Two Ideas of Human Nature: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Thomas à Kempis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the questions that many people contemplate in their lifetime is the idea of human nature. In this essay I will seek to examine and compare the idea of human nature in the minds of Christian humanists during the Renaissance to that of late Medieval Christian mystics. The Oration on the Dignity of Man, written by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Pico) provides an insight into the mind of a Renaissance humanist, while The Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas à Kempis illustrates the thought process that was characteristic of a late Medieval Christian mystic. Pico believed that humans are a great miracle and it is within their nature and capabilities to become something great in the world, something just below the level of God.[1] à Kempis held the belief that human nature, like the idea found in Genesis, was corrupted by the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. It can be found in his writings that he believed that human nature is something that is detrimental to the individual and should be controlled by calling on the grace of God.[2] The different points of view found in the writing of Pico and à Kempis can be traced to the sources of their inspiration. In writing The Imitation of Christ, à Kempis drew his inspiration only from the Bible. Pico, like many other Renaissance humanists, looked for truth about human nature not only in the Bible but also by studying other classical works such as the ancient Greeks and Arabs. [1] Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). [2] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Chicago: Moody Press, 1958).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".