Giambattista Vico (or Giovanni Battista Vico; 1668–1744) was an Italian philosopher and jurist who is credited with having founded the philosophy of history, as well as the modern understanding of history. He provided painstaking analyses of ideas in the past and accounts of how they developed over time, due both to varied circumstances and events, as well as the content of the ideas themselves. In that sense, Vico invented intellectual history.