John William Miller - Philosophy

Philosophy

Upon his retirement in 1960, Miller remained in Williamstown and continued his practice of philosophical conversation. However, the years of his retirement found Miller faced with the strong encouragement of a handful of former students who urged him to publish the four public addresses just mentioned and some of the many essays that he had penned over the years. In 1961 Miller published "The Ahistoric and the Historic" as an Afterword to a volume of translated essays by José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History. Finally, by the late 1970s, Miller gathered a collection of his essays, which were published just before his death under the title The Paradox of Cause and Other Essays.

The philosophy that one finds in The Paradox of Cause and such posthumous works as The Philosophy of History (1981), The Midworld of Symbols and Functioning Objects (1982), and In Defense of the Psychological (1983) is a hybrid. Miller consciously sought a middle route through the oppositions of realism and idealism as well as pragmatism and idealism. It is a synthesis and revision of those contesting positions. For Miller philosophy was not the means of removing strife but, rather, the recognition and thoughtful organization of conflict. "To philosophize," Miller wrote, "is to be in thoughtful control of a problem." One important way of describing his thinking, then, is to say that Miller's philosophical synthesis does not effectively resolve the conflicts of his predecessors but shows the philosophical import of their disputes and the way in which their contests outline what must be ingredient in any worthwhile philosophy. His conception defines philosophy as the activity of criticism in the Kantian sense of that term—i.e., to be aware of the conditions of one's endeavors.

As stated above, Miller’s philosophy unites philosophical thinking and historical thinking. In doing so he fully integrated concepts of action and symbolism into his epistemology and metaphysics. The fruits of this approach are seen in his ethical and political philosophy.