Preface Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was throughout his mature years professor of Latin Eloquence at the University of Naples. His works, first written in ...

Introduction: schema, substance, and symbol -- Linguistic form: the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture -- Mythical thought: beginning the ladder of consciousness -- Phenomenology of knowledge: taking phenomenology in the Hegelian, not the modern sense -- Metaphysics of symbolic forms: spirit, life, and Werk -- Logic of the cultural sciences: nature and culture -- Animal symbolicum -- Human freedom and politics.

This work approaches texts in the history of philosophy as the repository of a kind of literature that brings together rational thought and rhetorical principles.

Giambattista Vico is best remembered for his major work, the New Science, in which he sets forth the principles of humanity and gives an account of the stages common to the development of all societies in their historical life. Controversial at the time of its publication in 1725, the New Science has come to be seen as the most ambitious attempt before Comte at a comprehensive science of human society and the most profound analysis of the philosophy of history prior (...) to Hegel. Despite the fundamental importance of the New Science, there has been no philosophical commentary of the text in any language, until now. Written by the noted Vico scholar Donald Phillip Verene, this commentary can be read as an introduction to Vico’s thought or it can be employed as a guide to the comprehension of specific sections of the New Science. Following the structure of the text scrupulously, Verene offers a clear and direct discussion of the contents of each division of the New Science with close attention to the sources of Vico’s thought in Greek philosophy and in Roman jurisprudence. He also highlights the grounding of the New Science in Vico’s other works and the opposition of Vico’s views to those of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists. The addition of an extensive glossary of Vico’s Italian terminology makes this an ideal companion to Vico’s masterpiece, ideal for both beginners and specialists. (shrink)

This essay seeks a philosophical understanding of the nature of kairos that, in turn, discloses the nature of philosophizing. This essay claims that the kairos of philosophy is dialogue, and that dialogue is kairological in two ways: (1) Dialogue is not just a phenomenon that occurs in chronological time but, rather, imposes its own time in order to see how life (or being) itself is disclosed to us; (2) dialogue is kairological because it denotes a moment in which we are (...) pushed into the open, which demands our receptivity and response. Section I explains kairos as “circumstance” in Aristotle, as a required point of view in Heidegger, and as related to the beginning of creation in Schelling. Section II understands dialogue, as the kairos of philosophy, as a crisis—a breaking away from an ordinary understanding of and experience in the world. This destabilizing experience resonates with the untimeliness of philosophizing. (shrink)

Introduction: On philosophical tetralogy -- The canon of the primal scene in speculative philosophy -- Philosophical pragmatics -- Putting philosophical questions (in)to language -- Absolute knowledge and philosophical language -- The limits of argument : argument and autobiography -- Philosophical aesthetics -- Philosophical memory -- Culture, categories, and the imagination -- Metaphysical narration, science, and symbolic form -- Myth and metaphysics.

Introduction : interpreting The new science -- Synopsis of universal law -- The true and the certain : from On the one principle and one end of universal law -- A new science is essayed : from On the constancy of the jurisprudent -- On Homer and his two poems : from the dissertations -- Vico's address to his readers from a lost manuscript on jurisprudence -- Vico's reply to the false book notice : the Vici vindiciae -- Vico's "ignota (...) latebat" : on the impresa and the dipintura -- Vico's addition to the tree of the poetic sciences and his use of the muses -- Vico's reprehension of the metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke -- Appendix : Vico's writings in English translation. (shrink)

Consciousness confronts itself with the aim of achieving absolute knowing. This is the first commentary to regard metaphor, irony, and memory as keys to the understanding of Hegel's basic philosophical position.

Focusing in particular on the traditions of some of the late Greeks and the Romans, Renaissance humanism, and the thought of Giambattista Vico, this book's concern is to revive the ancient Delphic injunction "know thyself," an idea of civil wisdom that Verene finds has been missing since Descartes. The author recovers the meaning of the vital relations that poetry, myth, and rhetoric had with philosophy in thinkers like Cicero, Quintilian, Isocrates, Pico, Vives, and Vico.

THIS ESSAY ADDRESSES TWO QUESTIONS: Is the search for scientific truth a self-sufficient activity? or Does scientific right reasoning depend upon a form of truth-telling that lies beyond the limits of scientific investigation? Put differently, is there a sense of metaphysics as a form of human culture that is the embodiment of this general sense of truth-telling?

The small section of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes called “Das geistige Tierreich und der Betrug oder die Sache selbst” is one stage of the total dialectical movement of Hegel’s “Science of the Experience of Consciousness.” It plays a role like any other stage, as a form of appearance through which consciousness must pass on its way to “absolute knowing.” Some stages of Hegel’s Phänomenologie have tended to acquire a status for its readers beyond the function they serve in the total (...) movement of consciousness. This has certainly been true of the famous “Master and Servant” relationship and to a lesser extent of the “Unhappy Consciousness,” the “Beautiful Soul,” and that part of “Force and Understanding” called the “inverted” or “topsy-turvy world,” to name a few. (shrink)

At his death in 1945, the influential German philosopher Ernst Cassirer left manuscripts for the fourth and final volume of his magnum opus, _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene have edited these writings and translated them into English for the first time, bringing to completion Cassirer's major treatment of the concept of symbolic form. Ernst Cassirer believed that all the forms of representation that human beings use—language, myth, art, religion, history, science—are symbolic, and the (...) concept of symbolic forms was the basis of his thinking on these subjects. In this volume, which contains one text written in 1928 and another in about 1940, Cassirer presents the metaphysics that is implicit in his epistemology and phenomenology of culture. The earlier text grounds the philosopher's conception of symbolic forms on a notion of human nature that makes a general distinction between Geist and life. In the later text, he discusses Basis Phenomena, an original concept not mentioned in any of his previous works, and he compares his own viewpoint with those of other modern philosophers, notably Bergson and Heidegger. (shrink)

This is the first full-length study of Vico's Diritto Universale to be written in English. This study places the work within the wider traditions of Roman legal scholarship and natural law, which Vico was confronting. Truth and Authority in Vico's Universal Law breaks new ground in the treatment of Aristotelian influences on Vico. It examines Vico's idea that a theory founded on the subjective right of the single individual cannot be the foundation of social relationships. This entails the investigation of (...) Vico's refusal to endorse rationality as the basis of authority and political agreement conceived as «contract.» It traces a continuity between the Diritto Universale and Vico's major work, the Scienza Nuova. (shrink)