In this article we revisit a dividing issue as regards the corpus of one of the most famous nineteenth-century philosophers: John Stuart Mill. He was the author of two iconic texts in the history of political philosophy: On Liberty and The Subjection of Women . However, Mill attributed the first to collaboration with Harriet Taylor Mill, his wife, and characterized the second as a work of three minds: his own, his wife’s and her daughter, Helen Taylor. Experts disagree on this issue. Most think Mill was too generous sharing authorship credit. We use a training set consisted in manuscripts of the three above mentioned authors, to train a four-class problem (three authors and joint productions). For every manuscript in the training set we extract a set of features that are widely used in text analytics and classification. Then, we apply some pre-processing techniques to normalize the data and to reduce the number of features. Finally, we train three classifiers, namely k-nearest neighbours (k-NNs) with k = 1 and k = 2, support vector machines (SVMs), and decision trees (DTs) to attribute the texts of “disputed” authorship to one of the four potential authors. We routinely run the experiments using different feature sets every time, in order to identify the optimal combination of features that yield the best results on the test set. The best results are achieved with the SVMs, having as input the bigrams features and their principal components. The mean detection rate for all four classes is 100%. Similar results are achieved with the models built with the k-NNs (k = 1) and the DTs. The only classifier that consistently is returning significantly lower results is the k-NN with k = 2. All of the instances in the test set are attributed to John Stuart Mill.

This chapter presents that the claim that John Stuart Mill reverted to his utilitarian predecessors' method of treating political phenomena ignores the nuances of Mill's discussion of deductive reasoning as applied in practical affairs. It chapter shows that to the difference between science and art, that is, theoretical and practical knowledge, as applied to ethics and politics; to the method that is appropriate to each domain of knowledge; to Mill's analysis and criticism of traditional methodological approaches to politics; to Mill's delineation of the proper method of studying social phenomena; and, to Mill's method as applied in his Representative Government. In attempting to develop a 'philosophy of government' in Representative Government, Mill sought out and defined the "middle principles" between specific experience and psychological and ethological laws that ground the theorems his method produces-the key move was defining the criteria of good government in the educative and administrative functions of government.

In his biography of James Mill, Alexander Bain made a number of claims with regard to Mill's essay “Government” (1820). First, the essay was a catalyst in the movement for reform, making “in all probability . . . our political history very different from what it might otherwise have been.” Second, the essay provided a unique opportunity for Mill to expound on “the whole theory of Government in a compact shape.” Third, as far as his “Logic of Politics” was concerned, Mill depended on the deductive method—the method of geometry—having quickly discarded the applicability of inductive logic in politics. In this article, I take issue with the last claim.

"2 James Mill and George Grote: A Benthamite Defence of “Theoretic Reform”" published on 01 Jan 2014 by Brill.

John Stuart Mill's classic tale of disillusionment from a ‘narrow creed’, an overt as much as a covert theme of his Autobiography (London, 1873), has for many years served as a guide to the search for the causes and sources of his ‘enlargement-of-the-utilitarian-creed’ project. As a result, in analyses of Mill's mature views, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and friends—commonly take centre stage in terms of influence, whereas John's father—James Mill—is reduced either to a supernumerary or a villain in the last act of John's intellectual development. However, students of Mill's works should not take at face value the story presented in Autobiography. Mill's own emphasis on the role of his ‘new influences’ has led scholars to disregard the role of his ‘old influences’ in his attempt to create a broader theory of living—one which takes into account both the intellectual and the emotional capacities of individuals. A close look at key aspects of John Stuart Mill's ‘enlargement project’ suggests that James Mill may have played a more positive role than is usually acknowledged. A way into the intellectual affinity of the two Mills is the person they both kept returning to for guidance and inspiration throughout their lives: Plato.

It seems that eudaimonistic reconstructions of John Stuart Mill's conception of happiness have fallen prey to what they thought Mill should have done with regard to the role of pleasure in his notion of happiness. Insisting that utility and eudaimonia make conflicting claims, something which mirrors Mill's ‘conflicting loyalties’, they downgrade pleasure to just one of the ingredients of happiness. However, a closer look at Mill's intellectual development suggests otherwise. By focusing on Mill's radical background, this paper argues that pleasure retains a central role in his conception of happiness – even from a eudaimonistic point of view.