Ilse’s Reviews > When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?: Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life > Status Update
Ilse
is on page 16 of 300
Modern philosophy starts 30 years after Montaigne when Descartes asks himself what can be believed with certainty. The edifice that Descartes and other 17th century philosophers build around the answer – the huge glass-and steel cathedral of Reason – is one that eclipsed Montaigne’s more modest tower. As a result, he has silently slipped below our intellectual horizons: an eccentric provincial essayist.
— Aug 05, 2023 04:51AM
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Ilse’s Previous Updates
Ilse
is on page 19 of 300
And with this Montaigne's essays grow out of their stoical adolescence – their obsession with battlefield and military tactics – and instead begin to explore the mindset of friends and enemies, animals and cannibals, Catholics, Protestants and Jews – even asking himself ‘When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?’
— Aug 07, 2023 12:53AM
Ilse
is on page 18 of 300
Montaigne’s essays thus bring with them an acceptance of variation and difference, but a difference built around our similarities in the first place. He collects Brazilian love songs from the New World, making him perhaps the first fan of world music. He admires the Turks’ provision of hospitals for animals and wonders whether elephants have a religion. His scepticism arrives at sympathy rather than certainty.
— Aug 07, 2023 12:52AM
It is interesting to gather others perspectives every now and then. I feel philosophical observation came to be before any other - religious or scientific.