Ramus Petrus, in French, Pierre de La Ramée (1515–72), French philosopher who questioned the authority of Aristotle and influenced the methods and teaching of logic through the seventeenth century. In 1543 he published his Dialecticae institutiones libri XV, and in 1555 reworked it as Dialectique – the first philosophical work in French. He was appointed by François I as the first Regius Professor of the University of Paris, where he taught until he was killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. Ramus doubted that we can apodictically intuit the major premises required for Aristotle’s rational syllogism. Turning instead to Plato, Ramus proposed that a ‘Socratizing’ of logic would produce a more workable and fruitful result. As had Agricola and Sturm, he reworked the rhetorical and liberal arts traditions’ concepts of ‘invention, judgment, and practice,’ placing ‘method’ in the center of judgment. Proceeding in these stages, we can ‘read’ nature’s ‘arguments,’ because they are modeled on natural reasoning, which in turn can emulate the reasoning by which God creates. Often his results were depicted graphically in tables (as in chapter IX of Hobbes’s Leviathan). When carefully done they would show both what is known and where gaps require further investigation; the process from invention to judgment is continuous. Ramus’s works saw some 750 editions in one century, fostering the ‘Ramist’ movement in emerging Protestant universities and the American colonies. He influenced Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Methodism, Cambridge Platonism, and Alsted in Europe, and Hooker and Congregationalism in Puritan America. Inconsistencies make him less than a major figure in the history of logic, but his many works and their rapid popularity led to philosophical and educational efforts to bring the world of learning to the ‘plain man’ by using the vernacular, and by more closely correlating the rigor of philosophy with the memorable and persuasive powers of rhetoric; he saw this goal as Socratic. C.Wa.