Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the history of philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College, London and the LMU and Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, not matter but me, Michel de Montaigne.

Montaigne is among the most quotable authors in the whole history of philosophy. When discussing him, there's a strong temptation simply to reel off a list of his most memorable and pithy remarks.

And as the equally quotable Oscar Wilde said, I can resist anything except temptation.

So here is a selection of my favorite Montaigne moments. It is fear that I am most afraid of. The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.

Virtue rejects ease as a companion.

Reason is a too handled pot. You can grab it from the right or the left. On any topic, I'd like starting with my conclusions.

There are folk on whom fine clothes sit down and cry. I am rarely summoned and I just as seldom volunteer. I do not judge opinions by their age.

It is far easier to talk like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than to both talk and live like Socrates.

And finally, the unimproveable, when I play with my cat, how do I know she is not passing time with me, rather than I with her?

These and many other remarks to Saver can be found in Montaigne's essays, first published in 1580, expanded for a new edition in 1588, and published again posthumously under the editorship of Marie de Gaune in 1595.

Taken together, the essays make for an immensely long andlessly entertaining and willfully digressive work, which Montaigne himself compared to a monstrous protest, fused together from mismatching limbs, and to a patchwork of quilted fabrics.

They are a monument to Montaigne's favorite subject, namely, Montaigne himself.

The style of his writing eloquently expresses his goal to explore and understand his self.

Explaining the disordered appearance of the essays, he says, I let myself go along as I find myself to be.

To account for his habit of adding material and never subtracting it, he admits, I never correct my first thoughts by second ones, I want to show my humors as they develop, revealing each element as it is born.

Not since Augustine's confessions have we discussed such a sustained and intimate reflections on the working of an individual mind.

Yet Montaigne's method, such as it is, may be traceable not so much to the confessional mode of Augustine as to the inward turn proposed by Erasmus.

Montaigne's essays are a natural, if not predictable, outcome of the brand of humanism initiated by Erasmus.

Many of the quotable sayings that appear in Montaigne are, in fact, already being quoted from other sources.

Like Bodan or Lipsius, Montaigne was evidently a great exponent of Erasmus' commonplace book method whereby one reads widely and notes striking and limiting or simply interesting passages for later use.

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