Diego de Zúñiga

To be distinguished from Diego López de Zúñiga (theologian) (d.1531) Diego de Zúñiga of Salamanca (sometimes Latinized as Didacus a Stunica) (1536–1597) was an Augustinian Hermit and academic. He is known for publishing an early acceptance of the Copernican theory, he was also the most important Augustinian scholastic thinker from the second half of the XVI century.

Life A student of Luis de León, he taught at the University of Osuna and the University of Salamanca.

His In Job commentaria (Commentary on Job, 1584) addressed Job 9:6, in such a way as to assert that the Copernican heliocentric theory was an acceptable interpretation of Scripture. This publication made him one of a very small number of Catholic scholars of the sixteenth century who set out an explicit accommodation with the ideas of Copernicus. He did, however, subsequently change his views, on another front, philosophical rather than theological. In Philosophia prima pars, written at the end of his life, he rejected Copernicanism as incompatible with Aristotelian theory on natural philosophy.

The Philosophia prima pars was a large-scale work on metaphysics, structured in accordance with current university practice, and aimed at a reform in the university teaching of philosophy. Written from an Aristotelian point of view, it aimed to fortify the Peripatetic philosophy, fending off sceptics and arguing for it as scientific. Against the skeptical attack, truth was treated under metaphysics.

The work of Zúñiga was placed on the Church's Index, together with Copernicus' De revolutionibus, by a decree of the Sacred Congregation from March 5, 1616: