Giambattista Vico
Neapolitan philosopher, historian and jurist (1668–1744), trained in law but with an extraordinarily vast self-taught grounding in philosophy and philology, he spent almost his entire academic life holding a modest chair of rhetoric at the University of Naples, sidelined from the more prestigious and lucrative law chairs to which he aspired, which kept him in constant economic precarity despite the depth and originality of his thought, recognised only belatedly after his death. His masterwork, the New Science (published in three successive versions in 1725, 1730 and 1744), constitutes a pioneering attempt to found a rigorous philosophical science of human history and civil institutions, in open opposition to the Cartesian rationalism dominant in his time, which Vico considered incapable of truly understanding the human world by focusing exclusively on abstract, timeless mathematical truths. His central methodological principle, summed up in the Latin formula verum ipsum factum ('the true is the same as the made'), holds that human beings can only know with certainty what they themselves have created or made, so that while God alone can perfectly know nature (which He has created), men can know their own history and civil institutions with particular depth, precisely because these are human works, which makes history, rather than physics, the field of knowledge most proper and accessible to human reason. Vico also developed an influential cyclical theory of the evolution of civilisations, the 'corsi e ricorsi' (courses and recourses), according to which all societies necessarily pass through three successive ages —the age of gods, the age of heroes and the age of men— characterised by progressively different forms of language, law, government and mentality, before degenerating and eventually restarting the cycle. Largely ignored by his contemporaries, Vico's thought was rediscovered with enthusiasm in the nineteenth century by thinkers such as Michelet and was later regarded as a fundamental precursor of disciplines such as historicism, the philosophy of culture, philosophical anthropology and the hermeneutics of the human sciences.