Becoming Animal in Michel de Montaigne Views. Toward an Animal Community

• Authors: Skonieczny Krzysztof
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

It is a recent tendency to read certain pre- and early-modern thinkers as “anticipatory critics” of modernity; the name of Michel de Montaigne often comes up in this context. Most of the critical approaches treat Montaigne like a pre-Rousseau proto-romantic which is indeed is an important part of Montaigne’s thinking. However, as I show in this paper, his Essays also allow for a different interpretation. Namely, I demonstrate that 1) Montaigne’s appraisal of Nature is far from a romantic-idyllic one; 2) his understanding of the interspecies division is more subtle than it is often thought; 3) his thought thus interpreted includes an ethics of becoming-animal that is based on a radically anti-Platonic (and thus anti-Cartesian) body-mind economy.

Keywords

EN

becoming animal; Michel de Montaigne; animal community; animality; post-Cartesian; rationality; Nature; interspecies; body-mind economy

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk; Fundacja Filozofia Na Rzecz Dialogu
• Journal: Dialogue and Universalism
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 87-102

Contributors

author

Skonieczny Krzysztof

• Jagiellonian University in Kraków in Philosophy and in Psychology