William Ernest Hocking was born on 10 August 1873 in Cleveland, Ohio. An American idealist philosopher, he continued the work of Josiah Royce, integrating idealism into empiricism, naturalism, and pragmatism. In 1902, Hocking was the first American to study at the University of Göttingen with Edmund Husserl. Appointed Professor of Philosophy at Yale in 1908, he moved to Harvard in 1913. After the death of Royce, he took up the Alford Professorship of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in 1920, retiring in 1943.
Hocking delivered the Hibbert Lectures in 1939 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1943. During the First World War, he was one of the first American civil engineers to reach the front in France. Key works include The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion (1912), Morale and Its Enemies (1918), Human Nature and Its Remaking (1923), Man and State (1926), Types of Philosophy (1929), Thoughts on Life and Death (1937), Science and the Idea of God (1944), and The Coming World Civilization (1956).
