Excerpt

A fitting title for the following discussion could have been “Vico's Classical Idealism.” Yet, classical idealism is, for us, a question begging for elucidation more than an answer to questions already asked. Indeed, talk of Vico's “classical idealism” is likely to sound preposterous to the ears of most contemporary Vico scholars.¹

What is more analytically proposed here is that Vico returned to a purely pagan epistemology seated at the heart of an irreducible political-theological predicament. There is no denying that our proposal is daring; if correct, our diagnosis would entail that Vico scholars have by and large misconstrued Vico. Our…