Captain Jorge Alvares and Father Luis Frois S.J.: Two Early Portuguese Descriptions of Japan and the Japanese

摘要

The dialogism of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), that is, the study of cultural interaction and the acknowledgment of the value or at least of the objective existence of other cultures, corresponds to one of the most significant aspects of Renaissance Humanism.In his turn, the Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (born 1939) has stressed the Humanists' quest for "cultural relativism", as exemplified by Amerigo Vespucci, who sought to evaluate the arrival of Europeans from the standpoint of American Indians, in total contrast to the monological approach of Christopher Columbus.