Abstract

The paper examines the relevance of Platonic and Neoplatonic assumptions for two famous concepts of Humanist logic in the Renaissance: Melanchthon’s Erotemata dialectices and Ramus’s Dialecticae libri duo, and their assimilation into four diff erent sixteenth-century Philippo-Ramist textbooks. It argues that both Melanchthon’s and Ramus’s shared meta-logical implications, as well as the influence of these implications on the particular understanding, structure and function of dialectic are mirrored by the later Philippo-Ramist attempts to harmonize their doctrines. By uncovering the epistemological implications behind such concepts as "nature", "intellect" and "natural light" and their bearing on the Humanist concepts of dialectic, some new light can be shed on the way late sixteenth-century authors assessed, compared and joined the at times divergent heritage of their Humanist teachers. This paper thus contributes to the assessment of the origins and development of a particular understanding of logic in late sixteenth-century Protestant Germany.