Marco Andreacchio’s “Epistemology’s Political-Theological Import in Giambattista Vico” appears in Telos 185 (Winter 2018). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
The twentieth-century rise to fame of Giambattista Vico as anticipator of historical relativism obscures essential elements of the eighteenth-century philosopher’s message. Vico’s stringent argumentation points well beyond contemporary expectations, offering a classical alternative to both a political depreciation of metaphysics and a metaphysical depreciation of politics. Carrying on a Renaissance tradition inaugurated most notably by Dante Alighieri, Vico invites us to rediscover or return to the poetic language of pagan antiquity as political-theological key to philosophical reflection upon the nature of the human mind. What Vico intends to defend are not old myths as such, but the essential independence of the human mind from any and all myths, be they ancient, medieval, or modern.
