At eighteen, David Hume thought so hard that his body broke down, developing scurvy-like spots and emotional numbness that a doctor diagnosed as the disease of the learned. This episode follows the Edinburgh prodigy who entered university at twelve or younger, secretly abandoned law for philosophy, recovered on a prescription of daily claret and exercise, and wrote A Treatise of Human Nature at a Jesuit college in France, only to watch it fall dead-born from the press.

The hosts walk through the ideas that terrified the religious and academic establishment: empiricism, the problem of induction and constant conjunction, reason as the slave of the passions, the bundle theory of the self, and the is-ought problem. They also cover the bizarre jobs he took to survive, the six-volume History of England that finally made him rich and famous, his c ...