Background
Vico was the son of a poor bookseller.
(In 1716 Giambattista Vico published De rebus gestis Anton...)
In 1716 Giambattista Vico published De rebus gestis Antonj Caraphaei to celebrate Neapolitan Antonio Carafa who emigrated to Vienna in 1662 to serve at the Court of Leopold I of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor. After becoming familiar with the intrigues of the Viennese court, Carafa gradually learned the secrets of state and the arts of public administration and of governing. Enjoying the favors of the emperor and of the royal princes related to the Habsburgs, Charles of Lorraine and Maximillian of Bavaria, Carafa was allowed to leave the Viennese court for the Hungarian marshes. His military experience grew under the leadership of generals such as Montecuccoli and Lorraine and he was promoted to higher ranks according to the many accomplishments that revealed his bravery, foresight, prudence, strategy, and political diplomacy. Leopold appointed him Military Governor first of Upper Hungary and then of Transylvania as well as General Commissary of all imperial armies on all fronts: Rhine, Danube, and Po. However, because of the jealous attacks of his rivals, Carafa was recalled to Vienna where he died of despair.
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( This volume comprises a new critical edition of Vicos ...)
This volume comprises a new critical edition of Vicos original Latin text and a faithful translation of this early work on metaphysics. Robert Miners introduction offers valuable guidance in understanding this challenging text and assessing its significance.
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(This account of the basic theme of Vico's mature philosop...)
This account of the basic theme of Vico's mature philosophy explores the question of whether philosophical theories can ever be more than an intellectual expression of the underlying beliefs of an age. The first complete English translation of the 1725 text, Vico's The First New Science ia now accessible to a broad, new readership. It is accompanied by a glossary, bibliography, chronology of Vico's life and expository introduction.
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( Giambattista Vico: Keys to the "New Science" brings tog...)
Giambattista Vico: Keys to the "New Science" brings together in one volume translations, commentaries, and essays that illuminate the background of Giambattista Vico's major work. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene have collected a series of texts that help us to understand the progress of Vico's thinking, culminating in the definitive version of the New Science, which was published in 1744. Bayer and Verene provide useful introductions both to the collection as a whole and to the individual writings. What emerges is a clear picture of the decades-long process through which Vico elaborated his revolutionary theory of history and culture. Of particular interest are the first sketch of the new science from his earlier work, the Universal Law, and Vico's response to the false book notice regarding the first version of his New Science. The volume also includes additions to the 1744 edition that Vico had written out but that do not appear in the English translations?including his brief chapter on the "Reprehension of the Metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke"?and a bibliography of all of Vico's writings that have appeared in English. Giambattista Vico: Keys to the "New Science" is a unique and vital companion for anyone reading or rereading this landmark of Western intellectual history.
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(Giambattista Vico is now acknowledged to be one of the mo...)
Giambattista Vico is now acknowledged to be one of the most important figures in the history of European philosophy and social thought and increasingly attention is being focused on his writings. These, however have been difficult to obtain in English and many have never been translated. A real need therefore exists and to meet this Professor Pompa has here translated and introduced a selection of the central, representative texts, where the most important and seminal of Vico's ideas are developed. The volume will make a major contribution towards the study of Vico's thought and this period in the history of philosophy. It will be invaluable to students of those subjects and of the social sciences generally.
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( The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant b...)
The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant both as a source of insight into the influences on the eighteenth-century philosopher's intellectual development and as one of the earliest and most sophisticated examples of philosophical autobiography. Referring to himself in the third person, Vico records the course of his life and the influence that various thinkers had on the development of concepts central to his mature work. Beyond its relevance to the development of the New Science, the Autobiography is also of interest for the light it sheds on Italian culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Still regarded by many as the best English-language translation of this classic work, the Cornell edition was widely lauded when first published in 1944. Wrote the Saturday Review of Literature: "Here was something new in the art of self-revelation. Vico wrote of his childhood, the psychological influences to which he was subjected, the social conditions under which he grew up and received an education and evolved his own way of thinking. It was so outstanding a piece of work that it was held up as a model, which it still is."
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( Giambattista Vico's first original work of philosophy, ...)
Giambattista Vico's first original work of philosophy, On the Study Methods of Our Time (17089) takes up the contemporary "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns" and provides a highly interesting statement of the nature of humanistic education. This edition makes available again Elio Gianturco's superb 1965 English translation of a work generally regarded as the earliest statement by Vico of the fundamentals of his position. An important contribution to the development of the scientism-versus-humanism debate over the comparative merits of classical and modern culture, this book lays out Vico's powerful arguments against the compartmentalization of knowledge which results from the Cartesian world view. In opposition to the arid logic of Cartesianism, Vico here celebrates the humanistic tradition and posits the need for a comprehensive science of humanity which recognizes the value of memory and imagination. For this edition, Donald Phillip Verene has written a new preface placing the work in the context of the ongoing renaissance in Vico studies and added a chronology of Vico's major writings. He has also translated into English for the first time Vico's last public statement, The Academies and the Relation between Philosophy and Eloquence (1737), a short oration that presents his final views on wisdom, the unity of knowledge, and rhetoric?themes he had first adumbrated in the Study Methods. On the Study Methods of Our Time remains a key text for anyone interested in the development's of Vico's thought and serves as a concise introduction to his work. Scholars and students in such disciplines as the history of philosophy, intellectual history, literary theory, rhetoric, and the history and philosophy of education will find this volume helpful and fascinating.
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historian jurist philosopher rhetorician
Vico was the son of a poor bookseller.
Evidence from Giambattista Vico's autobiographical work indicates that Vico likely was an autodidact educated under paternal influence, during a three-year absence from school, consequence of an accidental fall when the boy was seven years old. Giovann Battista’s formal education was at the University of Naples from which he was graduated in 1694, as Doctor of Civil and Canon Law.
In 1735 Vico was appointed royal historiographer to the Neapolitan house of Bourbon, but this was a belated and niggardly reward for a life that had combined consistent dedication to learning with unrelieved poverty, marital tragedy, public indifference to his work, and betrayal by a succession of patrons. Vico’s prime intellectual enemy was Descartes.
Vico’s secondary target was the natural-law tradition as represented by Selden and Pufendorf.
The thinkers upon whom he drew for inspiration most often were Plato, Tacitus, and, among the moderns, Grotius and Francis Bacon.
In the New Science Vico tried to combine Plato’s notion of the relation between sense data and ideas, Tacitus’ insight into historical process, and the inductive method advocated by Bacon in the Novum organum.
The main arguments of the New Science can be discussed in terms of a question and three assumptions.
The question is, How does it come about that men, who are basically ferine, selfish, and vicious (as Machiavelli and Hobbes argued), are able to form communities, to submit themselves to the rule of law, and to serve the well-being not only of themselves but of others too?
According to Vico, none of the received intellectual traditions could solve this problem.
Hence Vico’s methodological principle—one can understand only what one has created or is in principle capable of creating.
Since man is a part of nature, he can, to be sure, understand nature in part.
But there will always be something in nature that he cannot comprehend fully; there will always be something mysterious about nature for everyone but its creator.
Man can understand himself and everything he himself has created, i. e. , the whole realm of human culture; but he can do so only on the basis of an inductive study of culture, not by proceeding from the study of nature.
Thus, according to Vico, the proper basis for a science of culture and a metaphysics of mind can be found only in a historical investigation of the encounters between human consciousness and nature as they occur in different parts of the world at different times and in different situations. However, if past human consciousness is understandable by present human consciousness, it must not be thought that past problems were the same as present ones or that the specific responses of men to those past problems were similar to what present responses to those problems would be.
In order for modern man to understand primitive man, then, it is necessary for the modern to enter sympathetically into a world in which nature seemed alive and governed by hostile spirits whose power over man was exceeded only by their malignity.
If primitive man is as ignorant of the nature of nature and is as irrational in his responses to nature as a child is, then it follows, according to Vico, that human society resulted not from abstract considerations of utility or from rational self-interest, as Hobbes believed, but, rather, from immediate responses to real or imagined physical threats.
Since men translate the unfamiliar into terms of the familiar, the processes of nature are at first experienced as anthropomorphic spirits that must be propitiated and placated, an activity that falls to the heads of families.
The first truly social classes appeared at this point, for the refugees (socii) were not linked by blood to the primal kinship groups but were affiliated only by services rendered and received.
This required that the patriarchs of the various tribes come together to protect themselves from the socii.
Of course, it is possible for nations to become “arrested” in their development, or even annihilated, if they come into conflict with other cultures at more advanced stages of growth.
But on the whole, cultures develop in response to needs and desires peculiar to them at specific times in their cycles. All of this points to the relationship between human needs, on the one hand, and institutional forms and modes of expression, on the other.
And it suggests that religious, poetic, and even philosophical systems must be viewed primarily as rationalizations of achieved social relationships.
As Vico put it, “The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions. ”
This is the essence of the New Science.
Although Vico shared the Enlightenment belief in the providential nature of history, he rejected the idea that humanity as a whole developed inevitably in linear sequence from lower to higher forms of self-consciousness and rationality.
In most cultures, he held, each stage is an improvement over the preceding one, but every third stage (the philosophical, or scientific, stage), which follows the religious and heroic stages, is always followed by a period of decline, a time of barbarism rendered more barbarous by the refinements on savagery that sophistication provides— in other words, true decadence.
In the end, providence is assimilated into human consciousness and thus becomes identical with the activities of a humanity liberated from all fear of nature and God by the New Science.
For example, the “second barbarism” of the early Middle Ages constituted a positive advance over the “first barbarism” of the Homeric age and the barbarism of pre-Roman Italy.
And Vico saw the expansion of Western civilization over the globe as an anticipation of a new humanity, unifying peoples hitherto separated and imprisoned within their specific cyclical patterns of rise and fall.
Just as Christianity is the one true religion for all men everywhere, so the New Science is the one true philosophy for all men everywhere.
And just as Christianity had freed man from servitude to an imagined hostile nature by divesting that nature of all spirits, so the New Science will free man from servitude to religion itself, not by destroying religion but by revealing it for what it really is, i. e. , man’s vision of what he might become.
In the New Science men are revealed as creators of their own humanity, are liberated from myth, and are charged to undertake creation of themselves selfconsciously and positively. Vico’s influence .
Therefore, Vico became fully appreciated only in the nineteenth century, largely as a result of Michelet’s popularization of his work.
Vico’s influence on nineteenth-century social and literary theory was profound: Goethe, Mazzini, Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Taine, Marx, and Engels all admitted debts to him.
In the present century his influence has been even greater, encompassing thinkers and writers as diverse as Croce, Gentile, and Collingwood in philosophy; Joyce and Yeats in literature; Toynbee and Trotsky in historiography; Pareto, Sorel, and Sorokin in social science; and Edmund Wilson and Erich Auerbach in literary criticism.
It is only in the present century that Vico’s highly original Autobiography, first published in 1728 and reissued with an addition in 1731, has been fully appreciated.
Here Vico applied the principles of the New Science to the analysis of his own intellectual evolution, thus providing, or so he believed, a confirmation on the ontogenetic level of the phylogenetic pattern of human evolution.
( The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant b...)
( Giambattista Vico's first original work of philosophy, ...)
(In 1716 Giambattista Vico published De rebus gestis Anton...)
(This account of the basic theme of Vico's mature philosop...)
(Giambattista Vico is now acknowledged to be one of the mo...)
( Giambattista Vico: Keys to the "New Science" brings tog...)
( This volume comprises a new critical edition of Vicos ...)
But Vico was no mere eclectic; the New Science was a highly original synthesis of the various philosophical creeds and scholarly disciplines of his own time, a synthesis which took into account the materialism of a Hobbes and the idealism of a Descartes, but which framed them in a new approach to history, conceived as the study of human consciousness as it has evolved in time and space. The New Science—main principles .
Modern philosophers posed it, but then went on to solve it by holding that ancient man was just as rational as modern man and formed human society in much the way that modern men form a commercial concern or corporation.
Vico’s philosophy was not very influential during the eighteenth century, but it did prefigure many of the ideas that later appeared in romanticism.
In 1699, Vico married Teresa Caterina Destito, a childhood friend, and assumed a chair in rhetoric at the University of Naples, which he held until ill-health retirement, in 1741.