John William Miller

John William Miller is an American philosopher in the idealist tradition. His work appears in six published volumes, including The Paradox of Cause (1978) and most recently The Task of Criticism (2006). His principal philosophical ambitions were 1) to reconcile the idealism of Josiah Royce and the pragmatism of William James and 2) to integrate philosophical thought and historical thought. As testimony to the integrative nature of his thinking, Miller referred to his philosophy as a "historical idealism” and a “naturalistic idealism.”

In his dissertation and subsequent book The Definition of the Thing With Some Notes on Language (1980), Miller tied together epistemology and ontology via an examination of the process of definition. Here the possibility of “static definition” was attacked—i.e., a definition that has no connection to action and a defined thing that is fundamentally ahistorical. 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. There is a dynamic relationship between the universal and particular, the terms of definition (predicates) and the thing defined.

The process of definition is founded on human action and meaning understood as "meaning for a human actor." 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. Definition thus ties in with pragmatism. But Miller was careful to underscore that his appropriation of pragmatism was not a crude pragmatism of simple means–ends thinking. Rather Miller saw the fundamental practicality of universal ideas and fundamental concepts which provide general order to our world (e.g., mathematics, language) but which are, on their face, not useful in any immediate sense. Definition links together individual actors and universal concepts in an existential dialectic in which meaning is established and revised.