Petrus Ramus, or Pierre de la Ramée (1515 – August 24, 1572), French humanist, logician, and educational reformer, was born at the village of Cuts in Picardy, a member of a noble but impoverished family: his father was a charcoal-burner.

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Having gained admission at age twelve, in a menial capacity, to the Collège de Navarre, he worked with his hands by day, offering himself as a servant to other more affluencial students, and carried on his studies at night. The reaction against scholasticism was still in full tide; it was the transition time between the old and the new, when the eager and forward-looking spirits had first of all to do battle with scholastic Aristotelianism. Ramus outdid his predecessors in the impetuosity of his revolt. On the occasion of taking his degree (1536) he allegedly took as his thesis Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse, which Walter J. Ong paraphrases as follows: "All the things that Aristotle has said are inconsistent because they are poorly systematized and can be called to mind only by the use of arbitrary mnemonic devices" (see Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, 1958: 46-47). According to Ong (36-37), this kind of spectacular thesis was extremely routine at the time. Even so, Ong raises serious questions as to whether Ramus actually ever delivered this thesis (36-41). But Ramus subsequently 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.

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