Online Seminar Series

New Science by Giambattista Vico

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

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“Giambattista Vico bestrides the modern humanities and social sciences like a colossus.”  —Anthony Grafton, Historian, Princeton University

Originally published in 1725, ‘New Science’ takes a blended philosophical and philological approach to identify predictable patterns in the development of human history. Among many surprising but convincing findings, Vico’s research leads him to conclude, over a century before the publication of ’The Ancient City,’ by Numa Fustel de Coulange, that the ancients saw the world in a fundamentally different way than modern man.

The historian Anthony Grafton, addressing Vico’s “massive decoding of ancient history, mythology and law,” writes that ‘The New Science’ “is commonly recognized as one of the founding works of the modern human sciences, a work in some ways as deep and original as the contemporary work that transformed the natural sciences, the ‘Principia’ of Isaac Newton.”

Vico’s many admirers include the author James Joyce, who used Vico’s cycles of history in the structure of his final work “Finnegans Wake.” Join us to explore this highly original and influential work.

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May 30 Reading:

New Science by Giambattista Vico

Section 2 (pages 75-118)

Penguin Classics; 3rd edition (January 2000)

ISBN 978-0140435696

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Series Schedule:

Every other Tuesday afternoon

Schedule:

12:00-1:30PM PDT

Tutor: 

Barry Rabe

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Location: 

Online. Register to receive the link.