Metaphysics and human science

Abstract

The paper examines some key places in G. Vico's work, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), in which the distinction between physics and metaphysics is never transformed into absolute distance, just as the heterogeneity of the infinite with respect to the finite is not dissolved. This is the great theme of the new metaphysics, concerned with reconciling itself with ‘our religion’, Christianity, and the limits of human reason in controversy with ‘the first true meditated by Renato Descartes’. Man is not only the meeting point of nature and spirit but also the place of evil, of original sin, and yet vis veri, according to Augustine's lesson that helps correct Malebranche. The theoretical novelty lies in the assimilation of the ingenious faculty to the formative forces (memory, imagination and fantasy) capable of carrying out synthetic operations, devalued by Cartesian gnoseology and psychology. If the verum is the factum, the latter is the fruit of ‘fictiones’, i.e. of mental constructions made by the ingenium and its ‘eye’, the ‘phantasy’, capable of referring the metaphysical prototype of the divine truth to human operations.