Giambattista Vico

Who was Giambattista Vico?

Giovan Battista Vico was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. He criticised the expansion and development of rationalism and was an apologist of classical antiquity. Vico is best known for his magnum opus, the Scienza Nuova of 1725, often published in English as New Science.

Vico is a precursor of systemic and complexity thinking, as opposed to Cartesian analysis and other kinds of reductionism. He is also well known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum, a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology.

Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the term is not found in his text. While Vico was not, strictly speaking, a historicist, interest in him has often been driven by historicists.

Famous Quotes:

• The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.