Giambattista Vico · Civilisations

Poetic Wisdom

Vico’s recovery of how the first humans thought - not in abstract reason but in vivid poetry, myth, and imagination - and his method for entering the mind of the distant past.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that Vico recovered the ‘poetic wisdom’ of early humanity - its imaginative, mythic mode of thought. Explain what poetic wisdom was and how Vico tried to understand it, in your own words.

Leads to Johann Gottfried Herder.

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