For generations, the philosopher's late essays were dismissed as the confused work of a mind in decline, so different in style from his celebrated early treatises that some scholars doubted he had written them at all. A reassessment now underway inverts this judgment. The apparent disorder of the late writings, these scholars argue, reflects not failing powers but a deliberate change of method. Having spent his youth constructing rigorous systems, the philosopher grew skeptical that any system could capture experience without distorting it. The fragmentary, aphoristic style of the late essays, on this reading, is the considered expression of that skepticism—an attempt to say what a systematic treatise cannot. The older interpretation mistook a philosophical position for a symptom. What looked like the erosion of a method was in fact its abandonment on principle.