Giambattista's Vico’s Sources

1. Introduction
Probably the first thing that can be said of Vico’s sources is that they are many and varied and that his New Science draws freely not only from an eclectic mix of those whose work he admired and accepted, but also from those whose work he condemned and ultimately rejected. Central to Vico’s philosophy is the view that ideas and concepts are not innate but arise in virtue of the collective consciousness (or, more accurately, the collective unconsciousness) of the community – the sensus communis. That is, that one’s ideas are formed by the society to which one is exposed. When we investigate Vico’s sources we are reminded that society or community can take different forms and that the ideas that shape us are not just those found in our immediate social environment. Indeed, the concern voiced today by so many in relation to the influence of television, the internet and other outside forces bears testimony to this fact. It might be argued that what the internet is to today’s youth is what his father’s book-shop was to the young Giambattista Vico, and the library of the castle of Cilento at Vatolla was to the eighteen year old Vico who was there as tutor to the children of the Duca della Rocca – a virtual reality where values, traditional and contemporaneous, could be measured against each other. Thus, as well as the influences of the immediate Neapolitan society into which he was born, we find such literary and philosophical giants as Homer, Tacticus, Lucretius, Varro, Plato, Aristotle, Pufendorf, Grotius, Selden, Hobbes, Spinoza, Valla, Descartes, Bacon, Le Clerc and many more. Vico’s history of philosophy revolves around four central themes: (1) that the history of humankind – the ideal eternal history of humankind - is a cyclical process which moves through three different stages before returning to the original; (2) that the myths and legends of ancient nations are in fact true histories which arise from the collective common sense judgements of the community – the sensus communis, under the direction of divine providence; (3) that man can only know to be true that which he makes – the verum ipsum factum principle; (4) and that these issues can all be investigated is in the light of his new form of criticism – his scienza nouva. This paper will show that, while Vico must be credited with bringing these ideas together to form a cohesive philosophical unit, they are by no means his ideas but ideas gleaned from the “sensus communis” of his own unique environment. It will investigate Vico’s sources in order that we might locate him in the history of philosophy, and that we might see, even for thinkers of the calibre of Vico, that no philosopher’s mind is an island unto itself.

2. The history of humankind as a cyclical process involving three distinct ages
According to Giambattista Vico the history of humankind is a cyclical process involving eternal ricorsi or revolutions each of which consists of three distinct ages: the age of gods, the age of heroes, the age of men. During the age of men, human reason reaches its zenith and then descends into chaos - at which time the whole cyclical process begins again. It should be said from the outset that this notion of history as a cyclical process is not an original idea. In fact, in Medieval Italy, as well as other European countries at that time, it was commonly held that human history was governed by the same laws as the four seasons; the linear view of history was taken from the Judeao-Christian tradition which, since it derived from desert people, was not subject to the same recurring seasonal variations. Peter Burke reminds us that Vico was well familiar with this traditional cyclical view of history and says that Vico took this idea from the ancient Greek historian Polybius (c. 203-c. 120 BC) “who suggested that monarchy was naturally followed by aristocracy and aristocracy by democracy, and when democracy went into decline, monarchy came around again”. Vico himself admits familiarity with Marcus Terentius Varro’s three ages of history: (i) the mythical age; (ii) the dark age, and (iii) the historical age, and he admits also that his concept greatly profits “from the antiquity of the Egyptians” – “l’antichità degli egizi” who, according to Herodotus, says Vico, also divided the history of humankind into different phases: “(1) the age of the gods, (2) the age of heroes, and (3) the age of men” – “la prima degli dèi, la seconda degli eroi e la terza degli uomini”. Vico was also familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle and would have known of the theory of a cyclical historical process advanced by Plato in the Republic in “The Myth of Er”, as well as Aristotle’s concept of eternal recurrence. In the Stagerite’s cyclical world process , a concept which Vico freely adopted to explain the Flood, the sun forever evaporates the waters of the earth, lifts the moisture into the atmosphere to form clouds, then falls again to reform the rivers and the seas. Like Vico, Aristotle sees human civilisation repeatedly reaching its zenith only to fall back into barbarism and begin again. Donald Kunze informs us that Vico was also familiar with the notion of eternal recurrence in Macrobius’ Commentary on the dream of Scopio. In this work Macrobius, the fifth century Latin author, brings together the threads of Cicero’s story of a dream of Scipio Africanus’ Grandson. A dream, Kunze reminds us, that “parallels in many ways the famous ‘Myth of Er’”, and in which “civilisation is explained as a “motion of the soul between wetness (the Flood?) and dryness” [Rationalism?].

While there seems to be no doubt th at Vico took inspiration for his cyclical historical process from Greek and Roman sources, he also found confirmation of his thesis in the works of the Jesuit father Michele Ruggieri, who had “seen Chinese books that were printed before the coming of Christ”, of Father Martini, whose History of China Vico had read; and of Nicolas Trigault, whose Christian Mission to China, says Vico, is “better informed that either Ruggieri or Martini". When we compare Vico’s view that “… in the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light” (“… in tal densa notte di tenebre and’ è coverta la prima da noi lontanissima antichità, apparisce questo lume eterno”) with a recurring theme in some Chinese stories where “a ray of light emerges out of chaos and builds the sky”, it seems fair to conclude that not only do the Italian philosopher’s words bear a strong resemblance to those of his Oriental cousins, but also that his view that the history of humankind inevitably moves to dissolution and chaos is also strikingly similar.

That Vico took his inspiration for his cyclical concept of the history of humankind from these sources is without question. That he firmly believed this process to be a true representation of human history also appears to be also without question. However, on his own evidence this thesis fails to hold true. As Robert Flint points out, on Vico’s own admission, Assyria was only known to have experienced one of these three stages - the other two would have to be “conjecturally affirmed on the ground that the law of three stages had elsewhere prevailed”. Even in relation to Italy, Flint goes on to say, Vico represents the age of gods as a stage of history that is not proper to Roman history. It should also be pointed out that the American Indian nation, which, it might be argued, moved from the age of gods to dissolution without passing through an age of dispassionate reason, does not conform to Vico’s worldview. Indeed, it might also be argued that as long as the people of any nation continue to create the concept of the ideal human being by bestowing attributes of exaggerated heroic proportions onto some of their political, literary, and religious leaders, both past and present, they too will fail to move beyond the age of heroes. As Robert Flint says, Vico, in his anxiety to show that all histories were subject to the same historical process, “did great violence to chronology, without succeeding… in establishing the thesis”.

3. Sensus communis, myths, legends, and natural law
According to Vico the myths and legends of early man were not “absurd fantasies of helpless primitives, or deliberate inventions designed to delude the masses and secure their obedience to cunning and unscrupulous masters”, rather they were true representations of the laws, institutions, religions, and other rules of societal behaviour that arose spontaneously from man’s experience with the natural world. Vico calls the collective mind of the people the sensus communis, by which he means the common sense judgements of the community. Myths and legends, then, contain the true values of these early people’s lives. The heroes around whom these myths are built were not real men but poetical heroes – physical embodiments of an anthropomorphic mode of thought who represent “the common sense, unreflecting judgement shared by an entire social order, people, nation, or even all of humankind” (“Il senso comune è un guidizio senz’ alcuna riflessione, comunemente sentito da tutto un ordine, da tutto un popolo, da tutta una naziona o da tutto il gener umano”). For example, amongst the many popular myths of the ancient Greeks that Vico was familiar with was the anonymous Hymn of Hermes (c. the 8th or 7th century BC). Hermes was son of the midwife Maia and the god Zeus. According to the myth, Hermes finds a tortoise, cuts off its limbs and scoops out the marrow, then, with the aid of reeds and strings, turns the creature into a lyre. In Vichean terms, Hermes is a poetical or imagined hero. His instinctive creative act of “metamorphosising” the tortoise into a lyre represents the spontaneous or unreflecting arising of values or ideas from the consensus of the community – the sensus communis. In the New Science, Vico turns to Homer to illustrate his belief that ancient heroes are poetic archetypes rather than real people. Works like the Odyssey and the Iliad are not the works of one man, says Vico, but “rhapsodes of which [the Greek people] were themselves the authors” (rapsòdi… de’ quali essi eran autori). Evidence of this, and of Vico’s view that “universals” are general terms for mutable principles and values rather than givens fixed for all time, is found in the section of the New Science entitled “Discovery of the True Homer” (“Della Discoverta del Vero Omero”) where Vico points out that in the Iliad, which was composed by a youthful Homer, that is “when Greece was young and therefore burning with sublime passions” (“quando era giovinetta la Grecia e, ‘n conseguenza, ardentte di sublimi passioni”), the hero possesses such attributes as pride, anger, and revenge, such as those embodied in Achilles, “the hero of violence” (“eroe della forza”), whereas the hero of the Odyssey, which was written when Homer was in old age, that is, “when the spirits of Greece had been somewhat cooled by reflection”, (“quando la Grecia aveva alquanto raffreddato gli animi con la riflessione”), was Ulysses, “the hero of wisdom” (eroe della sapienza”). Thus, says Vico, we see that “the Homer who was author of the Iliad preceded by many centuries the Homer who was author of the Odyssey” (“l’Omero autor dell’ Iliade avere di molt’ eta preceduto l’Omero autore dell’ Odissea”). In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey are not the works of one man, nor are they “absurd fantasies of helpless primitives”, but true representations of the spontaneous or unreflected judgements of the Greek people at different times in their history.

Gianfranco Cantelli reminds us that Vico considered his concept of the myths of the early poets as true histories of the customs of the ancient people of Greece as “the master key” to his new science. The methodology of Vico’s science, which advocates a careful and thorough examination of fables as historical documents, owes much to the work being done in Vico’s own time to Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736), the Protestant French editor of Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne (Ancient and Modern Library, 1714-22). As well as sharing Le Clerc’s view that ancient myths could be related to pagan history, Vico also took the view that the “universal” truths of the primitive man were not comparable to those of more civilised people. He agreed with Le Clerc that the history of the Hebrew people was separate from that of pagan history, and that myths were not constructed by cunning political and religious leaders in order to control the masses. However, it should be noted, that while, for Le Clerc, “the myth is a true and proper historical account, to be understood exactly like a modern historical narrative…[f]or Vico, myth constituted instead a primitive expression of fantasy”. In other words, while, for Le Clerc, myths represent a history of facts, for Vico they represent a history of the origin of ideas. Nonetheless, it must be accepted that Le Clerc’s concept of fables as historical documents had a decisive influence on Vico’s interpretation of myths.

Donald Phillip Verene, in his Vico’s Science of Imagination (1981), also reminds us that the key to understanding Vico’s science is his idea interpreting myths as representations of “universal truths” or, as Vico called them, “imaginative universals” (“universali fantastici”) which emerge in virtue of the spontaneous judgements of the sensus communis. As seen above, an example of what Vico means by myth as an “imaginative universal” is his view that heroes such as Homer, Hercules or Achilles were not representations of real heroic individuals but of a poetic thought of the heroic ideal that arose from the collective mind of the community. In the same way that each nation produced its own Jupiter, its own imagined deity, so too did each community produce its own ideal man. However, while this may indeed be the key to understanding Vico’s science, Harold Stone makes the point that the idea of the imagined archetype was not unique to Vico and that as early as the ninth century a similar notion was advanced by Agnellus da Ravenna, a writer whose work would certainly have been accessible to Vico since his book featured as a lead article in the same issue of the journal, Giornale de’Letterati, that reviewed Vico’s Study Methods of Our Time. Agnellus, an abbot, in his Liber pontificatis Ravennatenis, wrote the biographical history of the forty-five bishops of Ravenna. Notwithstanding the fact that in this work Agnellus clearly states that many of the accounts of the lives he chronicles have no oral or written tradition, he strenuously holds that from imaginative reconstructions based on portraits of these men, he could construct legitimate representations of the true character of each. Because these men were, like himself, bishops of the Church, Agnellus believed he could intuit all that was required to know of their lives. Thus, in the same way that Agnellus recreates imaginative universals of his saintly predecessors, so too does Vico’s early poets create mythical archetypes of all that they held virtuous.

Vico’s interest in natural law dates back to his youth when he was attracted to the writings of Suarez, Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf. Francis Suarez (1558-1617) was a Spanish philosopher who questioned whether individual nations had the right to establish their own legislative systems, and whether the law of nations was synonymous with natural law. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), of whose work Vico acknowledged “…enlarged his thoughts and gave him a strong onward impulse”, in his Law of War and Peace (1625), defined natural law as “the dictates of ‘right reason’ or ‘common sense’, summarised it as respect for others, equated it… with the law of nations, and declared that it would retain its validity even if God did not exist”. Grotius’ ambition was to establish a system of international law by arguing that, philosophically and historically, it was an extension of a rationality existing universally in the natural law of nations. While Vico acknowledges his debt to Grotius, in his New Science, he refers to Grotius’ work only to criticise it for failing to recognise the metaphysical importance of God. John Selden (1584-1654) was an English scholar who declared that natural law was “what natural reason establishes in all men”, and Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694), a German jurist, echoed Aristotle by positing the view that man is essentially a sociable animal, and that “living in society is living according to the law of nature”. While Vico accepted that the writings of Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf, or, as he called them, these “princes of the law of nations” (“principi… del diritto natural delle gente”), gave him insights into the way philosophy, he nonetheless held that their failure to recognise the difference between Hebrew law and pagan law, or, indeed, between historical law and philosophical law, was a serious error. Grotius, he rejected because he had severed law from religion; Selden was criticised for positing the view that the nature of early man was essentially benign, arguing that human nature was more beast than divine, and Pufendorf was reproached for his idea that man was “cast into the world without God’s aid or care” (“gittato in questo mondo senza niun aiuto e cura di Dio”). These thinkers were wrong to believe that ancients had been men and women like themselves, with thoughts and feelings like their own. For Vico, the nature of man is less the noble savage and more the Lucretian-style brute – Anthony Grafton, in his introduction to David Marsh’s translation of Vico’s New Science 1999, draws our attention to the fact that many scholars believe that Vico took his vision of the first men as bestioni – savage brutes – from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in which the “Roman poet described the gigantic sizes early beings attained and evoked the fear that thunder inspired in early men”. Thus, while Vico shares the view that natural law is a universal idea, unlike his “princes of natural law”, it is an idea which manifests itself in different guises during different stages of the ideal eternal history of humankind. It is a law that is a corollary of religion; it is ordained by providence, and it arises in virtue of the common sense judgements of the community - the sensus communis - to meet the spontaneous needs of the community.

As shown in his treatment of Grotius, Selden, Pufendorf, Vico makes something of a habit of denigrating many of those to whom he owed much. One other who meets this description is Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), whom Vico criticises for “making God an infinite spirit subject to fate” (“che dànno Dio in infinita mente soggetta al fato”) and for discussing “the commonwealth as if it were a society of shopkeepers” (“di repubblica come d’una società che fusse di mercadanti”), and yet whose doctrine of providence, Frederick Vaughan points out, bears a striking resemblance to that which would later emerge in Vico’s New Science. We first encounter Spinoza’s influence on Vico in his concept of providence which appears in chapter iii, “Of the Vocation of the Hebrews”, of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus where he says: “I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of God”. This concept is developed further when, in the immediately following paragraph, he asserts, “… to say that everything happens according to natural laws and to say that everything is ordained by the decree and ordinance of God is the same thing”. When we consider these remarks and one that appears later in the Tractatus, when Spinoza remarks that “God, and consequently His providence, are merely the order of nature”, we see that Spinoza’s concept is repeated almost verbatim by Vico in his New Science where he talks of “the eternal idea of God, who is eternal order” (“[l]’ idea eterna di Dio, ch’altro non è che ordine eterno”). Thus, while it may have suited Vico to decry the work of one whose work had been put on the Index of prohibited books, it seems that he had more in common with his Dutch Protestant contemporary than he was prepared to admit.
In his Autobiography, Vico identifies Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 55-120) as one of his early influences. Along with Plato, whom he salutes because he contemplates man as he should be, he salutes Tacitus because he contemplates man as he is. However, what Vico fails to say is that Machiavelli (1469-1527), a thinker much closer to his own time than his Roman historian mentor, also calls for man to be considered as he is rather than as he ought to be. Although Machiavelli is only mentioned twice by name in the New Science, it must be argued that his shadow looms large in Vico’s philosophy. For example, Vico’s remarks that “the supreme authority of laws follows the supreme authority of arms” (“il sommo imperio delle leggi va di séguito al sommo imperio dell’armi”), and “once warfare has made a people so fierce that human laws no longer have a place among them, religion is the only means powerful enough to subdue them” (“Ove I popoli son infieriti con le armi, talché non vi abbiano più luogo l’umane leggi, I’unico potente mezzo di ridurgli é la religione”), as Frederick Vaughan points out, bear all the hallmarks of Machiavelli’s Discourses. It should also be noted that Machiavelli’s acknowledged authority for this work is Tacitus. An authority, that is, in whom he shares respect, as we have seen, with Giambattista Vico.


4. Verum ipsum factum
Vico’s “big idea” is the principle of verum ipsum factum: the principle that men can only know to be true that which they themselves make. The discovery of this principle is considered to be unique to Vico, as well as his most important contribution to the history of philosophy. In discussing the Italian philosopher’s view that the world of men is made by men, Isaiah Berlin calls it “Vico’s greatest single claim to immortality”, while Edward Said not only describes Vico’s conception of it as an “exhilarating discovery”, but goes on to describe Vico as the “prototypical modern thinker… and [that] in order to understand the debt owed Vico… we must attempt finally to understand his work as having begun a significant process”. Although Harold Samuel Stone agrees that Vico’s principle is of significant importance to the history of philosophy, he is not so sure that the concept is peculiar to Vico alone. According to Stone, there is evidence that Vico may have taken his verum ipsum factum principle, at least in part, from the primary editor of the Elzevier Greek edition of the New Testament, Daniel Heinsius. It seems that Heinsius, in his Nonnus, Paraphrasus in Joannem (Paraphrase of the Gospel of St. John, 1627) draws attention to two specific references to making and knowing in the writings of St. John. According to Stone, Vico, who was familiar with Heinsius’ work, failed to acknowledge his debt to Heinsius because the 1627 edition of Nonnus was put on the Index of prohibited books in 1632. It should not be expected that Vico, who, as Stone reminds us, is known “to have played by the rules in these matters”, would bring himself to the attention of the authorities by acknowledging his debt to one who was condemned as a heretic. However, it must be argued that the connection that Stone makes appears to be a leap too far as the references of which he speaks do not make the same case for making and knowing as Vico. That is, the first, which appears in chapter 3, verse 21 of St John’s Gospel speaks of “the one who makes the truth” (qui autem facit veritatem), and the second is found in chapter 1, verse 7 of St John’s First Epistle and appears in the form of the negative where John, discussing God as light, says “and we do not make the truth” (et veritatem non facimus), clearly refer to truths which are created by a force which is other than man.

Notwithstanding the fact that Berlin hails the verum/factum principle as Vico’s greatest contribution to philosophy he does acknowledge that, by Vico’s time, it was a theological commonplace and that its

… doctrine ultimately stems from the Augustinian dogma that God by knowing creates, that for him knowing and creating are one, [that]… God alone knows all because he creates all; man, because he is made in God’s image, has limited powers of creation, and therefore knowledge only of what he himself creates and nothing else.

Evidence to support Berlin’s view can be found in Massimo Lollini’s belief that the most likely influence of Vico’s principle came from the Renaissance humanist, Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457). Valla, whom Lollini informs us Vico had read, held that the primordial experience of the passions was the basis of human culture. Danilo Marcondas, of the Philosophy Department of the Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, also recognises the influence of Valla on Vico and says that the latter’s verum/factum principle represents Valla’s view that “meaning should be seen as a creative activity… and that in consequence the use of language shapes our experience of the world both social and natural”. As if to underline the multifarious nature of Vico’s sources, Amos Funkenstein sees Thomas Hobbes as the inspiration for Vico’s verum ipsum factum principle. Vico’s connections with Hobbes are many, says Funkenstein: “[h]e too stresses he epistemological primacy of matters political over the physical sciences: verum et factum convertuntur, and civil society is for him as it was for Hobbes a human artefact”. M. H. Fisch and T.G. Bergin, in their introduction to their translation of Vico’s autobiography, point to the fact that Vico took from Hobbes the notion that the first founders of civil society, rather than being

philosophers filled with recondite wisdom which he had hitherto thought but man-beasts devoid of culture or humanity, yet guided by an obscure instinct for self-preservation that in time would draw them into social compact and lay the foundation-stone of civilisation.

In the New Science, Vico acknowledges that Hobbes’ aspiration to consider man within the whole of the human race was a noble one, however, he tempers his admiration by adding that Hobbes’ failure to recognise the role of providence in the origin of human institutions was a serious error. In the light of the above evidence, it seems fair to conclude that Vico may well have taken his verum ipsum factum principle from concepts that were already “in the air”, developed them, coined a phrase for them, and made the principle that emerged from them his own. If this is the case, then, by Vico’s own definition, it establishes him as a latter day theological poet: one whose creations are not drawn from some transcendent realm but are reflections of spontaneous common sense judgements of the people of the community.

5. La Scienza Nuova
Although Vico was vehemently opposed to Rationalism he was by no means anti reason. In fact the methodology of his New Science, the title of which was inspired by Bacon’s Novum Organum and “still more by Galileo’s Dialogue delle Nuove Scienze”, involves a careful and painstaking study of ancient myths, literature, and languages of past nations, so that one might uncover the true history of humankind. In other words, Vico advocates a reasoned study of the laws, institutions, principles and values of past nations, as ordained by providence, and recorded in their myths and legends, as the method of his new science. This method he calls the rational civil theology of divine providence. The concern for a systematic method of enquiry is not one that is peculiar to Vico but one that had been already employed by René Descartes. Thus, while he went on to reject Descartes’ philosophical approach, he did not do so without gaining from some advantage from his scientific method. As Cecilia Miller says:

… when reading Descartes one is struck more forcefully by the parallels with Vico than the contrasts. Repeatedly the same issues were addressed (imagination, memory, will, good or common sense) even though the conclusions are contradictory… both believed they had found a new method which would explain and unify all subjects.

Miller also makes the point that Descartes deserves to rank with Vico’s four other “acknowledged autori”, Plato, Tacitus, Francis Bacon, and Hugo Grotius. Autori, that is, who, although he found imperfections in their respective philosophies, strongly influenced his own philosophical approach.

If Vico was once a Cartesian, he was also a Baconian. Indeed, while he eventually rejected Cartesianism, it could be argued that he remained something of a Baconian throughout the remainder of his life. I say “something”, for, while he held that the scientific method of enquiry advanced by Francis Bacon could not, as Bacon intended, reveal the essence of things in nature, Vico employed the same principles to investigate those things which we can know: the laws, institutions, customs, and practices made by man. In the New Science, Vico acknowledges his debt to Bacon, but informs us that he has transferred the philosophical method of the English philosopher “from the natural phenomena studied in his Thoughts and Conclusions on Nature to our human civil institutions” (“dalle naturali, sulle quali esso lavorò il libro Cogitata visa, trasoportato all’umane cose civile”). Using this method, which Bacon calls “contemplating and seeing” (“cogitare videre”), Vico aims to separate “… the truth from falsehood in whatever popular tradition has preserved for many centuries” (“… vi si vaglia dal falso il vero in tutto ciò che per lungo tratto di secoli ce ne hanno custodito le volgari tradizioni”). However, while Vico was prepared to pay homage to Bacon, he also held that the English philosopher, in dedicating himself to the study of nature, “had misunderstood both the capacities of the human mind and the development of the human race”. For Vico, only God can understand the secrets of nature, human beings should concentrate their studies, not on nature, which, since it remains outside them, they can never know, but on that which they can know: the laws, institutions, customs, and practices which they themselves make. For Vico, because Descartes’ “clear and distinct” ideas are a priori, already in the mind, they are not made by man, therefore they cannot be said with certainty to be true; and since they cannot be held to be true, they cannot be held to be the criteria for other truths, let alone demonstrate knowledge of the existence of God. Although man imitates God by creating, his creations do not privilege him to know the true nature of things, merely to knowledge of things created from his own imagination. Thus, for Vico, man’s reasoning powers are constrained by his imagination. The truths on which physics depends are truths which man himself have created and therefore cannot be held to be absolute or unalterable truths. In short, man cannot, as Bacon held, attain knowledge of things in nature; rather it is that he can know only that which he has created from within the boundaries of his own imagination. For Vico, these “imagined” truths derive from a consensus between knowledge amassed in virtue of the Baconian experimental method and the powers of reason as determined by man’s time and place in the ideal eternal history of humankind.

6. Conclusion
During Vico’s formative years Naples was the “freest thinking society in Italy”. Amongst the philosophies being explored at that time were the Epicurianism of Pierre Gassandi, the modern naturalism of the Renaissance pioneers Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella, and the experimentalism of Galileo and Bacon. Although the prevailing interest was in Gassandi and Descartes, over time, it was the Cartesianism that became the dominant philosophy of the age. Indeed, so pervasive was this philosophy that “the highest praise of a philosopher was that he understands the Meditations of Descartes”. While Vico was initially drawn into the Cartesian web, in virtue of his willingness to investigate the works and thoughts of other writers and thinkers, it became his policy never to align himself to any one system of thought. Indeed, so committed was he to the policy of keeping oneself open to the ideas of others that, in his oration “On the Study Methods of Our Timed” (“De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione”), he exhorted “young students to grapple with all kinds of disciplines, and to discourse about their advantages and disadvantages, so that they may attain those and escape these” (“i giovani ad ogni genere, non è conviente che ne discorra, affinchè seguano i vantaggi ed evitino i difetti”). By the time Vico came to present this oration in a series of orations given to the Royal University of Naples between 1699 and 1707, the nuclei of much that would later emerge as the New Science was beginning to crystallise in his mind. However, while it should be acknowledged that what did emerge is a philosophical tour de force, it should also be recognised that Vico’s magnum opus is less the work of an original thinker and more a conduit in which and through which others’ ideas and concepts, albeit in a novel format, are collated and presented.