The New Science

Vico's attempt to found a science of the 'world of nations', first published in 1725 and twice rewritten; the version usually read is the third, of 1744. Its guiding idea is that we can truly know only what we have made, so the civil world, made by human beings, is more knowable to us than nature, which only God made. Studying language, myth and law, Vico argues that every nation passes through three ages, of gods, of heroes and of men, each with its own kind of language, law and government. The earliest people were not philosophers but poets who thought in vivid images; Book II, on 'poetic wisdom', reads myths as their way of understanding the world, as when thunder was taken for Jove. Book III argues that Homer was not a single author but the voice of the Greek people. Religion, marriage and burial are the institutions every nation shares. After the age of men, nations may sink back into barbarism, and the cycle can begin again.

It anticipates the philosophy of history, anthropology and the study of myth, and its claim that we understand cultures from the inside influenced Michelet, Collingwood and James Joyce.