The question, “Why has Harriet Taylor MM appeared in the history of philosophy as she has?” has several answers. The answers intertwine the personality and polities of Harriet, the sexism of those who wrote of her, misunderstandings of the means and meaning of her collaboration with John Stuart Mill, and the disturbing challenge of her questioning.

The question, "Why has Harriet Taylor Mill appeared in the history of philosophy as she has?" has several answers. The answers intertwine the personality and politics of Harriet, the sexism of those who wrote of her (which was a reflection of the overall status of women during the period the commentator wrote), misunderstandings of the means and meaning of her collaboration with John Stuart Mill, and the disturbing challenge of her questioning.

This paper is designed to reinterpret and clarify John Stuart Mill's ideas on science. Past discussions of these ideas strike me as unsatisfactory in two crucial respects. In the first place they have encouraged us to regard Mill's principal work on epistemology, A System of Logic, as fundamentally inductivist This is the received interpretation of Mill's Logic and one finds it summarized and affirmed in the remark of Laurens Laudan that 'by and large' Mill was 'a rather orthodox inductivist who (...) saw science as the generalisation of observation and who argued that all scientific ideas come directly from experience. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill didn’t take his life; but he could have done it. Had he done it when he was twenty, we would have never known what he thought about it. But he didn’t. And many years later he wrote about nature, God, religion and autonomy. My aim in this article is to show how his thoughts about nature and theism affect in fact his stance about autonomy to commit suicide.

ABSTRACT As the most famous critic of John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen has often been assumed to have been a religious conservative or even reactionary. In contrast to these assessments, this article shows that Stephen's most consistent enemies were what he took to be the two most significant religious forces of the modern world: Ultramontane Catholicism and Comtean Positivism. The article explores his objections to these two religious ideologies, which he saw as sharing certain harmful features. It then shows (...) that his famous critiques of John Stuart Mill and liberalism had much in common with his attacks on Ultramontanism and Positivism; for example, he charged that they rested on an implausible philosophical anthropology and that they degraded the state. (shrink)

In mill the principle of utility does not ascribe rightness or wrongness to anything. It governs not just morality but the whole art of life. It says that happiness is the only thing desirable as an end. But the meaning of this formulation is problematic, Since mill's theory of practical reason conceives this desirability as an end as generating reasons for action for all agents in a way implying impartiality between self and others, Whereas in the ordinary sense it does (...) not. This interpretation is supported by detailed textual analysis. (shrink)

This article examines John Stuart Mill's position as the principal historical opponent of legal moralism. I argue that inattention to the particular form of his opposition to legal moralism has muddied the interpretation of his liberty principle. Specifically, Mill does not endorse what I call the illegitimacy thesis, according to which appeals to harmless wrongdoings, whether or not they exist, are illegitimate in the justification of legal interference.