Vico: The First New Science (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Gianbattista Vico; Leon Pompa

ISBN 10: 0521382904 / ISBN 13: 9780521382908

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2002

About this Item

Hardcover, lxiv + 302 pages, NOT ex-library. Missing the front blank endpaper. Extensive pencil underlining and marginalia on 63 pages. Else clean, bright, untanned, free of stamps, firmly bound. Residue of a partially removed sticker on the boards. Issued without a dust jacket. -- Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was a Neapolitan professor of rhetoric who spent his career at the University of Naples in relative obscurity, yet produced one of the most original works in the history of Western thought. His Scienza nuova, first published in 1725, proposed that the study of human civilisation could be placed on a scientific footing. Against the dominant Cartesian philosophy of his age, Vico argued that the world of nations and cultures - its languages, laws, myths and institutions - is more knowable than the natural world, because human beings themselves created it. He charted how civilisations develop through recurring cycles of growth and decline, driven not by rational calculation but by imagination, poetry and collective custom, and he insisted that the earliest human thought was fundamentally different from modern reasoning - an insight that prefigured modern anthropology, sociology and the philosophy of history. Largely unread in his lifetime, Vico was rediscovered in the 19th century through Jules Michelet's French translation and went on to influence thinkers as diverse as Marx, Croce, Joyce and Isaiah Berlin. This translation by Leon Pompa, a leading Vico scholar at the University of Birmingham, makes available in English the complete text of the 1725 first edition - the most concise of the three versions Vico produced (1725, 1730, 1744) and widely regarded by scholars as the clearest statement of his intentions. A number of Vico scholars have persistently argued that it is also the most readable, free of the elaborations and structural complications that encumbered the later versions. Pompa's introduction and annotations provide the contextual apparatus to make this demanding but rewarding text fully accessible to the English-language reader.

Seller Inventory # 013257

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Vico: The First New Science (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521382904
• ISBN 13: 9780521382908
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

This account of the basic theme of Vico's mature philosophy explores the question of whether philosophical theories can ever be more than an intellectual expression of the underlying beliefs of an age. The first complete English translation of the 1725 text, Vico's The First New Science ia now accessible to a broad, new readership. It is accompanied by a glossary, bibliography, chronology of Vico's life and expository introduction.

About the Author

LEON POMPA is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of the University of Birmingham. He has published over a hundred articles and books on philosophy.