[Pico della Mirandola] On Being and Unity (1491)
Added 2022-08-10 15:09:33 +0000 UTCTranslated by Victor Michael Hamm (1943)
Text available here (see especially explanatory notes): http://www.esotericarchives.com/pico/beinguni.htm
This is the only surviving section of Pico’s planned magnum opus “The Harmony” or “Concord of Plato and Aristotle,” a work that stands unfinished on account of its author’s untimely death in 1494 at the age of 31. It has been described by Brian Copenhaver as “the least eccentric of Pico’s works of philosophy“. By understanding Being, Unity, The Good, and The True all as one thing – God – Pico attempted to reconcile the kataphatic and apophatic approaches to the divine in four steps, and thereby attempted to bridge the gap between the Aristotelian schoolmen and the mystical Neoplatonists (i.e., Ficino, in line with Plotinus) who differed on the question of whether “Being” and “the One” (or Unity) were really the same thing or somehow different to one another.
