Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance writer and philosopher who invented the essay as a literary form and made himself its subject. Withdrawing from public life to his château in Périgord, he spent years examining his own thoughts, habits, and opinions with detached curiosity, producing the Essais — a work of extraordinary intellectual honesty that established the examined self as a legitimate object of philosophical inquiry. His scepticism about certainty and his humanist attention to lived experience made him a formative influence on the modern tradition.