Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico ; ; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics. He is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures in history.

The Latin aphorism ''Verum esse ipsum factum'' ("truth is itself something made") coined by Vico is an early instance of constructivist epistemology. He inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history, and, although the term ''philosophy of history'' is not in his writings, Vico spoke of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically." Although he was not an historicist, contemporary interest in Vico usually has been motivated by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher and historian of ideas, Edward Said, a literary critic, and Hayden White, a metahistorian.

Vico's intellectual ''magnum opus'' is the book ''Scienza Nuova'' or ''New Science'' (1725), which attempts a systematic organization of the humanities as a single science that recorded and explained the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall. Provided by Wikipedia
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Published 1996
The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 1711-1741) : From the definitive Latin text and notes, Italian commentary and introduction by Giuliano Crifò. Translated and Edited by...

: Gustavo Costa reviewing the Italian edition of Vico's Institutiones Oratoriae in New Vico Studies 9 (1991), has written that Rhetoric is the mainspring of an important trend of Vichian studies which initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century and had its manifestation in John D. Schaeffer's Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), where Schaeffer aptly noted, summing up a long exegetic tradition, Vico was imbued with rhetoric and convinced of its centrality to Western civilization. Unfortunately, the editions of Vico's works published in English have not yet included the Institutiones Oratoriae , which more or less reflects the lectures on rhetoric given by Vico at the University of Naples, starting with the academic year 1699-1700 and going through 1739-1741. The manual on rhetoric was used in Italy up to the end of the nineteenth century and established the common curriculum in rhetoric to be followed in all Universities. This English edition offers a text of the Institutiones complete on the base of the four known extant manuscripts. It offers the marginal glosses made by Vico's students, a collection of Vico's phrases and explanations of terms collected by some of the students, a glossary of Latin words and rhetorical terms from the Latin text, and a wealth of information in the commentary. The Art of Rhetoric is the manual for everyone who wants to know what rhetoric is, how it was employed in the forum or the courts, how it could be learned from the classic orators, and how it can be used whenever we speak for convincing, praising or motivating.
: 1 online resource. : Includes bibliographical references and index. : 9789401200202
9789051839159

Published 2013
The Conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia and G.B. Vico /

: In September of 1701, events transpired in Naples that, through frequent retellings, became popularly known as "the conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia." Rapidly gaining fame, this apparently anonymous narrative was soon incorporated by different historians in their history of the transition years between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But who was the initial bard or narrator, the town clerk or citizen who first gave testimony of this event by creating a Latin text of the story of the Prince of Macchia? Giambattista Vico was not among the claimants to the authorship of the fabulous story that changed the future of the Kingdom of Naples. Nevertheless, four scholars across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were themselves convinced, and managed to convince the intellectual world as well, that Vico, then a young teacher of rhetoric at the University of Naples, was indeed the source of this original Latin narration of this oft retold Neapolitan history. This book provides the original Latin text with a parallel translation, as well as historical context and analysis of both the text's authorship history and the account itself.
: Includes a history and critical analysis of Giambattista Vico's text and role as author. : 1 online resource (xvi, 325 pages) : portraits. : Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-310) and index. : 9789401209120 : Available to subscribing member institutions only.

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