104 / 298
Horst Steinke
104
knowledge, and then effectively applied to the task of giving
structure to knowledge-acquisition in the world of humans and
history
251
. As the fundamental, intuitive – though not
ex nihilo
–
notion of the “metaphysical point” in
De antiquissima
was behind
the correct mathematical definition of the geometric point, thus
forestalling major conceptual errors, so Vico’s “philosophy” in
Scienza nuova
with its fundamental notions about human nature,
in particular its irreducible social dimension, guided his social
and historical theorizing in “philology”, and enabled him to cast
alternative proposals in a critical light. Among the key results of
seeing mathematics in terms of a mediating role was the refuta-
tion of the Cartesian “mathematization” of nature, of the iso-
morphism between nature and geometry. Analogously, with re-
spect to “philology” in
Scienza nuova
, no totalizing claim is made,
all pretension to full congruence of theoretical description and
historical reality is abjured by making the three great constants of
human life, and uncontrollable “providence”, as integral to the
overall cognitive framework as the purely theoretical proposi-
tions.
Notes to Chapter 5
165
Referred to in footnote 160 above.
166
This approach raises the issue of anachronism, all the more so since
Vico himself made anachronism a fundamental point of argument against var-
ious important social theorists of the early modern era, including Grotius, Sel-
den, Pufendorf, Spinoza, and Hobbes. According to B. A. Haddock, Vico
maintained that their «misadventures in historical reconstruction are each at-
tributable to a predilection for using the present as a criterion to evaluate the
past» (Id.,
Vico and Anachronism
, in «Political Studies», 24, 1976, 4, pp. 483-487,
p. 483). Therefore, a brief account of the kinds of anachronisms employed in
the present exposition, as well as in common academic practice, is called for.
One type is more or less terminological. As pointed out above, Vico uses the
terms “philosophy” and “philology” in idiosyncretic ways, and while our sug-
gested terms “pre-theoretic” and “theory” capture the distinction, they are by
no means entirely congruent with the original terms. Similar observations