Abstract

Pompa’s book is a welcome addition to the sparse English literature on Vico, and it will be of interest not only to philosophers but to historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists. Vico is written and developed as a guide to the final version of the New Science which is surely one of the most obscure books ever written. This is the first book in English which takes as its aim the exposition of the New Science. The other English books, ranging from Flint’s Vico in 1891 to Tagliacozzo and White’s Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium contained either a general survey of ideas, as in Flint, or a wide collection of background materials and analytic, historical, or comparative studies, as in Tagliacozzo and White. A. R. Caponigri in Time and Idea expressed perhaps the historically and philosophically most controversial thesis: that Vico had attempted to temporalize and historicize the Platonic forms in his concept of the "ideal eternal history."