The Montaignian Moment

Engster, Dan

doi:10.1353/jhi.1998.0034

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…Read by the likes of Shakespeare, Pascal, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Franklin, and Nietzsche among countless others, his ideas have excerpted a significant influence on developments in Western philosophy. There is no need to rehash this heritage, which others have admirably traced (Engster, 1998; Hartle, 2013; Levine, 1999; Schaefer, 1990; Thompson, 2018). I would, however, point out several cardinal themes that will emerge as the argument unfolds: notably the study of the self for which Montaigne is so famous, but also the themes of toleration and shared human dignity that inform the guiding ideals of cosmopolitan thought.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What reading Montaigne during the Second World War can teach us about just war

Brunstetter

2022

Journal of International Political Theory

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Revisionist just war scholarship employs the rigors of analytical philosophy to make arguments about the deep morality of war. Accepting the individual and cosmopolitan are paramount to making sense of war as many revisionists do, this essay looks outside the just war canon to Montaigne—a sixteenth century French humanist hailed for his exploration of the self and cosmopolitan musings—for alternative insights. It explores how Montaigne was read during the Second World War by three intellectuals to make sense of war: Stefan Zweig, Jean Guéhenno, and François Mauriac. While Montaigne’s skepticism and turn to the self as an act of preservation was, in the 1930s, rejected as a strategy to combat rising authoritarianism in Europe by philosophers such as Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt school, the thinkers studied here shed light on Montaigne as a source of active humanism based in reflective action that leads to Resistance. Building on trends in just war thinking that call for paying greater attention to the lived experience of war, the article identifies several psychological and moral processes—the inward turn, the cosmopolitan gaze, casting an existential anchor, and the humanist’s wager—to shed light on the doubt-laden process of making individual moral choices amidst the rising dogmatic forces that war tends to impose.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What reading Montaigne during the Second World War can teach us about just war

Brunstetter

2022

Journal of International Political Theory

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Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance

Zerba

2012

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This book is an interdisciplinary study of the forms and uses of doubt in works by Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Cicero, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Montaigne. Based on close analysis of literary and philosophical texts by these important authors, Michelle Zerba argues that doubt is a defining experience in antiquity and the Renaissance, one that constantly challenges the limits of thought and representation. The wide-ranging discussion considers issues that run the gamut from tragic loss to comic bombast, from psychological collapse to skeptical dexterity and from solitary reflection to political improvisation in civic contexts and puts Greek and Roman treatments of doubt into dialogue not only with sixteenth-century texts but with contemporary works as well. Using the past to engage questions of vital concern to our time, Zerba demonstrates that although doubt sometimes has destructive consequences, it can also be conducive to tolerance, discovery and conversation across sociopolitical boundaries.

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Montaigne and the lessons of ancient history

Regent

2016

Global Intellectual History

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The Montaignian Moment

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

What reading Montaigne during the Second World War can teach us about just war

What reading Montaigne during the Second World War can teach us about just war

Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance

Montaigne and the lessons of ancient history

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