Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e le Conclusiones

In December 1491, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola announced that he wanted to hold in Rome, in the following year, a public discussion on nine-hundred theses concerning theology, philosophy, and magic, in order to prove that all the different cultural and religious traditions, from which these theses derived, could be reconciled. Pope Innocent VII judged some of Pico's theses heretical, so the discussion never took place. What remains of this ambitious project is the text of the Conclusiones nongentae. It is a work that is hard to understand, consisting of a list of short propositions, which we do not know how Giovanni would ave reconciled during the oral discussion. This paper proposes an interpretation of the Conclusiones, under the assumption that Pico conceived them as ideas for an intercultural or interreligious dialogue. I argue that Pico's work helps to establish some basic requirements for promoting an intercultural attitude: the importance of giving attention to every culture, a gnoseological explanation for the existences of different opinions, a consideration about the role of philosophy in interreligious dialogue. On the other and, the paper shows some defects in intellectual projects, such as the Pico's, that aim to build a dialogue based on an appeal to a common logos or ratio.