Logical Grammar, Grammatical Logic, and Humanism in Three German Universities

Abstract

It has long been recognized that the literary revolution precipitated by humanists in the fifteenth and six-teenth centuries was paralleled by profound pedagogical innovations in the traditional, scholastic educational structure. In addition to new literary norms, the hussmanist pedagogues evolved linguistic structures and usages fundamentally foreign to those of their scholastic predecessors and prescribed rhetorical methods for the presentation of material which undermined medieval dialectic. Walter Ong, in his study of Pierre Ramus, says of the developments in dialectics at the turn of the sixteenth century:In terms of the established pattern, humanism forced a crisis by proposing a program, which in effect challenged the primacy of dialectic and, in so doing, impugned the whole curricular organization and the teaching profession as such, and thereby threatened the intelligibility of the whole universe.