Download or read book Philosophy and the Return to Self-knowledge written by Donald Phillip Verene and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing in particular on the traditions of some of the late Greeks and the Romans, Renaissance humanism, and the thought of Giambattista Vico, this book's concern is to revive the ancient Delphic injunction "know thyself," an idea of civil wisdom that Verene finds has been missing since Descartes. The author recovers the meaning of the vital relations that poetry, myth, and rhetoric had with philosophy in thinkers like Cicero, Quintilian, Isocrates, Pico, Vives, and Vico.