Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher [Hardcover]

Ann Hartle (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521821681 | ISBN-13: 978-0521821681 | Publication Date: April 14, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

Book Description

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

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521821681
• ISBN-13: 978-0521821681
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #299,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Montaigne's Friend, November 5, 2011

By 

George I. Greene (Chappaqua, New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (Paperback)

Ann Hartle has written a 'wonderful' book about Montaigne through a close reading of his Essays. She attempts to understand Montaigne as he understood himself. She explores what Montaigne means that he is an accidental philosopher during the great religious upheavals in France. She shows how he differs from deliberative philosophers (the ancients and the scholastics) and the moderns that are his contemporaries in order to show a person more open to the world and tolerant of others. The key seems to be his understanding of being a contingent being in the world. One can almost see her sitting next to Montaigne chatting. The conversation is warm and one can see that the company is good.

She sees in Montaigne the hints of a Christian republican; but, it is a Christianity different from orthodoxy and divorced from one's understanding of miracles as an exception/interruption of the natural world. One suspects his Christianity is more the result of imbibing milk at his mother's breast than being 'reborn'. There seems nothing transcendent in his religious faith for being Christian seems to be no different from being a Frenchman, an Englishman or a German.