Italian · 1668–1744
Giambattista Vico spent his career as a poorly paid professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, writing a masterwork that almost no one read in his lifetime. The New Science proposed that human history follows cyclical patterns and that the earliest forms of human thought were poetic and mythic. Ignored for over a century, Vico was rediscovered by Michelet, championed by Croce and Berlin, and adopted by Joyce as the structural principle of Finnegans Wake.