Richard Whately - Life and Times

Life and Times

He was born in London, the son of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Whately (17 March 1730 - 13 March 1797). He was educated at a private school near Bristol, and at Oriel College, Oxford. Richard Whately obtained double second-class honours and the prize for the English essay; in 1811 he was elected Fellow of Oriel, and in 1814 took holy orders. During his residence at Oxford he wrote his tract, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, a clever jeu d'ésprit directed against excessive scepticism as applied to the Gospel history. After his marriage in 1821 he settled in Oxford, and in 1822 was appointed Bampton lecturer. The lectures, On the Use and Abuse of Party Spirit in Matters of Religion, were published in the same year.

In August 1823 he moved to Halesworth in Suffolk, but in 1825, having been appointed principal of St. Alban Hall, he returned to Oxford. He found much to reform there, and left it a different place.

In 1825 he published a series of Essays on Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion, followed in 1828 by a second series On some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St Paul, and in 1830 by a third On the Errors of Romanism traced to their Origin in Human Nature. While he was at St Alban Hall (1826) the work appeared which is perhaps most closely associated with his name—a treatise on logic entitled Elements of Logic. In the preface to the Elements of Logic, Whately wrote that the substance of the treatise was drawn from an article written by himself, entitled Logic, which had already been published in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. The Elements of Logic gave a great impetus to the study of logic throughout Britain and the United States of America. Indeed, the highly original and influential American logician, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), wrote that his lifelong fascination with logic began when he read Whately's Elements of Logic as a 12 year old boy. Whately also contributed an article to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana entitled Rhetoric. This article was also adapted into a book, called Elements of Rhetoric, which was published in 1828.

He was initially on friendly terms with John Henry Newman, but they fell out as the divergence in their views became apparent; Newman later spoke of his Catholic University as continuing in Dublin the struggle against Whately which he had commenced at Oxford.

In 1829 Whately was elected to the professorship of political economy at Oxford in succession to Nassau William Senior. His tenure of office was cut short by his appointment to the archbishopric of Dublin in 1831. He published only one course of Introductory Lectures (1832), but one of his first acts on going to Dublin was to endow a chair of political economy in Trinity College.