Petrus Ramus
born 1515, Cuts, Picardy, Fr.
died Aug. 26, 1572, Paris
French philosopher, logician, and
rhetorician.
Educated at Cuts and later at the
Collège de Navarre, in Paris, Ramus
became master of arts in 1536. He taught
a reformed version of Aristotelian logic
at the Collège du Mans, in Paris, and at
the Collège de l’Ave Maria, where he
worked with Audomarus Talaeus (Omer
Talon). Talaeus, under Ramus’ influence,
reformed Ciceronian rhetoric upon the
principles applied by Ramus to the
rearrangement of Aristotle’s Organon.
These innovations so provoked the
orthodox Aristotelian philosophers at
the University of Paris that they
induced Francis I in 1544 to suppress
Ramus’ works on the reformed logic and
forbid him to teach that subject.
Cardinal Charles de Lorraine used his
influence with Henry II to have the ban
against Ramus lifted (1547), and in 1551
Ramus was appointed regius professor of
philosophy and eloquence at the Collège
de France. About 1561 he was converted
to Protestantism, and the last years of
his life were marked by mounting
persecution from his academic and
ecclesiastical enemies. He was murdered
by hired assassins two days after the
outbreak of the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew’s Day.
Ramus, identifying logic with
dialectic, neglected the traditional
role that logic played as a method of
inquiry and emphasized instead the
equally traditional view that logic is
the method of disputation, its two parts
being invention, the process of
discovering proofs in support of the
thesis, and disposition, which taught
how the materials of invention should be
arranged.
Ramus’ logic had an enormous vogue in
Europe during the 16th and 17th
centuries. He was a prolific writer;
among his most celebrated works are
Dialecticae partitiones (1543),
Aristotelicae animadversiones (1543),
Dialectique (1555), and Dialecticae
libri duo (1556).
