Imaginative universals and human cognition in The New Science of Giambattista Vico

Abstract

Universals have occupied a central role in philosophy ever since the Socratic quest for definitions. The need to find concepts both universal and shareable is rooted in the Western philosophical tradition, in order to capture and control the disorder that besets human life. In other words, Universals occur as part of a rational attitude by which to substantiate knowledge and its evaluation. My aim in this paper is to confront Vico’s discovery of imaginative universals with the classical paradigm of rational thought that, formed by abstraction from empirical experience, reduces the knowledge to a rigorous process of inference. Against this barbarism of reflection, what Vico does in his works is to chart out possible new ways in which science can innovate itself.