Selections from the Essays of Montaigne (Crofts Classics) [Paperback]

Michel De Montaigne (Author), Donald Murdoch Frame (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 088295105X | ISBN-13: 978-0882951058 | Publication Date: June 1, 2011

This practical, easy-to-use guide provides answers to the most common problems encountered by students in the writing of history research papers. It employs a practical approach beginning with the first task, selecting a topic, and takes the student through how to prepare a bibliography--without becoming bogged down in the nature and philosophy of history. Included are three student exercises designed to improve techniques in locating library resources, using historical criticism, and preparing footnotes.

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Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: Harlan Davidson (June 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 088295105X
• ISBN-13: 978-0882951058
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sense of modernity, October 8, 2005

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FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Selections from the Essays of Montaigne (Crofts Classics) (Paperback)

Michel de Montaigne is considered by many to be the inventor of the literary form of the essay, so the collection from which these excerpts come is important in several ways. Montaigne was a humanist and a skeptic in his philosophical approach, and essentially looked at his own experience as the first topic for examination always.

The book of Essays was one he worked on periodically throughout his life, issuing different editions, the first of which appeared in 1580. Montaigne's style of writing is sometimes stream-of-consciousness, sometimes structured in more formal styles.

Montaigne's stated task in his preface to the reader is for self-examination, but it becomes very clear that Montaigne sees himself as an 'everyman' character. He strives for full-disclosure; indeed, he writes that were he another culture 'which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws', then he might have appeared naked.

The particular essays included here are as follows:

* Of Idleness
* Of the Education of Children
* Folly to Measure True and False by Our Own Capacity
* Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions
* Apology for Raymond Sebond
* Of Repentance
* Of Husbanding Your Will
* Of Physiognomy
* Of Experience

Montaigne's essays show a pessimism and skepticism, perhaps based on the kinds of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants going on, in France and elsewhere, as well as the periodic flare of plague. He was a humanist who saw cultures as having value internal to themselves and preferred to not universalise morals, laws and other ideas.

Montaigne was sometimes conventional in thought (seeing marriage as necessary for children, and distrusting the idea of romantic love), but other times he was very much a free thinker (particularly when it came to religious dogma or absolutist kinds of philosophical paradigms). Montaigne had respect for those who followed religious codes and ways of life, but distrusted those who tried to impose such ideas upon others.

Montaigne added to his essays twice in major ways, but did not strive for consistency or systematic ways of thinking - he declined to remove previous essays if they contradicted new writings.

Montaigne is perhaps the most important French philosopher prior to the Enlightenment. His essays remain popular because they have a sense of the modern and the current about them.