The Philosophy of Giambattista: VicoThe Philosophy of Giambattista Vico

MY reasons for believing that a new exposition of Vico’s philosophy is required may easily be inferred from the observations on the effects of his work and the biographical notes which form respectively the second and fourth appendices to this volume.Here I merely wish to state that my exposition is not meant for a summary of Vico’s writings work by work and part by part. It rather presupposes an acquaintance with these writings, and, where that is lacking, is intended to induce the reader to procure them in order to follow better and to check the interpretation and estimate of them here offered.On this supposition, though I have made free use of my author’s actual words, especially in the chapters dealing with history, I have not thought it desirable to mark them as quotations except where it was important to emphasise the precise phrase of the original.In my anxiety to show in every detail of my work, so far as I could, the veneration due to the great name of Vico, I have endeavoured to be brief with the brevity at which he himself aimed as the hall-mark of sterling scientific thought. With this in view I have refrained even from controversy with his various interpreters, and have either contented myself with mere remarks, or more often left my details to be justified by the coherence of my view as a whole. Some of the interpretations supported by me I believe to be the mature fruit of the investigations and controversies which form the greater part of the literature on Vico. All the rest, for which I am personally responsible, and the general idea of my book, I will defend with further detail when occasion arises. I hope, in fact, that the present work will rekindle rather than quench the discussion of Vico’s philosophy: since in him we have, as Goethe calls him, the Altvater whom a nation is happy to possess, and to him we must hark back for a time in order to imbue our modern philosophy with an Italian feeling,however cosmopolitan it may be in thought. Carla Santilli mentioned this Neapolitan philosoper at the conclusion of [this](http://www.world-lecture-series.org/a-new-renaissance-in-cosmology-part-1-for-matter-section-3), regarding how science must progress by returning to Galilean-esque experimental verification here on earth before applying theories to cosmology. Romano Amerio quotes the conclusion of Vico's masterpiece in the conclusion of his *Iota Unum*. Card. Siri discusses Vico in the context of historicism, and Deely also discusses him in his *Four Ages of Understanding* , saying that he was as interested in Newton's physics as Kant was. * * * Credited as the inventor of the philosophy of history, Vico's influential pre-Enlightenment theories about knowledge, metaphysics, and moral consciousness gained a wider audience with this acclaimed 20th-century exposition.