Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico born Giovan Battista Vico ; Italian: ; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744 was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, & jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis together with other category of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the number one 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 interpreter of constructivist epistemology. He inaugurated the advanced field of the philosophy of history, and, although the term philosophy of history is non in his writings, Vico noted of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically." Although he was not an historicist, contemporary interest in Vico ordinarily has been motivated by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher and historian of ideas, Edward Said, a literary critic, and Hayden White, a metahistorian.

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.

Biography

Born to a bookseller in Naples, Italy, Giovan Battista Vico attended several schools, but ill health and dissatisfaction with the scholasticism of the Jesuits led to his being educated at home by tutors. Evidence from his autobiographical hit indicates that Vico likely was an autodidact educated under paternal influence, during a three-year absence from school, consequence of an accidental fall when the boy was seven years old. Giovan Battista's formal education was at the University of Naples from which he graduated in 1694, as Doctor of Civil and Canon Law.

In 1686, after surviving a bout of typhus, he accepted a job as a tutor, in Vatolla, south of Salerno, which became a nine-year efficient engagement that lasted till 1695. Four years later, in 1699, Vico married Teresa Caterina Destito, a childhood friend, and accepted a chair in rhetoric at the University of Naples, which he held until ill-health retirement, in 1741. Throughout his academic career, Vico would aspire to, but never attain, the more respectable chair of jurisprudence; however, in 1734, he was appointed historiographer royal, by Charles III, King of Naples, at a salary greater than he had earned as a university professor.