The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico by Benedetto Croce

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1913. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... APPENDIX III THE SOURCES OF VICO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE' My statement, that the criterion of knowledge contained in Vico's formula of the conversion of the true with the created is an original and modern principle, has been contradicted by certain Catholic editors; who state that this doctrine, however true, is not original to Vico, and is indeed far from modern, being a purely Scholastic doctrine. If I thought otherwise, this was only due to my insufficient knowledge of Scholasticism. I might indeed ask at the outset how such complete ignorance of scholasticism were possible: an ignorance not of its manifold varieties and the tangled forest of its distinctions-- that would be comprehensible: but of no less a matter than the fundamental criterion of its theory of knowledge, the starting-point of modern thought and as such, it would seem, inevitably familiar to every student of the elements of philosophy. But since it is always useful to suspect oneself of ignorance, or even to believe oneself more ignorant than one really is, I will make so far as concerns myself a voluntary display of humility. I find it less easy, I confess, to extend the accusation of ignorance to all who, like myself, have failed to run Vico's criterion to earth in the scholastic lumberroom: Jacobi for instance, who on reading it as expressed in the De antiquissima, sees in it the first manifestation of Kantianism and absolute idealism: 2 or the Catholic theologian Baader, who finds its later development in Schelling's philosophy of identity: x or the learned and subtle Spanish Thomist, Jaime Balmes, who treats it as a unique idea and attacks it from the scholastic point of view: 2 or the equally learned Catholic Bertini, who accepts and develops Jacobi's observation:8 or the eminent histo...