Giambattista Vico on Natural Law by John Schaeffer

Author:John Schaeffer [Schaeffer, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Law, General, Jurisprudence, Legal History, Natural Law, Essays, Philosophy, Political, History & Surveys, Renaissance
ISBN: 9780429575082
Google: CtSNDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-20T01:35:00+00:00

Notes

1 References to the revised New Science are to Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Revised Translation of the Third Edition (1744). Trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944). References will be to paragraph number.

2 David L. Marshall, Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 195—199.

3 Verene has pointed out that the five books of the second New Science parallel the five parts of rhetoric, and in his latest book he analyses the rhetorical structure of the revised New Science in considerable detail. In the revised New Science, Book I, “The Establishment of Principles”, is the “invention” or discovery of the principle arguments and their illustrations from mythology. Book II, “The Poetic Wisdom”, indicates “disposition” of these arguments, that is, it organizes them into corollaries and inferences. The book is dominated by enumerations and lists. Book III, “The Discovery of the True Homer”, parallels “elocutio”, since it is concerned with poetic expression, especially of the imaginative universals which will be discussed below. Verene rejects this part of the schema, saying that elocutio characterizes the whole of the New Science. I believe Book III can be characterized as elocutio if, for no other reason, the long discussion of “The Search for the True Homer” which concerns Homer’s poetics. Verene calls “The Discovery of the True Homer” a “digression” (2015: 24). Book IV, “The Course the Nations Run”, is analogous to memoria, that is, Vico explicates the patterns of human history. Finally, Book V, “The Recourse of Human Institutions which the Nations Take when They Rise Again”, confirms the universal history by articulating (pronunicatio) how the patterns repeated themselves in post-classical Europe. Donald P. Verene, Vico’s New Science: A Philosophical Commentary (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015): 19—26.

4 Jürgen Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology, Trans. Sean Ward (New York and London: Routledge, 2004): 52.

5 Marcel Danesi, Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993): 80.

6 In his study of Vico’s theory of language, Danesi argues that Vico anticipated several insights of modern linguistic research. Danesi specifies four concepts that Vico anticipated in the New Science:

Iconicity: awareness that some natural phenomenon, like lightning, “is encoded by the emerging deep level of mind as an internal iconic sign” (77).

Visual Mimesis: an individual who is aware of a phenomenon makes some gesture to call it to the attention of another individual. The gesture is gradually adopted by other members of the group to which these two belong (77).

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