Giambattista Vico and "The Method of Studies in Our Times": A Criticism of Descartes' Influence on Modern Education

Abstract

Giambattista Vico was born in 1668, at a time when Italy was just beginning to recover from the enervating effects of more than a century of clerical and foreign domination. In 1559, a century before Vico's birth, the long contest between France and Spain for supremacy in the peninsula had been decided in favor of Spain by the treaty of Cateau-Cambresia. Following this, hope for the independence of Italy had definitely been abandoned. The minor princes submitted to being Spanish vassals, and the Spanish rulers joined hands with the Roman Curia in a strict surveillance of the thought and action of the Italian people. The Church, fearful of the spread of Protestantism, drew more straight and narrow the way of orthodoxy, increasing at the same time the degree of punishment for those who strayed. The decadence and torpor that engulfed Italy during this period has come to be called secentismo or baroque.