Analogy: a way of telling and knowing the world in Hispanic territories in the modern period

Abstract

The present contribution proposes to analyse the use of analogy (or image, understood here in its rhetorical sense) in doctrinal texts (medical, scientific and also moral), as a tool of knowledge, in order to tell and describe the world. The image appears here as a process more intellectual than visual, based on what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “seeing as”: by establishing relationships between objects, through a process that recalls the concepto defined by Gracián, analogy allows to progress from visible to invisible, and permits to build knowledge about the unknown from the known. These writings, which leave a great place for analogy, reflect a vision of the world where everything is connected and where knowledge is produced and built by and through the image.