This book offers a new account of the relationship between empiricism and the essay in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Exploring topics such as trust, testimony, virtue, and language, it offers new perspectives on connections between philosophy and literature, empiricism and transcendentalism, and Enlightenment and Romanticism.

• Preface


• Introduction. Empiricism Made Easy


• 1: Self and Intersubjectivity


• 2: The Subject of Trust


• 3: The Conversable Intellect


• 4: Essays in Experience


• 5: Romantic Empiricism


• Conclusion


• Bibliography

Tim Milnes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He previously held posts at University College, Oxford, and Christ Church University College, Canterbury. He has published widely on Romanticism and philosophy, and is the author of The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (CUP, 2010), Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (CUP, 2003), and William Wordsworth: The Prelude (Palgrave, 2009). His is also the co-editor of Romanticism, Sincerity, and Authenticity (Palgrave, 2010).