BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
I. WORKS OF VICO
Vico's earliest extant work is the poem entitled Feelings of one in despair, composed certainly before the author's twenty-fifth year at Vatolla in the Cilento, where he lived for nine years as a tutor at the Casa Rocca, printed by Gonzatti at Venice and dated 1693. This was followed by verses and speeches of a merely rhetorical character.
The philosophical characteristics are accentuated in the six speeches read by Vico at Naples University, 1699-1707, not printed by him, and rediscovered and published by Galasso (Naples, Morano, 1869). In these speeches, though some tendencies of his thought show themselves, his philosophy is still the traditional system, not without some traces of Cartesianism. Vico's opposition to Cartesianism and formal adoption of his own views are announced for the first time in the inaugural lecture for the year 1708, entitled De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, published next year by the author himself (Naples, Mosca, 1709). A long digression (§§ 12-15) contains a sketch of the history of Roman jurisprudence, his first essay in the historical studies which led later on to the Diritto universale and the two Scienze Nuove.
The following year appeared Vico's first constructively philosophical and historical work: the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae Latinae originibus eruenda, or rather the first book of that work (Naples, Mosca, 1710): the other two were never written, but we can form an idea of their intended contents from what is said in the Autobiography. Beside Vico's theory of knowledge in its first form and the metaphysic which he always maintained in its entirety, the De antiquissima contained an attempt to reconstitute for the first time primitive wisdom, or rather one particular instance of primitive wisdom, that of Italy; but as we have already said in the text of our exposition the attempt was founded on the idea that this wisdom was philosophical, and conducted according to the criterion of the transmission of culture which Vico subsequently rejected, as he rejected the traditional opinion, accepted in this work, of the Athenian origin of the laws of the Twelve Tables. We must accordingly refuse to accept Cantoni's verdict (G. B. Vico, p. 38) that the De antiquissima forms "a strange anomaly in the history of Vico's thought, being contrary to his whole scientific life, his tendencies, his principles, and the method which later he almost universally applies in his historical researches." The reverse is in fact the case: namely that this work is the starting-point of his future developments and that without it we cannot understand his later thought.
The criticisms directed by the Giornale dei letterati d' Italia (1711, vols. v. and viii.) against the historical and some of the philosophical positions of the De antiquissima evoked Vico's two important Replies (Naples, Mosca, 1711 and 1712) in which he defends and elucidates his views on the theory of knowledge and metaphysics. The part of the De antiquissima that never went to the press included his meditations on the philosophy of medicine, from which he extracted an essay De aequilibrio corporis animantis: this he thought of publishing many years later, but it is now lost. Of these studies, therefore, as of his speculations upon physics intended to constitute a Liber physicus, we know only what he tells us in his autobiography.
Setting aside his rhetorical and occasional compositions, the largest of which is the De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphaei (Naples, Mosca, 1716), the continuation of his thought, now concentrating upon moral and historical problems, is sketched in a lecture of 1719 (of which an abstract is included in the autobiography) and developed first in 1720 in a printed prospectus of four double-columned pages known as the Sinopsi del diritto universale, and secondly in the vast treatise, De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno liber unus (Naples, Mosca, 1720) completed next year with the Liber alter qui est de constantia iurisprudentis, and supplemented in 1722 by the Notae in duos libros, etc. (same publisher); a work which is usually referred to briefly following the author's example as the Diritto universale.
This book, according to Cantoni (op. cit. p. 243) represents the culminating point of Vico's scientific activity. The verdict is no more acceptable than that quoted above. The author (Opp. v. 10-11) rejected the Diritto universale because he seemed to find persisting there the prejudice and the pretence of "descending" from the thought of Plato and other philosophers to that of primitive man, a tendency which led him astray "in certain matters"; but he also calls it, and rightly, a "sketch for the Scienza Nuova," which it really is. The ideas about poetry are here still confused, Homer is not yet a myth, the mythological canons have less unity than they acquired later, the theory of reflux is only faintly adumbrated, and in a word both the ideal eternal history and the theory of knowledge upon which it is founded are as yet immature. The book is all contained, under a new form, in his later work, except the general ethical and juridical philosophy, which is not highly original, and some historical developments which are merely alluded to in the later writings.