Mortimer J. Adler

Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author.

As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions.

He taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, served as chairman of the Encyclopædia Britannica board of editors, and founded the Institute for Philosophical Research.

He lived for long stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California.

Adler was born in Manhattan, New York City, on December 28, 1902, to Jewish immigrants from Germany: Clarissa (Manheim), a schoolteacher, and Ignatz Adler, a jewelry salesman.

He dropped out of school at age 14 to become a copy boy for the New York Sun, with the ultimate aspiration of becoming a journalist.

Adler soon returned to school to take writing classes at night, where he discovered the western philosophical tradition.

After his early schooling and work, he went on to study at Columbia University and contributed to the student literary magazine, The Morningside, a poem "Choice" (in 1922 when Charles A. Wagner was editor-in-chief and Whittaker Chambers an associate editor).

While at Columbia University, Adler wrote his first book: Dialectic, published in 1927.

Adler worked with Scott Buchanan at the People's Institute and then for many years on their respective Great Books efforts.

(Buchanan was the founder of the Great Books program at St. John's College).

In 1930, Robert Hutchins, the newly appointed president of the University of Chicago, whom Adler had befriended some years earlier, arranged for Chicago's law school to hire him as a professor of the philosophy of law.

The philosophers at Chicago (who included James H. Tufts, E. A. Burtt, and George H. Mead) had "entertained grave doubts as to Dr. Adler's competence in the field [of philosophy]" and resisted Adler's appointment to the university's Department of Philosophy.

Adler was the first "non-lawyer" to join the law school faculty.

After the Great Books seminar inspired Chicago businessman and university trustee Walter Paepcke to found the Aspen Institute, Adler taught philosophy to business executives there.

Adler long strove to bring philosophy to the masses, and some of his works (such as How to Read a Book) became popular bestsellers.

He was also an advocate of economic democracy and wrote an influential preface to Louis O. Kelso's The Capitalist Manifesto.

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 called How to Read a Book. He should now read a book called How to Write a Book."

Adler and Hutchins went on to found the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation.

In 1940, James T. Farrell called Adler "the leading American fellow-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 like Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Martin D'Arcy.

In 1952, Adler founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research.

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 by student activists in the 1960s and subjected to 'politically correct' attack in later decades."

As the director of editorial planning for the fifteenth edition of Britannica from 1965, he was instrumental in the major reorganization of knowledge embodied in that edition.

He introduced the Paideia 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).

He also served on the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, compiled its Syntopicon and later Propaedia, and succeeded Hutchins as its chairman from 1974.

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 in psychology.

His thought evolved toward the correction of what he considered "philosophical mistakes", as reflected in his 1985 book Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought.

In Adler's view, these errors were introduced by Descartes on the continent and by Thomas Hobbes and David 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, by Kant and the idealists and existentialists on the one side, and by John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Bertrand Russell and the English analytic tradition on the other.

Adler held that he corrected these mistakes with reference to insights and distinctions drawn from the Aristotelian tradition.

With Max Weismann, he founded the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas in 1990 in Chicago.

Adler was born into a nonobservant Jewish family.

In his early twenties, he discovered St. Thomas Aquinas, and in particular the Summa Theologica.

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."

An enthusiastic Thomist, 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.