[10] Born to a bookseller in Naples, Italy, Giovan Battista Vico attended several schools, but ill health and dissatisfaction with the scholasticism of the Jesuits led to his being educated at home by tutors.

Evidence from his autobiographical work indicates that Vico likely was an autodidact educated under paternal influence, during a three-year absence from school, consequence of an accidental fall when the boy was seven years old.

[11] Four years later, in 1699, Vico married Teresa Caterina Destito, a childhood friend, and accepted a chair in rhetoric at the University of Naples, which he held until ill-health retirement, in 1741.

[11] Throughout his academic career, Vico would aspire to, but never attain, the more respectable chair of jurisprudence; however, in 1734, he was appointed historiographer royal, by Charles III, King of Naples, at a salary greater than he had earned as a university professor.

In the 1708 commencement speech De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (On the Order of the Scholarly Disciplines of Our Times), Vico said that whoever "intends a career in public life, whether in the courts, the senate, or the pulpit" should be taught to "master the art of topics and [to] defend both sides of a controversy, be it on Nature, Man, or politics, in a freer and brighter style of expression, so he can learn to draw on those arguments which are most probable and have the greatest degree of verisimilitude"; yet, in Scienza Nuova, Vico denounced defending both sides in controversies as false eloquence.

As Royal Professor of Latin Eloquence, Vico prepared students for higher studies in the fields of Law and of Jurisprudence; thus, his lessons were about the formal aspects of the canon of rhetoric, including the arrangement and the delivery of an argument.

In lectures and throughout the body of his work, Vico's rhetoric begins from a central argument (medius terminus), which is to be clarified by following the order of things as they arise in our experience.

In the tradition of classical Roman rhetoric, Vico sets out to educate the orator (rhetorician) as the transmitter of the oratio, a speech with ratio (reason) at the centre.

Widely disseminated by the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Descartes's method was rooted in verification: the only path to truth, and thus knowledge, was through axioms derived from observation.

Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) ("Of the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language").

In it, Beckett sees a profound influence of Vico's philosophy and poetics—as well the cyclical form of the Scienza Nuova—on the avant-garde compositions of Joyce, and especially the titular Work in Progress, viz.

They belong to the era of Herder and Wolff, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great twentieth century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius.