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America - Europe: In the Mirror of Otherness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Edgar Montiel
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Extract

Because it is not pointlessly, but with much cause and reason, that this land is called the New World. And it is the New World, not because it has been recently discovered, but because its peoples and almost everything about it is like the first and golden age.

Vasco de Quiroga

It was precisely when printing became popular in Europe - which, for the first time in history, permitted the conservation and mass diffusion of ancient Greek, Arab, and Latin writings, a fact that signalled the beginning of the Renaissance - that the Letters of Amerigo Vespucci first appeared. These letters, like a revelation, speak of a novus mundus, a new world of unknown flora, fauna, and men, that contradicts the findings of Ptolemy‘s eminent Cosmography (published in 1478, in Rome), Theophrastus's History of Plants (published in 1498, in Venice), and the hallowed treatises of Aristotle, which were then in fashion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 40 , Issue 159 , August 1992 , pp. 25 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

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8. Cited by Louis Baudin in L'Empire socialiste des Inkas. Spanish version published in Chile by Editorial Zig-Zag, 1943.