Author: Emanuel Paparella

In 1976 A. Robert Caponigri of Notre Dame University published an essay in honor of the great Yale Dante and Vico scholar Thomas Bergin (in Italian Literature: Roots and Branches, Yale University Press) in which he stated that “In the ‘Scienza Nuova’ Vico anticipates by two centuries contemporary man’s most profound discovery concerning himself: the…

The bias in favor of science and against humanistic modes of thought is in line with the Cartesian paradigm which, as we shall analyze more thoroughly later on, cavalierly dispenses with the humanities—i.e., disciplines such as rhetoric, myth, poetry, religion—as being too inaccurate and not “scientific” enough, while privileging geometrical abstract reasoning; a kind of…

After a preparatory preamble on Providenceand the historical consciousness, I’d like to begin the journey into Vico’s mind with a metaphor from my own intellectual life-experience: that of a long journey on a train and the reflections it engendered. The train’s journey began from Ft.Lauderdale, Florida, bound for New Haven, Connecticut. It was the summer…

“But that was it—you never could think what things would be like if they weren’t just what and where they were. You never knew what was coming, either; and yet when it came, it seemed as if nothing else ever could have come. That was queer—you could do anything you liked until you’d done it,…

Vico’s New Science has often been identified as “a science of humanity.” As such it leads its readers to an exploration of what it means to be human, that is to say, to a journey into the self. We shall see that Vico considered self-knowledge essential for the road to wisdom, even more so than…

Having provided for the readers a very broad and general overview of Vico’s poetic philosophy I would now like to focus via a weekly column on some of its most important aspects, first and foremost the Vichian idea of providence which, as announced in the commentary on The New Science’s frontispiece, informs the whole of…