De l'antique sagesse de l'Italie

I classici del Pensiero Italiano #7

by Giambattista Vico

En 1710, au moment même où Malebranche et Leibniz achèvent leurs systèmes de la raison, Naples, avec Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), devient le foyer d'une nouvelle idée de l'homme, créateur de mondes et sujet de l'histoire. Cette publication présente la première grande œuvre de Vico dans la traduction de Michelet, et permet de mesurer l'importance de la revendication italique dans la circulation des idées européennes.

Genres: Philosophy, Italian Literature, Nonfiction

179 pages, Mass Market 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.