Petrus Ramus

Petrus Ramus, in French Pierre de La Ramée, lived from 1515 to 26 August 1572 and was a French humanist, logician and educational reformer, a prominent and controversial professor at the Collège de France in Paris who became famous for iconoclastic critiques of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. He argued that dialectic should be separated from the purview of rhetoric, a stance that significantly narrowed the scope of rhetorical theory. Born in the village of Cuts in Picardy, the son of a farmer, he entered the Collège de Navarre at about twelve as a servant, and for his M.A. in 1536 he allegedly took as his thesis that everything Aristotle said is false, though it is doubted that he ever delivered it. A convert to Protestantism, he was a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.