or societies, emerge, exhibiting the characteristics we find associated
with “minds” and “material structures.” Perhaps most significantly, if this
challenge is met successfully, biology will be placed, in the eyes of
philosophy, on an even footing with physics; metaphysics will do justice both
to human beings and to human beings as a part of nature; and such vexing
contemporary problem areas as animal rights and environmental ethics will
appear in a new light. Whitehead’s last two books, Adventures of Ideas 3 and
Modes of Thought 8, are less technical and more lyrical than is Process and
Reality. Adventures of Ideas is clearly the more significant of these two. It presents
a philosophical study of the notion of civilization. It holds that the social
changes in a civilization are driven by two sorts of forces: brute, senseless
agencies of compulsion on the one hand, and formulated aspirations and
articulated beliefs on the other. These two sorts of forces are epitomized by
barbarians and Christianity in the ancient Roman world and by steam and
democracy in the world of the industrial revolution. Whitehead’s focal point in
Adventures of Ideas is aspirations, beliefs, and ideals as instruments of
change. In particular, he is concerned to articulate the ideals and aspirations
appropriate to our own era. The character of such ideals and aspirations at any
moment is limited by the philosophical understandings available at that moment,
because in their struggle for release and efficacy such ideals and aspirations
can appear only in the forms permitted by the available philosophical
discourse. In the final section of Adventures of Ideas Whitehead presents a
statement of ideals and aspirations fit for our era as his own philosophy of
organism allows them to take shape and be articulated. The notions of beauty,
truth, adventure, zest, Eros, and peace are given a content drawn from the
technical understandings elaborated in Process and Reality. But in Adventures
of Ideas a less technical language is used, a language reminiscent of the
poetic imagery found in the style of Plato’s Republic, a language making the
ideas accessible to readers who have not mastered Process and Reality, but at
the same time far richer and more meaningful to those who have. Whitehead notes
in Adventures of Ideas that Plato’s later thought “circles round the
interweaving of seven main notions, namely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements,
The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical Relations, The Receptacle.
These notions are as important for us now, as they were then at the dawn of the
modern world, when civilizations of the old type were dying.” Whitehead uses
these notions in quite novel and modern ways; one who is unfamiliar with his
metaphysics can get something of what he means as he speaks of the Eros of the
Universe, but if one is familiar from Process and Reality with the notions of
the Primordial Nature of God and the Consequent Nature of God then one sees
much deeper into the meanings present in Adventures of Ideas. Whitehead was not
religious in any narrow, doctrinal, sectarian sense. He explicitly likened his
stance to that of Aristotle, dispassionately considering the requirements of
his metaphysical system as they refer to the question of the existence and
nature of God. Whitehead’s thoughts on these matters are most fully developed
in Chapter 11 of Science and the Modern World, in the final chapter of Process
and Reality, and in Religion in the Making 6. These thoughts are expressed at a
high level of generality. Perhaps because of this, a large part of the interest
generated by Whitehead’s thought has been within the community of theologians.
His ideas fairly beg for elaboration and development in the context of
particular modes of religious understanding. It is as though many modern
theologians, recalling the relation between the theology of Aquinas and the
metaphysics of Aristotle, cannot resist the temptation to play Aquinas to
Whitehead’s Aristotle. Process theology, or Neo-Classical Theology as it is
referred to by Hartshorne, one of its leading practitioners, has been the arena
within which a great deal of clarification and development of Whitehead’s ideas
has occurred. Whitehead was a gentle man, soft-spoken, never overbearing or
threatening. He constantly encouraged students to step out on their own, to
develop their creative capacities. His concern not to inhibit students made him
a notoriously easy grader; it was said that an A-minus in one of his courses
was equivalent to failure. Lucien Price’s Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead
chronicles many evenings of discussion in the Whitehead household. He there
described Whitehead as follows: his face, serene, luminous, often smiling, the
complexion pink and white, the eyes brilliant blue, clear and candid as a
child’s yet with the depth of the sage, often laughing or twinkling with
humour. And there was his figure, slender, frail, and bent with its lifetime of
a scholar’s toil. Always benign, there was not a grain of ill will anywhere in
him; for all his formidable armament, never a wounding word. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Definite descriptions in
Whitehead and Russell and in the vernacular,” “Definite descriptions in
Whitethead’s and Russell’s formalese and in Strawson’s vernacular” -- BANC.
weiner kraus -- Vienna Circle
vide ayerism -- a group of philosophers and scientists who met
periodically for discussions in Vienna from 2 to 8 and who proposed a
self-consciously revolutionary conception of scientific knowledge. The Circle
was initiated by the mathematician Hans Hahn to continue a prewar forum with
the physicist Philip Frank and the social scientist Otto Neurath after the
arrival in Vienna of Moritz Schlick, a philosopher who had studied with Max
Planck. Carnap joined in 6 from 1 in Prague; other members included Herbert
Feigl from 0 in Iowa, Friedrich Waismann, Bergmann, Viktor Kraft, and Bela von
Juhos. Viennese associates of the Circle included Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger,
Felix Kaufmann, and Edgar Zilsel. Popper was not a member or associate. During
its formative period the Circle’s activities were confined to discussion
meetings many on Vitters’s Tractatus. In 9 the Circle entered its public period
with the formation of the Verein Ernst Mach, the publication of its manifesto
Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis by Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath
tr. in Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, 3, and the first of a series of
philosophical monographs edited by Frank and Schlick. It also began
collaboration with the independent but broadly like-minded Berlin “Society of
Empirical Philosophy,” including Reichenbach, Kurt Grelling, Kurt Lewin,
Friedrich Kraus, Walter Dubislav, Hempel, and Richard von Mises: the groups
together organized their first public conferences in Prague and Königsberg,
acquired editorship of a philosophical journal renamed Erkenntnis, and later
organized the international Unity of Science congresses. The death and dispersion
of key members from 4 onward Hahn died in 4, Neurath left for Holland in 4,
Carnap left for the United States in 5, Schlick died in 6 did not mean the
extinction of Vienna Circle philosophy. Through the subsequent work of earlier
visitors Ayer, Ernest Nagel, Quine and members and collaborators who emigrated
to the United States Carnap, Feigl, Frank, Hempel, and Reichenbach, the logical
positivism of the Circle Reichenbach and Neurath independently preferred
“logical empiricism” strongly influenced the development of analytic
philosophy. The Circle’s discussions concerned the philosophy of formal and
physical science, and even though their individual publications ranged much
wider, it is the attitude toward science that defines the Circle within the philosophical
movements of central Europe at the time. The Circle rejected the need for a
specifically philosophical epistemology that bestowed justification on
knowledge claims from beyond science itself. In this, the Circle may also have
drawn on a distinct Austrian tradition a thesis of its historian Neurath: in
most of G.y, science and philosophy had parted ways during the nineteenth
century. Starting with Helmholtz, of course, there also arose a movement that
sought to distinguish the scientific respectability of the Kantian tradition
from the speculations of G. idealism, yet after 0 neo-Kantians insisted on the
autonomy of epistemology, disparaging earlier fellow travelers as “positivist.”
Yet the program of reducing the knowledge claim of science and providing
legitimations to what’s left found wide favor with the more empirical-minded
like Mach. Comprehensive description, not explanation, of natural phenomena
became the task for theorists who no longer looked to philosophy for
foundations, but found them in the utility of their preferred empirical
procedures. Along with the positivists, the Vienna Circle thought uneconomical
the Kantian answer to the question of the possibility of objectivity, the
synthetic a priori. Moreover, the Vienna Circle and its conventionalist
precursors Poincaré and Duhem saw them contradicted by the results of formal
science. Riemann’s geometries showed that questions about the geometry of
physical space were open to more than one answer: Was physical space Euclidean
or non-Euclidean? It fell to Einstein and the pre-Circle Schlick Space and Time
in Contemporary Physics, 7 to argue that relativity theory showed the
untenability of Kant’s conception of space and time as forever fixed synthetic
a priori forms of intuition. Yet Frege’s anti-psychologistic critique had also
shown empiricism unable to account for knowledge of arithmetic and the
conventionalists had ended the positivist dream of a theory of experiential
elements that bridged the gap between descriptions of fact and general
principles of science. How, then, could the Vienna Circle defend the claim under attack as just one worldview among
others that science provides knowledge?
The Circle confronted the problem of constitutive conventions. As befitted
their self-image beyond Kant and Mach, they found their paradigmatic answer in
the theory of relativity: they thought that irreducible conventions of
measurement with wide-ranging implications were sharply separable from pure
facts like point coincidences. Empirical theories were viewed as logical
structures of statements freely created, yet accountable to experiential input
via their predictive consequences identifiable by observation. The Vienna
Circle defended empiricism by the reconceptualization of the relation between a
priori and a posteriori inquiries. First, in a manner sympathetic to Frege’s
and Russell’s doctrine of logicism and guided by Vitters’s notion of tautology,
arithmetic was considered a part of logic and treated as entirely analytical,
without any empirical content; its truth was held to be exhausted by what is
provable from the premises and rules of a formal symbolic system. Carnap’s
Logical Syntax of Language, 4, assimilated Gödel’s incompleteness result by
claiming that not every such proof could be demonstrated in those systems
themselves which are powerful enough to represent classical arithmetic. The
synthetic a priori was not needed for formal science because all of its results
were non-synthetic. Second, the Circle adopted verificationism: supposedly empirical
concepts whose applicability was indiscernible were excluded from science. The
terms for unobservables were to be reconstructed by logical operations from the
observational terms. Only if such reconstructions were provided did the more
theoretical parts of science retain their empirical character. Just what kind
of reduction was aimed for was not always clear and earlier radical positions
were gradually weakened; Reichenbach instead considered the relation between
observational and theoretical statements to be probabilistic. Empirical science
needed no synthetic a priori either; all of its statements were a posteriori.
Combined with the view that the analysis of the logical form of expressions
allowed for the exact determination of their combinatorial value,
verificationism was to exhibit the knowledge claims of science and eliminate
metaphysics. Whatever meaning did not survive identification with the
scientific was deemed irrelevant to knowledge claims Reichenbach did not share
this view either. Since the Circle also observed the then long-discussed ban on
issuing unconditional value statements in science, its metaethical positions
may be broadly characterized as endorsing noncognitivism. Its members were not
simply emotivists, however, holding that value judgments were mere expressions
of feeling, but sought to distinguish the factual and evaluative contents of
value judgments. Those who, like Schlick Questions of Ethics, 0, engaged in
metaethics, distinguished the expressive component x desires y of value
judgments from their implied descriptive component doing zfurthers aim y and
held that the demand inherent in moral principles possessed validity if the
implied description was true and the expressed desire was endorsed. This
analysis of normative concepts did not render them meaningless but allowed for
psychological and sociological studies of ethical systems; Menger’s formal
variant Morality, Decision and Social Organization, 4 proved influential for
decision theory. The semiotic view that knowledge required structured
representations was developed in close contact with foundational research in
mathematics and depended on the “new” logic of Frege, Russell, and Vitters, out
of which quantification theory was emerging. Major new results were quickly integrated
albeit controversially and Carnap’s works reflect the development of the
conception of logic itself. In his Logical Syntax he adopted the “Principle of
Tolerance” vis-à-vis the question of the foundation of the formal sciences: the
choice of logics and languages was conventional and constrained, apart from the
demand for consistency, only by pragmatic considerations. The proposed language
form and its difference from alternatives simply had to be stated as exactly as
possible: whether a logico-linguistic framework as a whole correctly
represented reality was a cognitively meaningless question. Yet what was the
status of the verifiability principle? Carnap’s suggestion that it represents
not a discovery but a proposal for future scientific language use deserves to
be taken seriously, for it not only characterizes his own conventionalism, but
also amplifies the Circle’s linguistic turn, according to which all philosophy
concerned ways of representing, rather than the nature of the represented. What
the Vienna Circle “discovered” was how much of science was conventional: its
verificationism was a proposal for accommodating the creativity of scientific
theorizing without accommodating idealism. Whether an empirical claim in order
to be meaningful needed to be actually verified or only potentially verifiable,
or fallible or only potentially testable, and whether so by current or only by
future means, became matters of discussion during the 0s. Equally important for
the question whether the Circle’s conventionalism avoided idealism and
metaphysics were the issues of the status of theoretical discourse about
unobservables and the nature of science’s empirical foundation. The view
suggested in Schlick’s early General Theory of Knowledge 8, 2d. ed. 5 and Frank’s
The Causal Law and its Limitations 2 and elaborated in Carnap’s “Logical
Foundations of the Unity of Science” in Foundations of the Unity of Science
I.1, 8 characterized the theoretical language as an uninterpreted calculus that
is related to the fully interpreted observational language only by partial
definitions. Did such an instrumentalism require for its empirical anchor the
sharp separation of observational from theoretical terms? Could such a
separation even be maintained? Consider the unity of science thesis. According
to the methodological version, endorsed by all members, all of science abides
by the same criteria: no basic methodological differences separate the natural
from the social or cultural sciences Geisteswissenschaften as claimed by those
who distinguish between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’. According to the
metalinguistic version, all objects of scientific knowledge could in principle
be comprehended by the same “universal” language. Physicalism asserts that this
is the language that speaks of physical objects. While everybody in the Circle
endorsed physicalism in this sense, the understanding of its importance varied,
as became clear in the socalled protocol sentence debate. The nomological
version of the unity thesis was only later clearly distinguished: whether all
scientific laws could be reduced to those of physics was another matter on
which Neurath came to differ. Ostensively, this debate concerned the question
of the form, content, and epistemological status of scientific evidence
statements. Schlick’s unrevisable “affirmations” talked about phenomenal states
in statements not themselves part of the language of science “The Foundation of
Knowledge,” 4, tr. in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism. Carnap’s preference
changed from unrevisable statements in a primitive methodologically solipsistic
protocol language that were fallibly translatable into the physicalistic system
language 1; see Unity of Science, 4, via arbitrary revisable statements of that
system language that are taken as temporary resting points in testing 2, to
revisable statements in the scientific observation language 5; see “Testability
and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science, 637. These changes were partly prompted by
Neurath, whose own revisable “protocol statements” spoke, amongst other
matters, of the relation between observers and the observed in a “universal
slang” that mixed expressions of the physicalistically cleansed colloquial and
the high scientific languages “Protocol Statements,” tr. in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism.
Ultimately, these proposals answered to different projects. Since all agreed
that all statements of science were hypothetical, the questions of their
“foundation” concerned rather the very nature of Vienna Circle philosophy. For
Schlick philosophy became the activity of meaning determination inspired by
Vitters; Carnap pursued it as the rational reconstruction of knowledge claims
concerned only with what Reichenbach called the “context of justification” its
logical aspects, not the “context of discovery”; and Neurath replaced
philosophy altogether with a naturalistic, interdisciplinary, empirical inquiry
into science as a distinctive discursive practice, precluding the orthodox
conception of the unity of science. The Vienna Circle was neither a monolithic
nor a necessarily reductionist philosophical movement, and quick assimilation
to the tradition of British empiricism mistakes its struggles with the
formcontent dichotomy for foundationalism, when instead sophisticated responses
to the question of the presuppositions of their own theories of knowledge were
being developed. In its time and place, the Circle was a minority voice; the
sociopolitical dimension of its theories
stressed more by some Neurath than others Schlick as a renewal of Enlightenment thought,
ultimately against the rising tide of Blutund-Boden metaphysics, is gaining
recognition. After the celebrated “death” of reductionist logical positivism in
the 0s the historical Vienna Circle is reemerging as a multifaceted object of
the history of analytical philosophy itself, revealing in nuce different
strands of reasoning still significant for postpositivist theory of science.
Refs.: H. P. Grice, “What Freddie brought us from Vienna.”
williams: “There are many Williams in Oxford, but only one “B.
A. O., “ as he pretentiously went by!” – H. P. Grice. B. A. O. London-born
Welsh philosopher who has made major contributions to many fields but is
primarily known as a moral philosopher. His approach to ethics, set out in
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 5, is characterized by a wide-ranging
skepticism, directed mainly at the capacity of academic moral philosophy to
further the aim of reflectively living an ethical life. One line of skeptical
argument attacks the very idea of practical reason. Attributions of practical
reasons to a particular agent must, in Williams’s view, be attributions of
states that can potentially explain the agent’s action. Therefore such reasons
must be either within the agent’s existing set of motivations or within the revised
set of motivations that the agent would acquire upon sound reasoning. Williams
argues from these minimal assumptions that this view of reasons as internal
reasons undermines the idea of reason itself being a source of authority over
practice. Williams’s connected skepticism about the claims of moral realism is
based both on his general stance toward realism and on his view of the nature
of modern societies. In opposition to internal realism, Williams has
consistently argued that reflection on our conception of the world allows one
to develop a conception of the world maximally independent of our peculiar ways
of conceptualizing reality an absolute
conception of the world. Such absoluteness is, he argues, an inappropriate
aspiration for ethical thought. Our ethical thinking is better viewed as one
way of structuring a form of ethical life than as the ethical truth about how
life is best lived. The pervasive reflectiveness and radical pluralism of
modern societies makes them inhospitable contexts for viewing ethical concepts
as making knowledge available to groups of concept users. Modernity has
produced at the level of theory a distortion of our ethical practice, namely a
conception of the morality system. This view is reductionist, is focused centrally
on obligations, and rests on various fictions about responsibility and blame
that Williams challenges in such works as Shame and Necessity 3. Much academic
moral philosophy, in his view, is shaped by the covert influence of the
morality system, and such distinctively modern outlooks as Kantianism and
utilitarianism monopolize the terms of contemporary debate with insufficient
attention to their origin in a distorted view of the ethical. Williams’s views
are not skeptical through and through; he retains a commitment to the values of
truth, truthfulness in a life, and individualism. His most recent work, which
thematizes the long-implicit influence of Nietzsche on his ethical philosophy,
explicitly offers a vindicatory “genealogical” narrative for these ideals.
willkür, v.
Hobson’s choice. Grice: “‘will-kuer’ is a fascinating German expression,
literally will-care’.”
wilson’s
ultimate counterexample to Grice --
Grice’s counterexample – “the ultimate counter-example” -- counterinstance,
also called counterexample. 1 A particular instance of an argument form that
has all true premises but a false conclusion, thereby showing that the form is
not universally valid. The argument form ‘p 7 q, - p / , ~q’, for example, is
shown to be invalid by the counterinstance ‘Grass is either red or green; Grass
is not red; Therefore, grass is not green’. 2 A particular false instance of a
statement form, which demonstrates that the form is not a logical truth. A
counterinstance to the form ‘p 7 q / p’, for example, would be the statement
‘If grass is either red or green, then grass is red’. 3 A particular example
that demonstrates that a universal generalization is false. The universal
statement ‘All large cities in the United States are east of the Mississippi’
is shown to be false by the counterinstance of San Francisco, which is a large
city in the United States that is not east of the Mississippi. V.K. counterpart
theory, a theory that analyzes statements about what is possible and impossible
for individuals statements of de re modality in terms of what holds of
counterparts of those individuals in other possible worlds, a thing’s
counterparts being individuals that resemble it without being identical with
it. The name ‘counterpart theory’ was coined by David Lewis, the theory’s
principal exponent. Whereas some theories analyze ‘Mrs. Simpson might have been
queen of England’ as ‘In some possible world, Mrs. Simpson is queen of England’,
counterpart theory analyzes it as ‘In some possible world, a counterpart of
Mrs. Simpson is queen of a counterpart of England’. The chief motivation for
counterpart theory is a combination of two views: a de re modality should be
given a possible worlds analysis, and b each actual individual exists only in
the actual world, and hence cannot exist with different properties in other
possible worlds. Counterpart theory provides an analysis that allows ‘Mrs.
Simpson might have been queen’ to be true compatibly with a and b. For Mrs.
Simpson’s counterparts in other possible worlds, in those worlds where she
herself does not exist, may have regal properties that the actual Mrs. Simpson
lacks. Counterpart theory is perhaps prefigured in Leibniz’s theory of
possibility.
wilson: this is the way to
quote J. C. Wilson. Grice loved him, and thanked Farquarhson for editing his
papers. A favourite with Grice and Collingwood. In the chapter on
“Language” in “The idea of art,” Collingwood refers to the infamous, “That
building is the Bodelian.” – which may repreeent two propositions: one as an
answer to what building is that? The other as an answer to Which building is
the Bodleian? Grice would consider that the distinction is impilcatural, and
that stress is merely implicatural – and only one proposition is at stake – do
not multiply propositions beyond necessity. not to be confused with wilson,
author of “Grice: The ultimate counterexample” -- Oxonian philosopher, like
Grice. Cook Wilson studied with T. H. Green before becoming Wykeham Professor
of Logic at Oxford and leading the Oxford reaction against the then entrenched
absolute idealism. More influential as a tutor than as a writer, his major
oeuvre, Statement and Inference, was posthumously reconstructed from drafts of
papers, philosophical correspondence, and an extensive set of often
inconsistent lectures for his logic courses. A staunch critic of Whitehead’s
mathematical logic, Wilson conceived of logic as the study of thinking, an
activity unified by the fact that thinking either is knowledge or depends on
knowledge “What we know we kow”. Wilson claims that knowledge involves
apprehending an object that in most cases is independent of the act of
apprehension and that knowledge is indefinable without circularity, views he
defended by appealing to common usage. Many of Wilson’s ideas are disseminated
by H. W. B. Joseph, especially in his “Logic.” Rejecting “symbolic logic,”
Joseph attempts to reinvigorate traditional logic conceived along Wilsonian
lines. To do so Joseph combined a careful exposition of Aristotle with insights
drawn from idealistic logicians. Besides Joseph, Wilson decisively influenced a
generation of Oxford philosophers including Prichard and Ross, and Grice who
explores the ‘interrogative subordination’ in the account of ‘if.’ “Who killed
Cock Robin”.
winchism: After P. Winch, P. London-born philosopher. He
quotes Grice in a Royal Philosophy talk:
“Grice’s point is that we should distinguish the truth of one’s remark form the
point of one’s remarks – Grice’s example is: “Surely I have neither any doubt
nor any desire to deny that the pillar box in front of me is red, and yet I
won’t hesitate to say that it seems red to me” – Surely pointless, but an
incredible truth meant to refute G. A. Paul!” Winch translated Vitters’s
“little essay on value” which Grice “did not use for [his] essay on the
conception of value.” (“Kultur und Wert.”). Grice: “Not contented with natural
science, Winch wants a social one!”
wodeham: “If Adam of Wodeham was called Wodeham, I should, by
the same token, be called “Harborne”” – H. P. Grice. Oxonian philosopher, like
Grice. Adam de English Franciscan philosopher-theologian who lectured on Peter
Lombard’s Sentences at London, Norwich, and Oxford. His published works include
the Tractatus de indivisibilibus; his Lectura secunda Norwich lectures; and an
abbreviation of his Oxford lectures by Henry Totting of Oyta, published by John
Major. Wodeham’s main work, the Oxford lectures, themselves remain unpublished.
A brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose original manuscripts he
consulted, Wodeham deemed Duns Scotus the greatest Franciscan doctor. William
Ockham, Wodeham’s teacher, was the other great influence on Wodeham’s
philosophical theology. Wodeham defended Ockham’s views against attacks mounted
by Walter Chatton; he also wrote the prologue to Ockham’s Summa logicae.
Wodeham’s own influence rivaled that of Ockham. Among the authors he strongly
influenced are Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Nicholas of Autrecourt,
Pierre d’Ailly, Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of Candia Alexander V,
Henry Totting of Oyta, and John Major. Wodeham’s theological works were written
for an audience with a very sophisticated understanding of current issues in
semantics, logic, and medieval mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns Scotus
and Ockham, Wodeham argued that the sensitive and intellective souls were not
distinct. He further develops the theory of intuitive cognition, distinguishing
intellectual intuition of our own acts of intellect, will, and memory from
sensory intuition of external objects. Scientific knowledge based on experience
can be based on intuition, according to Wodeham. He distinguishes different
grades of evidence, and allows that sensory perceptions may be mistaken.
Nonetheless, they can form the basis for scientific knowledge, since they are
reliable; mistakes can be corrected by reason and experience. In semantic
theory, Wodeham defends the view that the immediate object of scientific
knowledge is the complexe significabile, that which the conclusion is designed
to signify. Oxonian philosopher, like Grice. Adam de (c. 1295–1358), English
Franciscan philosopher- who lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences at Oxford.
His oeuvre includes a “Tractatus de indivisibilibus, divisum in cinque
partibus”; his “Lectura secunda” and
“Lecturae Oxonienses” as transcribed by Henry Totting of Oyta, and published by
John Major. Wodeham’s main work, like Grice’s, the Oxford lectures, themselves
remain only partially published. A brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose
original manuscripts he consulted in his main unpublication, Wodeham deems Duns
Scotus the greatest Franciscan doctor. Occam, Wodeham’s teacher, is the other
great influence on Wodeham (“I treasure the razor he gave me for my birthday.”)
Wodeham defends his tutor Ockham’s views against attacks mounted by Walter
Chatton. Grice was familiar with Wodeham (“from Wodeham, as it happens”)
because he wrote the prologue to Ockham’s Summa logicae. Wodeham’s own
influence rivals that of Ockham. Among the authors he strongly influenced are
Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Pierre d’Ailly,
Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of Candia (Alexander V), Henry Totting of Oyta,
John Major, and lastly, but certainly not leastly, H. P. Grice. Wodeham’s
lectures were composed for tutees with a very sophisticated understanding of
current issues in semantics, logic, and mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns
Scotus and Occam, Wodeham argues – and this is borrowed by Grice -- that the
sensitive and intellective souls are not distinct (vide Grice, “The power
structure of the soul”). Wodeham further develops the theory of intuitive
cognition, distinguishing intellectual intuition of our own acts of intellect,
will, and memory from sensory intuition of external objects. This is developed
by Grice in his contrast of “I am not hearing a noise,” and “That is not blue.”
Thus, knowledge based on experience can be based on intuition, according to
Wodeham. Wodeham goes on to distinguishs different grades (or degrees, as Grice
prefers, which Grice symbolises as ‘d’) of evidence (for credibility and
desirability) and allows that this or that sensory perception may be mistaken
(“but if all were, we are in trouble’). Nonetheless, they can form the basis
for knowledge, since they are, caeteris paribus, reliable. “A mistake can
always be corrected by reason and experience. In semantic and pragmatic
theories, Wodeham defends the view that the immediate object of knowledge is
what he calls the “complexum significabile,” that which the conclusion is
designed to signify.
wollaston: when Grice is in a humorous mood, or mode, as he
prefers, he cites Wollaston at large! Wollaston is notorious for arguing that
the immorality of this or that action lies in an utterer who describes it
implicating a false proposition. Wollaston maintains that there is harmony
between reason (or truth) and happiness. Therefore, any ction that contradict
truth through misrepresentation thereby frustrates human happiness and is thus
“plain evil.” Wollaston gives the example of Willard [Quine] who, to pay Paul
[Grice], robs Peter [Strawspm] stealing his watch. Grice comments: “In falsely epresenting
Strawson’s watch as his own, Willard makes the act wrong, even if he did it to
pay me what he owed me.” Wollaston’s views, particularly his taking morality to
consist in universal and necessary truths, were influenced by the rationalists
Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. Among his many critics the most famous is, as Grice
would expect, Hume, who contends that Wollaston’s theory implies an absurdity
(“unless you disimplicate it in the bud.”). For Hume, any action concealed from
public view (e.g., adultery) conveys (or ‘explicates’) no false proposition and
therefore is not immoral, since one can annul it, to use Grice’s jargon. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “Wollaston and the longitudinal unity of philosophy.” cited by H.
P. Grice. English moralist notorious for arguing that the immorality of actions
lies in their implying false propositions. An assistant headmaster who later
took priestly orders, Wollaston maintains in his one published work, The
Religion of Nature Delineated 1722, that the foundations of religion and
morality are mutually dependent. God has preestablished a harmony between
reason or truth and happiness, so that actions that contradict truth through
misrepresentation thereby frustrate human happiness and are thus evil. For
instance, if a person steals another’s watch, her falsely representing the
watch as her own makes the act wrong. Wollaston’s views, particularly his
taking morality to consist in universal and necessary truths, were influenced
by the rationalists Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. Among his many critics the most
famous was Hume, who contends that Wollaston’s theory implies an absurdity: any
action concealed from public view e.g., adultery conveys no false proposition
and therefore is not immoral. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why bother with Wollaston?”
BANC.
wollheim: R. A. London-born philosopher of Eastern-European
ancestry, BPhil Oxon, Balliol (under D. Marcus) and All Souls. Examined by H. P. Grice. “What’s two times
two?” Wollheim treasured that examination. It was in the context of a
discussion of J. S. Mill and I. Kant, for whom addition and multiplication are
‘synthetic’ – a priori for Kant, a posteriori for Mill. Grice was trying to
provide a counterexample to Mill’s thesis that all comes via deduction or
induction. Refs.: I. C. Dengler and Luigi Speranza, “Wollheilm and Grice,” for
the Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
woodianism: Roy Hudd: “Not to be confused with the woodianisms of
Victoria Wood.” -- Grice loved O. P. Wood, as anyone at Oxford did – even those
who disliked Ryle! Refs.: H. P. Grice, “O. P. Wood and some remarks about the
senses,” -- O. P. Wood, “Implicatura in
Hereford,” for The Swimming-Pool Library, custodian: Luigi Speranza – Villa
Grice, Liguria, Italia.
woozleyianism: R. M. Harnish discussed H. P. Grice’s implicaturum
with A. D. Woozley. Woozley would know because he had been in contact with
Grice since for ever. Woozley had a closer contact with Austin, since, unlike
Grice, ‘being from the right side of the tracks,’ he socialized with Austin in
what Berlin pretentiously calls the ‘early beginnings of Oxford philosophy,’ as
if the Middle Ages never happened. Woozley edited Reid, that Grice read, or
reed. Since the first way to approach Grice’s philosophy is with his colleagues
at his Play Group, Woozley plays a crucial role. Grice: “While Woozley would
attend Austin’s Sat. morns., he wouldn’t say much – in fact, he seldom said
much.” Refs.: R. M. Harnish and A. D. Woozley, “Implicatura,” for The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
wyclif: “It never ceased to amaze me how Wyclif was able to
find Anglo-Saxon terms for all the “Biblia Vulgata”!” – H. P. Grice. English
Griceian philosophical theologian and religious reformer. He worked for most of
his life in Oxford as a secular clerk, teaching philosophy and writing extensively
in the field. The mode of thought expressed in his surviving works is one of
extreme realism, and in this his thought fostered the split of Bohemian, later
Hussite, philosophy from that of the G. masters teaching in Prague. His worldline
philosophical summa was most influential for his teaching on universals, but
also dealt extensively with the question of determinism; these issues underlay
his later handling of the questions of the Eucharist and of the identity of the
church respectively. His influence on English philosophy was severely curtailed
by the growing hostility of the church to his ideas, the condemnation of many
of his tenets, the persecution of his followers, and the destruction of his
writings. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “The problem of universals: from Bologna to
Oxford,” Villa Grice.
X
X: SUBJECT INDEX:
X: NAME INDEX: XENOPHANES -- XENOPHON
xenophon: Grice: “You have to be carefully
when researching for this philosopher in Italy – They spell it ‘Senofonte’ Grecian
soldier and historian, author of several Socratic dialogues, along with
important works on history, education, political theory, and other topics. He
was interested in philosophy, and he was a penetrating and intelligent “social
thinker” whose views on morality and society have been influential over many
centuries. His perspective on Socrates’ character and moral significance
provides a valuable supplement and corrective to the better-known views of
Plato. Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues, the only ones besides Plato’s to survive
intact, help us obtain a broader picture of the Socratic dialogue as a literary
genre. They also provide precious evidence concerning the thoughts and
personalities of other followers of Socrates, such as Antisthenes and Alcibiades.
Xenophon’s longest and richest Socratic work is the Memorabilia, or “Memoirs of
Socrates,” which stresses Socrates’ self-sufficiency and his beneficial effect
on his companions. Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates and his Symposium were
probably intended as responses to Plato’s Apology and Symposium. Xenophon’s
Socratic dialogue on estate management, the Oeconomicus, is valuable for its
underlying social theory and its evidence concerning the role and status of
women in classical Athens. Refs.: Speranza, “All you need is Loeb,” Villa
Grice.
Y
Y: SUBJECT INDEX: YOG-AND-ZOG
yog and zog: Grice: “This is my paradox on ‘si’ – ‘if’ – All
philosophers have a paradox named after them, and I thought it was high time to
name a paradox after me.” --. “My inspiration was Carroll’s “What the tortoise
said to Achilles.” Trust me to go to the defense of the underdog, or
undertortoise!” “Achilles had enough praise by the Romans!” -- “If” (Cicero’s
‘si’) is a problem for Grice. “Especially in it being the only subordinate
particle I have seriously explored.” According to Strawson and Wiggins, this
was Grice having forged his shining new tool – the distinction between ‘By
emitting x, An emissor coomunicates that p” and “The emissum x ‘means’ ‘p.’
Apply that to ‘if.’ In Strawson and Wiggins’s precis, for Grice, ‘p yields q’
is part of the conversational implicaturum – for Strawson and Wiggins it is
part of the conventional implicaturum. They agree on ‘p horseshoe q’ being the explicit emissum or
explicatum in “Emissor explicitly conveys and communicates that p horseshoe q.”
For Grice, the implicaturum, which, being conversational is cancellable, is
calculated on the assumption that the addressee can work out that the emissor
has non-truth-functional grounds for the making of any stronger claim. For
Strawson, that non-truth-functional reason is precisely ‘p yields q,’ which
leads Strawson to think that the thing is not cancellable and conventionally
implicated. If Strawson were right that this is Grice forging a new shining
tool to crack the crib of reality and fashioning thereby a new shining skid
under his metaphysical feet, it would be almost the second use of the
tool! This is an expansion by Grice on
the implicaturum of a ‘propositio conditionalis.’ Grice, feeling paradoxical,
invites us to suppose a scenario involving ‘if.’ He takes it as a proof
that his account of the conversational implicaturum of ‘if’ is, as Strawson did
not agree, correct, and that what an utterer explicitly conveys by ‘if p, q’ is
‘p > q.’ that two chess players, Yog
and Zog, play 100 games under the following conditions. Yog is white nine of
ten times. There are no draws. And the results are: Yog, when
white, won 80 of 90 games. Yog, when black, won zero of ten games. This
implies that: 8/9 times, if Yog was white, Yog won. 1/2 of the time, if
Yog lost, Yog was black. 9/10 that
either Yog wasnt white or he won. From these statements, it might appear
one could make these deductions by contraposition and conditional
disjunction: If Yog was white, then 1/2 of the time Yog won. 9/10 times,
if Yog was white, then he won. But both propositions are untrue. They
contradict the assumption. In fact, they do not provide enough information to
use Bayesian reasoning to reach those conclusions. That might be clearer if the
propositions had instead been stated differently. When Yog was white, Yog won
8/9 times. No information is given about when Yog was black. When Yog lost, Yog
was black 1/2 the time. No information is given about when Yog won. (9/10
times, either Yog was black and won, Yog was black and lost, or Yog was white
and won. No information is provided on how the 9/10 is divided among those
three situations. The paradox by Grice shows that the exact meaning of
statements involving conditionals and probabilities is more complicated than
may be obvious on casual examination. Refs.: Grice’s interest with ‘if’ surely
started after he carefully read the section on ‘if’ and the horseshoe in
Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory. He was later to review his attack on
Strawson in view of Strawson’s defense in ‘If and the horseshoe.’ The polemic
was pretty much solved as a matter of different intuitions: what Grice sees as
a conversational implicaturum, Strawson does see as an ‘implicaturum,’ but a
non-defeasible one – what Grice would qualify as ‘conventional.’ Grice leaves
room for an implicaturum to be nonconversational and yet nonconventional, but
it is not worth trying to fit Strawson’s suggestion in this slot, since
Strawson, unlike Grice, has nothing against a convention. Grice was motivated
to formulate his ‘paradox,’ seeing that Strawson was saying that the so-called
‘paradoxes’ of ‘entailment’ and ‘implication’ are a misnomer. “They are not
paradoxical; they are false!” Grice has specific essays on both the paradoxes
of entailment and the paradoxes of implication-. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC
MSS 90/135c, The University of California, Berkeley.
Z
Z:
SUBJECT INDEX: ZEIGARNICK -- ZETTEL -- ZWECKRATIONALITÄT
Z:
NAME INDEX:
ITALIAN:
ZABARELLA
ENGLISH
OTHER:
ZOROASTRO
zabarella: Grice: “Zabarella
is what I would call a proto-Griceain.” In fact, at Villa Grice, Grice was
often called the English Zabarella, after philosopher Jacopo Zabarella, of Padova.
Zabarella produces extensive commentaries on Grice’s favourite tract by
Aristotle, “De Anima,” and Physica and also discussed some Aristotelian
interpreters. However, Zabarella’s most original contribution is his work in
semantics, “Opera logica.” Zabarella regards semantics as a preliminary study
that provides the tools necessary for philosophical analysis. Two such tools
are what Zabarella calls “order” (cf. Grice, ‘be orderly’). Another tool is
what Zabarella calls “ method.” Order teaches us how to organize the content of
a discipline to apprehend it more easily. Method teaches us how to draw a
syllogistic inference. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and methods
classified by other interpreters to compositive order, and resolutive order, and
composite method and and resolutive method. The compositive order from a
principle to this or that corollary applies to this or that speculative,
alethic or theoretical discipline. The ‘resolutive’ order, from a desired end
to the means appropriate to its achievement applies to this or that practical
discipline, such as ‘pragmatics’ understood as a manual of rules of etiquette.
This much is already in Aristotle. However, Zabarella offers an original
analysis of ‘method.’ The compositive method infers a particular consequence or
corollary from a ‘generic’ principle. The ‘resolutive’ method INFERS an
originating gneric principle from this or that particular consequence,
corollary, or instantiantion, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from
effect to cause. Zabarella’s terminology influenced Galileo’s mechanics, and
has been applied to Grice’s inference of the principle of conversational
co-operation out from the only evidence which Grice has, which is this or that
‘dyadic’ exchange, as he calls it. In Grice’s case, his corpus is intentionally
limited to conversations between two philosophers: A: What’s that? B: A pillar
box? A: What colour is it? B: Seems red to me. From such an exchange, Grice
infers the principle of conversational co-operation. It clashes when a
cancellation (or as Grice prefers, an annulation) is on sight: “I surely don’t
mean to imply that it MIGHT actually be red.” “Then why be so guarded? I
thought you were cooperating.”H. P. Grice. “We can regard Jacopo as an Aristotelian
philosopher who taught at the of Padua.
He wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul and also
discussed other interpreters such as Averroes. However, his most original
contribution was his work in logic, Opera logica 1578. Zabarella regards logic
as a preliminary study that provides the tools necessary for philosophical
analysis. Two such tools are order and method: order teaches us how to organize
the content of a discipline to apprehend it more easily; method teaches us how
to draw syllogistic inferences. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and
methods classified by other interpreters to compositive and resolutive orders
and methods. The compositive order from first principles to their consequences
applies to theoretical disciplines. The resolutive order from a desired end to
means appropriate to its achievement applies to practical disciplines. This
much was already in Aristotle. Zabarella offers an original analysis of method.
The compositive method infers particular consequences from general principles.
The resolutive method infers originating principles from particular
consequences, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from effect to cause.
It has been suggested that Zabarella’s terminology might have influenced
Galileo’s mechanics. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, Notes on I Tatti’s edition of
Zabarella, “On methods,” -- H. P. Grice, “Zabarella,” Speranza, “Grice and
Zabarella,” Villa Grice.
zeigarnik
effect:
‘Conversation as a compete task and the Zeigmaik effect’ -- H. P. Grice. the
selective recall of uncompleted tasks in comparison to completed tasks. The
effect was named for Zeigarnik, a student of K. Lewin, who discovered it and
described it in the Psychologische Forschung. Subjects received an array of
short tasks, such as counting backward and stringing beads, for rapid
completion. Performance on half of these was interrupted. Subsequent recall for
the tasks favored the interrupted tasks. Zeigarnik concluded that recall is
influenced by motivation and not merely associational strength. The effect was
thought relevant to Freud’s claim that unfulfilled wishes are persistent. Lewin
attempted to derive the effect from field theory, suggesting that an attempt to
reach a goal creates a tension released only when that goal is reached;
interruption of the attempt produces a tension favoring recall. Conditions
affecting the Zeigarnik effect are incompletely understood, as is its
significance. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Conversation as a complete task and the
Zeigmarnik effect.” BANC
zettel: Grice entitled his further notes on logic and
conversation, “zettel” – “What’s good enough for Vitters is good enough for
me.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Conversation: Zettel,” BANC.
zoroastro:
the
founder of so-called ‘zoroastrianism.’ H. P. Grice wrote, “Thus Implicated
Zarahustra,” the national religion of ancient Iran. Zoroastrianism suffered a
steep decline after the seventh century A.D. because of conversion to Islam. Of
a remnant of roughly 100,000 adherents today, three-fourths are Parsis “Persians”
in or from western India; the others are Iranian Zoroastrians. The tradition is
identified with its prophet; his name in Persian, Zarathushtra, is preserved in
G. and Griceian, but the ancient Grecian rendering of that name, Zoroaster, is
the form used in most other modern European languages. Zoroaster’s hymns to
Ahura Mazda “the Wise Lord”, called the Gathas, are interspersed among ritual
hymns to other divine powers in the collection known as the Avesta. In them,
Zoroaster seeks reassurance that good will ultimately triumph over evil and
that Ahura Mazda will be a protector to him in his prophetic mission. The
Gathas expect that humans, by aligning themselves with the force of
righteousness and against evil, will receive bliss and benefit in the next existence.
The dating of the texts and of the prophet himself is an elusive matter for
scholars, but it is clear that Zoroaster lived somewhere in Iran sometime prior
to the emergence of the Achaemenid empire in the sixth century B.C. His own
faith in Ahura Mazda, reflected in the Gathas, came to be integrated with other
strains of old Indo-Iranian religion. We see these in the Avesta’s hymns and
the religion’s ritual practices. They venerate an array of Iranian divine
powers that resemble in function the deities found in the Vedas of India. A
common Indo-Iranian heritage is indicated conclusively by similarities of
language and of content between the Avesta and the Vedas. Classical Zoroastrian
orthodoxy does not replace the Indo-Iranian divinities with Ahura Mazda, but
instead incorporates them into its thinking more or less as Ahura Mazda’s
agents. The Achaemenid kings from the sixth through the fourth centuries B.C.
mention Ahura Mazda in their inscriptions, but not Zoroaster. The Parthians,
from the third century B.C. to the third century A.D., highlighted Mithra among
the Indo-Iranian pantheon. But it was under the Sasanians, who ruled Iran from
the third to the seventh centuries, that Zoroastrianism became the established
religion. A salient doctrine is the teaching concerning the struggle between
good and evil. The time frame from the world’s creation to the final resolution
or judgment finds the Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda or Ohrmazd, in the Pahlavi
language of Sasanian times, locked in a struggle with the evil spirit, Angra
Mainyu in Pahlavi, Ahriman. The teaching expands on an implication in the text
of the Gathas, particularly Yasna 30, that the good and evil spirits, coming
together in the beginning and establishing the living and inanimate realms,
determined that at the end benefit would accrue to the righteous but not the
wicked. In Sasanian times, there was speculative concern to assert Ahura
Mazda’s infinity, omnipotence, and omniscience, qualities that may indicate an
impact of Mediterranean philosophy. For example, the Bundahishn, a Pahlavi
cosmological and eschatological narrative, portrays Ahura Mazda as infinite in
all four compass directions but the evil spirit as limited in one and therefore
doomed to ultimate defeat. Such doctrine has been termed by some dualistic, in
that it has at least in Sasanian times seen the power of God rivaled by that of
an evil spirit. Zoroastrians today assert that they are monotheists, and do not
worship the evil spirit. But to the extent that the characterization may hold
historically, Zoroastrianism has manifested an “ethical” dualism, of good and
evil forces. Although capable of ritual pollution through waste products and
decay, the physical world, God’s creation, remains potentially morally good.
Contrast “ontological” dualism, as in gnostic and Manichaean teaching, where
the physical world itself is the result of the fall or entrapment of spirit in
matter. In the nineteenth century, Zoroastrian texts newly accessible to Europe
produced an awareness of the prophet’s concern for ethical matters. Nietzsche’s
values in his work Thus Spake Zarathustra, however, are his own, not those of
the ancient prophet. The title is arresting, but the connection of Nietzsche
with historical Zoroastrianism is a connection in theme only, in that the work
advances ideas about good and evil in an oracular style. Refs.: H. P. Grice,
“Nietzsche’s implicatura,” BANC.
zweckrationalität: “I chose this to
be one of the last entries in my dictionary!” -- Grice: “What I like about
Weber’s ‘zweckrationalitaet’ is that it’s one of the latter items in my
dictionary!” -- Grice: “I’m slightly confused by Weber, who was hardly a
philosopher, and his use of ‘zweck,’ – which Kant would have disliked. H. P.
Grice used the vernacular here, since he found it tricky to look for the
Oxonian for ‘Zweck.’ As he was reading Weber, Grice realises that one
of the main theoretical goals of Weber’s work is to understand how a social
process (such as a conversation, seen as a two-player game) become
“rationalized,” taking up certain themes of philosophy of history since Hegel
as part of social theory. Conversation, as part of culture, e.g., becomes
‘rationalised’ in the process of the “disenchantment of a world views” in the
West, a process that Weber thinks has “universal significance.” But because of
his goal-oriented theory of action and his non-cognitivism in ethics, Weber
sees rationalization, like Grice, and unlike, say, Habermas, exclusively in
terms of the spread of purposive, or MEANS–ends rationality (“Zweckrationalität”).
Rational action means choosing the most effective MEANS of achieving one’s
goals and implies judging the consequences of one’s actions and choices. In
contrast, value rationality (“Wertrationalität,” that Grice translates as
‘worth-rationality’) consists of any action oriented to this or that ultimate
END, where considerations of consequences are irrelevant. Although such action
is rational insofar as it directs and organises human conduct, the choice of
this or that end, or this or that value itself cannot be, for Weber, unlike
Grice, a matter for rational or scientific judgment. Indeed, for Weber this
means that politics is the sphere for the struggle between at least two of this
or that irreducibly competing ultimate end, where “gods and demons fight it
out” and charismatic leaders invent new gods and values. Grice tries to look for a way to give a criterion of
rationality other than the ‘common-or-garden’ means-end variety. When it comes
to conversation, see, Speranza, “The feast of [conversational] reason – Grice’s
Conversational immanuel – three steps towards a critique of conversational
reason.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Conversational rationality,” in The H. P. Grice
Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University of California,
Berkeley.
References: Following the tradition of H. P. Grice’s Playgroup, only
Oxonian English-born male philosophers of Grice’s generation listed)
Abbagnano,
N. Dizionario di filosofia.
Abbagnano,
Storia della filosofia.
Austin,
J. L. Philosophical papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Austin,
J. L. Sense and sensibilia, reconstructed from manuscript notes by G. J.
Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Austin,
J. L. How to do things with words, ed. by J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Blackburn,
S. W. Spreading the word. Oxford.
Bostock,
D. Logic.
Croce,
B. Estetica
Flew,
A. G. N. Logic and language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Galileo,
Scienza
Gentile,
Storia della filosofia
Grice,
H. P. Studies in the Way of Words
Grice,
H. P. Negation and privation
Grice,
H. P. The conception of value. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
Grice,
H. P. Aspects of reason, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
Grice,
H. P., D. F. Pears, and P. F. Strawson, ‘Metaphysics,’ in D. F. Pears, The
nature of metaphysics. London: Macmillan.
Hampshire,
S. N. Thought and action. London: Chatto and Windus.
Hampshire,
S. N. and H. L. A. Hart, Intention, decision, and certainty. Mind.
Hare,
R. M. The language of morals. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.
Hart,
H. L. A. Review of Holloway, The Philosophical Quarterly’
Leonardi,
Filosofia
Machiavelli,
Il principe
Mondolfo,
Storia della filosofia
Nowell-Smith,
P. H. Ethics. Middlesex: Penguin
Pears,
D. F. Philosophical psychology. London: Duckworth.
Pears,
D. F. Motivated irrationality.
Pears,
D. F. and H. P. Grice, The philosophy of action.
Speranza,
Minutes of H. P. Grice’s Play-Group – The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice,
Liguria, Italia.
Strawson,
P. F. Introduction to Logical Theory.
Strawson,
P. F. Logico-Linguistic Papers.
Strawson,
P. F. and H. P. Grice, In defense of a dogma.
Strawson,
P. F. and H. P. Grice, Categories
Strawson,
P. F. and H. P. Grice, Meaning.
Thomson,
J. F. and H. P. Grice, The philosophy of action.
Urmson,
J. O. Philosophical Analysis: its development between the two wars.
Vico,
Scienza nuova
Warnock,
G. J. The object of morality
Warnock,
G. J. Language and Morals
Woozley,
A. D. On H. P. Grice. – A. M. G. is Anna Maria Ghersi – Ghersi instilled and
keeps instilling – never ceases to instill -- in Luigi Speranza a love for
philosophy.
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