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A Household of Households: Arran Gare on Ecological Civilization and the Multipolar World
Empires, like dinner guests, rarely know when to leave. Arran Gare thinks the American one is collecting its coat. What comes next? His answer involves Aristotle, a few ecosystems, Switzerland’s four languages, and a household…
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The Dog at the Water: Whitehead on How Feeling Becomes Meaning
A dog sees a juicier steak in the river, lunges, and loses lunch. Aesop called it greed. Whitehead might call it a perception problem. Why does “I see” mean “I understand”? The answer, it turns…
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What the Body Hangs From: Health and the Renaissance Platonists
A Florentine priest prescribed fresh mint, good air, and the company of the young. A Swiss alchemist called his patients his best book. Both agreed on one strange thing about health, and you won’t find…
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Song Rather Than Speech: Homer, Hesiod, Solon, and the Lost Prose of Archaic Greece
A king who never sang a note, a hawk lecturing a nightingale, a lawgiver in a little felt cap feigning madness in the marketplace. Archaic Greek poets kept quarreling with someone. Who was the rival…
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The Eagle That Speaks Latin: Vico, Rome, and the American Republic
America’s Great Seal has been muttering Latin for centuries, quoting Virgil and clutching a suspiciously Roman bundle of arrows. Robert Pogue Harrison and Julian Davis ask Vico what the eagle is trying to tell us,…
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The Spirit of Commerce and the Spirit of Conquest: Genovesi Reads Montesquieu
Montesquieu promised that trade would make nations kiss and make up. A Neapolitan abbé, pen in the margin, grumbled: commerce is jealous, and jealousy arms men. So is the market a peacemaker or a pirate?…
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When Truth Is Monopolized: Maurizio Manzin on the Return of Rhetoric
Every few centuries, somebody declares they own the truth: myth, then grammar, then dialectic, then method. And every time, an old art sneaks back through the side door. A law philosopher’s table has one empty…
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The Driver Who Never Turns Back: Mourid Barghouti and the Routes of Palestinian Memory
A taxi leaves Ramallah hours before the tanks. The driver dodges checkpoints, detours through olive groves, pours coffee like a man on holiday, and never takes anyone back. Then the road ends at a mud…
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Maria Lai and the Village That Tied Itself to a Mountain
In 1981 a Sardinian village tied its houses together with twenty-six kilometres of blue ribbon. Bread for the beloved. A knot for the merely known. For enemies, a thread pulled bare and taut. Then they…
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The Gorilla Who Was Never Young Enough
A gorilla in Barcelona clutches an old tire. A novelist watches. A philosopher watches the novelist. Somewhere in that hall of mirrors sits the reason you can read this sentence, and a small hint about…
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Vico’s thought has never belonged to a single discipline, a single century, or a single language. Neither does this blog.
Here we publish short essays on Giambattista Vico and the long afterlife of his ideas — historical, genealogical, contextual, theoretical. Contributions come from an international community of scholars and readers, in English, Italian, and French.
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