“Habitar el tiempo y la historia”. Vitiello interprete di Vico

This contribution retraces the main stages of philosopher Vincenzo Vitiello’s Vichian interpretation. A first, intriguing line of inquiry concerns the extension of the mathesis universalis to history and, consequently, the evocation of the language of the origins, the unity of voice and gesture, the language that precedes, precisely, the separation of the word from the thing. An unavoidable point of connection between the first phase of the research brought together in Vico. Storia, linguaggio, natura and the subsequent investigations is the volume L’ethos della topologia, which outlines the fabric of a highly refined philosophical hermeneutics. The most recent work, L’ora e l’attimo, concerns the particular way, suggested by Vico, of “inhabiting time and history.” The scholar is convinced that behind the theory of historical cycles and the description of the “fortunate” cycle lies a strong moral sentiment, one that bears on the deepening of the “earthliness of the human.” Ultimately, the problem of the split between eternity and time –a crucial problem of modernityreproposes, on another level, the question of the ingens sylva as the unconscious of history, Hegel’s “power that is horrified by the light,” “the ever-uncertain time of human beings”.