The Providence of Associated Minds: Agency in the Thought of Giambattista Vico and the Origins of Social and Cultural Psychology

Abstract

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) has been one of the most innovative and influential thinkers in the history of human and social sciences. Although psychology sometimes underestimates his contribution, Vico was the first scholar to develop a systematic view of the relationship between mind and culture. This chapter presents his ideas about the co-development of psychological and cultural processes and about the philosophical view of individual and collective agency. I show how Vico’s “new science” about human facts will directly influence the birth of social and cultural psychology, through his reception, for instance, by Wilhelm Wundt and Carlo Cattaneo. The intellectual project that Vico pursued all his life was to develop a specific theory and method to account for the history of human development of civilization as well as to the full range of human products, arts, law, customs, language, institutions, etc. Besides, he developed several concepts—such as imagination, common sense, verum factum principle, embodiment, poetic logic, imaginative universals, genetic principle, etc.—that directly questioned the mechanistic and reductionist view of mental processes. For these reasons, it is worth rediscovering today Giambattista Vico as a fundamental source of ideas that could contribute to the development of new reflections and directions in psychological science.