Robert Merrihew Adams
| Robert Merrihew Adams | |
|---|---|
Robert Merrihew Adams
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| Born |
September 8, 1937 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Alma mater |
Princeton University Mansfield College, Oxford Princeton Theological Seminary Cornell University |
| Spouse(s) | Marilyn McCord Adams (m. 1966) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic |
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Main interests
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Metaphysics, Philosophy of religion, Ethics |
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Notable ideas
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Divine command theory |
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Influences
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Robert Merrihew Adams (born September 8, 1937), known to intimates as "Bob", is an American analytic philosopher of metaphysics, religion and morality.
Adams was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He taught for many years at UCLA before moving to Yale University in the early 1990s as the Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics. As chairman, he helped revive the philosophy department after its near-collapse due to personal and scholarly conflicts between analytical and Continental philosophers. Adams retired from Yale in 2004 and taught part-time at the University of Oxford in England, where he was a senior research fellow of Mansfield College. In 2009 he became a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Adams's wife, Marilyn McCord Adams, is also a philosopher, working on medieval philosophy and the philosophy of religion and was the Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford. In 2013 both became visiting research professors at Rutgers University, in conjunction with the founding of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion.
As a historical scholar, Adams has published on the work of the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Leibniz. His work in the philosophy of religion includes influential essays on the problem of evil and the relation between theism and ethics. In metaphysics, Adams defends actualism in metaphysics of modality and Platonism about nature of so-called possible worlds. He is a past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers. In 1999, he delivered the Gifford Lectures on "God and Being." He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.
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