What does philosophizing really get us? We can’t attain much in the way of certain knowledge. Knowing really doesn’t, contra Plato, make us virtuous. In fact, getting too sucked into parsing long and complex texts can cause us to lose perspective, i.e. miss the point of our interest in philosophy in the first place.
16th century intellectual Michel de Montaigne gives us a model of philosophy as practical: philosophy is a way to put us at peace with ourselves, to steel ourselves for the challenges we have to face, to humble our pretensions while ennobling our aspirations, to open us up to the world while making us sure enough of ourselves to maintain our integrity. Overall, philosophy should help us to be cheerful, even in the face of misfortune and death.
We’ll be reading some selections from his massive tome Essays. You can get Charles Cotton’s public domain translation online here. We’ll be reading the much more recent Donald Frame translation, which you can purchase here.
The book as a whole is definitely worth leafing through, but we’ll be reading some of the more famous essays:
“That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die” (Book 1, Chapter 20. Written in around 1574)
“Of the Education of Children” (Book 1, Ch. 26. 1580)
“Of Cannibals” (Book 1, Ch. 31. 1580)
“Of Solitude” (Book 1, Ch. 39. 1574)
“Of Experience” (Book 3, Ch. 13. 1588)
“Apology for Raymond Sebond” (Or as much of this one as we can manage; it’s a very long treatise on skepticism. Book 2, Ch. 12. 1580)
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