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Conclusion
While these notes attempted to be inspired and guided by the
postulated overall structure of the work, that is, its “concentric”
arrangement, the aspects dealt with were highly selective and re-
stricted, and thus
ipso facto
fall short of reflecting the breadth and
depth of the result(s) of Vico’s decades-long reflections. Our
choice of topics also may serve to give the impression of univo-
cality in Vico’s thought when this could not be further from the
actual state of affairs which is a rich, “baroque”, body of thought
moving along complex directions and dimensions. It is however
true that Vico is motivated, and energized, by the notion of the
possibility of discovering the origins of civilization and human
societies (
modulo
the Hebrews); and it is also the case that the
principal means at his disposal is the study of relics and artefacts
of the past in the form of language
604
in all its forms. Our notes
gravitated to aspects of Vico’s views and uses of language, and
thus share certain commonality; this does not mean, however,
that Vico’s work can be reduced to the same “core” concerns.
Perhaps the greatest difference between Vico’s exposition(s) in
Scienza nuova
and ours lies in the fact that Vico does not make
any explicit mention of Spinoza or polemically engage with Spi-
nozan philosophy, that is, in the direct and discursive manner in
which he engages with Grotius, Selden, Pufendorf, and Bodin
605
.
Our procedure of juxtaposing Vico and Spinoza was mainly an
expository tool, a means of profiling Vico’s stated and unstated
views by way of comparisons and contrasts with Spinoza, in in-
teraction with other assessments, both
pro
and
contra
any affini-
ties, in both Vico and Spinoza studies. As matters stand, the re-
sults obtained consistently seem to point to fairly sharp differ-
ences between the two thinkers. These disagreements seem to
come to the fore already from the beginning of
Scienza nuova,
namely, in relation to their reception of Euclid, considered met-