Giambattista Vico
Neapolitan philosopher: nations follow a course, from divine to human ages, then a return.
Life
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), from Naples, taught rhetoric at the University of Naples. Little read in his lifetime, he became a landmark of the philosophy of history. He holds that humans can understand history because they made it, and that nations follow a course (ages of gods, heroes, men) that recurs. He reads myths as the civil truths of the earliest peoples.
Main works
Sets out a science of the history of nations, their cycles and their institutions.
Criticises the Cartesian method and defends the role of eloquence and imagination in education.
Argues that the true and the made are convertible: we know what we have made.
In his own words
« The truth of laws is a certain light and splendour by which our natural reason is illuminated; hence jurists often say "verum est" for "aequum est". »
Il vero delle leggi è un certo lume e splendore di che ne illumina la ragion naturale; onde spesso i giureconsulti usan dire «verum est» per «aequum est».
« The first fables must have contained civil truths, and therefore have been the histories of the first peoples. »
che le prime favole dovettero contenere veritá civili, e perciò essere state le storie de’ primi popoli
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceHistory is guided by divine providence, which turns men's passions toward ends they did not intend.
Vico, The New Science (1744)
Against Descartes, we can know with certainty only what we have made: the human, civil world, more than nature (verum-factum).
Vico, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710); The New Science (1725)