Although the French Renaissance sceptic Michel de Montaigne is a much-admired thinker among many literary historians and some philosophical ones, his oeuvre hardly features in critical surveys of ideas in education. This is strange given that Montaigne offers modern educators an exemplary form of communicative discourse which anticipates contemporary education theory's emphasis on the importance of reflective practice and learning from experience. While each of these themes is capable of being rendered as repetitious slogans, sound-bites even, Montaigne, through his emphasis (...) on free thinking and self-study, helps to rescue them from such a fate, identifying a dialectical method called ‘essaying’ which has genuine purchase on practice and its improvement. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Between the publication of Montaigne's Essais and Hobbes's Leviathan rhetors became increasingly anxious about arguing in utramque partem. Paradiastolic discourse, fundamental to Montaigne's early essays, is anxiously though expertly deployed in Leviathan. Paradiastole fuses the ability to see and speak about an issue from antithetical perspectives with the ambivalence such power arouses in. Beyond their skepticism, Montaigne and Hobbes share a concern for how phenomena can be interpreted and represented through language. Despite Hobbes's desire for a method that would (...) ensure constant and determinate linguistic acts that would render rhetoric supererogatory, Leviathan demonstrates his unremarkable affinities with mainline Renaissance humanists alongside his uneasy affinities with the Sophists. Both the humanist and the Sophist used the trope to probe and to persuade, though both were anxious about the reversibility of such rhetorical redescriptions. Paradiastolic discourses, we argue, integrate the cognitive procedures of philosophy with the judicative procedures of rhetoric. The trope operates through exploiting the reciprocity between similar qualities, as exemplified by the influential paradiastolic pairing of ferox and fortis. (shrink)