Giambattista Vico considered his greatest philosophical achievement to be his discovery that early humans spoke in 'poetic characters'. Vico's New Science is thus also a philosophy of signs or semata. Jurgen Trabant reads the profound insights into human semiosis contained in Vico's 'sematology' as both a spirited rejection of Cartesian philosophy and an early critique of enlightened logocentricism. Sean Ward's translation makes this work available to an English-reading audience for the first time.