Petrus Ramus

Petrus Ramus, or Pierre de la Ramée (1515–1572), was a French humanist, logician and educational reformer. Born in Picardy, he attracted attention at Paris in 1536 with a thesis attacking Aristotle, and his textbooks on logic and rhetoric, which reorganized the arts by method and dichotomous division, were banned by Francis I before he won royal favor and a chair at the Collège de France in 1551. His Dialectique of 1555 was the first philosophical work written in French. He wrote on grammar, mathematics and the reform of the university, converted to Protestantism in the 1560s and was murdered in the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day.