The Culture of the XVIIIth Century and the Return to the Human Being

Abstract

Analyzing the works of Giambattista Vico, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant, the article searches into the typological peculiarities of the 18th century culture, shows a fundamental refocusing of the whole cultural process from the cosmological idea to the anthropological one, gives the humanist reasons of culture and the definition of its personalized form, reveals the self-identification of a human being not as the object but the subject of learning and creative work.