ABSTRACT
Vico developed his theory of culture, then, by combining with classical principles of oratory his growing insights into particular—principally Roman—forms of poetry, myth, religion, and law. Surprising as his achievements were, however, his beginnings were fully conventional. He took his start from a simple concern for the vitality of civil life and for the integrity of rhetoric as a form of public discourse. Faced with the confident claims of Cartesian science to universal competence, he sought to exempt civil affairs from the constraints of the new method and to regain for rhetoric a share in the task of reasoning. Modern philosophers of rhetoric, concerned with rhetoric as argumentation, lay stress on the gradual eclipse of the logical dimension; for as it was received and developed in the Latin West, rhetoric came to be seen progressively less in terms of its power of persuasion and progressively more in terms of its literary products.
