Scienza Nuova Research Articles

Srinivas Aravamudan, Principal Investigator

Srinivas Aravamudan, Principal Investigator Joseph Roach I suspect that am not alone in my selfish tendency to see the work of the scholars I admire in relationship to the essential terms that define my own specialty. Thinking about exceptional careers that have been prematurely curtailed reminds me poignantly that theater is the art of what can be done thrillingly in a relatively short time. Even setting aside the rigors of Shakespeare’s “two hours’ traffic” as the normal limit of a play’s running time, Molière’s company lasted but eleven years, Fielding’s not even that. But they got a lot done in their time, and so did Srinivas Aravamudan in his thrilling career. For him the work of a lifetime includes a prodigious number of wide-ranging publications, a cadre of inspired mentees, and a set of infrastructural improvements to the intellectual life of Duke University, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and “the humanities writ large.” That phrase quotes the words that he chose as the name of Duke’s ambitious program in undergraduate education, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He initiated “The Humanities Writ Large” and served as its Principal Investigator, or “PI.” Although the humanities borrow the term from grant writing in the sciences, “Principal Investigator” well describes his role in “The Humanities Writ Large” as well as other roles. As Professor of English, Literature, and Romance Studies, Dean of Humanities and Director of the Franklin Institute for the Humanities at Duke, and President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, he created many opportunities for scholars working in all the periods, genres, and methodologies of the humanities disciplines, enlarging their scope to include previously neglected regions, languages, and literatures. But also to the lasting benefit of scholarship in our field, in his own research he investigated principally the long eighteenth century, which he rendered three-dimensional by demonstrating that it was also wide and deep. Appositely, Srinivas’s ASECS Presidential Address for 2016 took up the visionary philosophy of history enunciated by Giambattista Vico (1688–1744). His lecture, read beautifully in his absence by Felicity Nussbaum, was titled “From Enlightenment to the Anthropocene: Vico Behind or Ahead of his Time?” It parsed the terms of Vico’s archeology of the dimly bounded “Ages” of deep time as set [End Page 113] forth in La scienza nuova (The New Science, 1725). Speaking from an eighteenth-century worldview that was both wide and deep, Vico divided history into three “Ages”: of Gods, of Heroes, and of Men. These epochs progressed more cyclically than linearly according to a “poetic chronology” of “universal history.”1 Srinivas reactivated Vico’s terms to help us understand the gravity of our present age in the framework of world-historical periodization, punctuated as it is at intervals by geo-historical fatality, such as the Great Earthquake that wrecked Lisbon in 1755. For Vico, the academic rhetorician, each historical Age had its own dominant explanatory linguistic trope: for the Age of Gods, it was metaphor; for the Age of Heroes, metonymy; for the Age of Men, irony. Vician irony still characterizes the present Age, the one we increasingly agree that we have created for ourselves (hence “Anthropocene”), spiking it with a heavy dose of paradox as the bitter trope of the catastrophic post-human. In sum, the paradox is that this prolific Age of Men threatens to eliminate human beings as we know them from the face of the earth along with most other vertebrates and other species that didn’t get a vote. Vico was appropriate as the touchstone for the valedictory moment of the Presidential Address for more optimistic reasons as well. That is so because the forward-looking project of understanding and explaining the eighteenth century in the context of world history, while also expanding the franchise of the people who study it by increasing the diversity of voting members, is the overarching aim of Srinivas Aravamudan’s scholarship. There isn’t space here to do justice to his long list of important works, but I want to reflect briefly on a few of my favorite moments from three of them. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency...

CORRUPTION IN VICO’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. SACRED, PROFANE AND CIVIL TIME

Giambattista Vico's conception of a «storia ideale eterna», in which history is characterised by «corso» and «ricorso», is, on the face of it, highly likely to give prominence to the theme of corruption . It is argued here, however, that corruption plays only a minor part in Vico’s philosophy of history. The explanation for this is found in Vico’s purpose in the Scienza Nuova , to provide an explanation of the formation of human societies which would refute that offered by the Protestant natural jurists, Hobbes, Grotius, Selden and Pufendorf. Against these, Vico would demonstrate the regular operation of divine providence in the «corso» and «ricorso» of nations; and in the «ricorso» following the fall of Rome he believed that modern monarchies had acquired the capacity to resist corruption. By way of epilogue, Vico’s philosophy of history is compared with Rousseau's: it was the latter, it is argued, who made corruption once again a major problem for moral, political and historical philosophers.

From common good to common utility. I. New remarks on intellectual terminology of «Scienza nuova»

From common good to common utility. I. New remarks on intellectual terminology of «Scienza nuova»

Scientific Fact between New Science and Scienza Nuova: Giambattista Vico's Factum and John Toland's Matter of Fact

The article deals with the syncretic construction of fact which took shape in Early Modern Times at an intersection of biblical exegesis, political science, esthetics, historiography and natural sciences epistemology. The study attempts a comparative analysis of Giambattista Vico’s ‘new science’ and John Toland’s ‘travesty philosophy’, outlining shared reference points and structural similarities in their political epistemology: procedure of the authorization of facts, modal implications of the fact, economy of political dissimulation.

CRISTINA DI BELGIOJOSO: SCHOLAR IN EXILE

The life of Cristina di Belgiojoso has been subject to multiple and contradictory interpretation. While much of her vast literary, scholarly and journalistic output, remains to be studied in full, her travel writing from years in exile in the East has been of particular interest to recent readers. This essay seeks to place the writing from the East within the context of Cristina's early scholarship, in particular her work on the early Church fathers in the Essai sur la formation du dogme catholique (1842) and her translation of, and commentary on, Giambattista Vico?s Scienza nuova, translated as La science nouvelle (1844). While the Essai throws an oblique light on what Cristina considered to be ‘bon sens’, social and political progress, it is her admiration for Vico which underscores her account of Eastern societies, rather than ‘Orientalism’ in Edward Said?s terms. On her return to Italy Cristina's hopes for the new nation state are rooted in her own intellectual and political history and personal experience, as she continues to view the new Italy through the same Vichian lens of reason.

SACRED HISTORY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT: NEAPOLITAN RESPONSES TO THE PROBLEM OF SOCIABILITY AFTER HOBBES

ABSTRACTFrom the mid-seventeenth century, the problem of human sociability, long a staple of natural jurisprudence, became even more central to political thought. Faced with Hobbes's insistence on man's natural unsociability, Protestant thinkers continued to treat the question from within natural law. For reasons we do not yet understand, however, Catholic thinkers did not. Instead, it is argued here, they turned to sacred history, and in particular to the Old Testament, as the earliest record of the formation of human societies, Hebrew and gentile. The materials for this enquiry were provided by new critical scholarship on the Bible and the peoples of the ancient Near East. Despite the hostility of the authorities in Rome to its findings, this scholarship was widely available in the Catholic world, notably so in contemporary Naples. Two of the most remarkable applications of sacred history to the problem of sociability were by the Neapolitans Pietro Giannone, in his ‘Triregno’ (1731–3), and Giambattista Vico, in the Scienza nuova (1725–44). These works explored the ways in which family relations, religious practices, and war enabled the ancient Hebrews and their gentile neighbours to form and maintain societies, notwithstanding the unsocial tendency of human passions.

Maravilha e conhecimento de Tasso a Vico

É um lugar comum associar o Barroco à meraviglia. Depois de contemplar o verso de Marino, è del poeta il fin la meraviglia, meu ensaio discutirá as concepções poéticas de Tasso, as quais unem o maravilhoso e a verossimilhança dentro do enquadramento da religião (ou seja, como uma representação do sobrenatural). A formulação de Tasso de que tudo que faz sentido é verdadeiro é discutida aqui em referência aos episódios amorosos de seu poema Jerusalem liberada. O ensaio abordará os escritos teóricos de Francesco Patrizi, que em seu Deca Ammirabil define o poeta como criador do maravilhoso, e também abordará o Cannocchiale Aristotelico de Emanuele Tesauro. O maravilhoso no século XVII também é uma característica dos escritos de Galileu, tanto como um traço da natureza das coisas, como uma manifestação da genialidade dos seres humanos na descoberta e invenção. A conclusão do ensaio enfoca a Scienza Nuova de Vico.

The Aesthetics of Human Experience: Minding, Metaphor, and Icon in Poetic Expression

This paper argues that the cognitive sciences need to incorporate aesthetic study of the arts into their methodologies to fully understand the nature of human cognitive processes, because the arts reflect insights into human experience that are unobtainable by the methodologies of the natural sciences. These insights differ from those acquired by scientific exploration, because they arise not from the conceptual logic of reason but from the precategorial intuition of imagination. Aesthetics provides a methodology whereby we are able to understand how art enables us to experience emotions caused by sense impressions. This methodology lies at the heart of Giambattista Vico’s Principi di scienza nuova (1725–44), which attempts to account for the way we live and participate in cultural, social, and civic communities. Vico’s theory challenges certain Western philosophical presuppositions that still inform much of cognitive science, such as the relation of language to our experience of the natural world, the nature of subjective and objective representations, and the role of the arts in the evolutionary development of the human mind. In basing my approach to literature on Vico’s, Susanne K. Langer’s (1953, 1967), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962 [1945], 1968) theories, I argue that the language of literature is distinguished from conventional language use by its imaginative use of aesthetic patterns that make manifest the inherent character of the external world as we experience it. By introducing the concepts of minding, metaphor, and icon as structures of the imagination, I show how the language of poetic expression in Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” enables us to apprehend the ways we intuitively participate in the reality that underlies our conscious experience. Such participation occurs because sensory impressions of the world we experience cause modifications in the human mind that result in affective responses. Current research in the cognitive sciences increasingly indicates that such modification occurs; aesthetic study of the arts provides a means whereby we can know what it is like to experience such modifications.

La funzione ermeneutica delle immagini nei frontespizi dei libri filosofici

The printed images in the frontispiece of modern philosophical books were not simply meant as decorations, but offered in remarkable cases a pictorial synthesis of the ideas expounded in the book. This is true not only of Bacon’s Instauratio magna, on the background of an explicit theoretical reflection on the use of fables and metaphors in the exposition of scientific truth, but also of Hobbes’ Leviathan, notwithstanding Hobbes’ own criticism of metaphorical language. One third impressive example is the “dipintura” of Vico’s La Scienza Nuova, which is the object of a lengthy hermeneutical analysis by the author himself. The paper argues that the prominent importance of the image in these modern classics reflects the search for a more immediate connection between words and things, whose actuality is still debated in XXthcentury philosophy.

Vico e la «temperatura»: sull’idea di Stato misto nel Diritto Universale

A scholar of Vico for years, the author analyses an issue which has not been very much dealt with in secondary Vichian literature: the issue of forms of Government in Universal Right. His thesis is that, although Vico cannot be considered as a theorist of “mixed” State, in Universal Right he elaborates a complex version of the “temperature” (the “mixtura”) which is functional to the general ethical-metaphysical system of the work, a system whose aim is that of proving the founding superiority of virtue upon strength, reason upon violence. Such system will then be replaced by a more purely anthropological point of view, in the various versions of Scienza Nuova.

Theorizing the Language of Law

law transforms reality, de iure and de facto, inasmuch as it attempts to bridge the gap between that which is done de facto and that which is regulated de iure. it is standard practice, for alfonso X of Castile, to reinvent the means of writing the law. he does not limit himself to compiling or revising existing legal statutes; rather, he elevates the corpus of the law to the level of juridical science. Dominating the meaning of the word—its hermeneutics and its relation to truth, lies, rhetoric, history, and poetry—is also the key to dominating juridical discourse itself and its capacity for creating certainty. or, at least, for controlling uncertainty. uncertainty, that is to say, the ambiguity in the interpretation of the relationship between words and things, appears to be one of the targets of alfonsine juridical science. it is in the institutions that one can best study this desire for control. in particular, the need for control becomes visible in the court and the places related to it (the palace, chamber, or bedroom), codified by the law in order to put justice into action, in the representation of power, in cultural exchange, in education, and in recreation. here legislation acquires a special significance with respect to the word, to narration, and to rhetoric. This is a philological problem: how does one compose and administer a text capable of controlling its own interpretation? how does one transpose this same dynamic to the institutions? how does one transmit this notion from the institution to those who inhabit it and who are, after all, the subjects of the legal science? it is therefore fitting to examine legislation about legal discourse, which is, in itself, the theory of law—not, however, in its abstract aspects but rather in the concrete elements of the formation of a legal vocabulary, in the way in which words, whose semantic and hermeneutic problems are clear, give life to this legal vocabulary. how is legal discourse constructed? in what way is it transmitted? what are the consequences of its dissemination? in what way is the law in charge of words, in particular, those expressed in the institutions? Perhaps the problem is philological, in the sense supposed by giambattista Vico. Vico, in his Principi per una scienza nuova [1: 10] proposed that the study of philosophy, as a science of truth could not exist independently without a philology, the origin of the conscience of certainty (coscienza del certo). attaching myself, then, to this idea of certainty (although not, of course, from Vico’s perspective) throughout this study i shall call “the space of certainty” the theoretical and conceptual construction (which is of both a philological and textual character) stipulated by the legislator in an attempt to control the distinct concepts related to the legal word, its institutional statute and its legal, moral, and cultural hermeneutics. i shall thus attempt to understand the meaning of this space of certainty, in what way it has been constructed, and how it affects legal, political, social, and cultural mechanisms.

What Are Institutions?

The use of the term institution has become widespread in the social sciences in recent years, reflecting the growth in institutional economics and the use of the institution concept in several other disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, politics, and geography. The term has a long history of usage in the social sciences, dating back at least to Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova of 1725. However, even today, there is no unanimity in the definition of this concept. Furthermore, endless disputes over the definitions of key terms such as institution and organization have led some writers to give up matters of definition and to propose getting down somehow to practical matters instead. But it is not possible to carry out any empirical or theoretical analysis of how institutions or organizations work without having some adequate conception of what an institution or an organization is. This paper proposes that those that give up are acting in haste; potentially consensual definitions of these terms are possible, once we overcome a few obstacles and difficulties in the way. It is also important to avoid some biases in the study of institutions, where institutions and characteristics of a particular type are overgeneralized to the set of institutions as a whole. This paper outlines some dangers with regard to an excessive relative stress on self-organization and agent-insensitive institutions. This paper draws on insights from several academic disciplines and is organized in six sections. The first three sections are devoted to the definition and understanding of institutions in general terms. The first section explores the meaning of key terms such as institution, convention, and rule. The second discusses some general issues concerning how institutions function and how they interact with individual agents, their habits,

L' ‘Orphée’ de Ballanche: genèse et signification — Contribution à l'étude de la pensée de Giambattista Vico

By Alan J. L. Busst. (Le Romantisme et après en France, 4). Bern, Peter Lang, 1999. 343 pp. Pb £35.00. Ballanche's reputation as a religious visionary with little grasp of historical realities was solidly established even before his death in 1847. Since then, the proverbial obscurity and density of his work have baffled and discouraged even his most sympathetic readers. Alan Busst's monograph is thus a welcome attempt to demonstrate the unity and coherence of Ballanche's literary output after his seminal third tour of Italy between 1823 and 1825. Busst argues that the suspended publication of Ballanche's Œuvres before the appearance of two volumes of Preuves was profoundly detrimental to the intelligibility of the Essais de palingénésie sociale, and of Orphée in particular. Intended as an appendix to the arcane or encoded allusions in the Essais, the Preuves were to comprise what Ballanche called ‘des dissertations, quelquefois des textes importants, quelquefois des indications d'analogies lumineuses’. The result of a largely unrecorded collaboration between Ballanche and an obscure Italian scholar called Fossati, the extant drafts of the Preuves are today held in the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon together with other previously overlooked archival material. These documents help to clarify the extent of Ballanche's unacknowledged debt to Vico following his discovery of the Neapolitan philosopher's work in 1824. Busst claims that Ballanche's understanding of historical change was considerably influenced by both the Pythagorean doctrine of perfectibility which he found in De antiquissima Italorum sapientia and the analysis of social conflict contained in the Scienza nuova. Vico's portrayal of Roman civilization provided Ballanche with the idea of a permanent dialectical struggle in human affairs, the consequences of which were only fully comprehensible in terms of Christian revelation. Within Ballanche's system, the antagonism between the patricians and plebeians became a model of all social dynamism and at the same time a providential mechanism for the spiritual progress of mankind. Busst discusses the historico-metaphysical foundations of the Essais, but he also clarifies the relation between the Preuves and specific themes in Ballanche's later work, such as the Pelasgian migrations, the dogma of the hierarchy of souls, the ‘loi-mos’ (the long runic poem in Orphée), and the mythical interpretation of the Odyssey. In the final chapter, Busst shows that, despite the author's claims to the contrary, a first version of Orphée was significantly revised in order to accommodate the criticisms and suggestions of Fossati. While Busst makes a strong and persuasive case for the influence of Vico and Fossati upon Ballanche, he does not ignore the problematic nature of this influence, and he is careful to draw attention to anomalies and lacunae in the evidence. At the same time, he does not reduce Ballanche to a mere conduit for Vichean ideas, but rightly mentions his affinities with other syncretist religious thinkers of the early nineteenth century, such as Maistre, Lamennais, and Eckstein. Although marred by occasional repetitiveness and the inclusion of peripheral or superfluous quotations, this is a meticulous and thorough work of archival research that should stimulate new inquiries in Ballanche scholarship.

Probleme im Medium der Anschauung: Giambattista Vicos 'Wahrer Homer' im Frontispiz der "Scienza Nuova"

The central theme of the second edition of Scienza Nuova (1730) by G. B. Vico is discovery of the True Homer, that is, the discovery that Homer was in fact not a historical personality but only a myth. The frontispiece of Scienza Nuova shows Homer as a statue. The paper discusses - on the one hand - the medial aspects of the illustration, with regard to understanding the statue as a singular collective, and on the other hand - the unusual and incomprehensible iconography of the True Homer, where the author tries to define, to what extent it was an independent creation of Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, the artist who designed the frontispiece. Throughout the whole paper the central question, of how far and how well the philosophical thought of the book fits in a given artistic form is investigated, and what breaches result from this relationship of the idea and the form.

The Arts of War: "Visual Presentation" and National Intelligence

The great conflicts that have scarred the twentieth century are rightly called wars, but the meaning of this term has shifted over time. In the most obvious sense, the geographic scope of World Wars I and II was unprecedented: never had the soldiers of so many nations taken up arms, never had so much of the earth been aflame at once. The wars of the twentieth century have been in another sense, however. Although warfare has never left noncombatant populations unscathed, the logistics of permanent mobilization-the condition described by the French urbanist Paul Virilio as pure war'-have drawn upon industry, science, agriculture, education, medicine, and other spheres of civilian life to a wholly unprecedented degree. That war in the nuclear age threatens to be total in yet another sense is a truism that requires no elaboration. This essay concerns the mobilization of the artistic community during World War II, not as expressed in the outraged imagery of a Guernica or a Heartfield montage, but through the direct recruitment of the applied arts-architecture, industrial design, and graphic design-by the Office of Strategic Services, America's wartime intelligence agency. The artists drawn into the of OSS entered the secret war with boundless enthusiasm, a determination to support the anti-Fascist campaign, and -like most other units of the fledgling intelligence service-no particular idea of how they were supposed to do it. Their early campaigns reveal the bravado of infinite possibilities. Gradually, as their ambitions became adjusted to reality, a series of theoretical principles evolved which enabled them to apply the scienza nuova of design to the ancient art of war. Through their pioneering experiments in the visual display of information in the propaganda war, in service of the War Crimes trials at Nuremberg and, finally, in the waning months of the organization, in preparation for the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco; they left a small but indelible mark on history. Armed with this extraordinary wartime experience, they went on to make a much larger mark on their respective professions. The contentious history of the Presentation Branch offers a compelling insight into the politics of both art and intelligence. We begin by recalling the situation that prevailed at the beginning of the war. Acknowledgments: I have greatly benefited from interviews and correspondence with the following alumni of the Presentation Branch, OSS, to whom I express my gratitude: Edna Andrade, Robert Konikow, Oliver Lundquist, Carl Marzani (dec.), Benjamin (and Jane) Thompson, and the tireless Donal McLaughlin. Thanks also are due the embattled National Endowment for the Humanities for research support.

Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge.

Acknowledgements - Note on the Texts - Select List of Vico's Writings and List of Abbreviations - Introduction - Vico's Intellectual Development - Vico's Early Writings, 1709-28 - La Scienza Nuova, 1725, 1730, 1744 - Language, Historical Reconstruction and the Development of Society - Imagination and Historical Knowledge - Conclusion - Notes - Bibliography - Index

Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy, Naturalism and Science in the "Scienza Nuova"

Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy, Naturalism and Science in the "Scienza Nuova"

“Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.”

It was Benedetto Croce, one of Vico's best admirers, who remembered that when Nicola Capasso first opened the Scienza nuova, he fancied he had lost his wits and ... by a joke hurried off to his Doctor Cirillo, to have his pulse felt.1 We may still sympathize a little. For us, the problem of understanding Vico and placing him correctly in Western thought, awkward enough in itself, is compounded by the difficulty in establishing a useful context. Over and over we have heard it said that Vico was ahead

Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns

It was Benedetto Croce, one of Vico's best admirers, who remembered that when Nicola Capasso first opened the Scienza nuova, he fancied he had lost his wits and ... by a joke hurried off to his Doctor Cirillo, to have his pulse felt.1 We may still sympathize a little. For us, the problem of understanding Vico and placing him correctly in Western thought, awkward enough in itself, is compounded by the difficulty in establishing a useful context. Over and over we have heard it said that Vico was ahead

Heracles and the Passage from Nature to Culture in G. Vico's La Scienza Nuova

In order to explain ancient myths rationally, Vico claims that one must affect to have no erudition whatever (in his words, “ridursi in uno stato di somma ignoranza di tutta l'umana e divina erudizione”), for myths are not fables but accounts of the beginnings of civil history as primitive minds, comparable to the minds of children, might have been expected to relate them. Later thinkers who dwelled on these “narrations” with their own civilized minds, failed to seek in them the very framework of the primitive and poetic world they described.