French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in a French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, in addition to postmodernism.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne 1533–1592 may have been Catholic, but his anti-dogmatic stances delivered him the father of the anti-conformist French spirit. His make consists of little trials for his thoughts, filled with autobiographical and casual anecdotes. His purpose with his essays was to leave something by which set could remember him. He was the first person to ownership the word essays, and his writings came to be highly influential upon Shakespeare, Rousseau and Nietzsche. His Pyrrhonian philosophical skepticism, summed up in his personal motto of Que sais-je? "what do I know?", served as one of the catalysts for René Descartes' oeuvre.