So, after writing about Montaigne off and on for nearly 14 years now, you’d figure I would have a really strong handle on the essays themselves and would know everything in them. So far from the truth! Over the last couple months, I have been working on a revision of my essay about Montaigne’s “On…

Happy New Year everyone. I close 2024 and welcome the new year with this excerpt from Montaigne’s 10th essay, To Philosophize is to Learn to Die: Life is neither good nor evil in itself: it is the scene of good and evil according as you give them room. And if you have lived a day,…

I asked ChatGPT this morning something that I’ve been pondering while working my way through the Kenneth Branagh film adaptation of “Hamlet.” I asked, given that it has been well established that Shakespeare read the John Florio translation of Montaigne’s essays before writing Hamlet, is it possible to view Hamlet himself as taking a Pyrrhonist…

After getting some web traffic over the weekend, I’ve switched around the navigation of the site. Before the Montaigne essays were treated like blog posts, but now they’ve been converted to pages and can be easily reached via the Essays table of contents tab on the masthead. One-off pieces that I’ve written about Montaigne, in…

Montaigne created no new philosophical system and to this day, there’s tension between those who read him as someone like Nietzsche, a deep reader of classical philosophy who had his unique take on it, or those who insist that he is purely an essayist, that only his viewpoint of himself should matter. This dispute has…