55 Facts About Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts.

Jeremy Bentham called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment and physical punishment, including that of children.

Jeremy Bentham has become known as an early advocate of animal rights.

Jeremy Bentham's students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter's son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin and American writer and activist John Neal.

On his death in 1832, Jeremy Bentham left instructions for his body to be first dissected, and then to be permanently preserved as an "auto-icon", which would be his memorial.

Jeremy Bentham was reportedly a child prodigy: he was found as a toddler sitting at his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England, and he began to study Latin at the age of three.

Jeremy Bentham learnt to play the violin, and at the age of seven Bentham would perform sonatas by Handel during dinner parties.

Jeremy Bentham had one surviving sibling, Samuel Bentham, with whom he was close.

Jeremy Bentham attended Westminster School; in 1760, at age 12, his father sent him to The Queen's College, Oxford, where he completed his bachelor's degree in 1764, receiving the title of MA in 1767.

Jeremy Bentham trained as a lawyer and, though he never practised, was called to the bar in 1769.

Jeremy Bentham became deeply frustrated with the complexity of English law, which he termed the "Demon of Chicane".

In 1786 and 1787, Jeremy Bentham travelled to Krichev in White Russia to visit his brother, Samuel, who was engaged in managing various industrial and other projects for Prince Potemkin.

Jeremy Bentham began to develop this model, particularly as applicable to prisons, and outlined his ideas in a series of letters sent home to his father in England.

Jeremy Bentham supplemented the supervisory principle with the idea of contract management; that is, an administration by contract as opposed to trust, where the director would have a pecuniary interest in lowering the average rate of mortality.

Jeremy Bentham remained bitter throughout his later life about the rejection of the panopticon scheme, convinced that it had been thwarted by the King and an aristocratic elite.

On his return to England from Russia, Jeremy Bentham had commissioned drawings from an architect, Willey Reveley.

Jeremy Bentham had by now decided that he wanted to see the prison built: when finished, it would be managed by himself as contractor-governor, with the assistance of Samuel.

Jeremy Bentham was an outspoken critic of the revolutionary discourse of natural rights and of the violence that arose after the Jacobins took power.

Contrary to assumptions, Jeremy Bentham had no hand in the preparation of the 'Proposal to His Majesty's Government for founding a colony on the Southern Coast of Australia, which was prepared under the auspices of Robert Gouger, Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, and Anthony Bacon.

One was John Bowring, to whom Jeremy Bentham became devoted, describing their relationship as "son and father": he appointed Bowring political editor of The Westminster Review and eventually his literary executor.

Jeremy Bentham was a rare major figure in the history of philosophy to endorse psychological egoism.

Jeremy Bentham suggested a procedure for estimating the moral status of any action, which he called the hedonistic or felicific calculus.

Jeremy Bentham wrote in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:.

Jeremy Bentham writes about this principle as it manifests itself within the legislation of a society.

Jeremy Bentham calls for legislators to determine whether punishment creates an even more evil offence.

Jeremy Bentham argues that the concept of the individual pursuing his or her own happiness cannot be necessarily declared "right", because often these individual pursuits can lead to greater pain and less pleasure for a society as a whole.

Law professor Alan Dershowitz has quoted Jeremy Bentham to argue that torture should sometimes be permitted.

Jeremy Bentham's critics have claimed that he undermined the foundation of a free society by rejecting natural rights.

Jeremy Bentham focused on monetary expansion as a means of helping to create full employment.

Jeremy Bentham was aware of the relevance of forced saving, propensity to consume, the saving-investment relationship, and other matters that form the content of modern income and employment analysis.

Jeremy Bentham's work is considered to be an early precursor of modern welfare economics.

Jeremy Bentham stated that pleasures and pains can be ranked according to their value or "dimension" such as intensity, duration, certainty of a pleasure or a pain.

Jeremy Bentham was concerned with maxima and minima of pleasures and pains; and they set a precedent for the future employment of the maximisation principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm and the search for an optimum in welfare economics.

Jeremy Bentham advocated "Pauper Management" which involved the creation of a chain of large workhouses.

Jeremy Bentham was the first person to be an aggressive advocate for the codification of all of the common law into a coherent set of statutes; he was actually the person who coined the verb "to codify" to refer to the process of drafting a legal code.

Jeremy Bentham lobbied hard for the formation of codification commissions in both England and the United States, and went so far as to write to President James Madison in 1811 to volunteer to write a complete legal code for the young country.

Jeremy Bentham is widely regarded as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights.

Jeremy Bentham argued and believed that the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, should be the benchmark, or what he called the "insuperable line".

Jeremy Bentham did not object to medical experiments on animals, providing that the experiments had in mind a particular goal of benefit to humanity, and had a reasonable chance of achieving that goal.

Jeremy Bentham wrote that otherwise he had a "decided and insuperable objection" to causing pain to animals, in part because of the harmful effects such practices might have on human beings.

Jeremy Bentham said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose in 1759, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist, though American critic John Neal claimed to have convinced him to take up women's rights issues during their association between 1825 and 1827.

Jeremy Bentham argued that empire was bad for the greatest number in the metropole and the colonies.

Jeremy Bentham considered both surveillance and transparency to be useful ways of generating understanding and improvements for people's lives.

Jeremy Bentham distinguished among fictional entities what he called "fabulous entities" like Prince Hamlet or a centaur, from what he termed "fictitious entities", or necessary objects of discourse, similar to Kant's categories, such as nature, custom, or the social contract.

Jeremy Bentham died on 6 June 1832, aged 84, at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London.

Jeremy Bentham had continued to write up to a month before his death, and had made careful preparations for the dissection of his body after death and its preservation as an auto-icon.

Jeremy Bentham had intended the auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life.

Jeremy Bentham is widely associated with the foundation in 1826 of London University, though he was 78 years old when the university opened and played only an indirect role in its establishment.

Jeremy Bentham strongly believed that education should be more widely available, particularly to those who were not wealthy or who did not belong to the established church; in Bentham's time, membership of the Church of England and the capacity to bear considerable expenses were required of students entering the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Jeremy Bentham failed in his efforts to see his disciple John Bowring appointed professor of English or History, but he did oversee the appointment of another pupil, John Austin, as the first professor of Jurisprudence in 1829.

Jeremy Bentham was an obsessive writer and reviser, but was only able on rare occasions of bringing his work to completion and publication.

Some made their first appearance in English in the 1820s as a result of back-translation from Dumont's 1802 collection of Jeremy Bentham's writing on civil and penal legislation.

The edition was described by the Edinburgh Review on first publication as "incomplete, incorrect and ill-arranged", and has since been repeatedly criticised both for its omissions and for errors of detail; while Bowring's memoir of Jeremy Bentham's life included in volumes 10 and 11 was described by Sir Leslie Stephen as "one of the worst biographies in the language".

In 1959, the Jeremy Bentham Committee was established under the auspices of University College London with the aim of producing a definitive edition of Jeremy Bentham's writings.

Free, flexible textual search of the full collection of Jeremy Bentham Papers is possible through an experimental handwritten text image indexing and search system, developed by the PRHLT research center in the framework of the READ project.