In the tradition of Ariskant: Who is Grice 'echoing' in "Logic and Conversation"?

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

THESE ARE EXCERPTS FROM ARISTOTLE. A book, Cat., that Grice knew by heart. And in Greek! He would use the Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press) edition. Loebs are anathema in Oxford. His best pupil in the area, J. L. Ackrill, had the bad idea of translating them to ... English! Later, Grice would complain that his Berkeley students were not studying Aristotle's metaphysics but Ackrill's!

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Ackrill writes that 'categories' can be:

either substance or quantity

or qualification or a relative or where

or when or being-in-a-position or having

or doing or being affected

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Aristotle Categoriae ch 4, 1b, in Ackrill 1963.

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References:

Aristotle. "Categories and De Interpretation", tr. J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963 -- credting "H. P. Grice" for his seminars on the topic.

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Aristotle will concentrate mainly on the first four categories. And one can trace the idea then up to Kant and his four categories.

If Grice's English Aristotle was J. L. Ackrill, his English Kant was Abbott.

Abbott says:

"Following Aristotle we will call these concepts

categories, for our aim is basically identical

with his although very distinct from it in

execution"

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Tr. from Kant, 1998:212)

Reference:

The above is not Abbott's, that Grice preferred, but the tr. by P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

--- The categories are "Of Quantity", "Of Quality", "Of Relation" and "Of Modality".

Abbott would write (cfr. Guyer/Wood):

this division is systematically generated

from a common principle, namely the

faculty for judging (which is the same

as the faculty for thinking), and has not arisen

rhapsodically from a haphazard search for

pure concepts, of the completeness of which

one could never be certain."

--- idem, p. 212.