The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Inspired by Lucretius and Plutarch, Michel de Montaigne composed this masterwork of French philosophy while living in solitude following his retirement from public life. His wide-ranging topics include conscience, politics, sorrow, solitude, fear, friendship, war, and poetry; informing countless readers that to look outward requires we first look within.

About the author

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was a French philosopher, essayist, and statesman. Born in Aquitaine at the Château de Montaigne, he was raised in a wealthy and powerful family with Spanish, Portuguese, and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Educated by tutors from his father's humanist circle, he went on to study under Latin scholar George Buchanan at the College of Guienne in Bordeaux. After completing a law degree, he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux and from 1561 to 1563 served as a courtier to Charles IX. After retiring from public life in 1871, he began working on his celebrated Essais (1580). Believed to be inspired by the loss of his dear friend Étienne de La Boétie, a prominent humanist and poet of the French Renaissance, the Essais contain Montaigne's reflections on literature, the classics, philosophy, human nature, and selfhood. Considered a landmark work of pre-Enlightenment French philosophy, Montaigne's magnum opus both popularized the essay as a literary form and influenced a wide range of Western thinkers, including William Shakespeare, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Product details

• Authors: Michel De Montaigne
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.11.2021
• EAN: 9798888973806
• ISBN: 979-8-88897-380-6
• No. of pages: 1194
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Series: Mint Editions; Mint Editions (Nonfiction Narr
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / General, Philosophy, PHILOSOPHY / Essays, PHILOSOPHY / Individual Philosophers, Philosophy: epistemology and theory of knowledge, Humanist & Secular Alternatives To Religion, Humanist philosophy