J. O. Urmson


James Opie Urmson, usually cited as J. O. Urmson, 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.

Life and career

J. O. Urmson was born in Hornsea. He was named after his father, the Rev. James Opie Urmson, a Methodist Minister. Urmson was educated at Kingswood School, Bath and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
When World War II broke out, he joined the Army, where he served for 6 years. He was captured and spent three years in Germany as a prisoner of war, where he spent his time "playing bridge and doing mathematics". After the war, he was awarded the Military Cross.
After the war he was a student of Christ Church, Oxford from 1945 to 1955. During this period he lived in 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, 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 – 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.
According to the in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "the history of supererogation in non-religious ethical theory is very recent, starting only in 1958 with J. O. Urmson's seminal article, "Saints and Heroes." which "opened the contemporary discussion of supererogation by challenging the traditional threefold classification of moral action: the obligatory, the permitted 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 USA by Cornell University Press, in the UK initially by Duckworth, now by Bloomsbury, under the distinguished general editorship of Richard K.R. Sorabji. His book Aristotle's Ethics was praised by no less than J. L. Ackrill and Julius Moravcsik as an excellent introduction to Aristotle's Ethics.
In the entry devoted to Urmson in the third edition of Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, Jonathan Ree wrote of Urmson that "Although many of his writings focus on theories about the nature of philosophy, he 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
Related Works