Petrus Ramus (French: Pierre de La Ramée; Anglicized as Peter Ramus ; 1515 – 26 August 1572) was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer. A prominent and controversial academic and professor in Paris' College De France, Ramus became famous for his iconoclastic critiques of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Ramus argued that dialectic should be removed or separated from the purview of rhetoric, a stance which significantly narrowed rhetorical theory's scope. A convert to Protestantism, he was a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
Early life He was born at the village of Cuts, Picardy; his father was a farmer. He gained admission at age twelve (thus about 1527) to the Collège de Navarre, working as a servant. A reaction against scholasticism was in full tide, at a transitional time for Aristotelianism. On the occasion of receiving his M.A. degree in 1536, Ramus allegedly took as his thesis Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse (Everything that Aristotle has said is false), 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 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.
Early academic career Ramus, as graduate of the university, started courses of lectures. 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 Gouveia), 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 Collège de France, but at his request he was given the unique and at the time controversial title of Professor of Philosophy and eloquence. 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. Audomarus Talaeus (Omer Talon c.1510–1581), a close 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 he faced significant enmity following his adoption of Protestantism. He had to flee from Paris; and, though he found 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 he was summoned on 30 June 1568 before the King's Attorney General to be heard with Simon Baudichon and other professors: 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 La Rochelle Confession of Faith 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. His death was compared by one of his first biographers, his friend and colleague Nicolas de Nancel, to the murder of Cicero.
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. In the Dialecticae partitiones Ramus recommends the use of summaries, headings, citations and examples. Ong calls Ramus's use of outlines, "a reorganization of the whole of knowledge and indeed of the whole human lifeworld." 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, educators largely having accepted his arguments by the end of the 17th century.
Rhetorician
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