Professor J. O. Urmson was one of the ablest of Oxford’s 20th-century philosophers and one of its most brilliant and most loved tutors, first at Christ Church, from 1945 to 1955, and later at Corpus Christi, from 1959 to 1978. From Kingswood School, Bath, James Opie Urmson went up to Corpus in 1934 to read Literae Humaniores, gaining firsts in Classical Mods in 1936 and Greats in 1938 and winning the University John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy. He was elected a Senior Demy (Scholar) of Magdalen in 1938 and a Fellow by Examination in 1939.
During the Second World War he served with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment during the withdrawal to Dunkirk, in North Africa and in Italy. He was awarded the Military Cross while with the 1st Dukes in the British 1st Division in the final phase of the battle for Tunis on May 5 to 6, 1943.
As the captain responsible for the supply of ammunition and water to the forward companies during the occupation of Bou Aoukaz, five miles west of the city, he led the battalion’s tracked Bren-gun carriers through intense enemy fire, including sniper fire, to deliver the essential supplies. Although wounded in the first foray, he repeatedly led the carriers forward until the re-supply was complete, allowing Bou Aoukaz to be held. Later, when serving with the same battalion in the Italian campaign, he was taken prisoner and remained in German hands until the end of the war in Europe.
Returning to Oxford, he soon became one of the most prominent of the group of mainly younger philosophers led by J. L. Austin, who developed the detailed study of ordinary language as a (perhaps the) principal method of philosophical inquiry. Urmson, a close associate of Austin, himself made significant contributions to this new current of thought, not by any single book but by a number of articles on a range of topics, several of which have been reprinted in numerous anthologies in English and other languages. Notable among these was his seminal paper On Grading (1950), in which he used the analogy between the grading of apples and the moral appraisal of people to show that such appraisals, though different from mere statements of fact, are nevertheless subject to rules and can be made correctly or incorrectly. Other famous pieces were Saints and Heroes (1958), in which he brought back to the attention of moral philosophers the problem of “works of supererogation” (an expression which he himself disliked), and The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy of J. S. Mill (1953), which definitively established the distinction between rule- and act-utilitarianism as a central topic in ethical theory.
His work on the history of philosophy included an admirable history of the development of philosophical analysis between the wars, an excellently edited encyclopaedia of philosophy, to which he made many contributions himself, a critical survey of the emotive theory of ethics and acclaimed works on Berkeley and on Aristotle’s ethics. He was also a leading figure in the development of aesthetics as an area of interest for analytic philosophers.
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In addition to his own work he made a significant contribution to the development of 20th-century philosophy as one of the editors of Austin’s posthumous works, especially in his reconstruction from the latter’s manuscript notes of his William James Lectures, How to Do Things with Words, the foundation of modern speech-act theory.
In retirement he revised articles on philosophical terms for the new Oxford English Dictionary, published an extremely useful survey of Greek philosophy terminology, in which more than 500 key terms are defined and their use illustrated by passages from ancient authors, and translated several works of later Greek philosophy, chiefly by the Aristotelian commentator Simplicius (published in the series of translations of the Greek Commentators on Aristotle, edited by Professor Richard Sorabji), and also by the early Christian writer Nemesius. His passion for, and knowledge of, music and gardening appeared in many places in his philosophical writings, and were a constant joy to himself and his wife, and a source of pleasure to his friends. He played the oboe and piano and sang in choirs.
In 1940 he married Marion Joyce Drage, who died in 2010. They had one daughter, who survives them.
Professor J. O. Urmson, MC, philosopher, was born on March 4, 1915. He died on January 29, 2012, aged 96