The new situation in Europe, as exemplified in Germany, calls for a common consciousness, one traditionally characterized as sensus communis or common sense. Kant organized his ruminations on common sense — specifically, the logical common sense — around three maxims: enlightenment, the extended way of thinking and the consistent way of thinking. These are here described with an eye to their consequences for the issues of identity, community and pedagogy.

This dissertation discusses whether Giacomo Leopardi can be considered a philosophical heir of Giambattista Vico, as some scholars retain, despite the fact that there is no evidence that Leopardi read Vico’s New Science or other works until late ; too late to demonstrate a direct influence of the philosopher’s thought on the deepest nexuses of Leopardi’s reflection. This dissertation clarifies how Leopardi responded to Vico-related questions characterizing the culture of his time through an innovative methodology that looks at the diffraction (...) of Vico’s ideas in Bourbon Restoration Italian culture. This work aims to paint a dynamic picture of Italian nineteenth-century polycentric culture through a geographical organization of the material; it in fact tackles the diffusion of Vico’s works and ideas from Naples to Venice, to Milan, to Leopardi’s hometown Recanati, to Florence, and again to Naples. Not only does this work shed new light on the existence of a Vico-Leopardi philosophical lineage, but it also present an original study of perceptions of time and history and of the dichotomy ancient/modern in Post-Napoleonic Italian culture. (shrink)

This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge. First, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merge on the relative claims of reason and authority. Second, his use of antiquarian knowledge to supersede historicist accounts of change in time and to position the plebian social class as the true arbiters of language. Third, his understanding of philological (...) knowledge as an instrument of political change, and a foundational element in the establishment of democracy. By treating the philological imagination as a tool for bringing about political change, Vico’s plebian philology is radically democratic, and a crucial instrument in the struggle against the elite, from antiquity to the present. -/- . (shrink)

El artículo, de intención didáctica, intenta ser una presentación alternativa a la concepción del método en Hegel. Parte de la premisa de que ésta es tomada como una estrategia para reconciliar la modernidad ilustrada, particular-mente tras el evento de la Revolución Francesa de 1789, tanto con el proyecto fundacional epistémico de la modernidad temprana como con su pasado antagónico: La concepción de la racionalidad retórica y hermenéutica, tal y como ésta procede de Platón y Aristóteles. El método de Hegel se (...) inscribiría en un afán por fusionar los aspectos omnipotentes de las narrativas ilustradas con los métodos premodernos de vinculación finita y fragmentaria con el sentido de la realidad. El texto sugiere la caducidad del proyecto, ante la ostensible inviabilidad contemporánea ante el optimismo ilustrado que lo inspira. (shrink)

Postmodernism is a post Second World War movement that is the natural issue of its progenitor, modernism. That is, where early twentieth century and post First World War ‘modern’ intellectuals held that it was their privilege and duty to restore order to a fragmented and chaotic world, post Second World war thinkers hold that since world order is an unachievable and therefore fruitless ambition, all humankind can do is make the best of what they have. One could say that where (...) modernists attempted to put the shattered shell of Humpty Dumpty back together again following his tumble from the wall, postmodernists feel that all one can do is do what one can with the pieces. Postmodernism is also associated with a movement that arose when writers and thinkers, in the wake of Saussure’s revelation that the words we attach to things are purely arbitrary, turned their iconoclastic gaze on universal concepts or ‘grand narratives’. This thesis sets out to show that postmodern consciousness is not a recent phenomenon, but, as a critique of the fragility of the claims made by exponents of the notion of metanarratives or ‘universal concepts’, it is evident in the philosophy of the eighteenth century Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico. The title of this thesis, ‘Vico’s Road to Postmodernism’, is something of a play on words of the theme that James Joyce, who, as will be shown, Ihab Hassan identifies as a postmodern thinker, took for his book Finnegans Wake. It seems that Joyce, who declared that his imagination soared whenever he read Vico, as a tribute to the Italian philosopher, begins the narrative of his famous novel at the Vico Road in the South Dublin suburb of Killiney. Not only is there a link between the name of this road and Giambattista Vico, but the view of Dublin Bay from this road is said to replicate the view of the bay of Naples, Vico’s native city. (shrink)

This article deals with the question concerning the role played by the concept of sensus communis in the philosophy of Giambattista Vico and the interpretation of it provided by Hans-Georg Gadamer in the context of his project of a philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer’s rehabilitation of the concept of commonsense, derived from an early work of Vico entitled De nostri temporis studiorum ratione ratione, is functional to his criticism of the methodological model of knowledge that the humanities have borrowed from the natural (...) sciences, to which Gadamer opposes the rhetorical-linguistic experience that one can make in a real community. Comparing these two philosophers will lead me then to analyze the interpretations of Gadamer’s hermeneutical appropriation of Vico that various scholars have provided, mostly to criticize Gadamer by arguing that his treatment of Vico’s concept of commonsense eventually falls prey to some kind of relativism. This topic also implies a critical analysis of the two authors’ overall philosophies, in particular with regard to the difference between Vico’s project of developing a science of human history grounded on universal transcendental structures in his Scienza nuova and Gadamer’s concept of extra-methodical truth and experience that forms the basis of his philosophical hermeneutics in Wahrheit und Methode. (shrink)