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Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico /ˈvk/; Italian: [ˈviko]; 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.

Giambattista Vico

Giovan Battista Vico

(1668-06-23)23 June 1668

23 January 1744(1744-01-23) (aged 75)

Naples, Kingdom of Naples

The Latin aphorism Verum esse ipsum factum ("truth is itself something made") coined by Vico is an early instance of constructivist epistemology.[8][9] 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."[10] 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,[11] Edward Said, a literary critic, and Hayden White, a metahistorian.[12][13]


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 recorded and explained the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall.[14]

The principle of Verum factum[edit]

Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) ("Of the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language").[16] 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.

Influence[edit]

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.[17] 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.[17]


In Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), Karl Marx's mention of Vico indicates their parallel perspectives about history, the role of historical actors, and an historical method of narrative.[18] 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.[19]


In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said acknowledged his scholar's debt to Vico,[20] 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."[20] As a humanist and early philologist, Vico represented "a different, alternative model that has been extremely important to me in my work", which differed from mainstream Western prejudice against the Orient and the dominating "standardization" that came with modernity and culminated in National Socialism.[20] That the interdependence of human history and culture facilitates the scholars' task to "take seriously Vico's great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography. As geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, and geographical sectors as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are man-made."[20]

Opere di G. B. Vico. Fausto Nicolini (ed.), Bari: Laterza, 1911–41.

(1708)

De nostri temporis studiorum ratione

De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia ex Linguae Originibus Eruenda Libri Tres (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language). 1710, Palmer, L. M., trans. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

Institutiones Oratoriae (The Art of Rhetoric). 1711–1741, Pinton, Girogio, and Arthur W. Shippee, trans. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1984.* "On Humanistic Education", trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.

On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Universal right (Diritto universale). Translated from Latin and Edited by Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl. Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2000

On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language, trans. L. M. Palmer. Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1988.

Scienza Nuova (The First New Science). 1725, Pompa, Leon, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

The New Science of Giambattista Vico, (1744). trans. and Max H. Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2nd ed. 1968.

Thomas G. Bergin

De rebus gestis Antonj Caraphaei (1713×1715), trans. Giorgio A. Pinton, Statecraft: The Deeds of Antonio Carafa (Peter Lang, 2004), a biography of (died 1693).

Antonio Carafa

(Institute for Vico Studies at Emory University)

New Vico Studies

Recapitulation theory

Finnegans Wake

, ed. (1911). "Vico, Giovanni Battista" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Chisholm, Hugh

Fabiani, Paolo.

"The Philosophy of the Imagination in Vico and Malebranche". F.U.P. (Florence UP), Italian edition 2002, English edition 2009.

Goetsch, James. Vico's Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World.. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

Mooney, Michael. Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1985.

Pompa, Leon. Vico: A Study of the New Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Giambattista Vico"

Andreacchio, Marco. "" in Telos. Vol. 185 (2019); pp. 105–27.

Epistemology's Political-Theological Import in Giambattista Vico

Bedani, Gino. Vico Revisited: Orthodoxy, Naturalism and Science in the Scienza Nuova. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1989.

. Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London, 1976.

Berlin, Isaiah

Berlin, Isaiah. . London and Princeton, 2000.

Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder

Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan; Boston, Ma: Bedford Books of St Martin's Press, 2001. Pp. Xv, 1673. (First Ed. 1990). 2001.

Colilli, Paul. Vico and the Archives of Hermetic Reason. Welland, Ont.: Editions Soleil, 2004.

Croce, Benedetto. The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Trans. R.G. Collingwood. London: Howard Latimer, 1913.

Danesi, Marcel. Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993

Fabiani, Paolo, "The Philosophy of the Imagination in Vico and Malebranche". F.U.P. (Florence UP), Italian edition 2002, English edition 2009.

Fisch, Max, and , trans. Vita di Giambattista Vico (The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico). 1735–41. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1963.

Thomas G. Bergin

Giannantonio, Valeria. Oltre Vico – L'identità del passato a Napoli e Milano tra '700 e '800, Carabba Editore, Lanciano, 2009.

Gould, Rebecca Ruth. “,” History of Humanities 3.2 (2018): 247–277.

Democracy and the Vernacular Imagination in Vico's Plebian Philology

Grassi, Ernesto. Vico and Humanism: Essays on Vico, Heidegger, and Rhetoric. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

Hösle, Vittorio. "Vico und die Idee der Kulturwissenschaft" in Prinzipien einer neuen Wissenschaft über die gemeinsame Natur der Völker, Ed. V. Hösle and C. Jermann, Hamburg : F. Meiner, 1990, pp. XXXI-CCXCIII

Levine, Joseph. Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. Journal of the History of Ideas 52.1(1991): 55-79.

Lilla, Mark. G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Mazzotta, Giuseppe. The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Miner, Robert. Vico, Genealogist of Modernity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

Schaeffer, John. Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Verene, Donald. Vico's Science of Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Verene, Molly Black "Vico: A Bibliography of Works in English from 1884 to 1994." Philosophy Documentation Center, 1994.

Alain Pons, Vie et mort des Nations. Lecture de la Science nouvelle de Giambattista Vico, L'Esprit de la Cité, Gallimard, 2015

at Project Gutenberg

Works by Giambattista Vico

at Internet Archive

Works by or about Giambattista Vico

Institute for Vico Studies

Entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Archived 2002-05-20 at the Wayback Machine

Entry in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory

Verene, Donald Phillip. at the Wayback Machine (archived May 20, 2002), archived from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Essay on Vico's humanism

Archived 2023-06-09 at the Wayback Machine

Vico's Poetic Philosophy within Europe's Cultural Identity, Emanuel L. Paparella

Leon Pompa, , archived at The Institute for Cultural Research

Vico's Theory of the Causes of Historical Change

Portale Vico - Vico Portal

Text of the New Science in multiple formats

Essays on Vico's creative influence on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Samuel Beckett's essay on Vico and Joyce

Vico's creative influence on Richard James Allen's The Way Out At Last Cycle

Vico's Historical Mythology

Rafferty, Michael (1913). "VICO (1668-1744)". In ; Manson, Edward William Donoghue (eds.). Great Jurists of the World. London: John Murray. pp. 345-389. Retrieved 11 March 2019 – via Internet Archive.

Macdonell, John