The website contains an introduction to the book; a complete bibliography of texts cited in the book, which space constraints made impossible to include in it; a list of errata as I discover them. Additionally, it will include a genealogy of the efforts since 1983--controversial among Vico scholars--to explore the affinity between the New Science and postmodern views of language, meaning, and human existence, and a note on my use of the term "uncanny."

In the future I intend to add the following sections: comments, criticisms, clarifications, and so on, which I receive about the book (it is my hope to carry on an ongoing conversation on the themes and issues raised in the book); extended versions of my analyses of the scholarly literature on Vico in Chapter 1 of the book; critiques of books and articles relevant to the thesis and themes of my book published after Vico's Uncanny Humanism.

INTRODUCTION

Vico claimed it took him twenty years to grasp the master key of the New Science, that the first men of the human race were poets--that is, creators--prehuman beings who, with their poetic language, created not only the human world, but their own human existence. Human truth, he believed, was limited to or "convergent with" the things which humans themselves had made (verum et factum convertuntur--the true and the made are convertible).

My effort to interpret the New Science has similarly taken twenty years, during which time I have come to appreciate the poetic nature of Vico's own language. I believe the language of the New Science illustrates the genetic insight that gives force to Vico's master key: "The nature of things (cose) is nothing but their coming into being at certain times and in certain guises." That is, since the made "things of the human world do not settle or endure out of their natural state," Vico's language--the language of the New Science, genetically derived from an original poetic language--must be poetic as well.

For this reason I read the New Science as a performative act in which Vico, who describes at length the autodidactic process by which he became a "new scientist," a philosopher-historian capable of "understanding" the poetic (creative) nature of the first men, manifests his understanding that, since the true and made are convergent, the "truth" convergent with the narrative he has made with his poetic language about humans as makers is that its "truths" are constructed. Thus, the New Science does not yield epistemological truth in the philosophic sense, but, rather, the hermeneutic understanding that, ontologically, humans are creators, that what they create are the true things of the human world.

Students of Vico's writings very quickly find themselves in the imaginative wonderland of Vico scholarship--a vast array of contradictory, inherently antithetic interpretations, often claiming to grasp the true nature of the New Science. I have come to interpret this literature as further examples of Vico's genetic insight that, if the first humans are poets, if things do not settle or endure out of their natural state, then humans remain creators even in the last stage of historical development. Though human language eventually develops from concrete tropes to abstract concepts, it, too, remains creative. The narratives we moderns make with our abstract, conceptual language--whether of analytic philosophy, the social sciences, even the narratives of natural science, and certainly those of Vico scholarship--yield only constructed "truths," along with the hermeneutic insight that humans are by nature creators, that among the things they make are their "true" narratives.

Because of this hermeneutic understanding of Vico's master key and genetic principle, I have self-consciously framed my book as an interpretive reading of the New Science, based on and contextualized by all my readings, assumptions, biases. Since, moreover, I believe all books on Vico are similarly interpretive and contextualized, I included Chapter 1 of Vico's Uncanny Humanism intensive hermeneutic readings of a wide range of Vico literature, in order to reveal assumptions which, differing from mine, produce narratives which differ widely from mine and from one another. Since the discussions in Chapter 1 were necessarily constrained by space, one function of this website is to include the longer versions of those readings shortened for the book--of interest, I readily acknowledge, only to the most dedicated and obsessive of Vico scholars. I shall also include interpretations, from my perspective, of other readings of Vico, relevant to the issues I discuss but published after my book.

SANDRA RUDNICK LUFT
Professor of Humanities
San Francisco State University
srluft@sfsu.edu

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