Quotes About Vico

Vico's terminology follows the principle of his oration Study Methods: to balance the moderns against the ancients. The reader is asked to have Joyce's ''two thinks at a time'' (FW 583.7), to move between the modern and Vico's meaning. Vico does not simply replace modern meanings with his own original ones. He repeatedly faces the reader with both.

C6 Now Vico here agrees with Aristotle. When he calls the world of nations the world of men, he means that what were beasts in the world of nature become men in the world of nations, and it is by the becoming of the world of nations that they become men. Or, as he puts it otherwise, in a sense they make the world of nations, and in the same sense they make themselves by making it [367, 520, 692].

He lays down as an axiom Dio's dictum that "custom is like a king and law1 like a tyrant; which we must understand as referring to reasonable custom and to law1 not animated by natural reason.

Bacon, like Vico, held that the ancients were not classic models for the moderns, but their primitive ancestors – an idea that lies at the core of the New Science.

Homer, whose own language was certainly heroic, in five passages from his two poems [437] mentions a more ancient language and calls it "the language of the gods.