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 of History 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 .

In The Definition of the Thing, an unusually provocative and original essay, Miller had already worked out a number of the basic contentions of his mature philosophy.