Henry Horace Williams

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Henry Horace Williams (1858-1940) was a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1890 to 1940. From 1921 to 1935 he was a Kenan Professor of philosophy at UNC, and from 1936-1940 he was a Professor Emeritus. After being invited to teach at UNC, he became the first chair of the Mental and Moral Sciences Department, which is today better known as the Department of Philosophy.

His many interests were varied, yet his especial focus was logic and its humanistic aspects and evolution. He was an owner of the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill, NC, where The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill is headquartered, beginning in 1897. Horace passed away in 1940 - nearing death, Horace donated his home and outlying properties to UNC's Philosophy Department. This outlying property eventually became the well-known Horace Williams Airport in Chapel Hill.


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[edit] Biography

Prof. Henry Horace Williams (HHW) was born in 1858 in Gates County, North Carolina. He was born to a farming family - his father was a country doctor who did not attend college. Horace, fortunately, attended the Academy in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, where he had "an intellectual conversion which determined the direction of his whole future life" (Origin of Belief, p.196). He went on to attend UNC in 1879, and he later he attended Yale Divinity School, where he achieved his B.D. degree in 1888. He went on to teach challenging philosophy courses at Harvard (which had a far freer environment than other institutions during this period) and was known as a notably tough grader, consistently asking labyrinthine philosophical questions.

Horace was quite well known as a community stand out in Chapel Hill and in other locales. Robert Watson Winston, well aware of the professor's iconoclastic nature, went as far as to pen a book called, Horace Williams: Gadfly of Chapel Hill.

"While he was a student in the Yale Divinity School he was not infrequently called before the committee, not for any fault in his conduct but because he openly questioned, even rejected, some of the statements of his orthodox professors... The only authority which he recognized as final was the authority of truth."
-Origin of Belief, p.196

Notable students:

[edit] Published works

  • The Evolution of Logic (1925)
  • Modern Logic (1927)
  • The Education of Horace Williams (1936)
  • The Good Teacher (1945)
  • Logic for Living (1951)
  • The Origin of Belief (1978)

[edit] References

  • The Origin of Belief, p. 195-203
  • The Evolution of Logic, IX-X, p.1-2

[edit] External links