A Selective Bibliography of Vico Scholarship (1948-1968) (review)

220 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY It presents us, then, not with a new Hegel, but with some new insights into antecedent shaping influences upon his thought. Not less important, it provides a new and pedagogically useful point of access to Hegelian concepts which have often been found abstruse. So far as I am able to judge, the treatment of Leibniz is equally well done. The work contains a number of interesting and insightful short sections which might be further developed. Of these, I find the discussion of "Der Begriff als dialektische Finalzeit" of particular interest. Despite the fact that the work is fairly condensed, the student with some knowledge of the philosophers discussed will find it generally readable. It should prove a valuable resource for many years to come. D~REL E. CHmSTENSEN Wofford College A Selective Bibliography of Vico Scholarship (1948-1968). By Elio Giantutco. (Firenze: Grafia Toscana, 1968) Professor Elio Gianturco believes that the time is ripe to free Vico scholarship from the evil of sixty years of idealist interpretation which Croce and Gentile imposed upon the great Neapolitan thinker. Gianmrco claims that the greatness and modernity of Vico lie not in the history of epistemology as Croce maintained, nor in the field of aesthetics and linguistics as many Italian scholars believed, but rather in the fields of social, legal, and anthropological sciences. Accordingly, the import of this bibliography is twofold. It intends to inform the English-speaking scholar of the various research on Vico and his influence since the publication of the Croce-Nicolini critical bibliography in 1948 and, further, to open fresh and new paths of investigation in the field of Vichian studies. The volume is 100 pages long and is divided into twenty sections. All the items collected are works written in the fifties and sixties with the exception of some studies which Nicolini had either overlooked or given "an inattentive fleetingly or overly laconic notice." It includes a complete list of Vico's works in translation, a section on Vico's intellectual and scientific background, foreign and English encyclopedias where Vico or Vichian themes are treated and more than seven sections explicitly dedicated to the influence that Vico did have or might have had in the fields of the social and legal sciences and philosophy of history. The net product is impressive, and Gianturco should be congratulated for undertaking a much-needed enterprise. Since his bibliography is the first work of its kind in the English language it undoubtedly deserves welcome. Yet despite its merits the reviewer wonders whether Gianturco's volume will not prove to be a mixed blessing9 To begin with, there are too many typographical and substantial mistakes which will try the patience and love of the most devout scholar. Gianturco seems so much the product of his master's scholarship that he quotes from memory as Vico did (see p. 4, item 6) and gives references which do not exist (see p. 47, item 12; p. 72, item 2). With Gianturco we cannot perform what Nicolini and Fisch have done for Vico, namely, correction of the mistakes made by a great mind in a great hurry with chastening love9 If a bibliography cannot be a work of vision, the least it can be is a precise and scholarly pedantic endeavor. Hence if this bibliography was to serve the purpose for which it was written and "bring up to date the Croce-Nicoliul Bibliografia Vichiana," it should have been seriously proofread (see p. 97, item 2; p. 70, item 10), each item BOOK REVIEWS 221 should have been numbered and each section pruned of useless references (see p. 23, item 9; p. 41, item 16). Although anyone who has read the New Science will agree with Gianturco's thesis that Vico fathered the social and legal sciences, still he must express astonishment with this reviewer at a Vico who was master of the social sciences without at the same time making an epoch in the history of epistemology. Furthermore it is to be doubted that sections 6 through 11 deprived as they are of any critical remarks can be of any help to the student who is ignorant of Vico but wishes...