Giambattista Vico

Lore & Background

Born to a bookseller in Naples, Italy, Giovanni Battista Vico attended several schools, but ill health and dissatisfaction with the scholasticism of the Jesuits led to his being educated at home by tutors. Evidence from his autobiographical work indicates that Vico likely was an autodidact educated under paternal influence, during a three-year absence from school, consequence of an accidental fall when the boy was seven years old. He graduated from the University of Naples in 1694 as Doctor of Civil and Canon Law. In 1686, after surviving a bout of typhus, he accepted a job as a tutor in Vatolla, south of Salerno, which became a nine-year professional engagement that lasted till 1695. Four years later, in 1699, Vico married Teresa Caterina Destito, a childhood friend, and accepted a chair in rhetoric at the University of Naples, which he held until ill-health retirement in 1741. Throughout his academic career, Vico would aspire to, but never attain, the more respectable chair of jurisprudence; however, in 1734, he was appointed historiographer royal by Charles III, King of Naples, at a salary greater than he had earned as a university professor.

Reader's Guide

Vico's significance lies in his early critique of modern rationalism and his foundational contributions to the philosophy of history and social science. His verum factum principle—first formulated in 1710 in *De antiquissima Italorum sapientia*—states that truth is verified through creation or invention, not observation: 'The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it.' This challenged Cartesian epistemology and influenced constructivist epistemology. In his magnum opus, *Scienza Nuova* (1725), he attempted a systematic organization of the humanities as a single science that records and explains the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall. Though not an historicist himself, his work later attracted historicists such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White. Vico's rhetoric emphasized common sense (*sensus communis*) and practical wisdom over abstract geometrical method, arguing that 'to introduce geometrical method into practical life is like trying to go mad with the rules of reason.' He is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures and as an early expositor of semiotics.

Did You Know?

• Vico's Latin aphorism 'Verum esse ipsum factum' ('truth is itself something made') is an early instance of constructivist epistemology.
• He survived a bout of typhus in 1686 before beginning a nine-year tutoring engagement in Vatolla.
• Vico was appointed historiographer royal by Charles III, King of Naples in 1734, at a salary greater than he had earned as a university professor.
• Samuel Beckett's first published work was an essay titled 'Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce' linking Vico's cyclical form to James Joyce's *Finnegans Wake*.
• Karl Marx mentioned Vico in *Capital: Critique of Political Economy* (1867), indicating parallel perspectives about history and the role of historical actors.