Milton was a Speculative Realist

Exhibit A: Milton was an adherent of ex deo creation. Quite a Spinozan view. Chaos consists of God's “dark materials to create more worlds”... Hence the title of Philip Pullman's trilogy.

Exhibit B: Raphael's conversation with Adam in Paradise Lost. Don't worry too much about things outside of Eden, says Raphael. Who knows, up there there may be all kinds of alien worlds, inhabited by all kinds of extraterrestrial life, maybe even conscious life—maybe there's an alien Raphael and an alien Adam having this same conversation. But don't worry about it...



Don't think of a pink elephant! (I talk about this part of Milton a bit in The Ecological Thought chapter 1.) Isn't “amplitude immense” a beautiful phrase to describe the Universe?

Nathan Brown has a very good essay on SR in Descartes and Hume coming out (“Absent Blue Wax”). Could Milton be another forerunner?