Sebastiano Mosti

Home university and country

Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (France) / Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele (Italy)

Short vita

Third year PhD (2026-2027).

Scientific positions or activities

Since November 2024 – PhD Student in Philosophy both at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University and at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan (international co-direction of the research).

Important scientific functions and memberships

Member of Società Italiana di Studi sul Secolo XVIII (SISSD).

Member of the History of Concept Group.

Member of Centro di Ricerca Interdisciplinare di Storia delle Idee (CRISI).

Member of Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM).

Member of Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee editorial team.

Member of Felice Mosca Press editorial team and blog Editor-in-Chief.

 

Duration of the scholarship

01/10/2026 – 31/12/2026

 

Research project

Visualizing Time in the Eighteenth Century: Images and Tropes in Vico's Historiographical Method.

This project aims to demonstrate that Giambattista Vico offers a decisive eighteenth-century genealogy of the image-based transformations of historiography. Its central claim is that Vico’s theory of history rests on a single, internally bipartite turn toward images: visual images, which organize historical visibility, and linguistic images, which organize historical meaning. The broader ambition of the research is to rethink Vico as a theorist of historical representation. His work shows that history becomes intelligible only through images: icons that make the past visible, and tropes that make it narratable. In this sense, Vico provides one of the most powerful early models for a pictorial and rhetorical theory of history, in which images are not secondary illustrations of the past, but constitutive forms of historical knowledge itself.

 

Publications in the field of Enlightenment research

Contributions to journals and anthologies

Mosti S., Forms of Order: Vico’s Poetic Wisdom and Lévi-Strauss’s Science of the Concrete [Forme dell’ordine. Sapienza poetica in Vico e scienza del concreto in Lévi-Strauss], in «Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica», CXVII, (2025), 3, pp. 647-661. DOI: 10.26350/001050_000531.

Mosti S., Culture within Nature: Lógos and Zoé between the New Science and the Elementary Structures of Kinship [La cultura nella natura. Lógos e zoé fra la Scienza nuova e Le strutture elementari della parentela], in «Quaderni di Inschibboleth», n. 21, (2024), pp. 229-246. DOI: 10.1400/298072.

Mosti S., Gestures, Bodies, Singing. At the Origin of the Language in Scienza nuova of 1744 [Cenni, corpi e canto. All’origine del linguaggio nella Scienza nuova del 1744], in «Lo Sguardo», n. 37, (2023), pp. 149-170. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13829554 .