author
W. R. (William Ritchie) Sorley
1855–1935
A Scottish philosopher with a gift for big moral questions, he spent decades teaching at Cambridge and became known for writing clearly about ethics, value, and religion. His work belongs to the world of British idealism, but it still feels grounded in lived human concerns.
2 Audiobooks
Recent Tendencies in Ethics Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge
by W. R. (William Ritchie) Sorley
On the Ethics of Naturalism
by W. R. (William Ritchie) Sorley
About the author
Born in Selkirk in 1855, William Ritchie Sorley studied at the University of Edinburgh while still very young, then continued with theology in Edinburgh, Tübingen, and Berlin before turning fully toward philosophy. He is usually cited as W. R. Sorley and is remembered as a Scottish philosopher whose main interests were ethics and moral philosophy.
Sorley taught first at Aberdeen and then for many years at the University of Cambridge, where he served as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy. He was also a Gifford Lecturer, and his lectures were later published as Moral Values and the Idea of God, a work centered on the relation between fact, value, and religious belief. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, reflecting the standing he held in British intellectual life.
Alongside his philosophical writing, Sorley also wrote on the history of philosophy. Readers may also know his name through his family: he was the father of the poet Charles Hamilton Sorley. He died in 1935 after a long academic career shaped by careful argument, serious moral inquiry, and a plain, lucid style.