Grice Picks Greek At Clifton

--- By J. L. Speranza
--- for the Grice,

From, "The Making of a Philosopher". Grice's father went bankrupt after the Great War (he had designed a metallic concoction that was proved useless after the duration). They could not send Grice to a good school. So, Mrs. Grice thought, "I will accept him in my class". She ran a prestigious prep in affluent Harborne. From there, it was a piece of cake for Grice to enter Clifton, where he learned all that an English gentleman (and gentlewoman, but women are not allowed) should learn: notably Herodotus's account of the war against Persia.

From then, it was either become a student of organ (the musical) at Westminster (Royal College -- his music teacher had been the choral master there) or go to "Corpus Christi", Oxford, with a Classics scholarship. This latter is what happened, and soon Grice found hisself (or himself) as a 'scholarship boy' from the Midlands in 'posh' Oxford --. He played football for Corpus Christi and found the time to edit the "Pelican", the undergraduate journal. He would NOT socialise much -- at least with J. L. Austin and A. Ayer and I. Berlin, and H. L. A. Hart, and S. N. Hamphire, and McNabb, and all the other 'posher' types that were meeting at All Souls. "The problem," Grice later recalled, "is that I had been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks".

Having been to Oxford and see how the tracks divide obscenely an otherwise peaceful town (if not gown) thing, I wouldn't know what's wrong with the west-side of the tracks. I mean, at least he was not a Cockney boy, right? Or a lord with no interest in Plato!

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The first two years of his Lit. Hum. (or 'great go', as the called it) was notable for the absence of anything that could be called 'remotely philosophical'. It was Herodotus, Pliny, and a bit of Tacitus -- all stuff he knew by heart from his Clifton days.

It's no wonder by 1941 he was writing on "I" as a logical construction of temporary states, and defining "... means..." as a reflexive intention without a factivity counterpart -- the development of the implicature and the maxims came later.

A less creative spirit would have just stuck with Aristotle! (*, Indeed, this is what Hardie did, who was Grice's tutor at Corpus Christi).

The problem with Grice was that he FELL in love with philosophy. Out of 80% types that go for the great go later move on, leave the 'dreaming spires' which remains in one's 'perpetual adolescence' phase. But he stayed for GOOD!

The charm of the man is that 20 years of having settled in the Americas he could not see himself but as an "Oxonian", with accent to match!