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Can a Machine Detect Metaphor in Court? Hindi Judgments, Vico, and the Limits of Legal Literalism
Somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, a judge writes that justice tips a scale. Nothing was weighed. Now a machine has been taught to notice — and it catches roughly one figure in three. Vico, three centuries…
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Why Did a Handful of Religions Swallow the World? Alan Strathern’s Big Picture
Four religions took the map. Thousands of nameless traditions vanished. Alan Strathern says historians stopped asking why, and wants the question back — with Vico, Sahlins, and a very wide lens. A cheerful argument for…
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The Geometers of God: How Politics Shaped Mathematics in Bourbon Naples
Naples, 1839: a professor throws down three geometry problems like a gauntlet. Behind the duel sits God, kings, and the terrifying question of whether algebra might let just anybody think. Massimo Mazzotti shows how politics…
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Hands on the Wall: How Philosophy Can Help Us Read Prehistoric Cave Art
Somebody crawled hundreds of metres into a cold Pyrenean cave, held up a hand, and blew red powder at it. Twenty-seven thousand years later we are still squinting at it. What if we were to…
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Before Descartes: Ernesto Grassi, Vico, and the Quarrel with German Idealism
Everyone says modern philosophy began with Descartes, alone by a stove, doubting everything. Ernesto Grassi cheerfully disagreed. He thought it began much earlier, with orators who trusted words before proofs. Vico agreed heartily. Hegel, unfortunately,…
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Was Vico the First Constructivist? Bharvad on the Foundations of Active Learning
Giambattista Vico argued we truly know only what we ourselves have made. Three centuries later, schoolchildren build volcanoes and call it pedagogy. A new paper traces constructivism’s family tree.
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A Philosophy Made of Shells: Bennett Gilbert on Rococo Ontology
Eighteenth-century Europe covered its walls in gilded shells, sagging cartouches, and furniture that appears to be levitating. Frivolous? Bennett Gilbert thinks all that plaster was arguing a philosophy: matter isn’t real, and God keeps redoing…
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Vico Wrote His Masterpiece Three Times. A New Edition Finally Lets Us Read All Three.
Imagine writing a masterpiece, then correcting every single printed copy by hand — twice — before starting over on Christmas Day. Giambattista Vico did. A new edition finally treats his three attempts as three books,…
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Is This Any Good? Richard Davies and the Problem of Judging Work That Belongs Nowhere
Richard Davies writes a book chapter that belongs to no single discipline, then asks a harder question: how would anyone know whether it is any good? His answer draws on Aristotle, MacIntyre, Collingwood, and Vico…
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The Anthropocene as a Crisis of Knowing: What School Forgot
Is the climate crisis really a crisis of knowledge? A new essay traces seven steps from prehistoric toolmaking to the atomic bomb, arguing that schools taught us to analyze the world but not to belong…
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Vico’s thought has never belonged to a single discipline, a single century, or a single language. Neither does this blog.
Here we publish short essays on Giambattista Vico and the long afterlife of his ideas — historical, genealogical, contextual, theoretical. Contributions come from an international community of scholars and readers, in English, Italian, and French.
We welcome new voices. If you are working on Vico, or on the traditions that shaped him and the ones he shaped in turn, we would like to read what you have written.
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