Wilbur Marshall Urban
American philosopher
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wilbur Marshall Urban (March 27, 1873–October 15, 1952) was an American philosopher of language, influenced by Ernst Cassirer.[1] He wrote also on religion, axiology,[2] ethics and idealism.[3]
Wilbur Marshall Urban | |
|---|---|
| |
| Born | March 27, 1873 |
| Died | October 15, 1952 (aged 79) |
| Spouse | Elizabeth Newell Wakelin |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| Institutions | |
Biography
Urban was born at on March 27, 1873 Mount Joy, Pennsylvania,[4] to the Rev. Abraham Linwood Urban and Emma Louisa (Trexler) Urban.[5]
Philosophy
His Language and Reality, besides its exposition of Cassirer's ideas, has been described as the work “that first introduced Husserl’s phenomenology to the English speaking world”.[6] It began with the words “Language is the last and deepest problem for the philosophic mind.”
He was Stone Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College, from 1920 to 1931,[7] and President of the American Philosophical Association in 1925-6.[8] He was then a professor at Yale University, succeeded in 1941 by Cassirer.[9]
He was a critic of Alfred North Whitehead,[10] and of Paul Tillich.
In literary criticism
Cleanth Brooks, in The Well Wrought Urn (1947),[11] gave extended attention to Urban's views on language and symbolism, as applied to poetry. Suzanne Langer, however, starting from a similar base in Cassirer's thought, had criticized what Urban had to say in detail on poetry, in Philosophy in a New Key (1942).[12] These matters are discussed in Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957).[13]
Works
- The Problem of a "Logic of the Emotions" and Affective Memory (1901)
- Definition and Analysis of the Consciousness of Value (1907)
- Valuation: Its Nature and Laws, Being an Introduction to the General Theory of Value (1909)
- Ontological Problems of Value (1917)
- The Intelligible World: Metaphysics and Value (1929)
- The Philosophy of Language (1929)
- The Church and Modern Thought: The Cure of Modern Souls (1931)
- The Church and the Modern World: The New Erastianism (1935)
- Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism (1939)
- Fundamentals of Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1945)
- Beyond Realism and Idealism (1949)
- Humanity and Deity (1951)