Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode, make it simple, Peter Romis.

Most historians of philosophy admire the figures they work on.

The Aristotle and Kant scholars might not agree with everything these famous thinkers said, but they believe it is all worth taking seriously, while devote your career to understanding the writings of a long dead philosopher.

This goes hand in hand with the seemingly indispensable principle of charity, which dictates that when interpreting texts, we should do our best to show how they made sense, seeking internal coherence, resources for answering possible objections and so on.

But there are exceptions. I just read a book which adopts what you might call a principle of uncharity. Walter Ong's 1958 study of Peter Romis.

It remains a very informative and useful study, but it is relentlessly critical, even dismissive of Romis.

Ong calls him curiously amateurish, speaks of his demonstrated incompetence, and at one point says that a certain doctrine held by Romis is close to the view of a madman.

For on, Romis could do no right.

As if that wasn't bad enough, just two years later, Neil Gilbert's study of method in the Renaissance, said of Romis, he stood alone, proud and defiant, with a doctrine that seems the very act me of banality to us, but which struck his contemporaries as original and indeed revolutionary.

With intellectual historians like these, who needs enemies?

Certainly not Romis, who already had plenty of enemies in his own lifetime. They would have been delighted to know that in 500 years people would still be calling Romis an idiot.

These critics thought that the Romist program was misconceived and over simplistic and that it was itself uncharitable.

Romis could give as good as he got, though, both through his contemporaries and to long dead authorities.

He issued shocking attacks on Aristotle, still seen as the greatest of philosophers, and on the leading Latin rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintillian.

This was a new and more radical version of what other humanists had been doing for quite some time.

Not content to mock this holastic Aristotelians, Romis identified flaws in Aristotle himself.

Not content to echo Erasmus' parody of Renaissance Ciceroanians, Romis aimed sarcastic invective at Cicero himself.

Already at his master's examination in 1536, he offered to defend the proposition usually translated as,

everything Aristotle said was lies.

Ong argues that the word rendered lies here, Clementitia, means something more like scattered remarks that do not cohere into a system, but still.

Romis' detractors also like to accuse him of inconsistency and not without reason.

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