Giovanni Battista Vico

Giambattista Vico
Portrait by Francesco Solimena
Born	(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
Influences Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Varro, Tacitus, St. Augustine, Duns Scotus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, Suárez, Selden, Hobbes, Malebranche, Francis Bacon, Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Leibniz, Herodotus
Influenced Maistre, Coleridge, Hegel, Marx, Croce, Gramsci, Joyce, Evola, Michelet, Quinet, Auerbach, McLuhan, Hillman, Frye, Castoriadis, Preve, Hösle, Voegelin, Berlin, Sorel.

Giambattista Vico (B. Giovan Battista Vico, 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian political philosopher and rhetorician, historian and jurist, of the Age of Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, was an apologist for Classical Antiquity, a precursor of systematic and complex thought, in opposition to Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism, and was the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics.

The Latin aphorism Verum esse ipsum factum ("What is true is precisely what is made/done") coined by Vico is an early instance of constructivist epistemology. As such, 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.” Despite his not being an historicist, contemporary interest in Vico usually has been motivated by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, an historian of ideas and Hayden White, a metahistorian.

Giambattista Vico’s intellectual magnum opus is the book Scienza Nuova (1725, New Science) that attempts a systematic organization of the humanities as a single science that recorded and explained the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall.