A Historiographical Problem

Why is the life of an author and particularly that of a philosopher of any interest? The belief that philosophy was something with a history originated, at least in the West, with Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Philosophers. All the same, if the life of a philosopher is a bios theoretikos, and what matters in philosophy is theoria, what is the value of a bios as such?

As Eugenio Garin has often noted, a study of the fortune and reception of Pico's thought over the course of time is long overdue. The philosopher's reputation has varied significantly; in the last century, it was subject to reactions that were alternately too “modern” or too conservative. In the nineteenth century, the figure of Pico struggled to disentangle itself from a web of fantastical anecdotes that presented him as a young wealthy nobleman of prodigious memory, a connoisseur of arcane disciplines, an expert in oriental languages, a man condemned by the church, and a friend of both Lorenzo de' Medici and Girolamo Savonarola. Despite this trend, a number of French historians and Italian scholars did manage to publish a wealth of unknown documents and archival material that became the basis for research in the next century.

In the twentieth century, the situation underwent a profound change. As Garin once again noted, Pico's significance and contribution to the age of humanism, especially in the fields of philosophy and science, were reconsidered.