Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico
Portrait
Born
Giovan Battista Vico

(1668-06-23)23 June 1668
Died23 January 1744(1744-01-23) (aged 75)
Naples, Kingdom of Naples
EducationUniversity of Naples (LL.D., 1694)
Notable work
Era18th-century philosophy
Region
School
InstitutionsUniversity of Naples
Main interests
Epistemology, humanities, jurisprudence, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, poetry, political philosophy, rhetoric
Notable ideas
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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.

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]

  1. ^ a b c Bertland, Alexander. "Giambattista Vico (1668—1744)". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  2. ^ Gambarota, Paola (2017). "Giambattista Vico, the Vernacular, and the Foundations of Modern Italy". Irresistible Signs. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 99–144. doi:10.3138/9781442695269-004. ISBN 9781442695269.
  3. ^ Lollini, Massimo (2011). "Vico's More than Human Humanism". Annali d'Italianistica. 29: 381–399. JSTOR 24016434.
  4. ^ Tedesco, Salvatore (2005). "La retorica arguta di Emanuele Tesauro e il problema del paralogismo". Laboratorio dell'ISPF. I: 257–266. ISSN 1824-9817.
  5. ^ B. Croce, Estetica (Bari, Laterza, 1922), pp. 253-4; Storia della età barocca in Italia (Bari, Laterza, 1929), p. 228; F. Nicolini, Fonti e riferimenti storici della seconda Scienza Nuova (Bari, Laterza, 1931), I, 94.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g Piperno, Martina (2018). "Giambattista Vico's 'Constructive' Language and its Post-Revolutionary Readers". Comparative Critical Studies. 15 (2): 261–278. doi:10.3366/ccs.2018.0292. S2CID 149891225.
  7. ^ "Vichian Theories of Language, Genius, and History in Goethe's FAUST | Comparative Literature".
  8. ^ Ernst von Glasersfeld, An Introduction to Radical Constructivism.
  9. ^ Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition, p. 800.
  10. ^ The contemporary interpretation of Vico is by Verene, Donald Philip. See: "Giambattista Vico" (2002), A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, Steven M. Nadler, ed. London:Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 0-631-21800-9, p. 570.
  11. ^ Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas
  12. ^ Giambattista Vico (1976), "The Topics of History: The Deep Structure of the New Science", in Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Philip Verene, eds, Science of Humanity, Baltimore and London: 1976.
  13. ^ Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White, eds. Johns Hopkins University Press: 1969. Attempts to inaugurate a non-historicist interpretation of Vico are in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy [1], Spring 2009, Vol. 36.2, and Spring 2010 37.3; and in Historia Philosophica, Vol. 11, 2013 [2].
  14. ^ The Penguin Encyclopedia (2006), David Crystal, ed., p. 1,409.