Inter Alias Philosophorum Gentium Sectas, Et Humani, Et Mites: Gianfrancesco Pico and the Sceptics

Abstract

The more heavily a Renaissance thinker drew upon the Ancient sources, the more closely his modern interpreters are expected to follow his practice. This article, part of a larger project to compile a catalogue of Gianfrancesco Pico’s massive borrowings from Sextus Empiricus,1 aims at providing an introductory map of Pico’s treatment of Sextus, whose writings handed down Greek Pyrrhonism to both Renaissance philosophers and modern scholars. The concern here is limited to some arguments about Pico’s encounter with Scepticism. To begin with, a few words about the two characters of our story. Sextus Empiricus (late-second century AD), the most comprehensive source of Ancient scepticism, was recovered by Italian humanists as early as the 1440s2; nonetheless, both his Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes [PH] and Adversus Mathematicos [M] remained unpublished until the Latin editions of the 1560s.3 Gianfrancesco Pico was born in 1469 – a contemporary of Machiavelli and Cajetan – and died in 1533, killed by a nephew in his hometown of Mirandola. His affair with Scepticism is recorded in the Examen Vanitatis Doctrinae Gentium et Veritatis Christianae