Gustavo Costa reviewing the Italian edition of Vico's Institutiones Oratoriae in New Vico Studies 9 (1991), has written that Rhetoric is the mainspring of an important trend of Vichian studies which initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century and had its manifestation in John D. Schaeffer's Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), where Schaeffer aptly noted, summing up a long exegetic tradition, Vico was imbued with rhetoric and convinced of its centrality to Western civilization. Unfortunately, the editions of Vico's works published in English have not yet included the Institutiones Oratoriae, which more or less reflects the lectures on rhetoric given by Vico at the University of Naples, starting with the academic year 1699-1700 and going through 1739-1741. The manual on rhetoric was used in Italy up to the end of the nineteenth century and established the common curriculum in rhetoric to be followed in all Universities. This English edition offers a text of the Institutiones complete on the base of the four known extant manuscripts. It offers the marginal glosses made by Vico's students, a collection of Vico's phrases and explanations of terms collected by some of the students, a glossary of Latin words and rhetorical terms from the Latin text, and a wealth of information in the commentary. The Art of Rhetoric is the manual for everyone who wants to know what rhetoric is, how it was employed in the forum or the courts, how it could be learned from the classic orators, and how it can be used whenever we speak for convincing, praising or motivating.

This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and philosophers a vast survey and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship.

This volume is the translation of "Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker", the second volume of the multi-volume work "Storia delle storie generali della filosofia". It guides the reader from the Cartesian rejection of the ‘philosophical past’ that found voice in the work of Malebranche, to the establishment of a ‘critical’ history of philosophy by 18th century thinkers A.-F Boureau-Deslandes and J.J. Brucker. The latter pair investigated philosophy from its most ancient origins up to the contemporary age, and oversaw the transformation of the history of philosophy into a genre in its own right, thus spawning dozens of works that made a major contribution to the culture of the Enlightenment. Through careful analysis of more than 36 separate works, the authors show how in the span of a single century the theoretical and methodological techniques used to assess the history of philosophy were refined and developed.

A fresh look at the importance of natural and international law in the religious politics at the heartlands of the Reformation, from the Low Countries, the German principalities up to Transylvania; from Niels Hemmingsen to Gian Battista Vico; from religious reasons for the universalist claims of natural law to political arguments for the sacred polity, their tension and creative potential.

The collection of essays presented here examines the links forged through the ages between the realm of law and the expressions of the humanistic culture.We collected thirty-five essays by international scholars and organized them into sections of ten chapters based around ten different themes. Two main perspectives emerged: in some articles the topic relates to the conventional approach of law and/in humanities (iconography, literature, architecture, cinema, music), other articles are about more traditional connections between fields of knowledge (in particular, philosophy, political experiences, didactics).We decided not to confine authors to one particular methodological framework, preferring instead to promote historiographical openness. Our intention was to create a patchwork of different approaches, with each article drawing on a different area of culture to provide a new angle to the history being told. The variety of authorial nationalities gives the collection a multicultural character and the breadth of the chronological period it deals with from antiquity to the contemporary age adds further depth of insight.As the element that unites the collection is historiographical interpretation, we wanted to bring to the fore its historical depth. Thus for every chapter we organized the articles in chronological order according to the historical context covered.Looking at the final outcome, it was interesting to learn that more often than not the connection between law and humanities is not simply a relation between a specific branch of the law and a single field of the humanities, but rather a relation that could be developed in many directions at once, involving different fields of knowledge, and of arts and popular culture.We are grateful to Luigi Lacchè for his contribution to this collection. His essay outlines the coordinates of the law and humanities world, laying out the instruments necessary for an understanding of the origins of a complex methodology and the different approaches that exist within it.This project is the result of discussions that took place during the XXIII Forum of the Association of Young Legal Historians held in Naples in the spring of 2017. The book was made possible thanks to the advice and support of Cristina Vano.The Editors

If among the many truths of Giambattista Vico's New Science there is one that is deepest, it is the truth that language, mind, and society are but three modes of a common reality. In Vico's term, that reality is the monde civile, the world of man. It is a world of many guises and faces. If reflected in a mirror, those faces would reveal an image of the full array of contemporary arts and sciences, all the disciplines of learning and technique by which, so Vico judged, humanity attains its perfection. Humanity in its perfection, however, is so rare a moment, so delicate and subtle a state, that it is never to be found among the nations of the world -- or is found in so fragile a form that it threatens always to crack and fall to the ground. In the West, a persistent line of thinking that has flourished from time to time holds that language is primary in culture, metaphor a necessity, and jurisprudence our highest achievement. This was the position of Vico, who not only received and cherished the tradition, but looked deeply into it, saw what its principles implied, and so made ready for the great social theorists of the nineteenth century. That is the thesis of this work. After an introductory chapter on Vico himself -- in which his intellectual world and his movements within it are sketched -- the work unfolds in three parts. These parts successively treat rhetoric, pedagogy, and culture, each proceeding from a major Vichian text.

Among the classics of the history of philosophy, the Scienza nuova (New Science) by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was largely neglected and generally misunderstood during the author's lifetime. From the nineteenth century onwards Vico’s views found a wider audience, and today his influence is widespread in the humanities and social sciences. The New Science is often taught in courses at colleges and universities, both in philosophy and Italian departments and in general humanities courses. Despite the excellent English translations of this enigmatic book and numerous studies in English of Vico, many sections of the work remain challenging to the modern reader. Vico's New Science of the Intersubjective World offers both an in-depth analysis of all the important ideas of the book and an evaluation of their contribution to our present understanding of the social world. In the first chapter, Vittorio Hösle examines Vico’s life, sources, and writings. The second and third chapters discuss the concerns and problems of the Scienza nuova. The fourth chapter traces the broader history of Vico’s reception. Hösle facilitates the understanding of many passages in the work as well as the overarching structure of its claims, which are often dispersed over many sections. Hösle reformulates Vico’s vision in such a way that it is not only of historical interest but may inspire ongoing debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences as well as many other issues on which Vico sheds light, from the relation of poetry and poetics to the development of law. This book will prepare students and scholars for a precise study of the Scienza nuova, equipping them with the necessary categories and context and familiarizing them with the most important problems in the critical debate on Vico's philosophy.