ABSTRACT
During the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries, both classification theory and definition theory were accepted sub-fields within the academic discipline of logic. While nineteenth-century authors created terms such as conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, and socialism to describe their own political and social milieus, they also developed concepts such as Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Ramism in order to help them categorize philosophy and philosophers of previous centuries. Ramism can, generally speaking, be considered as more harmful than helpful to serious scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century academic philosophy. Ideological concepts not only can be used to gloss over this limited knowledge, but also can be utilized to argue against the value of scholarship that would lead to a furthering of our knowledge concerning that same philosophy. Descartes’s theory of knowledge is perhaps given additional meaning when seen against the background of this strictly disciplinary environment.
