Abstract

These essays discuss Vico's conception of metaphor and the imagination as unique elements in the history of Western philosophy that allow Vico to formulate a new relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. On this basis, rhetorical forms of thought and senses of language are shown to be at the basis of philosophical thought. Philosophy is understood as an enterprise that cannot overlook its traditional roots in poetic and rhetorical senses of the word. Connections between this point of view and Heidegger's analysis of language and Being are shown.