Petrus Ramus
Petrus Ramus (French: Pierre de La Ramée; Anglicized as Peter Ramus /ˈreɪməs/; 1515 – 26 August 1572) was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer. A Protestant convert, he was a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
Petrus Ramus
26 August 1572 (aged 56–57)
French
Aristotelicae Animadversiones
Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse (Everything that Aristotle has said is false) (1536)
Early academic career[edit]
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.[5] 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.[6] Ramus was made to debate Goveanus (Antonio de Gouveia), over two days.[7] 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[edit]
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.[8][9]
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.[10] 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.[11][12]
Pedagogue[edit]
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."[19]
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".[20] 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.[21]
Mathematician[edit]
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.[30]
He had students of his own.[31] He corresponded with John Dee on mathematics, and at one point recommended to Elizabeth I that she appoint him to a university chair.[32]
The views of Ramus on mathematics implied a limitation to the practical: he considered Euclid's theory on irrational numbers to be useless.[33] 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).[34]
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.