Giambattista Vico
1668-1744 · Romanticism · Known
Vico was a Neapolitan philosopher of rhetoric. He held that you can know history in a way you can never know nature, because people made laws, languages and cities while God made the rest. The true is the made. His New Science of 1725 reads old myths as evidence of how early humans thought, and has nations cycling through three ages, of gods, of heroes and of men. It founded the philosophy of history.
Signature
The position Vico is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Society
- Collectivism – Individualism
- Time
- Cyclical Return
Positions on the 1 axes the sources answer
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (75 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
19 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Vico refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Knowledge
- Embodied Cognition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Beginning of Things
- Creation ex Nihilo / Eternal Cosmos
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Cyclical Return
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Metaphorical
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Human Nature
- Storytelling Animal
What is human nature?