The French humanist logician and mathematician Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) founded the anti-Aristotelian philosophical school of Ramism.

Petrus Ramus was born Pierre de La Ramée in the village of Cuth in Picardy. He worked and studied at the College of Navarre at Paris until he took his master of arts degree in 1536, having defended his thesis that "everything which Aristotle said is invented or contrived" ("quaecumque ab Aristotle dicta essent, commentitia esse" - the exact rendering in English of Ramus's dictum is still disputed, but the common translation of "commentitia" as "false" is now generally rejected). In 1543 he published his criticism of Aristotelian logic, called Aristotelicae animadversiones. This and further editions brought on Ramus the ire of his colleagues at the University of Paris, who accused him of heretical tendencies contrary to true religion and philosophy. Modern commentators do not see his departure from Aristotle as being as dramatic as his Parisian contemporaries did - his main differences with Aristotle are now considered to be more in pedagogical method than in logic. His case, however, was first taken before a civil magistrate, then before the Parlement of Paris, and eventually before Francis I, who in March 1544 issued a decree prohibiting Ramus's works and preventing his teaching of philosophy. Ramus left Paris and turned to mathematical studies until the decree was rescinded in 1547 by Henry II.

Ramus was a brilliant lecturer and the prolific author of more than 50 works. His adoption of Protestantism in 1561 rekindled his colleagues' hostility toward him, and he fled from Paris again in 1562. He returned in the next year, when Charles IX was able to conclude a tenuous peace with the Protestants. Ramus reclaimed his chair of philosophy and continued teaching until the religious civil wars resumed in 1567. This began a period of flight from France during which he traveled extensively and lectured at various universities throughout Europe. In August 1570 he returned to France. For 2 more years he lectured and published, but on April 24, 1572, his opponents seized the opportunity of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre to murder Ramus.

Ramus was a considerable influence in the humanist development of anti-Aristotelian, antischolastic, antimedieval thinking; he was a major contributor to the "new philosophy" then challenging the assumptions of the Middle Ages. His influence was especially strong (according to their own testimony) among the English and Scottish Ramists (including John Milton and Sir William Temple), in the German universities (Johann Sturm and Johann Friege), and among the Puritans of New England. Nonetheless, the controversies which he aroused in the 16th century now seem merely tendentious.

Further Reading

A readable biography of Ramus is Frank Pierrepont Graves, Peter Ramus and the Educational Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (1912). Indispensable for a thorough study of Ramus are the works of Father Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and theDecay of Dialogue (1958) and Ramus and Talon Inventory (1958). Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (1956), contains helpful chapters on the English Ramists. For Ramus's influence in colonial times see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939).

Ramus, Petrus (Perre de la Ramée, 1515-82) Teacher and professor of philosophy and eloquence at the Collège Royal. His first works included Aristotelicae animadversiones and were anti-Aristotelian. The Dialectique (1555) is the first substantial philosophical work in French. He converted to Protestantism in about 1560 and was brutally murdered in the St Bartholemew's Day Massacre of 1572.

(pē'trəs rā'məs) , or Pierre de La Ramée (pyĕr də lä rämā') , 1515–72, French humanist and philosopher. Attempting to break through Aristotelian and scholastic traditions, Ramus wrote a number of works that became influential, among them Dialecticae Institutiones (1543) and Aristotelicae Animadversiones (1543). In consequence, his teaching position was threatened, but in 1551, through the efforts of Cardinal de Lorraine, Ramus was established in a chair of rhetoric and philosophy at the Collège de France. In the religious wars of the period Ramus attached himself to the reformers and fled (1568) to Germany. He returned to Paris in 1570 and was killed in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Ramist logic, although faulted by modern thinkers, was exceedingly influential in the 16th and early 17th cent., holding sway in Protestant lands—Switzerland, Scotland, and much of Germany. From its English stronghold at Cambridge it markedly affected Francis Bacon, John Milton, and others. The emphasis of Ramist logic on clarity, precision, and testing and on definite boundaries between subjects can be said to have encouraged the scientific spirit.

Bibliography

See studies by N. E. Nelson (1947) and W. J. Ong (1958, repr. 1974); W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (1956, repr. 1961).

Ramus, Petrus (1515–1572), French humanist philosopher, educator, and communicator. A controversial figure in sixteenth-century Europe, Petrus Ramus used the lecture hall and the printing press to oppose the educational establishment of his day. His goals were to reform the teaching of grammar, redistribute and refashion the functions of logic and rhetoric, add physics and metaphysics to the liberal arts, and place more value on mathematics. Reconstructing the university curriculum, he argued with passion that all knowledge was available to those willing to use the correct method to obtain it. His message was that there was only one method in true learning, and that it was based on a new dialectic, his own. Challenging the authority of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, he furthered the work of the Dutch philosopher Roelof Huysman (Rodolphus Agricola, 1443/44–1485) and the early humanists who sought to simplify the world of Aristotle's dialectics.

Baptized Pierre de La Ramée, Ramus was born into a poor farming family at Cuts in the province of Picardy. He went to Paris as a valet for wealthy students in 1523, entering the College of Navarre in 1527. His M.A. thesis (1536) argued the falsity of Aristotle's doctrines. Among his colleagues and friends were future bishops and cardinals, which figured in his appointment as an instructor at the College of Mans in 1537. His lectures were well attended and he quickly established a reputation as a vociferous critic of Aristotle. Moving to the College of Ave Maria around 1540, he worked with a team of colleagues who included Omer Talon, his major collaborator, and Nicolaus Nancel, his later biographer. In 1543 he published his two defining works: Dialecticae Institutiones (Training in dialectic) and Aristotelicae Animadversiones (Remarks on Aristotle). In 1544 a royal commission forced Ramus into a debate with Antonio de Gouveia, defender of the Aristotelian tradition. The commission denounced Ramus for attacking the art of logic accepted by all nations, and banned him from teaching. However, his friend Charles de Guise, cardinal of Lorraine, procured his appointment as principal of the College of Presles in 1545, and had the ban lifted by the new king, Henry II, in 1547.

Over the next quarter century Ramus gained in girth as in stature. Appointed royal lecturer at the College of France (the Sorbonne, Paris) in 1551, his lectures were said to have drawn thousands. Meanwhile, he continued to publish a work or two a year. A major event was his conversion to the Protestant faith in 1561, an act that broke his relationship with the church and with patrons. With the outset of the Wars of Religion in 1562, he withdrew to Fontainebleau with the king's protection. The wars caused him to be on the move between France, Germany, and Switzerland, although he became dean of his college in 1565. During these turbulent years he published perhaps his greatest work, the Scholae in Liberales Artes (1569; Lectures on the liberal arts) in 1,166 columns. He returned to the College of Presles in 1570 and in 1572 was condemned by the Synod of Nîmes for advocating secular views of church government. That same year, hunted by assassins hired by his longtime academic adversary Jacques Charpentier, he was murdered in his rooms on 26 August in the midst of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Ramus was one of the most prolific writers of his time. He published over fifty works in Latin and French, and many unpublished manuscripts were looted from his study after his death. There were over two hundred editions of his Dialectic alone in the sixteenth century, in numerous languages and versions. Colleagues and devoted students typically worked with Ramus in his "laboratory" as unnamed collaborators, complicating the issue of authorship. In addition, Ramus frequently revised his books and papers. By 1650, there were over eleven hundred printings of his works in Europe, and hundreds of authors who wrote about him. The influence of his group spread to Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Poland, the Low Countries, Scotland, and England by the early seventeenth century, and to New England.

The purpose of Ramism was to establish a Socratic superiority that would invalidate Aristotle and all of medieval scholasticism, supplanting it with a new and simple method that would be applicable to all the arts and sciences. Logic (dialectic) comprised the two functions of invention (finding arguments to answer problems) and judgment, or disposition (arranging arguments to reach conclusions). The result was a godly law of truth for each problem resolved.

The largest influence was in religion, literature, and the sciences; the wider goal was to spur people to challenge authority, and to think, write, and create in their own vernacular languages in an era when Latin still predominated. While Ramus may be remembered by academics as a key figure in the history of the new philosophy and Protestant theology, by linking philosophical to mechanical theory, he often saw his own legacy as one for astronomers, geographers, engineers, and mathematicians, as well as architects, carpenters, and carvers (one of his works, translated in 1636, is titled The Way to Geometry). He was, in this way, a child of the Renaissance.

Bibliography

Feingold, M., J. S. Freedman, and W. Rother, eds. The Influence of Petrus Ramus Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences. Basel, 2002. The most recent evaluation of Ramus and Ramism by European scholars.

Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1986. The best modern work on dialectics and its context.

Howell, Wilbur S. Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700. Reprint. New York, 1960. The most lucid description of his logic and rhetoric and of their history in England.

Ong, Walter J. Ramus and Talon Inventory: A Short-Title Inventory of the Published Works of Peter Ramus (1515–1572) and of Omer Talon (c. 1510–1562) in Their Original and Variously Altered Forms with Related Material. Cambridge, Mass., 1958. Reprint Folcroft, Pa., 1970.

——. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Reprint. New York, 1974. The most complete study of his work.

—LOUIS KNAFLA

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