Utilitarianism, by British philosopher John Stuart Mill, is one of his most influential works and is a philosophical defense of utilitarian ethical theory. This publication remained a relevant publication since its original publication in the mid 19th century, as is still relevant in the application of utility in regard to social policy. This is an important work for those studying the concept of utilitarianism, or those who are interested in the writings of John Stuart Mill.
In his much quoted, seminal work, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill attempts to establish standards for the relationship between authority and liberty. He emphasizes the importance of individuality which he conceived as a prerequisite to the higher pleasures-the summum bonum of Utilitarianism. Published in 1859, On Liberty presents one of the most eloquent defenses of individual freedom and is perhaps the most widely-read liberal argument in support of the value of liberty.
A wonderful edition... -- Irving Louis Horowitz, Rutgers UniversityAlexander should be commended for making this invaluable material accessible to scholars and students... -- Maria H. Moralies, Florida State UniversityAn impressively compact and engaging introduction and a well-chosen selection of ancillary materials... -- Eileen Gillooly, Columbia UniversityThe introduction offers fresh insights... --Thomas Christiano, University of Arizona
The author of Straw Dogs, famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats—and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats--the animal that has most captured our imagination--than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Self: Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat", a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.
John Stuart Mill was one of the most important and influential philosophers of the nineteenth century. He was also someone who exemplified a view about the meaning of life that is widespread among both philosophers and nonacademics: that projects are what make your life meaningful, and if a single project is large enough to occupy center stage in it, that is the meaning of your life. His brilliant career notwithstanding, Mill's life was a train wreck; the intellectual energy and philosophical ingenuity which he devoted to figuring out what had gone wrong make him a fascinating object lesson in the view that projects give life meaning. Elijah Millgram argues that what went wrong was the very fact that Mill's life was a project-the tragedy of his life was an almost inevitable consequence of living out this account of the meaning of life. At once a scholarly contribution to the history of an important philosophical figure and an intervention in an ongoing debate within moral philosophy, this book takes on a topic that people outside the academy expect philosophy to address, but which it too rarely does: namely, the meaning of life. It is simultaneously an exercise in biography and a novel reconstruction and reframing of some of the central theories and texts of the philosophical canon. Millgram's work attempts to look at the theory of rationality from an unusual angle by asking: what difference does it make to the shape and progress of someone's life whether he has one or another understanding of practical reasoning-that is, of how one ought to reason about what to do?
Mill is famous for being an unbeliever, yet he was immersed in religion and open to spirituality in ways that many will find startling today. This well-research biography offers original findings and insights, you will encounter the Mill that you never knew.
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