The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico's rediscovery of "the most ancient wisdom" of the senses (a wisdom that is "human foolishness" or humana stultitia) his emphasis on the importance of civic life and his professional obligations remind us of the humanist tradition. Vico is a precursor of systemic and complexity thinking as opposed to Cartesian analysis and other kinds of reductionism. ” Developments in both metaphysics and the natural sciences abounded as the result of Cartesianism.

Vico is a precursor of systemic and complexity thinking as opposed to Cartesian analysis and other kinds of reductionism. He is also well known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum ("true itself is fact" or "the true itself is made") a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology. While Vico was not strictly speaking a historicist interest in him has often been driven by historicists (such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White).