1998 Miner - Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom in Vico

Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom in the

Early Writings of Giambattista Vico

Robert C. Miner

As several contemporary writers have noted, Giambattista Vico defends the idea of practical knowledge, a type of knowledge that cannot be fully expressed by propositions and defies reductions to method.' The defense of practical knowledge, against Descartes and the rise of objectifying science, is most clearly articulated in a group of Vico's early writings: the oration De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), the metaphysical book De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), and two re- joinders (Prima and Seconda risposte) to critics of the De antiquissima. In these texts Vico criticizes Cartesian method in terms that remind us of Aristotle, or at least the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. "If you were to import the geometrical method into practical life, you would do no more than exhaust yourself in becoming a rational lunatic" (A 7.5).2

This comment and many others like it seem to suggest that Vico is an "Aristotelian," but any simple classification is problematic. In the same text in which Vico defends the Aristotelian topos he also announces that "the true and the made are convertible" (verum etfactum convertuntur). The emphasis on the

' See, e.g., Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, 19892), 19-24; Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: "Phronesis" and "Techne" in Modem Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame, 1993), 464; and Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 19842), 277.

2 References to Vico's texts are parenthetical, by section and subsection. SR=De nostri temporis studiorum ratione. A=De antiquissima Italorum sapientia. Citations to the Vita refer to the page number in Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, tr. M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin (Ithaca, 1944). Vico's early works are cited from Opere filosofiche, ed. Paolo Cristofolini (Florence, 1971), with Italian translations on facing pages.

53 Copyright 1998 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

role of "making" in truth seems incompatible with the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, whose knowledge is associated with praxis and cannot be reduced to techne. It would be simpler if Vico distinguished between a realm in which the verum-factum principle applied and one in which prudentia was supreme. However, Vico not only situates mathematics and experimental science within the metaphysical framework governed by verum-factum, but also implies strong connections between making and ethics. The prominence Vico assigns to making in all areas of human endeavor gives him a distinctly modem appearance in the fashion of Bacon, Galileo, and Hobbes.

This gives rise to both hermeneutical and philosophical problems. Is Vico simply hesitating between the old and new? Does he coherently balance an Aristotelian perspective with the "moder" emphasis on artifice?3 Perhaps Vico is caught in the middle of the querelle des anciens et modernes, somewhat like John Dunn's version of Locke, a "tragic figure" who cannot reconcile his epistemological discoveries with a noninstrumentalist view of practical reason.4 The purpose of this essay is to provide a sympathetic interpretation of Vico's early writings on prudentia and its links to both verum-factum and rhetoric.

Vico contra Rule-based Ethics

The denial that ethics is well understood as a matter of following or justi- fying general rules has become a commonplace among contemporary Aris- totelians and Wittgensteinians.5 Against the Enlightenment ambition to construct a universally valid moral science, recent virtue ethics has emphasized the irreducibly contingent aspects of human life, aspects which resist the clutches of "method." Although Descartes wrote little about morals directly, his influ- ence can be detected in the ethical writings of Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Sidgwick. These examples of moder moral philosophy presuppose the correctness of the Cartesian diagnosis of ancient and medieval writing on virtue. In the Discourse on Method Descartes compares previous moral teaching to "the most proud and magnificent palaces built on nothing but sand or mud."6 Descartes himself did not provide a rational justification of ethics, but he has had no shortage of successors who have tried to complete his foundational project. Jusnaturalism, Kantian deontology, and utilitarianism, as different as they are from one another, share the desire to ground ethics in principles as universal and certain as

3 Cf. John Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico 1668- 1744: Part 1, The Early Metaphysics (Lewiston, N.Y., 1991), 316.

4 John Dunn, Locke (Cambridge, 1984), vii. 5 See (e.g.) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 150; John McDowell, "Virtue and Reason,"

Monist, 62 (1979), 336. 6 Descartes, Discours de la methode, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (11 vols.; Paris,

1964), VI, 8; Discourse on Method, tr. D. A. Cress (Indianapolis, 1980), 4-5.

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those of mathematics. Each of these variants of post-Cartesian ethics claim to have discovered and justified such a principle or set of principles. Maxims deduced from the principle, if not the principle itself, will arguably enable moral agents to discover the right course of action in a particular situation.

Vico did not live to witness the most articulate expressions of a Cartesian approach to ethics, but he did apprehend the shift in focus from prudence to method. In the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, an oration delivered at the University of Naples in 1708 and published the following year, Vico criticizes approaches that locate the essence of morality in rules.

Invoking an Aristotelian topos, Vico declares that "the deeds of men cannot be assessed by a straight and unbending rule of the mind; they must be viewed according to the supple Lesbic rule, which does not conform bodies to it, but alters itself according to them" (SR 7).7 Moral rules are characteristically general. In particular situations, their generality often renders them useless. No matter how comprehensive our ethical manuals, practical life will always include situations where no rules are at hand, where there is a single rule whose particular application is unclear, where there are many conflicting rules which might apply, or where the rule that usually applies demands an exception. There is no method that can reliably bridge the gap between universal and particular in the ethical life. Systematized routines, which are embodied in the artes that Vico admires and associates with the "modems," are no substitute for the virtues, better understood by the ancients. "For in those things regulated by practical wisdom, it makes no difference whether you have many artes or only a few" (SR 10). Prudentia "takes its deliberations from the circumstances of things, which are infinite; hence any comprehension of them, however wide, is never sufficient" (SR 10). At best, rules will give us access to the general features of a situation, but in practical affairs wisdom is a matter of insight into particulars.

The distinction between universal and particular informs Vico's entire case in the De ratione, but it does not receive adequate elaboration until the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, in which Vico will-perhaps bizarrely-criti- cize Aristotle on the ground that his metaphysics promotes the tendency to ignore ethical particulars in favor of abstract universals. In the De ratione Vico relies upon a distinction between necessity and contingency. "Eternal truths stand above nature; in nature, no truths are contained but those which are vari- able and inconstant" (SR 7). Even Bacon, whom Vico much admires, forgets this and "proves himself more worthy of a new world rather than our own" (SR 1). Vico combines a genuine appreciation of the merits of Baconian and Galilean science with a warning against hubris, ancient or moder. "Unlike the ancients, we should study physics as philosophers ... in order to quell human arrogance, if we indeed seek the truth in these things, which we desire so much. And if we

7 On the history of this topos from Aquinas through the humanists to Vico, see Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Vico, la storia e la politica (Naples, 1981), 146-74.

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do not find it, the desire for the truth will itself take us by the hand and lead us to God, who alone is the way and the truth" (SR 4).'8

If nature itself is too slippery to be conquered, then a fortiori we cannot hope to capture the demands of the ethical life in lawlike propositions. "With respect to prudence in civil life, we should remember that occasion and choice are the mistresses of human affairs, and are most uncertain, governed for the most part by simulation and dissimulation, things which are exceptionally de- ceitful" (SR 7). Only prudentia and its ally sensus communis, which arises from probabilities, are sound guides in the active life. Those who ignore this, perhaps spending too much time in the classroom, "accustom themselves to clinging to general precepts: in actuality we find that nothing is more useless" (SR 10).

An ethics centered around maxims is practically futile. Vico paints a por- trait of the imprudent savant (doctus imprudentis) who approaches ethics as if it were a manual of propositions to be memorized. Vico contrasts the type of the expert with three other types: the fool (stultus), the astute ignoramus (illiteratus astutus), and the wise man (sapiens). The fool lacks knowledge of either the general or the particular. Theory and practice escape him alike; he "constantly pays the penalty for his rashness" (SR 7). The astute ignoramus knows how to succeed in temporal affairs. But his ignorance of the most important things, evidenced by his consistent preference for the utile over the honestum, ensures failure. In Aristotelian terms he does not possess phronesis but only its counterfeit, deinotes. Only the sapiens possesses both practical and theoretical wisdom, knowing how to rise from lowly occasions and chance opportunities to the highest good. "Wise people [sapientes], who through all the obliquities and uncertainties of human actions, aim for eternal truth, follow roundabout ways, because they cannot take straight ones; and execute plans [consilia] which in the long run are for the best, as far as the nature of things allows" (SR 7). A parallel passage in the Vita describes the sapiens as the embodiment of both Platonic "esoteric wisdom" and Tacitean "common wisdom." "And as Plato with his universal knowledge explores the parts of nobility which constitute the man of intellectual wisdom, so Tacitus descends into all the counsels of utility whereby, among the infinite irregular chances of malice and fortune, the man of practical wisdom brings good things to issue" (Vita 138).

By contrast, the distinguishing marks of the imprudent savant are slowness in decision, arrogance in behavior, and incapacity for persuasive speech. Be- cause he lacks experience in situations where plausible arguments can be made in utramque partem, his choices come slowly, often too slowly. Vico scorns the

8 Angela-Maria Jacobelli-Isoldi, G. B. Vico: La vita e le opere (Bologna, 1960), 175, finds in Vico's entire oeuvre "due motivi, quello della esaltazione e quello della mortificazione della natura umana," motives which may illuminate the nature of the reference to Pascal in the Vita.

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critics who, "when something doubtful is presented to them, say: 'Let me think about it' " (SR 3). The practical consequences are baneful. Vico does not dis- guise his distaste for the physicians of his time who would suspend action, waiting for the disease to progress into something more treatable. Because his education focuses on the analytical faculty and neglects the memory and imagination, the imprudent savant will not develop his synthetic capacities. He will be unlikely to discover new or hidden things, to notice the small but telling detail that can alter one's perception entirely. As a result, his judgment will often rely on incomplete and misleading descriptions of a situation. This defi- ciency in apprehension, nourished by the substitution of precepts for prudentia and sensus communis, leads him to "erupt in actions both astonishing and arro- gant" (SR 3).

Vico identifies sensus communis as the ruler (regula) of both prudentia and eloquentia. Disregard for either produces the ineloquent bluster of one-sided rationalists. "Led to judge before properly apprehending," they "become arid and dry in expression and without ever doing anything set themselves up in judgment over all things" (Vita 124). The decline of eloquence and prudence are strictly parallel. Even when the "unscripted, anxious stutterers" produced by anti-rhetorical ideals are able to apprehend and judge rightly, they will not have acquired the habit of persuasive speech.9 This is the third practical failing of the imprudent savant. Vico is not referring to an inability to dress humble language with ornament. He means that persons without eloquence, in the wide sense of the term, will be unable to communicate their wisdom, to make a practical difference. Nor is Descartes an exception: his success in crafting works of philosophical persuasion owes much to his education in humanistic studies, as Vico implies at the end of the Seconda Risposta.

Insofar as he approximates the caricature of the imprudent savant, the moral agent will fail to realize the good in particular situations. Deprived ofprudentia, he will rely on his methods and manuals. These pretend to take him "in a straight line from general to particular truths," so as to "burst through the tortu- ous curves of life" (SR 7). Sometimes he may succeed-the very contingency of life ensures that his demise is not guaranteed-but the usual outcome is failure. "Frustrated in their own plans, deceived by those of others, they usually give up" (SR 7).

An ethics of maxims is self-deluding and self-frustrating. One might sup- pose that Vico is denying any point at all to moral rules. He consistently associates preceptual approaches with the Stoics and ridicules their identification of reason with the regula veri. Because the Stoics devalue probability and deny that the wise man has any opinions, Vico considers them the pompous ances- tors of Descartes and Amauld (SR 3). Their rationalism is inimical to sound

9 The phrase belongs to Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 216.

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pedagogy, and their individualism neglects the social nature of humanity. But Vico also speaks with a voice that praises the Stoics, insofar as they "seriously and authoritatively teach about the steadfastness [constantia] of the wise" (Orazione III). The ideal of rigor, embodied in an outlook that emphasizes the moral law, has a genuine role to play in character formation. "The rigor of human actions, meant to ensure that a person is constant to himself in all his doings and through all things, was best taught by the Stoics, to whom it seems the more recent sects of philosophers correspond" (SR 8). Vico does not ex- clude the possibility that some rules have the power to bind and admit of no exceptions, but even inviolable maxims are not unproblematically interpreted and applied. The life of the sapiens displays constantia but cannot be reduced to scrupulous rule-following. The primary function of rules is pedagogical. They serve as "an image of the divine cross-roads [deorum compitalia]" which "only indicate how and where one is to go, i.e. via philosophy to the contemplation of the best nature itself " (SR 10).

In his early writings, then, Vico offers a critique of Cartesian aspirations to make ethics into a moral science, complete with its own unshakable rules and procedures. It might be objected that Vico's criticism is merely negative, unless supplemented by an alternative model of practical knowledge. Vico would take this objection seriously. Negative critique, "though intriguing to the imagination, is repugnant to the understanding, since by it the human mind is not enlarged" (Vita 193). For philosophy to be useful, it must unite theory and practice. It must describe in more detail the ascent of the sapiens from common wisdom to esoteric wisdom. Taken on the widest possible scale, this is precisely the project of the Scienza nuova, but Vico first pursues the question in the individual case, through categories inherited from the tradition of rhetoric.

The ars topica

Classical French method, as embodied in the Discourse on Method and the Port-Royal Logic, violently represses the idea of a type of knowledge that ex- ceeds rational proof. Vico links this repression to Arauld's scorn for the Ro- man ars topica, itself a development of the mode of reasoning described in Aristotle's Topoi. "Who is to be believed?" Vico asks. "Arauld, who denies it, or Cicero, who affirms and professes that he was made eloquent from topics above all? Let others be the judge" (SR 3).

The ars topica is the "art of finding in anything all that is in it." It enables one to summon the full range of considerations that are relevant in a particular case and to discover the "middle term" (medium) of a persuasive argument. Even though particular topics, the "commonplaces" or "seats" of argument,10

1' Loci communes and sedes argumentorum are assimilated in Cicero (Topica, 1.5), but the metaphors are not identical. See Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the

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can be organized in a catalogue, the ars topica itself is not a method that can be acquired from a textbook, or learned and memorized in a classroom. It is akin to a disposition, whereby one has persuasive analogies and arguments at one's command. The orator uses the ars topica to ensure that he does not overlook a single consideration that can assist in the work of producing conviction. For the doctor the ars topica provides ready access to the stock of medical precedents that have historically enabled successful diagnosis and treatment.

Many commentators focus on the rhetorical and legal context of the ars topica. But Vico does not consider the ars topica as a tool just for orators and lawyers. His account of the necessity of the ars topica is perfectly general."1 Its cultivation is required for creative discovery and quick action in all disciplines, from mathematics and physics to medicine and law. His lament that the ars topica is neglected by Cartesian curricula is not rightly interpreted as only a protest against a natural-scientific methodological imperialism that threatens to encroach upon the territory of nonscientific humanism.12 In order to flourish, any discipline-whether "scientific" or "humanistic"-requires excellence in the synthetic reasoning that Vico associates with the ars topica.

Vico holds that ethics is a matter of prudentia, not ars. But his constant insistence on the parallels between eloquence and prudence suggests an ethical role for the ars topica. The exercise ofprudentia demands attention to circumstances. It requires that the agent describe particulars correctly and base her descriptions on a comprehensive "reading" of the situation that overlooks none of the details that are relevant for judging and acting rightly. In defending Cicero against Arauld, topics against method, Vico reiterates in rhetorical fashion the Aristotelian concern for comprehensive description of a situation.

The analogy between prudence and eloquence is embedded in Vico's conception of the sensus communis, which is described as the criterion of both prudence and eloquence. No less strikingly, Vico connects the rise of Cartesian pedagogies that devalue the ars topica with the abandonment of an ethics and politics based on virtue. In forging a link between prudentia, eloquentia, and sapientia, Vico invites us to recall the parallels between eloquence and practical wisdom. Both concern themselves with particular situations, aspire to persuade, consider the full range of circumstances, address the passions, employ a stock of precedents, and require ingenuity and sharp perception. Quid sit agen- dum? is the question that frames their inquiries. Situated in the contingent and

Commonplaces (New York, 1962), 131 and 147-52; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 111-20.

" Thus in Seconda Risposta, 4, Vico commends Herbert of Cherbury's De veritate on the grounds that it is "veramente altro non e che una topica trasportata agli usi de' fisici sperimental."

12 This is the Vico familiar to us from Berlin and Gadamer, among others. But, according to John Milbank (The Religious Dimension, I, 158), such interpreters tend to overlook Vico's avowals, in texts early and late, that his writings are composed on a geometric paradigm.

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the probable, where considerations can be adduced in utramque partem, each aims for truth while refusing to assume that its discovery depends on apodictic argument. The ars topica perfects the habit of attention to circumstances, no matter how trivial seeming, that is vital for the exercise of prudence. "Scientific knowledge [scientia] differs thus from practical wisdom [prudentia]: in scientific knowledge, those who excel seek one cause, from which many things in nature are produced; but in practical wisdom, those who shine are the ones who seek as many causes as possible of one deed [factum], so as to conjecture which is true" (SR 7).

The ars topica is important for the operation of prudentia. It facilitates both comprehension and celerity. Uniting these distinct imperatives is crucial in practical matters, which often require a swift response given ex tempore without the benefit of protracted analysis. As the good doctor cannot waste time, so the effective orator must give immediate assistance to the accused. Analogously, a distinctive characteristic of the phronimos is the capacity for making the right decision without the luxury of long deliberation. Ethics requires the ars topica, no less than oratory or medicine.

Comprehension and quickness, however, are not sufficient to guarantee truth. The ars topica seems to generate only facility and plenitude. This is a problem for Vico, who does not reduce truth to pragmatic adequacy in either scientia orprudentia. "As for the end of all pursuits, today only one is contemplated, one is cultivated, one is celebrated by all: truth" (SR 1). Although the end is posterior to the instrumenta and adiumenta, students must keep the finis in view throughout their labors. The ars topica, on its own, seems more likely to produce skeptics than seekers of truth.

One might reject the Cartesian notion that preservation of truth against the skeptic requires one to treat probable knowledge as if it were false. Vico identifies precisely this assumption as the basis for the moder rejection of the ars topica. Nonetheless, Vico's strategy is not simply to expose the assumption and then dismiss it. He takes seriously the concern that the ars topica will lead to a dangerous skepticism. Vico observes, echoing Cicero and Quintilian, that Carneades was a master of topical plenitude. "He would argue for both contrar- ies, holding on one day, that justice exists, on another, that it does not, bringing forth equally decisive arguments, with incredible force. This was born from the fact that truth is one, probabilities many, and falsehoods endless" (SR 3). A genuinely philosophical rhetoric must perceive the limitations of the ars topica. It must situate copia as means to end. The ability to summon all potentially relevant considerations does not guarantee truth, even if it is an important pre- requisite.

In the De ratione, Vico is reluctant to resolve the issue in favor of either the ars topica or ars critica. He defends the ars topica against those who would expel it from the curriculum. "As the invention of arguments is by nature prior

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to the judgment of their truth, so topica must come before critica in teaching" (SR 3). The priority accorded in this passage to the ars topica is strictly pedagogical. In the order of learning, arts that require phantasia and memoria must precede disciplines that develop the aptitude for criticism. Only after the study of painting, poetry, and rhetoric should learners study logic, algebra, and synthetic geometry. Those who learn criticism after topics will be in a better position "to judge anew, using their own discrimination on what they have been taught" (SR 3). These pedagogical considerations do not, however, license an ideal priority of topica to critica, inventio to iudicio. The ars critica, no less than the ars topica, is required for truth. The amplitude of one must be checked by the precision of the other. Those who are fluent in topics but neglect criticism fall short, because they "often latch on to falsehoods; the reverse error is committed by those who "do not also consort with probabilities" (SR 3). Inter- preters who take Vico to propose a "topical philosophy" that excludes or subor- dinates the role of criticism tend to ignore the multiple passages in which Vico ascribes the attainment of truth to critica or iudicio. In the De ratione, Vico proposes a model that serially joins the ars topica and the ars critica. He leaves the essential identity of each unchanged, while stressing the need for both approaches.13

Vico continues his explication of practical reason by turning to the connection between rhetoric and the transformation of human desire. The work of the ars topica and the ars critica, apprehension and judgment, is fruitless if it does not issue in a concrete work of persuasion. Milbank suggests that Vico tacitly assigns this function to elocutio (the stage that traditionally follows inventio and dispositio or iudicio), and he takes Vico to propose the replacement of Cartesian method with a notion of elocutio whose function is to unite topica and critica.'4 Elocutio is not just "the most purely aesthetic, emotional and linguistic moment of rhetoric" but becomes the "key rational and ethical moment, implying that "the most vital point of invention and judgment is post- poned to the very instance of utterance itself."'5 Vico does not speak directly of elocutio in the De ratione, but he adverts to the role of eloquentia in the section devoted to virtue. This device indicates Vico's desire to press the parallel between rhetoric and prudence as far as possible, without completely identifying them.

13 Jacobelli-Isoldi, finds analogies between the desired unions of topica and critica, of sapientia, prudentia, eloquentia, and the universal and particular (G. B. Vico: La vita e le opere, 180). But the "essential integration" of topica and critica that she speaks of is not achieved in the De ratione, as Botturi clearly realizes. See Francesco Botturi, La sapienza della storia: Giambattista Vico e la filosofica pratica (Milan, 1991), 43-47, 68-69.

14 Milbank, The Religious Dimension, I, 302-3. On the increased interest in elocutio in Italian culture just before Vico, see Brian Vickers, "On the Practicalities of Renaissance Rheto- ric," in Rhetoric Revalued (Binghamton, N.Y., 1982), 136-41, with references.

'5 Milbank, The Religious Dimension, I, 296-97.

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"Two things only are capable of turning to good use the disorders of the soul [animi perturbationes], all the evils of the interior man which originate from desire [ab appetitu], as it were from one source: one is philosophy, which tempers them in wise men, so that virtues arise. The other is eloquence, which in the common man sets them on fire, so that they perform the duties of virtue" (SR 7). Both philosophia and eloquentia are endowed with the capacity to in- duce virtue. Exercise of this capacity comprises their common telos. Action that arises from the virtue of prudence will involve the mediation of eloquence or philosophy. Practical reason without persuasion, Vico suggests, is not practical reason at all.

Vico first addresses the ordinary condition, in which desire is not fully rational. Here eloquence is the necessary complement of invention (the function of the ars topica) and judgment (the function of the ars critica). "The mind [mens] may indeed be ensnared by those delicate nets of truth, but the soul [animus] cannot be turned and conquered except by more bodily means" (SR 7). The necessity for artifice cannot be eliminated, unless the desires are already rational. The soul of the vulgus "must be drawn by corporeal images in order to love; for once it loves, it is easily taught to believe; once it believes and loves, it must be inflamed in order to will, against its ordinary lack of power" (SR 7). Vico illustrates by direct reference to the oratorical case: "Unless the orator does these three things, he has not at all crafted a work of persuasion" (SR 7). The parallel is obvious in the ethical case, where practical discernment must culminate in a work of self-persuasion. The conclusion of a practical syllogism is an action. As invention and judgment are useless without persuasion, so deliberation and choice are fruitless without action. The structural iso- morphism serves to link eloquence and prudence; both are normative activities concerned with achieving ends. It also implies the presence of a rhetorical dimension in moral discourse. An ethics that seems true in the abstract but lacks the capacity to persuade, to effect the transformation of desire, is a self-discred- iting ethics. It is the kind of philosophy that Vico consistently rejects as useless and therefore harmful.

The ars topica is a crucial starting point for Vico's response to the Carte- sian and Arnauldian challenge to practical reason in the De ratione. Although the text does not explicitly state the convertibility of the true and the made, it is simply unintelligible without the assumption of a substantial connection between construction and truth. In the ethical case we have seen the prominence Vico accords to the constructions of rhetoric. What makes these constructions or any others images of truth? The seventh inaugural oration does not directly address the question. It is in the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia that Vico takes himself to have realized the main theme of the De ratione "a little more distinctly" (Vita 156). There Vico will explicate the link between truth and construction, develop the critique of rule-based ethics initiated in the De ratione, and supply a new model of the relation between topica and critica.

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Verum-factum

The De antiquissima Italorum sapientia begins with the announcement that "for the Latins 'true' and 'made' are reciprocal, or in the common language of the Schools, convertible" (A 1.1). Vico presents the verum-factum axiom first as an etymological thesis, and proceeds to assert original identities between terms. Intelligere (to understand) is the same as perfecte legere (to read completely) and aperte cognoscere (to know clearly). In vernacular Italian, the identity is reproduced by the synonymy of pensare (to think) and andar raccogliendo (to collect), both of which are embraced by the Latins' cogitare. Finally, ratio originally denotes the "collection of arithmetic elements" (A 1.1). The effect is to suggest a primal homology between knowing and making, traces of which remain in our current language-despite the accretion of other paradigms, e.g., introspection, observation.

Verum-factum is not only a thesis about the original meaning of words. Its sense is also conditioned by the traditions of Christian theology, as the reference to the "schools" suggests. Thus Vico attributes to the Latins the conception of the human beings as a rationis particeps but understands this in a way that recalls both Aquinas and Renaissance translations of the De Interpretatione. "As words are symbols and signs of ideas, so ideas are symbols and signs of things" (A 1.1). There is no direct passage from word to thing; humans cannot escape the necessity of conceptual mediation. But Vico is not a pessimist about human knowledge. Words, ideas, and things are connected in reality, even if a literal and exhaustive grasp of the connections is not available to the finite creature. Vico understands human judgment by analogy to the process of reading. The reader gathers the alphabetic elements out of which words are constructed. In the absence of readerly collection, the elementa will be an incoher- ent jumble, lacking significance. Textual meaning is simply impossible without the active contribution of the reader. However, one should attend to Vico's use of the passive voice: the reader collects the elements ex quibus verba componuntur (A 1.1). The individual does not arbitrarily determine the combi- nations of elements that constitute words. Linguistic precedent sets constraints on literary synthesis. Constructions that do not make contact with the way in which the language is used publicly and has been used historically are unintelligible.

In the case of human judgment, the knower collects the elementa of a thing (res), out of which ideas are constructed. The more thorough the composition of real elements, the more perfect the idea. Vico defines intelligere, understanding, as the process of "collecting [colligere] all the elements of a thing [elementa rei], from which its most complete idea may be expressed" (A 1.1). Again the use of the passive is important. Without the active construction of human beings, there are no ideas, or at least none that are accessible to us. But the perfection of the idea expressed depends on the collection of the elementa

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rei, which are more than human productions. The ontological independence of the elementa places constraints on the human expression of ideas, just as the public and historical character of alphabetic elements makes the intelligibility of language more than a matter of personal fiat.

Vico combines the emphasis on construction (verum esse ipsum factum) with the conviction that "man is neither nothing, nor everything" (A 1.1, 2). Neither the analogies nor the disanalogies between human making and the divine art can be ignored. Vico claims "not to propose human scientia as the rule for divine scientia, but divine scientia as the rule for human scientia" (A conclusion). Any satisfactory reading of the texts, then, must consider Vico's understanding of the divine case. God, as the primus Factor, composes the elementa to produce the primum verum. The elementa are in no sense external to God. Vico does not hesitate to describe divine generation by analogy to the processes of human "composition" but makes clear that generation is not an arrangement of preexisting material. In generating the Son, the Father begets a modification of his own substance, his own elements that are contained entirely within himself. The primus Factor, the comprehensio of the elementa, and the Verbum generated by the collectio of the elementa are at root identical. With perfect consistency Vico associates the elements both with the Father, as primus Factor, and with the Son, who contains the divine ideas. In composing his own elements God knows and begets himself, as the Verbum.

Because the elementa are entirely contained in, and therefore wholly com- manded by, the primus Factor, the primum verum generated by the divine art is "infinite and exact" (A 1.1). Human making, by contrast, is derivative of the first true, because it attains only a partial grasp of the elementa rei. The "human mind, which is bounded and external to those things that are not itself, is confined to the outside edges of things only and never collects all the elements" (A 1.1). Vico repeats the phrase particeps rationis and deploys an image (similitudo), lest his reader fail to see that he does not intend to posit a univocal identity between divine and human making. "Divine truth is a solid image of things, like a statue; human truth is a monogram or plane image, like a painting" (A 1.1).

To understand more precisely how Vico considers the human appropriation of the elementa rei as incomplete yet fruitful, we must shift our focus to the hierarchy of scientiae that he proposes. Of the scientiae considered absolutely, "revealed theology" is the most certain, since complete truth uniquely inheres in its object. Human scientiae, by contrast, do not know the elementa by rev- elation. Instead, it creates its own images of elementa rei through "dissection." All human scientia, according to Vico, is a "type of anatomy of the works of nature" (A 1.2). Before human scientia can know truth by composing elements,

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it must gain access to the elements themselves. This is achieved by dissections of reality (dissicere, dividere, minuere).16

The metaphor of dissection testifies against secularizing interpretations of Vico that endow humans with the power to create autonomous elements. With- out an ontologically prior unum, nothing can be dissected into parts. Thus the human scientiae cannot simply create their own elements. On the contrary Vico suggests that human dissection aspires to know the very elements contained within the divine comprehensio: "God knows everything, because he contains within himself the elements, from which he composes all things; man, however, seeks to know them by dividing" (A 1.2). The distinction is not between two sets of elements but between two modes of grasping the elementa rei. One mode is proper to the infinite God, who possesses the elements in se, and the other to finite human beings who grasp them from the outside, through the use of dissections.

This seems to clash with Vico's understanding of mathematics, the scientia that seems to create its own elements. The human mathematician "creates the point, the line, the surface following the model of God, without any substrate and as though from nothing [tamquam ex nihilo]-as if they were things" (A 1.2). We seem to have at least one case in which humans are creators of autonomous elementa. The metaphor of dissection seems not to apply, in the absence of a prior whole. In response it must be said that even in the mathematical case humans do not literally create elements out of nothing (note the qualifying tamquam). Vico speaks of both unum andfigura as "abstractions." Figura, treated by geometry, is abstracted from corpus, which itself is a dissection of homo. The other division of homo is animus, which is carved into intellectus and voluntas. From all of these dissections, "from these things and from all other things," ens and unum are abstracted. There is no space in Vico's thought for the mathematician to create elementa that enjoy real existence independently of the divinely created elementa rei. We may speak of the mathematics as the human scientia that creates its own elementa but only if we take this as short- hand for elements that have no reality in themselves. Insofar as the elements of mathematics possess any ontological weight, they do so only as participations in "metaphysical points." (The nature of this relation is elusive; the point here is simply that the mathematical elementa are not autonomous, but ultimately depend on metaphysics, which Vico identifies as the "fount of all truth from which everything in the other scientiae are derived" [A 4.2]).

Even if Vico did attribute to human beings the power of genuine creation ex nihilo in the mathematical case, it would still be difficult to contend that its

16 The idea of "dissection," as presented in De antiquissima 1.2, may have inspired Georges Sorel's conception of "diremption."

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elements have real existence apart from the divine elementa. The reason is simply that, in themselves, the mathematical elements do not possess real existence at all. Vico describes the arithmetical unum and geometrical punctus as nominal "fictions." "For the point, if you draw it, is no longer a point; the unit, if you multiply it, is not entirely a unit" (A 1.2). Their fictive status does not make them any less useful.17 The unum and punctus enable the mathematician to fabricate "a certain world of shapes and numbers which he can embrace entirely within himself" (A 1.2). Both the elements and the constructions that proceed from them are within the full control of the mathematical scientiae. Following most closely the model of divine scientiae, human mathematicians "make the truths they teach" and operate "with their abstractions just as God operates with reality" (Prima riposta 2).

What makes mathematics the paradigmatic case of human scientia is the procedural analogy to divine knowing. Mathematics is the scientia operatrix that conforms most closely to verum-factum. Because it proves from causes, because it most thoroughly constructs its elements, it is most certain. "The most certain things are those which, redressing the defects of their origin, re- semble divine knowledge in their operation, inasmuch as in them the true is convertible with what is made" (A 1.2). As God possesses the elements and the generated Verbum entirely within himself, so the mathematician possesses the elements of his scientia and its constructions intra se. This position is not abandoned after the De antiquissima. Vico reaffirms it in section 15 of the Vici vindiciae, written after the first version of the Scienza nuova. "Just as he who occupies himself with geometry is, in his world of figures, a god (so to speak), so God Almighty is, in his world of spirits and bodies, a geometer (so to speak)."

Because it contains its elements within itself, and can manipulate them without external constraints, Vico places mathematics first on the hierarchy of human scientiae. The other scientiae, in descending order of certainty, are mechanics, physics, medicine, logic, and ethics. These also exemplify verum- factum, but less perfectly. Knowledge is still a matter of construction, of collecting the elements. But in deriving the elements themselves, the non-mathematical scientiae do not rely solely on their own procedures and so lack the formal certainty of geometry and arithmetic. Like the other human scientiae, mechanics and physics derive their elements (images of the elementa rei) through dissection. Here "dissection" not only refers to the postulation of abstractions but also embraces the notion of "experiment." The partly "external" character of their elements renders the scientiae of mechanics and physics less amenable to human control, and therefore less predictable than mathematics. Nonethe- less, the relative conformity to the verum-factum principle confers a degree of

17 Certainly Vico's positioning of mathematics at the pinnacle of the human scientiae is an anti-Cartesian irony, because what mathematics gains in certainty and clarity, it loses in ontological significance.

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assurance about their results. "Thoughts about natural things are considered most illuminating and are accepted with the fullest consent of everyone, if we are able to apply experiments to them, in which we make something similar to nature" (A 1.2).

Vico's hierarchy arranges the scientiae in descending order of human certainty, but certainty is not itself the ordering principle. The hierarchy depends on a distinction between scientia and conscientia. Mathematics is pure scientia because the grasp of its elements is entirely internal. ("Internal" is not a syn- onym for "intuited" or "introspected." The term is meant to recall the ability of the human mind to create the mathematical ficta independently of external constraints.) The other scientiae involve varying degrees of interaction with the external world. Their knowledge is not pure scientia but conscientia, knowledge that depends in some measure on elements grasped from the outside. The physicist may hypothesize any set of elements he likes, but the extent to which his postulations are true, i.e., genuine images of the elementa rei, depends on confirmation from without. His scientia is con-scientia; it requires a coopera- tion with nature, never completely within human control.

The other scientiae in the hierarchy-chemistry, medicine, logic, and ethics-involve an increasing proportion of interaction with the external world. Ethics is least amenable to formal procedures, relying on prudentia. Since its elements are not grasped by dissective methods, it is almost entirely a matter of conscientia. The primary elementa of ethics are the human person (homo) and the end (finis). Vico identifies ethics as the scientia that takes thefinis as its first cause (A 3). In connection with thefinis, it treats the motions of spirits (motus animorum). Of all human phenomena these are the "most deeply hidden" (penitissimi) and arise from "desire [libido] that is infinite" (A 1.2). Vico does not just mean that it is difficult to employ experiment in morals, as Verene suggests.'8 He intends the stronger claim that any dissective procedure whose mode of operation is to resolve wholes into parts (whether specifically experimentalist, as in physics, or non-experimentalist, as in mathematics) is unable to comprehend the integral realities treated by ethics (especially homo andfi- nis).

To situate ethics at the bottom of the scientia-conscientia hierarchy might seem puzzling. Is not desire the most interior of human realities? What pre- vents us from grasping it internally? Like Augustine, Vico uses the rhetoric of depth to evoke the opacity of desire, its seeming resistance to scrutiny, its tendency to escape human control. The "interiority" of desire, however, does not imply that it is "internal" in the relevant sense. The root of desire, its first cause, is thefinis, identical to the infinite primum verum. No human construction, finite and partial since confined to the outside edges of the elementa rei,

18 But see Donald Phillip Verene, Vico's Science of Imagination (Ithaca, 1981), 40.

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can exhaust it, or penetrate to its infinite essence. The ultimate explanation for the obscurity of libido and the motus animorum (of which libido is the efficient cause) is teleological. Vico identifies the finis as both the first and final cause of desire. Libido is infinite because the finis it longs for is infinite. Since the end is never available to transparent understanding, the human yearning for the end is mysterious. The elusiveness of desire is neither a brute fact nor a phenom- enon to be explained by depth metaphors. It is an anthropological reality, situated by Vico within a negative theology that is also a teleology.

The resistance of the elementa of ethics to dissective procedure might seem to alienate ethics from the verum-factum axiom. Certainly if the principle were only a thesis about the human derivation of elements, its relevance to ethics would be minimal. Verum-factum, however, embraces not only the origination of elements, but also-and more directly-their arrangement or composition. Moral philosophy, despite its lack of formal certainty, does not constitute an exception to the general principle "to know is to compose [componere] the elements of things" (A 1.1).19 The knowledge proper to ethical praxis will assume the form of a collection of elements. It can therefore be described without violence as a type of "construction" even though its elementa are not humanly produced. Given the emphasis on the inexhaustibility of desire and the resistance of thefinis to human remaking, an ethics of technical control is not possible for Vico, as it is for Hobbes. There is a role for "maker's knowledge" in practical reason, but the making is "poetic" rather than "technological." It adds content to our initial glimpse of the bonum, which Vico identifies as a criterion by which true makings are distinguished from others, without supplying a recipe for attaining an end whose essence is known prior to construction, or an airtight system of rules or principles that constitute the natural law. As we have seen, Vico specifically rejects "moder" attempts to replace an ethics of prudentia with an ethics of "method."

Ingenium and prudentia

Vico associates ingenium and prudentia first by adducing etymologies that locate them in neighboring parts of the body. "For the Latins commonly spoke of prudentia as lodged in the heart, or of plans and worries as turned over in the heart, and of acuity of invention [inveniendi acumen] as lodged in the breast" (A 5.3). Vico identifies inveniendi acumen and the Plautine expression e pec- tore acetum with ingenium. The implication is that without ingenium, the exercise of prudence is impossible. Practical reason requires both cors and pector.

19 Marcello Montanari, Vico e la politica dei moderni (Bari, 1995), 63, concludes that verum-factum is not reducible to an epistemological criterion, Baconian or otherwise, but is "un principio etico-politico, non solamente gnoseologico."

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Before discussing the faculty of ingenium in particular, Vico connects the general notion offacultas tofacilitas, "a ready and productive aptitude [solertia] for making" (A 7.1).2? Afacultas is "that by which power [virtus] is led to act" (A 7.1). This states what ingenium has in common with the other faculties of sensus, memoria, and fantasia. What is proper to ingenium is its capacity to "connect disparate and diverse things" (A 7.4).21 The best exercises of ingenium are "acute," while many are "obtuse." Obtuse wits are unsynthetic, and leave diverse things far apart. They are unable to construct connections, or construct them with painful slowness. Vico finds an "aesthetic" dimension to ingenium. It is the human ability to "see the proportion of things [commensu rerum] and recognize what is apt, fitting, beautiful and ugly" (A 7.4). Vico wants to pre- serve the conceptual connection to both art and geometry: "Is it because just as nature gives birth to physical things, so human ingenium generates mechanics and, as God is nature's artificer, so man is the god of artifacts?" (A 7.4). The spirit of geometry and finesse are at root one: "human knowledge [scientia] itself is nothing but making things correspond to themselves in beautiful proportion, which only those who excel in ingenium can do" (A 7.4). The De antiquissima echoes the conviction of the De ratione that good geometers, physicists, and orators arise from the same source. All possess the faculty of ingenium.

To probe more fully the operation of ingenium in the practical life, we must recall Vico's emphasis on the infinite character of the circumstances that con- front us. Practical rationality requires that we select some of them for consideration and ignore others. Not everything can be considered, but nothing can be omitted arbitrarily. To make sense of a situation, the agent must cut it down to size, without reductively falsifying it. This implies that the exercise of practical reason will involve, in its own fashion, a dissection of reality. The human being does not originate the elementa in ethics, but she "remakes" them in accor- dance with the requirements of the finis. This process requires the possession of the metaphysical genera. In the Vita, Vico specifically connects his ability, developed by the "long study of metaphysics," to "move freely in the infinite of genera" with his reading of orators, historians, and poets that enabled his intel- lect to take "increasing delight in observing between the remotest matters ties that bound them together in some common relation" (Vita 123). The genera enable the sapiens, whose mind is "made universal by metaphysics," to grasp the universal through acute judgment involving particulars. And this is precisely the work of ingenium, the faculty "by which man is capable of contem- plating and constructing [contemplandi acfacendi] likenesses" (A 7.5).

20 Botturi, La sapienza della storia, 113, note 169, suggests that the promotion of solertia from a habitus to afacultas is an artifact of humanism but leaves the details obscure.

21 This conception of ingenium suggests affinities with Baroque writers, especially Tesauro. On the Baroque aspect of Vico generally, see Botturi, La sapienza della storia, 106-10, with references.

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Both topica and critica are required for ingenium. The ars topica provides comprehension, and the ars critica supplies focus. "Topics discovers things and piles them up. Criticism divides the pile and removes some of it: and thus the topical wits are more fertile, but less true; the critical ones are truer, but are sterile" (Seconda riposta 4). This seems merely to echo the De ratione, which defends the ars topica of Cicero but acknowledges that Amauldian critica is a necessary supplement. In the De antiquissima Vico goes beyond the earlier work and constructs a new model of the relation of topics and criticism. He now faults both the ancients and the modems, attributing to the former an artificial separation of discovery and judgment. "Neither invention without judgment, nor judgment without invention can be certain" (A 7.5). Topica and critica are ideally one: "topics itself will become criticism" (A 7.5).

The exercise of ingenium and prudentia requires the agent to construct an adequate description of her situation. Descriptions must be constructed, for they are never simply given or read off from general principles. Relevant features must be isolated, pertinent circumstances must be considered, appropriate categories must be consulted. All this is the work of inventio, regulated by the ars topica. Without topics one might miss something, and risk acting in a way that is incompatible with the demands ofprudentia. But the integration of topica and critica suggests that the work of constructive apprehension will include the moment of critical discrimination. Inventio and iudicio are distinct stages in the manuals of rhetoric, but interact in the actual process of reasoning. Any appropriation of the topics is already "normative," guided by standards of what is desirable and what is not. The topics, moreover, receive their original identity as summaries of critical judgments, themselves products of ingenium. As precedents in the etymological sense, they embody the contingent judgments made on particular occasions. This enables us to make sense of Vico's ambivalence toward moral rules. Viewed as timeless propositions that auto- matically dictate the right course of action in abstraction from the processes of inventio and iudicio, moral rules repress ingenium. But taken as condensations of experiential judgments, as "abridgments" of tradition,22 they can be useful-provided that the fixed form they typically assume is not confused with the authentic universality of the genera. "No matter how hard another may try, he cannot speak or act more appropriately-which is why the memorable say- ings and doings of wise men are so much commended" (Prima riposta 2).

No "value-neutral" appropriation of topics is possible. Critical judgment, linked to the transcendental bonum which Vico identifies as the criterion of truth, always guides the description of situations. Bad orators, unconscious of the critical imperative, will tend to roam through the topics randomly, unaware that a disordered amassing of possible aspects and considerations will only

22 Cf. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (New York, 1962), 91-92.

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confuse the issue. Neither sententiae nor exempla can be used unreflectively; both require the discretion that is a product of critical judgment and prudentia. (It is relevant that Vico associates prudentia with both topica and critica.) Thus Vico contrasts the bad orator with the one who "ranges through all the topical commonplaces with a critical torch" (A 7.5). Another mode of topical abuse, more characteristic of the "modem" rationalist, is to scrutinize the topics too carefully, trying to find in them what is not there. "Aristotle's Categories and Topics are completely useless if one wants to find something new in them. One becomes a Lull or Kircher, or someone similar, who indeed knows the letters but cannot bring them together [colligit] to read the great book of nature" (A 7.5). The analogy of knowing and reading directly recalls verum-factum. Top- ics must be used as a starting point for construction, not as its substitute. Their practical function is to supply a reading of a particular situation that enables prudent action. Attempting to find solutions in the topics themselves is as fool- ish as trying to uncover the meaning of a book by examining its index.

Ingenium, then, is both the origin and the result of the exercise of the ars inveniendi. The appropriation of the traditional category and the critique of Cartesian rationalism are simultaneous. When Vico says that the geometrical method cannot be applied to practical life, unless we pretend that "desire, rashness, occasion, and fortune do not rule in human things, so that you could draw a straight line through the curves of life" (A 7.5), he is underscoring the contrast between "method" and ingenium. The constructive facultas of ingenium, as opposed to the artificial lamplight of method, provides a clear and distinct view of a situation, by demanding a thorough-and thoroughly critical-ex- amination of all the relevant questions at hand. This is precisely the require- ment of Aristotelian phronesis, the virtue appropriate to contingent things. Vico defends Aristotle against Descartes by pointing to the topical utility of his Cat- egories and by crediting him with the habit of never defining a thing until he has looked to see what is in it, either inside or outside (Seconda riposta 4).23 He also reaffirms the Aristotelian judgment that the aspiration for mathematical exactitude in morals is a mark of stupidity. The Stoics, whom Vico considers the ancient equivalent of modem Cartesians, "aimed to disrupt the established order and to replace mathematics with their pompous maxim: Sapientiem nihil opinarF' (Seconda riposta 4). Far from being useful to the community, the Stoics merely asserted doubtful propositions as true, and thus prepared the way for skepticism. In Vico's eyes the quest for certainty is bound to end in despair. It is a cause of skepticism, and not merely its effect. In the Scienza nuova, Vico will speak of the destruction wrought by the "barbarism of reflection," perhaps

23 Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 317: "Aristotle's ability to describe phenomena from every aspect constitutes his real genius."

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reminding some contemporary readers of Bernard Williams's dictum that "reflection can destroy knowledge."24

For Vico, knowledge of the human good in particular situations is a matter of both contemplation and construction. For human beings construction as- sumes a natural priority but does not remove the possibility of contemplation. It has been emphasized that moral knowledge is a type of construction, despite the fact that we do not wholly construct the ethical order, the order of the real. More than most commentators appreciate, Vico fuses the categories of practical and constructive knowledge. Prudentia is not scientia but conscientia, and so it involves an element of maker's knowledge. The activity which involves no making and is therefore less certain than either scientia or conscientia is "analysis," which Vico considers the ars divanandi (SR 5). If Vico excluded verum- factum from moral philosophy, he would be reducing it to the status of divina- tion; and Vico clearly does not wish to do this. Even as he emphasizes the difference between practical and geometrical reasoning against Descartes, he attends to their continuity. All knowledge is an instance of the convertibility of the verum and the factum. Vico both defends prudentia against Cartesianism and makes a partial break with the "ancients" who neglect artes in practical life, leaving it solely to prudentia.

Thus Vico does not devalue the role of the artificium in ethics, but he creates a space for the poetic.25 Practical reason aims at the end to be achieved and contemplated, but the content of the end is known through the construction of cultural models. R. G. Collingwood, himself influenced by Vico, captures this aspect of verum-factum in his contrast between "technique" and "expression." In the latter there is "a directed process; an effort, that is, directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived, to which appropriate means can be thought out in the light of our knowledge of its spe- cial character. Expression is an activity of which there can be no technique."26 The link between construction and knowledge of the good, the presence of a "poetic teleology," lends Vico a distinctively "moder" appearance.27 But it

24 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 148. 25 Montanari, Vico e la politica dei moderni, 61, emphasizes that "making" for Vico is

something more than technical operation. It is an "attivita creativo-poietica" that does not intend to "contraporre la poesia e le scienze morali alle scienze naturali, la retorica alla logica." Rather, it subsumes the usual dualities in a conception of philosophy that embraces "la volonta di combattere quelle filosofie che vogliono ridurre la 'potenza creativa' (la fantasia, la prassi) ad un agire meccanico."

26 R. G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938), 111. Quoted in Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground, 63.

27 Compare Milbank, The Religious Dimension, I, 90, which speaks of an "immanent teleology of art." This is similar to the "expressivism" described in Collingwood, and more recently in Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 61ff.

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does not assimilate him to the anti-teleological stance of Grotius, Hobbes, and Spinoza. The appropriation of "Aristotelian" prudentia against Descartes will find parallel expression in Vico's critique of rationalist ethics and jurispru- dence, initiated in the Diritto Universale and completed in the Scienza Nuova.

University of Notre Dame.

Article Contentsp. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60p. 61p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67p. 68p. 69p. 70p. 71p. 72p. 73

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 1-194Front Matter [pp. 52 - 74]On the Origin of Anaximander's Cosmological Model [pp. 1 - 28]"Nos faysoms contre Nature ...": Fourteenth-Century Sophismata and the Musical Avant Garde [pp. 29 - 51]"Verum-factum" and Practical Wisdom in the Early Writings of Giambattista Vico [pp. 53 - 73]The Microscope of Experience: Christian Garve's Translation of Cicero's "De Officiis" (1783) [pp. 75 - 94]Political Economy and Classical Antiquity [pp. 95 - 114]Coleridge's Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and the Walled Garden of "Kubla Khan" [pp. 115 - 134]A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism [pp. 135 - 148]Foucault's Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast [pp. 149 - 166]NoteDavid Hume and the Danish Debate about Freedom of the Press in the 1770s [pp. 167 - 172]

Review-EssayEclecticism Rediscovered [pp. 173 - 182]

Notices [p. 183]Obituary: Lewis White Beck (1914-1997) [p. 184]Books Received [pp. 185 - 194]Back Matter

Documents

1998 Miner - Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom in Vico