Vico’s Poetic Wisdom And It’s Implication Of The View Of Truth

Giambattista Vico (1668-1774), an Italian philosopher, philologist, esthetician and jurist, is the important founder of the Western humanities and philosophy of history. Vico’s thoughts are mainly reflected in his masterpiece New Science.In New Science, Vico eliminated the conceits of nationalities and scholars, and settled in the beginning of human beings. Using "Poetic Wisdom" as the master key of the new science, Vico began to explore the origin of human society and the development of human history. The "Poetic Wisdom" is the most crucial concept in the New Science, which refers to the wisdom created based on imagination. It has four main characters-intercommunity, concreteness, creativeness, and negativeness, which were gradually formed by the development of human history. And the foremost three basic criteria-religion, wedding and funeral, which generated from those four main characters, deduced the three eras of human society:the era of Gods, the era of Hero, and the era of People. During the self-evolution process of the Poetic Wisdom, Vico built the external appearance of his new science theory, which is distinguished from that of natural science. By including mythology, legend, poem and other aspects discarded by Cartesianism into the science system, he established different extension of the new science.The new explanation to the truth criterion in terms of epistemology enabled Vico to build the edifice of new science. The view that "truth means creation" is the core principle of Vico’s epistemology and the meaning of new in new science. Cartesianism believed that we can get knowledge from rational intuition and logical deduction. However, based on his background of Catholicism, Vico defined the difference between truth and certainty and held that Cartesianism could not provide scientific certainty. The proposition of "truth means create" pointed out that the process of creation and the process of recognization could be synchronous which means we could get truth and knowledge during the process of creation. This view is a response to the argument between phronesis and theoretical wisdom in the ancient Greece, as well as an answer to the question-what is knowledge-one main topic in the Renaissance Age.Although it did not have much impact in the academics of the eighteenth century, the creative thinking of Vico got tremendous responsefrom thinkers of the nineteenth century. According to Croce, Vico is the root of the nineteenth-century western philosophy.