ABSTRACT
Vico’s three works on natural law that we have investigated show him moving deeper and deeper into the relationship between sensus communis and natural law. First, in the Universal Law, sensus communis was simply the common opinion that held primitive societies together. Then in the New Science it became a receptacle for religious and political justifications for power and an arena for struggles for equity. Then in the revised New Science it became the religious and linguistic depths in which lay the foundations of “sense” that underwrote those structures of power and the concepts of equity that challenged them. Vico gradually came to see sensus communis as the inherited foundation of social life and as the arena in which arguments about equity were resolved and in which the concept of a natural law developed. At this point, it will be useful to see how Vico combines the three traditional “senses” of sensus communis: (1) a body of cultural knowledge and social value, (2) a faculty that judged the truth and/or aesthetic value of an experience, and (3) a faculty that separates the perceptions of the senses.
