Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (February 24, 1463 – November 17, 1494) was an Italian Renaissance humanist philosopher and scholar. Most famous for the events of 1486, when at the age of twenty-three, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of Man which has been called the "Manife ...

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Pico was a younger son of the family of the Counts of Mirandola and Concordia, feudal lords of a small region in the province of Emilia-Romagna. A precocious child with an amazing memory, he was schooled in Latin, and possibly Greek, at a very early age. Intended for the Church by his mother, he was named a papal protonotary at the age of ten and in 1477 he went to Bologna to study canon law. At the sudden death of his mother two years later, Pico renounced canon law and began to study philosophy at the University of Ferrara. During a ...

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Biography, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Writings, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Footnotes

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He belonged to a family that had long dwelt in the Castle of Mirandola (Duchy of Modena). To devote himself wholly to study, he left his share of the ancestral principality to his two brothers, and in his fourteenth year went to Bologna to study canon law and fit himself for the ecclesiastical career. Repelled, however, by the purely positive science of law, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy and theology, and spent seven years wandering through the chief universities of Italy and France, studying also Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac ...

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Biography, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Writings

Read more here: » Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Encyclopedia II - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Biography

In the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), Pico justifies the importance of the human quest for knowledge within a neo-Platonic framework. He writes that after God had created all creatures, he conceived of the desire for another, sentient being who would appreciate all his works, but there was no longer any room in the chain of being; all the possible slots from angels to worms had been filled. So, God created man such that he had no specific slot in the chain. Instead, men were capable of learning from and imitating any existing creature ...

See also:

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Biography, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Writings, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Footnotes

Read more here: » Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Encyclopedia II - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Writings