Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne served as a counselor and later mayor of Bordeaux before retiring at thirty-eight to the tower library of his family château, intending, as an inscription there records, to spend his remaining years in freedom, tranquility, and leisure, and instead began writing what he called essais, 'attempts,' at understanding himself.

The Essays, expanded and revised across three books until his death, range without system across war, cannibals, friendship, thumbs, and death itself, always circling back to his own uncertain, changing self as the one subject he could examine honestly. His famous question, 'Que sais-je?,' 'What do I know?,' became a motto for a whole tradition of skeptical self-inquiry.

He wrote in French rather than Latin, in a personal, conversational register nobody had quite used for philosophy before, and effectively invented the essay as a literary form still recognizable today.