ABSTRACT
Before the twentieth-century postmodernist criticisms to scientific knowledge and even before the nineteenth-century Romanticist reaction to the devitalization of the universe, Giambattista Vico mounted a profound critique of Cartesian cosmology. It is very interesting to notice that Vico's proposal for ascribing more epistemic power to the human sciences than to the natural sciences is based on a deep reconsideration of the nonrational capacities in the knowing process. The notion of imagination has a very long history in Western philosophy. The contrast of Nicholas of Cusa's imaginatio with Vico's fantasia is useful to highlight not only the radical novelty of Giambattista Vico, but also the tradition to which he is giving continuity, about three hundred years after Cusanus. Vico's is the modern version of the doctrine of the living mirror: we are able to understand human affairs because we have the capacity to transform ourselves into the examined object.
