Ovi Magazine Issue #26: WWI - 100 years - Published: 2014-07-28

Emanuel L. Paparella has a BA (major in philosophy) “St. Francis College,
NYC”, an MA “Middlebury College, Vt” in Italian Literature, an M.Ph. in Comparative
Literatures and a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism from Yale University. A former
professor of Italian at the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Central
Florida where he was director of the Urbino Summer Program from 1998 till
2001. He is currently retired, residing with his wife Cathy and his three daughters.
“If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present.”
--Eric Hobsbaum
The philosopher of history Giambattista Vica postulates that history
is constituted by three recurring cyclical eras: the era of the gods, the
era of the heroes, the era of men. He calls the phenomenon corso and
ricorso. The first era he designates as poetical, the second as imaginativephilosophical,
the third as that of extreme rationality or scientism. In as
much as his philosophy was scientific and rational it belonged to the third era, in
as much as it is imaginative and poetical, deviating from the usual Western linear
deterministic approach to history, it belonged in the first and second era; it is a
novantiqua; hence he titled it The New Science.