Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French writer who first employed the term essay (meaning “attempt”) to describe short pieces of writing. The idea was that he was “attempting” to describe himself and his thinking. Pyrrhonism makes an appearance in some of Montaigne’s essays, particularly in his social criticism. For example, in his essay “On Cannibals,” he outlines the supposed cannibalistic practices of peoples in the New World in some detail, but then asks whether this kind of practice should be condemned and whether it is any worse than the horrors Christians inflict on each other
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