“…Confirming the deep-rooted controversy surrounding the production of science in Brazil, the positions taken by Dias (1968) and Silva (1986) are restated in works that present new historical, social, and cultural perspectives of analysis 6 for the study of science in Brazil during the colonial period based on reference to Portuguese archives (Figuerôa, 2007(Figuerôa, , 2009AlfonsoGoldfarb, Maia, 1996;Alfonso-Goldfarb, Ferraz, 2002;Alfonso-Goldfarb, Beltran, 2004;Beltran, 2000;Ferraz, 1997). Likewise, countless studies have contributed to the understanding of the scientific knowledge the Jesuits produced about the wildlife in Portuguese America, especially in the seventeenth century, by highlighting both the originality of their scientific project and the eclectic philosophical positions they took, which diverged from the scholastic neo-Aristotelism evident in the intellectual disputes between its members (Camenietzki, jul.-dez.…”