[1] According to British historian Jonathan Israel: "[Ramism], despite its crudity, enjoyed vast popularity in late sixteenth-century Europe, and at the outset of the seventeenth, providing as it did a method of systematizing all branches of knowledge, emphasizing the relevance of theory to practical applications [...]"[2]Ramus was a cleric and professor of philosophy who gained notoriety first by his criticism of Aristotle and then by conversion to Protestantism.
[1] Ramism was closely linked to systematic Calvinism, but the hybrid Philippo-Ramism (which is where the Semi-Ramists fit in) arose as a blend of Ramus with the logic of Philipp Melanchthon.
[16] Similarly the leading Lutheran Aristotelian philosopher Jakob Schegk resolutely rejected Ramus and opposed his visit to Tübingen.
[18] Where universities were open to Ramist teaching, there still could be dislike and negative reactions, stemming from the perceived personality of Ramus (arrogant, a natural polemicist), or of that of his supporters (young men in a hurry).
There was tacit adoption of some of the techniques such as the epitome, without acceptance of the whole package of reform including junking Aristotle in favour of the new textbooks, and making Ramus an authoritative figure.
[20] He was a representative Dutch opponent; Ramism did not take permanent hold in the universities of the Netherlands, and once William Ames had died, it declined.
She considers that Ramism drew on Lullism, but is more superficial; was opposed to the classical art of memory; and moved in an opposite direction to the occult (reducing rather than increasing the role of images).
[24] Mary Carruthers referred back to Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas: "It is one of those ironies of history that Peter Ramus, who, in the sixteenth century, thought he was reacting against Aristotelianism by taking memoria from rhetoric and making it part of dialectic, was essentially remaking a move made 300 years before by two Dominican professors who were attempting to reshape memorial study in conformity with Aristotle.
"[25]An alternative to this aspect of Ramism, as belated and diminishing, is the discussion initiated by Walter Ong of Ramus in relation to several evolutionary steps.
Ong's position, on the importance of Ramus as historical figure and humanist, has been summed up as the center of controversies about method (both in teaching and in scientific discovery) and about rhetoric and logic and their role in communication.
[28] The cultural impact of Ramism depended on the nexus of printing (trees regularly laid out with braces) and rhetoric, forceful and persuasive at least to some Protestants; and it had partly been anticipated in cataloguing and indexing knowledge and its encyclopedism by Conrad Gesner.
Ong, though, consistently argues that Ramus is thin, insubstantial as a scholar, a beneficiary of fashion supported by the new medium of printing, as well as a transitional figure.
Brian Vickers summed up the view a generation or so later: dismissive of Yates, he notes that bracketed tables existed in older manuscripts, and states that Ong's emphases are found unconvincing.
[32] Lisa Jardine agrees with Ong that he was not a first-rank innovator, more of a successful textbook writer adapting earlier insights centred on topics-logic, but insists on his importance and influence in humanistic logic.
[33] It has been said that: Puritans believed the maps proved well suited to rationalize and order the Christian view of revealed truth and the language and knowledge of the new learning, specifically the scientific and philosophical paradigms arising out of the Renaissance.
[34]Donald R. Kelley writes of the "new learning" (nova doctrina) or opposition in Paris to traditional scholasticism as a "trivial revolution", i.e. growing out of specialist teachers of the trivium.
He argues that: The aim was a fundamental change of priorities, the transformation of hierarchy of disciplines into a 'circle' of learning, an 'encyclopedia' embracing human culture in all of its richness and concreteness and organized for persuasive transmission to society as a whole.
Francis Bacon, a Cambridge graduate, was early aware of Ramism, but the near-equation of dispositio with method was unsatisfactory, for Baconians, because arrangement of material was seen to be inadequate for research.
The Cambridge Puritans were represented by Alexander Richardson, George Downame, Anthony Wotton, and especially by William Ames, whose writings became the favorite philosophy texts of early New England.
[57][58] There is a short treatise by John Milton, who was a student at Christ's from 1625, published two years before his death, called Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio ad Petri Rami Methodum concinnata.
Through it, Sidney's usage of figures was disseminated as the Ramist "Arcadian rhetoric" of standard English literary components and ornaments, before the source Arcadia had been published.
William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks consider that the Ramist reform at least created a tension between the ornamented and the plain style (of preachers and scientific scholars), into the seventeenth century, and contributed to the emergence of the latter.
[68] With the previous work of Dudley Fenner (1584), and the later book of Charles Butler (1598), Ramist rhetoric in Elizabethan England accepts the reduction to elocutio and pronuntiatio, puts all the emphasis on the former, and reduces its scope to the trope.