Reviews for Mill's the Subjection of Women: Critical Essays

The average rating for Mill's the Subjection of Women: Critical Essays based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-30 00:00:00 Me Lonley This is Travis's second book on Wittgenstein. He gives readings of Wittgenstein's treatment of names, family resemblance, rule-following, logic and truth. Travis throughout contrasts Wittgenstein's view of these notions with Frege's. Contemporary philosophers are supposed to hold views continuous with Frege's, so Wittgenstein's attacks on Frege are supposed to have contemporary relevance (Dummett, Fodor, and McDowell are mentioned by name as targets at various points in the book). It becomes clear in the second half of the book that Travis's view is moved by a general view of representation and truth. In extremely abbreviated form, his view is that a representation is essentially general (even one containing a singular term) and the world is essentially particular. This raises the question of how something essentially particular could satisfy something essentially general. He argues against the Tractarian idea that the world has the same structure as the representation. He answers the question about the relation of world to representation with the idea of an understanding, which is what makes the particular bit of the world count as being represented. This, as far as I can tell, is a version of a worry about how our grasp of a rule could determine an infinite number of future applications (a worry raised, e.g. by Kripke and Wright). At each novel step, it is required that we apply the rule, in a way that requires certain human sensitivities. That kind of view clearly sets off anti-realist alarm bells, and Travis spends a chapter of the book trying to defuse those kinds of worries. There are parts of this book that are clearer than normal Travis-speak, but crucial parts are as opaque as ever.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-27 00:00:00 Bryan Wayne Hume is the moral philosopher who is most recognizable as a fellow modern human being. In his short autobiographical "My Own Life", he says that the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is "incomparably the best" of all his writings (though he admits that he isn't the one to judge that). Reading this for the first time, I was surprised at how little "philosophy" is in it--by that, I mean how little complicated argumentation there is. Most of the arguments are short and direct: against someone who thinks that all of morality can be constructed out of self interest, Hume says that such a view is intuitively implausible, and gives some examples of difficult cases for such a theory to handle: admiring the moral qualities of an adversary, assigning moral praise or blame to historically different acts whose relation to present self interest is not at all clear, and so on. Of course there are responses that can be made on behalf of the views that Hume criticizes, but they look needlessly complex, sophistical and increasingly implausible when compared with his straightforward approach, which is to find the traits that we find agreeable and the traits we find disagreeable and see if they have anything in common. If they do, then that's likely to be the foundation of morals. There is no search for absolute certainty. Not to give away the ending, but the foundation of morals turns out to be shared sentiment. One worry is that it's not as universal as he makes it out to be, but overall, this is about as enjoyable a work of moral philosophy as I've ever read (it's not as much fun as the Republic, but the view is saner).