page_title: Giambattista Vico
section_title: The Scienza Nuova
hierarchical_section_title: Giambattista Vico / The Scienza Nuova
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Giovambattista Vico, Principj di Scienza Nuova - copertina dell'edizione 1744
context_page_description: Giambattista Vico was an Italian political philosopher and rhetorician, historian and jurist of the Age of Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, was an apologist for Classical Antiquity, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to daily life, and was the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics.
  The Latin aphorism Verum esse ipsum factum coined by Vico is an early instance of constructivist epistemology. He inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history, and, although the term philosophy of history is not in his writings, Vico spoke of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically." Although he was not an historicist, contemporary interest in Vico usually has been motivated by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher and historian of ideas, Edward Said, a literary critic, and Hayden White, a metahistorian.
  Vico's intellectual magnum opus is the book Scienza Nuova, which attempts a systematic organization of the humanities as a single science that recorded and explained the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall.
context_section_description: The New Science (1725, Scienza Nuova) is his major work and has been highly influential in the philosophy of history, and for historicists such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White.
caption: Title page of Principj di Scienza Nuova (1744 ed.)