Abstract

This article aims to clarify two different uses of the term poetics in Giambattista Vico: as an adjective of the word wisdom in poetic wisdom, and as a noun, poetics in its broadest sense. This is done in order to understand thematic and historical developments of poetics in Vico and thus to explain his intention to recover, in times of abstract and reductive rationality, a poetic rationality able both to permeate the practical and to restore the lost unity between theory and praxis, between poetics and praxis. The proposal is not to go back to the times of poetic wisdom, but to recover a poetic dimension of existence.