Synthesis philosophica, Vol. 30 No. 2, 2015.
Preliminary communication
Viewing Vico within German Idealism. On Jacobi’s Comparison of Vico with Kant and with Schelling’s System of Identity
Ljudevit Fran Ježić
orcid.org/0000-0003-2431-8366
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ivana Lučića 3, HR–10000 Zagreb
Abstract
Although it generally holds that Giambattista Vico was almost never mentioned in Germany during the heyday of German idealism, there is an important exception to this general statement. As he happened to be acquainted with Vico’s early work De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi made interesting use of a passage from this book in his Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung (1811), which is famous for its polemical tone towards Schelling’s system. He here indicates that Kant’s central insight that we concieve an object only insofar as we are able to construct it in our thoughts (as is the case in geometry as opposed to metaphysics) had been formulated in Italy “long before Kant” in Vico’s work, as well as in France in the
work of Pascal. The paper will examine this curious comparison between Vico and Kant and the role it might have played in its original context.
Keywords
Giambattista Vico; Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi; Immanuel Kant; Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling; verum–factum principle; theism
Hrčak ID:
164519
URI
Publication date:
27.1.2016.
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