Comunicación sobre la reciente edición / Communication about this recent edition: Giambattista Vico, PRINCIPJ D'UNA SCIENZA NUOVA D'INTORNO ALLA COMUNE NATURA DELLE NAZIONI , a cura di Fabrizio Lomonaco e Fulvio Tessitore con una Nota di Manuela Sanna, Liguori Editore, Napoli, 2002, pp. 528.

Reason and law before New Sciences -- Dominion, liberty, tutelage : law, ethics and history in De uno -- The "constancy" of the divine and human things -- From Grotius to Vico : the "Natural right of the gentes.".

Estudio histórico-crítico bibliográfico del anuario Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani desde 1971 hasta 2000.PALABRAS CLAVE: Vico, Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, historia, filología, filosofía.This is a historical and critical bibliographic study of the yearbook Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, from 1971 to 2000.KEYWORDS: Vico, Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani, history, philology, philosophy.

This chapter is dedicated to the Cassirer’s theories concerning The Logik of Humanities and others Cassirer’s Essais on the «Philosophy of Culture.» The first part presents the concrete passages of mutual criticism on language and its relations with art and in relation to the interpretation of the modern history of philosophy. Brief final remarks recapitulate some radically different ways of understanding idealism with respect to the spiritual activity of man in the history.

Este trabajo realiza una reseña historiográfica de la bio-bibliografía de Pietro Piovani y de su activismo viquiano. Actividades en las que se encuentra, entre otras, la fundación del Centro di Studi Vichiani y del "Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani".To the memory of Pietro Piovani's thought and work in his death's twentieth anniversary. This papers outlines an historiographical review of Pietro Piovani's bio-bibliography and his devoted Vichian activism. Among those activities there might be quoted the foundation of the Centro di (...) Studi Vichiani and the "Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani". (shrink)

The Pietro Piovani Foundation for Vico Studies has launched a new series of the Collectio Viciana “Texts” with the anastatic reprint of the 1730 New Science. A discussion of the Foundation’s choice to reproduce the work and of many features of the text of the Second New Science is offered to accompany the publication of the text.

Questo saggio discute i volume di libro di Pietro Piovani Conoscenza storica e coscienza morale. Non è una semplice raccolta di saggi , perché c’è un’unità profonda delle pagine data da un interno filo conduttore identificato con la meditazione sul problema della specificità del conoscere, sulle sue conseguenze, tra cui emerge, dunque, la lenta maturazione novecentesca di un senso nuovo della storicità. Nella crisi dei valori assiologici il filosofo napoletano dedica particolare attenzione all'oggetto dello scandalo, l'individualità e pone la questione (...) di partenza comune all’esistenzialismo e alla fenomenologia: la datità primaria dell'ordine, come l'individualità di ordinazione, osservato da Ernst Troeltsch in Der Historismus und seine Probleme. Alle radici del nuovo storicismo in senso critico è il tentativo di dinamicizzare la datità del soggetto nella costitutiva “situazionalità” storica. Nell’individualità come “insolubile mistero” della vita è racchiuso un nucleo di umanità in espansione che il soggetto moderno ha lasciato in eredità allo Storicismo in coerenza con un processo di oggettivazione attraverso il quale l’esistente si autocostruisce quale doveroso-necessario ampliarsi e perfezionarsi. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band diskutiert die Geschichts- und Sprachphilosophie Giambattista Vicos, primär in Bezug auf die Rechtslehre. Dabei wird Vico sowohl als Denker seines Zeitalters als auch in der Auseinandersetzung mit Autoren wie Suárez, Bacon, Descartes etc. gelesen und es ergeben sich immer wieder Bezüge zu aktuellen Debatten.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 659-676 [Access article in PDF] Adam Smith's "Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review" Jeffrey Lomonaco One of Adam Smith's first publications was a letter addressed to the editors of the Edinburgh Review, printed anonymously in the second issue of the semiannual periodical in 1756. 1 The compact text entitled "A LETTER to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review," (...) which has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, offers valuable insight into Smith's work and career, and not merely because it confirms that Smith was an unusually widely-read man of letters long before he was the retrospectively anointed founder of the discipline of economics, though it does that. Indeed, the thirty-two-year-old writer presumes to pass judgment on the writing and learning of Europe as a whole and specifically assesses the only recently published work of Rousseau, the Encyclopédie project still in progress, and the work of Réaumur, Buffon and Daubenton, Descartes, Newton, and others. In this text (whose authorship was known well before Dugald Stewart noted it in his biographical account in the early 1790s) Smith delineates a space of learning that is at once Scottish, British, and European, mapping out a set of relations of complex rivalry between France, England, and Scotland in order to articulate and advocate a cosmopolitan patriotism. 2 He suggests that while England occupied the preeminent position in learning in the past, France does so in the present, and Scotland is in a position to do so in the near future, if it is properly incited. Smith's careful [End Page 659] rhetorical incitement of his Scottish contemporaries to fulfill this promise of future primacy in learning also reveals his own ambitions and how he proposed to realize them.My reading of the text will throw into relief Smith's strategy and show how, although Smith does not name his good friend David Hume, he subtly expresses his own allegiances to the Humean science of man as the way for Scotland to achieve primacy in the world of learning, and he indicates that the most important task facing the world of knowledge—the task he takes as his own—concerns the proper systematic organization and presentation of moral knowledge. That Smith's is a subtle writerly performance which calls for attention to the grain of the text is itself part of the point of my interpretation, especially since the rhetorical care Smith took in composition is generally underestimated, or at least not adequately attended to in detail. 3 Judging Rivals The Edinburgh Review was a project begun by a number of members of the Select Society, one of those social vehicles of improvement and enlightenment that flourished throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. 4 Smith was a founding member of the Select Society in 1754 and may have been one of the initiators of the periodical, to the inaugural 1755 issue of which he contributed a review of Johnson's Dictionary. 5 The preface of the opening issue of the Review, probably written by the editor Alexander Wedderburn, a close friend of Smith's, positioned the Review as Scotland's somewhat belated contribution to the widespread European print enterprise of bringing advances in knowledge to the attention of the public. 6 The purpose of the periodical, Wedderburn's preface declared, was to demonstrate "the progressive state of learning in this country" and thereby to incite Scots "to a more eager pursuit of learning, to [End Page 660] distinguish themselves, and to do honour to their country." 7 To these ends each issue of the Review was going "to give a full account of all books published in Scotland within the compass of half a year; and to take some notice of such books published elsewhere, as are most read in this country, or seem to have any title to draw the public attention." 8 The title page of the first issue, which appeared on 26 August 1755 and which covered books published between 1 January and... (shrink)

A partir del estudio comparativo de dos obras –el eje del análisis lo constituye el "Iusnaturalismo y Ética Moderna" de Grocio, uno de los cuatro autores explícitamente reconocidos cono fuentes por Vico, de quien Lomonaco escoge la quinta prolusión de apertura de curso en la Universidad de Nápoles– se destacan las interrelaciones que, necesariamente, han de conectar la reflexión filosófica y la práctica juridica, ámbitos entre los cuales median siempre delicadas cuestiones de carácter ético que están, además, inevitablemente impregnadas (...) de historicidad. Se trata, pues, de apuntar algunas ideas acerca del tema "derecho-naturaleza-historia" que, desde la óptica grociana-viquiana, supone incluso una transformación de modelos antropológicos a través del tamiz de un humanismo universalista.From the study of two works –although the core of the analysis is based on Grocio’s "Iusnaturalism and Modern Ethics", an author whom Vico explicitly acknowledges as one of his sources– the interconnections between philosophical reflection and legal practice are emphasized. The aim is to outline some ideas about the problems involved with the wide relationship between "law-nature-history", which from the Grocian-Vichian point of view lead to a deep transformation of anthropological patterns along the lines of the Universalist humanism’s principles. (shrink)

Partiendo de la definición crítica del “humanismo” en Said y de sus fuentes de crítica literaria (Auerbach) y de teoría política (Gramsci), este estudio intenta mostrar la originalidad de la aproximación de Said a Vico, en la medida en que los “textos” resultan reclamados para los contrastes y las luchas de donde emergen. El filósofo napolitano reconoce la centralidad de las “vulgares” circunstancias físicas de la propia biografía intelectual y de las fábulas antiguas, estropeadas y corrompidas, como las recibidas de (...) Homero. Para el estudioso americano de origen palestino recorrer la historia de la cultura en perspectiva filológica significa reconstruir los lazos entre tradiciones diversas y antagónicas como aquellos entre mundo árabe, hebreo y cristiano contra la distorsión de los documentos sagrados y profanos cotidianamente operado por los lenguajes del poder y de los medios. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks to characterize the style of government embodied in Adam Smith's vision of civil society. It is composed of two parts. The first, preparatory part develops a framework for offering a historically sensitive interpretation of Smith's works by drawing on and criticizing the treatment of the eighteenth century in the work of several contemporary political theorists and historians of political thought. Part II gives the full-fledged interpretation of Smith's thought, based on both detailed textual interpretation and broad contextual (...) juxtaposition. Smith's highly systematic knowledge of the governance of conduct in civil society forms an innovative response to a political problem first articulated in sixteenth-century raison d'etat, reformulated in seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence, the eighteenth-century discourse of polite sociability and its Mandevillean critique, and posed in acute form by Hume. The problem was how to secure the survival, and enhance the strength, of the political order under conditions both of international military-commercial competition and potentially devastating internal social conflict that could eventuate in the kinds of civil wars that wracked the seventeenth century. ;Accepting Hume's reduction of civil society to an immanent plane devoid of providential guarantee of social harmony, Smith shows, in a first moment, how individuals in civil society are able to govern themselves freely and naturally, and how social order is produced and reproduced naturally. The sympathetic sociability and the natural development of the individual's conscience and sense of duty depicted in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the commercial society depicted in the Wealth of Nations seem to obviate the need for invasive political governance. To this extent, Smith's "system of natural liberty" entails a minimal style of governance, oriented around the negative activity of administering justice, that is, of protecting individuals' rights by preventing and punishing injustice. However, Smith observes that the contemporary form of civil society necessarily produces among those he calls "the labouring poor," who constitute "the great body of the people," the very forces of "faction" and "fanaticism" that threaten to destroy political authority and social tranquillity. In response, Smith theorizes a more minute, controlling style of governance, oriented around the positive activity of forming and reforming the unruly lower ranks through habituation to a condition of orderliness, discipline and moderation. Smith takes up a series of existing practices for moderating conduct and forming character---practices embodied in educational, military, religious, manufactory and even recreational institutions---and projects them into an overall governmental strategy, theoretically unifying them by means of the jurisprudential category of police. Commerce, polite sociability, the self-governing individual, the practice of justice, the stability of government---in short, civil society as such---turn out to be dependent on the effective subjection of the great body of the people to police institutions. In Smith's comprehensive picture of civil society and government, justice and police represent not an ideal for civil society and its unfortunate but merely de facto subversion, respectively, but rather two ideals of civil society which exist in a relationship of uneasy complementarity. (shrink)

Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in ‘Cynthia will pass her exam’, will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are designed to satisfy different theoretical constraints, apparently pulling in opposite directions. We show that these constraints are (...) jointly satisfied by a novel modal account of will. On this account, will is a modal but doesn't work as a quantifier over worlds. Rather, the meaning of will involves a selection function similar to the one used by Stalnaker in his semantics for conditionals. The resulting theory yields a plausible semantics and logic for will and vindicates our intuitive views about the attitudes that rational agents should have towards future-directed contents. (shrink)

This book analyzes the uses of emotive language and redefinitions from pragmatic, dialectical, epistemic and rhetorical perspectives, investigating the relationship between emotions, persuasion and meaning, and focusing on the implicit dimension of the use of a word and its dialectical effects. It offers a method for evaluating the persuasive and manipulative uses of emotive language in ordinary and political discourse. Through the analysis of political speeches and legal arguments, the book offers a systematic study of emotive language in argumentation, rhetoric, (...) communication, political science and public speaking. (shrink)

The 14 essays collected in this volume explore the various aspects of Augustine’s philosophy and its medieval reception: by considering his education and the development of his thought as conveyed by a series of philosophical images and styles, the volume reconstructs the recurring motifs of his intellectual journey (the anti-Manichean polemic, his political vision, the role of reason, and the theory of war) and their fortune in authors such as Thomas Aquinas, Nicole Oresme, Gregory of Rimini, and Robert Grosseteste.