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Summary

The chapter introduces Vico’s praxis epistemology and situates it within the maker’s knowledge tradition. It shows how Vico transformed the tradition into an ambitious philosophical anthropology, a philosophy of history, culture, and existence, which informs human epistemic possibilities, strengths, and limits. It is argued that this philosophy supposes and outlines an alternative, non-Cartesian version of modernity – a version based on the practical certainty that we are makers of our history and symbolic world.

Published in 1710, Giambattista Vico's groundbreaking On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians argued, against Descartes, that knowledge is more about making and producing than speculating and theorising. Historicised activities precede any kind of ethereal abstraction. Maurizio Esposito situates Vico's epistemology of praxis within the longstanding tradition of the maker's knowledge perspective and shows how Vico transformed the ancient idea that knowledge is a form of making into a humanist and existential principle. Humans do not merely fabricate tools and transform nature; they also create symbolic spaces in which different forms of thinking and understanding evolve. Esposito explores the possibility that Vico envisioned a non-Cartesian version of modernity, where praxis, rather than reason, drives human history. This alternative modernity has directly or indirectly influenced some of the most significant philosophical traditions of the past two centuries and is more relevant today than ever.

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Introduction

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Vico and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition

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Introduction

Summary

Vico and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition