| Yet in his day he
gained an impressive number of followers and admirers, and his works
influenced the curriculum of many European universities.We must look at Ramus as a typical phenomenon of the sixteenth
century and its unceasing religious controversies.Ramus himself took part in these
events.Ramus soon came to be considered,
not an innovative thinker, but an outmoded one.To gain a true picture of Petrus Ramus and his work, it is necessary
to strike a balance between, on the one hand, the enthusiasm of his
admirers and hagiographical biographers and, on the other, the
historians who, from a positivistic or a scholastic perspective, have
criticized his lack of originality and consistency.It is impossible to
describe Ramus' thinking and to understand his importance without
considering both sides of the story.He may never have intended to
achieve what posterity has blamed him for not achieving.Ramus' background and studies
1.Ramus' death and personality
1.Freedom to philosophize
6.Our information about Ramus' life, apart from scattered
biographical notes in his own books, comes mainly from three of his
contemporaries: Johannes Thomas Freigius, Theophilus Banosius and
Nicolas Nancelius.Freigius and Banosius spent only brief periods with
Ramus and relied mostly on written sources.France), in order to reduce the power of the
university.He himself was briefly prohibited from teaching
logic and rhetoric.The tension between Ramus and the university did not abate.In 1551,
however, he was appointed to a regius professorship.Holders of these
chairs taught according to more humanist principles than those followed
by university professors.The latter, for instance, strenuously
defended the medieval rules for pronouncing Latin and Greek, which
Ramus ridiculed, just as he derided those who tried to develop a formal
logic that departed from the normal way in which people talk and
write.Ramus published many books during his career.It is sometimes difficult to distinguish Ramus' works from
those of his closest colleague and friend, Omar Talon (c.Talon's Rhetorica (1548), for example, was
essentially a slightly revised version of Ramus' Institutiones
oratoriae (1545).It was a great loss for
Ramus when Talon died in 1562.In the 1560s Ramus took the dramatic step of converting to
Protestantism.From now on he could only hope for the patronage of the
king.He was forced to leave Paris and the university, spending some
years in Germany and Switzerland.Therefore,
in 1570 he returned to Paris, where he took up his former position as
regius professor, but without regaining his licentia docendi,
his right to teach at the university.Ramus was an extremely controversial figure.In spite of the differing accounts given by
his biographers, we know that Ramus was murdered during the St.Bartholomew's day massacre, which started on August 24, 1572.Since,
however, Ramus was not killed until the slaughter had almost died down,
this may indicate that the reasons for his murder went beyond his
conversion to Protestantism.Nancelius, in order to present an accurate portrait of Ramus,
provides some details about his way of life and his personality.University of Paris
ordered all professors to shave, Ramus obeyed but stayed at home until
his beard had grown out again.He seems to have been quite moderate in
his drinking and eating habits.He spent most of his time reading,
writing and talking with friends.Nancelius also reports that Ramus
took a bath only once a year, but washed his hands, face and beard
daily in a mixture of water and white wine.Ramus is reputed to have had a very bad temper.Sometimes he even
physically attacked his students, though apparently this did not
prevent him from gaining many devoted disciples.He amassed a
substantial fortune and made a provision in his will that this money
should be used to establish a chair of mathematics.During Ramus' early years at the University of Paris he
devoted himself to the disciplines or arts of the traditional
trvivium: grammar, rhetoric and dialectic.Although he had become well known
for his Latin eloquence, he broke with the scholastic tradition by
writing in the vernacular.Rhetorica, though popular and
frequently reprinted in new editions, never attained the diffusion and
influence of his logic textbook.During the late 1550s and the 1560s
Ramus published his lectures on the various arts, including physics and
metaphysics.They were later collected
together and published as Scholae in liberales artes in a
Basel edition of 1569.Ramus also turned his hand to mathematics.Ong's negative judgment of Ramus' mathematical capacities
may be correct (Ong, p.Ramus in Augsburg in 1569, registering his
own amazement at this attitude.Although Ramus challenged the values and educational principles of
scholasticism, he never attempted to discuss theological issues.Nancelius points out that Ramus' large library had very few
volumes on theology, medicine or law (Nancelius, p.The most striking feature of this work was
that Ramus defined theology as the art of living virtuously, ars
bene vivendi, adopting an essentially Zwinglian point of view.Theology may give us the rules by means of which we can and must live,
but it cannot bring us salvation.In a particularly interesting chapter
of the treatise (I:8), Ramus discusses the meaning of
predestination.Unfortunately, no trace of
these writings has survived.Nancelius was eager to mention that he had
collaborated with Ramus in planning a long series of works on
mathematics.The enormous impact of Ramus on European education in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries has seemed astonishing to some modern
scholars; and among his harshest critics have been historians of logic.Carl Prantl, for instance, claimed that Ramus had no talent whatsoever
for philosophy and logic (Prantl, pp.Without engaging in arguments with
these historians, it is still legitimate to ask what it was that made
Ramus so popular and so controversial.The stress on some
aspects of logic and metaphysics, characteristic of the medieval arts
faculty, was becoming obsolete.Ramus' reform program may have been designed to respond to this
need.Though many of his followers
could be considered zealots, he himself was insistent on pointing out
the difference between what he referred to as the true and the false
Aristotle.Ramus
did not share this view.Ramus claimed that his work to reform the curriculum had begun
during his early schooldays.For Ramus, the main
reason for reforming the curriculum was related to the usefulness of
education and not to the question of Aristotle's role in it.He considered
Aristotle to be the most important of logicians, though he pointed out
that Aristotle had not invented the discipline of logic but rather
developed what his predecessors had hinted at.Even more significant
for Ramus was the need to call attention to the damage that the
corpus Aristotelicum had suffered after Aristotle's
death, which meant that we could not know for certain what he had
intended to say on any given question.Because of the bad state in
which Aristotle's texts were transmitted, his commentators, in
their discussions of individual books of the Metaphysics and
Physics, had taken up certain issues that really belonged to
logic.This is also why the Organon gives the impression of
being an amalgamation of different subjects.Ramus laid the blame for
all of this on the shoulders of the ancient and medieval commentators
who he thought had for centuries misinterpreted the Greek philosopher
owing to the poor condition of the Aristotelian corpus.The Philosopher himself had intentionally made
his theories a little more abstruse than they needed to be in order to
sift the wheat from the chaff among his disciples (Ramus, Scholae
dialecticae, in Scholae in liberales artes, col.To Ramus, Aristotle was a Socratic philosopher, whose approach was
broadly in line with that of Cicero.Ramus, Collectaneae
praefationes, epistolae, orationes, p.Schegk had a grudge against
Ramus, who had pulled one of his books to pieces.The discussion
nevertheless forced Ramus to reconsider some of his positions.Ramus' final contribution to the debate was entitled,
characteristically, Defensio pro Aristotele adversus Jacobus
Scheccium, that is, a defense of Aristotle against Schegk.In
this work he makes clear the difference between his position, which he
maintained had also been that of Aristotle, and the view of Schegk and
other Aristotelians.The question at stake was what logic really was:
its definition, its limitations, its goal and its nature.To understand Ramus' line of reasoning we have to start with
his firm rejection of the basic Aristotelian conception of philosophy.The Aristotelians defined philosophy as a habitus
intellectualis, a rational attitude toward being.For the Stoics, the universe was
rationally organized in a way that was directly equivalent to human
reason.There could not
be a difference of rank between the parts of nature, nor between the
parts of philosophy, as the Aristotelians thought.Ramus' way of looking at philosophy and logic was in many ways
similar to that of the Stoics.Ramus thus regarded logic as a part of philosophy and
defined it as an art that truly gives us knowledge of being.Ramus' followers often substituted the word doctrina for
cognitio, which made it even clearer that the perspective was
more pedagogical than ontological (Cf.It may seem that Ramus' attitude toward Aristotle and the
Aristotelians was not very consistent.At times, he claimed to be the
only true Aristotelian and criticized the scholastic Aristotelians for
misinterpreting Aristotle.Although
Ramus was an offspring of the Aristotelian tradition, he was also
influenced by Ciceronian and Stoic ideas.Ramus stressed that all arts should represent separate parts of
nature.In the Posterior Analytics Aristotle had set out
certain rules or laws for how a predicate should be related to a
subject in order to make a correct scientific proposition.But since it is not true in relation to all
triangles, such a theorem would violate the law of truth.Ramus regarded this as the most important of the three laws.No theorem belonging
to one art should be allowed to trespass into the subject matter of
another, since that would be unjust.To
Ramus, this law was fundamental for the purpose of organizing a new
curriculum and was also, as we shall see, an important aspect of his
method.This way of treating philosophy as an aggregate of rigidly separate
arts may have had some pedagogical value, but it also raised
difficulties.Ramus, for instance, could not accept metaphysics as a
separate discipline.By insisting that every art must have its
correctly formulated theorems, organized from the more general to the
more specific, and that no theorem should be allowed to have reference
to more than one art, Ramus almost seems to impose a military
discipline on nature.Ramus was reliant on Platonism.Although he at times claimed to be a
Platonist, his references to Plato are mostly aimed at distancing
himself from Aristotle and, above all, from contemporary Aristotelians.Ramus rejected the Aristotelian definition of logic as a
habitus instrumentalis, since an instrumental attitude could
be considered to be an effect of logic but not equivalent to it.Consequently, Ramus
thought that logic was about being, which made metaphysics
superfluous.Ramus,
Scholae dialecticae, in Scholae in liberales artes,
col.Nevertheless, Ramus' own dialectic showed many signs
of influence from Summulae.Therefore, to understand the
development of Ramist logic, we have to pay attention to this
scholastic background, as well as to Cicero, who played a key role in
the advance of humanist logic.The
Stoics, on the other hand, according to Cicero, were more concerned
about the different aspects of the judgments that we make.He called this kind of dialectic the ratio
disserendi, a definition that Ramus, via Agricola, rephrased as
the ars bene disserendi.The main emphasis at school was on
teaching young boys to construct syllogisms.This
book, printed for the first time in 1515, was to a great extent
influenced by humanism.In many ways Agricola's logic was based
less on Aristotle than on Cicero.In his view,
you must find the arguments before you can employ them in your
argumentation.The
close connection between inventio, as a part of logic, and the
art of rhetoric made it seem, however, as if humanists could not
separate the two disciplines.Another weakness which Aristotelians
often pointed out in Agricola and Ramus was that they were not
interested in finding answers to difficult questions but rather in
finding good arguments to use in defending a certain thesis (Sellberg,
p.Ramus wanted to carry on from where Agricola had left off.Although it never received as much attention as inventio,
iudicium became very controversial in Ramus' account,
and he therefore made large changes to his presentation of it.The shorter version, published in 1572, was more
suitable for schools and was therefore followed in most later editions.In the 1572 edition there are 32 chapters devoted to inventio
and only 20 to iudicium.Every chapter was carefully
constructed with questions and definitions of the main problems and
with examples, mostly taken from ancient authors.In his first treatise on logic, Dialecticae
institutiones (1543) Ramus had divided iudicium into
three parts: syllogistic, method and a kind of doctrine of ideas.Ramus, Dialectica 1623, p.Ramus included it tells us something about his attitude
toward logic.But it also reveals Ramus' lack of interest in the problem of how
to acquire new knowledge.It shows that his aim was instead to
systemize and organize arguments.For Ramus, therefore, method became
the most important part of logic.Ramus' interpretation of the
lines in question made it possible for him to maintain that his method
was strictly Aristotelian.The Aristotelians, for their part, largely
followed Averroes' commentary on this passage, which led to a very
different conclusion (Ramus, Dialectica 1569,
pp.The problem was to determine whether method was a
way of acquiring knowledge or of displaying it.The
concepts of analysis and synthesis, for example, were borrowed from
geometry and soon became the main principles of method.But it was also necessary to
think about natural vs.But Ramus took an extreme position.As a consequence of his
definition of an art, he could not accept any uncertainty as to how one
should proceed or as to whether the procedure should be natural or
artificial.If you see a living creature in the
distance, it is not until you are closer to it that you will be able to
identify it as a human being, and it will take still more time before
you can eventually recognize who it is.This example shows, according
to Ramus, that a method which proceeds from the general to the
particular is not arbitrary but natural (Ramus, Quod sit unica
doctrinae instituendae methodus, p.Since
it was obvious, at least to Ramus, that an argument is more general
than an axioma, or proposition, that an axioma is
more general than a syllogism and that a syllogism is more general than
a method, this proved that his way of organizing logic was the correct
one.When you cure a man who has a wound on
his forehead, you can either say that you cure him or his whole body,
but not that you cure his eyes or his belly, which, like his forehead,
are parts of his body (Ramus, Dialectica 1569, p.This method was an important part of Ramus' logic since it had
direct relevance for his philosophy as a whole.Ramus thought it essential to construct a
system of precepts arranged according to their degree of
generalization, always starting with the more general and proceeding
toward the more specific.To stress this point, Ramus in
some of his writings preferred to call the second part of logic not
iudicium but dispositio or arrangement.Considering Ramus' desire to make logic responsive to the
needs of the humanities, it is reasonable to ask whether the method was
applicable to artificial products such as poetry or only to natural
things.Ramus was aware of the difficulty of demonstrating his natural
method in literature.According to him, the method was also used by poets like
Virgil and Horace.He had to admit, however, that the ancients had
sometimes intentionally departed from it.Therefore, in earlier
editions of the Dialectica he had included another method, a
methodus prudentiae, which, as he pointed out, was really no
different from the one method.Instead, he talked about a methodi secunda
illustratio, that is, a second representation of the one method
(Ramus, Dialectica 1623, p.It has already been pointed out that Ramus had little interest in
the precise requirements for attaining scientific knowledge but was
instead primarily concerned with curriculum reform.In the first place, we feel
intoxicated.According to Ramus, there are always three essential aspects of every
art which need to be considered: nature, principles and practice
(exercitatio).It was the third element, practice, which was
essential, for it was through practice that one demonstrated that the
art and its principles were correct.All three elements were
thus closely connected, and Ramus often presented the various arts by
setting out their three main parts (as, for instance, in the
Dialecticae institutiones).We have seen that Ramus considered it extremely important to follow
the natural method.Ramus wanted students to learn
logic by reading and practicing the way we naturally think and argue.At this stage students were
expected to imitate, more or less, the procedure which they had
previously studied by means of analysis.This was a crucial moment
because they could now show how useful their studies had been by
demonstrating the ways in which they had benefited from their
theoretical knowledge.The same procedure could be applied to any art since analysis
involved textual study.It certainly showed that Ramus' real
intention was to make the curriculum useful to students of the
humanities and to future scholars (Hooykaas, p.This accusation may seem somewhat paradoxical given that
Ramus was very anxious not to confuse the arts in any way.Ramus turned this upside down.Ramus systematized the arts according to his method, which stated
that each art or doctrina should have exclusive rights to its
own principles.Another was that he defined
rhetoric as having only two parts: style and delivery
(elocutio and pronuntiatio).This was an extremely
radical transformation of rhetoric, which was usually considered to
have three additional parts (inventio, iudicium and
memoria).His reason for removing
memoria, memory, was typically Ramist.Since the natural order is also
basically our normal way of thinking, a genuine knowledge of any art
must always be easy for us to remember.In a letter of 1551 to his patron, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Ramus
wrote that he had heard a rumor that he was considered to be an
academicus, an adherent of the Academic school or, in other
words, a skeptic, who taught his students to doubt.Although Ramus
firmly rejected this accusation, he had difficulties in clearing
himself of the charge (Ramus, Collectaneae praefationes, epistolae,
orationes, p.Ramus accused them of treating Aristotle as
infallible and said that in doing so they subordinated their own reason
to blind faith in authority.Aristotle philosophized with the utmost
freedom and, for the sake of the truth, he held views with utter
freedom, against the entire tradition of the past, including his
teacher Plato.And he practiced the art of logic not only in short
debates but also in continuous disputations, in which both sides of the
question were discussed.Ramus,
Scholae, in Scholae in liberales artes, col.Ramus
really did attack Aristotle.For
Ramus, as for other humanists, the scholastics became the villains of
the story.Aristotle by Ramus in the passage quoted above, was to discuss both
sides of a question (in utramque partem disserere).In such
circumstances, however, you can never say that the side which triumphs
is the absolute winner, though you can come fairly close to a
definitive resolution.Ramus,
however, in line with the majority of humanists, was more of an
eclectic than a skeptic.He regarded Galen as his ideal since he had
borrowed from earlier thinkers what he considered to be good and useful
for his own theories (Ramus, Dialectica 1569, pp.Adopting radical skepticism in this period would have laid Ramus
open to the serious charge of holding dangerous philosophical or
theological views and even of atheism.Not surprisingly, Ramus declared that he would
rather be a philosopher than the slave of a philosopher (Ramus,
Collectaneae praefationes, epistolae, orationes, pp.There was no danger in allowing men to think freely, he
maintained, since true reason can never be wrong.Ramus' belief in the freedom to philosophize and his
eclecticism caused difficulties for his followers.If they showed too
much enthusiasm for Ramus' ideas, would they not also be accused
of being the slaves of their master?Perhaps the Philosopher
deceives us with his authority?Ramus, Scholae
dialecticae, in Scholae in liberales artes, col.Here we see the great respect that Ramus and his adherents had for
Socrates, whom they regarded as their hero.One of his most
devoted disciples, Guilielmus Adolphus Scribonius, attacked another
Ramist for departing from the teaching of the Dialectica and
for criticizing Ramus.Yet, at the same time, he emphatically declared
that every adherent of Ramist philosophy must swear to the principle of
libertas philosophandi, the freedom to philosophize.He tried to resolve it by maintaining that while all philosophers were
to some degree wrong, Ramus, like Socrates, had almost always been
right.By adopting this position, however, he took some of the sting
out of his own criticism of the insufficiently faithful Ramist, as the
latter was quick to point out (Sellberg, pp.Neither Ramus nor his followers felt able to extend this freedom to
theological questions, though their scholastic opponents accused them
of having done so.Some of Ramus' opponents called him usuarius or
usurarius.Both words derive etymologically from the Latin verb
uti, to use or to receive benefit from.Ramus was no doubt intended as a criticism,
indicating that he was strutting around in borrowed finery.Ramus, along with other humanists, often ridiculed the meaningless
rules and facts that young students were compelled to memorize
(Nancelius, p.Ramus, Scholae grammaticae, in
Scholae in liberales artes, col.As we have seen, Ramus wanted the study of every art to be directed
toward practice.Not
surprisingly, his innovative ideas attracted interest from those
outside the universities.They therefore
lent their enthusiastic support to Ramus' call for useful
studies.As a humanist, Ramus was also interested in including the humanities
within the encyclopedia of learning.He himself intended to edit and
comment on every speech of Cicero.His lectures were famous and,
according to Nancelius, his spoken Latin was eloquent (Nancelius,
p.Ramus was neither a bad logician nor a bad philosopher.It was not, in any case, his originality that brought him to a
position of eminence among his contemporaries.The reason for his
enormous impact, within both the university and the wider society, was
his capacity to perceive new needs and to respond to new demands.His
program of educational reform was, for instance, well suited to the
Reformation.Because Ramist logic made possible a more concise
presentation of different questions, it proved more advantageous than
scholasticism to Protestant theologians, who began to set out their
doctrines in the form of loci or brief passages on a specific
topic.Ramus appealed to statesmen and to humanists on account of his
endeavors to promote the humanities, especially the study of ancient
culture and languages.The emphasis which he and other humanists laid on the
usefulness of studies was to transform learned culture and eventually
to give rise to problems which he could not have foreseen.For the last 50 years Ramus has been at the center of considerable
scholarly interest and activity.The focus has
gradually shifted from examining Ramus' own works to tracing
their influence and impact.Peter Ramus's Attack on Cicero: Text and
Translation of Ramus's Brutinae Quaestiones, ed.Murphy and translation by Carole Newlands
(Davis, CA, Hermagoras Press, 1992).Collectaneae praefationes, epistolae, orationes
(Marburg, 1599; reprinted with an introduction by W.La Dialectique (1555), ed.Diaelcticae libri duo per Rolandum Makilmenaeum Scotum,
auctoris jussu in quibusdam locis emendati (Uppsala, Eschillus
Matthiae, 1623).Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian: Translation and
Text of Peter Ramus's Rhetoricae distinctiones in Quintilianum
(1549), transl.Ramus, Commentariorum de religione Christiana libri IV,
Frankfurt, 1577).Renaissance et Age
classique (Paris, Vrin, 1984).Freigius, Johannes Thomas, Petri Rami Vita, in
Ramus, Collectaneae, pp.The
Influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century
Philosophy and Sciences (Basel, Schwabe, 2001)
Hooykaas, R.Du Bellay, Ramus et les autres
(Leiden, E.Autour de Ramus: Le
Combat (Paris, H.Nancelius, Nicolaus, Petri Rami Vita (ed.Rhetorica, 5 (1987),
pp.Petrus Ramus en de wiskunde (Assen, Van
Gorcum, 1966)."See a map of synonyms of ramus in the Visual Thesaurus."Superior pubic ramus
A nerve ramus such as the Dorsal ramus of spinal nerve
Petrus Ramus
The academic journal Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature.Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian
Peter Ramus
(1549, tr.Adam Kissel
(Rhetoric Page)
Ramus's goal is to show that many of the categories that Aristotle came up with regarding rhetoric, which Cicero and Quintilian and others followed, are either arbitrary or actually false, because the divisions divide the subject at the wrong joints.Ramus says: Quintilian has added all kinds of things to rhetoric that do not belong to it.Ramus identifies rhetoric with what earlier writers call eloquence, limiting its scope to style and delivery.Ramus evidently believes that rhetoric can be taught apart from dialectic, even though speeches and even literature and poetry are constructed out of both.Dialectic and rhetoric work together in "stirring the emotions and causing delight" (Newlands 124), but training in ethics is the better place to go to learn about the emotions properly.There are only ten kinds of things which can be said (invention): causes, effects, subjects, adjuncts, opposites, comparisons, names, divisions, definitions, witnesses (Newlands 112).Aristotle and Quintilian make a huge muddle by naming all kinds of other supposed classes and subclasses.Since Aristotle said that rhetoric is not science, he gets into the bind of saying that scientific proof is not argument, for which Ramus takes him to task.Ramus makes a better case, in making argument part of dialectic rather than rhetoric, so that science has more of a place.Ramus Seafood Emporium Ilkley.New Ramus Seafood Emporium now open in Ilkley.Welcome to The Ramus Seafood Emporium Quality Seafood from Quayside to Kitchen.You can visit our fabulous new shop, check out new recipes or tips, see the history of Ramus Seafoods, but most importantly, you can buy the best seafood delivered overnight to your door.Chez la Vie is a parisian restuarant in the heart of harrogate town centre.So, for example, medicine is plagued with the likes of the ramus acetabularis arteriae circumflexae femoris medialis which is simply the branch of an artery that goes to the acetabulum (the socket) of the hip joint.Ramus exists to help you develop sales and build business.Whether you are an overseas company looking to enter the UK market, or a UK based company trying to improve sales, Ramus has a solution for you.Ramus offers a range of practical business development, sales and marketing programmes tailored to your specific requirements.For more information on Ramus clients click here. |
