Giovanni Battista Vico

v. 4. Reivindicaiones de Vico y otros escritos latinos -- v. 5. Escritos históricos : Gestas de Antonio Crafa y La conspiración partenopea (La conspiración de los príncipes napolitanos --.

The effort to penetrate the literary surface of Vico’s Autobiography exposes us to questions worthy of the best minds. What could it mean to understand our own lives as the ordered content of our own Ideas? What if, prior to being appropriated by forms imposed upon them from without, our lives possessed their own original and inalienable forms? What if human life were essentially one interpretative ascent to its own native form? What if Ethics coincided with the “writing” in which (...) the original dignity of one’s own life found its truly human vindication? What if human “reading” were in its essence the providential act of civil religion’s God? (shrink)

As a pioneer of historical thinkers, Vico laid out the origins of his historical thought in his critique of Cartesian mathematicalism. Descartes' effort, is not to attain the truth, but to attain certainty with the criterion of clarity and distinction. He sought to make all the sciences sure in this way. On the base of this point of view, all humanities, including history are excluded from the sphere of sciences, which means forgetting much heritage of the past. Vico considers Descartes’ (...) unhistorical and static understanding of human nature as the most important philosophical problem of French philosopher. For Vico the nature of man and consequently his thinking and Reason have transformed throughout the history. Vico justifies this transformation in different periods of history with corresponding forms of reasoning. On the base of his epistemological rule, namely “the real is constructive”, Vico conceives making something as the condition of knowing it. Therefore, he believes that history and all human achievements, are man-made and intrinsically constructed and hence are recognizable through empathetic insight and the power of imagination. Vico believes that the outcome of Cartesian philosophy is nothing other than human being’s disconnection from history and society. For Vico, the true knowledge of everything is knowledge through its causes or, in other words, historical knowledge about it. Although Vico considers history as the result of man-made activites, he conceives divine providence as the leader and guide of history. In Vico's view, understanding history in any given period is possible through a proper understanding of the intellectual framework and principles governing that period. (shrink)

Il saggio evidenzia come il «diritto naturale» rappresenti il cuore nevralgico della «scienza» di Giambattista Vico. Questi, nell’opporsi allo scetticismo, da un lato, e al giusnaturalismo, dall’altro, fa del «diritto naturale» il punto di incontro di molteplici questioni, dalla politica alla giurisprudenza, dall’«equità» alla «Ragion di Stato».

This study aims to analyse La Peyrère’s traditionally denied or under-estimated influence on Vico’s universal historiography. While Vico criticized La Peyrère’s impiety, his description of the cultural exchange between sacred and profane history, represented by the Jews and the Gentiles, corresponded with La Peyrère’s thoughts. Thus, one could interpret Vico’s criticism of La Peyrère as a strategy for saving his major work from the suspicion of heterodoxy. Vico refuted the existence of pre-Adamites, but accepted La Peyrère’s idea of the double (...) creation and transformed it into that of multiple creations and the origins of civilizations. This allowed him to arrive at the innovative concept of the plurality of history. Thus, La Peyrère’s hypothesis was a starting point for Vico’s innovations in historical reconstruction. (shrink)

The present essay is dedicated to the interpretation of Vico developed by Gillo Dorfles, which is based on the reason why Vico can be seen as the father of modern aesthetics, provided that the word “aesthetics” must be understood in a non-idealistic or Crocian sense, but according to the originally eighteenth-century notion of cognitio sensitiva. The key to this interpretation is thus given by the concepts of myth and metaphor, where the second one is especially seen as the principle that (...) governs a true “logic of fantasy”. (shrink)

El objetivo a perseguir por el presente artículo, es analizar tres de las principales teorías humanístico-filosóficas, respecto a la concepción del ciclo vital de que han sido participes diversas comunidades humanas a lo largo de la historia. Con base en tres propuestas de periodización histórica, se expondrán los enfoques temporales sobre los procesos y el fin de la historia teorizados por los filósofos e historiadores Giambatista Vico, Oswald Spengler y Arnold Joseph Toynbee.

El objetivo a perseguir por el presente artículo, es analizar tres de las principales teorías humanístico-filosóficas, respecto a la concepción del ciclo vital de que han sido participes diversas comunidades humanas a lo largo de la historia. Con base en tres propuestas de periodización histórica, se expondrán los enfoques temporales sobre los procesos y el fin de la historia teorizados por los filósofos e historiadores Giambatista Vico, Oswald Spengler y Arnold Joseph Toynbee.

The following article discusses an edition of Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis, issued without a place of publication or publisher in 1719. The article focuses on the claim first advanc...

Gianvincenzo Gravina and Giambattista Vico were two Neapolitan philosophers concerned with the way human society initially formed. They agreed that ancient myths were produced by a mentality that had a powerful ability for acute perception but could not reflect abstractly. They also agreed that wonder was an important force that enchanted the first peoples into founding society. They disagreed on how this happened. Gravina argued that early poets could see the truth and used persuasive poetry to teach the people how (...) to live. Vico argued that wonder impelled the first poets to create false divinities that frightened the first bestial people into founding civilization. While the two views differ, they show how Neapolitan Enlightenment thinkers developed radically different answers to questions that Northern Europeans were asking. (shrink)

While the resonance of Giambattista Vico's hermeneutics for postcolonialism has long been recognised, a rupture has been perceived between his intercultural sensibility and the actual content of his philological investigations, which have often been criticised as being Eurocentric and philologically spurious. China is a case in point. In his magnum opus New Science, Vico portrays China as backward and philosophically primitive compared to Europe. In this first study dedicated to China in Vico's thought, Daniel Canaris shows that scholars have been (...) beguiled by Vico's value judgements of China without considering the function of these value judgements in his theory of divine providence. This monograph illustrates that Vico's image of China is best appreciated within the contemporary theological controversies surrounding the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism. Through close examination of Vico's sources and intellectual context, Canaris argues that by refusing to consider Confucius as a "filosofo", Vico dismantles the rationalist premises of the theological accommodation proposed by the Jesuits and proposes a new functionalist valorisation of non-Christian religion that anticipates post-colonial critiques of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Giambattista Vico's Scienza nuova often appeals to several kinds of "proofs": historical, philological or theological... A further kind of proof may be added, which may be called "artistic proof". In Vico's view, art is the sign of the increasing ability of a civilisation to imitate nature - a correlation already proposed by Vasari and Winckelmann. The form of art to which the greatest explanatory power is attached is painting, as it requires abstraction. The more complex a painting is, the older (...) is the civilisation that produced it. The Scienza Nuova's parts dedicated to the Ancient Egyptian and Chinese art give an example of how Vico applies such kind of proof. He concludes that those civilisations cannot be as old as it has always been retained, since their paintings lacks perspective. Oppositely, the lack of any mention to paintings whatsoever is evidence for Homer's and Moses' antiquity. Artistic proof - alongside those previously mentioned - is indeed used by Vico to ground his ideas on chronology, historical subdivision in Eres and writing techniques. (shrink)

Georges Sorel's Study on Vico is a revelatory document of the depths and stakes of French social thought at the end of the 19th century. What brought Sorel to the 18th century Neapolitan theorist of history? Acute awareness of the limitations of Marxist thought in his day, a profound concern with the material underpinnings of language, law, and culture, and the imperative to understand the possibilities of revolutionary change. We find here a different Sorel, one who speaks in surprising ways (...) to the 21st century. The translation is accompanied by an introduction and by a set of notes which situate the text both in Sorel's overall intellectual trajectory and in the fin de siècle debates from which it emerged. (shrink)

This essay explores how Vico employs the terms mind, body, and language in his magnus opus, on the basis of the crux interpretandum that Vico created by turning the traditional mind-body problem into a body-language-mind problem. The problem is approached through a reading of Scienza nuova 1744 that emphasizes Vico's concern with issues of equity, justice, and jurisprudence through human history, starting in the early civilizations. The "languages" of the three "ages" that Vico delineates are interpreted in this context. The (...) proposed interpretation also influences how to understand Vico's references to poetry and imagination. The thesis presented concludes with identifying Vico's use of the terms mind, body, and language as symbolic and metaphorical rather than anthropologically. (shrink)

L'Ora e l'attimo narra--attraverso il confronto di Vico con Platone e Kant, Hegel e Nietzsche, Gadamer e, infine, Benjamin - la storia discontinua di un passaggio epocale nella concezione del mondo storico: il passaggio dal primato dell'orizzonte universale eterno, l''Ora', in cui si inquadrano le diverse età della storia, al primato dell'attimo, in cui sono parimenti possibili sia l'inizio di una 'nuova Ora' che la fine della storia dell'uomo ad opera dell'uomo. In Vico questo 'passaggio,' variamente contrastato e sofferto, ma (...) alla fine vincente, assume la figura del transito dalla 'mathesis universalis' della storia alla visione morale del mondo umano--Back cover. (shrink)

This book introduces the thought of Giambattista Vico into the discussion about natural law. For many critics, natural law is not natural but a façade behind which lurks the supernatural - that is, revealed religion. While current notions of natural law are based on either Aristotelian/Thomistic principles or on Enlightenment rationalism, the book shows how Vico was the only natural law thinker to draw on the Roman legal tradition, rather than on Greek or Enlightenment philosophy. Specifically, the book addresses how (...) Vico, drawing his inspiration from Roman history, incorporated both rhetoric and religion into a dynamic concept of natural law grounded in what he called the sensus communis: the entire repertoire of values, images, institutions, and even prejudices that a community takes for granted. Vico denied that natural law could ever furnish a definitive answer to moral problems in the social/public sphere. Rather he maintained that such problems had to be debated in the wider arena of the sensus communis. For Vico, as this book argues, natural law principles emerged from these debates; they did not resolve them. (shrink)

Das vorliegende Buch widmet sich der zweifachen radikalen Wende der Philosophie durch Giambattista Vico in seiner Scienza nuova: Die Begründung einer Philosophie der Kultur bleibt Vicos großer Beitrag zur Erkenntnistheorie. Vicos "Entdeckung", die Entfaltung des menschlichen Denkens in der phantastischen Verkörperung durch poetische Charaktere, in Gesten, Bildern, Sprache, ist der aktuellste Aspekt seiner Philosophie: eine anti-cartesische Philosophie des embodiment, der erste linguistic turn der Philosophie. Vieles, was derzeit in Szenarien des Anfangs menschlichen Denkens und Sprechens imaginiert wird, findet sich bei (...) Vico vorgedacht. Die Dualität von visuellen Zeichen und Sprache in menschlicher Kognition ist ein fundamentaler Beitrag zur Diskussion um die geistigen Grundformen unserer Kultur. (shrink)