Introduction
The introductory chapter begins by offering a reading of Hume’s unsent 1734 letter to Dr Arbuthnot, which recalls how his youthful enthusiasm for philosophy became pathological, leading him into the ‘Disease of the Learned’. The letter marks the point at which Hume consciously abandons the foundational idea of philosophy as the science of knowledge in favour of a holistic and ‘easy’ philosophy based upon the ‘science of man’, which encompasses moral, sentimental, and aesthetic concerns. This new science conceives experience according to the model of experimental thought evident in Hume’s own writing, a model based on the ‘essayistic’, trial-and-error method of intersubjective communication. The chapter explores the consequences of this fundamentally pragmatic reorientation for later eighteenth-century thought. While providing a breakdown and description of subsequent chapters, the Introduction also draws attention to the importance of this reorientation of notions of trust, language, virtue, performance, and the essay genre itself.