FREN 6540

Montaigne and Skepticism

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

How does philosophy respond to widespread and continuous disaster? The Wars of Religion in France and throughout Europe offer the context of continual violence, trauma, and social upheaval, and the Essais of Michel de Montaigne respond to this context by elaborating a new form of skepticism, based on classical models, which creates a space for more humane ethics (including some of the earliest discussions of religious and racial tolerance) and for freedom of thought (a relatively new concept in the Western World), by means of radical questioning of the functioning of political, religious, and intellectual authority. What Montaigne offers is both a practical and intellectual model for coping with extreme and omnipresent violence and social conflict, a model that presents difference as a necessary condition of physical and psychic survival.

When Offered Fall.

Comments All texts will be in French.

View Enrollment Information