New Science

Giambattista Vico

Apr. 1999 · Penguin UK

Über dieses E-Book

Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern, it argues that the key to true understanding of the past lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of ancient Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians were radically different from our own. Along the way, Vico explores a huge variety of topics, ranging from physics to poetics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Marking a crucial turning-point in humanist thinking, New Science has remained deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, inspiring the work of Karl Marx and even influencing the framework for Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

Bewertungen und Rezensionen

A must reader for all sociologists and other social scientists. Brilliant and still very actual, as outlining the foundation for a science of national societies. Vico anticipates the at his time not yet existing anthropology, puts philology in relation to philosophy and clarifies the concept of mind and social and human institutions. He proves that sociology has to be based in historical research, anticipating the evolutionary character of social systems, what Marx, Elias and Luhmann confirmed much later. A pity that this book took about hundred years to be discovered outside Italy. And still today it is not fully appreciated. Imagine the same would have happened with the research of Newton in physics...But it’s never to late. Our time needs better science in order to understand the current relations of nations and societies as particularly the emergent world society.

Autoren-Profil

Although Vico (1668-1744) lived his whole life as an obscure academic in Naples, his New Science is an astonishingly ambitious attempt to decode the history, mythology and law of the ancient world.