Civilisations
1668 to 1744, Naples
The cycles of history and the making of nations.
Start learning Giambattista →How an obscure, impoverished professor in Naples invented, almost single-handedly, the philosophy of history - a science of the development of human societies and civilisations.
Vico’s revolutionary principle - that we can truly know only what we ourselves have made - and how it founded a distinctive way of knowing the human world.
Vico’s cyclical vision of history - the recurring sequence of ages through which all nations pass, rising, flourishing, declining, and beginning again.
Vico’s recovery of how the first humans thought - not in abstract reason but in vivid poetry, myth, and imagination - and his method for entering the mind of the distant past.
Vico’s revolt against Descartes - his defence of history, rhetoric, imagination, and practical wisdom against the attempt to make mathematical reason the only path to truth.
epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.