"The greatest living philosopher" -- Grice on Heidegger

by JLS
for the GC

I wrote, in "Process and Conversation"

"Grice thought, or at least said, that Heidegger was "the greatest living philosopher"".

J comments:

"Interesting. Grice approved of Heidegger?".

J: I have to be sincere. This is one of the injokes in the Club. In the "Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation" -- the one that precedes the one you were re-reading recently -- and published in 1989, as chapter I, Grice is considering "assertion", vis a vis a discussion by Searle in "Assertions and aberrations". And so Grice gives the example of an utterance, uttered by Grice,

"Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher"

and goes on to elucidate or analyse what he may have meant by having asserted it. So, in the circumstances, seeing that one of the "felicity" conditions is that U (the utterer) is supposed to be taken seriously, Grice is possibly NOT thinking that Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher.

So. It´s not easy to see if he approved of Heidegger. Not that Heidegger would have cared!

Cheers!