Historicism

Giambattista Vico Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was born and died in Naples, where he spent nearly his entire life as professor of rhetoric at the local university — a post he held from 1699 onward that secured him a modest living but little academic prestige compared to the jurists and scientists of his day. Trained in law but self-taught in classical philology, Roman history, and philosophy, Vico built his work at a remove from the dominant currents of his time, above all Cartesian rationalism, which ruled the European universities and which he subjected to systematic critique as early as De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time, 1709). Against the Cartesian ambition to found all knowledge on the mathematical-deductive model, Vico argued that the human sciences — history, law, philology — require a method of their own, grounded not in geometric evidence but in the imaginative and historical reconstruction of human works. ...