Consciousness and imagination in the anthropological view of G. Vico

This study is intended to follow up and illustrate the theoretical steps through which G.B. Vico defined the concept of “Consciousness” (coscienza) in the works that preceded his masterpiece, the Scienza Nuova. The theme of consciousness is elaborated by the Neapolitan philosopher in a very different way from Descartes’s proposals, since it comes out by approaching verum to facere and, later, verum to conformari. This displacement occurs by means of a theoretical passage through the level of conscire, outlining a deep gap between feeling (sentire) and imagining (immaginare). Vico works on a possible definition of the concept of “consciousness” and moves a tight critique to skeptic and neostoic currents posing the question about how to became able to feel something while striving to imagine in a conscious way. The whole anthropological framework which allows the definition of the human is built on this theoretical passage and on the etymologic reconstruction of conscire as cum-scire and of conscientia as a part of scientia. Keywords: consciousness; imagination; G. Vico; science