William Ritchie Sorley

William Ritchie Sorley(/ˈsɔːrli/; 4 November 1855 – 28 July 1935), usually cited as W. R. Sorley, was a Scottish philosopher. A Gifford Lecturer, he was one of the British Idealist school of thinkers, with interests in ethics.

William Ritchie Sorley was born in Selkirk, the son of Anna Ritchie and William Sorley, a Free Church of Scotland minister. He was educated first at Edinburgh University, where he took a degree in philosophy and mathematics. He then spent a year at Trinity College, Cambridge where he took Part II of the Moral Sciences Tripos. He subsequently spent several years at Cambridge where he was lecturer and Fellow at Trinity.

In 1886, he was appointed to a post at University College, London. After two years he was appointed to a professorship at University College Cardiff, suceeding Andrew Seth as Professor of Logic and Philosophy.

In 1894 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and finally in 1900 he succeeded Henry Sidgwick in the Knightbridge Professorship at the University of Cambridge. He held this post until his retirement in 1933. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1905. He died in 1935, aged 79, at Cambridge.

He is now remembered for his A History of British Philosophy to 1900, published in 1920, with its idiosyncratic slant, as a retrospective view from the point of view of British Idealism. Among his other published works are: The Ethics of Naturalism: a Criticism (second edition 1904), The Moral Life and Moral Worth (1911), and his Gifford Lectures which he gave in 1914-15 and were published under the title Moral Values and the Idea of God (second edition 1921). In his obituary, J.H. Muirhead said of this: "I can remember the sense of freshness and power that this book gave us all at the time". The poet Charles Sorley was his son.

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