109 / 298
Vico’s Ring
109
in
Vico nella storia della filologia,
cit., particularly the contributions of C. Asso,
“Erasmus redivivus”.
Alcune osservazione sulla filologia neotestamentaria di Jean Le
Clerc
,
pp. 79-115; A. Viana,
A los pies de gigantes. Notes sobre la emergencia del “ars
critica”
, pp. 17-51. Viana, for instance, quotes a passage on philology by Juan
Luís Vives (1531) in which Viana sees «the absolute similarity» with § 139 of
the
Scienza nuova
(1744) with respect to the encyclopedic, “hyper”-textual,
scope of philology; Viana at the same time acknowledges that Vives’ defini-
tion remains «sin desarrollar como propuesta metodológica (without develop-
ing it as a methodological proposition)» (
ibid.
, pp. 26-27, and footnote 22).
The crux of the matter, from our vantage point, is of course precisely the the-
oretical, propositional core of Vichian “philology”.
186
See again my
Vico’s Three Realms
, cit., for further explanation and illus-
tration.
187
See A. Caponigri,
Time and Idea
, cit., pp. 65-66. Caponigri explains: «The
movement of this science would be oscillatory. The terms of its movement
would be, on the one hand, the idea; specifically, the idea of that humanity
which is realized in the relations of community; on the other, the concrete
forms of sociality. […] The primary orientation of the science of humanity
must be toward the idea
. […] The path of the science
leads back from the idea
to the
concreteness of social process not as something extraneous to that idea but as
to another dimension of it» (italics added).
188
G. Cacciatore made it clear that when speaking of the
factual
, it must be
bound up with the theoretical: «Nel
fatto
si concretizza (assume “corporeità”)
il
vero
, ma il fatto se non fa riferimento a una tavola di principi – […] alle strut-
ture mentale costanti, agli
eide
della mente – resta insignificante (In the
factual,
the
true
becomes concrete (takes on “corporeity”), but the factual that fails to
make reference to a set of principles – to the mental structures that remain
constant, to the
eide
of the mind – remains insignificant)» (Id.,
Un’idea moderna
di certezza: la filologia di Vico tra ermeneutica e filosofia
, in
Vico nella storia della filolo-
gia
, cit., pp. 177-197, p. 177). Throughout his contribution, Cacciatore high-
lights the propositional, systematic framework of Vico’s philology, contradis-
tinguishing it both from the baldly empirical, on the one hand, and abstract
philosophical “reason”, on the other hand. Without claiming necessarily con-
gruence in all respects, of his views with the thesis expressed at present, the
following two excerpts can be read to be in basic agreement on the epistemic
status of “philology”: «[I]nteressa evidenziare la struttura “teoretica” dell’argo-
mento vichiano, impegnato […] a ritrovare i nessi tra verità e certezza, tra
universalità “filosofica” delle idee e storicità “ermeneutico-filologica” dei cos-
tume umani e delle istituzioni civili (It is of interest to explicate the “theoreti-
cal” structure of the Vichian reasoning which is committed to bringing to