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Giambattista Vico Quotes

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, a precursor of systematic and complex thought, in opposition to Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism, 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 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. Wikipedia  

✵ 23. June 1668 – 23. January 1744
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Famous Giambattista Vico Quotes

“Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.”

Giambattista Vico

The New Science 144 (1744)

“Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.”

Giambattista Vico

The New Science 241 (1744)

“The truth itself is made.”
Verum esse ipsum factum

Giambattista Vico

On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710)

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