Nuevos mundos y viejas lenguas. El problema de la transmisión del conocimiento en la literatura utópica de los siglos XVI y XVII

Abstract

Neither the Ancients nor the medieval philosophers were unaware of the problem of the plurality of languages, represented symbolically by the Biblical Tower of Babel. The sixteenth century, nevertheless, had to face the problem from perspectives that went beyond the traditional philosophical debate. The discovery of new territories, new languages, new natural beings without known denomination, as well as the proliferation of names for apparently the same thing, created a great problem of scientific communication precisely when this began to erect like one of the essential values of the investigation of nature. The question about how to know nature became inseparable from the question about the best instrument to transmit natural knowledge. I propose here a review about how the utopian literature of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries echoed this problem about scientific communication, as well as some of the proposals coming from the own scientific practices.