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Petrus Ramus
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Petrus Ramus, or Pierre de la Ramée (1515 – August 26, 1572), French humanist, logician, and educational reformer, was born at the village of Cuts in Picardy, a member of a noble but impoverished family: his father was a farmer and his grandfather father a charcoal-burner.
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Petrus Ramus, or Pierre de la Ramée (1515 – August 26, 1572), French humanist, logician, and educational reformer, was born at the village of Cuts in Picardy, a member of a noble but impoverished family: his father was a farmer and his grandfather father a charcoal-burner. He was killed during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
Early life
Having gained admission at age twelve, in a menial capacity, to the Collège de Navarre, he worked with his hands by day, offering himself as a servant to other more affluent students, and carried on his studies at night. The reaction against scholasticism was still in full tide; it was the transition time between the old and the new, when the eager and forward-looking spirits had first of all to do battle with scholastic Aristotelianism. Ramus outdid his predecessors in the impetuosity of his revolt. On the occasion of taking his degree (1536) he allegedly took as his thesis Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse, which Walter J. Ong paraphrases as follows:
- "All the things that Aristotle has said are inconsistent because they are poorly systematized and can be called to mind only by the use of arbitrary mnemonic devices."
According to Ong (36-37), this kind of spectacular thesis was in fact routine at the time. Even so, Ong raises questions as to whether Ramus actually ever delivered this thesis (36-41).
Opposition
Meanwhile Ramus, as graduate of the university, had opened courses of lectures; but his audacities drew upon him the hostility of the conservative party in philosophy and theology. At this period he was engaged in numerous separate controversies. One opponent in 1543 was the Benedictine Joachim Périon.
He was accused, by Jacques Charpentier, professor of medicine, of undermining the foundations of philosophy and religion. Arnaud d'Ossat, a pupil and friend of Ramus, defended him against Charpentier. Ramus was made to debate Goveanus (Antonio de Gouvea), over two days.
The matter was brought before the parlement of Paris, and finally before Francis I. By him it was referred to a commission of five, who found Ramus guilty of having "acted rashly, arrogantly and impudently," and interdicted his lectures (1544).
Royal support
He withdrew from Paris, but soon afterwards returned, the decree against him being canceled by Henry II, who came to the throne in 1547, through the influence of Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine. He obtained a position at the Collège de Navarre.
In 1551 Henry II appointed him a regius professor at the university but he preferred to call himself a professor of philosophy and eloquence at the Collège de France, where for a considerable time he lectured before audiences numbering as many as 2,000. Pierre Galland, another professor there, published Contra novam academiam Petri Rami oratio (1551), and called him a "parricide" for his attitude to Aristotle. The more serious charge was that he was a nouveau academicien, in other words a sceptic. Talon, the constant ally of Ramus, had indeed published a work in 1548 derived from Cicero's description of Academic scepticism, the school of Arcesilaus and Carneades.
After conversion
In 1561 enmity against him was fanned into flame by his adoption of Protestantism. He had to flee from Paris; and, though he found an asylum in the palace of Fontainebleau, his house was pillaged and his library burned in his absence. He resumed his chair after this for a time, but in 1568 the position of affairs was again so threatening that he found it advisable to ask permission to travel.
He spent around two years, in Germany and Switzerland. The Second Helvetic Confession earned his disapproval, in 1571, rupturing his relationship with Theodore Beza and leading Ramus to write angrily to Heinrich Bullinger.
Returning to France, he fell a victim in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572). Hiding for a while in a bookshop off the Rue St Jacques, he returned to his lodgings, on 26 August, the third day of the violence. There he was stabbed while at prayer. Suspicions against Charpentier have been voiced ever since.
Pedagogue
A central issue is that Ramus's anti-Aristotelianism arose out of a concern for pedagogy. Aristotelian philosophy, in its Early Modern form as scholasticism showing its age, was in a confused and disordered state. Ramus sought to infuse order and simplicity into philosophical and scholastic education by reinvigorating a sense of dialectic as the overriding logical and methodological basis for the various disciplines.
He published in 1543 the Aristotelicae Animadversiones and Dialecticae Partitiones, the former a criticism on the old logic and the latter a new textbook of the science. What are substantially fresh editions of the Partitiones appeared in 1547 as Institutiones Dialecticae, and in 1548 as Scholae Dialecticae; his Dialectique (1555), a French version of his system, is the earliest work on the subject in the French language.
After studying Ramus's work, Ong concluded that the results of his "methodizing" of the arts "are the amateurish works of a desperate man who is not a thinker but merely an erudite pedagogue". On the other hand, his work had an immediate impact on the issue of disciplinary boundaries, where educators largely accepted his arguments, by the end of the century.
Logician
The logic of Ramus enjoyed a great celebrity for a time, and there existed a school of Ramists boasting numerous adherents in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. It cannot be said, however, that Ramus's innovations mark any epoch in the history of logic, and there is little ground for his claim to supersede Aristotle by an independent system of logic. The distinction between natural and artificial logic, i.e., between the implicit logic of daily speech and the same logic made explicit in a system, passed over into the logical handbooks.
He amends the syllogism. He admits only the first three figures, as in the original Aristotelian scheme, and in his later works he also attacks the validity of the third figure, following in this the precedent of Laurentius Valla. Ramus also set the modern fashion of deducing the figures from the position of the middle term in the premises, instead of basing them, as Aristotle does, upon the different relation of the middle to the major term and minor term.
Rhetorician
His rhetorical leaning is seen in the definition of logic as the ars disserendi; he maintains that the rules of logic may be better learned from observation of the way in which Cicero persuaded his hearers than from a study of the Organon.
Logic falls, according to Ramus, into two parts: invention (treating of the notion and definition) and judgment (comprising the judgment proper, syllogism and method). Here he was influenced by Rodolphus Agricola. This division gave rise to the jocular designation of judgment or mother-wit as the "secunda Petri". But what Ramus does here in fact redefines rhetoric. There is a new configuration, with logic and rhetoric each having two parts: rhetoric was to cover elocutio and pronuntiatio. In general, Ramism liked to deal with binary trees as method for organising knowledge.
Rhetoric, traditionally, had had five parts, of which inventio (invention) was the first. Two others were dispositio (arrangement) and memoria (memory). Ramus proposed transferring those back to the realm of dialectic (logic); and merging them under a new heading, renaming them as iudicium (judgment). Brian Vickers said that the Ramist influence here did add to rhetoric: it concentrated more on the remaining aspect of elocutio or effective use of language, and emphasised the role of vernacular European languages (rather than Latin). The effect was that rhetoric was applied in literature.
Mathematician
He was also known as a mathematician, a student of Johannes Sturm. It has been suggested that Sturm was an influence in another way, by his lectures given in 1529 on Hermogenes of Tarsus: the Ramist method of dichotomy is to be found in Hermogenes.
He had students of his own. He corresponded with John Dee on mathematics, and at one point recommended to Elizabeth I that she appoint him to a university chair.
The views of Ramus on mathematics implied a limitation to the practical: he considered Euclid's theory on irrational numbers to be useless. The emphasis on technological applications and engineering mathematics was coupled to an appeal to nationalism (France was well behind Italy, and needed to catch up with Germany).
Ramism
The teachings of Ramus had a broadly-based reception well into the seventeenth century. Later movements, such as Baconianism, pansophism, and Cartesianism, in different ways built on Ramism, and took advantage of the space cleared by some of the simplifications (and over-simplifications) it had effected. The longest-lasting strand of Ramism was in systematic Calvinist theology, where textbook treatments with a Ramist framework were still used into the eighteenth century, particularly in New England.
Works
He published fifty works in his lifetime and nine appeared after his death. Ong undertook the complex bibliographical task of tracing his books through their editions.
- Aristotelicae Animadversiones (1543)
- Brutinae questiones (1547)
- Rhetoricae distinctiones in Quintilianum (1549)
- Dialectique (reprinted and modified in 1550 and 1556)
- Arithmétique (1555)
- De moribus veterum Gallorum (Paris, 1559; second edition, Basel, 1572)
- De militia C.J. Cæsaris
- , au Roy, Paris, (1562)
- Commentariorum de religione christiana (Frankfurt, 1576)
- Three grammars: (1548), Grammatica Graeca (1560), (1562)
- (1565, 1566, 1578)
Bibliography
- Desmaze, Charles. Petrus Ramus, professeur au Collège de France, sa vie, ses ecrits, sa mort (Paris, 1864).
- Freedman, Joseph S. Philosophy and the Arts in Central Europe, 1500-1700: Teaching and Texts at Schools and Universities (Ashgate, 1999).
- Graves, Frank Pierrepont. Peter Ramus and the Educational Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Macmillan, 1912).
- Høffding, Harald. History of Modern Philosophy (English translation, 1900), vol. i.185.
- Lobstein, Paul. Petrus Ramus als Theolog (Strassburg, 1878).
- Miller, Perry. The New England Mind (Harvard University Press, 1939).
- Milton, John. A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic Conformed to the Method of Peter Ramus (London, 1672). Ed. and trans. Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger. Complete Prose Works of John Milton: Volume 8. Ed. Maurice Kelley. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. p. 206-407.
- Ong, Walter J. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958; reissued with a new foreword by Adrian Johns, University of Chicago Press, 2004. ISBN 0-226-62976-7).
- —. Ramus and Talon Inventory (Harvard University Press, 1958).
- Owen, John. The Skeptics of the French Renaissance (London, 1893).
- Pranti, K. "Uber P. Ramus" in Munchener Sitzungs berichte (1878).
- Saisset, Émile. Les précurseurs de Descartes (Paris, 1862).
- Sharratt, Peter. "The Present State of Studies on Ramus," Studi francesi 47-48 (1972) 201-13.
- —. "Recent Work on Peter Ramus (1970–1986)," Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 5 (1987): 7-58.
- —. "Ramus 2000," Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 18 (2000): 399-455.
- Voigt. Uber den Ramismus der Universität Leipzig (Leipzig, 1888).
- Waddington-Kastus. De Petri Rami vita, scriptis, philosophia (Paris, 1848).
See also
- Ramism (available in the German and Swedish editions of Wikipedia)
- Mnemonics
- J
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