On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, originally published in 1710, is widely regarded as Vico's most significant work after the New Science and the Autobiography. Subtitled "The Book of Metaphysics," it was one of three planned volumes of a larger work that was never published, and it marks Vico's transition from rhetorician to philosopher of historical knowledge. This edition incorporates translations from the Italian of a contemporary review and Vico's responses, published in 1711 and 1712. L. M. Palmer's translation helps make more accessible a treatise of vital importance for an understanding of Vico's epistemology, psychology, and philosophy of mathematics.

In an illuminating introduction to the volume, Robert Miner elucidates Vico's short but difficult work; at the same time, he allows the reader to assess the importance of that work, in absolute terms as well as relative to Vico's other writings and the work of his numerous interlocutors in the republic of letters. --

Professor Pompa has here translated and introduced a selection of the central, representative texts, where the most important and seminal of Vico's ideas are developed. The volume will make a major contribution towards the study of Vico's thought and this period in the history of philosophy.

Job's Illness: Loss, Grief and Integration explores the Book of Job and examines the psychiatric interpretation of Job's illness. This book presents the story of Job to help the readers to discover the links between depression, obsessional states, and paranoia. Organized into nine chapters, this book begins with an overview of the various medical references in which Job's illness is described in terms of categories of diseases in physical medicine. This text then describes Job's insistence on what has been called his perfection is a trait seen in obsessional personalities. Other chapters consider Job's own communications about his experiences and feelings. This book discusses as well the various ways of looking upon what happens to Job in terms of therapy. The final chapter deals with the transformation of Job with qualities different from the old one and restored to health. This book is a valuable resource for clinicians, psychologists and psychotherapists.

Vico's earliest extant scholarly works, the six orations on humanistic education, offer the first statement of ideas that Vico would continue to refine throughout his life.

Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern, it argues that the key to true understanding of the past lies in accepting that the customs and emotional lives of ancient Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Jews and Babylonians were radically different from our own. Along the way, Vico explores a huge variety of topics, ranging from physics to poetics, money to monsters, and family structures to the Flood. Marking a crucial turning-point in humanist thinking, New Science has remained deeply influential since the dawn of Romanticism, inspiring the work of Karl Marx and even influencing the framework for Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

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.