Petrus Ramus
Petrus Ramus | |
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educational reform | |
Notable ideas | Ramism |
Petrus Ramus (
Early life
He was born at the village of
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.[2]
According to Ong[3] 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.[4]
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
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.[8][9]
In 1551 Henry II appointed him a regius professor at the
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:[13] 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.
Returning to France, he fell a victim in the
Pedagogue
A central issue is that Ramus's anti-Aristotelianism arose out of a concern for
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]
Logician
The logic of Ramus enjoyed a great celebrity for a time, and there existed a school of
. 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
Rhetorician
Part of a series on |
Rhetoric |
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As James Jasinski explains, "the range of rhetoric began to be narrowed during the 16th century, thanks in part to the works of Peter Ramus."
Invention involves fourteen topics, including definition, cause, effect, subject, adjunct, difference, contrary, comparison, similarity, and testimony. Style encompasses four tropes: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. It also includes rules for poetic meter and rhythmical prose, figures corresponding to attitudes a speaker may take, and of repetition. Delivery covers the use of voice and gestures.[27]
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 Aristotle's works on logic (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.[28] 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.[29]
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.[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]
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 oversimplifications) 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.
The first writings on Ramism, after the death of Ramus, included biographies, and were by disciples of sorts:
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 (1555)
- Arithmétique (1555)
- De moribus veterum Gallorum (Paris, 1559; second edition, Basel, 1572)
- Liber de Cæsaris Militia Paris, 1584
- Advertissement sur la réformation de l'université de Paris, au Roy, Paris, (1562)
- Three grammars: Grammatica latina (1548), Grammatica Graeca (1560), Grammaire Française (1562)
- Scolae physicae, metaphysicae, mathematicae (1565, 1566, 1578)
- Prooemium mathematicum (Paris, 1567)
- Scholarum mathematicarum libri unus et triginta (Basel, 1569) (his most famous work)
- Commentariorum de religione christiana (Frankfurt, 1576)
See also
- Mnemonics
- Ramism
Notes
- ^ "Petrus Ramus" – Britannica Academic
- ^ See Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, 1958: 46-47.
- ^ Ong, Ramus, pp. 36-37.
- ^ Ong, Ramus, pp. 36-41.
- ^ Kees Meerhoff, Bartholomew Keckerman and the Anti-Ramist Tradition, in Christoph Strohm, Joseph S. Freedman, H. J. Selderhuis (editors), Späthumanismus und reformierte Konfession: Theologie, Jurisprudenz und Philosophie in Heidelberg an der Wende zum 17. Jahrhundert (2006), p. 188.
- ^ "CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Arnaud d'Ossat". www.newadvent.org.
- ^ James J. Murphy, Peter Ramus's Attack on Cicero: Text and Translation of Ramus's Brutinae Quaestiones (1992), p. x.
- ^ "CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Peter Ramus". www.newadvent.org.
- ^ Robert Mandrou, From Humanism to Science 1480-1700 (1978), p. 122.
- OCLC 892245076.
- ^ Compayré, Gabriel. "Ramus". www.inrp.fr/edition-electronique/lodel/dictionnaire-ferdinand-buisson.
- Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticim from Erasmus to Spinoza (1979), pp. 28-30.
- ^ Michel Félibien (1725). Histoire de la ville de Paris (in French). Paris: Guillaume Desprez et Jean Desessartz. p. 824. Retrieved 16 January 2021.
- ^ Edward Craig, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998), p. 52.
- ^ John D. Woodbridge, Kenneth S. Kantzer, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (1982), p. 185, with caveats.
- ^ Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courter Poet (1991), p. 60.
- ^ John Foxe's Book of Martyrs Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine, under Pierre de la Ramée.
- ISBN 978-0-7546-9408-3.
- ^ "Ramus, method, and the decay of dialogue: From the art of discourse to the art of reason," 1958. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
- ^ The Barbarian Within, 1962: 79-80.
- ^ Michelle Ballif, Michael G. Moran, Classical Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources (2005), p. 92.
- ^ Sourcebook on Rhetoric, 2001, pp. xvii-iii
- ^ Jasinski, James. Sourcebook on Rhetoric, 2001, pp. xviii
- ^ Steven Reid, Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World(2013), p. 13.
- ^ Peter Dixon, Rhetoric (1971), p. 65.
- ^ Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (1988), p. 206.
- ^ Steven Reid, Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World(2013), p. 8.
- ^ Erland, Sellberg (9 May 2006). "Petrus Ramus". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ Michael Losonsky, Language and Logic, in Donald Rutherford (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (2006), p. 176.
- ^ Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (1994), p. 131.
- ^ Petrus Ramus at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ Peter French, John Dee (1972), p. 143.
- ^ Peter French, John Dee (1972), p. 169.
- ^ A. G. Keller, Mathematicians, Mechanics, and Experimental Machines in Northern Italy in the Sixteenth Century, p. 16, in Maurice Crosland (editor), The Emergence of Technology in Western Europe (1975).
- ^ Thomas Johannes Freigius (1543–1583) was a Swiss scholar; "Historische Tabellenwerke - Freigius" (in German). Archived from the original on 2011-05-05. Retrieved 2011-03-27..
- ^ Théophile de Banos (died c. 1595) was a Huguenot pastor and author, originally from Bordeaux. Commentariorum de religione Christiana libri quatuor, nunquam antea editi (Frankfurt, 1576) included a biography of Ramus; Banosius was preacher in Frankfurt 1572 to 1578. Note in [1].
- ^ Erland, Sellberg (9 May 2006). "Petrus Ramus".
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(help) - ^ "Ramus, Petrus". www.ccel.org.
References
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ramus, Petrus". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 22 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 881. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
Further reading
- Nelly Bruyère, Méthode et dialectique dans l'oeuvre de La Ramée: Renaissance et Age classique, Paris, Vrin 1984
- Desmaze, Charles. Petrus Ramus, professeur au Collège de France, sa vie, ses ecrits, sa mort (Paris, 1864).
- Feingold, Mordechai; Freedman, Joseph S.; Rother, Wolfgang (eds.). The Influence of Petrus Ramus. Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences. Schwabe, Basel 2001, ISBN 978-3-7965-1560-6.
- 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.
- Howard Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and Its German Ramifications, 1543–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- 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. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen.(p. viii).
- ---.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, ISBN 0-226-62976-7).
- ---. Ramus and Talon Inventory (Harvard University Press, 1958).
- ---.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,
- 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, Charles De Petri Rami vita, scriptis, philosophia (Paris, 1848).
External links
- Works by Petrus Ramus at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Petrus Ramus at Internet Archive
- 'Ramism' entry in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas
- Sellberg, Erland. "Petrus Ramus". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Petrus Ramus at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Catholic Encyclopedia entry
- Charles Waddington, Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) sa vie, ses écrits et ses opinions (1855)