Book description
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. 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.
