The Reception of Copernicus in Sixteenth-Century Spain The Case of Diego de Zuniga

摘要

THE RECEPTION OF THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY in the years following the publication of De revolutionibus (1543) was conditioned by the contrast be-tween the audacity of Copernicus's proposal and the weak or problematic character of the arguments supporting it, which had to confront the enormous weight of Ar-istotelian natural philosophy and Ptolemaic astronomy as well as biblical arguments. Most authors continued to view the last as authoritative in questions regarding na-ture.1 To all this must be added the effect of Andreas Osiander's prologue, which invited the reader to consider Copernicus's theory as a "hypothesis" rather than as the truth. We must also take into account the disciplinary division between astronomy and natural philosophy in the academic world of this period: the former was occupied principally with technical problems, the latter with properly cosmological questions . This division was reflected in the subsidiary, mainly propaedeutic, status accorded astronomy in faculties of arts and in the consequent limitation on the intellectual autonomy of its practitioners. Beyond the academic world, the cultivation of as-tronomy in relation to pursuits like navigation, cartography, geography, and medi-cine and for computational or calendrical problems had a more markedly applied o r pragmatic character. Thus, in the middle decades of the sixteenth century Coper-nicus's work was discussed within the framework of a demarcation between celestial physics and mathematical astronomy; the techniques, data, and models of the Derevolutionibus were adopted within a geocentric scheme, and its most controversial aspects were simply passed over.