Vico's countervailing emphasis on humanistic inquiry--what the German scholar Wilhelm Dilthey would later popularize as the Geisteswissenschaften or "spiritual sciences"--has largely been responsible for an interest in Vico that during the last century has engaged some of the most influential intellectuals in Europe and America, including Benedetto Croce, Karl Lamprecht, Aby Warburg, Karl Lowith, Erich Auerbach, Isaiah Berlin, Arnaldo Momigliano, Hayden White, and John Milbank, among others.

] "In den Geisteswissenschaften wird der Begriff der Wahrheit durch den Begriff der "Akzeptanz" ersetzt.

When Oakeshott wrote Rationalism in Politics nearly sixty years ago the axiom that any observer must inherently be part of the phenomenon observed--essentially the Uncertainty Principle proposed by the physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927 but already adumbrated in Wilhelm Dilthey's Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften of 1883--was not yet the cliche it has subsequently become.