Giambattista Vico (born Giovanni Battista Vico ; ; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics. He is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures in history.
The Latin aphorism "" ("truth is itself something made") coined by Vico is an early instance of constructivist epistemology. He inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history, and, although the term philosophy of history is not in his writings, Vico spoke of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically." Although he was not an historicist, contemporary interest in Vico usually has been motivated by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher and historian of ideas, and Hayden White, a metahistorian.
Vico's intellectual magnum opus is the book Scienza Nuova or New Science (1725), which attempts a systematic organization of the humanities as a single science that records and explains the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall.
Biography
left|220x220px|"In this little room Giambattista Vico was born on June 23 1668. Here he resided until he was seventeen years old, and in the subdued little workshop of his bookseller father he used to spend the nights in his study. Youthful eve of his sublime work. The city of Naples poses." Tombstone in the house where he was born in Via San Biagio dei Librai.|alt=|thumb
Born to a bookseller in Naples, Italy, Giovanni Battista Vico attended several schools, but ill health and dissatisfaction with the scholasticism of the Jesuits led to his being educated at home by tutors. Evidence from his autobiographical work indicates that Vico likely was an autodidact educated under paternal influence, during a three-year absence from school, consequence of an accidental fall when the boy was seven years old. Giovanni Battista's formal education was at the University of Naples from which he graduated in 1694, as Doctor of Civil and Canon Law. The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation: "The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself." This criterion for truth would later shape the history of civilization in Vico's opus, the Scienza Nuova (The New Science, 1725), because he would argue that civil life—like mathematics—is wholly constructed.
The Scienza Nuova
right|thumb|Title page of Principj di Scienza Nuova (1744 edition)
The New Science (1725, Scienza Nuova) is Vico's major work. It has been highly influential in the philosophy of history, and for historicists such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White.
Influence
Samuel Beckett's first published work, in the selection of critical essays on James Joyce entitled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, is "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". In it, Beckett sees a profound influence of Vico's philosophy and poetics—as well the cyclical form of the Scienza Nuova—on the avant-garde compositions of Joyce, and especially the titular Work in Progress, viz. Finnegans Wake.
In Knowledge and Social Structure (1974), Peter Hamilton identified Vico as the "sleeping partner" of the Age of Enlightenment. Despite having been relatively unknown in his 18th-century time, and read only in his native Naples, the ideas of Vico are predecessors to the ideas of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Moreover, recognition of Vico's intellectual influence began in the 19th century, when the French Romantic historians used his works as methodological models and guides. Marx and Vico saw social-class warfare as the means by which men achieve the end of equal rights; Vico called that time the "Age of Men". Marx concluded that such a state of affairs is the optimal end of social change in a society, but Vico thought that such complete equality of rights would lead to socio-political chaos and the consequent collapse of society. In that vein, Vico proposed a social need for religion, for a supernatural divine providence to keep order in human society.
Arriving at Vico through both Marx and Michelet, the French philosopher Georges Sorel (1847–1922) used the Neapolitan philosopher's epistemology to develop an anti-determinist account of social scientific explanation. Insisting on the verum ipsum factum principle, Sorel developed a notion of social science as the study of how human groups produce institutions, cultures, and other forms of social relations, rather than as a search for causal laws capable of explaining historical developments. Through Vico, Sorel also further developed his interest in collective psychology and popular imagination. In the context of a discussion of Marxist theory, Sorel used Vico's insights to develop the idea that any material condition that influences a social formation is always mediated by this psychological layer. This severely limited the plausibility of economic determinism.
In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said acknowledged his scholar's debt to Vico, whose "ideas anticipate and later infiltrate the line of German thinkers I am about to cite. They belong to the era of Herder and Wolff, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great twentieth century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius."