Sir (Evan) Owen Williams

(b London, 20 March 1890; d Berkhamsted, Herts, 23 May 1969). English engineer and architect. He began his career as an apprentice engineer to the Metropolitan Electric Tramway Company in London in 1906. Through part-time study he gained a first-class honours degree in civil engineering from the University of London (1911) and became an associate member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in the same year. His life-long interest in reinforced-concrete design began in 1912 when he became an assistant engineer with the British subsidiary of the American concrete specialist firm, the Indented Bar and Concrete Engineering Company. Two years later he joined the Trussed Concrete Steel Company of England, another design firm with American origins. As Chief Estimator and Designer with this firm Williams was involved in the design of many standard concrete-framed factory buildings, including the Gramophone Company Factory (now the EMI Building), Hayes, Middx, which was designed in collaboration with the architect Arthur C. Blomfield (1863-1935). During World War I, between 1916 and 1919, he designed aircraft for the Wells Aviation Company and concrete ships for the Admiralty at Poole, where he headed a design and research team.

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Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen (1929-2003) English philosopher. Born in Essex, Williams was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and held Fellowships at All Souls and New College. He was professor of philosophy at Cambridge from 1967 to 1979 and Provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1979 to 1987, when he accepted a chair at Berkeley, returning to the chair of moral philosophy at Oxford in 1990. Williams was known for a subtle relativistic position in moral philosophy that rejected both Aristotelian and Kantian promises that virtue arises from the exercise of rational propensities in the mind. He also rejects expressive and projective theories, arguing instead that ethics cannot be what it seems to be, if it is based purely on contingent sentiments and passions. He argued influentially that Kantian ethics, and utilitarianism, impose an unnatural emphasis on purely impersonal concerns, ignoring the personal projects that necessarily occupy the foreground of people's practical lives (see also agent-centred morality, integrity, Stoicism, universalizability). Williams's principal books include Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993) and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). Collections of papers include Problems of the Self (1973) and Moral Luck (1981).