George Plimpton Adams

Background

George Plimpton Adams was born on October 7, 1882, in Northborough, Massachusetts, United States. He was the sixth and youngest child and the second son of the Reverend Edwin Augustus Adams and Caroline Plimpton Adams.

Education

George Plimpton Adams prepared for college at the Lewis Institute in Chicago. Later he entered Harvard University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1904 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1912. In 1954, Adams received a Doctorate of Laws degree from the University of California.

Career

George Plimpton Adams started his career as an instructor of Biology at Lewis Institute in 1903. In 1906 he became an instructor in Psychology and Biology there. In 1908, Adams left Lewis Institute and took up a post of an instructor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1909, he was appointed an assistant professor and in 1912 he became an associate professor. Adams became a full professor in 1918. He held this post until 1932 when he became Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. Adams held this position until his retirement in 1954. He also served as Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley from 1917 to 1918 and from 1943 to 1947.

George Plimpton Adams published his first book The Mystical Element in Hegel's Early Theological Writings in 1910. Later he wrote such books as Idealism and the modern age and Competitive Economic Systems. Adams also served as one of the editors of the University of California Publications in Philosophy and also of the scholarly periodical, Ethics, published at the University of Chicago. He was a co-editor of Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, 2 vols., 1930.

Achievements

• George Plimpton Adams was an American philosopher, educator and writer who was famous for his book The Mystical Element in Hegel's Early Theological Writings. His influence felt through more than fifty years in the development of philosophical thought.
  
  As a member of the faculty of the University of California, Adams helped to develop strong faculties in many fields of study. As a member of important Senate Committees and as twice Dean of the College of Letters and Science George Plimpton Adams was a leader in establishing wise and fair educational policies. During the depression of 1929-1933, he was one of those who established the policy of graduated salary cuts for all, as against the common practice of dismissing non-tenure faculty members.
  
  

Works

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  • The Mystical Element in Hegel's Early Theological Writings 1910
  • Idealism and the Modern Age 1919

Views

George Plimpton Adams said that philosophers faced a basic paradox: the issues which they do and ought to address are precisely those issues which lie outside the domain of what can be known and under­stood. If philosophy is not to be abandoned or end in irrationalism, he urged, philosophers must accept what many idealists of Adams’s time denied, that reality cannot be simply equated with experience. The alter­natives are naturalism and idealism, which Adams urged permitted a wider framework of interpretation, allowing as wide a range of characteristics as are necessary for intelligibility. Reality is thus made up of essentially logical characteristics. Adams insisted, however, that this does not necessarily imply the kind of unity characteristics of absolute idealism.

Adams was responding to the American realists and pragmatists who attacked the idealism of Josiah Royce. In the essentially pluralist atmosphere which developed, Adams sought to explain why philosophy must necessarily involve a process of constant criticism and why its aim was not to propound final doctrines but to critically aware of the human situation. The nature of philosophy became his main interest.

Membership

George Plimpton Adams was a member of the American Philosophical Association.

Connections

George Plimpton Adams married Mary Knowles Woodle in 1908. The marriage produced three children.

Father:

Reverend Edwin Augustus Adams

Mother:

Caroline Plimpton Adams

Wife:

Mary Knowles Woodle

Son:

John Edwin Adams

Son:

George Plimpton Adams

Daughter:

Cornelia Sheldon Adams

References

• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy – from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
  1996