William Ernest Hocking (August 10, 1873 – June 12, 1966) was an American idealist philosopher at Harvard University.

He worked first as a mapmaker, illustrator and printer's devil, before entering Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in 1894, where he intended to be an engineer.

In 1906 he and his wife moved to the West Coast, where he joined the philosophy faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, under George Howison.

In 1908 he was called to Yale, where he served as an assistant professor and published his first major work, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912).

[4] In 1914 Hocking returned to Harvard, where he eventually became Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity.

"[6] Influenced by his visit to China, Hocking published a characteristically open minded study of the twelfth-century Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi.

He argued that Zhu Xi's thought was "scientific," which not all European philosophers could claim, and therefore had something to teach westerners about democracy.

According to a review in TIME of the book containing his lectures, Hocking thought the important elements were a belief in obligation, in a source of things which is good, in some kind of permanence for what is real in selfhood, and in the human aspect of deity."

In 1930–1932, he led the Commission of Appraisal, which studied the foreign mission work of six Protestant denominations in India, Burma, China, and Japan.

[4] Protestant missionaries had been doing evangelistic work in Asia since the nineteenth century, but several groups noted falling donations and nationalistic resistance, suggesting that changes might be needed.

While in China, Hocking consulted with Pearl S. Buck, who was developing a similar critique of missions and who later threw her support behind the commission's report.

The commission also recommended reorganization in the US to coordinate and focus missionary efforts by creating a single organization for Protestant missions.

A staunch defender of idealism in the United States, Hocking was critical to thought about its meaning for "religion," "history" or the "superpersonal."

Richard became a professor of philosophy and his daughter Hester became affiliated with the St Augustine movement for civil rights and in April 1964 Hester along with three other woman (including Mary Parkman Peabody the mother of then Massachusetts governor Endicott Peabody) were arrested for protesting in a segregated lunch bar in the town, the event made front-page news at the time.

William Hocking's life, work, his predecessors, his colleagues, and especially his surviving personal library, West Wind, is the inspiration for John Kaag's American Philosophy: A Love Story.