The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

He was a thinking, ruminating fellow, and his ideas did not spring up in his tranquil study, but while on horseback. He went on long rides and came back with ideas. Montaigne was neither one of the academics of the Sorbonne nor a professional man of letters, and he was not these things on two planes. First, he was a doer; he had been a magistrate, a businessman, and the mayor of Bordeaux before he retired to mull over his life and, mostly, his own knowledge. Second, he was an antidogmatist: he was a skeptic with charm, a fallible, noncommittal, personal, introspective writer, and, primarily, someone who, in the great classical tradition, wanted to be a man. Had he been in a different period, he would have been an empirical skeptic—he had skeptical tendencies of the Pyrrhonian variety, the antidogmatic kind like Sextus Empiricus, particularly in his awareness of the need to suspend judgment.