Giambattista Vico

Born Giovanni Battista Vico on 23 June 1668 in Italy, he trained as a philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during a century drunk on rationalism. He found Cartesian reductionism useless for understanding actual human life and became an apologist for classical antiquity and Renaissance humanities instead. In 1725 he published his magnum opus, Scienza Nuova - the New Science - a systematic attempt to organize all the humanities as one discipline that could track the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall. He coined "Verum esse ipsum factum" (truth is itself something made), an early shot of constructivist epistemology, and inaugurated the modern philosophy of history, though he never used that phrase himself. He died 23 January 1744, recognised now as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures - a thinker who saw what the age of reason couldn't.