William Young Collection (#023)

William Young, a native of Brooklyn, New York, was born to William Young, Senior and Miriam Combs Barrus Young on May 9, 1918. William was the eldest of four children, having had two sisters—Elizabeth “Tootie” Young Cicero, Miriam Young; and a brother—Robert Young.

Growing up in Brooklyn, he matriculated through the New York public school system. He attended and graduated from John Adams High School, where he excelled academically. He earned the following degrees: a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1938, a Th.B. and a Th.M. degree from Westminster Theological Seminary in 1941, a Th.D. from Union Theological Seminary in 1944, a B. Litt. in 1958 and M. Litt. in 1960 from Merton College at the University of Oxford.

While at Union Theological Seminary, he was ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church on October 8, 1942. After graduating from UTS in 1944, he received a pastoral call from Bloor East Presbyterian Church, in Toronto, Canada, in the spring of 1945, as its stated supply and remained there until 1946. The collection contains a permit from the United States Selective Service to allowing Young to depart from the United States (for Canada) and is dated April 2, 1945. There is little in this collection that concerns World War II, and the fact that Young never served in any branch of the US military must have been due to his enrollment in divinity school. He must have had a ministerial deferment.

He began his teaching career in 1947, having secured a faculty position as an assistant professor of philosophy at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. He remained there until 1954. From there, Young moved to Jackson, Mississippi to accept a faculty teaching position at Belhaven College, teaching philosophy and psychology.

He was admitted to Merton College at Oxford University beginning in the fall of 1957 where he attempted to earn a Ph.D. While there he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the origins of Hegel’s dialectical methods. He failed to complete the necessary degree requirements in the time allotted to him, and his application for an extension was denied. Instead of receiving the Ph.D. he sought, Oxford instead granted him a B.Litt. degree in 1958 and an M.Litt. in 1960.

Returning states-side in 1960 Dr. Young was appointed to another philosophy teaching position—this time at the University of Rhode Island, remaining there until his retirement in 1988. During his time there he attained the faculty rank of associate professor.

Dr. Young was a member of several different organizations and associations. In fact, an entire series in this collection contains papers from the various groups in which he was a member or had some sort of affiliation. Among them were the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, the Evangelical Theological Society, the Metaphysical Society of America, the Association for Realistic Philosophy, the Charles S. Pierce Society, Phi Beta Kappa honor society, and the Renaissance Society of America.

Young was someone who was constantly writing, and apparently, he never learned to type. His manuscript collection is full of pages with his handwriting—on a variety of subjects—but mostly concerning theology, philosophy, and philosophers. Young wrote hundreds of sermons, essays (which may have turned into books, sermons or articles), several books, many articles and many more reviews of books and articles. He was a co-translater of Herman Dooyeweerd’s New Critique of Theoretical Thought and he was the author of Toward a Reformed Philosophy. He contributed to the article on Dooyeweerd in Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology. He was also very much interested in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and wrote a monograph on the famed philosopher for the Modern Thinkers Series.

Dr. Young was a faithful and dedicated Presbyterian throughout his life and he held very conservative Christian beliefs. It was the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (a conservative off-shoot from the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America) in which he was ordained, and in which he first preached. In January of 1976 he became a member of the Presbyterian Reformed Church, and also participated in its governance and administration. From 1978 to 1995, he was the stated supply of the Presbyterian Church of Rhode Island in East Greenwich. He was also interested in, and to some extent interacted with other Presbyterian denominations; and this collection contains papers from the Presbyterian Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Free Church of Scotland and the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. He also supported Christian missionary efforts in Korea and Japan.

Dr. Young has traveled extensively around the world, especially in Europe and the Orient. He spent time in the Netherlands in 1958 and Norway and Finland in 1966 studying modal logic and worked on the monograph at the Wittgenstein Archive.

Toward the end of his life his eyesight diminished to the point of blindness, though friends and associates attest that he remained mentally sharp. Dr. Young died in Kingston, Rhode Island in 2015 at the age of 97.