Giambattista Vico Book

Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo (23 June 1668 - 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is titled "Principles/Origins of Science about the Common Nature of Nations" (Principi di Scienza Nuova d'intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni). The work is explicitly presented as a "Science of reasoning" (Scienza di ragionare), and includes a dialectic between axioms and "reasonings" (ragionamenti) linking and clarifying the axioms. Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the expression is alien from Vico's text (Vico speaks of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically"). He is otherwise well-known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum ("true itself is fact" or "the true itself is made"), a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology. Overall, the contemporary interest in Vico has been driven by peculiarly historicist interests like Tagliacozzo and Hayden White.