- Lived:
- 1668–1744 · Naples, Italy
- Tradition:
- Counter-current of the early Enlightenment; founder of the philosophy of history and ancestor of the human sciences
- The Big Idea:
- We can truly know only what we ourselves have made — so the world of history and culture, made by human beings, is the one great territory of knowledge that belongs to us completely.
- In their words:
- "The world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind."
- If you remember one thing:
- While all Europe followed Descartes into mathematics and physics, one poor rhetoric teacher in Naples argued that the real "new science" was history — and it took the world a century to notice he was right.