Vico and Humes
Giambattista Vico was a 17th-century philosopher known for valuing rhetoric over natural philosophy, aka science. He was interested in the ancient versus modern ways of studying:
- Instruments (method — critique analysis): Vico claims ancient is better because they are more consistent. Modern criticism makes no distinction between a lie and something that’s a probability, leading to a generation that “lacks imagination and common sense.” Modern critique doesn’t teach rhetoric, which teaches people quick thinking and reading their audience. Vico wanted a return to pre-Socratic research. Natural science can never persuade, he said. All the things we need for society rely on rhetoric.
- Complementary aids (rules/prototypes): better in modern, because of printed books and universities
- Aim (purpose): to find truth, for both ancient and modern
Vico also thought there were three different ages of history:
- The poetic age, where people learn from metaphors
- The heroic age, where people make laws, and
- The human age, which is a time of knowledge, democracy, and individualism that eventually leads to collapse and the return to the poetic age.
He explained that we can’t understand history unless we have the mindset of the past.
David Hume was a philosopher that built on Locke’s idea of knowledge through experience, but also prioritized rhetoric. He became one of the first atheists to speak out. For him, morals and ethics came from ethics, not God. In the absence of religion, Hume argued that rhetoric was the origin of morals, ethics, and taste (which he believed was absolute).
In his “On Eloquence,” Hume asks why Britain doesn’t have any good speakers in a time when Britain was becoming more democratic. He suggested that oratory came out of legal courts, but that in ancient times, the legal process were simpler and people often defended themselves. So, he argued, the law is too complex. He also stated that modern people have more common sense and dislike rhetoric, and modern times are not as dangerous.
