The New Science

The New Science (1725, Principi di Scienza Nuova d’intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni) is the major work of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico that greatly influenced the development of the fields of the philosophy of history, of sociology, and of anthropology, because the conceptualizations of methodology prefigured the intellectual progress of the Age of Enlightenment.

For historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, an historian of ideas, and for metahistorians, such as Hayden White, among the values proposed in The New Science was Vico’s establishment of the objective consideration of the facts in the writing of history.

In 1720, Giammbattista Vico began work on the book Principi di Scienza Nuova d’intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni (Principles of New Science About the Common Nature of Nations), which was to be part of a treatise on Universal rights; notably, the book was written in Italian, the popular language, rather than in Latin, the language of academics and clerics. Cardinal Corsini (Pope Clement XII ) was to finance a volume of the book, but, when the cardinal withdrew his patronage, Vico financed the book’s production. The first edition of the The Principles of New Science About the Common Nature of Nations was published in 1725; the revised, second edition of The New Science was published in 1730, neither edition was well received during Vico’s lifetime.

In the 1730 and 1744 editions of The New Science, the first section is titled the “Idea of Work” (Idea dell’Opera) presents the “Science of Reasoning” (Scienza di ragionare). Throughout the work Vico presents dialectics between axioms, such as authoritative maxims (degnità) and "reasonings" (ragionamenti) by way of which the axioms are thematically and progressively linked; i.e. the section “Of the Elements”.

Vico specifies that the Science of Reasoning is principally about the social function of religion in the human world (“Idea of Work”), and in this respect the work "comes to be one reasoned civil theology of divine providence" (vien ad essere una teologia civile ragionata della provvidenza divina). Reconsidering divine things (viz. "the conduct of divine providence") within a human or political context, Vico unearths the "poetic theologians" (poeti teologi) of pagan antiquity, exposing the poetic character of theology independently of Christianity's sacred history and thus of Biblical authority (see e.g. Scienza Nuova [1744], "Of the Elements," CXIV). Vico's unearthing of poetic theology (anticipated already in his De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia (1710), "On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians") confirms the philosopher's ties to Italian Renaissance appeals to theologia poetica. With the early Renaissance, Vico shares the call for recovering a "pagan" or "vulgar" horizon for philosophy's providential agency, or for recognizing the providence of our human "metaphysical" minds/menti in the world of our "political" wills/animi ("Idea of the Work," par. 2). "Poetic theology" would serve as stage for an "ascent" (ibid.) to recognize the inherence or latency of rational agency in our actions, even when these are brutal (see further "Of the Method," par. 2). This way, the particular providence of the Bible's "true God" ("Of the Elements," CXIV) would not be required for the thriving of properly human life. All that would be needed was (A) false religions/Gods and (B) the covert work of the conatus (rational principle of constitution of experience rooted in its proper infinite form) examined at length in the De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia and evoked again in par. 2 of the "Of the Method" section of the Scienza Nuova (1730 and 1744).

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