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Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico
Portrait
Portrait by Francesco Solimena
Born Giovan Battista Vico
(1668-06-23)23 June 1668
Naples, Kingdom of Naples
Died 23 January 1744(1744-01-23) (aged 75)
Naples, Kingdom of Naples
Nationality Italian
Alma mater University of Naples
(LL.D., 1694)
Notable work Principî di Scienza Nuova
De antiquissima Italorum sapientia
Era 18th-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Historicism
Institutions University of Naples
Main interests
Rhetoric, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of history, jurisprudence
Notable ideas
verum esse ipsum factum

Giambattista Vico (B. Giovan Battista Vico, 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian political philosopher and rhetorician, historian, and jurist, recognized as a great intellectual of the Age of Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism and was an apologist for Classical Antiquity; Vico is best known for his magnum opus, the Scienza Nuova (1725, New Science).

Vico is a precursor of systematic thought and of complex thought, in opposition to Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism, and is credited with the first exposition of the fundamental aspects of social science and of semiotics. As an intellectual, Giambattista Vico is considered to have inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history, and, although the term Philosophy of history is not in his texts, he speaks of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically". Although not an historicist, interest in Vico usually has been driven by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, and Hayden White.

Moreover, Giambattista Vico also is known for the Latin aphorism Verum esse ipsum factum ("True itself is fact" and "The true itself is made"), which proposition is an early instance of constructivist epistemology.

Born to a bookseller and the daughter of a carriage maker in Naples, Italy, Vico attended a series of grammar schools, but ill-health and dissatisfaction with Jesuit scholasticism led to home schooling. Evidence from his autobiographical work points to the likelihood Vico was mostly self-taught. According to Costelloe, this was due to his father's influence on him during a three-year absence from school caused by a fall at the age of seven.


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