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BOOK REVIEWS 581 individual must begin existentially with the ethical imperative to love others as one loves oneself" (247). In this book, Elrod completes the most sustained and comprehensive statement available for a foundational ontology in Kierkegaard which holds together the self, existence, duty, love, truth, and faith. Jack S. Boozer Emory University Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Editor. Vico:Past and Present. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981. Two vols. in onetome: Vol. 1, Pp. xvi + 249; Vol. 2, Pp. 266. $32.5 ~9 This is the fourth volume of essays on Vico compiled and edited by the indefatigable Giorgio Tagliacozzo and his colleagues at the Institute of Vico Studies of which he is founder and director. The present work maintains the same level of quality and breadth of scope that characterized the earlier anthologies. While covering many of the same topics, the new collection manifests the advantages that the contributors had in being able to draw upon the earlier ones. On such questions as Vico's relationships to predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, the arguments presented here are still more subtly nuanced, lines of affiliation still more precisely drawn, and analogies still more carefully exploited for interpretive purposes. The introductory essay by Andrea Battistini on "Contemporary Trends in Vichian Studies" surveys the whole of Western and Eastern European work being done on Vico and amply, even intimidatingly documents the difficulty facing any single scholar wishing to master the current secondary literature. Nothing appears to have escaped Battistini's eye, and this essay alone is worth the price of the volume to any aspiring Vico scholar. At the same time, his survey of the vast number of Vichians churning out essays and books on their subject raises the question that this collection of essays in general seeks to answer, namely, how do things stand with Vico studies today? More specifically, what is the place in and contribution of Vico's ideas to our efforts to contrive a "science of the human" adequate to both our commitment to science, on the one side, and our sense of our distinctive humanity, on the other? These are the questions that inform this collection of essays. The raising of these questions locates us precisely in the gap created by the conflict between positivistic social science and its Marxian alternative, not to speak of the conflict between humanistic and materialistic conceptions of science itself. Standing at the point in Western cultural life when the possiblities of scientism and humanism were first clearly perceivable as alternative kinds of knowledge and hypersensitive as he was to the price that would have to be paid for a unilateral choice between them, Vico was sufficiently ambivalent in his intellectual affections to have provided paradigms for any subsequent thinker similarly afflicted by a sense of the difficulty of choosing. This is why, no doubt, Vico has been claimed (by Vichians at least) as a precursor of just about any modern thinker of any significance whatsoever. And this 582 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 21" 4 OCT ~983 is also why, I surmise, so much time, energy, and print has been expended in the effort to establish the genealogy of the cluster of ideas that passes for Vico's system of thought. The problem of the Vichian family-tree is represented in miniature in the attempt to determine the relationship between Vico and Marx. This problem is addressed in the current volume by H. Aaronovitch and M. Jay. Aaronovitch dilates on the difficulty of using either Vico or Marx as a basis for a "science of the human," while Jay examines the possibility of using Vico's thought as a way of transcending the "antinomies of bourgeois thought" as defined by Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness. The Vico-Marx connection, hanging as it does on the slim thread of the famous allusion to Vico in Capital, can serve as a representative specimen of many of the questions currently informing Vico scholarship. Are the theories of human nature , history, social structure and process, the possibilities of a science of society and culture, and the drive to transcendence found in Marx analogous to, consonant with, consistent with, different from, or alien to their...

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