ABSTRACT
Three years after the publication of his autobiography in 1728, Vico put together the material for an addendum in view of a possible revised edition. In these notes he also took into account the writing and publication of the autobiography itself, since in his estimation it had certainly been one of the important events in his recent past. He provided details of the circumstances in which the autobiography was published and offered a concise description of the objectives he had intended to reach and of the intellectual mode that he had adopted in writing it. ‘‘Scrissela da filosofo,’’ he says in the thirdperson style of the autobiography itself, ‘‘he wrote it as a philosopher,’’ an expression by which he means not only that the autobiography deals with philosophical themes but also that it deals with them philosophically. Vico had no doubts that The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself, as his autobiography is called, was a work of philosophy, to be included in the canon of his other philosophical works on its own merits rather than as a biographical introduction to them. For Vico the autobiographical exercise was a form of philosophical research which used introspection and self-narration as methods of analysis and presentation, consistently with the larger concerns of his thought, which are about the self-education of man and nations in history.1
