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[2] after its near-collapse due to personal and scholarly conflicts between analytical and Continental philosophers.[3] 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.
"Must God Create the Best?", Philosophical Review, LXXXI 317-332. 1972. Reprinted in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essay in Philosophical Theology below.
"A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness" in Religion and Morality: A Collection of Essays. eds. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder. New York: Doubleday. Reprinted in The Virtue of Faith.
"Theories of Actuality", Noûs, VIII 211-231. 1974.
"Motive Utilitarianism", Journal of Philosophy, LXXIII 467-481. 1976.
"Primitive Thisness and Primitive Identity", Journal of Philosophy, LXXVI 5-26. 1979.
"Actualism and Thisness", Synthèse, XLIX 3-41. 1981.
"Time and Thisness", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XI 315-329. 1986.
The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press. 1987.