Beginning in 1969, the Neapolitan thinker and critic, Giambattista Vico, opened each academic year at the University of Naples with an “Inaugural Oration” delivered on October 18, the Feast Day of St. Luke. As Professor of Rhetoric, it was his job to introduce new university students to the nature, aims, and traditions of education while at the same time elaborating his own ever-deepening sense of its components, purposes, and ideals.

His speech of 1708 was special for several reasons and in many ways. It was lengthier, more formal, and more elaborate because he aimed it not only at his students...

I took us through some very strong moments in Vico’s work to prepare us to see the demands his thinking makes on us at times like ours when it is very easy to inherit the influence of his great opponents such as Descartes. More important, though, the main obstacle to an appreciation of Vico as a predecessor today is, in fact, the principle reason why we must make the effort. Many major strands in current politics are authoritarian and imperial,¹ precisely the threats Vico’s writings resist, making them more valuable in defense of liberty than at any time in recent...

There are at least two different ways to introduce Erich Auerbach following what we have said about Vico. On the one hand, we might speak of him as a scholar who embraces philology as a method for thinking about literature and culture because it recognizes that human being is a self-making historical species — and so we might begin with a look at philology. On the other hand, we might approach Auerbach as a reader and student of Vico, about whose work he thought long and seriously, writing essays that give us perhaps the best literary critical understanding we have...

Is secular liberalism an ally of historical humanism’s devotion to poetics and the defense of criticism? The question is too broad and our time too short to answer fully, but there is no doubt that Mill’s great essay, On Liberty, published in 1859 — the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species and Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy — gives us passionate and compelling reasons to think so. Moreover, in On Liberty, liberalism and historicism show themselves in some ways to be more than allies. Mill’s liberalism is an important branch, an offshoot of the greater...

In 1962, the Nobel Prize laureate and American novelist, Saul Bellow wrote:

In what we call the novel of sensibility the intent of the writer is to pull us into an all-sufficient consciousness which he, the writer, governs absolutely. In the realistic novel today the writer is satisfied with an art of externals. Either he assumes that by describing a man’s shoes he has told us all that we need to know about his soul, or he is more interested in the shoes than in the soul.¹

In this little essay Bellow analyzes those readers and cultural habits, especially in...

Not long before his death in 1984, Michel Foucault gave a wide-ranging interview in which he clarified a number of popular misconceptions about his thinking while calmly describing the work he had before him.¹ The interview is, perhaps, as pedagogical as any Foucault ever gave, setting polemic aside for patient exposition that contains a legitimating of the teacher’s rights and responsibilities. We can sketch a rough context for Foucault’s remarks. From the late 1970s through the 1980s and perhaps, at least in the United States, onward into the Clinton administration’s multiculturalist ideology, the critique of institutions that had begun in...

The history of criticism takes William Empson to be brilliant and eccentric. In 2006, writing in The New York Review of Books, John Gross called him “a prodigy” and reminded us that “He arrived at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1925, with a scholarship in mathematics: his college supervisor regarded him as one of the best mathematicians he had ever had.” Three years later he changed fields and working with I.A. Richards produced one of the most influential and admired works of English criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity — a classic that began its existence as an undergraduate paper. Michael Wood...