John Stuart Mill: life and philosophy

Abstract

This study examines the life, intellectual development, and philosophical system of John Stuart Mill. Tracing Mill’s strict utilitarian upbringing under his father James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the volume outlines how his mental crisis of 1826 prompted an integration of romantic and historical influences—notably from Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Saint-Simon—into his empiricist foundation. The work analyzes Mill’s ethical thought, highlighting the internal tensions between his hedonistic framework, his qualitative hierarchy of pleasures, and the central role he assigned to character formation and traditional moral rules. In political philosophy, it reviews Mill’s methodology for the social sciences, his defense of representative government, his concerns regarding majority tyranny derived from Alexis de Tocqueville, and his arguments for individual liberty. Turning to logic and epistemology, the study details Mill’s theory of denotation and connotation, his interpretation of the syllogism as an inference from particulars to particulars, and his controversial claim that mathematical and logical principles are empirical inductions. It further evaluates Mill’s inductive canons, the foundational role of the Law of Universal Causation, and his mechanistic conception of scientific explanation. Finally, the text investigates Mill’s metaphysics, focusing on his phenomenalist definition of matter as a “permanent possibility of sensation,” his psycho-physical parallelism, and his late essays evaluating theism, wherein he entertained the hypothesis of a finite deity and recognized the moral utility of imaginative hope. – AI-generated abstract.