Abstract

The Italian writer Giambattista Vico is widely recognized as the first modern philosopher of history, and his New Science is generally considered an early example of the now predominant historical approach to the study of society. While not entirely misleading, this interpretation of Vico's masterwork assumes him to have been an unqualified partisan of modern science and political thought, and takes the derivation of a modern method for studying history to have been his primary concern. This dissertation takes issue with such an interpretation, and introduces Vico instead as a thinker with deep reservations about the modern outlook, one who turned to a science of history primarily to combat what he considered its most dangerous side-effect: skepticism. ;Such a reading of Vico's thought depends on a close examination of his early metaphysical and jurisprudential writings, and especially of his multi-volume treatise on Universal Right , published between 1720 and 1722. Vico's philosophical writings are seen to begin with a critique of the epistemological skepticism underlying the work of Descartes, and with a defense of ancient educational methods. Soon thereafter he became an essentially political thinker, taking as his target the "skepticism" of modern political philosophy, and particularly the works of Mahciavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, and Locke. Against these modern thinkers--who, he claims, denied the existence of the soul, justice, and providence--Vico defended a new theological theory of natural right and a glorified view of Roman virtue. ;Put in the context of these rarely studied Latin and Italian works , his better known New Science can be seen in a new light. It now appears as an antimodern "modern" science, a historical theodicy whose aim was to refute the political skeptics in their own modern scientific terms and to guard against the social decadence they encouraged. By recovering Vico's original theological aims from anachronistic misinterpretations of his New Science, this dissertation also suggests a more nuanced view of the relation between the tradition of Christian theodicy and the rise of modern historicism