Issue #25

Abstract: The article shows that the philosophy of Michel Montaigne can be viewed as an attempt to formulate, within the framework of the secular ethics, the principles and foundations of a person’s heroic attitude to death. Man’s hopes that go beyond his current and mortal existence are unfounded. There are no such potencies that can be realized in the future. According to the author of the scientific text, the parcels of Montaigne’s philosophy cannot be regarded as philosophical proper, since a person is described in categories reflecting his empirical being. Reality outside the relationship of man to it does not have any value. Reality is the sphere of the existence of such good and evil, which is comprehended and embodied by man. Earthly life is the only reality of human existence. The study of the philosophy of M. Montaigne also shows that the concept of the carnivalistic worldview as an attribute of the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, formulated by M. Bakhtin, needs additional arguments. The fact that M. Bakhtin attributes to folk culture can be found in the texts of educated people of that time. True, the argument “from Montaigne”, apparently, is significant to the extent that we study his work from a philosophical point of view. If “Experiments” are viewed as a work of art, they fully confirm the concept of M. Bakhtin.