[
Biographical
nformation on Vico from Web page by Junjiro Takahashi is a professor of the Faculty
of Environmental Information at the Keio University, Japan]
Italian
philosopher, legal theorist, and historical scholar: b. Naples, Italy, June 23,
1668; d. there, Jan. 22/23, 1744. The sixth among eight children of a semiliterate
bookseller, he attended a Jesuit school, and was for a time enrolled in the law
school of the University of Naples; in all essentials, however, he educated himself
in the library of the Rocca family at Vatolla near Salerno, where he served as
private tutor from 1686 to 1695. In 1600 he was elected professor of rhetoric
at Naples; in the same year he married and, with a family that eventually included
eight children, of whom three died in infancy, he subsisted for most of his life
on the pittance afforded by his post, eked out by private teaching. In 1723 he
competed for a chair in law, but was passed over in favor of a far less competent
candidate. In 1735, when his health was already beginning to fail, Don Carlos
of Bourbon ( Charles III of Spain ) made him royal historiographer of the new
Kingdom of Naples, and in 1741 his son Gennaro was confirmed as professor of
rhetoric in his place. The final version of his lifework, Principi di acienza
nuova d'intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (Principles of New Science
Concerning the Common Nature of the Nations), was in press when he died.
[ Biographical
nformation on Vico from Web page by Junjiro Takahashi is a professor of the Faculty
of Environmental Information at the Keio University, Japan]
Lawyer, historian, student of ancient Rome, rhetorician. He also designed a "new science," quite different from Descartes. Locates "facts" not in the clear and distinct perception or indisputablecertainty of the Cogito, but in the identity of truth and fact as that which is made or realized by man. "The facts" are historical as human design progresses in ascending and descending movements. No greater certainty is possible than when a person narrates and explains what he has himself done. This holds for sciences and metaphysics.
Language has a prominent role in the realization of the state and politics, religion and culture, the moral order and legal system, and is the design of modern science. According to Vico the human spirit (ingenium) did not form language, but was formed by it. Man is assigned the task of passing on and refining language: the world in which we now live has been unlocked by the mythical, poetic and later the objective, rational word. Outstanding speakers are those able to preserve, develop and transform this world.
The Cartesians were against historical science, myth and poetry, rhetoric as having anything to do with science. Vico argued that they have everything to do with it: that history is the best empiricism, that poetry offers the most enjoyment of life, that the rhetorical word constructs and displays the world.
Vicos work was largely ignored, outside of Italy, until Croce in early 1900's, Rosenstock-Huessy in the mid-1900's, and Grassi in the late 1900's.
More
on Vico [toward the bottom of the New Science page]
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