Giambattista Vico Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Giambattista Vico was born in Naples in 1668 and died there in 1744. The son of modest parents in a bustling port city governed successively by Spanish and Austrian authorities, he grew up amid bookstalls, legal offices, and ecclesiastical schools that shaped the intellectual landscape of the time. As a child he suffered a severe fall from a ladder that left him bedridden for extended periods. The forced isolation became formative: away from formal classrooms, he read voraciously and cultivated a taste for history, rhetoric, and the Latin authors that would later anchor his philosophy. Jesuit schooling introduced him to scholastic disputation and to the pedagogical emphasis on eloquence, while the University of Naples exposed him to jurisprudence, the Roman law tradition, and the tensions between emerging modern philosophies and classical humanism.

In his youth he absorbed the arguments of Francis Bacon for an empirical reformation of learning and the geometrical clarity championed by Rene Descartes, even as he came to reject the idea that the Cartesian method could serve as a universal key for all knowledge. He also encountered the legal and historical erudition of Hugo Grotius and the political analysis of Thomas Hobbes. These figures were not personal acquaintances but intellectual presences that pressed upon any serious thinker in Naples, where libraries such as that of the jurist Giuseppe Valletta gathered scholars into a lively, often contentious conversation.

Formative Years and Academic Career
In the late 1680s Vico left Naples for the countryside near Salerno to serve as a tutor in a noble household at Vatolla. The long sojourn removed him from university ambitions but gave him time for systematic reading. There he deepened his engagement with Cicero and Tacitus, with the humanist tradition of rhetoric, and with Roman law. Returning to Naples in the 1690s, he married, started a family, and struggled to secure stable employment. In 1699 he obtained the chair of rhetoric at the University of Naples, a position he would hold for decades. The chair was important in the Neapolitan curriculum because it shaped the training of lawyers and officials; yet it was not the more prestigious chair in civil law that he sought repeatedly and never won. These disappointments, noted in his later autobiographical reflections, sharpened his sense of how institutions reward certain methods of knowledge over others.

Within Naples he moved among jurists, historians, and reform-minded nobles. Paolo Mattia Doria advocated a civic humanism critical of sterile scholasticism; Pietro Giannone, a vigorous historian of the Kingdom of Naples, pursued a secular analysis of ecclesiastical power. Though Vico charted his own route, these contemporaries marked the city's distinctive blend of erudition and reform. He also addressed the broader learned public with programmatic orations, notably On the Study Methods of Our Time (delivered in the first decade of the 1700s), where he argued that education must marry the rigor of method to the inventiveness of rhetoric and the moral aims of public life.

Early Works and the Verum-Factum Principle
Vico's first major work, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710), set forth the thesis that would become the linchpin of his thought: the verum factum principle. It holds that truth is verified in and through making; we know most certainly what we ourselves have made. This claim, sharpened against Cartesian pretensions to indubitable method, recast the hierarchy of sciences. Mathematics is certain because we construct its objects; by contrast, nature, which we have not made, resists absolute certainty. Yet there is a domain we do make: the civil world of laws, customs, myths, languages, and institutions. Human history, not physics, becomes the privileged field for a distinct kind of knowledge.

In elaborating this principle, Vico linked philosophical reasoning to philology, the study of language and texts. He argued that human societies encode their sense of the world in words, rituals, and legal forms, and that these artifacts can be read to recover the stages of collective development. Against the notion that a single abstract method suffices, he urged a historically attentive wisdom that respects the creativity of imagination, the role of prudent judgment, and the authority of common sense.

The New Science
These insights culminated in the Scienza Nuova (The New Science), first published in 1725 and substantially revised in 1730 and again in 1744. The book is neither a conventional history nor a system of metaphysics. It is an ambitious attempt to disclose the order within the formation of nations by bringing philology and philosophy into a single inquiry. Vico proposed that peoples pass through recurrent stages he called the ages of the gods, of heroes, and of humans. In the first, imagination and fear generate myth and religious awe; in the second, aristocratic orders establish heroic law and martial honor; in the third, reflective reason and equality before law advance. These ages cycle, with periods of refinement followed by decline and a return to barbarism of reflection, a pattern he named corsi e ricorsi.

To support this, he mined etymologies, mythic narratives, and Roman jurisprudence, arguing that poetic wisdom (sapienza poetica) precedes philosophical reason. He analyzed how metaphors crystallize social experience, how proverbs encode practical intelligence, and how legal forms embody shifting balances of power. The New Science thus offered a genealogy of human institutions and a method for understanding them, neither reducible to theology nor to the physics of his day. It was an original alternative to both the rationalist systems of Descartes' followers and the purely empirical histories that lacked a guiding theoretical thread.

Public Life, Recognition, and Difficulties
Despite his innovations, Vico's career advanced slowly. He repeatedly petitioned for the more prestigious legal chair and for court recognition, often without success. Naples endured political transitions from Spanish to Austrian rule, and patronage was unpredictable. He continued to lecture on rhetoric, to examine students, and to publish, yet he worried about finances and about the reception of his books. Still, he won admirers in the city's learned world, including figures who, like Paolo Mattia Doria, saw in his defense of rhetoric and civic virtue a counterweight to narrow technical training.

In 1734 a new political era opened when Charles of Bourbon entered Naples. The following year Vico was appointed Royal Historiographer, an honor that offered belated recognition and some material relief. He celebrated the new monarchy in public addresses and continued to revise his major work. By the early 1740s, as age and illness advanced, he retired from active teaching; his son Gennaro assisted with duties and helped manage family affairs. The final edition of the New Science appeared in 1744, the year of his death.

Thought, Style, and Milieu
Vico's style combined juridical analysis with rhetorical suppleness. He wrote dense Latin treatises and vigorous Italian prose, deploying aphorisms and etymologies to illuminate how nations invent themselves. He insisted that ingenuity, metaphor, and imagination are not ornaments but engines of discovery, especially in matters human. He rejected the disdain for rhetoric that he found in certain readings of Descartes, and he sought to rehabilitate prudence as a form of reason adequate to civil life. At the same time, his engagement with Baconian reform kept him attentive to method and to the need for a disciplined inquiry into causes, even if those causes were embedded in human artifacts rather than in natural laws.

His intellectual circle, while not a formal school, included colleagues at the University of Naples and interlocutors in private libraries and salons. Giuseppe Valletta's circle exposed him to European debates; Pietro Giannone's historical project, though distinct, resonated with Vico's conviction that the institutions of a people must be studied through their laws and chronicles. Younger thinkers, among them Antonio Genovesi, entered a Neapolitan discourse that took shape in the shadow of Vico's lectures and publications. These figures, together with reforming nobles and magistrates, constituted the human context that his philosophy both analyzed and served.

Legacy
During his lifetime Vico's books circulated among jurists, antiquarians, and literati rather than among natural philosophers. Yet his wager that the human world is made and therefore knowable proved prescient. He offered a pioneering account of how language, myth, and law develop together, and he gave subsequent historians a vision of patterns within the flux of events. The verum-factum principle supplied a philosophical warrant for the autonomy of the human sciences; the method of the New Science, joining philology to philosophy, modeled a way to study cultures without dissolving them into either metaphysics or mere chronicle.

Vico died in Naples in 1744, having seen, at last, some recognition from the new Bourbon court. He left behind a body of work that his son Gennaro and Naples's scholarly circles helped preserve. The city's jurists, historians, and reformers, including Paolo Mattia Doria and Pietro Giannone, formed the closest human horizon of his life, while the broader presence of Bacon, Descartes, Grotius, and Hobbes supplied the intellectual pressures against which he defined his project. Out of that milieu he fashioned a philosophy of history that placed human making at the heart of knowledge and made the civil world, in all its languages and laws, the proper object of a new science.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by Giambattista, under the main topics: Wisdom - Truth - Free Will & Fate - Reason & Logic.