Giambattista Vico

Professor Pompa's study of Vico has done a great deal to stimulate and inform the growing interest in the English-speaking world in this remarkable figure. It remains the only work devoted almost exclusively to an interpretation of the New Science and offers a comprehensive guide to the main theoretical problems to which the text gives rise. For this second edition Professor Pompa has responded to the reactions of reviewers and critics and added a new chapter which analyses Vico's conception of the principles which govern the development of law.

Since Robert Flint introduced the thought of Giambattista Vico to the English-speaking world in 1884, the De Antiquissima Italorm Sapientia has been in peculiar position. It has been widely mentioned by Anglo-American philosophers but, unlike Vico's Study Method of Our Time and the New Science, little known in its entirety. Because the De Antiquissima contains Vico's fullest statement of the verum-factum principle, there are many references to the work, but the absence of an English translation until now may explain the lack of full-length monographs devoted to its significance in the development of Vico's philosophy.

"Although Vico (1668-1744) lived his whole life as an obscure academic in Naples, his New Science is an astonishingly ambitious attempt to decode the history, mythology and law of the ancient world. It argues that the key to true understanding lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of the Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians, were utterly different from our own. In examining these huge themes, Vico offers countless fresh insights into topics ranging from physics to (poetic) politics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, the New Science even inspired the framework for Joyce's Ulysses. This new translation makes it clear why this work marked a turning-point in humanist thinking as significant as Newton's contemporary revolution in physics."--Jacket.

The First New Science gives a clear account of Vico's mature philosophy: the belief that certain functions which are necessary for the maintenance of human society and culture, including philosophy, also condition them historically. This challenges the traditional view that philosophy can lay claim to an historically independent viewpoint, thus bringing into question the legitimacy of the claims of universal prescriptive political theories as against the de facto political beliefs of particular historical societies. This is the first of Vico's later major books in which he wrote in Italian in order not merely to expound but to demonstrate in practice, his conception of the philosophical importance of etymology. This 2002 Cambridge Texts edition is the first complete English translation of the 1725 text. Accompanied by a glossary, bibliography, chronology of Vico's life and expository introduction, it makes this important work accessible to students for the first time.

"This volume comprises a new critical edition and translation of Giambattista Vico's challenging and provoking early work On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. The Latin edition faithfully reproduces Vico's original 1710 text as first printed; it is accompanied by Jason Taylor's complete, accurate, and highly readable English translation." "In an illuminating introduction to the volume, Robert Miner elucidates Vico's short but difficult work; at the same time, he allows the reader to assess the importance of that work, in absolute terms as well as relative to Vico's other writings and the work of his numerous interlocutors in the republic of letters." "Taken as a whole, this volume provides the text and guidance to support a fresh engagement with Vico's thought, especially his earliest philosophical works. It will also serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars with interests in eighteenth-century thought."--BOOK JACKET.