G. B. Vico

Giambattista Vico
Portrait by Francesco Solimena
Born	Giovan Battista Vico (1668-06-23)23 June 1668 Naples, Kingdom of Naples
Died	23 January 1744(1744-01-23) (aged 75) Naples, Kingdom of Naples
Nationality	Italian
Alma mater	University of Naples (LL.D., 1694)
Notable work	Principî di Scienza Nuova De antiquissima Italorum sapientia
Era	18th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Historicism
Institutions	University of Naples
Main interests	Rhetoric, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of history, jurisprudence
Notable ideas	verum esse ipsum factum
Influences Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Varro, Tacitus, St. Augustine, Duns Scotus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, Suárez, Selden, Hobbes, Malebranche, Francis Bacon, Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Leibniz, Herodotus
Influenced Maistre, Coleridge, Hegel, Marx, Croce, Gramsci, Joyce, Evola, Michelet, Quinet, Auerbach, McLuhan, Hillman, Frye, Castoriadis, Preve, Hösle, Voegelin, Berlin, Sorel.

Giambattista Vico (B. Giovan Battista Vico, 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian political philosopher and rhetorician, historian, and jurist, recognized as a great intellectual of the Age of Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism and was an apologist for Classical Antiquity; Vico is best known for his magnum opus, the Scienza Nuova (1725, New Science).

Vico is a precursor of systematic thought and of complex thought, in opposition to Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism, and is credited with the first exposition of the fundamental aspects of social science and of semiotics. As an intellectual, Giambattista Vico is considered to have inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history, and, although the term Philosophy of history is not in his texts, he speaks of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically". Although not an historicist, interest in Vico usually has been driven by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, and Hayden White.

Moreover, Giambattista Vico also is known for the Latin aphorism Verum esse ipsum factum ("True itself is fact" and "The true itself is made"), which proposition is an early instance of constructivist epistemology.

Born to a bookseller and the daughter of a carriage maker in Naples, Italy, Vico attended a series of grammar schools, but ill-health and dissatisfaction with Jesuit scholasticism led to home schooling. Evidence from his autobiographical work points to the likelihood Vico was mostly self-taught. According to Costelloe, this was due to his father's influence on him during a three-year absence from school caused by a fall at the age of seven.