The Transmission of the 'ars dialectica' among the 15th and 16th Centuries: Lorenzo Valla and Pierre de la Ramée

Abstract

This essay addresses the theme of the transmission of knowledge starting from the process of traslatio studiorum. Such phenomenon – which occurred between the ancient Greece and occidental Europe since the medieval period – was intended as the triggering phenomenon of a whole series of transmission processes, persisted untill the Renaissance. It is my intention to propose a double riding, considering the Mediterranean area as a transient space, where different current of thoughts have been screened by speculative and linguistical filters, represented by the overlapping of commentators and translators. 

On first place, I intend to identify this phenomenon of knowledge's transmission, understood as transcultural process, taken in his historical connotation, that is as a process that commutes from one century to another. Secondly, considering the Arabic intervention concerning the translation and comment of Aristotelian auctoritates,  I would like to analyze the delicate process of transmission and contamination between different systems of thought. Within these coordinates, it is my intention to focus on the contact between two systems of thought that applied such approaches in the Dialectic field, namely  Lorenzo Valla's and Pierre de la Ramée's, better known as Petrus Ramus. I will take the cases of Valla and Ramus as examples of this phenomenon of translation: first, in the historical sense, since there is a shift of approach from century to century; secondly, in a geographical sense that affects the Mediterranean area, as both Valla and Ramus dealth with the linguistic problems linked to dialectic received from the Arabic heritage. I argue that these speculative currents might have come into contact, first, as the product of a long process of translatio studiorum, and then, as heirs of a tradition that had been influenced by the transmissions that had taken place in the Mediterranean.

In conclusion, the purpose of this note is to show the preliminary and little debated issue of the possible contact between two paradigms of thought which justified a change in the approach of the study of Dialectic between the major Italian centers of knowledge of the XV century and XVI century Paris. This creates the space for some hints of acclimatization of Valla's dialectic at the Ramus paradigm, thanks to the shifting of attention from the perfectly solid linguistic practice in Valla's logical philological method to the correct procedures of reasoning that were completely detached from the metaphysics dimension and projected towards the institution of the Methodus.