Continuation And Transcendence: Vico's Criticism Of Augustine's Philosophy Of History

To make a comparison between the philosophy of history of Augustine and Vico is mainly on the basis of their relationship. The contribution of Vico is not only that he carries on Augustine's philosophy of history, but also that he transcended Augustine's. In the philosophy system of Vico, there remained many Augustine's ideas, including the concept of God, the traditional differentiation of holy history and secular history, and the idea of "knowledge comes from creation" which underlies "God knows as He create". However, Vico objected to Augustine's theological approach which placed deity as the starting point of human historical inquiry, and adopted a new approach to delve into the mystery of human history in terms of humanity. His relative conclusions were according to historical facts in a much deeper extent in comparison with those of Augustine's. Moreover, being different from Augustine's static perspective towards history, which relies on God, his revelation and Augustine's explanation of Bible, Vico employed a historical perspective, based his study on the language relics and treated history as a dialectical development process. Therefore, Vico's methodology is more exact and reliable than Augustine's, which makes Vico's conclusion more desirable. In all, Vico developed Augustine's philosophy of history in that his approach is more humanistic in ontology and more empirical and positive in epistemology. This development is just the value of Vico's history thought.