81: Michel de Montaigne - “What Do I Know?”

What is consciousness? Julian Jaynes rejects all of the popular answers: that consciousness is thinking, reason, memory, or the capacity for learning. Nor does he think it can be accounted for as a merely accumulative development of "sentience" through evolution. In his controver ...  Show more

In this episode, we're going to discuss what is likely the founding text of the Zen tradition, the Laṅkāvatāra Sutra. According to some of the earliest sources on Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in China, the "Lanka" was the teaching whose "abstruse principle" he passed down to h ...  Show more

Centuries before Proust's Remembrance of Things Past took us on a tour of memory and James Joyce played with stream of consciousness, a 16th century nobleman - Michel de Montaigne - developed a wholly new style of reflective prose that examined his place in the world. ...

In his “Essays” Montaigne uses his wit, insight, and humanist training to tackle his favorite subject: Montaigne.

On this episode of the podcast, we learn about Michel de Montaigne. We first discuss how a case of 16th century road rage led to a near-death experience which ironically helped Montaigne overcome his fear of dying. Next, we learn why Montaigne valued personal experience above all ...  Show more

We're joined in this episode by a leading expert on one of the most famous works of philosophy ever written: Descartes' Meditations.