Petrus Ramus and Ramism

Petrus Ramus was considered a controversial professor in Paris in the middle of the 16th century, and he remains so among scholars today. He is mostly considered to have been an unimportant philosopher, yet his ideas about how philosophy should be understood, and how it consequently should be taught and, most importantly, to what benefit it should be undertaken, had an enormous impact on northern Europe and New England in the Early Modern period. Ramus was born in 1515 in the north of France. He came from a noble but destitute family. Ramus spent his youth in hardship before he secured the opportunity to study in Paris. He later adopted as a motto the words of Virgil “labor improbus omnia vincit,” i.e., insatiable work overcomes everything, which reflected his pride in his ability to surmount his difficulties and obtain a masters of arts degree in 1536. Ramus won a reputation for criticizing deficiencies in the curriculum and the teaching at the university as well as for blaming Scholasticism for it. His ideas on how to reform education were not appreciated by most of his colleagues, and he was for a time banned from teaching. Modern scholars of Ramism are divided between those who think that Ramus’s departure from the Aristotelian tradition stemmed from a Platonic ontological outlook, which he never abandoned, and those who thought that his childhood’s hardship engendered in him a striving for a new and shorter educational program, one that led him to abandon the traditional Scholasticism. One argument for the latter explanation is that it easily explains all the variations found in his system of textbooks. In 1551 he was appointed to a royal professorship through which he succeeded in distancing himself from the university. And ten years later he took a further step away from scholarly circles when he converted to the Reformed faith. As a Huguenot, he lost the support of the Roman Catholic Church. Eventually he left Paris and spent time in Germany and Switzerland. He tried, although he failed, to obtain a chair in Heidelberg and in Strasbourg. In 1570 he returned to Paris and to his royal professorship, but still without the right to teach at the university. Ramus was assassinated in the immediate wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres in 1572, and for many Protestants he became a martyr.

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