Last week I took another look at Montaigne’s final essay “On Experience” from a practical viewpoint — what personal need was Montaigne fulfilling through his project, especially as expressed in that work. Today, I’m going to take a few steps further back and look at that project and the essay from the vantage of meaning….

There is nobody less suited that I am to talk about memory. I can hardly find a trace of it in myself; I doubt if there is any other memory in the world as grotesquely faulty as mine is! From “On Liars” I concern myself in this piece with Montaigne’s final essay, On Experience, but…

12 May 2011 About a year ago, I came across some lines from American philosopher Richard Rorty in his book “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,” that had a big impact on me. I was being treated for depression and had been on Cymbalta for about nine months. I couldn’t stand the drug and wanted to get…

20 September 2020 Now in the heart of another Presidential election, this one in 2024, I’m tempted to just delete this essay from my collection, given that I’ve covered On Experience in so many different ways. But the essay that follows is an interesting artifact from my 2020 version of the Montaigne Project, so I’ll…

In this essay, Montaigne takes on mass delusions, tying them to hysteria over witches. It’s an appropriate connection. In the early 1950s, the red scare in Washington that spilled over into Hollywood, was referred to by its opponents as a witch hunt, inspiring the Arthur Miller play The Crucible. But I like to think Montaigne…

It’s called “On Physiognomy” but there’s no good reason for the title, other than a fairly brief discussion of beauty and how Montaigne finds it hard to believe that Socrates was so ugly. The essay never addresses the concept of judging the character of someone from facial characteristics. But since Montaigne digresses over at least…