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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton October 31, 2018

Poetic logic and sensus communis

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From the journal Semiotica

Abstract

Giambattista Vico first published his masterpiece The New Science in 1725, but it did not receive much attention from the academic world until the middle of the twentieth century. The last fifty years of academic research have witnessed a so-called “linguistic” and “cultural” turn which has revived our interest in this great Italian thinker. Looking at the Vichian scholarship of the recent past, it seems that Vico’s theory of poetic wisdom has gained a great deal of recognition and deservedly so, but his concept of sensus communis is yet to be fully appreciated. The present article thus tries to discuss the constructive and imaginative function of language and culture not just through the notion of poetic logic but also in relation to that of common sense, which hopefully can shed some light on the perennial debate over the criterion of truth and aesthetic judgement.

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Published Online: 2018-10-31
Published in Print: 2018-11-06

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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