author
Giambattista Vico
1668–1744
An original and often surprising thinker of the Italian Enlightenment, he explored how societies create their own laws, language, and history. Best known for The New Science, he helped shape later ideas about culture, historical change, and what humans can truly know.
1 Audiobook
Principes de la Philosophie de l'Histoire traduits de la 'Scienza nuova'
by Giambattista Vico
About the author
Born in Naples on June 23, 1668, Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. He spent most of his life in Naples, where he taught rhetoric at the University of Naples and developed ideas that stood apart from the dominant rationalist philosophy of his day.
Vico is best known for The New Science, a work that argued human beings can best understand the world they themselves have made—institutions, customs, laws, myths, and language. Rather than treating history as a random chain of events, he looked for patterns in the way nations develop, making him an important early thinker in the philosophy of history and the study of culture.
Although he was not widely celebrated during his lifetime, Vico later came to be recognized as a major influence on modern historical and cultural thought. He died in Naples on January 23, 1744, but his work has continued to attract readers interested in how imagination, society, and history shape one another.