Richard Whately is now best remembered as the author of a brilliant satire on David Hume and an extraordinarily durable rhetoric textbook that went through seven editions in his lifetime and is still in print today. In the first half of the nineteenth century he was a formidable figure in the educational and religious life of England and Ireland. As tutor, lecturer, and administrator at Oxford, he did much to revive the intellectual life of the university after a period of academic decline. To John Stuart Mill in his posthumous Autobiography (1873) he was the man who had "rehabilitated" the study of logic; to his younger colleague John Henry Newman in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) he was the man "who opened my mind and taught me to think and to use reason." After leaving Oxford he became Anglican archbishop of Dublin, where he worked until his death in the...