Peter Ramus

French philosopher and rhetorician

• Born: 1515
• Birthplace: Cuts, near Noyon, Vermandois, Picardy, France
• Died: August 26, 1572
• Place of death: Paris, France

Ramus rethought and reorganized Aristotle’s logic and devised what he called a simplified system of rhetoric based on method, observation, daily speech, and usefulness. He was highly influential on Puritan thinkers of the early seventeenth century, and he advocated the redesign of university curricula according to Humanist principles.

Early Life

Peter Ramus (PAY-tehr RAY-muhs) was one of the most widely read and influential rhetoricians of the European Renaissance. Born Pierre de la Ramée to poor parents, he later latinized his name to Petrus Ramus. He entered the Collège de Navarre in Paris in 1527, earning his master of arts degree nine years later. In 1537, he began giving well-received lectures at the Collège du Mans. Despite his popularity among students, however, his strongly anti-Aristotelian opinions angered faculty and administrators, who disagreed with his energetic plans to redesign the university curriculum by eliminating its reliance on courses of study dating from the Middle Ages.

Life’s Work

In 1544, Ramus was relieved of his teaching duties, but in 1545, he was appointed director of the Collège de Presles, and a ban against his teaching was waived in 1547. In 1551, he became the first head of the Collège de France. Despite his Roman Catholic upbringing, Ramus became a Protestant convert in 1561, an action that alienated his former advocate Cardinal Charles de Lorraine. He embarked on a plan to reorganize the University of Paris by arguing for a reduction of the teaching staff, the eradication of student tuition, the use of monies drawn from bishops and monasteries, and the inclusion of new professorships in physics, mathematics, botany, Hebrew, Greek, and other subjects.

Calvinists were expelled from Paris in 1562, forcing Ramus to leave for Fontainebleau. He returned to Paris in 1563 but spent only four years there, fleeing again after an academic controversy. In his absence, his library had been burned. The mounting religious conflict caused him to depart for Protestant Germany and Switzerland in 1568-1570. Though his Calvinism found him friends, his opposition to Aristotle continued to earn him criticism. He returned to Paris in 1570 but was denied again a teaching post, and in 1572, he was condemned by the synod of Nîmes for advocating a congregational form of Church rule.

On August 26, 1572, Ramus was murdered, becoming one of the three thousand Huguenots killed by Parisian Catholics in what became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, a religious persecution that claimed eventually seventy thousand French Protestants. It is possible that Ramus was executed at the order of an embittered faculty member at his own college.

In spite of his life of frequent travel, bitter controversy, and hard study (he reputedly slept only three hours per night), Ramus published more than sixty works in rhetoric, logic, languages, and religion, as well as collections of his lectures and commentaries and editions of the classics. Thirteen additional works were completed with the aid of Omer Talon (Audomarus Talaeus), a fellow academic with whom he worked at the Collège de Presles. Collected editions of all their works number well more than one thousand, testimony to the broad influence of this reformer during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ramus’s first major works, Dialecticae partitiones (structure in dialectic) and Aristotelicae animadversions (remarks on Aristotle) appeared in 1543. Brutinae quaestiones in Oratorem Ciceronis (questions of Brutus against Cicero’s orator) was published in 1547, followed in 1549 by Rhetoricae distinctiones in Quintilianum (Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian , 1986). Twenty years later, Scholae in liberales artes (lectures on the liberal arts) was published. A work on religion, Commentariorum de religione Christiana libri quatuor (commentary on the Christian religion in four books), was published four years after his death.

Ramus is not known for the sheer originality of his thought; rather, he is noteworthy for having attempted to revise the art of rhetoric (written and oral persuasion) as it had been practiced prior to the Renaissance and for his efforts to revamp the college curricula of his time. His scholarly energy and later conversion to Calvinism made him very popular among Puritans, yet his efforts to overturn the centuries-old academic methods of the universities met with hostility in England and on the Continent. Ramus’s opposition to the ancient methods of Aristotelian rhetoric was clear as early as 1536 in the title of his master’s thesis, “Whatever Aristotle Has Said Is a Fabrication.”

Rhetoric had been traditionally a part of the trivium, the academic course of study that included grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Aristotelian rhetoric consisted of invention (the finding of content material to support the argument), arrangement (the order or structure of the parts of the argument), style (the manner of expression), memory (to eliminate the need for notes), and delivery (effective oral presentation). Ramus was influenced in his renovation of this structure by the fifteenth century Dutch Humanist Rodolphus Agricola (Roelof Huysman), who, like other Humanists of the period, was dismayed by the voluminous medieval discussions that had complicated a clear understanding of Aristotle. Ramus had declared in his master’s thesis that even Aristotle did not follow his own rules of organization, and in his Dialectique (1555; Dialectics , 1574) Ramus chose to simplify rhetoric by teaching invention and arrangement as branches of logic, leaving only style (which included memory and delivery) as the basis for what had been a five-part subject. This simplification would also be understood by students more easily, making his rhetorical renovation also a pedagogical one.

In Ramus and Talon’s Rhetorica (1548), rhetoric was essentially limited to the use of ornamental poetic figures. Because invention and arrangement were fundamental ways of thinking about a topic, not merely writing or speaking about it, Ramus regarded them as logical, not rhetorical, functions.

Ramist logic was presented not primarily in terms of Aristotle’s favorite method, the syllogism, but mostly in terms of self-evidently true statements or axioms. Ramist educational practice focused not on the intricacy of the three-part syllogism, but on specific statements from actual speeches or various works of literature. Education in logic thus proceeded from specific examples that were regarded as universally true, demonstrable, and general, not from confusing, intricate arguments. Ramus’s method of simplification went further: Statements were divided into two contrasting, binary elements, each of which could again be subdivided into an opposing pair of ideas. This bipartite or dichotomous analysis of axioms was often portrayed pictorially as a kind of tree-diagram, with branching subordinate headings displayed across a page. Ramus had in this way also succeeded in appealing to students who might now be called visual learners.

Significance

Although Ramus’s influence faded in the eighteenth century, he was widely read and debated during and after his life. His rejection of the medieval scholastic reliance on Aristotle made him especially appealing to the emerging Puritan intellectuals of the seventeenth century. He was a shaping influence on the Puritan culture of the American colonies, as seen in the theology of Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard. In England, his work affected many, including the Cambridge preacher William Perkins, whose sermons were an example of the new plain-style expression. The more famous Cambridge graduate, John Milton, author of Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), adhered to Ramist principles in his Latin grammar of 1669. In 1672, Milton published Artis logicae plenior institutio ad Petri Rami methodum concinnata (a fuller course in the art of logic conformed to the method of Peter Ramus), his compilation of Ramus’s Dialectics. Ramus’s binary method for organizing knowledge would influence book 2 of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) and influence Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), two works of importance in the scientific revolution that flourished after Ramus’s death.

Bibliography

McKim, Donald K. Ramism in William Perkins’ Theology. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Studies the impact of Ramus on the theology of one of the most prominent English Puritans.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. 1939. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. An important study that considers the impact of Ramus and other intellectual forces affecting New England Puritan culture.

Ong, Walter J. Ramus and Talon Inventory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. A complete listing of the works by Ramus and Talon.

Ong, Walter J. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. 1958. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. The most detailed examination of the origins and practice of Ramism.

Parker, David L. “Petrus Ramus and the Puritans: The ’Logic’ of Preparationist Conversion Doctrine.” Early American Literature 8 (1973): 140-162. Discusses how the American Puritans Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard might have employed Ramist logic in their theology.

Sharratt, Peter. “Ramus 2000.” Rhetorica 18, no. 4 (Autumn, 2000): 399-455. An extensive review of scholarly studies on Ramus and Ramism appearing between 1987 and 2000.

Skalnik, James Veazie. Ramus and Reform: University and Church at the End of the Renaissance. Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2002. Examines Ramus as a reformer of university programs and as a Protestant rebel within the Church.