Abstract

In the past, treatments of Mill's ethical views focused on the principle of utility. Recent work has incorporated a wider array of topics but no systematic investigation of Mill's conception of character. That theme and its philosophical importance are addressed in the present dissertation through analysis of aesthetic education understood as the cultivation of dispositions of feeling and imagination. ;Aesthetic education is important in Mill for three reasons. First, aesthetic education occupies a place alongside intellectual and moral culture as one of the three forms of character development, of which it is the least studied. Secondly, it is a subject that is crucially important for comprehending the relation of Mill's views to those of his teachers and to those of prominent intellectuals in the period . Thirdly, close attention to the ideals of aesthetic education and the means whereby those ideals are realized provides the reader with a vivid portrait of the good life as Mill sees it. ;The dissertation strives to make Mill's views on aesthetic education determinate enough for philosophical appraisal. This requires historical contextualization in order to fill in the details which Mill often fails to state explicitly and for which he relies on shared understanding with his readers. Chapter One reconstructs Mill's aesthetic theory and explores the relations between aesthetic and ethical norms. The next chapter examines goals for the development of the moral imagination. In particular, it situates Mill's position on the imagination by contrasting it with the views of his contemporaries, and discusses Mill's substitution of humanist for religious imagery. Chapter Three addresses the cultivation of the feelings, placing it in the context of debates between Bentham and his critics. The final chapter shifts the discussion of character to institutions which shape character, namely, family and workplace. The dissertation concludes by reflecting on the portrait of character that has arisen from my analysis of aesthetic education, and by locating Mill's conception of character in the broader context of his ethical theory