John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life

This book is simultaneously an exercise in biography-one with a tragic narrative, to boot-and a novel reconstruction and reframing of some of the central theories and texts of our canon. And it attempts to look at the theory of rationality from an unusual angle, by asking this question: what difference does it make to the shape and progress of someone's life whether he has one or another understanding of practical reasoning-that is, of how one ought to reason about what to do?