Things collected and things seen in the philosophical painting of Vico's New Science

Abstract

Through Vico's etymological method it is possible to see relations between a materialist approach and the themes of childhood and the primitive world, which involves an interest in historical questions linked to the agricultural and religious world of origins and cognitive questions linked to the relations between touch, vision and intellect. The etymology of cogitare as “to harvest” and of intelligere as “to read” provides the bases for a theory of cognition decisively applied to the Dipintura of the Scienza Nuova, which serves as an introduction to the work and which reveals the gnoseological horizon of its pretensions already put to the test in his first texts, especially with regard to the theme of rationality and human wit.