Mortimer J. Adler | |
|---|---|
 Adler while presiding over the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas | |
| Born | Mortimer Jerome Adler (1902-12-28)December 28, 1902 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | June 28, 2001(2001-06-28) (aged 98) San Mateo, California, U.S. |
| Spouses | |
| Education | |
| Education | Columbia University (PhD) |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Main interests | Philosophical theology,metaphysics, ethics |
| Notable works | Aristotle for Everybody,How to Read a Book,A Syntopicon |
Mortimer Jerome Adler (/ˈædlər/; December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was anAmerican philosopher, educator,encyclopedist, popular author andlay theologian. As a philosopher he worked within theAristotelian andThomistic traditions. He taught atColumbia University and theUniversity of Chicago, served as chairman of theEncyclopædia Britannica board of editors, and founded the Institute for Philosophical Research.
He lived for long stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, andSan Mateo, California.[1]
While doing newspaper work and taking night classes during his adolescence, Adler encountered works of men he would come to call heroes:Plato,Aristotle,Thomas Aquinas,John Locke,John Stuart Mill, and others, who "were assailed as irrelevant bystudent activists in the 1960s and subjected to 'politically correct' attack in later decades."[2] His thought evolved toward the correction of what he considered "philosophical mistakes", as reflected in his 1985 bookTen Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought.[3] In Adler's view, these errors were introduced byDescartes on the continent and by Thomas Hobbes andDavid Hume in Britain, and were caused by a "culpable ignorance" about Aristotle by those who rejected the conclusions of dogmatic philosophy without acknowledging its sound classical premises. These modern errors were compounded and perpetuated, according to Adler, byKant and theidealists andexistentialists on the one side, and byJohn Stuart Mill,Jeremy Bentham, andBertrand Russell and the Englishanalytic tradition on the other. Adler held that he corrected these mistakes with reference to insights and distinctions drawn from theAristotelian tradition.
Adler was born inManhattan, New York City, on December 28, 1902, to Jewish immigrants from Germany: Clarissa (Manheim), a schoolteacher, and Ignatz Adler, a jewelry salesman.[4][5] He dropped out of school at age 14 to become acopy boy forThe New York Sun, with the ultimate aspiration of becoming a journalist.[6] Adler soon returned to school to take writing classes at night, where he discovered thewestern philosophical tradition. After his early schooling and work, he went on to study atColumbia University and contributed to the student literary magazine,The Morningside, a poem "Choice" (in 1922 when Charles A. Wagner[7] was editor-in-chief andWhittaker Chambers an associate editor).[8] Though he refused to take the required swimming test for a bachelor's degree (a matter that was rectified when Columbia gave him an honorary degree in 1983), he stayed at the university and eventually received an instructorship and finally a doctorate inpsychology.[9] While at Columbia University, Adler wrote his first book:Dialectic, published in 1927.[10]
Adler worked withScott Buchanan at thePeople's Institute and then for many years on their respectiveGreat Books efforts. (Buchanan was the founder of the Great Books program atSt. John's College).[11]
In 1930,Robert Hutchins, the newly appointed president of theUniversity of Chicago, whom Adler had befriended some years earlier, arranged forChicago's law school to hire him as a professor of thephilosophy of law. The philosophers at Chicago (who includedJames H. Tufts,E. A. Burtt, andGeorge H. Mead) had "entertained grave doubts as to Dr. Adler's competence in the field [of philosophy]"[12] and resisted Adler's appointment to the university's Department of Philosophy.[13][14] Adler was the first "non-lawyer" to join the law school faculty.[15] After the Great Books seminar inspired Chicago businessman and university trusteeWalter Paepcke to found theAspen Institute, Adler taught philosophy to business executives there.[10][16]
Adler long strove to bring philosophy tothe masses, and some of his works (such asHow to Read a Book) became popular bestsellers. He was also an advocate ofeconomic democracy and wrote an influential preface toLouis O. Kelso'sThe Capitalist Manifesto.[17] Adler was often aided in his thinking and writing by Arthur Rubin, an old friend from his Columbia undergraduate days. In his own words:
Unlike many of my contemporaries, I never write books for my fellow professors to read. I have no interest in the academic audience at all. I'm interested in Joe Doakes. A general audience can read any book I write – and they do.
Dwight Macdonald once criticized Adler's popular style by saying "Mr. Adler once wrote a book calledHow to Read a Book. He should now read a book calledHow to Write a Book."[18]
Adler and Hutchins went on to found theGreat Books of the Western World program and theGreat Books Foundation. In 1952, Adler founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research. He also served on the Board of Editors ofEncyclopædia Britannica, compiled itsSyntopicon and laterPropaedia, and succeeded Hutchins as its chairman from 1974. As the director of editorial planning for the fifteenth edition ofBritannica from 1965, he was instrumental in the major reorganization of knowledge embodied in that edition.[19] He introduced thePaideia Proposal which resulted in his founding the Paideia Program, a grade school curriculum centered around guided reading and discussion of difficult works (as judged for each grade). With Max Weismann, he founded the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas in 1990 in Chicago.
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in theUnited States in 1952, byEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present thegreat books in 54 volumes.
The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series drawn fromWestern Civilization: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read repeatedly with respect toliberal education; and it must be a part of "thegreat conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 "Great Ideas" as identified by the editor of the series's comprehensive index, theSyntopicon, to which they belonged. The books were chosen not on the basis of ethnic and cultural inclusiveness (historical influence being seen as sufficient for inclusion), nor on whether the editors agreed with the authors' views.[20]
A second edition was published in 1990, in 60 volumes. Some translations were updated; some works were removed; and there were additions from the 20th century, in six new volumes.Adler was born into anonobservant Jewish family. In his early twenties, he discoveredSt. Thomas Aquinas, and in particular theSumma Theologica.[21] Many years later, he wrote that its "intellectual austerity, integrity, precision and brilliance ... put the study of theology highest among all of my philosophical interests."[22] An enthusiasticThomist, he was a frequent contributor to Catholic philosophical and educational journals, as well as a frequent speaker at Catholic institutions, so much so that some assumed he was a convert to Catholicism. But that was reserved for later.[21]
In 1940,James T. Farrell called Adler "the leading Americanfellow-traveller of the Roman Catholic Church." What was true for Adler, Farrell said, was what was "postulated in the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church," and he "sang the same tune" as avowed Catholic philosophers likeÉtienne Gilson,Jacques Maritain, andMartin D'Arcy. He also greatly admiredHenri Bergson, the French Jewish philosopher and Nobel laureate, whose books the Catholic church had indexed as prohibited. Bergson refused to convert during the collaborationist Vichy regime, and despite theStatute on Jews he instead restated his previous views and was thus stripped of all his previous posts and honors.[21] Farrell attributed Adler's delay in joining the Church to his being among those Christians who "wanted their cake and ... wanted to eat it too" and compared him to the EmperorConstantine, who waited until he was on his deathbed to formally become a Catholic.[23]
Adler took a long time to make up his mind abouttheological issues. When he wroteHow to Think About God: A Guide for the Twentieth-Century Pagan in 1980, he claimed to consider himself thepagan of the book's subtitle. In volume 51 of theMars Hill Audio Journal (2001), Ken Myers includes his 1980 interview with Adler, conducted afterHow to Think About God was published. Myers reminisces, "During that interview, I asked him why he had never embraced the Christian faith himself. He explained that while he had been profoundly influenced by a number of Christian thinkers during his life, ... there were moral – not intellectual – obstacles to his conversion. He didn't explain any further."[24]
Myers notes that Adler finally "surrendered to theHound of Heaven" and "made a confession of faith and wasbaptized" as anEpiscopalian in 1984, only a few years after that interview. Offering insight into Adler's conversion, Myers quotes him from a subsequent 1990 article inChristianity magazine: "My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy."[24]
According to his friendDeal Hudson, Adler "had been attracted to Catholicism for many years" and "wanted to be a Roman Catholic, but issues like abortion and the resistance of his family and friends" kept him away. Many thought he was baptized as an Episcopalian rather than a Catholic solely because of his "wonderful – and ardently Episcopal – wife" Caroline. Hudson suggests it is no coincidence that it was only after her death in 1998 that he took the final step.[25] In December 1999, in San Mateo, where he had moved to spend his last years, Adler was formally received into the Catholic Church by a long-time friend and admirer, BishopPierre DuMaine.[21] "Finally," wrote another friend,Ralph McInerny, "he became the Roman Catholic he had been training to be all his life".[6]
Despite not being a Catholic for most of his life, on account of his lifelong participation in theNeo-Thomist movement[24] and his almost equally long membership in theAmerican Catholic Philosophical Association, this latter, according to McInerny[6] is willing to consider Adler "a Catholic philosopher".
Adler referred toAristotle'sNicomachean Ethics as the "ethics ofcommon sense" and also as "the only moral philosophy that is sound, practical, and undogmatic."[26] Thus, it is the only ethical doctrine that answers all the questions that moral philosophy should and can attempt to answer, neither more nor less, and that has answers that are true by the standard of truth that is appropriate and applicable tonormative judgments. In contrast, Adler believed that other theories or doctrines try to answer more questions than they can or fewer than they should, and their answers are mixtures of truth and error, particularly the moral philosophy ofImmanuel Kant.
Adler was a self-proclaimed "moderatedualist" and viewed the positions ofpsychophysicaldualism andmaterialisticmonism to be opposite sides of two extremes. Regarding dualism, he dismissed the extreme form ofdualism that stemmed from such philosophers asPlato (body andsoul) andDescartes (mind and matter), as well as the theory of extrememonism and themind–brain identity theory. After eliminating the extremes, Adler subscribed to a more moderate form of dualism. He believed that the brain is only anecessary, but not asufficient, condition for conceptual thought; that an "immaterial intellect" is also requisite as a condition;[27] and that the difference between human and animal behavior is a radical difference in kind. Adler defended this position against many challenges to dualistic theories.
The meanings of "freedom" and "free will" have been and are under debate, and the debate is confused because there is no generally accepted definition of either term.[28][29][30] Adler's "Institute for Philosophical Research" spent ten years studying the "idea of freedom" as the word was used by hundreds of authors who have discussed and disputed freedom.[31] The study was published in 1958 as Volume One ofThe Idea of Freedom, subtitledA Dialectical Examination of the Idea of Freedom with subsequent comments inAdler's Philosophical Dictionary. Adler's study concluded that a delineation of three kinds of freedom – circumstantial, natural, and acquired – is necessary for clarity on the subject.[32][33]
As Adler's interest in religion and theology increased, he made references to the Bible and the need to test articles of faith for compatibility with the conclusions of the science of nature and of philosophers.[34] In his 1981 bookHow to Think About God, Adler attempts to demonstrate God as theexnihilator (the creator of something from nothing).[2] Adler stressed that even with this conclusion,God's existence cannot be proven or demonstrated, but only established as truebeyond a reasonable doubt. However, in a recent re-review of the argument, John Cramer concluded that recent developments incosmology appear to converge with and support Adler's argument, and that in light of such theories as themultiverse, the argument is no worse for wear and may, indeed, now be judged somewhat more probable than it was originally.[35]
Adler believed that, if theology and religion are living things, there is nothing intrinsically wrong about efforts to modernize them. They must be open to change and growth like everything else. Furthermore, there is no reason to be surprised when discussions such as those about the "death of God" – a concept drawn fromFriedrich Nietzsche – stir popular excitement as they did in the recent past and could do so again today. According to Adler, of all the great ideas, the idea of God has always been and continues to be the one that evokes the greatest concern among the widest group of men and women. However, he was opposed to the idea of convertingatheism into a new form of religion or theology.
Mortimer Adler was married twice and had four children.[36] He married Helen Boynton in 1927. Together they adopted two children, Mark and Michael, in 1938 and 1940, respectively. They divorced in 1960. In 1963, Adler married Caroline Pring, his junior by thirty-four years; they had two children, Douglas and Philip.[37][38][39][40]
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)The Great Ideas Program is a ten volume companion toGreat Books of the Western World. [...] This set was published between 1959 and 1963 due to demand for an organized program of reading that was lacking in theGreat Books set itself. [...] The editors prepared this set "to provide a way into theGreat Books for readers who would like help in their first reading of them." Each volume contains fifteen readings that are designed to take a typical adult approximately two weeks to read, understand, and contemplate. Introductory material is provided for each reading and elements that might pose difficulties are highlighted. This material does not attempt to "spoon feed" the reader but does provide useful information to get started. [...] Each reading is supposed to account for two weeks since the goal is not to speed read these selections but to reallyread them, perhaps more than once, and then to write about them using prompts that the editors provide.
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