Peter Ramus 1515 – 1572

Pierre de la Ramee, known as Peter Ramus, was a French humanist philosopher, logician, and educational reformer whose attempt to reorganize the liberal arts on a simplified and pedagogically transparent plan made him one of the most controversial thinkers of the sixteenth century. After scandalizing the University of Paris with the thesis that everything Aristotle had said was false, he produced a long series of textbooks of dialectic, rhetoric, grammar, and the mathematical sciences that swept Protestant Europe and shaped pedagogy from Cambridge to colonial Massachusetts. Converted to Calvinism in 1561, he was murdered during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris in August 1572.