When John Stuart Mill married Harriet Taylor in 1851, he wrote out a formal protest against the laws that would govern their marriage. He objected to

This critique of the injustices of English marriage law formed the core of Mill's later work, The Subjection of Women. Although The Subjection of Women was enthusiastically welcomed and widely circulated among the small circles of women's rights advocates on both sides of the Atlantic in the latter nineteenth century, beyond these groups when the book was not ignored it was frequently ridiculed or excoriated by philosophers and politicians alike. James Fitzjames Stephen, one of the foremost jurists of the century, wrote that he disagreed with The Subjection of Women “from the first sentence to the last” (Stephen 1873/1967, 188).

When Mill was addressing a public meeting in his campaign to be elected as a member of Parliament, he was handed a placard with a quotation taken from one of his works that “the lower classes, though mostly habitual liars, are ashamed of lying”, and he was asked whether he had written those words. When he answered “I did”,the meeting, consisting largely of the working classes, applauded loudly. This incident epitomizes some of Mill's characteristic attitudes towards the working classes. He did not think much of their present intellectual and moral qualities. But he was prepared to speak frankly about them. His obvious pleasure at their favourable response to his openness confirmed his view that they had the capacity and willingness to improve themselves. He wanted to provide them with the opportunities for such improvement. He saw himself as their friend, or “a person whom they could trust” (CW I:274). But his idea of improvement was not to impose paternalistically his own conception of their interests on them, but instead to increase the scope for them to voice their interests, while at the same time subjecting them to various influences, including the influences, though not the direction, of abler persons, in order to advance their mental cultivation and thereby to broaden their interests. His hopes for their future well-being were tempered by his fears about letting them dominate social and political life in their present unenlightened state. So another part of his case for social and political reform focussed on finding a counterpoise to the prevailing views and on ensuring greater diversity. In the end, it was his overriding concern for the fate of individual freedom and development which guided all his social and political proposals.

THE ORIGINS OF MILL S PHENOMENALISM! BERKELEY, HAMILTON AND THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE

“Matter, then, may be defined as the Permanent Possibility of Sensation”. With this famous phrase, Mill put phenomenalism firmly on the philosophical map. The origins of phenomenalism - the standpoint which regards sensations as the basic constituents of reality, and attempts to construct the external world from sensations and the possibilities of sensation - can be traced back to Berkeley. But the analysis of matter as the “permanent possibility of sensation” and the attempted application of that analysis to mind in the best-known chapters of Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy constitute the first developed presentation of the doctrine. After Mill, a commitment to phenomenalism became standard among scientific philosophers, until superseded by physicalism in the 1930s. Figures associated with the doctrine included Mach, Russell, Carnap, C. I. Lewis and A. J. Ayer, and with these it took an increasingly “linguistic” or “semantic” form.

In his Autobiography Mill declares himself to be “one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it” (CW I:45). Yet Mill could hardly avoid engaging with religion in pursuit of his main concerns. It is no surprise that he does so in setting out the utilitarian morality, in defending liberal principles in the face of restrictions on free speech and discussion, and in assessing the quality of current University education. But only in the posthumously published Three Essays on Religion (1874) was religion itself the focal point of his analysis. In these essays Mill attacks orthodox theology on both epistemological and moral grounds. He argues, however, that there is some evidence that the universe was created by an intelligent being and he takes seriously the possibility that something important might be missing from a life in which religion had no place.

MILL'S CLASSICAL INTERESTS

Mill began learning Greek at the age of three and Latin at eight. From about the age of twelve his Greek and Latin reading focussed on works “such as were worth studying, not for the language merely, but also for the thoughts”.He mentions especially Demosthenes, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Quintillian. His father laid special emphasis on Plato. Throughout his literary career, from his discussion of Sedgwick on education in Cambridge to his own rectorial address on education in St Andrews, Mill retained a keen interest in Classical studies and their place in education. Moreover, he took an active part in encouraging the study of Classical antiquity among readers who were beyond the years of formal education. In 1834-35 he published 'Notes on some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato' - really an abbreviated translationcum- paraphrase. In 1840 he reviewed two publications on Plato. In 1846 and 1853 he reviewed two sections of the multi-volume history of Greece by his friend and (with some qualifications) ally, George Grote, and in 1866 and 1873 he reviewed Grote's works on Plato and Aristotle.

INTRODUCTION

Books III and IV of A System of Logic lie at the heart of Mill's empiricist enterprise, ambitiously aiming to provide “a reduction of the inductive process to strict rules and to a scientific test, such as the syllogism is for ratiocination” [Autobiography, CW I: 215-17). Mill's lengthy examinations 'Of Induction' and 'Of the Operations Subsidiary to Induction' constituted, in his own estimate, the principal part of his theory of logic, because - by the arguments of Book II - inductive inference was the only form of 'real' inference capable of leading us to genuinely new knowledge. Since deductive processes enable us to do no more than 'interpret' inductions, identifying the particular cases which fall under general propositions, it is induction alone “in which the investigation of nature essentially consists.” Consequently, “What Induction is ... and what conditions render it legitimate, cannot but be deemed the main question of the science of logic - the question which includes all others”(A System of Logic, CW VII:283).

INTRODUCTION

Mill's Utilitarianism was not written as a scholarly treatise but as a series of essays for a popular audience. It was first published in three instalments in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and appeared in book form in 1863. Fraser's Magazine was a magazine with a general audience and the essay was written with this readership in view. Although many commentators have examined the arguments Mill puts forward in this work in isolation from his other writings, in fact it cannot be properly appreciated unless it is placed in the context of the larger body of his work. In particular, this work needs to be read against the background of his more scholarly writing in A System of Logic and in his editorial footnotes to James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind [Logic, CW VII and VIII; James Mill 1869).

John Stuart Mill is rightly considered to be a major figure in the history of utilitarianism,- his theory is a touchstone to which contemporary ethical theorists regularly return for insights. Yet at the same time, Mill's utilitarianism is boldly revisionist, breaking free of many of the constraints and confines of the narrower and simpler utilitarianism of his predecessors Jeremy Bentham and his father James Mill. Although John Stuart Mill was carefully educated and prepared by his father to be the transmitter and torch bearer of Benthamite utilitarianism, he instead radically transformed it.

John Stuart Mill held, with his father, James Mill, and with all utilitarians, that the end of morality and of practice in general is to maximize the general welfare of humankind. However, to achieve any end, including this ultimate end, requires a knowledge of the means to that end, a knowledge of causes and effects that may be used to realize the end. Practice can only be as solid as the theoretical knowledge of fact upon which it is based. But the younger Mill disagreed with his father and the older generation of utilitarians on the nature of that knowledge and on the methods to be used to justify claims to have acquired such knowledge. To be sure, both the older and the younger Mills must be counted within the empiricist camp, with regard to the nature of human knowledge.On this view, human knowledge begins and ends in sense experience, and knowledge of causes is, as Hume argued, knowledge of matter-of-fact regularities (cf. James Mill 1869, L350, 4O2ff).

Tennessee Williams's reputation as one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century seems secure. Now just over a dozen years after his death, his plays are frequently revived, he continues to provoke critical inquiry, and he is one of the few American dramatists still taught in undergraduate literature surveys. Considering his prolific output, however, he is renowned for only a handful of plays, all dating from the first fifteen years of a forty-year professional career. Indeed, one might surmise that Tennessee Williams's critical reputation during his life soared, then plummeted, and that his later works were produced and tolerated only because of the early masterpieces; moreover, that his stature is entirely dependent upon a few well-wrought dramas: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana. It is no coincidence that these plays enjoyed long, successful New York runs, for critical acclaim and commercial appeal usually coexisted on the Broadway of Williams's time.

The thirty-two-cent United States postage stamp commemorating Tennessee Williams, issued in 1996, features a portrait of Williams in a white linen suit against a twilight sky and, in the background, a streetcar. The choice of the streetcar as the only element in the design that can be specifically tied to one of Williams's plays testifies to the centrality of A Streetcar Named Desire in his dramatic canon as well as in the American cultural consciousness. Whether or not A Streetcar Named Desire is Tennessee Williams's “best” play, or even his most performed play, it is probably the one most closely identified with the dramatist, and it is certainly the one that has elicited the most critical commentary.

When A Streetcar Named Desire premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on December 3, 1947, Tennessee Williams was essentially known to the public for one other play, The Glass Menagerie, which had ended a 561-performance run at New York's Playhouse Theater just sixteen months earlier. The elegiac tone and coming-of-age crises of The Glass Menagerie did not prepare theatregoers for the searing adult drama of A Streetcar Named Desire, with its references to unspeakable aspects of sexuality. Indeed, one reviewer called it the product of an “almost desperately morbid turn of mind,” and another found it “not a play for the squeamish.” And yet, it was recognized as “an enormous advance over that minor-key and too wet-eyed work, The Glass Menagerie.” It fulfilled the promise of the earlier work and catapulted Williams to the front rank of American dramatists. A Streetcar Named Desire ran for 855 performances and became the first play ever to win all three major awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award.