Since there is a concise biography at the beginning of the selection on Moodle, I won’t offer background beyond noting that Montaigne lived in the century before Descartes and Locke and long enough ago that he counts as having invented the essay as a literary form.

I’m not making an ungraded assignment for this discussion, but you should (as always) come to the discussion with questions. Many of Montaigne’s ideas are linked to quotations, so you might simply cite some quotation as your question. (To do that, you should of course be ready to cite a page number; but, since several quotations can appear on a page, you might add ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, or ‘d’ to note which quarter of the page a quotation appears on.) Of course, questions about other parts of the text are welcome, too.

Around the middle of p. 378, Montaigne distinguishes praising the person from praising the deed. It is worth noting that, while most ancient philosophers focused, in their writing on ethics, on judging persons, most modern philosophers (i.e., ones writing in the centuries after Montaigne) have focused on judging actions. So you might ask yourself which sort of judgment you take to be the more significant.

You will notice the letters ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ appearing bracketed at points in the text. These label three editions of the Essays, in which Montaigne gradually added material, and the letters indicate the edition in which the following material first appeared. If you are interested only in reading the essay in its final state, you can simply ignore the letters.