Petrus Ramus - Pedagogue

Pedagogue

A central issue is that Ramus's anti-Aristotelianism arose out of a concern for pedagogy. Aristotelian philosophy, in its Early Modern form as scholasticism showing its age, was in a confused and disordered state. 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.

He published in 1543 the Aristotelicae Animadversiones and Dialecticae Partitiones, the former a criticism on the old logic and the latter a new textbook of the science. What are substantially fresh editions of the Partitiones appeared in 1547 as Institutiones Dialecticae, and in 1548 as Scholae Dialecticae; his Dialectique (1555), a French version of his system, is the earliest work on the subject in the French language.

In the "Dialecticae partitiones," Ramus recommends the use of summaries, headings, citations and examples. Ong calls Ramus's use of outlines, "a reorganization of the whole of knowledge and indeed of the whole human lifeworld."

After studying Ramus's work, Ong concluded that the results of his "methodizing" of the arts "are the amateurish works of a desperate man who is not a thinker but merely an erudite pedagogue". On the other hand, his work had an immediate impact on the issue of disciplinary boundaries, where educators largely accepted his arguments, by the end of the century.