Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
1463–1494 · Renaissance Humanism · Prominent
Pico was a humanist scholar in Florence. Every other creature arrives with a fixed nature, and in the Oration on the Dignity of Man he wrote that man arrives with none, free to sink toward the beasts or climb toward the angels by his own choosing, with nothing in him settled in advance. He learned Hebrew and read Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and started a Christian version of it.
Signature
The position Pico is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Meaning
- leans Inherent
- Agency
- Libertarian Free Will / Radical Freedom
Positions on the 3 axes the sources answer
- Identity
- leans Unchanging (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (75 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
17 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Pico refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Other
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Union with God / Freedom
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Eidetic Intuition
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Intuition / Grounded in God / Receptive Intellect
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Libertarian Free Will / Radical Freedom
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Creation ex Nihilo
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Linear Progressive
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Sacred Tradition / Self-Sovereignty
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Speech Act / Sacred Speech
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Law
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Judgement / Ascent of the Soul
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Path to the Divine
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Existence Precedes Essence / Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?