ABSTRACT
Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher at the border between the humanistic tradition and the first signs of the advent of Enlightenment. But at the same time, his privileged position of immersion in the legacy of Southern Italian humanism, in the middle of the battle between Ancients and Moderns, allowed him to assume a different stance with respect to the dominant Cartesian rationalism of the time. He committed himself to the endeavor of developing a philosophical anthropology and a new methodology for the study of the relationship between the development of human mind and the development of civilization. He can be considered one of the most important, though neglected, ancestors of cultural psychology. In this chapter I will discuss the most relevant aspects of Vico’s theory and trace the development of his intuitions down to the twentieth century, when his thought has been rediscovered by cultural psychology.
