Giovanni Battista Vico

On 18 October 1708, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) gave his seventh inaugural oration, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (De ratione) at the University of Naples. There, he used the term conspirare to propose collaboration among the sciences. An initial study of the historical context, specifically the scholar’s involvement with the Conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia (1701) and the debates on university reform, makes it possible to formulate a hypothesis regarding Vico’s intent and word choice that enriches our understanding of the (...) preserved text. On a personal level, the Neapolitan professor was looking for a modicum of protection from the new authorities, especially the recently named viceroy in audience that day, Cardinal Vicenzo Grimani. On the political plane, along with a surreptitious argument against tyranny, Vico sought to dissuade the new governors from subscribing to the divisive approach embodied in the university policy of the Cartesian and Bourbonic reformers. Direct analysis of the text of De ratione enabled theoretical scrutiny of the frame from which Vico called for more than mere encyclopaedic knowledge. He was setting forth a vision for a conspiratorial project among the sciences based on a broad understanding of rhetoric. His original proposal for inter- and trans-disciplinarity can inform current debates on the same topic. (shrink)

The effort to penetrate the literary surface of Vico’s Autobiography exposes us to questions worthy of the best minds. What could it mean to understand our own lives as the ordered content of our own Ideas? What if, prior to being appropriated by forms imposed upon them from without, our lives possessed their own original and inalienable forms? What if human life were essentially one interpretative ascent to its own native form? What if Ethics coincided with the “writing” in which (...) the original dignity of one’s own life found its truly human vindication? What if human “reading” were in its essence the providential act of civil religion’s God? (shrink)

Examining the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, one of the key features of the Rivista di filosofia is a lasting interest in the Renaissance and Vico, while the focus on seventeenth-century metaphysics is significantly more time-bound and linked to the activity of some prominent figures in the journal such as Piero Martinetti, Eugenio Colorni, and Gioele Solari. The rise of the Neo-Enlightenment caused a radical change in the editorial choices, and turned the journal’s focus toward the empiricist tradition (...) and the debate on historiographical methodologies. (shrink)

Vico e Wittgenstein apresentam concepções diferentes a respeito da relação entre linguagem e mundo. Essa diferença resulta no modo como julgam a possibilidade da ética ser tratada dentro da linguagem, portanto, de possuir sentido. Enquanto Wittgenstein, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, apresenta uma concepção da relação linguagem-mundo pautada no isomorfismo da forma lógica das sentenças com a forma lógica dos fatos, Vico, na Ciência Nova, a concebe por meio das experiências e condições de existência humanas, na qual a linguagem diz do mundo (...) através de relações metafóricas que estabelecem ligações entre o diverso. Por conta disso, o primeiro julga que sentenças éticas seriam desprovidas de sentido, pois não refletem a forma lógica de fato algum. Já o segundo, ao notar que elementos como as fábulas contribuem para dispor os homens favoravelmente para a vida civil, julga que cumprem efetivamente uma função ética. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é fomentar o debate acerca da relação entre o pensamento do filósofo napolitano Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) e as disciplinas da chamada Studia humanitatis. A partir das reflexões sobre a natureza humana, sobretudo na sua maior obra, a Scienza Nuova, é possível identificar uma grande articulação com as grandes disciplinas das humanidades, como o Direito, Filologia, História, Literatura, Poesia e Retórica. Este empenho multidisciplinar conduziu o filósofo a configurar um compêndio de discussões que vão desde a questão (...) acerca da origem da poesia, passando pela crítica ao direito natural e refletindo sobre as origens das línguas e das letras. Haja visto que o contexto no qual Vico estava inserido situava-se numa Nápoles de clara efervescência da filosofia cartesiana, não seria de se estranhar que a busca por uma valoração destes saberes humanísticos percorrera as reflexões do filósofo italiano. Portanto, é nesta articulação entre estas disciplinas das humanidades que a latência da filosofia de Vico é atestada, e com isso, se tem os mecanismos para compreender os fatos envolvidos na trajetória daquilo que o filósofo chama de gênero humano. (shrink)

Giambattista Vico is a philosopher with a deeply tragic sense of life. His theory of the course of nations does not entail a notion of progress. Nations are born, mature, decline, and perish, and the nations that rise in their wake must begin again from barbarism. Nevertheless, Vico has a doctrine of humor and laughter, which he details in a digression within short apologia, the “Vici Vindiciae.” No significant scholarly attention has ever been paid to this digression. In this article, (...) I critically consider Vico’s theory, with the greater intention of situating it in the context of his philosophy as a whole. I demonstrate that Vico’s association of “acute remarks” with the pursuit of truth, and his criticism of “argute remarks,” mockery, and laughter are an extension of his doctrine of the heroic mind. I also discuss the significance of Roman comedy for Vico as philologist. (shrink)

O principal objetivo desse texto é apresentar um quadro geral da relação da filosofia de Giambattista Vico com a Nápoles do período do século XVIII. Os principais tópicos em discussão tratam da relação de Vico com o renascimento, com o barroco, com as principais mudanças das concepções científicas e as academias napolitanas, com a Igreja e com o agitado ambiente político. Para esse estudo, foram consideradas as suas primeiras obras, De ratione e De antiquissima, sua autobiografia e sua obra principal, (...) a Scienza nuova. Apoiados nos principais estudiosos e comentadores de Vico, pretendeu-se elaborar um panorama do contexto em que ele estava inserido e buscou-se interpretar como isso participou de sua teoria filosófica. (shrink)

A comparative analysis of the different notions of ‘ways of thinking’ introduced by philosophers. A guiding thread running through historical epistemology in an attempt to unify the researches of its authors. A comprehensive study of Ian Hacking’s ‘project of styles of reasoning’ and its implications for the relativism.

As a pioneer of historical thinkers, Vico laid out the origins of his historical thought in his critique of Cartesian mathematicalism. Descartes' effort, is not to attain the truth, but to attain certainty with the criterion of clarity and distinction. He sought to make all the sciences sure in this way. On the base of this point of view, all humanities, including history are excluded from the sphere of sciences, which means forgetting much heritage of the past. Vico considers Descartes’ (...) unhistorical and static understanding of human nature as the most important philosophical problem of French philosopher. For Vico the nature of man and consequently his thinking and Reason have transformed throughout the history. Vico justifies this transformation in different periods of history with corresponding forms of reasoning. On the base of his epistemological rule, namely “the real is constructive”, Vico conceives making something as the condition of knowing it. Therefore, he believes that history and all human achievements, are man-made and intrinsically constructed and hence are recognizable through empathetic insight and the power of imagination. Vico believes that the outcome of Cartesian philosophy is nothing other than human being’s disconnection from history and society. For Vico, the true knowledge of everything is knowledge through its causes or, in other words, historical knowledge about it. Although Vico considers history as the result of man-made activites, he conceives divine providence as the leader and guide of history. In Vico's view, understanding history in any given period is possible through a proper understanding of the intellectual framework and principles governing that period. (shrink)

Il saggio evidenzia come il «diritto naturale» rappresenti il cuore nevralgico della «scienza» di Giambattista Vico. Questi, nell’opporsi allo scetticismo, da un lato, e al giusnaturalismo, dall’altro, fa del «diritto naturale» il punto di incontro di molteplici questioni, dalla politica alla giurisprudenza, dall’«equità» alla «Ragion di Stato».

This study aims to analyse La Peyrère’s traditionally denied or under-estimated influence on Vico’s universal historiography. While Vico criticized La Peyrère’s impiety, his description of the cultural exchange between sacred and profane history, represented by the Jews and the Gentiles, corresponded with La Peyrère’s thoughts. Thus, one could interpret Vico’s criticism of La Peyrère as a strategy for saving his major work from the suspicion of heterodoxy. Vico refuted the existence of pre-Adamites, but accepted La Peyrère’s idea of the double (...) creation and transformed it into that of multiple creations and the origins of civilizations. This allowed him to arrive at the innovative concept of the plurality of history. Thus, La Peyrère’s hypothesis was a starting point for Vico’s innovations in historical reconstruction. (shrink)

In this chapter the author argues that modern technology rests on the axiom formulated by Giambattista Vico, the famous verum ipsum factum, verum factum convertuntur – we only understand that which we do or realize, or only fully understand all that we do or realize, to the precise extent that we actually do it or realize it. This is a reason-based concept, in the tradition of which we find thinkers such as Vico, Marx, Dewey and Bachelard, asserting the epistemic value (...) of the maker’s knowledge. In this text, Hermínio Martins searches for the epistemological foundations of technical reason, arguing that in the age of cybernetic technologies and bio-engineering, the human being has become the “god of artefacts”. (shrink)

The present essay is dedicated to the interpretation of Vico developed by Gillo Dorfles, which is based on the reason why Vico can be seen as the father of modern aesthetics, provided that the word “aesthetics” must be understood in a non-idealistic or Crocian sense, but according to the originally eighteenth-century notion of cognitio sensitiva. The key to this interpretation is thus given by the concepts of myth and metaphor, where the second one is especially seen as the principle that (...) governs a true “logic of fantasy”. (shrink)

El objetivo a perseguir por el presente artículo, es analizar tres de las principales teorías humanístico-filosóficas, respecto a la concepción del ciclo vital de que han sido participes diversas comunidades humanas a lo largo de la historia. Con base en tres propuestas de periodización histórica, se expondrán los enfoques temporales sobre los procesos y el fin de la historia teorizados por los filósofos e historiadores Giambatista Vico, Oswald Spengler y Arnold Joseph Toynbee.

El objetivo a perseguir por el presente artículo, es analizar tres de las principales teorías humanístico-filosóficas, respecto a la concepción del ciclo vital de que han sido participes diversas comunidades humanas a lo largo de la historia. Con base en tres propuestas de periodización histórica, se expondrán los enfoques temporales sobre los procesos y el fin de la historia teorizados por los filósofos e historiadores Giambatista Vico, Oswald Spengler y Arnold Joseph Toynbee.

The following article discusses an edition of Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis, issued without a place of publication or publisher in 1719. The article focuses on the claim first advanc...

Gianvincenzo Gravina (1664–1718) and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) were two Neapolitan philosophers concerned with the way human society initially formed. They agreed that ancient myths were produced by a mentality that had a powerful ability for acute perception but could not reflect abstractly. They also agreed that wonder (la maraviglia) was an important force that enchanted the first peoples into founding society. They disagreed on how this happened. Gravina argued that early poets could see the truth and used persuasive poetry to (...) teach the people how to live. Vico argued that wonder impelled the first poets to create false divinities that frightened the first bestial people into founding civilization. While the two views differ, they show how Neapolitan Enlightenment thinkers developed radically different answers to questions that Northern Europeans were asking. (shrink)

While the resonance of Giambattista Vico's hermeneutics for postcolonialism has long been recognised, a rupture has been perceived between his intercultural sensibility and the actual content of his philological investigations, which have often been criticised as being Eurocentric and philologically spurious. China is a case in point. In his magnum opus New Science, Vico portrays China as backward and philosophically primitive compared to Europe. In this first study dedicated to China in Vico's thought, Daniel Canaris shows that scholars have been (...) beguiled by Vico's value judgements of China without considering the function of these value judgements in his theory of divine providence. This monograph illustrates that Vico's image of China is best appreciated within the contemporary theological controversies surrounding the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism. Through close examination of Vico's sources and intellectual context, Canaris argues that by refusing to consider Confucius as a "filosofo", Vico dismantles the rationalist premises of the theological accommodation proposed by the Jesuits and proposes a new functionalist valorisation of non-Christian religion that anticipates post-colonial critiques of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Giambattista Vico's Scienza nuova often appeals to several kinds of "proofs": historical, philological or theological... A further kind of proof may be added, which may be called "artistic proof". In Vico's view, art is the sign of the increasing ability of a civilisation to imitate nature - a correlation already proposed by Vasari and Winckelmann. The form of art to which the greatest explanatory power is attached is painting, as it requires abstraction. The more complex a painting is, the older (...) is the civilisation that produced it. The Scienza Nuova's parts dedicated to the Ancient Egyptian and Chinese art give an example of how Vico applies such kind of proof. He concludes that those civilisations cannot be as old as it has always been retained, since their paintings lacks perspective. Oppositely, the lack of any mention to paintings whatsoever is evidence for Homer's and Moses' antiquity. Artistic proof - alongside those previously mentioned - is indeed used by Vico to ground his ideas on chronology, historical subdivision in Eres and writing techniques. (shrink)

Georges Sorel's Study on Vico is a revelatory document of the depths and stakes of French social thought at the end of the 19th century. What brought Sorel to the 18th century Neapolitan theorist of history? Acute awareness of the limitations of Marxist thought in his day, a profound concern with the material underpinnings of language, law, and culture, and the imperative to understand the possibilities of revolutionary change. We find here a different Sorel, one who speaks in surprising ways (...) to the 21st century. The translation is accompanied by an introduction and by a set of notes which situate the text both in Sorel's overall intellectual trajectory and in the fin de siècle debates from which it emerged. (shrink)

This essay explores how Vico employs the terms mind, body, and language in his magnus opus, on the basis of the crux interpretandum that Vico created by turning the traditional mind-body problem into a body-language-mind problem. The problem is approached through a reading of Scienza nuova 1744 that emphasizes Vico's concern with issues of equity, justice, and jurisprudence through human history, starting in the early civilizations. The "languages" of the three "ages" that Vico delineates are interpreted in this context. The (...) proposed interpretation also influences how to understand Vico's references to poetry and imagination. The thesis presented concludes with identifying Vico's use of the terms mind, body, and language as symbolic and metaphorical rather than anthropologically. (shrink)

L'Ora e l'attimo narra--attraverso il confronto di Vico con Platone e Kant, Hegel e Nietzsche, Gadamer e, infine, Benjamin - la storia discontinua di un passaggio epocale nella concezione del mondo storico: il passaggio dal primato dell'orizzonte universale eterno, l''Ora', in cui si inquadrano le diverse età della storia, al primato dell'attimo, in cui sono parimenti possibili sia l'inizio di una 'nuova Ora' che la fine della storia dell'uomo ad opera dell'uomo. In Vico questo 'passaggio,' variamente contrastato e sofferto, ma (...) alla fine vincente, assume la figura del transito dalla 'mathesis universalis' della storia alla visione morale del mondo umano--Back cover. (shrink)