When1: 1843
When2: 1873
Who: John Stuart Mill [Mill, John Stuart]
What: philosopher/economist
Where: Scotland/Britain
works\ System of Logic [1843]; Principles of Political Economy [1848]; Essay On Liberty [1859]; Considerations on Representative Government [1861]; Utilitarianism [1861]; Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy [1865]; Auguste Comte and Positivism [1866]; Subjection of Women [1869]; Autobiography [1873]
Detail: He lived 1806 to 1873, was James Mill's son, and was utilitarian, empiricist, and associationist. He tried to meld the Enlightenment with romanticism.
Epistemology
Knowledge, including mathematics and logic, comes only from experience. People can know matter and objects only as sensation loci.
Reasoning is induction or generalization {inductivism}. Reasoning can be good, middling, or poor.
Science laws can result from adding similar components {homopathic law} to obtain similar results. Science laws can result from multiplying dissimilar components {heteropathic law} to obtain new properties.
Eliminating objects and events that have no effect can find true causes {Mill's methods}, by agreement, difference, joint-agreement-and-difference, residues, or concomitant-variations methods.
Language feature, word, or phrase has connotation and denotation. Connotation is meaning and gives denotation. Proper names do not have connotation, because they have no wider meaning and no defining attributes.
Associations can be real and actual or apparent and verbal ones.
Consciousness is only perception associations. It does not need intuition or subjective faculty.
Ethics
People seek only happiness. Other goals, such as virtue, are part of happiness or means to happiness.
The happiness of the greatest number is the best. Happiness requires liberty and free will. Wrong actions or things cause less happiness.
Pleasures have qualitative differences. People must account for pleasure quality, as well as quantity.
Human nature is free and individual.
Mind
Mind can have experiences, memories, and hopes or desires, experienced by self.
Other humans seem to have consciousness, but how can mind know that there are other minds {Other, Mill}.
Politics
Society should provide the basic conditions for happiness. Society can nurture human nature.
Government can coerce individuals only to prevent harm to others {harm principle}.
Society must protect people's possessions. One possession is justice.
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Date Modified: 2022.0224