Talk:Mortimer J. Adler

Needs Criticism
Adler's opinions are offered as fact, and we can wholly reject his proof of God. The article needs rewriting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.103.104.48 (talk) 08:53, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

God Section
Is it just me, or does this section contain absolutely no reference to a criticism or an opposing point of view, even though there is a reference supporting his argument? Hardly balanced, since I'm sure there are definitely an abundance of criticisms of his argument and even I can think of a dozen holes in his logic just reading it tentatively for the first time. I'm going to go find some sources! 21:58, 11 November 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.62.161.251 (talk)

Initial discussions
Religion in Modern Times section is plagiarized, strangely enough, from Adler's own essay cited at the bottom of the page. Is someone going to edit that section? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.23.143.155 (talk) 17:27, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Thank you to the person who made the decision to remove the quote regarding black writers, for which no source was given. I also seriously doubt that Adler ever made such a statement. Now, it is possible that he said black writers had never written any "Great Books", but that one word, from "good" to "great", makes a huge difference where Adler was concerned. It must be understood that he had a very specific and technical definition of a "Great Book" that excludes 99.99999% of everything that has ever been written. Please see the following link for Adler's own comments on this issue: http://books.mirror.org/gb.sel1990.html.


 * For my comment on this, see the section below titled The "[blacks] didn't write any good books" Quote. Isokrates 15:14, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

I've seen this same article around the internet, and always there is no source given for the quote regarding black writers, "they've never written any good books". I doubt this quote is genuine without documentation. Adler was editor of the Great Ideas Today, which did include Black authors. In another instance, Adler was widley reported as once saying "we must abolish the United States". He never said such a thing, and the "quote" was from the notorius John Birch Society. So can someone find a source for this quote before putting it back in? PBTim

It is highly unlikely Mortimer Adler would have said or written something he would consider wreckless like "We must abolish the United States" I have studied Adler's writings for many years and I am almost certain that he would not make a racial generalization such as black writers have "never written any good books." The fact is Adler was probably the best dialectical thinker since Aristotle. He criticized Aristotle for his acceptance of slavery and his strong opinions about women. Adler's "Syntopicon" and his monumental comprehensive two volume work on Freedom are supreme examples of Aristotlean dialectical thought. I too challenge anyone to produce evidence that Adler ever expressed dismissal of American Government (see his "Capitalist Manifesto", "A Vision of the Future" & "The Annals of America,"20 Vols for his clearly stated views about American Government and race) Adler had many fans and many enemies. He knew John Dewey, was not taken in with his very verbose, misleadingly cavalier writing style and he was not afraid to meet him in public debate. To John Dewey's discredit, he responded to Adler's brilliant criticism with personal attack. He said Adler and his friends were fascists. Adler disliked Dewey but he did not let that blind him to the fact that Dewey did write one good, significant book, "Education and Democracy."

Correction: Mortimer Adler did not have a degree in philosophy. His only degree was the Phd in Psychology. He was not awarded his BA degree until many years later. An Unusually talented literature professor at Columbia, John Erskine, developed the great ideas approach to general education and he was Adler's chief instructor and mentor at Columbia. I believe it was Erskine who suggested to Adler that he prepare to prepare a dissertation and to apply for the Phd degree. Erskine, at the time, was America's most well known Professor. He was a gifted musician who toured and he was creator of the historical novel.

Martin Gardner anecdote about Adler and the Catholic church
There is an interesting interview of Martin Gardner (via ) in which Martin says some harsh things about Mortimer:


 * Gardner: I was at Chicago during the famous Hutchins-Adler period. Mortimer Adler came from an orthodox Jewish background and became fascinated by Catholicism, and he almost joined the Catholic church. Half a dozen or more students of Adler’s at Chicago became Catholics as a result of taking courses from him. I never liked Adler. I took one course, a Great Books course he taught with Hutchins. I wrote a letter to the New Republic—it was published—saying that readers should all pray for Adler’s conversion to the Catholic church, because that would clear the air, and we would know exactly what he believed. I have a very rare document, a speech that Adler gave at Northwestern University, and incredible as it may seem, he argued that, if the Catholic church is a true church, it had a right to execute heretics. Can you imagine somebody in this day and age saying that the church had a right to execute heretics? That’s in this lecture. Adler of course is very much ashamed of it. But the punch line is that, shortly before he died, Adler joined the Catholic church. So it took about half a century for the prayers of the New Republic readers to be answered.


 * Notices: You wrote that letter at the time you were at Chicago?


 * Gardner: Yes, I was an undergraduate. Adler was a character. He had a tremendous ego. He edited the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you look through the first volume, which has general articles, you will find very short articles on Bertrand Russell, no article on Carnap, a very short article on Quine—and when you turn to Adler, a big, long article of several columns! But the university was an exciting place partly because Adler aroused so much animosity among the faculty and among the students. This led somebody to propose the “Madman Theory of Education”, which says that every university should have a madman on the faculty who gets the students all riled up in opposing his views. There was also a joke going around at the time that the University of Chicago was a Baptist school where Jewish professors were teaching Catholic theology.

For the record, I'm actually a fan of both of these guys.

Well, that was certainly harsh, but I'm not sure how interesting it was. The only thing I learn from this is that Martin Gardner really didn't like Mortimer Adler, but he would not be the first. Every great mind had a thousand and one critics. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.20.44.211 (talk) 13:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

More on this in Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner, pp. 42-43 :
 * Mortimer Jerome Adler, Hutchins’s good friend, was there. Hutchins had made the mistake of appointing Adler a professor of philosophy without consulting any of the philosophy faculty. This so enraged most of the philosophers that they resigned from the university, crippling the philosophy department for years. Hutchins was forced to move Adler to the law school as the school’s only philosopher.
 * During the time I was at the university, Hutchins and Adler energetically promoted the Great Books movement, a movement that had earlier started at Columbia. The idea was that a general education required an acquaintance with the greatest books of the Western world. Later the University of Chicago would publish a set of the Great Books edited by Adler. The university bought the Encyclopaedia Britannica, also to be coedited by Adler in a new fifteenth edition. It broke the set into two parts: the Syntopicon, a two-volume index of short articles, followed by the usual multivolume set of long articles by experts.
 * Adler was a peculiar fellow. Raised by Orthodox Jewish parents, he became enthralled by neo-Thomism, a Catholic movement based on the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval scholastics. For various personal reasons, which he never made clear, for most of his life Adler refused to convert to Rome even though intellectually he believed the church’s doctrines. In 1935 he gave a speech, recorded and released in mimeograph form, which I have carefully preserved to this day. In it he stated that if the Catholic Church is what it claims to be, God’s one true church, then it was justified in executing heretics! Adler later, greatly embarrassed by this speech, renounced it, but, alas, the speech was recorded for posterity.

--RZiman (talk) 19:21, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

The "[blacks] didn't write any good books" quote
Adler does indeed appear to have said it. I found two articles on the internet that refer to the quote: Sabrina Walters, "Great Books won Adler fame, scorn", Chicago Sun-Times, Jul 1, 2001and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Best Schools Have White Affirmative Action; Good and Great Books", New York Times letters to editor, 23 June 1991  Based on these two references it looks like the original quote by Adler was: "They [blacks] didn't write any good books." And it looks like it originally appeared in a December 3, 1990 Los Angeles Times article by Elizabeth Venant titled "A Curmudgeon Stands His Ground", though I haven't seen the article myself.Isokrates 15:53, 23 June 2007 (UTC)


 * There is also a reference to the quote in Dave Newbart, "Adler of 'great books' fame is dead at 98", Chicago Sun-Times, Jun 29, 2001.Isokrates 13:56, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I have now read the original source of the quote: Elizabeth Venant (1990), "A Curmudgeon Stands His Ground", The Los Angeles Times, 3 December, pp. E1-E2. Venant does indeed quote Adler as saying about blacks, "They didn't write any good books."  Interestingly, and rather disturbingly, in response to a question about whether the "Great Books" list is "too Eurocentric", Adler is quoted as saying, "[Asians] came to the West, they better learn Western culture.  If they want to stay Japanese, they should stay in Japan."  (The backeted word is in Venant.)  In light of this, I have decided to restore (a somewhat edited version of) the line that was removed as unsourced from the 21 June 2004 version of the wikiarticle: "Adler was a controversial figure in some circles who saw his focus on the classics as eurocentric and dogmatic, and he was never afraid to speak his mind.  Once asked in an interview why his great books list did not include any black authors, he said simply "...they didn't write any good books."  Isokrates (talk) 16:09, 4 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Regarding this alleged statement by Mortimer Adler, it seems to be a misquote. I would assume that he used the term "great books" rather than "good books". In this essay/article, titled "Good Books vs Great Books", he clearly distinguishes between what he calls "good" and "great" books and he explains that the index of the second edition of the Great Books series contains an additional reading list of "good books", which includes a number of black authors. His argument against the inclusion of black authors only extends to the actual Great Books selection, which is also what the criticism was directed against. So, in light of that, this alleged statement wouldn't make much sense with the more general term "good books" as that would go well beyond both his own arguments and the criticism he's responding to. Given the antagonistic title of the article used as a source, I wonder if this is not a typical case of journalistic liberty. Journalists generally have a looser vocabulary than academic scholars, so it wouldn't at all be strange if Adler's "blacks have not written any great books" was casually turned into "blacks have not written any good books". To grasp the difference, one would have to have read Adler's views more in-depth and I suspect that there's a good chance this journalist did not do that. Abvgd (talk) 08:41, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this elaboration. Some write as if the criterion for a 'great book' was that Hutchins & Adler agreed with everything in it.
 * This is clearly not the case -- Adler, as pointed out above, publicly dissented from (even) Aristotle on two major issues.
 * Martin. Nick_cool (talk) 22:01, 30 January 2024 (UTC)


 * In spite of his views about the contribution so far of black authors, he seems to have been optimistic about their contributions in the future: he is claimed to have said, "I think probably in the next century there will be some Black that writes a great book, but there hasn't been so far" (quoted on p. 14 of Michelle McCalope, "Blacks Furious Over Exclusion from New Great Books of the Western World", Jet, 19 November 1990; I found the quote at http://www-distance.syr.edu/ndacelech7.html, but have not seen the original). Isokrates 18:51, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

How about a little affirmative action here. Since every ethnic group gets a turn at the Presidency, Supreme Court, football quarterbacking, etc., why can't we have a Great Book by a non–Caucasian, non–Asian person of African descent? What book can we propose for that honor? If the Quran and Virginia Woolf can make the list, why not James Baldwin or Leroi Jones?Lestrade (talk) 18:44, 20 February 2008 (UTC)Lestrade

October 31, 1990 C-SPAN interview
Adler was interviewed on a C-SPAN call-in program hosted by Brian Lamb on the morning of October 31, 1990 where he made some relevant comments:

Adler: We have about a hundred and twenty-five Paideia schools in this country. Two in Chicago. An all-black school and a hispanic school in very bad ghettos. It changed the character of the schools, the teachers -- the neighborhood, even, by doing this.
 * [02:37]

Lamb: Great books. What is a great book? Adler: Since we just published the second edition of Great Books of the Western World, I will tell you very quickly. The difference between -- let me do it this way. Every year, in the United States, there are forty thousand books published. Of those forty thousand, not one thousand are worth reading once, carefully. Maybe eight-hundred, nine -- but a one thousand limit, the number of books out of the forty thousand are worth reading carefully. Of those thousand, probably not a hundred, or less than a hundred, are worth reading carefully twice. Of those that are worth reading carefully twice, probably not one in every five years is worth reading carefuly three times. A great book is worth reading carefully again, and again, and again for a lifetime, as I've been doing since 1941. Lamb: You're editor-in-chief... Adler: I'll give you a second distinction. There are lots of good books published every year, but they're relevant to one or two or three ideas. The Syntopicon contains a hundred and two ideas. The great books -- the great books -- are relevant to a hundred ideas, eighty-five ideas -- always more than twenty-five. In the Syntopicon, we have a list of recommended readings in each of the hundred-and-two chapters. Some of the books written by blacks, some of the books written by feminist authors, in recent years, are in those additional reading lists. They're not in the set. The reason why we didn't put them in the set is that they're not great books! They deal only with a few ideas. The second criterion of a great book is that it deals with a great number of the hundred and two great ideas. There's a third criterion, and then I'll stop. Every year we have popular bestsellers. They're dead -- they're dead, on the shelf, next year. They're current. The great books are always relevant to every generation for the last 2500 years. We don't regard them as archeological relics. We regard them as contemporary books, always, dealing with our problems today.
 * [04:24]

Lamb: By the way, we mentioned earlier in the program, that on this list of great books: no blacks. Adler: No blacks -- in the set. Blacks in the additional readings. Lamb: Why not in the set? Do you have any theory on that? Adler: Yes, because I gave you the criterion. The books in the set are relevant to twenty-five or more -- many of them fifty or sixty great ideas. The books written by the blacks that are in the additional readings are relevant to one or two ideas.
 * [35:00]

--RZiman (talk) 21:19, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

October 25, 1990 Chicago Tribune article
More on this from an October 25, 1990 article in Chicago Tribune :


 * By elevating 60 authors into the pantheon, including James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the "Great Books of the Western World" formally join the 20th Century on Thursday.
 * However welcome after almost 40 years, the second edition of the "Great Books," which will be introduced in ceremonies at the Library of Congress in Washington, may provoke more discussion (and dissension) for the writers who didn't make the roster than for those who did.
 * With the admission of its first female authors (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather), the extensively revised and modernized "Great Books" represent at least a token victory for feminists. But the absence of black writers from the expanded library of classics seems certain to rile an increasingly vocal body of critics who maintain that the standard literary texts (or canon) slight or ignore the work of women, blacks and various religions and ethnic groups.
 * "All that is irrelevant, and we're absolutely prepared for it," declared Mortimer Adler, the editor in chief of the "Great Books." Assisted by a platoon of sub-editors and consultants, Adler ushered the "Great Books" into the first half of the 20th Century, up to 1955, with six additional volumes that include works by George Orwell, Eugene O`Neill, John Maynard Keynes, Claude Levi-Strauss and Bertrand Russell, among the new authors.
 * [...] Adler visibly bristled with anticipation over the accusations of Eurocentricism, racism and sexism (also known as phallocentricism) that are bound to come from the loose canonists. Perhaps the strongest fusillade will originate with Afro-American scholars, objecting to the absence of blacks among the great writers. But Adler insisted there are no "Great Books" by black writers before the 1955 cutoff. "There are good books by blacks—about 10—that are worth reading for one or two ideas, and they are in the Syntopicon." Among those considered for canonization by Adler and his editorial and advisory boards (which included one black) were works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.
 * As for the academic dispute over the canon, Adler said: "Utter nonsense. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. . . . We had 90 percent agreement on the board of editors, and you can't get any better than that. This is the canon, and it's not revisable."

--RZiman (talk) 22:55, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Intro/Biography
Is it normal for the lead to simply mirror the start of the Biography section? What I mean is that the intro paragraph seems to be just a simple rephrasing of the start of the Biography. Just a suggestion, as it stands right now it is readable, if a bit repetitive. 76.177.143.10 23:47, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree. It was uncritically pasted in by 24.23.36.221 on 23 June 2007.  I say "uncritically", because the original edit included a gross misrepresentation of fact: "...his command of the classics became so great that Columbia University awarded him a doctorate in philosophy...."  I edited this out, but left the rest, since it seemed harmless enough.  If you'd like to delete or reedit the whole intro, be my guest.  Isokrates 14:28, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 04:18, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Archive Available at the Harry Ransom Center
Sashafresh (talk) 20:17, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Hello,

I work with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I would like the Wikipedia community to know that the HRC has an Mortimer Jerome Adler. Due to conflict of interest, I cannot make changes on the page myself. Would someone please add the following in the External Links section:

"Mortimer Jerome Adler: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center".

It would link to: http://research.hrc.utexas.edu:8080/hrcxtf/view?docId=ead/00003.xml&query=mortimer%20jerome%20adler&query-join=and

Thank you.

New Editing
My name is Tim Lacy, and I finished a dissertation in 2006 that involved extensive archival research on Adler. I made some changes to the intro (per a note above), and added a "works about" section and some new citations. Timothy.n.lacy (talk) 22:47, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Quote from Steven Pinker's "How The Mind Works"
Page 325 of How The Mind Works:

"As recently as the 1940's, the philosopher Mortimer Adler argued that just as there can be no three-and-a-half sided triangle, there can be nothing intermediate between an animal and a human, so human beings could not have evolved."

Is it just me, or is this a complete mischaracterization of Adler's ideas? Adler did argue that there is a radical difference in kind between animals and human beings, but this had nothing to do with essentialism; the idea that it is impossible for the form "human" to change - thus - to evolve.

Is Pinker attacking a straw man here, or is it possible that Adler actually argued this sometime in the 1940's and later changed his mind? If he did, I can't find it anywhere. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.242.10.131 (talk) 23:17, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I haven't read Pinker's book, but I can think of two possibilities. (1) Pinker was referring to The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, in which (as you note) Adler argues that there is a radical difference in kind between animals and human beings and that the difference requires us to postulate a non-material element in human nature that cannot be reduced to bodily evolution. The Difference was published in 1967, though. (2) Pinker was referring to Problems for Thomists: The Problem of Species (1940), a highly technical work in which Adler argues that "species" is mostly a term of art; that there are very few natural boundaries between "species", but when there is a boundary there cannot be any intermediate forms (just as there can't be an integer between 3 and 4); and that human beings are a different natural kind ("species") from other animals. It would be surprising, though, if Pinker had actually waded through The Problem of Species!

Anyhow, to return to the original question, I think Pinker states Adler's position fairly enough; Adler believed in the evolution of plants and animals and also believed that, however the human body may have developed, an extra non-material element was needed to push those bodies over the threshold into being human. The sentence quoted, however, suggests that Adler thought that merely because he didn't know of any intermediate critters; the argument was much more involved than that. Wgrommel (talk) 19:33, 9 May 2019 (UTC)


 * In Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Martin Gardner cites numerous Adler quotes regarding evolution. In What Man has Made of Man, Adler called evolution a "popular myth" in the sense that he did not agree that species could possibly lie on a continuum where one species fades into another. In Problems for Thomists, Adler apparently states that he believes that there are only four "species" (matter, plant, animal, and man) within which each of several "types" was created. Which basically sounds like he is promoting baraminology.  According to Gardner (which is probably Pinker's source), the quote that Pinker cites above apparently comes from a 1951 lecture at a Catholic Club at the University of Chicago. The "three-and-one-half-sided figure" point is directly quoted by Gardner. According to Gardner, Adler appears to have been promoting either that humans were a separate creation or that mankind evolved but that the soul was at some point inserted into man by God.  Standard Catholic fare for the time.  Bueller 007 (talk) 14:44, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Added section on Free Will
I reviewed arguments from Adler's two-volume set The Idea of Freedom. Cmsreview (talk) 02:14, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

John Cramer referenced is not John G. Cramer
I removed the wikilink to John G. Cramer since the John Cramer referenced, who lives in Georgia, is not the same guy. Pleasantville (talk) 13:51, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

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It's sentences like this that are causing the comma shortage
He and Helen Boynton, with whom in 1938 and 1940, respectively, he adopted two children, Mark and Michael, were married in 1927 and later divorced in 1960. EEng 01:02, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Missing coverage on his NET TV program "Great Ideas" around 1957
I have added one external link to this on AAPB (american archive of public broadcasting), maybe someone could add relevant info in the body text. Hym3242 (talk) 21:26, 30 January 2024 (UTC)