Differences between Kant and Mill: A Discussion

Discuss the Theoretical Differences between Kant and Mill

Introduction

The development of logic, at least of formal logic, in the nineteenth century was largely independent of the general development of philosophy during the same period. Of the logicians considered in the preceding section only C. S. Peirce and perhaps William Hamilton were of importance in branches of philosophy other than logic, and the persons who were of most importance in other branches of philosophy contributed nothing whatsoever to technical developments of the sort here described. These persons did not ignore logic altogether, however, nor did competent logicians entirely ignore them. It will be helpful, therefore, to break the chronological order at this point and to glance back at these philosophical developments and influences.

Differences between Kant and Mill: A Discussion

MacIntyre (2004) mentions in the nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth, there were divergent Continental and British philosophical influences, but the Continental stream, stemming from Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), was now not so much rationalistic as idealistic, and in logic it was increasingly anti-formal, anti-mathematical, and anti-technical. Kant himself could not be described as anti-formal; he had a quite exalted view of the place of formal logic in philosophy (MacIntyre, 2004). Unfortunately, however, he thought of formal logic not as a field for new developments but as the first science to have reached perfection—it had reached perfection, he said, with the work of Aristotle. Even Kant's "Aristotelianism" was of the sadly truncated variety that had been characteristic of the interregnum. Slightly systematizing what he took to be Aristotelian logic, he divided "judgments" according to their "quantity" into universal, particular, and singular; according to their quality into affirmative (X is Y), negative (X is-not Y) and infinite (X is not-Y); according to what he called "relation" into categorical, hypothetical (that is, ...