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Humanities
- ISSN: 2155-7993
- Journal of Modern Education Review
Pierre De La Ramée (Petrus Ramus): A Logician Pontonneer between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Ruxandra Irina Vulcan
(University Paris-IV Sorbonne, France)
Abstract: The meaning of Ramus, a major logician of the XVIth century, changes according to the point of view: insignificant in relation to the contemporary formal logics, but linchpin between the Middle Ages and the Modernity; it is the methodical argumentation, gathering logics with rhetorics, which gives his Pontoneer’s signification. The presentation proposes then to explain the main shifts and adaptations of the ramist system. The new interest for Aristotle’s Topics consisted in thinking of the probable against that of certainties, truth and arguments of authorities; favorable for diversity and novelties, the loci allow an analytical access to experience, well necessary during the period of discoveries. La Ramée makes yet of those inventio, fruit of the new humanist rhetorics, his logical battle horse. Used as argumenta, he transforms them in tools of the iudicium; he bounds so the Topics to the Organon’s Analytics in a global logic, unifying both the “natural logic” with syllogistics, induction with deduction, dialectical ars disserendi with rhetorical figures and colours. Without interdisciplinar barriers more, the ramism unifies knowledge in a pacifist encyclopedism, especially thanks wellknown students of the Academy of Herborn, Alsted, Althusius and Comenius.
Key words: logical method, invention-disposition from rhetorics to dialectics, order of knowledge (cognitive “golden chain”), dichotomies according the degree of generality, syllogistics
