~Giambattista Vico~

Giambattista Vico:

~ "Truth itself is constructed"
~ Italian philosopher, rhetorician, and historian
~ Truth is shown through construction or creation, not observation
~ "The New Science"- focuses on civil life and its construction
~ Civilization is a cyclical development: the divine, the heroic and the human; Each of these ages is characterized by tropes

~The divine age relies on metaphor
~ The heroic age relies on metonymy and synecdoche
~ The human age relies on reflection and popular democracy through irony

~ Not well taken during his age, but influenced many after him including Northrop Frye, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce

~ Placed in humanist tradition
~ In reference to poets, Vico intentionally evokes Greek sense of "Creators"

~Vico considered himself his own teacher
~Today Vico influences humanities and social sciences
~ Because of Vico's 3 year absence from school he developed a melancholy and irritable attitude
~ Vico first began publishing poetry, then moved on to publish philisophical works
~ He composed and delivered lectures (including those on rhetoric and rhetoric eloquence)
~ "Necessity of nature"- with time societies and human beings move increasingly to realize their
"full potential"