James Opie Urmson (4 March 1915 – 29 January 2012) was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy (especially Aristotle).

Life and career

J. O. Urmson was born in Hornsea. He was named after his father, James Opie Urmson (1881–1954), a Methodist minister. Urmson was educated at Kingswood School, Bath (1928–1934), and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1934–38). When the Second World War broke out, he joined the army. He was awarded the Military Cross in 1943. He was taken prisoner in Italy in 1944, remaining in captivity in Germany until the end of the war in Europe. He spent his time as a prisoner of war "playing bridge and doing mathematics." After the war he was a student (i.e. a fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford, from 1945 to 1955. During this period he lived in Monckton Cottage in Headington, Oxford. In 1955 he accepted an appointment as Professor of Philosophy at Queen's College Dundee, then part of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. In 1959 he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and a Tutor in Philosophy. Except for visiting appointments in the United States (e.g. Visiting Associate Professor of philosophy at Princeton University in 1950–51), he remained at Oxford until his retirement, at which point he assumed the position of Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Stanford University.

Achievements

Urmson and his co-editor G. J. Warnock performed an invaluable service to the development of "analytic" or "linguistic" philosophy by preparing for publication the papers of the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin. After World War II, Urmson's book Philosophical Analysis (1956) – an overview of the development of analytic philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford universities between World War I and World War II – was influential in the post-war spread of analytic philosophy in Anglophone countries. David Heyd records that "the history of supererogation in non-religious ethical theory" began with Urmson's 'seminal' "Saints and Heroes" (1958). This paper, according to Heyd, "opened the contemporary discussion of supererogation," while hardly mentioning the term, "by challenging the traditional threefold classification of moral action: the obligatory, the permitted (or indifferent) and the prohibited." Urmson translated or wrote notes for a number of volumes of Aristotle, and commentaries on Aristotle's Physics by Simplicius, for the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series published in the US by Cornell University Press, in the UK initially by Duckworth, now by Bloomsbury, under the general editorship of Richard Sorabji. His book Aristotle's Ethics was praised by J. L. Ackrill and Julius Moravcsik as an excellent introduction to Aristotle's Ethics. Although, as Jonathan Rée notes, many of Urmson's writings "focus on theories about the nature of philosophy", Urmson holds that "on the whole the best philosophy is little affected by theory; the philosopher sees what needs doing and does it."

Works

Edited volumes

Translations

Books

Articles/book chapters

Related Works