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Sandra Luft, in her ambitious postmodernist reading of Vico's profoundly influential New Science, asserts the "strangeness" of texts that struggle to understand human existence outside the assumptions of traditional humanism. One of her central arguments is that Vico as a thinker moved toward such an alien understanding. Despite his warning against the tyranny of "familiar conceits," his work is commonly read within the traditional philosophic assumptions of the West--assumptions that she shows cannot contain nor explain the work's novelty.The book includes extensive comparisons of Vico with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Luft does not regard Vico as a precursor of the postmodern, which ...
Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797D1855) was one of the first natural law scholars to bring natural law thinking into a conversation with the market economic order that was beginning to emerge in Europe in the 19th century. His reflections on matters such as the origin, nature, and limits of private property, the role of the state, and the nature of human reason show him to be a unique, innovative thinker who nonetheless was determined to work within the parameters of Catholic doctrine. Many of these ideas are concretized in his seminal work The Constitution Under Social Justice, a text that has profound instights to offer those today seeking to integrate theology, philosophy, and economics into their conceptions of a social order that aspires to be both free and just.
In this important essay, Joseph Mali argues that Vico's New Science must be interpreted according to Vico's own clues and rules of interpretation, principally his claim that the 'master-key' of his New Science is the discovery of myth. Following this lead Mali shows how Vico came to forge his new scientific theories about the mythopoeic constitution of consciousness, society, and history by reappraising, or 'rehabilitating' the ancient and primitive mythical traditions which still persist in modern times. He further relates Vico's radical redefinition of these traditions as the 'true narrations' of all religious, social, and political practices in the 'civil world' to his unique historical d...
The fourteen contributors to Sites of Vision explore the hypothesis that the nature of visual perception about which philosophers talk must be explicitly recognized as a discursive construction, indeed a historical construction, in philosophical discourse. In recent years scholars from many disciplines have become interested in the "construction" of the human senses--in how the human environment shapes both how and what we perceive. Taking a very different approach to the question of construction, Sites of Vision turns to language and explores the ways in which the rhetoric of philosophy has formed the nature of vision and how, in turn, the rhetoric of vision has helped to shape philosophica...
by Paul Ricoeur It is already a piece of good fortune to find oneself understood by a reader who is at once demanding and benevolent. It is an even greater fortune to be better understood by another than by one's own self. In effect, when I look back, I am rather struck by the discontinuity among my works, each of which takes on a specific problem and apparently has little more in common with its predecessor than the fact of having left an overflow of unanswered questions behind it as a residue. On the contrary, Domenico Jervolino's interpretation of my works, which extend over more than forty years, stresses their coherence, in spite of the gap in time between my present, soon to be issued ...
For today's readers, the great Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) can be startlingly relevant to the social and educational divisiveness we confront at century's end: here Giuseppe Mazzotta, one of the leading Italianists in the United States, shows how much Vico, properly read, can bring to an understanding of contemporary social problems. To explore Vico's body of thought in all its monumental complexity, Mazzotta highlights the place of poetry, or "writerliness," in Vico's educational project, which links literature, history, religion, philosophy, and politics. The New Map of the World is the first book since Benedetto Croce's The Philosophy of G. B. Vico (1911) ...
"A rich historical pastiche of 17th- and 18th-century philosophy, science, and religion."—G. Y. Craig, New Scientist "This book, by a distinguished Italian historian of philosophy, is a worthy successor to the author's important works on Francis Bacon and on technology and the arts. First published in Italian (in 1979), it now makes available to English readers some subtly wrought arguments about the ways in which geology and anthropology challenged biblical chronology and forced changes in the philosophy of history in the early modern era. . . . [Rossi] shows that the search for new answers about human origins spanned many disciplines and involved many fascinating intellects—Bacon, Bayle, Buffon, Burnet, Descartes, Hobbes, Holbach, Hooke, Hume, Hutton, Leibniz, de Maillet, Newton, Pufendorf, Spinoza, Toland, and, most especially, Vico, whose works are impressively and freshly reevaluated here."—Nina Gelbart, American Scientist
It is too often assumed that religious heterodoxy before the Enlightenment led inexorably to intellectual secularisation. Challenging that assumption, this book expands the scope of the enquiry, hitherto concentrated on the relation between heterodoxy and natural philosophy, to include political thought, moral philosophy and the writing of history. Individual chapters are devoted to Grotius, the Dutch Remonstrants and Socinianism, to Hobbes, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Dutch Collegiants and English Unitarians, Giambattista Vico, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume. In their opening essay the editors argue that the critical problems for both Protestants and Catholics arose from destabilising the relation between the spheres of Nature and Revelation, and the adoption of an increasingly historical approach both to natural religion and to the Scriptual basis of Revelation. Contributors include: Hans Blom, Justin Champion, Jonathan Israel, Martin Mulsow, Enrico Nuzzo, William Poole, Sami-Juhani Savonius, Richard Serjeantson, and Brian Young.