The Prologue offers an overview of the Reformation of method from Augustine of Hippo through to the Ramist movement, providing an orientation to the rest of the book. It highlights and explains an important nexus of Realism, exemplarism and illumination fundamental to Ramism. Beginning with Augustine it shows how these themes coalesced into a distinctive Christian philosophy taken up and refined by Franciscans such as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and John Duns Scotus, as well as by Ramon Lull, the Franciscan-inspired encyclopaedist. (...) It traces the continuation of this methodological impulse into the Platonism and Christian humanism of the Renaissance, highlighting especially the topical and Realist (Scotistic) reform of logic pioneered by Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola. It concludes by showing the reception of this topical and biblical reform in Philipp Melanchthon and the movement of Reformed scholasticism, revealing Reformed Scotism and Christian philosophy as important preconditions for Ramism. (shrink)

Ramism was the most controversial pedagogical movement to sweep through the Protestant world in the latter sixteenth century. This book, the first contextualized study of this rich tradition, has wide-ranging implications for the intellectual, cultural, and social histories not only of the Holy Roman Empire but also of the entire Protestant world in the crucial decades immediately preceding the advent of the "new philosophy" in the mid-seventeenth century.

The book situates the works and reception of the French scholar Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus) in a variety of European cultural and educational contexts, from Britain and France to Eastern Europe, from Germany to the Iberian peninsula, and from Scandinavia to the Netherlands. Pierre de la Ramée or Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) has long been a controversial figure in educational reform and innovation, from the moment of his first public academic statements in the 1530s, to his reception among scholars (...) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is beyond dispute, however, is the vast reach of his influence throughout Europe. Ramus's ideas were disseminated through copious editions and translations of his own textbooks, and in wave after wave of adaptations and re-imaginings of his ideas that swept across the continent. This volume embarks on a European tour of Ramism, using a wide range of previously unpublished or untranslated archival evidence from throughout the continent to examine the dissemination of Ramus's works and his intellectual influence in geographic and in disciplinary terms. The ten chapters explore the spread of Ramism from his home country of France to Protestant strongholds in Germany, Holland, and Britain, and in the Catholic context of the Iberian peninsula. The book also examines Ramism in the less familiar territories (to most Anglophone readers) of Scandinavia and Hungary, and considers the preceding and contemporary Dutch and German educational reform movements from which Ramus borrowed to forge his own distinctive intellectual method. (shrink)

Berkeley's doctrines about mind, the language of nature, substance, minima sensibilia, notions, abstract ideas, inference, and freedom appropriate principles developed by the 16th-century logician Peter Ramus and his 17th-century followers (e.g., Alexander Richardson, William Ames, John Milton). Even though Berkeley expresses himself in Cartesian or Lockean terms, he relies on a Ramist way of thinking that is not a form of mere rhetoric or pedagogy but a logic and ontology grounded in Stoicism. This article summarizes the central features of Ramism, (...) indicates how Berkeley adapts Ramist concepts and strategies, and chronicles Ramism's pervasiveness in Berkeley's education, especially at Trinity College Dublin. (shrink)

L’article propose un bref état des lieux des études consacrées à Pierre de La Ramée, dit Ramus (1515-1572) et au ramisme depuis 2000, date du dernier bilan établi par Peter Sharratt (1939-2014), à qui le colloque rend hommage. Il est suivi d’une bibliographie (2005-2018), partagée presque également entre les études portant sur Ramus et celles consacrées à sa réception et à la diffusion internationale du ramisme. Les trois champs de recherche identifiés par Sharratt entre 1987 et 2000 (le (...) débat sur l’« humanisme » de Ramus, la définition du « ramisme » et la mise en évidence du contexte social et politique) ont confirmé leur fécondité, et l’on observe un renouvellement de la recherche sur les combats et controverses, et sur les rapport de Ramus avec les sciences, le droit et la politique. (shrink)

This article considers Frances Yates’s famous attribution of “inner iconoclasm” to the rhetorical and logical innovations of Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), particularly as exemplified in the theological writings of the Elizabethan preacher William Perkins (1558–1602). According to Yates, the rejection, by Ramists such as Perkins, of the imagistic art of memory practised by Raymond Lull (c.1232–c.1315) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was tied directly to Ramists’s commitment to the Calvinist rejection of religious images. For Yates, the rejection of images in religious contexts (...) motivated Ramists, including Perkins, to reject all images, both physical and imaginary. Contra Yates, this article suggests that there is little warrant to connect the rejections of mnemonic and religious imagery. Furthermore, Yates’s implicit suggestion that both Ramism and Calvinism constitute rejections of the human imagination tout court is contested through a detailed engagement with the philosophical theories of the imagination articulated by Ramists, Calvinists and proponents of the art of memory. The article concludes with an exposition of Perkins’s account of imagination, and its connection to his treatment of religious images, arguing that Perkins retained an important place for the imagination even within his theology. (shrink)

Ramism was the most innovative and disruptive educational reform movement to sweep through the international Protestant world in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During the 1620s, the Thirty Years' War destroyed the network of central European academies and universities which had generated most of this innovation. Students and teachers, fleeing the conflict in all directions, transplanted that tradition into many different geographical and cultural contexts in which it bore are wide variety of interrelated fruit. Within the Dutch Republic, (...) post-Ramist method played a crucial role in the rapid assimilation of Cartesianism into a network of thriving young academies and universities. From England to east-central Europe, the tradition was no less important in accelerating the reception of Baconianism. In the easternmost outpost of the Reformed world in Transylvania, the displaced tradition generated a final flourishing of philosophical innovation which exercised a formative influence on the young Leibniz. The failure of all of these efforts to assemble the fruits of this tradition into an encyclopaedic synthesis marks a major watershed in Western intellectual history. The Reformation of Common Learning brings together all of these aspects of the tradition in a manner which roots them in deeper historical developments and relates a series of far-flung and poorly understood developments together in new ways. (shrink)

The paper shows Timpler's contribution to development of a philosophical concept of system. The author proves that in this area Timpler has made the following important innovations: Differentiation of the concepts of science and system. Identifying system with external art, Timpler emphasizes thereby a practical importance of the theoretical knowledge too. He premises to system in strict sense the so-called "technology" which assumes some traditional functions of metaphysics. "Technology" treats about the nature and structure of arts, and also formulates the (...) normative principles according to which any system is to be built. He preserves the fundamental nature of metaphysics and significantly expands its subject. According to Timpler, the subject of metaphysics is not being, but intelligible. The metaphysical categories are considered by him not as kinds of being, but as ultimate bases of the intelligible. Though he keeps Keckerman’s concept of system as system of instructions, the metaphysics is represented as system of the categories located in a methodical order. Metaphysical categories are considered by him not as arts of beings, but as the last bases of intelligible. Categories determine the last principles of all intelligible. The author marks out four understandings of system at Timpler: as system of external arts, as system of sciences, as encyclopedia and as system of categories. Despite influence of neo-scholastics, ramisme, peripateticism and other methodological traditions, in this case one can tell about forming of new methodological direction in the philosophy of XVІІ century, namely “systematic direction” differing from syncretism and eclecticism. (shrink)

William Ames (1576-1633) a incarné une autorité fondamentale pour les puritains qui ont émigré en Nouvelle-Angleterre. Dans son œuvre, il a la singularité d’allier ses convictions religieuses à une mentalité ramiste. Ames considère la méthode de Ramus comme une manière adéquate de comprendre l’acquisition et la transmission des savoirs. Le système ramiste s’applique aussi au domaine de la théologie et à certaines questions liées au gouvernement de l’individu. Cet article vise à mettre en lumière cette combinaison entre le puritanisme et (...) le ramisme qui caractériserait une façon bien particulière de concevoir le gouvernement de l’individu : un modèle qui renforce la volonté de l’individu et sa capacité de contrôle, en tant qu’instruments essentiels de gouvernement, et qui renferme un objectif émancipateur et égalitaire. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Putting French Studies on the MapTom Conley (bio)A good deal of work accomplished in new historicism over the last decade has opened new perspectives on the relations of literature to cartography. If new historicism tends to be affiliated with Shakespearean scholars who reconstruct the world of the Globe Theatre in the context of London and the Elizabethan world picture, it almost goes without saying that cartography, whose mobilization and (...) rapid growth occur from the beginnings of the printing press to the middle of the seventeenth century, plays a significant role in the analysis of print-culture in general. 1 The convergence of the two disciplines has shown that Renaissance authors, obsessed with the beginnings of writing, valorize both its geographical and spatial virtues and the ways that its pictogrammar constitutes “a grid for comprehension of the world” [Martin 14]. Humanists discovered that it simulated divisions of land in transactions devoted to their negotiation. What early archeologists of writing discovered is comparable today to what we gather about the meaning of the crosshatched rectangles and insignia we admire on the great prehistoric petroglyph of Bedolina standing over its arable valley below [Jacob 41–48; Thrower 4–5]. In the early modern age cartographical issues are central to broader inquiry about the power of writing.New historicists take up early modern cartography not just to assess the impact of Ptolemy on humanism but to develop agendas that concern how a sense of habitus was conceived, projected, and betrayed at a time of tumultuous change. They ask how the “world” could be both imagined and experienced when its boundaries were expanding at exponential rates. Cartographic studies have shown where the unknown, vital for any definition of consciousness or even the drives of life itself, was located and bracketed. 2 The unknown was an integral part of cartography prior to the eighteenth century. But to assert, as many have, that cartography sought to contain the unknown within the terrae incognitae it indicated on its maps does not solve the relation of the discipline with the [End Page 23] unknown. Evidence shows how much in the early modern age the unknown inhabits most written and schematic representations of the world. 3 Unnamed patches that we retrieve on maps printed in the sixteenth century prompt reverie of spaces that can be fancied as unknown by virtue of the maps themselves. The cartographical impulse in early modern studies cannot be dissociated from our own drive to find spots that can remove us from the regnum of nonplaces that define our world, that is, other places, whether heterotopical or “anywhere out of this world,” valorized when the “nonplace” has come to define contemporary human geography [see Augé 1992].Concurrently, the history of cartography remains one of the most immediate modes of access for what we can understand about the imagination of power, control, statecraft, and economy at a time when maps figured with increasing regularity in matters of administration. In broader terms, we can say that the unforeseen growth of map production and the consequent stress laid on fantasies of power that accompanied cartographic representations from the beginning of print culture to the establishment of “state reason” under Louis XIV bore witness to a greater spatialization of knowledge. What in the study of literature goes by the name of discourse is seen through a cartographical lens as patterns of utterances and exchanges that owe much to the influence of Ramism, monocular perspective, and diagrammatical logic. It is a truism to note that when the world became a function of cartographical representations made accessible to a public at large, the ways it was configured bore great impact on communication in general. 4In this issue of Diacritics, where the current plight and uncertain future of French studies is being pondered, it also goes without saying that many teachers and scholars are wondering what can be done to invigorate one of the richest of all literary canons. The assault that American media have led on French culture (among others, articles in the New Times by Roger Cohen and Craig Whitney) would lead us to believe that literature has [End Page 24] become equivalent to freeze-dried croissants, a... (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: ARISTOTELIAN AND CARTESIAN LOGIC AT HARVARD -- by Rick Kennedy -- I. Introduction --II. Religiously-Oriented, Dogmatically-Inclined Humanistic Logics from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century -- A. Melanchthon and Aristotelianism 01 -- B. Richardson and Ramism 16 -- C. Aristotelianism, Ramism, and Schematic Thinking 25 -- D. Puritan Favoritism From Ramus to Descartes 32 -- E. Cartesian Logic and Christian Skepticism 37 -- F. The Religious and Dogmatic Orientation of The Port-'Royalfogic 42 -- G. Cartesian Logic (...) in British Textbooks 52 -- III. Charles Morton and c A; logick System -- A. Charles Morton 62 -- B. Morton's cAfogick System 78 -- IV. William Brattle and the Compendium of logick -- A. Intellectual Reform in the Puritans' Collapsing World 91 -- B. The Compendium ofJogick 93 -- c. Brattle: Tutor and Unofficial Professor of Divinity 108 -- V. Epilogue: Later Constituencies of Religious Logics and 133 -- The Separation of Logic and Divinity at Harvard. (shrink)

Vers la fin du XVI e siècle, le ramisme se répandit en Allemagne, gagna un grand nombre de prosélytes et fit preuve d'une remarquable vitalité. L'histoire de ses effets constitue un intéressant, néanmoins peu recherché chapitre de l'historiographie de la philosophie, et la question portant sur les ‹dettes› éventuelles de Leibniz envers le ramisme se tiend au coeur de cet essai. En premier lieu, quelques caractères théoriques du ramisme allemand et surtout du philippo-ramisme sont mis en (...) évidence, après cela on analyse l'emploi de Leibniz des notions ‹dialectic›, ‹topica› et ‹ars inveniendi› et l'on découvre une syntonisation conceptuelle entre cet emploi et la manière de penser des ramistes. Sans en tirer des conclusions hasardeuses, on peut comprendre le ramisme comme un ingrédient essentiel de l'univers leibnizien complexe et comme un thème de plus en plus important pour Leibniz. (shrink)

This book discusses the intersection of the great military and intellectual disruptions of the mid-seventeenth century. It examines how the Thirty Years' War scattered representatives of Ramism from central Europe into old and new institutions, especially into the northwest, the Dutch Republic, and England.

Si les relations des Regulae avec leurs sources antiques ou médiévales ont été bien traitées, leur mise en place dans l'environnement immédiat laisse à désirer. Pourquoi n'a-t-on jamais mis ce premier ouvrage de Descartes en relation avec les "Dialectiques" qui font du xvie siècle un "siècle logique"? Une documentation surabondante prouve que ces logiques renaissantes sont tombées dans les oubliettes de l'histoire. De multiples courants rendent très vivant le développement de ces ouvrages consacrés à l'invention, au jugement et à la (...) méthode. Leurs profils deviennent forts apparents à qui les étudie. Or les Regulae, dont le profil typique exige la considération d'autres concepts que celui de méthode, épousent les schèmes conceptuels du ramisme, sans références à d'autres courants. D'où cette étude qui consiste à prendre pour point de référence la Dialectique française de La Ramée et à tendre l'axe critique et spéculatif qui ne cesse d'être tracé entre La Ramée et Descartes. Mais ce n'est pas là seulement une rétrospection créatrice : c'est aussi une nouvelle entrée dans la philosophie cartésienne de "la lumière naturelle". Les œuvres mûres seront à reconsidérer sous cet éclairage. (shrink)

Philosophical Disputations at the University of Tartu 1632-1710: Boundaries of a Discipline.