That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die

“To know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.”



MICHEL de MONTAIGNE (1533-1592), was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance and the originator of the essay genre. Montaigne studied law and became a member of the Parliament of Bordeaux in 1557. In 1571, he retired to his castle at Montaigne and began to compose his many essays, on such diverse subjects as friendship, fear, education, and imagination, which were published in three volumes from 1580 to 1588. His work is characterized by skepticism, a desire for truth, and a driving interest in the human character, and admired for his explorations of ancestral sin, guilt, and the concept of justice. Across the ages, he is known to have influenced such disparate writers as Shakespeare, Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Virginia Woolf.