Giambattista Vico

Born in Naples in 1668, Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, historian, and jurist whose work pushed against the idea that human life could be understood only through the methods of mathematics and the natural sciences. He studied and taught in Naples, spending much of his career as a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples.

Vico is best known for The New Science (Scienza nuova), a book in which he argued that because people make the institutions of society, they can come to understand history, law, myth, and culture in a distinctive way. He was deeply interested in how civilizations develop over time and in how language, custom, and imagination shape public life.

Although his work was not fully appreciated during his lifetime, Vico later came to be seen as a major precursor to modern historicism and the study of culture. Readers still turn to him for his wide-ranging, original attempt to explain how human worlds are made and remembered.