Background
Urban, Wilbur Marshall was born on March 21, 1873 in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, United States.
Urban, Wilbur Marshall was born on March 21, 1873 in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, United States.
Princeton University BA 1895. The Universities of Jena. Leipzig, Munich and Graz (PhD, Leipzig, 1897).
1897-1898, Reader in Philosophy, Princeton. 1898 1902, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, Ursinus College, Pennsylvania. 1902-1920, Professor of Philosophy.
Trinity College, Connecticut. 1920-1930, Stone Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. 1931-1952, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Yale.
The study of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals shook Urban as a young student in Germany to undertake what he deemed to be his great philosophical enterprise in the study and defence of values. He considered values central to philosophy, and speculative philosophy to be indispensable to civilization. More than any philosopher of his generation, Urban shifted the argument for idealism from epistemology to the field of values. Urban sought early to formulate a general theory of value and valuation. Drawing upon the psychology of his time. Valuation (1909) offers a phenomenology of values. It is the first work in English in the field which he himself named ‘axiology’. He next went on to realize his intention of elaborating the value-motif and the value-centric predicament in several branches of philosophy. The Intelligible World (1929) is a defence of philosophia perennis by the use of self-referential argument against the naturalisms spawned in the wake of the First World War. It provides the clearest, most cogent and comprehensive statement of Urban’s metaphysical idealism. As analytic philosophers in the 1930s assaulted traditional philosophy and the objectivity of values, Urban concentrated on the philosophy of language. He was ‘concerned with the evaluation of language as a bearer of meaning, as a medium of communication and as a sign or symbol of reality’. Stressing the codependence of meaning and value, he located meanings conveyed by language within a speech community united by common orientation towards values. When the disputes between idealism and realism threatened to exhaust philosophy. Urban sought to reconcile the two philosophical types by appealing to values in meeting the separate minimal demands of each. While the realist insists that knowledge, to be true, must refer to reality beyond it, the idealist holds that meaning and value are inseparable. Urban’s idealistic philosophy is constructed along realistic lines in that he maintains that being, meaning and value are necessarily related to each other. Humanity and Deity (1951) carries the valuecentric approach into the field of rational theology, in opposition to atheistic naturalists and religious existentialists. Urban approached the concept of God by means of the traditional concepts of human value. He declared: ‘Humanity and Deity’ like the inside and the outside of the curve, like the mountain and the valley, are apart from each other unthinkable’. At the time of his death Urban left unpublished a book-length manuscript of studies in the philosophy of history.