Volume 12, Number 3 · February 13, 1969
Vico and Language
By Stuart Hampshire
Anyone who reads Vico has at his first reading been amazed. It seems impossible that any European philosophy should be so wildly imaginative and undisciplined, and should be a mixture of the most accurate prescience and quaint nonsense: flashes of clear light in a picturesque lumber room of antique learning. After the first edition of the Scienza Nuova appeared in 1725 nearly a hundred years had to pass before Vico could be taken seriously. Living in a city, Naples, that was still a provincial corner of Europe, a visionary trained in ancient rhetoric and entangled in theology, still writing in a baroque style, he was first understood, and put to use, by Michelet. He is almost unique among European philosophers in having had no predecessors and no immediate progeny.
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