Pagina 59 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

THE IMAGINATIVE UNIVERSAL 59
Furthermore, it has no negative implications with regard to his in-
terpretations of the content of myth and of the ways in which the origi­
nai contents of myth were corrupted over the passage of time leading up
to Homer. Again, it has no negative implications with regard to his ‘new
criticai method’, involving the extensive and systematic use of etymolo-
gy for the discovery and establishment of his interpretations of history,
law and myth. These, and many other insights in Vico’s later thought re­
maki untouched by the foregoing criticisms, which are directed solely
against his attempt to go back beyond conceptual thought and language
and offer an account of an originai non-conceptual form of thought, cre­
ated largely by the use of the imagination.
L e o n P om pa
THE IMAGINATIVE UNIVERSAL. This article discusses the coherence
of Vico’s account o f the poetic form o f thought and, in particular; of the
imaginative universal, moving from Croce’s criticism, which the author
partly shares, towards Vico’s over-estimation of what imagination can do.
conventions involving for the use of certain forms of linguistic expression, i.e. those with a
recognizable syntactical structures, could arise naturally through the repetition of similar
habits and practices of the sort that abound in different contexts in all his writings. This would
not mean that, as in the originai poetic language, similarity and imitation would be internai
features of the relation between ideas and language, but simply that the ability to identify sim-
ilarities and imitate things would supply causai conditions which would explain how the struc­
tures required for a language containing words of fixed meaning, i.e. of parlari convenuti,
rather than a placito, could arise naturally.