Reading Blog 9

October 13, 2011

Peter Ramus is a very interesting man.  He seemed to come up with his own versions of rhetorical argument.  The Renaissance was said to revive Aristotle with scholasticism, using philosophy and the nonartistic concepts.  However, Ramus argues against Aristotle and the idea of scholasticism.  He believes that this concept is very limiting to scholars like himself.  And that humans were born already knowing how to reasoning.  He believed that if no one knew there was more than one way to reason, than everyone would think like Aristotle.  With the dialectic concept, there are no absolutes.  The only ones are there because of holistic agreement.  The sophists use this dialectic as different ways to think.  There are some things that make me agree with Ramus.  The move toward science and the belief vs. fact argument are very interesting.  I think these arguments are still very valid today.  The fact that studying a specific scholar so closely there is bound to be a lot of influential impressions made.  Many scholars like Quintilian and Cicero were influenced so much by Aristotle's work that they were said to have reproduced his work for Rome.  This is a very interesting concept.  This makes me think that people today have evolved into intellectual beings, but we are very influenced by the things around us.  Studying in a single field will promote certain views on subjects that could have provided a different idea from someone else.  There is a lot of things that make our analyses today very biased.  Ramus argues that  logic doesn't belong in rhetoric.  I think that is completely false.  Making logic rhetorically effective is the art of rhetoric.