ABSTRACT
Giambattista Vico’s great breakthrough, and the generative principle of his “new science,” is to reverse the science of the Enlightenment based on investigating the book of Nature, claiming to discover in mathematics its native language. In spite of his momentous discovery of the historical dimension of humanity, Vico still believes, like Aristotle, that the proper object of science can only be eternal essences. Vico reads history as the record of humanity’s unwitting self-reflection by projection of itself onto the world. Vico’s new science reflectively reconstructs the mind’s knowledge of itself through the principles of its own modifications. Vico’s “new” science reflects historically on humanity’s role in “making” the historical world it inhabits. The nature of the self-reflection is to be self-engendering—but also oriented to a creative power or “providence” that transcends it, one that is the Other working in and through its own activity.
