Abstract

With all its shades the body constitutes a key feature of the vichian thought, yet so little studied. This essay aims at analyzing this bodily centrality by highlighting the profound link between body, temporality and theory of knowledge, between body theory of sensibility and aesthetics. A new vision of knowledge comes to light, rooted in that significant tangle of perceptive and imaginative intuitions represented by the body that reminds us that the thought does not arise from an entity as pure as the mind, but from an essential compromise with the body influencing and defining the nature of thought itself. Finally, in the last part of the contribution, through the comparison with the project of «somaesthetics», advanced by the American philosopher Richard Shusterman, the centrality of the bodily thought of Vico is confirmed in any discourse concerning the aesthetics.