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In Memoriam: Robert M. Adams (1937-2024)

Brian Leiter

Professor Adams, a leading contributor to metaphysics, the study of early modern philosophy (esp. Leibniz), philosophy of religion and ethics, did graduate work at Cornell, taught briefly at Michigan, and then spent most of his career at UCLA, before taking over the Department of Philosophy at Yale, then in receivership, circa 1992.  He retired from Yale in 2004, and taught at Oxford where his wife, the philosopher and medievalist, Marilyn McCord Adams, had taken up a position.  After Oxford, he spent time in the departments at North Carolina/Chapel Hill and Rutgers.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Adams or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work in any of the many areas he wrote in.

(As a rookie job seeker in 1992-93, I had an Eastern APA interview with UCLA.  Robert Adams was in the room, and his poker face in response to my answers to questions was unforgettable–whether the answers were good or not so good, his expression did not change!  I'll never forget it!)

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11 responses to “In Memoriam: Robert M. Adams (1937-2024)”

  1. Gordon Barnes

    In the fall of 1992, I went to Yale Divinity School to study philosophy of religion. One year later, Robert Adams came to Yale, and I took seminars with him in metaethics and philosophy of religion. To me, he was everything I had hoped a philosopher would be. He was thoughtful, creative, and open-minded. He had his own views, but he was happy to entertain almost any idea, just to see where it led. My favorite memory of him is from one year later. I was then a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and I went to a conference at Notre Dame, where David Lewis and Robert Adams had a wonderful debate about qualia. During a break between sessions, Robert Adams saw me from across the lobby, and he walked all the way across the lobby to ask me how I was doing. That's the kind of person he was. I think that two of the best arguments for theism were given their best defense, ever, by Robert Adams: the argument from consciousness, which he defends in "Flavors, Colors, and God," and a practical version of a moral argument for theistic belief, which he defends in part 2 of "Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief." I am no longer persuaded by those arguments, but I still think that they are exemplars of great philosophy. Finally, I think that Adams gave the best statement of the kernel of truth in G. E. Moore's Open Question Argument. In Finite and Infinite Goods, he put it this way:
    “…the critical stance is part of the general intentional framework in which we use evaluative and normative terms, at least where morality and excellence are concerned, and thus affects the semantically indicated role of such terms. The stance amounts to at least this. For any natural, empirically identifiable property or type of action that we or others may regard as good or bad, right or wrong, we are committed to leave it always open in principle to raise evaluative or normative questions by asking whether that property or action-type is really good or right, or to issue an evaluative or normative challenge by denying that it is really good or right. This is my version of ‘the truth behind’ G. E. Moore’s famous ‘open question’ argument.”

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  2. V. Alan White

    I worked only briefly with Bob–his insistence on using the familiar in email–with regard to his late wife's very last publication in an anthology I was co-editing. He was generous in comments and wonderfully cooperative in offering recollections in his bio of Marilyn, and I am proud to have some small role in her last publication largely thanks to his generosity. I have that small privilege to say that I knew him beyond just admiring his works in print, and could feel his grace even through this paltry electronic medium.

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  3. James C. Klagge

    I never took any courses from him at UCLA, but I went to him for life advice once, and he actually offered advice and it turned out to be good advice. RIP.

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  4. Alan Nelson

    Bob was an avid birdwatcher (among other things, of course). When I interviewed for my first job at UCLA, we spent a morning together birding hardly discussing philosophy at all. After that, it was all philosophy all the time!

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  5. Michael Otsuka

    When I was an assistant professor at UCLA during the 90s, the quality of the Q&A following colloquium talks was extraordinary. The three who most stood out were David Kaplan, Rogers Albritton, and Robert Adams. Though less memorable than the legendary interventions of Kaplan and Albritton because they didn’t involve their wit and theatricality, Adams’s were just as incisive, insightful, and devastating.

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  6. Greg Welty

    I was privileged to have Robert Adams as a philosophy professor at UCLA, for both philosophy of religion, and history of modern philosophy. Very clear and organized lecturer, meticulous handouts, good with questions, an almost obsessive focus on primary sources. I learned a tremendous amount from him.

    One anecdote: I took medieval philosophy from his wife, Marilyn Adams, who was a tour de force in her own right (sadly now having passed away several years ago). When she would get to Anselm, she would have her husband come in and lecture on the ontological argument. The handout was filled with diamonds, boxes, backward E’s and upside down A’s, which we undergrads were still coming to grips with in our symbolic logic classes. His command of the material was impressive, particularly on the differences between the different versions of Anselm’s argument, and one of the students exclaimed, “This is really quite a lot of material!”. To which Robert deadpanned: “Well, I have been studying this argument for over thirty years…” Everyone laughed.

    After I graduated, they left UCLA for Yale. I believe he was hired to head up the dept., because the dept. there had fallen apart a little because the continental and analytics weren’t talking to each other. (Just a rumor; what do I know?) Later, Marilyn went to Christ Church, Oxford, and Robert arrived later. I almost had him as my external examiner on my DPhil, but he was on vacation in Australia at the time. I remember him presenting at the Joseph Butler Society at Oriel College, Oxford, on Kant’s pre-critical argument for God.

    Robert and Marilyn were quite a duo at UCLA, and stuck out among several other stars: Tyler Burge, Keith Donnellan, Kit Fine, Rogers Albritton, David Pears, Seana Shiffrin, Michael Otsuka. Students were always waiting in line at Marilyn’s door, just for a chance to talk about an issue. Back in the early 1990’s, she made an extraordinary multi-volume contribution on William of Ockham. I benefited a lot from Robert’s The Virtue of Faith (a collection of his essays), and he went on to write outstanding monographs on Leibniz, and on metaphysical issues underlying ethics. Happily, a year or two before she died, I was able to tell Marilyn, at a conference at Purdue University, how much impact she had on my intellectual formation. I am sad that I didn’t take any similar opportunities before Robert passed. I’d say both of them were the most impactful of my professors there.

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  7. Dean Zimmerman

    Bob was remarkable for his combination of analytic insight and deep historical understanding. He was also a kind and generous teacher and mentor.

    Like Brian, I have an Eastern APA interview story, from 1991. Bob and Marilyn were the entire interview team. I had met her once or twice, but I knew Bob pretty well by then — he had taught me in two seminars at Yale Seminary in the late 1980s (where he visited one semester, and I drove down from Brown to take them; Yale and Brown had a reciprocal arrangement). The interview was very formal and proper, and consisted of the two of them simply demolishing my half-baked ideas about free will and agent causation. My advisor, Rod Chisholm, thought my project sounded okay, but I hadn't really worked out the details properly or written much more than a four-page proposal. Jaegwon Kim had given me a mock interview which convinced me I had no business going on the job market; I was only in my fourth year, I didn't have control over my thesis, I was really jumping the gun; but by then it was too late, I had a couple of interviews. After Bob and Marilyn showed me that agent causation wasn't going to do any of the things I had hoped it would do, and I just sat there in silence for what felt like minutes. Then I excused myself, and knew I was going to have to scrap that project entirely. I wrote a dissertation on mereological essentialism instead. I'm sure Rod and Jaegwon and Jim Van Cleve would have eventually convinced me that I had nothing new to say about agent causation, but Bob and Marilyn saved from even attempting to write on the topic!

    Bob was his same, scholarly self for the three years he taught at Rutgers, almost 30 years later (he and Marilyn helped inaugurate our Center for Philosophy of Religion); and another group of young grad students benefited from his criticisms and his kindness. He was serious about philosophy, serious about faith, but cheerfulness and humor were always just below the surface.

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  8. Tad Brennan

    I was one of Bob’s junior colleagues for a few years at Yale, and I gradually came to view him with an admiration that bordered on reverence. He was philosophically accomplished in every area of philosophy, and quick to learn anything new. His knowledge of history — both the history of philosophy and theology — was formidable. His articles were widely anthologized, and his books on virtue and the nature of goods are in my opinion classics.
    I also admired the way that he had supported and facilitated his wife Marilyn’s career at every turn — I consulted her Cornell dissertation on Boethius this last year, and found her expression of thanks to him in the preface. Their long partnership was productive for both of them, leading to her being the first American and the first woman to hold the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford. The legal and intellectual equality of women was one of Bob’s central values, and as with all of his values, he lived in full accordance with it.
    What I most admired about him was a kind of seriousness of purpose in doing philosophy, an unironic commitment to the value of the enterprise, that inspired everyone around him with the desire to do better. His presence was uplifting; it was harder to think low or ignoble thoughts around him. I did not have much in common with him, being neither a theist, an idealist, or even a birder, but I thought he was a good man as well as a great one. I feel lucky to have known him.

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  9. Thomas Carson

    Dean Zimmerman wrote “Bob was remarkable for his combination of analytic insight and deep historical understanding.” I agree and would add that he was all the more remarkable because his work was extremely ambitious and broad in its scope. He was a systematic philosopher in an older, grander tradition of philosophy. I'm most familiar with his work in ethics and his books Finite and Infinite Goods and A Theory of Virtue. In those books, he proposes a theory of good and bad, a theory of moral obligation, and a theory of virtue (a theory about what it is to be a morally good person). These are remarkable books that are worthy of careful study. I learned a great deal from teaching them.

    In his “Philosophical Autobiography” Adams said that he thought none of his writings were “more significant than” his work on the divine command theory and theistic ethics.
    Bob was one of the very best philosophers of his era.

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  10. Todd Buras

    Former student, here, with a remembrance and a quote.

    My first decade in the profession I taught an intro course contrasting naturalistic and theistic perspectives on a variety of topics. Along the way, I discovered a unifying theme for the course–very roughly: the problem of evil is to theism as the problem of consciousness is to naturalism. I was delighted by the coherence the theme brought to the course, and went looking for the perfect reading to bring the idea into focus for my students. I was gobsmacked to find the idea, almost verbatim, in a side comment of Bob's essay, "Flavors, Colors, and God." I had spent several years rediscovering an idea his essay had planted in my head without me even noticing! The surprise was not that Bob was so many steps ahead of me; I expected that. The surprise was how profoundly and subtly he shaped my thinking, and how much I owe him.

    Here is the quote that came to mind on the occasion of his passing; it is quintessential Bob: "Saints are people in whom the holy or divine can be seen. In a religious view they are people who submit themselves, in faith, to God, not only loving Him but also letting His love possess them, so that it works through them and shines through them to other people." Robert Adams, "Saints," Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984): 398.

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  11. Derk Pereboom

    Here is the obituary for Bob: https://www.matherhodge.com/obituaries/Robert-Adams?obId=31268485

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