John William Miller
At the onset of American involvement in the First World War, Miller declared himself a conscientious objector and served as a volunteer in the ambulance corps in France with Base Hospital 44.
Among his teachers were philosophical realists such as Ralph Barton Perry and Edwin Bissell Holt as well as idealists such as William Ernest Hocking and Clarence Irving Lewis.
It is still fair to say, however, that Miller’s strongest philosophical influences dated from the 19th century and were, most prominently, the German idealists Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
In 1921 Miller received his master's degree and, under the direction of Hocking, went on to compose a work on the fundamental connection among epistemology, semiotics, and ontology.
Apart from two summer sessions and a one-year visiting appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1937–1938, Miller’s teaching career was spent at Williams College until his retirement in 1960.
From 1945 on he was Mark Hopkins Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, a title inherited from his colleague and predecessor as chair, the critical realist James Bissett Pratt.
At Williams, Miller taught courses across the whole philosophical curriculum—i.e., epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, semiotics, and political philosophy.
Perhaps his greatest innovation in the classroom was the introduction of a course in the philosophy of history at a time when positivism was further separating philosophical reflection from historical thinking.
After these two publications, he presented four public papers: "Freedom as a Characteristic of Man in a Democratic Society" (American Political Science Association, Chicago, 1938), "History and Humanism" (Harvard Philosophy Club, 1948), "The Midworld" (Harvard Philosophy Club, 1952), and "The Scholar as Man of the World" (Phi Beta Kappa Society, Hobart College, 1952).
This small number of essays and statements made available to public audiences belied the fact that in private Miller was a prodigious writer who was actively at work developing a coherent philosophical system organized around his central concept, the midworld.
It would not be until his retirement that he would gather his writings and begin to make his historical idealism known to people other than his students and occasional auditors.
Unless definition is considered in this manner, Miller argued, we cannot make sense of 1) our own participation in the process and the establishment of meaning, and 2) the evolution and constant refinement of our understanding of things in the world.
At the bottom of definition is, Miller contended, an unending search for local control—i.e., an understanding of oneself and one’s world that was adequate to support a plan of action.
First it needs to be stated that the midworld of symbols and what Miller called ‘’functioning objects’’, is part of his answer to the problem of universals.
The need to generate, maintain, and revise meanings is one way of understanding history, and it is on such terms that we see the unity of epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics that provides a deep context in which we can grasp what Miller writes regarding definition, action, and symbol.
It is in this fashion that Miller’s historical idealism can be understood as a metaphysics of democracy (a term he borrowed from Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas).
Here Miller revisited the traditional connection between liberal democratic politics and the scientific community in which free and respectful speech is licensed, formal modes of criticism are supported, and orderly change and development is a key goal.
In order to affect that, in both politics and science, Miller maintained that, as noted above, a historical and symbolic conception of rationality has to be endorsed.
Scholarship and citizenship are two sides of the same coin in that they are two facets of an active and responsible life—i.e., understanding and then engaging with conditions of one’s endeavors.
While retirement did eventuate in the publication of The Paradox of Cause, Miller passed his latter years quietly, conducting philosophy in the form of conversation and correspondence much as he had during his teaching career.
