John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life

Elijah Millgram (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

256 Seiten

2022
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-761781-6 (ISBN)

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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 non-academics: 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?

Elijah Millgram is E. E. Ericksen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. Author of Practical Induction, Ethics Done Right, Hard Truths, and The Great Endarkenment (OUP, 2015), he has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

1 Introduction
2 From Principle to Project
3 Mill's Epiphany
4 Mill's Postdoc
5 How to Write a Letter of Recommendation
6 Logic and the Problem of Necessity
7 Mill's Incubus
8 Justice, Freedom of Speech and Other Higher Pleasures
9 Taking Liberties with Utilitarianism
10 Mill's Aftermath
11 A Very Quiet Traged
12 Concluding Remarks
A Mill's Metaphysical Paradox

Bibliography

Erscheinungsdatum	03.09.2021
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 226 mm
Gewicht	363 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Geschichte der Philosophie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
ISBN-10	0-19-761781-6 / 0197617816
ISBN-13	978-0-19-761781-6 / 9780197617816
Zustand	Neuware