Reviews for Introduction to Mill's Utilitarian Ethics

The average rating for Introduction to Mill's Utilitarian Ethics based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-08 00:00:00 Randy Phillips In the "Philosophical Investigations", Wittgenstein writes, "We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena...". (PI#90) Here the "late" Wittgenstein confesses to the "early" Wittgenstein's mistaken want, perhaps a lust, for a logically pure language. That is a language that banned misunderstanding; and, one that ounce freed from its ordinarily tensed moorings could penetrate and hence truly articulate what is seen in the timeless phenomena of the "Present" or the zone of "immediate experience". Although the zone (typically referred to as being consciousness) is a visible space, it is nevertheless without dimensions (dimensions after all exist only in the empirical world and are not applicable to the phenomena experienced in the zone); additionally the pure language of the zone forbids the use of pronouns. This means that there are neither "subjects" (meaning "I"s) in the zone to see, nor can that non-subject in the zone claim to "have" what it sees; nevertheless, all that that non-subject sees does inform against... "it"(?). In short and expressed in the misleading words of ordinary language, all phenomena experienced in the "Present" are about "you" and "you" are the only "subject" that can "know/see" them. Welcome to the world of Cartesian skepticism. Welcome to philosophical solipsism. In "Wittgenstein on Mind and Language", David Stern details Wittgenstein's ultimate abandonment of his quest for an ideal language and his rejection of the "private language" that that ideal promotes. Stern accomplishes this task by using the evidence provided in Wittgenstein's war time notes, letters, the remembered conversation reported by his students and his writes and re-writes and cuts and pastes that inform works such as the "Philosophical Remarks", the proto- "Philosophical Investigations" and more. Although this book quietly stood un-read for 12 years in the row of other works of secondary literature on Wittgenstein before one had the courage to read it, one understands that delay now as a useful preparation for reading it. For upon reading it one experienced time and again those happy, "Ah, ha" moments when one plainly sees what was always plainly before one, but hadn't noticed. One such moment occurred while reading Wittgenstein's complaint about "penetrating phenomena"(PI #90). In that instant the meaning, the view of that bit, and many other bits, of the "Philosophical Investigations" became clear.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-10 00:00:00 Michael Carney Focused too much on his biography.