SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY quite out of proportion to his actual merits as a logician Legend has it that for his master’s degree he defended the thesis that everything Aristotle had ever taught was false Certainly he went on to publish a short antiAristotelian treatise, and after his appointment as professor at the Colle`ge Royale he followed this up with twenty books of Animadversions on Aristotle His Dialectic, which was published in French in 1555, in Latin in 1556, and in English in 1574, was meant to supersede all previous logic texts For the Wrst time, he maintained, it set out the laws which governed people’s natural thinking Logic, he tells us, is the art which teaches how to dispute well It is divided into two parts: invention and judgement, to each of which a book of his text is devoted Treating of ‘invention’, he lists nine places or topics to which one may look to Wnd arguments to support a conclusion one wishes to defend They are cause, eVect, subject, adjunct, opposite, comparative, name, division, and deWnition He illustrates each of these topics with copious quotations from classical authors, which take up nearly half of his short Wrst book For instance, Ramus deWnes ‘adjunct’ as ‘that which has a subject to which it is adjoined, as virtue and vice are called the adjuncts of the body or soul; and to be short all things that chance to the subject, beside the essence, is called the adjunct’ He then illustrates this with a long quotation from a speech of Cicero’s, beginning: Doth not his very head and over brow altogether shaven and scraped so clean signify that he is malicious and savoureth of knavery? Do they not utter and cry that he is a crafty fox? (L, 33) Despite his oYcial contempt for Aristotle, most of the topics for argument that he lists are taken from various places in the Aristotelian corpus and deWned in similar ways The only novelty is the discussion, at the end of the book, of what he calls ‘inartiWcial’ arguments, examples of which are the pronouncements of divine oracles and human testimony in a court of law The second book comes closer to the traditional subject matter of logic Once again Ramus draws heavily on Aristotle in his classiWcation of diVerent kinds of statement and his analysis of syllogisms of diVerent forms His main innovation is that he devotes much more attention than Aristotle did to arguments containing proper names, such as ‘Caesar oppresseth his native country; Tullius oppresseth not his native country; Tullius therefore is not Caesar’ (L, 37) 12