New Science

• Book: The New Science. by Giambattista Vico. Yale University Press, 2020

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Description

"The New Science is the major work of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. First published in 1725 and revised in 1730 and 1744, it calls for a reinterpretation of human civilization by tracing the stages of historical development shared by all societies. Almost unknown during his lifetime, the work had a profound influence on later thinkers, from Montesquieu and Marx to Joyce and Gadamer. This edition offers a fresh translation and detailed annotations which enable the reader to track Vico’s multiple allusions to other texts. The introduction situates the work firmly within a contemporary context and newly establishes Vico as a thinker of modernity."

Discussion

Vico's Prefiguration of a Radically Constructivist Theory of Knowledge

Ernst von Glasersfeld:

"Vico’s battle cry “Verum ipsum factum” — the truth is the same as the made (factum and “fact” both come from the Latin facere, to make!) — has been quoted quite frequently since Vico was rediscovered in our century as a cultural historian and a philosopher of history. His revolutionary epistemological ideas, however, are rarely mentioned, let alone explicated. According to him, the only way of “knowing” a thing is to have made it, for only then do we know what its components are and how they were put together. Thus God knows his creation, but we cannot; we can know only what we ourselves construct. Vico even uses the word “operation” and thus preempts the main term launched by constructivists such as Dewey, Bridgman, Ceccato, and Piaget, in our century. Vico, of course, still tries to establish a connection between human cognitive constructions and God’s creation. Reading his treatise on metaphysics, one gets the impression that he occasionally frightened himself by his own ideas. Although the theory of knowledge he has developed is logically closed because man’s knowledge is seen as man’s construction and does not (and could not) pertain to God’s ontological creation, Vico is reluctant to stress that independence. Because of that reluctance, his picture of the world could be seen as a counterpart to Berkeley’s metaphysics. For Berkeley, the principle “esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived) does the same trick as Vico’s statement that God knows everything because he has made everything. For both, ontology is assured through God’s activities. Vico, however, also opens another way towards ontology that I find much more acceptable, because it does not involve any form of rational realism. He suggests that mythology and art approach the real world by means of symbols. They, too, are made, but the interpretation of their meaning provides a kind of knowledge that is different from the rational knowledge of construction.

For us, the important difference between Vico and Berkeley, as well as later idealists, is that Vico considers man’s rational knowledge and the world of rational experience simultaneous products of man’s cognitive construction. Thus Vico’s “knowledge” is what, today, we might call an awareness of the operations that result in our experiential world. Though Berkeley says “that all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, their being is to be perceived or known,” and thus presupposes the activity of the intellect, his accent always lies on the being, whereas Vico invariably stresses human knowledge and its construction.

There can be no doubt that Vico’s explicit use of facere, his constant reference to the composing, the putting together and, in short, the active construction of all knowledge and experience come very much closer to Piaget’s genetic epistemology and to modern constructivism in general, than did Berkeley. Nowhere does that become clearer than in a statement with which Vico anticipated the epistemological attitude of some of today’s philosophers of science: “Human knowledge is nothing else but the endeavor to make things correspond to one another in shapely proportion.”

(https://antimatters2.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/2-3-02-radical_constructivism.pdf)

More information

• Giambattista Vico's Stages in World History