Filologia ed epoca in Vico

Vico's conception of a criticism of the "authors" of civilization is more akin than it might appear to the aims of contemporary philology, in so far as this latter did not deal only with written texts, but was laying the basis of a critical method capable of analyzing scientifically all sort of remnants of past ages. Not only texts, but also contexts were brought into focus by the critical enterprise, and the further, 19. Century developments of philology, with Wolf and his dissolution of Homeric Poems in layers of different traditions, hypostatized epochs as the framework for organizing knowledge about past ages. The paper aims at demonstrating that at the core of Vico's notion of philology lays a new understanding of the notion of epoch, and that the order that the new "ars critica" is due to bring about in the world of knowledge is based upon it.