On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language

I classici del Pensiero Italiano #7

by Giambattista Vico, L.M. Palmer (Translator)

On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, originally published in 1710, is widely regarded as Vico's most significant work after the New Science and the Autobiography. Subtitled "The Book of Metaphysics," it was one of three planned volumes of a larger work that was never published, and it marks Vico's transition from rhetorician to philosopher of historical knowledge.

This edition incorporates translations from the Italian of a contemporary review and Vico's responses, published in 1711 and 1712. L. M. Palmer's translation helps make more accessible a treatise of vital importance for an understanding of Vico's epistemology, psychology, and philosophy of mathematics.

Genres: Philosophy, Italian Literature, Nonfiction

198 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is titled "Principles/Origins of [re]New[ed] Science about the Common Nature of Nations" (Principi di Scienza Nuova d'intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni). The work is explicitly presented as a "Science of reasoning" (Scienza di ragionare), and includes a dialectic between axioms (authoritative maxims) and "reasonings" (ragionamenti) linking and clarifying the axioms. Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the expression is alien from Vico's text (Vico speaks of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically"). He is otherwise well-known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum ("true itself is fact" or "the true itself is made"), a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology. Overall, the contemporary interest in Vico has been driven by peculiarly historicist interests as expressed most notably by Isaiah Berlin, Tagliacozzo, Verene, and Hayden White.

Reviews

[feifei · Rating 3 out of 5]

vico's diss track of descartes. (platonic) forms good, (aristotelian) universals bad. forms are infinite "not in amplitude, but in perfection" because (of course) God. the cogito is nonsense because consciousness (the mind's perception of itself) is not enough for truth, "the criterion of the true should be to have made the thing itself"—constructed a priori claims are always epistemically superior to discovered claims.

[Krit Chanwong · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be made compulsory reading for historians of philosophy. I will certainly come back to it.