Just as Descartes's clear and distinct ideas were becoming the measure of philosophy, a poorly paid professor of rhetoric in Naples argued the opposite. Mathematics is certain, Vico held, precisely because humans made it; nature, being God's work, can only ever be observed from outside. He compressed the principle into the formula *verum ipsum factum*: the true and the made are the same. The consequence was radical — the domain we can genuinely know is not nature but the world we have built: languages, myths, laws, rituals, in short, history.

*The New Science*, first published in 1725 and rewritten in 1730 and 1744, tries to found the science of that domain. Vico proposed that peoples pass through three ages — of gods, of heroes, and of men — each with its own language, its own law, its own form of imagination. He read Homer not as a single genius but as the collective voice of the heroic age. The dissolution and fresh start that follow each cycle he called *ricorso*: a scheme of history built on return rather than progress.

The book was barely read in his lifetime; outside Naples, Vico died unknown. His influence surfaced a century later among the Romantics and historicists: Michelet translated him into French, Marx cited him in a footnote to *Capital*, and Joyce credited him for the cyclical architecture of *Finnegans Wake*. Today Vico is regarded as the first systematic European argument that the historical and cultural sciences might need a method of their own, distinct from that of physics — arriving, unaware of it, at a road Ibn Khaldun had opened three centuries earlier in the *Muqaddimah*.