James Mill's Utilitarian Logic and Politics by Antis Loizides

Author:Antis Loizides [Loizides, Antis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780429602238
Google: 9p2RDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-04-08T03:00:27+00:00

I The method of philosophy: analysis and synthesis

William Thomas has argued that James Mill held to deductively derived political views “with a tenacity which avoided and abbreviated empirical enquiry”. The elder Mill’s cast of mind, Thomas added, “led him to trust to rules and principles and not to empirical evidence”, consistently preferring “the schematic and dogmatic to the empirical and inductive”.11 Others have concurred, arguing to the effect that Mill’s “rationalism” operated “separate to lived experience”.12 Similarly, focusing on the section on “Speculation & Practice” from Mill’s Commonplace Books, Kris Grint has recently argued that “the inductive approach […] was anathema to Mill”. Examining Mill’s intellectual and political context, Grint suggests that Mill’s views on induction may have represented a break from Scottish Enlightenment practice, though he concedes that no conclusion can be drawn safely.13 However, as I try to show, care should be taken in distinguishing between scientific and empirical induction. Mill criticized the latter, not the former. And this takes him closer to, rather than farther away from, his Scottish Enlightenment heritage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.