Ann Hartle, Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher

The Confessions of Montaigne

Montaigne rarely repented and he viewed confession—both juridical and ecclesiastical—with skepticism. Confession, Montaigne believed, forced a mode of self-representation onto the speaker that was inevitably distorting. Repentance, moreover, made claims about self-transformation that Montaigne found improbable. This article traces these themes in the context of Montaigne‘s Essays, with particul...

Hartle-Hawking Wave Function

In most attempts to compute the Hartle-Hawking “wave function of the universe” in Euclidean quantum gravity, two important approximations are made: the path integral is evaluated in a saddle point approximation, and only the leading (least action) extremum is taken into account. In (2+1)dimensional gravity with a negative cosmological constant, the second assumption is shown to lead to incorrec...

Co-directeur de thèse: M. Jean-Michel MAZIN

Innovation as Spiritual Exercise: Montaigne and Pascal

The rediscovery of the rhetorical tradition in the past thirty years has transformed the study of early modern authors like Montaigne and Pascal. The categories of traditional literary history, like originality, influence, predecessors, and followers, are now seen as inadequate when it comes to explaining how Montaigne and Pascal thought of themselves as authors and how they understood the proc...

Hartle-Hawking Wave-Function for Flux Compactifications

We argue that the topological string partition function, which has been known to correspond to a wave-function, can be interpreted as an exact “wave-function of the universe” in the mini-superspace sector of physical superstring theory. This realizes the idea of Hartle and Hawking in the context of string theory, including all loop quantum corrections. The mini-superspace approximation is justi...