Puritan Love of Logic: The Impact of Petrus Ramus
Listen to the lecture “Puritan Love of Logic: The Impact of Petrus Ramus” in the media player below or via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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Transcript of lecture:
Quick links to some primary sources: Puritan sermons can be found in the Evans Early American Imprint Collection
As a reminder, the learning goals of the lecture are:
…for learners to be able to identify 1-2 ways in which Ramus impacted the Puritans. Much of the information that I am presenting is sourced from Walter Ong’s in-depth discussion of Ramus in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue
Discussion questions and forum:
- Look at Increase Mather’s The Day of Trouble is Near (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N00137.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext). (Or, choose any New England Puritan sermon you are interested in, for example Urian Oakes’ New England Pleaded With; Samuel Danforth’s A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness or William Stoughton’s New England’s True Interest, Not to Lie –you can find many sermons in the Evans Early Imprint Collection, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/). See if you can identify the doctrine or doctrines within it and the starting Bible verse, typicaly of the doctrine-use/Ramist format. Skim the sermon in order to make an outline of it. What do you make of its structure? How does it reflect Ramist ideas or influence?
- Given what you know about the Puritans already, how do you think an interest in Ramus aligns with or contrasts with Puritan tendencies or thinking?
- (Bonus discussion question #3: Read the following imagined description from Miller of how Ramus felt upon encountering Aristotelian thinking. Then, consider how his idea of the relation between the art of dialectic and natural dialectic might have arisen from this experience.
- “Such was the logic [Aristotelian] taught at Paris when the penniless Pierre de Ramée came up from Picardy, consumed with a desire for useful knowledge…Their logic had neither rhyme nor reason, even from the very first lessons in which they confronted the student with a series of abstruse and disconnected terms and required him to memorize them. No reason for these terms was ever offered, no philosophical justification for their number or arrangement, and so the student never suspected that a rationale for the structure of logic could possibly exist. He was given a miscellaneous aggregation of disparate concepts…” (Miller 123).)
Respond to these discussion questions (or other topics of your choosing, relating to the lectures) here: