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Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography
In this book, 1st published by Macmillan in 1977, Mortimer J. Adler, author of "Ten Philosophical Mistakes", "How to Read a Book" & "Aristotle for Everybody", provides a chronicle of more than 50 years of achievement in the fields of education & publishing. He discusses the development of one of the great publishing ventures of the century--the 54-volume set of "Great Books of the Western World"--& he details the planning & production of the 15th edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica". This book describes the career of a man who sought to bring books to the layperson & engage all readers in philosophical thought & debate. It recounts a wide variety of personal & intellectual encounters & ranges from academia to the world of business.
363 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1977
3 people are currently reading
104 people want to read
About the author
Mortimer J. Adler
595 books1,055 followersNumerous published works of American educator and philosopher Mortimer Jerome Adler include
How to Read a Book
(1940) and
The Conditions of Philosophy
(1965).
This popular author worked with thought of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. He lived for the longest stretches in cities of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and own institute for philosophical research.
Born to Jewish immigrants, he dropped out school at 14 years of age in 1917 to a copy boy for the New York Sun with the ultimate aspiration to a journalist. Adler quickly returned to school to take writing classes at night and discovered the works of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and other men, whom he came to call heroes. He went 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). Though he failed to pass 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. While at Columbia University, Adler wrote his first book: Dialectic, published in 1927.
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 Mr. 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. Adler also taught philosophy to business executives at the Aspen Institute.
Adler and Hutchins went on to found the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. Adler founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research in 1952. He also served on the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica since its inception in 1949, and succeeded Hutchins as its chairman from 1974. 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). With Max Weismann, he founded The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas.
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 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.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer...
This popular author worked with thought of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. He lived for the longest stretches in cities of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and own institute for philosophical research.
Born to Jewish immigrants, he dropped out school at 14 years of age in 1917 to a copy boy for the New York Sun with the ultimate aspiration to a journalist. Adler quickly returned to school to take writing classes at night and discovered the works of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and other men, whom he came to call heroes. He went 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). Though he failed to pass 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. While at Columbia University, Adler wrote his first book: Dialectic, published in 1927.
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 Mr. 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. Adler also taught philosophy to business executives at the Aspen Institute.
Adler and Hutchins went on to found the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. Adler founded and served as director of the Institute for Philosophical Research in 1952. He also served on the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica since its inception in 1949, and succeeded Hutchins as its chairman from 1974. 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). With Max Weismann, he founded The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas.
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 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.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 12, 2012
My grandparents and parents were thoroughly middle-class and middle-brow. They grew up when an education was appreciated because it not always freely available or taken for granted. They listened to radio programs and read books by the likes of Mortimer J Adler (1902-2001), Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999), and David Ewen (1907-1985). There are no more "middle-brow intellectuals" in America, except, perhaps, for the likes of Bill Moyers.
Trying to "review" or "comment" on this, the first of two autobiographical volumes, and it with great humor revisits those people and places that helped shape him.
His semi-popular introductions of Aristotle, philosophy, and the Great Books of the Western World are still so very readable.
Some in academia look down their noses at Adler today because he was a product of his time, an era when great thoughts and great books were written largely by those dismissed today as "Dead White Men."
But reading Adler's autobiography gives one a window upon the world of a man who had such a great impact on American education and thinking from the 1930s until the 1990s.
Trying to "review" or "comment" on this, the first of two autobiographical volumes, and it with great humor revisits those people and places that helped shape him.
His semi-popular introductions of Aristotle, philosophy, and the Great Books of the Western World are still so very readable.
Some in academia look down their noses at Adler today because he was a product of his time, an era when great thoughts and great books were written largely by those dismissed today as "Dead White Men."
But reading Adler's autobiography gives one a window upon the world of a man who had such a great impact on American education and thinking from the 1930s until the 1990s.
August 27, 2022
Adler's journey was like mine: he started as a journalist and finished as a philosopher. From this book, I grabbed several useful ideas:
• We can define virtues as good habits.
• The way into the Great Books of the Western World is to read one a week. (Adler says it's necessary to read each of these books once quickly so you become familiar with the work and later do deeper readings.)
• A great way to tell your life's story if you're a bibliophile is through the books you've read and how their ideas have shaped you.
I liked Adler's style and the way he admitted some of his intellectual failings. The world is a richer place through his work creating the Great Books of the Western World set, especially the Syntopicon, and producing Brittanica 3.
I recommend this book for anyone interested in seeing how books influence a philosopher and the questions he seeks to answer.
• We can define virtues as good habits.
• The way into the Great Books of the Western World is to read one a week. (Adler says it's necessary to read each of these books once quickly so you become familiar with the work and later do deeper readings.)
• A great way to tell your life's story if you're a bibliophile is through the books you've read and how their ideas have shaped you.
I liked Adler's style and the way he admitted some of his intellectual failings. The world is a richer place through his work creating the Great Books of the Western World set, especially the Syntopicon, and producing Brittanica 3.
I recommend this book for anyone interested in seeing how books influence a philosopher and the questions he seeks to answer.
September 3, 2024
Adler, Mortimer J. Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Biography. Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977.
The danger in writing an autobiography is to focus on the more flattering episodes in one’s life. Mortimer Adler, however, completely avoids this trap. Although his work on the Great Books is the stuff of legend, in this work Adler gives a frank account of his own shortcomings. While not strictly an autobiography in the chronological sense, as the subtitle implies, this work does cover some key episodes one would expect in an autobiography. We see his early development in the New York public school system, but more importantly, we see his stumbling across the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, which would form the intellectual foundation for the rest of his life.
In the first section of his academic life, after ten years at Columbia University, Adler reflects upon his time at the University of Chicago, particularly his friendship with its president Robert Hutchins. Both Adler and Hutchins saw that the current (then and now) understanding of the university as a collection of different specializations actually cut against the grain of a university. This is particularly seen in its understanding of science. Should science departments focus simply on experiments and data? That seems obvious enough, but difficulties arise when one tries to integrate scientific knowledge, for then one is thrown back upon theory. Such an innocent observation rocked the university for ten years.
Chicago at this time was strongly influenced by the instrumentalism of John Dewey. Knowledge, accordingly, was simply the doing of more experiments. When need, then, of theory? Even worse, what was the point of the Great Tradition? Neither Adler nor Hutchins had any chance of winning that debate, leaving Adler to decide to start his Institute for public philosophy in Aspen. To summarize the debate, quoting his colleague Robert Hutchins, Adler pointed out: “The modern university may be compared with an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia contains many truths. It may consist of nothing else. But its unity can be found only in its alphabetical arrangement” (Robert Hutchins, 179).
A similar problem is also found in the liberal arts. As every teacher who has ever tried to teach grammar knows, having kids memorize and replicate grammar tables does not always lead to good grammar. As Adler points out, “Courses in formal logic or lectures on the arts of grammar and rhetoric, even when accompanied by exercises, will not produce the desired effect…Competence in the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic must manifest itself in skilled reading and writing, or skilled speaking and listening” (Adler 156). One can only shudder at what he would think today.
In 2020, I started to systematically read through the Great Books. I also wanted to read everything written by Adler. That seemed logical enough. Find a good thinker and read everything he wrote. It is a good thing I did not. Adler’s own views changed. By 1935, Adler had begun to reject his earlier beliefs outlined in Dialectic. Under the influence of Aristotle and Aquinas, his “inclination was now to come down flatly in favor of certain propositions as true, rejecting their contradictories as false” (175). As a result, Adler was dismissed as an “Aristotelian” or a “Thomist. There is just one problem with the latter moniker: Adler considered himself a pagan, not a Christian. Even worse, Adler’s own views on the existence of God were in contradiction to what Thomas had said.
Although we can laugh at the naivete of the extreme scientism exhibited by the University of Chicago, the liberal arts, as noted earlier, fared little better. For example, Adler had been invited to a symposium on the future of democracy. He made the logical case for democracy. He was told that if he were right, his views would logically preclude other views from being right, and so was undemocratic (187). Of course, this is absurd but the rebuttal to Adler is fundamentally correct on many levels, levels I do not think Adler himself always saw.
Some Vignettes
Against the Freudians: if all thoughts were wishful thinking, then on what grounds would psychoanalysis be considered a science? If all views were thus subjective, then no one view could be scientific (199).
The alternative to rejecting discipline is not freedom. The ship that will not answer to the rudder must answer to the rock (215).
On indexing the Great Ideas: “a great idea was not a simple concept but a complex and comprehensive one, having an inner structure of related notions and a pattern of topics, problems, or issues” (242).
On outlining the Great Ideas: “the novel feature was the substitution of topics for sentences. A topic…asserts nothing. It lays down a theme, a problem, or an issue concerning which diverse points of view can be expressed” (246-247).
Conclusion
I noted earlier that Adler, although nominally Jewish, considered himself a pagan. By this, he meant someone who did not worship God as understood by Jews, Christians, or Muslims. This paganism, so defined, also came out in his private life. Adler himself knew this. He suspected that he put off conversion to Christianity for so long because such a move involved a reorientation of his will. It might be presumptuous to think that an earlier conversion to Christianity would have saved his first marriage. I doubt it would have, but remaining a pagan probably did not help, either.
Although I did not discuss it in the review, Adler goes into detail on the formation of the Great Books of the Western World. What started out as a two year project with a budget of $50,000 became a ten year task costing over $1,000,000! You can imagine the drama and stress such a project entailed.
The danger in writing an autobiography is to focus on the more flattering episodes in one’s life. Mortimer Adler, however, completely avoids this trap. Although his work on the Great Books is the stuff of legend, in this work Adler gives a frank account of his own shortcomings. While not strictly an autobiography in the chronological sense, as the subtitle implies, this work does cover some key episodes one would expect in an autobiography. We see his early development in the New York public school system, but more importantly, we see his stumbling across the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, which would form the intellectual foundation for the rest of his life.
In the first section of his academic life, after ten years at Columbia University, Adler reflects upon his time at the University of Chicago, particularly his friendship with its president Robert Hutchins. Both Adler and Hutchins saw that the current (then and now) understanding of the university as a collection of different specializations actually cut against the grain of a university. This is particularly seen in its understanding of science. Should science departments focus simply on experiments and data? That seems obvious enough, but difficulties arise when one tries to integrate scientific knowledge, for then one is thrown back upon theory. Such an innocent observation rocked the university for ten years.
Chicago at this time was strongly influenced by the instrumentalism of John Dewey. Knowledge, accordingly, was simply the doing of more experiments. When need, then, of theory? Even worse, what was the point of the Great Tradition? Neither Adler nor Hutchins had any chance of winning that debate, leaving Adler to decide to start his Institute for public philosophy in Aspen. To summarize the debate, quoting his colleague Robert Hutchins, Adler pointed out: “The modern university may be compared with an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia contains many truths. It may consist of nothing else. But its unity can be found only in its alphabetical arrangement” (Robert Hutchins, 179).
A similar problem is also found in the liberal arts. As every teacher who has ever tried to teach grammar knows, having kids memorize and replicate grammar tables does not always lead to good grammar. As Adler points out, “Courses in formal logic or lectures on the arts of grammar and rhetoric, even when accompanied by exercises, will not produce the desired effect…Competence in the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic must manifest itself in skilled reading and writing, or skilled speaking and listening” (Adler 156). One can only shudder at what he would think today.
In 2020, I started to systematically read through the Great Books. I also wanted to read everything written by Adler. That seemed logical enough. Find a good thinker and read everything he wrote. It is a good thing I did not. Adler’s own views changed. By 1935, Adler had begun to reject his earlier beliefs outlined in Dialectic. Under the influence of Aristotle and Aquinas, his “inclination was now to come down flatly in favor of certain propositions as true, rejecting their contradictories as false” (175). As a result, Adler was dismissed as an “Aristotelian” or a “Thomist. There is just one problem with the latter moniker: Adler considered himself a pagan, not a Christian. Even worse, Adler’s own views on the existence of God were in contradiction to what Thomas had said.
Although we can laugh at the naivete of the extreme scientism exhibited by the University of Chicago, the liberal arts, as noted earlier, fared little better. For example, Adler had been invited to a symposium on the future of democracy. He made the logical case for democracy. He was told that if he were right, his views would logically preclude other views from being right, and so was undemocratic (187). Of course, this is absurd but the rebuttal to Adler is fundamentally correct on many levels, levels I do not think Adler himself always saw.
Some Vignettes
Against the Freudians: if all thoughts were wishful thinking, then on what grounds would psychoanalysis be considered a science? If all views were thus subjective, then no one view could be scientific (199).
The alternative to rejecting discipline is not freedom. The ship that will not answer to the rudder must answer to the rock (215).
On indexing the Great Ideas: “a great idea was not a simple concept but a complex and comprehensive one, having an inner structure of related notions and a pattern of topics, problems, or issues” (242).
On outlining the Great Ideas: “the novel feature was the substitution of topics for sentences. A topic…asserts nothing. It lays down a theme, a problem, or an issue concerning which diverse points of view can be expressed” (246-247).
Conclusion
I noted earlier that Adler, although nominally Jewish, considered himself a pagan. By this, he meant someone who did not worship God as understood by Jews, Christians, or Muslims. This paganism, so defined, also came out in his private life. Adler himself knew this. He suspected that he put off conversion to Christianity for so long because such a move involved a reorientation of his will. It might be presumptuous to think that an earlier conversion to Christianity would have saved his first marriage. I doubt it would have, but remaining a pagan probably did not help, either.
Although I did not discuss it in the review, Adler goes into detail on the formation of the Great Books of the Western World. What started out as a two year project with a budget of $50,000 became a ten year task costing over $1,000,000! You can imagine the drama and stress such a project entailed.
October 13, 2012
Mortimer Adler's autobiography is a delightful book to read. Who would have thought that this dedicated philosopher, pedagogical scrapper, and preeminent cataloguer of ideas possessed a self-effacing wit and winning charm? He didn't always, it seems, for he began his intellectual career as "an objectionable student, in some respects perhaps repulsive." And it took him most of his life to acquire the "emotional maturity" that has softened him. Adler describes that life with candor, humor, some regrets, much praise of mind, and plenty of detail. His focus on his role in the intellectual and educational history of the last 50 years--from the birth of the great books course at Columbia, through the embattled innovations at the University of Chicago and the expansion of the Great Books idea, to the writing of the Syntopicon, the work of the Institute for Philosophical Research, and the creation of Britannica 3 is endlessly fascinating. Adler displays a greater interest in ideas than in thinkers, believing that ideas must be judged by logic-not by their human origins. But this is not to say he is oblivious of people. In fact, he dismisses all of his philosophical writings prior to those of the last fifteen years, when he began to write for all. And he admits that his own intellectual preoccupations originated in his distinctive temperament: a compulsive organizer and inveterate yea-sayer, how could he have become other than an intrepid encyclopedist and intellectual zealot? This warm-hearted book demonstrates his love of the "Great Books" and what he learned from them and from life.
September 3, 2016
As an intellectual biography, it is excellent. As a typical biography, there are things some readers may not find. It reads like a who's who, in some ways, of the great books movement and educational perennialism. One thing I appreciated was that Adler did not mind to criticize himself at times.
February 28, 2009
Good bio of an intellectual life. Very interesting that as he neared his life's end he became a Christian.
April 2, 2008
I looooooove Adler, but I had to put this book down in the middle of it while he was having his mid-life crisis. The image of him weeping uncontrollably, out-loud in a San Francisco restaurant with no hope in his life was too much. I know that he eventually became a Christian, so there is a happy ending; but I'll have to approach this book at another time.
October 7, 2024
I think this biography will primarily interest people who are curious about Adler as one of the founders and promoters of Great Books approach to education. He advocated strongly for the traditional liberal arts education focused on reading and discussing a core collection of great works in the western tradition. It was his contention that education formed around that long great conversation of classical and more recent western works led to a better education than our buffet style undergraduate education that exists now. Because that argument struck a chord with me, I was curious to know more about Adler. In a sense, The Great Books movement is an attempt to draw a line against post-modernism and the turning away from the great works in the western tradition. I suspect that even by the 1950s the writing was on the wall. Adler relates how he found, when visiting a University of Wisconsin classroom in 1952, that the students there could hardly identify a single book they had all read. Even then the idea of a shared cultural inheritance was being lost even as the numbers of students able to attend college was skyrocketing. Education became more about exploring your own interests and pursuing a career specialization than it did about being a more educated citizen, and that was the problem that worried Adler and others. It worries me, too, though in the years since Adler wrote this auto-biography, post-modernism has decisively flooded out any study of classics and our interests now are so much more myopic. Why study Greek writers or even writers of the 16th Century when you can make your way in academia by writing cleverly on the meaning of Captain Crunch and Snap Crackle and Pop and how they demonstrate sexism, ableism, and homophobia in the American kitchen?
I found it an interesting biography because I'm interested in the liberal arts curriculum and so for me it was an interesting book. I would not say that it is a book that will have universal appeal these days. The main interest for a reader in his biography would be his role in promoting Great Books and the traditional liberal curriculum (liberal in the sense of focusing on humanities and classics, which is actually rather a conservative idea culturally). Since the Great Books curriculum has failed to capture the hearts and minds of higher education or the public, I think this book, and Adler, are somewhat reduced to historical curiosities, but I enjoyed reading about what it was like to be a professor and public intellectual from his perspective. That the war is largely lost--for now--is demonstrated by the fact that I was able to by nearly the entire collection of the 1952 great books collection for $10 at a friends of the library book sale. Who wants to read that stuff any more? Well, I for one.
I found it an interesting biography because I'm interested in the liberal arts curriculum and so for me it was an interesting book. I would not say that it is a book that will have universal appeal these days. The main interest for a reader in his biography would be his role in promoting Great Books and the traditional liberal curriculum (liberal in the sense of focusing on humanities and classics, which is actually rather a conservative idea culturally). Since the Great Books curriculum has failed to capture the hearts and minds of higher education or the public, I think this book, and Adler, are somewhat reduced to historical curiosities, but I enjoyed reading about what it was like to be a professor and public intellectual from his perspective. That the war is largely lost--for now--is demonstrated by the fact that I was able to by nearly the entire collection of the 1952 great books collection for $10 at a friends of the library book sale. Who wants to read that stuff any more? Well, I for one.
March 21, 2023
I am a big fan of Mortimer J Adler ever since I read his book Six Great Ideas: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, Justice which was based on a PBS program Adler did with Bill Moyers and was itself based on discussions Adler had at the Aspen Institute in 1981. This autobiography was written in the 70s before that time, but it lays down the foundations for Adler's thinking and teaching.
Adler believes that the "Great Ideas" are worthy of study for all people who have a good mind and the wish to expand their knowledge. I have tried to teach Great Ideas when I taught college with limited success. I am not certain outside of St. John's College's Maryland and New Mexico campuses that anyone else has attempted this.
I enjoyed reading this book, and I need to decide if I am going to go further with Adler and the Great Ideas. I have several of his books, but what am I to do if I give time to reading and pondering them?
Adler believes that the "Great Ideas" are worthy of study for all people who have a good mind and the wish to expand their knowledge. I have tried to teach Great Ideas when I taught college with limited success. I am not certain outside of St. John's College's Maryland and New Mexico campuses that anyone else has attempted this.
I enjoyed reading this book, and I need to decide if I am going to go further with Adler and the Great Ideas. I have several of his books, but what am I to do if I give time to reading and pondering them?
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews