Miranda Giancarlo A.
, SMITH
May 1, 2022
Robert Merrihew Adams and the Theory of Actualism
Brief Biographical Sketch
R.M. Adams was born on September 8, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For
many years he was teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, before
transferring to Yale University in the early 1990s as the Clark Professor of Moral
Philosophy and Metaphysics. As chairman, he assisted in the revival of the philosophy
department from its dying down due to personal and scholarly conflicts between
analytical and Continental philosophers. In 2004, he retired from Yale and taught part-
time at the University of Oxford in England, where he was a senior research fellow at
Mansfield College. He became a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009.
He is the former president of the Society of Christian Philosophers. In 1999, he
presented 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. As a historical scholar, he wrote on the works of the philosophers
Søren Kierkegaard and G.W. Leibniz. His opus in the philosophy of religion includes
influential essays on the problem of evil and the relation between theism and ethics. In
metaphysics, he defends actualism in metaphysics of modality and Platonism about the
nature of so-called possible worlds.1
The Theory of Actualism
According to Adams, Actualism is the doctrine that there are no things that do not exist
in the actual world. It is all about actuality and its relation to possibility, rather than
about existence though issues concerning existence will be tackled inevitably to expand
even more the concepts of actuality and possibility. in explaining the theory of
actualism, Adams used this analogy:
(1) “p” implies “Actually p.”
(2) “p” implies “Possibly p.”
(3) “Actually p” implies “p.”
(4) “Possibly p” does not imply “p.”
(5) “Possibly p” implies “Actually possibly p.”
(6) “Actually p” implies “Possibly actually p.”
This is a primary formulation, of actualism. Its presentation of the “actually” operator
bears a striking analogy to a disquotational account of truth, which analyzes “It is true
that p” as equivalent to “p.” Indeed, there may be nothing to say that is true about what
actuality is that goes beyond what is said in (1) and (3): “Actually p” is equivalent to
“p.” And both “Actually p” and “p” imply “Possibly p,” but it does not imply them.
Actualism is not a non-trivial theory about what actuality is, but a thesis of the
ontological primacy of the actual.2
1
Newlands, Samuel, Jorgensen, Larry, Metaphysics and the Good Themes from the Philosophy of Robert
Merrihew Adams, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p.28
2
Adams, Robert Merrihew, What Is, and What Is in Itself A Systematic Ontology, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2021), p.25
The rise of modal metaphysics of the 1970s was due to the remarkable accomplishments
in modal logic. A major occasion of metaphysical theorizing was the progress of
“possible worlds semantics” for modal logic. The intuitive idea was that of infinitely
many possible worlds, each of them completely determinate (presumably in infinite
detail). Each of them, if temporally ordered, is a whole world history and not a
momentary phase of one. One and only one of them is the actual world. Based on the
primary intuitive idea, a proposition is possible if and only if it is true in at least one
possible world, and is necessary if and only if it is true in every possible world. It is
impossible if and only if it is true in no possible world. 3
The effectiveness of this idea for modal logicians was improved by adding to it a
relation of “accessibility” between possible worlds, by which one world may (or may
not!) be accessible from (that is, possible in) another. If (and only if) world 2 is accessible
from world 1, everything that is true in world 2 is possible in world 1. With this relation
of accessibility, it has been proven that we can improve different models for diverse
systems of modal logic that produce different answers to questions about inferential
relations among types of modal proposition. For instance, we will have a model for a
system of modal logic according to which if it is necessary that p, then it is necessary
that it is necessary that p, and another model for an even stronger system according to
which if it is possible that p, then it is necessary that it is possible that p.
“Possible worlds” are useful as models for modal logic. So long as we regard the “possible
worlds” only as models of formal logical relationships, we needn’t draw ontological
3
Newlands, Samuel, Jorgensen, Larry, Metaphysics and the Good Themes from the Philosophy of Robert
Merrihew Adams, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p.50
conclusions about them. Fictitious models will serve the logician’s purposes as well as
actually existing models, so long as their relevant structure is clear—and so long as the
logician’s purposes are not metaphysical.4
Conclusion
Actualism is not assessing the existence of a being. Rather, it is about the most probable
possibility of existence of a being. It is not easy then to prove something to be non-
existent when there is always the possibility of its existence. It gives new dimensions to
how things came to be and will be. The problem now is not anymore whether a kind of
being exists or not but of its possibility of coming into being. The Actuality of a being in
itself is a clear proof of the existence and its possibility of becoming.
4
Adams, Robert Merrihew, What Is, and What Is in Itself A Systematic Ontology, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2021), p.29