Wilbur Marshall Urban

Wilbur Marshall Urban (1873–1952) was an American philosopher of language, influenced by Ernst Cassirer. He wrote also on religion, axiology,ethics and idealism.

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”. 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, and President of the American Philosophical Association in 1925-6. He was then a professor at Yale University, succeeded in 1941 by Cassirer.

He was a critic of Alfred North Whitehead, and of Paul Tillich.

Cleanth Brooks, in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), 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). These matters are discussed in Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt, Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957).

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