Authors: Giambattista Vico, David Marsh (Translator), Anthony Grafton
ISBN-13: 9780140435696, ISBN-10: 0140435697
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: January 2000
Edition: 3RD
Although Vico (1668-1744) lived his whole life as an obscure academic in Naples, his New Science is an astonishingly ambitious attempt to decode the history, mythology and law of the ancient world. It argues that the key to true understanding lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of the Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians, were utterly different from our own. In examining these huge themes, Vico offers countless fresh insights into topics ranging from physics to (poetic) politics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, the New Science even inspired the framework for Joyce's Ulysses. This new translation makes it clear why this work marked a turning-point in humanist thinking as significant as Newton's contemporary revolution in physics.
Introduction | ||
Translator's Preface | ||
Explanation of the Frontispiece | 1 | |
Establishing Principles | ||
Poetic Wisdom | ||
Poetic Metaphysics | 144 | |
Poetic Logic | 157 | |
Poetic Morality | 207 | |
Poetic Economics, or Household Management | 217 | |
Poetic Politics | 252 | |
Epitomes of Poetic History | 306 | |
Poetic Physics | 310 | |
Poetic Cosmography | 320 | |
Poetic Astronomy | 328 | |
Poetic Chronology | 331 | |
Poetic Geography | 338 | |
Discovery of the True Homer | ||
The Search for the True Homer | 355 | |
Discovery of the True Homer | 381 | |
The Course of Nations | ||
Three Kinds of Human Nature | 397 | |
Three Kinds of Customs | 399 | |
Three Kinds of Natural Law | 400 | |
Three Kinds of Government | 401 | |
Three Kinds of Language | 402 | |
Three Kinds of Symbols | 403 | |
Three Kinds of Jurisprudence | 405 | |
Three Kinds of Authority | 407 | |
Three Kinds of Reason | 409 | |
Three Kinds of Judgments | 414 | |
Three Schools of Thought | 424 | |
Further Proofs Drawn from the Properties of Heroic Aristocracies | 426 | |
Final Proofs Confirming the Course of Nations | 448 | |
The Resurgence of Nations and the Recurrence of Human Institutions | ||
Conclusion of the Work: On the Eternal Natural Commonwealth, Best in its Kind, Ordained by Divine Providence | 483 | |
Index and Glossary | 493 |