And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode

The Count of Concord Pico de la Mirandola.

The phrase nominative determinism sounds like it comes from one of the more technical areas

of philosophy, but actually it has nothing to do with our favorite intellectual

discipline. Rather it refers to the supposed phenomenon that your name determines your profession

or your fate more generally. Yes, there really is a meteorologist named Amy Fries,

an acoustic engineer named Ron Rumble,

and even a Russian track and field athlete who competes in the hurdles

named, wait for it, Maria Stepanova.

As if that weren't good enough, the internet will be very happy to tell you of another hurdle competition where last place went to the Bulgarian runner, Vania Stambalova.

People have been chuckling over this sort of thing for a long time.

There was the Latin phrase, Nomenest Omen, your name is a sign. It's a saying well illustrated by the fact that Pico de la Mirandula held the title

Count of Concord, Concordia being a landholding of his contemporaries

contemporaries did not fail to note this is almost too good to be true

because Pico loved to demonstrate the Concord between apparently conflicting

authorities.

He was heir to both a family fortune and the harmonizing project of predecessors like Cardinal

Bissarian, who had distanced himself from his teacher Platon by arguing for the fundamental agreement between Plato and Aristotle.

The traditional way to do this, as we saw with Bizarian, was to present a rather platonic

version of Aristotle.

Pico took the opposite tack arguing that Plato

Pateanists who departed from Aristotinianism were also departing from the

...