113 / 298
Vico’s Ring
113
Luft on the
verum-factum
principle which in Luft’s interpretation concerns orig-
inary socio-linguistic creativity
ex nihilo.
Lollini’s rejoinder is: «Il racconto vi-
chiano delle origini dell’umanità gentile non si basa sull’idea di una creazione
dal nulla, ma sulle concrete pratiche linguistiche e sociali dei proto-umani che
vivono in un particolare e specifico contesto naturale loro dato (Vico’s ac-
count of the origins of gentile [non-Hebrew] humanity is not based on a crea-
tion out of nothing, but on the concrete linguistic and social practices of the
proto-humans that lived in a particular and specific natural environment avail-
able to them)» (Id.,
Natura, ragione e modernità nella Scienza nuova di Vico
, in
Ra-
zionalità e modernità in Vico
, cit., p. 230; S. Luft’s work is
Uncanny Humanism:
Reading the “New Science”
between Modern and Postmodern
, Ithaca, Cornell Universi-
ty Press, 2003).
205
Philosophy
, Chapter 20: «The jurisconsults surpass the philosophers be-
cause […] by the power of truth itself they approached Platonism quite una-
wares while doing something else, namely, interpreting the laws». As already
quoted above, Vico went as far as saying that «philosophy follow[s] as a nec-
essary consequence from philology». Cfr. D. Di Cesare,
Parola, logos, dabar
, cit.,
p. 262: «Alla filologia viene attribuito un ruolo fondamentale; essa diviene la
condizione stessa della filosofia. Sulla base della filologia quest’ultima può er-
gersi a «scienza del vero» (A fundamental role is attributed to philology; it be-
comes the condition of possibility itself of philosophy. On the basis of philol-
ogy, the latter can raise itself to «science/knowledge of the true»)».
It is of interest to note that the problematic that Vico grappled with, still
occupies social thinkers today, evidenced by the statement: «I am afraid that
this [using only conceptual analysis and intuition] would condemn philoso-
phers to focus on only half of the story (or maybe even less). […] What phi-
losophers need is a combination of these tools with the methods provided by
the sciences, especially the empirical ones. The alternative is to quickly reach
the limits of what can be achieved by a priori reasoning […]» (F. Guala,
The
Philosophy of Social Science: Metaphysical
and
Empirical
, in «Philosophy Compass»,
2, 2007, 6, pp. 954-980, p. 975-976).
206
Cristofolini compares the Axiom with a putatively identical statement
by Spinoza (
Ethics
, II, 7) and observes: «In Vico però non si tratta di un prin-
cipio descrittivo del corso delle cose, ma di un principio prescrittivo per il
corso della scienza (In Vico, however, it does not have to do with a descrip-
tive principle of the course of institutions, but a prescriptive principle for the
course of knowledge acquisition)» (Id.,
La Scienza nuova
di Vico
, cit., p. 81). V.
Vitiello also makes reference to Spinoza, in a discussion of E. Paci’s philoso-
phy, and quotes Paci as pointing out another difference: «Vico differisce da
Spinoza in quanto le idee vichiane sono modi dell’uomo e non di Dio (Vico