William Dexter Wilson was born on February 28, 1816, in Stoddard, New Hampshire.

He was a clergyman, educator, and philosopher. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School (D.D., 1838) and was ordained as a Unitarian minister. He served in various churches for four years but became increasingly convinced of Trinitarian Christological principles, and as a result, he entered the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1842. While serving as a priest in Sherburne, New York (1842-1850), he investigated many philosophical and theological categories pertinent to different cultural and chronological settings. He was able to consult sources in French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Syrian. In 1850, Wilson was appointed Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (renamed Hobart College in 1852). In 1868, he became Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Registrar at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In 1886, he retired as Emeritus Professor and became Dean of St. Andrew’s Divinity School in Syracuse, New York. He was known as a public lecturer and author of books on methods of mathematics instruction, on a study of practical and theoretical logic, theories of knowledge, the influence of language on thought, and the psychology of thought and action.

In 1846, he married Susan Whipple Trowbridge (1821–1890). He died on July 30, 1900, in Syracuse, New York.