ABSTRACT

This chapter provides the opportunity to evaluate Ramus as a rhetorician, dialectician, theorist of method', educational reformer and even as a scientific innovator. It suggests that we treat Ramus and his late sixteenth century collaborators and inheritors as pioneers of print. The chapter looks at the way, in which the history of dialectic uses strategies of textual display and the novel resources of printing to energise its hubristic attempts at artistic reform. It asserts that with the exception of a very few passages, the partition is partly false and partly stupid: certainly everything is confused, out of place and lacking the illumination of dialectic. Systems of printed loci can be inscribed on and fulfilled by multiple readers, each potentially sedimenting them with different arguments, examples, axioms and commonplaces. The chapter concludes that what is genuinely novel about Ramist dialectic is his attempt to invent a new site of argument by accommodating and occluding previous orders within his textual domain.