After her undergraduate education at the University of Illinois, Professor Adams earned a PhD in philosophy in 1967 from Cornell University and became professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, where for twenty-one years she taught medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion. During this time she also earned two Masters in Theology, in 1984 and 1985, from Princeton Theological Seminary, was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1986, and served in various parishes in the Los Angeles area.
She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1989-90), the American Council of Learned Societies (1989-90), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1974-75).
Professor Adams’s distinguished record of publications includes, besides translations and edited works, her two-volume study, William Ockham (1987), and her book, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God forthcoming from Cornel University Press.
Among her many articles, chapters in books, and articles for encyclopedias, some of the most recent titles include: “Ockham on Final Causality: Muddying the Waters,” Franciscan Studies (1998); “Final Causality and Explanation in Scotus’ De Primo Principio” in Nature in Medieval European Thought (1998); “Reviving Philosophical Theology: Some Medieval Models,” in Miscellanea Mediaevalia (1998); “Chalcedonian Christology: A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil,” in Philosophy and Theological Discourse (1997); “Scotus and Ockham on the Connection of the Virtues,” in John Duns Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics (1996); “Satisfying Mercy: Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo Reconsidered,” Modern Schoolman (1995); “Duns Scotus on the Will as Rational Potency,” in Via Scoti: Methodologica ad mentem Joannis Duns Scoti (1995); “Praying the Proslogion,” in The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith (1995); and “Memory and Intuition: A Focal Debate in Fourteenth Century Cognitive Psychology: Introduction, Edition, and Translation of Scotus’ Ordinatio IV, d. 45, q.3,” Franciscan Studies 53 (1993).