Re-Evaluating Pico: Aristotelianism, Kabbalism, and Platonism in the Philosophy of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

ISBN-13: 9783030595807 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 251 str.

Sophia Howlett

Spis treści

Preface

Introduction

A Contested Site

Pico’s Contribution

Chapter 1: Life and Works

Family and education

The rise and fall of a public life

A private life?

Pico’s death

Building the myth

Works

Chapter 2: Pico’s Intellectual Context – Aristotle, Plato and Pico’s Syncretism

The question of allegiance

Aristotelianism

Platonism

Humanism

Syncretism

The prisca theologia and mathematical philosophical-mysticism

Chapter 3: The Third Pillar – Pico and Kabbalism

Introduction to Kabbalism

The History of Kabbalism

Key Texts

Pico and Kabbalism

Chapter 4: Pico’s Universe

God as the Ein-Sof

God’s Love

The Angelic Mind

The Active Intellect

Populating the Angelic Mind

Celestial and natural worlds

Chapter 5: The way home

Mutability and self-fashioning

Our anatomy

Immortality of the soul

Ascent

Love and beauty

Jacob’s Ladder

Conclusion

O autorze

Dr Sophia Howlett is President of School for International Training (SIT), USA, and the author of Marsilio Ficino and His World (2016).

Blurb

This book offers a re-evaluation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the prominent Italian Renaissance philosopher and prince of Concord. It argues that Pico is part of a history of attempted concordance between philosophy and theology, reason and faith. His contribution is a syncretist theological philosophy based on Christianity, Platonism, Aristotelianism and Jewish Kabbalism. After an introduction, Chapter 2 discusses Pico’s career, his power-relations and his work, Chapters 3 and 4 place his three pillars of Platonism, Aristotelianism and Kabbalism in their historical context, examines shared histories, and introduces the scholars around Pico who contributed so much in each of these traditions (introducing, for example, Christian Kabbalism), including exploring Pico's complex relationship with Marsilio Ficino. Chapter 5 examines the problems of concordance within Pico’s cosmology and metaphysics, including the question of God and the role of the Intellect. Chapter 6 describes Pico’s ‘exceptionalist’ version of the mystical ascent as an individualized ascetic experience. Pico eschews the contemporary desire to use a renewed christian thinking or christian-classical metaphysics to change the world (towards a Golden Age or a 'second coming') to present a personal path to God, with no return to the world.  

 

Dr Sophia Howlett is President of School for International Training (SIT), USA, and the author of Marsilio Ficino and His World (2016).