Alfonso De Cartagena and Leonardo Bruni1)
The Lost Modernity: 1436-1439 (Alfonso de Cartagena and Leonardo Bruni1) __________________________________________________ RAFAEL HERRERA GUILLÉN UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA (UNED) Abstract This work shows the transcendence that had to Modernity the polemic that confronted the Italian Leonardo Bruni and the Castilian Alonso de Cartagena about the translation of Aristotle. That episode was premonitory of two tendencies that found their way into Modernity to the present: a unidirectional Modernity, colonial, and a plural Modernity, mestiza. In this manner, it is revealed the existence of a lost Modernity that was not built from the binary parameters of imperial and colonial power. Keywords Aristotle, Leonardo Bruni, Alonso de Cartagena, philology, converts, antisemitism, humanism. “…aquéllos dirigen el mundo con la multiplicidad de sus libros”2 Alonso de Cartagena 1. Unidirectional Modernity vs. Plural Modernity Between 1436 and 1439 a dispute took place in Europe that would turn out to be a destiny for Modernity. The character of that inaugural moment was philological, but there was something much more profound at stake than a translation issue. During those three decisive years, an Italian, Leonardo Bruni, and a Castilian, Alonso de Cartagena, argued about the correct way of translating the Ethics of Aristotle. Both contestants knew that such a philological problem hid a cosmos of cultural, social, and political decisions which, still to them, were unresolved. Modernity in nuce was beginning to unfold on both sides. In that polemic certain lines of action and thought began to function, which in the end would configure the entire Modernity. And it happened, precisely, because the effective history of this polemic shows how Modernity configured its conditions of possibility, reducing and neutralizing the liberating and pluralistic potential from one of the sides, although it never fully erased it from its core.
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