Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
A System of Logic
Inductive logic and the method of the sciences – logic as psychology.
Introduction
Mill’s first major work appeared in 1843 in two volumes divided into six books, and was revised through many editions in his lifetime. It deals with names and propositions, with deduction, which Mill held to rest ultimately on induction, and with the methods for discovering causes – agreement, difference, residues and concomitant variations – still taught as “Mill’s methods”. Book VI applies the approach to the “moral sciences”, including a science of character Mill called ethology. Gadamer traced the spread of the German word Geisteswissenschaften to the translation of this book. Frege and Husserl later attacked Mill’s empiricist account of logic and mathematics as psychologism.
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Connections
Builds on
- Novum Organum1620 · Francis Bacon
- Course in Positive Philosophy1830 · Auguste Comte
Criticized in
- Introduction to the Human Sciences1883 · Wilhelm Dilthey
- The Foundations of Arithmetic1884 · Gottlob Frege
- Logical Investigations1900 · Edmund Husserl
More works by John Stuart Mill
- 1859On Liberty
- 1863Utilitarianism
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