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Malignum aditum puncti. “Primo punto di tutte le cose umane” nell`architettonica barocca della scienza vichiana
This study deals with one of the most “baroque” aspects of the Vico’s New Science – the paradoxical “utopia” of its first principle, «the first human thought in the gentile world», in the anamorphic structure of this early modern Gesamtkunstwerk. Taking as a starting point the irreducible plurality of the principles of the Vichian civil science and drawing an analogy between two strategies of translatio veri carried out by Vico – the first one in the chapter dedicated to conatus and “Zenonian points” in De antiquissima, the second one in the “diluvian postulate” in the section On elements of the New Science – we dwell on the aporetic form in which is expressed the passage from metaphysics to geometry and physics in the first case and from physics to history in the second. It has been shown that in both cases Vico deals with the same “antinomic” situation: while in De antiquissima the necessity to transfer the metaphysical principles to the realm of extension and motion makes him use oxymoric, liminal concepts (“Zenonian points”, conatus as «unextended virtue of extension»), in the New Science the passage from the state of nature to mondo civile necessitates the use of a very specific argument – a “physical postulatum”. This attention to the liminal, this anamorphic elusiveness and plurality of the fundamental principles, this particular tendency to use antinomic concepts allow us to approach New Science as a masterpiece of baroque metaphysics.