John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), was the leading British philosopher of the nineteenth century. An exponent and developer of the empiricism of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, and of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, he made major contributions to economics and political philosophy and is generally considered to be the founder of British Liberalism.

Biography
(based upon his autbiography ) John Stuart Mill was the eldest son of James Mill, a writer, philosopher and follower of Jeremy Bentham. He was intensively educated by his father,  receiving childhood instruction in Greek, Latin,  and political economy. From an early age he was an avid reader of history, and as a teenager he acquired a profound understanding of logic and became familiar with the teachings of  Adam Smith and David Ricardo. At the age of 14 he began a year's stay with a friend of his father's in France, where he made the acquaintance of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say; and on his return he turned his attention to the works of John Locke and Jeremy Bentham and became a convinced utilitarian. At the age of 17 he started work as a minor civil servant: a job that was sufficiently undemanding that he could do it and simultaneusly pursue his own thoughts. For a time he took the achievement of political reform to be his sole objective, but at the age of twenty he suffered a bout of depression, triggered by doubts about the merit of that objective. In 1830, at the age of 25, he formed "the most valuable friendship of my life" - with Mrs Harriet Taylor. Twenty years later, on the death of her husband, they were married - a marriage which ended with her death in 1858. In the meantime his outstanding intellectual reputation had been established by the publication in 1844 of his System of Logic that ran to eight editions. The succession of major works that followed (links to which are available on the works subpage) is recorded on the timelines subpage. In 1865 he started a three-year stint as a Member of Parliament, and he died in 1873 at the age of 66.

Logic
John Stuart Mill was a proponent of induction at a time when the generally accepted method of reasoning was deduction from axioms that were taken to be self-evidently true (as practised by the classical philosophers). He expounded and expanded upon the work on induction by Francis Bacon, and his "five canons of induction" were accepted for teaching purposes by the major English universities. He maintained that induction from observations by the five senses was the only acceptable method of scientific enquiry, but he regarded it, not as a path to certainty but as a way of reaching a provisional conclusion with an acceptable degree of confidence (see inset).

Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill was a devoted exponent and defender of Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism. He sought to correct the misunderstandings that he attributed to its critics, and in doing so he gave it wider currency than it had previously attained.