New Science

Front Cover
Penguin UK, Apr 29, 1999 - Philosophy - 560 pages
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.
 

Contents

TRANSLATORS PREFACE
INTRODUCTION by Anthony Grafton
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
ELEMENTS
PRINCIPLES
METHOD
PROLEGOMENA
POETIC METAPHYSICS
THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUE HOMER
DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE HOMER
INTRODUCTION
THREE KINDS OF GOVERNMENT
THREE KINDS OF JURISPRUDENCE
THREE KINDS OF REASON
THREE KINDS OF JUDGMENTS
THREE SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

POETIC LOGIC
POETIC MORALITY
POETIC ECONOMICS OR HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT
POETIC POLITICS
EPITOMES OF POETIC HISTORY
POETIC COSMOGRAPHY
POETIC ASTRONOMY
POETIC GEOGRAPHY
SECTION 13
FINAL PROOFS CONFIRMING THE COURSE OF NATIONS
THE RESURGENCE OF NATIONS AND THE RECURRENCE OF HUMAN
The Recurrence of the Invariable Nature of Fiefs and the Recurrence
Description of the Ancient and Modern Worlds in the Light of the
On the Eternal Natural Commonwealth Best in its Kind Ordained by Divine
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About the author (1999)

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.

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