Barbara Ann Naddeo
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801449161
- eISBN:
- 9780801460876
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801449161.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This concluding chapter elaborates on Vico's famous claim in his Autobiografia that he became a philosopher only because he failed to become a professor of law. It shows that Vico's politicking among ...
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This concluding chapter elaborates on Vico's famous claim in his Autobiografia that he became a philosopher only because he failed to become a professor of law. It shows that Vico's politicking among the judiciary was untimely—and hence a miserable failure—by narrating Vico's unsuccessful bid for the highly remunerative Morning Chair of Civil Law at the University of Naples. The chapter further recounts the great personal difficulty with which Vico drafted and sought to publish the first edition of the Scienza nuova, then ends with the first edition of the Scienza nuova, in which Vico generalized the hypotheses of his legal works to make applicable to world society those insights about the nature of citizenship and rights of humans that he heretofore more narrowly had exemplified with his history of the Roman metropolis.Less
This concluding chapter elaborates on Vico's famous claim in his Autobiografia that he became a philosopher only because he failed to become a professor of law. It shows that Vico's politicking among the judiciary was untimely—and hence a miserable failure—by narrating Vico's unsuccessful bid for the highly remunerative Morning Chair of Civil Law at the University of Naples. The chapter further recounts the great personal difficulty with which Vico drafted and sought to publish the first edition of the Scienza nuova, then ends with the first edition of the Scienza nuova, in which Vico generalized the hypotheses of his legal works to make applicable to world society those insights about the nature of citizenship and rights of humans that he heretofore more narrowly had exemplified with his history of the Roman metropolis.
