Spring 2010 - Interpretation

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I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
Improvements, and Additions], prepared by Vico in 1731 to be integrated
into the Scienza Nuova; however, he would later leave the additions
unpublished).
Other works cited: Oration I and II (1699-1700); Vico Vindiciae
(1729); De Constantia Philosophiae (On the Constancy of Philosophy) and
De Constantia Philologiae (On the Constancy of Philology), constituting Bk. II
of the De Uno.
All sources are quoted from original Latin and Italian
editions available in digitized form through the “Laboratorio dell’ISPF,” at
www.ispf.cnr.it/ispf-lab.
All quotes are faithfully translated, rigorously maintaining
the capitalization, cursives, paragraph indentations, and—as much as
reasonably possible—punctuation, as prescribed by Vico for the original
Italian or Latin editions of his works. Paragraphs (marked as “par.”) follow
the order they have in their respective original eighteenth-century editions.
All passages quoted from the SN44 are marked by references to the index
of the work’s contents found in Fausto Nicolini’s 1953 edition of Vico’s
Opere (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi), excluding the non-Vichian titles added by
Nicolini to those of the 1744 edition of the Scienza Nuova.
Addenda
1. “…many beautiful things, so fitly attached to each other
that never may the true of one be discerned without placing one’s eyes on
that of others, [so that] a man who does not have both amplitude of mind to
comprehend them all together, and the fortitude necessary to hold down the
tyrannical audaciousness of our own wrong foregone conclusions, with most
difficulty will be able to form of [those beautiful things] a judgment that is
straight and coherent. And given that very few have been those touched by
heaven [il cielo] with such beautiful grace and luck [ventura], no wonder at all
if [only] few are the Approvers of [Vico’s] own wonderful work” (Father Bernardo
Maria Giacco, Letter to Vico, Oct. 3, 1721, at www.ispf.cnr.it/ispf-lab).
2. “…so that for my tenuous part I might contribute something
to the doctrine of the natural right of gentile-peoples [gentium], for
which I travailed [sategi] when setting myself aside totally, dedicated in a
most deep, voluminous and variegated [multiiuga et varia] library of the universe
of human sense, where I would unravel [evolverem] the oldest authors
[auctores] of gentile-peoples, from whom only after more than a thousand