ABSTRACT
The idea of a science of humanity, which is the final informing principle of Giambattista Vico's thought, has its historical and its ideal roots in the tradition of classical political humanism. For Vico, as for the classical tradition of humanism, man's humanity is quintessentially his sociality, his power, that is, to generate, to sustain and to fructify the relations of community. The duality of philosophy and philology represents the projection on to the plane of the science of humanity of the alternality of the 'certum' and the Verum', in the first instance, materially. The actual problem of the natural law became for Vico the discovery or determination of a principle of mediation between these dimensions of the law. It is this pattern, extended and clarified to meet the extension of the material, which recurs at the level of the science of society.
