Michel de Montaigne was among the most important Renaissance thinkers, the greatest advocate of skepticism, and the virtual inventor of the modern essay as a literary genre. After serving as mayor of Bordeaux, late in life (1571) he shut himself up in an “ivory tower” not to escape from the world but to contemplate humanity from an objective distance. Trusting that any true knowledge, as opposed to received wisdom, begins with a skeptical willingness to suspend all preformed assumptions, he dared to ask “Que sçay-je?” or “what do I know?”

The only logical place to begin is with self-examination, which itself has a long philosophical pedigree. The idea of “know thyself” (γνῶθι σεαυτόν) was associated by Plato with Socrates but is probably much older. Montaigne’s intellectual sojourn led to the composition of the essays in 1580....