Henry Horace Williams (1858–1940) was a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1890 to 1940.

Williams was born in 1858 in Gates County, North Carolina to a farming family; his father was a country doctor who did not attend college.

Williams 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).

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...

Robert Watson Winston wrote a book called Horace Williams: Gadfly of Chapel Hill.