Why were these years important? The author of this article, Wilbur Samuel Howell, says, "The period between 1574 and 1681 witnessed the death of the medieval world and the birth of the modern world." Ramus was considered to personally have wanted to prolong the Medieval period rather than influence its end. But the author says the reforms Ramus made in communication theory inadvertently established the terms which help mark the transition form ancient to modern rhetorical theory.
So who Ramus? He was a frenchman who the author said "took a 'noisy part' in the 16th century reform of the liberal arts." He was the author of a system of logic which had great popularity for generation after his death. He was also one of the Protestant martyrs who died in the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572.
For years he was thought of a minor figure of the Renaissance period because he was overshadowed by other popular philosophers such as Erasmus, Descartes, Bacon & Hobbes. But historians of rhetoric and logic have recently begun to credit Ramus with a much larger influence on his times than was earlier acknowledged. Now Ramus is said to have been an influence behind the great literary writers of the English Renaissance and the Puritan revolution.
This article is written in two sections: in the first, the author describes Ramus' philosophy and how it is different from that of the conventional wisdom of the time, and second he tells of the English writers who were inspired by Ramus.
The teachings of Ramus were very unconventional for his time. The author says: "During his lifetime, Ramus sponsored a revision in educational method; its chief feature was his insistence that the liberal disciplines should exist as separate and independent entities." This meant that he did not allow in any way, one subject to overlap another. For example, at the time, if you were taking rhetoric you would have to master the subjects of invention, disposition, style, memory and delivery as taught by Cicero and Quintillian. If you were studying dialectic you were asked to again master invention and disposition as taught by Cicero and Aristotle. Ramus was totally against this.
The author says that Ramus was very concerned "about the general untidiness of having two important arts share the same subject matter... and that he probably thought it was a waste of time for students to learn invention and disposition twice over, once in their course in rhetoric and once in their course in dialectic."
It was based on this that he developed an important principle called the Law of Justice which meant that each liberal discipline should keep to its own subject matter. As it applied to communication theory, the Law of Justice meant that dialectic was to encompass invention and discipline and rhetoric was to cover style and delivery.
Ramus then devised two other principles: the Law of Truth and the Law of Wisdom. The Law of Truth said that "any principle in any liberal discipline should be universally true." The Law of Wisdom said that "principles of any discipline should be listed from general to the particular."
Ramus' own specialty was dialectic and his most famous work in this field was called the "Dialectique of 1555". Also published were the "Dialecticae Libri Duo" which were a Latin version of the same book published a year later. Both of these books contain the same teachings of Ramus: - They define dialectic as the 'art of disputing well.' - They divide dialectic into two parts: invention and disposition. - They say that invention consists of ten major subject-predicate relationships. - They say that disposition emphasizes how propositions, syllogisms, and whole discourses are put together. Both texts also outline the 'Ramist method' which is to divide any subject into two, and then divide each of these parts again in two. This 'branching in two' is everywhere as a structural principle. Later this methods was described as "Ramus' uniform method and dichotomies."
In the second part of the article, the author shows how the teachings of Ramus eventually spread to the English scholars. First, Ramus' colleague and student "Talaeus" continued the teaching of Ramus after his death when he published "Rhetorica" . This publication was a natural progression of Ramus' book "Dialectique". The author says the following of Talaeus: "His complete dedication to his master Ramus is everywhere...He makes his work read as if it were an exact continuation of the"Dialectique"...in fact, these two works blend together as neatly as they would if they were a single author."
Thirty years later, a Scottish man, Roland MacIlmaine, published Ramus' "Dilectic" in English. At the time it was introduced in England, the teachings of another scholar, Thomas Wilson, were already popular. His system was like those which Ramus had previously attacked: he allowed dialectic and rhetoric to duplicate one another in important areas of subject matter. But the author says that Ramus' works as translated by MacIlmaine "scored a complete victory for the French invader" and soon the Ramus was everywhere among English scholars.
Many English writers began to embrace the works of Ramus. The author says "In the century between 1574 and 1674, England appears to have produced at least eleven derivatives of Ramus' masterpiece, seven of which would be counted as annotated texts, three as Latin paraphrases, and one as a Latin rhetorical version of Ramus' theory of dialectical invention."
Ramus' surge of popularity, however, came to an end with what the author calls "the brave young science of the seventeenth century." He said the teachings of Ramus, with its emphasis on routine, became stale with the new scientists. All they wanted was a communication theory which was "suitable to transfer knowledge from scientist to scientist and from scientist to the public." The author says "Here we see pressures developing in society to render the rhetoric of tropes and figures obsolete, even as similar pressures were acting at the same time to make the dialectic of invention and disposition inadequate."
But at least he a good run of 107 years.
Dana McKoy, MCKOYD@UNCWIL.EDU