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Donald Phillip Verene. Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 264. Cloth, $45.00.
This is an outstanding book written with elegance and verve, packed with erudition and delivered with wit. It offers insight into both Joyce and Vico in their distinctiveness and in the mutual light they throw on each other. Verene outlines what is peculiar to his own approach in the following way. In the early part of the twentieth century the influence of Croce on the study of Vico as the "Italian Hegel" was immense. Verene, a distinguished Hegel scholar who has himself written with aplomb of the images in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, is well-placed to situate Vico in relation to Hegel. Croce's influence was followed by the search for a "Vico without Hegel." The ensuing studies of Vico as an original thinker in his own right have tended to oscillate between two approaches: either stressing Vico as a figure in intellectual history, addressing his sources and influences; or in terms of the philosophical and critical assessment of Vico's ideas themselves.
Verene offers a third approach, derived from his own relation to Joyce in relation...