Editing Giambattista Vico (section)

==The rhetoric and humanism of Vico==
{{Rhetoric}}
Vico's version of [[rhetoric]] is a product of his [[Humanism|humanistic]] and [[pedagogic]] concerns. In the 1708 commencement speech ''[[De nostri temporis studiorum ratione|De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione]]'' (''On the Order of the Scholarly Disciplines of Our Times''), Vico said that whoever "intends a career in public life, whether in the courts, the senate, or the pulpit" should be taught to "master the art of topics and [to] defend both sides of a controversy, be it on Nature, Man, or politics, in a freer and brighter style of expression, so he can learn to draw on those arguments which are most probable and have the greatest degree of [[verisimilitude]]"; yet, in ''[[Scienza Nuova]]'', Vico denounced defending both sides in controversies as ''false eloquence''.

As Royal Professor of Latin Eloquence, Vico prepared students for higher studies in the fields of Law and of [[Jurisprudence]]; thus, his lessons were about the formal aspects of the canon of rhetoric, including the arrangement and the delivery of an argument. Yet he chose to emphasize the [[Aristotelianism|Aristotelian]] connection of rhetoric with [[logic]] and [[dialectic]], thereby placing ends (rhetoric) at their center. Vico's objection to modern rhetoric is that it is disconnected from common sense (''sensus communis''), defined as the "worldly sense" that is common to all men.

In lectures and throughout the body of his work, Vico's rhetoric begins from a central [[argument]] (''medius terminus''), which is to be clarified by following the order of things as they arise in our experience. [[Probability]] and circumstance retain their proportionate importance, and [[Discovery (observation)|discovery]]—reliant upon topics (''loci'')—supersedes [[axiom]]s derived through reflective, abstract thought. In the tradition of classical Roman rhetoric, Vico sets out to educate the [[orator]] (rhetorician) as the transmitter of the ''oratio'', a speech with ''ratio'' (reason) at the centre. What is essential to the oratorical art (Gr. ῥητορική, ''rhētorikē'') is the orderly link between common sense and an end commensurate with oratory; an end that is not imposed upon the [[imagination]] from above (in the manner of the moderns and dogmatic Christianity), but that is drawn from common sense, itself.  In the tradition of [[Socrates]] and [[Cicero]], Vico's true orator will be midwife to the birth of "the true" (as an idea) from "the certain", the ignorance in the mind of the student.

Rediscovery of "the most ancient wisdom" of the senses, a wisdom that is ''humana stultitia'' ("human foolishness"), Vico's emphases on the importance of civic life and of professional obligations are in the humanist tradition. He would call for a maieutic oratory art against the grain of the modern privilege of the dogmatic form of reason, in what he called the "geometrical method" of [[René Descartes]] and the logicians at the [[Port-Royal-des-Champs]] abbey.