Robert Adams

"Conflict, Morality, and Democracy"

Friday, April 27, 2007
3:30 p.m.
347 University Hall, 230 N. Oval Mall

Co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy

Robert Adams is a professor of philosophy specializing in metaphysics, religion and morality.  He taught for many years at the University of California-Los Angeles before moving to Yale University in the early 1990s, where he chaired the department. He is now a visiting professor at Oxford University, where he is a fellow of Mansfield College.

Adams’s work has focused largely on theological responses to the problem of evil in religious philosophy. As a historical scholar, Adams has focused on the work of Søren Kierkegaard and is a respected Leibniz scholar.

Adams’s books include The Virtue of Faith (Oxford, 1987), Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford, 1994), and Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford, 1999).

His most important articles include “Theories of Actuality” (Noûs 1974), “Motive Utilitarianism” (Journal of Philosophy, 1976), “Primitive Thisness and Primitive Identity” (Journal of Philosophy, 1979), “Actualism and Thisness” (Synthèse, 1983), “Time and Thisness” (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1986), “Involuntary Sins” (Philosophical Review, 1985), “Divine Commands and the Social Nature of Obligation” (Faith and Philosophy, 1987), “The Knight of Faith” (Faith and Philosophy, 1990), “Moral Faith” (Journal of Philosophy, 1995), and “Things in Themselves” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1997).

Adams is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Robert Adams
Visiting Professor of Philosophy
Oxford University