Abstract

After Wittgenstein's criticism of foundationalism, it is common use to defend the prevalence of action or of practical reason over the theoretical outlook at the world. The substitution of human praxis in the world for a set of self-evident propositions as foundations of theoretical knowledge seems to imply a radical form of pragmatism. Against this view, and recording some ideas of Vico, the paper claims that the rebuttal of Descartes' epistemological theory of the spectator does not imply any kind of pragmatism