116 / 298
Horst Steinke
116
desired state. For further lexical information on the verb, see R. Ruggiero,
No-
va Scientia Tentatur
, cit., p. 141, footnote 1.
217
G. Cacciatore,
Un’ idea moderna di certezza
, cit., p. 195; A. Battistini,
Note
conclusive
, in
Vico nella storia della filologia
, cit., pp. 199-208, p. 206.
218
D. Ph. Verene summeds it up well: «What has been originally made by
human choice, a custom, a word, a law in the particular life of a people, must
be remade by an act of philosophical thought that shows how it embodies in
itself not just the conditions or history of that people but the universal princi-
ples of humanity» (Id.,
Imaginative Universals and Narrative Truth
, cit., p. 9).
219
For the original Italian see G. Vico,
La Scienza nuova
.
Le tre edizioni
, cit.,
p. 893; italics and capitalization in the original.
220
As already stated above, both functors are a
pair
, and in category-
theoretic language, they are
left-adjoint
and
right-adjoint
, according to their re-
spective direction. The sense of pairing is captured by N. Struever’s com-
pound expression of «philosophicalised philology and historicized philoso-
phy» (Id.,
Collingwood’s Vichianism
, in
Razionalità e modernità in Vico,
cit., pp. 317-
333, p. 331). Struever associates the first approach with Vico, the second with
Collingwood, while we find both approaches present in Vico.
We are therefore only in partial, qualified agreement with L. Pompa who
described Vico’s “logic” as follows: «The “ideal eternal history” is therefore a
theory about the nature and history of a possible society, deduced from a
network of mutually consistent, universal, and necessary synthetic proposi-
tions. The formulation of the categorical relationships which is assumed in the
statements of these propositions is the first part of the work of the philoso-
pher. This adducing of actual propositions, and the deduction of the theory
from them, is the second part of the work of the philosopher, i.e., the work of
the philosopher understood as a theoretical sociologist» (Id.,
Vico’s Science
, in
«History and Theory», 10, 1971, 1, pp. 49-83, p. 67; also appeared in Italian as
La scienza di Vico
, trans. by M. Donzelli, in «BCSV», II, 1972, pp. 13-51). We
can agree to denoting the
ideal eternal history
as a «theory», as the work of a
«theoretical sociologist», as well to the «formulation of the categorical rela-
tionships […] of the philosophers», however, the “adjunction” of mutually
interacting functors between “philosophy” and “philology” precludes any type
of straightforwardly “deductive” nexus. Pompa develops his thesis also in his
Vico: A Study of the “New Science”
, cit., pp. 73-111; Id.,
Hermenéutica Metafísica y
Metafísica Hermenéutica
, trans. by J. A. Marín-Casanova, in «CsV», 7-8, 1997, pp.
141-165.
221
According to Schaeffer, «the principle implicated in custom must be
exposed so that they may be altered or reaffirmed in a new praxis or in a
code» (Id.,
Vico’s Il diritto universale and Roman Law
, cit., p. 50). «The principles