Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico (1668 to 1744) was an Italian philosopher born in Naples, where he spent most of his working life as Professor of Rhetoric at the university. Trained in jurisprudence, he read widely in the classics, philology and philosophy, and drew on all of them for highly original views on history, historiography and culture. His mature work is the Scienza Nuova, or New Science, which sets out the principle verum et factum convertuntur, that the true and the made are convertible, in contrast to the dominant philosophy of Descartes. He was little known in his own time, but from the nineteenth century his ideas reached a wider audience and his influence now runs through the humanities and social sciences.