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| Portrait of Giambattista Vico, attributed to Francesco Solimena or his circle |
“Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.” ~ Giambattista Vico, The New Science
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist deeply rooted in the civic, linguistic, and historical traditions of Naples. Though formally educated, he pursued extensive independent study, distinguishing himself from the dominant rationalist currents of his age. A serious childhood fall interrupted his early schooling, an episode noted by later biographers, though its long-term significance remains uncertain.
He spent most of his career as a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, where his study of language, law, poetry, and history became central to his philosophy.
Vico’s major work, Scienza Nuova (The New Science), offered a critique of Cartesian rationalism and of attempts to reduce history and civil life to geometric certainty. Rather than treating civilization as governed by universal formulas, Vico argued that laws, customs, institutions, myths, and histories must be understood as societies create and preserve them. This principle, known as verum factum (“the true is precisely what is made”), stands at the center of his thought.
In The New Science, Vico also proposed that civilizations move through recurring historical cycles, or corsi e ricorsi, passing through the divine, heroic, and human ages. Early societies, he argued, expressed themselves through myth, religion, and poetic imagination before giving way to more reflective and rational forms of political life.
This cyclical understanding of history opposed the linear idea of inevitable progress favored by many Enlightenment thinkers and instead presented civilization as a process of rise, decline, and renewal. His attention to language, symbolism, memory, and custom anticipated later developments in the philosophy of history and cultural thought.
Little recognized during his lifetime, Vico’s work gained influence in later centuries among historians, philosophers, and scholars. Today, he is regarded as one of the foundational figures in the philosophy of history and as one of the earliest major critics of purely rationalist accounts of civilization.
His enduring importance lies in his insistence that societies are understood not through abstraction alone, but through the traditions, institutions, and historical memory they inherit and preserve across generations.
~ By Antonio Isernia
