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4.
THE DIALECTIC OF VICHIAN
“PHILOSOPHY” AND “PHILOLOGY”
Benedetto Croce, a century ago, with commendable candor
put into words what any reader of
Scienza nuova
might be forgiv-
en for feeling about Vico’s use of the terms “philosophy” and
“philology”
125
, writing in the classic
The Philosophy of Giambattista
Vico
: «The lack of clearness on the relation of philosophy to phi-
lology, and the failure to distinguish between the two quite dif-
ferent ways of conceiving the reduction of philology to a science,
are at once the consequences and the causes of the obscurity
which prevails in the “New Science”»
126
. Croce here, in fact, does
us the service of pinpointing the two challenges we are facing: (1)
understanding how Vico conceived the relationship between
“philosophy” and “philology”, and (2) the distinction between
them, or what different types of knowledge fall under each of
them. While Croce chose to raise the question of their relation-
ship first, it is obvious that an answer to that question needs to
be deferred until it is more clearly seen what “philosophy” and
“philology” actually mean in Vico’s discourse. We will therefore
make an attempt at examining the latter first.
In Axiom X (§§ 138-140), Vico provided one of the more ex-
plicit circumlocutions of both disciplines:
Philosophy
contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true;
philology
observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes
consciousness of the certain.
This axiom by its second part [i. e.
philology
] includes among the philol-
ogists all the grammarians, historians, critics, who have occupied them-
selves with the study of the languages and deeds of peoples: […] their