Vico's Science of Imagination

Vico's Science of Imagination
Author: Donald Phillip Verene
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 1981
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780801499722

A full interpretation of Giambattista Vico's thought, based primarily on his major work, the New Science, and on his earlier Latin writings.

Vico and Joyce

Vico and Joyce
Author: Donald Phillip Verene
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1987-07-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438422873

Joyce said, "My imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung." This volume is the first extended examination of the connections between Vico and Joyce. Joyce employed Vico's New Science as the basis of Finnegans Wake, as he employed Homer's Odyssey as the basis of Ulysses. In what ways are Vico and Joyce similar? To what extent is Vico an influence on Joyce? And in what ways can Vico's philosophy be newly understood when seen in relation to Joyce's use of it? This book suggests ways to see both thinkers anew. Vico and Joyce is divided into three major parts: "Cycles and History," in which Vico's famous conception of the course and recourse of historical events is examined in relation to Joyce's use of this idea in Finnegans Wake; "Joyce and Vico," in which the relationship between the two thinkers is approached more from the side of Joyce than Vico; "Language and Myth," in which the similarities of Vico's and Joyce's grasp of language and imaginative forms of thought are considered. This book opens up a relationship and set of ideas whose time has come. In the last decade there has been an exciting renaissance in the study of Vico that originated in the English-speaking world and spread back to Italy. Joyce has been the one major twentieth-century figure through which most English readers have come to know something of Vico. To consider them together opens up new avenues for our understanding of the imagination, memory, and the cyclic course of human history.

The Philosophy of the Imagination in Vico and Malebranche

The Philosophy of the Imagination in Vico and Malebranche
Author: Paolo Fabiani
Publisher: Firenze University Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2009
Genre: Imagination (Philosophy)
ISBN: 8864530665

This book is a retrospective view of modern philosophical anthropology through the works of two of its greatest exponents. the author demonstrates how mythology, the philosophy of history and language and Vico's concept of man had as a constant referral point Malebranche's psychology with its Cartesian formulation. The idolatrous and mythopoietic imagination that is described in La Scienza Nuova (New Science) has much in common with the "pagan" mind (that is to say the mind subjugated to passions, sensitivity and fantasy that is described in La Recherche (The Search after Truth). Some of the themes discussed here are myth, the metaphoric nature of thought, idolatry, the formation of mentality, the relationships which bind passions and representations and the association of ideas through iconic images. Also discussed are other themes such as the structure of society and imagination, imitation, persuasion and social relationships, communication within society between illustrious imaginations. Moreover in Malebranche has been found a complex and complete theory of imaginative universals (universali fantastici). The philosophy of the imagination in Vico and Malebranche is translated and edited by Giorgio A. Pinton.

Vico's "New Science"

Vico's
Author: Donald Phillip Verene
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2016-02-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501701851

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) is best remembered for his major work, the New Science (Scienza nuova), 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.

Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico
Author: Donald Phillip Verene
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2008
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0801458358

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 llin 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 17 44 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.

Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth

Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth
Author: Malcolm Bull
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2013-12-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0691138842

How the philosophy of Giambattista Vico was influenced by eighteenth-century Neopolitan painting Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe
Author: David L. Marshall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2010-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521190622

This book examines the entirety of Giambattista Vico's oeuvre and demonstrates his significance as a theorist who adapted the discipline of rhetoric to modern conditions.

On the Study Methods of Our Time

On the Study Methods of Our Time
Author: Giambattista Vico
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501732595

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. Giambattista Vico's first original work of philosophy, On the Study Methods of Our Time (1708–9) 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.

Vicos New Science Ancient Sign

Vicos New Science Ancient Sign
Author: Jurgen Trabant
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134390637

Jürgen Trabant reads the profound insights into human semiosis contained in Vico's 'sematology' as both a spirited rejection of Cartesian philosophy and an early critique of enlightened logocentricism. Sean Ward's translation makes this work available to an English-reading audience for the first time.

New Science

New Science
Author: Giambattista Vico
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 560
Release: 1999-04-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 014190769X

Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern, it argues that the key to true understanding of the past lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of ancient Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians were radically different from our own. Along the way, Vico explores a huge variety of topics, ranging from physics to poetics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Marking a crucial turning-point in humanist thinking, New Science has remained deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, inspiring the work of Karl Marx and even influencing the framework for Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.