RL 680 - Vico and the Question of Modernity
Course Description
The aim of this course is to explore The New Science (third edition, 1744) by Giambattista Vico, through a close reading of the work and a survey of its intellectual context. Those contexts are two-fold: first, the context of Vico’s response to Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637); second, the response to Vico’s work by various writers over the past two centuries (Michelet, Marx, Croce, and Joyce are among Vico’s most attentive readers, and the affinities of Vico and Nietzsche remain a major enigma for modern philosophy). Both contexts can be seen at work in every line of The New Science–as with, for example, the pervasive, and Nietzschean, topic of error and erring, proposed by Vico as a challenge to the Cartesian dictum putting reason in charge of being. With this historical overlapping in mind, it is our aim to read The New Science as a major moment in the invention of modernity.
We shall be working with English-language translations. Students will take a final examination, and write a research paper in addition to several class presentations.