Long 19th c. · 1748–1832
Who influenced Jeremy Bentham?
Influences and legacy
Measured the good in pleasures and pains, founding utilitarianism on arithmetic.
Jeremy Bentham was influenced by David Hume, and went on to influence John Stuart Mill. That is 2 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Henry William Pickersgill, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Jeremy Bentham?
Jeremy Bentham founded modern utilitarianism on one "fundamental axiom": the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong. His Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) is the first major book on the subject.
A political radical, he argued for the separation of church and state, free expression, equal rights for women, divorce and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and against slavery, capital punishment and the beating of children; he was also an early advocate of animal rights. He called natural rights "nonsense upon stilts". His preserved body, the "auto-icon", sits on display at University College London.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Jeremy Bentham?
1 direct influence on this map, earliest first.
- David Hume 1711–1776
Who did Jeremy Bentham influence?
1 thinker on this map draws directly on Jeremy Bentham.
- John Stuart Mill 1806–1873
The line of teachers behind Jeremy Bentham
The longest documented line of influence ending at Jeremy Bentham runs 18 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
Two steps away from Jeremy Bentham
Indirect influences
- Through David Hume: Michel de Montaigne, John Locke, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Bayle, George Berkeley
The second generation
- Through John Stuart Mill: Henry Sidgwick, Bertrand Russell, John Rawls
Contemporaries of Jeremy Bentham
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Jeremy Bentham, with no direct line between them.
- Johann Gottfried Herder 1744–1803
- Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi 1743–1819
- Mary Wollstonecraft 1759–1797
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762–1814
- Johann Georg Hamann 1730–1788
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729–1781
- Wilhelm von Humboldt 1767–1835
- Moses Mendelssohn 1729–1786
Jeremy Bentham by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 1
- Direct followers
- 1
- Thinkers upstream
- 61
- Thinkers downstream
- 24
- Wikipedia languages
- 77 — #20 of 47 among 19th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Questions about Jeremy Bentham
- Who influenced Jeremy Bentham?
- David Hume.
- Who did Jeremy Bentham influence?
- John Stuart Mill.
- When did Jeremy Bentham live?
- 1748–1832. The map files Jeremy Bentham under the long 19th century.
- How rare is the Jeremy Bentham card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Jeremy Bentham in 77 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 19th-century philosophers
- Karl Marx 1818–1883
- Charles Darwin 1809–1882
- Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910
- Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821–1881
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
- Friedrich Engels 1820–1895
- Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855