The Quest for the New Science: Language and Thought in Eighteenth-Century Science

James W. Marchand

In his well-known book on Vico, K. O. Apel speaks of three aspects from which one may view Vico. ¹ One of these, that taken by Croce in 1901 in his "rediscovery" of Vico, seeks to see in Vico the forerunner of the deutsche Bewegung in science and historiography of the latter half of the eighteenth century and to integrate him into this movement. This is the view taken by our authors, namely that Vico and his New Science not only are echoed in the development of German speculative science of the late eighteenth century, but that Herder, Schiller, and Goethe are representatives of a direction, if not a movement, in the philosophy of science which ought by all rights to be called The New Science in Vico's sense.

There is a theme which runs through all these essays: that the quest for a new science in the latter half of the eighteenth century and in Vico represented a return to the eternal truth that man is the measure of all things, and that science, a creation of man, must be understood through the understanding of man--homo scientificus equals homo scientifex as Vico might have put it in one of his etymological games. It is this realization which lies behind the New Science of the sociology of knowledge, which maintains, with Vico: "The sociological character of all knowledge, of all forms of thought, intuition and cognition is unquestionable. Al

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