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Questions of Reception for Vico’s De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia - Articlemore
by David L. Marshall
An article published in Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 33 (2003): 35-66114 views






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QUESTIONS OF RECEPTION FOR VICO’S
DE ANTIQUISSIMA ITALORUM SAPIENTIA
DAVID MARSHALL
There is a difference between what Vico meant and what Vico means, but it is with difficulty that thetwo questions are separated and it is not clear that a complete separation of the one from the other would be desirable even if it were possible. If we wish to decide what it was that Vico meant, thenwe shall be committed to an inquiry into the meaning of his writings in the periods in which theywere written. If, on the other hand, it is what Vico means that interests us, then we shall examine themeaning of his writings in the present, whenever that happens to be. These twin inquiries,
Vico nel suo tempo e nel nostro
, suffer from a similar difficulty, however, for just as the present is in thiscontext a ‘whenever,’ so the phrase ‘in the periods in which they were written’ is rich in equivocation. Nor is the problem solved if we concern ourselves only with one work, the
De Antiquissima ItalorumSapientia
, and one present, now. It is true that the
De Antiquissima
bears the date 1710, but it is alsotrue that the work is supplemented in some subsequent editions by the two short works published byVico in response to the review of the
De Antiquissima
in the
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
.
1
In anumber of modern editions, the three pieces written by Vico are published together with the threenotices that appeared in the
Giornale
.
2
It was suggested by the
Giornale
that Vico’s completemetaphysics would emerge if the text, the reviews and Vico’s responses to those reviews were takentogether as a single work; and it ought to be noted that Vico approved of this suggestion.
3
Thus, evenif we allow ourselves the interpretative luxury of assuming that Vico wrote the first book of the
De Antiquissima
in as it were an intellectual instant, continuously and in one state of mind – allowingourselves to ignore the fact that the author announced the
De Antiquissima
as the first installment of athree-volume work that would in time add books on physics and ethics and an appendix on logic tothe first Liber Metaphysicus – it is nevertheless impossible to suppose that there is a unitary period inwhich the
De Antiquissima
was written and to which we can direct ourselves if we wish to find themeaning of the work when it came into being. Similarly, even if we define the present as
this
presenthere and now we shall find ourselves undermined not only by the commonplace that any instantidentified is already past, but also by the fact that at least with regard to reception there is no nowthan must not also be conceptualized as a here. That is to say, your now and my now are differenteven if they are simultaneous because the questions that you take to the
De Antiquissima
areunavoidably different from the questions that I take to the
De Antiquissima
. Every now is thus both
1
Vico,
Risposta del signor Giambattista Vico, nella quale si sciogliono tre opposizioni fatte da dotto signore contro il primolibro
De antiquissima italorum sapientia
, ovvero Della metafisica degli antichissimi italiani tratta da’ latini parlari
, Napoli,Felice Mosca, 1712;
Risposta di Giambattista Vico all’articolo X del tommo VIII del
Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, Napoli,Felice Mosca, 1712.
2
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume V, 1711, article VI, 119-30; volume VIII, 1711, article X, 309-38; volume XII,1712, article XIII, 417-8.
3
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume VIII, 1712, article X, 335-6. The entire passage is cited by Vico in his SecondResponse where he adds ‘Talché io voglio, e devo volerlo, che ’l mondo creda, con questa
Risposta
me non contender conesso voi, ma avervi ubbidito,’
Opere Filosofiche
, Paolo Cristofolini (ed.), Firenze, Sansoni, 1971, 168.
1
temporal and spatial, spatial in the sense that a reader is a cognitive locus. Furthermore, even if it islegitimate to think of a reader as a unitary spatial locus, it does not follow that the reader is unitary ina temporal sense, for a reader is coinvolved in a complex temporal process that may be thought to possess past, present, and future dimensions: past when a text exists prior to the reader; present in thesense that the cognitive events that constitute a reading take place in the present; future when a textremains open to contrual. This essay will consider Vico’s
De Antiquissima
from this multiple perspective. Indeed, the essay will multiply this perspective, for it will make sense to think of thereader of the
De Antiquissima
as being subjected to pluperfect and future perfect tenses as well: Vicois a reader of Aristotle reading Zeno, and we shall also be considering an essay by Max Fisch thatadopts the perspective of how Vico (and the essay) will (and would) have been received. The firstsection examines an observation on the
verum
=
factum
principle made by Fisch in an essay intitled‘Vico and Pragmatism;’ the second, Vico’s approach to reading in the
De Antiquissima
itself; and thethird, the author’s involvement with the book’s immediate reception. It will be the conclusion of thisessay that the meaning of Vico’s
De Antiquissima
is not temporally located, is only more or lessdeterminate, is coordinate with the commitments and entitlements that may in the end be legitimatelyascribed to it and that the author of the work himself has an essentially similar, or at least compatibleaccount of meaning, although he does not articulate it.IAt the end of a rather fine essay Max Fisch intimates to the reader that he is not finished, that he hasmore to say, but that he may never say it. It is characteristic of Fisch to use a cryptic style that hopesto make up with precision what it lacks in explicitation. Fisch, pragmatist philosopher, scholar of C.S. Peirce and translator of Vico, is not ashamed, but instead proud to signal to the reader that thereis more to be done and, indeed, it is a mark of his pragmatism that he puts such store – faith would bethe wrong word – in future research communities. The insistence on the future-orientated status of inquiry finds its inspiration in Peirce’s articulation of the coincidence of reality and, what he calls,inquiry in the long run. ‘The real,’ argues Peirce, ‘is that which, sooner or later, information andreasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you.Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves thenotion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase in knowledge.’
4
Addressing himself to this indefinite community, Fisch concludes the essay withA last suggestion. What if Peirce, toward the end of his life, had heard of Vico’s
verum
=
factum
? He would have said: “The way to take that is to turn it first into Greek,the native language of philosophy, and then from Greek into English. The Greek for itis
το αληθες
=
το πραγµα
. The English unpacking is that the true in the transcendental
4
C.S. Peirce,
Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce
, 8 vols., Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1931-58,5.311; the passage is cited by Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’ in
Giambattista Vico. An International Symposium
,Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969, 416-7.
2
sense – the unconcealed, that which hides nothing, that which is intelligible withoutremainder – is the deed, action, behavior, practice, affair, pursuit, occupation, business,going concern. The Greek formula has several advantages over the Latin. The Latin
factum
emphasizes the completed actuality, the pastness, of the deed; the Greek
το πρ αγµα
covers also an action still in course or not yet begun, and even a line of conductthat
would
be adopted under circumstances that may never arise. The Latin isretrospective; the Greek is, or may be, prospective. The Latin is, on the face of it,individual, and it took Vico’s genius and years of struggle to make it social in the
NewScience
. The Greek would have offered no such resistance. The Greek leaves room for possibility and for generality, and so for Scholastic realism; the Latin, while perhapsnot excluding realism, favors nominalism. Further, the transcendental sense of “true”is more obvious in the Greek
το αληθες
than in the Latin
verum
. Now the doctrine of transcendentals, though metaphysical, includes a theory of knowledge, and the theoryof knowledge includes, at least by implication, a theory of meaning. The Greek formula lends itself better than the Latin to the disengaging of the theory of knowledgefrom the metaphysics, and of the theory of meaning from the theory of knowledge.Vico disengages the theory of knowledge but not that of meaning. He saw that thequestion of truth in the transcendental sense is logically prior to that of truth in the non-transcendental sense; he did not see that the question of meaning is also prior to that of truth in the non-transcendental sense. If he had thought in Greek instead of Latin, hemight have taken that final step of disengaging the theory of meaning. If he had takenit, the result would have been pragmatism.
Πραγµα
prompts us, as
factum
does not, tofind the meaning of probability (for example) in (for example) the insurance business.And the meaning it prompts us to find is not so much how that business
has been
,
hascome to be
, or
is
conducted, as how it
would
be conducted in a rational society.
5
The paragraph wants and warrants explicitation. First, let it be said that Fisch’s supposing of a Peircewho had read Vico is illegitimate (and negligible for the historian who does not indulge in counter-factuals) only if we are able to deny Fisch’s claim that the conditional is an integral part of meaning. Now, when Fisch speaks of ‘the true in the transcendental sense’ he assumes that ‘
verum
, true, as atranscendental, refers to the truth of things, not of propositions, and means intelligible.’
6
Likewise,when he talks of a theory of meaning that follows from the
verum
=
factum
principle analogous to thetheory of knowledge that Vico derives from the equation, Fisch intends to refer to a pragmatist theoryof meaning according to which, as Peirce puts it, ‘the only real significance of a general term lies inthe general behavior which it implies.’
7
Fisch’s belief that meaning is somehow a function of usesupports his intuition that it is significant that the author of the
De Antiquissima
was writing in Latinand that it makes sense to say not only that he wrote in Latin but that he “thought in Latin” and thathe would have thought differently, but subtly so, had he thought in Greek.Fisch’s suggestion is tremendously acute, but it simplifies the use that Vico makes of theterms
verum
and
factum
in the argumentative mêlée of both the
De Antiquissima
and his responses toits review in the
Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia
. Fisch is quite correct, however, to insist on theimportance of the syntactic position of the word
factum
. With a close reading of the
De Antiquissima
we see that Vico’s conceptualization of the participle’s temporality is not consistent in the way that
5
Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’ 424.
6
Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’ 403.
7
C.S. Peirce, MS L 321, draft of a letter to Howes Norris, Jr., May 28, 1912; cited in Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’418.
3
Fisch would have us believe, but that nevertheless the word moves, conjugates on precisely the axisthat Fisch has indicated with his Peircean gloss. Fisch’s point seems well served when Vico uses the perfect infinitive,
fecisse
on three separate occasions early in the work.
8
But the infinitive is, of course, a rather particular grammatical form that denies its own temporal determination. The perfectinfinitive is a kind of limitlessness that is bounded at one end by the present and the present infinitiveoccupies a temporal position only insofar as it is not explicitly the perfect or future infinitive. WhenVico comes to use the present infinitive in the work’s conclusion a peculiar thing happens to theequation between
verum
and
factum
. Those two terms appear grammatically comparable; they bothfunction as neuter adjectives and in the examples he cites from Plautus and Terence Vico is concernedwith the status of the words as comparable adverbs (‘indeed’ and ‘nicely done’); but in fact therelationship is asymmetrical in that
verum
does not stand to an infinitive as
factum
stands to
facere
.Vico explores this asymmetry when in the conclusion to the
De Antiquissima
he addresses PaoloMattia Doria with the words ‘Etenim habes verare et facere idem esse.’
9
In saying that Doria believes
verare
and
facere
to be identical Vico is putting his own words in Doria’s mouth, which is somethingthat he does also with Zeno, as we shall see. What is more important here though is Vico’sconcession to good analogical form. The pressure of proximity to
facere
generates the word
verare
.In translating
verare
it is difficult to ignore the direct transliteration ‘to verify’ even though it does notfollow from the standard translations of
verum
as ‘the true’ or ‘the intelligible.’ If we accept thatVico’s Latin stands in the vicinity of ‘to verify,’ we must conclude that syntactic pressure has alteredsemantic content because verification is significantly different from, although related to,intelligibility. This is a point to which we shall return when we come to discuss the semanticdimension of Fisch’s Peircean gloss of Vico, but for the moment it is important to note that there arefurther syntactic consequences to this syntacto-semantic development. With the infinitive equation
verare
=
facere
we have an equation of processes that must be conceptualized as taking place over time, although, by the same token, it cannot be conceptualized as taking place in any one of the past, present or future tenses.There is more, though. The dialogical quality of Vico’s address to Doria is in itself of littleimportance, but it mirrors an episode of considerably more significance in which Vico casts theotherwise impersonal
verum
=
factum
into a dialogical frame. Having indicated his belief that whatGalilei and his peers in English natural philosophy were doing with experimentation in physics was akind of
verum
=
factum
, Vico concludes by arguing that, although the Cartesians deny that they arecoinvolved in the probabilistic business of experimental verification, what they are in essence practising follows from the quite correct proposition that ‘mihi physica vera erunt, cum feceris; utgeometrica ideo hominibus sunt vera, quia faciunt.’
10
Physicals will be intelligibles for me, says Vico putting words in the mouth of an imagined Cartesian, when you will have made them, just as
8
Vico,
De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 69, 75, 93.
9
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 131.
10
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 125.
4
geometricals are intelligibles for men because they themselves make them. The extension of geometrical method to physics is right, but the Cartesians have misunderstood the nature of the move,which ought not to be motivated by a desire to found in physics a science as certain and sceptic-proof as the science of mathematics, but rather by a desire to practise in physics a kind of constructioncomparable to that practised in geometry. This sentence had its origin in a passage in the
De NostriTemporis Studiorum Ratione
where Vico had argued that ‘geometrica demonstramus, quia facimus; si physica demonstrare possemus, faceremus,’ that
geometricals we demonstrate because we make themand that were we able to demonstrate physicals, we should be able to make them too.
11
The premisemissing from this sentence is that God and not Man makes physicals and it follows that we must notthink ourselves capable of creating physicals in the same sense in which we create geometricals, thatis
ex nihilo
. The relationship between these two passages is often misunderstood. They are neither synonymous nor contradictory. Vico repeats the
De Ratione
sentence in the
De Antiquissima
withapproval.
12
Vico still maintains that it is mistaken to suppose that the certainty we have as a result of our definitional proceedures in mathematics can be applied to physics, but he does not mean therebyto deny that the
verum
=
factum
cannot be applied in some sense to the study of physical phenomena.The syntactic dimension of this issue is highly suggestive, but it is the semantic that is moreconclusive. Vico says in his autobiography of the period in which the
De Antiquissima
was writtenthat although useful in medicine and pharmacy he distained experimentalism because it seemeduseless to him in the field that interested him primarily, namely law.
13
This passage has encouragedsome to speak of a ‘rigetto vichiano della filosofia corpuscolare e della fisica sperimentale’ but giventhe explicitness of Vico’s advocacy of experimentation in the
De Antiquissima
it is not possible torely on an account written in 1725 of a work written in 1710.
14
Vico states quite clearly in the FirstResponse to the review of the
De Antiquissima
that the
verum
=
factum
principle accounts for whyexperiments are convincing, for they are performances in which making is a form of proving. Vico isquite serious in implying, thus, that experiments are geometrical method applied to physics but astopic, and not as critic. That is to say, experiments do not merely succeed or fail. They do not merely prove or disprove the propositions of which they are operations. Experiments partake of a history inwhich they appear not only as judgments but also as testimonies, contributing to the resolution of some questions and raising others. Speaking here in the language of law is quite appropriate, as weshall soon see, and the elision between natural philosophical inquiry and rhetoric should not be readas an obliteration of the former by the latter, but as an inclusion of the latter with the former. Theconsequence of saying that natural philosophical inquiry is opinable is not that all opinions areintellectually indistinguishable and that therefore disputes are settled in favour of the party that is
11
Vico,
De Nostris Temporis Studiorum Ratione
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 803.
12
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 83.
13
Vico,
Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 14. Note that Vico reiterated hisinterpretation of experiment as a form of
verum
=
factum
in the
Vici Vindiciae
of 1729, for which see
Opere Filosofiche
, 353.
14
See Paolo Casini,
L’antica sapienza italica. Cronistoria di un mito
, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1998, 183.


stronger or more manipulative, but rather that natural philosophical inquiry, like legal investigation, isa matter of resolving questions beyond reasonable doubts.

It turns out that Cicero’s Academica sharesa fundamental insight with the legal environment in which American pragmatism was conceived: a belief is that on the basis of which a man is prepared to act.

Vico’s statement that Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate
‘veramente altro non è che una topica trasportata agli usi de’ fisicisperimentali’ is a highly suggestive indication of the partnership established in his mind betweenexperimental physics and the probabilistic modes of argumentation taught to those who would practise in the law courts.


If it is not possible to take at face value what Vico says in 1725 of his attitude toexperimentation around 1710, it is nevertheless possible to argue that the reason he gives for rejectingexperimentation indicates a larger problem. Vico says in 1725 that he rejected experimental physicsin the period around the publication of the "De Antiquissima Sapientia"
because he could not see its import for inquiry into the law. It is tempting to wonder whether Vico’s memory has not been re-written in linewith a suggestion that he received from the Venetian reviewers of his
De Antiquissima

It had beensuggested to him that instead of involving himself in the endless difficulties of etymology, he ought to be concerned with Roman religion and law.

At the time Vico replied that religion and law were even more obscure than etymology, but it is difficult not to see in the "Giornale"’s suggestion the parametersof the research project that was to occupy Vico through the three volumes of the
Diritto Universale
and the three editions of the
Scienza Nuova
for the rest of his life.

The problem goes deeper, however, for Fisch wishes to advance the idea that the
facta
thatVico contemplates in the
De Antiquissima
are not merely the definitions of mathematics, nor merelythe confections of experimentation – confections that are constructions, when considered materially,and hypotheses, when considered discursively – but something much more sweeping. Fisch wishes tosuggest that ‘the world is not given as an object for contemplation, a world we have not made,waiting to be known. If it may be said to be given at all,’ he continues, ‘it is given as known andmisknown from of old, with our past knowing and misknowings inextricably, unidentifiably ingrown,a world already construed and more or less misconstrued, a world in part constructed out of our doings and makings –
our languages and other institutions, our domestications, our tools, machines,instruments, our experiments of all kinds
– and the rest construed by imagined extensions of our doings and makings and by anticipations of their results.’

Fisch is glossing the Vichian concept of
facta
– a concept that oscillates in Fisch’s representation between the version advanced in the
De Antiquissima
and that advanced in the
Scienza Nuova
– with his own, pragmatic, concept of

---
See Cicero,
Academica
, II.7-8 and Max Fisch, ‘Justice Holmes, The Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism,’ in
The Journal of Philosophy
, XXXIX, no.4, (February 12, 1942), 89.
16
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 163.
17
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume VIII, 1712, article X, 336-7. Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 146-7.
18
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 146-7.
19
Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’ 423, emphasis added.
6
----

“institutions.” In the 1968 revised edition of the Bergin and Fisch translation of the
Scienza Nuova
,Fisch defended the decision to change the translation of Vico’s
cosa
from “thing” to “institutions.”When Vico uses the phrase
cose divine e umane
, the translators took him to be glossing Varro’s
antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum
and avoiding
istituzione
because that word implied‘deliberate contrivance, artifice, choice, will, intent’ where the author wished to denote a foundationthat is at first entirely unconscious. Fisch justified the use of “institutions” by arguing that it nolonger connotes primarily ‘planned systematic instruction’ as the transliteration did for Vico when he read Quintilian’s
Institutio Oratoria
or taught that course at the University of Naples.
20
Thetranslators have been criticized for this substitution.
21
But Fisch for one had invested a good deal of time and thought in the word and had written on it elsewhere. In an address titled ‘The Critic of Institutions,’ Fisch had said in 1956 that ‘by institution, as a first approximation, I shall mean any provision or arrangement of means or conditions for subsequent activity, additional to or inmodification of the means or conditions that are already present prior to the institution, whether present in nature prior to all institution or present in nature only as modified by previousinstitutions.’
22
Here is a key source of Fisch’s concern to read futurity into Vico’s past participle,
factum
.Fisch’s world of misconstruals is not a world in which there can be no error, for ‘our misconstruings are detected, explained, and rejected, [albeit] for the most part one by one, with greatdifficulty, even painfully’ and although ‘the world is not cognitively innocent, any more than we arewho desire its better acquaintance,’ it is nevertheless the case that there is such a thing as falsification.Indeed it is our peculiar gift as finite beings that we are capable of confronting (and even beingsurprised by) our own limitations. Vico himself recognizes something similar in a passage in the
De Antiquissima
that, for its proximity to one of the several articulations of the performative value of experiments, argues for the existence of both a latent continuity between experimental and legalconstruction in the
De Antiquissima
and, likewise, for the existence of a question on the value of falsification posed with regard to law, but answered only later in the
Diritto Universale
, and never posed with regard to experimental physics.
23
Vico is concerned to indicate the particularity of causeand effect as guaranteed by Platonic form and to contrast it with the generality of class and class predictions in Aristotelian genera. Aristotelian physics attempts to know universals when it ought, inthe fashion of experimental physics, to imitate the particular effects of natural phenomena. It turnsout, however, that Aristotelian generality and especially the errors it projects are useful and Vico
20
Vico,
The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of “Practic of the New Science”
, Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (trans.), Ithaca, Cornell University Press,1968, xliii-xliv.
21
See, for example, Mark Lilla,
G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern
, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press,1993, xi.
22
Max Harold Fisch, ‘The Critic of Institutions,’ (Presidential Address delivered before the fifty-fourth annual meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association at the Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, May 3-5,1956), in
Studies in Philosophy and in the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Max Fisch
, Richard Tursman (ed.),Lawrence (Kan.), Coronado Press, 1970, 184.
23
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 77.
7
realizes this first in the context of law where it is precisely the exception to the rule, the recognition of the contravention of equity by extending an established rule into a particular case that advances thecause of equity itself. Ironically, it is the perversity of the law in the present that will make it just inthe future.
24
When Vico speaks of the ideal lawyer as he who has not so much an understanding of the thetic content of the law as a capacity to identify exceptions to that thetic content in particular circumstances, he is surely moved either directly or indirectly by the passage in Quintilian on the wayin which grades of generality and specificity in the concept of cause may be distinguished in Greek and Latin.


Certainly, the
Giornale
thought the passage relevant and presumed to bring theQuintilian to Vico’s attention.
26
One imagines that Vico was rather unimpressed by this rebuke, giventhat already in the text of the
De Antiquissima
itself he had been making use of the Greek terms intheir Latinate form – just as Quintilian had glossed them – so as to make his point on the superiorityof Platonic forms over Aristotelian genera.

Aristotelian physics is not truly knowledge from causes, Vico charges; it is rather knowledgefrom theses. In this terminological matrix, the implication is that physics should be knowledge fromhypotheses, but because he emphasizes the perfection of Platonic forms, he pays more attention to theverification of particular constructions than he does to the falsification of particular hypotheses. So,Vico considers the value of exceptions brought into relief by the mistaken extension of Aristoteliangenera in law, but he does not seem to consider the value of similar false projections in the case of experimental physics, but it is arguable that what holds in law holds in physics too, for it is in the production of anomalous results and the use of controlled experiments to generate as it were thetopical categories of similarity and difference (rather than in the perfect reproduction of natural phenomena) that experimentation really pays dividends. Now, the proximity of experimental physicsand law in this passage from the
De Antiquissima
is striking, particularly given the terms of Vico’srejection of experimentalism in the
Vita
. And although the promise of that proximity is leftunfulfilled and the analogy eventually broken by Vico’s subsequent self-interpretation, the fact of the possibility vindicates Fisch’s reading of Vico’s
factum
as a concept applicable likewise to experimentsand laws, construings and misconstruings.So rich, in fact, is Fisch’s own construal of Vico’s engagement with “pragmatism” that theAmerican produces another noteworthy gloss on the
verum
=
factum
principle. Motivated by a passagefrom Peirce according to which ‘our minds having been formed under the influence of phenomenagoverned by the laws of mechanics, certain conceptions entering into those laws become implanted inour minds, so that we readily guess at what the laws are,’ Fisch ventures the thought ‘not
verum
=
factum
…, but
verum
=
faciens
: it is not what our minds have made up, but what has made themup, that is intelligible to them.’
27
Fisch’s comment can be described as neither Peirce glossing Vico
24
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 77.
25
See Quintilian,
Institutio Oratoria
, III, 5, 7.
26
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume VIII, 1712, article X, 330-2.
27
Max Fisch, ‘Vico and Pragmatism,’ 419. C.S. Peirce,
Collected Papers
, 6.10.
8
nor Vico glossing Peirce. It is both and neither: it is Fisch reporting the preliminary result of adialogue that has taken place – perhaps literally, perhaps figuratively – in his own mind betweenimpersonations of each. (The supposition of such a dialogue is not far-fetched: it is in fact derivedfrom just such a dialogue written by Fisch, held between his persona as a historian and his persona asa philosopher.)
28
By substituting the passive present participle
faciens
for the active past participle
factum
, Fisch means not just to transcend the opposition between the past and future tenses, but infact also that between the passive and active voices.

Tacitly he is demonstrating the limits of the Latinand, once again, pointing to the flexibility of the Greek. That is to say, the doing here identified,which is convertible with the constitution of the true, is a dialectical generation of subject and objectthat is both reflexive and transitive. Peirce is of the striking opinion that ‘matter is effete mind,inveterate habits becoming physical laws’ and he thereby establishes a continuum between the twosuch that they may be mutually constitutive.
29

----

Vico was of the opinion that the relationship betweenthe words "facultas" and "facilitas"
suggests that the capacity (facultas) to perform an action is already a function of the habit (facilitas)
of performing it.

When he goes on to say that we make colours in seeing, flavours in tasting, sounds in hearing and heat and cold by touching it seems clear that he believes humansensations are the creatures of the human subject and not of the objects of those sensations, such thatthe dualism between subject and object remains.

But Vico offers a more precise formulation of theconcept in his Second Response, where he is careful to speak in an impersonal mode that transcends,as much as the Italian will allow, the opposition between subject and object, activity and passivity:Vico reports that the principle insight of Herbert of Cherbery’s
De Veritate
is ‘che ad ogni sensazionesi spieghi e manifesti in noi una nuova facultà.’
30
Aristotle had been of the opinion in Book III of
De Anima
that subject and object are one in the process of intellecting.
31
Vico himself compared histransformation of
cogito, ergo sum
into
quid in me cogitat; ergo est
to the active intellect of theAristotelians, the ether of the Stoics, the
daemon
of the Socratics and comes to make further use of that Aristotelian insight in the
Scienza Nuova
where he says, in a famous passage, that inunderstanding man becomes all things, but that in misunderstanding man makes all things out of himself.
32
Vico, genuinely a poet by the time of the
Scienza Nuova
, makes a point of using
sperimentare
in place of “to experience.”
33
Fisch asks questions of Vico that Vico did not ask of himself and in order to do so heimpersonates another historical figure who never formulated such questions either. There are probably some who would say that howsoever imaginative it might be, such an approach is notlegitimate for a historian, but whoever would say this must account for the utility and, yes, the
28
Max Fisch, ‘The Philosophy of History: A Dialogue,’ in
Studies in Philosophy and in the History of Science
, 193-206.
29
C.S. Peirce,
Collected Papers
, 6.24.
30
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 155.
31
Aristotle,
De Anima
, 430a.
32
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 110;
Principi di Scienza Nuova
(1744), in
Opere Filosofiche
, 486-7.
33
Vico,
Principj di Scienza Nuova d’intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni, Ristampa anastatica dell’edizione Napoli1744
, Marco Veneziani (ed.), Firenze, Leo. S. Olschki Editore, 1994, two volumes, I, 14, 80, 92, 111, 309, 421, 422, 436,473, 502.
9
historical sensitivity of Fisch’s gloss. By reformulating Vico’s Latin in Peirce’s Greek, Fischsuccessfully illuminates the restrictions operating in the Latin. Attention to the orientation of
factum
to the past brings into relief the various attempts to overcome it, by means of the perfect infinitive, the present infinitive and the future perfect in dialogical first and second persons. Attention to thesesyntactic issues highlights in turn the semantic extension of
facta
from definitions to include laws andexperiments, which suggests that
facta
are not only nominal, but also real objects. With the futurityand reality of
facta
secured, or at least suggested, in this way it becomes logical for Fisch to ask whether the subjects
of
these
facta
cannot become subject
to
them; that is to say, whether havingmade this civil world human beings may not themselves be re-made by it in return. Different scholarswould probably give different accounts of the way in which Vico answered this question, but few, if any, would say that putting this question to Vico is in itself anachronistic. That the question came toFisch in the terms that it did because he was a scholar of Peirce as well as of Vico, that it came to him,as it were, from the future is neither here nor there, it would seem. The assertion of this point mayseem strange to readers of an Italian journal such as the
Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani
because they are not likely to contest the legitimacy of Fisch’s reading Vico through Peirce. Theymay disagree with what Fisch says, but they do not doubt that the manner in which he has framed hisinquiry is permissible. To such open-minded readers let it simply be said that
la storia della filosofia
has its own particular status as a genre in Italy and that there are in fact anglophones who wouldchallenge the legitimacy of Fisch’s reading strategies, some not so much out of conviction as out of habit, others because they believe the theories of language to which they subscribe dictate that textsmay not be read in this way. To those who take the legitimacy of using Peirce to read Vico to be anon-question, let it also be said that such openness to the future is part of a broader account of thehistoricity of language – in its engagement both with the past and in the present, engagements towhich we pass in sections two and three of this essay – in which meaning itself is only ever more or less determinate. It may be that that assertion is somewhat less obvious.

IIIn the proem to the
De Antiquissima
Vico compares the mode of reading he will use in that work tothat displayed by Plato in the
Cratylus
, but in his responses to the Venetian reviewers of the
Giornalede’ Letterati d’Italia
he demonstrates that in fact the mode of his reading is better revealed by hisengagement with the
Physics
of Aristotle and the comedies of Plautus and Terence. If Vico’s mode of reading is a kind of etymology it is better to examine the nature of that kind through the lens of Cicero’s
Topica
or Aristotle’s
De Interpretatione
. In the end, however, it may not be inappropriate todescribe Vico’s approach to reading as Platonic – or rather Socratic – in the broad sense that derivesnot so much from the
Cratylus
as from a dialogue like the
Protagoras
. There is a sense in which Vicois in the
De Antiquissima
, and will be even more in the
Scienza Nuova
,
deeply opposed to the idea of
10the sophistic project. Vico rejects the reviewers’ suggestion that Pythagoras brought with him fromGreece what Vico called an ancient Italian wisdom by simply stating that carrying doctine around ‘fucostume de’ sofisti, i quali, per far guadagno della lor arte, andavano vendendo per fuora il lor vanoed ostentato sapere; la qual cosa dà l’occasione e ’l decoro al dialogo di Platone intitolato
Il Protagora
.’
34
This belief that philosophy does not travel operates throughout the Vichian corpus as akind of limit case, a negative condition for the possibility of the insights that are most characteristic of the
Scienza Nuova
, particularly the rejection of Roman law’s Greek origins and Homer’s philosophical authority. Yet even if it is clear that Vico believed himself opposed to the
idea
of thesophistic project, it does not follow that his engagement with language, with discursivity as such maynot profitably be categorized as sophistical. To reject in theory that which one imitates in practice iscertainly ironic, but it is far from impossible. “Sophist,” however, is a word so saturated inconnotations, most of them negative, that it will be necessary in the third part of this essay to discussthe word further before it can be used in reference to Vico.

------

In the proem Vico reports that while musing on the origins of the Latin language it occurredto him that aspects of the Latin lexicon seemed philosophical and that in order to explain this oddityhe hypothesized a philosophical wisdom that had contributed to the lexical structure of the language but that had subsequently passed out of knowledge, remaining not in consciously held opinions butrather in unconsciously observed habits of speech. Vico announces the "De Antiquissima Sapientia"
as an attempt to reconstruct this ancient philosophy and supposes that although such a project had not previously been attempted it might reasonably be numbered among the desiderata appended by Francis Bacon tothe 1623 edition of his De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum
and would in fact follow a mode of interpretation pioneered by Plato in the Cratylus
.
----

Vico had made the assertion that he was inspiredin examining the origins of the Latin language by the example of the Cratylus
in a letter to GianMario Crescimbeni (written after 19 June, 1710 and before the publication of the
De Antiquissima
, acopy of which Vico sent to Venice at the end of October in that same year); he will repeat it in theSecond Response and will say something similar in the
Vita
.
36

----

In the 1725
Scienza Nuova
, however,Vico states that he was wrong in the
De Antiquissima
to have modelled his investigations inetymology on the example set by the Athenian and in the 1744
Scienza Nuova
he goes on to arguethat Plato was wrong to go looking in the origins of the Greek language for a pure language in whichthe names of things followed from and illumined their natures, because that was the language of Adam and not the language of the first Greeks, who instead spoke in a language that was not so muchdivine as “theo-logical.”
37


---

It would appear, thus, that even when he rejected Plato’s project in the
Cratylus
Vico still took that project to have been one concerned with the recovery of a pristine speech
34
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 148.
35
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 57, 59.
36
Vico,
Epistole, con Aggiunte le Epistole dei suoi Corrispondenti
, Manuela Sanna (ed.), in
Opere di Giambattista Vico
, XI, Napoli, Morano, 1992, 82-3; ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 148;
Vita
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 25.
37
Vico,
Principi di una Scienza Nuova
(1725), in
Opere Filosofiche
, 275, 294;
Principi di Scienza Nuova
(1744), in
Opere Filosofiche
, 485.
11
in which the names of things followed directly from their true natures.

It is a question difficult toanswer conclusively whether Vico’s reading of the
Cratylus
is a reasonable one, for it appears possible that he associates the meaning of the dialogue closely with the position of Cratylus, whereasSocrates, although he argues as it were on behalf of Cratylus when he is interrogating Hermogenes,turns himself against Cratylus when he comes in the second half of the dialogue to argue on the other side of the case. Socrates adopts his characteristically ironic stance before the opinions of bothinterlocutors and it is difficult to ascribe to him more than a negative position. Quite what Plato, whoshould never be conflated wholly with Socrates, believed himself to be arguing in the dialogue is afurther problem and likewise a difficult one, for although it is possible that he was satirizing thesophistical habit of taking advantage of the equivocation of words it is also possible that he waslooking to demonstrate the sheer creative potential of language itself considered as a topos for thediscovery of arguments. In view of these ambiguities, it would appear that the most unreasonableaspect of Vico’s reading is its confidence. Paolo Casini suggests in effect that the meaning of the
Cratylus
may well have been settled for Vico by the way in which it was read in the Renaissance in,for example, Marsilio Ficino and through passages from Proclus’ “lectures” of the dialogue.

---

Certainly Vico’s confession in the
Vita
that he began but did not complete the study of Greek wouldlead us to suspect that his reception of the Athenian’s dialogue suffered through a number of iterations, although in fairness we should add that this layering of gloss upon gloss may well have been a source of richness as well as impurity.
39
Regardless of whether Vico’s reading of Plato is or isnot a good reading, though, it is still a question to be confronted whether the model that he wasfollowing in the
De Antiquissima
was in fact the model set by the
Cratylus
.There is reason to suggest otherwise. Reading is, in point of fact, at the heart of Vico’s senseof what it is to be a finite being that lives particularly in time and space. In order at the very beginning of the
De Antiquissima
to anchor the distinction between
intellegere
(which is the divineactivity where
verum
and
factum
coincide) and
cogitare
(which is the human equivalent) he says ‘utiverba idearum, ita ideae symbola et notae sunt rerum: quare quemadmodum legere eius est, quicolligit elementa scribendi, ex quibus verba componuntur; ita intelligere sit colligere omnia elementarei, ex quibus perfectissima exprimatur idea.’
40
Reading, then, is concerned with construction, withthe ordering and compositioning of words and their parts. It is, we might say, the structuring of syntax to answer the demands of semantics. Moreover, it is analogous to the divine activity of intellecting, but instead of expressing it is concerned with composing and instead of working onlywith things and their elements, it trafficks with words that are symbols and notes of ideas that aresymbols and notes of things. Reading, as we have seen, suffers from iteration. This passage,moreover, is not merely an assertion of the fact that language suffers from iteration; it is a remarkablyrich example of that fact too, for in saying that ‘verba idearum, ita ideae symbola et notae sunt rerum’
38
Paolo Casini,
L’antica sapienza italica
, 185-9.
39
Vico,
Vita
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 17.
40
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 63.
12
the Neapolitan is glossing a passage from Cicero’s
Topica
that itself glosses a passage from Aristotle’s
De Interpretatione
. The three passages are intended to do different work in each of their respectivecontexts, so we should not be scandalized if they are significantly dissimilar. Aristotle had beenlooking to place language in a fundamentally communicative context, where the vagaries of symbols,which vary between different languages, are less important than the imperatives of the
παθηµατα
and
πραγµατα
they serve, which are universal according to the Stagyrite.
41
Cicero was explainingAristotle’s
Topica
to a friend – although there is reason to suppose that he too was working notimmediately from the Aristotelian text, but rather mediately from some late Hellenistic text – and wasshowing how an inquiry into the original meanings of a word can be brought to bear on theconstruction of legal terms.
42
Vico is examining the way in which divine and human
verum
=
factum
differ, but are comparable in their difference.Striking, especially after the readings that Fisch has given us, are the translation of the Greek
πραγµατα
into the Latin
res
, the occlusion of
παθηµατα
in Cicero and their reappearance but as
ideae
in Vico, and the equivocation of the word
ideae
in the Neapolitan. Fisch steers judiciously clear of the word “thing” when he renders
πραγµα
with ‘deed, action, behavior, practice, affair, pursuit,occupation, business, going concern.’ It is not the case that the word
res
necessitates theconceptualization of a thing that exists substantively as an object in the world independent of humanactivity – indeed Vico is happy to use
res
if not in place of, then at least in the vicinity of
facta
and
negocia
43
– but the possibility of such an inference is sustained in the passage from Cicero and perhaps even encouraged in that from Vico. Likewise, the Greek subject remains strictly complicitwith the world of objects in which it exists, for Aristotle stipulates a close relationship between
παθη µατα
and
πραγµατα
: the former are neither
συµβολα
nor
σηµεια
of the latter, but rather
οµοιωµα τα
. Cicero omits the mediation of the human subject between words and things, but in Vico somesuch intermediary semiotic layer is reinstated. It is tempting, however, to suspect that instead of directly reclaiming the expressivist and realist vernacular present in Aristotle, Vico is speaking in aseventeenth-century French idiom that he otherwise, for the most part, rejects. Attention to the strictdelineation of word, idea and thing is characteristic, for example, of the Port-Royal
Logique
. Yet, asVincenzo Vitiello has pointed out, the word
idea
equivocates in the Vico. ‘Appare chiaro,’ Vitielloargues, ‘che, se il primo concetto di idea che Vico illustra – le idee simboli delle cose – richiamal’“universale” aristotelico, il secondo (la “perfectissima idea”) rinvia invece alla “forma” platonica, al
genus
.’
44
41
Aristotle,
De Interpretatione
, 16a.
42
Cicero,
Topica
, 35-37.
43
See, for example, Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 79.
44
Vincenzo Vitiello, ‘Il Medio Assente: Sul Concetto di Verità nel
De Antiquissima
,’ in
Studi sul
De Antiquissima ItalorumSapientia, Giovanni Matteucci (ed.), Macerata, Quodlibet, 2002, 86.
13
It is precisely by means of equivocation, however, that Vico moves away from arepresentationalist and towards an expressivist account of language, to use the terms favoured byRobert Brandom.
45
In the
De Antiquissima
Vico gives evidence of his agreement with Aristotle’ssuspicion of equivocation, arguing that all philosophical error arises therefrom.
46
Vico’srepresentation of this opinion is somewhat misleading, however, for the reader is likely to ask how itcan be that this condemnation of equivocation is approved in a book that was inspired by and restslargely upon the equivalence of words such as
verum
and
factum
,
causa
and
negotium
? There is aclose relationship between equivalence and equivocation, but it should not be assumed thatcondemnation of the latter forbids an interest in the former. In fact, the relationship betweenequivalence and equivocation in words is one of cause and effect, for it is precisely in using one wordin the place of another, as if they be convertible, that a single word comes to take on multiplemeanings. Nevertheless, it is coherent to say both that we are best positioned to understand the peculiarity of someone else’s thinking when we investigate instances in which they use importantwords in places that seem to us at first surprising and that it is trickier, more fraught to use words thathave multiple currencies, than those that are perfectly new and newly defined. The investigativemethod that focuses on transforming that which at first seems least reasonable into something that is,as it were, able to be reasoned has had a rather extensive fortuna. When Socrates reconstructsSimonides’ desire to distinguish between being good and becoming good, he saves the poet from thecontradiction that Protagoras imputes to him.
47
When Horace reports in his
Ars Poetica
that it is adelightful thing if a skilled setting makes a familiar word new he may be taken to mean that it issomething to be admired in poets if they can insert a word that is otherwise familiar to the reader intoa context in which the reader is both forced and enabled to edduce a new signification.
48
WhenThomas Hobbes speaks in his
Dialogus Physicus
of the way in which hypotheses must “save” phenomena, he means to indicate that it is the function of natural philosophical hypotheses to accountfor the apparent irrationality of natural events. Such rational explanations re-enact the motivation of nature; the genitive here is both subjective and objective and thus finesses the oppositions betweenthe active and passive voices and between introspection and “extrospection.”
49
And when R.G.Collingwood describes his stupefaction at the monstrosity of the Albert Memorial, he himself goes onto explain how the experience led him to formulate an account of what he calls the logic of questionand answer, in which it is proposed that central to the comprehension of anything that may be takenas a kind of answer or resolution is an inquiry into the nature of the question or imperative that
45
See Robert Brandom,
Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism
, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard UniversityPress, 2000, especially 7-10. Brandom’s terminology is somewhat intrusive, but it should be recalled that he inherits notonly the pragmatist approach to the philosophy of language that likewise characterizes Fisch, but also the post-Cartesianexpressivist enterprise for which he recourses to Isaiah Berlin’s
Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas
,although he makes direct mention only of the German.
46
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 79. See Aristotle,
Posterior Analytics
, 97b14.
47
Plato,
Protagoras
, 339-347.
48
Horace,
Ars Poetica
, 46-8.
49
Thomas Hobbes, ‘Hobbes’s
Physical Dialogue
(1661),’ Simon Schaffer (trans.), in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985, 361-2.
14
occasioned it.
50
With the possible although not certain exception of the Hobbes, these examples pointto the value of interpretative difficulty and of assuming that the apparently unintelligible hassomething to say.On these two points the examples from Plato, Horace, Hobbes and Collingwood arecomparable to Vico’s own account of the origin of the possibility of language. Vico writes in the1744
Scienza Nuova
that language originated in the attribution of a will to the heavens by primitivehuman beings moved to characterize a cause for the terror brought about in them by the thunderingand flashing of the sky.
51
What is common to these five hermeneutic moments is the imputation of something like a will to something like an event. The actual existence of an agent possessing that willis probably denied in the Hobbes and is rendered irrelevant in the Vico, such that a Vichian reading of the Horace could, and in the
Scienza Nuova
will, refuse to insist on the reality of the author and theexistence of anything like authorial intent. It is the reader who is poet in Vico, not the divine artifex.Regardless of how the matter truly stands, it is in behaving
as if a communicative situation alreadyexists
that the possibility of language is established. And if Vico’s
bestioni
mistake thunder andlightning for Jove’s judgments, then they are presuming not only that there is a judge capable of delivering an answer, but also that there is a supplicant capable of asking a question.This digression pays very specific dividends in accounting for the approach to reading and tointerpretation in the
De Antiquissima
. Vico reports his Collingwoodian moment in the SecondResponse where he says that his account of Zeno was driven by the conviction that Aristotle’s musthave been a misrepresentation, a misprision of Zeno’s paradoxes because as he relates them, theymake so little sense.
52
In order to save the reasonability of both Aristotle and Zeno in this matter,Vico argues that whereas Aristotle ‘parla di divisione del corpo, che è moto ed atto; Zenone parla divirtù, per la quale ogni corpicciuolo corrisponde ad una estensione infinita.’
53
For our purposes,however, it is the structure of the reading that is more important. In approaching the problem of Aristotle’s representation of Zeno in Book VI of the
Physics
, Vico establishes a tension between whathe terms authority and one’s own judgment. Complete obedience to authority makes genuine criticalinquiry impossible, but to investigate with the critical faculties of one’s own judgment only is to dowithout the experience of those who previously have conducted comparable investigations. Thespecific problem of Zeno’s meaning could be produced by an inquiry conducted neither according toauthority alone, because it would be impossible to question Aristotle’s representation of his debatewith Zeno, nor according only to judgment, because Aristotle’s opinion of Zeno would have norelevance in the first place. It is worth noting that this dialectic between authority and judgment isfunctionally identical to that theorized by the 1744
Scienza Nuova
in Axiom X.
54
When the reviewers
50
R.G. Collingwood,
An Autobiography
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1939.
51
Vico,
Principi di Scienza Nuova
(1744), in
Opere Filosofiche
, 477-8.
52
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 156-7.
53
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 141.
54
Vico,
Principi di Scienza Nuova
(1744), in
Opere Filosofiche
, 434, §140.
15
of the
Giornale
adopt the pose of philologians, or historians and ask Vico to document more preciselyZeno’s ownership of the arguments put forward by Vico in his name, the Neapolitan responds to theVenetians by saying that the whole point of his argument is that he has intuited something that is notitself documentable, but may be reasonably inferred from what is documented. Now, it
is
odd that a reader of Plato’s
Parmenides
and Cicero’s
Academica
could suppose thatthe Eleatic in the former and the Stoic in the later were one man – and it may be thought ironic thatsomeone who was later to become famous for reading authors, such as Hermodorus and Homer, outof existence should in his early work be guilty of reading authors into existence – but we should notallow this error to obscure the more important point, which is that Vico’s approach to reading in the
De Antiquissima
is profoundly dialogical. Nor is the Zeno case isolated in this respect. Essentiallysimilar Collingwoodian moments are reported by Vico when he is reading the comedians Terence andPlautus and it is no coincidence that in these examples the dialogical nature of the sources is explicit.It is generally agreed that Vico’s discussion of the word
factum
in these play-wrights is flawed, butonce again the fact of this error is much less important than the structure of Vico’s reading that itillustrates, which here as earlier is focused on those moments at which a peculiar location makes anold word new. And there are two much more pertinent examples. Vico reports being brought up short by the sentence in Terence’s
Andria
in which Davus looking to concoct with Mysis an imbroglio says‘Mysis, nunc opus est tua/ mihi ad hanc rem exprompta memoria atque astutia.’
55
The pairing of
memoria
with
astutia
, memory with cunning has seemed quite odd to Vico and in order to reconcilethe passage he conjectures that by
memoria
the Romans might also mean
ingegno
. Vico proceedsimmediately to say thatQuello, che noi diciamo «immaginare», «immaginazione», pur da’ latini dicevasi
memorare
e
memoria
; onde
comminisci
e
commentum
significano «ritrovare» e«ritrovato» o «invenzione», per quello, pur degno da notarsi, altro luogo nell’
Andriana
,dove Carino, querelandosi della creduta malignità e perfidia di Panfilo, dice:Hoccin’ est credibile, aut memorabile,tanta vecordia innata cuiquam ut siet,ut malis gaudeant, atque ex incommodisalterius sua ut comparent commoda?
56
English registers well the difficulty that Vico found when reading this passage, for although it is possible to transliterate
credibile
, memorable does not work. It is almost possible that
memorabile
could be translated with “memorable” if the English were to be taken not in the sense of “worthremembering” but in the more literal sense of “able to be remembered.” Corinus would then beasking whether anyone could remember an instance in which someone was so completely mad as totake pleasure in evil happenings. But the best translation is probably something like “conceivable,” because Corinus wants to make the stronger point that such madness is not only unknown to memory but also positively unimaginable in any circumstances, come what may. This example is especially pertinent both because this is the kind of potential dimension that Fisch wished to read into Vico’s
55
Terence,
Andria
, 722-3; cited in Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 152.
56
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 152; Terence,
Andria
, 625-8.
16
past participle
factum
, and because it is in this locale that Vico identifies the creative function of commentary.
Commentum
, says Vico, means
invenzione
, but the Italian equivocates, for it means not onlyfiction or falsehood, like the Latin, but also creation or object of ingenuity. Fisch’s is a
commentum
in this double sense, for it is both clearly a contrivance and arguably ingenious, something that is trueto what it glosses and innovative at the same time. Moreover, the same “remainder” that Vico pointsto when he says that even if it be conceeded that his gloss of Zeno is unhistorical, it will still behovethe reviewers to deal with the philosophical value of what Vico himself has said is present in theFisch. If Fisch finds that the future has implications for the past, then Vico finds that the past hasimplications for the future, but as we turn in the third section to a consideration of Vico’s owndiscursive engagement with the present, with his contemporaries, it will become apparent that inspeaking in this language of past and future the historian is nothing but a dialectician who hasexaggerated and reified the dimensions of debate.IIIIt is the peculiar durability and independence of words written that distinguishes them from wordsspoken. Separated from the author in being scripted, words written attain a status that renders them both more and less open to time, for without the immediate authorial control that is oftencharacteristic of the spoken, the written admits a plurality of interpretations and yet the absence of anauthor who can say “no, that is not what I meant” is also the absence of an author who can say “yes,in a way that is what I meant, but better, because more explicit.” The absence of an author who cancensure is also the absence of an author who can licence, so that words written are less resistant toconstrual generally but also more resistant to the authorization of any one construal. It is their peculiar durability and independence that also contributes to the misconception of words written asself-consistent and self-sufficient. It would be wrong-headed to suppose that writing is nothing morethan epiphenomenal to speaking – indeed it may be useful to transfer our ways of thinking aboutwriting to the ways in which we conceive of other people speaking
57
– but it is useful to imagine thattexts possess something like a right of reply, for in that way we are able to hold text in the dialogicalframe, between past and future, whence it came, and in doing this we do something quite similar towhat Vico does when he holds philology and philosophy, authority and reason together in tension.This dialogical frame, between past and future admits easily what Robert Brandom says with regardto meaning, namely that a full comprehension of the semantic content of a claim consists neither inmastering ‘the circumstances under which one becomes entitled or committed to endorse a claim’ nor,as traditional pragmatists argue, in mastering ‘the consequences of endorsing a claim, looking
57
See, for example, Simon Glendinning’s
On Being with Others: Heidegger–Derrida–Wittgenstein
, London, Routledge,1998.
17
downstream to the claim’s role as a premise in practical reasoning and ignoring its proper antecedentsupstream,’ but rather in mastering both together.
58
When the matter is put in this way, it appears quiteintuitive to think of the meaning of a claim – whether it be spoken or written – as existing over time,not as being once and for all, but as becoming more or less explicit.Certainly this is the most natural of positions to adopt when reading the six-part exchange between the Neapolitan author of the
De Antiquissima
and its Venetian reviewers. It should be addedwith equal certainty that mastering the circumstances for and consequences of a claim involves bothsemantic and syntactic sapience. That is, it will be necessary to know not only
what
needs to be said, but also
how
it needs to be said, for any given place and time will have particular understandings of which concepts may legitimately be combined and particular understandings of how concepts oughtto be combined in general. This is the project of the history of rhetoric, which insists that conceptsare historically articulated and that rules for the articulation of concepts are themselves historicallyvariant. Indeed it makes sense to go a step further and say that different ages may be more or less anddifferently preoccupied with the establishment of rules that govern the articulation of concepts and inthis connection it is worth pointing out that Walter Ong’s
Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue
shares with Vico’s
De Ratione
a dislike of early modernity’s literalist obsession with good discursiveorder .
59
Historical particularity is perhaps not the virtue of Jurgen Habermas’
Strukturwandel deÖffentlicheit
and his account of the early modern public sphere fits the case of Naples only in somerespects.
60
In his
Istoria Civile del Regno di Napoli
Pietro Giannone had lionized the early modern Neapolitan interlocution of what Francesco D’Andrea called
i nobili fuori di Piazza
. (It is modernscholars who have termed meridionale lawyers a
ceto civile
and opposed their interests categoricallyto those of the barons; D’Andrea counselled his peers to make their money in the courts and to keep it by investing in feuds, but to remain in Naples administering both their legal practice and their feudalinterests together, which proposes an altogether more complex historical dialectic.)

----
J.G.A. Pocock is sufficiently moved by Giannone’s account to comment on the vital alliance between scholasticismand jurisprudence in the history of Neapolitan discursive negotiation, but he does so in a way thatcompares early modern with late medieval practice and as Giannone himself was very particularlyaware the
Accademia degli Investiganti
and the
Accademia di Medinaceli
(to cite only two of themore important fora of that kind) were orientated towards a viceregency that itself looked to Madrid(later to Vienna and always in part to Rome) and that was transformed from a provincial and partly bureaucratic organ to a royalist one in the shift from the Palazzo Reale in the Piazza di Plebiscito to
58
Brandom,
Articulating Reasons
, 64, 66.
59
See Walter Ong,
Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason
, Cambridge(Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1958.
60
See Jurgen Habermas,
Strukturwandel de Öffentlicheit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft
, Neuwied, H. Luchterhand, 1962.
61
See Francesco D’Andrea,
I Ricordi di un Avvocato Napoletano del Seicento
, Nino Cortese (ed.), Napoli, Luigi Lubrano,1923, 206-8.
18
the Reggia di Caserta,
a would-be Versailles; and this is to say nothing of Tanucci or Murat.
62
Again,Giuseppe Valletta’s
Istoria Filosofica
wishes to insist on the distinctiveness of seventeenth-centurydiscursive modes in general and Investiganti discursive modes in particular, wishes to declare againstthe control of the Schools and of the Church that
filosofia
is nothing but
filosofare
and
filosofare
,nothing but
opinare
; it may indeed be a sign of robust debate in the Neapolitan
saloni
and
salotti
of the day – in which the
Istoria
circulated in manuscript – that Valletta appears to recant the generalityof his criticism of dialectic; yet his criticism of Aristotle’s
Organon
and his claim for the novelty (or renovation) of “modern” argument is greatly weakened by his lack of attention to the
Topics
and the
Sophistic Refutations
.
63
The history of the public use of reason at Naples is, in short, a complex one. Nevertheless, the Habermasian turn of phrase, the public use of reason, is tremendously felicitous andit is of course true that the Vico who is engaged with the reviewers of the
Giornale de’ letteratid’Italia
is a writer intimately involved in the historical development announced by LudovicoMuratori and theorized by Habermas.The even naïve proposal made by the reviewers of the
Giornale
and approved by Vico thattheir exchange be considered a kind of completion of the
De Antiquissima
is evidence of a genuinecommitment on both sides to the process and consequences of discursive negotiation. The syntax, asit were, within which they worked was particular, however, and had a significant impact on the wayin which that willingness in theory was modulated in practice. We know something of the way inwhich the
De Antiquissima
came to be reviewed in the
Giornale
owing to a letter written by Vico toApostolo Zeno, who had founded the
Giornale
in 1710. The letter – dated ‘ultimo d’ottobre 1710’and accompanied by a copy of the
De Antiquissima
– indicates that the work is the first of severalrelated volumes, asks Zeno to read it with the same consideration demonstrated by the review in the
Giornale
of the
De Ratione
, and says that he would be very grateful were Zeno to send copies toBernardo Trevisani and Biagio Garofalo.
64
This reference to Trevisani confirms the plausability of Croce’s suggestion that it was that Venetian critic who wrote the reviews of the
De Antiquissima
, butit is difficult to be certain of anything more than the plausability of this hypothesis.
65
What is certainis the structure of address within which the
Giornale
exchange took place. Vico addressed his firstresponse to an ‘Osservandissimo signor mio,’ but in the second he addresses himself to ‘le SignorieVostre illustrissime,’ the editors of the
Giornale
, and describes the object of his First Response as ‘un
62
See J.G.A. Pocock,
Barbarism and Religion
, two volumes, I –
The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764
, II –
Narratives of Civil Government
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, II, 53-4. See Pietro Giannone,
Dell’IstoriaCivile del Regno di Napoli Libri XL. Scritti da Pietro Giannone Giureconsulto, ed Avvocato Napoletano
, Napoli, Niccolò Naso, 1723, four volumes, IV, 419ff.
63
See Giuseppe Valletta,
Istoria Filosofica
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, Michele Rak (ed.), Firenze, Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1975,340-354 and 347ff for the qualification of his criticism of dialectic, which he had started out at 341 by describing, in a wayone would assume to be co-ordinate with his understanding of
filosofia
as nothing more and nothing less than
opinare
, as‘esercitazion di Filosofo, dimostra intorno all’opinabile a cagion della potestà di contradire.’
64
Vico,
Epistole
, 83-4.
65
In Croce’s opinion the reviews were written ‘con assai probabilità da Bernardo Trivisano (1653-1720), che, a ogni modo,era colui che in quella rivista s’occupava a preferenza della rubrica filosofica.’
Bibliografia Vichiana, Accresciuta e Rielaborata di Fausto Nicolini
, Napoli, Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1947, two volumes, I, 173. See also to V. Placella,
Dalla «cortesia» alla «discoverta del vero Omero»
, Città del Castello, Arti Grafiche, 1979, 128.
19
dotto signore anonimo.’ The
Giornale
articles are themselves written consistently in the first person plural and Vico chooses to assume that the author of the first article was an individual and the author of the second, collective, so that it be recognized that the
Giornale
has seen fit to respond as a public body rather than as a private individual. As he construes it the editors of the
Giornale
have paid hima compliment, scarcely warranted if at all Vico adds, in replying as a body and publically.
66
In thetext it is evident that Vico is highly conscious of the public quality of this exchange, anxious for boththe dangers and the possibilities it presents.The publicity of these opinions affects the exchange in a number of ways. The
Giornale
elides the public it imagines for itself with the public reading Vico’s
De Antiquissima
andconsequently criticises Vico for being more obscure than is desirable, while Vico counters that hiswas a word to the wise for which it was better to be laconic than verbose (although in his letter toZeno Vico had taken Trevisani for an ideal reader of the
De Antiquissima
on the basis of a book written in a manner fit, as Vico puts it, for the understanding of women and of the court).
67
Vico is, inessence, imagining a public of peers and manages to profess himself honoured to be numbered amongtheir equals. The
Giornale
, on the other hand, is in the business of constructing its own public.Having described the uncovering of temple ruins in Herculaneum, in a section relating the literarynews from Naples for the months January, February and March 1711, the
Giornale
promises to keepthe republic of letters informed of developments. This gesture to a public that is widespread,contemporary and implicitly future is partly a recognition of the audience that the
Giornale
has and partly a suggestion of what kind of audience it ought to have. That the first notice of Vico’s“unearthing” of an ancient Italic wisdom occurs in the same volume of the
Giornale
is, at the veryleast, a pleasant coincidence.
68
This public display of intellectual intimacy between parties partlyknown and partly unknown to each other also exhibits elements of tension. Vico had been offended by the criticisms of the
Giornale
, to which the reviewers responded in their second notice by trying todistinguish more clearly between the person and the opinions of the author, after which Vico is justself-aware enough to confess that he may be a person too sensitive – ‘di cotal natura o feroce odelicata’ is his rather ironic phrase – for such public dispute. The pretensions of this exchange aresentimental, but they betray the basic truth that passions are not private, but rather public states of mind, that emotions are, as Nancy Struever might say, reactions to representations made by othersabout us. Likewise, the wooden imitation of oral debate in a print medium sustains misprision, delayscorrection. Vico eventually manages to clarify that at first he had supposed the reviewers to befaulting him for not completing a full survey of the field of metaphysics as such when they called the
De Antiquissima
an “idea” only, where he later understood that they wished him only to describe
66
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 145.
67
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume VIII, 1712, article X, 313-4. Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 152;
Epistole
, 84.
68
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume V, 1711, article VI, 119-30; article XXII, 399-401.
20
completely his own metaphysical system.
69
Vico suspects that the equivocation of
critica
, like theequivocation of
idea
, is responsible for their disagreement on the question of whether criticism is theart governing the faculty of judgment.
70
The interactivity characteristic of dialectic – a quality for which Socrates is willing to harangue and humiliate in the
Protagoras
– is absent here and Vicoresorts to impersonating an immediate, but fictitious interlocutor in his own text in order to raise anddeal with objections with greater alacrity.
71
The attempts by both parties to formulate clearly the points that are at issue is a credit to the sincerity of their dialogue and a sign of the technical difficultyimposed by the written medium. Both the
Giornale
and Vico himself are at pains to say that thedialogue was conducted politely and concluded satisfactorily, which suggests that neither was entirelyconvinced of these facts.
72
Correlate to the notion that Vico must police the
Giornale
’s representation of him during thisexchange is the notion that he must represent himself to the
Giornale
and the public that it brings into being. In representing himself, Vico acts as if the author of the
De Antiquissima
were another man, athird party. What is more, this follows from his accounts of representation and of the self. WhenVico speaks of representation in the
De Antiquissima
he is not thinking of a pictorial relationship, butrather a legal one. It is not the relationship between a face and a picture of a face that Vico takes to bedesignated by representation, but rather the relationship between a client and a lawyer. The Neapolitan’s point of view is nowhere clearer than in his discussion of Roman “civil scepticism.”Vico wonders whether the Romans spoke tentatively when representing their own minds in judgingand swearing for fear of perjuring themselves.
73
The thought turns on the two verbs
praestare
and
peierarent
, the combined effect of which is to suppose a fracture between the self that reports and theself that is reported. Perjury refers usually to
wilful
misrepresentation – simple error in witnessing isnot an offence in the eyes of the law – but the caveat of appearance insures against perjury only if
non-wilful
error in testimony regarding one’s own state of mind is both possible and culpable.Moreover,
praestare
means most literally “to stand for,” but also “to become surety or guarantee for,to be responsible for” and this rather Hobbesian inclination of the Latin word is confirmed by Vico’suse of the Italian transliteration in the 1744
Scienza Nuova
.
74
The interest in
self
-representation isCartesian in provenance, or better anti-Cartesian. Vico’s Malebranchian revision of Descartes’
cogito
is justly famous and it speaks directly to Vichian discursive practice in the
Giornale
exchange.Descartes ought not to have said
cogito ergo sum
, in Vico’s opinion, but rather
quid in me cogitat
.
75
Vico makes a related point in the First Response when he utilizes the difference between the Italianverbs
essere
and
esistere
to argue that human existence is the expression of a properly divine essence
69
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 151.
70
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 163-4.
71
Vico, ‘Second Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 140-2.
72
Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia
, volume XII, 1712, article XIII, 417-8; Vico,
Vita
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 27.
73
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 109.
74
Vico,
Principi di Scienza Nuova
(1744), in
Opere Filosofiche
, 646-7, §945.
75
Vico,
De Antiquissima
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 111.
21
and in supposing that human being is not its own but rather another’s he induces a recognition of introspection’s opacity.
76
If one witnesses internal events in a way not radically dissimilar fromexternal events, then introspection is simply another form of testimony, unpriviledged, andautobiography cannot be radically dissimilar from biography. That is an implication one could alsotake from Vico’s third-personal life of himself.In a humorous response to a parodic review of his 1725
Scienza Nuova
in the
Acta Eruditorum
, Vico restates his commitment to the foundation of logic in imagination. Topic, the art of inventing arguments, comes before critic, the art of judging them, and topic is fundamentallyimaginative because it is in perceiving the harmony or disharmony between potentially distant objectsthat, for example, Demosthenes was able to demonstrate the consequences of assertions to his moreor less obtuse Greek audiences. His
enthymemata
enlist tacit assumptions. Demosthenes was in thisrespect a good pupil of Plato, Vico goes on to say; and Plato, of Socrates. It was the latter whointroduced this mode of questioning, which the Greeks called dialectic, in order to capacitate thelogical dimension of human nature.
77
In putting the matter thus, Vico commits himself to an accountin which logic is not only a means to an end, but an end in itself, a properly political value. Dialectichere stands for the possibility of persuasion, which some would say amounts to the possibility of politics insofar as politics is discursive negotiation and not simply the exercise or the exercises of power. Now, Robert Brandom has a different account of enthymemes – he says that enthymemesmay be
materially
good inferences that do not derive their validity by virtue of being abbreviations of
formally
good inferences possessing both major and minor premises, whereas Vico assumes thatenthymemes really are imperfect syllogisms and adds that it is in the audience and not in the rhetor that the missing (or better, implicit) premise has its effect – and Brandom places more emphasis onthe explicitation of particular conceptual contents rather than of human nature generally, but I submitthat the Pittsburger is offering a more developed version of an essentially comparable insight to whichthe Neapolitan would in all likelihood subscribe when he says thatinsofar as the idea of a theory of semantic or inferential harmony makes sense at all, itmust take the form of an investigation of the ongoing elucidative process, of the‘Socratic method’ of discovering and repairing discordant concepts, which alone givethe notion of harmony any content. It is given content only by the process of harmonizing commitments, from which it is abstracted. In [Wilfrid] Sellars’scharacterization of expressive rationality, modal claims are assigned the expressive roleof inference licences, which make explicit a commitment that is implicit in the use of conceptual contents antecedently in play. Rules of this sort assert an authority over future practice, and answer for their entitlement both to the prior practice beingcodified and to concomitant inferential and doxastic commitments. In this way theymay be likened to the principles formulated by judges at common law, intended both tocodify prior practice, as represented by precedent, expressing explicitly as a rule whatwas implicit therein, and to have regulative authority for subsequent practice. Theexpressive task of making material inferential commitments explicit plays an essentialrole in the reflectively rational Socratic practice of harmonizing our commitments. For
76
Vico, ‘First Response,’ in
Opere Filosofiche
, 143.
77
Vico,
Vici Vindiciae
, in
Opere Filosofiche
, 359.
22
a commitment to become explicit is for it to be thrown into the game of giving andasking for reasons as something whose justification, in terms of other commitmentsand entitlements, is liable to question. Any theory of the sort of inferential harmony of commitments we are aiming at by engaging in this reflective, rational process mustderive its credentials from its expressive adequacy to that practice before it should beaccorded any authority over it.
78
In putting the matter thus Brandom means to say that our idea of semantic or inferential harmonymust be a historical one. The relationship between time and idea was fraught in the Socratic projecttoo with the consequence that the separation between dialectic and sophistic is less certain than onemight wish, or assume it to be. For some the Socrates of the
Gorgias
is a Plato disenamoured of Athenian politics, looking to pursue philosophy before he will return to the agora certain of the true;for others he is a Maternus grown hoary in his quibbling, absented from the properly adult business of public life. Yet even there Socrates finds himself supposing that if oratory is a kind of medicine, thensophistic is better in that it is a kind of gymnastic, that is to say preventative. The “if” here isdesigned to trap Socrates’ interlocutor, but it can also be turned against its author.
79
Parmenides takesZeno’s paradoxes to be sophistical in this sense when he advises the young Socrates to practice themas dialectical exercises and here his interpretation is quite different from those offered by Aristotleand Vico who examine the content rather than the form of the paradoxes.
80
It is in the present tensethat sophistic and dialectic are most indistinguishable. In
The Sophist
, sophistic is identifiedtorturously, perhaps derisively, as ‘the imitative kind of the dissembling part of the art of opinionwhich is part of the art of contradiction’ but the dissembling identified here is not necessarilyinsincere, as it will be for Aristotle in the
Sophistic Refutations
; instead, it consists in the proposal of aquestion in all seriousness despite the absence of proof that the question is itself serious in the senseof fundamental.
81
A commitment to the vitality of interruption, to the value of contradiction even inthe absence of advance-notice of its validity is precisely what Socrates forces on Protagoras. Theirony that in the
Protagoras
Socrates has to beat the older sophist into reasonability is striking, butindicative of the truth that logic cannot be assumed and must be established as discursive practice.
82
This essay has labored to construct a mode of approaching Vico’s
De Antiquissima
thatmaintains future, past and present perspectives simultaneously. It is clear in the case of Max Fisch’sinterpretation of Vico’s pragmatism that it is possible to pay very close attention to the manner inwhich a series of opinions came to be expressed and at the same time to transport those opinions toanother place and time so as to clarify their meaning. It is also clear, I believe, that Vico’s ownmanner of reading was essentially comparable to Fisch’s, that the Neapolitan like the American held itimperative not only to reconstruct the environment in which a certain utterance came to be formulated but also to demand that the utterance be intelligible to the reader’s present. Furthermore, it is the
78
Brandom,
Articulating Reasons
, 75-6. For Brandom’s interpretation of enthymemes, see 80-96.
79
Plato,
Gorgias
, 520a-b.
80
Plato,
Parmenides
, 135ff.
81
Plato,
The Sophist
, 268c-d.
82
Plato,
Protagoras
, see especially 334-338.
23
argument of the third part of the essay, here articulated more explicitly, that the temporal situationestablished by readers (whether it be Fisch reading Vico, or Vico reading Aristotle) differs in particulars and in degree, but not in kind from the kind of intepretative practice exhibited indiscursive exchanges between contemporary interlocutors. Thus, the
Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia
’sreading of Vico and Vico’s of the
Giornale
cannot be categorically distinguished from reading thattraverses different historical periods. The possibility of response maintained in the present bycontemporary interlocutors does generate a degree of falsifiability that is considerably greater, amodality of contradiction that is more responsive than that maintained by texts whose authors aredead, but in the course of any one articulation or response the position of the contemporaryinterlocutor is essentially identical to that of the non-contemporary interlocutor, for in a dialogue inmotion the interlocutor’s utterance is a continually evolving amalgam of memory and imagination,memory of past responses and their construals, imagination of future responses and their ripostes.This approach has particular consequences for the meaning of the
De Antiquissima
: it suggests thatVico’s Platonism in the matter of hermeneutics was not Cratylean but rather Protagorean, whichserves to close the distance between the
De Antiquissima
and the
Scienza Nuova
; and it suggests a possible tension to be explored between the pragmatist elements of Vico’s thought and the Polybianconstraints operant in his conceptualization of historiography. This approach also has more generalimplications for the historiography of ideas. Whether it be Justice Antonin Scalia on constitutionalconstruction or Professor Quentin Skinner on political theoretical speech acts, there exists a widelydiffused desire to deny that something posterior to a particular utterance can have a legitimate impacton the meaning of that utterance.
83
Indeed, it makes a good deal of intuitive sense to say, for example,that Max Fisch may be right or wrong in his characterization of Giambattista Vico, but that he cannot be said to alter, augment or constitute the meaning of Vico’s utterances. Yet it is precisely such anintuition that this essay undermines, for, if one accepts that it is impossible to distinguish reception of testimony regarding oneself from that regarding others, then it follows that in order to deny that Fischcan constitute the meaning of the
De Antiquissima
one must also deny that Vico himself couldconstitute that meaning. Although it will often be the case that authors are better acquainted withtheir own minds than interpreters, it cannot be supposed that they always will be or even that they areacquainted with themselves in a fashion radically different from that in which they are known byothers. In the
De Antiquissima
we find Vico reading the
De Ratione
and in his two Responses to the
Giornale
we find him reading the
De Antiquissima
just like anyone else; in the
Vita
it is clear thatautobiography is both
reportage
and
inventio
. Certainly Vico himself believed that ideas had himmore than he had ideas and Brandom’s articulation of meaning’s historicity gives us reason to suspectthat, in a way, he was right. And when J.G.A. Pocock asserts that one of the key aspects of the early
83
See Antonin Scalia,
A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law
, an essay by Antonin Scalia with commentary by Amy Gutmann (ed.), Gordon S. Wood, Laurence H. Tribe, Mary Ann Glendon, Ronald Dworkin, Princeton, PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997; and Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,’
History and Theory
, 8(February, 1969), 3-53.
24
modern historiographic revolution was the development of the opinion that there were things to beknown about the ancients that the ancients had not known about themselves – a development in whichVico played a not insignificant role – it is a short step to the assertion that the meaning of the ancientsis in part formulated by the moderns. It is when writer and reader are said to collaborate indetermining the meaning of an utterance that philosophy and the history of philosophy are the same project, when in Valletta’s sense
filosofia
is not only
filosofare
but
opinare
too.
84
The historian of philosophy – indeed the historian of thought more broadly conceived – and the philosopher arelikewise dialecticians at base in that their primary responsibility is to make commitments andentitlements explicit.
85
84
See Nancy Struever’s gloss of Burton Dreben’s opinion that philosophy and the history of philosophy are the same projectin ‘The Uses of the Present,’ introduction to her
Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance
, Chicago, ChicagoUniversity Press, 1992, ix-xiii.
85
Both the idea and the phrase derive from Robert Brandom,
Making It Explicit
, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard UniversityPress, 1994.
25

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