Disciplines and Demarcations
Donald R. Kelley writes of the "new learning" (nova doctrina) or opposition in Paris to traditional scholasticism as a "trivial revolution", i.e. growing out of specialist teachers of the trivium. He argues that:
The aim was a fundamental change of priorities, the transformation of hierarchy of disciplines into a 'circle' of learning, an 'encyclopedia' embracing human culture in all of its richness and concreteness and organized for persuasive transmission to society as a whole. This was the rationale of the Ramist method, which accordingly emphasized mnemonics and pedagogical technique at the expense of discovery and the advancement of learning.
The need for demarcation was seen in "redundancies and overlapping categories".
This was taken to the lengths where it could be mocked in the Port-Royal Logic (1662). There the authors claimed that "everything that is useful to logic belongs to it", with a swipe at the "torments" the Ramists put themselves through.
The method of demarcation was applied within the trivium, made up of grammar, logic (for which Ramists usually preferred a traditional name, dialectic), and rhetoric. Logic falls, according to Ramus, into two parts: invention (treating of the notion and definition) and judgment (comprising the judgment proper, syllogism and method). In this he was influenced by Rodolphus Agricola. What Ramus does here in fact redefines rhetoric. There is a new configuration, with logic and rhetoric each having two parts: rhetoric was to cover elocutio (mainly figures of speech) and pronuntiatio (oratorical delivery). In general, Ramism liked to deal with binary trees as method for organising knowledge.
Rhetoric, traditionally, had had five parts, of which inventio (invention) was the first. Two others were dispositio (arrangement) and memoria (memory). Ramus proposed transferring those back to the realm of dialectic (logic); and merging them under a new heading, renaming them as iudicium (judgment). (This was the final effect: as an intermediate memoria was left with rhetoric.)
Read more about this topic: Ramism