Michel Montaigne
| Michel de Montaigne | |
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| Born |
Michel de Montaigne 28 February 1533 Château de Montaigne, Guyenne, France |
| Died | 13 September 1592 (aged 59) Château de Montaigne, Guyenne, France |
| Alma mater |
College of Guienne Collège Royal University of Toulouse |
| Era | Renaissance philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Renaissance humanism Renaissance skepticism |
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Notable ideas
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The essay, Montaigne's wheel argument |
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Influences
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Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (/mɒnˈteɪn/;French: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with serious intellectual insight; his massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts" or "Trials") contains some of the most influential essays ever written.
Montaigne had a direct influence on writers all over the world, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes,Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt,Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer,Isaac Asimov, and possibly on the later works of William Shakespeare.
In his own lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, "I am myself the matter of my book", was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would come to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, "Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as Que sais-je? in modern French).
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