Abstract

Three things make Father Ong's work on the sixteenth-century dialectician Peter Ramus an important contribution to the history of logic and letters. First, he has prudently avoided the temptation to make Ramus a hero or villain and to evaluate his work on its logical merits. His treatment is therefore balanced and well-directed, for Ramus was neither a great thinker nor a great man. Ramus's reforms appear here as epiphenomena of the humanistic reform of pedagogy, and the connection between logic and the demands of the university curriculum thus receives much needed attention. Finally, this book marks one of the first important attempts to apply the contrast between the personal communication through dialogue with the objective, impersonal conveying of information by the written word to the history of philosophy and the interpretation of the Renaissance.--R. F. T.