Way back in the seventeenth century, the Cartesian mind-set envisioned the machine as a tool to systematically order human experience through a rationalistic division and conversion into procedures of all the processes of the human world. Vico intuited that in that kind of technological world little room is left for works of humanistic imagination (e.g.,…
In his 1924 book on The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Edwin Arthur Burtt wrote this perceptive passage: “An adequate cosmology will only begin to be written when an adequate philosophy of mind has appeared, and such a philosophy of mind must provide full satisfaction both for the motives of the behaviorists who wish to…
In the light of the explorations we have conducted in Vico’s speculation on Man’s humanity, I’d like to offer some personal Vichian reflections on the subject. The ancient Greeks warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living; that man needs to ask the question what does it mean to be human and only…
One of the most misunderstood concepts in Vico’s speculation is that of Providence, yet it remains the sine qua non for presenting an undistorted Vico. Within Vico’s concept of Providence there are two complementary poles, namely transcendence and immanence. Some have misguidedly attempted a resolution of the antinomy by searching for the right rational middle…
The concrete without the universal becomes trivial. The universal without the concrete becomes irrelevant —Alfred N. Whitehead Within Vico’s historicism verum/factum, life/thought, form/content, subjective/objective are distinguishable but not separable. They are complementary to each other. Vico was acutely aware that to treat real concrete moments of Man’s history as mere moments of something higher is…
I cannot understand how our minds, which have been formed by responses to the emergencies of a small corner of space and time, could possibly comprehend a revelation of the total universe, even if it were granted them. I can understand that we might be given a mystical intuition of the nature of the universe,…
Some of the latest movies on war exhibit this dehumanizing process. In them violence has no face, suffering has no purpose and ethical considerations have no place. Homer’s Iliad they are not. Efficiency and effectiveness is the name of the game in those movies; nothing less than a prescription for insanity. In his book Orthodoxy,…
“The act of faith consists essentially in knowledge and there we find its formal and specific perfection.”—Thomas Aquinas Beginning with the Cartesian rationalistic, dualistic paradigm of perceiving reality there is within Western Civilization an unfortunate tendency to see science and religion in an adversary relationship to each other, but that is a false dichotomy. It…
Vico is particularly interested in demonstrating through his science of humanity the presence of a reality, which he calls providence, immanent within man’s history and operating primarily through man’s freedom, but also through social phenomena and institutions such as shame, honor, utility, authority, religion, family, language. In his De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia Vico had already…
To understand the imaginative universal one has to begin with myth which for Vico is the primordial spiritual movement of primitive man, the mediator between nature and spirit, between what is useful and what is moral, between natural necessity and law. Vico is the first thinker to be aware that indeed myth is truth that…