Michel de Montaigne was a French nobleman who retired from public life at thirty-eight to read and write in a tower on his estate, and produced a body of work that invented a literary form.

The Essays

He called the pieces essais — attempts, or trials. The form was new: writing that follows a mind working rather than presenting a finished conclusion, changing direction, contradicting itself, and leaving the contradictions in.

The subject is himself, and he is explicit that this is the point. He examines his own habits, fears, illnesses, reading and inconsistencies on the grounds that a person examined closely enough is a specimen of the species.

Que sais-je?

His motto — what do I know? — states the skeptical position as a question rather than a doctrine. Montaigne had read Sextus Empiricus in the newly available translations, and the ancient arguments arrived in a Europe fracturing over religious certainty.

His use of them is characteristic: not to prove that nothing can be known, but to reduce the confidence that was producing the wars. Customs he found absurd elsewhere turned out to have local equivalents at home, and the essay on cannibals turns the comparison against his own society directly.

Why he matters philosophically

He set the problem Descartes built a method to answer. The skeptical arguments Montaigne had made vivid were exactly what the Meditations were designed to defeat, and the connection is direct rather than atmospheric. See skepticism.

He also changed what philosophical writing could be. The first person, the digression, the admission of uncertainty — these were not available as philosophical moves before him and have been used ever since.