On the way to «Creative Empathy»: the concept of truth as a social community enterprise in G. B. Vico’s «New Science»

Abstract

There is no need to have recourse to sociology and to psychology in order to refute many worthy philosophers, in arguing that philosophical ideas, the history of philosophy, and philosophy itself, cannot be reduced to a chaotic and impersonal flux of problems and ideas. As Nietzsche says: «Little by little I have managed to form an idea of what all philosophies up to now have been: they have been the confessions of their authors, a kind of autobiographical memoirs, without their wishing it, or being aware of this». As Nietzsche shows, besides the categories for analysing the sociology of knowledge, it is useful to take into consideration too the character factors of the individual philosophers, as constants determining not only the actual construction of theories but also, and chiefly, their intelligibility.