Writing Doubt in Montaigne's Essais: Thinking Relationally with Seneca and Plutarch

Doubtful Writing offers a major reassessment of philosophical uncertainty in one of the early modern period’s foremost doubters. It argues that Montaigne’s engagement, his endless ‘commerce’ with two dogmatists, Seneca and Plutarch, produced a radical new mode of doubtful writing; one with which Montaigne could conduct and communicate a double, unresolved, and contradictory mode of thinking.
Seneca and Plutarch have long been recognised as Montaigne’s preferred authors: he himself, on numero...