Early Years and Education
John William Miller was born on January 8, 1895 in Rochester, New York. He began his undergraduate education at Harvard University in 1912, transferred to the University of Rochester for his sophomore and junior years, and then returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for his senior year. Miller received his A. B. from Harvard in 1916. 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.
After the war, Miller returned to Harvard to begin graduate studies in philosophy. 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 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. Ralph Waldo Emerson was also an important influence on the American side. 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. This work, titled "The Definition of the Thing," earned him the doctorate in 1922.
Miller's teaching career began in 1922 with an appointment at Connecticut College. During this time he married Katherine S. Gisel (1897–1993). In the fall of 1924 he took a position at Williams College in the Berkshire Mountains of northwest Massachusetts.
Read more about this topic: John William Miller
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early, years and/or education:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“When Prince William [later King William IV] was at Cork in 1787, an old officer ... dined with him, and happened to say he had been forty years in the service. The Prince with a sneer asked what he had learnt in those forty years. The old gentleman justly offended, said, “Sir, I have learnt, when I am no longer fit to fight, to make as good a retreat as I can” —and walked out of the room.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of men.... It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)