Vico and Locke

WORKING TEAMS:
Lavinia and Laura
Jerrell and Mary
Chris and Jon
Carina and Jeff

DUE DATE:
end of class on Thursday 10/8

PART ONE: What's Up with Vico?
Understanding Vico's On the Study Methods of Our Time

Here's where we are with Bacon: in his desire for a way to generate “new” knowledge, Bacon is helping us to differentiate between scientific inquiry and rhetorical recovery (or between discovery and remembrance), rather than between dialectic and rhetoric. Baconian invention seems to have a logical and rhetorical counterpart, where rhetorical knowledge is still somehow responsible for all four intellectual arts that Chris and Jon schematized for us.

On Vico, I provoked you mercilessly during our last class. We are trying to read On the Study Methods of Our Time as a rhetorical treatise (which it is not). We do understand that Vico is very interested in language in use, i.e., he is like an early discourse theorist. Let's see if we can figure him out. I’m offering you two ways to do this (choose only one):

1) By synthesizing the ideas represented in the passages below, write in your own words how you think Vico is important as a rhetorical player and how his theory diverges from Bacon's.

• Language reveals the processes of reason, passion, and imagination (B/H 862).
• “[Bacon’s] vast demands so exceed the utmost extent of man’s effort that he seems to have indicated how we fall short of achieving an absolutely complete system of sciences rather than how we may remedy our cultural gaps” (865).
• “As for the aim, it should circulate, like a blood-stream, through the entire body of the learning process” (866).
• “Some of the new instruments of science are, themselves, sciences; others are arts; still others, products of either art or nature” (866).
• “I may add that in the art of oratory the relationship between speaker and listeners is of the essence” (869).
• “[W]hereas truth is one, probabilities are many, and falsehoods numberless. Each procedure, then, has its defects. … To avoid both defects, I think, young men should be taught the totality of sciences and arts, and their intellectual powers should be developed to the full; …” (870).
• “Our chief fault is that we disregard that part of ethics which treats of human character, of its dispositions, its passions, and of the manner of adjusting these factors to public life and eloquence” (871).
• “What is eloquence, in effect, but wisdom, ornately and copiously delivered in words appropriate to the common opinion of mankind?” (877).

2) By exercising your right to (multiple) choice, discuss how you think Vico is important as a rhetorical player and how his theory diverges from Bacon's based on the combination of choices you make below.

Does Vico think that:
• sign systems are arbitrary or universal?
• the mind precedes language or arises with language?
• we go to language to discover “real” cultural and sociological theories about a nation or to discover ways that truths are distorted?
• rhetoric is potentially a threat to probability and a harm to inquiry, or a help to probability and a guide to inquiry?
• ingenuity is seen in metaphor or in imagination?
• we should be more concerned with training youth for civic action or with the ways in which knowledge becomes incorporated into social institutions?
• the poet is a scientist or a creationist?

Work collaboratively, and create a "new post" as a team.

PART TWO: ALEX Concordance Search
Language as a Vehicle for Understanding in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding

We are going to use the concordance in ALEX to explore terms and post results.

GOAL QUESTIONS:
1) What are the relations of ideas and langage?
2) How is language imperfect?
3) How does knowledge relate to ideas and language?
4) What are ideas? And how are they reached?

Preliminary steps

Select one of the "goal" questions above.

Link to the concordance for Locke's Essay.

Note the placement of the search bar, "go" button, and "view phrase in context" button. Thankfully, we are linking to the old platform so all of these tools are located near one another.

Using the search bar and "go" button, search the ALEX concordance of Essay for five of the terms below:

Virtue, civility, rhetoric, grammar, logic, history
Perception, learning, writing, language, philosophy
Science, reason, sensation, passion, education

Note the number of “hits" you get for each of your terms and comment on anything that strikes you. Be sure to “view phrase in context" as you begin to look for patterns or make broader realizations about how (often) your whole set of five terms are used in Locke’s treatise. Feel free to search and draw conclusions based on individual terms, but aim for a more vital realization by considering the whole set.

Find two or three sections in Locke’s treatise that (based on the results of your concordance search) speak to your goal question above, and post the references to those sections along with some ideas you have about what Locke was after in the Essay (in relation to your question).

Work collaboratively, and create a "new post" as a team.

Good luck and have fun with this.

-Tarez