Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. J.P. Loo's avatar
  2. Sebastian Sunday Grève's avatar
  3. Giovanni Molteni Tagliabue's avatar
  4. Fabien Muller's avatar
  7. Saul Smilansky's avatar

In Memoriam: Richard W. Miller (1945-2023)

Brian Leiter

Professor Miller spent his career at Cornell University, where he was emeritus.  His writings ranged widely over philosophy of science, ethics, metaethics, political philosophy and Marx.   He wrote some brilliantly synoptic books on all these topics, including Analyzing Marx (which is, oddly, omitted from this obituary).  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Miller, or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  The Cornell memorial notice is here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

6 responses to “In Memoriam: Richard W. Miller (1945-2023)”

  1. Tad Brennan

    Dick Miller was a great philosopher, a great colleague, and a great human being. Brian has noted his wide range, given that he did significant work in the philosophy of science, politics, Marxism, and metaethics (he was one of the creators of Cornell Realism, along with Dick Boyd and Nick Sturgeon). He began his career writing a dissertation on Wittgenstein, supervised by Albritton and Putnam. He was conversant with the whole field of philosophy, and remained engaged with new developments in the field up to the end — I corresponded with him two weeks ago about new work on environmental ethics.
    Throughout his career, he remained committed to the idea that philosophy can make a difference to society and to the world, and he made a difference through his work and his life. A mainstay of the department, he was scrupulously fair-minded and committed to deliberative self-governance.
    We are all in shock here, because his death was so unexpected. I feel lucky and honored to have had him as a colleague,

    Reply
  2. Jonathan Kramnick

    Dick was a professor of mine as an undergraduate, in a wonderful course on Political Philosophy in the spring of 1987. Many of my friends took his seminar on the philosophy of Marx as well—a much-discussed course among campus radicals My recollection extends further back to the 70s, however, when I was a Cornell faculty brat and he was almost fired for preventing the former prime minister of South Vietnam, Nguyen Ky, from speaking at an invited lecture. This was maybe 1976? He was an assistant professor and was accused of leading the effort to shout down Ky at a talk at Bailey Hall. There was an investigation and a hearing focusing just on him; the entire university community was involved. He was reprimanded but not canned. A partisan of the Progressive Labor Party at the time, he believed the Ky talk was part of the effort of the CIA and State Department to install fascism at home.

    Reply
  3. Phil Gasper

    I worked closely with Dick in the 1980s as a graduate student—I must have taken four or five of his classes (on Marx, philosophy of science, metaethics, political philosophy) and he we had frequent informal discussions and arguments both in the Philosophy Department Lounge and over a beer in Collegetown. I remember he was a tough grader—he gave me a A– (yes, double minus) for a paper I wrote on Marx and morality, but like other Cornell faculty he was always open to disagreement and debate. We had lots of philosophical differences, but he had a big impact on my views. I'm still a big fan of his interpretation of Marx's theory of history, which drew on his own post-positivistic views in the philosophy of science. We had political disagreements too, but he was one of the faculty members most supportive of my campus activism in the anti-apartheid and anti-racist movements at Cornell. After I left Ithaca in 1987, I only saw Dick a few times at conferences, but we would exchange emails from time to time. After Stephen Jay Gould died in 2002, Dick sent me some personal reminiscences of Gould's role in the antiwar movement at Harvard in the 1960s, which I incorporated in an obituary I was writing. It's sad that it is now time to write Dick's own obituary.

    Reply
  4. Gordon Barnes

    Miller’s paper, “Rights and Reality,” is one of the most incisive statements of Marx’s critique of morality ever written. It should be more widely read.

    Reply
  5. LFC

    Didn't know Richard Miller (nor am I a philosopher), but some years ago I read parts of his Fact and Method, which I recall as well-written and accessible. (I can't say I recall the substance all that well, except that it was a good overview of various debates — but that reflects more on me than on the book.)

    Reply
  6. GB

    I recently read Cohen's book on Marx's theory of history, and was looking for a respectable critique of his reading of Marx as a technological determinist. After seeing this notice, I bought and read Miller's *Analyzing Marx*. If the book is representative, it seems that philosophy lost a real talent, as well as a kind of generalist that is only too rare nowadays.

    —–
    KEYWORDS:
    Primary Blog

    Reply

Designed with WordPress