Vico and Descartes: From Rationalism to Historicism

Abstract

<p>In this work, we shall argue that the originality of Giambattista Vico in the history of anti-Cartesianism lies not simply, as it is generally believed, in his dissent from the anti-historical tenets of Cartesianism, but in his radical departure from the Cartesian conception of the universe. For Vico, in our view, was one of the very first, if not the first, thinker to recognise fully the implications of Cartesian mechanism and to, consequently, reject the Cartesian conception of nature and (correlatively) the Cartesian conception of man. His "nuova scienza", with its intrinsically dynamic universe and its fundamentally historical man, must therefore be understood as a fundamentally anti-Cartesian science of reality.</p>