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The New Science builds an “alternative philosophy” for a new age and reads like a “novel of formation” recounting the (hi)story of the entire human race and our divine ancestors.

For this reason the study of myth and folklore as well as archeology, anthropology, and ethnology must all play a role in the rediscovery of man. However, Vico argues, the truths that are most available and interesting to us are the ones humanity “authored” by means of its culture and history-creating activities. This course offers a close reading of Giambattista Vico’s masterpiece, New Science (1744)-a work that sets out to refute “all opinions hitherto held about the principles of humanity.” Vico, who is acknowledged as the most resolute scourge of any form of rationalism, breathed new life into rhetoric, imagination, poetry, metaphor, history, and philology in order to promote in his readers that originary “wonder” and “pathos” which sets human beings on the search for truth.