Frankena's father and mother immigrated to the U.S. as teenagers, in 1892 and 1896 respectively, from Friesland, a province in the north of the Netherlands.

After farming, his father, Nicholas A. Frankena (1875–1955), devoted the later decades of his life to elected office in Zeeland, MI, where he was mayor, and to service as an elder in the Christian Reformed Church in North America, which was founded by Calvinist Dutch immigrants.

from the University of Michigan (1931), where the Department of Philosophy included C. Harold Langford (1895–1964), Dewitt H. Parker (1885–1949), and Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973).

He studied with C. I. Lewis, Ralph Barton Perry, and Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard, and with G. E. Moore and C. D. Broad at the University of Cambridge in England while he did Ph.D. research.

His doctoral dissertation, which focused on Moore's work, was entitled "Recent Intuitionism in British Ethics."

Many Michigan undergraduates were introduced to philosophy in the popular, historically based course taught by Frankena and his close friend Paul Henle.

For nearly his entire career, Frankena did most of his philosophical reading and writing at home at a desk made circa 1870.

William K. Frankena's philosophical papers are in the collection of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan.

[citation needed] A memorial essay by a member of the Michigan Philosophy Department states that "William Frankena contributed as widely to moral philosophy and its neighboring areas as anyone in that remarkable group that dominated English-speaking ethics from the end of World War II well into the 1980s.

"[2] When Frankena retired and was awarded emeritus status in 1978, the University Regents stated that "he is renowned for his learning in the history of ethics, a subject about which he is generally believed in the profession to know more than anyone else in the world.