Vico Contra Dialectic

Vico was not opposed to logic, but thought that its centrality in modern educational systems was damaging: “it throws into utter confusion, in our adolescents, those powers of the youthful mind each of which should be regulated by a systematic study of specific subject matters; as, for instance, memory by the study of languages, imagination by the reading of poets, historians, and orators, and wit by instruction in linear geometry . . . .

“The intensive training in logic which they receive at the start of their educational process prematurely leads our young men to criticism. There is an inversion of the natural course of the mind’s development, by which natural course we are led first to learn, then to judge, and finally to reason; whereas, by the current practice, the student is taught the rules of exact judgment before those of right learning. The result is that we raise a youth incapable of expressing himself except in a devastatingly arid and jejune way; a generation of non-doers, who, disliking action, sit up in judgment about all matters.”