Vico: A Study of the 'New Science' / Edition 2

by Leon Pompa

Overview

Professor Pompa's study of Vico has done a great deal to stimulate and inform the growing interest in the English-speaking world in this remarkable figure. It remains the only work devoted almost exclusively to an interpretation of the New Science and offers a comprehensive guide to the main theoretical problems to which the text gives rise. For this second edition Professor Pompa has responded to the reactions of reviewers and critics and added a new chapter which analyses Vico's conception of the principles which govern the development of law.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521388719
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/29/1990
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.55(w) x 8.54(h) x 0.71(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. The structure of the Scienza Nuova; 2. Critique of current historiography; 3. Human nature and social change; 4. Human nature and historical change; 5. Providence; 6. The character of Vico's metaphysics; 7. The problem of knowledge; 8. The problem of methodology; 9. The ideal eternal history: its theoretical character; 10. The ideal eternal history: its deductive character; 11. The ideal eternal history: its sociological content; 12. The ideal eternal history: its historical content; 13. Philosophy and historical interpretation; 14. Philosophy and historical confirmation; 15. Theory of knowledge; 16. The character of Vico's theory of knowledge; 17. Law, providence and the barbarism of reflection; 18. Appendix. Humanist interpretations; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'Dr Pompa has reconstructed Vico's arguments with a precision not to be found in Vico himself, and his work leads the reader in a progressive fashion to the fundamental insights upon which Vico's project is founded … No other work in English attempts to exposit Vico's thought with such clarity and systematic attention.' Philosophy and Rhetoric

'Dr Pompa's analysis of the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of Vico's approach to history will be of great interest to today's student of the methodology of the social sciences.' The Times Higher Education Supplement

From the Publisher