Table of Contents Table of Contents
Previous Page  224 / 298 Next Page
Information
Show Menu
Previous Page 224 / 298 Next Page
Page Background

Horst Steinke

224

with his epistemic system no less so than his interpretative strat-

egy of Scripture

533

.

Our inquiry into Spinoza’s hermeneutics was occasioned by

both Spinoza and Vico studies that argue for closeness of their

hermeneutical strategies, with respect to the Bible, for the for-

mer, and Homer’s works, for the latter, if not for a high degree

of conceptual indebtedness of the latter to the former. The fol-

lowing sections will be devoted to certain aspects of Vico’s in-

terpretative turn as they bear on this question, primarily as a heu-

ristic means of bringing Vico’s views into sharper focus.

Notes to Chapter 9

409

L. Amoroso, for example, likely is speaking for many Vico (and Spino-

za) scholars when he stated: «Spinoza, ancora, argomenta che la tradizionale

attribuzione del

Pentateuco

a Mosè è insostenible. […] Questa tesi spinoziana

ha tanti elementi di analogia con la «discoverta del vero Omero» da parte di

Vico da far supporre addirittura che quest’ultima sia stata in parte ispirata da

quella (Spinoza, then, argues that the traditional attribution of the

Pentateuch

to

Moses is untenable. […] This Spinozan thesis has so many analogies with the

«discovery of the true Homer» on Vico’s part to make it compelling to even

assume that the latter was inspired in part by it)» (Id.,

Mosè fu un poeta teologo?,

in

Il sapere poetico e gli universali fantastici

, cit., pp. 211-225, p. 213).

Outside specialized Vico studies, the historian J. I. Israel is also fairly rep-

resentative with the following view: «The parallel between Spinoza’s claim that

the Pentateuch is not divine revelation but was written many centuries after

Moses, […] and Vico’s argument […] that Homer’s epics are an accumulation

of collective primitive poetic wisdom, […] has often been noted. […] Moreo-

ver, Vico not only embraces Spinoza’s epistemology along with the method-

ology of his Bible criticism and view on the origin and social functions of reli-

gion, but he is clearly a radical thinker» (Id.,

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and

the Making of Modernity. 1650-1750

, Oxford-New York, Oxford University

Press, 2001, pp. 668-669). An even stronger thesis is advanced by J. S. Preus:

«[…] that Vico extended Spinoza’s critical principles of historical textual in-

terpretation so as to make them universal in their applicability; that Vico’s

doctrine of the imagination, especially of imaginative universals as the first

stage of the development of reason in time, was adapted from Spinoza as

well» (Id.,

Spinoza, Vico, and the Imagination of Religion

, in «Journal of the History