In his first book of De revolutionibus Copernicus offered an alternative to Aristotle's account of gravity, levity and natural elemental motion. However, Copernicus's new world system, in particular his cosmological and physical theses, received almost no deeper discussion by scholars at the University of Wittenberg in the second half of the sixteenth century. This is not only true of the astronomical textbooks that Wittenberg scholars composed but applies also to their lectures. In fact, the Wittenberg scholars confined themselves to extracting certain astronomical data from Copernicus's work and to considering it a mere mathematical model that enabled them to render the celestial motions in a more accurate way. Westman has called this phenomenon the 'Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory'. Erasmus Reinhold and Philipp Melanchthon played a pivotal role in establishing this tradition. Adequate as the term 'Wittenberg Interpretation' is to describe the reception of Copernicus's theory in the second half of the sixteenth century, it contains a major shortcoming, as it is rather the description of an effect than of a cause. The question that must be raised is why the Wittenberg astronomers and natural philosophers were so reluctant to discuss Copernicus's cosmological and physical theses. The thesis we want to present in this paper is that the decline of the medieval culture of disputation was one of the main reasons, if not the decisive one, that prevented an adequate and vivid discussion of Copernicus's cosmological theses within university circles.