vico's road to postmodernism

de Tony Fahey

Each philosopher of note has one ‘big idea’: one central thesis that is the feature of his or her entire opus. For Plato this theme is the Good: the inner force that impels all things to excellence or perfection. For Parmenides it is that being is One: immutable and unchanging. For Hegel it is the dialectical process through which the Absolute Spirit moves to self-realisation. Descartes’ central intuition is the cogito. Heidegger’s is Dasein - being in the world with others. Giambattista Vico’s ‘big idea’ is set out the most often quoted portion of paragraph 331 of his magnum opus, New Science (1744) where he says: Still, in the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light. It is a truth that cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind. And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must be discovered within the modifications of the human mind. The ambition of Vico's Road to Postmodernism is to examine the ‘big idea’ implicit in this quotation, and to show how the sentiments represented in it anticipate that movement which we know today as postmodernism.

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