Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, historian and professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. Against the Cartesian method dominant in his day, he argued that the human world of language, law and custom can be understood from within, because humans made it. His New Science traces how nations pass through a recurring course of ages, from an age of gods through an age of heroes to an age of men. Little read in his lifetime, Vico later influenced philosophers of history and culture such as Michelet, Croce, Collingwood and Isaiah Berlin.

Key ideas

• Verum ipsum factum: we can truly know only what we ourselves have made.
• History, as a human creation, can therefore be known more fully than the natural world, which God made.
• Nations pass through a recurring cycle of three ages, divine, heroic and human, each with its own language, law and government.
• Myths and early poetry are not failed science but the 'poetic wisdom' of early peoples, revealing how they thought.

Major works

• The New Science (1725; 3rd edn 1744)
• On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709)
• On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710)

In the Book corner

• The New Science 1725; revised 1730 and 1744 · Advanced
  Vico's attempt to found a science of the 'world of nations', first published in 1725 and twice rewritten; the version usually read…

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