Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher

by Ann Hartle

Overview

Michel de Montaigne has always been acknowledged as a great literary figure but never thought of as a philosophical original. This book is the first to treat him 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". This major reassessment of a much admired but also greatly underestimated thinker is for historians of philosophy and scholars in comparative literature, French studies and the history of ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521821681
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/27/2003
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Note on the texts; Introduction; Part I. A New Figure: 1. 'That is where he got it!': Montaigne's caprices and the humours of ancient philosophy; 2. Bending and stretching the categories of traditional metaphysics; 3. The essay as philosophical form; Part II. Accidental Philosophy: 4. The circular dialectic of self-knowledge; 5. 'What it means to believe'; 6. The latent metaphysics of accidental philosophy; Part III. The Character of the Accidental Philosopher: 7. Montaigne's character: the great-souled man without pride; 8. What he learned in the nursery: accidental moral philosophy and Montaigne's reformation; 9. Christianity and the limits of politics; Notes; Works cited; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Hartle [is] an accomplished scholar..."
-David Lewis Schaefer, The Review of Politics


"There is much in Hartle's book which is suggestive, and much which is extremely perceptive...she captures the flavour and explains the shapes of Montaigne's thinking really well."
The London Review of Books


"[Ann Hartle's] thesis should make her book of interest to any philosophically inclined reader, and especially to those who desire better to grasp the great temporal or rather argumentative fault lines of philosophy's course through history. It ought also to earn for the book the particular attention of Thomists and other friends of high Scholasticism, who better than most ought to know how much can be learned about one's friends from their foes[...]Hartle's scholarship is a model of its kind."
-John C. McCarthy, The Catholic University of America, The Thomist

From the Publisher