In the Scienza nuova prima,
Vico discusses the "parlare contorto" (tortuous speech) in the section entitled "On the third part of poetic locution which consists of conventional idioms.
An obscure, poorly paid professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples for most of his academic career,
Vico left behind a sprawling, puzzling body of work, at once anachronistic and prescient, historical and mythic, secular and religious, Christian and classical--and bristling with penetrating insights scattered amid long-winded analyses of dubious scholarly merit.
Does
Vico in fact hold this view about the relation between subjectivity, thought, and language?
From there, Verene identifies "Joyce's poetic problem" as finding "a way to move words against themselves so that they will actually reveal what
Vico calls the common mental dictionary (idizionario mentale commune), that is, the very sense-making power of the imagination that lies behind every language and which every language is trying to express in its own grammar and vocabulary.
Chapter 1, "
Vico, Spinoza, and the Imperial Past," introduces
Vico to the reader as a purveyor of almost occult knowledge.
In the foreward to Paul Brienza's path breaking book on Giambattista
Vico (1668-1744), Guiseppe Mazzotta of Yale University observes that this study: "contributes a highly original and essential element to the two parallel debates on
Vico and social theory: he revives the somewhat forgotten problematic of the conatus [endeavor] and reinterprets it as the key to the individual's desire for self-preservation and, therefore, to any possible constitution of an ethical/political community.
Reyes said even at young age, she had seen in
Vico, her youngest child, the interest and potential to be a leader.
It was only later on that
Vico dropped these discussions, in favor of ambiguity.
In this engagingly written book, Malcolm Bull invites us to consider a paradox: that for the Neapolitan rhetorician, historian and philosopher Giambattista
Vico (1668-1744), the falsity of painting equated to--or could lead to--a kind of truth.
This volume collects two essays written by philosopher and political theorist Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) on three figures of the Counter-Enlightenment (although that characterization has more recently been disputed): Giambattista
Vico (1668-1744) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) in the first essay and Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) in the second.
Vico enthusiasts like Isaiah Berlin, Benedetto Croce, Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Donald Verene, Hayden White, and others have seen in him a highly original, untimely thinker who anticipated major currents of 19th century thought.
Vico had also claimed he did not see the truck that whose three occupants claimed that no shootout had happened.
