Giambattista Vico
Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Vico or Vigo (23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. A critic of modern rationalism and apologist of classical antiquity, Vico's magnum opus is Scienza Nuova (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 ("true itself is fact" or "the true itself is made"), 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 (Vico speaks of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically"). While Vico was not, strictly speaking, a historicist, interest in him has often been driven by historicists (such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White).
Read more about Giambattista Vico: Biography, The Scienza Nuova, The verum Factum Principle, Vichian Rhetoric and Humanism, Response To The Cartesian Method
Famous quotes by giambattista vico:
“But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called ‘Sympathetic Nature.’”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
“The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
“Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)