Exceedingly scarce enlightenment philosophy. A sammelband of four scarce first editions by the influential Enlightenment philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744).

Vico 'spent most of his professional life as Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples. He was trained in jurisprudence, but read widely in Classics, philology, and philosophy, all of which informed his highly original views on history, historiography, and culture. His thought is most fully expressed in his mature work, the Scienza Nuova or The New Science. In his own time, Vico was relatively unknown, but from the nineteenth century onwards his views found a wider audience and today his influence is widespread in the humanities and social sciences' (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Vico's earliest writings are significant for their development of themes that would be expressed fully in his Scienza Nuova. The first text in this volume, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione or 'On the Study Method of Our Times', is an oration comparing contemporary and classical political-philosophical thought, drawing attention to what the two can learn from each other. It is described by Healey as 'perhaps the most brilliant defence of the humanities ever written' (p294) and is rich with Vico's reflections about educative methods.

Notably, the second text in this volume is Vico's first major publication, Liber Primus Metaphysicus, which contains the fullest statement of the verum factum principle. The principle states that truth is verified through creation and not, as per Descartes, through observation. 'Since humans have made the civil world, they can understand the cause of the civil world and know the truth about it. Thus the skeptic, who claims knowledge is impossible, is incorrect because it is possible to know the truth about what humans have made. For Vico, making something becomes the criteria for knowing the truth about it' though Vico 'does not appear to hold that the only truth humans can know is of what humans make. Especially in his later writings, Vico holds that through the world humans make, humans can witness eternal truths such as the ideal eternal history and the verum-factum principle itself' (IEP).

This anti-Cartesian philosophical standpoint was further expressed in Vicco's De antiquissima sapientia (not present here), and in response to criticism of that publication by the Giornale dei letterati d'Italia in 1711, Vico published two Replies in 1711 and 1712 (bound here). In these, he defends and clarifies his views on the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, with the second taking an even stronger stance against Descartes' methodology than the first. This exchange between Vico and the Giornale was considered by both parties to be the natural completion of the De antiquissima sapientia.

Despite having been relatively unknown in the eighteenth century, and read only in his native Naples, the ideas of Vico are predecessors to the ideas of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Moreover, recognition of Vico's intellectual influence began in the nineteenth century, and his works would go on to influence the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Karl Marx, W.B. Yeats, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Benedetto Croce, and James Joyce.

First editions; four works in one volume, 12mo, (15.5 x 9.5 cm); small woodcut device to titles, woodcut headpieces and initials, some leaves browned, scattered light foxing; later quarter brown morocco, gilt lettering to spine, raised bands, some wear to boards and extremities, corners slightly rubbed, marbled endpapers, overall a good firm copy; 126, [2]; 130, [2]; 48; 93, [3]pp.