Richard Whately (1 February 1787 – 8 October 1863) was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.

He was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.

in 1808, with double second-class honours, and the prize for the English essay in 1810; in 1811, he was elected Fellow of Oriel, and in 1814 took holy orders.

After graduation he acted as a private tutor, in particular to Nassau William Senior who became a close friend, and to Samuel Hinds.

[6] In 1829, Whately was elected as Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford in succession to Nassau William Senior.

The new Whig administration found Whately, who was known at Holland House and effective in a parliamentary committee appearance speaking on tithes, an acceptable option.

[10] In 1852, the scheme broke down due to the opposition of the new ultramontanist Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, who would later become the first Irish prelate named Cardinal.

[15] Beginning in 1856, Whately began experiencing symptoms of decline, including paralysis of his left side, but he continued his public duties.

[7] Whately was a prolific writer, a successful expositor and Protestant apologist in works that ran to many editions and translations.

[7][23] A member of the loose group called the Oriel Noetics, Whately supported religious liberty, civil rights, and freedom of speech for dissenters, Roman Catholics, Jews, and even atheists.

There is no reason to question his reception of the central doctrines of the faith, though he shrank from theorising or even attempting to formulate them with precision.

[17] Whately's view of political economy, and that common to the early holders of the Trinity college professorship, addressed it as a type of natural theology.

[33] Whately's view of rhetoric as essentially a method for persuasion became an orthodoxy, challenged in mid-century by Henry Noble Day.

Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky thought Whately’s importance and influence greater than his later historical repute would indicate, and that Whately’s unsystematic, aphoristic style of writing might explain history’s relative forgetfulness of him:He had a singular felicity of illustration, and especially of metaphor, and a rare power of throwing his thoughts into terse and pithy sentences; but his many books, though full of original thinking and in a high degree suggestive to other writers, had always a certain fragmentary and occasional character, which prevented them from taking a place in standard literature.

[37]In 1864, Jane Whately, his daughter, published Miscellaneous Remains from his commonplace book and in 1866 his Life and Correspondence in two volumes.

See also Donald Harman Akenson A Protestant in Purgatory: Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin (South Bend, Indiana 1981)