Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico (born Giovanni Battista Vico; Italian: [ˈviːko]; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian thinker active during the Italian Enlightenment, working as a philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. He pushed back against the spread of modern rationalism, arguing that Cartesian analysis and similar forms of reductionism were not suited to real human life. He also defended classical antiquity and Renaissance humanism, and is credited as the first person to lay out the foundations of social science and semiotics. Historians often consider him one of the earliest figures of the Counter-Enlightenment.

Vico coined the Latin phrase "Verum esse ipsum factum" ("truth is itself something made"), an early expression of constructivist epistemology. He started the modern field of the philosophy of history, though he never used that term himself; instead, he wrote about a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically." While Vico was not an historicist, much of the modern interest in his work has come from historicists like Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White.

His major work is *Scienza Nuova* (or *New Science*), published in 1725. In it, he tried to organize the humanities into a single science that records and explains the historical cycles through which societies rise and fall.

**Biography**

Vico was born in Naples, Italy, to a bookseller. He attended several schools but was dissatisfied with Jesuit scholasticism and struggled with poor health, so he was eventually educated at home by tutors. His autobiography suggests he was largely self-taught under his father's guidance, especially after a three-year break from school caused by a fall at age seven. He formally graduated from the University of Naples in 1694 with a doctorate in civil and canon law.

In 1686, after surviving typhus, he took a tutoring job in Vatolla, south of Salerno, which lasted nine years until 1695. Four years later, in 1699, he married his childhood friend Teresa Caterina Destito and accepted a chair in rhetoric at the University of Naples. He held this position until retiring due to ill health in 1741. Throughout his career, he wanted the more prestigious chair of jurisprudence but never got it. However, in 1734, King Charles III of Naples appointed him royal historiographer, a role that paid more than his university professorship.

**The rhetoric and humanism of Vico**

Vico's approach to rhetoric grew out of his humanist and educational concerns. In a 1708 speech, *De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione* (On the Order of the Scholarly Disciplines of Our Times), he argued that anyone aiming for a public career—in courts, the senate, or the pulpit—should learn to master the art of topics and argue both sides of a controversy about nature, humanity, or politics. This, he said, would help them draw on the most probable and plausible arguments. Later, in *Scienza Nuova*, he condemned this practice of defending both sides as false eloquence.

As Royal Professor of Latin Eloquence, Vico prepared students for advanced study in law and jurisprudence. His lessons covered formal aspects of rhetoric, such as arranging and delivering arguments. But he stressed the Aristotelian link between rhetoric, logic, and dialectic, putting ends (rhetoric) at the center. He objected to modern rhetoric because it had lost touch with common sense (*sensus communis*), which he defined as the "worldly sense" shared by all people.

In his lectures and writings, Vico's rhetoric starts from a central argument (*medius terminus*), clarified by following the order of things as they appear in experience. Probability and circumstance keep their proper weight, and discovery—relying on topics (*loci*)—takes priority over axioms derived from abstract reflection. Following classical Roman rhetoric, he aimed to train the orator as a transmitter of *oratio*, a speech with *ratio* (reason) at its core. The key to the oratorical art is the orderly connection between common sense and an end suited to oratory—an end not imposed from above (as in modern or dogmatic Christian thinking) but drawn from common sense itself. In the tradition of Socrates and Cicero, Vico's true orator acts as a midwife, helping bring "the true" (as an idea) out of "the certain," which is the ignorance in the student's mind.

Vico's emphasis on civic life and professional duties, along with his rediscovery of "the most ancient wisdom" of the senses (which he called *humana stultitia*, or "human foolishness"), places him in the humanist tradition. He called for a maieutic oratory art that went against the modern preference for dogmatic reason, which he saw in what he termed the "geometrical method" of René Descartes and the logicians at Port-Royal-des-Champs.

**Response to the Cartesian method**

As Vico recounts in his autobiography, when he returned to Naples from Vatolla, he found that "the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters." Cartesianism had brought many developments in metaphysics and natural science. Descartes's method, widely spread by the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, was based on verification: the only path to truth and knowledge came through axioms derived from observation. Descartes insisted on the "sure and indubitable" as the foundation of knowledge.