The Renaissance & Peter Ramus

The renaissance was a time of war, violence and evolution. According to the reading, the Catholic Church had been in power as the religious and political head of state. This changed in the renaissance however. The middle class grew, and governments started to base power on monarchs and those in professional lifestyles. Humanism came about in the renaissance and “emphasized human powers to know and change the world and insisted on scholar’s rights to pursue knowledge without being constrained by church dogma” (Herzberg 555). Humanism started in northern Italy where people weren’t as effected by war and disease, even though they did see the Black Death. Being a center of philosophy and law when the rest of the world is in turmoil allows for a people to have a much greater influence over time.

With all of this change came some change in thinking among the youth in the region. Peter Ramus in specific was one of these different thinkers. He gained his Master of Arts degree using a thesis ridiculing Aristotle and other classical philosophers. Once graduated he began to teach students in colleges and gained quite a following. The reason this made such an impact was based on his ideas. Ramus attacked Aristotle and scholasticism according to the reading and “since scholasticism and the Paris facility were still strongly associated in people’s minds with the catholic church, Ramus`s academic arguments took on overtones of religious reform” (Herzberg 675).  His ideas however took flight as he gained a following. His claim was that “the ability to reason was innate in normal humans. One did not need to learn from Aristotle or any other classical source” (Herzberg 675).he said it was a waste of time to study the classical readings and texts because a person’s own thought process and pursuit of knowledge is what’s important. This seemed to take the idea of rhetoric capability and open it to the masses. He claimed that the only two aspects of rhetoric that mattered were style and delivery. He composed a list of topics which dialectical invention comes from in his proposed method. He was arguably making a “universal method of inquiry” which he thought was what people wanted. He seemed to have quite an impact in his time that he was alive, and historians argue that he changed humanism into humanities because of this universal method.

Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. "Against the Sophists." The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 72-74. Print.