Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes and David Hume are all skeptic philosophers who hold the belief that absolute knowledge is impossible to obtain. Skeptics make the claim that any knowledge we think we have about the world is uncertain, and therefore it is better to free yourself of any beliefs you may have instead of relying on flawed and dubitable reason to find the truth. These three skeptics agreed that there must be some sort of justification to go along with any knowledge one thinks they have; someone who thinks that what they believe is true is not enough, they must also have adequate reason to support that belief. However, according to the skeptic, it is impossible to have sufficient justification. Although these three philosophers…show more content… Although he too was a skeptic, his views differ greatly from Descartes’s and Hume’s. Montaigne took Pyrrhonian skepticism and tried to intertwine it with the teachings of the Catholic faith, and used it to defend the teachings of the Church. He is eminently known for his skeptic comment, “Que sais-je?” or, “What do I know?” Through Pyrrhonian skepticism, Montaigne attempted to analyze the universe through the only thing he could depend on: his individual judgment. Like Descartes and Hume, his arguments show that human sensory stimuli and reason should not be used to try and figure out the actual nature of things in the universe. We should not try to understand divine matters because we never will be able to as a result of the weaknesses of our natural being. Montaigne believed that we should give up hope on discovering the principle causes of things, and trying to confirm out our “instinctual understandings,” and instead submit to the authority and morality of the church, which gets its inspiration through supernatural phenomena. Unlike Descartes and Hume who believed that there were definite ways to discover the “principal truths” of our universe, Montaigne thought the opposite. Descartes thought we could get these basic truths through simple deductive reasoning while Hume thought we could get them through our natural human instinct. However, Montaigne promoted the view that man is completely ignorant and because of this he only has faith as a foundation for truth or the system of absolute