Encyclopedia of Philosophy: POST-REFORMATION PHILOSOPHY

The Reformation disputes also affected the areas on which philosophers concentrated. We can illustrate this in three instances: formal logic, scepticism, and free-will.  Formal logic had progressed steadily in the Middle Ages, building on the foundations laid by Aristotle and the Stoics. This study continued in sixteenth¬century universities, but humanist scholars were impatient with it, regarding its terminology as barbarous and its complexities as pettifogging. The Parisian Peter Ramus (1515–72), who according to legend defended for his Master's degree the thesis that everything Aristotle had taught was false, published a new model logic textbook in French which he claimed represented the natural movement of thought. Modern historians of logic can find little of value in his book, and the best of it seems to be merely a truncated Aristotle. However, Ramus, having turned Protestant in 1561, was killed in the terrible Paris massacre of heretics on St Bartholomew's day, and his status as a martyr gave his writings a prestige they could never have earned on their own merits. Their popularity impoverished the study of logic for centuries to come and it was only in the twentieth century that many of the medieval developments in logic were independently discovered by mathematical logicians.