Vico, corpo, storia

Despite having been little studied, the body constitutes a key notion in Vico’s thought. The essay aims at analyzing this bodily centrality in Vichian thinking by highlighting the deep connection between body, temporality, and theory of knowledge, between body, sensibility, and aesthetics. Following this connection a new vision of knowledge thus emerges, rooted in that significant plexus of perceptive and imaginative intuitions represented by the body reminding us that the thought does not arise from an abstract entity such as the mind, but from an essential compromise with the body influencing and defining the nature of thought itself. A new way of thinking with (and through) the body, because, as Vico writes, we are nothing but “mind, body, and speech”.