Publisher's Synopsis
This is the most modest but most important introduction to Emilio Betti's GENERAL THEORY OF INTERPRETATION. Parts of the few essays here presented were previously made known in the journal NEW VICO STUDIES of 1988. Betti presented to the academicians of Europe the central and fundamental nucleus of his methodology for the study of all the products of the human spirit. In a way, his theory is like the theory of G. B. Vico, which Vico revealed in a flow of three levels in his NEW SCIENCE. Vico began from the consideration of the historical origins and developments of the human kind, the so called "institutions," through philology and philosophy and told to his contemporary of the immensity and infinity of the human mind's faculties. Betti accepted Vico and looked at the practical and actual effectiveness of all the human expressions in all sciences and arts. That is interpreting in order to understand, comprehending the whole of what humans have done and left behind through the century, like lost fragments of our many cultures. Nothing truly has been lost. We must learn each in our own way to see what is not open to the naked eye. The methodology of Betti is made of carefulness, sympathy, humbleness, love for beauty, truth, sincerity, and, in one word, the humane spirit of the past, the present, and of what it will be.
