Philosophy of History

The Philosophy  History: With Reflections and Aphorisms by John William Miller (Norton) This little classic by a noted philosopher, available again. The essays offer some timeless reflection about philosophical topics. John William Miller (1895-1978) taught at Williams College, where from 1945 to 1960 he was Mark Hopkins Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. His extraordinary teaching is described in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, edited by Joseph Epstein. While deeply indebted to Plato, Kant, and Hegel, Miller arrived at a strikingly original reinterpretation of the history of philosophy, which, he believed, resolved long-standing epistemological and moral problems generated by that history. The Philosophy  History: With Reflections and Aphorisms criticizes all attempts to interpret history on premises not themselves historical. Miller holds that "to view history philosophically is to consider it as a constitutional mode of experience, a way of organization no less fundamental than physics or logic."
Contents
Preface
The Utility of Historical Study
Motives
Explanation
Cause
Purpose
Psychology
Accidents
The Static Ideal
Mistrust of Time
Alliance with Time
A Victory Is in Time
The Sense of Time
Time and Immediacy
The Sense of History
The Simultaneous and the Successive
Memory and Morals
Memory and the Humanities
The Past as an Influence
Memory as Control
Prediction
Documentation
The ``Referent'' of a Statement in History
The Facts
Order and Disorder
The Common and the Unique
Action and Immediacy
The Free Act
Power
Might and Right
Action Is Inherently Historical
Myth and Error
Myth and Control
The Role of the Actual
Judgment
Reflections and Aphorisms

John William Miller (1895-1978) taught at Williams College, where from 1945 to 1960 he was Mark Hopkins Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. His extraordinary teaching is described in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, edited by Joseph Epstein. John William Miller also wrote The Definition of the Thing: With Some Notes on Language. While deeply indebted to Plato, Kant, and Hegel, Miller arrived at a strikingly original reinterpretation of the history of philosophy, which, he believed, resolved long-standing epistemological and moral problems generated by that history. In The Definition of the Thing, an unusually provocative and original essay, Miller had works out a number of the basic contentions of his mature philosophy. In Defense of the Psychological and The Midworld of Symbols and Functioning Objects are also still in print.

Certainty As a Social Metaphor: The Social and Historical Production of Certainty in China and the West by Min Lin (Contributions in Philosophy, No. 79; Greenwood Press) combines philosophy, the social theory of knowledge, and historical analysis to present a comprehensive study of the idea of certainty as defined in the Western and Chinese intellectual traditions. Philosophical ideas such as certainty are the products of deeply layered socio-historical constructions. The author shows how the highly abstract idea of certainty in philosophical discourse is connected to the concrete social process from which the meaning of certainty is derived. Three different versions of certainty--in modern Western thought, in German Idealism, and in traditional Chinese philosophy--are examined in the context of a historical-comparative study of Western and Chinese social processes.

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