Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher

Name: Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher
Rating: 3.52
ISBN: 9780521037815

ISBN: 9780521037815 出版年：2003 页码：313 Ann Hartle Cambridge University Press

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内容简介

Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, has always been acknowledged as a great literary figure but has never been thought of as a philosophical original. This book treats Montaigne as a serious thinker in his own right, taking as its point of departure Montaigne's description of himself as 'an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher'. Whereas previous commentators have treated Montaigne's Essays as embodying a scepticism harking back to classical sources, Ann Hartle offers an account that reveals Montaigne's thought to be dialectical, transforming sceptical doubt into wonder at the most familiar aspects of life. This major reassessment of a much admired but also much underestimated thinker will interest a wide range of historians of philosophy as well as scholars in comparative literature, French studies and the history of ideas.

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George Greene

Ann Hartle has written a 'wonderful' book about Montaigne through a close reading of his Essays. She attempts to understand Montaigne as he understood himself. She explores what Montaigne means that he is an accidental philosopher during the great religious upheavals in France. She shows how he differs from deliberative philosophers (the ancients and the scholastics) and the moderns that are his contemporaries in order to show a person more open to the world and tolerant of others. The key seems to be his understanding of being a contingent being in the world. One can almost see her sitting next to Montaigne chatting. The conversation is warm and one can see that the company is good. She sees in Montaigne the hints of a Christian republican; but, it is a Christianity different from orthodoxy and divorced from one's understanding of miracles as an exception/interruption of the natural world. One suspects his Christianity is more the result of imbibing milk at his mother's breast than being 'reborn'. There seems nothing transcendent in his religious faith for being Christian seems to be no different from being a Frenchman, an Englishman or a German.

Dr. M. Schachter

Not an easy read but very good for in depth analysis

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