ABSTRACT
Vico’s interest in the vitality of civil life, and in the form of education that assured it, was very nearly a point of obsession. This chapter concerns for pedagogy and civil life that informs, from the beginning of his life to its end, Vico’s letters, orations, and other writings of the “school.” Vico entered the debate on the active and contemplative lives through another, related, and equally old academic contest—that between the ancients and the moderns. This is the explicit theme of the two great Inaugural Orations, the De studiorum ratione of 1708 and the De mente heroica of 1732, from which are suspended, as from two mighty pylons erected on the bedrock of humanist concerns, the entire edifice of his scientific writings. The querelle of ancients and moderns that Vico joined, therefore, was not that of Perrault and Rapin, of Wotton and William Temple.
