William Ernest Hocking

William Ernest Hocking (1873 - 1966) was an American Idealist philosopher at Harvard University. He continued the work of his philosophical teacher Josiah Royce in revising idealism to integrate and fit in empiricism, naturalism and pragmatism. Metaphysics has to make inductions from experience: "that which does not work is not true".

In political philosophy he claimed that liberalism must be superseded by a new form of individualism in which the principle is: "every man shall be a whole man" and we have only one natural right: "an individual should develop the powers that are in him". The most important freedom is "the freedom to perfect one's freedom". He considered christianity as great agent in making of world civilization.

He was attended lectures by many German philosophers of his time; Dilthey, Paul Natorp, Husserl, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. A staunch defender of idealism in America, Hocking took his understanding of idealism to be very critical in terms of what that entitled in meaning anything definite about "religion," "history" or the "superpersonal."

In many regards he agreed with Wilhelm Luetgert, a German critic of idealism, however without abandoning its position. Hocking believed nothing that could be was ultimately irrational, while declaring equally that there was no unknowable in what was.