Robert Merrihew Adams

Who is Robert Merrihew Adams?

Robert Merrihew Adams, 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 revived 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.