This book introduces the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) into the discussion about natural law. For many critics, natural law is not natural but a façade behind which lurks the supernatural - that is, revealed religion. While current notions of natural law are based on either Aristotelian/Thomistic principles or on Enlightenment rationalism, the book shows how Vico was the only natural law thinker to draw on the Roman legal tradition, rather than on Greek or Enlightenment philosophy. Specifically, the book addresses how Vico, drawing his inspiration from Roman history, incorporated both rhetoric and religion into a dynamic concept of natural law grounded in what he called the sensus communis: the entire repertoire of values, images, institutions, and even prejudices that a community takes for granted. Vico denied that natural law could ever furnish a definitive answer to moral problems in the social/public sphere. Rather he maintained that such problems had to be debated in the wider arena of the sensus communis. For Vico, as this book argues, natural law principles emerged from these debates; they did not resolve them.

This book introduces the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) into the discussion about natural law. For many critics, natural law is not natural but a façade behind which lurks the supernatural – that is, revealed religion. While current notions of natural law are based on either Aristotelian/Thomistic principles or on Enlightenment rationalism, the book shows how Vico was the only natural law thinker to draw on the Roman legal tradition, rather than on Greek or Enlightenment philosophy. Specifically, the book addresses how Vico, drawing his inspiration from Roman history, incorporated both rhetoric and religion into a dynamic concept of natural law grounded in what he called the sensus communis: the entire repertoire of values, images, institutions, and even prejudices that a community takes for granted. Vico denied that natural law could ever furnish a definitive answer to moral problems in the social/public sphere. Rather he maintained that such problems had to be debated in the wider arena of the sensus communis. For Vico, as this book argues, natural law principles emerged from these debates; they did not resolve them.

Long a shadowy figure in the history of philosophy, it was only in the twentieth century that Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) achieved renown as a major and original thinker. There has been a steadily widening interest in this figure who, had he been known in his own day, might have altered the course of European thought. Much has been written in an attempt to clarify his historical stature, but in Time and Idea A. Robert Caponigri approaches Vico's thought in terms of its relevance to problems of modern philosophy. Viewing the essential problem of twentieth-century philosophy as the elimination of human subjectivity from nature, Caponigri shows how Vico offers us a principle for the vindication of our own spirituality through history. In Caponigri's reading, Vico establishes an absolute dichotomy between nature and history. The latter is seen as the sum of the active, fully realized human spirit and thus the context for the true understanding of human nature. Although Vico's major work, The New Science, incorporates vast amounts of concrete historical research and contruction, Caponigri's focus is on Vico's theoretical apparatus. Following an introductory biographical chapter, the author turns to Vico's theory of history, emphasizing its importance as a genuine philosophical undertaking rather than mere methodology. Caponigri shows how the speculative problem of history first presented itself to Vico in matters of jurisprudence and natural law from which he derived the concepts of time and idea as the terms in which the historical process of culture becomes comprehensible. He then introduces the human subject as the principle of the synthesis of time and idea, and discusses the Vichian concept of the "modification of the human mind," and his idea of "providence" as the rectifying principle of human history. First published in 1953, Time and Idea remains an essential contribution to the ongoing dialog on Vico's work.

This book is the first translation from Latin into English of the juridical writings of one of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest figures in Italian philosophy. The complete text is fully annotated, supplied with an extensive introduction, completed by historical and biographical documents, and graced with evocative illustrations. Legal scholars, philosophers, historians, and political scientists throughout the world may now discover a classic by one of the world’s great jurists. Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) spent his entire life in Naples, where he taught at the University of Naples from 1699, the year he won the Chair of Rhetoric and Forensic Eloquence, to 1741, the year Gennaro Vico, his son, took over the duty of lecturer. In 1723, after having written the Universal Right, he competed, though without success, for the Chair of Civil Law, at the same University. He wrote the Universal Right in Latin, the official and universal language of scholarly works, to prove his competency in the field of law and jurisprudence. The Universal Right had a continuous relevance to the development and growth of juristic studies, both in Italy and in Europe, where it was translated into French and German. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the Universal Right influenced the writings and teaching of the practitioners of the Forum—Emmanuele Duni, Antonio Genovesi, Jules Michelet, Francesco Lomonaco, Mario Francesco Pagano, Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Cesare Lombroso, Pasquale Galluppi, Cesare Beccaria, and, among the many recent jurists, Emilio Betti, who taught in Italy and Germany, the author of Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften. Due to the influence of Benedetto Croce’s disapproving interpretation, the Universal Right remained often overshadowed by the New Science in its three editions of 1725, 1730, and 1744. As we start the twenty-first century, scholars are by-passing Croce’s statement, and are looking at the Universal Right with due objectivity and renewed interest. While the New Science has been available since 1948, the Universal Right appears now, for the first time, in English, the contemporary universal language. Contrary to the opinion of some scholars, Vico, in the New Science, stated that he did not regret having written the Universal Right; he used the copy in his possession as a reference manual for all the works written afterward, until 1735. Andrea Battistini wrote, “When an English translation of the Diritto universale [Universal Right] is available, which will be able to rectify the trend toward contemporary relevance with a greater sense of historicity through an emphasis on the debt to Roman jurisprudence, one will finally arrive at a synthetic overall view, obscured today by the numerous specialized analyses. At all events, however, it is to be hoped that the multiplicity of voices, the dialectical battle of interpretations and the duel between historicity and contemporary relevance do not subside”. Isaiah Berlin stated that, “Vico was not read,” and, thus, his ideas were the treasure-trove in the hands of a few specialists and, in like manner, they remained to our day. Other scholars have mentioned the “copiatori di [copycats of] Vico” when speaking about the history and transmission of ideas. In regard to Universal Right, contemporary research and writing is pale and scarce, given the unavailability of translations and the difficulties of the original.

Brings together in one volume translations, commentaries, and essays that illuminate the background of Giambattista Vico's major work.

A pioneering treatise that aroused great controversy when it was first published in 1725, Vico's New Science is acknowledged today to be one of the few works of authentic genius in the history of social theory. It represents the most ambitious attempt before Comte at comprehensive science of human society and the most profound analysis of the class struggle prior to Marx.

The concept sensus communis--a term that means a great deal more than its English translation "common sense"--has served as a key principle in the theory of knowledge from the ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment philosophers. John D. Schaeffer shows how the seventeenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico synthesized Greek and Roman ideas of what sensus communis and what this synthesis implies for current discussions of rhetoric and hermeneutics. Arguments for ethical relativism emerge from divisions between sensus communis as an ethical judgment (a concept that Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and others have tried to rescue) and as a linguistic consensus, a division against which Vico argued and which his own concept of sensus communis attempted to reconcile. In extended commentaries on Gadamer, the Gadamer/Habermas debate, and Derrida, Schaeffer shows that Vico offers the possibility of analyzing social phenomena and constellations of power from within the humanist rhetorical tradition. Vico's achievements have powerful implications for relating ethics and hermeneutics to the world of concrete social practice, particularly in an age in which the electronic media have replaced print as the primary means of communication and in which a "secondary orality" (a cast of mind similar to that of nonliterate peoples) is appearing within our literate civilization.