New Science (Penguin Classics)

New Science (Penguin Classics)

by Giambattista Vico (Author), Anthony Grafton (Introduction), David Marsh (Translator), David Marsh (Translator), Giambattista Vico (Author), Anthony Grafton (Introduction)

Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 560
Edition: 3
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 29 Apr 1999

ISBN 10: 0140435697
ISBN 13: 9780140435696

Author Bio
Although Vico (1668-1744) lived his whole life as an obscure academic in Naples, his New Science is an astonishingly ambitious attempt to decode the history, mythology and law of the ancient world.