New Science (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Vico, Giambattista

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140435697 ISBN 13: 9780140435696

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1999

Synopsis

Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern, it argues that the key to true understanding of the past lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of ancient Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians were radically different from our own. Along the way, Vico explores a huge variety of topics, ranging from physics to poetics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Marking a crucial turning-point in humanist thinking, New Science has remained deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, inspiring the work of Karl Marx and even influencing the framework for Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

About this title

Review:

"This new edition of the famous Bergin and Fisch translation of Vico's Scienza nuova, originally published in 1948 and reissued in a revised edition in 1968, includes a translation of a piece of Vico s work called the Practica . . . . It is a great advantage to have [the Practic of the New Science"] reprinted with the text of the New Science as it offers some of Vico s views on the application of his science. . . . Cornell University Press is to be congratulated for . . . this new full edition. Review of Metaphysics"

"This new edition of the famous Bergin and Fisch translation of Vico's Scienza nuova, originally published in 1948 and reissued in a revised edition in 1968, includes a translation of a piece of Vico's work called the Practica . . . . It is a great advantage to have [the "Practic of the New Science"] reprinted with the text of the New Science as it offers some of Vico's views on the application of his science. . . . Cornell University Press is to be congratulated for . . . this new full edition."--Review of Metaphysics

About the Author:

Although Vico (1668-1744) lived his whole life as an obscure academic in Naples, his New Science is an astonishingly ambitious attempt to decode the history, mythology and law of the ancient world.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140435697
• ISBN 13: 9780140435696
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 560