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Animal Studies After Its Own Critique: Roland Borgards on Three Corrections
A short new essay traces Animal Studies through three corrections: first the humanities ignored animals, then animal studies ignored environments, then everyone ignored that the whole critique was Western. Roland Borgards names the blind spots,…
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Why Plato Feared the Poets: A Vichian Answer
Why did Plato banish the poets? A new paper reads him through Giambattista Vico and finds an answer: poetry works by imaginative universals, stamping the soul directly and bypassing reason entirely. Dangerous not because it…
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Vico in the Margins: Herzfeld on the Words That Build States
Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld argues we should stop saying “the state.” Words like polis, civitas, and moeang carry buried histories that shape how we imagine belonging today. He credits Vico with the method — then leaves…
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Making History Knowable: Vico, the New Science, and the Perils of Praising a Precursor
In 1744 a poor Naples professor asked whether history has laws. Giambattista Vico’s answer: we can truly know only what we ourselves make — so law, language, and the state are knowable as nature never…
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The Two Eyes of History: Vico’s Forgotten Geography
The philosopher Giambattista Vico called geography and chronology the two eyes of history. Elio Manzi asks why geographers have looked away for three centuries, blaming provincialism, ideology, and an old suspicion of Naples. A persuasive…
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Giambattista Vico and the Foundations of Historical Reason: The Verum-Factum Principle and its Theological-Hermeneutical System
Vico’s “the true is the made” is usually quoted and dropped. A new article argues it only works alongside his theology of providence—making Vico’s system theological, anthropological, and hermeneutical at once, and reshaping his contested…
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Vico, Contemporary, Philosopher
Russo argues Vico’s Scienza Nuova anticipated twentieth-century epistemology by replacing Cartesian/Galilean certainty with verum factum—truth as inseparable from human making. Redefining mathematics as a product of human freedom rather than divine language, Vico shifted knowledge’s…
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Fantasia and the Machine: Vico’s Challenge to Artificial Intelligence
Andrea Sartori argues that Eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico offers a timely framework for understanding artificial intelligence. Where AI simulates human language and creativity, Vico reminds us that genuine intelligence is embodied, metaphorical, and biological.…
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Metaphor as method: G. B. Vico in the 21st century
In a recent article published in Forum Italicum, Sartori proposes using metaphor as a method in addressing the humanities’ relevance amid artificial intelligence. By engaging with Vico’s humanistic pedagogy, it explores metaphor’s role across various…
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Giambattista Vico as Character: Joyce, Jünger, Borges, and the Vichian Recorso with Dustin Peone
In a recent episode of the Hermetix podcast with James Ellis, Dustin Peone discussed his book Vico and Literature: One Character in Search of an Author. The conversation is a primer on why Vico’s strangest…
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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.
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