In hmolscience, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was an Italian philosopher noted for his anti-reductionism responses to Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Cartesianism—about which, in 1695, as he relates in his autobiography, upon returning to Naples following a nine-year tutoring stint at Vatolla, he found the “physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters.”
Where Descartes had argued, supposedly, that the history of the social world could never be objective in the manner of mathematical physics, Vico argued that because history and society are created by persons, we can understand them better than the physical world, which is alien to us. [1]
Vico, in his De Italorum Sapientia, stated the following:
“To introduce geometrical method into practical life is ‘like trying to go mad with the rules of reason,’ attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance. Similarly, to arrange a political speech according to the precepts of geometrical method is equivalent to stripping it of any acute remarks and to uttering nothing but pedestrian lines of argument.”
which, is in direct opposition to argument followed by Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), who said we can use geometrical methods to explain the passions.
References
1. (a) Vico, Giambattista. (1725). The New Science of Giambattista Vico (translators: Thomas Bergin and Max Fisch). Cornell, 1948.
(b) Brown, Richard H. (1976). A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences (pg. 10). University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Further reading
● Nickles, Tom. (2007). “Vico versus Voltaire: The Natural Sciences versus the Humanities” (Ѻ), WolfWeb.unr.edu.
External links
● Giambattista Vico – Wikipedia.
