Joseph Rickaby

Born in Everingham, Yorkshire, in 1845, Joseph Rickaby was educated at Stonyhurst College and later joined the Society of Jesus. He was ordained in 1877 and became one of the group sometimes called the “Stonyhurst Philosophers,” a circle important to the growth of neo-scholastic thought in England.

Rickaby taught ethics, natural law, logic, and metaphysics, including many years at Stonyhurst and later at Oxford, where he was connected with Campion Hall and worked with Catholic students. He was a friend and contemporary of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the two were ordained on the same day.

He is best known for writing on moral philosophy and for making the thought of Thomas Aquinas more accessible in English. Among his notable works are Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law, Scholasticism, and an annotated translation of Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles.