 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Count of Concord, Pico della Mirandola. The phrase nominative determinism sounds like it comes from one of the more technical areas of philosophy, but actually it has nothing to do with our favourite intellectual discipline. Rather it refers to the supposed phenomenon that your name determines your profession, or your fate more generally. Yes, there really is a meteorologist named Amy Fries, an acoustic engineer named Ron Rumbel, and even a Russian track and field athlete who competes in the hurdles named, wait for it, Maria Stepanova. As if that weren't good enough, the internet will be very happy to tell you of another hurdle competition where Last Place went to the Bulgarian runner Vanya Stambalova. People have been chuckling over this sort of thing for a long time. There was the Latin phrase nomin est omen, your name is a sign. It's a saying well illustrated by the fact that Pico della Mirandola held the title Count of Concord, Concordia being a landholding of his family near Pico's home city of Mirandola. As his contemporaries did not fail to note, this is almost too good to be true, because Pico loved to demonstrate the concord between apparently conflicting authorities. He was heir to both a family fortune and the harmonizing project of predecessors like Cardinal Bessarion, who had distanced himself from his teacher Platon by arguing for the fundamental agreement between Plato and Aristotle. The traditional way to do this, as we saw with Bessarion, was to present a rather Platonic version of Aristotle. Pico took the opposite tack, arguing that Platonists who departed from Aristotelianism were also departing from the original teachings of Plato. This at least is the line taken in a treatise called On Being and One, written at the behest of Pico's friend Poliziano and against the teaching of his other friend, Marsilio Ficino. Aristotle had stated that oneness and being coincide, in the sense that everything that is has unity, which seems plausible. After all, you can't be a giraffe without being one giraffe. But this contradicts the fundamental Platonist doctrine that the first principle of all things, the one, transcends being. It was Plotinus who first set forth the idea. He equated being with the realm of the Platonic forms, which reside in the transcendent intellect that it is only the first subordinate effect of the highest principle, the one. As we know, Ficino adopted Plotinus' system, identifying the one with the Christian god and the intellect with angel. We can find this in Ficino's great treatise The Platonic Theology, and also in his commentaries on Plato's dialogues, which followed the late ancient Neoplatonists in asserting that for Plato too, one transcends being. For this, he could point to several passages in Plato, like the statement in the Republic that the good is beyond being in majesty and power. But for Ficino, the best evidence was to be found in two other dialogues of Plato, the Sophist and the Parmenides. Picco's On Being and One offered a contrary reading of these dialogues, simply denying that anything in the Sophist could support an elevation of oneness over being, and arguing against the whole Neoplatonic tradition by insisting that the Parmenides has no metaphysical teaching at all. This dense and enigmatic argumentation is not an implicit map for a cosmic hierarchy, as interpreters like Plotinus, Proclus, and Ficino would have thought, but only a kind of dialectical or logical exercise. The debate concerns more than Platonic exegesis and the agreement of two great authorities. The Neoplatonic interpretation was welcomed to Ficino because it gave him a way to articulate the transcendence of God in philosophical terms. If God is the One and intellect or angel is being, then God is beyond being, transcendent above everything that is. Against this, Picco affirms an understanding of being that we saw once upon a time in Duns Scotus. The realm of being is just everything that exists, or as Picco nicely puts it, everything that is outside of nothing. And of course, God exists. Having said that, Picco admits that God is a very special kind of being, and to take account of this uses terminology familiar from another 13th century scholastic, Thomas Aquinas. We can say that God is ipsum esse, or being itself, and reserve the Latin term ends, which we might render as what has being, only for created things. This is like the distinction between whiteness and white things. But of course, to say that God is the paradigmatic case of being hardly warrants the claim that he is beyond being any more than whiteness is beyond white. So Picco affirms another scholastic doctrine, inspired by Aristotle, which we have come to know under the name of the theory of transcendentals, that being correlates with unity and other general properties such as truth and goodness. Ficino thought that all this missed the point of Plato's metaphysics. In 1494, the same year that Picco died at the tender age of 31, Ficino published his commentary on the sophist. Here he restated the Neoplatonic reading, and finding another way to pun on Picco de la Mirandola's name, wished that that marvelous youth, Mirandus Ilei Urenis, had been more careful to weigh the arguments brought by Ficino before criticizing him, his teacher. Especially by the standards of the combative and competitive world of Renaissance scholarship, Ficino's reaction to Picco was remarkably mild. This goes both for the debate over being and the one, and also for Picco's attacks on Ficino over the interpretation of Plato's theory of love, which we covered in an earlier episode. Perhaps as implied by the passage just mentioned, Ficino was inclined to excuse the precocious Picco because of his age. Not everyone was so forbearing with him though. Back in 1486, this wunderkind of the Italian Renaissance had run into trouble with the church authorities by flaunting his learning, not to mention his wealth, in stunningly provocative fashion. Only 23 at the time, Picco already fancied himself a leading intellectual, having received rigorous training in a variety of fields. He'd learned church law in Bologna, been exposed to hardcore Aristotelianism and the dangerous ideas of a Varroes at Padua, and studied scholasticism in Paris. As we know, he'd also sought guidance from Jewish scholars to help him learn Hebrew and study the Kabbalah. All of this had, in Picco's opinion, prepared him to debate all comers at a months-long session of disputations at Rome. He sent invitations across Italy, and offered to pay travel expenses for those who were willing to come argue with him. What would be debated? Why, the ideas of Picco of course, as set down in a list of 900 propositions or theses. Well, actually not all the theses are labeled as representing Picco's ideas. Some sections are labeled as setting forth his own innovative proposals, but much of the list consists of propositions ascribed to a variety of earlier authorities with whom Picco may or may not agree. He is true to his title as the Count of Concord, insofar as he emphasizes the doctrinal harmony between three pairs of intellectual forefathers. Of course, he mentions Plato and Aristotle, There is no natural or divine question in which they do not agree in meaning and substance, although in their words they seem to disagree. And he also claims he can reconcile the divergent teachings of Aquinas and Scotus, and of Avicenna and of Averroes. But even these latter pairs are not said to agree on everything, and in fact Picco can be quite critical. He elsewhere charges Aquinas with contradicting himself, never mind contradicting Scotus, and in general he is aware of the healthy amount of disagreement between scholastics. But he believes that as we go further and further back in history, to the ancients like Plato and Aristotle, and beyond them to the Egyptians and Hebrews, we find an ever-greater degree of consensus. In part for this reason, the 900 Theses need to be read with caution, and not just as a list of things Picco asserts in his own right. Even when he clearly does endorse a given proposition, it is often not clear why he would do so. The whole point is that he is prepared to discuss and where appropriate defend these theses in the tradition of the scholastic disputed question. In some cases we can fill in Picco's intended argument, for instance in the case of the propositions that touch on that same question of oneness and being. One thesis has it that only God is so fully substance that in no sense is he not substance. And God's paradigmatic being is again explained using the contrast between whiteness and white things. But the theses range over so much territory, covering everything from the Eucharist to the inadequacy of Aristotle's explanation of the saltiness of the sea, that we'd need Picco himself to tell us all that he had in mind. Which of course was the whole idea. Unfortunately though, the debate was called off, after the pope had a look at Picco's list of theses. In 1487, Picco was condemned, not for the obvious reason that he was acting like an obnoxious and arrogant rich kid, but on the more serious charge of heresy. Of the 900 theses, 7 were condemned and 6 censored. Picco fled to France, though as usual his aristocratic connections shielded him, and he eventually made his way back to Italy and enjoyed the protection of the Medici. As we saw in a previous episode, he arrived in Florence just as Ficino's translations of Plato were being published. Characteristically, Picco was far from chastened and wrote a furious defence or apology. Really though he should not have been surprised at the reaction of the papacy given that some of the 900 theses are phrased in a deliberately provocative way. Take for instance the proposition, not everything God wills through his benevolence is effective. It's possible to imagine even Ficino choking on his Tuscan wine while reading that in his villa. But when you read it in context, you realize Picco just wants to make the uncontentious point that, even though God wants all of us to be saved, some of us will be damned nonetheless thanks to our wicked use of free will. In his apology, Picco firstly excused himself on the grounds that some theses were merely being proposed for discussion, despite being false in his own opinion. But when it came to the condemned and censored theses, he slipped naturally into a more provocative mode, arguing that at least some of these propositions were so evidently true that denying them was senseless or led to contradiction. A striking example is the proposition, no one believes that something is true just by willing to believe it, so that it does not lie within the free power of humans to believe an article of faith to be true just by wanting to. On the face of it, this looks like an all-purpose rationale for pardoning heresy. If I can't help whether or not I believe the teachings of the Church, how can the Church punish me for failing to do so? No surprise then that the Church deemed this statement unacceptable if not itself heretical. Picco argued that, far from being outrageously controversial, the thesis is simply obvious. Surely we can't just believe whatever we want, rather our beliefs respond to argument and evidence. In this case, Picco claims, the whole faculty of the University of Paris would be on his side. An unexpected feature of the Inquisition against Picco is that the Church seems to have had no problem with the substantial sections of the list devoted to magic and kabbalistic teachings. We'll get into Picco's ideas about magic in a future episode. For now, it suffices to note that 15th century intellectuals could apparently discuss magic freely as long as the discussion didn't stray into theological territory. As for kabbalah, this is nothing that should lead Picco into conflict with Christianity, at least in Picco's opinion. One of the more breathtaking theses Picco meant to defend in Rome states that a thorough grasp of the Hebrew language gives one the means to understand the ordering of the sciences and knowledge of all things. And in the famous oration he wrote as an introduction to the planned debate, he said that kabbalah is the heart of understanding, that is an ineffable theology of super-substantial deity, the fountain of wisdom, that is, an exact metaphysics of intelligible angels, and the river of knowledge, that is, a most sure philosophy of natural things. He added that this mystical tradition would, rather ironically, also provide Christians with the means of refuting Judaism. That promise is fulfilled in the 900 Theses, which has a whole section of propositions showing how Christianity can be confirmed with kabbalistic arguments. Here Picco draws on many of the ideas we looked at quite a while ago in this series when we were discussing Jewish kabbalah. He refers to ein sof, a name signifying the transcendent infinity of God, and to the seferot, letters that have both numerical and rich symbolic meaning for the kabbalist. A study of Picco's sources has shown that he draws on a range of authors for his kabbalistic ideas, but above all on Menahem Rachanati, whose writings Picco used as a guide to such central kabbalistic texts as the Zohar. Picco also used his Hebrew learning in a biblical commentary of his own, which is called the heptapros. It explains the meaning of the passage in Genesis about the seven days of God's creation and rest. Here Picco once again turns the methods he learned from his Jewish teachers against their religion. He contends that the chronology of ancient Hebrew learning predicts the appearance of Christ as the Messiah and offers a torturous analysis of the first word of the book of Genesis, beresit, to extract from it a message about the divine Father and Son. In short, there is no science that assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and the kabbalah. More fundamentally, Picco's heptapros is structured in keeping with the system he apparently took from his kabbalistic sources, though it resonates well with the Platonism he shared with Ficino. This system recognizes three so-called worlds, namely the sublunary realm where we live, the celestial world, and then an intelligible world which may be identified with Platonian intellect or angel or lisepirot. Along with this syncretic metaphysical picture, Picco offers a syncretic interpretation of Genesis, according to which the scripture simultaneously has multiple meanings. A single phrase may refer to all three worlds at once, and also to human nature, with humanity making up a kind of fourth world. Or the phrase might also signify the interrelation of these four worlds, and so on, until we have seven levels of interpretation to match the seven days. So just to give one example, the distinction between heaven and earth in the Genesis account represents the contrast between matter and form in the sublunary realm, the sun and the moon in the heavenly realm, the parts of the angelic hierarchy in the intelligible realm, soul and body in the human, and so on. Picco is at pains to emphasize the originality of his approach to the biblical text, but it should be noted that the concept of multiple valid meanings is far from innovative. That had been a fundamental tool of scriptural exegesis since the ancient church fathers. But this particular assignment of hermeneutical layers to levels of a cosmological metaphysical hierarchy is Picco's invention. The Kabbalistic elements of Picco's philosophy and theology are certainly remarkable and distinguish him from older peers like Poliziano and Ficino. He knew this himself, as we can see from his own comments about his Hebrew studies, proudly boasting to Ficino of his progress and stating frankly in his commentary on Benivieni's poem about love that it was an interest in Kabbalah that primarily drew him to the study of Hebrew, not you'll notice an interest in the Old Testament. But we should not get so carried away by this aspect of his thought that we overlook his equally deep immersion in the scholastic tradition. We've already seen that schoolmen like Aquinas and Scotus played an important role in the 900 Theses, which begins with a warning that Picco has not imitated the splendor of the Roman language but the style of speaking of the most celebrated Parisian disputers, since this is used by almost all philosophers of our time. Which brings us to one last important theme I want to cover from Picco's precocious and all-too-short career, his views on the style in which philosophy should be done. For these views, we can turn to yet another famous document from his pen, a letter written to his colleague, Ermolao Barbaro. This humanist gave his colleagues another chance to have some fun with nominative determinism, because they could praise Barbaro's excellent Latin as a bulwark against the barbarism of scholastic Latin. But when Barbaro himself made a complaint along these lines in a letter to Picco, he provoked an extraordinary response, a letter in which Picco adopted the persona of a barbarian scholastic speaking in favour of stylistically poor, but intellectually solid writing. What could be more philosophical than disregarding the rhetorical quality of a work and paying heed only to its content? Plato knew this, which is why he excluded the poets from his ideal city. And Picco sounds like Plato critiquing the tricks of the sophists, as he argues that eloquence serves only to mislead its hearers. Of course, Plato is not a very good spokesman for the barbarian view, since he combines sound doctrine with stylistic excellence. So Picco draws a contrast between two other thinkers of the past. On the one hand, there is Duns Scotus, admirable for his philosophy, but, as anyone who has tried to read him will agree, far from elegant in his mode of presentation. On the other hand, there is Lucretius. His poem, which as we saw was rediscovered by Poggio, is a wonderful example of elegant Latin poetry, yet its teachings are anathema to Picco. The sweet verse disguises the purest poison of godless Epicureanism. The delightful irony of Picco's letter is that it is itself a model of polished Latin. This was already noted by Barbaro, who wrote back to Picco saying, you kill off those you defend by showing that eloquence is necessary after all. The irony was surely intentional, but still today, readers are not sure how to take it. At the end of his letter, Picco steps out of the persona he has adopted, which, by the way, was itself a standard rhetorical technique, to say that he himself does not necessarily agree with the barbarian whose perspective he has just been taking. Given that Picco produced the self-consciously scholastic 900 Theses, he was clearly open to working within the barbaric style, but he also took great pains to learn eloquence in both poetry and prose. His ideal was, apparently, to combine the two, as Plato and Cicero had done before him. In the end, he cited Cicero himself for the idea that if forced to choose, one should prefer true teaching over fine words. As he said in another letter, If a philosopher is eloquent, I am pleased. If he is not, I do not mind. A philosopher has one duty and aim, to unlock the truth. Whether you do so with a wooden or a golden key is of no concern to me. In this episode, we've surveyed a pretty astounding range of achievements by Picco. Yet his most famous work is one I have referred to only briefly, The Oration he wrote to introduce his 900 Theses. Posthumously entitled On the Dignity of Man, it is one of the most widely read texts of Renaissance philosophy, and for good reason. It's often taken as a foundational document for a trend we see in European thought more generally in the 15th and 16th centuries, which goes under the label of Renaissance individualism. A central theme of The Oration is human nature, its mutability, and its place in God's creation, and that will be our own theme next time, when we'll have one more case of nominative determinism as I explain what it means to be a son of Adam. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.