33 Facts About Richard Whately

Richard Whately was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.

Richard Whately was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.

Richard Whately was educated at a private school near Bristol, and at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1805.

In 1825, Richard Whately was appointed principal of St Alban Hall at the University of Oxford, a position obtained for him by his mentor Edward Copleston, who wanted to raise the notoriously low academic standards at the Hall, which was a target for expansion by Oriel.

Richard Whately returned to the University of Oxford, where he had seen the social impact of unemployment on the city and region.

In 1829, Richard Whately was elected as Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford in succession to Nassau William Senior.

Richard Whately published only one course of Introductory Lectures in two editions.

The new Whig administration found Richard Whately, who was known at Holland House and effective in a parliamentary committee appearance speaking on tithes, an acceptable option.

Richard Whately enforced strict discipline in his diocese; and he published a statement of his views on Sabbath.

Richard Whately lived in Redesdale House in Kilmacud, just outside Dublin, where he could garden.

Richard Whately was concerned to reform the Church of Ireland and the Irish Poor Laws.

In 1831, Richard Whately attempted to establish a national and non-sectarian system of education in Ireland, on the basis of common instruction for Protestants and Catholics alike in literary and moral subjects, religious instruction being taken apart.

In 1841, Catholic archbishops William Crolly and John MacHale debated whether to continue the system, with the more moderate Crolly supporting Richard Whately's gaining papal permission to go on, given some safeguards.

On 27 March 1848, Richard Whately became a member of the Canterbury Association.

Richard Whately was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.

Richard Whately gave up his college fellowship, which could not then be held by married men, and began tutoring and writing.

Richard Whately's daughters were writer Jane Whately and missionary Mary Louisa Whately.

Richard Whately was a prolific writer, a successful expositor and Protestant apologist in works that ran to many editions and translations.

In 1825 Richard Whately 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.

Richard Whately was a great talker, a wit, and loved punning.

Richard Whately took the line that the civil disabilities imposed on non-Anglicans made the state only nominally Christian, and supported disestablishment.

Richard Whately was a follower of Edward Copleston, regarded as the founder of the Noetics taken as apologists for the orthodoxy of the Church of England.

Richard Whately disagreed with the Evangelical party and generally favoured a more intellectual approach to religion.

Richard Whately disagreed with the later Tractarian emphasis on ritual and church authority.

Richard Whately dwelt more on the life than on the death of Christ, the necessity of which he denied.

Richard Whately took a view of political economy as an essentially logical subject.

Richard Whately belonged to the group of supporters of Thomas Malthus that included Thomas Chalmers, some others of the Noetics, Richard Jones and William Whewell from Cambridge.

Richard Whately saw no inconsistency between science and Christian belief, which differed from the view of other Christian critics of Malthus.

Richard Whately differed from Jones and Whewell, expressing the view that the inductive method was of less use for political economy than the deductive method, properly applied.

In periodicals, Richard Whately addressed other public questions, including the topic of transportation and the "secondary punishments" on those who had been transported; his pamphlet on this topic influenced the politicians Lord John Russell and Henry George Grey.

Richard Whately was an important figure in the revival of Aristotelian logic in the early nineteenth century.

Richard Whately had a singular felicity of illustration, and especially of metaphor, and a rare power of throwing his thoughts into terse and pithy sentences; but his many books, though full of original thinking and in a high degree suggestive to other writers, had always a certain fragmentary and occasional character, which prevented them from taking a place in standard literature.

Richard Whately was conscious of it himself, and was accustomed to say that it was the mission of his life to make up cartridges for others to fire.