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Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher. By Ann Hartle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. viii + 303 pages.
Many of us who have been reading the largely textual and historical criticism of the Essays of the last several decades will be delighted to find a book that treats Michel de Montaigne as an important contributor to the western philosophical tradition. Ann Hartle's Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher is such a book, not only because the author recognizes and takes up the many philosophical problems that Montaigne raises but also because she never sets aside the literary value of the Essays. Indeed, she treats the literary aspects of the Essays as an integral and even necessary part of the book's philosophical thrust. At the outset Hartle states, "Montaigne invented the essay because his thought could not be expressed in the traditional philosophical forms" (1). This is a very modest beginning, as Hartle understates her case: through most of her treatment, she shows that Montaigne takes strong issue with some of the most dominant trends in western philosophy, among them that philosophy moves in the realm of ideas and is "above" its textual crystallization, that the text must be subordinate to these ideas, and hence that its presentation must be "clear" and "orderly," carried out according to a certain notion of reason. She views Montaigne's often quick bursts of thought and digressive style as pointed criticisms of these trends. Extensively throughout her book, she develops the words in her subtitle, "accidental philosopher," borrowed from "The Apology for Raymond Sebond" (Essays, book 2, chapter 12).
Having said this, I will now take polite exception to one of Hartle's first claims about Montaigne: "Although his Essays have always been acknowledged as the origin of a new literary genre, they have never been recognized as philosophical in the deepest sense" (1). There has for some time been a small but noticeable tendency among readers of Montaigne to treat him as a philosopher through approaches similar to Hartle's (Réda Bensmaïa and Jacques Derrida are names that come to mind). However, I will quickly add that Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher is probably the only book in recent years devoted exclusively to Montaigne that explores his major contributions to the western philosophical tradition....