The philosopher Giambattista Vico stands apart from most Enlightenment thinkers in his insistence that the study of history must differ fundamentally from the study of nature. For Vico, the natural world is made by God, and therefore only God can truly understand it; human beings, by contrast, have made their own history and their own social institutions, and it is precisely this fact that makes history genuinely knowable to us. He called this principle the verum-factum correspondence: the true and the made are convertible, so that we know with certainty only what we ourselves have constructed.

From this premise Vico drew a sweeping conclusion: the humanities — philology, jurisprudence, rhetoric, and the history of myth — are epistemically superior to natural science, not inferior to it, because their objects are artifacts of the human mind. Poetry, for Vico, was not decorative embellishment; it was the original language in which early human beings organized their experience. Primitive peoples thought in images and metaphors because abstract reasoning was beyond them, and the great Homeric epics should therefore be read as historical documents encoding the worldview of an entire age.

Vico's reputation suffered during the high tide of positivism in the nineteenth century, when thinkers such as Comte dismissed humanistic inquiry as a preparatory stage that rigorous natural science would eventually supersede. Yet Vico anticipated, by nearly two centuries, arguments that would recur prominently in twentieth-century hermeneutics: that interpretation is irreducible to causal explanation, and that understanding a text or a practice requires grasping its meaning from within rather than subsuming it under universal laws.