Michael Mooney. Vico in the tradition of rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. xxiv + 318 pp $26.00 (cloth)
✍ Scribed by Jeffrey Barnouw
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1987
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 426 KB
- Volume
- 23
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The key insight of Giambattista Vico's New Science, for Michael Mooney, is "that language, mind and society are but three modes of a common reality" (p. ix). The enabling context of this insight is "the tradition of rhetoric," that is, "a persistent line of thinking that has flourished from time to time, and never so brilliantly as among the ancient Romans, which holds that language is primary in culture, metaphor a necessity, and jurisprudence our highest achievement" (p. x). The focus of this tradition "is not literary but judicial rhetoric -rhetoric as argumentation, a process of reasoning," which is reinforced in Vico by a strong "pedagogical impulse" (p. xiii). Two early works show Vico's close affiliation with this tradition: De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of our Time 1709) and Institutiones oratoriae (Principles of Oratory 171 1 , re-