RAMUS (de la Ramée), Pierre. - French humanist, b. in 1515 at Cuth (Soissons) and died on the 3rd day of the St. Bartholomew's massacre (26 Aug. 1572).
Nourished on classical studies, he soon became disgusted with the still predominant Aristotelian philosophy. The reading of Xenophon and Plato made him fall in love with the Socratic method. Barely twenty years old, he took his doctorate in artibus (1536) with a disputation in which he undertook to maintain that "quaccumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia essent". He first taught at the Collège de Mans in Paris, then opened his own school at the Collège de l'Ave Maria, for the teaching of rhetoric, accompanied by the reading and commentary of the Greek and Latin classics. To the teaching of rhetoric he soon linked, following the example of Lorenzo Valla and Lodovico Vives, that of dialectic, which he strove to free from scholastic formalism. In 1543 he published in Paris the Dialecticae partitiones (republished later in 1553 under the new title Institutionum dialecticarum II. III) and the Aristotelicae animadversiones. Attacked by Pierre de Perim of the Sorbonne and by the Portuguese jurist António de Gouveia, the two writings were censored by the faculty of theology and suppressed by royal decree of 1 March 1544, while the University demanded the galleys for their author. Suspended from teaching, he was put in charge of reorganizing the Collège de Presles, which under his direction became one of the most flourishing of the University of Paris, so that he soon became the target of new accusations. With the protection of the Cardinal of Lorraine, a chair was created for him at the Collège Royal (1551), where he delivered the famous prolusion Pro philosophica disciplina before two thousand listeners. From this chair he undertook to treat, one after another, all the liberal arts, natural philosophy and metaphysics. In 1554 he was attacked by Jacques Charpentier, who wrote his Animadversiones in II. III institutionum dialecticarum P. Rami, and in 1566 the Orationes contra Ramm; Charpentier was his most implacable enemy.
Ramus considered Aristotelian logic artificial, and, endowed as he was with a humanistic spirit, he proposed a return to natural logic, innate in all men and represented by the Socratic method in the dialogues of Plato. At the center of this dialectic stands the question, that is, the problem that man is led step by step to pose for himself concerning a given subject and which he resolves by means of inquiry (the inventio with its loci communes) and of judgment, which unfolds in its three degrees: the syllogism, the system, the reduction of all the sciences to God. This humanistic reform of dialectic tends to replace Aristotelian "analytics" with Ciceronian oratorical "invention". It is precisely through the exercise of speaking and writing that natural logic is perfected and becomes an art.
In 1561 Ramus adhered to Calvinism. During the first war of religion, forced to abandon Paris, he returned there after the Peace of Amboise (1563), to resume his lectures at the Collège Royal. During the second civil war he took refuge with the Prince of Condé. Threatened with reprisals, he left France (1568) and set about visiting the reformed universities of Switzerland and Germany. Having returned to Paris, he found himself expelled from the direction of the Collège de Presles and dismissed from his teaching at the Collège Royal. In vain he had recourse to the Cardinal of Lorraine, in vain he hoped to be received at Geneva, where Beza was too suspicious of the spirit of independence that Ramus also displayed in the Defensio pro Aristotele (Lausanne 1571), against the quarrelsome Protestant theologian Jakob Schenk. His assassination was due to Charpentier's denunciation.