119 / 298
Vico’s Ring
119
mately eliminating them from consideration in favor of the three he settled on
in particular. He provided an example of such engagement, in fact, in support
of the place of religion in § 334, in interaction with Peter Bayle who had
claimed that there were human societies without any religion (
ibid.
,
p. 55). If
an (anachronistic) side glance may be permitted here, other investigators have
proposed very different primeval origins of civilization, such as
cities, music
,
metals,
on the one hand, and
money, religion, empire
, on the other hand. (For the
first triple, see D. D. Lowery,
Toward a Poetics of Genesis 1-11: Reading Genesis
4:17-22 in Its Ancient Near Eastern Background
, Winona Lake, Indiana, Ei-
senbrauns, 2013; for the second triple, Y. N. Harari,
Sapiens: A Brief History of
Humankind
, trans. by the author with help of J. Purcell and H. Watzman, New
York, HarperCollins, 2015; first published in Hebrew by Kinneret, Zmora-
Bitan, Dvir, Israel, 2011).
233
G. Mazzotta commented: «The “principles” are in fact origins, begin-
nings, foundations, causes, or true criteria of the historical science, as Vico’s
self-reflection make clear» (Id.,
Universal History: The New Science between Anti-
quarians and Ethnographers,
in
Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain, and the New World
,
ed. by D. Castillo and M. Lollini, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2006,
pp. 316-330, p. 316).
234
Our view has certain affinities with G. Bedani,
Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy,
Naturalism and Science in the Scienza nuova
, Oxford-Hamburg-Munich, Berg,
1989, who highlights Vico’s “naturalism” (
ibid.
, pp. 255-259).
235
«Providence» plays a key role in Vico’s account. In Vico studies, two
main “schools of thought” on Vico’s meaning are to be noted, the “transcen-
dentalist” and “immanentist” understanding; see E. L. Paparella,
The Paradox
of Transcendence and Immanence in Vico’s Concept of Providence,
in «Metanexus
»
(
<http://metanexus.net>
), February 18, 2008; Id.,
Hermeneutics in the Philosophy
of Giambattista Vico
, San Francisco, Mellen Research University
Press/EMText, 1993, pp. 153-159. For instance, the transcendentalist view is
ascribed to Vico in Galeazzi,
Hermeneutica e storia in Vico,
cit., pp. 35-37; on the
other hand, taking a historical/historicist position, P. J. FitzPatrick contends:
«[…] Vico spoke within a tradition of thought for which some kind of theodi-
cy was inevitable» (Id.,
Vieni, Vedi, Vico,
in «Journal for Eigtheenth-Century
Studies», 7, 1984, 1, pp. 77-85, p. 79). See also the discussion in V. Hösle,
Einleitung
, cit., pp. CXXIV-CXXX, including the observation: «Vico ist zu
recht von der Überzeugung durchdrungen, dass eine Kenntnis der Inten-
tionen der handelnden Subjekte nicht ausreichend ist, um den Lauf der Ges-
chichte zu verstehen (Vico, rightly, is deeply convinced that knowledge of the
intentions of the acting subjects is not sufficient in order to understand the
course of history)» (p. CXXV). A survey of the debate can be found in E.