Keywords: History of Ideas, Italian Literature, Niccolò Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei, Giambattista Vico.
This essay outlines the main theses of the «History of Ideas» devised by
Arthur O. Lovejoy. It points out the features, the ways, the aims but also the
epistemological weakness of this method. This euristic perspective is then
applied to some cases taken from the Italian literature. The examples concern
the relationship between Machiavelli and the XVIth century naturalistic
philosophy, and the connection between science and literature. From this
point of view is paradigmatic Galileo’s case. This scientist was interpreted
from a literary point of view in an incomplete and distorting way because the
linguistic and stylistic necessity of a scientific discourse was ignored. The last
example of the history of ideas concerns the ermeneutic role of rhetoric in
Vico’s anthropology.