This monograph was not authored in two, five, or even ten years. Its depth and breadth reflect half a century of meditating on historical texts in their original languages, weighing arguments across several subdisciplines, and systematizing the author’s groundbreaking contributions.
In a preface to the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes compares philosophy to a tree. Its roots are neither epistemology nor the philosophy of language but rather metaphysics. In What Is, and What Is in Itself, Robert Merrihew Adams turns to these roots. He also returns to them—they were his own. The monograph serves as a bookend to a distinguished philosophical career that began where philosophy of religion meets metaphysical inquiry. But it does not simply compile past articles like an album of classic hits. In fact, only a single chapter closely approximates a previously published article. Chapter 6 repurposes one of Adams’s (2007) more important but lesser-known articles...