John Stuart Mill (1806—1873)

Abstract

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) profoundly influenced the shape of 19th century British thought and political discourse. His substantial corpus of works includes texts in logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, religion, and current affairs. Mill’s education at the hands of his father, James Mill, fostered both intellectual development and a propensity towards reform. Mill felt the influence of historicism, French social thought, and Romanticism, in the form of thinkers like Coleridge, the St. Simonians, Thomas Carlyle, Goethe, and Wordsworth. This led him to begin searching for a new philosophic radicalism that would be more sensitive to the limits on reform imposed by culture and history and would emphasize the cultivation of our humanity, including feelings and imagination. Mill argues for a number of controversial principles, including radical empiricism, the harm principle that the only legitimate reason for interfering in an individual’s liberty is to prevent harm to others, and women’s equality. – AI-generated abstract.