Contro la concezione della storia di Vico: l'Apologia del genere umano di Bonifacio Finetti

The essay wants to shed light on the controversy between Giambattista Vico and the Dominican friar Bonifazio Finetti (1705-1782). Finetti's literary beginnings are in scriptural exegesis and polemical theology: in 1765 he published in Venice, under the name of Gian Francesco, a Latin work on natural law, the twelve books De Principis iuris naturae et gentium adversus Hobbesium, Pufendorfium, Thomasium, Wolfium et alios, a work that intends to restore the Catholic and Thomistic doctrine that places God at the foundation of the law of nature, against the just-naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their theses on human origin. Finetti strongly argues with Vico. The controversy surrounding this work is lively, and the reaction of Emanuele Duni is particularly bitter, who in the spring of 1766 published an acrid Response to Finetti's objections against Vico's theses. Finetti replies to Duni at the end of 1767 with a pamphlet originally entitled The falsity of the feral state of ancient men demonstrated with Sacred Scripture, in which Vico's conception of "feral wandering" is identified with Rousseau's original state of nature, and before again with Hobbes' theories. The writing met immediate success, so much so that the Venetian typographer who had printed it released almost the entire circulation in 1768 under the title of Apology of the human race accused of having once been a beast. Part one, announcing the imminent publication of two more parts. The treatise demonstrates, through a tight and firm prose, how contrary the Vico hypothesis of the feral error is to the book of Genesis: the new Science, and before it also De constantia, for this bitter Catholic critic of Vico, leads to atheism and pantheism.