RAMUS, PETRUS (1515–1572)

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.

See also Aristotelianism; Humanists and Humanism; Logic; Mechanism; St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

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