La conquista de la aritmética binaria y la conquista espiritual de América según Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz

Beyond the logic of knowledge as a conquest of the scientific spirit attributable to a single culture, a single nation or a specific individual, this article does not seek to attribute authorship or to point out plagiarism. Instead, it attempts to restore the emergence of binary arithmetic to the cultural, intellectual, and scientific complexities of its time. The main argument of this article is the following: the complex intercultural relations between European and Amerindian knowledges made possible Caramuel’s first description of the binary code. That is to say: there is a certain parallelism between the political conquest of new peoples and the spiritual conquest of new knowledge.