Peter Ramus

Ramus, Peter (Pierre de la Ramée) (1515-72). Educationalist and professor of philosophy and eloquence at the Collège Royal. He wrote, mainly in Latin, on a wide range of subjects: the arts of discourse (grammar, rhetoric, logic), mathematics, ethics, and theology. His first published works, Dialecticae partitiones and Aristotelicae animadversiones (1543), were tendentiously anti-Aristotelian; the Dialectique (1555) which grew out of them is the first substantial philosophical work in French and presents the theory of method which is central to his thought. Ramus believed that there was one single method for teaching any subject, based on Aristotle's laws of demonstration, and although the emphasis on deduction was later rejected by Bacon, Ramus's theories were influential for two centuries. His rhetoric, published under the name of his collaborator Omer Talon (Talaeus) and also by his pupil Antoine Fouquelin (La Rhétorique française, 1555), is merely an adaptation of the classical theory of ornament; he had in fact removed the first two parts of classical rhetoric, invention and disposition, to logic and restricted rhetoric to elocutio (expression or style). His attempts at literary analysis are equally reductive. A convert to Protestantism from about 1560, he was brutally murdered in the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Ramus is significant not as a philosopher but as an educational reformer and as a focus for debate about discourse and communication.

— Peter Sharratt