Sparknotes essays montaigne

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was a skeptical philosopher and perhaps the most influential writer of the French Renaissance. His Essays are difficult—maybe even inchoate—for a modern reader to make sense of.

Montaigne: Selected Essays comes from the pen of Michel de Montaigne, a 16th-century French jurist, advisor, and diplomat whose many adventures would make a compelling autobiography. Instead, Montaigne writes a series of short works that examine his innermost thoughts and feelings, attitudes and beliefs, preferences and daily habits.

Matthew Sharpe is part of an ARC funded project on modern reinventions of the ancient idea of "philosophy as a way of life", in which Montaigne is a central figure. Deakin University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

Voltaire celebrated Montaigne - a man educated only by his own reading, his father and his childhood tutors – as “the least methodical of all philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable”. Nietzsche claimed that the very existence of Montaigne’s Essays added to the joy of living in this world.