Vico (1668-1744)
Vico Chronology
Information 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.
Information from Dr. Lamoureux:
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.
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