As distâncias dos céus aos infernos na cosmologia nanban

Abstract

The Jesuit missionaries in Asia were not indifferent to the intellectual interests of the peoples they met. In Japan, noticing the inquisitiveness of the common people concerning natural phenomena, they spared no effort in satisfying that curiosity. To that end, they used the then dominant scientific paradigms in Europe, the natural philosophy of Aristotle and the planetary theory of Ptolemy. This article presents the dimensions of the spheres that made the universe and were taught in Japan by the missionaries. It also analyses the reaction they elicited from a neo-Confucian scholar. Further, based on the values presented for those dimensions, it attempts to draw some implications about dependencies among three works of western astronomy written in Japan in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.