Defining the Emotions in the Post-Cartesian Humanism of Giambattista Vico

The interest of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in the emotions spanned his career as a philosopher and academic at the University of Naples. ¹ Significantly, his first publication was a poem printed in 1693 with the title Affetti di un disperato (The Affects of a Man in Despair). ² In his final work, the third edition of Scienza nuova (New Science), published posthumously in 1744, the emotions are placed at the heart of his philosophy of history as the fundamental civilizing impulse necessary for society. ³ Although Vico never offers a definition of the emotions in the manner of Aquinas, Suarez, or Descartes, his writings serve as an interesting interlingual case study for tracing their semantic development as he shifts from the Latin of Orationes inaugurales (Inaugural Orations, 1699–1707), his treatise on metaphysics and epistemology, De antiquissima italorum sapientia (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 1710), and his monumental treatise on Roman law, Diritto universale (Universal Right, 1720–1722), to the Italian of his later historiographical works (in particular the three editions of the Scienza nuova, 1725, 1730, and 1744). ⁴