Mortimer J. Adler

Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, author, and lay theologian whose life stretched across nearly the whole twentieth century. Born in Manhattan, New York City, on December 28, 1902, he was the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany: Clarissa Manheim Adler, a schoolteacher, and Ignatz Adler, a jewelry salesman. He later lived for extended periods in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. Adler’s philosophical work stood in the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, and his career joined classrooms, books, reference publishing, and public education.

Adler left school at 14 to work as a copy boy for The New York Sun, hoping to become a journalist. He soon returned to education through night classes in writing, where he encountered Western philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill became important points of reference for him. He studied at Columbia University and contributed to the student literary magazine The Morningside, including the poem “Choice,” published in 1922. Although he refused to take the swimming test required for a bachelor’s degree, Columbia later awarded him an honorary degree in 1983. He remained at Columbia as an instructor, earned a doctorate in psychology, and published his first book, Dialectic, in 1927.

In 1930, Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, arranged for Adler to join the University of Chicago Law School as a professor of the philosophy of law. The appointment was unusual: Adler became the first person without a formal legal background to join that faculty, and some members of the university’s philosophy faculty opposed his appointment to their department. At Chicago, Adler’s work with Hutchins helped shape the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. He also worked with Scott Buchanan at the People’s Institute and collaborated with him for many years on Great Books projects.

Adler is best known for bringing philosophy and serious reading to a broad public. How to Read a Book reached wide circulation, and Adler openly preferred the general reader to the academic specialist. He also supported the idea of economic democracy and wrote the preface to Louis O. Kelso’s 1958 book The Capitalist Manifesto. In 1952, he founded the Institute for Philosophical Research and served as its director. He joined the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, compiled A Syntopicon, later worked on the Propaedia, and succeeded Hutchins as chairman of the Board of Editors in 1974. Beginning in 1965, as director of editorial planning for the fifteenth edition, he helped reorganize the encyclopedia’s structure and its presentation of knowledge.

What shaped Adler’s mind was a steady return to older questions and older texts. In his early twenties, he became interested in Thomas Aquinas, especially the Summa Theologica, whose intellectual rigor and clarity led him to rank theology among his principal philosophical interests. Though born into a secular Jewish family, he became closely associated with Thomism, contributed often to Catholic philosophical and educational journals, and lectured at Catholic institutions. In Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought, published in 1985, he argued that many errors in modern philosophy could be addressed through concepts and distinctions drawn from Aristotle. His later educational work included the Paideia Proposal, the Paideia Program, and, in 1990, the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, founded with Max Weismann in Chicago.

Adler died on June 28, 2001. His appeal rests in the plain ambition of his work: to make difficult books, old arguments, and large questions available to ordinary readers. He did not write only for professors. He wanted philosophy to be read, discussed, tested, and used by people outside the university. That direct purpose still gives his words their force.