philosopher who had some better cultural awareness than 
those moved by the “Cartesian spring.” And Vico, like 
Heidegger, is a philologist among philosophers. His time theory 
of Òricorsi ” has been interpreted by lineal minds to imply 
“recurrence.” A recent study of him brushes this notion
aside. (107)

     Vico conceives the time-structure of history as “not 
linear, but contrapuntal. It must be traced along a number of 
lines of development . . .” For Vico all history is contemporary or 
simultaneous, a fact given, Joyce would add, by virtue of 
language itself, the simultaneous storehouse of all experience. 
And in Vico, the concept of recurrence cannot “be admitted at 
the level of the course of the nations through time”: “The 
establishment of providence establishes universal history, the 
total presence of the human spirit to itself in idea. In this