This article describes the tension that exists between the views of learning as a means of knowledge transfer and the alternative idea that it is socially situated and not separable from the activities in which it is developed. It concludes that the 'authentic practices' of particular academic domains should be employed in schools to encourage learning rather the culture of schooling itself.

This article describes the tension that exists between the views of learning as a means of knowledge transfer and the alternative idea that it is socially situated and not separable from the activities in which it is developed. It concludes that the 'authentic practices' of particular academic domains should be employed in schools to encourage learning rather the culture of schooling itself.

John Stuart Mill’s _Utilitarianism _is a philosophical defense of utilitarianism, a moral theory stating that right actions are those that tend to promote overall happiness. The essay first appeared as a series of articles published in _Fraser’s Magazine_ in 1861; the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863. Mill discusses utilitarianism in some of his other works, including _On Liberty_ and _The Subjection of Women_, but _Utilitarianism _contains his only sustained defence of the theory. In this (...) Broadview Edition, Colin Heydt provides a substantial introduction that will enable readers to understand better the polemical context for _Utilitarianism_. Heydt shows, for example, how Mill’s moral philosophy grew out of political engagement, rather than exclusively out of a speculative interest in determining the nature of morality. Appendices include precedents to Mill’s work, reactions to Utilitarianism, and related writings by Mill. (shrink)

This paper attempts to present a 'time line' of the increasing levels of doubt and anxiety about the path of 'Progressive Civilization' from the heyday of Victorian liberalism in the early 19th Century to the rise of postmodernism in our day. It does so by tracking a line of thought through John Stuart Mill, Lord Bryce, Matthew Arnold, Henry Adams, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Walter Lippmann. It uses the quip coined by the Yippie leader Abbie Hoffmann in the 1960's (...) as a symbolic phrase for the terminus to which the "Idea of Progess" has led us in the 21st Century. The argument is that over the time period covered the most serious observers became increasingly aware of the disappearance from modern society's horizon of any idea of a transcendent meaning within which it could explain and justify to itself its own deepest purposes. The necessity for a persuasive 'metaphysics' which could show why the modern western experiment is a good thing became increasingly evident in inverse proportion to its philosophical availability. Note: This paper was delivered at the University of Maine on April 27, 2009 under the auspices of the Program in Western Civilization and American Liberty directed by Michael J.Palmer the Abraham Lincoln Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine. (shrink)

: This paper shows how the ethical benefits of Mill's Religion of HumanityÑa life imbued with purpose, an improved regard for others, and greater happiness for oneself from the pleasures of fellow-feelingÑare to be actualized through the imagination's creation of compelling narratives about humanity. Understanding the ethical importance of the Religion of Humanity therefore implies understanding the central role of imagination in Millian ethical life. This investigation serves to articulate a feature of Mill's utilitarianism that differentiates it from Bentham's, namely (...) his commitment to the importance of a religious sensibility in the moral agent. It also raises the broader philosophical issue of what narratives a psychologically tenable humanist world-view requires. (shrink)

In this previously unpublished essay, Edward Caird attacks Spencer's Transfigured Realism, before defending an absolute idealist theory of the formation of self-consciousness. Along the way, Caird also considered the writings of Bishop George Berkeley, David Hume, Sir William Hamilton, J.S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick. Yet the primary foci of the essay were Herbert Spencer's writings, particularly First Principles, the second edition of Principles of Psychology and the third volume of Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative . It appears to follow from (...) Caird's 1874 review of the third volume of Spencer's Essays, a piece which concluded with the observation that: 'There are some other points of interest in Mr. Spencer's 'Replies,' particularly his strange representation of Kant's meaning , but it would take too much space to discuss the subject here.'. (shrink)

This paper examines Thomas Hill Green's changing attitude to the Reform Question between 1865 and 1876. sketches the Radical landscape against which Green advocated reform between 1866 and 1867, paying particular attention to the respective positions of Gladstone, J.S. Mill and Bright on the relationship between responsible citizenship and class membership. examines Green's theories of social balance and responsible citizenship at the time of his lectures on the English Civil War. argues that, contrary to the established scholarship, Green's Radicalism was (...) closer to Bright than to Gladstone and Mill during this period. counters Richter's claim that Green abandoned democracy following the 1874 General Election, while arguing that even sympathetic commentators misunderstand Green's attitude to the Reform Question immediately after this date. (shrink)

Individual choice and freedom are repeatedly invoked in contemporary policy debates, including those with a focus on risk behaviors such as smoking and health insurance coverage. The idea of making the right choice with regard to health and well-being has been fortified by the neoliberal discourse of self-reliance, personal autonomy, and responsibility. This neoliberal view, stemming from the conceptualization of freedom of philosopher John Stuart Mill justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control, holds that success, (...) good health, and favorable educational outcomes are largely due to individual effort. Correspondingly, so too is failure, including failure of.. (shrink)

The 'Art of Life' is John Stuart Mill's name for his account of practical reason. In this volume, eleven leading scholars elucidate this fundamental, but widely neglected, element of Mill's thought. Mill divides the Art of Life into three 'departments': 'Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Æsthetics'. In the volume's first section, Rex Martin, David Weinstein, Ben Eggleston, and Dale E. Miller investigate the relation between the departments of morality and prudence. Their papers ask whether Mill is a rule utilitarian and, (...) if so, whether his practical philosophy must be incoherent. The second section contains papers by Jonathan Riley and Wendy Donner, who explore the relation between the departments of morality and aesthetics. They discuss issues ranging from supererogation to aesthetic pleasure and humanity's relationship with nature. -/- The papers in the third section consider the Art of Life's axiological first principle, the principle of utility. Elijah Millgram contends that Mill's own life refutes his claim that the Art of Life has a single axiological first principle. Philip Kitcher maintains that Mill has a dynamic axiology requiring us to continually refine our conception of the good. In the final section, three papers address what it means to put the Art of Life into practice. Robert Haraldsson locates an 'Art of Ethics' in On Liberty that is in tension with the Art of Life. Nadia Urbinati plumbs the classical roots of Mill's view of the good life. Finally, Colin Heydt develops Mill's suggestion that we regard our own lives as works of art. (shrink)

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.

British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill is the author of several essays, including Utilitarianism - a defence of Jeremy Bentham's principle applied to the field of ethics - and The Subjection of Women, which advocates legal equality between the sexes. This work, arguably his most famous contribution to political philosophy and theory, was first published in 1859, and remains a major influence upon contemporary liberal political thought. In it, Mill argues for a limitation of the power of government and (...) society over the individual, and defines liberty as an absolute individual right. According to the still much debated 'harm principle', power against the individual can only be exercised to prevent harm to others. Full of contemporary relevance, this essay also defends freedom of speech as a necessary condition of social and intellectual progress. (shrink)

Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. (...) Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? -/- Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century is a crucial period in the history of ethics, when our moral relations to God, ourselves and others were minutely examined and our duties, rights and virtues systematically and powerfully presented. Colin Heydt charts the history of practical morality - what we ought to do and to be - from the 1670s, when practical ethics arising from Protestant natural law gained an institutional foothold in England, to early British responses to the French Revolution around 1790. (...) He examines the conventional philosophical positions concerning the content of morality, and utilizes those conventions to reinterpret the work of key figures including Locke, Hume, and Smith. Situating these positions in their thematic and historical contexts, he shows how studying them challenges our assumptions about the originality, intended audience, and aims of philosophical argument during this period. His rich and readable book will appeal to a range of scholars and students. (shrink)

Mill predicted that "[t]he Liberty is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written...because the conjunction of [Harriet Taylor’s] mind with mine has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring out in ever greater relief." Indeed, On Liberty is one of the most influential books ever written, and remains a foundational document for the understanding of vital political, philosophical and social issues. (...) In addition to its many useful appendices, this new edition includes a chronology, bibliography, and a substantial introduction which outlines Mill’s life and works, and sets this central work of 1859 in the context of both his own intellectual development and of the play of ideas and political forces in Victorian society. (shrink)

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 the mid-eighteenth century David Hume argued that successful prediction tells us nothing about the truth of the predicting theory. But physical theory routinely predicts the values of observable magnitudes within very small ranges of error. The chance of this sort of predictive success without a true theory suggests that Hume's argument is flawed. However, Colin Howson argues that there is no flaw and examines the implications of this disturbing conclusion; he also offers a solution to one of the (...) central problems of Western philosophy, the problem of induction. (shrink)

In the past two decades, much work on Kant has aimed to delimit and evaluate the bedrock assumptions of Kant's mature Critical philosophy. This volume brings together leading Kant scholars to address this issue in conversation with each other, articulating and interrogating Kant's critical assumptions.

Many weaknesses of game theory are cured by new models that embody simple cognitive principles, while maintaining the formalism and generality that makes game theory useful. Social preference models can generate team reasoning by combining reciprocation and correlated equilibrium. Models of limited iterated thinking explain data better than equilibrium models do; and they self-repair problems of implausibility and multiplicity of equilibria.

This volume of The Subjection of Women provides a reliable text in an inexpensive edition, with explanatory notes but no additional editorial apparatus. -/- .

We have now seen that, in what we call the mental world, Consciousness,- there are three grand classes of phenomena, the most familiar of all the facts with ...

This is an important work for those studying the concept of utilitarianism, or those who are interested in the writings of John Stuart Mill.

Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman exhibit several related dialectical methods relevant to Platonic education: maieutic in Theaetetus, bifurcatory division in Sophist and Statesman, and non-bifurcatory division in Statesman, related to the ‘god-given’ method in Philebus. I consider the nature of each method through the letter or element paradigm, used to reflect on each method. At issue are the element’s appearances in given contexts, its fitness for communing with other elements like it in kind, and its own nature defined through its (...) relations to others. These represent stages of inquiry for the Platonic student inquiring into the sources of knowledge. (shrink)

Henry More argues that materialism cannot account for cases where a single subject or perceiver has multiple perceptions simultaneously. Since we clearly do have multiple perceptions at the same time--for example, when we see, hear, and smell simultaneously--More concludes that we are not wholly material. In response to More's argument, Margaret Cavendish adopts a two-fold strategy. First, she argues that there is no general obstacle to mental unification in her version of materialism. Second, Cavendish appeals to the mind or rational (...) matter--terms she often uses interchangeably—to explain the integration of sensory input from multiple senses. When the mind integrates perceptions across modalities, the different parts of rational matter share their knowledge so that they all come to perceive alike. When rational parts successfully communicate their knowledge, each part knows what all the others know. They pool their knowledge; they perceive alike. Thus, when someone hears, sees, and tastes, each part of her mind hears, sees, and tastes alike, in parallel and in unison. The Cavendishian mind, in short, approximates simplicity by achieving uniformity or homogeneity of perceptions across its parts. (shrink)

Aimed at philsophy graduates this book investigates mental content in a systematic way and advances a number of claims about how mental content states are related to the body and the world. Internalism is the thesis that they are; externalism is the theory that they are not.

This two-volume work, first published in 1843, was John Stuart Mill's first major book. It reinvented the modern study of logic and laid the foundations for his later work in the areas of political economy, women's rights and representative government. In clear, systematic prose, Mill (1806–73) disentangles syllogistic logic from its origins in Aristotle and scholasticism and grounds it instead in processes of inductive reasoning. An important attempt at integrating empiricism within a more general theory of human knowledge, the work (...) constitutes essential reading for anyone seeking a full understanding of Mill's thought. Volume 1 contains Mill's introduction, which elaborates upon his definition of logic as 'not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence'. It also features discussions of the central components of logical reasoning - propositions and syllogisms - in relation to Mill's theories of inductive reasoning and experimental method. (shrink)

The Oxford-educated philosopher serves up his trenchant survey of his academic discipline, offering his commentary on Descartes, Anselm Bertrand Russell, Sartre ...

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...) conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition.

Many, including Marx, Rawls, and the contemporary 'Black Lives Matter' movement, embrace the ambition to secure terms of co-existence in which the worth of people's lives becomes a lived reality rather than an empty boast. This book asks whether, as some believe, the philosophical idea of human dignity can help achieve that ambition. Offering a new fourfold typology of dignity concepts, Colin Bird argues that human dignity can perform this role only if certain traditional ways of conceiving it are (...) abandoned. Accordingly, Bird rejects the idea that human dignity refers to the inherent worth or status of individuals, and instead reinterprets it as a social relation, constituted by affects of respect and the modes of mutual attention which they generate. What emerges is a new vision of human dignity as a vital political value, and an arresting vindication of its role as an agent of critical reflection on politics. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential English-language philosophers during the Victorian era. His autobiography recounts his rigorous tutelage under a domineering father, his mental health crisis at age twenty, and his struggle to regain joy amid self-reflection and a reassessment of theories he once believed to be true.

Should cognitive scientists be any more embarrassed about their lack of a discipline-fixing definition of cognition than biologists are about their inability to define “life”? My answer is “no”. Philosophers seeking a unique “mark of the cognitive” or less onerous but nevertheless categorical characterizations of cognition are working at a level of analysis upon which hangs nothing that either cognitive scientists or philosophers of cognitive science should care about. In contrast, I advocate a pluralistic stance towards uses of the term (...) ‘cognition’ that eschews the urge to treat cognition as a metaphysically well-defined “natural” kind. (shrink)

In Plato’s Statesman, the Eleatic Stranger leads Socrates the Younger and their audience through an analysis of the statesman in the service of the interlocutors’ becoming “more capable in dialectic regarding all things”. In this way, the dialectical exercise in the text is both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable, as it yields a philosophically rigorous account of statesmanship and exhibits a method of dialectical inquiry. After the series of bifurcatory divisions in the Sophist and early Statesman, the Stranger changes to a (...) non-bifurcatory method of dividing to account for the statesman, but does not explain the reason for this change. I argue that the change is prepared by the elements discussed in the digression from 277a2 to 287b2. Here the Stranger makes use of four concepts that are crucial for understanding this change: the notion of paradigm, the paradigms of care and the weaver, and the notion of due measure. I claim that the notion of paradigm clarifies the nature of dialectical inquiry, care and weaving act as paradigms appropriate to dialectical practice, and an account of due measure offers insight into the constitutive ratios that govern the structuring of kinds pursued through dialectical inquiry. I suggest that the non-bifurcatory method is intended to articulate knowledge in the strictest sense, or knowledge of the forms, presenting a method of inquiry into being and its structure that will foster the turning of the soul from things to forms that Socrates describes in the Republic. (shrink)