Vico in his 350th anniversary

Manuela Sanna

2018 marks the 350th anniversary of the birth of Giambattista Vico (Naples 1668-1744), a thinker who still has something significant to say today and who can still help us to interpret the world in which we live. Many of the themes his works deal with can still capture the interest of the contemporary reader. The idea of phantasy certainly plays a paramount role: Vico hypothesises the presence of a specific knowledge of the human body, flanked by the activity of memory, which for him is not primarily a conservative faculty but rather a creative and inventive capacity, thanks to the use of ingenium. And certainly it is important that Vico develops a very original concept of common sense, which applies to all people, in any place and at any time: for Vico human nature is not only the nature of the world of men, but precisely, as a human nature, the nature common to all men. Thus Vico succeeds in inserting himself into the debate with the culture of his time, proposing an eccentric and extraordinary concept such as the one of poetic wisdom. In the New Science he tells the story of the way in which man becomes man, proceeding from bestial beginnings, where everything was body, to the formation of a reflexive mind, which, at the same time, does never deny its strong emotive and emotional components.