ABSTRACT
The nature of the connection between Vico’s rhetorical profession and Vico’s new science is an enduring issue in historical scholarship. However, the first, and most obvious step is to recognise that modern scholars do not share definitions; a monolithic rhetoric, definitive, stable, does not exist. The historical shifts in interests and values within the rhetorical tradition confront the fractured status of contemporary rhetorical theory. The difficulty is that mainstream (non-Grassi) philosophical definitions of rhetoric carry with them the freight of philosophical judgements, goals and antipathies. Rhetoric thus can be caught up in a network of explanation and justification that distorts and diminishes its capacities, or trapped in a tissue of begged questions.
