By him it was referred to a commission of five, who found Ramus guilty of having "acted rashly, arrogantly and impudently," and interdicted his lectures (1544).
He withdrew from Paris, but soon afterwards returned, the decree against him being canceled by Henry II, who came to the throne in 1547, through the influence of Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine.
Pierre Galland [fr], another professor there, published Contra novam academiam Petri Rami oratio (1551), and called him a "parricide" for his attitude to Aristotle.
Audomarus Talaeus (Omer Talon c.1510–1581), a close ally of Ramus, had indeed published a work in 1548 derived from Cicero's description of Academic scepticism, the school of Arcesilaus and Carneades.
He resumed his chair after this for a time, but he was summoned on 30 June 1568 before the King's Attorney General to be heard with Simon Baudichon and other professors:[13] the position of affairs was again so threatening that he found it advisable to ask permission to travel.
[14] The La Rochelle Confession of Faith earned his disapproval, in 1571, rupturing his relationship with Theodore Beza and leading Ramus to write angrily to Heinrich Bullinger.
[17] His death was compared by one of his first biographers, his friend and colleague Nicolas de Nancel [fr], to the murder of Cicero.
Ramus sought to infuse order and simplicity into philosophical and scholastic education by reinvigorating a sense of dialectic as the overriding logical and methodological basis for the various disciplines.
[20] On the other hand, his work had an immediate impact on the issue of disciplinary boundaries, educators largely having accepted his arguments by the end of the 17th century.
[21] The logic of Ramus enjoyed a great celebrity for a time, and there existed a school of Ramists boasting numerous adherents in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
As James Jasinski explains, "the range of rhetoric began to be narrowed during the 16th century, thanks in part to the works of Peter Ramus.
[26] Invention involves fourteen topics, including definition, cause, effect, subject, adjunct, difference, contrary, comparison, similarity, and testimony.
[32] The views of Ramus on mathematics implied a limitation to the practical: he considered Euclid's theory on irrational numbers to be useless.
[33] The emphasis on technological applications and engineering mathematics was coupled to an appeal to nationalism (France was well behind Italy, and needed to catch up with Germany).
Later movements, such as Baconianism, pansophism, and Cartesianism, in different ways built on Ramism, and took advantage of the space cleared by some of the simplifications (and oversimplifications) it had effected.
The longest-lasting strand of Ramism was in systematic Calvinist theology, where textbook treatments with a Ramist framework were still used into the eighteenth century, particularly in New England.