A review by jbrown2140
New Science by Giambattista Vico

3.0

So this book is in turns repetitive, dogmatic, and insightful. Somehow its insistence on being "systematic", and finding these grand parallels everywhere, gets in the way of the more inquisitive (and, admittedly speculative) moments. The etymological musings, the notion of a "mental dictionary" and the development story about language and culture were certainly thought-provoking though at times a bit silly and forced. The final two books seemed largely either repetitive or simply an affirmation of Vico's own place in history. The "Discovery of the True Homer" is what led meto read this book in he first place. Almost all of the observations I made above apply to it in miniature. Still, the mythic view of Homer it espouses does have defenders in contemporary scholarship, which is usually a good thing.


If you're reading this bc of James Joyce, you'll find a lot that is helpful. You'll get beyond just this really shallow idea that Joyce used Vico's ideas of historical cycles, and see all sorts of other parallels between Vico and both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on nearly every page.

That said, the argument on its own has a forced and idiosyncratic quality that's hard to get past.