Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Montaigne’s political and religious context
- 3 Montaigne’s legacy
- 4 Montaigne and antiquity
- 5 The Essays and the New World
- 6 Justice and the lawlaw: on the reverse side of the Essays
- 7 Montaigne and the notion of prudence
- 8 Montaigne and the truth of the schools
- 9 The investigation of nature
- 10 Montaigne and skepticism
- 11 Montaigne on moral philosophy and the good life
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - Montaigne on moral philosophy and the good life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Montaigne’s political and religious context
- 3 Montaigne’s legacy
- 4 Montaigne and antiquity
- 5 The Essays and the New World
- 6 Justice and the lawlaw: on the reverse side of the Essays
- 7 Montaigne and the notion of prudence
- 8 Montaigne and the truth of the schools
- 9 The investigation of nature
- 10 Montaigne and skepticism
- 11 Montaigne on moral philosophy and the good life
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Moral philosophy today is not what it was in the Athens of Socrates and Plato, nor what it was in Montaigne's France. Philosophers today tend to think their task is, as Alexander Nehamas puts it, “to offer systematically connected answers to a set of independently given problems.” Philosophy is understood, moreover, as a largely if not wholly theoretical enterprise. Montaigne did not see it that way; and if we want to understand his relation to moral philosophy we need to begin by asking what he could have taken it to be. We must moreover include some consideration of how he saw the good life. With everyone else, he took it that in ancient philosophy - the philosophy he mainly studied - the pursuit of philosophy and the pursuit of the good life were inseparable. In this chapter I examine his reactions to some views of moral philosophy that he scrutinized with great care. I then consider what bearing his responses had on the moral philosophy that came after him, which for convenience I will refer to as modern moral philosophy.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne , pp. 207 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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