Beginning in the 18th century, the relation of mythos and logos flipped into reverse. Not entirely: variants of traditional allegory persist all the way to the present. But among some thinkers – Vico, Herder, and Christian Gottlob Heyne – a different, historicist approach emerged. There were two key shifts. First, these writers claim that mythos has its own philosophical content, without being translated into logos. Second, the philosophical content of myth isn’t a universally valid, timeless logos, but is specific to the era when the myth was formulated. That is, these thinkers insisted on “the pluralization of forms of Logos” (40).

Is it not a fact that we are now so wrapped up in ourown occupations and the special interests of our own oc-cupational groups that we are almost at the pretyrannicalstage described by Vico, the stage where everybody is soconcerned with his own special interests that nobody looks

Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”)—Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher