Myth and the New Science: Vico, Tiepolo, and the Language of the Optimates
The ideas of the Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico attracted little attention during his lifetime, except in Venice, where his works found an enthusiastic audience. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's early ceiling fresco in the Palazzo Sandi (1725–26) offers a unique example of how contemporary Venetian intellectuals read Vico's work. It appears that Tiepolo's patrons based the iconography of their salone on Vico's Universal Law (1720–22) and first New Science (1725) to illustrate the main tenets of the myth of Venice, a political fiction that legitimized the class structure of the republic and the absolute legislative and judicial authority of its aristocracy.
The Mind in Giambattista Vico's 'New Science'
This thesis is a reading and interpretation of Giambattista Vico's model of the human mind in the New Science. It focuses on the mind because understanding Vico's account of its origin and development is the key to assessing his overall claim of having discovered a new science of humanity. I contend that when the following three broad questions have been addressed the New Science will reveal a deeper and more complete dimension. The first is how Vico arrives at his thesis that the mind's development is a product of natural, social, and linguistic elements, rather than the emergence of innate faculties. Is this formulation coherent, and are there elements whose functions are not explained? The second is how he believed that a science of humanity was possible. Vico thought that true knowledge, or science, consisted in a synthesis of the esoteric and the practical. Was it realistic for him to suppose that these very different paradigms could coalesce and provide a backbone for scientific research? The third question is whether the accounts he gives of sacred and profane history are consistent and do not compromise his main thesis that history is human directed. Was Vico's explanation of the identity of the mind compatible with both narratives? It is intended that the development of the answers to these three questions will yield a new interpretation of the way Vico's account of the mind is understood. The originality of this thesis lies in two main points. The first is that it proceeds with a description, in toto, of the phenomenon of mind that follows the unfolding of the phases of the ideal eternal history. Previous studies have treated the characteristics of mind in separate phases, but none to my knowledge takes the present approach of viewing the mind in its entirety as it persists throughout universal history. The second is that it explains that Vico's position throughout the New Science was that the persistence of mind is due to somatically-based activity. I point out that Vico was establishing a new paradigm for the mind in which meaning is created through connectedness to social and physical activity. This position is in stark contrast to computationist and rationalist theories of mind in which, theoretically, rational consciousness could exist apart from a physical platform. 
 
I have made use of many references to historical and contemporary sources about the mind and cognition in general. The purpose of these are, firstly, to provide an orientation to where Vico's ideas belong in the history of philosophy and, secondly, to indicate where those ideas may be situated or find resonance in contemporary theories of mind.
The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic of 1832 and Anatomical Dissection--Medical Mistrust and Civil Unrest
Asiatic cholera reached Britain for the first time in late 1831, with the main epidemic occurring during 1832. The disease caused profuse diarrhea, severe dehydration, collapse, and often death. There was widespread public fear, and the political and medical response to this new disease was variable and inadequate. In the summer of 1832, a series of "cholera riots" occurred in various towns and cities throughout Britain, frequently directed against the authorities, doctors, or both. The city of Liverpool, in the northwest of England, experienced more riots than elsewhere. Between 29 May and 10 June 1832, eight major street riots occurred, with several other minor disturbances. The object of the crowd's anger was the local medical fraternity. The public perception was that cholera victims were being removed to the hospital to be killed by doctors in order to use them for anatomical dissection. "Bring out the Burkers" was one cry of the Liverpool mobs, referring to the Burke and Hare scandal four years earlier, when two men had murdered people in Edinburgh in order to sell their bodies for dissection to the local anatomy school. This issue was of special concern to the Liverpool citizenry because in 1826, thirty-three bodies had been discovered on the Liverpool docks, about to be shipped to Scotland for dissection. Two years later a local surgeon, William Gill, was tried and found guilty of running an extensive local grave-robbing system to supply corpses for his dissection rooms. The widespread cholera rioting in Liverpool was thus as much related to local anatomical issues as it was to the national epidemic. The riots ended relatively abruptly, largely in response to an appeal by the Roman Catholic clergy read from church pulpits, and also published in the local press. In addition, a respected local doctor, James Collins, published a passionate appeal for calm. The Liverpool Cholera Riots of 1832 demonstrate the complex social responses to epidemic disease, as well as the fragile interface between the public and the medical profession.