I. Life
John Stuart Mill, a British philosopher, received a rigorous education supervised by his father James Mill, a close friend and philosophical colleague of Jeremy Bentham. He began studying Greek at age three and had read all of Herodotus and some other Greek writings by age eight, at which time he began studying Latin. From age 8-12, he studied geometry, algebra, and some calculus, along with histories, adventure books, Latin and Greek authors. At age 12, he began study of Aristotle’s logical works and read his father’s History of India. At 13, his father took him through a complete course of political economy.
In 1823, his father got him a position with the East India Company, where he worked for 35 years. By 1824, he was editing some writings of Bentham for publication and was soon writing articles of his own for the Westminster Review. In 1826, he began to suffer from bouts of depression, which he eventually attributed to his having developed his analytic skills at the expense of his feelings. In overcoming the problem he give special credit to Wordsworth’s poetry. In 1830, he met the love of his life, Harriet Taylor, who was already married; they commenced a close friendship and intellectual collaboration for some 20 years until they were ale to marry after her husband’s death.
Harriet Taylor died in 1859; Mill later served in Parliament (1865-1868). He came to embrace the Utilitarianism of his father and Bentham, although he made some unique additions of his own to their basic position. For example, he insisted on greater appreciation of the role of feelings in making Utilitarian judgments and he stressed the qualitative superiority of intellectual pleasures to sensual ones.
During the nineteenth century, through his writings, John Stuart Mill became the most influential philosopher in the English-speaking world. His major works include: A System of Logic (1843), Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1863), The Subjection of Women (1869), Autobiography (1873)
