Giambattista Vico: Keys to the "New Science"

Thora Ilin Bayer is RosaMary Foundation Professor of Liberal Arts at Xavier University of Louisiana. She is the author of Cassirer's Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary. Donald Phillip Verene is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Vico Studies at Emory University. His many books include Vico's Science of Imagination and The Art of Humane Education, both from Cornell.

• Introduction: Interpreting the New SciencePart 1: Background of the New Science in the Universal Law (1720–2722)Synopsis of Universal LawThe True and the Certain: From On the One Principle and One End of Universal LawA New Science Is Essayed: From On the Constancy of the JurisprudentOn Homer and His Two Poems: From the DissertationsVico's Address to His Readers from a Lost Manuscript on JurisprudencePart 2: Reception of the First New Science (1725)Vico's Reply to the False Book Notice: The Vici VindiciaePart 3: Additions to the Second New Science (1730/1744)Vico's "IGNOTA LATEBAT": On the Impresa and the DipinturaVico's Addition to the Tree of the Poetic Sciences and His Use of the MusesVico's Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke

"This is a fine and comprehensive summary of a controversial and many-faceted thinker. It draws upon Vico's lesser known writings in his long and complex pilgrimage from humanist philology through jurisprudence and Homeric poetry to philosophy. This includes not only the crucial published work on universal law but also a manuscript fragment relating to it, Vico's reply to the early review of his 'new science,' additions to the second edition of work, his late conception of the classical muses, his 'tree of knowledge,' and his critique of Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke. All of these, not always available in the existing English translations, come with important and valuable interpretation, commentary, and a review of Vico's metaphysics. A complete bibliography of English-language translations of Vico's writings is appended. Vico's work is seldom, if ever, seen historically and as a whole. This work is much more significant than the numerous speculative interpretations that place him in fanciful contexts, and it is essential to a correct and comprehensive view of the scholar who was at once one of the last of the humanists and one of the first practitioners and theoreticians of the modern human sciences."