In the opening pages of How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, Sarah Bakewell highlights a site called “The Oxford Muse.”

The site was founded by historian Theodore Zeldin, she explains, to encourage people “to put together brief self-portraits in words, describing their everyday lives and the things they have learned .... For Zeldin, shared self-revelation is the best way to develop trust and cooperation around the planet, replacing national stereotypes with real people. The great adventure of our epoch, he says, is ‘to discover who inhabits the world, one individual at a time.’”

Bakewell traces that concept or tendency -- “writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity” -- to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a French nobleman, bureaucrat, and winegrower who lived in southwest France from 1533 to 1592. Given his curiously inquisitive nature and his violently divisive intellectual and religious context (French Catholics and Protestant Huguenots were engaged in bloody conflict just outside his door), Montaigne found refuge in chronicling his attempts at knowledge, or “essais” in understanding, as he called them in French. He’s the guy we have to thank, in other words, for the modern genre of “essay.”

It’s a similar belief in discovery, versus absolutism, behind the celebration of UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day later this week. Every third Thursday of November since 2002, UNESCO and the entire United Nations system honors the openness embodied by Montaigne and his most pressing question: “How to Live?”

This year in Paris, international philosophers and scholars including Tanella Boni of Côte d'Ivoire, Ioanna Kuçuradi of Turkey, and Yves Charles Zarka of France will speak to the conference’s general theme of “Inclusive Societies, Sustainable Planet.” This year’s focus on growing inequalities between rich and poor against the question of sustainable development reflects World Philosophy Day’s broader aim, as articulated by UNESCO’s Director-General Irina Bokova:

"Faced with the complexity of today’s world, philosophical reflection is above all a call to humility, to take a step back and engage in reasoned dialogue, to build together the solutions to challenges that are beyond our control. This is the best way to educate enlightened citizens, equipped to fight stupidity and prejudice. The greater the difficulties encountered the greater the need for philosophy to make sense of questions of peace and sustainable development."

Between bookmarking The Oxford Muse and revisiting it often for reminders about the world’s diversity of faces and voices, and bookmarking your favorite passages of Bakewell’s clever biography of Montaigne, you’ll be well on your way to developing the sort of progressive, open, and connected mind required to achieve the mission of World Philosophy Day.