 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. Most historians of philosophy admire the figures they work on. The Aristotle and Kant scholars might not agree with everything these famous thinkers said, but they believe it is all worth taking seriously. Why else devote your career to understanding the writings of a long dead philosopher? This goes hand in hand with the seemingly indispensable Principle of Charity, which dictates that when interpreting texts, we should do our best to show how they made sense, seeking internal coherence, resources for answering possible objections, and so on. But there are exceptions. I just read a book which adopts what you might call a principle of uncharity. Walter Ong's 1958 study of Peter Rameis. It remains a very informative and useful study, but it is relentlessly critical, even dismissive of Rameis. Ong calls him curiously amateurish, speaks of his demonstrated incompetence, and at one point says that a certain doctrine held by Rameis is close to the view of a madman. For Ong, Rameis could do no right. As if that wasn't bad enough, just two years later, Neil Gilbert's study of method in the Renaissance said of Rameis, The very acme of banality to us, but which struck his contemporaries as original and indeed revolutionary. With intellectual historians like these, who needs enemies? Certainly not Rameis, who already had plenty of enemies in his own lifetime. They would have been delighted to know that in 500 years people would still be calling Rameis an idiot. These critics thought that the Rameis program was misconceived and oversimplistic, and that it was itself uncharitable. Rameis could give as good as he got though, both to his contemporaries and to long dead authorities. He issued shocking attacks on Aristotle, still seen as the greatest of philosophers, and on the leading Latin rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian. This was a new and more radical version of what other humanists had been doing for quite some time. Not content to mock the scholastic Aristotelians, Rameis identified flaws in Aristotle himself. Not content to echo Erasmus's parody of Renaissance Ciceroians, Rameis aimed sarcastic invective at Cicero himself. Already at his master's examination in 1536, he offered to defend a proposition usually translated as, everything Aristotle said was lies. Ong argues that the word rendered lies here, commentitia, means something more like scattered remarks that do not cohere into a system, but still. Rameis's detractors also liked to accuse him of inconsistency and not without reason. So even though he was open about his irreverent project of attacking Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian in turn, he could also be quite complimentary about these very authors. He planned an ambitious set of commentaries devoted to Cicero, who he admitted was the most eloquent man who has ever lived, and he presented himself as the only true Aristotelian, who was finally recovering what was useful in a body of work that had been corrupted by ancient compilers and ignorant scholastics. When Jacob Schenk, who we met in episode 389 on theories of matter, attacked Rameis for his failures in logic, Rameis responded with a work called Defense of Aristotle, which of course presented a version of Aristotle in line with Rameis's own ideas. Eventually, Rameis's enemies caught up with him. In 1572, he was killed in the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, a spasm of violence in Paris directed against Protestants. Rameis had converted in 1561, applying to religion the same instinct for reform that he brought to philosophy. In doing so, he turned his back on an important patron, the Cardinal of Guise, who had been a schoolmate of Rameis and offered support during Rameis's meteoric rise to the position of Regius Professor of Eloquence and Philosophy at the University of Paris. After converting, he had an eventful final decade of life, joining the Collège de France, but then having to flee to Switzerland and Germany before making a fateful return to Paris in time to be killed. That tragic event is memorialized in Christopher Marlowe's play about the massacre, which shows the wicked Duke of Guise calling Rameis a flat dichotomist before ordering his death. Rameis is allowed final words which capture his ambiguous attitude towards Aristotle. This scene is actually not a bad introduction to Rameis's intellectual project. If you know anything about Rameism, it is probably that it did indeed involve dichotomies, conceptual divisions that were presented as branching diagrams. But this was only part of Rameis's effort to reduce Aristotle's logical corpus, the Organon, into better form. His vaunted method was simultaneously an epistemological theory and a proposal for how to teach the linguistic and philosophical arts. At the center of the undertaking were three laws, which are inspired by Aristotle. The first, called the Law of Truth, states that scientific statements should hold true universally and necessarily of all the subjects named in the statement, which seems fair enough. For example, you shouldn't say that all giraffes are on the savannah if some of them are at the zoo. And the second, the Law of Justice, ensures the homogeneity of the truths included in a science. They must all fall under that science and serve its special ends. The third, the Law of Wisdom, tells us to check that the subject and predicate of a scientific truth match in terms of generality. For instance, you shouldn't say that isosceles triangles have internal angles of 180 degrees because this is true of all triangles. These laws introduce us to Ramus's preoccupations with philosophical method. In light of the Law of Justice, we realize that each art must be pursued by itself, without bringing in material from other disciplines. This is because a given art is always looking at the essential features of the subject matter of that art, a subject matter that is investigated in this art and in no other. So Ramus complained about, say, bringing geometrical proofs to bear on arithmetic, or vice versa. He applied the same point to separate the domains of philosophy and theology. Another methodological point is connected to the third law and its attention to generality. From this law, Ramus infers that we must begin at the most general level and proceed by stages, without skipping anything, to the more specific. Ramus offers a giraffe-free but still vivid example. Suppose someone wrote down the rules of Latin grammar on slips of paper and put them all in a jar. If you started pulling out bits of paper one after another in random order, you wouldn't have the exposition of an art, but just a bewildering sequence of injunctions. But then someone, if they were skilled in logic and grammar, someone like Ramus, could take these same bits of paper and arrange them in a way that made sense, such that you could work through them in that arrangement and learn Latin grammar. His recommendation for how to do this was simple. You should start with the most general rules and work towards the more specific. Thus, to change this example, if you are explaining the rules of soccer, you should start not by saying that an attacking player cannot be offside from a throw-in, but by saying that this is a team sport involving a ball, where the players are not allowed to use their arms and hands. Now we can already see why dichotomies would be a relevant way to proceed. You might sit your student down and say that among sports, some are individual and some involve teams. You can then divide the team sports into ball sports and non-ball sports, and so on. Living well before the founding of Paris Saint-Germain, Ramus did not use this example, but he did claim that other methods proposed by Aristotelian thinkers would produce results that are messy. Either because of problems with the textual transmission or due to Aristotle's own failings, or more likely for both reasons, the logical treatises of the organon do not go from the more general to the more specific. This makes them exceedingly difficult to follow. Another problem was that even great authors like Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian neglected to offer reliable definitions, which are a crucial step in the process just described. If the student doesn't know what a sport is, then they will already be lost when you make that initial division into team and individual sports. Ramus explained that when he himself was a student, he was forced to endure teaching that was just as unsystematic as these classical authors, if not more so. Finally, though, he discovered the humanist Agricola, and was then led back to ancient writers who were more attentive to proper method, though not always perfect in their application of it, especially Plato and Galen. At this point, Ramus recalled, he began to think that Aristotle's authority was a deception. While all this sounds pretty reasonable, Ramus outraged his colleagues in Paris by suggesting that it is the entirety of what it means to be reasonable. There is only one method for the arts, and thanks to Ramus, I was just able to describe it to you in the course of a couple of minutes. One of his most bitter opponents was Jacques Sébentier, a professor at Paris who was appalled by Ramus's one-size-fits-all approach. It is not even the case that one and the same method is always used within a single art, never mind for all of them. You might need to use definition and division, sure, but you might also need to find causal explanations or analyze complex terms in light of their parts or perform induction and so on. In fact, the very first step in this method was more like pulling a rabbit out of a hat than pulling papers out of a jar. Sébentier asked where the initial definition comes from and accused Ramus of having no answer apart from an appeal to intuition. Whether or not this was entirely fair, Sébentier was putting his finger on a genuine and important feature of Ramus's approach to logic or dialectic, namely his optimistic assessment of our capacities as untrained reasoners. He of course offered a division of dialectic, which for him has three stages. The first is called natural dialectic. This means the tacit use of reasoning principles, which all of us do every day when we are arguing or explaining things. Ramus equates it with reason itself. It belongs to natural dialectic to go from the more general to the more specific. That's just an obvious way to make yourself clear, and people will do it without thinking. Only at a second stage does dialectic make these rules explicit and investigate them. This is what is taught in logic classes at the university. In a crucial third stage, students must put into practice what they have learned as abstract rules. Ramus proposed dividing even the day's teaching, accordingly, with rules explained in the morning followed by practice in the afternoon. Thus, you might study logic from textbooks until lunch, and then after lunch read passages in classical works trying to identify the logical structure in a process Ramus called unwieving. A real example mentioned by Ramus is a speech by Penelope found in Ovid in which she is lamenting the absence of her husband Ulysses. From these 28 verses, reckoned Ramus, flow four propositions, sixteen assumptions, and eight conclusions. That may not sound like fun, but at the time the Ramus' focus on practice was unusual in its attention to the needs of students. As that illustration also shows, Ramus applied the techniques of dialectic to literary texts. This seems to go against one of the strictures we mentioned before, namely that one should pursue each art in its own right without mixing in material from other arts. Shouldn't Ovid be handled by rhetoric, not by the logical art of dialectic? The contradiction is only apparent though. Ramus did advise studying arts one at a time and as self-contained disciplines, but he also thought that they built on each other. He recommended a seven-year curriculum with three years of grammar, in other words three years to learn good Latin, followed by one year each for rhetoric, dialectic, mathematics, and natural philosophy. By contrast, the humanist Juan Luis Vives recommended eight years just to learn Latin and Greek, with a further ten for the arts. Ramus' plan of offering a full curriculum in such a brief time has plausibly been traced to his humble origins as an orphan from the peasant class who had to work as a servant for a wealthier student to afford his studies at Paris. His plan would make it easier for clever boys of modest means, like the young Ramus had been, to complete their studies quickly and seek advancement. From this perspective, contemporary critiques of the superficiality of Ramism have a whiff of aristocratic gatekeeping about them. Notice that in his program of study, dialectic comes after rhetoric, which again may seem strange. Don't you need to learn to argue logically before you try to master the ornamentation and artful presentation of arguments in the form of rhetorical speech? Not necessarily. Remember, all people have a good grasp of dialectic at a natural level, so you can learn about rhetoric first, acquiring the skills to present with eloquence the intuitively plausible reasoning that comes naturally. Mythic has, again of course, two parts, delivery and expression. In the end, someone who has mastered both arts could combine them to come to a fully rounded appreciation of, say, a speech by Cicero, or produce a speech of their own, which is excellent in delivery and expression, but also has logical rigor. At the next stage of the curriculum, we have two more arts that are inextricably intertwined, namely mathematics and natural philosophy. Even Ramus's modern defenders admit that he was not a brilliant mathematician, but he did devote a good deal of time to the discipline and wrote about its history. His efforts were inspired by an underestimated factor in generating intellectual innovation, petty academic infighting. When his enemy, Charpentier, was given a chair of mathematics in Paris, Ramus protested on the grounds that Charpentier was completely ignorant of this topic. Charpentier argued that the professorship was not necessarily tied to any one subject and got permission to teach both philosophy and mathematics, but then he didn't get around to teaching any math. The case came before the Paris Parliament, which made the determination that pretty well anyone can teach mathematics, since it is so easy and thus found in favor of Charpentier. This gave Ramus plenty of reason to inflate the difficulty and importance of the discipline. He latched onto the figure of Pythagoras, imagining him as a kind of proto-Ramus who set out the truths of mathematics as principles for natural philosophy. A true physics, he said, should be founded on mathematical reasoning. While Ramus only sketched this project at a methodological level and did not really carry it out, we might still give him credit for anticipating the mathematical approach to physics that will emerge a few generations later in the 17th century. Likewise his more student-friendly innovations in pedagogy prefigure educational reformers of the Enlightenment, like the Czech theorist Jan Komenius. Like Komenius, Ramus gave serious thought to the perspective of his students. Bear in mind, we're talking about boys in their teenage years, more like today's junior high and high school students than today's university students. Latin was not their native language, and they were being asked to learn by rote memorization from texts by Aristotle that, to this day, frequently puzzle career specialists in his thought. Ramus's methods were tailored to make the acquisition of the liberal arts more feasible. This was bound to strike fellow academics as a kind of dumbing down of the curriculum, and the acerbic comments he has still attracted in our own day shows that this accusation has not gone away. Yet Ramus had significant advantages. His more streamlined curriculum, one discipline per year for seven years, would usher students through the university at a brisk pace and not ask them to do too much at once. As we're still asked to do a lot of memorization, but the structured presentation of the material, clear definitions, diagrams, branching across the page, made that a far more manageable task. Furthermore, we should not leap to the conclusion that Ramus's strict divisions and classifications allowed for no nuance. In rhetoric, for instance, one should learn how some audiences are friendly, others unfriendly, with different tactics appropriate for the two kinds. In real life, we know that things are more complicated. A given crowd might be on the fence, or made up of both friends and opponents, or be friendly to one part of your case and unfriendly to another. But learning the basic opposition draws the student's attention to this important consideration. It is at the stage of actual practice which Ramus emphasized so much that the student will learn to apply the point in real cases in all their diversity and complexity. Speaking of applying method to real cases, I can't end this episode without returning to a famous episode in Ramus's own life, his intervention in the debate over Copernican astronomy. As we saw when we looked at Tycho Brahe, Ramus encountered Brahe during his travels in Germany and pressed him to discover an astronomy without hypotheses. He also wrote to Gio Agreticus, urging him to pursue the same goal. And in the mathematical work that grew out of his confrontation with Sartre-Tier, Ramus elaborated on this by saying, would that Copernicus had rather set his mind on the establishment of such an astronomy without hypotheses, for it would have been easier by far for him to describe an astronomy corresponding to the truth of its stars than as if with the labor of a giant to move the earth so that in consequence of the motion of the earth we might observe the stars at rest. The passage concludes by offering a Regis professorship to anyone who manages the feat. In 1597, Kepler would, in a letter of his own to his teacher Michael Maestlin, jestingly lay claim to that chair. Joking aside though, we must ask what this has to do with Ramus' theories of scientific method more generally. To some extent the answer is clear. Just as he traced pure method in mathematics and dialectic to deep antiquity, so he thought that the most ancient of the ancients had pursued astronomy without hypotheses, so the modern exponents of the art should do the same. We might also note that the positing of hypotheses, which might then be directly confirmed by empirical evidence, plays no part in the single method recognized by Ramus. A Ramist astronomy would, like the rest of Ramus' natural philosophy, simply apply mathematical truths in a physical context. The fact that it's hard to spell out in fuller detail what this might mean, and the fact that Ramus was unable to see the potential power of a hypothetical method in natural philosophy, show that his critics, from Schenck and Charpentier to Ong and Gilbert, did have a point. The strength of Ramus was his insight into good educational practice. His weakness was to assume that real scientific method should track that practice, as if scientific research and the learning of what scientists have already discovered were the same endeavor. That weakness notwithstanding, the strength of Ramus' project was sufficient to trigger an international movement, as scholars well beyond France embraced his methods for their clarity, simplicity, and efficiency. Appropriately enough, Ramism branched out across Europe, and wherever it went it also appropriately incited division. We'll be learning about this in a couple of episodes, after we explore the nature of the Ramus program itself in the company of Robert Goulding. Let's give him our undivided attention next time, here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.