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Rousseau and Mill on the Arts and Sciences. A Discussion of Rousseau and Mill
on the Contributions of the Arts and Sciences to Society ...
Submitted by ttdebe on March 1, 2006
Category: Philosophy
Words: 4023 | Pages: 17
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A Discussion of Rousseau and Mill on the Contributions of the Arts and Sciences to Society
Tore DeBella
1 November 2005
“It has become appallingly clear,” Albert Einstein famously argued, “that our technology has surpassed our humanity.” Somewhat ironically, Einstein himself was among the greatest contributors to the preeminence of science and technology in contemporary society, some two hundred years after Jean-Jacques Rousseau had presented a similar argument against the arts and sciences at the Academy of Dijon.
I. Introduction
In 1750, while visiting an imprisoned Diderot in Vincennes, Rousseau read an advertisement for an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. The theme of the contest was “Whether the Restorations of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals.” Writing in the negative, Rousseau won the contest and a year later, his first discourse “On the Sciences and Arts” was published. The arguments within were strongly against the emphasis that the European Enlightenment had placed on reason and the universality of human nature. As such, Rousseau was lauded by critics and vilified by supporters of the Enlightenment.
A century later, in 1863, English citizen John Stuart Mill wrote what would later become one of the most important philosophical works, Utilitarianism. In Utilitarianism, Mill argued for the Greatest Happiness Principle, which “holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness (Utilitarianism 2).” He also elucidated, in response to an objection of this principle, that there are differences in the qualities of pleasures, arguing that “there is no known Epicurian theory of...
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