Ramus

I thought last week's Ramus reading was the most interesting piece we've read so far.  It felt the most modern of the readings, which one could argue was to be expected--but I didn't think it was.
Ramus lived 1515-1572 while Plato was around 428-347 bce, so it is not surprising Ramus seemed far more modern in his writing than Plato--he was close to 2000 years later! On the other hand, Ramus' writing felt like today's writing than Shakespeare's, despite Shakespeare being born around ten years before Ramus died, so it is not as simple as "writers that wrote later in history sound closer to writers today than older writers."  It makes me wonder why Shakespeare sounds so outdated today, or why Ramus wasn't using all kinds of words we don't anymore.
Another thing that contributed to Ramus' modern feel, besides the lack of Shakespeare's "ye", "wherefore" etc, was his self-insertion into the text.  Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian is not just a recording of a conversation or an impersonal text, it is a personal statement.  Ramus is saying "I don't like Quintilian because..."  The focus on the self makes this reading seem more like something by Hunter S. Thompson or Norman Mailer than other rhetors we have read, like Aristotle or Plato.
I also liked this work because it was calling some of the other, older works out on some of their faults.  A lot of the time it seems like the older works get a free pass because they formed the foundation, as if pointing out that some of their arguments were obviously wrong would cause the whole of rhetoric to crumble.
Aristotle, for example, said "...what is rare is a greater good than what is plentiful" (p194) and "...the more a thing is desired, the better it is." (p195), both of which seemed amusingly wrong--almost to the point of calling Aristotle's credibility as a thinker into question.  According to his first statement, a murder is a greater good than holding the door for someone, because murders don't happen as often as holding the door. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE: if murders became more frequent than holding hte door, then magically holding the door would become the greater good.  According to the second statement, many illegal drugs are better than world peace, as many people desire drugs on a daily basis but relatively few people are actively thinking about (desiring) world peace on a day-to-day basis.
This is not to say that the older works are completely without merit for study, just that it was nice to see them being taken off the pedestal and treated as normal texts.