John Robson – författare

One of the greatest prodigies of his era, John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was studying arithmetic and Greek by the age of three, as part of an astonishingly intense education at his father's hand. Intellectually brilliant, fearless and profound, he became a leading Victorian liberal thinker, whose works - including On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women and this Autobiography - are among the crowning achievements of the age. Here he describes the pressures placed on him by his childhood, the mental breakdown he suffered as a young man, his struggle to understand a world of feelings and emotions far removed from his father's strict didacticism, and the later development of his own radical beliefs. A moving account of an extraordinary life, this great autobiography reveals a man of deep integrity, constantly searching for truth.

Vision research is one of the largest and most active areas within brain research. Psychologists, neuroscientists, opthamologists and optometrists, computer scientists, and engineers all have an interest in the practical side of the subject. Vision Research is a clear and comprehensive laboratory manual providing all the detailed practical information needed to undertake vision research. Spanning methods used across the breadth of vision research, this book provides detailed protocols and advice on experimental techniques and procedures, as well as useful background information. It covers the choice and use of modern light sources and optical components, with particular consideration of how to generate specified colours, and the creation and presentation of images, with special emphasis on up-to-date computer techniques. It also deals with the design of psychophysical experiments, and the particular problems posed by working with children and with animals. Finally, it provides a thorough coverage of all types of physiological measurement: of ERG and evoked potentials, and the measurement of accommodation, eye movements, and pupil diameter. Here are the "tricks of the trade" of vision research, from some if its leading practitioners, of a kind that cannot be found in published papers and are often only acquired through apprenticeship and a life-time of personal experience. Accessibly written for those with little background in optics and electronics, this book will be essential for students undertaking practical vision research for the first time. Clinical researchers and experienced researchers in other fields wishing to learn about and use vision research techniques will also find it extremely useful. An essential resource in every vision research laboratory.

The interests and activities of John Stuart Mill (1806–73) were so wide-ranging that even the varied subjects of thirty previously published volumes of Collected Works cannot encompass them all. In this volume are brought together diverse and interesting instances of his polymathic career, none before republished and some previously unpublished.Neatly framing Mill’s writing career are his editorial prefaces and extensive notes to Jeremy Bentham;s Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827) and James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1869). Both demonstrate his extraordinary powers of mind and diligence as well as his fealty. His constant avocation, field botany, is shown in his botanical writings, which open a window on an almost unknown activity that sustained and delighted him. Brief comments on two medical works hint at another interest. Two articles of which he was co-author demonstrate his work as editor of the London and Westminster Review, and a calendar of his contributions to the Political Economy Club provides yet another glimpse into his chosen activities and concerns. Published for the first time are Mill’s English and French wills, providing still further biographical detail.

The South Seas, as this region used to be called, conjured up images of adventure, belles and savages, romance and fabulous fortunes, but the long voyages of discovery and exploration of the vast Pacific Ocean were really an exercise in amazing logistics, navigation, hard grit, shipwreck and pure luck. The motivations were scientific and geographic, but at the same time nationalistic and materialistic.A series on global exploration and discovery would not be complete without this book by Quanchi and Robson. It is ambitious and informative and includes the familiar names of Laperouse, Bougainville, Cook, and Dampier, as well as the intriguing stories of the Bounty Mutiny, scurvy, and the mysterious Northwest Passage, Terra Australis Ignotia, and Davis Land. There are entries on first contacts, ships, navigational instruments, mapping, and botany. The scene is carefully set in the introduction, the chronology spans several centuries, and the extensive bibliography offers a guide to further reading. There are more than just dry facts in this book. It has a whiff of salt air, the clash of empires, cross-cultural beach encounters, and personal adventure.

J.S. Mill's deep interest in French intellectual, political, and social affairs began in 1820 when, in his fourteenth year, he went to France to live for a year with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham. French became his second language, and France his second home, where he died and was buried in 1873. His interest in history began even earlier when, as a child of seven, he tried to imitate his father's labours on the History of British India; though he never wrote a history in his maturity, study of the past remained a passion and helped shape the philosophy of history that informed his views of society and ethics. His intense interest in contemporary French politics also led him to seek connections between historical developments and present trends, both seen by his from a Radical perspective approproate to what he believed to be an age of transition. The English historians of France, including Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle, as well as the French, some of whom were themselves political figures, are judged by their historical methods, but those methods are seen as having practical effects in shaping as well as revealing the mind of the times.This volume brings together for the first time the essays, running from 1826 to 1849, that meld these abiding interests. They give as well insights into Mill's personal aspirations, his developing view of comparative politics and sociology, his concern for freedom, and his feminism. During these years Mill worked on a published his System of Logic, Book VI of which shows in condensed form the results of the speculations here developed; reading these essays with that work, which made his reputation as a philosopher, enables one to see the effects of romanticism on analytic thought in a way not as clearly evident even in Mill's Autobiography. Independently important, then, the essays in this volume also enable us to interpret anew the practical and theoretical concerns fundamental to his formative years and maturity.John C. Cairns' Introduction demonstrates how the essays reveal, through their reactions to the Revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, and to French historiography, politics, and thought, the effect of France on Mill's ideas, and also the way in which his other concerns influenced his reactions to France. The texts, with the variants and notes that are the hallmark of this edition, are described in John M. Robson's Textual Introduction, which explains the editorial principles and methods.

One of the constant fascinations Mill holds for the general public as well as scholars derives from the early flowering of his genius. This development is seen in detail in the journal and notebook he kept in France during his fifteenth year, and in the debating speeches and walking-tour journals dating from his eighteenth to twenty-fourth years. This was the period when he first adopted Benthamism as 'a religion,' worked intensively as a propagandist for the faith, and then began the painful reassessment that led to his independent mature thought and action. Some of the results of that reassessment are seen in the diary entries from 1854, written for his wife, which reveal in personal form many of their most passionately held ideas. These materials have never before been gathered, and almost all appear here for the first time in scholarly form. They throw light on contemporary social interests and behavior, and will encourage new assessments of Mill’s life and thought.The texts, the great majority drawn from manuscripts, are presented in critical form, collated, with explanatory and textual notes. The Introduction gives the personal and historical context, with an analysis of content and rhetoric; the Textual Introduction supplies information about the nature and history of the documents, while Appendices provide ancillary materials. Both bibliographic and analytic indexes are included.

For just over fifty years John Stuart Mill contributed articles and letters to the newspapers, setting before the public a radical position on contemporary events. From 1822 to 1873, in newspapers as widely read as The Times and the Morning Chronicle, and as narrowly circulated as the True Sun and the New Times, he praised his friends and damned his opponents, while commenting on a while range of issues at home and abroad, from banking to Ireland, from wife-beating to land nationalization.His main series of newspaper writings concerned France (especially during the first four years of the Revolution of 1830) and Ireland (especially during December 1846 and January 1847, when various proposals for relief of the starving cottiers were being debated). Mill felt himself peculiarly fitted to explain French affairs and Irish solutions to the non-comprehending and wrong-headed English.But his pen was wielded wherever he say stupidity and narrowness, and he found them in astonishingly varied areas. He tried to explain to his obdurate countrymen the first principles of law reform, political economy, relations between the sexes, democracy, international law, and much more.Virtually none of these texts have been reprinted before this volume. The Introduction by Ann Robson sets the items in their historical and personal perspective, and draws out the implications for Mill's life and thought. The Textual Introduction by John Robson gives an account of the sources of the texts, and lays out principles and methods followed in the editing.The Mill that emerges from these pages is a fighting journalist, uninhibited, forthright, and often brilliantly satirical, testing his theoretical opinions in the real world, gradually maturing and developing a practical philosophy whose influence has been felt well into our own time.

The interests and activities of John Stuart Mill (1806–73) were so wide-ranging that even the varied subjects of thirty previously published volumes of Collected Works cannot encompass them all. In this volume are brought together diverse and interesting instances of his polymathic career, none before republished and some previously unpublished.Neatly framing Mill’s writing career are his editorial prefaces and extensive notes to Jeremy Bentham;s Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827) and James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1869). Both demonstrate his extraordinary powers of mind and diligence as well as his fealty. His constant avocation, field botany, is shown in his botanical writings, which open a window on an almost unknown activity that sustained and delighted him. Brief comments on two medical works hint at another interest. Two articles of which he was co-author demonstrate his work as editor of the London and Westminster Review, and a calendar of his contributions to the Political Economy Club provides yet another glimpse into his chosen activities and concerns. Published for the first time are Mill’s English and French wills, providing still further biographical detail.

An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, first published in 1865, with a second edition in the same year, and third and fourth editions in 1867 and 1872, has long been out of print. The Examination was, for his contemporaries, a most significant and popular work, presenting an extended treatment of some matters central to empiricism that found little space in Mill's Logic, the best known being his treatment of matter and mind from a psychological viewpoint.Appearing just before his successful parliamentary candidature, the Examination, with its deliberate and explicit onslaught on the intuitionists who were, in Mill's view, allied with anti-progressive political and religious forces, brought his beliefs into the public arena in a new way. Some of those who supported him politically found themselves viciously attacked because they had associated themselves with one who assailed settled religious beliefs. Other religionists who rejected many of Mill's attitudes strong expressed their admiration of the Examination because of its exposure to what they, with him, saw as dangerous theological and moral positions.Alan Ryan's analytical and historial introduction dwells on the most significant philosophical elements in the work, placing them in perspective and showing their relations to other aspects of Mill's thought. The textual introduction, by John M. Robson, examines the treatise in context of Mill's life in the 1860s, outlines its composition, and discusses, among other matters, the importance of the extensive revisions Mill made, mostly in response to critics. These revisions appear in full in the textual apparatus. Also provided are a bibliographical index, which gives a guide to the literature on the subject, and a collation of Mill's quotations, an analytical index, and appendices giving the reading of manuscript fragments and listing textual emendations.

These papers on key issues in intellectual history derive from those delivered at a conference held at the University of Toronto in May 1973 to honour the bicentenary of James Mill's birth and the centenary of John Stuart Mill's death. Nine authorities -- J.H. Burns, Karl W. Britton, J.B. Schneewind, George J. Stigler, Samuel Hollander, L.S. Feuer, Joseph Hamburger, Edward Alexander, and John M. Robson -- were invited to discuss what they took to be significant aspects of the thought of the two Mills. While history, philosophy, economics, social science, and the history of thought were the focal points for the conference, the contributors were free to choose their own topics and approaches. One of the most striking aspects of Mill scholarship that emerges in this volume is the applicability of their ideas to modern problems. These papers are not final assessments; they are individual and independent contributions to Mill studies that clearly show the vitality of both Mill's thought and the certainty that it will continue to influence and change the ways in which we think about the human condition.

As R.J. Schoeck explained in his introduction to the first volume in this series, a group at the University of Toronto began in 1965 to plan annual conferences on editorial problems. Our first conference (October 1965), dealing with the sixteenth century, was followed by a second in November 1966, out of which the present volume has grown. Our experience of these two justifies Professor Schoeck's hopeful assessment of the value of meetings "at which scholars actively at work upon editorial tasks could come together for a free discussion of their work, learning from each other's experience, pooling their common intellectual resources, and seeking out expert opinion and counsel." Some ninety scholars attended the second conference, which featured library displays, a reception, dinner and lunch discussions, as well as the formal sessions, and we are emboldened to say that this is about the optimum number for such conferences. There were amply sufficient interests and attitudes, yet not too many for useful and frank discussion, and there was room for interested graduate students from the area. Few came away from the sessions without having learned something of immediate value and without having been prompted to further hard thought.

Although John Stuart Mill is generally and properly known as a philosopher and political economist, his writings actually cover a wide variety of subjects. In this book Professor Robson brings together the most important strands of Mill’s thought in an attempt to show that it contains a basic unity of approach, at the heart of which is his ethical system. Mill’s ethical position depends on his understanding of the relation between practice and theory, and reflects his own experience, especially his "metal crisis," his appreciation of poetry, and his friendship with Harriet Taylor (who later became his wife). The study brings out the importance of the three phases in Mill’s life: his early period of adherence to the ideas of James Mill and Bentham; his period of assimilation of the influences of Coleridge, Carlyle, Comte, and de Toequeville; and finally his period of mature fame, when he published his System of Logic, Principles of Political Government, Utilitarianism, and other works still central in the British liberal tradition and still used as university texts.Mill’s eminence makes his thought important to anyone interested in recent political, social, economic, and philosophical trends; and his life, as his Autobiography demonstrates, has its own fascination for the general reader as well as for the student of the nineteenth century.

John Stuart Mill's political essays are a blend of the practical and the theoretical. In this volume are gathered together those in which the practical emphasis is more marked; those in which theory is predominant are found in Essays on Politics and Society, Vols XVIII and XIX of the Collected Works. The Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire are mainly from Mill's early career as a propagandist for the Philosophic Radicals (a term he himself coined). They provide a contemporary running account of British political issues at home and abroad, with a vigorous and sometimes acerbic commentary. Historians as well as political scientists will find interesting details of the view from the radical side, and all students of Mill will welcome the further elucidation of his development. Of special interest are his precocious if tendentious attack on Hume's History of England, and his reactions to Canadian and Irish issues, the latter being the subject of a previously unpublished manuscript. The textual apparatus includes a collation of the manuscript materials and identification of Mill's quotations and references.